Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Show Notes:
We are continuing to re-share a "Blast from the Past" series that I did back in Season 1 of Behind the Line. It was one of my favourite series and I think really important content for those who may have missed it the first time. The series takes a look at Brené Brown's work in her book, Dare to Lead, and discusses applications to helping professions where it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that we improve leadership and systems, because they are hella broken. I hope you'll share this series with your sphere of influence and that together we can make it different...
We are continuing in our series on daring leadership following the work of Brené Brown in her book, Dare to Lead. Today we are focusing on the third area of courageous and daring leadership: BRAVING trust. In this episode we break down the BRAVING acronym for trust and discuss the value and importance of trust in cultivating committed and caring workplace cultures.
We are continuing in our series on daring leadership following the work of Brené Brown in her book, Dare to Lead. Today we are focusing on the third area of courageous and daring leadership: BRAVING trust. In this episode we break down the BRAVING acronym for trust and discuss the value and importance of trust in cultivating committed and caring workplace cultures.
Brené and her team have already done the hard work of summarizing the acronym into a beautiful downloadable pdf, and you can find that here under The Braving Inventory. This link also offers access to several other free tools that are connected to her Dare to Lead work.
As discussed in todays’ episode, check out Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you’re new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.
Episode Challenge:
Take some time to look over the braving inventory and consider your personal areas of strength and areas for growth. Consider your workplace and where these pieces show up in your workplace or fail to show up and consider some steps you can take to model some of these areas of deficit in your workplace.
Consider bringing the braving inventory into your team and open discussion about applications within your team/workplace.
Additional Resources:
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.
Creators & Guests
What is Behind The Line?
Created for First Responders and Front Line Workers to tackle the challenges of working on the front lines. Dig into topics on burnout, workplace dynamics, managing mental health, balancing family life...and so much more. Created and hosted by Lindsay Faas, clinical counsellor and trauma therapist. View the show notes, and access bonus resources at https://my.thrive-life.ca/behind-the-line.
Hey out there, and welcome back to Behind the Line.
I’m your host Lindsay Faas. If you are new to Behind the Line, what you should know about me is that I am a clinical counsellor specializing in trauma therapy, and after over a decade working with First Responders and Front Line Workers around issues like burnout, compassion fatigue, PTSD and related OSI’s, I have become a passionate wellness advocate and educator for those who sacrifice so much for our communities out on the front lines. Behind the Line is a place for us to talk about the real life behind the scenes challenges facing you on the front lines. I created this podcast with the hope of bringing easy access to skills for wellness – allowing you to find greater sustainability, both on the job and off.
Today we are continuing in a series on leadership following the incredible research and writing of Brene Brown in her bestselling book, Dare to Lead. We are covering the topic of leadership because we know all too well the deep impacts of toxic work environments and that this often comes from the top down – leaving those on the front lines working to fight on two fronts – doing the very hard jobs that you do, and defending against the inner workings of your workplace. It’s exhausting, and it’s burning people out. Good people. People we want serving out communities – with big hearts and a longing to make a difference. These are the people we need, and we’re losing them. More than that, we are also robbing them of the lives they should be allowed to expect more from – the added pressures coming from all sides causes people to shut down and not only lose the love for the work, but also struggle to be present in their home lives, struggle to trust others more widely, struggle to be the kinds of partners, parents, and people they want to be.
We’ve talked during the course of this series about the reality that leadership happens at all levels. Wherever we are in the hierarchy of our workplaces, we have opportunities to be leaders and model leadership skills. We have a chance to sell the system on a different way of existing in the work. We have talked about developing solid leadership skills grounded in the very best research in an effort to become system change-makers from the inside out. My goal in tackling the topic of leadership is to empower you with the skills to transform the deeply entrenched toxicity in the cultures of so many first response and front line workplaces. I want you to feel equipped to erode the brokenness little bits at a time, and I want you to share this resource with those you know to create your own rebel alliance that is working collectively to this end: bringing about systems that see, hear, know and value people. Because when we feel seen, heard, known and valued – we work better, harder, smarter. We’re more committed and loyal, we look forward to being in an environment that let’s us thrive, we show up and bring our best selves. We are invested in the outcomes, not just of any given piece of the work, but in the success of the organization as a whole. Job satisfaction increases, leaves decrease, retention improves, suspensions and disciplinary action is reduced – because everyone wants to be there, everyone is aligned to moving things in a direction and feels like a meaningful contributor to the process.
Now, if I were to ask you what gets in the way in your current workplace of experiencing all those great things I just described, I bet I can guess what your answer would be. You may not choose the exact same word, but I am willing to bet that at the heart of it is this theme: trust. When we see unhealthy, toxic workplace cultures, once of the predominant issues is a lack of trust – that what I say, share or bring to the table isn’t safe with the person or people in the situation. Trust expert, Charles Feltman identifies this lack of safety as the definition of distrust, and he says that trust is, “choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another persons’ actions.” In order to feel able to risk, we need to have some sense of believing that the person we’re entrusting is safe to hear and hold what we’re offering. It doesn’t mean we expect them to agree with us, but we do expect them to engage it with us in a way that feels like they value us. Brene says this, “trust is the glue that holds teams and organizations together. We ignore trust issues at the expense of our own performance, and the expense of our team’s and organization’s success.” She also shares research that emerged from Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For review where they state that, “trust between managers and employees is the primary defining characteristic of the very best workplaces.” And that this shows up in significant and measurable ways in terms of financial returns in the corporate realm. In an article by Stephen Covey and Doug Conant in the Harvard Business Review, they say this, “While few leaders would argue against the idea that trust is necessary for building elite performance, not nearly enough realize the height of its importance, and far too many disregard trust-building as a “soft” or “secondary” competency. But in our joint experience, we’ve learned that trust is the one thing that changes everything. It’s not a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. Without it, every part of your organization call fall, literally, into disrepair. With trust, all things are possible – most importantly: continuous improvement and sustainable, measurable, tangible results in the marketplace.”
Ok, I know that as first responders and front line workers you likely don’t consider your professions and organizations as connected to the corporate marketplace, but the heart of the message is the same. The research, regardless of professional group, segment of industry, or existence within the private or public domain, has shown repeatedly that trust within workplaces is a make-it or break-it factor in the health and wellness of the team, it’s individual members and the organization as a whole. Research shows again and again that it has direct results in the outcomes and that success or failure to develop and walk the talk of trust is measurable and tangible in terms of the outcomes. For those working on the front lines, this shows up in some of the spaces we’ve already mentioned like job satisfaction, retention, and so on, but it also shows up in improved quality of care and services rendered to the community. Feedback from those accessing services report more effective and efficient care, treatment, or service from providers and organizations who have invested hard in abiding by the research on constructing effective, caring and wholehearted teams.
When it comes to cultivating trust skills, within the workplace but also within our lives, Brene has a clever acronym to help us out, the acronym is BRAVING. She offers a tool on her website based on this called the BRAVING Inventory that can be used by teams to help promote conversations around the topic of trust – I’ll link to it in the show notes for those who are interested in diving deeper or implementing this within teams. Let’s walk through the acronym:
B – is for boundaries. Ok, remember earlier in this series we talked about the fact that the most wholehearted people in Brene’s research were also the most boundaried? That is significant and here’s why: boundaries are protection without armor. Boundaries allow us to draw limits, take on what we feel we can or we’re skilled at and say no when we’re hitting our limit or stepping outside of our values or integrity. We don’t have to be jerks to be boundaried – how we choose to communicate boundaries can be in alignment with our values and the people we choose to be in the world. When we’re working at cultivating trust in team, or in partnerships or other relationships, demonstrating respect for one another’s boundaries is a big deal. It communicates care by saying, “I hear you, I see that line you’re drawing, and I value you enough that I want to help you hold that line.” We also talked earlier in this series about a key concept that relates to boundaries, that “clear is kind”. When we offer boundaries in a way that is clear, it allows others to be more successful at respecting our boundaries because they get where the line is – likewise if we are working at respecting the boundaries of others it can be super helpful to ask clarifying questions to make sure that you know where their limits live in an effort to help them remain aligned to their values, integrity and capacities.
What’s amazing is that when we use boundaries well, it tends to garner respect and regard. People tend to trust us more because we do what we commit to we do, and when we can’t commit to it, we don’t. It sets us up to be successful in meeting expectations because we are actively shaping the expectations that others have of us and that we have of them.
R – is for reliability. What this means is that we follow through. When we say we’re going to do something, we do it. We recognize our capacities and competencies, as well as when we’re overcommitting or promising more than we can deliver – and we stand in our integrity in communicating what people can expect of us. At it’s core, trust is this progressive process where we see people’s character emerge and notice the ways in which they show up or fail to show up. Reliability is a key piece in this, it helps people know that we walk the talk and show up in the ways we said we would.
Now, reliability isn’t always an easy thing in first response and front line work – the nature of the work is crisis, emergency response, unpredictability and staying on your toes. It’s hard to know if you’re going to get to pee when you need to let alone follow through on commitments around bigger issues. But my guess is that you can identify this principle at work in some of your experiences within your workplace – that there is that person that you know you can depend on, even when things are hitting the proverbial fan. There is that couple of people that you know show up and do what they can. They are likely the people you are more inclined to trust. And then there’s those people that are inconsistent or consistently not showing up with a version of themselves that is helpful or reliable. These are the people you likely dread being on shift with, knowing that you’ll be pulling more of the weight. We’re less inclined to trust them because they haven’t demonstrated a semi-consistent effort at being reliable people we can count on.
A – is for accountability. Have you ever been around someone who just never owns their own stuff? They’ll avoid acknowledging that something went wrong in hopes of not being found out, and when something happens, it’s someone else’s fault or there’s an excuse for why it’s not on them? Do you tend to have high trust in those kinds of people? Of course not! In part this can be the result of unhealthy workplace dynamics where we learn that we need to armor up – avoid, deflect, blame shift and hope to God we’re still employed – just in an effort to survive in the toxic culture. That said, if we want to contribute toward creating cultures that value people, we have to be willing to recognize that people make mistakes and that things are going to go sideways sometimes. We have to leave room and safety for accountability where we and others are able to own mistakes, acknowledge it to others, seek forgiveness and find a path forward toward reconciliation or repair. Doing this, being this, can on it’s own be a huge culture shift. It becomes an invitation and permission to everyone within the organization to be human rather than infallible machines. And by owning our mistakes and being accountable for them, we build trust and move through the process of getting back on track and working in a common direction again WAY quicker than when we avoid, deflect, pretend it’s not a big deal, blame shift and make excuses or justify.
V – is for vault. Did that one surprise you? You thought I was going to say values, didn’t you? Vault refers to our ability to be trustworthy with information. Now, this can refer to organizational information like changing policies that haven’t been communicated down the line yet or other types of key internal information; but it also refers to information on a far more general level. Think for a moment about that person you know…because we all know someone…you might be the someone…who tends to share information that’s not theirs to share. They tell stories about others or gossip – you may never have heard them say a bad thing about you, but when they talk about other people, doesn’t it make you wonder what they say about you when you’re not in the room?
Let’s be straight, this one happens a LOT in front line work. The rumor and gossip mill is hot in these types of workplaces – I think it’s become a cultural way of coping to some extent. We are so wanting to find some connection, and we struggle to find other ways to connect more healthfully that we build connection by dissecting others – except that in doing so, we actually insert this huge wedge in the dynamic because the other person is sitting there thinking “man I don’t want to give them any ammunition to work with on me!” We need to know what information is ours to share and what isn’t. We need to hold confidences and be proactive and accountable when we’ve failed to do so. The capacity to hold information well ties into our boundaries – it let’s people know if we have good boundaries or not so much, and this again reflects to people whether or not they feel they can trust us.
I – is for integrity. I mentioned earlier in the series that Brene defines integrity as, “choosing courage over comfort; it’s choosing what’s right over what’s fun, fast, or easy; and it’s practicing your values, not just professing them.” Really this piece is about standing in alignment with what we claim to value and showing up from that place, even when it is hard, awkward, uncomfortable or risky. The reality is that the right thing is usually the hard thing. It asks something of us that we might want to shortcut or avoid, but that moves us out of our integrity. Brene suggests that having integrity partners can be a helpful tool – essentially tis would be a person or a couple of people who know about the work you are trying to do and what it means and looks like for you to be living into your values and integrity. They are people you can run scenarios with and work out options to try to tangle with a situation in the best way possible. She shares that in her own organization she has a couple of people that she does this with on a daily basis – that they role play hard interactions, and work to find ways to broach situations that align with values and integrity rather than shy away. I think this idea is really helpful, and I would encourage you to consider who could be this kind of person in your life – someone who would be committed to walking with you in your efforts to show up more authentically, even and especially when it’s hard.
N – is for non-judgment. We talked about non-judgement a bit earlier in the series as well when we talked about empathy. In order to create a culture that values people, we have to try to leave our judgements at the door. This is SUPER hard, because we are trained in judging from birth and your actual professional training has likely honed this to the point that you are a judging expert. Particularly in first response and front line work, we are literally trained to make snap decisions based on judgements of a few key features in an effort to save lives, reduce risk and manage extreme moments. Right or wrong, it’s a part of the job and you are likely really good at it. But this doesn’t leave much room for empathy when we take this skill set and translate it into our daily interactions with people who are just doing the best they can. We can filter them through a lens before giving them a chance.
Engaging non-judgmentally is an invitation to be able to ask for what you need, and likewise for others to seek their needs, without worry for possible consequences or retribution. It opens space to talk about feelings and impacts without fear, and it allows permission to need and ask for help without being seen as helpless. Remember we talked earlier in the series about shame, and the fact that shame never offers anything constructive – this has been shown in research repeatedly and across the spectrum of situations. Shaming people into submission increases burnout, increases mistakes and quashes innovation and creativity among a host of other things. When we have cultures that shame people to the point that they don’t share, they don’t come forward when they are struggling or need help, they fear acknowledging mistakes or being accountable – we discover HUGE problems. It creates a cover-up culture where everyone is so busy keeping their noses down and covering their behinds that there’s no space or time for growth as an organization. Non-judgement create the space for trust to grow and thrive – which, as we’ve heard, allows individual team members, teams and organizations as a whole grow and thrive – reaching all the way out to actual metric results.
And G – is for generosity. Last episode we talked about the concept of assuming positive intent, and generosity is connected to this. Having generosity in our assumptions of others makes a huge difference in how we approach them and address issues when they arise. If I assume the worst in someone as I see an issue and have to interact with them about it, I’m more likely to be short, annoyed, disappointed, frustrated and all of this is likely to come across in how I handle the situation. If I’m not valuing them and believing the best of them, I am less likely to treat them with value. Holding generosity in my assumptions of others allows me to broach hard interactions from a better place – it allows me to be curious and open rather than already having determined what happened and how I assumed it happened, which is likely that they are a total idiot who can’t do anything right. When I’m generous in my assumptions I can recognize that something went wrong but that likely that person wants to be involved in solving the problem and moving forward together. Holding generous assumptions of others isn’t always easy – it connects pretty closely to the non-judgement piece. When I am in judgement mode, my generosity in assumptions is much narrower – when I can stay out of judgement I tend to have a wider capacity to hold generosity of assumptions. As a reminder, being generous with assumptions of positive intent is not the same as an invitation to take advantage of you – we can be both generous in our assumptions of positive intent and boundaried in terms of our expectations of others – they aren’t mutually exclusive and in fact they work hand in hand to communicate value to others even as we navigate tricky terrain.
Braving trust can be uncomfortable. It is vulnerable work – it’s why Brene identifies it as brave and courageous, because it means being real and risking of ourselves. Trust can’t be built when we’re being facades – not real trust anyway. Trust is only as real as the selves we bring to it. And that brings up another piece, which is trusting with ourselves. We’ve talked about trust in terms of trusting others and being trustworthy for others, but the BRAVING acronym is something we can look at as we consider our own capacity to trust and be trustworthy with and for ourselves. Boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault, integrity, non-judgement and generosity… I mean they are hard enough to give to others and offer consistently, but if we’re honest with ourselves we likely find this a million times easier to do with others than with ourselves. Managing boundaries that protect and serve me, including going to bed at a reasonable hour, not skipping breakfast, reaching out to social supports, or not sharing vulnerably with someone I know doesn’t hold safe space for me – do we do those things consistently or do we fail at trust building with ourselves? Do we show up in the ways we promise ourselves that we will? Can we rely on ourselves to do what we say and say what we mean when it comes to our own selves? Do we acknowledge our own shortcomings and work to reconcile with ourselves when we feel like we’ve let ourselves down? Do we hold our own confidence and protect information well that feels sensitive or needing caution and strong safety? Do we interact with ourselves non-judgmentally and extend ourselves generosity in our assumptions of positive intent? My guess is that there are at least a few of those areas where you struggle – where you’re hard on yourself or you shortcut to avoid discomfort or you put yourself in the backseat while serving the needs and interests of others. To some extent we’re all guilty of it, and the reality is that first responders and front line workers likely face this more than the average Joe-citizen, because we’re helpers at heart. We tend to be wired with an inclination toward valuing and promoting the needs of others. It’s why we tend to also be at higher risk for burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma and related challenges – because we give and give and give often to the detriment of our own selves. When we fail to cultivate and continually invest in a culture of trust within our own selves, it’s difficult to continuously show up in spaces trying to create this kind of culture outside of ourselves. This is both personal work within ourselves, as well as collective work as teams, partners, friends, and so on.
Trust that as we wrap up today, we are not stopping here. I’ve included some links in the show notes to Brene’s BRAVING inventory, as well links to some of her other work that you may find helpful as you work at exploring trust within yourself as well as within teams and other spaces in your life. In the show notes you will also find an episode challenge if you want to work at taking what we’ve talked about here today and personalizing the work and making it applicable in tangible ways in your life. We do this each week and you can find the challenge in the show notes on our website. Your involvement and support of this podcast has been overwhelming and inspiring, and I hope you know how much your comments, messages, likes and shares mean to me. To those who have reached out to share your stories and the impacts this resource has had for you, thank you. Please continue to share this with those you know on the front lines – there are so many aspects of front line work and so many who are struggling and my hope is to reach out in meaningful ways and offer some pieces that can make a difference as you work to make a difference. Join me again next week when we are going to finish up the final of the four areas of daring leadership: learning to rise. I look forward to connecting with you again soon, and until next time, stay safe.