Editor’s note: This article was first published on April 14th, 2020, just a few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic. While the context may have changed, your plays as a leader are still the same. In these uncertain times, you are likely facing new challenges as a leader. From working from home to school closures and outright community lockdowns – everyone has been dealing with significant, unexpected change over the past few weeks. These changes have impacted us all – changing the way we communicate, work together, and accomplish our goals. During these tough times what we have noticed is people’s desire to help others. The feeling that we will come through this together is a rallying cry that gives heart to many. But as leaders, as coaches, what does this mean? How do you help your people during times like this? It’s a question many are struggling with.

It’s all about the relationship

When people go through difficult times together, they can emerge more connected – but only if they’re conscious about it. Difficult times can also lead to fracture. As a leader, it’s your job to step back and really think about how you are building and deepening relationships with your people in this new environment. Take the time to check in with your people and listen to them. Take some time to step back and see what you’re going through as impartial observers and acknowledge that it’s hard. These are unprecedented times and the effort you make to stay connected with your people can make a huge difference. Coach Roy Rana of the Sacramento Kings spoke with us about how building relationships is intentional. There is an intention to communicate, to make the person feel connected, to ensure they know they have your attention. He talks about the little things that he does to accomplish this. In the video below, he lays out the wonderful challenge he sets for himself of “30 seconds every day for every player”:

Rana’s Strategies are for basketball – not your environment. So what would work for you? What are the little ways you can connect with your people to communicate that you are thinking of them and you care?

The game has changed

By now, every workplace has been impacted by COVID-19. The game has changed, and clarity needs to be re-established. Your team needs new skills and mindsets so that you can get through this together.

“We can’t go back, only forward.”

Ask yourself what your team needs for their new playbook. Do your people know what the work expectations are today? Timelines are different. Things change quickly so clarity is always evolving. Think short term and help them find focus. Do they know what other people need from them? Are they aware of how your goals have shifted? Especially if your team is working differently than they’re used to, over-communication is impossible when it comes to these things. Your team also needs clarity on what your organization’s values look like in this reality. Not just the vague, nice-sounding words – what they actually look like. If you value safety, how are you acting on that value? If you value team, how are you making sure that no one’s feeling isolated? Get together as a team to discuss your values and think through how you’re living up to them at this time. Through all of this, recognize that as a coach you need to meet your people where they’re at. Some team members might be juggling kids and other family constraints. They may even be caring for someone who is sick. Give them real clarity on how your team can work well together in a way that’s not going to make anyone feel criticized, judged or guilty. Have empathy for what they’re going through and use humour to help people feel at ease. Some team members (and perhaps even you) may be thinking they just need to hold on for a little bit longer until things get back to normal. That thinking will not serve them or the organization well. When companies face disruption, the ones who try to ignore it or find a way to hang on to their old ways of doing things don’t fare well – think Blockbuster. We can’t go back, only forward.

New plays for a new game

When the game changes, you can’t expect to get the same results from the same behaviours. As a coach, your goal is to help your people succeed in their new reality – and this means helping them get up to speed on the skills that will support the new expectations as well as discouraging the old behaviours that are no longer productive. This is all about consistent feedback and communication, and feedback is a challenge when you can’t see what people are doing. For the coachee, the lack of visibility can lead to frustration and unnecessary roadblocks that can harm engagement. Make a habit of checking in frequently with each team member to support their development. This isn’t about micromanaging or checking up on them; it’s about making sure they’re not sitting alone frustrated because something’s blocking their progress. If that sounds like a big job, that’s because it is. Coach Rana told us about how making time for each and every team member is a challenge even as a professional coach. And he offered this advice for keeping the connection alive even when it feels like you’re too busy.

Out of sight, not out of mind

If what I’m doing can’t be seen, how do I know if it’s valued or appreciated? This is one of the challenges your people are facing as they transition to a new reality. People need to know that what they do has value, so giving appropriate recognition is more important now than ever. This doesn’t mean handing out awards and prizes. It’s about looking for the bright spots – things that are going well, little wins, positive behaviours – and acknowledging them. You might recognize a team member who creates a shared space for everyone to connect, or someone who volunteers to take on a task for another team member they see struggling. It’s also vital to recognize that people need to feel connected and not isolated. Make every conversation a coaching one. Even simple questions like “how are things going today” have value for a coach. As you explore the answer, you can uncover the information you need to find possibilities and build commitment to a solution. When people are worried, anxious or afraid they’re harder on themselves than ever. Having the coach remind them of who they are at their best brings tremendous energy.

Be ready for the human element

Behind all this is a real humanitarian challenge. As time goes on, the people on your team may become sick, need time off to care for loved ones, or worse. Loss is going to look very different for different people – it can be loss of a loved one, income, or something else. As a coach you have a role to play in supporting your team members as they recover from whatever their loss may be. The temptation is to think that when someone is in pain over their loss that bringing it up will cause undue pain by reminding them of it. Just keep to your work and ignore it. And that’s like the monster under the bed for a little kid. As long as the kid believes there’s a monster under the bed it gets bigger and bigger. The longer it goes, the bigger it gets.

“When loss isn’t acknowledged, it feels like it’s been dismissed.”

This is true on both sides of the relationship. In Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, she talks about how the hardest part of going back to work after losing her husband was the silence. When loss isn’t acknowledged, it feels like it’s been dismissed. And a significant loss being dismissed feels really bad. You don’t need to be a counsellor or have all the answers, and there’s no secret formula for how to deal with these times. Your job as a coach is to bring things to the surface and give people permission to talk about it if and when they want.

Help people get better at whatever it is they do

We often define a coach’s core job as this: help people get better at whatever it is they do. We call this developmental bias, the idea that a coach is always biased toward developing their people no matter what the circumstance. As the “whatever it is they do” continues to change and evolve over the coming months, and probably years, you have an opportunity to help your people stay engaged and rise to the occasion. By maintaining and building relationships, building clarity around what’s expected, building competence in new ways of working, and recognizing the all of what is happening, you can show your people that you’re on their side and help your entire team emerge stronger for it. Resilience – the ability to grow through pressure, recover and respond in the face of setbacks, and perform under pressure – is a skill learned in the troughs, not the peaks. As a result of COVID-19, employees and managers are facing changes in pretty much every aspect of their work – what they need to do, how it needs to get done, where they need to do it from – and also facing the spectre of potentially significant impacts to compensation and results. There hasn’t been a time since 2008 in which resilience is more necessary or more top-of-mind.

Further reading: COVID-19: Ways Forward for Learning & Development

In the face of this tremendous uncertainty and need for resilience, we’ve developed a 60 minute, interactive, virtual, instructor-led session that will equip participants with an understanding of how uncertainty and pressure impact their performance and health, an awareness of the choices they have to enhance their resilience under pressure, and a guided, applied exercise that will specifically tackle how they are framing and taking direct action on the areas that will most impact their performance and resilience over the coming few months. Participants will leave with a better understanding of what they can control, what they need to let go of, and how they can approach the current and coming uncertainty in a way that maximizes their resilience. As an organization, providing your people with the skills to navigate this period will build engagement and signal a strong commitment to their growth, development and well-being. The coming few months may not be enjoyable, but with the right tools everyone can emerge with the satisfaction of knowing that they were up to the challenge and high levels of engagement with their job and organization. About the presenter:

Dane Jensen is the CEO of Third Factor and an expert on strategy, leadership, and resilience under pressure. Dane oversees Third Factor’s delivery of leadership development programs to leading firms across North America including SAP, TD, RBC, Uber, Twitter, the USGA, and others. He teaches in the Full-Time and Executive MBAs at Queen’s Smith School of Business in Canada and is Affiliate Faculty with UNC Executive Education at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. In addition to his corporate work, Dane works extensively with athletes, coaches, leaders and Boards across Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic sport system to enhance National competitiveness. He has worked as an advisor to Senior Executives in 23 countries on 6 continents, and his first book, tentatively entitled The Power of Pressure, will be published by HarperCollins in early 2021.

Our Building Resilience program opens by teeing up the ancient curse “may you live in interesting times.” These are interesting times indeed. The COVID-19 outbreak is the third time this century that we have collectively dealt with significant disruption and uncertainty – following the terror attacks on September 11th, and the great recession of 2008-09. The COVID-19 situation is particularly challenging for those of us in learning & development, whose work often centers on bringing groups of people together. Prohibition of non-essential travel and meetings, policies requiring self-isolation before returning to work, and even wide-scale office closures, such as those happening at major U.S. tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter, create significant challenges to ‘business as usual’ when it comes to learning. At the same time – periods of uncertainty and change are precisely the times at which learning is most vital. And, as anyone in adult education knows – relevance is critical to adult learners. When the need is real and present, adult learners are most open to learning new skills. Right now people are in acute need of skills to both handle the pressure they are facing and adjust to new ways of working.

“L&D teams can provide unique value and directly influence how the organization weathers the storm”

Connecting pressure to personal growth is vital for resilience over the long haul. If, as a leader, I feel like the pressure is just a weight on my shoulders that I must endure, it will have a significantly more negative impact than if I see how rising to this challenge can help me become stronger and better. Growth gives meaning to pressure – and our ability to help people see this tough period as a growth experience is a significant imperative for maintaining engagement at work.

Growth gives meaning to pressure.

Taken together, this makes the coming months a time when L&D teams can provide unique value and directly influence how the organization weathers the storm. The coming months will undoubtedly be a period of great pressure – but how heavy that pressure sits, and how skillfully it is navigated, is within L&D’s circle of influence. By rising to meet this challenge, learning and development organizations can support their risk management teams, build esteem for the department among senior executives, show the ability of the department to deliver in critical moments, directly influence performance outcomes, and directly support an entire workforce through an extremely challenging time. So, how can L&D navigate the choppy waters of risk mitigation policies while seizing the moment to step up and shine? We see three major imperatives:

1. Demonstrate agility + resilience – leverage technology to continue “regularly scheduled programing”

Personal growth and development is a major driver of satisfaction and engagement in the workplace. When other drivers of satisfaction and engagement are compromised, continuing to invest in learning is vital. And, as learning organizations – we want to model the behaviours we are asking leaders to engage in: resilience, adaptability and flexibility. If we are asking others in the organization to continue to do their jobs in the face of disruption – it’s up to us to do the same.

“Think deliberately about a learning journey that is designed to sustain energy and support application”

Depending on the measures in place in your organization, this may include continuing to run in-person programming in small-medium sized groups – perhaps modified to focus on local attendees. In many cases, however, policies will necessitate the conversion of regularly scheduled programming into virtual delivery. Speaking from the perspective of an organization focused entirely on the development of leadership, collaboration and resilience skills – there are two imperatives we see to getting this right:

Think Fortnite, not Netflix

There is a reason in-person, instructor-led training continues to deliver the best learning outcomes: it gives people a chance to engage directly with an expert, to learn from peers, and to debate, dialogue and practice. In short, it’s a participative experience. While it is tempting to replace in-person programming with self-paced programs and video libraries – think Netflix – when it comes to executive function skills like coaching, collaboration, and resilience, getting strong learning outcomes requires collaboration. This is the ‘Fortnite’ model: we’re in this together, working alongside each other, in constant communication, and working towards a common goal.

Think Fortnite, not Netflix – virtual learning should be interactive and participative.

Divide and conquer

With dates already reserved on learners’ calendars, it can seem logistically easy to replace a 1-day in-person program with a 1-day virtual session. Even the most expertly designed and facilitated virtual sessions begin to lose their energy, however, after the two-hour mark. Instead, take advantage of the luxury of dividing learning up into more manageable modules. Freed from the requirements of a group of 25-30 learners traveling to one location for a short period of time, virtual sessions give you the opportunity to think deliberately about a learning journey that is designed to sustain energy and support application. The best designs involve modules that don’t require prolonged periods of attention, include interactivity and discussions that invite participation and reduce the temptation of distraction, and close with a clearly actionable outcome that learners can practice prior to the next module (i.e. an action learning-oriented approach). Virtual instructor-led technology has come a long way in even the past 12 months. In the face of COVID-19 we’ve been working directly with many of our clients to use a technology stack focused on interactivity and collaboration to ‘convert’ their in-person experience into virtual ones – complete with breakout rooms, lively discussion, whiteboard sessions and polling. Take advantage of new technology to demonstrate resourcefulness.

2. Build resilience in all corners of your organization

Ultimately, resilience is built in the troughs, not the peaks. And, not only is this a time in which resilience skills are vital – it’s also the perfect time to support your people in building resilience. In my forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Power of Pressure, I argue that the two key factors that ramp up pressure are importance (“this matters to me”) and uncertainty (“I don’t know how this will turn out”). The threat posed by COVID-19 delivers an unhealthy dose of both these ingredients.

Changing policies and sparsely populated offices are just two sources of uncertainty.

In the face of this pressure, learning and development teams have an opportunity to show that the organization cares not just about physical safety but also about people’s psychological wellbeing, and stands ready to help them learn the skills they need to not just survive but thrive through this period. There are two key imperatives here:

Support physical resilience

Employee wellness programs have never been more important than they are right now. Sleep, nutrition and exercise are the basis of not just a healthy immune system but also a resilient individual. Now is the time to promote awareness of the programs available to your teams.

Build inner resilience

Resilience isn’t a genetic gift – it’s a set of skills that can be learned and mastered. Often we assume that resilience will be built naturally as a by-product of tough times – but just like an athlete needs a good coach to reap the developmental benefits of sport, so too do individuals need support in learning how to channel pressure into growth.

“In times of challenge, what’s often most challenging is that the old pressure doesn’t go away”

In our Building Resilience program, we do this by giving participants an understanding of how uncertainty and pressure impact their performance and health, and then grow their awareness of the choices they have and skills they can use to enhance their resilience under pressure. I led a 90-minute virtual session on resilience for leaders at a major cruise line last week. As you can imagine, the pressure they are facing is immense. In our opening exercise, I asked them to identify the things that make this “interesting times” for them. Here is a random sample of the 46 responses I received:

What’s most interesting to me is that the responses weren’t simply “coronavirus” 46 times. In times of challenge, what’s often most challenging is that the old pressure doesn’t go away – we simply add more to the pile, further compounding our already high-pressure lives. In acute scenarios such as this one, people need to have a clear sense of:

What they can control – i.e. their perspective + their behaviours
What they need to let go of – i.e. the situation + others’ responses

These choices apply to your learning organization as well. Most consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak are outside of your control. Policies will be handed down from senior executives. Despite best efforts, people may become ill. There may be disruption to supply chains, operations, and other critical components of your business. Having the discernment to identify the things outside of your control and the ability to let those things go is a critical aspect to resilience. A leader who can paint a clear picture of where we are going to focus our attention and what we are going to ignore is invaluable in any crisis. How you prepare your workforce for this challenge, however, is within your control. Investing in resilience skills for your organization is an easy way to demonstrate empathy and support, improve performance and productivity, and arm your workforce with the skills to rise to the occasion. The coming few months may not be enjoyable, but with the right tools everyone can emerge with the satisfaction of knowing that they were up to the challenge. This will greatly increase engagement with their own jobs as well as appreciation for an organization that cared enough to address the situation in a proactive, skill building manner.

With the right tools, everyone can emerge knowing they were up to the challenge.

3. Give People the 1:1 Learning They Crave (Without Breaking the Bank)

“The next few months provide a real opportunity for learning organizations to invest in the 1:1 learning that people crave”

All of the research into learning tells us that providing individualized, coaching is among the best ways to help people learn, achieve their goals, and feel satisfied with their progress. And yet, the cost of providing individualized coaching is often prohibitive at scale. The next few months provide a real opportunity for learning organizations to invest in the 1:1 learning that people crave. The travel challenges posed by the COVID-19 threat will mean a dramatic reduction in travel expenses, and 1:1 coaching is uniquely suited to virtual delivery. Taken together, this provides an opportunity to invest in personalized coaching for your high potential talent at a cost that’s similar to what you would spend on a per-person basis to bring people together for a workshop. Depending on how your organization calculates the overall cost-benefit of leadership development, reduced time away from the field for participants can also support your case for making this kind of investment. So, how do you do this effectively? Two ideas:

1 goal, 3 months

Unlike traditional executive coaching, which is often an open-ended partnership between a coachee and a coach, have people pick a meaningful goal in conjunction with their coach and give them 3 months of support to move towards it. Framing coaching around time-bounded outcomes makes for more deliberate, action-oriented partnerships, gives you a measuring stick for demonstrating ROI to the organization, and ensures that you don’t add on-going cost into your budget.

Build self-awareness + self-responsibility

As we all know, adults don’t change because a coach tells them to. They do it because they develop the self-responsibility to change. In our experience, the best way to build self-responsibility in a short period of time is to kick off a coaching partnership with a strong self-assessment tool. We use a tool called The Interpersonal and Attentional Styles Inventory (TAIS) that lends itself perfectly to this kind of individualized development. The TAIS was originally developed for Olympic athletes to better understand their tendencies under pressure and make conscious strategic decisions about how to play to their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. It was then adopted by the US Navy SEALS for the same purpose and is now very highly regarded in the business community as a tool for building self-awareness and high performance in the corporate environment. The TAIS looks at 18 different metrics to help people understand how they are most likely to behave under pressure and how their unique traits compare to their teammates and contemporaries. As an example, the TAIS results may show that someone has high needs for control – that is, they are less comfortable with uncertainty and like to have a clear view of what’s coming. In the current climate, this tendency has the potential to create significant additional strain for both the individual and anyone they lead as they attempt to exert control in a situation that is largely impossible to influence. Working with a TAIS coach in a one-on-one coaching call, the employee can gain a better understanding of how that tendency is likely to manifest and develop strategies for mitigating its impact. By combining the online TAIS assessment with one-on-one video coaching, you can create an opportunity for your high performing talent to gain a better understanding of themselves, adapt more readily to changes in their environment, and actually enhance their learning through the downturn rather than merely mitigate the impact.

Team Canada Captain Hayley Wickenheiser shares her TAIS experience.

Want to Learn More?

Your opportunity to make an important contribution to your organization over the coming months is a brief one and you will need to move quickly to succeed. We are committed to supporting you in seizing this moment and readying the workforce for a period of disruption. If you want to get started right away, we have two turn-key ways for you to roll out 1:1 virtual coaching, and resilience skill-building. For your executive team, mid-senior leadership and high-potential employees, we offer TAIS self-assessments and coaching calls that can be scaled for teams of all sizes and begin delivering to participants in a matter of days. For teams and business units that are most affected by your organization’s COVID-19 response, we are offering an adapted version of our Building Resilience program, delivered entirely online and available in a modular format comprising 1 to 5 modules. Give us a shout if you’d like to know more. For further reading on some of the subjects discussed here, we have a few whitepapers that are especially relevant.

The Why, What and How of Self-Awareness introduces the concept of “active awareness”, a skill that helps you leverage self-awareness in the moment, and that has worked for the thousands of executives Third Factor has worked with.
The Paradox Of Pressure explores what causes us to feel pressure, explores what happens to the human body and mind when we experience pressure, and looks at ways to transform pressure into growth.
The Meta-Skilled Organization lays out a framework for individuals and organizations who want to direct their own evolution and claim an uncertain future.

And finally, if you have any questions or want to speak with us directly about your organization’s learning and development needs in the face of COVID-19, we are here to help. You can reach us at any time at mail@thirdfactor.com. This Friday marks the 10-year anniversary of the Closing Ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games. Here at Third Factor, we were incredibly proud to directly and indirectly support many of the athletes and coaches that would go on to become household names. Ten years later, we are still committed to supporting Olympic and Paralympic athletes and coaches in their bid for the podium. And three incredible stories from the 2010 Games continue to influence our understanding of the power of pressure and the way we interact with our clients across all areas of our business.

Changing a Canadian mindset

Prior to the Vancouver Olympics, Canada was known in Olympic circles for one notable achievement: it was the only nation in the world to host the Games without a local athlete winning gold. In fact, Canada had achieved this feat twice; first at the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, and again at the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary. When Vancouver won the bid to host the 2010 Winter Games, Canada’s 13 winter national sport organizations were determined to change that reputation. A report by sport management consultant and Olympic Hall of Famer, Cathy Priestner Allinger, found that Canadian athletes ranked top-five in the world the year before the games were far less likely to go on to win an Olympic medal than international athletes who were performing at the same level.

“Canada’s challenge wasn’t producing world-class athletes; it was producing world-class athletes who could perform with all the distractions and pressure of the Olympics”

In other words, Canada’s challenge wasn’t producing world-class athletes; it was producing world-class athletes who could perform with all the distractions and pressure of the Olympics. Brian Orser was one of Canada’s star athletes at the Calgary Games in 1988, and he spoke to us about the pressure of competing in front of a home crowd.

To help Canada’s performers prepare for the pressure of Olympic competition, the not-for-profit organization Own the Podium was formed to provide and fund support structures designed to give Canadian athletes the preparation that would allow them to access their best performances in the face of Olympic pressure. Own The Podium was a spectacular success. At Vancouver, Canadian athletes won 26 medals, including a record-setting 14 gold medals, placing Canada third overall. Since that time, Canadian athletes have been ‘converting’ at a rate of around 70% and Canadians now enter Olympic Games with an expectation that they could indeed, be the best in the world.

The impact of self-awareness and communication strategies

We had always believed that self-awareness was a critical component of team performance, and there was no doubt on the subject following our work with the Canadian Women’s Olympic Hockey Team at the Vancouver Games. In 2010, the team was looking to defend its gold medal from the Turin Games four years prior. They were also preparing to face their American arch-rivals who had bested them at the world championship the year before. As the team’s mental performance coach, Third Factor Founder, Dr. Peter Jensen, was tasked with helping the team perform through the high-stakes tournament while under intense scrutiny from the home crowd. To help keep the team running like a finely tuned engine, he elected to bring in our collaboration guru, Peggy Baumgartner, to guide the team through our Self-Aware Team process. Through the program, the team was able to gain a better understanding of their tendencies – both individually and as a team under pressure. And, they leveraged that new understanding to design systems to keep communication flowing effectively when the pressure mounted. The players remember it as a challenge that was both extremely difficult, and extremely worthwhile.

With a strategy in place, the team was able to communicate and stay consistent whether things were going well or poorly. They were able to work their way through the ups and downs of Olympic competition and successfully defend their gold medal on home ice. What we learned is that when you have a high functioning team – even one that’s among the best in the world – one of the most powerful ways to further enhance their performance is to increase their self-awareness and communication skills.

The convergence of health and performance

For us at Third Factor, there was a hidden storyline we were following that was far more significant than the Olympics. One week prior to the start of the Games, Peter Jensen was with the Women’s Olympic Hockey Team in Jasper, Alberta, at their pre-Olympic camp when he received confirmation that he had throat and neck cancer.

“Peter had to keep the information from the team so as not to become an enormous distraction”

Peter had to notify the leadership at Hockey Canada and, with their blessing, continued to support the mental performance of the Women’s Olympic Hockey Team. As they headed into their most important competition of the four-year cycle, Peter had to keep the information from the team so as not to become an enormous distraction while simultaneously teaching skills, being at his best and dispensing regular doses of his usual sense of humour. Peter is currently cancer-free and maintains a crazy busy schedule delivering keynote speeches to audiences big and small around the world. Peter wrote about his experience in his own words in his whitepaper, When Health and Performance Converge: What I (re)Learned From Cancer. It’s a great read if you’re curious to learn more about how he was able to stay resilient through such a difficult time. To those of us at Third Factor, the 2010 Vancouver Games are a reminder that Peter doesn’t just teach people how to handle pressure, he lives and breathes the content. Great leaders coach their people by teaching, giving feedback, mentoring, and asking questions. And, when necessary, they confront problem behaviours. When done right, challenging conversations can lead to positive behaviour change and strengthen the relationship between the leader and team member. How you begin the conversation is the best predictor of the outcome. In this practical and motivating keynote address, Third Factor Associate Trainer and Olympian, Karyn Garossino, will introduce a map for challenging conversations and guide you through the process of effectively initiating a difficult discussion. By gaining a better understanding of the internal conversation that precedes the external one, you will leave the keynote with a better understanding of the positive aspects of challenging conversations and a new confidence in your ability to speak up when change is not negotiable and resistance may be high.

Participants will learn:

The role of confronting in fostering a healthy coaching culture
How coaches can build trust and rapport even while confronting
Skills for self-management during the internal conversation that preceeds the external one
Three critical questions a leader must ask themselves before engaging in a challenging conversation
Strategies for crafting an effective opening statement

You should attend if:

You are responsible for enabling and fostering a culture of coaching in your organization
You are leading a change that will require a large number of people to modify their behaviour
You want new ideas for increasing the effectiveness of your leadership team
You want to build your own capability for producing behaviour change in others

Set against the backdrop of one of Toronto’s newest and most exciting innovation spaces, OCAD U CO, participants will enjoy great peer networking and a delicious breakfast.

What can you expect at this event? Take a look at this recap from our last executive breakfast.

About the presenter:

Olympian Karyn Garossino, BA, M. Ed., brings a combination of insight and grit from 40+ years of being coached and coaching others. Her experience at the highest levels of elite sport, Master’s Degree in psychology and adult education, and experience working with thousands of leaders in business and government bring huge depth to her understanding what it takes to thrive under pressure—and to lead others to do the same.

About the venue:

Just minutes from Union Station on Toronto’s waterfront, OCAD U CO is a state-of-the-art 14,000 square foot studio designed specifically for collaborative innovation work. The space features is home to 20 resident design-led startups, a suite of formal and informal meeting spaces, and is the setting for our program, How To Lead Innovation, which we run in partnership with OCAD U CO and the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University.

Reserve your spot:

In 2002, the Canadian Women’s National Hockey Team entered the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City in an unfamiliar position: as underdogs. They had not hit their stride as a team, their confidence had taken a hit, and emotions were at risk of boiling over. In eight head-to-head games against the Americans leading up to the Olympics, Canada had lost all eight. For many players, it was hard to avoid memories from four years earlier when the team had lost to the Americans in the gold medal game. Jayna Hefford, who was playing in the first Games of her Hall of Fame career, recalls the point when the stress and emotion came to a head: “There was an intense conversation in the dressing room with the team. A lot of people had a lot to say about things we needed to do and how we were going to get better, and we realized that a lot of what was happening was the blame game.”

“We realized that a lot of what was happening was the blame game.”

Through a frank, players-only discussion the team was able to come together, but the conversation could have gone a number of different ways. It stayed on track because the team was prepared – mentally and emotionally – to have performance conversations under pressure and surface a number of issues the team needed to resolve. And that preparation turned out to be an important stepping stone to winning gold in Salt Lake City.

Training the bomb squad

Handled poorly, team communication under pressure can lead to combustion. And just like you wouldn’t get success as a bomb disposal technician going in without their toolkit, you won’t find success in communicating through tense situations if your team isn’t prepared. The advantage the women’s team had that allowed them to emerge from that conversation united was a deep awareness of their communication tendencies and systems to counteract the counterproductive ones. They had laid the foundation for performance conversations in good times so that they could happen and be productive when the difficulty hit. In other words: they had a tool kit and they knew how to use it.

“The biggest opportunity for meaningful growth is often to increase self-awareness and strengthen their ability to communicate productively when under pressure.”

We’ve worked with hundreds of teams in elite sport and business, including the last four medal-winning Canadian women’s hockey teams. One of the things we’ve learned is that when teams are already operating at a high level, the biggest opportunity for meaningful growth is often to increase their self-awareness and strengthen their ability to communicate productively when under pressure. To support this, we’ve developed a process to help teams become more aware of their tendencies, develop systems and practice performance conversations anytime. At the heart of this process is a tool called the TAIS – The Attentional and Interpersonal Styles inventory. The TAIS was developed for use by Navy SEALs and Olympic athletes, and we’ve found it to be an incredibly valuable tool for diagnosing communication challenges on all kinds of teams. When the pressure is on, when teams are in the midst of setbacks and failure, individuals will fall back on their default communication styles.

Five communication choices

The author of the TAIS, Dr. Robert Nidefer, showed that people make five choices over and over in the course of a conversation. These choices are informed by their tendencies on five dimensions.

Give up/take control – are you more likely to try to take control, or cede control to someone else? Speed up/slow down – are you more likely to force action or a decision, or encourage more thought and consideration? Extroverted/introverted – are you going to seek out others, or try to solve the problem yourself? Become quiet/express thoughts – are you going to become quiet and try to understand, or advocate for your position? Critique/express support – will you say no and become more critical, or will you say yes and express support?

Cut the right wire

Every team will have members with different tendencies. Ultimately, it’s not the tendencies that matter; it’s the level of awareness team members have of their tendencies, and the systems they put in place to leverage their strengths and weaknesses in the heat of the moment. The highest performing teams we work with take three critical steps in preparing for productive communication under any circumstances.

Acknowledge the “I” in team

Great coaches know that the phrase “there is no I in team” is a myth. Every individual makes their own contribution – and without self-awareness, people can’t adjust. That’s why the first step in your team’s communication action plan is to encourage every individual to build self-awareness across these five choices. By knowing and understanding their default tendencies, team members can begin to recognize their behaviour and course-correct when necessary for the good of the team.

Connect to the “we” of the team

It’s advantageous to know your individual tendencies, and the value is multiplied when that information is shared with everyone on the team. When you raise the waterline of team awareness, everyone can work on the same communication system. Team members can see the intent behind the behaviors their teammates exhibit. The process can be incredibly difficult; Team Canada Captain Hayley Wickenheiser called sharing her profile with her team-mates, “the most stressful part of the 4-year [Olympic] quadrennial.”

Come together as a team

Armed with knowledge of self and others, teams can come together and translate self-awareness into action. When pressure hits, if everybody on the team has the tendency to get louder, express their thoughts and try to take control of the conversation, the team can make decisions in advance to decide who’s going to take control when issues arise. By having these conversations earlier, teams can build systems to fall back on when the pressure is turned up.

Preventing detonation

The next time you’re headed into a potentially high stakes conversations, use the five choices below to carry out a short 3-step preparation exercise:

1. Plot your default tendency on each of the five scales – given your past history, where are you most likely to fall?

2. Where would you ideally like to be as you head into this specific interaction?

3. What are the gaps between your ideal and default style? What actions will you take to ensure you are at your ideal?

Repurpose the fuel for growth

We’ve said before that negative emotion is volatile fuel. Improperly handled, it can lead to combustion. Used properly, it can lead to high performance. Team communication must go beyond just staying cool during difficult times. Teams must use communication to understand and lean in to their negative emotions, uncover what the emotions are telling them, and frame it as an opportunity for growth. This is what happened with the women’s team in 2002. They prepared to have productive communication at all times, and used the tools they learned to find the opportunity for growth at a moment when it could have blown up. Jayna Hefford explains:

By understanding your individual communication style, sharing your tendencies with the team and proactively planning to address potential faults, your team can find its way through difficult times and not just safely diffuse difficult situations but find new strength and opportunity for higher performance in the process. When the trajectory of your life hangs in the balance of one critical moment – when your heart is racing, your palms are sweaty, and your breathing is ragged – how do you nail it? Few people are better qualified to answer this question than Olympic skating legends Brian Orser and Tracy Wilson. As athletes, they carried the weight of a nation at the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary – entering as a reigning world champion and 7-time Canadian champion, respectively. Competing in front of a home crowd with incredibly high expectations, Brian and Tracy won 2 of Canada’s 5 medals in Calgary. Today, Brian and Tracy are coaches to a new generation of elite skaters from around the world at the Toronto Cricket Club. They’ve produced gold medalists for the last 3 Olympic games and currently coach the reigning Olympic men’s champion, Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan, and the reigning Olympic women’s silver medalist, Evgenia Medvedeva of Russia. As athletes and coaches, Brian and Tracy have delivered exceptional performances in moments of intense pressure. In this video series, they shine some light on their experience performing under pressure and coaching athletes to perform under pressure, and reveal simple strategies you can use to be at your best in your own most critical moments.

“There was a media frenzy”

Brian Orser describes the media frenzy and inescapable layers of pressure he felt leading up to the ‘Battle of the Brians’ on home ice at the 1988 Calgary Olympics.

“What got me so excited was representing Canada”

Tracy Wilson shares how she practiced the emotional moments in advance of competition at the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary.

“We were prepared for any scenario”

Brian Orser talks about how he established and practiced routines for any situation, whether he had to skate first or wait around to skate 6^th.

“I hate this part”

Tracy Wilson explains how leaning into emotions can help performers diffuse tension and how coaches can use communication to help their team members perform at critical moments.

Determining what you can and can’t control is the key to harnessing the tremendous instructive power of adversity. Even when we lack control over certain circumstances, we will still have control over how we will deal with these circumstances, what perspective we will choose to take. In this whitepaper, Sandra Stark and Peter Jensen explore three aspects that comprise a resilient perspective during a time where many businesses began to lose hope – the global economic crisis. Though the Great Recession is now behind us, the inner skills that they address will help you flourish in the face of adversity and grow in even the poorest of conditions. Click here to download the whitepaper.

In this article:

Four imperatives for leaders in times of uncertainty