Today's lesson:Urgency is a Catalyst, Seldom A SustainerKey Points:Urgency is good, but only in doses. If we rely consistently on urgency, what do we get? Stress, poor decision-making, and decreased creativity. Urgency has a short shelf-life, it relies heavily on emotion and that emotion dissipates, so in the long run you should rely on vision and discipline to keep you going over a long period of time.Today's key action:Here it is: Keep your sustainability/urgency ratio higher than 3:1. For every 1 week that’s absolutely crazy, you need 3 that aren’t. For every piece of messaging you give to your team about pushing harder, send 3 that are about pace, intention, and sustainability.

In today's episode Tim and Junior define culture and explain the three levels at which it lives. They explain the most important level of culture: the micro-culture & the single most important variable for influencing psychological safety on a team. Today's conversations includes a peek into some of our survey data that’s brand new coming out of LeaderFactor’s Psychological Safety Survey Tools. (02:06) What is culture? In short, culture is the way we interact. Culture is in and around us. Fish have water and humans have culture. (04:26) How does culture form? Tim and Junior discuss the three levels of culture. 1) A pattern of thought or behavior in an individual is a habit. 2) A pattern of thought or behavior in an individual is a habit. 3) A collection of norms in an organization is a culture.(08:21) What is a sub-culture or micro-culture? A sub-culture is a smaller, distinct group within a larger society that shares unique beliefs, values, practices, norms, and behaviors that set them apart from the dominant or mainstream culture. These subcultures can form based on various factors, such as shared interests, hobbies, profession, ethnicity, religion, generation, or geographical location. In an organization there are many micro-cultures.(15:13) What does the data say? Team assignment is by far a more powerful variable in understanding variants, in understanding the nature of the culture and the nature of the experience that you'll have.(25:05) Team leaders have the single biggest influence on culture formation. Leaders are the cultural bottleneck for positive the experiences of their team members. The leader has the single biggest influence on the micro-culture of the team. This is more important than any single demographic variable. (32:58) How do we build better leaders through cultural accountability? "We have these, these KPIs, we have these numbers. And what is that? It's almost all going to be technical. Having that layer of cultural accountability becomes very important, which is why it's a big reason we measure psychological safety, we have quantifiable evidence of how we're doing in cultural accountability."(38:49) Culture by design or by default?  "If you're gonna try and go affect the opinion, the prevailing norms at the top of an organization, you better come with some data, and we've seen this over and over again. We won't go to the top of an institution and attempt to do this without some data, it's important that you can back up what you're saying."(45:13) Cultural accountability can help you in your planning. "We're starting to see this more and more in organizations where they are incorporating psychological safety as a selection criterion for promotion to management"Important LinksThe 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™ Survey

Today's lesson:Mistakes Are Not the Exception, They Are the ExpectationKey Points:Do we want more mistakes, or fewer mistakes? We want the right kind of mistakes. We need to distinguish between an operating environment and a test or experimental environment. It’s the difference between practice and the game. Each time we make a mistake, we learn about a cause and effect relationship. We learn what causes what. We learn what doesn’t work. That’s experimentation, that’s  discovery, that’s exploration, that’s problem solving. We are expected to fail and learn when we experiment and practice. We can't be afraid to do so.Today's key action:Share your next mistake.

What happens when you don't have psychological safety, and how does it affect your bottom line? In this episode of the Culture by Design podcast, Tim and Junior share some of the research behind the need for psychological safety at work. You can't fully understand these costs and not walk away with a renewed conviction to foster an environment of psychological safety. Our suggestion? Take this data to your teams and start the conversation around how psychological safety impacts you and your organization.Seven questions to assess your personal impact on psychological safety (01:56). Tim and Junior open the episode with several self-reflection questions. When asked in a survey environment, 60% of respondents said that at least one of these things had happened to them during the prior 24 hours. How cultures are formed (10:12). The way that we either interact, either healthily or pathologically, makes a difference. Any time humans interact, cultures are created, which means that cultures are constantly created because we're constantly interacting. This means that cultural quality, like interaction, runs along a spectrum from pathology to health.Consequences of punished vulnerability (17:15). Junior shares some stats from Christine Porath's work on the costs of workplace incivility. Cost 1: Bleeding out your best talent (19:47). An environment that fosters psychological safety is very quickly becoming a requirement for top performers. These employees know what kind of environment they need to do their best work. They won't tolerate unsafe environments wherethey can't contribute meaningfully, they can't make things better, and they can't challenge the status quo.Cost 2: Failure to innovate (24:52). Companies with a strong culture of psychological safety are 4.5 times more likely to be innovative than companies with weak cultures. When employees feel safe to take risks and share ideas, they're more likely to come up with new and innovative solutions.Cost 3: Hostile work environment (30:31). Cultures of punished vulnerability can very quickly turn hostile, and there are very significant liabilities and exposure that we incur as organizations that come with hostile work environments.Cost 4: Low-velocity decision-making (39:39). Low psychological safety makes the necessary discussion for analysis and decision-making shallow and slow. But having it allows you to do the most thorough analysis and assessment of risk.Cost 5: Learned helplessness (44:50). A lack of psychological safety can induce conformity, passivity, and learned helplessness which lowersthe bar of performance. Rewarding vulnerability and investing in its benefits (47:57). Tim and Junior explain the LIVE model (look, identify, validate, encourage), a tool to help individuals actively reward acts of vulnerability in their workplace. Mentioned Links:Christine Porath | Workplace IncivilityPsychological Safety Behavioral GuideThe 4 Stages Culture Diagnostic

The podcast delves into the importance of judgment in leadership, emphasizing that expertise alone doesn't guarantee good decision-making. Leaders are likened to 'decision factories' that transform ideas into actionable choices. It highlights the necessity of quality inputs for positive outputs. A systematic approach to decision-making is discussed, focusing on goal-setting and post-decision evaluation. The hosts encourage intentional learning to enhance leadership skills and motivate listeners to reflect on areas for growth.

In this week's episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior explain The Ladder of Vulnerability. We all experience vulnerability at work differently, and you have a ladder of vulnerability that's unique to you. This episode, and the online resources available to accompany it, will make it easier for you to talk about vulnerability at work. With these tools, you can change the conversation around vulnerability by providing a more practical, data-driven approach.Human interaction is a vulnerable activity. (02:25) If you’re interacting with other humans, you’re at risk of harm or loss. But the same exposure that brings the possibilities of rejection, ridicule, and embarrassment also brings the possibilities of connection and fulfillment. Not all vulnerability is equal. (17:01) Tim and Junior explain The Ladder of Vulnerability self-assessment, where, applying an 11-point scale, LeaderFactor surveyed over 3000 people from over 800 organizations throughout the world to measure the relative risk associated with the 20 selected behaviors.Leaders don't adequately understand vulnerability. (41:42) In order to encourage vulnerability in the workplace, leaders have to both model it and reward it with those they work with. The LIVE Model (43:25). Tim and Junior discuss the four steps to rewarding vulnerability: LookIdentifyValidateEncourageLinks:Take The Ladder of Vulnerability Self-AssessmentDownload the free guide

Today's lesson:Become an Agile, Self-directed LearnerKey Points:The biggest barrier to learning today is not access, it’s motivation. Many individuals stop learning when they get out of school or they don’t have outside requirements, external expectations, or a structured learning environment. Many people stop learning even though it’s an innate need and desire. The solution? Make learning completely your responsibility and avoid learning welfare like the plague.Today's key action:Identify an area of your professional life that you feel would benefit from some deliberate, aggressive, self-directed learning. And then book a 20 minute slot on your calendar within the next two days to do some intentional learning.

In this episode of Culture by Design, we're finishing up our Character and Competence series with the final episode. And if you've been with us each week, thank you. This has been an impactful few weeks where we've discussed topics including integrity, humility, accountability, courage, learning, change, judgment, and finally today, we cover the fourth cornerstone of competence, vision. Tim and Junior will discuss, vision is to see what does not exist, to see what others cannot see, and to see potential and possibility in yourself, in others, and in the organization. What is vision? (03:16) Vision is another differentiator between leaders and managers, and great leaders have two kinds of vision for two units of performance: the individual and the organization. But vision isn't made up of dreams, you have to take note of your wanting/willing ratio.‍Vision helps you survive (17:24) Inevitably, disaster will strike. Vision helps pull us through when we face uncertainty. Uncertainty paired with the vision that can pull us forward and create some mobilization.‍Vision precedes creativity (20:37) Tim and Junior explain that vision begins the creative process. Creating a vision is creating a conception of the future and defining a goal. Leaders need to enable independence in their people before they can enable creativity.‍Creating a vision (32:01) Our hosts delve into how to create, simplify, communicate, embody, and endure your vision. 

This is a LeaderFactor Single Point Lesson. These 10-minute episodes are packed with practical learning on a single topic. These episodes will be published in addition to our regular full-length episodes every Monday.Today's lesson:Leadership makes it harder to get to reality.Key Points:When you step into a formal leadership role, you face a built-in obstacle: you have to work harder to stay in reality. Why? Because now there’s a power differential. Honesty and candor comes with risk; it can be dangerous. You get less feedback and it’s filtered. In addition, leaders often develop a tendency to focus inwardly. Welcome to the reality distortion field. What's the solution? An open door policy will never work. That’s passive. The solution is to go get reality by soliciting feedback, being accessible, and rewarding the feedback when it comes.Today's key action:Go solicit feedback from those who have local knowledge regarding an issue you’re currently working on. 

In this week's episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior dive into the penultimate episode of their series, Leading With Character and Competence, with a discussion on judgment. If decisions are the primary output of any leader, then improving decision-making is a crucial part of becoming a better leader. The two define and frame the concept, and then share practical ways to improve judgment as a learnable skill. Judgment diagnostic questions (04:45). Tim asks listeners a few questions to gauge where they're at with their judgment abilities. The first one? Would you say that you're a good decision-maker? Judgment, systems thinking, and searchlight intelligence (14:16). Junior brings up analysis paralysis and the components of good judgment, including good information.Tackling adaptive challenges with good judgment (27:54). The faster you can identify adaptive challenges, the better your judgment will be. What are the opportunities, threats, and crises facing your organization?Judgment and delegation (46:47). Do you use your judgment to multiply force and accelerate the development of people around you? Can you resist the arrogance and overconfidence that comes with success?