A look on the bright side...

Welcome to another edition of the Leading with Empathy Newsletter here on LinkedIn . As you might see from the image, I've recently been working with the wonderful Louise Williams who has taken me well out of my comfort zone in workshops and a photoshoot to bring more life to my branding images.

I can't speak highly enough of Louise! Her process is challenging, fun, and introspective and helps unlock an empathy for self that is often hidden away. Many of my old photos were uber serious and pretty standard... over the coming weeks, I look forward to sharing more of the work we've done and would love your feedback.

Is trust the key to motivation?

What drives us to be our best? 

To strive for excellence is hard. But sometimes that is what we do. We do more, find more and achieve more than we could ever imagine. But why?

In my career, I have worked with many project managers who build complex Gant charts to explain the plan ahead. These are sophisticated maps of sequences of work and complex interdependencies. What I always find interesting is that the people are often accounted for as resources. We put people into the charts as FTE (full-time equivalents). Full-time employees are counted as a 1. Those who work part-time might be considered as 0.67 or 0.33 depending on how many days per week they worked. People were considered as resources valued based on the number of hours a week they worked.

Sometimes I would ask the project manager a simple question: 

“What if they don’t want to do the work?”

This often elicits a puzzled look, followed by a simple resignation. That factor is ignored. To me, this seems utterly ridiculous. While people are a resource, they are not a commodity. Unlike a litre of fuel or a metre of copper wire, they are not consistent. A person on one day might provide 1 unit of output. On another day, when they are hyper-committed, passionate and engaged they deliver 1.5 units. When they are burnt out, upset or disengaged, maybe it will be more like 0.2 units. Maybe it will even change by the minute.

We all know this personally. Very few of us are stable, predictable producers of goods. Motivation is often volatile and driven by complex factors that are often not easy to fully understand. Are we driven by necessity or passion? Is it Masolo’s hierarchy of needs or Sinek’s sense of purpose? 

The uncomfortable reality is, it is different for different people at different times. We have moments of brilliance and moments of failure. Sometimes we fly and sometimes we flop. The gap between our best and our worst can seem almost unfathomably cavernous, so much so that we regularly fail to predict it. Ask a person how much life will change in a given period and they generally report, not too much. While this might be true on the average, the daily fluctuations can be extreme. 

Imagine you are driving along a road listening to your favourite song. The sun is shining, the surroundings are calm and you feel like God has just swept aside the traffic to make the road all yours… bliss! You roll into work, smiling and ready for the day ahead.

Now imagine an almost identical scene. Same song, the same shining sun and beautiful surroundings. There is still no traffic but as you cruise along, you hear a siren behind you. You look in your rearview mirror, there is a police car. You glance down, you are doing more than the speed limit… no more bliss. You now roll into work, late with a mind full of frustration. Worrying about how you’ll pay the speeding fine if it will impact your licence and how you’ll explain it to your partner at home. The scene doesn’t need to change much for your sense of motivation to be vastly different.

As a leader, you can't control much of the external events that happen to your people. It is certainly not your job to manage people's private lives (notwithstanding that some managers try to do this anyway). You do though have a significant influence over their experience in the workplace and therefore the motivation they may derive from this environment. So, what can you do to create a more motivated workplace?

As it turns out, there is something you can focus your attention on that will almost surely help to drive motivation. That magic ingredient is:

TRUST

Trust is a fundamental building block of human relationships and social structures. Every time we buy canned food or any packaged good at the supermarket, we rely on trust that what is inside is what we expect. When we drive on a road, we speed towards other vehicles travelling at incredible speeds. What keeps us safe from a fatal head-on collision is not the small white lines on the road, it is a systemic trust that we both believe in. You know the rules, the other person knows the rules and you are both pretty confident the other will comply with those rules. Just like that, everyone is safe.

So let's explore trust a little more, because systemic trust - the shared trust we have in rules and systems - is important, but not the only type of trust. I might even suggest, it is the more fragile and possibly redundant form of trust we have.

Unfortunately, workplaces are not like roads. While there are times of stability in organisations, they seldom last long. Unlike the "don't cross double white lines" rule, organisations need to keep changing, adapting and altering their "rules" on an increasingly frequent basis. Yesterday, we were to say yes to a certain idea. Now we are told to say no. Yesterday we didn't need approval for X, now we need a form completed, with a certificate of authentification. Yesterday, I was able to come in a few minutes late. Today, I got an official performance warning.

Managing a team is not just deploying and policing a set of rigid rules. If your rules don’t change enough, you will fall out of touch with our complex world. If you intend to change the rules all the time and still enforce them ruthlessly, you should expect people to become frustrated with the constantly moving goalposts. So, what the heck do you do?   

From working with hundreds of leaders across many different situations, I believe the best thing to do is not focus on the rules at all. As a mathematician, this was initially a hard thing to accept. The beauty of mathematics is the promise that it creates a language for the universe. An ordered world that follows the laws of Galileo, Newton and Einstein. The only issue is, that humans don’t care about mathematics.

We don’t willingly follow the rules of the Universe any more than we follow the laws of a religion or a country. People are incredible not because they follow rules, it is actually our ability to break them and make up new rules that makes us so incredible. That is why we have national borders. Those fictional lines that run across the ground separate countries like Austria from Italy and Uraguay from Brazil. Humans create rules all the time that have no basis in physics. Another example is killing another being. Apparently, it is acceptable to kill a mosquito but not a cockatoo. In some countries, you can eat a pig but not a dog. In others, you can eat a chicken but not a pig. Others insist that none are okay, others say just eat what you can.

The rules for being a human are so incredibly complex and nuanced that it would be appropriate to say that being a ‘good person’ might be the most challenging of all roles in the entire animal kingdom. With internal mechanisms that are prone to cheating, leveraging and exploiting any advantage we can get, humans are both the most fascinating and dangerous creatures on the planet.

When we are alone though, we are vulnerable. No human has ever created an empire on their own. They all recruit followers, build tribes and leverage the strength of the collective group to become successful. Even if you put Bear Grylls in the wild for long enough, without human support his expected lifespan would decrease significantly. We need each other to thrive and this is why the rules for being a good person are so important. This is why groups need trust.

Trust is formed through consistently meeting expectations of each other. Through being reliable, consistent and predictable. Trust is fostered when our actions help to reduce uncertainty and create a sense of safety for others. Trust is a fundamental element of any high-performing team. We must build more trust, not just more rules. 

In fact, rigid rules in a low-trust environment create suspicion, defensiveness and individuals looking for ways to use the rules to their advantage. Have you seen this before? People looking to exploit loopholes in the rules. It happens in low-trust environments all the time. Rigid rules cannot save low-trust situations, they make them worse. So, let me give you one critical thing you can do to foster more trust, starting today:

Assume good intent.

When you are working with others, assume they mean well. Assume their words are coming from a good place. Assume their mistakes were based on their best efforts. Assume their actions are genuine efforts to help the group. Assume they are good people.

The response to this is often one of concern: What if people are not being good? Won’t they take advantage of me? Yes, they might. It turns out that this is far less common than we think. Most of the time, people start from a good place. Most people have good intentions and are trying their best. But, for the 5% who are not, we build workplaces of rigid rules that breed suspicion and squeeze that good intent out of them. Don’t let the 5% dictate the 95% of people who want to work in a high-trust environment.

Assume good intent and see how people thrive. Try it for September and let me know the results.

Leading with Empathy Masterclass

Practical, personal, engaging and hands-on, this comprehensive masterclass will optimise your professional performance and accelerate your growth as a leader. Specifically designed for new and emerging corporate professionals, you will gain key tools to thrive as a leader and build your career with drive and resilience.

Designed to build your professional and leadership development, this program has been thoughtfully crafted to optimise your learning experience. You will walk away with tools and resources that leave you refreshed, inspired and confident to lead with empathy to drive performance.

• Build leadership authenticity, understand your values and boost confidence to lead high-performance teams
• Develop self-awareness and empathy to become a more effective leader
• Receive an individual Team Management Profile (TMP) to identify work preferences and opportunities to work more effectively with others
• Learn how to communicate with influence and build trusting relationships
• Build resilience in yourself and others to navigate challenging situations
• Master strategies to break out of being busy and become a more strategic leader of your team
• Learn how to solve complex problems by embracing complexity, collaboration and accountability
• Shift from being a manager of the process to a leader of people

You will also complete a Team Management Systems Profile (TMP) as part of this masterclass providing rich information on your leadership and work preferences.

Find out more here

Thanks for reading and take care of each other!

Daniel