A tale/tail of encouragement

I once had a boss whose idea of motivating me was to critique and pull apart every element of my work and my approach. Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure my work wasn’t perfect but I was giving it my all. I was so demoralised by working for said boss that I changed jobs and sectors completely (and as it happened he did me a massive favour because it led to 10 happy years working at the British Library…).

Last autumn we welcomed a German Wirehaired Pointer pup into our home (bare with me there is a link between this story and the one above). She’s a completely hyper HPR (hunt/point/retrieve) breed so we sought out some specialist training. What unfolded wasn’t pretty. We were demoralised from the off – in fact from the moment the trainer walked into our garden he named everything we weren’t achieving with the pup. Inexperienced with the breed, I felt like I was continually failing. The more unruly the pup became the more I berated myself for being a rubbish dog owner. Then a couple of months ago I bumped into a fellow HPR dog owner in our local woods; we got chatting and she shared she’d had the same demoralising experience with the local trainer and recommended another trainer who she had worked with. Emboldened by this conversation I approached the new trainer. I can only describe the difference in this training experience as being as being as different as night and day – there was friendliness, there was curiosity, there was experimentation – and best of all there was laughter – laughter at the crazy antics of my pooch and laughter at my sometimes fumbling attempts to get the training commands down pat. I came away with a fresh sense of perspective and possibility – with the trainers words of encouragement in my ears and the realisation that I was actually getting a lot of things right.

There’s a lovely acronym I came across recently on a work training course I attended – it’s “FAIL: first attempt in learning”. When we learn something new we are inevitably going to get it wrong – because it’s the only way we learn. Only by getting things wrong, reflecting on those things and trying something new do we improve. And as we are trying new things, growing and stretching we need encouragement along the way. Sure we need to know what we are getting wrong and to be corrected – but we also need to have the things we are doing right pointed out and to be encouraged to keep going, keep trying, keep believing we can do it even when at times it feels like an unsatisfying slog.

There are lots of theories of what it takes to be a great leader but there is one seemingly simple thing that often seems to get overlooked – the ability to encourage. The power of encouragement – of “you’re heading in the right direction”, “you can do it” “keep going – you’ll get there”. So often in the relentless corporate drive for improvement we forget that we are all human beings who need words of encouragement to motivate us to keep going, to keep trying, to keep failing in service of growing and learning.

So the next time you go to provide some “constructive criticism” to a member of your team (or spouse or child or friend for that matter) I invite you to pause and think – what here is going right – what could be championed? What might inspire the change you would like to see? And what juicy Scooby snack might you offer up as a rewardJ.

May your tail keep wagging.

Sarah

www.boldly-go.co.uk

P.S Looking for someone to support and encourage you through a leadership challenge or change? Feel free to drop me a line for a chat.