Team Leadership

Your ego loves ‘this’ not ‘that’

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

It’s got to be like this. And if it’s like this, it obviously cannot be like that. This is the world your ego loves.

We have been exploring the difference between to be above the line and below the line in a number of blogposts now. The concept of ‘this’ not ‘that’ relates back to my original video in this serie about how we get trapped in wanting to be right. When we get trapped in ‘this’ not ‘that’, then we also are trapped in right and wrong and black and white and all the rest of it. And that’s fine. As long as we are operating in a simple world: that car is blue, that horse is moving or appels are fruits.

Video and Soundcloud versions below

‘This’ not ‘that’ works when things are simple

But as soon as we start moving out of very simple situations and into something that starts getting more complicated or even more complex, we start getting into trouble.

Just to recapitulate, computers are complicated. They are difficult but once you figure them out then you know how they will respond. A bowl of spaghetti on the other hand is complex. You have no idea how its is ‘configured’. If you pull a strand what happens next? It is unpredictable and the next bowl will behave differently.

That’s the beauty of complexity. Things are so interconnected and there’s so much randomness in the system that we don’t really know how things will evolve, respond or perform. In a complex world ‘this’ not ‘that’ is pretty useless. It doesn’t work.

Of all our fears, the fear of the unknown is the greatest

So why do we get trapped in wanting to be right? Well, you’ll see what happens is that most of us get scared when faced with complexity. We have nothing to hold on to, no rules to live by and our little ego freaks out and looks for something to cling to: And there is it is ‘this’ not ‘that’. The moment it does, it drags us below the line. It’s the end of open mind, we no longer see possibilities, we are not open to perspectives. We are fighting for ego-survival. It’s ‘this’ not ‘that’!

In order to stay above the line, we need get comfortable with complexity and we need to be okay with our ‘not knowing’. Complexity means dealing with the grey tones, resisting the black and white solutions. In complexity, we need more options, because we can’t possibly know beforehand which options will actually work out.

That is the world that we’re operating in.

In a complex world this not that no longer works

Great team leaders are not afraid of complexity

And in case you were wondering, anything that involves human beings is not only complicated, it is also very complex. That means the big error we keep on making is, we think we can reduce all those questions regarding our teams and people to ‘this’ not ‘that’. If we do ‘this’, they are going to do ‘that’. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. It just depends. “If we give them a bonus, they will do this”. Maybe, some people will, sometimes. Maybe they won’t. To be a great team leader is also to become a master of complexity.

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

Because you will drift you need to learn how to shift

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.

Leadership skills every team leader needs to master

April 14, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Team leader showing leadership skills — https://thoughts4action.com/transforming-team-managers-team-leaders-2/

I get a lot of questions around this subject of leadership and leadership skills.

How does one develop leadership skills? Are leaders born or developed? What do I need to do to become a better teamleader? I have colletede the over the years – I have over 300 variant of this question. What are way that i can develop my leadership skills

Despite the fact that there are thousands of books on this and masses of courses one can dive into this question comes up again and again.

So this is how I think about it

Or if you prefer to read about leadership skills…

To understand what leadership is, we need to look at the concept of followership. There is no leadership if there is no followership. The followers define the leader.

I love this old joke:

A leader without followers is just a guy out for a walk. ( or a girl).

If you’re not able to generate followership, you are not a leader, period.

So what does it take to generate followership?

The essence of generating followership is the ability to build trust. If you’re not able to build trust with the people around you, you don’t have a chance. There is no followership. They may pay lip service to what you say and ask, but there’s no true engagement or genuine followership.

Let’s examine some of the elements that make up trust?

Where are we going ?

The notion of leadership, first of all, implies that we are going some place. It is implicitly understod that you are leading me towards something. So where are we going? Can you explain to me the direction that we’re going and why we need to go there? If you can’t tell me where we’re going and why we need to go there, why on earth would I choose to follow you?

We can have the big grandiose visions, missions, whatever you want to call them. John F. Kennedy famously said “Put a man on the moon”. Martin Luther King roared : “ I have a dream !”

What do you as a team leader see for your team as a future? Where do you want to take this team? What will be your legacy?. Do you want to be the best customer service team in the organisation? Do you want to be known as the team that was innovative and brought new solutions to your customers? What is it? What is it that you’re trying to do? What is going to be different because of your leadership?

Peter Drucker wrote : What manager mange is change – the rest is admin

If it’s just about maintaining status quo, staying put, then we don’t need a leader, do we? We just need a custodian. Somebody to tally the time sheets and make sure nobody steals the furniture. There’s no need for leadership.

Will I be safe?

When we’ve established that we are going somewhere exciting, then the next thought that comes to me as your team member is am I going to be safe? Is it safe for me to follow you?

That safety comes on two basic levels. Is it physically safe? Are we going to do something dangerous that could put me in danger? In most companies we’re not going to climb Mount Everest or something like that, but there are lots of teams that do all sorts of dangerous stuff. So they need to trust that the team leader will keep them safe.

The other aspect which is much more crucial in corporations and organisations is am I going to be emotionally safe? Am I going to feel okay being on this team? Am I going to be worried that you’re suddenly going to scream and shout at me? Am I going to be worried that if I make a mistake, every one will ridicule me? Am I going to feel accepted by the others? Is it going to be okay to voice my opinion? Is it going to be okay to be me? Am I going to fit in?

Your job is to provide safety

These are important aspects that you as a leader have to find out how to accommodate. How do you make everybody feel safe physically and emotionally? It’s your responsibility.

It’s the classic trade off that goes right back to when we hunted in small groups on the great plains. We accept that somebody in the group is a leader and that being the leader comes with some perks? (First choice of females or food etc back in those days – now, the leader may just get the better office chair ;-) )

None the less, the trade off is that I accept you as my leader if you protect me. That’s the basic deal.

Will your see me?

If I’m going on this trip with you as my leader, will you see me or will I just be one more insignificant cog in the machinery? When I talk to you are you going to be on your iPhone half the time trying to do something else? Or are you truly going to see me, when we interact with each other?

Will I learn and grow?

Am I going to develop myself? Or is this project mainly about you as the team leader and how you are going to further your career? Is it our project or your project. Will you as my leadertake the time and create the space for me to improve myself.

Will I be allowed to contribute?

Will you as my team leader recognize that I have a contribution to make and will I be allowed to make that contribution? Will I be allowed to do what I’m best at?

So if I’m going to be allowed to contribute, learn and develop , it means that you as a leader are going to have to take some risks. I might make mistakes, I might screw up, I might make you look stupid. That’s the risk that you’re going to have to take. And when I do that, will you protect me despite the fact that I screwed up?

These are the key leadership skills that you need to work on if your want to build real followership.

Where are we going?

Will I feel safe?

Will you see me?

Will I learn and grow?

Will I be able to contribute?

And they all boil down to one thing:

Can I trust you?

How can you work on and develops the key leaderships skills?

You cannot learn to be a leader by reading a book. The same way that you can’t learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book, you need to do something and then you need to notice the feedback that you get. What happens when I do it? Are people taking chances? Are they contributing? Are they engaged? What is actually happening on my team?

Do I need to do something differently?

Sometimes it is really helpful to have somebody to discuss and develop some of these reflections with. That’s what one can use a coach for.

I hope this was a helpful. I’d love to hear your comments, ideas, feedback, anything you have to add, I am alway thrilled to engage with the people who read my blog and who also have a passion for Leadership .

Would you like to know more?

Download my free paper called exploring leadership.

In this ebook, I to try to demystify what leadership and leadership skills are all about and translate what may seem fluffy to some people into practical steps that can relatively easily be integrated into your busy day.

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If you would like to change your culture, start a new conversation

September 13, 2017By Mike Hohnen

Often teams say to me: “We need to change the culture around here.” And they often have a point, because toxic cultures are very powerful and can often destroy all sort of great initiatives – and as we have seen in a previous post, culture is a huge part of engagement. But it also easily becomes a fluffy excuse for not doing anything. It’s another drama triangle where the big villain is the culture and we are just the victims of this culture. “Well you know, that is just the culture around here. There’s not much we can do about it.”

But how does culture emerge? What creates the culture?

If you use the four quadrants we introduce in this blog post, then culture is influenced by:

– The attitude and behaviour of each individual

– The system or physical setting that we operate in.

If you are having a meeting with someone, the physical set-up has an influence on how the meeting unfolds. We could have the boss behind a desk looking down on the other party, or we could move to a sofa or we could even go for a brisk walk around the park. Each of these physical systems would obviously create a different feeling in that meeting. And if we run most of our meetings in a certain way … that creates a culture.

(I am known for insisting on having round tables or just circles of chairs for my workshops, and some people think I am being a bit silly in insisting ad nauseum about this. But I know from my 15 years’ experience that the setting creates a different feeling. It sets the tone. And when I am with a new group for the first time, this is the first step in creating a culture. A culture of conversations.)

Another aspect of culture is that, at the end of the day, our culture is the sum of the attitudes and behaviours that are present in our group over time. So first of all, each person needs to ask themself a crucial question: “In what ways am I contributing to this culture that I possibly don’t like?”

Secondly, how does each person behave? What they do and how they do it contributes to the culture. The more dominant or influential someone is in a group, the more their behaviour influences the common culture. This means that top management is key to the culture. After a few years, the culture becomes a mirror or reflection of the values and behaviour of the top person or the top management team.

So what can you do as a management team to influence the culture?

First, be very aware of your behaviour, including what you focus on, what you notice and comment on etc. All these things are cues that the organisation picks up and uses to try to decode what the culture is.

Secondly, change your conversations. More than anything, our culture becomes what we talk about. Take a look at your meeting agendas (and meeting formats) and think carefully about the conversations that you participate in during the day. What are we talking about?

But maybe more importantly, what do we never or very rarely talk about?

I spoke to a manager the other day who had just joined a large service organisation. He told me that when he was recruited, he was told all about the very customer-centric values the company has and how “we always put the customer at the centre of what we do”. “But,” he said, “I have been here for 6 months now and I have not had one single conversation about the customer experience. Every meeting is about financial KPIs. That is all we talk about.”

So, what do we need to introduce into our conversations if we would like to shift the culture? Where and when are we going to make the time and space for that conversation? Those are the crucial questions.

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This spring we ran a series of blog posts around development, developing yourself and others. We have collected and edited those blog posts into a simple e-book that you can download below if you would like to explore this subject further.

Would you like the people around you to take better decisions?

June 29, 2017By Mike Hohnen

Probably.

The better decisions they take, the easier your life becomes. That is the bottom line.

So how can you help them do that?

It’s all about awareness as we discovered in last week’s post. They need help to raise their awareness about their own decision-making process.

How often do you review decisions taken by your direct reports together with them? Other than maybe telling them that whatever they decided was in the good/bad category?

As you may remember, this is a point I have made several times in this blog. We don’t automatically learn much from our experiences. If we did, we would never make the same mistake twice, would we? We only learn from our experiences when we take the time reflect on them.

But in a busy service environment, reflection is not top of mind. Fire-fighting is more the mode we are in. The mantra seems to be: Do something if it works fine; if not, try something else. It puts out the fire most of the time but we don’t learn a lot from the process.

So instead of getting frustrated next time one of your people makes a less than perfect decision, try sitting them down for a chat. Make it clear that this is not a reprimand but a learning session. Use a reverse GROW process as the framework for the conversation.

What were you trying to achieve? (Goal)
What was the reality of the situation? (Reality)
What options did you have? (Options)
What did you decide? (Will)

In my personal experience, the two key points in this discussion are:

1) What was the reality of the situation?
Did they jump to conclusions, or confuse their assumptions with facts? Often it turns out their decision was based on everything but the reality of the situation.

2) What options did you have?
As humans, we have a tendency to stick with the first solution that pops into our head. “Ahha got it, I will do this”. Maybe the first solution is the right one, that flash of inspired insight. But more often than not, that first idea that pops up has overlooked other possibilities.

This is where it can be helpful to explore with them what other options were actually available. It will help them understand that next time, it might be worthwhile to pause for a moment and try and come up with a few more alternatives.

When we do this, we help our colleagues see how their decision-making process operates. Now they have a basis for getting better.

This works well in one-to-one sessions. But we can use exactly the same review process to consider decisions that we have taken together. The key here is to avoid blaming any individual but looking at the collective decision-making process in order to learn from it.

This the fourteenth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.

Are you an accidental diminisher?

April 14, 2022By Mike Hohnen

In my previous blog post, we looked at two very different leadership approaches: multipliers vs. diminishers.

In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the diminisher.

So how much output do we get from someone when we hire them to do a fair day’s work?

Well, there is quite a lot of research that indicates that on average, we are getting somewhere between 30 and 50% of what people are actually capable of.

This is also reflected in the Gallup engagement research that shows that +/- 65% of the workforce is not particularly engaged in their work. If you are not engaged, you are probably also not giving it your best.

So what are the barriers for our people to give their best? The top three, according to the research are:

Rules, regulations, and structure in the organisation
Lack of feedback and encouragement
The leadership style of the immediate supervisor

So to put it in a nutshell: If you are not getting max output from your team, it is probably because of you.

Yes, let that sink in for a moment.

That is not because you are a slave driver with psychopathic tendencies, at least I hope not.

More likely your are just an accidental diminisher. Accidental because when you have a diminishing impact, you are likely to be completely unaware of it and probably the last to know.

The first thing you need to think about is your own assumptions and beliefs.

You see, diminishers see intelligence as based on elitism and scarcity. Diminishers appear to believe that really intelligent people are a rare breed and that they are of that rare breed. This naturally leads them to conclude that they are special and that other people will never work out what to do without them.

They also seem to follow a logic that says people that don’t ‘get it’ now probably never will. Therefore, I need to do all the thinking around here.

This is what Caroll Dweck, author of Mindset, would call a limiting mindset.

The Multipliers, on the other hand, have a growth mindset, which is a fundamental belief that basic qualities like intelligence and ability can be cultivated through effort.

Multipliers get more from their people because they are leaders who look beyond their own genius and focus their energy on extracting and extending the genius of others. And they don’t get just a little more back; they get vastly more.
_Liz Wiseman

As we all well know, our assumptions and beliefs govern our behaviour.

So the diminisher typically displays some or all of the following behaviours:

Micromanage things
Do most or all of the talking at team meetings
Have the answers and ask few questions
Be judgmental and critical of others
Create stressful environments that often do not feel safe
Take fast decisions (as opposed to getting everyone buy in)
Drown the team with new ideas and initiatives

So here are a few questions to ask yourself and reflect on:

How might I be shutting down the ideas and actions of others, despite having the best of intentions?
What am I inadvertently doing that might be having a diminishing impact on others?
How might my intentions be interpreted differently by others?
What messages might my actions actually be conveying?
What could I do differently, that would make more space for the to contribute and grow?
These questions can be tricky to get feedback on from your direct reports, for obvious reasons. But what you can ask when there is the right opportunity is: Is there anything that I could do differently that would help you do a better job?

And then listen very very carefully.

Check out Lis Wiseman’s book for yourself: Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

This the twelveth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

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: