Growing Your Adaptive Skills
In part 1 of this series, Can you Adapt?, we answered the question, What are adaptive skills, and why are they important? If you recall, these are the skills that we brought with us from childhood and they determine our success in almost everything we do: being able to manage our anxiety well, not getting defensive when we feel challenged, effective listening, embracing conflict constructively, to name a few.
OK, now we get to the hard part…growing in our adaptive skills. The first step, of course, is identifying what you want to change. This can be difficult since adaptive skills are like the proverbial rose-colored glasses that we don’t know we’re wearing. It’s just what we do. Only when we intentionally step outside of the moment and reflect on our own behavior can we say, “Yeah, I guess I do get defensive when I feel challenged,” or “I really don’t listen well and often interrupt others,” or “I can see that I tend to shut down when I get stressed.”
Getting this far takes both honesty and humility, and that’s not always easy for us as adults. Our long-standing habits have made us into who we are and have no doubt impacted the people around us. Admitting that some of these habits haven’t served us well takes courage. Embrace this.
This is especially true if the pressure to change comes from the outside. A boss who says, “you need to change, or I’ll have to make a change,” a lifestyle-related health crisis, a broken relationship…all can reflect something about our adaptive skills. This is a tough place to be so, again, embrace it with courage and don’t look back.
Analyze Yourself
Once you’ve identified what you want to change, how do you do it? Think of every adaptive skill as a combination of two things: your external behaviors (what others can see and hear) and your internal behaviors (beliefs and attitudes). In the simplest terms, growing in your adaptive skills is about adjusting these, sometimes one at a time.
When I teach this module to groups, we practice with a simple, yet vitally important adaptive skill, listening so others feel heard and respected. We begin by identifying the external behaviors that we generally associate with good listening:
Eye contact
Attentive body posture
Asking clarifying questions
Not interrupting
Nodding in agreement
Cell phone is turned off
Empathetic facial expressions
Paraphrasing (So, what I hear you saying is…”)
Participating in the conversation without taking it over
Resisting getting into “fix-it” mode
If someone we were having a conversation with demonstrated these behaviors, we would very likely feel heard, respected, and cared for. Simple enough. But there’s also the internal aspect of listening effectively:
Assume that what’s being said is important no matter how you personally feel about it
Get in their shoes and try to see the issue from their point of view
Focus on the details and try to piece together their story as they share it
If you drift off or get internally distracted, no problem, just refocus and re-engage
Put these together and you have one of the most important adaptive skills a leader can have. Now that we’ve clarified the goal, the work is to begin implementing these behaviors every time you have a conversation.
We do this by developing the ability to monitor our conversations as if we’re an invisible third person in the room. To listen to your co-worker and think about you listening to your co-worker takes some mental focus but can be done. As you begin to see how you show up from this perspective, you consciously adjust what you need to adjust. On the positive side, the more you practice, the more all this becomes second nature and the new “just what you do.”
Editor’s note: What I’m presenting here isn’t intended to be a comprehensive guide to better mental health. Rather, it’s a practical self-management strategy that, in my experience, can be quite effective. Whatever the case, when we find ourselves in a leadership role, we have to take seriously the impact we have on others. Our adaptive skills are a significant part of that.
Complex Adaptive Skills
Some adaptive skills are more complex and not as easily reducible to a specific set of behaviors that apply to everyone in the same way. For example, take this important adaptive skill: the ability to manage your stress and not project it on others. I’m always surprised by how many eye-rolls I get when I ask groups if they have had a manager who has struggled with this.
Like all adaptive skills, there are internal and external behaviors associated with managing stress. The difference is that these will vary with the individual depending on their behavior style. I call this your “stress reaction” in the Behavior Styles module.
I’ll use myself as an example so you can see how this works. I’m primarily a “Conductor” behavior style, which means I’m generally results-oriented and naturally exert control on my environment to move a process toward a goal. In the tension between people and process, I tend to fall on the process side. Think of a conductor of a symphony. Their focus is more on moving the entire group towards making a perfect piece of music than it is on how a specific individual feels about that music, if they like the conductor, or even if they get along themselves. There’s more to be said but that’s the gist of it.
Like all behavior styles, my strength is a good thing until it isn’t and how I manage my stress is often what makes the difference. As I’ve watched myself over the years, my stress reaction shows up looking something like this:
External Behaviors:
Talk faster, more, and with unnecessary urgency
Make decision out of frustration (“just do something!”)
Be directive in petty, routine things
Adopt a slightly condescending tone
Engage in micro debates about less-than-important issues
Lean towards being unorganized with lower follow-through
Beliefs/Attitudes:
Scattered, worrisome thinking
Unable to focus on one thing for any length of time
Jump from one project to the next, fidgety
Easily frustrated with what others are/are not doing
Preoccupied with what’s not working for me, glass-half-empty
Easily distracted with time wasters
Gosh, I sound like a train wreck. Whatever the case, though no one (that I know of) has ever described me as a high-stress individual, I find myself in stress mode from time to time. I know these behaviors have an impact on others (just ask my kids…). Your own list will vary but if you pay attention to yourself, you’ll find them. I’ll say it again, your unmanaged stress will be a disruptive force to some degree and one of the responsibilities of leadership is to mitigate this impact.
How do I do this? In the same way we grew in our ability to listen. Once I’ve identified the characteristics of my stress response, I start to pay attention to how these show up as I’m interacting with others. Depending on what I see, I might need to do less of something (e.g., talk over or at others) or more of something (e.g., focus on one thing and just get it done). Whatever the case, I then make slight changes along the way based on what I observe. Again, the more consistently we do this, the more we habituate these behaviors. In time, it’s the new “just what I do.”
While this process is simple in concept, it takes work to see results in the real world. That said, I’ve consistently found in coaching relationships that the work is easier than first expected. The difficult part usually ends up being able to see oneself objectively and then accepting that you do have some measure of control over this. Once this bridge has been crossed, a significant sense of relief and empowerment is not uncommon.
Here are a few more points to take with you:
Remember the scope
Keep in mind that you’re not trying to resolve the deep causes of your stress or it’s more intense form, anxiety. You’re simply trying to reduce the negative impact it has on those around you. This is a far more manageable project and one in which you can find success.
Be honest with those around you
If you had a boss who announced, “Hey folks, I’m under a lot of stress right now and you know I tend to shut down when this happens. Please don’t take it personally and know that I’m here for you if you need me,” what would you think? Yep, that’s what I thought. Remember, your employees are people, too, and they know what it is to struggle. Share this element of your common humanity and see what happens.
Don’t blame the stress
It’s easy to believe that the problem with stress is the stress itself. Removing unnecessary sources of stress is always a good self-management plan, but there are limits to this. To choreograph your life to be completely stress-free would likely involve you moving into a cave. Alone. Without your phone. Instead, accept that stress is a part of life and make stress management an ongoing personal habit.
Pick the low hanging fruit
I love this figure of speech. It means when you’re facing a complex problem that feels too big to tackle at once, start with a small, manageable part of it. Once you handle this, you’ll likely see the rest of the problem in a different light, not to mention that you’ll have created some momentum for yourself.
When applied to the concept of adaptive skills, it means that you don’t try to change everything at once. Start with one easily identifiable characteristic you can change and put your energy into that. There’s a good chance that even this will have a positive impact and you’ll gain additional perspective and momentum for the next one.
Keep up the good fight!