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Keeping It Real: A Manifesto

What If Everything You Thought You Knew About Professional Success Was Wrong?

Guess What: It Is

screen-shot-2016-11-04-at-15-22-56Keeping it real?

There’s a worldwide agenda to do just the opposite.

Keeping it real is intuition, faith, trust and letting go. Keeping it real is understanding what success means on your own terms and having the courage to run after that.

Keeping it real doesn’t mean flaky, lightweight, vague or unmeasurable. And it certainly doesn’t mean dreaming at the expense of doing.

Keeping it real is getting things done informed by your biggest dreams, aspirations, goals and creative urges.

Business titans like Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos keep it real. Zen monks too.

A person who keeps it real gets things done, but does it in a way that doesn’t come at the expense of what they truly cherish and value.

Keeping it real isn’t something you accomplish. It isn’t a destination you arrive at, it’s the journey itself. It’s a practice, an art.

Keeping it real is the art of listening to the quiet, clear voice emanating from your soul and answering “Yes”. Go ahead and listen. You’ll hear it. The voice reminding you what makes YOU feel authentic, happy and free. The voice reminding you of the unique value that YOU alone can bring to this world.

Now, how will you answer that voice?

How will you start to pay attention to the way you turn up for that journey and how you keep yourself well, alive and thriving on the road? Not just in any superficial sense of that sentiment. But in a way that sets you up perfectly in mind, body and spirit?

Coming soon, I’m going to be sharing my Keeping It Real Manifesto. Regard it as the set of words that are going to shake you out of whatever current complacency you’re in and into a new conscious awareness of how you turn up for work and indeed live your life. To make sure you get first sight of it, make sure to sign up here.

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Why Wellbeing at Work isn’t Working and How it Can

50529631 - tired woman runner taking a rest after running hard in countryside road. sweaty athlete after marathon training in country road.

Over at City AM, William Turvill and Hayley Kirton wrote a compelling piece on current stress rates among bankers in London. Talking about recent research by MetLife, they report:

“40% of financial institution decision makers think their job is extremely stressful, with two-thirds (67 percent) considering resigning in the next year if their stress levels do not improve.”

The problem is of course not confined to the City. We can blame Brexit or whatever and, sure, that’s causing deep uncertainty and upheaval. But, from the perspective of my coaching practice, stress at work has been begging us to pay more attention to it for quite some time now. Global markets, the emergence of hand-held technologies, and the mushrooming of ways via which people can be accessed are all contributing to people blurring the boundaries between life and work. We’re becoming a culture that expects itself always to be on.

And companies know there’s a problem. In response to which, they’re hiring wellbeing experts with the aim of bringing coping skills and strategies on a whole raft of fronts. Mindfulness, for example, has become popular with some businesses running meditation sessions during lunch hours. Resilience coaching is teaching folks how to build their mental robustness. One to one talk therapy is available for many via their private health care providers.

What’s not to love?

But here’s the worrying bit:

It seems not everyone who could benefit from the support on offer avails themselves of it.

70 percent of those surveyed by MetLife believed that admitting to problems would damage their career prospects. And only 18 percent said their organization had a positive attitude to mental health issues.

A big concern, of course, is fear of reprisal.

Talk to people, and you’ll hear them list out the possible consequences of being out about being stressed. Lower performance ratings, smaller bonuses, poorer promotion prospects all get cited. And, with up to 20,000 job cuts looming in the City, the biggest fear of all is of ending up on the redundancy list as an easy way of being sidelined.

As any good coach, therapist, Occupational Health or HR person will shout at this point, the issue is that there’s still an enormous mental health stigma in the UK. That, of course, extends way beyond the realms of work. It’s still too easy not to understand, to marginalize, or – worse – to poke fun at people who for whatever reason are suffering from any mood or behavioral disturbance.

But while there’s a massive need across the board to do whatever we can to remedy this, I don’t believe it’s the whole answer to improving the take-up of wellbeing investment.

Instead, I advise business clients who are intent on creating wellbeing within their businesses to take a big step back, and reframe their approach to the challenge in the following four ways:

Four reframes to transform the ROI of your business’s wellbeing spend

From individual to cultural

The initiatives for which you’re currently paying are great. Don’t stop the mindfulness classes, or fire the coaches, or whatever. They can all, of course, bring immense help to the smart people who have for a moment lost their mojo or worse, and are willing to be open to the support.

But at the same time, take an honest look at how your culture creates illness rather than wellness. You know the kind of thing. The jobs that have conflicting reporting lines. The CEO sending emails at all hours of the day and expecting an immediate response. The boss finding it necessary to interrupt their worker’s thinking time with a, for them, urgent request.

These set ups and behaviors perpetuate stress. If you’re serious about wellbeing, you’ll change them. You’ll think instead about the kind of attributes that contribute to a healthy culture, and you’ll begin a program of bringing them to life.

From remedial to proactive

In writing this article, my trigger was concern about stress and how to fix it. And for many companies, the thing that prompts them to buy in wellbeing support is the same.

And, of course, if you have a stress at work problem, address it.

But what if you changed your paradigm away from trying to address illness, and towards creating wellness.

What if you didn’t look at things through the lens of trying to bring all the people in your business up to some average level of health and functioning? What if you dared to think they were worth supporting to be at the top of the wellbeing distribution curve and to develop within your business the kind of healthy environment in which your people could thrive?

How would you you focus your wellbeing budget in that scenario?

From intervention to strategic issue

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to consider wellbeing as a soft, nice-to-have in your business. Something that has no strategic importance to its performance.

I say this for several reasons.

First, people are in general becoming sicker.

All of which says to me that the costs of healthcare provision from both public and private sector are set to increase, putting possible strain on taxes and premiums alike.

But beyond the cost, there’s a huge business benefit to organizations whose people are well.

We’ve known for some time that employee engagement correlates positively with business results. Now, it turns out that wellbeing does too. Put simply, people who experience themselves as being in a positive state of wellbeing, and are engaged in their work, do extraordinary work for their companies.

Which to my mind is all the argument you need to put wellbeing on your company’s executive team’s agenda.

From being focussed on employees to starting at the top

Change starts and ends with leadership. Without the buy-in of the people at the very top, you kid yourselves that sustainable organizational wellbeing is possible.

And I don’t mean lip-service buy-in. I mean heartfelt buy-in.

Actions talk louder than words ever can.

For that reason, I advise senior business teams to review their own individual and collective wellbeing ahead of, or in tandem with, any other wellbeing activity that’s going on.

You’re at the top of your game, or you should be.

You wouldn’t expect Mo Farah to turn up for a race on a few hours sleep, weeks of multi-tasking and a diet of fags, pizza and endless cans of diet Coke. Why are you expecting yourself to be able to pull epic shit out of the bag when that’s exactly what you’re doing?

So, as you’re approving the budget for the next set of mindfulness classes, turn the spotlight on yourself and your leadership colleagues and ask, how well are we? How ready are we really on any given day or in any given week to do our absolute best? And how do we think more holistically about our own health and wellbeing in a way that means our performance is not just optimal, but sustainably so?

Moving forward

In the next weeks and months, wellbeing is something I’m going to be writing and saying much more about. Sign up here for updates to make sure you don’t miss out on the conversation.

 

Photo credit: Copyright: lzflzf / 123RF Stock Photo

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On The Business Benefits of Being Grateful

Love healsLove heals.

Two words that form part of our Keeping It Real creed. They have immense reach in the world beyond business. But could they be relevant within business too?

I’m sure Terry* was skeptical when we started talking about it during a coaching conversation.

Story

Terry, a Partner in a consulting company, was young, and keen to do even better than he already had within his firm. He had a team of Managers and Directors working for him. He found the younger, more ambitious ones quite easy to work with. But he struggled a little with people who were a little older than him; who were maybe good enough at what they did, but were topped out in their careers.

On an earlier call, we’d discussed this whole thing in general: how was it for him to manage people that he didn’t quite gel with? This challenge had clearly been around for him for a while as he shared with me conversations he’d had with this or that fellow Partner of colleague who’d coached him on this or that tactic he could use to try to get these people to change in some way.

I didn’t have any fresh tactics to offer Terry, but I did reflect to him the judgment that I heard in him. And wondered aloud how much of Terry’s issue was the people themselves, and how much was the way he was thinking about them? How much was about Terry changing, versus them?

And I wondered what might be possible if Terry could replace his judgmental thinking with compassion. I didn’t use the word “love” overtly, but that was what I was pointing to.

We didn’t then talk for a few weeks, but on the next call, Terry shared with me a huge breakthrough he’d had with John*, one of the people he’d found himself most struggling to manage.

Terry was honest and said that he’d seen John as a huge pain in the neck, always needing Terry’s time and attention, and instead of taking responsibility for making things happen, often seeking Terry’s prior approval.

Terry told me, that after quite a punishing week, he was driving home one Friday evening and John’s number came up on his phone.

“I just thought, ‘Oh God, here we go…'” he said, “but I answered anyway.”

He told me how John had wanted to update him on a client review meeting he’d done earlier, during which he’d discovered there was a prospective piece of add-on consultancy work. He wanted to run it past Terry because he was planning to do work on it at the weekend before going back to the client early the following week.

“At first it sounded like a really small piece, worth about £25K,” Terry said. “I had other proposals in the melting pot that week, all worth significantly more than that, and I just thought, why is this guy wasting my time on a Friday night? But all of a sudden I remembered the conversation you and I had had about judgment. And I stopped myself in my tracks.”

I just listened as he spoke.

“Something shifted in me. I just started to have the most enormous compassion, not just for John, but myself too. And I found myself saying to him, ‘Look, John, it’s Friday evening and we’ve both had long weeks. I’m sure neither of us is at our best right now. And actually, you don’t need to be working on it this at the weekend. Why not give yourself a break and let’s talk again on Monday?'”

“Huh,” I said. “And…?”

“It just diffused the tension I felt between him and me,” he said. “We even ended up having a joke about something.”

“And did you end up talking again on the Monday?” I said.

“We did,” he said. “I decided instead of another rushed phonecall, to actually invest face-to-face time with John. We ended up having a much different conversation than I think we’d have had if we’d just continued talking that Friday night. It was like, by Monday, two different people turned up.”

It seemed to me that the story would have been pretty cool already had that been where it ended. But he went on.

“Incredible thing is,” he said, “that because by Monday we were seeing one another in a different light, the conversation we ended up having about the client piece was different too. We got a whole lot more creative in looking at the problem John’s client was trying to solve, meaning that the intervention we ended up offering was worth about £200k.”

“Wow,” I said. We were silent for a while as we just held the whole magnitude of that.

“So, what did you take from all of that?” I said.

“It’s about what becomes possible,” he said, “when you bring gratitude and humility into the mix. I just found myself having huge compassion for John. It can’t be easy to know in your heart of hearts that no matter how hard you try, your career is going nowhere. And I appreciated him making the effort, irrespective. I also think that that had been the first time I’d honestly created real time and space for him; gave him my full attention and respect. The quality of our connection was therefor so much better. And so, it’s no wonder, we got a totally different result.”

Love heals

And that’s my point.

What Terry did there was, in a moment of feeling challenged, choose a loving, instead of a judging mindset, and the whole landscape of his relationship with John shifted, as did their collective business results.

Awesome!

And, I wonder, where and could you shift things on your business landscape? What results might that bring you?

*Names changed to protect confidentiality.

Copyright: / 123RF Stock Photo

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How To Speak Your Truth in Leadership Without The Sky Falling in.

truthAuthenticity in leadership gets talked about a lot.

Just Google the term: you’ll get over 20 million hits. Stand in the corner of any leadership development intervention (hate that term, but you know what I mean) and you’ll most likely hear it espoused. In fact the word “authenticity” itself appears on the list of values of quite a number of big organizations.

I get why it’s important: the more how you are in business and at work aligns to who you are and what you believe, the more resourceful and productive you can be. In leadership honest conversation can enable clear – if not always easy – progress. And results unhampered by hidden agendas and emotional baggage.

How easy is it to speak your truth?

But being yourself and speaking your truth is not always that easy.

I know you know that feeling. Something comes along that rankles with you. You have a strong point of view on it. You know you ought to put your opinion ought there. But the risk of doing so seems immense.

Maybe there’s an unspoken complicity in your business or team dynamic that things be done a certain way. And that how you want to do things breaks the taboo. You know that in breaking the taboo you stand to help things change and change for the better. But you fear that you run the risk at best of being judged as being disloyal. At worst of losing your job, your reputation, your career…

I know because I’ve been there too.

Personal story

Some years ago I was the HRD of a business within a much larger business. My boss was the UK HR board director, reporting to the MD. Let’s call them Dan and Phil. They were both powerful, charismatic men, with immense, strategic business brains and a phenomenal view of where the company was going. I loved working with and for them because of the level of access they gave me to big, sexy stuff. This was, in fact, a double-edged sword because often they’d drag me into work that was well over and above the already heavy work load me and my team had in serving our own client business.

But part of the thrill for me was that both of them *got* the importance of the whole people dynamic in business. They valued talent and performance.

And yet, paradoxically, there was an implicit value in the business that success meant working all the hours God sent. To my cost, I did the hours most of the time, as did my boss. In fact, at the time of this story, both he and I were going through our own painful marriage break-ups. But I was careful on behalf of my own team not to expect that because I was choosing that lifestyle, they had to too.

At one point, we’d bought another company and my team were dealing with the sea of changes you have to manage from a people perspective in that scenario. And we were doing it to some major deadlines, which meant that I asked my team, for a period of a few weeks, to put in the extra time. They were happily doing this and doing a phenomenal job of pulling things together, but as time went by, I could see them start to look weary.

One evening at around 7pm as we were all engaged in figuring something out around a desk in the open-plan office, Dan walked up to us and began a conversation with me that everyone else could hear.

He was buzzing because he’d just had a great conversation with the Phil. He’d persuaded Phil to consider something and Phil had asked for data to follow the idea up. Problem was, in his enthusiasm, Dan had promised to have the information with Phil the following morning.

I could see my people’s shoulders drop as Dan warbled on, because they knew what that meant: the 8pm finish we’d promised ourselves wasn’t going to happen, because we were going to be the ones to pull the information together.

And inside, I knew that on this occasion I had a choice. I could cave in and just get on with the unasked request to do the extra work because that was what the culture required of me.

Or I could speak my truth and push back.

For a few moments I did nothing other than just sit with the maelstrom of conflicted feeling going on inside me. I may well have gone and sat in the ladies to give myself space to breathe. I knew the right thing to do was to push back, but I feared that in doing so these two powerful characters would think less of me. Which was a concern because, at the time, I was seen as a kind of rock star HR person and I wanted to continue to be seen in that light.

I was quaking when I walked into my boss’s office and said:

“Look, Dan, you had no right to promise Phil that we’d pull that stuff together, without asking me if that was okay. The team is already working well above and beyond their normal workloads. If I just expect them to do this stuff tonight, they will do it, and the results will be good. But I don’t think it’s fair to expect. You and I may not have a life right now, and that’s a choice we’re making. But they do. And I want us to honor it.”

He went crazy at me. I don’t actually recall now what he said. Just that he ended up escorting me out of his office and slamming the door.

I was mortified. Cursing myself for being so stupid as having opened my mouth. I was sure that I’d be fired. But I was also sure that I was going to stand by my word.

One of the women said, “So, do you want me to start working on that thing for Phil?”

“No,” I said. “I want us all to stick with what we were already doing and call it a night when we get through.”

I could feel their relief.

Next morning I was in before Dan. As in fact was my whole team. He’d normally come by my office and say hi, but this day he walked past me, still clearly angry, and with his head down. I spent the entire morning feeling somewhat distracted. I was getting on with all my stuff, but I was sure I was going to be let go for insubordination. Or worse, that I’d become one of the people that weren’t on Dan’s Christmas card list, and be subjected to one of his drip-drip crusades of organizational bullying that would mean I’d end up leaving anyway.

As it turned out, later in the day a huge bouquet of flowers arrived at reception for me, with a note. “Forgive me.”

I walked along to his office to say thank you.

“Thank you,” he said. “I didn’t like that you said what you said, or did what you did. I felt stupid having to tell John that we’d have to rethink when he’d get his data. But I reluctantly came to see that you were right. I was not respecting you or your people. I’m sorry. I won’t make that mistake again.”

Now, not all the times that I’ve spoken my truth have gone this way. There’s another story I’ll save for another day that happened more recently where, on the face of it at least, the sky did fall in. Or so it seemed in the beginning. I have no sense now of how speaking my truth on that occasion affected the other person involved. But I know that it was transformational in helping me shape the direction of my life and work to this point now.

Ask yourself these questions:

If you’re in a situation where you’re feeling challenged to either speak up or shut up – be yourself or be some version of you that business requires – there are three core questions you can ask yourself.

1. What is your truth?

Be really clear. What’s your position on this thing that sits uncomfortably for you? If you can’t immediately be clear, just sit with the morass of feelings for a while. Center yourself with some meditation, or at least some deep breathing. Let your clarity emerge.

2. How comfortable are you with your truth?

Hopefully, with clarity, comes certainty. If you are okay that your position is okay, then you can speak it with gravitas and be heard, no matter the outcome. The worst place to speak your truth from is one where you yourself feel on shaky ground. That lack of conviction and confidence translates energetically and people pick it up.

3. How safe is it to speak your truth?

I didn’t consciously logic this out when I was in the grip of my own story, but clearly some part of me felt that Dan – and indeed Phil – would be able to hear what I was saying. But I know that, bottom line, there can been situations where your truth may fall on stony ground.

Sometimes self-protection is completely appropriate. And then you need to make a conscious choice on what best to say or do in order to be true to yourself regardless.

What do you think? How do you put your truth out there when you need to? Have you ever spoken your truth and lived to regret it?

Copyright: / 123RF Stock Photo

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What The Velveteen Rabbit Can Teach You About Leadership

25133834_mLeadership is a bit of a conundrum.

A lot of the world-class examples of what good looks like seem to be almost perfect. And yet, in my experience, the need for perfection is the very thing that all but guarantees you won’t succeed.

This theme came up in conversation with a client this week. She has just landed what some might consider a dream job, leading a major division of a big corporate. While clearly she has to keep all her stakeholders happy, she nevertheless has a high degree of autonomy around how to lead the business.

We sat the other day surveying the landscape of her new territory. The acres of stuff she has to get to grips with if she’s going to succeed.

First, having taken over from a successful predecessor, she has to ensure some kind of steady state on existing performance.

But then, she has an ambitious vision of how it can be different.

And she wonders how she can get people excited about it. “Engaged”.

At the same time as they’re running flat out to keep up with everything they’re already doing.

She has a big, demanding direct reports team. Just giving regular face time to them alone takes half her week.

Are there too many of them? Are they up to the job? Dare she deal with the performance management issues she knows are lurking there that her predecessor didn’t deal with, despite his success?

There’s the org structure too. Is it fit for purpose? Does it help or hinder business growth? How can she get the various bits of the jigsaw puzzle working better together?

Meantime she has a diary that’s running her, rather than her running it. Stuff just seems to get put in. How can she better figure what she should and shouldn’t be turning up for?

Oh yes, and there’s also life beyond work. Her children. Her desire to train for and run a marathon. Longer term desires to do some philanthropic stuff.

“Big agenda,” I said.

That took her to reflecting on how important it was for her to achieve things right across the board. To make her life matter.

“How can I be super-effective across all the important areas of my work and life?” she finally asked.

It was a genuine question. And she looked at me like I might know the answer. But I had another question:

“Can you be?” And…

“What happens if you aren’t?”

She took a deep breath at that point. Like it would be the end of the world. Like she’d somehow have monumentally failed.

Servant Leadership

Here was my client apparently wanting to be powerful and perfect across a whole range of things. And what we got to right then was the anxiety she felt under as a result. The pressure she was putting on herself to be almost super-human.

I didn’t think of The Velveteen Rabbit in the moment. Where I went instead was the concept of servant leadership, the essence of which is really simple: drop using power and authority as a way to get stuff done; instead put yourself at the service of those you serve – the board, direct reports, employees, customers.

And I’m not talking about this like it’s a neat technique.

I’m talking honest, in your bones stuff.

Come from service.

Robert Greenleaf explains it:

The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…

And:

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?

But coming from service as a leader requires a particular ingredient. One that many, many leaders struggle with.

See, if you want to lead from a place of service, you have to put a lot of ego away and allow some vulnerability in.

You have to get out of your own head, trying to make sure you look good, to stepping into other people’s shoes and really understanding what’s important to them.

You have to stop being mechanical. Going through all the motions that you think you *should* go through in a senior job. Let down some barriers and embrace some spontaneity.

Like we said last week, fail sometimes.

Acknowledge when you don’t have the answers.

Be honest about where you are emotionally and not like some wind up ra-ra machine.

Stop being so brittle and controlled and allow some softness.

Allow yourself to be okay to be you: imperfect and yet still enacting your vocation to lead.

In brief: you have to be real.

Vulnerability and The Velveteen Rabbit

It was only after I’d finished talking with my client, leaving her with the homework of reading Greenleaf’s book and reflecting on what she made of it in the context of her challenges, that I remembered the story of The Velveteen Rabbit.

If you haven’t read it, or not in a little while, you should have a look. It’s the tale of a toy rabbit given to a child one Christmas.

It has so many take away messages about all things work, business, life, love…

All revolving around this thing about being real.

See, the Rabbit starts off in life all self-conscious, trying to figure his role in the hierarchy of the toy cupboard, concerned about what other toys make of him.

Life in the toy cupboard certainly seems to have its politics. Certain toys thinking they’re more important than others. More real than others. And being disparaging or bullying of other toys as a result.

The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real.

He wonders what it means to be real. He begins to ask himself what the even means. By chance he finds himself under the mentorship of the Skin Horse, an old toy whose seen it all in the toy cupboard, and is unaffected by the shenanigans. Rabbit asks horse what it means to be real.

He said, “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Life conspires to have Rabbit promoted, however, to being the little boy’s main toy. He ends up being chucked about and loved by the boy so much that he’s no longer in perfect nick. But by then he’s no longer thinking about how pink his ears are, because he no longer cares.

He has served his purpose. He has been an important transitional object in the little boy’s whole growing up.

But the most meaningful thing that happens to Rabbit is that, when the child’s nanny dismisses him as being “just a toy”, the little boy insists that he’s not. And that he’s REAL.

Toy or Real?

And that’s the question I think it’s valuable to ask yourself if you’re in a big leadership job.

Is it just another way to turn up and play out your needs of power and perfection?

Or are you going to be real in it?

As we talked through the long list of my client’s challenges, we looped back to her wish to have everyone excited about her vision. To have them all pulling in her direction.

“If you want to get people behind your vision,” I said, “help them articulate their vision. Of course you’re going to be a co-creator in that process. You’re going to inspire and lead in the conversation. But let your people make it theirs. Then you don’t need to coerce them. And you’ve played your role full-out.”

That’s what I think being real looks like for her.

How will she go about it? Will she? I guess time will tell.

And, look, I know this talks easy and does hard. Which is why the whole Keeping It Real thing is a theme we’re weaving into our business here and will be doing and writing more about. So, for more and for further thoughts make sure you’re signed up for updates.

Meantime, jump on the comments below and let me know what lessons you take from The Velveteen Rabbit.

Picture credit: Eugenio Marongiu