Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders - February 2023
Building the foundations for brilliant conversations
Welcome to the February edition of Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders. If you are newly subscribed, thank you for joining us, and I hope you find this a helpful way to maintain your continued leadership learning.
Race Equality Week has taken place during February, so in this edition, I’ll be sharing some ideas about how you can build the foundations for brilliant conversations, as next month we’ll focus on how to have a conversation with your team about racism.
To have productive and transformative conversations about important topics such as racism, your team must be able to handle it.
The building blocks for brilliant conversations are when your team are:
non-judgmental,
able to actively listen,
able to respectfully share and challenge views,
trusting each other to be open,
caring for each other,
able to work through the discomfort, which will absolutely be experienced.
To be truly effective and real, this needs to be role modelled by you. You need to create this environment for your team and show them the way. This is about actively enabling psychological safety.
When psychological safety doesn’t exist, it makes it incredibly difficult to have big conversations in a constructive and compassionate way that can result in transformational change. It is also a sign that you are unlikely to achieve high performance.
This month, we will look at how to improve these connections across your team so you can have big, brilliant conversations. Further on in this edition, you’ll find some resources to get you thinking and there is an activity to help you reflect on where you are now and what action you need to take to ensure you have the foundations in place for brilliant conversations.
In the next edition, we’ll explore how, having laid these foundations, you’ll be able to have big conversations as a team, especially really important ones, such as tackling racism.
You can use the Activity Sheet I’ve created to help capture your thinking and future actions.
If you prefer, use your own notebook.
Creating an environment where your team can trust each other takes work and deliberate actions. This is about the big and small actions you and the team take every day.
For your team to feel true psychological safety, the right behaviours, and ways of working need to be consistent and led by you.
A colleague shared this analogy with me: the plants will grow and blossom if you take care of the soil. When you don’t take care of their environment correctly, they won’t flourish.
As the leader, you are the gardener.
You are there to care for the environment so your team can grow, flourish, perform, and combine as a beautiful garden.
Now, pop those gardening gloves on and let’s get watering...I mean, started.
Resources to get you thinking
Here are some brilliant resources that focus on trust, active listening and how to be less judgmental.
Trust - I’m going to start with one of my absolute idols in leadership: Brené Brown.
Here is a link to her BRAVING inventory from Dare to Lead.
You can use this tool to consider what Brené calls the ‘anatomy of trust’. This is at the heart of how people and therefore how teams can genuinely connect.
If you want to search for a clip of Brené in action, search for ‘anatomy of trust’ on your favourite video clip provider.
Active Listening - Here’s a clip on how to become an active listener by Emeroy Bernado.
This will help you to understand what active listening is and you’ll be able to pick up some techniques from Emeroy on how you can improve your active listening.
There’s always time for humour, right?! Here’s a funny clip (well, in my opinion, it is) of Sheldon and Amy from the Big Bang Theory. How much active listening is really happening here?
Being Less Judgemental - This is an excellent article from Viktor Sander for socialself.com.
This article will help you understand why we judge others, but it will also give you some ideas about how to challenge your thinking and behaviours, to become less judgmental.
I could keep going with these themes and resources, but I’m going to stop there, as it’s better to focus on a few key areas to build on rather than become overwhelmed trying to master everything in one go.
Getting great at listening, trusting and being less judgmental will open many doors to you successfully leading your team and to your team performing brilliantly together because you are creating a psychologically safe environment.
The questions in the activity below will help you understand where you want to get to with your team and the priority work to achieve the results you want.
If you would like some more ideas for resources or you’ve already mastered the ones I’ve shared, get in touch with me here to let me know what you’d like to explore more of.
Activity
Now you’ve watched, listened and read those resources, take some time to think about the following questions. Use the provided Activity Sheet or your own notebook to help you work through these sections, capturing your thinking and actions.
Consider your own experiences first:
When have you been in a team where you felt safe, comfortable, and able to be open?
When have you been in a team when you didn’t feel this way?
What contributed to each of those experiences?
How did this impact you?
Now consider each of the components identified for a great environment (being non-judgmental, actively listening, respectfully sharing and challenging views, trusting each other, being open, showing care and navigating discomfort); what would 10/10 look and feel like?
This is to help you consolidate your experiences and the resources you’ve discovered.
Use this section to visualise what great would look and feel like if your team regularly and consistently demonstrated these behaviours.
Next, consider how your team environment currently looks and feels.
Based on the visualisation you’ve captured, how would you score each of those components out of 10 for your team?
Be honest with yourself; you don’t have to show these scores to anyone. This is about you really understanding where you and the team really are.
Capture what you’ve noticed and what contributed to your score.
Consider each of those scores and the gap you have identified.
What needs to be consistently enhanced or maintained to score each component higher in 6 months?
Which are the biggest priorities and likely to provide the most significant benefit for the overall team?
Try and select only 3 top priorities.
It’s useful to complete the exercise for all 8 before deciding on your top 3. Let the thinking happen, then decide.
This will then enable you to clarify your actions.
Commit to the actions you are going to take.
Which actions will you focus on to ensure you lead the way in the priorities you’ve selected?
Create accountability for yourself.
A way to stick to your actions is to create a way to hold yourself accountable for those actions – what works best for you?
You might want to use the Activity Sheet as a way to remind yourself; you might want to share your actions with a trusted colleague so they can help you stay on track, or you might want to talk to your manager or coach and get them to help you review progress.
Another way to create wider accountability is to talk to your team about it. You might want to share with them what you are doing and what you will be practising.
I’d recommend including the team in a proactive conversation to help you identify the priorities and actions; this could become something you can all work on and commit to as a team.
Here’s some tips on how you might hold this team discussion.
It’s still helpful to complete this exercise yourself, but it would be incredibly valuable to do it with the team too. Creating team goals and commitments is a compelling way to achieve meaningful change and growth.
There is plenty here for you to get stuck into, and I’d recommend you complete this over several sessions.
Create the time to do this well, give yourself time to reflect and revisit, and then commit to action. It will pay off in the long term, enabling you to create a much more connected, open, and safe team environment. This will be excellent preparation for all challenges and opportunities you will face as a team.
If you feel a bit stuck, please contact me here and we’ll work out how I can help.
In March, we’ll look at how the foundations you have created will enable you to have a brilliant conversation about racism.
See you in March!
Would a safe space to explore your thinking help you take your leadership to the next level?
It’s time to consider Leadership Coaching.
With my Leadership Coaching 5-point pathway, I help you find focus, commit to action and grow by reviewing and understanding your impact and progress.
This is a way to learn and develop in the flow of your work, in a way that puts you at the centred.
Contact me here for an informal conversation about how Leadership Coaching can help you.