Tag Archive for: leadership coaching

How Perfectionism Impacts Performance

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Have you ever wondered the impact of your perfectionism on performance?

I’d like to tell you about my ‘Why’ in becoming so passionate about helping professionals elevate their performance.

The world has a funny way of pushing you into paths. I won a Facebook contest and could choose a 1/2-day group session or a one on one coaching session. I choose the one on one session as I am conditioned for coaching. My intention was to grow from coaching, but I had no idea what I was about to discover. And (know now) subconsciously believed I could breeze through it.

For the coaching session all I needed to do is show up, be honest and vulnerable, discover and choose how I will move forward. EASY I thought.

WRONG! What came out of this session with Ricky Goodall was a flood (I mean literally a flood) of emotion that my perfectionism was a result of feeling like I am not enough. I am not smart enough, experienced enough or brave enough.

Let me back up. Throughout my career I’ve always done well, finding ways to make it to the next corporate step but feeling small along the way. I’d do one of two things: 1) avoid and delegate; or 2) often time take personal time to perfect the report, the program or strategy.

I’d go out of my way to help other leader’s successes instead of focusing on my own success.

After self discovery, and responding to some really hard questions: it boils down to; am I enough and what does that have to do with performance, you ask?

EVERYTHING! Working through my career, I was sarcastic (which many found funny), and wore a corporate veneer while letting others take the limelight because I always told myself it wasn’t important to me. But that was a fib. It was a defense mechanism to navigate through corporate worlds from fabulous bosses to the bosses that shouldn’t be bosses.

It gave me an out from things that may intimidate me or challenge me in a good way.

As an entrepreneur, now, those defense mechanisms are stunting me, come to find out. I’ve read so many books and articles and follow the Gary Vee’s, Simon Serik’s, etc. that you do not have to be perfect but you do have to put yourself out there.

My gap was always things like: someone else has talked about it, someone else is the subject matter expert or someone else says it so much better.

My own realization: You do not have to be perfect and you do not have to be the first to the mark, because no one will say it how you do. Perfectionism and avoidance are red flags sometimes disguised as being too busy.

My defense mechanisms are what drive my passion to help others grow their performance. Now, however, I have a different lens, a developing lens that says I can play ‘big’ AND help others.

I do not have to downplay myself to help lift others. I can sit with them, in their communication language and help them elevate their performance from within.

I’d enjoy sharing more of my learning opportunities with you! Feel free to subscribe to Intuity Performance for more great performance, coaching and facilitation moments!

Contact us for your complimentary consultation.

Exhibiting Leadership within a Hybrid Workplace

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Over the past year, one big question has been on everyone’s mind. What does the future of work look like? If the answer is slowly starting to take shape for many organizations, one thing is clear: the future of work will involve a mix of in-person and remote working arrangements. Managers exhibiting exceptional leadership skills will be the most successful at manoeuvring within a hybrid workplace.

A New Reality Requiring Adaptation

The winning formula may look different for every business but a recent McKinsey survey showed that 9 out of 10 organizations intend on combining remote and on-site work in the near future. Motivations include staff well-being, safety and security, real estate costs, increased productivity and greater access to talent.

This may come as good news but management can expect a whole set of new challenges to arise.

Let’s not forget that aside from freelancers, remote work has only gained traction over the past few years and that to this day, most people have acquired professional experience in physical work environments in which people meet face-to-face and work hand-in-hand.

We may be used to technology but managing a team partially or entirely made up of remote workers is a different story and requires time, effort, adaptability and commitment from leadership.

Showing Up as a Strong Leader

In a virtual world, a lot of the usual cues are gone, making leadership skills even more important.

Zoom meetings don’t provide the same level of information as physical interactions, nor do they significantly contribute to create culture – unless handled with that goal in mind.

Surprisingly, a hybrid model combining entirely remote workers and others working from the office at least part-time can prove to be as or even more challenging than a 100% remote team, the risk being of generating two separate cultures.

As a leader, you act as the captain that steers the boat in the right direction. It is imperative that you communicate with confidence and ensure your people have the tools and resources to perform to the best of their ability and feel comfortable in doing so. Don’t pretend to have all the answers. Be open to change and suggestions while realizing that how you show up will impact how they react.

The devil is in the detail and it is by observing people’s reactions, witnessing their behaviors, and testing different approaches that you will know how best to handle the situation and exhibit leadership in doing so.

However, a leader can do so much in brushing up on its leadership skills. Training and coaching therefore becomes an interesting avenue to gain more perspective on oneself and access tools and techniques to elevate interpersonal capabilities.

Getting Started in Leading a Hybrid Workforce

1. Assess your own personal readiness as a leader

  • How do you feel about the changes you are faced with?
  • What biases or concerns do you have?
  • What can you do about them?
  • How might they impact your team?

Make sure to look at the big picture. Identifying how hybrid work can positively impact yourself, staff and the organization may help put things into perspective. As a leader, you are required to do what is best for the organization while taking into consideration the people you are responsible for.

In any case, finding this out will allow you to explore your solutions and make intentional decisions for all moving forward.

2. Assess your team’s readiness

Two-thirds of American workers have reported feeling anxious about returning to work.

Gauge where your employees stand.

  • Are they happy about the situation?
  • If not, what is preventing them from committing?
  • Are there simple measures or accommodations that can be put in place to help?

Taking note of this and addressing it early on will help overall productivity and performance.

3. Seek feedback

When making decisions about organizational policies and processes to facilitate a hybrid workplace, don’t let chance be your guide.

Ask other members of the leadership team for input and advice. What are their strategies to help them lead their teams with more confidence in this evolving workplace?

A leader is also a good listener so don’t be afraid to ask staff for their input as well. Without promising anything, ask them what they think would be useful tools, processes and practices to make their work easier and improve team dynamics. Present it so that everyone understands they have a role to play.

After seeking input, create a clear, consistent policy and process to clearly outline your working expectations.

The next step will be to communicate your plan – clearly and confidently.

In our next post, we’ll discuss how critical efficient communication is in workplace, and how taking into account different types of personalities and communication styles can help bring your team together.

Through workplace training, coaching and human resource solutions, Intuity Performance applies a Whole Person Performance approach to cultivate an environment for growth within organizations.

Contact us to find out how we can elevate your leadership skills.

Creating a Culture of Communication in the Workplace

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Critical to ensure employee performance and positive team dynamics, efficient communications don’t come easily to all, which explains why it can be such a sensitive topic for leaders. Establishing a clear communication strategy is the first step but managers have a role to play to create a true culture of communication in the workplace.

On our Elevate Business podcast, Michael Jansen put it this way: you’re the boss but your job is to enable your staff’ success.

Effective workplace communications can bring people together and get them to stand behind a shared goal and vision. It’s the glue that makes a team stick.

On the other hand, underperforming workplace communications can bring teams to fall apart.

As a leader, it is your responsibility to set the example, whether when dealing with a single individual or an entire team. It is also your responsibility to ensure your team has the resources and the know-how to operate in a concerted way.

Now More Than Ever

In a context where staff are working remotely, proper communication is even more important.

Teams need to know what to expect. What communication channels are being used? How often can they expect to hear from supervisors and management? When, how and where can they access the information they need?

In highly collaborative virtual or hybrid environments, leaders should reflect expectations and obligations through programs and informational tools that allow staff to perform tasks with ease, even when located outside of the physical workplace or collaborating with other staff based elsewhere.

According to a McKinsey survey on the future of hybrid work, the companies supporting small connections between colleagues were the ones enjoying higher productivity levels during the pandemic.

Virtually onboarding new hires are good opportunities to test out an internal communication strategy. If new staff can easily find answers to their questions and start developing relationships with their teammates, chances are that you’re on the right track.

Strong Leader, Strong Communicator

Strong leaders know to communicate regularly with their teams, sharing relevant if not short and simple information. They make a point to maintain communication, even when there is not a lot to say.

Strong leaders know to communicate with integrity. Being honest doesn’t mean sharing everything. It means being able to say that a given information is too sensitive to be shared. It means being able to explain the facts as they are. Everyone may not agree but they will understand and will respect you for it.

Strong leaders know to communicate clearly. A clear message is one that is presented in such a way that it is impactful and easy to understand, and that cannot lead to interpretation.

With this being said, a good communicator is nothing if no one is listening.

Instilling A Culture of Communication

Strong teams seek to understand and rely on transparent and open communications. Employees feeling misinformed will tend to question and disagree with decisions, leaving them dubious and disengaged and resulting in a divide amongst team members.

Ultimately, this will affect employee satisfaction and retention, recruitment, and overall organizational performance.

A good communicator knows to listen and to create a space where people feel comfortable sharing, expressing their ideas, and even questioning other viewpoints.

Working with our clients, we’ve observed the challenges they face in fostering an environment that is conducive to regular, productive, meaningful and sometimes difficult conversations and communications.

These typically emerge as a result of a deficient communication strategy, a lack of awareness on the part of management or a need to develop leadership skills further. Even when personality conflicts arise between individual team members, managers should be able to quickly spot the situation and take action.

Setting Your Organization Up for Success

If establishing yourself as a credible communicator is the first step, understanding team dynamics and personalities will make your interpersonal communication skills that much more efficient. Everyone is different and reacts to information differently. Knowing how to address each one of your staff based on their own style will allow them to better understand where you want to go and persuade them to join you on your journey.

Staff also need to take ownership of their own workplace relationships, developing strategies to find their place and to address communication issues as they arise.

At Intuity, we use the DISC evidence-based model to help individuals better understand their colleagues’ behaviours as well as their own. We have also developed a multi-day workplace communication training based on the model.

In the workplace, DISC is useful in many ways:

  • It helps individuals understand how they show up and how to adapt themselves based on the situation or the person they are interacting with
  • It provides for more honest interpersonal communications based on mutual respect
  • It gives staff the knowledge and training to address miscommunications or to avoid potential conflicts
  • It generates better productivity and problem-solving within teams

Whether it’s in a physical, hybrid or entirely virtual workplace, adopting a proactive communication model and adapting communications not only to the environment but to people can make a big difference in your organizational success.

Contact Intuity today to find out about our workplace communication training and coaching, and our DISC assessments.

The Human Skills of Leaders

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In leading a team, being an efficient and strong communicator is not the only thing that matters. Your overall behaviour plays a big role. Getting to know yourself and further developing your human skills as a leader can have a great impact on your team’s performance as well as your own.

Indeed, Assistant Vice President of Continuing Studies at York University Tracey Taylor-O’Reilly says that “While technical skills may get workers hired, it’s their human skills that will allow them to excel in the workplace”.

Self-awareness and empathy often top the list of the most in-demand human skills in the workplace – along with curiosity, communication, and decision-making, which are directly correlated.

Self-Awareness for Better Performance

How we behave as professionals is no different than how we behave as individuals. We may be able to adapt but who we are transpires in everything that we do and influences our behaviours and our relationships at work.

However, society has placed the focus on assessing performance first. Growing up, schools hand out report cards and the process continues throughout our professional career with performance reviews.

But such processes have been developed to measure our knowledge and actions and fail to analyze the root causes of our performance. They don’t take into consideration the beliefs, the emotions and the behaviours that we are made of.

The reality is that practising introspection and self-awareness gives us the opportunity to truly perform to the best of our ability. In fact, it has been demonstrated that there are significant correlations between emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness. If emotional intelligence is such an essential human skill to have in the workplace, it’s that it allows us to identify our limiting beliefs and to manage and adapt our behaviour so it doesn’t affect our performance and our relationships with others.

We rarely stop to reflect upon ourselves and on how our actions might affect others.

What makes us cringe at a colleague might be appreciated by others. What aims to express respect can sometimes be perceived as disrespect. But beyond knowing what you dislike in others and recognizing that no one is perfect, it may be worth asking yourself a few questions to assess the situation.

  • What are the behaviours that characterize you?
  • What types of behaviours can’t you stand in others?
  • Do you have a routine and what does it look like?
  • Do you go with the flow and rarely plan ahead of time?
  • Do you ever experience anxiety and when does it show up?
  • What sort of feedback have you gathered from others about yourself?
  • What sort of leader and communicator are you?

The answers to such questions can help you identify how you show up for others, what are the superpowers you need to leverage and which areas require improvement.

Don’t limit yourself to the workplace. Source examples from your private life as well.

The Role of Empathy

Self-awareness and empathy go hand in hand when it comes to the human skills of which the best leaders are made of.

In a recent blog post on self-awareness, I wrote that empathy is “a mindset and a comprehensive approach to being – in the workplace and in life”, and that it is “what gives us the ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes so we can see and feel from their perspective”.

A high-performing team is one where resistance is at its lowest and trust is at its highest. Without trust, there is no collaborative mindset and no commitment to the team nor the company. And without empathy, there is no trust.

Empathy can be expressed by demonstrating interest, showing appreciation, practising active listening and asking questions. Empathy is about gaining context about where others are coming from, questioning our own beliefs and biases, avoiding criticism and being fully present.

When there is empathy exhibited by leaders and peers in the workplace, trust can automatically follow. This lends itself to a ‘safe to fail’ work environment that we’re all striving for.

At Intuity, we support leaders wanting to adopt trust-based leadership and improve their human skills in different ways.

We often start by working with organizations to understand their team dynamics. Showing our curiosity, we lean into questions like: What kind of leader are you and how do you show up with your team? What type of individuals are part of your team and how do they interact?

This can be done through observation, interviews, as well as our DISC, 360 Leader, Emotional Intelligence-Q, and other assessments and reports.

Coaching is also a great resource to increase self-awareness and help you find the answers within yourself.

Lastly, our Showing Leadership Blueprint Training is a full-day virtual group training that helps teams assess their individual and joint behaviours and how they influence team dynamics and performance.

Want to find out more? Contact us!