Raising your game requires you to stretch your muscles, although not so far that they will react adversely. Stretching your muscles both strengthens them and enables them to relax more easily. You may need to stretch your muscles in different ways when developing different competences. Doing so can mean chairing a meeting more effectively, building your profile or taking control of a situation. It can mean 'feeling the pain and doing it anyway'.
Muscles that are not used wither away. A muscle that is not stretched becomes useless. Keeping different muscles working well will ensure that your whole body works effectively. Upping the pace necessitates keeping different muscles working in synergy together. At times, some muscles will need to be stretched more than others for the greater good of the whole.
Sometimes it is important to take stock and reflect on how much you have changed. When June looked back over the last 18 months she said that she was standing on her own more, taking charge and reshaping the agenda more, and becoming increasingly confident in her understanding of how she could make a difference in her organisation. It was as she looked back that she appreciated how much she had been stretching her muscles.
June's growth had not only been in what she had done, it was also in what she had deliberately not done and how in some circumstances she had maintained a tactful silence rather than rushed in with her comments. Part of her new-found strength lay in recognising that what mattered was not what sort of contribution she made, but whether there was a successful outcome. Sometimes that required direct influence from her, at other times it might just require gentle support or steering.
Fiona talked about the effect on her of moving into a new job in raising her game. Stretching her muscles involved taking forward a bigger challenge. She commented:
I knew I could do more. It was important to see clearly what needed to be done. It was seeing the bigger prizes and recognising that to get there you could do some hard things. You cannot make omelettes if you don't break eggs. You have to know how bad it is before you know what needs to be done next. You need to get used to high temperatures. It gives you confidence to deal with a wide range of things.
Anna Walker has held a number of senior leadership positions, including director general posts in government and chief executive of the Healthcare Commission. Her advice on raising your game is:
Always recognise that you can do things. What makes a difference is being flexible. There is a danger that people go back to approaches that were successful for them in the past, but that may not be what is needed for the next step. You need to learn to do things through other people. You need to recognise quickly what is important and what is not important, what can be left behind, or what you have to do and what your organisation has to do.
You need to be willing to learn from getting things wrong and accept being criticised and learn from it. You need to be able to use different styles and approaches in different circumstances while always having a clear vision for what you have to do. Most people want a clear lead from you.
Practical lessons from the experience of people like Fiona and Anna help you believe that you can rise to the challenge and spot where you can make a difference. They enable you to recognise what is important and learn from it. You need to bring together a clear vision, drive hard towards that vision and continuously gain knowledge from what goes well and what goes less well. All this is about holding your nerve, and accepting that you will face criticism but not being defensive about it.
It can be a valuable exercise to ask yourself every six months or so what the muscles are that you need to stretch. This could mean pushing yourself through a pain barrier in areas, often practical areas, that you have found difficult before.
The rest of this chapter addresses four specific areas where stretching your muscles could be of real, practical value:
Have you sat in interminable meetings where the chairperson has completely lost the plot? Have you seen the energy levels in a meeting fall through the floor as the chair wanders off into irrelevance? Enhancing your chairing skills can be done in a number of different ways by:
Observing good chairpeople and being clear what you are learning from them.
Experimenting with different approaches and seeing what works well for you.
Inviting a coach to observe you, talk to participants in your meeting and give you frank feedback.
Box 10 sets out a checklist of questions to ask before, during and after a meeting. The questions cover everything from logistics (room size and table layout), to authority (is there a prompt start and warm welcome?), to the level of energy in room (is the chairperson generating or sapping the energy?). The approach set out in the box suggests doing a self-assessment at the end of a meeting to see how successful it has been, then identify what might be done differently on a future occasion.
The most influential people ask the right question in the right way. They articulate the question that goes to the heart of the matter and help someone move on in their thinking and reach a new conclusion. The best question will rarely come completely intuitively. Even a few moments' preparation can lead to a question that hits the nail on the head. Two briefly scribbled questions on a pile of papers for a meeting can be a means of crystallising where you think the focus of discussion and conclusion should be. Often the best questions flow from one another. Once a relationship has been established there can sometimes be a killer question that goes to the heart of an issue and enables the formulation of exactly the right next steps.
Do you create an atmosphere in which hard questions can be asked? Do your team feel that they always have to modify the way they put questions so as not to go against the party line or offend? When someone asks you a question, do you hear the intent behind the question?
Meeting Checklist: Questions for he Effective Chair
Before the Meeting
During the Meeting
After Meeting
Box 11 contains a sequence of powerful questions to ask about yourself. Reflecting on the key question in a particular situation for a few moments can be invaluable. It might mean identifying what for you as an individual is the most difficult question to ask.
Building your reputation is a gradual process, one step at a time. It is based on conspicuous success, but is not just about public victories. Part of building your profile is building trust over an extended period so that people believe your impact is genuine and will be sustained. The following will help:
Be linked to specific, successful outcomes.
Be seen to contribute to a range of different projects.
Be associated with individuals who have been successful.
Become known for a distinctive type of contribution.
Develop a reputation for reliability and consistency.
Develop a reputation for influence within an organisation.
Demonstrate the ability to hold your own in difficult circumstances.
Be able to have a consistent impact even when new, unexpected problems crop up.
Taking control is not about dominance or aggressiveness. It is about bringing a measured understanding to difficult situations and being able to influence their direction. It is about contributing clarity and positive optimism alongside realistic expectations. It is about an ability to keep calm and a willingness to be decisive. It is about holding your own while listening to others. Show the following behaviours:
Be as clear as possible about what the underlying issue is.
Demonstrate that you understand others' concerns while believing that there is a way through.
Set out a constructive way forward that acknowledges the concerns of others while still being clear in its intent.
