On Connection

Bringing a team together - whether that be for meetings, offsites, retreats, kickoffs, happy hours, or other forms of gathering - is an important part of cultivating team culture, generating alignment, and building connection. Many will report that their teams don't meet often enough, or meet too much. At the heart of both critiques is a question - when we do meet, how do we ensure it's a valuable and worthwhile investment of time and resources?

Many are currently considering plans for team gatherings at the end of this year or the start of 2025, and we wanted to offer our insight and expertise around how to ensure that when you gather, you do it well.

Are you clear on why you need to come together? What outcomes would make that use of time and resources worth it? To design your gathering well, all decisions about virtual or in-person, agenda, team building activities, and more should be intentional, clearly serving what you're out to do together and why it matters.

In this episode, Mickey, Emma Rose, and their colleague Patrick Kennedy share what they've learned from advising clients on this very challenge, and how you can design your upcoming gatherings to serve the needs of your team and your business.

Resources:

The Five Sense Solution

Blog: That Email Could Have Been a Meeting

Blog: Do This One Thing to Run Your Meetings More Effectively

Of the challenges unique to senior roles, "Enterprise Leadership" is a common point of focus in our work with clients today. Enterprise Leadership is a distinction that refers to both a role and a mindset: taking responsibility for the health of the whole enterprise, and for the promises it makes to its stakeholders and citizens.

Leaders can have great capability and expertise in leading their function or a specific set of accountabilities, but at the most senior levels, organizations need people that extend their care not just vertically but across the organization. Leaders that generate the connection and alignment that allows the system to achieve strategic and cultural goals while navigating dynamic challenges.

Resources:

Challenges of Leadership: Practicing Emotional Leadership

Tool: Connected Leader Review

Imagine if all use of your time, energy and attention at work led to real value. How much would you get done? How would you feel? Now imagine if all use of time and resources across your organization caused value - no meeting, task or project was a waste.

Every organization has waste in its system, but the real problem is that we either don't notice it, or we don't feel empowered to do anything about it. Every individual in an organization has power to make the shift from waste to value, improving the vitality of that individual and the system as a whole.

In this episode, Robin, Mickey and Emma Rose share their advice for catching signs of waste in your work, and practical steps you can take to improve the value-to-waste ratio, improving your experience at work and the results you're able to produce.

Resources:

The 7 Signs of Waste

Organizational Vitality Quick Scan

Mike Tetreault, Chief People Officer of The Nature Conservancy, joins Robin Anselmi to talk about the value of Radical Partnership, and why it's a necessary focus for leaders navigating dynamic and complex challenges.

Mike leads the team focused on enabling a healthy, strategic and agile organizational culture that is dedicated to creating a world where people and nature can thrive. He believes in a human-focused approach to leadership, one that prioritizes empathy, integrity and collaboration in its pursuit of strategic goals.

You can learn more about ⁠Mike Tetreault⁠ and ⁠The Nature Conservancy⁠'s mission at www.nature.org.

Change and uncertainty are unavoidable challenges for organizations and leaders to lean into today. Whether those changes and shifting circumstances are externally driven or strategic choices, they can be disruptive and dislocating. They also offer powerful opportunities for generating connection, resilience, and value-producing cultures.

Mickey and Robin join Emma Rose to share what they've observed can help or hurt your ability to navigate times

When we find ourselves in disagreement with another person, it's easy to put our energy into winning the argument. How do I get my point across? How do I get them to see it my way? How do I prove that I'm right?

If we treat conversations and conflict like a win-or-lose game, we all lose. If we practice conversational accuracy, we create an opportunity for both sides to learn from the other.

In this episode, Mickey, Robin, and Emma Rose share the essential shift to focus on if you want to turn those differences into an opportunity to build something together. It starts with how you listen, and what you're listening for.

Resources:

The 10 Laws of Collaboration Summary (2004)

The Conversation Meter

TEDx Boulder: Rediscovering Connection & Belonging | Mickey & Emma Rose Connolly

Conflict resolution and the valuable management of differences are leadership skills that continue to be identified as critical areas of development across organizations and industries. While conflict is something we all tend to avoid or leave unresolved, the way we choose to engage with it can either hurt our goals and working relationships or increase our access to trust and new insights.

In this episode, Emma Rose, Mickey, and Robin share

Resources:

Gartner Future of Work Trends 2024

TEDx Talk: Rediscovering Connection & Belonging | Mickey & Emma Rose Connolly

Bioreactive Styles Assessment

Leading others has its challenges, and for the most senior leaders of organizations there are some challenges that weigh heavily.

What gets elevated to senior leadership isn't the easy stuff. It's often the complex, messy, challenging things that couldn't be resolved by others. Those leaders, however, are just human beings - people that have personal lives and responsibilities that draw on their emotional bandwidth. Because they have powerful influence, this means they have to be conscious of how their own emotional quality impacts those they lead. Practicing emotional leadership, however, is a tough charge - and an uncommon one.

In this episode, Mickey and Robin join Emma Rose to share what they've learned from working with senior executives around the world (and from leading organizations themselves) about why it matters to develop emotional leadership, and how to do it.

A new year brings opportunities for reflecting on our hopes and intentions for the year ahead, both personally and professionally. In organizational life, we set strategic plans and priorities, schedule milestones and deadlines, and put together development plans for ourselves and others. Most know that no matter how great the plan, we often get derailed as circumstances inevitably shift.

So how can we align our intentions with reality? And how can we care for that alignment throughout the year so that our efforts lead to successes worth celebrating? Whether you have goals for yourselves or for those you lead, we have some uncommon advice to help you launch a year of valuable achievement.

We know that influence is not limited to those with tenure, title, or hierarchy. Every member of an organization has the capacity to influence those around them, the quality of work, the collective understanding of challenges, and much more.

Choosing to develop influence as a skill is a worthwhile investment not only for senior leaders but also for leaders and contributors of all levels. We recently released an episode devoted to that topic, and this one expands on that conversation with a focus on non-executive audiences.

Conversant consultants Katie Mingo and Patrick Kennedy join Emma Rose to share what they've learned from their personal experiences and those with other leaders about developing influence and growing your impact without tenure or role-related authority.