choice


Leadership Decisions – A Lesson From McDonalds

In this week’s guest post teambuilding coach Sean Glaze shares his expertise and knowledge.

Leadership Decisions – A Lesson From McDonalds

by Sean Glaze

Can you close your eyes and see the menu board from your local McDonald’s?

Most of us who have visited often with our kids can effortlessly envision their value meal options and can order things from the “dollar menu” without even looking up.

I thought of this after my son’s basketball game when our family chose to stop in for a late lunch, too far from home to get away with making them settle for chips and a turkey sandwich.

royalty free mcdonalds

We all entered the restaurant, walked to the back of the short line, and then were greeted by the cashier who asked what we would like to have. Of course, my son was very clear before we had arrived. He wanted a Big Mac, fries, and a chocolate shake. When I told him it didn’t come with a chocolate shake, he even offered to pay the difference, saying “I’ve got money at home, dad- I just really want a shake!”

I gave him a parental “We’ll see…,” but was pretty sure he could survive without the shake.

My wife and our two daughters were not ready to decide as quickly, though.

They have been to McDonald’s restaurants on numerous occasions before, but still struggled to choose what it was they wanted, and grew even more uncomfortable when they saw a group of incoming customers. Feeling rushed and exasperated, they responded in three very different ways.

I thought of a quote from Seth Godin – “You don’t need more time. You just need to decide”

My wife said to me, “Oh, goodness – just get me something. You know what I like.” My oldest daughter said to me, “Whatever is cheap dad- I don’t really care.” And my youngest daughter followed that with, “I’ll just get whatever she does, okay?”

At first I was a bit shocked, but I hurriedly ordered, and then waited at the counter while I considered what had just happened while our food was prepared.

My family was a microcosm of decision making styles!

Leaders must make decisions – and the higher you climb, the more important your decision become. But it occurred to me that there were four very distinct examples of decision making in our family – at least in this illustration…

  1. Some people refuse to make a decision and let others choose for them – that isn’t very healthy, and usually results in dissatisfaction of some kind – usually regret by the decision maker for their hesitancy.
  1. Some people want to take the easiest route, wanting only to invest the smallest amount to get by with whatever is cheapest in terms of effort or resources. This “penny wise – pound foolish” approach is dangerous, because it fails to consider the long term effects that their short sighted decisions might have.
  1. Some people just follow the crowd and do what their friends or acquaintances will deem as acceptable. But what is popular isn’t always best, and what is best isn’t always popular… and strong leaders must be willing to make decisions that are unique to their situation and organizational needs.
  1. And some people want more than is offered to the masses on a menu. They want more and are willing to pay the price to enjoy it. They push their people to perform at a higher level and demand extraordinary results – and they recognize that it is often rewarding to invest more than others think is necessary.

I stood there thinking to myself that the McDonalds menu in front of me was what we all look at as leaders of any organization. We all have a menu of opportunities and goals– whether it is a principal setting teacher expectations of performance or a coach setting goals for the season, we all make decisions that impact the people we work with.

Joel, a prophet in ancient Israel, wrote “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision!” (Joel 3:14). I can only imagine how that looked; people milling around confused and wondering which way to go. Things haven’t changed much over the past 2,800 years.

The question of how to approach your decisions as a leader then becomes at least as clear as how to approach what we’re having for lunch. Be sure to order what you want, and consider what it will cost, whether up front or in the future.

Everyone has a menu in front of them. Everyone is responsible for their choices, and must stomach it – even if it was a choice they tried to evade having to make for themselves.

And everyone is capable of asking for and getting more than the ordinary meal.

Yes, I got my son the chocolate shake. Because he asked for it… Because he was willing to give more to enjoy something he really wanted… But mostly because I wanted a taste!

So, the next time you go into a McDonalds – look up at the menu and smile. Know that making decisions is a skill you can develop – both in yourself, and in those on your team.

And encouraging them to participate in team decisions is important, even when sometimes they make mistakes. Mistakes are less common, though, when people take ownership.

If you want your people to invest in team decisions, consider the impact that a full or half day of fun Atlanta teambuilding and leadership training could have on your organization.

With improved morale, communication and leadership skills they will be far more willing to collaborate and contribute to the team’s success – and as a leader, that is ultimately what your decisions are supposed to produce.

About the author

sean blue picAs a speaker, author, and team-building coach, Sean Glaze entertains and influences groups with a unique blend of dynamic content, interactive activities, and practical action steps. His team-building website, www.GreatResultsTeambuilding.net, provides more information on the team-building events, speaking engagements, and training workshops he offers.

If you are part of a business, school, or athletic team that needs to improve communication, inspire accountability, energize morale, contact him and transform your group into a more productive team!

 

 

 

 


The source of personal power? 2

In this weeks Friday Guest Post Andy Lucas, who assists clients to empower themselves, discusses the topic of empowerment in more detail.

The source of personal power?

by Andy Lucas

I was recently chatting with my friend Karen, also a coach, and we were discussing empowerment. The conversation arose because I mentioned my strong desire to help clients do things for themselves. I like to help them develop an understanding of their mental processes and an ability to manage and steer those processes with ease. In a nutshell I aim to help clients “empower” themselves.

In various fields of mind therapy we hear talk about the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious minds. And I often wonder if and how we can use that idea to empower people.

Many forms of conventional counselling and psychotherapy endorse sustained intervention over weeks, months and often years in order to restore unconscious patterns to conscious awareness. Maybe that work has a place, but it doesn’t appeal to many of us coaches especially if we want our clients to avoid depending on us, and if we want them to be self sufficient in their change and development. I guess most of us are hoping to achieve change in a relatively short length of time without engaging our client in prolonged soul searching.

Various schools of hypnotherapy encourage us to bypass a client’s conscious mind, and its apparently limited understandings. And instead they tell us to speak directly to the client’s unconscious mind. They say the problem is being performed by the unconscious, so we might as well get this unconscious mind to produce the solution too. Supposedly there is no need to get the conscious mind involved, because it might get in the way.

Western style hypnotherapy is not alone in working with the so-called unconscious mind. Many shamanic traditions have a long colourful history of using trance states, such as journeying to the underworld, to uncover the source of problems and to seek solutions in an altered state. Some even use plants to induce the states chemically. The purpose of these trances is to draw things out of unconsciousness and restore them to some level of awareness, consciousness.

Eastern teachings adopt other approaches, often giving even greater value to consciousness and discouraging “sleep walking through life” in a state of illusion and unconsciousness. These teachings, such as Tibetan Dream Yoga, implore us to operate sustained awareness of our subtler trance states – our habitual thoughts and perceptions. They encourage us to undertake a discipline of self-awareness, noticing the full extent of our dreaming, not just the dreams at night but the ones in the daytime too. This reminds me of the NLP presupposition: “The map is not the territory”, emphasising the distinction between the “real world” and our internal representations of the world. I guess Tibetan teachers are urging us to do whatever it takes to retain awareness of this distinction. Maybe we can benefit from observing our dreaming more often and even becoming more active in the authoring of the dreams. It is this active involvement that characterises the teachings of Tibetan Dream Yoga.

Other traditions offer further contributions to the consciousness debate. Hawaiian Huna, teaches three aspects of the mind – consciousness, unconsciousness and superconsciousness. It regards the unconscious mind as a route to the superconscious, which in turn operates as a kind of inner wisdom and source of solutions. Huna, like NLP, tells us we can reprogramme ourselves, we can design our mental templates.

Meanwhile schools of yoga and tantra teach about “pure consciousness”, a steady, still level of consciousness undisrupted by habitual thinking (samskaras) and inner chatter. Yoga teaches body awareness leading to mind awareness and/or breath awareness leading to mind awareness. I have even read of prisons successfully adopting yoga therapy to rehabilitate offenders. During deep meditation aspirants of Yoga Nidra are encouraged, among other things, to imagine a golden egg in the centre of the mind and to say to themselves something like: “I am not my body. I am not my thoughts. I am not my emotions. I am that golden egg. I am pure consciousness in itself witnessing all of this.”

Even within western approaches we discover more nuanced ideas about consciousness. Transformational Grammar and NLP help us recognise the words “consciousness/unconsciousness” as nominalisations, nouns describing actions. Is consciousness just a construction, a way of giving form to the processes we observe? Maybe consciousness is just being aware and unconsciousness is being unaware. Perhaps it’s as simple as that.

Meanwhile the distinction between two minds, the unconscious and the conscious, is often used as a metaphor for the difference between the functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. If I ask you to let the conscious mind do X while the unconscious mind does Y you probably accept it as a useful suggestion, an opportunity to think about something in two different ways, laterally versus linearly or creatively versus logically.

So why does it matter whether consciousness is an actual thing or just a way of describing what we do? I think it probably does matter (rather than being matter), because as coaches we value action, we encourage clients to be the cause of their effects, maybe even the conscious cause of their effects. And none of us wants our clients to become dependent upon us. I mean do we really want our clients to believe their behaviour is so unconscious they have to keep seeing us every time they want to change their life? Do we think everybody is so incapable of dealing with stuff seemingly outside of awareness that they have to get professional help on a regular and permanent basis? I don’t imagine many coaches believe that. I would rather enable my clients to develop greater levels of awareness so they feel more able to help themselves.

I’m not sure how easy it is to fuse all these different notions of consciousness. Yet I am convinced they each offer something useful to help our clients empower themselves. The acid test for me in how I treat consciousness or unconsciousness with a specific client is: “Will my client have more choices?”

As long as we acknowledge that “consciousness” and “unconsciousness” can be a variety of different imprecise notions, rather than rigid facts, we have tremendous opportunities to take our clients on great adventures in their amazing minds. Or, to put it another way, if we have more choices so do our clients. And if they have more choices perhaps they empower themselves. I hope so.

About the Author/Further Resources

Andy lives and works in Brighton. He is an NLP trainer (Society of NLP), coach, hypnotherapist and meditation instructor with a particular interest in Hawaiian Huna and Yoga Nidra.

Visit www.springtomind.co.uk for more details about Andy’s work.

Books that Andy likes:

Trances People Live – Stephen Wolinsky

Yoga and Psychotherapy – Swami Rama et al

Mastering Your Hidden Self , A Guide to the Huna Way – Serge Kahili King

The Tibetan Yoga of Dream and Sleep – Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

The Structure of Magic – Richard Bandler & John Grinder

The World of Shamanism – Roger Walsh

Yoga Nidra – Swami Satyananda Saraswati