INSPIRATION
9 Words To Stop Negative People From Sucking The Energy Out Of The Room
We’ve all been in those meetings where most people are trying to do something positive and constructive, but there’s one person who keeps sniping and oozing negativity over every good idea.
Someone says, “I think this new software will really help our productivity.” But the negative person immediately snaps “Oh please, this company never gets new technology right,” thus casting a pall over the rest of the meeting.
Sadly, those types of negativity bombs are being launched more frequently these days. One of my recent studies, called Fake News Hits The Workplace, surveyed more than 3,000 leaders about lying and other bad behaviors in the workplace. Among our many findings, we discovered that 53% of people have seen an increase in Criticism, 48% have seen an increase in Dismissing others’ ideas and 36% have seen an increase in Hostility or disparaging others.
What our data shows is that if you’ve been feeling like there’s more vitriol and negativity these days, you’re right. And it’s very much infecting our workplaces. So, what can you do about it?
Imagine you’re in a meeting and you hear someone make one of those blanket negative statements (e.g. “that will never work,” “this company doesn’t care about its employees,” “we’re just gonna get trounced by the competition,” etc.). The 9 words you’re going to say are “I’m curious, what evidence brought you to that conclusion?”
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What happens next follows a pretty typical pattern. The negative person might say “oh, you know, we’ve just never been good at implementing new technology” or they might say “well, it’s just obvious.” But regardless of what they say exactly, they typically evidence that there’s not a lot of factual basis for their negativity.
There are generally four layers in any conversation: Facts, Interpretations, Reactions and Ends (FIRE). Facts are those things that you could see, hear, videotape, and validate. Facts are objective, provable, and verifiable. But negative people don’t tend to traffic in facts; they much prefer interpretations. The human brain is an interpretation machine. It doesn’t show us the world as it is, but rather as it’s useful for us. This is why we all have different perceptions of the world, sometimes radically so. The brain perceives a fact, and then, almost instantaneously, it sifts through all our personal past experiences and knowledge to assign meaning, or intent, to that fact.
So the negative person takes a fact, like our company is implementing new technology, and they interpret that to mean that this new implementation is going to be awful, the technology won’t work, etc. They’ve left the world of facts and jumped feet first into the realm of interpretations. That means that your job is to gently force them back into dealing with facts.
When you make a negative person think through whether they have any factual support for their negativity, a few things happen. First, it becomes clear that they don’t really have any factual support for their negativity. And if they have some facts to back them up (e.g. “well, the last software we implemented went so badly that the company paid to have it uninstalled”) you will typically still have room to push back (e.g. “that’s true, but what about the one before that? And don’t we have a different team of leaders now? Is it really true that all technology installs go poorly?”)
Second, while you’re trying to help the negative person overcome their default negativity, you’re really playing to the rest of the room. The power that negative people wield is that their negativity is contagious and can cast a pall over nearly any group.
So regardless of whether you’re ultimately able to convince the negative person to become more positive, you need to show everyone else in that meeting that this blanket negativity is factually unfounded. And you do that by gently revealing the spurious (or nonexistent) factual evidence for this person’s negative interpretations.
Third, there are too few people that will directly challenge these negative people.
The thinking is often that ‘someone else will handle this’ or ‘it’s just Bob being Bob.’ But whatever the rationale, someone does have to jump in and tackle the negative person head on. The danger is that if you confront negativity with more negativity (e.g. “stop being so darn negative!”) you only make matters worse.
Instead, our simple nine-word phrase, “I’m curious, what evidence brought you to that conclusion?” is very nonconfrontational.
We’re just asking a simple question, from a position of curiosity, but it’s also a question that will reveal the negative person to be a factually hollow fount of ill will. But by exposing them gently, we evidence compassion while still showing the rest of the room that there’s no rational reason to be negative. And by being the one person willing to stand up to negativity, we breathe fresh life back into our meeting.
Business
Managing, Leading, Building Institutions And Sustainability
The two primary tasks of a top-level leader are to exploit and explore the organisation with people for now and in the future.
By Babs Olugbemi
One of my concerns for leaders is their capacity to be ambidextrous. Regardless of years of experience, knowledge, and leadership capacity, the lack of a clear distinction between managing and leading on the one hand, leading and building institutions on the second layer, and ultimately focussing on sustainability is a significant threat to successful leadership change.
I have followed events and people at C-suites, coached some, and developed frameworks for leadership development. Based on the personalities and styles of the new leaders, I have confirmed my fears about leadership sustainability in most African organisations.
“Successful leaders can aptly differentiate themselves and their roles without necessarily seeing activities as performance, focussing on what is required of them with appropriate tenacity and influence.”
The challenge for leaders is how to lead for the present and future without losing sight of the stakeholders’ immediate performance expectations. Successful leaders can aptly differentiate themselves and their roles without necessarily seeing activities as performance, focussing on what is required of them with appropriate tenacity and influence.
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In my walk as a leadership coach, I have keenly observed leaders who are managing rather than leading. Managing involves ensuring that processes achieve their intended outcomes. Leaders are above managing and should focus on creating an enabling environment for innovation, inventions, and team collaboration. The primary role in leading is not to monitor process outcomes, though critical to the company’s overall objectives, but to align corporate values with the people’s aspirations to create an engaged and ownership-thinking mindset ready to take on challenges and explore opportunities. An alignment of corporate and personal goals will not only deliver the present performance expectations. Still, it will also incubate innovations to adapt to future market demands and the sustainability of the business.
Unfortunately, the capacity for ambidexterity is rare and often marked by leaders’ exposure, approach and styles, perception, and perspective of their roles in the organisation. A leader with a wrong foundation in these areas is set for failure and awaits unfavourable decisions from the board of directors. A top-level leader might manage their teams instead of leading them. Not all leaders can combine leading for the present with building institutions. However, anyone able to submit themselves to an institution-building mechanism can champion sustainability. Aside from being a leadership coach, I help leaders achieve sustainability.
Mathematically, creating an ambidextrous organisation is beyond leading. It is to lead and build an institution that focuses on sustainability in all aspects of the organisation—employee fulfilment, customer retention, strategy effectiveness, performance evaluation, stakeholder management, process improvement, and goal congruence.
In a nutshell, the role of successful leaders in ambidextrous organisations is striking a balance between exploiting current assets and capabilities to ensure short-term success and allocating enough energy and resources to exploration to ensure future viability. The two primary tasks of a top-level leader are to exploit and explore the organisation with people for now and in the future. The two seemingly contradictory aspects—exploitation and exploration—encompass different strategies and processes and have different targets and outcomes (March 1991; O’Reilly & Tushman, 2004; O’Reilly & Tushman, 2013).
O’Reilly and Tushman described the two concepts as follows:
- Exploiting: Exploiting involves building on an organisation’s achievements and maximising returns on previous investments. It focuses on responding to current business demands to remain efficient and competitive within an established market niche, as well as on maintaining an existing customer base and stakeholder relationships. Examples of exploiting are activities focused on continuous improvement, benchmarking, and redesigning business processes.
- Exploring: Exploring focuses on expanding an organisation’s knowledge and capabilities, pioneering new products and services, and discovering and venturing into untapped markets.
The common area of practical bottlenecks in exploiting and exploring in organisations is a need for foundational trust and cohesion among the resources, especially the human capital, which are often treated as costs rather than assets to the organisations. Among all the factors of production, only humans can be ambidextrous with the capacity to think about changes in economic parameters and adjust their behaviours to match the time, content, and contextual requirements.
While organisations might have the resources to deploy in fighting competition, technology to obtain first-mover advantages, and production capacity to maximise output from input, none is compared with the potential of an engaged workforce.
Therefore, for leaders to be successful, they must refrain from operating in the realm of managing. They should operate in the capacity of institution builders, with the mindset of creating sustainable leadership and growth with people first and other factors of production second.
Consequently, only the leaders who prioritise their people over profits, pride, and organisational arrogance will be successful in the long term.
Business
BUSINESS: 3 Non-Financial Factors That Could Impact Your Business’ Value-JESSICA FIALKOVICH
we also look at factors like the level of owner involvement, company goals and growth opportunities.
Jessica Fialkovich, an entrepreneur leadership network contributor, has listed three important non-financial factors that could impact business value.
In a business publication on Entrepreneur, Fialkovich revealed that, to come up with the true value of a company or business, “we also look at factors like the level of owner involvement, company goals and growth opportunities.”
She explained that, “Determining a business’ value is not all about adding up revenue and subtracting expenses. While an important piece, these hard numbers are only half the equation for computing what a company is worth. To come up with the true value, we also look at factors like the level of owner involvement, company goals and growth opportunities. When we use the complete equation, we get a comprehensive picture of a business and can better understand the story of its past, present and future.”
“Calculations may vary depending on the company, but in a healthy one, there is about a 50/50 split between the quantitative (financial) and qualitative (non-financial) sides of performance. If the business isn’t profitable, it’s more important to focus on the quantitative side and fix the numbers first. Many owners don’t want to hear that, but if they’re not hitting their numbers, it may mean the business is not working. They must fix the quantitative issues before moving to the qualitative side” she added.
The first factor is what is called:
The owner’s Goal
We’ve found significant research showing that if an owner has defined goals and plans for the future that are in line with market expectations for their company’s value, they’re going to have a much stronger exit. What is the owner’s defined goal for exiting the business — to get the most money, to take care of their employees and to ensure a legacy? You must then get to the “why” behind the goals and devise a plan of action. It almost doesn’t matter what the answers to the questions are; having achievable goals and a strategy for reaching them can increase the company’s value because it keeps the owner focused on improving the other areas of the business.
The second factor is called:
The owner’s role
The extent of the owner’s involvement is a critical indicator, but perhaps not for the reason you think. The more involved the owner is in day-to-day operations, the more central they are to the business, the less the business will be worth down the road. If the owner is the linchpin that holds everything together, what will happen to the company when they leave? Evaluating operations is more about the system and the structure of the team. Look at the organizational chart and who’s on it – are they good employees or bad employees? Examine the company’s processes and procedures and how new team members are trained and onboarded. The owner sets the vision, but it’s the team that increases company value by carrying out the vision.
The third factor is called:
Growth opportunities
Nobody wants to buy a business and keep it exactly as it is. They want to see potential for growth in the future, especially the potential for return on their investment as a buyer. Whether it’s a simple price increase or new locations, whoever buys the business is going to ask about growth opportunities. Indicators like product or service diversification in both the company and the industry it’s in give a good sense of whether the company is moving forward or standing still (and at risk of going backward). The more potential you can show, the more upside there will be for the next owner — adding up to greater value.
Popular Nigerian columnist, philanthropist, writer, publisher and founder of Genevieve magazine, Betty Irabor has taken to social media to speak on the increasing rate of suicide in Nigeria.
Irabor who is a former columnist with Black & Beauty magazine UK in her post disclosed that she has attempted suicide in the past while also revealing that no one should be judged for taking such actions.
According to her, no one understands what the victims had been passing through, then they shouldn’t make assumptions on how they should have acted.
She wrote,
“suicide!!! don’t label or judge what you do not understand. if you haven’t walked in a man’s or woman’s shoes you cannot make assumptions about what they do or why they do it.
at the time i attempted suicide, i was sick and in pain. there was a volcano somewhere inside of me that needed to erupt and suicide seemed like an option to avoid the eruption. don’t trivialize anyone’s pain just because it’s not physical and you cannot see it.”
Irabor is also the founder of a foundation that promotes breast cancer awareness, early detection and treatment.
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