Learning

How are you getting your feedback?

April 14, 2022By Mike Hohnen

In my previous posts, I have been stressing the importance of feedback and reflection. In a nutshell, you can say that without feedback, there is no learning or progress.

So if you are interested in the people around you actually growing and developing, you need to give them feedback.

But what about you, where are you getting your feedback?

If you are very lucky, you have a great boss who understands all this and who provides both coaching and mentoring for you.

Alas, for many of you, that is not the case.

What about the team then? Only in the best of cases can you rely on your followers to provide feedback in the positive, constructive way that you actually need to improve at anything. Ask your followers: “How am I doing as your boss?” Put your people in a very difficult position, unless there is an exceptionally high level of trust. The one question that sometimes produces relatively honest feedback is: “Is there anything in your view that I could do differently and that if I did would make your life/job easier?

But most of you will need to source your feedback in other ways if you want to make sure that you are continuing to learn and grow.

As one manager said me to yesterday, “It’s frightening I just realised that at some point, way back, maybe 10 – 12 years, I stopped developing and growing as a leader. Since then, I have just been in firefighting problem-solving mode, basically using the same approach day in and day out. Lots of management, very little leadership.”

Bingo. And he is not alone.

“Anyone who stops learning is old whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays strong.” — Henry Ford

So what are your options?

Start a mastermind group. This is one of the most effective ways to support your now development. Find 2-3 other people either within your own company or from other companies that are also interested in developing as leaders and set up a group. This can be a physical group or it can be in a virtual group working online. I have tried both and both work well.

In my view, a mastermind group is very similar to an action learning group (‘Mastermind’ somehow seems to be the flavour preferred at the moment). The principles are the same, you get together with a small group of people who are all committed to supporting each other’s learning. Each of you formulates a leadership challenge that you would like to work on.

The group needs to agree how often it will meet and for how long and over how many weeks/months. I have participated in many variants, 90-minute meeting every other week, half-day meeting once a month or any other variation that would work for you. What is important is that there is a regular rhythm to these meetings and that they are not canceled or postponed. If you sign up for a mastermind, you also commit to attending, come hell or high water.

It is a good idea to agree upfront on how many weeks this will run for so that the session have a natural ending. Otherwise, they tend to go stale. My preference is the 90-day model. I generally like to work in 90 day ‘years’.

Mastermind groups can be facilitated by a coach or they can run as self-organising. As a facilitator/coach, I run a number of these groups online and it works very well. Drop me a line if you are interested in learning more. New groups will start this summer.

There are many ways to run a mastermind group. This is how I do it:

Agree the time. I.e we will be working here for the next 90 minutes (These meetings should not be allowed to just run on endlessly. They have a start and a finish time).
Check in. Each participant takes 2-3 minutes to respond to the question: How is life and what would you like to talk about today?
Depending on the time allocated, the remaining time is divided into equal chunks, and that is the time slot for each participant (If you are self-organising, the timekeeping is the most difficult and should be assigned to one person or your take turns. But it is important to avoid that the last person is left with 7 minutes).
Take turns in the hot seat. Each participant starts out by describing the issue that she would like to discuss. The other participants try their damnedest TO NOT GIVE SOLUTIONS but to stay curious and ask plenty questions. A good framework to have in the back of your head as a participant is the GROW Model. As that person’s session comes to an end, ask the person in the hot seat: What are you going to do next? What is your commitment until our next session? If there is a facilitator, it can be a good idea to make a note and follow up with participants at the next meeting.
Close the session by doing a quick check-out round answering the question: What was your key takeaway from today?
Confirm or reconfirm the next session

It’s a simple process, but you will see that it is incredibly powerful. Not only does one learn and grow, it makes a big difference in moving difficult projects and challenges to a conclusion. Try it! You will see for yourself.

If mastermind groups are not for you, you could consider finding a coach or a mentor. I will develop ways to do that in next week’s post.

This the sixth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why and how to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit Chain, we have a special treat for you:

No feedback, no learning. It’s that simple.

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Imagine you were deprived of all feedback, no matter what you did you, had no way of knowing the outcome of your actions.

Terrifying, yes?

Without feedback, we have no possible way of improving what we do. We are flying blind. Everything we actually know how to do, we have learnt in incremental steps. Only by paying attention to the feedback have we been able to get better.

So as a leader, there are two implications to this that you need to be thinking about. And they concern you and ‘them’.

If you find yourself thinking from time to time that this or that person reporting to you could do better (and I know you have these kinds of thought from time to time because in my position as a coach and confidante of many leaders I hear this regularly), then you need to ask yourself how good a job am I doing in giving this person helpful feedback?

Oh come on, Mike…

I can sense you thinking… if you just knew how many times I have told that person that this or that is not working.

You may have told them. But is telling skillful feedback?

Not really, telling is probably the least effective tool at your disposal, yet it seems to be a tool of choice for many managers.

Sir John Whitmore, the creator of the GROW Model has a lovely video where he coaches a beginner in golf.

Notice that all he does is ask questions. What would you like to accomplish? How did that feel? What do you notice about your body? What would you like to do now? And slowly but surely, the power of the questions helps the novice golfer improve considerably in just a few minutes. Watch for yourself here.

What I find even more striking is the comparison with the other novice golfer who is being ‘told’ what to do by the more traditional instructor. The more he gets told, the stiffer and more awkward he becomes.

What is that telling us?

If you would like to see continuous improvement around you, you need to work on your feedback skills. If you feel team members could do better, that is valuable feedback to you. It tells you more about you than it does about them.

Next week, we will explore the other situation that is possibly even more terrifying than finding yourself in a black hole with no feedback. It is the situation where all the feedback you are getting is more or less fake or misleading, and that I am afraid is not as uncommon as you might think.

You have been reading the fourth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit chain, we have a special treat for you:

For this month only, you can download Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if … for FREE using this coupon JLXW8P9QSE. It is only available for the first 50 people so first come first serve.

Download the book here!

Some experiences provide more learning than others

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

In our series on cultivating learning and development in yourself and others, we examined how we learn from experiences last week. If you missed it, you will find it here.

The next natural question to explore is: Then do we learn equally well from any type of experience?

Obviously not. Taking the bus to work each day is normally not a great learning experience, nor is doing the weekend shopping with the family, unless of course there is a challenge involved.

When something becomes challenging, we have a great opportunity to learn. And often we quickly solve the challenge and then pat ourselves on the back: “Well done, you are making progress.” Or we pat our associates on the back and tell them: “Well done! Nice job. I see you are learning a thing or two.” The learning that takes place here we sometimes also refer to as external. We are learning something about how the world outside ourselves actually works. This learning is often also context specific. Under these circumstances, this is what one needs to do. But when the circumstances change, as they have a tendency to do, then that learning is not always so useful.

So quite frankly these are not the challenges that maximise our learning. True learning begins when we hit serious resistance. Things are not working out the way we hoped. Maybe we are even experiencing serious setbacks and even failures. These situations provide some really interesting learning because of our lack of success.

These are the situation where we learn about ourselves more than anything else. And the learning does not arise for the external event but from how we choose to respond to whatever is going on.

This is where we learn:

To resist the temptation to blame others for the situation
We see how stepping back from the situation helps us gain perspective and as a result, we learn how we are possibly contributing to the mess that is being created.
How to develop resilience in moving beyond the unpleasantness or pain of the experience and commit ourselves to do something about our personal limitations
In short, this is where we learn how to grow.

Challenges that start out as failures and setbacks thus provide som of the richest learning environments that we can possibly encounter. Most of us get this on a personal level. “Makes sense. I screwed up on that assignment but I learnt a lot.”

But do we apply the same tolerance and understanding attitude toward the members of our team who screw up from time to time? Do we see that as a valuable part of their learning process or do we see them as a problem?

Maybe our learning should start there…

This blog post is the third in a series of blog posts where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit chain, we have a special treat for you:

For this month only, you can download Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if … for FREE using this coupon JLXW8P9QSE. It is only available for the first 50 people so first come first serve.

Download the book here!

Teams are organic systems, and therefore, by definition unstable.

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Team member

As we continue to explore team leadership as different from team management, we now need to look at another aspect of the team.

A team is also a system. And when we look at it from that angle, we need to recognise that systems come in many forms. One way to look at them is as either mechanical or organic. Mechanical systems are things like computers, cars and factories. Mechanical systems are by definition stable. You may feel that your car is moody – but that is probably more about you than the car. The car works or it does not work. If you stress it, it continues to work up to a point and then it snaps and is kaput.

Human beings – the core elements of your team are organic systems, as are cats, cauliflower or caterpillars. And organic systems are by definition unstable. They are always in transition from one state to another. Humans, go from happy to excited to sad. From wide awake to drowsy. From enthusiastic to reluctant and back again, on and on it goes. The only constant is change.

If we try and handle this instability with just management tools, we quickly get into trouble. The whole principle of management is that we can set up rules, and ways of doing things that can be replicated every day no matter what. Great idea if you are working with a stable system – quite tricky if you are working with an unstable system. Add to that, the complexity that these team members are not transitioning from one stage to another in an orderly and synchronised manner. While A is happy, B is frustrated, and C is indifferent. And tomorrow that may well be the other way round. It just depends…

The instability is not completely random. We typically shift to a new state as a result of some stimulus. This can be a change in weather, a remark from a colleague, a difficult task etc. the list is endless. Here you see the big difference with mechanical systems. Your car does not get sad when it rains, happy when we are going downhill – or frustrated by all the bigger cars on the road today. It just does its car thing in the same state no matter what.

Now all this may seem obvious to you. But in my day to day work as a coach, I keep running in to leaders who are assuming that everyone on their team is operating like a car and therefore have two states ‘off’ and ‘on’.

First step is to acknowledge and accept that this is what is going on. Learn to live with the fact that everyone around you is basically unstable – including you.

Second, if you are the kind of leader who is highly volatile or moody or otherwise prone to dramatic shifts in your states, you need to learn to manage your own states (I will be giving an online course on that in beginning of the New Year).

Thirdly, now that you are aware that this is what is going on, you need to help your team members better manage their states.

We will look at that in next week’s post.

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This post is one of a series where we are exploring the notion of leadership and how this is different from management. Our starting point is the Service Profit Chain and the understating that the management part of our job will only take us so far. If we really want to create an organisation that is capable of delivering outstanding customer experiences, we need to develop an organisation that delivers outstanding employee experiences – and that requires leadership. You can check out other articles of the series below:

What is your declaration of incompetence?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Learning

Learning and development is a key component in our overall wellbeing.

In order for you to learn – there needs to be a gap: A gap between your desired results/performance and your current ability. This was the topic of last week’s post where you can find a more detailed explanation.

You may of course not be getting the results you hoped for despite the fact that you have the ability. I.e. you know what to do but you are not doing it. That is not a learning challenge but a motivational challenge – the cure for that could be a bit of coaching but that is topic for another day.

We can look at our roles from two perspectives. There is a management perspective and a leadership perspective. Identifying the gap from a management perspective is often quite easy. In our roles as managers, there are typically some quite explicit expectations that have measurable metrics attached to them.

But the other part of our job – the leadership aspect does not come with the same set of quantifiable metrics. So how can we identify the gaps here?

One way of doing it is to use the DAC framework developed by Center for Creative Leadership. I wrote about that in a previous post that you will find here.

So to what extent do you feel that there is direction, alignment and commitment on the team that you are leading?

Take look at the matrix below and ask you self that hard questions on each of these. Where is my team and where would I like them to be?

	Happening	Not Happening
Direction	– There is a clear vision of a desired future that everyone buys into. – Team members are individually clear on what the team is trying to achieve as a whole.	– No agreement on priorities – Team members feel they are bingo pulled in multiple directions. – There is lots of activity but not much progress.
Alignment	– Roles and goals are clear individually. – There is a clear understanding of how each and everyone contributes to the larger picture. – There is a sense that this is a well coordinated and synchronised effort.	– Deadlines are missed. Rework required and lots of errors resulting in double work. – People feel disconnected from each other. – Internal competition and blame games are the norm.
Commitment	– Team members go the extra mile. – There is a sense of mutual understating and trust. – There are visibly high levels of engagement.	– Only the easy things get done. – Team members are questioning what is in it for them. – Individuals avoid taking ownership and responsibility.

Is there a gap?

So back to the learning – for learning to happen you must declare your incompetence. “I would like to achieve xyz but actually I don’t quite know how to get there.”

How does that feel? Scary, intriguing, motivating? Whatever you are feeling, what is important is that you are slightly out of your comfort zone – because that is where learning, growth and development actually take place. So if it feels a bit uncomfortable – great, you are on track.
There is a great learning opportunity.

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If you have the curiosity to take a deeper dive into the subject of how we produce engagement on our teams, you are welcome to download my ebook Understanding Engagement.

Enter your email below and download the ebook now!

In this brief e-book, we will look at how the lack of engagement is to a large extent a function of leadership. And that if we really want to change the engagement levels on our teams, we will need to make radical shift in how we understand the world of work. The shift is all about moving from a transactional mindset to a transformational mindset. We will look into what that means, how it can help you as a manager and why it is so important.

The price of success is often slow death.

May 25, 2016By Mike Hohnen

In the early nineties, Prof. John Kotter conducted a research on what he, at the time, called “unadaptive organisations”.

The business school case of that time was Rank Xeroz who invented the photocopier, created a highly successful business with a dominant market share, only one day to wake up and find that the Japanese had eaten their lunch.

Kotter pointed out that there seemed to be a pattern in these cases of dominant companies that were suddenly seriously disrupted. (More recent cases of this kind of disruption are KODAK and Nokia; same story and LEGO was within inches of falling of the same cliff a few years back. “We had become arrogant—we didn’t listen to customers anymore,” says Mr Knudstorp.)

A great strategy/product leads to exceptional success.

But success sometimes has some unpleasant side effects.

It starts out with focus, that leads to tighter control, that leads to rigid procedures and rules and eventually just before it’s lights out, to arrogance. The arrogance means there is no room for new input from any of the stakeholders involved – The internal logic is we are successful and therefore we know best – don’t mess with it.

The reason this rigid focus does not work is because it presupposes that the world we live in is also stable or even stagnant – but when everything else around us evolves at an ever increasing speed, we need to evolve with it – that means changing and adapting the whole time.

So how do we mitigate arrogance?

The buzz word seems to be agility – But how does one become agile? We install a culture of continuous learning.

If we are always learning – we are in questioning the status quo – it’s what Peter Senge calls open mind. We are asking questions of ourselves and our surroundings continuously; questions that stem from genuine curiosity. Curiosity about what is going on, what others are thinking and feeling. If we then also take the time to reflect on the answers we are getting, pure magic happens.

You see, it is a bit of a myth that we learn from our experiences. If we always did, we would never make the same mistake twice, would we? So we only learn from our experiences when we take the time to think about them – when we pause for a moment of reflection.

So we need to develop the habit of reflection as the natural part of ending a meeting, ending the day, ending a project.

My favourite way of doing that – which is super fast, is to use the goals grid developed by Fred Nicols – you will find it here.

We ask ourselves two questions: do we have it and do we want it? Then we get four sections: Preserve, Achieve/develop, Eliminate and Avoid. I often do this on a napkin.

“So how did the day go? what would we like to continue doing, do better tomorrow, eliminate or avoid in the future?”
“Thank you all for attending this meeting. Let’s just recap what did we learn today?”

Try for yourself – even on your own. At the end of the day, ask yourself: What did I learn today?

Implementing the Service Profit Chain requires a different state of mind.

May 4, 2016By Mike Hohnen

As we have seen in previous posts, our state is influenced by how we see things – SeeBeDo.

The dominant way of seeing the world of work is called transactional – it’s the something-for-something system – and as we saw in my previous post, it is not madly inspiring.

But what is the alternative?

Is there a different way to look at the world of work that would produce a different state of mind and as a consequence, a different kind of leadership?

The short answer is yes – it is called transformational leadership and what is puzzling about this is that this way of seeing work has been around since the late 1970s.

Transformational Leadership was first coined by the historian and political scientist, James MacGregor Burns in the late 1970s, and was used to distinguish the inspirational leadership style from Transactional Leadership.

It was later expanded on by Bass and Rigio in their book “Transformational Leadership”

“Superior leadership performance — transformational leadership — occurs when leaders broaden and elevate the interests of their employees, when they generate awareness and acceptance of the purposes and mission of the group, and when they stir their employees to look beyond their own self-interest for the good of the group. Transformational leaders achieve these results in one or more ways: They may be charismatic to their followers and thus inspire them; they may meet the emotional needs of each employee; and/or they may intellectually stimulate employees. “

Transformational leadership includes four central components:

Idealized Influence	being a role model that is highly regarded, valued, trusted, and deserving of emulation
Inspirational Motivation	encouraging enthusiasm in others through challenge and instilling a sense of significance while promoting cohesion, harmony, and confidence
Intellectual Stimulation	kindling creativity and inventiveness by encouraging novel ideas, questioning, and thinking outside the box
Individualized Consideration	paying particular attention to the individual needs of each follower

At the core of this is a fundamentally different approach to what work and life is all about

Transactional	Transformational
Homo economicus – humans are rational, and act only out of self-interest.Reward and punishment are the prime motivators.	The integrated human works on developing herself on many levels, physical, mental and emotional.Humans are driven by a need for purpose / meaning and a hunger for development and autonomy.
The transactional manager works within the established way of thinking and does not question these basic assumptions about how the organisation operates.	The transformational leader is continuously renewing the organisation by challenging existing assumptions and implementing new ideas process that question the status quo.
The employee and the employer have opposite interested it a zero sum game, I win/ you lose	The employer and the employee have common or at least overlapping interest and concerns. It’s a win/win or a lose/lose.

There is a ton of academic research that shows that the transformative approach produces superior results. If we then drill down and try to understand what exactly it is that makes this significant difference, two things jump out.

Transformational leadership, more than anything else, creates a high level of employee enthusiasm / engagement.
In a rapidly changing world full of wicked problems – survival, let alone growth, is dependent on the contribution of everyone.

The transformative leader is distinguished by the ability to mobilise all the resources that are present in a given group or organization. And because people feel involved, included, and accepted for who they are, you get a completely different level of engagement. It becomes a self-reinforcing upward spiral.

Because of this, there are better relations and a much better understanding of each other’s perspectives. This also builds a culture where everybody feels like contributing and adding their point of view and ideas without being nervous about being criticized, ridiculed, or otherwise falling foul in the system.

This also means that the transformational leader is more humble in respect to other people and open to their ideas and contributions, because it’s not about the leader as a hero, but about a challenge, a purpose, that we need to solve together.

The transformative organization does better over time – they are much better equipped to handle change.

This also solves a personal inquiry I have had for a few years now: Why is it that some organisations implement the Service Profit Chain framework with a natural ease and subsequent amazing results, while others seem to get stuck.

The answer lies in their fundamental approach to work, is it transactional or is it transformational?

Even with the best intentions, if your fundamental state of mind is transactional, you will not create the kind of internal quality that is foundational for success when implementing the Service Profit Chain.

Are you the chief employee experience officer?

March 31, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Focusing on the customer experience is the key to high customer loyalty – it’s well established.

That is also why around 70% of medium to large UK companies have a customer experience manager at the level of VP or equivalent. The current buzz-tool for developing these customer experiences is ‘service design thinking’.

So far so good.

But if you’re familiar with the service profit chain, you also know that the key to an exceptional customer experience starts somewhere else. We need to create what we call ‘internal quality’ – more popularly referred to as ‘a dream team cycle’.

So what would happen if we were to turn all this service design thinking on its head and focus more on the employee experience? When did we last sit down to analyse the employee journey as it unfolds throughout the day?

Do we know what the critical touch points are? Have we done some emotional mapping that could help us understand what the possible frustrations are during a day?

What are the learning opportunities? Does this job have varying challenges, or is it just the same thing day in, day out?

This idea came to me as I read Global Human Capital Trends 2016, published by Deloitte University Press. According to this latest survey, 92% of executives listed organisational design as very important and something they will be focusing on this year.

So designing our service organisations from the employee perspective should receive the same kind of attention and resources as we use when looking at the customer experience. Yes?

This leaves the question of who the chief employee experience officer is going to be in your organisation. Will they be part of HR, or will your organisation create a totally separate role?

I would love to hear your views on this, so please feel free to reply to this mail.