by Charles Plant | Jul 31, 2012 | Leaders, Leadership Development
Watching the Olympics today I was reminded of the story of a woman who showed incredible perseverance to get to the Olympics, let alone emerge a champion.
Wilma Rudolph was born prematurely, the 20th of 22 siblings. At the age of four she contracted infantile paralysis (caused by the polio virus). Until she was nine, Wilma wore a brace on her left leg and foot (which had become twisted as a result) and for another two years, wore an orthopaedic shoe. In addition, by the time she was twelve she had survived bouts of scarlet fever, whooping cough, chickenpox, and measles.
In 1952, at the age of twelve, she followed in her sister’s footsteps and began to play basketball. In the tenth grade her potential was recognized in track and field which she had taken up to remain active between basketball seasons.
At 16, she earned a berth on the U.S. Olympic track and field team and came home from the 1956 Melbourne Games with an Olympic bronze medal in the 4 x 100 relay.
At the Rome Olympic Games in 1960, at the age of 20 she won the 100 meter, the 200 meter, and got her third gold in the 4 x 100 relay with a world record. After these wins, she was acclaimed “the fastest woman in history”. In 8 years she went from overcoming the effects of paralysis to Olympic glory, and became for me a great example of perseverance in the face of adversity.
by Charles Plant | Jul 30, 2012 | Exercises, Leadership Development
“Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.” – Napoleon Hill
Perseverance works on your own tasks
Great books abound on the subject of persistence and perseverance. Seth Godin’s the Dip was an awakening for me as I am very slow to quit. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers countered my tendency to try to many things and never become a master at any one. Whatever your own demons, if you want to aspire to a position of leadership, you’ll need the perseverance to completely master your existing job and the persistence to keep seeking out new opportunities.
But its more than just persistence and perseverance. You need to know when to persevere and when enough is enough. If you persevere on a task that only involves you, that is great but when you persevere in trying to change other people’s behaviour, others will soon tire of you. To know when to quit, you need emotional intelligence.
But it doesn’t work when trying to change others behaviour
As a manager, your job is to get things done through other people. (Am I repeating myself often enough?) Persisting at changing a direct report’s behaviour when it isn’t bringing results is probably not going to work. In fact if you persevere long enough, you’ll do a great job pissing the other person off and frustrating yourself. So in terms of direct reports, perhaps persistence and perseverance is not always a good thing.
If you’ve tried multiple times to get a direct report to change his/her behaviour and it still isn’t working then it’s time to give up. It’s time to realize that you’ve either hired to wrong person, trained the person ineffectively or supervised them improperly. It has then become your problem, not theirs. Your options are to fire the person, change their job or change your approach. So in spite of everything you hear, there are lots of times when perseverance is the wrong approach.
Try this at work:
Think of someone at work whose behaviour you’ve been trying to change without success. Are things any better than when you started your change management attempts? If things are not any different and you’ve tried more than seven times then it is time for you to give up. Instead, try another approach, perhaps even a workaround.
by Charles Plant | Jul 27, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Development
In an attempt to acknowledge the problems of work related stress, the Japanese have coined a new word. “Karoshi” is now the new term for “Death from Overwork” and is the word used to explain occupational sudden death, mostly due to heart attacks and stroke. The problem has become so important that statistics are kept for it nationally and have been since 1987.
Japan’s post war economic rise resulted in a very strong work ethic, so strong that the average Japanese worker puts in approximately two hours a day of overtime. Until the 1980s no one paid much attention to the larger than usual number of men in their 40s and 50s who died of brain and heart diseases. However, when several high-ranking executives suddenly died without any previous sign of illness, the news media began picking up on this new phenomenon.
“According to Japanese Labor Ministry statistics there had been only twenty-one case of karoshi in 1987, twenty-nine cases in 1988 and thirty cases in 1989. But a liaison council of attorneys established in 1988 to monitor deaths from overwork estimated in 1990 that over 10,000 people were dying each year from karoshi.” (www.apmforum.com/columns/boye51.htm)
While the term Karoshi may only be used in Japan, several places in the United States have also recognized the phenomenon. In New York, Los Angeles and other municipalities, the relationship between job stress and heart attacks is so well acknowledged, that any police officer who suffers a coronary event on or off the job is assumed to have a work related injury and is compensated accordingly (including a heart attack sustained while fishing on vacation or gambling in Las Vegas).
The moral of the story: Stay Calm, this too shall pass and have a lovely weekend.
by Charles Plant | Jul 26, 2012 | Leaders, Leadership Development
In the world of leaders who stay calm in the face of stressful situations, Corneille Ewango stands out for his courage and dedication. While he grew up in a family of poachers and hunters he got the chance to go to school and there he found a new mission, to study and preserve the flora and fauna of his region, the Congo Basin forest.
The Congo Basin’s great forests are, like many other fragile ecosystems, under pressure from external forces. Settlers are always on the hunt for fresh farmland and miners look for valuable ore deposits. Worst of all are the soldiers who have been fighting over the forests both as territory to be won and as a resource for bush meat and cooking charcoal. Ewango risked his life to defend his country’s extraordinary wilderness. As director of the Okapi Reserve’s botany program during its civil war he led efforts to protect the forest and its people from mass murder, rampant rape, and widespread destruction.
According to the National Geographic “He rallied 30 junior staff members and 1,500 forest residents to stand up to marauding militias and preserve crucial reserve data throughout years of war and chaos. He divided irreplaceable plant specimens, secretly distributing them to friends for safekeeping. Research materials and data files were strategically buried in the forest. For three months he hid in the dense vegetation himself, foraging for food alongside the very wildlife he sought to protect. “I knew if I left, everything could be lost. And I wanted to be there to rebuild immediately after the situation normalized.”
His leadership is an example to all of us who face adversity and strive to remain calm in stressful situations.
by Charles Plant | Jul 24, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Development, Research
There is more to this staying calm stuff than you might realize. Research is showing that it may be possible to train yourself (or at least train mice) to remain calm in stressful situations. Yesterday’s blog elicited some feedback which took me to a piece of research published by Psych Central.
“In the new Neuron study, Pollak and Kandel sought to tease out the behavioral and molecular characteristics of learned safety in mice.
“In their experiments, mice were trained to associate safety or fear with specific auditory stimuli (tones). For fear conditioning, the auditory stimulus was paired with a mild shock to the mouse’s foot. For safety conditioning, the auditory stimulus was not followed by a shock.
“The experiments showed that the safety-conditioned mice learned to associate the tone with the absence of danger and displayed less anxiety in the presence of this safety signal.
“Moving to a stress test, Kandel’s team placed the safety-conditioned mice into a pool of water for a swim test. The forced-swim test is commonly used by researchers to measure how antidepressant drugs affect the behavior of mice.
“In this seemingly desperate situation – where the mice have no option to escape from the water — they start to show signs of behavioral despair that are ameliorated by antidepressant medications. We found that the mice trained for safety could overcome their sense of hopelessness in the swim test,” Kandel explained.”
I have been trying to think how this might fit in at work and think that perhaps the use of some object that calms you down might have the same effect. Think of a place that you find very calming, home, the outdoors, wherever it is. Now find some very small object that you associate with that environment. The next time you feel you might be entering a stressful situation at work, hold the object and think of the location from which it comes. I’m going to try this as a technique to see if it actually calms me down.
by Charles Plant | Jul 23, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Exercises, Leadership Development
“Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy.”
Aristotle
Staying calm in times of high stress is one of those leadership skills that amazes me. Watching someone react to a high pressure situation in a calm and balanced way is truly inspiring. Maybe I’m impressed because I am naturally excited, prone to get agitated and raise my voice in stressful situations. I know it doesn’t work and it’s a bad habit but I still manage to do it.
The problem with getting excited and not staying calm is that it exacerbates an already highly charged and stressful situation. If you’ve ever been in an emergency room as a patient, you’ll notice that unlike on TV, most staff don’t exhibit any stress. They are calm and measured but fast in everything they do. If they can stay calm when life and death is on the line, why shouldn’t business people be able to stay calm when revenue targets are missed, when customer returns increase or when costs rise unexpectedly. After all, it’s not as if anyone is going to die.
Try this at work:
You’ve probably been told to step back from stressful situations, breather deeply and modulate your voice. Easy to say, not that easy to do. Instead, the next time you find yourself in one of those situations, just imagine the worst thing that can happen.
It’s sort of like imagining the audience naked when you have to give a speech or your boss putting on his dress every morning to take away the jitters. In this case, imagine the worst thing that can happen. Could someone die? Will there be a loss of limbs or other essential body parts? If the answer is yes then by all means become excited but otherwise just think about the long run.
Try to imagine a room full of dead people and body parts that will fill up the room when the situation is over. If you actually take two seconds to try to create that image, it will be enough to make you realize that no matter how stressful the situation is, no one is likely to die or become maimed and that you’re better off remaining calm.
