Engaging The Modern Workforce

We helped our client, who is a director at a Fortune Global 500, tell a story directed at corporate executives about the many ways the pandemic upended corporate life in an effort to get them to adopt more humane approaches to workplace wellbeing.

I’m going to tell you something that you probably already noticed. Just as we’re entering a time in human and technological evolution that requires us to be the most innovative, changes in our values and ways of working are actually inhibiting innovation.  I’m sure you’ve noticed that workers feel miserable. The pandemic has catalyzed frustration pushing burnout, low engagement, and attrition to unprecedented levels, putting enormous strain on us emotionally. In fact, emotional pain has actually been building in the global workforce for the past decade. The isolation resulting from the pandemic just brought us to untenable levels.

Before the pandemic, it was almost as if we had erected a physical barrier between our professional work lives and our emotional home lives. For many of us, the pandemic dissolved that wall causing work and home life to merge. Now, many of us don’t want to go back. But this new challenge reveals a new opportunity. By developing and integrating our emotional intelligence with our rational intellect, we can harness a level of engagement and innovation that previously was impossible when we led compartmentalized lives. Modern neuroscience tells us that innovation works best when people are intellectually and emotionally connected in a tightly knit, familiar, empathetic, psychologically safe community.

As a leader, this can be challenging. Previously, work was a place where you could be logical and assertive and not have to manage a wide range of emotions. Now you have to provide an emotionally engaged approach to leadership.

Don’t worry. Though empathy atrophies with neglect, it is improved with practice. And modern social science and neuroscience have given us insight into optimizing brain chemistry, inspiring intrinsic motivation, and connecting people for peak collaborative innovation.

First, you need to apply some neuroscience basics to understand how brain activity affects teamwork. Fostering an environment of empathy, vulnerability, generosity, and nurturing relationships with your team induces oxytocin release that increases team trust. Oxytocin also causes the brain to release the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is essential for self-soothing, recovery and rest necessary for neuroplasticity, learning and mental health.  Another neurotransmitter, dopamine, is released when people face fears, solve problems, and gain mastery. Dopamine facilitates innovation by bolstering working memory and driving people to seek novelty and attain goals.

Second, you need to tie leader compensation to their ability to foster teams capable of achieving peak collaborative innovation. You can do this by connecting their variable compensation to achievement of specific targets on employee engagement and experience metrics, much like you would for sales targets. This will create environments that attract and retain elite talent who seek emotionally healthy work environments where they can develop mastery in their craft. A workforce of elite talent in key departments provides the company with consistently superior strategy, decision quality, and execution, which results in sustained competitive advantage. 

Third, you need to build deep relationships with and between your team members and weave them together into a psychologically safe community where people are more engaged, collaborative, and productive. I can’t stress enough how important it is to lead by example. Start by removing hierarchy and using matrixed structures to democratize power. Be humble and encourage people to challenge your thinking. Admit your mistakes and vulnerabilities publicly. Set recurrent coaching sessions with your team. Support your people emotionally and teach them the skills they need to thrive in all aspects of life, not just at work. Help them define their purpose, values, and development goals. Use the insights you gain from connecting individually to turn the team into a tight-knit community.

When you do these three things, you have the potential to achieve something few organizations ever achieve: group flow state, a state of altered group cognitive function that speeds learning, increases creative problem solving and productivity, and improves the quality and speed of innovation. When combined with design thinking and Agile ways of working, teams can achieve unprecedented levels of innovation. 

But don’t take my word for it. Back in 2012, Google commissioned Project Aristotle. They asked their top scientists to study 180 teams over two years to find out what factors resulted in the best team performance.

 They discovered that the most successful teams aligned individuals with purpose, provided team and role clarity, enhanced teammate dependability, enabled impactful work and ensured psychological safety. The project findings emphasized that by far and away, psychological safety was the most important dynamic. It’s actually the precursor for all the other team success factors. 

And that makes intuitive sense, right? How can we expect people to be able to tackle the most challenging issues of our time if they don’t truly feel safe? If you want to not just compete but win in the global marketplace, you must make psychological safety a top priority at all levels of your organization.

“Working with Chris was nothing short of educational, inspirational, and purpose affirming. He’s exceptionally skilled at narrative development and visual articulation. He also partners seamlessly intellectually, with a rare balance of EQ, humility, precise articulation, and willingness to draw from existing narrative in peoples’ minds and simultaneously challenge conventional thinking to create an exceptional product that encapsulates the story you needed to tell with emotional precision and maximum relatability. When we finished our project and I viewed the draft, it was so powerful to see and so meaningful to have my portable, scalable story to share that I actually cried.”

– Director at a Fortune Global 500 company