Direction over Detail

If you’ve navigated by topographic map in complex terrain, at some point you’ve stopped making forward progress while you try to work out exactly where you are. I’ve done it many times, and almost every group on our survival courses did it at least once. There’s two ways it happens:

1. We feel uncertain about where we are and attempt to regain certainty by pinpointing our exact location.

2. We feel certain about where we are (but are wrong), and bend our reading of the map to suit our perception.

Forward progress either slows or stops entirely, and the focus shifts to ever finer detail. I see the same thing happen to teams and leaders (and yep, I’ve done that version too). We burrow into detail to justify current effort, or make ourselves busy trying to perfect things that will never be perfect. Busyness goes up, progress goes down.

In the map scenario, direction is often the answer. On one challenging walk in the Pilbara, we spent ages going slow trying to justify our position and getting more exhausted and frustrated by it. If we had just walked East, we would hit a North/South water course that was unambiguous and unmissable. East was the way we were going and we were planning to follow that water course!

In teams and workplaces the answer is the same. Get clear on direction and favour progress in that direction over nailing the detail. The detail becomes clear as you make progress. It feels much more enjoyable too.

P.S. This is not a reason to avoid or gloss over detail when it is important. Listen to your specialist communications, risk, compliance and audit teams. Just be sure to keep moving.

On Trust

I got asked a great question. “Is trust the same as Psychological Safety in a team or organisation?” It’s not but they are closely related. Building one without the other is probably impossible. Both involve some initial faith and investment before they are backed by evidence. Hemingway once said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” There’s some risk involved. What if they turn out to be untrustworthy?

There are 2 useful questions to ask yourself/others in the team about trust:

1. How readily do you trust someone? We all sit somewhere on a continuum from ‘I assume everyone is trustworthy’ to ‘I trust no one’. At the extremes are dangerous territory. Too trusting is gullible and easily taken advantage of. Too distrustful and you are unlikely to ever work well with others. You'll always be watching your back.

2. If trust is broken, how readily do you restore it? Again it's a continuum. For some, any perceived breach of trust means they will never trust again. For others, they’ll repair broken trust easily.

Understanding what it takes for each person to give their trust and to fix it is useful.

I reckon a useful mindset is to assume people are inherently trustworthy. It speeds our ability to work well together. And we’ll build psychological safety more quickly too.

Consciously build and defend both.

Break Back to Back

Guess what! Back to back virtual meetings cause elevated stress levels. Recent research from Microsoft confirms it, but none of us are surprised. Anyone who has leapt from one “Brady Bunch” screen to another has felt it.

Microsoft scanned the brains of 14 people as they went back-to-back, compared to taking a 5 to 10 minute break between meetings. Back to back = elevated and sustained stress levels (Red/Yellow scan). Short breaks = minimal stress (Blue scan).

And while the research focuses on virtual meetings, I reckon it would hold true for face to face ones as well (although at least there is a short decompression as you move from one to the other.)

Elevated stress smashes our ability to think, decide, solve, communicate, and collaborate. Most of those meetings require one or more of these from us. As a survival instructor, creating ‘task saturation’ was a really easy way to create duress for a team on a survival course. Impose a tight deadline, swamp them with information, ask for clear decisions and plans, hit them with distractions and before long the stress levels are through the roof and mistakes are made. That adds even more pressure, as now the team has to solve problems it has created for itself. Now add conflict (or at least friction/tension) as people get shorter and sharper with each other. Does this sound familiar?

We can do better. And we need to. This stuff has a direct impact on bottom line. In Australia there have also been recent changes to Work Health and Safety that put greater responsibility for workplace mental health and wellbeing on employers. This stuff has a pretty clear cause and effect chain. There are known health consequences of sustained levels of unhealthy stress. Back to Back environments may well end up in similar territory of allowing employees to operate in dangerous environments when fatigued. In a tight recruitment market, being a better place to work will also be a competitive edge. Proactively addressing this problem makes sense on many fronts.

Potential system solutions:

• Set calendar systems to make meetings 25 min rather than 30, or 50 min rather than 1hr.

• Set 2 or 3, 15 to 20 minute break blocks per day where none can book anyone for anything.

Potential style solutions:

• Have some meetings standing up/walking, and outside.

• Lead by example. Take mini breaks. Encourage others to do the same.

Potential working solutions:

• Give people greater say in the meetings that they attend, or at least ask ‘why do we need this meeting?’

• Get clear about what the meeting is for. If it’s not clear, can it.

People are generally experiencing higher than normal levels of fatigue, stress and burnout. “Push Through!” is a valid answer in short burn situations. It doesn’t work in longer burn ones.

Let’s create an environment where we all scan ‘Blue’.

Emerging Workforce and Workplace Trends Post COVID with Professor Gary Martin

“We need to think this through!” Workplaces have been changed by COVID, probably forever, but making those changes work long term will require more.

Professor Gary Martin and I discussed current and evolving issues for workplaces and their leaders as we recover from COVID.

Stay tuned for other exciting guests this July.