Leadership and the Psychology of Turnarounds

Leadership and the Psychology of Turnarounds

Building a Culture of Confidence and Success

Confidence is at the very heart of effective performance. The media continuously bombards us with very public examples of individuals and teams in the performing arts and professional sports arena buckling under pressure from crises of confidence when strong confidence is call for. For me, people like Susan Boyle and the England rugby squad spring to mind when I think about confidence ‘gaps’ that result in lacklustre performance and failure. So we know just how important this concept it. However, in our experience, few leaders and HR practitioners actually know how to build a culture of confidence and success.

Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter from Harvard Business School says confidence comprises “positive expectations for favourable outcomes”. Rather than simply being something in people’s personal psychology, she maintains that it becomes embedded in everyday interactions and so, in the culture of teams and organisations. She asserts:

“On the way up, success creates positive momentum. People who believe they are likely to win are also likely to put in the extra effort at difficult moment to ensure that victory. On the way down, failure feeds on itself. As performance starts running on a positive or negative path, the momentum can be hard to stop. Growth cycles produce optimism, decline produces pessimism.”

So, how can we build and maintain a culture where success cycles are amplified and failure cycles are minimised?

Below are some practical approaches for leaders and HR practitioners:

Build Awareness of Strengths

Because people typically don’t get much feedback on their strengths during their life and career, they frequently don’t understand their strengths as well as their weaknesses. Many even experience anxiety, discomfort and embarrassment when talking about their strengths as they have learned to fear complacency, failure and being too different from the rest of the ‘pack’. There are many ways to build self-awareness about strengths, including reflecting more on one’s conscious experience, feedback from colleagues and other stakeholders and keeping a journal or diary of tasks that energise you. However, we have found that the best approach is to use an objective strengths profiling tool such as ©Strengthscope (www.strengthscope.com). The benefit of such a tool is that it provides a common language for people to start exploring their strengths and enables them to focus their energies on relevant opportunities to apply these more fully.

Develop Positive Action Routines

Self-awareness is crucial, but not sufficient. As part of ongoing performance dialogues, managers should work in partnership with employees to explore how their strengths can be made more productive, not only in the person’s current role, but in tasks and projects outside their role. Like professional athletes, employees need to build and practice positive routines or ways of doing their work which reflect who they really are and what comes most naturally to them. These action routines will result in successes which in turn will reinforce confidence.

Cultivate a Positive, Appreciative Environment

When people feel they have been successful and their efforts and achievements are recognised, it generates positive emotions and good moods. This positive emotion becomes contagious and boosts energy, morale and discretionary effort, fuelling the success cycle. By helping executives and line managers understand the importance of sharing and celebrating successes and putting in place organisation-wide mechanisms and processes for facilitating such sharing, a more positive performance culture will prevail. It is important that this is done across organisational boundaries as even others’ successes can make us feel more energised and positive provided these are communicated and celebrated in an appropriate manner. Authentic and frequent recognition and praise for a job well done at local line manager level is also essential in creating a culture where effort and hard work will flourish.

Ensure Leaders and Managers Model the Way

The “shadow of the leader” effect is strong at work in organisations. Leaders and managers should understand the impact that their values, attitudes and actions have on the workforce and should be invited to consider what type of “shadow” they cast now and how this can be strengthened in the future. In our experience, there are still too many leaders out there that cast a long and negative shadow, sapping energy and life from organisations. We would recommend educating and developing leaders and managers to understand and apply positive psychology and strengths-based concepts, principles and techniques in building a culture of success and confidence. This learning needs to be practical, relevant and ideally supported by on-the-job coaching in order to ensure maximum learning transfer.  This type of investment has an added benefit, as managers and leaders are more likely to stay with the organisation if it invests in their development and advancement. Improved retention and stability of leadership will in turn give rise to increased investment of time and trust by leaders in ensuring the organisation is a success and so the success cycle is amplified further.

Make Customer and Stakeholder Feedback Visible

Success brings positive feedback and rewards from customers and other stakeholders on the outside. However, employees often only hear about this feedback when failures occur or performance falls below expectations (e.g., when customers complain or when shareholders are unhappy with company performance). It is important to ensure this feedback is balanced and employees also get positive feedback from shareholders, customers and other stakeholders. This will all contribute to a more appreciative atmosphere and build confidence. One way to do this is to invite teams to interview their own customers (internal or external) and stakeholders using an appreciative inquiry interview process. Once the data has been analysed, this can then be reported back at a team meeting with a view to exploring successes, strengths, weaker areas and opportunities for improvement and growth.

Build Strong Cohesive Teams and Social Networks

Positive emotions produced through success strengthen relationships and give rise to a host of individual and team-based outcomes including improved collaboration, creative problem-solving and employee wellbeing. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they are more likely to be generous, supportive and tolerant of one another. This is turn reinforces teamwork and commitment. It also means people can more freely acknowledge their vulnerability (concerns, fears, etc.), admit their mistakes and learn from them.

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In summary, building a culture of confidence is largely about amplifying successes and strengths to ensure the ‘voices’ of possibility, optimism and self-belief drown out the ‘voices’ of self-doubt, negativity and pessimism. To turn around a failure cycle can be tough, particularly when successive failures have occurred, which have sapped the morale and energy from a team and/or organisation. However, like Moss Kanter, we contend that this is primarily a leadership challenge. With the right mindset, approaches and techniques, leaders, supported by their HR practitioners, can build accountability for the turnaround, focus on small ‘wins’ to start rebuilding confidence and inspire people to optimise their strengths and take initiative to get back on track again.

References

Moss Kanter, R (2004). Confidence: Leadership and the Psychology of Turnarounds. London: Random House.

http://www.strengthspartnership.com/blog/leadership-developments/building-a-culture-of-confidence-and-success/