Is your team brain-dead ?

It is commonly said that we use only 10% of our brain. Although the biological facts are a bit different, it remains pretty much accepted that there is much more potential for using this phenomenal tool to its full capability. Consultants and trainers will explain that they will unlock the remaining 90% of your team's brain power, and your performance will go through the roof.

Back to reality.

Working with a team on an organizational challenge, we arrived at the team debrief after the third working session. The three sessions had been intense but rich in discovery and learning. During this third session, the team had agreed on a shared understanding of the root cause of the challenge. The team was making good progress and had started to identify very interesting solutions to this problem (of which the sponsor had said "it exists since the company was founded 43 years ago !"). Towards the end of the session, I asked each member around the table to share "how they were feeling ?". Replies were varied. One member said ...

"I feel tired. I have never been doing so much thinking. In my normal working days, I get by doing this and that, some routine stuff, pretty much switching my brain off ... I feel tired from thinking." 

There was no stunned silence or gasps of shock around the table. It was more like mumbles and smiles ... Everyone recognized themselves in this description. This was not a group of assembly-line operators or laborers. These were so-called knowledge workers, supervisors and support staff whose job it is to solve problems, come up with solutions on a daily basis and who lead themselves teams. 

I don't think they are lazy. Or enjoy "switching their brains off". In fact, they had simply never been asked to switch their brains on !

Before attempting to tap into the 'unused' part of your team's brains with a fancy training session, ask yourself what you do to encourage your team to use their brain. For real. Giving them a problem and telling them it is their task to solve it. And then stick with this when they tell you they are stuck. 10% of brain power is in fact more than enough. If it is switched on at least once in a while.

Happy out of your comfort zone

At the end of a recent week-long leadership development program with a group of engineering managers in Singapore, the participants were asked to share one key thought or take-away for the intense week. One of the participants shared ...

"I have come to realize that, if you are pushed often enough out of your comfort zone, you can actually get used to it."

This is a thought that stuck with me. In several leadership development programs, I have seen participants who become very aware about themselves, and get a good understanding of what their own comfort zone is. Awareness is of course the necessary condition towards progress.

But while many understand the concept - and manage to apply it to themselves - pretty well ... the majority still struggle to do anything with this new awareness. As if they now have a good understanding of their own challenges, but remain stuck like a deer staring into the headlights.

So once you are aware of your own comfort zone, what's next ? My personal experience is that it helps to see the situations where you are moving out of your comfort zone, as ... learning opportunities. Not performance opportunities. Not opportunities to show to yourself, or someone else, what you can do (because you can't !). Just learning opportunities. If you can develop your mindset that these situations help you to learn, then the experience becomes far less stressful. And any of these experiences helps to learn more about yourself. Maybe learning that getting out of that comfort zone was easier, or harder, than you thought. It is not about doing it right. It is not about trying to copy what the others (the experts) do. I try to reflect out loud (in my head !) what I am learning, what is going better than thought, or what is not going really well and I would do differently next time. I try to keep myself in the learning mode.

Developing a mindset of learning, when faced with out-of-comfort-zone situations, goes a long way in becoming happy being out of your comfort zone.