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When I ask groups how feedback should be given, there’s always someone who mentions the Hamburger Approach.
This is the theory that you should start by saying something positive (the white bread), move on to what you really want to say – apparently often negative – and then close with something a bit more positive (more refined carbs?).
But what appears to be a balanced diet is just junk food
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
Most have us have known that feeling when we’ve got a lot on our plates; challenging targets, multiple demands (often a combination of work and home) and tight deadlines.
Yet sometimes this just helps us focus; makes us resourceful, creative, efficient. We’re resilient in the face of pressure.
Sometimes it does the opposite. We feel stuck; as if we’re going to fail at something (possibly lots of things). The pressure overwhelms us.
The impact of Control, Choices and Competence – or lack of it
I held an interactive webinar for the Time to Think group on Facebook to find out what caused them stress and how they dealt with it. Reflecting on the experiences and wisdom, I asked myself what they all had in common.
This is when those three Cs seemed significant. Pressure is a form of stimulation, which we can use to help us, just as long as we think we have at least one (preferably two) of those elements.
I think that unconsciously we ask ourselves:
Do I feel as if I’m control?
Do I think I have choices?
Do I believe I have the skills to complete the multiple demands being thrown at me?
Notice the role of our emotions, thoughts and beliefs
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
Grand initiatives haven’t made a dent in the discontent and disengagement
Everyone seems aware of the problem and a whole industry has sprung up, with million dollar consultancies and business schools clamouring to fix the problem.
When we at Mackie Consulting listen to people in organisations through our Clarity Survey, and through our coaching work with teams and individuals, people tell us that they are not having the conversations they should be having. What we hear supports the Ken Blanchard Leadership company’s research that shows the extent to which conversations are avoided:
81% say their boss doesn’t listen to them
82% say their leaders don’t provide appropriate feedback
28% say they rarely or never discuss their future goals with their boss
only 34% meet with their boss once per week
While people talk a lot, they have lost the habit of having meaningful, quality conversations
In all too many organisations, meetings are long and formulaic. People come to meetings either to transmit information or receive it. Dialogue seems to have been substituted by the “let-s-read-this-presentation-together” practice.
Meaningful conversations are frequently avoided, and the more challenging conversations are saved up for those zinging e-mails or vented to the wrong person at the coffee shop or water cooler.
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
How many times in a week do you get asked for advice?
If you’re half-way good at your job, I’m going to guess that the answer is “frequently”. If you’re quick to offer your advice I’m going to be blunt: you’re not helping.
I’m going to argue that most people who ask for advice are really asking for clarity and for the confidence to make a decision.
And by clarity, I don’t mean clarity about knowing what you think or what you think should happen. I mean clarity in the asker’s own mind.
Advice doesn’t give clarity or the confidence to act
These things are not in our power to bestow on others – they come from within. Clarity and confidence come when new insights emerge, motivating the asker to act from their own conviction. read more…
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
“I’m really trying to be more collaborative but I can see it in their eyes; they don’t trust me. They remember the old me – how can things get better if we can’t get beyond this?”
This is not the first client who has found it hard to change because others still remember the past
Which brings to mind my favourite Tony Robbins quote:
“Everybody’s got a past. The past does not equal the future unless you live there.”
It strikes me that any kind of change – whether inside you, within teams or even between whole nations – involves the ability to let go of the past. I think change requires forgiveness.
What I learnt about forgiveness by going home
It was April 1989 and I had been looking out of the airplane window, ever since we crossed the Zambezi River from Zambia into Zimbabwe. It was autumn and the bush below was losing its summer green, revealing small settlements, the occasional herd of elephant and long, straight gunmetal grey roads breaking up the red earth stretching all the way to the horizon.
As the plane bounced down onto the runway, I realised that I had been away for half my life.
But I felt that I was coming home
Walking across the tarmac I wondered what lay ahead. I was a white woman with a British passport – I potentially represented colonial white privilege.
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
Team work isn’t optional. Management theorists tend to over-complicate things by differentiating between groups and teams, but I like to keep it simple.
I frequently work with leaders and teams who ask me a version of this question:
“What if we’re not a great team and we don’t all really trust each other?”
Which is a necessarily honest and courageous start.
In my work I encourage my clients to consciously re-think what we mean by “teams”; to go beyond the idea that a team is only the group of people who report to one manager or one project lead.
We all belong to multiple teams
If you need other people to contribute to your output at work, then you’re part of their team. Their contribution might be time, advice, encouragement or materials and the contribution may be big or small, consistent or intermittent.
Team work is about co-operation and contribution
Great teams work well when the individuals have the mind set:
“What can I contribute?”
Not:
“What can I get out of this?” or “How can I get other people to do what I want them to do?”
I think that we have a tendency to romanticise the ideal team, when “good enough” is sometimes a lot better than average.
Instead of waiting for some magical time when trust will emerge or crossing your fingers that you’ll get some budget to hire an outside coach to help you strengthen those bonds, you could just do five things.
The real world guide to “good enough” teams
Five things any team can (and should) focus on to get great results
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
The other day my twenty-year old son baked a cake for the 18th birthday of his girlfriend’s sister. This was the first cake he’d made since he was little and we used to bake together – him standing on a chair, with a grown up’s apron folded over to fit him.
Suddenly, like it was yesterday, I see him learning to break eggs that are as big as his toddler hands. I can hear him laughing as he turns the electric whisk to High on purpose just to see the resulting cloud of flour and sugar.
Moments together AND the subsequent memories are great gifts
Along with kicking endless footballs and counting and categorising dinosaur and train collections, I took up baking as a way of spending quality time with my son. But as he grew out of needing a chair to stand on, he outgrew the desire to spend time doing this and I lost the chance to spend that time, just him and me.
Sometimes we mistake a gift for a burden
Whilst I can see those moments as clear and precious gifts now, I didn’t always appreciate them. I turned down moments because I was too busy, too tired and – yes sometimes – just a little bit bored.
Great gifts last for a long time
I was surprised that after more than a decade my son was choosing to go back to baking. It wasn’t an easy choice as he had to borrow everything he needed.
Instead of Google, he rather touchingly turned to me for a recipe and advice; phoning me half way through beating the cake mixture to check what it should look like. He was using a wooden spoon, so it was demanding patience and elbow grease.
What impressed me most was that this was not necessary
He could have easily bought a cake or some other gift. But he chose to give his time and his effort. In the process he pushed himself to try something outside his comfort zone.
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
Since 1830 farmers have been trying to protect their sheep from parasites by dipping their whole flock in troughs of fungicide and insecticide. At the time it was innovative, quick, compulsory and cost-effective. Over time, however, it’s become clear that this well-intentioned process has not eradicated the targeted diseases and has proved toxic to many of the people working with it (not to mention the costs to the environment).
Are modern companies stuck in 1830?
I see the connections between real sheep dipping and the metaphorical sheep dip approach so many companies take to training and organisational change. Every year organisations spend billions on top-down culture change initiatives and on large scale training programs. Over half of them fail to achieve their aims.
The sad truth is many organisations – and by that I really mean the people in charge – don’t really want to change. I have a check list here for you to see if you are inadvertently working for an organisation like this.
Many companies have dumped the dip approach for something better
Fortunately, there are courageous, far-sighted companies out there who know that dipping is not the answer. read more…
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
If I asked you the question “How much are you worth?” what would you take into consideration?
Would you think about how much you earn or how much you own? Would you think about what’s in the bank, or how much you owe the bank?
Or would you dwell on what other people might think you’re worth?
How long did it take you before you valued yourself?
Not just in this exercise above, but in your life?
The trouble with external valuations – like everything in a market – is the value can rise or fall without really having anything to do with you.
We’ve been judged and labelled all our lives
Sporty, smart, arty, eccentric, funny, beautiful, introvert, extrovert, people person, shy, bossy, go-getting. These (e)valuations are set by other people, or agreed by us in some kind of unconscious negotiation with other people.
Being an “X kind of person” makes sure that we limit ourselves before someone else does. It’s a bulwark against rejection.
It’s why I think psychometric tests are such comfort blankets for corporations; they’re grown-up labels where it’s ok to put people in boxes. The focus is on a fixed point. Nowhere are we considering our value; what we’re offering or what we have in common.
Most of the coaching conversations I’ve ever had – whether I have been the coach or the one being coached – has begun at the point of being frustrated or comforted with a label.
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
In simple terms, we can usually divide our careers into two parts. Before we managed people and after.
The first part of our career is usually spent building and honing our skills. We may start off as generalists, but gradually as we get recognised and rewarded for what we do well, we focus on our strengths. Perhaps without realising it, we become an “expert” in a particular area.
After a time, if we do this well enough we usually get given people to manage.
Promotion and progress are linked to managing others
Without knowing it, we’ve arrived at the Promotion Precipice. It’s a place of great opportunity, but also one of great unknown and potential risk.
Why?
Because in the eighteen years I’ve been coaching leaders and their teams, I’ve met only a handful of people who received any form of training BEFORE they were given people to manage.
Yet everything has fundamentally changed
From now on a manager cannot just focus on developing skills related to their task – the WHAT. Now they have to focus on the HOW, on building the skills of others.
Of course our Before Management career has involved people skills, but it’s different. Let’s take the example of an orchestra.
Before management you played the trumpet. You needed to be good at playing the trumpet, but also mindful of how you kept time and tune with the rest of the brass section. You also had to pay attention to what the rest of the orchestra were doing.
You keep your place by being a good solo contributor and by fitting in with the rest of the team.
Management requires you put the trumpet down and move to conducting the orchestra.
Once you’re a manager you’re responsible for co-ordinating multiple relationships – down, across and up the organisation. In fact, getting things done requires that you increasingly look up; that you develop a bigger picture view.
Without training or coaching new management can feel precarious
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
