The workplace is the grown-up’s playground; the pecking order is always challenged and embarrassing moments seem to last forever. Healthy working relationships depend on mutual respect but when an embarrassing situation arises, the embarrassed person may experience unpleasantness. The person may feel belittled, humiliated or even depressed after the event
As a leader, it will be up to you to soothe frayed feelings and prevent embarrassment from escalating to a more serious situation. Here are a few ways to work on being able to cope with embarrassment and threat:
Remind them to think about occasions when they felt embarrassed and theywill realise that the emotion fades after an hour or two, or perhaps a day or two. Rarely are occasions so embarrassing that they’re left with an emotional scar!
Train them to use positive language such as’I can....’, Tm good’ or ‘I will survive’ to talk up their self-esteem.
Assess the risk. As a leader, if you’re the sort of person who tends to worry when you do something wrong, such as asking an inappropriate question or making an inappropriate statement in a meeting, assess the real risk of doing so. For example, how many people do you know who were actually disciplined or dismissed for asking questions?
Recognise that every ‘cloud has a silver lining’. You learn by being exposed to difficult situations: you may not want deliberately to create situations in which you feel embarrassed, but you can certainly profit from them!
Sensing for success
Now we will describe the importance of switching on your senses - especially your visual and auditory ones - so that you can notice subtle changes or nuances in another person’s or your own:
Emotions
Behaviour or body language. Energy or enthusiasm about the issue or topic being discussed. Emphasis on words that reflect that certain words have significant meaning.
You can then use the information gathered in this way to better understand your work colleagues, especially their commitment towards taking a certain course of action or doing a task that needs to be done to achieve an objective. In this section you discover techniques for using your senses more effectively.
Being in the moment
‘Being in the moment’ is the act of bringing your attention into the here and now, and enables you to focus your total attention on the person(s) you’re working with at that moment.
Take a few moments to relax. When you feel relaxed, turn your attention to your mind and notice how still your mind is and any thoughts that are on or come into your mind .
You probably notice that your mind is still for only a few seconds before a thought jumpsinto it! Your active mind keeps grabbing your attention: you may sometimes find that this happens to such an extent that colleagues may occasionally notice that they don’t have your attention, prompting them to enquire whether something’s on your mind or even whether you’re day dreaming! You yourself may sometimes notice that your attention is somewhere else - that is, not in the moment - when, for example, you’re in a meeting and you miss comments made by your colleagues.
Practise the following techniques to enhance your ability to bring yourself into the moment:
Calm your mind. Let the thoughts that clutter your mind and disturb your attention slip away, and as new thoughts jump into your mind let each of them go. You may want to find a calm place to help you practise, but you can also practise this technique in public places such as on public transport.
Be aware of a single object. Select a single object that you can see and increase your awareness of it but don’t think about it. For example, I can see the shape of an apple on the computer I’m using: I’m increasing my awareness of the detail of the shapewithoutassociating lots of thoughts about apples with it. Practise holding your attention on a single object without thoughts entering your mind.
Relax your body. Breathe slowly and relax your body. Let the excess energy that’s causing your muscles - and you - to be tense slip away as you gently exhale each deep breath. You have probably heard the saying ‘healthy body, healthy mind’; now you know another one ‘calm body, calm mind’!
Seeing what others miss
‘It’s the little things that matter!’ Such a comment is often made when describing exceptional quality of service provided by a restaurant, hotel and so on. I suggest the same is also true when you’re effectively engaging a person: your work colleagues may rarely tell you how they feel and so noticing the subtle changes that other people miss, especially in a colleague’s facial expressions, is crucial for you to become an engaging leader.
Try the following techniques to enhance your skills in seeing what others miss:
Keep your head up. You can’t notice subtle changes in a person’sfacial expressions if your radar isn’t pointing in the right direction! Frequently looking at someone’s eyes (without doing it so intensely that you make the person feel uncomfortable) enables you to connect with and relate to people.
In my experience, people may avoid direct eye contact with you when they don’t want to commit strongly to doing something.
Watch for subtle changes in a person’s facial expressions, especially around the eyes, for clues about what a person is really thinking. Use subtle changes that you notice in a person’s behaviour, such as a raised eyebrow, as prompts to enquire about the person’s views on, for example, a statement you’ve just made that may have prompted the reaction. Enquire what the reaction meant instead of making assumptions.
Work your peripheral view. Practise noticing what’s on the edge of your field of vision, especially when you’re working with groups. You may detect subtle changes in people’s body language and behaviour that you may otherwise miss.
Scan in and out. Practise focusing your vision in and out so that you can zoom in on, for example, a person and notice what’s on your peripheral vision almost simultaneously.
Listening for meaning: Getting behind language
You’re most likely aware that you unconsciously ignore background noise at work, such as the soft drone of air conditioning fans. Your mind appears to tune out such noises so that you can get on with the work in hand. Although this skill is essential for good concentration, you need to develop your listening skills when talking directly with people.
Practise listening for details and meaning by tuning your hearing and attention in to the words and phrases that a work colleague’s using during direct one-to-one conversations:
‘Listen with your mind’ by concentrating on trying to understand what the person means rather than primarily focusing on your own thoughts.
Hold your attention at two levels; be ‘in the moment’ and attentive to the person while maintaining at the back of your mind an overview of what a successful outcome to the conversation is going to be.
Notice subtle changes in the tone of the person’s voice that indicates he’s placing more emphasis on certain words and phrases: emphasis that suggests that these words and phrases have a significant meaning to the person.
Look out for a colleague repeatedly using certain words and/ or phrases in a conversation. Repeated use ofthe same phrase may indicate that your colleague thinks that you’ve not fully discussed or considered the issue. For example, if your colleague keeps on repeating the phrase ‘there wasn’t enough time’ when discussing why a particular job wasn’t completed on time with them, I suggest this probably means that he thinks that you’ve not considered this ‘lack of time’ issue to his satisfaction.
Suspend judgement. If you interrupt someone, you’ve probably already decided that you know what your colleague’s going to say or disagree with him.
Listen for how people say things; and especially whether people are using jargon such as ‘thinking outside the box’, ‘blue sky thinking’, and ‘realising potential’. Make sure that you get people to explain what they mean in the particular situation and context.
Listen for what people don’t say; be alert to potentially different meanings of phrases and sentences that your colleague uses. Forexample, if a team member says the following sentence when explaining that he’s experiencing problems obtaining information from another department: ‘I tell them, but they don’t take notice!’
Does he mean (a) People in the other department deliberately ignore me, (b) I’m not very good at influencing people. (3) Or does he have another interpretation of the sentence?
Being brilliant at building commitment
The key to unlocking the commitment of work colleagues so that they perform tasks to a high standard is engaging them. When engaged, people take ownership of tasks and hold themselves accountable for successfully completing their work.
Work colleagues taking ownership of tasks is the difference between them being committed to doing tasks to the best of theirability and them doing their work just ‘okay’ simply because they’re being compliant with your requests/ instructions. When colleagues are only being compliant, they probably don’t do their work as well as they could, unless you have a great relationship with them and they want to really please you.
(Lionel Wijesiri is a retired company director with over 35 years’ experience in senior business management. Presently he is a business consultant, freelance newspaper columnist and a writer.)
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