As a millennial who was always told that he was intellectually gifted, David never learned much about becoming emotionally intelligent. Until he became a manager himself, David’s behavior was not questioned. As a manager, though, rolling his eyes in frustration at others’ ideas in a meeting and slamming his fist on the desk out of anger were becoming problematic.

As time went on, David’s habitual way of communicating had become a liability and even led to a few coworkers quitting. Others left meetings with hurt feelings after David critiqued their ideas too strongly, and many felt annoyed that David often did the most difficult work on a team project himself, sending the message that he felt his skills were superior to theirs.

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David is not unique. He is a young adult who simply requires more support toward his adult development, or emotional maturity, as do many other millennials who now make up the largest generational group in the United States’ workforce. Many older millennials are already managers, and as others transition into being leaders, the need for them to mature becomes critical — for them and those who work with them.

Helping David learn to grow up at work was my focus as David’s leadership coach. Given how much of our waking hours we spend at work, is there any better place to learn to grow up?

What It Means To Grow Up

Growing up is often discussed in material terms. In our shared vocabulary about growing up — now sometimes referred to as “adulting,” it often includes things like leaving home, going away to college, being offered a first job, getting married or signing the lease of a first apartment.

Though these are all important milestones, none of them speak directly to the process of maturing emotionally or psychologically as an adult. Yet it’s this aspect of our maturity — how we see the world, what we believe about ourselves and others, as well as our patterns of interacting, communicating and resolving conflict, that have the greatest impact on our ability to get along with people, to collaborate at work and to lead.

Psychological Development Beyond Adolescence 

The truth is most of us have been taught that our psychological development is most relevant in childhood and adolescence, and there’s a general perception that we plateau psychologically once we hit young adulthood. We now know this is not the case. In his book In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan suggests that there indeed are stages of adult development, marked by shifts in how we think and how our emotional and psychological states influence how we experience the world. The shifts between stages are not always cut and dry, and most of us exist somewhere between different states of mind a lot of the time. We can also show up in different mind/emotional states depending on our environment and what it provokes within us.

When millennials are struggling with issues in the workplace, it’s likely that what is happening is that they’re either shifting from one mind state to another or their emotional stage is not aligned with the people around them.

How To Find Out If People Think You’re A Jerk

David is a classic example of someone who was perceived as a “jerk” in the workplace, and truthfully I have met many versions of David over the years, so no one individual is being described here, but a composite.

In my experience — and in the best-case scenario — someone like David doesn’t know that others perceive him as rude or arrogant, and when faced with this “blind spot” they become interested in doing something about it. I am more concerned when I meet someone who doesn’t actually care what others feel because that speaks to something more pathological.

David didn’t realize the effect he was having on others, and the truth is, David was liked by some people very much in the office. Those coworkers were less sensitive to his communication style, and/or had realized David’s motives were good, and that by criticizing ideas, he didn’t ever set out to criticize people themselves.

Nonetheless, the breaking point for people like David often is the 360 review, basically a systematic way to get feedback from everyone at work about how you’re being perceived. (As someone who has been in group therapy, I actually find the 360 most similar to group therapy for the honest opinions you get from others). When David realized that his scores were in the lowest quintile of all managers who had ever taken the 360 instrument, he realized he had a problem.

What You Can Do About It

If you recognize that parts of you are like David, then congratulations! The big, critical first step in any behavior change or growth, especially for a person who lacks an awareness of others’ needs, is to realize that there is a problem.

A person with David’s tendencies is well-served to start approaching every interaction, and every meeting, as an opportunity to practice developing and using empathy. Instead of thinking “How can I get across my point in the most convincing way possible?” the question becomes “How am I affecting others, and what might they need from me?” In The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business, author Patrick Lencioni calls this the critical difference between being in “advocacy” mode versus “inquiry” mode.

Practice what it means to pay attention to others’ body language and words, and listen for their needs. Over time, your orientation will move from you to others. This is key. And slowly, from there, the work becomes about using language and demonstrating behaviors that are perceived by others as caring, generous, and open.

The post How to Grow Up at Work appeared first on Executive Coaching for Leaders & Teams.

Difficult conversations are – yes – difficult. All of us tend to avoid them – either entirely or by waiting too long to initiate a clearing conversation.

While having a difficult conversation is hard already, having it with grace raises the bar. We challenge ourselves – and you – to do just that. The world needs it more than ever.

Mediating team and interpersonal conflict is part of our work – so we could rely on a good number of real-life cases when we reflected on which behaviors and attitudes support difficult conversations with grace.

The steps in the chart may seem simple. But simple isn’t easy. Each step requires preparation, courage, skill, presence – and kindness with ourselves and “the other”.

Happy Holidays to all!

The post Give The Gift Of Grace In Difficult Conversations appeared first on Executive Coaching for Leaders & Teams.

A Conversation with Carlo Giardinetti

A Conscious Collaboration Podcast

In this episode, Yosh discusses aspects of self-organization and self-management with Carlo Giardinetti, an educator, educational leader, and Holacracy expert.

Carlo is an expert practitioner of self-organization principles and a certified Holacracy Facilitator. After a career as a professional soccer player in Italy, Carlo moved into a fast-advancing career in the hospitality industry managing hotels and resorts in Italy, Tanzania, Kenya, Maldives, Egypt, and Ukraine. Now “living his third professional life,” he works in the education management space as Dean of Executive Education and Global Outreach at Franklin University Switzerland.

During his tenure as Dean for the International Business School Lausanne, Carlo guided the adoption of Holacacy into BSL. Treating this transformation as a real-world change project as much as a research project offered invaluable insights into his understanding of how to best support self-organization in teams and organizations.

Carlo’s research on self-organization organically touches aspects of adult development theory — connections we happily explored in our conversation.

Show Notes / Highlights from this episode:

• Collaboration is an ongoing, committed, intentional practice that requires personal commitment

Collaboration is an act of functional generosity. People underestimate how much it takes in terms of personal change to become a great collaborator.

• • To become a great collaborator, we need to open up, to give to the group — such openness is an act of generosity, “I call that professional generosity”
  • But it’s also functional generosity – this kind of generosity isn’t just personal or moral – it “pays back” amazingly in terms of results and what the team or organization can accomplish
  • Side note: The core of functional generosity – the willingness to be open to input from others while being open with others – seems very related to the idea of reciprocity that came up in our podcast with Vincent Chang (See our post “Your Vision – Their Vision – Our Vision“)

• Functional generosity comes at a cost

Functional generosity is a learned trait. It starts with oneself and it takes effort to cultivate it.  

• • We have to train ourselves to allow that cost – it’s an investment into collaboration
  • What’s the “cost”?
    • Effort: It takes work to overcome attachments to our own ideas (See our blog article “why smart people defend stupid ideas“)
    • Political/Social cost: No one owns the idea – it’s not your idea vs. my idea but about the best idea for the organization. We have a desire to please or to avoid tension due to disagreement that can arise when we speak our truth. Even if it’s constructive, it takes courage to criticize ideas or to be open to criticism
  • We need to learn to welcome criticism
  • So, another aspect of functional generosity is learning to detach emotions when discussing ideas or processes
    • Of course, this is easier said than done and takes personal work

When we avoid vulnerability or withhold disagreement, hopes, or requests, we basically withhold information. Less available information makes it harder to self-organize. 

• Self-organization / Self-management doesn’t mean chaos

Self-organization isn’t about a lack of structure – but about the sweet spot between freedom and structure. What matters most is the synthesis of freedom and structure.

• • Having cultivated functional generosity  really helps to have conversations required to have clarity about roles, accountability, dependability, the meaning of our work or the intended impact of it
  • Such clarifying conversations aren’t just operational conversations – they can be deeply personal
  • In my experience, there is no hierarchy between the personal and the process side of such conversations and the group will pursue these as needed
  • Self-organizing is very structured – it’s a bit like doing architecture
  • Holacracy isn’t a lack of structure – it has a constitution, a book of rules, meeting structure
  • “Scripts” – are templates for having clarifying conversations support the process
  • You start organizing around a hierarchy of work vs. a hierarchy of people
  • Freedom finds its best expression within a structure

• Let’s make this practical: How to start the journey… 
  • Google’s Project Artistotle and the five factors they identified is a good place to start for folks who are interested in bringing these ideas to their team
  • Self-organizing teams are actually very good at having conversations that support these five factors
  • They also tend to be more flexible because if a project evolves and requires changes in roles or agreements, people will bring this up
  • Psychological safety is critical because without it, the learning and feedback loops are broken and a team cannot self-organize effectively
    

    Self-organizing teams aren’t looking for stability – they are looking for clarity.

• How do people react to the offer of self-organization / self-management?
  • Reflecting with hindsight, my team and I had some painful insights
  • Our research finds that about 30% of people feel negative towards it, 50% neutral, and 20% are excited to be “liberated”
  • We thought we could convince people by showing how “cool” this approach is and by role-modeling it credibly. However, the harder we tried the more we alienated the people who were critical or even neutral at the outset
  • At first, we were defensive – like “not everyone is ready for this approach” – but you cannot give up on 30% of your employees – certainly not all of them
  • We realized it’s a strange assumption that self-organization “liberates”
  • Many people don’t feel liberated at all – that’s were adult development theory comes in:
    • More than 60% of the population is predominantly in a socialized mindset
      (See our in-depth posts Growing Up at Work and What It Means to Have a Self-Authoring Mind)
    • There is nothing wrong with that and you cannot work against it – it would be the opposite of cultivating psychological safety
    • There is a risk of misunderstanding that a self-organizing / self-management approach requires self-authoring mindsets
    • It’s not about pushing people into self-authoring mind – which you cannot do anyways – it’s about separating our emotions from the work that needs to get done

High-performing teams and organizations are really good at keeping their focus on the funcational aspects of their work. 

• Where to start? 
  • We had to learn what not to do: You cannot push for innovation and agility by demanding self-organization
  • Rather than trying to transform mindsets, provide what people need
  • Rather, you need to take time to facilitate conversations that create clarity about structure, roles, ownership, etc.
  • Don’t expect the leader to architect this process but teach the group to have the necessary conversations

Hierarchy is still good for some things – like setting a strategic direction. But it’s not so good at driving innovation or organizational agility – here hierarchy gets in the way. In the end, we saw a hybrid approach work well where you structure both hierarchy and self-organization.

Enjoy listening and stay tuned for our next episode.

The post Podcast Episode 10: Carlo Giardinetti – Self-Organizing Teams & Holacracy appeared first on Executive Coaching for Leaders & Teams.

Just a couple weeks ago it was announced, at the last minute, that the IPO planned to make WeWork a publicly-traded company would be delayed, and Neumann was asked to step down as the CEO of the company. The reason cited was related to investors’ concerns about Neumann’s leadership. Financial projections made were potentially inaccurate, and dishonest. Neumann was also under fire for behavior; from the reports that were made about him, it became evident that Neumann might very well suffer from an unfortunate, yet common characteristic of many leaders: arrogance.

Now, I don’t know Neumann, and it’s possible that the stories about him are inaccurate or only partially true. I hope so, in fact. I’m less interested in discussing him, per se, but using his story to look at the phenomenon of arrogance – and arrogant leaders. In a recent leadership class I taught, our conversation turned to the phenomenon of arrogant leaders and the toxic effect they have on company culture. Paradoxically, though, the charisma of those same leaders led to investor interest and initial waves of followership. We observed that Neumann was not alone in being a leader alternatively described as bold, colorful, charismatic and arrogant.

Why is this so? And what is the antidote to arrogance?

There are probably many reasons why leaders are arrogant. One reason may certainly be related to what we learn from research about power. It has been shown that power has a corrupting effect on those who possess it, and it takes a great deal of intentional effort and mindfulness for a leader to counteract that corruption. (Do you know that owners of expensive cars are less likely to stop for pedestrians than are owners of inexpensive cars?)

Another frequent reason is poorly managed personality traits:

Arrogance is really the shadow aspect of strengths applied in excess: Boldness, courage, and drive devolve into fantasized talent, overconfidence, excessive risk-taking, and volatility.

Operating at peak performance requires finding and maintaining a sweet spot between leaning into one’s strengths without overdoing it – as any strength applied in excess can become a liability. Self-serving biases as well as a disproportionate focus on “building on one’s strengths” can make it hard to balance that sweet spot. In fact, there is a whole coaching approach called “derailer coaching” that focuses on bringing more awareness to the “dark side of personality”.

In my experience, the antidote is simple but not easy: It’s the on-going cultivation of qualities like self-awareness, empathy, and humility – all of which also require openness to feedback. When I look at leaders who are perceived as arrogant, I can safely suggest that these are not human beings who have a regular practice of introspection, nor do they consistently consider other people’s feelings and needs in what they say or how they operate. Nor are they trying to cultivate a sense of humility – which, per Confucius, is the foundation of all virtues – and personally, is one of my favorite characteristics of people I trust.

Much of the work I do with leaders – whether they are emerging or seasoned leaders – is centered on helping them develop a greater sense of who they are, who they want to be, and an awareness of how they affect others. We focus on helping them be in touch with the feelings and needs of others – for some of them, for the very first time in a concentrated way. I also believe – perhaps indicative of my leaning toward Buddhism – that it helps to never take oneself, or one’s ego, ever too seriously. This combination of qualities tends to have a deeply humanizing effect on a leader.

If a leader is accused of arrogance, I suggest they start by honestly looking in the mirror, asking others for honest feedback on an on-going basis, and developing empathy for the needs, values, and preferences of others. It’s a life-long practice – so it comes with the upside that it’s never too late to begin.

The post The Antidote for Arrogance appeared first on Executive Coaching for Leaders & Teams.

I republish below a revised article I wrote at several years ago for Forbes.

In my coaching practice, especially in transition coaching contexts, I hear clients incorporate phrases into their speech like “stepping into my own” or “developing my leadership voice”. It’s something that’s on the minds of many: a desire to be more true to oneself, to act “more grown-up,” not just driven by external or our superego’s expectations but rather by an inner value compass that feels true and meaningful.

All this seems important to many of my clients, but it’s also a bit obtuse. Vague hopes and intentions usually don’t translate well into new behaviors — so let’s break this desire for being more true to oneself and following one’s passion down in ways that allow us to take action.

We are well aware that children go through distinct developmental stages as they get older. For instance, your 3-year-old won’t throw a hypothetical question at you; your 14-year-old most certainly will. But what does it mean to be an “adult”? Are we an adult once we hit some magical milestones? And then what?

Adult development theory has been around for more than three decades and recognizes distinct developmental stages in adults — much like in children. Rather than a “this is it” fully formed adult mental stage, the adult self is an evolving self.

Creating terminology and a framework to describe this evolution is a key contribution of Robert Keegan’s, a retired professor in adult learning and professional development at Harvard, whose work with Lisa Lahey and others presents the adult self as a self marked with successions of advancing mental logics.

In relation to leadership or our ability to be effective team members, people who are more conscious and self-aware are better problem-solvers, collaborators, and leaders.

That’s not just a hypothesis. One study, for instance, showed a strong correlation between a person’s effectiveness as a leader and that person’s way of processing mental complexities, such as different points of view or competing objectives.

Kegan’s and Lahey’s model distinguishes three stages of adult development: the socialized mind, the self-authoring mind, and the self-transforming mind.

Most of us — about 75% of the general population — live predominantly from a socialized mind. That means we tend to seek external direction, are shaped by definitions and expectations of our environment and try to adhere to identities we formed earlier.

Compare that to the self-authoring mind where people align with an internal sense of direction and inner seat of judgment. These people are able to step back enough to question expectations and values, take stands, set limits, and solve problems with independent frames of mind.

For now, I won’t even touch the self-transforming mind stage that takes our ability to mentally process complexity and interdependence to a whole other level.

“Let’s be more adult” will mean for many of us being less in a socialized mindset and more in a self-authoring mindset.

Let me give you two examples from my coaching practice of what this could look like.

I am working with Julia, a top-level executive in line for a C-suite role. Part of her challenge is to build authentic influence among her executive peers — and part of that challenge is to let others know what she stands for personally.

Julia’s leadership vision is pretty clear, her technical acumen beyond doubt, but people wonder what drives Julia. What is this about for her? Is this money, status, recognition? Something else? The problem is that Julia doesn’t really know for sure, either. She had built much of her professional success on her smart, drive, persistence, and some internalized parental expectations to “be in it to win it.” Being “more of an adult” for Julia challenges her to step into her leadership that rests on her own value compass and sense of purpose vs. demonstrating her ability to execute someone else’s agenda.

Another example is Thomas, a leader of a global function in a multinational company that recently went through a merger. Thomas, in his late 50s, is ready to step off the career treadmill. He knows this with certainty. What he doesn’t know is what’s next. In our sessions, he tries to “organize” his transition, feels he is not effective in managing it, too slow in setting himself up for what’s next — whatever that may be.

Finally, Thomas had an insight: He measured this whole challenge of transitioning out of his professional identity of many decades in just the same way he managed his responsibilities — plan and execute with efficiency, meet defined success measures, rinse and repeat. Realizing that his situation was new and that he would have to define for himself what his next life chapter was about was a step toward living from a self-authoring mind.

I invite us to seek and deepen our own ways to being more adult — clarifying and acting on what we know is true for us, honoring a sense of self not based on achievements, exploring our interconnectedness with others and the world, and reflecting on the limits of our personal beliefs and ideologies. And wondering, above all, what truly matters for you?

The post What Having a Self-Authoring Mind Means appeared first on Executive Coaching for Leaders & Teams.

A Conversation with Paul Zak

A Conscious Collaboration Podcast

In this episode, Yosh explores with Paul his work on the neuroscience of trust – and discuss how understanding trust on a neurological level helps leaders and teams deepen collaboration.

Dr. Paul Zak is a scientist, public speaker, and author of several books such as “The Moral Molecule” and “Trust Factor: The Science of Building High-Performance Organizations“. Trained in economics and neuroscience, he is a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics – applying his research findings to the study of markets as well as organizational and team health. He researches and teaches at Claremont Graduate University.

One aspect of Paul’s research focuses on the neurological mechanisms that enable cooperation and trust. His work led to a deeper understanding of the critical role of the neurotransmitter oxytocin which he can measure not just in laboratory but also real-life workplace settings.

What I find fascinating about Paul’s work is that he and his colleagues “look under the hood”: They measure what’s happening in regard to trust and collaboration not just on a behavioral level but literally in the brain on a neurological/neuro-biological level.

Understanding the neurological details of trust and collaboration allows to reverse-engineer processes that create opportunities for the release of oxytocin – which, in turn, will facilitate trust and thus cooperation.

You can learn more about Paul’s work by visiting www.immersionneuro.com or oFactor, a neuroscience-based organizational trust survey.

What allows us to be great collaborators is also what makes us prone to feeling social slides.

Show Notes / Highlights from this episode – exploring the neuroscience of trust

• Neuroscience 1.0 vs. Neuroscience 2.0
  • Neuroscience is a powerful lens to develop a deeper understanding of human behavior. Developing an understanding of the mechanisms and processes that drive behaviors has been a focus of Neuroscience 1.0
  • Human behavior comes in wide variations – and neuroscience can help us understand not only what we do by why we do it differently
  • Brains are constantly optimizing every second to increase the odds or survival and reproduction
  • Consistency of behavior – not variance – is really the outlier

It’s incumbent on leaders to focus team members’ brain activity on shared objectives. That’s no easy task. Neuroscience 2.0 adds actionable insight to support coaching and team leadership. 

• Collaboration is an ongoing, committed, intentional practice

Brains are inconsistent and want to idle.

• • It’s “metabolically costly” to sustain a conscious effort to exhibit consistent behaviors
  • That’s another reason, from a neurological point of view, why clear objectives and milestones are so important
  • A servant leadership approach – empowering others and supporting them in pursuing their goals – is the most effective leadership approach

Improving collaborative behaviors carries over into our personal lives. 

• The neuroscience of trust

We are built to collaborate… It literally feels good when we are connected with others and acting in aligned ways.

• • Our anatomy makes collaboration easy and enjoyable — due to an extraordinary density of oxytocin receptors and a dense network of brain molecules – that’s very different from even monkeys or great apes who would get territorial and compete way faster than human beings
  • Oxytocin is the key signal transmitter in brains that tells us others are trustworthy, safe, familiar.
  • Oxytocin facilitates some important neurological processes: 
    • Allows us to measure behaviors of others – which reduces stress
    • Increases our ability to understand emotions – which supports empathy and thus an understanding of why others act the way they do 
    • Motivates us to act on other’s / team’s behalf – i.e. work towards a shared goal bigger than my own
  • So we can study behaviors and conditions that promote or inhibit oxytocin release to “reverse engineer” / build effective collaborative, trust-building behaviors

One key way this boils down to is “ingroup cooperation and outgroup competition”. 

• oFactor Model: Our research identified eight factors / behavioral clusters that build trust in teams / organizations
  • One factor is “setting challenging but achievable goals” — called challenge stress
    • Brains like to be stressed but rest – recovery cycles are important – the brain in this respect is like a muscle
    • Challenge stress is not chronic stress which leads to burn-out
    • Under-challenging people leads to boredom and neurological idling
    • How to find the right level of challenge stress? –> Involve people into the conversation about what they want next for themselves that’s challenging in good ways

Neuroscience and our technology offers real data to assess the right levels of challenge stress for optimal engagement

• Mistakes aren’t necessarily bad – they are an opportunity to find innovation
  • Trust matters so we can be open, experiment, admit and explore mistakes – so we can collectively find and improve best practices

Another word for the deviant side of errors is innovation.

• Social Sensitivity – Blessing and burden
• • Our high density of oxytocin receptors is a blessing in that it enables collaboration
  • But it comes with a cost – social sensitivity
  • It’s important to read social signals from others
  • But having this sensitivity also means we are receptive to feeling social slides – actions of others that can evoke feelings of exclusion, incompetence, non-likability

Enjoy listening and stay tuned for our next episode.

Check out our related blog post: “What’s love to do with high-performance teams?“ –
which also speaks about Paul’s work specifically in the context of high-performance team-building.

The post Podcast Episode 9: A Conversation with Dr. Paul Zak – The Neuroscience of Trust appeared first on Executive Coaching for Leaders & Teams.

The post Being Conscious about Our Commitments appeared first on Executive Coaching for Leaders & Teams.

So, what has love got to do with it – “it” being building high-performing teams?

The answer is oxytocin — sometimes dubbed the “love hormone” — a powerful brain chemical and neurotransmitter that plays a huge role in how we bond with others. Applying neuroscience concepts and research technologies to the field of organizational psychology, neuroeconomists such as Dr. Paul J. Zak from Claremont Graduate University have found that oxytocin allows us to determine whom we trust.

Much attention has been given to how fundamental trust is in establishing high-performance teams. Put simply, without trust and openness, team members won’t work their way through the conflicts that create outstanding results. Rather, by settling for compromise and by avoiding tension, a team settles for the safety of mediocrity.

So if trust enables high performance, what enables trust?

Trust in work settings comes in two forms: interpersonal and organizational.

The interpersonal side is pretty straightforward — if not always easy to live in practice. Regardless of whether you interact with peers, direct reports, your boss, clients or external partners, practice what you preach, keep your promises, right wrongs as soon as possible, demonstrate competence, deliver results, strive to improve, and use straightforward language. Furthermore, as Linda Hill and Ken Lineback point out in this Harvard Business Review article, “Being the Boss,”  credibility is required for any form of influence that doesn’t rely on coercion. Credibility, in turn, is built by establishing competence and trust. So building trust is just not optional for anyone who wants to collaborate without coercion.

Establishing organizational trust rests on individuals’ ability to build interpersonal trust, but then takes trust to a more complex and challenging level. Just search the phrase “organizational trust” to see how many models are out there. It gets confusing quickly. But it doesn’t need to.

Enter, for practical purposes, oxytocin as a grand simplifier. In a nutshell, more oxytocin means stronger interpersonal bonds, which means more trust, which means more mutual openness and willingness to work through conflict, which means higher levels of performance.

Dr. Zak and his collaborators describe some critical factors in their publication “Building High-performance Organizations Using Neuroscience.” Let me cite the top three factors that contribute to organizational trust:

• Facing challenges (and the resulting stress from them) jointly as a group

• Sharing information broadly

• The generous recognition of excellence in others

There are other factors, of course, such as intentionally building relationships or letting others choose how to best perform a task.

So what’s love got to do with high-performance on teams? The search for the secret sauce of high-performance teams has turned to paying attention to behaviors and conditions that will increase oxytocin levels.

If we truly want high-performance on our teams, we have a simple litmus test we can apply each day: Am I behaving in ways that make my relationships with others stronger and deeper?

I may not be; the world isn’t perfect. I may, for instance, have repeatedly tried to deepen a particular relationship but seen no reciprocating behaviors. I may have seen confidentiality broken. I may experience my work culture as corrosive or my boss as despotic. But then let’s be honest that I am choosing something else, such as personal comfort, emotional or job safety, etc., over the quest for deepened relationships and improved collaboration.

The correlation between oxytocin and team performance makes connectedness way more than a “nice-to-have.” The ability to collaborate well has become a new form of competitive advantage. I call this the collaborative advantage, which you can read more about here. While the effort to build a collaborative culture may be significant, so are the rewards. Who can afford to miss out on it?

LISTEN IN to my conversation with Paul
on our Conscious Collaboration Podcast

The post What’s Love Got to Do with High-Performing Teams? appeared first on Executive Coaching for Leaders & Teams.

A Conversation with Natalie Rast

A Conscious Collaboration Podcast

In this episode, Yael and Natalie discuss team growth and culture building – and the work Y7’s leadership team engaged in over the course of two+ years.

Natalie Rast, SHRM-CP, is the Head of People at Y7 Studio. Y7, a rapidly expanding and widely popular yoga studio with many locations in Manhattan, L.A, and elsewhere, is on a mission is to create an inclusive and accessible space for clients while offering an approach to Yoga that’s disrupting the Yoga space. It which was recently named number 80 in the Inc. Magazine’s Fastest Growing Companies List. After launching her career at Warby Parker, Natalie has gone on to build out the entire people department at Y7.

A key success factor to Y7’s success goes beyond its brand promise – but lies in its culture that values authenticity, empowerment, and experimentation. This mindset does not only inform the actual yoga practice at Y7. There is a general orientation towards growth and a readiness to show up for the personal work that comes with it – which ultimately positively affects how the organization is run and how leaders at Y7 role-model collaboration.

Natalie partnered with Yael to facilitate a series of workshops with Y7’s leadership team that helped it to engage in a process of authentic interactions, skill building, and “collaborative norming”. Both Natalie and Yael talk about steps on that journey.

I haven’t seen these types of trainings work sustainably before. But now, when we need to have difficult conversations, we are having them. 

Highlights from this episode

• Bringing intention to how you go about your work is important for you and your team
  • Approach each work interaction thoughtfully
  • Think about the impact you can have on others in your organization
  • Realize that we’re the same people inside and outside of work
  • Work relationships can be healthy, just like our personal relationships are

We bring our whole selves to work; this impacts our work and our team.

• Support and trust start at the top
  • If the top management is not dealing with issues – be it a need to change or interpersonal dynamics – in an optimal way, it will trickle down and affect others
  • Support and trust can be felt on every level, but it must come from the leadership team
• Working through the Forming and Storming stages of growth at Y7:
  • It’s important to go beyond the “what” (content and results-focussed) conversations and talk about the “how” and “why”, i.e. how are we doing/relating as we are acting on our sense of purpose
    • Trying to get things done together inevitably leads to friction
    • Begin having those difficult conversations
  • Anonymous one-on-one interviews in preparation of any team offsite help bring important issues to the fore; which allows us to then address the root of whatever is relevant
  • Laying the foundations of conscious leadership / conscious collaboration by drawing from shared theories and thus creating a common language for how we want to work together

• Best Practices in Leadership at Y7:
  • Feedback training
    • Learning how to give and receive feedback upward, and peer-to-peer has made a big impact on the organization; more difficult conversations are happing and people are moving past the drama
    • Giving effective feedback affects every single aspect of a team; creating a tremendous amount of openness and trust
  • Be authentic
    Authentic relationships contribute to growth – personal and business 
  • Involve the team in the work of creating healthy work relationships and conscious leadership
  • Be willing to hear things that maybe you don’t want to hear in order to create change
  • Have the right people on the bus – people willing to engage in personal growth work and who work through conflict to support collaboration
    • You cannot build a healthy collaborative culture if people don’t have that readiness – it’s a serious consideration during any hiring process
  • Spread the culture of healthy relationships throughout the organization

Some concepts and materials mentioned in the conversation:

• Y7 Anthem Campaign
• Superpower Cards by SY Partners (nice strengths-based card deck to support teams to leverage team members’ “best self”
• Above – Below the line: An concept from several decades ago to encourage responsibility and “self-authorship” – really brought back into popularity by for instance the Conscious Leadership Group. (They have a nice explainer video of the idea and we recommend their book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership)
• Drama Triangle: This idea goes back to Stephen Karpman, a student of Eric Berne, the father of Transactional Analysis. It’s a social dynamic model that looks at three archetypes (victim, villain, hero) that we inhabit when we go below the line. We can flip these, though, into proactive above the line archetypes – see this explainer video.

Enjoy listening and stay tuned for our next episode.

The post Podcast Episode 8: A Conversation with Natalie Rast from Y7 Studio appeared first on Executive Coaching for Leaders & Teams.

Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Let’s apply that to “going far” and “going fast”. So often, the leaders and teams I coach want to do just that – go fast and go far. Be nimble and adaptive and implement an ambitious, far-reaching vision with a strategic blueprint.

It’s here – at that intersection of vision & ambition and patience – where our first-rate intelligence is tested.

A key promise – and major responsibility – of leadership is to bring a meaningful vision to life – to make it happen. That same impulse, though, also feeds our egoic selves that love to think we are in control. Adult development theory calls that self-authoring – the capacity for having an intrinsic vision, self-directed doing, and an internal seat of judgment. Great things happen from this (advanced) place of social-emotional maturity. However, if we let the ego’s need for control take over, we are tempted to put DOING over BEING because DOING gives us a sense of control. Once I am engaged in DOING that’s separated from BEING, DOING leads to wanting to be DONE. And I just can’t get there fast enough.

In my spare time – as a balance to my people-oriented and interactive work – I garden. Gardening just nails that tension between driving and allowing to unfold. So, let me use some gardening metaphors to make a point. I may be stating the obvious. Perhaps. But bear with me as, for so many of us, knowing is less of an issue than allowing ourselves to be affected by what we know (and act on it…)

Over and again, gardening teaches me something about vision and patience: I can’t rush it. There is only so much I can do to prep the ground and think about which plants to use and how to space them etc. At the end of the day, after all the groundwork is done, it’s watering, weeding – and waiting to let nature run its course.

I am reminded of the delicate balances of dynamics by my clients all the time: Be it a team leader needing to heal a team from strained relationships, a business leader needing to onboard a new key staff member, or a coaching client who needs to shift her team’s and organization’s culture from siloed and reactive to collaborative and audaciously visionary.

You.
Cannot.
Rush.
It. 

It’s easy to say and hard to bear. And mind you, I am not proposing to “just go with the flow”. You cannot forego urgency either.

How we navigate the tension of this irreconcilable contradiction is a true test of leadership. To pass this test, and what I am reminding myself of – is to avoid the misleading separation from DOING and BEING. Picking one over the other implies a false choice. It’s not either… or… – but both… and…

So, how do we resist the temptation to sever the two? Much like the snail in Issa’s famous haiku, let’s climb our personal and professional Mount Fuji with urgency and determination. But slowly, slowly. What will allow us to ease into patience is having clear goal posts and a credible roadmap for getting there. This way, we can bring direction to our agency and vision AND enjoy the trip as it unfolds – whatever milestone we’re at…

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