When our brain senses a threat, our body activates a threat response. It’ll go into some form of defensive behavior and lock down most functions that aren’t necessary for survival. It’s what we rely on to keep us alive when we’re confronted by an angry bear. And, as it turns out, when we have to deal with feedback at work. SCARF To illustrate how feedback constitutes a threat, we can take a look at the SCARF framework from David Rock. It lays out a range of things that can trigger a social threat and create stress: Status: talking to a person of higher …
Practicing active listening in online conversations
I think of myself as a leader being placed somewhere on a value based spectrum, with efficiency on one end and empathy on the other. As an individual contributor, I started my career all the way on the efficiency end of the spectrum. I believed that talking to people about their feelings was a waste of time. Turns out, that’s not true at all. Leaders who value efficiency over empathy tend to sacrifice investing time in relationships with their team members. The result? Ironically, team efficiency is negatively impacted. Why? Because team members who don’t have close relationships with their …
Launching in lockdown: Genesis
The world’s changed a lot since we first started working with Emma-Kate Greer and Tamara Sallis from Genesis, an energy company in New Zealand. Genesis has over 1,000 employees spread across the country in a wide range of roles including retail, wholesale operations, delivery and customer service. It’s an essential service provider, so work continues for the Genesis team even under lockdown conditions – the electricity must flow. This week Emma-Kate and Tamara launched Joyous across Genesis, and used the launch as an opportunity to send Covid-19 check-in questions to the entire team. So to see how well the launch …