We all have a collection of things in our lives that we would like to change. When it comes to change, we often find that it's a lot harder than we expect it to be. Even small things turn out to be much more difficult that we think they should be. The problem comes down to control.

In order to change something to be exactly the way you want it, you need to control it. If you try to change something you have no control over, you will fail. A lot of coaches and consultants will get you to draw diagrams showing the things you control vs the things you don't. The message is that you can change the things you control and can only influence the things you don’t. If you want to change something the way to do that is to expand your sphere of control - try to gain control of the thing you want to change. Unfortunately, 99% of those diagrams are completely wrong. We generally have control over far less than we think we do.

Last time I talked about the 3 C's required for people to feel empowered - Clarity, Competence and Care. We need all 3 for people to feel empowered. They need the skills to do the job right (competence), they need the information to make the right decision (clarity) and they need to feel that the organisation and its leadership are asking them to step up and take responsibility because it's the right thing for them, not the thing that will make the most profit or allow more downsizing (care). It should make their jobs better and more fulfilling, it should help them grow and advance their careers. If all 3 C's are present, people will feel empowered.

So care is essential for empowerment, but that's not all. My view is that care is the single most important quality that sets great leaders apart from everyone else. These days, care is not something we talk about a lot in a business context. There might be an "Employee care" section of the HR website which lists the services you can call when the stress of your job gets too much, but there is very little actual care involved in modern business. You are more likely to hear words like "data driven" than "care driven". I mean, most organisations call people "resources" without even cringing a little (and treat them like resources as well). Actual, real care and compassion for people is missing in modern organisations and I strongly feel that it needs to be brought back. Not just because it's good for people, but because it's good for business as well.

Hi folks, first post back after the break. I hope you all had a great holiday season and that the new year is treating you kindly (at least kinder than last year). I thought today that I would go back to a topic that I have covered before, because I think I left something important out when I covered it the first time. I have written before about empowerment and what conditions need to exist before people will accept that empowerment (here) . Empowerment isn't something you can just give to someone and expect it to work, they need to accept the responsibility and authority that they are given. If they don't accept it, they will be empowered on paper but will still turn to the hierarchy to make decisions for them.

I said before that there are two key things that need to exist in order for people to accept empowerment - clarity and competence. Clarity is the organisational clarity around why the decision needs to be made and what the operational constraints and limits are on the options that can be considered. Competence is the skills and other knowledge that someone needs in order to operate in that space. Without those two, no matter how much you tell people they are empowered to act, they will not do it. Unless they feel competent and have the right clarity, empowerment will not happen. All that still holds from when I originally wrote it, but I left something out. There is a third C - Care.

I'm sure we have all been in this position - you are in a meeting where ideas are being shared. Someone puts forward an idea and someone raises an objection. The raiser of the idea reacts as if they have just been punched in the face - angry, defensive, aggressive. Or sullen, withdrawn, silent. Fight or flight. And all because someone raised an objection to their idea. People tend to hold their ideas very tightly. They identify with them. They are their idea. So an attack on their idea is very literally an attack on them.

Or what about this one - you were just in a meeting and someone says to you "that was a pretty bad idea they raised.. what a fool they must be". In this case we are associating the idea with the character of the person who raised it. The idea was bad so therefore, by extension, they must be bad. We see both of these situations all the time. Both associating strongly with your own ideas, and conflating the quality of an idea with the attributes or character of the person who raised it, are things most of us do all the time, and they are both extremely unhelpful.

One of the most effective things any person or team can do to improve the way they work is to make their work visible. Unless you work in a factory building physical things, chances are most of your work is invisible. It lives in emails and in documents and in conversations. It's not physical stuff that you can easily see in front of you. It's hard to get an overall picture of where all your work is in your process and where things are getting stuck. On a factory floor you can see a pile of parts build up in front of a bottleneck. It's really hard to do that with invisible work. Invisible work generally only becomes visible when there is a problem.

So if you want to understand your work, you need some way to make it visible. Make a big board somewhere and put cards on it representing all the work that is in flight and where it is in your process. By visualising work that is usually invisible, you can start to see patterns and make changes to improve the flow. If is invisible you can't control it. You only become aware of it when it jumps out at you and causes you a problem. By making the invisible visible you gain control over something. That works great for things like invisible work, but what about other invisible things? Things like our own internal states - our thoughts and emotions.

Last time I wrote about the drive for change being caused by a tension between the way we want the world to be and the way the world is. We looked at the two ways in which to release that tension - change reality to match your vision, or lower your vision to match reality. We explored the sad fact that most of the time it’s much easier to lower your expectations and what happens when you do that. We also looked at how you can keep your dreams alive in the face of difficulty - by not fixating on reaching the goal but focusing on the progress made along the journey. That post generated a bunch of questions from readers so I thought I'd write a follow-up to address them.

There were three main questions raised - does the goal have to be an external goal (change the world) and not an internal goal (change me); is any changing of your goal a bad thing; and what to do if you are a really goal oriented person and keep focusing on reaching that goal.

We all carry within us a picture of how we would like reality to be. Then there is the objective reality that surrounds us. When those two do not agree, an uncomfortable tension is built up and it is this tension that creates the desire for change. Our imagined state is usually a much happier/more productive/more complete state than the one we actually find ourselves in. How many times have you said to yourself something like "I wish I could be more..." or even more commonly "I wish work could be more like...."? The difference between our dreams and aspirations and where we find ourselves creates a mental tension and this drives the desire to change.

Mental tension is uncomfortable. It needs to be resolved. It won't resolve itself - something needs to change to resolve that tension. There are only two things that can change here, either we make changes to make the world we live in more like the one we aspire to, or we lower our aspirations to make our dreams more like reality. Either we change the world, or the world changes us. Unfortunately, it is often much easier to adjust our aspirations downwards than to make real change in the world.

Have you ever had one of those days (or weeks, or months) where you just feel stuck? What do I mean by stuck? That feeling that you are not making progress. That you are doing the same thing over and over and nothing is changing. Solving the same problem time after time and knowing that tomorrow you will probably be solving the same problems again. That feeling that you are working really hard but not really achieving anything.

If you do feel that way, I'm going to let you in on a secret - it's not just you. Unless you have talked openly to others about this (and how many of us have done that?), you probably feel like it's just you. That everyone else around you feels fine and is having a great, fulfilling experience. But they probably aren't. That feeling of being stuck is pretty common. Most of us have spent weeks, months or even whole careers feeling like that. It's not much fun. It's draining. Soul destroying. It leads to stress, burnout and just plain unhappiness. Fortunately, there is something you can do about it.

As a brewer, when you hook up a keg of beer to the gas and hook up the tap, one of the things you learn quite quickly (unless you really like drinking nothing but foam) is that the pressure of the gas pushing the liquid through the tube creates a resistance in that tube that poses the flow. The more pressure, the more resistance. Eventually the resistance becomes too much, creates turbulence and the tap will pour gas and foam rather than lovely beer. Electrical engineers recognise this phenomenon as well - the more current you push through a wire (the pressure of the electrons), the more the wire will resist their flow and cause energy to be lost as heat. Eventually the wire will get so hot that it will melt.

This is a well known phenomenon of many of the physical sciences. Whenever you push one thing into or through another thing, there is resistance and that resistance is proportional to the pressure doing the pushing - small pressure, small resistance. Large pressure, large resistance. Importantly, that resistance can build to a point where it will cause damage to the materials involved. Push too hard and the wire will melt or the pipe will burst. Pushing harder may actually get you less flow because the resistance is greater. So why am I telling you this? Because it applies to coaching as well, but unlike the physical sciences we often don't recognise it.