Fire Up Your Team

#7 Deep Dive into Authentic Conversations To fire up your team, talk to them! Really talk. You likely know what matters most to your team collectively as well as to individual members. Don’t leave this unspoken. Make it a normal part of your conversation. Talk purpose. Talk aspiration. Talk appreciation. And when times are tough, don’t fear the elephant in the room. Everyone knows it’s there. As the leader, be courageous, acknowledge it, and lead a thoughtful discussion about it. Your team will feel unburdened knowing there are no taboo subjects, only topics that may require gentle handling. When you make it real, people will feel inspired. “Leadership is conversation.” How often have you seen people speaking around what they really ought to be talking about? Over and over again I have witnessed people not: raise topics that might get emotional, bring up concerns requiring sustained time and effort to resolve, or advocate for ideas that might be at odds with beloved systems or beliefs, and more! When I challenge the superficiality of my clients’ communications, their most common response is: “Why can’t we just focus on the work and get on with it?” Seriously? This is the biggest cop-out I’ve ever heard. People hide behind the veneer of tasks at hand, action plans, and business as usual, instead of tackling the big issues underlying them. What they are really saying is, “I don’t have the skills and ‘know how’ to sort this out, so I’m going to pretend I don’t have to. Anyway, our performance is good enough. We’re successful.” On one level, this is true of course. There are a lot of mediocre companies and leaders out there. A good number survive and many are successful in specific ways. But they could be thriving beyond their wildest dreams…. Avoidance of all kinds is, more often than not, the result of fear: fear one might not be able to handle what ensues, fear it might make things worse rather than better, fear it will take too much time and effort, fear it will put other goals at risk, fear that…. You fill in the blank. When we say, “It’s good enough,” essentially we’re saying we don’t want to take on the challenge. We don’t want to put the status quo at risk. But why not? Perhaps because the status quo is known, whereas the results of addressing inefficacy are still unknown. And, we want to know! Making Conversation Safe We have been conditioned to know versus explore, calculate versus intuit, and manage risk versus effect change. We want to play our conversations safe rather than communicate in ways that will free us to do even greater things. For many of us, this feels like an incredible risk and rather than embrace it, we shy away from it. Marianne Williamson, author and founder of The Peace Alliance, captures the concept thus in her poem Our Deepest Fear: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. (1996) To be fair, most of us haven’t developed the skills to navigate complex, emotional and/or abstract conversations. That’s why many of the tools in this book strive to support the requisite skills in a leadership context. At its core, being a leader is about being an explorer and spending a lot of time not knowing. That may sound counter intuitive, but it’s a fact. We will always know less than what is available to know. What does this have to do with having conversations? In my experience, leaders often fear exploring (i.e., “playing”) through real, meaningful conversations. I realize this sounds absurd, but it’s true. Talk to a leader about business models, strategy, negotiations, or tasks, and he is comfortable. Talk to him about his need to give more feedback or address team dysfunction or challenge long-held beliefs, and it’s quite another story. The business world does not produce leaders who “deep dive.” (Deep diving is a term borrowed from the sport of scuba diving, where deep divers equip themselves–through training, the proper equipment and breathing techniques–to explore the water at great depths, sometimes up to hundreds of feet.) Activity: How can you, as a leader, deep dive into conversations that matter, plumbing depths below the surface? ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ Build on this list by using the tools and techniques into which we’re going to deep dive right now! Once you get the hang of it, it is fun and fulfilling–nothing to dread.