Lead Your Team to Win

Achieve Optimal Performance By Providing A Safe Space For Employees

Maxine Attong

• Publisher: River Grove Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781632990105
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Have you, as head of your team, felt frustrated when team members seem distracted and unable to work because of personal issues? Have you, as a team member, wanted a second opinion for your big idea, but were afraid of being laughed at, or—worse—having your idea stolen? Have you been in a work situation where you felt trust was broken, and you were left with few options for repairing it? These issues stymie productivity and strain relationships in offices around the globe; professional business coach Maxine Attong offers a radical, but proven solution: the office “safe space.” Enter this space—where trust is paramount—and find your way forward, free from the worries of being judged, ridiculed, shamed, or stolen from. A safe space offers: an empathetic leader willing to listen as you share what’s preventing you from focusing on the day’s task; a fellow team member willing to help you hammer out an idea you have for streamlining an office procedure; or a team leader willing to listen to your frustrations over a coworker, yet remaining neutral and sworn to secrecy.
    
Attong developed this “safe space” concept through more than twenty years of work with organizations in the gas and oil, financial, manufacturing, and service industries.  When team members feel safe, Attong believes, they will take risks, make decisions, and put forth their best efforts despite what is happening in their personal lives. A team with all members able to perform at their peak will be a winning team—one that achieves excellence and propels its people forward to even greater victories. This book leads the way to those victories.

What Is a Safe Space?

Imagine that you are in the office, with a pile of work on your desk. Although your head is not there today, you have shown up because you have some pending deadlines. Perhaps your dog died, you had a major fight with a loved one, or a coworker is stressing you out. Try as you might to ignore your personal issues, they just keep popping up, affecting your ability to concentrate and slowing down your pace of work. What would it be like if you could go into a room where you have total support and have a good cry for the dead dog, vent how angry you are at your loved one, or rant about how stressed you are over the coworker’s behavior? When you are done, you leave the room knowing that your behavior was not judged and that anything you said was confidential. You return to your desk and comfortably resume working.

Or suppose you are sitting in a meeting and get this brilliant idea you believe might solve a major problem for the company. You can’t share it in the meeting because you don’t have all the pieces yet, but your gut says you are onto something big. You enter an office and chat with someone who will not steal your idea. This person helps you work out the concept and weigh the options until you’re crystal clear about the way forward. You then write up and present your idea, certain that you’ll get full credit for it.

Or say that you are on your third cup of coffee and you just can’t seem to settle down. You’ve been procrastinating completing a critical task. Success means a huge bonus, and messing up is not an option. Rather than remaining in anxiety mode, you get help identifying the risks and working out mitigation plans. You work past the fear, knowing that even if you fail at the task you will probably learn something new. And you’ll still have the opportunity to try again, to succeed, and to have another shot at that bonus.

The safe space allows each of these and many other scenarios to play out. It’s a place for you to release emotions and get past negative feelings, to shift the issues that bother you so you can pay closer attention to your work. It’s where you create clarity in life’s confusing moments, and park the problems that inhibit your performance. It provides room for you to take risks that lead to rewards.

A safe space is one of no judgment. It is a space where you can cry, curse, and get rid of what’s on your chest. It’s a retreat where you can say that you are overwhelmed and rest for a few minutes before you resume work. It’s a place where you can release the emotional, stressful stuff that wears you down and keeps you stuck.

A safe space is the office Vegas: what happens in the room stays in the room. This is the place to be weak, vulnerable, indolent, petulant, and indulgent, knowing that whatever is said and done happens in a pre-arranged place that won’t haunt you or result in repercussions down the road. You can always leave with your dignity intact.

This is not an advice-giving space or a counseling session. It’s a container for holding negative emotions. It’s a clearinghouse that allows good feelings to emerge and bad feelings to subside. It shifts the balance between what is real and unreal, between fear and courage, between anxieties about the future and needs of the present—to restore equilibrium and inner peace. It is a physical space that allows you some mental space. It’s where you go to clear your mind so you can return to work with greater focus.

The safe space is also for dreaming. Employees imagine how they want the organization to look and feel, and then plot projects to make it happen. It is the space for the impossible to become possible. It is the team’s think tank, the place for risk taking. In here the leader may prompt the team to be ridiculous, to go for big ideas. Though people might come in believing that failure is an option, they will leave with the confidence to try something new, and—if necessary—the permission to fail.

The safe space is designed for exploring organizational issues, challenging the status quo, asking questions, and creating solutions. This is the place for effective planning, fine-tuning details, and making decisions. It is where workers are offered the space to prepare: for the big meeting, difficult presentation, worrisome job interview, or other career-changing moments.

It is a place that supports the team to work at its optimum and removes the obstacles that may hinder progress. The safe space recognizes that between the desired outcome and the current realities are personal and professional debris that need to be cleaned up before the job can be done. Team members are encouraged to drop their burdens, those personal and professional issues that keep them up at night and prevent them from doing their best work.

Usually we can compartmentalize, and keep our work and personal lives separate; but there are times when the walls between the two break down. I used to pride myself on my ability to keep my private life from interfering with my work life. Each morning I locked my apartment door, securing my dreams and hopes behind, and went to work. Privately, I dreamed of being a writer, but I had an accounting career. For a long time, I focused on my job and denied my desire to write. However, one day my need to write became greater than the need for the steady income that accounting provided, and I became resentful of my profession, even though I was well paid and enjoyed a good life. I was no longer proud of my accounting qualifications; my accomplishments seemed fake and false. I could feel the walls between my two lives cracking. My inability to reconcile my personal desire (to write) with the reality of my professional life (as an accountant) left me claustrophobic, and the struggle took a personal toll. On the outside I had a great life; but inside I was in turmoil. I was ill equipped to deal with this internal conflict, and my ability to work was compromised. Yet, I was expected to show up every day and perform.

Looking back, I know now that if I could have found a way to marry my passion for writing with my accounting job, then I could have found a resolution. If I’d had a space that I could have used to clear my head, as well as someone to listen to my story of struggle, I may have gained enough clarity to continue to hold my accounting position and also write. But I didn’t have such a space, and never found such a solution.

I know that many team members are just like I was, trying to balance private ambitions with work demands. And I know how difficult it is to maintain that balance. The safe space encourages team members to reconcile their personal and work lives by bringing their ambitions and dreams to the office. In the space, we learn that there is no need to sever this most sacred part of ourselves—the private dreams—in order to work. Rather, we’re encouraged to use our creativity and intelligence in our work. The safe space allows us to honor all of who we are, every single day.

My office these days is a safe space where coworkers can think, emote, plan, and take risks. When a team member wants my ear, my role is to keep the member feeling safe, limit the distractions, and keep him company while he gets rid of negative feelings, thus creating a vacuum for better feelings to rush in and fill. I am very clear that I cannot and will not act on what is said, unless of course my colleague threatens harm to himself or someone else.

The safe space transforms my office for a few moments into a magical and powerful place. People come into the room to speak about personal and professional successes and failures. They have “aha” moments, question decisions, state fears, shake their heads, laugh, shout, and cry. They learn about themselves, and what makes people tick. It is a place to experience the personal growth that fuels professional development and celebrates both the private and public achievements that are important to each of us. It is a place of discovery and wonder that allows visitors to see life from a different perspective. In the safe space anything can happen and there is nothing to fear.

How does this safe space operate? When a member needs to vent, you let her vent. Do not defend the issue she may be upset about; nor do you want to pacify her. Just observe and say nothing. When a member needs to cry, let him cry; offer a tissue and leave him alone. Maintain physical distance; do not touch him, hug him, or pat his back. It is not your role to soothe or to stop the tears. Let team members rant, laugh, and express how they feel about the issues they are dealing with. I am not a counselor; I do not know the root cause of the emotion, nor do I try to stop the emotion. I let it flow; I am present, attentive, and aware of the members as they express themselves.

I use the safe space as well, and call on my team members to support me. When my CEO rejected a project that I submitted, I shared my feelings with the team. This helped me get over my disappointment and indicated to members that I know how they feel in similar situations. In the safe space we realize that nothing is really too big, that the way we feel is not unique, and that we all struggle with something. The space allows us to support each other’s humanity so we can get on with the important tasks at hand.

CONCLUSION

Once a safe space has been established in an office, and workers have become accustomed to knowing such a non-judgmental space is always available to them, the concept can extend to other areas. This has happened in my workplace: my safe space has extended beyond my office walls. Fellow team members have created safe spaces for each other in their cubicles and in the areas where they sit. They provide space for each other to question, to share doubts, and to vent. The concept has reached beyond a physical space and has become the way we treat each other. We hold this sacred space ready wherever and whenever our team members need it.

The safe space benefits both the team leader and the members. Team members are then able to get on with the work at hand, and the leader is assured that work is getting done.

Why a Safe Space?

Although I have been a manager since age twenty-five, I haven’t always liked it. I thought that being a good manager meant doing all the work, fixing everything that was broken, supporting team members through their personal breakups, divorces, ill kids, marriage, anxieties, etc. Back then, I went home every day juggling all this new and unwanted information about my colleagues. Soon I found that telling people what to do, having to always be right, taking responsibility for other people, taking initiative with limited authority, and fixing other people’s messes were absolutely exhausting.

I was taught that to be a good leader, I needed to be strong, and never appear weak. I needed to be even-tempered and rational, giving an excellent performance regardless of my personal problems. Unfortunately, maintaining this demeanor is difficult for me. It is hard for me to pretend that I am not upset, mad, disappointed, shocked, or hurt. I simply cannot accept the notion that I can automatically function at the top of my game at all times.

I wanted a leadership style that would work with my personality and still allow me to have a winning team. I knew that creating a safe space in my office was essential to achieving this since it would:

• Get people to work creatively and generate ideas and new solutions.
• Develop an incredible team with outstanding performance that ensured me, as the leader, promotions and wins. (My assumption is that each time a team member wins, the leader automatically gets one or two wins.) To achieve wins, team members must have big ideas and the guts to implement them. They need to fail and believe that while there’s a cost to failure, there’s no personal loss; and they can certainly try again. To win, the team needs to work together, think strategically about their actions, and always weigh consequences. The safe space provides a cocoon in which ideas are hatched, nurtured, and grown before being released to a wider audience for scrutiny.
• Provide a stable environment in which everyone can perform, even on the days when nothing seems to go right.
• Allow team members to bring to work the adult parts of themselves that they often park at the office door and retrieve when they leave the office. This safe space gives them permission to be the responsible, accountable, decision-making, trying-to-be the-best-they-could-be people they are outside of the office. These people make tough decisions every day about household budgets, their children’s future, and aging parents. They fail and keep going, juggling different balls to keep their lives and those of their loved ones on an even keel.
• Permit team members to think, and in so doing challenge me to think more. They need to ask questions so I can explain and become clearer, and thus we can all generate even more great ideas and make better decisions.
• Motivate the team so people feel good about what they are doing, and work well because of these positive feelings. When the team members feel safe, they’ll take risks that will bring rewards, and will accept challenges to grow professionally and personally.
• Keep my big ego in check, ensuring that my natural tendencies to be a benevolent autocrat don’t overtake my humanity. This keeps me honest and responsible for the things I do and say at the office. It also gives me the freedom to change my mind and not be seen as indecisive, and releases me from the burden of feeling I always have to be right.
• Satisfy my curiosity about leadership and the many strategies I’ve read about. I wanted to create an alternative style that would work with my personality and allow me to remain true to myself. I wanted to present an alternate and realistic tool that people like me could easily implement with their teams.

The safe space provides a dynamic and creative environment for the free exchange of ideas, and encourages team members to make decisions and take action. While it promotes team accountability, it does not release the leader from the ultimate responsibility for making the final decisions. The idea promotes a shared team consciousness about the reality of the bigger political landscape within which the team operates, and dissuades any pretensions of naïvety about how the organization and various stakeholders need to be maneuvered. Thus, it provides a reality check for the team and its members.

The safe space means that I do not have to coddle or barter for good performance. I do not have to instruct the team to subscribe to some abstract premise, nor do I have to make any promises that I may not live up to. The safe space works because ultimately the team and I want the same thing—to win.

Early in my career, before I had fully developed the concept, I was selected as manager to replace the newly appointed finance director. My predecessor had close but messy personal relationships with the finance team members. Suddenly, I found myself in the middle of this chaos and had to be the buffer between the director and the team members. I translated her messages and demands into palatable requests until she believed that I “got them to work” and that I “had the patience to hold their hands.” The team members also communicated messages to her through me, for approvals or any special requests that only she could grant. After three years in this position, I was burned out. I loved my job, made some important changes, and was proud of my achievements. But after gaining the trust of the director and the team, while working long hours managing both parties and being solely responsible for all the decision making, I wanted out and resigned.

After that experience, I did not want any more leadership responsibility. I spent the next ten years doing contract and short-term jobs, enjoying the easy life of a contract worker—driven by deadlines and objectives. There was no one to worry about, no need to build relationships. I could just move from job to job and do the work. Or so I thought.

I was the project manager for the transfer of data from one IT platform to another. The project sponsor had set some tight deadlines and was at loggerheads with the project manager about the next steps. The project team was caught up in the maelstrom of the pair. The project was behind schedule, and the team felt that failure was imminent and nothing could stop the wreckage. I worked with the team to reset targets and deadlines, and persuaded the sponsor to create some performance incentives while I negotiated some wins for both sponsor and manager. At the end of the project, I was asked to consider taking on a more permanent position, but I declined. I had become way too involved in managerial issues and shunned the responsibility.

Project assignments provided me with lots of opportunities to observe. I worked at thriving companies that have been around for decades, and had healthy profit margins. Wherever I worked, I noticed there was an ongoing conflict that derived from an “us vs. them” attitude. It could be team members vs. team members, leaders vs. team members, leader vs. leader, manager vs. manager, but the result was the same: it prevented people from getting the job done. I also realized that because everyone wanted to be right, no one could take the chance of being wrong. There was a palpable fear of failure that delayed decision making and paralyzed teams, preventing them from taking action, while leaders initiated only those projects within their expertise to ensure success.

Save for a few companies, there was a dearth of leadership, as most leaders seemed just as bewildered as the team members. Enough work was getting done to keep the wheels turning and the trains on the track, but with very little innovation. Leaders were delegating work and covering their backs when things went wrong, and members were playing it safe by doing as their leaders said and nothing more.

When my colleague Beatrice was promoted to finance director, she worked as if she was on her own. Without the support of her team, she initiated and implemented proj...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. What Is a Safe Space
• 2. Why a Safe Space
• 3. How It Works
• 4. Make the Choice
• 5. The Concept of Caring
• 6. Setting Up the Space
• 7. Keeping the Space Safe
• 8. Trust
• 9. Honesty
• 10. Challenge the Team
• 11. Decision Making
• 12. Issues Are the Problems
• 13. It Is What it Is
• 14. Check in Regularly
• 15. The Safe Space Can Backfire
• 16. Different Strokes
• 17. What’s in It for Me?
• 18. Leader’s Rights and Expectations
• 19. Change Management
• 20. Culture
• 21. Final Thoughts
• About the Author