March 25, 2019
Tag: coaching
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Referral Marketing for Beginners: The Power of Referral Programs
When it comes to small business marketing, trust is by far the most valuable currency. Driving web traffic and increasing brand awareness are great goals, but there’s nothing more impactful than engendering trust in your business. This can be achieved in a number of ways, but word-of-mouth consistently produces the best results. Indeed, 92 percent of customers say they are inclined to trust “earned” media like word-of-mouth and personal recommendations. Referral marketing is the simplest and most effective way to generate this invaluable buzz, so take a look at what you need to know to get started.
What Is Referral Marketing?
There’s no question that word-of-mouth is a powerful force. Plenty of businesses have succeeded largely on the strength of word-of-mouth marketing. In-person recommendations generate over five times more sales than paid marketing efforts, making them a holy grail of advertising. Unfortunately, most businesses can’t afford to simply sit back and wait for these recommendations to happen organically. The solution, then, is referral marketing.
In its most basic form, referral marketing simply means offering some kind of incentive to encourage satisfied customers to spread the word about your business. Why is this necessary? While 83 percent of customers are willing to spread the word about great products or services, just 29 percent actually do so on their own. Offering a referral program can tap into that remaining 54 percent and lead to a huge increase in your word-of-mouth recommendations. It’s a simple strategy that can produce serious growth, but it’s not right for every situation.
Is Referral Marketing Right for Your Business?
An effective referral marketing campaign requires that a business has a few things in place. The first requirement is a truly excellent product or service. After all, few customers are going to suggest a subpar product to their family and friends. Even worse, offering a referral program for something that doesn’t meet expectations can backfire in a serious way. Good reviews for your offerings, positive feedback from customers and unsolicited referrals are all good signs that referral marketing is a fit for your business.
Another prerequisite is excellent customer support. This serves a few important purposes. The first is to ensure that your business can adequately handle an influx of new customers. It’s no guarantee, but a referral program can sometimes bring in a major increase in traffic. Can your company handle this increase appropriately? The second factor is to make sure that each new customer has as good an experience as the person who made the recommendation. A single referral doesn’t do much good, but a negative experience can stop the chain before it even begins. The best campaigns rely on each referred customer subsequently bringing even more referrals on board.
The Basics of Creating a Referral Program
The first step in building a referral program is defining the goals you’d like to achieve. What would constitute a success for your campaign? For some businesses, it may involve hitting a specific sales figure in a certain time frame. For others, it may be more important to bring on a particular number of new customers. Perhaps the most important factor for your industry is building greater trust and recognition. No matter what success looks like to you, it’s important to be specific and set tangible targets that can be used to track your progress later on.
The next task is to choose the right incentives. In some cases, simply thanking your customers and asking them to spread the word if they’re satisfied is enough to jump-start the process. In other cases, it’s best to offer a reward to help spur your customers into action. Take a look at what your competitors are doing and consider which incentives are appropriate for your industry. Popular options include the following:
• Priority service
• Credits or cash back on purchases
• Access to exclusive deals and discounts
• Free or upgraded shippingPromote, Refine and Refocus
Once you’ve determined your goals and settled on incentives, the key to success is building awareness of your program. As with incentives, the right approach to promotion may vary depending on your industry and the goods or services you offer. Reaching out to existing customers with an invitational email is almost always a great place to start. A prominent call to action on your website is usually an effective approach as well. It’s also a good idea to incorporate your referral program into your newsletter. Recent studies have shown that 90 percent of people who are prompted to subscribe to a newsletter opt to do so.
After the program has been launched, it’s important to track the results and adapt your approach as necessary. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes some trial and error to hit upon the most effective combination of incentives and promotional strategies for your industry and customer base. Regularly refining your approach and refocusing your long-term aims will help you maximize your returns. Utilize the metrics that are most important to you to track your success. Consider requesting feedback from customers to gauge their response to your program and use this information to shape any changes moving forward.
The modern hyperconnected, media-saturated world has given businesses more avenues for marketing than ever before. Nonetheless, word-of-mouth is undoubtedly still king. In fact, it’s the primary motivating factor behind a staggering 50 percent of all purchasing decisions. The most successful small businesses capitalize on this and turn satisfied customers into true allies. With small business referral programs, you can engender trust, give back to the customers who fuel your success and open up new opportunities for strong and sustainable growth.
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When the Weight of a Decision is Keeping You Up at Night…
Most of us find it easy to make a decision when faced with a right versus a wrong option. We were educated to know the difference between right and wrong in most cases, and through experience our minds were shaped to know how to make such a decision.
There is clearly a right way to do things because doing it any other way would be wrong. As leaders, we tend to experience these types of situations on a daily basis. And, for the most part, we do quite well in removing obstacles, selecting the best options, and getting things done. However, most of us were not equipped to deal with situations that actually present two equally right options.
The challenge in these situations is deciding which right thing to do because choosing one means we cannot chose the other. When faced with a right-AND-right choice, we are more likely to avoid making a decision altogether. Relying on the simple rule of “do what feels right” school of personal ethics won’t resolve your dilemma. Moreover, not making any decision doesn’t mean that the situation goes away or vanishes completely. In fact, the opposite is true. It creates a bottleneck, with work piling up because mandates cannot be completed on time due to your indecision. And try as you may, you cannot avoid these situations. It sort of feels like an unwanted traveling companion moving with you wherever you go. The weight of that decision lies solely with you, and only you can decide. No one else.
So what’s ‘the thing’ about situations that ask you to choose one good option over another good option? Fundamentally, they require you to consider all aspects of the situation in light of personal and organizational values concurrently since the decision you will ultimately need to make will not only shape your character, but also the fabric of your organization.Throughout your professional career, the weight of these situations is experienced slightly differently.
During the early years, the right-AND-right scenarios tend to touch upon personal integrity. Choosing one option versus another one usually means you compromise something that is of value to you. The pull is between one set of responsibilities over another: “Do I say ‘yes’ and realize I cannot do that anymore? If I accept this, it means I need to give up that!” The qualitative nature of the pull is essentially about you.
As you gain in scope of influence and accountability in your line of work, these situations of right-ANDright tend to take on a different, more complex flavor. Now, your decisions are not purely personal. The consequences of your decisions can send ripple effects throughout the organization. Everyone is watching you carefully, and noticing if what you said is what you will do. Your decisions can also impact whether others will follow your lead or not: “If I decide to act on this, how will others interpret our corporate rules? By making this decision, who in my group will be mostly impacted? By saying no to this, will others feel I wasn’t being fair?”
These decisions do define your leadership future as people notice the incongruence in how you hold yourself and others accountable to what you said was important to you, to the team, and to the organization. Finally, and perhaps the most challenging of situations are those that impact networks of relationships outside of your organization. These relationships have legitimate claims, but you cannot satisfy them all. Obligations to one network may be in conflict with another, for instance. Complicating this decision-making process is the stake you claim personally.
Your own personal values and views may be in direct opposition to any one stakeholder group and what they are responsible for. In his seminal book, entitled, “Defining Moments”, Joseph Badaracco (1997) takes a deep dive into these situations. Suffice to say that there is no exact science or fast-easy approach. Making decisions in right-AND-right situations calls for prudence and awareness of our own moral compass. It demands that we select one option knowing that it factors out all future opportunities and possibilities linked with the other option. Organizations, for their part, ought to encourage managers to value the decision-making process for its inherent complexity, and not just push for ANY decision to be made.
Moreover, when a decision is well-researched (not just rationalized) and thoughtful, it should be seen as ONE good decision even if it leads to an outcome that was not wanted. Otherwise, you risk creating organizational cultures where decisions are only made in right-versus-wrong situations, and those that present leaders with right-AND-right options are avoid ed altogether.*** Not too long ago, I shared the following three rules with a young aspiring student who was faced with aright-AND-right scenario. My intention was to help her notice that she was indeed facing a situation that she had never encountered before, and that the choice she made today meant eliminating some future directions.
Embedded in my strategy was to have her ease into this part of young adulthood and not fear such situations as she is bound to experience more in her adult life.Three Rules to a Happy Life:
1. Never be too proud to change your mind. The sign of a strong leader is one who changes her decision as new information emerges.
2. Never go for easy. You have one life. Make it matter.
3. Even after you have carefully considered your options and how each one factors in and factors out possible pathways, flip a coin and name the two sides. If the toss lands on one side that represents the option you chose, and you feel the need to flip again, you have your answer.
Final words:I’ve encountered countless leaders faced with right-AND-right situations who in the moment, needed an impartial person to help them through the decision: Someone completely separate from their company and usual circle of trusted advisors who although held in high esteem, still tended to have some sort of bias. They have acknowledged that a simple phone call to a professional coach, outside of their structured leadership and mentorship programs, was the game-changing difference. This my friends, was the AHA! moment I had in founding Grand Heron International – for on-demand coaching, for anyone, anywhere, facing a situation where they feel stuck and unable to move forward. I’ve been there, I’ve seen others there and chances are, you’ve been there in your professional life too.
Remember: Stagnating in indecision is never an option. There are ways to help you see beyond the horizon.
By Mirella De Civita Ph.D., PCC, MCEC President & Founder of Grand Heron International https://grandheroninternational.ca/
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The Power Of Resiliency — And How To Prepare For The Coming Storms
Helps leaders in new roles make a bigger impact faster. Neuroscience, behavior design and communication. www.connectconsultinggroup.com
During her 2017 book tour, Facebook COO and best-selling author Sheryl Sandberg taught me to appreciate the power of resiliency, and I continue to be indebted to her, especially during the June through November hurricane season. Along with a friend who joined me for Sandberg’s talk, I marveled at what we had heard. We agreed that Sandberg seemed to exhibit superpowers.
Shortly after Sandberg’s husband, Dave Goldberg, died unexpectedly and suddenly in May 2015, she teamed up with another best-selling author, the Wharton professor Adam Grant, to co-author Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. Writing the book helped her deal with her grief as well as recover. Less than two years after the loss of her husband, she had completed another bestselling book to go along with her well-known Lean In. Plus, she was raising two kids on her own while working as the chief operating officer at Facebook and serving on the board of directors for Disney.
While my friend and I were tempted to wallow in our feelings of inadequacy over dessert following the talk, I realized Sandberg was teaching me valuable lessons about resiliency that can be applied in a variety of circumstances.
According to psychologists, individuals with good resilience are able to bounce back from hardships, often life-shattering ones, more quickly and with less stress than someone whose resilience is less developed. Some individuals who face trauma even experience positive changes. They bounce forward from their trauma with renewed strength. And even those who may have been shaken to their core by a traumatic event can over time discover a sense of personal growth. The psychologists call this post-traumatic growth.
Until Sandberg’s talk, I had started to take for granted the resilience skills I had learned many years ago during a man-made disaster in New York City. Almost 30 years ago, in August 1989, weeks before Hurricane Hugo destroyed much of Charleston, South Carolina, and the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the San Francisco Bay area, we experienced the Gramercy Park steam pipe explosion where I lived.
Three days after the deadly explosion, authorities discovered that the underground pipe had been wrapped in asbestos. Since airborne asbestos is a major health hazard, the 200 residents of my 18-story apartment building were forced to evacuate for the cleanup, which lasted about four-and-a-half months. As victims, we were fine from a financial perspective, since the utility Con Edison was responsible for the accident and paid for our living expenses, including providing us with a clothing allowance. But, from a quality of life perspective, it was a very strange experience.
Sandberg’s Option B made me recognize that my life experiences to date, as well as the book I co-authored with a client back in 2006, Leading People Through Disasters, had helped me build up strong resiliency skills that are transferable.
Having dealt with tornadoes in my home state of Oklahoma and earthquakes when I lived in California, I now face hurricanes in Charleston, where my family and I moved in early 2014. Every fall since 2015, we’ve dealt with one major hurricane or flood each season. After staying home the first time, we now prefer to evacuate, saving our strength for the cleanup that saps our energy, time and other resources.
While resilience is so often built in the aftermath of a disaster, much of our stress occurs when we see the inevitable trauma coming toward us. Here are my five tips for dealing with the stress of preparing for a disaster, which I most recently used this September for Hurricane Florence. (We lucked out when the storm turned inland rather than moving south and spared Charleston this time.)
1. Adjust your view of time.
Suspend your desire to be as productive as usual. Everything takes more time than you think it will. You’ve also got to rearrange your schedule for the next few weeks, including canceling appointments and meetings, rescheduling what you can and focusing on important actions you need to take now. For example, you probably want to pack up important documents, photographs and other irreplaceable or important items to keep with you.
2. Practice self-care.
As much as possible, try to get enough sleep and exercise. Try to eat well-balanced meals. You’ll feel better physically and mentally. And, generally, you’ll able to react faster if conditions change quickly and you need to alter your plans.
3. Toggle between keeping to a routine and taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves.
For example, when Hurricane Florence was approaching this September, I was concerned about getting to Washington, D.C., for a conference I was facilitating. So, I left two days ahead of my planned departure date. Once in D.C., I enjoyed the extra time by having lunch with a college friend and exploring a couple of museums. One morning I even conducted a webinar workshop from my hotel room for one of my clients.
4. Advocate for yourself.
Speak up for yourself when talking to customer service representatives. Unless you tell them, they probably won’t realize the severity of your situation. Many also are clueless about how much latitude they have with their company’s rules and deadlines until they ask a supervisor. When I explain my situation, airlines, hotels and even insurance companies generally accommodate my requests.
5. Be social.
Stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues to allay their concerns as well as get an opportunity to talk and think about something other than your situation.
You never know what disaster you’re going to face, but if you prepare and you’re resilient, you’ll power through and be stronger for it.
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How You Need to Balance Belonging with Standing Out
by Liz Guthridge, MCEC | Jul 7, 2018 | Blog | 0 comments
Superstars, rock stars, and heroes who save the day have fallen out of favor in many organizations.
Now we’re encouraged to celebrate team players who cooperate, collaborate, and play well with others.
They combine their brainpower to deal with the complexity surrounding us. (Yes, it’s a VUCA–volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—world.) More brains are better than one as it’s impossible for one person to know all the answers, or even pose all the key questions.
Yet, we still need to pay attention to and honor individuals and their personal contributions.
Any time we ignore an individual’s “superpowers” or even a person’s unique characteristics, we turn a blind eye to our humanity. As a result, we’re doing a disservice to individual team members and the team as a whole that can hurt individual as well as team performance.
Here’s why individual recognition is so important. We humans have two competing social needs—the need to belong and the need to stand out from the crowd. Or in a work setting, stand out on the team.
Scientists have a name for this dynamic duality: optimal distinctiveness.
Becoming aware of this 27-year-old concept is the first step to improving individual performance and creating more inclusive, better performing teams.
The second step is finding the optimal balance between homogeneity and uniqueness. This is challenging, not only for an individual, but also for team leaders and especially organizational leaders.
The upside of belonging gives you as a team member purpose, meaning and clarity. Let’s say you’re proud to be a member of a special project team that’s tackling a vital organizational issue, such as expanding services to new customers, including animal owners.
On the downside, you don’t want your group membership to crush your personality or silence your distinct voice, especially when you have a strong point of view. For instance, what if you don’t have much passion or compassion for one of the new customer niches, such as exotic animal owners?
For some individuals, getting and staying in equilibrium with certain groups can be a continual challenge.
As a leader, you may need to make an effort to achieve optimal distinctiveness for your teams or organization unless the duality is baked into your organizational DNA.
For instance, consider Airbnb and Planned Parenthood. Both are built around group belonging and individual uniqueness. Airbnb hosts offer up their personal homes to guests. In Planned Parenthood’s case, stand-alone affiliates around the United States provide reproductive health care and other related services to local patients. These affiliates represent the Planned Parenthood brand as they adjust their delivery to fit their local community.
For leaders in other types of organizations, here are three suggestions for working toward applying optimal distinctiveness:
Embrace inclusion, recognizing that it affects everyone. As the neuroscientists say, if you aren’t actively including people, you’re accidentally excluding them. The human brain interprets ambiguity as a potential threat, which can make people feel they don’t belong and you as a leader may not care about them. From a practical perspective,
as a leader you can make people feel included by being clear in your words and actions that they are members of the group and play an important role.
Remind them of the group’s purpose.
Keep them regularly informed.
Help them and others find common ground as they work.
Encourage them to speak up, reinforcing that it’s a safe place. (For more about the importance of psychological safety and inclusion, check out Why you need safety for a high-performing culture.)
Get to know team members as individuals and treat them according to the platinum rule. This means treating people the way they want to be treated.
For example, if they prefer private recognition over public recognition, write them a handwritten, personal note to thank them for their contribution instead of asking them to stand up to be applauded at a public meeting.
In other situations, be curious about their interests outside of work, such as entertainment preferences, hobbies and family, and ask about them.
And support them in bringing their whole self to work and expressing their individuality.
Champion volunteer issues groups, rather than employee resource groups. As background, the traditional employee resource groups, such as women’s groups, African-American Groups, and LGBTQ groups, heighten the differences among individuals in the workforce. This can lead to two detrimental effects. Those who don’t fit the group membership criteria feel excluded. (This has contributed to many white males feeling they’re being left behind in diversity initiatives.) Also, research has shown that identity groups can act as an echo chamber for individuals, perpetuating self-stereotypes, such as women feeling they lack confidence.
By contrast, volunteer issue groups, such as teams working to protect the environment, further education, or address customer concerns, give interested individuals an opportunity to contribute their unique gifts for a good cause and work with others who share their interests.
Yes, there’s pressure between belonging and maintaining individual identity. However, it’s a healthy tension that contributes to our humanness. And if individuals and leaders make an effort to strike a balance both as individuals and teams, they can achieve amazing things together.
How do you balance belonging with standing out?
Resource: https://connectconsultinggroup.com/how-you-need-to-balance-belonging-with-standing-out/
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4 Signs an Executive Isn’t Ready for Coaching
The stigma of asking for or being assigned an executive coach is vanishing quickly. The growth of the industry tells us so. In the U.S. alone, $1 billion was spent on business, personal and relationship coaches last year, according to IbisWorld, up about 20% from five years earlier. And the number of business coaches worldwide has zoomed more than 60% since 2007, according to one coaching association. But while executive coaches have improved the performance of many already-good managers and sanded the rough edges off many less effective ones, they aren’t a miracle cure. In fact, we have seen many companies waste considerable sums by assigning coaches to managers who just aren’t ready to be coached, no matter how effective the coaches may be.
So how do those who control the coaching purse strings — HR, talent managers, and other buyers — avoid throwing money away on uncoachable executives? Considering that a year’s engagement with a top executive coach can cost more than $100,000, it’s an important question.
From nearly 35 years of coaching hundreds of executives, our firm has noticed a pattern of red flags that indicate when a coaching investment will be wasted. Here are four things to watch out for:
1. They blame external factors for their problems.
When things go wrong, does this person always have an excuse? Maybe they point a finger at the quality of their team, a lack of resources, or even their boss.
When leaders argue about the validity of your reasons for offering coaching, or offer excuses or defenses for poor results, it can be a sign that they lack self-awareness. Before any coaching can be effective, they need to wake up to the ways their actions affect others.
One CEO we worked with was known for his smart turnarounds of a large media company. But he was struggling to get along with his executive team. Finally, several board directors suggested he should seek out a coach. After multiple sessions, he had shared little information about himself, and we were no closer to figuring out the root of the problem. Stymied, we suggested that we observe the next executive team meeting.
Suddenly, all was clear. We were shocked by how he controlled the conversation in the room. He simply spoke over other people with a volume of words that was unfathomable. When he left the room to take a call, his team members erupted with frustration. It was obvious that this CEO was completely out of touch — something that became even more apparent later on, when he asked us to tell the board how positively he was responding to coaching.
Leaders like this often ignore criticism if it doesn’t jibe with their view of themselves — and such feedback is easy to ignore if it’s buried in a performance review or mentioned briefly in a larger conversation. Conducting a non-judgmental, just-the-facts 360-degree review could help them see the reality of their situation. Until they can see what others see and why it matters, they won’t examine their behavior, and coaching will be useless.
2. You can’t get on their calendar.
Some leaders claim to be receptive to coaching but just can’t find the time. They may cancel sessions at the last minute, constantly reschedule, or, when they do show up, be visibly distracted. They lack space for coaching both in their calendar, and in their mind.
Unlike the oblivious leader, the too-busy leader is often quite likable. They will apologize for being hard to pin down, and be very direct about how busy they are. Don’t be surprised if they’re flattered to be offered coaching. But coaching can’t be crammed into the schedule of a leader who wears their busy-ness as a badge of honor. Their inability to prioritize is a sign they need coaching, but their unwillingness to make room for it suggests they won’t be a good coaching investment.
A brilliant engineer we know had been promoted three times in four years, and by the time he was nearly 30 he was a group president at a U.S. manufacturing company. Diligent, humble, and smart, he could hold a room spellbound with only a marker and a whiteboard as he worked out solutions to highly technical problems. However, as adept as he was at the technical aspects of his job, he now had 20 people reporting to him whom he had no idea how to manage.
After three months of coaching, his superiors could see it was going nowhere. The executive often rescheduled his sessions, telling his coach he didn’t have the time. He believed he couldn’t set aside the time to improve himself. That made him uncoachable.
HR managers should do some reality testing to ensure the too-busy leader is willing to make room for coaching. To benefit from coaching, too-busy leaders must make the space to be fully present, both during the coaching sessions and after, doing the difficult work of developing new mindsets, skills, and habits. Ask this person what tasks or responsibilities they’d be willing to give up or delegate, even temporarily, to make time for coaching. If they struggle to think of any, give them a gentle but firm ultimatum as part of a career planning conversation: that they have plateaued at the company and won’t go to the next level until they make time for self-development.
3. They focus too much on tips and tactics.
Some leaders eagerly agree to coaching, but then avoid the deeper inquiries required for meaningful transformation. They’re willing to modify behaviors, but not beliefs. They view coaching as medicine that, if taken regularly, will help them get ahead.
The quick-fix leader becomes frustrated when their coach asks questions that require self-reflection. They want answers, not questions. “You’re the expert, you tell me,” they’ll say in response to questions from the coach, or “What if I did this?” Everything comes back to tactics. (A related warning sign is if a leader asks how quickly the coaching can be finished — especially if they demand that the cycle be compressed.)
Although coaches sometimes offer suggestions, their real job is to help executives uncover the assumptions driving their behavior. Only then can a coach help them challenge self-limiting beliefs that block their development. However, the quick-fix leader has little interest in this process.
One CEO we worked with was leading a family business that had recently been sold to a large company. He was told by a leader in the new parent company (who himself had benefitted from coaching) that coaching would help him make the transition. The CEO gladly accepted, wanting to be seen as a peer.
However, it wasn’t long into the first coaching session that he showed his entire focus was on “doing whatever other successful people did.” The coach worked tirelessly to shift the conversation to the CEO’s purpose and goals. Each time, however, he shifted the discussion back to the “secrets of success” of other organizational leaders he wanted to emulate. Ultimately, he was passed over for a permanent role on the parent company’s leadership team, and left the organization.
To prompt this kind of leader to be open to self-reflection, remind them of all the other times they vowed to change but were unsuccessful. They then might realize they need to work on more than just changing their game plan. Or, introduce them into a preliminary mentoring conversation with one of the leaders they admire. Tell the mentor to share their experience of struggling to develop.
4. They delay getting started with a coach to “do more research” or “find the right person.”
To be sure, it’s important to have a good fit between a leader and his coach. But a continual rejection of qualified coaches should give you pause. A related red flag is if the person is acting confused, and asking repeatedly why coaching has been suggested. Assuming you’ve clearly explained why coaching is necessary, this could be a defense mechanism and a signal that the person is not ready to confront their shortcomings. It usually stems from insecurity.
Being coached can be daunting, and not everyone is ready to take it on. We remember a physician leader who was hired to turn around a business unit of a large medical center. When his staff challenged him, he became emotional. Told by his boss that he needed a coach to help him control his emotions, he was hurt and angrily asked “Why?” — failing again to control his emotions. He was too full of hidden fears for the coaching to be useful. His boss eventually reassigned him, and ultimately he left the organization.
Reframe coaching as an investment the organization is making in their development rather than a personal fix. Tell them your firm provides this resource for high-potential, top performers to accelerate their success. If this leader can view coaching as something positive to help them achieve their goals, they may warm up to the process.
When Going Coach-Less Is Not Viable
After hearing us say that a certain leader is not a good candidate for coaching, an executive who brought us in will often say a variant of this: “Well, he must be coached. We can’t let him continue to manage others the way he has, but we can’t fire him easily either because we need his skills badly.” But imposing coaching on someone who just can’t handle it at the moment isn’t going to help anyone. Companies are better off directing their people development investments elsewhere — skills training or academic programs are often better options.
Invest your coaching budget in people who have shown the willingness and the capacity to change, and you’ll get a much better return on your investment.
Source: https://hbr.org/2018/07/4-signs-an-executive-isnt-ready-for-coaching
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July 09, 2018 -
High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It
“There’s no team without trust,” (….”and no tribe without trust and direct feedback” cb) says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. He knows the results of the tech giant’s massive two-year study on team performance, which revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake ...”or speak your truth”…cb). Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.
Ancient evolutionary adaptations explain why psychological safety is both fragile and vital to success in uncertain, interdependent environments. The brain processes a provocation by a boss, competitive coworker, or dismissive subordinate as a life-or-death threat. The amygdala, the alarm bell in the brain, ignites the fight-or-flight response, hijacking higher brain centers. This “act first, think later” brain structure shuts down perspective and analytical reasoning. Quite literally, just when we need it most, we lose our minds. While that fight-or-flight reaction may save us in life-or-death situations, it handicaps the strategic thinking needed in today’s workplace.
Twenty-first-century success depends on another system — the broaden-and-build mode of positive emotion, which allows us to solve complex problems and foster cooperative relationships. Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina has found that positive emotions like trust, curiosity, confidence, and inspiration broaden the mind and help us build psychological, social, and physical resources. We become more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent when we feel safe. Humor increases, as does solution-finding and divergent thinking — the cognitive process underlying creativity.
When the workplace feels challenging but not threatening, teams can sustain the broaden-and-build mode. Oxytocin levels in our brains rise, eliciting trust and trust-making behavior. This is a huge factor in team success, as Santagata attests: “In Google’s fast-paced, highly demanding environment, our success hinges on the ability to take risks and be vulnerable in front of peers.”
So how can you increase psychological safety on your own team? Try replicating the steps that Santagata took with his:
1. Approach conflict as a collaborator, not an adversary. We humans hate losing even more than we love winning. A perceived loss triggers attempts to reestablish fairness through competition, criticism, or disengagement, which is a form of workplace-learned helplessness. Santagata knows that true success is a win-win outcome, so when conflicts come up, he avoids triggering a fight-or-flight reaction by asking, “How could we achieve a mutually desirable outcome?”
2. Speak human to human. Underlying every team’s who-did-what confrontation are universal needs such as respect, competence, social status, and autonomy. Recognizing these deeper needs naturally elicits trust and promotes positive language and behaviors. Santagata reminded his team that even in the most contentious negotiations, the other party is just like them and aims to walk away happy. He led them through a reflection called “Just Like Me,” which asks you to consider:
- This person has beliefs, perspectives, and opinions, just like me.
- This person has hopes, anxieties, and vulnerabilities, just like me.
- This person has friends, family, and perhaps children who love them, just like me.
- This person wants to feel respected, appreciated, and competent, just like me.
- This person wishes for peace, joy, and happiness, just like me.
3. Anticipate reactions and plan countermoves. “Thinking through in advance how your audience will react to your messaging helps ensure your content will be heard, versus your audience hearing an attack on their identity or ego,” explains Santagata.
Skillfully confront difficult conversations head-on by preparing for likely reactions. For example, you may need to gather concrete evidence to counter defensiveness when discussing hot-button issues. Santagata asks himself, “If I position my point in this manner, what are the possible objections, and how would I respond to those counterarguments?” He says, “Looking at the discussion from this third-party perspective exposes weaknesses in my positions and encourages me to rethink my argument.”
Specifically, he asks:
- What are my main points?
- What are three ways my listeners are likely to respond?
- How will I respond to each of those scenarios?
4. Replace blame with curiosity. If team members sense that you’re trying to blame them for something, you become their saber-toothed tiger. John Gottman’s research at the University of Washington shows that blame and criticism reliably escalate conflict, leading to defensiveness and — eventually — to disengagement. The alternative to blame is curiosity. If you believe you already know what the other person is thinking, then you’re not ready to have a conversation. Instead, adopt a learning mindset, knowing you don’t have all the facts. Here’s how:
- State the problematic behavior or outcome as an observation, and use factual, neutral language. For example, “In the past two months there’s been a noticeable drop in your participation during meetings and progress appears to be slowing on your project.”
- Engage them in an exploration. For example, “I imagine there are multiple factors at play. Perhaps we could uncover what they are together?”
- Ask for solutions. The people who are responsible for creating a problem often hold the keys to solving it. That’s why a positive outcome typically depends on their input and buy-in. Ask directly, “What do you think needs to happen here?” Or, “What would be your ideal scenario?” Another question leading to solutions is: “How could I support you?”
5. Ask for feedback on delivery. Asking for feedback on how you delivered your message disarms your opponent, illuminates blind spots in communication skills, and models fallibility, which increases trust in leaders. Santagata closes difficult conversations with these questions:
- What worked and what didn’t work in my delivery?
- How did it feel to hear this message?
- How could I have presented it more effectively?
For example, Santagata asked about his delivery after giving his senior manager tough feedback. His manager replied, “This could have felt like a punch in the stomach, but you presented reasonable evidence and that made me want to hear more. You were also eager to discuss the challenges I had, which led to solutions.”
6. Measure psychological safety. Santagata periodically asks his team how safe they feel and what could enhance their feeling of safety. In addition, his team routinely takes surveys on psychological safety and other team dynamics. Some teams at Google include questions such as, “How confident are you that you won’t receive retaliation or criticism if you admit an error or make a mistake?”
If you create this sense of psychological safety on your own team starting now, you can expect to see higher levels of engagement, increased motivation to tackle difficult problems, more learning and development opportunities, and better performance.
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Leading with Grit and Grace
Leading with Grit and Grace from CB Bowman, CEO Master Corporate Executive Coach -
How swapping life stories can make you a better leader
Professor Nigel Nicholson on why executives should explore their own timeline and take interest in other people’s experiences
By Nigel NicholsonView original publication on London Business School
Did you ever tell someone your life story? If so, it was most likely when you were in the first warm flush of a new romance, with you and your beloved bonding by swapping narratives. Over the years, you’ve no doubt given friends and family edited highlights of the steps in your life journey. But it’s less likely that you’ll have told one or two attentive listeners whom you scarcely know the full story: the what, why and how of your journey to now. What would it feel like to do this? Why would your audience possibly be interested?
You might be surprised on two counts. First, by the emotions you experience when doing this exercise. Second, by the positive impact your narrative has on your listeners, no matter how “ordinary” you think your story is. I see these effects regularly on the Biography Workshops I run for executives; the experience turns out to be remarkably powerful for both teller and listener.
Let’s begin with the teller. Before you start talking, you’ll have drawn a Life-Line that maps out your key dates, events, relationships, roles and feelings over time. The mere act of doing this can be startling – you begin to recall sequences of events half forgotten. You see the drama, the highs and the disappointments with fresh eyes and are struck by how much has changed, including feelings that seemed indelible at the time. You’re also struck by how good eventually came out of what seemed like a disastrous situation, or how you slipped into negativity while scarcely aware of what you were doing.
The landscape of your life is not proportional – some big things seem very distant while others continue to loom over you. Doing this exercise gives you a remarkable new perspective; part helicopter view and part re-immersion into the tangle of your past. The new perspective comes from the now and from your view of the future. It raises questions and clarifies choices.
Some of these questions are important reflections for now and the future. You may find yourself asking, ‘Have I been making the same kind of mistakes repeatedly? What big decisions did I take too carelessly? What have life’s troubles taught me? How might I have undervalued these people or those processes? What might I have overvalued? What have I neglected that will help me in future? What have been the constant factors – visions, driving beliefs and reliable relationships – that have helped steer my course? What choices have come from the best part of me?’ These are important questions. The Life-Line exercise gives you an unparalleled opportunity to reflect and generate new plans and purposes for the next chapters of your story. In many cases, it’s a tool for thinking anew about legacy, an issue that looms larger as the years pass.
Second, the listener. What effect does it have on them to hear your story? Far from being bored, judging you or failing to understand, you find people are drawn into your perspective, especially if they have similar backgrounds and experiences. This is a real eye-opener for cross-cultural insights. We often judge others and make snap judgements about their motives in ways that make us feel good about ourselves, without taking the time understand them. This exercise makes that kind of mental laziness difficult. It’s hard to judge when drawn into someone else’s narrative. You’ll more likely feel sympathy for the hard things that happened, understand their emotions and wonder how they coped with life’s challenges.
Being a listener in this context is a gift as it allows us to do one of the things that self-centred humans find so hard: ‘decentring’. Self-centredness is the inevitable consequence of our strong sense of personal identity and the limitation of our vision. Yet, I find time again when coaching and consulting that we can transcend that limitation using our minds. Empathy – sharing someone else’s feelings – is easy with people we love but harder with those we don’t. It’s especially difficult with people who we have nothing in common with. They may come from a completely different background or culture; or we may not trust or like them much. Decentring – seeing the world from another person’s perspective – is unlike empathy. It’s more analytical, allowing us to understand the inner and outer forces that bear down on others. It’s almost easier to decentre with strangers and enemies. We can take friends and family for granted but tend to be more cautious with strangers and enemies.
Empathy is easier with people we like or respect, as we find them. Decentring really helps as a “cooler” analytical process on the left side, but comes into its own as a really special technique on the right side of the line. It’s not easy, but there are various exercises I use that can help people decentre. The Life Line exercise is a superhighway to decentring. It is a vivid demonstration that it almost impossible for you not to develop a deeper understanding of how others really think, feel and act if you decentre.
Deep insight into other is not just therapeutic. It is essential in management and leadership. It’s a powerful tool for negotiation, alliances, managing difficult people and outmanoeuvring those who might be obstructing us. With enemies, it can replace fear and anger with a more dispassionate intelligence, making it a tool for smart and humane Machiavellianism – know thine enemy!
In summary, the Life Line provides us with two powerful benefits. One is to give us a fresh perspective on the relationship between the past and the future, and find renewal of purpose in the present. The second opens an escape hatch from our self-centred vision, giving us a deeper understanding of what it means to be another, different and remarkable human being.