Team Anywhere Leadership Podcast

On today’s episode we interview Hannah Berson, Founder and CEO of the Design Thinking Consultancy, SALT Collaboratory. Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to creative problem solving. Hannah introduces us to Design Thinking and to MURAL, an online tool that allows people from all over the world to collaborate in a creative, productive and engaging way.

 Hannah shares an enlightening story of how a real company used Design Thinking in solving how to bring their employees back to work. We are certain you will enjoy discovering how Design Thinking is imperative in today’s world to effectively team from anywhere.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a disciplined approach leaders use when they are trying to creatively solve problems. The types of problems businesses face today are too complex, and today’s leadership teams need to come up with creative solutions.

“If I had an hour to solve the problem, I'd spend the first 55 minutes figuring out what the problem is, because I'd only need five minutes for the solution.” - Albert Einstein

3 Step Problem Solving Process with Design Thinking

#1 Understand the Problem from the Perspective of the People Who are Experiencing It

By spending more time on this important step, you can get a really clear definition of what the problem actually is versus what you originally thought it was. 

#2 Propose Three Possible Solutions
By following a formatted process, team members are encouraged to develop three solutions. 

#3 Humbly Test the Solution
Instead of rushing to provide a solution, the design thinking approach focuses on taking one solution and offering it as a prototype. 

DESIGN THINKING TOOLS

• Tool #1 Use of Expert Facilitators
• Tool #2 Use of Mural or Similar Technology

Ways Companies Plan to Go Back to Work: A Design Thinking Example
One of the most recent complex problems that companies are currently faced with is creating a plan to return to work. Should they stay fully remote? Create a Hybrid Plan? Or start going back to the office full time now? In applying Design Thinking, the first thing companies should do now is listen to their staff. Companies can leverage surveys to understand what their staff wants from work in the future. 

Design Thinking Exercises to Support Your Back to Work Plan
What’s On Your Radar?

One way to survey your staff is to use an exercise Hannah calls, “What’s on your radar?” Exercise. In this exercise, each person is given an unfilled outline of a radar that is divided into several labeled pie pieces, such as Career Development, Work Life Balance, Tools and Technology, Team Connections, etc. In breakout rooms, each person fills-in the pie pieces with elements they want in the future. For example, in the work/life balance area, one person might say that they want to eat dinner at home with their family every day. As the leader, you can drop into the breakout rooms to listen to what they are saying. After listening to these breakout rooms, you can create a consolidated radar that visually displays everyone’s cares and future hopes across the entire spectrum. 

Buy-A-Feature

Another way that companies can discover feedback through design thinking is a tool called Buy-A-Feature. With this tool, you can create a storefront with three aisles, each titled as either Technology, Real Estate, and People. Each participant is given money that they can spend however they want in the store. For example, some people can spend their money on certain items such as a nice office in the Real Estate Aisle, or an outdoor gym at work, etc. During this exercise, people begin to understand cost vs. wants and can have an ideation session that best informs leadership on future implementation strategies. 

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What if you took the details of the most memorable experiences you’ve had and integrated that into work? How did that experience make you feel? What did you get through that experience? What is it that made you walk away and continue to share that experience with others? 

Inside this episode, we interviewed Experience Strategist and former head of VIP events at Cirque du Soleil, Carolene Méli. Carolene has traveled the globe creating and delivering VIP experiences and now she’s here to help leaders understand more about Experience design and tips for creating unbelievable experiences.

On today’s podcast you will learn the four essential elements to create a successful and meaningful event, the one question to ask before planning any event, and the magic of a box of popcorn.

To Create Incredible Experiences Ask Four Questions

To become better at experience design, leaders must ask four questions when they are planning experiences.

1. Is it Personalized? 
2. Does it Create Connection and a Sense of Belonging?
3. Is it Memorable? 
4. Will I Share this Experience with Others? 

Solve Problems With Low Effort, High ROI Gestures

In Cirque du Soleil, Carolene shared she was surprised by how many problems she could solve by offering a box of popcorn. It was how she quickly solved customer service problems by offering this small gesture. Offering a box of popcorn showed the customers that she cared about them and understood the issue, even if she couldn’t solve the problem. Often, the customers would come up and thank her for the box of popcorn after the show. Carolene explains that we tend to overthink solutions (internally and externally.) Offering a box of popcorn for her was incredibly cheap, but had a high impact for customer service solutions. 

As a leader of your team, what low effort, high ROI gestures can you make to help solve problems that show that you understand the issue even if you can’t solve the problem? This goes back to personalization. How can I get something across very quickly to my team? Examples to consider are using more personalized videos. Don’t overlook personalization when it comes to small gestures; this extends connection even further. 

What do you have to offer to your customers and employees to solve problems that are low effort, high ROI.

Event Planning Tips:

For leaders to become better at experience design, they should start planning events by leading through curiosity.

• Don’t focus on creating the experience that you want to create; rather, focus on creating the experience your attendees will want to create. 
• The ideas in your strategy are going to come through your employees and teams. 
• Your teams are the ones who know your customers better than you. Rely on them for improvement ideas. 

Create opportunities for conversations to happen naturally.

• What can you put in place in the event for conversations to happen naturally? 
• When people walk into the event, how can you wow them with a conversation starter right away? Can you use food to open a conversation? 
• Virtual Events: What questions can you present to the group that will create exciting conversations? 

How do you want them to feel at the end? 

For a more detailed summary, visit our blog.

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In today's episode, we interview Gwen Stirling Wilkie, author of From Physical Place to Virtual Space. In this episode, she emphasizes that our team meetings will need to be more purposeful, build stronger connections and be open to new ways to collaborate and co-create. Inside this episode you’ll learn about eight common mistakes leaders make when leading virtual meetings:

1. Copying & Pasting the In-Person Meeting to a Virtual Setting

Full-day meetings are typical when everyone is in the office. In these meetings, leaders have time to introduce some context, have several presentations and then have a discussion around certain topics. 

Virtual meetings need to be structured in a different way. Meet shorter and more frequently. In-office meetings often can run smoothly for 60 minutes. But virtual meetings should be shorter and more frequent. 

2. Jumping Right Into Business
Leaders tend to want to knock tasks off a list, but miss the essential need for connection. One thing many  people are missing in the virtual world is our sense of connection. 

Leaders need to remember “connection before content”, and they have a responsibility to connect. Leaders make sure people feel listened to, valued, appreciated and a part of the team.

3. Unrealistic Expectations of Attention Spans
Our attention spans are much shorter in the virtual world. It’s much harder to concentrate for a long period of time and recent research from Stanford University acknowledges the impact of ‘Zoom fatigue’. We face many distractions at home; the dog barking, the lawnmower running outside, Amazon ringing on your door bell. 

4. Not Using Pre-work Strategically
One way to leverage that time, is to create preparation work; work done by attendees before the virtual meeting itself. When leading and planning online meetings, leaders think about themselves as master event planners. Completing work before the virtual meeting allows space during the meeting to bring different stakeholders together to share their unique perspectives and generate breakthrough thinking.

5. Trying to make a Hybrid Meeting “Inclusive”

Whether you want to admit it or not, the truth is, we’ve all tried this. If you haven’t tried it, you’ve been in a meeting where someone else tried it. Attempting a meeting where half of the people are in person and several other people are somehow on Zoom is a recipe for disaster. 

6. “Having” All the Answers
Leaders need to be in a mindset of being more like a talk show host when they are leading virtual meetings. The purpose of having the meeting isn’t so that you (the leader) can come up with all of the answers. The purpose of the meeting is to get everyone's contributions and perspectives so that the team can create the best answer. “Having” all the answers causes your team to depend on you to “have” all the answers, and they will then never come up with their own. 

7. Using Technology Above the Participants Skill Levels
Leaders need to consider the technological skill level of the meeting participants. After identifying the skill level, leaders can choose technology that is appropriate for everyone. 

8. Avoiding Conversations that Create Accountability

Working virtually has given us more of an excuse to avoid hard conversations. Whether you’re working virtually or in person, as a leader, it’s your responsibility to have conversations that create accountability, and to do so with the right approach, right spirit, and right intent. 

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Organizational culture is built deliberately and differently in top performing remote companies. In this episode, we interviewed Brett Putter,  author, culture expert and CEO of CultureGene. Brett shares with us details into his research for his most recent book, Own Your Culture: How to Define, Embed and Manage your Company Culture. Brett researched 50 CEOs of startup and high-growth companies with top performing cultures. 

These CEO’s are skilled in clearly defining their culture, mission, vision, and values, and actively recruit new employees for a fit with the values of the company. They are also able to explain how their leadership team has a framework for making decisions based on organizational culture. The leadership teams embed this framework into their processes. 

In-Office Culture
Communication
In-office cultures depend more on synchronous communication (i.e. in-person meetings, phone calls). Synchronous communication requires presence and availability which is easier to achieve when the entire staff is in the office. 

The dynamic of being in the same place allows the culture to develop by default. With in-office cultures, leaders could afford to be lazy in building the culture because of the osmosis that happens between people.  In-office culture occurs naturally in break rooms, walking down hallways and during random points of contact.  This feeling of connection and being in the loop is often a huge challenge in remote cultures. 

Processes
In-office cultures also depend less on having written processes. According to Brett’s research in-office culture had between 20%-40% of their processes defined and written down. It’s easier to touch base with someone and ask questions about processes in the office.

Remote Culture
Communication
Successful remote cultures depend more on asynchronous communication, (i.e. company handbooks, forums, collaborative documentation, project management tools, video messages, etc). Remote companies design and build their company around asynchronous communication.
How to Maximize Asynchronous Communication - Overcome Zoom Fatigue

Processes
Remote companies depend more on written processes than their in-office counterparts. The most successful remote companies have a working document or company handbook for processes and use them regularly. 

Virtual Meetings Ideas
When it comes to leading virtual meetings, the most successful companies have a working document for how to prepare for and run meetings that includes pre-work. This pre-work includes a structured agenda, deciding who should be in the meeting, and asking those in the meeting to complete tasks before the meeting as well. Many companies explain that meeting participants have to respond to this working document and do the pre-work or they should not show up to the meeting. The pre-work becomes an extremely important element to maximizing time spent on a Zoom call.

Cultural Values
The CEO’s that Brett researched were able to go into detail around how they structured initiatives around their cultural values. Most of the CEO’s also had implemented specific times when they re-evaluated their values. When one of those companies would lose a VP-level leader or higher, the companies were able to explain specifically how this person was or was not performing compared to the values of the company. Learn more

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According to Denise Jacobs, Author of Banish Your Inner Critic, one of the greatest ways to strengthen a hybrid or virtual team is to lower the fear of failure and encourage people to bring out their creativity. Everyone has their unique creative gifts and by supporting your team to unleash theirs. Denise's most powerful strategy to unleash creativity is to promote failure. In today's changing environment, perhaps building up a tolerance to try fail and try again is the best way for a team to achieve great results from anywhere

Many people believe that they are not creative. This belief is a myth that is holding them back from leveraging the creative power that they really have. In fact, creativity is a top desired skill in the workplace. Creativity is a skill that only humans have. It’s one of the main skills that set us apart as humans. But how do you develop it? First, uncover what you love doing and can’t stand doing. Then, increase your awareness of what you enjoy, and see where you are the most creative. Lastly, take that and start to capitalize upon it. 

7 Ways to Build a Creative Team
1. Get in touch with your own creativity

If you don’t believe yourself to be a creative person, ask yourself, how are you creative? What part of your day do you identify yourself using your creativity? The first step in developing your own creativity starts with recognizing that you are creative.

2. Role Model Behaviors

The first thing you should do to spark creativity on your team is to role model behaviors.By role modeling the  behaviors first, you give your team permission to take on behaviors they need to spark their own creativity.
3. Develop your curiosity & Pretend to Not Be The Expert

Denise explained the importance for you to pretend that you don’t know what you know. She calls this releasing the tyranny of the expert. Working through your entire day as “the expert” blocks you from receiving valuable input. If you want to be a more creative leader, pretend to not be the expert and see what you learn.
4. Fail 

Failure is how we learn, and failure forces you to be creative. If you want to reframe failure, fail on purpose. Deliberately do something wrong or poorly. Denise has teams do an exercise where they write the worst poem that they can possibly write. Then they discover what they learned from it. 
5. Seek Surprise

To seek out surprise, make a surprise journal. Answer the questions located in our blog. Seeking out surprises helps us become more creative.
6. Understand the mechanics of flow so you can be in it.

To develop your creativity, learn to lay the foundations and set the stage for flow. Look back to times where you’ve been in a creative flow state, and you've been in the zone, think about what was happening. What you didn't realize at the time, was that in that flow state, there’s an intersection of skill and challenge. When you are walking that fine line, you get into a flow state. The way you stay in that flow state is when your skills and the challenge are equal. 
7. Leverage the Power of Play

Too many people take work too seriously, underestimating the value the role play has in effectiveness. When people play, they are more productive, and do things better. 

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In today’s episode, we interview Lexy Thompson, author of the recently released book, The Power of a Graceful Leader. In the book, Lexy shares strategies to break through the ceiling that many leaders don’t want to face to reach higher levels of engagement and success. This ceiling involves deep, introspective work that demands a different mindset. Lexy lays out three common barriers that must be overcome to align who we are with how we lead. 

In this episode, Lexy lays out three common barriers that must be overcome to align who we are with how we lead. She uncovers the secrets of gratitude practice, the alignment of values with future goals, and several applicable tips for moving into “graceful leadership.” 

Components of Graceful Leadership

After decades of working with executives, Lexy has identified three barriers leaders face that feel like a leadership ceiling. These barriers are flow, integration and alignment. When leaders can make it through these three barriers, they can achieve a leadership style Lexy calls Graceful Leadership.

Four Reasons Why Leaders Aren’t Willing to Do the Work to Get to The Next Level

Many leaders reach a leadership ceiling and tend to stop where they are at for four common reasons. 

• Doing the Work is Inconvenient
• Doing the Inner Work is Painful 
• Doing the Inner Work is …Work
• Diving Deeper can be Risky

Four Leadership Tips for 2021

1. Start a Gratitude Practice

2. Use the skill of Curiosity to Discover the Real Truth

3. Be Gentle with Yourself & Be Willing to Look Within

4. Listen to Your Intuition Before You Act

About Lexy Thompson

Alexsys Thompson wrote the book The Power of a Graceful Leader, as a testament to her own leadership journey, as well as the journey of hundreds of other leaders. For Alexsys, the tipping point came when she established her gratitude practice and spent a decade refining it. Today, developing a gratitude practice is a key element of her work as a board-certified executive coach. Alexsys also serves as adjunct staff for The Center for Creative Leadership and is a member of the Forbes Coaching Council. She authored The Trybal Gratitude Journals, curated a collection of short stories called Gratitude 540, and is building a retreat center in Vermont that will be a “safe space for souls to show up.”

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Is there a connection between leadership and mindfulness? Is there a connection between profitability and mindfulness? What is the benefit of mindfulness on a remote team? And why is it crucial now more than ever? Today we interview Dr. Keren Tsuk to uncover the importance of Mindfulness Based Leadership. 

We are in the midst of huge transformation and it’s transforming the way we live and work. Leaders want to be successful, creative, and innovative. To do this, leaders need to have a flexible mindset that rapidly adjusts to the changing needs of the environment. In order to do this, leaders need to practice Mindfulness Based Leadership.

Why is mindfulness important to organizations today?
Successful leaders need to be able to balance tensions. Leaders need to be able to hold tensions between opposite ends of spectrums. In business, leaders need to hold tensions in areas such as short term and long term business outlooks, speed and quality, and employees needs and organizations needs. As a result, leading mindfully allows leaders to hold space for these tensions and enable the right solutions to emerge. 

What is Mindfulness Based Leadership?
What mindfulness is
(Classic Definition)
The ability to be present, here and now, intentionally, and in a non-judgemental way. (Mindfulness Definition of Jon Kabat-Znn)

Keren’s Definition:
The ability to be aware of the experience that we are going through in a non-judgemental way and not being managed by it. This could be a thought, and emotion that you're feeling, or a process you're going through.

Mindfulness is the ability to be aware of the experience that we are going through in a non-judgemental way and without being managed by it. So this could be a thought, an emotion that you're feeling, or a process you're going through.

Mindfulness Leadership Bridges Logic With Emotion
We are afraid to connect to and express emotions at work. In order to avoid our emotions at work, most of the day we work from our mind. However, other important leadership skills like creativity, passion and compassion come from our heart. Mindfulness Based Leadership enables leaders to be more complete. As a result leaders can handle tensions better and find more accurate solutions as they practice mindfulness.

Four Things Mindful Leaders do to Solve Team Problems

1. Make Sure Everyone is Fully Present before meetings (Including themselves)
   • In opening meetings, mindful leaders ask, “On a scale of 1-10, how present is everybody right now?”
2. Create the Space for Tough Conversations & Address Emotions
   • Leaders are especially mindful to create the space to solve problems and acknowledge emotions like anger.
3. Mindfully empathize with their teammates' situations.
   • Mindful leaders are fully present to listen rather than offering a solution. They are compassionate and empathetic towards others. 
4. Focus on Self-Management - Walk the Talk
   • Mindful leaders have the ability to manage the thoughts and emotions in their internal world. These leaders vulnerably share the thoughts and feelings occurring inside of them. 
   • Leading through this place is leading by example. “We can't be for others more than what we are for ourselves.”  To illustrate: you can't love anybody, more than you love yourself. So, if you’re judgmental toward yourself, you will be judgmental towards your employee. 

Read the full summary here.

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In this episode of Team Anywhere, we interviewed Generational Expert and Author of Second Wave Millennials, Warren Wright. Warren uses his experience from his work at Gallup to help bridge the divisive gap between generations in the workplace. 

Why Teamwork is Important in this Multi-Generational Work Environment

Inside Warren’s research, 75% of the respondents said generational differences get in the way of being productive in the workplace. 

When respondents were asked, “When you describe how you see the world and how you view things, what is it about you that actually makes the person that you are?” They were given options like race, gender, where they’re from, and what generation they’re in. After reviewing the results, Warren was astonished to discover that generations actually came up first. So this means that people are defining themselves first by their generation. 

Communication Styles Between Generations

BOOMERS & GEN X - Boomers and GenX’ers are learning new ways to communicate and keep up with their teams. They are often newer to systems such as Slack and Zoom and depend more on phone calls and emails.

MILLENNIALS & GENZ -Millennials and GenZ are leveraging new technologies to help improve their collaboration. 

Workplace Values for Millennials
Collaborative
Millennials like to chat and be in constant communication with each other. With this value, we’ve seen a rise in tools that encourage rapid communication and feedback this generation values so greatly, reducing the amount of emails.
Purpose-Driven
Millennials want to know that what you're talking about at work is meaningful and real and authentic and makes a difference. 
Authenticity
Millennials value authenticity because they want their inner life to be the same as their outer life. As a result, They value authenticity in the workplace and keenly look that the leaders in the company and the company itself stays authentic to who it or they really say they are.
Frequent, High Quality Feedback
Ensure that you are touching base with Millennials on a frequent basis, because their time frame is very different from your timeframe. 
Current issues Millennials & GenZ are Facing 

Isolation, Anxiety and Loneliness

One small company made entirely of Millennials, keeps their zoom on all day to defeat isolation and loneliness. Even if they're not talking with each other, they do this just to be together. 

Dealing With Anxiety

The levels of Anxiety the two younger Generations are facing is off the charts.  With this in mind, Leaders could help combat loneliness and ease some anxiety through creating solutions that bring people together in non-work related ways through events, contests, and games. 
Leadership Tips for 2021
Coach Your Multi-Generational Team
Warren recommends being like the CEO of Microsoft, take off your “Boss” hat and put on your “Coach” hat. First set up Weekly 1-on-1 coaching sessions for 10 minutes with each person on your team. Next, inside those coaching sessions, ask your team What did you do last week? What do you have planned for this week? How can I help you?
Hire in Cohorts
For the purpose of creating connections to reduce a sense of loneliness, hire young people in batches and help them connect to each other and collaborate as a team.
Find Ways to Increase Connection and Collaboration
Whether this involves adding events, online collaboration tools or just creating valuable conversations, leaders need to find ways to increase connection and collaboration with their teams.
Ask Your Team What They Need
Younger generations are feeling isolated but if you really want to know what they want, and what they need, just ask them.

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There is a battle going on between humans and technology. How can we humans differentiate ourselves in a world of digital technology and machines, particularly artificial intelligence? 

If you’re leading virtual calls, one of your main concerns is how well you are doing at keeping the attention of the people in this meeting. If we lose they’re attention, chances are that they are scrolling on social media. Greg’s framework identifies four super powers humans have to leverage in a way that keeps your team in their maximum zones of genius. With these teamwork skills leaders can (and should) leverage on their team. These skills are: consciousness, curiosity, creativity and collaboration. These four skills are not only a way to differentiate yourself from AI, but also from fellow robotic humans. 

This pandemic has greatened a divide of two types of people. First, there are those who are purpose-driven, curious, leading to their creativity and collaboration. On the other hand, there are those who are just working for a paycheck, and not inspired to develop themselves. Those of the latter type, can be identified as robotic humans. These are the humans on your team that you want to engage, connect, harness and awaken using these strategies. 

Curiosity in Teamwork

Curiosity is a teamwork skill that we all might have, but don't always tap into. At this point in the pandemic, we need to work on defeating the feeling of the mundane. We can defeat this groundhog day feeling by diving into our curiosity and consider how we can redesign our days to find the part that’s the most productive. 

Leverage Curious Discussions Around Meaningful Work
What is the meaning of our work? Why do we do what we do? Who are we helping?

Weaponize Curiosity 

Curiosity is not a fixed trait, think of it more like the mercury in a thermometer rather than having blue eyes. The level of curiosity in people goes up and down depending on who you’re with and what you’re doing. Curiosity is the gateway drug to creativity and if leaders leverage this they can use curiosity to get their team excited about their work. To weaponize curiosity on your team: Encourage Time for Personal Learning. Personal learning- Even in the most wide variety of interests and areas are crucial to creating innovative connections between things. 

Creativity in Teamwork

When and how leaders should find time to be creative in their team and then bounce between creativity and execution is an important teamwork skill. Execution is what happens for this year’s profits, creativity is what happens for next year’s profits. It’s challenging to balance between these two. 

Leverage Your Sense of Humor

If you can make someone laugh or even smile a little bit, it will release oxytocin in their brain. This helps you bond with them, lowers anxiety, helps them listen to you and take action on what you say. There’s a great correlation between having a laugh and being more creative and collaborative. It seems counterintuitive to focus on laughing more, particularly when many people are facing dark times, but Greg thinks we need to laugh more in dark times.

Creativity Isn’t Always Sunshine and Rainbows

Creativity isn’t always a happy scenario, there’s a yin and yang to it. Also, creativity is driven by a kind of relentless perfection, a restlessness, a passion that is not always very comfortable. As a leader, you need to understand this yin and yang of creative leadership and balance the mood of the team depending on where you are in the creative process. 

Questions Leaders Should Ask themselves

How can I effectively make an impact through a screen?

If productivity is the same remotely or in person- what would that look like if it was the best of both worlds?

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