A bi-weekly roundup of ways that teams think they're aligned but they aren't
July 20 - August 2

The Problem With The Meeting Before The Meeting

Have you ever had a pre-meeting with a colleague before going into a meeting with the rest of your team?

TL;DR: that's a red flag.

Lemme explain.

Culture, psychological safety, radical candor- these are hot buzzwords in the team management realm to describe something we all want to feel, "Do I feel safe in this group to be open, honest, and vulnerable?"

This is an important feeling. This feeling is why I started my own business. I want everyone to feel like they can have the confidence that white middle-class men take for granted. I fundamentally believe that teams perform better, workplaces retain more talent, businesses innovate faster, better candidates apply, customers more often prefer, etc. etc. etc. an organization that has high levels of internal trust.

The data overwhelmingly supports this belief:

• ​PwC found a 2.3x return on investment when creating a mentally healthy workplace​
• ​McKinsey found that 89% of business leaders think psychological safety is essential​
• ​Google, through Project Aristotle, discovered that psychological safety is the most important factor in a successful team​
• ​Jasmine was willing to go on a magic carpet ride with a relative stranger​

Is this enough to drink the Kool-aid of Trust?

Here, take a cup.

Mmm, trust tastes good.

Let's get back to the Meeting Before The Meeting, or MBTM.

There could be a million reasons why you're having a prep call before a team meeting. Perhaps you and your boss need to get on the same page. Maybe you know you've got a VIP that has strong opinions you need to strategically manage. Your MBTM could be a dry run before a high-stakes budget discussion.

This doesn't sound like a red flag; I'm not sure why you made me drink the Kool-aid of Trust, Dan.

However, there's very likely some warning signs in that MBTM:

• You may feel unsafe voicing your opinions or concerns directly in the main meeting, fearing potential backlash or negative judgment.
• You'd rather gauge reactions in a smaller, less intimidating setting, ensuring that you won't be caught off guard or "thrown under the bus" in the larger group.
• You may not trust your colleagues to come prepared or engage in constructive debate during the actual meeting.
• Your actual meetings have become conflict-free, making it intimidating to disturb the tranquility culture and share bad news in the larger group so you do it in the MBTM and deprive others from contributing.
• You wasted 30 minutes of your day today, and then another 15 tomorrow, and then another 45 later in the week...eventually, these "quick syncs" add up into hours and hours of "alignment" which could have just been done in a 20-minute psychologically safe meeting.

When backchannel conversations, quick syncs, prep meetings, and dry-runs start happening at your organization, they are symptoms of a growing root problem: absence of trust.

​Patrick Lencioni described this as the first and most fundamental dysfunction in a team.​

Unfortunately, establishing (or re-establishing) trust and psychological safety is a much bigger topic than just an email. Fortunately, I nerd out on this stuff and collected several specific steps to resetting a team culture in a more extended blog article, The Comprehensive Guide To Resetting A Team Culture.

Sorry, there's no silver bullet to fix a psychologically unsafe workplace, but the good news is that it can be done. Of course, that's part of what Learn to Scale does for clients, but it's also what Dan does to try to make the world a better place.

Look hard at your next "quick chat to prep" and ask: what are we hiding here?

A TL;DR from the CRO

Curiosity is a positive sign of psychological safety.

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

The OG of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety as a term was coined by Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson. If this stuff gives you the jollies, get it straight from the source:

• ​Follow Professor Edmondson on LinkedIn​
• ​Read her most recent book, Right Kind of Wrong​
• ​Read her 1999 original article on psychological safety​

ROCK CARVING UPDATE

I recently purchased a new tool to carve my tumbled stones because I live a thrilling life. It's called a Dremel and it's basically a tool that lets me conduct root canals on rocks. I wanted to turn my slowly-growing collection of tumbled stones into something a little more artistic. Maybe I want to carve the word "Poop" into a shiny rock and leave it in the mens room at a dive bar. You know, harmless mayhem.

I took some time last weekend to really test this fancy Dremel out and I learned something very important:

Rocks are hard.

You heard it here first.

I spent hours trying to carve a dent into a few of my tumbled stones and ended up using the whole battery making a circle the size of a pill. Hunched over a tub of water on my front stoop, I was starting to really respect artisanally engraved rocks that say "Peace" and "Hope." I began to wonder if I needed a workbench, vise, and more arm days at the gym if I wanted to continue to pursue rock carving.

I then did some research to see if rock carving was truly so time consuming and difficult.

Nah, I just had wicked hard rocks.

There's nothing quite like learning a universal truth that rocks are hard, some rocks are harder, and some rocks are softer.

Glad you're here for this amazing content.

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Wishing you a soft rock for your next project,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

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​PS. This was the moment I realized my rocks were too hard.​