Leading Through Compassion, Building to Last: Chapter 3

Leading Through Compassion, Building to Last: Chapter 3

Here is the third and concluding chapter in a three part piece on 'Compassionate Leadership'. Do check the first and second parts for a much better understanding of this conclusive piece.

 

 

At its heart, compassionate coaching has to be about transcendental change. It is one thing for an older and wiser leader to advise a younger one on the rigours of the corporate world, it's another to change ingrained habits. It’s about transforming the "unconscious incompetencies" into "conscious competencies". And these are very subconscious, subtle stages of learning. In the first stage– unconscious incompetence – individuals don't know that they don't know. Some sort of awakening is required that what has been done in the past doesn't work anymore and this leads to 'conscious incompetence' – now you know you don't know. In the next stage, conscious competence is developed, 'so now you know you know'. The final stage is 'unconscious competence', where – like driving a car –behaviours and thinking become automatic. It happens from an unconscious state.

While not a word typically associated with organisational leadership, compassion in this context means taking responsibility for the growth and development of others, something that should be every leader's goal.

In everyday life, people typically confuse compassion with kindness. There is a point that all managers face, wanting to be nice to people, but also having an organizational purpose. How often have we seen leaders getting stuck trying to balance the two, either being too hard or too soft in their approaches. Taking responsibility for organizational systems and the people in them can be overwhelming, tiring or frightening for managers. One example is the common dilemma when a manager is reluctant to tell a subordinate that they are not performing because that person is perceived to be fragile. They may come from a minority group or be difficult to deal with. But for a manager faced with this situation, to stick his or her head in the sand is counter-productive. Whether the reluctance to address the performance issue is due to kindness (or fear), failure to address the real issue actually blocks the under-performing person's growth and the system is damaged. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Getting people where they want to go will sometimes involve hard conversations. Many managers don't like having these conversations. But to be effective as a manager and leader, they must have them. And they must have these discussions through the platform of ‘Compassionate Coaching’.

This Compassionate Leadership will certainly bring you much closer to a ‘diamond in the rough’ fellow team member. It’ll allow you to harness the true potential of this team member. In more ways than one, it’ll allow you to discover the true ‘leader’ in yourself.

So how many lives have you positively impacted today? How many careers have you shaped today? How many team members have you not just managed or led but Coached Compassionately today? How many foundations have you laid for built-to-last Centers of Excellence? 

 

 

 

Leading Through Compassion, Building to Last: Chapter 2

 Leading Through Compassion, Building to Last: Chapter 2

for a much better understanding of this follow-upiece

Here is the second chapter in a three part piece on 'Compassionate Leadership'. Do check the first part for a much better understanding of this follow-up piece.

Eventually, be it a Manager, a Leader or a Coach, all have the ultimate objective of leading individuals to attain certain desired results. However, here’s the way I look at it, a manager can be attributed with Transactional Leadership – focusing on the Now. A leader can be attributed with Transformational Leadership – focusing on the strategic, long-term goals through continuous change. However, it is the coach, who needs to take a deep-rooted approach of Transcendental Leadership - focusing in the overall growth of the individuals within a team. Needless to say, none of these are mutually exclusive roles. A Manager will have to time and again keep driving the larger strategic goals amidst his operational gains. A leader will have to play multiple roles from time to time, be it managing some crucial projects or coaching his troops and building the leadership pipeline.

During our fast-paced roles as leaders and managers, our energies are often conserved in achieving tactical or strategic goals. Most of our evaluation mechanisms are often centered around ‘the achieved’ or ‘the not achieved’ part of an individual or team’s objectives. Yes, there are detailed planning sessions, periodic reviews and root—cause analyses at the start and end of each project. But as indicated earlier, the underlying objective is always ‘the project’ at the core of all such discussions. Let’s be candid, most often in our demanding roles as leaders or managers, we have a water-tight mechanism of dealing with our people. We share objectives, make people accountable, empower them, conduct periodic reviews, share feedback, evaluate, hold them responsible and at the end of a grueling year, judge their performance. Meets, Does not meets or Exceeds our Expectation. Period. Absolutely nothing wrong with the entire process and certainly all of us are doing it with utmost sincerity and integrity. However, a good Coach needs to focus on the HOWs, WHYs and essentially WHY NOTs and HOW ELSEs? It demands the Coach to invest much more in an individual and do all that he can do, to make the individual successful. It is here that the success earned has a far long-lasting effect in transforming both the coach and coachee. 

According to a research carried out by the Australian School of business, across 5600-odd employees in 77 organizations, there's a powerful link between productivity and what has been identified as ‘Compassionate Leadership’. It is the ability of leaders to spend more time and effort developing and recognizing their people, welcoming feedback, including criticism, and fostering co-operation among staff. Out of all of the various elements in a business, the ability of a leader to be compassionate – that is, “to understand people's motivators, hopes and difficulties and to create the right support mechanism to allow people to be as good as they can be" – has the greatest correlation with profitability and productivity. Compassion in this context means taking responsibility for the growth and development of others, something that should be every leader's goal. Without this motivation we are on our own with the power we have, rather than using it to benefit our world and work. Without this motivation we're not really leading.

Yes, the pace of our constantly evolving operations and the wide span of our direct reports don’t allow us to slow down and exhibit Compassion at will. Eventually, we do have to identify the stars and the also-rans within our processes and categorize them accordingly. However, time and again, a leader or a manager will need to pick up these ‘also-rans’ and try to fathom – “why haven’t they been running as fast as they potentially can?” Just like a relay-race, ultimately processes are team sport, where success is determined by the speed of the slowest rather than the fastest.

It is these slowest that’ll need a manager’s timely intervention and emphatic ‘coaching’ more often. It is these also-rans and underperformers who’ll need a little bit of push and nudge to ‘be what they have the potential to be!’ It is here that good coach will have to continually flex within the ‘directive and supportive’ leadership scale to truly nurture and extract the most out his coachee. 

  

Everyone needs that one slight nudge

 



This is the second chapter in a three part piece on 'Compassionate Leadership'. Do check the conclusive third part to get a complete dope on your role as a Compassionate Leader.

Leading Through Compassion, Building to Last: Chapter 1

Leading Through Compassion, Building to Last: Chapter 1

Here is the first chapter in a three part piece on 'Compassionate Leadership'.  

 

Amongst the many over-used, misused and often abused ‘management magic wands’ is the hype and hoopla around ‘Centers of Excellence (COE)’. The others in the fray being other whiz-terms like Lean, Balance Score Cards, Six Sigma, Process Reengineering, TQM and of course the latest panacea, Big Data.  The powerful terminology of COE has caught everyone’s fancy and now every leader or manager worth his salt aspires to build a COE. Be it a COE team, a process, a business unit or for that matter an entire organisation. Going strictly by the definition of a Center of Excellence (COE), a center of excellence refers to a team, a shared facility or an entity that provides leadership, evangelization, best practices, research, support and/or training for a focus area. Each manager and leader, by virtue of well-defined and well-oiled processes, SOPs, taut metrics and failure modes intends to build an impeccable team and process. And every such team needs dynamic and agile super-performers to execute the lofty vision of their leaders. Every team demands a bunch of nimble-footed ‘hit the ground running’ individuals that have the ability to burst the learning curve and achieve the top-speed ASAP.

Today’s fast paced and overtly competitive environment expects optimum productivities and other performance KRAs from an employee ASAP. The water-tight metrics and real-time dashboards are quick to bucketise employees into ‘rising stars’, ‘high potential’, ‘also-rans’ and ‘underperformers’ in no time. In turn, the leaders or managers are quick to pick these ‘labels’ and deploy their focus on the stars within their system.

Are ‘Centers of Excellence’ just meant to further ‘excellent’ employees? Or is it a culture of cloning excellence and building excellent employees out of everyone? Do managers and leaders have the will to spend time with the laggards in their teams? The intent to turnaround their under-performers. The drive to create a culture of excellence within the team, where each individual gets habituated to delivering a superior performance…continuously…consistently. Do our managers have the willingness to not just create COEs, but create a built-to-last culture? Do our leaders have the passion, and more importantly compassion, to don the mantle of an empathetic Coach?

Most of us have been managers. Be it while managing people, projects or even in many tasks in our personal space. Some of us may also have had the opportunities to be leaders. What then is the difference between managers, leaders and coaches? Aren’t all these roles basically created to serve a single purpose i.e. to ensure Success of projects, people or teams. Why then so many terminologies? Based on my understanding so far, managers and leaders are necessarily much broader roles involving one-to-many relationships and impact. However, a coach necessary takes the mantle of someone more closer, relatable and personal. A more one-to-one relationship. The canvas for managers and leaders is much larger, focusing on a range of activities and processes driven by people and their diverse competencies. On the other hand, a Coach takes a more inside-out approach of focusing on an individual, nurturing and shaping him while trying to attain the desired outcomes.

Did you ever wonder why people hire personal fitness trainers instead of working out on their own? It’s simple. The trainer pushes them beyond their comfort zone and can get them to do much more than they thought was possible. Why do people need someone to motivate them? I am not sure, but when it’s done right, that person can do much more. While it’s the same body doing the same exercises, someone is putting them in a different mindset. The trainer is telling them they can do it. They believe it and that belief allows them to achieve much more. This is also effective at work and that’s where the timely presence of an emphatic and compassionate Coach can work wonders. People can meet tighter deadlines. They can add more features. They can build a better stakeholder experience. They just don’t believe they can do it because it would require them to be uncomfortable. A Coach, talks to people, understands them and their self-inflicted boundaries and eventually pushes them outside of their comfort zones. You will learn very quickly that your team can accomplish much more than you think it can. Push and push hard. Most people don’t want to stretch beyond their skill set if it involves risking their existing position. Encourage them to “lean in” to the opportunity and discover what else they can do beyond the status quo.

 

This is the first chapter in a three part piece on 'Compassionate Leadership'. Do check the follow-up second part to know more about your role as a Compassionate Leader.