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”Ha! She can’t even speak properly…”

No, we do NOT think that about small children!

We cheer when they learn new skills: to talk, walk, sit still in class etc etc.

The brain’s millions of neural connections are developed at rocket speed when we are small, and the development does not stop just because we grow up. The brain transforms itself, develops new cells and both creates and shreds connections, as we learn new skills or make new experiences.

It IS possible to teach an old horse new tricks; we have the ability to change throughout life. But the conditions – including a strong motivation and a reasonably stress-free environment – has to be in place.

For the small child, the motivation to learn how to speak is evident and directly connected to survival. The goal is not to develop a large vocabulary and an error-free pronunciation. But babble and repeated sounds creates instant contact, over time a language evolves.

When we aim for personal development, regardless of whether we want to learn an actual skill or have a more personal wish for changes in behavior, it is crucial that we are motivated like the child: aiming for things we can do here and now – choices we can make, actions we can try.

But most importantly: we must believe change is possible! Problems with wellbeing, uncertainty in career choices, poor relationships, conflicts, lack of energy – with a focused effort things can be changed.

In our work life we are typically motivated by very high-level goals with no guidance in terms of actions to support their achievement. We can have goals for things such as revenue, a score in employee satisfaction surveys, conversion rates etc. For myself, I used to work in strategic sales: megadeals with big bets where a team could work a full year on a single sale. Our goals were the type: “Win profitable deals worth $200m each year”.  

Even if goals like these are easy to understand and measure, they are not helpful in personal development but frequently sneak in anyway, eg “Run a marathon”, “Lose 10 kg”, “Get promoted”.

What would be more helpful: ”Run 3 times a week”, “Choose a healthy lunch”, “Seek feedback regularly”.

Personal development and growth, including changes in habits and lifestyle, require us to acknowledge that our development never ends. That our intelligence and ability are not cast in stone, but something we can improve upon our entire life, evaluate and improve again.

Initial thoughts on where you want “to go” with your development, become very important – more important than the finishing line. It is one thing to want a promotion, but what does it take! Where are the actual areas that need to improve, and how to begin?

For me personally the transition from strategic sales to the work as business psychologist involved a massive change in mindset: from financial, win-or-lose goals to: identifying good focus areas and positions of strength, nudging things in a good direction.

With babysteps, loads and loads of trial actions and continuously renewed neural connections.

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Step into conflict

The sum total of all contentious topics, that SHOULD be brought to light but we steer around, could be called the conflict debt.

Overall, there will be more conflict – and less conflict debt – in teams with a high level of psychological safety. Psychological safety is the cultural foundation for saying what’s necessary without fear of retaliations from other members in the team.

Debt can come from “simple” conflicts, eg feedback to the colleague always speaking too loudly on the phone. Or more complicated problems: a meeting culture where the minds are elsewhere (next meeting, the mobile phone, the email needing an answer, …) Or, a tendency to talk about the problems with the wrong people, not the people they actually concern; we may not steer clear of the topic, but we avoid the opposition.

The opposition in a conflict is what feels like unpleasant friction. Friction occurs between people, not topics/areas/departments. Practice in stepping into conflict consists of habituation to the unpleasantness, very similar to the training you’ll be going through to overcome other avoidances or fear: exposure, exposure, exposure.

Constructive conflict habituation happens in a way where others are not harmed (of course!), and where the conflict is justified. The goal is to reduce conflict debt, NOT to turn the workplace into a battlefield.

As individuals, we can make an effort to improve culture in this important aspect. It’s good for the community, productivity and innovation, and our personal skills are strengthened.

Previously, I have suggested to question the foundation for statements presented as facts.

Here’s another exercise: explore an underexplored aspect.

Regardless of discussion topic, tunnel vision can develop, ie the tendency to see things from only one (typically, own) point of view. Suggest another angle, and try the discussion from there. Take your departure point in whatever you agree upon, but stretch agreement a little bit, eg: “Good plan. How do we also solve [….]”

Example: You agree to let job applicants know within two weeks, if they are invited to an interview. You say eg: ” That’s a good goal. How do we solve the situations where the time limit cannot be met?”

Or: Until now, your internal newsletter has been produced by each department taking turns, a practice you agree to change so marketing is the permanent writer. You say, eg: ”That simplifies the process a whole lot. How do we help marketing with information, so the newsletter remains interesting and relevant?”

Or: You agree, that the summer party should be planned by new hires. You say, eg: ” That’s a great way to get to know a lot of people. How do we handle the years where we have no new hires?”

As you internalize the structure – and keep focusing on the goal, which is to improve ideas, not kill them – it will be easier to step into, and remain in, conflict.

This exercise requires you to have a view of the missing perspective, and therefore it’s slightly more difficult than the previous one.

Structuring your training always drives the best result: you can practice in even-numbered weeks, or the first week of every month. Make a note of it!

Enjoy training 😊

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Post-its!

The tiny piece of paper with glue on one edge has been a part of the consulting toolbox for quite some time. Early on as an (overrated) gimmick, almost as if the use of postits in itself demonstrated meeting facilitation that was dynamic, engaging and creating results. A small colourful confirmation of the saying about consultants: hot air in a nice-looking wrapping.

Now, when I hand out piles of post-its to groups joining a workshop, I see the rolling of eyes with a few participants: “*sigh*, again?” But, after more than 30 years in the tech industry and with thousands (!) of meetings and workshops behind me, I STILL have not found a tool that beats the post-it note.

Group work is the favourite discipline of noone. Herarchies and asymmetrical power relations cannot be put aside, and in addition to those you can add personal tendencies to talk/listen too much/little. If everyone in the group shall contribute, then the framework and the tools must support it – it does not happen by itself.

I find it useful to divide group work into individual and common phases, and below I bring an example from a workshop on psychological safety. The task at hand is to improve psychological safety in the team’s weekly meeting.

After a brief plenary introduction to the topic itself and the group work process, the first phase is individual work – in silence and within a clearly defined timeframe. Individual work is great for generating statements for later common prioritization and discussion, and the format gives time and peace to think each for him/herself. The mission for this phase is to find factors that inhibit psychological safety in the weekly meeting, in practice: write one statement per post-it note illustrating inhibiting factors. As many postits as practically possible.

Then follows a short phase of common work: individual contributions are sorted and a vote is held: which are the most important to solve. The result after this phase is a number of statements, developed and selected by the entire group, not just the particularly well-spoken or senior in rank.

Then, back to individual work! This phase takes more time and generate a LOT of ideas on how to help remove the most important inhibiting factors. Each participant writes his/her own list, and the list should be TOO long, to a point where the ideas in reality become silly or meaningless – because it’s funny and you get to the actual end of your creativity. The phase is concluded with a few minutes where each participant selects the best ideas from own list – and write them on post-its.

Group work has now been going on for half an hour, and most of the time it’s been quiet.…….

The last phase is common work and involves a vote – the best ideas are selected – and then: discussion and further detailing. Group work as we know it! But on a more democratic foundation, and with documentation for the entire work process at hand.

Lots of postits have been used, and it is good for every participant to see the discarded – a bunch of ideas that were good, but just not good enough and the pile itself evidence of the group’s hard work – as well as the selected ones, with loads of voting dots!

Could other tools than post-its be used for this kind of work? For sure! I am aware that there are also digital platforms offering excellent post-it-like functionality. But the colourful scraps are wonderfully reliable; a low-tech tool that effectively builds abridge between individual reflection and joint solution development.

Read more about the workshop on psychological safety here.

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The most important colleague

There is no colleague we have greater expectations for – for better or worse – than our nearest leader. Measurements show that our relationship with our leader has four times the impact on our job satisfaction than the relationship with other colleagues. Leading human beings is a big responsibility, regardless of organizational level.

Changes in the leader’s role is much discussed and described: increased complexity and speed of change, hybrid work forms, generational differences, stress, expectations for involvement, etc. It makes sense to take an interest in leadership, and to develop the areas that need to be: employees with a low job satisfaction is twice as likely to change jobs, and has an average of 12 days more sick leave per annum.

But how to get started? And which areas to select for development?

GAIS is a tool to measure wellbeing and job satisfaction. The tool includes and option for in-depth measurements of employee’s experience of the most important aspects of leadership:

  • Involvement and freedom
  • Recognition and feedback
  • Meaning and direction
  • The leader as a role model

You can use the tool yourselves, and/or choose to get help from someone like me, also to decide how to move on when the results are in.

As inspiration, and introduction to the universe of research and technology in GAIS, you can download the report “Når Ledelse Skaber Arbejdslyst” (in Danish).

This post is not an advertisement, I am not affiliated with GAIS/Krifa and I paid for my own certification.

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Considering a new job?

Not everyone reflects regularly. It usually takes a break from the everyday life, or an external event: seasons changing, events among friends or family, children being born – or other reminders that time is passing.

For most people, summer vacation is the longest break from work during the year. A whole week of vacation can pass before it is really felt: peace of mind

Jobindex posts that most people change job in August. As many as one in five employees wants a new job after having reflected over it during summer vacation, more than a tripling of the baseline number. The pattern repeats itself to a slightly less extent around New Year. Maybe not surprising.

When we are at ease, we have skills that are suppressed when we are “at unease” (just to stay clear of the term stress! I do NOT mean stress, just the workload removing us from being vacation-style relaxed). At ease we become more social and loving, and we are able to see the nuances of things. We are better at remembering everything we’ve learned. Good preconditions for personal reflection: things come to the surface and can be seen in their ambiguity.

The last vacation time, maybe as much as the whole last week, can see the return of “unease”:

“I wish I didn’t have to go back. My boss does not appreciate me. My salary is not good and workloads are too high and too unpredictable. The office is in a sad location, and not very pleasant at all. I just can’t see my future in this job.”

All these statements could be called “AWAY FROM”.

Of course it’s better if you can land a job where “TOWARDS” arguments are in place: the workplace and your role in it aligns with your values. Your mastery of the tasks is perfect and you will be appreciated accordingly. Workload and salary is agreed in a fair and open dialogue. You will be proud of this new job, and the change will add meaning to your work life.

But – it can be very difficult to express what you want and am good at. Which values are the most important. What characterizes the good boss, and the good colleagues.

And then you can be tempted by “honeypots”. You may have specific skills that makes you feed wooed, and it can be very tempting to accept the works from the headhunter / the new workplace / the person in your network: “This job is SO MUCH YOU”

Maybe it’s time for a change, maybe there are more opportunities in staying where you are. In any case, I encourage you to study in detail what is important to you.

If you’re experiencing that it’s hard to have a conversation about this – that you’re being interrupted too quickly with suggestions – then consider sparring. You will have the time you need to talk things though, and we’ll focus on your perspective.

Photo by Saulo Mohana on Unsplash

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Leader: show your values, not your emotions

Being vulnerable and bringing your whole personality to work is a development goal for many leaders. We want workplaces with a strong psychological safety: everyone should feel free to speak their mind. Otherwise the workplace loses its ability improve and innovate.

We need leaders that are human beings! As a leader you may therefore try to show your emotions more.

I believe that to be a misunderstanding

What you feel, is not just a reaction to the situation you are in here and now. Your emotional reactions are grounded far earlier, not just by everything you experience during your upbringing. We’ll have to go thousands of years back through evolution of the human race!

I’m a huge fan of getting to know your emotions. Getting really sharp at recognizing them when they wash over you, categorizing them and maybe even reflecting on their origin and functionality. The total number of emotions is debatable, but there are more than the 3 people usually mention first: angry, sad, happy.

As an example, there is difference between doubt and anxiety, Doubt arises when we are unsure of something new. We focus our attention on our preparations. Our breath is slow and shallow, and we hesitate. Anxiety is the conviction that something can hurt us. Anxiety arises in new as well as familiar circumstances, our breath is quick and shallow and we feel a clenching of the belly, shoulders and neck.

Recognizing and separating between own emotions is like knowing the names of the trees on a walk in the forest: a better experience. This does not necessarily mean acting upon the; they can be part of a survival pattern only relevant thousands of years ago.

That the leader also has feelings will come as no surprise (not to anyone, not to the staff). But emotion-laden reactions, however well-meant, can be perceived as self-centered and cringe, and can hereby increase the distance we wanted to reduce!

What makes sense is to act on your personal values. Values are a set of reflected guidelines, the essence of YOU. Don’t you know them very well, or not well enough to be able to use them actively? Spend some time with me and we’ll clarify them together.

From a former client: “Lone helped me define my personal life values – something I didn’t even realise was so important, but which now forever will define me and my actions. It gives me a sense of direction in life, and it gives me strength to be ME and be mindful of when my borders are crossed”.

Sessions are taking place in Østerbro or Inner City. Contact me om hej@lonealler if you’re curious.

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Job satisfaction – precisely!

A lot of people will tell you that they can only describe three emotions: happiness, sadness, anger. This can make it hard to understand and explain what you need – hence difficult to act or help.

This also applies in the workplace: when you talk about job satisfaction, there is not necessarily a common understanding of what is meant.

Some will find job satisfaction to be about being happy every day, having good colleagues and a nice, appreciative boss. Others think it’s about having a super-ambitious goal and a killer team working towards it. Others appreciate about the security from having a steady job, enabling the pursuit of dreams on your personal time.

This is all true for the individual, but how should a workplace and a leader act in a universe this rich and varied in understanding?

I frequently see initiatives to strengthen job satisfaction, where the intention is good but the mark is missed completely. A few examples:

  • Development of a common ”team charter”; this is a great tool if collaboration is faltering, but won’t help if the boss is a tyrant.
  • Subsidicing fitness memberships and providing fruit baskets in the office may be masked as initiatives to strengthen job satisfaction. In essence, these are hygiene factors, only contributing negatively if they are absent.
  • Christmas parties and other social gatherings, where the idea is to get to know each other better across departments. May lead to huge frustrations and brand new crisis, especially if there is alcohol involved.
  • Frequent 1:1 meetings. Great if you’re a new leader wanting to connect with your team, but won’t fix the absence of vision and strategy.

To be able to address job satisfaction constructively, we need knowledge and a common language.  You don’t have to settle for ”anything goes”. I was recently certified in the platform GAIS, based on ”General Job Satisfaction Index” measured by statistics professionals since 2015. (This is not a commercial, I have no relationship to GAIS, am not a member of Krifa and paid for the education myself).

When you look at a large enough pool of numbers, you’ll begin to see patterns. And when you apply a health-focus (rather than the typical APV-sickness focus) you will have interesting results. GAIS identified 7 factors which impact job satisfaction: meaning, influence, mastery, achievements, leadership, colleagues and balance. The factors have varying impact on job satisfaction, and their weighting will shift over time.

GAIS can be used at no cost, also by businesses (you can see examples here  of regular business clients).

When your satisfaction is measured according to 7 welldefined and benchmarked factors, you get a temperature for each (how are ”we” doing compared to ”others”). But even more importantly, you develop a common language for something that can otherwise be fluffy, and as a leader you are enabled to target the real problems rather than shooting generic initiatives into your team.

Reach out if you want to hear more, or check them out yourself directly.

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Diversity, disagreement, courage

Margaret Heffernan, UK scientist and entrepreneur, Professor of Practice at the University of Bath School of Management, is the author of a string of books on effective leadership and the release of hidden or unused talent.

She is featured in this TED Talk about the importance of having diverse ways of thinking; how even freely available information will be of no use unless someone has the courage to fight for it.  And how we need to resist our neurological wiring, driving us to seek companionship with people sharing our world views, rather than actively seek diversity.

Global connectivity and sharing of information are only the beginning. We need the courage to start conflict and disagree, challenge conventional wisdom, and speak up for real change to happen. This is true in politics as well as in business.

A culture where opinions can be shared freely and conflicts addressed without fear of interpersonal retaliation, is a key precondition for psychological safety.

The talk is less than 13 minutes; and it’s great!

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Summer reading

Vacation is just around the corner, and the feed will now be flooded with pictures of planned summer readings. Piles of eminent management books, in English or American to get to the contents quickly.

No thanks. For me, vacation is part of my self-defense. I’m letting go of all feelings of guilt and obligation, not wanting to contribute to the self-destruction so applauded in our culture. A few weeks of unplugging and blissful relaxation is just what I need. My summer reading is just one book, and I’ve already read it many times. Still looking forward to hours in the proverbial hammock with this one, it’s almost like spending time with an old friend.

For years and years, my favorite novel was Gabriel García Márquez’ “A Hundred Years of Solitude”. I’ve read it countless times, its magical and exotic universe coupled with a complicated family legend – deservedly awarded the Nobel Prize. Since 2012 however, I’m having a new favourite: Kim Leine’s “The Prophets of Eternal Fjord”. I’m reading it in Danish to really indulge in every nuance of the story, but it’s available in many languages. The story is about Greenland’s movement to liberate from Danish colonialism, told from the viewpoint of a Danish priest and set in the late parts of the 1700’s. It is every bit as magical and amazing as the Márquez novel, a quiet, gripping story of Nordics and the Arctics.

Enjoy summer.

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First: conflict habituation. Conflict management and resolution come later.

We have learned that unless we have something “nice” to say, we should stay silent. Unfortunately, this drives a conflict-avoidant behavior well into our adult lives.

Even well-supported and -founded conflict resolution models (such as the Thomas-Kilmann instrument) are based on the unstated assumption that we know what we want – based on insight into what our own best interests are – and can articulate it, compare it with alternatives, and argue our case.

This fairly analytical view of conflicts skips the “quenching” mechanism coming from not feeling free to speak our minds even when it’s a dumb question or slight critique. Many teams (in fact, most teams I have ever worked with) have a huge “conflict debt”.

Legitimately opposing interests (eg between sales and delivery – does that sound familiar to anyone?) are escalated rather than resolved at an appropriate level, frequently due to our lack of conflict habituation. We avoid tough conversations, rather send an email, right?

We must un-learn the habit of only speaking up when we have something nice to say. This is not about being obnoxiously aggressive. But about acknowledging that we are actually NOT all pulling in the same direction. We often have different, even opposing objectives, sometimes to a level of win/lose.

Before we can start working through our conflicts, we need to get used to their existence; expose ourselves to training in conflict habituation. This needs to be long-term; after all, we are dealing with deeply rooted behaviors.

As part of my work in team development, I offer a 9-step conflict habituation program. Each step is a small exercise, a tiny step towards being able to address conflicting interests without going full-throttle emotional about it.

Step 1 is: Explore facts (or, information presented to you as facts). Ask where they’re from or what they’re based on. Make everyone understand that you’re a team asking questions and not accepting everything as given. Do this for a week and notice how this becomes easier every time you try. Step 2-9 gently introduces increasing levels of pressure and interpersonal risk.

Only when we are relaxed about legitimate conflicts can we bring them to the surface and work on their constructive resolution. A prerequisite for teams looking to be innovative, creative, productive – and friends having fun.