chapter 2 Tap the Psychological Side of Development

“WHAT? YOU EXPECT ME TO BE AN AMATEUR PSYCHOLOGIST?” That’s what we often hear from anxious clients when we discuss some of the core skills involved in making talent your business. Our answer? “Well, yes. If you want to make a deeper developmental impact with your employees, you can’t be just logical. You also need to be psychological.” Often managers think that laying out performance directives and instructing team members to “try new approaches” leads directly to achievement of development goals. Guess what? That doesn’t work.

Maybe like other managers, you glaze over when someone starts talking about psychological approaches. They are the fuzzy, soft side of doing business, far removed from the comfort zone of hard numbers and measurable customer deliverables. Addressing the “soft stuff” may indeed be the hardest part of your job. Yet exceptional development managers (EDMs) who pay attention to the psychological side of development know that this investment of their insight and energy gives them an essential edge in developing talent. In fact, they would feel totally stymied if directed to develop their staff without addressing their staff’s “internal processes” such as motivation and self awareness. By recognizing the importance of these approaches and honing your ability to tap into them, you can leverage the time you spend developing your staff, have more of an impact, and get deeper, more sustainable results than if you remain only in the tactical world. Bringing out your inner psychologist really is a vital part of making talent your business.

One of the biggest “a-ha’s” from our research was that both EDMs and exceptional developing employees (EDEs) emphasized the importance of the psychological factor even though we didn’t ask about it. This pervasive factor cut across all five practices exceptional managers used for development. It took a variety of forms, many of which you’ll recognize as strategies you already use. EDMs expressed it in these ways:

“Development: it’s all about the relationship you build with staff.”

“They need a safety net to take those really big steps while testing out new skills.”

“Pushing them to their limit can be overwhelming, yet doing that produces significant breakthroughs.”

“When they are particularly frustrated, I buoy them up.”

On the other side of the equation, EDEs described what they appreciated in their managers with phrases such as

“Building my confidence”

“Providing a safe place to discuss issues”

“Listening to me when I hit a brick wall”

“Exploring what was in me that was holding me back”

How to Tap the Psychological Side of Development

Imagine that you’ve just spent three months finishing your basement. The moment of truth arrives for you to showcase your work to family and friends, many of whom lent a hand. You lead the crew down the dim stairs, and with excitement and anticipation, you flip the light switch. A sigh of disappointment surrounds you as only half of the lights come on. All that work, but without the essential feature of fully wired lighting, there’s no way to see the room’s details. Your unveiling lost all of its impact, and you feel demoralized.

Developing members of your team can feel just like that. You sink tons of effort and resources into coaching, online tutorials, and specially designed stretch assignments, and they come across simply as more “to-do’s” because the connection hasn’t been properly “wired.” By tapping into a bit of psychology, EDMs help their employees make the essential connections that lead to growth. They help employees understand the link between their emotions and their behavior, between their inner obstacles and their hesitancy to change, between dips in their performance and uncomfortable situations, just to name a few. Helping employees make these connections “wires” them to extend their true potential in a way that deepens and broadens their capabilities.

As a manager, you too are in the enviable position of helping people make these connections every day. If your employees aren’t open or ready to learn something new, your energy is wasted—even if they are the smartest bunch around. Your psychological insights open the door for them to pursue more significant and lasting behavior change and growth. The four main approaches you can use to encourage openness that leads to growth are

1. Start with yourself

2. Cultivate relationships built on trust

3. Help employees “see” themselves during key interactions

4. Connect the dots between emotions and learning

1. Start with Yourself

EDMs we talk to know that the first step in tapping into the psychological side of development is looking in the mirror. Taking a cue from the adage “Master, know thyself,” these astute managers (brave enough to look in the mirror without blinking) improve their own self-awareness before asking employees to improve theirs.

We know that increasing your own self-awareness involves some hard work. We assure you, however, that it will deliver huge dividends. The very process of becoming self-aware opens you up to what it takes for others to develop their self-awareness. You’ll practice pausing to recognize your emotional state, observing how you behave under stress, identifying how you deal with trade-offs, recognizing your strongly held beliefs that color your decision making, and so forth. When you are courageous enough to look at your own strengths and weaknesses, triumphs and defeats, you’ll be in a better place to empathize with your employees. Like Jake in the next story, you can even become a positive role model rather than a distant demanding boss.

At a staff meeting, Jake, a thoughtful systems operations manager, shared the story of how he got a difficult internal client to move ahead with a plan that had been stalled. A few weeks earlier, some of the staff had been at the meeting during which the frustrated internal client had put a major project in jeopardy. Incensed, she threatened to let the VP of finance know how much the lack of progress with the new system was costing the company. In recapping the situation for his staff, Jake explained his initial reaction: “I knew I was ready to jump all over this client. It was her insistence on grandfathering the old system that was causing all our delays and cost overruns. My first instinct was to let her have it. But in a flash of insight, I realized opening my mouth at that point would really set us back. I stopped myself in my tracks and simply told her we wanted to find a win-win. I asked her to meet later in the day to discuss ideas to move forward.

“With my head pounding, I went to think this through with Christy. Many of you know she is a colleague whose opinion I really trust. Christy helped me realize I was creating my own roadblock with our client by not really delving into her true objective for grandfathering. The point was that she didn’t want to make her users have to jump through a lot of hoops during the year-end closing. I realized two other things. First, I had been too hell-bent on getting this installation over and done with. I wasn’t really being flexible. Second, although this client probably doesn’t even know it, she whines a lot. That can really set me off. So I told myself that I would not let the whining get to me. Instead, I wrapped my head around the best way to give her the ‘old user-friendliness’ she needed to get over the year-end hump. We met at three o’clock and smoothed everything out. She got what she wanted, and so did we. So that’s how we got back on track. It was all about me changing my attitude and reaction, not about blaming or changing her. In the end, it all worked out.”

Jake did a stellar job in the self-awareness department. By paying attention to his headache, Jake realized he would not be operating at his best to handle a sensitive client situation. In reaching out to talk with a trusted colleague, he gained perspective on his own somewhat dysfunctional behavior. He developed insight into how the client triggered some negative reactions in him. And by sharing his story with his team, he became a role model in using self-awareness to turn a situation around. Way to go, Jake.

Success stories like this reflect research that shows that self-awareness correlates even more strongly with leadership success than IQ and technical skills, which are often thought of as more important. This big idea may remind you of Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking work on emotional intelligence that made such a stir in the business world of the mid-1990s. Your success as a leader and your power to develop both revolve around your understanding of the impact of your emotions on performance and relationships. When you demonstrate self-awareness, you can operate more transparently and share your thoughts more freely; in so doing, you implicitly invite others to similarly reveal their “true selves.” The more you are able to tune into your own motives and emotions, the more you can help employees understand and explore their own.