The Leader's Advocate

In Print: Crucibles of Leadership

Crucibles of Leadership: How to learn from experience to become a great leader

Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 2008.

by Robert J. Thomas

This book deeply explores the importance and power of reframing adversity as a growth opportunity where real leadership is born, consistent with the metaphor of a crucible for refining precious metals. Thomas underscores that the essence of thriving in adversity is learning. It addresses the importance of leaders' experiences, how to create a personal learning strategy in order to grow through adversity, and identifies an organizational agenda for experience-based leadership development. Filled with examples and practical application, the book is a great resource for leaders and OD professionals.  

 

In Print: The Beethoven Factor

The Beethoven Factor: The new positive psychology of hardiness, happiness, healing and hope Hampton Roads Publishing: 2003 By Paul Pearsall, PhD The composer Beethoven serves as the icon for Pearsall's book based on the way in which he overcame and was transformed by adversity. Despite losing his hearing, Beethoven subsequently composed his Ninth "Ode to Joy" symphony. The author makes a strong distinction in this book on how resilience and thriving differ, then provides numerous practical strategies to thrive in the face of adversity. He draws upon his own experience as a cancer survivor as well as the stories of individuals with whom he has worked. Drawing upon many of the established theories of resilience and thriving, including hardiness, Pearsall also includes a thrivability test based.  Pearsall's book is a highly-readable and practical resource for leaders and managers interested in building their capacity to truly grow through the challenges they face.

 

Thanksgiving and the science of positive emotions

As we move toward wrapping up 2011, seems there's an awful lot of bad things happening in this world. All the more reason for restoring our energy by experiencing a Thanksgiving holiday filled with gratitude as well as supportive interactions with people we care about.

Recent psychological research suggests that experiencing gratitude has a greater impact that simply feeling good over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Fredrickson's groundbreaking research on positive emotions, highlighted in her book Positivity, builds a case for the impact on positive emotions in helping us maintain our sense of resilience when facing adversity. Gratitude is one of ten positive emotions she identified in her research. In order for positive emotions to have the greatest impact, they need to occur in a three to one ratio relative to negative emotions. Other studies, such as one that focused on the ways resilient people rebounded after the horrors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, also demonstrated how resilient people use positive emotions to maintain their resilience.

The Thanksgiving holiday provides the perfect opportunity to practice gratitude - not just on this day, but on a sustained basis and thereby contribute to our resilience. Of course, for many the choice to spend time with family is the source of significant negative emotions...shame, anger, frustration, stress, or sadness.

Frederickson's work also highlighted the fact that negative emotions have more negative impact than positive emotions have a positive impact. Thus, eliminating the source of negative emotions might be more fruitful as a place to start.

Maybe its time to renegotiate key family relationships that contribute to our experience of negative emotions, or intentionally create new social support networks and thus improve our overall sense of resilience in facing life's adversities?

In Print: Resilient Leadership for Turbulent Times

Resilient Leadership for Turbulent Times

Rowman & Littlefield: 2009

By Jerry L. Patternson, George A. Goens and Diane E. Reed

Researchers Patternson, Goens, and Reed have written a well-supported, accessible volume that will help leaders increase their capacity to bounce back and thrive in challenging times. The authors distinguish between resilience (bouncing back after a major challenge) and thriving (growth as a result of adversity). The book is organized based on a 73-factor leadership resilience assessment tool they have developed. 

The three key skills they identify as being critical for leaders include:

• Resilient thinking including one's ability to make sense of reality and view future possibilities,
• Resilience capacity building through gaining clarity on personal values, building personal efficacy, increasing well-being and building social support
• Resilience action skills including acting with courage on insights gained, perseverance, courage and personal responsibility. 

By better defining the source, type and timing of social support that helps leaders thrive in crisis, the researchers could enhance the impact of the book. They also neglect important research on the role that positive emotions play in helping people maintain their resilience. 

 

 

Cool Apps: TraxItAll

TraxItAll: A goal setting, daily tracking, and habits building system

Cost: $2.99

Platform: iPad, iPhone, iTouch

Overview

Most psychologists agree that one of the most effective ways to achieve our goals is consistent action over time. However, setting goals without a mechanism for regularly monitoring progress is a recipe for failure. To this end, TraxItAll is a new software application that is particularly helpful for this purpose.  It allows users to identify goals associated with key priorities and track them on a periodic basis. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use.

For each task, such as exercise, you can identify how often you want to commit to doing it - daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. It then allows you to quickly update the system with actions you have taken, as well as easily display reports to explore how well you are doing in working toward your goals

I'm using this app with a number of goals I've set for myself by tracking a number of actions:

• Average number of hours each night
• Total number of hours writing my book every day
• Number of workouts per week
• Extent to which I meditated daily
• Number of contacts I've networked with each week

This application is far more powerful and east to use than the application I reviewed in my last newsletter (Datum). Unlike Datum, the information collected is confidential.

Detailed Screen Shots

I've included a number of screen shots that demonstrate the ease of use for the application.

1. Setting up a goal to track

2. Entering daily data (data is entered in the right-most column):

3. Reporting statistics for a specified time period (weekly):

4. Generating a trend chart for a longer time period:

Building Organizational Alignment: 4 Key Strategies

The lack of alignment among organizational stakeholders in organizations is a costly proposition in terms of resources, energy and opportunity costs. In a global economic context of scarce financial resources, no longer can most organizations afford to overlook the strategic importance of alignment.

 I recently worked with a federal agency that suffered the consequences of a lack of alignment. One part of the organization engaged me to conduct a leadership retreat. As part of the preparations, I conducted a focus group containing 10 employees. They collectively described how frustrating it was to work there as a result of mixed messages on their overall purpose and vision, as well as conflicting signals on the rationale for various changes. New organizational changes were announced and began to be implemented, only to be recalled or abandoned. These employees concluded that because senior leaders were unable to reach alignment on these changes, they acted unilaterally without engaging each other. As a result, numerous false starts occurred in the implementation of new organizational designs, incurring significant costs in terms of wasted time, money, resources and emotional engagement. 

Levels of Alignment

At its core, alignment refers to agreement about both where we are going as an organization as well as how we will get there. It is manifest at three levels including:

• Cognitive
• Emotional
• Behavioral

 From a cognitive perspective, it represents a shared mental model about a collective future and pathway to achieve the vision. In essence, organizational members want to understand intellectually where you want to take them. From an emotional perspective, alignment represents a deeper connection to the vision. In essence, it speaks to the importance of overlap between what an individual deeply values and the envisioned future of the organization. The third level is the behavioral. The behavioral embodiment of alignment is evidence of the presence of the other two levels, cognitive and emotional. Thus, if I don't understand the targeted future and have some sense of emotional connection to it chances are good I will not behave in ways that demonstrate alignment.

Domains of Misalignment

The primary underlying causes of organizational misalignment originate from three main domains: individual, group and structural.  More often than not, organizations fail to reach alignment because of concurrently occurring factors from all three domains.

 Some of the more frequently occurring individual causes of organizational misalignment are:

• Leaders who are unaware or unskilled at systems-oriented thinking that recognizes the ripple effects of introducing change and the need to examine bigger-picture impacts
• Leaders who hold untested assumptions about the level of alignment that exists among key stakeholders
• Lack of participation from stakeholder groups in the formulation of organizational visions and strategies

Within the group domain, causes include:

• Inadequate processes in teams for surfacing and exploring issues or differences of perspective on vision or strategy elements
• Lack of trust and a fear of conflict in work groups and teams, preventing people from voicing their confusion and misalignment

And finally, at the organizational level causes include:

• Reward systems that overemphasize individual leader achievements to the detriment of organizational goals and priorities
• Performance management systems that lack alignment on organizational priorities and success outcomes
• Silo-oriented organizational structures that ignore core business processes, creating disconnects and misalignment 

In summary, there are three primary domains of underlying causes for organizational misalignment. Let us now examine some potential strategies for addressing these issues.

Strategies for Building Alignment

There are four key strategies for building alignment in organizations including:

• Use inclusive processes for creating strategic visions
• Build systems-oriented thinking skills into leadership development programs
• Focus on improving how leadership teams function to enable transparency and honesty
• Review and refine organizational processes, such as performance planning and management

First, inclusive approaches to developing visions that engage key stakeholder groups, while taking longer upfront, go a long way toward reducing the time it takes to implement or execute the visions. This is consistent with well-proven strategies for successfully managing change that allow people to work through their internal resistance by opening communicating their concerns. Second, build systems-oriented thinking skills into leadership and management development curriculums. Systems-thinking refers to the ability to see the interrelationships of aspects of the organization, as well as patterns that keep challenging problems in place. Leaders who are adept at this skill are better equipped to build alignment by understanding the ripple effects of change on various aspects of organizational functioning. As a result, they can more readily identify potential sources of misalignment and intervene to address it. 

Third, by focusing on how well teams are functioning, issues related to trust and aversion to conflict can be surfaced so that any misalignments among team members can be surfaced and remedied. This can be accomplished by helping leaders develop skills at diagnosing team functioning, as well as engaging external facilitators who can perform this diagnosis more objectively. Finally, fine tuning organizational goal setting and performance management processes helps ensure that goals and performance outcomes are linked horizontally across functional areas, as well as vertically within specific functions.   

In summary, the challenging economic context most organizations operate in translates to greater need for efficiency, profitability and long-term sustainability. Even mission-driven organizations such as Federal agencies are under greater scrutiny to do more with less. No longer can organizations afford to pay the real cost of a lack of alignment.  Organizational leaders must take concrete steps to determine the extent to which alignment exists and intervene to address it.

 

Research Briefs: Executive coaches and goal setting

by Kevin Nourse, PhD

 

Researchers Gregory, Beck and Carr suggest that well-established psychological theories on how people set and achieve goals provide a useful frame for guiding how coaches work with clients. Their proposed framework, noted in a 2011 edition of the Consulting Psychology Journal, addresses such issues as goal setting and striving, self-efficacy, as well as feedback giving and seeking. At its essence, control theory attempts to explain how people regulate or control their behavior when they set goals, generate results, and compare outcomes and feedback to their original goals. With roots in systems theory, coaches can play a significant role in helping clients build aware of those patterns or loops. They conclude with a set of practical tips for coaches as well as a research agenda to better understand the role that executive coaches can play in supporting their clients. 

 

Given how little research is available to support coaching practices, the researchers present a compelling case for a core framework on goal setting, as well as the role of executive coaches in supporting this process. However, referencing attribution theory could strengthen their model. Attribution theory attempts to explain how people make sense of what has happened to them, looking to internal or external sources. Executive coaches can contribute to the success of their clients by inviting them to examine goals they have achieved and reinforcing the ways in which they achieved the outcome. By doing this, clients are better prepared by developing greater internal resources to draw upon when faced with future challenges.

Research Brief: Manager as Coach

The presence of trust, empathy, a positive feedback environment and an approach that is situationally adapted to the unique attributes of an employee are key factors that shape employees' perceptions of the quality of coaching relationships with their bosses. This conclusion was noted by researchers Gregory and Levy, in a 2011 issue of the Consulting Psychology Journal. 

In their study, the researchers surveyed 221 supervisors and 1290 direct reports in a single Fortune 500 manufacturing company. Among the survey instruments administered to the direct reports of the supervisors in the study was the Perceived Quality of the Employee Coaching Relationship (PQECR) which examines four dimensions: (1) genuineness of the relationship, (2) effective communication, (3) comfort with the relationship, and (4) facilitating development.

Despite the fact the study included participants from only one organization, it offers practical insights on how to ensure that a manager/employee coaching relationship is successfully implemented. Management development programs should ideally include training on both the behavioral aspects of coaching subordianates, as well as concepts associated with how to set the right coaching context that includes trust, empathy and adapting ones' coaching approach to the unique styles of each subordinate. 

Tuning Your Thermostat: A CEO Perspective on Leadership Resilience

by Kevin Nourse, PhD

The operating context for most organizations is becoming increasingly complex, integrated, and unpredictable. Global forces and trends, such as terrorism, global warming, and financial downturns, can all profoundly affect businesses. As a result, successful leaders need more than technical knowledge of their fields to respond effectively. They need the ability to cope resiliently and adapt to adversity.. I often use the metaphor of a thermostat to explain resilience to coaching clients. A thermostat regulates the temperature in a room, keeping it from overheating or becoming too cold. Leaders who are resilient have a refined inner thermostat such that if they begin to operate outside the parameters they set for themselves, they take action to regain their optimal operating range.

 

What is Resilience?

Resilience, consisting of a psychological state as well as complex skills for rebounding from adversity, was originally defined in the 1950s. More recently, the research of Dr. Martin Seligman and other psychologists have helped shift the emphasis from viewing how people function through the lens of repairing brokenness to that of strengths and capabilities.  As a result of this trend in the evolution of psychology, an increasing number of organizations are identifying resilience as one of their core leadership competencies. For example, the US Office of Personnel Management has identified resilience as one of the key competencies for senior executives.

 

Our knowledge of how people build and sustain resilience has been influenced by a number of research domains. For example, we know that our capacity to maintain our resilience is a by-product of internal resources, such as optimism and hardiness, as well as social resources from people who care about us. Emotional intelligence and self-regulation play important roles in maintaining our ability to sustain our resilience. Groundbreaking research on emotions has taught us that resilient people use positive emotions to maintain their resilience. Researchers have also concluded that drawing meaning from adverse situations is instrumental in growing as a result of challenges. Self-determination theory helps us understand how we can maintain our motivation despite challenges.

 

A CEO Perspective: Terry Simonette

Terry Simonette has worked in the field of community development and financial services for the past 35 years. He is the President and CEO of the Arlington, VA-based NCB Capital Impact. His organization is a national nonprofit dedicated to helping people and communities reach their potential at every stage of life. I interviewed Terry to explore how he defines resilience in himself and in the managers in his organization.

 

Kevin: How do you define resilience?

Terry: Resilience means being able to bounce back against defeat and frustration. Resiliency means over a long period of time being able to deal with issues and bounce back while maintaining control.

 

Kevin: Why do leaders these days have a growing need to build and maintain resilience?

Terry: First, the complexity of our business strategy. Complexity is increasing geometrically and therefore places greater pressure on leaders to do what they must do and create an environment that is engaging. Too often when faced with this complexity, leaders only focus on the task versus the "who" and the "how." Thus, the combination of overwhelming complexity and the need to better engage people creates a heightened need to build and maintain ones' resilience to learn and adapt as leaders.

 

Kevin: How do you know when you have lost your resilience?

Terry: I have to have clarity of mind where I am constantly re-evaluating the environment and tactics, making sure I'm fully informed. If my mind isn't clear when I'm rethinking my next move and I'm reacting emotionally with anger and frustration, then I know.

 

Kevin: What do you do to regain your resilience?

Terry: I'm really good at actively limiting or managing my environment so I get what I need, such as peace and quiet. I've got to have a period of time to heal myself and rethink what we're trying to achieve. It's hard to regain resilience without my "boundary time." Also, I gain perspective through consultation. I'm constantly looking for feedback. I'm always waiting for information or different perspectives. It makes me feel like I have an arsenal of resources.

 

Kevin: Who models resilience for you?

Terry: One of the people is President Obama. He's a great strategist, connects with many people, and seems cool and detached when he needs to be.

 

Kevin: How important is resilience for the managers in your organization?

Terry: It's critical. Each of them has their own challenges and there is a lot of pressure on them. I expect them to go through the process I go through. If you don't have it, you better get it. You will come to a point you need it. Otherwise it will burn you or the people who report to you because of your bad decisions. The most important competency in leadership is emotional intelligence. This includes looking for feedback and self-awareness of how you react in certain situations, constantly assessing your strengths and areas for improvement-including your own behavior and when you need more focus. Finally, you've always got to have clarity on the long-term goal and keep your eye on the prize. This allows me to realize there's so many things that intervene that aren't important in the final analysis. By doing this, this allows me to compromise and save my resilience energy for situations where I really need it.

 

Final Thoughts

Resilience is a skill that can be developed. While an increasing number of organizations are beginning to incorporate that competency into formal leadership development efforts, highly successful leaders like Terry take responsibility for honing their own skills.

 

In Print: The Resilience Factor by Karen Reivich and Andrea Shatte

The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life's Hurdles

Random House: 2002

By Karen Reivich, PhD, and Andrew Shatte, PhD

 

Writers Reivich and Shatte, both psychology professors at the University of Pennsylvania, have compiled a useful book on building and sustaining resilience. It explains how to examine and adjust how you think to help you reflect on reality more accurately and adapt your actions to become more resilient. They identify seven resilience-building skills and offer a self-assessment exercise. One of the key skills they explore is examining what sets you off, what your underlying unquestioned beliefs are, and the consequences of your actions. The key is to identify and rewrite self-defeating beliefs, as well as avoiding thinking traps that trigger actions resulting in a loss of resilience. The book is based on their research at the University of Pennsylvania, a noted institution for the study of resilience.  However, one aspect of maintaining resilience that is only marginally referenced in the book is the importance and use of social support.