1st Lead U - Leadership Development
This podcast, now in Season 2, is dedicated to self-development, self-awareness, and learning to lead oneself so listeners can lead others well. If someone cannot lead themselves well, it will be difficult for them to be an effective leader of others. This podcast will help listeners understand what it means to 1st Lead U and build confidence in themselves and their leadership ability. Personal Growth Coach John Ballinger has spent 35 years developing the knowledge and material he shares with individuals, business owners, and leaders from a variety of areas.
1st Lead U - Leadership Development
Communication is Essential in Leadership - Ep. 218
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Communication can make or break your leadership. Join us for an insightful episode of 1st Lead U as we explore this vital leadership component and promise you'll walk away with actionable strategies to elevate your leadership game. Our discussion kicks off with a heartfelt conversation with John's 13-year-old daughter about political ideologies and leadership, showcasing the power of curiosity in fostering effective communication. We'll dissect the concept of over-communication and compare traditional open-door versus closed-door leadership styles, aiming to equip you with the tools to empower your team to make decisions independently.
As we navigate the evolving landscape of workplace culture post-COVID, we'll tackle the ongoing debate between remote and in-office work. Discover why in-person interactions can be crucial for building trust and camaraderie and how leaders can foster an environment where employees are excited to come to work.
We shed light on the importance of trust and communication in enhancing productivity, enabling collaboration, and resolving conflicts. You'll gain insights into the psychological aspects of leadership, learning how to create a psychologically safe environment that reduces stress and fosters trust within your team.
Finally, we delve into the core elements of high-performing teams, such as psychological safety, dependability, and clarity. Learn how effective communication can ensure these elements are present and prevent common pitfalls like unclear instructions and lack of engagement.
We'll emphasize the importance of involving team members in decision-making processes to promote a sense of ownership and reduce the leader's burden. By the end of this episode, you'll be armed with the knowledge to cultivate a thriving team environment where ideas are valued and criticism is constructive. Tune in to transform your leadership approach and drive your team towards success!
I wonder how many leaders sit at home on Sunday night and say you know, is my team ready to come to work or are they dreading to come to work?
Announcer:Welcome to First Lead you, a podcast dedicated to building leaders, expanding their capacity, improving their self-awareness through emotional intelligence and developing deeper understanding of selfless leadership.
John Ballinger:Hello America and welcome to First Lead U where we believe selfless leadership is essential. America is suffering a leadership crisis. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence is the key to developing selfless leaders. Now here is personal growth coach John Ballinger. Hello, I'm John Ballinger, with First Lead you. I'm here with my co-host, mr Douglas Ford. Hello John, how are you? I should be refreshed.
Douglas Ford:Yes, you were on vacation last week. I was on vacation last week.
John Ballinger:You should be ready to go. I'm a were on vacation last week. I was on vacation last week. You should be ready to go. I'm a little bit more brown than when I left. You know. I told you it gives me a lot of time to think, you know whether driving. But it was unique because my daughter, who's 13, wanted to have a discussion about the country and leadership and the direction it was going in, and I forget how long we talked about it, but it was a long time because it it it kind of veered into what's a Democrat, what's a Republican, what's a liberal, what's a conservative. She'd heard the term blue dog Democrat, I mean we went down for a 13 year old absolutely
John Ballinger:uh, and then we, uh, on the trip back, started talking to have some other conversations about leadership and I thought, man, what if? What if everyone well, let's just say 10 were as inquisitive as she was, because this is not something that I've made her do. You know, it's not like with a parent in sports where you're going to play this and you're going to do that. I've always let the kids kind of gravitate to what interested them and then if there was something they needed from an informational standpoint, I'm happy to oblige and give them as much as I can. And but I mean, at 13, she's really she's leaning in on this. And so it made me think what if leaders, what if people in leadership positions were as interested in learning how to lead well, even with the changing dynamics going on, and not resisting as much? And I think today's topic is a great one because we're talking about communication. The topic of the podcast is communication is essential for leadership and you sometimes have to over-communicate in today's population.
Douglas Ford:Oh yeah, absolutely. I would think that that is probably more the rule, much more than the exception, in terms of over-communication, because there's so many incoming messages, there's so much that we're distracted by, we're in such a rush, especially at work. Everything needs to be done yesterday, so there's not a lot of time to create any depth to a lot of things. So for people to hear you, for people to understand where you're going, what you want to do, overcommunication is probably key.
John Ballinger:Yeah. So I started looking up. Like you know, the old style leadership we heard, I heard growing up was closed door versus open door. That was a big topic of discussion and the closed door meant you didn't want anybody to disturb you. And so there were leaders that got to the point where I'm going to close my door, because it's not that I want anybody to disturb me, I don't want to answer any questions because I don't even know how to answer the question. So if I'm out there and somebody needs me, I'm just going to kind of blow up on them and run and shut my door and they'll be like, well, I don't know, you know, I'm not going to ask them anything.
John Ballinger:And then the open door became just the big thing and and the executives are saying, well, I can't get anything done because my door's always open and everybody's just coming into it all the time. I've got a solution to that or a question to the leadership, and this is a tough one but are you empowering your team to answer questions? Because I think what was happening that closed door mentality person was also the one that had to make every decision for the company and they didn't empower their teams to make decisions. Even it meant that that leader ultimately had to go clean up a little mess because they didn't make the right decision.
Douglas Ford:Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. The idea of empowering people we've talked about that before is if you are truly helping people develop in their own leadership and helping them understand the mission purpose goals of the company, at some point they should be able to start picking that up. Fewer and fewer decisions should be coming to you and the types of issues that you're dealing with while they may still be numerous you should start to see those change.
John Ballinger:You should, you should. So obviously, the word for the day is communication. This is a long definition. Do we need two applause rounds that we may need one in between? Actionable transfer of information from one person, group or place to another by writing, speaking or using a medium that provides a means of understanding.
Douglas Ford:Yeah, that was a mouthful.
John Ballinger:You might want to repeat that again, so an actionable transfer of information from one person, group or place to another by writing, speaking or using a medium that provides a means of understanding, and I thought out of all of that, like understanding was the last word, which most of the time in the environment that we're in, when a leader says something, they leave the room and the people are about 50% clear on what needs to happen.
Douglas Ford:Yeah, you're right. I think understanding is absolutely the key to that. If you don't have understanding, I don't know that you truly have communication, because you may have had verbalization but you don't have communication because I think part of that definition and some other circles might be that there has to be a sender and a receiver, and some other circles might be that there has to be a sender and a receiver to have effective communication. So if the receiver doesn't understand, then you're still at a loss.
John Ballinger:So I thought, just for simplicity purposes, I thought, can we come to a more simple definition than that, because that's a lot to remember, absolutely. And so there actually was a website that I looked up and I said, yeah, it's a one word, meaning it's convey. Okay, well, what's the definition? To convey, you know, and this is pretty simple. It says to make known or understandable to someone. There, there we go Understand, understand. And I really think, if you start digging into your leadership style, are you communicating the way your team needs to be heard versus the way that you communicate or want to be communicated to yourself?
Douglas Ford:Yeah, well, and we had the situations recently with an organization we were working with where the question come up do your team members really understand why certain things are happening?
Douglas Ford:And kind of the response to that was, well, they should understand these things and it's like, well, it's actually, I think, a bigger question and it's like, well, it's actually, I think, a bigger question. They're not asking to understand the technical reason. It's really the bigger question of the why. And do people understand the why, like? Do they understand, when an unexpected sale happens, that it impacts our workload here, even though we may have already had a plan for a workload, something unexpected happened, could be positive, could be something that negatively that happened, but either way, it impacted us in a way that has now caused us to change. And so, if they understand, these are possibilities, these unexpected occurrences are possibilities. Maybe it helps me understand why my day changes, maybe on a daily basis. Even though we had our weekly work plan, tuesday, that got interrupted and Tuesday, wednesday and Thursday didn't look anything like we thought they were going to look because of this unexpected occurrence.
John Ballinger:So are you saying that the old adage or words, because I said probably doesn't resonate much in society?
Douglas Ford:Yeah, yeah, Even as a parent.
John Ballinger:I found that out pretty quick, yeah, and I think part of that is okay. There are some times you just want to say because, because I said but when you explain to someone who maybe communicates or thinks or differently than you do, you know, it's not a bad idea to explain why, there's nothing wrong. Because if, if you're both taking away respect and understanding from that, there's that, that word again right, then it makes the communication moving forward better for the, for the two party, right, absolutely, you know. And so one of the things that we deal with is you know, especially post COVID, after COVID is is culture, because culture did change, has changed. There's still a tug of war going on in society about coming back to work.
Douglas Ford:There's people that just flat out I am not coming back to the office, and there's companies that are drawing a line in the sand and saying you're coming back into the office and some of these are the same companies that, prior to covid, were the biggest ones promoting remote work and oh, we can get people out of office and we'll have flexible time, and whether that's working or not working, obviously that's a determination for an individual company, but what we're seeing is to be a cohesive team. A lot of times you need to occupy the same space for a certain amount of time For you to work cohesively as a team. Zoom meetings are great, video conferencing is great, but just being in the room with somebody, getting to know them, not just clicking the off button and now you're immediately off doing something else like that that pre-meeting and post-meeting kind of camaraderie that gets created when you're in person is super helpful in trying to communicate effectively with somebody.
John Ballinger:Well, I had two big questions that came out of this discussion of remote versus non or flex and all this stuff. I had two questions how are you going to do valuations and how are you going to decide who can be promoted into a leadership position? Because you've not seen them interact with teams to say, oh well, they can communicate and weave through and understand, and I've seen them work and you know, yeah, they can lead people and people gravitate to them. And it's difficult to do if you're sitting at the house. Try to be able to see what somebody's capabilities are from a leadership standpoint and nobody can answer that question. They just want to say, well, you know, I just want to be at home because I want to be at home and that's the way it is, and companies are saying, nope, can't happen. So, talking about culture, I read this the other day and I thought, man, that's powerful. Your company culture is not words on a website or posters on a wall. It's how your people feel on Sunday night.
Douglas Ford:Well, that's, that's strong words.
John Ballinger:It is a strong image and I wonder how many leaders sat at home on Sunday night and say you know, is my team ready to come to work? Are they dreading to come to work?
Douglas Ford:Well, how many people in the quote unquote leadership position is that are asking themselves that question?
John Ballinger:Well, that's getting worse. So this last week I read another article where there is a significant amount you know we talked about, I think, two or three podcasts ago about the CEOs and leadership. I mean, it is ramping up. They're just they're. They're throwing the towel in, they're waving the white flags and not my, not my monkey, not my circus anymore. So, yeah, but I thought you know company culture. Do your people dread coming to work or are they ready to come to work? And I think that's something that leaders really need to ask themselves and their teams what's the temperature on down the line inside the company and are our people dreading to come to work? I think that's important. So we've got some information research that we do on our podcast because we feel like it's important to have substantive data that's in the marketplace, and we've talked about the different websites that we use, whether it's Harvard Business Review or Forbes or Inc or whatever that is.
John Ballinger:And one of the things that communication does is it builds trust Absolutely. And we've talked about trust. One of my favorite books, speed of Trust, speed of Trust, and when you put trust and communication together, what happens in teams I mean. So we're going to talk about the communication and what communication does. When you speak directly to your team and they understand it, it's going to increase productivity, enables collaboration, fosters creative creativity and innovation and enables conflict resolution.
John Ballinger:You can intermingle trust and communication throughout all four of those, because you can't sit down with conflict resolution and communicate without trust. You can't sit down and think well, they're going to trust me and not be able to communicate with both parties in a conflicted situation. And the same thing with creativity and innovation, collaboration and productivity. Each of your employees has a unique strength. When you establish an atmosphere of trust, slash communication among your employees. Talented individuals can use those strengths to collaborate and innovate to your company's benefits, can use those strengths to collaborate and innovate to your company's benefits. And you know it's like why are leaders not wanting people to absolutely be the best version of themselves inside that organization, even if it means they've got to do a little bit more work in communication and building trust?
Douglas Ford:No, I agree. I mean you wonder why people don't leaders who have teams don't do what it takes to help their team just love coming to work. I mean, if you're passionate about something, if you love doing something, you're well. First of all, it's just going to be a more pleasant atmosphere. I mean there's a lot of benefits to it. But if you're looking at it purely from a dollars and cents standpoint which we're going to do in a couple of weeks how trust and communication, effective leadership, how that all actually leads to profitability.
Douglas Ford:But if you have a team that loves coming to work, well, they're going to be more creative, they're going to be able to solve problems better. They're not going to be stuck in like I wonder why he's mad today. Or I wonder why she's mad today. Well, what do we do to make them upset? Why are they in all these secret meetings and slamming doors? You know it's just. It creates, it kind of restricts the creative process. If you're stressed and tensed, unless you've gone through some significant training, you're not going to be able to break out of that cycle and really come up with some creative solutions and innovations for the problems that you face on a daily basis.
John Ballinger:So when you don't have trust communication. Let me tell you what it does to a company it creates redundancies. This drives me bananas, though, when a leader tells three different people the same thing to do and hadn't communicated with those three people, and so all three are working on the one thing and all of a sudden they find out. Well, I thought I was working on that, but he told me, or she told me, and I thought I was working on it. Look what that does. I mean it erodes trust. Communication has been horrible, and everybody and look at, you've got three people working on one thing.
Douglas Ford:And it also adds to the checks and balances. So if you the redundancy can happen because you've asked somebody to do something but then you ask somebody else to check on that, and then you need somebody to check to make sure that those two things have already been done. And so you know, I've spent all that extra time on the one task that, if you just had trust and good communication back and forth, would have known and been able to rely on the person that you assigned the task to or was responsible for the project, that it was going to get done, or they were going to come to you and say here's where we're stuck and here's what we need. Right, right.
John Ballinger:Causes bureaucracy to take over Politics, gets involved. Then you have disengagement because you're like you know what, it's not going to matter what I do. Then you have turnover take place because people get disgusted which we'll talk about this in a few weeks where turnover in employees is so costly in an organization, especially today, when you're trying to recruit teams and build teams, then you start churning teams, teams, and then fraud takes place because then you don't even have people in there doing the job that needs to be done, or if you've got the wrong people in there, they're doing things that shouldn't be done. And we're seeing that in a company we're working with right now where fraud and deception was run amok and had been for years.
Douglas Ford:Absolutely. And if your team members feel like, well, I'm doing this because I'm owed this, let me not even really be thinking about like, oh, I'm stealing or I'm doing something deceptive. It's just like, well, they treat me this way, so I can just do this.
John Ballinger:And you could tell, in this situation it almost felt like that it was owed, you know. So we're going to take a break and we're going to come back, and we're going to be talking about one of my favorite words in the business world and that's the psychological impact of communication and trust in the workplace. Hello and welcome back to First Lead.
Douglas Ford:Today we've been talking about communication and trust and we talked about some of the elements that can impact the business when you have good communication and trust, as well as things that can negatively impact the business when good communication and trust is lacking, negatively impact the business when good communication and trust is lacking. And, john, you said we were going to spend the second half of the episode talking about psychological safety and maybe we can feel some eye rolls about that. That's kind of a buzzword, but I think when people understand what we're talking about and hear the rest of this episode, they'll feel much better about it.
John Ballinger:Yeah, I don't. This is. This is something that I probably need your help. We didn't talk about this, we didn't prepare for this at all, but I say this so many times and I do get.
John Ballinger:I wrote when I say that there's a psychology to leadership and I'm telling you it's like people's they're, they grown. I'm like, if you read the definition of psychology and I'm not going to go through another definition because I've got one more I want to read today and we don't need a bunch of applause but we all have minds right, absolutely, and there's a psychology to each one of us and the leadership's responsibility is to understand your team from a psychological standpoint so that you can be a better leader for them. I mean, it's just that's just the human nature of who we are. And if you're a leader and you do not want to understand how to communicate, how to have patience, how to build trust, how to communicate properly, if you don't want to do that, step aside please, because you are destroying teams and under you and you're causing some of that turnover, that disengagement, that politics, that churning and that fraud. You're creating that in your organization.
Douglas Ford:I was talking to someone earlier today about this the idea of companies creating true tracks of success. You can have the leadership track or you can have the technical track, and just because you're on the technical track doesn't mean you might not lead a project or lead a short-term team to accomplish something, but you're going to grow more in your expertise. And if you're on the leadership track, your focus is going to be on developing other people and I think that's a great model and so much I think in the last 40 or 50 years of corporate culture we've kind of tried to marry those two things together and we really have left off this idea of creating true leadership and the idea that people who are leading are going to be developing others.
John Ballinger:I totally agree with that and you know, in this research that we've completed, psychological safety is essential in building high-functioning, performing teams, and the key word there is safety. And that's why I want to read the definition of safety and I want the leader to hear this. And I want the leader to hear this the condition of being protected from, or unlikely to cause danger, risk or injury. If you get up every day thinking about the safety of your team and that they feel protected, that it's unlikely that your leadership is going to cause them danger, which could mean losing the job, the company, going out of business, risk for them internally, maybe losing their position in the company, maybe the company is still there, but your lack of support for them didn't allow them to mature in their position and so they got demoted or moved to another position, which happens a lot. I was in a discussion last week with a guy that his whole career has been about OSHA safety and he said John, what does it take for leaders to embrace safety? I said the sad part on the civilian side of it. It takes something happening to one of their team members and then they recognize oh, we need to do something. That's sad, but that's the state of society. But if you think about that from a leadership standpoint the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk or injury and you pair that with your team and the psychological safety that we're talking about, it is critical in trust, communication and a team that lacks psychological safety, people will feel at risk. They feel like they're being blamed or shamed because of mistakes they make. They have a sense that they are disagreed with or they have to admit to failures. They're implicit. I mean just think about all the negativity when people don't feel like they're being led well through a psychological safe environment. I mean it'll be like pretty soon.
John Ballinger:I talked to a guy recently that said you know, I love going to church, I really love going to church. But I got to where I hated going to church. I'm like why? What the church he said. What church he said, that meant Monday was coming and I hated my job and I thought, man, he couldn't even go to church because he already had Monday on his mind. He hated it that bad. And so he had zero psychological safety in his workplace that he had been recruited for, he had a recruiter and all that. I mean I was like good Grace. That is terrible. In a psychologically safe environment, we know our identities, our relationships are safe and secure. If we make a mistake, we can talk about it, our feelings are allowed to shift and we're able to learn individually and as a whole, and it lessens the stress and pressure. So I mean, if you just took those two and say your team's either going to fill this or they're going to fill this as a leader, why wouldn't you work diligently to implement psychological safety inside your corporation?
Douglas Ford:Absolutely and I think it goes back. I mean, you know kind of statement of the obvious here. I mean it all has to do with learning to first lead you. I mean you've got to be the one that sets that tone, and you're not going to be able to create psychological safety if you don't feel psychologically safe for yourself, meaning that you're disturbed all the time, that you're angry, that you feel like perhaps that you've been done an injustice. I mean, if you are not kind of psychologically sound and kind of have that mental strength of some of the practices that we've talked about in the past, if you're not doing things like journaling, if you're not doing things like reflect, you're not doing things like reviewing your reaction to things and working on responding to things versus reacting, you're not regularly working on those things to things versus reacting. If you're not regularly working on those things, there's probably some opportunity there for you to grow a psychological safety standpoint for yourself so that you can then create that for your team.
John Ballinger:So while I was away, I was doing a little reading and a Harvard Business Review article said this professor said if he could narrow it down to leadership and say all right, just do this one thing, it would be daily self-assessment of how you're leading. He said that would be the most important thing that a leader could do is sit back at the end of the day and do some journaling and say this happened, that's how I reacted, this happened, this is how I should have reacted versus how I didn't react. And he said self-assessment is so important but most of the time, leaders will not even self-assess and if they do, they'll lie to themselves about. I think that was right.
John Ballinger:Sittman, when you've got everybody out there, you've created a train wreck out there on either the marketing sales team or the manufacturing team or the financial or whatever it is. You've thrown grenades in there because you didn't self-assess how you react to whatever came at you. You know you can talk about this, mr Ford, this Google article that was published in 2015, which was a two-year study focused on identifying characteristics of high-performing teams.
Douglas Ford:Yeah, started in 2012, and it was called the Aristotle Project and they really wanted to figure out how do you put together the best teams. And when they started the project, they really thought like if you take engineer type A and you put them with creative thinker type B and add in a little bit of task management C, like that's what's going to be the high functioning team. And what they found out is it wasn't so much about the individual skills of the people that were on the team, because obviously, working at Google, a lot of smart people, highly competent, highly capable individuals but what they found is these five characteristics that seem to make up the best performing teams typically shared these five characteristics.
John Ballinger:And this is a different article than things that we were reading from earlier.
Douglas Ford:Oh, absolutely.
John Ballinger:This is a study that was performed, and so I want you to think about what we just talked about and then think what the top characteristics of a high-performing team is. Okay, so, psychological safety.
Douglas Ford:Here we go, surprised that that would be number one, given what we've been talking about here. But it really creates a level of trust and the idea of psychological safety versus trust, and so just a quick explanation of those two things. So trust is more of a one-to-one, even if you're in a group and there's a leader speaking or giving information and you don't get to interact with that leader very often on a personal level. But you personally have developed a trust for the leader, like I feel like they're doing the best for the company, which is they're also doing the best for me and that's putting me in the best position possible. So you've mentally established that trust with the other person. You may have one-to-one trust with other people who are in your group and so the more people you have in a group you have one-to-one trust with, then you start creating psychological safety, because psychological safety is really about the trust you have in the team and the group that you're working with. So just to kind of give a little clarity to those two things that we've been talking about. But then you have dependability. Can you depend on the other people? If you can depend on your teammates, then you're much more likely to have a high-performing team.
Douglas Ford:Structure and clarity of the team and the mission. So that will lead to everybody knowing the different tasks and responsibilities, what the roles are, how we're going to get there, who's responsible for what. So you've got structure and clarity. Finally, does what we're working on have any true meaning? Does it have meaning to me? Does it have meaning to our larger group or society at large? Are we doing something that actually means something? And, finally, what impact is that going to have? So, does the work matter and is it going to have a positive impact? Those are the things that the best performing teams, the highest performing teams at Google, share as their common characteristics psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact is psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact.
John Ballinger:Would it be true that, in order for those five things to take place, the leader needs to communicate effectively? Absolutely, and you know so. We've been through companies and I think it's one of the things that still struggle, especially in top leadership. The top leadership. So well, I said, do this, okay. Well, did they get it done? Well, no, they didn't get it done. Well, did you communicate it accurately? Or did you say these words? Did you all understand everything I said? You mean, I have to do that. Yes, you do. There's nothing wrong with asking your team is there anything that I said that you didn't understand? So I can clarify it? So it allows you to better go do what you need to do, because they don't want to leave and have to go do a task with half the information or understanding of what's going on and fail. They don't want to do that.
Douglas Ford:No, they don't. But you also have to ask that question in a way that elicits response versus like, oh yeah, we do, we got it, we got it, we know what you mean.
John Ballinger:Yeah. And then there's another article that really kind of talks about the eight ways to create psychological safety in the workplace, because I think this is a new topic, subject that people are just now getting used to from a leadership standpoint. But as I started going down through there, I thought that's like military 101 stuff and I think again, because of being in the military and going through different leadership training courses, these things seem so basic to me. And then I get out the civilian side and I continue to beat my head against the wall because it's just not being adopted and I'm like, so is it because that you had no option there but to? And we're given options on the civilian side, what happens if the leader doesn't give his team option to embrace these things? Then I kind of pause it. Yep, the leader's not doing it. Yeah, so how can he? How can he enforce it in his company? Because they're looking back at him or her. It's like you're not doing it, you're telling me to do it.
John Ballinger:So but here's, here's the eight ways to create psychological safety in the workplace. Show your team you're engaged, you're engaged. I was asked this the other day do I need to look at somebody when they're talking to me, or can I? Is it all right if I am trying to multitask? No, stop, I'm guilty of this too. Put the phone down, look in their eyeballs, listen to them and don't look past them. Don't look over them, don't look around them. Listen to them, let your team see you understand. That's important. Remember, they're communicating back to you and if you don't understand, as the leader, guess what you can also say I really don't understand what you're saying. Help me understand. Don't just agree just to get them out of your way.
John Ballinger:Avoid blaming to build trust. Don't do that. Do not blame. Be self-aware. There's that self-aware and I didn't you know? That's a huge thing. Demand the same from your team. If you're going to be self-aware, then absolutely ask them to be self-aware. But if you're not being, and then you expect them to be, it's going to be another one of those. You're not doing it. Why do you want me to do it? Nip negativity in the bud. Nip it in the bud. Nip it. Barney Fife used to say that all the time on Andy Griffith, see we're now we're dating ourselves, aren't we?
Douglas Ford:Well, yeah, they have reruns.
John Ballinger:Nip it, nip it, nip it. Include your team in decision-making.
Douglas Ford:Oh, that's a big one.
John Ballinger:It's a big one, but it is. I mean, it's so crucial for that leader to be able to allow his, his or her team to make decision, because, you're going to see, it actually takes pressure off of you. So teach them, let them, and let them skin their elbows, maybe blacken out a little bit, but let them make decisions.
Douglas Ford:And for that to be effective, you've got to do what we've been talking about this whole time. You've got to communicate effectively and there's got to be some psychological safety around that. If you're going to open a discussion up and it's like, hey, I want to get your input on this, I mean they've got to have some psychological safety that we've been talking about to start throwing those things out, because they don't want as we've talked about, they don't want you to come back and go. That's a crazy idea, that'll never work. Or they don't want their teammates laughing or rolling their eyes or coming up with anything.
Douglas Ford:I just watched Jerry Maguire again for the first time in 20 years, whatever it was, since it came out. But he writes this big memo and he goes back to the office and everybody's clapping. He realizes after he wrote this he called it a mission statement, 200 pages or something that he walks out and everybody's clapping. They're like oh, oh, yeah, that's great. Everybody says, well, you know, that was obviously false. You know congratulations, and. And so he felt like, okay, well, I've done something. But then he gets you know, no spoiler alert here but he gets fired. You know, like two scenes later he gets fired because everybody was like he's crazy, this will never work. Why do we do that? But you know so. There was no psychological safety anymore for him there in terms of like believing what his team was going to say here, this next one be open to feedback as a leader takes trust and communication it does.
John Ballinger:And I'm you. That is a tough one right there, because you need to allow your team the psychological safety to say you know what, boss, I think that might be right and listen I mean, you can let it well up inside of you whatever you need to do, but listen, because they get some good nuggets out of that and then champion your team, celebrate wins and that is so crucial today, in today's marketplace.
Douglas Ford:You've got to go out and tell the people hey, we did it, and let them know that you did it, and that's one thing that I think gets pushed to the side a lot, because you're always looking at that next goal, you're always trying to get to the next thing and you don't take time to look back and celebrate those wins. And those are things maybe sometime in the past. So it's like these kind of moral victories or morale boosts, but they are essential in letting people know hey, we've accomplished the thing that we set out to accomplish, even if tomorrow we're going to be tasked with another difficult project to get in front, to get a hold of and to move forward. We accomplished this task today. That gives me inspiration to go tackle tomorrow's problem Right.
John Ballinger:So the homework for the listener is ask yourself the question and consider this as you're doing it how far does trust communication reach outside into my circle of influence, and does your executive team or your leadership team do you empower them to then allow for that circle to continue outside them to the next level, or is it just bottled up at the top and you really need to consider that as a leader, am I allowing psychological safety and trust communication to permeate throughout this organization, all the way down to the lowest level possible in the company, so that the person at the very bottom, the brand new employee that's in the lowest mailroom person or whatever you want to call them, the janitor they feel psychologically safety to be able to go and communicate with their next tier up for them if they've got something going on that they need help with? And you need to ask yourself that question, because when someone feels psychologically safe in their workplace, what's their work performance? Go up.
Douglas Ford:Absolutely Well. It's all those benefits that we talked about earlier that, where you have trust and communication, psychological safety is right along those same lines.
John Ballinger:Yeah, so yeah, uh, bennett, a good conversation. I've enjoyed it. Uh, communication, uh important. I'm still learning myself. You know you'll challenge me when I get done with something and said well, never stop learning as a leader, cause the day you stop learning and developing yourself as a leader is the day you'll stop progressing and the day you'll start regressing and your team will feel the impact of regression. I can promise you that, absolutely. All right, mr Ford, thank you very much. Thanks for a great conversation. We'll be right back. I'll see you next time.
