The Leader Factor

Today's lesson:Adversity is an Opportunity for BeautyKey Points:There’s tremendous incentive to make things as easy as possible but adversity is a constant. "The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen." -Elisabeth Kubler RossToday's key action:Take five minutes and ask yourself, name 3 people you consider to be beautiful people. Not in looks but in character. Why those three names? What characterizes their experience? Have they had easy lives?

Psychological safety is crucial for team performance, with leaders as the key variable. Only 15% of managers create a safe work environment due to a lack of training. Managers should prioritize people and develop a culture before numbers. Changing norms and enforcing expectations are essential for cultural transformation. Tolerance, accountability, and rewarding vulnerability play pivotal roles in promoting psychological safety.

Today's lesson:Proximity Prevents HostilityKey Points:"There’s a lot of hatred, prejudice, discrimination, and contention between and among people who don’t really even know each other. Humans tend to fear difference, especially at a distance." -James Baldwin 1963 “Many of our society's greatest problems are created by people who don’t feel seen and heard.” -David Brooks “Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction” --Alain de Botton Today's key action:Here it is: Spend time in the same physical space as someone with different bumper stickers than you and make a concerted effort to understand their perspective by asking questions.

Today Tim and Junior will be discussing coaching and accountability. These are two of the most important tactical levers a leader has and they always go together. If we do these things well, we’ll be able to effectively transfer two things to our people: 1) Critical thinking and 2) Ownership. In this conversation, Tim and Junior will reference the coaching and accountability matrix created by Dr. Clark which we have included below. (01:52) Coaching and accountability are connected. "You can't really separate them. They don't come apart. If you think about what coaching is, coaching is really about a cycle of delegation and then holding someone accountable through the process and then coming back and reporting. It's about that ongoing journey. So coaching cannot be separated from accountability." (09:41) The pattern of our communication will dictate the quality of our coaching. What is your ask to tell ratio? "What's your pattern of communication? Are you telling people what to do all the time? Are you asking questions? What is your ratio? (17:55) What are the three levels of accountability and how do they play into our coaching conversations? What level of accountability do the highest performers operate at? When we are coaching, can we help others move up to higher levels of accountability? (28:12) Introducing the coaching and accountability matrix. This diagram serves as a powerful diagnostic tool for leaders, coaches, and managers. Whatever the position, stewards can look at the people for whom they have responsibility and assess their mode of performance based on the two dimensions: coaching and accountability. (39:09) Where do you fit on the coaching and accountability matrix? What level of accountability do you operate at? Use this matrix not only in your coaching situations but as a measure of your own performance. Important LinksThe Coaching and Accountability Matrix

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