You can get the book here.
What the book is about.
Leading in 6 moments that matter.
- Use anger intelligently in the workplace – use anger to drive better results and match mood of a group to the task.
- Recognizing and dealing with ‘terminal politeness – don’t avoid important conversations – attack the idea not the person
- Making decisions when no one else is making them – embrace a willingness to be wrong in order to drive action
- Taking ownership with others are externalizing a problem – uncover the inherent biases that may lead you to be part of the problem.
- Identifying and leveraging permission – yours and others
- Inspiring others to take action – recognize when you and others are stuck in unproductive and redundant dialogue. – how to reverse momentum and focus on a solution or just move on.
Other notes.
- Learning a skill requires concrete experimentation – try out the new behaviours.
- Get quality feedback often.
- Reflect on the results on the new behaviour – check in on what were you trying to achieve, how did that work for you? This requires that you honestly reflect on that experience. Be kind to yourself
- Assimilation – What am I going to do differently next time, what action will I take based on what I have learned.
Sounds very much like many of the agile continuous improvement practices we are trying to implement. Like having short timeboxes to run your experiments in, getting short feedback and reflecting on how it went and making an action plan for how to make things better next time based on what we have learnt.
The first point is about Getting Angry not stupid
To take advantage of a situation requires two things
- The awareness of one’s own negative emotion and the ability to make productive use of them
- The skill to help others do the same
Use your anger as a fuel to generate the energy required to move. This applies to all your negative emotions and I remember one of our internal courses advises this as well, to take that negative emotion and use the energy generated from that for positive action.
We need to learn to Respond – don’t react
A response is the behaviours and action you thoughtfully planned to demonstrate when and if you were ever in a particular situation.
We need to practice the behaviours we want to develop into habits and push ourselves further to grow. To do this we need to Identify our triggers .
- Ask yourself what type of behaviours in others tend to make you feel upset. For me it is when I am not allowed to contribute or I am not listened to.
- What types of situations tend to make you feel upset and what is your go to response action.
We are all human, we all make mistakes time and time again. And we also all leap to judgement and when interacting with people whose beliefs differ from our own can be guilty of judging the entire human being as ignorant, stupid or evil.
- People can sense how you feel about them.
- They are probably more complex than the single opinion illustrates
- You could be misunderstanding them
- They might offer you a perspective you are currently lacking.
you probably made a similar mistake at some point in your life and would want people to offer you compassion and the benefit of the doubt.
Managing your emotions – Getting angry is your body giving you a sign that you are about to go primal. Use these techniques to help you stay intelligent.
- Breathing – Deep controlled breaths.
- Questioning – when you ask your brain a question if forces blood back to the neocortex.
- Palms up –
- Time out
Practise these techniques when you are not in the moment so that they are readily available when you are .
Anger is a potentially toxic emotion. The techniques above will help you get in control of it and remain intelligent, however the point is to keep hold of that high energy state and direct it towards something productive. When you are in control you are able to respond appropriately. Anger isn’t the best emotion to develop plans, but it is useful way to implement plans.
The author provides some great questions to ask to identify your emotions and also to manage and redirect them.
Questions
Ask yourself before an interaction that you suspect might raise negative emotions.
- How am I felling right now
- Why I am feeling this way
- What emotions am I primed to experience because of my background mood?
The next two questions help you manage your emotions during the moment they occur
- Are my emotions intensifying
- Am I choosing to allow my emotions to heighten, or are they now in charge?
Final questions will help you redirect the emotion towards a positive end.
- What would be a good use of the energy I am feeling right now
- What could my next step be.
You can leverage your negative emotions to produce positive outcomes.
We have been implementing or trying to at least a feedback framework for those difficult conversations, when you want to say something to someone that they are not going to like. It is hard and people avoid having these conversations which is a real shame. I believe it is something that needs to be taught a lot earlier and maybe across the whole society. Otherwise we don’t deal with the issues, people aren’t honest with themselves or each other and act too nice, or you get shot down because the other person doesn’t want to hear it at all.
The challenge is to ignite enough of the right type of conflict to bring the best out of people.
I liked this activity that the author suggests to give you some perspective on how equally you treat everyone. Definitely something to think about and make a conscious effort to change.
Write down a list of the 10 people with whom you interact the most at work. Now rank order them from one to ten, from whom you like best to whom you like least. Take a good look at how you treat the people at the top versus the people at the bottom.
How much time do they get, who do you confide in, most of us like to think that we treat everyone fairly and equitably, but you may get a surprise if you have complied your list honestly .
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