The Inspiration Code

How the Best Leaders Energize People Every Day

Kristi Hedges

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780814437902
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business Skills

Everyone wants to be the kind of leader who energizes and mobilizes others-yet too few are. Why is it so challenging to crack the code?

All it takes is the right conversation…great leaders inspire action with their words. They spark enthusiasm and commitment. With a single conversation, they can change the direction of someone's life.

Executive coach Kristi Hedges spent years studying exactly what inspiring leaders do differently. Informed by quantitative research and thousands of responses from leaders at all levels, she reveals that inspiring communication isn't about grand gestures. Instead, those who motivate us most do a few things routinely, consistently, and intentionally.

In Inspiration Code, Kristi explains:

• Present: investing their attention carefully and guiding the flow of conversations
• Personal: speaking genuinely, listening generously, and bringing out the potential of those around the
• Passionate: exhibiting sincere emotion and exuding energy attuned to the situation
• Purposeful: helping others find meaning and see their place in the bigger picture

Eye-opening and accessible, The Inspiration Code dispels common myths about how leaders communicate-and guides them in cultivating qualities that authentically excite. Inspired companies need inspirational leaders. Learn to unlock motivation, lift peoples ‘sights, and lead them into the future.

CHAPTER 1

ARE YOU TALKING TO ME?

“She was there for me.”

“He made the time.”

“Her door was always open.”

“He invested in me.”

When I’ve asked people to describe someone who inspired them, one of the first comments is that the person was noticeably present. People who inspire us are both physically and mentally available to us. They focus on us. They give us the gift of their time, and just as important, the gift of their attention.

That attention affects us in a multitude of ways.

How we focus our attention reveals what we care about—whether or not we mean it to. On a basic human level, we crave positive attention from those who matter to us. We’re social animals. Isolation hurts us. It’s hard to overestimate the very human need to have others bear witness to what’s happening in our lives.

Certainly the connections we feel form the fabric of our days and influence our attitudes. Gallup’s well-cited research on what makes productive workgroups shows that those who say they have a best friend at work are significantly more likely to strive for quality and to get recognition and encouragement.¹

Leaders should also keep in mind that their attention casts a large shadow and has an inflated impact. Psychologists have long studied how power shapes attention. Susan Fiske, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, has found that that we pay more attention to those above us in social hierarchies.² Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at Berkeley, has published numerous studies showing that being in power makes us not just pay less attention to others, but to actually feel less for them.³

This power differential is important. Think about it. When you’re a leader, people are watching you closely. They notice how you enter a room and where you sit as well as your tone of voice and demeanor. However, you’re more prone to overlook the people at the levels below you. You are less likely to be tuned in to them, perhaps lost in your own concerns, while you’re being studied intently. Many leaders don’t realize that this phenomenon is happening, or they ignore it, or they let it wear them down. This explains the considerable misunderstandings and frustrations often seen in hierarchical relationships.

When you’re a leader, people are watching you more closely and you’re more prone to overlook them.

For leaders, presence is a blinking red light that signifies importance. Being fully present at key times has a motivational impact. When a leader actually pays real attention to us, it feels great. We feel special. The capacity to inspire is heightened.

BEING PRESENT CHANGES THE CONVERSATION

At a theoretical level, the conversations we have may seem pretty similar. If we’re present enough for a dialogue, then we’re accomplishing what we need. But if we’re truly present, that’s when the shift happens.

In workshops, I lead an exercise to show the impact of focused attention. (I’ll share here so you can experience it vicariously.) The setup is easy. Working in pairs, participants discuss recent weekend plans—with a twist. In the first round, I have the speakers talk about their plans, and instruct the listeners to act as if they don’t actually care all that much about what the speakers are sharing. They can check their phones, look around the room, and practice spotty eye contact—whatever is in the realm of normal, disengaged behavior.

The energy in the room during Round 1 is low-key. Participants share conversations like this:

What did you do this weekend?

Saw a movie.

Oh yeah, what did you see?

The new Bourne movie. It was pretty good, but I thought the last one was better.

I’m not big on action movies, but I do like the Bourne series. I haven’t seen a movie in a while though. Just seems like we never get to it.

I know what you mean. The weekend goes so fast.

You know the drill; it’s your typical catch up. Short conversations that lose steam quickly, with people looking to me for the “all clear” to stop talking as the exchange devolves into uncomfortably lowered gazes.

Then we go to Round 2. This time, the listeners are encouraged to be completely present to their discussion partners. They are asked to orient their posture toward each other, make sustained eye contact, and tune out distractions. Listeners are told to be curious, to notice the reactions of the other person, and to ask questions about what the speaker seems to have energy around. Otherwise, they have the exact same conversation.

Except they don’t. This time the discussion is completely different. There’s a high level of energy in the room. People are laughing, gesturing, and listening intently. They are mirroring each other’s body language. I can barely get the participants to stop talking.

And time after time, when we debrief, I hear that the act of paying attention changes the conversation significantly. In Round 1, the speaker could barely discuss the most basic of experiences without a present listener. The conversation is superficial and brief. In Round 2, the experience is markedly changed, looking more like this:

What did you do this weekend?

Saw a movie.

I noticed you smiled when you said that. What brought that on?

You caught that! Yes, I was thinking about my son’s reaction. I took him to see the Bourne movie, which was the first grown-up movie he’s seen with me. It felt like a rite of passage . . . something I used to do with my dad. We loved to see action flicks together.

I can tell that spending time with your son is really important to you. What else do you like to do?

We’re both into hockey, and love going to games. We don’t go very often though; that’s harder to plan, especially with my travel schedule. Now that I think about it, it’s not about the content of what we do, but the time we spend together that makes it memorable. Even a quick trip to the movies was meaningful. I’m going to think of activities we can do on the spot, like . . .

If you were a fly on the wall in the room, you would think you were looking at a group of old friends catching up, or colleagues hashing out a serious topic. You’d find it hard to believe it’s the same people who could barely keep a conversation going! While weekend plans may have initiated both conversations, in Round 2, a present listener enabled the speaker to expand the topic, often in surprising ways. The speaker covered more ground, the conversation ventured into areas of meaning and importance, and both the speaker and the listener learned more about each other.

When I conduct this exercise with intact work groups, participants say they learned more about their colleagues in the five-minute exchange than in all the years they’ve known them. I’ve heard people say they discovered something new about themselves simply by having a curious listener. And just about everyone admits that the contrast between the conversations is remarkable.

By sitting in front of someone and investing fully, we create an inspirational space. Not so difficult, or so it seems. While it’s fairly straightforward to be a present communicator, it’s hard to find one. If we can make the commitment, especially in relationships where we want to inspire, we can make an impact by essentially doing nothing but choosing to pay earnest attention.

This same effect comes into play in a large group or public setting. Ever meet someone at a networking event who actually took the time to get to know you? That person stands out. And I’m pretty sure you’ve been to a networking event where someone looked over your shoulder to see who else was in the room, and can recall how diminishing that feels. (No wonder so many people consider networking to be a distasteful, or even a little soul-crushing, chore.)

Our presence is an invitation to inspiration. It’s the lead-in, the door opener, the hook. Yet, how easy it is to squander this opportunity to use our focused attention to make an impact. I was once brought in to work with a senior leader, Sam, who needed to unite a team behind a new and bold vision. She asked me to attend her all-hands meeting, where her entire team had gathered from around the globe. Sam, who had grown up at the company but had spent most of her time in a different product division, was an unknown quantity to her current team. This meeting was Sam’s chance to introduce her vision and rally the troops around it.

Expectations were high. Everyone milled about, buzzing with eagerness to hear what was in store. As the start time neared and passed, you could see people glancing at their watches. Excitement lapsed into concern, and then into annoyance. Finally, Sam walked into the room fifteen minutes late, finishing a call, and took the stage hurriedly. She began her comments by telling everyone that she’d been managing a crisis so would be talking off the cuff. She was there, but everyone in that room knew she wasn’t present. There was zero inspiration happening that day. In fact, Sam created an inspiration deficit.

Sam’s team needed to be optimistic and engaged to accomplish its mission. After that meeting, I overheard several people lamenting the fact that the company had picked the wrong person to lead the cause.

LET’S GET REAL: TIME IS MONEY

You may be thinking that you’d love to be fully present, but it sounds like it takes more time than you have to give. Many of us feel as though we can barely get through our inbox by the end of the day. Which leads to what gets in the way of being fully present: We’re distracted and busy. Yet, some people manage to be fully present to what matters to them. They have equally demanding jobs and the same twenty-four hours to play with each day. So, how much of our distracted attention is our own doing?

Social researchers would argue, a lot.

How much of our distracted attention results from our own choices? More than we’d like to admit.

We’ve concocted...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I: Present: The Gift of Attention
• Part 2: Personal: Putting Yourself Into It
• Part 3: Passionate: Bringing Heart And Energy
• Part 4: Purposeful: Spotlighting Meaning
• Conclusion: You’re Already in a Virtuous Cycle
• Appendix: Leader’s Prep Guide to Inspirational Communications
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author