Coaching Blog
The Coaching Group Of Switzerland

By Daniel Goleman,Contributor, Korn Ferry Institute
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He was doing great—at least in his own line of vision. As a senior director at a Fortune 500 retail company, Greg had become one of the company’s best performers, overseeing a $1 billion market. He knew he wasn’t afraid to take swift action and that he brought true intensity to his work. The company had even handed him a second market.

But it turned out that our confident district manager had a critical blind spot: himself. He didn’t realize that all that vaunted success had come at the expense of the store managers he constantly berated. Intensity, in his case, meant focusing only on what was wrong. Sure, he had managed to spot and fire failing managers before, but in his new territory, he had demoralized the team so much that too many leaders for him to oust were missing their targets. As the second market’s results sank, Greg couldn’t understand what was wrong.

Think about it: Is there anything more frustrating than a corporate executive who is clueless about his or her own weaknesses? Is there no harder leader to work with or improve?

We are talking here, of course, about the importance of self-awareness and just how dramatically it alters the workplace. Self-awareness is part of what makes up what I call a leader’s “emotional intelligence” (EI), a group of competencies that studies show may well be the best measure of a leader’s odds at success. In all, there are a dozen competencies that make up EI, ranging from possessing empathy to having a positive outlook to resolving conflict. But in the end, the one that matters most is one Greg didn’t have.

Indeed, new research done for Korn Ferry Hay Group has found that when executives demonstrate high self-awareness, they are likely to show strengths in as many as 10 of the dozen major competencies that define EI. It is the self-aware leader who has the most positive impact on a team’s working climate and performance—and who instills the most loyalty. High EI leaders, research shows, build team climates in which people know what is expected of them, have challenging but attainable goals and feel empowered to attain goals in their own way.

But Greg’s high-drive style—with the opposite effects—has become all too common in many businesses, when leaders push their people to hit ever-higher targets and put a hypercritical focus on people’s failures while ignoring successes. That may work at first, but as time goes on, it batters morale, lowers motivation and loses people. And because such leaders seem to be succeeding in the short term—as they hit quarterly targets—they turn a blind eye to the downsides in the long term.

The good news is that the blindsided leader can be turned around. Greg connected with Jennifer Joss, a veteran executive coach in Oregon, who tells me her first step was a universal one: making Greg aware of what was limiting his own success. She told him to pay careful attention to his thoughts and feelings when he talked with district or store managers about their performance, and to note what worked well and what did not. Through Joss, he also received candid feedback from 15 stakeholders, people who worked with him and could tell him how he might improve. And finally, he started to think about leaders he admired and realized he wanted to model himself on one who, early in Greg’s own career, cared about and believed in him.

When he saw himself falling back on his old confrontational style, he would take a moment and remember to apply an approach that he took with his two young daughters: Engage the person in an open, curious way—a joint inquiry that invites critical thinking and problem solving.

This exercise in self-management goes hand in hand with another EI competency: empathy or understanding and connecting with his direct reports in the moment. 
This attunement creates receptivity, so that his people are open to his influence, and motivated and enthusiastic about their own abilities. In fact, the results would speak for themselves: Greg’s initial market continued to perform exceptionally, and within the first six months, his new market turned in their best performance in many years. In the end, there would be confidence—and self-awareness.
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By Susan Begeman Steiner

​Have you ever had someone ask you what you are waiting for? if so, you know the meaning is clear: Get into action - stop wasting time!
 
Waiting has become synonymous with wasting time. We all dread the Limbo feeling of the doctor’s office waiting room. The magazines are boring, time slows down, have to get out your iPhone. Waiting seems a waste, an inconvenience, or worse, a slight – after all, important people don’t have to wait.
 
This waiting room phenomenon has colored our ability to wait in other parts of our lives.

• We are impatient when things don’t go our way.
• If our memo isn’t answered for several days, we wonder what the holdup is.
• We want it now, now, now.

 
Impatience keeps us distracted, in perpetual motion and on the surface level of life, like skipping stones.
 
This intolerance for waiting is a lack of appreciation for what waiting can actually bring.
 
Mechanically speaking, most people operate optimally if they wait for a “nudge” from the outside that they can say YES or NO to. When they say YES, they find themselves drawn to something -- think romance, inspiration, kismet. Something inside them rises up and is called forth. A sleeping desire is awakened, followed by an influx of energy to start something.
 
This is the Wow Factor of Life.
 
But if you are too busy being busy, it is not possible to wait. When the kismet thing happens, you are already gone, having run off to the next thing that you thought of, fueled by a fear of staying still for a moment. Kismet arrives like the movie hero who finally comes to his senses and knocks on his Love’s door, only to find that she took a job in Chicago.
 
Waiting requires patience, no way around it. But it is the patience of the acrobat on the flying trapeze who lets go in mid-air and waits to be caught by her partner. For her it is an exciting waiting, that endless moment until she is caught (or falls into the net).
 
We need to get better at waiting. We need to turn waiting from something that is boring into an exciting, endless moment of allowing. Allowing the next amazing thing to happen. This way you are home when your Love rings the bell. Something deeper can guide you and you are no longer dictated to by the Hurry Gods.
 
Three practices in the art of waiting:

1. Reserve 5 minutes each day to do nothing.
2. Listen to the sound within you (that small, still voice) and notice how it communicates. That “voice” is unique to you. Find out how it sounds.
3. Experiment for a full day, or if you are really brave, for a week, with waiting to be called by the next thing, rather than rushing headlong into another moment. Sit and do not do anything until you are 'called.' It won’t take long for the next thing to catch up to you. Then follow your inner YES or NO. Find out what happens next.

For some of us it is best to tune into the invitations that come to us. But, whether you hear that inner voice or listen for invitations, the waiting is the same. Patience is the starting point. 

Contact me if you would like to learn how you operate mechanically and learn for yourself how you can wait for the very best that life has to offer.  
 

BY DR. TOMAS CHAMORRO-PREMUZIC AND ADAM YEARSLEY
This story reflects the views of these authors, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

In 1998, after a year-long study on the subject, McKinsey researchers declared that a “war for talent” was underway. In the years ahead, they said, organizations’ future success would depend on how well they could attract, develop, and retain talented employees–an ever more valuable asset in ever higher demand.
Instead of winning a war for talent, organizations appear to be waging a war on talent, repelling and alienating employees more successfully than harnessing their skills.Today, in a world full of many more Chief People and Chief Happiness Officers, that war nevertheless appears to have been lost on all sides. Of course, many workers excel in their jobs and make pivotal contributions to their organizations. But for every one employee who does, there are many more who are underemployed, underperforming, and just plain miserable at work.

THE RISE OF PASSIVE JOBSEEKERS
More people than ever are dissatisfied enough with their current jobs to want to consider other opportunities. Over the past few years, LinkedIn has estimated that figure at anywhere between 45% and 60% of its more than 400 million users. Some recruiters believe these so-called “passive jobseekers” now comprise up to 75% of the overall workforce. Just imagine if three out of four people in long-term relationships were still holding out for a better option to come along.