In Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, Will Guidara writes about how his York City restaurant (co-owned with Daniel Humm), Eleven Madison Park, came to be named the World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2017.

The book appealed to me because I am always looking to learn strategies for creating unforgettable experiences. When I turned to chapter two entitled “Making Magic In A World That Could Use More of It ” I realized the book would transcended rules specific to the hospitality industry.

This book is as much about exceptional leadership in 2023 as it is about exceptional hospitality. If I could pick one book on leadership development, it would be this one, with each chapter revealing foundational and nuanced leadership lesson gems. 

Will Guidara’s Leadership Lessons

1. One Team: Historically, restaurants operated on the two-team model, with the front of the house servicing the guests and the back of the house preparing the food. The book illustrates that this two-team model leads to a lack of cooperation, low trust levels, incivility, and a fractured guest experience. When teams are unified, commitment and innovation are accelerated based on trust, psychological safety, communication and collaboration. The secret sauce is a culture of active listening and a relentless focus on the team’s vision and mission.

2. Hospitality is Universal: While hospitality may seem limited to service-based businesses, Guidara demonstrated how hospitality can revitalize any business. “When you create a hospitality-first culture, everything about your business improves—whether that means finding and retaining great talent, turning customers into raving fans, or increasing your profitability.” Guidara illustrates that hospitality can take teams from ordinary to exceptional when consistently applied. Leaders embracing this hospitality mindset can be a critical and positive differentiator in the eyes of their employees, stakeholders and customers. The numerous successes of Eleven Madison Park under Guidara’s leadership demonstrate hospitality’s transformative power.

3. Set Ambitious Goals and Empower Your Team: Guidara and co-owner Daniel Humm set an audacious goal of building Eleven Madison Park into the world’s number-one restaurant. He understood the significance of sharing his ambition with his team, creating a lofty shared goal. Guidara writes, “It was a tremendous risk to articulate that dream out loud. When you set a goal for your team and fail to achieve it, you run the risk of damaging morale and this was a particularly audacious benchmark. At that meeting, we were inviting the team to decide to go for it with us.” Guidara demonstrates how a unified aspirational goal can create the tenancy and ingenuity to overcome monumental obstacles, including the 2008 U.S. recession, by offering opportunities for skill development and nurturing an environment where innovation and creativity could still thrive.

4. Empathy as a Core Value: Empathy is a central theme woven throughout the book, and it’s a valuable trait that leaders and teams in any industry can leverage. Guidara illustrates how to engage with empathy to better understand customer needs and pain points, create an emotional connection with guests and staff to increase trust and loyalty and embrace feedback to develop innovative solutions while heightening team commitment and camaraderie.

5. Build Your Legacy. Creating a legacy is the genuine test of a great leader as readers learn Guidara and Humm (Chef and Eleven Madison Park co-owner) part ways in early 2020. Exercising humility and gratitude, listening to the advice of wise elders, and putting one’s team before one’s self were among just a few lessons I gleaned from this final chapter. 

From making it cool to care, to improvisational hospitality, to hiring the person, not the resume, to tapping into the team’s passion and then giving them the keys, Unreasonable Hospitality is a must-read for leaders pursuing a culture of excellence and engagement.

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Our 21^st-century workplace needs its version of the mask dance.

Irrespective of industry, organizational rank, or personal temperament, fear of failure is the one conversation that professionals, including those in the C-Suite, resist the most, even behind the closed doors of a coaching conversation.

One of my group coaching clients said the mere act of talking about fear at work would make her look weak, so she keeps quiet. Her group nodded in agreement. We spent the next hour openly talking about failure and the fear of it.

Without these honest conversations, learning doesn’t happen and organizations are destined to repeat past mistakes, lose competitive ground and risk extinction.

In the business world, we wear a far less empowering mask; the work mask.

We don this work mask to appear confident and in control. However, similar to a child’s Halloween mask, our work mask reduces our peripheral vision, preventing us from seeing resources and opportunities in our environment that are the very keys to solving our big thorny problems.

This work mask weighs heavy.

We spend an inordinate amount of time, energy and cognitive bandwidth on maintaining our work mask, at a time when we need to be investing energy on learning, collaborating and innovating. Over time, we come to falsely identify with this mask, and we enter into a world where egos rule and self-protection is the object of the game. The casualty is our healthy self-esteem and a genuine sense of belonging.

What stops us from shedding our work masks and bringing our most authentic, creative and collaborative selves to our work?

 We believe the myth that our work mask protects us from harm. Humans are inherently risk-averse, a requirement for survival.

Dr. Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics) and author of the seminal book, Thinking, Fast and Slow  describes conducted an experiment that highlights how risk-averse we are. Study participants were asked if they would accept a bet based on the flip of a coin. If the coin landed heads up the participant would win $200.00, but if the coin landed tails, the participant would lose $100.00. In other words, it’s better not to lose $100 than to gain $200. In this experiment, the potential gain must be at least twice as much as the potential loss. According to Kahneman “Losses loom larger than gains.”

Risk-Averse Workplace Cultures

This fear of losing manifests as a risk-averse cultural within many organizations. Work teams and companies experience undue conflict borne out of the inherent tension between playing it safe and risk-taking.

In spite of our risk-aversion, companies must innovate if they are going to remain relevant in our turbulent, uncertain and complex world. The Boston Consulting Group  recently reported that thirty-one % of professionals identified a risk-averse culture as a key obstacle to innovation.

According to Baba Shiv, professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School:

“Experimentation and failure are essential to innovation because, by its nature, innovation is an unknown that can only be discovered through trial and error. Failure is the mother of innovation”.

The entrepreneurial rally cry of “fail fast and fail often” understandably doesn’t sit well with the quarterly reporting-focused corporate mindset. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from a healthier relationship with failure.

Here are three strategies for putting fear of failure into perspective:

1. Start talking about failure

Comparison, insecurity and vulnerability (which we believe could be taken advantage of) are why we don’t talk about our failures. Dr. Brene Brown, qualitative researcher and author, delves deeply into this topic in her book Rising Strong: The Reckoning, The Rumble and The Revolution. Brown writes:

“We gold-plate failure…skipping over it or sugar-coating the process and the pain involved in failing. Comparative suffering is a function of fear and scarcity. Falling down, screwing up, and facing hurt often lead to bouts of second-guessing our judgment, our self-­trust, and even our worthiness”.

Shame is the final stop on this emotional cascade, which according to Brown is the “most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough”.

With clients, I overtly signal that it is appropriate and safe to take on this heady subject. With my choice of words, tone of voice, and body language, I model that this conversation is welcomed and healthy. I say, “bring it on!”

The sense of relief that washes over my clients’ faces is a telltale sign that they have been holding onto this burden for far too long.  When clients talk about what keeps them up at night they harness the power to transform their relationship with fear for the better. As professionals appreciate the valuable data behind their fear, they learn lessons about what drives them to succeed and what gets in their way. More importantly, they begin to identify a source of rich information about how they see the world, which is one of the first steps to making bigger moves in work and life.

Write your failure CV.

 As a postdoctoral student at Caltech, psychologist Dr. Melanie Stefan wrote an article called “A CV of Failures” in one of the most prestigious scientific journals, Nature. The International Journal of Science. Publishing in this journal is a big feather in any scientist’s cap.

Stefan poignantly wrote:

“Societal pressures to manage our professional image often gets in the way of us being whole, fallible human beings. MyCV does not reflect the bulk of my academic efforts.  It does not mention the exams I failed, my unsuccessful PhD or fellowship applications, or the papers never accepted for publication. At conferences, I talk about the one project that worked, not about the many that failed. As scientists, we construct a narrative of success that renders our setbacks invisible both to ourselves and to others. Often, other scientists’ careers seem to be a constant, streamlined series of triumphs. Therefore, whenever we experience an individual failure, we feel alone and dejected”.

Imagine what organizations would learn and how their teams would grow if leaders, particularly senior leaders, shared their biggest career mistakes?

2.  Anticipate being wrong.

In his seminal book, Good To Great, Jim Collins writes about his teams speaking candidly as they worked together to discover the framework described in the book. He writes, “… we would debate, disagree, pound on tables, raise our voices, pause and reflect and debate some more…”.Had Collins believed he was right all the time, the framework that has been studied by countless organizations and business schools likely would never have emerged.

It’s incumbent upon twenty-first-century leaders to admit they don’t have all the answers. Hiring and cultivating a diverse team that sees the world differently than you is essential to developing the best ideas. Share an idea that might run counter to your team’s current line of thinking. Encourage your colleagues and direct reports to speak out if they have an idea that they might typically keep to themselves. A specific question you might consider according to researcher and author, Dr. Amy Edmonson is “Where am I wrong?”.  Put another way, Dr. Jennifer Garvey-Berger, author and executive coach encourages leaders to ask their teams “What might I be missing here?”

Adopting a mindset of humility, brimming with curiosity is where 21-century leaders can stand-out.

3. Maximize learning after a failure

 Ashley Good, Founder and CEO of Fail Forward, helps organizations get the maximal benefit from failure. Good uses her expertise as an engineer to help teams and organizations design healthy failure processes.

According to Good:

“At Fail Forward, we provide new perspectives on failure alongside the tools and skills to help us deal with missteps more productively – so that when we fail, we Fail Intelligently”. The mere act of documenting failure promotes the risk-taking, creativity and continuous learning required for innovation.”

When I interviewed Good she told me that there is no truth to the labels of “success” or “failure”; because every situation contains elements of both. When we can acknowledge that reality, we appreciate both where we have succeeded and learn from what didn’t go so well”.

Fear has value.

Good told me that fear has value as it makes us test our ideas. “What isn’t healthy is when fear paralyzes us. We need to acknowledge real risks and prepare for those risks appropriately. For example, imagine you sent an e-mail that you later regretted, or you bombed at an important presentation. These types of experiences help determine how they might impact your job, your career and the relationships that you hold dear”.

Replacing negative emotions with objective acceptance is the path through, Good told me.  “It’s about separating yourself from the failure and acknowledging the role that you played in the situation. It means accepting responsibility”.

I still crisply recall a presentation I gave in Banff, Alberta twenty years ago. I fell significantly short of my expectations and I had a hard time shaking it off.  Tentatively, I  approached one of my mentors, who had attended the presentation and suggested that I work on public speaking skills. While painful to hear at the time, I sincerely took this advice to heart. Keynotes and workshops are now an essential and rewarding part of my work.

Step One

Good offers a simple, though not necessarily easy first step in developing resilience through failure. When facing a failure, she recommends pausing and breathing, to avoid a knee-jerk defensive reaction. The goal isn’t to deny or ignore the emotions that erupt after what feels like a failure; it’s ok to feel these emotions.

Step Two

As a second step, Good recommends setting your ego aside and developing a failure fascination mindset. Good reminds us that this new curiosity helps us learn and grow from our life experiences.

Ben Zander, Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, also highlights the need for mistake-fascination. Sitting on stage with Zander is a 15-year old Cellist who makes a mistake while playing a complicated piece of music. Zander invites the Cellist and the audience to throw their arms up into the arm and exclaim “How fascinating”, when we make a mistake to negate our typical ruminative reaction.

Both Good and Zander understand that being fascinated with our foibles helps open us up to possibilities so we can learn and become masterful.

Failure can be a powerful teacher or a harsh critic. Everyone gets to choose. Will you grow or will you wither? The opportunity to leverage your mistakes today is the key to your future success.

If you could share one of your formative workplace failures, what would it be?

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Along the path to technological advancement and the pursuit of efficiency, we’ve lost the ability to listen deeply and our willingness to be vulnerable.  In our increasingly distracted and polarized world, it’s easier to dismiss, reject, or avoid thorny conversations entirely.

Flight or fight is our typical reaction to the mere whiff of conflict.

Flight manifests itself as sweeping differences of opinion under the proverbial carpet. Beneath the carpet issues incubate like bacteria in a petri dish, slowly multiplying at first until they invariably morph into personality conflicts and power plays. With enough time, problems become too immense and too toxic to tackle. More importantly, the original problem gets lost in this toxic stew, placing significantly greater stress on the system to solve the primary issue now in the face of strained relationships.

Flight may be as innocuous as glancing down at your phone to text in the middle of a conversation. Flight can also take the form of presenteeism; employees who are physically present but they have mentally checked out, often as a self-protective mechanism.

What does fight look like?

On the other hand, fight behaviours runs the gamut from criticism and sarcasm to bullying and it exists in all organizations, albeit more covert in some cultures than others.  Flight frequently rears its ugly head as passive-aggressive behaviour. Have you ever witnessed a colleague being shut down or ignored outright. How often have you seen conversations transform into hallway gossip? These are all examples of fight behaviour.

Both flight and fight are harmful if not promptly identified and positively dealt with. If left unchecked, these two polarized stances lead to the same predictable results: employee disengagement, poor working relationships, lower productivity, higher employee turnover, less innovation and a soured corporate culture.

Fight and flight are inevitable responses to stressors in the environment. Here are simple skills and techniques that can help you overcome these human tendencies and learn how to disagree well.

1. Focusing on all sets of facts.

 Too often, our discussion goal is to change the other person’s mind. We rarely engage in a conversation anticipating that we need to shift our perspective. In the new world of work, leaders don’t have all the answers. It’s hubris and naive to believe that additional scrutiny won’t improve our ideas or expand our thinking in some way.

Imagine you are with a colleague conducting a venue site assessment for an upcoming off-site meeting. You are admiring the stunning view from the grand foyer. Light floods the room from the 35-foot cathedral ceilings. On the other hand, your colleague is roaming around the dark, windowless basement complete with builder-beige coloured paint and musty broadloom. Each of you would have a very different opinion of the venue. Each of you would be right.

Presume instead that you and your colleague are working off very different data and seek to understand what that full dataset is. Fleshing out the example above, you believe that your colleague is acting negatively as she/he describes the venue as uninspiring if not downright depressing. They, in turn, wonder about your judgment when you describe the event space as being perfect for team-building and celebration.

Ask for clarification.

Why do you and your colleague have such different interpretations of what you believe is the same environment? How can you learn more about their worldview, e.g., take a trip down to the basement to understand their experience better? Invite your colleague up to the foyer to understand where you are coming from.

Rather than disagree with each other, take the opportunity to learn.

While this is a simplistic example, it describes what I regularly observe in the workplace.

     2. Create a Yes and… Scenario

Even with the same data, expect differences of opinions, though your job isn’t to steamroll over people in an attempt to get your way. First and foremost, you need to nurture your relationships by affirming them, not necessarily affirming their point of view. In Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts., author and researcher professor Brene Brown recommends inserting the phrase “that isn’t my experience” when you are faced with an opinion that opposes yours.

Here’s an example.

Your HR business partner approaches you about one of your Managers, Johan. She tells you that Johan is a weak communicator and that he needs to work on his presentation skills if he is going to be a candidate for the next round of promotions. You believe Johan is an exceptional communicator.

Rather than butting heads by making your HR business partner wrong, speak from your own experience, “I understand you feel like Johan isn’t a strong communicator, however that isn’t my experience. I’ve seen Johan deliver compelling presentations to the board on several of occasions. He has been well prepared, articulate and answered follow-up questions with confidence and gravitas. I’d appreciate hearing what your experience of Johan’s presentation skills has been?”

Your HR business partner responds by saying, “Well he certainly didn’t deliver when he presented to our team. He fumbled over numbers and got flustered when asked about some of his 2Q projections.” You remember that meeting differently. While Johan did stumble over a few numbers, he recovered with ease in the final few minutes of his presentation. Plus, you have seen Johan deliver under pressure in many other situations, which influences your opinion of him.

Now your conversation with your HR business partner has some space to breathe. You both have an opportunity to interrogate together.  Most importantly, this open stance protects your relationship, which is vital to business success, your sense of job satisfaction and ultimately, your career.

3. Set learning rather than consensus as the goal.

Consensus is a deceptive and unhealthy goal. We need a greater willingness to explore a broader range of perspectives and be prepared to change our minds in the process. Innovation requires a healthy sense of humility.

In 1983, The Quaker Company headed up by President, William Smithburg, purchased the Gatoraid parent company for $220 million, which Quaker grew to $3 billion in 10 years. By 1994, Smithburg, yearning to buy another high growth product, identified Snapple as the likely candidate at the lofty purchase price of $1.8 billion. Market analysts reported this was a bad buy and every member of the Quaker executive board opposed the purchase. However, not a single board member spoke up to counter Smithburg’s unbridled enthusiasm and the acquisition went through.

The Snapple purchase was later described as one of the greatest business failures in history. By 2000 the fateful purchase nearly toppled the 100-year-old company.  Snapple was later sold for a 1/6 of its purchase price and Smithburg, who had been President for 16-years resigned.

This devastating set of losses might have been averted, if at least one Quaker executive had stepped forward to challenge Smithburg’s over-confidence

Leaders implicitly set the decision-making tone within their organizations. Unconscious biases, which include overconfidence and confirmation bias may be limiting your team’s ability to make the best choices.  Confirmation bias is defined as attending only to the data in the environment that supports your beliefs and world view.  Resist the urge to confirm what you already know; the future success of your organization is predicated on your teams’ ability to harness a more extensive set of ideas. If you are going to lead into a successful future, anticipate that many of the ideas from your teams and consultants who support your work will be counter to your thinking.

Here are two simple tactics that you can use to mitigate over-confidence and confirmation.

(a). Brainwriting.

Brainwriting is a tool to safely surface diverse opinions in a group, while quelling the conflict that can arise.  At meetings, provide each participant with a marker and a stack of index cards or larger sticky notes. Ask questions that invite divergent thinking such as, “If you were in my position what would you do with this project?”, “How would you solve this current problem we are facing” or “What opportunities do you see that we should be capitalizing on?” These questions sharpen people’s thinking, expand the range of ideas, options and interpretations available for further inquiry.

After asking a brainwriting question, give your team a few minutes to think about the question before writing their responses on an index card/sticky note. Complete this individual activity in silence. You might need to re-enforce these rules.  Do not rush this process. The more time you give your team to reflect and write, the better. Get comfortable with the silence.

Once people have written down their idea, they pass their index card/sticky note to the person next to them. At this point, the person reads what is written on the card and builds off of that idea by writing down their additional thoughts. Complete a few rounds of this exercise; three or four rounds are ideal. Finally, have team members post their cards/notes on the wall. Review and discuss the ideas as a team, with an open mind and heart.

Be mindful of your reaction to the responses to these questions. Ask a trusted ally in the room about your tone of voice, your choice of words and your body language. Verify if your verbal and non-verbal communication are in sync.  Were you open and curious and rewarding people for exploring new concepts or were you unconsciously shutting people down?

(b). Expect to be Wrong.

Routinely ask your colleagues and team the question, “Where am I wrong?” Above all, this question explicitly gives other permission to challenge your thinking. Through stress testing your ideas, you are also empowering your team to think more critically and creatively.  Expecting to be wrong is also a healthy and necessary precursor to normalizing conflict.

4. Normalize conflict.

Productive conflict, as Liane Davey in her newest book, The Good Fight describes it, is a wise and proactive way to address thorny conversations that arise in this new world of work.  As Davey explains, historically we relied on “the right words to say”, as though it was a simple role-play exercise. Productive conflict is a natural part of the human condition.  Moving through conflict requires a genuine connection, not just a script that we follow.

Productive conflict is where you will find gold.

First of all,  being comfortable with conflict signals to your team and your organization that you aren’t fleeing the situation, nor are you preparing to go into battle.  In doing so, you will reward your team for staying in tough conversations with curiosity and respect.  Your team will quickly realize that you can take a bit of the emotional heat because you trust them and you have confidence that as a group you will come out the other side, better for it.  Additional benefits include: more fully flesh out ideas, more nuanced solutions, strengthened relationships, more fluid communication and fully tapped innovation.

As the world of work becomes progressively more demanding and exponentially more complex, leaders are going to have to step up to meet these thorny challenges.  Disagreeing well is a vital step forward in creating a more enlightened workplace.

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She is a talented marketer and a trusted colleague who doesn’t shy away from demanding projects. Coupled with her ability to develop her team and her eagerness to learn, it’s no wonder that her senior leadership has identified her as a high potential.

Whit has just come back from a leadership program and she’s excited to put her learning into immediate practice. She walks through her office door eager to take the day on. Whit opens her e-mail, proud of her first quick win of the day (vowing that she won’t check e-mail between 7:30 at night and 8:00 in the morning). She recently read an article that checking e-mail less frequently reduces stress.  While only having adopted a nightly technology fast in the past two months, she has already seen significant productivity gains and she feels calmer.

Thirty-two new e-mail alerts appear on Whit’s laptop screen.

Four of those messages are marked urgent. Whit starts to lose focus when she reminds herself of her promise to stay out of the weeds. Knowing  how easy it is to become hijacked by other peoples’ urgent issues, Whit takes a few deep breaths to regain her focus and calmly reviews her inbox. In two minutes, that Whit needs to deal with personally are flagged. Upon closer inspection she evaluates who else on her team would be better suited to address the other e-mail queries.

Whit realizes that three emails are better handled by Keitha, a marketing manager within her group. She forwards these messages to Keitha and encourages her to respond to them in the order she feels is best.

Delegation is a new leadership skill for Whit.

A year ago, she went through the company’s 360 feedback review, where her manager and three of her direct reports described that she was a little controlling as a leader. Whit has since learned that giving her team autonomy about how they do their work is far more important than doing the tasks the way she would have done them. She genuinely cares about her team and wants to empower them. In delegating, she is helping her team develop their own capacity, while freeing her up for work most suited to her strengths and capabilities that will move the business forward.

Whit dashes of to her 9:00 a.m. brainstorming meeting with her team.

The team is  nearly all assembled as she takes her seat at the table as the clock strikes nine. The brand manager asks if they should hold off starting the meeting until the last two team members arrive. Whit smiles and informs the group that meetings from now on, start and end on time.

At first, the group exchanges puzzled glances across the table. Whit recognizes this body language, pauses, and states that the organization has a culture of being late to meetings and as a result, meetings start late and often end late, perpetuating the cycle of tardiness, which reduces productivity.

Everyone nods in recognition that late arrivals aren’t just tolerated, but as Jim from Finance pipes up “We worship lateness”. After an open discussion, the attendees all agree that meetings will start and end on time.

The team starts each meeting with a minute or two of gratitude.

Each team member shares something they are grateful for ranging from a new puppy who is finally house trained, to acknowledging a team member’s extra help in analyzing market research data, to celebrating a second anniversary with the company.

For some, at first this act of gratitude seemed a bit fluffy but Whit knew this activity had teeth. She recently read that positivity is a learned skill and that people are more engaged and innovative when they feel grateful. This is a three-minute investment that will pay dividends. Whit noticed a marked increase in collaboration since starting this gratitude practice. Now the team jumps at the chance to be the first to share their piece of gratitude.

Delegating Leadership

Han, the meeting timer and tech facilitator, (the team rotates through all the meeting roles), displays the cloud software the group uses for their brainstorming work on the whiteboard.

Han asks the team to come up with three program upgrade recommendations on sticky notes, a method called brainwriting. This simple analog approach to brainstorming ensures that each member of the team has the same opportunity to participate, no matter how junior or introverted they may be. This method avoids group-think, the psychological phenomenon in which people strive for consensus within a group, often unwittingly agreeing with the most senior, or most vocal in the group.

The team quickly comes up with 43 ideas which are displayed on the screen at the front of the room so the team can review the suggestions together. Within 15 minutes the group has whittled the list down to seven items. Each team member is assigned to take one idea away to investigate further. They have three weeks to collect data, survey the market and come back to the team with their recommendation. The meeting goal (actively involve the entire team to come up with at least three-to-five new ideas for the brand launch) has been met and the meeting is adjourned a few minutes early.

Whit heads back to her office. Based on a recent conversation she had with her executive coach, Whit has blocked time off for reflection between meetings. This gives Whit the edge she needs to stay fresh and leverage the learning from every meeting.

In the reflective time she has at her deck, Whit reviews her accomplishments against the plan she created on the previous Friday.

“The Friday Win List:“

1. Put learning from leadership development program into practice within 24-hours

2. Only check e-mail and texts between 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.

3. Stay focused on important issues that will move the business and my work forward

4. Actively delegate to the team

5. Start and end meetings on time

6. Include gratitude reflection as a standing meeting agenda item

7. Observe body language to develop empathy and influence

8. Actively include all team members in meetings to enhance engagement and innovation

9. Block off time between meetings for reflection

It’s only 11:00 a.m. and Whit has accomplished more than most do in a day.

What habits can you adopt to accelerate your leadership?

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Eleven days into her trek, Natalia abruptly awoke when a strong earthquake (6.2 on the Richter scale) struck. She was on a glacier, was it collapsing she wondered? Two hours later a second powerful earthquake rocked the mountain, and in an instant, Natalia’s dream of summiting the mountain was over.

With possible earthquakes and avalanches to follow, it was equally perilous for Natalia to continue with her ascent, as it would be for her to make her way back to basecamp. Her expedition quickly turned into a rescue mission. Harsh weather, hurricane-force winds and heavy snowfall hampered rescue efforts, and Natalia had to call on all of her mountaineering, survival and leadership skills waiting for help to arrive.

Here are four of the valuable leadership lessons we can learn from this courageous mountain climber:

1. Preparation

Natalia spent two years in Patagonia preparing and training for the rigours of her solo trek. As an experienced mountain guide and climber, she was mentally, emotionally and physically equipped to deal with Mount Logan’s harsh weather and quickly changing climatic conditions.

While Natalia hadn’t anticipated earthquakes or the subsequent avalanches, her preparation was the cushion she needed to endure the ordeal. She had adequate equipment, food, and fuel to withstand nearly four grueling and lonely days on the mountain while waiting for help to arrive. Helicopter pilot, Ian Pitchforth described that Natalia was “packed and ready” when the rescue team arrived. Scott Stewart, the Parks Canada rescue coordinator, said she “did everything right” which included her training, her equipment and the mountaineering insurance she had purchased.

Business and community leaders need to prepare mentally, emotionally and intellectually for a variety of unforeseen disruptions, including those in the economy, technology, organizational, and rapidly changing customer and employee expectations. In the world of work, the proper preparation may make the critical difference between success and failure. As philosopher Seneca wrote: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Leaders can no longer afford to leave their futures to chance.

2. Calculated Risk-Taking

Trapped two-thirds up the mountain when the earthquakes hit, Natalia realized she needed to move her camp to a higher altitude to avoid further avalanches of snow, glacial ice and rock. She made the calculated risk of moving beyond the avalanche zone, requiring she expose herself to snowstorms with 100 km an hour winds and temperatures dipping to -30°C.

In the volatile, uncertain and complex world, leaders are always making calculated trade-offs and managing their organizations for risk. Planning requires foresight, courage and the need to adapt quickly and learn from early failures, allowing them to capitalize on their learning. Leaders who develop proactive contingency plans and see failure as experimentation also bank resources that their organizations can use in challenging times, ensuring their teams are successful in the long-term.

3. Mindset 

Natalia focused on what mattered most, her family and friends, including her partner (also a climber), Camilo Rada to keep her morale high during the four days she spent waiting for help to arrive. She was keenly aware of her emotional state, “The last day before the rescue, my mind was eating me. I was more sensitive to every sound. I felt alert to every danger”. She engaged in positive self-talk to help remain calm despite the cold and lack of sleep. “Come on, you can do it, you can do it. Just a few more days.” She kept herself busy and healthy by focusing on what she could do: drinking, eating, tending to her tent and making a wall to stop the wind from howling through her camp.

Self-awareness, a hallmark of emotional intelligence is key to leadership success. The ability to name and monitor one’s emotions in real time unlocks core emotional and mental capabilities. Without this essential ingredient, leaders lack insight into their fears and vulnerabilities, which strips them of their sound decision-making.

4. Attract a Diverse Team

While Natalia mounted a solo trek, she was surrounded by a team who she heavily relied upon. This team included The Royal Geographic Society who financed her trip, the Parks Canada/Kluane National Park and Reserve’s Public Safety Team, the outfitter Icefield Discovery Tours and her partner Camilo, with whom she spoke to regularly via satellite phone while she waited for help to arrive. Without this extensive team, neither Natalia’s expedition nor her rescue would have been possible.

Every leader has their unique set of strengths, weaknesses and consequently, they have their biases and blind spots. Self-aware leaders naturally surround themselves with diverse teams of people who have complementary strengths to augment their perspective. Team diversity also combats the perils of groupthink that so many teams succumb. Workforce diversity makes good business sense. Companies who embrace cultural diversity report higher rates of innovation.

Tectonic forces, brutally cold temperatures, and blinding snowstorms will test few leaders. All leaders will be tested on their proverbial mountain and will face unpredictable forces that challenge their courage and mental fortitude in this new world of work. There are leadership lessons everywhere.

When faced with adversity what lessons will define your leadership?

The post Leadership Lessons From A Stranded Mountain Climber appeared first on Natalie Currie Enterprises.

If you’ve lost your passion and drive for your work – you aren’t alone. The most recent research published by Gallup Inc. shows that only 31.5 percent of the U.S. workforce feels fully engaged at work. The data for Millennial workers is even less encouraging: only 28.8 percent feel a sense of engagement in their job. According to The Center for Creative Leadership, employees spend on average 72 hours per week working or connected to work. You spend so much time in or involved in work you deserve nothing less than an enriching work experience.

Here are seven strategies to help you rekindle your joy for your job.

1. Leverage Your Inherent Strengths

Craft your career by leveraging your strengths. Strengths as ways of being rather than doing that you find continually energizing, easy and put you in that state of flow, such as social creativity, love of learning and critical thinking.

You may be an analytics power-user or the go-to person for showcasing your teams’ accomplishments in front of the board but if those activities leave you feeling uninspired or perhaps even drained that could be a sign that that your work tasks aren’t aligned with your inherent strengths.

Identifying and leveraging your strengths is critical to you doing your best work. According to the Gallup Inc. blog people who use their strengths, every day are six times more likely to be engaged at work.  Employees who use four or more of your top character strengths daily are more likely going to see your work as a calling with deep meaning and purpose.  There are a number of tools and assessments you can use to identify your top strengths. The VIA Institute on Character at http://www.viasurvey.org is a free, scientifically-validated survey that will identify your top signature strengths. Other strengths-based assessments include Strengths-Finder 2.0,

http://strengths.gallup.com/default.aspx, Standout https://www.tmbc.com/ and TILT 365 True Tilt Profile.

Think creatively about how you can use your strengths within your current role at work. You needn’t find a new job – often just some subtle refinements or little strengths-based tweaks are all you need to reap significant benefits. Consider opportunities that exist within your current role where you could use your strengths and where your organization would also benefit. If love of learning comes up as one of your strengths, perhaps there a task force you could lead or a new project team that you could join that as an added benefit would help you develop a positive workplace profile. If you rank high on perspective offer to add that point of view at meetings or strategic planning sessions to help your workgroup appreciate the bigger picture when the rest of the team is in the weeds.

2. Develop a Gratitude Practice

The research supports conventional wisdom: being grateful for what you already have is the first step to getting more of what you want. What is good or even great about your work right now? Do you work in an environment that offers flex time, has a gym on-site, or does your employer offer tuition reimbursement for that degree you want? Focusing on what is already working will help you appreciate other positive aspects of your environment that you may not have noticed. Taking a few minutes at the end of your day to reflect on some of the high points at work can have a profound influence on your levels of joy.

3. Identify and Nurture Workplace Friendships.

In their Q12 Survey, Gallup Inc. asked the question “Do I have a best friend at work?” This survey revealed that workplace friendships were considered as important as salary or benefits. Having a best friend at work was positively correlated with productive, profitability, safety and customer loyalty. When Gallup Inc. administered this survey to a random group http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/787/collective-advantage.aspx. Friends at work ensure we are supported, while being positively challenged, leading to better performance and job satisfaction.

4. Ask for Help.

You don’t have to have all the answers. What’s important to keep in mind is that you don’t have to suffer in silence. If you feel comfortable share your feelings with a trusted colleague, mentor or your boss.

If you don’t feel comfortable sharing that you lost your workplace mojo, start first with a circle of friends, a mastermind or a professional coach to share your thoughts and help you develop an action plan to see through your funk.

5. Develop a Growth Mindset.

Fostering a sense of learning is one of the quickest ways to create engagement. In her seminal book Mindset,  psychologist Carol Dweck shows readers that learning stems from adopting a growth mindset. Based on Dweck’s research, humans grow and develop task or skill-set mastery through deliberate and sustained effort over time, which is self-reinforcing.

Moreover, we know from Dan Pink’s work in Drive that mastery is one of the three key pillars of intrinsic motivation. As humans, the drive for mastery is a strong force that is self-reinforcing. Embracing the growth mindset means that you need to be willing to try and fail and to use that experience to deepen your learning. By offering to take on new responsibilities at work outside of your a little outside comfort zone, you will expand your skills set while giving you an added sense of achievement. Some of my clients have found that taking a team lead role, leading a committee or speaking at departmental or divisional meetings not only gives them much-needed visibility within their organizations but also gives them significant opportunities to learn, while opening new doors. Today may be the right time to talk to your boss about a new work assignment, job shadowing or a formal stretch role.

6. Build Rest Breaks into Your Workday

Breaks are critical for our emotional and mental wellbeing. John Media, psychologist, researchers and author of Brain Rules http://www.brainrules.net/ describes that human bodies and brains were designed to function optimally under constant movement (our ancestors likely walked up to 10 miles a day in search of food and shelter). Tony Schwartz has an entire organization http://theenergyproject.com dedicated to studying the science of optimal performance. He describes that “human beings aren’t computers and we were not designed to run at high speeds continuously, for long periods of time. Science tells us we’re at our best when we move rhythmically between spending and renewing energy.” Build regular breaks into your workday, working no more than 45-minutes at a time before taking a quick 30-second stretch break. Try talking 15-minute walk outdoors at lunchtime, connecting with a colleague over coffee, taking part in your departmental potluck, or even just sitting quietly at your desk for a few minutes between e-mails and meetings.

If pressed for time, let’s face it, we all are – try combining a bit of activity while connecting with colleagues in the form of walking meetings. Walking meetings can help you quickly slip some activity in your day while keeping up with your work and workplace relationships (https://www.ted.com/talks/nilofer_merchant_got_a_meeting_take_a_walk?language=en and http://netwalkingllc.com).

7. Take your Holidays/PTO

One survey recently reported that U.S. employees take only half of their paid vacation time off, even more staggering 15 percent of employees surveyed took no time off at all during the year. Concern about getting behind in their work or wanting to outperform colleagues were the reasons why employees aren’t taking all their paid time off.

Not taken paid time time off may only be part of the picture. According to a 2013 report, 23% of Americans have no paid vacation . Other countries, including many in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada fair somewhat better when it comes to paid time off – but we still need to be mindful that people still feel overworked. Carving out time for renewal is good for business and your health.

Perhaps more troubling are those working environments where there is an implicit message that work comes before all else. Taking time off from work can be the best thing for a healthy career with benefits including improved problem-solving and lower rates of stress. A very good friend of mine who is a Director in a large organization takes regular vacations despite of a heavy workload and dedicated to supporting her direct reports. What she models to her staff is vitally important. If managers take time off from work, they are implicitly telling their direct reports they have permission to do the same. We need more managers who are willing to be this kind of a workplace role model.

The work you do matters. Take to heart even just one of the suggestions in this post and you will make even more of a difference at work.

I’d love to hear what strategies and tips you have used to bring the joy back into your job.

The post How to Bring the Joy Back to Your Job appeared first on Natalie Currie Enterprises.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Jamie Gruman recently about employee on-boarding, a topic that employers and managers continue to grapple with in the workplace. Dr. Gruman shared some of his research and insights on how employers can help employees make the most of their initial days on the job and why that should matter to employers.

Dr. Gruman is an Associate Professor of organizational behaviour and serves as the Graduate Coordinator in the Organizational Leadership stream of the Ph.D. in Management. In addition to being a member of numerous professional associations, Dr. Gruman is a founding member and serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Positive Psychology Association.

Natalie: Thanks so much for joining me, Jamie. Could give us a little bit of background about the type of work that you do at the University of Guelph?

Dr. Gruman: Sure. I’m a Professor of organizational behavior in the Department of Management. My research focuses largely on positive psychology, positive organizational psychology. My point of entry is often the on-boarding process. I’ve done research looking at employee engagement and psychological capital, which is the combination of hope, optimism, confidence, and resilience, workplace spirituality, and well-being in general. I often will look at newcomers in organizations and how they’re on-boarded as my entry point to investigate how well-being and these other positive psychology topics are promoted in the organization.

Natalie: You touched on some really important concepts that we’re all talking about in the workplace these days. I’d love to hear your thoughts on on-boarding and where employers might be able to adapt some of their current practices to make it easier for new employees integrate into organizations?

Dr. Gruman:   Let’s get the lay of the land. The way people are typically on-boarded these days is they’re given an enormous policies and procedures manual, which is now online. They’re told to read it, and they’re shown their cubicle and, “Here’s the washroom,” and there you go. The on-boarding process is largely about providing people with information to get going. Certainly information is important, but what the research shows us is that it’s not even the most important piece.

If your objective is socializing people, you have should have two objectives. First is to produce adjustment. You want them to feel integrated. You want them to feel like they know what they’re doing. You want them to feel like they’re part of the team. Those adjustment variables lead to business outcomes. That will lead to performance and productivity.

Natalie: Are there any downsides to socializing folks, that leaders should know about?

Dr. Gruman:  The problem that most organizations have is they focus almost exclusively on providing people with information to make this happen. But the research shows us that that’s not the most important thing that leads to integration and performance. In fact, what’s most important are the relationships that people develop. If you look at decades of research on- onboarding, what you find is that a host of variables related to social activities of the relationships. People develop a number of relationships. The quality of the relationships, whether they have buddies and mentors, those are the things that lead to successful on-boarding outcomes.

What people need to do to produce better outcomes and to keep their turnover low and keep their cost low, is shift their focus from information provision to (in addition to that), provide them with other resources that they need, the most important of which need to be relationships. Do things to help people build relationships. What my colleague, Alan Saks (Alan’s a former colleague of mine at the University of Toronto) have developed what we call Socialization Resources Theory (SRT). Based on a thorough review of both the academic and the practitioner literature we’ve come up with a list of 17 resources that organizations can draw from to best integrate newcomers.

Natalie:  Can you share with us maybe two or three of those resources to get organizations started on the right track?

Dr. Gruman: Sure. We have information as one of the resources. We have things like feedback, giving people feedback on a regular basis on how they’re doing. I mentioned how important it is to integrate people socially, so are you holding social events? Are you having get-togethers? Are you taking people out for drinks at the end of the day? Do you put newcomers on the company softball team or hockey team? These are the sorts of things that are going to promote effective integration. Are you giving them a buddy and a mentor? Do you have a formal orientation program? I know a lot of places don’t even have that. The nature of the assignments that they have early on: are they bored at work? Or are you challenging them appropriately, so they can build confidence and feel like they’re an effective member of the team?

Those are some of the resources that we’re focusing on. We’re in the process of building a scale to measure all of these. We have a number of studies that we’ve done looking at how each of these resources relates to various adjustment and more distal outcomes, like productivity and performance.

Natalie: Thanks for sharing some practical tips on how that can help with employee on-boarding. I’m looking forward to hearing more about your on-boarding scale – I know it will certainly be valuable for so many organizations.

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To recap, here are my two key learnings from my interview with Dr. Gruman:

1. Create an on-boarding program that facilitates relationship-building, while still maintaining the critical infomration piece of the process.
2. To enhance job performance and productivity, first focus on formal employee on-boarding
3. Provide new employees with appropriately challenging work to build their confidience and to help them see that they are contributing members of the team.

Dr. Gruman can be found on:

Linkedin 

and

Google Scholar 

What are your best on-boarding practices?

The post Employee On-boarding: The Science and Practice of Building Relationships at Work appeared first on Natalie Currie Enterprises.