Emotional Safety® – 3 rules for knowing when to fight (at work)
I was backstage about to give a speech to a large group of CLO’s who are seeking new ways to engage top talent while improving organizational performance…a difficult balance to achieve.
I spoke about how to keep high performers happy, largely through giving them a collaborative environment in which the best ideas often win. This gives your organization a Competitive Advantage.
Unfortunately and as humans, we are not wired to let the best ideas win. As humans, we are emotional first and rational second. This means that we usually fight when we feel like fighting, even if that is not the right time and/or person to be fighting with. Another way for you to think about this is to remember that we often fight because of how we feel, not because fighting may lead to the best outcome for the team.
You have a process for most things you do at work. Think of this is a 3-step filter for knowing when to and also, when not to fight.
We’ve got clients in more than 80 countries so let’s focus on a sign that all of us know, the traffic light. Red means stop, yellow means slow down, and green means go. In the context of fighting and in the spirit of leaving the room with the best idea, please use the traffic light in the following way:
In short, know when fighting will serve you and also, potentially hurt you by following our traffic light process.
The concepts we published in our Amazon Top 10 book, Step Up Lead in Six Moments that Matter have been covered by Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., the Washington Post and others.
Today I’m talking about when to fight, make sure you check out our other blog called “Get Angry, Not Stupid” so you know HOW to fight.
As always, we appreciate your time. For additional ideas, follow me on twitter:@HenryJEvans
Emotional Safety® – Tell Me What I Don’t Want To Hear
There’s an old saying that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. I don’t know about you, but in my experience, nothing could be further from the truth.
When I deliver keynotes to leaders explaining why Emotional Safety® is the key to making smart decisions, I point out that if people don’t feel safe bringing you bad and/or challenging news, they won’t do it.
Now, on the surface, that might sound pretty nice. You only have to hear about the good stuff. But let me challenge you to think about it another way: You can only make decisions based on the information you have. If people aren’t bringing you the truth about what is happening in the organization, it means you are making decisions with extremely limited information.
Your perspective alone is almost always incomplete.
Getting people to feel “just okay” bringing you “bad” information puts you at a below-average level. You have to strive for more than that. You need people to have the Emotional Safety® to bring you any and all information that could affect your decision-making process.
In our book Step Up, Lead in Six Moments That Matter, we outline the steps to achieving Emotional Safety®. Let’s take a look at how you could put into practice one of the first steps, which is to give the people around you the gift of your invitation.
You might say something like this:
In the past, I may have acted in a way that made you feel I was resistant to bad news — and you know what? Maybe I was. That may have led you to think you should just tell me what I want to hear. Moving forward, please tell me what you think I don’t want to hear. It could be about a customer or vendor problem, an internal issue, or maybe you need to openly challenge a decision or offer feedback on my leadership style. I rely on you to be a second set of eyes and ears for me as I make decisions. So, going forward, please make it a habit of telling me what you think I don’t want to hear.
The more consistently and frequently you ask people to tell you what they think you don’t want to hear, the more they will be willing to try. Make them feel rewarded for doing it, and they will generate a constant flow of what you need to make smart decisions: the truth.
Try giving the people around you the gift of your invitation in one of your next conversations with your team members. Because the reality is, it’s what you don’t know that will usually come back around to hurt you.
If you want to learn more about the value of building Emotional Safety®, check out our post, “Get Angry, Not Stupid™.” You can also take the complimentary “Step-Up Assessment” at dynamicresults.com. For even more practical tools and a deeper dive, consider enrolling in our Emotional Safety® eSchool.
Permissive Approach
3 ways to engage difficult people and build collaboration.
Think of a discussion that you know is important to have and that you have been avoiding. Perhaps you have given up on it because you don’t feel listened to. Maybe you are not addressing the issue because, in the past, you have had a bad experience with the person you need to speak to.
Sometimes bringing up an issue, challenge, or offering constructive feedback to your another is a sensitive task and requires a thoughtful approach. With your boss, it can be outright dangerous, or something we call a CLM, a “career limiting move”.
How do you do it? In our Amazon Top-10 business book, Step Up Lead In Six Moments That Matter, we talked about using a “permissive approach”.
This means that you ask the boss (or challenging co-worker) to tell you what time and place would be good to have a discussion. Here are three approaches for you to consider.
Find the one that works for you;
1. If I had a topic that I thought was important for you to hear, and may also be difficult for you to hear, what would be the right time and place to offer my observation?
2. I know I may be completely wrong and still, I think we have a roadblock and would like to brainstorm a solution with you. What could be the right time and place?
3. I’m hearing a buzz that may be of interest to you. It involves the way some people perceive you. If you are interested in hearing more about it, what would be the right time and place?
For all of these options, don’t suspend your intuition when using this approach. Remember what Einstein said, good decisions are a combination of head and heart. When approaching this person, if your intuition tells you that the time they picked is not a good one, believe your gut and reschedule. For example, if you said “when would you want to talk about this and they aggressively said “right now is GREAT”, clearly, this is not the right time.
If this happens, try saying something like, “thanks for being so flexible. I actually didn’t organize my information yet and would like to. What time tomorrow or the day after might work?” You could also say, “wow, you’re fast, thank you. Let me go collect some more information and how does tomorrow look on your calendar?”
Mostly we want you to avoid the suckers’ choice of thinking, “should or shouldn’t I have this discussion?”. Instead and using the techniques we just gave you. We would rather hear you ask, “what is the most intelligent way for me to have this discussion?” or “what is the right approach to having this discussion in a successful way?”
The best leaders rise above the anxiety of having a difficult discussion and practice ways of doing so effectively. We hope that today, you picked up at least one approach that works for you.
Become A Metrics Medalist
What makes the highest performing organizations better than the rest?
When I’m giving keynotes or working with some of the world’s leading companies, I’m often asked that question. The answer is way too big for a short video and I don’t proclaim to have all the answers.
With that said, our clients achieve extraordinary results by driving Accountability and Emotional Safety® into their interactions and the way they measure and communicate their results.
Competition is like the Olympics: you see levels of performance from some individuals and teams that simply outperform their competition. Culture is a complex and primary ingredient of success. Today, let’s focus on this one aspect of culture and performance, the creation and communication of good metrics.
I see a lot of “thought leaders” trying to sound impressive with complex explanations, let’s keep ours simple.
If you don’t have metrics and use language like “let’s do better” or “let’s try harder”, you simply don’t get a medal.
Please note that this last metric is subjective, and subjectivity is something I see many leadership teams resist. The fact is, in most industries, the consumer experience is your most important metric and….it is often completely subjective.
Gold medalists embrace this subjectivity and they take a stand, applying specific measurements to subjectively measured achievements. Gold medalists have the courage to commit, even when an outcome is uncertain.
Your success journey will need all three kinds of medalist experiences, Bronze to get started, with Silver and Gold as you go. Using this formula, our clients implement their strategies at 8x the rate of most organizations, something we hope you will do too.
Should you Focus on Metrics or Culture?
Do you focus on results or culture? Yes.
Do you feel a tension between the pursuit of a healthy culture vs. the achievement of results? If your answer is yes, you are having a very common experience, one that most organizations share.
If your answer is no, experience tells me that you are in one of two scenarios, 1) your organization has successfully found the right balancing point between the two OR, 2) your organization is stuck in this tension and you don’t realize it.
We have conscious and unconscious pursuits to balance between the need to cultivate culture and achieve results. Working with some of the world’s highest performing organizations, we see that they struggle to find the balance too.
It is complicated. A healthy, innovative culture (one that has Accountability and Emotional Safety®) tends to generate better business results. By the same token, many organizations that achieve great results find that associate engagement is a natural by-product. People feel better about an organization when they are celebrating success.
It’s the traditional yin yang. Good performance is usually one of the primary ingredients of good culture and a good culture tends to drive high performance.
Performance + Culture = Performance Culture
Here are 3 tips to find the balance point between performance and culture in order to generate a high-performance culture in your organization:
1) Tell the truth when recruiting. If your organization is riding a success wave, if you are growing and profitable, recruit accordingly and screen for people who have already contributed to a growing and successful team. If on the other hand, your organization is in crisis and you need firefighters, tell the truth about that too. Screen for people with excellent crisis management behaviors like “staying cool under pressure”
2) Measure everything – objective or subjective, decide on, publish, and regularly check in on your metrics. Objective measurements like having a 5% reduction in delivery errors is easy to measure and communicate. When subjective, like “how much do our customers like our pizza?”, you have to take a bold stand and knowing you won’t be perfect. You say something like “85% of our customers rate our pizza as “very good” or “excellent” on a five-point Likert scale”.
3) Celebrate and Standardize your successes. You get the behavior you incentivize. When you are achieving success after following steps one “telling the truth about your culture” and two- “have clearly communicated metrics”, it is time to both celebrate and processize. (If processize isn’t a word, I’m making it one now). This means that you give rewards and recognition to your star players. Extra PTO, cash, or recognition within the organization. One way of measuring a star player is their direct contribution to an achievement. Another is holding people to a standard; namely studying your successes for repeatable process improvements. This is what we mean by processize.
These are just 3 ways to find the sweet spot between culture and performance. Check out our other blogs and/or any of our best-selling books for other ways to outperform your competition.
Go First – The Secret Sauce Of Gaining A Competitive Advantage
Go first. That was one of the mantras I learned from my coaches when I was a competitive martial artist.
Whatever your current position, leader, individual contributor, employed or not – you are in a constant state of competition. You compete against other organizations for business, your peers if you are trying to get promoted, or other candidates if you are currently job seeking.
When I was competing, and hearing my coaches encouraging me to “go first”, they meant strike first, make the first move, play offense, or in other words, get out ahead of my competitor. This meant taking control of the physical space we were competing in, it meant controlling the momentum between me and my opponent, namely, get them playing defense and catch up. In a competitive match, I had to figure out how to do this, even when the match was not going according to plan. In other words, based on what was happening around me, I had to maintain high awareness, in the moment, and change as needed.
How does this apply to you?
Let’s focus on decision making. It used to be that markets and competitors moved so slowly, the playing field was so stable, that having a near perfect 10-year plan was a good recipe for success. We’ve facilitated thousands of hours of strategic planning and implementation sessions with executive teams and our clients execute their strategies at almost 8x the rate of most organizations. In this market, one where the earth is constantly shaking and disruptions are always happening, we don’t even take a client if they want to write more than a 2-year plan. A 10-year plan is obsolete, as is the company that tries to write one. Simply put, whatever plan you write will have less and less of a relationship to what you actually do as more time progresses. This too shall change.
We encourage our clients to decide and execute faster than their competitors. This means there are two things we want you to take away today for a competitive advantage;
To wrap up, there are no perfect plans and even if you had one, your environment would change forcing you to change the plan anyway. So, gather as much information as you can, we recommend 60-70% and begin executing.
When executing and as markets or the behaviors of competitors change, you must undo some of your past decisions to remain competitive in the current conditions.
Lastly, realize both the case for change and change faster than your competitors. For decision making (and in most business cases) speed won’t kill. In fact, it will give you a competitive advantage.
If you want more information on how to make better decisions, read the chapter Decide Already, Chapter 3, page 65, from our Amazon top-10 business book, Step Up, Lead In Six Moments That Matter.
The Do’s and Don’ts of Receiving Feedback Like a Pro
Recently, I received the results from a 360 leadership feedback assessment. If you’ve participated in a 360 before, you’ll know that this means I, in an anonymous way, asked for feedback. It was aggregated and shared with me to increase self-awareness and for the purpose of my development. It was easy to ask for input, but hard to receive it – hard because it contained some constructive feedback that I did not want to hear. I can’t say it was a surprise – but it was challenging. After receiving it, I had a choice – accept and learn from this feedback or throw it aside saying, “these people do not know what they’re talking about.”
If like me, you’ve been lucky enough to receive comprehensive feedback – like in a 360 or some other way – you have received a huge gift. You asked your colleagues, friends, and family members to give input for your own learning. They invested their valuable time and took – what for many people feels like – a significant personal risk to give it to you. Upon receiving it, you had the same choice I did – to learn from their feedback or to waste it. Sounds like an easy choice, but we all know accepting feedback gracefully, is easier said than done. It’s intellectually simple and behaviorally complex; especially when you don’t agree with the feedback you’re being given.
The first challenge is simply accepting the feedback that is being offered to you as the reality or the lens through which other people view you. People deal with you based on how they perceive you, not on the way you think they should. If you accept their constructive criticism or critical feedback with that in mind, you will be starting to deal with your actual reality and not the reality you wish you had. This will give you a realistic platform to begin developing yourself.
An often missed component of a 360 is how you respond to the people who gave you feedback. I suggest the following do’s and don’ts:
Do say thank you. You asked your community for feedback and they gave it to you. Say thank you.
When you’ve taken some time to metabolize all the feedback and decided what you’re going to work on, Do follow up with the people who gave you feedback. Let them know what one or two things you’re going to be working on from all the feedback you received. It might sound something like this: “Based on all of the feedback I received, I’m going to be working on managing my own defensiveness.”
Do invite them into your self-development. It should be totally at their discretion, but a heartfelt ask can go a long way. This might sound like, “While I’m working on managing my own defensiveness I would love if you would tell me when you think I hit or miss an opportunity to demonstrate my new behaviors.
Don’t ever go back and try and figure out who said what. Doing so will not help you and it jeopardizes the very nature of confidential feedback for everyone. Said another way, if you harass people who give feedback, they won’t be willing to give it to you or others in the future.
Don’t defend yourself by pointing out where the feedback you received might be wrong. If ever there were a situation to approach with complete lack of defensiveness, this is it. This feedback is purely for your learning, just accept it. You don’t have to agree with it, but accept that this is how others view you.
Over time, you’ll have the opportunity to change how others view you. Like many things in life, only time, dedication, and hard work will help them see you differently.
3 Steps to Succeed in the Age of Agile Leadership
Change your mind and the best will follow you; 3 steps to demonstrate agile thinking, in a way that makes people want to follow.
If you are in a leadership role, you have a problem. Your people want you to communicate consistently and you are also expected to be agile in your decision making to keep up with the ever-increasing speed of business. This creates a paradox. On one hand, your people want you to be consistent and always do what you said you would do in the past. The company requires you to change what you think and say, based on the current needs. You and your people, and the company want the best possible outcomes in the future.
When you are agile in your thinking, perhaps based on new information, it is likely that some of your people will say things like “that isn’t what you said two weeks ago” or “I thought you said we were going the other way”. This can cost you credibility if you don’t manage it correctly; here is how to do that.
The top incentive plan consultants say that when you roll out a plan, you must set (and maintain) the expectation that the plan will change. They clearly state that, and include, “as we learn and/or market conditions change, if we feel that the plan has become unfair to employees and/or the company, we will change it. Expect changes 1-2 times per year”.
I think this is good advice.
Leaders are asked to provide reliability and consistency in what they say. This is great from a values perspective and may also be great for making the decisions that will best serve the organizations current needs. Like in our blog entitled, “3 Steps to Making Things Right After You’ve Made a Bad Decision”, we suggest that making the right decision isn’t always easy.
Please consider the following steps to follow when you are making and announcing decisions.
In short, be consistent in what you say when it comes to your values. Change what you say when market conditions and/or your thinking changes around decisions. The agile leader knows that changing their mind is part of staying current and your best people know that.