Cultured Conversation # 7: Humanity
The Brand Inside
The Brand Inside is an Organisational Culture Change Consultancy with a specialisation in Africa.
In this edition of Cultured Conversations, we:
Anger Management
Anger is a powerful emotion. On the one hand, we are told to express it because bottling it up may cause us harm. On the other hand, how we express it often causes unnecessary harm to others. This is particularly true in workplace relationships between leaders or managers and staff. The implicit understanding of where the power lies in such relationships makes anger very frightening to experience. Employees tend to react to a boss’ anger by catastrophising: "I’m going to lose my job."?
This is even the case in organisations where people rarely get fired. Recently I was working in one such enterprise. Despite what I consider to be an abnormally low staff turnover, managers and staff honestly believed that every day, they were walking a tightrope. That, despite an average tenure of ten years, their job could end at any moment. Just imagine how exhausting that must be and how unproductive.
When people are afraid, the rational part of their brain goes into pause mode. This reduces their ability to complete normal tasks and inhibits anything more creative.? Employees default to the emotional part of the brain (which is capable of feeling but utterly incapable of communication) and simply hope to survive the day. Prolonged exposure to fear swiftly leads to wellness issues as people develop their own coping mechanisms. These vary from eating too much of the wrong food to alcohol and substance abuse. Even worse, employees may go home and vent their unhappiness on the people who look up to them.
It is natural for bosses to feel anger when they are frustrated with a lack of progress, when a customer gets angry with them, or when the Board questions their ability. However, allowing the anger reflex to kick in without pause for thought will produce negative outcomes.?
The Greek philosopher and teacher Aristotle wrote: "Anybody can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way is not within everybody’s power. And that is not easy."
So, in a world where we are becoming exposed to the value of greater emotional intelligence, we need to fix people being the ‘cross boss’. Each successive generation that joins the workforce has less tolerance for it.
Finding a productive way to use anger starts with developing self-awareness. Many ‘cross bosses’ actually lack independence and assertiveness, and their language of self-expression is limited. That is where life coaching would help them.
The Culture Dividend
Whenever I’m introduced to a new business concept in business, I ask ‘who’s the beneficiary?’ I’m less interested in creativity and more motivated by relevant innovation. For example, if my opinion is sought on a piece of advertising, I ask, "Who is the target audience?" Without this context, I would be hard-pressed to say anything more profound than "I? like it" or "make the logo bigger" or "that elephant looks cute."
When it comes to culture transformation, it’s just as important to identify the likely beneficiaries of organisational change. If I look back thirty years, the answer would generally have been ‘the company owners’. In companies created by entrepreneurial individuals, they were often trying to make a company culture that reflected their own personalities and values. Sometimes, this was a good thing, but at other times, this led to an unattractive self-satisfaction. The propensity for self-delusion was huge because even the harshest of employers likes to consider himself a benevolent patriarch.
Twenty years ago, the term General Manager was supplanted by Managing Director. This, in turn, gave way to the Chief Executive Officer.? As organisational aspirations grew, their cultures were adjusted to flatter the ego of the business leader. Whatever was written about leadership in Harvard Business Review or studied at London Business School, you can be sure that local employees were heavily dosed with it. Regardless of the relevance of global (western) trends to the realities of running businesses in Africa.
However, that change also brought about a more thoughtful focus on the customer in better-led companies. Questioning whether Customer Service was enough or whether a more clearly defined Customer Experience was what we should all aim for.
Ten years ago, the narrow parish of Personnel Management broadened to consider the employee as a person rather than a numbered component. Since then, some of our Human Resource professionals have evolved into Talent Managers, dedicated to offering careers over jobs and growing employee talents to meet future business needs.
So, we have reached the point where companies that have been through this evolution are ready to enumerate the benefits of a carefully curated organisational culture. The primary beneficiaries of this will be the customers, if employee behaviour has been aligned with the promise being made by the brand. Secondary beneficiaries will be the employees, who will now know how to bring the brand to life in their daily work and understand where they fit in. Then, the CEO and shareholders can take their share of the credit, enjoying deserved recognition and better commercial returns.
Amalgam Leadership for Stronger Succession Plans
At Amalgam Leadership, we share a clear purpose. We're building more emotionally intelligent leaders for African organisations. With eight years of successful work behind us, we now boast a well-connected and empathetic Alumni Group of more than 60 business leaders in four African nations, representing various sectors, from Agriculture to Fintech and Manufacturing to Utilities.
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Our regular corporate sponsors use us to validate their leadership candidates and equip them for success. They appreciate the opportunity to upskill and pressure test their high-potential seniors in a safe environment. Enabling them to return to the organisation and assume their new positions with confidence.
The Amalgam Leadership Programme delivers four interlinked curriculum themes:
In January 2025, the next Amalgam Class will form in Nairobi, Kenya. But, right now, you can talk to Kathy Mwai, Registrar [email protected], to learn more about this inspirational programme and reserve places for your future leaders.
If your brain is an average adult human brain, you have more potential than you have ever dreamed of.?Look at how that brain is engineered to deliver peak performance for you.
Your brain is made up of neurons, specialised cells that process electrochemical information. These neurons connect in structures called synapses, where they pass signals to one another. The synapses form neural nets that store information and process everything we need to navigate life and work.
Neuroscience has revealed that the average adult brain has 86 billion neurons. But what does that mean??
Well, neuroscientists like to think of each neuron as having the processing capacity of an average laptop computer. That means your brain is like a massive biological supercomputer.?And when computer scientists tasked one of the most powerful machines in the world to simulate the activity in a human brain digitally, guess what happened? The Fujitsu K computer took 40 minutes to replicate 1 second of the neural activity of only 1%? of an average adult brain. Making it 2400 times slower than the brain.??
Just imagine storing your memories on your actual laptop. You would use its full capacity for just one weekend away with friends. But our brains never seem to run out of space. Everything you know, every memory, person, smell, colour, and sound. Every face and place you recognise. It’s all stored in the neural networks of the brain.??
?So, if your brain is so amazing, why are you struggling with your credit card debt? Why haven’t you spoken to your brother in two years? Why can’t we all figure out ways to get through the difficult things in life??
Part of the problem lies in the subconscious ‘wiring’ that’s happened throughout our lives. Over time, our experiences and perceptions have progressively handicapped our ability to make the most of our brainpower. The more we mature, the more we apply the handbrake and the more restricted our abilities become. Hence the adage: ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’
The good news is that we can all teach ourselves ‘new tricks’ and learn new skills that expand our ability to use our actual brain capacity. The science of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) development is rooted in overcoming the subconscious dynamics that limit us, such as the way we judge ourselves, engage with other people, keep commitments, or handle stress.?
In fact, there are at least 20 recognised subsets of EQ skills that anyone can learn and practice. All it takes is the decision to start.
Chris Harrison is the Managing Director of The Brand Inside. He's a Marketer and Africa expert with 30 years of experience building and delivering brands across Africa. As a Coach, he currently leads programmes to transform organisational cultures in Logistics, Microfinance, Agriculture, Fintech and Banking.
Chris partners with the Emotional Intelligence development platform Mygrow in Africa and helps to develop future business leaders through the Amalgam Leadership Programme
Cultured Conversations showcases the latest thinking in leadership, workplace behaviours and organisational culture change.