As you up the pace you will face new and different problems. These can feel more acute as you may have only limited time to deal with them. You may not be able to do all the research yourself, and will have to become much more reliant on the advice and support of others. How best do you respond to the problems that hit you week by week? You need a high level of self-awareness and strategies that enable you to negotiate well and cope with conflict effectively. Success is about knowing yourself well enough to anticipate how you will respond to problems and how best to prepare yourself.
Clear, practical strategies can help you turn the anguish of a problem into the satisfaction of tackling it well.
Knowing how you respond in different situations can help you prepare for similar situations in the future. Often your behaviour follows a pattern. Sometimes your reactions might frustrate you, but getting cross about them doesn't help. On occasion you might want to try to modify your responses, but often you just need to learn to live with them effectively.
When you face a new problem that you aren't sure how to tackle, it can be hard to admit your uncertainty: it can feel like an admission of failure. However, a consistent message from successful leaders is that being honest with yourself is a considerable leadership strength. Many of us experience the pressure or the sense of obligation to have to 'do it all', but that is reaching for the impossible and can lead to dangerous overstretching. A key consideration is knowing what things you do well and accepting the limits of your capabilities.
As you respond to new and different problems, it is worth reflecting on the following:
What aspects of your approach worked well?
What worked less well?
What might you do differently in the future?
What might you be less concerned about in the future?
An excellent moment to take stock about your level of self-awareness in addressing problems is when you move from one job to another. Ronald talked graphically about the contrast in how he felt in his new job compared to his old job. In his previous role he had felt under pressure, personally accountable and inward looking. He had addressed problems in a very introspective way and his uncertainty had affected the confidence that other people had in him. His effectiveness had begun to diminish as his confidence spiralled down.
In his new role, Ronald has as a key theme 'I am in control'. He is much more objective in addressing problems. He is more confident and measured in his approach. He sets a more realistic timetable for achieving next steps. He has effectively built a set of supporters who are great sources of encouragement. When he faces criticism he does not take it personally, he addresses it in a straightforward and factual way. He keeps embedding the firm belief that problems are solvable.
Alongside this perspective comes a willingness to acknowledge, to both himself and others, when specific steps are not working and need to be changed. Ronald has a new confidence and a new effectiveness in what he is achieving. He is grateful that people's memories are often shorter than he fears. His reputation has now been rebuilt. Moving to a new role in a new location provided an opportunity to reinvent himself. He is aware of the risks that could lead to a downward spiral again and is determined to protect himself from that possibility.
Keeping an updated picture of how you have responded successfully or less effectively to different problems can help you further refine your self-understanding.
Psychometric assessment can play a useful part in enabling you to understand how you respond to different sorts of problems. The benefits of psychometric tools are that they can help build self-awareness, highlight preferences and motivations that may not be obvious, and bring clarity about strengths (enabling you to use the strengths you have even more). They identify your least preferred approaches that may need further development if you are to widen your repertoire of ways of responding to diverse situations, and they open up issues for conversation about behaviours and responses with which you might not otherwise be willing to engage.
All psychometric instruments have to be used with care. One useful personality instrument is FIRO-B, which measures how you typically behave with other people and how you prefer them to act towards you. The results can be used to show patterns of interpersonal behaviour and expectations and enable you to reflect on how satisfied or dissatisfied you are with those patterns. Areas of interpersonal needs identified by FIRO-B are:
Inclusion: how much you generally include others in your life and how much attention and recognition you want from others.
Control: how much influence and responsibility you want and how much you want others to lead and influence you.
Affection: how close and warm you are with others and how close and warm you want others to be with you.
The results cover both expressed and wanted needs. For example, expressed control is about how often you act in ways that help you direct or influence situations, while wanted control is about how much leadership or influence you want others to assume.
FIRO-B provides a snapshot of interpersonal needs that enables you to be more aware of your natural tendencies and thereby to choose more deliberately whether a particular behaviour is, or is not, appropriate at a specific time. Reflecting on the conclusions from psychometric assessments like FIRO-B can help you think through how you respond to problems in interpersonal work in groups or on committees.
The more you up the pace, the greater the likelihood that you have to deal with conflict. Conflict can be creative and need not be destructive. Out of conflict can often come new options that you hadn't previously thought possible. Preserving your values and self-esteem during conflict is crucial to surviving it.
Key steps in coping with conflict include the following:
In advance
In the moment
Be clear about your armour and its effectiveness.
Anticipate the blows and your reactions to them.
Pace the exchanges and keep up the deep breathing.
Know how you have responded to conflict in the past.
Know how you best keep yourself in control in difficult discussions.
Understand what emotional reactions you are likely to have and how you can keep them under control.
In retrospect
Embed the learning from what has worked well.
Recognise the support and encouragement of others.
Put any conflict into a wider perspective about what really matters in life.
Allow yourself to take credit for what you have achieved.
A psychometric tool such as the Thomas-Kilmann conflict resolution tool (see www.kilmann.com) can be helpful in assisting you to understand how you respond to conflict. It looks at how you handle conflict using the five strands of avoidance, accommodation, competition, compromise and collaboration. It helps identify how much you naturally need to respond to others' interests and how much value you place on relationships. Some people seem to enjoy being in conflict; the use of this tool highlights that tendency and enables constructive reflection about different approaches to resolving problems.
Developing effective negotiating skills is a core competence for a range of different situations. Effective negotiation is not about beating the opposition into submission, it involves getting a conclusion that is satisfactory for both of you.
Critical steps in effective negotiation are:
Know the facts well and be clear about objectives.
Understand what your flexibilities are.
Build a good working relationship with those with whom you are in negotiation.
Build up an effective way of negotiating on small issues first.
Understand why that negotiation process worked and build on what has been successful.
Agree beforehand how to hold the negotiation (i.e. location, time, numbers of people, pace of proceedings, recognition of outcomes).
Allow trusted others to observe you as you negotiate and encourage them to give you feedback.
Be prepared for random events that can throw you off course.
Mark successful outcomes and learn from them.
There are times when you are dealing with a problem and your supporters seem to drift away. Your courage begins to sag and you wonder if you have been set up to fail. When you have taken a decision and set a course, holding firm when going through a bleak period might be helped by the following:
Be clear in your own mind why you have made a particular decision.
Keep your eyes fixed on the ultimate goal, whatever the hesitancy from others.
Hold on to good things in parallel worlds, so that your life is not completely dominated by this one issue.
See and enjoy good friends and make sure there is plenty of laughter.
Remember there are various phases, accepting that some are more torturous than others.
Imagine there is light at the end of the tunnel and what that would look like.
Try to stand back and see the situation as objectively as possible.
Enjoy doing something completely different that might give you energy and will feed back into dealing with this difficult situation.
Focus on the personal learning and strength that flow from dealing with this type of situation effectively.
