Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink

46 - You Lied to me!

• Leah Fink • Season 1 • Episode 46

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What happens when leaders deliver promises they can't keep? This episode promises to guide you through the intricate world of leadership and how even unintentional miscommunications can undermine the trust of a team. Together, we'll unpack the complex dynamics of hierarchical communication, reflect on the significant impact a leader's words and actions have on their team, and explore ways to rebuild that trust.

Can you be sure you are not building unachievable expectations with your team?

If you want to ensure that you are intentionally communicating in order to keep trust with your team, this is the episode for you!

To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story

Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 12:00pm MST.  Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/

Speaker 1:

Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real-life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. Today we are going to be talking about the real impact that can happen to your employees when you lie, even unintentionally and today's story is actually from an employee, but I thought it was really important to share with leaders what kind of impact this might be having on people. Bs shares his story with us. I am part of a small department in a very large company that has gone through a lot of changes over the last couple years. Some of it was communicated well by leadership and some poorly. About six months ago, a top level of leadership could tell that people were worried about the way things were going, so he assured us that our staffing and positions would not be changing, that even with the other changes, that part would be consistent. Well, positions are changing. Someone was let go and all of our roles feel in jeopardy. Now I've started talking with my co-workers and we're all thinking about how we should be ready to leave. Even if I were promised today that our positions were assured for the next year, I wouldn't believe our leadership team anymore. Thank you for sharing your situation, bs, and I am sorry that you have to go through that, the worry and the stress that can come with that kind of uncertainty is so hard to get through, and especially if you're trying to still work at this place and maintain a high quality of work, how do you still feel bought in during this whole process and with this show, since we want to look at the leader's perspective, we might not know a lot about that and we might even start to be judging it, of thinking to ourselves like, oh man, it's just that BS's leaders are not that great. They're not great at communication. I would never lie to my staff like that. That seems like such an obvious slip up, maybe, but as we know, there are often unintentional impacts we could be having as leaders. So we really want to dive into that today.

Speaker 2:

And let's first acknowledge that there are things that leaders know that employees don't, and every level up of hierarchy that you go in your organization, there is going to be a different level of knowledge, and that is a good thing. It wouldn't be helpful for everyone or for anyone if an employee had to be informed of every single detail, especially when decisions aren't made. Things are still changing. That wouldn't make sense at all, and when there is a hierarchical structure, it means that there are people who will be making those decisions and people who won't have a say in them. And it would also be way too many voices if every decision had to be made by every employee. Everyone had to be a say, and it would be also frustrating if employees knew about every decision but then didn't have a say. So in a hierarchical situation, it does not make sense for everyone to know everything.

Speaker 2:

Now, in a healthy system, management is going to be informed by their staff and they're going to be informing higher levels of management what's going on. So, when big decisions are being made with that select group of people, that higher level of management, they've got all of the information from all these different layers of the organization of what's happening, what would be helpful to change, how people could be more effective, and then they're going to make that decision, communicate it well back to the staff. Unfortunately, that rarely happens and it's for a bunch of reasons. Information can be corrupted in different ways as it goes through layers of people. Everyone interprets things their own way and it becomes like a game of telephone where people are whispering this message, passing it along, and it gets a little bit warped. It can also, of course, be impacted by how each leader feels confident and comfortable in their own role. Maybe in the span of their own worries about the situation or what's happening or their position, they're going to shift the message to protect themselves a little bit and their own interests. Or they're going to shift the message to try to protect their team, realizing that another level of management may not like what they're hearing and maybe there's a top tier of leadership that just has different goals. Maybe they're really focused in one area and what your management is bringing to the table is just not their priority right now. And in situations, maybe like BS, where you're part of a small department, your department might not have as much say, your management might not have as much say as some bigger departments in the organization. Those other needs will be prioritized. So we've got all these levels of information coming in, all these levels of decision-making that have to interact with each other, and that all impacts employees of all these different levels that might not have much of a say in what's now going to happen. And you as a leader probably know this right.

Speaker 2:

It sounds like even BS's leader at a high level knew that there was some discomfort, some worry or unease, and they really wanted to assure people those six months ago. They had a really good intention. They wanted to keep people feeling secure. The problem is they made a promise they couldn't keep and it doesn't sound like this whole piece was maybe communicated the best. And since, in this case, we're not talking, obviously, to that top level of leadership, we don't know exactly what happened and why this happened. We're kind of like BS and his co-workers we just have all these questions and you've heard the impact of that already.

Speaker 2:

It sounds, honestly, like his whole team have one foot out the door. They're thinking about what's going to happen to them and they're prepping for that. They are, honestly, they're getting ready to leave in a part of their mind, and this is one of the worst case scenarios for your staff. Once people have decided they cannot trust an organization, a leader, a situation, whatever it is, they check out, they lose motivation and drive. They quiet, quit, they don't engage in the same way that they used to. It kills their passion for work and it could even lead to things obviously like medical leave, as people are overly stressed, or them leaving the organization, which is probably the last thing that you want.

Speaker 2:

So let's consider what happened from a leadership perspective and what can you do if this happens when you're leading a team? So we'll address this first from top level of leadership and what to do if you're that leader caught in the middle. And the first thing you can do, although it seems obvious, is try not to get caught in this situation. And this might be more challenging than you think, because some of what we say, some of what we do, is not going to be intentional and perfectly thought out and it may be interpreted different ways. And, of course, it comes generally from this place of good intentions. You want to be able to assure your employees if they seem worried. When there's big decisions up in the air, it's nice to be able to provide that sense of comfort of what's going to happen. Because we like black and white, we don't like sitting in gray. It can be uncomfortable for everyone at every level, but we can only provide that real black and white surety when we are 100% sure of what we are promising.

Speaker 2:

And we do this in a million other ways as well. Right, this is like I said. It could be a side comment to an employee without realizing a situation may change or something may come up that you didn't realize that was out of your control and we, honestly, might not even remember what we said. It might have been like I said this offhand thing, or might have been something that we said that was a little more vague than it should have been and it was interpreted in a different way than we intended it. So, first, this means we have to be very intentional in our language.

Speaker 2:

If you notice yourself stating things with surety that you're a pretty direct, confident, confident person you've stated a lot of things as facts, we you need to add some details. Maybe that are the facts that then we're not giving this super huge promise that we know we won't be able to keep or might not end up being able to keep. So you could add things like a time span so we can guarantee that things won't change with your positions for at least six months and we'll update you then. It's very different promise than we can guarantee positions aren't changing, right? That time span instantly changed it. You can mention the current information that changes are being made on. So, for example, you know we have this new mandate coming into effect and this is what we think it'll look like. As we test run it, things might change. This is how we're gonna might change. This is how we're going to get feedback. This is how you'll be informed about those changes. You can mention external factors that may come into play.

Speaker 2:

So we're aware of this trend on the market and we're taking these steps to mitigate any challenges. This is how you can stay engaged with what's happening. We'll do our best to protect employees this way. So there's all these pieces that you're putting in, and it's not trying to just cushion things, and how you communicate does matter. People can pick up if you're just trying to put a false cover over something. So this is as truthful as you can be without scaring people. You're not trying to terrify them, but you are trying to be truthful.

Speaker 2:

Things don't feel sure and safe at work. They know when big changes might be coming, and people don't want platitudes, they don't want false promises. They may help you in the short term, right Like in this situation, I suspect in the short term they helped a little bit, but in the long term, it is really how you lose employees. What they want is the truth, as much of it as makes sense to give to them, and to do that, you need to have clear, regular communication about these things. Now let's talk about what we can do.

Speaker 2:

If something like this has already happened because the chances are it's already happened at least some capacity. Maybe not a promise like this, but statements that have built these expectations that then end up being broken. This is going to be harder the higher up you are in a company. First it's going to take you having to get this feedback from employees right. So, having healthy feedback mechanisms that have informed you of what's happening for these employees after you shared something and if you do hear about these situations, hopefully that you're looking back over what this impact could have been and how you could support these different levels, how you might need to repair some harm to the relationship as you're representing the kind of whole organization, the harm they've done to this employee, how they've stressed out now and I would first directly address what happened and apologize for the impact you know we realize we had told you there wouldn't be any changing to staffing and there now has been. This is the situation that changed and we need to address it. Realize this probably created some stress around your role. There are still decisions that are being made and this is how we're planning on protecting our employees. We're going to reconnect in this time frame with more updates. Right, you have to.

Speaker 2:

If this trust has been broken, you're going to have to be a little bit more upfront Because, like Bia said in their story, if you just now say no, we promise nothing else is changing for six months, I don't know if they're even going to believe you. But shorter timelines, more specific information will really help you out in this. You need to be accountable. Make only promises that you absolutely 100% can keep and make sure that you are acknowledging the impact to what you did. And if you're a higher level of leadership that's not directly interacting with all these employees, make sure that you're supporting those managers who are now going to have to interact with those employees on this more personal level right, really supporting them. That way, and if you are one of those leaders that needs to be supported, you unfortunately get to take on the challenge of helping your staff get through something that was probably fully out of your control.

Speaker 2:

You can provide the information that you have. You could talk about your own plans for what you're doing and how you're working to protect the team. You can emotionally support them in the way that they need and recognize that they might be stressed and you might not be able to get rid of all that stress right. You could do your best to mitigate it and share with them honestly and support them. But there will probably be still some added stress from this. And if this is less of a decision from above and you're just looking at how you've been communicating with your team, you're now contemplating some of those pieces in general about how intentional you are, about how you talk.

Speaker 2:

Hopefully you are becoming more aware of this. You may be thinking back and going oh, maybe I did say that to the team and you hopefully also have a bit of a sense of how they interact. If you've noticed that everyone seems a little bit different in how they communicate with you, maybe you pick up that cue, realize that they're a little bit unhappy and you're asking what happened. So if you hear about something that you said that they felt bent on expectation, something that they were promised and didn't get, I would do some of the same steps as I shared for those higher levels of leadership. You want to acknowledge the impact, share what information you can share what you are able to do and what you will do and see what you might need to do in the relationship to rebuild trust.

Speaker 2:

The hope, of course, is that most of the times that we do this, it's not quite as big, it's not quite as trust-breaking.

Speaker 2:

It is going to be those little comments that do impact trust but don't break it quite as fully as this.

Speaker 2:

So I really hope that all the leaders that are listening are taking this opportunity You've taken this opportunity to really reflect on the intentionality you need and you put into how you speak, because even the smallest bit of trust can have an impact and these big situations have such a huge impact on people that we want to be really aware. If you have more questions about rebuilding trust in a relationship, please feel free to contact me. I look forward to continuing our conversation bs and, as a reminder, if you want to share your story or question with the show, I'll follow up with you with a session to make sure that we did get through everything, answer your question and to say thank you for sharing with us. I thank you, as listeners, so much for engaging with this material, thinking about the real impact you might be having on people that you care about and are trying to help. So thank you so much for listening and learning with me and, as we close, remember to ask yourself what kind of ripples am I going to create this week?

Speaker 1:

We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.