Clare Haynes, an organisational psychology specialist and leadership coach, explains why there is a disconnection between teams and leadership, and suggests some ways leaders can get meaningful feedback from their teams.
Haynes also identifies some qualities and traits that can help leaders grow in their roles, and why it’s important for leaders to “have a sounding board” during times of stress and increased pressure.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
- Why teams and management are becoming more disconnected from each other.
- The relationship between new working environments and skill loss.
- Two ways leaders can elicit constructive feedback from their teams.
- Notable traits and qualities that inspire better leadership.
- Tactics to reduce stress and minimise burnout risks for leaders.
Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:
— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com
Transcript
Steph Brown: Welcome to the FM podcast. I’m Steph Brown. We’re recording live from UK & Ireland ENGAGE, and I’m speaking with Clare Haynes, an organisational psychology specialist and leadership coach. We will be talking about the ways leaders can build an effective work culture by supporting their teams to meet their organisation’s goals. Clare works alongside finance teams, including CIMA, to help executive leaders become more confident in their roles and to set their teams up for success.
Welcome to the podcast, Clare.
Clare Haynes: Thanks, Steph.
Brown: What does it mean to have a performance culture?
Haynes: I think that’s a really personal question, and for me, it means that teams are led to know exactly how they can contribute to be most effective towards the organisation’s needs.
Brown: What are some things that need to be addressed in a company’s work culture before productivity can be achieved?
Haynes: Well, as you know, we have a productivity problem. And those stats; an economist can tell you those better than me. I think that for us, currently, is that mix of meeting the needs of workers and the needs of an organisation or a business. It is mixing work and pleasure in a way. Because we are increasingly hearing about flexibility, and businesses need to meet that somewhere. But also we have a lot, as part of the flexibility and hybrid working, we have some real issues around disconnection. around people not learning through the osmosis that they would have done, say, around what we used to call the water cooler, standing around the kettle when people are closer.
I think it’s working out how you can create the connection in your culture that enables people to have the right direction and the right freedom to be able to do the job the best they can.
Brown: In your experience working with people in leadership roles, are there any trends or consistent knowledge gaps that you come across in relation to team development?
Haynes: I think, increasingly, teams are becoming more alienated, and junior members of teams or people with least experience are not learning from the people that have more experience. Also, some of the gaps are where people are not as confident to speak to each other, literally. We have a culture now where we send an email or we send a meeting invitation in order to have a phone call. Whereas we used to pick up a phone to make a phone call. It’s the informality and it’s all of the little bits of information within that informality that seems to be skipping.
Whereas managers used to know their team members, I’m hearing a lot from senior people saying, “our team members are not necessarily telling us how they’re feeling”, or, “we can’t really gauge them”, or, “they’re not speaking up”, or, “we can’t get them to speak.” A lot of managers will say they’re having a performance meeting or a one-to-one or a team meeting, and they genuinely cannot get people to speak up.
Brown: Why do you think there’s such a big communication gap between teams and management? Is it a lot to do with hybrid and remote working, or do you think it’s much more extensive than that? Are we becoming a bit too formal at work and forgetting to engage like humans?
Haynes: I think it’s a really good point. I think you’re absolutely right. It is forgetting to engage like humans. But, also I think there are some skills that are being lost. I have spoken to customer service teams and my first question to them has been, “What’s your biggest problem?” I’ve been astounded when they’ve said, they work in customer service, and they’ve said, “Actually just answering the phone.” They’re intimidated to answer the phone, but they work in customer service. It’s the last bunch of people I would have expected to say that, because that’s their job and they’ve chosen that role.
I think it’s part of us being so digital. We have a better relationship with our phone than we do with other people because that’s what we’re looking at all the time. Our attention is constantly on a screen, and so we’re losing the informal, spontaneous interactions and the skills that go with it: the natural building [of] rapport. People will say, “How do I start a conversation with someone? How do I go into a conversation without planning it?” To them now it’s a risk rather than just having the confidence of let’s go into conversation and see what happens.
I think that’s why people are scared to say what they might feel because they’re trying to get it right. I don’t think it’s about formality, I think it’s just, in a lot of cases, we’re losing normal communication skills.
Brown: If people are becoming quite alienated in their jobs, if it’s a personal or an organisational reason, what can leaders and management do to correctly evaluate where people might be struggling or might need to be upskilled? What steps can leaders take to assess where those gaps are? And, secondly, [how can they] take practical steps towards developing a team that can cope with the demands of their role?
Haynes: I think there are lots of questions in that. I think one is if you can’t get people to speak, ideally, you’ll get people to speak and tell you where they’re at, and you can see where they’re at, and you compare notes, not a formality, just people being people. But if people won’t speak, then I’m a big fan of anonymous surveys or just any way that you can get people to have the freedom where they don’t feel that they’re going to be incriminating themselves [by] saying anything, that they have the freedom, that it’s anonymous. It’s all about psychological safety. All of these things that we’re talking about, they’re all about psychological safety. If we’re confident in having the freedom and autonomy to be ourselves, we perform at our best.
I think one is working really hard to get that feedback and those insights from all levels in an organisation or a business, and then actually bringing people together.
Because sometimes senior leaders, senior managers, or learning and development people assume that they have to come up with all the answers, and they have to create something formulaic and systematic that’s going to deliver. But actually, when you get people in a room and you say: “Right, OK, what are the problems? What do you think and what would solve them?” In my experience, nine times out of ten, they give you the better answers that are simpler and more effective. They’re [a] far more efficient, better use of time, and they work for the people. It’s getting people to help design the issue, and in turn, you’re helping them to solve a business issue, so they then have the ownership that comes with it.
Brown: That’s a really good point. Thank you for explaining that, Clare. For leaders who actually excel in developing teams, what skills would you say that set them apart from others?
Haynes: Quite a few. The leaders that I most like working with, one way I guess I would put it, are people that have real integrity. And they’re often people who know their shortcomings and they really enjoy surrounding themselves and they’re smart enough to surround themselves with people who are better than they are at things; often the things they might not enjoy doing. I know a chief financial officer who refers to the intricate detail of finance management as “tippy tappy”, and he likes the real change-direction-type stuff. He surrounds himself with people that are really good at that. I think one is noticing your shortcomings, having integrity. It’s really being values-driven. Because we need to inspire people. But in order to do that, it does go back to psychological safety. We need to make people feel that they’re important, and there’s only one way of doing that.
This is where finance people do have an advantage. I call it their superpower. But I’m not sure they always know it. Generally, because they’re good attention-to-detail people; they’re also normally very good listeners.
The problem we have there, with all organisations; and all teams that I work with, across all kinds of different sectors is time. If you’re not prepared to give people your time, they are not going to relax into the conversation to tell you what’s needed, or be themselves, or be creative, or come up with the best ideas, or do problem-solving, finding you the solutions. People will do the work for you and they’ll also give you an enormous amount of discretionary effort.
I don’t mean doing lots of overtime. I mean just effort. Just wanting to go that extra mile to solve the problem where they could just pass it on to somebody else, or say, “No, that’s not my job.” It’s all about how much time you dedicate to people. So, simply, if most of us think in a week: how many people actually stop and get your attention and say thank you, and they explain what they’re thanking you for because they’re so grateful for it.
In our culture, we’re really bad at saying, “Hi, how are you?” If you see someone in the street, or a neighbour, or [someone at the] school gate, or whatever it is, you say, “Hi, how are you?” They go, “Fine, thanks.” We don’t actually stop and say, “How are you?” We don’t have that proper, meaningful conversation. And it applies at work. Just giving people a bit of valuable time makes such a difference because then if they feel important, they’ll give back. And it all comes down to empathy. It nearly always comes down to empathy. There are very few situations I see that you can’t peel back to empathy.
Brown: That’s great. Thank you, Clare. When leaders are facing challenges in their roles or they’re going through a particularly stressful period, what would you advise them to do to alleviate that stress and focus on the big picture in their jobs?
Haynes: I think it’s really important that leaders feel that they can be open. And there’s always that balance of how much do you appear as a strong leader because you’re in the leadership position, and how much do you express your vulnerability? We’re increasingly hearing how vulnerability is powerful, in the sense of because it’s so relatable in a world where loneliness has never been higher and that people are disconnected.
There’s something about being able to put your own oxygen mask on first like they tell us to do in the health and safety briefing on a plane. There’s a strength in that. Being able to express that you are stressed and how you’re struggling because then other people can tell you the same. There’s that balance.
But in terms of what they need to do, I think it’s so much more important that you address what you need and you work out how to avoid burnout. Because we increasingly hear that people are on their second or third burnout in their career. Just the long-term effects are enormous, for them. But, also it’s really hard to work with someone if they’re your boss and they’re burning out because you have lots of mixed messages. It’s confusing as a culture.
I would say, if you can, you get the team together and you find what the crunch points are, you find out what the pressure points are. You don’t need to explain that you’re burning out necessarily or you think you’re at risk of it, or you’re about to crash. But be honest with teams and find out, particularly, where are the silos? Because if you take a team, for example, that are working three days a week at home and they don’t get to have that many informal chats as a team, there are lots of things — there’s overlapping information, there are gaps, there are silos. It’s having those important conversations about saying, well, for example, duplicate reporting has been an accounting one for years, or systems that don’t talk to each other is another one within finance that a lot of people have had issues with. Having those conversations about, what are the blocks? What do we need? What can we delegate? Who can take this away? Who can work in other teams so that the leader doesn’t need to have to solve all of the problems? They don’t have to bank up. These problems don’t have to stack up.
It is said that it’s lonely at the top, and it really can be. I think it’s harder in middle management because you’re getting shot at from the bottom and from the top. But as a leader, it can be really lonely. It’s making sure that you have different teams that you’re part of — whether it’s your leadership team, whether you have mentors, whether you have a buddy, or a mastermind group that you’re part of.
That’s the kind of thing that actually stops you getting to the point of stress. Because one of the reasons that we have such high stress and our cortisol levels go through the roof is because we’re not having enough of the good stuff happening, we’re just feeling the pressure, and some of that can be simply because we’re trying to be perfect. One thing that I noticed in finance is when you are really good at attention to detail, you can also try to be too perfect. We know that doesn’t work, and that can cause stress and can lead to burnout.
It’s having a balance of all of those things with surrounding yourself with the right people, even if you’re the kind of person that doesn’t like loud groups. A lot of finance people are introverted. You don’t need loud groups, you just need a really good support network. It’s looking at where are your gaps in your support network, whether it’s your team, or mentors, or a mastermind group, whether you have a coach. A lot of senior people will use me as their coach. It might be because their boss is quite distant or they don’t see eye-to-eye or they just need that extra talk time for them to offload, because there are things they don’t want to be seen complaining about, for example, with their team.
And so it’s just making sure that you have a sounding board. Whatever it is. And that you’re making sure your needs are met. Because sometimes a lot of leaders don’t have that sounding board, and that’s where it can implode.
Brown: That’s great. Thank you, Clare. Thank you for providing all these insights for FM today. We really appreciate it. Do you have anything else that you think is important to add that we’ve not mentioned in the conversation today?
Haynes: I think the one thing I would leave you with is, and we’ve all heard this before, but it’s so easy to forget. When we think of something like productivity or performance culture, we very much think about how much are we achieving? How much are we getting through? How efficient are we being? Yes, it’s going back to the numbers. But ultimately, it comes down to who you’re being, not what you’re doing. I think we could all do with that reminder sometimes.
