May 20, 2025 • 20 mins
In this episode of the HR Mixtape podcast, host Shari Simpson welcomes Sabina Nawaz, an elite executive coach at Nawaz Consulting, LLC. They delve into the critical topic of effective management, particularly for high-performing leaders who often overlook the importance of feedback and psychological safety within their teams. This conversation is timely as organizations increasingly prioritize employee experience and inclusive leadership in today's dynamic work environment.
Listener Takeaways:
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Learn how to cultivate a culture of feedback that empowers team members to share their insights openly.
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Discover why speaking less can enhance your leadership effectiveness and foster better communication.
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Explore strategies for creating psychological safety, enabling your team to engage in tough conversations without fear.
Hit “Play” to gain valuable insights that can transform your management approach!
Guest(s): Sabina Nawaz, Executive Coach, Nawaz Consulting, LLC
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
You're listening to the HR Mixtape Your podcast with
the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and
stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel,
well, like work. Now, your host,
Joining me today is Sabina Nawaz, executive coach at
Nawaz Consulting, LLC. Sabina is an
(00:24):
elite executive coach who advises C-level executives and
teams at Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies,
Sabina, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast with me. Thank
you, Shari, for having me. So I was really excited
(00:45):
to hear that you are talking about
a new book that you have written. And I wondered if we could start
there, if you could tell us a little bit about the book and how
you wanted to go down this road about really helping people become
Yeah, Shari, this book is targeted at managers, but
(01:06):
not just managers, but managers who are already really successful.
So these are managers who have done a great job, who have a
track record, who've been promoted over the course of their careers, whether
they've been just promoted into the ranks of management, whether they've
been promoted into middle management, or whether they're at the CEO spot. So
for people who are really successful, It's
(01:29):
not about what you know, it's about what you don't know. And
there are three things in my experience that people usually don't know
that are somewhat counterintuitive. First is that
being promoted is often the riskiest time in your career. It's
great, but it's also very risky. Second is that
it is not power that corrupts, but pressure. And
(01:52):
the third is that the more you know, the less
you know. The less you know about the impact your actions are
having on other people and their productivity because power
insulates and isolates you. So those are the things
I share in the book to open people's eyes a little
bit wider so they can continue to be
(02:15):
Let's talk about that pressure for a while. You know, I
see this so much when, when talking to leaders on,
again, the ones that are really successful, they, they put on
themselves a lot. They have a lot put on
them from leadership and they have a lot of expectations coming from their
(02:38):
Yes, I think you're really onto something there,
Shari, about putting so much onto ourselves first. And
one of the ways we put things onto ourselves is through this trap
that I call the sole provider trap. And we
fall into this in a number of ways. The sole provider, meaning I'm
the one who has to do this thing, or I just instinctively
(03:01):
jump in and do it. I don't even think about it, that I'm the one who has to
do it. That can happen as
a caretaker. Oh, my team is going through a lot. Let
me jump in. Of course, your team is going to be going
through a lot all the time. And every time you jump in, you're
hobbling their growth and you're adding more pressure to yourself. You
(03:21):
could also be that whack-a-mole champ, you know, that arcade
game where you have the rubber mallet and you've got these moles that pop up and
you whack them as fast as possible and you fall asleep really
satisfied that you whacked a whole bunch of moles that day. only
for them to reappear the next day. Cesar,
somebody I share his story in the book, used to do
(03:43):
that. And he got a high out of that. What
he didn't realize is after a while, his team started leaving. He
was whacking their morale and their productivity in
addition to the to-do list that he was whacking. So you could be the whack-a-mole champ.
You could also be that straight-A student. Nobody's going to
have it done as perfectly as me. That period really
(04:04):
has to be there. And this needs to be an M-dash instead of an N-dash. and
so on, and so I want everything to perfection, and
I jump in as a sole provider. Or you could be a flash, where
so many of my clients say, screw this, it's gonna take
me a lot less time to just do it myself than to try and explain and coach somebody
else. The problem is then you have to keep doing it over and over again
(04:26):
and feeding that beast. So yes, those are a lot of ways in which
Do you find that as these leaders progress
in their career that they almost forget kind
of like where they cut their teeth and what managers helped them
grow? Because I find that sometimes you reach a point that
(04:50):
you kind of forget those things. You forget your own journey. And,
and you, like you said, you, you end up in these positions where you have all this pressure on
yourself. But if you think back, typically the managers
I've seen that have been really successful They all have a mentorship story
or a coaching story or a, hey, I learned from this failure story.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. They forget that
(05:14):
because when I tell them how they might gradually coach
and teach other people, they go, well, I didn't
need that and I was never that needy. Every
person in a position of power says that, and yet people
who are rising up the ranks say they need that and they benefit from
that. So obviously there's an amnesia here. There's
(05:36):
an executive amnesia, if you will. And so it
is actually about reminding them, hmm,
how did you secure that first promotion? Who else contributed
to your success? And try and get them to remember that and then bottle that
and replicate that. In some cases, I don't bother
arguing with them. I go, yeah, maybe you weren't that needy. And
(05:58):
you know what? That's not the case with the majority of the people. It's
not neediness. It's actually being strategic. Wouldn't
you rather they come and ask you how to do this, then
pretend they understood what you said and deliver
(06:19):
How have you helped managers solicit that feedback
that they need from their employees to see that they
have an area to improve in, in this area? And I
don't necessarily mean managing up. I mean, more like creating that
culture on your team where there's safety to be able
to say to your manager. hey, you know what, I'm struggling with this
(06:41):
or like, I don't, I don't feel like you're giving me enough opportunities to
maybe fail at this task before you jump in. I feel like
I'm like right on the precipice of learning something, but you
kind of swoop in before I get the opportunity. How have you coached managers
to start building a culture of feedback towards them
The first thing is to recognize that you're never going to get the full feedback. So
(07:03):
don't take it at face value. Power
is a two-way volume control. What we
say in a position of power is going to get amplified. So
we're saying it at a level five, they're going to read it at a level seven. And
similarly, what they're going to say is going to get muted up. So
if they say they have a problem and they say, you know, it's a level five problem,
(07:26):
probably a level seven problem. So it's apply that
filter, first of all, and and be under no illusions that
people are going to tell you the full truth because they won't. There's
too many things. People in position in power have
control over others for which
there's going to be fear, uncertainty, and doubt, even if you're
(07:47):
the kindest, gentlest manager. Now, here
are some strategies to help with that. First of all, for yourself.
What I mean by that is be consistent. The
more consistent you are, the more people will believe you.
So if you say, we're gonna
do a round of feedback at every one-on-one, then you better make sure you're
(08:10):
doing that at every one-on-one. And the first few
one-on-ones, you're gonna get very muted feedback. But
when they know this is here to stay and you really mean it, then
of course, they're gonna do more. So bore yourself. How
you respond to the feedback. Really, just two words.
Thank you. The minute you start to
(08:33):
poke at it or provide justifications or correct them,
you've lost the opportunity. And thirdly, the
quality of feedback you receive is directly proportional to the
quality of the question you ask. So instead of
saying, how did I do? You might say, what's one
thing you thought that went well in that client presentation? And
(08:54):
what's one thing I could have done even more of
or less of? So now when I frame it as what's one
thing, then first of all, I'm not asking them
to really put themselves out all the way on the line. They
can give me one thing. It's much milder than going, oh, here's
25 things that I thought you screwed up on. Start
(09:15):
with one and start really small and slowly start to notch
Does that model change at all if you're
working in a remote or a hybrid environment where you're
doing all of these conversations, you know, on Zoom or
Teams or, you know, you don't have that same, you know,
(09:37):
Yeah, I think it, it makes it even more important to do
it. because you're not getting so much of
that spontaneous conversation, you lose access
to a full body 3D experience of the persons, you're
missing some cues potentially. So it's even more important to
do this consistently, and very, very mindfully really
(09:58):
framing the question appropriately. Somebody
I've worked with, he has a brilliant practice
where at the end of each staff meeting,
so you can ask for feedback one-on-one and also in groups to
transmit why that this is really important and it's
part of the culture, as you said. So at the end
(10:19):
of every staff meeting, he reserves a few minutes for
people to go around and they answer the question, what's the
last 10% you are not sharing? And
because he has done this for years, it has
become part and parcel of the culture. Now,
does everyone share every last bit of that 10%? Of course
(10:41):
not, nor should they. Some things are better left unsaid. And
it fosters an openness that most teens don't have.
And it's such a good practice to open up your teams to
be able to give those opportunities or
there's negative things that you're experiencing. We had a leader that I worked with
(11:04):
once who would ask in a team
meeting if everybody was on board with the project or the idea or
the concept we were going down the road with. He would say, OK, who's the thumbs
down person who can play that role for me right now and and
kind of pooh-pooh the idea so that we could uncover
things that maybe we didn't think about or or didn't
(11:25):
consider as we were building things. So I love that idea of introducing that.
That's so smart to actually assign a role to somebody to be
the thumbs down person for the entire meeting, perhaps. And that
reminds me of another one is have them channel somebody.
So if we took this out into the world, what's
a harshest press critic going to say? How
(11:47):
will our competitors celebrate our failure? Asking
those kinds of questions, so it externalizes it and gets people
I love the, how does our competitor, what are they going to say? I love that.
What a great mindset to have in a meeting. Okay, let's switch
gears just a little bit. So you're working with these managers. They're,
(12:07):
they're high performers as we talked about. Maybe
though they're at the point now where they say, you know what? I don't got time
for that. I'm doing great. You know, my team is fine.
I'm meeting my KPIs. I'm just too busy to prioritize my
own growth. Their own growth, their
(12:28):
Yeah. Maybe you're fine. Great. Uh,
or how's it working for you? Yeah.
One of the things you can, you can learn through growth is how to be
not too busy. So one way
to meet them where they are, like what are the challenges they're facing
right now? I'm too busy. Now, of course, everybody's going to say that.
(12:52):
So it's a great entry point to say, how can you get less busy? Let's
talk about the pressure pitfalls you have fallen into where
you've become the sole provider or where you're feeding your own
needs for affirmation and confirmation and heroism. or
where you've fallen into the trap of busy. Let's
(13:12):
talk about those things and where you might be able to
loosen up some of that pressure for you and at
the same time increase the growth and independence of
your team. So that's the angle I would come at if
You know, the growth of a team, I think, has always fallen
into a place where managers really need to think about psychological safety.
(13:35):
And I've talked about this before in the podcast, just how important that
concept is. What are your recommendations on
building psychological safety on your team as a manager and
really creating a place where we can have some of these tough conversations
and I guess I'm looking for specifics because
I think sometimes managers are like, OK, great, I understand it. What
(14:00):
I think many of the things we've talked about in terms of receiving feedback would
absolutely go a long way. But when we're talking about a team and
it's not just feedback to the manager, Here's the thing, it's feedback
to each other. We over-focus on just the
manager-employee, and it's easy then, it
keeps us off the hook from holding each other accountable, because that's what true
(14:20):
leadership is, when you can influence without authority, when
you can lead without authority. Here, there are prescribed
roles and processes to do that. So, a
few ways to do that. First is, are you role-modeling that? Are
you providing direct feedback or are you skirting around
things or using the feedback sandwich with the positive, corrective, positive, which
(14:42):
everybody knows doesn't quite work? Are
you receiving feedback really well? So those, first of
all, those things. Then I think it's about
proactively putting some difficult topics on the table. and
having that conversation, but giving people some
space for grace. One very concrete
(15:05):
way that many of my clients now do at their meetings, after
I've worked with them, is three
choices for each person. On key topics where it's really important
to have that safety and put all the issues
on the table, you can play, plus
one, or pass. So play as in,
(15:29):
I'm going to tell you my thoughts on this. Plus one
as in, Shari just said that, I totally agree with
her plus one, so we're not going ad nauseum and repeating things.
Or pass, because for whatever reason, I don't
have something to add or I'm not comfortable adding. So a
key to safety is also giving people some
(15:49):
choice. It's not forced sharing. So
play plus one pass, immediately
increases the safety level to say, yeah, I'm invited
to play, but I don't have to repeat things and I don't have to
participate today, if for whatever reason I don't want to. And
there's no explanation excepted. Now, if somebody passes
(16:12):
10 times in a row, you might want to have a one-on-one conversation with
I've never heard it articulated that way, that concept. And
I think it is such a great takeaway from this conversation. If
you're thinking about, you know, sometimes you create those team
expectations of how we're going to handle our meeting and they
(16:33):
can get really complicated or they can get really silly,
right? You have to hold the thing or whatever to be
able to talk in the meeting. What a great way to just introduce
those concepts. And again, like you said, you're creating this
routine where there is psychological safety because everybody knows the
landscape, the road of what's being expected of them. And the
(16:55):
past part, that's the part that I think is really interesting about what you
share because it gives people that opportunity who
are sitting in a meeting and like, I just don't have anything to contribute to this
conversation. They don't feel like they have to make something up to look
smart or whatever. They can just task. Exactly,
And as the manager, sometimes you want to pass so
(17:16):
that again, you're showing there's no shame in passing. So
make sure you are doing each of those roles with
great frequency. So it levels the playing field
as much as possible. It reduces that power gap of the
rift we create naturally when hierarchy is in the room. Another
(17:38):
thing is you don't always have to be in the room. So
is there a way for you to have them have a conversation with
each other and then bring you into the room? Because
Oh, that's 100% true. And if you don't have a relationship with
(17:58):
quote unquote, people in power, you can be very intimidated.
You know, I like that you had shared earlier the concept around how
we all know about the compliment sandwich and how like it just doesn't work.
And I was kind of laughing as you were saying that because I was thinking about a
leader that I had that would use compliment sandwich, but
it worked because my relationship with this leader was so good that
(18:21):
the compliment sandwich ended up being like, a nice thing, thing
that I needed to work on and then something really silly because it was kind
of the dynamic of the relationship that allowed for that sarcasm. Um, so,
but, but we would not have got there if I hadn't had some of those, you know, more
heartfelt conversations earlier. So as
we wrap up our conversation and, and you look at, you
(18:42):
know, your crystal ball of the future, if you could wave a magic wand
and fix one kind of typical manager habit, bad
habit, what would it be? I
Okay, maybe two or three. I'll
stick to one. The one I would choose, Shari,
(19:04):
is speaking less. Speaking
less as in utilizing or
building what I call your shut up muscle. learning different ways
to not abdicate, but to listen in and
not be the first to speak. So very, very tactically and
concretely, can you be at least the third or later to speak in a meeting?
(19:28):
Can you take notes with your ideas so they don't go away, but
that prevents you from interrupting? Can you ask
more questions of the person speaking instead of telling them? additional
points. So it would be about speaking less. And since
you did give me the grace to have additional ones, I'll say
another one, which is do less. Doing less,
(19:51):
as in the notion of what I call creating blank space, two
hours a week. back-to-back, where you unplug
from everything and stop to think about the bigger picture instead
of do, do, do, do, do. Learn how to delegate better,
and my book talks about a tool called the delegation dial to avoid
the number one delegation mistake managers make, and
(20:14):
use that space and time to really think about what you're truly paid
to do, which is elevate yourself onto the
platform and look at the landscape, the horizon, and
Such great advice. Thank you so much for taking
a few minutes of your day to talk to me. And for those listening,
I will make sure to include a link to your book in the show notes so
(20:37):
that they can grab that. But Sabina, this was a great conversation. Thank
I hope you
enjoyed today's episode. You can find show notes and
links at thehrmixtape.com Come back often
You're listening to the HR Mixtape Your podcast with
the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and
stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel,
well, like work. Now, your host,
Joining me today is Sabina Nawaz, executive coach at
Nawaz Consulting, LLC. Sabina is an
(00:24):
elite executive coach who advises C-level executives and
teams at Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies,
Sabina, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast with me. Thank
you, Shari, for having me. So I was really excited
(00:45):
to hear that you are talking about
a new book that you have written. And I wondered if we could start
there, if you could tell us a little bit about the book and how
you wanted to go down this road about really helping people become
Yeah, Shari, this book is targeted at managers, but
(01:06):
not just managers, but managers who are already really successful.
So these are managers who have done a great job, who have a
track record, who've been promoted over the course of their careers, whether
they've been just promoted into the ranks of management, whether they've
been promoted into middle management, or whether they're at the CEO spot. So
for people who are really successful, It's
(01:29):
not about what you know, it's about what you don't know. And
there are three things in my experience that people usually don't know
that are somewhat counterintuitive. First is that
being promoted is often the riskiest time in your career. It's
great, but it's also very risky. Second is that
it is not power that corrupts, but pressure. And
(01:52):
the third is that the more you know, the less
you know. The less you know about the impact your actions are
having on other people and their productivity because power
insulates and isolates you. So those are the things
I share in the book to open people's eyes a little
bit wider so they can continue to be
(02:15):
Let's talk about that pressure for a while. You know, I
see this so much when, when talking to leaders on,
again, the ones that are really successful, they, they put on
themselves a lot. They have a lot put on
them from leadership and they have a lot of expectations coming from their
(02:38):
Yes, I think you're really onto something there,
Shari, about putting so much onto ourselves first. And
one of the ways we put things onto ourselves is through this trap
that I call the sole provider trap. And we
fall into this in a number of ways. The sole provider, meaning I'm
the one who has to do this thing, or I just instinctively
(03:01):
jump in and do it. I don't even think about it, that I'm the one who has to
do it. That can happen as
a caretaker. Oh, my team is going through a lot. Let
me jump in. Of course, your team is going to be going
through a lot all the time. And every time you jump in, you're
hobbling their growth and you're adding more pressure to yourself. You
(03:21):
could also be that whack-a-mole champ, you know, that arcade
game where you have the rubber mallet and you've got these moles that pop up and
you whack them as fast as possible and you fall asleep really
satisfied that you whacked a whole bunch of moles that day. only
for them to reappear the next day. Cesar,
somebody I share his story in the book, used to do
(03:43):
that. And he got a high out of that. What
he didn't realize is after a while, his team started leaving. He
was whacking their morale and their productivity in
addition to the to-do list that he was whacking. So you could be the whack-a-mole champ.
You could also be that straight-A student. Nobody's going to
have it done as perfectly as me. That period really
(04:04):
has to be there. And this needs to be an M-dash instead of an N-dash. and
so on, and so I want everything to perfection, and
I jump in as a sole provider. Or you could be a flash, where
so many of my clients say, screw this, it's gonna take
me a lot less time to just do it myself than to try and explain and coach somebody
else. The problem is then you have to keep doing it over and over again
(04:26):
and feeding that beast. So yes, those are a lot of ways in which
Do you find that as these leaders progress
in their career that they almost forget kind
of like where they cut their teeth and what managers helped them
grow? Because I find that sometimes you reach a point that
(04:50):
you kind of forget those things. You forget your own journey. And,
and you, like you said, you, you end up in these positions where you have all this pressure on
yourself. But if you think back, typically the managers
I've seen that have been really successful They all have a mentorship story
or a coaching story or a, hey, I learned from this failure story.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. They forget that
(05:14):
because when I tell them how they might gradually coach
and teach other people, they go, well, I didn't
need that and I was never that needy. Every
person in a position of power says that, and yet people
who are rising up the ranks say they need that and they benefit from
that. So obviously there's an amnesia here. There's
(05:36):
an executive amnesia, if you will. And so it
is actually about reminding them, hmm,
how did you secure that first promotion? Who else contributed
to your success? And try and get them to remember that and then bottle that
and replicate that. In some cases, I don't bother
arguing with them. I go, yeah, maybe you weren't that needy. And
(05:58):
you know what? That's not the case with the majority of the people. It's
not neediness. It's actually being strategic. Wouldn't
you rather they come and ask you how to do this, then
pretend they understood what you said and deliver
(06:19):
How have you helped managers solicit that feedback
that they need from their employees to see that they
have an area to improve in, in this area? And I
don't necessarily mean managing up. I mean, more like creating that
culture on your team where there's safety to be able
to say to your manager. hey, you know what, I'm struggling with this
(06:41):
or like, I don't, I don't feel like you're giving me enough opportunities to
maybe fail at this task before you jump in. I feel like
I'm like right on the precipice of learning something, but you
kind of swoop in before I get the opportunity. How have you coached managers
to start building a culture of feedback towards them
The first thing is to recognize that you're never going to get the full feedback. So
(07:03):
don't take it at face value. Power
is a two-way volume control. What we
say in a position of power is going to get amplified. So
we're saying it at a level five, they're going to read it at a level seven. And
similarly, what they're going to say is going to get muted up. So
if they say they have a problem and they say, you know, it's a level five problem,
(07:26):
probably a level seven problem. So it's apply that
filter, first of all, and and be under no illusions that
people are going to tell you the full truth because they won't. There's
too many things. People in position in power have
control over others for which
there's going to be fear, uncertainty, and doubt, even if you're
(07:47):
the kindest, gentlest manager. Now, here
are some strategies to help with that. First of all, for yourself.
What I mean by that is be consistent. The
more consistent you are, the more people will believe you.
So if you say, we're gonna
do a round of feedback at every one-on-one, then you better make sure you're
(08:10):
doing that at every one-on-one. And the first few
one-on-ones, you're gonna get very muted feedback. But
when they know this is here to stay and you really mean it, then
of course, they're gonna do more. So bore yourself. How
you respond to the feedback. Really, just two words.
Thank you. The minute you start to
(08:33):
poke at it or provide justifications or correct them,
you've lost the opportunity. And thirdly, the
quality of feedback you receive is directly proportional to the
quality of the question you ask. So instead of
saying, how did I do? You might say, what's one
thing you thought that went well in that client presentation? And
(08:54):
what's one thing I could have done even more of
or less of? So now when I frame it as what's one
thing, then first of all, I'm not asking them
to really put themselves out all the way on the line. They
can give me one thing. It's much milder than going, oh, here's
25 things that I thought you screwed up on. Start
(09:15):
with one and start really small and slowly start to notch
Does that model change at all if you're
working in a remote or a hybrid environment where you're
doing all of these conversations, you know, on Zoom or
Teams or, you know, you don't have that same, you know,
(09:37):
Yeah, I think it, it makes it even more important to do
it. because you're not getting so much of
that spontaneous conversation, you lose access
to a full body 3D experience of the persons, you're
missing some cues potentially. So it's even more important to
do this consistently, and very, very mindfully really
(09:58):
framing the question appropriately. Somebody
I've worked with, he has a brilliant practice
where at the end of each staff meeting,
so you can ask for feedback one-on-one and also in groups to
transmit why that this is really important and it's
part of the culture, as you said. So at the end
(10:19):
of every staff meeting, he reserves a few minutes for
people to go around and they answer the question, what's the
last 10% you are not sharing? And
because he has done this for years, it has
become part and parcel of the culture. Now,
does everyone share every last bit of that 10%? Of course
(10:41):
not, nor should they. Some things are better left unsaid. And
it fosters an openness that most teens don't have.
And it's such a good practice to open up your teams to
be able to give those opportunities or
there's negative things that you're experiencing. We had a leader that I worked with
(11:04):
once who would ask in a team
meeting if everybody was on board with the project or the idea or
the concept we were going down the road with. He would say, OK, who's the thumbs
down person who can play that role for me right now and and
kind of pooh-pooh the idea so that we could uncover
things that maybe we didn't think about or or didn't
(11:25):
consider as we were building things. So I love that idea of introducing that.
That's so smart to actually assign a role to somebody to be
the thumbs down person for the entire meeting, perhaps. And that
reminds me of another one is have them channel somebody.
So if we took this out into the world, what's
a harshest press critic going to say? How
(11:47):
will our competitors celebrate our failure? Asking
those kinds of questions, so it externalizes it and gets people
I love the, how does our competitor, what are they going to say? I love that.
What a great mindset to have in a meeting. Okay, let's switch
gears just a little bit. So you're working with these managers. They're,
(12:07):
they're high performers as we talked about. Maybe
though they're at the point now where they say, you know what? I don't got time
for that. I'm doing great. You know, my team is fine.
I'm meeting my KPIs. I'm just too busy to prioritize my
own growth. Their own growth, their
(12:28):
Yeah. Maybe you're fine. Great. Uh,
or how's it working for you? Yeah.
One of the things you can, you can learn through growth is how to be
not too busy. So one way
to meet them where they are, like what are the challenges they're facing
right now? I'm too busy. Now, of course, everybody's going to say that.
(12:52):
So it's a great entry point to say, how can you get less busy? Let's
talk about the pressure pitfalls you have fallen into where
you've become the sole provider or where you're feeding your own
needs for affirmation and confirmation and heroism. or
where you've fallen into the trap of busy. Let's
(13:12):
talk about those things and where you might be able to
loosen up some of that pressure for you and at
the same time increase the growth and independence of
your team. So that's the angle I would come at if
You know, the growth of a team, I think, has always fallen
into a place where managers really need to think about psychological safety.
(13:35):
And I've talked about this before in the podcast, just how important that
concept is. What are your recommendations on
building psychological safety on your team as a manager and
really creating a place where we can have some of these tough conversations
and I guess I'm looking for specifics because
I think sometimes managers are like, OK, great, I understand it. What
(14:00):
I think many of the things we've talked about in terms of receiving feedback would
absolutely go a long way. But when we're talking about a team and
it's not just feedback to the manager, Here's the thing, it's feedback
to each other. We over-focus on just the
manager-employee, and it's easy then, it
keeps us off the hook from holding each other accountable, because that's what true
(14:20):
leadership is, when you can influence without authority, when
you can lead without authority. Here, there are prescribed
roles and processes to do that. So, a
few ways to do that. First is, are you role-modeling that? Are
you providing direct feedback or are you skirting around
things or using the feedback sandwich with the positive, corrective, positive, which
(14:42):
everybody knows doesn't quite work? Are
you receiving feedback really well? So those, first of
all, those things. Then I think it's about
proactively putting some difficult topics on the table. and
having that conversation, but giving people some
space for grace. One very concrete
(15:05):
way that many of my clients now do at their meetings, after
I've worked with them, is three
choices for each person. On key topics where it's really important
to have that safety and put all the issues
on the table, you can play, plus
one, or pass. So play as in,
(15:29):
I'm going to tell you my thoughts on this. Plus one
as in, Shari just said that, I totally agree with
her plus one, so we're not going ad nauseum and repeating things.
Or pass, because for whatever reason, I don't
have something to add or I'm not comfortable adding. So a
key to safety is also giving people some
(15:49):
choice. It's not forced sharing. So
play plus one pass, immediately
increases the safety level to say, yeah, I'm invited
to play, but I don't have to repeat things and I don't have to
participate today, if for whatever reason I don't want to. And
there's no explanation excepted. Now, if somebody passes
(16:12):
10 times in a row, you might want to have a one-on-one conversation with
I've never heard it articulated that way, that concept. And
I think it is such a great takeaway from this conversation. If
you're thinking about, you know, sometimes you create those team
expectations of how we're going to handle our meeting and they
(16:33):
can get really complicated or they can get really silly,
right? You have to hold the thing or whatever to be
able to talk in the meeting. What a great way to just introduce
those concepts. And again, like you said, you're creating this
routine where there is psychological safety because everybody knows the
landscape, the road of what's being expected of them. And the
(16:55):
past part, that's the part that I think is really interesting about what you
share because it gives people that opportunity who
are sitting in a meeting and like, I just don't have anything to contribute to this
conversation. They don't feel like they have to make something up to look
smart or whatever. They can just task. Exactly,
And as the manager, sometimes you want to pass so
(17:16):
that again, you're showing there's no shame in passing. So
make sure you are doing each of those roles with
great frequency. So it levels the playing field
as much as possible. It reduces that power gap of the
rift we create naturally when hierarchy is in the room. Another
(17:38):
thing is you don't always have to be in the room. So
is there a way for you to have them have a conversation with
each other and then bring you into the room? Because
Oh, that's 100% true. And if you don't have a relationship with
(17:58):
quote unquote, people in power, you can be very intimidated.
You know, I like that you had shared earlier the concept around how
we all know about the compliment sandwich and how like it just doesn't work.
And I was kind of laughing as you were saying that because I was thinking about a
leader that I had that would use compliment sandwich, but
it worked because my relationship with this leader was so good that
(18:21):
the compliment sandwich ended up being like, a nice thing, thing
that I needed to work on and then something really silly because it was kind
of the dynamic of the relationship that allowed for that sarcasm. Um, so,
but, but we would not have got there if I hadn't had some of those, you know, more
heartfelt conversations earlier. So as
we wrap up our conversation and, and you look at, you
(18:42):
know, your crystal ball of the future, if you could wave a magic wand
and fix one kind of typical manager habit, bad
habit, what would it be? I
Okay, maybe two or three. I'll
stick to one. The one I would choose, Shari,
(19:04):
is speaking less. Speaking
less as in utilizing or
building what I call your shut up muscle. learning different ways
to not abdicate, but to listen in and
not be the first to speak. So very, very tactically and
concretely, can you be at least the third or later to speak in a meeting?
(19:28):
Can you take notes with your ideas so they don't go away, but
that prevents you from interrupting? Can you ask
more questions of the person speaking instead of telling them? additional
points. So it would be about speaking less. And since
you did give me the grace to have additional ones, I'll say
another one, which is do less. Doing less,
(19:51):
as in the notion of what I call creating blank space, two
hours a week. back-to-back, where you unplug
from everything and stop to think about the bigger picture instead
of do, do, do, do, do. Learn how to delegate better,
and my book talks about a tool called the delegation dial to avoid
the number one delegation mistake managers make, and
(20:14):
use that space and time to really think about what you're truly paid
to do, which is elevate yourself onto the
platform and look at the landscape, the horizon, and
Such great advice. Thank you so much for taking
a few minutes of your day to talk to me. And for those listening,
I will make sure to include a link to your book in the show notes so
(20:37):
that they can grab that. But Sabina, this was a great conversation. Thank
I hope you
enjoyed today's episode. You can find show notes and
links at thehrmixtape.com Come back often
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