Working Wisdom

‘A rock pile ceases being a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.’
— Antoine De Saint-Exupery

In your first coaching session as a colloquium delegate we asked you to set some goals for yourself. We have many reasons for this. For one, we know that people engage more vigorously when they feel connected to a goal. For leaders we also know how your ability to lead is determined by your sense of purpose, and the development of your passion.

In other words, meaning is an essential quality that draws your team to action. It is the one thing in modern leadership that will unite your organisation towards a common goal. The days of a manager who drives results from above have shifted to a leader who persuades, inspires and develops her or his people from the inside.

Telling stories
Here is a story I enjoy re-telling — it illustrates the moment of imagination so well. During the building of the El Duomo, the great cathedral of Florence, the Vatican sent out a reporter to see how the construction was going. The reporter approaches three stonemasons and asked, ‘What is it you are doing?’

The first stonemason said that he follows the directions of the foreman. He explained what the team was doing, cutting the stones just so, and putting them up on the wall.

The second stonemason described his craft. He demonstrated how his skill allows him to put the stones up on the wall with such precision. ‘Not even a piece of paper can fit between them.’

The third stonemason paused, when asked. He reflected for a moment, and then said quietly: ‘I am building a cathedral.’

Find your cathedral.

Each of these perspectives is important for the functioning of a team, but for great activities the last stonemason’s perspective is the most important. We are often very able to say what it is we do, and how we do it, but very few organisations have made the ‘Why’ of what they do a part of their organisational story.

This is leadership by imagination. You will pay a price when you imagine a different future than has existed. Leadership can be lonely and confusing at such times. You will often be drawing upon a new map.

But those who make no such imaginative leap have their own terrors. Without a strong sense of passion for the change – without meaning behind it – most leaders will fall back into conformity, and what is merely expected.

Ask yourself: What is your cathedral? What are you creating when you come to work with your team? What principle do you serve? Is your work a job, a career or a calling?

These questions go to the heart of what it means to be a professional. Do you have a meaning that goes beyond your individual efforts, and puts your work into a larger story? Working together in the colloquium we can draw this out together.

Who cares enough about you to hold you to the highest standards? Sometimes our greatest professional relationships may challenge us, or bring feelings of discomfort, and sometimes that is the role we must take with others, too. As leaders we have to make choices about our approach when coaching or leading members of our team. What are those times when we have a duty to challenge those around us in order to help them positively?

A workshop facilitator recently asked me to describe someone who made a great difference in my life. Almost immediately I thought of a teacher, George Vosburgh. Recounting old teachers, we often fall into a wistful affection, with sepia tinted memories. Not so with George.

I was proud to get to study with him. He has been the lead trumpet player with the Philadelphia Symphony for many years now, and at the time I studied with him he was second most senior player in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He is commonly seen as one of the premier orchestral players in the world. I look at those four months of lessons I had with him as among the most important learning times of my life. I still date my understanding of myself and my performance capability as ‘Before George’ and ‘After George’.

My memory of George is not affectionate in the traditional sense, though. He really didn’t seem to like me, and I didn’t like him much at first, either. He had an intense face, a red beard, and I don’t recall him ever smiling. He challenged me at a crucial time in my performance career, and I have taken the lesson of how he did this as important to me as a performer. But I also learned from him as a leader about the importance challenging the comfort zone of those with whom I work.

Taking Lessons

The summer I sought him out, I travelled from where I attended music school to Chicago. He agreed to meet with me, but I would have to audition to see if he would accept me as a student. I thought to impress him, so I started with one of the more difficult pieces in the trumpet literature, a piece I had been working on for my junior recital.

He stopped me after the first line.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not like that. Can you play me a C scale?’

A scale? I started to play the simple scale.

‘Slowly!’ he interrupted.

I played it slowly.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said,’ just play the first note.’

I played it.

‘Listen,’ he said. He played the note. ‘Play that.’

He then proceeded to teach me to play a note. We took it apart, with its beginning, middle and ending. It’s tone and dimensions of expression. We spent an hour just looking at the basics of how to play a note.

He set me an assignment to play a few simple scales, some range practice, and a simple, simple melody. He made it clear that I was not ready to be attempting difficult pieces until I started with baby steps again, and basically re-learn how to play my instrument.

I left that first lesson wondering what I had gotten myself in for. He did not express much warmth, or interest in me, and was not an encouraging teacher, or a teacher interested in his students. I was frustrated, and wondered if I had made a mistake in approaching him.

I left the lesson discouraged, but I also left the lesson feeling like I had seen a new world of trumpet playing. He was teaching my ears as much as teaching my fingers and breath.

Tough Medicine

Medicine, it is said, given at the wrong time and wrong amount, can become poison. The reverse is also true, that what is often a negative can help. The same can be said of leading others.

We discuss this in regards to performance management, in the Australian Applied Management Colloquium program. Of course we stress positivity and nurturing our people, but sometimes a confronting approach will bring out the best for the task at hand.

George was good medicine for me. Great teachers will often break their students pre-conceptions and comfort zone down. George was forcing me to go beyond what I had been taught, and to connect with each moment of making music directly.  I was overconfident, and overly comfortable with my accomplishments so far. He booted me up the butt and got me to take the next step into direct perception of the music I was playing.

As leaders we must nurture as well as challenge, and the key to doing this well is to have a clear sense of what it is we are trying to create together. George was a great musician, and had been pushed by his own teachers to listen carefully, and to take apart every aspect of his own performance. He cared deeply about making great music. He paid service to that, and expected me, as his student, to focus on my performance more than the stroking of my ego. In doing so he offered me a great teaching in what makes for great performance.

Who have been your great teachers? When have you been pushed in a positive way, and what made that a positive experience? I’d love to hear from you.

by Kirk Fisher

This is a story about time and about leadership, and the power of waiting. A leader’s job is to help find solutions, but often the right answer needs wisdom, and a bigger perspective. This can only happen with time. Though the pressure to produce can be huge, we need to have the ability to slow down, take our time, or even reverse a decision if we feel it has arrived to quickly

I recently heard this about Vinoba Bhave, a close follower of Gandhi’s, and how he led the largest peaceful transfer of land in history. In 1951, after Gandhi’s assassination, the followers of the movement looked for who would step into the role of leader of the movement. Vinoba was the most likely successor, and huge masses of people asked him to take over from Gandhi and to speak to them about how to get the movement started again.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘That’s turning the clock backwards.’ In a time of transition we want to return to the past, which feels certain, and tested. At such a time the model of the past feels safe. Are we looking at the reality of the situation?

So Vinoba said, ‘Let’s go forward instead.’ The people begged and pleaded and eventually he agreed to stand in front of the movement.

‘But only,’ he said, ‘if you will wait.’ There is no need for leadership if there is no change needed. The job of leadership is to pay attention and make a decision. Paying attention means there is a space where things can be seen, and talked about. In some cases we will want to leap across this space, but Vinoba suggested that they wait, and open the potential for seeing and understanding the situation more clearly.

He wanted them to wait while he took six months to talk to people in the villages. What he told them is that he would walk to the conference across India.

So he walked and met with people. Early in his journey he came to a village, and as he commonly did, he sat under the trees to listen. In this village the people were very hungry, and hungry in a way that we can’t probably imagine. They had no food for their families. They had great need, they told him, and they wanted him to get someone to help them.

‘Why wait?’ he asked. ‘Why don’t you plant food and feed yourselves? Don’t wait for the government or someone else to fix this.’

‘We are untouchables,’ they replied, ‘and cannot get access to the land.’

‘I’ll go and talk to the new government,’ he said, finally. ‘We’ll change this.’

The meeting ended, they all retired, and Vinoba went away and thought about what the people had asked him. The next morning he woke up and called another meeting.

‘I made a mistake,’ he told them. ‘If this is going to work, governments and laws won’t do this. By the time all the wheels of bureaucracy work there will be no good land left.’

There was a silence. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he told them. They sat and thought about this. To change your mind and say you don’t know is hard to do as a leader. You are expected to have the answers. You are expected to be decisive, and to be the solver of problems is great for the ego. To ‘not know,’ however, invites intimacy with the situation, and the moment. When a group is lead into this unknown there is greater potential for participation in solving the problem, and a widened series of possibilities. Have you had a leader stand in front of your team and say: ‘I don’t know’? Such candour often empowers the group to develop solutions.

In the meeting with Vinoba a rich man stood up. ‘How much land do you need?’ he asked the crowd.

‘We have 15 families, and we need 5 acres a piece’

‘I will give it,’ the man said.

‘No,’ Vinoba said, however, yet again. ‘Not this way. You have to check with your children, who will inherit this land, and your wife and family, and make sure this is okay.’ No person stands alone, outside of the system.

So the man did this, he checked with his family, and he came back the next day and said, ‘Yes. My family agrees we will give you this land.’

In the next village, Vinoba came across a similar situation, and the villagers told a similar story. He did not present a solution, but he told them what happened in the last village. Sure enough a man stood up. ‘How many truly poor?’ and he offered 100 acres for 20 families.

By the time Vinoba arrived at the gathering for the movement he had collected 2200 acres for poor families across India. And this was the birth of the Budhan land reform movement. His followers walked across land, without government support, and accomplished this great transfer.

As you will see from this story, there were moments where a solution presented, but a whole system needed to be addressed, not one part of it. It is easy to see that we can pause before leaping at a solution. One of the great uses of decision-making processes is to slow the answer’s arrival, so the greater network of opportunities, can be more fully explored. This takes wisdom and creativity.

The further consideration of Vinoba’s great leadership is in the courage it takes to say, ‘Wait. Let’s consider. Maybe our solution needs more time.’

The Leadership Challenge, by Kouzes & Posner (2008, Jossey-Bass)

Kirk Fisher

The classic book I’ve chosen this month is ‘The Leadership Challenge,’ by Kouzes and Posner. The authours went around the world, across all sorts of cultures and nationalities, and they looked at what leaders do when extraordinary results happen in organisations.

Just take one of the key questions they studied: ’What characteristics do followers want from their leaders?’ This is a question for us all.

Delegates in the colloquium know I love setting up experiments in class. The first of many such experiments comes on day 1 of the colloquium. I ask Kouzes & Posner’s question, phrased as: ‘What do you want from your leaders?’*

It’s remarkable, but every time, four characteristics seem to rise to the top of the list. What’s more, they come up in the same proportions Kouzes & Posner found, as well.

Here are the global results, and again, these are consistent across all sorts of socio-economic backgrounds, nationalities and cultures:

Honest (88%)

Forward Looking (71%)

Competent (66%)

Inspiring (65%)

Think about it: if you want to improve your leadership, and influence others, here are four universal characteristics you can improve.

Consider this for yourself, and let me know what you think. The ‘Challenge’ in the title is about how we can act upon Kouzes and Posner’s research findings. How can you demonstrate your honesty, for instance? Remember, it’s not whether you are honest or not, but how do you communicate, role model and act in a way that demonstrates honesty?

And get a copy of the book. It’s hefty, but it has a good index so you can search for themes as you need them.

* I am indebted to Des Penny for showing me this exercise many years ago.

Today, like every day, billions of human brains go to work. This is nothing new. For centuries our ancestors rolled out of bed, dressed and offered their services for pay. What we know now, though, to a greater degree than ever, is what happens inside these heads. In this article I’d like to share a quick history how we look at workplace happiness and productivity, and then share some more recent studies of what actually happens in our brains. Most importantly, I’d like to show why a positive organisational culture works.

Before we had our current brain scanning technology we looked at the workplace as a matter of productivity. Efficiency studies in the 1930s showed us evidence that workplace morale made a difference. Experimenters in one early study looked at assemblers in the Hawthorne Electrical Factory. The experimenters changed a range of factors like toilet breaks, lighting, and the length of the workday.

The researchers observed that a sense of happiness, autonomy or control had a large effect on efficiency—even more than changes in pay, policy, or physical discomfort. Workers performed better, for instance, when the experimenters installed a red button to control their lighting, heat, and cold. The addition of the button increased productivity—even when they disconnected the wires to the button so it didn’t work.

The Social Brain

Since then we have seen further factors that effect workers’ happiness and morale, and to look at this it is helpful to look at the brain.  Our brain operates as a social organ. While at work, we appear to be, well… working. We dress as professionals, and talk with practiced confidence. However, we can see that more is going on when we look through a Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan (MRI).

What we see is that while our conscious activity seems to be dressed nicely, smiling and confident, our hidden grey matter is constantly checking for social threats and opportunities. The most powerful systems of our brain operate like a member of a primate group in the wild, whether we consciously know it or not. Our kinship relations are our number one priority, as far as the brain is concerned, and this can have a huge impact on our ability to work.

Your brain, in fact, is wired the same for social pain as physical pain (see illustration). Your brain looks about the same when a colleague publicly criticises you as when you cut a finger. When you tell a lie or hide your feelings it is the same as a blow to the head. Why is this such a surprise?

Dr Beecher served as a medic in World War II. Cut off from supplies during battle he was forced to ask soldiers about their pain to see who would get the limited amount of morphine. To his surprise, 75% of the soldiers said they were okay, and suffered no pain.

They had been shot, after all. Dr Beecher had been a civilian physician long enough to know this was not right. The story the soldier told, however, suggested that the message these wounded men told themselves was a different message than what civilians tell themselves when they are shot.

The story makes a difference. The civilian might say, for instance, ‘I am shot! How terrible!’ and need the morphine.

The Soldier, on the other hand, tells a different story, and suffers less: ‘I am shot. I’ll go out of the battle now. They’ll bring me to a hospital. Maybe I’ll get to go home.

Pain and emotion link closely in our neural systems. Most over the counter pain relievers, for instance affect the emotional reaction parts of the brain, rather than nerve receptors. We should look at what this looks like in the workplace next.

Brain Pain in the Workplace

The emotional systems in our brain closely link to physical pain, as we see, but for some reason we tend to ignore our brain pain as if it were not there. If we perceive a social connection threat, for instance — if our colleague ignores us, or we feel nagged by our boss — we might pretend to ignore it, shrug it off, and try to mask our feelings.

We need to know that our brain cannot do that. When our social connection is threatened a central part of our brain will change the way the whole system operates.

This is surprising. Intuitively, we think that our brains speed up or slow down, but they actually operate at one speed. Whether we are asleep, driving a car, or solving a crossword, the brain maintains one level of output. At the warning of a threat, therefore, blood and glucose immediately divert to the ‘fear, flight or fight’ portions of our brain. Other parts will slow down to compensate. Because we are limited in our brain capacity, we will lose the ability to concentrate, to remember short-term facts, or think creatively. This is what we mean when we say our ‘morale’ suffers.

This is why psychologists Dr Peter Cotton and Dr Peter Hart note that organisational climate is the strongest predictor of individual morale and distress. In their review of workplace wellbeing and performance, Cotton and Hart suggest morale, in turn, gives us a strong influencer of behaviours like productivity, negativity and positive ‘citizenship’ types of behaviour in the workplace. (Cotton, Peter and Hart, Peter M. (2003) ‘Occupational wellbeing and performance: a review of organisational health research’, Australian Psychologist, 38: 2, 118 – 127)

Brains at Work

So morale is important. Great leaders understand this, and create conditions for brains to thrive. We suggest issues of culture, social connection and morale are the main tasks of leadership.

To do this, we must learn the code our brains follow. Here it is – our brains focus on the following primary qualities of social connection:

1. Status

2. Certainty

3. Autonomy

4. Relationship

5. Fairness

These form the basis for a positive workplace culture. For instance, when cooperation outweighs competition, individuals focus less on loss and gain of status. We give trust to an organisation when our managers behave predictably (certainty). When our leaders offer us opportunities for autonomy over how we achieve outcomes we will work harder than if simply handed a set of procedures. If we sense we are part of a team we will work better (relationship). If we see poor behaviour rewarded or ignored, this offends are innate sense of fairness, and we will be likely to disengage.

We will see variations on this theme every day in our workplace. What we find, too, is that when team members learn how the brain works, our views change. While we used to view discussions of culture to be a ‘fluffy’ aspect of organisational leadership, we can now we see a basis for paying more attention to our social connections. Our brains work that way.

“The reasonable person adapts to the world. The unreasonable person persists in trying to adapt the world to his ideals. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable one.”      –George Bernard Shaw

“You’ve got to go out on a limb sometimes because that’s where the fruit is.” –Will Rogers

Teaching principles, without first changing mindset, is useless. We read books and articles about innovation but the harder step is to step back and look at how we fail to think fully. Before we simply add tools to the mix, before we teach how we develop new ideas, we need to examine the biggest hindrance to innovation, which is conformity.

Conformity has an immediate power over our minds and actions. It can be a positive force, of course. We need compliance, identification with a team, and socialisation skills. We also need to be able to have pre-set, simplified procedures. This is how we work together. It is how we build individual ideas into big concepts. Please follow your traffic laws, for instance, when driving home. It is simply arrogance, as well, not to read, or cultivate the wisdom of those who are experts in our fields.

The paradox is that conformity can also mean the loss of innovation, original thinking, and can result in terrible judgements. We find unconscious conformity at the heart of our how we think when we fall into fundamentalism, or the fascism of masses of people. You may think of footage of the Nazi Nuremberg Rally. More personally, when a celebrity commits suicide the rate of suicide in the populations as a whole goes up by ten percent for the next two weeks.

You may be less aware, though, of how the instinct to believe others saps our ability to think clearly. Howard Gardner, at Harvard University, has studied how we use our intelligences. He introduced the idea of ‘multiple intelligences’ into our vocabulary, and he also looked at how our intelligence changes over our lifespan.

Gardner found that young children were very powerful in their ability to take in information, organise it and use it. About 99% of children, between the ages of 0 and 4 years, were ‘geniuses’ in their ability to use their intelligence, he found.

When he continued up the age levels, though, he found that only 70% of children between ages 5 and 10 were still operating at this same ‘genius’ level. Further on, only 20% of young people between the ages of 11 and 20 used their intelligence potential to this level. After age 20 only 2% still had highly integrated intelligence.

At first the researchers could find no explanation. Then Gardner and others noticed that these rates of decline followed exactly the rate at which we give up faith in our own judgement in favour of our peers. Conformity, in other words, steals our genius. It swallows our ability to think to our potential.

We see this in business, too, where studies show that trained, experienced professionals, again and again, will give up their point of view to defer to the opinions of their superiors.

As we say in our training, we don’t want bloody revolutions, but we do want to encourage robust discussion. Our work cannot afford less than full potential thinking.

You may recall the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle explosion. Before the launch the engineers warned the project managers that the O-rings might fail in the cold predicted for that day. This is not what the managers wanted to hear.

“Are you sure,” they said, “that you can prove this is a problem?”

When pressed, the engineers backed down, and seven astronauts died in the explosion from the failed O-rings.

It can be a painful process to go beyond our normal thinking, in a team or as individuals. The French painter, Matisse, described his creative process as extremely violent. To sit down and paint each day felt the same as if he was sitting down to punch someone in the face. ‘It is like lancing an abscess,’ he said.

The drive to see one’s work in fresh or innovative ways is often difficult in professional situations if innovative thinking is not encouraged. We have a biological drive to fit in, to not risk ostracism from our ‘pack.’

Nevertheless some people do go beyond conformity, individually and in teams. The qualities of curiousity, and passion for the work at hand, are at the core of these thinkers, but we can be more explicit.

Cynthia Rabe, in her book, “The Innovation Killers,’ describes some qualities of those who break through conformity, and who help organisations break through conformist thinking. She notes how important it is that organisations seek out, and cultivate these qualities in employees.

She describes the quality of being a “Renaissance Thinker,” for instance, as being wide-ranging in your interests. Renaissance Thinkers enjoy exploring connections where connections don’t normally occur. They read widely, and explore outside their main disciplines.

Another quality is “Psychological Distance,” which is the ability to not get caught in the expert mode. A temporary addition to a team will often add this quality, or a relative newcomer to a field can bring this quality. Paired with some basic training in a field we can bring what I call an “informed-naiveté” to the situation. “We didn’t know enough to know it couldn’t be done,” said one member of a ground-breaking education team.

Similarly, Edward DeBono suggests that we look at increasing our alternatives for any given decision. If you are choosing from any less than 12 ideas you are not choosing, he suggests. You are merely reacting.

Try this: choose a problem you are facing and force yourself to come up with 20 solutions. Often it is hard to go past 4 or 5 possibilities, comfortably. Then we see how our criticising mind begins to hold us back when we go beyond the easy answers.

“Oh that couldn’t work,” we say. “That’s ridiculous!”

That’s where innovations lie.

I have heard a story about when DeBono was hired to solve a problem for a builder of a skyscraper. No one wanted to rent the upper floors of the building because the elevators they had installed were too slow. The cost of installing a new system in the finished building would be too much, they said, but neither could they afford to rent the lower floors only.

DeBono came into the building and sat in the lobby for a day, studying the lifts. At the end of the day he came to the owner and told him to install a bank of mirrors around the entrance to all the lifts.

“How will that speed up the lifts?” he was asked.

“It won’t,” he said, “but people love to look at themselves, and they won’t mind the wait as much.”

Making a commitment to go beyond conformity is a commitment to questioning assumptions, and stretching beyond the standard answers. The commitment great leaders have to listening to new ideas takes humility and courage. Think of the difference between the investors in early phones and the British diplomat, who at the first demonstration of a long-distance phone call said: “Well that is well and good for Americans, but we won’t need phones in England. We have many boys to use as messengers.”

What are the new opportunities that we are missing today? What are the types of conformity that will benefit our work? To go further, as leaders we must develop our ability to choose between what is conscious conformity, and aids us in working efficiently, and unconscious conformity, which steals our genius. Conformity, positive or negative, is not a conscious choice for most people. We don’t see how it happens, and so we don’t develop the perspective to judge.

We recognise that ideas are power in today’s marketplace, and so we must look at what stops ideas from being born, and what stops them from being acted upon. We must first understand conformity, develop our ability to go beyond it, and then develop this ability in our teams. The commitment we all must have is to look at what narrows our view, and what narrows our ability to choose.

When we are talking about change of any kind it is often helpful to start with conditioning.

There’s a story that came out of the University of Melbourne several years ago. Researchers put 10 monkeys in a room, and put a ladder in the room, too, with some food on top of the ladder. Monkeys looked at the food and, of course, tried to climb the ladder to get to the food.

The researchers, though, had rigged the ladder. As soon as the monkeys touched the ladder the sprinkler system went on, and the monkeys all got wet.

Monkeys hate getting wet, so they quickly learned: ‘Don’t Touch the Ladder.’ Pretty soon, no monkeys would touch the ladder. They didn’t even need the sprinkler system.

They wouldn’t touch the ladder, themselves, but also, if they saw another monkey touch the ladder they would grab their fellow, beat him or her up, and in effect tell them: ‘Don’t Touch the Ladder.’

Then the researchers did something interesting. They took one of the monkeys out, and put in a new monkey–who’d never seen the ladder, never had the sprinkler system.

First thing it did? Went for the food on top of the ladder. But all the monkeys grabbed the new guy, beat him up, and said, again: ‘Don’t Touch the Ladder.’

Then the researchers started replacing the monkeys, one by one, until they were left with 10 monkeys who had never touched the ladder, never seen the sprinklers go on, but still, if one of them went near it, they’d all beat him up: ‘Don’t Touch the Ladder.’

That happens with monkeys, but it also happens in groups. Something happens, we respond, and we continue to respond in the same way every time after that, whether we know it’s right or not.

What can we do about it? In my previous post, ‘Choose Your Attitude,’ I mention how we think 40,000 to 60,000 thoughts each day. Most of these are redundant and fearful. So we can see that relying on just a good set of values and positive thinking won’t help us. If we are just going to give it our spontaneous best efforts we will be heading backwards.

One of the best things a group can decide is to develop a strategy around behaviours. If we have a strategy, and landmarks set up along the way, we will know what we need to do in order to move forward, and we will know if we are actually moving forward.

We have to understand that it is extremely difficult to make changes happen. Most change efforts are annoying and ineffective because they don’t take this into account. Our conditioning is powerful, and it takes a top-down, bottom-up, inside and outside effort to get beyond it.

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”

—Robert Frost

Our ability to choose our attitude at any given moment is key to our ability to lead. The ability to control our response is a fundamental aspect of our emotional health and our workplace competency. When you drive you want to have control over your car. Imagine driving down the highway and suddenly you start to swerve. That would be a problem. In the workplace we sometimes lose control in the same way. We lose our thinking and emotional ability to steer and react.

Our attitude is our ability to see a situation and respond to it. When there’s a problem with our attitude our attention narrows, we become reactive, fall into a negative mood, or we have a limited perspective on our situation. Dr Victor Frankl wrote: “Everything can be taken from us but the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Frankl came to this conclusion after an experience with the extremes of human survival. During World War II Frankl lost everything. An Austrian Jew, and a psychologist, he was captured by the Nazis and brought to Auschwitz. There he lost his wife, his parents, his writings…and nearly his life. He survived, almost impossibly, and from this experience he came to see the importance of making meaning, and choice.

There were some in the camps, he said, who seemed to remain alive in their hearts, despite the horrors. There were those who could be starving, but still decide that someone else needed their potato more. Some who could still hear a bird song on a frozen morning and smile. These were the ones who chose their response, and found their meaning despite the outward conditions beyond their control. With nothing left to them but their choice of attitude they retained this last freedom—to choose who they would be.

How do we respond to our situation? At a more mundane level, how might you react if some unjustly accuses you of incompetence? Poor attitudes are common in some workplaces—how much has your attitude become negative towards your work, your colleagues or your self? We don’t have to be taken into the extremes of a concentration camp to be tested. As Frankl suggested, our choice of attitude is the last of human freedoms, but often the first to go, as well.

Imagine walking to a meeting with your boss, ready to present a proposal. As you walk, negative thoughts may come up. You might tell yourself: “She’ll never like it. This will make me look flaky, or aggressive.” You start to doubt yourself and look back at old failures or fears.

We have a huge stream of thought-moments that flow throughout our day. Psychologists tell us that we have between 40,000 and 60,000 thoughts a day. Most of these thoughts, they tell us, are automatic, unconscious, and largely negative. Most of our thinking, in other words, relives our fears and failures. We can contract into these automatic thoughts, because they are comforting, they are known. We are largely conditioned to relive our history.

So how can we expect to create new ideas, and live positively in the present when most of our energy is spent reliving our failures from the past? As leaders, how can we help our team or department to turn this around, and look at our present situation with more focus? How can we turn towards the future with a sense of potential?

The key is to catch your thinking. We form our attitudes based on our conditioning. Our conditioned attitudes might be helpful, or they might not. Our unhelpful attitudes are like giving false directions when someone asks you how to get somewhere. We will have the wrong map. If I were to land in Perth, and I wanted to go to Victoria Avenue, I could look at my map. I am on Princes Street now, and so I take out my map and see that the two roads run together. I start walking and walking and soon realise there is nothing that meets up with Princes Street that resembles a Victoria Avenue. Then I look at my map and I realise I am using a Melbourne map, not a Perth map.

Here’s how this can happen with children. As I write this it is around 6:30 on a Friday night. My youngest daughter is hungry, tired and cranky. She sees we have some freshly baked muffins out on the counter and she wants one. I can tell her that dinner is already cooked, and I’ll serve it in about ten minutes, but I just want to finish this article. That doesn’t even register for her. She wants a muffin now! She might start begging and whining, over and over…or worse!

Of course, I’ll stop writing at this point and attend to my children, but the question is: if I give in, give her the muffin—who wins? She certainly doesn’t, because she has now learned a false set of directions for getting what she wants: whinge and make a pest of yourself to get what you want. This might work once, or twice, but if you grow up like this you can get yourself in some serious difficulties in the work place.

We can learn to anticipate our map structures, and learn the grammar of how we make choices. If we can see them in the formation stage we can become active choosers. We will always have some false or unrealistic maps and beliefs of reality because life is always changing. The layout of our life is in flow, as is our maturity and understanding.

We can learn, and like weightlifters we can practice our attitudinal muscle. The late psychologist Albert Ellis suggests we learn to work with our ABC’s:

A = Activating Event

B = Belief

C = Consequent Reaction

It works this way: Picture that you are stuck in traffic during peak hour. You are late for your meeting and if you go now, you’ll get through the intersection and save yourself two minutes. All of a sudden, without signal, a car zooms into your lane ahead of you. You slam on the brakes, avoiding an accident and you are cut off from going through the intersection.

This is your Activating Event. The Consequent Reaction is the attitude you form. You might become enraged, frustrated, or even drive erratically to try to get through the intersection after the lights change. Maybe you fall into road rage, and make the problem worse.

The question is, what caused your Consequent Reaction? Was it the Activating Event of being caught in traffic, or your Belief? In this case your Belief could be that you can drive through traffic at all times and not ever have to share the road with other drivers. Or that getting angry with this other driver will cause the problem to be fixed.

We can take the route of innocence. “I am completely not responsible for my attitude in this situation. It is the other driver, the traffic, the people who built the roads, the makers of automobiles…” This is very seductive, but it leaves us powerless. And we can’t change the traffic, or the behaviour of other drivers, so we are innocent.

What we can take responsibility for, in this situation, is our belief. We must become detectives, and get to know the beliefs that determine our attitude.

For our wedding, my wife met with the florist. “I don’t mind the exact mix of flowers,” she told them. “You can choose how they work together. But the one thing I hate is peachy-apricot flowers. None of those please.”

When she arrived at the florists to pick up the flowers they opened the box, and guess what? All of them were peachy-apricot.

My wife just laughed. She described a sudden revelation she had at this moment: “This will only be terrible if I make it so.” Her belief had been that she hated these flowers, but in that moment she spontaneously saw that this belief wasn’t quite so firm, and that her enjoyment of her wedding day would not change by the colour of the flowers she saw on the altar.

This is what it is like to move into the unknown, and to embrace change in our workplace. It takes courage. It takes heart. This situation we are in now is different in its history than situations we encountered in the past. There is new potential here, and we can choose to see this.

Choose your attitude. Choose a new belief that is more realistic and your attitude will follow. In my car, I can choose to make this a miserable experience, yes. I can also play the radio, or wave back at the bored children ahead of me who are gesturing and laughing. I can plan my next project in my mind. I can roll down the window and enjoy the breeze. Life is happening right now.

Here’s an exercise: Think about someone you admire. It could be your father, a friend, someone at work, or maybe a famous figure. Think about this person for a moment, and consider what you admire about them.

In our workshops I ask people to tell the group a couple of words that describe what they admire about this person. I hear words like “honest,” “passionate,” “conviction,” “integrity,” and so on. What we most admire about these people is the attitude they bring to their work, to their relationships, to their lives.

We have two sides to our work. One is to get results, to solve problems, to serve, and to create. We set up means to an end, a goal. Choosing our attitude is important for this. One business study demonstrated that for every 1% shift in positive attitude there is a 2% shift in revenue. Competency skills in customer service, team building, emotional intelligence and communication all link directly with our mastery of our attitude.

There is another side to our work, though. We bring our own success with us when we choose our attitude. We are the ends, as well as the means. We often quote Ghandi: “You must be the change you want to see.” We are not only a means to an end. Put yourself into the picture. Our attitude determines our ability to be the person we want to be. We are also the end to our means.