I learned an important lesson long ago from my Cub leader (Scouts Canada): “To do my best”. In Scouting all of the promises start with “I promise to do my best…”. In Cubs we even had an opening/closing ceremony which had us challenging each other to do our best! It’s a constant theme in the program, and perhaps there are some lessons we can draw from it.
Much as in Scouting, the business world should always be challenging our people to do their personal best. In the principles of Agile we can find numerous examples of this foundational behaviour.
- Build Projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done
- Working software is the primary measure of progress
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
- The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
- At regular intervals, the reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly
Self realization and people always striving for their personal best! So how can you realize this lofty goal? As a leader in our teams your job is to help people reach for this goal, and help them through the transformation. I’ve always been impressed and amazed when I take the time to bring the best out of people how they rise to produce amazing results!
Inspiring people towards always achieving their personal best takes some time and patience to achieve.. You cannot mandate them to be amazing as it simply won’t happen. It doesn’t work this way! Dr. Peter Jensen has written about helping people realize their true potential, and talks about the importance of sparking personal greatness in his book “Igniting the third factor”. As a coach of Olympic coaches (including the 2010 Gold Medal Canadian Women’s Hockey Team!), Dr. Peter Jensen talks about how achieving personal greatness can only be achieved if you have ignited them from the inside. The book talks about how as leaders we should be using five things as tools for helping people find their inner greatness:
- Manage yourself
- Build Trust
- Encourage and use Imagery
- Uncover and work through blocks
- Embrace Adversity
Christopher will tell us the basis for taking responsibility lays in the three keys of:
- Intent – awareness is useless, unless you intend to step up and fix it
- Awareness – you need to know what’s happening, and where you’re landing
- Confront – you have to face the reality of your actions
When faced with issues and adversity humans land in one of four spaces:
- Obligation – you believe you are doing something as it is required of you
- Shame – you hang your head low in disgrace for the result you produced
- Justify – you use other factors to explain the result you produced
- Lay Blame – you point to others as the cause of your situation
A colleague of mine recently explained how unhappy he was in his current job. He knows he’s doing a poor job, but he’s just so unhappy about his current role he isn’t paying attention to quality like he knows he should. We discussed the current situation, as I was trying to help him find the root cause of the dissatisfaction. In the end he just doesn’t like the work he’s doing any more. So I asked him, why he doesn’t go find another job and get out of this situation. His response was the money is so good. At this time I pointed to the responsibility process and asked him where he was in the model.
For this friend he has two choices to make. Either way he needs to move himself up to taking responsibility for his situation, which means he has to make a choice:
- Find a way to find satisfaction in his current role
- Go find a new role, and if the money isn’t as good accept that it’s easier to take responsibility in a better environment
Please let me know if you have other tools & models you work with in the area of personal greatness. The human factor is a difficult one, and I'm always looking for new tools.
