Leading the Relationship With Yourself

Transcript

Emma Bell: So much of the time, we just live life as if we're on autopilot. And, as leaders, we lead as if we're on autopilot much of the time.

Leading the relationship with yourself is about engaging your conscious mindset. 90 percent of the thoughts that we think today will be exactly the same as the thoughts we thought yesterday.

Now, if you're a leader or a manager who's just repetitively thinking the same thing, what in fact you're doing is allowing your subconscious programming to drive some of the most important decisions that you're required to make. So we're evolutionarily hardwired to achieve certainty by reaching a judgment about a person as quickly as possible.

So if a leader has a new member of the team beginning, then fairly quickly, usually within hours if not within days, the leader will start to form a fixed view about how that person is. Now, this really can be quite toxic for relationships that leaders have with their team members, because if they've labeled a team member, as a work-shy or someone who's careless, then that will be what they tend to notice, because that will be what they look for, subconsciously of course, in every interaction. Now, because they're getting what they look for, confirmation bias – the most common cognitive bias – then that will trigger certain thinking in them.

And all of that is a sort of, "So what?" But "so what" is that that drops down into their behavior. And so, if a leader has got into thinking through labeling an individual, then that thinking is gonna be leaking all over the place. Why not choose instead to switch the label from that person as a X, Y, Z to switching the label to say, "Okay, they've also got some great attributes. And so what I'm choosing to focus on as a leader is the attributes that they bring to the role."

So if you know, as a leader, that the way in which you relate and connect to your team members is the single aspect that will determine the degree to which they're motivated, then that should be the incentive to test your thinking and to try and choose thinking that's much more likely to engage and connect and elevate this relationship to its optimum level.

I talk a lot about authenticity in "The True You" because I think it's vitally important for leaders and managers to be conscious about the extent to which they're authentic.

The key motivator for staff is the sense of connection that they have with their line manager, with their leader. And one of my favorite all-time poets is David Foster Wallace... in "Infinite Jest" said, "You'll become way less concerned about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do." And I think that is so true. We unconsciously worry constantly about how we're coming across, what do they think about us? We are on the lookout for how people respond to us and we immediately assume it's about us. But the truth is, it's most often about them. They could be thinking about something entirely unconnected with what we're seeing.

And so, for leaders and managers, if they have a habit, as many of us do, of trying to project an external identity and working hard to come across in a particular way then the suggestion is that there's something else, something hidden that they don't want to show. And my view of that is, that's a complete waste of energy. If connection is a key motivator, then no connection, no meaningful connection, is ever achieved between the leader and the member of staff through this external identity because it feels fake. And if you've ever worked for a leader who was inauthentic you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. It's really hard to respect them. It's really hard to feel any depth of connection with them.

Team members are not concerned whether you're fallible or not. They're concerned whether you're real, whether you're authentic, whether you're connecting with them. And if they get a sense of that they're much more likely to be engaged, to be inspired, to be motivated by you.

About Emma Bell

Emma Bell is an employment law specialist, as well as a long-standing practitioner in the fields of leadership and coaching. Her first book is "The True You: Discover Your Own Way to Success by Uncovering Your Authentic Self and Building Remarkable Relationships With Others."