Love and the Highly-Engaged Team

Make a Difference Through Your Leadership

Maria R. Nebres

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642796483
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Love and the Highly-Engaged Team presents two key mindsets for leaders and how the right one can help turn problems into solutions that produce commitment and top results.

Author and human resources practitioner, Maria R. Nebres brings over twenty-five years of personal and professional experiences, gained insights, and problem solving with time-tested measures to offer an integrative framework to answer leadership questions and address dilemmas. Within Love and the Highly-Engaged Team, Maria invites leaders to learn:

• The truth about lasting success and what it takes to achieve it
• Why most leaders fail when it comes to leading tired, disengaged employees
• The truth about time and how to use it to make it their all
• An inside-out leadership approach to boosting energy, talent, and engagement
• A framework with key steps to achieve lasting balance, productivity, and results

Section II

Building the Foundation and Seizing Momentum

Chapter 4:

FRAMING THE FOUNDATION FOR YOUR SUCCESS

“You can be anything you want to be, if only you believe with sufficient conviction and act in accordance with your faith; for whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

– Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

Why Framing Is Important

We all have our own views and opinions, and in business, as you may know, leaders use techniques to influence their organizational views and opinions for increasing effectiveness of aligned focus, engagement and achieving results with their teams. One such technique is called framing, the process of demonstrating a concept, situation, or idea to a clear point that enable others to paint a mental picture of it and gravitate to deciding and acting on it. Generally, framing is the process of communicating a concept, situation, or idea in a manner (visual and in writing) so that others can paint a mental picture of it and decide to either ‘get with the ‘program’, or not. The actions from decisions made are monitored, measured, and managed (in performance management and feedback mechanisms for instance), and further decisions for managing results are made. Essentially, framing is like placing an imaginary frame around an idea or situation to zero in on a certain targeted view or perspective. The effect of framing is what comes out of presenting information in a way that alters or influences yours or someone’s decision. Often, this is achieved by using words or visuals that emote someone to feel a certain way about an idea, concept, or situation.

We see this technique used in media, in marketing, in companies when communicating on business changes or new implementations, and even in politics to influence others’ views to a particular concept, situation, or idea. In my research on the framing technique, the basic gist for its purpose, is to influence our choices, and more often than not, we fall prey to the framing effect – a cognitive bias in which our brain makes decisions about information, depending on whether the information is presented to us in a positive or negative frame. Born from the development of the prospect theory in the research findings from psychologists and behavioural economic experts Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk, Econometrica,1979, 47, 263-291), choices can be presented in a way that highlights the positive or negative aspects of the same decision, leading to changes in their relative attractiveness these aspects have on people and their choice to opt for either.

For instance, when one refers to the glass as “half-full”, the inference is to be positive and that an adverse situation can be overcome. If one refers to the glass as “half-empty”, the inference is that an adverse situation is adverse and that there is little hope to overcome it.

An essential purpose for framing your mind is to improve the focus-to-distraction ratio so that you allow focus on the right things, through the elimination of unnecessary context (variables, factors that don’t serve the focus). When the right framing is in place, your ability to focus improves as your attention is narrowed down to the items that need priority focus – no distractions. To kickstart building your mindset foundation, reframe your view of a problem into a solution-oriented way of life and believing that solving something is no more or less a cosmic event as things such as sweeping up the floor after a spill, or showing compassion to an employee who needs constructive feedback, or reflecting on your day’s fill of tough decisions, attending to a strategic planning meeting that will discuss lagging results and how to tend to it. I’ve found that viewing life in this way allows for a healthy detachment of what can constrict true leadership: getting caught up with unnecessary emotional drama that comes with focusing on problems and not solutions. Every focus deserves the same meticulous attention and commitment because they are all opportunities, for better. Every achievement, every failure, is an integral part of life and giving it full and whole attention can make a significant difference in how things work out, for you and thereby, for others. You are a whole person and your life enters the life environments you choose. To view life in this way is to live leadership and your frame of reference comes from your mindset view.

Frame for Focus

Aside from the role-specific talent and technical competencies, successful leaders have a frame of mind that catapults them to exceptional heights in achieving success results, while inspiring others to join them. Such a frame of mind allows for the right focus, the right supporting behaviour, attitude and actions that unleash and make use of the engagement and focus needed to fuel vision and goals achievement. Bill Gates had it with his tenacity to make decisions quickly in a market known for high-change situations. Martin Luther King had it with his focus to turn a dream into a visionary and charismatic leadership for a movement. Winston Churchill had it with his transformational and collaborative public image, notable for his ability to build morale, motivation, and a unified sense of identity. I believe that this frame of mind is the one that defies what, conversely and on average, others default to. This frame of mind I speak of is one in which you use focus as a step to achieve what you want. It is a frame of mind that is guided by the conscious act of deciding what you wish to achieve, deliberately concentrating on and acting on it. It is the frame of mind where “focus” means directing your mental energy and your daily actions (your habits) to be the person you want to be and the focus you want to achieve.

Scientists tell us that we are naturally hardwired for survival and thus initially gravitate to a bias for negativity. Negative experiences stick to our brain so that we can routinely assess risks by making judgements about people and situations for safety measures. To protect us, those negative events that come our way quickly, grab our mind’s attention more so than positive ones. For instance, forget the doe and her fawn along the roadside on your way to the cottage. If you don’t focus on the winding single lane-road you’re driving along at 80 kilometers (50 miles) an hour, you’re in the ditch.

Mindset experts tell us that it takes at least three positive thoughts to offset one negative thought. It’s no wonder that remaining hopeful and staying the course on a goal seem difficult to maintain when faced with challenges where that bias for negative outcomes bombard us to keep us “safe”. When we get stuck in our negative thoughts, we tend to overestimate a situation to conclude impending threats, and underestimate our ability to overcome such threats, thereby underestimating positive possibilities. Without realizing it, we build a view of negative outcomes, such as someone trying to purposely ruin our day by their series of critical questions, when perhaps that person was merely asking questions for better clarification, for collaboration to an even better outcome. The good news is that we can change our frame of mind so that when seeming negativity strikes, we can underestimate negative thoughts of threat and replace them with positive thoughts for possibilities and due diligence actions that serve what we really want to achieve. There is a way, with time-tested strategies that successful leaders use to navigate challenges and obstacles.

Focus and Mindset

With all the distractions in life, it’s easy to get focused on things that don’t connect to your purpose – your purpose for what you truly want to achieve. In progressive societies, it’s become a constant flow of readily available information, some useful and some noisy, entertainment, and insatiable wants for keeping ‘in the know’ or meeting superficial expectations with our external world’s demands and distractions. Right before our eyes and within easy reach, we have access to the constant stream of information, whether we truly need that information or not. We’re fed messages from news, blogs, advertisements, articles, television, movies, proposal, and strategy documents setting the parameters for how we are to be, how and what we should want, in our conscious world. We’re also fed messages of expectations from colleagues, friends, family, society, anyone we come in regular contact with that show up in our day-to-day lives and expectations of ourselves. Each piece of information enters our mind with one goal: to gain control of our attention and resources, for response. And once our conscious mind accepts each piece of information, it goes into our subconscious mind, shaping our way of thinking and behaving.

Knowing what information is deemed as a distraction and what is important have become more difficult for many of us to discern, as we habitually sift through and react to the myriad of messages and information coming from everywhere. As a result, many of us live our lives distracted by unconscious habits that keep us in that hamster wheel of crossing off a long list of unqualified “to-do’s” and “have-to’s”, limiting our ability to focus, create and accomplish anything meaningful. And we may even find ourselves relating with others out of obligation, or a routine of “doing”, so much so that we’ve lost clear purpose for why, simply for – you guessed, it – distracting us. When we find ourselves on this wheel, responsibility wanes for living a life of attentive, intentional living – keeping us in a life of distraction, rather than true meaning. It’s all too easy to find ourselves at the mercy of our distractions. You may know it well as you recall the acceptable words you exchange with others like, “I don’t have enough time”, or “I wish I had more time, but…”

Make sure you’re certain about what you need to focus on and what distractions to keep away from. It’s like what movie producer Martin Scorsese says, “Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame, and what’s out.” Or, like what an architect plans for his dream bungalow home with a deck overlooking a lake. A frame for a high-rise building wouldn’t be constructed. Framing for the right focus is about the choices you make, what you want to focus on achieving at your desired end state, what actions you will take and how you respond to every situation to get there. Framing for right focus, then, is a preliminary step to help minimize distractions that get in the way of achieving goals. It’s about framing your mind, making sure you have the right mindset as your foundation, so that you’re clear on what it is you do want and what goals and actions it takes, to be ready for handling all the variables and distractions that will inevitably come your way when striving to achieve, perform, relate. Your frame of mind is your mindset which is what supports you in what you determine are distractions, opportunities, and what the necessary elements are for responding to what’s happening in your life. Your mindset – the distinguishable and patterned mental attitude that determines how you’ll interpret and respond to situations – is what supports your individual thoughts, decision-making, capability, and capacity for what you act on, and how you act in response to any of these environments that are operating in your life. It is the support-base for your outcomes in these environments. Your thoughts completely control your destiny for every aspect of your life because it’s from your thoughts where actions and outcomes result.

From a cause and effect perspective, your thoughts are the cause of your results, both personal and professional. Creating the right mindset allows for creating thoughts that align with your goal, and replacing thoughts, beliefs and behaviours that don’t.

Understanding Where You Fall in The Mindset Continuum

Your mindset is where you hold your beliefs about yourself and the how the world around you fits into and influences those beliefs. An informative and easy-to-read book to learn more about mindsets is Carol S. Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In it, she highlights two types of opposing mindsets: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. Those with a fixed mindset hold the belief that traits, talents, and intelligence are fixed and cannot be changed. Carol posits that those with a fixed mindset “worry about their traits [and talents] and how adequate they are” and are usually driven by having “to prove something to themselves and others.” While in comparison, those with a growth mindset view their traits and talents as something that can be developed and grown through effort, commitment, and accountability. Those with a growth mindset thrive on learning, developing, growing, and they view their potential as limitless. She further demonstrates in her research findings that each of these mindsets are on the opposite ends of a continuum – which highlights that somewhere along this continuum, is where each of our mindset falls. She reports in The Atlantic article “How Praise Became a Consolation Prize” (December 16, 2016), “Nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time. Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a predominant growth mindset in an area but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait.” These triggers surface beliefs and behaviours from past negative experiences that have not been fully dealt with and resolved at the conscious level such as childhood traumas of abuse or feelings of fear and failure. So which end of the continuum serves us best for achieving success, particularly for the sake of progression or achieving desired results? I believe the right end of the continuum is along the growth mindset. Developing a growth mindset is crucial to succeed in anything – it’s the most important component of your journey’s foundation to achieving success. When I decided to switch my career in 2005 from employment to owning my own consulting and coaching business, I knew that there was a way for me. I held faith to my purpose, tested, optimized, and seized momentum for getting out there to learn, adjust, and expand my network for opportunities – and I knew it would pay off eventually. I had a gut-feeling of it – it did pay off, and it’s ongoing. I was on the right path, because I set a mindset to align with my ongoing path for what I progressively wanted, not what I didn’t want.

When building the right mindset, it’s like building a home: your blue print is created by your clear vision for what makes a house feel like home to you (your end in mind) and you hold to that vision with your mindset as the foundation. When I refer to “feel”, I mean really feel the feelings from a place of love, connection and joy for that vision. Picture yourself in that beautiful kitchen, that family room with the joyful memories you’ll create with your loved ones if that is your vision. Your vision could be that you and your team have achieved the results with stellar performance where everyone is productive, highly engaged. Within the mindset are guiding elements needed to form the right thoughts, beliefs, behaviour/attitude, decisions, actions, and habits to effectively attract the positive emotions and feelings (and even resources) that support you for what it takes to create the reality of your vision. By this, you will be able to respond effectively to those opportunities, obstacles and challenges that will come along the way, not stay in your current state that does not serve your focus.

Here are some of the key focus areas, at a minimum for setting the right mindset:

Critical Reflection for Current State Clarification

Critical reflection is more than just “thinking about” something. It is a way of evaluating yourself and situations in a rigorous way – helping you to carefully consider what is good and what could be improved. It is vital to make mindset change positive and productive. It involves trying to make sense of what happened to create your current state and it means looking for answers about the personal issues that have arisen, and which are patterns from past experiences. Critical reflection is a genuine deep search from within for what’s led to the current state – an examination of cause and effect relationships, resulting responsive emotions, behavioural patterns and actions that have been embedded as habits. When critical self-reflection occurs, it enables the ability to move on from seeking to blame and relinquish responsibility for outcomes.

Discovery and Exploration of Options for Future State Clarification

This is the part of transformation when you become aware of the possibility for changing your reality through self-empowerment, from a vision that incorporates what you have realized about your core passions, joys, values, needs. This awareness empowers you to consider alternative and solutions-oriented options for a better future state utilizing the awareness of your true purpose, your abilities and power that may have been untried in the past. Appreciative inquiry, visualization and affirmation tools and techniques are typically used to fortify the posi...