How to Balance Patience With Impatience.
Edition #169
Introduction
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Empathy Is A Non-Negotiable Leadership Skill.
Here’s How to Practice It.
All of us know empathy is an important skill. The most interesting aspect is that we overestimate ourselves in this skill. According to this article, “55% of CEOS think they lead with empathy at work, but only 28% of employees and 22% of HR share that view.”
We believe we are highly empathetic towards others, but we always feel that the other people we interact with every day - our peers, colleagues, boss, etc.- need to learn a lesson or two on how to be empathetic!
This article from Harvard Business Review has some interesting tips on how we can be better at being empathic:
Developing an ‘empathy protocol’ is a powerful idea and concept: We recently encountered this in an IT Services organization, where we found that many associates who came to present their work for the meeting expressed ‘gratitude’ first before they even started presenting their work. The most interesting one was that this was done by most of the people with whom we interacted, which meant this was a protocol they had imbibed for themselves.
Be Other-Focused: Avoid anchoring conversations with others using your own experience. The article suggests some interesting methods for doing this - be a container, listener, and questioner.
Balance individual and group needs - The following sentence has so much more meaning when you read it as to how best to understand the idea of balancing both - ‘Perspective-taking is about gathering information to understand what is true for someone without feeling their feelings.’
Facilitate support rather than taking over - Don’t jump in and try to solve the problem. Find what support is needed for the individual and make it available or accessible. That can make a big difference.
Model boundary settings - When leaders are excessively empathetic, it can lead to a syndrome called empathic distress - “the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from excessive negative feelings.” Know your limits and protect your energy. Model healthy behaviours like work-life balance, self-care, taking breaks, vacations, digital detoxes, emotion regulation and stress management.
Update your language to connect. Try to validate and explore when people express their feelings. It is essential to be open and interested in discovering what someone’s truth looks and sounds like. Avoid using dismissive phrases and use well-intentioned phrases.
You can read the entire article here.
Can You Recession-Proof Your Job?
Economic cycles have an upward and downward impact on demand for goods or services. To top it all, disruptions happen where new competitive forces emerge, pushing businesses into making hard decisions around people, pulling back investments, etc. So, can you really recession-proof your job? What does it take to do it? Some of the skills mentioned make it vital for you to build, irrespective of the economic headwinds.
This podcast, Per My Last Email, discusses this topic threadbare on what you can do that is under your locus of control. Here are some key takeaways.
“Demonstrate how your job ties directly to revenue and communicate that frequently.”
If you work in a cost centre function, convert your qualitative work into a quantitative one.
During hard times, people with T-Skills tend to get valued and retained. What do people with T-based skills have? ‘Have better communication skills, demonstrate a lot of flexibility, have developed hard and soft skills, broadly know what's happening at the company because of that horizontal expertise, have developed hard and soft skills, which make them quite versatile.’
The power of weak ties is an interesting concept that is discussed here. Build, build and build your network.
An HBR research study has identified job functions that tend to be recession-proof as those that have:
Have close prioximity ot revenue
Measurable ROI
Operational necessity
Regulatory compliance
Upskill yourself and stay abreast of new tools and technologies. MIT did interesting research on this, looking at the impact of automation on manufacturing. The people who held the job were the people who asked themselves this question: “How do I understand what the robot can do and can't do, and how do I complement what it can do?”
You can listen to the entire podcast on:
Spotify | YouTube | Amazon Music
Three Essential Skills For Today’s World.
Robert Greene is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, The Laws of Human Nature, and most recently, The Daily Laws.
In this video, Robert discusses the Three Essential Skills that are vital irrespective of the disruptions that technology and business models can create. These are foundational skills that stand like a rock, regardless of the changes happening around you.
Learn to cooperate with people
Love of Learning
Need for Patience
Just click on the above link and watch this video.
How to Balance Patience With Impatience.
Robert Greene’s three essential skills offer many perspectives on why they are vital for an individual’s success.
Let’s look at patience, for instance. We live in a fast-paced world, and we get accustomed to getting things at the click of a button and crave for instant gratification. However, professional expertise and success take their own time. You need to work on your skills diligently over many years to be recognised as an expert and successful. In an interesting article, Aditya Gaur writes that patience is a superpower for personal growth.
We will have to endure many ups and downs in a career spanning many decades. It happens to even the best of people. Therefore, having the resilience to stay focused is an essential skill we must develop in ourselves. Also, at the workplace or if you are pursuing a professional career as an individual consultant, lawyer, doctor, architect, etc., you will have to deal with people or situations with different benchmarks of work ethic, professional excellence and success.
Many people don’t set their own compass, blueprint and roadmap for the above. A company’s appraisal serves as their personal appraisal of professional growth and success. But is that good enough? Not at all.
When you build a personal professional compass or blueprint for yourself, which you can keep refining as you go along in life, it serves as an anchor for dealing with events in your life with a lot of patience. Take, for example, you work under a boss who does not have a very high benchmark for excellence at work. The first question to ask yourself is, ‘How do I know if this is a high or a low benchmark, if you don’t have one?’ The company you work for may be amongst the best in your industry, but the boss may not be or vice versa. Then, patiently working your way around it for a few years becomes important, without diluting your benchmarks. This will become vital to your professional growth and success.
You have to learn the art of being ‘Patiently Impatient’ - which means being patient on the outside but being impatient on the inside with respect to sharpening your tool kit for excellence, irrespective of external benchmarks, and recognition. You develop the patience to handle external contradictions and build the resilience inside you, so as not to be influenced by them.
The next important aspect of patience is that you develop a ‘true reality’ of your inventory of skills. You seek to keep improving on the ones you are good at and learning new ones. Patience also sets a different ‘time clock’ in your head because you develop a ‘Long-term View’ of what it takes to achieve true expertise, success and achievement. Patience helps to observe and view things more deeply than look at them from the periphery.
For example, when you build a strong patience DNA, you will realise that any company’s reward and recognition are only relative to the goals and quality of people they have with them. Your personal growth blueprint is independent of those rewards and recognition, and these will come your way in your journey, but you are not swayed by them in any way. It’s like a station or a stop that comes during a journey to a destination. You must learn to cherish those moments, but they should not stop you from moving to the next milestone in your journey - milestones don’t just mean promotions, designations, but also learning new skills and capabilities to build a new version of yourself every few years. That’s the impatience you will need to build within yourself.
What patience leads you to develop is finding a way of working with people with different benchmarks. Some are intense, where you will need to fuel their ambition further, some you may need to inspire, with some you need to up your own skills and benchmarks by not becoming insecure, with a few others you have to learn to let them be, etc. Hence, patience helps you manage people better.
Finally, patience is a great elixir for learning. Patience serves as a powerful engine for learning all the time. It helps you develop a keen awareness of what is needed to take your act to the next level. Let’s take an example - If you are not recognised at the workplace, patience helps you assess what is right or wrong with you. You don’t make knee-jerk career jumps. Because you are recognised every year, it must not stop you from pursuing your learning and personal growth agenda. That’s your impatience at play. The reason is that you see a destination or a journey that is not seen by others.
Therefore, having patience alone is not enough. Having a high degree of impatience within you is vital, too. Having both of them in the right balance is key to personal growth and success.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Leaders overestimate their empathy scores, while people underestimate their leaders’ empathy scores. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Know and find ways to improve your T-skills.
Patience, cooperating with people, and learning are three essential skills for personal growth and success.