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Leadership

Team Conflict: Is It Always a Bad Thing?

When we hear “conflict”, we think “trouble”. When we hear “conflict”, we think “dysfunctional team”, where communication doesn’t work, and people have personal issues. Or when we hear “conflict”, we think that leader doesn’t know how to lead his/her team successfully. Is that really true? Why are we so scared of a conflict? What is the worst thing that can happen when there is a conflict in the team? What kind of experiences we have with the conflict that make us think and behave in a certain way when one appears? Why do we avoid conflict? The real question should be: why do we avoid doing things in overall? In the area of conflicts, it’s extremely visible: we avoid it, because we burned ourselves once or twice. Based on that we make this strategy to not get involved in any kind of “risky” situation: so, we sit quiet and just focus on living through another day. Is it really the best option we can get? When a lack of conflict is dysfunctional, not the other way around? One of the biggest experts of team development and leadership, Patrick Lencioni, years ago wrote a book “5 Disfunctions of a Team”. It is a really short story (doesn’t even look like a personal/professional development book), yet it’s very powerful. And there is one part that stopped me when I first read it: Lencioni says that one of the dysfunctions of a team is a fear of conflict. What? (On the chart on the left-hand side there are definitions of all disfunctions and on the right-hand side there are solutions, that answer the questions: what is the best thing we can do here for our teams?) If we stick to our old believe that a conflict is something negative and destructive – that it ruins the trust and good atmosphere in the team, how is it possible that it’s actually the other way around? When we avoid conflict, not speaking up and be open about what do we really think, feel, or observe in the workplace, there is a huge risk of not being as effective and efficient as possible. It’s also short sided: if we are not sharing it now, it’s going to backfire in the future. So, at the end of the day, it will bring worse result than we imagine now. What’s even worse, people probably will talk behind other colleagues’ or leader’s backs, and not saying anything out loud. We can imagine that it will bring even worse outcomes, like really ruining the atmosphere, creating space for psychological games and in a consequence: lack of trust. The fear of conflict can be one of the biggest barriers that will stop people from growth, thrive and being the best versions of themselves in a workplace. What can we do to change this mindset? How can we use conflict that nourishes our team? The key thing to understand is that a certain kind conflict is something that we can use. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, it really depends on what we are dealing with. There are 2 categories of conflicts, I call them functional and dysfunctional. What can we do with the dysfunctional conflicts? First and foremost: we need to map and name correctly which conflict is the real one in the situation we are dealing with. Without that, even the most beautiful strategy is not going to work, because we are going to answer to the wrong need. We’ll get frustrated and use all our energy badly. Focus on investigating will bring the best results, since then the solutions will be to the point: it’s more than certain that it’s worth investing time in this process. The bottom line The conflict is a huge, hairy, and scary thing that we often have very strong convictions about. We avoid it, by staying low, don’t speak up to not get into any confrontation. We do it because we don’t want to get hurt, expose ourselves to bad emotions, stress or feeling that we do not belong. Perfectly natural, there is nothing to be ashamed of. When we make a mindset shift: from fixed (focused on avoiding conflict) to a growth one, where we take into consideration that the conflict can be good for us, nourishing and interesting, we can gain more than we think. With remembering about having a good intention, being in OK-OK zone and with a goal of creating something extraordinary as a consequence of a passionate discussion, we can achieve the outcome that won’t be possible to achieve on our own. It puts old, good conflict in a completely new light. I believe it’s worth trying if it fits.

22 July 2023 No Comments

Organization

How To Teach Others Effectively?

Did you ever have a situation when you wanted to teach a person something? You explained everything, you put a lot of time and effort in it, and at the end of the day the person never learned anything? Or you gave somebody feedback because they didn’t do something correctly. And after the conversation it seemed that everything was okay, but after a couple of weeks or months the same mistake was done by the same person? Did you start getting angry, feeling disappointed or guilty: is it you or is it all about them? Were you persistent, sit with the person and explain the same thing 10 times? Or have you just decided to not bother anymore: since apparently this person doesn’t understand what you are saying? How many cases ends like a failure when we think about teaching others effectively? 20%? 50%? More than that? And how many of them don’t say that they don’t understand because they don’t want to look or sound stupid? What can we do to teach others better, so they can grow thanks to our knowledge and experience? And both sides don’t have the impression that they’ve wasted time on the doubtful effect? Why doesn’t learning process work so often? We can have the best intentions to teach others. In fact, most of the time we have those: we want people to be better in what they do, we share our knowledge, experience and what we’ve learned so far in a certain topic. Everything seems good in our head. The readiness to teach and an honest intention to do it is there. Let’s say we are a buddy to the new employee. We want to onboard this person, take care of them, pass all information about how this organization works. To prepare a new joiner to understand the new environment, how everything gets done, so they don’t waste time and get stressed or frustrated of running around in circles, looking for the right person to answer their questions. We have a plan, we start the process. We pass our knowledge, we teach the other person how to cover the goals we have as a team as well as possible. We check by asking: “do you have any questions?” or “is everything clear for you?”. And what is the answer on those two questions most of the time? 90% people goes with “no, all good, no questions”, “yes, all clear”. Is it your experience too? And it’s clear until it isn’t. We explained everything, checked with new employee and this is it: they start to work on their own. And there is one mistake. And then another one. We give feedback, all is clear again, they go and do the same mistake again. When we ask what they need to do it to have the result that we aim for, they say “nothing, all good”. Sounds familiar? Sometimes we teach, then we see that the work is not done with a result that we did contract for, we give feedback with an intention so next time it’s better. And it’s not better at all: sometimes it’s the same, or even worse. What is happening in between of this process, so the results are often so disappointing (for both sides)? Who we need to be to teach others well? There is a certain set of skills that people who want to be efficient and effective in how they teach others should have. Based on my teaching (others) and learning (from others) perspective, I believe that those are a golden list of competencies that make a person amazing guide to transform work and life of people that are around them. And we do know that you don’t need to be a school or academic teacher to use them. We share knowledge in so many ways every day: we teach our colleagues at work, our kids at home, we share some tips and tricks with our friends or family members, we pass value to the members of our community. What do we need to do it in the best possible way? The bottom line When we teach others, we are there for them. It can be super hard to stop the need to show that we the smartest persons in the room, but we must do it to be effective at teaching others. Remembering that the process where we teach something is for our audience (even if it is a one person), makes us take a step or two back from time to time and reflect on the way we do it. Is it for me, or for them? Where is my focus: on the process, or on the person? Do I care more about ticking all the boxes that I passed everything I had on the agenda, or I care about the change that I make in this person’s brain and heart? These are the questions that I invite all of us to ask ourselves every time we teach something. It will make everything we do better, more effective and efficient, and: we will be satisfied with the job well done.

16 July 2023 No Comments

Leadership

TEAMING: Why No One Teaches How to Be a Good Team Member?

Did you ever noticed that we teach leaders in countless growth programs, workshops, or mentoring processes how to be a great leader, and we almost never teach employees how to be great team members? To follow the TEAMING idea? Why is that? Is it more important to have qualified leaders than people who know how to work well together? We know it’s not true. A part of successful leadership is to have a team that has an ability to cooperate effectively, ideally to like and understand each other as people. During my post-grad studies in Transition Management area, one of the lecturers brought to the class a book named “Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in Knowledge Economy” by Amy C. Edmondson. And while having a conversation about the teaming, people, communication and how it creates great (or not so great) organizations, I’ve started to wonder how all those dots are connected. How one thing influences the other and makes success or failure at the end of the day? How to think about TEAMING: is it even the real thing? What is TEAMING? TEAMING is a mindset. Based on Amy’s book, TEAMING is more about “being” with others in a certain way than “doing” things. Of course, the behavior is an important part of the whole idea, so we can tell that “behaving” is “doing”. But it’s not the point. The point is that TEAMING covers the way of working, behaving, making decisions in work environment where we don’t have a luxury of a stable team structures. Where individuals, teams, departments, and projects need to work together somehow, while the circumstances change all the time. So, TEAMING brings to the table collaboration based on an eagerness to learn, be better every day and communicate as well as possible, despite the constant change that never ends. And it never will, let’s be honest about it. Do we ever think about the qualities of a good team member? We for sure can list very quickly the qualities of a good manager within 30 seconds. But how about team members? Recently, I did this exercise with one group of leaders that I facilitated the workshop for. I asked them to give 2-3 things that they believe are qualities of a great team member. The results came up like this. So, as we can see, there are a lot of things connected with taking responsibility and do the job, but mostly there are things connected to “being” with others. A person who shares knowledge, taking care of other team members, listen, be brave, mentor others etc. Not many “transactional” elements are there as we can see. Interesting, isn’t’ it? How to lead a TEAMING process? As leaders, we have a lot of influence (more that we think we have) on how the work environment looks like for our people. Pretty often we don’t use this power because we don’t believe that it would work, we don’t know how to do it, or we are afraid that we’ll get different outcome from what we aim for by certain actions. We don’t believe that we can actually change something. Leading in TEAMING means using the mindset that will allow people to be a better team member. It consists of three things: A leader is responsible for creating a workspace for people to thrive. It’s all we need to do. Why don’t we teach people how to be great team members? It’s not very intuitive to start from teaching people about being a good team member. Definitively more classical way is to teach leaders how to be great and lead others successfully. But that way, we put all responsibility on the leader’s shoulders. I’m not saying that leader don’t need to grow, have certain set of skills, behaviors or mindset. But when we think about improving the ability of being a great team member, we divide the responsibility into all people that making a team: manager AND team members. Both parties need to participate in the process of team creation: it influences the level of engagement, being in control and a part of something more than just my own scope. Why don’t we do it more often? Maybe because it requires a mindset and approach shift, a creation of a new one to cover the different perspective. And it can be difficult, sometimes going far away into the stretch zone and recreate the growth options we have for people in the organization. What do we need to make that shift? Wouldn’t it be more efficient, nice, and engaging to have more than one people who takes care of different team building elements? Imagine that we all are taking part in building the environment where people are highly motivated, performing very well, create space to give different ideas and have sparing partners to discuss them? Where we learn from each other, share knowledge and the best ways of working? Sounds pretty cool to me. And for you?

7 July 2023 No Comments

Self-Development

Does The Way You Feed Your Brain Influence Who You Are?

We often hear: “you are what you eat”. But not very often we reflect on how the content we are feeding our brain with makes us becoming a certain person. Depends on which sense(s) do you use the most while absorbing what is outside to build what is inside of you, the stimuli can be different and the ways of learning can be different for each of us. But what is the most important here is that we can become what we take, consciously or unconsciously. And by having more elements in the scope of control, we have more and more influence on how we shape our mindset. You can say: “I read every day, how my mindset can be in danger?”. The point is, reading or seeing something is not the only channel that influences our brain. Let’s divide the ways of feeding our minds, so you can reflect on how you shape your reality by the content you consume every day. The things you read For people who consume the most of their content from using the visuals (by reading, looking at things, observing what is around them, how things work etc.), feeding the brain that way will be the best option to grow. For those people by everything they see, they shape their mindset. It’s how they learn in the fastest way possible and how they build the understanding of the world that is around them. If you are a visual person, everything you read: books, articles, reports, documents, social media posts, comments under the YouTube videos etc.; it all has an influence on what you think, how you feel and what kind of decisions you make in your life. Does all of it has an impact on who you are and how do you feel about yourself and the world? Absolutely! Good, valuable, developmental content – regardless of what is the subject of it (business, career, relations, habits, health, spirituality – you name it) is the key to feed your brain with something that will nourish it. Not a pile of trash that contaminates your body. How to recognize if the piece of content is feeding or contaminating your brain? Reflect on how you feel after consuming it. It’s just like with the food: you feel different after having healthy, balanced meal in compare to the fast food that you eat within the 5 or 10 minutes in between the meetings, without even sitting at the table. Do you feel inspired, good about yourself and/or others? Do you have a new portion of energy that you can use to keep your momentum going? Or you feel bad about yourself, angry, guilty or you lose the whole hope for this world after you read the news for instance? (There is nothing good ever come from reading the news though: did you ever feel good after reading the news? Exactly.) The things you listen to Same story, different medium. This category is for people who consume the most of their daily content by listening (to other people talking, podcasts, radio, recordings, music, video – but only sound of it etc.). What they hear is who they become, how they create themselves in this world. When they don’t hear anything, they don’t learn, grow or they even have troubles with a simple existence. If you are in this bucket, check on what kind of things do you listen to on a daily basis? What kind of resources do you use to feed your listening need well? What kind of authors, storytellers? Audiobooks? Online courses? Or do you listen to the news and commercials on the radio? Or you listen to all of those whiny people that are talking about how this world is crazy, that changes all the time, is getting worse and worse? And again: how certain pieces of content make you feel? Energized, hopeful? Or rather disengaged, without any hope for the better tomorrow for yourself? The things you touch and experience For some people, reading or listening to something is not the way they experience the world that is around them. They need to touch, feel, make a physical connection with a certain object, situation, moment or other person. They don’t believe before they actually live through something or have something in their hand. You can either have the experiences that nourish you, or not. When we think about taking the best out of the moments that are happening for us throughout the whole life, there is always something that you can take with you, even when the situation is tough. It is about treating the day without a mistake or weaker moment as a wasted day. Do you plan your activities or they just happen TO you? Do other people decide on what you do, where you spend your time and energy on? Do you choose what kind of objects and spaces are around you: in the office, home, what kind of gym of open outdoor space you use? Do you have experiences after which you feed energized, inspired, happy, full of new possibilities? Or after what happens every day you feel dejected, sad, with no energy whatsoever? The people that are around you People are interesting species. They can be happy, inspired, successful, open-minded, loving, caring and determined. At the same time they can feel angry, sad, furious, disappointed, frustrated, depressed or not-loved. Depends on what kind of convictions we have in our brain that were constructed there at the very beginning of our lives, we either have a winning or a losing script. The winning script is a set of assumptions that we have about our life, ourselves, people and situations that are around us that support us in achieving our goals. The losing script is a set of assumptions that we have that is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: that all we do brings us closer to destruction. Whatever we do, everything is going to end the way we predicted and

11 May 2023 No Comments

Self-Development

5 Ways to Use Every Mistake to Grow

No one likes to make a mistake and fail. Mistakes are connected with one of the worst feelings that a person can experience: guilt, shame, disappointment, sadness, sometimes anger. And the consequence is often an impression that we failed again, that we are not good enough to do what we are aiming to do, or that maybe we should stay where we are. We often think that what we do is pointless, we aren’t meant for more than we have today, we are incompetent, not skilled, strong or smart enough. The truth is that if we don’t fail, it means that we don’t try hard enough. If you don’t make mistakes, it means that you stay in your comfort zone and you don’t push yourself to be in the stretch zone. Mistakes are necessary to grow. Of course they only make sense when we learn from them. When we analyze, make conclusions and move forward being wiser, with better understanding of ourselves, others and the reality that is around. But for many of us, making a mistake, being wrong or making a bad decision is a no-go. The end of the trip, relation or a business opportunity. So the question is: what we can do differently to use the mistakes to grow, instead of being eaten by them alive? Let’s dig deeper into that today. 1. Treat a day without a mistake as a bad day Sara Blakely, who is a founder of Spanx (a brand which sells undergarments, leggings, swimwear and maternity wear in over 50 countries all over the world) was raised with quite a counterintuitive sentence that her father asked her every day. “What you failed at today?”, was this sentence. And when she answered: “nothing, everything was fine”, her father was saying something like: “that means that you didn’t try hard enough”. And that’s how she and her brother learned that they need to have at least one failure or mistake every single day when they come back home from school, because without that, the day is not valuable. It was an actual failure not to fail. Of course it is not only about failing every day and be miserable because of it. The main thing is to fail and learn from every single thing that went wrong. To make mistakes, to reflect and be better the next day. Look how this shift of thinking can free you up from the guilt, being constantly unsatisfied or feeling that you are not good enough. This shift allows you to make a change in your mindset that will have a huge influence on what you do, how you think and make decisions. From now on, every day (at the end of the day or the next day in the morning: if you journal, it’s a great thing to add to your journaling ritual) think about one situation, reaction, decision, or thing you did the day before that you are not proud of. Or you treat it like a mistake, failure, not the best version of yourself. Think about what triggered you to behave that way and ask yourself: what could I’ve done differently in that situation? What other, better decision could I’ve make? Treat a day without a mistake as a bad day, look for those moments that weren’t perfect, reflect and learn from them. But protect yourself from going too far into the rabbit hole of disappointment or guilt: it won’t bring you any good. Be smart about it: when you feel that you don’t feel very well, stop for a few days, get some rest. That’s fine to take a breath from time to time. For some of us that kind of exercise can be really hard, even exhausting. Especially if you have a “Be Perfect” Driver that tells you that when you not 100%, you are not a valuable person. Be aware of it, look for the roots and change your story. This is something you actually can do for yourself. 2. Get one thing for you from every mistake To use every mistake as an opportunity to grow, to build a momentum, we need to be wise about the work that we do within each situation. It is a really thin line between a constructive analysis of the situation and sinking into the abyss of despair, imperfection or disappointment of who we are in compare to who we think we should be. That’s why I would like to invite you to get only one thing from every mistake you make for yourself. Not more, not less. It’s a good and healthy way to protect yourself (especially from the mental health perspective), to not go to deep into the negative emotions. For some of us, it can be tempting to go to far and land in this moment that it’s going to be super hard to get out of. You said something mean to your significant other? Think about why you did that and give yourself one sentence that can be more adequate for you to use the next time when a similar situation appears. Don’t ask yourself the questions like: “does he/she love me at all?”, “am I smart/funny/pretty/handsome enough?” or “where are we going?”. Of course, some of those questions can be valid, but for this exercise reflect on just one thing you can do differently, so you see the results in your area of influence. Somebody at work pushed you to the limits of your patience by their incompetence? You can ask yourself: “are they really incompetent? Maybe their competence lays somewhere else that in my reference frame?”. And one of the most important: “what have I done to come back to OK-OK position with them?”. This is the question that resonates with me lately, and I think that it may be useful for you as well. What one thing can you do differently tomorrow in relation to that person? 3. Invest 5 minutes of growth every time Every time

6 May 2023 No Comments

Artykuły

Team Conflict: Is It Always a Bad Thing?

How To Teach Others Effectively?

TEAMING: Why No One Teaches How to Be a Good Team Member?

Does The Way You Feed Your Brain Influence Who You Are?

5 Ways to Use Every Mistake to Grow