Leadership (part 2 of 2)

Part one of this series of two was about trust. It originally became a bee-in-my-bonnet over a year ago, when some of the behaviour at work was proving interesting. I struggled to write something that was anything like coherent initially, because of the intensity of the situation.

 Time and a different employer gave some distance and perspective, and I began to wonder if trust really was the issue. Certainly there was a trust issue – but was that cause or effect ? Or was there something else … like leadership ?

 If you look up leadership, you’ll find it talks about leading – so not much information added there. Mark Rashid talks about the horse “turning over the decision making” to the rider/handler. And it strikes me that this is a pretty good model to use.

 For there to be leadership, there needs to be guidance/decisions, and there needs to be someone making them.

 The leader is the one who is making the decisions.

The follower is the one who is accepting and acting on those decisions.

 To turn over the decision making in a particular situation/context, I would propose you need to trust whoever is going to make those decisions.

 My old pony (“Red”) was fast both physically and mentally. He was always one step ahead of me. If I had lacked confidence, that might have been a bad scenario. But he and I just sort of “clicked” and  I trusted his abilities. That meant I could leave a big proportion of the detail (how we got over a jump) to him, while I provided the direction (which jump was next, what to expect *after* the jump – water, a drop etc). And our successes built on that trust and confidence. He listened to me, I listened to him. When other people took him out in his later days, that caused problems as he would “ask” whether he should go faster – but the rider wouldn’t realise what was going on and would get taken home at speed ! To me we were the perfect team, and there were only 2 occasions I can think of where “equal” partnership resulted in a problem. The first was in our heyday and in hindsight I think he must have been feeling under the weather. It took a rare stop at a jump before I realised and helped him out more than usual. The second was in his semi-retirement, where his view of his abilities had not adjusted to his age, and I went along with his decision (to take the option of a bigger jump). Once again, it just took that one time for me to realise I had to take a bit more of the decision-making. If you were using the situation leadership model, this was probably a “delegating” style.

It was a big change to start working with Fi who, as I commented last time, needed a very different type of leadership from me. To accept that leadership, she needed to be able to hand over the majority of the decision-making to me. From the “big” stuff like where and when we worked together, to the “little” stuff like speed, direction and destination.  She still got to offer me what she could, and as her acceptance and confidence in “us” grew, she could and would offer more. But she needed a lot of directing and we probably started in a Directive and moved into a Coaching style sometimes.

Conversely Rosie challenged *everything*. Actually it is quite a breakthrough for me to write that in the past tense rather than present ! She would challenge speed, destination AND direction – and any change to any of those. One of the trainers I worked with back in those days commented that “most” horses quickly learnt that it took more energy to object that collaborate. And conserving energy is a survival trait. But Rosie…. Nooooo…. She would challenge for prolonged periods of time, and when you went back the next time, she would challenge the same things all over again. I had to be stronger with her than I was really comfortable about – I had to insist, and in a way that meant she realised collaboration was the best option. And *how* you were strong was key – any attempt to just dominate with sheer force just got more challenge and a really peeved pony. I needed to stay calm, insistent, persistent. But still recognise and reward the smallest try.  It isn’t easy to be that strong and still listen hard enough to hear that tiny “whisper” of a try. But over time things started to get better. And once again we had that virtuous curve where the better things got, the less I had to insist, the more I could ask and reward. The more she tried, the more I could reward. And the more I asked and rewarded, the happier she was ! I’m still not quite sure where our partnership will end up – collaborative (like Red) or directive (like Fi). Or something else. And I’m not sure how we will end up splitting the decisions between us – but for the interim I have needed to take on more of that just to get her to accept turning *any* decisions over.

But in a work role I am more usually in the Follower role, which means I need to be capable of what  I ask of my horses – turning the decisions over to someone else. If stepping up to a stronger kind of leadership was tough, what is it like to be on the other side of the fence ?

I think my natural preference for a collaborative/delegative style is probably not a surprise from how I worked with Red. I suspect I am probably as demanding and challenging of my “leaders” as Fi and Rosie have been of me. Do I challenge ? Yes, although I aim to make it relevant and timely (but of course will not always get that right).

So where can it go wrong ?

Well I found some more quotes ;)

“Trust is earned, respect is given, and loyalty is demonstrated. Betrayal of any one of those is to lose all three.”  Ziad K. Abdelnour,

And one from that prolific author “unknown”

“Honesty is the foundation for trust; without one you can’t have the other”

I also understand (although I confess I don’t have the reference) that when you research what people are looking for from their leaders, year after year the aspect of “authenticity” (or “consistency” – basically doing what you say and vice versa) comes up in the top 3.

Hmmm. So as a rider/handler/leader with horses I need to be consistent.

And as a follower at work I look for honesty and consistency from my leaders, in order that I can trust and respect them. Or as a leader, within the hierarchy, I need to offer the same as I ask for.

Of course a leader could be consistently bad as well as consistently good. In one of Mark Rashid's blogs he talks about the horse learning  as much from "absence of direction" - all those things we'd really rather they didn't learn but they do. 

One last definition to close the loop. A certain Natural Horseman came up with a definition of respect as “an appropriate response to pressure”. That may work for horses, but it also works in the office.

If the leadership is inconsistent, and the trust and respect are lacking, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise if the response to pressure may at times be…. “Inappropriate” ?!

Trust (part 1 of 2)

I've had something on the subject of trust bumping around in my head now for over a year, but not been able to really get to grips with it. For a while I thought maybe it was leadership I needed to put pen to paper about. Actually I think it is both, and this is part one of two.

There is an quote (source unknown) “Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.”

 I’m not sure I entirely agree….

 Trust is defined as a “belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something”, and a belief is “an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof”.

So when we talk about Trust being earned or built, I’m not sure we’re talking about the right thing. An acceptance based on experience is something slightly different. Trust requires that leap of faith, to accept that something “is” without prior experience or knowledge.

 Trust can be granted very quickly, which is where first impression count. Or trust can be about the confidence of the trustee, what their appetite for risk is. A horse and rider place trust in each other as soon as they start to work together. They have to – their safety depends on the other.

 That initial trust will be bolstered by good experiences, which reinforce the faith you have placed on whatever or whoever you are trusting. Even a neutral “nothing bad happening” will back the trust up with experience.

 But it is equally true that trust can be lost as quickly as it is given.  A misplaced word or step, and the trust starts to be broken down. Depending on the degree of the “break”, it can be catastrophic or simply eroded. And breaking that trust often takes you past zero into the negative; you are going to need to earn your way back to the start point before you can even think about rebuilding what you lost.

 When we give a “second chance”, we’re often looking for reassurance that the breaking of trust was a one-off and will not happen again. Every betrayal of trust makes it harder to repair. And yet we will persevere, looking for reasons to continue to trust. The failure of trust isn’t just about the something/someone that has proved untrustworthy; it is also about the trustee needing to adjust their value system for that breaking of trust. And we don’t really like to do that.

 I trusted someone for over a decade, and only found out after he had gone that my trust had been misplaced. It led me to question whether I had missed the signs, missed chances to expose what was going on. In this particular situation, the trust was being deliberately broken and my behaviour was consistent with my values.  But while I don’t think I could have done anything differently before uncovering the trust-breaking, it does leave a legacy. I am less likely to accept that things are as they seem on the surface, more likely to question. Despite that I am still not likely to micro-manage the situation to prevent the possibility of trust being broken. After all, how do I know if I can trust that person if I never put them in a situation where trust is required ?

And yet that is exactly what I did with my horse (“Fi”) – micro-manage the situation. We didn’t start with a trust issue. I was confident that I was a good enough rider for her, and could handle her anxiety or lack of confidence. But I was used to a partnership that was fairly even – a 55/45 type of deal – with my previous horse. Fi doesn’t really work that way. If someone isn’t obviously making all the decisions for her, her anxiety goes up and she starts to feel she has to take responsibility for everything, and everything becomes a risk. She needed me to go in with more like a 90/10 deal, and I didn’t realise that at first. So I was under-delivering – 55 vs the 90 she was looking for. It led to a few bad experiences for us both,  which meant the trust started to break down between us. By the time I realised she needed me to step up to the mark (at 90% or more), my confidence was dented and that made it even harder for me.

 I started to micro-manage so that we didn’t have any more train wrecks. But that only worked short term because it meant the communication was all one way – me telling her. I wasn’t listening, and that made me a bad leader, even at the required 90%.

 Being 90% responsible for the decisions includes understanding your partner and knowing what *not* to ask of them. My current equestrian partner (“Rosie”) was very unconfident but also very opinionated. She didn’t really see the point of all that hard work; asking nicely wasn’t going to hack it, but asking (too) strongly was just seen as rude and unreasonable. The gap in between those two was incredibly small at first. As I have found ways to motivate her, she has realised that I *will* listen. And when it really is about confidence rather than “can’t, shan’t won’t”, I will find a way to make it safer and easier for her. As she has come to expect that from me, the “can’t, shan’t, won’t” has slowly decreased over time and she’s now regularly trying her heart out for me.

 So it turns out you can turn a vicious circle into a virtuous one. With Fi what I needed to do was set some physical boundaries in terms of what we did (for example, we stopped hacking out), and by stepping up to that 90% ask within those boundaries, we started to rebuild the mutual trust and confidence. And the interesting thing is that as that confidence grew, Fi could get to the point she could accept less than 90% from me. Which meant I was less out of my comfort zone. But she always has to know I am capable of being there at 90% of the team/leadership for her. As long as I *am* capable of 90%, I don’t have to be ! Fi has now retired, but it was the learning she gave me that helped me with Rosie.

Fake it til you make it (aka New Boots)

I had the good fortune of winning some (riding) boots in a magazine competition. When they arrived- I tried them on to check they fit and, as they did, I just kept them on. (They were new so clean and smart).

As it happened I was heading into town... via the petrol station as the warning light was on :o I was standing there filling the tank when I realised I was standing differently... stronger... It was because of the boots, and it felt good.

Which got me pondering...

At a couple of work events, the topic of body posture has come up, specifically the physical impact your posture can have (Power Poses, Amy Cuddy). The way you stand doesn't just affect the impression other people have of you, in affects your own body chemistry. Adopting a power pose changes the levels of key hormones in your body.

There is an interesting cycle between the physical and the emotional - where adopting a smile, even where "faked" by holding a pen in your teeth, affects your mood. And your mood affects your posture.

I think we all know this somewhere in the back of our heads. We know that first impressions count and we manage the image that we present, in every aspect - the clothes, body language, voice, language, hand shake - even down to the car we drive or the gadgets we use.

We choose the face(s) we present to the world.

What occurred to me while fuelling my car was how the clothes and shoes we choose don't just have a direct affect on the people around in terms of the impression we make. They also affect how we feel about ourselves, which will affect our body language (and body chemistry), and that will also influence the people we meet.

Once upon a time I used to wear heels and putting on heels, glad rags and make up was enough to change my body language. But then I damaged my knee and heels were banned for quite a while. Even when I was given the all clear, I was physically unbalanced and fairly unconfident in crowds of people. Feeling vulnerable affected my body language, and hence the impression I made. I've never really made it back into a "heels" state of mind. I have tried wearing low heels a few times and while it does change the way I walk, I don't feel confident. Plus my joints hate me by the end of the day. So I don't do it very often, which means I don't get into "heels" state of mind very often.

One of the other things that came up in the work course was the ability to choose your "state". We did a practical exercise choosing what "state" to greet people in, and it was interesting how the extremes of the state spectrum felt false and difficult. I felt I could probably choose state within a range, but would struggle to choose outside of that range.

[Quick side bar on "state": I realise I didn't really challenge what was meant by "state" when I was on the course. I just made an assumption that it was about "positive mental attitude", but somewhere in the mix you also get energy level, confidence, in fact probably the big five personality traits. The exercise was to greet people at a zero, five and ten level of "state". And they would be doing the same but you wouldn't necessarily get a zero:zero meeting. I think most people found the zero and ten states were not very comfortable and took some effort. What a "ten" was varied between people. And a big mismatch between states e.g. a zero:ten meeting also caused some frustration on both sides.]

I have been updating my wardrobe anyway as changing job always means some adjustment to the new dress code. But I think I need to spend a bit more time thinking about how that also affects me; how the clothes and shoes I choose affects my posture and also my mood.

However "state" isn't just about clothes and shoes. Horses don't judge me by what I wear, but they are very good at reading body language. How I am feeling, what I am thinking, these things affect me at the level of minute differences in my muscles that might not be visible to the eye (at least to a human) but can be felt by a horse, even with a saddle in the way.

Us humans probably used to be better at doing this than we are now, but we've got lazy because we can listen to what someone is saying (and the tone and so on). And our survival doesn't depend on it.

There seems to be a fine line where "faking" confidence or calmness works and the horse responds to a not-entirely-genuine state. But at the same time horses seem to have a pretty consistent ability to see the things you are not even aware of yourself - when you have doubts about a jump, or "don't really mean it" when you ask them to do something.

Somehow there is an aspect of "authenticity" to faking it - you need to mean it.

If I choose particular clothes or shoes in the short term, that will change my mood, and my body language in the short term. And that will affect my body chemistry in the short term. But if you choose to do this again and again, you start to embed that mood, that "state" in the long term.

There is a lot of research about how often you need to do something for it to become a habit - and it is only a matter of days. So if I have been moping around for 20 or 30 days, that is effectively a habit I have created for myself. I have been inadvertently choosing a whole load of habits for myself.

It isn't just a question of accepting that I can choose my state. it is a question of what state do I want to choose ? What 'me' do I want to be (a 'me' that I can be with enough authenticity) ?

Which is a fair amount of pondering given I only have a small petrol tank !

Speed, direction and destination

I'm not sure whether Mark Rashid does this deliberately, or whether he just has a knack of pointing those universal truths that have an unexpected depth and meaning.

I was out for a nice quiet peaceful toddle with my mother's pony today. Weather was neither here nor there, but at least it wasn't raining. The bluebells were still out and looking lush. 

I deliberately set out not to have a fast hack, but to include some "hillwork". Well it would count as hills in Norfolk... really just undulations in Scotland ;)

Anyway, I was reflecting that a year ago my "goal" was for us (Rosie and I) to be able to comfortably manage an hour's hack. And last year we did a few taster rides, managing the last one at the right speed and time. (If you are riding 9-12km at the required speed, it takes around an hour to do).

So this year the aim was to step up a bit and aim towards doing a short pleasure ride. Rosie was already starting the year fitter than this time last year - but still wasn't going to be "fit enough". We have already done our first taster this year - the same ride we finished last year with. The ride is in a forest so is level and soft going, and we just snuck in at the maximum time.

Which means the training needs to work towards more than an hour, needs to be not just on flat soft going, and needs to be building more speed.

As we pootled along today (aiming for the longer time but not at any speed), I realised I could express my/our goals in terms of "speed, direction and destination" (something Mark talks about in his clinics).

On any ride I want to achieve a certain speed, on a specified route (direction), with a known destination in mind (most of our rides are loops, but they go "via" different places).

And then for some reason my mind made a link with work. If you used the same three aspects - speed, direction, destination - couldn't you pretty much define your work goals as well ?

The destination is where you want to be, whether on a personal, team or corporate/organisation level. 

To get there you need to know where you are starting from, and what route you plan to use - a roadmap. The direction might be overall (I want to go north) or for the next part of the journey (I need to travel along this road for a mile and then turn left).

And then you decide how fast you are going to get there.

You get what you settle for

as part of my translation from myspace:   I was venting about behaviour.

To quote from Thelma and Louise "You get what you settle for"

Or to put it another way, borrowing from NLP every behavior has a benefit for a person.

Now normally I had come across this in terms of encouraging good behaviour. But in this case I was venting about what, in my view, was sub-optimal behaviour.

I had a bit of a vent about what I thought was going on. When I had been talking about my own stress levels I had commented a number of times that it wasn't about work load, it was about behaviour. But when you start to think about why the behaviour is persisting, despite there being a definite will to "do the right thing", you end up coming full circle to workload (the number of things we were doing).

And this is compounded by working inefficiently. To quote Einstein

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." 

If we grasped the nettle and said "no" to a few things, we could turn some work around, clear the decks and be ready for the next thing on the list. Shorter, sharper, more focused.

As long we are doing the same things, the same way, no one person can make up the difference. Trying is simply a road to bad physical and mental health. The only sensible and logical thing is to stop trying.

The only real question is why it took me so long for me to come to this conclusion.

"It's not what happens to you that matters, but how you take it."

OK so I finally clocked that myspace had reinvented itself and stopped hosting blogs. Shows how often I used it. While there is probably a lot of content that can just shuffle quietly off the internet coil.... there are a few posts that I shall "reuse and recycle" - so there may be a few posts while I translate the content.

This time last year I was reading a book called "Control Stress" by Paul McKenna. He quotes Dr Hans Selye as saying

"It is not the event, but rather our interpretation of it that causes our emotional reaction."

I figured I would double check that quote, and the closest I could find was the one I have used as the post title.

"It's not what happens to you that matters, but how you take it."

Hmmmm. Now this was at a time when I have been signalling pretty strongly that things are not good at work - to both my line manager and HR. And spent time looking at stress triggers and so on and so forth. Not much happened as a result. From where I stood it felt that it wasn't a question of sheer workload, it was much more about behaviour. 

 (I did a mind map where the centre said "everything is grim" - I found it the other day.... not much has changed :( )

Then a colleague went off with stress, and another left for a new job. So then we had all the previous complexity and chaos, but exacerbated by 40% less resource in the management team.

So there I was.... stressed. According to Dr Selye I should have been able reframe that... reinterpret it... so that my emotional reaction is different.

What happened next ? Well they appointed a new director, who restructured us and then left. Joy. My job disappeared and my team were split up. Three guesses how I felt.

There still seemed to be a prevalent view that any negative view of what had happened was purely about "point of view". As I said to one of my HR colleagues: if something is a muck heap, I can look at it from any side, from any point of view, it is still a muck heap.

Goal setting

A few weeks back I was at interview. I can say that now as it's no secret any more. There was one question that completely stumped me .... and got me thinking, on all sorts of levels. The question was

Tell us about a personal goal that you have failed to achieve and how you dealt with that

Hmmmmm. Now I've been on the other side of the table doing competency based interviewing so I have an idea what they are looking for. They are not trying to get me to confess to something "bad".... they are trying to find out more about how I deal with things going wrong.

My brain starts mentally thumbing through the past to try and come up with an example that fit the question. And I'm struggling.... the examples that I can think of have really related to things outside of my control. Like my horse having arthritis.

Whoa....

Do I only remember success and I have blanked out all the bad stuff ? Is this selective memory ?

Or....

Does this mean that I don't set myself goals that I can't achieve ? I know I have a "talent" for pacing myself - I know my own limits and I work within and up to them. But have I got too good at that and don't actually challenge myself ?

Oooo.....

Does that mean I don't actually set myself goals at all ?? If they are always within my limits, always "do"able, are they really goals ?

Needless to say I only went through parts of this at the time, and some of it later when I was pondering my reaction. Though I suspect I did briefly have that "deer in the headlights" look as I tried to work out something....anything.... to say. Inventing things in an interview is never a good idea and not an option. But I was coming up empty. I explained the only example I could come up with (wanting to do things with my horse but being limited by her physical issues) but that I wasn't sure that was the kind of thing they were after. We moved on.  I got the job so it can't have been too much of a disaster.

Don't get me wrong, it is not that I have never experienced failure. I have. We all do. And I have learnt from it. In fact if they had asked me to talk about what I had learnt from failure, that would have been easier to answer. For example, my degree result was pretty useless. But I was lucky in that my future employer wasn't bothered about that and so the related "goal" still went ahead. I didn't fail to achieve the goal, but I did learn from the experience.

Do I remember the good stuff more than the bad ? I'm not sure (is that because I'm blanking out the bad stuff ? I could paint myself into a corner with this one !). But that isn't the question they asked. Would I have had equal difficulty answering a "tell us about a goal you succeeded at and how" ? I suspect so. I think I tend to assume failures are *mine* whereas successes are about the whole team.

They did ask me what I would see as my greatest achievement.... and the next question was whether my boss would agree with my answer. There is a saying that

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime

My answer was that my achievement was building the team,. as it wasn't just about the projects *I* had delivered, but about the ongoing value the whole team were adding. And no, I didn't think my boss would have the same  answer (after all, they had just restructured my team out of existence !).

Do I set myself goals ? Yes, though not all the time. I don't think we tend to think of everything in our life in terms of goals and objectives. Sometimes we are just doing stuff ;) And when I deliberately set myself a goal, yes it probably is carefully thought through, planned, considered in a way that makes it a stretch but achievable.

If  reality intervenes, then I have options - in the way we do with managing risk. Say something changes to make the goal unrealistic. When my horse was simply lame, I managed that lameness but I confess I had not really given up on ever riding her again. Maybe this was just denial. (as part of the change/transformation cycle) But it did mean I had to consider a longer timescale for what I had hoped to do.

And then last year she lost the sight in one eye. And that meant having to accept that I really wasn't going to achieve certain goals with her. It didn't necessarily mean I was never going to achieve those goals - but certainly not in the near future and with my current horse.

So what I did was redirect. In this case I was lucky that my mother has a little pony, not suitable for my original goals but in need of a jockey to "do fun stuff" with. In an ideal world would I be riding a small native pony ? No. But can we have fun together - yes. (And am I learning from it..... absolutely !)

I don't think I would have considered my original goal as being "have fun". It was more about the what and how I wanted to have fun. But when the chips are down, you often have the chance to realise what is at the core of your aims. Maybe it's a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In this case the original goal (with my horse) was further up the needs pyramid. But with her issues, I wasn't then fulfilling needs at a lower level. She simply needs to be a horse - and by effectively retiring her, I can let her get on with doing that. And in the meantime, there is a win-win by working with another pony.

And maybe one day I will get back to those unmet equestrian goals ;)

Are there other areas of my life in which I am not setting goals (and should be) ? Well there are certainly areas where the report card might read "could do better". I guess I need to think some more about whether that is something within my circle of control (something I have the power to control myself)... and if so maybe set some appropriate goals and actions.

I've been reading a book called "Grow Your Own Carrots". It has a structure for goal setting. What I like about it is that rather than setting the big, long term goals, they encourage you to set shorter term goals that you can achieve in, say, 8 weeks. I need to finish it soon as it belongs to my current employer - so that gives me a nice short term goal... to finish the book this week ;)