Cultivate Your Culture: How To Have Fierce Conversations
Reading time: 10 minutes
What you’ll learn
The relationships behind team culture
The importance of feedback
Having better conversations
In the second episode of Cultivate Your Culture, Susan Scott dives into the importance of relationships when it comes to team culture. Susan is a best selling author and renowned keynote speaker with a focus on building strong leadership in business through her company Fierce.
Fierce Conversations
To Susan, culture is created through the relationships between team members. These connections are a highly valuable currency Susan refers to as emotional capital. This emotional capital can be created or lost in conversation, which places great importance on the types of conversations leaders have with their team members in order to create a deeper connection and understanding between all members. Susan states that every relationship lost, whether that be a customer, an employee, or a personal relationship, can be attributed to failed or missing conversations.
How connected a team feels to each other will dictate how they pull together when faced with an obstacle. When team members and team leaders feel valued and respected, they will be more likely to work as a unit and perform. Susan finds that the quality of the relationships within the organization are directly correlated to the performance of the team, and that when team members are all getting along and making time to spend with each other, this is the pulse of the team that will ultimately result in a more positive team culture.
Perspective
Susan stresses the importance of leaders creating the culture their team members need to perform at a high level. When creating change in an organization, Susan talks about perspective. She says leaders should be considering not only what they think will be best for the company as a whole, but also take into consideration the smallest voices, who will be the ones carrying out the change. When leaders act out of selfishness, or only see their own perspective, they will miss out on the ideas of those who see those decisions in action.
When meeting with a new client or team, Susan begins the conversation with the question of “what is the most important thing we should be talking about today?” This, according to Susan, will give the clients the opportunity to think out loud, and perhaps even discover new insight they didn’t have before without you giving them any advice. If the solution comes intrinsically, it is likely that the client will be more willing to follow it. It also enforces from the beginning that their voices are heard and are important. This conversation should be had at least bi-quarterly to ensure that everyone involved is on the same page.
The Importance of Feedback
Susan believes one of the worst behaviors to engage in as a team is anonymous feedback. Susan states that individuals giving anonymous feedback makes it harder to solve problems because you don’t have context. You’re unable to identify the specific scenario that led to such feedback, and you as a leader are left wondering what you did wrong. For feedback to be effective, Susan believes it should be current (do not bring up things from over a month ago), and to train employees in giving feedback so they will not be shy in offering it up honestly and non-anonymously.
Susan’s feedback operates in a similar way to that of a sports team, where technique is corrected or praised in the moment, as the action is happening. This will also take the pressure off formal performance reviews because there won’t be any surprises or calling back to situations where no feedback was originally given, which otherwise may leave the team member wondering why no one said anything as soon as a mistake was made.
Be Fierce
Ultimately, Susan believes that the key to fierce conversations is to be open. Being honest and saying what you truly feel is difficult, and it’s much harder to have these deep conversations than to simply scratch the surface with small talk. But Susan says that projecting our true selves consistently will result in more open conversations with those around us. When you are real with one person, they’ll be more real with you, and this will allow more conversations to flow, and therefore create stronger relationships that will benefit both you and your team in the future.
Making it Happen
Challenge yourself to have more fierce conversations with the important people in your life. Put away your devices (unless it’s a computer for a virtual conversation), focus on the other person, and speak honestly about your day and how you’re feeling.
Learn how to give and receive feedback.
For more information on this topic, you can find Susan’s book Fierce Conversations at your local bookstore.
About the Author
Willa Hladun believes that every individual has the tools within them to excel at their craft. She wants to help others achieve their potential through mental training and understanding that the mind can be your biggest obstacle when starting a new path or reaching new heights. She has a BA in Psychology from the University of Victoria.
