The leadership decision ‘speed trap’
Leaders need to know the difference between haste and speed, particularly when it comes to their thinking. In modern business, we seem to be in the habit of needing to be ‘fast’ to just keep up. However, going too fast can get leaders stuck in a ‘speed trap’ that can get you and your business into trouble. Feeling pressured to make fast decisions – and even feeling that you have to make decisions for others when they can make them for themselves – can be critical leadership errors that can impact upon your leadership (and whole organisation) performance. Decision making requires an appropriate amount of thinking. What we have learned through behavioural economics and psychology, is that there are common errors inherent in thinking. These errors, although well documented, are routinely made by almost everyone. Leaders, under pressure to take decisions, often fall foul of these errors, sometimes with catastrophic
Stress is inevitable – how you respond to it is not
Stress is inevitable, but can it enhance performance or does it always harm us? Stress is reported as one of the significant ‘modern diseases’. People are reporting feeling so ’stressed’ from their work and private lives that it making them physically and psychologically ill. When you consider performance, stress plays a massive role in dragging people out of their peak performance states into less resourceful ones. Stress is almost contagious, with people being influenced by stress that others experience to become stressed themselves. Have we created a world where stress is inevitable, and we are all just victims of our circumstance – or is there more to stress, and can we do more than just manage it? What is stress? Stress is the body’s response to being forced to operate outside its comfort zone. When we are in our comfort zone, we have the belief and expectation that we can
12 steps to tactful communication
“What we have here is a failure to communicate” –Cool Hand Luke. (Paul Newman) How often is performance derailed by a failure to communicate? We lead and work through others, collaborate and seek to influence beliefs and behaviours. These all take quality communication to achieve. However, communication is perhaps the greatest single opportunity for increased efficiency and effectiveness in any business, organisation or system. It simply does not work well enough, often enough – because although we are taught to talk, we are rarely truly taught to communicate. Communication, at its heart, is about ‘transmitting’ a message of some kind to one or more recipients, in such a way that the message they understand is equivalent to the message that was transmitted. This transmission requires pre-processing by the communicator (translation) and post-processing by the receiver (reception and decoding). The transmission is conducted through a medium using known symbols (language, hand
Are you lying to me?
Valentine’s day around the corner – when your partner says “I love you” – how do you know if they are telling the truth? You will not be surprised to learn that we are lied to all the time – in work situations, in social situations and in our most intimate relationships. Understanding lying allows us to better detect it from others – and ourselves – and seek higher quality communication and truth. Deceptions are common. Over 60% of all 10 minute conversations contain at least one lie – and usually it is more than three. More often than not, both parties are ‘spicing up’ the discussion with a broad sprinkling of lies, falsehoods and deceptions. Humans start lying and deceiving from around 6 months of age, and it comes a practiced part of normal communication. It has been reported that in normal society we are exposed to up to
The fisherman’s tale
There was once a fisherman in a small Mexican coastal town. A simple man, he would live his life by getting up late, going fishing at about 10, selling his small catch in the market. He would catch up with his mates to play cards in the cantina in the afternoon, go home for dinner then take his wife out dancing. One day a banker from New York was passing through on his holiday. He had seen the fisherman live his live for a few days and pulled him aside. “Listen”, he said, “we can do some amazing things”. “We can start by getting you out fishing at 5 am, leveraging your assets to get another 6 boats. We could set up a processing plant at the end of town, pack the fish in ice and sell them for a great price in the US!” The fisherman swirled his tequila
Mindfulness – The business performance secret
Do you want to be more effective, efficient – and at the same time enjoy everything more? Are you being overwhelmed, diverted and unable to achieve what you want? Too often high performance is derailed by over-load, multi-tasking and lack of focus on what matters. Sometimes our minds are so full – we are ‘mind-full’ – that we have no time or space to really think. Perhaps it’s time to become mindlessly mindful –that is, to stop being ‘mind-full’ and start being truly mindful. It is a skill which is critical to high performance but can be difficult to realise in the hustle and bustle of modern business life. The myth of multitasking Have you ever noticed how you can be here, and not here? Whilst you are ‘listening’ to someone on your team, you are thinking about the next meeting? As you are working on an important project, your
You must use IQ before EQ
A coaching client stated that a key hire they were chasing had to have ‘EQ’. So I asked a couple of refining questions, and it opened up a really interesting discussion. It turns out that the term ‘EQ’ had been thrown around so much in the executive board and no-one was really clear what anyone meant by this term. Reflecting on this conversation, I wondered about all the times EQ is used in conversations about leadership. Has it become a buzz word, or do people really understand and use the term appropriately? EQ as the big thing – or do we mean EI? EQ (Emotional quotient) is reflective of a quotient or score, that is related to the score that someone achieves on a specific test instrument measuring aspects of Emotional Intelligence (EI). Emotional Intelligence, on the other hand, is more reflective of the expression of ’emotionally intelligent’ behaviours. When