Month: April 2021

My client shook her head. “They just don’t get it.”

It’s something that I hear a lot from leaders (and something that I catch myself thinking, too).

“They just don’t get it.”

It’s a deeply human belief. We experience our own thought processes and believe our conclusions. So, when someone doesn’t agree with us, it’s easy to think that they’re wrong.

In fact, my client (an HR business partner) was dealing with the R-word: Resistance. And, like a lot of leaders, she saw it as something to be overcome.

She was struggling to convince a group of her peers to buy into a small piece of digital transformation.

“Our system for hiring contractors is a mess,” she lamented. “Different departments have different requirements around confidentiality and different contract structures. We don’t have a central place to store these contracts or even see how many contractors a given department has.

“I’ve spent a lot of time on how inefficient our system is. For example, every contract basically lives in email. So, when a leader transitions to a new role or leaves the company, we have to sift through years of email to figure out their outstanding contractor relationships. We’ve even had contractors take advantage of this gap by slyly renegotiating their terms with a leader’s successor. Obviously, we don’t work with those people anymore.

“We’re not even talking about the money; leaders hire contractors out of their own budgets. It’s just about getting some kind of rational system in place so that every department doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

My client even had a technological solution in mind. It would be almost trivial to implement. And it wasn’t even that important of a problem. But it was emblematic of her struggle to contribute to the chief people officer’s push for digital transformation.

“This affects everybody’s departments. HR is on board. So are the CTO and people in other departments. It’s uncontroversial. But we can’t seem to get it done.

“If we can’t even take this small step, how can we expect to go after bigger things, like streamlining our hiring and promotion process?”

She assumed that people were resisting because they didn’t get it. So, she threw data at the problem: case studies. Examples of overspending and contracting chaos that could have easily been prevented. And a strong case for the return on investment.

But what my client missed—and what’s easy for a lot of leaders to miss—is that resistance comes in many flavors. What seems like people not “getting it” is often an expression of something deeper.

In my work, I draw on a model from Rick Maurer to help leaders work skillfully with resistance. This model divides resistance into three levels:

1. I don’t get it.

2. I don’t like it.

3. I don’t like (or trust) you!

It’s true: people may not get it. Most of us are very comfortable working at this level. We throw more data at others to try and convince them that we’re seeing the problem clearly. But that’s often not the whole story.

Repeated requests for more data can mask something else, a deeper type of resistance: people may not like your idea. It may require them to change or give up control. It may even threaten something deeper, like their professional identity. This came up recently with a team of lawyers I was working with. They were being asked to step away from their subject matter expertise to develop a system that could help them work better together.

Also, people may not trust you. Often this isn’t about you personally but about your role. One of my clients described this as “I’m from corporate, and I’m here to help.” A history of ill-handled changes, imposed from a central source, can engender (very justified) feelings of resistance.

Identifying these levels of resistance presents a whole new way of skillfully working with change. After talking it over with me, my client realized that people might not have liked what she was trying to do, even though it supported her boss’s and the CEO’s efforts.

So, she got curious. She started to engage with her peers by asking them a simple question: “What don’t you like about the system we’re thinking about setting up?”

What she heard was both obvious and insightful: senior leaders at her company liked the idea of a system to manage contractors better. But they were worried about imposing too much bureaucracy. As the head of manufacturing put it, “Sometimes I have an urgent technical problem. I have a consultant that I know can solve it. And I have the budget for it. I don’t want to be hamstrung by weeks of negotiation around unnecessary contract terms that are imposed by HR. That could cost me a fortune in inefficiency and downtime.”

Now that was something my client could engage with. As the importance of speed became clearer to the businesses she was supporting, my client made that the primary goal of the new approach to contracting. Working with legal, her team even created “one click” contracts: below a certain dollar value, managers could generate a contract by checking a set of boxes and the contractor, in one click, could sign it.

In learning what was important—and in honoring what she learned—my client converted one of her project’s biggest detractors into an early adopter who is even advocating to his peers.

So, what’s next? As you work on an important problem, instead of trying to overcome resistance, get curious. Download this handy diagram, and pencil in resistance on the diagram where it fits best. This can help guide you to engage more effectively on the parts of your problem that matter to others.

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“I am so done with Zoom.” –Everyone in 2021

Man, aren’t we all? Kids, parents, teachers.

Zoom calls can be really fun. They can be energizing and creative.

But they can also be terrible. Meetings full of participants where only a few people talk the whole time. Meetings where you feel like you would rather be doing anything else. (And meetings when you turn your video off and actually DO something else!)

Zoom fatigue—the brain ache that comes after a day of virtual meetings—is real (article, theory paper from Stanford researchers). There are a bunch of different reasons for this.

In virtual meetings, we lack nonverbal cues. People can’t make eye contact, so you don’t know when they’re focusing on you (and vice versa).

Video limits body language. And social cues—like a small hand gesture that warns of an interruption—are lost.

All of this increases cognitive load. We need to use our thinking brain, instead of our intuitive, social brain, to make sense of what’s going on.

Yes, we still need to receive updates from our colleagues. We need to ask questions and share our work. And we need to uncover creative solutions to hard problems—all challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But even as we absorb the impact of coronavirus, the way we work has changed forever.

Video calls are here to stay.

So, how can you stay connected while minimizing Zoom fatigue? How can you prevent endless video chats from dominating the calendar? And how can you create space for the creative problem-solving that is at the heart of your work?

Here are some practices I’ve developed through managing my team, working one-on-one with coaching clients, and helping large, distributed groups define and solve their most challenging problems.

Have fewer Zoom calls

What can you do instead of clicking that “New Meeting” button?

Inform without Zoom

If you need to tell people about an upcoming event, deadline, or project, draft a short and informal document that your team can engage with asynchronously. Have your team edit the doc and use comments to provide feedback and ask questions.

Do this even if you know that you’ll need to have a discussion with your team. Circulate your document as a pre-read or—as is the practice at Amazon—begin your meeting by reading it. (Pro tip: have everyone turn their video off.)

Even though it may take you longer to write something, you will reclaim energy for you and your team. It’s not just about time, it’s also about fatigue. Shaving off 15 minutes of video chat may not seem like much, but it adds up, particularly when everyone on your team gets that time back.

Update without Zoom

Instead of endless update meetings, experiment with structured questions.

Every Friday, for example, we ask my team

• What are you going to work on next week?
• What obstacles do you anticipate and what input or support do you need to make progress?
• Do you have quarterly goals that you are going to be moving forward?

Or if it’s something that’s hard to write about—something where tone and sensitivity matters—consider circulating a short video message with your team.

 

Create without Zoom

 

I’m a person who loves to create in partnerships. But in a Zoom meeting, even with just a handful of people, it’s too easy for creative conversations to become stilted. It’s hard to interrupt, and many participants remain silent.

 

Instead of bringing together a group on Zoom, create a mini-podcast. Host a podcast with a peer and record the conversation. You can share the resulting file with your team (often with transcription through a service like Otter.ai) to share your thoughts.

 

Communicate without Zoom

 

Finally, recognize that sometimes you just don’t need video calls. Sometimes I use video conferencing with my coaching clients, sometimes I just ring them up on the good, old-fashioned cellular telephone.

 

Video is great. But so is the phone. I often find that I’m more focused, less distracted, and less fatigued when I can move around instead of staring at my screen.

 

Have better Zoom calls

 

Zoom can be a wonderful tool that helps people feel engaged and creative. And there is still some work that really requires real-time collaboration. So, how can you best collaborate while managing fatigue?

 

Create space to bond

 

With fewer video calls on your calendar, you can afford to spend some time strengthening connections within your team. Rather than run a “Zoom happy hour,” create space for your team to share what’s going on in their lives. Or start with a warm-up, something as simple as having participants cover and uncover their cameras in response to questions: “Leave your camera on if you’re a coffee drinker… a tea drinker… ate meat last night.” It’s a simple exercise, but it helps mobilize energy.

 

Create space to think

Not everybody thinks at the same speed. When you ask a question of your team, set aside a minute for everyone to think about it before the discussion starts. Then put pairs in breakout rooms (yes, even in small teams) to seed the discussion before rejoining the larger group. Not only will this generate better ideas, but it will also reduce fatigue since there are fewer people to divide attention between in breakout rooms.

 

You can also create space by inviting fewer people to your meetings. It will result in better meetings that create less fatigue. And the people who don’t join? You just eliminated a source of fatigue from their lives.

 

As long as people trust that you’ll inform and engage with them when the time comes, not everyone needs to be part of every discussion.

 

Create space to collaborate

 

Zoom limits throughput. There are delays. We can’t interrupt, we can’t have simultaneous conversations. We can’t build off each other’s ideas.

 

In short, it’s harder to collaborate.

 

So, take advantage of the format. Create a parallel workspace with shared visibility—in Google Docs, OneNote, chat, live Q&A software, or an online whiteboard. Having your co-creators type in ideas in a Google Doc is a remarkable way to multiply the impact of your collaboration.

 

Create space to plan

 

Spend as much energy planning your Zoom meeting as you spend engaging with the problem you’re actually trying to solve.

 

Planning how you engaged was important (and often undervalued) before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the cost of Zoom fatigue—and the limitations of video—makes it critical now.

 

For every meeting, choose one content goal and one process goal ahead of time and encourage your team to do the same. Write them down. And consider sharing them.

 

What does that look like? Here’s an example.

• Content goal: I want to get three ideas for how we can message our new product to customers.
• Process goal: I want to make sure everyone shares at least two ideas.

 

Create space to experiment

 

We’re in a brave new world—one that’s here to stay. Be open with your team about your efforts to reduce their fatigue.

 

To that end, create space for ideas and suggestions. Consider using the approaches above to talk with your team about how you will reduce video conference fatigue. (Meta, I know.)

 

Remember, there is no right answer, there are just things we can learn. Be open. Be curious. Run better meetings. That will go a long way to reducing fatigue and, ultimately, empower your team to do great work.

 

And don’t stop experimenting with Zoom! For more on the power of experimentation (and why we need it now more than ever), check out my essay on The Transformational Power of Curiosity.

 

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