Tag Archive for: decision-making

Building a Learning Culture Within Organizations

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Hi, and a warm welcome to The Human Side of Business Podcast. I’m your host Ange MacCabe. I am pleased to introduce you to Ellen Bailey, VP of Diversity and Culture at Harvard Business Publishing.

In this episode, Ellen dives into the strategies behind establishing a learning culture within leadership and organizations and provides insight into how HBP champions this mindset change for their culture and people.

What Is a Learning Organization?

Ellen Bailey: Organizations, including our own, need to shift how we think about a learning organization. Let’s shift from having a checklist to having guidelines; let’s shift to being more transparent with our employees, so they know the thoughts behind our decision-making process and strategic goals. So that enables them to make smart decisions, and it allows them to take risks and innovate and change how we work and think beyond the moment in a way that supports our goals and strategy.

Building Trust Into Workplace Culture

Ellen Bailey: There’s a little bit of learning and development that goes into enabling an organization to be a trusting organization because you have to change some processes to allow people to do that. It’s not just about folks’ good intent. And we can do training and development and learning to help with behaviours, but you also have to have the processes in the mechanisms that support that.

Leaders Don’t Have to Have All The Answers

Ellen Bailey: We fear that if we don’t have the answers, people will question our ability. We are not comfortable with demonstrating authenticity and vulnerability due to that. And so, back to the Fearless Organization article. I will quote Amy Edmondson one more time when she says that in situations we haven’t faced before, it is simply not possible to have all the answers. And so that’s what I continue to express to our team. So we continue to grow and innovate and go and go beyond where we have been. So what got us here will not get us there. And so as we continue to try to advance the thought leadership to impact the world globally, to improve the practice of management, then we aren’t going to have all those answers. And so we need to demonstrate that vulnerability internally, especially with our teams.

Leaders Should Facilitate Individual and Team Elevation

Ellen Bailey: We all have opportunities to facilitate someone’s best, especially as leaders. And so, how do we do that so they can continue to excel? I find so many gaps in that because leaders often feel they need all the answers. We have leaders that are afraid people will run past them, and it’s like, no, no, everybody wins when you facilitate your team best, and you can identify with them on a human level to help them be most productive. It’s fun and awesome to see people you work with continue to excel and do great things.

For more leadership insights check out my blog: 3 Ways to Develop an Intentional Approach to Leadership

Link to full podcast episode

Leadership Spotlight: Building Transparency and Trust in Leadership

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Hi, and a warm welcome to The Human Side of Business Podcast. I’m your host Ange MacCabe. I have the pleasure of introducing you to Jeff Kelly, CEO of The Flower Cart Group, about Transparency and Trust in leadership.

Jeff dives into the challenges of leading a firmly established team and how he took a people-centric approach to leadership when integrating with his team as their new leader.

Building Trust Through Team Collaboration

Jeff Kelly: Full transparency. We know each other, so, you know, I’m not a very confrontational person and certainly not intimidating as a boss.. So I think that’s one of the things I learned. I don’t see that as a weakness. I see that as a strength. If you play it as a strength.

Ange MacCabe: Very much so, because I hear you in the sense that you’re utilizing that from a place of authenticity. Like you’re using that from a place of what I call positive vulnerability. Right. So you’re saying, hey, I have a thought that I really want to put out here. You’re my subject matter expertise. Let’s solve this problem. This together, essentially, is what I’m hearing. And based on that transparency and that continued effort that you put in over time, Jeff, what I’m hearing is you build strong trust across the team, especially your management group.

Learning How to Be Vulnerable As a Leader

Jeff Kelly: When I took over here, I was in my early forties and it was my first overall senior leadership role. I had leadership positions in other organizations, but I as the director at the time needed to do a check on my own energy and enthusiasm, which is crucial, but at the same time, that ability to understand when it’s appropriate to overshare or when you do overshare – maybe that was not such a great idea. Right?

Looking to Your Team for Their Expertise

Jeff Kelly: Early days, an opportunity came up with a local business not too far from us. And I wanted to work towards training, experiences being compensated, participants to be compensated. And I basically said, Guys, we’re going to do this. We’re going to do this. Let’s make it happen. Let’s put ideas out on the table. And to the credit of my team at the time, I think it was well understood that this was a line in the sand for me. I wasn’t going to back down from this.. But at the same time, I was looking at them saying, you guys are the experts in delivering this, how we can make this work. And they rose to the occasion.

Staying People-centered With an Open Door Policy

Ange MacCabe: There’s a lot that you’ve said that is piquing my interest. So I really like your approach to getting to know me. Integration. So there’s still boundaries, right? Because oftentimes what you hear from leaders is, yes, I always have an open door policy. And that can be disheartening to some employees when they see that your door is closed half the time. Right. Because the realistic approach of things is that you do have to close your door sometimes to have confidential conversations, just to have some space to focus as well as continue to lead the organization. So really appreciating your thought process. Hey, when my door is open, please come in. Get to know me, interrupt me. That is an authentic approach to transparency, which I’m sure helped you along the way with trust.

What is Transparency?

Jeff Kelly: Being transparent means you have to come from a place of vulnerability. Because for me, being transparent means being open to hear both support and criticism. I’m talking about it in the context of new ideas and new directions and change essentially in a change management environment which I still find myself in.

For more leadership insights check out my blog: 5 Questions to Ask Yourself to Become a Better Leader

Link to full podcast episode

How To Design Your Environment For Success

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I’m beginning to realize the lack of control I have over my actions. When I’m with certain friends, I act differently than I would with others. Where I go, will determine what I wear. How I’m feeling, will impact my decision-making. Even the time of day can have an effect on my patience. We have so much less control over our decisions than we think we do. Our behavior is largely influenced by our environment.

If I get a compliment on a new shirt, I’ll be more likely to wear it again. But if I feel out of place, I’ll think twice before putting it on. But that makes sense, right? Past experiences help form future behaviors through trial and error.

When I get a positive reaction, it reinforces behavior and a negative one will deter me from it.

What makes up your environment?

Our environment can be broken down into 5 categories, which influence behavior.

Environment / Example /  Behavior

  • 1. Location / At work / Dress appropriately
  • 2. Time of Day / 9:00 / Drink coffee
  • 3. After event / After eating / Rinse dishes in the sink
  • 4. Social Influence/ With athletic friends/ Eat healthy food
  • 5. Emotional State/ Stressed out/ Eat comfort food

However, our environment is subjective and can trigger a different response for you than it would for me. In the morning, you might drink coffee and I may drink tea. After eating, you might clean your dishes and I’ll leave them on the counter. When stressed, I might binge and you might exercise.

Your environment is the first step in The Habit Loop, which sparks a craving, behavior and then reward. But let’s focus on how you can design your environment to create good habits.

Why is your environment important?

It plays a role not only in your behavior but also on your mood.

Have you ever cleaned your desk and felt a weight lift off your shoulders?

I recently gave away a bunch of stuff in my office and felt more focused. While an otherwise messy desk causes me to feel overwhelmed.

This created a positive association between a clean environment and increased focus. The next time I feel my concentration declining, I might look to clean my environment.

Even better, I may even be proactive in keeping a clean desk to avoid losing focus. And that’s the type of habits we’re looking to create.

How does environment influence behavior?

Your brain is always looking for shortcuts to making decisions. Habits are a great way to make decisions automatic.

Therefore, you can design your environment to cue positive behaviors by reinforcing associations.

For example, how I associate a clean desk with feeling focused. Or when I get into the shower, my brain is cued to wash, and when I take a bath, it’s cued to read and relax.

Over time your mind prepares itself for a specific action primed by a particular environmental cue. However, if you do something different than what was expected, your mind will take notice.

If one day I decide to wash in the bath and read in the shower, my mind will say; “WTF Scott, this isn’t the association we developed!” That’s an extreme example. But the same thing occurs when you take a drink of Coke but find Sprite in your cup instead.

Design your environment for success

You can design your environment to establish certain behaviors. However, it will take time to create new associations. As described, start by creating positive associations within your environment.

This can be as simple as dedicating each location for specific actions – by giving every behavior a home.

  • My computer is for work.
  • Tablet for play.
  • Dinner table for eating.
  • Couch for watching tv or playing video games.

By devoting specific spaces to new habits will help in making them stick. The more environmental cues you use, the stronger the association becomes.

I meditate on the same chair (location), at the same time (time of day), after I shower (after event).

Combining environmental cues helps to make my meditation practice habitual. However, when I used to travel for work, changes in my environment made my habit more difficult. Another example is if you watch TV in bed; you’re creating multiple associations for your bed.

Watch TV and sleep, which can be confusing. Every time you climb into bed you’re brain may be primed for sleep or TV – which are 2 very different associations.

Try and use location cues for similar activities to avoid discrepancies. However, you can also design your environment through other cues.

  • Time – Around 9 am each morning, I drink a cup of coffee.
    After Event – After making a protein shake, I wash my blender right away.
  • Social Influence – When I eat out with healthy friends, I’m more conscious of what I eat.
  • Emotional State – When I feel stressed, I pause and take a few deep breaths to relax.

Habit Challenge

For this week’s habit challenge, design your environment according to the associations you wish to create.

  • 1. Make a list of locations
  • 2. Determine relevant associations for each location (+/-)
  • 3. Design your environment to reinforce positive actions

Here are a few examples of how I’ve re-designed my environment to reinforce good habits.

I keep a water jug in plain sight to encourage drinking.

A book beside my bed as a reminder to read.

Sweets are hidden away in the pantry or fridge and healthy food in front.

I’ve even designated one side of the couch for reading and the other for watching TV!

The goal is to design your environment to make bad habits difficult and good habits easy.

The Human Skills of Leaders

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In leading a team, being an efficient and strong communicator is not the only thing that matters. Your overall behaviour plays a big role. Getting to know yourself and further developing your human skills as a leader can have a great impact on your team’s performance as well as your own.

Indeed, Assistant Vice President of Continuing Studies at York University Tracey Taylor-O’Reilly says that “While technical skills may get workers hired, it’s their human skills that will allow them to excel in the workplace”.

Self-awareness and empathy often top the list of the most in-demand human skills in the workplace – along with curiosity, communication, and decision-making, which are directly correlated.

Self-Awareness for Better Performance

How we behave as professionals is no different than how we behave as individuals. We may be able to adapt but who we are transpires in everything that we do and influences our behaviours and our relationships at work.

However, society has placed the focus on assessing performance first. Growing up, schools hand out report cards and the process continues throughout our professional career with performance reviews.

But such processes have been developed to measure our knowledge and actions and fail to analyze the root causes of our performance. They don’t take into consideration the beliefs, the emotions and the behaviours that we are made of.

The reality is that practising introspection and self-awareness gives us the opportunity to truly perform to the best of our ability. In fact, it has been demonstrated that there are significant correlations between emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness. If emotional intelligence is such an essential human skill to have in the workplace, it’s that it allows us to identify our limiting beliefs and to manage and adapt our behaviour so it doesn’t affect our performance and our relationships with others.

We rarely stop to reflect upon ourselves and on how our actions might affect others.

What makes us cringe at a colleague might be appreciated by others. What aims to express respect can sometimes be perceived as disrespect. But beyond knowing what you dislike in others and recognizing that no one is perfect, it may be worth asking yourself a few questions to assess the situation.

  • What are the behaviours that characterize you?
  • What types of behaviours can’t you stand in others?
  • Do you have a routine and what does it look like?
  • Do you go with the flow and rarely plan ahead of time?
  • Do you ever experience anxiety and when does it show up?
  • What sort of feedback have you gathered from others about yourself?
  • What sort of leader and communicator are you?

The answers to such questions can help you identify how you show up for others, what are the superpowers you need to leverage and which areas require improvement.

Don’t limit yourself to the workplace. Source examples from your private life as well.

The Role of Empathy

Self-awareness and empathy go hand in hand when it comes to the human skills of which the best leaders are made of.

In a recent blog post on self-awareness, I wrote that empathy is “a mindset and a comprehensive approach to being – in the workplace and in life”, and that it is “what gives us the ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes so we can see and feel from their perspective”.

A high-performing team is one where resistance is at its lowest and trust is at its highest. Without trust, there is no collaborative mindset and no commitment to the team nor the company. And without empathy, there is no trust.

Empathy can be expressed by demonstrating interest, showing appreciation, practising active listening and asking questions. Empathy is about gaining context about where others are coming from, questioning our own beliefs and biases, avoiding criticism and being fully present.

When there is empathy exhibited by leaders and peers in the workplace, trust can automatically follow. This lends itself to a ‘safe to fail’ work environment that we’re all striving for.

At Intuity, we support leaders wanting to adopt trust-based leadership and improve their human skills in different ways.

We often start by working with organizations to understand their team dynamics. Showing our curiosity, we lean into questions like: What kind of leader are you and how do you show up with your team? What type of individuals are part of your team and how do they interact?

This can be done through observation, interviews, as well as our DISC, 360 Leader, Emotional Intelligence-Q, and other assessments and reports.

Coaching is also a great resource to increase self-awareness and help you find the answers within yourself.

Lastly, our Showing Leadership Blueprint Training is a full-day virtual group training that helps teams assess their individual and joint behaviours and how they influence team dynamics and performance.

Want to find out more? Contact us!

Can Workplace Culture Evolve Through Leadership?

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I’ve interviewed over 80 CEOs in the past 12 months, and often we get on the topic of company culture. I get excited each time. When we ask CEOs to define culture, the range of responses varies with every company, AND many leaders are not aware of what culture means to them specifically.

Some responses include:

  • Teams create culture as a company grows.
  • Culture changes based on values, beliefs and assumptions of the organization’s values, ideas, and assumptions.
  • Culture is built around the goals and objectives of the organization.

The odd time, we get a candid answer – “I don’t know- but we need to figure it out!”

Culture Defined

So what is culture, and why does it matter in the workplace?

Workplace culture is not tangible. The term is thrown around all the time, but it’s not something that you can point to and say, “That’s culture.” Yet, it holds immense value because it is essential to tie together every aspect of your business.

Workplace culture is the beliefs, behaviors, and values shared by employees within an organization. Whether good or bad, working in an organizational culture can significantly affect how people grow professionally and personally.

Based on my experience, I have learned three essential things that contribute to culture shaping which companies can apply to get desired results.

  • Self-awareness allows you to see others more clearly by understanding how beliefs, behaviors, and values shape performance.
  • Curiosity – what drives and motivates the human side of teams
  • Judgment – Ensuring there is enough information to see people without bias.

Here’s what we know about culture:

  • We go after what’s easy – changing company artifacts, behaviors, and metrics is more straightforward.
  • Writing can easily change company artifacts, behaviors, and metrics.
  • Influencing changes in behaviors and metrics can be easily agreed upon by teams.
  • Beliefs, values (our real ones, not those on an internal billboard), and assumptions are much harder to change.

Blind Spots

Organizations can write down and discuss their intentions, but here’s where the realism comes into play. If our beliefs, values, and assumptions aren’t aligned, we do not have an effective organizational culture – despite the matched RRSP and monthly gift cards.

Culture touches on everything – mountains of data tell us that organizational culture hits on performance, decision-making, atmosphere, team approach, structures and even how we communicate.

Regardless of the debate, culture is from the top-down and the bottom up. The profound thing that screams out to me is that culture isn’t as intentional as it should be. I haven’t done the research, but it certainly leans into self-awareness and EI-Q.

It’s something that is moving and growing daily. That demands our attention, especially now in this hybrid working world with new and undiscovered pressures.

We are human first – To answer the questions around “Can culture change with leadership?”. In short, YES! By becoming self-aware and tapping into the human side of organizations, leaders can capitalize on the human (soft) skills that drive performance, decision-making, atmosphere, team approach, and communication in order to drive performance and foster an intentional and effective workplace culture.

Leadership Burnout: Common Symptoms and How to Turn it Around

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What is burnout?

We’ve all been there, feeling mentally or physically exhausted, but what is burnout really? Most of the time, burnout comes from taking on too much at once, like an overwhelming workload. But it can also come from neglecting your self-care (i.e. how much sleep did you get last night?) and being isolated from friends, family and colleagues (remember early pandemic days). Burnout can be tough whether you’re a leader, manager or individual contributor.

If you’re starting to feel run down in life and at work, it’s time for some self-reflection. Slowing down and thinking about what’s bogging you down is the first step toward feeling better. If you aren’t sure if you are experiencing burnout, here are some common symptoms that arise:

Symptoms of Burnout

  • Detachment from colleagues, company engagement opportunities, friends and family
  • Not communicating feelings of failure and self-doubt
  • Loss of motivation leads to increased procrastination and absenteeism.
  • Exhibiting anger or lack of patience towards employees, friends, or family.
  • Showing signs of reduced efficiency.

Life is busy, and it can be so easy to get wrapped up in our daily responsibilities, but I’m sure we have all heard the saying, “You can’t pour from an empty cup’ – this statement couldn’t be more accurate. If you’re feeling burnt out, it can be hard to take action because it can feel like ANOTHER thing to think about on top of your already huge pile, but it’s better to face burnout head-on to find your way back to your best self.

Here are some things to consider when trying to overcome burnout:

How to Overcome Burnout

Practice self-awareness – becoming aware of your thoughts, feelings, and environment and understanding how you react to things can help you step back and allow for space to make more precise, better-informed decisions.

Find your purpose – leaning into what lights you up can lend to your well-being; when we feel like what we do matters, it helps us focus and fulfill objectives.

Practice well-being – most people focus a lot on their careers, but the truth is there is a lot that goes into ensuring we as people are functioning in our optimal state. It’s essential to take the time to get movement into your day, eat nutritious food and get optimal sleep. We can’t expect to show up as our best selves at work if we aren’t taking care of ourselves in the other areas of our lives.

Learn to Prioritize – there isn’t a person on earth who knows and can do everything, so practicing resilience is essential.

  • Break large tasks down into smaller, more manageable parts and assess if items can be delegate
  • Learn to prioritize tasks in order of importance or impact
  • Aim for consistent, not perfect
  • Focus on personal development, and learn new skills that foster growth and improve work-flow.

As individuals, we all experience natural ups and downs in our energy levels. However, incorporating conscious choices into your daily routine can significantly impact your motivation, engagement, creativity, and productivity. By proactively managing your physical, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual well-being, you can create a healthy balance that allows you to perform at your best.

By exhibiting a healthy work-life balance as a leader, you can foster a workplace culture prioritizing mental health and well-being, leading to increased engagement, better productivity, and higher job satisfaction

Take a step back and prioritize your well-being so that you can lead your team to do the same.