MINDSET
COACHING:
WHEN SOFT
VALUES DRIVE
HARD RESULTS
From the boardroom to the gym,
awareness of your thinking, speaking
and actions can be the difference
between failure and success.
WORDS: GREG SELLAR
eing aware and knowing where
you lie in space is one of the
fundamental priorities for anyone
wanting success – it isn’t a magic bullet, but
it is the first step. Self-awareness is about
understanding your own needs, desires,
failings, habits, and everything else that
makes you tick. By being more aware, you
open up the number of choices available to
you in any given situation. The more you
know about yourself, the better you are at
adapting life changes to suit your needs. It’s
a little more complex than the over-saturation
of blogs citing the ‘Top 5 Tips To Create
Successful Leaders’. If it were that easy,
we’d all be doing it. If you don’t know
yourself, you can’t expect to put any advice
into practice.
I had a discussion at dinner recently
where a friend asked, ‘What is it you do at
lifehack?’ In explaining that I believed the
individual is key, he commented ‘oh, so it’s
quite a soft approach then’. I had to pause
for a second to ask myself why he might
think that, because from what I knew,
being aware enough to deal with your own
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34 | NETWORK WINTER 2016
thoughts and actions was much harder and more confronting than
recognising a simple skill deficit. I knew it was more challenging to
look at yourself objectively and assess emotions and habits than
it was to eat up some self-help performance and productivity tips
on LinkedIn.
I found myself saying, ‘No, actually, it’s quite the opposite. I find
these supposed ‘soft’ values are where most people in leadership
and management roles fall down, because they’re focusing on the
wrong things. Focusing solely on ‘hard’ values such as growth,
profitability and ROI, ruling with an iron fist, being too direct, arrogant
and bullying, leads to underperformance.’ People in business who
lack interpersonal skills, because they aren’t aware of how they’re
behaving, perform poorly over all but the shortest of time periods.
And their businesses do as well. This is a verifiable fact. They are poor
performers, not only as people managers, but also at developing
strategy and delivering bottom-line financial results. In other words,
soft values drive hard results.
In their study titled ‘What Predicts Executive Success?’, teams
at Green Peak Partners and Cornell University produced some very
clear research results:
• ‘Bully’ traits that are often seen as part of a business-building
culture were typically signs of incompetence and lack of
strategic intellect – being arrogant or impatient correlated with
low rates of financial results and business acumen.
• Poor interpersonal skills lead to under-performance in most
executive functions – executives whose interpersonal skill scores