Leading with Self: Emotional Intelligence

What it was

A one-day session on what it means to “lead self” in the context of a changing civil service, through being present and leading with emotional intelligence. Part of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme. Held in London on 28 January 2020.

What I learned

Emotional intelligence

The Emotional intelligence Framework – drawn from (Goldman, D. “Working with emotional intelligence”) – gives ways in which people can be emotionally intelligent and suggests areas to develop.

A similar model is the diagram here: https://hbr.org/2017/02/emotional-intelligence-has-12-elements-which-do-you-need-to-work-on

This model considers Self Vs Others and Awareness Vs Action

  • Awareness / self
    • Self awareness: Emotional self awareness
  • Awareness/ others
    • Social awareness: empathy, organisational awareness
  • Action /self
    • Self management: achievement orientation, adaptability, emotional self control, positive outlook
  • Action / others
    • Relationship management: conflict management, coach and mentor, influence, inspirational leadership, teamwork

Social Motivations

People typically have a combination of three social motivations:

  • Power motive: Primary test: Have an influence or make an impact on others
  • Achievement motive: Primary test: Meeting or exceeding a standard of excellence and or improving ones performance
  • Affiliation motive: Primary test: Maintaining or avoiding disruption of close friendly relations with people

People are often uncomfortable talking about power as a motivation!

Where things can go wrong:

  • Communication problems, including inability to listen or failure to speak up
  • Poor decision making processes, individual and group
  • Experienced experts can make poor choices and commit fundamental decisions making errors, especially under pressure

As a leader you need to be able to see when the team’s emotional engagement is blinding them to reality, for example failing to challenge assumptions, and leading to poor decisions.

Overall reflections on the day:

  • I find this subject hard to “do in the abstract” – I need to revisit this often and see how it can be applied at work.
  • I need to be braver and unafraid to challenge assumptions – especially from senior leadership.

What I will aim to do differently as a result

  • Get closer to the different teams and people – make more visits.
  • Understand what senior leaders want and worry about, talk to them.
  • Think about people’s motivations and how I can help them.
  • I will figure out a way of getting actions from these learning write ups into my task-tracking system
  • I will make time in my diary for leadership and reflection, and for follwing up on the actions from this course
  • Reflect on my social motives (impact and influence) and not to see it as bad, and reflect on the motives of others
  • I will aim to research how to develop greater focus, attention and self control (e.g. Pomodoro technique?)
  • Challenge assumptions and groupthink, have courage

Future Leaders Scheme – End-of-Scheme reflection and discussion

What it was

A meeting to reflect on our collective learning with a cohort of people who had completed the Civil Service Future Leaders Scheme in 2017/18/19, chaired by Director-General at MOD and held in February 2019.

In this blog post I have pasted the content of the end-of-scheme learning template that I completed in preparation for the meeting.

What I learned

What was your key learning from the Scheme?

  • Better grounding in commercial considerations
  • Importance of self-organising, planning and review for my learning
  • Preparation and considering my approach before meetings and engagements
  • The value of coaching with my team leaders and as a general approach to conversations
  • The need to ‘bring the outside in’ and harness external perspectives whenever the organisation needs to learn, grow, change or do new things
  • Importance of planning and directing senior conversations
  • Understanding my leadership style, and ensuring that I embody this

What has been your most important learning about yourself during your time on the scheme?

  • I have a distinctive leadership style with helpful and unhelpful elements
  • There is a place for my leadership style in the SCS (previously I had though there was not)
  • I am able to adapt my leadership style to suit
  • I need (and am broadly able) to create structure, context and continuity for myself as well as for the team
  • I need support on project management / team co-ordination tasks
  • My learning and development needs to be planned and managed
  • Reflection is a powerful tool that I am able to use

What has been your greatest challenge over the past 2 years and how have you addressed this?

Aside from on-the-job challenges, the greatest challenge has been finding time/energy to dedicate to learning and development. I have addressed this by:

  • Booking time in diary for learning, booking onto courses and insisting upon attending these even under sever diary pressures;
  • Making my learning public, making a public commitment to act upon learning and therefore more likely to follow through
  • Using some hours every week ‘dead time’ to focus on technical skills development. I have used the time to complete an online Python course (coding skills for data / analytics).

What were your departmental and corporate contributions during your time on the scheme?

  • Arranged and hosted 2 x Action Learning Sets at MOD
  • As part of the Experiment Group work, I developed, executed and analysed a randomised digital survey (analogous to a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT)) of the FLS cohort (80 responses) – which showed that allowing flexible working makes a very significant difference to the number of candidates who will apply for an SCS post.
  • Contributed to early phases of corporate challenge (was not able to participate in later stages)
  • Set up the ‘lift lobby group’ of people involved in defence change programmes.
  • Began publicly sharing (blogging) my learning

Overall comments on your experience of the scheme and what your next steps will be?

  • I feel I have developed tremendously while on the FLS.
  • Some of this development is likely due to my being on temporary promotion to SCS this year – however I feel I have developed much more during this stint on promotion than during my previous stint, with FLS being the key difference.
  • I posit that the FLS has given me a framework and discipline to reflect upon and contextualise, and so truly learn from, my experiences – rather than simply experiencing them!

What I will aim to do differently as a result

Looking to the future:

  • I want to continue learning about leadership and management
  • I will continue to develop my technical skills and pursue becoming an intelligent customer for Machine Learning and AI.
  • I will continue to seek out and apply for SCS1 opportunities
  • I will aim to seek out a delivery role, and leadership roles.
  • I will consider opportunities outside central Govt Departments
  • I wish to stay in the digital/data/information field but would consider opportunities elsewhere that gave me the leadership and delivery opportunities I need.

Deputy Director Leadership Programme – additional reflections

What it was:

Some reflections on my overall learning, plus some miscellaneous learning from my notes, derived from the two days of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme held in London on 16 and 17 September 2019.

What I learned:

Focus on personal impact:

  • Focus on the key six or so relationships (boss, close peers, direct reports) where you can make a difference.
  • Where can I take a leadership position? How can I be useful to the wider programme?

Find the bandwidth to be a leader:

  • Carve out time in the diary!
  • Carve out time within the framework you are already operating in… so for example, Use 5 or 10 mins within existing meetings – do some reflection, ask how we are doing, how are people feeling, do we understand what we are doing and why?
  • Just do it!  Stop operating and start leading. Just stop doing the operator or manager work – give it to someone else. You are making the conscious choice to be in a different mode.

Miscellaneous points

  • People watch what you do and how you act, be aware of the shadow you cast.
  • Be a lateral thinker – think of it like a dating agency – how can you join together different unconnected parties to the common good?
  • Like a lobster, it’s good to feel uncomfortable as you grow
  • The importance of being able to manage between ambiguity and clarity

What I will aim to do differently as a result:

  • Re-engage on leadership and learning
  • Get back into coaching and mentoring (myself and others)
  • Carve out leadership time
  • Make the conscious decision to lead not just do work

Some specific actions:

  • Adapt and update my leadership statement
  • Update my learning and development plan
  • Make time for leadership thinking and review
  • Re-engage on networking and stakeholder engagement
  • Put in new learning time (Thursday and Tuesday nights)
  • Get this blog into better shape and be more disciplined in publishing my learning
  • Start gathering shareable data about my work and consider how to publish it
  • Set up some self-coaching – e.g. some automated tweets or a similar tool
  • Complete an exercise to capture my reflections from my time as Hd C&MI
  • Write up the EOY feedback and make this the basis of the next phase of learning

Leading with Self: The personal leadership statement

What it was:

A talk, group and individual exercise led by Dionne Corradine. This was part of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme held in London on 16 and 17 September 2019.


What I learned:

A personal leadership statement can help crystallise your leadership style, your aspirations, and what you offer to the people you work with. It can also be used as part of your objectives and to measure your progress.

A personal leadership statement takes time to develop and should be considered a work in progress – it can be a blend of where you are and where you want to be.  It should answer the question “Why should anyone be led by me?”

We conducted a brief exercise to generate a first-draft personal leadership statement.  Here is my draft:

PERSONAL LEADERSHIP STATEMENT – Ten-minute draft

What do I stand for?

  • The power of science, technology and information to do public good
  • The Integrity, impartiality and objectivity of the Civil Service
  • Experimentation and taking decisions based on evidence
  • The importance of collaboration 
  • Development and growth for all

Why follow me? Because I am:

  • Inspiring:
    • Try to see where the future is going and get there early
    • Always work collaboratively, cohering teams into action
    • Work to set a compelling vision and concepts 
    • Work to engage people and stakeholders in that vision
  • Confident:
    • Enjoy communicating, engaging and influencing
    • See and do things differently
    • Practice open leadership, working out loud and being open to feedback 
    • Volunteer and step in when things are going wrong
    • Try to influence thinking outside my area
    • Aim to be aware of myself, my impact and be reflective
  • Empowering:
    • Create a team that’s fun, supportive, loyal to each other
    • Keep myself and my team at the leading edge, by driving change and developing forward-leaning skills
    • Try to help my team achieve their development dreams
    • Encourage and reward reasonable challenge, listen to evidence
    • Enable teams to do new things in new ways

Things I’m trying to be better at:

  • Servant leadership
  • Planning and managing the pipeline of work
  • Staying always a leader, not a manager or operator 
  • Maintain technical skills and being an intelligent customer 
  • Coaching and mentoring my team leaders
  • Maintaining and growing my and my team’s networks

What I will aim to do differently as a result:

  • Develop the statement above and then try to live it!
  • Bake my leadership statement into my personal objectives
  • Build in review / reminder points
  • Consider ways to test my performance against the statement
  • Get hold of the speaker’s slides for this session as they contained lots of useful thinking.

Leading through complexity and change

What it was:

A crisis management case study (based on a real DFID example), talked through in respect of the actions and behaviours required of senior leaders, followed by some reflections on crisis experience from a leader, and a group exercise on our own responses to crises and change.

This was part of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme held in London on 16 and 17 September 2019.

 

What I learned:

As a group we identified some early things the senior leaders would have to consider:

What we are going to do:

  • The overall principles we would adopt
  • This is primarily about partnership and the stakeholders to be managed
  • What are the key risks – what action do we take against each?
  • What levers do we have on this problem?
  • The need for internal communications and keeping an eye on staff impact

Reflection during a crisis:

  • Are we the right people to be leading this?  Do we need to change leadership style or change leaders?
  • Capture the lessons – as a case study to inform the response to the next crisis
  • Is there an opportunity for a positive outcome from this crisis?
  • Setting the context for the multi-disciplinary team
  • Crisis management expertise – Is there a template we could follow?

Reflections on crisis management from a senior leader:

  • It’s really difficult to get into crisis mode, but easy to identify a crisis in retrospect! Someone in the team needs to be able to see when you are in crisis – maybe you!  
  • It’s better to over-react early than under-react, or you will always be playing catch-up.  
  • Try to get to the right policy answer as quickly as possible – otherwise you will be dragged  to the right answer eventually.
  • Keep the ability to see beyond the invested position – be able to be disinterested and impartial.
  • What are our levers?  Need to understand what realistically can be done
  • A simple tool – think what I need to do for my Organisation / Team / Self
  • It’s important for the senior leaders to understand their own strengths / weaknesses and what value they can bring.
  • Never waste a good crisis – look for opportunities for your organisation (and where applicable the wider UK) to take a leadership position – find a way for the energy of the crisis to be channelled into something valuable and enduring.

Outcomes of the group exercise on Complexity and Change

When a shock happens…

What do I think my teams will be thinking and feeling?

  • Uncertainty, afraid of the future, worry they will not be supported
  • Think about their hierarchy of needs.

What are your own personal thoughts and feelings?

  • Regret / paralysis – feeling responsible when I am not 
  • Worry about being under scrutiny
  • Worry about my decision-making and judgement under pressure

What you would want people to say about your leadership style

  • Decisive, sets clear context and priorities 
  • Leads under pressure
  • Keeps team welfare in mind

What action could you take now to better prepare yourself and your team?

  • Have someone you can trust that you can talk to 
  • Understand your stress behaviours
  • Take care of well-being and promote this behaviour in your team


What I will aim to do differently as a result:

  • Try to recognise when a crisis is happening – don’t be the boiled frog.
  • Be more open with my bosses when things are not going well (on any front) – be less afraid to ‘cry wolf’
  • Familiarise myself with the crisis management structures and learning in Government
  • Have a ‘buddy’ (or more than one) to baseline with in the event of a crisis
  • Adopt the PERMA framework to undertake some team well-being and hence resilience building.