Employees’ moods, emotions, and overall dispositions have an impact on job performance, decision making, creativity, turnover, teamwork, negotiations and leadership. … employees’ emotions are integral to what happens in an organization, says Professor Barsade, who has been doing research in the area of emotions and work dynamics for 15 years.
Everybody brings their emotions to work. You bring your brain to work. You bring your emotions to work. Feelings drive performance. They drive behavior and other feelings.
12 Step Program for conducting a difficult, stressful, or frightening conversation
Here is my 12 Step Program for conducting a difficult, stressful, or frightening conversation in a way that will create new possibilities for relationship and action.
Help the other person feel safe. “We’re friends and colleagues now and we’ll still be friends and colleagues after this conversation.” Easy on the relationship, rigorous on the topic.
Get a firm agreement on facts before delving into opinions. Be conscientious about distinguishing facts from opinions. “The client reported several misspellings in the report,” is a fact. “Your work is sloppy,” is an opinion.
Remember, seek first to understand, then to be understood, is Covey’s fifth habit. Listen before you speak. Encouraging the other person to talk first is also a way to get his or her concerns out of his or her head to make room in there for what you have to say.
Ask questions to clarify how it looks to him or her. Stop behaving as though you know what they think; be genuinely curious.
Repeat key points back to him or her to show that you are listening and to verify that you have heard correctly. You do not need to agree with the person’s point of view, but it is helpful to let him or her know you understand and you accept that he or she sees that way right now.
Take responsibility for your own reactions.
It is not responsible to assert, “You are forcing me to double-check all of your reports.” It is more useful to explain, “When I hear a client complain I feel obligated to double-check all of your reports.” See the difference? The first is the voice of a victim making an accusation, one who has reached a firm conclusion about the location of the problem: it’s the other guy. The second is a person making a choice on limited information, one who is eager to consider alternatives.
The simple shortcut from victim to choice is to start sentences with “I” rather than “you.”
Establish the level of trust: sincerity, capacity, competence, consistency, and care. “I know that you can see when a project is suffering from scope creep and that you will let me know about it.”
Explicitly agree on the shared commitment or values e.g., “We both want to preserve the company’s reputation with clients and develop the next generation of project managers”
Point-out what you see as missing or not working. Reach an agreement on the facts of the situation and its threat to our shared commitment.
Explore and create together possible actions to move closer to circumstances consistent with your shared values. Don’t get stuck on your favorite course of action. It is not a solution until both sides take action to make it work.
Make requests and promises.
Establish a structure of accountability for monitoring the agreed actions.
These steps are in sequence, like bricks in a wall. If you are having trouble completing a step, return to the previous step. That is, if you cannot agree on the relevant shared values, talk about trust. If you cannot talk about trust, talk about safety. If you cannot talk about safety, get in touch with your center. Get centered even if you need to take a break and leave the room.
See also, on this blog, step-by-step conversation instructions with video here: The Conversation Contract.
I was lucky to attend a benefit dinner last night for injured combat veterans. About 100 local business people paid $275 each to reserve a room at Morton’s steak house in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. They invited a small group of soldiers undergoing treatment at Walter Reed to join them for a meal and the NCAA basketball game, projected on huge screens at both ends of the room. It was one of many small, unpublicized gestures people routinely make to support and appreciate each other.
The evening was short on ceremony but did include one brief speech that made a lasting impression. Captain Roger Donlon, who earned the first Medal of Honor in Viet Nam, reminded the soldiers present that, though some of them have earned Silver Stars and other medals for valor and all were permanently injured in battle, their most courageous acts may be ahead of them as they faced the normal temptations and challenges of life. He closed by saying,
“I and the other warriors here know that the most powerful force in the world is not hatred for the enemy but love for the man next to you.“
That love was much in evidence last night, amongst the wounded warriors and between the businessmen. I was lucky to be there.
Marshall Goldsmith, nearly always introduced as “America’s foremost executive coach,” has written some fine books and helped many executives. My only complaint is that what he does, in my experience, is advising and consulting not executive coaching.
The vital difference is evident in his post today at the Harvard Business Review website, How to Spot the Uncoachables. Goldsmith describes his executive coaching clients in negative terms more appropriate to a particularly judgmental therapist than a respectful coach: “wrong direction,” “fix behavior,” and “It’s hard to help people who don’t think they have a problem.”
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? (more…)
One topic eventually appears in nearly every conversation with my executive coaching clients: stress. Everyone is aware of increased stress. For many, stress is the dominant experience. Let’s examine the mechanism, symptoms, and treatments.
Stress is a word imported from engineering, where it refers to pressure sufficient to cause a body to deform. High stress can permanently alter the form and function of the material bearing the load, even to the point of destruction. No wonder that endocrinologist Hans Selye chose stress to describe the reactions of lab rats to his injections of what would later be labeled stress hormones: cortisol, adrenaline, etc. You and I do not need an injection to experience the symptoms of stress; we make plenty of these hormones ourselves.
Why? Because employees are more sensitive to mood than leaders often realise. And these moods are contagious. Research carried out by Caroline Bartel at New York University and Richard Saavedra at the University of Michigan found that in 70 different teams, people working together in meetings ended up sharing moods – whether good or bad – within two hours. And bad moods spread faster than good ones.
In their 2001 Harvard Business Review article “Primal leadership”, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKie argued that one of the key duties of leadership – they say it is the most important one of all – is to manage your emotions with care.
Many companies and organizations are dealing with multiple changes right now to adapt to the huge shifts in our economy: layoffs, salary reductions, and freezes, office closings, budget cuts, etc. My CEO executive coaching clients are making painful decisions, managing personal stress, communicating more often with employees, customers, and suppliers. All of that is useful and important.
I also find it useful to remind managers that change is not quick or easy for companies.
Leaders, especially the most dynamic, creative, and entrepreneurial, must keep in mind that stability is in the nature of organizations. That’s why we call them organizations, rather than alterizations or adaptizations. People, especially in groups, need (more…)
“Soldiers require 7-8 hours of good quality sleep each night to sustain operational readiness,” according to … the U.S. Army Medical Command. … “sheer determination or willpower cannot offset the mounting effects of inadequate sleep”…
Scans of sleep-deprived brains, when compared to scans of alert subjects’ brains, show less activity in the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain associated with high order functions like problem-solving, judgment and moral decision-making, he said. …the people who should sleep the most are unit leaders who make mission-critical decisions. …
[If you can’t change your work schedule, at least adjust your weekend routine.] Sleep can be “banked,” Balkin said. Soldiers forced to sleep for 10 hours, who were then sleep deprived for a week, performed better than soldiers who had only a normal night’s rest on the first night.
I studied 100 founders of Inc. Magazine’s 1989 list of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. Virtually all of them had started between 1981-83 in the midst of an awful recession.
But that didn’t prevent those founders from starting a new venture — in fact, in many ways it may have helped. Several had lost their jobs, so they weren’t risking steady employment — and they were able to hire employees who didn’t have great job prospects on the cheap. Landlords offered leases without asking too many questions about credit histories. Suppliers were willing to wait to be paid.
I was lucky to attend a benefit dinner last night for injured combat veterans. About 100 local business people paid $275 each to reserve a room at Morton’s steak house in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. They invited a small group of soldiers undergoing treatment at Walter Reed to join them for a meal and the NCAA basketball game, projected on huge screens at both ends of the room. It was one of many small, unpublicized gestures people routinely make to support and appreciate each other.
Many companies and organizations are dealing with multiple changes right now to adapt to the huge shifts in our economy: layoffs, salary reductions, and freezes, office closings, budget cuts, etc. My CEO executive coaching clients are making painful decisions, managing personal 
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