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Is your team intimidated by you? And if they are, how would you know? Many leaders unintentionally or unconsciously create an environment thats unnecessarily fear-based, whether through their communication style, decision-making, or even the pace they expect from their team. A study by OnePoll and HR software company Bambee found that 60% of U.S. workers feel too intimidated to go to their boss or manager with an issue theyre having. Thats significant, cosidering bosses have a disproportionate impact on employee well-being. The Workforce Institute at UKG found that a managers influence on an employees mental health is equal to that of an employees spouse or partnerand greater than that of an employees doctor and therapist. The good news is that once you become aware of behaviors that could be perceived as intimidating to your team, you can focus on changing them. Speaking in declaratives When it comes to inviting input, theres a universal truth: The more polished, finished or done something appears, the less likely people are to give feedback on it. The feeling is that the window for real input has closed. Similarly, when you speak in declaratives in meetings, like This is the plan, or That wont work, your forceful language tells the group to comply, that things are already decided. Instead, leave some thoughts unfinished to open up conversations. Rather than Were going to move forward with X approach, say Heres what Im thinking, but Im open . . . or Im leaning toward this direction. What am I missing? Intimidation will lessen when people see that your thinking is still taking shape. Inhibiting disagreement You say you want open discussion. But if you get defensive or look annoyed when people challenge the norm, its only going to breed caution. Your employees will read your level of receptiveness and stay quiet next time. Instead, normalize respectful disagreement. Try Thats a valuable challenge, Jane, keep it coming . . . or Im glad you raised that, Marco. Such responses will make it unmistakably clear, in real time, that you see disagreement as a form of group engagement. While youre at it, try to keep a neutral facial expression even as you ponder challenging views: no frowning, eye-rolling, or grimacing. Conveying calm acceptance and curiosity is what youre after. Keeping interactions all business If your touchpoints with people feel stiff and scheduled, youre missing out big-time on opportunities to build trust. You can maximize casual interactions like walking to a meeting together, Slack check-ins, or hallway chats by showing curiosity and interest. For example, you can make a callback to something they mentioned to you earlier, like How are the college tours going? or How did last weeks soccer tournament go? This shows that you actually listen and instantly creates a more humanistic tone. You can also resist jumping right into work in team huddles. To create a friendlier feel, kick off by asking the group a question thats not limited to work: Whats a win youve had recently, personal or professional, big or small? Overspeaking If you want your team to speak up and contribute their best thinking, they need spaces, gaps, and pauses in the conversation to do that. Instead of narrating every meeting like its a nature special, intentionally leave some openings. You might say Whats your read on this? while you pause and visually scan the group with an anticipatory look, or ask everyone to share one opportunity they see with the new direction and one concern they may have. You can even divvy up the agenda in advance if you want to ensure multiple people have speaking roles. Pretending youre perfect I can guarantee youve had a pie-in-the-face moment that was a prime learning experience. When youre trying to communicate a message to the team, pull from a personal story (even better if you werent the hero). Maybe you under-communicated on a project, which led to a misunderstanding. Or failed to ask for help once and spent three days unnecessarily troubleshooting an issue yourself. Perhaps a disruptive, company-wide change that your team is stressed about is also making you a little nervous. Sharing some of your concerns and face-plants helps you build trust and keep it real (yes, even that time you accidentally said Love you when signing off from a Zoom meeting). Being intimidating is often unintentional. But if no ones challenged you in a while, it might be a sign that your team is feeling the pressure to suppress their real thoughts and feelings. Humanize your leadership by integrating these small actions, and youll shift the atmosphere to one that feels safe, not severe.
Category:
E-Commerce
A small town in Finland is experimenting with a new type of infrastructure: the world’s largest sand battery. The batterya 42-foot-tall, nearly 50-foot-wide silo filled with 2,000 tons of crushed stonesits on the edge of a parking lot. When there’s extra renewable electricity on the grid and power is cheap, the system uses electricity to heat up the crushed stone. That heat is stored in the battery until nearby buildings need to use it. [Photo: Polar Night Energy] The basic approach is simple. “We just heat air and [circulate it] through sand,” says Liisa Naskali, COO of Polar Night Energy, the Finnish startup that designed the technology. Sand, or other material crushed into sand-size particles, has the ability to store heat for weeks. Unlike some other batteries, the system doesn’t rely on chemicals, doesn’t degrade, and won’t catch on fire. The town, called Pornainen, relies on a district heating network to heat a group of buildings, from city offices and the local school to some businesses and apartment complexes. Until recently, the network burned oil or wood chips to run. But the municipality is aiming to become carbon neutral, and realized that it needed to make a change. [Photo: Polar Night Energy] Now if someone in a nearby apartment turns on hot water for a shower, the heat comes from the sand battery. Like other district heating systems, the heat from the battery travels to other buildings via pipes filled with hot water; each building has its own equipment to distribute the heat to radiators, floor heaters, or other HVAC systems. [Photo: Polar Night Energy] The battery started running this summer, and was officially inaugurated this week, meaning the district heating system no longer uses oil at all. Over the summer, it relied entirely on the sand battery. As the weather gets colder, the system will use both the battery and wood chips, but the use of wood chips can drop by around 60%. (Burning wood chips is technically carbon neutral since trees take in carbon as they grow, but since trees are slow to grow and burning is fast, it’s not a good short-term climate solutionand it also produces a lot of other pollution.) [Photo: Polar Night Energy] Though the startup calls the technology a “sand” battery, it can use other materials. For the new installation in Pornainen, the company turned to soapstone scraps from a nearby fireplace manufacturer. That helped reduce waste and avoided the environmental challenges of sourcing sand, which is typically excavated from rivers, lakes, or shorelines. [Photo: Polar Night Energy] Inside the silo, the company uses a heat exchanger and a closed-loop system to circulate heat. Software runs heaters when electricity prices are low. Throughout the summer, Naskali says, the utility paid around 10% of the average price of electricity by charging only at optimal times. That helps make the technology cost-competitive, though the initial installation cost is high, she says. The startup is now in talks with other utilities. Factories can also use the technology to replace fossil fuels for high-heat processes. Other startups, including Rondo Energy and Antora Energy, are also pioneering new approaches to thermal energy storage. For Polar Night Energy, the project in Pornainen is a critical proof point. “This is really important for us, Naskali says, because now we can show thatthis really works.
Category:
E-Commerce
Its been 70 years since Douglas McGregor sketched a management theory at MIT Sloan that leaders still ignoreand their teams pay the price. Known as Theory X and Theory Y, McGregors framework built on Abraham Maslows work on employee self-actualization, and it quickly became one of the foundational texts of modern management thinking. In McGregors theory, leaders fall into two camps. Theory X managers assume that employees are inherently lazy, need constant supervision, and would rather coast along than contribute. Theory Y managers, by contrast, see employees as self-motivated, responsible, and capable of growth if given the right environment. The kicker is that both kinds of managers usually get exactly the employees they expect, no matter who they originally hired. What McGregor was tapping into was the fact that certain beliefs have an uncanny way of turning into real, measurable effects on human behavior. Whether its placebo studies in medicine or examining how teachers’ expectations impact classroom performance, the science is unambiguous about how simple expectations can have far-reaching effects. The psychology behind high expectations Psychologists were among the first to observe and take note of the feedback loops expectations set off. Take the now-famous study by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson in 1968. Elementary school teachers were told that a group of randomly selected students had been identified as “late bloomers” who were about to show remarkable academic growth. The result surprised even the researchers themselves. Those students did indeed outperform their peers, in part because the teachers, subconsciously or not, started treating them differently by offering more encouragement, more patience, and more challenging material. The students responded in kind, rising to the challenge now that someone in authority believed them capable of meeting it. The only thing that had changed was the expectations. The expectation effect Journalist David Robson chronicles just how far this phenomenon goes in The Expectation Effect (which should be required reading for leadership). From placebo heart surgeries that deliver real relief to workouts that burn more fat just because people believe theyre working harder, Robson lays out the scientific evidence showing how our expectations construct reality around us. The psychology behind the effect is simple: Your brain doesnt sit around waiting for input like a neutral recordkeeper. It ceaselessly guesses and simulates what might happen so that you can be prepared for whatever comes across your desk. At each moment, the brain is busy constructing an internal map of whats likely to happen, and then it updates that map based on whatever comes next. Its no surprise to find that our expectations prime the brains sensory and emotional circuits almost as if something is already happening. If you are expecting pain, the amygdala lights up before you even stub your toe. If you expect failure, your cortisol rises, attention narrows, and your working memory takes a hit before youve even started the task. Expect a sense of existential dread and meaninglessness at work? Here you go, says the brain, lowering your dopamine levels until motivation plummets because your brains prediction model no longer sees a reason to invest cognitive effort. Thats why a sugar pill can relieve chronic pain, why sham surgeries produce real outcomes, and why a warm-up jog feels harder if you think it’s the workout. The experience conforms to the prediction, and belief becomes biology. When leaders talk about setting the tone or creating a culture of excellence, theyre not that far from hitting upon something truly powerful. If we accept that expectations change biology, cognition, and motivation, then leveling them appropriately becomes one of leaderships central tasks. Careful what you expect, because you might get it If you walk into a boardroom assuming your team lacks ambition, youll subconsciously act like it by designing processes that assume failure. Your team, in turn, will rise, or in this case, sink, to the level you’ve set. Welcome to management by cynicism. Nelson Repenning, an MIT Sloan professor and coauthor of the new book Theres Got to Be a Better Way, has spent his career helping leaders break out of this cycle. He advises people to expect more, and better, from others as a starting point. When people fail, we treat it like a character flaw. But in most organizations, failure is a design problem, he says. The question every leader should ask isnt Why did they screw up? Its What about our system made it easy to screw up? Repenning and longtime collaborator Don Kieffer argue that modern management has become too disconnected from the work itself. Youd be amazed how many executives cant describe how the work actually gets done, Kieffer says. Its like trying to fix a car without opening the hood. These leaders cant set a good expectation because theyre so far removed from reality to begin with. Without that intimacy, leaders default to assumptions, not expectations. Before long, youre managing caricatures of your team instead of the real people doing the work. Great leaders dont set expectations and step back Anyone can ask for a 17% increase in revenue and expect it to happen, Repenning says. But thats not a healthy way to set goals, let alone a culture of expectations. Leaders need to know what they are asking for, and they need to understand how powerful the expectations they set are. This is where too many leaders trip over their own lofty visions. They expect more but enable less. Perhaps some even care less. Repenning calls this the paradox of servile leadership: Great leaders dont set expectations and step back. They ask, What do you need from me to get there? Then they go and move those boulders. The accompanying leadership model isnt that much more complicated. Set the target, communicate belief, and then roll up your sleeves to start fixing whats brokenwhether its systems, workflows, org charts, tools, or, yes, your assumptions. McGregor and Maslow would be nodding along if they were still with us. Decades before we started talking about psychological safety and employee empowerment, they argued that the job of management was to unlock people’s natural drive. Give them autonomy and show them how their work connects to a bigger picture. Eliminate the management by the stopwatch and start practicing management by the soul. Expectation is freedisappointment is expensive If you expect your team to take shortcuts, youll create a culture of cutting corners. If you expect your team to challenge ideas, theyll innovate. If you expect mediocrity, youll be surrounded by it. And the inverse holds, too. When a leader believes in their people, when they really believe in their capacity to achieve, something remarkable happens: People stretch to meet the expectations and trust begins to compound. Done right, simply expecting greatness might do more than any retreat r bonus ever could, Repenning says. But expecting isnt enough. You still have to earn it. Thats the fine print of McGregors theory, and the trap too many leaders fall into. They want the results of Theory Y, but still manage like they believe in Theory X. The message that sends is I dont really think youve got it in you. But prove me wrong. Thats not leadership. Thats abdication. And now you know how to do better.
Category:
E-Commerce
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