Grow Kind: Easy Focus

In this week’s episode of The LeaderLab, we continue our discussion about how leaders can play an active role in helping their teams and people through periods of growth in the kindest way possible. We invite Annie-Rose London, a Facilitator at LifeLabs Learning, to explain how leaders can harness the power of easy focus to quickly create space for their teams to think, feel, and connect by using the "I could talk abouts" primer.

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[Music by Blue Dot Sessions]

Transcript

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Welcome to the Leader Lab, the podcast powered by LifeLabs Learning. I'm your host, LifeLabs Leadership Trainer and Director of Product Strategy and Operations, Vanessa Tenisian. Join me and my lab mates as we distill our findings into powerful leadership tipping point skills, the smallest changes that make the biggest impact in the shortest time. We'll also welcome members from our learning community who share how they experiment with these skills in their world of work and beyond. Howdy there, Leader Lab listeners. You are tuning in to another episode where we are focusing in on how to grow kind. How does your business scale in a sustainable way so the folks working there don't just survive, they thrive. And here on the show with me today is Annie Rose London. They are an incredible facilitator here at Life Labs Learning. Welcome to the show, Annie Rose. Thanks, Vanessa. Happy to be here. Yes. So tell me about this unified theory of Bundt cakes. What's that about? Okay, follow me here. So the Bundt cake is a perfect cake. Every slice has equal center and edge. So no one misses out. So you're just telling me you have unlocked the secret to perfect Bundt cakery. Yes. And life. I love that. So aside from, you know, schooling me on baking, I know that growing kind is something that we've both fan personed over in the last few weeks. I know, especially in your work as a facilitator, that you're at a number of companies that are growing. So what are your thoughts about what you typically see at a company that's not doing it in the most kind way? Oh, yeah. I mean, I see that all of the time. Of course, I see a lot of efficiency only mode, a lot of the growth being all about people getting really focused on the measurable elements of growth and missing out on some of the less measurable elements like relationship building, like slowing down to ask hard questions. And what I love about the idea of growing kind is that it actually makes it measurable. We've kind of taken this thing that could feel very quote unquote soft and said, no, no, no, there is actually skills here. It is practicable. We can do this thing intentionally. So I am curious about the growing kind tool that you want our leaders to experiment with. What are we talking about today? Yeah. So we are talking about the tool of easy focus and specifically easy focus as a way to help build psychological safety for teams that are trying to grow kindly. So we're going to look at that and a specific tool for that, which is called the I could talk about. Ooh. So let's actually like break this down. What is the I could talk about? How does it relate to easy focus? And how does that relate to psychological safety? Yes, all those questions, I'm going to take them in reverse order. So when it comes to growing kind, a big topic is psychological safety, which can be defined as everyone on the team agrees that they can take a risk. Right? So one piece of being able to do that is being able to feel like I can share half baked ideas, I can make mistakes, and easy focus helps us build that psychological safety. So I kind of share. This is psychological safety, you know, and then an easy focus. I want to kind of share like what is not easy focus. That is hard focus. So you can kind of imagine hard focus is when I'm in the zone of I'm really focused only on one thing. I'm looking for the problem and I'm solving the problem. And easy focus is for when we broaden up that perspective, essentially. Oftentimes it means I'm not only just focused on the thing in front of me, but I can feel the things around me as well. Gotcha. So what makes hard focus bad at building psychological safety? Yeah. So hard focus Right. I feel like I've gotten those two levels down. Psychological safety, a big component of growing kind. in order to access that, we want to get into easy focus. Now, my next question is, how do we even do that? It's an excellent question. And I think that's actually the question that oftentimes stops a lot of managers that I work with is how can I actually do this thing that can feel kind of ambiguous? And the good news is that there are tools, there are practices. And what I want us to look at is this idea of changing the conversational architecture. This is an idea that was introduced to me by thought leader Kelsey Blackwell. So shout out to her. The conversational architecture is basically the norms, the unspoken rules of who talks when, who brings up hard ideas, who takes up most of the floor space when it comes to conversation time. And by shifting it, just by practicing different ways of talking to each other, we can literally have different conversations that actually practice easy focus where we're taking turns, we're sharing those half-baked, far-flung ideas. So that's where I Could Talk About has come in. It helps us practice a different way of talking to each other. So the I Could Talk About is basically a great tool to kick off a meeting so that for the rest of the meeting, more voices are going to come in. It was created by Interplay, an awesome organization that does tons of different tools for people to get together and talk more effectively and with their whole minds and whole bodies. And it looks like going around sharing things you could talk about, but you're not going to actually talk about them. Okay. Can you give us some examples? We could practice it together a little bit. Okay. Yeah. You know, I'd love to take things for a spin. Let's go. Let's take it for a spin. We'll do a mini one right now. So basically, you're going to share like the headline of something that you've could talk about, but don't worry, you don't have to actually talk about it. I could talk about the fact that we record under blankets. I could talk about being surprised by how warm it is, in fact, underneath a blanket. I could talk about how melodious our voices sound. I could talk about starting my workday a little early for a workshop. I'll round us out here. I could talk about how lucky we are to be able to teach this stuff via audio. I'm feeling some, you know, some softness in the body. So is that what the I Could Talk About do? Yeah. So what we just did is super open-ended and there's two times I'm thinking about using I Could Talk About. One is relationship building and then the other one is strategic thinking. So we just kind of did it in a relationship building way where we're surfacing things that are present for us. So the relationship building piece reminds me of phatic communication, which we highlight in our Behaviors of Inclusion course. I'm glad you brought that up because the I Could Talk About is a great example of what we talk about in both behaviors of inclusion and also talking about meetings mastery, which is how the best teams are the ones where everyone talks equally, which is kind of shocking. More so than how smart the team is, is how well they are to take turns. And something that's great about the simplicity of the I could talk about is that help people literally practice the type of conversation we want to have where we get everyone's voice in. But we also practice stopping talking. I love that. So that's the relationship building piece. I am super curious about how this would work for strategic thinking conversations. Yes, totally. So I want to kind of take us back to this idea of easy focus for this, right? If you think about literally vision, right? When you're in hard focus, you can only focus on one thing at a time. You could say one truth at a time. With easy focus, we're literally broadening out. So there can be multiple truths. So for example, multiple truths on the theme of going kind might be, I'm really excited for this growth and I'm really worried about what it's going to do to my workflow. So as a brainstorming tool and as a thing I could talk about. being really excited to meet new lab mates. I could talk about how we can optimize onboarding so that way new lab mates are more effective sooner. I could talk about the process of identifying which BUs were really operating when we were super small and how to scale them up as we grow. Yeah, I could talk about BUs. That means behavioral units for our new listeners out there that we want to maintain as part of our ethos. Shout out to Joey Lim in her episode on organizational ethos. I could talk about systematizing ways to share concerns as we grow. Do we have time for another rounder? I'm thinking why don't we do a round of, I could talk about fears around rearing kind. Yeah, I could talk about how things get blurry, meaning there's not that much clarification of lanes and roles and responsibilities sometimes as we grow. Yes, I could talk about losing track of the why in some communications as companies grow and there's more stages in between getting the final updates. I could talk about how it's harder to trust new people, even if they are values aligned. I don't necessarily know them, so that can get in the way. I could totally talk about the mere exposure effect and being merely exposed to people less, which means I don't necessarily know their faces as quickly. And I'll wrap us up with this last one. I could talk about that. It just makes me nervous. How about that? How about that? My question to you, Annie, Rose, is when you're thinking about this and going through these rounds, what do you do with this information? So it depends on whether you're using it for relationship building or for problem solving and strategy. For relationship building, the tool is itself. It literally, you practice the new conversation architecture. You built some rapport. What I'm doing this for brainstorming, oftentimes what I'll ask next is, well, what would we like to talk more about? Definitely. Simply the act of talking about it is enough to get people into action or into momentum sometimes. I think that's a really great point. I think a lot of leaders are afraid about sort of opening the can of worms. And this is a great way to say we're going to open the can and then the worms are just going to crawl around there productively as they do. I don't know if that was good. I just had a visual picture of like really productive worms. And then that brings us to our Leader Lab listener experiment. So Annie Rose, what are you asking our listeners to experiment with in their laboratories of life? Oh, I am so excited for you to play with this listeners. I encourage you to think about a meeting or a team that you're ready to launch where it really benefit you to begin with some good relationships in the room maybe it's your family hey and whatever that is plan to start your next meeting with a few rounds of I could talk about and just see what happens notice how the rest of your meeting goes after that and we have another grow kind tool in our toolkit Annie Rose I could talk about I could talk about with you honestly forever thank you for being here oh my goodness I could talk about what a joy it is to be here with you thanks so much Thank you. The Leader Lab is executive produced and hosted by me, Vanessa Tenisian. Alana Berman is our creative director and senior editor. Juliana Jack is our assistant editor. Lauren Feller is our associate producer. And Yadier James is our senior producer. You can find all our episodes, transcripts, and more at lifelabslearning.com slash podcast. While you're there, you can learn more about our learning programs to help you build an engaged high-impact team faster. See you in the lab.