Truly honored and blessed to reconnect with the leadership team from Carnival Cruise Lines.
Energetic, heart filled and highly skilled, these leaders were eager to hone their skills even farther. No amount of superlatives will be able to completely describe this group and the relationship with each of them is priceless.
A sincere apology offered to a difficult person can go a long way in helping ease the situation and win them over. At a minimum we need to apologize for what they are feeling and an apology is not an admission of wrongdoing.
We are so incredibly thankful for all of you. We appreciate greatly our customers, friends, vendors and program participants and on behalf of the entire team at Aegis Learning, Happy Thanksgiving!
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Genuine and sincere empathy, either situational or emotional, will go a great way to diffuse a difficult person. Always listen for queues in which you can provide empathy and never compare to any situation you have experienced. Also add the use of the person’s name during this step.
And never, ever, use comparative empathy when you directly compare someone’s experience to yours. A real empathy killer.
At the end of the day, the decision was yours. Even with collaboration and using systems thinking, you made the call. The decision is part of your leadership record and legacy.
Effective leaders cannot run from their decisions. They cannot blame others. They cannot blame the economy. They cannot hedge or try to escape accountability. It was your decision.
When right on target a decision is a glorious thing. Your hard work paid off and you chose the correct course of action. Everything fell into place nicely and the return was better than anticipated. It is pretty easy to own that type of decision.
The harder decisions to own are the clunkers. The ones that don’t work out so well or the choice that just did not pan out. Those are hard to swallow and to have your name attached.
Effective leaders own decisions that are both good and bad. With good decisions, the leader will share credit with the team, those that provided valuable input and any stakeholder that gave clues about outcomes or consequences.
When the decision is a poor choice you are on your own buddy. Can’t blame the data or any person. It is all you.
With bad decisions, there are a couple of additional decision points that come into play. The poorest choice is to defend and continue to cheerlead for a bad decision. This is simply digging a bigger hole and drawing more attention and potentially, criticism to a bad decision.
The effective leader must admit the mistake and work diligently to fix it. Simply say that you made a mistake, you are sorry and you will get it fixed. Use plenty of personal pronouns to make sure the ownership of the decision is clear. You may not get beaten up for a bad decision but you will certainly loose credibility if you try to run from it.
When looking at a poor decision, first check and see if you gave yourself enough time to analyze and diagnose the situation and all of the potential impacts. This is the most common reason for poor decisions. Then, retrace the system thinking and seek a different and wider scope of input that focuses on why the first decision failed and that the issue still exists. Never compound a poor decision with a rash or arbitrary fix that is simply designed to save face.
Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years. He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.
He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.
The first, and most important step, in dealing with difficult people is to listen to them. Complete and uninterrupted listening is needed to remove the emotionalism and allow you the space to provide solutions later. Creating boundaries is also needed to keep the interactions civil and acceptable.
Unlocking a Heart for Leadership
This is a multi-part series of excerpts from Unlocking a Heart for Leadership, a soon to be released book by Tim Schneider. This book and series examines the powerful methods to add heart based (affective/feeling) approaches to your leadership and life. An unlocked heart is the third facet of full leadership and personal realization.
What is Showing Up?
“What you resist persists” Rick Warren
One more quick self-check to see if your heart needs to be unlocked. Quick but complicated to get our heads around.
Look at and spend some time thinking about what is showing up in your life. Is it really what you want and desire or are there elements of dissatisfaction or evenly some deeply rooted pieces where you are not living as you desire?
To be specific, examine who is in your life. Are you pulling great people around you or are you a bug light for toxic and negative humans? Are the relationships you have mutually supportive and caring or is it one way only? These are tough questions but necessary as you move forward to unlock your emotional power.
Take a moment and reflect on your last three or four thoughts. Were they positive, upbeat and encouraging or were they dark and negative? What is the ratio of good thoughts to negative or bad thoughts? This one is a pretty good sign that there are some unresolved issues blocking the emotions that drive your thought patterns.
Another very specific view is about obstacles you are facing. Have you done everything right in an area but the results are not coming? Are you working very hard and have very little to show for it? Have you been passed over for a promotion? Turned down for a loan needed to go into business for yourself? Are you wondering what is holding that back and preventing that success?
Weather consciously known to you or not, yes answers to the above reveal some unresolved issues you are carrying in your heart and emotional composition. Most common among those are:
1. Unrepaired relationships
2. Ungrieved loss
3. Motivations for your actions that are not rooted in good intention
4. Projections to the world that are not what you want or hope (negative perceptions by others)
Have you ever watched news accounts of crime victims reaching out and connecting with the perpetrators of their pain? Although grotesque to think about, these are perfect examples of why relationships, even the most fleeting, need to have some closure, questions answered and some point of clearing.
Unrepaired relationships pull consciously and subconsciously on all of us. Blocking someone out of your life is not repair and simply serves to bury the hurt and block deeper into our subconscious, making it harder to heal. As we all suffer disconnect with others, the heart healthy works to repair while the emotionally unpowered seek to bury the disconnect and simply forget. Quick little note here: you won’t really forget. It may move away from the top of your mind but never out of your subconscious thoughts and emotional composition. As we move through the tools and practices in this book, you will have a pathway to repair these relationships, or at minimum, attempt to repair them. This is an area that we will not sugarcoat in any form. This is difficult and some relationships have decades of estrangement.
Another hard examination is the ungrieved losses in our lives. Very personally, this one weighed on me for many years and there are still a couple of losses that need some grieving time. It wasn’t until years after I lost my dad and mom, did I fully mourn their loss and clear that heart blockage. There is a likelihood that you too are carrying some ungrieved losses in your life. They don’t need to be a death and could come in the form of a lost marriage, failed business or even a missed opportunity.
Like with relationships, our losses cannot simply be buried and we cannot rely on time to heal these wounds. Time blunts some of the pain but the loss remains in our hearts and subconscious minds creating blocks to our success and our ability to capitalize on our heart and emotional power. It will become a matter of finding, acknowledging and then finally grieving these losses to move on successfully.
Your motivations and projections will be examined in detail later in this book but suffice it to say that they drive a big part of our emotional healthy and heart power. When motives are pure and positive, those types of results will follow. When motives are less than pure, the results that show up in your life will reflect that as well.
Projections are the same. You will attract exactly what you project. The unhealthy elements (and people) in our lives appear because of something we have projected to the world. We certainly don’t mean to do that but there is something buried in our emotional composition that keeps driving our projected behaviors. It could be very old or something deeply rooted in a difficult experience. Only you know and it is up to you to find out about it.
Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years. He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.
He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.
