People need to feel connected to people. There is no doubt that over the last 3 years, human connection has been threatened in the workplace. While good has certainly come from employees working from home (having a sense of control over their environment) there is a definite lack of connection to their work, their coworkers, and their bosses. Laura Canter shares a bit about the psychology of human behavior and leading people through change. She shares the importance of focusing on individual strengths rather than weaknesses. We've all had change forced upon us over the last three years and today on the Unconventional Leadership podcast we want to talk about how you can weather the changes well!

Find Laura Canter online at: https://canterassociates.com/

Quotes from the Episode:

Covid kind of exacerbated it and let everybody throw their hands up and say, okay, this is what I actually need and want from either my organization or my boss or just life in general.

People don't become teachers or nurses for the big bucks. They don't do it because it's just a job. It really is a calling for them.

We have to manage more. We have to keep up with more.

I need to take a mental health day. People don't laugh at that anymore. They see it as a, wow, you know what? I think I might need to as well.

There's such an, innate protection element that we all want to hold on to what we've always done.

Working from home, it allowed people to maybe set their own schedules a little bit more, have a little bit more of that flexibility again, feeling like they actually had some sort of autonomy within their role.

We have to talk to the individual. We have to understand their individual priorities, motivators, stressors. If you don't take time to do that, this is where you're going to create chaos in a team.

We spend more time in a job than we do with our families. It's completely unrealistic to think that you're not going to have a personal and emotional connection to whatever it is that your occupation is and what you're doing

If you had one negative interaction with someone on your team, you need more positive events to get you back to neutral, you're never going to build that positive relationship with them.

As a leader, when you know your strengths, the way that you manage "the weaknesses" is to go hire people who have incredible strengths in areas that you don't.

Number one, do you even recognize the strengths and the talent of the people on your team first? Second, do you acknowledge and appreciate then how well those strengths and talent can come together?

If a company is actively investing in you and feeding into your interests and the strengths that you have inside of you, you're going to naturally be more engaged.

By putting so much on managers, they don't feel like they have the time to even get to know people. That's the biggest mistake you can take, not genuinely getting to know your individual team members.



Resources:
Mike Sipple Jr. | LinkedIn | Twitter
Laura Canter |