Belief

Who do you know that could benefit from an injection of belief?

No Fear! Really?

In the early 2000’s “No Fear” was everywhere. It never made sense to me. Courage is more realistic. We only need courage where there is fear.

Courage features in some of my proudest moments, and the ones I’d rather forget. In the proud ones,  I stood for something when it was both important, and uncomfortable. Some were small interactions like recognising someone's effort, or extending kindness when someone was doing it tough. Some were much bigger like calling out unacceptable behaviour when few were speaking up. Some had me working hard to change something about myself when I knew it would be better for me and the people around me.

But there have also been times when I held my tongue, not shown support, avoided a necessary but tough conversation, let something substandard (in me, or others) slide, ignored my intuition.

Over years of working with some great leaders and working on myself, I know that courage has a lasting impact on individuals, companies and cultures.  When I’ve worked with teams on building Psychological Safety,  I see a direct correlation between leader courage  and the courage of their team. Courage is contagious and directly impacts Psychological Safety.

“No Fear” = no courage. I’d rather notice fear,  explore the cause, and act courageously. How does courage show up in your leadership?

A Standing Ovation

I saw a great post this week of a leader receiving a standing ovation and as he walked down between 2 rows of his team heading for the exit on his last day. The celebration was warm, genuine and emotional. People were cheering, slapping him on the back, hugging him and crying as he walked the guard of honour. I know nothing of the man or his work, but he had clearly made a massive impression and impact on his colleagues and team. I suspect he was a master at some of the core ingredients of building trust and psychological safety in a high performing team.

• Competence - in a professional environment, connection is important, but you also need to be able to get the job done.

• Warmth - we judge people in a heartbeat, way faster than they can demonstrate their competence. Warmth means you care and genuinely connect with people as people, not assets or resources. The easiest and quickest way to do this is make eye contact and smile.

• Integrity - do what you say you will do, when you say you will do it. Competence and warmth won’t be enough to continue building trust and psychological safety if you don’t follow through. (PS, this also means being good at saying “No” - more on that later)

• Connection - beyond your warm smile, is connection. Getting to know team members, what they care about, what they aspire to, what their challenges are, where they shine and where they need support not only show you care, but also help in building high performance.

• Clarity - Great leaders add clarity to everything- roles, boundaries, timeframes, measures of success, standards and more.

I reckon that standing ovation was built on these ingredients. And the beauty is they are all skills which means they can be learnt and improved by anyone. Which of them could use some attention in your world?

The Missing Link

One of the teams I’ve been working with has a great feedback culture. They ask for it and give it. They clearly valued feedback and made it part of how they work together. They also give lots of positive feedback, and often pause to self-reflect - sometimes giving themselves feedback about something they could improve.

And yet all of them said the same thing. The feedback they received was hard to use.

Actionable detail is the missing link. Feedback is more valuable if it is actionable. The more specific the better.

“You did a great job today” is feedback, but not useful. “You did a great job today. The specialist information you brought to the meeting, and the way you broke it down for non specialists really helped our colleagues understand what was needed. You left them with a clear path for action too. Thank you and keep it up.” is much more useful.

“I need you to step up” is feedback that’s not useful. “When we met on site today, you hung in the background and didn’t raise any of the issues you have previously highlighted. Could you take a more active role in leading the project. Next time could you bring the issues up for discussion and guide the resolution. I can offer support if you need a hand to prep.”

If you’d like a tool for giving more useful feedback, let me know and I’ll send it through.

Socks and Psychological Safety

One of the most embarrassing moments I’ve had as an adult happened a number of years ago when I bought some new socks (that wasn’t the embarrassing bit). I left them sitting on our kitchen bench for many days. One day, I was short of socks, so I went to the bench to find them. They weren’t there. I assumed my dear wife had cleared them up and put them somewhere. I asked her where they were and she said she had no idea. Then it got embarrassing - I got cranky and started asking her how the hell she could forget where she had put them when she had clearly moved them. It wasn’t my finest hour, and at the time I found it really hard to let it go. Some time later it got even more embarrassing when I found the socks and discovered that it was me who had moved them, and me who had forgotten where. It took a while to repair our relationship after I had acted so poorly.

I was thinking of this incident recently when working with a team who have some fractures in their team culture right now because people aren’t behaving at their best. Like me back then, they have been treating each other in less than ideal ways. It’s pretty human to want to avoid admitting and taking responsibility when we haven’t behaved at our best. It’s also pretty human to want to fire back, rather than extend grace and forgiveness when people treat you poorly (even more so if there’s zero justification for it). It can take a team quickly in a downward spiral where defensiveness, blame, and sniping become the new norm. It gets in the way of both productive effectiveness and team cohesiveness.

One simple principle is “Play the problem, not the person.”

Inspiring Company

I met Amy a couple of weeks ago. She’s 10 years old and already blazing a trail. Amy is in the process of learning to fly. There’s been a bunch of hurdles in her way with people giving her all kinds of reasons why it's not possible. She’s also meeting plenty of people who are inspired by her clarity and working with her to make it possible. When I asked why she wants to fly, it's to be an aeromedical pilot, preferably with RFDS. She’s also aiming to get into one of WA’s aviation specific schools where her goal is to be the highest performing student in that sector and see the school become the highest performing aviation school.

Check out some of her work to shed light on women in aviation at https://girlscanflyanything.com/

As a by-product of what Amy is doing, she’s being invited to speak at all sorts of events around the country.

Regardless of age, people with clear visions like Amy often run into walls. People actively blocking, telling them why not, and how it won't end well. Some go so far as to stomp on the vision, running the person down in the process. Vision like this is less common than it could be because there’s plenty of spectators with fire extinguishers in hand just waiting to put it out. I reckon we should hold the door open instead, or at least get out of the way and let the person work - and then watch this space, because something amazing will emerge. Go Amy!

Who could you encourage this week? What would that look like?

Chunking Up

When I was working in the disability service sector, I was asked to get involved with a family whose services were not going well. More particularly, the mother of a young adult we were supporting did not think they were going well. She had made a number of complaints. I was told “they are a problem family” and warned that I would not be likely to get a reasonable response from mum. I was appreciative of the warning, but I reckon it wasn’t particularly helpful, as it predisposed me to an adversarial conversation. A few people before me had been in vigorous arguments with her about the service and not reached any suitable solutions. Mostly the interactions led to more complaints.

When I first met mum she was angry about a lot of things. She was entirely justified about a number of them. The volume of things she was unhappy about was big and some of the things were not solvable, so I chunked up. Chunking up is moving away from detail toward principle. If you go far enough, you eventually find territory where instead of arguing 2 sides, you both agree. For that mum and me it was that we both cared about high quality of life for her son.

Chunking up to a point of agreement allows two (or more) people to get away from adversarial positions and start on the same side. If you can find a bigger principle that is true for both and connect about that, then it’s easier to work back down into the details. Look at the details through the principle. “Does (detail) contribute or erode higher quality of life?” is a more useful conversation than arguing head to head over details. It becomes easier to see what is important to both parties, what should be fought for, and what should be compromised.

It took a number of sessions, immediate actions on some stuff that wasn’t great, more proactive changes and compromises for both of us, before everyone was satisfied with the service.

Where could you chunk up for a more effective conversation?

Feedback

How’s feedback working in your team?

When I ask teams about improving how well they work together, feedback almost always shows up in the conversation. Most teams tell me there is not enough feedback, or that it’s low quality. Ideally feedback is clear and specific enough that you can do something useful with it. In effective teams (ones where there are competent people and not much in the way of toxic behaviour), getting better at feedback is a great way to level up. But while a lot of us would like more (or better) feedback, hardly anyone gets excited about giving it. We shy away from it, concerned about negative reactions or hurting people’s feelings.

One of the best ways I know to change that dynamic is to start giving people clear and useful feedback about the great work they are doing as well as the stuff that needs improving. You’ll build a culture where feedback feels safe, and people feel valued whatever the nature of feedback you are giving.

Teams that nail this have a ratio of about 5X more positive feedback than corrective feedback.

What do you reckon the ratio is in your team?

Know Your Place

One of our Perth footy teams has been copping a heap of flack lately. They have had a woeful season, plagued with injury and losses. As always, there’s a bunch of armchair coaches with plenty of views about what could or should be done to fix it.

One player has been copping more criticism than usual. It’s been based on how much contact he has with the ball (Nowhere near enough apparently). In a radio interview another player was discussing the issue. His view is the player is doing exactly what his job is on the team, and doing it well. Apparently the position has wildly variable ball stats because it’s oriented slightly behind the play to create opportunities and turnovers. Depending how the game unfolds this means either lots of contact, or none. He could easily rush into the play and increase his stats, but hanging back is precisely what he’s meant to do.

There are several lessons from this interview that relate to Psychological Safety and high performance in any team:

• Clarity and willingness . The roles are clearly articulated and understood. People are willing to play their role for the team, even when there’s external pressure to do something different.

• Support roles are crucial. There are roles that are specifically about support. The people in these roles are unlikely to be the central figure or superstar (many times they don’t want to be either). Their support is part of the recipe for success. The highly visible roles in any team are surrounded by people who make it possible for them to do their best work.

• Support for support roles is crucial too. In a high performing team their essential contribution is recognised and celebrated in ways that make sense to the people in support, and the culture of the team. If those in support roles are not properly recognised, they either rush into action to improve their ‘stats’ or they become increasingly disengaged as their hard work goes unnoticed (or worse, others claim credit for it).

Without role clarity, none of this will happen well. What can you do today to increase clarity for the people in your team dedicated to support? How does recognition happen for them? Could that be improved?

If you’d like some tips and strategies for improving Psychological Safety in your team, feel free to be in touch.

Disclaimer - My knowledge of AFL is possibly the lowest of any human in Australia (at some point I’ll tell you about my own woful start and very short footy career). While my interpretation of the nuances of the game is way below the average armchair coach, the observations derived still stand.

The Right Tool for the Job

On the weekend I did a bit of work on my old 4WD. It got me thinking. I spent about 60 minutes applying brute force and busting knuckles trying to get a ball joint out of its socket. I phoned a friend. I swore quite a bit. Nothing worked. Then I went round the corner and paid $50 for the right tool for the job. In less than 10 minutes I had done 2 joints. It was easy and even pleasurable.

Sometimes we have to make do with not having the ideal tool to hand. More often than not it's false economy. One of the effective things leaders can do to build psychological safety and create momentum in the workplace is to set people up with the right gear for success.

Are there any areas where you or your team don't currently have the right tool?

P.S. This isn't a licence to demand the best and latest of everything. I could have bought a $800 tool that would have done the same job. If I was using it daily that would be money well spent. For the one off job, it would have been overkill.

Black Belt Mastery

I was learning from a black belt martial artist. The way she moved seemed like magic. One sequence flowed smoothly into another, and she was able to find advantage over much bigger and stronger opponents. She taught me about how she was using leverage in different situations. It sped up my journey because I was focussed on an important and effective principle. But there was still no magic. Using her insight speeds me on the path, but there are still years of dedicated practice to gain the same precise and fluid movement.

How can you speed someone's journey today?

A picture of Self-Reliance

I work with many organisations who provide support to people with disabilities and the elderly. At face value, their clients are not very self-reliant. The truth of it is we are all reliant on others, all the time, regardless of how independent we think we are. As leaders, recognising and appreciating the people we rely on is a great way to build a sense of team, and to grow psychological safety in your workplace.

I love Steve Jobs’ take on this…

"I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being."

(An email Jobs sent to himself in 2010. Bought to my attention by James Clear in his weekly post)

Isolation - What Does it Mean at Work?

16 years ago, I did a 12 day solo survival walk. An isolated part of Western Australia was the backdrop. Sourcing food and water from the land. Sleeping on the ground in just my clothes. When I first started, being alone and unplugged was an absolute luxury, but as the days wore on the effort of doing 100% of everything and having no one to share the scene, decisions, insights etc became wearing. There were moments when I felt the impact of isolation at a deep and visceral level. Without an external reference point, my mind explored all manner of answers to the question “Who am I?”. Some of it was useful and enjoyable. Some of it had a darker edge.

Since then there’s been a regular stream of survival shows that leave people alone. There’s a consistent pattern to the exits. Early on people with insufficient skill or experience quickly pull out and retreat to home. Of the people left, many have the skills to survive a very long time, if not indefinitely. Eventually, they all quit because they crave the company of others. Assuming no medical reasons for withdrawal, it's the isolation that gets people. We are meant to be with other people.

It’s no surprise to me that isolated work (including work from home) is listed as one of the potential risks in workplace psychosocial hazards. The baseline is to consider how we facilitate connection and inclusion in inherently isolated working settings. But I reckon the gold standard is to become really aware of how we potentially isolate people in any setting.

Who has access to resources and opportunities?

Are we Cliquey?

Are people snubbed or shunned for behaviour, appearance, professional background, belief, or any other factor?

How are social connections working? Everything from casual chats over coffee to formal events.

While we don’t have to include everyone in everything all of the time (That would get really cumbersome), we should be having regular conversations about what connection looks like in our workplace. How is it at yours?

The Edges of Clarity

“We meet and agree on the direction of the project. But then I find work is being done that is counter to the strategic direction we have agreed.” (A CEO)

“One of the decision makers is unavailable to meet for extended periods. Meanwhile we have to decide and take action. Then he shows up, doesn’t like the decisions and ‘throws grenades’.” (Company Director)

“My manager meets with me weekly and keeps getting involved in the nitty gritty of my projects. I’m a senior practitioner with years of experience managing projects like this. When she gets involved in this way, I feel like my skills aren’t valued and it slows everything down.” (Senior Technical Project Manager)

“Mate, we just sit on the sidelines until ‘Bullshit Castle’ tells us what to do. If we start anything, they always come and change it anyway, so what's the point? Might as well chill til they make up their mind.” (Frontline Supervisor)

Have you ever heard or said things like these? They are all real examples from coaching sessions over the years. All stem from a lack of clarity. Lack of clarity burns time, energy and resources. Do-overs, stress, frustration, lack of momentum, fatigue, cynicism are byproducts.

The challenge for clarity is that your expectations and assumptions are probably different to mine. Unless we spend some time understanding the gaps and creating alignment, we are destined to carry unnecessary load. It’s no wonder that “Lack of Clarity” is listed as a psychosocial hazard in the updated Work Health and Safety Legislation in Australia.

Time spent increasing clarity is never wasted time. It’s a case of slowing down to speed up. Where could you add clarity today?

Smiling: The Simplest Super Power

We were heading into an awkward moment, neither sure what to do next. I was being served by an older Malay woman in a store in Kuala Lumpur. Her limited English was way better than my limited Bahasa, so it was the language we were using. I asked a question, and despite our best efforts together, I couldn’t make it clear, and she couldn’t understand. We were both getting a little frustrated, not with each other, but with our mutual misunderstanding. I smiled. She smiled back. We laughed. It was a moment of human connection. Frustration dissipated. We tried again with more success.

According to some researchers, trust in a workplace has 2 components - Warmth and Competence. Warmth = approachability and safety. Competence = We’ll be able to get the job done. We humans judge warmth in milliseconds. Competence takes longer to establish. But guess what… If we are already seen as warm, we are more likely to be seen as competent too. A genuine smile is one of the fastest ways we have of conveying warmth. Smiling more is a simple super power to build trust and open the door for Psychological Safety.

It’s easy to forget when under pressure, in a hurry or dealing with contentious topics. And it’s also all the more important. Experiment with smiling more, I’d love to hear your results.

The Busy Dillema

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I was working with a leader (let’s call her Beth) last week who echoed a familiar theme. Busy! Not just with ‘busy work’. Beth faces a continual assault of important things joining her action list. Much of it is ‘Mission Critical’ - left for too long it becomes both important and urgent. Like many, she feels the timeframe for action is getting compressed. The result? Close range focus and compelling reactivity. Both feed the sense of urgent transactional pressure. So how the hell do you add clarity in the midst of that!

One of the simplest levers is to look for recurring patterns and see if you can inject clarity early. Beth works in human services and has an important customer whose service sometimes reaches a crisis point where their family gets involved. At a minimum, this requires some careful communication. At worst it results in a formal complaint and mandated response/action. The urgent (and important) requirement to respond adds pressure to Beth, her team and the person receiving the service.

When we unpacked it in detail, most of the issues arise because the family doesn't have enough information about what is happening. The family, Beth and her team spend hours (sometimes days) resolving the situation. When Beth contacts the family regularly to update them on the service, the larger concerns are dealt with while they are still manageable. It adds clarity for everyone. Adding a regular call or visit to update the family saves time and adds value for everyone involved.

The challenge for Beth is she is genuinely busy. The service is mostly going well. Making those regular calls will be in competition with many other urgent tasks. AND proactive action like this always creates clarity, capacity and alleviates pressure.

What are the recurring pressure points for you? What action could you take to add clarity and reduce the pressure?

Clear as Mud

Image by Hans from Pixabay

One of the greatest barriers to effective work is getting clear about what we want, need or expect for a job well done. Here are some examples of lack of clarity getting in the way of good work. They are all live examples from my own interactions with staff, or from leaders I coach.

• A designer sends me some sample ideas based on an initial brief. It’s not even close to what I was expecting. I’m baffled, because I’m sure I have been really clear about what I consider some of the fundamental ‘must haves’ in the design. When I go back to my brief I find several areas that I thought were crystal clear, but on reflection are very ambiguous. I have not set the designer up for success. I could have done a much clearer job of the brief. The designer could have asked for more clarification.

• A manager gets very frustrated when a high priority piece of work has received no attention for several weeks. They had given an urgent task to the person responsible. The urgent task was interpreted as a ‘drop everything else’ priority. He had shifted all his effort and attention to the new task. It left the manager questioning his capability and him feeling ambushed and unsupported.

• A team gets delegated work from their team leader. They take no action. Why? Because the team leader has a pattern of taking over part way through a delegated task and ‘re-doing’ it because it’s not ‘up to standard’. Neither the leader or the team can articulate what the ‘standard’ is. The team has decided to wait until the team leader initiates the direction, because it feels like a waste of time to do otherwise.

• A director gives a senior leader responsibility for coordinating the scheduling of staff for significant remote area projects that the team is delivering. The leader starts organising a detailed roster to ensure expertise, breaks, and logistics are all taken into account for each trip. She’s told she’s overstepping the mark. The directors wanted to be able to assemble their own project teams. The senior leader was completely confused about what was expected. Turns out they wanted someone tracking workloads and scheduling issues, to advise on team makeup, rather than someone to actually assemble the team. Both had a really different picture of what ‘coordination’ meant.

All these examples burnt time, energy and resources. They created frustration and more work to arrive at good outcomes. All of them involved capable, competent and enthusiastic people. Lack of clarity was a significant factor in all of them.

Do you have similar experiences where you work? What’s the impact?

Lack of role clarity is listed as a potential psychosocial hazard. Lack of clarity adds to workload and can certainly contribute to stress. Clarity also contributes to a sense of certainty and acts as a launch pad for high performance. Next time we’ll talk about what we can do to add clarity.

How quickly will we evolve?

The recent formalising of Psychosocial Hazards in Australian Work Health and Safety legislation is a fantastic evolution. We have been aware of the risks to people’s well being (Both mental and physical) from Psychosocial Hazards for a long time, and it’s taken a while for it to be seen as a hazard that needs to be actively managed.

Early in the industrial age accidents and fatalities were an accepted and expected outcome in work environments. The attitude was largely “You know the risks, so the responsibility is on you. By the way, it might not end well”. Over time safety and risk became the subject of increased awareness and responsibility for employers, transitioning through cultures dominated by compliance/policy/procedure and ultimately growing to deep safety cultures. The exemplars of this are zero blame cultures where safety is prioritised over production. Everyone is empowered to call a halt if something seems unsafe, and there are continual conversations about how it can be made more safe.

We are just emerging from the equivalent of “you know the risks” in PsychoSocial Hazards. You can track it in laguage like:

• Stress is part of the job, suck it up

• Go to the hardware and buy a bucket of harden up

• Your emotions have no place at work

• Everyone is busy, deal with it

• Yes he’s a bully, but he’s also a great performer we’ll all just have to put up with it

These are fading, but they haven’t gone away. We now have a regulatory environment. How quickly can we evolve to cultures of deep responsibility where we are encouraged to call out unsafe practice, hold each other to account, educate rather than blame? We have a road map in the physical WHS space that has been a roughly 200 year evolution. Let's not take that long on psychosocial hazards. The clock has been ticking for a while.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be exploring some of the hazards named in the excellent Worksafe “CODE OF PRACTICE - Psychosocial hazards in the workplace” and especially how these contribute to a high performance culture as well as one free from harm. Just like physical safety, it makes sense regardless of what metric you measure.

Quick Way to Reduce Stress

Breathing has long been known to reduce stress. In my first book “Thrive and Adapt” I recommend rhythmic breathing as a quick way to get back to clarity, presence and focus in moments of pressure. At the time I wrote it, that was the most evidence based tactic I could find. Turns out there’s an even more effective approach called the Physiological Sigh.

How? Take a long, deep inhale through the nose. Follow immediately with a second short sharp inhale through the nose. Then ‘sigh’ a very long exhale through the mouth.

There’s lots of evidence based research suggesting this is the fastest way to de-stress in a moment of pressure. It also has a number of great benefits for respiratory system health.

The Guerrilla Mindfulness tactic in “Thrive and Adapt” has 3 steps:

1. Take 3 long slow rhythmic breaths in and out. Focus on rhythm.

2. Say how you feel.

3. State your intention for what you are doing, or are about to do.

Practice in transitions. Use it anywhere. In light of this more current information, I suggest amending step 1 to a Physiological Sigh.

I’d love to know how you find it in practice.

Image by yeison bueno from Pixabay

P.S. If you’d like a free chapter of Thrive and Adapt about Guerrilla Mindfulness, send me a message and I’ll email it to you.

P.S.S. If you’d like to take a deep dive into actionable research about breathing, this 2.5hr episode of the Huberman Lab goes into great detail about the Physiological Sigh and other breathing tactics.

Fringe Magic and Psychological Safety for Leaders

Last week I took a risk. It worked out beautifully. I teamed up with Stuart Lightbody, a globe-trotting, award-winning magician who was in Perth for Fringe Festival. We ran a leadership workshop together. I learned 3 clear lessons from Stuart that any leader can apply. Each has a direct impact on Psychological Safety.

• Play Host - Well before the show starts, Stuart focusses his energy on the audience. His shows are designed to create wonder. His focus is on what people will experience, rather the technical elements needed to make it happen. As people arrive, he greets them with infectious enthusiasm. Acting as host takes us out of our own head and gets us thinking about what others need for success. We could all do more of that in our work.

• Embody It - “If I want people to be curious or amazed, it helps if I am too”, Stuart said. Don’t try to impose emotion, disposition or thoughts on others. They are their own person and forcing them to show up a particular way almost always leads to showing up less authentically. Invite them into the ideal state for the work you are doing. Model it, but don't force it. I worked with a leader once who was scathing of anyone pointing out potential barriers or challenges to a project. She was forcing an artificial positivity (interestingly her own demeanour at these times was far from positive). People stopped raising challenges and several projects got sideswiped by issues that people could foresee but didn’t feel safe to speak about. The same leader could have framed the challenges through a lens of positive regard for her staff. If she assumed that they were challenging in order to drive success, and invited them into a positively framed exploration of the challenges, the results would have been much closer to what she and her team desired.

• Audience-Centred - No doubt there are many details Stuart needs to take care of for his shows to work, but these are invisible to the audience. When he designs and hosts his shows, he’s immersed in what it will be like from their point of view. He embodied the same positive enthusiasm when we met to design our workshop. It immediately created an open and curious space for us to work in. Especially when we are a subject matter expert, it’s easy to feel like people need to know everything. Usually that is confusing and overwhelming. I remind myself of this regularly as I counter my desire to give people a ‘complete’ workshop rather than a good one. Every time I stray over the line the feedback is that the workshop was confusing, or there wasn’t enough time. Give people enough to achieve what they need but not more. Design for value from their perspective rather than yours.

These 3 - Play Host, Embody It, and Audience Centred if done consistently and well, create a safe and open environment. It will be focussed on the right work, the right people, the right atmosphere and the right result. That makes commercial sense. It might even be magic.