Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

team leader

Because you will drift, you need to learn how to shift

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Maybe you have now decided for yourself: ‘I will never, ever again fall into a drama triangle’. I know I’ve tried that approach more than once . Well, I can tell you something. It’s not going to work. It doesn’t work because we drift. In the post I will show you how we need to shift instead

Here is the video version and the sound track version for thos on the go

We start out with some degree of presence. We are totally ‘here now’ And then something happens. Something that causes us to drift out of presence. It could be beep on the cell phone. “Oh, sorry. Just a minute , oh no, not again. Yeah, sorry. Where were we?”

Or we just, can’t stay concentrated. Our mind starts floating: I wonder what’s for lunch? These interruptions and many more we call drift. And when we drift, we easily slip below the line. ( because left to its own devices our Ego loves to run the show) And before we know it we get caught in the drama triangle again.

Develop your awareness – understand what is going on

And so the issue is not to never ever get caught in the drama triangle because you’re not going to solve that. The real challenge is you need to develop the awareness to realise when that is what is happening.

The drift shift model - how to get back above the line and away from the drama triangle

And then you need to develop the skills to shift yourself back out of the drama triangle and up into presence of being fully ‘here now’. A simple first step of shifting is to take a deep breath, and re-center. Then you ask yourself the key question: I wonder how we could fix/solve/develop that. By activating a ‘creating’ question we come back to the present. A question that seeks to create something that would contribute to the current situation. That’s the core skill and that’s what we need to practice.

More Vblogs in the pipeline

This concludes my first six-post series on leadership skills, based around this model of above and below the line.

I will continue these VBlogs in the future, and will continue to explore the leadership qualities that we need to develop in order to become great team leaders.

Here are the previous post in this series

Leadership skills every team leader needs to master

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

Feeling right you are probably wrong

Great team leaders do not get sucked into drama

Mike Hohnen, MBA is a coach, trainer, author and public speaker who supports leaders, managers and their teams in implementing the principles of the Service Profit Chain.

Do the post-project review before you start the project

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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

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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.