Search Inside Yourself
Chapter Eight - Leadership & Social Skills
"The real world is both your dojo and your zendo, from which you will get your mojo."
- Chade-Meng Tan
I am a strong believer that compassion and kindness are key qualities of successful business leaders. However, there are people in life (and therefore employees in the workplace) who will try to take advantage of a situation once they sense an opportunity. I think that kindness and open-heartedness in management, need to balanced with good instict, judgement and where appropriate, discipline. Too much of one and not enough of the other will both result in poor performance either because everyone hates you, or everyone walks all over you. Each person is a different individual and it is not fair to allow the 'give an inch and take a mile crew', to ruin it for the people who have a genuinely tough circumstances. This may sound a little hard-nosed but I have been a manager in the hospitality industry for over 10 years and the number of times people phone in sick on a Sunday is incredible.
As with anything, compassion can (and should) be trained. By taking the time each day to have kind and compassionate thoughts towards others, our brains form a mental habit, and after a while we will begin to have these thoughts both frequently and effortlessly. One exercise is 'multiplying goodness meditation', where during mediation we visualise ourselves breathing in goodness from ourselves, others or the whole world. We then use our hearts to multiply the goodness we breathe in by a factor of ten and then breathe all that goodness back out into the world. The more we practice this exercise the easier and more powerful it will become, but it definately makes you feel happy and upbeat from the first time you do it. There is also an 'advanced level' of this excercise called Tonglen meditation.
As well as a leader, there are also some guidelines and principles as to how to become an effective and successful team member. The SCARF model outlines where our social brains identify different threats and rewards. An example of a simple social reward would be a smile from a colleague when passing in the hallway, and an example of a threat would be an angry scowl. Research suggests that negative social experiences (scowls/threats) have three times the effect on us compared to positive social experiences (smile/reward). SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness and by helping ourselves and others to feel good in these five areas, we can make each individual feel more valuable to the team and strengthen the overall team as a whole. This is something I feel I will be able to apply at EDA bootcamp as I try to be a strong team player but having the actual five areas to refer to will definately help.
One last thing chapter eight of the book leaves us with (and something which I generally struggle with) is 'mindful-emailing'. Because emails remove the emotional context from traditional face-to-face conversations, there can easily be miscommunications which cause the reader to take offence when non was intended. I am ok at writing 'mindful-emails', because I know I spend far too long being overly-cautious and overly-sensitive preparing them. The problem for me lies on the receiving end, where I can be guilty of reading an email, and if I am unsure of the emotional context, I assume it to be the worst. People are often very busy when writing emails and what should be considered to be a beautifully written brief, concise and to the point message can often be misinterpreted as abrupt, rude and offensive. I must make a special effort not to allow myself to read too far into emails unjustifiably, and where possible and appropriate, have potentially sensitive conversations in person.
This is the last blog I will be writing before entering Phase One at EDA next week. I am super-excited and super-nervous but ready to take on the challenge.
Wish me luck,
