Ignore at your peril!

‘Aha,’ I thought, ‘this is where the screen wash goes.’ Lifting the bottle of screenwash towards the now open nozzle, it was awkward to position it and impossible to pour. I tried a few different angles, none of which enabled the liquid to pour.  

‘This is a ridiculous design,’ I thought, before a nagging doubt began to form. ‘Maybe it’s not supposed to go in there?’ Nevertheless, I went about solving the problem, tipping the screenwash into a small jug (which still didn’t work) and eventually into an even smaller cup which gave me just about enough room to pour the screenwash in. Success! Except after only a small amount, the reservoir was full and overflowed. It turns out I was attempting to fill the engine coolant!  Thankfully, I have not done any lasting damage to the car.   

This serves to illustrate a truth in life and leadership. We often sense a problem ahead and yet suppress and ignore the signal. The result? More problems and trouble to solve than we would otherwise have experienced.  

The skill of anticipation - the diligent avoidance of potential obstacles and problems - is one of the foundational and learnable skills for effective leadership. It’s one of a selection of core habits that we measure when working with our clients via a specialised psychometric assessment. It’s a healthy habit that’s closely associated with a sophisticated awareness of risk. This can be both intuition, which some of our clients describe as a ‘gut feel’, and rigorous research. The key is listening to those signals and, when appropriate, taking pre-emptive action.  

Consider fire alarms. Unless you know that there’s a pre-arranged fire alarm test, you will hopefully take the ringing bell as a clear signal to take action and leave the building. Unless you are the type of person who ignores it, expecting the bell to be a false alarm. Or like one person who told us that they’re so irritated by the bleep of their smoke alarm at home that they’ve removed the batteries, rendering them useless (they recently had a small kitchen fire, thankfully no one was hurt).  

Signals come in many forms. Here are just a few that we’ve heard recently from leaders in Guernsey, Jersey and the UK: 

• It doesn’t feel quite right at work, perhaps it’s our new expenses policy. 

• She’s started to ignore me in meetings.  

• I’ve been removed from the email group. 

• The client didn’t seem quite so friendly this time. And they brought their lawyer to the meeting. 

• I don’t like the way that my boss speaks to me, it just feels a bit off.  

• On reviewing the financials, we spotted a discrepancy.  

• They don’t seem that keen to be here anymore.  

• We talked about this months ago but nothing’s changed.  

• Our employee engagement survey shows a problem in this department.  

• I feel more emotional than usual, a bit more on edge. 

The action we take in response to such signals informs the quality of our lives and leadership.  

A healthy, positive response includes: 

1. Testing the first thought. Especially for those who are more pessimistically disposed. Pessimism is not in itself negative. In fact, it can be helpful and healthy. However, it helps to verify concerns rather than to allow a worrisome thought to escalate out of proportion. Those people who have particularly acute hearing when it comes to risk signals will sometimes misinterpret the signs, treating something innocuous as an urgent alarm. We each possess bias and it’s important to consider these consciously, obtaining verification and facts wherever possible before we jump to conclusions. This is especially so for the more fast-paced amongst us, who will rush to an opinion with barely a second thought. 

2. Paying attention to the signals. Excellent leaders don’t dismiss the signs ahead. It can feel irritating to have to dwell on a potential problem in that initial moment of discovery, especially for firefighter-type leaders who prefer to rush around solving problems rather than pre-emptively invest in preventing them. ‘I’d rather cross that bridge if we ever come to it,’ they say until the bridge actually arrives. It’s remarkably easy to ignore signals. We prefer things to be settled, it takes effort and energy to investigate potential problems. For example, one team we worked with last year dismissed their low employee survey scores, preferring to ‘teach the people how to fill in the survey properly’ rather than ask more searching questions. In contrast, the sophisticated leader will attend keenly to signs and senses. They recognise that what they’re seeing and feeling is more often merely the tip of an unseen iceberg, one with the potential to do huge damage if left unaddressed.   

3. Talk about it. The desire to avoid conflict can become an excuse to ignore a signal. And yet, for the most part, these are just conversations, they’re not combat. The better way is to talk with the right person about the potential problem, to have a conversation, carefully explore your senses and gain a clearer understanding as to whether there is an issue to tackle or not.  

How can we strengthen healthy anticipation habits?  

• Be interested and ask good questions. A defensive response when presented with troubling information will shut down the conversation. Instead, we can be curious and adopt an open stance to the information, even if we don’t like it. If you’re not sure how to do this, start with just one question: ‘Please can you tell me more?’  

• Schedule ahead of time. We encounter many leaders who are adrenaline addicts, enjoying the rush of an urgent deadline and the drama that provokes. Often the drama is unnecessary. Much of the work could have been performed under more stable conditions ahead of time. Preparing ahead might feel less exciting, but the quality of the work will be significantly better with far less collateral damage as an added bonus.  

• Dwell, don’t rush.  Leaping from one meeting to another, rushing away from a conversation and skim-reading reports in haste all create a fog around our risk radars. We fail to notice what’s really going on. It’s like driving too fast and missing the scenery. Taking just a little more time to dwell with people and to think will strengthen our senses. For me, this includes sometimes walking more slowly to a meeting, limiting (preferably refusing) back-to-back appointments, creating time to think in my diary and a regular reading discipline. I don’t always get it right, but it’s helping to strengthen my radar.  

• Reflect more. Sometimes anticipation arrives like a faint whisper in our thoughts and emotions. It starts quietly and is fragile. Taking quiet time to pause and reflect on our thoughts and emotions allows the anticipatory sense to form properly and more clearly. A good self-reflective question to ask is this, ‘What am I feeling about this?’ Followed by ‘What’s the real issue here?’  

We ignore our senses and risk signals at our peril. Excellent leaders listen and invest ahead of time.  What will help you to strengthen your anticipation habits?