FAQ: Leaders first day

Moderator: We talked about engagement but doesn’t really work in the real world? In this episode, we challenge our experts to respond to these difficult leadership challenges that some may face on their first days in a new leadership role. Let’s get started with scenario number one.

Interviewer:  Leader comes into the team and they find significant cliques on the team by which I mean let’s say they’ve got 20 employees and there is a group of five employees who are really bonded very closely together and they are very exclusive, the kind of drive the tone. Is that something they should concern themselves about? How should a leader react if they see that there’s a clear clique that has formed on this team?

Jeremy Spidell: Well, one of the first things I would say is that to some degree, cliques at their heart are about belonging. And we know that we are all hardwired for belonging and connection. And so that’s part of the deal is people – so the upside of cliques are that people have found a group to which they feel they belong. And they feel safe maybe with. It depends. It depends on how mean these cliques are, Anna, that we are talking about. But if they are at least somewhat nice spirited, then I think that part of the goal as a leader can be how can I leverage the connection that certain pockets here have with each other and use those cliques to the advantage of the overall team and the ability for them to perform at a high level. And at the same time start to blend and merge and bring together the clicks and make that’s through greater understanding of each other. So it could be, I know a lot of teams have done the virtual happy hours in 2020 land, back before. And when we are able to be back together doing things outside of work, getting a deeper understanding of each other’s stories, of each other’s lives outside the office, all of these things can start to dissolve some of these invisible boundaries that we sometimes create in the world.

And maybe mitigate any damage that’s happening with the cliques because on the other side of while some people may feel more belonging because they are in a clique, there are people who are maybe feeling excluded and that’s not good for the team. That’s not good for engagement. So figuring out a way to leverage the strength of that and then at the same time, find ways to bridge the gap and bring people together would be what I think would be one of the best courses of action.

Interviewer: Amalia, I know that you have helped some very senior roles in a number of capacities both in the United States and internationally. You are also, to us, one of the newest members of the team. So you are very much having been on both sides of that. Follow that path of promoting belonging. Was there anything in your experience that was really effective with helping integrate groups? Anything that you’ve seen?

Dr. Amalia Yensil: First of all, let me start by just saying that I loved how Jeremy started his answer to your question why it’s about belonging. It is. It is about belonging and it’s also about sharing ___ ___ ____. So going back to your question about what tweaks, I would be curious to see what are the elements that are bringing this people together? Are there elements of a cultural nature? Is it performance? Are they parents of small children? What is the commonality? Because people usually tend to gravitate together when there is something that is strongly binding them. So I would like to understand that.

I start from the premise that I am giving people the benefit of the doubt and assuming good intentions or maybe ignorant intentions. So I just want to understand the nature of those binding elements for this clique. I mean, what’s ___ here? We are forming groups within groups. This has a reality and there has also been other research for ___ ___ about even this ___ impacts of these informal groups on performance.

So after I’m clarifying what is it that brings these people together, what is the common denominator that is acting as a binding element for this micro group within a team, I also want to understand hey, what is the impact on performance? What is the impact on safety? On the psychological space of the team? And then how can I use the belonging aspect into maybe creating a sense of how can I educate people about what’s in the team better?

So for example, let me rephrase it. So for example, if I am an international person and the only international person, the only other person in this team who is speaking with an accent is my teammate, then you as the leader can come and notice that we tend to hang out together just because maybe we feel like we are belonging in this group of international people. And we tend to see things a bit similar. So you can come and invite us to share our experience. So basically, I would say belonging and sharing those two sides of the same coin.

And a lot of people actually were forming this group, they take great pride in sharing what makes them come together. The same thing that makes me get a sense of belonging can also be one thing that I can share to you as a group and makes me feel like I’m accepted by you.

Interviewer: I love everything about what you just said. One thing I’m also reflecting on is I use the term click which I think has a negative connotation to many people. You use the term micro group which is definitely a more neutral, thoughtful way. And so I almost wonder if a take away for me is to approach it with curiosity. To think of it more in the micro group space and explore as you said, what brings this group together and how is it functioning? And taking some time to just observe with curiosity before I make any value statements about the rightness or wrongness of anything. That there’s a lot of opportunity to just I think react knee jerk negative I’ve got to break that group up which I think is the temptation for many.

Dr. Amalia Yensil: Anna, this is an excellent observation. I think what we are seeing right now it at this moment is that maybe your wording is a reflection of your experience, your previous experiences with these micro groups. Maybe you felt excluded before and you perceived these groups as, these micro groups as excluding you and therefore cliques.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Dr. Amalia Yensil: So that, and I think this is why am so excited about it is that you as the leader can ask yourself when you are noticing these groups hey, what do I think about that? What has been my experience? I was also maybe part of a team before. How did I feel in a relationship with that? Was I included in a micro group? Was I excluded? So basically noticing where I am standing in relationship to that can really bring me the awareness that I need to then address in whatever way I want to address it. Explore, be curious about it and then create a sense of – and then choose the strategy that I want to choose to create a sense of psychological safety for the entire team.

Interviewer: And also recognizing what I’m bringing into it which I think is really important as well.

Dr. Amalia Yensil: Yes.

Interviewer: I love that so much.

Dr. Amalia Yensil: What is your values? Your experiences? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Yep, yep.

Interviewer: All right, next challenge. Let’s say I’m a leader. I get on my team. I find out within the first hour that the previous person who was the manager of this team was demoted and now reports to me on the team that they used to manage. What now?

Dr. Amalia Yensil: It sounds like a pretty unfortunate scenario to use the emotional term to describe it. If it was between the two of us, I would say that sounds horrible. So I wouldn’t like to be in any of this two ____ choses, yeah. Choses the stuff. So I’ll let Jeremy. I see that he’s thinking. His wheels are spinning.

Jeremy Spidell: Well first, whoever hired the person, you’ve got to let the person know what they are getting into. That shouldn’t be the hour one surprise. Oh, by the way, one of your new directs used to have your job. That’s got to be communicated. You’ve got to have a heads up on that if your bosses are managers or other people involved in hiring you are doing the right job so that you can prepare a strategy for that because I think the strategy is important, it’s crucial there. And part of that involves some of the things we’ve been talking about already which is listening, empathizing, understanding. Hey, this is a tough spot for you. And meeting it head on. Like I get it, I understand where you are. And I think the biggest – the only shot really, I don’t like to use either/or scenarios but for the most part really, the only shot you’ve got right here is to build some common goals. If there are some things like hey, this is the situation we are in. I understand that you’re probably not super happy about it and how can we move forward together and help each other out and be successful? What would it look like if we could build something and collaborate? And maybe there’s another spot that you want somewhere else and how can we move towards that? What would that look like? Let me help you as you are regrouping and figuring out what’s next for your career, let’s figure out how we can collaborate. Let’s align some common goals and figure out how we can help each other and work towards that.

 And you can’t always control their response and that but to me, that would be the textbook way to step in and build some authentic connection and hopefully build some alignment and what you both are trying to pull off together.

Interviewer: Amalia, anything from you or would you like the next one?

Dr. Amalia Yensil: That sounds great. I cannot ___ Jeremy has said. I was seeing his wheels spinning and then ___ ___ with something brilliant. So I’m just going to leave it to that.

Jeremy Spidell: Brilliant, okay. Wow. You’ve got this one, Amalia.

Interviewer: Here’s another horror story. Jeremy and Amalia, let’s talk about another probably rare scenario but has happened from time to time where a leader gets in a position and very early on in their beginning, hopefully not day one but maybe it happens day one, they discover or are asked to terminate someone on the team. What guidance would you have for that leader where it’s not possible. They have to do it. How do they execute on this in a way that they don’t immediately burn down all the relationships? And maybe that’s phrased too tactically. Maybe the question I’m asking is what guidance would you have for this leader who does not have an option in doing this but still wants to have really good engagement further down the road? How did they do this?

Dr. Amalia Yensil: So I’ll start and then maybe this – I’m going to start blabbering and maybe this is going to lead us somewhere. But there are two elements here, two elements of engagement and I’m going to piggyback on what Jeremy was mentioning earlier describing the different levels of engagement. Different dimensions of engagement.

So you have engagement with your team and then you have engagement with your managers. You have engagement with your peers. So to ask specs I’m seeing here that we need to consider are – and that can help us to conceptualize the situation. One has to do with the engagement with the manager, seeking the clarity. Seeking clarity in this situation. So what is happening? Understanding the details. Anything that can help me if I were in the situation, anything that can help me to understand the actual situation.

And then also thinking mentorship. So building my connectedness with my manager. How would you do this? You know this team. You were the manager of the team before so you definitely know more about it than I know. How do you think this will impact the morale of the team? So this would be one direction. The connectedness, the clarity that I’m seeking from my manager.

And the second element that you were touching Anna, is the engagement of the team. So how will this action that I’m going to take reasonably after I’m taking over the team, how is this going to impact my engagement with the team? How am I going to be perceived? What are they going to think about me? So that’s another thing.

 And then, there’s another one, the third one which is how am I treating, how am I having a relationship with this person to whom I need to give the bad news? They don’t know me. We don’t have that experience. I basically am the bearer of bad news but there is no relationship there so I’m only going with some facts that I was given before. And I need to trust 100 percent the facts so there is a conversation that I have with this person that I will also need to start from maybe even a place of their relationship of vulnerability and strength. So to feel strong in the conversation that I have with this person means to feel vulnerable that I am in this position where I have this information that was given to me. And this is what I have. And I would also like to hear you. So that’s the situation.

And then the second one of the engagement with the team, I would need to be transparent with the team; of course paying attention and abiding to the HR procedures but it’s not transparency in terms of my own vulnerability. Like hey, I know how this – well, I imagine how this might be seen by you. I’m coming here and a week after I’m coming, I’m firing somebody. So let’s talk about it. So I am bringing this up in the team. I don’t act as if this didn’t happen.

Interviewer:  Jeremy, anything to add or would you like the next one?

Jeremy Spidell: I think it’s good. Let’s go to the next one.

Interviewer: Okay. Those two were probably the hardest so good news, you got through and you did awesome.

Jeremy Spidell: Those were tricky.

Interviewer: All right, so, leaders in the role and they discover that they have an employee or maybe more than one employee who goes over their head a lot. So it might be that they have a really good relationship with the leader over that role that that leader is not taking or whatever, but you’re just seeing a pattern of that employee consistently taking things over the leaders head and going further up in the management chain. What would you diagnose the problem as and how would you treat it?

Jeremy Spidell: I think it depends on the Why. Why is this person going over the head? I’ve had some situations where I’ve worked with leaders who have said hey, one of my directs actually has a better relationship with my boss than I do. And I want to encourage them to speak to my boss anytime they want because when they are close and connected, it makes the team better, it gives me even sometimes more information that I’m able to give because sometimes, thinking about the merger situation that we are experiencing at Trust. We have lots of new teams, lots of new managers. And sometimes there are people who maybe have worked together for 10 or 15 years in one capacity and other people who have only worked together for 10 or 15 days. And so sometimes, and I don’t want to use the word disparagingly, but leveraging those relationships. There’s capital in those relationships of being able to say, as you are cultivating and developing something that’s going to take some time, there may be somebody that has a better relationship than you do.

 And so I think on one end of that spectrum, there’s a lot of courage and a lot of confidence to be able to say hey, you know what? You’ve got a good relationship a couple levels up with this person. Go for it. And be great because of your great, our team is going to be great and we are all going to succeed.

On the other hand, if it’s done in a more sneaky kind of way that’s maybe potentially looking, somebody is looking to sabotage or derail or you perceive it as that way, that’s a whole other sort of circumstances that is going to require some candid conversations about what is it about the situation that’s making you feel like that’s a course of action you’d want to take? I think that’s a reasonable question to ask. Then have some dialogue about that. And if that’s going to impact, we get back to values and purpose. If that’s going to impact the values, impact the purpose, impact the output of this team and what we are all trying to do together, then you’ve got to keep it about that issue. Like this is going to impact our values of this, by this when you go over my head. And if you can keep it about that, you might have a shot at not deteriorating it into a really dark or personal struggle with somebody and you can maybe find a way to actually work through that conflict and recalibrate and realign what you expect and how they are going to perform as a member of your team.

Dr. Amalia Yensil: Yeah, I think Jeremy covered that. It’s very conceptual, really and also, I think I would visit my own personal reactions to that. So once I understand the context and reasons this is occurring, I think to clarify how I as an individual because I am a leader but I also am a person. And I have feelings inside about that. So it’s important to be true to myself and to analyze to see how that sits with me. And maybe I am not comfortable. Even if the situation in the context makes perfect sense, maybe there is a part of me there that doesn’t feel really comfortable. And I need to be aware of that. I need to be aware that that doesn’t show up in my direction with my teammate.

Interviewer: Do you have a leadership horror story you’d like to challenge our experts with? Email me at LeadershipInstitute.com.

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