I am struck by what appears to be more frequent, genuine kindness in language and actions today, especially at work. Checking on others. Showing real concern. Smiling bigger at seeing someone appear on the video call. Space given on those video calls to listen to what others are going through. Proactive reach-outs. Grace. People sharing real confessions of downfalls in how they’re coping. This amount of generosity does not seem to be part of the usual persona of work. 

Maybe people are reconsidering what it means to be kind at work. Reconsidering boundaries. Still professional but more authentic. Everyone is actively coping. We’re all immersed in this grand experiment.

This got me thinking: What if someone had designed this thing we’re all going through as an experiment? Why might such an experiment be created? What would be its purpose? Why might you agree to be part of it?

Initial thoughts: Maybe to…

• Test how well you work with your team 100% remotely? Learn to get great at it?
• Appreciate all you have?
• Understand what you really need and what you really don’t need?
• Appreciate your health? 
• Strengthen the bonds with your family?
• Appreciate your friends? Find ways to spend time with them that doesn't require physically meeting somewhere?
• Appreciate all that your community provides you? Appreciate your neighbors?
• Appreciate how much you love to do certain things? Like a night out? A sports event? The theatre? 
• Learn how to stay put? Daydream? Watch the clouds go by? Enjoy silence?
• Learn how to be resourceful and less dependent?
• Rediscover hobbies? Reimagine fun?
• Contribute to improving the planet by not driving or taking public transportation?
• Work deeply on a project that you've always wanted to do?
• Be more self-reflective?
• Consider what you want your life to be about? Consider how that shows up in your words and actions? Maybe rework that?

​I think we’re learning these and a lot of other things by accident. That’s quite an experiment!

I hope the themes of kindness and love we’re seeing more often in the workplace persist long after we get back to “normal”. I know not everyone is having this experience but a move in this direction is good for everyone, good for our collective health. And, a giant step toward more joy at work.

As we go further into the COVID-19 pandemic, the prevalence of low-level anxiety is increasing.  The end is uncertain.  We may have much further to go.  Although many have a low probability of danger from the virus, the very existence of a global pandemic coupled with consistent news stories and press conferences that describe terrible scenes of overwhelmed hospitals and exhausted medical staff all fuel the anxiety that seems to be within us all.  On top of all of this, the economy has slowed and tens of millions are out of work, furloughed, or dealing with reduced hours.  I’ve had two significant experiences with persistent low-level anxiety.  What I learned from those experiences is helping me now as I deal with my own anxiety as well as helping my loved one’s anxiety.

Finding Inner Calm
In 2018, I was diagnosed with oral cancer.  I did not smoke.  I exercised.  I was in good health.  It was a shock.  The initial few months were consumed with tests and discussions with doctors about treatment.  We landed on surgery first.  I was concerned but not overwhelmed.  I had either enough confidence or could live in denial (or maybe both) so that the stress didn’t get to me.  Then, when the first surgery wasn’t fully successful and I needed a second, the anxiety started to settle in.  Insidious and persistent anxiety.   Mostly I was able to push the anxiety away, but it never fully left.  After the second surgery which was much more invasive leaving a hole in the roof of my mouth that required a prosthetic device called an obturator to cover the hole so I could eat and talk, the low-level anxiety began to build.  A few weeks later I began radiation treatment.  
I had no idea how difficult radiation would be.  Although the application of the radiation itself is rather brief, just minutes, the process is claustrophobic.  For head and neck radiation, a form-fitting mask is used.  In my case I would lay on my back, the mask would be placed over my face, neck, and shoulders, and then clipped into the table so that I could not move.  Having served in the military, I was used to experiences that made me uncomfortable, even afraid, but this was different.  Immobilized while a massive machine orbited around my head and irradiating me was terrifying.
To cope I reached back into my past and found prayer.  I have not been a regular churchgoer for decades, but having grown up Catholic I had many prayers memorized.  One of those is the Rosary.  As the machine would start, my heart rate would go up and the anxiety along with it.  I would begin to recite the rosary in my head.  My relationship with God has been personal and mostly private.  I don’t know that it deepened with this experience.  I was scared and was looking for solace.  Prayer helped to calm my mind and calm the anxiety.  My advice for all of us in this “after” time is to:

Find the inner conversation that helps to calm you

This does not have to prayer per se.  It could be reciting a poem or a mantra or a song.  But it has to have meaning.  The key is to wrap your mind around that meaning in order to focus it on what strengthens you and not the anxiety that weakens you.  

Finding Outer Calm
In 2007, I was mobilized from the Navy Reserves and sent to Baghdad.  I was shocked.  I had spent 10 years on active duty as a Naval Aviator landing planes on aircraft carriers and another 9  years in reserve units that were supposed to be at the top of the list for mobilization.  Yet, it never happened.  Now, I was working for the Naval Historical Center in the Washington DC Naval Yard, literally recording interviews to go into the archive for historians to use decades from now.  I was planning on retiring soon!
Nevertheless, I was mobilized landing on the staff of Gen Petreaus in the heart of the Green Zone.  For the first few months rocket and mortar attacks were frequent, if not daily several times a week.  When the siren first goes off and the voice comes up over the loudspeaker “DUCK AND COVER!!” my heart would race as I would run to the nearest shelter or dive under my desk.  But after a couple of weeks of that, I (and every other newbie) stopped reacting.  It became part of the background but still with a general sense of anxiety.  There were not significant numbers of injuries and deaths around the Green Zone but they did occur with enough frequency that I was never completely comfortable outside of a sturdy building.  There was safety in many of the buildings but not all.  We were much more exposed outside. If we were outside and the siren would go off, we would always scramble for shelter.
Trying to work in an environment where people are trying to kill you but you can’t do anything to fight back can be debilitating.  Fortunately, those in the military excel at dark humor.  This was the outlet that we used to deal with the low-level anxiety that would otherwise have ground us down day by day.  What was key in this coping mechanism was not so much the humor itself but the camaraderie it creates.  Going through a difficult circumstance with other people is significantly easier to take.  It provides a shared community to vent in a way that is acceptable to the group.  It also provides a way to gauge the danger and therefore calibrate the anxiety.  My advice to you gentle reader is to:

Find the outer conversation that helps to calm you

Applying this to the current pandemic
Note that for both of these suggestions, whether inner or outer, I’m suggesting conversation.  The word conversation means to literally “turn with” as in we are pointed in the same direction.  This is important and not just boring semantics.  With a group, the interaction has to be an exchange that brings you together.  So not just you venting so that you feel better, but you conversing so that you feel better.  For an inner conversation, this is you connecting to some higher truth, whatever that means for you.  For me it was prayer but for you, it can be whatever helps you to connect.  What’s important is the change of viewpoint that moves away from the low-level anxiety and toward a better possibility.  You can’t manage the pandemic so that it goes away, but you can manage your reaction to it.

​

​Early in my change career, my boss, my colleagues, and I were learning the art and science of change work by absorbing everything we could get our hands on. We poured over books together to see what we could glean that was relevant to our current business problems and applied the concepts right away. We were learning like crazy. It was energizing because we knew we had to get it right. Our reputations depended on it. A lot of people were depending on us.
 
At the time, most of the advice we were taking in was about getting from current state to future state, point A to point B. The goal was to have a clear articulation of both, examine the difference, then dive in to close the gap. All great concepts, but we quickly ran into a brick wall. 
 
My boss was spending a huge amount of energy and time to get our senior leaders to articulate "B". It was exasperating for her. Over and over again, she'd come back to the team feeling like she was no closer to understanding the future state. We were at a loss! How could we do our work without "B!"
 
Perhaps we took this idea too literally. Perhaps that was a reflection of our inexperience. Experience over decades and through a wide variety of change work helped me to let go of the need for a clear “B” future state and instead focus on the direction. In fact, I don’t believe there is a “B”, at least not the way I understood it then. It’s a phantom that can take a life of its own. Worse, it can be an excuse for not moving forward and a source of friction or even the cause of a rift between people.
 
Here’s what I’ve long believed since then: You need to have an idea of where you're going and why. It needs to rooted in your values and the drivers of your business. It needs to be compelling to you because it's going to get hard sometimes. And you need to be okay with what you don't know yet so much so that you'd be comfortable telling others what you don't know yet. You also need to be prepared to learn your way forward because as you embark on your change you will be actively learning and making adjustments to your implementation strategy or even the change goal itself!
 
Here's the difference: Rather than putting pressure on yourself to create a beautiful articulation of a future Nirvana, instead say where you want to go and why and what you're willing to do and learn to get there. Being that honest is something people can get behind and trust. 
 
This is risky, I get it. What if you're wrong about the future you imagine? What if people constantly pepper you with questions you can't answer? 
 
Here's some simple advice on that...
 
First, take care of yourself because that matters a lot to your decision-making and the way you interact with people. When an organization feels stress, people will pay attention and notice your energy and they will respond to it. 

• Get one or two people that you can trust to advise you through this change process. This can be a coach but you need someone who will do more than ask you questions that you reflect on and answer. You need advice too. A mentor, a former boss, someone you trust.
• Give yourself some mental space to stay clear. Maybe that's going for a run. Maybe that's coffee shop time to read a book or listen to a podcast. We love Deepak Chopra’s variety of 21-day meditations and the Calm app to help us get out of our heads.

 
Second, set up a process to learn how the change is progressing:

• Answer this set of questions about how you know if the change is progressing:
  • What tells you people are aware of the direction you have in mind?
  • How will you know they understand what it means to them, what they’ll need to do differently?
  • Ideally, what actions would they be taking to support that direction?
  • What types of questions are people asking that tells you where they are in the process?
  • What are the signs that you may have a risk to manage? 
• Set up a way to regularly gather this information (sometimes referred to as feedback channels).
• Take a look at this gathered information periodically and make some decisions:
  • What risks do you have to achieving the change?
  • Is it okay to accept the risk or do you need take action?

 
This does not need to be complicated. What you're doing is setting up a learning process in an intentional way so you can make practical decisions. This is particularly useful when you need to lead change with your company's leaders and managers.
 
So what does this have to do with joy at work? Part of what people say joy at work means to them is finding connection to the mission of the company. When you communicate the direction you want to take and why, you start to involve the whole company in the process. They feel invited to participate and start to see how they can help make your vision happen. That kind of empowerment is meaningful to people. It's their contribution to creating something in the world. That's joy at work.
 
So, our advice is not to worry about "B." Just get clear about what you want, set yourself up to actively learn your way forward and engage trusted advisors to help you see. Focus on your goal and be open and flexible to the way you get there. By articulating where you want to go and why to the people that work for you, you’re on your way to achieving the future you have in mind.

​In corporations around the globe, managers are engaging in a process to develop their associates. At least they are trying to do it. These well-meaning attempts typically include some sort of a model of competencies. The manager is supposed to “ground” an assessment of the employee’s competencies with behavioral examples when they exhibited higher or lower levels of these competencies, then finally give the employee a score against each competency. There are a few core questions to examine in this system of thought. 

First, what is a competency? So many companies talk about these. Rate their people on these. Determine promotions, bonuses, raises on these. Companies define competencies like “strategic thinking” and “builds relationships.” These certainly seem useful. Who wouldn’t want an employee to be great at these two competencies and others? Typically, competencies are the more intangible traits that a company thinks makes for a great employee. So, we need to define a competency so we can measure it.

Second, how is a competency defined? This is where it starts to get tricky. Competencies are abstractions, something that only exists as an idea. To make sure everyone is on the same page for the meaning of any competency, companies attempt to define them by listing “behavioral examples” that often have “differentiators” for the level of proficiency of the competency that an employee demonstrates. With a typical five-point range, that means even having five competencies requires twenty-five differentiators. The descriptors used to make the differentiation are often adverbs like “rarely,” “sometimes,” and “always” which now sets up the problem of defining those terms. On it will go becoming more and more complex and unwieldy. 

Third, how is a competency measured? With descriptors either fixed year-over-year or defined for each year (a laborious process), managers are now tasked with determining where on the scale each employee sits. Here’s where the system really starts to wobble. There are two factors to examine in any measurement system: validity and consistency. Validity is the ability of the system to accurately measure. Consistency is the ability to do it repeatedly without significant variation. Competency measuring systems can do neither. 

First, competencies cannot be measured. Taking “strategic thinking” and “builds relationships” as examples, are they expressions of who we are and therefore immovable or are they skills that can be improved? If they are skills then there should be direct tests to measure them and a body of knowledge to learn. If companies see these as skills, then there is a clear path to measurement and training. A skill mapping system makes sense because then all are clear that these are skills which are valuable for the role. It would be possible to develop schools and classes for these like there are for accounting and marketing and analytics all of which have a body of knowledge to learn and external tools to measure proficiency. If instead competencies are expressions of who we are, then a very different approach is needed to understand these. For an understanding of the psyche of a person, we look not to a group of outsiders (managers in this case) to peer inside the head of an employee, but rather we use internal tools. Questions are asked that an employee answers, not managers, about how they would handle a situation or simply how they would assess themselves. A look at art and artists can be instructive. There are many skills involved in creating art, that can be learned. Arts schools exist in part to do this.  But art schools take a very different route for the competency of creating art. They don't measure it with external tools, instead they create a dialog between student and teacher where the student can discover what art means to them.

Second, improving a competency does not necessarily drive improved performance. Certainly, it is the job of managers to make decisions with limited information. It is not unreasonable to explore the idea that even if it is very hard to get the measure right, the process of doing it can still be valuable. This is the second problem with competencies. The idea of the well-rounded person who performs better as a result of improved competencies is the stuff of management theory not management reality. To see this, we can look to examples of all kinds from sports, music, business, military, government. We wouldn’t ask a great footballer to enter the hockey ring or an opera star to sing hip-hop or a sales person to handle accounting. In studies of what did make for a great performer, what consistently showed up was that they excelled somewhere. It was not being well rounded but instead having greatness in some aspect of the role.

If measuring competencies is irrelevant and impossible then what should we measure?  Answer: outcomes. This is at once subtle and obvious. Obvious in that people have been measuring outcomes since the first person made a trade of a good to another person. What else are we measuring except the goodness of the work? We should continue that tradition. This is, however, subtle in that describing a good outcome in our ever increasingly complex processes of business can be hard. But…that is the role of a manager! Of all the things a manager can do to create value, clarity of what good means for each employee tops the list. With that clarity, employees are now empowered to make decisions about how to get to that outcome. An opaque system of competency measurement will not do it. 
​
There is still room for managers to help employees make improvement. Managers can coach to provide guidance on how employees can use their skills to better effect. They can provide training to improve skills. Even better they can be clear on what skills are needed and then set up training programs for employees to obtain those skills. They can select work that both plays to their strengths but allows room for them to grow. Managers remain critical to the success of the group and the growth of the employee. It is clarity of outcomes that shows the path to success.

In work, I often feel pressure to offer others an insight or something else that may be valuable within just one conversation. That means giving something without attachment to whether or not it’s received as I intend. I recognize the limitations of that because I can’t fully know their context. I can only try to get a glimpse in that one moment. 
 
The pressure I feel is self-imposed. It’s based on my personal interest to try to alleviate the pain, self-doubt and confusion people feel when working together. I try to give others new words, a new concept, a new frame that comes from my belief that people are generally good at their core. I believe people want to do work that’s meaningful in some way, however small.
 
This personal interest began from a childhood decision. At a very early age I remember very clearly that I made a conscious decision to work, to have a career, so I could be independent. I had a fierce independent streak that was not particularly welcomed in the oldest, female child in a blue collar rural Connecticut family and community. Yes, I was expected to work hard but know my place. Like others, I got those messages all the time. 
 
I could see as a female the culture’s preferred choice for me was to get married, have a family, take care of the home and contribute to the finances by working, maybe as a receptionist somewhere or maybe a bank teller or doing the books for a family friend’s business. It might have been a great life. I might have signed up for it too had it not been for the harsh reality I was facing because of the suffocating dependence I witnessed in the women that were part of it. It’s subtle, unseen and real. I was lucky, I was born at a time when I could break out. For many reasons, the women in my family before me did not have that choice.
 
So it’s with that grounding experience and constant reminder I decided that I was going to work my whole life to secure my independence. I had a huge desire to learn things and think things and imagine things with others. This set me on a path to imagine what work could be like. I thought, if I’m going to work for the majority of my life what do I want it to be like? What would I choose it to be? How would I choose it to feel and be about?
 
I’ve always worked hard. I’ve always been determined. When I say to others, “first imagine what it could be like then make it happen,” that’s because that strategy has worked for me over and over again. My life as a child looks completely different from my life now and that’s largely because I imagined it and then made it happen while filtering the messages I received from my environment. Over the years, I had a lot of self-doubt and often wondered if there was any point to my persistence. I did not spend much time thinking about fairness or disadvantages because that would have spiraled me down and out. I had to constantly remind myself to stay in my belief that life could be better. The battle with myself to stay on course seemed much more productive than a battle with others. There are definitely lower points to my life but in work it constantly improved. 
 
What’s on my LinkedIn profile is a curated recent history. It’s the result of learning over and over again what the world of work values “on paper”. What’s not on my resume is my first official job working summers in the tobacco fields of Connecticut so I could afford to get my hair cut and buy clothes for school. What’s not on there is my next job which was scooping ice cream at Friendly’s. I remember what a luxury that job felt like because there was actually air conditioning and relief from the harsh physical toll of farm work. Right there, work improved for me. This is just the beginning. I worked for the Sheraton as a waitress and then became a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines just before they went bankrupt (what a crazy experience that was!). Those two jobs I held at the same time which helped me fund classes at a community college an hour away. I worked all the time and I was tired but I mostly loved it.
 
There are so many other improvements I made to my working conditions out of sheer determination. I never took a job that would put me in danger. I never took a job that would compromise my personal integrity. At 16 years old, I walked out of a retail store after filling out a job application in their stock room when I became insulted by its line of questioning. It was assuming the wrong thing about people, like they couldn’t be trusted. It made me imagine what it would be like to work there, how I might be treated. At 28, in a job interview for a prominent corporation I was being questioned about whether or not I lied about never taking drugs. The line of questioning went something like, “Everyone has done drugs of some kind. Are you sure you don’t want to change your answer?” It was manipulative and insulting. They did not know me. They did not know my background. I was not interested in a company that valued this interview technique (which it turns out they were notorious for) no matter what that opportunity meant for my career. Both the retail store and corporation pursued me afterwards and I turned them both down. I always believed I had choices even if no one else did.
 
As a young girl with limited education and a shaky family foundation, I was an easy, vulnerable target. I knew that. I knew what it meant to be taken advantage of so it was through this lens that I constantly assessed the risks to my mental and physical well-being. People do this all the time.
 
There is so much more to my story, but that’s true for everyone. Everyone has so much more to their story than we can know. People are amazing, when you think about it. All of this is the source of my drive to improve daily life at work. For all the disadvantages, I know I’ve had many privileges too. I’m truly grateful for all of it. The unique contribution I can make is based on experiencing the good and the bad, and knowing what’s possible. 
 
This is what I carry with me every day and connects me to my purpose. This is my context.

This past July I participated in Seth Godin’s altMBA. The altMBA is designed as an alternative business course for “high-performing individuals who want to level up and lead.” Seth Godin calls these individuals ruckus makers because they’re enrolling in the altMBA to learn how to instigate change within their companies and communities. When describing my experience to others, I often said, "It's like going to human school and learning a bit about business.

Each altMBA session brings together a class of 100+ leaders in a virtual workshop setting for four weeks. It is a 30-day sprint during which leaders complete three projects a week, give feedback to peers on their posted projects, and share reflection summaries in response to the feedback they received. It is 30 days during which smart minds from all over the world thoughtfully challenge their peers’ best ideas. Each week’s projects originate from prompts that encourage one to think, read, and write expansively – with humility, courage, generosity, and no judgment.

One prompt in particular, “Make Good Decisions,” was pivotal for me. It enabled me to open my mind to new, future possibilities by way of letting go of outdated or erroneous frameworks. These frameworks had anchored my decision-making and consequently inadvertently narrowed my vision. I learned to see that the truths informing my thoughts were actually influenced by emotional narratives. Once I saw them for what they were, I learned how to reframe narratives to reflect actual realities.

To do this I first had to understand a few core tenets:

• Outcomes
  • Good decisions don’t equal good outcomes.
  • A great way to make a good decision is to separate the emotional attachment to the outcome from the understanding of choices in front of you.
• Sunk Costs
  • Sunk costs are merely gifts from your old self to your new self; future decisions do not need to be made in their honor.
  • Identify sunk costs to illuminate what you think you are afraid of losing; then understand that is an emotional narrative, not a reality.
• Change Agents
  • It is important to identify agents of change because they sway the way decisions are made and change the way risks are considered.
  • To identify change agents ask, “What occurred that is making you choose to act now?”
• Framing
  • What got you here is part of your narrative, not part of your decision.
  • When emotions are involved, it is easy to make a reactionary decision in the absence of properly considering options. To ensure goals are leading decisions rather than emotions it is important to ask, “What are the reliable outcomes with consideration to my interests, my present frames, and my available resources?”

Learning the importance of reframing narratives, detaching my emotions from outcomes, and recognizing agents of change all help me make good decisions. When I say good I mean objective, rational, deliberate. This enables me to let go of constraints I didn’t know existed, tap resources I didn’t know I had, and see opportunities that I had overlooked. In letting go I gained the autonomy, creative license, and possibility I need for making a ruckus in our wild world.

With one quarter remaining in the year, it’s an opportune time to think about how to lead your team to the end of ”two-thousand-greateen” so that you achieve greatness.

These last three months can be a pivotal time of year. Vacations are finished. The press of work and the hustle for families has returned. It’s  easy to get lost in what is right in front of you instead of concentrating on your end-of-year goals. Don’t let that happen. Engaged teams emerge or vanish in opportunities like this. 

Team Engagement is the pinnacle of leadership. It’s the end result of a process that guides each person to their place on the team, so that they can find their personal fulfillment in the team’s success. This makes Team Engagement a completely different beast than Team Building. 

Team Building is discovering more about the members of your team; what they enjoy, their creativity, or their competitiveness. It comes through playing bubble soccer, and attending wine and cheese pairings, or even a team lunch. For a great place to find these kinds of events, check out Occasion Genius. And, while Team Building is valuable, it is not Team Engagement. Done well Team Building can create connections where true Team Engagement can begin to form. Done badly, it is a sugar pill for teams that creates the expected high and then the inevitable crash. Team Building answers the question: “Who are these people?”

Employee Engagement is about the individual and how that team member finds personal fulfillment at work. An engaged employee is more likely to be able to contribute to an engaged team which makes your focus on the employee important. To get to Employee Engagement a manager needs to spend one-on-one time with an employee to understand from where that personal fulfill can come. Employee Engagement answers the question: “What do these people need?”

Team Engagement answers the question: “How do these people find joy in the team?” Team Engagement is the lightning in a bottle that many of us have experienced on a sports team, theater group or hopefully somewhere in your work. Team Engagement (like so many things) is something you know when you see it, but there are signs.
​
There are three signs of Team Engagement:

1. Team members are putting team results ahead of their own
2. Team members offer help to others on your team as a way to drive the team forward, not as a way to assert a superior status
3. Team members express joy at being part of your team and seeing the goals of the team achieved

But if these are the signs, how to achieve them? We will focus the rest of this year’s newsletters on just that question. But for now, the first necessary step is totally with you, Awesome Leader. You need to embody the three signs of Team Engagement. As Roxanne has often said, for a team to change, the leader must change first. 

Your first assignment is to reflect on the level of truth for you Awesome Leader in each of the three signs of Team Engagement. Think about how that truth came to be. Think about how happy you are with situation. Think about where you would like that to be by the end of the year.

There are lots of times when I’ve thought (exasperated), why can’t I do anything about this?!
 
I read endlessly about change. I’ve advised countless executives and practitioners on the ways and means of getting change done. I’m constantly thinking and talking about it. No kidding, I’m oddly fascinated and adore the subject.
 
And yet when it comes to some things I work on personally, it just doesn’t matter how much I know. So frustrating!
 
My conclusion? Sometimes you just need a little outside help to get what you want. I know, I know, not particularly insightful and a little self-serving. Definitely not my intent!
 
What I can share that may be of use to you are a few resources that can help -- the things I turn to when I’m working on something I really, really want. So, here you go…
 
Book advice:

• Change Anything, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Granny, David Mayfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler – A great resource for different strategies you can try. Some of my favorite strategies are…
  • Turn accomplices (your change preventers) into friends (positive change influencers)
  • Make it a game -- how can I make it fun to do something I really don't like?
  • Raise the price of bad behavior -- e.g., contribute to a charity you hate
  • Bribe yourself -- e.g., set up a bank account to reward yourself each time you perform the right behavior
• What to Say When You Talk to Your Self, by Shad Helmstetter – Yup, a classic self-help book that gets your inner voice working for you.

 
Podcast:

• The One Thing – An inspiring talk series to help you identify and act on what matters most. Here’s one of my favorite episodes for getting focused on the year ahead: Your Best Year Ever.

 
A tool of my own:

• Create a Leadership Bubble for Yourself – A plan to help you tackle a change, one piece at a time.

Sending best wishes for getting what you want most this year!

What is trust? And, why do we want to build it? These may not have the easy answers the simplicity of the questions suggest. Let’s start with trust. We place our trust “in” things and people, like, “I’ll put my trust in this old car,” or “I’ll put my trust in Angela,” or even “I’ll put my trust in God.” We talk about “my trusty pen,” or “umbrella,” or “screwdriver.” But how do we even know we have trust? The one key characteristic of trust is that it is something given, as in, “I give my trust to you.” It cannot be taken or really even earned. The origin of the word itself is from Old Norse and means strength. In giving trust, you are giving your strength to another. A powerful gift.
​
As to why would we want to build trust, especially in a team situation, the value is clear. The team is stronger. This makes sense if the team is thought of as the collection of connections between the members of the team. The collective strength of those connections are the strength of the team. Building trust is team building.

This definition provides a guide to the activities that will truly build the team. These activities cannot be merely episodes in the life of a team. Although ropes courses and team outings and, yes, even trust falls can create comfort between team members, they cannot create trust. These efforts are more of a quick, sugar high. Tasty but it doesn’t nourish. This is particularly true when the team is working mostly through virtual means.

One of the ways to build trust is for each of the team members to express to all of others the unique value they bring to the team. Then the other members of the team tell that person what they appreciate about them. This Appreciation Exercise is something we have done with many teams and the results continue to surprise us. In a simple exercise like this, people who are normally emotional rocks will tear-up as they hear what others appreciate about them. In many cases, they did not realize the value that others held for them. Trust was implied but not expressly given. A video meeting is a perfectly good way to do this for a team that must work virtually.

This brings up the second way to build trust, use video. Effective human communication relies strongly on audio and visual information not just the conceptual content of the message. So a phone call is better than an email, and a video conference is better than a phone call. Making sure that the message is fully received is certainly important in the giving of trust. How sad it is to mean to convey your trust only to have the receiver miss the message because of the limits of the medium.

The third way to build trust is the most obvious and most difficult. It must be given. Since Trust is a gift, it cannot be earned by the team member on the other end of the video chat. It must be given. In that gift, you are strengthening the team and increasing the chances of your own success. This is the key to strengthening a team...trust me.