Let's Talk, People Episode 10
[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Emily Frieze-Kemeny, host of Let’s Talk, People, where leaders come to bridge humanity and profitability. Informed by a couple decades of work as a head of talent and leadership development, I'm here to amplify leaders so they can exalt everyone and everything they touch. Are you ready? Cause it's about to get real.
[00:00:28] Let’s Talk, People.
[00:00:33] So on today's episode, I wanted to share an aha that I had from playing tennis. And while that seems to have nothing to do with leadership, it actually has everything to do with it. Because when we play a sport, we hit a ball back and forth. In the case of tennis, we're exchanging momentum. And what came to me was this idea of how do we give and receive positive momentum from one another at work.
[00:01:04] And what is our role as leaders in being that giver of positive momentum to our teams? I don't know if it's just me, but I find that just living life gives me so many leadership lessons. So the other day I was playing tennis with my husband, which was an act of kindness on his part because I'm a really, uh, lame tennis player.
[00:01:23] I'm not the most athletic of humans. I think my talking skills outweighed my physical capabilities. This is a total random fact about me and then I'll get to the point of this podcast episode. But when I was a baby, I could talk before I could sit up. So hence the challenge with athletics. So we were playing tennis.
[00:01:44] And the thing that was striking me is, and many of you know this from other sports, is there's something about the momentum exchange that happens when you're hitting a ball. So when my husband would hit the ball to me, and it was a really nice shot, like it had some good momentum on it, it kind of came to me in a place where I wouldn't have to run like crazy to get to it.
[00:02:05] I not only felt really good about my ability to hit it back, but I was using the momentum of his strength from hitting the ball to help me to hit it. And then there was, of course, other times, you know, where I would hit it to him, it would go only halfway down the court, which, um, you know, then he's basically hitting it back like on the triple bounce, which is not a ton of fun for him, or where we started to get into it and his competitive side kicked in.
[00:02:31] My competitive side sucks. Uh, a little bit light. I'm, I'm not that alpha. So let's say for him, his competitive side was starting to kick in and then he'd start hitting the ball like all over the place. And then I'm running around like a lunatic. I'm missing it most of the time. And then that didn't feel so good.
[00:02:45] It's not actually that different than what we do as leaders to our teams, if you think about it. So when we're at our best, we are serving it up to our team members in a way that not only sets them up for success, where they feel like, okay, I got the ball now I can do this, but it's actually just enough challenge that it gives them so they're responding to our momentum.
[00:03:12] So that could be by the way we describe the challenge, the opportunity, we incentivize them to perform well. It could be by the way that we share our passion and excitement. It's about the potential impact it could have on our clients or our consumers. So there's something about our role as leaders as positive momentum makers.
[00:03:38] So like we give people positive momentum when we provide the right degree of motivation and challenge, that feels really good on both sides because when we do that and we give the correct dose of it or speed of it or strength of it, then they have something to react to, like, so they're basically bouncing off of what we give them.
[00:04:01] So our motivation gives them motivation and drive. And then we get even more back, which is what we always are striving for, which is gaining higher performance and productivity from our teams. So, what made me think about is we get very frustrated when our organizations or our teams are not performing and delivering the results that we had expected and very often, it may be true.
[00:04:25] But let's think about if it's always truth. We think about what is going wrong with them? Is it that our people managers are not doing a good enough job? Do we have the wrong people? Do they have the wrong skills? Like what's going on? Is it just these new generations of the workforce don't want to work that hard?
[00:04:42] These are all the complaints that we say, or that we, you know, we hear in our client work as well, but sometimes we actually need to look back at us as leaders. What was our part in it? Because when we're not getting the performance we want out of our teams, are we not giving enough positive momentum? Are we not setting the right conditions in place?
[00:05:02] So let's use the example of, you know, my husband getting really competitive and hitting the ball all over the court and I can't keep up. I actually can't. So I just want to stop playing or I want to get angry at him. Well that happens in organizations too. People start to not give as much because when they think they can't succeed or when they think they can't do it all, it's going to hamper their ability to give.
[00:05:27] Or how many times do we hear people complain about leadership? So that's another example. They're frustrated because they don't feel set up for success. There is a relationship between our role, and what happens in terms of performance in our organizations. So how do we own our part in it? I think there are so many times we try to make things better from a place of assumption.
[00:05:55] So what a place of assumption means is I think I already know why things aren't going well. And maybe it's because of one off circumstantial evidence. So I talk to one or two people, they say, "Oh, this group, they're not motivated. They got some weak performers, their manager sucks." And then we take that as truth.
[00:06:16] And then we make a series of decisions based on that. Or we're making a decision based off of some sort of historical context of what happened before that is no longer the case. So what I would say for us as leaders that we should always do is to be really curious to go beyond our assumption of what we think is happening.
[00:06:35] And the best way to do that is to ask. And not to ask the people that we normally ask, but it's to ask the people who are really doing the work. And the people who are most responsible for creating higher performance. So that may mean going down three levels in a team and talking to people. It may be going out and walking around and saying, "Hey, I'm noticing this is going on. I'd love your thoughts on it." It might mean bringing a broader group into a room and saying, "Let's do a work session on this. I'm noticing that we're not getting the performance out of this account that we had expected. Let's workshop it. What have we learned about them? What might be going on? How can we work together better?"
[00:07:14] And to make sure that you don't just get a lot of BS because people are trying to please you as the boss. There's ways that you can ask questions to get at the more critical feedback that makes it safe for people. So examples of that could be, "Give me an example of why this might not go well." That would be an example of a way that you could invite people into the conversation, because you're basically teeing it up as a hypothetical, so that it's appropriate to say that it may not go well.
[00:07:44] Now, we know that that's intentional, because you're trying to get at what's not being shared, but it will make other people feel more safe to share it. Or you ask a question and you keep it very specific, like, "Can you give me one suggestion on what would make this work even better, or how you think we could improve the account?"
[00:08:05] Just one suggestion. Because one feels manageable. It doesn't feel like, oof, if I say too much, the boss is going to be upset, or I'm going to make somebody else look bad. One thing, everybody has one thing that they could share. Or a third example would be, you could ask, "Let's think about another account."
[00:08:25] I'm just using account as an example of a business situation, but like, let's think of another account. Where things are going really well, what could we learn from it? What happened in those circumstances that contributed to higher results, better engagement, um, with that account? So just some examples. So the idea is that we're always trying to move past what we think the answer is.
[00:08:47] And this is hard for us because as leaders, we're used to feeling like we have to be the smartest person in the room. For some reason, that's the archetype that many of us grew up with. And in some cases, what got us to the roles that we're in is because we were the smartest person in the room and had a lot of good answers and good ideas.
[00:09:05] But the truth is that what the organization needs from us the most is curiosity. Because it's from a place of curiosity that we can figure out what's wrong in this momentum exchange. Where did it break down? What was our part in it? Where do we need to support others? Give them the right amount of momentum.
[00:09:28] Maybe it's skills. Maybe it's rewards. Maybe it's different forms of collaboration that are more effective than what's currently in place. But it's our responsibility to, with them, right in collaboration with our teams to figure out where the exchange of positive momentum is breaking down and to adjust it.
[00:09:48] And I'd say that this idea of adjusting positive momentum exchange is constant. You never nail it. You might nail it for a period of time, maybe a month, maybe two months, maybe you get really lucky for an entire quarter. But I think what we're doing is we're constantly calibrating because circumstances change, right?
[00:10:06] New dynamics come into play either internally or externally that affects the exchange of momentum. So let's think of ourselves as leaders, as positive momentum givers so that our team members and the other leaders that we provide direction to can be able to receive positive momentum from us that makes them even better in a way that is motivational, challenging to the right degree without it feeling frustrating.
[00:10:42] And we do that together. Because we have to keep calibrating with one another to make sure that we're giving the right degree of momentum and if the conditions need to be changed so that we can better provide one another with momentum, we can do so. And that can be through asking questions. It can be through work sessions.
[00:11:01] It can be through reflecting on our role and causing challenges to happen with results. So seeing that we may be a factor in why our teams might not be able to perform to the degree that we had hoped. So let's see what you can do with this for your own organization. Where can you add in more moments of calibration to ensure that you are a positive momentum giver in a way that can be received, building an even stronger momentum from your teams?
[00:11:34] Thanks for joining today's episode of Let's Talk, People. For more info and insights, visit arosegroup.com and find me, Emily Frieze-Kemeny on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you're enjoying the show, please follow, share on social and leave a rating or review in your podcast app. It helps other listeners to discover us.
[00:11:54] Well, that's a wrap friends until next time when we come together to talk people.
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