Friday Fifteen #2: Reroute to empathy

I started out wanting to write about listening today. I wanted to write about Shaw’s comment that “the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Listening as a leadership skill has come up in several conversations this week. In reflecting on this, I wanted to write about listening to understand vs listening to respond, and about how listening well can help us find connective tissue in communities, teams, and organisations.

Instead, what I kept coming back to was empathy. Perhaps because in order to listen, we need to hold a certain degree of empathy. Or perhaps because when we listen well, we bring empathy to round out our understanding. When we’re leading ourselves, empathy is also self-compassion, a necessary element of innovative, constructive learning, and often destructively lacking in ambitious leaders. When we’re leading others, empathy builds the connection required to retain, motivate, and promote excellence. It doesn’t have to be complicated. By deliberately understanding teams as fundamentally human, we can measurably improve people experience and business outcomes.  

I began to get frustrated when I couldn’t arrange my thoughts about listening on the page the way I wanted to. What I needed to do was listen, empathetically, to where my reflection was settling.

Friday Fifteen #1: Start Where You Are

I’m experimenting with a new way of focusing my writing practice. For the next six weeks, I’m blocking out 45 minutes every Friday for a quick write. Fifteen minutes to collect my thoughts, fifteen minutes to draft, fifteen to edit. Fifteen minutes isn’t a lot of editing time, so I’m hoping that the comparative lack of polish will help me frame these as “thinking out loud” for myself. I spend a reasonable amount of time taking in ideas and information every week, so by doing this on Fridays, I’m curious to see how this might help me synthesize and clarify my own thoughts. 

Changing a habit or building a skill in a single person takes repeated efforts, and consistency. On an individual level, we know from research in psychology and neurobiology that changing existing behaviour patterns, or developing new skills requires both extended repetition and consistency. On an organisational level, it’s not dissimilar. Collective patterns, process, and development add layers with magnifying power. In learning science we talk about building automaticity. How long does it take to build the skill of consistently rerouting to a new process flow, or outcomes that meet a strategic goal? Depends on the quality and consistency of the skill building practice. No matter where you’re trying to go in the future, it helps tremendously to start by knowing where you are in the present.

Data and people analytics are essential tools for understanding our starting place. We can plan more strategically, create greater, more sustainable impact, when we have this as a foundation to start from. The process of integrating change can be dynamic. Just like on a journey, signposts help. Speedometers show us how fast we’re going on the highway, the ubahn app shows us where the delays are on the route. They help us maintain awareness of where we’re at so we can make more informed choices about our journey. And, they show us when we’ve reached milestones. Gathering and engaging with specific data on a regular basis creates signposts to inform our navigation.

As a tool, people analytics gives us the ability to track behavior, experience, and outcomes in a measurable way. The data itself doesn’t give us the whole picture. Data is information about the experiences, performance, and outcomes in your organisation. The people are where those experiences, performance, and outcomes come from. The more effectively change journeys contextualise their data in the human basis of the work, the greater the scale of possible success. Katarina Berg calls this “data is your detective, not your dictator.” Tempting though it can be to look at it in isolation, change that really integrates and sustainably transforms an organisation looks at data as reference points. It is most valuable as the wireframe of the piece, not as the piece itself. 

Speed and Grace

“But it is possible to build the emotional and behavioral muscles that allow us to respond to human error with speed and grace.” - Amy Edmonson, Right Kind of Wrong

You know those team building exercises where you’re put in a group and you have to get a ball from one side of the room to the other using popsicle sticks etc? A team I was on had one once, intended to support cross-level relationship building. Everyone was put into groups and got started. In the middle of the process, someone got flustered, as happens, and fumbled the prop. Most of the group thought nothing of it. The team lead was immediately rattled, and, raising their voice, began barking instructions at the group so that we would complete the exercise first, or in their words, ”win.” The trainer didn’t engage in the situation, and missed the opportunity to reinforce that the objective wasn’t so much to complete the process as it was to practice cohesion and mutual support. Of course there are times when urgency and criticality necessitate leadership to act with immediacy and authoritatively. A low stakes teambuilding exercise intended to build trust with a sizeable number of new team members? Not it. But that reactive response was the “muscle” that was primed in that environment. 

I know that this experience wasn’t unusual. How many of us have experienced patterns in leadership–or rather, patterns from leadership–that instead of promoting psychological safety, innovation and growth, stifle each element through distrust, fear, and disengagement?  

I come back to Right Kind of Wrong periodically, and this closing line in chapter four  jumps out at me each time I revisit the book because of how Edmonson pairs speed and grace. Speed is often necessary in the world we live in today. Handling the responsibilities and pressures of leadership can make it unavoidable. Grace, however, is also increasingly essential for folks who want to do it better. Leaders who want to be more than reactive must build the muscles for grace. To be responsive in the moment, and proactive moving forward, transformative leaders must be able to pair both speed and grace in their dealings with human error. Leaders who undervalue the relational aspect of their work by focusing on the former at the expense of the latter risk undermining their own potential, and that of their business.