Bishop House Consulting, Inc.

Your Team’s Emotional Strength

Recently, I delivered a speech on emotional intelligence – the ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships – to an audience of senior executives and provided them with insight regarding how they can assess and grow their emotional intelligence (EI).  For leaders a key aspect of EI is the opportunity and challenge to harmonize emotions and thought and then manage behavior.  The investment of energy to understand/assess your EI can be doable at 9:30 in the morning but much more difficult at 2:30 pm after 4 back-to-back meetings and no lunch.

A really interesting aspect of EI is to then ponder your team’s EI.  And further, how does the team’s cumulative EI impact team performance?

Try this non-scientific approach:  At your next team huddle, ask each person to describe the 1 or 2 things which scare them today.  As team members respond, look for their level of vulnerability, for their trust in the group, for their confidence in managing their emotion regarding the issue/item and maybe most importantly their capability to articulate their message.

Need a primer on EI?  Wikipedia has a decent summary:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

13 Minutes a Day to Better Productivity

Productivity increases significantly when we make conscious decisions about what to work on and for how long. Planning allows us to be proactive rather than reactive and work for results rather than filling time fighting fires or just busy with activities.  Invest 13 minutes in planning and re-planning your day to stay focused and increase your and your team’s productivity.

7 Minutes to Start Your Day

Start your day investing 7 minutes of your budget to think about the following:

• What should I be working on today to get the results I and my team need?
• Where am I investing my valuable time?
• What work will best model behaviors I expect in others?

Two, 2 Minute Time Outs 

As the day progresses continually ask the question “what is the best use of my time right now?”  Establish two time outs which you’ll use to review your plan and adjust your focus to meet your goals for the day.

A 2 Minute End of Day Recap

At the end of each day, recap your current status, confirm your focus and think about the next day.

Teach this to your employees and improve their productivity as well.  Encourage them to stop and ask the same question:  What is the best use of my time right now?  Create a reminder to help trigger the question for you and your employees.  Maybe a small, brightly colored Post It note strategically posted in your office.  Consider establishing set times during the day such as 11:11 am and 1:11 pm for the timeouts.  Or setup a task reminder in Outlook to remind you 3 times a day to re-evaluate your time.

Give it a try for the next 5 work days.  Your investment of 65 minutes might just pay off!

Why You Make So Much Money

Question to Ponder:  Why have organizations invested such large sums of money to fund supervisors, team leaders, managers, project managers, regional managers, associate directors, directors, senior directors, VPs, senior VPs, CFOs, CAOs, CIOs, COOs, and CEOs?

A very intriguing theme from the book Smart Swarm was the ability of mere insects – ants, bees, termites – to architect amazingly complex homes/factories without the need of a leader.  Locating, constructing, operating, fixing, protecting their factories was all accomplished without the need to have a hierarchy of leadership and dutiful managers.  An important key to the success of these insects turns out to be the unique methods of communication that have been adapted over time.

Companies invest those large sums of money in people like you in the hope that you will enable effective communication within, among – and at times in spite of – the team or organization.  The ideal result is motivated and productive dynamic humans who together can accomplish goals to increase corporate, societal and/or cultural wealth.  You are the short term solution until we evolve our unique methods of communication.

By the way, the insects have been evolving for over 100 million years so your professional leadership role isn’t going away soon assuming of course that your ROI is trending well.

DiSC Tip:  What a “D” Fears

Our high “D” friends tend to fear loss of control, being taken advantage of and vulnerability.

How Interim Assignments Can Grow Leadership Capacity

The departure of a high level leader from an organization creates a vacuum of leadership.  In rare circumstances a company actually has an up-to-date and implementable succession plan.  But for most companies, the succession plan notebook sits right next to the dust covered copy of the strategic plan on the middle shelf of the tall bookcase.  So, basically, there are two options to pursue:

1. Safe but Short Sighted – Assign the departing leader’s responsibilities to a combination of peers and the boss or a single peer or subordinates within the business function.
2. Investing in the Future – Move a high performing, lower ranking leader from a different business function into the role for an interim assignment.

The radical approach of option #2 appears on the surface as far too risky and disruptive to the organization.  The interim leader will be limited in functional knowledge, will be temporarily leading peers, will leave a huge hole in his/her home department and will need support and mentoring to be successful.  But the disruption might well be exactly what the organization needs to create collisions of talented people that inspire/encourage updated approaches which will:

• Spark innovation.
• Realign the energy of relationships.
• Challenge staid productivity.
• Build leadership wisdom with real job experience.

Let your mind wonder for a moment on the following interim assignments.

• An IT leader to a Human Resources role
• A Finance leader to Sales
• A Human Resources leader to Manufacturing or IT
• A Customer Services leader to Finance
• A Manufacturing Foreman/Leader to Customer Service

Stretching the growth of your internal leaders by moving a high potential to the interim role and increasing the roles of those the high potential leaves in leadership behind her/him increases the leadership capacity within the organization.  And a depth of leadership capacity is a defining success factor for teams, organizations and companies.
Have the courage to invest in and grow your leaders to reap the long term rewards of broad and deep leadership capacity.

DiSC Tip:  What an “S” Fears

Our high “S” friends tend to fear loss of stability, change, loss of harmony, and offending others.

Our Cohesive Team Blog 

Randomly, we write down our tremendous insight regarding building cohesive teams. Checkout our most recent posting: Priming Your Team

Priming Your Team

You’ve just finished a tough business call with a very rude, obnoxious person.  Now you are off to attend your team meeting.  Any guess as to the climate you’ll help create for that meeting?  Well social psychologists know very well what will likely happen.

A team, like an individual, will follow the environmental cues found in the room.  As living organisms a team reacts to the environment.  Social psychologists have studied how adjusting the major stimulus in the room – the team members themselves – impacts team performance.  The stimuli is adjusted using a method/concept called priming.  There’s a lot of psychobabble that can define priming but an easy example is to watch someone’s face as you mention the following words/phrases:  sunshine, sand, smell of salt water, calm breeze.  Most people will immediately think about a nice time at the beach, feel the warmth of the sunshine and crack a small smile.

To prime your team discussion – and get you out of your funk from the bad phone call – start your team meeting with a short exercise.  In a lightening round, ask everyone for the best thing that has happened to them so far today.  The energy in the room will increase and more importantly, the latent cognitive capacity of each team member will be awakened enabling discussions to be more insightful.

Be sure to play around with the question to match up to your team’s functional work (customer service, finance, technology, ion implantation, etc.)

Leadership Archaeologist

The interesting thing about people coming together in organizations is that they tend to create a mini society and this society will have its own personality, rules, values and behaviors.  Leaders may tend to underestimate the ingrained culture within these mini societies and overestimate their ability to change these mini societies with simple commands, just in time leadership and because they said so (always a great leadership approach.)

Consider adjusting your leadership perspective taking on a temporary role of archaeologist.   The discipline of archaeology involves surveyance, excavation and eventually analysis of data collected to learn more about past human activity.  In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research drawing upon anthropology, history, art history, classics, ethnology, geography, geology, linguistics, semiology, physics, information sciences, chemistry, statistics, paleoecology, paleontology, paleozoology, paleoethnobotany, and paleobotany. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology)

Learning more about your employees and their culture may just help you learn more about your leadership capability.

Avoid the Email Addiction, Time Block Your Day

How many emails do you receive on any given day?  Formal and informal studies differ on a solid average but the range runs from 48 to 75.  The addiction to email is real.  You need to immediately respond to the ding or ring indicating a message has arrived.  For leaders today, the response is almost Pavlovian.

Take control of your time and focus.  Try time blocking your schedule for a day.  Decide what times during the day you will review, answer and compose emails.  As you plan your day, create three to four, 20 minute time blocks which will be dedicated to email.  During the remainder of the day turn off your email – all devices and gadgets – removing yourself from the temptation to take a quick read.

During the non-email time, focus on other leadership work at hand.  You will likely be amazed at how well you can focus when not being interrupted with the pings, dings and rings of email.

Next question. . . what to do with the “found time”?   Here are a couple of ideas to help you develop your own list.

• Drop by an employee’s workstation to have an impromptu, real time, one-on-one, in-person conversation.
• Have lunch with an external peer.
• Take an 18 minute walk to develop an action plan for the next 36 hours.
• Think.  Simply use the time to think.

Create Organizational Clarity

I imagine that most employees can recite the general wording of the mission statement or vision statement or whatever statement is posted around their work environment.  In our own lives we all have statements we’ve memorized:  the Pledge of Allegiance, scouting pledges, the Lord’s Prayer, the 1^st few phrases of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the 1975 McDonalds jingle “two all-beef patties. . . ”  But there’s a distinct difference between someone reciting a statement and someone living the essence and purpose behind the statement.  Somehow there is a deeper connection to the intent of the statement.

The psyche of successful teams and companies centers on the concept of all members knowing intimately the purpose and intent of the entity.  The employees or team members know their individual role and how that role helps to achieve success for the greater good.  This intimate knowledge comes from leaders who work hard to create, sustain and protect organizational clarity which according to author Patrick Lencioni “. . . it [is] not merely about choosing the right words to describe a company’s mission, strategy or values; it is about agreeing on the fundamental concepts that drive it.”

Your role as a leader is to work with your peers to create organizational clarity allowing employees to really know why the team and organization exists, who it serves and what is to be achieved.  And then behave and lead in ways which amplify those fundamental concepts.

The Gap in Leadership Capacity

Assessing the impact of an organization’s leadership reveals an odd, almost indescribable foggy, murky blob of an answer.  We can plot out a nifty graph that shows the maturity of leaders based on facts about time in the role, education, depth and breadth of assignments, success of attaining metrics, employee retention, performance, etc.  More difficult though is the calculation of leadership wisdom defined as what leaders gained from their experiences which they in turn translate into better leadership in the future.  Further, if we could accumulate the valuable buckets of leadership wisdom across the organization, would we then have a true measure of the real maturity of the leadership asset with the organization?

We believe, and studies have shown, there is this appreciating – or depreciating – asset of leadership.   We also believe and know that wise leaders at any level in an organization have an amplified positive impact on employee engagement.  Therefore if we increase this wisdom, we likely increase the value of our asset and conversely, if the wisdom decreases then the value of the asset likely decreases.

So, maybe the real concern should center on understanding the opportunity cost we incur with regard to the size of the leadership capacity gap.   That gap would be the difference in value of the leadership asset today and the value at full capacity.

To Think About:  What if we could leverage 8% or 10% more of the nebulous leadership capacity resulting in leaders being wiser thereby engaging employees more deeply who then passionately impact customers.   How might your bottom line be impacted?

Spice up Your Team Meetings

Spice up your ongoing team meetings with two simple practices.

Rotate the Seats

In many team meetings, especially those team meetings that occur on a regular basis, attendees often sit the same seat every week.  Guide a change in energy, perspective and attention by creating a purposeful rotation of seats.

Make it Random – Create seat labels/identifier cards.  Shuffle the deck ahead of the meeting and have team members pick a card upon arrival.  The card will tell them where they will sit for the meeting.

Dynamic Agenda

Good meeting management includes the development of an agenda for a team meeting.  So all of us dutifully prepare an agenda ahead of the meetings we run and forward along to those attending.   But too often the agenda is stale, repetitive or lacks tactical urgency.

Make it Dynamic – Utilize the first 8 minutes of your meeting to list out the top 3 agenda items that are important to each attendee.  Write the items on the white board or easel allowing each attendee to provide at least 1 item but no more than 3 items.  Use a simple voting system to prioritize the items.

Start the meeting with the item that received the highest votes.  Once the discussion is complete on that first item, move on the next most important item.   You may not get to all the items, in fact, you may only get through one or two of the items.  But the team will have invested their time in the items that are most important to the team as a whole.