Author: CB Bowman
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How You Need to Balance Belonging with Standing Out
by Liz Guthridge, MCEC | Jul 7, 2018 | Blog | 0 comments
Superstars, rock stars, and heroes who save the day have fallen out of favor in many organizations.
Now we’re encouraged to celebrate team players who cooperate, collaborate, and play well with others.
They combine their brainpower to deal with the complexity surrounding us. (Yes, it’s a VUCA–volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—world.) More brains are better than one as it’s impossible for one person to know all the answers, or even pose all the key questions.
Yet, we still need to pay attention to and honor individuals and their personal contributions.
Any time we ignore an individual’s “superpowers” or even a person’s unique characteristics, we turn a blind eye to our humanity. As a result, we’re doing a disservice to individual team members and the team as a whole that can hurt individual as well as team performance.
Here’s why individual recognition is so important. We humans have two competing social needs—the need to belong and the need to stand out from the crowd. Or in a work setting, stand out on the team.
Scientists have a name for this dynamic duality: optimal distinctiveness.
Becoming aware of this 27-year-old concept is the first step to improving individual performance and creating more inclusive, better performing teams.
The second step is finding the optimal balance between homogeneity and uniqueness. This is challenging, not only for an individual, but also for team leaders and especially organizational leaders.
The upside of belonging gives you as a team member purpose, meaning and clarity. Let’s say you’re proud to be a member of a special project team that’s tackling a vital organizational issue, such as expanding services to new customers, including animal owners.
On the downside, you don’t want your group membership to crush your personality or silence your distinct voice, especially when you have a strong point of view. For instance, what if you don’t have much passion or compassion for one of the new customer niches, such as exotic animal owners?
For some individuals, getting and staying in equilibrium with certain groups can be a continual challenge.
As a leader, you may need to make an effort to achieve optimal distinctiveness for your teams or organization unless the duality is baked into your organizational DNA.
For instance, consider Airbnb and Planned Parenthood. Both are built around group belonging and individual uniqueness. Airbnb hosts offer up their personal homes to guests. In Planned Parenthood’s case, stand-alone affiliates around the United States provide reproductive health care and other related services to local patients. These affiliates represent the Planned Parenthood brand as they adjust their delivery to fit their local community.
For leaders in other types of organizations, here are three suggestions for working toward applying optimal distinctiveness:
Embrace inclusion, recognizing that it affects everyone. As the neuroscientists say, if you aren’t actively including people, you’re accidentally excluding them. The human brain interprets ambiguity as a potential threat, which can make people feel they don’t belong and you as a leader may not care about them. From a practical perspective,
as a leader you can make people feel included by being clear in your words and actions that they are members of the group and play an important role.
Remind them of the group’s purpose.
Keep them regularly informed.
Help them and others find common ground as they work.
Encourage them to speak up, reinforcing that it’s a safe place. (For more about the importance of psychological safety and inclusion, check out Why you need safety for a high-performing culture.)
Get to know team members as individuals and treat them according to the platinum rule. This means treating people the way they want to be treated.
For example, if they prefer private recognition over public recognition, write them a handwritten, personal note to thank them for their contribution instead of asking them to stand up to be applauded at a public meeting.
In other situations, be curious about their interests outside of work, such as entertainment preferences, hobbies and family, and ask about them.
And support them in bringing their whole self to work and expressing their individuality.
Champion volunteer issues groups, rather than employee resource groups. As background, the traditional employee resource groups, such as women’s groups, African-American Groups, and LGBTQ groups, heighten the differences among individuals in the workforce. This can lead to two detrimental effects. Those who don’t fit the group membership criteria feel excluded. (This has contributed to many white males feeling they’re being left behind in diversity initiatives.) Also, research has shown that identity groups can act as an echo chamber for individuals, perpetuating self-stereotypes, such as women feeling they lack confidence.
By contrast, volunteer issue groups, such as teams working to protect the environment, further education, or address customer concerns, give interested individuals an opportunity to contribute their unique gifts for a good cause and work with others who share their interests.
Yes, there’s pressure between belonging and maintaining individual identity. However, it’s a healthy tension that contributes to our humanness. And if individuals and leaders make an effort to strike a balance both as individuals and teams, they can achieve amazing things together.
How do you balance belonging with standing out?
Resource: https://connectconsultinggroup.com/how-you-need-to-balance-belonging-with-standing-out/
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How To Use 360-Degree Feedback For Executive Coaching
Executive coaching has been on the rise for decades as a strategic investment in human capital. When well-designed and delivered, coaching has been found to be one of the most effective approaches for developing senior leaders and enhancing the performance of their teams and organizations.
One of the most important components of executive coaching is the 360-degree feedback that the coach gathers for coaching participants about their strengths and development needs, how they are perceived, and what they need to do in order to achieve a higher level of performance and positive impact. Feedback can be gathered via automated online surveys or one-on-one interviews.
The first decision for coaching participants, their managers, and the coach is whether to collect data online or through in-person, video conference, or telephone interviews, or some combination thereof. Online 360s are more convenient and less costly, but, if correctly formulated and well-structured, interviews can help provide additional context and information. Sometimes an executive coach can use both, and follow up on a previous online 360 or performance review by interviewing designated feedback providers, in-person when possible, and via video conference or phone for those who are traveling and/or who work in different locations.
Once the approach has been decided on, the next decision is who should participate. The list of feedback providers should generally include anyone who has enough familiarity with the coachee’s work to be able to contribute useful observations and suggestions. The list should also be inclusive rather than exclusive, and should include all of the coachee’s direct reports, peers, and managers. It’s important to take organizational politics into account when drafting the 360 list: internal or external constituencies, such as customers or counter-parties, may also have helpful feedback to provide, and inviting them to participate can send a positive message, indicating that the coachee cares about their views and feedback. In order to ensure that the feedback providers will have a balanced perspective, there should be no sample bias, wherein only those who have positive (or negative) things to say are invited to participate. As far as process is concerned, it’s generally best to have coachees draft the initial list, and then run it by their boss, and possibly even HR, for refinement and approval.
In advance of doing the online 360 or conducting the interviews, it’s important to define who will see the feedback reports, either in full, edited, or summary form, and to clarify whether comments will be given “verbatim” in the feedback providers’ own words, or whether the coach will offer filtered/paraphrased feedback. Generally, we recommend that verbatim comments get shared in the report in order to include the most direct feedback. However, it should be clear to everyone who participates in an online or interview 360 that their verbatim comments will be shared, and in the case of an online 360, it’s useful to provide feedback providers with a sample report so they can see how their comments will be reflected in the report. We also suggest that the online or interview-based 360 should be shared in full, but only with the coaching participants themselves, as this increases the comfort that people have in being open and honest in the feedback that they provide without concern that tough feedback and/or specific criticism will somehow end up in the coachee’s “file.” However, once participants have received the full report, they should be willing to share a summary of insights gained, and/or developmental plans made, based on the feedback in order to ensure that they will be (and feel) accountable for making progress based on the report. Regardless of which option is chosen, the choice needs to be made and communicated before the interviews are conducted, so that parameters are fully clear in advance to all participants, and they know exactly how, and with whom, their feedback will, and will not, be shared.
Once a consensus has been reached about the list of 360 providers, and who will see the report, the next step is drafting the questions that will be asked. If a standard online 360 will be used, it can be helpful, at times, to include a few additional context-specific questions, including open-ended questions, to gather more relevant information for the coachee. The boss and the coaching participant will likely be interested in each other’s preferred additional open-ended questions, as these questions will reveal their respective priorities and goals for the coaching program. If the boss wants to ask questions about executive presence or presentation skills, that is a signal to the coachee that the boss believes that those areas are relevant and improvable. If the coachee wants to ask what he or she needs to do in order to get promoted, that informs the boss that getting a promotion is a current goal or expectation for the coaching participant.
It’s important to achieve consensus between the boss and the coachee about how broadly or narrowly to focus the questions, whether or not to include questions about the individual’s role and organizational constraints, whether to ask about potential future roles for the coachee, and whether or not to ask the same, or different questions to different people. Every question will also send a signal to participants about the coaching participant’s (and potentially the boss’s) coaching concerns and priorities, so it’s important to also consider organizational politics in drafting the questions in order to make sure that they are conveying the right messages. As with the participant list, we recommend that the coaching participants first draft the list of questions and then ask their boss (and possibly HR as well) for any edits, additions or changes.
For interview-based 360s, here are some open-ended questions that we find helpful as a starting point:
• How would you describe Jane’s leadership and management style?
• How would you describe Jane’s communication and collaboration style?
• What are Jane’s strengths?
• What are Jane’s areas for development?
• If you could give Jane one piece of advice, what would it be?
• If you could make one request to Jane, what would it be?
If the boss and organization are open to it, the coach can also ask contextual questions like:
• What organizational factors or changes outside of Jane’s department present challenges and opportunities?
• What organizational factors or changes inside of Jane’s department present challenges and opportunities?
• What leadership suggestions do you have for Jane and her department to be more successful in the future?
• What organizational suggestions do you have for Jane and her department to be more successful in the future?
After all of the above decisions have been made, the next step is for participants to email their feedback providers about the upcoming interviews (or online 360). Sharing the questions in advance can have the dual benefit of giving people time to prepare their answers in advance, and also providing reassurance that everyone will be asked the same questions in the interviews. Furthermore, gaining alignment about the timing and logistics of the interview-based or online 360, including the list of participants, the questions that will be asked, and the confidentiality and reporting parameters can help set up the process for success. When the coach asks the most topical and timely 360 questions of the right sample of feedback providers, the answers will enable the coach to provide the most specific, relevant and useful feedback to coaching participants who can in turn utilize it to develop their skills and professional capabilities. Often, the process of selecting feedback providers, drafting questions, and deciding on timing, logistics and parameters can itself be an important learning opportunity within the overall coaching process. When it comes to 360-degree feedback, the questions (and the process of the coachee achieving consensus with his or her stakeholders about how the questions will be asked, of whom, and how and with whom the report will be shared) can be as important as the answers to those questions.
In brief, although it can be laborious and complex to get it right, there is no better source of evidence for an executive’s reputation, and no better way to enhance their self-awareness, than through 360s.
Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a Professor of Psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup
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4 Signs an Executive Isn’t Ready for Coaching
The stigma of asking for or being assigned an executive coach is vanishing quickly. The growth of the industry tells us so. In the U.S. alone, $1 billion was spent on business, personal and relationship coaches last year, according to IbisWorld, up about 20% from five years earlier. And the number of business coaches worldwide has zoomed more than 60% since 2007, according to one coaching association. But while executive coaches have improved the performance of many already-good managers and sanded the rough edges off many less effective ones, they aren’t a miracle cure. In fact, we have seen many companies waste considerable sums by assigning coaches to managers who just aren’t ready to be coached, no matter how effective the coaches may be.
So how do those who control the coaching purse strings — HR, talent managers, and other buyers — avoid throwing money away on uncoachable executives? Considering that a year’s engagement with a top executive coach can cost more than $100,000, it’s an important question.
From nearly 35 years of coaching hundreds of executives, our firm has noticed a pattern of red flags that indicate when a coaching investment will be wasted. Here are four things to watch out for:
1. They blame external factors for their problems.
When things go wrong, does this person always have an excuse? Maybe they point a finger at the quality of their team, a lack of resources, or even their boss.
When leaders argue about the validity of your reasons for offering coaching, or offer excuses or defenses for poor results, it can be a sign that they lack self-awareness. Before any coaching can be effective, they need to wake up to the ways their actions affect others.
One CEO we worked with was known for his smart turnarounds of a large media company. But he was struggling to get along with his executive team. Finally, several board directors suggested he should seek out a coach. After multiple sessions, he had shared little information about himself, and we were no closer to figuring out the root of the problem. Stymied, we suggested that we observe the next executive team meeting.
Suddenly, all was clear. We were shocked by how he controlled the conversation in the room. He simply spoke over other people with a volume of words that was unfathomable. When he left the room to take a call, his team members erupted with frustration. It was obvious that this CEO was completely out of touch — something that became even more apparent later on, when he asked us to tell the board how positively he was responding to coaching.
Leaders like this often ignore criticism if it doesn’t jibe with their view of themselves — and such feedback is easy to ignore if it’s buried in a performance review or mentioned briefly in a larger conversation. Conducting a non-judgmental, just-the-facts 360-degree review could help them see the reality of their situation. Until they can see what others see and why it matters, they won’t examine their behavior, and coaching will be useless.
2. You can’t get on their calendar.
Some leaders claim to be receptive to coaching but just can’t find the time. They may cancel sessions at the last minute, constantly reschedule, or, when they do show up, be visibly distracted. They lack space for coaching both in their calendar, and in their mind.
Unlike the oblivious leader, the too-busy leader is often quite likable. They will apologize for being hard to pin down, and be very direct about how busy they are. Don’t be surprised if they’re flattered to be offered coaching. But coaching can’t be crammed into the schedule of a leader who wears their busy-ness as a badge of honor. Their inability to prioritize is a sign they need coaching, but their unwillingness to make room for it suggests they won’t be a good coaching investment.
A brilliant engineer we know had been promoted three times in four years, and by the time he was nearly 30 he was a group president at a U.S. manufacturing company. Diligent, humble, and smart, he could hold a room spellbound with only a marker and a whiteboard as he worked out solutions to highly technical problems. However, as adept as he was at the technical aspects of his job, he now had 20 people reporting to him whom he had no idea how to manage.
After three months of coaching, his superiors could see it was going nowhere. The executive often rescheduled his sessions, telling his coach he didn’t have the time. He believed he couldn’t set aside the time to improve himself. That made him uncoachable.
HR managers should do some reality testing to ensure the too-busy leader is willing to make room for coaching. To benefit from coaching, too-busy leaders must make the space to be fully present, both during the coaching sessions and after, doing the difficult work of developing new mindsets, skills, and habits. Ask this person what tasks or responsibilities they’d be willing to give up or delegate, even temporarily, to make time for coaching. If they struggle to think of any, give them a gentle but firm ultimatum as part of a career planning conversation: that they have plateaued at the company and won’t go to the next level until they make time for self-development.
3. They focus too much on tips and tactics.
Some leaders eagerly agree to coaching, but then avoid the deeper inquiries required for meaningful transformation. They’re willing to modify behaviors, but not beliefs. They view coaching as medicine that, if taken regularly, will help them get ahead.
The quick-fix leader becomes frustrated when their coach asks questions that require self-reflection. They want answers, not questions. “You’re the expert, you tell me,” they’ll say in response to questions from the coach, or “What if I did this?” Everything comes back to tactics. (A related warning sign is if a leader asks how quickly the coaching can be finished — especially if they demand that the cycle be compressed.)
Although coaches sometimes offer suggestions, their real job is to help executives uncover the assumptions driving their behavior. Only then can a coach help them challenge self-limiting beliefs that block their development. However, the quick-fix leader has little interest in this process.
One CEO we worked with was leading a family business that had recently been sold to a large company. He was told by a leader in the new parent company (who himself had benefitted from coaching) that coaching would help him make the transition. The CEO gladly accepted, wanting to be seen as a peer.
However, it wasn’t long into the first coaching session that he showed his entire focus was on “doing whatever other successful people did.” The coach worked tirelessly to shift the conversation to the CEO’s purpose and goals. Each time, however, he shifted the discussion back to the “secrets of success” of other organizational leaders he wanted to emulate. Ultimately, he was passed over for a permanent role on the parent company’s leadership team, and left the organization.
To prompt this kind of leader to be open to self-reflection, remind them of all the other times they vowed to change but were unsuccessful. They then might realize they need to work on more than just changing their game plan. Or, introduce them into a preliminary mentoring conversation with one of the leaders they admire. Tell the mentor to share their experience of struggling to develop.
4. They delay getting started with a coach to “do more research” or “find the right person.”
To be sure, it’s important to have a good fit between a leader and his coach. But a continual rejection of qualified coaches should give you pause. A related red flag is if the person is acting confused, and asking repeatedly why coaching has been suggested. Assuming you’ve clearly explained why coaching is necessary, this could be a defense mechanism and a signal that the person is not ready to confront their shortcomings. It usually stems from insecurity.
Being coached can be daunting, and not everyone is ready to take it on. We remember a physician leader who was hired to turn around a business unit of a large medical center. When his staff challenged him, he became emotional. Told by his boss that he needed a coach to help him control his emotions, he was hurt and angrily asked “Why?” — failing again to control his emotions. He was too full of hidden fears for the coaching to be useful. His boss eventually reassigned him, and ultimately he left the organization.
Reframe coaching as an investment the organization is making in their development rather than a personal fix. Tell them your firm provides this resource for high-potential, top performers to accelerate their success. If this leader can view coaching as something positive to help them achieve their goals, they may warm up to the process.
When Going Coach-Less Is Not Viable
After hearing us say that a certain leader is not a good candidate for coaching, an executive who brought us in will often say a variant of this: “Well, he must be coached. We can’t let him continue to manage others the way he has, but we can’t fire him easily either because we need his skills badly.” But imposing coaching on someone who just can’t handle it at the moment isn’t going to help anyone. Companies are better off directing their people development investments elsewhere — skills training or academic programs are often better options.
Invest your coaching budget in people who have shown the willingness and the capacity to change, and you’ll get a much better return on your investment.
Source: https://hbr.org/2018/07/4-signs-an-executive-isnt-ready-for-coaching
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July 09, 2018 -
There’s only one way to truly understand another person’s mind
It’s often said that we should put ourselves in another person’s shoes in order to better understand their point of view. But psychological research suggests this directive leaves something to be desired: When we imagine the inner lives of others, we don’t necessarily gain real insight into other people’s minds.
Instead of imagining ourselves in another person’s position, we need to actually get their perspective, according to a recent study (pdf) in the Journal of Personality and Psychology. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Northeastern University in the US and Ben Gurion University in Israel conducted 25 different experiments with strangers, friends, couples, and spouses to assess the accuracy of insights onto other’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and mental states.
Their conclusion, as psychologist Tal Eyal tells Quartz: “We assume that another person thinks or feels about things as we do, when in fact they often do not. So we often use our own perspective to understand other people, but our perspective is often very different from the other person’s perspective.” This “egocentric bias” leads to inaccurate predictions about other people’s feelings and preferences. When we imagine how a friend feels after getting fired, or how they’ll react to an off-color joke or political position, we’re really just thinking of how we would feel in their situation, according to the study.
In 15 computer-based experiments, each with a minimum of 30 participants, the psychologists asked subjects to guess people’s emotions based on an image, their posture, or a facial expression, for example. Some subjects were instructed to “consult their own feelings,” while others were given no instructions, and some were told to “think hard” or mimic the expressions to better understand. People told to rely on their own feelings as a guide most often provided inaccurate responses. They were unable to guess the correct emotion being displayed.
The second set of experiments asked subjects to make predictions about the feelings of strangers, friends, and partners. (Strangers interacted briefly to get to know one another before hazarding guesses about the preferences of they had just person they met.) The researchers wanted to see if people who had some meaningful information about each other—like spouses—could make accurate judgments about the other’s reactions to jokes, opinions, videos, and more. It turned out that neither spouses nor strangers nor friends tended to make accurate judgments when “taking another’s perspective.”
Imagining another person’s perspective doesn’t actually improve our ability to judge how another person thinks or feels. “Our experiments found no evidence that the cognitive effort of imagining oneself in another person’s shoes, studied so widely in the psychological literature, increases a person’s ability to accurately understand another’s mind,” the researchers write. “If anything, perspective taking decreased accuracy overall while occasionally increasing confidence in judgment.” Basically, imagining another person’s perspective may give us the impression that we’re making more accurate judgments. But it doesn’t actually improve our ability to judge how another person thinks or feels.
There were no gender differences in the results. Across the board, men and women tended not to guess another’s perspective very accurately when putting themselves in the other’s position. But this did increase self-confidence in the accuracy of their predictions—even when their insights were off.
The good news, however, is that researchers found a simple, concrete way we can all confidently and correctly improve the accuracy of our insights into others’ lives. When people are given a chance to talk to the other person about their opinions before making predictions about them—Eyal calls this “perspective getting” as opposed to perspective taking—they are much more accurate in predicting how others might feel than those instructed to take another’s perspective or given no instructions.
In the final test, researchers asked subjects both to try putting themselves in another’s shoes, on the one hand, and to talk directly with test partners about their positions on a given topic. The final experiment confirmed that getting another person’s perspective directly, through conversation, increased the accuracy of subjects’ predictions, while simply “taking” another’s perspective did not. This was true for partners, friends, and strangers alike.
“Increasing interpersonal accuracy seems to require gaining new information rather than utilizing existing knowledge about another person,” the study concludes. “Understanding the mind of another person,” as the researchers put it, is only possible when we actually probe them about what they think, rather than assuming we already know.
The psychologists believe their study has applications in legal mediation, diplomacy, psychology, and our everyday lives. Whether we’re negotiating at a conference table, fighting with a spouse, or debating the political motivations of voters, we simply can’t rely on intuition for insight, according to Eyal. Only listening will do the trick.
“Perspective getting allows gaining new information rather than utilizing existing, sometimes biased, information about another person,” Eyal explains to Quartz. “In order to understand what your spouse prefers—don’t try to guess, ask.”
https://qz.com/1319441
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High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It
“There’s no team without trust,” (….”and no tribe without trust and direct feedback” cb) says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. He knows the results of the tech giant’s massive two-year study on team performance, which revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake ...”or speak your truth”…cb). Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.
Ancient evolutionary adaptations explain why psychological safety is both fragile and vital to success in uncertain, interdependent environments. The brain processes a provocation by a boss, competitive coworker, or dismissive subordinate as a life-or-death threat. The amygdala, the alarm bell in the brain, ignites the fight-or-flight response, hijacking higher brain centers. This “act first, think later” brain structure shuts down perspective and analytical reasoning. Quite literally, just when we need it most, we lose our minds. While that fight-or-flight reaction may save us in life-or-death situations, it handicaps the strategic thinking needed in today’s workplace.
Twenty-first-century success depends on another system — the broaden-and-build mode of positive emotion, which allows us to solve complex problems and foster cooperative relationships. Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina has found that positive emotions like trust, curiosity, confidence, and inspiration broaden the mind and help us build psychological, social, and physical resources. We become more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent when we feel safe. Humor increases, as does solution-finding and divergent thinking — the cognitive process underlying creativity.
When the workplace feels challenging but not threatening, teams can sustain the broaden-and-build mode. Oxytocin levels in our brains rise, eliciting trust and trust-making behavior. This is a huge factor in team success, as Santagata attests: “In Google’s fast-paced, highly demanding environment, our success hinges on the ability to take risks and be vulnerable in front of peers.”
So how can you increase psychological safety on your own team? Try replicating the steps that Santagata took with his:
1. Approach conflict as a collaborator, not an adversary. We humans hate losing even more than we love winning. A perceived loss triggers attempts to reestablish fairness through competition, criticism, or disengagement, which is a form of workplace-learned helplessness. Santagata knows that true success is a win-win outcome, so when conflicts come up, he avoids triggering a fight-or-flight reaction by asking, “How could we achieve a mutually desirable outcome?”
2. Speak human to human. Underlying every team’s who-did-what confrontation are universal needs such as respect, competence, social status, and autonomy. Recognizing these deeper needs naturally elicits trust and promotes positive language and behaviors. Santagata reminded his team that even in the most contentious negotiations, the other party is just like them and aims to walk away happy. He led them through a reflection called “Just Like Me,” which asks you to consider:
- This person has beliefs, perspectives, and opinions, just like me.
- This person has hopes, anxieties, and vulnerabilities, just like me.
- This person has friends, family, and perhaps children who love them, just like me.
- This person wants to feel respected, appreciated, and competent, just like me.
- This person wishes for peace, joy, and happiness, just like me.
3. Anticipate reactions and plan countermoves. “Thinking through in advance how your audience will react to your messaging helps ensure your content will be heard, versus your audience hearing an attack on their identity or ego,” explains Santagata.
Skillfully confront difficult conversations head-on by preparing for likely reactions. For example, you may need to gather concrete evidence to counter defensiveness when discussing hot-button issues. Santagata asks himself, “If I position my point in this manner, what are the possible objections, and how would I respond to those counterarguments?” He says, “Looking at the discussion from this third-party perspective exposes weaknesses in my positions and encourages me to rethink my argument.”
Specifically, he asks:
- What are my main points?
- What are three ways my listeners are likely to respond?
- How will I respond to each of those scenarios?
4. Replace blame with curiosity. If team members sense that you’re trying to blame them for something, you become their saber-toothed tiger. John Gottman’s research at the University of Washington shows that blame and criticism reliably escalate conflict, leading to defensiveness and — eventually — to disengagement. The alternative to blame is curiosity. If you believe you already know what the other person is thinking, then you’re not ready to have a conversation. Instead, adopt a learning mindset, knowing you don’t have all the facts. Here’s how:
- State the problematic behavior or outcome as an observation, and use factual, neutral language. For example, “In the past two months there’s been a noticeable drop in your participation during meetings and progress appears to be slowing on your project.”
- Engage them in an exploration. For example, “I imagine there are multiple factors at play. Perhaps we could uncover what they are together?”
- Ask for solutions. The people who are responsible for creating a problem often hold the keys to solving it. That’s why a positive outcome typically depends on their input and buy-in. Ask directly, “What do you think needs to happen here?” Or, “What would be your ideal scenario?” Another question leading to solutions is: “How could I support you?”
5. Ask for feedback on delivery. Asking for feedback on how you delivered your message disarms your opponent, illuminates blind spots in communication skills, and models fallibility, which increases trust in leaders. Santagata closes difficult conversations with these questions:
- What worked and what didn’t work in my delivery?
- How did it feel to hear this message?
- How could I have presented it more effectively?
For example, Santagata asked about his delivery after giving his senior manager tough feedback. His manager replied, “This could have felt like a punch in the stomach, but you presented reasonable evidence and that made me want to hear more. You were also eager to discuss the challenges I had, which led to solutions.”
6. Measure psychological safety. Santagata periodically asks his team how safe they feel and what could enhance their feeling of safety. In addition, his team routinely takes surveys on psychological safety and other team dynamics. Some teams at Google include questions such as, “How confident are you that you won’t receive retaliation or criticism if you admit an error or make a mistake?”
If you create this sense of psychological safety on your own team starting now, you can expect to see higher levels of engagement, increased motivation to tackle difficult problems, more learning and development opportunities, and better performance.
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Leading with Grit and Grace
Leading with Grit and Grace from CB Bowman, CEO Master Corporate Executive Coach -
How to hire top performing salespeople in an evolving sales environment
How to hire top performing salespeople in an evolving sales environment from CB Bowman, aster CEO MCEC: MCorporate Executive Coach