Archive for Leadership

Working with interruptions? Not smart!

October 20, 2008 / / No comments

As a brief departure from our current discussion, I recently heard that when we are regularly interrupted by ringing telephones, email announcements, and visitors, that our IQ drops by about 10% – the same level of impairment found in people who are under the influence of marijuana. The colleague who shared this information with me joked, “All of the impairment, none of the benefits.”   

Most of us who have worked in an environment with frequent interruptions know that it materially affects our productivity, as well as our stress levels. It is the oppositive of the flow state, in which we tend to be extraordinarily effective. 

In our current age, which has been called the information or innovation age, the success of our organizations depends on the intelligence, creativity and effectiveness of people, who are many times also the biggest investment of the firm.  How can we make sure that our organizational members are as creative and effective as possible?

Some time and activity management experts recommend that we cultivate the habit of setting aside uninterrupted work time on a regular basis, to make progress on our most important projects — that we schedule appointments with ourselves in the same way that we schedule them with others.  The key is to let people know when you will be responding to email and phone calls.

Yet, some corporate cultures do not support this practice, prefering that its members always be available for questions at any time.  (It would be interesting to compare their results with organizations that manage this issue more strategically!) 

What is your experience?  What practices work well for you?

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Culture, Design, Innovation, Leadership /

Cultivating strength

October 10, 2008 / / One comment

Especially given the turmoil in the markets in recent days, it seems to be good timing to return to the subject of how we can leap off the “hamster wheel of fear” — a self-perpetuating negative cycle — and onto our wheel of creative freedom.  Recently, I had the privilege to watch a presentation by certified hypnotherapist, Monica Justus, CHt.  Ms. Justus invited a volunteer from the audience, a local business owner with a technical background whom I would consider a skeptical person, and demonstrated the effect of thoughts and words on our physical and mental strength.

For the demonstration, she asked him to extend his arm straight out to the side, which he did. She then asked him his name, which he answered truthfully. She pressed down strongly on his extended arm, but it remained strong and in place, demonstrating strength. She then asked him to respond to the question in a way that was not true.  Strikingly, his arm weakened, and she was easily able to push it down.  I’ve since used this demonstration in a training situation — it works.

It appears that when we speak our truth, we are, in fact, stronger.

Ms. Justus went on to test the effect of positive and negative words and concepts. The words “love” and “peace” tested “strong.” The word “war” caused his arm to go weak.

We spend most of our days thinking and communicating with others. What is the quality of our thoughts? Do we think self-defeating and fearful thoughts that weaken us, or do we look for the positive in ourselves and our situation? Do we see problems or opportunities? 

And, are we living and speaking our truth or supressing our true thoughts out of fear?  (On this note, I don’t advocate reckless, controlling, or inconsiderate speech. However, if your situation does not safely permit you to express your perspective, it may be worthwhile to consider how you might alter your situation).

Choosing what makes us stronger, including our truth, and a constructive perspective is a key to shifting off the wheel of fear, and onto our wheel of creative freedom.  More on this later!

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, Culture, Leadership, Partnership, Vision /

The Wheel of Creative Freedom is Powered by Positive Perceptions

September 21, 2008 / / No comments

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we’ve been discussing tools or principles for creating our “wheel of creative freedom,” a virtuous cycle to replace the vicious cycle that master coach Rhonda Britten calls the “wheel of fear.”

So far, our review of experiments — the brown-eyed and blue-eyed children experiment, and the Stanford Prison experiment — illustrate the power of perception: 1) How perception gives rise to interpersonal dynamics; 2) How these dynamics tend to become even more stable over time once translated into rules/processes, roles and environments; and 3) How these dynamics (especially as they become increasingly structured) powerfully shape our perception of ourselves and others, and give rise to realities which seem to support the original perception.

In the first experiment, the learned perception that brown-eyed children were superior to blue-eyed children created conditions in which the academic performance of the brown-eyed children improved and the performance of the blue-eyed children declined. In the second experiment, the more the guards tried to control the prisoners, the more prisoners rebelled; this in turn justified the guards position that the prisoners needed to be controlled at all costs and the prisoner’s perceptions that conditions were deplorable, justifying rebellion…

The dynamic by which our perceptions creates reality is neither postive or negative in itself — it’s simply how we select and create (really, negotiate) one reality out of the many possibilities available to us.

In general, we might notice that negative perceptions tend to invoke negative realities and positive perceptions tend to invoke positive realities. In fact, we might observe that negative perceptions tend to fuel our wheels of fear and positive perceptions tend to power our wheel of creative freedom.

It may be useful to note that we are not talking about solipsism — the theory that the self is the only existent thing — which would imply that we are the omnipotent creators of our own realities. Rather, in each experiment, we can see how the resulting realities were shaped by the interaction (or dance) of the participants. Because participants have the power to change their perceptions and behavior, they have the power to shift the system (the sum total of the interrelationships) to a greater or lesser extent; however, they don’t have direct power over the perceptions and choices of the other participants. The power we are discussing is not absolute, but as both experiments illustrate, it is considerable.

In upcoming posts, we will consider in more depth, how our perceptions of ourselves, as leaders, shapes our possibilities, including the possibilities of our organizations. We’ll be going deep with this one, so if you want to come along, wear your miner’s hat! 😉

Category: All Posts, Leadership, Organization, Philosophy /

Want to be more creative? Reduce stress.

September 13, 2008 / / No comments

In our last post, we talked about working harder and longer as a mainstream cultural approach to dealing with a threat (or challenging environment). Those who have been reading this blog for a while may recognize this pattern as a common “wheel of fear.” This response is so common as to appear commonsensical. When the going gets tough, the tough don’t slough off, right?

This kind of response is very appropriate in certain kinds of situations. Our body-minds respond to perceived threats to life and limb by firing up adrenaline that can be used for “fight or flight” — a physical response. We draw upon our reserves to deal with the immediate threat. Organizations and nations do this as well. Of course, this is not sustainable, and if overused, can lead to personal and collective burnout. In burnout, our ability to respond becomes drastically reduced. Using the common analogy, a stress response can help a sprint and hurt a marathon.

A second distinction that becomes important is whether we are dealing with a simple task or with complex problems, which require a creative response. Our present age has been referred to as the “innovation age” in that innovation has become the engine of growth. Innovation — creative problem solving — is also crucial in an age of continous change. Under these conditions, the stress response can actual impair a creative and effective response to complex problems.

A study by David Beversdorf and Jessa Alexander in the department of neurology at Ohio State University demonstrated that people under stress perform slightly better on memory tests; however, they performed more poorly on complex problems requiring flexible thinking: “When individuals [under stress] are faced with a challenging task, they are less likely to perform well in complex situations.” (Graham qtd. in Brown, 2004)

If our “commonsensical” response to a stressor is to engage in behaviors that decrease our effectiveness, we are on our self-perpetuating “wheel of fear.” Clearly, the only way out is “counter-intuitive” behavior — our “wheel of creative freedom.” So, continuing to build our toolkit for our wheel of freedom, when under stress, we might consider and experiment with some of the following counter-intuitive suggestions:

* Make haste by not being in a hurry.
* The more we take it easy, the more we accomplish.
* The more overwhelmed we are, the more we need to take a break.

I’d love to hear your experiences …

References
Brown, Steve. “Stress Stifles Creativity, Study Shows.” The Latern (Online). 11/10/04. Retrieved from:
http://media.www.thelantern.com/media/storage/paper333/news/2004/11/10/Campus/Stress.Stifles.Creativity.Study.Shows-799647.shtml

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Culture, Innovation, Leadership / Tags:

Becoming a “human being” takes time

September 7, 2008 / / No comments

Time has flown, as it does when our schedules are full.  For me, the past three weeks have been filled with a lot of work and a some necessary relaxation, or as some call it, “human being.”  Given that, in this blog, we have been in the midst of constructing our “wheel of creative freedom” and that I’m just now returning from taking a few weeks away from my blog, it seems timely to talk about the relationship between being and creativity.

Mainstream American culture has always valued industry, and this value is reflected in the process and culture of our organizations. As Americans, we tend to link our prosperity to hard work; further, we tend to think of work as a good in itself. Work is seen as virtuous. This value is rooted in religion: The Protestant work ethic, sometimes called the Puritan work ethic, is based on the Calvinist sensibility that hard work is godly and that success is a sign of design favor. On the other hand, sloth is considered one of the seven deadly sins.

We are a workaholic culture and proud of it. And so, when we are under threat, when we have an urgent problem to solve, we tend to work all the harder. The rational ego and will override our needs for rest, for play, for relaxation, and depending on our field, we might work 50, 60, 80, 100 hours a week.

This strategy can work well in the machine age, and it can work well in sprints; but how well does this strategy work in the innovation age? in a marathon? As it turns out, it works less well. We’ll talk more about this and its counter-intuitive implications in upcoming posts…

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Culture, Leadership, Values /

The Power of Situation – The Stanford Prison Experiment

August 19, 2008 / / No comments

The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted by Professor Philip G. Zimbardo in 1971 at Stanford University to explore the question of the power of situation to shape the moral behavior of participants. The role play involved simulating a prison in the basement of one of the buildings at Stanford. The study recruited male college students in good mental health and no history of violence as volunteers and randomly assigned them roles as guards and prisoners. The simulation was made as realistic as possible: “prisoners” were arrested by actual police officers, the guards were given uniforms and the prisoners were made to wear prison attire. The professor assumed the role of prison superintendent.

The situation quickly deteriorated: When the prisoners rebelled on the morning of the second day, the guards asserted their dominance through increasingly sadistic punishments that prefigured the abuses later seen in Abu Garib. By the fifth day of the experiment, five of the students needed to be released due to extreme stress; the others collapsed into numbed and docile obedience.

Professor Zimbardo observes that his own perception also seems to have been distorted. It was only when a colleague, Assistant Professor Christina Maslach visited the “prison” and pointed out to him the awfulness of his actions in allowing the experiment to continue, that Zimbardo was fully able to appreciate its human cost. He had to pull the plug on the experiment after only six days.

As Zimbardo writes, “We had created a dominating behavioral context whose power insidously frayed the seemingly impervious values of compassion, fair play, and belief in a just world” (3).

This experiment demonstrates the enormous power of situation. We might notice that this situation included well-defined roles, characterized by a semi-permanent absolute power differential, established by a clear authority figure and reinforced with identifying uniforms. We can also notice how the setting itself also reflected and supported the roles and rules, and thus behavior.

Finally, we might notice how the setting, roles and uniforms helped to shape the perspectives that led to the behavior of both the guards and prisoners. 

So, at this point, we might observe that while it is true that perceptions shape roles, rules and settings, and it is also true that settings, roles and rules shape perception.  Together, they function as a self-reinforcing system or we can use the word paradigm. Because paradigms are “self-sealing” to borrow the term from Steve March’s blog, they seem obvious, commonsensical and “God-given.”

Our takeaway here is to notice another point of power that we have to shift off our wheel of fear and onto the wheel of freedom — to create a shift in paradigm — and that is to shift the settings, roles, and rules that shape behavior. 

Zimbardo, Philip G. “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: A Lesson in the Power of Situation.” The Chronicle Review, 53, no. 30, p. B6. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i30/30b00601.htm

Category: All Posts, Culture, Design, Ethics, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Rewards, Values /

What kind of dance are we doing?

August 3, 2008 / / No comments

In my last post, I succumbed 🙂 to using the dance analogy for describing how we negotiate what is taking place in any interaction or relationship. We could use the term “negotiation” or “game” but the first suggests conscious “strategy” and even manipulation, and for me, the second invokes transactional analysis, which describes some common scripts or “dances” that people tend to engage in together.

No, the term “dance” works well because while it can involve conscious intention, it’s more holistic, reflecting both the mental and physical, conscious and subconscious interactions. Given that 80% or more of communication is non-verbal, this analogy reminds us that our body language and tone of voice are conveying much more than our words do.

These dances happen on a very small scale (what kind of conversation are we having with ourselves?) to a very large scale (national and global). For example, most of us are familiar with the classic “dysfunctional family dance” in which grown children return home only to find themselves in the sway of old roles and communication patterns. There are the all-too-common painful dances of co-dependence and addiction, of victim and victimizer, and conversely, the constructive and pleasurable dances of supportive friendships and high performing teams.

The dance we do is always at least partly a reaction or response to the dance that other people are doing. Just as in some forms of dance, one person moves forward and the other moves backwards, people tend to respond to each other in complementary ways, which may evolve into more structured roles. As a day-to-day example, after dinner, I clear the table and my husband does the dishes. We didn’t plan it that way — it just evolved. Small, organic organizations typically evolve this way, and as they grow the roles become more formalized.

Therefore, one way of thinking about culture, including organizational culture, is as a dance of complementary relationships. As with families, these dynamics can be constructive or dysfunctional. Either way, the power of the situation very often leads us to react in ways that tend to perpetuate that situation.

In my next post, we’ll consider the Stanford Prison experiment as an example of how easily a professor and a group of college students were able to slip into a highly dystopian dance within a very short period of time through the power of role playing. The purpose is to illustrate the power of role playing to create rather gripping realities. We are all already doing this today, but we are not always consciously aware of it. By becoming consciously aware of these dynamics, we are better able to respond in ways that create the outcomes we want.

Practice
1. Make a list of your significant relationships. These may include work-related relationships and can include relationships with groups as a whole.
2. What role do you play in each relationship? What role do others play in relation to you?
3. Do you notice any patterns?
4. What are the outcomes for you? for others?

Category: All Posts, Change, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Teams /

Example: How a shift in perspective can shift a situation

July 26, 2008 / / One comment

We are all hardwired to respond to subtle social cues. Smiles, laughter, yawning — are all contagious. Studies have shown that when we are in tune with others we unconsciously adapt our body/language to be compatible with theirs.

This unconscious mimicry of physical expression tends to invoke a similar emotional or psychological effect: Someone smiles at us and we smile back; their good feeling becomes our good feeling. To test this premise, smile now and notice how it lifts your spirits. (It feels great and it’s also good for you: professor of psychology Barbara L. Fredrickson hypothesizes that positive emotions can help undo the damaging effects of stress.) This mimicry is considered a biological/psychological/sociological foundation of empathy.

A colleague shared an insight from her own experience. In contrast to her husband, who is outspokenly judgmental, “Barbara” has always kept her thoughts to herself. However, as she has become more aware of her own faults, she had become less judgmental and more compassionate towards others: her perspective changed, and her thoughts and quality of being followed.

Because she had never shared her thoughts, she had assumed that this “internal” shift was completely private, until a family member appreciatively noted how much less judgmental she is “nowadays.” Although she had never said a word, her attitudes had come through in her body language, eyes — her whole presence. And, that had affected the way that people felt around her.

It’s easy to imagine how Barbara’s earlier judgments might have created some subtle or not-so-subtle distance in those relationships, and how this distance would have made it more likely that she would continue to judge and find fault; it can also lead to others judging her negatively in turn: “She is always frowning at me!”

In turn, her new attitude of compassion has clearly strengthened her relationships, creating a more positive dynamic. Although the analogy of dance might be a bit over used today, we might imagine that they are all doing a different dance together. This is about more than feeling good (a good in itself): putting on our practical “ends-oriented” hat, we can also notice that the before and after situations have very different potentials, for example, in terms of what the participants might accomplish together.

Similarly, as leaders, our perspectives and thoughts affect the way we “show up,” the dynamics of the situation, and ultimately, its potential.

This is something we all already “know” from our own experience. However, our cultural emphasis on “doing” often blinds us to how a shift in our perspective (“our being”) can transform a situation in ways that no amounts of “doing” under the old paradigm could accomplish…

Practice
1. Begin to notice how the way other people “show up” affects you, and how you are inclined to “show up” with them.

2. After you have some experience with practice #1, you might begin to notice how differences in the way you “show up” affects others and the situation. A constructive experiment, if you are not already doing this regularly, would be to practice actively looking for the positive in others and notice how it shifts the dynamics of the relationship and situation.

Please feel free to share your experiences here.

Category: All Posts, Change, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Teams /

Creating a virtuous cycle (recap so far)

July 18, 2008 / / No comments

Because our conversation on vicious and virtuous cycles is multi-part and spread out over time, I thought it might be helpful to briefly recap the previous discussion and look ahead.

Earlier we talked about the downward spiral that master coach Rhonda Britten calls the “wheel of fear,” a vicious cycle in which our fears prompt us to perceive particular aspects of reality and take actions that ultimately perpetuate our fear. We also considered how our personal wheels of fear can shape our leadership philosophies and organizations in ways that  can create the problems we seek to overcome.   

I also promised to talk about the antidote — a strategy for “leaping off” the hamster wheel of fear in order to begin to create a virtuous cycle, which Britten calls the “wheel of freedom” in which we recognize and leverage strengths, and invoke and develop potentials — of both ourselves and others.

This topic is particularly relevant for down economic times: Because these times tend to trigger stress and because our reaction to stress can either help or make conditions worse, it is useful to understand the dynamics of both kinds of cycles and how to shift from a negative cycle to a positive one.

To get off the wheel of fear, we need to take action which is “counter-intuitive.” Towards that end, we are considering some principles that we can use in our “wheel of creative freedom” towards 1) creating the conditions that best support our visions, and 2) optimally engaging the conditions we experience.

The first principle we are exploring is “perception creates reality”: our perspective tends to shape the psychological and social realities that confirm our perspectives. Towards this end, we considered how our perspectives with respect to Theory X and Theory tend to generate different kinds of organizations and dynamics (which endorse those theories), and how the beliefs that we hold about ourselves and others can either nurture or suppress and diminish the potentials of ourselves and others.

Coming up, we’ll be continuing to explore the power of perception and belief, and for those who like to understand things before they experiment, how and why that works…

Category: All Posts, Change, Coaching, Leadership, Organization /

How perspective draws out or diminishes human potential

July 8, 2008 / / 2 comments

One famous experiment that really illustrates how perspective can draw out or diminish human potential is the experiment first conducted in the 1960s by American teacher Jane Elliott, who went on to become an anti-racism activist.  In this exercise, she praised brown-eyed children as “hardworking” and “intelligent,” and dismissed blue-eyed children as being innately less hardworking and intelligent. In light of that premise, she institutionalized a set of privileges for the “superior” and “more deserving” brown-eyed children, such as extra food at lunch, restricted access to a new jungle gym, and extra time at recess.  In contrast, brown-eyed children were not allowed to drink from the same water fountains and were made to wear a paper armband.

At first, the children resisted the new order. However, after Ms. Elliott provided the pseudo-scientific explanation that the greater intelligence and better work ethic of the brown-children was related to their higher levels of melanin, the children came to accept this view, with dramatic results. The “superior” brown-eyed children became arrogant and bossy and treated blue-eyed students with disrespect.

Even more dramatic was the effect on the self concept and performance of each group: The brown-eyed children began to perform better academically, even doing well in areas that had been difficult for them in the past. In contrast, the blue-eyed children performed more poorly, even in areas where they had previously done very well. They also became more timid and submissive.  

When Elliot reversed roles the following week, she received similar results, in reverse, although the discrimination was noticeably less acute: those who had experienced the pain of being deemed “inferior” seemed less inclined to inflict that experience on others. Eventually, of course, she concluded the experiment and the students experienced a rather emotional reconciliation…

It’s not difficult to see how a similar dynamic can be found with the whole range of “isms” (racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, etc.).

This is not to say that we all have identical interests and aptitudes; but a key take away might be the extent to which perception, expectations and the structures we create actually invoke or suppress human potential.  This is also illustrated by the example in which a “low-performing” student was accidentally noted as being “gifted” in the transfer to a new grade. The new teacher, believing child was gifted, gave him/her attention, encouragement, challenge; the child excelled academically.

As leaders, the “halo” effect is a reality for us, isn’t it? And, in contrast, some people seem to do worse and worse.  How much is the person and how much is due to our own leadership style (or the culture or organizational environment)? 

Some questions that might be interesting to explore around this topic are:

* What is your perpective/perception regarding others in your organization (especially those over whom you have some power and influence)?

* Is anyone going “up” or “down”? What are the dynamics surrounding that?

* What beliefs do you have/does your organization have regarding superiority and inferiority of different people?

* How are these beliefs reflected in your organization structure?

In upcoming posts, we’ll explore some successful applications of this principle, going into greater depth on the dynamics. We’ll also explore how organizational structures and roles shape our personalities and experience, with an eye towards the practical implications for leaders and organizations…

Category: All Posts, Change, Communication, Culture, Design, Diversity, Education, Ethics, Leadership, Organization, Rewards /
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