Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink

56 - Trust Before Tactics: Introducing New Ideas

• Leah Fink • Season 2 • Episode 6

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Why do great ideas often face stubborn resistance? This episode tackles the common leadership challenge of introducing change when your team seems unwilling to listen – even when your suggestions would clearly make their lives easier!  Join us to understand the trust and relationship gap that might be hindering your efforts for improvement. 

Are you getting to the heart of effective and impactful change management?

If you want to ensure that the changes you bring to your team are embraced and well implemented, 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 2 weeks 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're going to be talking about how you can get your staff thinking more proactively about how they're going to be facing new challenges and working on improving their environment, so that when you suggest new ideas, they're met with a lot of acceptance and excitement versus more of a resistance. Au shares their story. I'm a mid-level manager who recently transitioned into a new company. Although I know the field well, I'm still adapting to my new company's way of doing things. To be honest, I don't think they're doing things in the most efficient way. I have a lot of great ideas of things that I know will make the workflow more efficient, but my team aren't interested in hearing them. I'll suggest something. People will say they don't want to do it, and after we face an issue, suddenly they figure out that this new way is a better way to do things. It's getting quite frustrating, especially since everyone always feels strapped for time and I just want to help them. They're tired, they're working overtime and I know it's a problem that we could solve if they would just listen. Thank you so much for sharing your situation, au, and I appreciate that you care so much about your team and you're really doing this out of this hope to make their lives easier, and I'm sure that it is frustrating to share this information that you know will be valuable to them and have them not respond in a way that you find helpful. So let's take a little bit of a look at what kinds of things could be at play in this situation and as we're going through this. Obviously we're talking about this concept of bringing new, different ways of working to a team, but the concepts I'm talking about today really apply to all change management anytime you want to bring something different into a current team dynamic.

Speaker 2:

Now, the first thing that I'm curious about which you haven't mentioned AU is what your relationship with your team is like, and that is really where I would start. If you have joined the team relatively recently, what do you know about how they see you and how they've experienced that? Have you had the chance to develop more personal relationships, both with them as a team and as individuals? Do you know if they missed their previous manager or something about them in the way that they led? Do you know if they missed their previous manager or something about them in the way that they led? Do you know if anyone on the team was vying for the position that you got, and there could be some underlying feelings there. Have you developed your understanding of how they used to operate and what parts of that felt good for the team? What was helpful?

Speaker 2:

There is this whole history to their experience with this company that you probably don't know, or maybe at least don't know the full scope of. You weren't there, and so always trying to understand more of that is a great place to start because, ultimately, how much do we ever know of anyone's perspective? For all we know, your staff had their experience that they had a manager that they loved enough that they were, you know, not happy, but enough that they were, you know not happy, but pretty okay with working overtime for them regularly, and then that person left and now some new person that they don't trust yet has come in and keeps telling them they're doing things wrong. Now, that is not what you're going for and of course, this is just me making up a story about what they could be experiencing. But thinking of that experience is a place that we want to start because, at the very least, it wouldn't surprise me if there was a little sense of feeling that they're doing something wrong. When you come in with all these new ideas, even when the information that we're sharing in this case is about systems and ways of working and you're really focused on how it can help them, from the other side, think about how that could potentially feel like a criticism of the work that they have been doing and are doing. It's important for leaders to remember that it takes eight positive statements to balance out. Just balance out one constructive one, and that's not even surface level. Good jobs, thanks for doing that. This is specific, positive feedback about ways that their actions had a positive impact. And so making sure, first of all, that you're having that really positive balancing out this brain's negativity bias.

Speaker 2:

Interaction with the team, because if you've come in with a great energy and a lot of enthusiasm and all these great ideas, mentioning all these new things that they can do better, I'm guessing that part of their experience is that you come in and it feels like you're just constantly putting down the way things are. That's what our brain does, right. It has this negativity bias. This is, again, totally unintentional. It's from a place of caring, but I suspect at least part of it's being received differently and that's why there's this sense of resisting from your staff team, right, the resisting this idea of that they're doing a bad job. They don't want to hear that. So the first thing I would do is focus on those relationships, how you're taking time and effort to foster these positive interactions, making really intentional relations out of this. Before you keep suggesting and even if you've already done this you're like, wow, I already have a great relationship with them. I would still recommend always being fostering this, because it is such a positive and powerful way to get on board with your team. But let's also add a couple layers to it. In addition to this relationship, health and strength.

Speaker 2:

One of the biggest challenges that leaders often come across is there's this unearned belief that we should be immediately trusted by those we lead, just by the value of our position, because we often equate the influence that we have in our position being seen as that kind of expert or someone who gets to tell others what they need to be doing with this sense that people are required to do what we tell them and this idea that that all comes together to the sense that they must trust us because they are doing what we ask. And as we often talk about on this show. When people have less power in a situation, less influence, they have more vulnerability and their brains even react from more of a place of fear. That's just the physiological response, but when we're in leadership positions, we can actually become a bit blind. We forget about that feeling and we make assumptions about how they should feel, based on our good intentions, and that's part of what leads to this assumption that we know that we are trustworthy and therefore should be trusted.

Speaker 2:

Because of that and because of our position, it sounds to me like there is a bit of this trust gap as well, where you're relying on your good intentions and this past knowledge that you know you can help them do better and you know you can make their lives easier. They are not in a space yet where they trust you enough to believe in what you're proposing. They know it's worked for them in the past, so they're going to continue to do that until it sounds like some issues come up. They're forced to try a new thing and they now know, once they have their own experience, that that new thing will work and so they can take it on. They can trust in that piece of their self experience more than they trust in this new relationship that they have. Of course, it's important to build that trust, and you want to do that, and there are a couple things you can do with that, the first obviously being the relationship building that we just talked about. People need to know someone generally, to like them and to trust them more, and so the better your relationships with your team are, the more trust you're going to continue to develop. And another component that you can build onto that which also fosters trust is how much your staff feel heard by you. This is also a big component of relationship building, and on a deeper level.

Speaker 2:

So in a situation like this, I'd recommend something really important to do is to start these conversations about the staff's experience in the role. What do they see as some of the benefits of the way that they currently do things, or what do they see as some of the drawbacks? And when you propose, if you were to bring forward a hypothetical new way of doing things, what would they see as the benefit to that and the drawbacks as well, the pitfalls that could come up? You think about this experience. There's a big difference between being told to do something and ask their opinion about something. In one case, it's someone coming in telling you that they are more of an expert and then they're holding this expectation over you, and in the other case, someone's acknowledged for their experience and opinions and you're asked about understanding them more deeply. Which of those options feels better to you as a human? Which do you prefer? I suspect that everyone likes being acknowledged for what they know and asked to understand themselves and their experience better.

Speaker 2:

You can consider that as you move forward with your team, because once you also have that information and this understanding, that opens up even more possibilities. You'll get to hear more about the current challenges your team are facing. Maybe they're seeing these challenges a bit differently, which is also why they're resisting this idea of something new coming in. You'll understand more about their strengths and how they could even cultivate that better and how you could use those to cultivate these new systems. This gives you important information, new information as a leader, to understand how you can be improving with your team, alongside of them, instead of trying to improve something for your team. That is what makes you an ally. You want to be an ally to your team, tackling problems together, being on the same side, instead of now creating this side, where you're telling them to do something and they're resisting that concept of doing something new. You put yourself on different sides in that case.

Speaker 2:

And with that I want to add just one more component of building trust and something to consider as you go through this whole relationship development process, and that is how responsive you can be to the different needs of different staff. So, as an example, everyone has a different personality, different preferences, different values, and if you can work more to meeting those specific preferences, those specific values, that will help you gain trust and build relationship a lot quicker. So, for example, when people focus more on organization and structure first of all, they're probably going to be the ones that are the most resisting of the change, and showing them a really well planned out system, a really well thought out structure, will help them to be able to know that they could continue to be organized even as they have to face this change. For those who focus on relationships and really care about that interpersonal interaction, you want to keep learning about them. You want to keep taking this more personal approach, to continue to foster that kind of deeper connection that they're looking for. For the more logically minded people, you want to share more about your expertise. You want to share that knowledge so they know that you can trust the information that you have and your knowledge and your skill, or they will start to question you and your decisions. And finally, for the more high energy, spontaneous people, you want to keep things moving and shifting and if you have your these people on your team, they're probably the ones who were more okay with the changes and they were the first who were a bit more willing to accept them.

Speaker 2:

Now, this all being said, what I would really recommend is taking this more human approach.

Speaker 2:

When you bring change to your staff, of any kind, you have the knowledge, you have the experience.

Speaker 2:

You are able to help them with any kind of change management, any new thing that comes in, and what you want to focus on is connecting on this more personal level, fostering these better relationships and really focusing on the sense of trust that when you bring something in, they are willing to go along with it, that you're on the same team.

Speaker 2:

Like I said, if you can foster this understanding, bring these ideas alongside, you become an ally instead of someone who is imposing something upon them. So thank you again so much for sharing AU and I look forward to continuing our conversation. As a reminder to our listeners, if you have a great story or question that you'd like to share with the show, we would love to have it. You can find the link for that in the description below and, as a thank you, I'll always follow up with a session just to make sure all your questions were answered and to say thank you so much for contributing. Finally, I want to thank you so much for listening, for learning with me, for just considering some of these pieces instead of continuing along a path that may be less effective and ultimately not as helpful to your staff, team or yourself. And, as we close, remember to ask yourself what kind of ripples are you going to create this week?

Speaker 1:

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