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Leadership Results PodcastAuthor: Jordan Goldrich
Welcome toThe Leadership Results Podcast Learn proven formulas from reputable executives and industry consultants. All of our guests will help you become the best leader possible. We promise to bring you key insights that impact trust, morale and alignment These are the keys for productivity and the bottom line. We invite you to listen weekly. You will benefit from the up-to-date formulas that our listeners demand. Become a world-class leader. Subscribe to The Leadership Results Podcast. https://www.customentor.com/ Language: en Genres: Business, Management, Marketing Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Managing Attitude for better results
Episode 1
Monday, 20 April, 2020
CUSTOMentor Leadership Results Podcast Managing Attitude for better results Welcome to the 'Leadership Results' podcast. Learn proven formulas from reputable executives and industry consultants. All of our guests will help you become the best leader possible. We promise to bring you key insights that impact trust, morale and alignment. These are the keys for productivity and the bottom line. We invite you to listen weekly you'll benefit from the up-to-date formulas that our listeners demand. Become a world-class leader, subscribe to the Leadership Results podcast. Jordan: Hello everyone, I'm your host, Jordan Goldrich. Today's episode is called "Executive leadership during crisis, managing attitude for better results". Our guest is Dr. Wayne Hart. Wayne is a business executive, licensed clinical psychologist, senior executive coach, author and speaker. He's had executive leadership roles in a number of organizations in different industries. For 18 years he was senior faculty with one of the largest and best-known executive coaching and leadership development organizations in the world, the center for creative leadership. He is now a senior fellow with the center. Dr. Hart is author of five books and dozens of professional journal and newsletter articles. He specializes in helping leaders, coaches' mentors and trainers get better results. Welcome Wayne. Wayne: Thanks for having me on board Jordan. Jordan: It's a pleasure to have you here. So, before we started the interview today or the podcast today, you told me a great story about attitude. Why don't you share that with our listeners? Wayne: Oh, that would be fun. This goes back a few weeks just before the state of California asked everybody to shelter in place. It was on a weekend and I had broken my headset and being more and more involved on conference calls with zoom and things like that, I needed to get a new headset. So, I thought well I'm gonna head on down to Best Buy. But before leaving, I took a moment to just think about well, I'm going out into kind of an uncertain situation that could be stressful, could be unpredictable. I thought you know; I need to get my head right. So, I decided I was going to practice an attitude of seeing it as an adventure. So, fast-forward, I drive up to the local Best Buy and the store is closed except that there are a few people outside and Best Buy, is roped off. So, I think well this is interesting and I think okay, I remind myself. Rather than thinking of it as an inconvenience or a frustration which is my default reaction to things, I practiced seeing it as an adventure. So, I walked up to the folks at the front of the store. They were very nice and they explained to me that you couldn't get in the store but that they had three options. One was to go online and order an object and then they would provide it at the back door or I could call in and do the same thing. If I wanted the help of a Salesman, they would have a Salesman call me. Well and I got to thinking how hard it is to find a Salesman who isn't distracted by stuff and I haven't bought headphones in a long time, that one may be good. So, I gave them my phone number and I walked back to my car. Just in a couple of minutes the salesman calls me, we had this conversation. I'm on my tablet, I'm able to pull up the items he's talking about. I'm talking about the features I want; he's talking about the features in the thing. He explains all the options to me and I decided what I want, I order it. Then a few minutes later I get a text from Best Buy and it's available. So, I go around, drive to the back of this and pick it up. Now I think because I was in this attitude of "let it be an adventure", I was kind of open to the process and as I'm driving away, I had this thought "Man, that was the best concierge shopping experience, I've ever had". Jordan: It's funny. So, is that kind of typical for you that you would tend to get frustrated when things don't go exactly the way that you want them to go? Wayne: Oh yes, yeah. I have spent my entire adult life trying to manage that more effectively. You know at different times I might have practiced a different attitude and there are other times when I don't remember to do it and that's when I'm more likely to create more frustration stress from myself and bad feelings among the people that I deal with. Jordan: Yeah absolutely, so any interesting stories about how that showed up when you were a senior executive? Wayne: Well one comes to mind, I was running an oil trading company. I went into an executive committee meeting; it was my first executive committee meeting after the chairman of the board appointed me to the role. So, I went in with a rather rigid notion of how things should go. I ended up in this room with a bunch of really wealthy long-term oil industry people, who all had their own ideas about how to do things and they sort of believed that arguing was part of the enjoyable culture. Jordan: Ah, they must have come from my family. Wayne: I've heard about your family. It was a little bit like a Cub Scout meeting, you know? So, there was this part of me that felt I needed to get in control and manage what people were doing. So, it was frustrating for me that I couldn't. After the meeting I felt embarrassed and the chairman was actually a mentor of mine. So, we had a long conversation and that was probably a breakthrough moment for me in realizing that I need to work on my mindset when I engage problems, crisis or just any event. If I'm intentional about the lens through which I'm going to observe or perceive the situation, I'm more likely to handle it in a way to get better results. That's the bottom line. Now sometimes I do it out of habit but it really helps if I am intentional to make my hit rate more positive. Jordan: Sure. So, you know in these times of the virus and everything that's going on with people working at home, I imagine that if you have a negative mindset or not a positive mindset, that that is likely to trigger more responses from your family and perhaps less positive results. Any thoughts about that? Wayne: Absolutely, I'm more likely to be judgmental, critical, impatient. When I do those, when that energy comes out of me, people are more likely to have their feelings hurt to defend themselves. Passive aggressive people will withhold performance in that situation, confrontive competitive people will want to argue about it. It just makes things less pleasant all-in-all. Jordan: Sure. So, as an executive coach do you have some thoughts about how a driven executive, one who wants to get things done, one who might be a little bit impatient when things aren't happening quickly enough or when obstacles get in the way. Any thoughts about what that person might need to do in order to manage their attitude? How do they prepare? How do they handle it while it's happening? Wayne: The big picture there is I think it's important to not be reactive but to be proactive. I can use a couple of stories or metaphors to illustrate that point. One, it has to do with realizing what we can control or what we can't. I'm reminded of the serenity prayer. I attributed it to an American theologian what was his name, Reinhold Niebuhr In about 1951, I think. Anyway, the quote that's attributed to him that I think is used by for example Alcoholics Anonymous is "God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference". Jordan: Yes. Wayne: So, that gets to what could we really control? What can we deal with? Then the other thing that kind of pulls us together for me is the basic theme of a great book that was published in 2008. This book was on the New York bestseller list for a hundred and fifty-six weeks. Then in 2019, they made a movie of it. The name of the book and movie is "The art of driving in the rain". One of the lessons that is taught in that movie is in the case of the example, of the one of the stars who is a racecar driver and he's noted for being really good at driving in the rain. It is explained in the movie that he's good at that because unlike most drivers who react to the rain, and then get into a skid situation and don't know how to handle it. So, they're reluctant to push it to the limit and if they do, they lose control. The other option is to be proactive about it and to drive aggressively and drive into the skid and learn how to control and manage that. To be setting your own conditions for the situation you find yourself in, rather than letting the situation define them for you. The phrase is something like "If you set your own conditions, this just rain". Because you're gonna go into practicing dealing with skid rather than trying to avoid it and being reacted to the rain in the situation. So, if we take that to - well go back to my example about the executive meeting. If I'd gone into that meeting thinking to myself, okay this is going to be a kind of a chaotic situation. Then I'm gonna find myself and I can't control that. These guys are all experienced professionals, they know what they're doing. They got their own culture of how they relate to each other. What condition do I want to set? In that case maybe the attitude that I would want to set or my mind set would be something like, I'm gonna let them play this out and just guide it as gently as I can. Or I could have seen that as an adventure. Jordan: Sure, makes a lot of sense. Actually, you're making me think about what one of my coaches suggested to me. I was the chief operating officer of a health care organization. He suggested to me that before I told anybody what to do, that I needed to find out from them why it wouldn't work. So, this is what I'm thinking of doing, they're gonna tell me why it won't work anyway especially if you're dealing with higher level executives. I would say "This is what I'm thinking about doing, tell me what I'm missing?". They would launch into telling me what I'm missing I would learn a lot and also, I wasn't now all of a sudden in the one down position of having presented something, they were actually responding to my requests so it worked very very well. Wayne: That's a great example and it also speaks to combining an attitude with a tactic. Jordan: Yes. Wayne: I think so it's a great tactic that worked to help you to make the most of those kinds of situations. Jordan: Exactly so it was a tactic, behind it the attitude was as my coach slapped me on the head several times was that you don't know everything. People know stuff you don't know. So, don't expect that being a great executive means going in there and knowing everything before you walk in. Wayne: Well you know that ties into another attitude that I find myself practicing sometimes, which is that there's always more than one right answer. Anybody should be able to come up with one right answer for how to deal with a situation. I think a really great leader is somebody who can come up with multiple right answers and is receptive to other right answers so that you're choosing among the favorable options. Jordan: It makes a lot of sense so all of this conversation we're having about attitude, I know goes back a long way. We've talked a little bit about the historical roots of where does this wisdom come from. Wayne: For me in my years of studying psychology, one of the greatest minds that I had a chance to study was that of a neo analyst who worked in the middle of the last century. Her name was Karen Horney. She talked about how there are really two core issues that can be upsetting and problematic for people and those are isolation and helplessness. I want to talk to that helplessness part because if we become reactionary to situations outside ourselves and we can't control them, then that's going to arouse all the emotional and mental things that come with feeling helplessness or out of control or powerless or unheard or disenfranchised. There's a number of experiences we can have relative to that. So, we can tie that in then to the notion that well if you define the condition or the way that you want to engage a situation, even where there are unknowns. You define how you're going to approach that, you're more likely to experience yourself as in control. You're more likely to be able to use your best tactics to deal with it. Jordan: If I understand you correctly then you would go into this board meeting for instance that you were describing knowing that you have no control over what other people are going to do, perhaps practicing several different approaches because it's an important meeting and it's worth the time to practice. Then have at least three or four or five different tools that you can use when you get in there. Wayne: Right, exactly. Jordan: My experience is when I do that, even when something happens that I didn't expect, I'm usually a lot more prepared to handle it. Wayne: Absolutely I remember during my years of the Center sometimes I would do feedback sessions. So, before the session that they lasted half a day. As you know the Center does a very exhaustive assessment and experiential work with people. So, by the time they showed up in these feedback sessions, they've gotten a lot of input about their behavior and how it impacted others. Jordan: Yes. Wayne: I'd had a chance to review all this information on them so now I'm sitting down with a stranger about whom I know a lot but I don't know everything and I have no idea at the beginning of that meeting what state of mind that person is in and what attitude they have towards being forced to sit down with a stranger? Who knows all these intimate things about how he's perceived in the workplace or she's perceived? So, I had to go into every one of those sessions with an open mind to "Where do I find the client? How can I meet the client where he or she is in order to build trust and a relationship to move forward?". If I went in with an agenda to just do something to them, I might be way off the mark. More often than not, I would. Jordan: Yeah, so in my experience as an executive coach with highly driven executives, a lot of times they've got more on their plate than they can handle. They're pressured, they may be impatient. They want to get things over with. They walk into a meeting and they want to get this done, it seems obvious to them and then people don't react the way they want them to react. Then they start getting frustrated and even feeling attacked a little bit because people aren't understanding how bright they are or how right they are or something like that and I think that applies, what are your thoughts about that? Wayne: Well it does apply, for some reason it made me think of one's attitude while driving. You know if you're driving your car and you think I got to get there as fast as I can, that's your attitude. Then if someone cuts you off, there's a safety issue and you might have a reaction an angry or frustrated reaction. If your attitude when you're driving the car is "I want to get from point A to point B safely", then if somebody cuts me off, I might have a disapproving attitude toward them but I'm not going to try to catch up with them and cut them off to get even. Jordan: Right, so interesting. What I find also in talking with a lot of executives right now is that working from home is kind of difficult. I had a big insight with my wife, I work from my home office all the time. She's now working home four out of five days a week and we discovered that we could irritate each other a little bit, I don't know how that happened but we do. One of the insights we had is that, if you have somebody in your life that you're attracted to, that you love, that you care about, that you respect. You have a choice, you can either be alone for the rest of your life or you could be annoyed for the rest of your life. So, once we figured out that good relationships don't mean not being annoyed, it helped us both deal with the fact that we annoy each other. I'm thinking it is kind of similar. The attitude a lot of people have gone into with going home is that this should be easy, and the executive isn't aware of the fact that they're invading somebody else's territory which is their spouse or their partner. Wayne: I think that's a great attitude Jordan. It is reality based, right. There's going to be some frustration with anybody you have a close relationship with and so it's reality based. By the way we can go farther with this this point but I think it's very important that we don't pretend that you can just talk some happy think idea and that's going to work for you in all situations. There needs to be a reality base to whatever attitude you're practicing. Something that you truly can buy into and you found that, you discovered that to be true. Now when you practice it, it helps you be gracious in those moments where perhaps you or your lovely wife Deborah whom I know and love dearly, maybe either of you is not at your best or both of you aren't at your best. Jordan: Well I'm really not at my best but we understand that. Oh, I'm glad, she's got a good sense of humor. So, any thoughts that you have you know wrapping this all up for executives in terms of managing their attitude, managing their expectations during this difficult time? Wayne: Couple of things come to mind. One is that attitude isn't the whole thing. I mean attitude is just one of the things you can work on. So, it's not a panacea, I'm not pretending that it's anything like that. The other thing is that a lot of people will have difficulty practicing an attitude that is effective at overcoming the negative feelings they have about a situation. We're going to want to honor that. For instance, some folks in a in difficult times like we're facing right now with COVID-19 and shut down of the economy and stuff like that going on, a lot of people are feeling fear. just practicing a positive attitude can help but in many cases it's not enough. Then I would say a word or two about the kinds of kinds of attitudes. There's a world of possibilities of what attitude you might want to practice. So, I talked about for example, an adventure, thinking of something as an adventure. But think about some well-known states of mind of perspectives that could all work just as well. The notion of thinking "This too will pass" or "looking for the silver lining in a situation". Now those are clich�'s, but they're also true that if you can practice, an attitude like that it's going to help. Now compare those to what I would call dysfunctional attitudes. Let me give you a couple of examples of that. How about the attitude of "I'm entitled to this or that or whatever" and how that can be dysfunctional in situations and antagonize people. Or how about the attitude "this is somebody else's fault"? So, being deliberate about practicing let's call it a "Positive attitude" is a good way to interfere or interrupt any tendencies we have to lapse into a not so conscious negative or maladaptive attitude, then let me add one other thing. I think practicing the attitude as a way of thinking it's most effective if you can combine with it practicing feeling, something that's aligned with it. For instance, when I decided to go shopping for a headset with an attitude of adventure, going into some unknown circumstantial events and situations, I also made a point of practicing feeling some anticipation, some excitement about what will I encounter in the adventure. If I had said "Well I'm going on to an adventure" and then I felt "Oh gee, this is gonna be a bummer. It's gonna be a pain in the rear end. Things aren't going to go the way I want them to, yeah that'll be an adventure but it'll be miserable. If I'd gone to that kind of feeling about it, it wouldn't have worked for me. So, we have to take responsibility and we can take responsibility for how we feel and practice a compatible feeling to the attitude of thought that we're working on. It's important to join them together, especially for folks who are trying to overcome anxiety and fear and uncertainty at this point in time when we're facing such stressors. Jordan: Very nice. It raises the question about when you know somebody is not acting from their - or you strongly believe that they're not acting from good will and good faith and humility, how do you handle it? I want to say that the thing that I've learned over the years is that I need to develop compassion for them. To recognize that just like every other human being they're not perfect, that they're suffering, they're in pain. They may not even realize it and that part of my job on earth is to help people alleviate their pain. Let me give you a quick chance to respond to that because I think it's worth a whole other conversation. Wayne: Sounds like we're talking about another date, that sounds fine to me. Yeah it's like whether an authority figure is gonna be respectful to you or antagonistic to you, is like is it raining or not? You still have a choice to drive into that situation with an attitude of respect and courtesy or compassion Jordan: One of my big problems along the way was when I was talking to a senior a superior who wasn't being respectful, that was something I had to learn how to how to deal with. So, I think we've got the next topic. Wayne: Well it'll be fun to think about how to have a conversation about that. Jordan: Sounds good. So, if you'd like to contact Wayne Hart and have a further conversation with him, by the way he says that he'd be more than willing to spend 20 minutes on the phone with anyone talking about this. You can contact him at waynehartphd@outlook.com. His phone number is 6198864119 or you could message him on LinkedIn. If you'd like to have further conversation with me, you can reach me at my website jordangoldrich.com or jgoldrich@ customentor.com and CUSTOMentor is custom and mentor with only one 'm'. We hope you enjoyed the program and we hope you'll join us on our next program, thank you very much for listening. If you enjoyed today's program please rate and review. Go to customentor.com. Tell us the questions you want us to address and how we can improve. You can also schedule a 20 minutes strategy conversation with any of our guests. Find the link below in the transcription, become a world class leader and subscribe to the leadership results podcast.
