Always up for a change and a challenge, the Juniper birds will be migrating to their new office in Weybourne, Surrey next month – and we are very excited about it!

We will be embarking on the next chapter of our story in a place that has been the home to innovation, creativity and sporting excellence for many years. From John Henry Knight (pictured here driving the first petroleum carriage for two people made in England), a founder member of the AA, pioneer and inventor; to Dame Vera Lynn, famous World War 2 singer, who spent summer holidays there with her aunt; to Jonny Wilkinson OBE, former England rugby player, who was educated there in his early years, Weybourne has certainly witnessed the birth and life of extraordinary success.

So let’s see what is in store for us.  Watch this space for more updates!

From Monday 3 December, our new office details will be :

Upper Barn
4 Hillside Road
Aldershot
Hampshire
GU11 3NB

Please bear with us over the next couple of days while we move!

Part 2 (continued from last week)

Having identified the roles, let’s look at how we can change our behaviour.

In their book, Leadership Presence, Halpern and Lubar say: “Much of leadership is about finding balance between two often-conflicting activities: asserting authority and responding to others’ needs.” I use an adaptation of the DESC approach to giving feedback to provide the recipe for assertive communication and building adult-adult relationships.

1. State – your observation using ‘I’ statements – do not judge – find out how the other person views the situation: I have observed that…  How do you see…
2. Express – share your feelings and describe the effect that the situation has had: I feel that …
3. Ask – for suggestions to improve the situation - How do you suggest…
4. Request – very specifically what YOU would like to see happening and state the benefits – I would like to ask that …

When I’m running a skills workshop to help people get along better with their colleagues, I ask them to give examples of statements in the child, parent and adult mode. Here is an example statement for each mode :

Parent : “Don’t worry about the business planning meeting, I will work something out to make the numbers add up”.

Child : “We are never given any notice for business planning meetings. There is no way I am going to get this done on time.”

Adult : “Right, the business planning meeting is next week. Let’s have a pre-meeting at the end of this week to understand what’s left to do.”

It is also important to remember that in transactional analysis, behaviour accompanying the words contributes largely to the sense of the comment.

It is sometimes easy to slip into habits and behaviours we have used for many years. However, a change in our own behaviour can only produce a change in others’. I tell clients, who are struggling with this : “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” So why not give it a go yourself? 

How can we all learn to get along better with the people we work with? And how can a company empower its people to build strong, effective and fruitful relationships?

One way of doing this is to ensure that your people are capable of maintaining adult-adult relationships. When people have an adult-adult relationship, they are able to communicate assertively. This means they can stand up for themselves, while acknowledging others; they can effectively express needs, feelings and preferences – and empathise with others. And both parties feel they are gaining from the relationship.

When we are aggressive, we often slip into the parent role and when we are submissive or manipulative, we slip into the child mode. Neither of these two behaviours help people to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes from the interactions.

If you interact as the parent, you will always have to take responsibility for other people’s problems (mopping up after others). You will also fall into a pattern of chiding, reminding, threatening and getting frustrated. If you act as the child, you will not be taken seriously by others. You will find others making decisions for you, underestimating your competence, checking up on you, second-guessing your decisions and trying to control you.

When an organisation is going through change, the project leader or team leader can often fall into the role of the parent and the people they are relying on to implement change take on the position of a child. Change managers often have a paternalistic approach but adult-adult conversations help everyone in the business to feel they could contribute and take responsibility for making the change successfully. An adult-adult relationship maximises the chances of getting the kind of relationships, jobs, friends and life we want. It raises our level of confidence and self-worth and makes us feel more capable, optimistic and in control.

As a manager, do you tend to go to extraordinary lengths to protect your team or do you try to take control of certain situations instead of giving team members responsibility? If this is the case, then perhaps now is the right time to start thinking about regaining the adult-adult equilibrium in your working relationships.

Revisit our blog next week to find out how!

If you are responsible for managing change then you’ll know how important it is to find common ground with your team so that you can connect with each of them and engage them in the change process. Sometimes it seems to come so naturally to others – we often value certain qualities in our peers and aspire to be more thoughtful, caring, motivated or emotionally intelligent, but we don’t take the time to break down exactly what we like about those characteristics and how we can begin to emulate them. 

“Stop, start, continue” is a simple exercise I do with clients to help them become aware of what behaviours they should stop, start or continue, which might help or hinder the change process. It’s a great way of identifying small things that can really make a big difference throughout change.  

This exercise involves evaluating how you come across in certain situations. You might find gaps between the values and character traits that you want to convey and those that you actually project, so you can then begin to assess the ways in which you can close those gaps. For, example, if you find it hard to relate to people in meetings when you’re discussing your change programme, you might want to start becoming more aware of others’ body language (if someone looks uncomfortable, then they most likely are), stop using closed questions (which tend to elicit one-word answers) or negative language and continue to seek common ground and shared goals.

This easy exercise can help change leaders identify the essence of who they are and who they want to become so that they can positively motivate and engage others in change.

The ‘activity trap’ or being in a constant motion is a state many of us find ourselves stuck in when we’re in a pattern of doing ‘stuff’; keeping busy without truly doing ‘valuable’ activity. 

It often happens to people at work when they’re struggling to acknowledge a change in business direction; they’re concerned about adapting to a new process or an alteration to their job role.

The classic Change Curve illustrates the process people go through when adapting to change. Put simply, there are two stages: 

1. Denial and Resistance
2. Exploration and Acceptance.

Stage one is concerned with the past – “I like it the way it is”. Stage two is looking to the future – “I can see this is going to work for me.” 

It’s while we’re in the resistance stage that we get ‘busy’ – spending our time filing, responding to emails and participating in other displacement activity. It keeps us in motion, but only reaps short-term rewards. 

As change leaders, when others in our team are not excited by a change initiative, we assume that they don’t understand it or are being obstinate or negative. When this happens, it’s useful to search for possible historical and emotional reasons why people might find it hard to deal with the proposed change and explore the various reasons why people might fear or resist change. Taking time to explain the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ can help people move from resistance to exploration and be open to accept the change.

Action is something people need to do to focus on long-term gains and adding more value. It means they have to risk making a much bigger investment in effort and thinking. But, it tends to be more challenging and rewarding than filing!

In business we are constantly faced with decisions about change – whether it is change that has a global impact on the organisation, such as a restructuring programme; deciding on how to improve processes within a department; or more personal decisions, such as a career change.

It is only if we are able to make decisions in line with our goals, that we can take positive action. There are a number of ways to go about making effective decisions and you might have your own preferred method, but at the basis of all these are the following underlying principles and steps:

1. Identify the decision to be made: we often offer solutions without really nailing down the problem. Be specific.
2. Define your objective: keep your overall goal in mind.
3. Generate options: brainstorm as many options as possible and don’t censor ideas – be creative. Ask contemporaries for their input too.
4. Weigh-up the options: assess the risk factors and decide which consequences you can live with and which you can’t live with. Research your options further and narrow viable options.
5. Decide on a solution and implement: take decisive action!
6. Review, assess and adjust: and do it constantly so that you can adjust your plans where needed.

Embrace the process with a positive mind and wonderful things can happen!