With a Growth Mindset, you learn from failure and why you fail to hit your goals with the FoooDo Model from Thinking Focus. This video shares four easy steps to turn failure into better results.
For more on FoooDo, our mental model and thinking tools for getting stuff done and achieving your goals, check out this video:
Use these questions to identify why you’re not getting the results you want or expect. Develop a growth mindset and turn failure into better results for you and your team.
Did you get creative and explore the art of the possible?
Ask yourself…
Did I create many ideas that I could choose from, possible things I could do, and ideas of the kind of things I might need.
Did I think about the things that might get in my way and how to overcome them?
Motivation is essential if you want to get the best from your team that is. How to get the best from your team comes from understanding what motivates them and how they like to work.
Do you know what motivates the members of your team?
Have you considered why your people are not stepping up?
This video is a 90-second summary of our first LinkedIn article, which asks why my people are not stepping up.
We explore how your leadership shadow can limit your people more than you ever imagined. The shadow of a leader makes it hard to step up; it feels too hard, so they don’t.
Stepping up is expected of every leader, and we hope our people follow suit, but your shadow and your behaviour get in the way.
As a leader, you cast a shadow. It may be unintentional, but it is inevitable. In your role as the ‘boss’, the ‘Grand Fromage’ (big cheese), the top banana, you create a range of perceptions for people that casts a shadow. A shadow is made up of a collection of helpful and unhelpful thoughts, it’s the lens through which your people attempt to interpret what you stand for and what you really want from them. Your shadow is how you are seen and become known – it’s your reputation.
A shadow is made up of a collection of helpful and unhelpful thoughts, it’s the lens through which your people attempt to interpret what you stand for and what you really want from them.
Leadership shadows can be fantastic, but they can also be destructive.
Let’s consider a leadership shadow that isn’t working. You, the person, may be reasonable (well, most of the time) and impatient—yes, but reasonable. You hired your people to do a job, but they are not stepping up for some reason. If your shadow creates doubt or uncertainty in your people, they will look for reassurance that they are doing a good job and getting it right.
Your tendency, though, is to step in and poke around to get the confidence and reassurance you need that they have it covered. So, when you lack confidence and need reassurance, you poke further, ask more searching questions, and start to dig deeper.
Do you see the problem? You both want confidence and reassurance.
But, if your leadership shadow causes uncertainty, you will unlikely get the confidence and reassurance you crave. When your people feel uncertain, they may pause and not want to expose a perceived weakness; you are their boss! As the boss, you decide people’s future. People don’t want to give their boss any cause for concern. And so, inertia reigns; they pause, fret, slow down, and, inevitably, are scared to fail.
When your people feel uncertain, they may pause; they may not want to expose a perceived weakness.
And so, the perpetual cycle begins as they wait for the leader to provide direction and guidance; as the boss, you feel the need to check and search for comfort. This feeling leads to resentment; as people start to question your trust and faith in them, you as the leader start to question whether your team are up to it; you’re not seeing them stepping up!
Photo by Ian Keefe on Unsplash
We call this the leadership vacuum; it emerges as a void between leaders and their reports. Learned helplessness leads to inertia and causes frustration. Leaders want their people to step up, and direct reports often want their leaders to set the directions and get out of their way.
The solution to this problem requires a change in behaviours from both.
As a leader, you need to create the headroom for your people to step up. That means being prepared to give before taking, and trusting your people. When you trust people and communicate that trust clearly and openly, you can begin the dialogue and establish the behaviours that fill the vacuum — creating safety where people can fail safely and not question themselves about their own self-worth in your eyes as their leader. To paraphrase Brene Brown, author of Dare to Lead, ‘let’s teach them to land before you ask them to jump’. This environment of trust enables learning and creates the space to test assumptions and expectations without concern.
When you trust people and communicate that trust clearly and openly, you can begin the dialogue and establish the behaviours that fill the vacuum.
In this podcast, Richard and Ricky explore what this means. What is different about the way in which senior people need to think, and what does that mean for them and the way that they work?
You can find out more about the four areas and how we use them below:
Your people need to step into the void and take a risk, enter the growth zone and trust you to have their backs. This leap, however, won’t happen until you put your trust in them. Until you communicate clearly about what you expect and work together to define how they might do it, and then crucially, get out of their way and let them get on with it.
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
Whichever role you’re in, it takes a leap of faith. It will take some coaching, regular discussion, and check-ins. You’re both looking for new behaviours that provide you with confidence and reassurance for it to become your new normal. It will take a little time to change your “go-to” behaviours of poking around to look for the certainty you need.
But, as with most things, if you want your people to step up – that journey begins with you!
Thinking Focus are behavioural change experts in the workplace. We believe that individuals, teams and business units underperform, not by choice, but because they can’t get out of their own way. We help individuals, teams, and business units challenge mindsets to unlock untapped and hidden potential and become more effective and productive.
Change in the workplace can be traumatic; most of us are pre-programmed to dislike change, but in the workplace, somehow, the stakes are even higher.
Change in the workplace needs managing, and having access to powerful change tools is a great start when helping people navigate change in the workplace.
In this video, Rob walks you through three simple steps to help anyone, including themselves, navigate change in the workplace.
Change at work, how to deal with it, navigating workplace change, accepting change at work,k adapting to workplace change, modern workplace change
Are you a change agent or a manager responsible for helping people through workplace change – I imagine that means all of you!
We all respond differently to change; our attitudes and behaviours will depend on many factors. This video shares four labels to help you identify change behaviours and attitudes.
Check out this video, too; it will give you practical ways that will help you to help your people through change.
Every organisation suffers from politics in the workplace; it’s how things get done; influencing, cajoling and getting stuff done means we need to know how to handle politics in the workplace.
In this video, we share a useful, practical model from Baddeley and James; their work uses animals to describe political behaviours. The Fox, the Owl, the Sheep and the Donkey. You will learn how to spot politics in the workplace, and working with political animals is essential if you are to get things done and navigate your way through everyday business life.
In this video, we discuss how to show up as your best self in seven ways. So, whether you’re working on your own personal growth or striving to be a better co-worker, colleague, or manager, this video will provide you with some helpful tips.
With this video, you can work on becoming the best version of yourself! I think you’ll find that this is a journey that’s well worth taking. Thanks for watching!
A quick run-through of 12 signs your culture is broken. Culture is the single biggest factor in your success, a broken culture will have a dramatic impact on productivity and results.
Peter Drucker once said “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
We have broken the 12 signs down into these four bite-size videos; you will find three in each. The first three signs of a broken culture deal with misalignment, self-interest, and focusing on the wrong stuff. Each of the 12 signs is supported with a question or two to help you think about improving your culture.
We’d love to hear which one you’re facing right now and what impact it is having.
For more on our take on organisational culture, check out the Culture Blueprint
An HBR article suggests that 70% of change fails to achieve its intended outcomes.
Of course, change is a cost; the question is – when we embark on change, do we help our people to come on the journey, or do we add to the cost by creating disengagement – a sense of unfairness, lack of control, build-up of resistance, these all add up to a hidden cost of change, that will never appear on your balance sheet. You are losing valuable time that will escalate if not managed correctly. What’s your cost of change, and more importantly, what’s your cost of doing nothing?
How much is your current or most recent change costing you?
Add your numbers to the calculator to determine how much change has cost you so far and how much it will cost if it goes unresolved:
Cost of Change Calculator
Cost of Change Calculator
This is not a scientific calculation, just a quick indicator. It may not be the total you arrive at, but it won’t be zero either; your instinct and judgment will tell you where you believe it to be on the scale.
Want to talk about how to reduce your cost of change?
When you’ve worked out the cost of change for your business, call us, and we’ll help you cut the cost whilst engaging your people as you go. Download the Change Blueprint for our take on organisational change and how you take people on the journey.
