And, you know what that feels like to be in a team where your voice doesn’t feel like it matters or you don’t feel like you belong or it doesn’t feel like you’re valued, and then how that shuts down your own perspectives and ways that you contribute. So, for me, as I moved into leadership spaces, I’ve never forgotten where I began. And I think that’s one of the most important pieces, is that you were once the new intern, you were once the new hire, you were once that person who is trying to get their sea legs and their bearings of how do I operate here and how do things move.
So if my role now as the leader is we need to accomplish some big picture, and I stay grounded with, “I always know what it feels like to be the new person on the team”, then now I’m way more cognizant to what’s the environment that I’m building for success. Do I actually have a space that’s conducive for people’s growth? So it’s the ultimate pillar of really building a cohesive team is as the leader, do I actually care?
And that’s been the biggest thing for me. Like, even looking through some of my companies that I’ve run, I can think back to early phases in my second business where we were starting to really start doing more events in the community, taking up more space, teaching classes, all kinds of stuff. And for the first two years, whenever I would teach a class, I would have to bring in an outside consultant. I’d have to bring in some other source to help me do that.
But as I started over the next two years, pouring into my staff, pouring into my team, really educating them, helping grow their competency, helping them become solution oriented, grow their maturity and their approach to things, well, now that shifted the entire approach of how I had to do business because now I didn’t necessarily need those outside consultants. Now, I had built a team that was competent, right? Which shifted the entire culture, right? Because on the front end, when your team feels like, oh, you’re not trusted, and therefore I need to bring in an outside source, that also changes how they show up.
Right? Now they feel a little bit less empowered. They’re just going to check the box, they’re just going to do the bare minimum to get through the day. But when they become the focal focal point and you’re the people that I’m leaning on, and together we’re going to accomplish this big mission, well, now that changes. Well, now I’m a part of it. Now I have buy in, now I have stake in the game, now I want to engage at a higher level. Now I have new questions.
So my role as a leader, right? Is one I had to slow down to speed up. So I had to stop rushing my people to be a version of me because they’re not, right? Like I’m me, because I’ve done all this work for all these years and learned all these skill sets. But now the role is not to identify a copy. It’s to help train someone else and give them what I know. So slowing down the speed up on the front end of not having this super high bar expectation that someone’s going to be perfect, but understanding, hey, there’s a new person.
And it took me time to learn all this, right? So if I wanted that same grace for myself, I should be giving that same grace to others, right? And giving them that time on the front end to really help. So what that shifted in the culture of my business as we kind of fast forwarded two years is now we did a lot more internal work, right? And instead of bringing in that outside person, I could leverage this person over here.
And now, you know, instead of me being an integral part of it, I can pull two, three people from the team and let them go run that project, right? And then, hey, just let me know how it goes or where I can help, right? And now they feel like they have ownership, and, you know, it just. It changes everything. But I think going back to some of the core fundamentals of things we’ve talked about before, is that environment conducive for growth, right? What is that actually? What’s the foundation of that? What’s the fertilizer for that environment?
Psychological safety, right?
Where people aren’t scared to fail. Where they’re not scared to ask a question, where they’re not scared to mess up, right? And, you know, one big project that a lot of people might have heard of, if you haven’t, it’s a valuable one, is Google’s project “Aristotle”, right, where they studied all high performing teams. And the biggest thing they found, I mean, it’s based on Aristotle’s quote, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But, like, what they found is, you know, having that psychological safety built in is what builds the highest performing teams.
Well, I just had coffee this morning with a friend. We sat at the park, and we just kind of talked about business and leadership and all that. And as we’re sitting there, he asked about diversity and inclusion work, and he said, you know, I don’t agree with that. I don’t think it’s real. And I said, that’s not a choice that you can make. I was like, it’s not optional. It’s not an opinion based thing. I was like, I have five fingers, and they’re all different, right? I have diverse fingers, right? Like, I didn’t choose to all have, like, a handful of thumbs. But the biggest thing that people need to overcome when it comes to looking at diversity and inclusion work is how they gauge at success. I was like, the issue that I see in a lot of corporations, organizations, school systems, all that is that they think it’s a checkbox. They think it’s just a thing that I can say, oh, we grew by this amount of revenue. So therefore, that’s not how it works.
It’s in the conversation. It’s slowing down with somebody. It’s knowing about their family, it’s knowing what’s going into their decision making process. It’s being able to hold space for them so that they can perform at their best, which may not be on Monday, it may be on Wednesday, maybe Tuesday. They need a little bit of time to figure out some stuff with the kids, right?
And as a leader, if I can slow down to have that convo on Monday, to give them space on Tuesday, when they show up Wednesday, they’re super appreciative. They’re grateful for the environment that they’re a part of. They’re glad they have a leader who can see them and respect them for who they are as a person. And they show up Wednesday way more excited to get to work. So it’s not the metric, it’s the slowing down, the taking time and really building in that psychological safety aspect as the fertilizer for the environment where someone can say, hey, I’m struggling with this.
I’m having a little bit of a hard time here. I could use some help, or I just need a day. Whatever the thing is a person needs. Because when you start implementing these slow down practices, listening practices, asking one more question, practices. And I think we talked about that in a previous episode, too, of just, you know, those two little phrases of say more and what makes you say that?
Right?Little things. If I can just do that as a leader with my team, people show up way differently.
Yeah, but I think what you’re talking about is, like, how do you create that space so that people can show up, like, more than just, you know, clock in, clock out, you know, do the time kind of a thing that I can actually show up and I can be, you know, I think there’s a lot of different disagreements around, like, are we ever fully present that whole thing, right? But when I know that I have space to take care of other things, that means that I also have space to take care of these things.
And if I know that, you know, in my team, however, you know, if it’s a work team or a social team, like, whatever group of people that I know that I have those different spaces and those different times allotted for, accounted for, and kind of honored and respected by those different people groups, well, then I can show up more freely. Even if I’m not fully present, I can be more free to show up more holistically in this space, in this way.
But that, I think, does come from, I have that openness, or, like, it’s okay. That’s more than just words. It’s not just like, oh, this is a psychologically safe workplace. Well, you don’t get to declare that it needs to actually be that. And so when we’re showing up in those spaces, I’m thinking of, like, one of the research projects that I got to, I kind, it just sort of happened, was there was a team that was really struggling. A lot of internal dissension, a lot of hierarchical challenges where kind of the titles carried more weight than maybe the productivity or even the skills that the team had to kind of play with.
And one of the metrics that we used was just productivity, right? Like, your team is stuck. Like, it’s not actually coming to the result that you want them to come to. So can we try some of these goofy, silly team building things? Can we break down some of these barriers? Can we get rid of some of this hierarchical issue and see, right? Hypothesis. It’s a guess. And see if your team can actually increase its productivity. Can you get back in the groove of actually getting what you’re here to do done?
Um, and it was like, ah, this is dumb. This is goofy. Like, whatever. You know, like, very dismissive. But they were also completely at a roadblock, and they hadn’t found any other avenues, so they were like, I mean, if you want to. Okay, whatever. And it actually worked. And people had space to kind of share things in ways that were less scary than, like, going to the boss and airing grievances. Instead, it just came up in activity and, like, completely irrelevant to the actual work that they’re doing.
But just to kind of break down some of those social barriers and to allow people to bump shoulders with each other in a way that didn’t have that hierarchy associated with it. And now all of a sudden, people were just people and they could just be themselves. And then when they walked back into the work, now all of a sudden they had these other versions of each other that were also present at the same time.
And the collaboration, the communication was smoother. They were more able to actually hash stuff out and like, come up with a, like, come into that problem and walk through toward some semblance of any solutions as opposed to then just, well, that’s a problem, right? And then that was where their team was stuck. Now they were able to iterate, they were able to collaborate, they were able to, like, challenge each other’s thinking and not have any of this fear kind of associated with it, at least not as much as what there had been before. Enough had been kind of broken down that they could start trying to kind of move again.
But those are the things, right, where, like, the work needs to get done. Whatever that work is, it just needs to get done. And then we come in with these words like “psychological safety” and like all this, like the stuff that seems so ambiguous, but you can actually quantify some of these outcomes in a way that, you know, is meaningful to people who care about metrics, even if maybe those interventions, in my words, right, like the interventions may seem a little, I don’t know, out of left field or not, you know, connected, right? People are like, oh, we need to look at team management, we need to look at conflict resolution, we need to look at team building.
Like, what? But to see how some of those things are actually connected, right? It’s just attempt the intervention and collect the data. And did the data shift? Right? Like that’s, that’s really what it comes down to. But sometimes it doesn’t feel as directly connected or interconnected as what most of us may assume from the beginning.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you described it so perfectly of just remembering the humanity of us. Like remembering we’re people. And that’s the thing that we forget when we come into the office or we come to in some professional setting and you’re there under the guise of whatever you’re there for, right? I’m this behavioral technician, or I’m this project analyst, or I’m this whatever the title is.
And in your own mental model, you have a picture of what that’s supposed to be, and you step into the room in that picture, not in your truth. And I think the value of these team building and like more explorative exercises, is it reminds us of who we are that, yes, you may be a supervisor, right? But also, you’re a mom who has a child with disabilities, a parent who’s blind, who just moved in with you, you’re pregnant with your second child, and you just got a promotion at job, at your work, right? And you’re dealing with all these competing things inside of your scenario that if I just see you as the person on the other side of this outlook email, your challenge can feel like an attack or you’re not responding to my email can feel like laziness or procrastination.
But when I know who you are, I’m like, she’s probably just had, like, some stuff going on. Like, I’ll just ping her tomorrow, right?
And it changes the way that we approach each other, the way that we work with each other, and we have so much more grace and understanding because now I want to help you. Now when you can’t get back to me with that email by a certain time, you know what, I understand that you have life stuff going on. Let me fill the gap for you. Let me help the team support. Like, let me show up because we know each other.
We have buy in with each other’s lives, right? I want you to now be successful. You’re not just another person who’s at this company, right? I want you to win with the family. Go ahead.
What you’re talking about is contextual behavior analysis. So, like, you are making assumptions on someone else’s kind of motive, or, you know, we would call it like that function of behavior. Why is what I’m seeing happening? But you are weighing so much of that analysis on the context, right? And if you don’t know the context, you cannot consider that in part of your analysis. And that’s something that I do a ton, not just with students, right? But with staff, too. Exactly the way you’re talking about it, right? You’re like, I’ll get pulled in into a conversation, and some staff has a certain perspective around another staff. And so for me, I’m just like, okay, take it in, right? Like, all the stories, all the information.
But then I’m also seeking additional information that I wasn’t provided from the get go. A lot of times it’s just information that people don’t know or they don’t have about each other. And that could be anything from the staff,to the community, to the kid, to the family, to, like, all the different angles. It’s just, I don’t know. I ask a ton of questions, right? Not to just be annoying, but truly to try to open up any bit of context that could then make the situation make more sense.
And I think within a team, as much as I personally tend to really hate a lot of these team building exercises, like, that’s the purpose of it, right? It opens up context in a way that it doesn’t necessarily just naturally happen in the context of a work situation or work, you know, work dynamics. But what you’re talking about is truly, like that contextual behavior analysis. You’re looking at the behavior, you’re trying to understand why or, you know, what that choice is communicating, and you’re only able to do that with the information that you have at hand.
Yeah.And I think this goes back to where this convo began, of my role as a leader is I have to care about the people.
Right?Like, I cannot have an effective team if I just see them as people in numbers, right?I have to see them as humans with families. And, like, when I do, then. Now I understand that asking these other questions matter, that learning about the context matters, right?
And for me, it always goes back to that same self reflection of, I remember being the newest person and so many things that impacted my work performance that no one ever asked about. They never asked about what was going on at home or how my family was doing or, you know, what I thought about certain things. They never asked about it. They just said, hey, that guy, he’s not really performing that well.
And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. I just didn’t know how. And I needed a space where someone could just guide me.
Right? Have a little support. So all the way back to where we began is like, as a leader looking at a team, I have to know very clearly that when I focus on the person that moves the bottom line, and therefore, my shift and focus needs to be the person, right?
Which, you know, and there’s so many things that we can do to really help move the needle forward there, one of which is a mentorship program, right? That’s something that I implement in every organization I’m a part of is there needs to be a mentoring aspect in some way. However, not an assigned mentor.
