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]]>As I work, my attention often meets a photo of my Father-in-Law, taken more than 30 years ago. Irv Weinberg is sitting behind the only desk he ever knew. Irv was a civil engineer who spent his entire career working for the Department of Highways (now The Ministry of Transportation). I love this photo because it captures a moment in history that I’ll never know. Long gone are the days of dedicating one’s entire professional life to one organization.
The world has changed so monumentally since this smiling picture of my Father-in-Law was taken. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around how much change we experience. We are living in such uncertain times; for many it feels like the sands are constantly shifting beneath their feet. Since the year 2000, 52% of all Fortune 500 companies have disappeared. Eighteen, billion-dollar companies including Twitter, DropBox, FitBit and Spotify didn’t exist ten years ago. According to the Deloitte 2017 Global Human Capital Trends Report, you are looking at up to 13 different jobs within your 60-year career span. So many of us will never return full time to an office. Many others will float from hoteling station to hoteling station as companies cut back of offices, even for those who are no longer working remote.
Globalization, automation and technology are reshaping all jobs in all industries, but with the most significant impact in production, food services and transportation. These seismic forces forge new career paths ranging from artificial intelligence engineer, drone mechanic, apps designer, 3-D printing operator, cybersecurity analyst, social media manager, data protection officer and if you live in Canada, who would have imagined even just a few years ago, sitting down at a family dinner to announce, “Mom and Dad I’m going to be the new marketing manager for a leading cannabis company!”.
The sum total amount of the world’s knowledge, known as the Knowledge Doubling Curve, has been doubling every year since 2000. Today our world knowledge is doubling daily.
A consequence of this data tsunami is the precipitous drop in in the time it takes for a learned skill to become irrelevant. Depending on your industry and profession, your work skills will be out of date inless than ten years. If you’re a software engineer, your current technical skills are only marketable for two-four years.
According to a survey conducted by The Society for Human Resource Management earlier this year, the lack of technical and soft (people) skills are two of the most frequently reported reasons organizations aren’t able to find suitable job candidates. The survey revealed that the most common competency gaps were: Communication skills, the ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity, problem-solving, critical thinking, innovation and creativity.
Many of my clients are concerned about their ability to remain competitive in the ever-evolving job market. I recently had a senior-level client who was so concerned that he couldn’t remain competitive in his field that he was convinced he’d become irrelevant in the time it took him to eat breakfast. While I appreciate that these fears are valid in these turbulent and complex times, I don’t agree that the sky is falling. Professionals often struggle in this new world of work because their brain is continuously seeking predictability, which is opposed to our reality. As NYU Professor, Arun Sundararajan describes, “There’s far less structure, there’s far less predictability” when it comes to our careers”.
You can reconcile this conundrum between your need for predictability in an uncertain world by owning your career.
Strengths are inherent positive traits that shape how we think and feel and act. Strengths come easy to us and are self-reinforcing, making them highly enjoyable and engaging. According to psychologist and author Shaun Achor, “A positive and engaged brain is the greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy”.
Gallup, who has long been publishing data on strengths reports that employees who use strengths regularly are six times more likely to be engaged at work. Those who commit to using their strengths experience higher workplace productivity and performance and experience greater well-being. Moreover, strengths-use will protect you against the negative impact of worry, stress and even anger.
Identifying your inherent strengths is the first step to greater well-being at work. My go-to strengths assessment is the VIA. It’s scientifically reliable and validated and a complimentary, on-line, self-assessment. In twenty minutes, you’ll have greater clarity into how to leverage what makes you tick. Once you know what your inherent strengths are, you are poised to take full advantage of this valuable new information. Look for novel ways to engage your strengths daily to get the most out of this strategy. Professors Tayyab Rashid and Afroze Anjum, from the University of Toronto, describe 340 ways you can make the most of your unique character strengths. Choose even just a couple from this list and watch your engagement, productivity and well-being soar.
It’s all too easy to focus on your faults, what isn’t going well at work or where you aren’t making headway. Shifting your focus to what is working can have impressive positive results. Research has shown that gratitude is the quickest way to create a positive brain state. Employees who exercise gratitude are more highly motivated to achieve their goals, experience greater workplace satisfaction and have better workplace relationships than their non-gratitude exercising colleagues, have fewer health complaints, lower levels of stress and take fewer sick days.
Gratitude is a simple habit to develop. One of the easiest and best researched gratitude tools comes from the Father of Positive Psychology, Dr. Martin Seligman. He recommends at the end of each day for a week writing down three things that went well that day and reflecting on the role you played in making those good things happen.This is a powerful tool that can help you see resources and gifts that are all around you. Some of my clients start meetings with a minute or two of gratitude, with strikingly positive results. Teams that were previously negative and stuck quickly became supportive and collaborative through this quick and easy gratitude practice.
Once you’ve identified your strengths and you are humming along with gratitude, you’re ready to weave those attributes into your professional narrative in the form of what I call “back-pocket stories.” These are the stories that you can share at company events, networking functions, or at job interviews, as ways of meaningfully drawing others into conversations while highlighting your unique abilities.
I once had a coaching client, who I’ll call Keith, who told me that when he was in his twenties, he had all of his personal possessions (including his wallet and passport) stolen while he was traveling solo in eastern Europe. To make matters worse, he had a plane to catch in less than 48-hours; a flight that was going to take him around the world. He shared with great pride that through his resourcefulness and calm demeanor he managed to make all the arrangements he needed to get his passport in time to make his flight. Keith beamed when he shared this story, admitting it was one of his greatest achievements.
Craft two or three of these back-pocket storiesthat you can tell in just a few minutes. Your accounts need to be true, but they don’t need to be heroic.
Executive coaching is one of the most effective ways to take charge of your career. Coaching is a rare opportunity to take time from your packed schedule to reflect, recalibrate and plan in a confidential and safe environment. A coach can help you make the most of your career by helping you develop your people skills, create a career plan, clear away potential challenges and help you achieve your goals all in service of you creating greater meaning, satisfaction and impact in your work.
One can only imagine what the world of work will look like in the next 10 years. Will we still commute to work in offices in a nine-to-five world? How will our work be integrated into an AI world? Will your picture be sitting on someone else’s desk as a source of inspiration? Own your career now and reap the benefits of work and a life well-lived, no matter what the future brings.
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]]>The post How to Create an Innovative Work Culture. appeared first on Natalie Currie Enterprises.
]]>Irrespective of industry, organizational rank, or personal temperament, fear of failure is the one conversation that professionals, including those in the C-Suite, resist the most, even behind the closed doors of a coaching conversation.
One of my group coaching clients said the mere act of talking about fear at work would make her look weak, so she keeps quiet. Her group nodded in agreement. We spent the next hour openly talking about failure and the fear of it.
Without these honest conversations, learning doesn’t happen and organizations are destined to repeat past mistakes, lose competitive ground and risk extinction.
We don this work mask to appear confident and in control. However, similar to a child’s Halloween mask, our work mask reduces our peripheral vision, preventing us from seeing resources and opportunities in our environment that are the very keys to solving our big thorny problems.
We spend an inordinate amount of time, energy and cognitive bandwidth on maintaining our work mask, at a time when we need to be investing energy on learning, collaborating and innovating. Over time, we come to falsely identify with this mask, and we enter into a world where egos rule and self-protection is the object of the game. The casualty is our healthy self-esteem and a genuine sense of belonging.
We believe the myth that our work mask protects us from harm. Humans are inherently risk-averse, a requirement for survival.
Dr. Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics) and author of the seminal book, Thinking, Fast and Slow describes conducted an experiment that highlights how risk-averse we are. Study participants were asked if they would accept a bet based on the flip of a coin. If the coin landed heads up the participant would win $200.00, but if the coin landed tails, the participant would lose $100.00. In other words, it’s better not to lose $100 than to gain $200. In this experiment, the potential gain must be at least twice as much as the potential loss. According to Kahneman “Losses loom larger than gains.”
This fear of losing manifests as a risk-averse cultural within many organizations. Work teams and companies experience undue conflict borne out of the inherent tension between playing it safe and risk-taking.
In spite of our risk-aversion, companies must innovate if they are going to remain relevant in our turbulent, uncertain and complex world. The Boston Consulting Group recently reported that thirty-one % of professionals identified a risk-averse culture as a key obstacle to innovation.
According to Baba Shiv, professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School:
“Experimentation and failure are essential to innovation because, by its nature, innovation is an unknown that can only be discovered through trial and error. Failure is the mother of innovation”.
The entrepreneurial rally cry of “fail fast and fail often” understandably doesn’t sit well with the quarterly reporting-focused corporate mindset. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from a healthier relationship with failure.
Comparison, insecurity and vulnerability (which we believe could be taken advantage of) are why we don’t talk about our failures. Dr. Brene Brown, qualitative researcher and author, delves deeply into this topic in her book Rising Strong: The Reckoning, The Rumble and The Revolution. Brown writes:
“We gold-plate failure…skipping over it or sugar-coating the process and the pain involved in failing. Comparative suffering is a function of fear and scarcity. Falling down, screwing up, and facing hurt often lead to bouts of second-guessing our judgment, our self-trust, and even our worthiness”.
Shame is the final stop on this emotional cascade, which according to Brown is the “most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough”.
With clients, I overtly signal that it is appropriate and safe to take on this heady subject. With my choice of words, tone of voice, and body language, I model that this conversation is welcomed and healthy. I say, “bring it on!”
The sense of relief that washes over my clients’ faces is a telltale sign that they have been holding onto this burden for far too long. When clients talk about what keeps them up at night they harness the power to transform their relationship with fear for the better. As professionals appreciate the valuable data behind their fear, they learn lessons about what drives them to succeed and what gets in their way. More importantly, they begin to identify a source of rich information about how they see the world, which is one of the first steps to making bigger moves in work and life.
As a postdoctoral student at Caltech, psychologist Dr. Melanie Stefan wrote an article called “A CV of Failures” in one of the most prestigious scientific journals, Nature. The International Journal of Science. Publishing in this journal is a big feather in any scientist’s cap.
Stefan poignantly wrote:
“Societal pressures to manage our professional image often gets in the way of us being whole, fallible human beings. MyCV does not reflect the bulk of my academic efforts. It does not mention the exams I failed, my unsuccessful PhD or fellowship applications, or the papers never accepted for publication. At conferences, I talk about the one project that worked, not about the many that failed. As scientists, we construct a narrative of success that renders our setbacks invisible both to ourselves and to others. Often, other scientists’ careers seem to be a constant, streamlined series of triumphs. Therefore, whenever we experience an individual failure, we feel alone and dejected”.
Imagine what organizations would learn and how their teams would grow if leaders, particularly senior leaders, shared their biggest career mistakes?
In his seminal book, Good To Great, Jim Collins writes about his teams speaking candidly as they worked together to discover the framework described in the book. He writes, “… we would debate, disagree, pound on tables, raise our voices, pause and reflect and debate some more…”.Had Collins believed he was right all the time, the framework that has been studied by countless organizations and business schools likely would never have emerged.
It’s incumbent upon twenty-first-century leaders to admit they don’t have all the answers. Hiring and cultivating a diverse team that sees the world differently than you is essential to developing the best ideas. Share an idea that might run counter to your team’s current line of thinking. Encourage your colleagues and direct reports to speak out if they have an idea that they might typically keep to themselves. A specific question you might consider according to researcher and author, Dr. Amy Edmonson is “Where am I wrong?”. Put another way, Dr. Jennifer Garvey-Berger, author and executive coach encourages leaders to ask their teams “What might I be missing here?”
Adopting a mindset of humility, brimming with curiosity is where 21-century leaders can stand-out.
Ashley Good, Founder and CEO of Fail Forward, helps organizations get the maximal benefit from failure. Good uses her expertise as an engineer to help teams and organizations design healthy failure processes.
According to Good:
“At Fail Forward, we provide new perspectives on failure alongside the tools and skills to help us deal with missteps more productively – so that when we fail, we Fail Intelligently”. The mere act of documenting failure promotes the risk-taking, creativity and continuous learning required for innovation.”
When I interviewed Good she told me that there is no truth to the labels of “success” or “failure”; because every situation contains elements of both. When we can acknowledge that reality, we appreciate both where we have succeeded and learn from what didn’t go so well”.
Good told me that fear has value as it makes us test our ideas. “What isn’t healthy is when fear paralyzes us. We need to acknowledge real risks and prepare for those risks appropriately. For example, imagine you sent an e-mail that you later regretted, or you bombed at an important presentation. These types of experiences help determine how they might impact your job, your career and the relationships that you hold dear”.
Replacing negative emotions with objective acceptance is the path through, Good told me. “It’s about separating yourself from the failure and acknowledging the role that you played in the situation. It means accepting responsibility”.
I still crisply recall a presentation I gave in Banff, Alberta twenty years ago. I fell significantly short of my expectations and I had a hard time shaking it off. Tentatively, I approached one of my mentors, who had attended the presentation and suggested that I work on public speaking skills. While painful to hear at the time, I sincerely took this advice to heart. Keynotes and workshops are now an essential and rewarding part of my work.
Good offers a simple, though not necessarily easy first step in developing resilience through failure. When facing a failure, she recommends pausing and breathing, to avoid a knee-jerk defensive reaction. The goal isn’t to deny or ignore the emotions that erupt after what feels like a failure; it’s ok to feel these emotions.
As a second step, Good recommends setting your ego aside and developing a failure fascination mindset. Good reminds us that this new curiosity helps us learn and grow from our life experiences.
Ben Zander, Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, also highlights the need for mistake-fascination. Sitting on stage with Zander is a 15-year old Cellist who makes a mistake while playing a complicated piece of music. Zander invites the Cellist and the audience to throw their arms up into the arm and exclaim “How fascinating”, when we make a mistake to negate our typical ruminative reaction.
Both Good and Zander understand that being fascinated with our foibles helps open us up to possibilities so we can learn and become masterful.
Failure can be a powerful teacher or a harsh critic. Everyone gets to choose. Will you grow or will you wither? The opportunity to leverage your mistakes today is the key to your future success.
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]]>The post How to Disagree Well appeared first on Natalie Currie Enterprises.
]]>Along the path to technological advancement and the pursuit of efficiency, we’ve lost the ability to listen deeply and our willingness to be vulnerable. In our increasingly distracted and polarized world, it’s easier to dismiss, reject, or avoid thorny conversations entirely.
Flight manifests itself as sweeping differences of opinion under the proverbial carpet. Beneath the carpet issues incubate like bacteria in a petri dish, slowly multiplying at first until they invariably morph into personality conflicts and power plays. With enough time, problems become too immense and too toxic to tackle. More importantly, the original problem gets lost in this toxic stew, placing significantly greater stress on the system to solve the primary issue now in the face of strained relationships.
Flight may be as innocuous as glancing down at your phone to text in the middle of a conversation. Flight can also take the form of presenteeism; employees who are physically present but they have mentally checked out, often as a self-protective mechanism.
On the other hand, fight behaviours runs the gamut from criticism and sarcasm to bullying and it exists in all organizations, albeit more covert in some cultures than others. Flight frequently rears its ugly head as passive-aggressive behaviour. Have you ever witnessed a colleague being shut down or ignored outright. How often have you seen conversations transform into hallway gossip? These are all examples of fight behaviour.
Both flight and fight are harmful if not promptly identified and positively dealt with. If left unchecked, these two polarized stances lead to the same predictable results: employee disengagement, poor working relationships, lower productivity, higher employee turnover, less innovation and a soured corporate culture.
Fight and flight are inevitable responses to stressors in the environment. Here are simple skills and techniques that can help you overcome these human tendencies and learn how to disagree well.
Too often, our discussion goal is to change the other person’s mind. We rarely engage in a conversation anticipating that we need to shift our perspective. In the new world of work, leaders don’t have all the answers. It’s hubris and naive to believe that additional scrutiny won’t improve our ideas or expand our thinking in some way.
Imagine you are with a colleague conducting a venue site assessment for an upcoming off-site meeting. You are admiring the stunning view from the grand foyer. Light floods the room from the 35-foot cathedral ceilings. On the other hand, your colleague is roaming around the dark, windowless basement complete with builder-beige coloured paint and musty broadloom. Each of you would have a very different opinion of the venue. Each of you would be right.
Presume instead that you and your colleague are working off very different data and seek to understand what that full dataset is. Fleshing out the example above, you believe that your colleague is acting negatively as she/he describes the venue as uninspiring if not downright depressing. They, in turn, wonder about your judgment when you describe the event space as being perfect for team-building and celebration.
Why do you and your colleague have such different interpretations of what you believe is the same environment? How can you learn more about their worldview, e.g., take a trip down to the basement to understand their experience better? Invite your colleague up to the foyer to understand where you are coming from.
While this is a simplistic example, it describes what I regularly observe in the workplace.
Even with the same data, expect differences of opinions, though your job isn’t to steamroll over people in an attempt to get your way. First and foremost, you need to nurture your relationships by affirming them, not necessarily affirming their point of view. In Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts., author and researcher professor Brene Brown recommends inserting the phrase “that isn’t my experience” when you are faced with an opinion that opposes yours.
Your HR business partner approaches you about one of your Managers, Johan. She tells you that Johan is a weak communicator and that he needs to work on his presentation skills if he is going to be a candidate for the next round of promotions. You believe Johan is an exceptional communicator.
Rather than butting heads by making your HR business partner wrong, speak from your own experience, “I understand you feel like Johan isn’t a strong communicator, however that isn’t my experience. I’ve seen Johan deliver compelling presentations to the board on several of occasions. He has been well prepared, articulate and answered follow-up questions with confidence and gravitas. I’d appreciate hearing what your experience of Johan’s presentation skills has been?”
Your HR business partner responds by saying, “Well he certainly didn’t deliver when he presented to our team. He fumbled over numbers and got flustered when asked about some of his 2Q projections.” You remember that meeting differently. While Johan did stumble over a few numbers, he recovered with ease in the final few minutes of his presentation. Plus, you have seen Johan deliver under pressure in many other situations, which influences your opinion of him.
Now your conversation with your HR business partner has some space to breathe. You both have an opportunity to interrogate together. Most importantly, this open stance protects your relationship, which is vital to business success, your sense of job satisfaction and ultimately, your career.
Consensus is a deceptive and unhealthy goal. We need a greater willingness to explore a broader range of perspectives and be prepared to change our minds in the process. Innovation requires a healthy sense of humility.
In 1983, The Quaker Company headed up by President, William Smithburg, purchased the Gatoraid parent company for $220 million, which Quaker grew to $3 billion in 10 years. By 1994, Smithburg, yearning to buy another high growth product, identified Snapple as the likely candidate at the lofty purchase price of $1.8 billion. Market analysts reported this was a bad buy and every member of the Quaker executive board opposed the purchase. However, not a single board member spoke up to counter Smithburg’s unbridled enthusiasm and the acquisition went through.
The Snapple purchase was later described as one of the greatest business failures in history. By 2000 the fateful purchase nearly toppled the 100-year-old company. Snapple was later sold for a 1/6 of its purchase price and Smithburg, who had been President for 16-years resigned.
Leaders implicitly set the decision-making tone within their organizations. Unconscious biases, which include overconfidence and confirmation bias may be limiting your team’s ability to make the best choices. Confirmation bias is defined as attending only to the data in the environment that supports your beliefs and world view. Resist the urge to confirm what you already know; the future success of your organization is predicated on your teams’ ability to harness a more extensive set of ideas. If you are going to lead into a successful future, anticipate that many of the ideas from your teams and consultants who support your work will be counter to your thinking.
Brainwriting is a tool to safely surface diverse opinions in a group, while quelling the conflict that can arise. At meetings, provide each participant with a marker and a stack of index cards or larger sticky notes. Ask questions that invite divergent thinking such as, “If you were in my position what would you do with this project?”, “How would you solve this current problem we are facing” or “What opportunities do you see that we should be capitalizing on?” These questions sharpen people’s thinking, expand the range of ideas, options and interpretations available for further inquiry.
After asking a brainwriting question, give your team a few minutes to think about the question before writing their responses on an index card/sticky note. Complete this individual activity in silence. You might need to re-enforce these rules. Do not rush this process. The more time you give your team to reflect and write, the better. Get comfortable with the silence.
Once people have written down their idea, they pass their index card/sticky note to the person next to them. At this point, the person reads what is written on the card and builds off of that idea by writing down their additional thoughts. Complete a few rounds of this exercise; three or four rounds are ideal. Finally, have team members post their cards/notes on the wall. Review and discuss the ideas as a team, with an open mind and heart.
Be mindful of your reaction to the responses to these questions. Ask a trusted ally in the room about your tone of voice, your choice of words and your body language. Verify if your verbal and non-verbal communication are in sync. Were you open and curious and rewarding people for exploring new concepts or were you unconsciously shutting people down?
Routinely ask your colleagues and team the question, “Where am I wrong?” Above all, this question explicitly gives other permission to challenge your thinking. Through stress testing your ideas, you are also empowering your team to think more critically and creatively. Expecting to be wrong is also a healthy and necessary precursor to normalizing conflict.
Productive conflict, as Liane Davey in her newest book, The Good Fight describes it, is a wise and proactive way to address thorny conversations that arise in this new world of work. As Davey explains, historically we relied on “the right words to say”, as though it was a simple role-play exercise. Productive conflict is a natural part of the human condition. Moving through conflict requires a genuine connection, not just a script that we follow.
First of all, being comfortable with conflict signals to your team and your organization that you aren’t fleeing the situation, nor are you preparing to go into battle. In doing so, you will reward your team for staying in tough conversations with curiosity and respect. Your team will quickly realize that you can take a bit of the emotional heat because you trust them and you have confidence that as a group you will come out the other side, better for it. Additional benefits include: more fully flesh out ideas, more nuanced solutions, strengthened relationships, more fluid communication and fully tapped innovation.
As the world of work becomes progressively more demanding and exponentially more complex, leaders are going to have to step up to meet these thorny challenges. Disagreeing well is a vital step forward in creating a more enlightened workplace.
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]]>The post How the Best Leaders Start Their Day appeared first on Natalie Currie Enterprises.
]]>She is a talented marketer and a trusted colleague who doesn’t shy away from demanding projects. Coupled with her ability to develop her team and her eagerness to learn, it’s no wonder that her senior leadership has identified her as a high potential.
Whit has just come back from a leadership program and she’s excited to put her learning into immediate practice. She walks through her office door eager to take the day on. Whit opens her e-mail, proud of her first quick win of the day (vowing that she won’t check e-mail between 7:30 at night and 8:00 in the morning). She recently read an article that checking e-mail less frequently reduces stress. While only having adopted a nightly technology fast in the past two months, she has already seen significant productivity gains and she feels calmer.
Four of those messages are marked urgent. Whit starts to lose focus when she reminds herself of her promise to stay out of the weeds. Knowing how easy it is to become hijacked by other peoples’ urgent issues, Whit takes a few deep breaths to regain her focus and calmly reviews her inbox. In two minutes, that Whit needs to deal with personally are flagged. Upon closer inspection she evaluates who else on her team would be better suited to address the other e-mail queries.
Whit realizes that three emails are better handled by Keitha, a marketing manager within her group. She forwards these messages to Keitha and encourages her to respond to them in the order she feels is best.
A year ago, she went through the company’s 360 feedback review, where her manager and three of her direct reports described that she was a little controlling as a leader. Whit has since learned that giving her team autonomy about how they do their work is far more important than doing the tasks the way she would have done them. She genuinely cares about her team and wants to empower them. In delegating, she is helping her team develop their own capacity, while freeing her up for work most suited to her strengths and capabilities that will move the business forward.
The team is nearly all assembled as she takes her seat at the table as the clock strikes nine. The brand manager asks if they should hold off starting the meeting until the last two team members arrive. Whit smiles and informs the group that meetings from now on, start and end on time.
At first, the group exchanges puzzled glances across the table. Whit recognizes this body language, pauses, and states that the organization has a culture of being late to meetings and as a result, meetings start late and often end late, perpetuating the cycle of tardiness, which reduces productivity.
Everyone nods in recognition that late arrivals aren’t just tolerated, but as Jim from Finance pipes up “We worship lateness”. After an open discussion, the attendees all agree that meetings will start and end on time.
Each team member shares something they are grateful for ranging from a new puppy who is finally house trained, to acknowledging a team member’s extra help in analyzing market research data, to celebrating a second anniversary with the company.
For some, at first this act of gratitude seemed a bit fluffy but Whit knew this activity had teeth. She recently read that positivity is a learned skill and that people are more engaged and innovative when they feel grateful. This is a three-minute investment that will pay dividends. Whit noticed a marked increase in collaboration since starting this gratitude practice. Now the team jumps at the chance to be the first to share their piece of gratitude.
Han, the meeting timer and tech facilitator, (the team rotates through all the meeting roles), displays the cloud software the group uses for their brainstorming work on the whiteboard.
Han asks the team to come up with three program upgrade recommendations on sticky notes, a method called brainwriting. This simple analog approach to brainstorming ensures that each member of the team has the same opportunity to participate, no matter how junior or introverted they may be. This method avoids group-think, the psychological phenomenon in which people strive for consensus within a group, often unwittingly agreeing with the most senior, or most vocal in the group.
The team quickly comes up with 43 ideas which are displayed on the screen at the front of the room so the team can review the suggestions together. Within 15 minutes the group has whittled the list down to seven items. Each team member is assigned to take one idea away to investigate further. They have three weeks to collect data, survey the market and come back to the team with their recommendation. The meeting goal (actively involve the entire team to come up with at least three-to-five new ideas for the brand launch) has been met and the meeting is adjourned a few minutes early.
Whit heads back to her office. Based on a recent conversation she had with her executive coach, Whit has blocked time off for reflection between meetings. This gives Whit the edge she needs to stay fresh and leverage the learning from every meeting.
In the reflective time she has at her deck, Whit reviews her accomplishments against the plan she created on the previous Friday.
1. Put learning from leadership development program into practice within 24-hours
2. Only check e-mail and texts between 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.
3. Stay focused on important issues that will move the business and my work forward
4. Actively delegate to the team
5. Start and end meetings on time
6. Include gratitude reflection as a standing meeting agenda item
7. Observe body language to develop empathy and influence
8. Actively include all team members in meetings to enhance engagement and innovation
9. Block off time between meetings for reflection
It’s only 11:00 a.m. and Whit has accomplished more than most do in a day.
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]]>The post What Do We Really Know About Employee Engagement? appeared first on Natalie Currie Enterprises.
]]>Natalie: In 2014 you published an article, “What do we really know about employee engagement? Can you share more about that research?”
Dr. Gruman: Sure. Every company today has an engagement survey. When I give talks on this topic, what I’m fond of saying is, despite the fact that they all have engagement surveys, nobody knows what engagement is. If you look at the items on these surveys, they measure things like, “Are you happy with your job? Do you like working here? Would you stay here if you had employment elsewhere?” Those don’t measure engagement. The very concept of engagement has to be something that’s different from concepts that we already have if the concept of engagement is to be valuable.
Asking people things like, “Are you happy here,” that measures their job satisfaction. We’ve had measures to assess job satisfaction for decades. We don’t need to ask them about job satisfaction to measure their engagement. Asking them if they feel affiliated with the organization, that measures organizational commitment. That’s not engagement, and we don’t want to include measures of commitment if we’re trying to measure engagement because we already know about commitment. It’s not adding any value to our understanding of organizational life if we’re confusing commitment with engagement. Also, what very common is we ask people, do they go the extra mile at work? That’s what’s called organizational citizenship behaviors or extra role behaviors. Again, that’s a separate concept.
Engagement was introduced in 1990 by (William) Kahn, in his dissertation research where he defined engagement as the extent to which people bring their full selves to their role of performance. If you’re bringing your full identity, your views, your ideas, your sense of self to your job. You’re investing yourself fully in your job that’s what engagement is. That’s something new and different. It’s not just old wine in a new bottle. It’s not just taking constructs we already have and repackaging them into this new thing that we’re now calling engagement, but it’s really nothing new, which is what most organizations are doing.
They’re not measuring anything new and different. They’re just giving a new name to things they’ve been measuring for decades, forever really. If they want to measure engagement, they have to ask questions around things like, “Do you invest your full self in your role? Does the work environment allow to bring your values and your identity, your personality, fully into your role?” That’s what organizations are not doing. In this paper that we wrote1, what do we really know about employee engagement? We discuss this at length, and we discuss solutions, how organizations can properly measure engagement and different levels at which engagement can exist, and the value of doing that.
Natalie: Is there a scale that can be used to get at the right questions?
Dr. Gruman: There are scales that exist that can get at the right questions. We’re also in the process of building another scale that measures psychological presence. This idea that you’re bringing your full self to your role, another term for that is psychological presence. We’re in the process of building a scale to measure that as well. It really is a new and different and valuable piece of the puzzle of what’s going to make organizations effective.
The example I like to give to put this in context is: Think of your relationship you have with your husband or your wife. Would you want your husband or wife to be satisfied with your relationship? They’re okay. If you ask them, “Are you satisfied?” Yeah, I’m satisfied. It’s not great, but I’m satisfied.” That’s not great. That’s not the kind of employee you want. That’s not the kind of relationship you want. If you ask, “Are you committed?” “Yeah, I’m committed. I fell out of love a few years ago, but I’m committed.” That’s not what you want either. If you ask people, “Are you engaged in your relationship?” “Yeah, I am. I think about this person all the time. I do things for the other person. I’m fully invested in the relationship.” That’s what we want with our employees. We want engaged employees.
Yes, there are tools to measure it. There are some controversies around the tools that exist. That’s part of the reason we’re in the process of building a new tool to measure psychological presence, to really be able to tap into whether employees are engaged or not.
Natalie: What an important tool to bring to the workplace. Before we wrap-up Jamie, are there a couple recommendations you would have to help employers improve engagement within their organizations?
Dr. Gruman: Yes. In the original research that Kahn2 did, he looked at the antecedence of engagement. There are three of them. They are psychological meaningfulness, psychological availability, and psychological safety. I’ll quickly touch on three. What they mean is: psychological meaningfulness refers to whether people feel like they’re getting an investment – a return on their investment of their self in the role. When they come to work, are they getting something out of it? Do they feel that the work is meaningful? Are they making a difference? Every leader in every organization, by virtue of the way they act and speak, the issues that they bring up, those they ignore, can help people feel that the work is more or less meaningful. There are ways to help people become engaged by increasing the degree to which they feel the work is meaningful.
The second is psychological safety. People will not bring their full selves to their roles if they’re afraid to do so. Leaders need to create cultures, environments where people feel that it’s safe to bring their full selves to their role. When people speak up and have ideas, do you shut them down? Or did you ignore their idea? If that happens, people learn to ignore their own ideas and shut down and they don’t become engaged.
The third is psychological availability, which means, do people have the resources to engage themselves? One of the things that leaders need to do is they can help people build things like their psychological capital. Which is their hope, optimism, confidence, and resilience, which helps them have the resources they need to fully invest themselves in their role.
Natalie: Where do you think we’ll be in five years – what kind of a conversation will we be having about engagement?
Dr. Gruman: That’s a good question. There are three possibilities. One, we’ll be nowhere. Organizations will keep doing what they’re doing. When I give talks on this to senior executives and I explain to them the reality of engagement, they’re interested and they want to talk to me about. If you’re a senior vice president of human resources and you just spent 15 years trying to build an infrastructure in your company that is not based on this definition of engagement that I have, then you’ve got to dismantle a lot of things. Even though a lot of people see the value of doing it, they don’t want to do anything, because it’s too tough. One thing that may happen is nothing.
One thing that may happen is, as the idea of this real measure of engagement. This real idea and the value of this approach to engagement catches on we’ll start seeing changes in organizations. The other possibility is that the idea of engagement will fade. It’s been popular for a long time and organizations like to jump on bandwagons. They like to do new and different things, so engagement may become replaced with resilience, which is the hot topic now. Maybe people will stop measuring engagement and start focusing on other things like resilience. Who knows? Wherever it goes, I’ll be there.
Natalie: Number two and three seem like more positive, optimistic options for our collective future.
Dr. Gruman: They do. You’re right.
Natalie: In closing out, if people want to learn a little bit more about the work that you do, where can they find that, and where can they find you, Jamie?
Dr. Gruman: The easiest thing would just be to Google me, Jamie Gruman. A lot of my stuff will come up. You’ll find my contact information. You can go onto Google Scholar, to find some of the papers that I’ve written.
Natalie: Thank you so much for your time. I look forward to seeing your two scales published and seeing how they contribute to the future of work.
Dr. Gruman: Okay. Ciao.
While we have some significant work to do in this area of employee engagement, we have the resources and acumen to solve this problem. We simply have to ask the right questions and be prepared for the answers.
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]]>While millennials may have led the way in asking for real-time feedback at work, we all appreciate the power of regular, constructive feedback. Organizations have seen the value in just-in-time feedback, including Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, Deloitte, GE and Linkedin and as a result these organizations have replaced dated annual performance evaluations with monthly, weekly and in some cases daily feedback or performance check-ins.
Feedback is critical for growth.
Yet we all know what it feels like to receive negative feedback. It can leave the most accomplished and confident of us wanting to hide in the corner of the room. Even the whiff of feedback and our defenses naturally go up. Think of the last time someone said, “Can I offer you some feedback?” Your brain likely felt as though it was going into battle.
Doug Stone and Shelia Heen, Authors of Thank You For The Feedback share that as human beings we need to feel accepted, respected and safe – just as we are now.
We are neurologically predisposed to interpret feedback as a threat response. Daniel Goleman, psychologist and emotional-intelligence thought-leader first coined the phrase amygdala hijacking to describe the activation of the midbrain region, which is responsible for our fight, flight or freeze reactions. In highly emotionally charged states our ability to reason is compromised. It explains why in some instances good people behave poorly in conflict. From a biological perspective, escaping unharmed is far more relevant than having a cogent discussion or working on your business plan.
Neuroscientists Mathew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger have shown that the brain is activated in the same way when feeling excluded from interpersonal interactions in the same way as it does when experiencing physical pain. Negative or critical feedback is akin to social pain.
It is no wonder that we experience feedback in such visceral, and unsettling ways.
We don’t have to be at the mercy of these biological tendencies. As leaders, we have the ability to exert choice about how we respond to feedback, which is critical to our growth and well-being professionally. Feedback serves as an information loop freeing us from the blind spots we may have regarding our behavior and how our behavior impacts others.
Firstly, while you might not want to act on your emotions, you are entitled to them whether you feel hurt, upset or angry. Recognize that your reaction is a natural one that you have the ability to manage.
Recognize that the person giving feedback may not have the skills, knowledge, and experience to share information in a way that is most constructive. Always assume best intent. By doing so, you will free yourself from the bonds of amygdala thinking and start to activate the pre-frontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for constructive, higher-order thinking.
Thank the person for taking the time to share the feedback, even if you don’t appreciate it or agree with it. Gratitude will free up cognitive resources shifting your brain into a more resourceful state. Inform the feedback-giver that you would want to think about what they have said. Taking a break from the conversation allows you to process the information, while keeping the lines of communication open thus protecting your good working relationship
Recognize that the feedback-giver has their own biases and experiences through which they are interpreting your behavior. Appreciate that no one knows you as well as you do. We judge our actions by internal factors, such as our experience, personality, and intentions, while others judge our behavior exclusively through our actions, something that psychologists refer to as the fundamental attribution error. Don’t assume that the feedback giver has all the information.
Ask clarifying questions if you receive generic or confusing feedback. For example, lets say that your boss has just given you feedback that you speak over other people at meetings. Is there a particular time when your boss can recall where they noticed you speaking over others? Is there a specific meeting that the feedback giver can recall that would give you some context about your behavior? Ask them to clarify what specific behavior would be more suitable or appropriate. Are there examples of those who demonstrate the behavior the feedback giver would like to see more? Continue to respectfully probe to get the feedback that you need. Remember that your brain is likely perceiving this conversation as a threat so work to remain as non-defensive as you can. Take some deep breaths, listen actively and maintain open body posture (that means keeping your arms and legs relaxed and your shoulders down). It is easy to discount feedback that feels uncomfortable or downright painful. Might there be a glimmer of truth in what you are hearing?
Get some distance as a way of reducing the emotional tension that may be keeping you from making greater sense of the information. Take a break, go for a walk or call a trusted colleague or coach.
Separate the person giving the feedback from the content itself. People are often less willing to accept criticism when it comes from someone that they don’t trust or don’t respect. You may be losing out on a prime opportunity to learn from this feedback. Would you have a different reaction if the same feedback came from a close friend or mentor?
Keep in mind that a single point doesn’t make a line. Look for additional sources of feedback to gain more data points about your behavior. Engage in a formal 360 review, ask your boss, peers, direct reports and coaches what they would offer to support or challenge the current feedback you are grappling with.
A specific piece of feedback, no matter how embarrassing or hurtful doesn’t need to label you. Feedback is merely one piece of information given at a single point in time by one individual through their perceptual lens. You get to decide if the feedback is valuable or not, and what if anything you are going to do with that new found information in the pursuit of success and career satisfaction.
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