We know HR. Read our Human Resources blog archives for stories and best practices from our work with real clients and personal experiences in the world of HR.
We have an active group text at HPC. It is rare for a day to go by that I’m not receiving (or sending) a text from (or to) our team. The content varies – a funny meme, a word of encouragement, a link to an innovative podcast or book, or a picture of a new pet. The subject of the messages change daily, but the intent does not. The constant stream of communication conveys how we encourage one another, share ideas and help us become a stronger team.
As with most success stories, our team dynamic starts from the top. Our President/CEO is a servant leader who actively listens, communicates and builds relationships. I’ve often said “she makes me want to be a better person.” She truly has a heart for others and opens her home, her door, her table to everyone. The best example I can think of when reflecting on opening the door to communication, encouragement & relationships is our monthly one-on-one meetings. Those conversations are full of encouragement and enlightenment, and they always leave me feeling ready to conquer the next month along with all the projects & challenges that go along with it.
How do you improve your communication skills? Check out Lorrie’s tips here:
I can’t think of one person I know that loves conflict. Let’s be honest, it’s uncomfortable. However, conflict is a crucial part of leadership. And there are ways to address conflict that provides growth to everyone involved in the situation.
Last year, I had more conversations than I can count about cowardly leadership. These were not necessarily with HPC clients, but with people in general – family members, friends, colleagues, etc.
As I write this post, I want to reflect on leaders I’ve encountered in my career, ones who avoided conflict at all costs. I’ll also offer tips for moving away from cowardly leadership.
A family member who confides in me about his work environment has a manager who has great potential as a leader. However, he avoids addressing issues/conflicts. For example, one employee is suspected of making choices on the job that results in an unsafe work environment for everyone involved. It has been going on for years. I consulted Lorrie, our legal guru on staff, about the situation. She gave me the best tips to share with my relative. Number one was documentation and two was addressing the issue at hand, i.e., not avoiding conflict. These actions allow the leader to address the situation and make choices that show all employees they care about their well-being above the organization or avoiding conflict.
The second leader I want to share about is someone I encountered in my work career. As a manager, “Hannah” seemed to have a personal conflict with a direct report. She just did not see eye to eye with the employee. She pushed for an assessment and feedback session in an effort that seemed to blindside the employee. As a result, nothing was resolved. My recommendation was to provide feedback, develop an employee action plan and work through the issues to help the employee thrive (and grow as a leader simultaneously).
Leadership is hard, but it can be so rewarding as well. Here are some leadership blog posts from The Point Blog that offer great tips to growing your leadership skills:
This week I have the pleasure of presenting the topic of rumbling with vulnerability. I am going to need you to take a pause, a deep breath and embrace the suck. Wait, did she just say embrace the suck? Why yes, she did. How else can you describe the feeling of being naked in a room full of people while you bare your soul? In my professional as well as personal life, I have had first-hand experience in this department. I have always walked away from the experience as a better human, but at the time it can feel like anything but “better”. Unfortunately, we don’t grow in our comfort zones, so embrace the suck we must.
In Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead she says that you can’t get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability.
At the heart of daring is a deeply human truth that is rarely acknowledged: Courage and fear are not mutually exclusive. Most of us feel brave and afraid at the exact same time. We feel vulnerable. Sometimes all day long. During those moments, when we’re pulled between our fear and our call to courage, we need shared language, skills, tools, and daily practices that can support us through the rumble.
To rumble with vulnerability, I will share part of my story (even as my mind gives me a million reasons not to). I am a woman who has entered the world of Human Resources at 39 years old, 17 years after graduating from college. I am 8 years into recovery and I took the road less traveled for many years. There are days when I show up for work and feel like a kindergartner, but nonetheless, I feel the fear and continue to take the action.
I am fortunate in the fact that I work with a team of women who know my story and have practiced acceptance and non-judgement from the very beginning. As an organization we show up and share the good, bad and ugly. We get in the ring, and we rumble. Since we don’t operate as a traditional 9-5, there are days when I shoot a text and say “for the sake of being vulnerable, I am having a hard time with _______.”
Mary Ila leads us in a way that allows to grow together and to get curious about what could be the “why” underneath our behavior. We are encouraged to lean into our weaknesses and get honest about our struggles. This allows us to feel psychologically safe with one another and to know there is no doubt that we will be supported. Our team has monthly meetings and one on ones where we are led to share honestly about what fits and what doesn’t work for us and how we can grow as a team and invididually.
Is your workplace a safe space that you can be vulnerable and if not, how can your organization embrace the suck and start to rumble? Need some help starting off? Take a look at this Rumble Language from Brené Brown.
Last week, Lorrie talked about braving trust, and a willingness to be vulnerable. She mentioned the theme from Brené Brown of taking off our armor and daring to lead.
Recently, Horizon Point has seen more and more client leaders struggling to take off their armor. We think it’s tied to the desire to be perfect, or at least to be seen as not a failure. Mary Ila’s research in grad school was actually on leader emergence versus leader effectiveness, and she found that emerging as a leader within a group is distinct and separate from being effective once you’re there. Let’s consider a female leader who makes it to the C-suite because of her natural traits (leader emergence) and is now finding herself ineffective. Or consider the student who was elected as SGA president, but once they got the job, they floundered. When people find themselves in leadership roles where they feel ineffective, it’s almost like…because they aren’t perfect, they just freeze up. But what does it even mean to be perfect?
If you’ve seen the show The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, or The Office, you may be familiar with Michael Schur. Schur created The Good Place, a show about how to be good (in order to get to heaven) and when he was doing research he dove deep into ethics and morality. The result was a book called How to Be Perfect. It is poignant and hysterical. The short summary: Perfect is made up. Everyone decides for themselves what is good versus bad or ideal versus not ideal – think back to Mary Ila’s blog two weeks ago about values. We all adopt and refine our personal values overtime which shape what we believe about being good or being perfect, and when we feel like we’re not achieving that, we start to become an unhealthy version of ourselves.
It’s as if in order to fit in, to climb the ladder, to “have a seat at the table“, we learn these behaviors of protecting ourselves, always on the defensive, expecting to be attacked around every corner. A few months ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to the Women in Business students at Mississippi State University, and I focused on this topic. We had a great discussion about the balance of vulnerability and self protection. Specifically, we walked through Brené Brown’s model of Armored versus Daring leadership.
Armored leadership looks like…being a knower and being right.
Daring leadership looks like…being a learner and getting it right.
Source: Urban Wild Studios
We are helping clients recognize when they are demonstrating Armored leadership, and we are helping them develop the skill (because it is truly a skill that takes practice) of taking off their armor, and stepping into Daring leadership.
I’ve also been the emergent leader who then found herself ineffective, but I’ve had incredible mentors who have helped me practice taking off the armor and living in my values. As Mike Schur says, “If we really work at finding the means of our virtues – learning their ins and outs, their vicissitudes and pitfalls, their pros and cons – we become flexible, inquisitive, adaptable, and better people.” In layman’s terms, know your values and practice them.
What armor are you wearing that you could take off? What if you start with one piece? It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If you need help getting started, we have a couple of worksheets that are modified from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead. In the end, we just need to make a choice to live in our values, rumble with vulnerability, and step into Daring Leadership.
One reason we roll our eyes when people start talking about values is that everyone talks a big values game but very few people actually practice one. It can be infuriating, and it’s not just individuals who fall short of the talk. In our experience, only about 10 percent of organizations have operationalized their values into teachable and observable behaviors that are used to train their employees and hold people accountable.
Ten percent.
If you’re not going to take the time to translate values from ideals to behaviors—if you’re not going to teach people the skills they need to show up in a way that’s aligned with those values and then create a culture in which you hold one another accountable for staying aligned with the values—it’s better not to profess any values at all. They become a joke. A cat poster. Total BS.
So how do we convert “professing” into behaving? Here are four ways:
Set Expectations Based on Values: Design your employee development and evaluation tools around your values and specify observable behaviors that are needed in order to meet and/or exceed expectations. If you are having trouble getting behaviors down or understanding how to put a behavior into language, Brown’s reference list of behaviors may help you.
For example, one of our clients values is “Service” and one sub-component of that value where they have to rate a person’s performance in the evaluation is: “The employee acts with empathy, kindness, patience, and honesty in all interactions and shows respect for those that he or she works with, including, but not limited to, co-workers, clients, vendors, and community representatives.”
Then, the person performing the evaluation has to input behavioral based information to support that rating such as, “Jane Doe exhibits our service value when she answers the phone at the front desk. She answers the phone with a positive greeting and tone of ‘Good morning, this is Jane Doe. Thank you for calling today! How may I direct your call or assist you this morning.’ She does this consistently regardless of mood or type of call or time of day. She is also friendly and welcoming at the front desk when all employees come in as well, greeting each person when they enter and exit with personalized exchanges.”
Give Feedback in Values Based Language: Whether you are giving feedback in formal evaluation or in an ongoing developmental way, good and bad behavior should always be framed by putting your values into language.
To continue with our example above, you’re Jane Doe’s supervisor and you hear one of these positive phone interactions. You could immediately respond with, “Jane, I appreciate you being empathetic, kind and patient with the person you just spoke to on the phone. I could tell it was a difficult call, but you never lost patience or made the caller feel inferior. Thank you. You are demonstrating our value of Service and I appreciate it.”
Decide Based on Values: Values really begin to become operationalized when you use them as the basis of all decision making, big or small.
Continuing with our example, let’s say you are deciding if you should even have a person answer the phone or automate it either because of budget constraints or because it just doesn’t seem like the modern thing to do because no one else is doing it anymore.
Based on your value of service, you may ask yourself and others: Does making this cut diminish our ability to show service? Does having a live person answering the phone differentiate us in the marketplace? Does and/or could it bring us a competitive advantage? If we get rid of it, what positive or negative outcomes could come of it based on all our values?
Ask Based on Values: As a leader, using values to help people make decisions and guide their development is a great way to do all three of these things. When someone comes to you with a problem or a decision to make, ask them, “How do you see this decision in light of our organizational values? What do our values lead you to think is the next right thing?” Help them learn to think in terms of values which will help them act on them.
