Harvard Business Review | Doug Belshaw's Thought Shrapnel

I’ve written about this before, but this HBR article explains that successful teams require both psychological safety and cognitive diversity. Psychological safety is particularly important, I think, for remote workers:

Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It is a dynamic, emergent property of interaction and can be destroyed in an instant with an ill-timed sigh. Without behaviors that create and maintain a level of psychological safety in a group, people do not fully contribute — and when they don’t, the power of cognitive diversity is left unrealized. Furthermore, anxiety rises and defensive behavior prevails.

If you look at the various quadrants in the header image, taken from the HBR article, then it’s clear that we should be aiming for less hierarchy and more diversity.

We choose our behavior. We need to be more curious, inquiring, experimental and nurturing. We need to stop being hierarchical, directive, controlling, and conforming. It is not just the presence of the positive behaviors in the Generative quadrant that count, it is the corresponding absence of the negative behaviors.

When you’re in a leadership position, you have a massive impact on the cognitive diversity of your team (through hiring decisions) and its psychological safety (by the way you model behaviours).

How people choose to behave determines the quality of interaction and the emergent culture. Leaders need to consider not only how they will act, but as importantly, how they will not act. They need to disturb and disrupt unhelpful patterns of behavior and commit to establishing new routines. To lay the ground for successful execution everyone needs to strengthen and sustain psychological safety through continuous gestures and responses. People cannot express their cognitive difference if it is unsafe to do so. If leaders focus on enhancing the quality of interaction in their teams, business performance and wellbeing will follow.

Everyone, of course, will see themselves as being in the ‘Generative’ quadrant but perhaps the trick is to get feedback (perhaps anonymous) as to whether that’s how other people see you.

Source: Harvard Business Review

Leadership is a funny thing. There’s lots written about it, but, at the end of the day, it’s all about relationships.

I’ve worked for some great leaders, and some shitty managers. This Harvard Business Review article describes the usual three ways those in positions of power get things wrong:

The key derailment characteristics of bad managers are well documented and fall into three broad behavioral categories: (1) “moving away behaviors,” which create distance from others through hyper-emotionality, diminished communication, and skepticism that erodes trust; (2) “moving against behaviors,” which overpower and manipulate people while aggrandizing the self; and (3) “moving toward behaviors,” which include being ingratiating, overly conforming, and reluctant to take chances or stand up for one’s team.

But there’s another, potentially even worse, category:

Absentee leaders are people in leadership roles who are psychologically absent from them. They were promoted into management, and enjoy the privileges and rewards of a leadership role, but avoid meaningful involvement with their teams. Absentee leadership resembles the concept of rent-seeking in economics — taking value out of an organization without putting value in. As such, they represent a special case of laissez-faire leadership, but one that is distinguished by its destructiveness.

The problem with absentee leaders, as the article explains, is that they rarely get weeded out. There’s always more pressing problems to deal with. So the people who report to them exist in a professional feedback vacuum.

The chances are good, however, that your organization is unaware of its absentee leaders, because they specialize in flying under the radar by not doing anything that attracts attention. Nonetheless, the adhesiveness of their negative impact may be slowly harming the company.

If leadership is about relationships, then the worst leaders are those who show poor emotional intelligence, don’t invest in building trust, and provide little constructive feedback. If you’re in a position of leadership, it’s worth thinking about this from the point of view of others who interact with you on a regular basis…

Source: Harvard Business Review

Tag: Harvard Business Review

The best teams are cognitively diverse and psychologically safe

Absentee leadership