mastering

Are You a Bull in a China Shop?

January 4, 2017 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

5 Ways to Approach a Problem

My friend Dana (not her real name) prides herself on confronting problems head on.

“I used to be a pushover,” she says. “People trod all over me, and I just rolled over and allowed it. Not anymore!”

Unfortunately, people now describe Dana as a “bull in a china shop.” She has developed quite an overtly aggressive stance that is now costing her relationships and opportunities.

When do you confront? And if you don’t, do you simply have to roll over and allow others to take advantage of you?

Knowing how to resolve a problem effectively requires some discernment. Where do you start?

Before jumping to a quick conclusion, ask yourself the following:

Is the issue symptomatic of a larger root cause, or do you need to gather more information in order to make a best decision?

Your best approach is to avoid the problem until you have the information you need in order to correct it appropriately.

Are you outmatched or losing ground on the issue? Or do you need to build goodwill by acceding to others, since the issue is more important to them than to you?

Your best approach is to accommodate others by allowing them to decide, even if what they choose is not your first choice.

Do you need to reach long-range solutions?

Do you need to find an integrative solution so that all sides can come together to work more effectively? You will want to take a collaborative stance in problem-solving.

Sometimes compromise is your best option.

When you need to settle complex issues temporarily or to reach quick solutions when you are under time pressure, compromise can be greatly beneficial.

An aggressive stance can be necessary under certain circumstances.

I wish Dana had learned when to use this, rather than to adopt it as her default mode. But aggression is absolutely necessary in an emergency, or when issues are critical and you are absolutely sure you are right.

Knowing you have options in problem-solving approaches and learning to exercise these strengthens your ability to lead and influence others.

What problem are you currently confronting? Which approach do you feel will work best? Join us (LinkedIn)

Patti Cotton helps women executives optimize their effectiveness in leading self, others, and enterprises. Her areas of focus include confidence, leadership style, executive presence, effective communication, and masterful execution. With over 25 years of leadership experience, both stateside and abroad, Patti works with individuals, teams, and organizations across industries, providing executive coaching, women’s leadership development, change, and conflict management. She is also a Fortune 500 speaker. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Fast-Tracking Your Way to the Top

November 23, 2016 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Do You Need a Mentor, Sponsor, or Coach?

You know you have what it takes to succeed, but you’d like to move a little faster to get to the top.

Getting help is the smart thing to do – but what kind of help do you need to get there?

Liz was in middle management, but she was bored with her area of responsibility and wanted more out of her career. She knew she was talented, but, although others always complimented her on her work, they didn’t seem to recognize she had more in her – at least, they didn’t say so. However, she was convinced she could contribute at higher levels, if just given the right opportunity. She also knew she could go a couple of directions in the company with her professional background and experience, and wondered which path was right for her.

One day, Liz shared all this with a couple of close colleagues.

“I’m ready for more – but no one has called me into the executive suite to say I’ve won the prize promotion. I know I can do this. How do I get the help I need to get there?”

“Get a mentor,” said Jackie. “Mentors are supposed to give you direction to help you get there, aren’t they? They can give you pointers on specific technical skills – I had one once that taught me how to better analyze financials, and that really helped the way I was able to strategize. Mentors can also put you in touch with other people in the industry to widen your networks and such. So they are a kind of career guide and connector. That has to be good for your career.”

“No, wait,” said John. “I’ve been reading about sponsors – some people call them champions. They are supposed to be better than mentors, aren’t they? If they decide you have more in you, they commit to positioning you with others in high places, and go around talking positively about you. They influence others to take a look at you, and they can volunteer you for projects that will show off what you can do. It’s kind of like the ultimate PR agent with clout.”

“Hey, I’m not sure either of you are right,” piped up Sandy. “My boss hired an executive coach who got her straight into the C-suite. They worked on the way she communicated so that she showed more confidence, instilled more trust – even sharpened her influence skills. And they worked on her decision-making, and how she led her team so that it went from mediocre- to high-performing. It really showcased her abilities.”

“Hmmm…,” said Liz. “It may be that I need all three. Let me reflect on this – stay tuned for an update, people!”

After careful thought, Liz sought out a well-known leader in the industry who happened to live in the area. She explained what she was doing, and that she needed some advice on her career path. This leader met with her, helped her to look at trends within her industry, and offered to connect her with people who could talk about career possibilities within her focus.

Liz then thought about seeking a sponsor. However, the sponsor relationship is usually initiated by the sponsor, and Liz knew she had to stand out before she asked for someone of influence to go to bat for her in the organization.

So she hired a coach. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” she thought. Her executive coach reviewed her career goals with her, and then suggested assessing how she led herself, others, and the enterprise (her area of responsibility). Together, they pinpointed some critical areas for improvement – ways of being, relating, and doing that would help her to showcase to others the exceptional talent she was. Liz and her coach worked over the next several months, and it paid off – someone higher up in the organization reached out to ask about her career goals, and to share they would like to help her get there.

Who’s in your court? And who needs to be?

For a free informational guide to help you determine your best resource for help based on where you are right now in your career, click here.

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Why You Need Your Emotions for Rational Decision-Making

November 16, 2016 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

We spend a lot of our lives learning to master emotions. Sometimes they overcome us, and we goof things up. So we try to discount them or put them aside in an effort to be more rational in our decisions and actions.

But discounting or ignoring emotions isn’t really mastering them. You need your emotions in order to make your best decisions. Sound counter-intuitive?

In my work with high-potential female executives, I find quite often that these women have shut off their emotions, feeling these get in their way. Often, they have been told they were being too emotional in a certain situation, or they have found themselves overwhelmed with feelings when confronting a critical scenario, and it kept them from moving forward. Somehow, these women decided to shut off the “feeling part” of themselves in order to execute and get ahead.

Bad move.

Emotions are meant to trigger or alert you to something. When you ignore these, negative consequences are in store, not only for yourself, but for the way you are able to work with others, and ultimately succeed.

So how do you manage your emotions so that they actually help you get ahead?

There are three steps to managing and bridging your feelings so you can support your best thinking and actions:

1. Recognize the emotion you are feeling in a situation.

This may sound easier than it is. I once coached Sandy, a member of her company’s C-Suite, who could only name two emotions that she felt – anger and fear. Because of this, she continuously operated from the “fight or flight” part of her brain – high stress, and low reasoning. As a result, her decision-making suffered. We spent a couple of months helping her to identify and expand her lexicon of emotions as I coached her on how to handle specific situations. Why? Emotions are “gut triggers.” It means, “Hey, something is up, here! Pay attention!” This allowed her to move from a “fight or flight” mode to the reasoning part of her brain.

2. Decide how you want to manage the emotion.

Recognizing what emotion you are experiencing in a certain situation allows you to ask yourself how you would like to handle it. Just because someone has angered you doesn’t mean you need to express your anger. It means, instead, that you can ask yourself why you are experiencing this, whether it comes from a bias or is relevant and appropriate to the situation, and what you want to do behaviorally because of your reflection. This process puts you in charge. Once Sandy could identify the emotion she was feeling in a certain situation, she was able to reason more effectively, asking herself what this emotion was telling her, and whether this was viably related to the decision or situation at hand.

3. Allow your emotional self to collaborate with your rational self.

When you have checked in with yourself as to why you are feeling a certain emotion, where it comes from, and how you want to handle the emotion, you have made space for your rational self to join at the table. Having recognized how you are feeling, what the emotion is telling you, and deciding how you want to handle the emotion, you can now ask yourself to identify the real issue at hand so that you can resolve it most effectively. Sandy discovered that a colleague had undermined her to her staff. When she stopped to recognize how she felt about this, how she wanted to manage it, she then felt much more in control of how she dealt with the situation. Instead of operating from her “hot buttons” as she would have done in the past, she was able to discuss the issue calmly with him, and worked to resolve things.

How do emotions affect the way you work? Join us for our LinkedIn discussion and share!

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Why Aren’t Your Strengths Working For You?

October 12, 2016 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Mastering Your Inner Leader, Part III

Why aren’t your strengths working for you?

You’ve read the book. You went to the company training. You’ve taken the assessment that told you what your top strengths are. It was kind of an interesting exercise.

But knowing what your strengths are hasn’t changed a thing for you.

Unfortunately, strengths become hungry when they aren’t used. In fact, your strengths might just do you in, rather than help you out.

What do you do?

You must address the issue because, without mastering your strengths, you won’t be able to master your leadership.

In the last two weeks, we’ve talked about the importance of mastering your inner leader, or your “leadership DNA,” in order to powerfully engage with others and execute your best work (if you missed the first two steps, click here for Part I and Part II of this series).

As a reminder, your leadership DNA is the unique combination of values, themes, and strengths that you bring to the table to powerfully engage and execute your work effectively. The third step in identifying yours is to discover and integrate your unique strengths.

Why is this important? You’ve been getting your work done – and getting it done well – without paying much attention to strengths. What will being intentional about integrating yours do for you?

Here are 3 reasons why you want to pay attention to your strengths:

Quality of work. Your strengths are what allow you to do your best work. Have you ever heard of the term “being in flow”? Flow is the mental state of being completely immersed in an activity. You are so into what you are doing, so energized, that you don’t realize the amount of time that has passed. This is what utilizing your top strengths can do for you. Since your strengths are the natural wiring you possess for getting your best work done, they get excited and invigorated when you use them, supporting you in energy, focus, and creativity.
Positive self-identity. Your strengths are natural gifts that support your best self. How you feel about the contribution you are making to the world is very important to your self-worth and well-being. Using your strengths on a consistent basis reinforces who you are at your best and the value you bring. It’s a natural motivator to continue moving forward with purpose, because you experience feeling grounded and aligned as you show up in the world when you operate from your natural strengths.
Health and well-being. Your strengths are hungry. If you don’t feed them, they get cranky. It actually takes more effort for you to work without coming from your top strengths. There are many of you reading this who operate consistently with your “non-strengths.” When you do this, you spend a dollar in personal energy to get a penny of outcome in return. Doing so can cause stress, low energy, difficulty in focusing – and over time, burnout. Meanwhile, while you are neglecting your top strengths, they grow frustrated. They beg to be used, and this plea can come disguised as irritability and overwhelm as you go about your work. Who needs that?!

So how do you identify and integrate your own strengths?

First, to identify them… There are some respected assessments in discovering your strengths, and I have used them in my work. Whatever the assessment you choose, be sure it is reputable and tested for validity (how accurate is it in the research world?). One excellent free resource I use with clients is the VIA Strengths Survey, which allows you to discover top character strengths – strengths that are valid not only for your work, but also for the rest of your life. Character strengths mesh well with your life themes (last week’s focus) to shape how you fuel your work when you are at your best.

And now, to put your top strengths to work. Being intentional means to flex and practice, and there are several ways to do this. Here is one approach that works extremely well for the beginning stages of integration. I’d advise running through your top five strengths twice with this method to firmly increase awareness and begin to firm up your strengths approach:

Selecting one strength weekly, journal who you are as leader, at your best, when you exercise this strength.
Then, review your calendar’s upcoming meetings, projects, and conversations, and ask yourself how you will use this strength in the interface.
Debrief each evening, and ask yourself how you did, congratulate yourself on being more intentional, ask yourself what learning you gleaned, and how you will approach the same next time.

What is your biggest question about your own strengths? Join us in the LinkedIn discussion here.

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Why Aren’t You Leading? Part II

October 5, 2016 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Mastering Your Inner Leader, Part II

Last week, I asked you why you aren’t leading.

And a lot of you have written in to tell me why.

A few of you cited you needed more confidence – most of you stated you were ready to do the work, but you weren’t quite sure where to start.
Not surprisingly, every single one of you admitted that you were capable of more.
You also mentioned being at a place in your life where you are ready to lead – to take charge, and to accept greater responsibility for more recognition and reward.

Last week, we talked about the vital step of mastering your inner leader before you can “take it outside” to effectively engage and execute as one. Most people make the mistake of thinking they can develop their leadership simply by attending a company’ program designed for this, or by reading the best books on the subject and putting learning to practice. How hard can it be, after all? But these efforts fail.

There are a few reasons why this doesn’t work, even though the United States spends more than $170 Billion annually on training. And we explored this last week.

But it came down to this: You must empower your leadership from the inside out!

In other words, you must identify and know how to effectively use the unique abilities you possess within to govern your decisions, behaviors, and actions. And we started with values – key to success. You can read more about it here in Part I.

This week, I want to discuss the next important step in mastering your inner leader…identifying into your life themes to discover your purpose, or your “why.”

Why is this important? It’s how you do your job – and why.

Keeping your purpose central to all you do keeps the passion flowing in your leadership. It’s the heart-to-action connection. It also makes your leadership distinctive – something that helps you to stand out and rise above the crowd.

A while ago, I sat with a woman named Jane.

“Patti,” she said, “I doubt you can help. My motivation left me about a year ago. I’ve lost touch with colleagues and team. Goals aren’t exciting. I wish I was retired – yesterday.”

“You are checking out – I can hear that,” I answered. “What happened?”

“You tell me. That’s why you are here,” she smiled.

So I asked Jane why she did what she did. What fired her up to get going in the morning? What difference was she making in her leadership, and in the outcomes she produced for the company? And she couldn’t tell me.

“You’ve lost your reason for leading,” I said. “It’s your purpose. We sometimes call it ‘your why.’”

“So,” she asked, “How did that happen?”

“Oh, it happens when we don’t stay true to our life themes, our purpose. Purpose is what drives us. It fuels meaning and satisfaction.”

“Can I get it back?”

“Yes, you can,” I smiled.

I worked with Jane on identifying the main themes throughout her life that had driven her decisions and actions. Two things stood out for us: Jane had always sought to be an advocate and a teacher – even when small. It showed up on the playground, in her volunteer work in college, and throughout her career. We could look back and see how she had used it to rise to be the executive she was, today.

But about a year ago, Jane had been assigned an ailing initiative requiring her full attention. And we noticed that when she did so, she began to lose the passion in her work. A closer examination revealed that Jane had not actively considered how to use her advocate and teacher themes in approaching the initiative. Instead, she had taken quite a different approach that was creating burnout as it depleted her energy. As she lost her edge, she began to disconnect from others in small ways. Over a year’s time, she wound up feeling isolated and alone.

Fortunately, we were able to turn this around, reconnecting with her life themes of advocate and teacher, and shifting her approach to incorporate these into her work. I’m happy to report that after reconnecting with her purpose, she is back in top form, and loving her work, once again. Others recognize it – and she is being considered for a greater role.

What are your life themes? Can you look back over the years to see what roles you have naturally sought to play, and what energizes you as you do so?

Here’s are some quick questions to get you started in identifying your why:

Describe 3 experiences in your life when you faced challenges. How have they shaped you?
Look back at a period in your life when you felt special, as though you were meant for “this.” What were you doing? What was the role you played, and what energized you?
For what reasons do people seek your help? Among those, which ones energize you?

Meanwhile, please join me in our LinkedIn group for more discussion on this topic.

How do you integrate your values in your work?

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.