An effective leader

• Understands the capacity and potential of their reports, and supports them to challenge themselves to grow and learn without feeling like they’ve been thrown in the deep end without a life jacket.
• Understands and promotes the value of a strong feedback culture, providing clear, kind and actionable feedback without shaming, blaming or humiliating people for mistakes
• Is clear about expectations, and holds people to account for agreed deliverables and behaviours, whilst providing the required coaching and support to enable people to meet those agreements.
• Can express feelings and emotions to aid understanding and trust in a style, tone and setting that is not intimidating or provocative
• Seeks support from their Manager, People and Culture team or external coach to navigate what can be very nuanced and sensitive scenarios.

What other examples can you think of? I’d love to hear about your experiences?

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

Change projects are essentially about people. A successful change depends on getting people on board. But this takes us into the murky area of psychosocial risk. Should we stop initiating change because of the risk? Absolutely not. Whether you’re a leader or a senior technical expert, a core part of your role is to find new ways to create value for your organisation. If you stagnate, you don’t survive.
To keep people psychologically safe during change, I believe we need to support them in two distinct domains which I’ve named Change Agility and Change Stability.

1. Change Agility
This involves building the capacity to adapt and engage. It includes three key activities:
a) Context – Help people understand why the change is needed, framed within the organisation’s strategy.
b) Conversations – Create opportunities for one-on-one or small-group discussions. People don’t resist change because they’re change-resistant—they resist when they can’t make sense of the change within their personal frame of reference. Encourage questions and dialogue to help people align their mindset with the proposed change.
c) Contribution – Give people the opportunity to contribute. They might help design solutions to the challenge driving the change or shape how the change strategy is implemented. Involvement builds ownership.

2. Change Stability
This focuses on giving people psychological anchors during change. It includes three key activities:
d) Familiarity – Highlight what’s staying the same: familiar processes, systems, people, or routines. These act as a tether in unfamiliar waters.
e) Alignment – Reinforce how the change supports the organisation’s purpose, and how each person’s work continues to contribute to that purpose.
f) Grounding – Anchor the change in the organisation’s values. Not only should the outcome of the change align with the values—but the process of change should also consistently reflect them.

Managing change safely means recognising and addressing psychosocial risk. By supporting both agility and stability, I believe we can create the conditions for people to not just survive change, but engage, adapt, and thrive.

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

I start with the lowlights – the things that didn’t go to plan, that challenged me, that created pain or hardship, and I acknowledge that these are inevitable components of what it means to be human.

I follow-up with my highlights – surprises, unexpected good outcomes, achievements I’ve worked hard towards, people that have given me strength and support, and all the ways in which I’ve lived my passion and purpose. I make sure that for every lowlight, I come up with three highlights, to create a sense of positivity and help counteract any negative emotions arising from the lowlights.

Reflecting on my highlights puts me in a creative, positive and open state, which is great for generating new awareness, thinking and perspectives. How am I seeing things differently now compared to a year ago? What lessons have the lowlights taught me? What new strengths have emerged in me that helped create my highlights? What do I know about myself that I hadn’t been aware of before? What has changed in how I see myself, how I respond to others, or how I see the world around me? Is there one big truth that I will now try to live by?

Sometimes I’ll take myself down to the beach, to a nice park or to my favourite coffee shop to reflect. Some years I just sit outside in the sun with a bit of music in the background. Sometimes I like to be in a busy place full of life and atmosphere, other times I’d rather be somewhere peaceful on my own. And there are years where I write all my thoughts in a journal, and others where I just sit and purposefully ponder. Experiment and choose the style and setting that works best for you. And if so inclined, for an extra boost of positivity and connection, share your key lowlights, highlights and insights with someone important to you.

A lowlight for me in 2020 was being mistreated by an employer I had given my heart and soul to. Highlights included a weekend diving with the giant cuttlefish, joining a ukulele band, and completing my Advanced Coaching Training. And my key insights? I’ve shared some of them throughout the year – act on what’s most important, be kind and stay connected. I think my one big truth for the year is that we are less in control that we think – goals and plans are important but we need to keep a light grip on our attachment to them, as we just don’t know what’s around the next corner.

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

All my face to face training has been cancelled
Coaching provides a deeper and more personal learning experience than many group training programs; the coaching agenda is set by the client based on what they need at the time, rather than a pre-set group learning agenda that may or may not be relevant to every participant.

I’m working from home, I’ll have to wait till I get back to the office for any development
Coaching sessions can be arranged at any time and from anywhere that suits you. If you have a private space, whether its at your home office, in your garden or walking along the beach, we can coach.

I’m Zoomed out – please, no more staring at little people on a screen!
Me too. It’s draining physically and mentally if you’re trying to run group meetings or participate in on-line learning all day. One on one coaching can be done via any video call platform that works for you, using your favourite portable device, and means you’re just focusing in on one other person. Not such a strain on the eyes or brain – or ditch the camera completely and just use the audio, tapping into deep listening skills.

I’m completely pre-occupied in keeping the business afloat, I don’t have time for development
This is exactly the time for development; there is no road map to guide us through a pandemic, so we need the skills to lead, manage and work within a completely uncertain and rapidly changing world. We also need resilience more than ever coaching can help maintain both performance and well-being even during a crisis.

I’m overwhelmed with challenges
It can be hard to work out what to do and in what order during a crisis, we’re so busy reacting to the next challenge, everyone is expecting things from us, we’re constantly second guessing, and may be plagued with self-doubt. Now is the time to get some support to help plan, prioritise and get back on the front foot.

Work has slowed right down, I’m finding it hard to know how to productively use my time
This is a great opportunity to use the time to focus on your own personal, professional and career development; identify some development goals, grab yourself a coach and use the time to develop your capability.

I’ve been stood down temporarily while the business gets back on its feet
This is a difficult time socially and emotionally, our self-worth can take a battering, and it can be easy to lose hope and motivation; working with a coach at this time can help to formulate some achievable goals and provide the support and motivation you need to get back on track.

I’m desperately missing human connection
Coaching, apart from all its other benefits, offers deep and genuine engagement with another human being. Coaching validates our sense of who we are, nourishes the soul and satisfies our need for authentic human connection. Who wants some of that?

What are you waiting for? Now is your opportunity. Now is the time!

For a confidential conversation about how coaching can support you right now, Contact Jo

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

Why does this matter? High work engagement is linked to higher productivity and improved organisational performance. Gallup’s 2018 survey found a rate of only 34% engagement, and these figures have been pretty consistent since we’ve been measuring it. That’s a pretty grim and costly scenario for both workers and organisations. Imagine if your fancy new iphone only worked properly 34% of the time!

At its heart engagement is about the relationship between the employee and the employer, and like any healthy, productive and sustainable relationship, I believe that both the worker and the organisation have a responsibility to understand, manage and build engagement.

As a worker:

• Reconnect with why you do what you do – what was the reason you got into this work, why was that important, what do you need to do to re-kindle that purpose?
• Set yourself some goals for development – can you take on a new project, learn a new skill, stretch yourself in some way so you feel like your continuing to grow and learn?
• Get connected – if you’re becoming disengaged, chances are you feel isolated or unsupported, so who can you ask for help, who can you collaborate with, what can you do to build stronger relationships with your team, your clients, your external stakeholders or even those outside of work?
• Monitor your engagement, if your commitment, energy or interest drops for more than a short period of time, get some support from your manager, your EAP or an external coach.

As a manager

• Take a real interest in your staff – care about them as people, find out what drives them, and look for ways that work can meet their needs as well as well as the needs of the organisation
• Help your staff to grow – teach them, mentor them, help them identify and achieve learning and development goals that give them a sense of progress
• Give constant feedback – reinforce what they’re doing well, recognise improvement, acknowledge accomplishment, celebrate success
• Aim to make yourself redundant – maybe not literally, but figuratively! If your staff have the skills, motivation, tools and confidence to do the work that’s needed, they’re more satisfied and you’re now free to focus on the bigger picture
• Learn to coach – using a coaching style of leadership rather than an authoritative, coercive or telling style empowers staff to try, to experiment, to learn by doing, to take responsibility, to be accountable and to drive their own success

And if you’re part of the leadership team

• Your people management policies, processes and systems must be robust – that means the way the organisation recruits, employs, supports, develops, rewards, manages, and exits your people must be fair, transparent, aligned to organisational strategy and grounded in contemporary best practice
• Devote the time and resources needed to develop your managers to be outstanding people leaders
• Ensure employees have a voice – how do they give feedback, input ideas, get involved, raise concerns and be part of the growth and success of the organisation?
• Shine a light on organisational integrity – this is about organisational reputation and credibility; it’s how you’re perceived internally by your staff, and externally by your clients, your stakeholders and the public; and its foundation rests in the values and behaviours of the senior leaders and the culture they create.

I’m not sure we need large and complicated engagement surveys any more – I think we know enough to be able to identify disengagement when we see it, and to do what’s needed to turn it around. HR might take responsibility for driving the initiatives, but it’s the buy-in from the leadership team, the managers and the staff across the organisation that will drive the success of an organisational engagement strategy. What part will you play?

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

There’s no doubt that our top athletes are blessed with unique physical abilities, but these natural gifts are enhanced by a bunch of other factors which every single one of us, no matter what our circumstances, can tap into in order to be our Personal Best.

Build on strengths
Athletes recognise early on what they are good at, and work hard to develop their talent in that field. Everyone has strengths, but sometimes they’re hidden. What are your strengths? What are you good at? What energises you and makes you feel alive and strong, and how can you nurture this strength in your work or life?

Practice
Being the best in the world doesn’t come easily to any athlete, despite what it looks like from the outside. Athletes develop their talent over a life-time of hard work and dedication, often practicing one very specific skill for hours on end.  Psychologists believe it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve world-class performance in any domain. (That’s 4 hours/day, 6 days/week over 10 years for those interested!) And not just any practice – the hardest, most concentrated and deliberate practice possible. What are you doing to practice and nurture your talents and skills? You may not be aiming for 10,000 hours, but are you finding the time and opportunities to develop and improve yourself? And is your development focused, goal oriented and purposeful?

Mental focus
When training and competing, athletes have an extraordinary ability to focus their mental attention very narrowly on the task at hand. They’re not distracted by external factors such as spectators or weather conditions, or by their own internal thoughts and judgements. Whilst they’re subject to a huge range of emotional reactions, often within a short period of time (for example fear, pride, frustration, excitement and despair), they’ve learnt strategies for managing their emotions so they can stay focused on their performance. If, like most of us, you find that you are easily distracted, or that your emotions detract from your own performance or negatively affect those around you, then seek out ways to improve your mental focus. Sport psychology books and articles are a great place to start, or talk to a coach or psychologist about strategies that are right for you.

Get a coach
All sportspeople, regardless of their ability and level of competition, use a coach to help them set goals, overcome obstacles, maintain motivation, hone their skills, develop the right mindset and improve their performance. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t seek out the support of an appropriately skilled and objective coach to help us achieve our best in all areas of our life. If you want to be your personal best, you need to be able to monitor, manage and improve your own attitudes and behaviours, and a coach helps you develop the insight, motivation and skills to do this.

If you or your employees want to achieve a world-class performance in some area of your life, please email me for a confidential discussion about how coaching or a motivational presentation can help.  

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

Most of us aren’t dealing with life or death situations, but once we experience what feels like the psychological death that we can easily associate with failure, we spend the rest of our lives trying to avoid it at all costs. But can failure be helpful?

As a downhill ski racer, and member of the Australian Disabled Ski Team back in the 1990s, there was a saying – if you don’t fall, you’re not trying hard enough. I fell lots! But as a professional, as a leader, as a human being trying to do my best in life, I can be terrified of failure, and it often stops me trying. The anticipated psychological harm feels so much worse than the frequent and  inevitable bruises and bumps I got racing at speed down a hill with limited vision.

Leaders need to be able to fail so they can push themselves and their organisations beyond the limits of what they know, think and do. But it’s hard, because you have to over-ride the internal safety regulator that clicks on the moment we sense the potential for even small failures, and you have to be willing and able manage the biases, judgements and expectations of others around what it means to fail.

So, if you’re not sure if a project will succeed, and there’s valuable learning in giving it a red hot go, here’s some suggestions to help make failure an OK option:

Fail Fast
Get on to it quickly – drawing it out might put off the pain, but prolonging the agony or uncertainty can be unsettling for you and the team. If something isn’t going to work it might be better to know that quickly so you can recover and move on.

Fail Small
There’s no point in risking everything – start with a pilot, a short trial, a low risk part of the business, or with a group of early adopters, and see what happens. You can better manage any risk, and if it doesn’t work out, you’ve minimised the fall-out.

Fail Soft
I used to dread training on days when the snow was packed down hard as ice – I’d hold back just that little bit more, attempting to avoid at all costs, a fall that felt like landing on concrete. Training on softer snow meant losing some of my fear, and being able to push myself to the edge of my limits. What are the conditions that make it easier for you to fail with a soft landing? For example, pick your timing – maybe don’t try something risky until market conditions are relatively stable, or wait until the new merger is bedded down.

Fail Safe
Nothing is ever really fail-safe. Human beings are not perfect, accidents happen, the world works in mysterious ways. We can’t control our environment or each other as much as we think, or as much as we’d like. So let’s get used to things not working out in the way we’d hoped or planned, and be OK with that. That means shifting how we view our own failures, and it also means as leaders, we need to make it safe for others to try and to fail, by encouraging creativity, appropriate risk-taking, and a mindset of experimentation. Reward staff for taking a risk, protect them if it doesn’t work out, and institutionalise a process to tease out and share learnings from failed projects.

So learn to fail by failing fast, failing small, failing soft, and failing safe. But learn from what you did and didn’t do, from what happened and didn’t happen, from what went well and not so well, and recognise that this is the only way we make progress, as individuals, as leaders and as organisations. It turns out that failure is, after all, an option.

PB Performance

Looking under the bonnet can be a bit like developing greater self-awareness – the process of uncovering more of yourself and learning how you show up with others. And just like with the car, we can actively avoid taking a look inside ourselves for fear of what we might uncover, but in doing so, we run the risk of some disastrous personal and professional consequences.

What are we afraid of?
We avoid looking under the bonnet of our car because we can’t afford the cost of the work that might be needed, because it’s inconvenient having the car off the road while it’s serviced, or because we’re afraid the mechanic might uncover more than we bargained for. These concerns are equally relevant when we consider looking inside ourselves. There might be a financial cost of raising our self-awareness if we’re using a coach or attending a leadership development program; we might worry about what we might uncover; we might lose some efficiency or effectiveness while we’re doing the hard work of examining and shifting our ingrained patterns of thinking or behaviour; or we might worry about whether the expected benefits of the work will be worth the investment of time, money and effort.  And at the end of the day, what we don’t know can’t hurt us, right?

What are the risks if we don’t?
Is blissful ignorance the way to go? If we don’t take a look under the bonnet of the car from time to time, we won’t notice when parts are getting worn, and we’ll miss opportunities for fine tuning the engine that might give us better vehicle performance. And when we never take the time to look inside ourselves, we can miss the warning signs that things are deteriorating. We might miss the fact that we’re becoming reactive, negative, disengaged, inefficient or burnt-out. And we miss the opportunity to fine tune our own internal operating systems which inherently affect the way we show up with others, the way we perform and the way we lead. Self-awareness is the foundation for any shift in mindset or behaviour and is recognised as an essential component of effective and authentic leadership.

How do we do it?
Building self-awareness is like exercise – you need to make a commitment to the process, make time for it, and practice. Build habits of self-reflection, find opportunities to get feedback, and stay curious about your own behaviour, what’s driving it, and its impact on others.

• Listen to your internal narrative – this has such a strong influence on our external behaviour
• Notice your reactive behaviours – are there certain scenarios that tip you into being aggressive, controlling, arrogant, passive, distant, critical, complicit.or other habitual ways of operating that limit leadership effectiveness
• Recognise situations that trigger an over-reaction in you – one that in hindsight, or from another’s perspective, is completely disproportionate to the circumstance
• After a meeting or a significant interaction, think about what you said and did, how you intended it to be received, and how it might have been perceived differently
• Find ways to ask for feedback – don’t wait for the annual performance appraisal to find out how others experience you. Start with people you trust, whether they be superiors, peers, reports or people in other life domains – ask them to share how they see your strengths, and where they notice a behaviour that they perceive might be limiting your effectiveness
• Take a formal 360 assessment (using a reputable tool and process) to learn about how others experience you, and how this might differ to your own self-perception, then work with a coach to unpack what this might mean for you
• Journal your self-reflection, look for patterns, trends, insights and opportunities
• Stay curious – try to suspend your judgement about what you notice through self-reflection and replace with curiosity and permission to grown and learn.

When we make the effort to service our car, we’re ensuring we get optimum performance of our vehicle over time. When leaders make the effort to shine a light on the underlying thinking patterns that drive their behaviour, they gain access to an untapped reservoir of new choices, possibilities and potential for more authentic, sustainable and effective leadership.

PB Performance

Rather than blaming yourself, your boss, your organisation or the rest of the world, take a closer look at this lack of alignment. This means firstly taking a good look at yourself – understand your strengths, talents, interests, personality and values. Then work out which of these are not being expressed through your work and how critical this is to your job satisfaction. For example, your work may not be that interesting, but the environment is great and you can see how your job contributes to a broader purpose – this may be very rewarding for you. Or you may have a job that’s easy and interesting, but the environment is toxic – can you live with this?

Once you see a lack of alignment, ask yourself three questions:

• Can I change the aspects of my work that are not aligned with my core needs, strengths and values?
• If so, what and how?
• If not, can I accept the aspects of my work that I’m unable to change?

If not, you are probably at the point of having to make some serious changes. Think about changing roles within your organisation, seeking alternative work, or ask yourself if you’re up for a complete change of career direction! Whilst this sometimes seems daunting, surely life’s too short to be miserable for the roughly 50% of our waking week we spend at work.

When the wheels of your car are out of alignment, steering, efficiency and safety are all compromised. In the same way, if you and your work are out of alignment, you’ll soon go off course, suffer wear and tear and eventually burn out. Take control of your own job satisfaction – work out what’s really important for you and find the courage to seek it out. Don’t wait until the wheels fall off before taking action!

PB Performance