Sharing your story - making connections

This week we facilitated a session to jump start the relationship between a new leader and her team. As part of this exercise, we spend time with the team talking about their leader and gathering constructive feedback.

We had a situation where a woman leader was managing a team of nearly all women.

While there was strong consensus that this person is a leader in her field, a role model, and someone to learn from...

She was reserved and quiet... 

We heard what I felt to be an unusual amount of concern about her shy nature...

• "We don't know the real person"
• "We don't know how to connect to her"
• "We feel like we are working with a robot"
• "We don't know what she does outside of work"
• "We don't know what she likes to do for fun"
• "It's hard to relate to her"

I had to wonder, is this the woman-to-woman dynamic? When women work together is part of the relationship built on sharing personal information about ourselves? Do we hurt ourselves if we are too private?

We have learned to share our stories as a way to connect to other women. This is the grease in the relationship and allows for the hard conversations and helps us handle personal challenges. It helps us create a sense of empathy and camaraderie with our peers.

So if we don't share these stories with the women on our team, are we creating an uncomfortable dynamic? I think we are. And I think we can foster a much more collaborative environment by sharing who we are. But the stories we share at work are different than the ones we share with our girlfriends over wine.

• Share decisions you are considering (school for the kids, new home purchase, new car purchase...) - these are non-threatening ways of talking about things in your life and gathering information from others
• Share events/activities you are planning (movies, theater, sports, hobbies) - again non-threatening and a way to share some things that are important or relevant to you

Remember though, this is how to work with relational oriented people. Most women are relational and want this level of connection. Most men do not. So these stories would likely bore and frustrate a man because it is wasting time before getting to what is really important - work!

Look for cues as to how much the women (and men) on your team want to know about each other.
Are they asking about your weekend? your kids? your commute? Are they telling you about something they did? Try asking them about something outside work before you start your meeting and see what their reaction is. This will indicate their style.

We need to play to our strengths. When we work with women we have an advantage - we know how to connect and build relationships. We know how to share our stories. Not only does it make everyone feel better, it helps us get things done and it creates loyalty and trust. Take advantage of it!

Establishing yourself and your team

When it comes to disciplining our girls, my husband tells me I am the "hammer" and I call him the "velvet glove." I think there are 3 really important elements to helping my girls learn to be successful in the world.

• Communicate expectations:  I tend to set very strict rules which I gradually ease up as the girls demonstrate they are responsible enough to manage themselves. I think that it is much easier to loosen up the reins than try to tighten them after the fact.
• Issue consequences: To reinforce the rules requires immediate and relevant consequences. A few years ago, when Amelia refused to stay on her chair at a restaurant, I marched her to the car, strapped her into the car seat, and left her there while we leisurely finished our dinner. Don't panic, we were sitting outside and the car was parked next to the patio. Today I can take her out to eat without ever worrying about how she will behave.
• Deliver what you promise: Always do what you say, even if it makes your life harder in the short term. It's important to really think about what you are saying BEFORE you say it. Last week I was grocery shopping with Katie Paige. She didn't want to walk next to me so I told her we going to go home and she would sit in her room until lunch if she did it again. So 10 minutes later I was leaving my grocery cart and driving home to send her to her room. I was ticked off that I would have to make another trip to the store, but I know she learned an important lesson and I won't have to do it again.

For me, these are the characteristics of being a good leader. Which comes back to how to establish yourself with a team you have inherited.

• Establish clear expectations, communicate them in a relevant and meaningful way, and hold people accountable to them. Don't let anyone off the hook until they demonstrate they can be trusted.
• Deliver immediate and relevant consequences if people are not meeting expectations. Everyone is watching you and wants to know what happens if they don't deliver.
• Think about what you say, say what you mean, and deliver what you promise.
• Most importantly, do this because you want these people to succeed. This is about helping them learn, grow, and get better. It's not about you.

Remember the really hard teachers who turned out to be the best ones? They came in really mean, they told us how hard the class was going to be, they scared us a little bit... and over time, if we were good, we learned a lot and we ended up respecting and maybe even liking them.

We tend to focus too much on whether people like us. We should focus more on whether they respect us. Once we build this respect, they may learn to like us.

My last thought on building a team. Get rid of people who aren't helping you create the team environment you want. It is easier to on-board a new hire than to deal with the constant turmoil of an unhappy team member.

Of course, I can't do this with my girls but they don't really have a choice either - we have to figure out a way to work together. Plus I can't think of anyone else I would rather have on my team.

The old boys club

This morning over breakfast my dear friend shared a story of recent events that was so astounding it left me speechless (which is saying a lot).

They had finally found a highly qualified, proven, and experienced sales executive to join their team. The executive team convened to discuss the candidate. Oh BTW she happened to be a woman.

one guy's heated argument: we can't hire her! what will we do when we want to go play golf? this will totally mess up the team dynamics! 

CEO: do you hear what you are saying?

guy: but really, I am serious, this would really mess up the team and how we sell and what about when we want to go out drinking?

CEO: we are NOT having this conversation.

And this guy is in his early 40's.

I don't know if he ever did hear what he was saying. Or understood what it implied.

Makes me scared. and mad.

Building a team - dealing with intimidation

I’m working with Elizabeth, a senior executive in Finance. She is responsible for completely reshaping the accounting organization – outsourcing, segmenting roles, restructuring, raising the skill level and expertise…

She is incredibly smart, funny, and professional. She also sees herself in a bigger role someday. She was surprised when she found out that people were intimidated and afraid of her. Even her direct reports were not willing to ask her questions or tell her what they were thinking.

Elizabeth took this personally. She worried about how to engage better, how to be less intimidating, what could be causing this. She swung between “I don’t care, I just need to get this done” to “what can I do to relate better with my employees”. She thought about situations where she might have said something differently, and other situations where she did something that seemed to engage people positively. 

This thinking was taking up a whole lot of energy that would be spent better on other things. And I realized that I hadn’t ever had this conversation with the men executives I had worked with.

• Women executives are more likely to deal with issues with intimidation because of the degree of power and authority they have. 
• Women have a need for a team to really collaborate with – people want to work with people we like and people we trust. 
• Women are more sensitive to how they are being perceived. And it is harder for us to separate the personal relationship from the professional relationship. It hurts our feelings when people don't like us or say mean things about us (and it really ticks us off).

So we spend a lot of time trying to be less intimidating, pulling our team together, and worrying about what people are saying and whether they like us or not. It is frankly quite exhausting.

• Get out there and talk to your “team”. Instead of staying in your head, take action. It’s your job as a leader to get your direct reports playing well together.
• Tell them what you want to achieve, share your stories. Find out who they are, what they really enjoy doing, what brings them to work each day.
• Talk about why you need them on the team. What do they do that you like?
• And most importantly, tell them what you like and don’t like. We tend to focus on the job and tasks at hand. Elizabeth needed to tell people her criteria: that she hated to be surprised about problems and concerns (hearing them in the hall drove her crazy) – she wanted people to tell her directly. She also liked well thought out options and ideas when people were presenting problems (people coming in to vent and complain irritated her). This helped people know what to do to build their credibility and relationship with her.
• Finally, if you have someone on your team who doesn't fit, make a change. I've seen women keep a person because of a skill/experience level but who was disrespectful and sabotaging their efforts. Is this making life better? easier?  

When we run into these challenges – rumors, intimidation, relationship-related issues – I’ve seen a tendency, especially with women, to hope it will all work out. To think if we keep plowing ahead, ignoring the problem, and making progress, the problems will somehow sort themselves out. But we can make our lives and our work so much more enjoyable by dealing with these challenges. Telling people what you expect helps. Getting to know them and sharing your own stories helps. 

Building relationships and trust takes time and it may mean we need to be uncomfortable for a while.