LEADERS ISSUE 24
FEBRUARY 2019
DIGEST
DEVELOPING A
GROWTH MINDSET
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PUBLICATION TEAM EDITORIAL
Editor-in-Chief Segaren Assistant Editor Yvonne Lee Graphic Designer Awang Ismail bin Awang Hambali Abdul Rani Haji Adenan
CONTENTS
ISSUE 24 I FEBRUARY 2019
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HOW TO DEVELOP YOUR EMOTIONAL INTEGRITY
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ARE YOU GROWING YOUR BRAIN?
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INTEGRATED THINKING
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SIMPLE MINDSET CHANGES TO EVOLVE AS A LEADER
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FIVE DENIALS OF THE HUMAN BRAIN
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WHEN DO YOU THINK STRATEGICALLY?
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HAVE YOU BEEN LISTENING TO SOUND ADVICE, OR JUST NOISE?
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BAD MEETINGS
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WHAT FAILS US AS LEADERS, AND HOW WE GET OUR BREAKTHROUGHS
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OBSERVE PROCEDURAL INTEGRITY WHEN YOU DO TARGET SETTING
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Content Partners:
Leader’s Digest is a monthly publication by the Leadership Institute of Sarawak Civil Service, dedicated to advancing civil service leadership and to inspire our Sarawak Civil Service (SCS) leaders with contemporary leadership principles. It features a range of content contributed by our strategic partners and panel of advisors from renowned global institutions as well as established corporations that we are affiliated with. Occasionally, we have guest contributions from our pool of subject matter experts as well as from our own employees.
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Successful leaders see the opportunities in every difficulty rather than the difficulty in every opportunity.
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- Reed Markham
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How to Develop Your Emotional Integrity BY RAJEEV PESHAWARIA
For over a decade now I have been asking people some simple questions like “What is the most important thing in your life?” or “What do you care about most of all?” No matter where in the world I go, the most common answer is always the same. Yes, you guessed it right – Family. Of course, everyone should care deeply about, and do their absolute best to ensure the well-being of one’s family. So when I hear this answer I typically ask them to show me their diary for the last six months. A quick flip through their schedule and it becomes clear in many cases that family has not been their priority. More often than not, people fail the diary test. When confronted with this uncomfortable truth, they justify it by saying their jobs are very demanding, or that they are working hard only for the sake of the family’s well-being.
succeed more than someone that lives a reactive existence without such awareness and intelligence. All of this is true. However, if one wants the full benefit of such intelligence – which is to achieve true happiness and fulfilment along with (and not just) material success – one must first meet a key prerequisite: emotional integrity. Emotional integrity is the courage to acknowledge one’s true feelings, wants and desires without judging them with the societal lens. In essence, it is about being 100% honest with oneself. If one is just emotionally intelligent without being emotionally honest, the benefit will at best be temporary and skin deep. Unfortunately, most people suffer from low or inadequate emotional integrity, often without knowing it.
The more aware you are of your own feelings, the higher the chances of you managing your emotions intelligently.
Here are some common examples:
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Really? Or is it because it is convenient and/or no one is looking? Or could it be that it is not a deeply held value in the first place?
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I am compromising my value(s) for greater good.
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Really? The consistency of responses regardless of culture or geography raises an important question – how honest are these responses? And if they are not fully honest, who are the respondents most dishonest with? For several decades now, emotional intelligence or EQ has been bandied about as the key skill for career success. Researchers have found that people with higher EQs make more money and get promoted faster. The argument is simple: Emotional intelligence is primarily made up of two things – self-awareness and social-awareness. The more aware you are of your own feelings, the higher the chances of you managing your emotions intelligently. The more aware you are of others, the higher the chance of you managing your relationships intelligently. And if you are intelligent about managing your own emotions and those of others around you, chances are you will
I hate everything about the relationship I am in but for several reasons I have no choice but to stay in it. Or is the fear of being left all alone in the world greater than the pain of the bad relationship?
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I will pursue what I really want after I have been successful, or after I have achieved financial security for my family.
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I really want to pursue a higher purpose, but I cannot take any risks because of my family responsibilities. Or could it be because of lack of personal courage or fear of failure?
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I am not succeeding because I haven’t had the lucky breaks many others have had.
Or might it be because not enough pro-active effort has been made?
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Are you clear about what you really want, and what success looks like in the first place?
I am helpless because I have no power or authority to change anything.
Or are the risks associated with challenging the status quo too scary?
only to regret it at the end of their lives. As Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse in the palliative care wing of a hospital found out, the top regret of the dying is “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” A life full of compromise and sacrifice does not do justice to any of the varied roles one plays in life. When at work, we feel guilty about not spending enough time with the family. When at home, we constantly worry about work. If at all we play, our mind is forever pre-occupied by family and/or work matters. In any case, we are never fully present, and before we know it, we end up in our death bed thinking about the top regrets of our life. It doesn’t have to end up this way. Life becomes a lot more fulfiling and satisfying if one can change his mind set from sacrifices to choices. This transition (from sacrifices to choices) is one of life’s most liberating experiences because one moves from forever feeling like a victim to being empowered. Once empowered with deep clarity about what is most important, one can make the most difficult of choices with courage and conviction. And the primal step towards acquiring such empowerment is to develop the highest possible degree of emotional integrity.
Add a bit of Imagineering (see below), and you will be well on your way to true happiness, success and fulfilment.
Going from Victim to Empowered:
1. Honestly list what you really want most out of your life
2. Acknowledge your wants, desires and ambitions without any judgement or guilt
The list can go on and on. The point is, without honestly acknowledging what one really wants most out of life, true fulfilment may not be possible. So, how can one develop high emotional integrity? By introspecting deeply about the five most important things one wants in life, and rank ordering them. The exercise sounds easier than it is because for it to be powerful, it requires complete honesty with oneself. For example, if push came to shove, would you choose your own health or your family’s financial security? Or, what is more important and valuable to you – your personal sense of achievement or helping others? These are tough questions, and there are no universally right or wrong answers. Integrity begins at home; one must first develop laser sharp clarity of what is most important and what s/he wants most out of life. Based on such honest clarity, one can then make choices about focus, actions and behavior. In the absence of emotional integrity too many people spend an entire lifetime compromising and sacrificing,
3. ‘Imagineer’ your life:
Imagine what you want to achieve, visualize the impact you want your life to have, and reverse engineer it by making choices rather than scarifies
Rajeev Peshawaria
CEO of the Iclif Leadership and Governance Centre, author of the Wall Street Journal and Amazon best seller Open Source Leadership (McGraw Hill 2017), Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders (Simon & Schuster 2011), co-author of Be the Change (McGraw Hill 2014) and a regular writer for Forbes, Rajeev is an out-ofthe-box thought leader on leadership, management and corporate governance. He has extensive global experience in leadership and organizational consulting, with a particular focus on uncovering personal and organizational “leadership energy.”
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Integrated Thinking BY RAJEEV PESHAWARIA
In a recent talk he gave, my good friend Raghu Krishnamoorthy, Chief Learning Officer of GE, made a couple of bold statements that hooked his audience immediately: 1. Talent is abundant not scarce 2. Intelligence is now a commodity. To illustrate his first point, he talked about how GE Aviation redesigned their engine brackets through crowd-sourced innovation. They ran a global contest for designs to reduce the weight of the brackets by 30%, and offered a prize of $20,000 for the best design. To their surprise, the winning design came from a small town in Indonesia, which reduced the weight by a whopping 84%. Now, how’s that for exceeding your innovation KPI by 180% at the cost of just $20,000? Who would have thought that the world’s biggest aviation giant would achieve such a breakthrough for so little, and more importantly, from small town Indonesia? The GE experiment is just one small example of how drastically the business world is changing. Thanks to Google and 24/7 connectivity, Raghu’s second point about the commoditisation of intelligence is also easy to see. But I am not sure if the real impact of this knowledge-is-free-and abundant age is fully appreciated and understood.
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It might be time for us to think differently, and give right brain development its due share of focus going forward
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In a class I gave to 30 emerging leaders from different companies recently, I posed the following three questions: 1. What skills and mindsets determined professional success until the mid-90s? Why? 2. What disruptive changes began in the 90s, and how are they shaping the global business landscape today? 3. What skills and mindsets are most important for professional success today and in the next 10-20 years?
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The group found no difficulty in answering the first two questions accurately. In essence, knowledge was power until about the mid90s. The more specialised knowledge one had, the more one was likely to succeed. As Daniel Pink nicely puts it in his wonderful book “A Whole New Mind”, our left brains have made us rich in the last century. Thanks to the knowledge-is-power era, we now live in a world of abundance, where we have an amazing array of choices for anything we want to buy or experience. However, as knowledge is becoming free and easily available, and as computers are replacing human tasks (and thinking) at an alarmingly fast pace, is knowledge likely to remain the key to professional success going forward? My class rightly determined that it will not. However, there was no agreement about the answer to the third question. Some said relationships, others said caring leadership, while still others said integrity.
So we discussed the third question at length, and concluded that the following three abilities will determine success going forward: 1. Symphony Making: The ability to think big picture, and to integrate seemingly unconnected elements within and between systems in order to find holistic solutions 2. Connecting Deeply: The ability to touch people’s sense of meaning and happiness 3. Designing for beauty: The art of creating solutions that are visually and emotionally appealing
The three abilities combined together is what we call Integrated Thinking. To paraphrase the words of Daniel Pink again – in today’s “conceptual age”, right brain acumen will be equally if not more important than left brain acumen. If Pink is right, the implications are huge, particularly for Asia. While educating and developing our kids, we in Asia place a disproportionately high emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Someone studying liberal, fine or performing arts is not always considered smart enough. With some exceptions, while evaluating candidates for key jobs, we still largely regard left brain (STEM) skills higher than right brain skills. It might be time for us to think differently, and give right brain development its due share of focus going forward. While the education sector is beginning to do its bit, Asian corporations will serve themselves well if they incorporate right brain development within their employee ranks. So far, we do not see enough evidence of this happening. As we partner with companies across Asia to help develop leadership and management skills within their organisations, we routinely work clients’ competency models. In five years, we have seen only one example where an organisation lists Integrated Thinking as a core competency for success. Other than this one, we are yet to see any hint of right brain emphasis in competency models or corporate curricula. If you approve or oversee talent development for your organisation, it might be worthwhile looking at your mix of offerings to make sure you have the right balance.
Thinking about following questions should help: 1. How is the marketplace for our products and services changing thanks to automation, 24/7 connectivity and abundance? 2. What core capabilities determined our success in the last 10-20 years? How many of them were left brain skills versus right brain skills? 3. What capabilities do we need in the next 10 years? How should we build the new capabilities within our organisation?
Rajeev Peshawaria
CEO of the Iclif Leadership and Governance Centre, author of the Wall Street Journal and Amazon best seller Open Source Leadership (McGraw Hill 2017), Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders (Simon & Schuster 2011), co-author of Be the Change (McGraw Hill 2014) and a regular writer for Forbes, Rajeev is an out-of-thebox thought leader on leadership, management and corporate governance. He has extensive global experience in leadership and organizational consulting, with a particular focus on uncovering personal and organizational “leadership energy.” Issue 24 I February 2019
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FIVE DENIALS OF THE HUMAN BRAIN BY RAJEEV PESHAWARIA
Generations of human experience have taught us that the five principles discussed in this post are proven keys to success, happiness, and leadership effectiveness. Yet, most of us not only forget, but also flagrantly violate them in our daily interactions with people. We are quick to criticise others when they fail to follow the principles. Yet, when we ourselves are faced with situations that need their application, the brain conveniently goes into denial, and most of us default to the exact opposite and therefore negative behaviours. I describe the principles briefly below, invite you to reflect on the question posed at the end of each, and share a simple approach to train the brain on how to avoid the five denials.
PRINCIPLE 1: RESPECT MUST BE EARNED, IT CANNOT BE COMMANDED Recently, an Asian politician traveling in his car reached a toll booth. When asked to pay the toll, the driver informed the attendant that his boss was a Member of Parliament (MP) and was therefore entitled to pass without paying tolls. Aware of the rules, the attendant agreed but demanded to see the politician’s ID before letting the car pass. Enraged by the audacity of a “mere toll booth attendant” demanding his ID, the MP stepped out of the car wielding a gun and threatened the attendant. Later when the CCTV footage of the gun wielding MP was flashed all over national television, he made this statement in his defence, “I am a MP and therefore deserve to be respected.” Contrast the above with a scene I witnessed almost 20 years ago when I was an entry-level professional at an international financial services company. A retired former CEO of the company was visiting the office, and was making his way to each desk to greet employees. I noticed that as he approached each department, everyone stood up to welcome him. No one sat down until he had left the area even though he repeatedly told people to sit down and continue working. When I asked later why this was the case, I learned that when he was CEO, he took personal interest in each employee’s career, made it a point to remember their names, and “was there” for his people whenever they needed him. One coworker summed it up nicely by saying, “Standing up to greet him is our small way to salute him for the respect he gave us while he was the boss.”
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Question 1: Do you earn the respect of your people through your values-based behaviour, or do you attempt to command it because of your position? “…a conflict rarely means that for one party to win, the other must lose. Yet, we forget this basic principle when we find ourselves in a conflict situation. Despite what history has told us time and time again, instead of trying to negotiate win-win agreements, we act as adversaries and try to finish off our opponents.”
PRINCIPLE 2: THERE ARE HARDLY ANY ZERO-SUM GAMES IN LIFE Whether we like it or not, conflict is a big (and necessary) part of our professional and personal lives. The fact that constructive conflict leads to innovation and overall progress is well known – it is conflict that challenges humans to come up with solutions to pressing problems of society. Equally well known is the fact that in life there are hardly any zero-sum games. In other words, a conflict rarely means that for one party to win, the other must lose. Yet, we forget this basic principle when we find ourselves in a conflict situation. Despite what history has told us time and time again, instead of trying to negotiate win-win agreements, we act as adversaries and try to finish off our opponents. After years of hopeless and bloody conflict over the Israeli occupation of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, when President Sadat of Egypt sat down with Prime Minister Begin of Israel to negotiate in 1978, they were able to find a solution that worked equally well for
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both parties. Key to their success was the fact that they agreed to act as partners (rather than adversaries) to find a win-win solution. The original problem was: Who keeps the Sinai Peninsula. Once they openly shared their needs and interests – why each country wanted the peninsula – it was clear that Egypt wanted the peninsula back from Israeli occupation because of sovereignty considerations, and Israel wanted to keep it because of security concerns. Discussions also revealed that they both wanted peace in the region. After they agreed to sit on the same side of the table to find a win-win solution, the re-framed problem became: How can we work together to meet Egypt’s need for sovereignty while also addressing Israel’s security concerns? Eventually, Israel agreed to hand the peninsula back to Egypt on the assurance that it would become a de-militarised zone ultimately monitored by the United Nations.
Like John, many of us feel happy or miserable by comparing ourselves to others. In this sense our sources of happiness and misery are both extrinsic, and we have little control over them. A better strategy is to have clarity of personal purpose and values, and to judge the extent of our happiness and success from an intrinsic perspective. How we feel is, and should be, entirely up to us. We don’t need others to decide how we feel. For example, when faced with immense grief, the human mind has the power to choose between self-pity/ alcoholism or refocus attention on creating a positive future. Yet, we forego this choice and allow ourselves to go deeper into our misery. The fact is – no one has the power to make us feel bad, only we ourselves do. Conversely, we also have all the power we need to feel good. The question is not about what happens to us, but about how we chose to react.
This, and countless other examples in business, political and personal life show that most conflict can be resolved in a way that fully meets the needs of both parties. Collaborating with the adversary, however, is a prerequisite for such an outcome. Unfortunately, as well known as this fact is, most conflict remains unresolved because people see zero-sum games in conflict even while there are so few of them. In a majority of situations, a winwin outcome is possible.
Question 3: Who controls how you feel – you or other people and events around you?
Question 2: When in a conflict situation, do you always try to beat your opponents or do you invite them to collaborate on a win-win outcome? “Contrary to conventional wisdom, forgiveness requires huge inner strength. Those who see it as a sign of weakness are the ones that are weak, not the forgiver.”
PRINCIPLE 3: HAPPINESS AND MISERY ARE BOTH CREATIONS OF ONE’S OWN MIND From very humble beginnings, John rose to become a very successful trader at a leading investment bank. At a relatively young age, he became the Managing Director and head of the equities trading floor of the firm. By any yardstick, he was extremely wealthy and successful. His family and friends were suitably proud of him. However, when he compared himself with a few other more successful traders on the street, he began to feel inadequate. Even though he had already stashed away several millions in investments and bought the best of cars and houses, he felt miserable about the fact that a few others had more than he did. His need to prove himself finally motivated him to initiate trading positions well beyond his limits. Blinded by his ability to read the markets correctly, he was convinced that he would be able to reverse his large positions profitably long before anyone would find out about the limit violations. Unfortunately for him, the markets moved against him and he ended up losing a massive amount of money for his firm. He is now facing criminal charges.
PRINCIPLE 4: FORGIVENESS IS NOT A SIGN OF WEAKNESS Throughout history, revenge and violent aggression have prolonged conflict instead of solving it. Yet, the human race refuses to learn from its own experience. When we are attacked or harmed by someone in any way, the natural human instinct is to seek revenge. Why? Because we feel hurt and violated by the unfair act of the attacker. In this situation, it only seems fair to teach the attacker a lesson, right? Wrong! Imagine if Mahatma Gandhi had the same idea while fighting for India’s independence? His is one of the most powerful examples of leadership in recent history; yet, it is devoid of the use of any violent force or revenge. He fought the might of the British Empire with weapons of mass construction (not mass destruction) like simple truth, humility, non-violence, and forgiveness. The famous quote sums it all: “An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.” Imagine if after serving 27 years of a wrongful prison sentence, Nelson Mandela had ordered revenge. What would South Africa look like today? Instead of using the force of revenge, he used the power of forgiveness to build the foundations of the Rainbow Nation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, forgiveness requires huge inner strength. Those who see it as a sign of weakness are the ones that are weak, not the forgiver.
Question 4: When you are hurt or harmed by someone, what is your natural instinct? After initial anger and sadness, are you able to reorient yourself towards forgiveness?
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PRINCIPLE 5: HUMILITY AND EMPATHY FORM THE BEDROCK OF POWERFUL LEADERSHIP Since moving back to Asia in 2010, I have been struck by the high power-distance culture in most Asian countries. Be it Malaysia, Singapore, India, Korea or Indonesia, Asians revere authority and never challenge it. A senior person (as defined by hierarchy or age) is neither questioned nor given feedback, even if he is wrong. In our programmes and seminars in Asia we often ask delegates why they don’t speak up or provide feedback if they feel strongly about something. Repeatedly, we hear the same answer, “The Boss wants to hear none of it. We tried a few times, only to have our hands bitten off.” Conversely, we ask CEOs and other C-Suite executives if they really know what motivates each of their direct reports. Many answer in the affirmative, but based only on their assumptions and not on any deep knowledge about the needs, hopes and aspirations of their subordinates. On being asked a simple question “When was the last time you sat down with one of your subordinates to ask them,” most of them are unable to answer. In today’s increasingly complex world, leaders need to be both humble and confident. They must be humble enough to understand that they cannot create a better future alone. At the same time, they must have confidence in their leadership ability to co-create it with others. Being humble as a leader means making it safe for people to speak up without retribution, and keeping an open mind to admit mistakes or change opinion. Having confidence in one’s leadership ability is about practicing genuine curiosity and empathy in order to get to know what really makes people tick.
Question 5: Do you have humble-confidence? How can you develop it further?
So how can one avoid these traps? There are no magic pills, but the following three-step approach helps a lot in re-wiring the brain: 1. Think about the principles, refine them, and make them a part of your personal belief system. 2. Practise using them. Practise, practise, practise! 3. Make it a habit to reflect on your behaviour each time you violate one of the principles, and visualise doing it differently the next time. Over time, the principles will become second nature and the brain will stop denying them. This approach sounds simplistic but it is not. Science now confirms that the brain can change itself. By regularly reminding oneself of these principles, and by repeatedly visualising behaviour in accordance with them, new neural pathways can be created in the brain. Current research in Neuroplasticity – the brain’s amazing ability to learn new things
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and form new habits – is challenging the old notion that the brain’s ability is fixed and hard to change. In fact it is just the opposite. Neural connections can be re-wired simply by visualisation and practice. I have seen many people benefit from adopting the five principles, and have observed them getting better at applying them over time. Initially, it is difficult to go into collaboration mode when faced with a conflict. Over time, the brain trains itself to start looking for a win-win outcome right from the word go. Similarly, while it initially seems unimaginable to forgive someone who hurts you, once the brain is re-wired, forgiveness becomes a habit.
So go ahead and re-wire the brain. Because you can!
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This was the message I received recently. As someone who loves to help others work towards realising their ambitions, I hope it inspires people to get out there and do whatever it takes to create incredible success stories. In response to the question, I wrote: “… Everyone nods along to all the advice out there. Everyone thinks that what they read online is great and that they should ‘really breathe some life into that idea, soon.’ But few people act consistently with deliberate intent to be better than they were yesterday, and to keep building on that progress. To stand out, all you have to do is put everything you’ve got into working towards achieving the goals you set yourself. As the saying goes, if you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way; if you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. Standing out is easy… simply commit to taking more steps forward than most other people are willing to take.”
Have You Been Listening To Sound Advice, Or Just Noise? BY ROSHAN THIRAN
The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
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I love to read articles and advice on how to be successful - but how can I stand out when everyone is following the same advice?
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So often, when I have conversations with young people and they ask me how to stand out, succeed, go their own way, and follow their dreams, I can sense they’re looking for a magic formula. It doesn’t work like that. Nuggets of advice The best advice anyone can give is that you have to realise that you are 100% in charge of your own life and its direction. This means that any ambition you have can be reached, as long as you’re willing to put in the hard work, commitment, time and dedication to get to where you want to go. The next piece of advice comes with a caveat. Some people have certain life circumstances that means they’re unable to make the kinds of choices they would like to make. While “everything’s a choice” is technically true, it’s clear that the ability to make life-changing choices is much more difficult for
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some than it is for others. With that in mind, I offer the following piece of advice for those who are able to make use of their relative good fortune and decide the direction of their own lives. You’ll succeed a lot quicker if you drop the excuses. Read to lead It’s particularly true when it comes to reading (a powerful way to maximise your potential). People often tell me they have no time to read. Usually, I’ll ask them if they have a tougher job than being the President of the United States. When they say ‘no’, I share how former President George W Bush had a competition with his Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Christian Rove, to see who could read the most books in a year (this was when Bush was serving as President). At the end of the challenge, Bush had read 95 books to Rove’s 110 – the President found the time to read roughly two books every week. Reasons vs excuses To stand out takes a lot of work and, to many, that’s off-putting. Fewer people than you think have the patience, the passion, the perseverance and the work ethic to follow their dreams. Dreaming is nice and easy; bringing dreams to life is another thing altogether. It’s the excuses that tend to hold us back. It’s important to remember that ‘excuses’ are different to ‘reasons’. If you can’t start a business because you’re a full-time caregiver for an elderly relative, that’s a reason – it’s an end point. An excuse would be to say, “I can’t start a business because I don’t have enough money.” Excuses are the shields we use to avoid the possibility of failures. Noise or sound advice? We can listen to the wrong advice that’s either well-meaning but unsuitable to us, or it’s simply misguided. Don’t get me wrong – unless it’s blatantly terrible advice, we should always consider the input of others. However, we should learn quickly to separate good advice from those that hold us back and narrow our potential. When it comes to having an edge and standing out, British writer George Monbiot offers some excellent advice. He focuses on journalism, but the advice can be adapted to just about any field or profession. He writes: “… You are told to travel, in other words, in precisely the opposite direction to the one you want to take. …
“The advisers say that a career path like this is essential if you don’t want to fall into the ‘trap’ of specialisation: that is to say, if you want to be flexible enough to respond to the changing demands of the employment market. “But the truth is that by following the path they suggest, you are becoming a specialist: a specialist in the moronic recycling of what the rich and powerful deem to be news. And after a few years of that, you are good for little else.” As we can see from Monbiot’s words, most people are given the same advice, and most tend to follow it for two reasons: 1. It comes from a place of authority (even the experts can get it wrong). 2. It’s just easier to follow what someone else tells you to do than to walk your own path. In a way, everyone does follow the same advice – the safe advice, hence why many don’t stand out. Few people follow the advice that truly makes them feel alive, the kind that strongly resonates with what they really want to do. The trouble is, while the advice sounds good, it also takes dedication and hard work to reap the rewards, and so most simply don’t follow it. Here are questions to ask yourself: • Who do you want to be? • What kind of life do you want to live? By taking the time to think about these questions, I hope you’ll find the inspiration and the courage to do what 90% of others fail to do. Concluding thoughts For what it’s worth, here are five suggestions to stand out from the crowd: 1. Always give much more to others than others give to you. 2. Make your giving unconditional: it’s not giving if it comes with expectations. 3. Look beyond your specific area of interest for the truly valuable lessons that will help you to grow. 4. Learn to love the process of your passion and work hard at it. Success is always dependant on the amount of effort you put in along the way. Give your all. 5. Find the time to read. Let’s set a challenge to see who can read the most books in a year!
Roshan Thiran Roshan is CEO of the Leaderonomics Group. He believes that everyone can be a leader and make a dent in the universe, in their own special ways.
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WHAT FAILS US AS LEADERS, AND HOW WE GET OUR BREAKTHROUGHS Leaders must capitalise on failure to achieve greatness BY JACK CHUA
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” -John F. Kennedy Most of us have been told, at one point in our lives, that it is okay to make mistakes, as long as we learn from them. In practice, however, this is something that does not occur often enough. Paradoxically, most of us are brought up with a strong societal pressure to perform. Success defines our worth, while failure discredits us in the eyes of others—often inviting blame and retribution. Despite the costs of failure, history has shown that the sooner we come to terms with our mistakes, the better our chances are of developing towards greater success. Those who are unprepared to learn from their mistakes, end up in a worse position than those who do.
His many failures include flunking his college entrance exam three times, being rejected 10 times by Harvard University, and even failing to secure work at KFC. Rowling, known globally for her Harry Potter novels, is also no stranger to failure. She was rejected numerous times by publishers, while living as a single mother on benefits. Solution: Having a ‘growth mindset’
Let us examine how some leaders overcome the impediments that prevent people, or even institutions, from learning from their mistakes; and extract some leadership insights from their success. IMPEDIMENT NO.1: WE ARE DISCOURAGED BY FAILURE Repeated failures often lead to helplessness, low self-esteem and giving up. To many of us, people like Jack Ma and J. K. Rowling seem superhuman because of their ability to get back on their feet after encountering numerous failures and rejections. Having a “growth mindset” is better than a “fixed mindset”. Ma is one of Asia’s, if not the world’s, top business magnates who founded the e-commerce company Alibaba. 14
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This is opposed to a “fixed mindset” where one believes that any failure is a sure indication of one’s personal inadequacy that cannot be changed or improved. Whereas someone with a fixed mindset will think “I am not smart” or “I have no talent” when they fail, someone with a growth mindset will think “I need to put in more effort” or “I must try a different approach.” When Ma started off, most people thought he was crazy. His advice for young entrepreneurs reflect his growth mindset: “Before 20 years old, be a good student. . .before 30, follow somebody, work for a small company. . .(where) you learn to do a lot of things at one time. . .it’s not which company you go to, but which boss you follow. A good boss teaches you differently.” He added, “At 25 years old, make enough mistakes. Don’t worry. You’ll fall, and you’ll stand up.” Rowling, on her dozens of rejections, had this to say: “Believe me, neither Galbraith (Rowling’s alter ego) nor I walk around thinking we’re fab. We just shoot for ‘writing better than yesterday’.” IMPEDIMENT NO.2: WE ARE ASHAMED OF MAKING MISTAKES Humans are built with a psychological immune system. We may want to be strong, independent, intelligent perfectionists, but reality proves us wrong by throwing challenges that test our limits. Many of us react to challenges by building an emotional wall, or defence mechanism, to safeguard ourselves from the shame of making mistakes. Shame motivates us to conceal our mistakes, rather than act on them in a constructive way. Solution: Wholeheartedness or the acceptance of vulnerability
Brené Brown, author of the bestseller Gifts of Imperfection, brought the concept of “wholeheartedness” to public attention. Proud of her Texan heritage, Brown recounts a time when her attitudes toward success were based on being a strong woman who was independent, perfectly in control of life, and emotionally unfazed by whatever obstacles that were thrown at her. Her life changed when she undertook a grand research project to uncover the traits that make an individual strong. After interviewing hundreds of individuals, Brown’s research took an unexpected turn.
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One of the keys to success is having the right mindset for learning, or what psychologist Carol S. Dweck calls a “growth mindset,” where one believes that success comes from actively taking on increasingly harder challenges that stretch one beyond his or her comfort zone.
She realised that the people who had the happiest and healthiest way of dealing with disappointments in life were those who courageously and wholeheartedly accepted their personal flaws or vulnerability.
Those who dealt with their problems by denying their own weaknesses often led themselves down a path of depression, stress, and substance abuse. Her TED Talk on vulnerability has garnered over 24 million views. Its message resonated with many around the world, prompting her to set up a training company to help professionals deal with the issue of accepting vulnerability. The relevance of wholeheartedness has gained traction in the area of team management. Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunction of Teams and president of consulting firm, The Table Group, wrote that feelings of shame and the desire to shield one’s vulnerability can start a chain of events that lead to distrust between team members, interpersonal conflict and the eventual breakdown of teams. IMPEDIMENT NO.3: WE HIDE OUR MISTAKES Most of us will be shocked when we look at the statistics on accidents in the healthcare industry. A 2013 study in the Journal of Patient Safety found that around 400,000 patients die prematurely each year in the United States of America (US) due to preventable harm in hospitals. Dr Gary Kaplan, chief executive of Virginia Mason Health System, identified a key problem that plagues hospitals today—healthcare professionals are not open about their mistakes.
Accepting your vulnerabilities is the happiest and healthiest way of dealing with disappointments.
He found that when mistakes were made, doctors and nurses constructed communication barriers that prevented any information from coming into the open. Doctors under-reported the incidence of medical errors; hospital staff feared to question the bad decisions of their superiors; and euphemisms were used to sugarcoat the issues. Issue 24 I February 2019 15
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Solution: Open communication
Solution: ‘Learning culture’ vs ‘blame culture’
Practising an open communication is key to learn from mistakes.
Pick a “learning culture”, rather than a “blame culture”.
To encourage open communication, Kaplan implemented a Patient Safety Alert protocol—a 24-hour hotline where staff members are incentivised to report any potentially harmful error that they find.
To deal effectively with complex problems, organisations need to substitute the “blame culture” with a “learning culture.” We need to take a serious look at the problem and focus on solutions. Maybe the protocols need to be revised; or multiple viewpoints are needed to scrutinise the quality of a product; or certain procedures need to be automated to reduce human error. In the book Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed documented the numerous instances where even experts and top managers, due to their reluctance to own up to their mistakes, bring about even more devastating outcomes.
After some initial resistance, the staff of Virginia Mason accepted the idea when they found that they now had the power to learn from the mistakes of one another and prevent costly errors before they occur. Today, Virginia Mason has received numerous accolades for its safety protocols and is ranked as one of the world’s safest hospitals. IMPEDIMENT NO. 4: WE BLAME OTHERS Error-denial comes in other dangerous forms. “Blame culture” is a common occurrence in organisations that lack open communication. In a “blame culture,” people are more interested in pointing fingers at one another. Symptoms of a “blame culture” can be seen especially after a failed project, when managers throw a post-mortem meeting, which quickly devolves into a witch-hunt to identify the scapegoats. Many of us feel a strong need to judge others, as we believe it is only fair that wrongdoers are severely punished to prevent similar problems in the future. The problem is that blame is a doubleedged sword. The more we feel the need to blame others, the stronger our fear of being blamed when we ourselves commit an error. Ultimately, blaming distracts us from fixing the real issues that we face. According to Dave Zwieback, author of Beyond Blame, “blame culture” springs from the failure to realise that failure is multifaceted and finding a single “root cause” to a problem is often too simplistic and pernicious. Such thinking allows managers to come up with comfortable and convenient answers to complex problems.
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The term “black box thinking” gets its name from the device which records what goes on in an aircraft. The black box is crucial for assessing the factors that contributed to aviation mishaps so that safety procedures and mechanisms could be improved. The philosophy of examining accidents to make improvement to organisational procedures has been vital for reducing the number of aviation accidents. According to Syed, in 1912, the US Army lost eight out of 14 pilots in plane crashes, and nearly a quarter of pilots in aviation schools have died during that era. In 2014, there were only 0.41 accidents out of every one million planes that got off the ground in the West—a significant drop in fatalities after years of painstaking improvement. IMPEDIMENT NO. 5: WE UNDERESTIMATE THE NEED FOR EXPERIMENTATION There is an inspiring story in David Bayles’ and Ted Orland’s book Art and Fear. A ceramics teacher assigned two groups of students a pot-making project. The first group was told that they will be graded on “quantity”; they had to produce as many pots as they can. The second was judged on “quality”; they had to produce only one pot per student, which will be graded on beauty. Curiously, at the end of the course, the group that was judged on “quantity” produced pots that were more exquisite and refined than the other group. What happened was that the “quantity”
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group made one pot after another, and gradually improved their technique with each successive pot; while the ones who focused on quality sat down and theorised about the perfect pot before starting to work on it. The lesson learnt was that even in creating art, much depends on trial, error, and refinement. Solution: The art of experimentation
Are we ready to fail? Like most of us, famous leaders who have succeeded have also failed considerably, facing gruelling disappointment, fear and shame behind the scenes. It is how we deal with defeat that distinguishes the winners from the quitters. The crucial ingredient is always the ability to turn every failure into a learning opportunity. Thomas Edison was once asked if all the thousands of failed experiments he had conducted were in vain; his famous reply was this: “I know several thousand things that won’t work.” So, are we ready to learn the thousand things that won’t work in our lives?
Experimentation is crucial in order to find solutions to problem Experimentation is, in fact, a crucial step in developing efficient solutions to complex problems. In the real world, perfectionism only goes that far in helping us achieve the ideal result. A lot of issues are unpredictable until you start working on a project. A good example of this is in software development, where developers would cobble up a minimum viable product (MVP)—a product with only the basic workable features for potential customers to try out. Issues with the product (and there may be many at this stage) are noted and fixed by the developers, and this process is repeated until most of the creases are smoothed out. To give an example, software engineer Drew Houston, made many mistakes during his initial plan to implement his idea of creating an online file-sharing service. Frustrated with his tendency to misplace his thumb drive, he decided to create what would later be known as Dropbox. He described the process of perfecting his product as a “very gruelling experience.” Aside from problems of getting funding from investors and running the routine operations of his business, he also had to repair many of the problems in his early product. “One day you are on top of the world; you get the first article written about you. The next day there is a huge bug and the site is down and you are tearing your hair out,” said Houston, whose company went on to be valued at US$10bil (RM 41 bil) in 2014. When asked about his success, he stated that “there is surprisingly little magic” to it. Successful leaders, he said, “get groups of smart people together, and try to make the best decisions they can, solving one problem at a time. Then, (they) just do it over and over again.”
Jack Chua
Jack Chua majors in psychology and currently works as a researcher in the field of psychometrics. He is also a regular Leaderonomics writer on leadership topics.
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Are You Growing Your Brain? BY ROSHAN THIRAN
The best leaders have a healthy brain A few years ago, whilst I was teaching leadership in Switzerland, I met brain researcher Terry Small and he posed a very interesting question: What is the most important part of your body with regards to leadership? I immediately answered “the brain.” Our emotions, intellect, knowledge and expertise all reside in the brain. And he answered “Absolutely” and posed a second question: “So if your brain is critical to leadership success, how many books on the brain have you read?” I had to pause for a second as I knew he was right. If the brain is so important to leadership, why aren’t leaders more interested in knowing how to develop and grow a healthy brain? Thus began my exploration on the brain and leadership. The brain is involved in everything we do. In thier book Primal Leadership: Realising the Power of Emotional Intelligence, Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee demonstrate that leaders selected solely on the basis of IQ and technical ability lack the necessary emotional competencies to lead effectively. They argue that high performing leaders have both high EQ and IQ levels. Both are directly connected and controlled by the brain. The limbic system in the brain controls your emotions, impulses and drives whilst your neocortex is the part in your brain that IQ, knowledge and learning is managed. Human emotions are brain-controlled and spread charismatically whenever people are near each other, even with no verbal contact. When emotionally engaging-leaders were observed, their followers harmonised most readily with
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the leader’s ideas, and ultimately “caught” the leader’s mood. High-energy and positive leaders like Sir Richard Branson, effortlessly transfer their optimism to their followers whilst the negative ones wear down their employees. On the other hand, when leaders perceive a threat or are under stress, their brain acts differently and an “Amygdala” hijack happens where they act on impulse instead of reason. A person with high emotional intelligence vetoes this hijack but an “untrained” brain will result in an “Amygdala hijack” and a reactionary response. Wang Laboratories, a top technology company in the 80s was destroyed by a bad decision that was highly emotional by its then leader, An Wang. A leader’s ability to manage emotions is critical as emotions can compromise, or sabotage your ability to make effective decisions. Previously, I wrote about “gut feeling” and how our life’s wisdom and experiences are stored by the brain and retrieved when we face an emergency complex situation. World-class leaders learn to develop their “gut feel” by managing an emotional brain part called the basal ganglia. Interestingly, our brain actually gets better the more we use it. The same with our bodies – the more you use it, the longer it lasts. Since 1986, scientist David Snowdon studied 678 nuns of Mankato, many of whom lived past 100 years – painstakingly collecting data, testing them and dissecting their brains after death. Among the findings of this nun study are: • An active intellectual life prolongs your brain’s lifespan and protects you from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.
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• Those who express the most positive emotions in their language live the longest. • The brain retains the capacity to change and grow stronger even in elderly people. • Those who teach and are constantly challenging their minds live longer than folks who don’t. • Strong bonding develops positive emotional intelligence which leads to a sharper mind. After their deaths, scientists were shocked to see that parts of the brains that generally wither with age did not become so in the brains of these Mankato nuns. How did these nuns manage to remain sharp and productive even after 100 years? Researchers have found that intellectual stimulation of only 20 minutes a day can spur new neuron growth. Brain exercises were the norm for these nuns, who lived by the principle that “an idle mind is the devil’s playground”. They wrote spiritual meditations in their journals, letters to their politicians and doggedly challenged themselves with quizzes, puzzles, and debates on current events. Your brain has the capacity to continue to develop and grow. A growing brain keeps mastering the competencies of leadership – everything from self-confidence and decision-making to empathy and persuasion to running effective meetings – till it gets it right. Our brain thrives on change and challenges. But in most cases, people resist change because of the pain of change. The brain’s main function is to keep you alive and resist pain.
turnaround of an organisation, one of the methods we deployed was to conduct mini-action labs where employees were given the opportunity to solve a problem, recommend and implement the solutions. Within a short period, there was high engagement and the turnaround was swift and effortless, driven by the employees. Compare that with numerous attempted turnarounds when a commanding CEO comes in and dictates the terms of the change. There is usually huge resistance to the change and failure. Leaders who leverage on brain-power will understand the need for engagement and employee participation in any change effort. Our emotional brain has neural pathways that pump out streams of good feelings when a goal is accomplished and reduces feelings of worry or frustration in achieving the target. Great leaders use this in their change efforts too. Many leaders still hold on to the old adage of leadership by command-andcontrol. Instead, empathy and social intelligence is the way forward. A newly-discovered brain neuron, called the mirror neuron, enables leaders to learn empathy. Mirror neurons, discovered accidentally by Italian neuroscientists monitoring a monkey’s brain, show that the brain has neurons that mirror what others do. “When we consciously or unconsciously detect someone else’s emotions through their actions, our mirror neurons reproduce those emotions. Collectively, these neurons create an instant sense of shared experience.” (Goleman/Boyatzis) Additionally, mirror neurons enable leaders’ emotions and actions to be mirrored by their followers. This role-modelling was never truly understood until the mirror neuron discovery. So, a leader’s action is more important than his words. The brain thinks in pictures; not words. Finally, if you really have no time to develop and grow your brain, the least you can do is keep your brain healthy. Small’s research concludes that by just eating a few prunes a day you “reduce the chances of Alzheimer’s disease by 92%”. The brain is 80% water so drinking lots of water keeps it hydrated and listening to Baroque music increases your ability to learn by 25% to 400%. Like you, I am on this new journey of discovering the power of the brain in leadership. For starters, why not invest 20 minutes daily of doing something outside your comfort zone? At least you will grow some new neurons!
Generally, the brain pushes back when instructed what to do. This is attributed to homeostasis, the movement of organisms towards equilibrium and away from instructed change. On the other hand, your brain will release an adrenaline-like rush of neurotransmitters when you figure out how to solve a problem yourself rather than being told how to solve it by others. When I returned to Malaysia years ago and helped in the
Roshan Thiran Roshan is CEO of the Leaderonomics Group. He believes that everyone can be a leader and make a dent in the universe, in their own special ways.
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Simple Mindset Changes To Evolve As A Leader BY JESSICA THIEFELS
“Today’s leader cannot afford to operate with a default style of leadership. They need to be more intentional about how they lead, moment by moment, remaining flexible and in tune with the various phases the people they are attempting to influence are going through in pursuit of their key objectives.” Mindset is an important area of growth for leaders because it affects how they interact with others, how they define success, and how they manage setbacks. This year, take a look at your mindset and consider how you can shift to become a better leader. FROM FIXED MINDSET TO GROWTH MINDSET Leaders with a fixed mindset believe that we are all born with the talents we have, but worse, that those talents should come naturally ‒ they don’t need to be improved or worked on. This means, “failure is deemed as an event which calls into question their true intelligence, resulting in these individuals experiencing significant struggles with setbacks or mistakes,” suggests Alaina Love, chief operating officer (COO) of Purpose Linked Consulting. As a leader, you need to be the example; if a simple setback sends 20
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you reeling into self-doubt, you’ll struggle to empower your team to take chances and make mistakes themselves. Yet taking chances is at the heart of any successful business. “What I didn’t realise then but live by now, is that risk-taking is essential in leadership. Taking risks involves moving forward despite fear and/or uncertainty. Until you experience discomfort, real growth and development do not exist,” says Dr. Sharon H. Porter, chief executive (CEO) of Perfect Time SHP LLC. That’s why having a growth mindset as a leader sets you, your team, and the business up for success.
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Make the change: Start an initiative or policy within your team or the organisation ‒ call it something like ‘Figure Out the Failures’, where everyone makes a point to dive into the ‘failure’ or mistake and find out why it happened and how to improve in the future. This goes for you as much as it does for your employees.
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A great leader is always evolving, taking cues from employees, themselves, and the world around them to improve and grow. This active evolution in leadership is even more important now than ever before, which Drea Zigarmi explains in a recent article in the Chief Learning Officer magazine:
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and experience to guide them to the answers. In business, this allows you to develop better employees; ones who are self-sufficient and empowered to do their job well. Rather than barking orders, you let the employee figure it out, using their own strengths to be successful. The key to this is making yourself available to be the guide; when employees need your assistance, you’re there to help them along. Make the change: There are a number of ways to become a guide and Partners in Leadership recommend a few ideas that you can use to cultivate this attitude company-wide: Provide mentorship wherever possible, incorporate feedback, and encourage peer coaching. FROM MY GOALS TO OUR GOALS There’s a certain amount of pride you have as a leader. It may even be what has gotten you to where you are today: a top-performing, successful manager or executive in a great company. Yet, when you keep everything on your plate so you can prove that you can handle it all, something else happens: you’re also the last one standing when something fails. Not to mention, your team is anything but engaged because they don’t feel connected to the projects they’re working on. As you switch from a ‘my goals to our goals’ mindset, there’s one framework to consider: servant leadership. In the article ‘Reflections from a Reluctant Servant Leader’, it explains that traditional leaders often crave this command and control ‒ ‘barking, yelling, pointing fingers and telling everyone around you what to do’. Because of this, when things go wrong, no one is there to take the fall with you; you’ve made all the decisions, without input from anyone else. As a servant leader who shares in the same goals with his or her employees, you share in both the wins and the losses together. Reflections from a Reluctant Servant Leader continues, “When you’re a servant leader, the people around you are happy to share in the blame. They feel some responsibility for any failure to succeed or perform, and they’re only too happy to speak with optimism about their plans to recover, to create a new or better solution.” Make the change: Set a meeting at the start of every month or quarter to run through team goals as a group. This is an easy way to start shifting your mindset from mine to ours. Better yet, encourage the team to share feedback on goals or add more to the list ‒ prioritising together truly makes the goals feel like theirs. FROM SAGE ON THE STAGE TO GUIDE ON THE SIDE These terms are often used in the education world about how to best lead a classroom of students, but they can both be applied to leadership in the business world as well. The idea is simple: rather than teaching to your students (employees), use your knowledge
FROM DECISION-MAKER TO DISCUSSION-FACILITATOR How often do you have discussions about on-going projects with your employees? Rather than simply asking for a status update or handing out an assignment, do you have a discussion about the progress or their thoughts on the assignment at hand? The Center for Management and Organization Effectiveness says that asking for status updates rather than having a discussion is often where leaders go wrong. “Another mistake that many business leaders make is not allowing for open, timely dialogue that travels up and down the organisation. Communication often comes only from the top down, leaving lower-level employees powerless to influence their work environment. Establishing better communication practices can help your employees feel empowered to grow and contribute to the big picture.” Similar to the idea of being a guide rather than a ‘sage’, going from decision-maker to discussion-facilitator puts your employees in the driver’s seat. Empowered employees are more engaged, and therefore more effective, making this a critical mindset shift. Make the change: When holding your monthly or quarterly goal meetings, make time for brainstorming and discussion. This is the perfect time to open communication, hear feedback, ideas, and wins and losses, all of which will affect how goals are handled in the coming weeks or months. MAKE A MINDSET SHIFT THIS YEAR If you’re dedicated to being a leader, you must also be dedicated to shifting your mindset towards one that will make everyone most effective and empowered. Consider where your tactics could be shifted to drive growth within your team, yourself, and the business as a whole. Jessica Thiefels is the founder and CEO of Jessica Thiefels Consulting, a content marketing agency. She has been writing for more than 10 years and has been featured in top publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur and Fast Company. She also regularly contributes to Virgin, Business Insider, Glassdoor, Score.org and more.
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When Do You Think Strategically? BY SEGAREN
To help you understand what we mean, think of yourself in entrepreneurial terms, as if you were a large corporation. To be successful, organizations have to be in the business of solving customer problems and providing valued solutions. Long-term survival depends on having the right business model, being agile and adaptable, utilizing smart marketing, and becoming a partner with the consumer. It is all about creating value now and in the future. Applied strategic thinking focuses this same skill and spirit on a personal level, regardless of your job, position, or rank in an organization. Smart individuals discover their personal business model and adjust it to meet changes in the environment. The whole point is that you can be more effective if you look to future and think about where you are headed and what you want to accomplish. You have a strategic landscape where you can 22
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Broader IMAGINATION
For us, being strategic means being an active force in creating and shaping your future. According to this definition, strategy is very personal. It boils down to seeing the future and creating choices for yourself. When you don’t have choices, you are locked into responding with robot-like tactical action. Being strategic means having the desire and capability to help create the future of your choosing and not limiting yourself to forces and dynamics that act upon you.
map out and visualize your world from a strategic perspective, as depicted in the following graph:
Narrower
The word “strategy” is used loosely by many people and in the writings of various authors. It means different things to different people. Sometimes strategy is defined as a plan and sometimes as a future goal.
ZONE III: INVENTOR Discover Improve Refine
ZONE IV: STRATEGIST Innovative Entrepreneurial Proactive
ZONE I: OPERATOR Expedient Efficient Reactive
ZONE II: PLANNER Anticipate Prepare Preempt
Present
TIME
Future
The horizontal axis on the chart represents the time dimension of strategy, ranging from the present to the future. We have found that when most people think about strategy, they are thinking about this axis, planning for and anticipating the future. But the other element of the strategic landscape is the level of imagination represented on the vertical axis with a range from narrow to broad.
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ZONE I: OPERATOR
Most of us try to be excellent at performing our present, primary function and don’t get a lot of time for strategic thought. Some people feel like operational robots in their jobs: stiff, mechanical, and not very imaginative. It is like having an 800 pound gorilla on your back. If you find yourself in this situation, you are probably caught in Zone I, OPERATOR. Like most people, you have probably figured out how to efficiently execute the immediate tasks you are faced with. In fact, you may believe that fulfilling these functions is really all you have the time, resources, and energy to do.
ZONE II: PLANNER
The next level of the landscape is Zone II: PLANNER. This is where you start to act strategically because you are looking forward and anticipating the future. However, the scope may be too narrow to maximize your full strategic potential. This doesn’t mean you won’t find strategic benefit being a planner; it is certainly a good place to start. At this level of the strategic landscape, you are looking further ahead in the context of your current routine. In this zone you are moving outside your box in terms of the future but without the benefit of a little innovation.
ZONE III: INVENTOR Zone III of the landscape is called INVENTOR. It is when strategic thinking is taken in a different direction because you are thinking creatively about the future, being innovative, and making valueadded improvements that will help you be more effective. In this zone, you are doing things differently and better. Inventing innovative services or ways to work does not require large-scale flashes of genius. It is simply a way of searching and asking a few provocative questions such as “Where do I want to go with this project?”, “How can I deliver a better solution to my internal and external customers?” or “Who will be my customer in the future?”
contributions to the organization, you must be on the cutting edge of new ideas and innovations that allow you to deliver distinctive results in better ways and with greater efficiency in the future, not just the present. In fact, strategy is all about improving your position to make a difference in the organization. If you don’t make a difference or add value, or if you allow yourself to become irrelevant to the organization’s fundamental mission, you will likely fail in the long run. The way to avoid failure or elimination from the game is to continually reinvent who you are, what you do, how you do it, and for whom you do it. Change provides the catalyst for this reinvention to occur and enables you to play a more significant role in the organization. You need the ability to manage, spark, work with, and harness change because it can be the greatest ally on a strategic journey. When we refer to applied strategy, we are not saying that it has to be a grand, system-wide, revolutionary strategic change. Rather, breakthroughs can be subtle and quiet, without a lot of fanfare, hoop-la, or hype. In fact, being a strategist in Zone IV of the landscape is taking advantage of change that could be very personal, private and internal. Examples include electing to alter your perspective or attitude about customers, deciding to learn a new skill or technique, or noticing that a new member of the team has some special talents and capabilities worth learning. These are all small but strategic moves that will improve your position or avoid obsolescence. As you can imagine, the ability to see change developing gives strategists a distinctive edge because they can uncover new ideas, prove their value, and repeatedly move ahead of the curve.
We call the final zone STRATEGIST, because this is the land of strategic opportunity. It is truly a blend of thinking both broad and long term. Here you will find the most valuable strategic breakthroughs, the ones that will lead to your long-term success. Zone IV is where you act as a strategist by thinking about the future in entrepreneurial ways. Here strategic thinking efforts are applied to things that are sustainable, distinctive, and extremely value added. Simply put, it is the way you creatively solve tomorrow’s problems today and shape the future the way you want.
Strategists know that the marketplace for their services and skills is always changing. Internal and external customers’ needs and preferences change, the business plans of your manager or business unit are routinely updated, technology is always advancing, and suppliers and co-workers come and go. When change occurs, you have two choices. You can dismiss it and say, “You know, I think I can see some things I can learn from our new manager,” or “I need to consider if this new supplier will deliver as fast as our old one did. Maybe I will do some checking into this,” or “ I wonder how we can take advantage of the new healthcare policy that was just announced.” The choice is clear. You can be strategic and proactive about change, learning to adapt or create new solutions; or you can let the change “swamp your boat” and pull you under, screaming and yelling, and playing the role of a “victim.”
Good strategists in Zone IV have an uncanny ability to anticipate, recognize, and convert changes into opportunities. They understand that long-term change is the fuel for progress on their strategic journey. Success in a strategic sense is the ability to capitalize on and exploit change, to turn change to your advantage. This means being able to perpetuate yourself (or your team) and discover special ways of contributing. To enhance your unique
Segaren is the Chief Operating Officer at Leadership Institute of Sarawak Civil Service
ZONE IV: STRATEGIST
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Bad Meetings! BY SEGAREN
Meetings are a very important part of the management process in any company. The main objective of meetings is to get the people involved in a project or problem to meet, discuss and come up with solutions. It is as simple as that. However, meetings are one of the most mismanaged of management functions in Malaysia. The complaints are usually focused on three areas, namely: • There are too many meetings. • They take up too much time. • They are not effective, i.e. a ball park figure of 50% is usually given. The question therefore asked is, “Why are there so many meetings and why aren’t they effective?” In a survey done by MCI, one of the leading telecommunications company in America, these were the following findings about meetings in Corporate America. a. Approximately 11 million meetings occur in the U.S. each day. b. Most professionals attend a total of 61.8 meetings per month and research indicates that over 50 percent of this meeting time is wasted. This comes to approximately four work days in a month. c. Most professionals who meet on a regular basis admit to daydreaming (91%). d. A large percentage (73%) say they bring other work to meetings and 39% say they have dozed during meetings. These statistics, although taken from America also mirrors the way meetings are held and viewed in Malaysia. Let us now look at the reasons of unproductive meetings.
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Reasons for Unproductive Meetings: Routine Meetings One of the biggest culprits of non-productive meetings. How many of us walk off to the meeting room on a Monday morning because we have to attend this ritualized ‘manager’s meeting’. Sometimes we do not even know what is going to be discussed and sometimes we do not even care. Worse still, there is nothing serious to discuss, but since everyone is around, trivial matters are discussed to justify the forum, to the annoyance of many of the meeting participants. Once a meeting becomes a ritual, then there is always the danger that people will find ‘something’ to discuss. Weak Chairman Meetings which have an excellent agenda are sometimes led astray because of a weak chairman. How many times have we’ve seen the following scenario taking place i.e. a decision is made at the first meeting after a long drawn out discussion. At the next meeting someone raises the issue again and the same discussion takes place one more time to the frustration of the meeting participants. Meetings also take a long time, because the chairman is not able to control the meeting well and allows some individuals who have ‘verbal diarrhoea’ to dominate proceedings. Another trait of a bad chairman is the fact that they loathe to making decisions on their own but want to try to reach consensus.
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3. Set Time Limit • The time limits set must be realistic and in congruence with the objectives of the meeting. Many management gurus invoke the rule that meetings should last no longer than 90 minutes. 4. Get the Right People • How many times people coming to a meeting and not sure why they’re there in the first place? • It is better to have a meeting with three people who can contribute rather than 20 people who are there just for the sake of being there.
Habit Unproductive meetings also rise as a result of bad habits. For example, when something goes wrong at the Marketing department, the usual temptation and habit is to call for a meeting of all department heads to ‘get their views’. The Human Resource Manager then goes for the meeting, stays quiet for three hours, then leaves without having made any contribution as he lacks comprehensive knowledge of the issue being discussed. He was there only because it was the requirement for all Heads of Departments to be there but only three individuals do most of the talking as they are the experts. Wouldn’t it have been better to just call these three people for the meeting? Deviation from the Agenda Due to lack of control, individuals try to bring up lots of other issues that have nothing to do with the original agenda. The discussions then deviate such that more emphasis is given to the side issues rather than the main item on the agenda. For example, the main objective of the meeting aimed at discussing the format of a new performance appraisal system, but however degenerates and ends up discussing the need for extra car parks for employees!
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CONCLUSION In any organisation, we can’t run away from meetings. Bad meetings are probably one of the most pervasive yet underestimated problem in many Malaysian organizations. On the other hand, good meetings can be a very powerful way to communicate and solve organizational problems. Managers must realize that it is a necessary management tool and what they have to do is to be able to use that tool as effectively as possible so as to create a positive impact on organizational effectiveness and efficiency.
MEASURE TO ENSURE EFFECTIVENESS MEETINGS 1. Is a meeting necessary? • Before calling a meeting, ask whether “there is a need for a meeting in the 1st place” • Consider the costs involved; value that would be received from the meeting would be greater than the investment in time & interruption of workflow. 2. The Agenda • Outline the main objective of the meetings . Limit the agenda to 3 points. • Agendas should be strictly adhered to. People tend to use the meeting forum to bring up issues that they have a personal interest.
Segaren is the Chief Operating Officer at Leadership Institute of Sarawak Civil Service
Issue 24 I February 2019 25
LEADERS
DIGEST
OBSERVE PROCEDURAL INTEGRITY WHEN YOU DO TARGET SETTING BY SEGAREN
TARGET SETTING is an important dimension of performance management. Therefore, strictly speaking, we need to adhere to specific aspects of good practices in this area. Firstly, it is important that targets are set based on the horizons set for the achievement of a strategy. It has to be realistically considered within what is achievable given the resources made available for a given time period. We cannot have a target set that is beyond the realm of reality. Besides resources, process efficiency is an important determinant in arriving at realistic targets. Equally important is the skill sets of employees. Given that all these are available, then, targets can be set at higher levels. However, the requirement may be slightly different, when we set subsequent targets. Subsequent targets must be seen on the basis of possibilities as against baseline targets which is based on limitations on the availability of resources, process efficiency and skill sets. In this regard, one important thing that all KPI owners need to constantly remember is that efforts need to be simultaneously made to ensure that an effective eco-system is put in place to support the achievement of the target set; making sure the availability of resources, process efficiency and skill sets. Secondly, it is important to make sure target setting is done judiciously and procedural integrity is appreciated to ensure that the end results are reliable and defendable when questioned. What I mean by procedural integrity is that when we set a target, we need to also have all the ingredients that constitute the outcome of the target determined. If a KPI is an index, then we need to make sure that we have the components determined before we set the targets. We cannot have the targets and its components determined at different times. This is good practice. Procedural integrity is a set of rational steps that we need to observe to ensure we don’t compromise on the integrity of targets. These steps also ensure we don’t change the targets as an afterthought. If this happens, it would mean that we manipulated the outcomes. We need not have to invoke personal integrity to make up for the missteps in procedural integrity as it is unnecessary if requirement for compliance is adhered to. This aspect of target setting is critical to ensure we have a near-perfect performance management system. All KPI owners need to adhere to this strictly. Finally, it is important to accept the fact that targets set and outcomes achieved is a reflection of good governance. Hence, KPI owners have an onerous job to set KPIs, targets and initiatives simultaneously to ensure organization’s resources are spent both efficiently and effectively on the strategy set out in line with the organization’s vision. KPIs Should Make You Feel Uncomfortable! If your KPIs or performance measures aren’t pushing you outside your comfort zone, then they’re wasting everyone’s time. If you only measure what you already know you can achieve, those measures or KPIs probably won’t take you any further. They’re just confirming that things are as you expect. They’re not pushing you to try harder, think smarter or reach higher.
Segaren is the Chief Operating Officer at Leadership Institute of Sarawak Civil Service 26
Issue 24 I February 2019
LEADERS
DIGEST
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Leadership is something you earn, something you’re chosen for. You can’t come in yelling, ‘I’m your leader!’ If it happens, it’s because the other guys respect you.
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- Ben Roethlisberger, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback
Issue 24 I February 2019 27
Building Leaders of Excellence
LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE OF SARAWAK CIVIL SERVICE KM20, JALAN KUCHING SERIAN, SEMENGGOK, 93250 KUCHING, SARAWAK. TELEPHONE : +6082-625166 FAX : +6082-625966 E-MAIL : info@leadinstitute.com.my