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Team Elements – Respect: Humility, Development, Compassion

by Ron Potter March 14, 2019

Teams are at the heart of great performance, great happiness, and the best memories. These blogs are built on the 4 Levels of Happiness by Aristotle. In his framework, Aristotle says that the highest level of happiness will be achieved at Level 4. In describing Level 4 Happiness, Aristotle Used five words:

Truth
Love
Purpose
Beauty
Unity

Love (Respect)

The Greeks had several words that are all translated into the English word “love.” The Greek word for Love that Aristotle used had nothing to do with emotions or the feeling of love that we have for another person. This word referred to treating the other person with respect. It’s about what we do, not how we feel.

As human beings, we seem to have an innate sense that someone respects us or not. Great teams require great respect (love) for each other.

In unpacking the concept of Respect (or love), we will look at the following concepts over the next couple of posts:

Three elements of building Trust: Humility, Development, Compassion
Patience
Kindness
Envy
Anger
Grudges

In our last post, we looked at Psychological Safety (both Truth and Respect being at their highest level). Research has indicated that Psychological Safety is one of the best indicators of high team performance.

This post will start a series digging deeper into the concept of Respect. How do we define it? How do we use it?

Humility, Development, and Compassion

These are three of the eight concepts that we learn from my book, Trust Me are present with great leadership. Let’s look at each one and see how they relate to Respect.

Humility

When someone does not demonstrate humility, it’s hard to believe they have respect for others. Lack of humility becomes self-focused. When someone is self-focused, they are not “other” focused. Humility means that I have an interest in your opinion. Steven Covey listed one of his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as “Seek to understand first before being understood.” When someone wants to know what I think before sharing with me what they think, I feel respected. I feel like my opinion counts. I’m more interested in their opinion because they were interested in my opinion first. I feel respected.

Development

When a leader believes it’s worth their time to grow and develop me, I feel respected. Leaders dedicated to development will provide straight and meaningful feedback.

I once worked with a client who told me their boss was a wonderful person, always positive and encouraging but not very useful. They went on to explain that all of their performance reviews were great with nothing but good feedback. However, it gave them nothing to work with. There were no suggestions for growth or betterment. Therefore, it just wasn’t very useful.

Positive Development means straightforward feedback about what’s working and what is not working with suggestions for development and follow-up on efforts. Taking the time to develop people demonstrates respect.

Compassion

I would often get negative comments about this topic when we first published Trust Me. Many managers would express the sentiment that they were not running a charitable organization; they were running a business and business was rough and tumble, not soft and cushy!

I started dealing with this question by asking these rough and tumble leaders about their doctors. Did they like doctors that looked at the lab results only and treated them as numbers on a graph or did they like doctors that related to them as human beings first and then talked to them about how the clinical numbers might be affecting their quality of life. They all like doctors who were professionally competent but treated them as human beings first and foremost. The same is true with your teammates.

You want a teammate who tells it to you straight but knows you as a human being first. We are not motivated or encouraged by people who treat us as a human ‘doing’ (relating to what we do rather than who we are) rather than a human being. If we’re treated as human beings (which means we’re respected) first, we are much more likely to respond to our fullest.

Patience, Kindness, Envy, Anger, and Grudges.

These are concepts that we’ll look at in our next post about Respect.

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Blog Trust Me

Compassion is Not Cheap

by Ron Potter September 17, 2018

Compassion is not easy or cheap. A leader who sincerely seeks to understand and care for others will pay a price. But the rewards are satisfying and great.

I want to examine compassion from the perspective of a “you-first” leader—the man or woman whose focus is on responding to the needs of employees, customers, and community before his or her own needs.

I urge you to be a person and leader known for radical acts of compassion. Here’s an incredible example:

It was 1944, and Bert Frizen was an infantryman on the front lines in Europe. American forces had advanced in the face of intermittent shelling and small-arms fire throughout the morning hours, but now all was quiet. His patrol reached the edge of a wooded area with an open field before them. Unknown to the Americans, a battery of Germans waited in a hedgerow about two hundred yards across the field.
Bert was one of two scouts who moved out into the clearing. Once he was halfway across the field, the remainder of his battalion followed. Suddenly, the Germans opened fire, and machine gun fire ripped into both of Bert’s legs. The American battalion withdrew into the woods for protection, while a rapid exchange of fire continued.
Bert lay helplessly in a small stream as shots volleyed overhead. There seemed to be no way out. To make matters worse, he now noticed that a German soldier was crawling toward him. Death appeared imminent; he closed his eyes and waited. To his surprise, a considerable period passed without the expected attack, so he ventured opening his eyes again. He was startled to see the German kneeling at his side, smiling. He then noticed that the shooting had stopped. Troops from both sides of the battlefield watched anxiously. Without any verbal exchange, this mysterious German reached down to lift Bert in his arms and proceeded to carry him to the safety of Bert’s comrades.
Having accomplished his self-appointed mission, and still without speaking a word, the German soldier turned and walked back across the field to his own troop. No one dared break the silence of this sacred moment. Moments later the cease-fire ended, but not before all those present had witnessed how one man risked everything for his enemy.

How would your business, your family, your community—our world—be better if more of these radical acts of compassion occurred on a daily basis?

We can respond with compassion to every person we encounter by thinking “you-first.” Jesus constantly demonstrated this approach with his team of disciples. Perhaps the most memorable example occurred shortly before his death when he got down on his knees and washed their feet. In this humbling act he demonstrated to them that even as their leader he desired to serve them. He wanted them to understand that in his view—the ultimate leader—the needs of others came first.

An entire, well-established management perspective has evolved from this concept of service to others. Robert K. Greenleaf first used the term servant leadership in a 1970 essay.

This is a very counterintuitive notion in my day when competition is fierce in nearly every area of life. You can’t “look out for number 1” and say “you-first” at the same time. To be a “you-first” leader feels like it costs at first, but is far valuable in the long run.

So then how do we learn to put others first?

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Blog Trust Me

What Does Spontaneous Compassion Look Like?

by Ron Potter August 27, 2018

We recently discussed that compassion can involve challenging others to attain high-quality results on projects that stretch them. Compassion is also a compelling conviction to care enough to become involved and help others by taking some action that will improve their lives or set them on a fresh course. Effective leaders act spontaneously with a true heart of compassion, caring for the person regardless of the consequences.

So what does that look like?

I observed a great instance of this very thing with a client. I was preparing for a webcast. While setting up the presentation, the IT expert helping set up the equipment and handling the technical details received a telephone call from one of his employees who was troubleshooting at another location. I learned that this employee was working on a crisis situation of great importance to her company.

Hearing just half of his conversation, I picked up that she was reporting on her progress in solving the problem. Later, when my technical helper gave me the details of the conversation, I learned that almost in passing she mentioned, “I have to check on my father. I think he had a heart attack or stroke or something.”

The man interrupted the conversation right then and said bluntly, “You need to go to your father.” He didn’t even ask, “Do you need to go to your father?” He just said, “You need to go to your father.”

The employee protested, “No, I’m not going to go until this is fixed.” Her boss just kept saying, “Get off the phone, get on a plane, and go to your father.”

I knew that this man might get into trouble for making that kind of decision; his employee was trying to solve a serious problem. But he insisted, and she went home.

I reached several conclusions from this leader’s act of spontaneous compassion: First, this woman will be one of his most loyal and productive employees from now on. Second, he did the right thing even though painful consequences might follow. A trusted leader acts like that. Finally, he showed a true heart of compassion. He decided to care for the person. In that moment when he had to make a choice, he understood and responded to the needs of the person, not just a valued cog in the company machine.

That’s what compassion is all about.

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Blog Qualities of a Caring Leader Trust Me

Qualities of a Caring Leader: Spontaneous Compassion

by Ron Potter February 1, 2016

Over the next few weeks, our Trust Me posts will explore the qualities of a caring leader. We explored the first quality – Understanding here. Then we took a look at the second quality – Concern. Communication was the third quality. Then we discussed Confrontation. Today we look at Compassion.

I observed a wonderful incident of compassion once while preparing a webcast for a client. The man helping set up the equipment and handling the technical details received a telephone call from one of his employees who was troubleshooting at another location. My writing partner Wayne and I learned that this employee was working on a crisis situation of great importance to her company.

Hearing just half of his conversation, we picked up that she was reporting on her progress in solving the problem. Later, when our technical helper gave us the details of the conversation, we learned that almost in passing she mentioned, “I have to check on my father. I think he had a heart attack or stroke or something.”

Our man interrupted the conversation right then and said bluntly, “You need to go to your father.” He didn’t even ask, “Do you need to go to your father?” He just said, “You need to go to your father.”

The employee protested, “No, I’m not going to go until this is fixed.” Her boss just kept saying, “Get off the phone, get on a plane, and go to your father.”

We knew that this man might get into trouble for making that kind of decision; his employee was trying to solve a serious problem. But he insisted, and she went home.

We reach several conclusions from this leader’s act of spontaneous compassion: First, this woman will be one of his most loyal and productive employees from now on. Second, he did the right thing even though painful consequences might follow. A trusted leader acts like that. Finally, he showed a true heart of compassion. He decided to care for the person. In that moment when he had to make a choice, he understood and responded to the needs of the person, not just a valued cog in the company machine.

That’s what compassion is all about.

Compassion is a compelling conviction to care enough to become involved and help others by taking some action that will improve their lives or set them on a fresh course.

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Blog Myers Briggs Type Indicator Myers-Briggs

Myers Briggs Type Indicator: Deciding

by Ron Potter April 1, 2021

There are a couple of problematic issues with this preference pair. One of the issues is the title of this preference. For years it was titled “Judging” but the wise people at Consulting Psychologists Press (CPP.Inc) who own the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) changed it to “Deciding” a few years ago. I think this is a better description.

The other problematic issue with this particular scale is that one end is defined as “Thinking” while the other end is described as “Feeling” (T vs. F). Business teams in particular revolt at the use of feelings. They’ll say things like they don’t let their emotions or feelings get in the way of making logical decisions. But this is your Deciding Function! You will either make balanced or unbalanced decisions. Make balanced decisions, both thinking and feeling. Those will be better decisions.

Thinking – Positive and Negative

A thinking preference can be very positive when it comes to decision making. The thinking preference tends to be very logical, objective, and can be firm but fair. In addition, they will often hold justice in high esteem, can be very principle-based, and will easily critique ideas and decisions. In the end, it’s very difficult to argue with the logic-based decision that comes naturally to the thinking preference. And that can sometimes become the problem.

Because the thinking preference comes across as confident and even critical, there is a natural barrier for others to challenge. I had a boss once that was probably the most logical, thinking based person I’ve ever known. Because I had gained his trust, he often would take me to visit various project sites to get a feel for how the business was working. Unfortunately, it never occurred to him that the way he set up the meeting rooms seemed much like a judge (with full authority) questioning those running the business. He would sit at the center seat at a small table. To his left would be the site’s general manager and to his right would be me. He then would ask each of the site managers to enter the room, sit in a chair (feeling fully exposed) in front of this tribunal looking over the desk at them.

I know that my boss was simply trying to get as deep into the details (He also had a strong presence for sensing that we talked about in the last blog) and find out the truth of what was going on. As soon as he detected any weakness in a person’s thinking or attention to facts, he would relentlessly pursue further details with more critical questioning. Often the person seated in front of us (the tribunal) would eventually crumble and sometimes leave crying.

Later, as we were driving away from the site, I would say to my boss that he had really crushed Larry (or whomever). My boss would come back with genuine surprise and say something like “I noticed there was something wrong. What was the matter with that person?” I would explain to him that his approach to questioning and drilling down shook the confidence of some people. Again confused, he would say “I don’t get it. I’m just trying to find out how things are going!” He was a total thinker and never learned the value of balancing it with feeling type questions.

Feeling – Positive and Negative

The positive side of the feeling preference is truly caring. Caring for people. Caring for values. The feeling preference focuses on things like values, mercy, compliments, harmony, empathy, compassion. These are actually the issues that help create great teams. If you’ve read my blogs you’ll know that there is no correlation between IQ and success. But, there is a complete correlation between EQ and success. EQ is Emotional Quotient and deals with many of the issues we just listed above: value, harmony, empathy, compassion. The feeling preference does not ignore the thinking side. They’ll acknowledge all of the points that the thinking preference makes as being real and accurate but will question if a decision is better being made on the facts or harmony (or other feeling preference focus).

I’ve watched leadership teams get ready to make a decision based on logic. They’ll list all of the logical reasons they should make this particular decision. But then, someone says “But how will our customers react to that decision?” After a pause, someone will say “Your right. They’ll hate it. Maybe we should consider a different decision.”

Statistics

I’m going to take a look at the statistics to see what we might learn and then I want to close with a couple of more thoughts.

Here at the Statistics:

US Population Thinking = 40%; Feeling = 60%
Leadership Teams Thinking = 84%; Feeling = 16%
Operation Teams Thinking = 83%; Feeling = 17%

One of the things we learn from these numbers is that both Leadership and Operations Teams are substantially more thinking-oriented than the general population. To some degree, this makes sense because businesses and corporations generally run and make their decisions based on logic, not feelings. However, that’s a falsehood.

Fifth Avenue marketing firms learned long ago that people make decisions based on feelings and then justify those decisions based on logic. Business and Corporate leaders are just the same, they just won’t often admit it. In fact, it’s important to know that even ideas are believed to be true based on our emotions and then justified by logic. Knowing this to be true, it’s important that when having a team discussion about which decision to make, members should share their feelings, emotions, previous experiences (baggage) with each other. And don’t let a member get away with explaining the logic of a decision. Make sure they share their emotions first, then explain what logic they use based on the emotions.

You’ll get sick of me saying this time and time again, but the best decisions are balanced. Balance, balance, balance. However, it’s important that to balance this Deciding function, you must start with the feeling side.

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Blog Leadership

He Makes Good Decisions

by Ron Potter February 4, 2021

I happened to come across a National Football League (NFL) scouting report of a young college student who wanted to be drafted into the NFL. The Scouting reports were not good.

The college student also took part in the NFL Scouting Combine where they test physical attributes. The results of that were not good either. The reports said he had poor arm strength and athleticism and his sprint times for the 40-yard dash were terrible.

In his report, one longtime analyst said, “I don’t like him. Smart guy. That’s it.” The only positive part of another report said that “He makes good decisions.”

In spite of these poor reports, this young college student was drafted in that year. Of the 200 drafted, he was taken at 199.

He Was Prudent

Prudent is not a word we see anymore. In fact, it doesn’t really sound very flattering. But the definition of prudent is: The perfected ability to make right decisions. That seemed to be the only positive thing in his scouting reports and physical analysis. He was Prudent.

The Perfected Ability to Make Right Decisions

There are two points that you need to pay attention to in that definition.

Right. It’s easy to make decisions. It’s not easy to always make “right” decisions. “Right” in this case means right for the individual, organization, country, and the world in general.
Perfected. Perfection comes with practice, patience, and wisdom. It takes time. You must work at it. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to perfect my golf swing. It’s far from perfect but it is better. Even the pros who will hit thousands of balls a day are trying to perfect their golf swing.

Practice Makes Perfect

We’ve all heard that old adage. But it’s not true. Practice doesn’t make perfect if you not practicing the right things or the parts that need to be practiced. Back to the golf pros, they not only have coaches but lots of technology to help measure and visualize their practice. They get almost instantaneous feedback on each practice swing.

Feedback

This is why instantaneous feedback is so necessary. I heard someone once say, if you swat your dog with a newspaper for something he did wrong yesterday, he’ll have no idea what he’s being punished for. He will only become afraid of newspapers. This is one reason why annual assessment sessions with employees are so useless. There may have been an instance several months ago that needs to be fixed. But by now each participant has formed a memory in their head that satisfies their own needs and ego. Memory is powerful.

A college professor once had the students in his class write down everything about the day before when the space shuttle Challenger exploded during take-off. Ten years later, the professor tracked down as many students from that class that he could find. He handed them their own written record of that day to read over. One student who had written 14 pages read it through and then tossed it to the side and said to the professor, “That’s not right. Let me tell you what really happened!” Ten years later his memory of the incident was more powerful than his recording of the incident the following day. Memory is powerful.

Prudent Decision Making

Prudence is a process. It has well-defined steps that will need to be practiced to reach perfection. The Prudence process requires Trust, Diverse Points of View, and a Good Process

Trust

In my book, “Trust Me” I list the eight elements of trust. Those elements are self humility, development of others, commitment to learning, listening and creating unity, focus on the issue, compassion for others, personal integrity, not avoiding constructive disagreement, and finally endurance to stick with it to the end.

Diverse Points of View

We hear the word diversity used a great deal these days. But diversity by itself is worthless unless there is trust. Trust must be established first. Without trusted diversity of thought, there is no perfecting of the decision-making process.

Good Process

Prudent decision making is not haphazard; it is a well-defined process. It can be simplified into three words: Deliberate, Decide, Do.

Deliberate. Because “time is critical”, most corporate teams don’t do enough (or any) deliberation. Other reasons I’ve encountered for not deliberating well include:

- “We already know the answer.” This happens because of ‘group think’ and ‘selective attention’. If we don’t have the trusted diversity of thinking, it’s easy to fall into these traps that make us think we already know the answer.
- This is only one right answer. This means that all the other possible answers are wrong. Leadership teams shouldn’t waste their time on truly right-wrong decisions. Leadership teams should be spending their time on dilemmas. This means they are dealing with right vs right decisions. These are the hard decisions.
- I believe what I see or I remember. (See the “Feedback” section above.)

Decide. One element of good decision making is described in something called Triple Loop Learning (Originally developed by Gregory Bateson and extended by Chris Argyris and Peter Senge). The first step in triple loop learning is to share openly and honestly your beliefs and assumptions about the topic up for decision.

Do. Having reached a decision through this process, the do part becomes much easier because all the parts of the team are working together. There is full commitment from each member of the team. I cover “Prudence” in previous blogs–take a look to get more detail than we covered here today.

So who was that young college student that was drafted 199 out of 200 that year? Tom Brady.

No other quarterback has appeared in more than 5 Super Bowls, let alone claimed over 4 rings. Tom has played in nine Super Bowls and won six of them. This weekend he will play in his tenth Super Bowl with the opportunity for his seventh win.

He makes good decisions!

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Blog Culture Leadership Team

Team Leadership Culture

by Ron Potter February 13, 2020

Over this last year, we’ve spent time and detail defining the Team and Culture sections of Team, Leadership, and Culture.

Our Monday blogs have spent a great deal of time over the last couple of years looking at the Leadership elements from my book Trust Me. Let’s wrap up this section with a summary of the three elements.

Team First (Sort of)

As I’ve said in the past, I believe Teams should be worked on first followed by Leadership than Culture.

However, the overlap between Team and Leadership makes it very difficult to do them in order.

You’ll notice from the matrix above that there is a great deal of overlap between the Team and Leadership columns. It seems as if you can’t accomplish one without the other. I believe this is true!

The first element of the Team list includes “Truth”. However, you won’t have the reputation of a “truthful” person if there is no humility, compassion or integrity.

Respect requires humility, development, and commitment from the Leadership list. Neither one of these overlapping issues is restricted to the three that I mentioned for each one. There are elements in all eight of the Leadership outline that are required in one or more of the Team outline. Essentially, you can’t have one without the other.

Next Steps

Start by focusing on each of the first two outlines, Team and Leadership.

With the Leadership list, become much more self-aware and get some straight feedback from a trusted advisor, coach, or partner.

For the Team list, it will require the entire team to be made aware of the four elements and do some honest grading in each of the categories. In our next blog, I’m going to introduce you to an app called GPS4Teams that will help you accomplish this goal.

Culture

The Culture section follows work on Team and Leadership. Until you’ve improved to a very high level on the Team and Leadership aspects, any efforts at improving Culture tends to fall on deaf ears.

A friend and I were discussing why some cultures last (the Mayo brothers died decades ago but the culture at the Mayo Clinic seems to continue). In identifying those companies where the culture doesn’t last, we always came back to elements of Team and Leadership that either changed or were lacking over the years. You can’t build a great culture without first building great teams and leaders.

Emotional Quotient

Many people feel a high IQ is sufficient for solving problems. The interesting thing is that there has never been any correlation found between high IQ and success.

What has been well documented is the correlation between high EQ and success.

Emotional Quotient can be divided into two components, Personal Competence and Social Competence. You’ll see the Personal Competence of self-awareness, self-regulation and self-motivation relating to Leadership. The Social Competence of social awareness and social skills relate to building Team.

Team and Leadership = Success

This correlation tells us that success requires great teams, great leadership leading to great culture.

Get started on your success today. There’s nothing mysterious about the process.

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Blog Leadership Team

Team and Leadership: Summary

by Ron Potter July 15, 2019

Over the last several weeks we have been reviewing and expanding on the elements of a great team in our Thursday blog. At the same time, our Monday blog has been exploring more detail on the elements of great leadership. These are the first two legs of our Team Leadership Culture (TLC) model.

In general I believe it’s important to build a great team before working on leadership skills but in reality, it’s difficult to accomplish one without the other. In many cases, they are tightly coupled and interdependent.

Today let’s review the elements of team and leadership and see how they fit together.

Elements of Team

Truth – Respect – Elegance – Commitment

Elements of Leadership

Humility – Development – Commitment – Focus
Compassion – Integrity – Peacemaking – Endurance

Interdependence

Let’s start with the elements of Team and look at the interdependence, overlap, and alignment with the Leadership elements.

Truth => Humility – Integrity – Peacemaking

To build a great team, members must be truthful with each other. Truthfulness requires Humility, Integrity, and Peacemaking from the Leadership Skill List.