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Episode 1 - An introduction to this new Leadership series with Suria and Mel

Self-paced learning in 2022, for Mel and Tim is the equivalent of taking a textbook into a quiet room to read and at best occasionally sending the author an email or discussing the current chapter with a friend via SMS. The focus is on consuming knowledge from an expert (the author), as much as you can, and want, when you want. It’s convenient, and in many cases accessible by many. The experience is influenced by your drive and learning preferences. It has a place. Peer based virtual learning evolves the experience from consumption to a deeper conversation that wholeheartedly activates embodiment. If you consider knowledge activation as an iceberg, peer based (virtual or face to face) learning is going well beneath the surface. It’s where we grow best. It’s an invitation to witness and experience, to be and see, to say, sense, feel and hear. It’s designed to activate transformation at higher rates than above the surface consumption. It's generative. It’s compounding. It shifts the focus from one expert and therefore one stream of knowledge, to many and multiple streams of knowledge which becomes a force multiplier. It's what happens when we know, like and trust people, real stuff shows up. Virtual peer-to-peer learning evolves the learning experience. It’s safe, it's insightful, it's a community of practice, its embodiment, its compounding and for all these reasons it's transformative. So come and experience this for yourself, on the 19th December Mel and Tim are hosting a mini version of what to expect throughout the Being Leaders 2023 program. It’s an opportunity to experience ‘the more’ with our Being Leaders community. Co-authored by Melina Lipkiewicz and Tim Collings o 4igroup, the Being Leaders program is open for registration now. To join us for the event on the 19th December, register here Follow our LinkedIn page to join our community and stay updated More about the program here

Executive coaching has become increasingly important in recent years as businesses realize the direct impact that leadership can have on the overall culture and performance of the workplace. Increased Self-Awareness: Effective leadership requires a high level of self-awareness, and executive coaching helps leaders develop this skill. The nature of coaching is self-awareness.

Executed well, executive coaching enables leaders to transform their leadership resulting in improved The coaching relationship is one of trust, where the coach guides the Leader on a path of topic exploration value from coaching, and coaching as the third most effective method in leadership development overall And in another report citing 23 coaching studies, there is a distinct correlation between executive coaching Coaching has become so fundamental to leadership development, that some organisations are now turning

the situation Speak to someone with context to expand my thinking Verbalise it Find support Executive Coaching Talk to us for more information. melina@peopleq.com.au #leadershipdevelopment #leadership #selfawarenessjourney

That's our culture tool, PQfactor, powered by Teamgage, our leadership programs, our consulting on talent

A reflection of the Being Leaders Circle hosted by Tim Collings + Melina Lipkiewicz Recently we hosted a circle for our Being Leaders community, bringing into focus how adults learn today, to create a micro experience of the program. We invited the sharing of learning experience challenges and opportunities, followed by peer discussion to deepen the dialogue on how learning can support leaders to sustain change, and finally coalescing to reflect on what we now think about learning and what this means for how leaders learn. Rather than offering expertise, our approach was to hold space for knowledge to be shared and leaders stretched and challenged collectively, which includes us as hosts. As we applied this experience to the theme, the very essence of it became topical as leaders identified the need to decentre expertise to learn collectively, embark on challenges and create safe spaces to be stretched in, which often resulted in growth you wouldn’t have previously imagined. Over time this brought about sustained behavioural change and increases in performance. From here the conversation flowed to the importance of making learning sticky to sustain change. 80% of people acquire knowledge and do nothing with it, inviting dialogue around the need for practice not just safely but also within the context of our own environments being crucial to the way adults learn today. The role of conversation in a community of practice was necessary for embodiment, deepening understanding and reflective practices. As was the role of storytelling to the way we seek to understand the world, ourselves and each other, so nurturing spaces for this to organically appear was critical to adult learning. A cycle emerged for learning to be sticky - digest smaller amounts of content at a time, that is relative to your situation and environment and place of beginning. We processed the role of leader vulnerability and authenticity in not just your own growth, but also as a witness and in giving feedback to others. When we witness and experience with you, we are also experiencing for ourselves, paving the way for thresholds to be crossed and participant action. The campfire enabled us to form a mutual starting point; the flow deepened our understanding collectively of what leaders needed to learn; relationships are needed to explore and challenge each others safely so that change emerges; and thresholds are crossed when expertise and knowledge is decentralised and not the focus; decentralising knowledge enables multiple streams of knowledge. And all of this is how the Being Leaders program is designed. To allow for deeper collective discussion, emergence, safe practice and sustained behavioural change. To find out more about the Being Leaders program, visit us here and register for the 2023 cohort. Co-authored by Melina LIpkiewicz and Tim Collings

In part one, we shared a few pitfalls of employee engagement surveys when you focus on scores and feedback that disappears into the metaverse! Today we are building on this to give you a few more pitfalls to consider the next time you're having a team huddle. Spreading your focus too thin When you first embark on culture transformation there may be a number of items brought to your attention as responses come through. And it’s tempting as a leader to want to address all the challenges at once; this approach has the potential to overwhelm team members and can feel quite surface level. Missed opportunity: Addressing too many challenges at once in most instances has the ability to lose impact and can be more of a distraction as opposed to focusing. Hone in on one priority at a time and give it the effort and focus it needs to get the lift it deserves. Practice: Discussing together as a team, which is the priority to focus on and explore right now, and what actions will be most impactful? Obsessing over who, what, when Leaders, we’ve all been here, we receive feedback we don’t agree with and our focus shifts to understanding the source of the feedback to make sense of it, or validate how we feel about it. In an anonymous survey, it might be tempting to go to lengths to find out who might have left a not so glowing perspective. Just don't! Missed opportunity: Feedback, whether anonymous or not, it's still feedback and that’s a gift! People don't invest time in giving feedback unless they trust you will do something productive with it. If you’re putting your effort into finding out whodunnit, you’re distracted from the main goal - cultivating a feedback culture where everyone’s voice and perspective matters. All feedback is useful, it provides insight into the diverse perspectives of our teams, so use it wisely! Practice: Applying a growth mindset. We are all here to learn and grow. Notice what you’re feeling and examine why you might be feeling this way about the feedback. Sit with that feedback and accept that this is someone’s perspective. Approach with curiosity; Is there something in this feedback that you can apply and take on board? To all the perfectionists out there, accept that it’s never going to be perfect, all at once or all of the time, we are working with humans, who are coming into the workplace with a diverse range of external factors. Our role is to perfect our ability to adapt to this changing sequence of events, or as we like to call it, humanising the workplace!. Seeing workplace culture as a 12 month project This is one of the most common pitfalls we see, leaders believe a solution will transform their organisation/teams in 12 months and so they take a project perspective when it comes to transforming workplace culture! If it took you years to get here, what makes you believe you'll transform in 12 or even 18 months? Like strategy, productivity, talent acquisition and marketing, your approach to workplace culture is not a project, it's not a once off and it certainly isn't short term. Missed Opportunity: A focus on workplace culture is a continuous effort by leaders to create forward positive momentum, and in the same way strategy incorporates productivity, financials and customers, so too should it include people and workplace culture, for they are the driving force of any business! And like a river ebbs and flows, so does workplace culture as people move within organisations. Practice: Incorporating workplace culture into your day to day accountabilities, engage everyone and ensure leaders understand they are key drivers of workplace culture. Take a top down approach to workplace culture, and at a strategy and board reporting level, include a culture measure along with your financials, productivity and customer measures. Hopefully you now have a few more ideas to implement, join us for part 3 coming your way soon! For more information on PQfactor, let's have a coffee meeting, you can contact us on suria@peopleq.com.au or melina@peopleq.com.au.

What not to do Part 1 Employee engagement and culture survey tools are a great way to invite and collate feedback from your employees in a meaningful way. The insights generated from this collection of data is useful not only to quickly gauge team and employee sentiment but also to empower leaders and organisations to identify where and how they can improve. The more transparent and action oriented the engagement tool, the better the outcomes, given transparency builds trust and actions naturally propel us forward. Whilst these tools are a game changer to how we design, measure and manage workplace culture, there are some potential pitfalls that leaders need to be aware of. Even the very best leaders can easily become caught up in one or more of these challenging scenarios. The good news is that with a bit of troubleshooting and practice, we can overcome pitfalls. Feedback that disappears into the metaverse This is the most common and detrimental pitfall. There is nothing worse than asking for feedback and for the organisation and leader to never make mention of the survey or results again. Without the right follow up to discuss results, you can be sure to erode trust. Employees naturally perceive the organisation and leader don’t take workplace culture improvement seriously. This also applies to inconsistent engagement with your culture tool by leaders. The end result? Overtime response rates drop, productivity may also drop and you may even notice an increase in staff turnover. Missed opportunity: The aim of most culture tools is to promote productive and focused team conversations. These discussions generate new questions, insights and ideas. It’s predicted that bringing teams together regularly to brainstorm enhances the sense of connection, improving engagement and morale. Practice: scheduling team meetings in advance as a show of commitment to prioritise, share and follow up on feedback as a way to build trust and team rituals. Score tunnel vision Setting goals and utilising your culture tool as a mechanism to measure your progress is a great way to help you and your team stay on track and drive continuous improvement. While culture and engagement tools are designed for leaders to pay close attention to survey scores, it can sometimes cause leaders to have tunnel vision which in turn can create some unintended behaviours. Missed opportunity: If you’re focused on simply attaining a particular score then you are at risk of missing the point of employee engagement. Culture tools should encourage leaders, teams and organisations to think deeply about what the team wants to achieve together and how they will get there. Practice: Nurture what’s in your control by prioritising productive team conversations. Through productive and genuine conversations and follow through on actions, scores will naturally follow. Hopefully we’ve given you some ideas that you can implement today ! And if a culture tool is on your list of ideas, speak to us about PQfactor, our thriving cultures tool powered by Teamgage! Look out for part 2 coming your way soon!

Hands down my favourite subject was economics. I was fascinated by opportunity cost and those unseen yet powerful forces like Adam Smith’s invisible hand; a metaphor describing a free market economy. Later on I noticed unseen forces alive at work, this time in the context of culture. I was part of both dysfunctional and thriving teams and often team members were unchanged. I wanted to understand how this could be? And if we could experience moments of thriving together, how we could find a way to sustain this ideal? Or at least create the momentum needed to move towards it. So as many leaders do, I asked my teams the big sweeping question about how they’re feeling at work and combined this with intuition and productivity to predict where culture might sit on a spectrum of terrible to amazing. But this was always a guess influenced by one’s perspective. And a single perspective is almost always flawed given we see the world as we are and not for what it is, unless you’ve mastered the art of holding many perspectives at once? In more recent times, as the world increasingly digitizes, we’ve asked teams to convert their responses into a rating using anonymous survey tools. How good is that!? Leaders and organisations now have the opportunity to use technology to collect feedback which allows for a more objective and accurate view of team culture rather than rely on intuition alone ! Contemporary leaders will love that those previously elusive elements of culture are finally brought into plain sight and quantified. These tools and their results now even feature more prominently in board reporting as well as elevating employer brand and that’s a positive, given how widely culture is talked about in the public arena without any data to back it up. Now you’ve got the data to back it up! Employee engagement and survey tools have the best of intentions; they simply are not all created equal. Many tools boast multiple functions from allowing you to customise questions and even integrating reward systems. This is great, but make no mistake; the work to achieve and maintain a thriving culture does not come from the tool or a recognition platform, it comes when leaders and teams take shared responsibility and work together to create change. The moral of this story? The tool alone is not the answer, it's how leaders are supported to work with their teams and the tool to enact change. Creating space for team members to have continuous deeper conversations, checking in, sharing new ideas, discussing challenges, celebrating wins and driving actionable change is what will move the dialler on employee engagement and workplace culture. Taking action goes a long way towards the pursuit of a thriving culture. The tool is just that, a tool. And whilst it’s now best practice to have a people measure in place; the real gift is feedback and guidance as to where leaders should focus their energy to achieve a thriving workplace culture. The outcome: a much more inspired workplace. Assess your workplace culture with our complimentary assessment tool or better still check out our culture tool PQfactor, powered by Teamgage and let us support your journey from good to great. Contact us today and let's schedule a coffee meeting. suria@peopleq.com.au

Navigating the feedback jungle. It's not surprising leaders find their authenticity compromised in certain conversations, particularly when they relate to conflict or performance issues. Other types of workplace conversations leaders have parallel struggles with, range from pay rises, scenarios misaligning with their values, senior management behaviour, situations with legal ramifications, personality clashes or managing someone with a fixed mindset. When we discussed this with senior leaders from both the private and public sector, this was what they had to say on the issue. Be present and mindful of how you show up – BE in the moment. Check the environment is right, this not only includes the setting, time needed and time of day, it’s also taking into consideration what else may be happening that could influence the conversation or skew perspectives. Don’t quell your empathy and avoid being caught up in the amiability of the person. Skirting around it wont aid you either, so get to the point. And if you’ve been advised to sandwich a message, now would be a good time to recall that advice! Instead, these senior managers suggest you step into empathy by inviting others to share their thoughts and feelings and consider sharing how you feel about the situation as well. Give feedback that is constructive, also presenting positive news where appropriate. Be mindful of your tone, eye contact and body language, relax your posture and if you’re struggling, we recommend our heart focused breathing technique; slow breath in 1,2,3,4,5, the same rhythm out, and imagine you are breathing in through your heart, and back out through your heart. It’s a scientifically proven technique to activate calm on the go and get coherent. And whilst you're being mindful of how you show up, take the opportunity to listen for the unspoken and exercise EQ! Stay with facts and have the conversations early on if your needing to raise a concern. If your organisation has policies and procedures, use these resources to guide you and at the heart of these conversations, ensure you have good intentions for the person, the team and the organisation. You may get derailed by behaviours that deflect, defend, deny, divert or responses that are aggressive, emotional or nebulous. When this happens, these leaders advise you wait, stay silent if you must, ask again or ask another open question, try rephrasing, reschedule or just listen, and our favourite 3Rs of refocusing to redirect and reframe the moment. Link your feedback to intention – to connect, cultivate cohesion, energise, motivate, share vision, create alignment or have a bit of fun, create reassurance, clarity or accountability. Use feedback to reward effort and as a way to reflect. You can also normalise feedback as a way of building better relationships with each other, so invest the time to get it right. Feedback is an investment in confidence, it builds belief and trust, empowers, supports and aids equality. It sets standards. It’s easier to have these conversations when you are being your authentic self. So anchor to hope and be a role model for your team.