Month: August 2022

“You’re being relentless! Can you please stop asking questions so we can just chill for a bit?”

 

A request my partner, Katy, offered me in the midst of a conversation about our life and relationship.

 

I was trying to get to the root of something. She just wanted to relax.

 

I’m not always great at relaxing. But I tried. I settled in. I “chilled.” On we moved.

 

A few days later, a client wrote me a nice testimonial: “Chris took us through an amazing journey. His relentless curiosity and drive helped shape our global strategy.”

 

I laughed out loud when I read it (and sent a screenshot to Katy). There it was.

 

At work, drive and relentless curiosity are my superpowers. With Katy, they’re an impediment to connection.

 

It’s not that my relentless curiosity is right or wrong—it’s just not the right tool for every context.

 

If we want to be better, we need to grow our range.

 

Imagine a team caught in the day-to-day, endlessly meeting on Zoom to respond to crises and unexpected events. To work to their fullest, they need to develop the ability to step back and look at the big picture.

 

Now imagine another team—one that spends their time designing and discussing a future strategy without moving toward it. That team needs to cultivate its ability to focus on the details and move toward action.

 

More broadly, growing your range is about being able to reach for a response that’s appropriate for the moment.

 

We all have tools that we love, and approaches that come easily to us. But tools and techniques are specific to the tasks they are created for.

 

Just because something works in most situations doesn’t mean it will work in every situation. If we can take a beat, we might find a different tool, a different approach, or even a different way of being.

 

The key is awareness. So much of what happens in our brains and our bodies are automatic. Awareness creates a space in which we can hold off reaching for the easy, familiar method and try for something else that serves us better. We can experiment and see how different ways of working feel. What works? What doesn’t?

 

Operating differently than the ways we’ve perfected over the course of our lives can be scary and uncomfortable because it’s unfamiliar to us, like wearing a new pair of dress shoes. We worry the toes will be too tight or that the backs will give us blisters, but in the end, we might be glad we didn’t wear our ratty old sneakers to our sister’s formal wedding.

 

To achieve growth, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable and sometimes vulnerable as you test new strategies. You have to accept that you might make mistakes as you learn. Not every hypothesis will pan out. Not every experiment will be a success. Developing proficiency in new methods of communicating and leading change takes practice, and that practice can be rough, but ultimately, temporary discomfort is a worthwhile tradeoff for long-term personal and professional growth.

 

As a coach, I can support you and your team as you experiment with reaching past your familiar tools. I offer a fixed number of slots, so reach out if you’d like to discuss what might be possible if you could approach your work in a new way.

 

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“Dimmi con chi vai e’ ti dirò’ chi sei.”

(“Tell me who you go with and I will tell you who you are.”)

-Italian Proverb

 

The culture of my first company was very left-brained, quantitative, winner-take-all, and zero-sum: everything was a calculation, anything could be speculated on.

 

We were traders, so gambling on outcomes was our job, but it influenced our play as well. We would make crazy side-bets in the office on things like which intern could run faster, how long someone could stand on one foot, or who could lose a larger percentage of their total weight over a months-long period. I once even won two hundred bucks betting on whether North Korea would test a nuclear weapon over the weekend.

 

At the time this all seemed normal; in retrospect, I realize gambling like that was unusual outside my team’s culture—and that a nuclear weapons test, in particular, is a weird thing to bet on.

 

I realized that the culture of my office had given me a different perspective on how life is supposed to work when I found myself considering paying somebody ahead of me in line at the DMV to switch places. Time was money. Everything and everyone had a price. That’s the heart of capitalism.

 

I didn’t follow through on my fantasy of paying somebody for their place in line; I was just too uncomfortable. At the time I saw that discomfort as a weakness, but looking back, I’m happy I wasn’t able to reduce a person to a placeholder quite so easily.

 

Unintentional Mirroring

 

A team’s culture not only affects who shows up, but it also starts changing new employees as soon as they arrive. From the lingo and dress code to the attitudes presented about work and clients, our behaviors and ideals begin to rub off on one another.

 

My editor, Tina, reads almost everything I write. She spends hours each week pouring over her clients’ words, shaping them up, and making us sound better. During a meeting with a writer, Tina caught herself using the phrase “growing your awareness,” a phrase I often use both in my speech and writing. She’s noticed other new behaviors too. Our meetings often involve moments of quiet reflection, which she’s begun to incorporate in her own meetings. (She still refuses to leave her eggs on the counter, though.)

 

We take the concepts and ideas we learn from our work culture into other parts of our lives. It affects our friendships, our romantic relationships, and how we parent our kids. For better or worse, that is how cultures take shape.

 

An Evolving Environment

 

Work culture influences who we hire and how they change once we’ve brought them on board, and new additions to the team impact the work environment as well. We shape each other. That’s part of what makes cultural change hard—how sticky it is because of how easy it is to conform.

 

So how do you change? Well, there isn’t a fast or easy fix, but there is a process. Begin by surrounding yourself with people whose behaviors and ideas you are okay with absorbing, because they will inevitably change you. Pick people who will help you become a better person, and lead by example when you want to see a change in others.

 

Teaching and modeling the behaviors you want to see in your team is one of the best ways to ensure the kind of culture you want. This is especially effective when a new team is forming since the original culture of the founding members will influence the organization’s future culture. This is often referred to as “imprinting.” Like animals evolving, teams develop characteristics that reflect their formative environment, and those characteristics stick around long after the ecosystem changes.

 

Intentional Culture

 

Instead of being passive about shaping (or completely changing) the culture of your team, you can accelerate the personal and professional growth of your team by hiring a coach who will be intentional about the ideas and behaviors they teach.

 

That depth of engagement with work culture isn’t something I experienced on Wall Street, or even when I started my own firm. At first, my company’s culture emerged as a consequence of what I did. As I’ve deepened my skills as a coach and consultant, working with clients across a range of industries, I’ve started to see cultures more clearly. As a result, I’m more intentional in how I work with my clients and about the culture I create within my own teams.

 

Examining work culture has helped me understand the importance of creating space for feelings, fresh insight, dissent, and teamwork. I want to create an environment where everyone can win together.

 

It’s also the approach I bring to my clients.

 

Are you struggling to see (let alone shift) your work culture? I coach leaders and teams to create meaningful change for their companies. If that might be helpful to you, click here to set up a call.

 

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