Liane Davey's Blog, page 16

Why Having a Solution Isn’t Always the Best Solution

 

How to identify problems (instead of solving them) – video transcript

We often hear the following advice: “Don’t come to me with a problem, come with a solution.” 

While that advice is okay if you’re talking specifically about going to your manager, I think coming with a solution and not a problem is the start of so many conflicts on teams. 

Here’s why. 

If you’re coming to your team with a potential solution, it’s probably not to something in your own area because you could have just fixed that yourself. You’re likely coming with a solution to something that cuts across areas, or even sits completely in one of your colleague’s remits. 

When you do that, it can trigger a lot of unhealthy reactions. 

The first is that people might think you probably don’t know enough about how things work. Maybe the reaction you get is, “That would be great, if it weren’t explicitly prohibited in our contract…” 

This will just make you look ignorant, which is not very helpful. 

Another outcome to you suggesting a solution without having talked about the problem is the other person is caught off guard and becomes really defensive. If they didn’t know there was a problem in their shop and all of a sudden you jump straight to a solution, there might be lots of pushback and resistance. Again, you don’t want that. 

Of course, a third possibility is that you might be suggesting a perfectly good solution, but also unintentionally coming across as condescending. This attitude could convey that you don’t have the confidence in the other person to identify or solve the problem on their own, which will only harm your relationship with your peers. 

So instead of coming with a solution, it makes a lot more sense to come to your team with what the issue is. 

Here are a few tips on how to do that. 

First of all, start by saying you’re starting to notice a problem brewing. Then, qualify it with evidence; rather than saying “I feel like”, you can say something like “I took a look at the data” or “I’ve compiled a few things.” 

Coming with the evidence that something might be brewing is much more constructive, and will also make it a lot harder for people to ignore the point 

At this point you can then shift to a question. So, “What do you think this can be attributed to?” “What might be causing this? “What actually might be another explanation?” 

If you help to get your team aligned on what the problem is, then the person who is accountable for solving the problem is much more likely to be responsive to your suggestion and solve it themselves.

This approach avoids you putting yourself out there with some hair-brained answer that doesn’t actually work on the ground. You haven’t surprised somebody and made them defensive about an issue within their own domain that they hadn’t noticed, and you haven’t been condescending in suggesting that they aren’t capable of coming up with their own solution. 

So no more coming to your team just with a solution. Instead, come with some evidence and some ideas about what might be problems that they need to solve. 

More on this

Your Value is in Identifying the Problem, Not Solving It

Stop Solving Problems

Stop Rewarding Arsonists for Putting Out Fires

You’re Not Too Busy to Take Time off Work

 

You need a break! (video transcript)

Are you starting to think that vacation is not even worth it, because it’s so stressful getting ready and then so overwhelming coming back?

Here are some things to think about to make your vacation last a little longer and feel less stressful. 

Vacation stress management tip #1 – ‘Stocking the pantry’

Four weeks ahead of my most recent vacation I started ‘stocking the pantry’. 

That means I dedicated an hour three times a week to getting ahead on a few tasks. I got my invoicing finished early. I wrote blogs that are going to be going live while I’m away. I also wrote the blog for the week after I’m back, so that I have one less thing to think about in that busy week. 

So stocking the pantry really helps. 

Vacation stress management tip #2 – Marathon day

As I know that there’s going to be so much left to get done before I head off on vacation, I just accept it and try to make it fun. 

I start my marathon day at 7:00 AM with a quick massage to make myself feel better and to start to dream about what vacation’s going to be like, and after that massage, I go back and I work until everything is done. 

Vacation stress management tip #3 – Pre-holiday buffer day

If you can afford it in your vacation, book a day where you might have to work for a couple of hours to tie up those loose ends, but which also gives you some time to think about packing or other things you need to do before going away.

Vacation stress management tip #4 – Out-of-office rule 

When you’re on vacation, it’s really important to have a good out of office rule. 

Make sure you’ve talked to your colleagues and your manager beforehand to decide how you’re going to manage things.

For example, are you going completely off the grid until you return? Are you going to be checking in each morning at 8:00 AM, but only then? Whatever you decide is fine, but you need to ensure that it’s clear with people before you go and clear in your out of office message or your voicemail. 

Vacation stress management tip #5 – Allow yourself a cheat day 

As I’m an entrepreneur and I have my own business, I don’t feel comfortable being completely out of touch for two weeks. 

So what I do is assign a ‘cheat day’ during the vacation where I schedule a few meetings or set aside time to catch up on some important work.

For example, I might schedule one meeting from 7:30 to 8:15 in the morning, and another from 4:00 to 5:00 PM; that way the meetings don’t interfere with the prime time of the holiday!

Vacation stress management tip #6 – Post-holiday buffer day(s)

When you come back, I find it makes life so much easier to have one or two buffer days. 

Say if you come home on the Saturday, I set aside Sunday as a home buffer day to take care of things like laundry and unpacking. I then have Monday as a work buffer day, which is a day with no meetings so that I can get through my inbox and get my head around things. 

Another helpful tip for the work buffer day is to triage your inbox. Rather than responding to all emails in order, set some time aside to gauge which emails need prioritizing so you don’t waste your time responding to something that’s already been resolved in your absence. 

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Vacation is super important. It’s important to your business, to your team, to your productivity, to your mental health and to your relationships. Please make sure you do take your vacation, but try a few things to make it less aversive, both in the lead up and when you come back. 

More on this

Are You Taking Steps to Prevent Burnout?

A Personalized Approach to Feeling Less Overwhelmed

Restart

8 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed by Your Workload

Are you having difficulty focusing, trouble sleeping, or no success silencing the unrelenting anxious voice in your head? Are you struggling to get started in the morning or running out of energy long before the end of the workday? Or do you just catch yourself sighing, daydreaming, or looking at your phone for merciful distraction? You might be overwhelmed.

If you are feeling overwhelmed, you’re not alone. A 2021 study by the American Psychological Association revealed that nearly 60% of adult workers are experiencing negative impacts of work-related stress, including cognitive weariness (36%), emotional exhaustion (32%), or lack of interest, motivation, or energy (26%). And those numbers have increased by 38% since 2019.

It’s normal to be overwhelmed occasionally. The important thing is that you don’t get to a state of overwhelm too often or stay there too long. You need to protect yourself from burnout, which can have severe and lasting effects on your health and your career.

What’s Causing You to Feel Overwhelmed?

There are many possibilities for what might trigger that sense of being in over your head. So it’s no surprise that you feel overwhelmed if you’ve been put in a position with one of the following:

Too many tasks: you’re juggling multiple different activities at onceToo little time: you’re expected to deliver faster than is possibleToo hard: you’re not capable or confident in your ability to deliverNot knowing where to start: you don’t know how to approach a task or whom to ask for helpWorried about the stakes: you’re fretting about the impact of making a mistake

It’s also possible that your workload isn’t unreasonable but that you’re too tired, stressed, or disorganized to get on top of it. That doesn’t mean your issue is less important than someone whose workload is objectively unmanageable. What it means is that you might get less sympathy from your colleagues or boss, and you’ll need to be more self-sufficient in climbing out of the hole you find yourself in.

Steps to Reduce Overwhelm

I’ll leave the advice about negotiating your workload for another post and focus here on how to manage that horrible feeling of being overwhelmed. You can treat this list as a step-by-step and work through each step in order, or you can pick one or two that seem doable right now and use them to get some traction before you move on to others. Anything that helps you feel like you’ve made a dent in the problem (or reduced the dent it’s making in you) is good.

#1 Write it out

Thoughts swirling around in your head are nerve-wracking, not to mention distracting. Unfortunately, those distractions caused by your thoughtload make it harder to get through your workload, creating a vicious cycle of decreasing productivity and increasing overwhelm.

The other problem is that while your head is swimming in tasks and to-dos, you’ll often lose track of commitments that you should remember but have somehow disappeared because they’ve been crowded out.

Do yourself a favor and start writing things down. You’ll notice that getting your task list out of your head and onto a piece of paper (or a digital document) will give you the first dose of relief. Start with one long, random to-do list and get everything you can think of on that list.

“Write it out” doesn’t just refer to your task list; it’s also an excellent strategy for diffusing your emotional reactions. If you like journaling or morning pages, go that route. If that doesn’t appeal to you, use an emotion wheel to name what you’re feeling. It’s amazing how naming an emotion can reduce its hold on you.

#2 Break it down

When you have to complete a large project, you might feel like you’re trying to summit Everest, but you don’t climb Everest in one go; you have multiple stops along the way, each with its unique challenges and rewards. Break your tasks down. How are you going to get to Base Camp? Think of getting to Base Camp as doing all the preparation required to begin your tasks (collecting information, getting input, etc.). Then figure out how you can divide the work into different milestones.

#3 Get it going

One of the best ways to cope with overwhelm is to get moving. Action is a great antidote to anxiety. If I’m feeling especially overwhelmed, I make a deal with myself that I only have to do a small piece of the work. For example, if I need to write an article, I make a deal that I only have to create a bullet-point outline, or I only need to write for 15 minutes. Inevitably, once I’ve got the outline, I can start filling it in without needing a break. Fifteen minutes almost always turns into 45. The secret is that I’m not afraid to start if I only have to accomplish something small. And started is half the battle.

#4 Spread it out

Trying to muscle your way through a massive assignment all at once will give your brain more evidence for why it’s right to feel overwhelmed. Instead of trying to boil the ocean, spread the work out. If I’m writing, I spread it out over a series of early mornings. I’d rather write each week’s post for a couple of hours on Saturday morning, and a couple of hours on Sunday than use four hours of Saturday and feel like I’ve lost half my day. The “spread it out” technique can help you capitalize on your circadian rhythms. While I like to write very early in the morning, I do invoicing at my natural lull around 3 pm. If I don’t get it all done in one day, I save it for another 3 pm slot rather than eating into a more productive time before dinner.

Another form of spreading it out is to enlist others to help you. Maybe they have unique skills and can make the task easier. Perhaps they can take some of the workload off of you. Either way, it’s worth looking for opportunities to spread your tasks to colleagues who might be able to help.

#5 Talk it through

If you’re an extrovert, one of the most helpful approaches when you are overwhelmed might be to talk through your workload with a trusted colleague. In many cases, the other person won’t need to say a thing, just their friendly smile or empathetic nods will be all you need to feel a little less isolated. In other situations, talking it through will yield a great question that unlocks a new approach or even a similar example you can use as a precedent or a template for your work.

#6 Give it bounds

Another way to reduce the hold that your workload has on you is to find different ways to impose boundaries. Setting time limits is the most obvious boundary. I’m a big fan of time-limiting tasks, such as limiting how long I’ll spend responding to emails. I ordered this nifty TimeTimer after a client showed me his “secret” for keeping his meetings on time.

It’s not just time that you can bound; you might also impose quality boundaries such as limiting yourself to including three months’ worth of data in your analysis or two primary research articles. You can also limit the scope of collaboration and determine that you’ll socialize the idea with four people rather than ten. If you’re feeling swamped, be deliberate about what parts of your task need to be done to industrial strength and which fall into the “good enough is good enough” category. Set the appropriate bounds and stick to them.

#7 Try it on

If your concern stems from a fear that you’re not doing it right or that failure will have dire consequences, you can reduce that sense of dread by vetting your work along the way. (As a baker, I think about tasting the batter before it goes in the oven… it’s relatively easy to adjust your batter and almost impossible to change it once it’s baked.)

#8 Tune it out

This last step is essential. Once you’ve made some headway on your project, give yourself time to rest. It’s not just your body and your eyes that need time away from your work; it’s your brain. Giving yourself time to consolidate the information you’ve taken will allow you to come back to your task with a fresh perspective.

You’ll have your own strategies to tune it out. In general, you can use three different types of barriers to enforce your boundaries and help you tune work out: physical, technological, and social. Use physical barriers to distance yourself from the work (get your computer or phone out of your line of sight, go into a different room, leave the building). Use technological barriers to reduce the pull of work (turning off notifications, using an app that doesn’t let you access certain things, having a separate device for work versus personal use). Finally, you can use social barriers (talking with friends or family, asking for help staying away from your device, planning fun activities that distract you from work).

Final Thoughts

Feeling overwhelmed is awful in itself. The cruel fact that feeling overwhelmed makes you less productive, which causes your workload to pile up, which increases your sense of being overwhelmed, is a double whammy of suckiness. I assure you that the most important thing to do is something, anything. Action reduces anxiety.

Further Reading

(As I was researching for this post, I found this article about burnout by Ginny Graves. I enjoyed it, and you might too.)

Good and bad stress

Prioritize Means Deprioritize

Does a Manager Have to Be a Therapist These Days?

 

How to Deal With One of the Most Annoying Workplace Habits

 

Stop workplace rants (video transcript)

Do you ever find yourself in a situation where someone is venting to you and you want to be nice, but you also want to get back to work?

Here are three quick lines that you can pull out of your back pocket anytime someone is venting and you need to move along.

1) “What do you need?”

The first scenario is one where someone is venting to you how they feel, and they’re telling you everything they’re worried about and what’s not working, but without explaining what would actually make things better.

In this case, the simple little line is just, “What do you need?”. This line is so effective because it makes them stop and pause to actually evaluate things themselves and consider what they could do to make things better.

2) “Where from here?”

The second scenario is where someone is droning on about the past, and they’re stuck thinking about everything that’s come before.

The line in this case is “Where from here?”

In saying this, you avoid debating what happened or taking sides in some past argument, and instead you help the person figure out how to move on today.

3) “What’s left?”

The third line is for when people keep providing excuses and reasons why something won’t work or why they can’t move forward, and you need to get them unstuck and onto something that they can actually do to make progress.

In this case, the line is “What do we still need to solve for?” or even just “What’s left?”

This is a way of avoiding putting too much focus on what doesn’t work, and instead focusing on what they still have to solve for to be able to move forward.

–

Each of these lines has the same idea behind it.

One, to not invalidate or argue with someone who feels like they’re not in a winning situation. Don’t fight with them as it will only increase and prolong their frustration.

Secondly, by keeping things short you avoid provoking defensiveness in the other person.

Finally, these techniques make sure that you don’t assume accountability for those problems. These are not your problems to solve.

These great back pocket lines are ideal for when somebody’s venting to you and you want to be a good teammate, but you also want to move things along.

More on this

When Your Teammate Needs to Vent

4 alternatives to throwing your teammate under the bus

Are you lending support to a teammate or just enabling gossip?

Prevent Slack and MS Teams From Overwhelming Your Team

I gave a speech to a fantastic group of high-tech start-up CEOs. I talked with them about how our failure to manage people’s attention is diluting them to the point of poor productivity and emotional burnout. Someone suggested that Slack was a major culprit; it was clear that many of the leaders in the group had developed a love-hate relationship with the tool. So when one of the audience members emailed me to ask for my advice on wrangling the Slack monster (or Teams monster), here’s what I said.

How to Manage Your Team’s Use of Collaboration Tools 1. Good Organization and Hygiene

Start by setting up your collaboration software so that it feels like it serves you rather than you serving it. Put effort into getting the proper channels and deciding what notification strategy you’ll use for each channel (full email notification, in-app notification, or mute). Then, set a frequent reminder to revisit your settings and prune your channels and threads back to something manageable. 

2. Blackout Periods

Have blackout periods where your team members have their settings on Do No Disturb, and all notifications turned off. If it makes sense for your team, have a regular, recurring time such as 9-11 and 1:30-3:30 each day. If that doesn’t work, find your own way to have a meaningful chunk of time where people can shut out the distractions. Whichever method you choose, be sure to talk about this time so that everyone knows it’s part of how your team works. You want it to be normal for team members to be unresponsive sometimes. 

To make this work, you’ll also need to institute a way to get in touch with one another in case of an urgent issue during a blackout period. Ideally, use a mode such as a text or a phone call so that it will notify the person without them having to monitor anything continually. 

3. Communication Guidelines

As a team, set guidelines for what should go into Slack and what should be communicated through other means. Slack is mainly written communication, which is light on context cues and prone to negativity bias (what experts refer to as “lean” communication). It’s also an asynchronous communication tool where people send and receive information at different times. As a lean/asynchronous communication vehicle, you don’t want to rely on Slack to communicate about any of these types of issues: 

Important issues where you need to know that everyone has devoted a certain amount of time to the content.  Novel situations where people don’t have history or experience and therefore might misinterpret the message.  Complex issues with many interrelated factors and unknowns (but DO use it for complicated, linear processes or deliberations where you can apply a set of rules and processes). [If you’re interested in the difference, I enjoyed this article in the MIT Sloan Management Review about Rick Nason’s work on the difference between complex and complicated problems.] Interactions with people who don’t share the same experiences, language, or context. Situations where there might be contentious or personal issues Owner’s Manual

In addition to any team ground rules for communication, it’s also helpful to have your own standards for how you like to collaborate. You can create your own instruction manual to get the most out of you, just like you have for your car or washing machine. The owner’s manual is where you articulate how you prefer to communicate and which mode colleagues should use for different things. For example, you might say, “I don’t monitor Slack or email after hours but if you need me, feel free to text because I’ll get that.” 

4. Communication Bursts

Since I read Christoph Riedl and Anita Williams Woolley’s HBR article, I’ve been a big fan of “Communication Bursts.” Bursts are a way to coordinate focused time, maybe two or three times per week when everyone will be working independently and monitoring Slack to be immediately responsive to one another (and allowing for spontaneous and ad hoc calls). I think this is a great approach, particularly if you’re in different time zones and want at least a few opportunities where team members can get access to move things forward quickly. 

5. Meetings

Slack and Teams do not replace your need for team meetings as a forum to discuss issues and dynamically come to a shared view on an issue. For example, you could reserve 15 minutes of a weekly operations meeting to ask if there are any questions or updates on conversations that have been happening in Slack. You can use Slack to identify topics that need more preparation, attention, options, or alignment and deserve dedicated time on a monthly agenda. Remember that lean/asynchronous communication is excellent for some things, while the rich/synchronous forum that meetings support is better for others. 

Our desks (and desktops) are riddled with technologies that were supposed to make us more efficient and effective but have made us more frantic, frenzied, and frustrated. Unread emails are piling up, your phone is dinging with new text notifications, your watch is vibrating, and the number in your Slack red circle is climbing every minute. It’s hard to ask any individual team member to tackle the issue independently. So instead, establish new team standards and claw back your attention and focus. 

Further Reading

Are you using the right virtual collaboration tools?

How to Manage Conflict in Virtual Teams

10 questions to increase collaboration

 

Are Your Emotions Getting the Better of You?

 

Owning emotional situations – 3 communication strategies (video transcript)

Have you ever been in a conflict or a disagreement in your team, and although you have the skill set to deal with it constructively you lose control?

This is what I call an emotional hijack moment.

You are not your best self, and you need to figure out a way to resolve this situation without ruining your reputation or completely embarrassing yourself in front of your team.

Some days we’re just not in a position to be our best grown-up selves, and we lose it a bit. So in today’s article, let’s look at three steps to dealing with an emotional hijack moment during a team disagreement or conflict, and learn how to take back control of your emotions and the situation.

Step 1: Own the situation

The first step is perhaps the most uncomfortable, as it involves admitting to yourself and everybody else that you have lost control of your emotions.

However, you’re not giving people new information by doing this. They’ll see that you’re upset through your body language, your facial expression and maybe even your voice.

As such, it’s okay to say something like, “This conversation is throwing me for a loop”, “I feel like I’m going throw up at the moment” or even “Wow, my heart is racing in this conversation”.

Give them something very simple and objective.

The benefit of this is that verbalizing these emotions makes them less powerful. Often in these situations we put so much energy into pretending that we aren’t upset, which is wasted effort as everyone can see it written all over your body language anyway.

It’s much better to highlight what everybody can already see anyway.

So the first step is to name your emotions, say how you’re feeling and give people some kind of story about what’s going on.

Step 2: Give some insight into the situation

The second step is to give them some insight about the cause of what’s upsetting you.

It may be that you’re imagining something playing out and that’s why you’re getting upset. For example, if a new set of priorities is introduced which will render the last six months of your team’s work wasted, you can state that you are concerned about how to break the news to your team.

Another situation might be that you thought you were done with a project, and that the thought of having to do more work over the weekend is upsetting.

Be honest with them about what is actually going on.

Do as much as you can to give insight into what’s beneath the emotional reaction. Is it related to some kind of internal narrative? Is something that you value or care about being violated?

Help them understand where the emotional reaction is coming from. This will allow them to offer solutions or assistance in ways that will help you address the source of that emotional reaction.

Step 3: Ask for what you need to move forward

After clarifying the causes of your upset, you then need to ask for what you need to move forward.

There are lots of ways of asking for help depending on the situation and your personal approach.

You can ask them to not pay attention to the tears welling in your eyes and to get back on track.

You can also ask for a specific kind of help. In the example where you’re imagining breaking the story to your team, you can ask for help in figuring out how to tell them.

It may also be that you know yourself well enough to know that things aren’t going to improve in the next five minutes, in which case you could ask for an adjournment.

Remember: ask for what you need.

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It’s important to remember that everyone struggles with emotions, and everyone has days where they can take over. However, the immature thing to do is to pretend nothing is happening and let the negative emotions build up further. Instead, by being transparent about what’s bothering you and then asking for help in moving forward, you take the high ground and retake control of that emotional hijack moment.

More on this

3 Questions to interrupt an emotional diatribe

Should I risk making someone emotional?

When conflict gets emotional

How to Evaluate the Quality of Meetings

I’ve been working with several leadership teams recently to help them become more efficient and effective, particularly in their meetings. It’s a simple process that makes a big difference, particularly optimizing the time the teams spend together. When one client asked how to tell if the process was working, I shared the criteria I use to evaluate the quality of a meeting. I figured it might be helpful to you, too.

Meeting Evaluation Criteria

There are several criteria I’m paying attention to if I’m assessing the effectiveness of a meeting.

Preparation

The first questions I ask are about preparation. Without preparation, most meetings are filled with aimless opining. They go on longer than the discussion merits and often require follow-ups because there was insufficient information to support a decision. Total. Waste. Of. Time.

When I evaluate preparation, I go one agenda item at a time. Was the owner clear on the purpose of the discussion? Did they have a primer document that set up participants to contribute? Did they choose an effective structure to facilitate the deliberations?

If the presenter was a guest to the team, there are additional questions to ask. Had the item’s sponsor prepared the presenter by sharing the goals of the discussion, the context, and anything that might derail the debate? More on having guests here.

Then I gauge the preparedness of the participants. Did they read the primer? Were they ready to add value? Was the value based on evidence rather than just opinion? Did they represent their different positions and perspectives effectively?

Value Add

One of the most important measures of meeting quality is whether the content was suitable for the forum. (To avoid the old “meeting that could have been an email” problem.) Unfortunately, most meetings are filled with one-way monologues without attention to what gets on the agenda. As a result, they add little value, infringe on individuals’ accountability, and make people feel the team is a waste of time.

When evaluating the value of the agenda items, I’m assessing whether the topic needed to come to a meeting. Did the team contribute to the proposed plan or the decision, or did it come in fully baked and leave in exactly the same form in which it arrived? My position is that the most important thing you can do in a meeting is have conflict. Productive conflict, of course. If you’re not disagreeing, debating, challenging, and struggling to come to the best plan of action, what the heck are you doing?

Was the interaction focused on answering questions at the right level? At the executive level, I expect the team to primarily answer “why” questions with a few “what” questions. The departmental level should focus on answering “what” and “who” questions. For the most part, teams should avoid answering the “how” questions and leave those decisions to the people who will do the work. Leadership teams that spend time solving the “how” questions tend to be remarkably inefficient (and overbearing).

One final thing I’m looking for is that more agenda items add value proactively than reactively. For example, are the discussions focused on what’s coming and how the team will shape the response (anticipating, envisioning, defining, delegating) or on what’s wrong with work that’s already been done? There are undoubtedly essential discussions after work is completed, including those focused on evaluating, course-correcting, and learning. However, the more teams focus on adding value proactively, the less likely they will have to rework, firefight, or crisis manage.

Contribution

A team is a group of individuals and evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of a team requires an eye on how each of those individuals contributes. Without each person engaging, many meetings lose the value of diverse contributions. They over-emphasize the perspectives of a few vocal members, tolerate people being silent, and generally make teamwork into a spectator sport.

When I’m judging the success of a meeting, I look at the amount and quality of each person’s contributions. For example, did the person take up a proportionate amount of the airtime, or did they dominate or shrink into the background?

It’s not just about how much they contributed but also how they contributed. Who was asking great questions and opening up the conversation, and who was shutting it down? Who was reflecting on what they were hearing and adding to the ideas of others, and who was doing a poor job of listening and building?

Drive to Action

You might have heard me use the gymnastics expression “stick the landing” to talk about an effective end to a meeting. Without a tidy close, most meetings are just modestly interesting conversations with no impact on the course of events. Instead, they leave misalignments, set team members up to disappoint one another, and erode confidence in the value of the team.

Was there a clear action step attached to each agenda item? Was there an ambiguity left in the commitments, such as leaving terms undefined? Did each action step name a person who is responsible and a date for when it needs to be done?

Meeting Assessment Tool

When you put those criteria together, you can evaluate each agenda item on a 2×2 grid based on how worthy the conversation was of the team’s time and how well the team used the conversation to add value. I invite you to share this evaluation sheet with your team and try it in a few meetings. It will create an important discussion about using your time more effectively. You might not like your assessments for the first while, but you’ll see how quickly people make a change when the quality of the agenda items is an open discussion.

Meeting Evaluation Tool (Click to download)

 

Further Reading

8 Techniques to Make Your Meetings More Effective (Part I)

8 Techniques to Make Meetings More Effective (Part II)

8 Quick Tips to Shorten Your Meetings

 

Starting a New Relationship

 

New relationship mistakes – 3 things to avoid (video transcript)

Are you just getting into a new relationship and figuring out how you can get it off on the right foot?

Whether it’s a new work relationship or a romantic one, when we are so invested in getting that relationship off on the right foot there are many mistakes that we can end up making.

Making certain decisions at the very beginning of a relationship will help set them up with the best chance for success.

New relationship mistake number 1: Presenting a false version of yourself

We all want to fit the profile of what the person’s looking for, whether that’s from a job site or on Bumble.

However, being something that you’re not or playing a role from the beginning just means that that person is signing up for a relationship with somebody other than you.

Don’t do it. It just means you will have to be playing a part for the foreseeable future.

New relationship mistake number 2: Pretending to be low maintenance

The second thing we do is we pretend to be completely low maintenance. This results in us thinking “I don’t need anything, you can treat me any way you want and I’ll just keep coming back for more”.

You don’t want to set yourself up as somebody who needs nothing and is completely low maintenance. That’s setting up the relationship in a way that is all take and no give, which doesn’t make any sense.

New relationship mistake number 3: Not communicating expectations

Finally, the third thing we do when we’re starting out in relationships is that we hold expectations that we don’t communicate to the other person. We sit and wait to see, will they pass our test or not?

Starting out a relationship with poor trust and with no foundation for something solid going forward is no good.

What to do instead

So instead, understand who are you and what a great match looks like for you.

Whether that’s a great match with a job, organization or boss, or it’s a great match in a romantic relationship, identify what you’re looking for and what works for you and know who you are. You can present the best version of you, just not somebody else.

Secondly, it’s perfectly fine to state from the beginning “Here’s the one thing that is the most important to me and what I’m looking for”.

Even if it’s your first job interview or first relationship, it’s important to state your goals and feelings to ensure you are a good match.

If you state at the start of your new job that you need a lot of stimulation and a chance to innovate and they aren’t receptive, you’ll know immediately that it’s not somewhere you want to work.

If say on your first date that you’re somebody who needs a lot of outdoor adventure and to be on the go all the time, and the person says they’re more of a chilling at home with a movie type, again, is that somebody you wanted to be in a relationship with?

Finally, it is so important to share your expectations with people and clarify what “good” looks like for you. For example with a prospective boss, you could say “I’d love if I could have a one on one with you for 15 minutes at least once a week; that would make feel like I’m up to speed and I have what I need”.

Avoiding these mistakes will help you get your new relationship started on the right foot and set up to last over the long term.

More on this

The first 3 things to ask when you join a new team

How To Repair A Workplace Relationship When Trust Is Broken

How to End a Business Relationship

10 Ideas to Create An Office People Want to Return To

Many people are resisting coming back into the office. As I said in my last post, overcoming the inertia of two years of working remotely is hard. It’s tough if all your organization offers is the same hum-drum day of tasks but with an hour commute on each side.

If you’re trying to jump-start your team back into a new office groove, why not start by creating a few months that are chock-a-block with the best of teamwork. So here’s what I would be sprinkling into my schedule:

An Office That’s Worth the CommuteBuddies: We know that remote work made it challenging to build skills (or know where there were capability gaps). I read about one social learning technique that I thought was brilliant. You pair people up and have them interview one another about one thing they have learned and one thing they’re still trying to figure out. This method reduces the friction of asking for help and allows good ideas to spread. Schedule a one-hour buddy session on an office day each month.Customer or Partner Meet-Ups: Many people have gone over two years without interacting directly with key customers or partners—time to fix that. Invite guests into the office and assign someone to host them. Make the host responsible for soliciting questions in advance and setting up the conversations. Have the customers or partners participate in a panel discussion in front of the whole team and arrange smaller meet-and-greets before and after.Mission Control Spaces: Create a central space in the office that’s visually appealing and full of tools to get people contributing ideas and building on one another’s suggestions. I’d be ordering vinyl stencils of inspiring quotes or company strategies. I’d be covering one wall in paper and buying the funkiest sticky notes I could find. I’d have piles of markers lying around and a stack of stickers that people could use to react to the ideas. I would do everything to make this space as tactile and un-digital as possible. I’d then call out the coolest things I read on the wall in a weekly message with the whole team.Breaking Bread: Create opportunities to eat around a table together. It can be as simple as bringing bagels once a month, as inexpensive as having time for everyone to eat their lunches together, or as elaborate as a full team dinner. What matters is that you create downtime where people can eat and chat informally.New Employee Milestones: I’d have in-office events for newer employees at various milestones. All the new employees from a given month would come together for a full day of orientation. Three months later, I’d have them back for a listening and learning session where you interview them about their insights. At six months, the focus could be on a specific initiative, value, or cultural pillar. You could even have the six-month day be a group outing for community service.Communities of Interest: During remote work, evidence suggests that we did a decent job fostering trust and connection within our intact teams but didn’t do quite well in maintaining relationships across teams. Now’s a great time to build a few communities of interest that cut across your formal organizational boundaries. It might be a customer experience group that draws from all different functions. It could be a group for those who aspire to leadership positions. Make time and space and provide funding or connections that allow the group to learn together.Joint Team Sessions: Host a session with another team in the organization where you’re strengthening relationships and deepening understanding among team members. Include a tour, a project update, or a deep dive on a topic. Take turns with which team plays host.Office Hours: Set times when you are available to chat with team members on any topic that they’d like. Don’t sit in your office if you want to make it clear that this is welcomed and not an interruption. Grab a spot in a common area and leave your computer behind. Grab a magazine. Or schedule a couple of people to join you at the start of each office hour and invite others to drop in. If you want to be playful, have a theme snack (popcorn, donuts, ice cream sandwiches in summer).Community Building: If your organization supports charitable work, use an afternoon to break the team into different groups to go out into the community. Give employees some options and flexibility about how they’d like to contribute, and then let the work be the reward.Blue Light Specials: Do you remember “Blue Light Specials” at Kmart. I do. There would be a blue light flashing in an aisle and an announcement of a quick sale on something in that aisle. “Blue Light Special on sleeping bags, Aisle 14!” I think people bought sleeping bags because of the hype and because they didn’t want to miss out. What if you did the same in your office. Number your whiteboards and have a blue light special. “Blue Light Special White Board 3… all great ideas for the name of the new product.” You probably don’t have a public address system, but an email would do. Everyone who’s available gathers at the whiteboard to brainstorm for 10 minutes.

None of these ideas is earth-shattering, but it’s the spirit that counts. So what can you do to make returning to the office worthwhile? How can you add more collaborative, social events to your calendar? What have you seen that really worked? Share your ideas in the comments and we’ll create a really great resource!

Further Reading

Reset Your Remote Management Approach

How to Onboard New Employees Remotely

Wasted time in meetings

 

Why People Don’t Want to Return to the Office

Are you reluctant to return to the office? Is your team?

I know many people who are. One of them is helping to craft their company’s Return to Office program. (I think it’s great that the company has an office-skeptic on the committee because there are plenty of them are in the workforce, and they need representation.)

So, how much resistance is there to returning to the office? Will it fade over time, or is the old office model permanently doomed?

Magnitude of the Problem

Before I get into the reasons for resistance and the likelihood that it will persist, it’s worth taking a moment to assess the size of the problem.

There are a variety of studies (of varying quality) that gauge anti-office sentiment. For example, a Flexjobs survey of 2,100 people who worked remotely during the pandemic found that 65% wanted to remain fully remote. A recent Pew survey shows a lower percentage, closer to 60%, who want to work remotely, but not necessarily five days a week.

Research by James R Bailey published in Fast Company shows that resistance to office-based work is strongest among younger workers and weakest among Gen Xers. But, interestingly, attitudes about the office among Baby Boomers are mixed.

And there’s also the much-ballyhooed finding that the higher you go in an organization, the more likely you will be racing back to the office. Three-quarters of executives want to work from the office the majority of the week. (It’s easy to want to return to a reserved parking spot, mahogany desk, and doting assistant. Am I too cynical?!?)

Ok… back to the point. No matter how you slice it, the conclusion is that the resistance to returning to the office is significant, the gap in attitudes between leaders and employees is large, and we’d better be taking both seriously.

But how much of it will pass, and which aspects are here to stay?

Passing Resistance to Returning to the Office

I suspect that a reasonable portion of the foot-dragging on returning to the office will fade over the next six months. Here are some reasons why I believe that:

Inertia

Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest, while bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. Do you remember that law of physics? I think it’s a psychological phenomenon as well. If you think back to March 2020, you’ll recall the whiplash we all got at going from the flat-out, frenetic pace of our office life back then to being locked into our homes—grounded. It was a painful screeching halt, and many of us crashed in the process. Body in motion tend to stay in motion. But we’ve adapted.

Now the inertia is working in the opposite direction. We’re accustomed to working from home, using our commute time for more exercise, family bonding, or accomplishing things on our to-do lists. We’re comfy in our soft pants and slippers. We like the efficiency of switching from one meeting to the next with the click of a button. So, the thought of booting the system back into office mode is aversive for many. We’re bodies at rest right now.

Once we get back, many of us will remember the good parts of being in the office. We’ll enjoy getting into nicer clothes. We’ll get used to having someone in a food court make us a sandwich again. Then, the inertia will switch directions.

Office-Life Infrastructure

Another huge problem is that we’ve lost the infrastructure we relied on to allow us to work from an office. So many parents of school-aged children haven’t needed before and afterschool care, and trying to find new solutions for that will take a while.

Our hard pants don’t fit.

We went down to one car in the family and don’t have an easy way to get to the office.

We secretly moved to Bora Bora. (If you did this, please write to me. I LOVE you!)

It’s going to take a while to get that stuff sorted and rebuild the infrastructure of office life. But it will come back. The shuttered delis under office towers will re-open. You’ll resolve your childcare situation. You’ll find a new, 2022-appropriate version of office wear.

Safety Concerns

For some employees, the resistance to returning to the office comes from a fear that it’s still not safe. If you are immunocompromised, pregnant, or caring for a vulnerable family member, returning to an office full of close talkers who aren’t wearing masks is a constant threat to your safety. Over time, our protection from Covid will increase, and we will think of it more like the seasonal flu. As someone who made it 2.5 years and just got Covid this week, I can confidently say that we’re NOT there yet!!! But we’ll get there.

Those are just some of the reasons, which to me are very legitimate, why people are resisting a return to the office. With a little empathy and flexibility,  I expect these to fade as people start returning a couple of days a week and get their sea legs back.

Which Problems with Office Work are Here to Stay?

Now for the other side of the story. I believe there are sources of resistance that aren’t going away. Ever. They are inherent downsides to working in an office.

Commuting… Ew!

In the Flexjobs survey, the number one reason for the desire to continue with remote work was to avoid the commute. This was given as the #1 reason by a whopping 84% of respondents (followed closely by the cost savings cited by 75%). Of course, commuting has always been brutal, but with gas prices at record highs, every trip to the pumps is another kick in the teeth.

Comfort and Control

I’ve been working from home for seven years now. I love it. High on my list of perks is that I control the thermostat. I spent 17 years freezing my butt off in offices (well…sadly, that is not literally true.) Did you know that research supports the importance of a warmer room if you want women to be at their best? Seriously, it makes a massive difference that I’m no longer distracted by my brain telling me I might freeze to death any minute!

Ok, I know that’s a minor thing, but a bunch of minor things adds up to many of us being more comfortable at home.

If you’re working from home, it’s easy to pop out and pick up the kids from school in the time most people take for a coffee break. If you’re in the office, not so much. If you’re working from home, you can let the cable guy in without taking five hours off to wait for them. If you’re working from home, you can empty the dishwasher on a break (rather than filling the dishwasher with the dirty cups your childish, selfish coworkers insist on leaving in the sink!!! I had forgotten about how much that drives me around the bend!)

Distractions

Now that the pandemic puppies are housebroken, most of us can create a home office environment with few distractions. No chatty Cathy’s perching a butt cheek on our desks and talking our ears off. No getting sucked into a juicy conversation, you overhear from the other side of the room. No being taken off task by the boss showing a guest around.

If you’ve managed to stem the self-inflicted wounds created by checking your email every three minutes or responding to each Slack comment, you’ve probably got your productivity to a pretty nice spot by now. But, unfortunately, offices are naturally distracting places. Especially our modern open-office plans. That’s not going to change, and if workloads keep increasing, the resentment toward anything that decreases our productivity will likely escalate.

Where From Here?

Get the resistance in the open. Talk about it. Acknowledge both sides of the issue. Be empathetic about the hump many need to get over during the first few weeks back in the office. Be open to flexible arrangements that allow employees to get the best aspects of the office for part of the week and the best of working remotely the other part. If you do that, I suspect little resistance will be left six months from now.

For Elon Musk, David Solomon, and the others that have decided to ignore and invalidate the resistance, well…good luck. You’ll be providing fascinating data for Organizational Psychology nerds like me.

Further Reading

The Pros and Cons of Hybrid Teams

Working Remotely

How to Onboard New Employees Remotely