How practicing curiosity, humility, and empathy can help you and your team.
Who wouldn’t want to lead a team operating at its natural best?
If we’re looking at how to improve efficiency, we will find pieces of advice like how this tool will improve productivity by X%, or suggesting to follow that set of guidelines. While all that can be useful, it won’t be effective if the team isn’t ready to use them. It’s like giving a high-end camera to a new photographer, it doesn’t matter how great the gear is, it’s the skills of the user that do matter, gear will often be only a matter of convenience.
That’s why we need to foster a healthy team first, for it to be ready to use all these tools and tips.
How do we cultivate a healthy team then? It doesn’t start with the team members, it starts with the leader. It starts with you. There are three social skills we can focus on (I prefer to use social and technical skills instead of soft and hard skills). First, they will make a better you, then they will make your team better as you create a healthy environment where your team members notice what you do, learn from you, and do the same. You will lead by example.
These social skills are…
Curiosity
Expressing curiosity can be done by questioning why things are done in a certain way, it can be about a process, software, technology, a piece of code… and it can be about something existing or new. But be careful about how you want to ask about it though, you don’t want to be perceived as doubting what has been done, you want to genuinely inform yourself to learn about the thought process that led to this decision, what has been considered, the use cases that had to be fulfilled, in short, everything that is relevant to what is being questioned. In practice, sometimes it can be as simple as “Can you tell me more about X, please?”.
Once you have acquired all that information, you will have learned more about the context. At best you will have a suggestion to improve existing processes, and guidelines, or even come up with something new.
In a way, this could be summed up as “Keep learning from others”, it’s not because you’re in the lead position that you’re supposed to know everything, let yourself be vulnerable by not knowing something, and normalize this situation.
Curiosity comes from introspection too and can lead to taking initiative. Notice your behavior at work. Have you been doing a specific task regularly? Can it be automated? I’m pretty big on automating everything that can be, given the time investment versus reward is worth it. If that’s something you’re building for yourself or a small team, and if it will serve only one purpose, don’t spend too much time implementing the perfect solution. In this instance, something that gets the job done and could be easily understandable by someone else is much more important. One important thing to consider is how much time you want to spend on implementing that automation because workflows are always evolving, the thing you’re automating now might be irrelevant in the future, make sure to keep this in mind.
For example, once I automated the generation of weekly production notes that someone used to create manually for the 30-40 employees of the studio. The time gained from that automation was massive, that person was then able to focus on things that did matter with the time they earned back.
Source: xkcd
For a long time, there has been a toxic culture where we expected leaders to know everything, but it is still the case in some places, unfortunately. It was considered a weakness to not know, leaders would then make things up to palliate their lack of knowledge. This is harmful behavior to the team, the project, and the company.
In the same vein, I like this example given by Simon Sinek in this 2-minute video about being the “idiot” in the room. It shows that letting yourself be “vulnerable” by asking questions, may help others also ask questions that they wouldn’t have asked otherwise fearing to look stupid.
The Truth about Being the “Stupidest” in the Room | Simon Sinek
By practicing curiosity, you will demonstrate to your team that it is fine (and IS okay) to not know everything. Encourage them to ask questions to gather more knowledge and get a better grasp of the work being done, it’ll lead to delivering higher quality work.
Humility
Have you ever worked with someone you could ask any question without fear of looking stupid? Have you ever worked with someone where you could bring up any of your ideas knowing it will not be directly discarded and would be improved by exchanging feedback? Have you ever worked with someone that would always take the time to walk you through anything and will share everything they know with you in a genuinely caring way?
This is the superpower of humble people. I had the chance to encounter and work with a few of these mythical creatures and let me tell you, the positive impact it had on my work, and my feeling of belonging to the workplace was insane.
When we find that in a lead, each person part of their team will be able to benefit from that, and both their growth potential and productivity will become unmatched. Humility is rarely cited when discussing the traits of a lead, but the effect of a humble lead in a team is second to none. People won’t be afraid of asking questions, meaning being curious, will all the benefits it brings.
This skill ties back to curiosity, and the fact that it’s normal to not know everything, even for leads. When asking questions around and expressing curiosity, you will also express humility, because you will publicly demonstrate not knowing everything. At the same time, you will show that you’re on a never-ending quest of learning new knowledge and new skills.
In the same spirit of the never-ending learning quest, asking for feedback is another way to express humility. A way I like to do so is during my 1:1s, by asking about good/negative events since the last 1:1 at the start of the discussion, and by directly asking them if they have any feedback for me at the end of it. Because you will always have room to improve, it is natural the feedback goes the other way around. In the same way that you will be giving them feedback, giving them an avenue so they can provide you feedback will show that you’re on an equal footing and you’re receptive to it.
And no, asking for personal feedback once or twice a year during a performance review is not enough. You want this feedback like your fish, fresh, especially the critical one. You owe it to your reports to deliver them fresh feedback as well.
Feedback can be (and more than often, should be) asked about your ideas. There will be things you didn’t consider in your plan, the best ideas are always built on top of each other. Because of that perception that as a lead (or any position with reports) you know exactly what you’re doing, your reports are less likely to share their ideas. They will be agreeably surprised when you ask directly for their opinion. If you want their most authentic ideas, be the last one to speak. Ask for their ideas first, consider everything that has been said, then share yours.
Openly admitting when you have been wrong, and sharing your failures as examples to learn lessons from are also great ways to express humility.
Expressing both curiosity and humility will make you practice the next and last skill…
Empathy
Contrary to curiosity and humility, this one trait is shared a lot amongst the lead literature, and it is for a good reason.
Empathy will help you create a safe environment for your team to thrive. It will feel safe to be vulnerable. It will feel safe to fail and start again.
Empathy is understanding that not everyone has the same skills. A task could be easy for some people, and more difficult for others. Some people might need more explanation to understand something. For some others, they might be facing difficult times and it could affect their results at work.
We all work in different ways, and we never know what could be going on in someone’s life. We’re playing the same game, but we’re all dealt different hands. Sometime you’ll be given a bad one, and sometime it’ll be someone else. So instead of being quick to judge when someone doesn’t meet expectations or fails a task, remind yourself there is a reason for things to happen.
In this situation, practice empathy, remember the time you needed help, and be the help you wanted to have, whether you received it or not. If they failed to meet a deadline several times, sit down with them, take the time to understand their problem, and come up with a plan to help them face this situation, it starts with: “Are you okay? What’s going on? I’m worried about you”, rather than: “You better make it work next time, or else…”. If they have a hard time understanding something, maybe they are lacking some requirements, maybe there are some barrier languages and things got lost in translation, and so on…
We all are the hero of our own story, but for once, play the support character of someone else’s story.