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Kathy Stoddard Torrey

~ Leadership Coach and Trainer

Kathy Stoddard Torrey

Category Archives: Team Building

The Importance of Being Reliable

15 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by Kathy Stoddard Torrey in Leadership, Team Building, Uncategorized

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Tags

#LeadershipRules #LeadYourselfFirst #KathySays, #Reliable, #self-discipline, #trustworthy

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Trustworthiness is the cornerstone of exceptional leadership. If people don’t feel that they can trust us, we do not have psychological safety or the positive relationships required for organizational success. However, trust is a difficult thing to cultivate and maintain because it relies on us being consistent. Great supervisors are consistent, dependable, and reliable.

Honestly, none of us are going to be reliable and consistent all the time, but we need to manage it most of the time. Our employees need to know that we aren’t going to yell at them when they come to us with a problem. They need to feel confident that we are going to be calm and reliable. We’re going to ask questions and figure out how to fix the situation. We want our employees to feel that we are a stable, reliable force that is going to help them. Until employees feel confident that their leaders are reliable and consistent, they are going to be tentative and watchful—maybe even subversive or dishonest in order to avoid an unpleasant confrontation.

Keeping our emotions and, more importantly, our actions in check takes a great deal of emotional intelligence. Specifically, we must exercise self-discipline. We don’t get to fly off the handle and yell whenever we get angry. When we talk about this in workshops, participants ask me if I ever lose my temper, yell, and say hurtful things. My answer is “rarely.” Actually, I can’t think of a time in the last ten years when I’ve hurled mean-spirited insults at anyone. I do get angry, and I sometimes raise my voice a bit and sound stern, but my words are still intentional and measured.

The first reaction that I get is incredulity, and then there is a definite belief that to control one’s temper is not healthy. One does need to express anger, but we don’t need to damage people, walls, furniture, or relationships to do it. Exercise is a great way to release pent-up anger. When my boys were young, I would hold sofa cushions while they hit on them and yelled. I’ve used both of those techniques.

I’ve also walked through my home ranting and yelling. I have a friend or two that will allow me to vent to them. One time I called a good friend and fellow coach and said, “I need you to say, ‘What an ass!’ every time I pause for breath for about three minutes.” She did, and I felt better. Recently I bought an ax-throwing kit for children. Think Nerf when you visualize it in your head. Throwing foam axes can be very cathartic.

The bottom line is that we can manage our anger so that we don’t intentionally harm others. Words can be powerful weapons. We want to express our anger in appropriate ways to others, and then go home and take it out on the sofa cushions.

Fortunately for us, people have a tendency to extend trust to others in the beginning of a relationship. The trust is a gift that we need to appreciate and work to keep. We want to avoid breaching trust because once it’s gone, trust is difficult to gain back. However, all is not lost if we lose someone’s trust. There are things that we can do to regain it as quickly as possible.

The first thing to do is to admit that we’ve done something disappointing. If we made a bad decision, forgot something, or lost our temper, we should admit it. The second thing to do is to apologize. Some old-school thought states that leaders should never apologize. It’s based on the belief that leaders have to be perfect to be great leaders. The problem with that thinking is that none of us are perfect. We are human, and we make mistakes. We only make matters worse if we don’t admit them and apologize.

We also need to do whatever we can to fix the problem if that’s possible. An apology goes a long way, but we also want to do what we can to make things right. If we forgot to do something, how can we get it done and deal with the results of forgetting? If a plan doesn’t work, it’s time to regroup and try again. We help to rebuild trust when we do what we can to repair any damage that we’ve done.

After we have broken trust, we will have to continue to behave in a consistent, reliable manner until everyone feels comfortable again. It may take some time, so we need to be patient.

In summary, when we break trust, it’s important to acknowledge it, apologize, and do what we can to fix it. Then we continue to be trustworthy until whoever was affected decides that they can trust us again. However, the best course of action is to do our best each moment of every day to be reliable, consistent, and dependable.


For a little bit of fun leadership development, join 53 Leadership Challenges at KathyStoddardTorrey.com.

Want to go further with your professional development? Check out the courses offered at PositiveEffectLeadership.com.

If you are interested in taking your career to the next level quickly, contact me for a sample coaching session at KSTorrey@tapferconsulting.com.

Establishing a Group Identity

09 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by Kathy Stoddard Torrey in Leadership, Motivation, Team Building, Uncategorized

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#groupidentity, #groupnorms, #LeadershipRules #LeadYourselfFirst #KathySays, Motivation

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Defining a clear team or group identity is one way to create a culture that supports success. One of the best examples of creating a group identity comes from the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. A young man named Paul Butler went to Saint Lucia to save the Saint Lucia parrot. The parrot was on the brink of extinction, and the people of Saint Lucia didn’t have strong feelings about the parrot. He had little money and no staff to help him. He created a campaign around the identity of the people of Saint Lucia. Specifically, his message was “We take care of our own.”

The campaign was wildly successful. The Saint Lucia parrot is now thriving. Paul Butler went on to work with a conservation organization called Rare, where he replicated the creation of a local identity over and over. Creating a specific identity is a hugely powerful tool for any group.

In a business setting, the people in the group get to decide who they want to be as a group. It’s important to write down and promote the group’s identity. The group can come up with a name, a mascot, and t-shirt designs. One group that I worked with decided that an octopus represented them, and they each had a stuffed octopus on their desks as a reminder of who they wanted to be as a group. It’s an opportunity for the group to express its uniqueness and create cohesiveness.

I start by having the group complete the sentence: We are people who… Once we have a list of qualities and actions, they decide what sort of animal or creature embodies those qualities. That discussion is usually a lot of fun and involves some very creative thinking.

Once the group has decided on a mascot, we move on to a name. Sometimes it is the name of the creature. One of the most creative groups I’ve had the pleasure to work with decided that a gryphon was the creature that represented them. A gryphon has the head, talons, and wings of an eagle, with the body of a lion. However, the gryphon seemed a little intimidating to some of the group, so they named it “Andy Gryphon” so that it would seem more friendly, like Andy Griffith.

When faced with a problem in the future, the group can ask, “What would Andy Gryphon do?” or “How would Andy Gryphon handle that problem?” The group has established a clear identity that reminds them of who they want to be and how they want to behave.

It is kind of fun to create an identity for a family, too. The discussion of who the group wants to be and how they want to be seen by others can be creative and enlightening.

The Torreys have always been people who take care of people smaller and weaker than themselves. We are a tall, strong, determined group of people who stand up for others. When my two-year-old granddaughter got frustrated with her not-yet-one brother, she gave him a push, which is normal behavior all around.

However, I took her hands in mine and looked her in the eye. I said in a stern voice, “We do not hurt people who are smaller than we are. That is not acceptable. You are a Torrey, and Torreys take care of people who are smaller and weaker than we are.”

She is a pretty smart two-year-old who got her first exposure to the group identity of the Torreys. If she continues with the behavior or does more than a gentle push, there will be more severe consequences. The same sequence of events would happen in a workplace. We start with gentle reminders and then move on to appropriate consequences for unacceptable behavior.

A group identity is a powerful motivator. When someone acts outside the group norm, the team will remind them, “That’s not who we are.” It’s a quick and easy guideline for a group – or family – to follow that gently helps us all stay on track.


For a little bit of fun leadership development, join 53 Leadership Challenges at KathyStoddardTorrey.com.

Want to go further with your professional development? Check out the courses offered at PositiveEffectLeadership.com.

If you are interested in taking your career to the next level quickly, contact me for a sample coaching session at KSTorrey@tapferconsulting.com.

Designing an Alliance: In-Depth View

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by Kathy Stoddard Torrey in Psychological Safety, Team Building

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#Communication, #DesignedAlliance, #LeadershipRules #LeadYourselfFirst #KathySays

Ideally, we want our people on our teams and in our organizations to behave a certain way. For example, we want them to be respectful, efficient, and productive. We can create a culture that defines and supports those behaviors. Creating a culture intentionally makes a leader’s job much easier. The culture that we create at our level may not exactly align with the organization’s culture, and that’s okay. We can decide that within our group there are certain behaviors that are important to ensure individual and group success.

We can begin creating the culture that we want by having our group or team design an alliance together. The Designed Alliance is a guideline for acceptable behavior for the group. Sometimes the agreement is called Ground Rules. When we get the group together to design an alliance, we want to make it clear that we are going to decide together on some standards of behavior. Handing down rules about acceptable behavior is not as effective.

First, we want to decide on the sort of atmosphere or emotional field in which we want to work. The group can list qualities that they want to bring into conversations. “Respect” is usually a good start. Many groups list “open-mindedness” and “humor.” Make sure the qualities are reasonable and attainable by everyone. Once the group has discussed the atmosphere it would like to create, it’s important to consider which behaviors would help the group achieve that atmosphere. For example, one ground rule could be “No sarcasm” in order to support a positive work environment.

Another good discussion is about what would help the individuals in the group and the group itself to do a good job. It might be a weekly meeting or a commitment to provide information quickly. The group might decide that daily progress reports are needed. The discussion might include a request for a less hostile attitude toward necessary requests. The Designed Alliance should address the individual needs that are going to help the group succeed. It’s a great time to remind everyone of how their actions support the goals of the group and the organization.

A specific discussion of how the team wants to behave when things get difficult is crucial for the Designed Alliance. Many groups have trouble handling conflict. Generally, groups avoid discussing differences of opinion, or they yell. Of course, the yelling is what encourages avoidance. Sometimes it helps to talk about how an ideal team would handle disagreements. How would The Perfect Team handle conflict? Having the discussion in terms of how an ideal team would handle conflict can make the discussion less personal.

In creating guidelines for behavior, a discussion of what the group doesn’t want to happen can lead to some specific behaviors that they want to include. A group normally has pretty clear ideas about behaviors that they don’t want to see. When writing out the Designed Alliance, we want to state the opposite positive behavior, rather than a negative behavior. For example, if the group says it doesn’t want dishonesty, we would include “Be honest.” If they don’t want yelling, we could include “Use a professional or respectful tone of voice.”

The Designed Alliance isn’t useful if no one adheres to it. The group must decide what they are going to do if someone breaks one of the agreements. This Designed Alliance belongs to the group, and it isn’t the supervisor’s job to enforce it. It really is up to the entire group. Many groups decide to gently remind the person about the agreement. Often, they also explicitly add that no one will get defensive or angry when reminded. There are many different ways for a group to remind each other about the Designed Alliance.

If the discussion feels like it could go further, there are a couple of other questions the group can discuss:

  • What can you rely on from each other?
  • What will you commit to for one another?

Once the entire agreement is written, it’s important to make sure that everyone agrees to the rules. The final task is to have everyone look at the list, and ask if there are any questions or problems. We want to give everyone a chance to disagree with the items on the Designed Alliance. Ensure the group understands that they are committing to behave in alignment with the Designed Alliance. It’s easy for everyone to nod their heads or just be silent if they disagree. It’s a good idea to ask the group to stand if they agree to act in accordance with the agreement and to hold others accountable as well.

At this point, someone could refuse to stand, and that’s okay. In that case, we all sit down and talk about the person’s reservations. If one person refuses a guideline, it’s best to take it off the list. If the action in question is a part of the person’s job or common professionalism, we want to schedule a coaching session on that topic privately.

There are a few things that can be included in the Designed Alliance that are useful. If these guidelines don’t show up in the discussion, it’s a good idea to mention them to the group. The group can reject them in the end, but it’s good to at least talk about them.

We agree that everyone’s perspective is, at least partially, right.

In agreeing that everyone’s perspective is partially right, we are explicitly acknowledging that there is usually more than one valid way to view a situation. There isn’t, necessarily, a right and a wrong. This perspective makes the discussions and the disagreements a lot easier because we don’t paint someone as totally wrong. As a result, the discussion continues, and we foster the positive relationships that help the group function more effectively.

We will listen to each other’s ideas and perspectives with an open mind.

This guideline means that we are open to being influenced by others. We will go into the discussion with the intentional perspective of looking for things with which we can agree. In essence, it’s agreeing to listen and being open to changing our minds. If people are resistant to the idea of being open-minded, we can remind them that listening with an open mind does not require agreement in the end.

We will always be respectful to one another.

Being respectful is usually brought up pretty early in the discussion. However, if no one mentions it, it’s a good idea to bring it up for discussion.

We won’t leave a meeting where a decision was made and complain about the decision to others if we didn’t speak up in the meeting.

Finding someone to complain to after we haven’t spoken up in a meeting is called triangulation. The group is agreeing to bring up their reservations and complaints in the meetings when the group can discuss the point of view together. It also means that when approached by someone wanting to complain outside of a group meeting, we will remind them that we’ve agreed to discuss issues as a group, not privately and individually. If the group agrees to discuss things together in an open way, that is a huge step forward for the group.

We will share our thoughts and feelings on a topic.

If the group agrees not to triangulate, a person could avoid the situation by never talking to anyone about his or her ideas or reservations. The solution is a separate guideline that requires everyone to speak their minds. The group can’t deal with issues unless they are brought out into the open for discussion. The Designed Alliance helps to create an environment and a culture where people talk and solve problems and share perspectives in a positive way. However, ultimately, it’s up to us as supervisors to maintain a safe space where people are comfortable proposing opposing views. If people believe that they will be harassed or ignored, no amount of coercion will get them to share their opinions.

We will presume good intent.

Instead of assuming that someone is being mean-spirited, we will first assume that their motivation is positive. It saves a lot of emotional pennies and hurt feelings. The only way to know someone’s intent is to ask. Until we ask, we presume good intent.

The Designed Alliance is a powerful tool that helps to create the psychological safety that a team or group need to excel. We work better when we feel free to share our ideas, disagree, and take reasonable risks.


For a little bit of fun leadership development, join 53 Leadership Challenges at KathyStoddardTorrey.com.

Want to go further with your professional development? Check out the courses offered at PositiveEffectLeadership.com.

If you are interested in taking your career to the next level quickly, contact me for a sample coaching session at KSTorrey@tapferconsulting.com.

 

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