Mobius Executive Leadership

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the February newsletter where we celebrate four great pieces in the realm of transformational leadership. Topcis include how to create psychological safety; why some teams work and others don’t; the hidden assumption that derails good feedback; and the creative versus reactive mindset behind Bob Anderson’s Leadership Circle Profile (LCP). Just to remind you, there’s only days left to avail of the Early Bird discount for the Next Practice Annual Gathering, where this year there’s an opportunity to get certified in the LCP. Sign up to join our ever-growing and deepening community of practice and for a truly unique set of learning intensives for coaches, leadership development facilitators and business executives working to develop future leaders. 

Warmest best, 

Chief Executive Officer,  Mobius Executive Leadership 

 IDEAS WORTH SHARING

How to create psychological safety

“Don’t want to look ignorant? Don’t ask questions.”

Don’t want to seem intrusive? Don’t offer ideas. Don’t want to seem negative? Don’t question the plan. In this brilliant 11-minute TED talk Mobius Senior Expert and Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, Amy Edmondson discusses psychological safety in the workplace. Offering examples of a nurse who notices the dosage for a patient seems high … and a senior executive new to company who has grave reservations about a proposed take-over everyone else is excited about, Edmondson explains why we remain silent and don’t speak up when we should. This silence costs organizations. It causes catastrophes, inhibits learning and ensures a lack of innovation and creativity. Edmondson walks us through three moves leaders can make to create psychologically safe teams, departments and workplaces. Including this: frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. Compelling TED talk, watch the video here.

The unwritten rules of great teams

“Take one Rhodes Scholar, two extroverts, one engineer who rocks and a PhD. Voila. Dream team assembled, right?”

Google admits they were wrong about their assumptions on what makes a team great. Who’s on the team doesn’t matter. How they interact does. After years of research Google stumbled onto the work of Mobius Senior Expert and Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson. Whether a team does or does not provide psychological safety finally surfaced the pattern previously hidden within Google’s data. For those skeptical of the value of “opening up” in the workplace, this engaging article by Charles Duhigg in the New York Times offers an excellent response. In it, he tells the story of how psychological safety became the answer to Google’s question of what makes a team great. If this article is the case for why psychological safety is so important and what it looks like in action, then Edmondson’s TED talk up above is the how-to. Read the article here.

Think you know the problem? Then you can't give great feedback

“I am a supervisor and I have super-vision” mindset

Mobius Senior Expert and leading thought leader in adult development and complexity thinking, Jennifer Garvey Berger, recently posted this piece on LinkedIn. It’s well worth sharing. We may know “the steps” on how to give feedback, but what we’re really thinking can derail our good intentions. What happens when we believe we have special access to “the truth?” which we just need to convey to the other person effectively? What happens when we're blind to the assumptions we're making about the other person’s situation? Garvey Berger shares what went wrong with her client’s approach to giving feedback and shares three questions to check our assumptions before diving in. Most of us reading this are in the business of giving feedback and helping others to do the same, this quick read shows us how to probe what we think we know. Read and share the post.

Next Practice Special Feature: Evolution of Senior Leaders

“There is no safe way to be great.” 

Watch and share the video of Bob Anderson’s NPI Keynote from last year. Founder and CEO of the Leadership Circle, Bob introduces key aspects of the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP), considered the most advanced leadership assessment available. Not only an invaluable overview for everyone interested in using the LCP to assess leaders (especially those considering getting accredited at this year’s Annual Gathering), but on a broader level, this is a wonderfully accessible talk about the adaptive challenges facing us today and the primary mindset shifts we must make to address these. In particular, Bob discusses the tension between our opposing internal “operating systems” (those aspects of us which react to problems compared with what we can accomplish when we focus on creating positive outcomes). Throughout 2018 we are releasing keynote talks representing emerging voices, distinguished thought leaders and pioneering experts in the field of transformational leadership who inspire and advance our learning.  The first two in our series, from Bob Anderson and Dick Schwartz, were recorded at the 2017 Annual Gathering and can be found on our website here. 

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

Please visit our website for the calendar of upcoming learning events and other professional development opportunities. To register for the Next Practice Institute Annual Gathering and to learn more about it, visit 2018 Annual Gathering. To avail of the Early Bird discount register before Wednesday February 26th.

Please contact our editor, Nathalie Hourihan, if you’d like to suggest a topic or materials for future editions of the newsletter.