The Modern Manager

Working 60, 70, 80+ hours in America has become the norm for too many teams. Yet it seems impossible to get everything done in only 40 hours. Not for the employees of Wildbit. This week’s guest shifted her organization to a 32-hour, 4-day work week. Over a year into it, they’re seeing more positive results than they could have imagined. Natalie Nagele is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, the company behind Postmark, Beanstalk and Conveyor. With 29 team members across 5 countries working on multi-million dollar products for developers, she’s proving that you can grow an extremely profitable business while focusing on shorter work days, an enjoyable work-from-anywhere environment, and staying small. Natalie and I talk about why her company moved to a 4 day, 32 hour work week. She shares how she introduced it and managed the transition, the surprising impact it had on the people and the company, and how you might translate this practice if you work in a larger organization.   Read the related blog article: Make a 32-hour Work Week Work For Your Team   Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) to get Natalie’s overview of the 4-day work week which includes a description of their paid time off plan.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.     KEY TAKEAWAYS: We started with only working 40 hours per week and truly limiting our hours on weekends and evenings before moving to a 32 hour work week. Agree on a hypothesis about the impact or why you’re making the shift to a shorter work week e.g. We believe we can accomplish the same amount of work with greater focus and increase the quality of work by having more time to rejuvinate outside of work.  To make this work, you need to be extremely intentional about what work to do and how to do it. You need to change the mindset, processes, and priorities, not simply cut hours. Experiment with changing your communication methods. Cancel all standing meetings to see which ones you really need. Turn off Slack for 1 week or have everyone turn off all notifications to see how it enables people to focus better.  Position the shift as an experiment which you can measure. Check in on it weekly - how people are feeling, what might need to shift, etc. After 1 year of the 32 hour work week, Natalie’s team had increased the quality and quantity of their work! 4 days isn’t the answer for every team or every person. It could be 6 days of 5 hours of work per day.  For knowledge workers, especially, it’s a managers job to help identify what a reasonable amount of high value work looks like so that we can move away from “hours in the office” as a sign of productivity. For larger corporations where you can’t change the workweek structure, look for opportunities to create flexibility in the work week by having each person deliver a specific set of tasks or value - if I get XYZ done, it’s been a solid week and you can go home early.   KEEP UP WITH NATALIE Website: https://wildbit.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-nagele-b9aa42/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/natalienagele

For many teams, email is the primary form of staying connected, making it critically important but also a major point of stress. Logistically, the most obvious way to make email more manageable is to just have fewer emails coming in. But in reality, this might actually be the hardest thing to make happen because we’re not totally in control of how many emails we receive every day. But, there are a number of things you can do with regards to how email is used amongst your team members and therefore strongly influence how many emails you get and send every day. In this episode, I discuss four principles and related tactics for more effective team email along with how to introduce them to your team.  This is part two of a two part series on email management. This episode tackles team email practices. Part one, episode 60, covered individual email management practices.   The full episode guide includes sample agendas and activities to help your team redesign its email practices. Get it when you join the Modern Manager community or purchase the full guide at www.mamieks.com/store.     Get the free mini-guide at www.mamieks.com/miniguides.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Read the related blog article: How to Establish Effective Team Email Practices.   Key Takeaways: Aligning your team’s email practices is one way to reduce the quantity of emails you receive while enhancing the flow of communication. Email is just one tool in your team’s communication toolbox. Clarify how to use email vs chat, meetings, your team collaboration software (e.g. Asana, Basecamp), a document, text message, etc. Email is generally well suited for a limited number of activities such as one-way information sharing, communicating with external stakeholders, multiple choice questions, gauging whether a meeting is needed. Crafting thoughtful emails may take a few extra minutes but will reduce the back-and-forth, saving time and energy in the long run. Consider how your team uses email subject lines. Standardizing subject lines to include a bracketed term followed by a headline makes it easier for the recipient e.g. [ACTION] Your input needed on Monday’s client meeting agenda  If assigning tasks or making a request, be as precise as possible for the 3 Ws: who is responsible, what do they need to do, when does it need to be done by. Explore how your team might structure email content or use formatting consistently to draw attention to important information. Establish explicit norms for email such as how and when to use niceties such as the “thank you” response, what a reasonable response time is for regular and urgent emails, whether email should be read/responded to outside of work hours, etc. There are not right or wrong ways to design team email practices. Engage your team in this process to decide what make the most sense for your team’s situation.   Additional Resources: Science of Success Episode 60: Habits and Principles to Manage Your Email Inbox mamie@mamieks.com

Employee handbooks are typically filled with procedural information, legal requirements and company policies. They provide an important function, but aren’t typically fun to read. Nor do they incorporate concepts for how the team will work together to build a positive environment in which people thrive and great work gets done.  Building off the idea of an employee handbook, this week’s guest created a Team Playbook which clarifies how the team will collaborate in a playful yet articulate manner. Millie Blackwell is the CEO and Co-Founder of Showcase Workshop, a digital toolkit for sales representatives that contains presentation slides, videos, price lists and brochures, replacing old fashioned ring binders and printed collateral. Millie and I talk about this brilliant Team Playbook she developed for her company which provides guidance for how the team communicates, collaborates, and much more.   Read the related blog article: Enhancing Collaboration with a Team Playbook   Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) to get a copy of the Team Playbook which you can use as a reference for your Team Playbook! Plus, join before August 12th and you get entered to win one of 5 copies of The Boomerang Principle from guest Lee Caraher of episode 61.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.     KEY TAKEAWAYS: The Team Playbook is part of a series of documents that provide guidance for how people engage. It focuses on the “heart” of the business and the team. It includes the company mission and vision, the brand story, the team members, roles and responsibilities, communication methods and practices, and more. The Team Playbook should reflect the tone and culture of your organization. It can be playful, humorous, elegant, etc. Meetings are a strategic tool for communication, not a default. Before scheduling a meeting, consider what other ways the information can be shared/gathered. Develop or articulate your norms for each mode of communication. For example, should task request be made in Slack? By email? Via your collaborative task system?  After three rounds of back-and-forth on email, if an issue still isn’t resolved, pick up the phone. Different personalities have different preferences for communication modes. Some people prefer to talk things through over the phone while others prefer to read an email and have time to compose a response.  Consider an org chart that visualizes the roles or responsibilities (rather than the people) as the structural framework. Then the people’s names are added into the boxes which they manage.  This type of org chart enables everyone to quickly grasp who is responsible for what. It helps illuminate who might be spread too thin, who has overlapping responsibilities, and where the team may want to invest in adding capacity.    KEEP UP WITH MILLIE Website: http://www.showcaseworkshop.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/millieblackwell/   RESOURCES Awesome at Your Job Podcast

Very few people are eager to add more meetings to their calendar, but what would happen if you scheduled a weekly check in with each of your team members? That’s what this week’s guest did. Chris Zaugg has been leading people for over 40 years, and according to his own reflection, had made LOTS of mistakes and had a few victories. He has trained people in leadership principles and communication all over the world, and loves to share what he's learned from other leaders. He currently serves as the President of OPIN Systems, a software company based in Bloomington, MN. Chris and I talk about how he incorporated weekly check-ins with his team and the transformative effect they had. We get into his process and why weekly can be so much more effective than monthly touch-bases.   Read the related blog article: Strengthen Your Team With Weekly Check-Ins   Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) to get three months of free access to Uptick, a software to help you with your weekly check-ins. This is doubly special because you get to skip the waitlist and to start using Uptick right now.    Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.     KEY TAKEAWAYS: It’s not easy for employees to translate big company goals, vision and strategies into daily activities. Organizations need systems that allow staff to honestly share with managers and managers to really listen to their staff in order to truly know what’s going on. If you want your team members to feel like they’ve won every day, they need to end the day knowing they accomplished their most important priority. Have a regular 15 minute check in with each team member. As prework, they write down what they see as the priorities for the week. Work together to prioritize them so they are clear on what matters most and why. In those 15 minutes, (1) prioritize the work for this week - use their individual, team and organizational goals as a reference point, (2) Ask reflection questions like "Did anything keep you from being productive last week? When did you feel like you most productive?” (3) Celebrate by learning what they were most proud of last week or milestones accomplished. Keep basic notes which you can then use to for upcoming performance reviews, simplifying that process and removing recency bias. Employees don’t want to feel like they’re doing work just to check the box. If you ask them to write something down for you, read it and use the information. In every workplace, people want three things: to know and be known, to serve and be served, to love and be loved, or perhaps to give and receive respect. Aim to hold weekly check-ins at the optimal time for each person given their work flow. For example, first thing Monday morning, Monday afternoon, or early Friday afternoon. The challenge with monthly check-ins is that you need much more time and that time is often spent recapping what happened and catching up to where things are now.   KEEP UP WITH CHRIS Website: https://blog.uptickapp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriszaugg/

Ah, Millennials. This generation may be the most broadly stereotyped, yet often misunderstood. As managers, we may be Millennials ourselves trying to figure out how to manage and build relationships with older peers, or we may be struggling with how to manage this unusual cohort which seems to “know everything,” and “demand autonomy.” What is really going on with Millennials and what does it mean for managing every generation in the workplace? This week’s guest is Lee Caraher is the CEO of Double Forte PR & Digital Marketing; she’s known for her practical solutions to big problems. Lee’s the author of Millennials & Management based on her experience with failing and then succeeding at retaining Millennials. Her second book, The Boomerang Principle: Inspire lifetime loyalty from your employees, was published in April 2017. Lee and I talk about various cohorts of Millenials, the experiences of Gen-Xers and Boomers in the workplace, how to manage new graduates who are just entering the workforce, and management practices that work for everyone, whether you’re a young manager with older team members or an older team member with a younger manager.   Read the related blog article: Successfully Manage Millennials and Other Generations in the Workplace   Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) by August 12th to win one of five copies of Lee’s book The Boomerang Principle: Inspire Lifetime Loyalty from Your Employees.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.      KEY TAKEAWAYS: The term Millennial technically only tells you what age cohort they belong to. Pew Research says that a millennial was born between 1980 and 1997. There are three cohorts of Millennials that are grouped based on what was happening in the world when they were young. (1) The oldest group which joined the workforce shortly after 9/11 and grew up with minimal technology; (2) The middle group which entered the workforce in the late 2000s which was the same time that work was becoming digital; and (3) The youngest group which learned with iPads in the classrooms and grew up as digital natives. One challenge recent graduates face in the workplace is the experience, often for the first time, of being told their work isn’t “A+” and that they have to do it again. In a schooling environment, the directions are typically very clear on how to get an A+ and rarely do you re-do work once it’s done, even if it’s only B+ work. Set expectations for a new hire right from the start. Be clear that you want them to spend the first 30-60 days getting to know the job and doing the work “your way” and then you want to hear their ideas for how to improve it. Be clear about deadlines - the day, date, time and timezone. This eliminates ambiguity and decreases frustration within a team. Each generation has its own expectations of work, behavior, access and opportunity. It can be emotionally hard for Boomers and Gen-Xers to have fought for greater rights in the workplace for decades to now see Millennials and Gen-Zers “waltz in” and express a sense of deserving of these rights. Millennials want the same things as other generations, they’re simply willing to be vocal about it from a younger age. When you address the needs of Millennials, you can address everyone’s needs. Be clear about your company purpose and values, clarify and engage people in defining projects and what success looks like, be explicit about roles and expectations.  Gather input from those around you who are closer to the work. Synthesize and make decision, and share the decisions with context for why this was decided. Without context, the team will never stay aligned. A boss that is younger than you is no different from any other boss. They’re not a child, they could be great or terrible regardless of their age. If it makes you uncomfortable to have a younger boss, talk to them about it. Let them know you have a lot to offer based on your years of experience and that you hope to learn from them too. As a manager of any age, you will be measured on the contribution of those around you, not necessarily your own performance on the owned tasks that you have. Your job as a manager is to understand the people on your team: what motivates them, what they hope to get out of a project, what their career goals are, and then outline how you can help them do that through the work, and then also to guide the team on the rules of engagement and behaviors you're going to tolerate and not tolerate.     KEEP UP WITH LEE Website: http://leecaraher.com/blog/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leecaraher/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LeeCaraher1/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/leecaraher Instagram: @leecaraher Books: http://leecaraher.com/books/

Email overload plagues almost every manager. After feeling frustrated with myself for missing important emails and watching my inbox slowly tick up, I decided to take a new approach to managing my inbox. I set out to learn more about various approaches to email management and then try them out. In this episode, I share with you the various practices I learned and the impact I’ve noticed on my own mental state, productivity, stress level and inbox management in just a few weeks.  This is part one of a two part series on email. This episode tackles personal email management. Part two will tackle team email practices. The full episode guide includes questions for reflection on your current email habits, steps for how to clear your inbox, a description of the 5 principles and suggested tactics for each. Get it when you join the Modern Manager community or purchase the full guide at www.mamieks.com/store.     Get the free mini-guide at www.mamieks.com/miniguides.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Read the related blog article: Strategies and Tactics to Achieve and Maintain Inbox Zero.   Key Takeaways: Inbox Zero is a mindset that gives you freedom from your email. It’s about having the right tactics and habits to keep your inbox empty so you can spend your mental energy on more important activities. Often we don’t have intentional practices for email management, which leads to unhelpful behaviors like ‘grazing’ on email all day long, using the inbox as a to-do list, reading email and marking as ‘unread’, etc. Consider how you can implement these five principles to effective email management - the tactics you decide on will be unique to your particular situation and preferences. Principle 1: Your inbox is not your to-do list. If an email requires an action that will take more than 2 minutes, add it as a task on your task list (paper or digital) and archive the email. Principle 2: Not all emails are equal. Not every email requires the same level of attention. Skim an email and then decide if it’s a priority to spend more time on it. Create a ‘someday-maybe’ list to track websites, articles or topics you *may* want to explore in the future.  Principle 3: Touch an email only once. Only open your inbox when you’re in a position to take action. That may mean removing email from your mobile device. Consider scheduling a few 30-minute blocks on your calendar to address email. Principle 4: Take advantage of technology. Email apps have lots of features native or as add-ons to make email management easier. Look for the ability to ‘snooze’ an email for later, set a reminder for the email to return to your inbox, and create email templates. Principle 5: Reduce the number of emails you receive. Unsubscribe from newsletters you don’t read or have them auto-filtered into a specific folder.  Clean out your existing emails by selecting a date before which all emails will be archived. For all emails between that date and the present, go through them following the two-minute rule. Select the date based on the number of emails and likelihood of there being anything that still may warrant your attention even if its a few weeks or months old.   Additional Resources: MixMax Gmail add-on Calendly Doodle Asana Evernote Sanebox Unroll.Me Mail Spring Episode 25: Finding the right task management app Episode 27: Getting started with a task manager Episode 29: Overcoming common challenges with task managers mamie@mamieks.com

I typically follow the 80-20 rule when considering the challenges that managers face. About 80% of a a manager’s role and the challenges they encounter are the same regardless of the setting. But that 20% which is different can be drastically different. So what might we all learn from building culture in a retail setting? This week’s guest is Lorean Cairns, Co-Founder of Fox and Jane Salons, Skin Habit, and Little Lion Salon. Her initiatives employee over 150+ members in globally. Lorean leads the charge in coaching and mentoring leaders, executives, and managers of all levels.  Loren and I talk about building a collaborative culture in a non-office environment, how everyone can learn from success, feedback, and mis-steps, how to grow consistent culture across multiple locations, and how to stay connected and informed with what’s happening on the floor.    Read the related blog article: Building Culture in an Unusual Setting   Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) to get 15% Lorean’s book Culture Fox: How to cultivate a lasting culture. My path from hairstylist to international CEO.    Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.     KEY TAKEAWAYS: It’s possible, and desirable, to create a retail environment in which everyone feels a sense of unity and teamwork.  Exile the competitive nature and replace it with a focus on winning (and losing) together. Celebrate success and process poor customer feedback as a group. Assume everyone can learn from the experience and be part of the solution. Incorporate the essential elements of your culture into your hiring practice so candidates know what they’re joining and what’s expected of them. In the moment coaching can be a powerful technique for providing a gentle nudge that enables the recipient to recognize when their own behavior isn’t appropriate. This may be a slight head nod or simply stating their name as you give a very direct glance. Develop a monthly meeting rotation that provides insight into the business and activities on the floor. Each week of the month has a designated agenda so topics are addressed on a monthly basis. Topics may include data, customer feedback, progress towards goals, process improvement, professional development, problem solving and more. When you receive poor customer feedback, don’t assume it’s completely true. It’s critical to explore the feedback in context of what the employee recalls. It’s important to learn from the feedback, but not overweight one customer’s bad experience.   KEEP UP WITH LOREAN Website: https://foxandjanesalon.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorean-cairns-ba45a162/ Instagram: @loreancairns @foxandjane Book: https://shop.foxandjanesalon.com/products/culture-fox

What’s the tone of your team? Do you assume people want to work hard, learn, grow, and achieve results? Or do you feel like you’re constantly trying to motivate people to take ownership over their work? Do you set the bar high and support your colleagues to be successful? Or do you set average expectations and focus on compliance? This week’s guest, Bob Dusin, is the co-author along with Sue Bingham of Creating the High Performance Work Place. They collaborate with leaders and organizations in all industries to help create the highest performing work environments possible. Bob speaks at numerous expos and events throughout the country each year.   Read the related blog article: 3 Critical Ingredients for a High Performance Work Place   Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) to get 15% off when you register for an upcoming high performance leadership workshop. Learn more about the workshop at https://hpwpgroup.com/events/    Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.     KEY TAKEAWAYS: Leaders and managers to create an environment where people want to go to work, not just have to go to work. Too many managers have been taught to focus on results only whereas strong cultures focus on the people too. 8 elements to a high performing workplace: positive assumptions about people, remove the negative, mutual trust and respect, two-way communication, employee involvement empowerment, high-level training, competitive wages and benefits, and setting high expectations. The old model of separating yourself as the boss from those you manage doesn’t work. Instead, get to know your team members and build authentic relationships with them. Set high, not unrealistic, expectations of your team. People will often meet your expectations. When you set low expectations, you don’t create an opportunity for engagement. High expectations signal you believe in the person. Stop saying, “Just do the best you can.” That phrase gives an excuse for bad performance. Instead say, “It’s going to be tough, but I’m here to help. Let’s create a plan so you can succeed.” When you make positive assumptions about people, it starts a positive, reinforcing cycle. Try assuming people want to do well, want to be challenged, want to make the ideas better.   KEEP UP WITH BOB Website: hpwpgroup.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobdusin/ Twitter: @HPWPBob Book: https://hpwpgroup.com/book/

Flexible work hours, greater autonomy, freedom, virtual teams, work from anywhere… These are growing in popularity but not always easy to implement. To successfully manage a team “at a distance” (whether that be geographic or just being more hand’s off), you need solid systems and colleagues with the right skills to succeed in that environment. This week’s guest, Carissa Reiniger, is the Founder & CEO of Silver Lining Ltd. She started Silver Lining in 2005 and created the Silver Lining Action Plan - SLAP! - A methodology that has helped over 10,000 small business owners in 9 countries set - and hit their growth goals. Carissa’s team is 100% virtual, spanning 14 countries and dozens of employees. She has developed systems and processes that enable autonomy and deep engagement without having met many of her employees in person.   Read the related blog article: How to Build Autonomy into Your Teamwork.   Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) to get Silver Lining’s Team Cheat sheet which they use to set mutual expectations and basic understanding of how they operate AND their Verbal Warning / Coaching Template, which they use as part of the Progressive Discipline process.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    I need your help: What's challenging about being a manager? Share your experience here: www.mamieks.com/new-course   KEY TAKEAWAYS: It is very hard for humans to learn the skills of being self-disciplined, self-structured, and results oriented. Regardless of culture / country of origin, most of us need to learn these skills. Too often people have been trained to be submissive instead of contributive, yet to be a good team member, it’s important not to just follow along and say “yes.” Think, push back, share your perspective and help make the system better. Encourage sharing by creating a virtual ‘suggestion box’ and follow up with each idea. Be conscious about publicly rewarding the behaviors of speaking up. Silver Lining has a monthly “silver stars” program in which anyone can recognize a colleague.   Silver Lining manages using a Roles-Goals process: Once per month, each person in the company spends one hour doing a reflection during which they consider how they’ve spent their time, what they’ve accomplished towards their goals, how they or the system can improve, etc. Then they meet with their manager to review it for one hour and generate any plans for the next month. Think creatively about how to design the hiring process to determine fit. How might both parties assess whether the candidate will likely be successful in the role and the company’s culture, and that those are also what the candidate wants. At Silver Lining, the interview process focuses on non-negotiables and then the onboarding is really when the candidate will get the job or not. Each new hire, regardless of seniority, spends one week going through SLAP University, a 40 hour, self-managed one week program where they orient themselves to the company, products, culture, etc. The onboarding process helps people get oriented quickly but also gives them an opportunity to demonstrate whether they can manage themselves, learn and integrate the information, and have other skills needed to be successful at the company. Every time you need to teach someone something, record it or document it so next time, you share the documentation instead. Over time, you’ll build a library of how-tos and save yourself hundreds of hours. Plus it becomes a resource to current staff who may need an occasional refresher. You can invest in underperformers forever, but it’s not healthy for the business or their colleagues. Silver Lining uses Progressive Discipline: When someone is underperforming, first get them coaching. If after 90 days, the behavior hasn’t changed, write a written warning that includes a clear mandate for change in the next 30 days. Continue to give them whatever support seems appropriate to enable change. If after two weeks there still isn’t visible change, they get a second written warning. At the end of 30 days (2 additional weeks), if there still isn’t adequate change, the person is terminated, totalling a four month process.   KEEP UP WITH CARISSA Website: www.smallbizsilverlining.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carissareiniger/ Facebook: @SilverLiningActionPlan Twitter: @silverliningltd   ADDITIONAL RESOURCES Episode 5 Providing Autonomy That Works - www.mamieks.com/podcast-005

Building psychological safety may be the most important thing you do as a manager. Creating an environment in which people feel comfortable acknowledging mistakes, asking questions, offering ideas and feedback, and experimenting and failing, enables a team to think big, be nimble, and accomplish great feats.  In this episode, I’ll touch on what psychological safety looks like in the workplace and why it’s important, the difference between psychological safety and trust, why people don’t speak up and what you can start to do about it.  Much of what I share I learned from the book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy C. Edmondson.   Join the Modern Manager community to get the full guides, guest bonuses, access to the forum and more. Join before June 30th and get two special bonus gifts: a Modern Manager mini-notebook (usually reserved only as a thank you gift for my guests) and Meeteor meeting log to help clarify your meeting outcomes. Memberships start at $2.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.   Read the related blog article: Why Psychological Safety is More Important than Trust   Key Takeaways: Psychological safety describes people’s perceptions of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks in a particular context. In other words, what does someone expect will happen if they speak up at work. Psychological safety is what makes integrating diverse knowledge, perspectives, and skills is possible. It’s what enables teams to think big, be nimble, deal with conflict, give and receive feedback, and so much more. Psychological safety shows up in every interaction regarless of medium. The level determines whether someone speaks up when they have a different point of view, notice a mistake, have a question, have bad news or feedback to share, or anything where there is potential risk of looking stupid or incompetent, being seen as a failure, coming across as mean or argumentative or otherwise putting themselves out there. We can’t see when someone doesn’t speak up. It’s a silent act so no one knows except the person who didn’t speak up, making it hard to do anything about it. Psychological safety and trust are two different things. Psychological safety is a function of the group and is about immediate response, where trust is between two individuals and about belief in future action. There are three failure archetypes: (1) Preventable failures are deviations from recommended procedures that produce bad outcomes; (2) Complex failures occur when a series of factors collide in ways that have never happened before; (3) Intelligent failures are the result of a thoughtful foray into new territory where you’re going to have to get things wrong in order to get things right. To build psychological safety, how you frame failure is critical and highly dependent on the type of work and failure you are likely to see. Is intelligent failure seen as necessary in order to be creative and learn? Is the act of identifying a mistake - preventable or complex failure - considered heroic because you’re helping to improve the outcome? When you focus on purpose and remind people what’s at stake, you reinforce psychological safety. The outcome or impact becomes more important than the fear of speaking up. To encourage others to speak up, you must be crystal clear in your ask and invite their response through proactive inquiry. Do not wait for people to speak up. It’s important to respond with appreciation for whatever has been shared, even if you disagree, in order to encourage future speaking up. When a new idea or experiment doesn’t work out, take time to discover the learnings and celebrate what came from it as a way to destigmatize failure.   Additional Resources: Episode 38: How to Unleash New Ideas Through Failure with Jesse Fowl Episode 18: Culture Change and High Performing Teams with Wes Kao The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy C. Edmondson mamie@mamieks.com