Chapter 4

Moving to Peak Performance

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Objectives

How to attain peak performance?

How engagement and meaningfulness are enhanced to generate the energy for high performance?

How to manage a good fit of EI, MI, BI and SI required for high performance, depending on the task?

How continuous improvement is managed and barriers to leadership behavior are overcome?

What makes a good leader turn into a great leader?

How to face ambiguity and create simplicity in processes?

The discussion encompasses the following:

• Create Self-Power
• Enhance the Engagement for High Performance
• Make Good Fit of EI, MI, BI, and SI
• Understand What Makes a Good Leader Great
• Know the Vital Habits Leading to Great Results
• Face Ambiguity
• Create Simplicity

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Moving to peak performance essentially means moving from a fixed mindset to a growth-oriented mindset. It never happens until a professional has attained a high level of engagement and achieved meaningfulness in workplace.

High performance is attained by managing the following underpinning core factors:

1. Dependability: when trust in team has reached to a level where their commitment is respected
2. Clarity: the task is well defined and the clarity of path to the set goal is known
3. Meaning in work: personal values are aligned with project/organizational values and the level of engagement is high
4. Impact: the effects of contribution are made known
5. Psychological safety: each member is comfortable to discuss or express dissent and take risk in trying something new/different

Peak Performance Is Also a Journey Toward “Self-Actualization”

Take an attempt to answer the following fundamental questions that drive your behavior and create your leadership persona:

• What do you want to achieve in life?
• What legacy do you want to leave at workplace?
• Who will be benefited?
• What is your choice to place energies?

It helps to have a viewpoint toward the “rightness” of a philosophy. When you believe that self-actualization is an important goal in your life, you will tend to move toward collective benefit without making the least bit of a conscious choice. In a workplace, this might mean the following:

• You made a choice of accepting the leadership role, with the justifiable intent of expanding your learning and capability.
• You sought fairness for yourself in a situation when it wasn’t crucial.
• You lead your team toward a jointly developed vision.
• You’ve been recognized for clearly articulating the role others have played in contributing to success and joint success intentionally created from the start.

The ever-increasing challenges are to inspire and extend trust for leading, without which one might be managing or administering, but not leading. You manage things; you lead people—and real leadership requires trust!

Trust does not just happen; it builds over time and requires a conscientious effort. Building trust organization-wide takes time but erosion is triggered with just one mistake.

4.1 Create Self-Power

Tremendous power is achievable in concentration, meditation, or maintaining some form of daily solitude for self-reflection.

Our world celebrates the extroverts and reveres the overcommitted.

The great game of success, society suggests, is won by filling our days with complexity, our hours with noise, and our moments with interruption, distraction, and overstimulation.

What a mess that causes—along with serious destruction of our highest potential.

The quiet ones and epic performers know a different game.

From Pablo Picasso to Kobe, Bill Gates to Nelson Mandela, Maya Angelou to Mozart, most of the best in their field spend time alone: walking in the wilderness, thinking in a room, communicating with deep pockets of total solitude, being liberated from the confines of the world, breaking free from “normal thinking,” and going deep into the loftiest realms of creativity, introspection, and uncommon insight.

The science behind the rewards of solitude are pretty phenomenal—making time to be alone actually shuts down the part of the brain responsible for self-criticism, firing up the part of the brain that contains a natural state of genius.

Steven Kotler, in her article “Your Brain Performs Better When It Slows Down,” wrote the following:

In flow, parts of the brain aren’t becoming more hyperactive, they’re actually slowing down, shutting down. The technical term for this is transient, meaning temporary, hypo frontality. Hypo—H – Y – P – O—it’s the opposite of hyper means to slow down, to shut down, to deactivate. And frontality is the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that houses your higher cognitive functions, your sense of morality, your sense of will, your sense of self.

Researcher Aaron Dietrich in 2003 provided the understanding to kickstart our A-game. It contains revolutionary insights from neurobiology, the science of elite performance and even breakthrough understanding from epigenetics and how our environment dramatically influences the expression of our genes.

The following are the essentials of ritualizing solitude at least once a day:

 

#1. When you get out into “the wild” (maybe a 1-hour walk in the nature at the end of your work day; however, the wilderness for you could also be a quiet room in your home or a jog through your neighborhood), your brain waves slow down.

#2. When—amid solitude—the part of your brain responsible for self-criticism, mental chatter, and constant worry shuts down. This silencing of the prefrontal cortex happens temporarily and is known to neuroscientists as transient hypofrontality.

#3. With the prefrontal cortex temporarily quiet and your mind on a little vacation, you enter the flow state. Elite athletes call this “the zone,” the state when all great performance begins.

#4. In the flow state, your neurochemistry is altered. Dopamine (the neurochemical responsible for inspiration) gets released. Anandamide (the neurochemical responsible for bliss) shows up. And serotonin (the neurochemical responsible for pleasure) kicks in.

#5. With what is called “a pharmacy for mastery” in place, you get your best ideas. Your creativity makes explosive gains. You begin to see around corners, and solve problems that few humans ever get to solve.

This is your natural state available to you daily; most people don’t know they have it. And not many create the conditions to experience it.

4.2 Enhance the Engagement for High Performance

Take a look of how to deal with challenges of professional engagement and creating the alignment of values for a high-performing culture on a project. The focus is on values—and a need to manage the human factors to facilitate a member in pursuit of values—instead of unwillingly working on assignments.

Organizational culture is a conscientious endeavor to develop the support required for desired end results and for meeting the business purpose. Cultural strength is derived from values. Necessary corrective actions are required immediately when misalignment is noticed in values of team members. The alignment enhances engagement, commitment, and enthusiasm. It is fatal to delay a corrective action. Procrastinating lead to a heavy cost.

Cultural development is a continuous process that goes along with business advancement. It starts with the induction of a team member, and goes through the alignment process, maintaining engagement. The well-aligned values result in high engagement, a higher level of commitment, higher motivation, and higher performance.

High-Performing Culture

You just cannot go unnoticed in a high-performing organization; in such organizations, a high level of enthusiasm is prevalent and the team members remain energized. They have a purpose—and they work together to get things done.

Values-driven organizations are the most successful. Values have a great influence on a team member’s behavior and attitude, and are at the very core of all human decision making. When you work in a culture that aligns with your personal values, you feel energized. You are motivated toward and committed to the welfare of your colleagues and the success of the endeavor. Releasing this level of energy is critical for building a high-performing culture and for business advancement.

It is true that leadership practices transform into culture, and to make it impactful, they need to align with core values. Therefore, each team member must practice self-leadership and find the alignment of core values within the organization to touch upon the potentials of high performance.

Value-Driven Culture

When your personal values are aligned with that of the organization, your engagement level goes high. You are working not only for the organizational business purpose, but also for the satisfaction of your own values. You are contributing to the culture of your project.

Values matter a lot in achieving the following business outcomes:

• Values drive the culture
• Culture drives team-member fulfillment
• Fulfillment drives customer satisfaction
• Customer satisfaction drives end results

What Is Value?

What is value and where does it comes from? For a better understanding, we can look at the work of sociologist Morris Massey on the value systems that are discovered by a person in three stages:

1. Stage 1:The imprint period—birth to age 7
2. Stage 2:The modeling period—ages 8 to13
3. Stage 3:The socialization period—ages 13 to 21

Further, Dr. Scott William, of Wright State University, wrote an article on human values. The following is a relevant extract:

Our personal values are our convictions regarding what we believe is important and desirable. Each of us has a “complex of values.” A values complex is the set of values that we hold and the conflict, compatibility, and hierarchical relationships among them. Personal values come in two varieties; terminal and instrumental. Terminal values are the desired end-states that a person strongly wants to achieve such as “a comfortable life,” “freedom,” or “salvation.” Each individual has a different set of terminal values in his or her values complex. Instrumental values are convictions about a person’s desired characteristics or ways of behaving such as “ambitious,” “forgiving,” or “polite.” We possess instrumental values because we believe that each one helps us achieve our terminal values. For instance, “ambition” may be an instrumental value that helps one progress toward the terminal value of “a comfortable life.”

Why Values Matter?

Paying attention to our values helps us to

1. Become more self-aware,
2. Make ethical decisions,
3. Prioritize our tasks, and
4. Develop credibility as a leader.

First, understanding one’s own core values is integral to becoming self-aware. Self-awareness, in turn, helps us understand how people perceive us, and allows us to identify the personal qualities that we would like to change. Values influence our choices, but our choices also influence our values over time. If we neglect to examine the congruence of our actions with our values, our actions may be guided by immediate concerns and instant gratification rather than our values. Change in values is a slow process, but it often begins with changes in behavior. Over time, we come to take for granted the choices that we repeatedly make even if they are initially incongruent with our values, and our values begin to drift as well. Clarification and re-clarification of our personal values can halt that drift.

Instilling Values in Others. Effective team leaders and business executives build common values among the people they lead. Up to this point, I have described values as if they originate from within a person. In fact, a person’s environment and life experiences shape their values. Moreover, social systems such as business organizations, schools, and churches influence their members’ values.

Values of a Team Member Must Align with Business/Project Purpose

An important point to note is: Although the values developed by a person at an early age are re-shapeable on the job through strong leadership, the core values in line with the required business purpose must be analyzed when hiring for a project. Re-shaping of values is a long and difficult process, and productivity cannot be put to risk for shaping the right value.

The impact of culture on the progress of work was validated in a webinar on February 9, 2017, at www.ProjectManagement.com. The webinar was attended by 940 project management practitioners. Two surveys were conducted in the webinar.

1. First survey question: Do you recognize an existing culture in your organization?
2. Second survey question: “How supportive is the organizational culture of your values/views/aspirations?” [Scale 1-5 (Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, Excellent)]

The first survey indicated that 94.4 percent of participants were conscious of the existence of a culture in their organization. The second survey showed alarming results—both for professionals and for their organizations—indicating that an alignment of values to support a high-performing culture was missing.

The second survey results indicated the following:

1. Only 10 percent of participants were enjoying an organizational culture that was highly supportive of their personal values that indicated their high engagement, high commitment, high performance, and high satisfaction—such workplaces typically create outstanding results.
2. Another 24.4 percent found that they got very good support from their organizations, but needed some corrective actions to fix the alignment of values to help the organization move to the next level of excellence in performance. Attention from leaders is needed to rectify the situation and to remove the irritants and align the values.
3. Alarmingly, a majority of 44.2 percent of participants indicated that although they got good support from their organization, there was still much room for improvement in aligning their personal values. That means the professionals were not able to reach their full potential to reach a high level of performance. This is a pity for organizations that are not able to align their values with the professionals who work for them and, thus, end up performing with mediocrity. Such situations may warrant the loss of star performers who leave for better cultural support in order to reach higher self-satisfaction.
4. The remaining 17.6 + 3.61 percent of practitioners are not working in a conducive work environment. Professionals under such conditions may hang on for a while, and then leave at the first opportunity to move. This is an example of poor management, when organizations have hired professionals but have failed to engage them enough to happily perform to their mutual benefit.

How to Make a Difference for a High-Performing Culture?

Thus, we have recognized the significance of “values” that a project needs to manage for aligning the organization’s project values (business purpose) with those of each professional in a team. We can understand the meaning of value along the following lines:

 

V – Volatility, the disruptive force that creates hurdles in the right direction

A – Awareness of the disruption

L – Learning the process of team building

U – Understanding the importance of alignment of values

E – Engagement of team members

The following approach may help achieve values:

1. Identify a professional’s personal principles, values, and beliefs, preferably during the hiring process.
2. Combine everyone’s values.
3. Integrate core values in everything the organization does.

Develop a Strategy

A culture strategy is formed by shared belief systems and values that are intended to support both business strategies and personal development. A values-driven culture supports the human behaviors that bring about enthusiasm, passion, and commitment—behaviors that are critical for success. The components of strategy are as follows:

1. Vision of future—what needs to be achieved and how
2. Shared values aligned with systems and processes—what values need to be upheld in systems and processes for advancement of tasks
3. Critical success measure—what success will mean in every endeavor
4. Walk the talk—what is being preached must show in actions
5. Accountability—what punishment may be given for not upholding the values

Influencing Factor

Values-driven organizations are the most successful. They have a huge influence on a team member’s behavior and attitude, and are at the very core of all human decision making.

When you work in a culture that aligns with your personal values, you feel energized. You are motivated and committed to the welfare of your colleagues and the success of the endeavor.

Releasing this level of energy is critical to building a high-performance culture and for successful business outcomes.

Take advantage of the project management approach, which not only helps governance and control of an organization for high performance, but also develops organizational competence and capacity for professional advancement in peoples’ careers. Project management culture is the best solution to the increasing complexity for business advancement. The dominating culture with the project management approach creates values that are equally important for organizations and professionals alike.

Project Management Professional Culture

It is minimally defined as a set of work-related values, knowledge, and beliefs shared by project management practitioners, consisting of four key dimensions:

• Professional commitment,
• Project team integration,
• Work flexibility, and
• Viewing others in terms of work performance.

Project Management Cultural Strengths

The project management approach provides a knowledge strengths–based culture that is managed with the evolution and advancement of knowledge in relevant fields and stays aligned with market requirements. The strengths-based culture is driven by

1. Knowledge-based foundational standards, guides, and practices
2. Systems and processes
3. Lessons-learned and continuous self-improvement
4. Leadership-intensive approach

What Values Are Created with the Project Management Approach at the Portfolio Level?

1. Systematic advancement—A business goal is translated into a portfolio of projects where interrelated and interdependent projects are grouped together into a program for enhanced benefits of implementation. Portfolio/program/project management provides a line of sight for governance and control, channels of communication, flow of information, a group of activities for costing and an evaluation of progression for satisfying needs of customer.
2. Results-driven management—Incremental advancement helps to evaluate the outcomes with the desired results and make corrections well before landing into a point of no return, thus saving resources and minimizing costs.
3. Defined hierarchy of responsibilities—Clarity in roles and responsibilities enhances the interest of professionals in their tasks and helps them perform to the best of their abilities.
4. Governance and control—The clear line of sight of scope and challenges help achieve enhanced governance and control of resources, minimizing duplications and waste.
5. Transparency—It helps gain the ownership of responsibilities and advances the steps needed to achieve the desired results, helping practitioners to shine before management and gain recognition.
6. Self-improvement system—The process of capturing lessons learned provides a strong tool to make corrective actions in processes or changes in methodology, which brings wealth of experience at every level and helps achieve continuous improvement with innovation and creativity to help maintain a competitive edge.
7. Team work—Clarity of the portfolio-level goal helps each team to pursue their incremental, desired outcome to reach the interim deliverable. The mindset for working in a team is a very important factor in high performance.

Business Benefits Are Created at the Organizational Level

Each project contributes to a business value. Further, at the organizational level, it is managed through organizational project management (OPM),which comes into play through the core enabling processes noted below:

1. Competency management—This ensures that skills are developed and available when needed for the implementation of a portfolio, program, or project.
2. Governance—This describes the decision-making framework and oversees the work done in each process.
3. OPM methodology—This provides the structure (people and processes) necessary for implementing the portfolio, program, or project.
4. Strategic alignment—This aligns the portfolio, program, and project with the business strategy (PMI 2013).

Fix the Value-Driven Culture and Cultivate Benefits

Value-driven projects contribute to organizational culture and are a continuous endeavor in that direction. They help in indicating the disruptive misalignment of professionals’ values with the organization’s business purpose. The corrective actions are taken immediately, and a high-performing culture is created to cultivate benefits through the following:

1. High professional engagements, dynamism, commitment, and work performance
2. Attracting and retaining high performers
3. Satisfaction for long-term work commitment
4. Growth and leadership behavior

4.3 Make Good Fit of EI, MI, BI, and SI

Advancement in leadership requires multiple intelligences—emotional, moral, body, and social, as shown in Figure 4.1.

Developing a grasp of these intelligences helps one move to the next level of leadership. Leaders who aren’t agile enough to adapt these won’t stay effective leaders for long.

“Psychologist Howard Gardner advanced the idea of multiple intelligences more than 35 years ago” (Gardner 1983). Since then, there has been a growing appreciation of how individuals can excel in math while doing poorly in verbal areas or—more pertinent to the fitness world—how intelligence is represented in athletes’ complex and graceful actions. Such performances require an embodied understanding of spatial relations, physics, and kinesthetics.

Let’s discuss each area in detail.

Emotional Intelligence

In project management the key word is communication, and it is more than simply reporting. Effective communication relies heavily on a person’s emotional intelligence (EI). It may be used to relate with the team in a positive manner and encompass the emotional brilliance, social incompetence, organizational savvy, and group IQ. The best source of knowledge on this topics is: Goleman (1995) describes the competencies that drive leadership performance.

1. Self-awareness

   The ability to read one’s emotions and recognize their impact while using gut feelings to guide decisions.

2. Self-management

   Controlling one’s emotions and impulses and adapting to changing circumstances.

3. Social awareness

   The ability to sense, understand, and react to others’ emotions while comprehending social networks.

4. Relationship management

   The ability to inspire, influence, and develop others while managing conflict.

   Effective communication is far more than simply going through the motions of speaking and listening, writing and reading. Done well, communication is one of the most powerful tools that any manager or leader may use to achieve their goals.

Communication: Emotional Intelligence

Neurogenesis adds power to our understanding of neuroplasticity, that the brain continually reshapes itself according to the experiences we have. If we are learning a new golf swing, that circuitry will attract connections and neurons. If we are changing a habit—say trying to get better at listening—then that circuitry will grow accordingly. On the other hand, when we try to overcome a bad habit, we’re up against the thickness of the circuitry for something we’ve practiced and repeated thousands of times.

In order to excel, leaders need to develop a balance of strengths across the suite of EI competencies. When they do that, excellent business results follow.

How can you tell where your EI needs improvement—especially if you feel that it’s strong in some areas?

The 12 competencies required in EI are shown in Figure 4.2 against each domain.

Simply reviewing the 12 competencies in your mind can give you a sense of where you might need some development. There are a number of formal models of EI, and many of them come with their own assessment tools. When choosing a tool to use, consider how well it predicts leadership outcomes. Some assess how you see yourself; these correlate highly with personality tests, which also tap into a person’s “self-schema.” Others, for sample, Yale University president Peter Salovey and his colleagues, define EI as an ability; their test, the MSCEIT (a commercially available product), correlates more highly with IQ than any other EI test (Goleman and Boyatzis 2017).

So what are the brain lessons for coaching, or for working on your own to enhance emotional intelligence?

First, get committed. Mobilize the motivating power in the left prefrontal areas. Get enthusiastic about achieving the goal of change. Here it helps to draw on dreams, vision for selves, where to be in the future. Then work from where you are now on what might improve to help get where want to go in life.

Next, get practical. Don’t take on trying to learn too much all at once. Manage your goals at the level of a specific behavior. Make it practical, so you know exactly what to do and when. The neural connectivity is strong. When you start to form the new, better habit, you are essentially creating new circuitry that competes with your old habit in a kind of neural Darwinism. To make the new habit strong enough, you’ve got to use the power of neuroplasticity—you have to do it over and over again.(Goleman 2011)

Moral Intelligence

Moral intelligence (MI) is the ability to lead with four core principles: integrity, compassion, responsibility, and forgiveness. Increasingly, business advancements with project management have the same core principles.

Researchers Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel, in their book Moral Intelligence: Enhancing Business Performance and Leadership Success, found a connection between strong moral principles and business success. Using original research, the authors show how the best performing companies have leaders who are able to promote moral intelligence throughout their organizations, despite the fact that the business world all too often seems to reward bad behavior, at least in the short run. Included in their book is what the authors call their Moral Competency Inventory, a metric that can help leaders assess where they and their organization currently stand.

“Businesses endeavors that are anchored in these four moral principles: integrity, compassion, responsibility, forgiveness and have leaders that practice them will return greater value to their shareholders, team members, customers and the communities that they operate in than leaders who aren’t. That’s our core assertion,” Fred Kiel wrote. “We find that in these four, integrity will yield trust from the workforce; responsibility will inspire; forgiveness will promote innovation; and caring [compassion] will gain retention.”

According to Lennick, some leaders often become too distracted and lose sight of their own behaviors, which leads to irrational decision making. “Irrational decision making trumps IQ every time,” he wrote. “The way the brain works, practice makes permanent, so leaders may actually learn to be very self-aware . . . . That’s a skill few people have mastered.”

But learning the skill, according to Lennick, can change all leaders for the better and, in turn, allow them to find greater success not only for themselves but for the people they lead. Yet Lennick issues a stern warning—making a pronouncement is only a step. Actually working toward a behavioral change is something organizations need to pick up on, where chief learning officers can highlight learning and development overall.

Lennick wrote, “Organizations under-invest and underestimate the importance of developing and helping team-members accomplish an awareness of themselves.”

Body Intelligence

To sustain strong pressures of workload you need a strong body. Body Intelligence (BI) refers to how aware you are of your body, what you know, and what you actually do for and with your body. The concept may sound new, but it is central to everything you do.

According to Jim Gavin and Margaret Moore (2010):

As we explore the concept of body intelligence, consider the following examples:

Kyle is a superior physical specimen. He trains daily and eats well. He knows which exercises work different muscle groups. However, he constantly pushes beyond his pain threshold. It’s a matter of habit. He treats his body as a machine—so much so that he feels detached from it.

Riham is a resident in internal medicine. She is a walking encyclopedia on symptoms of internal disorders. Yet, it’s hard for her to find time for exercise, and her long hours have accustomed her to a questionable diet and chronic lack of sleep.

What’s missing in each of these profiles? Is it knowledge of what to do? Awareness of bodily sensations and conditions? Or appropriate action?

BQ (Body Quotient) comprises awareness, knowledge, and engagement. BQ incorporates a deep and sensitive awareness of the body, both internally and externally. It embraces knowledge of what the body needs—and what it doesn’t. It also encompasses action in a way that integrates awareness and knowledge. There are three pillars of body intelligence.

The First Pillar: Awareness

How often do you experience aches and pains that you hope will go away? What physical sensations have you lived with so long that you think they’re normal? Awareness is about being tuned into your body and its signals. It’s about being awake to how your body “speaks” to you. Theorists such as Ken Wilber (2000) distinguish between gross and subtle body sensations. Gross sensations include experiences like soreness in your muscles after weight training. Subtle sensations relate to awareness of body energies, experiences of flow, or knowing where joy shines in your somatic being. Knowing your body allows you to make adjustments in the moment; for example, when you are sitting awkwardly or sensing the energy shift in the environment. It also means being conscious of the impacts that certain foods or physical practices have on your well-being.

The greater your body awareness, the more you are in control of bodily outcomes. Attune to the effect the first cup of coffee gives you as a base for choosing or refusing a second cup.

The Second Pillar: Knowledge

Generally one tends to ignore the unhealthy habits and continue until a warning is given in a subtle way by [the] body or doctor. In a time where threats to our physical existence show up in whatever media we tune into, and yet, paradoxically, most people live as if the rules did not apply to them. The other dilemma of this information age (Castells, 2009) is that after a few Google searches people often claim a self-ascribed expertise. Instant access to virtual realms of information permits us to argue almost any position.

Body knowledge is akin to what scientists call “health literacy” (Hasnain-Wynia & Wolf, 2010). Knowing scientific facts is an important part of health literacy; however, it’s not enough. Body knowledge also refers to an understanding of the actions needed to diagnose and treat physical concerns. Applying generic scientific body knowledge on a personal level, do you know what steps to take in order to learn what’s going on in your body?

The knowledge pillar of BQ is partially demonstrated in your ability to assess the level of information you can accurately interpret without expert consultation.

The Third Pillar: Engagement

Engagement isn’t just about “doing it”; it’s about doing the right thing repeatedly until you need to switch to the next right thing. Engagement is commitment to intelligent action based on what you need at this point in your life.

Engagement is intimately tied to knowledge and awareness. If this were not the case, the third pillar would create as many problems as it is intended to relieve. The marathoner who scoffs at wearing orthotics or the cyclist who never stretches is not demonstrating Body Quotient (BQ). Action must work in harmony with reflection and information in a lifelong process.

BQ Programming

In the fitness world, where do you focus? The mandate is mostly about action or engagement; however, action is often narrowly defined as the enactment of physical exercises (e.g., strength training to build physical muscles). For well-rounded BQ (encompassing all three pillars), you need to build awareness and knowledge muscles as well. Awareness and knowledge can be as difficult to achieve as reliable adherence to exercise. It means that you must develop programming around these nonphysical agendas in the same way you do around physical goals. Call it BQ training.

Increase Awareness. Professionals do body scans not only do so when they exercise but throughout the day. This boosts their awareness over time. Journaling and meditation are wonderful aids to self-attunement, as are “stop-and-notice” practices. Cause-effect reflections involve noticing how you are feeling (good or bad) and reflecting on possible influences.

Increase Knowledge. Certainly, whatever reading program is suggested needs to be part of an ongoing practice. Attending conferences and seminars can also be helpful, and health webinars offer easy access to user-friendly information. Part of knowledge acquisition is specific to body. Do you know cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and other biochemistry stats? If not, how do you access this information and keep it current?

Evolve Engagement. Habits are hard to break. What better way to change patterns and practices than through careful experimentation? This might begin with exercising consciously or paying attention to the sensations and thoughts that arise while training. Professionals might do in an unusual manner”.

Social Intelligence

Social intelligence (SI) helps us to work together, build teams, and pursue a common goal. You must develop social skills to make yourself comfortable among team, stakeholders, customer, and community.

Dr. Daniel Goleman in his book Social Intelligence noted the following:

Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person. That neural bridge lets us impact the brain—and so the body—of everyone we interact with, just as they do us.

Even our most routine encounters act as regulators in the brain, priming emotions in us, some desirable, others not. The more strongly connected we are with someone emotionally, the greater the mutual force. The most potent exchanges occur with those people with whom we spend the greatest amount of time day in and day out, year after year—particularly those we care about the most.

During these neural linkups, our brains engage in an emotional tango, a dance of feelings. Our social interactions operate as modulators, something like interpersonal thermostats that continually reset key aspects of our brain function as they orchestrate our emotions.

The resulting feelings have far-reaching consequences, in turn rippling throughout our body, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate biological systems from our heart to immune cells. Perhaps most astonishing, science now tracks connections between the most stressful relationships and the very operation of specific genes that regulate the immune system.

To a surprising extent, then, our relationships mold not just our experience, but our biology. The brain-to-brain link allows our strongest relationships to shape us in ways as benign as whether we laugh at the same jokes or as profound as which genes are (or are not) activated in t-cells, the immune system’s foot soldiers in the constant battle against invading bacteria and viruses.

That represents a double-edged sword: nourishing relationships have a beneficial impact on our health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies.

Virtually all the major scientific discoveries have emerged since emotional intelligence appeared in 1995, and they continue to surface at a quickening pace.

Our inner potential for positive relationships makes the picture that enlarges beyond a one-person psychology—those capacities an individual have within—to a two-person psychology: what transpires as we connect.

Empathy, for example has the sensing of another person’s feelings that allows rapport. Empathy is an individual ability, one that resides inside the person. But rapport only arises between people, as a property that emerges from their interaction. Here the spotlight shifts to those ephemeral moments that emerge as we interact. These take on deep consequence as we realize how, through their sum total, we create one another.

Develop Social Skills

Project teams look for a leader who remains calm and effective under pressure and who empathizes with team, their peers, and the management in pursuit of the best results. Such individuals have exceptional social skills that enable them to act with grace in stressful situations, listen and communicate effectively, admit their mistakes and learn from them, respond well to criticism, and show high self and situational awareness.

Career advancement depends on improved social skills; these are as important as technical skills and allow for instantly reading someone to communicate in the best possible way to help navigate everyday interactions such as holding conversations, forming and maintaining relationships, asking for help, instructing and guiding others, and listening and thinking critically.

Social skills are not the same as behavior; they are components of behavior that help an individual understand and adapt across a variety of social settings.

Hill Walker, a leading educator, defined social skills as a set of competencies that

1. Allow an individual to initiate and maintain a positive social relationship
2. Contribute to peer acceptance
3. Allow an individual to cope effectively with the larger social environment

Social skills can also be defined within the context of social and emotional learning—recognizing and managing emotions, establishing positive relations, making responsible decisions, and handling challenging situations constructively and ethically. These are essential people skills, sometimes referred to as “emotional intelligence.”

Extensive research and science reveals that social connections contribute to happiness and healthy behavior (Zins et al., 2004).

4.4 Understand What Makes a Good Leader Great

Great leadership is a matter of self-actualization and pursuing the passion to attain the peak of satisfaction and pleasure and contributing to the organization, profession, and community.

The Mindsets for Greatness

#1. Nothing Matters More Than Work.

Not fame. Not fortune. Not glory. “Balance” just isn’t the game of the most legendary performers. Their lives are all about their craft. It’s their true love, their greatest passion, and their central mission. And because of this, they overcome impatience, self-doubt, fear of stumbling, and attraction to distraction that causes most to give up.

#2. The Process Matters More Than the Masterpiece.

Great leaders see themselves as apprentices, learning the skill (often at the feet of a master), step by step, day by day. They commit to their education. They ritualize the discipline. They understand greatness takes time (Darwin had the devotion to study barnacles for eight years as part of forging his scientific understanding).

#3. The Audacity of Originality Is the Dream.

They start as beginners (every pro was once an amateur). In this period, they watch the masters and copy their moves. With focus, grit, and practice, they reach the next part: technical brilliance. Audiences are delighted by their proficiency. What lacks is soul and bravery and audacity. As the performer continues, they reach the final stage. This is where world-class skill meets serious heart. The performer has the guts to express their own voice. Do their own thing. Behave in ways no one has ever seen. This is the goal of every star player: to become a phenomenon.

#4. Genius Is an Inner Play.

Genius is less about natural gifts than internal character. The titans of sports, science, art, and enterprise are neither the smartest nor the most talented. No, the best of the best are those with the character traits that allow them to stick to the vision, transcend insecurity, endure the pain of intense practice, and ignore the envious ridicule of their critics.

Great leaders are equally conscious of the undercurrent of an organization while taking an action for change. See Figure 4.3 for organizational challenges.

With the mindset of greatness, great leaders keep the iceberg beneath the surface in view of realities as follows:

 

Beliefs: Strong communication helps build up positive beliefs in all team members.

Shared Assumptions: Team members are aware of advancement and share common assumptions.

Perceptions: Strong interactions with leadership help do away with weak perceptions.

Traditions: Leaders observe traditions and help bring positive change in the interest of their teams.

Values: Leaders understand and respect the values supported by their organizations.

Norms: Leaders understand and respect the norms built over time.

Unwritten Rules: Leader take note of unwritten rules and bring changes with consensus when necessary.

Stories: Leaders take note of stories and replace them with stronger ones where necessary

Feelings: Leader take note of feelings and never manipulate them. Instead, they deal with them on an individual basis when necessary.

Dominating Culture: Leaders conscientiously develop project management culture to create support for advancement to strategic goals.

Making a Good Leader a Great One

Refining your skills is important in leadership. All great leaders keep working on themselves until they become effective. Here’s how:

1. Learn to be strong but not impolite. This can be an extra step for you to become a powerful, capable leader with a wide range of reach. Some people mistake rudeness for strength. This is not a good substitute.
2. Learn to be kind but not weak. Kindness isn’t weak. Rather it is a type of strength. One must be kind enough to tell someone the truth. One must be kind enough and considerate enough to lay it on the line. One must be kind enough to tell it like it is and not deal in delusion.
3. Learn to be bold but not a bully. It takes boldness to win the day. To build your influence, you’ve got to walk in front of your group. You’ve got to be willing to take the first step, tackle the first problem, and discover the first sign of trouble.
4. Learn to be humble but not timid. Some people mistake timidity for humility. But humility is a virtue; timidity is a disease. It’s an affliction. It can be cured, but it is a problem. Humility inspires a sense of awe, a sense of wonder, an awareness of the human soul and spirit; it is an understanding that there is something unique about the human drama. Humility is a grasp of the distance between us and the stars, yet having the feeling that we’re part of the stars.
5. Learn to be proud but not arrogant. One should be proud of their accomplishments. But the key to becoming a good leader is to be proud without being arrogant. Do you know the worst kind of arrogance? Arrogance coupled with ignorance is intolerable. If someone is smart and arrogant, we can tolerate that. But if someone is ignorant and arrogant, that’s just too much to take.
6. Learn to develop humor without folly. In leadership, one learns that it’s okay to be witty but not silly, fun but not foolish.
7. Learn to deal in realities. Deal in truth. Save yourself the agony of delusion. Just accept life as it is—the whole drama of life. It’s fascinating.

Life is unique. Leadership is unique. The skills that work well for one leader may not work at all for another. However, the fundamental skills of leadership can be adopted to work well for just about everyone.

Some basic ingredients to move from good to great leadership include–the following:

• Creating trust and confidence among all relevant stakeholders (e.g., employees, customers, society, and others)
• Being a role model by living the values/beliefs of the organization, leading by example
• Engaging in mindfulness—showing integrity and respect, and focusing priority on ethical behavior
• Understanding that people’s minds are like rubber bands. A rubber band works only when it is stretched. Similar is the case with people’s minds and capabilities—stretch them in order to help people realize their full potential
• Continuously emphasizing the importance and power of teamwork, which contains three essential elements that apply from senior executives to the front line:
  1. Communication—open, honest, two-way, regular
  2. Coordination—realizing and appreciating inter-dependencies
  3. Collaboration—respecting inputs and working together for a common goal
• Conducting regular reality checks by reviewing everything that is done against the purpose, vision, and values of the organization
• Giving credit where due and showing appreciation as well as recognition for a job well done
• Driving out fear so people are willing to take initiative—be creative and drive innovation
• Fostering continuous learning and renewal—allowing mistakes—in fact, welcoming them as these often represent the quickest route to wisdom and learning
• Relentlessly pursuing “flawless execution” across the board
• Possessing relationship mastery as well as practicing “inclusive approaches” and ensuring broad participation not just with team but with all key stakeholders—no organization is an island
• Promoting prevention and root cause analysis and, better yet, being proactive—anticipate events through pattern recognition, through agility
• Engaging in strategic thinking regularly; being intuitive and ensuring an integrative mindset

4.5 Know the Vital Habits Leading to Great Results

In the roles of project managers and program managers, it is crucial to touch upon the greatness for desired outcomes persistently. The importance lies in humanity: leader first, and then a manager. Healthy leadership habits set and maintain a framework for how the team is treated and in return what is expected of the team.

The leadership concept is complicated, but the greatness boils down to a few core principles: care, understanding, service, and protection. By no means are the principles listed here all inclusive.

Care

You need to care about the people you lead. To genuinely want each team member to succeed, leaders need to invest themselves in their team’s success. The caring attitude simply leads to an ability to make yourselves more successful. While caring deeply about the well-being of team members, you cultivate positivity.

Think about the last time a leader came to you and asked how things were going. Think about the last time a leader came to you and cared about your opinion on a situation. Better yet, think about when a leader cared enough to take action based on your opinion, and give you credit for it.

When you care, you reinforce in your team members’ minds your commitment to their goals. You are, in essence, letting them know that their involvement matters to the overall team. In doing so, you are also reinforcing the ties that bind a successful team together.

Understanding

Caring is not enough to lead effective teams. There are many leaders who care in the abstract, but don’t apply that caring to real situations. As leaders, more important is seeking to understand the team members and situations that you find yourself in. When you care about your teams more naturally, you will try to understand their point of view, the message encoded in their words or actions.

Attempting to be understood is a basic drive that humans feel, and as a leader you need to engage that need in your team members.

The important point is that when you take on leadership roles, you also take on a much stronger responsibility to understand people and their motivations. Once you understand your team members’ points of view, you will have a much easier time communicating with them and achieving your team’s goals.

Service

The best leaders in the world know how to give their time and energy to those they lead. Your job is not to point your finger in a direction and say, “Go there, do that!” Your job is to go there and do that with the skills you have, and to enable your teams to do the same with their skills.

As a leader, you care about your teams. You are also actively seeking to understand the point of view of each member of your team. The reasons we do these things are many, but one important reason is to be better able to serve your team. To some it may seem antithetical that a leader must focus on service. Indeed, as a leader, you will have many people looking to help you and serve the needs of your team. To get caught up in that cycle, however, is to become a tyrant or a task master, not a leader.

As a leader who cares and actively seeks to understand the needs of the team, those needs stand out like beacons in the mist. When you focus on those beacons, and invest your time in serving the needs of your team, the payoff is endless.

Protection

The people you lead need you. They don’t need you to tell them what to do. When you work in a relatively mature organization, most people in your organization know their jobs. As a leader, you need them to know that you will run cover when things go bad. They need to know that you will stand in the front and say, “I’ll get to the bottom of this.” In short, they need your protection.

Appropriately and consistently protecting your team may require a delicate balance. On one side, you are loyal to those you care about; on the other side, you never undermine your integrity by defending unacceptable results. These unacceptable results sometimes happen, and you are required to deal with those results appropriately. You can achieve both the outcomes required and the loyalty of your team members.

Inspiration

Inspiration may be defined as filling someone with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.

Filling someone with an urge or ability is an extremely difficult task to achieve directly. Indeed, to take it one step further and fill someone with the ability to be creative can be even more daunting. Inspiration, then, is not something you can directly work for in others. The best you can do as a leader is to care about your people, seek to understand their needs in light of the team’s goals, and constantly improve the services you offer your team. Through doing this, you exponentially increase the chances that your team will be inspired, and as an amazing side effect, you will become a more thoroughly actualized leader.

Great Leaders Understand the Impacts of the Power Base

Advancement in project management requires leaders to know what base of power is necessary for a particular situation and their implications. Hypothetically, a leader draws authority from a power base, which in each case has different impacts, and a great leader must appreciate those impacts of power base shown in figure 4.4 while applying power in pressing situations. These impacts are noted in Figure 4.4.

• Coercive Power: The hierarchical position or the political connections entail the power that is useable in a coercive manner. It may bring the desired results, but the impacts are always negative and lasting on the reputation of a leader. It never lets the team to work effectively and cohesively. The team resents coercive power tactics. In extreme situations, exceeding the available power may be acceptable when strong reasons are communicated.
• Utility Power: The hierarchical power that influences the team, available with position. Although used for functional purposes, it may bring resentment when team members disagree on issues.
• Principle-Centered Power: The leader enjoys unmatched respect and support from team when the actions are principle based. Principle-based power is recommended in all conditions for building the team into a cohesive unit.

4.6 Face Ambiguity

Unique projects in unchartered waters may land you in a highly challenging situation. You need a special competence to tolerate the ambiguity and patience to stay calm while dealing with the demands and making your way forward. Among the 21st-century skills sought by employers, tolerance for ambiguity is often on top of the list. The feedback one gets from senior professionals and peers have an enormous impact on the ability to deal with uncertainty.

Artificial intelligence increasingly makes many jobs obsolete; success in the future will belong to those able to tolerate ambiguity in their work. Too many fresh graduates approach their job descriptions the way they did a college syllabus—as a recipe for winning in a career. They want concrete, well-defined tasks as if they were preparing for an exam.

Carol Dweck, a Stanford University psychologist, has found that praising children for their intelligence, rather than for their efforts, often leads them to give up when they encounter the unknown. It’s much better in her opinion to compliment children for their persistence. People perform better when they can focus on things they can control rather than things they cannot.

Dweck has conducted several studies over the years that found people would do better when they think of their intelligence as flexible and not something fixed at birth. People with what she calls a “growth mindset” see challenges as opportunities to broaden their skills. But people who have been constantly praised for their intelligence freeze in ambiguous situations when they don’t know the answer and often tie themselves in knots trying to reach perfection.

The ability to tolerate ambiguity on the job requires people to think contextually, what is called the “connective tissue” that occupies the spaces between ideas. This is the “killer app” of today’s workplaces. We make these connections by following our curiosity and exploring and learning from peers.

Knowledge is not just what is in our brains, but is distributed throughout our networks. Learning happens by building and navigating those networks. But these networks are not just virtual—such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or LinkedIn. Some of the best connections between knowledge occur in face-to-face conversations.

Focus on your persistent efforts to find solutions and do not get paralyzed by unknown, ambiguous, and uncertain situations. That is the area where your competence counts to make your way forward.

4.7 Create Simplicity

Your first success and the subsequent ones in project management demand an approach that can be made simple and adaptable by the team members, to reach the desired outcomes.

Focus on simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clear to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

Create an approach that is S-I-M-P-L-E (see Figure 4.5).

S = Set expectations

• The success of any organization comes down to one thing: How well it organizes its members to focus on and work toward the same purpose.
• The team members need to know what is expected of them before they are held accountable for anything.
• The more clearly the expectations and goals are set upfront, the less time will be wasted later clarifying—or worse, arguing about—what was really expected.

I = Invite commitment

• Just because your team members know what to do doesn’t mean they will do it. After goals and expectations are set, team members need to commit to achieving them.
• Team members are more likely to do this when they understand two things: How the goals will benefit them personally, and how the goals will help move the organization forward.
• Once this connection is made, they are more likely to buy into the goals, and actually welcome you holding them accountable for results.

M = Measure progress

• Information is needed to hold your team members accountable. Measure their ongoing performance and gauge whether or not they meet the goals and expectations to which they have previously committed.
• Goals are measurable only when they are quantified. Measure the results and compare them to the team members’ goals to discover the gaps that require further attention.

P = Provide feedback

• Feedback won’t solve problems by itself, but it will open the door for problem-solving discussions and follow-up actions.
• The team members need feedback to do a good job and improve in areas where performance is falling short of expectations. Most of the time, giving objective, behavioral feedback is all it takes. Setting expectations followed by quality feedback is the backbone of holding someone accountable for results.

L = Link to consequences

• Sometimes team members need a little external motivation to live up to their commitments. When they struggle to reach their goals, they can be helped by administering appropriate consequences.

E = Evaluate effectiveness

• Review how the process has been handled.
• Put a systematic and consistent method in place and you’ll find that when people are held accountable for the work that must get done, it gets done.

Goals Must Be Tied to Larger Organizational Ambitions

For goals to be meaningful and effective in motivating team members, they must be tied to larger organizational ambitions.

Team members who don’t understand the roles they play in company success are more likely to become disengaged. No matter what level the team member is in, they should be able to articulate exactly how the efforts feed into the broader company strategy.

They are not dependent on one simple factor or as a result of one or two things. The entire context you operate in greatly impacts your results.

Summary

Professionals attain high energies when their personal values are aligned with organization/project/cultural values. If one works for the satisfaction of personal values, that will entail performance at the highest level.

Multiple intelligences are needed to create a good fit of EI, MI, BI, and SI and to help enhance the capability to withstand the challenges of a project. Leaders need special capability to face ambiguity and find their path to advancement in the right direction. They also need to create simplicity in processes for their team to reach the desired outcomes successfully.

References

Mirza, M. A. Webinar on Feb 09, 2017. www.projectmanagement.com

Gavin, J. and M. Moore. 2010. “Body Intelligence: A Guide to Self- Attunement.”http://www.ideafit.com/fitness-library/body-intelligence-a-guide-to

Goleman, D. 2006. “Social Intelligence.” http://www.danielgoleman.info/topics/social-intelligence/

Goleman, D. 2011. “The Brain and Emotional Intelligence.” http://www.danielgoleman.info/the-brain-and-emotional-intelligence-new-insights/

Goleman, D. and R.E. Boyatzis. 2017. “Emotional Intelligence Has 12 Elements. Which Do You Need to Work On.” https://hbr.org/2017/02/emotional-intelligence-has-12-elements-which-do-you-need-to-work-on

Kotler, S. “Your Brain Performs Better When It Slows Down.” http://bigthink.com/think-tank/steven-kotler-flow-states

PMI-PMO Report 2013 “Strategy Implementation”.

Zins, J.E., R.P. Weissbert, M.C. Wang, and H.J. Walberg. 2004. Building Academic Success on Social and Emotional Learning. New York: Teachers College Press.