Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This episode reveals simple intentional moves to bring trust & safety into your team permenantly
Is your team not quite clicking and you can't put your finger on why? Are you carrying the weight of holding everyone together while the business keeps moving? Do you wish you had a way to actually understand what's going on around your people and fix it?
You're in the right place.
This podcast helps leaders understand the signs around their team and change them intentionally; so performance, engagement and trust follow naturally.
I'm Josey. I was part of a fractured team and chose to do things differently. What we built together turned out to be what the world's top 30% of organisations do consistently. I spent two years sitting on it before deciding to share it. Now I can’t wait to share it.
If you're ready to lead differently people-first leadership is the better way to have a better day.
Ciao.
Next steps:
Step 1: Take the Leadership Self-Assessment - www.theolivetreemethod.com/leadership-self-assessment
Step 4: Listen to the episodes - we start with aligning to the Leadership Self-Assessment - 26 core areas to make the difference
Step 2: Sign up and make the The Olive Tree Method yours - www.theolivetreemethod.com
Step 3: Reach out if you have queries - josey@theolivetreemethod.com
Welcome back. Continuing on from the previous episode, what was the simple thing I asked my team to do that had everyone thinking I'd lost the plot, but it changed the team dynamic. Hang in through the intro. I can't wait to share the core themes that will shift trust and safety for your team. I'm stoked you're here.
Checking in and welcome back again have you observed about safety and trust around yourself and your team? Did you notice some other things that may need support?
The Olive Tree Method Leadership Self-Assessment is a tool I offer where you can get instant results to see how you and your team are doing against 26 areas of teamwork.
It's simple, quick, and it will help you with something you may have observed. Then you can name it so you can change it.
We've established that safety and trust is low in most workplace environments. I felt it in my own experience, and that's definitely what the data is saying. So that means change is needed. That means team transformation in some form.
That isn't normal everyday work to get done. Change can often be interpreted as extra. But the awesome news is, and that's why I'm sharing, People First turns that model upside down and becomes the foundation of your team embracing change and their own transformation.
Change is done well when the people leading it are trusted. This isn't the only factor, but it's the foundation. Trust establishes safety.
Trust is built in the workplace with engaged leadership, a common vision or journey, common established values of behaviour, taking the heat out of mistakes, and the team seeing that the business is wanting to make people's lives better in order to reach business goals. It's not to pull the people around to accommodate for what the business needs.
If you can establish that difference, that you as the leader are invested in helping them do the work in the best way that can be done for them. You're on a rocket ship to your best workday ever. This could be through one-on-ones, polling, feedback, finding out what's going on, where you need to put energy, and where the priorities are for your team.
I'll share a link to an outstanding Forbes article about the skills needed for leaders in transformation today. It was one of the key motivators for me to start doing this work. If you're struggling to get your boss on board or need a different perspective about change, it's a great conversation starter. A direct quote from that article, shifting how teams think, react and respond to change is more important than ever before.
Moving change in teams can be tough, so I highlight this now as the more comfortable you are with the necessity to adjust the way your team may be operating or working together, the smoother the change is. As you're a condition, the leading condition, if you're okay with change and leading, your team will be.
People first is having the kahunas to make engaging invitations. To act well towards each other. That needs to be modeled intentional respectful for acknowledgement of our shared humanity again ahead of the business needs. So what does that actually look like in practice?
While waiting for a meeting to start, I rolled around an idea with fellow managers and the feedback was I was nuts. But I did it anyway.
I asked everyone in my team to say good morning to each other before they sat down at their desks and goodbye to one another before they left. It sounds so simple. I just asked for everyone to give it a go for a week. I didn't blame or point fingers. It was an invitation. For some people they were like, why are you even asking? I had noticed that some people got ignored and isolated and it didn't feel right.
For me it was checking in with each other, just the basics. We spent 8-12 hours a day together, friend or foe, say hello.
The first day after I said it I could hear the team, it was pretty awkward. There were giggles and protests. Someone called me a dick, pick ya battles. At the start of every day people were being respected. Did it stick? Yep. Did I feel like a dork asking? Yep. But did the team feel embarrassed because they weren't being courteous towards each other? I'm not sure. But it did make a difference. People felt respected and acknowledged. The engagement with each other went up. An engaged team is a signal of trust.
Actually, I've remembered that there was another bonus I didn't expect from saying hello and goodbye. A manager who was renowned for coming in and being funny and taking the mickey heard and watched as one of my team came in and was going around saying hello to everyone. They were waiting for that person. When they did sit down to give them attention, they took the mickey out of what she was doing and tried to give her a hard time about making them wait. Another team member kicked up and had a go at the manager. They had already decided it was their thing. They all liked it and it felt good. And instead of being part of a judgy weird comment about being nice, they protected one another and their principles. That signaled safety to me.
How you manage mistakes, I found out, was a key to building trust because it stopped the angst behind people stuffing up and just became wins, literally. We all make mistakes, hold mistakes up as learning, refining, development. Encouraging your team to support others when they do make an error, rather than sighing and making them feel bad for the extra work, is an opportunity to say to one another, it's okay, I have your back. More trust and more safety.
I remember high-fiving when a mistake was caught. It was a big one and we were able to change process documentation so it didn't happen again. Something that had been held onto in someone's head, cross-trained and not passed on. Bad. We found it and we fixed it. The bad was not having it written out so someone else didn't get caught in the future. The good was finding it. No pointing fingers. Mistakes are part of life and business. We'll just try to improve. If your team hear you're reacting in that way, actually celebrating, being logical about dealing with it, and saving someone else from crashing in the future, they get it. That could be them next time.
Celebrate as much as you can. Small wins, big wins, customer wins, all the good stuff. It feels so much better sharing that than the fact that the system keeps crashing or so-and-so is sick again. When safety isn't present or there's an uncomfortable feeling amongst a team, we can start to fill the silence with fear and create a narrative that may or may not be true. That's when people start grouping together, gossiping, being fearful of having their say, or being different.
Fear is a horror demon, and if we can reduce fear, we're building safety.
If you embark on a change journey together and your team realizes you are invested in them succeeding, that's more important than you helping with the operational side of things, the nuts and bolts.
If you can, stay out of the operations. You allow the team to feel what it's like to be trusted and capable and they will see you instead moving the pieces that may be in their way to make their work easier, more efficient or provide them space to come up with creative solutions to problems. Stepping away and giving people ownership signals trust in a big way.
The article I mentioned highlights how there can be so many factors that have an impact on change. If you lead in a people first way, you already have the foundations of trust, you already know what conditions around team members need to change, and you should have established what the team needs to focus on to evolve and grow to move into a more resilient position. When you do know this and are working on this together, you are far less reactive and way more proactive the energy will slowly start to shift. If it's been low, just that momentum and people seeing that things are changing and shifting, it'll just keep getting better.
I'll finish with a summary. A model that Dr. Timothy Clark identified as four stages that develop as safety in us grows.
Where are you and your team? Spot where you are and you'll know how much work you need to do to build up safety and trust. First level, are people themselves all the time? Second level, are you getting questions and engagement? Third level, are people holding back? Fourth level, the highest amount of safety, are people comfortable challenging the status quo?
I'll link this for you because this is a pretty brutal summary. There's way more to that.
Next episode is about mistakes. I'll share my $100,000 one which was a beauty. When I think about some of my mistakes, I just want the world to open up and swallow me. It's also about how mistakes can be used to pull people down. We want to build people up.
My invitation for you today, what has landed in your heart while you've been listening? Have you resolved to do something differently? I hope you're proud if you have made a decision like that. Operations is mind stuff, people first is heart stuff.
Be blessed, I wish you the best work day, ciao.