Thursday, April 30, 2020
Paula's Team Tonic
Two Critical Elements Leaders Need Right Now
In this time of disruption none of us is exempt from difficulties and all of us need support to step up and show our best selves. The alternative is to retreat into fear, helplessness, and blame. In this newsletter I deal with two distinct capabilities organizational leaders right now in order to build resilient teams: empathy and competence.
Empathy
Empathy is critically important right now and fundamental to quality connection and psychological safety. Leaders must excel in this attribute if they are to bring out the best in their people. The term empathy is often misunderstood and loosely equated with caring for others, telling others that they are understood or being aware of others' human needs. However, whether one is seen to be empathetic or not is determined by its recipient. It's their experience that matters.
Empathy encompasses the following five core elements:
- Seeing the world as others see it
- Deeply connecting with the lived experience of another, both rational and emotional
- Managing the internal tendency to judge another's map of the world
- Genuinely caring about another person's experience, and not just when it's easy to do so.
- Communicating in a language that enables another to feel known, cared for and understood
When we experience empathy, we are far more able to articulate our fears, challenges, concerns, hopes, and dreams. With the articulation of our deeper thought and feelings comes the ability to see them for what they are and to move through them most positively. This in turn prevents team members from feeling stuck and enables them to capitalize on their potential.
Competency
Leaders who model competence enable others to feel more anchored and hopeful despite uncertainty. The following five actions are exemplars of leaders demonstrating competence
- Building confidence by frequently communicating the approach that will enable the organization to succeed through the crisis
- Connecting teams with shorter and longer-term purpose as they navigate disruptive change
- Demonstrating each person's specific role in relation to immediate goals and readjusting roles so that people can contribute maximally in the new environment
- Clarifying expectations regarding what good looks like in the present environment
- Dynamically providing feedback so individuals and teams can adjust in line with changing needs
Leaders frequently have one of the above two dimensions but rarely have both.
Paula Flynn, The Alchemist of Teams. Freeing Collaborative Genius
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Paula Flynn is internationally renowned as The Alchemist of Teams. Her approach has been deployed in over forty countries around the world. She has an uncanny ability to free collaborative genius, enabling teams and groups to achieve truly transformational results. She has achieved tremendous success with Boards of Management, executive teams, line functions, strategic teams, and alliances in the world's highest-profile organizations. Her reputation as an incisive, high impact consultant, facilitator, and coach has resulted in organizations using her expertise across diverse industries in every continent across the globe.
Paula's distinctive approach enables teams to embrace dissonance, transform conflict, shift mindsets as well as generate the synergy to coalesce around compelling purpose. Her unique expertise has generated enormous value not only in typical contexts but in situations where collaboration is perceived as impossible.
Her clients include CEOs, VPs, and senior leaders in fortune 500 companies and public sector organizations globally, including Kraft Foods, Mondelez,, Bacardi, Fonterra, Firmenich, GHD, Clayton Utz, PwC, major hospitals, health insurers and the Department of Health and Human Services