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Power Literacy: Own and Leverage Your Power

2/25/2018

 
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References
  1. Kim, Sara A New Focus in Healthcare Conflict Research Journal of Community and Public Health Nursing Volume 3, Issue 4, 2017
  2. Baker, Neil Flattened Hierarchy = Increased Empowerment? 
  3. Liu, Eric You’re More Powerful Than You Think: a citizen’s guide to making change happen Public Affairs 2017

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In this article, you will learn the basics of power literacy in order to enhance your effectiveness. 

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Secrets to successful healthcare innovation too often stay hidden

5/29/2017

 
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References
  1. Kahneman, Daniel Thinking Fast and Slow Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2012.
  2. Baker, Neil J. et al Hidden in Plain View: Barriers to Quality Improvement Physician Leadership Journal (2) Mar-Apr 2016, 54- 57
  3. Lencioni, Patrick The Advantage Jossey-Bass 2012

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Tool for Ongoing Review Meetings for Improvement Initiatives
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​In this article you will learn that secrets to successful healthcare innovation too often stay hidden, why this happens, and what is needed to uncover them. 

Here are two brief stories of improvement initiatives told at conferences in which critical success factors emerged only when I later talked individually with the presenters. 

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Beware of the Potential Harms of Trust: Five Safeguards

4/26/2017

 
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Additional resources for developing norms
  • An Easily Missed Ingredient for High Team Performance
  • Don't wait. Apply principles for dialogue in every conversation.
  • Five Barriers to Feedback and High Capacity for Transformation
  • Are flaws in decision-making processes causing conflict and poor alignment?--a quick diagnostic

Brief overview and list of references for “Beware of the Potential Harms of Trust”
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​In this article you will learn about the potential harms of trust and five safeguards or ground rules to prevent them. How we define trust is the important issue. 

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Normalize Human Messiness                                                     to Enhance Psychological Safety on Teams

3/22/2017

 
Video (5 min. 38 sec.)
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References
  1. Edmondson, Amy C. Teaming Jossey-Bass 2012
  2. Salazar, Marco J Barzallo et al Influence of surgeon behavior on trainee willingness to speak up: a randomized controlled trial J Am Coll Surg 219: 1001 – 1009, 2014

Additional resources
  • Are you leading from reactivity or creativity?--four steps to see your blind spots
               Provides more details about indicators of "reactivity"--another term for "messiness."
  • A Key Barrier to Making Our Leadership Transformational
               Explains a method to reflect on personal behavior to identify our own messiness.
  • An Easily Missed Ingredient for High Team Performance
               Explains why team norms are so important and why it is so easy not to set them. 

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​Imagine someone has video-recorded you during every minute of your work the last week and you are now watching it. What are the odds that you will wince in some parts because of mistakes in the way you behaved or communicated?

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B = f (P, E)                                                                                       how to approach personality problems at work

2/15/2017

 
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References
  1. Weisbord, Marvin R. Productive Workplaces Revisited Jossey-Bass 2004
  2. Cooperrider, David Positive Image, Positive Action: The Affirmative Basis of Organizing in Appreciative Inquiry ed. by David L. Cooperrider et al, Stipes Publishing LLC 2000
  3. Miller, William R., Rollnick, Stephen Motivational Interviewing, Second Edition The Guilford Press 2002

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​Our beliefs about what causes problematic behavior in others substantially impact our ability to influence change. ​

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Are you leading from reactivity or creativity?                           ---four steps to see your blind spots

1/20/2017

 
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Tool
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A Four-Step practice--Guiding Questions
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References
1. Ellis, Albert The Road to Tolerance Prometheus Books 2004
2. Kahneman, Daniel Thinking Fast and Slow Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2011

Reference List on Reactivity

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In this article you will learn about a four-step practice for a major leadership challenge—seeing our own contribution to problems. I discovered this challenge in my first leadership position supervising a staff of doctors and nurses at a hospital.  

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A Key Barrier to Making Our Leadership Transformational

6/7/2016

 
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An executive in a recent workshop I led pulled me aside to privately say:

“I know I need to reflect on the way I am thinking, feeling, and acting to be a better leader but I don’t know how.”

I was taken aback by his honesty. This was clearly hard for him to reveal. He chose not to ask in front of the group.

Reflection seems so straightforward. 
But is it?

What 420 leaders say about reflection…
It turns out the executive who pulled me aside is not alone. Of 420 healthcare leaders I surveyed at talks on leadership, almost all indicated they face one or more barriers to reflection. Two of the most common, each checked by nearly half of the leaders, were “uncertainty about how to do it well” and “lack of time.” 

The majority of written comments were about struggles with prioritizing and taking the time for reflection. Some of this was attributed to being “caught up” in issues such as “lack of trust in the organization” or “lack of political capital to get anything done.” One leader attributed his difficulty reflecting to “weakness.” Another wrote that it is “hard to change habits.” 

What brain science says about reflection…
At the heart of things, creating a reflective practice is creating a new habit. We all know changing habits like diet and exercise is hard. But I think reflection is much harder. In reflecting, we work to shift from being “caught up” in our thoughts and feelings to looking at them to expand our understanding of situations and open to more creative and effective options. 

Brain science has indicated that experiential information we take in is coupled to automatic, habitual ways of explaining events. Our brains are hard-wired for us to leap to conclusions from limited data in nanoseconds. It takes work to “decouple” ourselves from such automatic processes. But, even brief reflection such as taking 15 minutes to write down lessons learned from experience can yield more objective understanding of events and better options. (1 – 2) 

Hard-wired to avoid transformation 
Transformation involves getting to new perspectives. Because our brain hard-wiring can easily trap us into biased conclusions, we benefit from developing a regular practice of questioning our own thoughts. This is not easy for the ego. It is humbling. The tendency is to jump quickly to feeling “right” rather than leaving ourselves open to uncertainty. Think about how easy, common, and seductive it is to be sure other people are “the problem” rather than looking at our own contribution to problems. 

Missing the true level of our accomplishments
Another challenge is that our automatic responses can make it surprisingly easy to miss the true level of success we have had. Seeing our successes accurately is crucial to changing habits. 

For example, in the middle of a longer conversation, almost as an aside, a leader mentioned she had resolved a conflict with a team. I said “Wait! At the start of this conflict, what would you have estimated for the chances of achieving this level of success?” She replied “No more than a 20% chance.” Suddenly, this event became one worth reflecting on. How did she pull this off?

Three steps forward you can take right now
I guarantee you have already had multiple experiences of “decoupling” yourself from automatic thinking. The challenge is to turn such experience into an intentional and systematic practice. There is no way around carving out time. But, you can start small. For example, carve out one half-hour a week to reflect on a past or current situation.

Next, start trying out a consistent set of questions for guidance. Be willing to change them over time to find out what works for you. Here is a quick set to work from: What happened?; What were my thoughts, feelings, and actions?; What did I do that was helpful and unhelpful?; Where did I leap to conclusions?; How did I contribute to the problems?; What options might I consider?; What will I try next?; What do I hope to accomplish?

Finally, be sure to keep the goals for actions small to build confidence. For that leader who resolved the team conflict, her first step was to simply listen to the team and explore their concerns. That was transformational for her instead of needing a solution in one meeting. 

Consider engaging an extra set of neurons
The journey of developing a reflective practice also benefits from episodes of coaching and consultation. In my own work with clients, I think of myself as offering “an extra set of neurons” to increase power in countering hard-wired responses and generating creativity. In the wild complexity of organizational life, two brains can sometimes be better than one. 

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​References
  1. Di Stefano, Giada et al Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance, Harvard Business School Working Paper 14-093, March 25, 2014
  2. Siegel, Daniel J. Mindfulness training and neural integration: differentiation of distinct streams of awareness and the cultivation of well-being, SCAN 2, 2007

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First, manage your brain.  

10/16/2014

 
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The Ladder of Inference

9/22/2014

 
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As humans, we are hard-wired to leap to assumptions in ways which create tension with others, especially under the pressure of stress and complex problems. 

This hard-wiring derives from ancient parts of the brain which evolved early on to generate automatic survival reactions--flight, fight, or freeze.

Difficulties in modern social situations can activate these pathways and drive us in nanoseconds, outside of our awareness, to faulty interpretations not infrequently accompanied by strong emotions. This happens to everyone. We cannot stop our brains from this quick process. But, we can modify it. One way is through stopping, even for a few seconds, to observe the mind.

The Ladder of Inference (1,2) is a tool to make visual these rapid movements of the mind and help us pause for reflection before we take action. The bottom rung of the ladder represents all the observable data in a situation. Our hard-wiring leads to rapid selection of part of the data and then "up the ladder" to judgments or assumptions, and finally to conclusions and action at the highest rung. Such actions are at risk for being unproductive or counterproductive for work relationships and problem solving. 

The Ladder can be divided into as many as 7 or more steps to represent schematically the brain's information processing. There is not one right number of steps. I use four because that is all I can remember in the midst of conflict which is when I use the tool to mentally orient myself. In the example shown above, my brain causes me to get very negative about a colleague, Chris.
  • At the bottom rung is all observable data I could consider from my working relationship with Chris or even just for this one day.
  • At the next higher rung, the brain selects data out of this pool. This day, Chris is late to a meeting and does not apologize. Because this has happened before and/or because I am particularly sensitive that day, my brain immediately focuses on that one piece of data.
  • From selected data, the brain moves to judgments, assumptions, and opinions--i.e. making meaning out of the selected data. In this case, I assume Chris is totally disengaged and not committed to the team.
  • At the highest point of the ladder, conclusions and actions are taken. I am gripped by my interpretations to the point that I don't think I can work with Chris. Or, I might withdraw from Chris, disrupting the flow of work between us. Or I might publicly attack him for his "bad attitude" (an interpretation which has not been checked out).

If we keep the ladder in mind in the midst of conversations, we can step back to observe our own thinking. We can shift to asking questions which move our thinking back to data and experience opening us to more choices for communication and action.  We can ask:
  • What am I thinking?
  • What interpretations and judgments have I made?
  • On what data am I basing these conclusions?
  • What is my reasoning?
  • What other data am I not considering?
  • What else could be going on?
  • What other interpretations are possible here?

I can then use these same questions with others if I have sensed they have moved up the ladder. 
Research from Gervase Bushe (3) suggests that about 80% of conflicts at work occur because people have not checked out their experiences with each other--i.e. moving down the ladder with each other to share observed data and experience. When such sharing does occur, the conflict often either goes away or the issues are entirely different from what was expected.

Though simple in concept, sharing experience in this way can be very demanding because we may be gripped by strong emotion or the stakes may feel high or we may just have a strong need to be "right" at that moment. Then it can be hard to own our contribution to the tension. Slowing down to reflect requires a good deal of self-regulation of emotion and thought.

The Ladder of Inference reminds us to treat our strongest conclusions as just theories to be tested. Our first conclusions are all too likely to put us at risk for becoming part of the problem. 

References
(1) Attributed to Chris Argyris and Donald Schon. See a brief history of the development of the Ladder of Inference in
     Diana Mclain Smith The Elephant in the Room, 2011, pgs. 275 - 276
(2) Thanks to the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare for the Ladder of Inference image.
(3) Gervase Bushe Clear Leadership, Davies-Black, Nicholas Brealey Publishing 2010

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Hard-wired to react. Hard-wired to connect.

9/18/2014

 
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Having trouble with the human side of change? Are you dealing with resistance, seemingly intractable conflict, personality issues, poor motivation?

The good news is that such human troubles are quite often due to activation of hard-wiring in the brain as opposed to more intractable personality issues, lack of skills, or even deep cultural dysfunction. 
 
And, the hard wiring is malleable. Here are some principles based on neuroscience research (see references below).

Hard-wiring basics:
  • An overarching principle in the brain is to decrease danger.
  • Perceived physical dangers and social dangers activate the same neural networks and involve the limbic system.
  • These neural networks evolved earlier for survival and are faster, last longer, and are harder to impact than pathways for higher cognition and judgment.
  • Activation of these survival pathways decreases activity in higher brain centers for cognition and judgment, especially the prefrontal cortex (PFC). As a result, when in survival mode, quality of perception, thinking, and decision making are diminished and we may not even be aware this is happening. 
  • Survival pathway activation leads to strong emotion, leaps to faulty conclusions and interpretations, and behaviors which are at risk for disrupting work partnerships.

A few principles for management:
  • We are also hard-wired for social harmony—we can overcome our personal survival instincts for the good of the group. The opportunity for influencing and connecting positively to others socially is built-in.
  • By consciously activating higher cognition centers in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), activity in the survival pathways of the limbic system is decreased.
  • Using the higher centers of the PFC is energy expensive. It is easy for the PFC to get overloaded.
  • So, it is important to focus attention on just a few issues or priorities repetitively--work environments are generally complex, stressful, and constantly changing so survival pathways will be constantly re-activated.

Actions likely to help activate higher centers:
(based on linking neuroscience with research and experience in psychology and organizational development)
  • Commit to a practice of reflection to learn the types of situations which trigger your reactive states and signs of reactivity in your emotions, thoughts, and behavior. See the article Are you leading from reactivity or creativity?--four steps to see your blind spots.
  • Label thoughts, emotions, and behaviors Just naming them reduces limbic arousal.
  • Reinterpret and normalize your own and others' states of mind and behaviors.Even the most skilled people can be quite reactive at times.
  • Refocus on what you what to accomplish and on your highest values. See the post From reactivity to creativity: a first step.
  • Adjust expectations to what is doable from a mutual perspective with others. For example, when caught in reactivity, a step forward might be to simply decide to have another meeting when things are calmer.
  • Find any way to diminish the risks of perceived social threats via understanding, empathy, and respect. See the post Respect: an ongoing practice. Also see Two ways to capitalize on positive actions and experiences.
 
By getting to know our own personal signs of limbic system vs. PFC activation, we create the ability to choose the way we deal with human troubles as opposed to just reacting. The clues to which of our pathways are activated at any given time are in our physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. By steady observation and self-reflection in tough situations, we can learn to literally shift the brain pathways from which we are operating.

(Based on David Rock Your Brain at Work, 2009 and Matthew D. Lieberman Social: why our brains are wired to connect, 2013)

Hard-wired for troubles with power. 

8/7/2014

 
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Positional power in an organization--the ability to hire, fire, manage resources, assess performance--must be handled with care.

Otherwise, troubles WILL emerge.

We are all "hard-wired" to be acutely sensitive to power. Early in our evolution, brain centers developed which generate automatic responses for survival in reaction to perceived threats--flight, fight, freeze. These responses can bypass modulation by higher centers.

In modern times, perceived social threats can activate these pathways and grip us in strong emotions and faulty interpretations leading to disruption of work partnerships. Such threats might include potential failure, loss of self-esteem, or loss of control. Positional power taps into deeply rooted wishes and fears which magnify the effects of this ancient brain system.


If you have positional power
, "the sense-making of people who work for you will be determined less by the facts and more by their internal story. If you do anything that tells them it is not OK to be real around you, your authority will amplify the impact of your action. The slightest voice inflection, the most innocent remark, can land hard on those you have authority over, causing them to make up stories that support increased caution and distort further interaction." (1)

"Every action and utterance can be scrutinized for meaning"--those with power are suspect until proven trustworthy. (2)

On top of this, research suggests that, regardless of underlying personality or values, just being in a position of power will cause a person to listen less, talk more, and have difficulty getting into another person's shoes to understand and empathize. (3)

On the other side of things, because of this magnifying effect of power, those with positional power can have a large, positive impact on the psychol
ogical safety of a work environment.

A few tips for the care and attention of power:
(a) Stay aware of the high risk for troubles no matter how skilled you are at relationships.
(b) Develop and maintain two-way feedback to generate external checks on how you are doing.
     See the blog post Vulnerability, results, and leadership.
(c) Make explicit the values and norms of how you want people to experience relationships in
     the workplace and use two-way feedback for ongoing assessment. See the blog post Create
     share values by learning from imperfection
.

(d) Assure that you take time with individuals and groups for open dialogue--get all the views on
     table, even if critical or negative about your course of action. See the blog posts Thinking
     Together
and Asserting authority while preserving choice.
(e) Show individual consideration in working through problems people are having with decisions.
      See the post Having trouble motivating others?--a quick diagnostic.
(f) Tailor your language to minimize status differentials and avoid threats to self-esteem. For
     example, ask people to do things because you have decided that it is in service to the vision
     not because you have more power than them.

References
(1) Goleman, Daniel et al Primal Leadership: unleashing the power of emotional intelligence Harvard Business
      Review Press 2013
(2) Bushe, Gervase
Clear Leadership: sustaining real collaboration at work Davies-Black 2010
(3) Cohen, Allan R., Bradford, David L. Influencing Up: partner with senior management and other powerful
     people
John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2012


From reactivity to creativity: a first step

5/27/2014

 
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Feelings of oppression, burden, and victimization are a common human experience, especially in organizational life with all of its technical and interpersonal complexity.

Situations can seem impossibly entangled, hopeless, or stuck. This experience can be quite compelling.

Such feelings are red flags for being in reactivity--a state of mind driven by ancient brain centers for survival. (See the post Hard-wired to react. Hard-wired to connect.) In such states, our attention is narrowed and our ability to discern a variety of causes and possibilities is impaired.

What is the first step from reactivity toward feelings of creativity and flow (a sense of full involvement and being at one's best)?

"There is quite extensive evidence showing that even if one does not experience flow, just the fact of doing something in line with one's goals improves the state of mind. A simple way of improving the quality of life is to take ownership of one's actions." (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997)


Similarly, Emerald (in The Power of TED, 2010)
conceives of the way forward as choosing to shift our focus away from problems to what we want to create---what we are passionate about. In making this choice, we shift from a "victim orientation" to a "creator orientation"-- from trying to make problems go away to taking small steps toward what we care about.

Day-to-day pressures can cause a gradual slip into a victim orientation outside of our full awareness. When we finally realize we feel consumed by problems, then a way out is to choose to focus on our goals--on creating. Things may still be difficult, but the burden is usually lightened.


Unexpected transformations of "personality problems" at work

4/21/2014

 
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How often do you deal with people at work who cause headaches due to what seem like deeply ingrained personality issues?

There is hope.

(See the full article online at Unexpected transformations. The following are brief excerpts).)

In the large majority of circumstances of such difficult behavior, situational factors are the predominant driving forces—not personality traits or even lack of skills.
Quite often, these situational factors are amenable to change.

Psychological research has shown that attributing difficult behavior to fixed personality traits as opposed to situational factors (the “fundamental attribution error”) is a pervasive and nearly automatic cognitive bias.

The good news about humanness

3/25/2014

 
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Multiple researchers (e.g. Ellis, Argyris) find that, no matter how smart and successful people are, everyone falls into counterproductive behavior at times—especially under complexity and stress.

The good news: this means that at any given moment what we see around us as lack of communication or "people" skills could, not infrequently, be a temporary, quite human reaction to complexity and stress.

And, at any given moment, there is likely to be a large amount of unused leadership capacity in any organization to tap into. For more research see: Invisible Barriers to Communication

Behavior = function (person, environment)

3/20/2014

 
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Right now, what percent of leaders face a challenging work situation with problematic behaviors in people and which, if improved, would significantly impact their work-lives?

At a recent workshop, the answer was 91% of 263 leaders.

The main causes of situational behavior are captured in Kurt Lewin’s equation  B = f (P, E)—behavior (B) is a function (f) of the person (P) (e.g. personality) and the environment (E). In tough situations, the human tendency is to blame (P). The ability to influence change depends substantially on focusing on (E).


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