On Connection

Time is something we all struggle with, and many battling stress and overwhelm feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. We tend to hunt for productivity hacks, time management techniques, and methods of working that will solve the problem, but there is no one-size-fits all solution.

For any method to be effective, it must be designed to clearly serve a purpose and set of targeted results. Designing our time works the same way. What purpose would a different use of time serve? What would a successful method cause in your work and life?

Kell Delaney and Patrick Kennedy join Emma Rose for a conversation about designing our relationship with time, the distinction between efficiency and effectiveness, and how to manage improvement at an individual and team level.

Show notes:

Design Your Time: More Space, Less Burnout, Stress & Overwhelm

Why the Four-Day Workweek Isn’t the Answer to Stress & Burnout by Kell Delaney

MIT Sloan: This New Year, Resolve Workaholism

BBC: How widespread could the four-day workweek really be?

Dr. Debra Clary began passionately researching curiosity a few years ago after being asked if she thought it was something that can be learned. Since then, she has become a thought leader on the connection between leadership and curiosity and has shared her expertise with over 10,000 people. She has discovered that curiosity is not only able to be learned but is a contagious state and a predictor of achievement.

Curiosity is key to evolution, innovation, and growth. It’s an innate human tendency and one that, when encouraged and tapped into, can generate new ideas, authentic connection, and engagement.

In this conversation we ask:

Learn more about Dr. Debra and her research:

Curiosity: A Superpower (article written by Dr. Debra Clary, shared via The Disruption Lab)

Website: http://debraclary.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-debra-clary-55936994/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drdebraclary/

As leaders and businesses prepare for 2023, "recession" is on everyone's minds. It's a responsibility of leadership to consider what pressures and challenges may be on the road ahead. Holding the reality of uncertainty along with a hopeful vision for the future is a skill, and one that can be compromised if we allow fear to dominate. 

Fear has a tendency to cause retraction – tightening of budgets, cuts of staff, yes, but also more generally in the human experience we do tend to pull away from others. Whether economic pressures worsen next year or not, what if the more imminent threat to our organizations is actually a recession of connection?

Talking about love in the context of leadership, organizational development, and strategy execution is not common, but we’ve decided it’s a worthy area of research. We have found that it is a uniquely human superpower, in a time when the human side of work is increasingly an area of strategic focus for business success.

How would your approach to leadership change if you led with love? What experiences have you had at work, with leaders and peers throughout your career, that were acts of care for your development and you as a human being? How did those experiences impact your growth and your relationship with work? Robin Anselmi and Michelle Wonsley join Emma Rose for this conversation – the first of a renewed exploration we’ll be sharing with you over the year to come.

Show Notes:

The Art of Adjustment

Disrupt HR: Love, the Next Leadership Skill

McKinsey Future of Work research

The Vitality Imperative

Our Anniversary episode!! The first year of this podcast has been a great experiment and success, and we are so grateful to the community of people that makes it possible. Thank you to all that have listened, joined as a guest, shared an episode with a friend, or sent us a note about how the show impacted you. It wouldn't be a success without you!

Even when things are going well, occasions and mile markers such as anniversaries are a great opportunity to pause, reflect, and see what there is to learn from the experiment to-date. For any project, taking that pause is really hard to do, especially when we’re all running a mile a minute managing so many other things. But taking a moment to REVIEW what has happened and RENEW your commitments, intentions, and strategies means you move forward in a much smarter, more agile way.

Emma Rose is joined by Robin and Mickey once again to talk about why adjustment matters, when it’s the right time to adjust, and how to leverage those moments to cause even greater impact for your investments of time, money, and energy.

The Cycle of Value 

7-step Adjust Protocol

Books: The Communication Catalyst and The Vitality Imperative

Most organizations in the world are experiencing dynamic change and facing uncertain futures. At the same time, their people are stressed, overwhelmed, and facing dynamic change and uncertainty themselves. Businesses face challenges of increasing complexity, which require high degrees of connection and collaboration to successfully navigate.

Stress and uncertainty generally make human beings contract and pull away from connection, which can compromise collaborative efforts. In this episode, Kell Delaney joins Robin and Emma Rose to discuss the ways teams and leaders can move through these challenges and make progress on their important goals, leaning into connection and community for greater resilience and collective intelligence.

Michelle Wonsley joins us for our second episode on Inclusive Leadership Design. This time we ask, what do we mean when we say the words "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice & Belonging"? They are so often used now, but are we on the same page about how we define them? And if we don't have a common definition, how can we know we're making meaningful progress in any of those domains? 

These are complex areas of study, discipline, and reflection, and simplifying them to an acronym does not reduce their complexity, or the need to clarify what meaning we step into with others when we commit to their cause. In this episode, we don't come to specific definitions but offer some wisdom on how to approach your own community with a respect for everyone's diverse views. 

The Intersection: Overview Handout

For many reasons, sponsoring an “ownership mindset” is a popular topic for organizational leaders. Increasingly, leaders want (and need) teams that can be self-supervising and take independent action in service of strategic goals. Given that distributed and hybrid work are here to stay, and belt-tightening across industries means fewer hands for the same amount of work, increased efficiency and trust in people’s ability to make decisions without hand holding is imperative to business success.

There are leadership behaviors that can help or hurt autonomy and ownership, which is what Mickey, Robin, and Emma Rose spend the majority of this conversation focused on. A common theme: leaders that drive connection and high-quality communication while making expectations explicit will be most successful at sponsoring responsible autonomy.

Links:

Autonomy Ain’t Anarchy

6 Disciplines of Leadership That Inspires Ownership (Inc.)

How True Leaders Take Ownership (Newsweek)

3 signs your team doesn’t have an ownership mindset and what to do about it(Atlassian)

Ownership is Leadership: Three Steps to Owning Your Outcomes and Being A Better Leader(Forbes)

It’s not uncommon today for leaders and employees to place significant importance on workplace culture. Culture and work environment is a major deciding factor for job hunters, hiring managers are tasked with assessing “culture fit” when hunting for talent, and increasingly caring for culture is considered a strategic imperative for business success. This word gets used so often and is weighted so heavily in the working world today, we thought it wise to take a pause and ask… what is culture? Robin and Conversant colleague Katie Mingo join Emma Rose for that conversation, having worked with many leaders and organizations on projects relating to culture and culture change, and the role of leadership in cultivating workplace culture. 

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion has made its way into the priorities and public commitments of countless organizations across the US and globally, with more and more companies creating jobs and initiatives dedicated to the challenge. While this may show up as progress on paper, the reality is that most of those efforts have failed to make a meaningful impact.

As the world continues to learn what works and what doesn’t with regard to DEIJ, Conversant is evolving into its own perspective and approach, which we are calling Inclusive Leadership Design. The word “evolve” is purposeful, as this is an ongoing process that we are engaging our own organization in. For this episode, we invite you into that conversation – what is Inclusive Leadership Design? How can we make DEI efforts more impactful? Who do we need to be, as leaders, to cause the change we want to see?