sheds-site

How to Make It Safe for People to Speak Up at Work

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 01:31:28 GMT

If we reward people for speaking their truth, we can create better and more productive workplaces.

When people are afraid that something bad will happen to them because of their decision to speak up, in most cases, they won’t do it. And can we really blame them? This is, seemingly, leadership’s failure to foster the type of culture that encourages and rewards people for speaking up.

Whether our experience is real or perceived—and sometimes our perception is our reality—if it feels dangerous and like we may be punished for sharing our ideas, concerns, disagreements, and mistakes, the likelihood of our speaking up decreases.

Professors Ethan Burris and Jim Detert call the process of deciding whether to speak up “voice calculus,” during which people “weigh the expected success and benefits of speaking up against the risks.”

There are plenty of examples where not having a speak-up culture proved disastrous, including the Boeing 737 MAX tragedies that resulted in two plane crashes and 346 lives lost, as safety and quality issues with the MAX are ongoing—or the Titan submersible disaster, where two former OceanGate employees separately voiced similar safety concerns about the thickness of the hull, but found their voices dismissed.

The stakes need not be life and death for employees to feel that the risk to speak simply isn’t safe or worth it. And, when people choose to keep their ideas, concerns, disagreements, and mistakes to themselves, everyone loses. The bottom line, for everyone, is that organizations with speak-up cultures are safer, more innovative, more engaged, and better-performing than their peers.

So, how do you foster a speak-up culture? It starts with resisting the urge to manipulate employees—and ends with making it safe and worthwhile for them to share their truth.

The costs of manipulation

There are two psychological phenomena that affect the outcome of our voice calculus and a propensity for staying quiet: gaslighting and toxic positivity.

Gaslighting occurs when someone is manipulated by psychological means into questioning their own reality. Sounds fun, I know.

For example, someone dares to risk sharing with their leader how they feel, and their leader essentially responds with, “You’re incorrect. You don’t feel that way.” Of course, this is a ridiculous assertion. While we can debate facts and figures, arguing that someone’s feelings are invalid is quite inhumane and certainly lacks emotional intelligence.

A “gaslighter” uses four main techniques (with examples) to influence their victim:

Reality manipulation (“that’s not what happened”)
Scapegoating (“you are the problem” or “they are the problem”)
A straight-up lie (“this contract is designed to protect you”)
Coercion (“do this, or else”)

Convincing others that they themselves are the problem rather than acknowledging and dealing appropriately with the very issue they are raising is a form of gaslighting. This is also abdicating the responsibility of leadership.

Toxic positivity is a more subtle cousin, if you will, of gaslighting. It’s a “good vibes only” approach, where we’re allowed to talk only about good things and the future—no lamenting about the past or talking about the real challenges at hand.

For example, 30% of the workforce was just laid off, and talking about it to cope and grieve is off limits: “Are you a part of the problem or do you want to be a part of the solution?,” people may say.

Heedless positivity is not the same thing as grounded and realistic optimism. Toxic positivity is the belief that people should always remain positive, no matter how dire the circumstances.

Unfortunately, wishing negativity away is not a great strategy. The avoidance of those hard and real emotions is unproductive and unhealthy. Toxic positivity is dysfunctional emotional management, without the full acknowledgment of negative emotions, particularly anger and sadness. These, of course, are part of the full spectrum of human emotions.

Making space for authenticity

When organizations encourage and reward people for sharing how they truly feel and make space for expressing emotions beyond the positive ones, it can be an advantage.

As Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David, Ph.D. teaches us in her 2016 book, Emotional Agility , emotions are data that can inform us and others of what’s going on. When a broader spectrum of emotions is safe and welcome within organizations, we can make better, more sound, holistic, and wise decisions.

To avoid gaslighting or toxic positivity—and, perhaps most pressingly, being fired—people turn the other cheek, put their head down, share the truth but not the whole truth, or just keep walking by. Importantly, it doesn’t matter whether their fears are well-founded or not.

Again, our truth is but our perception. Our brain releases cortisol whenever we sense a threat. Cortisol is the same neurochemical that during our primal days instigated us to either head for the hills or stay and fight. While our surroundings have evolved, our neurobiology hasn’t.

When we perceive a threat, our brains release cortisol—our pupils dilate and our muscles tense just as readily inside the four walls of our office or videoconference screen as they did on the plains. The only difference is that now we’re worried about losing our livelihood, not about being eaten by a large cat. But it feels as critical, as if we were worried for our lives. Cortisol is, after all, designed to keep us safe. If it feels dangerous to speak up, the likelihood that we will diminishes.

So, how do leaders create an environment where people feel it’s safe and worth it to speak up?

How to create a speak-up culture

Leaders can, quite simply, encourage and reward people for sharing their truth.

When we join a team, we very quickly learn the culture and norms—what’s accepted and what’s not. We may hear about someone else’s attempt to share an idea, feedback, concern, disagreement, or mistake. Perhaps it went well; perhaps it didn’t. We may even be so bold as to contribute to a conversation. What happens next typically dictates how we, and others, will behave going forward.

Some may speak up and be encouraged and rewarded for doing so. Still, people may speak up and be ignored or, worse, punished. Some may never find out how leadership would react to what they are thinking because they do the voice calculus in their head and choose to refrain from speaking up at all. When people choose not to speak up, they tend to hold back for two reasons: fear or apathy.

Before someone chooses to speak up, they consciously or unconsciously ask themselves:

Is it safe? As Amy Edmondson teaches, do I feel there is enough psychological safety present for me to take the risk to my job, relationships, and reputation to speak up?
Is it worth it? Do I perceive that speaking up will yield a useful, positive impact? (This is what’s known as “perceived impact.”)

The matrix above maps out the continua of fear to safety and apathy to impact. Obviously, the top-right quadrant is the sweet spot. When safety and impact are high and maintained, you likely have a healthy speak-up culture. This is not a place of fearlessness, but rather a place where people fear less.

The bottom left is a miserable place to be. I’ve been there, and I’ve seen others there, as well. It’s an unhappy marriage between fear and apathy, where it feels neither safe nor worth it to speak up. Quiet quitting (putting one’s head down, doing the bare minimum, waiting until something better comes along) or resignation likely happens here.

The other two quadrants are less straightforward. The top left is characterized by safety, but low impact. You may feel safe to confront a friend, colleague, or boss, but you do not believe doing so would lead to any meaningful change. Perhaps this is because of bureaucracy or a larger systemic issue, or because a personal change in habits would be highly improbable.

The final quadrant in the bottom right—low safety and high impact—is where Ed Pierson , the senior manager at Boeing working on the 737 MAX, found himself leading up to the first crash in October 2018. The cost of remaining silent was too high. This is the reason a speak-up culture is ever more important in high-stakes and potentially dangerous lines of work and environments. Pierson and others courageously risked their jobs, livelihoods, reputations, and relationships to speak up. In his case, after repeated attempts and dead ends, Pierson ultimately decided to whistleblow in December 2019, testifying before the U.S. Congress.

This was also the case for Dr. Kim McLear , a whistleblower who served in the U.S. Coast Guard from 2003 to 2023. As a queer Black woman with a Ph.D. and highly decorated in the Coast Guard, she was unfortunately the target of workplace bullying, psychological harassment, and intimidation.

McLear felt harassed because she brought a differing opinion and point of view; because of her gender, race, sexual orientation, and same-sex marriage; and because she became a trusted confidante across the Coast Guard. In 2016, after enduring two years of direct abuse, she made the conscious decision to speak up, “not only for [her] own survival,” but also to shine a light and educate others on the injustices she felt and saw were occurring more broadly in the organization. Following her speaking up as a whistleblower, she experienced further retaliation.

Today, McLear continues to be an outspoken advocate for helping leaders and organizations create workplaces and communities where people feel they matter, belong, and can be their full, authentic, and healthiest selves.

This is not a license to share whatever we want, with whomever we want, and whenever we want. Emotional intelligence and situational awareness ought to be nurtured and expected. Comedian Craig Ferguson is credited with these brilliant questions that can form a Venn diagram: “Do is need to be said? By me? Now?”

That’s the responsibility of every employee. But the special responsibility of leaders is to value the voice and input of the employees and team members, by making it both psychologically safe and worth it to speak up. To both encourage people to speak up and reward them for doing so, especially when they bring up hard things to hear. Creating such an environment is the responsibility and the advantage of leaders at every level who want to be great at leading, and who want to create a better version of humanity while they do it.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Greater Good Science Center Magazine here . Learn more about what a speak-up culture is and how to build one in my book, in " Speak-Up Culture: When Leaders Truly Listen, People Step Up. "

Let's Play!

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 14:32:19 GMT

Why PLAY is a Bigger Motivator than Purpose �� WHAT?

A bigger motivator at work than purpose?! Yup. It's PLAY.

I've devoted the last 10+ years of my career helping individuals, teams and organizations discover, articulate, activate and embed their purpose. I love purpose. I believe in purpose. And, as it turns out – per Lindsay McGregor & Neel Doshi 's work and in their book " Primed to Perform " – play is the most powerful motivator, two times more powerful than purpose ��

And, it makes sense. Play is directly connected to our activity whereas purpose is one order removed from the actual work. Play is doing something for the sheer enjoyment of doing it. Play is connected to our strengths and Flow Theory. Purpose is being motivated by the impact that our work has on another. It's once removed from our activity. Still motivating, just not as motivating as play.

Uh, kinda mind blowing and worth noting for managers, leaders and us all.

Put everything together and McGregor and Doshi speak to what they call Total Motivation or "ToMo" for short. They distinguish between Direct Motives – Play, Purpose & Potential – and Indirect Motives – Emotional Pressure, Economic Pressure and Inertia. We want to maximize the Direct Motives and minimize the Indirect Motives for our highest Total Motivation as individuals, teams and organizations.

Want to learn more? Watch the video below and get your play on! ��

Can You Walk Outside at Night?

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 20:50:10 GMT

How cognitive empathy can help expand our perspective

Want to grow your own perspective? Connect with people who have a different experience than you. I was recently in a coaching conversation with a client who is a Black male. He described a scenario in which it would have been helpful to have some time and space away from the other inhabitants of his home. Sometimes we ALL need some physical separation, especially during a Covid lockdown. It was nighttime and he mentioned that his home didn’t lend too much privacy to remove himself. He felt kind of stuck and trapped. So, my instinct was… go outside for a walk��

I was coach-like enough to ask a curious question rather than impart my opinion and advice… right away �� I asked him: “If you were to relive this experience again, what, if anything, would you have done differently?”

“Maybe go out for a drive in the car,” he said, “but I was pretty tired.”

Then, I went for it. I asked him to do what I (a white male) would have done. “Could you have gone out for a walk?”

<Pause>

“That’s a woke question," he responded.

While I’m glad (and relieved) he felt that way, I wasn’t trying to be woke. I was trying to be helpful. Turns out my instinct and experience wasn’t so helpful.

He went on to say that he doesn’t feel comfortable walking around his neighbourhood at night because of the color of his skin. He shared that,

“ Walking around at night is not typically a thing I can do .”

Holy sh!t. My mind was kinda blown and I’m glad it was. While I understood it and certainly appreciated his experience, I couldn’t really relate to it.

This is where empathy, specifically emotional empathy, can fail us. Emotional empathy is sharing in an emotional experience with another—being able to feel what they feel. Emotional empathy is pretty hard and sometimes impossible. I don’t know, and will likely never truly know, what it feels like to be a Black male, or to be female giving birth or to miscarry a child, to be a refugee, an Asian in America, or to be LGBTQ2S+ and the list goes on.

Turns out there are other types of empathy that can be more accessible to all , even if we cannot truly feel what another person feels. Enter: cognitive empathy.

Cognitive empathy is when we practice taking another person’s perspective, imagining what it might be like to experience and feel what they are going through.

While I’ve never felt like I couldn’t go for a walk at night in my neighbourhood because of just being who I am, I could imagine what that restriction and inhibition might feel like. I can even imagine and relate to other people’s similar experiences, like my Polish grandparents who lived under Nazi occupation.

Cognitive empathy helped me understand some of my inherent privilege being a white male.

While we sometimes cannot feel what another person feels, we can still work to relate to their experience. We can imagine how they might feel. We can attempt to take on their perspective. And, in doing so, we can act with greater care, concern, and compassion. We can become a part of the change we wish to create for ourselves and others.

So, how can you better use empathy (emotional, cognitive and more) to connect with others and become the change you wish to see?

Purpose and Vision and Mission, OH MY!!

Sun, 21 Mar 2021 15:33:48 GMT

Making sense of and finding use for 'em all

Nearly every organization has a purpose or vision or mission statement... OR all three of them! And, most of them suck. Sorry, it's true and you know it too. Most of these statements are not all that inspiring, real or useful to your people (more on that below). And, if they are not useful to your people, they are not useful for your customer or end-user. Fortunately, there is a use and definition for all three – your purpose, vision and mission. Oh, and your values too �� which we'll unpack and bring all together in the end.

Before we define and apply the terms, let's unpack why these statements are not all that impactful in the way most leaders and organizations use them.

Too often, statements of purpose, vision and mission:

Are too aspirational. They describe who you want to be without doing the hard work to close the gap in becoming it. That's the definition of inauthenticity and people internally and externally easily sniff that out. If your own people roll their eyes at or ignore your internal communications, external marketing and social media, chances are your purpose, vision and mission are simply nice words that are not being practiced in reality. If your people feel genuinely inspired, interested in and proud by your communications, social and marketing, you're on track! Continue to lead the hard work to become who you claim to be because customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.
Put the customer and results first. I see too many organizations putting their client, customer, patient, student, etc. first, often at the sacrifice of the wellbeing of their own people. Too many leaders and organizations neglect the fact that the very people who serve those end-users are their staff. It is always your people from the inside who deliver upon and advance any of these statements of purpose, vision and mission. While an organization exists to provide value to an end-user, leaders must exist to serve their people. When people feel cared for they are all the more likely to care for one another, which leads to better performance – innovation, execution, customer experience and organizational performance. Indeed, the greatest way to improve customer experience is to start by focusing on improving staff experience. It is your inputs that lead to your outputs.
Serve primarily as marketing. If the focus of your purpose, vision and mission is to sell more stuff, that is disingenuous and it will not work in the long run. It is self-serving and not service oriented. The intent of purpose, vision and mission should be to serve something greater than yourself, as a leader and as an organization. I see it so often that purpose lives and is led by a marketing and communications departments. If your purpose only lives in your marketing and communications and is not meaningfully activated and embedded throughout the organization, your purpose, vision and mission will likely die as a campaign and will not become a way of operating.
Aren't based in real, lived experience or include stale stories of old. As you'll read in the descriptions below, these statements must live in real events from employee and customer experiences. They can be from your origin all the way to the very recent past. The strength of your culture is not in how many great stories you have from years ago. The strength of your culture (and the degree to which your purpose, vision and mission are being lived) exists in how many great stories are being created in the present, unearthed and shared inside and throughout the organization.
Cause more confusion than clarity. Language matters. If you use the same terms in different ways, both internally and externally to the organization, you cause confusion. If you use a term and then have to define how you are using that term, it is simply a cause for confusion, noise and a waste of time and attention. And, this confusion of terms creates the need for organizations to refresh their purpose and vision every so often, which is an indication you haven't gotten to it in the first place.

So, let's start by defining the terms so we can use them in the same, effective way.

Purpose

Your purpose is your origin story. It comes from your past and it is the very reason your organization was founded in the first place. Think of your purpose as the foundation of a house. It won't change and everything you do and create can stem from that foundation.

As I'm the founder, my company's purpose is my own purpose. It is: To engage with people in meaningful ways, so that we connect with depth and live in a more fulfilled world . I use my purpose as a filter for decision making. When I and my team think, act and communicate with my purpose, we attract people who believe what we believe. My purpose comes from the meaningful events – the peaks and valleys – of my past. I'll spend the rest of my days trying to bring that purpose to life in everything I do – my work, my relationships, my everything. My purpose won't change – it's the foundation. What I do to bring that purpose to life can continue to morph and pivot as I go and grow and the world around us changes.

Vision

Your vision is an ideal. It is a positive and specific description of a future state. Your vision paints a clear picture in our mind's eye of a world in which your purpose is fully realized and brought to life, which it never will be. This is the reason your purpose and vision are infinite and is linked to your legacy. You can use your career, life and organization as a vehicle to advance your purpose and vision. Simon Sinek does a brilliant job of laying out the characteristics of a vision in his book The Infinite Game , which I wrote more about in this article . He outlines that a vision has these five characteristics:

For something – a positive and specific vision of the future
Inclusive – open to all those who would like to contribute
Service oriented – for the primary benefit of others
Resilient – able to endure political, technological and cultural change
Idealistic – big, bold and ultimately unachievable

Mission

There is also a place for mission. Mission is finite. Mission can be accomplished. That why we say, "mission accomplished" �� It can be a goal, big or small. Tangible milestones we can set, adjust and reach, which helps us measure our momentum to bring our purpose to life and move closer toward advancing our vision.

It's like running a marathon...

One of the most useful analogies I've found for these distinctions is a marathon.

Purpose is the starting line – again, it's the foundation. The basis to start running in the first place.
Missions & goals are the mile markers along the way. Running a marathon without mile markers is unnerving (I'm told ��). You could be at mile 25 of a 26.2 mile marathon. Without being able to track your progress and see the finish line, you are more likely to give up or underperform. Measuring momentum helps us see and feel our progress, though in the context of our careers, lives and organizations, the metrics are not the ultimate goal and be all end all. A balance must exist in the tension to hit the targets while advancing the ultimate vision.
Vision is the finish line that we can see, smell, taste, hear and strive to touch though never quite reach. Remember, vision is infinite. The image of what the finish line looks like is so clear and compelling that you are driven to keep pursuing it and inspire the next generation of leaders to grab your torch and keep running with it.

That's how it all works together – purpose and vision and mission, oh my! I hope these distinctions are helpful... and...

Last call for values

Your values are vital.

Surprise, surprise! There's a key issue I see leaders and organizations doing when it comes to their values – they articulate their values as nouns or adjectives, like Respect or Integrity or Communication or Excellence. While these are nice words, they're meaningless. Those just listed were actually Enron's values – an organization whose accounting scandal, propagated by unethical leadership, caused its 2001 bankruptcy and demise.

The reason we have values is so that we live them. An equation for culture is:

Culture = (Values x Behaviour) ^ Influence

The strength of a culture is determined by the clarity of its values, multiplied by its behaviour. If you have clear values and don't live them... anything multiplied by zero is zero and anything multiplied by a negative is a negative. If you don't have clearly defined values, or worse, you don't live them, you have a toxic, deleterious culture.

Also, the equation is weighted by influence. The more senior you are in the organization the louder your whisper becomes. While every member of an organization contributes to culture through their behaviours, the more senior you are and influence you have the more impact you bear on the culture.

Instead of articulating values as meaningless nouns or adjectives, articulate them as verbs or action phrases. We cannot do a noun or adjective, we can only do a verb. Let's transform Enron's values, shall we?

Treat people like the human beings they are ( Respect )
Say and do the right thing, especially if it's hard and no one is looking ( Integrity )
Communicate clearly, consistently and often ( Communication )
Do great work ( Excellence )

Side note: to me, "Excellence" leads the list of meaningless values.

At least as verbs and action phrases, Enron's values are easier to act upon, reward and recognize in others or as a basis to provide feedback, coaching or discipline if people live outside of them.

Values are the actions and behaviours you take to operate at your best and aligned with your beliefs. Living your values is the antidote to combating the 5 pitfalls outlined at the beginning of this article.

Inspired by your purpose, if you pursue your vision and accomplish missions along the way in a manner that is outside of your values, simply put, that's a problem. You may lose the will and resources to stay in the game and keep going. How you perform – meaning your values in action and behaved, or not – is more important in the long term than your performance. If you run the marathon by cheating, it will catch up with you. If you tolerate and reward behaviour that is outside of your values, you may just become the next Enron. Oh my!