Category: Leading Individuals and Teams

Lately, our collective conversation around emotional resilience has been incredibly rich—and necessary. And the timing comes as no surprise: We’re all trying to heal from the stress, hardship, and isolation the pandemic continues to bring. 

We might notice that our emotions are a bit tender and our well of resilience a bit tapped. We’re not bouncing back from criticism or terse words quite the way we used to. 

That’s why it’s more important than ever to treat one another with care. Doing so inspires others to show care in turn and contributes to the psychological safety of our teams. (Try our five-step “Communicate for Resilience” challenge with your team!)

Of course, work goes on—and at some point, we’ll need to give each other sensitive feedback at not-so-great times. How can we balance the need to have tough conversations with the need to show care and preserve our relationships?  

Preparing for Human-Centered Conversations

Before we begin, we need to be in a good place ourselves. That means we’re feeling calm and have the bandwidth to consider what’s best for our teammate. (Need some help getting there? Step 1 of our emotional resilience challenge will help.) Then we deliver our feedback in a warm, well-meaning, and constructive fashion.

Sounds great, right? 

It is great. But in the moment, it doesn’t always go so smoothly. We bungle, we blurt, and we blank out on the supportive, encouraging things we meant to say. 

Using proven human-centered feedback methods inspired by authors Sheila Heen and Kim Scott, we’ve created a collection of customizable feedback mad libs. (Remember those?) Writing your script for kind, constructive, effective feedback is as easy as filling in the blanks. We’ve included mad libs for communication, performance, and team relationships—plus a wild card you can use anywhere, anytime, with anyone. 

Getting difficult, caring conversations right is vital. So why ad lib…when you can mad lib? 

Starting Your Script: Five Essentials

Establish right away that you care about the person and that your feedback comes from that care. Remember that your teammate may not be expecting to receive feedback—that’s why we open with care.

 

Describe the situation clearly and concisely so that your teammate understands the context of your feedback.

 

Give an example of the behavior you observed—this is what you want your teammate to do differently, do more of, or stop doing.

 

Explain the consequences—good or bad—of your teammate’s behavior in the situation.

 

Ask your teammate to commit to a concrete action going forward.

 

 

Let’s warm up with an example of how that might look in a friendly conversation with a teammate.

Once you get comfortable with this basic script, you can add some flourishes of your own. Caveat: When we get nervous, we tend to add too many flourishes that can lead us off script.  

Ready to rehearse a real-live coworker communication situation? 

Mad Libs: Four (Potentially) Fraught Feedback Situations

Coworker Communication

Got a team member who does beautiful work…in secret? This mad lib will help you encourage them to share their milestones with the rest of the team.

Work Quality

The life stressors we’ve all been facing can prevent us from reaching our full potential—and this can affect the quality of our work. Completing this mad lib will help you and your teammate create a plan to protect your projects. 

Coworker Relationship Issues

Acute stress makes higher-order thinking physically impossible, which means our teammates might have trouble applying the Golden Rule. We all slip up—but when you see a pattern of misdirected emotions, this mad lib can help you approach your teammate with kindness and understanding.  

Wild Card: Human-Centered Feedback for Everyone

If you’re like 99.9999% of people, you might have seen some opportunities to give constructive feedback to folks in your family, neighborhood, and community. Personalize this mad lib to organize your thoughts and approach with care. 

From the Page to the Stage: Continuing the (Caring) Conversation

Feedback conversations do get easier, we promise. And the biggest enabler is an organization-wide business practice built upon caring, commitment, and goodness—one with the “care and resilience of human workers” at its center. You’ll find that a human-centered organization treats its people with care and compensates their work with abundance. 

Want to learn more about how to communicate, collaborate, and thrive on a human-centered team? Our eBook It’s All About Your People!: Embracing Human-Centered Business, Workplace Culture, and Learning Design will help you find the words, mindsets, and practices to re-create work as a source of resilience.

It’s a curated collection of lessons learned from our two decades together as a human-centered organization—and decade-plus as a fully remote team. Whether you’re a leader, a manager, or an individual contributor, you’ll find plenty of proven steps you can take today (or anytime!) to be happier and healthier at work.

You might say we’re at a collective Rubicon right now, with thousands of leaders crunching the numbers and seeing the business value of meeting their employees’ fundamental human needs and helping them grow their potential. We call these organizations human-centered organizations.

We love seeing more and more leaders steer their businesses in this direction! To light their way, we’ve been sharing our experiences in building a human-centered organization with compensation, policies, and procedures that provide abundance for our people and help them reach their full potential. (Want in? Check out Chapter 1 of our eBook.) 

For organizations and roles that have the option, we firmly believe that virtual work is the human-centered choice. We’ve been 100% remote—and thriving!—since 2009, and our employees savor the time recovered from commuting. (See below for a snapshot of how our team members have reclaimed that time.)

The result: renewed, refreshed employees who log on ready for collaboration, creation, and new challenges.

Not seeing this side of your people? They’re probably going through a stage. And you can help them through it with great virtual management skills that help them grow into their full potential. 

Human Potential: We’re All Going Through a Stage

Like much of life, human potential can be measured in stages. We’re social science buffs, so we’ve been inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; Graves, Beck, and Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics; and Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. All of these models speak to how meeting people’s fundamental needs helps them develop to their full moral, intellectual, and creative potential. 

What does that mean for the workplace? 

Essentially, when employees are freed from existential concerns—safety and security, for example—they have the energy and bandwidth to immerse themselves in their craft, grow, and innovate. If they’re stuck in survival mode, they can’t engage in this deep work. 

We’ve simplified these models into three stages of human potential. Remote work is just one part of what we call Stage 3. Stage 3 is characterized by creativity, connection, and a harmonious relationship with supervisors and peers. 

Not sure where your employees fit? Tune in to the tone of your next team call. Are your people guarded and curt or expansive and open? How do they talk about their time away? What hobbies do they have? 

If they don’t say much, consider why not. Is their salary enough to support their interests—and basic needs? Are you rigid about where and when your employees work? Do your employees trust you with personal information?

The Virtual Management Opportunity

Your employees’ daily interactions with you and their peers can make or break their quality of life at work and their ability to reach their potential. And—no pressure!—managers have an outsized impact upon how the entire team behaves and interacts. 

The sum of those behaviors is what we talk about when we refer to team culture. Gregg Kendrick, Director of Thrive by SweetRush, adds, “Those behaviors include what people choose to say—and how they react in difficult moments. If conflict or negativity occur and they’re not addressed, they, too, are a part of your culture.” 

In other words, culture is everything you do—and everything you don’t do.

 

Where’s a virtual manager to start? 

We’re so glad you asked! Here are a few virtual management mindsets and practices that have made our 20-year experiment in remote work a success. 

Managing Better: Virtually 

Trust

Trust is a key element in remote work, both among colleagues and between managers and their teams. A study by Heidi K. Gardner identified two essential types of trust for effective remote teamwork (cited in Mortensen & Gardner, 2021):

(Gardner, 2021) 

Trust is a two-way street; it’s also the path to the other virtual management mindsets and practices. Trust is also a direct route to psychological safety—a fundamental human need. 

Assume Positive Intent

We’ve said it before, but it’s important enough to repeat—and to be a foundational step in our Emotional Resilience Challenge! 

As you engage your employees, assume the best. Whatever makes the person tick, their modes of interaction are not about you, directed at you, or used with malicious intent. 

As Linda, our COO, reminds us, we need to trust that everyone is doing their best. We don’t know what Stage 1 worries the person might have or what else is competing for their attention. In fact, if we knew what they were going through, we might be impressed by how well they’re performing under pressure.

Offer Autonomy

Here’s where you build on that foundation of positive intent. You’ve got great people; now let them figure out when and how to do their jobs. 

Autonomy is a huge part of a Stage 3 life. Trust your employees to set their own schedule, deliver projects, and manage client relationships—and you’ll get better results. 

Remember that two-way street? Extending this trust to your people means that they’ll reciprocate: You’ll hear from them when there’s an issue—and while there’s still time to repair it. 

Clear the Pebbles

Trusting your team frees you up to spend your energy more productively. One of the biggest values you can add is by removing external barriers to your employees’ work. Whether they need access rights, different tools, or a forum to share their work, you can use your influence to get them what they need. 

These don’t need to be major, either—ask your people about the “tiny, incremental, irritating, and painful stuff at work that can wear [them] down” over the course of the day. Social psychologist Christina Maslach describes these as “pebbles” that gradually accumulate and contribute to burnout (Harvard Business Review, 2019). 

Removing the pebbles (and boulders) that inhibit them helps your employees focus on their biggest value-add: reaching their potential through the practice of their craft.

Find the Root Cause

Fact: People generally want to do a good job.

Fact: They don’t always succeed. 

These two facts are not mutually exclusive—and they’re not a cause to withdraw trust. When an employee performs poorly, there’s probably more to the story. If they trust you not to penalize them for mistakes, they’ll come to you first. For example, if an employee can admit to you that they were short with a client after an all-nighter with an ill parent, you can preempt that angry call and de-escalate the situation. 

If an employee doesn’t feel safe, they’ll hide any missteps—and appear irresponsible. That’s a vicious cycle: If you view them as irresponsible, you’ll begin to treat them differently. In turn, they’ll feel less safe and hide even more. 

The bottom line: Assume that employees mean well even when they don’t perform well. Start the coaching conversation with “How are you?” and follow that up with “How are you really?” Keep in mind that Stage 1 stress takes higher-order thinking off the table—and plan together accordingly. You’ll avoid the need for after-the-fact damage control. (Want to keep your coaching conversations on message? Try these feedback mad libs.) 

Managing the Change 

If, like so many of us, your management practice began in a face-to-face office setting, the adjustment to virtual management may feel uncomfortable at best. Trusting people you can’t see—and might never have met in person—may feel counterintuitive. 

We’d still encourage you to take the risk—and trust your employees more than might feel comfortable. After all, most people want to do well. Protecting yourself from the few who don’t is a waste of energy: It harms your relationships with your team and detracts from the psychological safety that helps us all reach our full human potential. Let Manage as if you’ve never been burned be your guiding principle. 

Of course, you need to know that you have the right people for the job. (Check out some tips and resources from our Talent Management team on recruiting the best people—virtually!) Once the right people are in place, extending trust is the best way to elicit trustworthy behavior and high-quality work from your team.

Curious about more virtual management practices that help your people reach their full human potential? Check out our eBook, It’s All About Your People!: Embracing Human-Centered Business, Workplace Culture, and Learning Design. You’ll find plenty of lessons from our two decades as a human-centered organization—and decade-plus as a fully remote team.

As a leader of remote teams, you have important work in front of you—so does your team, who needs leadership and an organizational culture that supports them in being successful. Our panel of virtual leadership veterans and culture experts have answers for important questions, from fostering caring and trust to navigating a fear of failure.

At our recent webinar, Get the Inside Scoop on How to Lead High-Performing Teams When Working Remotely, we discussed challenges that leaders are facing due to COVID-19—leading remote teams for the first time, and leading through uncertainty. 

SweetRush Cofounders Andrei Hedstrom and Arturo Schwartzberg brought insights based on 10 years of leading our 100% virtual company. Culture and change experts Gregg Kendrick, Ahmad El Nashar, and Quanita Roberson spoke about how to be present for your team and drive positive cultural change that benefits everyone in this moment. If you missed our session, you can still access the recording at eLearningIndustry.com!

Thank you for your great engagement and questions during the session. As promised, here are our reflections on the questions that we didn’t have time to answer during the session.

LEADING A TEAM

• How do you “stop by someone’s office” when you’re a remote manager? I typically did that by walking around. Now when I do it remotely, it seems artificial or forced.
• How do you manage team members who already have a sense of distrust with you as a lead/manager?
• How do you deal with someone on your team who has shown you that they cannot be trusted?
• We talk a lot about fear of failure. How have you been vulnerable and shown your teams it is OK to fail and thus build trust?

MANAGING UP

• How do you deal with difficult persons, especially from senior management, when trying to create mutual success? What is the best way to manage my manager?
• Can you please share ideas for emphasizing and building an atmosphere of caring and shared respect when it does not have top-down support?

LEADERSHIP PHILOSOPHY & CONCEPTS

• There are various types of leadership in society, such as autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire. Psychology, inherent values, ethics, and moral values also affect leadership quality. Please help me understand what the qualities of a good leader are during coronavirus.
• I love systems thinking as long as the systems are open-ended and inclusive with real context. How do you contextualize any systems without excluding the value of other systems?
• Can you please explain how to “act with intentionality”?
• You use the words “sense of community” and culture. How do you differentiate them in building the levels of trust required when one is an input and the other may be an output?

LEADERSHIP INSPIRATION

• How has this inspired your clients in their own cultures? Any favorite stories to share?
• Where can I learn more about developing effective leadership skills and stronger, more productive teams?

 

LEADING A TEAM

How do you “stop by someone’s office” when you’re a remote manager? I typically did that by walking around. Now when I do it remotely, it seems artificial or forced.

Ashley Munday: Real-time chat technologies can be a great way to “stop by someone’s office.” Skype and slack are both good examples of this. You can ping your employees and see if they have time for a brief chat. Create a routine of making the rounds and soon it will feel as natural as a casual drop-in. (Read more about Remote Team Communication and Technology.) 

 

Andrei Hedstrom: The heart of this work is about being curious and having empathy. Find a simple exercise to put your heart and mind on each person. I keep lists and I also try to keep a few minutes before a meeting or connection with a person to think about them and wonder about how they are doing and what they are working on. I keep another assertion fresh when I talk with them. 

Research has shown that people can be productive and feel good even in tough moments or settings when they believe they are making progress on something they believe is meaningful or has purpose. Part of my curiosity and service to people is keeping that front and center. I ask questions that help me get clear on whether they are focused on meaning and purpose and if they aren’t I focus my connections with them on that. Sometimes they don’t know what they are doing is meaningful, because they don’t have your context and need you to help them connect the dots to why it is important for the organization or for you or for peers.

When you ask these kinds of questions, you draw them closer to what matters to them, and they feel you focused on them and what is meaningful. Through this, you often discover a way that you can be of service to them, and if you take action, knocking down a barrier, giving them a resource, helping them think through a tricky conversation they need to have, they will see you differently.

The fact that you “walk around” is a good practice. In person, this shows you are available and care about them. Remotely, walking around looks different. I use some of the techniques mentioned above, but there are many ways to virtually walk around or gather that can feel genuine to you and your team. Experiment. If nothing seems to work, tell stories. Have a story that illustrates the values you want the team or the person to pick up. Have it be a story that you want to tell. Everyone loves stories.

How do you manage team members who already have a sense of distrust with you as a lead/manager?

Ashley Munday: Leadership 360-degree assessments that collect anonymous feedback are a key way to understand how you are being perceived. At times, it could be a misperception, because the team members don’t understand your intention. Other times, it may be because they don’t believe that you advocate for their needs. This is important feedback to adjust your behaviors and communications.

On another tack: Stephen M. Covey believes that trust is developed through competence, doing your job well, and character, how you act. Cultivate a culture of feedback and learning, both with one-on-ones with individual team members and together as a team. Frequently communicate about the culture you want to create and the strategic objectives you intend to achieve. It is not up to you to convince anyone to like you, but with clear communications and integrity of behavior, you will soon know who is truly aligned with where you are going.

Gregg Kendrick: I agree wholeheartedly with Ashley’s comments. Additionally, I would encourage authentic conversations, both collectively with your team as a whole and individually. Encourage your team members to express their celebrations as well as their concerns. Listen and ensure they know you are listening—for example, write it down on a flip chart, reflect back what you are hearing, report back survey results, etc. For “whole team” conversations, you will likely find it advantageous to get an outside facilitator so you can focus on connecting with your team rather than holding the process of the conversation.

How do you deal with someone on your team who has shown you that they cannot be trusted?

Ashley Munday: First, believe that they can change and be trustworthy again. Give that person clear feedback, about what did not work for you, and what you would hope for the future. Ask that person what’s going on in their life and work.

Going forward, make clear agreements. Encourage team members to negotiate the terms of what, how, and when it is delivered, so that they accomplish the work but do it in a way that makes sense to them as well. Empower team members to take ownership to renegotiate delivery terms if needed. We live in complex times and our priorities shift.

Lastly, if the person is repeatedly unable to meet agreements or to meet the needs of the role and team, it is fair to put that person on a Performance Improvement Plan to give them an opportunity to change their behaviors or to move on from that position.

We talk a lot about fear of failure. How have you been vulnerable and shown your teams it is OK to fail and thus build trust?

Gregg Kendrick: At the core of a “fear of failure” is the mindset that when I make a mistake, when I get it wrong, I’ll be blamed, I’ll be punished, I’ll be seen as ‘less than.’ To build trust as a leader, the conversation needs to shift to owning the situation and learning from it. I often use coaching questions to support this difference—such as How did your choices and actions contribute to this situation? What would you do differently next time? What support would you need to make that happen? The key here is to shift from a “mistake/blame” mindset to a “ownership/learning” mindset.

Model this behavior by owning your own “mistakes” and being explicit about how you are learning from them. Even better, ask your team members to give you feedback when your own behaviors are not in alignment with core team values or principles. Share with your team members a specific behavior you are working on as a leader, and ask for their feedback around that behavior. Create an environment of mutual accountability.

Andrei Hedstrom: Abolish the idea that people are basically bad or trying to get away with things, if you have any of that in you. People can smell that in a leader, even if you are trying to cover it over with the clichés of the day about failure. “There is no failure, only feedback” is something I keep fresh in my mind. You should also keep in mind that much of society has programmed us with the goal of being somehow perfect at what we do, even going so far as creating situations where people feel they should be perfect at something they are trying for the first time, or doing in unreasonable circumstances. They not only get into treating themselves this way, but end up with unrealistic expectations of perfection from others and expecting it of others. While privately we all know this is not realistic and can create situations for more suffering, blame, and defense, people’s general default setting is this way.

I lean on something I learned in my counseling graduate degree: Carl Rogers talked about “unconditional positive regard.” Extending through your actions and words a sense that you hold the person as basically good and even if their actions created challenges or a “failure,” you recognize it does not impact their basic goodness, and also the confidence they can work toward something better. So, all you give them in terms of direction or feedback will come from the assumption that you are both working from that basic good space and have abilities to improve. In that context, supporting and being vulnerable yourself is much simpler. I like to tell stories about my own moments of “failure” both with happy and not-so-happy endings. The moral of each story is typically pointing at coming to an understanding that being open to feedback inherent in challenging moments is a catalyst for growth, and feeling more satisfied about the outcomes of our work.

There are other angles you can work with this, and I would be happy to hear more specifics about your work and team and perhaps offer something more. I would add, and my guess is if you are holding this question, you might have already seen the research of Brene Brown. It’s compelling and feels easy to pick up (here’s her well-known TED Talk, “The Power of Vulnerability”).

Ashley Munday: I’m a big believer in cultivating the concepts of a Growth Mindset. I highly recommend having your team watch this TED talk and talk about learning and growth regularly in your team meetings. There are some innovative approaches to naming and learning from failure. One organization had a regular Church of Fail to celebrate the lessons learned. A client of mine had a #failfast competition and would reward the best failure and learning stories submitted each quarter.

 

MANAGING UP

How do you deal with difficult persons, especially from senior management, when trying to create mutual success? What is the best way to manage my manager? 

Arturo Schwartzberg: This is a challenge we have all faced. There is a fine art to posture yourself and act in a way that disarms another person, especially someone in senior management. Most people think of managing down, but rarely do people think of managing up, and it’s good to think about how to manage up. 

People are people, and they have egos and insecurities and each of us is different. How you might “manage up” to one individual who is difficult will take some thought and artful action on your part. Start by finding ways to let them know you care about them and empathize with some of the difficult challenges they are facing. 

There are many techniques to get beyond someone’s surface shields or masks: Maybe you can ask them for their help and advice since people like to feel they are wise and their counsel is being sought. Maybe you can ask them to join you for a virtual coffee or lunch and open up a bit, make yourself a little vulnerable and see if you can get them on your side. These are just ideas, and each person is different; how you can get yourself and them into a mutually advantageous position is an art form you will need to cultivate and practice, and over time this will enable you to manage up and down elegantly. 

Can you please share ideas for emphasizing and building an atmosphere of caring and shared respect when it does not have top-down support?

Arturo Schwartzberg: When my daughter entered the workplace, she kept moving from one company to the next because the cultures were so bad, it was not going to hold onto this good-hearted millennial. Somehow I was surprised (naive) by just how bad these cultures were, in this day and age. Perhaps you find yourself in this sort of environment, and ultimately it may not hold you…but in the meantime, you are there and you have a team to support. 

So, do the right thing, show your team you care and, to some extent, you can align with them in a shared desire to be the team bucking the trend—without, of course, bad-rapping management (too much). This, of course, makes your job harder, but on a personal level, you can create magic, bond with your team, and, as a team, set goals for everyone to be awesome—not for the company, but for yourselves. Good luck!

Ashley Munday: Without top team support, it can be difficult to sustain a culture within a team that’s different from the overall organizational culture. That said, with a strong leader, an intact team can create their own norms and agreements about caring and shared respect with intention, practice, and dialogue to learn and grow together.

 

LEADERSHIP PHILOSOPHY & CONCEPTS

There are various types of leadership in society, such as autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire. Psychology, inherent values, ethics, and moral values also affect leadership quality. Please help me understand what the qualities of a good leader are during coronavirus.

Andrei Hedstrom: Service and empathy. Care about your people to seek an understanding and a felt sense about what they are going through. Care about them, their family and community, and the work they care about. Once you have any insight about what they need, serve that need.

I sometimes think about leadership in terms of karma. Meaning, when you care about people, those good feelings are an investment in the relationship that you may benefit from later. Make good karma; take every advantage to create karmic credit with all the people you serve. It not only makes for better relationships when they have needs you need to serve, but also can be called upon as a favor when you need something from them. Everyone has needs and everyone wants love and respect. Every leadership style has to deal with that. Some look to suppress or control those. Servant leadership looks to attend those and balance the many needs around them while moving the organization’s needs forward.

 

Ashley Munday: Empathy first in this time. There’s a great piece that McKinsey recently put out titled “Cultivating Compassionate Leadership in a Crisis.”

I love systems thinking as long as the systems are open-ended and inclusive with real context. How do you contextualize any systems without excluding the value of other systems?

Ahmad El Nashar: First, determine which level the system exists in: team/organization/society/global etc. Then, think about the internal and external components of each system, how they relate to each other, and how they are different. So, if you are in a team, some internal questions to ask as a team include What do our stakeholders expect from us? What is our purpose? What are our values/norms? How will we organize ourselves? Some external questions would include What external factors have an impact on our team? What information do we need from other teams? What information do we provide? How do we communicate with other teams? By answering such questions, you define the boundaries of your own system and its relationship with other systems.

Can you please explain how to “act with intentionality”?

Ahmad El Nashar: Acting with intentionality is about being clear about the purpose of your actions. We are constantly receiving information that we should consider when taking actions to make sure we are taking into account this data we are receiving. Think about how many of us walk into meetings that are in our diaries—just because that has been the norm for years—when there are clear signs that the meeting is no longer serving its purpose. So, if you are in a meeting, what is the purpose of the meeting? What outcomes are you hoping to get out of it? Is the meeting designed to help the team achieve such an outcome? 

Similarly, acting with intentionality can manifest itself in many different ways. Another example is prioritization: How does a team prioritize tasks and goals? What influences their prioritization process? If you are creating a presentation, who is it serving and what is it trying to achieve? As an organization, how is our customer behavior changing? Are we still serving the right customer profile? Typically, we receive data that can help answer such questions, but a lot of time we don’t use it or tune into it, and fall victims of deeply entrenched habits. Acting with intentionality is essentially a mindset that helps us tune into the wider system and respond to it more effectively.

You use the words “sense of community”and culture. How do you differentiate them in building the levels of trust required when one is an input and the other may be an output?

Gregg Kendrick: I see these two qualities as distinct, yet potentially highly related.

Belonging is a core human need. A person’s “sense of community” or “sense of belonging” in the workplace is nurtured when their contribution to the larger team or organization is seen and valued. For this to happen, the leader needs to first ensure the person has a clear role that’s defined in terms of the value it brings to the team and organization. Secondly, the person needs feedback from their peers and leaders that their contribution is seen. Not just the extraordinary ways they deliver value, but the tasks they do every day that are a part of their role. Belonging and being heard are two qualities that strengthen a person’s sense of self-worth (that is, that they matter).

In building a culture, leaders state what they value (that is, core values, purpose, principles) and more importantly demonstrate what they value both by their example and by creating a culture of accountability around what they value. 

Another aspect of enhancing “sense of community,” then, is recognizing or “seeing” when a person is showing up in alignment with the organization’s core values, purpose, and principles, or having an accountability conversation when their behavior is not in alignment.

Of course, if one of the core values of the organization is “belonging” or “building a sense of community,” then you are amplifying this connection between culture and “sense of community.”

 

LEADERSHIP INSPIRATION

How has this inspired your clients in their own cultures? Any favorite stories to share?

Arturo Schwartzberg: Thank you for asking this question as it has me thinking about how we—and really all of us—may have affected not only our clients, but people around us in ways we do not realize. We do have a clear philosophy about trying to make a positive contribution to every life we touch or that touches us. 

In our Talent Solutions group, we are often looking for talent for our internal team and often for our clients’ teams. Every time we have a job opening, we may get 100 or 500 resumes from applicants, people who want this job, and yet at the end of the day we will only hire one—and so 99 or 499 will be rejected. So we ask, how can we respond to these 499 in a way that is respectful and kind and somehow adds to their lives? 

And so we try, and we try as well to act in a way with clients where they experience SweetRush being different. They experience a committed team that is respectful, but also intentional about acting in ways that are all about mutual success and not the success of one party over the other. Clients seem to love us and stick with us, so somehow I have to hope that our way of being rubs off. 

Where can I learn more about developing effective leadership skills and stronger, more productive teams?

If you’re in need of skill and competency building, Thrive by SweetRush has two established workshops that we just converted to virtual. These workshops upskill and benefit leaders and teams—both of which include creating customized action plans for moving forward,

Team Building: Creating Psychological Safety

Develop high-performing and collaborative teams that have a commitment to vision, strategy, and desired culture! Psychological safety is found to be the number one differentiator in Google’s highest-performing teams, and we want to help you achieve it.

Your Brain on Change: Decriminalize Resistance and Accelerate Adoption

The greatest leading indicator of a successful change effort is employees’ speed to adoption of new behaviors. This unique, neuroscience-based workshop develops the mindset and skills that improve speed to adoption.

Leading Remote Teams Consulting Package

We are offering real-time consulting and coaching to build cohesion and performance on your team in the remote environment. These sessions are facilitated by world-class consultants and coaches. We determine what your team most needs in terms of development. This is high-quality consulting, facilitation, and coaching on what matters to you in this moment to help your teams build momentum, performance, and morale. This package consists of 20 hours of coaching and consulting. 

If you need a specialist to lead your meeting so you can participate in it, we also offer:

Online Meeting Facilitation

Need a skilled facilitator for an online meeting? We have excellent resources available and would be happy to discuss qualifications with you.

Contact Gregg at [email protected] or connect on LinkedIn.

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Secrets of Effective L&D Leaders: Innovation, Embracing Change, and Cultural Transformation

Infographic: 6 Steps to Building Trust

Leading Remote Teams: Free Learning Resources

Alicia Schwarz, our Director of Instructional Design Operations and Program Manager, discusses how leadership at SweetRush is about empowering those around you.

I recently had a member of a large team I worked with reach out to me to share his thoughts on our team and the work we did together. He and I were two of the first people on the team, a team that grew from a small core team to over 50 people at its peak. A team of creators that have changed, flexed, excelled, and continues to do so after three-plus years. An amazing team.

He thanked me. He thanked me for listening. He thanked me for trusting him. And he thanked me for creating an environment that empowers others to problem-solve, create, and relate in their own way. He shared that my trust gave him confidence. That my confidence empowered him to create and communicate with clients and stakeholders in a new way. I was really taken aback and moved by his words, his honesty, and his thanks. 

Our conversation caused me to reflect and think about leadership, and the power and responsibility one has in a leadership role. Four key words resonated with me: Listen. Trust. Challenge. Empower.

 

 

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Una publicación compartida de SweetRush Inc. (@sweetrushinc) el 29 Ago, 2019 a las 12:38 PDT

Listen to your team. Really listen to find out what they are passionate about and learn what their strengths are. Take the time to truly understand them.

Trust your team. Help to build their confidence and do what you can to support them. Recognize where they may need help, and where they excel and can help others.

Challenge your team to look at things from different perspectives and in new ways. Help them grow.

Empower your team to share their ideas, make mistakes, test new ideas, and solve problems in their own way. Build on their individuality.  

 Realize the impact you have on others by listening, trusting, challenging, and empowering individuals and amazing teams will form—and amazing work will be created.

When Entrepreneur magazine reported findings by Harvard University researchers in early 2019 that open office plans are bad for productivity, people around the world who think for a living heaved a huge sigh of relief. And those of us who work virtually and are managing a virtual team smiled because we knew we actually have the best situation for working productively.  

Recently, a friend who was considering a management position at a virtual company asked me what I really thought about managing a virtual team. She knew that I lead over 50 people located globally, but did I really feel like it’s a good idea? I gave her a strong affirmative, though there are four things you need to watch for in order for your team to be happy and productive: accountability, community, collaboration, and connection to the organization’s culture, mission, and vision. There are tools and methods that can help.

You want to know that people are doing the work assigned to them, especially if you can’t just casually wander by their offices. 

Tools: Online project management software so everyone is aware of handoff dates

Methods: Daily standup calls, intermediate handoffs (i.e., don’t wait to the end of the project to get a handoff)

People should feel connected to their teammates and not feel isolated. 

Tools: Use chat software so the whole team is on the same chat (like Skype) and make places for people to share out-of-work stuff, like Google+ community

Methods: Do the same things people do IRL but do it virtually: virtual coffee and donuts with the team, virtual lunch dates, celebrations when important milestones are passed.

Collaboration, especially in cross-functional work teams: People who think for a living (like Instructional Designers) can be so much in their heads! Discouraging silos for folks who work without the benefit of collaboration is always a challenge, and virtual teams have that challenge big time.

Tools: Software that makes collaboration easy—like G Suite products—is essential.

Methods: Make collaboration an important ritual in project work. Call it out in your project plans; ask teams to present handoffs together.

When we are far apart, it might not be easy to remember that, at SweetRush, we have a unique culture that shows up in all aspects of our work. Helping my virtual team connect to the culture, vision, and mission of the larger company means I need to bring it up all the time, and in lots of different ways. This won’t just happen—at least not at the beginning. You will need to think about how your culture authentically manifests and call it out so your team is very aware of it. My team is used to hearing me say, “Think about the downstream team—make it easy on the downstream team” and giving feedback with candor: two important aspects of our culture. But it takes multiple examples to make the culture visible when you are managing a virtual team.

At SweetRush, I am super fortunate that I get to work with the best of the best, in a culture that truly mirrors the best of my own values. Working virtually has allowed me to hire from a global market, not just in my own small town. And with a little effort, we have both the perfect, quiet environment in which to do our best work and a team who’s ready to collaborate and celebrate our day-to-day successes.

Are you interested in more information about managing virtual teams? Check this out:

• Leading Remote Teams Webinar: Answers to your Questions