Is that a fact?

Having just got a new job there is lots of information you need, isn’t there. And it is really important to show how keen, challenging and curious you are by asking lots of questions, isn’t it.

Even better if you can leap in with some information when someone has got it wrong. Gives you a reason for being there.

But how and when do you give information without stopping the other person thinking for themselves? Or is that something you want to actively discourage anyway. Do you always really need to understand what someone is talking about……enough to interrupt them? What will your interruption do to their thinking? It is highly possible that things will become clear to you as they continue to speak, and if not, could you restrain yourself until they have finished before you ask for or give information?

What are your motives for giving information immediately – to deflect attention towards yourself, to show off, to be one up, to prove you need to be there?

On the other hand, how often have you not asked for fear of being thought stupid or just in case you had not been listening properly.

Ever withheld information from someone because ‘they never tell me what I need to know’ or because they are annoying. Just me, eh.

Accurate, complete and timely information is crucial to us all, but only at the right time.

Ask yourself, does this person need to know this right now?

Got a Feeling....

Ever felt so angry or upset that you thought your head was about to explode? It’s hard to think straight isn’t it? But which is the best option – to let your feelings out, get them out of the way, or to stuff them back down inside to simmer and fester. How much energy do each of these options take?

At work, especially, we are trained to find emotions somehow weak or distasteful or unprofessional (even though we all have them). We think it is indulgent to let people express their feelings, worry that we have lost control if we or they do, or that it takes too long to allow for this.

We have mixed up the release of pain with the cause of pain. But when we repress out feelings we muddle our minds and we are unable to think clearly. If we could just let someone be sad, angry or afraid for a short while and pay attention to them while they did this, these feelings would soon pass and clear thinking return. Could you do this if someone was angry at you? Of course, if they are so angry they look as if they might turn violent it is wise to beat a hasty retreat.

If you knew that if feelings are expressed just enough, then thinking restarts, how differently would you react next time one of your team is upset?

No competition

You have just got a new job and it would be good to get a few early wins under your belt, right? Get your ideas out and make sure they are the ones taken up.

Trouble is, in presentations and meetings it can seem as if to express a new idea it to expose it to ridicule and almost certain death from envy and competition.

And you don't want to have to sit and listen to praise for someone else's idea because that somehow feels as if you have lost.

Competition, combativeness..apparently good for business but in reality they keep your attention on your 'rivals' and not on the result. Generate comparative success not necessarily excellence.

If it was really more important to you that the right solutions are implemented rather than that you be right, how many more of their ideas would people tell you?

Get real

'Get real', 'take a reality check' etc. It is not just at work, but in our culture as a whole, that being 'realistic' means to take a negative view, as if anything good is somehow not real. To see the positive is to be naive, vulnerable and childish, whist to see only the negative is realistic, grown up and informed.

I once worked for a director who motivated his team by generating a culture of 'relentless dissatisfaction'. I am sure you can imagine how motivated we were by continually hearing that nothing we did was good enough.

In truth, what this approach gives us is an incomplete view of reality and stifles thinking. Consider how it affected you the last time someone told you that you had done some specific thing well. Not just a general 'you're great' but specfic, sincere appreciation of something you had done or some quality in you. Did you feel more confident about tackling problems? Could you think better for a while afterwards? Did you manage to avoid turning into a raging egomaniac? Thought so.

What difference would it make to your team if you told them, specifically, what you had noticed them doing well before you asked them what they thought needed to be done differently?

P.S. Once you have started to see the good close to you, get some inspiration for the good in the world from http://reasonstobehopeful.blogspot.com/

Easy, now.

When you have just been promoted a sense of ease is often the last thing you are feeling, or,in fact, think would be useful. It seems much more important to rush to get up to speed, to be seen to be on top of things, to be doing something...and quickly.

If you are in a hurry there must be lots going on and you must be really important, right?

In reality, urgency is destructive. It creates anxiety, quick, rather than correct, solutions and a general inability to think straight in most of us.

Ease, on the other hand, is a deceptively gentle catalyst. It allows the mind to broaden and reach for new and better solutions and to see those imagined emergencies for what they really are.

In your new role, how much more clearly could you see what needs to be done, and hear what people are really saying to you if you were at ease?

We are all equals here (aren't we?)

In Time to Think, Nancy Kline points out that we are often intimidated in to thinking that 'the higher up in an organization you are, the better you can think'.

In your new role, do you think that it would make you look incompetent to seek out ideas from junior members of staff, or even from yours peers. Did you not get promoted because you had so many good ideas of your own?

Or are you sitting quietly at the back, not sure how you ended up in a room with all the big thinkers of the company and dreading least they should all suddenly look your way and ask 'what do you think?'

If you knew that your thinking was equal to that of anyone else in your organisation, how much more might you learn and contribute?

Are you paying attention at the back?

How marvelous. You have just been promoted to a senior mangement role in your company. So, what are you going to do now? Carry on doing what you were doing before - well, they obviously liked it as they promoted you. Do what the person in the job before you was doing - that must have been OK because they got a good job somewhere else. Start afresh - can't do that as they know you and you are supposed to know a lot having been with the company for several years. They have set up a bit of an induction programme but is is really just form as you should know all of it already, shouldn't you?

How would it be if you went into that induction process ready to truly pay attention to what people were telling you? What, you are a good listener are you? Well, what else might you be thinking about while they are talking to you?

• What question to ask to make yourself look great;
• How you will do things differently in the future
• Everything you know and assume about them from your previous contact
• Guessing what they are going to say next so that you can finish their sentence and demonstrate how much in tune you are
• What is for lunch

So how much of your attention is left for what they are telling you and how interested are you in what they actually think.

What does giving someone attention mean? It means listening with palpable respect and fascination. It is much more than active listening, which for most of us means little more than nodding and making enough 'uh huh's. When you are listening to someone, much of what you are hearing is your effect on them. Given someone your full attention is in itself generative of good thinking - freeing them from what they ought to say, or think you want to hear or believe you want want to listen to.

What might you learn that would help you in your new role if you gave your colleagues your full attention?