Joy@Work Podcast - How to Undermine Engagement, Destroy Trust and Wreck Collaboration Before it Can Even Dare Take Root

How to Undermine Engagement, Destroy Trust and Wreck Collaboration Before it Can Even Dare Take Root

06/03/21 • 21 min

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Joy@Work Podcast

The Power of Deep Listening: Creating Psychological Safety for Team Effectiveness and Joy@Work

Google's "Project Aristotle" sought to determine the key factors of effective teams and found that Psychological Safety is the #1 factor for team effectiveness, followed by Dependability and Meaning/Impact. Listening deeply and asking questions is essential for creating a culture of safety, belonging and mattering in the workplace and preventing disasters resulting from a lack of open, candid communication. Doing this can help create trust, collaboration and joy at work.

Collaboration is when an effective team harnesses the best out of individuals working together and appears to be disarmingly simple:

“to work with another person or group in order to achieve or do something”

But everyone in the team comes with their own personality, their culture and way of doing things and their own competitiveness, their fears, their concerns and their needs. For successful and fruitful collaboration, the leader needs to help the team be actively engaged in what they are doing, and that they trust one another by setting the groundwork to build a solid foundation and then maintaining it rigorously.

Many thousands of leaders have failed to create team unity, trust and engagement through team building courses and enforced jollity of casual Friday or a virtual happy hour. But the buzz from that ropes course wears thin after a few days when your brain recognises that what it wants and needs is still missing.

How do we fix that? Well, before we get to that let’s check in on what your brain really wants and needs:

What Your Brain Wants and Needs:

Fortunately, we know that every human being shares a fundamental need for three things in life:

The need to feel safe

The need to belong to a group or tribe, and

The need to believe that they and what they do, matters

Getting a team to be actively engaged, to trust each other and collaborate takes plenty of leadership time and effort - so why would you destroy it before it has a chance?

Purpose

In this guide we’ll understand how to build and maintain the critical foundation's of Safety, Belonging and Mattering by Listening Deeply so that the team can trust each other and, with clarity of their own purpose and direction, be actively engaged and collaborate to achieve the desired results.

Process

We'll look Pat Lencioni's famous work on the five dysfunctions of a team and see how further research shows that Safety, Belonging and Mattering are crucial to your brain and thus to your ability to trust and collaborate. We'll then look at how listening deeply is the ONE missing ingredient that all leaders can do and use to help build the foundations and hence, ultimately, get the results they desire.

Payoff

When you start to listen deeply you will begin to dismantle any climate of fear or the lack of safety felt in too many organisations. Team members will learn that they can speak up and help the leader build and maintain the edifying climate to guide themselves and other team members towards effective trust and collaboration.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.joyatwork.coach

The Power of Deep Listening: Creating Psychological Safety for Team Effectiveness and Joy@Work

Collaboration is when an effective team harnesses the best out of individuals working together and appears to be disarmingly simple:

“to work with another person or group in order to achieve or do something”

How do we fix that? Well, before we get to that let’s check in on what your brain really wants and needs:

What Your Brain Wants and Needs:

Fortunately, we know that every human being shares a fundamental need for three things in life:

The need to feel safe

The need to belong to a group or tribe, and

The need to believe that they and what they do, matters

Getting a team to be actively engaged, to trust each other and collaborate takes plenty of leadership time and effort - so why would you destroy it before it has a chance?

Purpose

Process

Payoff

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.joyatwork.coach

Previous Episode

Understand Me 4 - Who are they?

At this point, you know what your audience Knows and what the Need to know. You've got a handle on their Opinion and remember that they need to be right, and they need to belong and you will be encouraging their positive self-image. But you recall the saying it's not what you know but who you know? In this section we'll cover:

1. Stakeholder Mapping

2. Action Types

Stakeholder Mapping

Stakeholder or audience mapping uses a simple 2x2 matrix with Low to high power on the vertical axis and low to high interest across the horizontal.

Consider the specific individual members of your audience and place them on the grid relative to each other. Include, where appropriate, stakeholders who might not be personally present but sending a representative (aka spy).

Your focus in your presentation are those individuals who are most interested in your topic and have the power to affect the change you desire.

When you are preparing a sales presentation, for example, it pays to know who is the key decision maker (powerful) and the most interested. Not always the same person! I often find myself presenting to greatly interested people with little power and the person with the actual power isn't even in the room. I think of this as a gatekeeping presentation and once through the gate, I have a chance to pitch to the person with the power.

When you have a clear idea about the power and interest in the room, it's time to establish how you call the four different audience types to action.

Nancy Duarte says that there are four audience types, each requiring a slightly different call to action:

There are:

Doers, Suppliers, Influencers and Innovators.

- A Doer is someone who instigates activities. You should ask them to assemble, make decisions, gather, respond or attempt.

- A Supplier is a person who controls resources. Ask them to acquire, fund, support or provide resources.

- Influencers change perceptions. Ask them to activate, convert, empower or promote.

- Innovators generate ideas to add value to and spread your ideas. Ask them to create, discover, invent or pioneer.

How do you call to action if you don't know their type?

Intuitively you can see that these four audience types make sense. When you know your audience well and have experienced presenting to them before, it's relatively easy to pin them down to a particular type. But there will be times when you don't know them well enough. In such a situation, make sure to sow those key action verbs throughout your presentation noting who responds to each, usually shown through greater attentiveness, a smile, a nod or simply paying attention. Note also any of the verbs that appear to fall on deaf ears, you might not, for example, have any innovators in the room.

Above all, be sure to establish the audience type for the most powerful interested stakeholder and focus on getting the right call to action to them.

Of course, all of this is moot if you don't actually have a call to action

Your call to action for this episode is to identify your audience, map them on a simple power/interest grid and work out, if you can, their audience type.

I use post-its on a whiteboard (Here's my Blank Miro Template you can use) to help me in planning. And once I have identified the key stakeholders (high power and high interest) I take a little longer to get to find out what they know, and specifically what they need to know and take a little extra effort to understand their opinion and create a call to action that will activate them to fund the resources we need to make the change they need.

On that template, you’ll also map your Trust and Respect Matrix actions.

Next Episode

Four Questions Every Leader Should Ask (If They Want To Improve Performance)

Welcome to the Joy at Work Podcast with me, Dr John Kenworthy. In this guide we're learning the:

Four questions every leader should be asking, if they want to improve performance.

Introduction

Improved performance requires growth. And without growth, our career is doomed to stagnation and eventual death. Am I exaggerating? Well, stop watering your plants for a few weeks and see what happens. Organizations that don't get better, don't improve their performance year on year are stagnating too.

If you has a leader, don't grow, then your career will stagnate. You may be exceptionally good at what you do, but if you want to move up the hierarchy, you need to grow into that position before you get given it because afterwards is far too late.

Plus you won't have developed your team to take on your job. So how can they promote you? How, then do we raise performance easily?

Purpose

Our purpose and payoff being prepared to learn and change, and put in the necessary effort, is a critical step in growth and improve. And getting yourself and team members to regularly consider what's going well. And what needs work is essential. If you want to improve performance.

Process

To do this, I'm sharing Four simple yet, oh, so powerful neuroscience-based questions that work to stimulate personal growth and the resulting conversations will take you in just five to 15 minutes of your time.

Payoff

Use it once now, as I guide you and you'll immediately gain one benefit with a very clear action for next week. Use it with your team members once and you'll gain one improvement in performance next week.

Use it weekly. And you'll gain 52 improvements this year. The improvements don't have to be huge. Small gains add greatly.

Before I start with the four questions, grab yourself a pen and paper or a iPad with a pencil, anything to make notes and be ready to pause as we go through this. The four questions starting off with keeping the good stuff.

The Four Questions

If I were to ask you to tell me how was work for you this past week or so the chances are very high that you would reply along the lines of : "it was okay, good. not bad, fine, or terrible. It's dull, boring, and not at all helpful. Instead, I'll ask:

" Tell me, what three specific things that you enjoyed and, or believe that you did really well at work this week?

So here, I'm going to give you a few moments to consider your answer, pause the player. If you're listening and write them down. If you can.

Pause the player and write down your answer to the question.

If this is your first time, you are probably finding this a little challenging. If you're replying nothing, uh, stop and find something go further back in time, if you need to, but do the work here. You'll thank me later.

Got three things. Fantastic. If we were in a live coaching here, I'd be probing into your answers to help you dig out the beautiful gems.

For now let your magnificent mind mull on these and let's get to the easy part.

What Needs Work?

Identifying what needs work.

Now, if you struggled some with answering that first question, you are in very good company. Pretty well, all of my clients struggle with that first question because, well, we're so used to dwelling on this next part.

What needs work. Ready? Here's your question:

What is the one real challenge for you that if you improved or changed would have the greatest positive impact on your performance, now?

Let me repeat that. And then I'll pause. What is the one real challenge for you that if you improved or changed would have the greatest positive impact on your performance, now?

Again, pause the player and write down your answer. Got one? Not two or more choose one. Is it about somebody else changing? Then think again, this is about you, your performance. Great. Awesome.

If you and I were in a coaching session right now, I'd be digging in to make sure that this is the real core challenge.

So I'm going to add on a quick question to help you right now.

Is there anything else that is the real, real challenge for you here?

Now, before you rush off and start, I have two more questions for you. Next, let's get you motivated.

Finding the Drive

Finding the drive.

What exactly do you want to achieve?

If you or somebody of whom you're asking with this is ...