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Leadership Development

Better Leadership Through Anxiety Management

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A key factor in the success of modern leadership is learning to hold back personal assumptions and listening to the views of those that are able to deliver valuable input on a particular subject.  This is a very difficult skill to master, as it necessitates that such leaders are able to trust first, believe in the potential of others and embrace the fact that their own personal view of the world may be skewed with their own subjectivity.


More traditional or directive leaders often feel that their style is participatory, but are sometimes shocked to hear that this is not what their subordinates think.  Leadership rank tends to have a magnifying effect on their actions, and often limits the feedback given to them by others.  Modern leaders need to learn skills such as coaching and facilitating in order to help enable their teams.  Good coaching and facilitating requires the suspension of personal judgments while guiding others towards the best solution.


So why do we as people feel such anxiety when hearing views that contradict our own, particularly in the workplace? Can we learn to embrace differing views without anxiety?  The normal human response is to avoid anxiety by taking input, but discarding many of the ideas proposed to us.  Leadership behaviour such as this, in a team setting, could be described as energy-draining behaviour, and will result in decreased creativity and minimised team performance.


In order to better understand our own anxiety, it may be useful to consider the constructs of our brain.  In our evolution as humans, we survived with the aid of our autonomic nervous system also known as the limbic brain, the most primitive part of our brain.  At times of danger, this limbic brain would produce the emotions of fear and anger which would trigger a chemical change in our bodies to prepare us for “fight or flight”.  Later in our evolution we developed the cortex, housing the Central Nervous System and we became more intelligent beings.


Today our limbic brain is alive and well and unfortunately often confuses situations such as opposing views as life threatening situations.  Our amygdala (part of the limbic brain) then starts to ready us for fight or flight and hence we feel anxiety.  The limbic brain cannot be trained through cognitive learning, but through experience, reflection and trial and error.  Daniel Goleman tells us that many of these skills are first learned through our experiences by the age of 22 years, but we can continue to learn them with age, it just takes more effort.  One could then say that leaders are not born, but developed, but certain people have more development to do than others.


It may be interesting to reflect that this complex post-modern world in which we live demands a new set of leadership skills that enables people at all levels, and liberates creativity within organisations.  It is therefore no surprise to see that there is an increasing demand for executive coaching to assist leaders cope with complexity, anxiety and hence their emotions.

 

A good way to develop ourselves and “take charge” of our own minds starts with understanding our own emotions during the day.  Ideally our organisations would like us to spend most of our time in the top right “stimulated” quadrant, for that is where we are efficient and creative.  Once a person understands their “swings”, they can slowly start recognising their triggers and pull themselves back to the top right.   Each time one manages to take control of ones anxiety, the task will become easier and easier.

 

It has been interesting for me as an executive coach to observe that many of the factors limiting leaders appear to be associated with the avoidance of anxiety.  It would therefore be a huge advantage for leaders to learn to astutely observe their reactions to the surrounding world, and learn to understand and control their emotional responses thereto.

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Leading without blinkers, imagine the power

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Recently I consulted to a particular executive team regarding their company structure. Working with the team early one morning, I started by having them imagine their business in a few years time having achieved a high level of success. They then worked in two groups to draw up what the describing attributes would be in that scenario. Next I had the team draw up the attributes considering the worst case scenario, that of the business having failed. At this point they started looking rather concerned, and commented that many of the negative scenario attributes existed in the present.

These new perspectives appeared somewhat of a surprise to them, yet all I did as their facilitator was enable them to share information they already individually knew. Clearly the team for some reason had not until that moment been able to share their views and perspectives adequately. The ability for a team to share and consider every perspective is paramount to creating high performance teams, a prerequisite to building sustainable high performance organisations.

This type of situation is not uncommon. Considering the fact that the overall tone, culture and direction of the organisation is set and modelled from the top, team performance can make or break organisations. Companies that were average performers managed to flourish in the simpler word that lies behind us. The highly competitive world that faces us today will increasingly only tolerate top performance. Today increasingly higher demands are placed on senior leadership to develop highly performing companies. Our cognitive blinkers In order to understand what leaders can do to better enable companies through their collective leadership, it may be useful to look at some of the potential blind spots we have as individuals, after all a team is simply made up of individuals. Dr Gregory Berns, neuroscientist and author of “Iconoclast”, describes that the human brain is limited by an energy constraint of about 40 watts of power (a light bulb). In order to save energy the brain will use information stored from past experiences rather than figure out new options by re-evaluating all the new information. This small flaw in our system will often result in us feeling that our perceptions are real. The truth however is that our perspectives are just our perceptions. Dr Berns goes on to say that the solution to limit the effects of our past experiences on our perceptions is by regularly bombarding our brains with information it has never encountered before. This information bombarding process will force the brain to think outside of our normal pathways. Inferring from Dr Berns’ findings, one could go on to say that as leaders we need to always be open to hear different views however tough and despite sometimes feeling that we know better.

The field of cognitive science describes a number of cognitive biases that result in humans making judgement deviations from “reality”. These biases may well be related to the brains energy constraints. Below is a list of a few of the most common biases:

  • Bandwagon effect — the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.
  • Choice-supportive bias — the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
  • Illusion of control — the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot.
  • Confirmation bias — the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
  • Status quo bias — the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.

Full list found at www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

Rank and power blinkers

Another dynamic that can have a severe impact on people, teams and the organisation is the effects of rank and the related use of power. In the world that lies behind us, it was more acceptable for management to lead using their positional power as a motivator for example by saying: “I am the boss now do what I tell you”. Today this old world style would be considered coercive leadership and could result in people becoming fearful and angry and disengaging from the organisation. Organisations where coercive leadership is the norm tend to develop cultures of dependence, where people hold back their personal power and abdicate thinking and leadership to higher levels. These organisations become slow and struggle to reinvent themselves. In such cases, senior leaders are forced to get too involved in operational thinking to the detriment of long term planning and organisational integration.

Today senior leaders need to work very hard to soften the effects of the positional rank they have inherited within their organisations. They have to demonstrate to others that they are open to receive all forms of feedback by not becoming defensive when the feedback arrives.

They need to search out views and perspectives widely, even though they may think they already have all the information.

Flattening the organisation

High performance organisations require leadership to be distributed throughout the organisation. In order to foster a culture of agility and adaption which is key to competitiveness, all the resources need to be engaged resulting in staff feeling as if they own the business. The traditional hierarchy created a vertical flow of power within the organisation, resulting in silos and counterproductive leader-follower dynamics.

The challenge is to create an organisational structure and culture where the power flows horizontally, where staff interacts directly with others outside of their “team” in the business to find solutions, rather they using the vertical hierarchy as a long distance telephone. In order to achieve this requires a departure from certain traditional views. As an example, if we ask members of an executive team who their team is, the CFO, CTO, CMO etc will traditionally answer finance, technology, or marketing respectively. Considering this view, the danger would be that these executives are so focused on their function that they are not spending adequate focus on the objectives of the greater organisation. The chief executive most certainly cannot be the only person with the greater hilltop view. This same paradigm shift should be applied throughout the organisation resulting in everyone broadening their view of the organisation and their function. Heads of marketing should not just understand their individual components of marketing but should also understand and influence all of marketing within the organisation.

Today’s winning leadership toolkit

In order to lead organisations to success in this world requires leaders with a set of skills that often seem absent from our toolkits. Few of the skills required today were used by previous generation’s leaders, nor were these skills taught to us in our homes, schools or universities.

Leaders today need to:

  • Learn to feel comfortable not knowing all the answers.
  • Master the art of having courageous and sometimes tough conversations with others.
  • Invite and receiving feedback without defensiveness.
  • Value opposing, dissenting and unfamiliar views and voices.
  • Suspend personal anxiety and judgement.
  • Learn to be the manager as facilitator and coach.
  • Master listening skills.
  • Create reflective sanctuaries in order to reflect on events and perspectives.
  • Understand and use personal power and rank effectively.

The challenge is that many seasoned leaders may have attained great success withoutmastering these skills in the old world, but success will demand them in the future. These skills are often labelled as soft skills however when a person tries to learn them, you quickly discover just how hard it is to break old habits and master these skills as well as the powerful impact their use has on others.

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Conscious leadership a key factor of sustainability

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Con-scious – Having an awareness of one’s environment and one’s own existence, sensations, and thoughts. Conscious is a word that has been coming up for me a lot when dealing with leaders at senior levels within organisations. It means different things to me in different dimensions. At the personal level it means being truly aware of the impact of one’s leadership on others and the organisation over time. Do other people hear what I am saying and understand it in the way I intended when I delivered those words? Do I understand my impact on others? Is the person I imagine I am, the same person experienced by others?

Does my leadership have the best effect on others? Most people answer “yes” to all these questions until they elicit honest feedback from their manager, peers and/or reports. Organisational systems generally don’t create environments in which brutally honest feedback can be given and therefore requires leaders to either use third party confidential 360 instruments or to gradually show the people surrounding them that they value developmental feedback and consistently solicit that feedback. For most people the former is the only way.

We find ourselves in a radically different world today compared to the world we grew up in during the sixties and seventies. Organisations require skills tailored to an environment of urgency, high stakes and uncertainty. Organisational Cultures need to be built where the best internal and external thinking and practices can be leveraged. The leadership and energy of each person needs to be leveraged and hence we need to use a leadership style that includes people and takes them along with us. The challenge of our time is we are currently living in the gap between the old and the new. By this I mean that many of us grew up in an authoritative and coercive world where we were told what to do. Today it is about inclusion, respect, transparency and trust. We can use the old school methods but these tend to lead to disengagement and talent attrition which is not what we need in order to create agile and High Performing Organisations.

Jim Collins in his book why the mighty fall, describes a key component leading to organisational failure as “Hubris”, basically meaning organisations thinking they are so good that they become arrogant and fail to see the changes in the competitive landscape. We as humans have many wired irrational faults described as cognitive biases. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias) Cognitive biases skew our judgement, leaving us thinking our views and perspectives are accurate when in fact, they generally have many flaws. The way to avoid such pitfalls is to engage others for their views and perspectives, a practice particularly difficult for those of us schooled in the old way of doing things. Many managers I have worked with over the years believed they engaged others sufficiently, but upon receiving their 360 reports, have been shocked to discover the contrary. Once they contemplate these new insights, they may be convinced to begin to lead in a more conscious or aware state and start the journey of growth. Learning starts when we can shift from a place of unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, knowing what we don’t know. It is therefore not a surprise that the bulk of leadership literature considers humility a key trait of successful managers. A healthy level of low self-confidence is not necessarily a bad thing, as it may assist us to engage others for their perspectives in order to consider that just maybe I could be wrong.

So how do we become conscious leaders? As I have stated above, we need to become conscious about how we are seen by others. This means we must be able to work with and integrate perspectives that vary from our own without pushing them away. This is very difficult for most of us as adults, and requires a focus and desire of wanting to learn and develop. We see the world through our knowledge or lenses and it is incredible how people and the teams they manage grow through acquiring new perspectives. I have met many good people working at senior levels over the years, some which have done a huge amount of damage without intending to. It is a pity that such people generally only start wanting to change when they make a catastrophic mistake or have derailed as executives.

Maybe we require that jolt to start looking inside. An ideal list of things to do and learn as a minimum requirement to start the journey towards becoming a more conscious leader would include:

  • Understanding self emotionally and learning how to deal with our own stress and anxiety.
  • Encouraging people to give you honest feedback and be careful not to be defensive when receiving it.
  • Finding a good 360 process, and get feedback regularly.
  • Learning inclusive leadership skills such as listening, situational leadership, coaching, giving and receiving feedback and team leadership.
  • Learning about self: Psychological diversity or preferences, shadows, strengths and weaknesses.
  • Learning to reflect as an individual and as a team.
  • Reading widely particularly regarding self development and leadership.

A conscious leader can make a huge positive impact on Organisations and teams and is usually admired and followed by others. Conscious leaders build powerful Organisational Cultures that keeps the Organisation conscious about its internal and external environments and the strategy needed to pave the right trajectory. Fred Kofman in his book Conscious Business – how to build value through values, points out why we need such Organisations and what leadership must do to achieve them. In their book Conscious Capitalism, Raj Sisodia and John Mackey discuss the role of business in society and what needs to be done to create win win situations between all stakeholders to lead to sustainability for all.

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