Great People Make People Feel Great E-Book

Stuart Holah

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 256

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

“If you want to grow, start by making other people feel taller.”

In Great People Make People Feel Great: How Leaders Elevate Teams With Cloud Nine Thinking, accomplished management coach and business veteran Adrian Webster and Stuart Holah set out an inspiring and practical collection of insights into how to unlock the full potential of yourself, colleagues, team members and collaborators. You’ll learn to elevate your workplace by shifting assumptions, and choosing new perspectives which generate better outcomes for managers, team members and entire businesses. You’ll discover the culture shift that’s possible when you give people permission to bring their undiluted selves to work and inspire them to get more out of themselves than they thought possible.

The book will show you how to:

• Find clarity of meaning by simplifying goals and strategies so you focus on what’s most important
• Build effective teams and foster collaboration by understanding how to motivate people with diverse skills and strengths
• Celebrate failure for its rich learning opportunities, as well as building on the lessons of success
• Recognize the power of incremental small changes that add up to powerful transformations

An essential handbook for leaders or would-be leaders in any size of organisation, Great People Make People Feel Great will benefit entrepreneurs and founders, as well as senior leadership and board members in established businesses. Each chapter takes a familiar aspect of leadership and examines it from a new angle to show that when we are prepared to ask why we often think and react automatically in certain situations, we can learn to ‘re-programme’ our thinking and consciously adopt more effective strategies.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

About the Authors

Introduction

What Is Cloud Nine?

Why Cloud Nine Thinking?

1 Let Go of Perfect

2 See People as They Are

3 Embrace the Power of Small

Seven Fundamental TNT Leadership Actions

4 My Motivation Isn't Your Motivation

Motivation, Inspiration and Enthusiasm

Goal Setting

Doorstep Goals

Internal and External Motivation

Lyre Birds

Show Ponies

Cloud 5: Calmness, Stress and the Choices We Make

What Is Stress?

Self‐compassion

Important and Urgent

Delegation, Ownership and Empowerment

6 Celebrate Failure, Learn from Success

Idea 1: Win or Learn

Idea 2: Innovation and Calibration – Will Pareto Was Right

Idea 3: Agile Comes with Fragile

7 Integrity, Strength and Resilience

Resilience

Resilient Teams and Psychological Safety

Building a Resilient Team

Respect

Integrity

Strength

8 To Find Meaning, Simplify

Child's Play

Icebergs

Keep It Simple

See the Big Picture

Applying Big‐Picture Thinking to a Business

Communicate Better

Optimise Processes

Ensure Consistency

Demonstrate Compliance

Out‐compete Rivals

9 Pursue Mastery

The Natural Talent Myth

Steps Towards Mastery

Habitual Behaviour and Self‐discipline

Stages in Mastery

Why Don't We listen?

SONAR

Passing It On

Acknowledgements

Appendix

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 8

Table 8.1 Big‐picture thinking model.

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

About the Authors

Introduction

Begin Reading

Acknowledgements

Appendix

Index

End User License Agreement

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GREAT PEOPLE MAKE PEOPLE FEEL GREAT

How Leaders Elevate Teams with Cloud 9 Thinking

Stuart Holah

Adrian Webster

This edition first published 2023

Copyright © 2023 by Stuart Holah and Adrian Webster. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

The right of Stuart Holah and Adrian Webster to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

Registered Office(s)John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USAJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial OfficeThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

TNTs™ and Tiny Noticeable Things™ are both Trademarks belonging to Adrian Webster.

For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.

Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

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While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

ISBN 9780857089533 (Paperback)ISBN 9780857089595 (ePDF)ISBN 9780857089588 (ePub)

Cover Design: Wiley

For Yvonne

About the Authors

Stuart Holah worked in the asset management industry for 25 years, holding roles including customer services, writing, marketing, business change and leading marketing and business development teams across the UK and Europe. Stuart describes his career as ‘showing people they could achieve things they didn't believe they could’.

Adrian Webster is a highly sought after motivational speaker and business coach who is also the author of Tiny Noticeable Things and the Polar Bear Pirates books, and co‐author of Sort Your Brain Out. Adrian specialises in inspiring everyday people to deliver exceptional service and helping business leaders to generate extraordinary results.

Despite our inevitable differences in background, experience, temperament and perspective, we have resisted the temptation to write as two separate editorial ‘voices,’ which we felt would infuriate readers and needlessly complicate what we have tried to present as simple ideas. From this point onwards, the ‘voice’ of this book is an amalgam of both our experiences, opinions and views. If, in the course of reading this book, you occasionally discern differences in perspective or inconsistencies of viewpoint, then we respectfully apologise for being unable to fully hide the many arguments we enjoyed and which were our inspiration for writing a book together.

Introduction

What Is Cloud Nine?

No‐one is exactly sure when ‘On Cloud Nine’ first entered the English Language. I remember the phrase being in common usage from the 1970s onwards; meaning an extreme state of happiness, bliss or euphoria. Strangely, the exact origin of the expression isn't known and internet searches reveal attributions to meteorological classification systems, which I find unconvincing.

I believe a more likely source could be from the title of a novel written by seventeenth‐century Korean aristocrat, politician and scholar Kim Man‐Chung (1637–1692). The title translates as ‘Dream of the Nine Clouds’ and the book explores Buddhist themes; that earthly glory and pleasures don't bring true happiness, reality and dreams are indistinguishable and enlightenment is attained by renouncing commonly desired rewards. In the story, a young monk is banished to experience a life of earthly success, which turns out to be just a dream. When he awakens from his Nine Cloud dream, he realises that lasting fulfilment comes from trying to do what is right, not what is pleasant. The ‘Cloud Nine’ of Kim Man‐Chung's book therefore refers to the attainment of fulfilment through transcendence and enlightenment, quite the opposite of the fleeting state of emotional pleasure that is its modern idiomatic meaning.

I know which I'd choose.

Why Cloud Nine Thinking?

If you want to grow, start by making other people feel taller.

This sentence is one I find myself sharing more than any other when speaking with entrepreneurs, business owners and especially large organisations when they ask how they should attract and retain great talent. These managers know that people are the key to helping them stand head and shoulders above the competition and they are genuine in their desire to foster talent in their teams. Yet most of them are seeking that magic one thing they can change. I have to tell them the answer to what they should do differently is ‘almost every thing’.

None of these individual things is particularly hard; in fact you could start doing most of them tomorrow if you wanted to. No single change will bring about the whole transformation that unlocks the collective ability of teams; but shift a few assumptions, challenge some rules and allow people to be their true selves and the talent that is already present in people will show that it is ready to rise. And that's how Cloud 9 Thinking was born. Cloud 9 Thinking creates an elevating workplace that lifts people up and helps them feel good about themselves, colleagues and their customers. It's a culture shift that gives people the confidence to bring the undiluted version of themselves into work, inspiring them to get more out of themselves than they thought possible. Once this starts, it's contagious; when people start thinking and working this way it encourages them to want to make others feel a few inches taller too.

Like all change processes, it must come from inside us. People must be willing to give up some comforting and familiar habits and beliefs in order to embrace new viewpoints and practices. Cloud 9 Thinking is about identifying and learning how to relinquish things that we do unthinkingly, and accepting new perspectives relating to how we think about issues, other people and ourselves. It's about simultaneously letting go and embracing.

As a result, implementing Cloud 9 Thinking takes bold leadership and a willingness to change. It requires leaders who know themselves, who lead by example and take ownership for helping others change. Leaders must dare to do things differently; building a transparent workplace culture where egos are left at the door, diverse thinking is cheered, mistakes are sometimes made and new ideas are celebrated. Their goal is to create a standout workplace and an innovative and winning culture, where no‐one is held back from going in pursuit of excellence and everyone shares a simple mantra of: ‘Great people, make people feel great.’ By great people I don't mean famous, important or high ranking; I simply mean ordinary, everyday people doing an exceptional job as managers, leaders, colleagues or collaborators in whatever business or path of life they have chosen.

This book sets out the nine principles of Cloud 9 Thinking. Though it outlines these principles in a specific sequence, there is no sense of prescription that steps must be taken in any particular order or that each step is relevant to all people or businesses. The Cloud 9 ‘plan’ if there is to be one, must be your own; using as many or as few of these insights as you feel are required to make your people feel taller.

Talent is an anagram of latent. Latent means something already present, waiting to be found. Your challenge is to create the conditions for talent to get released.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

PURSUE MASTERY

TO FIND MEANING, SIMPLIFY

INTEGRITY, STRENGTH AND RESILIENCE

CELEBRATE FAILURE, LEARN FROM SUCCESS

CALMNESS, STRESS AND THE CHOICES WE MAKE

MY MOTIVATION ISN'T YOUR MOTIVATION

EMBRACE THE POWER OF SMALL

SEE PEOPLE AS THEY ARE

LET GO OF PERFECT

1Let Go of Perfect

Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

In the Introduction, I shared the spoiler that Cloud 9 Thinking involves relinquishing perceptions that you may previously have held on to quite tenaciously. Many chapters in this book explore common viewpoints that can be challenged and let go. Others introduce new perspectives that might be accepted in their place.

This chapter is most definitely about letting go.

Carrying around inside our minds a perfect idealised conception of how we are meant to act as managers, be viewed by others and even how our projects should turn out, is a tragedy. By tragedy, I don't just mean that it can make you feel unhappy, although it undoubtedly will. I am using tragedy in the original Greek dramatic sense; that a flawed belief or misdirected action will make the downfall of an otherwise capable hero inevitable even when that bad outcome is the very thing that they are seeking to avoid.

I am stating very bluntly that if one of your beliefs is that ‘perfect’ is always the objective, then this view is more likely to undermine your efforts to achieve success than it is to help you get there. Let me share some examples of how this belief can tragically impact the performance of people and teams.

When staff surveys ask people to list the qualities they admire about those in leadership positions, the ability to generate and sustain people's motivation often ranks very highly. Quite right too. But the way in which many managers respond to this leadership requirement is by believing that they need to continually carry around enormous reserves of motivation in order to spread this around every member of their team. As a consequence, when individuals in their teams are not performing as they hope, managers who think this way will consider it to somehow be their own failing and may become disheartened and demotivated. So, if your idea of personal managerial perfection is where your own force of desire will translate magically into individual motivation for every person in your team, then let me set something straight: it won't.

Understanding and accepting that you cannot motivate anyone other than yourself should take a lot of weight off your shoulders. I am a professional motivational speaker and yet I have never motivated anyone except for myself.

What I have done, mainly through storytelling, is clarify objectives and set visions in people's minds; using vivid pictures to hopefully fire imaginations. I have enthused people and hopefully inspired them, but their motivation must come from inside. They must discover their own force of motivation. In Cloud 4 we will look in more detail at the differences between the emotion of enthusiasm and the psychological drive of motivation, and we will explore how you can inspire and help people find their force of own motivation. For now, I am simply asking you to accept you don't have to single‐handedly carry the burden of collective motivation. If that's part of your perfect, you can put it down now.

I'd like to try to further unshackle you and your team by challenging another belief that many of us have about ‘perfect’. It is often assumed that aiming high and being the best is all about getting stuff right first time. In their worthy desire to deliver excellence as an endpoint, many managers believe that everything must be perfect from the start. It often escapes people's minds that unless you happen to be a neurosurgeon, an air traffic controller or a concert pianist, you really don't need to deliver perfection first time, or all of the time.

Most ideas are iterative; you start with an original version that is subsequently refined and improved over time, usually through the input of many different people. In most endeavours, aiming for right first time when it applies to ideas is counterproductive. It ignores a lot of other, potentially better, inputs for a start. It is also unattainable and so is not only demotivating and potentially harmful; it's a waste of effort and opportunity. Whenever humans become involved in anything, perfection has a tendency to wander out the door. Beneath the airbrushed surface of any successful business around the world, you would see that they are all made up from an eclectic mix including talented, highly experienced experts as well as a majority of dedicated employees working to achieve common goals. And despite most of these people having given everything their best shot, every one of them will, at some time, have screwed up. Thankfully, they are all imperfect; because if you asked the most highly successful businesses where their very best ideas, innovations and breakthrough discoveries came from, you might be surprised to learn that many of them were the result of a mistake, which was then iterated and improved until the idea became perfect.

In Cloud 6 we will look at why the process of innovation is actually dependent on failure in order to foster progress. Without errors and mistakes, a lot of new breakthroughs simply wouldn't be discovered; so business leaders must learn to shift the focus of analysing failure, making it less about assessing costs and assigning blame, and more about eliminating poor options and quickly identifying any resulting ideas that can be developed. We must learn from the mindset of researchers in areas like psychology, mathematics, theoretical physics and computing where results of failed experiments and null hypotheses are published in academic papers because of the contribution these failures make to cumulative understanding in these scientific fields.

At the cutting edge of industries like technology services, bioscience and computing, where companies have an entrepreneurial, experimental and academic mindset, it is not uncommon to find a culture of celebrating failure as an opportunity to learn quickly and move forward. Such companies have let go of notions of seeking perfection; they just want to find what works.

There is a far more everyday enemy of success that also stems from notions of perfection, and that is procrastination. If we are honest, we may recognise this as much in ourselves as in others. A typical situation might be that a report, presentation or project plan needs writing. The parameters are identified, goals are set and fully understood, and there's no shortage of enthusiasm; and yet nothing is happening. You find yourself over and again staring at an empty screen or blank piece of paper. Why?

There are many reasons this might be. Sometimes it's a prioritisation issue; you or others around you may simply be too busy, distracted or overwhelmed to focus right now on anything relating to the future. This calls for ruthless action. Cloud 5 will look at how to determine which priorities are most important or urgent and offer a framework for deciding whether tasks can be deferred, delegated or even discontinued in order to protect your time for things only you can do. I warn you now that this is not a comfortable exercise. It involves asking whether many day‐to‐day tasks that you routinely do yourself have become a convenient excuse for not addressing other issues and goals that stretch your capabilities and take you outside your comfort zone. In other words, prioritisation is often not the real reason for procrastination.

If you've already reprioritised other tasks and stared into the abyss of what will happen if you don't get started on a project, and it is still not even begun, then I suspect your barrier is a form of perfectionism. A major reason why many people delay starting tasks is because they don't have all the answers. They believe the end result will be better if they wait for just one more piece of information. It's an understandable viewpoint because starting without the full facts is an uncomfortable feeling, but this view is also a logical fallacy; part of the process and purpose of any project is to acquire the necessary information as it progresses. Being willing to start something before they have all the information is exactly what distinguishes innovators and entrepreneurs. In their minds, being willing to embark on a course of action when inputs as well as outcomes are still uncertain is not a risky course of action because they trust that answers to questions will emerge. In fact, entrepreneurs are more likely to think that the biggest risk lies in not starting, because that way the answers won't come to them but to their competitors. For tasks involving an element of creativity the challenge is especially difficult because without the flash of inspiration from your creative muse it can be difficult to know how to start. As we examine in Cloud 9, creativity relies on input from your subconscious mind and the very act of starting a project can trigger the familiar routines and thought processes that free and unblock your subconscious. If you find yourself in this situation, remember what poet and author Charles Ghigna says so eloquently; ‘Don't search for inspiration … just start your work and you will see that it will soon find you.’

For most of us, the best way to counter perfection‐based procrastination is to focus on a process, not an outcome. For example, when I set out to write a 200‐page book, I didn't wait until I felt I could write all 200 pages perfectly. Instead, I broke the task down. Starting with just the barest outline, I next filled in the missing information by asking the businesses and people I work with what their biggest workplace issues were and what questions their teams were asking. I then had a series of chapter topics and could start authoring a page or a sentence at a time, testing my ideas on anyone who would listen, expanding these ideas and making amendments and corrections as I went. I didn't worry that my early ideas and drafts were frankly pretty poor. I focused on finding a writing process that worked for me, and once I'd started I found that the task could only move forwards.

As a writer, I'm swimming in a small pond compared with Pulitzer Prize‐winning author Jane Smiley. Jane has over 30 books to her credit and must be more than familiar with the tyranny of a blank page and the intimidation of deadlines. That's probably why her words on this subject are so insightful: ‘Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.’

Procrastination is normal and we all do it to a degree. Excessive procrastination can be based on notions of perfectionism and is a common block to success. You may be interested to learn that there is a name for an obsessive fear of imperfection: atelophobia. I am not suggesting that people who procrastinate are suffering from atelophobia. However, I do believe that perfectionists are unnecessarily hard not only on themselves, but on those around them.

If workplace goals are not met because projects don't get initiated on time and you suspect perfectionism lies at the heart of this, then the problem runs deeper than a lack of immediate productivity. Procrastination is a workplace disease that has a high impact on the overall well‐being of your team. Individuals who procrastinate excessively can suffer from anxiety and low self‐esteem; the more prolonged any delay, the more anxious they become. They are not only more prone to workplace stress as individuals but they can be difficult and uncomfortable colleagues; not getting the best out of teammates.

As a leader, you can help your team overcome perfection‐based procrastination by openly challenging a viewpoint that perfection is always the goal, especially at the outset of a project. You can also reassure people that they can learn to live with the discomfort of not knowing all the answers they will need. But by far the greatest difference will come when you back all this up by consciously fostering a culture where it is OK for people to admit that they don't know all the answers, when it is permitted to make mistakes and where people are encouraged to ask for help whenever it is needed. How to do this is in fact the topic of Cloud 7, which looks at building team resilience.

The last point I want to make in this opening chapter is one I personally consider to be amongst the most important in this book. For what seems to be an increasing number of people in the workplace, a desire to live up to some perfect and unrealistic conception of how they should be is so overwhelming that they constantly think they are failing and falling short. They suffer from a nagging insecurity that they don't deserve to be here in their role. Instead of seeing perfection for the myth that it is and just trying to do the best they can in their jobs, such people suffer a crippling anxiety and become more determined than ever to avoid making mistakes. It is not difficult to see how this can have catastrophic and self‐fulfilling consequences: if people are scared to make mistakes, they are resistant to trying anything new and therefore deny themselves opportunities to learn to overcome their fears.

Today, the term imposter syndrome is widely used to describe such feelings of self‐doubt and inadequacy in the workplace. Before the 1980s, imposter syndrome wasn't a term used outside the sphere of academic psychology. Today it is a leading topic and studies have stated that around 70 per cent of people will experience at least one such lifetime episode of feeling this way.1

What I would like to explore here is an idea that for most of us, some feelings of work‐related self‐doubt and anxiety are an entirely normal reaction to particular situations and are also strongly linked to our mental template of what constitutes perfection. I'd also like to make it very clear that, in trying to take a slightly wider perspective on this issue, I am not in any way seeking to diminish the genuine suffering that those with imposter syndrome undergo. Thankfully, this is now a clinically recognised psychological condition and there are a range of therapies and services available to help people.

A characteristic of someone with severe imposter syndrome is that they would experience their negative feelings as overwhelming, debilitating and permanent because they arise from deep‐rooted beliefs and insecurities about themselves. For the rest of us, feelings of self‐doubt may be an entirely rational human reaction to unfamiliar situations. Self‐doubt may also be a measure of the degree to which we can learn to manage our own conception of ‘perfect’ as it relates to different aspects of our workplace performance. I would go so far as to say that some occasional feelings of doubt are positive. They are reassuring proof that you have enough insight to anticipate that an environment or a challenge you face will require you to develop skills and abilities you may not feel confident about. Recognising and acknowledging where you need to develop is a great strength. If you don't believe me, think about anyone you have ever met who is blissfully unaware of their own shortcomings, limitations and ignorance. They are a person who lacks insight and there are more of them out there than you would believe.

As we shall explore further in Cloud 5, human brains evolved to deal with the world as it existed 300,000 years ago. Despite all the changes in the way we live now, the fundamental neural wiring of our brains hasn't changed a great deal since then. Consequently, our own brains can create perceptions, emotions and biases that are not only poorly adapted to today's modern world; we are often completely unaware that this is happening. One such example is the so‐called negativity bias, which describes the psychological basis for why we find bad news easier to believe than good news and tend to dwell on our own and other people's negative perceptions rather than positive viewpoints.

The explanation for why our brain works this way goes back a long way.

When our ancestors lived in caves and ran away from sabre‐toothed tigers, there was a significant evolutionary advantage in having a brain that could focus very close attention on aspects of our surroundings which could be threatening or harmful to us. The brain developed a mechanism designed to give priority to bad news and recognise it faster next time. The better this mechanism worked, the more evolutionary advantage it conferred and the more the genes responsible for this ability were passed down to all the descendants who hadn't been eaten by predators. Eventually, this brain mechanism evolved to work really well indeed.

The part of the brain that processes our response to events and experiences is the amygdala, which is a complex structure of cells in the midbrain making up part of our limbic system. Neuroanatomists have shown that around two‐thirds of the neurons in the amygdala are pre‐wired to recognise bad news rather than positive stimuli, and will preferentially transfer negative events and experiences much more quickly to our memory. In comparison, positive events and experiences usually need to be held in conscious awareness for a period of