The wisdom of self-sabotage

Have you ever noticed yourself sabotaging your own success?  Often, this is subconscious, so here are some examples of what it might look like in a work context:

• Not following up on things, knowing that your lack of action might have negative consequences;
• Avoiding or withdrawing mentally from meetings, training sessions, or people related to your work;
• Reducing, or even stopping, your communication to colleagues and senior managers;
• Increasingly leaving things unfinished, or poorly done, even when you know you could do better;
• Slipping into negative speech patterns, focusing on “what’s wrong” more than “what we can do is…”;
• Being shocked when receiving feedback about the above types of behaviour – not recognising it as “you”;
• … you’re getting the idea, right?

Any single incident of the above behaviour would not necessarily be a concern.  But when it’s a pattern, it can also be a sign that it’s time for you to take stock.  Especially if this behaviour is atypical, it can indicate that you are no longer happy or fulfilled in your current role or environment.   Some part of you is waving a red flag – creating drama that will shift the status quo.  You could even call it a strategy.  I have a close friend, for example, freely admits that when he is no longer happy in his work he simply stops communicating with his boss.  This usually results in getting fired.  A dramatic, but effective, way of getting out of an undesirable situation.  But it’s hardly positive for his future employment opportunities.

There is wisdom in self-sabotage.  When you notice it, you can intervene proactively by evolving your dreams and goals, and taking action to move in a new direction.  If you are observing someone else doing self-sabotage, you can start by helping them to focus on “what’s next”.

For whom your work toils…

At the risk of sounding incredibly crass and corporate, do you know who your primary customers are?  These are the people who get the direct result or product of your work.  They are the people who would jump up and down in protest if your job didn’t exist.  They are the people who would be checking to see if you’ve been providing value for money, or whether there are other ways to get the same product/service.  Therefore, even if your work ultimately serves a variety of other stakeholders, some of them perhaps sexier than your true primary stakeholders, it behooves you to stay in close contact with the needs and desires of the latter.

Advantages of being clear about who your customers are:

• Allows  you to ask the right questions about what you should and shouldn’t be doing.
• Allows you to target your efforts for the greatest impact (presumably your service to primary stakeholders in turn allows them to serve your secondary stakeholders better).
• Allows you to communicate clearly about what you do, for whom, and why you are not doing other things.
• Gives you the focus to measure and report on your work in the way that is most meaningful to your primary stakeholders.
• Helps you to stay in touch with whether your work is being valued by the decision-makers who keep you employed.

Need I say anything about what happens when you overlook your primary stakeholders/customers?  If you want me to do so, send me a message.  But first and more importantly, who are YOUR primary customers/stakeholders?

When drama goes up, trust goes down

This is not my idea.  A long time ago, I was at some training program or other (I don’t even recall what it was about).  My takeaway for the day was this incredibly useful insight – when drama goes up, trust goes down.

At the time, I applied the notion to being prepared for delivering a training event.  If when participants begin to arrive, you are messing around with AV, handouts, nametags, etc., you won’t be able to greet them and begin to establish rapport.  You won’t reassure them that you are in control, and they won’t relax.  Since then, I’ve observed that there are many types of drama that can derail trust.  But of course, our current economic climate demonstrates this quite clearly.

This is worth thinking about on a personal and organisational level, because trust is the foundation for effective and rewarding relationships.  And it is through relationships that we get things done.  I’d like to challenge you to think about daily dramas (situations that set up conflict) that could be eliminated or reduced.  Here’s a short list of some that I’ve observed:

• Procrastination – saying you’ll do it, but not following through.
• Lack of decisive commitment – the negative impact of this one is compounded by the next …
• Lack of communication – non-existent, insufficient, or misleading communication will lead to others inventing their own interpretation of your silence.
• “Awfulizing” – focusing on how bad things are or might get.  This leaves little head space for being productive now.
• Lack of preparation – trying to “fly by the seat of your pants”, other people can usually spot this.
• Over-commitment – trying to do too many things at once usually results in poor preparation and less communication.
• Assigning blame – puts the other person on the defensive

What are some of the conflict-inducing or confidence-reducing dramas in your world?  What could you do today to eliminate or reduce drama in your life?

What does supervisory skill have to do with it?

As this is a brand new blog, I have yet to get around to some of the topics near to my heart.  One of these is the important role managers play in creating a workplace that retains and nurtures staff.

If you are like many managers, you’ve come to supervising people indirectly.  In your current role, you probably have an interest and passion for the work itself, and the focus of the work is on improving people’s lives.  Managing your own staff should be the easy bit – shouldn’t it? 

 

You probably wear many hats in your role:  planning, budgeting, negotiating, reporting, etc.  Since the focus of your job is on getting the operational work done, it only seems fair that the majority of your time and energy should be spent on doing this. 

 

Therefore, when a stranger asks “what do you do?” chance are good that you’ll say something like “I manage (or administer, or conduct) programs that advocate for others, or deliver aid, or …”.   With this type of focus, it is very, very easy to minimize or completely forget the importance of the supervisory role.

 

It can truly be a challenge for you as a professional, competent in your own field, to value the supervisory role as highly as the technical or service side of the work.  You may have entered this field because you enjoy what you do, or to match your work with your values.  Employees came later, perhaps as part of a promotion. 

 

But maybe you never wanted to manage people in the first place.  If that is the case, it would be easy to feel annoyed and frustrated by the demands of hiring, training, motivating and disciplining other people.  You have more important things to do.  This may result in micro-managing, whereby you work 80 hour weeks and can never go on holiday.  Or it may result in delegating to an extreme and losing control over the quality of work in doing so.

 

Why it is so IMPORTANT

 

Lack of supervisory skill (or failure to use it consistently) leads to career derailment or failed/sub-standard projects, either through sheer burnout, or declining productivity and quality.  The good news is that the basic supervisory skills can be learned, and made into habit.

 

When you accept and become comfortable with this aspect of the job, you can create for yourself a trusting work environment, in which the work gets done well and on-time by the people most qualified to do it.  You can return balance to your life – have time with the family, go on holiday, relax. 

 

The work gets done well, and you can RELAX.  It’s good for your career and your health. 

 

So if you are one of the managers who finds the people management side of your job to be the most difficult, what are you doing to improve your skills in this area?  What questions do you have?

Being strategic about getting the work done well

When you think about work, you may have several focal points, depending on your role in the organisation.  You may be thinking strategically, with an external and/or internal view.  You may shift to an operational focus, at the organisational, team and/or individual level.  Or you may be thinking of your individual relationships – with the agency, external stakeholders, your manager, colleagues, employees.  And of course, when thinking of work, you may be simply thinking of your personal service and of your career in general.

However you choose to think about work, here are some key observable points:

• Strategic and operational work is completed by people using their unique sets of personal and interpersonal skills.
• People are effective at strategic and/or operational work when their unique individual character and set of technical and interpersonal skills match the requirements of their position and the various relationships they must maintain.
• In other words, individual effectiveness is compromised when there is not a good match. 

Now, organisations are traditionally good at providing training for people whose technical skills don’t match the job.  And they are increasingly interested in helping people develop the “softer”  interpersonal and emotional intelligence skills, because:

• Almost all work is done by people through relationships with others.
• Effective problem-solving within interpersonal relations requires an ability to reflect on and understand what we as individuals bring to the equation. We describe this ability as ‘self-awareness’.
• Not everyone is fully self-aware of how they typically or habitually respond to people and/or situations. Often this doesn’t happen until there is a problem. Usually, this also means the emotions are engaged.
• Emotion can be both a barrier to self-awareness (through defensiveness), and an opportunity.  Usually, there needs to be some active personal challenge at an individual emotional level for self-awareness to be triggered and expanded.
• If a person gets stuck in defensiveness when challenged, his/her effectiveness in getting the work done well will suffer.

The question is: when you are challenged in an organisational setting, how can you make the shift from defensiveness to learning?  When you do learn something, do you congratulate yourself for building self-awareness and being open to new ideas?  Or do you sheepishly discount it as something you should have known already?  Does your organisation/manager impede or facilitate this personal development process?  Do you think organisations/managers should actively facilitate this process?

 

I’d like you to fully consider the following sentences:  

• Anything less than developing yourself and others at a personal level, isn’t all about getting the work done well, isn’t it?  I mean it’s not just about getting the work done well, personal development, I mean.  
• And, anything less than facilitating your staff’s personal development, isn’t all about strategic priorities, isn’t it?  I mean it’s not just about strategic priorities, personal development, I mean.

Moving confidently towards that which “feels” right

Thanks again, N., for this question: “I suppose that my question for you seeks wisdom about embracing uncertainty and stepping confidently towards a direction that ‘feels’ right, but ‘looks’ vague, cloudy and unclear…”

Part II

Making a firm decision in the face of doubt, and then acting on it, will certainly give you feelings.  Even before you can clearly see the path and its outcome, you might feel breathless anticipation, sinking regret, excitement, overwhelm, motivation, fear, … and  you’ll be picking up these feelings through your physical body, your internal mental dialogue, your emotional responses, and perhaps your spiritual sense of well-being.  One might wonder whether any of these sources of feedback should be valued over any other – and this opens a Pandora’s box of philosophical debates.

I once had a mentor who advised me to make a firm decision, and then for the next 24 hours pay attention to how my body feels about the decision.  Am I energised?  More alert?  Is my posture upright?  Or am I deflated? Drained?  Is my posture defensive?  If my body feels great, it was the right decision.  If not, what am I missing?  The message from my mentor was that in many ways our physical body is a more direct and honest indicator of the “rightness” of our decisions. 

For the most part, I’ve found this to be useful advice.  And I’ve developed my own corollary.  I make a decision and then pay attention to my spirit.  Do I feel immense gratitude, or a sense of awe?  Or am I fighting not to feel resigned to my fate?  This works for me.  It helps me move through second thoughts and panic attacks to staying focused on what I want.

How do you do confidence?

Uncertainty as a positive and creative force

Part I again – I’ve more to say about uncertainty!

One thing we can say about uncertainty is that it does get your attention.  It can raise your heart rate, make you more alert to your environment and cause  you to think more consciously about your options.  It can also create a sense of urgency, as in time or resources running out.  There is energy in this, which can be productively applied.  In my experience, this is best done by first acknowledging the uncertainty and allowing the energy to motivate me along three basic lines:

1. Practicing gratitude for everything currently in my environments, including those so-called “negative” things that are in my life to teach me something.  Gently shifting my mind away from potential negative scenarios to what I appreciate about my life in this moment.  This may not be as easy as it sounds.  Uncertainty often makes us newly aware of what we have that we don’t want to lose.  The trick is to convert this awarenes to gratitude, and not fear of loss.
2. Being genuinely curious about what new, unexpected, positive opportunities will emerge out of the uncertain, shifting environment.
3. Getting clear on what is most fundamentally important to me in any given context, and staying focused on goals and actions that are in line with this.  Having the courage to take action, based on considered decisions and commitments.

I picked up this definition of courage from my NLP training with Chris Howard:  COURAGE = DOUBT + COMMITMENT + ACTION.  I encourage you to think through the components of this equation and the result if you were to eliminate one of the components.  I will say this:  I believe one of the ways to reduce the need for courage is to reduce doubt.  And I believe you can do this by making strong decisions, followed by commitment and action toward those decisions.  And this is how you convert uncertainty into a positive and creative force.

Personal example:  after 2  years of paralysing doubt, I committed to a decision to go public with this blog, and with every new post (action) I am increasingly energized to develop it further.

Question for you:  what decision can you make in the face of doubt?  How will you commit to it and follow up with action?

From uncertainty to focusing on what you want

Thanks, N., for this question:  “I suppose that my question for you seeks wisdom about embracing uncertainty and stepping confidently towards a direction that ‘feels’ right, but ‘looks’ vague, cloudy and unclear…”  I’m seeing/hearing/feeling two parts to this question.

Part I:  Uncertainty

It seems like everyone is writing about uncertainty these days, and here’s the problem with that:  the more of your mental and emotional resources you focus on uncertainty, the less you have to focus on what you want.   Uncertainty scatters our attention and our focus.  Added to this, what we focus on will grow.  So if we focus on uncertainty, uncertainty will grow.

Human beings are natural risk assessors.  Incoming information is evaluated with the question “can it hurt me?”  If the answer is “no”, then we carry on toward our goals.  If the answer is “yes”, we experience fight or flight.  But what if the answer is “it depends”?  Assessing the risks associated with uncertainty creates too many scenarios, and usually the assessment results in conflicting “wise courses of action”, which in turn can lead to paralysing inaction.   There will be people who get stuck here, but you don’t have to be one of them. 

Risk assessment is good, but staying focused on what you want and responding in the moment are more powerful.  Example:  What if I get retrenched?  What if my budget is slashed? – having a Plan B or C in mind will help to put your mind at ease so that you can re-focus, but rarely do you act on Plan B until something happens.  In the meantime, it behooves you to get very clear on the fundamentals of what you want, stay focused on what you want, and respond in the moment to opportunities that lead to what you want.   Personally, I wouldn’t call this “embracing” uncertainty as much as “acknowledging” it as I do what I want to do anyway.

I hope this is useful.  And since this is getting long, I’ll write tomorrow about calibrating your movement toward a cloudy dream.

What’s my personal life got to do with it?

I have often observed that people who work in service of others often put their own needs at a much lower priority.  In fact, their organisations often expect this of them - maybe not explicitly, but the work is so compelling and never-ending that it’s easy to lose touch with what we as individuals bring to the equation each day.  Added to this is that some people still think that work and personal lives should remain separate.  And clearly, we do not want everyone bringing all of their problems (with spouses, children, flat mates, finances, emotional upheavals) out in the open for discussion and resolution at work. 

 

However, we must acknowledge that our personal lives both drain and sustain us.  To the extent our personal house is in order, we have expanded resources of time, energy, creativity and good will to contribute to our work.  To the extent the house is not in order, we are handicapped.

 

A second far-reaching implication relates to the fact that personal motivations and concerns often drive conversations and problem-solving efforts at work, often sub-consciously.  If you are not paying attention to your own and others’ internal landscape, you are missing half of the picture.  Consequences include:  creating solutions that are not sustainable, because they are based on partial information; stifling ideas and creativity, decreasing trust, increasing dependence on management/technical solutions to essentially human problems, and so on.

Question for you:  How can you increase your awareness of personal issues that may be affecting you at work?  How can you help your co-workers and bosses do the same?

Didn’t get it the first time?

Have you ever seen a movie several times, and gotten something different out of it each time?   Have you ever seen a movie and thought it was so rich with one-liners, or with thought provoking messages, that you thought you would like to see it again?  Or maybe you do this with books?  If so, you already know that it can be worth revisiting material you’ve been in contact with in the past.  You get more out of it the second time.

Personal development is a spiral process, I like to think.  Whether you are learning street names in a new city, a new language, how to be less judgemental, how to be more organised, how to manage people … whatever … you take in as much as you can in a given moment, and that serves as a foundation for future learning.  With your new expanded perspective, the next time you engage with the subject, you’ll look at it through new eyes, and see new things.

So don’t be discouraged if you made a big push to do something or learn something in 2008, and didn’t fully get it or implement it.  You’ve laid in a foundation to build upon.

Questions for you:  In 2009, what book would you like to finish, or re-read?  What inspiring training program from the past would you like to review?  What aspect of your development is waiting for another round of learning?