Three shadows falling across the land of organizational performance
Why is stress and a deficit of leadership the paramount obstacle to organizational learning and collaborative intelligence?
You want team performance?
You want to drive leadership?
You want to empower your teams?
Seriously!
Well, I have news for you.
Really tough news. Generally ignored. Swept under the rug. A blind-spot.
What is it?
Stress!
Stress?
Yup.
High performance has a concomitant rise in pressure. A rise in stress.
The better you get. The more you achieve, accomplish, blow your targets.
The pressure cooker kicks in.
Anxiety is the twin of performance.
It’s a funny thing, but when an expert plays against a beginner. Stress levels can go through the roof.
Weird.
What do you mean?
Well, the expert actually has more to lose than the beginner.
Really.
Think about it.
The beginner has nothing to lose. But everything to gain.
The expert has everything to lose. Period.
You would think it would be the other way around.
Performance tests your confidence.
“Between the Idea and the Reality Falls the Shadow” T S Elliot
The shadow.
What is the shadow?
There are three types of shadow
The first shadow is your mind
A lack of self-belief. A lack of confidence. Fear. Errors. Mistakes. Peer pressure.
For anybody in sales, marketing, engineering, public speaking, negotiating, they share the same stress response as athletes.
Fear is at the bottom of your performance.
What do you mean?
Fear rules and dominates our internal emotional landscape. It holds our future to ransom. We have to learn to negotiate with this kidnapper of our soul. We have to learn to have a conversation in our head.
What do you mean?
Well, when you are training to compete or a preparing a key business activity, negative thoughts accompany you. Like uninvited guests, these thoughts can overwhelm you.
What types of thoughts do you feel?
“I can’t do this.”
“I am not good enough.”
“It’s too hard.”
“They are much better than me.”
“I am too young”
“I am too old.”
“I don’t have the right experience.”
“They won’t like me.”
“I feel like an imposter.”
“I am too scared.”
To make matters worse, there is a bigger shadow over our lives.
The second shadow is community
Stress has become a permanent feature of the globe landscape. Energy, climate, war, economics, food, water, poverty, heat, health are just some of the main challenges we are facing every day… every day the news fills our screens with items that frankly scare us to death.
Frankly, this is not an overstatement.
Street conversations are about fear. Threats to our lives and families and community. Nuclear war.
People are alarmed.
Seriously upset, unnerved, shocked and disturbed.
Discussions around the water cooler, at home, in school in hospitals are about being in shock.
Depression and mental health issues are obvious.
The third shadow is leadership and teamwork
If the first two shadows of self-belief and community fear were not enough, it is made even worse by an absolute deficit in leadership and teamwork.
The world is transparent now. Leaders and top teams cannot hide. Leadership teams appear at times like a bad TV reality show. They continue in the face of overwhelming evidence, continue to strengthen their negative strategies of group-think and skilled incompetence. Why do they keep on insisting on outdated models of leadership and human potential?
Vertical organizational models dehumanize people. Treat them like barcoded products. Machine parts to be hired and fired at a whim.
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