communication – Talent Revolution

Unlocking Team Potential: Insights from Conducting

The conductor steps onto the podium, raises their arms, and the orchestra snaps to attention. The role of the conductor is to be a communicator — to use language, gesture, and presence to drive performance from a team in order to bring an experience to life.

To learn how to be this type of communicator, you study and practice. The study of conducting includes:

Instrument study: how instruments are played, their constraints, where they sound best, and how to speak to the performers of those instruments.
Music study: how music is written, elements of music, the function of harmony and form, and the history of music.
Communication: gestures, hand waving patterns, baton technique, how to hold one’s self, and how to run rehearsal.

I want to write you about presence. The conductor’s must project confidence and competence while projecting a certain kind of humility. Simultaneously saying to their orchestra “trust me, I know what I’m doing, and I am here to serve you, our music, and our patrons.” The conductor may stand tall, shoulders back, and with a puffed out chest. They may speak firmly but with a tone that leads with respect. Conductors that project such confidence and yet project so much humility and respect get amazing performances.

People are community animals and we love to follow the leaders we admire. And the same way that musicians perform better for effective conductors, so do teams outside of music.

You, the savvy leader, can practice the skills of great conductors.

Study how your teams work. Understand the constraints of their work, the conditions required for great work to occur, and know how to speak to people about their work.
Study your product. Who does your product serve? What are the mechanisms of action that product value for your customers? How do your teams contribute to the top and bottom lines?
Study communication. What type of communicator are you? How well do you simultaneously project confidence and humility? How likely is it that your team admires you?

Remember — you’re not just managing talent — you’re creating the conditions for talent to flourish. Just like a conductor.

Another thought on listening

I wrote about listening a few days ago. Then yesterday, I came across this paper by way of HBR. The paper studies psychological safety and its correlation to how teams learn and adapt. Unsurprisingly, the study finds many positive correlations between psychological safety and team performance. I list a few below.

Direct relationship with performance. Team psychological safety was positively associated with team learning behavior (seeking feedback, discussing errors, experimenting, adapting, improving).
Reduced friction caused by power and team dynamics. Teams with higher psychological safety give back greater returns to their employers in the form of learning, adaptation, output, and feedback to upward feedback.
Teams that are high in “team learning behavior” have high psychological safety and perform better… in fact, it reshapes our earlier thoughts on efficiency.
Team efficiency may be less important for helping teams learn than we thought. Psychological safety may be the friction reducing mechanism that enables more learning and productivity.

You saw the concept “team learning behavior” a few times. The concept describes how a team works. Seeking feedback, continuous improvement, and shipping work are all hallmarks of high performing teams and teams high in “team learning behavior.” It just happens to follow that teams that demonstrate high team learning behavior also are more likely to be high in psychological safety.

One Useful Thing

As a savvy leader, the best thing you can do is create space and time to get better at interpersonal communication.

Listen more and better.
Wait a beat before decision.
Ask more “what if” and “how might we” and “ooh, that’s interesting, how did that…” style questions.

These behaviors act as signals that communicate your desire for more openness. When your team perceives openness, they’ll begin feeling confidence to be more generative. Generative teams ship work. You only grow if you ship.

I hope I’ve shown that three simple behaviors above can start you on a path to increasing team learning behavior and improving the psychological safety of your team.

Investing in listening, and executive presence.

Talent: I’d like to speak about how we communicate with each other. I’m hoping we can work out something, I feel we’re not communicating well.

Leader: Is this really a good use of our time?

How confident are you at this conversation is not happening within your org?

At work, humans typically work with other humans to create meaningful and valuable outputs. For that work to happen, communication must happen. And communication is both a beautiful, elegant, and simultaneously messy process.

Humans communicate differently from each other. Some more direct than others; others more indirect. Some people are optimistic, others skeptical. The list goes on, and no one way is better than another way.

Understanding, of any kind, is iterative. We make claims, we test those claims, we are later proven right or wrong. We make Bayesian updates to our worldview and move on.

As systematic and logical as that process sounds, the human element is not always so logical. Enter the paradox of management.

Two people speaking to each other and each with vastly different communication styles and in the process of collaborating with one another towards the same end may experience friction. Friction converts kinetic energy into heat — and heat in this context could be energy, excitement, anger, or abuse.

The management paradox is that human communication is messy and the furthest thing from logical. The talent obsessed manager, like yourself, learns how to convert communication friction into energy, excitement, and joy. Why can’t friction be fun?

Workplaces that are fun are a joy to be in. And if talent is joyfully learning, growing, and iterating upon themselves what incentive might they have to leave?

Underrated

The value of improving your interpersonal communication skills is underrated and therefore undervalued. The returns from becoming a more skilled communicator are great. The Harvard Business Review’s Sylvia Ann Hewlett wrote an article that “listening to learn” is considered the new rule for executive presence replacing “forcefulness” (read the post).

Here’s an excerpt from Sylvia’s post. I removed a paragraph and spaced out the wording to be easier to read. What’s most important to me, and hopefully to you, is how Unilever is cultivating the type of listening I advocate with their leaders. Read on:

“Trait: “Listen to Learn” Orientation.

Although displaying forcefulness was high on the list of most-sought-after communication traits in 2012, it’s less desired today. People now gravitate more toward leaders who listen and learn from others before they make decisions—a trait seen as critical to growing markets and retaining top talent.

Tactic: Go beyond your comfort zone.

Unilever, which makes and markets hundreds of consumer goods in 190 countries, takes listening seriously, asking selected current and future leaders to spend time outside the realm of their normal experiences in a program called GITS (Get Inside the Skin). GITS is designed to teach them how to better empathize with the company’s 3 billion customers, who come from all walks of life…”

One Useful Action

Evolving as a communicator isn’t about metamorphosing into someone else. It’s about having the humility to acknowledge that you can level up your listening skills, get better at seeking clarification, or take that extra beat before jumping to conclusions.

Here’s a simple behavior you can practice now.

Reflect on the question: How might I listen to learn more this week?
Reflect on the question: How might I wait a beat before making a decision?

Final Thought

Job searching is never easy, and there are networks of job seekers discussing their experience with firms and their hiring leaders with other job seekers. Networks give carriage to bad experiences and word travels fast.

Do your firm and your team a favor, and invest the time to not be one of those leaders known for being an awful and exhausting communicator.

Machiavelli’s Quick Take on Credibility

In, “The Prince”, Machiavelli warns leaders not to build on the people. He implies that people hate being managed and ultimately serve their interests first. You can’t build on or trust someone whose interest is themselves.

I like Machiavelli because I believe his work is cautionary — it highlights the costs of tyrannical action. He almost always offers an alternative.

Building on a person, let’s call this “building culture”, is possible when you — the leader — established that you have the ability to lead, behave with good character, advance towards adversity, plan for the unknown, and inspire others. You demonstrate yourself to be a trustworthy and credible person.

I believe there the leadership talent market lacks a supply of leaders who can demonstrate credibility and trustworthiness upfront. And, I believe there’s demand for that type of leader. It’s good that both of these behaviors are learnable.

The Currency of Credibility

Practice these behaviors to create credibility in those you lead and consult.

Willingness to do yourself what you ask others to od.
Make the small things matter.
Help others save face.
Give your attention.
Give credit.
Ask about impediments to action.
Elevate what matters.
Connect your teams with people and resources that will help them improve their outputs.
Always be spotting — talent, good work, and poor execution.

You can find many coaching programs that will help you learn these behaviors well. I enjoy the Admired Leadership program — where I derived inspiration from the list above — and you may know your own. Find what works for you.

One Useful Action

Are you showing up late for one-on-ones? And while you’re in one-on-ones, are you focused on your person?

If you are — great. Pick another behavior from the list above and practice.

If you’re not — start now.

Overthinking collaboration

I have a theory that leaders overthink how to create highly collaborative and productive teams. This article from the Harvard Business Review recommends the new rules include a culture statement, a way to measure performance, and continuous improvement systems. What’s novel? And why is there demand for this knowledge?

I respect HBR’s work, and I value that they’re serving a need. Thank you, HBR. And I believe their output is not new, it’s what we do everyday — culture.

Let’s consider culture a system of transmitted behaviors, norms, values, and status markers that shape our society or organizations. It’s everything we see and can’t see. The system, like any organism, evolves in adaptive and maladaptive ways.

If that definition is true, here are my reasons for why we’re overthinking teams.

Life Finds a Way

Critique: Large teams are composed of people likely organized in sub teams. When people are organized together to create work outputs, they’ll create a system of behaviors, norms, values, and status markers that help them create valuable outputs — Robin Hanson calls these developments “cultural gadgets“.

Alternative: Allow sub cultures to form and thrive. Great work cultures can have contagion effects. Enjoy that. In fact, go out of your way to share subcultural practices with other teams so that they can be adopted. You’re creating your own internal and mini culture market.

Robustness vs Performance

Critique: Establishing key performance indicators is critical. No disagreement. However, as initiatives change your team will need to adapt. You’ll want robust culture systems that evolve to meet the shifting demands and pressures.

Alternative: Employ real time performance management dashboards (recommended by the article) and track how well the team adapts to changing priorities. Keep a history of all of the changing demands your team evolved to meet, productivity levels during those changes, and challenges you all overcame along the way. Share that story with your team constantly!

Maximize for Bottom Up

Critique: It’s common to hear that culture starts at the top. I disagree. I believe, based on my experience, that the inverse is true. Organizational culture statements are often feel good statements defining “who we are”; however, those statements aren’t a system — they’re words. Platitudes ≠ outputs.

Alternative: Allow your cultures to pop up and grow. In fact, allow for cultural drift — the process of a culture system evolving and adapting to new demands. As leaders, create selection pressures that favor more effective team cultures — celebrate the groups (collectively) that are making the most valuable outputs. And be wary of rigid company-wide policies that may stifle cultural evolution.

Do My Ideas Work and Scale?

Yes. My ideas are not novel. Scrum teams and creative groups operate in similar ways. The teams I build need to be high executing and creative problem solvers — adopting ideas from software and collaborative arts makes sense.

Scaling is both easy and hard. It’s easy to allow cultures to form. As a leader, it’s hard to let go. I am comfortable letting go and allowing culture to form. It’s my experience that people want to feel trusted, and when they do, they create good work. Your mileage may vary.

Potential Downsides

My ideas may not be suitable for teams that need to run a certain way to be successful. More rigid teams or organizations may find my ideas too radical — and that’s okay. As a leader, you need to assess your own culture and determine what’s best.

Wrapping it Up

This blog is for people who are obsessed about talent — spotting it, cultivating it, retaining it, and successfully exiting it into better roles internally or externally. If you’re going to be that person, it’s critical that you create environments for talent to do their best work. That means, creating space for micro cultures to take root, evolve, and adapt.

Being a bad hang; never a good thing.

I’ve been on teams where senior leaders ask me: “David, how do we get people to engage more” or “How, we do we get people to complain more?” Leaders want to create open environments for new ideas to make things better. Sadly, these very same leaders engage in behavior that makes them bad hangs.

Professional musicians sometimes categorize other musicians as “good hangs” or “bad hangs.” People who are considered “bad hangs” rarely get called, “good hangs” always get called. To “hang” well is to engage in behavior that makes someone want to spend time with you.

Showing up on time and sober.
Being kind.
Active listener.
Plays well with others.
Shares.
Show up prepared.

That’s it.

And in the corporate world, why should a hang be any different?

Managers that show up on time, demonstrate kindness, listen well, engage well with others, share their time and space, and show up ready are people that anybody would want to collaborate with — they’re a good hang.

In most cases where a senior leader asks for more open conversation, the challenge has been that the leader doesn’t listen well, doesn’t share the space, and talks over people — they appear impatient. And when teams begin to think that they are causing someone to become impatient, they quickly learn to shut up. Generativeness dies on the vine. Good talent starts looking for other managers.

One Useful Action

Focus on listening. Here’s how to practice the behavior:

(In your off time) learn to play an instrument. I’m not joking. Learning an instrument requires slow and painful repetition and critical listening skills. In addition, you’ll get a fun hobby out of it too!
When a direct report comes to you with an idea, ask a few questions before outputting a decision. Questions could be: What are the ramifications of this idea? What are the implications? What roadblocks do you expect and how might I help clear them? How might I help?
Don’t give the answer. Leave the question/idea with your team member and encourage them to work on it.

Parting Thought

If the returns from the talent you lead matter, the upfront cost of learning to be a good hang — in this case, listening — is worth every effort.

Proportionality

Reasons to deploy intensity:

Create urgency.
Communicate importance.
Communicate gravity.

Reasons to deploy aggression:

….

And now for something completely different.

And remember, if you find yourself reaching for aggression in the zoom room, perhaps it’s time to reach for a glass of water instead. Or a pen. Or better yet, the door. After all, nothing says ‘I’m a visionary’ quite like strategically excusing yourself to stare at the water cooler.

H/T to Adam Frith via Rohan Rajiv from a Learning a Day

Leadership transitions

Charismatic and adored leaders develop a sense about them. The organizational culture reveres that leader. The leader is considered “legend”. High performing talent may have joined your firm simply because of that leader. Some people may believe that the company won’t last without that person.

At the point when that leader must leave, skilled managers recognize they’re at a critical decision point — how they communicate change.

The sub-optimal thing is for the exiting leader to announce their departure on an all hands and for the new leader to join the call and share the new plan forward. That move threatens the established culture and norms of the organization. As much as change may be needed, that is not the moment.

A more optimal strategy would be two steps.

Meeting 1: The exiting leader to share their departure with the team. Share their plans for the future — that gives the team the opportunity to feel hope for their beloved leader. And, use that as an opportunity for the team to share their memories of the leader. Perhaps give an award or a silly gift for the leader to remember the team. This milestone moment gives the team the opportunity to grieve together, separate, and prepare for what’s next.
Meeting 2: The new leader introduces themselves. They acknowledge the legacy the last leader left behind — they pay homage to the past. They share what they observe the team doing now that works. They share their plan to listen, get to know everyone, and in the future share what they learned and how they see things move forward.

What’s happened here?

Meeting 1 is for the team to collectively grieve and progress forward.
Meeting 2 is for the new leader to say they come in peace and promise to listen, thus assuaging concerns that the new leader will threaten the culture.

Why bother?

Because if you hope to seek the gains that result from hiring and cultivate great talent, you need to have an environment for talent to thrive and do its best work.

If you can’t do that, what are you doing then?

The strength to restrain

Imagine a scenario where a customer satisfaction rep drops the ball on an account. The sales person, who worked tirelessly to secure the deal, needs to backtrack to save the deal. The customer is frustrated, they want to pay less. A group message is started with all of the parties (except the customer) in copy. The Leader says “customer satisfaction rep, I think it’s best you don’t engage with this customer anymore, and here’s why…” It’s stressful, people are mad, and someone needs to be held accountable.

It’s important for leaders to demonstrate decisiveness and strength at times. They must be able to create and hold accountabilities, and be perceived to be able to punish as well as reward. That said, a skilled leader never publicly humiliates — causing someone to lose face in front of others.

Nothing erodes the trust, morale, or psychological safety of a team more than a leader who publicly humiliates. And, a leader who engages in that way may believe they’re sticking up for the sales person. I argue no.

The sales person, who may have worked hard and may be frustrated, is on the same team as your customer satisfaction rep. They don’t want to see people hurt. They don’t benefit from seeing someone shamed on their account. In fact, it may cause the sales person to think twice before making a mistake — thus eroding morale, trust, and psychological safety.

The better path is to strategically leverage “negativity” and re-affirm the mission. Here’s how it might play out.

(In a Direct Message) Leader: Customer Satisfaction Rep A (Person A), when you did (insert behavior) the customer became upset and distrustful of our product. Don’t do that. Next time, you’re in this scenario, use (insert approach) instead. If you do that, you’ll be able to produce (insert benefit) here.

(In a Direct Message) Leader: Sales Person A (Person B). I am so sorry that I dropped the ball on your deal. I identified the mishap, addressed the issue in our process, and it won’t happen again. I know you work hard on these deals, and it’s important to me, and all of us, that our sales team is successful. Thanks for you partnership.

(In a Group Message) Leader: Person A, Person B, and I spoke. Thank you for the quick connects. I identified the issues in our process. We fixed (insert what you fixed). Here’s what’s happening next… Also, Person A and I discussed our account management strategy going forward and here’s how we’re going to pivot.

This approach is more collaborative, positive, and seeks to build people up. It places the go-forward first. The leaders real strength is realized — the strength to take the hit personally and not publicly shame their team.

Special Note

If you’re working with teams that may be locally in countries where losing face is a major offense, it’s even more important for leaders to demonstrates restraint.
The space between stimulus and response is the space where you get to decide who and how you are. Don’t discount that time.

The paradox of grand change management

Why do change management projects often fail? I attended a seminar led by Diana Hong of Admired Leadership/CRA Inc to to help me answer that question. I took notes for you. Here are the takeaways:

Principle: Don’t overlook human nature and psychology.

Understand the adoption curve.
- 16% will eagerly adopt change.
- 16% will resist fiercely.
- Focus on the 68% in the middle seeking social proof.
- Map your organization to this curve.
Connect change to identity Use language like “We’ve done this before” and “You’re skilled at changing.” Reference past successes. People need to see themselves as capable of change.
Manage expectations ruthlessly Don’t oversell. Be optimistic about outcomes, pragmatic about the journey. Repeat: “We can’t predict everything. We’ll get smarter as we go. This is the right thing to do.”
Start small, scale fast Begin with early adopters as change champions. Use peer networks to spread adoption. Give managers clear talking points.
Make it the new normal Success is when change becomes habitual. Don’t declare victory too soon. Aim for small wins that compound over time.

If I had to to boil it down to a simple behavior, it would be for more leaders to say what Diana recommends:

Here’s the best case scenario;
Here’s the worst case scenario; and
Reality will fall somewhere in the middle.

The paradox is as much as managers believe a grand, over optimistic, well-built change management strategy will excite and energize their employee, the opposite is likely true.

Embrace the paradox and manage for the mundane.

Effective change is habit change.

Work “I Understand” Out of Your Leadership Vocab

When I worked at Carnival Cruise Line, I took part in a training called “Care Team.”

Care Team is a group of volunteers dispatched to emergencies to provide support to people who experienced some form of trauma or crisis. Example: a loved one died on a cruise, the ship caught fire, anything.

The lesson I most remember from “Care Team” training is never to use the phrase “I understand” — it’s an emotional assault. While often intended to comfort, it can invalidate the unique experience of the person needing comfort creating barriers to authentic communication.

Principle: You can’t possibly understand. So don’t.

Talented members of your team will experience ups and downs. On occasion, they may want to open and talk. Perhaps a charismatic and well-loved leader changed. Maybe there are difficulties at home. It’s possible they sense a RIF coming and are anxious. Whatever the reason, how you handle the conversation signals to talent how much you care about them as a person.

Instead of listening and saying “I understand”, I recommend leaders say “I heard (say what you heard)” + “I can’t imagine how hard this is for you” or “That sounds tough, how might I help?” A great response can be, “Thanks for sharing. We can talk more if you want. Just know, I’ve got your back.”

I wish I had a number for how many people tell me they wish they had a boss that listened to them. When talent meets managers that care, talent sticks around and gives their best outputs.

If you want to read more, I made this Perplexity page for you. You’ll find more practical tips and links to sources that can help improve your communication game. I hope it helps.