George Kohlrieser High Performance Leadership Takeaways 1-3

1. Know thyself, deal with grief. Try to see the meaning, and even the benefit, of grief. If not, you make yourself and others miserable.
2. It is easy to hold yourself hostage through your own self-limiting beliefs or by accepting other people’s labels.
3. Loss is a large driver of behavior, even more so than benefit.
4. Emotions are not meant to be held.
5. Never stop learning.
6. For some people the future is no more than a memory of the past. You can overwrite it and rewire your brain.
7. Emotional blackmail from negative ‘self-talk’ or from others can kill creativity, performance, motivation and self-esteem.
8. Look for signals of being a ‘hostage’: such as blaming, over-defending, feeling trapped or victimized.
9. Take responsibility for your actions and refuse to be a victim of circumstances.
   

    

Let’s zoom in on takeaway 1.a.:
Know thyself, deal with grief. Try to see the meaning, and even the benefit, of grief. If not, you make yourself and others miserable.
‘Grief is the process to be able to come back and reconnect again. We need grief. It’s part of the human experience. Grief is basically these stages:

1. Denial
2. Emotions: anger, fear, sadness – that’s all part of letting go
3. Mental acceptance, the mindset change
4. Emotional acceptance
5. Reattachment, reconnection or connection to a new target
6. Forgiveness
7. Gratitude

Gratitude means that you come back to the experience of the joy of life, or in the case of work, to the joy of work. People who don’t enjoy their work are disconnected, they’re disengaged, they’re in negative states. What is the grief that’s feeding that? What is the loss? They’re victims, or they lost the joy of work. And then there are people who are passionate. They love their work. They find the joy in work. They’ve been able to get over their losses.

There are people who lose a job and never get over that. They feel criticized or betrayed and they never get over it. That’s a very dangerous position. We all have to be able to go through that grief process, to come back to the full joy of work and the full of joy of life. That’s why loss is such a critical part of leadership and understanding the bonding cycle. The whole question is, for you as a leader, how are you going through that and then how are you helping others? This brings us back to Drucker’s definition that you as a leader have to be helping people go through their leadership journey, not just use them as a robot who’s producing results for you.

 The reason this is so important, is that it affects the energy. Grief affects the energy and affects the bonding behavior. As leaders you first of all have to know if you’re carrying grief. Many are carrying grief and they don’t realize it. And they’re hostage to that. It’s affecting them in one way or another. The second thing is, you have to learn to be comfortable talking about human pain, being able to talk about loss, in language that you find acceptable.

Leaders have to learn first of all what the pain point is. This comes from hostage negotiation. You have to create a bond and then you have to hear the loss behind that. What is the pain point? Most leaders are not comfortable talking about pain points, which takes us back to the grief, which takes us back to how the brain is working. Some people will make their decision based on up to 80% the losses they’ve had in the past, the losses they will have, or the losses experienced in the present.’ – George Kohlrieser PhD, IMD Lausanne

One of the things that I was struck by is that the old cliché—’first impressions matter’—is so true. This is not about outward appearances, though, it’s about the instant psychological effect you have on others! As a leader, you need to be aware of how you come across, and, if necessary, learn to modify this effect. Let’s take a closer look takeaway 2: Cycle of Bonding.