Coach Dan's Blog

 

 Empowerment begins with your team feeling psychologically safe. This week's blog post is specially crafted for leaders, managers, product managers and product owners.  Don't let that slow you down if you have a different fancy job title, of course, but today I'm speaking directly to the leaders of teams! One of my favorite definitions of empowerment comes from CEQ, Collaborative Equalit y: “Empowerment is defined as …the largest amount of voluntary and discretionary action in support of the company’s goals.  It is people proactively, and habitually, doing the right things at right time; people working out what’s needed and acting without instruction; people looking within the team for support, not looking upwards for answers." Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it?  Problem is, it doesn’t just happen!  You have to work every day at creating and maintaining an environment where your teams feel safe to “work out what’s needed and act without instruction.” Here are some...

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Somehow in the workplace we've equated being a good leader with being infallible... with never making a mistake or a misstep.  I gotta be honest, that sounds EXHAUSTING to me!  I would argue that one of the most important characteristics of being a great leader, is showing that it's ok to make mistakes.  That it's ok to be wrong.  To take risks that didn't work out the way we hoped.  To give us permission to be human as we strive to serve our customers and our users. Consider this During an Australian Open tennis match in March of 2020, star player Rafael Nadal returned an out-of-bounds serve and absolutely (and quite accidentally) CLOBBERED ball-girl, Anita Birchall in the head.  Now mind you, Rafael did nothing WRONG.  It just happened. but it impacted poor Anita. The referee checked in to make Anita was OK, even as clearly shook Anita (who is definitely a boss-girl) scanned her zone to see if the ball (that had just bounced off the side of her face...

 Today is Tuesday, 2/22/22.  Can anyone think of a better day to carve out two minutes of your day, and say "Thank you" to a partner, peer, coworker or friend who went out of their way to help you? If you've been paying attention, you already know that showing gratitude at work can measurable improve a team’s performance.  Did you also know that "Overdoing Thank-Yous" is also shown to help improve a team's (and an organization's) psychological safety, which (wait for it) is necessary for a high performing culture? Daniel Coyle, in his book The Culture Code , states that one of the key components of the cultures of highly successful organizations is a sense of belonging.  Take a few minutes and think about a really great team you've been a part of. (It could be a work team, a sports team, a school project, a community/volunteer effort, it doesn't really matter what kind of team, just a great team.)  What were some of the things that made that team...