Elemental Wisdom for the New Year - Feng Shui at Work

In Feng Shui, the five elements — metal, water, soil, fire, wood — teach us how to enhance and balance the quality of our reactions and interactions. Metal refers to our mental capacities; water to our spiritual; soil to our sensory; wood to our intuitive; and fire to our emotional capacities.

Vital Instincts are “the elemental wisdom” we are born with; universal wisdom that applies to all human beings and exists across all cultures. Earth wisdom describes the timeless, insightful knowing of how we can evolve ourselves to the next level of greatness.

When we understand how our elemental wisdom impacts relationships, our environment and our organizations, we are able enhance all of our interactions and deepen our relationships, and open ourselves to greater possibilities for creating outrageous futures.

Applying elemental wisdom to our relationship with ourselves and with others, helps us achieve closure with our broken connections, and encourages our own healing process.

Healing Emotional Wounds
When we feel hurt, belittled, wrongly judged, cast out, neglected or isolated, we often react by projecting the negative feelings we have onto others. We blame them for what we are experiencing. We project our inner fears, hurt and weakness on others, and become critical of them. Sometimes we read into others words and feel judged and alienated – especially when our relationships are broken or not going well. Feeling hurt and rejected, we project “insensitivity” “blame” or “disappointments” onto others.

• Emotional Wisdom: When you are feeling “wounded,” work with your emotions. Avoid projecting your negative emotions onto others and try to view the situation as objectively as possible. Also, try to understand what triggers you — what people, what environments — and make choices accordingly. Remember, you can choose to disengage from negativity or respond to it in a healthy way.

Mental Wisdom… Dealing with Unmet Expectations
How good we feel about our relationships with others is integrally tied into our expectations – many may be unspoken yet fill us with desires and aspirations for how our future will play out. When our expectations are not met — when we don’t get invited to the party, or asked to join the project, or aren’t chosen for the promotion — we feel it in every cell- we feel rejected – we feel abandoned – we feel like an ‘emotional orphan.’. We become sour on life, making it harder and harder for us to experience the full robustness of true partnership and true collaboration. We turn inward. We get aggressive. We withdraw or freeze. We can be so caught up in our own internal experience that we miss an opportunity that is right in front of us.

• Metal… Mental Wisdom: Work with your mind. When you begin to imagine “worst-case scenarios,” catch yourself and realize you are imposing “feared implications” on the situation. Don’t be the trigger of your own fatal instincts. Create a new movie. Rewrite the script. Imagine the “best-case scenario” and allow for room for others to show up differently in your movie. Give people in your movie room to be who they are. Allow yourself and others room to co-create the stories. See how much more energy and possibilities come to life.
  

Sensory Wisdom…Moving from Inference to share Perceptions of the Facts
In life, everything connects. We connect to our environment through our senses, which connect to our feelings, to our minds, to our hopes, desires and beliefs about the world. Once we have an experience, we immediately try to put meaning on it by making inferences and filling in the gaps. We interpret things from own perspective of how we want them to be; we make assumptions and we draw conclusions. From these conclusions, we create beliefs about our relationships with others.

• Earth… Sensory Wisdom: Work with your perceptions when you start to turn data into stories that are not really grounded in fact – or stories in which you impose interpretations such as “foe” “us-them” or “if only they would.” . Catch yourself, and climb back down from interpretation to explore others perspectives and to seek to understand the facts as they see them, not just as you see them. Step back and step down to the ground — that is what grounded wisdom is all about.
  

Spiritual Wisdom: Protecting our Ego
When we feel hurt, belittled, wrongly judged, cast out, neglected or isolated, we often react by protecting ourselves from experiencing the same pain again. We avoid the person, making sure we do not come face-to-face with what is causing our distress. We stay clear. We put obstacles in our path and our adversary’s path so we don’t meet him or her again. When we are severely bothered, we turn to face-saving behaviors to protect our ego, meaning that we will go to all costs to ensure that “we look good” and “they look bad.”

• Spiritual Wisdom: Work with your self
  Notice when you “stand behind your ego” rather than face-to-face with others. By daring to be vulnerable, and you will discover greater love and support in your life than what you would ever imagine experiencing. Vulnerability actually triggers others to be truthful with you. Being vulnerable and honest, actually changes the playing field and asks others to meet you eye-to-eye, and heart-to-heart. Vulnerability says, “I am open to influence and I am open to you.” Being trusting with others is the single most admired quality of leaders – the best leaders.

Intuitive Wisdom: Managing our own Self-Talk
When we feel hurt, belittled, wrongly judged, cast out, neglected or isolated, we may react by creating a dialogue with ourselves about what we believe is happening. More often than not, this “self-talk” is more disabling than enabling. We grumble about our disappointments. We get angry. We make others the bad guys. By engaging in self-talk, we disconnect from others and we create noise inside so that we can no longer hear our inner guidance. Sometimes intuition and self-talk can become confused — only over time and with great sensitivity to the quality of guidance that comes from the inner voice do we learn to separate out the true intuitive inner guidance from destructive self-talk.

• Wood… Intuitive Wisdom: Work with your inner voices, tuning in clearly so that you can distinguish between negative self-talk and your true inner voice. Allow yourself to be still, to acknowledge your self-talk as a voice of concern for you. Honor your self-talk and thank it for being with you and for being there to guide you. Then allow space and openness to give your true inner voice a chance to emerge. Be sure not to let negative self-talk dominate your inner domain, preventing your inner voice of intuition from guiding you forward.

The Bagua – Start the New Year by Moving Energy in Positive Ways
While some people think of Feng Shui as esoteric, our work with this discipline suggests it is the fundamental wisdom behind all business and relationship success.

In the practice of Feng Shui, a Feng Shui master uses a Bagua (The Feng Shui Masters Tool for Energy Management), which is a template that guides them to explore the placement and relationship of things in the environment to see where energy is being generated, or depleted in the environment. The Bagua dimensions are: success, relationships, creativity and innovation, knowledge and self-cultivation, health, wealth, fame and reputation, helpful people, integration and balance.

The Feng Shui master helps people take out from the environment those things that deplete energy around those key dimensions, and bring into the environment those things that create positive energy around those dimensions. The same items in the Bagua, interestingly line up with important areas for business success.

As a New Year Ritual, Leaders should set up team meetings around the seven dimensions of focus and discuss how they want the New Year to unfold based on the learnings from the previous year.

The key areas for discussion are:

• Success - what does it look like - what do we want it to look like?
• Relationships - what are great relationships and partnership all about?
• Creativity and Innovation - what will drive us in the future?
• Knowledge and Cultivation of Wisdom - what are our best practices and how to we work together to surface them?
• Health - what kind of environments do we want to create to yield the best results?
• Wealth - how to we design our organization for greatest profitability?
• Fame & Reputation - how do we create a culture that reflects the best of our brand and how do we cultivate our brand for its greatest potential.
• Helpful People - who are the people we need to work with and build partnerships with for ultimate success?
• Integration and Balance - how do we create environments that enable us to work together to maximize our mutual success
  

We have found this process creates renewed "intention" for new success, clears out old beliefs that may be standing in the way, creates a focus for the futures, and drives a team forward towards a shared vision.

Judith E. Glaser is the Author of two best selling business books: Creating WE: Change I-Thinking to We-Thinking & Build a Healthy Thriving Organization - winner of the Bronze Award in the Leadership Category of the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards, and The DNA of Leadership; and the DVD and Workshop titled The Leadership Secret of Gregory Goose

Contact: 212-307-4386 - www.creatingwe.com

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Art - Conversations - DNA

Art and conversations go hand and hand. Conversations are how we express ourselves in the same way an artist creates paintings to express themselves.

Growing up my grandmother was an artist.. and I wanted to be like her... but I couldn't draw.

Then I went on a hunt for learn what drawing really was. All I knew is that I couldn't do it and she could....

Along my journey, I discovered some gems that really helped me get inside of what drawing was and wasn't... when I studied art history in school, I learned about how each artist became fascinated with "something" - and started to study that "something" at a level deeper than what most of us would do. If it was flowers, they would study flowers from every angel, with every change of light, with every type of bloom, close-up, and far away. By studying this one thing - the subject they were fascinated with - they caused their brains to move from "labeling" this thing as "flower" and started to activate their ability to see the "thing" in all the beautiful dimension of it's being.

My first big lesson came from letting go of labels and "falling in love" with a subject that fascinated my brain - and to see through the label to the shapes that composed the "thing."

I leaned that most things are made up of squares, triangles, circles, rectangles all shapes - all connected... so when you start to break down objects into shapes you can draw... you begin to create your first personal artistic lexicon .... your personal language for the way you want to express yourself... and in the world of art - everyone's art is their own. I visited the Miro gallery in Barcelona last year - and realized his whole life as an artist was the study of triangles, circles and lines... he never graduated from that fascination.... that was his palette.

I also found out that people we call artists - all can't draw what others draw.... they each have their own artistic materials they work best with, their own style, and way of seeing and expressing themselves.... so we don't have to become the artist of everything... just the things we want to express.

I found that I fell in love with Batik after seeing a friend demonstrating how she made dresses from fabrics that she had Batiked... it mesmerized me. Then I spent 5 years immersed in using these tools to express myself... wax, dye, fabric and jaunting tools... who would have thought? At the end of that time I had done 200 batiks and actually sold most... when I started my business in 1980 I stopped doing the artwork, and went into the business of helping leaders "see" how to bring their visions to life - by "seeing" new distinctions - this wisdom is the basis of adult learning.

There are many starts and stops along the journey to discovering where your artistic talent lives... and once we free ourselves of the "mythology" of what real artistic talent is ... and we stop telling ourselves we can't do it... and we find materials, or subjects we fall in love with... and we experiment - (never making ourselves wrong) the talent begins to emerge.

Then I found Betty Edwards book called Writing on the Right side of the Brain. Her book is one of the best to help us break out of old 'seeing patterns'... she confirmed that "labeling" is what stops the brain from seeing distinctions.... so when we label a "tree" a "tree" we stop seeing the tree, and we draw a stick tree of something that represents tree - an icon of a tree.

Her famous exercise was to take one of Picasso's charcoal drawings and turn it upside down. Then each person would draw what they saw... since it was now not a picture of a man sitting on a chair but something else - it tricked the brain to come alive and try to draw the lines and the relationships of one line to another... seeing enhanced, became more acute.... and it is from this 'waking up of the brain-eye connection' that each person's artistic abilities began to emerge.

Hope this gives you more food for thought...

Best wishes,

Judith

Judith E. Glaser is the Author of two best selling business books: Creating WE: Change I-Thinking to We-Thinking & Build a Healthy Thriving Organization - winner of the Bronze Award in the Leadership Category of the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards, and The DNA of Leadership; and the DVD and Workshop titled The Leadership Secret of Gregory Goose

Contact: 212-307-4386 - www.creatingwe.com

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The Challenge of Leadeship - Shaping DNA

Sitting inside the challenge of leadership development is one of your most important jobs as a leader: that is to help employees and colleagues learn how to work together to expand their collective ability to handle complexity and change, to think bigger and bolder, and learn how to use feedback to become better navigators of the organizational and marketplace terrain. The practices are mind-opening, mind-expanding ways to stretch one’s normal mindset and mental boundaries and open up previously limited thinking in the workplace.

Imagine that you have in your power the ability to trigger this potential shift in colleagues and in the organization. Imagine that you have the ability to set the stage for growth beyond what is seen at face value. Imagine that you could shape and craft the environment at work in such a way that you would see talent emerge that previously seemed hidden. What would that work place look like?

Creating a We-Centric Workplace

Ask yourself these questions and determine where you are in your evolution as a We-Centric Leader. How are you shaping the environment for success? In what ways are you creating environments that enable colleagues to:

Focus Outward on Creating the Future
Create Feedback-Rich Relationships for Mutual Success
Make Beliefs Transparent, and Create the Context for Collaboration and Co-Creation

Conversations and Language:
Are conversations healthy? This means do people focus on complaining about others behind their backs, or do people have face-to-face healthy discussions about what concerns them. Is there a lot of triangulation (people using others to tell someone what’s on their mind) or can people give direct feedback to others? Is there an ongoing conversation among the members of the community/culture? Are people engaged in working out how to get to the end game, or are people distracted with conversations about whose fault it is that things are not moving forward?

Is there a blaming/victim culture or an accountable culture? Is the enterprise being run by fear or hope? Are people connecting emotional states with the type of conversations taking place? Is there a level of wisdom and insight about how the words we use impact perception and outcome? Are people savvy to the levels of non-verbal impact on the culture and on relationships? Do people share a common language? Do they share a common reality? Can people tell the truth? Or is truth telling painful and hidden to protect people from reality?

Heart & Soul:
Is there a spirit of appreciation surrounding the organization, or is there a punitive spirit? Do managers and leaders complain about poor performance, or are they savvy in the skills that develop talent. Do leaders and managers understand how to provide developmental feedback? Do they recognize good work and effort, or only look for what’s wrong? Do managers and leaders always look at the past and complain about what’s not happening, or do they understand how to focus people or create what people want to happen. Are manager and leaders always focusing on problems or do they focus on opportunity?

Actualization of Vision:
Are leaders providing direction? Organizations cannot move forward without direction. More often than not, the enterprise has gone through a visioning process and has constructed some conceptual framework for elaborating the vision, mission, goals and strategies. More often than not, these constructs are Two-dimensional not three-dimensional with a vision too far out for people to grasp the implications at their level within the organization.


Too often the guiding principles are on paper, not manifesting in everyday life; then breakdowns occur in the actualization of the vision, and this causes the greatest breakdowns between leader and employees. Leaders think they communicate the vision and therefore employees should be able to implement it. What’s missing is the interpretation of the vision down to the level of “what does it mean to me and what do I have to change to get there.” It also means creating benchmarks for measuring success, and sharing those measures and using them diligently to create a culture of learning.

Networks:
Are employees collaborating and bonding across boundaries? Clanning naturally takes place when people work together. Its how people cluster together to support each other in the pursuit of their goals. Clanning launches the growth of customs and traditions that make up a culture and either strengthen it or weaken it. Some cultures form silos, which is where groups of people are excluded from others. This can be divisional, departmental, functional or sub-cultural. Healthy organizations create effective networks that allow information, idea and best practice sharing to take place through the enterprise and with outside vendors and customers. Sub-cultures are natural, yet they need to be monitored to ensure they don’t create blockages in the evolution of the enterprise.

The mental health of the organization depends on the “wellness” of the factions and sub-cultures co-existing and co-creating well together even in the face of their differences. When teams are in conflict, there may be excessive gossip from one team about the others, which can build up as if there were organizational factions at war. Remedy: Creating interventions to bring the groups together to harmonize or expand their common perspectives. Like an a-capella singing group – they can have different voices but when they come together they need to sing a common song.


Give and Take:
In what ways are colleagues engaging with each other for mutual success? An enterprise is like a community that depends on the sharing of resources, ideas and practices to survive and more so, to thrive in the face of outside challenges. A cultural fingerprint spans the dimensions from harboring to sharing. As colleagues learn to share, and trust, leaders mature and evolve the capability of sustaining trust in the face of challenges. Less evolved cultures are those that encourage lots of ideation, without the processes in place for ideas to develop and mature.

Cultures that encourage brainstorming with no support process for turning the ideas into reality create, over time, incredible frustration and disappointment. Unmet expectations abound and employees loose faith in their leaders and in themselves. A mature culture puts into place support systems such as Ideation Centers, and Innovation Centers. The management team resources projects designed to test and experiment to find new ways. Making mistakes is okay in the spirit of discovery. People are not punished, but rather rewarded for their efforts to come up with the next generation products and services; in maturing cultures, look for physical evidence of the systems and processes as well as physical environments in place to support experimentation.

Examine the reward and performance management systems to see support of experimentation. Listen to employees and hear how they are feeling and reacting to innovation and growth. What messages is the organization sending? Is there a way for people to contribute their ideas and turn them into reality? Is the culture protecting the old, or embracing the new?


Enterprise Mind:
Is there a feeling that “we’re all in this together?” Are employees and management linked as though they were “one mind?” Or is there tremendous fractionation and fragmentation about who we are and what we stand for? Are people thinking and acting from the “I” or from the “We”? Is learning taking place? Are people learning from past mistakes and using them to find new and better strategies. Are people doing this in collaborative teams or are individuals seeking credit for themselves? Is there an enterprise brand, and how developed is it? Do employees live the brand? Do they understand the brand? How do they engage with customers about the brand to build its power and magnetism? Is the brand only a logo, or products, or does it live a spiritual life engaging the hearts, minds and sprits of employees and customers? What efforts are taking place in the company to engage people in living the brand?


Spirit:
Is there a spirit of discovery and inquiry in the enterprise? Is learning taking place? Are people learning from past mistakes and using them to work better and smarter? Can people let go of the past, and embrace the new. Is there a feeling that everyone is connected and working to realize a purpose larger than any one person can encompass alone? Is there recognition of the importance of self-expression and developing leadership points of view? Are leaders pushing their ideas on others (creating an environment of compliance) or are they helping set the stage for employees to grow their points of view (take ownership and have strong commitment). Do people feel suppressed? What forums exist for employees to push against the current rules, and culture and create the next generation of thinking and being?

Raising Our Cultural and Organizational IQ
What kind of leader are you? Unaware leaders blame others for what is going wrong. Self-aware leaders are willing to look inside and learn what they are made of. They commit to exploring the dynamics of their own human nature, and are willing to address the impact they have on their organization’s culture. In doing so they learn what it takes to create an environment that enables colleagues to be fully engaged and motivated to achieve organizational and market place success.

Are you willing to look in the mirror and explore the dimensions of your leadership and how you influence others? Are you influencing in positive ways. If you are, the result will be nothing less than a profound impact on bottom and top line growth, and more importantly, your impact will create a cultural atmosphere that propels and sustains on going commitment and enthusiasm to achieve your organization’s audacious goals.

Vital Conversations - Narrow-cast or Broad-cast

Years ago, when I started working on strategic conversations, strategic planning and forward thrusts in organizations I realized that any model that takes people into "judging backwards" or "finding weaknesses" or "analyzing why things don't work" or "obstacles to success" all focus our minds on what we can't do, not what we can do.

From this perspective, we feel, on a conscious or unconscious level, that we can't achieve our goals. We often "narrow cast" the opportunities without knowing it, and we call that reality and we limit what we imagine could be possible.

Instead, what we should be focusing on is what we want to do -- and when we do that what happens is we open our minds to new energy and we "broadcast the opportunities" in our minds. In other words we expand what we imagine could be possible.

Creating the Future
My business focus is working with CEO's and their teams, and organizations to create the future. Most of my clients are Fortune 500 companies. When I started to use words like "aspirations" and "wishes" in the mid eighties, some CEOs and their senior teams thought I was quite "woo-woo" and some didn't want to enter discussions with this framing.

Others found it intriguing and did experiment with me on how to shift energy and shift mindsets. This lead to two decades of research, projects, initiatives and incredible growth inside of large companies who many would say "could not change."

Aspirations are the Key:
Those executives who were willing to enter a new space and search inside themselves (that's where aspirations live) for their most treasured hopes and dreams, and then experimented with articulating these deeper aspirations, became tougher mentally for the journey ahead because of the internal touchstone that was created by being courageous and willing to find their own place of greatest desire -- and share it with others.

Unfortunately, life teaches us that hoping for too big a dream creates disappointment -- especially when we don't get it, and so we often give up the dream for the reality. My two decades of work with transformation has taught me that when I am successful in helping create space for aspirations to surface, and when we can create the support team to hold the space open, and for redirecting our the energy and learn along the way, then big dreams do happen and everyone involved lifts to the next level of their growth and evolution.

This may sound a bit spiritual for some, yet those who experience it find the words to explain it and sometimes what is required are more spiritual or energetic words to capture the feeling of growth. Some clients call this a rebirth ... others transformation. Client's who have experienced this want more experiences like this because they energize, catalyze and create a positive ripple effect in their organizations.

Anyone who wants to read more about the approaches I'm experimenting with, please refer to my website for case studies, or to a variety of books and articles: http://www.creatingwe.com/.

Growth and Health – Cells and Organizations have Similar Needs
Also, I have a series in Executive Excellence Magazine on partnering. In the first issues of my series, I have linked three key principles, or conditions for growth. The principles that I've discovered came out of my husband’s research on cancer. He and scientist from NYU have found a disruptive technology for curing cancer by "reinstructing cancer cells how to be normal." They are an early stage research and development company and their work is an incredible contribution to the field of oncology, and with the inspiration of their work, I've connected it to how to create conditions for growth in individuals, teams and organizations.

I hope my work will add to AI's community of thought leadership by defining the conditions for AI practices to thrive.

I welcome further conversation... Judith

PS: My husband's site is: http://www.biomegalaboratories.com/

Difficult Conversations Don't Have to Be So Difficult

No one could believe it – Radio Shack let thousands of people go and they did it through email! Most people dislike delivering bad news in person, and will find any way to avoid it.

Making eye contact with another person who you care about, and with whom you need to deliver a difficult message – probably creates disappoint, upset or hurt – and is one of the most difficult things for human beings to do. So, rather than confronting these challenges, we often take to many alternatives which at the time seem to be less challenging or hurtful but later turn out to cause more pain.


Discussing/Delivering/Moving Through Bad News

Clouding the Issue
Two years ago I was asked to coach a CEO who was one of 6 reporting to a chairman. The difficult message the chairman wanted to give the leaders was that if she didn’t raise the performance of her team she would be asked to leave. Rather than giving that message, the chairman wrote a 6 page report that provided feedback and 98% was about how good the leader was. Embedded in the document were 2-3 lines which briefly stated that the chairman expected a higher level of performance from the leader. When I asked the leader what this document communicated to her and what she would do as a result, she said she was doing everything right and therefore was on the right track for her bonus.

Failing to be candid with others is one of the largest reasons why people ultimately leave companies. When we think we are doing the right things, we keep doing them. When key messages are embedded into larger messages, they get lost, are “sandwiched in” which means we can easily discount them or deal with them as less important.

Candor is Golden
In the July – August 1997 HBR article called Fair Process, the authors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne state that “people do care about outcomes, but they care more about the processes that produce those outcomes.” People want to know where they stand and why. If there is a difficult message they need to hear, employees would prefer to know the truth rather than a watered down or clouded version of it.

Candor supersedes fluff in situations where truth is the medicine needed. Fear of telling a person they have failed, or are about to be fired, or they didn’t make the cut are realities in life. We all know this. Yet we do more harm to an individual by trying to soft pedal our way through a difficult conversation.

Here are some questions to ponder, and address:

How should a leader address customers; shareholders; the press; employees? Are there different components of the message that should be shared with one group and not another? Who needs what type of information?

• Unmet Expectations: Most difficult messages come from a very common origin - unmet expectations. I failed to deliver the results you expected. You failed to deliver the results I expected. It is difficult because it contains embarrassment and disappointment – two things human beings dislike the most. It is a social embarrassment and when this is the core of the context, then people want to deflect the message, minimize it, blame others, avoid it – or any other tactic they can think of.
  Every difficult message has some dynamics that are unique to the situation. And each group of people may have different messages that are required to share, however there are a few things in common with all. These are all people – and in each case they are important relationships that you want to preserve and sustain even thought the message you need to discuss or deliver is different. If you don’t care about the relationship then you can say anything you want.
  In this case you can “data dump” or get the situation off your chest and act mindlessly about how you say it. Sometimes this can be venting or letting it all out if the issue is about your relationships with them.
• Caring: However in most other cases, if your goal is to share something that is considered “difficult” and you want to sustain the relationship, you need to set the context for a sustained relationship up front so the person knows that this may be difficult for both of you… and that you care about them regardless of how difficult the message will be.
• Candor: In addition you want to be explicit and honest about what you are sharing. Candor communicates respect, and that is what people want most. Not candor that looks like blame or anger, but candor that looks like the real truth.
• Failure to Deliver Results on Your End: For example, your company failed to make its numbers this quarter and it’s because of a delay in the launch of a product. There will be an impact on stock price, or deliveries, on employee bonuses - so the impact is across the board with employees, shareholders, press and even customers. Identify where the impacts lie, take responsibility for the event, ask people to accept your apology, explain your new strategy for making it better, and asking for their on going support or help in any way that is needed.
  

Do's

• Do be specific and clear about what is happening, rather than clouding the message with hyperbole
• Do focus on outcomes and especially those that may be good or better for the person down the road. They are focusing on the loss and you want them to focus on how to use this situation to grow and to gain something better than what they had before.
• Do deliver the message in person whenever you can. It’s felt as honest caring and does make a difference. It also allows a discussion about feared implications which are what often cause people to spiral down. Fear implications are “mental imaginations of the worst” and they can be controlled by a dialogue around the news. Conference call is next after face-to-face. Again it allows for dialogue. Emails or newsletters are last on the list. It turns something that should be personal into something very impersonal – and that is the wrong message to be sending. Some employees have learned their company is going down, or they will be losing a job in the newspaper… that is the worst example of how to do it right.
• Do be open to discussing the impact and implications of the news. People will always say after the fact, that when a leader was open to discussion, it makes them feel that the difficult news was palatable. They feel if the process of exchange is fair and open, with candor, respect and caring, then they can accept the news. Also, if there is dialogue they may come up with other ways of handling the situation that had not been revealed before.
  

A Process for Discussing Difficult News with Candor and Caring
When bad news can be set in a context for future growth, it is no longer seen as bad news - it’s seen as a new way to achieve success. Too often, we project “feared implications” onto a difficult conversation, and make it mean the worst case scenarios that our mind can conjure. As a result, we begin to fear the encounter so much that we either avoid it or we project fears into it that are beyond what is healthy – thereby shaping the actual impact in negative ways.

We can minimize the impact of this difficult situation by setting the context for the conversation first. First we need to start by asking ourselves a set of questions even before the conversation so we are prepared to move ourselves mentally from fear and protection, to a state of partnering.

Prepare Self

How do I want this person to feel after our conversation?
What can I do to allow them to hear the news with an open mind and heart?
How can I set the context for an empathetic exchange?

Engage with Other

1. Set the Context for Caring and Empathy: Includes everything from: "I need to have an important conversation with you... and I really spent time thinking about it before I called” to “I really care about you and what you are thinking and feeling about this.... and I believe this will be a very valuable conversation for us.” You can’t partner unless you care!
2. Explore Desired Outcomes: Share what you hope they will gain from the conversation. “I really hope this will help you grow... understand something important... take away the confusion... clarify... or deepen their understanding of ... what you say depends on the news.” Conversations help us grow!
3. Share Perspectives with Candor: Be open, honest and non-judgmental. People usually know when they have failed. Be empathetic, yet firm. When you find things that the person clearly missed... say "let me share some thing you can do in the future to make this phase easier to manage.” "What we’re going to talk about are the projects you were working on - I know they were important to you, and to me.... this was a very challenging project with lots of unexpected dynamics.... and at the end of the project the results were not what either of us expected.” Focus on the future so this is a learning experience!
4. Discover What’s Important to Both of You: It’s important to discuss the news in the context of a larger frame of reference. For example, if it's a person who failed to deliver results and they are scarred that they really disappointed you, you can say something like “I'd like to hear more about how this unfolded for you... what do you think worked well, what did not... what was the toughest part... etc.” Then share your perspective and together get a clearer view of what happened. Be sure you make as few assumptions or interpretations as possible - and listen well!
5. Agree to Next Steps: Discuss how to do this differently in the future. Make sure the person realizes how to improve, not just that they missed the mark. People are usually more responsive to "constructive foresight" than "constructive criticism" which sends most of us into protect behavior.
6. Contract for Success: Discuss how what you need to give and receive for this to be successful. How will you measure success? How often will you communicate? What will you each do if the changes are not working?

Judith

How to Respectfully Disagree

Our brains are incredibly sensitive to nuances and meta-messages - those very subtle "micro-inequities" or signals we send each other about who is up, and who is down - who has the power - who does not.

When we disagree with another person, we are stepping right into the dynamic "alpha-alpha" conflicts that set off people in the workplace, and sustain conflicts. Too often this dominates an organization leaving people feeling the are in a toxic, competitive environment.

Meta-messages
Disagreeing with someone is not just "disagreeing with their point of view, or the information they are sharing. Disagreeing can communicate the following "meta-messages" if not careful:

1. I am right, you are wrong.
2. "You stupid idiot" (YSI) - how could you think such thoughts.
3. How could you see the world that way.
4. You must be blind to the truth

Human beings has a gene for "truth-telling" and when people disagree it is felt at the deepest level. We all want to trust our observations and beliefs, however disagreeing can challenge us at the core of who we are, not just and rarely just at the informational level.

DON'T SAY

Don't say, "yes - but" - and then deliver your perspective. The "but" negates anything that came before that appeared like an agreement - and turns the conversation into a combat.

DO SAY

Alternatively, saying "yes and" creates an extended conversation that builds on ideas - it says, what you said is really important, and lets take it one step further... the "and" invites further development of the conversation and expands perspectives. I call this type of conversation "co-creating" and when people in the workplace make a shift to this way of talking - even with they don't fully agree with others, it moves people away from adversarial behavior and into collegiality.

DON'T SAY

With a boss, using the phrase "respectfully speaking" is also a way of saying.... "I know I should respect your position" - "BUT" I don't' so here goes with what I think.

DO SAY

I understand what you are trying to say... help me with this aspect... I'm having trouble seeing how to get from here to there. This is an invitation to talk more deeply about beliefs or observations, it takes you out of the positional dialogue where you are going back and forth one-upping or arguing about what is right, and it invites people to be open to influence.

Advocating/Inquiring
In summary, when we get into conversations that feel adversarial, we see people in "persuasion" using high levels of Advocating (their point of view). Sometimes they are Inquiring, however the intention behind it is to learn what the other person is thinking so you can turn the conversation back to "winning your point."

Sharing and Discovering
As an alternative, "agreements" come more easily when people are open to influence, and when we get into conversations that feel like partnering - where people share and discover from each other - open the context and framework to both gain new perspectives. Then agreements seem to be the outflow. Even if you agree to disagree - it comes with the spirit of respect.

Judith

The DNA of Leadership... Future Leaders

Old beliefs about leadership can stunt our leadership growth, unless we take time out to reflect on what leadership really is. Old command and control style of leadership is old – and ineffective for the world we are evolving towards.

Leadership is encoded in our DNA and is often undercut by erroneous and conflicting beliefs about authority, leadership, dominance, power, and winning. We too often accept many of our beliefs about these important concepts as “conventional wisdom” without questioning them. The problem is, these beliefs are not necessarily true—and, worse, they may be corrosive to healthy individuals and to healthy enterprises.

One of the most corrosive is the belief that authority is the same as leadership. In reality, this hierarchical, chain-of-command notion of leadership is a major contributor to organizational dysfunction. Too often, when we think of leadership, we envision the tough boss, the intimidating executive. Out of a desire to simply survive, we may even envision ourselves assuming a position of submission to such “leaders.”

Abandoning these outdated beliefs can be the first step in releasing your leadership insitincts and capabilities.

Developing Future Leaders

Our genetic leadership code develops over time by focusing on the following leadership mindsets, beliefs, and practices:

C-gene: Future leaders act, think and speak inclusively to develop co-creating environments. They understand how to develop inclusive environments for asking inclusive questions that open minds and inspire others to think co-creatively. By cultivating an “inclusive mindset” they continuously demonstrate greater capacity toward creating community than their peers.

H-gene: Future leaders act, think and speak appreciatively to develop humanizing environments where truth-telling abounds (candor and compassion). They understand how to develop engaging environments that honor the best strengths people can bring each other, and at the same tine are able to provide honest feedback to catalyze growth in peers, colleagues and direct reports. By cultivating “an appreciative mindset” they continuously demonstrate greater capacity toward compassion than their peers.

A-gene: Future leaders act, think and speak about the future and in doing so develop aspirational environments. They encourage people to discover their aspirations and ambitions and they encourage them to develop action plans to achieve their ambitious results. By cultivating “future site” they continuously demonstrate greater capacity toward growth and evolution than their peers.

N-gene: Future leaders act, think and speak about power and how sharing power – in the form of knowledge, support and other currencies creates a navigational environment where everyone benefits. In doing so develop navigational environments. By cultivating “sharing” they continuously demonstrate greater “we-centric” behaviors than others.

G-gene: Future leaders act, think and speak about learning, growing and nourishing each other, and in doing so develop generative environments. They have the ability to move from status quo, to experimenting with new and better ways of doing things. They take leaps of imagination to grow the business. They continuously demonstrate greater adaptability to the future that others.

E-gene: Future leaders act, think and speak about developing future leaders, which includes both nourishing them and challenging them, and in doing so develop expressive environments. They seize the opportunity for challenging people to take on bigger assignments, thereby expanding capability and capacity to develop a leadership voice. By cultivating “speaking up” they continuously demonstrate greater capacity towards mutual growth and evolution than their peers.

S-gene: Future leaders act, think and speak about ongoing evolution, which includes celebrating milestones, reinvention and sharing in a common purpose, and in doing so develop spirited environments. They are driven to take things to the next level. By cultivating a mindset of “reinvention” they continuously demonstrate greater capacity towards mutual growth and evolution than their peers.

Insight Driven: In-sight and outward-sight
What distinguishes future leaders is they exercise a combination of instinct and observation in making leadership decisions. They are mindful of when they are making assumptions and jumping to conclusions, and they will slow themselves down to take in new information that may shift the perspective on the situation.

At the same time, they develop the skills of independent thinking – and are able to hold a point of view different from others – at the same time holding the space for multiple perspectives to be shared and new insights to emerge.

The DNA of Leadership is based on the belief that our genes are encoded for leadership. By engaging with others to develop each other’s leadership capacity we are advancing our leadership capacity in our selves, our teams and our organizations. The 7 Vital Leadership Genes are the blueprint for the expression of our leadership genes.