It’s crucial to understand that cultivating a psychologically safe environment does not equate to an unhealthy leniency in terms of behaviors, processes, or outcomes.

Instead of engaging in heated, free-for-all debates that often lead nowhere, consider using a version of the IMAGO conversation process. This approach ensures that everyone's opinions are heard and understood fully.

Inescapable in any workplace or relationship, conflict often emerges like an unwelcome dinnertime telemarketer. Yet, let's shatter the notion that conflict is inherently detrimental. When skillfully harnessed, conflict emerges as a catalyst for positive transformations: a forge where creativity is kindled, decisions are refined, and bonds are fortified.

In Part 1 of this conflict management series, we explored the importance of understanding our own and other team members' conflict styles. Here in Part 2, we will delve into specific mindsets that individuals and teams can adopt to change their perception of conflict and handle it in a way that yields positive team outcomes.

When team members are able to stay relationally engaged in the midst of conflict (regardless of outcomes), they tend to walk away feeling respected and empowered, instead of drained and angry. This provides them with more energy to truly connect with their loved ones outside of work, which in turn leads to a more fulfilling life. What better gift can you give people than that?

For the past several decades, comprehensive surveys of employee attitudes toward work find that around 50% of American workers confess they do only the minimum to avoid being fired. Although the idea of “quiet quitting” is now in vogue, it’s not new; many people have been silently skating by for years.

It sucks to consistently have critical job duties get pushed into the evenings and weekends because you’re spending a lot of the regular work hours in meetings. Constantly talking about the work without the time to actually do the necessary independent work demolishes morale and induces burnout.

You’re wondering who should be in each meeting, are you?

Tough question! Again, the answer to this question is circumstantial. But here’s the thing - big meetings make people sad.

As an agency, we’ve interviewed thousands of leaders and employees, and a common complaint we hear is, “I’m in too many meetings.”

Because we are living in an increasingly changing world, it has become more and more necessary for organizations to be flexible, nimble, and adaptable. Quick pivots and transformations of core processes, products, services, and operations are becoming a requirement for organizational survival. Yet people tend to resist change, even when it’s good for them and their organizations. It’s human nature. This presents a rather complex dilemma: consistent and substantial change is necessary, yet asking people to significantly change evokes fear, insecurity, and uncertainty. That is why change management is an art – we must help people work through the resistance so they can accept and embrace change.

If you want to improve engagement, the best place to start is to improve your leadership culture. At Nash Consulting we often share this Morale Formula with our clients: Skilled managers = high morale = all that cool stuff you can't pay for and you can’t punish for – which includes employee engagement. As Stephen Covey put it, and we paraphrase here, you can pay employees for their hands and backs, but they volunteer their hearts and minds.

A healthy leadership team is, in part, one in which all leaders, from supervisors to executives, are singing off the same sheet of music with best-practice leadership and management behaviors. Naturally, every leader will use their unique style – and they should! - but the fundamental philosophy and skills with which they manage people need to be aligned. We’ve seen many organizations in which leaders all go off in different directions and read different management books and attend different leadership conferences, and although these individual leaders often bring back great skills, they are not bringing back the same skills to the organization.

It’s important to keep in mind that when we give someone corrective or critical feedback, it will likely trigger a "fear response" in that person, which will show up as defensiveness, leading to that person’s inability to learn from and respond well to the feedback. To complicate things further, this fear response will probably be more extreme if you’re that person’s manager because you also have a power differential over them.

Change. We all resist it on some level, whether the change in question is good for us or not. We can’t help it – it’s who we are as human beings. We prefer certainty and stability. When something in our environment threatens to disrupt the status quo, we tend to get up in knots about it. From an evolutionary lens, this is a clever survival mechanism meant to protect us from conditions we are unequipped to handle. But from a modern workplace lens, this resistance to change can be the bane of an organization’s existence.

A client who had recently listened to one of our latest podcast episodes asked me the other day, “How do I proactively create psychological safety with my employees?”

When I dug into what he meant by “proactively,” he said that he didn’t think he needed much more of the “don’t do this” type stuff such as don’t yell, don’t interrupt, don’t show up late to meetings and say “Catch me up,” don’t use too much air time in conversations or meetings…you know, all the “don’t exaggerate your power differential” stuff we talk about a lot in workshops and podcasts. He also didn’t want to focus on the super basic “just be a decent human being” stuff, like saying “good morning” and asking about their weekend and all that jazz.

These days, self-compassion and “growth mindset” are terms used frequently in the business word. Many conscious leaders now understand that one's internal state of mind is as important of an input to performing in the workplace as are outside factors such as reward systems, feedback, and incentives. At the same time, many people still disregard these practices (and they are, indeed, practices) as irrelevant factors of performance. They are soft, touchy-feely ideas best reserved for books and documentaries by self-appointed, give-yourself-a-hug-and-think-good-thoughts type of self-help gurus. Yet the research on the positive performance effects of self-compassion and a growth mindset is pretty eye-popping.

Feeling defensive is human. Defensiveness is how we survived as a species. It’s a manifestation of a fear response that takes place in our amygdala – a small, almond-shaped region in the brain that detects and responds to threats by feeling fear and triggering your “fight, flight, or freeze” instincts.

All of us who value growth and development can benefit from a coach who can help us improve our performance or wellbeing in one way or another. But not all coaches are created equal. Many of us have experienced what it’s like to work with a coach that’s ineffective. Many of us (if not all of us) have also experienced what it’s like to work for a less-than-effective manager. The truth is, being a good coach and being a good manager involves a very similar set of skills. In our modern workforce, being a good manager means you have to be a good coach.

Laurence Peter and his writing partner Raymond Hull coined what’s become known as “The Peter Principle” in their book by the same name. Over 50 years later, we still see this play out over and over again in organizations big and small.

Here’s a truth bomb that I wish I had known in my first management gig when I was leading a team of 24 social workers: Employees just want to know if they’re influencing, deciding, or neither. They’re usually OK with whichever one it is – as long as they know up front and as long as there’s a pretty healthy balance between leaders deciding and employees having an actual voice in those decisions.