Elephant thinking

What is elephant thinking and how we can use it to recognize our strength?

 

Some weeks ago I read a book ”Self-leadership and the one minute manager” written by Ken Blanchard, Susan Fowler, and Laurence Hawkins. The book provides a nice story of one person increasing his effectiveness three cornerstones of situational self-leadership. The first one is “challenge assumed constraints”, the second one is “celebrate your points of power”, and the last one is “collaborate for success”.

 

But first to elephant thinking. Elephant thinking comes from the story of training elephants. Very beginning of training young elephants are locked with chains to poles and by the time they get used that and are not trying to escape. Later on chain does not need to be strong or either the pole does not need to be deeply grounded since elephant assumed it cannot escape due the chain and pole even it has enough power to cut the chain or pull the pole out of the ground. Elephant is the prisoner of its own learned assumptions.

 

Based on this, the first cornerstone of self-leadership encourages us to challenge our assumptions, our ways of thinking basing on past experiences and to break the chains and to pull the poles out of the ground. It also reminds us that no one is mind reader, but still we assume what other people are thinking and we make assumptions based on those.

 

Next pole on the road of the self-leadership is “celebrate your points of power”. This is something what we need when recognizing our strengths. Quite often people are feeling powerless when they feel not to have right position. When asked what kind of power exists, they will answer only position power. But that is not true, there are different kinds of powers to use to affect to people around. Recognizing these powers and knowing nature of those reveals the strengths of the person opening the ways to lead yourself. What are those powers then?

 

• Position power – Power provided by authority.
• Relationship power – Power to be well networked and using connections to get help from the correct people to make work done.
• Knowledge power – Power of knowing the system, knowing the processes and practices.
• Task power – Similar power with knowledge power, but power is more on real doing not just knowing.
• Personal power – Power to give assurance to people and make them feel comfortable with whatever they are doing.

 

Next time when you feel for example that you are not in a position to get people to do what you want them to do, just take a few seconds and think about is the position power only solution in your case.

 

The third stone of self-leadership is “collaborate for success”. This requires that you know your needs. What kind of support you need, is it supporting, directing, delegating or coaching type of. And in order to get what you need is to use words “I need” to tell about your needs. There is real magic in those words because human beings love to be needed and feel they can help you and share the success with you. 

 

The book full of absolutely great and thoughtful tips and tricks for increasing your effectiveness and ability to recognize personal strengths and competences. I found a lot of new ideas to my everyday life from this book.

Trust good, control bad

Oldies but goldies. It is a bit cliche to say that everything was better before. But sometimes it is good to go back to get perspective to existing issues and matters. I have been thinking motivation and commitment a lot lately. How to get myself motivated and how to get others motivated? How increase commitment of people to their tasks? Most likely very common thoughts if you are working in supervisor role.

These thoughts dropped me back late 90's while I was just graduated from university head full of great theories and new skills. I joined Nokia Mobile Phones at that time as a programmer in a team implementing GSM high speed data transmission services. Technology was pretty new and there were no clear understanding what is all about and how it should be implemented. We pretty much jumped into deep without knowing where and started to make trials and increasing our knowledge level. Have to say those days were full of innovation. There were no right or wrong decisions, no good or bad trials. There were only actions towards common target known by everyone. That target was achieved successfully, we implement high speed data transmission for Nokia mobile devices.

So what? As I analyse the time almost 20 years ago I like to highlight the main success factors from my point of view. The first thing is the attitude of management. They were honest and open with their knowledge base. They did have guts to say that they do not know how to do it but they trust we can do it. They gave us a frame within we were allowed to work and they did not took part to actions happened inside the frame. The second thing to point out is innovation. As I mentioned there were no good or bad trials. There were number of different trials made by the team and all those gave something to the final product. We had a freedom to try and fail on our journey. The third thing is the use of peoples potential. Everyone had a significant role and everyone was having right match between skills and tasks. All of this can be summaries by saying that success of the team was based on trust without controlling.

Trust and control, good and bad? Not exactly. Every organization needs reasonable amount of control. Controlling is needed for target setting and giving frames within to work for. But what happens inside the frame should be based on trust. If controlling happens also inside the frame we are talking about micromanagement. The message what micromanagement gives to employees is that they don't have motivation, they do not have skills, they are not trusted etc. This leads to situation where people are not using they potential, they are carrying out tasks with minimal effort and they do not feel to be appreciated. Too much control promotes distrust.

Successful leadership is not based on control but it based on leading people's potential.  What does it means? It means that leadership is paying attention to the people and their potential and how use it, not just controlling what is done, how it is done and in a worst case dictating how something needs to be done. Understanding the potential of people requires emotional intelligence and skills to see value of people from the organization point of view. Key to make people to use their full potential is trust.

Control based leadership is not working anymore, that is the fact. Army as an organization has always been seen as very controlled and authoritarian environment. But now also in army they have started to look leadership from different perspectives. This can be noticed for example from the article of Finnish military magazine Suomen Sotilas 5/2015. There was an article named same way as this blog "Trust good, control bad" and it handled same topics. The summary was that we need to increase trust and decrease control. And the most important is to take a good of the most precious ones, people.