Trust and vulnerability

Ever since Brené Brown disclosed her own vulnerability to the world, and began popularizing her research on vulnerability and shame, I have heard people talk about ‘building’ trust by encouraging vulnerability. There are two things really wrong with that course of action.

First of all, trust is not a building that can be assembled, plank by plank. Trust is a consequence of something else. Trust can enter when there is safety. When physical safety is not an issue, psychological safety is key. How do I know that an environment is psychologically safe? For me it means that I can say things without people rolling their eyes, interrupting me, or pretending I did not say anything worthy of attention. Stated more positively, I feel psychologically safe if people listen intently to what I say, ask follow up questions, acknowledge my contribution as worthy of attention, maybe even worthy of action – a contribution of consequence.

Secondly, being vulnerable is easy when you are the product of a trauma-free childhood. But how many people are? Millions of people have been raised in war zones, ripped from their mother’s arms, born and raised by people unfit to be parents, born drugged, abandoned or orphaned. A small group of those became resilient because of some positive force that appeared early in their life, but most, I suspect, were not. For them being vulnerable triggers behaviors anchored deep in early childhood memories of abuse, neglect, invisibility, lack of food, shelter, belonging and/or love.

Children who survive into childhood have learned to manage their fragility by developing ways of coping – the primordial defense mechanisms of all sentient beings: fight, flight, freeze or fawn (sometimes called appease). I learned these four f-words from Pete Walker who wrote a book about complex PTSD – I think the C of Complex could also be the C of Childhood, as these mechanisms get honed to perfection in childhood, and then carried, unawares, into adulthood.

I don’t insist on vulnerability anymore, and certainly not as a plank in the construction of trust. Vulnerability cannot be summoned. It can only emerge as the adult recognizes his or her childhood coping mechanisms, dares to experiment with new behaviors and can let go of those behaviors that are no longer relevant to physical safety, and may actually get in the way of psychological safety.

Self disclosure in teams

How little do we know about each other when we are working as a team? Can we really work as a team when all I know is the professional persona of the person in front of me, or his or her role representing a particular constituency?

Many decades ago Harry Ingram and Joe Luft devised a clever two by two framework, known as the Johari Window. The history of this important contribution to the human relations field can be found here.

I have always liked this framework as it not only shows why feedback is important but also why disclosure is important, the kind of disclosure that gives others a peek behind the persona curtain.

I have had plenty of experiences with others who I was quick to judge, rather harshly, only to find out later that their life experiences were worthy of my respect . This discovery led me to change my judgment and increased my tolerance of the behavior I previously disliked.

When people start to disclose things about themselves there is a palpable shift in energy in the room; sometimes people even move in closer with their bodies as they don’t want to miss anything about how the other is shaped by the past. People’s life stories are endlessly fascinating – that is why we humans like to write, read and make movies about other humans.

There used to be a time that people were admonished to ‘leave their personality by the door.’ As if half a person could do the work of a whole person. Some people may still believe that it is possible to do so, but I think they are in the minority now. Anything personal, and in particular feelings, had no place in organizations, at least not when I started working, some four decades ago. I am glad that this is now changing thanks to the enormous body of research on emotional intelligence and the flood of neuroscience experiments measuring the presence, surges or absence of certain neurochemicals in our blood and how that changes our behavior and our thinking.

Because self-disclosure nearly always includes information about feelings (and if not explicitly mentioned, then at least some feelings will leak out), we see a more complete person emerge, complete and faulty, just like we are ourselves. This, contrary to beliefs about workplace efficiency from the days of the industrial revolution, helps with the task that the team has at hand. There will be less interference of assumptions, judgments and other energy drains that take us away from the work we have to do together.

I have seen teams derail completely by getting to work right away, with work meaning a review of the team’s terms of reference, charter or mandate. This is especially likely if the team leader abhors self-disclosure and thus cannot tolerate time for this upfront investment of time, as it seems frivolous, unprofessional, irrelevant.

A new year of trust?

I wish all of you reading this post a happy new year. I have been mulling over this happiness wish and find it unsatisfying. We could not possible be happy all the time. The wishes I have for myself and others are not about happiness but about the caring and candor that is needed to ensure trust, in our teams, in our families, in our organizations and simply in our transactions with others. When there is trust a whole host of other things become possible. Trust is the great facilitator.

I would therefore like to make this year the year of Trust. I would like us all to think about what makes or break trust and do whatever we can to heal what is broken and strengthen what is weak. And so I wish you a trusting new year.

I have come across a practical way to address trust in a program on Conversational Intelligence™ I am about to complete this month. I learned that one can look at trust as consisting of five elements: T for Transparency, R for Relationships, U for Understanding, S for Shared Success and the last T for Truth telling, or, if this makes you nervous, you can replace this with: Testing assumptions.

The practical implications of looking at trust this way lead straight into five New Year’s resolutions:

1. How transparent am I in my work, my interactions with others, my decisions?

2. What is the quality of my relationships, both at work and in my private life? What am I doing or not doing to enhance those relationships that could be better?

3. How well do I understand others? How well do I listen to them? Am I fully present when listening or am I formulating my point of view and simply pretending to listen?

4. Have I created a shared vision with my team (your family can also be your team)? Do we have the same understanding of what success looks like?

5. Am I telling the truth? Or, if you prefer, am I testing my assumptions when I draw conclusions about others, judge them? Is my judgment simply an opinion or is it based on facts that others can verify?

Imagine the possibilities! May 2019 be full of trust.

What's wrong with exhortations?

Improving leadership, management and governance behaviors is all about behavior change, in particular changing habits and raising people’s self-awareness of behaviors that they often know have negative consequences.

Yet when it comes to people actually changing their behaviors, after this or that workshop, seminar or program, I notice that often they don’t. In all the years I have helped people to improve their leadership skills, I can’t begin to count the times people said that communication is critical, that good listening is essential for a leader, that planning is the proper thing to do. Yet I observe over and over that these pieces of good advice, to ourselves and others, are not followed, or at least not all the time, and not consistently or consciously.

I have pondered why this is happening for a long time and started to delve into neuroscience to look for answers. We all know our brains have something to do with habits and behavior but how? (A good read about how our brain influences our behavior and our behavior influences our brain is ‘Behave’ by Robert Sapolsky). Why can't we just tell people what they should do different?

Neuroscience has gone through an enormous growth spurt thanks to the advances in neuroimaging technology. Yet the field is still relatively young, with daily discoveries, plenty of questions, much controversy and a lot of neurobabble (sweeping statements about the brain that are actually not supported by compelling evidence).

Here are some things I am discovering that have some bearing on this complex phenomenon of the behavior of leaders, managers and those who govern.

Fast and slow

David Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow), Elkhonon Goldberg (the Executive Brain and other newer books) and many others have written about how we make decisions. The adult brain has stored many routines and short cuts that keep our Pre Frontal Cortex (PFC), the latest evolutionary development of our brain, from overload. If slow thinking is the work of the PFC, the conductor in our brain, then fast thinking is the product of sloppy work by other parts of our brain. They make lots of mistakes, such as taking a cellphone for a gun. Fast thinking is responsible for biases, impulsiveness and simply making poor decisions. Yet is serves a function – we couldn’t be slow thinkers all the time – we would get exhausted.

Our PFC consumes much more energy than any other part of our brain. If we could not rely on routines, templates, shortcuts, we would get overloaded, and maybe blow some fuses, and surely exhaust ourselves. And yet, the prescriptions we bring to our clients and counterparts presume that all decisions are made in a way that can only be done by PFC. It is our PFC that recruits all those areas of our brain that need to chime in on a decision we have to make (including a habit to change). Another labeling of these brain phenomena are the Default Network (DN) and the Executive Network (EN). Marcus Raichle from The University of Washington first coined the term Default Network which describes the mode to which our brain defaults when not on task.

The interaction between the EN and DN has been wonderfully described by Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack in their book ‘The Net and the Butterfly,’ (Chapter 2). In their reconstruction of how the Rolling Stones’ hit song ‘Satisfaction’ came about they illustrate how the DN and EN work together. The DN team that creates the breakthrough consists of Leonardo Da Vinci, Sun Tzu, Joan of Arc, Sherlock Holmes, Amelia Earhart, Napoleon, Euclid, Marie Curie, Michelangelo, Teresa de Avila, Erasmus, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. They are in the skunk room surrounded by Post-It Notes, clay, notepads, music, toys soldiers and airplanes, pens, markers, whiteboards and more. Keith Richards is like a CEO (if you can imagine that): he (granted, unwittingly) formulated a challenge and then goes to sleep, or does some mindless task so as not to interfere with the team’s creative problem solving. The interplay is critical, as is our ability to not always be ‘on.’ Hence, an exhortation to be creative, rational, on-task, is unlikely to work all the time (or at all), and may even be counterproductive. ‘Take a walk in the woods’ would probably result a better yield, yet in most organizations this would be perceived as slacking. Yet we know enough about the brain now (and meditation experts have known this forever) that such a walk can calm down our frantic brain; calming it down enough to look at multiple and novel options, whether these are about hard decisions or new strategies.

Fear and self-protection

When we are in a bad place, either because we are not well, someone close to us is suffering, or when we have experienced trauma, it is hard to get excited when our boss or chief executive talks about our vision or mission, the good we do in the world or the importance of our jobs. When we are in a bad place the most primitive part of our brain is activated. The limbic system which lies deep in our brain is the (evolutionary) old brain that served us a long time ago. It was primarily preoccupied by survival and belonging. This part of the brain is activated when strong emotions occur, emotions that accompany thoughts like ‘I am going to die’ (or my incompetence will be exposed) or they will kick me out of the tribe (I will be fired). While nowadays most of such threats are psychological in nature, they still activate these (fast acting) parts of our brain and put us in protect mode. When an individual, a team or an entire organization is in protect mode, and leaders need productivity and creativity, it is unlikely that exhortations will work. The first order of business is to create stability and safety. Once these basic conditions are in place, people can start to come out of their corners. But don’t expect them to become enthusiastic and energetic co-creators, which is what we usually want, and want it now (‘that’s enough slacking, back to work!’).

Relationships or numbers?

I have been reading Nora Bateson’s Small Arcs of Larger Cycles. It is a collection of short essays she has written over the last 5 years or so. The essays are of the kind that make you think and that change you. I am changed but not just because of the book. Nora’s essays found fertile ground in my head and heart because of what I saw here in Madagascar.

Last week we covered about 1200 kilometers, a few hundred of these over roads that looked more like dry riverbeds than roads. We went to places where foreigners are rarely seen, which meant that I created quite a stir – stares followed by smiles and waves from older kids and adults, fearful cries from the small ones.

We went to visit teams that had participated in a leadership development program (LDP) sponsored by the USAID Leadership, Management and Governance (LMG) Project. It started nearly a year ago in the region of Haute Matsiatra. The local facilitator team had selected the five best teams – best defined as ‘those who had achieved their measurable result.’ These results consisted of more women who came for their first prenatal visit, more women delivering their babies in a facility, more children vaccinated. The teams had selected those as leadership challenges that stood in the way of achieving the indicators set forth by CARMMA, the African Union’s campaign to accelerate the reduction of maternal and child mortality.

As we interviewed the teams on how they had managed to increase the numbers it became quickly clear that it wasn’t actually the numbers that were important. It was the relationships that made the positive changes possible: relationships that either had not existed before or that were of poor quality. The participants in the LDP had created relationships were none existed or improved relationships that were bad. They had moved these relationships from mistrust to trust. Contrary to popular opinion that trust, once broke, is as hard to put back together again as Humpty Dumpty, we saw that trust could be established or re-established easily.

Nora Bateson’s book and my experience here brought something sharply into focus, best illustrated with her words “Within the great whirl of life there is culture; in culture there is language; in language there is conversation; in conversation there are two beings; in the beings there are frames of perception and, in their communication, a kaleidoscope of unpredictable repatterning."

What had happened is that people had realized that it was only through the relationships, and thus through conversations, that they could hope to make things better. And in those relationships they changed as they learned about the other. The simple act of approaching and asking changes everything. It led to sharing and discovery, finding out that one’s point of view was not the only one and not necessarily the right one because it came from an expert. When interactions are based on trust rather than mistrust all things become possible that were not possible before.

And in this process people changed. We heard the same echoes wherever we went: “I changed from dictatorial to cooperative; I changed from impulsive and careless to caring and thoughtful. Ask my wife!” Those wives were often present or nearby as we interviewed the doctors at their health centers. They confirmed the changes. There was much laughter.

As a result of this trip I am changed too. I am also changing my vocabulary. I have become suspicious of words like ‘solutions.’ We ought to know by now that the problems that catapult poverty in our living room are not solvable from the mindset we have. It was Einstein who observed that problems cannot be solved from the same mindset that produced them. This quote is often cited but the deep meaning of it seems to be lost.

The mechanical, engineering mindset (every problem has a solution) is deeply anchored in our culture and it is easy to be sucked into its promises of engineering a better world. Yet I know that a better world cannot be created using an engineering framework simply because we are not made of steel and bolts. And now we are talking about systems, and system approaches and systems thinking, but they are still anchored in mechanical thinking: arrows and boxes, cause and effect, if this then that. Old wine in new bottles.

When Nora Bateson searched images for systems on Google she noticed that she had to scroll down through hundreds of images of circles and arrows and boxes before she found a picture of a human.

Indicator improvements do not make for better health care, although they may show that dollars entrusted to us were well spent. But the numbers don’t guarantee that they will continue to get better or at least stay where they are after we are gone with our extra resources, per diem, attention. I have come to believe that health care will only improve if the local relationships improve so that mistrust can be replaced by trust. It is only when people can talk together in ways that recognize that no one can do the difficult work alone and that we all need one another to improve whatever it is we want to improve.

Measuring up

Over the years I have come to see a few patterns in human behavior around me that appear to be critical to team or organizational success. One such pattern is behavior that used to puzzle me: people who seem to have a lot going for them behaving in ways that appear counter-intuitive or even self-defeating. Curiosity led me to coaching and coaching led me to understanding.

After some 100 hours of coaching individuals, during which I have had the privilege learning about those things people usually don’t talk about I discovered one thing that stands out consistently among all others: people seem to be trying to measure up to standards which drives the no longer puzzling behavior.

Standards may be one’s own as we might see in a highly ambitious person who set challenging goals for him or herself. But such standards usually have a history. They are often unconsciously or consciously adopted from a parent, a spouse or a friend. Sometimes these are only imagined.

I am reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet and see a life determined by imagined standards of the protagonist’s childhood friend. I see presidential candidates (and presidents) driven by a need to prove something. I see children bully or withdraw, being loud or quiet to prove something to self or others. I see colleagues get into trouble because they blame others for their ‘not measuring up.’ I see supervisors unwittingly reinforce standards that ignite childhood feelings of inadequacy.

Entire lives are determined by this desire to measure up or avoid altogether measuring up. It drives people to be on a relentless chase to get to the top, to do risky things, to hurt others, to be disagreeable, to fight or do the opposite: to run or fall into depression, to avoid risks, to stay in low jobs, to please or appease.

There are interpretations and assumptions as well as limiting beliefs that often stem from our childhood and the dynamics that played out in our families. These determine whether we will advance or hold ourselves back. We bring old standards into our current life and project them onto others, usually authority figures, who become the new standard setters. In hierarchical structures, supervisors and managers often unwittingly become the screens on which we project these old standards.

We blame others for our stuckness when the sense of being stuck comes from within. The voice on our shoulder, the inner critic, tells us we are not good enough and that we should try harder or give up. Imagine if we could brush this creature off our shoulder, tell the inner critic to shut up; if we could set our own standards of success, redefining the ones others set for us, and then pursue them, unencumbered by someone whispering, ‘you can’t do this, you are not good enough!’

This is the joy of coaching, to help others discover that they are, always, ‘good enough.”

Toxicity in the workplace

“The higher you go, the more problems are behavioral” —Marshall Goldsmith[i]

Over the years I have often been asked to work with senior leaders on their management and leadership skills. These requests don’t usually come from these leaders themselves but are suggested by other interested parties who feel that the dysfunctionality at the top gets in the way of project or program success.

I have been involved in a variety of senior leadership interventions, such as senior leadership development programs, teambuilding retreats, field visits, or executive coaching. In my past life at Management Sciences for Health, we received US government funding (when there was a lot of that) to send some of those senior leaders to the US to get a degree. Sometimes this served the double purpose of removing the person from the environment so that others could breathe again or thrive, and also to open their minds by exposing the person to other ideas, cultures and ways of working with people.

We don’t have a lot to show for how these interventions changed things. We may have some anecdotes, if we stay in touch with the people we worked with, but the impact of senior leadership development programs and executive coaching interventions is hard to measure. There is so much variation in how such interventions are done that it is hard to extract any lessons from them about how we should deal with dysfunctionality at the top. As a result we have very little guidance for people who find themselves working in situations where the quality of the work environment gets in the way of improving performance, no matter how good our interventions are.

Dysfunctionality at the top has been described well by Peter Senge[ii] in his classic ‘The Fifth Discipline,’ in particular in the chapter where he describes the “myth of the senior leadership team.” One of the ways we see this dysfunctionality expressed is in the form of ‘toxic teams.’ Toxic teams are a huge problem in organizations. Unfortunately they are quite ubiquitous around the world.

I often ask people about their experiences in working in a great team. It is troubling to see how many people have never had such an experience. Recently I asked a group of mid-level and senior leaders from six African countries the same question. Very few hands went up. When I started to talk about ‘toxic’ teams nearly everyone nodded their heads in recognition.

Most people know intuitively what a toxic team is. Toxic teams are created by toxic leaders. Toxic leaders are people who have responsibility over a group of people or an organization, and who abuse the leader–follower relationship by leaving the group or organization in a worse-off condition than when they took on the role of leader[iii]. They harm their staff, and thus also their organization, unit, program or project “through the poisoning of enthusiasm, creativity, autonomy, and innovative expression.”[iv] They spread their ‘toxic fumes’ through over-control, believing that leading is about control. The resulting toxicity in the work environment is bad for morale, bad for self-confidence and makes it unlikely that anyone would risk proposing something new or take initiative. Ergo, we have an organization or team that functions well below its potential.

Toxic teams especially where employment is not easily found and walking out not an option, perpetuate themselves as people have no other role models than those who control and depress. Consequently when members of a toxic team move into positions of authority themselves, at best they have no other models to emulate, and at worst, there new position of power triggers a wish for revenge. We can talk about performance improvement, better results or innovation until we are blue in the face, but we are unlikely to see any of this in teams (or organizations) that are awash in toxins.

So we should be very concerned about toxic teams and help people who are the source of the toxicity become aware of the impact they have on others and then help them with tools and coaching to turn things around.

Since we cannot change others, unless they ask our help in changing (but they’d still be doing the change, not us), we can contribute to reducing toxicity in the environment by asking ourselves some questions first. We can later use those same questions to assist a toxic leader who is ready to detox:

The questions are adapted from Goldsmith’s book “What got you here won’t get you there.”

1. Do you need to win, to be right, and to be the expert, all the time?

2. Do you always have to add your opinion, your advice to someone who has an idea? Is the proposal or presentation not good enough or complete without your ideas? Do you always have to add something, even if someone else already said the same? Can you ask yourself, before opening your mouth “what is lost if I don’t add my two cents?”

3. How often are you passing a judgment, on a person, someone’s idea? How often are you using judgmental adjectives in your head when listening to someone speak??

4. How often are you using words that dismiss the other’s ideas or proposals? Do you have a tendency to make destructive comments? Or share your negative or destructive thoughts out loud, even when not asked?

5. How often do you start your sentence with “No,” “Yes, but,” or “However?”

6. How important is it to you to tell the world how smart you are, by speaking out at a meeting, giving your opinion? And how often do you make your opinions sound like there are facts?

7. How often do you speak up or out when you are angry, even if you pretend you are not?

8. How often are you withholding information that could help others do their job better?

9. How often are you failing to give proper recognition or claiming credit for something you don’t deserve?

10. How often to you find yourself making excuses when something in your performance is being questioned (by anyone who cares) – sure way to stop getting feedback about things you could improve, or passing the buck or blame to others?

11. How often to you find yourself clinging to your past successes, things you accomplished when you were in a very different (often technical) position?

12. Do you find yourself playing favorites with some people, who may be exactly the ones that suck up to you, flatter you and make you feel great? What about the ones that make you feel uncomfortable? How do you treat them?

13. How often should you have said “”I’m sorry” but didn’t, or refuse to express regrets? And how often did you miss an opportunity to say “thank you,” express gratitude or recognize someone for a job well done? Especially when this person is critical of you??

14. How often do you find your mind wandering when (supposedly) listening to someone? Are you listening better to some people and less so too others? Do the ones who are your favorites get a better ear than the ones who critique you?

15. How often do you punish the messenger of bad news?

16. How often do you say, in the face of criticism, “that’s just the way I am”?

[i] Goldsmith, M. (2014). What got you here won't get you there, Hyperion eBook. Page 41.