so how’s it going?

One of my most valued resources is my copy of Susan Scott’s Fierce Leadership and my even more dog-eared copy of Fierce Conversations. In it she talks about common errors we make when we are about to launch into a difficult and frank conversation where the stakes are high. One of the common mistakes is opening up the conversation with the generic question, “So, how’s it going?” It is disingenuous, because you have a pretty strong opinion about how it’s going and it isn’t good. And it takes that much longer to wind your way to the main topic.

Today I want to point you to another context when this generalized question is less than useful. Let’s say you have just had a meeting with an employee or a key stakeholder. It may be a meeting where you did a lot of the talking or it may simply have been a conversation where some important issues were discussed or even decided upon. Before the conversation ends you offer some version of, “So are yo

u okay with this?”or “So are we good?” or “How are things going, in general?”

I bet your intentions are good. You want to know what the other person is thinking. But what if the meeting has gone on too long and they just want to get out of there. Maybe they don’t know you very well yet and they don’t trust that they can be honest. Maybe they don’t even know what you are asking them. So what you get is well...worthless. “Yeah sure we’ll be in touch.” Or “Terrific, thanks.”

What do you know now that you didn’t know before? Nothing. Wasted words.

What can you do instead?

Here are a few sample options and for each one—be prepared to answer the same que

stion! Or answ

er it for yourself first and then check in with the other person.

“Tell me what you are taking away from this conversation”

“What are the key points here and is there anything you think I am missing?”

“What are the next steps for us?”

“What’s the next conversation you and I need to have? What should we make sure to put on the agenda?”

These questions are specific. They will

give you concrete information about whether or not you are on the same page or heard the same things in the conversation. They will also ensure that you keep the door open for issues that may have been tabled (or that you were oblivious to) that need to be discussed in the future.

“So, are we good?” (just kidding!)

We Have Met The Enemy

Have you ever been confronted with an angry challenger? How do you react? If you are not completely triggered then you might respond professionally. You might also meet the energy of the challenger. They are angry and you respond angrily. Or they are mocking and you mock back. And what is happening internally? For so many of us, a seed gets planted which matures into a weed called, “they are the enemy.”
I was reading a post on Lessons from the world of Aikido. In lesson # 6, I found the following:

“Those who may challenge us are not the enemy. The only real enemy is inside
us... the real enemies are fear, self-doubt, anger, confusion, and jealousy and
other emotions inside us that can disturb the flow.”

Speaking of flow, this started a whole flow of thoughts in me that I wanted to share with you. Warning—these are not quick fixes. These thoughts challenge you to do deep inner work. It is the only way.

Thought 1: A Core Belief of mine (won’t you join me?) is: There is a divine spirit within each of us. We have the capacity to connect to a sacred spirit within ourselves and seek it out in others. Our spirit links us inextricably to powerful inner resources and to each other. It is too easy for that which is threatened in us to dehumanize the messenger. And yet, no matter what is coming at us, it is coming from a fellow human being.

Thought 2: This reminded me of Havi’s great ‘alignment’ exercise. It is all about how you move yourself toward finding common ground with the other person.

Thought 3: It can be hard to find common ground when we are upset. A process CRR Global calls the ‘partner as truth teller’ might help. We start by assuming that the quality we are confronted with (e.g. anger, harshness, judgment, etc.) actually lives in us too. We marginalize it in ourselves and don’t want to see it in others. How are we also angry (or judgmental, or harsh)? And then, although we know all the ways in which this quality troubles us, what is the essence of the quality? (Perhaps it is power or clarity or even faith.) If the essence energy lived in us, what could that look like?

You are not really the enemy and neither is the person confronting you. But if you are going to lead, you are going to want to become very familiar with all the parts of yourself that is quick to jump to that label.

announcement!

Thanks for getting the word out on Facebook, twitter and by forwarding to your friends.

I have just created a small group coaching program for non-profit and education
leaders. I have called it 4:4:1. It will serve 4 carefully selected leaders (who must apply), for 4 months and include a one-on-one private coaching session with me. And it is priced at half my usual fee. Only $1,000. One last thing: this is not a program for novice leaders. This is graduate work, for leaders who know that if you are going to take yourself and your institution to the next level you need to catapult your capacity.

The Tyranny of Either/Or Thinking

• If they are not working to my expectations, I need to do it all for them
• In every dispute, an employee is either right or wrong
• I can be a friend or I can be a boss but I can’t be both
• We can be loyal or we can be ruthless
• My business life and my personal life can’t be intertwined

These are great examples of either/or thinking. And they all come from my clients: sophisticated, highly effective clients. These beliefs showed up in our coaching because my client’s were experiencing dissonance and disequilibrium. When they acted on these beliefs they didn’t always get the expected results. And yet, they were having trouble finding the middle ground. Or, as one of my clients likes to say, “living in the gray.”

Listen to two clients reflect on how they moved out of an either/or stance. I propose some ways to characterize their strategy. You might see it differently:

Client #1: For the longest time I was hiring people I liked. I hired people who had potential. I hired people whom I thought I could mentor and develop. And then I would get stuck. I could build a relationship with them. I could be their friend. But often I would have to come down hard on them because they were not getting the job done. I thought this meant I needed to stop being friends with my employees and that made me very uncomfortable. Today I realize that I was hiring wrong. I now keep my focus on the position not the person. What is the need we are trying to fill? What are the organization’s needs we are trying to serve? With the right people in the right roles who better understand the organization’s expectations, I can be a boss and a friend. Strategy: Shift your focus. Do you have the right things in your view finder?

Client #2: I started my own business and at various times over the years I have had members of my nuclear and extended family work with me. Our business is a pressured one, and the stress can sometimes lead to conflict. I was sure that the conflict I was having with family members meant that I could not mix family with business. And yet, we were a family-oriented business. It took me a long time to realize that I was over-generalizing. There was one family member I needed to fire. I had to let him go. Once I did, I was able to find the balance with the rest of my family and I am working on rebuilding the personal relationship with the family member I let go. Strategy: Look for generalizations. Don’t chop down the whole apple tree for one rotten apple.

Pay attention to where you may be falling pray to your own either/or scenarios. How do you act when these beliefs dominate? What is the impact?

Cool Announcements:
There is a terrific new product out in the world entitled, “All about Inventive Play: The E-kit.” The sub-title is even better: “How to ditch the consumer gizmos and help your kid use imagination to build a great life.” Megan Lubaszka and her partners at Tandem Teaching have assembled a terrific set of resources most appropriate for parents and care-givers of pre-school and elementary aged kids. For all that you get with this offer it is only $47. I am not getting affiliate monies for this announcement. It is that good.

My dear friend, and colleague Judy Elkin and I are so excited about our new joint venture Watershed Moments Coaching. Too often, momentous occasions are fraught with miscommunication, hurt feelings and lost opportunities. Our vision is to enable every Watershed Moment in a family’s life to become one which creates powerful memories that sustain. Please head on over and check it out.

Setting Goals: 4 Common Mistakes

Let’s jump right in shall we? The topic: Goal setting. We all do it. Over the years I have noticed that there are common pitfalls in this process that are worth naming:

Too many: You are being overambitious. You feel the pressure of expectations. Yours and every one else’s. You can’t possibly settle for anything less than well...everything that needs to happen. So then what happens? You might feel frozen by the enormity of the task you have set for yourself. A shmatte* before you have even begun. Or you start the year in a sprint when this is a long distance event and your systems start to fail you way too early in the process.
*a spent rag

The wrong kind: Maybe you are too far down in the minutia. You have articulated 5 goals that are all really in the service of one big idea and you are predetermining aspects of getting to the goal that others need to weigh in on. Or, your goals contain a lot of ‘nice to have’s.’ And yet, they are not essential to your mission. So then what happens? Your people are frustrated—quality drops. Or, you are reporting on lots of progress but none of it has made a dent on the core purpose of your organization.

Invisible: You generated a serious list of goals. They are informing your thinking about all aspects of the work. And for some reason, you have not shared them. Your board doesn’t know what they are. Your leadership team has never seen them in black and white. The community you serve is completely in the dark. So then what happens? You are pulling and ‘they’ are pushing. You are getting pressure to make certain things a priority (some of which may already be a priority for you but no one knows that!). You are being assessed on the basis of stakeholders’ subjective sense of what you should be doing rather than on how you are doing relative to the specific goals you are trying to achieve.

Unimaginable: So let’s say you have a manageable set of goals that get to the heart of your work. Everyone knows what they are. BUT, no one knows what success looks like! How will you know when you have achieved the goals? There is no clarity and therefore people may be carrying different conceptions of what the goals are really about. So then what happens? People start to worry that in fact the goals are unrealistic. Or, no one has a clear sense of what steps it will take to reach the goals.

Take a good look in the mirror of your practice. Be transparent about what you have noticed. Involve your community in the process. Get information, get feedback.

And by the way...these apply to your personal relationships too. If you unload a laundry list of what is wrong with your relationship, get petty about the details, think you can change something and your partner will “just know” or are fuzzy about what you mean when you say you need to be more (fill in the blank) you will get stuck!

A Metaphor for a Meeting Make-over

Is it a pack of wolves?
Is it a beehive?
Is it the Muppets?
NO—it’s a metaphor!

Patience dear reader, I shall explain in a moment.

Imagine that you are an employee in a group that has just had one of its newer members leave because he couldn’t work with you and your colleagues. It is time to hire a new employee. Your manager brings you together to talk about what it will take to successfully induct a new team member. So you start gossiping about what went wrong with the guy who left and why it was all about him. Then you realize that you may have had a role to play too. And your manager asks you to start identifying some concrete things you can do differently and even asks for some suggestions from all of you about what she can do to better prepare the candidate for the group’s work. All good stuff but a little boring and really you have a lot of work to do. How much longer will this meeting last?

Enter the right brain [and an inspired coach! :) ]

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine that your team is a living breathing organism. What real or imagined creature would it be? How would it move? What would it feel? How would it interact with others? How is it healthy? How does it evolve? How does it integrate new entities into its midst and remain healthy?

You look around and see that, in fact, your colleagues are doing this so you do too. Then you talk to each other in pairs about your organism. And the room is buzzing. The energy is sky high. No one is checking blackberries. Your teammates start talking and each one is more interesting and potent than the next. Not only are you getting brilliant and powerful ideas about how to integrate a new teammate you are beginning to get a much better sense of who you actually are as a team and who you want to be. There is some good discussion about what would happen if your roles really were as clear as those bees in the beehive. And you have made plans to talk about what it would take to have more of a sense of collective responsibility like those wolves.

This really happened folks.

Right brained exercises in general and metaphors specifically are a great doorway into the real work of your organization. Stash the skepticism and give it a try. And let me know what happens.

Can We Share Broken Hearts At Work?

Last month, our family suffered the devastating loss of my sister. For almost 10 days, my entire professional life came to a screeching halt. My grieving process is far from over but I am working again: re-establishing contact with my clients and colleagues, coaching and writing. And it has caused me to reflect on a dilemma that I sometimes hear in my clients.

How much of my personal life should I reveal at work?

I have no simple answers. But I do want to tell you how important it was for me and for my clients to be able to show a side of ourselves to each other that seldom has permission to take center stage.

The wonder of our humanity is that we are heart and soul; mind and body. Yet, on a typical day, we connect mostly with our minds and mouths. We even struggle to tap into our hearts when we are alone. For a brief moment of blinding intensity, I felt the full force of my clients’ heart as they shared my pain. This momentary revelation has changed us and the relationship. We are a little bit more whole now as we work together.

In the spirit of bringing our whole selves to each other, I share with you two articles which I have written for Simple Marriage.

In the first article entitled, Our Children are Zen Masters, I reflect on the lessons learned about presence from my sons when they were infants.

In the second article entitled, We Are So Proud of Who You Are, I learn about acceptance and appreciation from a HS guidance counselor.

Talk to you next month,

Stress is not mission critical!

In this economy you have to prove your worth so everyone is expected to do more in less time and with fewer resources

You cut back on staff and now everyone is doing more than one job. Efforts are scattered and morale is low

There is never time to breathe. You move from one new initiative to the next, one change effort to the next...

If these describe your workplace then you are in danger of the Acceleration Trap as defined in the April edition of Harvard Business Review. To my mind, it seems so obvious that if your organization is operating this way—it is simply unsustainable and can’t possibly serve your mission. And yet, we seem to be living in a time when our worth is measured by our stress. In a world where technology reigns is it any wonder that human wear and tear is practically irrelevant? Please don’t fall into the trap. We need you. You need your people. You need them to be resilient and creative and dedicated and yes, even joyful! Which brings me back to the article...

There is a lot of bite-sized wisdom in this article: Everything from ways to stop the cycle right now to 5 strategies for institutionalizing habits that can stave off the trap.

My favorite strategy

Ask your organization, “What do we need to STOP doing?” As the authors point out, following through on these recommendations, requires the leader to be courageous and steadfast. It will be tempting to keep adding to your plate.

The article ends with a variety of new patterns you can try that will serve to slowly change the culture. Here are two useful ones, read the article for more:

Call for time-outs
Offer recovery after a big push on a new initiative or a labor intensive effort. We are not talking about taking a few days off. We are talking about declaring a 6 month moratorium on strategic planning for the next big thing. No new change efforts. Just time for people to do the work they love and have the space and energy to begin to think creatively again about what could be.

Measure over-acceleration
What we quantify and track is often a sign of what we value. So start helping people to pay attention to when they are over working. Ask employees to self-assess and encourage colleagues to let each other know when they see signs of energy drainage. Develop indicators to help people pay attention and then offer options for addressing the intense pace.

PS: A quick announcement:
I have just unveiled a new program for senior leadership teams of schools and non-profits-entitled, Alt/Shift. Check it out and let your friends and colleagues know about it!

leading in your skivvies

“At its core, naked service boils down to the ability of a service provider to be vulnerable—to embrace uncommon levels of humility, selflessness and transparency for the good of a client.”

Lencioni’s latest book Getting Naked is written for and about consultants. And yet I can hardly think of a context in which the ideas of this book are not relevant. He claims that too many of us are hampered by three fears:

Fear of losing the business (e.g. the family, the donor, the client, the grant)
Fear of being embarrassed
Fear of feeling inferior

I want to share just two of the many practices Lencioni identifies in this book because they resonated with me and reflect the real challenges of many of my clients.

Tell the Kind Truth
Very often you see something that your client is missing. If you play it safe and keep it to yourself, you are not really serving the client. For example, you know that the fighting at home is making it impossible for the child to learn at school. Or you see that your key donor is working off of mistaken assumptions about her influence. Maybe a customer wants to purchase a product from you that will not really help them. In all these cases, it can feel risky to tell the truth. You could lose the client and anger the donor. Telling the kind truth is about stepping into that danger zone because you care about serving the client. You will want to do it with respect and with humility. And if you are willing to face the risk of losing, you may actually win a more loyal and trusted ally than you had to begin with. It is too rare for any of us to hear the truth—especially when it is a hard one. Ultimately we come to trust the people who level with us.

Ask the Dumb Questions
How many times have you sat in a meeting confused about something? And how many times have you been incredibly grateful when one brave soul asked the question you shied away from? This practice is about having the courage to ask the questions that you think might be obvious to everyone—yet they are not obvious to you. For example, your team is about to move forward on an ambitious plan. You have been adding up the numbers on the cost and it doesn’t seem to match the budget. Math isn’t your thing but still... A board member is taking over a new committee. You want to assume that your board chair has oriented this person to the goals and expectations but you haven’t heard any plans to that effect. Sometimes, it really will be a dumb question. So what? I would much rather we all overdraw our quota on dumb questions than let silence and complicity rule. Sometimes, it will be the question upon which everything turns.

As always this book is a quick and entertaining read. If you are in a service business—read it with your whole staff and talk about which of these practices you already do well. Which could you incorporate more of?

You’ve got to go through it!

“Oh-Oh! Mud
Thick, oozy mud.
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
Oh, no!
We’ve got to go through it!”

Michael Rosen, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt


Those of us with children, have not only read and re-read this classic story countless times (so beautifully illustrated by Helen Oxenbury) but have had the experience of our children dragging us through some adventure that we would really rather not be having. Who wants to slog through mud? To find a bear?! And yet our children, in their infinite wisdom, get it. Here are some of the kernels of wisdom to be gleaned from Michael Rosen’s book:

We can face obstacles with a sense of purpose
So much of the time, we close off opportunities and experiences because we just don’t want to go through “it”. How many times have you told yourself and your friends, ‘I just can’t deal with ‘it’ right now?’ By limiting your own choices you are choosing to make your life smaller. So many places you won’t go. But what if you really connected with your purpose in life? What is your bear hunt? What is it that terrifies you and yet thrills you as well? Are you hungering for connection and community? Are you meant to protect our environment? Ease the pain of others? What would you be willing to face to serve your purpose in life?

When we speak to what is before us right now it will move us forward
Have you ever had the experience of talking to a trusted friend and as you name the issue you are struggling with, it is demystified? Sometimes you can’t really make sense of a problem, and your friend just puts her finger on it and you begin to develop the courage to tackle it?

Being fully present right now, doesn’t prevent new vistas from opening up
“Swishy-swashy, Splash-Splosh, Stumble-trip” Don’t you love the way those moments are captured? Sometimes I think of this as the difference between being on a train and being on a hike. When I am on a train, in order to get any extended look at a part of the scenery I have to look ahead in the direction the train is moving and then as we pass it, I have to look backwards as it recedes in the distance. I never get to see what is right in front of my eyes. It is always a blur. But on a hike, I can walk at my own pace. I can stop; I can feel my feet on the ground and hear every sound around me. And I can keep moving when I am ready. We may be on a mission, but so what? What is here right now? Feel the sun on your face, or the rain in your boots. So be with the frustration that it is taking so long. Be with the anger. And be with the joy and the laughter that is here right now in this moment. Be with the curiosity. The next thing is coming, don’t worry. It always does.

You can change your mind about the goal it’s not about where you get to it’s about what you learn and make possible in the process
The family on the bear hunt runs all the way home after encountering the bear and decides they are never going on a bear hunt again. In her incredible wisdom, the artist, Helen Oxenbury draws the last page of the book with the bear (who has emerged from his cave in pursuit of the family) walking on his own on a stretch of beach. So not only did the family learn something important, but if they hadn’t found the bear, he might never have explored the beach. You can never know what the impact of your pursuits will be. You can only undertake them with purpose, presence of mind, and a willingness to learn from the journey.

A Mid-Winter Pep Talk for Leaders

This month I focus on three recommendations I find myself giving over and over again. I feel strongly about these. You probably already know them; it might be time for a reminder.

The conversations you avoid today are the fires you will be putting out tomorrow
It’s so natural. We all do it. Avoid the hard conversations, that is. You see the issue clearly. You know you should start addressing it. But you don’t really want to deal with the fallout. You don’t want to be attacked. You don’t want to feel like you have just ruined someone’s day. You don’t want to discover that you may not be able to resolve this issue easily. I know; I have been there. So have most of my clients. This is why they have discovered the discipline of creating a list of the three conversations they need to have each week.

If you don’t step away from the work; you’ll be trampled
This is the hardest thing about doing work you are committed to. This is the hardest thing about working in an institution that desperately needs you and all you have to offer. This is the hardest thing about managing people. The demands are endless. There is never enough time. And the expectations are so high—from the people you serve, from your board, from yourself. You have to set limits. You have to take time to exercise, to have dinner with your family, to read a book or take a walk or do any number of things that have nothing to do with your work and happen from away from your office.

Be yourself but don’t take it personally
This is a little complicated and paradoxical but important. On the one hand, you need to show up at work and be as wholly and authentically you as you can be. Your values, your humor, your style—these are the tools of your success. And yet, when you are on the receiving end of criticism and complaints, when things go wrong and the buck stops with you—it is not a referendum on your worth as a human being! Absolutely check in with yourself and own responsibility if you messed up. That is not what I am talking about. If you are sucked into the vortex of self-recrimination (or worse: righteous indignation), you are not going to be responding in the best interest of the institution.

If these practices are already part of your routine—hats off to you. Now teach them to others. If not, try them. Please?

Who Is Getting Your Attention?

I recently finished reading The Power of Story by Jim Loehr. If you find that you are tired of hearing yourself explain your life with the same stories or you notice persistent patterns of not feeling engaged or inspired by the way you are living your life—this is a book to read.

This month, I want to share a small excerpt from the book on a topic I feel passionate about: making sacred connections with others. (Yes, I used the word sacred. Yes I do know it is not generally used in professional settings.)

Watch this 2 min. clip before reading on:


Apparently Loehr often shows the original full clip of the show (which featured the child, Jeff Erlanger), to his workshop participants because of, “Mr. Rogers’ extraordinary gift for engagement—for how he can make the small space, the eighteen to twenty four inches, between him and the little boy as sacred as a shrine...”

Loehr continues:

Who in your life do you give that kind of attention to? At least some of the time? Who gets that eighteen inches of close-up intensity? What gets you to focus with that level of commitment, of reverence for the moment? Is there someone or something in your life so sacred that nothing and no one- not ringing phones, not errands, not ballgames in progress, not the news crawl at the bottom of the screen or the one always running through your head, not money or career concerns, not insignificant noises or images whizzing by—could possibly break your concentration? ...that’s a kind of focus we so rarely give to things now. Why is that?

What’s the story we tell ourselves that prevents this from happening? Is our lack of full engagement just a stage in our life that will pass someday? Or is the story that life in the 21st century is too complicated? Or has it always been like this? Do we assert that technology is the culprit? Or do we blame the competitiveness of an increasingly global marketplace? Is our story that multi-tasking is necessary as never before?...Is our somewhat diluted attention really that big a deal? Absolutely. Because it’s not about time. It never was and never is. It’s about energy.

As you read this, I will be packing for cherished vacation time with my family. Of course Loehr’s message is meant for me as much as for any of you. I continue to strive for living the story of sacred connection—join me?