What Can A Rose Teach Us About Workplace Relationships?

It seems like forever ago that I came across ‘The Rose Story.’ I don’t remember the source or the circumstances; what I do remember is that it was one of those mini AHA moments for me. A real whack on the side of my head!

The Rose Story popped into my mind twice in the past few weeks as I was engaged in two separate but similar coaching conversations. In both cases, capable leaders committed to the coaching model were struggling with disappointment and frustration.  In one situation, the leader was second guessing herself for promoting a rising star to a challenging position. From the leader’s perspective, the individual was ‘letting her down’ by not rising to the occasion. In fact, the newly promoted team member seemed overwhelmed and unsteady in the role. The leader was increasingly frustrated by the amount of time, energy and attention that was personally required of her to support this person and the work.

In the other case, a savvy, experienced leader was impatient, unsupportive and overly critical of a new colleague. From the experienced leader’s perspective, the new colleague had not ‘earned’ an executive position; she was immature, overly eager and inexperienced.  And now they were peers; it just didn’t seem fair or reasonable to her.

I think that it’s too easy to fall into such traps. Using ourselves as we are today as the gold standard for everyone else. And perhaps conveniently forgetting our own missteps and insecurities on our leadership journeys. If we are to become more masterful coach leaders, then most of us must fundamentally shift our thinking about the people around us at work. We need to begin to acknowledge and affirm that we are all capable, smart, talented, creative, willing and accountable. We have to understand that we are at different stages of leadership & professional maturity; and of education & experience. And that different is okay. It doesn’t mean less than or inferior. That’s the powerful lesson that a rose can teach us about the people with whom we work. And by teaching us about others, it simultaneously enlightens us about ourselves. Read on for your own personal AHA moment: 

 THE ROSE

When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small but we do not criticize it as “rootless” and “stemless”. We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as “immature” and “under-developed”; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care that it needs at each stage of its growth. Finally, as the rose’s bloom fades and the petals fall, we gather them and use them for fragrance and healing. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.

Here’s your May leadership challenge:

Week 1:  Keeping the Rose Story in mind, reach out to someone around you who is starting a new leg of their career journey (or maybe taken on a significant challenge) and nurture & nourish that person. Recognize their potential. Express belief in them; encourage & feed them through affirmation. Then stand back and watch them take root!!

Week 2: Share the Rose Story with others. Your team. Someone who may be struggling with self-doubt. Using coaching questions ask people what it means to them and how we can apply it to our relationships at work.

Week 3: Perfect enough! That’s the theme of our leadership challenge this week. The Rose Story applies to you too. You are perfect enough right where you are. You care enough. Know enough. Do enough. Make it a priority to tend to yourself. Affirm and appreciate who you are today and look to be both better and different every day. I often tell myself, “I’m satisfied with who and where I am while eagerly anticipating even more in the future!)

Week 4: Collect Positive Aspects! The final leadership dare of the month is to purposefully look around your workplace. Celebrate the wonderful diversity. Rejoice that everyone isn’t exactly like youJ Think of each member of your team or work group and identify one or two things that are positive or great about them. What are their special talents? What unique contribution do they make? Then make it a point this week to share your insights.  Give them the care and attention that they want and need to build and grow themselves.

Create Your Own Brand Of March Madness!

March Madness is a nickname indelibly stuck to the single elimination Division I college basketball tournament that occurs each Spring in the US. Get ready because it’s coming! From March 15 to April 6 millions of people will be possessed by this affliction. You don’t even have to be a basketball fan to get swept up. Before you know it, you’ve joined an office pool, become a bracketologist (yes, there is such a word); and find yourself cheering for teams to which you have no emotional ties!

For me, the word ‘madness’ does a good job of capturing the sustained energy and excitement associated with the tournament:

So much constant action

So many games

So many teams

The element of unpredictability

The emotional highs and lows

The thrill of an ‘upset’

Everyday heroics

Single minded grit and determination to make it to the next round; to win the ultimate prize

The magic of a high performing team

The inspiring performance of an underdog

Over the top school spirit

And so much more…..

What if we co-opted this term?

What if we co-create our own brand of ‘March Madness?’ No dribbling or shooting involved.

What if we harnessed the passion, the energy, the excitement, the fun and the esprit de corps that are characteristic of the tournament and creatively put them to work in our workplaces, departments and teams?

For me, this feels like the perfect antidote to the energy drain associated with an all too long winter and a great way to shift into refresh and renewal mode as Spring arrives. 

I’ve come up with some leadership bright ideas for delivering a memorable March Madness experience in your workplace throughout the month ahead. Of course, once your creative juices start flowing, develop your own unique ways to catch the ‘feva.’

Don’t forget to share your most creative ideas with us!!

March Madness Challenge 1: During one recent NCAA tournament, a Kentucky coach shared the following secret to his team’s success. He said, “We don’t practice until we get it right. We intentionally practice until we don’t get it wrong.” I found this to be a thought provoking insight. Share this with your team and lead a discussion on what it means to you and your team mates. Identify one thing that you can collectively do differently to ‘intentionally practice until you don’t get it wrong’.

March Madness Challenge 2: There’s a big difference between frenetic energy and focused energy. The former is hurried and harried. We might be checking things off the list; but are we doing our best work? The right work? In a sustained way? In the latter, we aim ourselves strategically and bring our best selves to the work. Sometimes, we’ve got to slow the game down a bit to win.  Name one or two ways in which you can ‘slow down to speed up.’ That is, identify one or two areas in which we can pause briefly and get fanatically focused on what we need to do to create a great outcome.

Stay tuned for two additional March Madness Challenges!

Assist Others To Identify Their Greatness

Lots of people tell me it’s so much easier to focus on what’s wrong with them (their ‘weaknesses or what they’re not good at) versus what they’re really, really great at. I think that’s because it’s a long standing habit for many of us. We’ve focused there for so long, it’s come to define us. It’s what our self talk is all about. This often limits a person’s willingness and ability to stretch into more challenging assignments, take some risk at work and perform at higher levels. In other words, it can prevent people from leading from their seat!

It’s in everyone’s best interest to help people own the best that is in them!  If we’re tuning into others regularly and training our eyes and ears to unearth strengths, we can see someone else’s potential long before they do. So, as a coach leader, what can you practically do to help others look in the mirror and see what you see? Here are some ideas that you can implement lickety split:

1. Work on yourself first! Let’s get better at uncovering the brilliance in others. Pick one person each day for a week and list all of the assets or positive qualities that s/he has. Be sure to select a variety of people, not only those for whom you already have an affinity.
2. Share your thoughts with each person and listen/observe their feedback.
3. Complete a learning exercise with your team. Ask each person to identify their own signature strengths and their growing edges (this is my reframing of ‘weaknesses’). Review and discuss in detail in your one-on-one meeting OR, if the team is ready for a challenge, review and discuss together at a team meeting!
4. Check out the strengths finder website, www.strengths-finder.com , for other potential tools and techniques. 

Ask, Don’t Tell

If you really, really want to build richer relationships at work, help others to lead from their seats, create a culture of owners and become a more influential force in your organization, then you need to make it a priority to master the art of asking great questions!  Now, there are many different types of questions. Background questions. Open-ended and close- ended ones. Confirming questions. Then there are the ones to which I’m referring - the powerful, provocative kind. The ones that:

• Have a purpose beyond information
• Can interrupt a typical thought process
• Have the potential to result in a breakthrough or an aha moment
• Come from and/or follow clearly listening to someone
• Are almost always followed by silence as you allow the question to marinate in the other person’s
• Stem from genuinely wanting to help someone(s) learn & grow.

Asking powerful, provocative questions (or practicing collaborative inquiry, as it’s called) is a hallmark skill of the coach leader. What makes mastery of this skill so challenging is that most business professionals have been conditioned for a very long time to use a telling approach in their communication – I’ll tell you what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. I’ll direct this team, this project, this work. I’ll lobby for my preferred solution. Telling rather than asking is one of those habits that I’m encouraging you to unlearn! Now!

Let’s really think about the strategic advantages that cultivating a habit of asking instead of telling delivers to you, to the other person(s) and to your organization:

•   A powerful question invites the other person(s) to come up with their own solutions. That’s big! It fosters a greater sense of ownership and opens up the opportunity for others to ‘lead from their seats.’
• It can be a portal for innovation and creativity. You may have a good solution to a problem. You may have one right answer for a situation. But someone else might have an even better one! Someone else’s idea could be a best practice.
•  Asking someone for their thoughts or opinions says to that person, “ I value your perspective. I think you’re smart and capable. I trust you.”
•  A shift from telling to asking helps us to acknowledge that we’re not the only person with worthy ideas.
• Asking intentional questions allows us to fulfill the #1 priority for us all in business – to build and grow others around us! Think about the boost of confidence that someone may feel when you ask a question and really listen to their ideas and solutions! 

Developing the self-discipline of asking questions more often will have a huge payoff for you and the organization. But it’s a skill and perfecting a skill takes time, energy, desire, focus and practice. Also, it will take more time to ask questions than tell someone what to do. You need to decide if that short term investment of time is worth the long term dividends of building more independent thinkers and leaders around you! I’m hopeful that you’ll say YES to this opportunity. I’m rooting for each of you!

Powerful, probing questions share some features. They’re:

• Non-judgmental, non-critical
• Simple & straightforward. In fact, most times, the simpler they are, the better they are.
• Asked with a neutral tone of voice
• Followed by silence & clear listening. Yes, you actually have to listen to the other person’s response.

Piece of cake, right? Not so fast. Take it from someone who has been refining my questioning habit for a very long time, it’s simple but not easy to do day in and day out.  So let’s make certain that we have a shared understanding of these points by using a few examples.

Example 1: One of the best questions is also one of the simplest and most effective: “What do you think?” In fact, Tom Peters calls this sentence the four most powerful words in business!  You ask this question and then you listen and allow the other person to think about it and offer their ideas. It sends all of the right messages to the other person – you’re valued; you’re smart and capable; your idea might be the best idea….

Example 2: Here’s an example of how to make-over a same old same old comment into a strong coaching question:

            From: You’re always late in getting out our meeting minutes!

            To: What’s the timeline that you typically follow for releasing our meeting minutes?

So, how can you sharpen your inquiry ability so that you develop the habit of asking, rather than telling and, once you’re in the rhythm of asking, turning good questions into great ones? Here are some do-ables to get you started:

• Start asking more questions! Duh. Make the choice and work through that feeling of awkwardness. It’ll pass. Repetition & determination are your dynamic duo.
• Preare for one-on-one and team meetings by jotting down some possible questions related to key topics. Cultivate the habit of checking those questions before speaking.
• Create a ‘powerful questions’ bank. Think ahead about typical situations that you encounter in your organization and create one or two coaching questions for each. For even more impact, make it a team project.
• Use the go-to question – “What do you think?” Don’t forget to follow it with silence (yes, shutting up is a great skill to master!).
• Find a partner and work on this together. Ask your partner to highlight any missed opportunities to use the ask, don’t tell approach.
• Put your mind and heart to it. To change your habit, you’re going to have to be aware and intentional. You’ve gotta want this new habit to catch fire.
• To sum it all up, coach leaders intentionally replace the habit of “telling people around us what to do” with the new habit of asking questions of others. This is immensely beneficial because it allows the other person to create their own solutions, to take moderate risks, to become more effective decision makers, and to more fully engage in the everyday life of the organization.

Sometimes, I’m asked if asking more questions is really that big of deal. What do you think?

***RELATED LEADERSHIP TIPS***

Leadership Tip #1

Take the Tom Peters challenge to jump start your new inquiry habit! Pick a work day in the next week. For that day, make it your business to ask the question “What do you think?” in appropriate situations. Keep track of the number of times that you say it. At the end of the day, check your total. Notice what difference that question made. Celebrate new insights and relationship wins. Sustain this newly acquired habit.

Leadership Tip #2

Here are two of my favorite quotes on questioning for you to contemplate:

"We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong." – Bono

"The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions." - Antony Jay

Leadership Tip #3

How about spicing up your regular meetings by using the following questioning framework:

• What are all of the things that are working?
•  How did all of those things end up working?
• What’s not working yet?
•  How can we make things even better?

This can really shake things up and create a surge of energy!

Fresh Eyes

One of those small but significant (I always say ‘big door swing on small hinges) habits that everyday leaders practice is to view their work with ‘fresh eyes’ each day. If you’re committed to being both better and different then you’ve got to have the courage, energy and discipline to briefly pause before you jump in and ‘do’ the work  Take a look at it as though you’re seeing it for the first time. If you could press the re-wind button, how would you organize the work differently; what would you do to have a better outcome, make your job or someone else’s easier?

Think of it another way – when you slow down and really re-examine your work and explore your processes and approaches, you actually have the chance to speed up in the long run, by becoming more effective and efficient. Slow down to speed up!

When you look at your work with fresh eyes, it’s as though you have a new leadership lens that endows you with ‘super powers’ to:

·         Connect the dots differently

·         See opportunities that were hidden in plain sight

·         Have an in-sight on the solution to a wicked problem

·         Experience an ‘aha’ moment or a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious)

Now, this isn’t an invitation to go rogue and change your work flow without running it by others. It is all about making suggestions that help you be the best version of yourself and get great work done AND help your colleagues and the organization.

So today, be fearless! Change the lens through which you see your world. Write down any ideas (no censorship please) that surface for streamlining, eliminating, combining, re-creating….You might be surprised at how long that list is. Then pick one, maybe two to pursue. Now, lead from your seat and talk with your colleagues and your boss about your new ideas. Take a risk…take the lead!

Twenty Seconds of Insane Courage

One of my favorite ‘feel good’ movies is We Bought A Zoo, starring Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. What can I tell you, I’m a sucker for sweet stories that include animals! The way that the characters used language so creatively is part of what made it special for me as well. One of my favorite quotes comes from Matt Damon’s character, Benjamin Mee. He shares a life lesson with his son by saying: “…Sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage. Just literally, 20 seconds of embarrassing bravery…” 

 

I think that’s equally applicable to everyday leadership. In order to ‘lead from your seat’ each day, you don’t need to be perfect; you don’t even need to be ‘on’ every single moment. What you do need are mini bursts of organizational bravery throughout your work day – twenty seconds of insane courage – to challenge same old same old thinking; to try something different and better; to do the right thing; to behave as an adult; to help a colleague to be successful; or to simply choose to be happy and optimistic.

Big doors swing on small hinges --- it is the little stuff that we do consistently throughout our day that adds up to big change and even bigger opportunity. That’s what everyday leadership is all about!

Today, make that your mantra --- 20 seconds of insane courage. Consider it a leadership dare! And to jump start your thinking; here are some everyday examples of organizational bravery:

1. Avoid the temptation to join in on gossip or griping
2. Ask for help or offer a helping hand without being asked
3. Accept responsibility rather than make excuses or throw blame
4. Warmly welcome a new member to your team
5. Agree to try something that scares you – e.g. give a presentation
6. Really listen to the feedback that someone is giving you, especially if it is difficult to hear
7. Say no to an unreasonable request, suggest an appropriate alternative
8. Mend a relationship, even if it includes apologizing and/or forgiving
9. Discuss the ‘elephant in the room’ at a meeting
10. Have lunch with someone new, who’s not part of your inner circle   

Take the dare yourself today! It’s simple but not easy.  Repeat after me…..20 seconds of insane courage….twenty seconds of insane courage.  Let us know how you do and pass the dare on to one other person tomorrow.