culture change

Practicing Giving and Receiving Feedback

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Give Without Expecting

https://www.flickr.com/photos/pictoquotes/14020634976


I had so much fun at the all-staff meeting we held this week at Temple University and felt very supported by the team as we practiced giving and receiving feedback to create a more open and collaborative culture. We invited all of our IT colleagues from across campus to join us for the meeting and many of them came, which was terrific.
I was able to incorporate some of the feedback from our previous meeting. Specifically, I heard that some team members were uncomfortable at our last meeting because I asked everyone to share personal stories with someone they didn’t know. Also, I received a suggestion to use technology to solicit more honest feedback and make people feel safer. To address this concern, I used PollEverywhere to create anonymous polls scattered throughout the presentation.
fear-to-freedomAfter giving an update on the action items from our previous meetings, I introduced the Fear to Freedom model to the group. This is a simple and powerful tool that has helped me recognize when I am in fear and focused on myself and to manage myself to a more open and free state of mind.
The heart of the training was around how we can think about feedback as a gift that we graciously give and receive from a place of freedom and openness. These are the principles that we asked everyone to follow.
When giving feedback:

  • State facts – be specific
  • Leave out generalizations (all, every, always) and judgement (good, bad)
  • Go direct – preferably in person
  • Check your intentions
  • Ask if the person is open to feedback
  • Use “MRI” – Most Respectful Interpretation – of others’ actions.
  • State the problem from your own observations

When receiving feedback:

  • Listen attentively
  • Say thank you
  • If you are not in a place to be open to feedback, let the other person know
  • Assume the best intentions
  • Ask clarifying questions
  • Avoid being defensive (going to fear)
  • Take the feedback away, determine what you want to do with it

Then we broke into groups of three and alternated roles of giver, receiver, and observer playing several scenarios designed to show how fear can interfere with either giving or receiving feedback.
After the first scenario, I asked the group whether it went as they expected and many of the groups indicated that they were surprised that the gift of positive feedback was not well received. Each person only saw the following information for the role they were playing.

  • Kelly (Giver): Pat is a peer and one of the best people on your team. It has been a crazy couple of weeks on the project and the entire team has been working really hard to make a deadline. Pat really helped you out personally by the way s/he maintained a sense of humor and optimism. You want to let Pat know what a difference s/he made to you personally and the team.
  • Pat (Receiver): You have often felt that Kelly is quite competitive as a team member and a brown-noser and looking to advance at the expense of the rest of the team. You are not sure if you trust Kelly.
  • Observer: Watch to see if the giver asks permission and is specific in the feedback. Watch to see if the receiver sincerely thanks the giver and if there is any underlying tension in the exchange.

One giver described in bafflement, how the receiving partner responded to his sincere thanks with abrupt, monosyllabic thanks that made him want to stop giving praise. The receiver reported that he felt he was being open, but that was not how the giver or the observer felt about his responses.
This simple role play demonstrated how much our internal stories influence our actions and put us into a closed, judgmental, and fearful position. When we take this defensive and fearful stance, we can discount all feedback, even when it is positive, from individuals based on our previous interactions or even things we have just heard about them.
When we can master our stories and stay out of fear, we can break the negative cycle and be in a powerful position to influence and change outcomes. The most common question that I got after the meeting was what if all of our attempts to extend in openness and kindness are rebuffed. My answer was that we can never change anyone but ourselves. If we can stay in a place of freedom where we continue to be positive and open in giving and receiving feedback, we will be happier and more successful and productive independent of whether anyone else changes.
The quote on the picture that I found for this blog answers this question much better than I did. When we are looking for something in return to our gift of feedback, it is our ego showing up. We are focused on ourselves and want validation, not what is best for the person who we are giving feedback. We are operating in fear, not in freedom.
The slides from the meeting with all of the scenarios are available online. My challenge to you this week is to practice giving and receiving feedback using the principles above. I would love to hear from you to see how your practice is going.

Rituals Reinforce Values

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As the new students converged on campus last week, I was thinking a lot about rituals and how important they are in reinforcing shared values as we try to integrate 5000 new students into the Temple family.
Selfie ConvocationConvocation was on Friday and it was the first one that I ever attended. The Temple New Student Convocation is a formal ceremony that welcomes freshman and new transfer students to the university. The faculty and officers of the university were in full regalia, which added gravitas and importance of the message, Since I am also new to Temple, it was an opportunity for me to see what values were being reinforced to the incoming students.
I was not disappointed. The core values that attracted me to Temple were exemplified throughout the ceremony. Accessibility, affordability, excellence, and community service are the heart of Temple’s mission.
The new Provost shared her story which exemplifies the values of Temple. She encouraged the students to reimagine their futures and be willing to take risks. One of my favorite moments was when she took a selfie of herself with the new students in the background.
The emphasis throughout the ceremony was on the students. The core values of making a positive difference in the world and pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone were emphasized in story after story. Two current students and one recent graduate spoke and they were inspirational, encouraging their classmates to be fully present and invest in the Temple community. I spent most of the ceremony watching the students in the audience and was impressed by their enthusiasm and apt attention to the speakers. They were listening and ready to learn.
During the ceremony, the student president led the audience in the student pledge.

“As a Temple Owl, I pledge to uphold the highest principles of honesty and integrity in and outside of the classroom as founder Russell Conwell intended. I embrace Temple’s commitment to excellence, diversity and respect for the community; these values define my path. I take pride in saying, ‘I am a Temple Owl,’”

This was the first time I heard the pledge and because I had been thinking about rituals all week, was a clear example of how important they are in reinforcing values and setting the tone of an entire community.
Something for each of you to think about in the coming week. What rituals do you have in your team and at your institution and do they promote the values that you want to reinforce?
 

Shifting from a Scarcity Mindset

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Pas de place pour deux -- Not enough space for two
Last week, I met someone who talked about how Philadelphia wasn’t a great city. When I asked her why, her answer was that the lack of money was the root of its problems. Most people I have met talk about what a wonderful city it is and how the community has worked together to make it better. I have been thinking about that for much of this week as I dealt with budgets and allocated resources to various projects and initiatives.
My thoughts have been around how the core belief that resources are scarce is at the root of so much of what we do and think. The quote from Lynne Twist. In her book The Soul of Money, defines the mindset of scarcity really well.

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of.… Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack.… This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.…”

As I have been mulling this over this week, I thought about the concept of abundance that I read and learned about in my MBA program. The idea that we just need to be creative to make the pie bigger so that there is more to divide is still rooted in the idea of scarcity and focused on getting MY share of the limited quantities of stuff that are available.
Brene Brown defines scarcity as the “never enough” problem and proposes that to move away from a scarcity mindset, we need to develop a belief that we are enough that is satisfied internally rather than externally. This core belief gives us the courage and confidence to share our ideas and ask for what we need without being dependent on external praise or deflated by criticism from others. It also opens us up to incorporate different ideas and truly partner with others. The real magic happens when we feel as much joy in others’ success and good fortune as we feel in our own.
This rings very true for me and my experience. I spent years doing what I call the ego hustle. Constantly feeling inadequate and focused on what I didn’t have. I struggled to drive my agenda and get through my long list of to-dos, believing that if I just worked hard enough, I would be successful and feel better about myself.
I have learned to recognize the thoughts of “never _____ enough” that consume my energy and divert my focus. When I can redirect my energy and focus on being a positive leader, then I am able to discern the most important things I need to accomplish, have the focused attention to get them done, and find others very willing and able to help. How I work now is so different than how I have worked in the past and it is so much more fun and effective.
My challenge to you this week is to notice whether you have a scarcity mindset. How much time and energy do you spend worrying about “never ____ enough?” The first step toward changing is always awareness.
 
Photo credit: Gilles Gonthier – https://www.flickr.com/photos/gillesgonthier/470270194

Crowdsourcing Culture Change

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My first week at Temple has been great. Everyone has been very welcoming and I loved getting to meet individual team members and hearing their ideas. Many of the ideas that I heard this week, and also in the weeks before I started, were about changing the culture.
Establishing a supportive and innovative culture is my most important job as a leader.  It is also one of the most challenging things to do. This is not something any one person can do alone. Each group defines its culture together, either intentionally or unintentionally.
This week, we started to intentionally create a new culture together by crowd sourcing ideas from the entire Computer Services team. I invited everyone to come to a meeting and we did two liberating structure exercises to identify the top things that the team would like to change.
The first exercise was to identify what we should STOP doing. We did this by having each person in the room design the most demotivating work environment that could imagine. The power of asking the opposite of what you want to achieve is that it is unexpected and opens the thinking of the group. The second step of this exercise was to identify which demotivating things we were currently doing as a team. The final step was to prioritize the top two things we would like to stop, with a concrete first step on moving forward. Each step of the exercise is done by having each individual do their own thinking, then share their thoughts with one other person at their table, then discuss the ideas as a table before sharing their ideas with the entire group.
The report out from the tables was fun and it was very clear immediately that the team wanted  to stop requiring salaried employees to clock in and out each day,
The second half of our all team meeting was to generate bold ideas of what we could do. This exercise is done by having each person generate one bold idea of how to make the culture of the team better with the first step that they would take to make their idea happen.  The ideas are written on one side of an index card. Then everyone in the room stands up, exchanges cards and rates others’ ideas on a scale from 1-5, with 5 representing a terrific idea that they could fully support.
This exercise turned out to be a little chaotic with so many people in the room. While not perfect, the exercise did work and the group generated several ideas that got top ratings.
Like the first exercise, the majority of the ideas centered around one theme. The team really wanted to establish flexible work schedule options, including telecommuting. This is something that is important to me as well and we will work together to define guidelines for the team in the coming month.
I have already taken concrete steps based on the suggestions from the meeting. Eliminating clocking in and out for salaried employees was an easy thing to accomplish which I did by sending out an email at the end of the week. One team member tweeted about clocking out for the last time, which made me smile.
We will all meet again next month and will assess the progress that we have made on the creating more flexible schedules for the team. We will also work together on other aspects of the culture.
My challenge for you this week is to think about the culture that you are either intentionally or unintentionally creating in your team and identify if it is the culture you want. If it isn’t, think about how you can involve the entire team to start to shape your culture more intentionally together.
Photo taken by ITU pictures – https://www.flickr.com/photos/itupictures/albums/72157634087412090