Story Telling Patterns

"Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs."
Pearl Strachan, author

Our stories either build or break down relationships with others. At work, we interact with colleagues and hopefully create networks and build alliances. Every day in your business, there are a million interactions that will create either a positive or a negative dynamic among people. While these interactions may seem small, they begin to add up to a larger pattern. We are either spiraling up or down. We are either building a stronger sense of I or a stronger sense of WE.

Building Stories - Two Scenarios

Storytelling, like the words we use, comes naturally to human beings. Stories are how we share what we are seeing, feeling, and sensing inside. Storytelling is, in essence, our view of reality.

Storytelling begins as an I-centric capability enabling us to state and often defend our point of view. In organizational life, storytelling shapes the way we view the world individually and collectively, and it can have positive or negative consequences for the health of the enterprise. Learning how and when to shift from an 'I to a WE' perspective in the stories we tell is essential to organizational health and growth.

We create stories based on our point of view-based on our function, our title, and our respective level in the hierarchy. "Where we sit" can determine "where we stand." Because we each see the world through our respective lenses of experience and beliefs, it's not hard to understand how colleagues engaged in different functions or operating within different environments-even within the same organization-can come to tell their stories about the enterprise from the vantage points of their own separate silos.

IMAGINE

Imagine you just joined a new company in a new position, and you have been given the responsibility for achieving success. Your predecessor was unable to pull it off, so you have some extra pressure to deliver results. Imagine you accept this responsibility and start your job tomorrow.

• What story are you telling yourself about this job, about your role, about what you want to accomplish?
• What story are you telling the new employees who will be meeting you for the first time? Your staff? Your customers?

Imagine the following situation, which I'll call Scenario 1. As you do your due diligence and make your assessment of the situation, you uncover concerns that you didn't see before. The talent seems to be light for the task ahead. You sense that the resource base is also light, and you realize that the job is bigger than you thought.

The business problems also seem bigger and you can't get your arms around them. You are new and believe you are supposed to be in charge of the situation. You decide not to share your fears and worries out of concern that others will think you are not capable of being a leader or are unable to handle the challenge. How will the story you hold inside, and the story you tell outside impact the future success of the business?

Your Story: The story you tell yourself in this scenario is that you need to be tough, and show confidence. Sharing your concerns will weaken your leadership, and asking for help or involvement will weaken your power.

Their Story: The story your direct reports tell each other is that you are not interested in their perspectives and are a command and control leader. They band together and are fearful of what you do, lack trust in your assessments and resist your approach.

As an alternative, let's look at Scenario 2. You come aboard, do your due diligence, and find problems are more difficult than you originally anticipated. You immediately bring your direct reports into your assessment and, with open and honest communication; you create an engagement process to build positive energy and focus. You include others in discovering new and exciting ways for building the business. In Scenario 2 you are more open and transparent with colleagues, you express your desire to create sustainable partnerships, and you are willing to coach and be coached to help yourself and others grow.

Your Story: The story you tell yourself in this scenario is that while you were hired to be the leader, you weren't hired to have all the answers alone.

Their Story: The story your direct reports tell each other is that you are an incredibly inclusive leader who really cares about their perspective, wisdom and insight.

Telling Stories

We establish our power through our stories and story telling with others. Stories shape our sense of the world, our relationships, and our future. Stories communicate our aspirations, our hopes, our intentions, and our beliefs. Most importantly, stories convey the hopes and dreams we hold in our minds about the reality we believe we are living in or want to live in.

We tell our stories all day long. We tell them to customers, to colleagues, and to our friends and family. But the person we tell our stories to most of all is ourself.

Human beings have the power and ability to make up dramatic stories with any conceivable ending. Our stories can portray a future full of promise and accomplishment or one that is dark and empty. It's all stuff we first make up and then come to believe. Once we believe our story, we live it out the way we visualize it in our minds.

Like it or not, we are storytellers. Our main audience is us; and our life develops from the stories we create. In other words, if we wake up one morning to discover that our finances have been wiped out because we purchased a bad stock, our story could become that we are a loser and stupid, or we could tell a story of our ability to take risks and go after the Big One. Our stories influence how we see ourselves and how we approach the life challenges that come next. Stories can empower or dis-empower our life journey.

How are You Using Story Telling at Work?

Think about the power of stories to shape your future. How are you using story telling at work? Scan and monitor your stories and reflect on how you are using stories to either lift you up or push others down. Are your stories I-centric or WE-centric?

Are you using story telling to:

• Prove you are right?
• Build stronger relationships?
• Inspire people to step into new challenges?
• Break from the past and create the future?
• Blame others and make them bad in the eyes of others?
• Build people up and make them feel great about themselves?

Reflect on your story telling process and keep track of the themes that show up in your stories.

In the next issues we'll talk about the neuroscience behind story telling!

We didn't know if our ideas were strong enough of big enough, yet as we listened to each other's ideas, and became inspired by what others had to say - we did.

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; the DVD and Workshop titled The Leadership Secret of Gregory Goose; and editor and contributor of 42 Rule for Creating WE, a newly published Amazon bestseller.

Contact: 212-307-4386

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Are We Really Connecting?

Rituals for 2010

It's another year ending and a New Year beginning. My guess is that many of us would like this year to be a 'one of a kind,' and not something we intentionally repeat. Often actions with high emotion become patterns, which become rituals even without intention.

So as 2009 ends and we step into a hopeful and exciting 2010, think about the rituals that you would like to hardwire into your organization, and work on rituals that build community and empathy.

Here are some ideas of how to think about rituals. I put this together with Barbara Biziou, one of the founding members of Creating WE Institute, who is a ritual guru.

Healthy Rituals

Healthy Rituals that build community bring individuals together awaken the spirit of the team, and they enable individuals to build healthy thriving relationships. In this changing and uncertain time, our relationships are more important than ever before. They become our anchors in the sea of uncertainty, and help us quell the hardwired fear centers that live inside our brain.

Power of Relationship Rituals

Our research shows that if you are having an unhealthy relationship with someone in your team, the impact on you and others will be unhealthy - and the negative influence may go on for weeks, or months and spread to others on the team. When something is wrong in a relationship, the other person may tend to 'blow you off.' However, if you do have a healthy relationship with people, they will take the time to work through the difficult conversations with you. Relationship Building Rituals are the keystones to building successful business relationships at work. Connection breeds loyalty, trust and compassion.

If we do not feel connected to others, we won't feel connected to the job; we lose motivation and become apathetic. We check out, we give up and give in, and we lose our voice, or we get angry or resistant to change.

Pay Attention to the Meta Messages

Why and how do rituals impact the brain? Rituals communicate inclusion, acceptance, and send messages to the brain, saying: "you are part of the team." These 'relational messages' are non-verbal and could account for as much as 90% of the impact you have on others.


Notice the impact: our pupils will dilate when we are interested in something. Looking at someone directly can show him or her that we care. We tend to put higher trust in and believe more in these signals than the words spoken. For example, saying, "you did a good job" while scowling and rolling your eyes sends a mixed message causing a breakdown in communication, which leads us to distrust others.

Rituals You Can Experiment With: A Venting Ritual

When we interact with others, conflicts may arise - that's normal. Each of us has our own ideas for what we want to make happen, and when others disagree, we can get mad, emotional, angry, upset and sometimes avoid others when we can't find a way to work through the conflict.

There is an Ancient Ritual, which was called Stenia. The younger women got a chance to complain, and moan about what was bothering her, releasing anger and resentment they would have held onto. The 21st century version of this is called It's Okay to Vent Once a Day. Venting can be positive if it is done correctly. It releases stuck energy from the body and quiets the mind. Venting is the process of giving each other permission for venting time with others, rather than letting it go on forever. We can choose to vent for 7 seconds, 7 minutes, even 7 hours.

Releasing Emotions

We all have interactions with life that create emotional responses that often don't end at the time that the interaction ends. It's like striking a guitar cord. After your hand leaves the strings, the cord you've played continues to reverberate. Sour notes create music we don't like to hear, and we complain.

Here are the steps:

1. Establish a timeframe for venting.
2. Pick a partner that you totally trust to keep the information confidential.
3. Choose the role you want your partner to play in order to help you "work through it."
4. Decide if the role should be to:

• Listen.
• Listen for something specific.
• Listen with the intention of helping you create a new strategy for reentering the relationship or situation with a fresh point of view: to re-contract, or reconnect.
• Listen so you can give the person coaching-a new perspective on the situation.
• Listen to help you interrupt a negative cycle you may be having and transform it into a positive cycle.

5. Take turns so each of you have a chance to be a coach and coachee.
6. Ask your colleague to try different roles to see which one helps you the most.

Healthy Rituals

Healthy Rituals allow individuals, teams and organizations to practice what we call "self-regulation," which doesn't mean suppression - it means 'self-expression' and that is healthy. Suppression is a form of holding in emotions - such as frustration, anger, disappointment. When we suppress, we cause a cascade of stress hormones to 'own us' - hence the term Amygdala Hijacking (Amygdala is our 'flight, fight, freeze and fear' mechanism in our older Reptilian Brain).

Creating Healthy Check Ins

Check in with people to create positive rituals that meet the needs of team members.

1. Ask for input from the members of the organization so people feel included in the rituals.
2. Be creative.
3. Listen non-judgmentally.
4. Be consistent, be mindful and be open to change.
5. Rituals can open the door to new behavior and pave the way for new business results.

Neuro-tips: Rituals enable us to meet the needs of connectivity, our most profound and powerful need.

Neuro-tip #1: When needs are unmet in a relationship, we become more emotional and frustrated. We become dissatisfied with the person, which over time will increase and can turn into dislike. (Shifting from friend to foe).

Neuro-tip #2: Positive mood states in one person encourage positive mood states in others. Oxytocin, a bonding hormone in men and women, is released during human contact, connecting and bonding, which reduces aggressions and increases cooperation.

Neuro-tip #3: Empathy for others is expanded through community rituals. Empathy is more than a feeling; it leads us to actions. By experiencing positive community rituals, we trigger our 'mirror-neuron' systems, which are located in the parietal lobes and prefrontal cortex. Positive Rituals expand our ability to empathize with others.

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; the DVD and Workshop titled The Leadership Secret of Gregory Goose; and editor and contributor of 42 Rule for Creating WE, a newly published Amazon bestseller.

Contact: 212-307-4386

READ OUR PAST NEWSLETTERS

Judith was recently interviewed by Wayne Turmel on the Cranky Middle Manager Show. They discussed creating WE, a sense of togetherness and team, Judith's new book 42 Rules for Creating WE, Moses, Shakespeare and all kinds of management foolishness.

Listen to the interview.

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; the DVD and Workshop titled The Leadership Secret of Gregory Goose; and editor and contributor of 42 Rule for Creating WE, a newly published Amazon bestseller.

Contact: 212-307-4386

READ OUR PAST NEWSLETTERS
SIGN UP TO RECEIVE OUR NEWSLETTER

"Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs"
Pearl Strachan, author

Our stories either build or break down relationships with others. At work, we interact with colleagues and hopefully create networks and build alliances. Every day in your business, there are a million interactions that will create either a positive or a negative dynamic among people. While these interactions may seem small, they begin to add up to a larger pattern. We are either spiraling up or down. We are either building a stronger sense of I or a stronger sense of WE.

Building Stories - Two Scenarios

Storytelling, like the words we use, comes naturally to human beings. Stories are how we share what we are seeing, feeling, and sensing inside. Storytelling is, in essence, our view of reality.

Storytelling begins as an I-centric capability enabling us to state and often defend our point of view. In organizational life, storytelling shapes the way we view the world individually and collectively, and it can have positive or negative consequences for the health of the enterprise. Learning how and when to shift from an 'I to a WE' perspective in the stories we tell is essential to organizational health and growth.

We create stories based on our point of view-based on our function, our title, and our respective level in the hierarchy. "Where we sit" can determine "where we stand." Because we each see the world through our respective lenses of experience and beliefs, it's not hard to understand how colleagues engaged in different functions or operating within different environments-even within the same organization-can come to tell their stories about the enterprise from the vantage points of their own separate silos.

IMAGINE

Imagine you just joined a new company in a new position, and you have been given the responsibility for achieving success. Your predecessor was unable to pull it off, so you have some extra pressure to deliver results. Imagine you accept this responsibility and start your job tomorrow.

• What story are you telling yourself about this job, about your role, about what you want to accomplish?
• What story are you telling the new employees who will be meeting you for the first time? Your staff? Your customers?

Imagine the following situation, which I'll call Scenario 1. As you do your due diligence and make your assessment of the situation, you uncover concerns that you didn't see before. The talent seems to be light for the task ahead. You sense that the resource base is also light, and you realize that the job is bigger than you thought.

The business problems also seem bigger and you can't get your arms around them. You are new and believe you are supposed to be in charge of the situation. You decide not to share your fears and worries out of concern that others will think you are not capable of being a leader or are unable to handle the challenge. How will the story you hold inside, and the story you tell outside impact the future success of the business?

Your Story: The story you tell yourself in this scenario is that you need to be tough, and show confidence. Sharing your concerns will weaken your leadership, and asking for help or involvement will weaken your power.

Their Story: The story your direct reports tell each other is that you are not interested in their perspectives and are a command and control leader. They band together and are fearful of what you do, lack trust in your assessments and resist your approach.

As an alternative, let's look at Scenario 2. You come aboard, do your due diligence, and find problems are more difficult than you originally anticipated. You immediately bring your direct reports into your assessment and, with open and honest communication; you create an engagement process to build positive energy and focus. You include others in discovering new and exciting ways for building the business. In Scenario 2 you are more open and transparent with colleagues, you express your desire to create sustainable partnerships, and you are willing to coach and be coached to help yourself and others grow.

Your Story: The story you tell yourself in this scenario is that while you were hired to be the leader, you weren't hired to have all the answers alone.

Their Story: The story your direct reports tell each other is that you are an incredibly inclusive leader who really cares about their perspective, wisdom and insight.

Telling Stories

We establish our power through our stories and story telling with others. Stories shape our sense of the world, our relationships, and our future. Stories communicate our aspirations, our hopes, our intentions, and our beliefs. Most importantly, stories convey the hopes and dreams we hold in our minds about the reality we believe we are living in or want to live in.

We tell our stories all day long. We tell them to customers, to colleagues, and to our friends and family. But the person we tell our stories to most of all is ourself.

Human beings have the power and ability to make up dramatic stories with any conceivable ending. Our stories can portray a future full of promise and accomplishment or one that is dark and empty. It's all stuff we first make up and then come to believe. Once we believe our story, we live it out the way we visualize it in our minds.

Like it or not, we are storytellers. Our main audience is us; and our life develops from the stories we create. In other words, if we wake up one morning to discover that our finances have been wiped out because we purchased a bad stock, our story could become that we are a loser and stupid, or we could tell a story of our ability to take risks and go after the Big One. Our stories influence how we see ourselves and how we approach the life challenges that come next. Stories can empower or dis-empower our life journey.

How are You Using Story Telling at Work?

Think about the power of stories to shape your future. How are you using story telling at work? Scan and monitor your stories and reflect on how you are using stories to either lift you up or push others down. Are your stories I-centric or WE-centric?

Are you using story telling to:

• Prove you are right?
• Build stronger relationships?
• Inspire people to step into new challenges?
• Break from the past and create the future?
• Blame others and make them bad in the eyes of others?
• Build people up and make them feel great about themselves?

Reflect on your story telling process and keep track of the themes that show up in your stories.

In the next issues we'll talk about the neuroscience behind story telling!

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; the DVD and Workshop titled The Leadership Secret of Gregory Goose; and editor and contributor of 42 Rule for Creating WE, a newly published Amazon bestseller.

Contact: 212-307-4386

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SIGN UP TO RECEIVE OUR NEWSLETTER

42 Rules for Creating WE' Becomes Amazon Bestseller

42 Rules for Creating WE' Becomes Amazon Bestseller By Offering New Approaches to Difficult Conversations

On September 17th, "42 Rules for Creating WE" was one of the fastest-selling books on Amazon, having achieved sales that brought its rank to #1 in the Leadership, Management, Motivation, and Organizational Behavior categories, and the #2 fastest-selling book in any category on that day.

Why did this book strike such a cord? Read the press release...

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; the DVD and Workshop titled The Leadership Secret of Gregory Goose; and editor and contributor of 42 Rule for Creating WE, a newly published Amazon bestseller.

Contact: 212-307-4386

READ OUR PAST NEWSLETTERS
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Can I Trust You?

As long as we feel we are gaining, not losing, we play as WE. However, our fear is that someone will get more. The fear is always: I'll trust you and then you'll stick me in the back.

Even though most of us value being considered a partner, the ability to work together interdependently is one of our least-developed skills. This skill is so vital that, in its absence, good leaders turn bad, good executives become ineffective, and good colleagues turn into adversaries. The skill of opening up to others - and of creating the emotional space for others to open up to us - requires deep trust. Trust is the most precious of the golden threads. Without it, there can be no WE.

When we open up WE to include partners outside of our conventional thinking, we encompass stakeholders and allies beyond the traditional boundaries of the enterprise - including vendors, customers, and donors. We expand the way we work and how we generate value. After all these years, we are starting to see how shifting boundaries - throwing the net wider - is a way to achieve alliances in a new way. With the golden thread of trust, we can weave our lives together like a beautiful tapestry.

WE-centric relationships are built on trust. I trust you will not harm me, and you trust I will not harm you. When we have that level of trust we do no't feel the need to duck into protective behaviors. We automatically assume a mutual support, and we move forward from there.

When we experience doubt about the good intentions of others, for whatever reason, we need to recognize the importance of having the kind of conversations that bring us back to trust. Creating the space for open dialogues enables us to reclaim trust with others.

5 Vital Questions

There are 5 vital questions that, if not addressed on an explicit level, will be working 'behind the scenes' eroding trust at every corner.

• How do I protect myself?
• Who loves me, who hates me?
• Where do I belong, where do I and fit in?
• What do I need to learn to be successful?
• How do I create value with others?

As we interact with others, we are asking and answering these 5 Vital Questions with every interaction. Our human communication system with others is designed to send energy out and get an answer back. As we send out these questions in the form of direct questions or indirect messages to others, we calculate our 'coordinates with others' and navigate either with them or against them. When we are seeing to understand where we stand with others, we are listening, I-centrically. Once we get these questions answered we energetically shift into a "WE-centric" relationship and trust will emerges.

Co-creating a Book is Like Giving Birth!

The 5 Big Questions are key to the health of a relationship, team and organization. These fundamental questions are what propelled a team of us - 18 coaches, consultants, and practitioners at the Creating WE Institute - to do an experiment in co-creation and trust building. We decided to work on writing a book together!

When we started our co-creating conversations, we didn't know what each other was thinking about - we trusted we would find a way to build a conversational space for our best ideas to emerge - and we did.

We didn't know what we would do if we had conflicting ideas that would conflict, or too many ideas. We trusted we would find a way to work through it, and we did.

We didn't know if our ideas were strong enough of big enough, yet as we listened to each other's ideas, and became inspired by what others had to say - we did.



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; the DVD and Workshop titled The Leadership Secret of Gregory Goose; and edited and contributed to 42 Rule for Creating WE, a newly published Amazon bestseller.

Contact: 212-307-4386

READ OUR PAST NEWSLETTERS
SIGN UP TO RECEIVE OUR NEWSLETTER

Building our Brain Trust

Building Trust Takes Commitment

Too often, we see management and employees as separate. In reality, both are part of a larger system of colleagues working together to create positive business results. The challenge for you as a leader and as a colleague is to understand how to create "mutual trust" through the way you communicate with colleagues every day.

Our ability to communicate openly, with candor and caring, determines the quality of the connectivity between us as individuals, teams, or larger organizational units. While we do not always talk about our fears of speaking up candidly, we feel it. Knowing where we stand is vital to our success, and when we feel we are on the outs, it negatively impacts our performance. We start acting strangely-we protect, we hide, we defend-all because we feel we are being rejected.

Creating the space for open and non-judgmental conversions is a WE-centric skill. As we have conversations and listen, we are able to sort out what affects our personal future and what does not. The Amygdala in our brain senses threats and tries to prevent them from harming us. It senses where we are in the pecking order, who is bigger, who is more powerful, and who is a friend or foe. This kind of subconscious listening is fundamentally I-centric by nature.

Listening I-centrically

Listening I-centrically causes us to be apprehensive in our conversations with others and cautious about their intentions and motivations. One of our least-developed skills is the ability to confront another person and have a difficult conversation. As a consequence of our fear of confrontation, we reactively take on the posture of being defensive when we sense we are facing an enemy.

Even thinking of the word "confrontation" causes our blood to boil, or our fears to rise. The word is fraught with meanings that keep us at a distance from others. The dictionary defines confrontation as "to stand over or against in a role of adversary or enemy." While the word also means "to meet or to face someone; to encounter another person," we often project onto the word all of the bad experiences we have had when we face others. Over time the word itself has become tinged with fear and apprehension.

When we think of a "confrontation" or of having a "difficult conversation" with an associate, it takes many of us to the edge of our comfort zone, and we will do everything imaginable to avoid it.

Having a difficult conversation scares many of us into thinking we will lose a friendship, and so we avoid confronting the truth. When we feel frustrated or angry with someone who has stood in the way of our success or undermined us and caused us to lose face-at least from our point of view-we get so upset we just can't find the words to express ourselves. We end up angry and express our most reptilian behaviors (Our Amygdala Response which is hardwired as fight, flight or freeze). Worse than that, we hold all our feelings inside until we boil up and over with frustration, and then we blast that person.

How We Connect

Confronting others honestly requires that we all share mutually in building relationships, with all parties feeling the power of the exchange; these are power-with relationships. When we feel others want to own us or take our power away-a power-over relationship-we fear harm and cannot open up with honesty. If we think of our conversations as a power-over experience, it's impossible to be comfortable confronting others honestly.

Additionally, when confronting another person brings up potentially volatile emotions, we move with caution and keep our real feelings close to our chest. In the most extreme cases, when in the midst of situations that stir up highly charged emotional content, most of the tension and drama are actually taking place in our own minds. We make up our "story", and this is how we see the world. It is our own personal drama of the confrontation, and our interpretation of our experience. Much of our frustration is coming from the words we use to tell this story to ourselves and to others.

Behind the Scenes

Behind the scenes is the reality of the confrontation challenge:

• How do we communicate with each other when we feel we are being excluded?
• How do we deal with others in a way that builds relationships rather than erodes them?
• How do we masterfully keep ourselves in a state of openness, with our assumptions and inferences in check?

Co-creating Conversations

• Think about your workplace.
• Think about your team.
• What Co-creating Conversations can you introduce to create a stronger WE-centric workplace?

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

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SIGN UP TO RECEIVE OUR NEWSLETTER