Working from Home: An Unexpected Gift to Improve Our Lives

Recently, I had the honour of being interviewed by Ryan Jon on Ticker TV on how to lead remote teams.

Working from home has been an amazing gift to both employees and organisations.  In the past, leaders have been resistant to people working from home because visibility has been an issue.   But we can’t do that anymore.

In this forced experiment:

Leaders have had to take their leadership skills to the next level, at a much faster pace, than if COVID hadn’t occurred.

Leaders have had to trust people to work when they can’t see them. Teams that have done well in this environment know they have the full support of their boss who knows how to build trust.

Mental health issues are being acknowledged.  Again, organisations that are doing well have leaders that are addressing wellbeing concerns.

Dealing with the pandemic might have been difficult initially, but for many of us, it has helped us:

Understand how we like to work, in order to be our most productive.  This impacts what we need to be happy in our personal lives, as well.

Appreciate the importance of relationships and being with people in-person (or not!)

Better understand our leadership style and what works and what doesn’t.  For direct reports, it’s helped them crystallise what leadership styles they work best with.

Realise that we can change quite quickly, when we have no other choice.

Of course, the most important thing is that it has forced us to live and work differently.  In doing so, it has given us lots of new insights into how we work.  Best of all, a lot of a leaders who were against working from home have discovered that people are actually more productive when they work remotely.  

Now, the challenge is taking the time to reflect on what’s worked and what hasn’t.  So that we can rethink how to create a fairer, more compassionate, creative and energetic workplace with leaders who model these behaviours.  The good news is that we have the opportunity to speed up this process, which might have taken decades, if the pandemic hadn’t nudged us along.  If you want some help to speed up the process, feel free to reach out to me at support@trustologie.com.au.

What gifts have you discovered in your working/leadership style since working from home?

How COVID-19 Requires New Ways of Leading (WOL)

For years businesses have played around with the concept of remote work.  Now that we have been catapulted into new ways of working, it’s fair to say that organisations will blend two working styles together moving forward – with a mix of both remote or office based employees.

For this to work well, it requires leaders to shift their leadership style.  New ways of working (WOW) isn’t enough.  You also need need ways of leading (WOL).   While leaders have had to change pretty quickly over the last few months, the reality is that believing that you can go back to how we used to work is no longer valid.  

We are at a wonderful juncture where we can reimagine how work needs to look like.  Working for some months in crisis-management mode and moving into a powerful new future requires reintegrating what has been working, discarding what’s not and contemplating what we need, so we can plan and operationalise it. 

Essentially, how do we create an organisation that enables employees to feel inspired, energised and innovative, when they are not connected face to face?

1. Leaders Being Visible

2. Leaders Know How to Support Employees

3. Leaders Know how to get Hybrid Teams to Collaborate

Reimagining the New Workplace

In the new world living with COVID-19, we need to work more collaboratively than ever before, yet that’s become harder as we navigate how to work separately.  Many organisations have learnt pretty quickly that to survive the pandemic leaders must connect and communicate regularly to their direct reports.  Caring leaders and organisations have worked hard to ensure people’s emotional wellbeing hasn’t suffered during isolation.  After all, it is pretty easy to feel disconnected and disengaged when you are working alone.

One of the gifts of COVID-19 is that it has given us a chance to reflect and review on our leadership styles and how we like to work.  With the wonderful freedom of working from home, it’s unlikely that employees will opt to be back in the office full time.  Furthermore, employees will probably have less tolerance towards leaders micromanaging, not being transparent and bullying.  This means that leaders really have to develop the capability to not only lead a dispersed team with employees working both at home and in the office, but unite everyone together.  Leaders who master how to build a cohesive team will be in demand in a post COVID world.

So how do you improve your cohesive leadership capability?

Start with Assessing Psychological Safety and Accountability

The first step in improving your cohesive leadership ability is to actually take a look at how your team functions, in order to work out the steps you need to take to improve both team cohesion and performance.

As I mentioned in my last article, we need leaders who can balance creating both a psychological safe environment coupled with accountability.  That is a leader who creates a team culture where people are safe to be themselves and challenges them to deliver and do their best work.

Looking at the model to the side, you can see that on the y axis there is accountability and on the x axis there is psychological safety.  Ideally, we want teams to be in the Achievement Zone where there is both high safety and accountability.

But if you push people to deliver, and berate them in the process, you have people up in the Anxiety Zone that is notorious for stress and burnout (and high employee relations costs).

One of the confusing aspects about psychological safety is that it is all about fostering a feel-good environment.  Focusing on that alone can be to the detriment of the team and organisation as employees are likely to coast and deliver mediocre work. Leaders still need to hold people to account and demand high levels of performance.  Otherwise, it creates an Abatement Zone where people get comfortable in the status quo and performance slips.

In the last quadrant, where you have both low psychological safety and accountability, it puts people into Apathy.  Typically, this is the result of a leader who probably doesn’t have the right relational skills to lead people.

Cohesive Leadership Capability Ladder

Developing our cohesive leadership capabilities is a bit like moving up a ladder.  You have to gently encourage people to know they can follow you and they won’t come to any harm.  This takes a leader who knows how to empower and energise employees, while emphasising the importance of teamwork and exciting new goals.  By lifting people’s sights and abilities, you take them further than they ever could alone.

In the model above, as you move up the rungs, you can see that as leaders build trust and cohesion, performance and accountability increase. At the same time, while team productivity progresses, leader effort starts to decrease. That’s because they have learnt how to delegate and lead their team in such a way, that team members put in the right energy and commitment.

Of course, this goes against how most people lead.  We often mistakenly feel that we have to cajole others into getting things done.  But this only happens if the team culture isn’t safe and the leader has not learnt how to trust their people to perform or get the best out of them.

In fact, down at the first rung, or Apathy Zone, is where you find some new team leaders start off as they learn the team dynamics of an inherited team.  This zone requires the most time and dedication to not only increase morale in the team, but to improve the standards of work. Here the ratio of leader effort to team impact is (10:1) which is ten times the leader effort required at the top rung (1:5).

Productivity can be negative in this zone because other teams have to work around them – either duplicating or redoing their work.  Teams fall into this danger zone when they have emotionally unstable leaders or leaders who feel building trust upwards is more important than their own direct employees.  Toxic employees can also be a contributing factor.

Often, restructuring the team or placing an emotionally intelligent leader in charge is required. If you are put in charge of a team in this zone, you need to be willing to empower team members through providing autonomy where team members start to make small decisions and work on their own projects. It requires a leader who believes in each direct report, reassures them of their abilities and commends them on their improvements.

At the next level, is the Abatement Zone.  Here performance is waning, but it can be slow to show up because often this team is riding on the success of a previous victory. It requires a leader honest enough to realise that they need to not only push themselves a bit more, but their team.

This really is a tipping point to moving into better performance that is dependent on the team leader having those dreaded performance conversations. At its core, this requires leaders to energise performance through explaining to their direct reports the benefits of improving.  This is critical because the team is often producing mediocre output, that is pulling down the performance of the organisation.  Yet, the leader almost lives in a delusional land presuming that she can trust those on her team to deliver.  Not realising that the fallout is other teams will start to distrust her leadership, as her team can’t be relied upon.

Then, the next zone is where you have low psychological safety and high accountability aka the Anxiety Zone.  This is where individual effort is rewarded, rather than group effort.  It’s where team cohesion takes a back seat.

This creates an environment that is competitive and unsupportive. It requires a leader to come in and change behaviours through the regular repetition of emphasising the importance of teamwork. Not only that, the leader must learn how to extend trust to those around him, as often trust issues are because of his own behaviours. This actually decelerates trust because people hold back commitment to goals because they don’t trust their boss or the situation.

Leading out of this zone requires a significant mindset shift because as the team is already performing at a high level there is little incentive for improvement.  Often, leaders in this zone will boast about their team’s progress and that trust with each other is high. However, scratch the surface and the work environment is characterised by subpar work that goes under the radar and high employee relations and turnover costs.

Finally, encouraging teams into the Achievement Zone requires a positive leader who ensures there is high trust, not just within the team, but across teams and with everyone they work with. In other words, a trust guardian who holds everyone to high standards of behaving and performing.

Staying in this zone can be difficult. In my work with leaders, those who model curiousity and stay open to exploring new ideas create the excitement needed to stay on course. They focus on a positive future.  The result is productivity that is five times the rate of average teams, but the performance is sustainable and doesn’t burn people out like in Anxiety Zone.  

Cohesive Work Environment

Interestingly, even high achieving teams have been at risk of sliding down into the Anxiety or Abatement Zones during the pandemic.  That’s because it is more difficult to build trust with team members when everyone is working separately.  Leading dispersed teams requires a skilled leader who can efficiently build trust and connection with their team members during uncertainty.

As it happens, I have developed a way for team leaders to amplify their dispersed team results and save 30 minutes a day.  You can learn more in my Building Cohesive Teams program.  If you feel you want to learn more, contact me here.

The post What’s your Cohesive Leadership Style? first appeared on Trustologie.]]> 4419 https://trustologie.com.au/2020/06/22/how-psychological-safety-and-accountability-are-inextricably-linked/ Mon, 22 Jun 2020 22:52:24 +0000 https://trustologie.com.au/?p=4360 Copyright Marie-Claire Ross Pty Ltd In a highly popular Tedx video, Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business professor, talks through her research on the impact of accountability and psychological safety in teams.  She discovered that when high levels of psychological safety and accountability collide it leads to high performance.   Her theory has been the genesis for these four zones of […]

Learning to Improve Productivity in Dispersed Teams

Over the last few months, many leaders have quickly learnt to lead a remote team while working from home.  

It’s been a steep learning curve for both team leaders and team members. Not only did leaders have to deal with how to work from home (with kids and a partner in the same space), learn new technology (and run an online meeting without anything embarrassing occurring in the background), but also how to remotely motivate and manage performance of an anxious team.  The latter being particularly difficult with people fearful about keeping their job, catching the virus or having to work in isolation away from their peers.

Those new to their job or in junior roles have found isolation particularly difficult as they navigate the unspoken cultural rules of working in a new organisation or comprehending what they need to deliver to placate their boss.

Speaking to team leaders from a range of industries, many have found it difficult to know how to trust their people to get work done when they can’t see them doing any work.  Visibility of work is just one of those human mindsets that can be particularly difficult to break through.  The result is team members who over-work to compensate creating more stress and anxiety.  Some team leaders even report that particular team members justify the work they are doing and quickly point out those they perceive as being a slacker.  Behaviours which do little to improve team cohesiveness (and which incidentally, is a little bit like how my teenage daughters were acting with online learning).

One of the stumbling blocks that many leaders have found with their teams was trying to not only motivate their direct reports, but help them feel connected to one another.  Underlying this is a need to not only trust people to work productively at home, but also encourage team members to trust each other.  Any savvy leader honest enough to be concerned about these issues is right.

As you can see in the 3 Phases of Team Building chart below, high performing teams have trust underlying their success.  They have high social support, connection, and energy which is underpinned by behaviours modelled by their team leader.  This ensures that they work well interdependently, have open communication, deliver on time and to quality and keep kicking goals.  Creating a wonderful positive momentum that spurs them on to further achievement.

However, the big risk to any team is when you have some sort of change.  Any uncertainty and teams are in danger of sliding back a phase or two, even if they are high performing.  In this case, into a consolidating team that is working out how to work productively from home.  Of course, the real threat to people working separately is that they fall into the habit of working independently and not interdependently. 

Now, some of you are probably thinking that independence is good.  But care has to be taken to not confuse independence with autonomy.  Providing autonomy to employees is ostensibly the hallmark of a great leader.  According to research,  teams that have autonomy are 60 percent more likely to be considered high-achieving than their more constrained counterparts. While employees without autonomy are at risk of stress and burnout.  One of the beautiful benefits about working from home is that it gives people the freedom to work the hours that suit them (provided that they don’t have a boss that measures productivity by time in seat, rather than outcomes.)

As Dan Pink mentioned in his book, Drive, the difference between independence and autonomy is that autonomy isn’t about go it alone individualism.  It means acting with choice – working both autonomously and happily interdependently with others.

Independent workers make it difficult for collaboration to occur, as they tend to put their needs first ensuring that they don’t quite understand another person’s (or team’s) priorities.  And if there is one thing that we know, that if you don’t have people working together to solve problems –  their team, and their organisation, are at risk of failing to innovate and stay relevant.

And so the question is, how is your team faring in terms of working cohesively?  How are you supporting employees to work both autonomously and interdependently?

We are a few weeks away from moving back into the office for some industries.  And the big global work from home experiment has meant that now, some people don’t really want to go back into the office full time.  Working from home rocks.

For some employees, they have learnt that they are far, far, far more productive at home than they are at work.  No commute has not only expanded the amount of time in their day, but also motivated them to keep working (which counter-intuitively makes a leader’s fear that people aren’t working from home, a little bit redundant).

While others have enjoyed the freedom of not being distracted by others, needing to travel interstate or overseas and being able to deeply focus on their work.

Back in March, millions of global companies were scrambling to set up working from home systems. It was chaotic.  The good news is this time we now have time to plan how we go back to the office, even if it is months away.  And this is important because how do you connect team members to each other and provide autonomy when you have some people still working from home and others working remotely?  In essence, how do you become the glue that holds your team together?

As a leader, to improve your leadership skills and create a stable, thriving environment for your team, what’s important is to reflect on what is working, what’s not working, so you can plan out what you need to do less or more of with your team.  All through the lens of ensuring you enhance cohesiveness and autonomy.  Some questions to help you reflect are:

1. What online or face to face meeting routines have worked to increase productivity and reduce anxiety?
2. What interactions did you have with employees that made them feel connected to yourself and others in the team?
3. What hasn’t worked?  What do you need to stop doing?
4. What behaviours, processes or interactions should you continue to use?
5. What do you need to do to encourage both autonomy and interdependency?

No matter what you think about COVID-19, the reality is that with every grey cloud, there has been a silver lining which has been different for everyone.  It’s a great time to review how we are performing, so that we ensure that we don’t go back to bad habits which will be pretty hard to shift.

If you want to know more about the online facilitated workshops that I’m running with team leaders on Building Cohesive Dispersed Teams, call me 03 9696 8810 or contact me here.

1. “A team fused by trust and purpose is much more potent.  They can improvise a coordinated response to dynamic, real-time developments.”  General Stanley McChrystal

 2.  “Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other.  Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.” Amy Edmondson

3.  “When people don’t trust each other everything is slow and takes a million meetings.  It’s like sludge and they block each other.  Nothing moves quickly.  You end up doubling up on resources.  If you could just trust each other, you could talk about issues.” Kate Morris, CEO, Adore Beauty

4.  “Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up—it means you trust them when they do screw up.” Ed Catmull, CEO, Pixar

5.   “Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose and together they forge individuals into a working team.” Coleman Ruiz, Navy SEAL

6.  “Leadership is the relentless pursuit of truth and ceaseless creation of trust.”  Jack Welch, Ex-CEO, General Electric

7.  “Great teams have trust at the heart of their success.  If you don’t trust each other, you’ll play safe.  Trust makes it possible to aim higher.  To leap further and to know someone has your back if you fall.”  Adam Grant

8.  “Individuals on teams with high trust bring in more revenue, are less likely to leave Google, are more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates and are rated as effective twice as often by executives.  There is no team without trust.” Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google

9.  “Vulnerability is the gift I give to those I trust, when I trust myself.  A leader’s authenticity is rooted and grows in a field of self-trust.” Terry Kellogg and Marvel Harrison

10.  “As you go to work, your top responsibility should be to be trust.” Robert Eckert, CEO, Mattel

11.  “Without trust, you generate a dysfunctional organisation and teams. There is no meaningful connection between a group of people. It’s just meaningless coordination. It is trust that shifts a group of people into a team.”  Marie-Claire Ross, CEO, Trustologie

12.  “A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.” Simon Sinek

13.  “If people are aligned in a common strategic direction and trust each other’s motives, then all will ‘move faster’ – all saving cost and time to both parties and increases the chances of achieving end value goals. In a hostile takeover there is even greater risk, with target and acquiring firms often suspicious of each other’s intentions, and claiming the other party’s lack of trustworthiness.” Edward Marshall 

14. “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” Albert Einstein

15.  “It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Warren Buffett

16.  “Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

17.  “Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.” Albert Einstein

18. “Trust starts with trustworthy leadership. It must be built into the corporate culture.” – Barbara Kimmel Brooks

19.  “In today’s fast-paced business world, the more trust you have across your organisation, the faster you can operate.” Marie-Claire Ross, CEO, Trustologie

20.  “The glue that holds all relationships together–including the relationship between the leader and the led–is trust, and trust is based on integrity.” Brian Tracy

One of the biggest gifts in life is to be able to trust not only those around you, but yourself.  Start by taking small steps to extend trust to those around you at your workplace and you will find that all the “people problems” that you commonly experience begin to drop away.

Whenever there is change and uncertainty, employees will naturally withhold expending too much energy into a team, until it feels safe to do so. Continuing to boost your teams trust levels is critical, while everyone is learning the ropes. This is trickier to do remotely because repairing and maintaining trust is much easier face-to-face. To ensure team performance doesn’t drop precipitously requires the team leader, and team members, to be willing to not only change how they interact, but also their underlying mindsets.

That’s because humans have this odd tendency to only believe something is true if they can see it. In a work environment, leaders only believe team members are working if they can see them work.

Today, team leaders have to cast aside this limiting mindset that has literally stopped remote working from really taking off in the past. Now, we’re all in this interesting workplace experiment where leaders have no choice but to let go of the reins and trust that people are getting work done. This requires leaders to stop basing people’s performance on whether they’re seated at their desk from 9-5. The truly liberating and empowering benefit of working from home is that people can adjust their work schedule to fit in with their lives. As long as they can attend important meetings and produce the work required, the set times people work are irrelevant.

Pivoting from measuring time at work to delivering outcomes takes a bit of getting used to. Particularly for more mature leaders, who have been conditioned since school to work during set times. Usually the tendency is to micromanage when people aren’t visible – sending an unintentional message to employees that they’re not trusted. The result is employees will overwork to demonstrate their contribution. And during this anxious time, this only compounds stress levels.

The good news is that this can all be avoided if leaders are consciously facilitating trust in their distributed teams. Visibility can be improved through using project management software that makes progress and work achieved highly visible to all. While both the team leader and team members need to modify how they work together.  Casual Clothes Fridays is an example that’s now been changed to Formal Fridays (because don’t we all miss getting dressed up now that we’re in hibernation?)

Like learning any new skill managing working remotely takes time to get right. After all, it’s a bit like moving a team from playing netball to football. All the behaviours, mindsets, interactions and communication styles all need to change.

To keep trust levels optimised, there are two elements leaders to focus on. The first one is:

1. Building trust with each individual in the team and
2. Fostering trust between team members.

Counter intuitively, leaders need to spend more time structuring communication and relationship building between team members than when working separately.

Six Steps to Managing Remote Employees

Let’s go through the steps to do this using our SUCCEeD Together Trust Framework®. This is based on six trust drivers that make it easier to leaders to identify and understand trust issues.

Support – Leaders who care, get the most out of their people. Support underpins all of the other trust drivers and is more critical to remote teams than co-located ones. Essentially, humans don’t trust people who don’t care about them. So leaders need to do more work to ensure that team members feel supported by everyone in the team.

This is so critical because distributed teams have limited opportunities to spontaneously interact in hallways and food areas, which naturally bonds people together.

According to the Building Workplace Trust Study by Interaction Associates, the main way virtual workers wanted their leaders to build trust was to convene periodic face-face meetings (40%). Of course, during the pandemic this is impossible. But for teams that have each previously met in person, building trust remotely is easier. But you can’t take it for granted.

If you’re a team leader, there are two areas that you need to focus on in improving support for remote teams:

1. Foster Visibility – This is on three levels. The first one is ensuring that you share as much information as possible. It can be easy to forget to share making people feel left out. Make it a general rule to be as transparent as possible, in order to provide the right context for people. The second level is making sure you’re accessible. In a workplace, it’s important for leaders to walk the floor and speak to people daily. Of course, it’s impossible to do this virtually. To get around it, schedule the same time everyday when people can call you and get an immediate response. Another example is to let employees know that if they mark their email as a high priority you will respond to it that day. Finally, make sure everyone has their webcam on in meetings. Video meetings encourage stronger connection between team members than phone calls.
2. Help Team Members Understand each Other – Remote teams are less likely to recover from team members that are not trusting or trustworthy.  Creating opportunities for people to learn about each other outside of work is important. Make sure that you schedule social time before or after a meeting to allow people to talk about their personal lives. You can even have virtual coffee or lunches, where people chat over meals. If your organisation is big enough, consider have a Slack channel where people can find others in the organisation that share the same interests such as knitting or photography.

United to Solve Customer Problems – We trust people who are similar to us.  In a team, you have lots of different people thrown together. Unite everyone by regularly aligning people to how the work solves customer problems. On an individual basis, connect how each person’s contribution brings value to the team and organisation. In team meetings, regularly share customer success stories, customer feedback and challenges.

Clarity of Thinking and Communication – Humans need certainty and communication is all about reducing ambiguity.  Without it, we tend to not trust a situation. This trust driver requires leaders to spend time clearly thinking and planning how they are going to provide employees with the right information to do their job.

According to the Building Workplace Trust Study by Interaction Associates, there were three things that virtual workers required from their team leaders:

1. Reveal their thinking about important issues
2. Remind team members of their common purpose
3. Create clear working agreements.

To do this requires spending time one on one with people and convening together as a team to align everyone to your shared purpose.

With each individual, make sure you:

• Discuss what success (including quality) looks like for the team and how their tasks connect to that.
• Work with them to create their own goals that are tied to the team’s overarching goal (and share their goals at the team meeting).
• Clearly articulate how they need to communicate progress with you. For example, do they need to send you a summary email of work done at the end of the week or would you prefer a daily phone call?
• Explain their role, responsibilities, and your expectations. Encourage them to repeat back to you what they believe them to be.

For the team, you’ll want to ensure you have regular meetings, in order to co-ordinate team schedules and progress updates.

• Ensure each team member talks about their progress to help everyone understand each person’s contribution. Make each individual responsible for gathering this information and presenting it. This is important because we only trust people who are competent at their job. Encouraging each member to prove their competency will help others trust them.
• Schedule weekly check-ins to discuss what people are working on, what’s keeping them stuck and what is working. If you’re team is new to remote work, implement daily check-ins.  You can also start with a meeting (say 8am) and then finish the day with a meeting (say 4pm) to provide people some of the structure they would have if they were working in the office.

Candour – You can’t fix problems, if people aren’t willing to talk about them. Ensuring team members feel safe to talk about issues is one of the defining factors of a high performance team. Unfortunately, conflict can go unresolved because it’s easy to agree in an online meeting.

Improving candour involves the team leader modelling the right behaviours that enable people to speak up. Allow people to challenge you and respond by listening and asking curious questions. Give positive verbal feedback for those brave enough to express issues and concerns. If your team does not naturally talk about issues, ask in meetings: Who has a different point of view on this issue? Consider asking people by name to articulate their support or concerns.  

Empowered to Grow – You can’t grow a company unless the people within it are growing.  You want to make sure that learning is safe and it’s a journey that you’re all on together.

Set aside time to learn jointly. This can either be formal learning (eg: learning how to read a profit and loss statement) right through to ensuring that people are learning from each other. Don’t forget to do training because you’re remote.

Encourage project wrap-ups to share lessons learned. And also encourage team members to provide virtual presentations that you can record it, and tag, so that it is easily searchable.

Dependability – At the heart of trusting others is being able to rely on them.  In a workplace team, we need to feel that others will make good on their promises and do the right thing. This requires ensuring that each team member understands all of the interdependencies of their role. The role of the leader is to provide a holistic understanding of the interactions between all the moving parts and ensure everyone is accountable. Check in with team members regularly about any bottlenecks that are potentially stopping team members from delivering on goals.

Successful Remote Teams

Great remote teams thrive in a culture of trust. While it is more difficult to build trust when team members aren’t face to face, it is still achievable. It just requires more planning and structure.

The payoff can be extensive. According to Interaction Associates, virtual workers tend to report a significantly higher level of trust in their organisation than their non-virtual workers. And the benefits can be quite staggering – the same research study found that organisations that have high trust have 2.5 times the revenue generation of low trust organisations.

And today, I want to help you because even though things feel like they’re uncertain and deteriorating on an hourly basis, we have power. More than we realise.

Currently, we are all operating from our survival brain – the limbic and mammalian brain that operate subconsciously.  They’re designed to keep us safe from harm. When we operate from this mid-centre of the brain, it means we aren’t in our optimal, smart zone.  We focus on the wrong tasks, get easily distracted and assume the worst.  Fear drives us.

What the research shows is that to move into a high performance zone, we need to think about the exciting future ahead. And that’s what a good leader does. Pulls people out of fear and breaks their addiction to safety.

If you’re regularly monitoring the news a couple times a day, you’re operating from your survival brain, trying to desperately work out how to stay safe. But you won’t work it out from this part of the brain.  Nor will your employees.  The only way we can pull ourselves out is to envision a better future.

What people want to hear, especially from their leaders, is that everything will be okay. Strong leadership is all about painting a picture of a brighter future. In today’s terms, that’s one where we can go to cafes, attend weddings or conferences and discuss footy results to our work buddies over the water cooler. But it’s also a future that is even better than what we’ve ever had – where companies, schools, families and not for profits are all thriving.

If you’re a fan of history, you know that in tough times humans get it together and come out stronger than ever before.  We are now being given a wonderful opportunity to unite and help each other during this time of need.  The true gift of leadership is to provide people with hope, a meaningful existence and belief that all will be well.  It involves having compassion and empathy for those who are suffering and who need our strength. 

Now, you’re probably wondering, how can I do that with my people, when I don’t even feel like that? And it’s a good question.

So I want to teach you a quick 3-minute meditation that you can do anytime, anywhere. You can learn the process in the video below that you can use with your employees and yourself. What it does is harmonise the heart and brain, so that we are feeling and acting from our heart, rather than thinking from our brain.  I’ve been doing this regularly for three years and it calms me down when I go into fear. I do it as a group exercise with senior leadership teams and with my family (it helps both my children sleep better afterwards). And for six months, I have done it every morning when I awake – dreaming of the future I want for my family and my business.

This meditation has been designed and scientifically tested by the Heart Math Institute. According to Greg Bradden, a scientist and best-selling author, this short harmonisation of the heart and brain triggers 1300 life giving biochemical reactions in the body.

Even better, during this health crisis, is that lab studies show that it boosts SIgA in our mouths, which is the first line of defence for our immune system. And the immunity boosting properties last for up to six hours.

From a business perspective, this meditation also makes us more resilient to change through encouraging heart rate variability. Something that is so important to us as we adapt to a new world of work and life.  If you don’t feel comfortable, facilitating a meditation with your employees, then follow these leadership tips on How to Talk about the Future and Build Workplace Trust.

And from a global perspective, the more people that focus on a bright future with a thriving economy means we will be able to create a Covid-19 free reality sooner, rather than later.

The good news is that the more people who think positively about the future and have compassion for others, the bigger the change that will potentially be recorded on the Global Consciousness Project that started at Princeton University in the 1990s. It has proved that the more people experiencing or thinking the same thing, changes the structure of reality of the planet from the 33 miners being saved in Chile to Princess Diana dying.

Of course, you can debate with me that this isn’t possible. My challenge to you is give it a try. Have fun with it.  Envision lots of happy future scenarios that make you feel good.  If science proves that it boosts our immunity, now is the best time to try something new. What have you got to lose?

You have the power.  Now, use it to help your people, your family and yourself.  We will get through this together.  Please share this page/video with as many people as possible to help as many people as we can.

And let me know how you go!

In their minds, these symptoms are frustrating and quite insurmountable (it often gets labeled as “nothing you can do. Just human nature.”) But it becomes pretty apparent to me what the issue is and it is often not what they want to hear.

So what’s the answer you might be asking?

People don’t know their future at the organisation. And by that I mean on two different levels. The first one is clarity on the big vision for the organisation and where the leader plans to take the organisation. While the second is how each person fits into that and what capabilities are required.

That might sound pretty trite. But if the CEO or a senior departmental leader has not clearly communicated the vision that’s in their head, and how people fit into that, it creates enormous uncertainty and trust issues. The fallout is that people are often unproductive or disengaged because they don’t know what they’re doing or why it matters. And it all has to do with our brains.

Our Survival Brains

In the middle of our brain, there are two old, survival brains that have been with us since our days roaming the African savannah. Known as the limbic and mammalian brains they store our habits and routines, so we don’t have to think about how to walk every time we get up in the morning.

These essential brain hacks help us to do other important things such as check how many followers we received on Instagram overnight or how to seamlessly match our shoes to an outfit.

While our brain does enormous subconscious tasks for us that are mind-boggling (except maybe to the brain), it was primarily designed to keep us safe from danger. Allowing us to switch into fight, fright or flee mode.

Except the trouble is that our world isn’t that dangerous anymore. We don’t have to look out for sabre-tooth tigers ready to eat us for breakfast. But our brain regularly scans the environment asking subconsciously: Is it safe to be myself? Do I belong here? What’s my future with these people? Can I trust these people to look out for me?

When we are stuck in our old brain operating system, we are in an unresourceful state of mind. It is a pretty limited and fearful perspective of what’s possible for us. We work on the wrong tasks, solve non-existent problems or get stuck and don’t know what to do.

Ideally, we are primarily operating from our prefrontal context. This is a newer part of the brain that enables us to see the big vision and work out the steps to get there. It’s where we feel we have choice and can make decisions based on a more positive and expansive outlook.

And that’s what we crave as human beings. We want our leaders to clearly articulate the strategic roadmap. It makes us feel excited, inspired and that our work has meaning. All of a sudden all the pesky little people problems fall away because everyone is focused on the big picture.

As Jack Stack says in the book, The Great Game of Business, “If you want to make things happen, get people to raise their sights not lower them. The broader the picture you give people, the fewer the obstacles they’ll see. People need big goals, then they will blow through little obstacles. But those issues will become mountains if you don’t get people beyond day-to-day decisions.”

All it involves is a leader that creates the right environment where everyone feels safe, connected and believe they share a future together. And it’s the future factor that I want to cover in this article.

3 Steps for Leaders to Define the Future

There is an activity I undertake with leaders where they have to envision the future they want for their team. That means imagining what a high performance team would look and feel like. For some, it is team members sorting out petty conflicts or problems by themselves without the CEO. For others, it is a team working harmoniously together where they would do anything for each other. While for other leaders, it is a team that communicates clearly, makes decisions fast and takes action with no stuffing around.

For some leaders, envisioning an idyllic future is a tough task. We often feel that we can’t create the future that we want. That we have to put up with frustrating behaviours because “that’s how people are.”

But we don’t have to put up with it. In fact, when we get really clear on the behaviours we want, communicate them clearly and reward the right behaviours (and pull up toxic ones), it creates a healthy team culture. One that is modelled by others in the business. After all, senior leadership team interactions are amplified across the business. They create organisational culture whether you like it to or not.

It requires seeing the present more clearly so you can intentionally create the future you want. And we need to do this in two areas – the organisational vision and future modes of behaving and interacting. This is so powerful because it leverages what is known as gap theory.

Curiosity happens when we have a gap in knowledge. So when there is a void between where we are and where we need to get to, our brain is driven to close that gap. It creates tension that drives us to keep searching to find the answer and get closure. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle. We keep working on putting all the little pieces together, so that we can see how they interrelate to create the big picture.

As Daniel Coyle says in the book, The Culture Code, leaders need to provide two simple locators that every navigation process requires: here is where we are and here is where we want to go. Communicating the purpose or vision isn’t about tapping into a transcendent realm. Instead, it produces readily identifiable beacons that focus attention and engagement on the journey ahead. It works through connecting the present effort to a meaningful future.

It is also really motivating for people because it provides clarity around where they need to get to work because they now understand what is most crucial to shift.

And there is a remarkably powerful process to link the future with present reality. It is a bit like providing every employee with a treasure map that has “X” marks the spot of what you are aiming for combined with a shopping centre map that say “You are Here.” Except you don’t give step-by-step instructions to people on how to get the treasure. The power lies in giving people the ability to make the decisions on how to get there. Of course, it might be helpful to give them the first landmark so you can provide guidance, but then you let them figure it out.

Photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash

So how does a CEO or team leader make this work?

The first foundational step involves working out two things. The future ideal and the best behaviours for the organisation to get there (eg: sharing information, critical thinking). You can also include skills and capabilities with behaviours, as a lot of employees like to understand what future capabilities they will need to remain in the organisation.

The good news is that when you can imagine a better future and get excited by it, you easily bring other people onboard, who are naturally drawn to it. The more descriptive you can be and the more you can feel it, the easier it will be to communicate it. It attracts and engages people forward because they’re now operating in the resourceful prefrontal cortex. This is critical because what successful companies do is relentlessly tell their story in a variety of ways.

To introduce the ideal future to your people you need to almost draw it out like you’re talking about a map in two steps:

1. Here’s where we’re at (here’s what you know) – What the company has achieved, how people work together, what capabilities people have and the impact this has on customers. Then, to encourage people to accept the new change talk about why what they’re doing now isn’t working. The more intense, the better.

2. Here’s where we want to go (here’s what you’re missing) – The future goal and how it will make customer lives better. It’s painting a picture of what success looks like and future capabilities, so people can determine whether they they have the right skills and mindset.  It even means discussing the potential obstacles and pitfalls. After all, there is never a smooth and easy journey to a future goal. Honestly discussing the risks and the negative experiences on the road keeps it real. It also makes people more likely to not only expect derailments only the way, but to be more open to solving them.

Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School Professor, says it’s about framing work as learning problems rather than execution problems. This requires being clear about uncertainty and how everyone’s input matters: “We’ve never been here before, we can’t know what will happen, we’ve got to have everybody’s voices and heads in the game.”

Helping Employees Understand the Business

It’s a myth that successful leaders provide the strategic vision, give directions, and take charge. Instead, to lead and manage team effectiveness requires creating the right conditions for people to perform. Leaders rise up to show how accepting the present challenge will actually shape a better tomorrow.

This requires telling narratives that take people on a journey from present to future state. This process cascades abstract visions into more conceptual information that helps all employees from top to bottom more readily identify what needs to be done. Encouraging action and importantly, caring about the outcome.  And it stops all those pesky people problems because people know where they’re going and what they’re doing. 

And isn’t that what true leadership is about? Inspiring people with a future where there are rewards, new behaviours and processes. This pulls people in rather than pushing people into distrust.  And when you do that the future is certain. 

He has been planted to portray one of three negative stereotypes: the Jerk (aggressive/negative), the Downer (depressive) and Slacker (no definition required). All in the name of a research study being run by Will Felps from the University of New South Wales.

No matter which character he plays, in almost all of the groups, team members eventually mimic his non-productive behaviours. Either finishing the plan quickly and, at poor quality, or lethargically putting their heads down on their desk with their arms folded.

Across 40 teams, Nick plays the villainous teammate. Almost effortlessly reducing group performance by 30 to 40 percent. No matter which character he plays – the decrease is the same.

Yet, there is one team that doesn’t fall into his web of trickery and deceit. You would probably think they are the smarter group. People that are more experienced, more skilled, or emotionally intelligent.

In actual fact, it boiled down to one participant. Let’s call him Tom. In Tom’s team, despite the odds, his group are not only engaged, but they produce high-quality results.

So what do you think Tom did that changed the effectiveness of the team?

We often associate strong leaders with having certain characteristics. You might think that Tom has ‘the gift of the gab’ able to magically convince his teammates to focus on developing the marketing plan. Or maybe you believe he is a gifted marketer – persuading the team with his great ideas. Or perhaps, you think, he is a born leader, one to whom people are naturally drawn and want to follow.

But you’d be wrong. It’s nothing to do with measurable abilities like intelligence, skill, or experience. It even has nothing to do with the words Tom used.

As Felps articulates in the book, The Culture Code, “Nick would start being a jerk and [Tom] would lean forward, use body language, laugh and smile, never in a contemptuous way, but in a way that takes the danger out of the room and defuses the situation. It doesn’t seem all that different at first. But when you look more closely, it causes some incredible things to happen.”

After examining the video footage of Tom, Felps uncovered a pattern. When Nick acts like a dickhead, Tom defuses the negativity – using a variety of techniques from acting warmly or being curious. He was able to draw each person in individually by asking simple questions such as “Hey, what do you think of this?” or “How would you do that? Then, Tom would actively listen and respond.

All together, these small behaviours, almost unnoticeable to the untrained eye, increased energy levels, openness and team cohesion.

But most important of all is that Tom creates safety for his team. A quality that we don’t (yet) equate with a successful leader.

How to Lead the Team to Success

Thousands of years ago, when humans roamed the African savannah, it was in our best interests to live in tribes. Being part of a tribe allowed us to sleep soundly knowing that others were looking out for man-eating sabre-toothed tigers.

We have become biologically programmed to want to be with people and work together, as we instinctively know it helps our survival. But even though we no longer have to fear being eaten by a wild animal, our brains still scan the environment every 4-5 times a second to make sure we are safe. Except in this modern world, our brain monitors whether we are safe in our team.

As a leader, improving your team’s performance isn’t about giving orders, having the answer to every question, or being the most knowledgeable. It’s actually about ensuring your team feels safe, connected and believe they share a future together.

It all comes down to leaders providing their team with small, consistent behaviours known as belonging cues.

As Daniel Coyle says in his book, The Culture Code, “Belonging cues aren’t to do with character or discipline but with building an environment that answers: Are we connected? Do we share a future? Are we safe?”

The good news is that these signals don’t take much time to deliver, but daily practise creates a huge impact because they create a foundation of trust, which our brains need to propel us to perform at our potential.

In our work, we take those three questions a little bit further to ensure they create a foundation of trust:

Psychological Safety is when we believe we can take risks, make mistakes and we won’t create “a career-limiting” move. While Connection is when we feel liked, valued and appreciated by our team.  It’s when we feel like we belong.  Underpinning both these important dimensions is clarity around a Meaningful Future. This means knowing that the company has a future plan and that we have some sort of career pathway as well.

These three critical factors combine to create four important impacts with the main one being Trust. Consider the impact between Safety and Connection. This gives people the confidence to have truth-seeking conversations about current performance. It fosters Honest Conversations that help an organisation swiftly reach ambitious goals. It requires embracing discomfort and people talking about bad behaviours, errors and bottlenecks.  

While at the intersection of Connection and Meaningful Future, provides people with the safety net they need to go that extra mile.  In other words, people both feel, and provide, Support. This is when people know their teammates care about them and have their back. 

At the junction between Safety and Meaningful Future you get Accountability. When people know they are free to make mistakes and have clear goals, it improves accountability. Stuff gets done. And in a healthy, non-burnout type of way.

Driving all of these behaviours requires a team leader who interacts with each team member in a way that subtly tells people “we’re all in this together.”  This creates trust, or as I like to define it:

The ability for everyone in an organisation to confidently rely on (and predict) that others will do the right thing and make good on their promises.

Marie-Claire Ross

Leading Teams – It’s Not about the Words We Use

As someone who has written a book on workplace communication, it pains me to say that leadership is more than just what words we say.  And while communication does play a part in behaviour change, it’s our actions that are far more powerful.  After all, people are more likely to trust us if we match our words to our actions. In other words, if we do what we say we’re going to do.

Observing leaders asking questions, listening to others and taking action on feedback creates safety.  It has a much greater impact on the workforce than words said to inspire but ring hollow with inauthenticity.  What Tom did to build trust with his team was that he didn’t go about taking charge, giving directives and laying out an inspiring vision. Instead, he created the right environment for others to perform, rather than making himself look good.

We think group performance is about verbal intelligence or experience, but it’s incorrect.  How we perform as a team is based on all the subtle, subconscious cues that help our brain believe that we are safe and united.

For team leaders, leading teams involves more than just communication, it involves modelling the right behaviours and using body language to convey safety and connection.  How are you going to build safety in your team?