Transformation & Coaching
One of my former bosses had a nice sign on his desk: “It’s my fault!”. He often pointed to it silently when we came to him again finger-pointing on each other – complaining and quarreling.
Our project was very stressful. Everyone had a lot to do on a tight schedule. Of course, we had defined our responsibilities at the beginning of the project so that we could each concentrate on our areas. Given the complexity of the project, this was a must.
Trust is the currency of interpersonal relationships. The metaphor of an account has always helped me to illustrate this when I was working with people from financial services. Once you initiate a relationship with a person, you open up a trust account. Every action that meets the expectations increases the account balance. Every disappointment leads to a debit.
When I take over a new team, I like to get an idea of its members. During the handover from the predecessor, you usually concentrate on the business aspects: who has what area of responsibility, what is this person’s strengths and weaknesses profile? You mostly review mandates and the last performance assessments.
Values are crucial. They define what is important to us. Most interpersonal conflicts can be traced back to violations of values. Violations of values always generate emotions. And once the conflict becomes emotional, then fact-based arguments usually have a difficult stand.
Master Yoda was right: “Fear the way to the dark side is”. Many leaders still follow Caesar’s motto “Oderint dum metuant – should they only hate me, may they only fear me”. But does that really work?