Team Motivation and Trust: Know Your ABCs with Paula Davis
In this episode, we explore the art of building trust within your team and unlocking an insider's guide to drive motivation, boost resilience, and beat burnout. Discover how mastering the ABC building blocks of motivation can help you and your team push past obstacles to reach success.
In This Episode, You Will Learn About:
Mastering the ABC building blocks of motivation
Building trust within teams
Strengthening self and team resilience
FREE Career Accelerator Workbook: https://bit.ly/3xXy8U
Build Your Personal Brand Workbook: https://chelliephillips.com/buildmybrand
Want to work with Danielle? Schedule your call today: https://bit.ly/3OnuLLO
Let's Connect!
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MsDanielleCobo
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedaniellecobo/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DanielleCobo
Website: www.DanielleCobo.com
Book Recommendations: https://www.amazon.com/shop/influencer-de49157c/list/2W8I8NWS6N4CJ
About our guest:
Today's guest is Paula Davis founder of the stress and resilience institute and author of Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being and Resilience. A former lawyer, she studied applied positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts
"Danielle is so Uplifting." <-- If that sounds like you, please consider rating and reviewing my show! This helps me support more women -- just like you -- accelerate their careers. Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then be sure to let me know what you loved most about the episode!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dream-job-with-danielle-cobo/id1571797640
Also, if you haven’t done so already, follow the podcast. I’m adding a bunch of special release episodes and, if you’re not following, there’s a chance you may miss out. Follow now!
Key Factor of Resilience: Psychological Safety and Needs
As a military community, we know that they are often put in very high stake situations that some of us can't even comprehend what they're in because it's very difficult to see. Not only the aftermath of war, being in a war, seeing how it affects the people, the civilians that are affected by the war as well.
These soldiers are put in these very highly stressful situations and they're still expected to work as a team to be successful in executing their missions. What have you found to be the key factor that fosters resilience among some of the teams? I'd like to know what are the breakdowns and then how you foster them.
That was a big part of what I wanted to research for my book. I wanted to take a very like teams and resilience angle to a lot of what I talked about in my book. And I just dove into the research and I looked at my research and my own experience, just working with all sorts of populations. There was a framework that emerged and different pathways that emerged that I codified into what I call a primed model.
The acronym primed stands for one each letter standing for an element of the pathway. The foundation of building resilient teams starts with the letter "P". And so it's two things: it's psychological safety or trust. I'm sure you know this as a military spouse, and I certainly saw this in my work with the military and continue to, like, that's a key element. There is an extraordinary amount of trust that gets developed within military teams because when you're talking about operations at that level, you can't have it. I mean, you have to be able to rely on your brothers and sisters in arms to be there in all sorts of situations. That trust piece is critical across all professions.
The other "P" is psychological needs, which is such a research-based term. I use it for purposes of my acronym work. But I also call them your A, B, and C needs, the sense that we all need a sense of autonomy for flexibility and control with our work and what we do. We need a sense of belonging. We have to very critically feel like we’re part of a team that matters to me. I have leader support. People have my back and I feel cared about. This is interesting I think, because people might not think about that so much with the military. After all, you're thinking about drill sergeants and people with intense personalities, but it is a very important core piece as you know.
The C is competence or mastery. I wanna continue to get better at goals that matter to me. Those two things are not just nice to have, but they're foundational. They're very critical to orienting a team in a resilient way, in a thriving way, in a well-being way, and what have you, so those two pieces are ultra important.
I've seen when organizations have maybe lacked the training and development for their employees, and I can see what you're saying about a lack of belonging. Because when organizations, I've seen on the flip side, when organizations invest in their people, they invest in the training and development and up-leveling their skills, it brings in this sense of belonging, it brings in this sense that the organization cares about me.
Future of my success within the organization. It helps foster a positive team culture. So I agree with you a hundred percent, that when organizations provide that caring element and say, we're gonna be investing in you and the future of your success, it boosts morale and it boosts employee retention as well.
I guess if you know people, no one's asked me this specifically, but if you could, if somebody asked me if you could boil down if you could solve the burnout problem, and if you could increase the resilience of teams and you could do it quickly and you could do it with one thing, what would you say is the most important thing?
And to me, my off-the-cuff response would be, because I hear this so frequently in various ways would be to make people feel like they belong, to help people feel like they belong in their organizations and on their teams. Because the results are as you suggest, and when people feel seen, not the, like the gift certificate, gold watch type recognition, which I'm not saying we get rid of, but when you make them feel like they matter, when you make them feel like they are seen for their contributions and who they are and what they do and their skillsets and their capabilities, there's a whole host of positive results that come from it.
There's even a new study in the legal profession showing that when lawyers feel like they are valued for their humanity, for what they bring to the table in terms of their skillset, they're far less likely to say, "I'm thinking of leaving the profession because I'm stressed and because I'm burned out and because I don't like it around here."
There's a very tangible, real-world consequences to a lot of these elements, but particularly that one, right now, I think we're having a really hard time with it. Many companies are trying to navigate a hybrid model of work with various levels of success, mostly not so successful. And that's a big piece of the puzzle right now, is how do we foster the sense of community and belonging and recognition and appreciation, when people aren't physically present.
How to Deal with Generational Differences in the Organization
These younger generations where they're doing a lot of research on the new and emerging generations that are coming with Gen Z, and they're saying specifically that these individuals, this generation are looking for organizations that have a sense of purpose, community, and involvement in the community, so very different.
Each generation kind of depends on its upbringing, depending on what events have taken place in each generation have different kinds of motivators within the workplace, but specifically, Gen Z is looking at what I want a sense of purpose in my work. I wanna choose a company that has a sense of purpose and in contributing to the community overall a whole. And that's becoming more and more apparent right now.
I'm seeing the organizations that take a step back and look at how can we incorporate everybody within the organization. It is very much kind of against the thread, which before it was, here's upper management we're gonna tell you, guys, what we're gonna do. This is the way we're gonna do our business. This is how we're gonna execute things. However, the organizations I've seen be most successful are the ones that create advisory boards, and inclusive of everybody from the top level executives to middle management. To even down to some of the newest members on the team because they come from this curiosity approach and ask questions that sometimes when we get stuck, this is what we've always done. It creates conversation and it's including everybody within the organization, and that helps build belonging and trust, and purpose as part of the organization.
There's so much to say with what you just said, and in part, it's almost thinking about it as a reverse mentoring sort of situation where we intuitively tend to think that people who have senior levels of experience have a lot to offer in terms of teaching people who might be newer to the company or newer to their careers. That is a lot of information, and that's certainly true.
What we forget though, is exactly what you said, that people who are fresh to a team, are fresh to an organization, are fresh to their career even, they're looking at the world in a little bit of a different way, and they're looking at it with more of that curiosity mindset, and they're asking questions like, "Well, why do we do it that way? Have you ever thought about this?" Or, "I read somewhere over here that maybe this is something that we should consider." That's one of the hallmarks too, of a psychologically safe environment, are you allow for those conversations to take place and to take and to happen. Then you don't shut them down by your reaction or by only listening to the two people who report directly to you or what have you. You value people's opinions at all levels of the end stages of their careers.
When you talk about generational differences, I tend to think about those as work values. We have different work values depending on kind of how we were raised and how we came through the workplace system. You have baby boomers who were raised in a very specific way, and a lot of them when I'm talking about recognition and belonging and things like that, they sort of say, "Why do I need to thank you? Your paycheck is thanks enough. I didn't get a lot of praise coming through the system, so why are you telling me I gotta like, hand it down all the time? It feels soft. I don't see the need for." There's a very big disconnect there, and we can start to label the generations in ways that aren't productive.
Gen Z and younger millennials, they're just these needy young people who need to have feedback on their handheld all the time and things like that. And it was because they were raised differently and they have had a phone in their hand since they were 10, and they've given feedback. They're the ones writing a lot of the reviews that we see online for all sorts of things. They're just used to giving feedback about things and they expect feedback in return.
When you take a step back and you ask, Is that a bad thing? Is it a bad thing that they're asking to be given a sense of how they're doing? Is it a bad thing to be asked to be recognized in a way that makes them feel like they're cared for? And that creates this sense of belonging. The answers are resounding, "No", I mean, I think there are different pieces about every generation that you could probably hang your hat on or argue with.
But we have to get out of that mentality of thinking like, the way that we did it is the only way that we can do it. Or the way that I was raised in my world of work is the only way, and now they have to suffer and struggle or whatever we're thinking, go through the same exercise to get where I'm at. And the answer is, that's completely wrong. Not only that, I just think it's a lazy way to think and a lazy way to lead. There's a lot for us to dig into and I think about those intersections, but those are some big, I mean, you opened up a lot of really great stuff there with those comments.
Well, and to add two of the points that you just brought up, one of them being that we can learn a lot from the newer members that are part of our organization, and I also wanna add to that different industries. Because often I see recruiters or hiring managers saying, you need X amount of years of industry experience. And as a hiring manager myself, I often found that I liked hiring people from different industries because there are different ways that they approach their business that we get to learn from.
If we only stick with you needing X number of years of industry experience, then you really don't get to see how other organizations or industries go through their processes. How they will organize the way that they approach the business. How they react to different approaches of business. I see that all the time with recruiters and it kind of does light my fire a little bit. You're preventing innovation in that way. I want everybody, I wanna build a team with different perspectives and different industry experiences, and different values and strengths.
Motivators in the Workplace
In addition to that, when you were talking about, motivators, work motivators. I know that a lot of times the millennials were pegged as lazy. And I understand, but when did we take a step back? Because you're also talking about how was each generation raised, and millennials, at least some of the older millennials, entered the workplace during the 2008 market crash. Here it was, you're graduating college, congratulations! Oh, by the way, we're going through a recession. There are no jobs. And yet millennials were being pegged as lazy because they were living at home, instead of taking a step back and saying, "Well, wait a minute, look at the situation that they were brought into." And I always say, ultimately, I'm responsible for the upbringing of my kids, so however they turn out is a reflection of my parenting.
Leaders have to adopt that mindset and that mentality. You bring up such a great point, and I think that now that we're, what, 10, 15 years beyond the crash, that was a really profoundly horrible event, particularly for people coming out of school. I think people forget that there just really wasn't a lot to grasp in terms of job opportunities and work. Everyone just went inward, like we gotta protect what we're gonna protect because the world just completely shifted, especially financially. And we don't know what we don't know and this is bad and so we've gotta go into protection mode. We're gonna lay off or we're gonna clamp down, or we're not gonna hire. That shapes you when you go through an experience like that. It makes you think and rethink what you want from your world of work, what you expect from your world of work, and what you're willing to do for your world of work.
And then you get to the pandemic, where you've seen a lot of people just go through that same series of questions again and you can see them. Is this really what I wanna do for the next 15 years? Not so much. I'm showing up and they think I'm a cog in the wheel is, that's not fun, there's no meaning in that. We're not collaborating and we're not sparking innovation and we're not doing all of these great things that motivate us. What else could I do? It reminds me of how I started to think toward the end of my law practice and we have to take, and we have to take those big events seriously.
The Sense of Self-Efficacy
I believe that the resilience of starting my career through the market crash taught me how to be a saver, and how to prepare myself for the future. Because here I saw my parents, my grandparents, losing their retirement almost overnight. And I also lived in California, I was part of that mortgage industry where all my friends were making all of a sudden this money, and then just like in a snap, they had no job. They weren't savers. I believe that experience actually is what taught me resilience.
And then fast forward to the pandemic when I started a business. I started a business during the pandemic when companies were laying off employees. I do believe that instead of pegging some of these generations into these segments, let's look at the positive that came out of it, very much resilience that's been brought through these situations.
A hundred percent. And resilience is not just about bouncing back, it's also about bouncing forward. It's taking the lessons that you learned going through a challenge and obstacle, a change in adversity, a problem, a stressor, a failure, a setback, whatever word you wanna put to it, and applying those lessons to future events going forward.
One of my favorite concepts associated with resilience is called self-efficacy. That sense of, I know you have young kids and I have a six and-a-half-year-old, the little engine that could as a popular kid's book, at least it was when I was growing up, and the little engine always said, "I think I can, I think I can". When you can activate that mindset of "I think I can, I think I can," even if it's tough times, even if there's adversity. I can see that I'll lean on something like I have a network, or I have internal capabilities or a thinking style that's gonna help me get through difficult things that activates so much power in terms of increasing our resilience and increasing our motivation and our perseverance and our ability to just stick things out when we need to be able to stick things out.
That sounds to me like going through those tough times taught you some lessons that you could apply and made you feel like, this might be kind of a crazy time to start a business, but there's something about me that knows that I can do it and so I'm gonna try it. It might not work, but that's okay. I'll pivot, and then we'll figure it out. But I'm gonna put a stake in the ground and try this thing out a little bit. I think it's fascinating.
And that's exactly how it was. I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna go for it. If it works out, awesome. If it doesn't, then it's a matter of pivoting. I can always fall back on anything else that I had done, and that's true. It's the challenges that you overcome in life that help prepare you for that next step if you've been through X, Y, Z, okay, well it's preparing you for the next.
I wanna shift a little bit on the words, cause I love that book, that little engine that could, I absolutely remember reading that as a child. But now shifting it just a little bit and saying, "I know I can, I know I can. I know I can. I know I can." Because it's very powerful when you sit there and you say, at night. I tell my kids, we do it together, we do affirmations and we say, I'm smart. I'm kind, I'm caring. I can accomplish anything I put my mind to, and now going into it, I know I can do this."
The “I Know I Can” Mindset
That's a really powerful, distinction in the language. Because you're right, I mean, "I think I can," think gets us to a certain level in terms of a confidence mindset. But "I know I can," is what I hear to be a much more powerful version of that. It takes some time though for us to be able to get to the "I know I can" point.
Anytime that we're trying something new or trying something that feels scary or might feel outside of our comfort zone, I think we're always gonna have, you know, some sort of mindset of. "Gosh, is this gonna work? Am I good enough?" And being able to harness and manage some of those counterproductive thinking styles, which is also very central to resilience helps in being able to get to the point where you can finally say, "I know I can."
It's amazing, and I think really hard step or mindset to be able to get. Once you get there, it's just sort of like the sky's the limit. You're not gonna stop me.
I almost feel has a little bit of self-doubt in it. If I think even if it's 80% confidence and 20% self-doubt, I still believe it's there. But sewing saying it, "I know I can." And even if you don't believe it just yet, there are studies and research that show when you start to tell yourself positive affirmations, you start to believe it in itself. And as I said, If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. But you can at least, you can lay your head down at night and say, I tried. I at least tried and I learned from it.
I'll talk a little bit about my story and people wanna know like, how, how did you go from that to this? ]There's always a moment in those journeys where you think to yourself like, should I leap? Can I leap? Why am I thinking of this crazy next step potentially?
But then you into it and you get further down your journey and then you start to reflect and you start to look back. And I think to myself, like, you know, I could have gone back to the law firm that I worked at, they loved me there and I did well. It would've been the easier and safer choice. For a whole host of reasons, I just decided to go in the opposite direction. I think about the people who wouldn't have come into my life and the experiences that I wouldn't have had with the Army soldiers and beyond that.
It profoundly influenced and changed me and how I even decided to approach my business going forward. A big part of what I learned from the Army soldiers is the power of vulnerability and the courage to say, here is something difficult that I went through. Weirdly, the military people are the ones who taught me the most about vulnerability. But at the end of the day, they've been through so much and when they shared their stories, it made me feel like I could share my story because I never talked about my burnout story at all up until that point. Because I didn't feel comfortable doing that, and that switched a light on for me.
When you're at the beginning of it to see, you can't see all of those things. And I think Steve Jobs mentioned this, he has a famous graduation speech, a college graduation speech that he gave, I think it was back in 2005 or so, but he always says you can't connect the dots looking forward. It's only when you down the road and you reflect that you can connect the dots and start to see why I did this, and this is what was meant to be. Knowing that there will be these things coming down the road, it's hard to imagine that when you're starting something new or tough or outside of your comfort zone, they're the greatest rewards, once you get there.
