Would they respect me?
Would they respect me? You might think the asker of this question was one of my leadership coaching clients and I’ve had many conversations with clients about respect over the years. In this case, the asker was my seven year old daughter. We were attending a National Geographic Live event to hear Geographic Explorer Dr. Sylvia Earle share her stories as a Marine Biologist for the last four decades and most poignantly her leadership and many firsts as a woman in her field. Being the first women to live on the sea floor and the first to do research on a ship in the Indian Ocean as the only woman on board. As she showed a picture of her with the twenty men on the boat, my daughter leaned over and asked “If I did that, would I be respected?”. I was floored and awed that my seven year old thinks of such deep concepts and my response to her was, “Yes, you’ll be respected.” I have no doubt she will be respected because she’s thinking about respect and its impacts.
My thinking might be naive. I want her to be respected in life and I believe in her character as her mom. By sheer virtue that she’s curious and asking the question tells me she already recognizes how important respect is and will do things to ensure she respects and is respected. But, respect isn’t guaranteed. It’s tied to how we show up and interact with those around us.
This got me thinking… What is respect? How do we become respected? Where are the implications of respect. Here is what I’ve since learned.
What is respect?
A quick google for “What is respect” and I found this definition: “A feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.” A simpler definition is: Respect is how you feel about someone and how you treat them. Its thinking and acting in a positive way about yourself or others and showing others you care about their feelings and their well-being. You can have respect for others and for yourself.
How do we become respected?
Like trust, you can’t take respect, you can’t ask for it, you can’t demand it. You can give it and earn it. Respect is demonstrated and built through your thoughts and actions.
Respect is earned by:
Think the best of people Treat others with care for their feelings and well-being. Respecting yourself Appreciating your strengths Have boundaries Talk about what you care about Listen, really listen Live your values Keep your word Be comfortable in your own skin Find a way to be inclusive Focus on solutions, not blame Seek and share knowledge Express gratitude and praise the work of others Find the joy in everything
What are the implications of giving respect?
The benefit of giving respect is that you receive it back from others. It gains you connection and deeper relationships with those you’ve built respect with. You experience less conflict and move through conflict and differing perspectives more easily. And you find greater contentment and harmony. Finally, you’re seen as a person others want to support and be with. An essential quality of any leader is respect.
In exploring this issue to ensure my daughter will give and earn respect in the future, I’ve discovered that respect is both a way of thinking and acting. Begin with respecting yourself and those around you and it will come back to you. I’m going to be working harder on being a role model for respect not just for my daughter but everyone around me.
Rising Up From Failure, Hurt and Mistakes
Learning from failure. Creating a culture of failure. Success through failure. There are a multitude of phrases that tell me that failure is good for us, so why do we all resist failure? Failure is painful. Failure can bring feelings of shame, not good enough, that I’m a failure rather than my actions or project failed. As a manager, entrepreneur, team leader, people leader you’re going to fail and face adversity if you’re "all in" and success is all about getting up more times than you fall down. Getting up can look easy, you just have to stand up right? Yet when it comes to failure getting up stronger than you were when you fall down requires a process.
With economic uncertainty, leaders in my city are laying off staff over the past several months and will continue to do so for many weeks or months into the future. Those leaders and the team members they’re laying off will be feeling hurt, failure, and mistakes. They may question their decisions that led to having to downsize at this time. Were they to blame? Was it the economy or could they have taken steps to be proactive and manage the business differently? I don’t know and I’m not sure we can’t really know where they’d be at today if they had made different decisions. The fact is, they’re laying off and it hurts everyone.
Dr. Brené Brown shares with us in her new book, Rising Strong, a process for navigating everyday falls, hurts and mistakes. Her goal is to help us rise from our falls, overcome mistakes and face hurt in ways that bring more wisdom, awareness and wholeheartedness to our lives and those we lead.
Step 1: The Reckoning: Recognize emotion, and get curious about your feelings and how they connect with how you think and behave.
Step 2: Get honest about the stories you make up about your struggle, then challenge the story and assumptions to determine the truth, what’s self-protection and what needs to change if you want to lead more wholeheartedly.
This middle is messy. Its the part you want to skip. I assure you that you can’t skip the middle. This is where the magic happens. Unless you stick with the middle mess and process what is there for you, you’ll repeat the same scene over and over again in life and leadership until you receive the learning and gifts that life has for you in the experience. As my husband says, “You only learn when you burn.”
Step 3: The Revolution: Here is where you write a new ending to your story based on the learnings you’ve unearthed in your rumble. Use this new, braver story to change how you engage with the world and transform the way you live and lead.
Now doesn’t that sound like a clean easy process with a nice tidy bow? Sure does and I assure you that its nothing easy and brings up the things about ourselves we like to ignore and pretend about. To truly rise up stronger from failure, hurt or mistakes you must take a deep look at what you’d rather ignore.
When you hide from your stories, they’ll define you. Write your own ending and you’ll find your way. You’re worth the work.
To learn more about getting back up, check out Brené Brown’s new book Rising Strong and reach out to me to learn about my leadership keynotes, retreats and workshops that bring this wisdom and learning into an experiential learning environment focused on helping you own your story, dare greatly and rise strong.
5 Benefits of Grit and How to Get it
Find yourself face to face with starting something that sounds like a great idea? Soon enough you might find the dip in your endeavour, project or race as I did Saturday morning. Grit, some call it mental toughness, gets you through to the finish line or the top of a mountain. Its what separates success from failure and is an essential leadership quality.
Ten kilometres wouldn’t normally be a big race for me, and my running habits over the last year haven’t been consistent. At kilometre seven my legs didn’t want to keep running, they were burning and stiffening up. My lungs were on fire and I had three kilometres left. There was only one thing getting me through to the finish line and that was grit.
Grit isn’t about just bearing hard stuff to make the finish line. It is also about making the hard decision to quit because its the smart decision. Its about persevering and making the tough choices moment by moment through the hardest moments of life and turning them into fulfilling moments. People with grit:
Persevere through difficult circumstances without losing confidence
Never become victims because they retain personal choice
Are more consistent
Focus on what they can control
Learn from mistakes and then let go
My grit got me through to the finish line and to my goal of completing the race not for time, but for same day finish. As it turns out, my time wasn’t too far off my regular pace, yet this finish felt better than any of my faster or longer races. Why? Because I truly earned this finish by persevering through wanting to quit. I made the choice to keep going even when I passed my hotel. I kept to the trail when I could have easily cut a corner and shortened my race. I wasn’t racing to win so why keep to the track and finish? Because this particular race has personal meeting for me and it means not giving up in other areas of my life.
How do you develop more grit?
Work with your feelings, validate them don’t ignore them.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable - Do things that stretch you
Keep an eye on the big picture - Learn your why behind everything you do. What's your source of motivation? Why do you WANT to do it?
Develop simple repeatable resiliency habits. A personal mantra is an example.
Get clear on what is in your control and what’s out of your control. Then choose to let go and focus your efforts on what is in your control.
Set reasonable expectations.
Focus on the next step, not the finish line.
We had a saying when I used to rock climb." If you’re not falling, you’re not climbing a hard enough pitch." Fail going 100%. Its not a matter of if you’ll end up failing, its a matter of when. If you’re all in you’ll fail and having grit will get you through it.
Each time I had to walk during the race was a small failure and yet I’d walk to the next lamp post, bridge post, or tree and start running again. My race time could be seen as a failure but my finishing the race, was all success. It all depends on how you look at it.
How do you develop grit?
Getting Comfortable with Uncomfortable
Do you ever have moments where you feel so uncomfortable and yet your work requires you to stick through it? Maybe it’s stepping into a hard conversation where you’re not sure how the other person will respond. Or, perhaps you’re hiring or letting go of a team member for the first time, or even challenging your leader or client on their thinking or a decision they’ve made. You might even be delivering a presentation to a room full two hundred of your peers. Mid-July I found myself on the business end of a video camera for the first time. “Relax and be yourself”, I was told by the Red Jacket West video production team. Hmm… relax. Be myself. But, stand on the tape, don’t move my feet, and talk to a camera through a teleprompter. I talk to people, not machines! So hard to be myself in such an artificial environment! Trying to explain to the video team my challenges to get further coaching, I remember saying: “I’m not sure what to do with my hands when I’m standing still. When I talk to a group, I walk around – my hands are attached to my feet.” Over the course of two days of filming, I received lots of coaching and was honest with the team about where I was struggling. Little by little, the work got easier and it never felt comfortable. I learned to practice new skills to stick with my work to create the great videos needed for my e-course. The discomfort and vulnerability was always there but I started learning strategies and pushing the distraction of discomfort aside to focus on my work. Had I not been willing to stretch outside my comfort zone, I’d have never stepped in front of the video camera and would have never authored an e-course.
Hard conversations are one of those things that never get comfortable and are a regular topic with my leadership clients. You can learn skills, like Crucial Conversations, for managing those tough conversations and develop confidence that you’ll be well prepared to manage whatever comes your way, yet your brain will always give you feedback that you feel uncomfortable. The trick to moving through it is practice, practice and more practice.
Practicing the uncomfortable allows us to get comfortable being uncomfortable and move through it. Where do you need to practice?
Leadership Starts with You
Earlier this year, I honestly considered writing a book. Maybe there is a book in me for the future, but today my mission is to make inspirational leadership development accessible to anyone. Every day I meet leaders, exceptional leaders, good leaders and mediocre leaders who are all challenged. Leadership is a path for those that want to become magnetic leaders worth following. It’s a path that leads to an unfolding journey of self-discovery as a foundation for taking others through their own self-discovery. To support leaders on such a journey, in a way that fit with their time, finances and other constraints in life, I created an e-course ensuring they could not only take in the wisdom of a book, but also have structure and support in applying it.
Leadership starts with you. Leadership begins with finding and bringing forth your highest potential so you can do the same for others. This is leadership’s highest calling – unlocking the potential of others, but it starts with you. Understanding who you are is the foundation for knowing your purpose, or why you do what you do. Knowing who you are and your purpose gives you the foundations for others to take up your cause and you’ll still need to figure out what you need to do and how you’ll do it to ensure your followers can take your strategic vision and run with it to create results.
All of the leaders I meet experience areas of challenge and opportunity. Whether it’s feeling lonely at the top, like they don’t really make an impact, that they’re putting out fires day to day but not thinking strategically enough, that the days just fly by and they’re left to do the real work after hours or that they’re not developing their team or creating deep accountability with their followers. These are just a few of the essential areas of development for all leaders and often I find that leaders have attempted to develop in their challenge or opportunity areas without success. What’s common is that their development has been focused on the skill before creating a solid foundation of authentic leadership first. After all, leadership starts with the leader not with the skills of leadership.
Today I’m inviting all leaders who want to be worth following to take a deep look at themselves. To know and understand who you are, the purpose and impact you care about bringing to the world, your values as a leader as a foundation to bring great leadership forward. Once you, as a leader, have taken that first step of the journey I invite you to look at how you trust others, express gratitude and how you build depth of relationships while also having strong and honest boundaries for yourself and your team. Finally, look at how you develop others through coaching and having honest feedback conversations with yourself and your team to ensure you continue to evolve as individuals and together.
Leadership is not a skill, it’s an art that begins with you. Like any great artist, you need support and structure to develop and refine your craft whether it’s through a coach, an e-course or something else – a book doesn’t create an artist.
Make time to master yourself and you’ll become worth following.
How to Become Worth Following
I’ll never forget the sound of the words, “You’re making me look bad.” This is what our leader said to our team after working through the night, sixteen hours straight, to resolve a complex problem we’d never seen before. It was grindy, it was challenging, and it wasn’t an easy problem to solve yet the team had given up their personal time to work through the night to do the right thing for the business, our team and our leader. Our team stepped up and dug into hard messy work without a guarantee of success and our leader didn’t get it. It wasn’t about our leader; it was about all of us together. Moments like this pushed me away and eventually led me to my passion for helping develop inspiration leaders. I believe everyone wants to be inspired, make a contribution and feel appreciated. We all deserve to work with leaders worth following.
So, why would you want to be a leader worth following? Imagine a magnet, if you point the wrong side toward your followers, you push them away and have to work hard to bring them to work with you. If you point the right side toward your followers, you easily pull them toward you with no effort. You can’t help but attract them. The same is true for magnetic leadership. Team members that “get it” ask to follow you. They ask to join your team, they look for ways to further your cause and they understand how to make decisions that honor the team values and strategic purpose even when you’re not there. They begin to think like you but in their own unique way. Another benefit is potential poor fit team members that don’t “get it” are pushed away and save you the time and anguish of trying to bring them along.
You want to become a leader that others are magnetically drawn to. You want to be more than just management. The kind of leader who has people asking to join your team and inspires them to deliver their very best. You want to be yourself at work, as a leader and in all areas of your life and feel that you have an integrated life.
So how does someone become worth following? It starts with cultivating your authentic leadership purpose and values. Then, using that foundation, you developing depth of relationship with your followers and grow and develop them to reach mastery, make strategic decisions and have meaningful impact. These are the foundational elements that I’ve discovered create leaders worth following:
Cultivate Authenticity: Know and be true to yourself. Challenge what you learn and ask if it’s my true core.
Purpose: WHY would people want to follow you? Know and articulate your purpose as a leader and the impact you want to make in the universe.
Values: Get clear on your values as a leader. Act and make decisions consistently within your values.
Trust & Vulnerability: Build deep trust with your followers. Show up with vulnerability allowing others to get to know you and bring your whole self to work.
Empathy & Gratitude: Seek to first understand how others feel and their perspectives. Develop a regular practice of being grateful and sharing your gratitude with others.
Boundaries: Create healthy boundaries around what is most important in life, at work and away from work. Have clear boundaries with your team and master the ability to say "No" so you can say "Yes" when it matters.
Accountability & Commitments: Regularly ask yourself and help your team ask the questions: What can I do? What is my part? Look for solutions, not blame, and help your team members learn to come with solutions, not just problems.
Develop Others: Be well equipped to have developmental coaching conversations with your followers, both planned and in the moment. Learn to give feedback that can be heard. Your followers thank you for being honest with them and for helping them become their very best.
What will you do to be a magnetic leader worth following?
Practicing Mindful Leadership
Summer is one of the best times as a leader to develop a deeper awareness and practice around mindfulness. Through vacation, slower workloads, a reduction in family demands at home with kids on break from school and sports schedules, not to mention the energy that sunshine and warmer weather brings. This slower pace is a perfect time to develop new leadership skills and habits to carry into the busier parts of the year ahead. I found myself staring at my iPhone and thinking through the gifts and challenges of this life-changing device at a leadership workshop recently on the culture of “busyness”. It’s amazing what comes to you with a little focused contemplation time in our world of busy. We reflected on our smart phones for just a few minutes on questions like: How does it benefit your life and the lives of others? Have you ever noticed their finer, more intricate details? Have you thought about what life might be without these things? How does it make life more challenging? By taking a few minutes to reflect on this object and the gifts and challenges it brings, I was able to gain awareness of my habits around busyness and make decisions in how I want to be more present. Moving away from a culture of busyness and towards a culture of intention, awareness, ownership and mindfulness.
Mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment. Mindful leaders are able to recognize what’s bubbling up inside them (their emotions) and as a result keep them under control in stressful situations by making conscious rather than reactive choices. They are aware of the impact they have on those around them. They are in tune with their team and have greater intuition simply because they take the time to listen to with their ears and intuition moment by moment. They are able to connect how decisions today impact the bigger picture and the future ahead. Mindful leaders are mentally present in a way that allows them to make choices and decisions aligned with their values and those of the organization.
Cultivating a mindfulness practice isn’t easy in our world of busyness and even harder for leaders who are often requested to be always “on” and have open door policies that invite interruption at all times.
A FEW STRATEGIES THAT WILL SUPPORT YOU IN PRACTICING MINDFULNESS:
Quiet your mind – Meditation, journaling, relaxation, and reflection. Finding 10 minutes of quiet mental space each day.
Eating breakfast and lunch - It’s hard to be mindful when you mind is hungry. Quiet your body; fuel your mind. (P.S. coffee doesn’t count as breakfast).
Exercise – Even a 10 minute walk make substantial impact in quieting your mind and increasing your self-awareness.
Protect uninterrupted thinking time in your schedule.
Set your intention for feedback – Take a few moments before giving someone feedback to check your intention.
Prepare for meetings – Give yourself at least a few quiet minutes to prepare your thoughts for each meeting.
The 50 minute meeting – End meetings 10 minutes early so you and others going to a next meeting have mental space to refresh and regroup.
The benefits of cultivating a mindfulness practice? There are many including: Reduced stress and increased resilience to the challenges life and business bring your way. Deeper clarity and understanding about what is important to you, your team, and the world around you. The ability to clear away worries about unimportant things so you can think clearly and focus on what is important. Nurture passion for your work and empathy for others. Greater connection to your purpose and values allowing you to empower and engage your team. And lastly, tap into your creativity; a quiet mind is a creative mind!
WHAT IS THE ONE MINDFULNESS HABIT YOU’LL BE PRACTICING THIS SUMMER TO ENHANCE YOUR LEADERSHIP?
Four Leadership Lessons from Japan
Two weeks in Japan and you’ll fall in love like I did last month on vacation with my family. You’ll fall in love with the food, the culture, and the amazing people and hopefully you too will meet someone who steps up unexpectedly with exceptional leadership like Taka. Our first day in Tokyo, I woke up to a message informing me that our guide for the day had hurt his leg and no replacement could be found. I went to the hotel front desk , since there was no concierge, and asked a fellow at the desk for help in finding another guide. That fellow turned out to be Takahiro who we got to know affectionately as Taka. Taka carefully listened and took his time to understand what kind of help I needed asking lots of questions. Once he understood, he started to research and see if he could find some options and April is busy season in Japan so there really are few if any options. He searched a number of possible solutions on the computer as I waited, called some friends who were concierge at another hotel and as he did so mentioned that he might be able to “show us around a bit” when he finished his shift at 10:30am. After a considerable amount of calling and searching he explained he was out of ideas and I let him know I’d go back and email and research myself to see what I could find and later had no luck of my own.
My husband and I then went back to the reception desk and asked Taka if he was serious about being our guide for the day. He checked with his supervisor for permission and then came back with news that he’d be delighted to do so on his personal time and not as a representative of the hotel. (all with permission of his supervisor)
This is an example of a team member that truly understands the impact of his role on the company and its guests. He greatly demonstrated that title does not dictate leadership, attitude and actions do. Here are four leadership lessons I’ve taken away from getting to know Takahiro:
LISTEN
Taka was a patient listener seeking first to understand from a language perspective and next to understand the impact of us not having a guide our first day in Tokyo.
ACT LIKE A HOST
Taka treated us like friends from the first moment I talked to him at the hotel reception desk. He worked hard to help, expressed empathy and I truly felt he wanted to take great care of me as a guest not just in the hotel where he worked but also in his city and country. He stepped up in a way that was not expected or required but what he felt was the right thing to do for a guest.
GO ABOVE AND BEYOND
Taka became our guide for the day spending 10 hours with us including dinner at the end of the day and we were all sad to say goodbye. Throughout our day, he had a second cell phone for us to use whenever we were separated so that we could find each other again. He taught us about Japanese culture, he showed us around the city to beautiful places, he had lunch with us. Little did we know until well into the day that Taka had just finished working a 16 hour shift, gave up a day off with his wife and two young daughters to help us feel at home and welcome in Tokyo.
He was hands down the best ‘guide’ we had during our two week trip to Japan, but he’s not a guide at all. We learned the most from him about Japanese culture, Tokyo and the places we visited. It was like touring Japan with our best friend.
HAVE FUN
I’m not sure what Taka thought when he decided to help us and be our guide for the day, but I can tell you that he didn’t realize he’d have so much fun. Over the day we saw Taka go from formal and reserved to informal and having a blast. He laughed with us and explored Tokyo along side us through new eyes.
What an incredible first day experience we had with Taka and, as it turns out, one of our fondest memories from Japan.
People First Leadership Lessons from Gen. Rick Hillier
One of the generous opportunities that comes as a result of volunteering as a mentor for the MBA program is being invited to hear some world class inspirational speakers. Last week I had the exciting opportunity to hear Gen. Rick Hillier speak in Calgary at the University of Calgary Haskayne School of Business. Gen. Rick Hillier says, he's just an average Newfoundlander and he asks you to call him Rick. He loves to chat and tells a lot of stories… stories with rich learning that suck you in and leave you inspired not about what he did but about the ordinary courage of amazing people he has lead. Here are some of the great inspirations that I took away from his talk:
THERE WERE 5 KEY STEPS THAT HILLIER FELT MADE HIM SUCCESSFUL AS A LEADER:
Step 1: Inspire people to accomplish.
In order to do this, you have to have a clear purpose or mission. They want to join and be a part of a winning team. When you inspire them to believe in your purpose, you'll have your pick of the very best talent. They'll bring both their body and mind to your work and want to change the world with you.
Step 2: Prepare them to do the job you hired them to do.
This will build their confidence that they can do it.
Step 3: Give them the resources to do the job.
Give them the best resources available and they'll trust you and believe you want them to succeed.
Step 4: Give credit to others for what has occurred.
Recognize your team for what they have done to bring the vision into reality. Let them own it. When things don't go well, don't blame your team. Accept responsibility as a leader when things go wrong and help others learn from it.
Step 5: Draw inspiration back from your team.
Being a leader is tough and you'll get tired. When times were tough he spent 50% of his time out getting to know his team. He told a story about a brave soldier who lost his legs in war and went on to get married, have children, run marathons and become an elected city Councillor.
SOME OF HIS GUIDING LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES ARE:
1. Have a clear purpose or "great mission"
and this will allow you to focus your thoughts as a leader, give perspective to others so they can see how the little things they do contribute to a larger greater good. It also allows you to prioritize. Also, link your vision to a plan.
2. Be learning focused
and encourage your team to do the same. Be willing to look at all angles, learn from others including those who have succeeded and failed before you. 3. Be the visible leadership at the front. Be there with your team, don't send them in alone and lead from the safety zone.
4. Actions speak louder than words.
He committed to keeping soldiers "figuratively in Canada" to help remind solders of Canadian values and know they were supported. They took many actions to support that including bringing the Stanley Cup on tour in Afghanistan and bending the rules to ensure it made its way to all soldiers regardless of where they were located.
5. Be decisive.
Don't delegate your decisions to committees.
6. Connect face to face.
Nothing substitutes face to face communication to build relationships - after all, if leadership is all about people, you might want to make time for them.
7. Be clear on your team's values.
Teach them, talk about them, hold your team and yourself to acting within your values.
8. Be yourself.
Its all anyone can ask you to be and what we value most - vulnerability and authenticity.
9. Be prepared to give.
Real leaders are servant leaders.
10. Encourage your team to challenge you.
Ask for regular feedback and ask them to question your thinking.
Gen. Rick Hillier was gracious enough to tell a final story at my request after he concluded his talk that I heard a number of years ago. He told of how the military used to believe that you'd have been issued a family if the military wanted you to have one. In his people first leadership approach, he saw this didn't work for soldiers as they had families and they needed to be supported. He led the way for the soldiers to bring about initiatives to put people first bringing in an initiative to reach soldiers within 7 minutes anywhere in the world if there was a family issue at home, brought in video terminals for soldiers to talk and see their families and teddy bears with voice recorders for soldier's children to hear their mom or dad's voices anytime they needed. Thats just one of the many ways he put people first.
What actions might you take to put your people first?