Leadership in Chaos: 6th edition. miners, kindness, framing. "Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today." Malcolm X. Viet Ha Tran - Dreams of Ophelia. Change: miners. Change is tough. It’s scary and uncertain. So we hate it. As AI rockets through our lives and jobs, it leaves a trail of change anxiety. Because it’s also scary and uncertain. But it’s inevitable, so much can be learned from organisations that have dealt with similar change and technological shifts. This story of the UK coal mines in the 1950s is one of those. It describes how one mine (Haigh Moor Seam) leaned into new excavation technology (ability to scan new areas of mines) and bucked the trend of declining productivity and morale that crippled the industry. They didn’t just adopt new tech but changed the organization much like Howard Leavitt’s Diamond model of change by embracing systemic and holistic change across structure, task, people and technology. They changed everything, and everything changed. A thought for leaders: Leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith’s famous book, “what got you here, won’t get you there”, is exactly how this unique mine thought. So, ask yourself, what will get you there? How can your organisation lean into this change? How can it embrace it holistically and not just the tech? What are the implications of AI across the structure of your business, the people in it and the tasks they do? And, as the winds of change blow, are you building walls to defend against it, or windmills to harness it? Viet Ha Tran Culture: kindness. The power of kindness has largely been overlooked as a way to build culture. Maybe because kindness is often confused with weakness. But as the Governor of Illinois said in this widely circulated commencement speech at Northwestern University, the kindest person in the room is often the smartest (kindness is an evolved state). A rise in hybrid working, has meant a decrease in social connections, so focussing on kindness, recognition, compliments, praise, and simply saying thanks, are important ways to bring joy back to work. Which is declining. The Gallup 2023 State Of The Global Workplace Report, identified that stress is at a record high, over half of employees are job seeking, and the majority of workers are quiet-quitting. A thought for leaders: Be kinder. Champion and promote a culture of kindness. Being kind improves culture, and good culture improves talent retention, absenteeism, productivity and work quality. So, being kind is smart. A culture of kindness though, needs to be top down. High status team members behaviours are contagious. So kindness then, becomes contagious. Kindness, starts with you. Viet Ha Tran Resilience: framing. We know resilience is important. But, how do we know if we have it? It’s only when faced with challenge, that we know if we'll succumb to it, or surmount it. And, can we learn it? Well, developmental psychologists have met thousands of children across decades of research, to determine how people learn to become resilient. They found that yes, we can learn it and two things are key. The first, is how we perceive events. Do we see an event…
FlowIrelandAdmin12th July 2024