Power Your Tribe

Christine Comaford: When you look around the world, what I find is that every day there seems to be something that people can get upset about; markets are changing, currencies are plunging, political unrest, random acts of violence, natural disasters. Change is the new normal and many people are just trying to keep up, everything is moving so fast, everything is bumpy, lots of change, so we're finding that people can really learn to navigate their emotional state, because 90 percent of all of our decisions and behaviors are driven – dominated by – our emotional brain.

Once we learn how to manage our emotions it doesn't matter how turbulent, how crazy, how much change is happening, we can be still and centered inside, regardless of what's happening outside.

Rachel Salaman: And your book is a guide to developing that kind of emotional agility. Near the beginning of it you say, "wings for a bird are like emotions for human beings," so could you put that idea into context for us?

Christine Comaford: Yes, a bird can't move forward without wings, humans can't experience the world without emotions, so here is what happens in your brain: sensory data comes in, visuals, you see things, you hear things, you smell things, you taste things, you feel things. That all zooms into your brain stem, into your reptilian brain, it then moves very quickly to your mammalian brain where emotions are attached and then it zooms to your prefrontal cortex where we make meaning.

So here we go, we see somebody scowling, maybe it's our boss, we see our boss scowling, that is a visual input, it comes into our brain stem, goes into our mammalian brain, maybe our shoulders crunch up and we feel a little bit concerned or stressed out, and then by the time it gets to our prefrontal cortex we have decided that he's disappointed with us, he's never happy with our work.

What is that going to do to someone's behavior and capabilities, they can maybe keep their head down, play small, do minimal acceptable work just to try to not be seen, whereas that was meaning they just made, maybe he is scowling because he has a stomach ache.

Rachel Salaman: From that we need to develop emotional agility to understand that process more and make it work for us, is that how it works?

Christine Comaford: Yes, and to unpack it and to slow it down. Oh, I see him scowling, ha, I'm going to get curious and maybe ask him how he's doing before the train leaves the station and we decide that he's disappointed with us, so getting curious about the feelings that start to come up based on the sensory data that you receive. If we don't know how we're feeling, frustrated, overwhelmed, happy, peaceful, confident, then we can't navigate our emotions.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you say that to become more emotionally agile we need to feel three things: to be safe, to belong and to matter. Why did you choose to focus on those three?

Christine Comaford: Maslow was right, once we have food, water, shelter, warmth and Wi-Fi these days, then and only then would those basic physiological needs met, then we need to feel certainty, safety, freedom from fear, we need to feel that we belong, we fit in somewhere, we have equal value to others, we're part of something beyond ourselves, we need to matter to be seen, appreciated, acknowledged for our unique gifts, we're not a cog in a wheel, we're not a replaceable part.

And Maslow's research so long ago stated this and we have found that this is absolutely true in corporations, we even do an assessment called the Safety Belonging Mattering Index so we can find out if the sales team feels that they don't matter, if the engineers are feeling unsafe, if the operations people are feeling that they don't belong then we unpack those results from this assessment, it's only ten questions, it's very fast, we put in different programs in place to boost agility, we take the assessment maybe six months later and we find that we have increased results.

And what does that mean: 35 percent to 50 per cent more protected because they're not being squished by feeling unsafe, not belonging, not mattering. Our emotional state, 90 percent of our decisions or our behaviors are driven or dominated by our emotional state, we've got to really start paying attention to this.

Rachel Salaman: And from a manager's point of view you say that safety plus belonging plus mattering equals trust, which is essential for good leadership, so how do you think that equation might influence how a team leader works?

Christine Comaford: You know what's so interesting is that as leaders start to understand this, they start to pay attention to what people are subconsciously asking them for, so if somebody is constantly coming to you saying I need more information, I need a backup plan, what if this doesn't work, then what are we going to do, so they're probably asking you for safety.

If you sit down with them from the very beginning and say 'hey, we're taking on this new project, let's figure out a plan, let's figure out a backup plan, let's just figure out a backup plan to the backup plan.' We're speaking to them in safety because that's where they go when they are shut down or when they are triggered or where they're in stress.

If somebody comes to you often for belonging, they want to be included in things, they want to be part of the team, they want to see how they can contribute to the team; then we approach them through the lens of – if you will – speaking through belonging.

If somebody often when they are under stress feels unappreciated, like nobody is seeing their contributions, they are probably wanting mattering, so as leaders become more sensitive, you see this is the hardest part about leadership. I'm sure you've seen this a million times, great leaders pay attention to what their people need and they give them that emotional experience so that their people can perform at their peak levels. It's like the leader must meet the person where they are.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you say that we should think of our minds in terms of the critter state and the smart state, and this relates to the response that goes on in our brains that you talked about a moment ago. What more can you tell us about that?

Christine Comaford: The critter state – we call it critter to make it fun like a little animal, safe or not, dead or not, we're trying to be a little playful with it – is when we're in that fight, flight, freeze response, when we don't have behavioral choice. We've all been there, we all go there on a regular basis, maybe if somebody cuts you off in traffic and you just go 'whoa' and it takes you a little while to come back down and to get back to a calm state.

Critter state is when the reptilian brain (which cares about keeping you not dead) doesn't understand quality of life. It's binary, it's dead or not dead, so the reptilian brain is just trying to keep your basic physiological existence continuing plus the mammalian brain trying to keep you emotionally safe.

The third part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex within the neo cortex, is where we have problem time, seeing where we want to go and figuring out a plan to get there, with language skills. Everybody listening: I bet you've had this experience, where something kind of shocking or stressful happens and you feel like you don't have the right response, and later you think of a great verbal response, but you didn't have one right then because your prefrontal cortex is offline.

So critter state is mammalian and reptilian, and smart state is all three parts of the brain working together. So you get a flame email from somebody and you don't react, you just go 'wow, poor George, he's probably having a really bad day,' whereas if somebody says something mean to you or you get an email and you're not feeling quite as emotionally agile, emotionally resilient, you might go for roar, battle, and get into fight, flight or freeze.

So leaders need to be able to monitor their people and also monitor their behavior and their speech so that we don't send people into critter state all the time, we keep them in smart state where they have high productivity, high collaboration, high innovation, high emotional engagement.

Rachel Salaman: To help with this I think you explain in the book the process of creating experiences and then leveraging elements of the memory of those experiences – like visuals and sounds – to feel more powerful and to have more of that control.

Christine Comaford: So let's talk about your question, which is a beautiful one; the way that we make meaning as I mentioned earlier, is through those visual auditory kinesthetic cues, that data that comes in.

What we do when we work with people and through coaching and training we want to actually help them anchor certain states, we will have them recall a memory, where, let's say, they want a confidence anchor, we will have them recall a memory where they felt really confident, they have to see what was in that memory, hear what they were hearing in that memory, feel what they were feeling in that memory, and as they load up that potent, powerful, empowering memory they can then anchor it on their body, right hand squeezing left wrist (a popular one is right thumb pressing the center of left palm) they can actually anchor that emotional state in their body so that when they're walking into a challenging meeting or they're going to a situation where they want to really show up and feel confident, they can press that physical anchor on their body and their system is flooded with these good feelings.

Try it a couple of times, some people naturally are great at anchoring, it's very easy for them; others, myself included, it took me several tries before I actually got it to work, so be patient with yourself because these things are so powerful.

Rachel Salaman: Most of your book is dedicated to exploring the resilience cycle which has seven steps to it, and the first four of these are about solo resilience, and the last three are about tribal resilience. So how do solo and tribal resilience relate to one another and what's your definition of tribal?

Christine Comaford: Tribes are really collections of people that come together with a shared purpose, with a shared desire to create something great, with a shared desire to collaborate, to be with each other, to pursue a specific vision. As leaders we have to model the change we want to see, we can't just say hey everybody, be emotionally resilient, we're not doing it, so we can start by learning to, okay, I'm feeling some resistance around this particular program or change or whatever, and we go through the steps and the tools, empower your tribe to release that resistance.

Then we need to actually say 'okay, how am I feeling about this,' and then we can make that new meaning, just like the scowling boss, maybe he just has a stomach ache, let's find out and then we can anchor the outcome that we want to create, anchor that new meaning so we can keep recalling it, when this happens I want to feel confident, when that happens I want to feel peaceful. So once we get those first four down and we take responsibility for our own behavior then we can enroll and engage others, build that agility, expand that.

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Rachel Salaman: Let's talk about those steps in a little bit more detail now. You mentioned that the first step in the resilience cycle is release resistance. Could you share an example of what that looks like and then what happens after that?

Christine Comaford: Maybe you're in a situation where a new change has just occurred, there is a new policy, there's a new leader, somebody who you really liked left the organization or whatever, and the steps that we go through we call maneuvers of consciousness, and what's beautiful about it is you find out how agile you actually are.

So the first step is to resist the heck out of it because you have to get that out of your system, so you sit down and you do what we call negative evaluation. This is a really stupid idea, I can't stand this, and here's what I don't like about it, here's how it makes me feel. You do that for a full three minutes, so you set your timer and you can either do this alone or I think it's more powerful to do it with a buddy where the buddy is silent, they're just sitting there being your witness.

Three minutes on negative evaluation, and then you look at the emotional wheel and wow, you say 'I feel mad, I feel overwhelmed, I feel frustrated, I feel angry,' and then you shake your body up because emotions do have energy which we talk about in the book, and then we go the next step.

And step two is curiosity: 'well I wonder why this change took place, I wonder whose idea it was, I wonder what they were trying to achieve with this change.' If they're going to full curiosity, again three minutes and then you check your emotions and you go 'huh, I'm feeling inquisitive, I'm feeling puzzled' and suddenly you notice that the emotion is not nearly as intense, shake your body out.

The third phase is amazement. Wow, this is amazing that this particular change happened and here's what's amazing about it, so you've got to go fully into amazement and now you're starting to shift into more of the peaceful, powerful sections of the emotion wheel, then you shake your body out.

And then the last one is full appreciation. It's so great that this change is happening because I can see how it's opening up new possibilities, we're going to have some fresh, new talent here, we're going to be looking at things in a whole different way, this will probably result in some innovation.

And then after that you're squarely in the peaceful, powerful, joyful section of the emotion wheel, and then what's important once we get that, once we've shifted that resistance, is to then go immediately to 'so what would you like' and we go into an outcome frame: what would you like, what will having that do for you, how will you know when you have it, what value might you risk or lose, as there is always a risk when there is a change, when, where and with whom would you like it and then what are your next steps.

So when someone goes through this process they can very quickly actually release resistance and make new meaning and anchor at the same time, so it's a beautiful thing.

Rachel Salaman: And then that leads on to the second step in the cycle, increased rapport with yourself, so what exactly does that mean?

Christine Comaford: It means actually understanding how am I feeling, where am I, where am I emotionally, where do I get in trouble, so for instance we talk about organismic right and every human being has five organismic rights: the right to exist, the right to have needs, the right to take action, the right to have consequences for their actions, the right to love and be loved.

When we start to look at our team maybe somebody has a real hard time with accountability and showing up, that might be low right to take action or maybe somebody blames and points fingers when their own work doesn't work out well, low right to have consequences for their actions, maybe somebody plays really small and kind of disappears in conflict, low right to exist, maybe somebody is constantly doing other people's work, taking one for the team, rescuing, not honoring their needs, low right to have needs.

As we understand this it actually also feeds into safety belonging mattering, we've got this table in the book where you can empower your tribe, understand why people have certain behaviors, what is driving it at the subterranean level and then how to help them increase rapport with themselves to actually shift their own behavior, as people will always go to whatever behavior feels best or whatever behavior feels less bad if they don't have a good feeling behavior.

So that's what the whole book is about, it's helping people make new behavioral choices and actually adding more behavioral choices to their menu if you will.

Rachel Salaman: When you talk about self-sabotage in the book you say that the behaviors we dislike were once solutions and this is a quote: 'behavior always, always, always has an intended positive outcome.' I was surprised by that thinking, for example, that laziness, bullying, or bitchiness could have positive outcomes?

Christine Comaford: Good question. So let's look at bullying because I don't know how things are going in the U.K., but in the U.S. 75 percent of U.S. workers – this just came out maybe six months ago – are affected by bullying. It doesn't mean that 75 percent are being bullied, but it's very stressful to watch somebody else be bullied.

So we have a bullying situation in the U.S. that we are really working on, so for the person who is doing the bullying, what is so great about it, they are probably (feel into this for a second everybody), they are trying to become bigger, they are trying to have more power over someone which probably means they don't have an experience of belonging because if they felt connected and they valued that person they wouldn't bully them.

So there is a belonging challenge and there is even something bigger which is a mattering challenge. If they felt acknowledged, appreciated, seen for their unique gifts, mattering, if they felt connected to everybody else, belonging, bullying wouldn't occur.

So my question is, there isn't such a thing as a bullying challenge or a sales challenge or an operations challenge, there's only a leadership challenge; who is that bully's leader and why aren't they unpacking that person's behavior and creating change, because to the bully that is their best choice, that feels good, it gives them a feeling of power even though it's transitory and cruel.

Rachel Salaman: A lot of your tips and advice are based on re-framing or re-looking at a situation. In fact, there's a section in your book about re-framing, could you talk a little bit about that?

Christine Comaford: Yes, because we have challenges around the meaning that we make and we have opportunities every day to make feeling differently. Shakespeare, one of your countrymen, said this hundreds of years ago, he said, 'things are neither good nor bad, only thinking makes them so.'

That's what we call meaning making and human beings are meaning making machines, we are constantly making meaning, but often the meaning that we make is to keep us not dead, it's critter state if you will, basic survival meaning as opposed to empowering meaning.

As an example, when my father was dying of pancreatic cancer it had spread everywhere all over his body, it took him a while but we finally got one of the better, more powerful re-frames I've ever heard and in his last four months of life: he said that cancer is the second best thing that's ever happened to me, and I said 'wow dad, that's awesome, what was the first thing' and he said 'meeting your mom.'

The second thing was cancer, and I said 'why dad, why has pancreatic cancer been so awesome for you?' and he said 'because it helped me open my heart and I'd rather live for a few months with an open heart than a few more decades angry, bitter and shutdown.'

And I was like that's a heck of a re-frame. We decide if things are good or bad and we decide based on how they feel, so if our people aren't being accountable we want to create better feelings around being accountable. We show you exactly how to do this in 'Power Your Tribe'.

Rachel Salaman: Let's talk now about the fifth step in the resilience cycle, enroll and engage others, which is the first of the steps to focus on the tribe rather than the individual. Here you demonstrate the power of a couple of key tools that can influence people, so could you tell us about meta programs and how they can be used?

Christine Comaford: Yes, meta programs were discovered by Leslie Cameron Bandler in the seventies and refined in the eighties and basically they are the lens through which we experience the world, what motivates us, the direction that we're moving etc, how we make decisions.

If we look at personality tests, Myers-Briggs etc, that is like the third floor of the building, meta programs are like the sub-basement and what's awesome about meta programs is once you understand a person's set of meta programs in challenging situations, not all the time, in challenging situations, in times of change we want to speak to them in their meta programs. I'll give you a couple of examples.

One meta program is toward, that is the person who wants to get, attain, achieve goals, goals, goals. The opposite of the toward person who is seeking pleasure and not even thinking about pain, goals, goals, goals, let's achieve, achieve, achieve; the opposite of that is away, the person who wants to solve problems, mitigate risk, prevent disaster.

So if you talk to an away person who is all about problem solving and you're talking about goals, goals, goals, let's get all this great stuff, and they're thinking 'oh my gosh, I see the problem there, I see the pain there, yikes,' you're not going to be in rapport with them, you're going to have a hard time engaging and enrolling them, but if you say 'hey, I have this problem I really would love your help in solving, they're going to perk up, there are these risks I really want to avoid, they're going to perk up.'

We go through six different meta programs that really shape a person's reality and as we understand and we use the decoding tools in 'Power Your Tribe', we can understand how to shift people and help them get what they want and help them get on board because we're actually stepping over into their world and giving them this experience of being the same as them.

Rachel Salaman: That's all about communication and in the book you say that communication is about engagement, not manipulation, but the examples you give in the book do show these tools as having influence on behavior as you've just outlined, so in your view what's the difference between influencing and manipulating?

Christine Comaford: Influencing is looping arms with someone subconsciously and walking forward to a mutually beneficial future. Manipulating is trying to get someone to go your way if it's not equally beneficial for them.

Manipulation, domination, and control is about one party and them winning at all costs. It's about intention. Manipulation doesn't work, it only works temporarily and then tremendous amounts of anger and resentment are the result, we've all been there, but enrolling and engaging, we are co-creating, we are both deciding, we're not being forced to go a particular path that doesn't feel good to us.

Rachel Salaman: Number six in the cycle is build tribal agility and it's interesting that here you don't hold back on the difficult truth, such as we're all biased and we're all a little bit borderline, so when it comes to bias what should we look out for in ourselves and others?

Christine Comaford: You know there are over 150 cognitive biases, so it's great to know what the key ones are for you, like for me, one of my biases is optimism and planning fallacy – oh, this isn't going to take that long. It will. Or, this isn't going to cost that much. So, since I know I have those two biases I always bounce stuff off other people and they're like 'Christine, the cycle takes two weeks, that is going to take two months.'

So we have the filters, these biases that are baked in, that we just need to call out and we need to ask questions which we show you in the book so that you can bust those biases and start making better decisions.

And of course a huge one that really factors into diversity and inclusion and equity is the 'like me' bias, and the 'like me' bias is basically something from our cave people days. If somebody looks like me and behaves like me they probably want the same things I want, so they're probably going to be a friend versus a foe.

So this bias is what causes companies to have people that all look the same, the executive suite to be filled with middle aged white males, all the stuff that we're seeing that becomes problematic today.

Now just because somebody is a different gender, a different skin color, a different nationality, a different religion, etc. does not mean that you don't have tremendous amounts in common with them, so we show you some different tools to start to do three minute journaling for instance, we realize they have kids too, they like the outdoors too, they really care about doing a good job, they are really accountable too, they love innovation too. Wow, I've just been looking at the surface, this person is totally like me, we redefine like me.

Rachel Salaman: Now with all your experience of working with teams you know a lot about feedback and how to give it and even receive it effectively, and you go into a little bit of this in the book. What are your top tips for giving feedback to team members based on your experience?

Christine Comaford: The first one that I would want everyone to take away from today is the feedback frame. Many of us are taught to give feedback in a way that we say something great, we say something not so great, the constructive feedback, and then we say something great again, and the brain is like 'what, am I great, am I not great, I don't get it.'

So what we found with our over a thousand companies that we've worked with is that if we say 'hey, what's working is…' and we tell them what's working, such as 'you're great at innovation, you always have these cool new ideas etc., and then what I'd like to see more of is collaboration with the marketing team, like you did with the sales team six months ago on project X.'

So we're telling them here's what's working and here's what I'd like to see more of, equal amounts of what's working and what I'd like to see more of, and then we stop talking because when we say what's working they are loading up the visual auditory kinesthetic structures of that behavior that you liked.

Let them bake on that for a moment and then what I'd like to see more of is, and we tell them the behavior we'd like to see more of, and then if they've never done it, like in the example of collaboration, if they've never done collaboration that's where we can give them some suggestions, so possibly doing this or how would you do that and we enroll them in actually seeing that desired state.

But for starters we have to normalize feedback and feedback frames go up, down, across the org chart, the leader should be receiving feedback frames from his or her people.

Rachel Salaman: We've covered a lot of ground in this discussion, so what for you are the top takeaways for a manager who wants to power his or her tribe more effectively starting today?

Christine Comaford: First of all, release resistance and then make new meaning, if we just focus on releasing resistance, making new meaning and using the feedback frame so people can course correct, that alone will change the tone if you will of the workplace, that will start to create more safety belonging mattering.

Then you can get into the tools that are later in the book. The results with these tools I'm very happy to say are quite swift and what you will find is that you'll really start to experience how leadership is a privilege and how we can help expand people's identities and experiences of themselves and their beliefs about the company.

Rachel Salaman: Christine Comaford, thanks very much for joining us today.

Christine Comaford: Thank you so much Rachel, what a pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Christine's book again is "Power Your Tribe: Create Resilient Teams in Turbulent Times." I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.