CHALLENGE

How do you make others feel safe to challenge the status quo, innovate and improve things?

1. Remove your finger from the fear button.

Fear triggers the instinct of self-censorship and causes people to retreat into silence and personal risk management. When a leader uses fear, it is usually a punitive response driven by frustration and insecurity. More importantly, it is a renunciation of leadership.

2. Assign disagreement.

If you assign certain members of your team to challenge a particular course of action or find flaws in a proposed decision, you remove much of the individual’s personal risk and change it with institutional permission. This allows intellectual courage to become the norm rather than the exception. Be explicit and tell your team members that you gave them a license to disagree and expect to use it.

3. Encourage others to think beyond their roles.

Inviting your people to venture out of their tactical and functional silos creates more opportunities for divergent thinking, allowing them to connect things that aren’t usually connected. Of course, you must carefully manage the process and discern when constructive disagreement gives way to destructive extinction.

4. Respond constructively to distracting ideas and bad news.

Your positive emotional response to distracting ideas and bad news is a clear signal that you have a high tolerance for honesty and will protect your people in their right to disagree.

5. When you refuse feedback, explain why.

When you decline a team member’s contribution or proposal, explain why you did not adopt it. Your careful response will encourage the individual to continue giving feedback.

6. Measure the last one.

Speaking first, when you hold a position of power, you gently censor your team. Listen carefully, acknowledge the contribution of others, and then express your point of view.

7. Don’t show pride in authorship.

Explain clearly to your team that your ideas are no better than any other. Sometimes team members are too reckless with a leader’s ideas because he or she is the leader. Don’t let that happen and don’t overestimate your own ideas. Approve the critique of your own ideas. Reinforce the fact that just because you are a team leader, you are not giving substantially superior suggestions. In fact, admit that many of your ideas in the past have led nowhere.

8. Model vulnerability.

Remember that vulnerability is an opportunity to expose yourself to damage or loss. If you model and strengthen the pattern of vulnerability, others will do the same.

9. Reward vulnerability.

Remember, the security of the challenger must project the individual and the team to the highest point of personal and interpersonal vulnerability. The security of the challenger is to create and then exploit different perspectives, and even disagreements without escalating emotions and destructive social frictions. If you reward a pattern of vulnerability to cause the status quo, it will become the norm. Use your positional power to follow them through vulnerability, encouraging them.

10. Reward shots on goal.

This means rewarding your team members with recognition and enthusiasm when trying to challenge the status quo. Not all ideas and suggestions will have merit, but if you encourage attempts (shots on goal), those shots will increase and you will be more likely to have some successful challenges (goals) that add value and move the team forward.

11. Make a “break” rule.

As a leader, you must be a role model and impose respect and a cooperative temperament and set of behaviors to make them every day. Maintain a rule of continuity in group discussions. This rule will empower team members with the respect and permission they need to challenge the status quo.

12. Determine what is in range and out of range.

Define what can and should be challenged based on the defined scope of team activities. This will avoid unnecessary frustration that arises when team members are out of range or with irrelevant issues.

13. Create diverse teams.

Assign different people with different perspectives to work together on assigned projects. Different teams possess cognitive diversity and think naturally creating divergent differences. If you don’t have a diverse team, make a list of the demographic and psychographic attributes of your team’s data today. Identify your gaps, and then deliberately shape your selection and recruitment and recruitment strategy to fill in the gaps.

14. Break before failures.

When the interpersonal dynamics begin to break down, take a break immediately. Do not allow social friction and extinguish intellectual friction, which is a destructive force. When a team gets tired, social friction easily increases. Take a break when you see this happen. Refresh the team before you get back together.

15. Identify and avoid defensive routines.

Team members often defend themselves when their ideas are challenged. Teach team members the concept of a defense routine. We do and say these things to avoid potential threats and shame. Get team permission to recognize defense routines from team members as soon as possible. Invite all team members to do the same. This will help the team to learn defensive routines and activate new behaviors that promote greater tolerance for honesty.

16. Look for the bad news.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but looking for bad news is a way to speed up the process of identifying areas for experimentation and innovation. When there is bad news, it allows us to more easily challenge the status quo, because something is already broken or not working properly.

17. Tee-up-the-status-quo issues.

Ask your team a challenge-status quo question at the end of the day and ask them to think about it with the expectation that you will discuss it the next day. This practice helps to establish the norm, pattern, and expectations of the challenging status quo. Have a short meeting the next day and have each person share their thoughts.

18. Praise quantity over quality in the brain.

Brain research clearly shows that the most fruitful approach to the brain is to generate as many ideas as possible, rather than focusing on the qualities of those ideas. In the end, unlimited thinking is a means of finding the best solutions. When dealing with a brain problem, don’t limit or limit the process.

19. Challenge your decisions.

Leaders make decisions that are right today and then wrong tomorrow. In other cases, we simply make the wrong decisions and the point. Openly challenge and discuss some decisions you have made in the past to show that even the right decisions are not the right ones forever. Help your team know that you are ready to visit old decisions, directions, and points of view.

20. Look for R.O.T.

Everything we do eventually becomes obsolete. Every source of competitive advantage we have is temporary. It’s like ice. It’s just a matter of melting speed. Engage your team to look at the way you do things. Identify anything that is redundant, outdated, or trivial (R.O.T.). Sources R.O.T. represents the fruits of the status quo that are needed to be dismantled.

21. Learn a thoughtful strategy in relation to an emergent one.

Deliberate strategy is a formal, long-term strategy that we are all familiar with. But when that deliberate strategy meets reality, it is always wrong. The only question is: how much? On the other hand, an emergency strategy is a process of adjusting your strategy in real-time in the context of a dynamic environment. Conduct a discussion in which you teach these concepts, and then determine where your intentional strategy does not work in the context of current reality.

22. Model the art of disagreement.

Having challenging security means that your team members can discuss their issues and find the best ones, without creating fear and conflict between people. It is your job to teach them how to have miraculous disagreements to create the idea of ​​meritocracy. Master the emotional and interpersonal skill of disagreeing in a warm and friendly way so that others are not offended. Maintain posture with respect, and avoid short, abrupt, and abrasive language and overly aggressive or sarcastic body language. If you continue to practice this skill, your team will develop an incredibly high tolerance for honesty.

23. Share challenging experiences.

You can’t eliminate all the risks associated with the status quo challenge, but you can eliminate most by simply sharing your own successful challenge experience. These are the times when you took risks and challenged the status quo yourself. Identify the best examples from your professional life and share them with your team at the right time.

24. Identify tangible and intangible sources of value.

When we challenge the status quo, it often means we have an idea of ​​how to create more value. Help your team understand that there are two categories of values ​​- tangible and intangible. Tangible value can come in the form of design, comfort, durability, or ease of use. Intangible value can come in the form of prestige, security, or reputation. Encourage your team to challenge the status quo with specific dimensions of values ​​in mind so that they can be more detailed and thorough in their thinking.

25. Identity patterns.

Before we can challenge the status quo with a credible idea or proposal, we need to identify a pattern of cause and effect that we think we can improve.

Teach your team members to deal with pattern recognition. It is their job to collect and analyze data – both hard and soft – to understand the basic patterns. The results are simply the result of a cause-and-effect relationship, but with many variables at work, there are more complexities.

26. Put the hypothesis on the table.

Invite members of your team to present hypotheses. The hypothesis is a proposed explanation of why things are the way they are. When you use the concept of hypothesis, you naturally feel less fear and more objectivity in what you do. You are not so worried that you will make a mistake. You can always say, “Well, that’s a hypothesis. I could be wrong. ” This is a healthy, apolitical way of putting an idea or challenge on the table.

27. Protect your team from group thinking.

When team members start thinking alike, we do it we call groupthink. Groupthink is an obstacle when it comes to creating an environment that can incubate innovation. Team members sometimes become more concerned about fitting into the group’s conventional thinking instead of dealing with the hard work of critical thinking. Get in the habit of asking your team to disagree with you. Say, “I don’t want an echo chamber. Which is another way to think about it. “

28. Scan the environment for adaptive challenges.

Teams and organizations must respond to three types of adaptive challenges:

(1) Opportunities,

(2) Threats,

(3) and crises.

Opportunities offer potential benefits. Threats represent potential damage. Crises offer some damage. This should be the default team setting for scanning the external competitive environment and the internal performance environment for regular adaptive challenges. Once you identify your adaptive challenges, ask the team how you can challenge and prevent yourself from responding to each one.

29. Determine the folding points.

The point of inflection is the point on the curve where the direction changes. It’s a turning point. Teams have a responsibility to identify changing points that may have an impact on what they do. But that’s not all. Each team has a three-step responsibility point:

(1) Identify,

(2) Interpret,

(3) Respond.

Lead your team in the discussion to the question: What is starting to change? What does this mean for us? What should we do about it?

30. Get involved in recombination.

The challenges of quo status are often the natural result of connecting things we don’t usually connect. It is a trial and error process that requires a lot of repetition. For example, who would have thought that chocolate and peanut butter would go together? The process of connecting things over and over again is called recombination. You keep recombining sessions in which you take one thing and try to combine it with many other things so that you don’t usually think of connecting. Try some unusual combinations just to see what happens.

31. Hold a “do nothing” session.

To test the status quo, gather your team and maintain a “no action” scenario in which they think about the consequences of maintaining the status quo instead of changing it. Let them think about the planned and proposed side effects in both the short and long term. This often results in the realization that maintaining the status quo is a greater risk than changing it.

32. Determine the bias of your status quo.

Status quo accessibility is a bias that favors everything that protects the status quo because we believe we are doing things the right and best way. When our bias is strong, we stop looking for ways to make things better. We focus on conservation instead of harassment. We cultivate a “not invented here” mentality. Good enough becomes an acceptable option. As your team, “What would you do if there was no status quo and you started fresh? How would you do that?

33. Come up with stupid questions and messy solutions.

You have heard leaders say, “Don’t approach me with questions. Come to me with solutions. “It’s nonsense. Encourage your team to come to you with unrefined thinking. Mature ideas are not born that way. We need time and we need each other to help us sharpen our issues and potential solutions. Allow your people to put half-thinking in front of you and others. Give room for ad-hoc, casual, anecdotal, and impressionistic. If you expect polished, tested, and priority issues and solutions, be prepared to wait a long time.

34. Respect local knowledge.

When talking to one of your team members, look at them as an expert. Recognize that in their individual role they have access to local knowledge – first-class information that comes to us in context through real experience and relationships.

Respect that local knowledge and be prepared to collect and disseminate it through the team. This increases the speed of information in your team and increases the chances that someone will see an opportunity to challenge the status quo.

35. Bring out the outsiders.

To deliberately rattle and disturb your team, bring in foreign members to present alternative ideas and thoughts. It is one thing to have a difference of opinion in your team, but it is still typical in a narrow range. Attracting strangers can fill your team with energy and fresh thinking. It can blow up your assumptions and raise your eyesight. It can push you beyond what you believe is possible.

36. Follow the sequence of interruption questions.

An effective way to challenge the status quo is to use a series of termination questions. Start with the “why?” Question: Why do we do it this way? Go to the “what if” question: What if we tried this. In the end, finish with the “how?” Question? How could we do that? Model and teach your team members to apply this in a three-question process, which is the primary driver of disruptive and innovative thinking.

Thank you for your time and reading on psychological safety! To make sure your team brings maximum value, bring our team to the table!