Sep 2, 2020
Frances Frei is
a Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard
Business School, and her research involves understanding how
leaders create the conditions for organizations and individuals to
thrive. Frances discusses her new book, Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to
Empowering Everyone Around You. She dives into fixing broken cultures by
creating an environment of psychological safety.
Key Takeaways
[3:50] Trust can be lost in
three critical ways: authenticity wobble, logic wobble, or an
empathy wobble.
[5:50] The logic wobble
typically means you have sound logic but you lost the person in
communication somewhere.
[11:40] When it comes to
delegation, it’s on the leader to delegate well and to really
examine where the process can be improved if tasks aren’t being
performed as expected.
[12:35] Take radical
accountability for your team member’s success.
[13:35] To achieve
high-performing teams, they need to have psychological safety. In
this climate, it can be hard to navigate this safety because people
become guarded by another person’s opposite opinion.
[18:55] Cultures really like a
redemption story.
[21:25] It’s on your shoulders,
it’s your obligation, to build trust when there is no
trust.
[25:35] If you want people
within an organization to behave and act differently, you must get
them to think differently.
[29:15] Cultural values can
become weaponized. When this happens, you have to scrap it and
create a new one.
[35:00] When it comes to
diversity and inclusion, Frances wishes those words were reversed.
If you are inclusive of difference, more and more difference is
going to want to come and flourish.
[38:00] We are instinctively
tribal and try to find people who are similar to us. This means if
we can’t think differently, we have to go through our instinctive
nature and put in new processes to help us think
differently.
[41:30] Listener challenge: Seek
a room where you’re the least smart person in that room.
Quotable Quotes
- “If I
can delegate, I will be better off. Now, I have to learn how to
delegate well.”
- “Whether or not you trust me, it’s my
obligation.”
- “Culture can fix good people behaving
badly.”
- “Culture exists in our minds and it manifests
in our behaviors. Culture can change through
education.”
- “It
started as diversity and inclusion, I wish we could reverse those
words. I can bring in diversity, but if I’m not inclusive of it, it
doesn’t make anything better.”
- “I
don’t want to take my difference and learn to be similar. I want to
learn how to be different.”
Resources Mentioned
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