TRANSCRIPT 🔗
Paul: Welcome to the Resilient Leadership Podcast. I am Paul Marks. I'm an executive coach with 30 years of experience working with leaders and teams across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Australia. In each of the episodes of the Resilient Leader Podcast, we're going to be exploring practical strategies that leaders can use to be able to lead their teams effectively in a very dynamic, fast-paced, and uncertain world that we live and operate in today. We'll be talking about things like Building trust, leading through change, and creating high-performing teams in complexed, fast-paced environments. Also, I will be bringing in applied neuroscience and psychology, as well as drawing from my own experiences and insights of working with multinational and multicultural organizations from around the world. Thank you for joining the podcast today. Now, I want you to imagine that you're leading a team through AI transformation. Some of you listening to this may be in that very position today. Over the years, especially over recent years, I've worked with a number of teams going through transformation. And they bounce from one transformation to another. Before it was digital, now it's AI. Your organization is investing heavily. There's a lot of pressure coming down from the top. And let's be honest, your team, well, they're probably terrified. They've got a lot of questions around what's actually happening and what will be happening. The biggest question, of course, that a lot of people have is: is my job safe? Can I keep up with a fast-paced change? And am I is my workload gonna get more or am I gonna get less? And can I still add value to this organization? But here's the real kicker. As a leader, you're probably not entirely sure yourself. You probably don't have answers to all of those questions. But at the same time, you still need your team and your people to be engaged and perform. The bigger issue, of course, though, as well, is that when there's a lot of uncertainty and there isn't a clear path forward, and people don't know what's happening, they start to lose trust. They start to ask themselves a lot of questions. And very often we start to create meaning or we start to create stories around the situation that often turn out not to be true. So Well, what we do as leaders, and how do we support our teams, and how do we reestablish that trust? And that is actually what we're going to be talking about today in this podcast. The first thing I want to talk a bit a little bit about is how change or how uncertainty, let's say more specifically, has an impact on our brain and our team's brain as well. After I've talked about that a little bit, I'm also gonna go into a story. And during my podcast I will be drawing a lot from stories that you know that I've had or been through with leaders and organizations because I think as a student myself and I'm always learning in development, I've had that privilege of working with some incredible people throughout the years. And there's so much knowledge and insight that I've gained from conversations and being with those people that I think can really add value to our podcast. And hopefully If you're a leader, it will add value to what you're doing with your teams as well. After we've talked through, I'm going to share one story today with about a guy and his team that I was working with in Singapore. And then after that, what I'm going to do at the end of the podcast is give you some real concrete strategies that you can actually go out and apply if you're finding that your team is losing trust in the direction that your organization is going, or if you're going to Through transformation and it's causing fear. So let's dive in. Or let's just talk about the big topic here, the overarching topic, which is the uncertainty that people have to deal with. Your brain doesn't like it. Full stop. When things are unpredictable, our nervous system kind of goes into this alert mode. It's not rational as such, it's biological. Your body starts producing stress hormones. You tense up. And your team, well, of course, they're doing the same thing. They're feeling that. Now, I could go into the neuroscience and throw a lot of jargon at you. you know, how when we recognize uncertainty in the environment that it has an impact or, you know, the on our insula, the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex, and all that stuff. But here's what actually matters. When you're Brain perceives threats or uncertainty, the parts of your brain that handles that reasoning, creativity, and connection get quieter. You literally become less capable of the collaborative, trusting behavior you actually need in that moment. And of course, once again, your team will feel this too. They're watching you, they're watching how you're showing up. And it's not just about the words that are coming out of your mouth, it's also the nonverbal cues that are sending the messages as well. And they're sensing whether you're being genuinely or genuinely confident, or you are just faking it. And when they pick up on your uncertainty and fear, it amplifies theirs at the same time. But trust doesn't just crack, it kind of it kind of crumbles. I worked with a technology leader in Singapore about three years ago now. And his company at that time was going through a massive digital transformation. But I'll be very honest with you, his team was quite fractured. People were looking out for themselves. There was a lot of protection going on. And with that, knowledge wasn't being shared. And trust, if no one said it, It still existed, but it really had been broken. What I noticed was with this particular leader that he was actually trying to convince people that everything was fine. And he was trying to do it using logic and data. But what he failed to see was that his team wasn't operating from a space and place of logic. They were actually operating from fear. And you can't logic someone out of a nervous
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system that's in threat mode. It just doesn't work that way. But what was really good about this particular leader that he had a lot of self-awareness. And second, he had a willingness to listen, to open up, and change. The changes started to happen when he stopped pretending to have all the answers. He actually started showing up with a genuine transparency. And I can remember being in meetings where he would shift his tone a little bit and say to people, look, I'll be honest, I don't have all the answers. But here is what I'm committed to. He became really honest about the challenges that him and his team would be facing. But most importantly, and this was the bit that I really I think had the biggest impact, he checked in with his team on a regular basis. And I'm not just talking about the tasks and their work, but actually how they were coping and how they were feeling. That vulnerability that he started to demonstrate, that consistency as well, and those regular check-ins with his team members, actually made quite a significant shift. Now, of course, trust didn't come back overnight, but people began to feel safe enough to engage with him. And this is where I think the magic happened. Before People weren't so open about their concerns, the problems that they could identify, and, you know, how they were going to move forward. But the moment that the leader regularly checked in and was showing genuine concern and understanding and trying to put himself in his team members' shoes, they started to open up because they felt that they were being listened to. They started to take more risks about telling him about how they truly felt. But more important, they started to talk about some of the gaps that they were noticing, some of the problems. Now, this gave this leader tremendous insight into what was really happening within his team. And of course, when he started to get to the truth of the matter, he could really see and understand in a very practical way as well what he needed to do next to make sure that his team would feel engaged and performed, and of course, felt safe above everything else. Here are three con as we get to the kind of almost the end of this one today. here are three things that you could start to do this week if you're a leader in this position. If you're going through change and you feel like that uncertainty that's coming about is creating that level of distrust, there are certain things you can do. So the first one is As we learnt from this situation, be radically honest about what you know and what you don't. Your natural instinct might be that you want to project confidence and certainty. But people trust authenticity more than they do false confidence. So name it directly. Here's what we know, here's what we don't, and here's what we're doing to figure everything out moving forward. That honesty and openness actually creates safety. The second thing is: show up consistently and regularly. Don't go up in a town hall and speak and then run back and disappear into your office so no one can see you. When uncertainty is high, predictability becomes a lifeline for your people. Check in on them as often as you can to see how they're doing. And not just you know on updates about their work, but how they are coping. Listen. Listen to their concerns. Listen to the things that they're sharing with you. When you do this, when you show up consistently, it helps people's nervous systems know that although the mat the environment may be uncertain, it's manageable because they've got that safety line and they can put trust in you. The third thing that maybe I haven't talked about in my story, but is really important is to give people agency. People feel safer when they have some control over what's going on. Even if it's a small amount of control. Invite them into problem solving. Ask them for their ideas and input on solving challenges or finding steps forward or innovating. When people move from being a passive victim of change to an active participant in shaping the change, there is a shift in their response, but more importantly, there it will be a shift in their nervous system. The thing about resilient leadership is this: it's not about you always having all the answers. It's about understanding how your brain works under pressure and creating the conditions for trust to be rebuilt. That's what we're going to be exploring here on the next episode as well of Resilient Leadership. I am Paul Marks. Thanks for listening. The next episode will go into this topic a little bit deeper as we start to talk about psychological safety and how to create it in Teams. See you then. Thanks for listening. And remember, if this podcast episode was useful or you found it educational, you might find that somebody else could benefit from some of the things. That I've been sharing today. Please, first of all, subscribe yourself and two, please share the wealth with your team or people around you. Thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next episode.