[polldaddy poll=1354219]
In today’s competitive and fast paced world, our most precious assets are our people, our relationships and our time. Most executives and professionals are familiar with W. Edwards Deming’s concept of optimization and fine tuning a system to achieve the optimum output and results.
Few people apply the concept of optimization to their lives, people strategies, systems, policies, procedures, marketing and management practices.
Leading a team of people in today’s highly competitive, technologically sophisticated and connected world is very different from the command and control style prevalent in the preceding centuries.
Intangible assets such as people, know-how, systems and intellectual property are valued at many times more than tangible assets. Traditional management training and methods are severely lacking in “people knowledge” and an understanding of a world that is more and more intangible.
A new style of leadership is required for the new paradigm economy of today and the future.
Futurists commonly predict that we are moving away from separate personal and professional lives towards a life where our personal and professional lives are fully integrated.
For many of us, our lives have developed as fragmented sections or compartments. We are one way at work, and altogether different in our personal life. This leads to a split personality: the work persona and the home persona and never the twain shall meet. Our feelings get left at home, and the very fabric of what makes us human gets left out of the workplace.
Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person who is faced with a fact, feeling, situation or reality that is uncomfortable or painful to accept, repeatedly rejects it, despite overwhelming evidence.
Three different types of Denial are as follows:
- “Basic Denial” is when the person outright denies the reality of an unpleasant fact, feeling, situation or reality.
- “Minimization” is when a person admits the fact, but denies how serious it is.
- “Transference” is when a person admits the facts and seriousness, but denies any responsibility and transfers responsibility to someone else.
I noted an interesting statistic today. The most popular post on this BLOG relates to dealing with stress. This has got me thinking… Since October 2008, what is on most people’s minds is the financial crisis and how this continuing crisis is going to impact our companies, our investments, our finances and our personal lives.
What does financial stress have to do with leadership? Everything! If you are feeling nervous, anxious or even outright terror at the thought of not making ends meet, the first person for you to lead is yourself. It is very difficult to be creative, resourceful and confident when you are dealing with the various mind-numbing hormones we experience as fear.
So how do you lead yourself?
Often (but not always) our mind speculates as to what could happen and we conjure up images of the worst case scenario, which in most cases turns out to be worse than reality.
Leading yourself requires objectivity. If you consider the worst case scenario versus the best case scenario, first figure out ways you can live with the worst case. Then from this place, you can calmly consider possible courses of action that you could take to avert the worst case. And in most cases, reality tends to be somewhere in between the worst and the best case.
On the other hand, if you avoid the worst case, pretend it won’t happen (denial), and go on as if nothing is going to happen… you have a very good chance of going through the worst case scenario in reality!
So accepting the worst case allows you to let go of the fear and to think calmly of what can be done with the resources at hand. Once you have a number of items that you can take action on immediately, a strange thing happens. Fear turns to confidence… confusion is replaced with clarity.
Having a plan – any plan – is far better than no plan at all. At least with a plan you have certainty of what you can do. And if it does not work, you can at least be confident in the knowledge that you succeeded in finding out what does not work. Then you can try another approach, and another… until you succeed. Accepting the worst case and then having a plan will reduce your stress, especially when you take action on your plan.
Another possibility is to look at the financial crisis as an opportunity. This will empower you to make changes that you would not otherwise make. Oftentimes, when things don’t flow, we have an opportunity to examine why they are not flowing. Whereas, when the money is easily flowing, we would continue on unchanged and not question what we are doing.
So the financial crisis is an ideal opportunity to re-examine what is flowing and what isn’t so we can make different choices.
Over the next few days and weeks we will write more about stress, the financial crisis and how to cope with it. Stay tuned.
Lack of love as a child leads to feelings of inadequacy. This leads to sensitivity to rejection as an adult.
“The key to a leader’s impact is sincerity. Before he can inspire with emotion he must be swayed by it himself. Before he can move their tears his own must flow. To convince them he must himself believe.”
– Winston Churchill
There are a lot of things that can cause a leader to fail. None of them are as deadly as what they do to themselves! The following is a list of saboteurs that apply equally to leaders and followers:
- fear, doubt & disbelief
- criticism (and the inner-critic)
- anger (under-expressed & over-expressed)
- invalidating behavior & communication (most of us are so used to this, we don’t even notice it)
- triggers, reactions & moods (we all know people who react to small things and are moody)
- greed & jealousy (yikes)
- black holes, denial and the emotional roller coaster (no matter how much you give, it is never enough)
Who wants to follow a leader who is afraid, doubts the task at hand is possible and disbelieves the team’s ability to get the job done? On the other hand, who wants to lead people like that? The truth is no one in their right mind would “want to.” However, the reality is that as a leader, we end up having to lead people exactly like that!
The key is to learn how to succeed as a leader regardless of the quality or state of the people we are leading.
In future posts we will discuss in more detail how to handle difficult people…