How good are you?
Elizabeth (Liz) Gulliver
Our business is your people. We elevate employee experience and drive retention & performance.
Perspective and framing have been on my mind. And not because I went on a massive cleaning binge over the long weekend (I was organizing toys until 2 AM. Only to have it ripped apart in 5 minutes the next morning).?
They’re on my mind because I think we’re not using them enough, but they might be just what we need.?
Take a step back. Everyone from the big-wigs at Davos, to the CEOs you listen to on podcasts and that girl from high school on your Linkedin feed is talking about ‘vision’ right now (“Here’s our vision for the year!” “Check out my vision board!”). Why? Because last year was brutal, people are tired & worried, and the future is unpredictable. So we’re all painting a picture of our Vision amidst that chaos.
Most of those Visions are an end point, a place we want to get to. The key to getting it right though is to stop thinking about it as a single goal or destination. Vision is a story you shape for the future. A story that grabs people and motivates them. It must be loose enough to adapt to inevitable changes along the way, but specific enough to be a driving force. A shared vision is what moves organizations, communities, even countries. ‘Visionary Leaders’ are the ones who know how to tell that story.?
Why are we talking about that? Because I don’t know about you, but I have yet to be on a single a call in 2024 where I haven’t heard:
You get the idea.?
People are struggling. Companies are struggling. We’re in a deep, deep engagement crisis. So deep that it’s become a massive drag on organizations. So deep that it’s now a business imperative - solving it is the only way to win, to succeed. You want performance, output, profit? It comes from unlocking the potential of your people, and that sits in engagement. Storytelling alone can’t solve for this. But it’s a start.?
Building a vision in choppy times is hard though. It requires leaders to think long term, plan with uncertainty, and make the choices with limited in-puts. The key to exceptional leadership in these circumstances is ‘low-data decision making’ (that’s not from me, that’s from experts on it). You won’t have all the data you want and need, but you have to move forward anyway. AI is awful at operating in unpredictable circumstances, human brains thrive in it. If you’re going to steer your organization through this next year & whatever it brings, you need to practice making choices and taking action with limited data.?
This is where perspective and framing come into play. Looking at challenges differently helps substitute for missing data and drive innovation. Try it out. In your next meeting, before you dive into problem solving, make everyone stop and examine the problem itself through different frames. There’s a robust framework (ha!) on how to do this, but the key is asking expansive questions - what if, how might, in a different world - these help you think outside preset assumptions, remove any limits, and find blind spots.?
It’s also a great time to bring in an outsider.?
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Have you ever been struggling to build a piece of furniture for hours? The directions are infuriatingly vague, but you finally get to the last steps, and you can’t quite get it. The final pieces won’t fit. You’re at the point of ripping apart the entire thing in a fit of anger when your spouse walks in. He’s awful with tools, no DIY skills whatsoever, but he takes one look, and figures it out.?
How does he do it? He’s reframing it to ‘What if we just tried this piece here’ instead of ‘Why the F** ?isn’t that piece fitting where I think it should?!’. He hasn’t been staring at it for 4 hours. He’s using new frames, fresh perspective and zero preconceived ideas.
Work challenges are no different. Who hasn’t sat in their leadership meetings thinking they’re listening to a recording, the same old songs on repeat? Now is the time to ask who isn’t in these conversations who should join now? Maybe that’s a 3rd party or a different team.?
In our work on this with clients and Leadership Teams, it’s clear that most of us want to immediately solve a problem when we see one. We’ll spend lots of time, energy, and resources brainstorming ideas + testing to see what sticks. It creates a lot of waste. Few of us pause to actually study the problem first. But that’s where the innovation lies. Moving from immediate problem solving mode into problem framing mode is part of how we go from directing our teams to coaching them. When you have managers/leaders operating from a coaching mindset instead of as a director of work, the changes are dramatic.?
I imagine many of you are also thinking about your 2024 Visions, wrestling with engagement, and trying to make decisions amidst uncertainty. Storytelling, perspectives and framing might not be the most obvious tools that pop to mind, but they’re some of the most applicable.
So the question is, how good a storyteller are you? How are you reframing the biggest you’re looking at right now??
Invites: Join us!?
What we’re reading
Free agent. Co-Host/Producer @ HR Confessions. Co-Founder @ PeakHR, Tendlab, OrgOrg. Advisor, Investor, Writer, Storyteller, Mama. PeopleOps + Parenting. ADHD/OCD.
10 个月Love this one!!
MBA- SHRM-CP Empowering Individuals with Special Needs.
10 个月A tool that works for me is placing myself outside my comfort zone. I imagine myself in a place, go for it and figure out the rest after the decision was made. I do that almost all the time for work and personal. For instance, I am afraid of heights, I do not like cold and I never traveled in a small plane. Yet, I am planning and training to hike to Mt. Everest Base Camp in November (nine days hiking, and then go around the mountain and back down in a helicopter). That gives me purpose, generates energy and spark, and allows me to set everything else in perspective.