Leadership Today - Practical Tips For Leaders

Summary

Appreciation is an under-utilised method for engaging and motivating our people. This week we explore the most appreciated ways of showing appreciation.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 182 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we explore the most appreciated ways of showing appreciation.

There are many ways we can show appreciation, however research demonstrates that employees favour some approaches over others. Before we explore these, it's important to think about what we are appreciating.

Appreciation can largely be based on either effort or results. As leaders we will tend to favour one of these over the other. For me, I tend to place more emphasis on recognising effort. Some people really appreciate having their efforts recognised on the way towards a result, so this approach works well for them. However, others would prefer to be recognised for what they have delivered. They may even dislike being recognised for their efforts. So any form of appreciation starts with a conversation. You should explore how people have liked being appreciated in the past.

Research into the ways people prefer to be appreciated highlights words of affirmation as the most frequently chosen, with just over 45% selecting this as their most preferred method. This could include verbal or written appreciation. There weren't major gender differences in how people prefer to be appreciated. Interestingly, the least preferred approach was gifts, coming in around 5%.

It can sometimes be easy to just give someone a gift or other token recognition, but this is likely to fall flat if it's not paired with words of appreciation. Providing regular specific appreciation and positive feedback is a great way for motivating your people. Everyone wants to feel appreciated. Take some time to talk to others about how they like to be appreciated and build that in to your approach.

Have a great week.

Reference

White, P. (2017), "How do employees want to be shown appreciation? Results from 100,000 employees", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 197-199. https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-06-2017-0037

Summary

As human beings we face a tension between solitude and socialising. This week we explore practical ways to strike the right balance for you.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 181 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we explode practical ways to strike the right balance between solitude and socialising.

As human beings we face a tension between solitude and socialising. A recent study found that in older adults, while socialising is important for mental and physical well being, times of solitude are also important to help people recharge. The authors provide a helpful analogy of solitude and socialising as opposite ends of a see saw. We need both, and we need to oscillate back and forth.

Socialising helps foster a sense of belonging and connection with others, allows us to consider new perspectives, and builds relationships. In contrast, loneliness not only impacts our mental health, but also our physical health.

Solitude allows us to reflect and consolidate our experiences. This can help build our understanding of ourselves and our effectiveness. As the earlier study flagged, solitude can also allow us to recharge and refresh from the demands of socialising.

We need to be strategic in our application of both solitude and socialising. Here are some thoughts to consider:

1. How do you spend your time now? Take a look at your calendar and gain a rough idea of your balance between solitude and socialising.
2. Assess your current levels of satisfaction with this balance. Our needs can shift over time. What worked for us five years ago may not suit us now. Changes in our work arrangements may have also knocked our balance out. If you find yourself working more often remotely, you may also need to be more intentional about scheduling social connections.
3. Make the first move. If you do want to increase your level of social interaction, don't wait for others. Think about people you love catching up with and give them a call to schedule a time to reconnect.
4. Schedule seclusion. While meeting with others often requires a calendar invite, we don't typically apply the same approach to time alone. Put time for solitude and reflection in your calendar.

Striking a balance between solitude and socialising is important. What works for others may not work for you, and what worked a few years ago may no longer work. Take a quick audit and let me know how you go. Have a great week.

Reference

Luo, M., Pauly, T., Röcke, C., & Hülür, G. (2022). Alternating time spent on social interactions and solitude in healthy older adults. British Journal of Psychology, 113, 987– 1008. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12586

Summary

With a fluid employment market it can be tempting to keep looking for new opportunities. This week we explore why you might need to stop looking for your next job.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 180 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. With a fluid employment market it can be tempting to keep looking for new opportunities. This week we explore why you might need to stop looking for your next job.

We all have times in our career when we want to make a change of job or organisation. We might be dissatisfied with our current role, be chasing a higher salary, or just want to make a change. We can then end up committing a lot of time and energy to looking around for new opportunities. If we're going to go down the path of looking externally for a new role, we need to make sure the effort is well placed and worth it. The search for a new role can lead us to be less engaged and effective in our current role. Frustrations will likely become even more pronounced and noticeable. So here are some things to consider before you look for that next job:

1. Focus on going rather than leaving. It's far better to be motivated to go towards something you want to do, rather than have your decision driven by a desire to escape where you are. The grass often isn't greener on the other side, and we can sometimes make poor decisions in order to get away from a situation. What feels like an awesome move can suddenly feel less great two months in.
2. Explore internal options. Be open with your manager about what's working and not working with your current role. Look for opportunities to add value to the organisation. If your interests align with organisational needs, it's likely that a job can be crafted towards these needs. Talk to others about opportunities that might exist within the organisation. We often underestimate an organisation's willingness to adapt or even create a job to keep a great employee.
3. Make a decision to start or stop searching. It's easy to start half-heartedly looking around without fully committing to a job search. That just extends the uncertainty of a job change which typically doesn't help us. If you're not convinced it's time to leave, set a date in the future when you will reassess that decision. If you have decided to leave, set aside time each week to dedicate to that job search. As humans we crave certainty, so provide yourself that certainty by making a decision.
4. Write a list of opportunities you would love to have in the future. You might want to work overseas, or manage a team, or work in a particular industry. Having this list clear in your head will help you to quickly act on opportunities that might come up unexpectedly. Most people's careers are filled with chance encounters and opportunities, so be clear about what you want.

I hope these ideas are helpful. Having a fulfilling career is in your hands, but can also be elusive at times. Take time to reflect occasionally and make progress, but don't obsess about that next job and miss the opportunities in front of you. Have a great week.

Over the past few years meetings have become worse than ever. Here's what meeting science teaches us about how to make meetings great.

Welcome to episode 179 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we explore making meetings great.

The pandemic saw a rapid shift to working from home. This was associated with significant changes in meeting habits according to research by Microsoft and others, including:

• 13% increase in the number of meetings

• 14% increase in the number of people attending each meeting

• More multitasking doing meetings with around 42% of people working on other things such as email

• Shorter meetings but more likely to run over time

• Meetings across a longer work day, particularly for managers

• People having fewer meetings with their direct manager

Now, each of these are interesting in their own way, but the flow on impact of working remotely on work performance can be significant. For example:

• 57% of people reported a reduction in their ability to brainstorm with colleagues

• 32% reported a reduction in their opportunities to collaborate

• 26% reported a decrease in opportunities to discuss dissenting positions

So the way we're approaching meetings currently clearly isn't working, and is only getting worse with the shift to online. Something needs to change.

Fortunately there are people who specialise in researching how to make meetings better. Here are six rules for meetings from those who specialise in meeting science:

1. Call a meeting with a clear purpose and only when necessary - not everything needs to be a meeting, so save meetings for two-way communication and collaboration

2. Include only those people whose expertise and knowledge is required - virtual meetings allow us to easily invite far more people, but it's important to ensure each person is there for a reason

3. Prepare and follow an agenda - this should be distributed beforehand so people can prepare and maximise their time together

4. Start the meeting on time - set a culture where meetings begin on time even if everyone hasn't arrived

5. Avoid distractions and multitasking - when meetings are purposeful and well run, you will see a drop in multitasking, particularly if you also shorten meetings

6. Actively encourage everyone to participate, including after the meeting - given you have the right people in the room, make sure they all have a voice and opportunity to share

Try re-introducing these meeting disciplines to generate greater value from your meetings, and let me know how you go.

Collaboration and Meetings By Nancy Baym, Rachel Bergmann, Adam Coleman, Ricardo Reyna Fernandez, Sean Rintel, Abigail Sellen, Tiffany Smith Chapter 1 of The New Future of Work: Research from Microsoft into the Pandemic's Impact on Work Practices, edited by Jaime Teevan, Brent Hecht, and Sonia Jaffe, 1st ed. Microsoft, 2021.

Skip Bowman is an author, consultant and speaker focusing on how to transform organisations with a growth mindset and psychological safety. Skip is based in Copenhagen and has worked with global organisations for over 25 years. Skip has an upcoming book - From Safe to Great - which will be published in September 2022.

Our discussion covered how growth mindset and psychological safety can be applied at a team and organisational level, what it feels like when leaders get things right, the challenges facing leaders, and how to encourage people to work collaboratively. Skip also discussed how leaders need to consider how automation, artificial intelligence and climate challenges will impact our organisations and world.

You can learn more about Skip and his work at https://www.safe2great.com/

Ongoing debates remain about returning to the office. Here are some thoughts to tackle this often contentious topic.

Welcome to episode 178 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. Ongoing debates remain about returning to the office. This week we explore ideas to tackle this often contentious topic.

In many geographies the opportunity to return to the office following the worst of the pandemic has coincided with tight labor markets. As a result, employees often have more bargaining power than employers when it comes to workplace conditions and ways of operating. Many senior leaders want people back in the office, citing perceptions of collaboration and culture suffering under remote working. These views often align with their personally preferred way of working, and less so with the experiences of employees. Many employees are enjoying their new found flexibility and ability to give the commute a miss. They're delivering the same level of performance, so why come in to the office? So how do we progress these conversations? Here are six steps to consider:

1. Start with the work: This sounds obvious, but it's important to determine the best way to work by starting with the results you're after. We need to start with the why and what before we get to the how of the work. This should include consideration of how each job interacts with others.

2. Recognise your own biases and interests: Write down how you prefer to work and be as detailed and honest as you can be. Have people in your team do the same thing. It's easy to assume that the way we prefer to work is what everyone else prefers as well, but you will quickly learn from this process that isn't true. We need to be careful not to inflict our preferences on others.

3. Listen with respect: Be genuinely interested and provide space for people to share their opinions.

4. Recognise that no one has best practice: It's helpful to look at what organisations are doing around flexible work, but no one has it all sorted out yet. Be careful not to blindly follow the lead of others.

5. Measure the right things: When changing the way we work, we need to be able to measure performance. Without that we are flying in the dark.

6. Experiment: Rather than setting things in place for all time, try something for a month or two and evaluate how it went. You can then make adjustments.

This experimental mindset will help reduce the level of debate and unstick many of the conversations around returning to the office. Give it a try and let me know how you go.

Summary

The pandemic shifted much of our work away from transformational towards transactional. What has this meant for us and what can we do?

Transcript

Welcome to episode 177 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we discuss making work transformational.

It was just over a year ago when I was speaking with a relatively new employee in an organisation. They described how their work was being undertaken. They joined the organisation when everyone was working remotely, so they had not met any fellow employees in person. Their manager was helpful, but clearly busy. The employee's typical work day involved their manager asking them to do something via email, which they worked on for the next hour or two and then forwarded on the completed work. Then they waited for the next work request. Sometimes there would be another request, and other times they would be left wondering what else they should do with the remainder of their day.

This is an almost textbook definition of transactional work. Yes - work is being completed, but it's easy to see the lost productivity, engagement, and enjoyment in this way of working. Added to this is a greater risk of the employee leaving for another job. The employee remains unchanged - not really learning or growing. The team isn't benefiting from interactions, creativity and support, so they're not collectively growing either. While this might be an extreme example, I believe work has shifted far more towards transactional and away from transformational over the past few years. The mantra has become "just let me get my work done". Efforts to bring people together to collaborate, support, and build connections are rarely made, and actively resisted.

In contrast, transformational work leaves the individual, team, and organisation different. It's like working out. If you lift weights, at the end of the workout you are different to when you started. There's strengthening and growth. That growth compounds over time to the point where you are transformed through the workouts you complete. It's the same with our work. If we continue to stretch, challenge, and support our people, they will grow. In contrast, transactional work doesn't just inhibit growth - it leads people to go backwards in their performance, engagement, and satisfaction.

So what can we do to make work transformational? Here are four ideas you can try out this week:

1. Talk about frustrations with a view towards improvement. A soldier in the Army once described to me the somewhat unorthodox approach of their commanding officer. The leader told their people that it was okay to occasionally complain or express frustration, provided they then focused on improvements and solutions. He asked that they remove their symbols of rank - the bands and stripes on their chest and shoulders that were velcroed on, to walk in and share their issues. He then asked them to walk out of the office, put their symbols of rank back on, and come back in to focus on improvements. This senior officer made it safe to raise concerns, but coupled that with accountability. He made it safe to open up, and compelling to act.

2. Delegate meaningful work. Transactional leadership involves delegating tasks. "Complete this report for me" or "setup a time with this person". When the task is done you need to delegate again. When you delegate accountabilities, it provides ongoing responsibility and direction. Here you are asking the person to be accountable for producing the reports, or for liaising with the stakeholder. This transformational approach allows the leader to operate as a coach or mentor, rather than relying on command and control. It's far better for the individual and the leader.

3. Build intra and inter-connection. Part of a leader's role is to identify opportunities for their people to work with a diverse range of colleagues within the team and across the organisation. You can actively support this process to help build connections, support, and collaboration.

4. Have work-related fun. Daniel Goleman once said that great leaders recognise that having a good time isn't a waste of time. That doesn't necessarily mean going out bowling or other activities outside work hours. Work with your team to find enjoyment in the work.

I hope you found this helpful. If it is of interest, there's more detail in my 2023 Leadership Today conference session titled "Bring Belonging Back". You can find that and all the other conference sessions at 2023.leadership.today - have a great week.

Summary

In this episode we explore putting the "inter" into connection.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 176 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we explore putting the "inter" into connection.

I'm recording this in March 2023. The last few years have brought dramatic changes to the way we work. Necessary adjustments during a pandemic have had positive, negative and interesting impacts on how we approach our work today. There are individual impact, but today we're going to focus on teams and collaboration.

One of the interesting shifts highlighted through research conducted by Microsoft and others is that teams have become more intra-connected and less inter-connected. Teams have become more siloed - showing a 25% reduction in cross-group collaboration when compared to 2019. At the same time, teams are more intra-connected - adding more active connections within the team.

The positives from this shift include greater team identity and connection at a local level. It's an understandable response to extraordinary times - we draw in with those we're closest to. But a negative is that we invest less time working across the organisation. We become more "intra" than "inter" connected. However one of the advantages of being in an organisation is the cross-team collaboration that allows us to deliver more than the sum of its parts. The challenge for many organisations now is how we bring inter-connection back. Here are three tips for re-building inter-connection.

1. Self-reflection point. Ask your team to identify the positives, negatives and interesting elements of how we work in our organisation today. Why do we include interesting? The author Edward de Bono has helped people to think about thinking. His six thinking hats framework for example encouraged people to approach problems from six different perspectives, and also recognise their more typical approach to situations. One thing that stood out for me from his work was our tendency to look at things from a perspective of positives and negatives. That many of our institutions such as politics and our legal systems are adversarial. But this way of looking at the world can constrain us. There's also interesting things - things that aren't necessarily positive or negative, but are still relevant. I'm sure you'll find exploring positives, negatives and interesting elements of how we work to be beneficial.
2. Work across teams to identify how we can help each other. You might think of this as paying it forward at a team level. What can our team do to help another part of the organisation? If you're a support function that might be easier. But if you're in operations, consider how you can help a support function and make their life easier. Or perhaps your organisation is segmented by geography - look for ways to support other regions.
3. Actively connect people across the organisation. Help people in your team to build their network. You don't necessarily have to do this with an outcome in mind beyond building inter-connection. You're likely to have more connections than the people you lead, so use these connections to help build their network.

I believe as we rebuild inter-connection our teams and organisations will be able to achieve far more than we could by just focusing on our own team. Have a great week.

Checkout the Leadership Today Conference - www.2023.leadership.today

This month we're featuring one of the guests from our 2023 Leadership Today conference. I had the pleasure of interviewing four time Olympian Drew Ginn talking all things leadership, teams, stress and careers. Drew has had an extraordinarily successful athletic career in rowing with three Olympic Golds and a Silver together with a host of international medals, has coached at elite levels in rowing and cricket, while also having worked in business leadership. The full interview and other conference sessions from leadership experts will be available to subscribers from February 25th. Just go to Leadership.Today and follow the on-demand link, or download the Leadership Today app.

This month we're featuring one of the guests from our 2023 Leadership Today conference. I had the pleasure of interviewing four time Olympian Drew Ginn talking all things leadership, teams, stress and careers. Drew has had an extraordinarily successful athletic career in rowing with three Olympic Golds and a Silver together with a host of international medals, has coached at elite levels in rowing and cricket, while also having worked in business leadership. The full interview and other conference sessions from leadership experts will be available to subscribers from February 25th. Just go to Leadership.Today and follow the on-demand link, or download the Leadership Today app.