We provide full service talent management and talent development consulting services. Read our blogs in this category for stories and best practices from real clients and real research on Performance Management.
Career Development is becoming even more relevant in the workforce arena these days. Career Development as Performance Management is a great tool to attract and retain employees.
Revisit this blog post from 2021 for ideas on how to use Career Development as a Performance Management (& retention!) tool.
I will be presenting at BSHRM on May 11 on this topic. We would love to see you there!
Check out where else we will be in the coming weeks here.
Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with a lot of organizations about the importance of psychological safety. A 2012 study by Google showed that psychological safety is far and away the most important factor of a team’s success, yet many organizations lack the psychological safety required to be successful.
A few years ago, I worked with a client that was going through some major changes and employee morale was at rock bottom. As I began speaking with employees one theme stood out, employees didn’t feel safe speaking up. There were a number of reasons for this, including the fact that they felt their voices weren’t heard, their ideas were shot down or ignored, their requests for improvements fell on deaf ears, and yet they were expected to increase performance, meet tough deadlines, and help get the company out of the red. They were working in an organization that fell into the Anxiety Zone. There was low psychological safety but high accountability.
Amy Edmondson, a Harvard professor, is the top authority on psychological safety. She has spent the past thirty years studying the effects of psychological safety on work teams and has found that there are four zones that organizations fall into.
The zones are defined by the level of psychological safety and motivation (keep in mind motivation can be negative or positive) and accountability the team has. The zones are described as follows:
Learning zone: In a learning zone, team members experience high accountability and high psychological safety. This is the ideal learning environment for innovation and growth because even though members are responsible for their actions, their team offers continuous support.
Comfort zone: Team members have high psychological safety and low accountability. While this zone is more relaxed, almost like a vacation, there is no push for creativity and growth.
Apathy zone: With low psychological safety and low accountability, team members fall into the apathy zone. There are no repercussions for mistakes, teams lack adequate communication and support, and individuals struggle to care about their work.
Anxiety zone: Team members experience low psychological safety and high accountability. Communication breaks down and when mistakes are made, people are often too scared of punishment or humiliation to take responsibility. Opportunities for learning and innovation are scarce.
Which zone is your team in and if you’re not in the learning zone, how can you help your organization get there?
This week, I had the great pleasure of facilitating in-person training with a group of junior managers who are working diligently to improve team and unit dynamics among their direct reports. They quickly identified the teams they lead that are functional vs. dysfunctional, and we had some deep discussion about why some teams work and some don’t.
Patrick Lencioni is a subject matter expert on organizational health and team dynamics, and his model of the “5 Dysfunctions of a Team” is embedded in most training about how and why teams work or don’t. The foundation for the model is Trust, followed by Healthy Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results.
Source: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
Trust must come first, and trust isn’t always easy to establish. Effective team leaders build trust through psychological safety, which in turn creates an environment where healthy conflict can sprout.
Our instinct when we hear Conflict is to physically cringe (unless you’re someone who is wired for it), but Healthy Conflict is simply the open sharing and ideas – allowing space for innovation and continuous improvement through challenging and questioning. Without it, a team will never achieve cohesion and commitment.
Another way to think about Commitment in teams is buy-in – are all team members bought-in to the shared purpose and goals? Without buy-in, the team will lack internal accountability.
When team members are not comfortable holding each other accountable to shared purpose and goals, any results achieved maybe by happenstance, not by clear and cohesive teamwork. Results improve exponentially when all members of the team hold themselves and each other accountable.
If teams have Trust, Conflict, Commitment, and Accountability, but struggle to value collective team success over individual achievement, they will ultimately reach some level of dysfunction. A team of people who are focused on their own independent successes are really just a group. There’s a difference!
So, take a minute to evaluate a team you’re a part of. How many of the critical pillars of functional teams do you have? Is your team stuck in one of the dysfunctions? What insights can you take from Lencioni’s model back to your organization?
We’ve been looking at all things workplace wellness throughout the fall, seeking to provide insight to ourselves and our clients about how to create workplaces where people can thrive. A lot of the impetus is put on individuals to manage their wellness and stress. This has its place but is also up to organizational leaders to help create systems and structures that give people the ability to survive and thrive at work. This will impact how they also thrive in all aspects of life given that people do not live and operate in silos.
A thought-provoking book that is geared towards the individual management of stress is a book called Burnout: The Secret of Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Although it focuses on how individuals can “complete the cycle” the book provides insights to organizational leaders on the difference between stress and stressors and how to complete the stress cycle in ways that can be incorporated into workplaces.
First, what the book describes as stressors:
Stressors are what activate the stress response in your body. They can be anything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine could do you harm. There are external stressors: work, money, family, time, cultural norms and expectations, experiences of discrimination, and so on. And there are less tangible, internal stressors: self-criticism, body image, identity, memories, and The Future. In different ways and to different degrees, all of these things may be interpreted by your body as potential threats.
It’s worth noting that as another book, What Happened to You? points out that we may be cognizant of these stressors happening to us, but more often than not, we aren’t. As this book describes, our lower order brain- the brain stem then the diencephalon then the limbic system- takes in input from the inside world of our body and the outside world through our senses and processes stressors and reacts to stressors often before our high order brain, the cortex, ever receives it and is able to THINK about it. That’s why you sweat when you’re nervous when you don’t even realize it, or you flee or “attack” someone when they smell in a way that is associated with a bad memory.
Likewise, we often don’t even realize what we are doing or why we are doing it in reaction to a stressor. We often do not connect the dots to the linkages between our stressors and our stress.
As Burnout describes, stress is:
…the neurological and physiological SHIFT that happens in your body when you encounter one of these threats. It’s an evolutionary adaptive response that helps us cope with things like, say, being chased by a lion or charged by a hippo…. It initiates a response to help you survive…. Your entire body and mind change in response to the perceived threat.
As the book goes on to state, what we’ve been conditioned to do when we experience the lion is run! The book quotes Robert Sapolsky as saying “ …the core of the stress-response is built around the fact that your muscles are going to work like crazy.”
But we aren’t doing very much running these days in modern workplaces. We aren’t involving our muscles to help alleviate and eliminate the stress we feel. We are, however, experiencing a lot of modern-day “lions.”
So what do we do?
1. So first and foremost, one thing workplaces need to incorporate into practice to help their employees complete the stress response is to initiate movement into the workday. Especially when a situation is anticipated to be stressful or a stressor has occurred.
For example, one day I knew I was going to have to have a conversation that was going to induce a stress response with someone I worked with. Instead of sitting down across the desk from her, I said, “Let’s take a walk.” We walked and talked instead of sitting and staring. I know it helped to reduce my stress about the situation and I think it did hers too.
We need to be encouraging people to move and allowing time for movement during the workday. The book suggests that most people need twenty to sixty minutes a day to walk, run, swim, dance, or anything that involves physical activity.
2. In addition, in the modern-day workplace we live in, we may think that dealing with the stressor deals with the stress. We need to realize dealing with the stressor doesn’t necessarily allow us to complete the stress cycle. Take for example a “jerk” you’re dealing with at work. Maybe he or she is not a lion, but they’ve been elevating your stress level at work, so much so that your natural response is either to literally fight the lion, I mean jerk, or to flee from him/her. But, you can’t come across the table at the person literally like your body might be telling you to do, so you play nice. (As the book states, social appropriateness- or being taught to be “nice” at all costs- really impedes the natural stress cycle- it makes us get stuck). Or maybe you even act and go talk to your supervisor and/or theirs about it, or you go home and vent to your spouse about it. But, dealing with the stressor, aka the jerk/lion, doesn’t mean you’ve completed your body’s natural response to the person and situation(s) he or she creates.
So we need to help people, again, move to help complete the stress cycle. But we can also create workplaces where other things happen regularly- all that involve engagement with our bodies and minds- to help deal with the stress, not just the stressor. These are:
3. Breathing. “Deep, slow breaths help regulate the stress response.” Encouraging people to breathe is a very simple thing that can help change the tone of a conversation, meeting, or a person’s outlook on a situation. Asking people to inhale deeply for a count of three to five and exhale at the same or longer cadence is simple, and sometimes seems silly, but it may be the small thing needed to get people to a point where they can access their higher-order brain to be able to think clearly and respond appropriately.
4. Positive social interaction. Things to include in positive social interaction are opportunities for laughter, affection (hugging and kissing- encourage this at home, not at the office-!), and also can include interaction with animals, like petting a dog or a cat.
5. Allow time for creative expression. Incorporating sports, arts, music, theater, and storytelling in all forms can help with this. Some of the work your organization does may naturally incorporate creative outlets. We incorporate coloring sheets, fidgets, and role play at times into training to help initiate this. Asking people to start a meeting by sharing something- in other words, something that is going to allow for storytelling can be a good way to start things off on the right foot. Like, “Tell us about a time when you…” where the question and response is tied to the meeting’s purpose.
6. Allow crying. Crying is one critical way for the body to release stress, yet we label people who cry, especially at work. At the very least, keep a stigma around crying that is neutral and do not punish people at work when crying happens.
7. Help people pay attention to their body’s response to things. This is necessary to know when stress is taking place and also to know when the stress cycle has been completed due to one or more of the interventions above. It’s like knowing you’re full after you’ve eaten. Some people are more in tune with it than others and we need to equip people with the mindfulness to pay attention when we are “hungry” or “full” when it comes to stress as well. Some questions or actions you may help people engage with this is to encourage people to check their heart rate, monitor their body for tension, sweating and other responses that show us we have not completed the stress cycle and need to “eat” to initiate an action to help our bodies do so.
How do you deal with stress at work and how does your organization incorporate systems and actions to help people complete the stress cycle?
If you are interested in learning more about how to create organizations where people thrive, please visit our Illuminate website at: https://horizonpointconsulting.com/illuminate/
I could tell before he opened the door to the car that something had gone wrong at school. My ten-year-old gets in the car, sits down, and scowls. I ask him what’s wrong and he doesn’t answer. I ask his sister what is wrong and she says she doesn’t know.
I’m afraid to have to tell him that we are now headed to do something that he does not like to do, which is to go to reading lessons. He loves his reading teacher, but he just hates to read. Especially when he is in a bad mood.
Sister goes to reading too, but for the exact opposite reason. She loves to read, so when she goes to reading she gets to do something she likes.
I try to think of a way to tell him he has reading for the afternoon without World War III breaking loose. I remember a podcast by the Neuroleadership Institute that I had recently listened to about how to return to the office well. In it, it talked a lot about the value of giving people autonomy, of giving people choices.
So, I asked my son, “Would you like to go to reading first or second?”
“Second!” he says “Definitely second.”
I drop sister off at reading and take him home for a snack and a little break. His mood begins to change, and by the time I take to reading, he is happy. His belly is full, he got to make a choice- a kind of choice that is usually made for him- and he was able to hit the reset button.
Mission accomplished.
Can it be this simple at work? Can just giving people choices over things make a difference? The research and brain science says it sure can.
Take for example studies (here is one in particular) that cite workers given the autonomy (permission) to decorate their own cubicles saw up to a 25% increase in productivity.
COVID has exacerbated the need for autonomy at the office for two reasons 1) Many of us have tasted autonomy in work by being able to work from home (or from anywhere) and we don’t want it stripped back. Taking autonomy away activates all kinds of stress in the form of a threat response. 2) COVID created a lot of stress from uncertainty, where there weren’t a lot of choices, and people need to be able to step back from that stress. One way to do this is to allow for choices or continue to allow choices around where, when, and how work gets done. These reasons and responses are two sides to the same coin.
So what can you do as a leader to help cultivate autonomy at work?:
Resisting the urge to command and control as a leader at work (and as a parent) pays dividends. It always has, but it is increasingly needed as leaders think about how to effectively transition after COVID in order to continue to retain and recruit top talent. Because top talent does have choices, and they will exercise the need to have it by going elsewhere if you don’t foster autonomy at your place of work.
How do you and how will you foster autonomy in work?