Thursday, November 26, 2009

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

My colleague and friend, Max Brown, gave a great presentation to members of the Human Capital Institute last week called, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” When he first shared the idea with me I told him he had been listening to too much Tina Turner.

While he did play on that association in his presentation, his points were sound and solid on the need for love being a powerful principle in leadership and caring for people.

Max clearly stated you can’t just introduce recognition programs to counteract negative, fear driven leadership and management practices.

He outlined principles for putting “love” into recognition through the following steps:

1. Define your Purpose.
2. Articulate the Strategy
3. Consider their Perspective

Now I don’t want to give the farm away, but I highly recommend you investing an hour of your time to both listen and view this reflective webinar. Just click here to view.

My take is that love has a LOT to do with it. Well done, Max.

Enjoy.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Face Off on Recognition

Intuitively, I have observed and known, you have to be able to appreciate your own worth and abilities first in order to recognize and appreciate someone else. So this means what motivates you will affect how you motivate others.

Recent research in the Human Motivation & Affective Neuroscience (HuMAN) Lab indicates that implicit motives enhance individual’s ability to recognize facial expressions of emotions in others. This skill is viewed as a critical component of emotional intelligence.

So how good are you at recognizing emotions in others? If you’re good at it you will likely be a great giver of recognition to others.

The psychologists and researchers at the HuMAN Lab out of Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany took a scientific angle on facial expressions and examined whether a person’s implicit motivational needs or style (what motivates them internally) actually influences their perceptions of the reward or punishment value of facial expressions of emotion, known by the acronym of FEEs (e.g., joy, anger, or surprise)?

How you feel about yourself affects how you view the non-verbal communications shown towards you.

Apparently, these FEEs tend to parallel a person’s implicit motives. We are born with the ability and can also learn to recognize these facial expressions. These non-verbal signals can communicate a sender's superiority (e.g., anger, smiling) or powerlessness (e.g., fear, surprise) in relation to a perceiver or another person.

It seems the type of facial expression displayed triggers a more prominent reaction depending on your internal motivation – power-motivated or affiliation-motivated.

This might explain why some senior leaders (possibly who are power-motivated) have a harder time in expressing positive feedback to employees (some of whom will be affiliation-motivated).

It’s all in the face and how you look at people!