Welcome to Hacking Your Leadership. I'm Chris and Lorenzo, and welcome to this week's Thoughtful Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking Your Leadership and leave us a review on iTunes. On this Thoughtful Thursday, I want to talk about kind of a follow up to our Monday episode. On we talked about the four stages of psychological safety, and we got some really good
feedback and comments from our listeners on how much they liked that episode. It was a little longer than normal, but there was just so much good content in there. So if you haven't listened to that yet, go back and listen to it and you'll have a little bit more context for this episode. I want to talk about how not everybody in the room can be expected to play every single role. If if you're having a psychologically safe group, like
I'll give you an example. I know that if I'm putting a room and someone says, solve this problem, I'll look at it like I don't know
where to begin. But if I come into a room that is where people have been contributing ideas for a period of an hour or two, and they have certain things up there, on the whiteboard and they're looking through certain things, I can I can committo that room and look at it and kind of pick things apart and and kind of optimize them and figure out what what part parts of it will work, what part of it parts of it won't work, almost like a like a from a user experienced perspective as opposed to you
know, starting from scratch, and and everybody is different with regard to what there's where their strengths lie. And I think when it comes to the topic of psychological safety, assuming that everybody in the room, if you have a psychologically safe team, is all going to raise their hand and say we got to change the way things are doing that, you know that that isn't necessarily the case. Some people just aren't comfortable doing that, not because it's not
psychologically safe, but because it's not who they are. They're not They're not the one who has the ability to innately see something that is being done wrong or or where an optimization can be made. They're they're better at kind of coming up with the idea to begin with. This is this is a lot of nuance here, and it can lead teams to think that there is a
problem with psychological safety when there might not necessarily be one. Yeah, I think it's it's when you think about that first foundational step around just the ability to feel included and feel valued for unique perspective, you've got to find ways to share that. You have to find ways of saying, like, what what are the unique perspectives, what are the unique skills and strengths that we
have collectively as a team. What are the things that we bring to the table, and how do we show appreciation for those different talents and strengths, but also how do we put those to use? And like what are those what are those scenarios, what are those things that we do? How do we find that value? Because to your point, like you know, I've had people on those teams that you know, eight or ten people in the meeting, we're talking, we're talking, we're talking. They're really quiet for
like fifteen twenty minutes. It's not that they're ignoring everybody. They're listening. They're not in their head, they're thinking about stuff, they're writing things down like they're in the moment, but they're not actively participating at the level of maybe others are participating. And then they'll get to the point where they'll raise their hand and they'll say, hey, okay, I heard this, I
heard that, you said this. I think if we took that and that and we put that together with this, this would help us get here and this would be a good place for us to start. Like that skill is such an important skill. But if you looked at it and said, no, everybody, I want everybody in here. So you have to share right now, you have to give an idea like there might be a time for
that. And and maybe there's those moments when you don't have any element of inclusive nature where you have to force the ability for everybody to have a voice in the room. But that's definitely not the most productive way, and it doesn't allow there to be that element of individuality when it comes to like how
people process, how they think and where they add the value. And so I always think about that being a thing you have to consider when you're when you're really building that foundation element is what are the small practices or things that you can do to bring this to life for a team and celebrate the fact that everybody brings something different and then appreciate each other for those contributions that they're
making to help the idea or the strategy become better. Right, if you are expecting a contribution from every person, almost like you're trying to validate that there is psychological safety, or you're trying to validate that everybody has that opportunity to have a voice. By forcing that that voice to happen, you'll end up with two things. One, you'll have people who don't feel a psychologically
safe because they're being put on the spot to contribute something. Maybe when they don't have the knowledge, skills, or ability to contribute something to this,
maybe they still are taking things in. Or they don't feel like they have the right to speak up, not because it's not a psychologically safe environment, but because they haven't earned the right to speak up on this particular topic, for whatever the subject matter is. Or you'll end up with people who are constantly speaking up because they know that's the expectation, and they're they're gonna throw
out ideas and make contributions that don't move anything forward. They're going to be they're gonna be meaningless or irrelevant or hurtful because the expectation is such that everybody contributes, and I have nothing meaningful to contribute, But I got to come up with something, So let's pickhole. Let's let's throw something out there and
see what happens. That that's not a good thing. That that's just trying to validate your own leadership in making sure that you know that, Hey, every everybody in the room was able to speak up because I forced them to speak up. That's not That's not a good thing. Um. What I want to ask you, Lorenzo, is when when is a time when you have felt this in a room, when you have you know, kind of
seen that this is a need to happen. And it may have gone maybe against what your thoughts were of how psychologically safe the room was, um, and you had to kind of really dig in to figure out, well, is there a lack of psychological safety here or are people just playing their roles? So I want to ask you that first. I want to give it
up towards one of our sponsors. All Right, Lorenzo, when have you been in this kind of situation where you were you know, kind of different people have been in the room and it isn't necessarily an indicator that there's a lack of psychological safety. Is an activity that I did with a team, and I think that the team I felt at the time very highly motivated,
a lot of dialogue, a lot of strategy building. But again that's from my biased perspective of being the person who has a lot of high energy and likes to move things forwards. So like I felt at the time, I was a part of a team that was doing really good work. What I learned after this activity was, as a matter of fact, we're not all and we weren't really clear on who we were and how we added value.
We weren't creating space where the ideas of the strategies could be the best that they could be because certain kind of certain leaders of the team had an energy and a push to to just drive things through versus really being tactical and having a clear expectation for everybody in the room. And so the activity was talking about innovation and the roles that people play in the innovation process, and there
were really four roles to that. The first one was we learned about was generators, and generators find new problems and ideate based on their own direct experience. So I see a problem, I have an opinion. I'm gonna share what I think based upon my experience and I'm going to kind of share that and push that and just continue to dump ideas as to what could possibly work. Then there's the conceptualizers, and they define the problem and prefer to understand
it through abstract analysis rather than direct experience. So they like to really take it in. They like to idate, but they are taking in a much larger piece of the puzzle of thinking about a lot of different things. They're looking at data, they're looking at the opinions of others, they're looking at history and experience. They're bringing that all together to kind of help consider what the strategy could be. Then there's optimizers, and they evaluate ideas and suggest
solution a little bit of what you talked about earlier. They prefer to systematically examine all possible alternatives in order to implement the best solution among the known options. So like cool, show me what you got, let me take a look at it, let me maybe reorganize it, and what are the best ways we can move this thing forward? And then the implementers. They are the ones who put solutions to work. So they are typically enthusiastic, sometimes
they're impatient. They take action. They like to experiment with some things they like to really like make adjustments based on the experience the experiments, but they are like, ah, y'all have fun, decided what the idea is. Just tell me what we're going to go do, and now I'm going to go make it happen. And we did this as a team, and what it really showed was like, Wow, we have these different individuals that do these things really really well, but we tend to maybe skip over some of
these. We don't pause. I don't stop and say hey Chris, like okay, Chris, We've done our due diligence. We had some we generated some ideas, we we conceptualize them. We went to a lot of different back and forth. It took into a lot of context, and these are the top three things that we think would make sense to go forward. Now we need you to step up and look at this. What do you think? What do you want to do with this? How do we move forward?
And then thank you because basically what we're asking you to do is like poke holes and all these strategies, rearrange them, push back, and adjust. And I think that this is a really good example of an activity that allowed us to see each other through the value, that we bring in the diverse way in which we have skills, and that we look at how we build strategies together. So these are the things that I think we have to do more often if we want to build in that true element of people feeling
included and feeling valued for the different ways that they were. This is such an important perspective here because when this goes wrong, it's when people are expected to be one of these four things that they're not w you have. If a person leading a team is an implementer, they'll have less patience for the optimizers and for the conceptualizers because they just want to get something going. They
need to understand that this is a process that has to go through. If a person on who leads the team is they a conceptualizer, they want the meeting to go eight hours where they think about more particular options. There's somebody in the back of that room who's tapping their feet just anti they just want
to get going. Because because perfect is the enemy of done right, like all of these things matter, and all these step steps in stages matter, all these people matter, and if you want to do things the correct way, you need to at least start by acknowledging where your team is, how many how many of each of these types of people you have on your teams and allow them to be who they are without expecting them to play in the
other spaces, and then there could be some overlap here. There are something like when I'm looking at these types of you know, the for innovation styles, I am a mostly an optimizer, but I have some conceptualization also in it. I am It's harder for me to play in the generator space or the implementer space unless unless I know it's already done. Like I'll implement something if it's just presented to me as a fully big pie. But if I'm in a room, I'm not the one tap of my feet going let's go,
let's go, let's go. I want to kind of optimize it more. I want to, you know, bring some more kind of meat to it first. But if you put me in the room at the beginning of the conversation again, like I said, at the beginning, a lot more difficult to just start from scratch. I want to kind of come into the conversation it's already there. And this is really eye opening from a perspective of
that. If you're a leader, You'll have each of these people on your team know who they are and don't expect them to play in spaces that are less comfortable to them, or you're you're going to get results that are less than optimized results because you're expecting a conceptualizer to implement something that's not fully baked, or an implementer to sit there and have patients while a project starts from the beginning, maybe not even needed for the first three meetings, right like,
these are all the different things you have taken to account as a leader. Absolutely, and with that it brings us to the end of this episode. This is hacking your leadership. I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris, and have a great day.