Monthly Archive for August, 2011

What Happens To Your Thinking When You Are Stressed Out?

Added on August 12, 2011 at 10:10 am
During this past week a number of my clients reported being stressed out at work.  I was surprised that tensions were so high given that it is summer, a time usually filled with patio networking lunches, and catching up with clients and colleagues.  This year it seems that many of my clients are going through mergers, company-wide systems integrations, or they are being pushed outside their comfort zone due to a recent promotion.  The lazy days of summer are long gone, or never quite arrived.
As a coach it never fails that when stress at work runs high, so do my client’s thinking distortions.  It is a time when clients become convinced that everyone in the meeting is going to laugh at them when they fumble their way through a high pressure presentation, or they become worried that they don’t have what it takes to live up to their excellent reputation now that they are promoted into a new role.  Or, they become convinced that their perspective is absolutely the right way to do things, regardless of all the resistance they are encountering.
So, what happens to your thinking when you get stressed? Take a quick inventory of these common cognitive distortions.  It is helpful to know your thinking distortions because they usually exacerbate yours stress.  If you understand them, you can catch them before they throw you off your game.
• Mind-reading: In this type of thinking, you assume you know what another person is thinking (or will think) even though you have no clear evidence to back up your assumptions. When you’re mind-reading, you almost always assume that what someone is thinking about you is negative. For example, are you sure you know what your boss thinks of you?  Or, are you guessing?
• Minimization: If you use minimization when making sense of events, you tend to shrink the importance of some events, which deserve far more weight than you give them.  For example, if you get your 360 feedback results you may minimize the positive feedback, or your achievements, and only focus on the development gaps.
• Emotional reasoning: This is probably one of the most common in my analytical clients.  Here, you draw conclusions from how you feel which may not be accurate. That is, you interpret your emotions as evidence of some general truth.  For example, if you feel anxiety about your job, you may believe there is a genuine threat, instead of understanding that your anxiety is due to how you are interpreting your feelings.
• Black and white thinking - Here, you look at people or situations as all good, or all bad.  You are a total success, or a total failure.  You are 100% right, or 100% wrong.  In reality, there is usually more complexity to the situation.  You may have part of it right, and part of it wrong, or you may have been successful with some part of the assignment and not others.
• Fairness Error – In fairness error we tend to judge peoples actions by what we think is fair or not fair.  We feel resentful when someone does not act towards us in a way that we think is fair.  Their version of what is fair is probably different from our version of what is fair.  For example, “If my boss really cared about how employees, he would implement our ideas.”
Source:  Cognitive Biases, Harvard Edu, PDF Handout

Succession Management in Professional Services Firms

Added on August 1, 2011 at 7:31 am

If you run a professional services firm, you are likely thinking about whether or not you need to kick off a formal succession planning program, or whether it is time to refine the program you have in place. Before you take the plunge, here are six pitfalls to watch for that are unique to professional services firms.

Risk to clients: A key part of succession planning is structuring job assignments that address development gaps. In professional services this must be managed carefully, so employees who are learning are not putting client projects at risk, and so clients are not being double billed when a mentor is assigned to correct someone’s work.

Talent crunch: In a professional services firm the senior partners, or senior project leads, are typically over-resourced on projects because they have specialized skills that are in high demand. This is especially true for senior engineers, tax professionals, and lawyers with specialized training. The Catch 22 is that these are the same people who would make excellent mentors for successors. This puts strain on the organization because on the one hand, you need the senior people to mentor, yet at the same time, you do not want to over burden them to the point that they consider leaving the organization for greater work-life balance.

Partners who don’t leave: Given the partnership model in many professional services firms, partners often stay with the business for a long time. This limits the career options for the next generation of leaders who want to fast track their career.  If up and comers feel like their career is being stalled due to slow turnover at the top, they may opt to leave for larger firms.

Technical leaders promoted into people leadership positions: Right now there are shortage of people who can fulfill the senior leadership responsibilities typically required in a professional services firm: sales, people leadership, client delivery, and technical responsibilities.  Given this, it can be tempting to promote a technical person into a senior leadership role, despite them showing limited potential to fulfill all the responsibilities.  Unfortunately, there is a high probability they will fail.  And, once you have promoted them, it is hard to reverse the decision.

High Potential Politics: As part of a succession program certain employees are often tagged as high potentials.  The firm invests more heavily in high potential’s skill development to address the succession gap.  In a professional services firm whether or not to call some people high potentials, and not others, needs to be thought through carefully.  You want to ensure that future leaders know they are being considered for upcoming vacancies, yet you don’t want to alienate solid performers who may not be likely to progress.

Senior Leaders Feel Threatened – For senior leaders who have invested many years in the firm, succession planning may be viewed as a threat. If senior leaders feel pushed out of the firm, or that their security and identity may be at risk, they may exhibit dysfunctional and protective behaviours and not truly support leadership development efforts.

For these reasons, it is important to have a well thought out succession management strategy and to proactively identify and address the issues that could derail your program.