New Years Resolutions: Dial Down the Doubt, Dial up Yourself

Happy New Year!  

For many, this is a time of recommitment, resolutions, intention setting and goal setting. Whether at work, or in some other aspect of your life, these resolutions are hard to sustain because they are like all lasting change -- big change is hard to make rapidly and quickly. Simply just changing a behavior you think you should do or someone told you do doesn't result in meaningful change.

Rather, it's about being patient and persistent. Small changes, adjusting the dials up a little bit and down a little bit, helps result in meaningful focus and improvement on how you show up.

The one resolution you really need to keep -- is to turn down the dial on the noise, the ego-trips, the stories, doubts and judgments.

We all have them, and so often act because of them.  But when you turn them down, when you get out of your own way, you can turn the dial up on letting more of yourself shine through.  And that's enough.

You are enough.

The root of so many struggles people have is the lack of ability to be silent, and to silence the voices of doubt and fear and anticipation and worry.  Simply dialing that all back, and instead listening to what comes about when you're a bit more silent would make the world far better, far more connected, far happier.  

Wishing you a year of being more fully yourself and showing up in all aspects of your life that way. 

Flexibility and Resilience

Flexibility. Resiliency. Two of the most important, sustaining capacities to cultivate in your professional and personal lives.

In the last month, I’ve spent time with friends battling addiction, friends who’ve gotten out of relationships, friends who were fired from their jobs unexpectedly, friends who are being pilloried very publicly, friends who are miserable and stuck in their jobs and wish to leave but feel they can’t.

I spent time leading an offsite for a promising team recently. They wanted to focus on communications and team dynamics. We didn’t even get to the communications training that was a primary focus of the whole offsite - because the other parts were so surprisingly fruitful and were leading us to really interesting spots. We pivoted in the moment - a conscious choice to take advantage of a new opportunity that we didn’t expect but that was better than what we had planned.

These moments teach a lesson. We control so little, and if we adhere to expectations we’re bound to be perpetually disappointed and miss out on all the other good, interesting, possibly richer things that come from what we don’t expect.

Being flexible and resilient means widening the aperture of our lens and being open to what else is possible. It means letting go of our stories about how that person is, what the situation demands, or what we’re supposed to be.

Maybe a new focus for 2019?

6 Steps to make Difficult Conversations More Effective

Everybody has difficult conversations — at work and at home. Often these conversations are hard because they are personal and because our brains are wired to feel strong, protective emotional reactions to conflict. But, the good news is we can re-wire our brains with a little bit of focus, and with the right intention. Here’s how:

6 Steps to make Difficult Conversations More Effective

1. Start with your Motivations -- ask yourself what you really want?  What do you really fear? What’s really bothering you?  Positive motivations are learning, finding truth, getting results, cultivating connection.  Negative motivations are trying to win, be right, to blame or punish or embarrass, or to avoid.  

2. Recognize your own narrative. Every person’s brain develops their own narrative or story about a person or situation.  We all have them, we all carry them around with us. Recognize and know yours. Separate out the facts from opinions, and see how what you see or hear immediately turns into a story that immediately turns into a feeling, that then drives how you act.  Separating facts helps clarify your own narrative. Are you seeing yourself as a protagonist or an antagonist? As a victim or a villain? Positive motivation are rooted in facts and shared understanding; negative motivations are rooted in stories, assumptions and narratives about other people and situations (which often aren’t realistic).

3. Make it feel safe for others. Start from a place of respect. Make sure to clarify your intent and your connection with the other person -- connection over content. People get defensive when they perceive negative intent. Notice if someone is being silent or violent -- this is when you’re being less persuasive and more abrasive.  SIlence and avoiding only makes things worse. Communication from a place of positive intent allows you talk through and work through your narratives.

4. Share your goals or your path.  State the facts, share your narrative, ask about others narratives, and then converse with the other person.  Ask about their story, ask, test assumptions, explore rather than expound.

5. Make it feel safe for them to share with you, and explore their paths. Make it your goal to understand their point of view.  Don’t react right away. When you do, you can find where the narratives match up, where they don’t, and talk through the differences. Thank them for the feedback and for sharing something hard.  Mean it. Express gratitude and admiration for what’s going well. Positive feedback is important.

6. Clarify action and outcomes: Who does what?  When? What is a next step?  Even if you agree to disagree, what will you do differently? How do you move forward?

Protests and Speaking Up ARE Culture

Today hundreds of Google employees around the world are walking out to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment claims.

I’ve never worked at Google and don’t know enough to know whether I’d choose to walk out or not. But I am familiar with culture at tech companies and am familiar with grassroots political movements, and there are two things I do know:

First, it’s incredibly powerful to use your voice and stand up for what you believe is right, especially after being thoughtful about it, and it’s possible to have faith in your leaders while also holding them to higher standards for everybody.

Second, now more than ever, culture in organizations is everything. It’s more important than strategy or business models or products. And it’s everyone’s responsibility to formulate, maintain and evolve.

Walkouts like today at Google (which, to be clear could happen at just about any company in any organization) are culture moments. It IS culture. For anyone who cares about the cultures they are a part of, how this plays out is really important whether you’re a CEO or a new employee who just started, whether you’re a manager or not, whether you’re a woman or a man.

Bias, Inclusion, and National Coming Out Day

It’s National Coming Out Day. Everyone deserves a chance to be heard and loved, and leaders in business have a unique role to play in creating inclusive, supportive environments where people can feel they belong.

Coming out is really powerful for two reasons: first, it’s a relief to step into your own life and to bring the best of yourself to work. Hiding behind a mask or a way of acting, limiting yourself and walling off parts of yourself take a huge amount of energy — that’s energy you’re not able to spend really listening to others and bringing the best of your ideas and problem-solving skills to work. Second, it’s a really powerful example for others. So many people in work environments take their cues from what they see leaders doing. If they observe leaders who feel confident and comfortable in their own skin, who are open about who they are it creates a kind of confidence that’s infectious.

We talk a lot about bringing your “authentic self” to work yet so much of our work cultures focus on conformity — to a certain way of doing things, or certain way of acting. Coming out, inclusion, it at the center of this tension between authenticity and conformity. Being authentic doesn’t mean sharing every intimate detail of your personal life at work, or standing out just to stand out. It really means simply being who you are — aligning your actions with your values, and working to create a space where others can feel included. Being conformist doesn’t mean hiding yourself, checking out, and fitting in. It means being a part of a broader whole, a broader community.

So many studies have shown that diversity is important — not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s also good for business. Some forms of diversity are much more evident than others, and some more broadly understood than others. Coming out — whether as gay, bisexual, transgender — is still very hard for many. But those organizations that lead on creating inclusive environments where people can be open will be the most successful in the long run, because they will attract the best talent, and people will be far more motivated to do their best work.

It starts with managing your own biases — recognizing we all have them — and taking small steps that add up to a significant difference — in making sure all voices at work are heard, people feel they can be their own best selves at work, and calling out bad behavior when we see it.

Being gay, coming out, takes courage and bravery, and those of us at work — leaders — have a special role to play in helping create inclusive environments where people can come out if they choose.

The Best Leaders practice more than Self-Care: they Self-Regulate

It seems like daily there’s a new barrage of bad news, anxiety-producing information, and rapid, immediate pace we work and are expected to work 24/7 today means the stakes are higher and higher at work for our own ability to self-regulate. This anxiety, this pressure, inevitably spills into your personal life — the way you show up in the world for your partners, your teams, and to strangers alike.

I generally dislike the term “self care” because it’s often a catch-all phrase used without a lot of specificity, but that sounds clinical or more specialized than it is — because it’s really just taking better care of yourself, which is something we all need to do. Get more sleep, take time outside, prioritize, eat more healthful foods…listen to music you like….the advice is all over the map, and the lists are long and often vague….when it really just means take care off yourself so you can show up more fully in the world.

I like the term self-regulate a little better. I’ve found there are really just things all good leaders do — more than just caring for themselves, they regulate their reactions and ups and downs beyond just tending to their feelings.

The best leaders care for themselves and care for others, and the best organizational cultures are supportive and inclusive — people care for, and about, others around them.

How can you better manage stress and anxiety you might be holding? How can you self-regulate?

(1) Do something for someone else. Get out of your own way, your own head, by doing something for someone else. That someone could be a team member, a spouse or a stranger. The best leaders are willing to share credit, freely give credit and truly want others to succeed. When you do something for someone else, you feel better. You train your focus and your energy onto something positive. It gives you a sense of control and capability in a world where lots of things are out of our control. And it improves others’ perceptions of you as relatable. Do one thing a day without expectation for reward or acknowledgment, and your mood and your productivity will improve.

(2) Gratitude not attitude. Change your frame from attitude to gratitude. Whenever something bad happens, immediately think of three things that are going well or that you’re thankful for. We become, and we are, what we think. If you’re constantly allowing your mind to chase the stimuli of negativity and anxiety, of judgment and a clouded view of the world, you’re literally going to just become more of a problem yourself. Find something to be thankful for even when things are stressful. If you look around, those things are everywhere. This might seem corny at first, but getting yourself in the habit of focusing your mental and emotional energy on things that are bad, which increases anxiety and crowds out other thoughts in your brain, literally carves new grooves that just create a more positive outlook on life, on work, on any situation. You can control the gut reaction you have in new moments of stress…cut out bad habits and create new ones that service you better… if you practice cutting down the attitude and dialing up the gratitude.

(3) Breathing room: Make it for yourself, give it to others. This means literally breathe. There’s a direct connection between the body’s ability to regulate itself during times of stress if you breathe deeply, evenly, and smoothly. But this also means stepping back and giving people a little breathing room. Get a broader perspective. Step back from social media, step back from the news. Take a break from a contentious conversation and come back to it after some space. And give others the space to be how they are — especially if they are acting in ways that only increase your anxiety. The best leaders are ones who are calm, even-headed, steady and have perspective. If you’re staring at a big boulder of a problem right up in the face of the problem, it’s hard to tell how big the boulder is, or what ways you can get around it. Giving yourself more distance to breathe, and to see it in context means you can better sort out a plan to move forward. More importantly, it gives you perspective — so much of our stress and anxiety comes from a sense of immediacy and reaction to what’s right in front of us. The best leaders help provide more context and perspective — for others and for themselves.

On LISTENING: Why you should do it more

LISTENING: It's a vastly under-developed leadership skill and life skill.

Listening, not just hearing.  Listening, with curiosity, with a desire to understand rather than just waiting to deliver your comeback to win an argument....listening without thinking you know the answer, without jumping to conclusions, without relying on your potentially out-dated or irrelevant conclusions, or worse, biases -- unconscious or conscious...is hard, and sorely needed today.

It's a core competency in effective communications.  It's a core part of being a more "authentic" and "empathetic" leader.  It's fundamental to a functioning political system, a well-functioning company that's not based in bias or where people are too scared to speak up.

Lack of skills listening means you lose out on the chance to learn and understand more, to build a better relationship, to learn more about yourself, and is super inefficient.  In a perverse way, it also makes it far more likely people tune you out, especially if you are quick to speak without listening, or you act without adjusting based on new information you might have missed had you listened.

Worse, lack of building listening ability cements some of the most pernicious unconscious bias in the workplace today.  There are countless studies that talk about the power of "gendered" listening, where men AND women are more likely to listen to male voices than female voices in professional contexts.

And there are even more studies that talk about the negative effects of interruptions (which only happens if you're not truly listening) at work, again, significantly affecting women and under-represented minorities more.

I'll be writing a lot more about listening in the coming months, since I think it's at the root of effective communications, being a good leader, and a responsible citizen.  But for now, three ways you can start practicing better listening:

(1) ATTITUDE SHIFT: Listen to learn, not to be nice. If you're really interested in learning, not just in being nice or being perceived as listening, you'll be a lot better and it will be a lot easier to quiet the agenda-setting, rapid-fire response instinct inside.

(2) ASK: Ask questions. Repeat back what you heard to ensure you understood what you heard.  This gets you some clarity, and allows the other person to feel they have been heard.

(3) STOP TALKING:  Wait for the person to finish. Less interruptions, more silence, means you have more time and ability to process what you're hearing, come up with an insightful or thoughtful response, and makes it much more likely the other person feels heard and respected.  It also sends a signal to others around you that you are open to new ideas and feedback, which makes you a better and more trusted leader.

Flipping Problem-Solving on its Head

Our brains are wired for negative thinking -- to look for problems, even when there aren't any, to focus on fear or insecurity or comparison, to be and feel stressed, or angry or frustrated.  Our brains have a negativity bias as a core part of our fight or flight responses and for survival.  Negativity breeds more negativity, toxicity, and you start crowding out space in your brain for focusing on what works well and then...simply doing more of that thing that's working.

Rick Hanson lays out the science behind the human brain's bias for negativity in "Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom."  It's one of my all-time favorite reads -- I like it so much I bought it for my entire team at Facebook and have given it to several friends.  Hanson not only addresses the science behind our brain's hard-wiring to see the negative and then talks about the way several traditions have tried to counter-act our brain's hard-wiring to find more peace, happiness, and success.  Who wouldn't want more of each of those in their life?

But what about more teams at work that have more peace, happiness and success?  The science is the same, and the tools and tricks to counter the negativity bias are many -- some work really well, some are terrible, and some work in the short term without resulting in any real, lasting change.  

This is especially important for companies in the tech world where there's the constant focus on problem-solving. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard some variation on the question: "What are we solving for? What's the problem we are trying to fix?"

The problem-solving mentality is fairly analytical, and often leads to clear outcomes.  And to be fair, the world has lots of problems that need solving, and sometimes you're in a crisis and need to resolve it.

But if you're focused on longer-term development of your company, sustainability of success and satisfaction among the people at work, and making lasting change the builds on the bottom line and leads to more success, we need to focus on the positive, not the negative.  We need to stop focusing so much simply on stopping and solving the problems we have, and start focusing more on doing more of what we're doing that works well and that brings us success and satisfaction. 

And we need more tools to counter the brain's negativity-bias at work, just as much as we do in our personal lives. Luckily, there's a good one:

I recently read "The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry" by Sue Annie Hammond, which is a great, short read focused on building high-performance cultures by focusing less on what's gone wrong that you need to fix, and more on what's gone right that you need to do more of.  Hammond makes the argument for -- and includes several great, practical tips and questions teams can ask themselves in the course of their work to get to -- more emphasis on doing what works well, and recognizing people who have good ideas and do work that results in success. 

It got me thinking about how important it is to focus as much on the HOW we assess our work and our successes and failures as on WHAT we find when we do those assessments, post-mortems, and lessons learned sessions.  Often how you look for something determines what you find.  This isn't to say we only focus on the good and ignore the bad.

But let's not ignore the good, and what works simply because we have built a habit of only looking at the world and our work as a bunch of problems,

Ultimately, a bit more time to reflect, both individually and as a team, on what went right and trying to do more of that, rather than simply diving head-first into each new problem, is a slight shift that results in big changes to the bottom line and satisfaction at work -- and thriving company cultures.

Why the Best Leaders Focus on Culture and Engagement in All Moments

So often, organizations focus on culture and on employee communications only once something's gone wrong.  The best organizations, the best leaders, invest early and often in employee engagement and in cultivating an honest, inclusive culture constantly. 

This means regularly communicating with employees, regularly seeking and listening to feedback, regularly talking about culture and values, regularly celebrating successes, and regularly drawing out lessons learned from both successes and failures.  

There are lots of key moments when effective culture leadership and employee engagement matters, and we'll dive into these in a future blog post.  But here's why you should start focusing on these things regularly, all the time, now:

• First, if you do a little bit all the time, it becomes habituated. You carve new grooves in the gears that drive the organization.  It becomes less of a big deal, more common place, and less daunting for leaders to focus on.
• Second, it creates an environment where people feel more empowered to, and therefore are more likely to, speak up.  The worst thing is when everyone sees a problem, knows what's going wrong, but no one speaks up. Sharing good news and bad news early and often, regularly seeking feedback means people are more apt to share it.
• Third, focus on culture and inclusion and effective employee engagement when times are good means you build up a well of goodwill you can draw on when times are hard. People are more likely to trust you, be in for the wild rides, when they feel you've been with them through all the other times.

On Using "Speaking As..."

I agree with the idea in the recent New York Times Op-Ed by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at NYU, "The Problem With ‘Speaking as a …’ and want to share it here:

Speak for yourself, not for a group or to underwrite your own opinions.  Your own ideas as a leader, whether in a community or as a team or even just in daily life, matter because they are YOUR ideas, not because they are underwritten by a label, category, or identity.  And not ever opinion, every idea, everything we're outraged by, needs to be shared and couched in terms of a singular identity.

So often today, especially in social media, people use this convention either to establish some authority or credibility, or to hide behind their own ideas and opinions.  We could all do better with a little more ownership and clarity, and a little less categorizing and labeling.  After all, the opinions of one group, no matter how much shared experience, are rarely, if ever homogenous.