Learning

Why my fear of roller coasters does not keep me out of amusement parks

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Helix - Liseberg - Gothenburg — *Helix – Liseberg – Gothenburg*

They scare the living daylight out of me those roller coasters.

Intellectually I understand that they are safe, probably safer that taking a taxi to the airport, statistically… but still. It’s always been like that, so maybe in a previous life I was traumatised by a roller coaster gone wild. Anyway that is not the point of this final blog post of the year. The reason I mention it is because paradoxically this year I have seen more incredible roller coasters and heard more delighted shrieks from thrilled crowds than at any time previously in my life. More on that in just a minute.

Yes I am in a reflective mood.

You see, technically, this week is just like all the other weeks, but somehow in our mind it’s quite special. It marks an ending and a new beginning and we all get in this mood of yearly review and even more importantly setting new bold goals for the coming year.

All my lovely blogging colleagues are probably bombarding you with: The ten best books you should have read, the eight new trends that you must understand or (flavour of the year) the twelve point action plan that will make this your best year ever!

So why the roller coasters?

Well believe it or not, this was the year that I got to spend considerable time in amusements parks!

Seriously!

As always I have been doing work with my loyal gang of regular hotel clients, but I also got to spend time at Efteling in Holland introducing the Service Profit Chain for IAAPA. In Copenhagen, we introduced a new approach to leadership development at Tivoli gardens and I had the honour for 16 weeks to take a group of seriously enthusiastic managers from Liseberg in Gothenburg through the GROW leadership program.

So what am I learning?

I think my key takeaway this year has been confirmation that at the end of the day, being a great manager is deceptively simple on the surface, and incredibly hard to do well in practice. It’s like juggling. You see the guy rotating 5 oranges in the air and you think: “That’s neat. I can do that.” You pick up the oranges and you understand that there is a gap between knowing and doing.

The 5 oranges of management that you need to juggle have been elegantly formulated by the Gallup organisation based on their extensive research of hundreds of business and managers.

Great managers have these talents/skills/abilities:

They motivate every single employee to take action and engage them with a compelling mission and vision.
They have the assertiveness to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.
They create a culture of clear accountability.
They build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency.
They make decisions that are based on productivity, not politics.

That’s it! But again this is just more information, and I am sure you don’t need more information.

What you need is probably execution, the HOW part.

So that brings me to next year. Early 2017, we will be launched the Team Leader’s Toolbox – a training program aimed at helping busy mangers learn quickly how they juggle their ‘oranges’.

We have been exploring this theme of Leadership and Management over the year on the blog as well and if you missed some of the posts you can download a compilation in the form of ebook HERE.

Thank you for reading my blog. If there is anything you would like to see more (or less) of next year, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I love hearing from my readers.

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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:

Progress drives engagement – So how do you focus on progress?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Progress

Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run. Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high quality product or service, everyday progress, even a small win, can make all difference in how they feel and perform.

The Progress Principle

This quote which makes so much sense to me brings us to another aspect of not just why we need to focus on developing the people around us, but also how we can do it.

Focus on progress

In order to progress, we need a baseline to progress from. Once we have a baseline, we can start thinking about what we need to learn or practice in order to get better.

For learning actually to happen, there must be a gap between your current capability and the results that you desire.

So in order for our people actually to learn they need to:

Have an awareness of the gap
Be willing to declare their incompetence (I don’t know how to do that.)
Commit to learning

(I have written about this in a previous post some time ago.)

So if I sneak into your business and tap any one of your team members on the shoulder and ask them: “What are you working on at the moment in order to get better?”, or I ask them: “In what ways does your boss feel you have made progress last month?”, do they know?

Or is progress something that is randomly observed and then celebrated: “Oh look isn’t this nice!”?

Focusing on progress is an important part of your leadership role. And your most important tool for this is not a dashboard in excel but conversations, one-on-one conversations (According to Gallup research, team members who have no or very few one-to-one sessions with their direct supervisor are 67% more likely to be disengaged at work. I mention this just in case you have the notion that one-on-one is a waste of time and it is easier to tell them all at once.)

If you happen to be a manager of managers, this is even more import – you are the role model. If you are not having one-to-one conversations (about progress) with your direct reports, there is little chance that they are having them with their team members. In fact, if you are not talking to them about how they are progressing with their approach to manage progress with their team, I am pretty sure it is not happening at all.

How to structure an engaging conversation

What would be a good way to structure these conversations?

Establish the gap. Once we have a gap, we can establish a goal. Moving toward our goal is what progress would look like. Then we can have a chat about so what is going on now compared to that goal. Once we agree on how what is going on is different from the goal, then we can talk about what options there could be in order to make progress towards the goal. Finally, we pick an action and commit to doing that.

The following conversation will be a follow up / feedback on how this is going. If you are familiar with coaching, you will have recognised that what I have described here as a framework is in fact the GROW coaching model – you can check it out in more details HERE.

In any case, in my upcoming course The Team Leaders’ Toolbox, we will be exploring this model more in details. If you would like to be notified when we launch that, sign up with the link below!

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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Who gets the last chef?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Who gets the last chef?

That was the title of my presentation for a group of managers last week. The title was inspired by a number of conversations that I have been having with clients during 2016. (You can substitute ‘Chef’ for the type of critical position that is part of your current reality.)

Reflecting on those conversations, I realised that there has been a common thread through most of them.

They have all been concerned with:

The lack of bench strength on their management teams
The scarcity of new talent

On a day to day basis, this is not so obvious, and therefore it’s not a high priority; but it hits them every time a key team member needs to be replaced. First, they realise that there is no obvious no.2 who has been groomed for the job. Secondly, when they start the search, they quickly understand that there is not a lot of talents available out there.

Problem is that once they realise this, it’s a bit late to do much about it other than pray…

And honestly, are they going to get the cream of the crop in that situation? Probably not. Most likely, they will get what is left over. It’s like purchasing a second hand car. You are essential taking over someone else’s problem.

Why?

Because the smartest of your colleagues out there have understood the problem a long time ago and have been working strategically with their HR development.

They don’t start thinking about who is going to replace the head chef on the day that he resigns.

They have a strategy to be the preferred employer in their area and an important part of that is a proactive strategy for succession planning. That means that when they recruit or promote someone to the position of, say sous-chef, they ask themselves does this person have the potential to become a chef one day, or is this just a good cook who just might make it as a half decent sous-chef? If that is the case, we have created a problem with a time release.

Part of being a preferred employer is being recognised as an organisation where employees can learn, develop and grow. And in order for that to happen, someone needs to take charge of developing, coaching and mentoring.

If you are a manager, that someone is you.

But this is an actually quite challenge for most managers. In fact, it is one of six key challenges that managers have in common across borders, hierarchies and professions, according to research conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership.

Developing, coaching and mentoring team members also happens to be one more of the leadership attributes that our current series on defining management and leaderships is about.

So let’s start off by understanding how do people actually learn and develop in the job situation?

According to a much quoted piece of research also by the Center for Creative Leadership*, lessons learned by successful and effective managers are roughly:

70% from challenging assignments
20% from developmental relationships
10% from coursework and training

The authors of the research explain it like this:

Development generally begins with a realisation of current or future need and the motivation to do something about it. This might come from feedback, a mistake, watching other people’s reactions, failing or not being up to a task – in other words, from experience. The odds are that development will be about 70% from on-the-job experiences – working on tasks and problems; about 20% from feedback and working around good and bad examples of the need; and 10% from courses and reading.

We can support learning and development through courses and training sessions, absolutely, but at the end of the day, it can only be support for what is actually going on in the day to day job situation. That is where the real learning takes place; which is why the immediate manager plays such a key role in the development of team members.

In the coming blog posts, we are going to explore this crucial leadership competence and what you need to do in practical terms.

*Lombardo, Michael M; Eichinger, Robert W (1996). The Career Architect Development Planner (1st ed.). Minneapolis: Lominger. p. iv. ISBN 0-9655712-1-1.

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Do you understand the stages that your team goes through?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Team

Last week, we took a deeper dive into understanding how the mental states of each team member has an influence on the whole team – and that the team leader probably has more influence on this than anybody else. If you did not read that post, you might want to start there first.

The mental state that team members are in also produces a certain collective behaviour, especially as there are states that are typical for each stage of the life cycle of a team.

When we put a bunch of people together in a team, they typically go though certain stages. This was first described by Psychologist Bruce Tuckman who came up with the memorable phrase “forming, storming, norming, and performing” in his 1965 article, “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups.”

team-phases-pic-001

So this is not new. On the contrary, it is well established framework and many of you have probably heard the expression “forming, storming, norming and performing” before. The words that describe the basic stages that small groups experience. In theory, this is a linear process that starts with forming and then goes step by step through all four stages. But the challenge in this is that most teams do not naturally follow this path – they need some help or else they get stuck.

What stage is your team at?

So what is important is for the team leader to recognise the stages as they unfold in the team and to act skilfully in helping the team through each stage. Part of this team leader’s awareness also means understanding that the team is basically an unstable system, and that from time to time it will regress from the current stage and take a step or even two steps back to previous stages. And it requires skillful action on the part of the team leader to get the team back on track.

Less experienced team leaders often have an aversion to conflict. They feel it is all important that we all get along and have a nice time. So when the initial phase, the forming stage, is coming to an end and the first signs of friction become apparent, the typical reaction is to reorganise the team in order to stop the conflict from escalating. The deep fear is that this could get really ugly.

The quick fix is to shuffle positions or tasks, maybe even transferring one or more team members away from the team to other teams or whatever. The shuffle causes the team process to reset and a new period of forming starts. And it creates the illusion that the conflict or problem is solved.

During the forming stage, everyone is doing their best to fit in and not rock the boat too much. They are also trying their best to adapt to everyone else. But after a while, the friction invariably starts again. It happens because after a while, each of the team members have had enough, they are tired of not voicing their need and constantly trying to bend over backwards to keep everyone happy and they start to voice their dissatisfaction.

Conflict is just a symptom.

Friction is not a bad thing as such; it is just a symptom that we need to align whatever we are doing better with each other.

The way we do that is that we start a number of conversations about how the team is functioning and what we need to do in order for everything to work better for all. This may mean some heated meetings and possible disharmony, but eventually the skillful team leader will help the team come to an understanding that enables them to move forward – typically by establishing some rules of engagement or a team manifesto. As they do, the team moves out of the storming into the norming stage and after a while it becomes (high) performing.

You need to work on the fluffy stuff.

As the team leader, it is important for you to understand that it is hard to get to any level of (high) performance without investing time and energy in what is often seen as the fluffy stuff. You need to have the necessary conversations; conversations that aim on developing better relations and not just on task accomplishments. Handling this in a helpful way that keeps everyone on the bus and heading in the same direction is not something we are born with – it is learned skill.

In my next online training, the Team Leader’s Toolbox, I will go into much more detail on how to actually do this in practical terms. Because it is not rocket science, it just requires you to be aware of some basic principles about human behaviour and the importance of relationships.

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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What is the gap between your capability and your desired results?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Capability Result gap

The research is pretty clear – personal growth and development are key factors in creating engagement on the job.

If we are lucky, we have a job situation where continuous learning and development is built into the culture. But in my experience, this is definitely not always the case.

So if no one else is looking out for your growth and development then maybe you should take it into your own hands – if not you, who else?

In order for us to develop and grow as human beings – and managers – some forms of learning probably need to take place.

But what does it mean to learn?

One definition that I like is this one:

“To learn is to increase your capacity to accomplish the results that you desire.”

Think about that for a moment.

What does it take for us to learn then?

For learning actually to happen, there must be a gap between your current capability and the results that you desire.

This makes it all a bit trickier. Because that means that in order for learning to actually take place, you will need to:

have an awareness of the the gap
be willing to declare your incompetence (at least to yourself)
commit to learning

So your first step here is to start the search for appropriate gaps between current capability and desired performance.

There are several ways to start thinking about this. But let’s start with the very big picture – and draw a 2×2 matrix.

On one axis, we have you as an individual versus the organisation; On the other, we have the internal vs the external perspective.

learning

This then gives us four large areas to choose from:

1) My internal drive, attitudes and motivation. How I choose to see and understand the world – This will, to a very large extent, determine how the world responds to me.

2) How I relate and connect to people around me – Strong interpersonal dynamic is a key to succeeding in any kind of managerial role.

3) My knowledge of an ability to shape the culture that I am part of – Culture eats strategy for breakfast remember.

4) My understating of an ability to influence the myriad of external stakeholders , customers, supplier, partners etc.

So take a moment now to reflect.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your achievements in each of these four overall areas? Where do you see a gap between your current capability and the results that you desire?

I leave you with these thoughts for now – next week, we will continue our exploration of how we can take responsibility for our own growth and development.

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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.

SeeBeDo

April 14, 2022By Mike Hohnen

I have been reading “Building the bridge as you walk on it” by Robert E. Quinn. It’s a lovely book. What struck me the most and what has been going round in my head for a while since reading the book is this very simple statement:

“Management is what we do. Leadership is who we are.”

So from that perspective, all this talk about leadership tools and training misses the point. What we need to talk about is what it takes to develop a healthy leadership state.

And that made me go back and dig out some writings by Doug Silsbee. He has a lovely acronym SeeBeDo that reminds us that the way we choose – and it is a choice – to see things, influences the way we are. Our state. And the state that we are in will influence our actions. And our actions determine the outcomes that we get in life.

A simple example: The way I drive on the day I have all the time in the world, meandering through the countryside on the first spring day, is different from when I am late for the airport and traffic is dense in the rain. And the way behaviour shows up comes out most obviously in how I behave towards other people.

I expect that you can imagine for yourself the two different scenarios and the two different types of driving behaviour that are the result. I say no more.

But the implication of this line of thought is that my driving style is at the mercy of the circumstances that I happen to be in. Ultimately, that means I see myself as either a lucky guy out for a drive in the countryside, or as a victim of bad weather and crowed motorways and I behave accordingly.

Ouch…..

I don’t need more driving lessons – that is not the point – I need to learn to manage my states.

The first step in managing my states is to examine closer how I choose to see what goes on around me. The state that I am in is driven by the way I choose to perceive the situation.

Neuroscience has documented this very well; we are what we give our attention to. Whatever we hold in our mind unconsciously influences what we can notice and focus on – and maybe more importantly, what we are unable to notice and focus on. This too has been well documented in “the Gorilla on the court” experiments.

So to what extend are we conscious of what we are holding in our mind? And is what we are holding in our mind supportive of the leadership responsibility before us or is it getting in the way, possibly even hindering us in understanding what is truly going on?

As always I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this topic. Feel free to leave your comments below and let me know what you think.