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Hey there, Maureen Chana here, founder of the MindSight Academy, neurocoach to executives, leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, and a neuroleadership trainer using insights from neuroscience to help you flourish and exceed expectations. Welcome back to episode 16 of the Lead to Excel podcast. This is a show designed to equip you with knowledge to enable you to understand the science of how your brain works so that you can unlock your leadership potentials and have the tools to rewire your brain because this will enable you to flourish and achieve high performance in every single area of your life. I am so thrilled to be with you today because we're looking at how leaders and managers can thrive in uncertainty. Your role as a leader or a manager is to get things done in your organization. That includes delivering results, managing people, and all this requires competence, rigorous discipline of management. But very importantly, you need to understand how to connect with people to be able to get the best out of them. You need to understand how to remain calm under pressure, in the midst of uncertainty, and when there is even chaos around you. So it's time now for you to grab your cup of coffee, put your feet up and listen in. There's a common quote, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And this has an equal and opposite version which says, Better safe than sorry. You might be asking which quote you should believe or adopt as a leader that really wants to push boundaries. Should you encourage your people to take chances and release the entrepreneurial spirit? The risk in this is that it could lead to missing targets, or as an entrepreneur, it could even result in losing a lot of money, business failure, and that feeling of drilling holes in the bottom of the ocean with abandon. Or should you be cautious, try to protect yourself, your team, your business, and even your children from all harm. But this could also mean grounding all aircrafts at the first wave of volcanic ash. You know what I'm talking about. It's not easy to take risks when you're unsure what is going on and when you're pulled by your emotions to stay clear of these perceived threats. Many managers and leaders believe that their job is to be super confident in charge and in control. But this mindset is a very limiting one because we live in a world of constant change, great complexity, and uncertainty. We are totally out of control. Look at what's going on all over the world. Coronavirus, volcanoes, Brexit, bushfires, the madness of Washington, we are out of control. But that's an opportunity to learn. Being prepared that you might not even know what to say in a meeting, and being okay with that discomfort is where you need to get to. The main challenge that you face now as a manager leader is the scale and pace of change. We all see how rapidly our systems, processes, and approaches can become irrelevant and no longer fit for purpose in a short space of time. Our digital and information world has created a very hyper-connected and fast world, so much so that people have stopped thinking. People have become very reactive and judgmental. Being unsure what to do is not limited to deciding what idea is going to work. It's also the uncertainty of how people are experiencing things inside their brain. What have they heard from what has been communicated to them? How are they with the new idea? How are they dealing with this change that you've told them about? How do they feel about failing? Understanding that failure is okay is extremely important but a massive challenge for many organizations, managers, and leaders to comprehend. I don't hide the fact that I've failed so many times. And think about it. Most successful people have failed countless times. The important thing is what you learn from it. Now, my question to you is what do you need to change to push forward? Let's take Amazon as an example. Amazon's Z Shop, which was created in the late 90s to compete with eBay, failed woefully. But it led to the format and success of Amazon's Marketplace Today, which is an integrated model of being able to buy something from the vendor, buying something that is used, or buying something that is from a third party. About 50% of the retail activity on Amazon today occurs in the marketplace format, but it actually started with a failure. The whole point of taking risks is to learn to push through the discomfort of trying out new ideas to make life better. Your job as an executive or senior leader or anybody in life is to create a better workplace or life. In order to achieve this and deal with the discomfort of pushing through uncertainty, you have to know some key elements. Let's look at this. The first is that you need to be clear about your dreams or aspirations. Decide what your current situation is and what you want to achieve. Choose something that you want to improve. For example, it could be to analyze competitive requirements, customer needs, industry benchmarks. Maybe you want a different communication culture in your team or in your organization because people are not honest enough with each other. Maybe they resist giving each other feedback or they resist sharing information with each other. In this situation, what you want to build is a culture of collaboration where honest feedback is provided in a constructive way. Another example is it might even be choosing to go into a new market. Basically, your aspirations should be challenging but doable. Avoid aspirations or goals that are cautious because that won't create the pressure that you need to push limits. Involve your team and don't be put off by any disruption because that will most likely occur as people can be conflict avoidant. Choose something that you've been avoiding because you feel that it's difficult. Ask the right questions for yourself and your team. Questions like how will this affect you? Where do things trip up? What happens when you have a member who's not functioning at a high level? This allows you to hone it so that you plan effectively right from the beginning with the facts that you have. To be able to do this, you need to be clear on your values individually and as a team collectively. And as a leader, you need to be clear on what your values are, what you stand on, and what you stand for. Know what you believe and what is important to you. And understand why you lead the way you do. What is your leadership style? Are you adaptable or are you fixed in one type of leadership style? Knowing your values will enable you to trust your intuition. Values such as love, fairness, justice, equality, trust are really important and that will guide you in being able to take effective actions. The next thing is you need to be comfortable being uncomfortable. When you move out of a comfort zone or experience something new, you often feel vulnerable and weak. You don't feel in control because of the uncertainty of the situation that you're in. To be able to overcome this kind of situation, you need a new mindset that leaves behind old assumptions, old beliefs, and adopts new ways to move forward. This is exactly the mindset you need when confronted with challenges and obstacles. The fact is that if you continually and deliberately place yourself in situations that are out of your comfort zone, you become more prepared to deal with the unknown. With experience and practice, you then find that you can predict your responses to the unknown with greater accuracy. This is a very important component of mental toughness. That's the ability to choose your response when confronted with the unknown rather than simply reacting to your situations. I go a lot more into this in my online masterclass, and I'm going to leave a link in the description. I learned an interesting lesson as a young teacher. When I started out on my teaching career, I felt a sense of assuredness about the education system and being in charge of a classroom. I had assumed that all I had to focus on was delivering information to my students. After all, I was a scientist. I lived and dreamt about microbiology. I had studied the text, I had practiced in research and hospital labs. But what I discovered was that the classroom was a hotbed of uncertainty. Whether it was a student that was displaying low-level disruption or the massive differences and disparities in the student's knowledge, dealing with students' emotions, or sometimes dealing with very demanding and rude parents. And to crown it all, the sheer volume of work that I had to do outside the classroom was unbelievable. The fact is that the daily choice of life serves as a daily reminder of just how unpredictable life and leadership can be. So it's important to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. If not, you find that you create so much stress in your life that you can't even cope or deal with. Learn to embrace the uneasiness and embrace challenges. Learn to support your people by being transparent and communicate effectively with them to enable you and them build brain muscle to push through these obstacles and blockers, build resilience and excel. Don't worry about failing. The important thing is what you learn from the process. The next thing we'll look at is you need to be aware of self-sabotaging behaviors. These are defensive behaviors that are very common in business and life. We all know them. The best intention managers can unwittingly get in their team members' way without even realizing it. A typical example is micromanaging. As a manager, your primary responsibility is to support your direct reports so that they can do their jobs effectively and you're able to remove any barriers that might stand in their way. But you find that many managers feel the need to be in control of everything, requiring employees to check in on every project with them, which then adds another layer of administration that can hamper productivity and slow down the progress of the project or the results that you want to achieve. Effective managers don't get caught up in every detail of what the employees are doing, especially the ones that they know are well trained and competent. You need to trust them to be able to build them up. You need to trust them for them to believe that you believe in them because that is what will enable them to be able to bring out their best. Successful managers create systems for employees to run things without them as much as possible. The importance of watching out for these self-sabotaging behaviors is that you learn to recognize them and switch strategies. So watch out for things like micromanagement we've talked about, perfectionism, conflict avoidance, and disengagement. These things are so common. So when you find yourself over obsessing about things, either the way people are doing it because it's not the way you would have done it, or you find yourself frustrated with your team because they haven't either prepared the slides or reports that you ask them to do. Instead, stop and ask yourself the question: the method that they're using, will they achieve the same results? Does it have to be your way? You could ask yourself questions like Is this proposal really a winning proposal for this client? Once you find yourself doing any of these things, go, oh gosh, okay, I am micromanaging. It's time to stop. Now you need to get into a strategy of stopping yourself, stopping the speeding train of you reacting and being able to now ask the questions. What do we need to do here? Have we spent enough time on this work? Is this okay to do it this way? When you move from reactivity to activity, you're going out in a learning mindset. When you go from reactivity to activity, you find that you cause yourself less stress, but also you don't create stress for your team or team members. Another point is that delivering negative feedback can be uncomfortable and difficult for managers. Many managers often cloud criticism in a favorable light in order not to hurt or upset their employees, but this leads to employees interpreting this feedback as more positive than it's actually intended. A lot of people believe that their internal dialogue is more apparent to other people than it actually is. And I found myself asking my husband sometimes, do you think I'm a mind reader? I don't know what's going on in your head. So the assumption that their own intentions are easily discernible by others prevents them from making the effort required to communicate their thoughts in a clear, succinct, direct, and understandable way. The difference between what managers assume that the employees have understood and what the employees actually have understood increases usually when the feedback is very negative. This is due to the managers' assumption that their own opinions are already evident and that employees perceive the feedback more negatively than they do. So a lot of managers end up misjudging the effort required to communicate their feedback and leave employees with impressions that are too vague to comprehend. And then they find themselves going on in this loop where the employee then feels, okay, this is the only thing that I need to improve on, but generally I'm doing very well, and then they're still underperforming, and the manager gets really upset that they've been giving them feedback, but nothing is happening. I've witnessed this quite often in the role I do as a consultant. One example was I had to literally go and shadow this manager, sit in the meeting where the manager was giving feedback to the employee, and the feedback that she gave to this team member was so diluted that the team member left that meeting feeling actually things are pretty good. So he had no reason to adjust things because what she had told him was so different from what was actually happening, and giving feedback is so important. Let me know if you want a podcast on how to give feedback effectively. If you do, leave a comment in the review session and I'll do a podcast on how to give effective feedback. It's letting a lot of people down and it's creating a lot of issues in terms of a lot of teams and organizations not able to meet their targets, mainly because managers don't know how to give feedback effectively. The next thing is to find purpose to help fuel your travel through the discomfort of the new idea that comes with the unknown. This is really key for middle managers in particular. The important thing is when you and your team have been given a task to achieve, come to your team as being part of them that see, guys, this is what we need to do. And as a team, decide on the best way to do it, to carry out that task. What is the motivation for you as a team to achieve this task? So look at it positively in terms of what's the benefit of doing it and what's the plan that we're going to have to do it. So it's having the goal and creating a plan together, and not you coming to tell them what you want them to do, but doing it together because that will create the ownership and accountability as well. The fact is that we've all got to adapt to change. You can't fight off the future. So basically, accept the rapid pace of change that is taking place in the world today. Layoffs will continue to happen, unexpected firings will occur, organizations will keep modifying and changing, job descriptions will change like a chameleon, and managers will come and go. The good news is that you can actually be a boost for your own success and for your team. Be confident for you and your team to take calculated risks. And if your current work situation is causing conflict, try a new approach or adjust your strategy. Avoid getting stuck in a rut because the usual approach is familiar and comfortable. And I always say that managers and leaders need to have entrepreneurial skills. Entrepreneurs generally are riskier decision makers than their managerial counterparts. Additionally, the type of decision making essential to the entrepreneurial process is possible to be taught and learned and enhanced by managers in corporate. Entrepreneurs represent an example of highly adaptive risk-taking behavior, which can result in positive outcomes during stressful economic circumstances. It's that ability to make quick decisions under stress. And this can be learned by learning to understand when you're literally having an emotional hijack so that you put the brakes on your brain for you to then reactivate your cognitive thinking brain. I go into a lot more detail on this on my online course on emotional intelligence, and I'll leave the link at the bottom. So I hope you found this podcast valuable and informative. Thank you again for tuning in and remember to subscribe to this podcast. If you haven't, make sure that you click on that subscribe button wherever you listen to this podcast, because once you subscribe, you will not miss an episode. So you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on SouthCloud, you can even listen to it on YouTube. It's everywhere. So basically, find the most convenient place for yourself and subscribe. And if you've already subscribed, I'd love you to give me a review on iTunes to ensure that we can get this podcast out to more people. And also to let me know if you need me to talk about a specific topic that interests you. That's it for now, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Do have a fantastic week. Bye for now.