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Manage Your Mindset with The A-Team

April 13th, 2021

If you’re dealing with a big challenge, you’re often drawn to its physical or practical issues. This blog encourages you to also consider your mindset. If you want a book (or audio book) to explore mindset in more detail, I strongly recommend any one of the following three:

• The Chimp Paradox, by Steve Peters
• Positive Intelligence, by Shirzad Chamine
• Mindset, by Carol Dweck.

In different ways, all three articulate the view that our brains have two main parts:

1. The Growth Mindset aka Our Best Self, or Sage

As the names suggest, this part of the brain is ‘us on a good day’. It’s wise, empathetic, forgiving and discerning. It understands that things may not be as they first appear; that things are rarely black or white, good or bad. It accepts ambiguity and that very little is certain. It thinks before acting.

2. The Fixed Mindset aka Our Chimp, or Saboteurs

This part of our brain makes immediate judgements, sees things as good or bad and others as either friends or enemies. It’s fuelled by emotion and acts before thinking. It ensures your basic needs are prioritised and its tendency to worry and remain vigilant keeps you safe. Indeed, its evolutionary importance explains why it is often stronger than the ‘best self’ part of your brain. It’s also stubborn. If it decides it’s not going to do something, it’s unlikely that your ‘best self’ will be able to persuade it otherwise. This is why willpower alone rarely leads to sustained change.

So what can you do? Firstly, you need to accept that you can’t change your chimp’s nature; but you can manage its behaviour. To manage your chimp effectively, I recommend bringing in the A-Team. No, not the 1980s characters of BA, Murdoch, Hannibal and Face, but the A-Team of:

• Awareness
• Acceptance
• Attendance
• Activation

Awareness

The first ‘A’ of managing your chimp involves being really aware of what it’s feeling. It’s easy to know when your chimp is dominating your thoughts and feelings; it’s anytime you’re having thoughts and feelings that you don’t want to be having. However, your chimp needs to feel listened to and understood. To do this, it helps to identify the specific emotion that’s causing your unhelpful thoughts. So if you’re not looking forward to the next part of your challenge, try and get beyond the common first response of ‘I just don’t feel like it’. Is it stress in relation to other things that need to be done today, or fear as to whether you’ll be able to manage it?

For example, during a recent personal challenge, going beyond the ‘I just don’t feel like it today’ made me appreciate that I was actually feeling feeble and inadequate, as I was struggling to do something I’d been able to do before.

By identifying the precise emotion, your chimp will know you’re aware of how it’s feeling and this will comfort it. It’s not uncommon to struggle with finding the precise feeling you’re feeling, so choosing from a list can be useful. One such list can be found here.

Acceptance

Once you’ve identified your emotion, the next ‘A’ is to accept it. If you’re not feeling a particularly positive emotion, this can be hard to do, but feeling bad about feeling bad is even worse. Accepting the emotion prevents this from happening, as acceptance takes the ‘heat’ out of the emotion. Negative emotions like lurking in the shadows. Acceptance brings them out into the light where they can’t last long. In my case, accepting that I was feeling feeble and ‘naming it’, helped avoid any sense of shame in feeling this way.

Attendance

With the emotion not feeling as powerful, you can move onto the next ‘A’, attendance. Here the goal is to attend to your chimp, by finding simple statements that it will accept.

I give my chimp a name - it’s called Sparky. By trial and error, I’ve learnt Sparky accepts that;

“Everyone, including me, is allowed to have one bad day.”

Reminding Sparky of this during my challenging situation, helped calm him down and stopped him berating himself and me.

What will your chimp accept? Work out the short and simple statements that it will hear and accept.

Activate

The final ‘A’ is activate. Here the goal is to activate your chimp’s more positive attributes. So in my case, Sparky responded well to;

“I know you’re not enjoying this, but as soon as we get home you can have a nice hot bath, with a beer and some peanuts.” [Sparky loves peanuts!]

As soon as Sparky heard this, he was bought into getting the challenging situation done as quickly as possible.

With Sparky occupied and engaged, it also allowed me to activate some of my best self. I was able to empathise with how I was feeling and remind myself about why this challenging situation mattered and was worthwhile. In doing so, I was able to give my challenging situation a better narrative.

The narrative we construct around what happens to us is ultimately up to us. I hope being mindful of your two brains and using the A-Team of Awareness, Acceptance, Attendance and Activation, helps you construct the best possible narrative for you.

Aligning Organisational Values with Your Personal Ones

January 8th, 2021

In my adolescence and early adulthood, I developed a series of core values that I felt would stand me in good stead for life. They were as follows:

• Service: Equipping myself for life, not just for my own benefit, but for the whole community.
• Balance: Balancing work with life outside of work. Trying hard, without becoming a fanatic. Knowing when enough is enough.
• Equality: Endeavouring to create equality of worth and opportunity and striving to ensure that these are not inhibited by any inequality of resources.
• Fun/Positivity: Life’s too short to commit myself to careers or activities that I don’t enjoy.
• Health: Emotional, mental, physical and societal health enable life to be lived to the full.
• Integrity: Telling myself the truth. Am I really living my values if I proceed in this way?
• Relationships: What brings most purpose to life: very little of any true worth is done completely on my own.
• Quality: If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. If I live all my other values, this value should take care of itself.

When I founded mch in 2005, it seemed obvious to me that the company’s values should align with my personal ones. On its inception though, I chose only to declare publicly three of the above values as company values:

1. Balance
2. Integrity
3. Quality

I took the view that these were the most relevant to my company and the values that clients would be most interested in. By 2008, my values-based approach to business gained sufficient attention that I was asked to write a short article for a regional enterprise network on how values can inform business. An edited extract of this article can be viewed below.

Fast forward to 2018 and, while my values remained constant, a considerable amount had changed in both my personal and professional life. A notable change was that I had started a relationship with someone who also led a company. A period of turmoil ensued as I felt that the way they were leading their business was in conflict with some of my personal values. In particular, my partner’s organisation was distributing resources in ways I found difficult to reconcile. I felt that they, like most businesses, were perpetuating the inequalities of opportunity that exist in society. Essentially, I found it very hard to separate the personal from the professional. Indeed, I began to appreciate that there really wasn’t a separation of my personal and professional values. Although I had only listed three professional/company values on my company’s website, the other five personal values had informed, and continued to inform, my professional practice.

In particular, I was reminded of just how much the value of equality had shaped my career choices. For example, my initial decision for mch to exclusively serve charitable organisations and social enterprises was, in part, driven by a desire to provide a level of support and expertise that such organisations wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. Furthermore, a key motivator in taking on the role of Chief Executive of Rumbalara, the indigenous sporting and community development organisation in Australia, was to assist a community that had been deprived of equality of opportunity.

The experience also strengthened my view that so much of my own situation and success stemmed from an inequality of opportunity. The biggest contributors to my good fortune were nothing to do with anything I had done. Yes, I have worked hard throughout my career and have tried to make the most of opportunities. However, the greatest opportunities have arisen on account of being born in a country where I had access to free education and from being born into a loving and supportive family. My innate intelligence is nothing of my own doing either, and even my work ethic is likely to have been influenced by the cultural environments I have found myself in. The result is that from an early age, I have felt that I am already a winner in the lottery of life. Consequently, I have tried to find careers and adopt a lifestyle that utilises the skills I’ve been lucky enough to develop, to help others win too.

A key outcome of this experience has been to be more public about mch’s broader values and to use my business to promote them. For example, the value of equality informs the pricing of mch’s online courses and the appeal to support equality of opportunity in learning and development that features within them. I’ve also experienced the positive impact that can come from engaging with organisations with differing values. In addition to clarifying what’s really important, experiencing differing perspectives can help bring about positive changes in thinking and acting.

Original mch Values Article

Top Tips for Career Success

May 1st, 2020

In delivering The Institute of Fundraising’s Future Leaders Programme I have the opportunity to hear great guest speakers share their insights. One such guest speaker is Paul Nott, a principal consultant at nfp consulting. Paul has very kindly produced a bite-sized version of his talk, for the benefit of those unable to participate in the programme. In the audio below, Paul gives some great tips on the importance of developing a personal brand for those seeking a leadership position. In addition to tips for developing compelling CVs and covering letters, Paul also talks about the importance of mindset, planning and the use of “I” vs “We” when it comes to interviews. Finally, Paul stresses the fundamental importance of self-awareness and reflection to career development. Invariably, there is a balance to be struck between seniority, salary, spare-time and stress and it is only through self-awareness and reflection that you can find your own careeer sweet spot.

While Paul focuses on those considering a Director of Fundraising position, I believe the tips he provides are applicable to multiple roles in multiple sectors.

Helping Us All by Addressing the Leadership Imbalance

May 1st, 2020

Recently, I attended a research event that explored the experiences and challenges women face in transitioning to senior leadership roles in fundraising. The title of the excellent research says it all:

‘Missing Out: Understanding the female leadership gap in fundraising’

Four issues struck me in relation to the current leadership imbalance, which I believe are relevant to almost all sectors, not just fundraising:

(i) Sexism

(ii) A Lack of confidence/Imposter syndrome

(iii) Short-termism and its impact on strategy and culture

(iv) Perspective: unrealistic expectations as to what is ‘enough‘

In this blog, I aim to elaborate on these four issues and highlight what can be done to address them.

Sexism

At times, being at the research event proved very uncomfortable for me, as a man. The stories shared about sexism were loathsome and the extent to which gender stereotyping takes place (75% of female fundraisers have faced gender stereotyping in their role) was deeply saddening.

What can be done? I have three suggestions:

Raise awareness amongst male leaders and trustees

Awareness of the problem is the first step to addressing it. I felt it was a shame that, at the launch event, which was attended by around 100 people, the number of men in the room was in single figures. Consequently, make it your goal to share the report with at least three male leaders you know.

Create opportunities for male leaders to be the ‘odd one out’

Privilege can be thought of as anything you take for granted. While I like to think that I have always been egalitarian, this value was sharpened during my role as Chief Executive of the Australian aboriginal organisation, Rumbalara. During my tenure, being on the receiving end of racism, sexism and ageism increased my appreciation of its impact. Furthermore, it was hugely valuable to simply experience what it’s like to be in the minority. It made me appreciate that being in the majority was something I had taken for granted.

Let’s be optimistic and postulate that the behaviour of some male leaders is down to ignorance, rather than malice. To address the ignorance, training in areas such as unconscious bias can be very helpful. However, I believe it would also be incredibly valuable if experiencing being the ‘odd one out’ became a standard part of any man’s induction into a leadership role. Such experience does not have to be as dramatic as being seconded to an aboriginal organisation on the other side of the world! There are numerous ways of surrounding yourself with people who are not like you. Simply going to events which are almost exclusively attended by women can be enough.

For leaders more broadly, spending time in institutions, societies or even pubs that have a very different social and economic demographic to the ones you usually frequent can be insightful. If possible, going to parts of your town/city where your skin colour puts you in a minority can have an equally powerful impact.

Measure It

A key aspect of high performing teams is what is termed ‘psychological safety’. An overview of this term can be found here. In short though, if you feel you have psychological safety in a group, you feel able to be candid and honest. You feel the team has a positive regard for you and is sensitive to your emotions. Equally, you have a positive regard for the team and are sensitive to the moods of others. A key characteristic of teams with ‘psychological safety’ is equal ‘air time’: no one consistently speaks more in meetings than anyone else.

Do your teams have equal air time? How can you find out? Technology can help. Apps like GenderAvenger can be used to analyse how much time men and women are talking for in a typical meeting. A consistent imbalance could open up a useful conversation.

Confidence and Imposter Syndrome

A lack of confidence and/or a sense of imposter syndrome were also raised at the research event. In my role as deliverer of The Institute of Fundraising’s Future Leaders Programme, this is something I see a lot (in both men and women). The Future Leaders Programme is designed to help those who have either just started a formal leadership position, or for those who are at a career crossroads and are asking themselves:

Do I want to take up a formal leadership position?

What does authentic leadership look like for me?

Find a Good Boss

How can a lack of confidence/imposter syndrome be addressed? In my experience, the most effective way is to ensure it doesn’t arise in the first place! I’ve observed hundreds of staff members who’ve caught the syndrome and hundreds who have not. While correlation does not always equal causation, the most common distinguishing feature of those without the ‘disease’, is that they have a great boss. Consequently, when applying for a role, be sure to interview your boss as much as they are interviewing you. Speak to those who are/have been managed by them. How effusive are they about working for them? A significant number of ‘lukewarm’ appraisals should be taken as a warning sign.

Find Yourself a Mentor or Coach

A detailed review of both mentoring and coaching is a blog post in itself, but an insight into both can be found by clicking here. Essentially, both can cultivate the new mind-sets and behaviours required to be more confident. A mentor does not have to be some sort of oracle; some of my most valuable mentors have been peers. While coaching can incur a cost, the impact of a good coach should repay such an investment many times over. The key to either is simply to ask and give it a go.

Become a Trustee

Becoming a trustee is an opportunity to take on a genuine, but collective, leadership role. In doing so, many realise how much they already know and how much value they can contribute in a leadership role. The experience also proves incredibly valuable if you decide to take up a permanent leadership role, as such roles are very likely to require significant Board engagement.

Short-termism and its impact on strategy and culture

It’s commonly cited that many senior leadership roles are incompatible with caring responsibilities, and more fundamentally, with a balanced life. The reluctance of many organisations to allow part-time, shared and flexible working is often cited as a leading cause of the problem. Currently, since women are more likely to take on caring responsibilities, they are most impacted by the relative scarcity of the above practices.

In my view, the conversation needs to change. Currently, it often focuses on the difficulties and challenges of implementing flexible working practices. Instead, let the facts speak for themselves. Not only does flexible working lead to happier, more loyal staff, it leads to more income. In short, if you want to maximise your organisation’s impact to its stakeholders and beneficiaries, then flexible working should be the default way in which you work.

However, I think a more fundamental change also needs to take place, one in which organisations deprioritise short term targets and reprioritise longer term aims. Consider the following thought experiment:

A charity is recruiting for a new Director of Fundraising. Having completed the final round of the interview process, two candidates have performed equally well. Candidate A is female, recently married and has stated that they would like to start a family soon. Candidate B is male, has two adult children and has had a vasectomy to prevent having any more children. I realise it’s unlikely that the recruitment panel would ascertain this information, but for the basis of this thought experiment, let’s assume they have!

If the charity’s sole measure of success for fundraising is whether it achieves its ambitious 18 month target, then based purely on the above facts and criteria, selecting Candidate B would be the rational choice. This is because, given everything else being equal, Candidate B has a lower risk of taking extended time off in the next 18 months. Given the prioritisation of a short-term target, the potential impact of such a risk is significant. I realise that if the charity made their recruitment decision on this basis, it would be acting unlawfully (based on UK employment legislation). Unfortunately though, in my experience, this thought experiment is often played out in real life; it’s just that assumptions replace facts.

However, if the charity’s measure of success for fundraising is to hire and retain exceptional people and see fundraising income grow over a 10 year period, then Candidate B loses his preferential status. In addition to being more egalitarian, this approach also avoids the dangers of short termism and excessive goal setting. While such dangers are well researched and documented, many leaders remain unaware of them. Therefore, such information needs to find its way into more Board meetings and interview panels. Consequently, set yourself the goal of sharing this research with at least two Boards you know.

Perspective: unrealistic expectations as to what is ‘enough’

The last issue is the most fundamental. I believe we need to recalibrate our individual and collective sense of what is ‘enough’. As a former Chair of a social enterprise, I always asked the CEO to work with the team to satisfy themselves (not me or the Board) that the strategy we had collectively developed was achievable in the time we’d set aside. I did not prescribe how this should be done, only that it was conducted and that ultimately the team was confident the strategy was achievable. Conducting such a ‘sanity check’ seemed like common sense: there’s no point in committing to a strategy that staff don’t have confidence in achieving. However, many people have commented on how rare it is to conduct such an exercise. Sadly, it’s all too common to hear a training participant, or someone I mentor, articulate being asked to achieve more and more challenging targets with fewer resources. At the same time, they have incredibly high expectations in their role as a parent, partner, friend, sibling, son or daughter. Consequently, they often feel overwhelmed and unhappy.

The root cause of this dynamic is the expectation that we can always and should always ‘have it all’. I believe such an expectation is both pernicious and unachievable. We need to be kinder to ourselves. ‘It’s OK to be not OK’ and ‘done is often better than perfect’ are mantras I’d like us all be comfortable embracing. In my view, learning to have a genuine appreciation for having ‘enough’, rather than ‘it all’, is not a sign of defeat, but the way to sustainable contentment and success.

Four Strategic Guidelines

November 7th, 2019

I was recently helping some clients think about strategy. As part of the training, I tried to convey a number of guiding principles, which often prove useful in developing strategy. Consequently, I thought I would share some of them with you, in the hope that they prove useful when you next embark on developing a strategy.

1. Strategy can be Simple

Strategy has a reputation for complexity and being difficult. The cynic in me feels such a reputation is, in part, generated by the consultancy industry, to justify why their expertise is required. While many look to key strategic ‘thought leaders’ for guidance with their strategy, I believe one of the most useful strategic frameworks comes from the author of The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling;

‘I keep six hoest serving men (They taught me all I knew);

Their names are

What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who’

To invoke Baloo the bear’s advice to Mowgli in The Jungle Book, strategy is about the ‘bare necessities’. It is about being clear on the key ‘Ws’;

• ‘Why do we do what we do?’
• ‘What positive difference do we make to society and how can we increase it?
• ‘Where are we now?’
• ‘Where do we want to go?’
• ‘Who do we need to get us there?’
• ‘How much will it cost and how long can we give ourselves to get to where we want to go?

It’s also crucial to be clear on ‘What is strategy?’ and ‘Why do strategy?’, but sign up to a training course, or wait for a future blog, if you want clarity on these particular ‘Ws’!

2. Focus on Decisions Rather than the Plan or Process

You’ll note that all the ‘Ws’ above are listed as questions. That is no coincidence. Strategy is all about making decisions. It’s about deciding how best to achieve your overarching goal, or to fulfil your organisation’s vision. Consequently, your strategy will almost certainly benefit from improving the quality of your individual and collective decision making.

Sadly though, many people rush straight to a strategic framework/template and then focus purely on completing its relevant sections. Instead, I’d encourage you to consider some key precursors such as:

• Who should be in the room when you do strategy?

Strategy is situational. It depends on your own organisation’s circumstances and what’s going on in both your direct environment and the wider world. A balance needs to be struck between a sufficiently large number of people to give diverse perspectives, to reduce the likelihood of strategic blind spots, and a small enough number of people so that timely decisions can be made.

Consequently, there is no ‘right’ number of people. However, two rules of thumb that can stand you in good stead are:

(i) Ensure at least some of the people who are going to be ‘doing the doing’ are involved. (ii) Remember that everyone likes to be heard (even if they are not agreed with).

• How can we minimise flaws and embed good practices in decision making?

There is a significant amount of research which highlights common flaws when making decisions. There are also some tried and tested techniques for making good decisions. The links below provide some insight into both:

Testing Your Decision Making

Making Great Decisions

As referred to in the first link, remember to feel as well as think. A strategy should excite, or at the very least satisfy you. So, in addition to analysis, be sure to tap into your intuition.

3. Embrace Assumption and Improvisation

Assumption

While the process for developing a strategic plan lies outside the scope of this article, do remember that, regardless of the particular process you use, it should include some degree of analysis and experimentation. This is because I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s been able to articulate where they are now and where they want to go, without some sort of analysis/experimentation.

In my experience, analysis and experimentation can often create the most angst and fear during strategic planning. It is the strategic equivalent of the social condition, FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out. There are endless analytical frameworks and experiments you could employ, so doing them all would mean spending all your time analysing and experimenting, rather than actually implementing the strategy. However, if you can’t do them all, how do you decide which ones to do?

In my experience, the best strategists deal with this reality by being hypothesis driven. They discipline themselves to generate:

(i) The 1 minute ‘answer’

Then (if it’s worth pursing) the:

(ii) The 15 minute ‘answer’

Then (if it’s worth pursing) the

(iii) The 1 hour answer

Then (if it’s worth pursing) the

(iv) The half-day answer

and so it goes on.

The alternative, to do every piece of analysis/experiment fully, would simply take too long.

In my communications training I often state that:

“Assumptions are death to great communication.”

In strategy though, I find assumptions are essential – as long as you’re clear on the assumptions you’re making and how they will be tested.

Improvisation

The other key to successful strategic analysis and experimentation is improvisation. I’m often struck by the reverence with which analytical frameworks are viewed, and the subsequent reluctance to adapt and alter them. Given the situational nature of strategy, I believe there is always value in considering how a particular framework can be adjusted to best cater for your specific situation, or what you believe to be important.

To illustrate, a framework that I have personally adapted is Jim Collins’ ‘Hedgehog Concept’. The concept was born out of Collins’ research on the characteristics of consistently successful organisations. The term ‘Hedgehog Concept’ is a reference to Isaiah Berlin’s essay, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’. Berlin divided the world into two groups, based on an ancient Greek proverb, which pitted the two animals against each other. He characterised foxes as pursuing many ends at the same time and seeing the world in all its complexity. They are scattered and never integrate their thinking into one unifying vision. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single principle that guides everything. When faced with challenges, the hedgehog only focuses on things that relate directly to the unifying principle. Consequently, when foxes and hedgehogs are pitted against one another, the hedgehog always wins.

Collins claims that all consistently great organisations exhibit the ‘Hedgehog Concept’. In practice, this means that they operate in the ‘sweet spot’ of what they are passionate about, what they can be excellent at and what will make them enough money. Anything that lies outside the intersection of these three things should be of no interest.

This links back to one the fundamental ‘Ws’ I mentioned at the start of this article:

‘Why do we do what we do?’

I personally believe that a fourth circle needs to be added to Collins’ concept – ‘service’. To me, service means operating in a way that is enriching to staff and society as a whole. This therefore requires a focus on:

(i) The organisation’s physical and cultural environment, so that staff can bring their best selves to work

(ii) How the organisation contributes to enhancing social justice and social capital

(iii) Minimising the negative environmental impact of its operations

While mch’s ‘Hedgehog Concept’ creates a smaller sweet spot, decisions can become even clearer and, in my experience, life becomes all the sweeter for it!

4. The is no one way

As alluded to above, strategy is situational. Consequently, I do not recommend any particular strategic framework. I have developed and implemented strategic plans which are many pages long and include numerous pictures, case studies, charts, graphs, bullet points and action plans. I have also developed and implemented a plan that was hand written and covered two sides of A4. Both were equally successful.

I am comfortable with the format of any plan, as long as it clearly conveys:

(i) Why you’re doing what you’re doing and why it has value

(ii) Where you are now, where you want to go and why you want to go in that particular direction

(iii) A plan of action and how the plan will be reviewed

Furthermore, the best strategists I know have several formats for their plan. They know the strategy is likely to be shared with different audiences, so they tailor the format to give each audience what they want and need. They are also able to tell their strategy as a narrative. They appreciate that people remember stories far better than bullet points and graphs. They also know that stories tap into emotions which are more powerful motivators than pie charts. Furthermore, they understand that, unless they can explain their plan to a lay person in simple, compelling terms, then they’re not clear enough on it themselves.

I hope the above principles prove useful. Do let me know about any frameworks you’ve modified, or even created, to best serve your strategic endeavours.