The Reality Paradox

Simple but not easy. That saying rings so true for me when it comes to accepting challenging realities. Simple, smart, wise — definitely not easy. It can take me ages to arrive at acceptance. And it’s a powerful place to be. I reckon it's hard because it can feel like quitting, or losing hope, or dropping standards (Sometimes all of the above if the reality is challenging enough). Acceptance is none of those things. It simply gets us focused on the right pieces — the pieces where we can make a difference. 

The reality paradox is finding acceptance while holding onto your ability to act meaningfully. Without the paradox, it’s fatalism. We have no say and are pushed where the winds of chance will take us. With the paradox, we get to act on the parts of the experience that make a difference. Sometimes the field of action is small — perhaps only choosing how we will face this adversity. Sometimes it’s vast - deciding on something that changes everything. 

Either way, the faster we can find acceptance, the better. What’s that like for you? I understand the wisdom and it can still take a long time to arrive. And I reckon that's OK — especially if I can accept it with grace.

Get the Reps in

If you want to get good at something, repetition is critical:

• Skills - reps

• Strength - reps

• Handling pressure - reps

It’s the same for building culture in a team or organisation. Doing something occasional and expecting it to stick is like lifting a dumbbell once and expecting massive biceps.

It simply won’t work. Get clear on what the guiding principles for your team and work are, and then find ways to get the reps in:

• Discuss success stories and applications to other areas of the work

• Notice when things go less well, and harvest lessons learnt

• Get people to share examples of things that are important and do it often

• Refer to core principles in decisions of consequence

When teams filter everything through what matters to them, alignment and consistency can't help but follow. 

What’s important in your world?
How and where is it reinforced? 

If you can't remember the last time team culture or standards were shaped, or if it only happens once a year, then you are missing lots of low hanging fruit.

On Perfection

Last week's article ‘On being right’ drew quite a few responses from readers about how wise it is not to go in hard, and also how challenging it can be to do that in practice. Several people highlighted the parallels with wanting perfect outcomes. 

There’s a pragmatic balancing act when it comes to solving problems. We can easily get bogged down in way too much detail, seeking the perfect outcome. Perfection very often stops us from moving at a sensible pace and sometimes bogs us down completely. 

Getting something done at an acceptably good standard, getting it out and moving on is usually a lot better than fussing over tiny details that will not contribute much in the way of results, but will increase the amount of work to be done. There are few exceptions to this. Notable ones are high-consequence decisions that are difficult or impossible to reverse, or high risk situations where controls need to be very carefully implemented - Those scenarios are pretty rare.

Good enough and done will almost always beat perfect, but still polishing. Get after it.

On being right

‘What we are doing carries substantial risks. I’ve got the data to prove it. I’ve been trying to get the decision makers to see it, but the conversations are going nowhere.’

This was the essence of 3 recent coaching conversations with leaders who have significant influence, but they are not the decision makers. All three had been working hard to prove their point and galvanise a decision or action. It’s not going well for any of them. 

Going in hard seldom works - even if you are right and can prove it. It’s inherently adversarial and tends to get various parties digging in on their perspective. When we try to influence like that, we can argue until well after the cows come home. 

Going in hard forgets:

• There may be other factors I can’t see from my position.

• Other parties may have investment (time, money, resources, ideas) in the way things are. If they feel personally attacked, they are likely to dig in.

• Even if I have the problem right, I may not have the solution right.

• Even if I have both the problem and the solution right, I’ll need others to fix it. I need agreement or at least alignment.

• If the perfect solution gets no buy-in, it’s no solution at all. A partial solution with solid buy-in will beat it hands down. 

• There may be an even bigger problem that is the cause of what I can see.

• What else might be missing?

Instead of going in hard, get curious about what constraints might be present for others. Are there ways to work with them to remove those obstacles? Explore for understanding, not for ‘right’. You’ll likely expand your influence.

Faster than before

Once a team gets clear about what's important, both culturally and transactionally, they can start to build speed. Clarity brings the possibility of mantras… pieces of language that are packed with shared meaning.  

For example Atlassian, a global company founded and headquartered in Australia, has several mantras. One of them is “Be the change you seek”. For them, it means:

• Take initiative rather than seeking/waiting for permission. 

• If there’s a problem, find a way to get involved in the fix.

• If there’s a gap in the market, fill it.

• If the product is not up to standard, change it. 

Smart leaders build mantras with the people around them. Then they find clear examples to reinforce their meaning. Mantras and clarity go hand in hand. Once you have them, you can remind people of what is important and set direction with a few words dense with shared meaning. It takes effort to get to that place, but on the other side of it is speed.

Do you have any mantras? If not, what might they be?

Trust - Stopping Erosion

I love visiting gorges. The carvings made by water, etched into the landscape over millions of years, are breathtaking. Water doesn’t seem significant enough to work its way through hundreds of metres of solid rock, but over time it has its way. Observing a given moment, the erosion is imperceptible. Once you understand the mechanism, it’s obvious.

There’s a similar pattern with trust in workplaces. Like water, there are forces that erode trust. Viewed in a moment, they seem insignificant. Over time they wear trust down. They multiply and the erosion gets deeper and harder to fix.

Here are three and what to do about them:

1. Open loops. When people make suggestions, ask about progress or for a decision, they often don’t hear anything back. Even if they ask many times, there's still no reply. It doesn’t mean nothing is happening. I talk to many busy leaders who are working hard, with good intent to make stuff happen. But in the busyness, it’s easy to forget to update people. It erodes trust, because it seems like there's neither care nor action. Close those loops.

2. Talking behind people’s backs. Even if we don’t consciously notice it, someone bad-mouths someone else, we wonder what they are saying about us when we are not around. We become more guarded. Address issues early and often.

3. Agreement without agreement. In a meeting everyone agrees, but then agreement is undermined in practice. Have robust conversations to reach agreement, and then back the agreement. Sometimes this means living with something that is different from the choice I personally would have made. That's OK.

In places where there are already deep gorges worn into the landscape of trust, it takes time and intentional effort to rebuild. It is possible, and can be surprisingly rapid if there’s willingness to do the work.

What does the trust landscape look like where you work? Is it effective or ineffective?

Don’t let legislation lead

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ll know that WHS legislation has recently changed in Australia to include psychosocial hazards. Organisations now have a legislated responsibility to ensure that people are safe from undue psychological impacts of work. As of this week, there's been additions to enshrine people’s right to disconnect from work, meaning they cant be compelled to respond to out of hours communication unless it is unreasonable (e.g. when you are on call, or under a specific set of conditions for a limited time)

You could take the approach of finding out what the new rules are and then follow the legislative lead. That will take you down a rabbit hole of minimum standards and a compliance mindset. A better approach is to build the culture you and your team want/need for optimal performance and then create it together. The standard you set will be much greater than the minimum required, and will have the added bonus of boosting engagement and performance.