Flexibility: The Untapped Leadership Skill

As a trained coach in Cognitive Coaching, one of the areas that I gauge my questions and find clarity with a client is to pay attention to cognitive shifts. This newsletter is about the cognitive shift of flexibility.

Flexibility, as a leadership competency, refers to a leader's ability to adapt their approach and strategies in response to the changing needs of their team and the organization. Flexibility also:

• involves being open to new ideas

• responds to unexpected challenges

• adjusts plans to support team members better

• is crucial in guiding people effectively

• allows leaders to meet the diverse needs of their workforce

• fosters an environment of trust and collaboration

Unfortunately, too many leaders think flexibility is a sign of weakness or disorganization, and tend to gravitate toward structure, logic, and process-oriented thinking. This newsletter outlines many advantages and practices to move from logic to empathy as a way of being flexible.

Julia

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Last week I hosted my first official “Teach Them “webinar as a full-time consultant, called “Flexibility is not a dirty ‘F’ word.” 

I thought the name of the session was appropriate (and a little catchy) for leaders and teams to open the conversation about how flexibility is often perceived as a negative, when in fact, flexibility is a true indicator of cognitive awareness, social engagement, and outstanding leadership.

Although I’m a huge fan of creating systems and structures, processes, and sometimes policies, that help an organization maintain levels of standards and expectations, I’ve experienced throughout my coaching work how “flexibility” (and inflexibility) was coming to the surface in many of my conversations.

Heck, even in my own life, I started to see where I was leaning too much on systems and structures, and not enough on my own flexibility. As a coach, it’s important to recognize the types of coaching, questions, and methodologies to engage a client.  When clients share deep thoughts and vulnerabilities during a coaching session, it would be ignorant of me to assume that having a standard process for coaching would be universally beneficial.

Flexibility, as a cognitive shift, began to show up in some of my coaching conversations, where the systems and structures of the organization were so ingrained into how leadership functions, humans often forgot the importance of retraining and reframing the brain that includes empathy, flexibility, and human-centered feedback.

 Flexibility is something we retrain our brains

to practice as an operating system.

One of the key themes for the webinar was about how flexibility is often an unconscious and uncontrollable aspect of our thinking.  Our brains are socially, and eventually habitually conditioned to think with a left brain, logical framework. Flexibility is something we retrain our brains to practice as an operating system. Just like training your AI to think with a persona, or with specific outcomes, humans need to retrain their own brains with the vision of flexibility.

Over the past six months, I have had several sessions with leaders about how they approach difficult conversations with team members. At times, it has been debilitating for the leader to even imagine having a conversation that was not direct, task-focused, or using evaluation expectations to legitimize the conversation. Worse, they may avoid the conversation entirely! They firmly believed the interaction was going to turn into chaos, and defaulted to keeping emotion out of it for fear of losing control, or not being flexible to attend to those emotions.

While leaders appreciate the structure of conversations, particularly using the SBI model for feedback, what they lack in engaging in those conversations, is the flexibility to attend to the other person‘s emotions. Hopefully, your colleagues do have emotions 😉 and recognize where they are working together with each other and in a very emotionally intelligent way. Focusing exclusively on competencies and task-oriented expectations may only reinforce the lack of emotions that go into the relationships of how work actually functions. This is where flexibility is an important aspect of leadership.

Here are the questions I often ask leaders when they struggle with conversations and the opportunity for flexibility:

• How can you express your intent and outcomes for the conversation in an empathetic way? 

• What is most important for you to feel during your conversation?

• How might you explore your colleagues' feelings in the conversation?

• What might be some negative outcomes you can imagine during this conversation?

• Where do the negative emotions come from, and how do you quiet them?

• Let’s practice some of this dialogue.

  
  

Hacking the Brain

Another key theme in the webinar was the need to rewire our brains and practice flexibility in our daily lives. One exercise asked about initial thoughts when walking into a possible conflict: “I’m walking into this situation feeling …(disappointed, frustrated, victimized).” The brain hack is to add “I will not” to the front of the statement, to look like: “ I will not walk into this situation feeling…” which forces the brain to be flexible (and positive) in its intent to grow, learn, and adapt.

While the bulk of the webinar was focused on flexibility to move toward empathy, which seems to be more commonplace in leadership than over-empathizing or being too flexible, it shouldn’t go without saying that over-flexibility (and favoritism) has its own barriers as well. 

Indecisiveness.

Lack of attention to detail.

Anything-goes attitude.

I’ve never heard of effective leadership that incorporates competencies that are lax or willy-nilly. However, I know they exist and can be equally damaging. My hunch is that the focus is not on empathy, but rather fear. Fear of being judgmental, and fear of future, unmanageable conflict. And even in that stuckness of fear, attending to possibilities and flexibility, and how to navigate overly-flexible leadership, has its merits. Fear is also a survival mechanism that is rooted in the left side of the brain, and further creates over-reliance on logic and reason over flexibility and creative thinking. 

Teaching flexibility is not a one-shot deal. It’s about understanding the continuum of what level of flexibility is appropriate for leadership, its people, and their situations. It’s naive to assuming blind trust within teams, so I like to assume positive intent, and recognize where grace and human due diligence can work to our advantage in showing flexibility in a variety of circumstances.

In closing, I learned the value of deep engagement in small groups that are an extension of one-on-one coaching. My two participants, which I am extremely grateful for, were able to share relevant and personal connections to the content, and flexed their brain muscles to try new strategies for themselves, and hopefully, teach others to do the same. I was able to focus on how we teach ourselves and others the importance of flexibility, and how it isn’t always a natural thought process.

Join us for the

next session

Don’t Let the Monkeys Steal your Motivation: Keeping the Team Synergized!

Thursday, November 13th from 11:15 am to 12:00 pm

Event Location:

Google Meet

Register Now

Don't Let the Monkeys Steal your Motivation

Hosted by Julia Keider

I’ll be hosting more “Teach Them” learning sessions and welcome any suggestions where you might think a larger group conversation would be helpful to a problem of practice of yours.

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