The Power of the RESTART

[Transcript]

00:03

Welcome to the Finding Gravitas podcast brought to you by Gravitas Detroit. Looking to become a more authentic leader? Finding Gravitas is the podcast for you. Gravitas is the ultimate leadership quality that draws people in. It's an irresistible force encompassing all the traits of authentic leadership.

Join your podcast host Jan Griffiths, that passionate, rebellious farmer's daughter from Wales, entrepreneur, leadership coach, keynote speaker, one of the top 100 leading women in the automotive industry, as she interviews some of the finest leadership minds in the quest for Gravitas.

Jan Griffiths: 00:50

Hello, Finding Gravitas audience, we are, again, in a period of transition. We are going back to the office. Some of us are tremendously excited about that. Others are not, others are somewhere in the middle, others are concerned about what we're faced with, with this hybrid team, what that's going to look like. And as leaders out there, I'm sure you've got some concerns as to how to lead through this transition and what that will look like. Well, I'd like to share with you today, some research, and some strategies to help you during this transition time.

01:30

The title of this episode is the power of the restart. And when I'm talking about restart, this is what I'm talking about. I'm talking about putting a milestone in your life or in your calendar that requires you to restart something. So let me give you an example. Monday's, how often have you said, Oh, well, okay, I'm not going to do that this week. I'm going to start Monday. Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start Monday. Always say, well, yeah, I didn't really, I didn't do that today, I'm going to do it tomorrow, I'm going to restart tomorrow. Two examples of restarts would be the week, the day, the month, even in business, the quarter, well, maybe not this quarter, but next quarter, not this month, but next month. And then of course, the ultimate restart at the beginning of the year. We have new year's resolutions and we'll say okay, you know, next year, I am going to lose weight, I am going to work out, I am going to achieve all these great things in my professional life, I am going to restructure, I am going to increase revenue. Whatever the professional and personal goals are.

02:38

It's a restart, and there is psychological power behind that restart. Let me cite to you a quote from the research that I've been reading by Hengchen Dai and Katie Milkman. And the quote says this, “Temporal landmarks spurred goal initiation when they signal new beginnings or the start of new time periods.”. Hmm, temporal landmarks? What is that? And they go on to say, “temporal landmarks that open new time periods can help people relegate their missteps to the past, and elevate their self image and confidence.” And if you think about it, that's what we do, right? We say, okay, we look at our past behavior. And we say, okay, I realize that happened in the past, but I'm going to start again, I'm going to start tomorrow, or next week or next month, and I'm going to do better. And we always have so much confidence in what we can do in the future. And there is some science behind that. And I will drop a link to this article in the show notes if you want to go deeper into it. Katie Milkman has also written a book called How to Change that I am into right now, which I find fascinating. So there is indeed power to the restart. And what a great opportunity we have right now to look at this return to the office as a restart. Okay, you know, there will be some leaders out there that will be happy to get back to the office, and will want to get back to the old ways of doing things because after all, they provide comfort and security, and maybe the business has been profitable and successful. So why change? Hmm, not sure that's the way we want to look at this.

04:45

What if we looked at this and we said, You know what, this is an opportunity to break the mold of corporate leadership that has been holding us back for decades. Now is the time for authentic leadership to come to the forefront to stand up, and rise up. And for all of you authentic leaders out there to step forward in your true beautiful, wonderful, authentic selves and lead from the heart. What if you could inspire your team, galvanize them around your vision, create a high-performance team that would just break through walls for you and for the team and for the goals and the mission? What if right now was the time to make that happen?

I believe that it is, I believe that there is power to this restart. But we got to do it right. We can't just come up with some lame loose policy that says, oh, you know, three days in the office in two days at home? Yeah, that sounds right. No, I know that we're going to have to have some HR guidelines around this, I get that. But my fear is that in a large company, you're gonna have people, you're gonna have leaders who will want to embrace the flexible work structure, and truly have teams in the office only when they really need to have that period of collaboration. And then there are other leaders out there who will want to get back into the position of control as quickly as possible and want to have all the people around them. And maybe these two leaders are working for the same company. How are you going to handle that? That's going to be tricky. It starts at the top, it starts with leaders at the top, it starts with the C suite.

07:05

I remember working in a company once where they said that it was jeans day on a Friday. And then none of the executive team wore jeans. Actually, I did I think it was one of the first ones to do it. So my example is, you know, nowhere near as significant as the type of change that we're talking about now, but the point is still the same. The C suite will have to model the behavior. You can't say that there's a hybrid work model in play, and it's okay to work from home, and then all the executives are in every single minute of every day. The C suite and the senior level leaders will need to model the behavior for this to work. Because if we don't embrace this flexible work, and this opportunity to create a High Performance Team inspired by authentic leadership, we're not going to be able to attract Gen Z, and we're not going to be able to move forward with the innovation agenda, we will just go backwards.

I believe that as leaders, you deserve to lead a team with a strong foundation, one where everyone understands who they are, what they do, and how they can deliver on both personal and organization wide goals. It is possible to make that happen. We need to build trust. If we didn't have a lot of trust in the business before, now's the time to start building it. We need agility, we need to speed up execution. Everybody wants that. Now's the time to do it. We need to facilitate more open, transparent communication. We know that transparency is a key trait of an authentic leader. Now's the time to start making that happen. We need to inspire the team. We need to banish fear, and doubt, and establish a real purpose driven culture.

08:43

Yes, the C word, culture again, I know many of you out there are probably rolling your eyes. Oh, no. Let's talk about culture again. But what is culture really? Culture to me is how things really get done. We have policies and procedures and the way that we think things get done. And then there's the way that things really get done. And that has a lot to do with leadership, and the behavior or model that exists within the organization. And it's up to the leader to understand it, call it out, establish what it should be, and deal with exceptions. I've been working on a workshop. It's called the Gravitas Workshop. And I'm going to be conducting a webinar on June 10. And I'll put a link in the show notes for this. Here's... it's really a compilation of different workshops that I've been running over the last couple of years.

9:45

And I believe that these seven things will help you establish that foundation for a high performance team and help you navigate this transition back to the office in a way that will make everybody feel good, feel confident, feel trusted, and inspired. So let's start.

Number one is connection. We miss connection, we crave connection, you know that as human beings, we need it, and we want it, and we've missed it. We've missed those conversations between meetings, the hallway conversations, the water cooler conversations, now we have to be more intentional about that interaction. And I would suggest that there's a very intentional workshop where people come prepared with maybe one or two things that they've learned during the pandemic, maybe a new hobby that they've picked up, bring your team together, and have them share those things. Have fun with it, use pictures instead of words, you know me, I'm all about the visual. It's about being intentional, and it's about reestablishing the connection.

You may have new members on your team. They don't know anything about some of the other members other than what they've seen on a Zoom call. So being intentional about connection is going to be really important. And then once you do this once, that's one thing, but making time for team collaboration. You know I look back on my career, and one of the first questions that will come out of anybody's mouth, if it was any type of team building activity was, well, what's the bottom line? You know, what's the impact of the bottom line, if I spend x-thousand dollars on this? Well, you can't say that anymore. It's much more than just the numbers. ROI is one aspect of the business. If we don't have the people on board, if we don't have the people feeling inspired and engaged, you can forget the numbers. So this is an investment in people.

There's many different companies out there that run different team building events, that you can bring your team together and do something fun together. But great leaders, leading through this transition will recognize that now, managing this hybrid workforce, you'll need to make time for connection, so time to do no work. If that makes sense. Yes, you're going to have to set a time where you either maybe share a meal together, do an activity together, it's going to build trust, help transparency, and help the team feel comfortable and safe with each other. So number one is connection.

12:40

Number two is, I call it get it off your chest. This is a simple exercise, you can put people in groups. And we've been through a lot. And there's a lot of fears out there as to you know how things will be in the future. Maybe somebody on the team made you really, really mad with something that they did. And these kinds of behaviors in the past will stay with you. It's baggage that you will bring with you into the future. And we can't allow that to happen. So just as Katie Milkman talked about this temporal landmark, putting some distance between your past and the future, this is putting a stake in the ground and saying, okay, these are things that happened in the past that we didn't like, we don't like.

You work with a facilitator to get the ideas out, get them out on a flip chart, on a virtual whiteboard, whichever way you want to do it. And then you start to put them into groups. And some of those things may end up into action items, things that you have to do something with, and some may not. It's simply exactly what I just told you. It's get it off your chest. People have to work through that, you have to give them the time and the space to work through that, otherwise you're carrying baggage into the future.

14:06

Then number three, we move into what we love. What do we love about the way that we're working right now or the way that we worked in the pandemic? We've all learned how to do things faster. I've heard countless executives tell me, they couldn't believe how quickly they got things approved. People getting plants up into production faster than they ever thought imaginable. I remember speaking to Fred Lowry, the President of Fisher Thermo Scientific, and the way that they were able to activate production in their plants, just astounding. So there's lots of great things. You know, and let's be honest, we've loved working from home. Maybe not all of the time, I will tell you that sometimes it drove me crazy, that I felt compelled to either do a load of laundry, run the vacuum cleaner, make dinner, or work. And I felt torn between all those things. We've had to deal with childcare at home. And if two parents are working all the challenges, we know what they are, and then the constant zoom fatigue that we've all been feeling. So we've got, you know, we've got some things that have not been working well. But yet, some things, we did like the flexibility of working from home.

And so let's talk about what we love. What does the team absolutely love about the way that they've been working in the past, you know, 14-15 months, and get them out, because what's important about this section, about number three, is that you retain those in your culture. And they may be actual mechanisms or ways of doing things in the business, they might be behaviors. Here's an example. Many people have commented about how they love to see, wait for it, authentic leadership come through in their senior level leaders, and that they will just real, they will just people. They had stripped off the corporate mask. They will sitting in front of a Zoom camera with either a child screaming in the background, a dog barking, a cat jumping on the keyboard, you've seen countless examples of that. Because it made the leader more real, more authentic, more approachable, more relatable. And that in itself builds trust. And remember Google project Aristotle, psychological safety is the number one trait of a High Performance Team, it's important the team has spent time talking about what you love.

16:52

Then we move into strengths. Number four is strengths. And I love doing this exercise with people because we're always so quick to talk about strengths and weaknesses or strengths and opportunities. I remember when we weren't allowed to say weaknesses anymore, we had to say opportunities, you're not fooling anybody by saying that everybody knows what that really means. And when we talk about weaknesses, or opportunities, you know, I'm not good at the numbers, never have been, never will be, I don't like doing analysis. I like to know the total at the bottom of the spreadsheet, and I like to know the meaning behind it, and I will know how to weave that into a story and a strategy and a decision. But I do not want to be the person cranking through those numbers. It's not my strength. And that's not gonna change. You can train me, you know, time and time again. And that's not going to change.

So why do we, you know, why do we force? Why do we force our opinion or our perception of somebody else on to them and say, well, you know, you really need to improve in this area. Now, identifying weaknesses and opportunities, and development are two different things. Because a coach will understand development needs to help people leverage their strengths in the right direction, to get where they need to go to. You know, coach works on development, that's very, very different. So I'm all about working on strengths. And I really like the Gallup Strengths Finders, I use that a lot in my team coaching practice.

But for this exercise, here's a simple exercise that you can do with your teams. Split into smaller groups, maybe three or four, and have them talk about one professional strength, which could be a very sort of technical skill, subject matter expertise, something that they're particularly good at within the work skill set. But then talk about one behavioral strength. And it could be, hey, I love the way that you showed empathy and compassion with your team, it seems like you had a lot of one on ones. I love the way that you don't have any problem putting out issues on the table, or you're very transparent. I love the way that you handle that customer issue. That's more of a behavioral strength. So for each person, you write down a professional strengths and behavioral strengths, and then you review it as a group, as a subgroup. And this is an incredibly powerful tool. Because so often, we don't spend time to tell our teammates, what we think their strengths are.

Often we're too quick to judge and we want to talk about weaknesses or what we think weaknesses are, but we don't reinforce the strengths. And a high performance team is all about understanding the individual strengths, reinforcing them, making sure that the work incorporates and works in line with those strengths. So it all works hand in hand together, then you get that team multiplier effect. And you get a high performance team. So walking through that very simple exercise. It's emotional because you see people, you know, I've done this before, people will say, oh, wow, I didn't realize that you thought that of me, I didn't see that as a strength, but I guess that it is. And now you've set a foundation where you can talk about strengths. So let's say a project comes up next month, and you think, okay, well, this is something that doesn't fit neatly into, you know, anybody around the room, or maybe anybody's particular function. So who's the right person, who's got the right skill set for this project? And then you'll go back to this exercise, you’ll, go, you know what, I remember that that was your strength, maybe that's a good fit for you to take the lead on this project. And it all works beautifully together. That's the strength exercise.

21:00

Now we move to number five, the trust battery, or trust. What is trust? It's a feeling, it's an emotion, it's very difficult to define, you feel it, you sense it. And you know what I'm talking about, you know, when you meet somebody, you know right away if you can trust them or not. And why is it when you walk into a car sales room, there's just some of those people that you trust more than others. What is that? It's a feeling, because you don't have any data around you to evaluate that person, you don't even know him, just walked into a car dealership. But there's some people that you trust more than others. And there's so many things that go into building that feeling. As human beings, we need to feel safe, we want to feel safe.

We've got to build trust with our team members, with our stakeholders with everybody in the business. And it takes work, it doesn't just happen. You can't say I give you 100% trust bank, which I tend to do when I first meet people, and then their actions and the way they behave will either erode that trust or reinforce it. But what does trust mean to each individual? We've got to talk about the trust battery. And the trust battery is simply a nice visual that says where your trust battery is with either certain individuals or certain functions. It's a bit sensitive, if you're going to do this early on to do it with individuals, but maybe you could do it at a functional level, and say, alright, you know, our trust battery with the sales group. I don't know why I'm picking on sales today, I'll pick on sales today. And then it's either low or it's high. You don't have to spend a lot of time talking about the why and definitely not the who, because it's about the behaviors, not so much the people.

What are you going to do to charge up that trust battery? And it could be an action that's as simple as this; you've avoided talking to a person in that department because you don't trust them. And you know how you communicate with some people that you trust? It's easy, right? You've heard of Stephen Covey and the speed of trust, I'm sure. When you communicate with somebody that you trust, it's effortless, it's easy, you don't have to think, you don't have to think about the words that you use in the email, you don't have to worry about how they're going to interpret it. You don't have to copy 15 people because, you know, you're concerned that somehow you need to bring visibility to that email, so many different things that we do, it's a painful process, and it takes time. And that in turn costs money. So when we don't have trust with people, that communication process takes a long time.

Take a moment right now and think about somebody that you trust and somebody that you don't trust, and how that communication flows. It's very, very different. So we can do something about that, we can take an action. And this is called taking the high road, where you take a very specific action to have a meeting, set up some time with the person that you don't have a very high trust battery with, to take some time to understand their position and where they're coming from. To start to build that bond of trust. It's not going to happen overnight. But when people take very specific intentional actions to build the trust battery, it will happen.

25:00

Number six team traits. If you're listening to your CEO, or your highest level leader in your company, describing your team to somebody else outside of the business, what words is he or she using to describe the team? How do you want to be known, both in terms of your professional accomplishments and skill set, and then in terms of the behavior? Because I can assure you that most CEOs will talk about the fact that you're trustworthy, you have credibility, you have integrity, you always deliver, you're innovative. It's these kinds of things. But yet, we don't really talk about those, I would call them team traits. We don't really talk about those too much in team meetings. We tend to talk about objectives and deliverables, not about the how, the behavioral part of it, and this is where culture happens, in the behaviors. Have a conversation with the team about it. How do you want to be known? What is your team brand? Because when you talk about behavioral traits, you're establishing your brand as a team. How will you make decisions? How do you handle conflict? How are you going to hold each other accountable? How will you define success? How will you celebrate it? This is a blueprint for a High Performance Team, spending time working through these team traits and behavioral issues, critical to establishing your foundation. And these are things that maybe have been going on in the business these behaviors for decades. Now's the time to call them out.

26:17

Then you have to figure out, and this is number seven, if you've done all this work, what now? The team has to develop a cadence for accountability and a framework to make sure that the work that you've established continues to involve an individual skill sets continue to grow. You have to enter into a cycle of continuous improvement. So this idea of a cadence for accountability sounds very structured and rigid and horrible, honestly, to me at first glance, but it isn't. I've had to develop a cadence for accountability for myself and my business. And I have an Accountability Lab that I run every morning. And basically people call in and they make a commitment for a work task, a personal task and a word to describe their mindset. And it does exactly that, it's a cadence for accountability. But it's in a positive motivational sense.

When you say cadence for accountability, that doesn't mean, you better tell me where you're at with all your action items every single day or every week, you know, otherwise, you're out of here. That's not accountability, that it is one sense of accountability, but it's not one that works very well, and certainly not one that most people respond to. But you can have a positive cadence for accountability and a framework to make sure that people are connected. And if you've spent the time talking about behaviors, and you now have a team brand, how do you deal with situations where people are ambassadors of the brand? So they're actually doing something that reinforces the brand? How you're going to capture that? And then what are you going to do when somebody does something that detracts away from the brand and is totally out of line with the brand? What are you going to do? How are you going to handle it? I think the secret is to really, well it’s not a secret, but to have that discussion upfront as a team. Otherwise, you fight it over and over and over again, right, and it just keeps coming back up. These behaviors keep coming back up. And we have to deal with them. But we have to provide a positive safe environment so that people can put their voice forward and you can improve.

I believe that if we do all of this now, then we can harness the power of the restart. And again, to go back to the quote from the beginning, a restart is a temporal landmark. So it's putting a line in the sand psychologically, it opens up a new time period, which will help people relegate their missteps to the past and elevate their self image and confidence. And this is what great leaders will step up right now. Embrace the power of the restart, put together these kinds of workshops, you can do it on your own with the framework that I've talked about, you can take some or all of everything I've talked about.

29:20

I can come in and run it for you. We call this our Gravitas Workshop, and there's a few other things that we do along with that, and I would love to do that with you because now is the time. There's another pivotal moment you might have seen in social media. I will be speaking at the CAR, the Center for Automotive Research, management briefing sessions in Traverse City in August. That to me is another pivotal moment where people are going to come together. It's a hybrid event. A lot of people are going to be there face to face. I can't wait. It's going to be exciting just to be around people and have the collaboration and feel the energy and feel the inspiration in the room. That's a pivotal moment where people are going to start to think about a new way of leading the automotive industry and moving forward. So, you know, that's another opportunity for a restart, right? These opportunities for restarts are all around us. We have to recognize them, recognize that they have power, and we have to do something about it. I know that all of you leaders out there, certainly all the leaders in the Finding Gravitas audience, you've all got this in you. Step up and lead and I will talk to you soon.

30:39

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