A bit of ‘No’ makes a better ‘Yes’

Saying 'Yes' means we are agreeing to something.

We say 'Yes' many times a day. What are some of the things you say 'Yes' to on a typical day? Note them down.

We say 'Yes' for a variety of reasons:

• It’s part of our job

• We can add value

• Moving towards goals and objectives

• Opportunity to do something we enjoy

• Obligation

• Feeling pressured

• No alternatives

• Repercussions if I say “No”

'Yes' implies a commitment. Each commitment we make occupies time and energetic space. Even if we will never deliver, it occupies time and thought. Sometimes we add guilt or anxiety as well. Consider the cost of that commitment (especially if delivery will be difficult) as well as the cost/benefit of saying 'Yes'. Sometimes ‘No’ would be a better response:

• If we say ‘No’ sometimes, it makes our 'Yes' more valuable.

• It makes it more likely that when we do say 'Yes', we will deliver.

• We avoid commitments that we are not willing to keep

Are there times you said 'Yes', but should have said 'No’? What was the cost/impact? Should you be saying ‘No’ more often? What would it take to do that?

Clarity is often missing in our agreements. The clearer you can be about what you are saying 'Yes' (or no) to, the higher the quality of your 'Yes'. Eg. I’ll get back to you soon is less clear than I’ll get back to you by COB. Clear agreements set clear expectations and are easier to deliver and/or manage.

Clarity = tangible agreements

Have you ever said 'Yes' when timing, quality, scope, responsibility, resources (or other details} were unclear? What impact does lack of clarity have on you, your team and others?

For this week, focus on improving the quality of your ‘'Yes'’. When asking others for a ‘'Yes'’, be clearer about what you are asking.

A Standing Ovation

I saw a great post this week of a leader receiving a standing ovation and as he walked down between 2 rows of his team heading for the exit on his last day. The celebration was warm, genuine and emotional. People were cheering, slapping him on the back, hugging him and crying as he walked the guard of honour. I know nothing of the man or his work, but he had clearly made a massive impression and impact on his colleagues and team. I suspect he was a master at some of the core ingredients of building trust and psychological safety in a high performing team.

• Competence - in a professional environment, connection is important, but you also need to be able to get the job done.

• Warmth - we judge people in a heartbeat, way faster than they can demonstrate their competence. Warmth means you care and genuinely connect with people as people, not assets or resources. The easiest and quickest way to do this is make eye contact and smile.

• Integrity - do what you say you will do, when you say you will do it. Competence and warmth won’t be enough to continue building trust and psychological safety if you don’t follow through. (PS, this also means being good at saying “No” - more on that later)

• Connection - beyond your warm smile, is connection. Getting to know team members, what they care about, what they aspire to, what their challenges are, where they shine and where they need support not only show you care, but also help in building high performance.

• Clarity - Great leaders add clarity to everything- roles, boundaries, timeframes, measures of success, standards and more.

I reckon that standing ovation was built on these ingredients. And the beauty is they are all skills which means they can be learnt and improved by anyone. Which of them could use some attention in your world?

Expedient?

How much pressure are you under to get things done?

Many leaders are experiencing increasing transactional cadence. The rate that things pop into the “to-do’ list is intense. It has us asking ourselves what the most expedient way to deal with each item is. I reckon it’s the wrong question. The quickest way to a result sometimes creates second or third order consequences that consume more time, energy and resources than a little more initial effort might have.

In my front yard right now there’s a large messy hole. The team that installed soak wells and paving did a great job. It looked awesome. But through winter there’s been issues with drainage. Today they dug part of it up to find the problem. A quick compaction job to finish the original job, rather than return another day, left a hollow air space under a pipe. The pipe slumped into the hole and no longer ran freely. It will be a full day to fix, and a fair bit of mess to clean up afterwards.

Some of the leaders I work with are either doing similar, or people in their teams are.

Sending a text rather than meeting about a critical tweak got things moving immediately, but the team is now redoing a heap of work because it was misunderstood.

Assuming someone had been included in a major project briefing, rather than directly checking now has a team buried in contentious stakeholder management, because residents were not informed of a major project nearby.

A customer issue has escalated to a major complaint and standoff after a rushed approach to finding out what the real issue was.

A colleague's motivation has dropped because she wasn’t included in the celebration of a piece of work she majorly contributed too.

These are all examples of time, energy and resource waste because something was done in what appeared to be the expedient way, only to cause more consequences. Most of them could have been avoided with a bit more though before rushing to the desired end point.

Sometimes we have to slow down to go faster. It’s a lesson I find myself learning more often than I’d like. How about you? Where could you slow down to go faster?

The Missing Link

One of the teams I’ve been working with has a great feedback culture. They ask for it and give it. They clearly valued feedback and made it part of how they work together. They also give lots of positive feedback, and often pause to self-reflect - sometimes giving themselves feedback about something they could improve.

And yet all of them said the same thing. The feedback they received was hard to use.

Actionable detail is the missing link. Feedback is more valuable if it is actionable. The more specific the better.

“You did a great job today” is feedback, but not useful. “You did a great job today. The specialist information you brought to the meeting, and the way you broke it down for non specialists really helped our colleagues understand what was needed. You left them with a clear path for action too. Thank you and keep it up.” is much more useful.

“I need you to step up” is feedback that’s not useful. “When we met on site today, you hung in the background and didn’t raise any of the issues you have previously highlighted. Could you take a more active role in leading the project. Next time could you bring the issues up for discussion and guide the resolution. I can offer support if you need a hand to prep.”

If you’d like a tool for giving more useful feedback, let me know and I’ll send it through.

5.6:1

Years ago I saw this research by Losada and friends which says the highest performing teams give almost 6 times more positive than negative feedback. How these numbers were derived has copped lots of scrutiny and criticism, but I reckon that completely misses the point.

The ‘work’ of making a team excel, is in alignment. The clearer our shared expectations of things like behaviour, standards, targets, the more likely we can achieve them. Lack of clarity burns time, energy and resources. Knowing what a great job looks like and why is way more important than what substandard looks like.

Positive feedback clearly sends a message that we care about each other and value the good stuff. We’ve all experienced places where people only seem to speak up if there is a problem or a criticism - and never seem to notice people’s good work.

I reckon most of us have room to improve when it comes to this ratio. I know I do. And rather than focus on the number - focus on clarity. “Is what we tell each other about performance clear enough that we can take action on it? Do we emphasise good work more than things we need to improve?” Those are effective questions. P.S the same ideas work well in our personal relationships too.

Next week we’ll talk more about the clarity and quality of feedback.

Socks and Psychological Safety

One of the most embarrassing moments I’ve had as an adult happened a number of years ago when I bought some new socks (that wasn’t the embarrassing bit). I left them sitting on our kitchen bench for many days. One day, I was short of socks, so I went to the bench to find them. They weren’t there. I assumed my dear wife had cleared them up and put them somewhere. I asked her where they were and she said she had no idea. Then it got embarrassing - I got cranky and started asking her how the hell she could forget where she had put them when she had clearly moved them. It wasn’t my finest hour, and at the time I found it really hard to let it go. Some time later it got even more embarrassing when I found the socks and discovered that it was me who had moved them, and me who had forgotten where. It took a while to repair our relationship after I had acted so poorly.

I was thinking of this incident recently when working with a team who have some fractures in their team culture right now because people aren’t behaving at their best. Like me back then, they have been treating each other in less than ideal ways. It’s pretty human to want to avoid admitting and taking responsibility when we haven’t behaved at our best. It’s also pretty human to want to fire back, rather than extend grace and forgiveness when people treat you poorly (even more so if there’s zero justification for it). It can take a team quickly in a downward spiral where defensiveness, blame, and sniping become the new norm. It gets in the way of both productive effectiveness and team cohesiveness.

One simple principle is “Play the problem, not the person.”

Inspiring Company

I met Amy a couple of weeks ago. She’s 10 years old and already blazing a trail. Amy is in the process of learning to fly. There’s been a bunch of hurdles in her way with people giving her all kinds of reasons why it's not possible. She’s also meeting plenty of people who are inspired by her clarity and working with her to make it possible. When I asked why she wants to fly, it's to be an aeromedical pilot, preferably with RFDS. She’s also aiming to get into one of WA’s aviation specific schools where her goal is to be the highest performing student in that sector and see the school become the highest performing aviation school.

Check out some of her work to shed light on women in aviation at https://girlscanflyanything.com/

As a by-product of what Amy is doing, she’s being invited to speak at all sorts of events around the country.

Regardless of age, people with clear visions like Amy often run into walls. People actively blocking, telling them why not, and how it won't end well. Some go so far as to stomp on the vision, running the person down in the process. Vision like this is less common than it could be because there’s plenty of spectators with fire extinguishers in hand just waiting to put it out. I reckon we should hold the door open instead, or at least get out of the way and let the person work - and then watch this space, because something amazing will emerge. Go Amy!

Who could you encourage this week? What would that look like?

Chunking Up

When I was working in the disability service sector, I was asked to get involved with a family whose services were not going well. More particularly, the mother of a young adult we were supporting did not think they were going well. She had made a number of complaints. I was told “they are a problem family” and warned that I would not be likely to get a reasonable response from mum. I was appreciative of the warning, but I reckon it wasn’t particularly helpful, as it predisposed me to an adversarial conversation. A few people before me had been in vigorous arguments with her about the service and not reached any suitable solutions. Mostly the interactions led to more complaints.

When I first met mum she was angry about a lot of things. She was entirely justified about a number of them. The volume of things she was unhappy about was big and some of the things were not solvable, so I chunked up. Chunking up is moving away from detail toward principle. If you go far enough, you eventually find territory where instead of arguing 2 sides, you both agree. For that mum and me it was that we both cared about high quality of life for her son.

Chunking up to a point of agreement allows two (or more) people to get away from adversarial positions and start on the same side. If you can find a bigger principle that is true for both and connect about that, then it’s easier to work back down into the details. Look at the details through the principle. “Does (detail) contribute or erode higher quality of life?” is a more useful conversation than arguing head to head over details. It becomes easier to see what is important to both parties, what should be fought for, and what should be compromised.

It took a number of sessions, immediate actions on some stuff that wasn’t great, more proactive changes and compromises for both of us, before everyone was satisfied with the service.

Where could you chunk up for a more effective conversation?

Inviting Response

An Executive leader recently noticed something in one of my workshops. He asked “When someone in the room asks a question or makes a comment, you seem to either agree or say something positive before commenting or answering, even if you don't agree with them. Is that deliberate?”

I love this kind of question from someone who is simultaneously engaging with content, plus observing the detail of what is happening in the room. That’s a useful skill to cultivate. And his observation was spot on. Some of the things I might say are:

• That’s a really interesting story, thanks for sharing it.

• Thanks for your question.

• Tell me more about…

• I can see how (reflect observation) would be potentially challenging in your context.

• Thanks for your insights.

• Thanks for your thoughtful response.

• I see, help me understand more about the impact of that.

Even when I strongly disagree with a perspective, it’s rare that I will immediately take an oppositional perspective without exploring further. For leaders, whatever the context, we have an overweighted share of creating (or damaging) psychological safety. I want people to interact, ask, challenge, respond. If I immediately disagree with them, or take a black and white opposing view, I immediately degrade the likelihood that others will speak or ask anything. Inviting dialogue can be challenging when we directly disagree, but if we shut people down, it doesn’t change their point of view. It shuts the gate on open participation, driving the real conversation underground and out of view.

How do you encourage open dialogue in your context? How do you handle contentious perspectives?

Thanks Paul for the thought provoking observation and question.

Chunking up

Feedback

How’s feedback working in your team?

When I ask teams about improving how well they work together, feedback almost always shows up in the conversation. Most teams tell me there is not enough feedback, or that it’s low quality. Ideally feedback is clear and specific enough that you can do something useful with it. In effective teams (ones where there are competent people and not much in the way of toxic behaviour), getting better at feedback is a great way to level up. But while a lot of us would like more (or better) feedback, hardly anyone gets excited about giving it. We shy away from it, concerned about negative reactions or hurting people’s feelings.

One of the best ways I know to change that dynamic is to start giving people clear and useful feedback about the great work they are doing as well as the stuff that needs improving. You’ll build a culture where feedback feels safe, and people feel valued whatever the nature of feedback you are giving.

Teams that nail this have a ratio of about 5X more positive feedback than corrective feedback.

What do you reckon the ratio is in your team?

Know Your Place

One of our Perth footy teams has been copping a heap of flack lately. They have had a woeful season, plagued with injury and losses. As always, there’s a bunch of armchair coaches with plenty of views about what could or should be done to fix it.

One player has been copping more criticism than usual. It’s been based on how much contact he has with the ball (Nowhere near enough apparently). In a radio interview another player was discussing the issue. His view is the player is doing exactly what his job is on the team, and doing it well. Apparently the position has wildly variable ball stats because it’s oriented slightly behind the play to create opportunities and turnovers. Depending how the game unfolds this means either lots of contact, or none. He could easily rush into the play and increase his stats, but hanging back is precisely what he’s meant to do.

There are several lessons from this interview that relate to Psychological Safety and high performance in any team:

• Clarity and willingness . The roles are clearly articulated and understood. People are willing to play their role for the team, even when there’s external pressure to do something different.

• Support roles are crucial. There are roles that are specifically about support. The people in these roles are unlikely to be the central figure or superstar (many times they don’t want to be either). Their support is part of the recipe for success. The highly visible roles in any team are surrounded by people who make it possible for them to do their best work.

• Support for support roles is crucial too. In a high performing team their essential contribution is recognised and celebrated in ways that make sense to the people in support, and the culture of the team. If those in support roles are not properly recognised, they either rush into action to improve their ‘stats’ or they become increasingly disengaged as their hard work goes unnoticed (or worse, others claim credit for it).

Without role clarity, none of this will happen well. What can you do today to increase clarity for the people in your team dedicated to support? How does recognition happen for them? Could that be improved?

If you’d like some tips and strategies for improving Psychological Safety in your team, feel free to be in touch.

Disclaimer - My knowledge of AFL is possibly the lowest of any human in Australia (at some point I’ll tell you about my own woful start and very short footy career). While my interpretation of the nuances of the game is way below the average armchair coach, the observations derived still stand.

The Gap

Some Aussie front line workers colourfully describe the office as ‘Bullshit Castle’. The castle might be HQ in another city, or the supervisors office. When they tell me more, the story is always about directives issued with no operational perspective. In the same organisations, leaders are often looking back the other way with low confidence about how business is being done on the front line. Clarity is low. Frustration (and/or scepticism) is high. Do-overs are frequent. It’s hard to get a complete picture of what's going on, because trust is like unicorn horn!

There’s a continuum at play. At one end, I reckon just about every organisation experiences some mild form of the above. It doesn’t cause major issues, but it slows everything down. At the other end there are highly toxic environments where people rarely bring their best and collaborative work is non-existent.

Where does your organisation sit on the continuum? Whether you have a vast icy wilderness to cross, or already great pathways, enhancing psychological safety will move you in the right direction.

I’d love to hear what’s working for you, and where the frustrations are.

The View from Here

How clear is the strategic view in your organisation? Most of the leaders I am working with are experiencing 3 factors clouding the view:

• Staff shortages - For many this means time off strategy and on tools to keep up. It means employing people you might not employ in different times. It means pressure on induction and training processes as people try to get staff up and running in the shortest possible time. It often means frustration as the combination also makes for low engagement and lack of clarity = do overs, or new people leaving before they are even up to speed.

• Fatigue - the cadence has been high for ages. To-do lists grow so fast you know some items will die there, never seeing the light of day. People are worn down.

• Short horizons - some have got into a habit of reacting to whatever comes up. It started with COVID when Friday’s plan was torn up on Monday because the rules had changed - reactivity was the only choice then. Combined with staff shortages and fatigue it’s leaving many feeling as if they are perpetually chasing their tail.

It all obscures the view. How do you know that your business is delivering on what it promises? Are you experiencing a greater than usual gap between front line efforts and high level strategy and planning?

If you answered yes to either of the above, sing out. I have some solutions that are working well across a number of sectors.

What it Takes

I was invited to observe a team meeting today as part of work building on their already robust psychological safety. Four significant elements of how they work together really stood out.

1. Recognition - All sorts of things were recognised. New hires, project milestones, people’s skill and contribution, a recent big push on a project involving lots of extra time and covering for people who are away. No rose coloured glasses here though. Fatigue, mental health, a significant safety incident, concerns about links between HQ and operations were also openly discussed. There was ample celebration, but also deep dives into real and significant issues that deserved attention.

2. Up for the challenge - Several times people raised challenges to decisions, processes, people. The challengers spoke openly and directly. No one took offence. More often than not their challenge was met with open and curious questions seeking to understand their perspective more fully. Contributions were welcomed and explored.

3. Marking the Boundaries - At every opportunity people shared information, purpose, backstory, decision making parameters, reasoning and more (often as part of the challenge conversations). Everybody contributed to a more complete team view of what was happening, what was expected and what value they could add.

4. People took responsibility - When action was required someone put their hand up to own it. Timelines and detail were given. Follow up was arranged. Lots was getting done. People volunteered for this responsibility without prompting. It seemed expected and normal.

This team is quite a contrast to some others I have worked in and with. The kinds of contributions made by every individual in this meeting are often nowhere to be seen. One way traffic from the ‘chair’ coupled with defensive conversation and lack of accountability are more often the picture.

If you could pick one of the points above to focus on with your team, which would it be?

If you’d like to discuss building psychological safety in your team or organisation, let's have a chat.

The Right Tool for the Job

On the weekend I did a bit of work on my old 4WD. It got me thinking. I spent about 60 minutes applying brute force and busting knuckles trying to get a ball joint out of its socket. I phoned a friend. I swore quite a bit. Nothing worked. Then I went round the corner and paid $50 for the right tool for the job. In less than 10 minutes I had done 2 joints. It was easy and even pleasurable.

Sometimes we have to make do with not having the ideal tool to hand. More often than not it's false economy. One of the effective things leaders can do to build psychological safety and create momentum in the workplace is to set people up with the right gear for success.

Are there any areas where you or your team don't currently have the right tool?

P.S. This isn't a licence to demand the best and latest of everything. I could have bought a $800 tool that would have done the same job. If I was using it daily that would be money well spent. For the one off job, it would have been overkill.

Leading Voices

Quality leaders are able to share strongly held opinions, backed by quality information. When they do it well, there’s also an acknowledgement of other perspectives and an invitation to a deeper conversation. Done well, it provides both Psychological Safety to enter the discussion and also a clear direction from the leader. Psychological Safety does not mean watered down leadership, or the lack of robust debate.

Australia is on the verge of an historic vote on the Voice to Parliament. There are a range of strongly held perspectives on this. Unfortunately, a lot of the discussion is polarised and adversarial rather than as described above. This from Braden Hill is a great example of excellent leadership as described above. What do you think? How could you emulate this kind of leadership in your roles?

Black Belt Mastery

I was learning from a black belt martial artist. The way she moved seemed like magic. One sequence flowed smoothly into another, and she was able to find advantage over much bigger and stronger opponents. She taught me about how she was using leverage in different situations. It sped up my journey because I was focussed on an important and effective principle. But there was still no magic. Using her insight speeds me on the path, but there are still years of dedicated practice to gain the same precise and fluid movement.

How can you speed someone's journey today?

A picture of Self-Reliance

I work with many organisations who provide support to people with disabilities and the elderly. At face value, their clients are not very self-reliant. The truth of it is we are all reliant on others, all the time, regardless of how independent we think we are. As leaders, recognising and appreciating the people we rely on is a great way to build a sense of team, and to grow psychological safety in your workplace.

I love Steve Jobs’ take on this…

"I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being."

(An email Jobs sent to himself in 2010. Bought to my attention by James Clear in his weekly post)

Isolation - What Does it Mean at Work? (Part 2)

We definitely want to make connection and inclusion a core attribute of the places we work - see my earlier article on that topic.

However there is a balance. Most, if not all of us benefit from isolation from time to time for many reasons. In our efforts to facilitate connection and inclusion, we also need to be aware of ensuring there is space for people. How much space is different for different people and at different times. Space is useful when:

• We need dedicated thinking or production time.

• We need to rest and recharge.

• We are digesting or synthesising large amounts of information.

• We are checking the quality of something.

• We are overwhelmed.

• We are an introvert needing to recharge.

• We are neurodivergent and need space to process people, situations or experiences.

• We are solving problems.

• We are deciding strategy.

• We are dealing with trauma.

• And lots of other reasons…

And sometimes in the situations above, it may be connection we need. Thinking and talking about the quality of our connections, inclusion, and the space we give each other at work helps build a high performing, psychologically safe environment.

Isolation - What Does it Mean at Work?

16 years ago, I did a 12 day solo survival walk. An isolated part of Western Australia was the backdrop. Sourcing food and water from the land. Sleeping on the ground in just my clothes. When I first started, being alone and unplugged was an absolute luxury, but as the days wore on the effort of doing 100% of everything and having no one to share the scene, decisions, insights etc became wearing. There were moments when I felt the impact of isolation at a deep and visceral level. Without an external reference point, my mind explored all manner of answers to the question “Who am I?”. Some of it was useful and enjoyable. Some of it had a darker edge.

Since then there’s been a regular stream of survival shows that leave people alone. There’s a consistent pattern to the exits. Early on people with insufficient skill or experience quickly pull out and retreat to home. Of the people left, many have the skills to survive a very long time, if not indefinitely. Eventually, they all quit because they crave the company of others. Assuming no medical reasons for withdrawal, it's the isolation that gets people. We are meant to be with other people.

It’s no surprise to me that isolated work (including work from home) is listed as one of the potential risks in workplace psychosocial hazards. The baseline is to consider how we facilitate connection and inclusion in inherently isolated working settings. But I reckon the gold standard is to become really aware of how we potentially isolate people in any setting.

Who has access to resources and opportunities?

Are we Cliquey?

Are people snubbed or shunned for behaviour, appearance, professional background, belief, or any other factor?

How are social connections working? Everything from casual chats over coffee to formal events.

While we don’t have to include everyone in everything all of the time (That would get really cumbersome), we should be having regular conversations about what connection looks like in our workplace. How is it at yours?