The clock is ticking louder: South African businesses must drive real change in performance, innovation, & engagement
How often do companies feel utter frustration trying to get their management teams and workforces to do one or more of the following?
- Perform tasks and work duties at higher levels of performance and aligned with the organisational values and vision
- Overcome problems as a reasonable expectation, and tackling more strategic problem solving requirements with gusto, confidence and enthusiasm
- Engage proactively inside and outside the organisation with a sense of purpose and drive.
During a session today we debated and brainstormed these pertinent topics. The relevancy of these matters at this point in time, as a continuum of economic slow-down, is being driven by the demands for businesses to achieve higher productivity and competitive behaviour styles. Added to that, the elevated price sensitivities in the marketplace, are inhibiting fiscal inflation of sales values, as well as disallowing discretionary price increases. These competition-driven downward pressures on the top line are squeezing the entire income statement, and ruptures will and are occurring in overheads. These are high risk ruptures, with runaway bills on band-aid short-term solutions to maintain false longevity. Further, the scale of these ruptures for business operating in the current climate are sufficiently large for companies to bleed out and their sustainability becoming marginal, at the very least.
The question is, “Are companies able to identify the root-cause human component factors that are inhibiting performance, innovation, problem solving and engagement behaviour?”
The answer we are seeing is, “No”. Simply answered by the evidence that companies without innovation and competitive brilliancy are being wiped out by competitors located elsewhere in the global village.
At Polarity we’ve identified that these root causes exist outside of businesses, yet we acknowledge that there is an expectation that businesses have to solve the symptoms that they have to endure.
The solution exists in identifying fear-based behaviour(s), analysing it, embedding a philosophy and culture to shift it quickly and applying a relentless healthy pressure on a people based interactive approach to stimulate the environment. Disengagement, problem solving apathy and low performance are symptoms of environmental variables that need to be defined, refined and calibrated on an ongoing basis to eradicate these symptoms.
Variables that will impact organisations are:
- physical environment – its impact on mental and emotional intelligence stability and resilience, and the knock-on failure effect through an organisation when pressure is applied
- mental constructs of the workforce – considering that workforces are being drawn from a resource pool that looks and behaves very differently from the earlier pool that business senior management and owners generally came from
- the reality of the failings in our cumbersome primary and secondary education systems in aligning and keeping abreast of world trends which vehemently demand high creative outputs in rapidly shifting landscapes
- the poor understanding of subtleties arising out of demographic diversity
- the impacts of poor stress management and the knock on effects that bludgeon successful communication, strategic foresight, and expectation management.
To overcome these effects requires senior management and stakeholder courage. There is an emotional bravery that underscores organisations that leapfrog competitors during economic slowdowns. Few senior management embrace the screams of their organisation’s desire to change, yet ironically demand the highest levels of change and shift from workers. This can never be achieved because workers simply mimic the example they observe in their reporting lines.
Arrange an insightful talk to your company on these matters in more detail.
Contact us at info@polarity-consulting.net
Emotional Intelligence – the Heart of Leadership
I recently presented at the Institute of Directors’ (South Africa) Annual Business Update, with the conference themed 
“Courageous Leadership Conversations”.
Attended by senior directors from across South Africa, this gave me the opportunity to discuss the shifting corporate boardroom, strategy and branding landscapes and the threats that lie in wait for productivity, competitive edge and share price stability.
My keynote was “The Heart of Leadership” and how emotional intelligence (EQ) is an invaluable addition to the repertoire of the modern leader. Below is the essence of my presentation. (Craig Mitchelmore (November 2011) – Managing Director of Polarity)
THE HEART OF LEADERSHIP
LIMITING REALITIES IN BUSINESS LANDSCAPES TODAY
Directors sitting in industry today at the head of SME’s, corporate, and multi-nationals are all facing realities which give rise to fears that limit potential and yet are demanding high Emotional Intelligence (EQ) of these leaders so that they can overcome the these issues:
1. The delayering or the flattening of organisational structures.
2. Cutbacks of staff, projects, capital investment, and market share.
3. Staff entering your organisation today, particularly younger ones, are arriving with attitudes and personalities that ask questions begetting answers – not smoke and mirror answers….answers that delve into integrity, values, societal commitment, and radically different views on the ratio benchmarks of lifestyle to work. This “attitude of the youth” is generationally misunderstood by leaders outside that generation.
4. Corporate reporting protocols are exposing remuneration of directors – a visibility that is distorted by the uninformed vantage points of certain people accessing that information. Your level of risk absorption, accountability, entrepreneurial vision, long working hours is not considered by readers who do not understand the human value of what they are reading in monetary styled reports.
5. Social media opens up the possibility of immediate brand damage to large public companies that have made huge investments in brand awareness by disgruntled and ill-informed staff and public alike.
6. Staff leaving organisations as a result of retirement are taking with them time honoured journeyman skills, and if that dissipation of retirees leave without sincere human involvement in their own psychological shift into twilight years, those staff will leave with skills, creating a slack that cannot be taken up a younger generation who exhibit high-satisfaction indices leveraged off low-experiential backgrounds.
7. The advent of the real impact of globalisation is here. Directors today are facing market share threats, operational outsourcing threats and shared services adversaries located in India, China, and Bangladesh……and there after the SA workforce productivity balloon itself is being punctured left right and centre by human capital exports from countries where wage requirements are low with exponentially high productivity and ethos levels, relative to our local workforce.
8. Human Resource demands in South Africa are being leveraged against a shrinking local pool of world class thinkers, entrepreneurs, and trade enabled journeymen. Our continent is hungry for educated minds, which are being pulled into it to partially sustain our continents insatiable desire to come out of the economic wilderness.
There is a solution here, and it is underwritten by Emotional Intelligence (“EQ”).
WHAT IS EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE?
EQ has as much to do with knowing when and how to express emotion as it does with controlling it. It includes empathy, the ability to identify another’s emotions accurately, communication dynamics, as well as the achievement of real influence, initiative and drive.
In addition, I believe that EQ is also about being able to overcome fear, to provide oneself and others the freedom to create and innovate in healthy spaces connected to mental & emotional expression, and to make tough decisions with dignity.
IS EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE A FLEETING DISCIPLINE?
Will EQ wash over the oiled slippery surface of our existing business world? I think not. Fundamentally, emotio
n is the driving force of human beings and one thing that human beings do is drive business. The reality of our world at the moment is that people are seeking a depth of quality cutting through the mundane, and touching a vast array of disciplines, activities and belief systems. Take for example the shifts seen in the past 3 years in business and societal values. The rising green movement and the values attachment to that, the uprising of social values and a social consciousness that is sweeping through north & west Africa, the Middle East, and Indonesia. Then there is the Eurozone economic crisis.
A rock has been thrown into the global pond, and as we all know every shore is feeling its ripples.
A NEW LANGUAGE MOVING FORWARD
I am stating here, that the rock that has been thrown is the old information that we used to base our decisions upon historically. Now, as a result of all these shifts, this information is out of date, it is unusable, and in effect it has regressed – it is no longer information ….it is now “Data-in-Transition”.
Why do I speak of this regressed information as Data-in-Transition?
My position is that historically man applied information that he had in an attempt to fix his errors as a species. The reality is that this information was applicable back then, but it is not applicable now. Something new has to evolve out of our intelligence or the world will continue to find itself in the mess it is in economically, environmentally, socially and ethically. So we have to start again, and the starting point has been this regression of information back into data because currently the conundrum is that we don’t know how to use it to move forward.
The “X-Factor” needed to accelerate and knit this data-in-transition into workable new and useful information, is emotional intelligence.
By threading emotional intelligence through this data-in-transition, we are in effect weaving a new language which will become way forward in meeting demands for the delivery of values, innovation, creativity, empathy, and collaboration. These are the new environment constants for businesses to embrace in order to succeed. The catalyst that will combine with Emotional Intelligence will be Leadership Style, and in turn, this will accelerate Culture transformation. A courageous conversation is: “Why transform culture and why is your role as a leader imprinted against that culture transformation?”
The answer is simply that businesses are alive, pulsating, evolving non-biological entities possessing a neuro-cardio centre. A neuro-cardio centre you may ask? Yes, that’s who the leader is…..the hub determining how the organisation thinks and feels. Leaders form the culture of an organisation and have the ability to reframe it from its status quo to a shifted future. It is this culture, one of either capability or non-capability, which is a direct representation of the level of emotional leadership present. The EQ is the bedrock that binds culture and that culture then influences the cognitive areas of organisational behaviour.
REFRAMING
To practically understand this, leaders will need to engage another courageous conversation with themselves. Leaders of successful organisations going forward are going to need to become experts at reframing. A reframe needs to be felt. It needs to have an emotional impact beyond its appeal to the “thinking mind”. This is because the new frame needs to be more emotionally compelling than the old one if it is to be accepted. To reframe, leaders need to be able to adjust their reference points, thinking, and behavioural style. This requires maturity, creativity to adjust and broaden their positional tangents of influence, and in so doing influence their organisation’s potential. Failure to adjust and be flexible results in imbedded organisational status quo influencing the leader, and the tail wags the dog. Since organisational scale is the enemy of creativity, I advocate that the shift happens from the leader in a top-down approach. As a consequence of time, there is an indirect correlation of personal nurturing to organisational scale: – the larger an organisation, the lower the availability of time for each employee to be nurtured. So I encourage the embracing “The Tipping Point” phenomenon (per Malcolm Gladwell’s book), which effectively describes that through sufficient shift in leadership potentials, thinking and behaviour, it comes to pass that they, in turn, infuse and influence the rest of the organisation in the same direction without having to specifically retune the business one employee at a time.
WHY SHOULD LEADERS REFRAME ?
1. Do your employees know how you as a leader feel or do they only identify with how you think?
2. As a leader are you giving your employees loads of data, reports, instructions, and new systems……..instead of giving them you?
3. Are your employees coming to work, disengaging and powering down ……..yet all you want them to do is power-up?
Let’s be honest, the aspect of employee loyalty is a waning phenomenon. If employees were in jobs to gather data, reports and instructions they’d be sticking to organisations like glue. However, employees are not scanners, they are people and for the return of loyalty they will fundamentally need to attach meaning from their employment into their lives. Positive attachment very often comes from the perception that employees have of their leaders. People love heroes, and leaders can be heroes all day every day if they know how to achieve this. Followers of heroes do flick-flacks, create, invent, innovate, expedite, contribute and buy-into vision.
CASE STUDY: 
The successes of BMW in a global recessionary market. In China, BMW sales in 2010 were up 98% on the previous year and in the United States sales volumes outsold its European sales. Global sales were up 15%. Why and how was this achieved?
The answer is that BMW “went radical” as a result of the leadership of Chris Bangle accompanied by a highly astute and talented cadre of managers.
Here is BMW’s courage:
1. BMW was one of the first companies to fully embrace the use of social media, the use of crowd-sourcing to enable the consumer to contribute to design.
2. In the USA they reframed the market demand profile by attracting aspiring career-women and families, and that reframed the perception of their motorcars. Just like the genius companies (Apple, Amazon, & Google) BMW has a knack of creating new categories of products. The Sports Activity Vehicle (SAV) includes the MX5 and MX3, and is a very smart play on the Sports Utility Vehicle.
3. The Mini was a moribund brand until BMW reinvented the small stylish car by reintroducing it. It was what Chris Bangle called “an egg waiting for a chicken so it could be hatched”.
4. BMW reframed the concept of ownership through its car sharing project named Drive Now
5. BMW actively engaged extreme forms of car personalisation and ramped up resources in after-sales fitment centres to engender owners with further emotional attachment to their vehicles.
6. To crown it off BMW engaged with radical adjacency where companies radically diversify into markets where they have no previous experience or base and succeed. In doing that, BMW set up a new $100 million venture fund in New York to pursue new concepts in personal mobility. A car producer today BMW could become something quite different in future, though it is not clear what. This is remarkable ability to reframe.
Here is leadership style composing elements of cognitive functioning and emotional intelligence as core attributes in overcoming obstacles and doing things differently.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE – THE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD
EQ can be a cunningly double-edged sword when place into the hands of leaders with varying degrees of astuteness and awareness. In one swipe, leaders with high EQ can slice through the noise in a business and empower it with remarkable awareness and brand buy-in that is willingly owned inside of the business and outside of it . Like a transfusion of blood, the two attributes of values based leadership and employee creativity (per Richard Barrett’s book: “Liberating the Corporate Soul”) have to permeate the entirety of a business. This permeation is where the courage lies in the heart of leaders. This is where, likened, to the battlefield of old, the leader infuses his or her personal dispositions vertically and horizontally in the organisational channels, doesn’t just simply back the passing of a new resolution, but rides into the fray with a full display of the substance of who he/ she really is!! This is the passion of leaders evident through real human identification, communication, boundary dissolution, and understanding the human is behind his/her title. Herein exists the humanity of leaders who can cross the polarity divide and move away from the barrier of fear, reach out, set out and achieve the end goal of organisational emotion integration.
On the contra, a low awareness leader, with poor EQ and under-developed consequence management insight, can slice through an organisation bleeding it of its lifeblood. That lifeblood is its people who, in turn, drive creativity and efficiency.
THE OPPORTUNITIES THAT EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE DELIVERS
1. Leaders can use EQ as a brand driver during market slowdown and staff cutbacks: There is huge scope in becoming someone that used adversity as an opportunity to guide, mentor and shift the lives of others in a style of engagement, rather than having to own the indignity of decisions that influence the demise of spirit, hope, family and stability. Sincere transparency here can create brand ambassadors.
2. Communication around changes. Reveal to your workforces how you as a leader feel about innovation and change. Tell your workforce how change inspires you. Tell your workforce how they, as your colleagues, inspire you. Where does change and openness prod your own triggers that activate your nervousness? Expose your answers and BE HUMAN . These are courageous conversations that come from making decision that create environments for your organisation to back you.
3. Observe how your organisation embraces its social engagement and upliftment programs. This is where leaders need to be on the ground, visible and interactive. Bear in mind my question: “What difference do I, as a leader, choose to make in the world around me today? Do I choose to blow the hope in a life out, or do I choose to ignite that hope?” Have this conversation amongst your leadership fraternity.
4. What is the style of guidance when engaging inbound people in the company? Are your organisational culture and succession plans designed to churn-out replicate “mini-me” leaders, instead of providing actualising examples of leaders who openly advocate allowing people to be who they are? This awareness contributes to your own personal growth, and it will give employees the confidence to change how they perform, interact and gravitate to loyalty.
END
Staying ahead of the curve in a rapidly changing world
On Saturday 16 July 2011, I had the opportunity to present to a really great audience on the shifting landscapes in education, energy, water, exploration, technology, agriculture, police & defence, and human movement and urbanisation occurring around the world.
I have attached the Power Point presentation for readers to look at and give insights on. Click on this link to view “Staying ahead of the curve – A future look at the world“
Integrative Thinking seminar
Our Integrative Thinking 1-day seminar
Click here to book your company team an Integrative Thinking seminar
Download as a pdf : Integrative Thinking ebrochure (PDF format)
Download as Powerpoint show : Integrative Thinking ebrochure (PowerPoint format)
What is Integrative Thinking about?
Integrative Thinking is designed to break down fear-based thinking and replace it with awareness, assertiveness and confidence to perform brilliantly. This applies to individuals and in the corporate space.
Our outcomes include:
How do we achieve these outcomes via Integrative Thinking?
Through self-awareness telescoping. This enables people and corporate culture to look inside themselves.
Life is testing us all at the moment and people are seeking meaning in their lives. This is the conclusion I have come to having been exposed to the varying range of questions and concerns about their lives that my life coaching, corporate and executive development clients pose to me. The objective of each person’s search for meaning is the validation of their own personal value.
The economic downturns in business are driving people’s work-induced and performance-measured stress levels through the roof. The knock-on effect of this phenomenon is that people are actually not coping and are now openly starting to ask a range of questions starting with the word “Why?” (“Why am I not happy?”, “Why is my company struggling to compete?”, “Why do I need this stress?”, “Why do I need this job?”, “Why do I still feel empty no matter how hard I work?”, “Why am I tired all the time?”, “Why can’t this all be different?”).
The exciting thing is that people are starting to ask, “Why?”. You see, starting to ask questions is directly related to igniting your intelligence, your creative potential and your quest for personal value validation. (Polarity’s 1-day Integrative Thinking seminar is designed to ignite intelligence, accelerate individuals, companies and communities, by getting people to ask “Why?” and understand why they are asking it). Book for Integrative Thinking in your organisation now
Just look at the sweeping changes occurring across the Middle East at the moment and potentially with more to come. This is the symptom of people asking “Why?” on a larger scale. The peoples of these countries shifted over the watershed purely because they have started to ask, “Why do we have to continue living life as we have been?”, and the consequences have been dire for the hierarchies.
The simple fact is that as human beings we have a stockpile of choices, and if these choices are eroded by extraneous forces or individuals, the affected start to create other options to choose from which generally are counter-measures to the whims of the extraneous force. Through the power of communication on the internet and mobile, the world has become so in touch within its own ranks. As a consequence, woe betide countries, organisations, management structures and societal relationships that have archaic behaviours that are designed to control rather than embrace.
Leaders, true leaders, not the abjectly bad ones who scream from rooftops, preside in ivory towers and hold position purely because of lies that confuse corporate and national electorate, are the ones that are ahead of the “Why?” curve. They grow people, they themselves say, we are not doing things just the same as we have always done, they seek inputs from their people. These leaders are transparent because their heightened intelligence (not knowledge) enables them to realise the razor sharp power with which their followers/ employees burn through false leadership, insincerity and, I say it, all the bullshit.
Ask “Why?” and you will receive an answer. Sometimes that answer will be to shift everything that you have ever known so that you can re-stock your pile of choices. If you are a leader, you should be asking “Why?” to stay ahead of the curve, to turn the lights on in your organisations or in your circle of influence. It is a responsibility that we all have because once we stop asking “Why?” there will be others dreaming up radicalised answers to questions borne out of a desire to shift their spaces.
Contact us for a discussion about activating the people around you /your organisation:
Mobile: contact Craig on +27 (0)82 575 7316
Email: craig@polarity-consulting.net
Towards success & happiness………………Letting go of Shame-Based Thinking
(“Shame-Based Thinking” is abbreviated as ”SBT” in this article)
Success is about confidence and courage. These are needed before we can actually create and actually “do” the activities and tasks that lead to our successes.
So why does this sound so simple and yet so many people battle to find that courage and confidence?
My life coach experience and work indicates to me that very often there is a varying degree of SBT within the psychology of a client that prevents him/her reaching full potential.
SBT is laid down within us predominantly during our earlier years of life, and can be as a result of either:
(i) a simple day-to-day event that created minor mental discomfort, or
(ii) a traumatic event that can include physical, mental or verbal abuse.
In a nutshell, SBT withers the self esteem methodically over time. It ultimately flattens and punctures the inner-giftedness and potential that each individual is born with.
SBT is often quite easy to detect. Test yourself here with these 12 question indicators that indicate the presence of SBT if you answer “Yes”:
1. Do you continually say, “Sorry” ?
(Sorry I am late/ Sorry I did not remember/ Sorry to interrupt/ Sorry, I just need to ask you……?)
2. Do you ever feel embarrassed about any member(s) of your immediate or extended family?
3. Do you come up with great ideas and then procrastinate or fail to complete the project?
4. Do you seek the opinions of others? (about your clothes/ your ideas/ your progress/ your friends/ your romantic partner)
5. Do you feel intimidated by people in authority even if you have not done anything wrong? (your boss, your child’s teacher, your bank manager, an overbearing spouse?)
6. Do you plan, plan, plan & re-plan any social event no matter how big/ small? Does everything have to be just perfect before, during and after the event?
7. Do you feel guilty about or repressed in any aspect of your sexuality or sexual activity?
8. Do any parts of your life look like addictive behaviour? (excess shopping/ excess gyming/ excess chaos/ over-eating or significantly overweight/ under-eating or significantly underweight?)
9. Do you wear top-brands clothing/ cosmetics/ fragrances because “everyone else is”?
10. Do you ask yourself,” Why am I living this horrible/ boring/ hurtful life?” or “ Why am I working this job /career?” , and you feel there are no realistic options open to you to have another way of life or career?
11. Do you dislike having your photo taken either spontaneously or posed?
12. Do you ever refer to yourself as being stupid, or do you ever feel stupid?
SBT is your subconscious mind creating drama in your life that becomes the chaos. This chaos may seem veryreal to the person suffering from SBT, but ultimately this drama is only a perceived reality, not one that in truth actually exists. This limits your ability to succeed, to really fly, and to be really happy.
Through life coaching the spark of your confidence will ignite, accelerate your courage and surround you with the activities and people that are aligned to achieve your dream.
Executive teams, individuals and couples will be amazed by the shift in their lives that occurs when SBT dynamics are removed.
Contact us to discuss SBT and how we can help you:
Craig Mitchelmore
Mobile: +27 (0)82 575 7316
Email: craig@polarity-consulting.net
Based in Randburg, Johannesburg (South Africa)
Divorce (including long-term relationships that disintegrate)
This discussion : the practicality of involving a Life Coach to assist with the pain & chaos that arises during and after divorce.
I am astounded at the apparent increase in the number of divorces and separations that I am encountering on my journey at this present moment. As a divorcee myself, I have been exposed to a large number of divorce affected environments in the past 3 ½ years. Maybe it’s a phase of life and a peer age that I am encountering, but I am feeling as though the divorce rate has suddenly become rampant. (Note: I include in my definition of divorcees formally separated partners who co-habited, but may not have been “married” in the strictest sense of the word).
Divorce is about as painful as emotional pain can get. Divorce is about rejection and rejection is in extreme friction with the human psyche’s need to belong.
Somehow, by belonging, people gain a sense of value, security and bond. It is no different in marriages. Marriages, however, are about dreams, aspirations, togetherness, future, stability, security and permanency. When divorce arrives, these aspects are not broken, they are shattered because divorce is a conscious process of deliberate rejection pushing our human fears to their outer limits where separation, loneliness, disappointment, anger, and grief play in the darkness of our minds. At this time, personal value can be eroded towards dangerous proportions.
In divorce, every dragon that ever needed taming, comes to visit. The paint-by-numbers methodology applied to divorcing is the ultimate non-stop rejection process that is exponentially multiplied when there are children from the marriage. The inclusion of children creates a lifetime-ahead scenario where moving on from the other partner can never be truly accomplished. Distance, as a healer of broken hearts and minds, cannot diffuse its healing potion because divorcing spouses, as co-parents, never cease contact with one another. Even if one parent disappears “over the hill” forever, the remaining parent never truly comes to term with that exit, and sickeningly that lack of contact is itself a constant reminder of the brokenness of the home.
Rejection in divorce, as the multiplier of pain, works something like this:
The initial communication of intent to divorce is rejection. Then in the months thereafter, all the communications are reinforcements of that rejection, but now cruelty is introduced in that it becomes formalized, cold, legal and very often manipulative structured rejection and positional jockeying. The irony in this structured legal communication as a tool to enforce the rejection, is that it is laced with structured forms of bonding the two parties forever to each other as these communications deal with child custody, maintenance payments and visitation conditions.
This rejection, and yet simultaneous enforced bonding, results in confusion from which pain arises. You see, the confusion is created by expecting our minds to conceptualise an outcome of a future that alien to the familiarity from where we had operated from for lengthy periods of time. This lack of predictability is one of the most intimidating obstacles for the human mind. We become unable to draw upon our natural fight-or-flight response mechanisms, because the reality is that we do not innately know the situation we are facing and simultaneously don’t know what we would be running from. It can take years to develop the coping mechanisms necessary to understand newfound singularity.
During this time of coping we try our utmost to function beyond the control of the emotional wilderness that we find ourselves in, yet the reality is that we are deeply contained within its clutches. We don’t make bad decisions during this time, we make SHOCKING decisions, especially ones related to our initial unchartered navigation into romance and dating. We are capable of inciting cruelty against our former spouses which beg of their similar reactions in our jockeying for position and “rightness”. Many new divorcees, in trying to protect their own sanity during this emotional blizzard, make devastating decisions affecting the emotional and mental wellbeing of their children. For a time, we become shadows of our former selves – no matter how anyone in this scenario tries to deny this.
No matter how many legal stamps are made to define the death of a relationship, the painful sentiment that is divorce remains powerfully alive during an extended personal healing phase.
Life coaching is vital during the initial healing phases of separation and divorce because there is a powerful need for objective direction and guidance that new divorcees are limited in being able to practically create, follow or fine-tune as a result of their emotional distress.
Life coaching will enable you to see the power and gift of your independence, your growth through change, your ability to forgive and the resulting deeper peace that dignity in your life will provide you with.
Contact the author: Craig Mitchelmore at craig@polarity-consulting.net
