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Self-feeding Negative Feedback Patterns

How to Identify and Break Them

More and more, managers are expected to recruit team members whom they have never met face to face, and perhaps never will, for remote work. Still more daunting than this leadership trial, are difficult conversations for conveying feedback for course correcting unacceptable performance, behavioural or task-related, across digital distance to these employees. More than ever before, they will have to become proficient at having these difficult conversations.

A feature of these difficult conversations is that managers can find themselves going around in circles, for months, and years, without resolving the issues at stake.

How can managers tell when they are feeding one, or other, persisting dynamic with their employees? Identifying it is critical to breaking its stranglehold on what business results they accomplish.

There are 4 prevalent self-perpetuating patterns.

  1. Avoid-Sustain

With team cohesion risks and likeability concerns preying on the minds of managers, it is not hard to see how they could imagine the only possible outcome of a difficult conversation of this nature will be negative, and best avoided. It need not be so.

 A manager’s avoidance behaviour, for fear of conflict, being disliked, or any other reason, leaves team members uninformed and unmotivated to adapt their behaviour and performance. Paradoxically, when employees sense they are not receiving honest feedback from their managers, they accord them reduced likeability and trust.

Not discounting the emotional turmoil many managers experience when faced with this situation, addressing performance issues sooner rather than later can make all the difference to guiding an employee’s behaviour to meet organisational expectations. Without any managerial intervention, adverse performance will be encouraged and sustained, leaving managers to adjust the work themselves to reach an acceptable standard.

  • Approach-Resist

If employees have had little or no intimations of managerial dissatisfaction, when managers eventually broach the issue, they can expect resistance. Employees are more likely to accept accountability for, and redress underperformance, if they feel they are being treated fairly. Untimeliness impacts perceptions of fairness.

Calm introspection will reveal opportunities for getting onto a thinking track, more supportive of their managerial intentions. Initial beliefs managers have about situations determine the outcomes they foresee. Examining a few alternative beliefs, instead of locking into the worst one, unlocks possibilities for making the best outcome more likely, and the feared one less likely.

It helps to storyboard these alternative beliefs, eg. when I hold belief 1 about the situation (this is too emotionally exhausting for me to engage in), this is how I feel, this is how I behave and this is the outcome I anticipate. Every alternative belief can then be examined in the same way, and will lead to different outcomes. Thereafter, the obstacles each belief presents, and how to overcome them by taking appropriate steps, should be considered.

  • Buckle-Prevail

Ambiguous or inconsistent messaging on underperformance feeds self-perpetuating patterns. Managers buckling under pressure of self-doubt, when confronted with employee objections, will fail to hold them accountable consistently, or at all. Astute employees could use this as a test of managerial intentionality. Not standing up to intentionality scrutiny, generates employee uncertainty and self-protective behaviour, whilst underperformance prevails.

Fear of micro-managing is symptomised by distributing tasks vaguely, and just letting employees get on with it. Communicating with clarity when distributing tasks, what done satisfactorily looks like concretely, when outcomes should be delivered, and whether there are non-negotiables is not micro-managing. Doing so creates psychological safety to work autonomously fully informed of the end result, with freedom to choose how to arrive there.

Preparation in advance, including anticipating personal vulnerabilities, emotional and body conditioning as well as objections from employees, should equip managers better to convey their concerns unambiguously.

  • Dissociate-Reorientate

When managers recognise being continuously triggered by employees’ emotional reactions when tackling underperformance, they can make a conscious decision to dissociate themselves from it. Stepping outside the situation to view its context more broadly, puts them in the driving seat to break the previous interrelationship pattern.

Role status levelling can attenuate interpersonal antagonistic manager-employee reactions. Treating an underperforming employee as an advisor has the effect of emotional disarmament and status elevation: ‘What can I do differently to support you better?’ This can then be followed up with; What can you commit to doing differently if I implement what you have suggested?

Brain mirror activity decodes sensory information we receive from others, enabling the employee to perceive his manager’s more positive emotional tone, and mirror his responses to it, as he re-orientates himself. A new dynamic of the manager re-configuring her behaviour and the employee reaching out for support and guidance can now emerge.

Managers need to consider what they hope for in improved employee performance, and actively deploy their efforts to help elevate team members’ capabilities. Increasing the manager-employee bond inspires confidence in employees to raise their performance bar.

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New Team Leaders’ Relationship Management Angst

Top Tips to Surf through RELATIONSHIP ANXIETY

Over the past year, a rising source of anxiety for first time managers of people in teams has been how to relate to friends who are now members of teams they lead. These friends cover the spectrum from intimate friends they meet with socially, to befriended individuals who participated in the same teams as themselves, before they got promoted.

As a first-time team leader- whether titled segment team leader, territory team leader, advanced analytics team leader, test design lead, or any other of the proliferating titles for this role- you may even have previously exchanged personal grievances about management, with some of them.

Now, you have effectively joined management ranks. You find yourself in perpetual internal conflict with what you believe your company’s often implicit new team leader role expectations of you are, and simultaneously holding back from executing on some of them. You may not even always be fully aware of why you find yourself so emotionally entangled.

Common sources of ambivalence are not wanting to;

  • Lose long-standing friendship benefits
  • Be seen as elevating yourself above peers
  • Act disloyally to former peers

When you accept a promotion to lead team members, either reporting directly to you, or in an influencing capacity, accept that you will have to adapt how you have conducted yourself before. You have assumed accountability for ensuring team members produce outcomes the organisation values, as contributory to strategic goal accomplishment. Essentially, you have acquired decision-making powers affecting their careers and work experiences.

When you are on this ambivalence track, recognise there are ways to explore switching from it, to gain better perspective of the proficiency demands of your new position, and useful attitudes and behaviour to adopt.

1. Adopt a more expansive map of relationships

This is the first time in the careers of many team leaders when serious consideration has to be given to self in relation to others and how they appear to them.

  • Inevitably, you may trust your friends more than others in your team. Regardless, unless you can build trusting working relationships with all team members, your ability to influence them to take required action will be constrained.
  • Managing individuals shifts the focus to relationship-management through which performance is secured.

-Your emotional connection with the rest of the team will influence their behaviour, and in the end, their performance.

-Communicating to your whole team, as early as possible, what the organisation expects of you in your new role, and how you will exercise it, sets the tone well for your leadership intent.

  • If you do not communicate the way forward, friends will assume nothing has changed between you and them.

– They may even anticipate a continued flow of information on what is happening in the company, that you may acquire privileged access to, and that they do not have a need to know. This is what some new team members have come to discover.

  • Creating dysfunctional team dynamics will reduce team performance and undermine your own standing as team leader.

2. Value the importance of role boundary management

Differentiating social meetings from work meetings seems obvious taken at face value. In practice, this proves otherwise, because we care deeply about not offending our friends.

  • How you behave socially and the information you exchange with friends, should not extend to discussing fellow team members, as may have been your habit previously.

-When others are referred to in an unfavourable light, being mindful that you represent the whole team and not only parts of it, will support you in acknowledging the feedback, and still remaining impartial.

  • Another oversight is ignoring the behaviour of friends who take up too much space in team meetings, shutting down others’ views, and risking groupthink, because you do not wish to ruin your friendships.

-Bear in mind too, it would be naïve to think that all your friends would want you to succeed.

-Some may unconsciously still be competing with you, having been in the running for your promotion. 

  • Maintaining a distinction between your private and work life gains prominence at this time too.

-One senior team leader battled with this distinction in the mistaken belief that to do so would make him an inauthentic leader.

– Inadvertently, bringing his private life to work was accompanied by bringing his moods associated with it to work.

– His team members noticed this. They experienced him as unapproachable and unsupportive on days when he was unhappy or frustrated, and so avoided him.

-This led to regular retrospectives with them, because outcomes were repeatedly unsatisfactory, due to his guidance not being sought, when team members needed it the most3.

3. Disassociate being liked or disliked from performance or behavioural feedback.

We are emotionally programmed to be more accepting of positive than negative feedback.

  • Although positive feedback inspires higher motivation, actionable feedback about unacceptable behaviour and performance, communicated clearly and thoughtfully, can still be experienced as growth-promoting by recipients.

-If you only give glowing performance and behavioural feedback, you could paint yourself into a corner, by raising expectations.

-Disgruntled team members will pressure you to know why their remuneration and upward mobility prospects in the organisation are not equally glowing.

  • More generally, fear of falling out of favour with team members is the undertow holding team leaders back from attending to the quality of team task outcomes, as well as how individuals’ behaviour affected them.

– These are legitimate leadership responsibilities, even if an organisation prefers soft-touch leadership.

 Leaving some of your past behind involves loss and unavoidable emotional discomfort. Acknowledging and welcoming this opens the way to embracing your new relationship management role requirements.

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COVID-19 Has Disrupted My Normal Sleep

How Can I Reset it?

Image courtesy of Troy Herrick On Emaze Thank You Clipart Black And White

There is increasing evidence that during various phases and levels of COVID-19 lockdowns, our sleep quality has deteriorated, so that its timing is earlier or later than we would prefer, and irregular. When our internal bio-neurological 24-hour waking and sleeping clock is not aligned with the timing requirements of our external social and work environments, our disrupted circadian rhythm results in sleep disorders. Other behaviour, such as concentration, mental processing capabilities and creative thinking, which varies within the 24-hour cycle, are affected by disrupted sleep. This makes it important to understand how COVID-19 has disrupted circadian rhythms, and what behavioural interventions could help restore it to avoid long-term deleterious effects on our mental and physical well-being.

Body Clocks and Behaviour

In reality, we have more than one internal body clock., although our brain’s hypothalamus is seen to play the dominant role. All our body tissues and organs contain their own clocks. That necessitates collaboration amongst our network of clocks, a role it is suggested our central clock, in the brain’s hypothalamus, performs.  Light is transmitted to the hypothalamus via our eyes, although it is thought there could be other pathways, and this information is used by our central clock to synchronise internal physiological with external environment timing. When all is well in our world, the functioning of all clocks is dynamically synchronised. It is true to say, all has not been well in most of our worlds since the first quarter of 2020, when the pandemic began to spread at an alarming rate across borders and continents.

Covid-Related Sleep Disorder Effects

In his Sleep Research in 2020: COVID-19 related sleep disorders overview in the LANCET, Markku Partinen makes reference to the growing incidence of COVID-19 related sleep disruptions. One of the earliest studies from China he mentions, involving 7236 respondents on COVID-19 impacts, reported an 18% incidence of sleep disorders   Maria Rosario Gualano et al.’s later research in Italy, at the end of its first lockdown period, found anxieties related to COVID-19 and confinement were highly correlated with sleep disorders, with 42% of their 1515 participants experiencing poor sleep quality.

Aside from confinement, work from home conditions for professional employees have tipped the scales in favour of disrupted sleep, as a client, Max, experienced:  I find myself working and in video cons day and night. This intrudes into family time. Across time-zone emails arrive late at night for my urgent response.  I am desperate to unplug and unwind.

Working late into the night, he experienced raised body temperature. Whilst this enabled mental alertness, it simultaneously postponed the onset of sleepiness, which requires a drop in body temperature. Light exposure from his laptop that time of night, signaled time to wake up to his brain, and these body temperature and light characteristics strongly influenced his disrupted sleep. Inevitably, he became irritable and despondent as the pandemic wore on, without any certainty of when and how it would end.

Working mothers with young children, home schooling them and fitting in domestic chores, in between work tasks, have had their days spill over into nights. Maria Rosario Gualano et al.’s findings concurrently show women had an increased risk of sleep disorders, as compared with their male counterparts.

A Post-COVID-19 World of Work

The way most employees have been working remotely from anywhere in the world, in their homes, will not be entirely abandoned in the post-pandemic world of work. Behavioural adaptations towards regularising sleep-waking to an approximately 24- hour circadian clock rhythm could result in better coping with the side-effects of this new way of work.

Behavioural Interventions: Resetting Circadian Rhythm

These actions have had positive benefits for some individuals with sleep disorders, arising from a desynchronisation between internal body clocks and external environmental timing needs.

  • Exposure to sunlight during the day, and darkening rooms as much as possible at night, help to reset our bodily clocks to a more regular 24-hour circadian rhythm  
  • Adjusting the intensity of light from computer screens could minimise room brightness at night
  • As always, physical exercise contributes to wellness, and in this case resetting your circadian rhythm through physical activity, provided that it is done more than an hour before bed time, could be beneficial too
  • Regularising meals to the same time every day, could reset your liver clock and other digestive organs
  • Maintaining regular sleep and waking up times, wherever possible, could contribute to neutralising the circadian clock disruption
  • If you have unavoidable early evening video con interactions or other work to attend to, try napping in the early afternoon, for a duration of no more than 30 minutes, so that it does not disrupt your night-time sleep. Even if you do not fall asleep, just closing your eyes in a quiet, darkened room, wearing an eye mask, would suffice.

Influencing company culture to encourage ‘heads down’ days, where no video cons are scheduled and no late-night incoming emails are attended to, would re-inforce the effects of these interventions.

Should your sleep disorder persist after putting these behaviours into action for more than 14-30 days, consult your medical doctor for referral to a Neurologist about your sleep disorder.

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Team Leaders are Experiencing Dysfunctional Overload

What Can Managers Do to Support them Better?

Image courtesy of Francesco Ungaro

Since the 1990’s team leader (TL) roles have proliferated in companies. Teams have become a hub of organisational work activity and, together with their leaders, an indispensable means to adapt to mounting global competitiveness, through sourcing the most outstanding talent, no matter how geographically dispersed, to collaboratively solve customer problems more innovatively, cost-effectively and timeously. Recently, the most conspicuous demonstration of the benefits of collaborative team work has been in the pharmaceutical industry, which reduced the discovery to trial phase of COVID_19 vaccine development, by nearly two years, as compared with previous timelines.

From my experience with clients from companies across numerous sectors and four continents, it is evident that, irrespective of sector or continent, numerous companies have failed to notice organisational impediments their highly talented team leaders (TLs) face, to lead teams proficiently. TLs are showing warning signs of dysfunctional overload, induced by pressures of time and workload demands. These effects have intensified with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, creating upheaval in team functioning, and additional challenges, such as job and health anxieties of team members, as work from home is becoming the norm.

Crucially, these difficulties stem from unclarity about their roles and how they fit into the rest of the organisation. On a positive note, how organisations design TL roles, articulate their expectations of them, and support their incumbents, have a direct bearing on possibilities for TLs to bring their best qualities and performances to team situations they find themselves in.

If organisations are to leverage fully the promise of collaborative teamwork, there are three critical facets for managers to attend to.

1) Defining the Team Leader Role Unambiguously

Articulating what they expect of team leaders and how their work will contribute to organisations’ specific strategic goals are key questions to answer. Otherwise, how would managers assess fairly the outcomes produced by teams they lead, and the impact they have on the rest of the organisation?

When these issues remain open questions, puzzled TLs reach for the best explanations available to them, even if incomplete, when asked: ‘What does your manager expect of you?’ By way of example, ‘My manager says he wants nothing less than exceptional work from me’, ‘My manager assesses me on the quality of the team’s work and meeting deadlines.’ ‘My manager tells me I should learn to prioritise work better to produce what our company expects of me.’

Another difficulty they encounter, when role ambiguity prevails, is an inability to frame the tasks they are required to deliver in relation to their organisations’ strategic goals. Positive framing, which evokes meaningfulness and goal-directedness, is motivating to team members to engage with tasks and sustain effort. For the TL to effect collaborative outcomes valued by the organisation, and members to orientate themselves suitably to their leader and each other for this purpose, it is essential that both have clarity about the ambit of their respective roles.

Team Leader Add-On Roles

At one extreme we have functional specialists who have been asked by their managers to simply add on team leadership to their existing jobs demands, without any review of pre-existing task loads.

Their job titles change as a result. In reality little else does. They continue to concentrate on their functional specialist roles, eking out a minute percentage of their time and effort to allocate to team leadership. Inevitably, incumbents experience unmanageable emotional overloads.

Team Leader Technical Manager Roles

At the other extreme, TLs fulfil traditional technical managerial roles, eg. delegation, monitoring and management of work performance, conducting performance appraisals of team members, resolving team conflict and addressing non-performance.  At a comparatively younger age, what is demanded of them is far more involved than what fell to the traditional entry level managers.

2) Understanding How Team Leaders Accomplish Team Tasks

If managers paid more attention to how TLs perform their roles, they would discover what information is revealed about their developmental and support needs. This is a facet few managers have insight into, until the team overshoots deadlines and fails to meet tasks to their expectations. Even if there are no overt signs of under-performance, if team members are just going through the motions, there is a danger that they will be productive in the short-term only, and not produce their best sustained work.

The quality of interpersonal and team relationships can easily be assessed from team members’ feedback. Surprisingly, few companies assess these aspects systematically, and when managers do, they may skirt around giving what they see as negative feedback. As one Departmental Head, in a major European telecommunications company realised: ‘In my conversations with team leaders, the difficult issue hangs in the air, either because it appears contentious, or I am afraid to address it.’

3)  Recognising Team Leadership as an Organisational Rite of Passage

Assumption of a TL role represents a seismic shift from former functional specialist roles. Flattening the hierarchy makes this point no less pertinent. Progressing from managing ones’ own work outcomes, to managing and leading others for the first time, has always been a daunting prospect, even for the most talented employees. Being cognisant of this, in the traditional hierarchy, entry level managerial roles were commonly recognised as organisational passages requiring relatively more significant training and development resources, to improve job performance, especially in managing reporting individuals in their teams. The same consideration is not as widespread for team leadership, and role definition ambiguity contributes to this failure.

These are quite straightforward actions to take, which do not exceed the competence of any good, caring manager, to make team leadership more effective and rewarding for incumbents. Lack of concerted attentional focus to these basic managerial activities can be traced back to the prevailing tension in organisations between abdication of responsibility, and constraining autonomy through micro-managing. Direction setting is fundamental to leadership, and can be executed without dictating specific work content and processes, and undermining individual initiative and creativity.

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How to Become More Innovative

Differentiation in the presence of intensifying consumer demand uncertainty is a tall order.  It is therefore encouraging to know that innovativeness can be learnt, and that it is possible to identify processes and behaviour that promote or constrain it.

We know that we all have the propensity to innovate, although some of us are either too demotivated to activate our innovative selves, constrained by organisational barriers, or too ingrained in our ways of acting and seeing the world.  Whatever the constraints we face, there is a growing imperative for organisations to find new solutions to old problems and to create new products for emerging consumer demand. As consumer markets become more global, unpredictable and technologically disruptive, the need to innovate has become ever more pressing for differentiation and continued competitiveness.

Here are my 4 key DOs and DON’Ts to becoming more innovative:

DOsDON’Ts
1. Implement an iterative process of discovery to test and validate your assumptions about the consumer problem you are trying to solve; how big it is; and the appropriateness of your solution and business model for taking it to the market1. Use the traditional, linear, milestone- based stage gate process of decision-making for new product development, where progress depends on achieving the previous milestone.
2. Employ a divergent approach by identifying and testing as many promising ideas as possible2. Converge on a single promising idea and defend it tooth and nail with consumers, instead of listening intently to their feedback
3. Get into the market as soon as possible with the aim of validating your ideas rapidly as you go along, and iterating based on consumer feedback to reduce uncertainty and costs.3. Try to manage uncertainty of consumer demand by aiming for desk-bound perfect planning & execution.
4. Aim to learn fast from consumer insights, and fail fast and cheaply by constantly iterating as you progress.4.  Engage in unnecessarily lengthy internal decision-making, locking in ideas not validated by consumers, that may result in costly failure.

To learn and practice an implementable process for innovating in your business, refer to Professor Nathan Furr’s on-line programme, Innovation in the Age of Disruption  

View details.

Apply here      Drawing on his own prolific research, numerous publications and interactions with Silicon Valley icons, Professor Furr has ‘nailed’ the innovation process in this programme, making it easy to master and implement, to effect change, in our present highly uncertain, digitised markets.

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6 Simple Actions for Emotional Balance &Resilience Growth

We know that a revved-up nervous system is a threat to problem solving, creativity and recognising situations that could undermine our good intentions, and frustrate the accomplishment of business and personal objectives. So, what supportive actions could you take to uphold yourself when this happens, so that you can begin to access your best thinking and interpersonal relationship resources once again?

  • Tone Down your Nervous System
    Tone Down your Nervous System

6 Simple Protective Actions

Here are 6 actions you could take to calm yourself and reduce your brain’s threat response:

1)  Avoid multi-tasking:Our brain is more adept at sequential task performance. Overloading it with more than one task at a time, especially novel ones, is very demanding of glucose, oxygen and blood circulation your bodily system needs to multi-task. You are likely to feel tired very quickly and find yourself making unforced errors as your attention slips.

2)  Front-load heavy lifting tasks: Tackling tasks that are more demanding of brain energy first, will go a long way towards enabling you to get through your day more productively and satisfied. It is easy to get side-tracked by checking social media and your inbox first thing in the morning. Before you know it, so much time has passed that you will have to extend your working hours to meet a pivotal client’s service request.

3) Boost your Oxygen Supply:  The quality of our breathing affects performance on tasks requiring mental effort. Where are your breathing from? Above your diaphragm or below it? Are you taking increased, shallow breaths, to increase your oxygen intake, as your brain senses a reduction in supply? Breathe in deeply and slowly, from below your diaphragm so that your lungs expand to take in more oxygen, and expel carbon dioxide waste when you exhale. Boosting oxygen supply improves brain functioning.

4) Let your mind travel: Recall a memory from the past associated with positive emotions. This will result in feeling the pleasurable emotion in the present, to override your brain’s threat response, and activate positive emotional energy to accomplish your day’s workload.

5) Change your environment:  When we are stressed, we ruminate about our unwanted circumstances, and the more we think about them, the more ingrained our negative thoughts become. Taking ourselves out of our usual environments, even if just for a short while, can have a calming effect. Leave the office to take a walk around the block, or jog in a nearby park to awaken your senses. Even better, take a quick weekend break to a destination that inspires and invigorates you. If none of this is possible, due to COVID-19 restrictions, then simply step outside for breaths of fresh air, periodically, to expand your lung’s intake of oxygen.

6) Do something just for fun. Activities that inject humour into our everyday lives relieve stress levels by lightening our spirits and emotional load. When we are under enormous pressure to meet a tight deadline, or solve a seemingly intractable problem, even when experiencing mental strain, we tend to push on. This is even when our train of thought is along a rutted track. Allowing yourself an interlude, even if just briefly, to do something you enjoy, could increase your levels of oxygen and glucose needed for demanding mental processing. Whether taking in an entertaining movie, engaging in an exciting computer game or connecting with a friend who inspires you, any behavioural activity, that results in lifting your mood, would be helpful to restore your emotional balance and grow your resilience.

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ASSESS YOUR PERSONAL STRESS SIGNATURE

Checking in with Yourself

You wake up on a Monday morning with your memory of back to back team meetings in your calendar, and the deadline for that mission critical Project X for your company’s digitisation slowly coming into focus.  If only team members will deliver what they committed to on time for once, you would feel less anxious about deadlines. Then you will still somehow have to find the time to respond to your share of the world’s more than 267 billion emails that will be generated today. Not to mention, you are now working from home due to your country’s COVID-19 lockdown.

When your mind flits over all of these work demands, your breathing becomes shallow. You feel exhausted already just thinking about them.  A knot is developing in your stomach. Then, you remember the rest of the week, which gives no respite. The knot is now tightening, accompanied by shoulder tension. You wish it were still Sunday. In my Resilience coaching, these are some of their stress signatures my clients have shared with me.

Does this sound familiar to you? What you are experiencing are early warning signals that you are on edge. How on edge are you? It is particularly being on edge repeatedly that produces these effects. If we experience an unmanageable stress load that continues for weeks or months on end, without respite, we need to pay careful attention to this. Otherwise, we may collapse or experience burn out.

We all have unique stress signatures. They manifest in our emotions, thinking, body, behaviour, and impact on our relationships.

Quick Stress Signature Assessment

How could you monitor yourself to acknowledge your stress signature and take preventive measures?

An important principle is to look at your feelings and thoughts as if they were objects outside of you. Looking through feelings and thoughts clouds your perspective. Even worse, over time your unhelpful feelings and thoughts assume a life of their own, and you become them.

Here is a simple approach to help you determine whether you are carrying a manageable stress load, or feeling overloaded. Simply note down what you typically experience when you are stressed in all of these 5 areas. The example given here is derived from the Checking in with yourself section.

YOUR STRESS SIGNATURE:

AFFECTED ASPECTSWARNING SIGNS
FEELINGeg. Anxious, Frustrated
THINKINGDon’t know how I will cope, but I must
BODYRacing breathing, Knot in stomach, Shoulder tension
BEHAVIOURDistracted, Make unforced errors
RELATIONSHIPSIrritable, Impatient
Stress Signature Assessment Example

Restore Your Balance First

A revved-up nervous system, is a barrier to problem solving, creativity and accessing your best thinking for addressing your situation. You need to modulate this first before you can develop and implement your action plan with any degree of success.

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Building Culturally Aware Organisations

Research on leadership and culture and organisational culture has revealed five broadbased themes to differentiate one culture from another. Although one can expect to find variations within societal cultural groups, there are modal group characteristics that extensive global research has identified.

  • Temporality encapsulates the manner in which time is viewed and used, eg. goal-directed/unfocussed approaches to deadlines, punctuality/tardiness, methodical planning/ skeletal outlining, simultaneous/ linear approaches to task completion, and whether there is a tendency for long-term or short-term orientations
  • The group/ interpersonal/environmental interaction category refers to the extremes of environmental mastery/fatalism beliefs, individualistic/in-group loyalties and direct or indirect communication style preferences
  • Risk seeking/avoidance includes risk appetite in the business environment for newness and uncertainty, and degree of openness to learning how to relate to others cross-culturally and in unfamiliar settings
  • Assertiveness/modesty incorporates the degree to which a society or organisation expects individuals to set the bar high and accomplish stringent goals, promote their own achievements and incentivizes them for individual achievement
  • Performance/people orientation refers to the extent to which employee concerns are subjugated to performance considerations, or the reverse.

Whilst presented as polarities, it is more realistic to interpret these cultural dimensions as varying on a continuum. One may deduce from these five dimensions that culture can influence; time management, how managers organise and delegate work, how company leaders take decisions, how managers communicate with and discipline their reportees, beliefs about role accountability, management of diversity, impressions formed of individuals, and ultimately productivity and performance. Although this list is not exhaustive, it gives an idea of the scope of cultural behavioural programming, which cannot be ignored in the work environment.

Achieving Organisational Cultural Alignment

Organisational leaders need to be sensitive to cultural diversity and how employee behaviour is affected by underlying cultural values, assumptions and beliefs. This is the first step towards integrating different approaches and behaviour into a coherent set of outcomes in support of company values and performance prerequisites. Their reportees would benefit from assistance in stepping outside their own cultural precepts, to reflect on how they impact on their ability to function well in their employing organisations. Successful alignment of their cultural values, beliefs and behaviour with that of the organisation reduces dissonance and contributes positively to business success.

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How to Energise and Mobilise Employees for Top Performance

Both understanding employees and keeping them highly motivated to achieve companies’ business results are easier said than done. Challenges aside, influencing individuals’ commitment to their employers, and to producing the highest level of performance they are capable of, has to be mastered by company leaders for organisational success. Here are three key pointers towards their mastery.

Breaching the Commitment-Performance Gap

There is a link between commitment to organisational purpose and performance, and company leaders play a crucial role in forging that link with employees. To fulfil this expectation, leaders must hold and act from the right perspective of the size and scope of their roles. Other prerequisites are that they must be able to connect with their employees, know what support they need to be effective, and communicate their expectations unambiguously. Leadership that balances and integrates a performance orientation with employee concern is likely to generate greater value for the company, than pursuing either of these approaches in isolation.

Assuming Clear Role Accountability

If company leaders at all levels do not own their roles and function to the expected standard, they will avoid having difficult conversations on issues such as discipline and performance expectations. Such avoidance behaviour will not engender engagement and mobilisation of employees. Another consequence is that first line management will delegate their responsibilities upwards to the next levels of management, and fail to take full accountability for getting the necessary work done in their business units. Their reportees will see this happening. They will conclude that their own managers contribute little added value to their own work. Over time, those managers will experience great difficulty in earning their respect, and the authority that goes with their roles will be eroded. One cannot lead others unless one has earned the right to lead.

Engaging and Mobilising Employees One by One

Various leadership behaviours applied towards energising and mobilising employees, and increasing perceived organisational support, have differential impacts on different employees, at different times. Some employees may have a more intense need for positive feedback and approval than others. Still others may be more driven by future material benefits from the company. It would make the job of managing for performance so much easier, if a singular approach to motivating and enabling employees could be followed. But, experience shows that engaging and mobilising employees one by one produces the best results.

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Time to Change your Job?

TURBOCHARGE TRICKY CAREER SWITCHES

With the festive season moving on towards new year, it is that time again when many employees find the time and mind space to pause for thought about the direction of their careers. Questions such as; ‘Am I still in the right job?’ ‘Is this company still right for me?’ ‘Am I limiting my career by staying in this role?’  ‘What differentiates me in the job market?  spring to mind.

Too Busy to Think about Your Career Direction

What is it about the contemplation of career transitions that makes it so challenging to most of us? With the breakneck speed of technology driven changes in customer and competitive dynamics, companies have to move rapidly to remain responsive to these developments. Small wonder then that many employees at all levels in the corporate world feel that they are forever propelled forward  by the next deadline, next meeting, or next item on the ‘to do’ list. Being busier than ever, they have little time and mind space to contemplate their careers and accumulated learning.

The Price of Unresolved Career Transitional Issues

When the realisation hits home that they are no longer as motivated in their jobs as they used to be, and that it is time to move on, they are distinctly unprepared to act on this revelation. Remaining stuck in a job that you can no longer engage with productively, can not only hurt your performance and credibility, but set back your career growth as well, in a rapidly evolving job market.

Resolving Career Change Concerns

Most often, we are unable to communicate effectively what we want, until we find and respond to the right questions. Asking the right questions, and answering them thoughtfully, on your own, or with the  assistance of a skilled coach, can help you begin to regain perspective on the direction of your career, whatever your transitioning  concerns might be.  An important exercise to help clarify your future career options is to identify your personal brand.  Engaging in this process can minimise the risk of overlooking salient competencies gained.  Equally, overstating competencies, in the absence of supportive narratives, undermines job applicants’ credibility.

Let us look at a talented strategist and analyst, whom we will call Rachel, to see how she came to resolve her career change concerns. Rachel has post-graduate degrees from leading, global universities, and an undergraduate IT degree. She was contemplating applying for a CEO job with a start up, which was part of a group of established companies. The job expectation for this role was that she would launch its new digital product into the market and grow the company’s market share rapidly. She agonised over whether she could make ‘the leap’ into this CEO role, seeing that she had never occupied a managerial role before.

When she spoke about her career achievements and the various roles and tasks she had performed, it became clear that, indeed, none of this experience gained was ‘managerial’ in the hierarchical organisational and process sense, such as, interpreting company strategy into business unit planning, implementation, budgeting and resource allocation management, and supporting employee performance. That said, when encouraged to reframe her perception that management experience can only be obtained within organisational hierarchies, she began to reappraise the  value of  the tasks she had performed over the years,  for the CEO position.

Gaining and Viewing Work Experience Differently

Thinking differently and in terms of non-hierarchical organisational networks, Rachel was able to link many of the tasks she had already performed, and organisational impacts she had achieved, to the specifications for the job under consideration. Some of these key tasks and achievements were:

  • Cross-functional leadership : Leading organisational teams across all divisions and levels to address short term and long term challenges
  • Strategy development: Creating a turnaround strategy for an incoming executive
  • Linking strategy to implementation: Developing business and financial models for newly acquired Group businesses
  • Customer value generation: Spanning the entire company value chain from inbound logistics through marketing, operations and sales, in an advisory capacity to senior management ; and
  • Realising go-to-market plans: Launching award winning marketing initiatives for company products

Once this point was reached, our conversation shifted from identifying salient competencies for carrying across into the CEO role, to drawing on her business management and IT qualifications to close the gap in requirements, where on the job experience was lacking. This formed the basis of her branding for the CEO start up role, and for building a coherent, credible narrative around her suitability for it.

Coherence and credibility stem from having the appropriate backing stories for claims you make. Casting your net too widely or narrowly is inadvisable. To help you to begin taking stock of your job experiences and achievements, in preparation for your next career move, here is a list of 6 questions to answer, to identify what your personal brand has to offer prospective employers.

Personal Brand Identification Exercise

1)      Who am I?     What events and/or work experiences have contributed the most to making you who you are?

2)      What do I do?

    Consider also job related tasks performed outside of the organisational hierarchy, which constitute building blocks for future roles.

3)      What are my greatest achievements in my career?

Did you outperform expectations in a challenging task? Did you find innovative solutions to problems? Have you been recognised for your exemplary leadership?

4)      What employer needs have I satisfied to accomplish business results?

How did your actions contribute to growing and sustaining profitability?

What is distinctly different about what I offer?

    Think personal attributes and applied competencies

5)      What positive impacts will I have on my new employer?

   Use the company value chain to demonstrate your value contribution.