Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization, and even out into to 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 are creating the ripples you want.
If you would like your questions answered on the show, please share your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story/
To join the show live, go to: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink
48 - Are You Questioning Your Assumptions?
What if the assumptions you hold about your team's well-being are actually barriers to their growth and satisfaction? In this episode, we challenge leaders to question their perceptions and delve into the often hidden layers of employee experience. We unravel the intricate dynamics of feedback, highlighting its crucial role in both professional and personal relationships.
Are you sure that the feedback you get isn't a one-time event but a catalyst for real change?
If you want to maintain effective feedback cycles and transform how teams function and grow, 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/
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 this complicated piece of how do you actually know what kind of experience your employees are having, not just what you think is happening, but how do you really know. And today, instead of a story from one leader, I want to use an example that I've pulled together from a couple conversations that I've had recently at a couple different networking events. When I share with people about the workplace mental health assessments that I do, we usually end up discussing this concept of how you get feedback and information from your staff team. And a trend I notice and this especially with leaders of smaller businesses and sometimes a bit more with male leaders is this tendency to say things like my staff knows they can come to me with things or I have a good sense of how everyone is doing, or I know my team would tell me if there was a problem. And in a couple of these cases, when I was having these discussions, these leaders actually had some of their staff there. They were part of the conversation and in these instances I noticed there was a slight facial expression changed when these things were said and one even gently kind of challenged, that they had brought up something and it wasn't maybe fully addressed. That kind of went unacknowledged by the leader. The conversation ended up going in a different direction. I think that these leaders were good people and they had genuinely good intentions, were genuinely nice people, they cared, they wanted to get feedback, they wanted to do better, they wanted to support their team, and I can also guess that if I dove deeper into all of those leaders' teams' experiences, I would probably hear some constructive feedback that they either haven't fully shared or maybe they felt was unheard or unaddressed by their leader. Now, if you're listening to this episode, I'm guessing you're also a leader who wants to support your team and grow from feedback, and I'm going to ask you to be honest with yourself for a moment and see if you have ever said any of those kinds of statements like earlier. Or maybe I have an open door policy or I always listen to my team or my staff always call me out on things, anything that speaks to a confidence that you know how the people on your team are feeling or what they're thinking, and this is not to say in any way that you've done a horrible job understanding your staff If you've said some of those things probably some of it is true. It's not coming from nowhere and a lot of leaders have developed trust with their teams and they are getting some genuine constructive feedback and that they've used it and grown from it. But I would hazard a guess there's almost no leaders out there who understand their staff's perspective quite as deep as they think they do.
Speaker 2:We are very good at overestimating how much we know about what's going on in anyone else's head. Our brains, naturally as a shortcut, because we need to be able to do this make these assumptions and they fill in gaps and we end up creating these whole stories about other people. But this is often very instinctual, very subconscious, and so we barely think to question it. We just go along with it and assume it to be a bit more of truth, and this is on every level. Let's say you have a romantic partner at home. Let's say you've been married for 40 years. You would probably say that you know them pretty well.
Speaker 2:Even with that level of connection and trust, if you start diving deeper and deeper into their experience and how they've perceived it and their views and beliefs, there will be some things that you'll learn that'll be different than you expected and because the relationship's been so long, you've spent so much time making maybe some of these assumptions not from a bad place and not that they're bad assumptions but maybe you just never thought to question something and assumed that they thought about it the way that you did because their behavior was the kind of behavior you'd had. But a lot of this is generally unchecked, it's unconfirmed, but it might be pretty accurate not to say that it's not. And I would especially hazard it. If there are small behaviors that you don't like, those maybe those little nitpicky things, little frictions in your relationship that you wish they'd do different, those little nitpicky things, little frictions in your relationship that you wish they'd do different, they might have a different meaning behind that that is foreign to you, that you've never fully understood in a way that's kind of allowed you to understand it better, and they feel such a different way about something that you can't comprehend or you're not comprehending that it could be frustrating or annoying or even hurtful, and those things can impact your relationship in negative ways, obviously, even small ones, and you may have tried to give feedback about this thing, you may have even tried to understand and explore it at the steeper level, but often, to be honest, we leave these things unaddressed.
Speaker 2:It is awkward to bring up these conversations. We don't know how to talk about them, we don't feel comfortable with that and you might be worried about damaging your relationship by rocking the boat, as it were. A lot of people worry about that and that's in equal relationships, where a lot of our assumptions are probably positive and you have all this trust built up. So let's think about the impact that these are having on relationships where there is a power dynamic, like with your staff team. Now, on this show you may have noticed if you've listened before we like to talk power dynamics and the effect that they have on how we interact with others, and something that's always key to consider, one of the reasons we talk about this so much is because there's so much more vulnerability when you are in that position with less power, like your staff member is to you as a leader. Because when you are in those positions, your brain reacts differently. You react more from this place of your amygdala that has the fight-flight-freeze reaction and fear reactions. And even in healthy relationships that are very trusting, there's this physiological difference knowing that this other person has a bit more influence and ability to control something in the situation than you do.
Speaker 2:So if we have a staff member who's thinking about their leader, even if they like them, and we have a situation with a bit of feedback that they want to provide, not only is this person dealing with how awkward it can be to provide feedback and how they might not know really how to do it best and they're worried about damaging the relationship, but they also have this additional vulnerability and fear of what could happen if the leader doesn't like this feedback. Could it impact them professionally in some way? What else could happen if the leader doesn't like this feedback? Could it impact them professionally in some way? What else could happen if they choose to do this? So maybe you can understand when staff say nothing's wrong, everything's good. Of course I'd come to you with any problems I'm having. That might not be the whole story. There might be a little bit more going on there. Now, on top of this, all of this being said, let's say your staff team are really trusting. You've done a great job. They are 100% willing to come to you with any challenges they have. They're happy to contradict you. That is amazing, congratulations. Let's add one more layer that might be happening to the situation.
Speaker 2:How do you actually take feedback and what do you do with it? How are you ensuring that you fully understand what kind of feedback you're getting, that you know what kind of behavior change is desired, and how are you checking back in about it? Often, as well-intentioned leaders, we take feedback and it becomes kind of this one-time experience and we assume that if we've changed something, if we changed a behavior to help this out, then we've solved the problem. We are done, the feedback is good. Or maybe you sometimes hear feedback you realize you weren't quite willing or able to do the thing that they asked about and maybe you assume that you told them or shared that but you didn't give them actually all that information, you didn't loop back to that feedback giver.
Speaker 2:And I hear a lot of examples of frustrated staff from both of these situations that someone took feedback and they ran another way with it and never came back to it. Or maybe they just gave feedback, never heard anything and nothing changed and they don't know why and people become frustrated with this. This is the same reason that, on a larger scale, employees don't usually like engagement surveys or similar, because leaders get this information. They try to do something with it. They often don't do enough to check back that their efforts are moving things in the direction that they hoped, and then those problems that need to be solved don't end up getting solved in the way that the employees hope. And, of course, some of this lack of clarity can come from the staff. They're probably not masterfully trained in how to give perfect feedback that'll drive the exact behavior change that they want. Maybe they weren't super clear. Maybe they gave examples of what had happened, but not what they wanted to happen, and that's understandable. It's not to say that they're perfect and you're wrong, but as a leader, it is your responsibility.
Speaker 2:I believe that you should be checking in and following up. I think that's a critical piece of your leadership journey. So you could talk to them. Hey, you mentioned that you would prefer if I was quicker to make decisions in these kinds of situations. For the last month, I've been trying to make those decisions quicker. Was that were you were hoping for? Yes, okay, great, I'll continue that. No, okay, can you tell me a little bit more about your experience in this process? Let's brainstorm together about how this could look in your ideal world. Okay, I can do that thing, oh, I can't do that thing. Let's keep talking about it. That's a big difference.
Speaker 2:That's a discussion that happens much less often than just hey, could you give me some me some feedback? Or I hope you could tell me about feedback for this, because we often put a lot of, if not pretty much all, of the burden of providing feedback about our leadership on our staff team. Now, of course, they are the people who should be providing feedback about how we lead because we are leading them, but they shouldn't be carrying the mental load of that, and what I mean by that is they shouldn't be carrying the responsibility to seek us out, to give us feedback, to plan that time, to bring forward something. They shouldn't be the ones checking back if something wasn't the way that they hoped or something's gone wrong with that to refine the process. We as leaders should be driving that process, doing the scheduling, asking specifically for feedback at regular intervals, checking in on how things are going and if any changes you have made are having the right impact, because what happens is sometimes, as leaders, we get caught in this cycle of kind of just wanting to make sure that we feel good about ourselves as leaders. That's very natural.
Speaker 2:If your staff was trusting enough to give you some feedback, of course you're glad about this. And then, on top of it, you took the time and effort to change some behavior and now you're feeling really good about yourself. Enjoy that feeling, of course, because you did take some great steps to be there. But make sure that that doesn't stop things, that you don't just sit in the feeling good and now won't take that awkward step again to go, ooh, did this actually have that positive impact? Because if they say, well, I really appreciate what you did, but it didn't quite help me, that's hard to hear as a leader, but also critical, because you put in all this effort, you're putting in all this care that you want to do better. That means you need to be able to keep asking about that feedback, keep checking in if your efforts were actually helpful.
Speaker 2:Basically this is all to say hopefully not too much of a soapbox that I hope that you, listening, are deciding to take on this responsibility of the mental load of the feedback cycle, that you're focusing on outcomes for your staff, that you're being aware of why feedback might not always be quite there and how you might need to continue to build trust and relationship, to keep supporting that, but, most importantly, to just keep asking questions, keep being curious about what your staff's experience is heck, go home and practice with your partner. Keep being curious about what their experience is, what they actually meant by things, how you can keep asking them about improving your relationship. I think that would be a very powerful thing for every person to take from this today. I think that would be a very powerful thing for every person to take from this today. Because today didn't have a specific storyteller, I'm going to leave the follow-up slot for this open. So if you want to talk feedback in the workplace and how you could improve your own growth in that area, send me an email to info at allthriveca and I will do a draw for a free consultation slot.
Speaker 2:As a reminder to our listeners, if you have a story or a question that you'd like to share, we would love to hear it and have it on the show.
Speaker 2:You can find the link for that in the description below and, of course, then I will follow up with a session to say thank you so much for sharing and to make sure your question is fully answered. If you enjoy this kind of thing in podcast form that comes out on Friday mornings. You can also find the link for that in the description and, if you've been enjoying the show, if you're listening to this on the podcast, if you wouldn't mind just taking one second to leave a rating or review on your favorite app, that would be so helpful for me and I'd really appreciate it because it gets the word out about this. And once again, I want to thank you so much for listening and learning with me. If we can improve the way that we interact with people, if we can take that burden of feedback off of our staff, I think it would be a wonderful place and we'd make a real difference. Remember to ask yourself, as we close 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.