Read our blogs in this category for stories and best practices from real clients and real research on Talent 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.
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?
We’ve been talking about having a Growth Mindset for the past few weeks. If you missed it, check out the series kickoff blog here: What is Growth Mindset?
This time of year, we often get the opportunity to work with high school students looking for guidance related to the next steps after graduation. Career development for students looks like career exploration and exposure. That should start way before the final two years of high school, but it is definitely a priority for most students (and their parents) as secondary education draws to a close. The number one recommendation I have for high school students is to job shadow and/or conduct informational interviews to gain as much exposure as possible before selecting a career path. Check out 4 Tips for an Awesome Job Shadow or Informational Interview.
Growth mindset looks different for individuals who are in the early stages of their careers. It looks like learning and growing. Check out The Essentials of Professional Development for ideas at this stage.
For mid-career, growth mindset looks like continued development and sometimes a revisit to exploration and exposure. It is not uncommon for individuals to seek a career change in the middle of their careers. If someone is looking to make a change, an interest assessment is often a great place to start. A free assessment recommendation and more can be found in Career Change – Is it for you?
As our Growth Mindset series comes to a close, we encourage you to adopt a growth mindset and reach out to us at HPC if we can help!
The Neuroleadership Institute (NLI) defines growth mindset as
…the belief that your skills and abilities can be improved, and that ongoing development is the goal of the work you do. However, creating a growth mindset culture isn’t just about having optimistic employees, but creating a space where employees strive to learn, enjoy being challenged, and feel encouraged to develop new skills.
Let’s look at a case study of NLI’s work with Microsoft.
A few years ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella started a revolution from a revelation: the success of the company was dependent upon a culture of continuous learning and a workforce of “learn-it-alls” instead of “know-it-alls”.
Training and development became the forefront of the Priorities, Habits, and Systems of the company.
NLI’s growth mindset work follows a structure of Priorities → Habits → Systems. In the case of Microsoft, executive leadership adopted a growth mindset as a major priority to be supported through habitual training and learning activities and embedded into organizational systems like performance management and pulse surveys.
Microsoft created “interactive online modules with rich storytelling and multimedia” for their employees to learn independently and on-demand about the why, what, and how of growth mindset. Managers were given conversation guides to help drive and facilitate meaningful discussion about growth mindset within departments and teams. When team members exhibited growth mindset habits, they were recognized and positively reinforced.
Graphic: NLI Growth Mindset Case Study Collection
Training is often thought of as sitting in a room (physical or virtual), facing forward, listening to a facilitator read words from slides. Training doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – look and feel like that.
Our team hosted an interactive workshop this week where participants sat around one large table with the facilitators, everyone facing inward and around at each other. Learning was facilitated through large group discussion, partner discussion, independent work, and even physical movement around the building and the block (we literally walked around the block during a break!).
Is your training stale? How can you shift the paradigm to a Growth Mindset in your training and development priorities, habits, and systems?
Oftentimes getting from one place to another requires a bridge to cross. A connection point between two things that seem unconnected or so far apart they can’t be reached by conventional means is necessary.
These “bridges” are often grounded in both sides of what they are trying to connect. They are meaningless and useless if they don’t have two sides for anchoring.
So is true of meeting survival needs and getting to “thrive” needs in the workplace. Relational needs are the bridge. Relational needs have roots and support in both survive and thrive and they provide a way between the two. Meeting relational needs is the bridge. They also may be the linchpin.
In her book Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown seeks to map and define the language of feelings and emotions before being able to build meaningful connections. In her section on “Places We Go When We Search For Connection” she seeks to define belonging and connection and contrast it with disconnection and loneliness.
In this section, Brown drives home the point that relational needs (belonging and connection) are both about surviving and thriving. She states, “from an evolutionary perspective, connection was about survival, today, it’s what gives purpose and meaning in our lives. Research shows that ‘people who have strong connections with others are happier, healthier, and better able to cope with the stresses of everyday life.’”
In contrast, disconnection can “‘actually share the same neural pathways with feelings of physical pain.’ Current neuroscience research shows that the pain and feelings of disconnection are often as real as physical pain.” (For more on this and the connection to building inclusive workplaces, tune into this Neuroleadership Podcast.)
We need connection – pun intended – to build the bridge to meet our survival needs that are evolutionary and adaptive, as well as to help us meet our full potential and thrive-to produce meaningful, creative, and purpose-driven work..
So what do we do to meet relational needs and build bridges in the workplace?:
So, in the workplace we need to:
a. Puts guardrails around communication almost exclusively done through means that don’t give people literal voice. COVID has made this harder. A simple guardrail would be “cameras on” during a virtual meeting. A larger area of focus would be training leaders on what modes of communication are appropriate given what needs to be communicated and teaching people how to not “hide” behind email and text messaging when difficult conversations are needed. Read Do Nothing for more practical insights on this.
b. Build workspaces that foster communication in person. This doesn’t mean the open office environment, but it does mean common spaces where people can interact formally and informally throughout the work day as people return to the office post pandemic. This could be common break areas for meals and common meetings areas conducive to formal meetings and also informal chats that pop up doing the workday. (Note: Don’t take this to mean we are advocating for a 100% return to the office all day, everyday post COVID. Research shows that most people want a hybrid arrangement and the research also supports the critical piece autonomy and flexibility play in meeting thrive needs. More on this in next week’s post.)
2. Focus on building psychological safety. In Atlas of the Heart and her other works, Brown repeatedly emphasizes how important belonging is. She says that “true belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.” The best way to foster this type of belonging that leads to meeting both survive and thrive needs is to build a psychologically safe environment. Here is some more information from us on psychological safety and some tools for building a psychologically safe workplace from Google.
When we produce a psychologically safe environment we get over the bridge to the thrive side, thus increasing positive workplace outcomes and diminishing negative ones as found in the research by Amy Edmondson.
In summation, work by William Patrick cited in Atlas of the Heart emphasizes our need not for individualism (which we seem to value so much, particularly in western cultures) but from our “collective ability to plan, communicate, and work together.” Our workplaces can’t thrive without these things either.
Interested in learning more about how to apply these principles in the workplace? Sign up for our Illuminate workshop.