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Topics Allyship Growth Mindset Coronavirus Diversity & Inclusion Performance
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Communication | Culture & Leadership | Engagement | Feedback | Growth Mindset |
Management


IN A HYBRID WORLD, QUALITY MANAGERIAL CONVERSATIONS MATTER MORE THAN EVER


By Ted Bauer
August 5th, 2021


“WELL, THAT WAS AWKWARD.”

Years ago, Gallup did a Twitter thread asking about the most awkward
conversations people have ever had with a manager. As you’d imagine, there were
some doozies — a good chunk were termination stories, which is inherently a bit
awkward, but the stories ran the entire spectrum. Someone saw a manager call a
10-year employee named David “Phil.” Someone else saw a manager dead sprint out
of a meeting because he couldn’t deal with the topic at hand.

Communication at work has never been stellar. It can be stellar, yes, but
stellar’s not commonplace. There’s often a mix of absentee managers — called
“the silent killer of companies” — and micromanagers, but not much in the
middle.

In the post-COVID world of work, the role of managers is going to shift pretty
dramatically, though, and much of that shift is going to happen around
communication and the quality of conversations that the manager can produce with
direct reports.


IMPROVE CONVERSATIONS

While quality conversations were important before, in the post-COVID world of
work, they’re going to be even more imperative. Employees may be literally all
over the map. Check-ins need to be less about deliverables and more about
mentoring, employee development, and broader strategy. Mentoring, developing,
nurturing of employees will be a mix of virtual and periodic in-person.

Plus: as automation gets more sophisticated, increasingly managers who just do
the check-box, “update me on these tasks” conversations will be replaced.

At NLI, our research has consistently highlighted three techniques that help all
managers increase the quality of conversations with direct reports and peers,
that are especially helpful when emotions are high.

 * Minimizing threat and risk
 * Maximizing insights from employees
 * Using a growth mindset and fostering a growth mindset in others

So what can managers do to improve their conversations?


FIRST: UNDERSTANDING THREAT

If the last 18 months had a core theme, it’s threat. We changed the way we work.
We lost jobs. We lost loved ones. We bickered about science daily. Every week
seemed chaotic. And chaos creates a threat response in the brain.

Our brains perceive three levels of threat.

Level 1 threats do not seem to pose immediate danger. Your brain is aware of the
threat, without yet feeling alarmed. An example of this threat is hearing, in
passing, that a hurricane is making its way toward your home state.

Level 2 threats are those in your neighborhood. Your heart rate and stress
hormones increase as you prepare to either run or fight. You may become
hyper-alert and feel a bit alarmed, significantly degrading cognitive resources.
This is the hurricane making landfall. It’s near you.

Level 3 threats are upon you. Your brain and body are in full-on panic mode;
you’re making decisions entirely reflexively; and you are actively recruiting
every bodily resource to fight or flee. Minimal complex thought takes place.
This is the hurricane coming right towards you.

The post-COVID threat baseline in workers is so high that managers have to
interact in a way that reduces threat intentionally. That’s because when you’re
at a high threat level, neutral or even positive statements can be interpreted
as threats. The result is that…

You want to keep your direct reports in a Level 1 state. This involves clearly
communicating about what’s happening with them, their responsibilities, but the
overall business as well. A manager’s elevated threat state only worsens his or
her team’s threat state, and ultimately leads to poor decision-making.

Studies have also shown that ambiguity can feel more threatening than an actual
threat. The working world we’re entering right now has a lot of ambiguity for
millions of employees. Your direct reports might already be at Level 2 just
because of the ambiguity about working styles, reporting, potential layoff
waves, etc. It’s important to be clear with them, check-in frequently on topics
other than just task work, and minimize those threats.


UNDERSTANDING INSIGHT

As a manager, you want to bring your employees to have insights of their own, as
opposed to telling them what to do and micromanaging them on tasks. When
employees generate their own insights, it motivates and engages them. It also
saves time for the manager.

Andy Grove, a founder of Intel, always said that the goal of a good manager is
to make themselves unnecessary. While that’s terrifying to many managers (and
our brains), it’s also very true. And if you move your employees to generate
their own insights, they can act in your place on certain topics, which frees up
time for bigger picture discussions and actions.

To help employees generate insights, ask questions — but not about the
deadlines, or the pace of work, or specific bullet items. Ask bigger questions
about how projects connect, how things are flowing, roadblocks and challenges,
etc.

Ask about solutions, not problems.

Working through the “why” and “how” of issues instead of the more basic
questions moves employees towards insight faster — and when you have limited
time with them, across distance, this should be your goal.

Other ways that managers can support employees in generating insights, as we
mentioned in an October 2016 Harvard Business Review article:

 * Let them take breaks between meetings and find some alone time. Encourage an
   empty conference room or, even better, leave the office and take a walk
   outside. (Walking might in fact spur your next insight, according to
   scientists.)
 * Allow some downtime on a regular basis — even small doses can have a big
   impact. Encourage them (and do it yourself!) to turn your devices off for
   several hours a day – or several days a week if you can. This way your mind
   will be truly free to wonder, and your brain won’t miss the next light bulb
   moment when it happens.
 * Remember to take a break from any decision-making process. And once you are
   taking it, focus on something else. Exercise is a foolproof way to take your
   mind off work, so put a daily workout on your calendar the same way you would
   schedule a meeting with a client or boss.

All these help employees (and you) find quiet signals — also called “weak
activations” — in the brain, which create more A-HA moments and insights.

And overall, asking questions about solutions, i.e. having a real two-way
synchronous conversation on the business and the strategy and the long-term,
increases reflection and raises a sense of status and autonomy in our brains.
Telling? That decreases both. It’s about real conversations and moving employees
to insight, as opposed to task-based check-ins.


UNDERSTANDING GROWTH MINDSET



In a few weeks, you might be sitting next to people you haven’t seen in 15
months except on video calls; in other cases, you might have a new teammate in
Poland who was an elite find for the organization — and you may never meet him,
but now you’re in the trenches together.

Things are vastly different. You need a growth mindset to help get through that,
and manage stress.

The good news: growth mindset can be developed over a short period of time, and
you can inspire your team to constantly learn and develop new skills. We talk
often these days of “up-skilling” or “re-skilling,” but many of those programs
have very low success rates. Instilling a growth mindset in your people over
time, through small repeatable actions, is a better approach — and an essential
need for managers post-COVID.

Employees and managers alike can grow through quality conversations. Try opening
a dialogue with a direct report by discussing where they see their career in
three years, or bounce some executive-level strategy off them and get their
take. If you have a mix of in-person and virtual, adopt a “one virtual, all
virtual” rule which means no people can be together, even if they’re in the same
office. It cuts down on exclusion, clique-y behavior, side conversations, etc.
and helps to make the at-home people (the virtual ones) feel less left out. Work
on having quality meetings as well: memos to open and parallel processing review
(everyone works on the same document for 10 minutes, then comes back to discuss
it). Quality conversations and meetings help teams grow.


SO, ABOVE ALL, FOCUS ON THE QUALITY OF YOUR CONVERSATIONS

When you increase the quality of conversations across an organization, the
benefits are tremendous — including increased motivation, faster solutions to
problems (and thus fewer “fire drills”), managers with higher EQ, and teams that
can embrace a growth mindset.

We know from research that the brain responds and reacts differently in
different types of conversations. In fact, in late 2020 research from Yale, we
learned that activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is
involved in control of cognitive processes, was much greater when people talked
with someone from a different socioeconomic background than with someone of
similar status. Mix up your teams. Experiment with their diversity. Give people
from different silos opportunities to have conversations. It might also spur
your next great product line.

Managers should aim for the highest tier of conversation with employees — it’s
often called the “transformational conversation” level — where insights can
happen. This does involve a bit of small talk on the front-end, but the
conversation should be structured around goals, bigger-picture issues,
long-range project planning, roadblocks, and how the employee is feeling about
his/her career amid all the shifts in the work process.

If managers focus less on back-end logistics and more on high-quality,
insight-reaching conversations, then post-COVID organizations will be primed for
the future of work.

Want to learn more about how you can implement a hybrid mindset in your
workplace? Contact us about FLEX.




WHAT'S NEXT

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Webinar 11:30 - 12:30 PM BST Thu, Aug 26


THE NEUROSCIENCE OF SUCCESSFUL HYBRID LEADERSHIP (EMEA)

Register chevron_right

Aug 26 Thu

BBC 9:00 - 5:00 PM BST Tue, Aug 31


BRAIN-BASED CONVERSATION SKILLS (VIRTUAL - EMEA)

Register chevron_right

Aug 31 Tue

Podcast


EPISODE 10: CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IN AN AMBIGUOUS WORLD

Listen chevron_right




RELATED POSTS

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


3 BIG IDEAS TO REVOLUTIONIZE PERFORMANCE CONVERSATIONS


3 BIG IDEAS TO BUILD YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL GROWTH MINDSET


HOW NEUROSCIENCE CAN HELP US UNDERSTAND DE-ESCALATION: FROM FIRST-RESPONDERS TO
FIRST-LINE MANAGERS

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