EQ4PM

You Can Do Anything You Want On Your Last Day at Work – Part 2

A couple of weeks back, I posted about Bill Gates and the video he made regarding his upcoming last day at Microsoft.  I complimented Bill on his self-confidence and his willingness to have a laugh at his own expense.  I also noted the importance of being able to laugh at ourselves as a sign of strong self-confidence. 

Bill’s video and his willingness to show his flaws demonstrates another key aspect of leadership – selectively revealing weaknesses.  This may seem like a rather minor leadership trait but one that has been shown to be important in leadership studies conducted by Victor Dulewicz and Malcolm Higgs. 

You may remember my previous posts (1, 2 and 3) about Dulewicz and Higgs and their work with the Leadership Dimensions Questionnaire.  They have shown that revealing weaknesses is a key aspect of  effective leaders.  It relates directly to the managerial competencies of Engaging Communications and the emotional intelligence competencies of Interpersonal Sensitivity and Self-Awareness.

This finding of Dulewicz and Higgs is based in part on the 2006 book, Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? , by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones.  In their book, Goffee and Jones talk about the importance for leaders to communicate to their followers some form of personal weakness.  Effective leaders show who they truly are, warts and all.  This serves to make the leader more human and therefore more approachable and likable.  It serves to establish trust and credibility with followers.  The leader seems more authentic than they would if they were not revealing any weaknesses, and that is desired (or perhaps demanded) by followers.

"The desire to be led by a real person demands that we know something of a leader's human foibles and shortcomings." 
- Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones

This runs counter to our natural inclination to build ourselves up and try to look our best.  Goffee and Jones say that those leaders that don’t let themselves show any sign of weakness are either perceived as a phony or as someone that doesn’t take any risks. 

What Bill Gates did in this video, and has done over his tenure as CEO and Chairman of Microsoft, is to show that he is fallible and human.  It’s not that he isn’t brilliant or that he doesn’t take his work seriously.  It is because he is able to show that he isn’t superhuman; he is a human like the rest of us.

Those leaders who are unwilling to reveal a weakness may find that their subordinates make one up for them.  It’s like the celebrities and stars being followed around by the tabloids and papparazi; if they can’t find something to write about, they will fill in the blanks or make something up.  Don’t leave your subordinates in the lurch; give them something.

Part of our communication challenge as project managers and leaders is to let people see the real us at work.  We need to show them that we have weaknesses too.  Here are some examples from various leaders in the public realm:

• As President, Bill Clinton revealed a weakness for junk food and women. He probably should have just stuck with the junk food.
• Ronal Reagan was also a very popular President despite his confessed lack of memory and details and his love of jelly beans.  

A leader that I respect and admire is Bill Hybels, the senior pastor at my church. He has done a great job of sharing flaws that make him human without diminishing his leadership abilities.  Here are some of the weaknesses he has shared:

• He says he is of Dutch origins and therefore very cheap
• He is a complete pushover for his new grandson
• He lacks artistic talent even though he frequently makes flip chart drawings during his talks
• He is not a "hugger"

As Bill has shown, the key is to reveal weaknesses that make you human without taking away from your leadership skills.  It is similar to the challenge you face when you interview for a job and the interviewer asks about your weaknesses.  This is not the time to share that you frequently “borrow” company supplies for personal use, that you sleep late and miss important meetings, or that you have a string of sexual harassment suits pending against you.  This is the time to share some real but not lethal weakness.

Goffee and Jones say to never expose a weakness that would be seen as a fatal flaw.  In other words, it needs to be a real weakness but just the right weakness. 

"Knowing which weakness to reveal, and when, is often a highly honed art closely linked to the ability to sense the requirements of different situations." 
- Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones

This is time to share something that is an understandable weakness and one that is tangential to your work efforts.  As a project manager, you would not want to say that you are disorganized or that you have poor people skills.  If you are in IT, you would not want to share that you are not good with technology. 

Here are some weaknesses that I have heard people share:

• They are uncomfortable speaking in front of large groups (unless you are a speaker or trainer)
• They sometimes get so involved in the details that they lose track of time
• They collect porcelain pigs
• They can not remember people’s names
• That they are scared of heights or hate to fly in airplanes

One more caution about these flaws; the flaw must be real and genuine, otherwise the leader will be perceived as inconsistent or dishonest.  For example, I once saw a senior executive in an organization who broke into tears during an emotional discussion.  His employees viewed his tears as manipulative and didn’t trust him.

My challenge to you is to determine if you are trying to be too perfect.  Are you showing your weaknesses to your followers or trying to be a super-project manager?  Let me know what you think.

If you didn't see Bill's video about his last day, here is the link.

Cheers!

Anthony
 

Self-Awareness - The Truth Will Set You Free

I have been reading Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box a book about relationships.  This is written in the form of a business fable, similar to The Goal, or The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.  It is an easy read and something you could finish in four or five hours if you wanted.

Similar to The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Leadership and Self-Deception is about our relationships and the breakdowns that occur.  Specifically it is about our ability to see and understand how our own issues prevent us from being in relationship with others at the same time that those issues perpetuate conflict.  While not specifically about emotional intelligence, this book is about understanding ourselves better and improving our relationships.

The thing that struck me most about this book was how it highlighted our ability to deny reality.  In order to justify our poor behavior toward others (what the book calls betraying ourselves), we need to make others bad by highlighting their shortcomings and diminishing their good qualities.  We attribute negative qualities to them (e.g. she is lazy) or use all or nothing thinking (e.g. he never shows up on time).  At the same time, we imagine ourselves to be better than we are and we enhance our own qualities.

The book calls this process self-deception.  We deceive ourselves about what is really happening and that becomes a reinforcing cycle that is hard to break.

I think all of us have some sort of denial going on all the time and I believe it to be an important factor on whether we are able to make meaningful change in our lives.  If we get honest with ourselves about our current situation, admit that we are falling short or need help, we empower ourselves to make changes.  On the other hand, if we stay in denial, we simply find or produce evidence to help us stay right where we are.  Awareness is indeed the first step to making meaningful change.

Self-awareness is one of the first building blocks of emotional intelligence.  Having an accurate self-assessment is the key to being able to see ourselves as others see us and to have a starting position for any kind of change or improvement.  For more on self-awareness, see my earlier posts on self-awareness on this blog or visit my squidoo lens Project Manager's Guide to Emotional Intelligence.

If you want to improve your self-awareness, break through denial, and see yourself as others see you, here is one concrete step you can take today.  The Six Seconds EQ Network is offering free use of their SEI-360 emotional intelligence assessment tool for a limited time.  This is a great opportunity for you to get a better view of how others see you and your emotional intelligence.  You can invite project team members or other project stakeholders to provide you feedback on your emotional intelligence.  This would typically cost $200-$300, so getting it for free is pretty nice!  (Disclaimer:  I have no affiliation with Six Seconds and get nothing from this referral).

It is vulnerable to open yourself up to feedback and to the truth about how you act and how you are perceived.  Paradoxically, this vulnerability strengthens us instead of weakening us.  As it says in the bible, "Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free".  How can you find out more about yourself and your interactions with others?  What are the areas of truth that you need to learn about yourself?  That truth will empower you to make positive changes in your life.

How to Develop Your Emotional Intelligence

It has been nearly a month since my last post; time flies when you are busy.  My last post was on the various ways for people to learn about emotional intelligence.  Emotional intelligence expert and fellow blogger Galba Bright and I have been discussing these topics since the article Beyond the Hype was published in the PM Network magazine.  Galba articulated his thoughts on books, learning programmes, and coaching in his series of related posts.  While not nearly as articulate or persuasive as Galba's posts, my own post featured this nifty graphic showing what I believe to be the increasing utility of various learning modes for emotional intelligence. 

I also promised in that last post to talk about my own learning experience and the process I went through.  I learned primarily through group therapy.  The particular group I was involved in was an assignment group at the Center for Life Enrichment, a Christian based counseling center. 

Here is how the assignment group worked.  You met for 90 minutes each week with the same group of 10 people.  Each group was facilitated by one or two trained therapists.  Each group member had a series of assignments to complete.  There were many different assignments and they were all intended to get us to better understand our feelings, make ourselves more self-aware, heal relationship issues from our families of origin, and help us to develop strong relationships with others. 

Outside of the weekly group meeting, we were expected to stay in relationship with the people in the group.  This meant frequent phone calls to check in with people and stay current with them.  It was pretty intense and time consuming. 

One of the major outcomes of the group process was that each group member received a lot of feedback from the other members.  Each person had 10 or so other people - men and women - to react to them and to work out relationship issues.   Each person was responsible for telling the truth about how they saw and experienced the other group members.  It was like a safe playground to experience emotions and learn about relationships.  It was scary, exciting, fun, and incredibly satisfying!

I think the reason that the group learning process worked so well for me was largely because of my lack of self-awareness.  I wasn't in touch with my emotions and I wasn't aware of how others experienced me.  I quickly learned!  In fact, I received plenty of feedback on how I impacted others, my lack of empathy, and my biases and filters. 

The value of the group is that everyone tells the truth.  When others react to you, they let you know it.  When you hurt or offend them, they tell you.  Which is why I think that learning in a support group has a slight advantage over one-on-one coaching.  With groups, you get input and relationships with many people, not just one.  Everyone in the group becomes a potential teacher.  They are a peer to you, and they don't have to worry about you getting upset or cancelling the relationship with you as a coach might.

In addition to the assignment group, I also experienced the group process on about 10 retreats over the last 6 years.  I also joined a men's group after leaving the assignment group last year.  In the men's group, we focus on being good leaders at work as well as being good husbands and fathers at home.   

I should point out that I have been seeing a coach throughout the time I have been involved in support groups and that has been invaluable.  I met pretty much every other week with him for an hour.  I have also read 12 to 15 books on emotional intelligence and that has helped to round out my learning.

I am a big believer in the group approach to learning, in particular when it comes to emotional intelligence.  I have incorportated this model into my own workshops so that people learn from each other and begin to see themselves as others do. 

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic.

Why Don't You Just Tell the Truth?

I've written before about the importance of telling the truth at work.  For any number of reasons, people choose not to tell the truth.  Under the guise of being polite, wanting to appear to be kind, or taking care of the other, people choose to not tell the truth.  This just happened to me twice in the last couple of days and it bugged me.

In the first case, I was supposed to interview for a PM position to lead a large IT project.  The interview was to start at 9:00am and sure enough, at 9:00 my phone rang.  The women I was to interview with said hello and then said that she didn't want to waste my time but the position had been offered to another candidate the previous day.

This of course was not great news and I was disappointed.  OK, I was sad and angry.  But what also bothered me was that she said she didn't want to waste my time.  In other words, she believed she needed to take care of me and watch out for my time, instead of letting me take care of my own needs and end the interview.

The truth of the matter was that she didn't want to waste her time!  That would have been a more truthful and direct communication.  She stated it as if she were taking care of me but the truth was she did not want to invest any more of her time.  So, to be more honest, she could have simply said, "I don't want to spend any more time on this so let's not have an interview this morning".  Or, "I don't want to waste both of our time with an interview".

The second case of not being quite truthful happened to me last night.  I was talking with my friend on the phone and he said, "I don't want to keep you any longer".  That may very well have been true.  But like the previous example, it sounds like he believes that he needs to take care of me. 

By take care of me, I mean that he is saying it as if I could not take care of myself.  Like I am a hostage to him, and must remain on the phone until he tells me I can leave the call.  This would be typical of someone who has poor emotional boundaries.  In other words, if I have strong emotional boundaries, I don't need anyone to take care of me, I can take care of myself.  If I want to end the call, I can simply say, "I need to get going".  If, on the other hand, I had poor emotional boundaries, I might feel as if I needed someone to release me from the call.  I would be afraid of upsetting the other person by telling the truth.

We have all heard this before, right?  We have had people say to us, "I am going to let you go now" or "I want to respect your time", or "I don't want to keep you any longer".  What they are really saying is "I want to go now".  That is much more direct and truthful. 

Why don't we just tell the truth?  For me, I appreciate it when someone is telling me the truth; I don't want to be lied to or manipulated.  I like directness and honesty much better than someone trying to make it sound as if they are acting in my best interest or taking care of me.  Because the truth is, they are not taking care of me, they are trying to take care of themself.  Which is OK; just tell the truth about it.