45- Positive Energy Leadership for Engineers – Show up Authentically Every Day
This is the first of a five-post series designed to help you be a better leader by focusing on positive energy every day.
Dr. Emma Seppälä taught a full-day workshop recently as part of CREW Network’s Leadership Certificate Program. Training in these types of skills commonly referred to as “soft skills” by the engineering profession has been ignored in classical engineering academia. However, as Dr. Seppälä teaches us, these skills are crucial to one’s success in business, and more importantly, to one’s well-being. As part of this blog series, I’ll step through top five takeaways from this workshop:
- Show up authentically every day
- Change your breathing to change your mind
- Listen to life stories
- Embrace eudemonic happiness
- Fill your cup
Show up authentically every day
As a leader, your staff watches you more than their peers or their clients. How you show up to them makes a significant impact on your organization. By showing up in an authentic and positive way you can help to move each conversation forward and make an impact beyond what you even realize.
Micro-moments are invaluable.
In this workshop, I participated in a Reflected Best Self (RBS) Exercise. As part of this exercise, I solicited feedback from those in my personal and professional life. This feedback involved asking for stories of times when I was perceived to be at my best in their eyes. After obtaining the feedback, we were asked to carefully evaluate the information and look for common themes across the different respondents. My common themes involved considering diverse perspectives and helping people to “feel heard.” These overall themes were not surprising as I actively try to engage a variety of sources before forming opinions and making decisions. However, I was very surprised to read that many of the examples provided were based on very small moments, or “micro moments” as Dr. Seppälä calls them, that I don’t remember. In the larger group, I was further surprised to hear that many people had a similar experience where they didn’t remember the stories that made such an impact on those around them.
This phenomenon is at least partly explained by the process of attention and encoding. Attention is the process of selectively focusing on specific things in your environment while ignoring others. Encoding is the process by which memories are made. Often, when we have interactions with others, our attention is focused outward on the other person. This means that when we are interacting with someone, we are often focused on what they are saying or doing versus our own actions. This lack of attention can lead to poor encoding and the event doesn’t get locked into our memory.
Another process that may affect retention of these micromoments is self-perception bias which means that we all have a different view of ourselves than the view that others have of us. Often, acts that we perform but don’t see as noteworthy are perceived differently by those around us. This means that many of our actions are more impactful to others than we realize because our bias obscures our perception of the significance of the action. The result is that these micromoments are even less likely to be encoded to our memory.
One example that stood out in my RBS feedback was a story reported by a former supervisor that involved a conversation we had several years ago. In this conversation, my supervisor explained that they were having a conflict with one of their direct reports. I provided feedback on how they could change their language during the discussion with their direct report to more effectively communicate with their direct report. The story continues to say that the direct report was going to leave the company and this micro moment made such an impact on my supervisor that they believe that implementation of the advice given directly resulted in their direct report staying with the company.
This is an example of why micro-moments matter. Showing up in an authentic and positive way impacts people you have no idea you are “touching.” I encourage you to do this by being present and practicing active listening in every conversation. By giving your attention to the person you are engaged with, you can better respond in an honest and genuine way.
As leaders, we set the example for those around us. When we make it our normal operating procedure to authentically and intentionally engage with others, even for a few seconds, the positive energy impacts others in a way that we don’t often know.
In the next blog, we will take a deep dive into the important link between breathing and your mind.
What are your tips for being more impactful during micromoments?
©shanacarroll
