Seeing People as People has been Integrated Work’s way for more than 20 years!  See the article for more information about how to stay engaged, even in these intense times. Read more here!

When a leader is promoted into a new role it constitutes a significant identity shift. Bob had spent his professional life concerned with a specific strata of organizational activities. Now, his role required a broader focus, looking at information through new lenses and seeing the same situation with a fresh perspective. He found it very hard to make that shift. Such moments may be familiar to you; sometimes our focus doesn’t match with where our leadership is needed. We hold on to what we used to do and how we used to think, when the leadership opportunity that we currently face requires a different capability.

Our shift in perspective can take a while to catch up. We need to change inside as well as in our role or we risk “leading too low.” In other words, we focus at a lower level of impact, expending our energies on what worked in the past and ultimately leaving too much of our leadership capacity untapped.

Read more here.

Families of any size can use leadership skillsets and mindsets to improve their home life and grow wonderful humans capable of collaborating from an early age. Why wouldn’t we apply the lessons learned from developing leaders at work in other areas of our lives?
How we listen, collaborate, communicate, and self-regulate our behavior is the work of conscious leaders, whether on the job or around the dinner table.

Consciously navigating the sophisticated balance of challenge and support in healthy relationships provides a lifetime of development opportunities at home, in our community, and at work. Applying the capabilities we build from one area of our lives to the different spheres of our experience is a way to live congruently.

Coaching, project management, delegation, negotiation, and purchasing are skills that directly apply at work and home. The same can be said for teamwork, troubleshooting, and technology. Parenting as leaders who build capacity in others and who grow children to be effective, ethical leaders is a pipeline strategy I’ve not heard much about in business circles. But if you take the long view, it benefits families, kids, communities, and the planet. Here are just two examples of how to apply conscious leadership principles at home.

Reflection is a critical tool in self-directed development. In The Conscious Professional: Transform Your Life at Work, I challenge readers to develop a consistent reflection practice to leverage their experiences for growth. In our personal lives, reflection can be done individually and collectively. In our family, Friday night is a time to notice what we are grateful for about the week and share that with each other. It connects us with loved ones and reminds us that we have a choice about where we focus our time and attention. Increasing our awareness about our thoughts–noticing what we are thinking about and choosing where to focus–is a key factor in the conscious leadership movement and a way to be deliberate about partnering with our family members.

Teamwork is a skill highly valued at work. Yet, so many of us fail to leverage the opportunities to build it at home. When you have projects to complete with siblings, elders, children, or neighbors, can you take the time to assess the strengths, provide clarity, and establish effective teamwork? These skills can be constantly renewed and re-built in our personal lives even beyond our family life when we get involved in local or national communities. Political organizing, neighborhood associations, school boards, and meaningful community events are all great opportunities to exercise and strengthen our teamwork skills.

As an executive coach, I find many examples where a client’s family experiences demonstrated a heart-breaking lack of teamwork. People didn’t feel valued, didn’t have a voice, or found it overwhelming to trust and navigate collaborative relationships with others. Building new neural pathways to be a good team member and team leader is completely within our power, but it does take practice. Those who have experience with teaming at home–being open to diverse ideas, collaborating on strategy, and working with others to accomplish something greater than they could do alone–are a gift to a newly formed work team.

Ethical companies that live according to their stated values need leaders who live authentically and congruently between what they say and what they do.

The first professional development we get is at home. We learn how to think about work as we reflect on it from home. What is discussed about worklives in your home? When you were growing up, to what extent did the conversation about work in your household impact you? Character development is a long, slow arc, and is the result of many stacked experiences and our interpretation of them.

Professional purpose enriches worklives. Passion, drive, creativity, and engagement are intrinsic to individuals, yet also the lifeblood of innovation, growth, and advancement for organizations.

Authentic leaders are open with their values and act consistently with the principles they hold. Yet, we are all works in progress along a continuum of development. As we go, we can grow ever-greater abilities to understand what really matters, deal with the changing circumstances around us, and listen to the voice of wisdom deeper than biochemical reactions.

In what ways can you live your values more fully and make conscious choices at home or work?
Creating conscious leaders at work and being a conscious leader in our personal lives are inescapably integrated. 

Every day, our decisions shape our reality. According to a survey by Columbia University decision researcher, Sheena Iyengar, the average American makes approximately 70 conscious decisions every day. We decide our lives again and again, from the moment we wake.

Our moments of truth as leaders, and the most critical junctures in our personal lives come down to our decisions.

We are all peers in the experience of wrestling with a tough decision, feeling its weight, making our choice. Big ones and little ones, we all have them. A lot of them. You would think the science and practice of decision-making would be a required course in every high school since it impacts our life so profoundly.

Feeling certain about a decision can be deeply satisfying, because we feel we can decide to do based on what we know is right. Certainty though, is a terrible measure of quality.

We can be certain and terribly wrong.

We can be unsure and absolutely spot-on.

Confidence and competence don’t always go together.

So how do we define effective decision-making? We could evaluate whether a decision was good or bad based on the outcomes achieved.

But wait, sometimes good results happen from bad decisions, and vice versa. Forces outside our control, and beyond our awareness, may determine the outcome we experience.

As an executive coach, I’ve learned how to be a good thinking partner for those making big decisions by noticing the process being used.

Sometimes, people don’t have enough options. They’re trying to make decisions from poor choices, and having a tough time. I spoke with one gal who sought a career change.

She told me, “Either I’m going to stay put until I retire, or I need to quit and get started on something else, but I just can’t decide. I can’t really afford to quit my job.”

When she framed the decision as “Should I be bored for the rest of my professional life, or loose my financial footing?” it is easy to see why she didn’t feel like she could make a good choice.

We talked about her interests, and how she might experiment with a business start-up concept, while maintaining her current job. To do that, she felt she needed better skills in negotiating her job responsibilities. Negotiating skills would also be key for someone who was going to start her own business, so she decided to work on that for three months. Now she had an option that was worthy of her decision, and a plan to create several real alternatives to being bored.

In their book, Winning Decisions: Getting it Right the First Time, J. Edward Russo and Paul Schoemaker explain that a high quality decision-making process produces better outcomes more often. They certainly convinced me. I have used this model to help improve countless decisions.

Before I read the book Winning Decisions, I used to believe this decision-making myth: “We learn to make good decisions through experience.”

It’s false. If you have tried to grow other people’s skills, you know, firsthand, that people don’t always make the most of their experiences, or learn from them. The experience itself isn’t the where the learning lies.

You can have the same experience thousands of times and never learn. If our experience also includes reflecting, thinking, shifting perspective, expanding one’s awareness, improving, and changing, at least a little bit, then are we likely to make a better decision next time? Experiences aren’t optional. Learning is.

So we have to choose to learn from our experience, and this awareness really changed my thinking about the value of a debrief. Reflection, or debriefing, is where the learning from the experience is available to us.
Having a good decision-making process is one way you can get good decision outcomes. The four steps to decision-making below is a handy method, and the most clear, simple, easy-to-use decision-making process I have found. What I love most is that it not only gets you through the decision, it also grows your ability to make good decisions when you use it.

I’ve found this process serves well for a lot of decisions, and I hope that it will help you the next time you feel you are stuck at a crossroads.

The Four Steps to Decision-Making

The decision-making process, advocated by Russo & Schoemaker in Winning Decisions, consists of the following simple, clear, and useful steps. You can start anywhere:

1. Framing the decision – Determining your viewpoint on the issue. This includes which aspects of the situation are considered important, and which are not.

What decision are your really making? What outcome do you seek?

2. Gathering intelligence and generating options – Seeking knowable facts and options to enable decision-making in the face of uncertainty.

What options exist? How much can be known?

3. Coming to conclusions – Determining how will you evaluate the options. Consciously decide how to decide, before coming to conclusion.Use your ethics, values, and heart, as well as your intellect. Different methods make sense for different types of decisions.

How should decisions like this be made? Who else needs to be involved?

4. Learning– Learning from the results of past decisions to continually improve decision-making skills.

What were the results? What did you learn from the experience?

My friend who was choosing whether to move out of state found that by reflecting on his past decisions, he could reframe his current dilemma, build better options, and include his values as he came to conclusions. The four steps helped him think through the decision in productive way.

Having this four-step process helps to create a better outcomes. Build your skills here, and you will use them again and again to serve the causes you care about.

Remember, decision-making is an art as well as a practice. We are all peers in learning how to do this well.

Goodness knows, the world can use more effective, ethical decision-making at every level. Let’s keep getting good at it.

I’d love to hear your experience with this process. Leave a comment below, or join the discussion on my Facebook page.

“Listening within” is a term I use to describe what it’s like when we really check in with ourselves to discover our true intentions, and what really matters. It’s an important skill to learn because it’s hard to focus on work that matters when we, ourselves, are out of touch with what that means.

Listening within is how we check in with our deeper self, beyond the fears and ego, to remember what really matters. One client who worked with me on aligning his work with what matters most came up with a unique way of expressing the process…

This client was a former CEO. He had been asked to leave a role and was now in career transition. I asked him to listen within about a decision he was wrestling with.

He just kept talking about the situation, and sharing other people’s opinions.

So, I said, “Greg, hold on a minute. Let’s just take a moment to ask yourself what you really think about this. You are getting lots of external influence, but I don’t think you are getting enough internal influence. I’d like you to take a moment and listen within to get some feedback about this from inside.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“OK, let’s try this,” I suggested. “Just ask these questions of yourself and see what information you get:

• How is your body feeling about this?
• What does your heart have to say about it?
• What is really important here, for you, from the inside?”

We stayed quiet for a few minutes, and then Greg shared.

“It’s like there is a little guy inside who knows what I really like and want. I’m out here worrying about what is happening around me, and everyone tells me what they think. It’s almost like I’ve forgotten what I really believe. But I can ask the little guy, and he remembers.”

I loved this description of the inner landscape Greg created to get in touch with what was important to him. He would ask the “little guy inside” questions throughout the transition to his new CEO and consultant roles. It helped Greg stay true to his dreams, and his conscience.

Prioritize What Matters: Listen Within

When you need to prioritize your commitments and responsibilities, it can be helpful to “listen within” so that you can remember what really matters. There’s not always a logical way to determine where to best focus our time and effort. Sometimes, the situation calls for us to turn our attention inward to cultivate our inner knowing.

People often call it “gut instinct,” intuition, or just centeredness. Either way, the idea is to ask ourselves a question about a specific situation, choice, or challenge.

By questioning ourselves, we’re activating the logical mind. But on a deeper level that goes beyond thinking and reasoning, we can start to notice our emotions, body sensations, and perhaps a tugging on the heart.

Sometimes we receive a very strong “yes” or “no” feeling in response to a question, or maybe a calm inner knowing about how something will turn out, even when we have no logical basis for that conclusion. But that’s kind of the point: listening within lets us go past the logic and rationale so that we can start to feel a directional pull.

Inner knowing has a specific type of positive quality – even when it is warning us of danger, or saying “no” to a choice we think we want, it is a positive and forward-looking orientation of aligning with what matters.

Inner wisdom is not about recrimination, anxiety, or opening old wounds… that’s not the voice we want to listen to when we listen within. That’s an inner critic.

In contrast to the harshness of our inner critics, wisdom is more sure-footed. Even the flickers of inspiration are worth exploring and connecting with, so we can visualize a new angle or perspective.

Many clients share with me how they have been moved to take action, share ideas, talk to a specific person, change jobs, and try out something new because of a hunch, a tug, or inspiration that just “feels right.”

Perhaps you have similar experiences of having been moved by an inner wisdom. Use these memories as a touchstone for the type of communication you are requesting.

When you check-in next, ask a question with genuine curiosity:

• “Where do I need to focus?”
• “What is most important about this?”

Then you can follow the thread of impressions you receive to create a dialogue with your inner knowing, moving step-by-step to new territory and insight.

After asking your question, don’t forget to be quiet so you can actually listen within. Remember, this is not a “talking within” exercise.

Claim this time for yourself. Hunches can turn into great results that could not have been anticipated with the logical mind.

Effective, high character leaders blend their business savvy and effective systems with their inner knowing to create a powerful source of direction and insight for themselves and causes.

For more advice on growing your leadership skills, check out my new book, The Conscious Professional: Transform Your Life at Work.

“So, when you teach management and leadership development, what do you teach?” the neighbor of a friend, Dan, asks me over beers in the backyard.

This fellow was in software development at a big company, and has mentioned that he has been passed over for a promotion a few times.

The first thing that comes to my mind (and out of my mouth) is seeing events from a strategic perspective. I explain over the conversational din: any given issue can be looked at from multiple perspectives and multiple levels — from highly tactical to highly strategic.

If you are dealing with a programmer who hasn’t met deadlines, you could see it is a performance issue with that programmer. And maybe it is. But you could also see it from the perspective of the issues that relate to the whole project.

• What systems are missing that gave rise to this issue, or allowed it to go on for so long?
• Is our tracking system or meeting structure lacking?
• Is there a missing component to our onboarding, or expectation setting?

A leader who is thinking strategically asks not only how can we solve this problem, but is also looking at how this issue impacts the larger organization, and how the larger organization impacts the problem.

Being aware of multiple levels, and knowing what it’s time to address now, is one of the fundamental areas of leadership and management that I teach. And these skills are pivotal to making the most of learning from whatever comes your way in your current position.

Satisfied I was worth talking to further, Dan asked about his boss, who he didn’t like working for. He shared that this boss had been promoted to the level of his incompetence.

Being Promoted is a Stretch Assignment

My response was that we are all promoted to our level of incompetence, if we are promoted at all, but if we’re smart, we grow.

Promotions are a “stretch assignment,” that require us to expand our views, and grow our capacity to deliver what is needed, right where we are. This is exactly why we grow in place.

We use the challenges that need to be addressed to build our awareness of where we need to grow, we prioritize based on what we are willing to learn, and we start practicing to build new skills so we can handle the challenges with more confidence and grace. Deliberately developmental individuals do this throughout their careers. (See The Conscious Professional: Transform Your Life at Work, page 4.)

Being a conscious professional means choosing to get better at what we do, deliberately.

When you need to stretch into a new role, that’s the perfect time to get out onto the developmental edge and expand your playing field by growing new skill sets and mindsets. Pretending that you ”already know” prevents this growth from occurring. Some people have a hard time admitting they have areas to grow in, which is funny, because it’s not like it’s a secret! Whatever shortcomings are there, certainly the rest of your co-workers are most distinctly aware of it.

Growing in place is how we develop ourselves to be able to succeed in our current and future roles, as well as build the skill sets and mindsets to impact the causes we care about. By growing in place, we build transferable skills that we can use to be more capable than ever before when tackling our next project, assignment, or organization.

So while Dan’s boss may be awful, it doesn’t mean he couldn’t get better, as long he’s willing to grow, and starts to work on at his developmental edges. One of the best ways I’ve seen to create a culture and experience of development is to start growing yourself.

Managing Up

So how do you “manage up” when your boss doesn’t know how to do all the aspects of their role?

• See and use your own strengths. If you are noticing that your boss isn’t competent in a certain area, it may be that you have gifts or experience in that area that you could further customize to this situation. Grow yourself first, and then you can support your department by working alongside your boss. As an added bonus, you have a chance to both advance your skills and show it.
• Grow what is needed. Maybe no one around you knows how to do what is needed. That happens a lot in fast-changing environments and innovative spaces. Why not identify the skills that are needed, and begin learning what is needed for yourself? Share what you find with your boss.
• Upgrade as a group. How about a team approach to growing in place? Is there a book on leadership, project management, communication, or whatever topic is at issue that you could read and discus together as a team? That would help everyone grow in place together.

Just because a boss has shown more interest in managing their image rather than managing their growth, doesn’t mean you should do the same. (Remember that we can have Reverse Mentors who show us how not to act.) Time is ticking. You might as well be learning along the way. The detrimental effects of incompetence can be mitigated by growing in place.

With compassion, we can see that we all have uneven developmental edges – some areas we know exactly what to do, some areas we don’t. Skills that once worked may no longer suffice.

Maybe you are great at the technology, but not so good on the communication side. Or maybe your vision and strategy are brilliant, but next some focus on systems development would really help you succeed.

However good you are today at your role, there is always room to grow and improve.

Growing in place is how we design our future.

For more advice on growing in place, check out all the articles on The Conscious Professional Blog.