Welcome to Hacking Your Leadership. I'm Chris and Lorenzo, and welcome to this
week's Thoughtful Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking Your Leadership
and leave us a review on iTunes. On this Thoughtful Thursday, I want
to talk about kind of a follow up to our Monday episode. On we
talked about the four stages of psychological safety, and we got some really good
feedback and comments from our listeners on how much they liked that episode. It
was a little longer than normal, but there was just so much good content
in there. So if you haven't listened to that yet, go back and
listen to it and you'll have a little bit more context for this episode.
I want to talk about how not everybody in the room can be expected to
play every single role. If if you're having a psychologically safe group, like
I'll give you an example. I know that if I'm putting a room and
someone says, solve this problem, I'll look at it like I don't know
where to begin. But if I come into a room that is where people
have been contributing ideas for a period of an hour or two, and they
have certain things up there, on the whiteboard and they're looking through certain things,
I can I can committo that room and look at it and kind of
pick things apart and and kind of optimize them and figure out what what part
parts of it will work, what part of it parts of it won't work,
almost like a like a from a user experienced perspective as opposed to you
know, starting from scratch, and and everybody is different with regard to what
there's where their strengths lie. And I think when it comes to the topic
of psychological safety, assuming that everybody in the room, if you have a
psychologically safe team, is all going to raise their hand and say we got
to change the way things are doing that, you know that that isn't necessarily
the case. Some people just aren't comfortable doing that, not because it's not
psychologically safe, but because it's not who they are. They're not They're not
the one who has the ability to innately see something that is being done wrong
or or where an optimization can be made. They're they're better at kind of
coming up with the idea to begin with. This is this is a lot
of nuance here, and it can lead teams to think that there is a
problem with psychological safety when there might not necessarily be one. Yeah, I
think it's it's when you think about that first foundational step around just the ability
to feel included and feel valued for unique perspective, you've got to find ways
to share that. You have to find ways of saying, like, what
what are the unique perspectives, what are the unique skills and strengths that we
have collectively as a team. What are the things that we bring to the
table, and how do we show appreciation for those different talents and strengths,
but also how do we put those to use? And like what are those
what are those scenarios, what are those things that we do? How do
we find that value? Because to your point, like you know, I've
had people on those teams that you know, eight or ten people in the
meeting, we're talking, we're talking, we're talking. They're really quiet for
like fifteen twenty minutes. It's not that they're ignoring everybody. They're listening.
They're not in their head, they're thinking about stuff, they're writing things down
like they're in the moment, but they're not actively participating at the level of
maybe others are participating. And then they'll get to the point where they'll raise
their hand and they'll say, hey, okay, I heard this, I
heard that, you said this. I think if we took that and that
and we put that together with this, this would help us get here and
this would be a good place for us to start. Like that skill is
such an important skill. But if you looked at it and said, no,
everybody, I want everybody in here. So you have to share right
now, you have to give an idea like there might be a time for
that. And and maybe there's those moments when you don't have any element of
inclusive nature where you have to force the ability for everybody to have a voice
in the room. But that's definitely not the most productive way, and it
doesn't allow there to be that element of individuality when it comes to like how
people process, how they think and where they add the value. And so
I always think about that being a thing you have to consider when you're when
you're really building that foundation element is what are the small practices or things that
you can do to bring this to life for a team and celebrate the fact
that everybody brings something different and then appreciate each other for those contributions that they're
making to help the idea or the strategy become better. Right, if you
are expecting a contribution from every person, almost like you're trying to validate that
there is psychological safety, or you're trying to validate that everybody has that opportunity
to have a voice. By forcing that that voice to happen, you'll end
up with two things. One, you'll have people who don't feel a psychologically
safe because they're being put on the spot to contribute something. Maybe when they
don't have the knowledge, skills, or ability to contribute something to this,
maybe they still are taking things in. Or they don't feel like they have
the right to speak up, not because it's not a psychologically safe environment,
but because they haven't earned the right to speak up on this particular topic,
for whatever the subject matter is. Or you'll end up with people who are
constantly speaking up because they know that's the expectation, and they're they're gonna throw
out ideas and make contributions that don't move anything forward. They're going to be
they're gonna be meaningless or irrelevant or hurtful because the expectation is such that everybody
contributes, and I have nothing meaningful to contribute, But I got to come
up with something, So let's pickhole. Let's let's throw something out there and
see what happens. That that's not a good thing. That that's just trying
to validate your own leadership in making sure that you know that, Hey,
every everybody in the room was able to speak up because I forced them to
speak up. That's not That's not a good thing. Um. What I
want to ask you, Lorenzo, is when when is a time when you
have felt this in a room, when you have you know, kind of
seen that this is a need to happen. And it may have gone maybe
against what your thoughts were of how psychologically safe the room was, um,
and you had to kind of really dig in to figure out, well,
is there a lack of psychological safety here or are people just playing their roles?
So I want to ask you that first. I want to give it
up towards one of our sponsors. All Right, Lorenzo, when have you
been in this kind of situation where you were you know, kind of different
people have been in the room and it isn't necessarily an indicator that there's a
lack of psychological safety. Is an activity that I did with a team,
and I think that the team I felt at the time very highly motivated,
a lot of dialogue, a lot of strategy building. But again that's from
my biased perspective of being the person who has a lot of high energy and
likes to move things forwards. So like I felt at the time, I
was a part of a team that was doing really good work. What I
learned after this activity was, as a matter of fact, we're not all
and we weren't really clear on who we were and how we added value.
We weren't creating space where the ideas of the strategies could be the best that
they could be because certain kind of certain leaders of the team had an energy
and a push to to just drive things through versus really being tactical and having
a clear expectation for everybody in the room. And so the activity was talking
about innovation and the roles that people play in the innovation process, and there
were really four roles to that. The first one was we learned about was
generators, and generators find new problems and ideate based on their own direct experience.
So I see a problem, I have an opinion. I'm gonna share
what I think based upon my experience and I'm going to kind of share that
and push that and just continue to dump ideas as to what could possibly work.
Then there's the conceptualizers, and they define the problem and prefer to understand
it through abstract analysis rather than direct experience. So they like to really take
it in. They like to idate, but they are taking in a much
larger piece of the puzzle of thinking about a lot of different things. They're
looking at data, they're looking at the opinions of others, they're looking at
history and experience. They're bringing that all together to kind of help consider what
the strategy could be. Then there's optimizers, and they evaluate ideas and suggest
solution a little bit of what you talked about earlier. They prefer to systematically
examine all possible alternatives in order to implement the best solution among the known options.
So like cool, show me what you got, let me take a
look at it, let me maybe reorganize it, and what are the best
ways we can move this thing forward? And then the implementers. They are
the ones who put solutions to work. So they are typically enthusiastic, sometimes
they're impatient. They take action. They like to experiment with some things they
like to really like make adjustments based on the experience the experiments, but they
are like, ah, y'all have fun, decided what the idea is.
Just tell me what we're going to go do, and now I'm going to
go make it happen. And we did this as a team, and what
it really showed was like, Wow, we have these different individuals that do
these things really really well, but we tend to maybe skip over some of
these. We don't pause. I don't stop and say hey Chris, like
okay, Chris, We've done our due diligence. We had some we generated
some ideas, we we conceptualize them. We went to a lot of different
back and forth. It took into a lot of context, and these are
the top three things that we think would make sense to go forward. Now
we need you to step up and look at this. What do you think?
What do you want to do with this? How do we move forward?
And then thank you because basically what we're asking you to do is like
poke holes and all these strategies, rearrange them, push back, and adjust.
And I think that this is a really good example of an activity that
allowed us to see each other through the value, that we bring in the
diverse way in which we have skills, and that we look at how we
build strategies together. So these are the things that I think we have to
do more often if we want to build in that true element of people feeling
included and feeling valued for the different ways that they were. This is such
an important perspective here because when this goes wrong, it's when people are expected
to be one of these four things that they're not w you have. If
a person leading a team is an implementer, they'll have less patience for the
optimizers and for the conceptualizers because they just want to get something going. They
need to understand that this is a process that has to go through. If
a person on who leads the team is they a conceptualizer, they want the
meeting to go eight hours where they think about more particular options. There's somebody
in the back of that room who's tapping their feet just anti they just want
to get going. Because because perfect is the enemy of done right, like
all of these things matter, and all these step steps in stages matter,
all these people matter, and if you want to do things the correct way,
you need to at least start by acknowledging where your team is, how
many how many of each of these types of people you have on your teams
and allow them to be who they are without expecting them to play in the
other spaces, and then there could be some overlap here. There are something
like when I'm looking at these types of you know, the for innovation styles,
I am a mostly an optimizer, but I have some conceptualization also in
it. I am It's harder for me to play in the generator space or
the implementer space unless unless I know it's already done. Like I'll implement something
if it's just presented to me as a fully big pie. But if I'm
in a room, I'm not the one tap of my feet going let's go,
let's go, let's go. I want to kind of optimize it more.
I want to, you know, bring some more kind of meat to
it first. But if you put me in the room at the beginning of
the conversation again, like I said, at the beginning, a lot more
difficult to just start from scratch. I want to kind of come into the
conversation it's already there. And this is really eye opening from a perspective of
that. If you're a leader, You'll have each of these people on your
team know who they are and don't expect them to play in spaces that are
less comfortable to them, or you're you're going to get results that are less
than optimized results because you're expecting a conceptualizer to implement something that's not fully baked,
or an implementer to sit there and have patients while a project starts from
the beginning, maybe not even needed for the first three meetings, right like,
these are all the different things you have taken to account as a leader.
Absolutely, and with that it brings us to the end of this episode.
This is hacking your leadership. I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris, and have
a great day.