Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Leadership/Management

Feeling right – You are Probably Wrong

By

Have you ever had this feeling of just knowing that you are right?

Well, I have some interesting news for you. It is just that, a feeling. An emotion, in the same category as anger or love and likewise it has no connection to reason.

When you have this feeling about just how right you are – you could just as well be wrong. In a complex world there are not many simple answers.

You may not realise it but this feeling that you are right comes with some serious consequences for your role as a team leader.

Below is the video version and below that the text version – whatever works best for you:

Leadership skills series

In my previous blog posts, we started to explore this model that we call above and below the line and we looked at the disadvantages of being below the line.

Just to recap: Below the line, we are in a reactive defensive position where it’s more about our own survival, the survival of our ego than anything else. There is no learning and we are closed to new ideas.

It’s not the best place to be, when as team leaders we are trying to create followership or build relationships with other people.

Feeling is not thinking

Now, pause and digest this for a moment. When you have this feeling of being right, it is not the result of a careful thought process. It’s just a feeling.

And only when someone challenges your ‘rightness’, will you perform a post feeling rationalisation and come up with arguments that supports your original feeling.

Your sense of being right about something, the sparkling clarity of certainty, is not a thought process, not a reasoning process, but an emotion that has nothing to do with whether you are right or not.

Jennifer Garvey Berger

Ah, you will say but when I tell you that 2+2 is 4 then I am right and it’s not a feeling it’s fact! Yep – the problem here is that people will not challenge you on what is to all an accepted fact. They will challenge the complex stuff that you feel so sure about but which is possibly not as simple as you think feel. I will post some reference at the end where you can read more. It’s fascinating stuff in my view.

Defend your rightness and dive below the line

Above and Below the line model

The reason this is intersting from a team leader’s perspective is that when we give in to that feeling of being right we also automatically shift down below the line. We desperately want to defend our ‘rightness’ and the more insecure we are in our leadership role the harder we will defend our rightness. As a result we become reactive, defensive and ego driven.

This is what Jennifer Carvey Berger in her wonderful book, “Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity” calls falling into a mindtrap.

Caught in this mind trap we are in a really toxic unconstructiv place and the sooner we get out of it the better.

How do we do that?

The magic question you need to ask yourself

The first step is to be aware. You must actually notice that, this is what is happening. As soon as you register yourself moving into this pattern of rightness, then all your alarm bells should go off and you should try and stop the process. The way you do that is by awakening your own curiosity.

The easiest way to do that is to ask yourself a question beginning with :

I wonder…

  • … why they disagree with me?
  • … what am I missing here?
  • … what does she know that I maybe don’t?

Jennifer Carvey Berger says, you could ask yourself the key question: ( I wonder) How could I be wrong?

It works like magic.

When you have the courage to question your own knowing you also have the key to shift yourself back up above the line. You awaken your curiosity, you awaken your ability to learn and you start engaging with others without the defensive boundaries you otherwise would have erected.

Chances are you will learn something that would have been completely lost if you’d stayed stuck down below the line.

There is much more to discover below the line

So I hope this week’s post has inspired you to try and catch yourself feeling right and to experiment with asking yourself, “I wonder… “

Next week I’m going to explore with you what else is going on below the line. Besides just wanting to defend being right there is a whole swamp of toxic emotions that are activated automatically and they are not helpfull at all.

Reading that might inspire you:

Jennifer Garvey Berger: “Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity”

Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp: “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success”

Previous blog posts in this series on Team Leadership Skills and working above and below the line:

Leadership skills every team leader needs to master

As a leader do you have the courage to examine your mindset model?

What is a good book on leadership?

By

This is a question I get all the time.

In my view there is no one universal book on leadership  that you must read.

The book you will learn most from is your own daily journal. Seriously.

Ask yourself  these 4 questions at the end of each day:

  • What was my intention today?
  • What did I observe?
  • What did I learn?
  • What is my intention for tomorrow?

Do this every day and you will learn the most amazing  things.

Accelerate your learning by doing a weekly review of the past weeks entries.

Now ask your self:

  • What was my intention this week?
  • What did I observe?
  • What did I learn?
  • What is my intention for the coming week ?

Enjoy

The courage to look at yourself

By

“The problem is that leaders think they’re supposed to be courageous in facing the outside world, whereas what is so profoundly transformative is the courage to look at yourself.

It’s the courage to not give up on yourself, even though you do see your aggression, jealousy, meanness, and so on.

And it turns out that in facing these things, we develop not self-denigration but compassion for our shared humanity.”

Pema Chödrön en dialogue avec Margaret Wheatley.
My friend Pierre Goirand posted this and I  love it

How your mindset contributes to the knowing-doing gap

By

Last week, we looked at the knowing-doing gap and some of the causes behind that. But your mindset is possibly the biggest hindrance in closing your knowing-doing gap. That is what this week’s video is about.

Download The Mindset Checkup Test

Icon

Mindset checkup

1 file(s) 2.65 MB
Download

Next week, we will have a look at what it takes to change our beliefs.

The knowing-doing gap

By

In my previous blog post, I mentioned that I have decided to switch format in 2018 and try my hand at vlogging. Here is the first video in a new series about learning developing and getting better at stuff.

Next week, we will explore how your mindset contributes to the knowing-doing gap for many of us.

Do the post-project review before you start the project

By

Sounds nuts, I know, but according to research by psychologist Gary Klein, it’s a great way to improve the actual outcome of your projects.

But before we go into details, there is an additional benefit that fits in with this month’s theme of improving how our top management teams function.

You see if you perform what Klein calls a pre-mortem on your projects, you are also providing a psychologically safe space for your team to voice disagreement or worries without being labelled as negative spoilsports or even worse being seen as disloyal.

So how do you do it? You make a plan for the project in your usual way, or maybe it is just a plan how you are going to execute the day with your team. When everyone is happy that we now have a plan, you announce:

“I am sorry to tell you but it has turned out that project (X) was an unprecedented disaster. Please give me your ideas as what could have happened to derail the project so badly.”

This is a very different question from asking: “So what could go wrong?” When we ask the ‘what could go wrong’ question, voicing your doubts on the team can be much trickier and often decidedly outside the psychological safety zone.

Now, everyone gets out a pad of paper and brainstorms with themselves 3-5 ways that this project could have been totally derailed, or that this day that we planned so carefully ended up a total disaster.

On a whiteboard or a flip-chart, draw a 2×2 as shown below:

Now ask each person to read out their ideas as to why this day/ project went wrong. As they do, note the item in the appropriate square.

Now you have an overview of what problems we might encounter, sorted in a practical way. Discuss how to create proactive solutions where you can see the need and make a backup plan for the issues that you can see could happen under a certain set of circumstances.

You have now achieved two things:

1) You have proactively identified a number of issues that you would probably not have discovered until it was too late.

2) More importantly, you have provided a safe space where it is possible to actually discuss the proverbial elephant in the room. Instead of a messy feedback session loaded with blame and critique, you have made it possible to voice doubts in a constructive way regardless of hierarchies or departmental boundaries.

The method is called ‘prospective hindsight’ and according to Author Karl Weick, it can improve people’s ability to predict the reasons for future outcomes by 30%.

Developing our team by embracing our mistakes

By

After the reset, then what? We reset the management team and cleared the air using the workshop framework  I described in my previous blog post.

Now, the question is what is the one thing we could start doing immediately, that would help us grow stronger as a team. In my view, the obvious answer is to learn how to we deal with setbacks and mistakes. The crucial move is from holding people responsible to  everyone taking responsibility.

This may sound theoretical but is not, we can learn how to do that by one simple shift in our behaviour as a team. We need to develop and integrate the practice of the After Action Review, not in the form of the occasional event when something has gone wrong but as a natural part of how we finish ‘things’. The job is not complete until we have not done an after action review.

But nor is the week, the month or the year for that matter. We need to develop a different approach, a culture of not rushing into the next ‘thing’ before we have finished digesting what we just accomplished.

The format of the After Action Review can vary and if you google the term, you will see many more or less complex versions. My favourite fast and dirty is to grab a flip chart,  napkin or whatever I can find to write on, I  draw this:

Then I ask the team “So what went well (today, this project, or whatever we are wrapping up)?” That goes in the square labelled ‘Preserve’. Here we list things we are happy with, things that went well or even beyond our expectations. Practices worth learning from.

What do we need to get better at or develop in the future? Here we list things that did not go according to plan or turned out different than what we expected. We are not trying to place blame, only to identify what needs to change next time. Think of more as a feedforward than a feedback. Whatever comes up goes into the square ‘Develop’.

What did we do that we wish we had not done? I.e. what should we stop doing in the future? This is a great place for the individual mea culpa.  I screwed up and I will try not to do it again, or maybe we all screwed up.  What counts is the conversation about how are we going to avoid that in the future. Those items go the square marked ‘Eliminate’.

And finally, I ask what are we happy that we avoided today. Maybe last time we promised each other to keep tempers down even when things get tricky and today we manage to do that, yea! And that goes onto the last of the four squares.

This process can take 10-15 minutes at the end of a shift or it can take a full morning at the end of a larger project. When doing it this way, we create a relatively safe space for everyone to voice their views and opinions. It helps us clear up any friction or misunderstanding that might have arisen during the heat of the action.

Once we develop the habit of doing this as a regular practice, we have also taken the first step toward a more open and honest feedback culture. A culture with a focus on fixing things and learning from our mistakes.  It’s a shift away from problem focus and towards to a solution focus. It is a goodbye to the drama triangles.

You can try it out very quickly at the end of your next management team meeting as: “So let’s just do a quick review of how we hold meeting with each other…”, you grab the flip chart, draw the model and ask the question. Easy, you are off to a new start.

Your top management team may need a hard ‘reset’.

By

Harvard professor Dr. Robert Kegan says:

“Let’s be blunt: In the ordinary organization, nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for — namely, hiding their weaknesses, looking good, covering their rear ends, managing other people’s favorable impression of them. This is the single biggest waste of a company’s resources.”

And the way I look at it is that the better they are at that second job, the more dysfunctional the management teams become…

So what to do about it? How to stop the madness?

Again, according to Kegan, it requires a different mindset, a culture that goes something like this:

“We hired you because we thought you were good, not because we thought you were perfect. We are all here to get better, and the only way we will get better is to make mistakes, reveal our limitations, and support each other to overcome them.”

And that, says Kegan, is the starting point. That is the basic foundation of how to create what he and co-author Dr. Lisa Lahey have labelled the DDO a Deliberately Developmental Organization in their book: An everyone culture.

In that culture, we would not need to spend time on our second job at all but would use the time more productively to develop ourselves each other and the organisation. This is not as utopian as you might think, but it definitely requires a hard ‘ RESET’ of how the team interacts with each other.

A good place to start might be to go off-site for 2-3 days and agree on a new set of ground rules for collaboration development and growth. There are various ways to do that. One of my favourite frameworks is using Peter Blocks six conversations as the agenda for the retreat.

  1. Invitation conversation. Transformation occurs through choices, not mandates. Invitation is the call to create an alternative future. What is the invitation we can make to support people to participate and own the relationships, tasks, and process that lead to success?
  2. Possibility conversation. This focuses on what we want our future to be as opposed to problem-solving the past. It frees people to innovate, challenge the status quo, break new ground and create new futures that make a difference.
  3. Ownership conversation. This conversation focuses on whose organization or task is this? It asks: How have I contributed to creating current reality? Confusion, blame and waiting for someone else to change are a defense against ownership and personal power.
  4. Dissent conversation. This gives people the space to say no. If you can’t say no, your yes has no meaning. Give people a chance to express their doubts and reservations, as a way of clarifying their roles, needs and yearnings within the vision and mission. Genuine commitment begins with doubt, and no is an expression of people finding their space and role in the strategy.
  5. Commitment conversation. This conversation is about making promises to peers about your contribution to the success. It asks: What promise am I willing to make to this enterprise? And, what price am I willing to pay for success? It is a promise for the sake of a larger purpose, not for personal return.
  6. Gifts conversation. Rather than focus on deficiencies and weaknesses, we focus on the gifts and assets we bring and capitalize on those to make the best and highest contribution. Confront people with their core gifts that can make the difference and change lives.

In my experience, it is well worthwhile to have a person who is not part of the team facilitate these conversations. So that each team member can participate freely without having another job to as well.

On the first evening, I also like to add a Life Map exercise in addition to the Six Conversations. After dinner, each participant takes 15-20 minutes to reflect on the path they have come along in life. They draw that as a graph or map using a template (you can have a copy  by simply entering your email below). Once everyone has completed the Life Map, they take turns sharing their story using the life map as the guide. This ALWAYS produces a much better understanding of why each of us is who we are. And ultimately that contributes to higher levels of trust in the group.

I also recomend the book: Community The Structure of Belonging By Peter Block