Recently Averil, along with other inspirational contributors, talked to Elle UK about navigating the waters when it came to the thorny issue of negotiating a pay rise.

“Change your own beliefs” says Averil. “You have to build a case for yourself first before you take it to anyone else or you won’t be convincing.” The other two top tips are to demonstrate where you have stepped out of your comfort zone and learned new skills; and then practice your pitch before speaking up.

Read the full article to glean more tips here.

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Today the Telegraph interviews Averil and other experts on how to lead millennials. Views range from the ‘received wisdom’ of the Entitled Generation to more subtle cues on getting the best out of them…

Where some see uncommitted workers, Averil discusses more entrepreneurial workers seeking a fuller life: “They want to find ways to incorporate real relationships, be hands on in bringing up their kids, keep up external interests and be fit and healthy.” This is facilitated by the fact that “They grew up with technology so they know how to work remotely and cannot see why sitting in a building is required. They don’t ‘go to work’, they just work.”

“There are countless examples of unhappy baby boomers who, for their whole career, have been absent, workaholic, and money-focused because they perhaps felt they had no choice. Indeed, if we were to design a business all over again to suit human nature, allowing people the chance to use their strengths for fair reward and have a satisfying home life, wouldn’t we want this, too?”

Read on in this article by Tanith Carey

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In every leadership situation, how people feel is of critical importance. It has the ability to make or break initiatives and yet emotions are often given the least consideration in the grand scheme of things. Time and time again, leaders have been surprised at the howl of rage that accompanies their announcements. They don’t see it coming: Bob Diamond’s – no doubt logical to him – view that it was time to move on, sent people ravening for blood. People’s feelings were not yet sufficiently appeased to allow them to let go their anger. Cameron’s ill chosen, Michael Winner catch phrase, ‘Calm down, dear’ inevitably provoked a paradoxical reaction.

Strong leadership will provoke strong reactions. Professional leaders seek to recognise the emotions they will engender by their actions and will plan in advance how they can bring people with them by provoking positive and constructive feelings. In every situation, emotions are a data stream – leaders neglect them at their peril. Above all, they should never just hope they won’t happen. In order to be a truly emotionally intelligent leader, you have of course to start with yourself. ‘Aye, there’s the rub’ – Hamlet. Learning to recognise your own feelings, give them legitimacy and then deal with them appropriately is a precursor to being skilled at dealing with other people’s emotionally charged reactions.

Those at the most senior levels have classically been expected to demonstrate stiff upper lipped stoicism, play their cards close to their chests and indulge in what psychologists would usually describe as denial – often because of their fear of how others might perceive their responses. As a result, they can be disfunctional due to lack of emotional literacy.

Science tells us that leads to pretty grim consequences for people’s health, well being and judgment. Recognising and categorising an emotion influences the emotional experience itself. For example correctly processing emotional reactions to traumatic events – e.g. loss of a job, restricted bonuses, delayed promotion – leads to health benefits, more adaptive behaviours, better relationships, faster results and better working memory.

Being able to label feelings, makes people more magnanimous towards others. All of which contribute to success. Social psychologist James Pennebaker describes verbally labelling an emotion as much like applying a digital technology (language) to an analogue signal (emotion and the emotional experience). If an emotion remains in analogue form, it cannot be understood or conceptually tied to the meaning of an event. Once an experience is translated into language then it can be processed in a conceptual manner. It can be assigned meaning, coherence and structure. The traumatic event can therefore be assimilated, resolved and eventually forgotten.
If this process does not happen, incomplete emotional processing has a deleterious effect on well-being, judgment and decision making. If you have time, catch the fascinating programme on Radio 4 on iPlayer to hear about Pennebaker’s work on Expressive writing.

What we are not suggesting is that you let it all hang out. Quite the opposite! We think you owe it to yourself to take positive action to master a practical emotional approach to processing emotion and events.

If you want to hear more about what you can do in fifteen minutes a day over four days to improve your emotional resilience, give us a call – 020 7036 8899 or drop us a line by return.

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Averil expresses her point of view on salary talks but also emphasizes the implications that these can bring.

Click on this link to read more.

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1. Does not assume they know what your personal environment comprises. Many organisations were designed by and for men. As a result, women face very different challenges and experiences.
2. Understands that organisations are not gender neutral. Traits and characteristics associated with maleness are more likely to be accepted as the norm. While many allegedly female skills are discussed and endorsed, they aren’t actually rewarded in day to day behaviour.
3. Is conscious of their own unconscious bias . . .and the organisation’s.  I was gender blind for years, accepting as the norm that senior people were usually male. What beliefs have potential coaches challenged in their own attitude to gender diversity. If they say they treat everyone the same, there may be a lack of insight into the issues.
4. Realises that men and women may be differently motivated. Women are more likely to say that they want advancement so that they can make a difference rather than so they can gain status or power. Now, that may just be what the ‘good girl’ in us thinks is more acceptable but it may actually touch on a very real difference. So a coach needs to discover what motivates the individual.
5. Questions the veracity of 360 feedback because he or she knows that labels like ‘aggressive’ are used differently for men and women and need careful exploration before setting off to remedy or tone down behaviour.
6. Is smart enough to know that none of the above may apply to you rather than making assumptions about what ‘all women’ are like because the wonderful thing about women is that they are themselves so diverse that they will all want to do everything differently!

So, choose well, engage in coaching and become the best, most authentic, all-round version of who you want to be .

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Engagement is a worldwide issue for large businesses. A 2012 Towers Watson global survey of 32,000 employees finds that ⅔ of employees are either disengaged or feel unsupported by the business. Once you realised that the truly engaged are sprinkled from the top to the bottom of the organisation you begin to wonder how companies stay in business. 26% are disengaged – the living dead going through enough of the motions to avoid detection (but then again – who is looking closely enough?) or the c.v. pedlars who just can’t wait to get out. Some of those by the way are the most senior people who talk about their ‘running away fund’ – as soon as the mortgage is paid, the children’s school fees organised, whatever… they promise themselves they’ll be off. Between these extremes you find everything from the almost catatonic, to the ones that could be boosted into highly engaged with the slightest encouragement.

Triage on the battlefield or A & E means that in an emergency you ignore those who will live or die anyway and you put your focus on those who could go either way. If you could increase engagement of the moderately engaged by even 10%, what commercial advantage could this give you? People are really complex but also quite simple. The human condition demands that in order to grow into fully formed adults we need to connect, belong, form attachments, receive recognition. Anything else leads to psychopathy. Our organisations are human systems. How do we make them humane as well? We hear a lot of theory about Emotional Intelligence but somehow behaving in an emotionally intelligent way becomes awfully difficult when you have been encouraged for years to leave your feelings at the door as you clock in. So the emotions talked about most in the corporate world are anxiety, stress, fear, frustration. The positive, life enhancing feelings like excitement, joy, love, fascination, inspiration are a little less obvious.

We also hear quite a lot of talk from senior people about their need to develop intimacy with people at work. Yet, when we work in groups with clients, every time they approach what could be an intimate moment of genuine thought or self-disclosure, some wise guy cracks a joke or uses another displacement device to avoid the fearsome risk of embarrassment. When you then put them into a structured exercise that requires to go beyond the usual mundanities of the weather, the best back roads or the budget, and give them the opportunity to engage in deep and meaningful topics, they take to it like ducks to water. Often people feel constrained about talking about  anything personal with work colleagues. Of course, professional communication should be planned and purposeful but in order to really know your people, understand their drivers it is critical to be comfortable having some of those deep and meaningful conversations in ordinary time not just when big life events intrude.

When working with leaders to enable them to become emotionally connected and inspirational, we often start with heroic leadership styles – Henry V, Tim Collins, and the like, to challenge and refresh stale, jargonised linguistics but then it always has to move on to emotional openness and self revelation. That takes guts but, when, from a position of perceived strength, they open up about their own doubts and fears they transmogrify into the type of leader people might actually want to follow.

Top tips:

1) Response contingent positive reinforcement – fancy words for ‘catch someone doing something (anything) right and tell them immediately’. Point out what strengths they were using to do it and ask them to find new ways of using those strengths. Every one gives positive feedback, but few do it well or often enough and far too many think it is the mere bread in the sandwich that allows you to tell people the bad stuff.

2) Use selective self-disclosure. A leader who looks perfect (and only you know you are not) or tries to appear perfectly in control at all times is not a good role model. Someone who copes inspires us better. Let them see some of your workings, how you got to this point in your calculations or ability to see the future e.g. I had some real doubts about this path but I overcame them because… I have had my dark nights of the soul, but now…

3) Love people to bits – that’s the White Water mantra. However awkward, difficult or different from you people choose to be, find what is wonderful, unique, special and admirable in them. Focus on that, tell them genuinely what you like and respect about them, reward steps in the right direction and ignore the ‘naughty ‘ behaviour- (works for children too!)

4) Be brave enough to allow greater intimacy. Avoid the instinct to shut down. People are capable of huge and deep thoughts about the meaning of life. See where that goes instead.

Averil, François and all at White Water Group

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• commenting on a family WhatsApp conversation,
• checking my phone messages,
• updating Facebook,
• reading e-mails,
• catching up on LinkedIn; and
• feeling guilty about not tweeting enough.

All fabulously entertaining distractions. Psychologists get very suspicious about this kind of behaviour, assuming that there is some displacement, i.e. the avoidance of a more challenging task, something bigger that we can’t face. So we mop up all the smaller tasks available, distracting ourselves from our true purpose. Habitual behaviours – like obsessionally checking all your social media or even your business e-mails – seem rational but repeatedly breaks concentration and shifts your attention from the important to the merely urgent. It is easy to blame open plan offices, gadgets or meetings for reduced focus, but the biggest single problem is likely to be yourself. Intrusive thoughts such as doubts about your ability or the enormity of the task destroy concentration and lead to avoidance. This problem gets amplified in the next generation: research on students by Larry Rosen has shown that they were only able to focus for a shocking average of 3 minutes and most of their distractions came from technology. Even when all the alerts were switched off- so no beeps or vibrations, they were still distracted, wondering about what messages had accrued. The best students were unsurprisingly those who could concentrate for longest and the worst were those who worked on several tasks at once and consumed more media. However, those who could exercise ‘Metacognitions’ – make insightful judgements about how to handle interruptions to their focus, did better. So self -awareness is the first step if you want to train new patterns of behaviour. Be honest about where the interruptions to your focus come from, remove them wherever you can and make informed decisions.

Focused leadership

We know from our own leadership model that a key attribute of successful leaders is Drive, and that Drive is a combination of energy (Zest) and the ability to focus despite high volumes of distraction, a desire for detail, competing demands and lack of certainty. They seem to exert a consistently high degree of self-control. Furthermore, successful leaders need what to focus on. Daniel Goleman – of Emotional Intelligence fame – claims that leaders need to use focus:

• on themselves: to be aware of their own feelings, values and intuitions;
• on people: to read them well, manage relationships; and
• on the big picture: to understand the larger forces and systems and to determine the best strategy going forward.

Some basic tips

We all vary in our ability to focus but individually experience a wide range of levels of concentration. What can we do to consistently operate at the top of that range?

1. Don’t even think about multi tasking. If you want to know why, try walking behind someone who is walking and texting, especially if you are in a hurry – they end up not doing either thing very well.  Science has shown that multi tasking doesn’t work. If you need to focus on more than one thing, do what is called switch tasking. Concentrate fully on the one thing for a period of time and then on the other. Some of us love to be spinning plates all the time, perhaps because we are terrified of getting bored. Multi-taskers just love the excitement. Successful people learn to focus when they have to.
2. Learn to deal with distractions. The obvious external distractions are people interrupting – in person, phone, e-mail etc.  Shut the door. Tell them you need 30 minutes and to come back later . Most things can wait that long. Often we allow things to break our focus because we really don’t want to do the task in  hand. That’s probably because of the internal distractions – thoughts like, ‘it’s too difficult’ ‘too complicated’, ‘I’m not smart enough’ or even ‘what do I want for tea?’ These thoughts intrude if you let them. Keep drawing your attention back and politely telling yourself to shut up because it will probably be fine.  I have already had two people walk in and start talking while I was trying to write this. Although I asked them (nicely) to leave me alone, it took minutes to get my focus back because of point 1 – I wanted to be in the middle of the plates. Now concentrate!
3. Exercise your focus muscle – when you need to concentrate, check all your messages- phone, e-mails, Facebook and then switch everything off while you focus for 10 minutes. Each day, do a few minutes more without all the distraction. Gradually wean yourself off the constant stimulation. Make set times when you gorge yourself on all the social media stuff and then get back to focussing.
4. If something’s worth doing, it is worth doing any way you can. It is easy to scare yourself out of focussing by setting the standard too high. Stop trying to do a perfect job. Settle down and have a go at ‘doing it badly’. Give that permission and you will get started.
5. Focus on your dreams We often maintain we can’t focus on our important aspirations because we just don’t have the time. You never will, so don’t put it off.  Just take 15 minutes at a time to have a go at doing something in bite-sized chunks. I’ve written 5 books now and I never had any time to do it so once I planned the content, it was 10 minutes when I got up, 20 minutes at the airport, 15 minutes before lunch and before I knew it I had thousands of words.

Ok, got that off my chest; now I can allow myself to tweet! Averil, François and all at White Water Group

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• We know that women do well at school and this includes training in the professions: young women make up 62 per cent of law graduates in the UK for example, as well as 53 per cent of newly qualified doctors in Canada. In the USA, they marginally outnumber men in junior professional and management roles 51/49.
• However, when we turn to senior ranks the picture is markedly different: if 15 per cent of Fortune 500 Board Directors are women, the vast majorities are non executives and only 1.6 per cent of CEOs are women. If you strip away the fashion and retail sectors the numbers become minute.
• Things are not much better in the professions: although women represent 30-40 per cent of accountants qualified by the Big Four audit firms in the UK, their proportion of women partners stagnates at 10-15 per cent.

Once at the top, we know that women do pretty well on average and they are less likely than men to screw up spectacularly. The issue is one of progression and retention. The Leadership Cliff is a corporate problem concerned with attracting and retaining quality leaders in a traditional employment setting, in other words building the Leadership-Rich Corporation. Coaching top women and beyond It’s lonely at the top, but it’s much lonelier for women! By the time women reach upper-middle management, most of their peers have disappeared. Coaching is particularly effective for senior women – it focuses on the right issues, provides thinking space in a neutral setting and also helps engage peers in the conversation. It is by no means the only intervention needed but every senior woman should have a coach. Let’s start from there to keep those already in senior roles and then move down the Talent pipeline to understand which other interventions are going to engage and retain others, hence saving us from wasteful poaching and lost Talent. To further discuss the Leadership Cliff, click here or drop us line.

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