Have you ever worked in an environment where team members were chronically late for meetings and when they did show up, interrupted the flow and needed to be caught up? How about trying to work with people who blamed others for their mistakes or made excuses for not finishing a task or hitting a goal? These are just a few examples of workplaces with a lack of accountability. What starts as small issues can quickly snowball when no one takes ownership of making decisions, addressing challenges and solving problems. And it makes it impossible to create a high performing team.

What does accountability look like in the workplace? A culture of accountability means that team members take responsibility for their performance and project outcomes. They don’t play the “blame game” when something goes wrong, but take ownership of mistakes and try to learn from them. Accountable employees work to find solutions. As a result, an organization thrives and doesn’t have as many issues with productivity and engagement.

That doesn’t mean that holding team members accountable is easy. We often resist doing it because it makes us uncomfortable, we simply forget or maybe we don’t even know how to go about it. Here’s a look at 4 things managers can do to foster an accountable team environment:

• Lead by example: You can’t hold others accountable until you begin with yourself. As a manager, you set the tone, performance and culture for your team. If you’re continuously showing up to meetings late, pushing deadlines and not owning up to your mistakes, people will follow your lead.
• Set clear, measurable goals: When you clarify expectations and goals, you help your team understand what their focus should be. Explain what should be done, why it matters and what the final outcome should look like. Most people want to meet their goals and help the team, especially when they truly understand what’s at stake.
• Work on your feedback skills: Giving tough feedback is never easy, but it’s a necessary management skill and one of the most important to develop. However, it’s also important to provide consistent positive feedback. If all your employees hear about is what they’re doing wrong, that’s hardly motivating. It’s all about clear and respectful communication, something we’ll cover more in our next article.
• Reward accountability: When managers see accountability being practiced, they should celebrate it and recognize team members that are doing it. Ideas include: making accountability a criteria when considering employees for promotions, publicly thanking team members for taking accountability and solving problems and offering professional development opportunities when team members take accountability in areas they need to learn.

Fostering a culture of accountability on your team will not only improve employee morale, but it’ll also give your team the sense of ownership they need to thrive. If you feel accountability is lacking within your organization, working with a coach, like Leah M Joppy and Associates can help. We can work with you to identify any accountability issues on your team, assist managers with how to deal with them and help build a culture of trust and transparency. The result is more engaged, focused and happy employees!

Ready to learn more? Call us at 301-670-0051 or email us at leah@lmja.com.

For many organizations, collaboration is a key element. But just because teams are collaborating more than ever doesn’t mean they’re doing it effectively – and the main culprit is usually communication. In an era where we’re balancing in-person, hybrid and remote workers, effective communication is more important than ever. But it takes work and it often means being candid.

When people hear the words “candid conversation,” it can often be accompanied with feelings of anxiety and a pit in their stomach. But being “candid” doesn’t have to be synonymous with being disrespectful or unkind. In fact, candid communication used in the right way is kind – it builds greater trust, transparency and opens the door to more constructive conversations about tough issues.

So often, managers (particularly new ones) and team members are focused on being “nice” and they’re afraid to speak up when problems arise. Or they sugar coat communication so much that it loses any effectiveness. There are ways to be both candid and respectful. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• Learn how to provide feedback: We touched on this briefly in our last article, but learning how to give constructive feedback is so vital. When challenges arise, leaders can use both kindness and candor at the same time. The key is self-awareness and training. It’s important to understand your own feelings about having difficult conversations, especially if you’ve had experiences when feedback was given in a hurtful way or if you’re uncomfortable with conflict.
• Build trust through communication: When you build relationships that include mutual trust, you and your team will be more comfortable bringing up issues and being yourselves. How do you build that kind of relationship? Actually, the first step is being more candid! A leader who provides honest and transparent communication is more likely to gain the trust of their team than someone with a facade of “niceness”.
• Make sure you lead by example: Again, it all comes from the top. Show that you’re open to feedback (ask for it!) and others will do the same. Provide opportunities for team members to bring up issues without having to be afraid of repercussions and reward those who do it respectfully. Not every candid remark will be helpful, but nurturing a culture of candor and kindness has more benefits than downsides.

Remember that approaching difficult conversations with kindness allows you to be both objective and empathetic – and these are the basic requirements for candidness.

Effective communication is the backbone of any organization, yet many leaders struggle when it comes to having honest, candid conversations with team members. Working with a coach, like Leah M Joppy and Associations, can help managers at any stage in their career take a closer look at their communication style, areas for improvement and tactics to provide feedback and solve problems in a direct and respectful way. Your employees will thank you for it!

Call us at 301-670-0051 or email us at leah@lmja.com to learn more.

Take a moment and think about the last time you had a meeting with your team members. Was everyone engaged and encouraged to share their ideas? When someone did speak up, was everyone listening or were they distracted by their phones? Were new ideas or questions met with interest and enthusiasm or was there a bit of laughing and a “that will never work” kind of attitude? As we go through our daily routine, we may not think about how the workplace environment is shaping the attitudes and perceptions of team members. But there’s an important component of workplace motivation and engagement that shouldn’t be ignored: psychological safety.

What exactly is psychological safety? It’s the belief that people feel safe in admitting they don’t know something or can disagree with an opinion without the risk of being thought less of, penalized, retaliated against or considered not a team player. It’s feeling comfortable taking risks and expressing work-related thoughts and feelings. Psychological safety plays a vital role in decision making, healthy interpersonal relationships, greater innovation and more effective execution within organizations.

The big question on leaders’ minds is, “How do I know if my team has psychological safety?” The answers to these 7 simple statements, developed by Amy Edmondston, Harvard Business School professor and author of The Fearless Organization, can give you a sense of the degree to which employees feel psychologically safe:

• If you make a mistake on this team, it is not held against you.
• Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
• People on this team often accept others for being different.
• It is safe to take a risk on this team.
• It isn’t difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
• No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
• Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

A lot of what goes into creating a psychologically safe environment are good management practices. This includes things like encouraging open communication and actively listening to employees, making sure team members feel supported and making it clear that their voice and ideas matter.

Here’s what psychological safety is not: It’s not about “being nice” or creating an environment where people have to feel comfortable all the time. Taking risks can make people feel like they’re out of their comfort zone. Mistakes happen and need to be pointed out in order for learning to take place. The key is that these risks and mistakes happen in a safe environment.

Psychological safety has become a hot topic in the workplace and for good reason. An environment where it’s lacking results in greater employee dissatisfaction, less productivity and innovation and, ultimately, more turnover. How would you rate the level of psychological safety within your organization? Do team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas, questions and concerns or is there room for improvement? That’s where Leah M Joppy and Associates can step in and help. We can look at your current practices and help you craft new and innovative ways to communicate, problem-solve and engage with team members.  

Ready to learn more? Call us at 301-670-0051 or email us at leah@lmja.com to learn more.

We spend the majority of our week at the office, yet how often do we stop and think about what makes us really excited about our job? For leaders, do you ever consider what keeps team members motivated to do their best work? We get so caught up in the next project and deadline that sometimes we forget to focus on how to improve engagement in the office. That’s where the three principles of employee engagement come into play: psychological safety, psychological meaningfulness and psychological availability.

In our last article, we took a look at psychological safety. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the other two components: psychological meaningfulness and availability. All three were developed by organizational psychologist William Kahn, author of the 1990 study “Physical Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work.”

Psychological Meaningfulness

What is psychological meaningfulness? It’s when team members feel motivated within their positions due to challenge, opportunities for autonomy and strong goals. They feel like they’re a part of something larger than themselves. If you give people challenging and meaningful work, you set them up for success and they’ll reciprocate by pouring themselves into that work. Research from the American Psychological Association has shown that workers who perceive their jobs as meaningful report higher job satisfaction, are more engaged, have lower rates of absenteeism and even enjoy better health.

How can organizations increase psychological meaningfulness with team members? Here are a few tips to help:

• Communicate the work’s bigger impact and make team members aware of the connection between their contribution and the result.
• Recognize and mentor team members’ potential. Ask them what they’re interested in, learn what their strengths are and match them with opportunities.
• Nurture personal connections with team events, check-ins, educational opportunities and social time.
• Give team members autonomy and use “leading to support” behaviors (ie- clarify confusing or missing information related to team goals or tasks, provide reasons for any policy changes and encourage team members to be self-starters).

Psychological Availability

What is psychological availability? It’s when team members team members feel the demands of their position are reasonable and achievable. They believe they possess the physical, emotional and psychological resources necessary to do their job.

How can organizations increase psychological meaningfulness with team members? Here are a few ways to help:

• Provide learning opportunities and feedback that allows them to feel confident about investing themselves in their work. In short, set team members up for success.
• Ensure that team members have the necessary resources to do their jobs. This includes examining the physical work environment (noise level, lighting, accessibility to quiet meeting spaces, etc.).
• Examine if the demands of the job are achievable. Make work/life balance a priority.
• Provide empathy for personal situations by offering support and resources. Look for any changes in behavior and have regular check-ins.

Most organizations don’t know where to begin when it comes to helping their employees find more meaning in their positions and increase overall engagement. The typical “office perks” are often surface level and don’t delve into the root issues. That’s where Leah M Joppy and Associates can help. A fresh approach and perspective, combined with experience tackling all different types of employee disengagement issues is just what you need to jumpstart your team’s motivation! Call us at 301-670-0051 or email us at leah@lmja.com today.

You and your team are working on a project and, suddenly a problem (or two or three) develop and threaten to derail your progress. Dealing with obstacles and challenges is a regular part of working life and overcoming them isn’t always easy. People tend to do three things when faced with a problem: 1) they get afraid or uncomfortable and wish it would go away; 2) they feel that they have to come up with an immediate answer and it has to be the ‘right’ answer; and 3) they look for someone to blame. Most of us are ‘conflict-adverse’. It makes us feel uncomfortable and dealing with that discomfort is a huge challenge. That’s why building a culture of creative problem solving in the workplace is so vital.

So, what exactly does creative problem solving mean? Creative problem solving or CPS is a method for approaching a problem or a challenge in an imaginative and innovative way, aka thinking “outside of the box”. It helps you redefine the problems and opportunities you face, come up with new, fresh solutions and then take action. If you do an Internet search on the term, you’ll find many variations, most of which can be traced back to the work started by Alex Osborn in the 1940s and further developed at Buffalo State College and the Creative Education Foundation. CPS is based on a few core principles:

• Everyone is creative.
• Creative skills can be learned and enhanced.

CPS is an essential soft skill that can help leaders and team members find new solutions to old problems and thrive in a fast-paced and ever-changing environment. Making creative problem solving a priority has a wealth of benefits for organizations:

• It encourages innovation
• It improves productivity
• It allows for adaptability
• It fosters growth

And here’s a really big one: It leads to better job satisfaction. When people are encouraged to be creative, they’re also more engaged. They’re not just solving problems in the stale, same old way, but are brainstorming and coming up with new, fresh ideas to approach challenges. This encourages retention and more joy in the workplace. And who doesn’t want that in today’s competitive hiring environment?

How many of us have had training in problem solving? We know it’s an important part of our role, but do we actually know how to do it effectively? That’s where working with a coach, like Leah M Joppy and Associates, can help. We can walk you through the CPS process, work with your leaders and team on how to approach problem solving in a fresh way and support you through any challenges during the entire process. Call us at 301-670-0051 or email us at leah@lmja.com to learn more.

It’s inevitable. Problems are going to happen in the workplace. It’s how leaders and team members approach them that makes all the difference. And trying to solve new problems using old solutions isn’t the answer. That’s why creative problem solving (CPS) is a such a vital skill to prioritize and develop. It fosters innovation, encourages brainstorming and approaches issues from a fresh perspective. In our last article, we looked at many of the reasons why CPS is a benefit for any organization. But how do leaders and teams get started if this is a relatively new concept and way of approaching problems?

The CPS process can be broken down into 7 steps:

1. Identify the goal: Before solving a problem, you need to understand the problem. Take some time to analyze the conflict and clear up any confusion. Did you misunderstand some details or overlook something? Clarity is key.

2. Gather data

Once you know what the problem is, you need to learn all about it. Gather all the information you can to gain a better understanding of the issue and to solve it. For example, who is involved in solving the issue? Who does it affect?

3. Ask challenging questions

After you’ve gathered details, turn the problem into a question. Be sure to phrase the question in a way that encourages suggestions and ideas. Questions should be short, concise and only focus on a single issue. Trying to tackle too much only leads to frustration and feeling overwhelmed.

4. Explore ideas

Now the brainstorming begins and the creativity really starts to flow as you create possible ideas and solutions. With so many ideas being thrown around, it’s crucial that you write each one down—even they seem a little stupid! Trying to sort out bad ideas from good ones during this step can squash creativity.

5. Come up with solutions 

Evaluating each idea will help you zero in on the best solution and weed out the less effective ideas. See if the possible solution actually solves the problem and if you can implement it successfully. If it doesn’t resolve the issue, move on to the next idea.

6. Create an action plan

Now that you have a solution, it’s time to create an action plan outlining steps for implementation. Think about what resources you’ll need, how long it will take and document everything clearly. Once you create the plan, communicate it to the rest of the team so everyone is on the same page.

7. Take action

Now that your plan is created and your team on board, it’s time to implement your solution and resolve the problem. Then, take a step back, look at what worked, what could have been done better and document ideas for the next time.

Dealing with problems in the workplace is a fact of life, yet so many us are conflict-averse. It’s human nature! But learning the CPS process can make a big difference in how both leaders and team members face hurdles and come out stronger on the other side. It takes training to build these skills and that’s where Leah M Joppy and Associates can help. We work with both leaders and team members to learn how to approach problem solving in a fresh, creative way that builds trust, innovation and a new perspective. It’s an investment that pays off in a big way for your organization.  

Ready to learn more? Contact us at 301-670-0051 or email us at leah@lmja.com to learn more.