Tag: Matthew Taylor | Key Step Media

Posted on March 1, 2018January 14, 2022 by Matthew Taylor

How to Build Self-Management to Change Deeply Ingrained Behaviors

Several years ago I decided that I had enough personal baggage getting in my way to merit going to therapy. It was a wonderful and challenging experience, therapy. I had some major epiphanies about where some of my “less functional” behaviors come from. One of these behaviors—being over-critical of and micro-managing my kids—was one that I felt real motivation to change. Unfortunately, despite what felt like life-changing new awareness about my parenting behavior, I struggled to self-manage when they didn’t clear their breakfast dishes or borrowed my clothes without asking.

Therapy is just one path that leads to epiphanies about ourselves in our lives, and if we are present and aware we see these moments as real gifts. Unfortunately, those gifts often fade into the background of our lives once the sessions are over. Therein lies the hard truth about self-awareness and self-management: building new self-awareness (even rock-your-world self-awareness) does not in itself change our behavior.

It takes deliberate focus and supported skill building, informed by self-awareness, to shift ingrained, routinized, emotionally-laden behaviors.

This is the work of self-management: building the intellectual, emotional, and behavioral muscles to modulate our thoughts, emotions, and reactions to the triggers that lead to ingrained behaviors. This change doesn’t happen overnight after our big epiphanies. To truly change our behavior we must self-manage in our trigger moments, over and over and over, until we replace old, ingrained habits with new, ingrained habits. Self-management is a long-distance race. And the race is winnable!

“Self-management is the work of building intellectual, emotional, and behavioral muscles to modulate triggers that lead to ingrained behaviors.”

Five Ways to Develop Self-Management

1. Do the pre-requisite self-awareness work

My coaching colleague Michele Nevarez wisely says that, “we arrive at where we aim.” Before we can effectively go after our self-limiting behaviors, we have to understand where it is we are actually aiming, or what we are really trying to self-manage. This is because emotional self-management is more about managing what causes our behaviors than the behaviors themselves. Doing self-awareness work means uncovering the triggers, emotions, and self-limiting thoughts that lead to our behaviors. Our target is to self manage at the point of trigger; before the behavior itself. We want to head off our emotional chain reaction that leads to the behavior. Some of us who are naturally self-reflective can do this work independently if we ask the right questions. Most of us will need the help of a thoughtful friend, coach, or therapist to bring these triggers, emotions, and thoughts to the surface.

2. Plan for it

Once we know what our trigger is, we can plan for it. If I know that my adolescent son will yell at his sister every time she is remotely critical of his outfit, I can plan for how I react. I can plan my response, verbatim. I can plan a logical and fair series of interventions if they escalate. I can even plan to leave the room and put on my headphones. If I can be aware enough in the moment and remember to follow my plan, then that may sometimes be enough to shift a pattern of unproductive behavior.

3. Access your power

I believe that we all have the power inside of us to not only manage our triggers but become resonant leaders in our own right. This power comes from our values and our deeply-held beliefs. We can learn how to access this power in the micro moment of our triggers to block our self-limiting emotional chain reactions and create the space for a productive path. Questions we can ask ourselves to discover that power include:

Why do I care about this behavior or situation?
What do I believe about what is right and true about this?

Once we identify our deeply held belief that connects to our triggering context, we can articulate a phrase or a mantra that we can access in the moment—such as “my kids will build character and social skills if I let them work this out on their own.” It will help us to practice accessing our beliefs with a partner in a simulated moment of trigger to build this muscle.

4. Cultivate your inner coach (the angel on your shoulder)

Remember the cartoons of our youth, in which a devil and an angel would appear on a character’s shoulder at a key decision-making moment? With our ingrained habits, we have an oversized devil and undersized angel on our shoulders. Cultivating our inner coach is essentially building up that angel. What can this coach say to you at your moment of trigger to remind you how you plan to manage your emotions and story? How can that coach help you remember why you care about this behavior, and what you aspire to become? If you can answer these questions in meaningful ways to yourself, and practice, then your angel/coach will likely be there for you in that split second of need.

5. Create structures for reflection and support to sustain practice over time

Again, changing ingrained emotional reactions, stories, and behaviors is a long-distance race. We have to practice over and over to rewire our brains, literally growing new neural highways and building new behavioral muscles. If we do not build structures and supports around this practice, we will likely lose focus amidst the other urgent day-to-day demands of our work and our lives. Coaches are great supports because we not only keep your eye on the ball, but help you to continue to build new awareness and self-management strategies over time. Peer coaches or “change partners” can be effective if you both truly commit to a long-term relationship and stick to an effective system of reflection, revision, recommitment, and practice. Those of us who are particularly reflective and disciplined can even do this work on our own, but even this group will need some external structures (like scheduled, sacred self-meetings) to make it happen.

With the right skill-building, supports, and self-discipline, we can build new awareness and change deeply ingrained self-limiting behaviors over time. In other words, we can become more emotionally intelligent. I can think of no better reward for a long distance race.

“Cultivate your inner coach and create structures for self-reflection in order to better self-manage in work and life.”

Recommended Reading:

Our new series of primers focuses on the 12 Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competencies, including Emotional Self-Awareness, Adaptability, Emotional Self-Control, Teamwork, and Inspirational Leadership.

The primers are written by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis, co-creators of the Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competency Model, along with a range of colleagues, thought-leaders, researchers, and leaders with expertise in the various competencies—including the author of this article, Matthew Taylor. See the full list of primers by topic, or get the complete collection!

Posted on December 15, 2017November 12, 2020 by Matthew Taylor

Attunement: The First Step in Inspirational Leadership

Carl sits in his office in front of his computer on Sunday night, deep in thought. Tomorrow he will introduce the strategic priority for the next year to his team, and he needs to inspire them. He has spent more time working on this presentation than most, revising for the most compelling language and the most striking visuals. He has practiced the presentation with his partner to improve his presence and capture just the right mood. He has and will put in many hours to prepare for this high stakes engagement. And yet, when he arrives in the conference room, Carl will not be able to shake a nagging worry: will this land with my team? Will it inspire them?

While there is plenty that Carl may be doing right in this scenario, he is missing at least one key ingredient of inspiration: connection to his team. Resonant leaders know that inspiration comes largely from connecting to what their teams care about. It takes strong social awareness to create this kind of connection, which Daniel Goleman describes as the ability to, “breathe life into the hopes and dreams of others.” He calls this attunement—a direct connection with people’s emotional centers.¹

How to Become Attuned to Others

If I were coaching Carl, our team inspiration work would have started weeks earlier, and it wouldn’t have happened in front of his computer. Leaders who find themselves at a point of change or transition need to engage their teams early in the planning process. Jentz and Murphy’s “Embracing Confusion,” while written for new leaders, can be an excellent resource for any leader in need of becoming more attuned to their teams in times of change or challenge.² In this piece the authors urge leaders to “hit the ground learning.” Jentz and Murphy lay out a process for systematically engaging stakeholders as experts in their experience of a team and a problem, forcing leaders to adopt a learner mindset and encouraging them to roll up their sleeves and engage their teams one-on-one as thought partners. Jentz and Murphy’s process ends with leaders engaging their teams in “sense-making.” In these conversations leaders share what they have learned and challenge their teams to grapple together with the complex, messy issues connected to their biggest challenges.

Inspiring leaders connect with their teams to “embrace confusion” and truly understand complex challenges before offering solutions.

Coaching for Competencies and Attunement

Jentz and Murphy’s process is an exercise in building attunement. As Carl engages in it over time I would focus my coaching on raising his self-awareness and self-management, surfacing and managing his internal obstacles and personal strengths connected to empathic listening and collaborative problem solving. My goals would be the following:

1) Build Carl’s appreciation for the power of connecting through listening for the needs, hopes, dreams, aspirations and values of people.

2) Build his ability to get out of his leader persona and engage his team in healthy, unfiltered collaboration as part of a strategy-building process.

As Carl listens for why his people care and engages them as partners in their collective challenge, he will be able to meet his team at a place of common belief and aspiration. Simultaneously he will be building trust—another pre-requisite to true inspiration.

Connecting the Gaps

Engaging teams isn’t just about connecting, however. Strong leaders also engage to diagnose gaps between their teams are currently, and where their teams need to be to reach their potential. As Goleman writes, strong leaders “slow down to speed up” by engaging people in looking at the gaps.³ I would also be coaching Carl to explore his team’s gaps from both technical (logistics, skills and knowledge) and adaptive (relationships, emotions, and beliefs) perspectives by asking him two simple questions, over and over:

Where is your team right now, and where do they need to be to reach their potential?

Leaders are able to answer these questions accurately by adding the data that comes from person-to-person engagement to the rest of their diagnostic data. As a result, socially aware leaders attuned to their team’s gaps are most likely to meet their team’s needs, while also reaching big picture objectives. What is more inspiring than hearing your leader accurately name and go after your needs?

Flash forward now to Carl sitting at his desk after engaging deeply with his team. He no longer sits alone, attempting to pull his most inspiring ideas out of his head. He now sits with the hopes, dreams, fears, and shared problem-solving of his team. Their words surround him and inform his own hopes and dreams for the team’s new strategic priority. He is not worried about whether his people will be inspired by what he says, because he already knows that he will be speaking the same language when he stands in front of them. Because he is attuned, he will be able to meet the emotional needs of his team. In fact, that work—the work of inspiring—has mostly already been done. As he turns out the light he feels confident and calm knowing that the connection he has earned leading up to this moment is worth so much more than the very best words and sensational visuals.

“Leaders, first take time to attune to the needs of your team, understand them, then offer more attuned strategies to fill the gaps. This is inspiration at work.”

Recommended Reading:

Our new series of primers focus on the 12 Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competencies, including Emotional Self-Awareness, Adaptability, Influence, Teamwork, and Inspirational Leadership.

The primers are written by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis, co-creators of the Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competency Model, along with a range of colleagues, thought-leaders, researchers, and leaders with expertise in the various competencies – including the author of this article, Matthew Taylor.

See the full list of primers by topic, or get the complete collection!

Citation #1 and #3: Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, (2002) Primal Leadership. (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing)

Citation #2: Barry Jentz and Jerome T. Murphy. “Starting Confused: How Leaders Start When They Don’t Know Where to Start” (Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 86, No. 10, June 2005, pps. 736-744).

Posted on November 20, 2017November 12, 2020 by Matthew Taylor

Coaching for Conflict with Self-Awareness and Self-Management

The more I have learned about the emotionally intelligent leadership competencies, the more I am struck by how little most other conflict management trainings and literature focus on self-awareness and self-management. Some models focus on social awareness, incorporating listening for other perspectives, but most focus almost exclusively on relationship management “moves” – i.e. how we interact productively with others in conflict.

In my experience, any approach not grounded in the self is not likely to succeed. The best conflict “moves” in the world won’t help me engage effectively in our conflict if I arrive feeling that I’m right, you intentionally hurt me, and that what I really want is “justice.”

Before we focus on strategies to manage conflict, we must raise critical self-awareness and build self-management so that we are able to bring our best selves to any relationships in our lives – personal or professional. In my coaching of people in conflict, this rigorous self work begins with exploring the baggage and stories that might be getting in our own way. Then it moves to self-management, exploring how we can manage our baggage and stories so that we can effectively communicate with others in conflict.

“Before we can resolve conflict, we must develop self-awareness and self-management, and bring our best selves.”

What baggage might be getting in your way?

As a leadership coach, my first goal is to help people see how their emotional reactions to conflict have triggered their “baggage’’, or the thoughts, beliefs, emotions and behaviors that limit their ability to effectively engage others. This happens through asking a series of questions that include some combination of the following:

Tell me exactly when in this conflict you were first aware of having a strong negative emotion?
Tell me what emotions you were feeling? (follow up with probing questions and only accept answers that are actually emotions)
Exactly what happened that triggered these emotions?
When you were feeling these emotions, what thoughts were going through your head?
And so what did you do?
How do you think your actions served you, and how do you think they might have gotten in the way of resolving your conflict?
If you had to name what you really wanted to happen—your real goal—what would you say?

What stories might be getting in your way?

Once people are able to see their baggage more clearly, they are ready to consider how their stories—about other people involved and about what actually happened—may also need to be reconsidered. My next goal, then, is to help them become aware of their negative stories, focusing mostly on the person or people on the other side of the conflict. This work happens through the following questions:

When you were/are feeling the strong emotions you have named, what story are you telling yourself about the person/people on the other side of the conflict?
What evidence do you have that supports your story?
How does your story about this person or people serve you, and how does it get in your way of engaging effectively in this conflict?
What other stories might be true about this person/people and their emotions, values and behaviors?

“Manage your own baggage and stories first, then you’re emotionally ready to address conflict.”

How can you manage your baggage and stories?

Getting to awareness about our baggage and stories tends to be pretty enlightening for most people in conflict because we are least likely to be aware when we are feeling wronged by others. Awareness alone, however, does not mean we are prepared to effectively engage with others in a conflict. We also need to deliberately manage our baggage and stories in the moment.

To manage the baggage, I focus people on self-management strategies they can use at the moment they feel emotionally triggered. Coaching for emotional self-management follows this line of questioning:

How can you manage the emotional triggers that are getting in your way right now?
What do you need to do for your true goal to be working through this conflict, and what can you do in the moment to hold onto this goal?

Helping people manage their stories is usually the highest impact self-management coaching for people in conflict. We explore what they need to believe about the other person/group in the conflict to effectively engage them. I help them build the emotional “muscle” of replacing negative stories with “noble” ones by engaging them in the following exercise:

Make a list of the real challenges this person is facing, and the emotions that feel related to this conflict. What can you genuinely empathize with?
Write a list of at least five aspects of the other’s noble story that you respect or value. These may include: values they hold; positive shared experiences; behaviors and actions that positively reflect on their character; their real strengths and past successes; the noble intentions that drive their actions

Without fail, after making this list people notice an immediate positive shift in their emotions connected to the other person/people with whom they are in conflict. I charge them with reading their list before their next engagement and noticing how it impacts how they show up differently to the interaction. People usually report that they are suddenly able to engage without the negative emotions they have been bringing up to this point, and they are able to listen with real curiosity to other people’s experiences and interpretations of the conflict. This, in turn, prevents escalation, and may even prevent future conflicts from coming up.

Conclusion

When we add rigorous self work to our conflict management coaching, we make it exponentially more likely that our people will effectively access the relationship management strategies they learn in most programs and literature in the field. When we help people become aware of their emotions and the baggage and stories they trigger, they realize the extent to which they are working from assumptions without evidence. They become motivated to manage their baggage and revise their stories about others involved in their conflict.

When you self manage effectively, two things happen. First, you show up able to listen with curiosity to other perspectives. Second, you show up reflecting other people’s noble stories back to them. When we reflect people’s noble stories—their best selves—to them, that’s typically how they will show up. If our goal is truly to resolve conflict, then shouldn’t we be inviting our best selves to the conversation?

“When we reflect people’s noble stories – their best selves – to them, that’s typically how they’ll show up.”

Recommended Reading:

In Conflict Management: A Primer, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and colleagues introduce Emotional Intelligence and explore the many facets of approaching conflict management with skill and positivity.

In a relatively short read, the authors illustrate how to frame conflict as an opportunity rather than a burden, how to maintain bonds despite differing perspectives, and how to blend mindfulness and thoughtful analysis into professional relationships that work.

For more in-depth understanding of emotional and social intelligence in leadership, see the full primer collection or the Crucial Competence video series.

Posted on September 28, 2017January 14, 2022 by Matthew Taylor

Coaching, Teaching, Consulting: What’s the Difference?

coaching, consulting, teaching

As the Senior Director of Adaptive Leadership for the Achievement First Charter School Network, I coach for the full range of leadership roles with a focus on emotional intelligence. I’ve been developing leaders for over ten years, but I’d like to tell you a story about how I learned to develop the emotional intelligence competency of Coach and Mentor early on, and how that lead to a refined understanding of the differences between coaching, teaching, and consulting.

The Muddled Approach

David seemed to be struggling to manage his time and take decisive action. This surprised me, as I promoted him from team lead to department manager because of his incredible organization and effective problem solving. So, I dove into developing David’s personal organization system. But that seemed fine, and our work there didn’t improve his performance. David then told me that he just needed a thought partner to solve new kinds of challenges. I shifted to that, assuming that David would learn over time if I lead him to, or just told him, the right answers the first time. Several weeks passed and I realized that David’s task management only got better on the challenges we discussed in our meetings, but not on other issues where I anticipated he’d make progress on his own.

At this point, I wasn’t sure what more I could do for David. There was something going on here that I doubted I could teach him. I began to wonder whether David had the skills and abilities that his role required.

So what went wrong? Ultimately, this is an unfortunate unfolding of events, because I attributed a weakness to David that was actually about my own failure to give him what he needed to grow.

When Teaching and Consulting are Not Enough

Back then I would have told you that I was coaching David, and many managers would agree with me. Since then I have learned from the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and my mentors at the Teleos Institute that I was actually teaching and consulting, not coaching. I have learned in my own work that knowing the difference and being able to match the right approach to the right growth area is critical to developing leaders.

So far in my David story I had been teaching (modeling, practicing, and giving feedback on a skill) and consulting (giving advice and co-creating). I had pushed on his observable skills and knowledge because I assumed that I could SEE David’s obstacle to growth. This would be true if David’s growth area were just a skill gap, but David kept hitting a brick wall. Strong managers who coach know that when someone like David hits a wall with technical skill development, there’s something deeper going on, an obstacle to growth that we can’t see.

In their training related to Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence model, Korn Ferry Hay Group uses the metaphor of the iceberg to explain that there is a whole set of characteristics we have that are hard to see, and that play a role in our ability to develop new competencies.¹

It is easy to see the skills and knowledge that are the “above the surface” part of the iceberg. It’s harder to see values, self-image, and motives. Sometimes these deeply personal characteristics “below the surface” get in the way of our growth. Teaching and consulting alone won’t work when the challenge is below the surface. That’s when we need to coach.

Knowing When to Coach: Technical vs. Adaptive (Or Skill vs. Will)

The concept of technical vs. adaptive challenges has helped me make the right decision about when to coach as a manager. Technical challenges require us to learn new skills and knowledge about something we’ve already got in our wheel-house, and that is consistent with the way we see the world.

Adaptive challenges go beyond skill and knowledge acquisition. They demand a shift in the way we see the world and ourselves. If it’s adaptive, it hits us below the surface at our values, character traits, core motives, and beliefs.²Quite often, as in David’s case, managers who attack technical skill building quickly discover that the obstacle is actually adaptive. When skill growth stagnates, strong coaches ask themselves a simple question: “Is this a skill issue or a will issue?” When they sense an adaptive or will-related challenge they pivot to coaching. Strong coaches will move back and forth between teaching, consulting, and coaching over time, but they always make a deliberate choice about which hat they are wearing.

“Strong coaches can intentionally move back and forth between teaching, consulting, and coaching as needed.”

A good coach helped me realize that David’s obstacle was an adaptive one. I stopped teaching him how to organize his time and consulting him on technical problems, and I started asking him questions. We dissected specific times when he was getting stuck and I asked him how he was feeling and what was going on in his head in the moment. We discovered that David’s greatest strength, his analytical mind, was turning against him in the face of multiple new challenges and his ensuing feelings of incompetence. When a new challenge came up, David got so in his head about the many potential solutions and his inability to choose that he defaulted to answering email or executing tasks that made him feel successful.

Our coaching shifted to how he could self-manage his limiting emotions and behaviors, and manage his brain so he could settle on one sound decision. I deeply believe that managers can coach. The key is to know when to coach, and to shift our focus to what’s below-the-surface. If we can accept that we don’t have the answers there, then we can facilitate a conversation that helps our people surface their unseen obstacles and tap into their full potential.

To summarize the difference between these three approaches

Teaching is when a manager models, guides practice, observes practice and gives performance feedback, and is appropriate when someone has a skill or knowledge gap.

Consulting is asking guiding questioning, giving advice, and co-creating, and is appropriate when someone needs a thought partner to help solve problems.

Coaching is supporting someone to uncover their internal obstacles and to learn how to manage them, and is appropriate when a manager realizes that skill and knowledge gaps are not the primary obstacle to performance.

Recommended Reading:

In Coach and Mentor: A Primer, Daniel Goleman, Matthew Taylor, and colleagues introduce Emotional Intelligence and dive deep into the Coach and Mentor Competency, exploring what’s needed to develop this capacity in leadership.

In a relatively short read, the authors illustrate the valuable skills needed to foster the long-term learning or development of others by giving feedback and support.

See the full list of primers by topic, or get the complete Emotional Intelligence leadership competency collection!

References:

Hay Group. “What is a Competency” from Hay Group Accreditation Training Presentation (Boston, MA, 2013).
Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, (2002) Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading. (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2002).

“Coaching is supporting someone to uncover their internal obstacles and to learn how to manage them.”

Posted on August 8, 2017November 12, 2020 by Key Step Media

How to Influence with Emotional Intelligence

Today marks the release of Influence: A Primer, the latest in the Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence series, which explores the 12 EI competencies of leadership developed by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis. Influence is a competency not often associated with Emotional Intelligence, yet it is essential to leadership as a social skill in order to make progress and get things done through – and with – others.

To help clarify this relationship, and illustrate the style of influence covered in our primer, we thought we’d share a few excerpts and quotes. The primer itself is available now for only $9, and will cover all of this in much greater depth, yet in a concise format you can read in less than an hour and fit in your pocket!

What is Influence?

Influence is a social competency. Leaders who are equipped with the emotional self-awareness and self-control to manage themselves while being adaptable, positive, and empathic can express their ideas in a way that will appeal to others. Influence is necessary for any leadership style, and can be done in a way that is meaningful and effective or fraught with resistance.

Leaders competent in influence will gather support from others with relative ease and are able to lead a group who is engaged, mobilized, and ready to execute on the tasks at hand. This is how real progress is made, how extraordinary successes are accomplished. How does a leader leverage these abilities to become influential? That is the focus of this Primer.

Daniel Goleman:

With the Influence competency, you’re persuasive and engaging, and you can build buy-in from key people.

You can’t order people to do what you want, you must persuade or inspire them to put forth their best efforts toward the clear objective you have defined.

Influence competence draws on empathy””without understanding the other person’s perspective and sensing their feelings, influencing them becomes more difficult.

Richard Boyatzis

The core intent of the Influence competency is a desire to get someone to agree with you. The behavior that demonstrates this competency is doing things that appeal to their self-interest and anticipating the questions they would have.

To the extent that we have a sphere of influence””and we all do in our families, with our friends, at work””we are leaders. Everyone is a leader in this sense.

Peter Senge

Real change often happens informally, with people who are good listeners, respectful of their culture, and who look for windows of opportunity.

Don’t worry about “getting everyone on board.” Instead, build a critical mass of people who have influence and then support them in spreading their influence.

Where there are matters you care about deeply, let go of the moral high ground of thinking “I’ve got to get people to do this,” and find where your interests and others’ naturally intersect.

Vanessa Druskat

Emotionally intelligent leaders typically recognize that team collaboration requires effective team member interactions, and such interactions are built upon the trust that grows out of relationship-focused norms and behavior.

In our work, we have found “emotion resources” or tools to be one of the most effective ways to enforce or reinforce team norms and, thus, to influence team behavior and outcomes.

Matthew Lippincott

Leaders with self-awareness and emotional self-control are better able to influence others and cultivate effective relationships.

By consistently demonstrating honesty, integrity, and authenticity in your interactions with people, a leaders’ ability to influence them significantly improves.

Matthew Taylor

Effective leaders use influence both to move people and inspire them to move. They do this by simultaneously communicating belief in their teams, appealing to their values, and holding them to high expectations for growth and achievement.

At any given moment, the leader has many variables to consider, including other people’s emotions, beliefs, values, goals, level of self-awareness, level of resistance, and level of skill. Ultimately, what the team””the individual or the group””needs is a just-right recipe of warm and demanding.

“Leaders with self-awareness and emotional self-control are better able to influence others.”

The Influence Primer is available now.

In Influence: A Primer, Daniel Goleman and colleagues introduce Emotional Intelligence and dive deep into the Influence competency. In a relatively short read, the authors illustrate the valuable skills needed to guide others in realizing the value of your ideas and point of view – not for the sake of exerting blind command, but to collaborate towards a positive vision with empathy and awareness.

“The influence competency entails empathy, self-awareness, and integrity for effective leadership.”

Posted on July 20, 2017November 12, 2020 by Matthew Taylor

Coaching Leaders to Value and Manage Their Organizational Webs

DeLea is like a spider, aware of even the most subtle vibrations across her web. She is able to predict how emotional energy will travel across her organizational web of stakeholders when she makes a leadership decision.

When one of her senior managers denies her proposal to implement a progressive reading practice in her school, she positively engages her powerful allies across her web to build support for the new practice. Meanwhile, she re-engages her manager at the level of values and beliefs that she knows they both hold dear. As a result, the no turns into an enthusiastic yes in weeks. On her own team, DeLea meets individually with key influencers about the new practice to hear their point of view and subtly appeal to what they value. When it comes time to formally make her pitch to her team, many strong voices in the room voice their enthusiastic support. Weeks later when DeLea hears secondhand about a veteran teacher voicing frustration about the practice in the staff lounge, she knows exactly which teachers, support staff, and parents to engage to head off a potential setback. She also engages the teacher in question with the just-right blend of affirmation and high-candor feedback to begin shifting his resistance.

Isabel, a leader at another school, is like a fly caught in a web. She skillfully builds the schedule and transition protocols for her school’s extended day program makeover. However, it never occurs to her to question how people will feel about the new program. She never asks anyone for feedback or shares any details about the plan until unveiling it in a Friday staff meeting. On Monday she is surprised to hear gossip about how she treats people and how arrogant she is to just “take over” the extended day program. Hurt and disoriented, Isabel just didn’t see this coming, and she feels like she’s been ambushed. Isabel has a new appreciation for those who say that leadership is a lonely path.

What separates DeLea and Isabel is organizational awareness.

DeLea values her team’s emotional energy. She reads people, trusts her gut, and actively seeks information about people’s beliefs before she acts. Isabel doesn’t value her team’s emotional energy and so does none of the things that DeLea does to guide her actions.

How do you teach Isabel to be like DeLea?

“The most respected and effective leaders develop a sense of organizational awareness.”

The first step is to build Isabel’s awareness that the web exists, and that her success depends on her understanding how it works. Expect resistance! Leaders who aren’t aware of the web and don’t value it tend to believe that small interactions don’t matter, and that people won’t find out about what they say behind closed doors.

Some take a values stand against caring about the web. They won’t stoop to paying attention to gossip. People should just be adults and get over their own emotional reactions. These leaders need help seeing the impact of the web on their ability to meet their goals. Coaches can help leaders to unpack their webs by digging deep into a current or past challenge. Isabel and I drew a web of relationships on a big piece of butcher paper on her wall. We named the key players and interest groups on her team, and how they connected to each other. We thought about each person or group individually in terms of what they valued, their relationships, and their power to either support or challenge progress toward Isabel’s goal. As we worked, Isabel began to see how her actions created dissonance for her people, and how their reactions were actually consistent with what they valued. Isabel’s biggest a-ha: their actions are predictable! Her resistance melted away as she began to see the power in predicting her team’s reactions and proactively engaging to avoid being ambushed.

Isabel and I then applied the web to moving forward towards her goal. We began by identifying her supporters. She was unpleasantly surprised to realize how few she had. From there we identified which people or groups were most likely to become supporters with some effective engagement from Isabel.

The key to getting that engagement was Isabel’s ability to figure out what these people valued, and what they needed from her.

“The key to organizational ability is to figure out what people value, and what they need. “

One person valued his standing on the team. He needed an apology, and to be consulted on the new model. Another group worried about the impact of the new approach on families. They needed Isabel to affirm this worry and collaborate with them to find a solution. Isabel had no idea what several people or groups needed, and realized that she needed to go find out.

Next, we focused on the people in the web who were actively resisting the new system. I supported Isabel to build some empathy for these people–to see the noble story they were likely telling themselves that justified their actions. Then I helped her understand the tactics these folks were using to influence other stakeholders across the web. Again, Isabel had to figure out what these people needed from her to move from resistance to motivation, or at least compliance.

As she brainstormed, Isabel was building new appreciation for the range of influencing strategies she needed to embrace to get her organizational web behind her initiative.

By the time we were done, Isabel had created a complex visual representation of her stakeholders and their values, power, and relationships. While this was all done in the context of her after-school system, Isabel realized that she could apply most of this map–reactively or proactively–to other leadership challenges. We continued to use this map, or create new ones, over time as Isabel continued to build her organizational awareness. Happily, she is no longer the fly caught in her web, and is on her way to becoming the spider.

“Yes, you can coach leaders to develop organizational awareness and use it wisely.”

Recommended reading:

Our new primer series is written by Daniel Goleman, George Pitagorsky, and fellow thought leaders in the field of Emotional Intelligence and research. See our latest release: Organizational Awareness: A Primer for more insights on how this applies in leadership.

Additional primers include:

Emotional Self-Awareness

Emotional Self-Control

Adaptability

Achievement Orientation

Positive Outlook

Empathy

Posted on June 14, 2017November 12, 2020 by Matthew Taylor

Empathy in Leadership: Coaching Leaders to Manage Their Stories

empathy in leadership

When leaders struggle with staff morale or direct reports failing to thrive, a lack of empathy is the lead domino. These leaders forget that, as humans, we tend to make decisions based on our stories about other people. These stories impact our every interaction with others because we can’t hide the emotions behind them. Our stories also determine our broader management tactics, which can be as wildly off the mark as our stories themselves.

Negative stories about others that we hold as leaders come from what Heath and Heath call the “Fundamental Attribution Error” (Switch, 2010). The simple idea: it is “our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than the situation they are in” (180). The error, of course, is that situations are far more likely to impact behavior than character traits, and this approach can lead to unnecessary conflict or losing high-potential employees.

The antidote is what I have come to call the noble story. This idea has its roots in the concept of noble purpose, which I learned in my coaching training at the Teleos Institute. The basic premise is that we all believe we act from “noble” intention, which we can connect to our core values. If we believe this is true for others as much as it is true for ourselves, then we must call into question stories that assume negative intent. This offers us a path to connecting with people we struggle to believe in.

“Connect with people’s “noble story” to develop empathy as a leader.”

Much of my coaching involves helping school leaders connect personally with teachers and parents who have disappointed them, who are actively resisting them, or who just don’t share their race, class, gender, or philosophy. Empathy comes into play often. A principal’s job is to create the conditions for students and teachers to learn in their buildings, and the core emotional conditions they must create are based on trust through relationships. You can’t fake caring and trust, so it’s my job to teach principals how to build it with everyone.

The key is to help these leaders replace their negative stories with the noble story that the other person holds about him or her-self.

This line of coaching begins when I hear my leaders start to explain their report’s behavior with their negative stories. I hear things like, “How is it that an adult who went to college doesn’t know how to ____,” or “he’s not a good fit here because he doesn’t (care/try/believe) enough. “When I hear these kinds of comments I ask the following questions to raise self-awareness:

“How does that story serve you, and how is it getting in your way?”

“To what extent do you think that they are aware of how you are feeling?”

“What impact do you think that assumption has on your staff member?”

Leaders usually get to the unpleasant answers themselves, but if they don’t, I remind them of Daniel Goleman’s concept of the emotional loop: you can’t fake or hide your true emotions. People know how you feel about them. And the impact of not being “believed in” on one’s ability to learn–especially when learning includes an adaptive challenge–is debilitating.

“Leaders, don’t set up your team members to fail by not believing in them. Have trust and empathy.”

From here, we start our work on self-managing stories. This is where we build the “muscle” to manage negative stories and create noble ones. The following are steps that any of us can use to develop this muscle.

Showing Up To Connect: A Self-Management Exercise to get to Empathy

List 3-5 things about the other person that is part of your negative story. What are your emotional triggers behind this story? How can you manage them?
Make a list of the real challenges this person is facing at work and/or in life. Connect each one to an emotion they are likely experiencing that may be contributing to the challenge at hand. What can you genuinely empathize with?
Write a list of at least five aspects of the other’s noble story that you also value. These may include:

core values or character traits that you can respect about them
current strengths
past growth and success
the intentions that drive their actions that you can respect

List the things that you want for the other as a person (i.e. as another human being in this world that is trying to do this work and live a happy life).

After taking these steps I ask my leaders to write them as a narrative. I ask them to share it with me, and then I ask them what emotions they are feeling toward their staff member. Leaders notice a significant change of emotion from our past conversations, and even from right before doing this exercise. This is a sign of developing empathy, and it comes with a new approach in how the leader interacts with their team. With this motivation, I charge them with:

Revisiting their “Noble Story” narrative before their next meeting with their report.
During the meeting, asking questions about their report’s own noble story. Leaders should listen for what they missed or don’t understand, holding the intention of building their noble story.
Affirming what they hear and adding pieces of their own narrative.

Leaders usually report an instant shift in the energy of their relationships. This is just a beginning of course. Over time I work with leaders on developing the muscle to hold their story even when people struggle or disappoint them in some way.

Feeling empathy for the people we lead is not the silver bullet to accelerating growth or building team morale, but I have found it to be the foundation for both. People need to feel that their leaders believe in them and trust them enough to take learning risks. They also take the cues from leaders about how to treat others.

“Try this self-management exercise to understand the “noble stories” of others.”

Recommended reading:

Our new primer series is written by Daniel Goleman and fellow thought leaders in the field of Emotional Intelligence and research. See our latest release: Empathy: A Primer for more insights on how this applies in leadership.

For personal interviews, see the Crucial Competence video series!

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