Weirdos In the Workplace

Welcome to Weirdos in the Workplace, where we talk about creating environments where we're learning together to increase our impact in the world through developing servant leadership, creative cultures, and high-performing diverse teams, among many other things.

I'm your host, Erin Patchell, my quest is to turn business philosophy into business fact, and today's episode is on fitting like a piece of the puzzle.

Last week we talked about finding a space where we belong. I mentioned a quote from Brene Brown and another from Simon Sinek describing belonging as not fitting in but about being authentic and being able to be ourselves. Now I'd like to detangle the nuance a little bit because sometimes that statement feels a little bit like semantics. What's the difference between belonging and fitting in? We could fit into a space where it feels natural so that we will explore that a little bit. I recently had a very cool experience that I want to share with you, where it felt natural to both fit in and stand in.

Stay tuned.

A couple of months ago, I applied to attend the Ted Conference in Vancouver. I'm sure you're all familiar with Ted Talks Ted X. So, Ted puts on this really big conference every year, and that's where a lot of their material comes from. The theme this year, 2023 was a possibility, which for me is probably, you know, the best thing ever because that's all I think about is what if, what if, what if?

It was only three months into my new adventure as a small business owner and an entrepreneur, and it felt like a fairly big risk because it was a fairly reasonably sized investment. It was an investment in myself, and I was and I'm currently still in an exploratory phase of my new venture.

So, I was going to get inspiration, meet some new people, and learn something about myself, and I thought, hey, sounds like a good idea.

Immediately when I arrived at the Ted Conference on Sunday evening last Sunday evening, I was greeted by a very warm, lovely Ted team member who ushered me through into the lobby at the stairs and provided me with a gift and a name tag lanyard.

Very high-tech lanyard. Let's say, and then, of course, I desperately snuck into the bathroom immediately and recomposed myself because if you haven't, if you don't know by now, I have a lot of anxiety and social anxiety, and so, I had made it. I had, I had, I had achieved the milestone of getting into the building. I had received my bag, and I needed to go and hide for a minute to compose myself, so that's what I did. I found a bathroom I composed myself. I looked in my bag to see what was in their perk bag. I tried to get myself to stop sweating, and then once I had composed myself, I went back into the lobby and stood around waiting for what was the next event for people who were new. At the Ted Conference, people had never been there before now, like any good extrovert, and you'll probably be surprised by the fact that I have such high anxiety that I am also an extrovert. It's a very interesting combination.

I found one person like me who was standing around and started talking to them, and then I talked to another person, and then I talked to another person, and every single person I talked to in that lobby was brilliant, curious, curious about me as I was curious about them, intelligent and had some special interest and reason for being there, of course, and that experience did set the stage, I think, for the entire rest of the week because it enabled me to feel comfortable.

Every single person that I met was so welcoming and so interesting that it was really easy to both fit in and stand out.The entire event was, I thought, catered to people like me who had a huge diversity of interests and ways

of thinking.

Still, as a very anxious girl from rural Ontario, I've talked a little bit about my anxiety. Therefore, I have social anxiety, and it's sometimes pretty crippling.

I can usually stand to be in a place for a little while, and then I literally have to leave like I have to cut and run. I'm the same way in almost every social situation, like in restaurants and concerts. I can usually withstand it for a little while, but as soon as the thing is over, I'm out the door. I am not even kidding—people who know me will know that at restaurants, I will ask for our bill even as the food is coming because I want to know that as soon as I am done eating, I have already paid for it, and I can literally get up and leave. I don't want to dilly-dally around anyways. I did feel some of that at the Ted Conference because I carry it everywhere. It wasn't even remotely as pronounced as it normally was, and I think that is because of three different things I observed. The first thing is there, the environment; the second thing Is the ability to flow; and the third thing is the people.

In terms of fitting like a piece of the puzzle.

To me, fitting like a piece of the puzzle is what enables us to understand each other, collaborate effectively, communicate, and be authentic. I've spent my whole life trying to be a chameleon. Many folks out there also resonate with that, trying to figure out how to best fit into a particular environment while still feeling whole and authentic and not feeling like I needed to wear a mask all the time. I felt like that at the Ted Conference. This is a good context to help articulate and understand how we can build environments and organizations where that comes together.

So, let's start with the first thing, which was the environment at the Ted Conference, which was a very large space for the number of people that were there, so there was lots of room to move around.

They did an amazing job of basically setting up little conversation areas or work areas throughout the entire building on multiple levels.

Many of them also had simulcast areas as well, baked within them, and so if you didn't feel comfortable or if you needed to work while you were watching the Ted talks, you didn't have to go into the, the, the, the bigger arena space where they're being held.

More importantly, if it's all about energy management for folks with anxiety, folks, anybody, we're all of us. It's literally that we have to manage our energy every day. That's why we learn how to prioritize. We learn how to manage time, learn how to focus on things like that. So, to manage your energy, you have to be able to move within a space within your environment that reflects your energy level.

So, when I feel like high energy and very social, I have a place to go where I can be social. If I need to step back, I need to be a little bit more, you know, have some solitude or get some work done. Then I might have a place to focus. They did an amazing job of setting up different spaces where there were different things to do. There were social spaces, activity spaces, and more spaces of solitude.

There were definitely times when I needed to let off some steam because I was clearly anxious. I was getting anxious and overstimulated; similarly, the space that they built for the actual Ted talks was also well-designed. It was an arena format. There were different types of places to sit. There were couches, and there were chairs, there were swivel chairs.

I found immediately that in the first talk in the first session, I gravitated towards the very back of the arena as I do in the back of the bus.

The back of the arena, and they had swivel chairs set up, and then there was a kind of like a bar in front of you, a that you could lean on or put to write on.

That was where I felt the most comfortable, and I spent almost all the sessions back there. Conveniently, it was also the easiest way to escape as well, in case I needed to escape.

I was able to move around back there, which is something, you know, that you can't do when you're beside somebody when you're close in contact with somebody else because often you will you don't. You don't want to interrupt them. You don't want to, you know, be a nuisance, right?

I was able to move around or walk or stand up or, you know, whatever. Whatever was that I needed to do at that moment to feel comfortable. People will sometimes underestimate the profound impact that our environment, our physical environment, has on our capacity to learn, collaborate, and feel comfort as individuals. So, they did that really, really well. So, congrats to them.

Another thing that I thought that they did extremely well, and this is, of course, my opinion for what it's worth, aligned with the design of the space, but was really more about the learning side of things. Most of the learning professionals that I know, they focus on something, not learning preferences. They focus on something called flow, which is the idea that, as I mentioned before, at all moments of the day, we're all managing our energy, and some things motivate us, and some things demotivate us.

This and it's about learning how we learn, how we're motivated and what we're curious about in order to maintain and manage our energy and our drive in a way that increases our flow and our productivity. Basically, I got a little lazy and had to ask ChatGPT. to describe flow for me, for someone who'd never heard of it before, and they mentioned that when experiencing flow, a person is fully absorbed in the task at hand and their performance tends to be at a peak.

They have clear goals, they experience immediate feedback, and they're able to more easily assess their project product, their progress and make adjustments as needed.

There's a balance between challenge and skill. They have a sense of control. They're less self-conscious. Time seems to fly, and activities become more intrinsically rewarding.

The very interesting thing about flow is that it's basically, and this is me now, by the way, not Chad GBT. The very interesting thing about flow is that it is basically impossible to be in a state of flow and a state of anxiety simultaneously by its nature. The concept of flow, or being in a flow state, quote UN quote, allows for a sense of purpose drive focus and control while, on the other hand, anxiety is a sense of a loss of control and the fear of the unknown that creates that physiological and mental response.

The Ted Conference did a phenomenal job of supporting individuals to access and follow a state of flow by allowing each person to experience the event in a completely different way from every other person.

It's however they wanted to experience it. You never felt you had to do the same thing as everyone else because there wasn't. There was obviously some planning. There was some scheduling, but there was lots of buffer around. The scheduling was a very big sandbox.

There were lots of different options, especially for the breakout sessions to follow, you know, whatever you're curious about in terms of the physical space, it aligned with this concept of flow as well, where you can use your energy to its best advantage through the whole process, which was important because it was a marathon, not a Sprint, that is, for sure, and the third thing that I wanted to mention was the people the Ted Brand is extremely strong. People are drawn to it. I was drawn to it. It's a high-trust brand, which is something that we talked about in one of the previous episodes about creating trust in organizations. Ted has done that.

They've done a fabulous job of nurturing trust in their brand, brand consistency their, transparency, honesty and vulnerability. As a brand, they've got quite a democratic nature and willingness to accept feedback and, again, consistency, consistency, consistency.

They demonstrate that over and over again, are they perfect? No, who is? But on the whole, I'm pretty impressed. And I think because of that brand, the people who showed up at the Ted Conference were there to learn. They were there to experience something new and bring together folks that had, you know, such open minds about everything.

Things created this interesting dynamic community where everyone was just so very curious and, you know, interested in whatever it was that you had to say. And it's interesting how, via the environment that they created.

This, you know, this kind of like open concept flow, free flow sort of conference idea. We were able to sort of assemble into little tribes because you'd kind of match and mesh, and you'd end up seeing the same people over and over again. And so, you knew that those were sort of your people. They're on the same wavelength as you.

The thing about a puzzle is that it's more than the sum of its parts. One puzzle piece alone isn't super meaningful, but when you find just the right spot where it belongs, along with the others around it, the outcome is a picture that actually makes sense.

You could also think about a puzzle in the Wu Way sense.

If you've read a little bit about Daoism, you'll understand the context. Effortlessly doing, not doing or allowing the energy to flow naturally like water flowing and filling up space, but the point is you are totally unique. There is literally no one else on earth like you.

No one can do things and see things exactly the same way you do; that's a fact.

At the same time, we ourselves alone are limited to what only one person can achieve. So, I encourage you to think about the puzzle and how to bring each unique person together in a way that is complementary, holistic, and integrative and allows every person to strengthen the people around them and the systems around them.

That's all for today.

Thanks for listening!

If you like this episode, I'd love to connect with you on https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-patchell/ or https://www.positivist.ca/.

I'm your host Erin Patchell, and remember, don't stay out of trouble.

Welcome to Weirdos in the Workplace, where we adventure into topics like transparency, authenticity, purpose, values and culture. In today's world of work. I am your host, Erin Patchell, and I'm on a quest to help companies turn business philosophy into business fact.

Today, we're going to turn the topic to trust. What is it? Why is it important? How do you know when you have it? And what do you do if you lose it?

Stay tuned.

It's hard to trust anything when so much of what we see, hear and read is highly curated and architected like a snapshot filtered, nipped and tucked into oblivion.

Trust is such a topic of deep meaning for most people because I think that all of us, at some point in our lives, have been hurt by someone we thought we trusted, and every single time that happens, our walls get a little bit thicker and taller.

As a business owner and a business leader, I really don't have to tell you how important trust is to build a strong and thriving team. It's such a foundational building block to every single relationship we have in our lives, and you also know that the research is extremely clear on the subject, so it should be easy.

We know how to build trust. We've read lots of articles on it. You follow three easy steps. You're honest, and you're reliable, you're accountable, and voila, trust is born.

You have corporate values. You put them on your website. This is how we do business. We care about transparency. We care about diversity. But is it really true?

It can be challenging, and I know that because I work with clients who are developing trust in their organizations, whether they're trying to improve employee retention or to create a high-performing creative culture within their organization.

The statistics also show the same thing. In 2021, Price Waterhouse Coopers did an annual global CEO survey, and only 18% of those CEO's said they were confident in their organizations. Ability to maintain trust, maintain trust in the current environment 18.

Gallup 2020 did a State of the Global Workplace survey measuring employee engagement and well-being, and only 40% of the employees that they surveyed said that they trusted the leadership in their organization. The research is also extremely clear that trust completely changes the way a company is capable of doing business.

American neuroscientist Paul J Zak wrote an article for HBR called The Neuroscience of Trust, and he discussed the research on the connection between trust and performance, finding that companies with high levels of trust had 50% higher productivity and 74% lower stress and 106 percent more energy than companies with low levels of trust.

That is completely mind-blowing, and we can keep going. Edelman, a global communications firm, surveyed in 2021 called the Trust Barometer report.

They found that 86% of employees who trust their employer plan to stay with the company for the next 12 months, compared to only 59 percent of employees who don't trust their employer. We've talked a little bit about why trust is important in an organization.

We know trust is important as people, right, like you, feel it every single day. You know that trust is an emotional process, and it's a cognitive process that we go through based on our entire history of experiences that we've had. And it's extremely instinctive, so it is such a gift when we find people and organizations whom we learn we can trust.

When we hire, work with or work for companies that embody trust, it's something that we can feel inside of our bones developing. A reputation or a brand that's built on trust takes quite a long time because it starts with developing relationships that are based on trust.

So how do you know if you have the trust of your team well?

Do your employees trust you to listen and respond in a healthy way?

I would personally get worried if it seemed like someone was just telling me what I wanted to hear all the time. To me, that would be a sign that I hadn't yet earned their trust or if my employees are making decisions, taking smart risks, and trying new things, and then letting me know how it went, you know, taking the successes of successes and learning from the failures, and that's a sign that they'll trust me to support their growth and development.

If employees are curious and enthusiastic about their work, they're communicating well together. It's a great sign that they're working in the right job. The culture is supporting them, and it's a trusted environment, and if they're loyal to the organization, this is a huge one. People are hopefully growing with your company, and they're staying there a long time.

If they're very loyal, they have a great trusting environment, a great trusted relationship. They're usually willing to go above and beyond their duties if a situation requires it, and if that's the case for your company, then bravo. You definitely have a high-trust organization.

It's a little bit ironic sometimes that a lot of employers focus so much effort on recruiting new talent, and they completely forget about their existing employees. It literally is like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it. The water keeps pouring at the bottom, and you keep pouring more water into the top just to try to fill it back up.

How would you know you needed to put more energy into building trust?

I want to try to say this first one delicately, but there's no delicate way to put it.

If you or anyone else on your team tends to react emotionally or aggressively to obstacles to challenging conversations or constructive feedback, you need to figure out how to manage that. And you probably have some work to do.

From what I've seen, personal conflict in the workplace that has been allowed to continue for too long might be the most detrimental factor. So being self-aware and being aware of the emotional climate of your workplace and then actually doing something about it.

There are some metrics that you can actually track most organizations at once they reach a certain number of employees, they start to track, you know, engagement and turnover rate, different kinds of turnover. So, if you're seeing low engagement and high voluntary turnover, then that's, of course, a signal. That there's probably something wrong. It doesn't. It doesn't always mean trust. Trust is one of the factors that you know is involved in engagement in turnover. It's not the only factor, but it definitely warrants further investigation.

It doesn't matter what size your company is. You can start to measure some of this data even when you're a small company, even if you're just one, two or three people.

Obviously, if it's just yourself, then maybe not. But if you're more than one person in your company, you can start to measure your company's engagement and turnover; you need to know some straightforward tools and tracking methods. It's well worth doing that because human beings, our memories are terrible, like objectively terrible. You know, reflecting on the information, the real information, can give you a lot of interesting insights.

The good news is that human beings are creatures that are completely capable of change. There have been so many demonstrations of organizations that have turned their entire culture around, and honestly, they kind of did it using those three easy steps, honesty, reliability and accountability.

It's a bit trickier than that. Yes, I think these things are the foundation for building or rebuilding trust, but where it gets a bit complicated is that it's how we demonstrate the principles in every single interaction that we have, and every decision that we make, both publicly and privately, that make the difference. And that's the part that's not always easy.

You know, we can't pretend to be ethical and think that no one's going to notice we can't pretend to be transparent. Without it creating more problems than it solves, I guess the whole point is that you need to practice what you preach, and that goes down to what organizational values. Well, organizational values only work if every person in the organization is actually working in alignment with those values.

So how do we know? How do we know that? That's true? How do we know that we have trust?

How do we know that we're in alignment with our values?

How do we know if we're being objective about it, and how do we know if we're getting better and better at it over time?

First, setting the intention to want to get better and better at it over time and to actually know what the truth is as a starting point, right?

So how are we benchmarking this?

How do we know what?

What is the current state looks like?

Are we getting honest with ourselves about it?

Are we doing surveys and focus groups, and interviews?

Are we being totally objective about this and seeing it from a more scientific perspective and the really fun thing about making something like this real?

Facing the reality of a situation publicly and then saying guess what, you all, this is a situation we've heard you. This is what we're going to do about it and then actually do something about it. Demonstrating what you're doing about it is the thing that will increase trust the most in your organization, making it right. Still, it does have to come from a place of conviction.

You have to have the conviction to want to have a high-trust organization, and I'll leave you with a little quote from Warren Buffett says it takes two to do the trust tango, the one who risks the trust and the trustworthy one, the trustee, each must play their role. It's totally true that trust goes both ways if you don't trust your team. Then they will need to trust you back, maybe a little bit of food for thought for next time.

That's all for now.

Thanks for listening!

If you like this episode, I'd love to connect with you on https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-patchell/ or https://www.positivist.ca/. I'm your host Erin Patchell, and remember, don't stay out of trouble.

Welcome to "Weirdos in the Workplace," the podcast that celebrates authenticity, passion and purpose in today's world of work. I'm your host, Erin Patchell, and today's episode is "on finding a space where we belong".

Today we're going to talk a little bit about why I think belonging is the most powerful feeling on earth and why feeling like an outsider might be the worst. We'll also explore how you can create a community at work where every person feels like they are safe, accepted, included, and can be their full selves.

As you might have guessed about a podcast called Weirdos in the Workplace, I haven't always felt included and like an outsider for a lot of my life. I think that if you were drawn to the title of this podcast, you'd probably feel the same way at some point in your life. The thing is, I was not content being an outsider. I always felt like there was always a force field to keep me out of the communities that I desired to become a part of. You know, the grass is greener on the other side, right?

It always took a tremendous effort to step inside the barrier. I usually found that once I managed to find the courage to engage that I had to focus so much of my energy on whatever the group's interests were that eventually, I found myself bored or I found something else that I was more interested in, or a group that I was more interested in becoming a part of in episode one, we established that I'm a generalist. I like to diversify, and that includes people too.

Figuring that out was a shockwave because I never understood why it wasn't easy for me. As I could see, it was easy for other people, and I literally was trying to diagnose myself like, what is wrong with me? Why don't other people seem to be easy around me like they are with each other sometimes? I definitely had times when I thought it was my fault that something was wrong with me. Something was wrong with my personality, and people could somehow supernaturally sense it. Still, after you know a lot about processing therapy aging, it turns out that it's my personality. There's nothing wrong with me. This isn't a problem to be solved. I'll explain a little bit more about that later in the podcast. But first, I want to talk about belonging in general.

Well, why is belonging so important? It's been researched by numerous organizations, university institutions, Stanford University, Oxford University, Deloitte, Harvard Business Review, and Gallup, to name a few and the findings that they've had included, you know, increased happiness. When we feel like we belong, we're more likely to experience positive emotions, improved mental health, reduced stress and anxiety, and increased motivation and engagement. When we feel like we're part of a group, we're more likely to contribute and feel a sense of purpose in our work and improve performance. It can give us greater confidence and self-esteem and greater resilience as well. All of these things we've experienced ourselves.

When I'm part of a community, especially a diverse community of individuals with different skill sets, who can balance me out, I can get more accomplished and become. I'm more resilient. I can. I can get things done.

So, what is belonging really?

Well, I mean, let's go to the experts here. So many folks talk about belonging, but I'm bringing up a couple of interesting quotes from some interesting authors that you'll probably recognize. The first is Simon Sinek, who is a well-known author and speaker. Simon Says belonging needs to fit in, and fitting in is the opposite of belonging. Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to become. Accepting the longing, on the other hand, doesn't require us to change who we are. It requires us to be who we are.

The second quote is by the amazing Brené Brown, who said true belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness.

These two quotes illustrate so perfectly the point that I have been trying to make much more eloquently than I probably ever could. Which is when you stop becoming yourself, when you are either afraid to be yourself or feel like you need to conform to a pattern of behaviour that is only acceptable to a group.

Then you'll never feel like you belong, even if you're part of the community, right?

So, when I was young, you know, I would try to participate in these communities, but I felt like I was only accepted if I changed myself, and I wasn't capable of doing that. I literally wasn't capable of doing that sustainably, consistently over a longer period of time, and so the quotes highlight the true connection between belonging and authenticity. When we belong to a group, we can share our true selves without fear of judgment or rejection.

This can be a transformative experience that helps us connect more deeply with ourselves and other people. There is something that needs to be said about it. Understanding yourself first, there have definitely been groups I belonged to in the past where I felt like I didn't belong, but that's because I needed to work on myself, I hadn't done the work to understand myself, and I was putting on a mask when the reality was if I had taken off that mask within that community. If I had been courageous enough to be myself and all my sorry, there's a very good chance I would have been accepted for who I was, and I don't think that there is any disrespect I think it was. Honestly, I think it was. It was me. It was me, you know, creating. I was the master of my self-destruction, in a way. So, we've established that creating a community takes more energy than expected.

We've established, through the words of Simon Sinek and Brené Brown, that belonging is really about feeling like we can express ourselves within a group of people and that we have the courage to be authentic. I mentioned that I believe it goes both ways that belonging is partly about being accepted by the group, not feeling judged, and having the courage to take off our mask.

And sometimes, we are the ones preventing ourselves from taking the mask off. It's only sometimes our environment. Sometimes we need to do work on ourselves that we've had, you know, past trauma, history and experiences that have made it unsafe for us to be ourselves and take our masks off.

And that's one of the reasons why organizations aren't just capable of creating inclusion but actually creating belonging. If feeling like we truly belong means being comfortable with taking our masks off for many of us weirdos out there, it's going to take time, consistency, a great deal of trust and for the people around us, our leaders, and our colleagues to lead by example and show us that it's safe to be a little bit weird and a little bit wonderful to be who we really are. We spend more time at work than we do almost anywhere else in our entire lives. So that's why the opportunity is so great to create these environments where people can really be themselves and feel like they have a community and relationships in their lives where they can bond with other people, create ideas, create innovative solutions, do something good, have a stronger, higher purpose.

Then, within that, finding out who they really are, diversity really is the spice of life. It helps us think differently when exposed to a wide range of perspectives. We're more likely to see things from different angles. Consider different viewpoints. So, it leads to creativity and innovation and problem-solving. It helps us challenge our assumptions, assumptions, and biases. Other people with different perspectives challenge us to help us become better people. They help us understand ourselves at a deeper level.

Appreciating all of the diversity of people, all of the different experiences, all of the different neurotypes and the way that people think and act and behave helps us become better collaborators. It takes work. It's sometimes hard, and trying to understand someone who doesn't believe like you take a lot of energy. Still, if you can get through that and keep working at it, it's amazing what comes out the other side, you know, so if we can creatively collaborate and have creative conflict in the workplace, healthy conflict, healthy communication. We can all understand each other better, and we can create these places where there is belonging and feel people can feel like they can trust themselves to take their masks off and trust that they're not going to be judged because, honestly, in today's world of work, more brains are better. We need every person's human capacity in order to solve the problems that we have in the world. And I think the first step is to accept people and accept where they're at and create belonging and listen to them and understand.

That's all for now. Thanks for listening.

If you like this episode, I'd love to connect with you on https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-patchell/ or https://www.positivist.ca/.

I'm your host Erin Patchell, and remember, don't stay out of trouble

Today, in episode #2 on building high performing teams, we draw inspiration from Jim Collins' "Good to Great," and explore why embracing our authentic selves will level up our own and our teams' performance. We'll discuss the power of self-acceptance, of accepting others, nurturing a developmental mindset, why hustling gets a bad name (but shouldn't) and ultimately, transforming ourselves into unstoppable forces at work. Enjoy!

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Transcript >

Welcome to Weirdos in the Workplace, the podcast that celebrates authenticity, passion and purpose in today's world of work. I'm your host, Erin Patchell, and today's episode is called on creating high-performing teams.

I expect this podcast to get weird, wonderful, and ooey-gooey. I decided to frame the episodes by stating that this is my perspective on high-performing teams.

Today, we will draw on inspiration from Jim Collin's "Good to Great" and explore why embracing our authentic selves will level up our own and our team's performance, regardless of our role in that team. We'll discuss the power of self-acceptance, accepting others, and nurturing A developmental mindset. We'll talk about hustling and ultimately transforming ourselves into unstoppable forces at work.

Enjoy.

It was essential to make it super crystal clear up front that I believe organizations exist to serve a purpose. Organizations exist to deliver value to customers as an agile list. That's something that I think, and that's something I've learned to believe. Working in the world of work and especially in my previous role on a people and culture solutions team and developing products for customers that supported professional development. One of the things that I learned through my previous position was that you can only have a company with the performance of its people.

Performance is intrinsically linked and will always be linked to the success of an organization.

It's also very clear that there are a lot of different ways to develop the performance of your team.

I'll lump them into two different categories. There are ways to develop the performance of your team that create trust with your team, and there are ways to develop performance within your team that eventually break the trust of your team.

We've all worked for bosses that had the latter approach. We know how it turned out. Those are often the bosses that people leave, and that's not to say that you can't learn something from them. I mean, some of the people I've learned the absolute most from in my career have been the people who were hardest on me and helped me grow.

But the problem with that model is that it needs to be more sustainable. You know it's not sustainable for every individual human. So, the question in the class is, how do you develop the performance of the team?

Because in order to develop performance, we all need to be able to look at ourselves, and we need to recognize what our gaps are and what our strengths are and leverage our strengths in order to develop our weaker areas right, ideally focusing on our strengths if we can.

But how do you do that?

How do you Let people feel like it's OK to be themselves so that they can learn?

To be the best version of themselves.

How do we build the resilience of our team so that day over day, week over week, month over month and year over year?

They are consistently becoming, step by step, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, the best version of themselves, allowing that to be sustainable.

Now Jim Collins wrote a little book called "Good to Great," and if you haven't read it, not just the HBR article, but the book, I would highly recommend it because almost every single page is full of amazing little tidbits and like thought.

One of the things that I always took away from this book is, you know, specifically about the Level 5 leader, the Level 5 leader, Jim Collins, Level 5 leader. The way he describes it is that they channel their ego away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a company. It's not that the level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they're incredibly ambitious, but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themself.

So how does this relate to authenticity?

Because authenticity is mostly self-acceptance, accepting who I am and being confident enough to let other people in, while the Level 5 leader is less self-interested and much more interested in the organization's performance.

So, taking the onus off of ourselves and the pressure off of ourselves and putting that on to the organization and focusing on the organization, I Believe, allows us to actually become more authentic in our own selves.

We can be who we want to be, especially when we're focusing on a bigger picture or a bigger vision, and that's why career specialists focus so often on the vision or the why, right?

The purpose what is your purpose?

Because really, your purpose and your authenticity are completely entangled, but purpose on its own isn't enough. Jim Collins also says the Level 5 executive builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.

I want to emphasize that professionals will be high performers; there's nothing else you can say about that. They understand that they have to hustle. And yeah, I'm taking that word back, guys.

I like to hustle. It's a great thing to hustle. I think, sure. Yeah, it can become toxic. Like, literally anything else in the world and hustle culture. I get it, you know; I get it that maybe you don't want to be there right now, or you need to take breaks 100%. We want to build sustainability.

That's the entire point we want to build performance and sustainability, but that doesn't mean that hustling doesn't have a place in time. Absolutely. I think it does. And you know what? The Level 5 leader.

Knows how to hustle better than anybody else, but they are singularly focused on their highest priorities. And so that is how we support each other to have performance and to make progress. To develop while also working really hard because we're also working smart, right?

So senior manager and you're trying to figure out how to nurture this mindset on your team. Maybe you've already got it yourself. You know your you, and you hustle, you develop. You're listening to this podcast, presumably. So, you're trying to figure it out.

How do I help my team develop this mindset?

I don't know that you really can. I think it's not one person's job to do that. I think the entire team is responsible for developing themselves, and ultimately the individual is responsible for developing themselves. But I can tell you the first thing that you should do is accept them the way that they are.

Truly accept them the way that they are because I can tell you that if there is any fear in them about what might happen if they make a mistake, they will always be covering up their mistakes, and they will never be able to learn from them, and nobody else will either. Interestingly, all the research I've ever read on teams talks about complementary teams, meaning that individuals on the team have different skill sets and different Drinks, and they can leverage each other's complementary strengths to become stronger.

Some organizations even go as far as to buddy people together who have complementary skill sets and have them work together the majority of the time. This actually works, and it has been well-researched as a great tool in the workplace.

So use that if you're struggling with your team a little bit, but the really important thing to remember about development is that people can only learn from where they are. If you jump too far ahead, they're not going to have a foundation stone in order to grow up from that.

And so we really need to figure out where that foundation is right now, or is it where we think it is?

It could be in a different place. There may need to be a building block added.

I'll leave you with this short personal anecdote. A few years ago, my son James played a couple of seasons in a Kid's Football League. Their team was absolutely amazing, and they had two incredible seasons. It was so cool to watch as a parent, of course, maybe you can say that the coaches got lucky when they drafted the kids, but I don't think it was luck every single year, no matter how many years the kids have been playing, they took them back to the absolute foundational elements of football and waited until everyone learned or remembered the fundamentals before moving on to more complex things.

So this did two things. One Every single kid who was new on the team felt included. Not a single person felt like an outsider.

And two, the kids who had been playing for years stayed humble, and it gave them an opportunity to strengthen what they already had in a lot of cases; it probably fixed a lot of bad habits that they developed as well. Sometimes you need to start at the foundation.

In football, it's easier to know what those foundation stones look like in people, but that's not easy, and you need to learn about your people. You need to build their trust and demonstrate to them that you are who you say you are and that the only thing that matters is their development and hustling. But we'll talk about that another time.

That's all for now.

Thanks for listening!

If you like this episode, I'd love to connect with you on https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-patchell/ or https://www.positivist.ca/. I'm your host Erin Patchell, and remember, don't stay out of trouble.

In this episode we pose the question - are generalists better equipped to solve complex problems and navigate uncertainty? We also talk about (drumroll) being the dumbest person in the room and why the beginner's mind is a gift.

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Transcript >

Welcome to Weirdos in the Workplace with your host Erin Patchell.

This is our first episode. It is March 29th, 2023, and I'm happy to chat with you a little bit today about,

Being the dumbest person in the room.

Stay tuned.

So, I grew up with more than my fair share of social anxiety. I won't get into it because it's probably a long and frankly boring story, but needless to say, I spent a lot of years observing people and a lot of years getting very comfortable with being the dumbest person in the room for a long time. I thought I was really stupid when I was growing up.

To say I know that there were people around me and friends and family who did not think that way, and they thought that I was quite intelligent, in fact, but I always felt like I was missing something. I always felt like there were just pieces of information that I didn't understand.

And over time, I learned that it's because my mind sees things in such detail that if there's any detail missing, then there are so many variables that I won't be able to, you know, assimilate into my algorithms, my internal algorithms, and that's why I'm often confused all the time.

I love, love, love being in A room with people who are smarter than me, and it helps me to assimilate knowledge. That's an interesting place to be in the world that we live in. Right now, that is constantly changing, and we can't trust the status quo. We can't trust.

You know, everything is changing all the time, and so we have to learn how to learn faster.

Eric Hoffer, who was quite an interesting American moral and social philosopher, died the same year I was born, incidentally said that in a world of change, the learner shall inherit the earth while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists.

What he's saying here is that it is less risky to be a generalist in the world that we have today, and I know that people talk about this all the time. There are lots of very interesting philosophers and psychologists, and business leaders who've talked about this concept of being becoming a generalist in this world.

But think about it. People who become specialists because I'm not a specialist. As you get to know me, you'll realize I'm the classic Jack of all trades. I've done a little bit of everything. I've dabbled, and I've tried to learn as much as I can. I keep an open mind, yadda yadda.

But I think A lot about being a specialist because I envy that. I deeply envy people who know what they want.

They are fixated on it, and they're capable of having the drive, intelligence, and motivation, all the things they need to succeed in a very specific role and become very good at it.

Part of me wonders if it's because of how we manage risk as people or how we've learned to manage it as people. That's something that I've been curious about, and I've not seen any research on that. So, if you know any research out there about, you know, risk tolerance and, you know, human beings who have generalized versus specialized, I'd be very curious to read about that.

But I do wonder about that.

I'm curious how much of our upbringing, our nurture, has created our risk tolerance and, therefore, our interest or ability or psychological ability to specialize and get really good at something.

Because I know for myself, and this is definitely true for me, that I very much resist learning deeply about something because I am worried that that thing that I'm interested in and that I have spent many years possibly. A lot of energy learning is eventually going to become obsolete or not useful to me or to anyone else, not marketable.

I do envy that I do envy that ability to throw caution to the wind and trust that if you learn something deep enough that you will, there will be a market for it.

You will have a career I know that is not necessarily true for everyone.

I know there are very educated professionals who do go down that path and find themselves a little bit stuck and have to pivot. I've worked with some people who that has been true for.

But the reality is that even specialists have numerous transferable skills, so it's not really as risky as my own brain as trying to make it out to be right.

These are some of the crazy things I think about. So being the dumbest person in the room, I think it's a good position to be in.

If you're constantly surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you, you're capable of being in the room, and you're willing to ask the questions that no one else is willing to ask and look a little stupid, to be honest, sometimes. Because everyone else is making assumptions, and you're not making assumptions.

Then that's a great place to be because you're going to have a lot of breakthroughs, and everyone else is going to have a lot of breakthroughs as well.

So, don't make any assumptions.

I guess you know, I think, most importantly, if you can cultivate that mindset where you are, you're the dumbest person in the room, but that's OK.

In fact, that's a great thing to be the dumbest person in the room. It's a great position to be in, and keep asking questions and getting curious. Then it creates this culture in your organization where people feel safe to just say dumb things sometimes, and sometimes it's the dumbest things that end up being the most profound.

I'll leave you with this little story.

Once, a professor went to his Zen master; he asked him to explain the meaning of Zen, and the master quietly poured a cup of tea. The cup was full, but he continued to pour the water splashing over the sides of the cup. The professor could not stand this any longer, so he questioned the master impatiently. Why do you keep pouring when the cup is full?

I want to point it out to you. The master said that you are similarly attempting to understand Zen while your mind is full. First, empty your mind of preconceptions before you attempt to understand them.

Of course, this is a fairly famous parable, but I think it applies to basically everything that we do in life in every single room we come in, in everything single space that we come in, make an intention before you enter that space, whether it's a virtual space or a real-world space or even just another moment in time. Purpose to enter that space with a completely open mind to possibilities and shed off all your preconceptions, preconceived notions, and assumptions. Allow it to open like a flower, allowing the scenario, thought, or conversation to open as it as it is intended to be.

That's all for now.

Thanks for listening!

If you like this episode, I'd love to connect with you on https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-patchell/ or https://www.positivist.ca/. I'm your host Erin Patchell, and remember, don't stay out of trouble.