Beware your nurturing side..

Many of us are proud of how we look after others, how much we care, how we may even protect others - especially those that work for us.

Take a moment and consider this: Are we actually harming them and their careers?

Many a seven year old is perfectly capable of getting up, washing themselves, cleaning their teeth, dressing themselves, getting some breakfast and making their way to school. How many seven year olds are trusted and allowed to do this? Not many I guess and it’s understandable. We care for our children. We don’t want to put them at risk, we don’t want them to get hurt or have to feel scared.

With the best of intentions, many a manager unconsciously over-protect their people- severely limiting their potential.

If this could be you - take the opportunity to have a conversation about how much risk your people want and are able to take. My bet is that they will surprise you and shine!

The adjacent possible

I had never heard of the adjacent possible before last week. I heard about it the day after I had been describing the concept to someone without knowing it for what it was.

The idea behind the adjacent possible (as I heard it) is that certain things only become possible because of the circumstances and environment surrounding you at a particular moment of time. My personal example was developing applications for mobile phones using rich content nearly ten years before there was the required ‘adjacent possible’. We had the ideas, and the content, and the consumer need - but we didn’t have was the adjacent possible of the iPhone and the App Store! We were waaay too early!

Researching the concept informs me that this concept is mostly used in describing biological systems but I think it can be a really useful concept in any endeavour.

Consider your goals right now. Do you have the requisite adjacent possible to achieve those goals?

“What needs to be in place for you to succeed?”

Sometimes we can be convinced that we can achieve anything if we want it enough. However, we might make much better choices and expend a lot less effort if we check out the current status of our adjacent possible...

But it should have worked!

I was reading up on project management looking for some data on the causes of project failure and I came across a PCI Global Survey - Taking the Pulse of Project Management - worth a read though the more interesting stuff (for me) was on page two.

They detail 6 Key Issues and Complaints but they nail it in the very first line.....

“Project Managers are pragmatic people.” (my emphasis)

Exactly! Pragmatic! Not emotionally intelligent! Year after year of surveys show that projects continue to come in late, out of scope and over budget. The reason - really pragmatic people ‘leading’.

The issue with practical, pragmatic and so called logical people is that they are convinced that things should happen in a certain way - like what’s on their plan.... However, all the evidence shows us that human beings are absolutely useless at predicting - rubbish! (checkout Dan Ariely’s Black Swan if you want to be lectured at on the subject)

We’ve all heard it but most of us don’t get it - the Prussian Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke the Elder was right when he said (paraphrased) “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying that you shouldn’t plan, von Moltke considered the main task of leaders was in the extensive preparation of all possible outcomes - not the ones they think should happen.

So pragmatism as a key trait in project leaders? Wouldn’t be at the top of my list!

"Cuddling people into doing things"

I was having coffee, catching up with an old client when she used this phrase “Oh yes, he’s very good at cuddling people into doing things”. What a brilliant expression I thought!

It reminded me that the best leaders really engage at an emotional level. People talk about cross-functional teams and sweat the fact that they don’t have the people delivering their results reporting in to them.

I know the person in question and I’ve observed how he gets results - without seeking authority or permission, he transmits passion and enthusiasm for a project so that people just join him on his journey - putting discretionary effort in way beyond their ‘day job’.

He collects people and connects them - to him, to the mission, to each other. Eh voila! - results are delivered. Delivered in timescales not thought possible and with less budget. No better argument for Emotional Intelligence.

Hard work and leadership development

One of my favourite people on the planet for fresh thinking is Seth Godin.  If you haven’t looked at this stuff you really should.  His performances on TED are a good introduction.

I first became aware of him when he wrote an article in Fast Company Magazine in April 2003 “A Brief History of Hard Work, Adjusted for Risk”.  The gist of the article is that when we existed in an economy based on manual labour hard work was exactly that - hours of hard physical labour.  In our knowledge economy, today’s hard work is about taking apparent risk, making difficult emotional decisions - making choices where our lizard brain kicks in with a fight or flight response, where we need to override our unconscious responses.

When Ken Robinson had his latest speech animated by the RSA it really resonated.  He makes the point that our education system originally came into existence to service the needs of the industrial revolution to produced skilled workers, or rather, workers with manual and intellectual skills.  He is calling for a paradigm shift in primary, secondary and even tertiary education.  

We need to consider the same for our businesses and organisations if we want the leadership that’s needed for us to survive and thrive.  An alarmingly large amount of our existing learning and development paradigm around leadership still involves people ‘going on courses’ to learn skills.  

Developing leaders to better handle modern ‘hard work’ means not sending them on that 'executive' course.  In these hard times, that’s a waste of valuable resources.  It’s time to be a lot more creative, and more courageous, in leadership development.