According to Gallup research, what employees want most — along with competitive pay — is quality management. When they feel unappreciated and disapprove of their managers, they leave or join the growing ranks of the disengaged.

 3 Steps to Positive Leadership

In 2005, Jerry Krueger and Emily Killham shared the results of Gallup research that showed managers play a crucial role in employee well-being and engagement—but the research didn’t study what managers specifically did to elicit positive responses.

That’s why Margaret Greenberg, president of The Greenberg Group, and Dana Arakawa, a program associate at the John Templeton Foundation, put the theory of positive leadership to the test. They wanted to know if managers who apply positive leadership practices have teams with higher project performance and employee engagement.

As it turns out, positive managers practice three leadership behaviours:

1. Use a strengths-based approach.
2. Provide frequent recognition and encouragement.
3. Maintain a positive perspective when difficulties arise.

None is an innate behaviour, but all can be learned.

A Strengths-Based Approach

There’s a reason why managers’ focus on strengths and weaknesses is so important. Most organisations are obsessed with fixing weaknesses. They conduct performance reviews, 360-degree assessments and the like to evaluate how well employees and managers are measuring up to predefined goals and competencies.

Managers are instructed to look at an employee’s assessed gap and coach for greater performance in areas of weakness. But such assessments usually pay only cursory attention to an employee’s strengths. Performance reviews and subsequent remedial programs focus almost exclusively on weaknesses.

Focus on What Works

Too many managers assume that employees need to be good at many things, rather than excellent in the key areas.

Recent studies have firmly established that focusing on what works, followed by a program to scale it to greater levels, is a more practical and efficient approach to developing people and their performance.

Managers who take a strengths-based approach help employees identify strengths and align their talents with their work. These managers don’t ignore employee weaknesses, but fixing them isn’t their primary focus.

Greenberg and Arakawa found that managers who focused on strengths enjoyed superior team performance, as opposed to managers who focused on weaknesses.

The Problem-Seeking Mindset

It’s not enough to wait for performance reviews and project completion to deliver feedback. Praise must be frequent, ongoing and specific to current behaviours—not vague or general.

Sadly, we’re predisposed to look for the negative: in ourselves, in others and for external events. We rarely scan our environment and ask:

• “What’s working right now… and how can we do more of it?”
• Instead, we look around and ask: “What’s broken—and how can we fix it?”

The problem-seeking mindset is one of the brain’s shortcomings, while also serving as a protective device to spare us from danger and making mistakes.

In Switch (2010), Dan and Chip Heath write about “finding the bright spots” in our work and lives. After extensive research, the two business school professors have documented how we’re wired to focus on bad over good.

It’s no wonder performance reviews and feedback are usually aimed at what’s not working. Yet, some successful individuals can override this brain tendency and focus on the positive, at least enough to create successful relationships both at work and home.

John Gottman, a psychologist who studies marital conversations, finds that couples who sustain long-term marriages use language that reflects five times more positive statements than negative ones. In fact, he calls this “the magic ratio” and claims it will accurately predict if a marriage will last. He urges managers to use a ratio of 5:1 positive statements in conversations with employees.

When Things Go Wrong

Managing long-term, multimillion-dollar projects that involve dozens of people and several workgroups is a complex challenge, and things are bound to go wrong. How managers respond to problems has a direct and measurable impact on both the employees and the project.

Researchers Greenberg and Arakawa asked employees:

• “When a problem crops up on my project, is my project manager able to help me come up with solutions?”
• “What steps does your project manager take when such a problem arises?”

Here’s what they found:

• Managers who maintain a positive perspective don’t turn setbacks into catastrophes.
• They don’t fly off the handle; they control their emotions.
• They recognise what’s within their sphere of influence (and what’s not).
• They see and discuss the problem as an opportunity.
• They provide a solution-oriented perspective.

Greenberg and Arakawa also discovered that managers who maintained a positive perspective when things went awry experienced greater project performance. Managers who scored in the top quartile for positive perspective (as reported by their employees, not self-report) had significantly higher project performance than those in the bottom quartile.

Reflect on how you as a manager and leader can implement positive leadership by practicing these behaviours:

1.      Focus on and work with people’s strengths.

2.      Improve the frequency with which you give praise and recognition.

3.      Respond with a positive, solutions-orientation when the going gets rough.

The truth is, most of us don’t know how to ask good questions, or when we do ask a really great question, it is by accident. There are several ways to ask questions. Some people seem really good at it, while others use a random, what-ever-pops-into-their-head approach.

Fifty percent of good communications is good listening. Asking the right questions must precede good listening. Good questions pave the way for good communications.

We have all encountered problems with bosses and colleagues, and especially with spouses from asking the wrong question at the wrong time. We scratch our heads and wonder what went wrong. After all, we were just asking, right?

The problem is that we were raised by parents and teachers who asked the wrong questions for most of our lives. Parents ask their children questions designed to teach them something. Teachers also use questions that are rhetorical or Socratic, designed to make us think and come up with the right answer, as predetermined by them. There is usually only one right answer, the one they are looking for.

Here’s a clue: these people—parents and teachers—aren’t really asking questions. They are trying to tell us something. They do not ask questions to learn something, but to teach what they determine is important. We learn from parents and teachers the wrong way to ask questions in the adult world.

What Real Questions Are Supposed to Do

Real questions are designed to learn about the other person’s way of thinking, and to gather information. A truly neutral question is rare. Most of us ask leading questions designed to influence others to our way of thinking, just like our parents and teachers do.

Instead of gathering information about the other person’s perspective, our questions lead someone down a thinking path of our choice. One needs only to view TV courtroom dramas to see prime examples of leading questions.

When you ask leading questions, you must hold your own agenda in sight, and design your questions to end up with a predetermined answer. The person asking the question is focused on getting to this result, and therefore is not really listening to the responder with an open and receptive mind.

While this can be an effective teaching method, it is not a way of developing true and meaningful communications, because the listening is cut off by predetermined goals on the part of one person.

Different Kinds of Questions

Managers overuse this leading style of questioning, and then wonder why they don’t fully understand the actions of employees. They don’t have a grasp on what is really going on, because they aren’t asking open questions designed for learning.

People in relationships, including spouses, often fall into the “leading question” trap, in persistent attempts to influence the perspective of the other person. People communicate better when they start asking neutral questions to learn about the perspective of the other.

Some authors define questions as being empowering or disempowering. Empowering questions are positive ones, such as:

• What works best for you?
• What are you doing right?
• What is your favourite part of this?
• When are you most effective?

Disempowering questions are also called judging questions. They bring up negative feelings and focus on what is wrong:

• Why did you do that?
• What went wrong?
• Who caused this?
• How could this have happened?

Notice that these disempowering questions can appear to be neutral. They resemble information-gathering questions. It depends on the source, the context, and tone of voice. There is a fine-line between information-gathering where one is exploring causes in order to find solutions, and questions that judge and blame. It also depends on who is asking the questions, their position of authority, and their prior history of being judgemental and blaming.

In order to frame questions in a neutral, exploration context, it may be necessary to qualify questions with statements such as:

• Help me to understand this situation…
• I just want to clarify the sources of this problem so we can solve it…
• Without blaming anyone, can we identify where we went wrong here?

Questions are clearly the way to create open discussions, deepen relationships, and create a learning environment necessary in any relationship, be it at work or at home.

We all fall into the trap of trying to influence through our questions, because it is so ingrained in us from early childhood on. It is hard to ask truly neutral, non-leading questions without influencing.

Questions that Encourage Problem-Solving

Here are some guidelines for creating a more problem-solving approach in our communications and questions.

When problem-solving with another person, remember these three kinds of questions designed for three different levels of interactions (Argyris):

Single loop questions: How can you fix this problem? What needs to be done differently? How can this be done better, faster, more efficiently?

Double loop questions: Is this the right problem to fix? What else needs to be considered? Is there another way to get better results?

Triple loop questions: What is your role in this, and how do you need to be in order for this to be solved? What shifts in your thinking and being need to happen?

Clearly there is much that goes into asking the right questions at the right time. There is a body of research designed around Appreciative Inquiry, in which people are taught the effectiveness of keeping discussions and questions positive.

We live in a culture that readily diagnoses what is wrong, gaps in performance, and areas for improvement. We focus a disproportionate amount of time on how to fix things, without adequately investigating what is right. We would do well to remember that the research demonstrates that people learn better when reinforced positively rather than negatively.

Resources:

Adams, M.G. (2004) Change Your Questions, Change Your Life. Berrett-Koehler, Inc.

Block, P. (2002) The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters. Berrett-Koehler, Inc.

Hammond, S. (1996) The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry. Thin Book Publishing Co.

Miller, J. G. (2001) QBQ! The Question Behind the Question. Denver Press.

Mayer, B. (1997) The Magic in Asking the Right Questions. Bill Mayer International.

Torbert, B. & Associates. (2004) Action Inquiry: the Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership. Berrett-Koehler, Inc.

Failure to Confront Problem Behaviour

            Leaders such as you want to be liked as much as anybody else does, so you’re likely to delegate the distasteful job of confronting people about their behaviour to other people or to business systems. Good leaders, after all, are supposed to delegate. The trouble is that although business systems can deliver for hard outcomes, they consistently fail to do so in regard to confronting behavioural shortcomings, teamwork problems, and sustained change.

            An expert in leadership coaching and development named Marshall Goldsmith discovered an interesting paradox. Although you may think that people will like you more if you avoid conflict situations with them, they actually respect you more when you face up and deliver the truth with compassion.

            Good leaders frequently engage external consultants and executive coaches to help make serious breakthroughs in such matters, as appropriately trained coaches can gather data and provide you with objective feedback honestly and confidentially. Executive coaches and consultants, furthermore, can also help successful leaders to improve their capacity to hold their direct reports accountable for delivering long-term, sustained behavioural change.

Over-Reliance on Outdated Performance Management Systems

            The traditional performance-management process is inherently problematic as a tool for sustained behavioural change and cultural alignment. The Taylorist school of management originally developed this process within industrial-age organisations in which organisational control was the norm and managers assumed the role of being judge, jury, and sometimes executioner. This disempowering model undermines the goals of those modern organisations for which competition and rapid change demand a culture that encourages employee discretion, responsiveness, and innovation, these being the factors that drive sustained positive change. 

Effective modern organisations have the capacity to respond to change with speed and agility. People who have a deep personal connection with their work and a sense of control drive such organisations. They’ve tapped into their own motivations and problem-solving skills and feel empowered to make a difference.

            External coaches can help you shape your organisation’s behaviour and culture so this can happen by providing objective leadership-performance feedback from multiple sources, helping you to understand and apply the latest techniques for promoting positive organisational cultures, and shifting the balance of your performance conversations from feedback about the past to the more empowering technique of feed-forward for the future.

Leaders Preaching Teamwork but Not Demonstrating It In Practice

            The senior leadership team’s behaviour is the ultimate model of any organisation’s values, culture, and teamwork. Although leaders can be adamant about their walking the talk, many are often unaware that other people see the situation differently.

            We can understand why this discrepancy exists between how leaders perceive themselves and how others see them exists by examining the career paths of many  senior leaders. Three things have probably played a role in most senior leaders achieving their present status. You’ve probably demonstrated significant specialist or generalist expertise, an ability to lead others within your area of expertise, and, more elusively, an ability to manage up, to understand the big picture, and to become noticed by being in the right place at the right time.

            When senior leaders arrive at the top, however a potential problem emerges. Open and honest collaboration with peers, who were also rivals, is unlikely to be a factor in such career-ladder climbs. This, then, becomes the final challenge for those on a senior team leading major organisational-cultural change. The qualities of self-reliance and achievement that had been invaluable for reaching the top can damage your effectiveness by reinforcing rivalries and operational silos between business areas, thereby undermining the ability to demonstrate cohesive teamwork, culture, and leadership.

            As a senior leader you can ill afford to dismiss your need to operate as part of a cohesive senior team and expect other teams within your organisation to operate cohesively within and across business units. Experienced consultants and coaches can introduce simple techniques to help senior teams confront the part that their own behaviour and language has played in undermining the culture and values they espouse – often with profound results.

            In order to achieve such results, exemplary organisations use executive coaching as the most powerful component of their leadership development and organisational-change toolkit. Organisations and senior leaders who seriously want to improve find that the benefits of focussed coaching programs for leadership teams are undeniable. Such programs help you to learn:

•              what conversations you aren’t having in your business and what that is costing you,
•              how your senior team can unlock its capacity to create a positive, high-performing organisational culture in which people want to work,
•              how to know if you’re walking the talk and what to do about it if  you’re not,
•              how to make change last without your having to be there all the time, and
•              how to feel more confident as a senior leader.

            For a confidential discussion about discovering whether an executive-leadership coaching program would make a difference for your organisation, call  02 9599 6791 now, or email me at di@humanresourceschange.com.au.

To Your Success

Di Worrall

Corporate Change Specialist, Executive Coach, Author

Nominee 2010 Telstra Business Women’s Awards

Principal Worrall & Associates

www.humanresourceschange.com.au 

“The insight I gained into myself from Di’s coaching was truly eye opening.  I gained clarity with regard to my strengths, and more importantly, discovered areas of potential improvement that I was previously unaware of.  Once identified, small changes was all it took to produce significant positive results.  I highly recommend Di’s coaching to people who are serious in exploring continuous self improvement.”

Mark Migallo, ANZ Channel Development Manager, Sun Microsystems

Moving forward, a new metric is proposed: the extent to which executives create organisations that are economically, ethically and socially sustainable.

The new metric is trust. Building a culture of transparency is a fundamental first step to achieving trust. Broadly defined, transparency refers to the degree to which information flows freely within an organisation, among managers and employees, and outward to stakeholders.

Trust in our leaders is alarmingly low. While exact figures and study results vary, no data compiled over the last 7 years has shown more than 50% trust for company leaders.

Easier Said Than Done

If transparency is such a vital component of trust, why wouldn’t companies promote openness and a free flow of information?

Several issues can stand in the way:

• People may be unable or unwilling to communicate upward and with honestly
• Teams may not yet have the capability of challenging their own assumptions
• Boards of Directors may be unable to clearly communicate important messages to company leadership

Further, the failure to promote transparency may stem from a leader who won’t listen to followers; as well as followers who won’t speak up.

Poor transparency also occurs when team members are ensconced in “groupthink,” usually without awareness. In this scenario, people on the same team don’t challenge each other. Sometimes, they like each other too much. Other times, they simply don’t know how to disagree with one another.

Knowledge Is Power

In all groups, leaders try to hoard and control information because they use it as a source of power and control. But the ability of a few powerful people to keep information secret is now vanishing, in part due to the Internet, as well as the facility of rapid communications.

Transitioning from a hoarding tendency to a transparency culture starts at the top when leaders:

• Share more information.
• Welcome challenge and counterarguments.
• Admit their own errors.
• Behave as they want others to behave

7 Steps to Transparency

Bennis and O’Toole offer seven steps for developing a culture of transparency:

1.  Tell the Truth

Each of us has the impulse to tell others what they want to hear. Instead, keep it simple, and be honest. Candid leaders tell everyone the same thing, and they have no need to revise their stories.

2. Encourage People to Speak Truth to Power

It’s never easy for us to be honest with our bosses. It takes courage to speak up.

But encouraging people to share their honest opinions is crucial if leaders want to build trust and open communication.  Of course, this sometimes means executives will hear unpleasant information.

3. Reward Contrarians

If you make it acceptable, are willing to listen to opposing points of view and promise to consider the merits of others’ arguments, you pave the way for a culture of transparency.

Find colleagues who tend to be oppositional, listen to them intently, and create conditions for thinking differently.

4. Practice Having Unpleasant Conversations

Few people excel at delivering negative feedback during performance appraisals. Offering negative feedback upward, to one’s boss, is even more challenging.

The best leaders learn how to deliver bad news kindly so people don’t get unnecessarily hurt. It’s certainly not easy, unless practice opportunities are provided.

5. Diversify Information Sources

Communicate regularly with different groups of colleagues, workers, customers and even competitors to gain a nuanced and multifaceted understanding of others’ perceptions.

6. Admit Mistakes

Candour is contagious. When you admit your shortcomings or errors, it paves the way for others to do the same. Simple admissions can disarm critics and encourage others to be transparent, as well.

7. Build Organisational Support for Transparency

Protect whistle-blowers—but don’t stop there. Other norms and sanctions should encourage truth-telling, including open-door policies, ethics training and internal blogs that give a voice to people lower down in the hierarchy.

Board Vigilance

Changing a system that encourages information-hoarding is the board of directors’ responsibility. Truly independent boards should provide a much-needed check on executives’ egos and truth-telling. If they fail to assess transparency at the uppermost levels, they’re not functioning appropriately.

“Boards are the last line of defence against ruinous self-deception and the suppression of vital truths,” write Bennis and O’Toole. “If they’re not vigilant in the pursuit of honesty, the organisations they serve are unlikely to have a free internal or external flow of information.”

Trust

As a species, we are hardwired to trust others, especially those who appear similar to ourselves and who have similar interests. But as recent financial scandals reveal, we sometimes trust too easily and trust the wrong people.

To trust wisely means starting with small acts that foster reciprocity. By communicating your willingness to trust, you give others the go-ahead to do the same. However, Jonar Nadar points out in How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People (2006), that communicating your willingness to trust employees is more than a simple statement or delegation of responsibility.  Deeply trusted leaders go the extra mile by removing obstructions to an employee’s capacity to communicate views and explore possibilities (Worrall, D., A Climate for Change, 2009).

Transparent Communications

Open and honest communications support the decision to trust. Lack of communication and transparency creates suspicion.

To increase the transparency of your communications:

• Increase the frequency and candour of your communications.
• Build a relationship beyond the constraints of your official role.
• Use the word “we” more often than “I.”
• Emphasise common values and goals.
• Be clear whose goals and interests you are promoting.
• Be sure your actions support your words.
• Demonstrate a clear concern for others.
• Under-promise and over-deliver.
• Ask more questions.
• Really listen to the answers.

D.Worrall (2010)

It’s not as though we don’t have a choice. A staggering 74% of us feel we could adjust our job duties to suit our strengths. Yet we don’t.

Why? I think one of the reasons is because we’re more conditioned to run away from the fear of what might happen if we don’t do well, than we are of embracing and celebrating what’s possible if we fully exploited our strengths. The motivation to avoid criticism is stronger than the motivation to bask in praise and adulation. Imagine what we could achieve in our job performance, our businesses and our lives if we all played to our unique talents and strengths?

For your FREE subscription to Di Worrall’s Creating a Climate for Change Newsletter click on the following link http://www.worrallassociates.com.au/