If you are a leader or manager in Higher Education, you don’t need a report to tell you that the pace of change is relentless. Across the UK, university teams are navigating constant volatility, from financial deficits to complex restructures.

In this environment, ‘change fatigue’ is a real barrier to progress. When everything feels urgent, the very thing that could help is often avoided: honest, difficult conversations. We tell ourselves we’re protecting our teams from more stress by staying silent, but the opposite is true.

Avoiding these discussions – whether about a missed deadline or a departmental shift – is exactly what holds your team back. By reframing these moments as opportunities rather than threats, you can unblock the energy and collaboration your institution needs right now.

The cost of silence in HE

There is a lot of change, transformation and rapid improvement in Higher Education in the UK right now.

Even the mention of change can spark anxiety about job security, about roles, about workload. Before you even start talking, people are primed for conflict. That’s a scary prospect.

This baseline anxiety is not helped by the state of workforce wellbeing: the 2025 Teacher Wellbeing Index reported that 76% of all education staff are stressed, with half stating that their organisational culture negatively impacts their mental health.

In our work supporting change in HE we often see a similar pattern. ‘Consultations’ that feel performative because they’ve been rushed to gloss over anything uncomfortable. The result is frustration and resistance: people feel unheard, powerless, adrift, angry. Exactly the outcome you feared.

The truth is though, if you’ve been avoiding the smaller day-to-day difficult conversations – the missed deadline, the tension in a team meeting, the underperforming colleague – you reduce the capacity to have these ‘bigger’ ones.

The invisible debt of unresolved conflict

Have you ever worked with a ‘difficult’ colleague? Have you waited in vain for your boss to ‘deal with it’? Or avoided doing it yourself, because you are just thinking about the worst that could happen?

Whether it’s a faculty-wide reorganisation or a single team member’s negativity, the danger of staying silent is the same. The people affected by a difficult colleague build up a debt of resentment, waste energy working around them, and absorb their negativity. Things look functional from the outside so you can justify not acting. But what’s your staff turnover like?

This isn’t just a cultural issue; it’s also a productivity one. Research from Acas shows that workplace conflict costs UK employers between £500 million and £2.3 billion and estimates that when conflict leads to an avoidable resignation the cost to the organisation is about £31,000.

Reframing conflict as a superpower

It’s tempting to imagine that by ‘not going there’, by not having that difficult conversation, you’re keeping things safe – but actually that’s only because you haven’t worked out ways to do it well.

In a university context – where transformation and pressure is everywhere – you simply can’t afford to stay stuck. Avoiding difficult conversations leaves projects stalled, teams frustrated, and blockers to change piling up.

The longer conversations are avoided, the more friction, miscommunication, and wasted energy accumulates.

What if, instead of seeing these conversations as something to avoid, you saw them as opportunities to make things better? It might sound crazy, but if you can see your way to that mindset shift, you can unblock a lot of energy, progress and collaboration.

How teams get stuck

The words ‘conflict’ or ‘storming’ (from Tuckman’s team development model) are really loaded. It’s hard to see how they could ever be positive. But rather than seeing conflict as a threat, if you see it as the bringing together of differences it becomes less negative.

Developing a practice of bringing differences into the light is a superpower we can all learn to harness. It starts with the recognition that no two people see the world in the same way. I’m responsible for good student outcomes, you’re responsible for cost reduction. You want to simplify your processes, I don’t want to pick up the work your team is no longer resourced to do.

Everyone’s point of view is reasonable from where they are sitting.

‘Conflict’ in some form is inevitable when you’re trying to do anything complex. Teams have different ways of working or different KPIs. People feel unsafe, their identities threatened. Learning to sort out disagreements is something that you have to be ready to do and need to learn to do well.

And it’s not so hard, most of us have been doing it since we could crawl.

The trap of the mental rehearsal

I recently spoke to a leader who was quietly frustrated about a team member who prioritises the wrong thing, or is too detailed: when a three-point bullet summary is wanted, they deliver a five-page document that the leader doesn’t have time to read. They needed to raise it with them, but kept not quite doing it.

When faced with something like this people often rehearse the conversation over and over in their head, trying out different ways it could go. You might get trapped there, imagining all the ways it could go wrong, putting it off or waiting until the moment is right.

And while you’re doing that, the real conversation isn’t happening – your colleague doesn’t get the chance to be different and your frustration continues to fester.

You are not being as kind or honest or courageous as you might be – to yourself or to them.

Avoiding the issue strengthens the invisible barriers that keep you all stuck. A manager might be quietly seething because someone isn’t delivering, or a team member might feel unheard. That stuff burns slow, and deep.

All that energy on worrying and imagining unhappy outcomes instead of solving problems and getting work done.

What’s the worst that can happen? Actually, honestly, it’s THIS: what’s already happening because you are not talking about it.

The good news? The majority of the time, having the conversation goes way better than you expect.

And even if it doesn’t solve everything, it makes future conversations easier. If not solved, progress at least.

A personal lesson: when the problem was me

Here’s an example from my own life. My first job was in radio. I did well and at a young age I was promoted to head up a local station. A few months in, during the regular weekly team meeting, I asked about any problems. There was an awkward silence. After a pause, someone finally said:

“Well the thing is Steve, there is a problem. And it’s you… You’re a nightmare. One minute you’re cracking jokes and being a laugh. The next you’re all uptight. Grumpy. Aggressive. We’re sick of it. We don’t know whether we’re coming or going. It’s horrible working with you, Steve.”

I’ll be honest, my first instinct was panic, then defensiveness, then desperately grasping at straws for a way out of it. I found one.

I was completely taken aback but I managed to respond with something we could all do: I asked the team for their proposals for what could be better and what they could do to help that. Later at the suggestion of my boss, I asked them to add what they loved about working there.

And I did it too.

A few days later we read out our answers. Without interrupting, without justifying. The more we spoke, the more we all realised: this wasn’t an attack, it was a mutual shout for help. We were working out what was holding us all back.

It was a turning point.

We started to talk openly, to acknowledge frustrations, to work on the issues together. We all felt heard, and I felt a clarity I hadn’t had before. What began as a moment of conflict became a moment of connection.

From that point on, meetings were different. It didn’t solve every problem overnight, but it created a culture where difficult conversations became opportunities to improve, rather than threats to avoid.

That lesson has stuck with me ever since.

How this plays out in teams

That same principle plays out with the clients we work with:

At one faculty, the leadership team went through a formal consultation on a reorganisation. On paper, the process was followed perfectly: “But we did the consultation, Steve,” they told me. They did, but it was performative. They only succeeded in convincing colleagues they hadn’t heard a word. Frustration built. Meetings became tense, people shouted. Had the leaders been willing to really listen and create space for candid feedback, for genuine concerns to be raised, the process could have been smoother, resistance evaporating instead of solidifying.

At another institution, one senior leader I worked with dreaded giving honest feedback. They imagined arguments, upset colleagues, even blow-ups. When they finally had the conversation, it was calm, constructive, and revealing. It didn’t magically fix everything, but it cleared the air, allowed both sides to feel heard, and made future conversations easier.

Even the hardest conversations – like discussing someone losing their job, or giving difficult feedback to someone whose behaviour has been challenging – can lead to unexpectedly positive outcomes.

The act of talking, listening, and acknowledging each other’s perspective can form an allyship, even in difficult circumstances.

Moving from friction to collaboration

If this resonates, here are a few questions to consider:

• Which conversations are you replaying in your head instead of having?
• Where is your team stuck because of unspoken issues?
• Which discussion could move your team from friction to collaboration?

7 guidelines for a good conversation mindset

However, before you jump straight in and have that difficult conversation – it’s worth pausing to check on your assumptions.

If you think you know what’s going on for the other person, take a breath. Instead start with curiosity, generosity and respect, it’ll demonstrate that you value them enough to find out more. That is a good foundation for progress.

Here are seven guidelines for a good conversation mindset:

1. Listen first: ensure people feel heard, especially when they are angry. Irritation is usually a sign of an unmet need.
2. Assume you don’t know: Your ‘facts’ about why someone is underperforming are usually just guesses. Ask them instead.
3. Clarify your intention at the start. Begin by saying: “My goal is for us to work together better, not to place blame.”
4. Admit your own anxiety, and commit to trying and sticking with it even if it gets hard. Acknowledge your own contribution: your behaviour shapes the conversation and their experience too.
5. Set simple ground rules: pause if needed, agree to keep trying, clarify next steps.
6. Be aware of any power imbalance. How can you make this space safe for everyone?
7. Stop imagining the worst, start imagining the best. Assumptions are guesses, not facts.

Difficult conversations are iterative: the first one rarely solves everything, but it creates a pathway for progress to be made together.

What you can do: a call to action

If a difficult conversation is keeping you up at night, here’s one practical step you can take:
Try to reframe it as an opportunity. What would be better if you managed to get unstuck?

Even if you can’t fix it all, having the conversation will move things forward and will often help more people than you expect – you, your team, and your wider organisation.

Often the worst-case scenario is far less likely than you imagine. And the act of having the conversation is often the best thing that can happen.

At ThenSomehow we help universities and other HE organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post The conversation you’re avoiding is holding your university team back appeared first on ThenSomehow.

There is a principle – known as isomorphy – that patterns repeat across different levels of a system. What happens at the top, especially in leadership teams, is often mirrored across departments, faculties, and functions – even if no one realises it.

Put simply, isomorphy means that patterns at one level of an organisation often mirror themselves at other levels. It’s like the way the patterns in the fjords of Norway look the same no matter how much you zoom in.

Recognising isomorphy in your organisation

To understand isomorphy better, it helps to look at the current challenges facing the UK Higher Education sector such as leadership culture. When looking at these we often see repeating patterns across our Higher Education clients. These patterns repeat across different institutions and they reverberate up and down organisations with the power to both energise and diminish agency and effectiveness.

More than one head of service has complained that their teams are struggling to juggle competing priorities, or to react to sudden changes of direction, or are afraid of provoking a negative reaction from somebody senior.

When we hear these stories, the first place we look is up, to try to find the source of the pattern.

All too often it’s present right at the top. Senior leaders competing with each other rather than working toward the broader interests of the institution. Or a charismatic VC who will brook no challenge.

The isomorphy of these behaviours is powerful.

Case study: the University of Dundee

The recent Gillies report into the financial woes at the University of Dundee was highly critical of weak governance and a culture that discouraged challenge, and how that particular pattern contributed to its failure. The inability of the University Court to provide sufficient challenge was echoed in the executive and senior management levels and almost certainly in the levels below that.

That’s the thing about isomorphy: what happens in one place is happening everywhere.

If a senior leader feels the need to protect themselves from a capricious boss, they won’t challenge, they won’t make proposals, they won’t back up their peers or receive back up in return. Their isolation might lead to overwork and burnout, or behaviours damaging to others. Their teams will get frustrated when plans suddenly switch, and when their well-reasoned proposals get rejected on a whim they’ll start to spend more energy on trying to manage the politics than solving the problems. Worse, they’ll stop raising concerns.

They’ll stop taking the initiative and wait to be told what to do rather than waste their efforts.

Ultimately, they become passive, slow to respond, and focused on survival.

It’s not anyone’s fault – but it is everyone’s opportunity.

The domino effect of isomorphy: how patterns cascade through teams and leadership

A few years ago, we were called into a faculty where tensions between heads of teams and the leadership felt as though they had reached breaking point. Trust had collapsed. When we sat down to explore what was going wrong we found a repeating pattern.

The team leads were complaining they were experiencing:

Lack of clarity
Poor communication
Poorly wielded power
Conflicting interests and priorities
No time to manage properly
Mistrust
No space to talk about what’s difficult

And when we spoke to the managers above them, they explained that they were going through exactly the same thing. They were also unclear, stressed, overworked and unsupported. They were also frustrated and operating with lack of clarity, using their best guesses.

Each level was frustrated and irritated at the levels above and below them. Everyone was blaming everyone else. Everyone believed someone else had the power to fix things.

Everyone was looking up for a solution.

Once it became clear that everyone was trapped in the same pattern – and that no one person had the power to fix it – they realised they had to find a solution together.

That wasn’t easy, especially with a lot of bad feeling that was so hard to let go of. But it was possible, with patience and effort.

Breaking the pattern with relational leadership

This experience highlights a key point: If you notice what’s hard for you – the confusion, the anxiety, the lack of transparency, the powerlessness to address it – there’s a very good chance your team is experiencing the same thing. There is a good chance it feels worse for them.

And in fact, they might be experiencing it because you are.

So what helps? In our work, we’ve found the simplest – and hardest – answer is: listening.

Really listening.

By slowing down and creating space to hear what’s happening beneath the surface, you can take a relational approach that helps teams recover. If you get good at it and do it repeatedly, you can prevent things from getting bad in the first place.

Real-world example: a faculty group rebuilds trust

It was only when the faculty group we supported stopped blaming each other, realised they all cared and discovered they were all trapped in the same pattern, that they could start to find their own solutions and enough clarity to operate effectively together.

The power of listening differently

Effective listening goes beyond simply hearing words. It’s about:

i. Listening to understand

To find out what’s actually going on for people – what they are seeing, how they interpret that, what it makes them feel and their underlying needs. This is an important part of including and enabling people, and can reveal differences in understanding that create opportunities.

ii. Listening to draw out those differences

Everyone experiences things slightly differently. These differences can feel like a challenge or a threat, but they are actually a chance to find new solutions.

And yes, it is difficult. Everyone’s under pressure to deliver. Time is tight. When you’re working remotely, spreading your time across multiple priorities. You don’t bump into each other in corridors anymore. And when you are face to face it’s still hard to go deeper.

But if you don’t find time to really understand each other, or the relational skills to have conversations in the right way, misunderstandings can multiply. For example:

• I think I’m being inclusive and open, but you experience me as unclear and indecisive.
• I believe I’m as transparent as I can be, but I don’t actually understand what you need.
• You expect support, but I’m also struggling to stay afloat.

What feels like conflict is often just misaligned intent, unclear expectations and unspoken assumptions. And without seeing the patterns of isomorphy, you risk replicating them.

Small actions that can shift the system

The good news is that these patterns can be broken. If you pause, you might discover that the things that feel like differences are actually commonalities, and the things that you’re craving are shared.

If you’re a leader who can slow down, listen differently, and communicate with more clarity, – you can shift the dynamic not just in your team, but across the entire organisation

This is because isomorphy works both ways. If suffering can replicate, so can care. If confusion cascades, so can clarity. By intentionally trying to shift the pattern, you will have an impact far beyond your immediate sphere.

Practical steps for leaders to disrupt repeating patterns

1. Spot the pattern
Take five minutes to notice what’s frustrating you. Then ask yourself: is this also showing up in my team? What might I be unintentionally passing on?

2. Listen differently
In your next one-to-one or team meeting, try asking: “What’s one thing you wish was clearer right now?” Then just listen, without fixing or defending.

3. Explore it further
If you’d like help making sense of the patterns in your team or leadership group – we have tools we can recommend – and are always happy to have a chat. It might just shift something important.

At ThenSomehow we help universities and other HE organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post The invisible trap of isomorphy: how to break free from repeating patterns in Higher Education appeared first on ThenSomehow.

The continual feedback from departments about their culture was, “We’ve got this locally, but we’re really bemused by what’s going on elsewhere in the network.”

A networked approach to culture change

In a similar piece of work at another institution, we found extraordinarily vehement resistance to change within one faculty, because the requirement to adopt a uniform approach felt like a threat to their identity and completely ignored the fact that they had a unique situation. They did a lot of work with external partners, requiring a different approach, but there was no recognition from the top that something else was needed for them.

In our work with large organisations like universities, we come across these kinds of situations fairly often. In more than one institution we have been struck by how the strength of identity and sense of belonging diminishes as you move away from the local team. The further away someone is from the central administrative hub, the looser their feeling of affiliation to the organisation as a whole.

The effect is that people in universities often feel siloed, and individual departments and faculties feel disconnected from each other

We’ve come to the conclusion that it might be better to think of a university as a network of distinct and differing communities each with its own unique identity and ways of doing things, rather than a single entity.

This way of thinking could shift the approach to change in any organisation.

Changing the view, changes the change programme

When thinking about making a change or ‘transforming’ an organisation, how often is the starting point an unspoken assumption that it is a single entity? If you started with a different view instead – that you are dealing with individual but connected groups, how might that change how you approach the challenge?

Most of us tend to be drawn to solutions that can be applied across the board, but what if that approach is starting from the wrong place?

The idea of a harmonised uniform process that flows smoothly across all departments so that errors are reduced, data is easy to collate and anyone can step in to help because it’s all the same, is tremendously attractive.

The problem though, is that clean, simple, uniform solutions are often not flexible enough to accommodate the inevitable exceptions.

When the universal solution doesn’t fit

To give an example from another area of our work, one department manager revealed with exasperation that at least 40% of their programmes were ‘non standard’ requiring manual workarounds every time a member of staff interacted with the programme software.

That is a huge amount of wasted effort every day.

So when faced with the requirement to implement a uniform approach that will not work, a team is likely to be highly stressed by the request – especially when no one at the top seems interested that the standard solution does not fit.

Perhaps that is why there is so often discomfort around top-down change programmes – because ‘non standard deviations’ are not recognised or accommodated.

Why consistency is better than uniformity

As someone from one university pointed out, there’s a difference between consistency and uniformity.

The idea of consistency is interesting. Rather than a uniform set of actions, it might mean thinking about underlying principles and values, and the required outcomes. If those are clear might it be okay for local adaptation that works in each specific context?

How we’re changing to a networked model at Then Somehow

We’ve been so struck by this ‘network of communities’ way of thinking that we have taken it on as an experiment of our own: we’re now trying to reframe the way we work together at Then Somehow.

Until recently we have been organised as a ‘hub and spoke’ (just like ‘the centre’ in a university), with the founder in the middle and everyone separately connecting with them.

That has felt constraining and that we’re missing out somehow. So a few weeks ago at our team away day we talked about what we could do to create more of an interconnected ‘point-to-point’ network, and what might we do differently.

Meeting and thinking like this has been a really interesting experiment in the way that we work and is already leading to good outcomes.

There’s a whole bunch of unspoken assumptions that we have started to subvert a little bit which is making space for creativity and other interesting things to emerge.

Notably a few people have been making a point of hanging out together, and developing new possibilities to work with each other.

It’s early days but we’re very curious to see what happens next.

The Power of Networked Thinking

What strikes us most about this is the untapped power of these networks when you apply this kind of thinking.

And we’re very curious about what happens when you reimagine organisations as networks of communities. Rather than trying to make everything uniform, could you let people solve problems locally? What if you design processes or platforms that encourage people to link up with each other?

How might that transform the way people engage with change? If you start with the assumption that an organisation is a coherent consistent whole, you approach change in a certain way. If you see it as a network of communities, it might completely shift the way you think about it.

Of course some change projects are born of crisis, driven by the compelling need to save money quickly. In a crisis you often crave the fastest, cleanest simplest path possible. Seeing an organisation as a single uniform controllable and biddable thing is attractive and reassuring. In a crisis you need urgency and compliance, and you might design a process according to those needs rather than the needs of the people you want to make the changes.

In truth those people also recognise the need to save money, and their jobs. They also want to protect the mission of their institutions: the thing that gives them their sense of purpose. And they are best placed to find the solutions that can make that possible.

The very moment you crave uniformity and compliance might be the moment you need to let go of them. The more you dig under the skin of any large institution, the more people will explain to you why they’re different. Maybe they are not wrong. We know from our work with institutions that there are ways you can distribute leadership, and trust people to solve problems in adaptive and non-uniform but consistent, and creative, ways.

Whilst the challenges across an organisation are fundamentally universal and shared, and broadly speaking the solutions are the same, the way you might go about achieving the solutions could be different. Or there might be special flavours that you can apply in one place that you can’t in another.

So how could you equip people, give them the time and allow them to solve a problem locally? And do that in a way that isn’t so at odds with everybody else that it becomes impossible to integrate.

What this means for people who are attempting to bring about change is to encourage them to see any community or organisation as a group of diverse individuals, to talk to them and hear their points of view, and to facilitate conversations where other people can hear these points of view too.

Because then the group as a whole has the information that it needs to change its future.

We’d love to know what you think about this – does any of it resonate or inspire, or would you like to challenge it? Get in touch and let us know.

At Then Somehow we help universities and other organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post Why your organisation is really a network of communities appeared first on ThenSomehow.

As a manager in an organisation, awkward, difficult conversations are inevitable, but they don’t have to be a minefield.

Regardless of whether you need to hold a colleague accountable for something they did or didn’t do, tell your boss that their request is no longer possible, or confront a team member about their disrespectful behaviour, with the right approach you can successfully navigate them without feeling stressed, anxious or uncomfortable.

It may be tempting to dodge these chats, but sweeping problems under the rug is far from a solution. Surprisingly, a significant 70% of employees tend to avoid these tough talks, leading to simmering issues within teams.

Difficult conversations with your boss or colleague may be a bleak prospect, but putting it off and ignoring problems hoping they will resolve themselves can make matters worse.

For instance, not telling someone about a delay might escalate into larger issues later. Keeping quiet about concerns can lead to project failures, and unchecked disrespectful behaviour can disrupt team dynamics, turning into unhealthy conflict that can have a bigger impact on your team’s performance.

Why Difficult Conversations Matter. A real life example

Consider this real-life scenario where a new manager we were supporting in a large organisation faced passive-aggressive behaviour from a senior member in their team. This team member had been passed over for promotion and was not happy: they questioned every suggestion and proposal to the point of destruction, exhausting everybody on the team.

Instead of confronting the issue, the manager tolerated the behaviour which led to unproductive conduct: the person concerned continued to sabotage everything, holding the team back and keeping everyone stuck.

We advised the manager to tell this person in a clear and respectful way that their behaviour was not okay and had to stop. They needed to say that it was affecting them, the work and everyone else too.

Unfortunately they initially didn’t feel able to – instead adopting a ‘do nothing’ strategy, something that is more common than you might think.

A fear of conflict will see people putting up with a great deal. Fierce Conversations found that the number one response to coping with toxic employees is to ignore them, with almost half hoping the issue will magically disappear.

According to a survey by Vitalsmarts the most common difficult conversations that people tend to put off, range from dealing with rude behaviour to challenging faulty proposals and addressing incompetent colleagues.

This “do nothing” approach might seem like an easy way out but it’s far from effective. The postponed conversations result in a negative atmosphere at work where people ruminate, complain, and engage in unnecessary work, all because they’re avoiding the core issue.

Moreover, there’s a significant financial impact, with each delayed conversation estimated to cost anywhere from $100 to $5,000.

Regardless of how delicate the issue or how grim the news, the most effective approach is to address it head on and engage in a conversation with the individual involved, no matter how challenging it may seem.

In our example above, the manager finally took the initiative and calmly explained to their colleague the impact it was having on them personally. The response was dramatic. There was an apology followed by a frank and open conversation. The person’s behaviour improved, though ultimately they made the decision to leave as their frustration was with the organisation rather than with the manager.

Often embracing the conflict leads to good things. So remember, if you are faced with similar situations, think what is the best that could happen rather than the worst.

How to Navigate Tough Conversations with Your Team

Mastering difficult conversations is a crucial skill for managers in any organisation. Practice is key; the more you do it, the more confident and adept you become at having the conversation with respect and honesty, which will always lead to better outcomes.

Try this 5-step framework – it will help you get better at tough talks and as you practise, your confidence will grow.

Step-by-Step Framework for Handling Challenging Discussions:

1. Face the situation head on
2. Empathise with the other person
3. Use an I-Statement
4. Use the FONT tool
5. Respond in a different way

Here is more information about each of these steps, with examples of how to use all the above at the end:

Step 1: Confront the Issue Directly

Talking about a sensitive subject can be an anxiety inducing prospect, but avoiding it only prolongs the issue. You may be worried that the other person will be defensive or won’t listen, or that they’ll be angry and aggressive. They might do any or all of these things but if you don’t try, you won’t make any progress at all. You’ll just be stuck in a difficult situation.

And you’ll probably find that it’s not nearly as bad as you imagined.

Step 2: Practice Empathy Before Engaging

There are many reasons why someone is behaving in a particular way. If they are delivering poor work, they may be struggling but be unable to ask for help. If they are not motivated, they could have issues at home. If they are being rude they may be feeling wronged by the way they’ve been treated.

Try empathising with their situation before you start talking. As their manager, your aim should be to support them while addressing their behaviour.

Step 3: Communicate Using ‘I’ Statements

Express your feelings clearly using an “I” Statement to tell the other person how you are feeling in a clear, effective and truthful manner.

“I” Statements are a powerful way to help you express your point to someone else without causing them to feel defensive or aggressive, which allows them to respond rather than react.

The way to do this is to structure what you say in this way: “I feel X when you do Y, and [how their behaviour affects you].” For instance, say, “I feel upset when you say things like that, and this is affecting our working relationship.”

This approach fosters genuine dialogue by focusing on the consequences of behaviour rather than blaming the person.

If instead you start the conversation with the other person’s actions, or say “you make me really angry when you do X,” you’re blaming them and giving them the message that they are the problem.

NB Be careful not to turn an I-Statement into a ‘blaming-you-statement-pretending-to-be-an I-Statement. Eg “I feel that you are passive-aggressive,” is not an “I” Statement.

Step 4: Understand the FONT Tool to Improve Conversations

FONT (Feelings, Observations, Needs, Thoughts) is a way to decode a conversation so that you understand what’s really going on for people.

Despite their importance, most people don’t bring their wants and feelings into the workplace. However you’ll find it harder to resolve an awkward conversation and increase your chances of receiving a defensive response if you attempt to handle it without discussing their needs and feelings.

FONT is a way to become more aware of what is going on, both for yourself and what you are sensing from the other person. The four categories will help you break the conversation down.

For example, I might be observing your body language and notice that you’re being defensive. I might think, “This is going to end really badly. We’re going to start shouting and she may storm out.”

With that information, I could stop trying to tell you something, and instead ask a question: “I noticed that you raised your voice when you said that. What’s going on for you? How are you feeling?”

The ultimate aim of FONT is to increase your awareness of what the other person is feeling, and to bring that into the conversation. If you can do that, you are more likely to have a much more valuable conversation.

If you just stick to actions, decisions, communication and results (ie the bit above the waterline in the iceberg model, you’ll have limited leverage to change anything.

The first time you try using FONT, you may find you’re really good at working out the thoughts and observations parts, but not so good at recognising feelings or needs.

The more you practise, the more you’re able to do it on the fly.

The five core emotions
To help you identify what people are feeling, this is a helpful shortcut to use alongside FONT, the five core emotions:

• MAD (Angry)
• SAD
• GLAD
• HURT
• SCARED

If you can find a way for the person to tell you how they’re feeling, for example they might say, “I’m feeling both angry and anxious (scared),” then you might be able to empathise with them and work together to find a solution.

If their needs include being acknowledged, and a sense of feeling valued, look for opportunities to recognise them and point out their positive traits to make them feel more appreciated.

There are two ways to work with FONT:

i. In the moment
Use it to guide the conversation towards the true issue at hand. This frequently leads to a really liberating conversation. It takes practice, however your attempt won’t necessarily fail, even if it doesn’t work out the first time.

ii. Reflecting after the fact
To better understand what happened, go back over the conversation and replay it using FONT. What did you notice? What was going through your mind? What might they have been thinking? What emotions might they have had? Which needs might be motivating them?

Even if the situation fails in the moment, taking some time to reflect on what you could have done differently will help you next time, since you’ll be more prepared and be able to try something new.

Being able to say to someone, “I can see you are getting upset,” and asking, “How are you feeling?” can help to resolve the situation. If they are able to be truthful about what they’re feeling, you can say, “Okay, let’s talk about what you need.”

Step 5: Respond with the opposite

This is an approach that’s helpful if someone is either very emotional or bombards you with facts:

• When faced with facts, respond with emotions.
• If they are very emotional, point to the facts.

Imagine an awkward conversation with a colleague who’s delivered a poor piece of work. They might start listing all of the reasons why it’s not their fault. Using facts and figures to build their case. In doing that, they’re being defensive and it will be hard to move the conversation forward. If you respond with how you feel, you can shift that dynamic. Breaking down barriers in a difficult conversation opens up possibilities for transformation.

Or perhaps the opposite happens and they start crying or become really angry. A way to respond is to, firstly, empathise with their feelings, then bring in some facts to try and get back into a conversation.

This is a useful approach if you find yourself stuck because it’s easy to remember.

Three examples of difficult situations and how to deal with them

These are examples where difficult conversations might become dysfunctional, and where people can easily become defensive:

1. There is a restructure and jobs are at risk
2. Someone is not doing their job properly
3. A colleague is being offensive

i. People are at risk of redundancy during a restructure

If you have to restructure your team, some people’s jobs may have to be cut. People often come into those conversations with a lot of anxiety. The minute you tell them what is happening, they will be worrying about money.

Their anxiety could be unwarranted, because they may be at less risk than they think. But because they’re nervous, they may become antagonistic or aggressive. They might, for example, threaten to bring in a union rep.

What to do? Use FONT to find out what is going on for them and to reflect on what they fundamentally need.

For example, you might notice that they’re agitated, that their voice is raised and they’re being aggressive. You might be feeling nervous yourself – it is never nice to pass on this kind of news – and you might start being defensive. If the conversation spins out of control, our best advice is to stop, identify what you’re observing, and ask what they are feeling.

If they tell you they are angry after all the work they have done, calm them down by talking about what the options are. There might be options to redeploy them or a number of other roles and opportunities they could consider applying for.

Communicate what the scale of the risk is: “Even though there will not be enough posts left after the restructure, some people on the team want to leave anyway. So actually, you’re a lot less at risk than you realise. Maybe this is an opportunity, because in the new posts there are more opportunities for development. You could expect to get a pay rise.”

If their original reaction to the news was: “I am so angry because of the way this was communicated.” Their need is for an apology and a recognition of the harm that’s been done.

By addressing that need, you can move the conversation to a different place.

ii. “You are not doing your job properly, you need to improve”

Someone you are managing is performing badly. You arrange a conversation with them to discuss the situation.

You have a ‘you need to improve’ conversation but there is a thought at the back of your mind that, “this is all going to end in a formal performance management process.”

You know that’s a challenging and uncomfortable process for the person concerned and likely your relationship with them will be destroyed in the process. They’ll end up leaving anyway which may be what you really wanted, but they’re miserable and you’re miserable.

Just the thought of that could cause the conversation to be a clumsy one. However it’s avoidable if you can intervene early enough.

If you’re able to talk to them early, use The Three Key Questions to help them understand what you need and how they’re measuring up:

• Do they know what’s expected of them?
• Do they know how they’re doing? and
• Do they know where they’re heading?

In that conversation you have to be really clear about what is expected of them. Then you can monitor how they are doing, and you can identify what help they might need to do it. They’ll (hopefully) improve and you’re more likely to avoid the whole performance management process.

Win-win.

iii. A member of staff is being offensive

Sharon has made a complaint about Annie. You’ve only heard Sharon’s side of the story and you’d like to know what happened from Annie’s point of view. In this case, FONT can help you figure out what actually happened and come up with some choices for how to respond.

Annie says: “Sharon left her dirty coffee cup on the side in the kitchen. It seems a small thing but I just lost it. I shouted at her and I might have called her a rude name, because I always do the washing up – no one else does it and no one ever says thank you.”

As her manager you might say: “I’m noticing that as you talk about it your voice is raised. It seems that you’re still angry and upset about it. How’re you feeling right now?”
Annie: “Sorry. I was just so angry.”
You: “What do you need?”
Annie: “I need to not be the only person who cares about this stuff.”

You: “Did you know that Sharon had put her things in the dishwasher but it was full she had to reorganise it. Some bits didn’t fit back in so she put them on the side and put the dishwasher on, intending to come back later and finish it.”

Annie: “Oh … I didn’t know that. I’ll apologise and try not to react in future.”

You: “Thank you, that sounds good.”

Key Tools to Improve Your Conversations

Difficult conversations can be daunting but there are strategies for making them better. Having read this, we hope you have more of a grasp on how to handle them, plus a couple of useful tools that you can try. With experience, difficult conversations will become easier, leading to more productive dialogues and better results.

At Then Somehow we help universities and other organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post Difficult conversations: how to master them with confidence. A guide for managers. appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Join us as we explore a carefully curated list of tools, exercises and methods to help modern managers lead more effectively, enhance collaboration and work smarter not harder.

From delegation to communication, meetings to mindset, these tools can help you foster a culture of growth, empowerment, and performance within your team and organisation.

Let’s embark on this journey to discover how simple practices can amplify your effectiveness and revolutionise the way you lead and manage.
 

Productivity tips for managers

1. 6 Productivity tips that work and last, including how to do email better.
There’s plenty of productivity advice out there, and you’ve probably tried a lot of it – but how much of it actually sticks? These 6 proven productivity tips have worked for our clients and will help you work smarter, not harder.
Read the 6 tips here.

2. How to prioritise using the Impact Effort Matrix.
The Impact Effort Matrix is a simple tool that helps you and your team identify what matters most. It’s a quick way to align priorities and create clarity.
Learn how to use it here.

Protecting your time

3. Too many meetings? Here’s 8 ways to cut down.
Meetings, meetings, meetings. They’re endless and affect your work and your productivity. Here’s how to free up your time for the work you want to focus on instead.
Discover the 8 ways here.

4. Are interruptions breaking your day? Here’s what to do.
Interruptions are a reality of organisational life. We know that interruptions are one of the biggest challenges managers face. Here are 4 proven tactics to help you stay focused, set boundaries, and protect your time.
4 simple things you can do to overcome interruptions.

Managing and empowering your team

5. Get better at delegating. Here’s how.
Delegation is a skill every manager needs. Use the CPORT checklist to delegate more effectively and avoid common pitfalls.
Learn how to use CPORT here.

6. Three powerful questions that build staff engagement.
These 3 questions can reveal powerful insights about your team’s engagement and motivation. Your team should be able to answer them. If they can’t, then money may be the only sense they have of where they’re at, and your organisation could be at risk.
Discover the 3 questions are here.

Improving communication makes you a more effective manager

7. How to make sure people hear what you say.
Do people actually listen to and understand what you say? Research suggests not so much. Ensure your communication lands by using the Replay tool, it helps people actively listen and retain key messages.
Discover Replay here.

8. 4 tools for better conversations with your team.
Despite how much time you spend in meetings, or how many plans you make, it can still be really hard to make anything happen. Better conversations lead to better action. Here are 4 tools to make team discussions more productive and impactful.
Explore the 4 tools here.

9. Stop avoiding difficult conversations.
Having a difficult conversation can be one of the most powerful things you can do in the workplace. If you can’t have difficult conversations, it can hamper your organisation’s ability to grow. Wen done well, they can unlock trust, clarity, and progress.
Learn how to do them better here.

10. Getting to the feedback that actually makes a difference.
Giving and receiving staff feedback can be challenging but it is key to development and growth. Discover a tool that makes feedback conversations more effective and meaningful.
Read how to do it here.

Essential tools for building mindset, agency and performance

11. Circles of Influence. A tool that shows why you have more power than you think.
Help your team focus on what they can control using the Circles of Influence exercise developed by management guru, Stephen Covey.
Download a free Circles of Influence worksheet here.

12. Make the boat go faster. Boost your team’s performance.
Inspired by Olympic gold medalist Ben Hunt-Davis, Make the Boat Go Faster is a way to identify what’s holding your team back, and how to overcome that.
Learn how toimprove your team’s performance here.
 

Final thoughts on being an effective manager: lead smarter, not harder

By adopting the strategies, insights, and tools outlined here, you’ll be equipped to navigate the complexities of leadership, with confidence.

Remember, being an effective manager is not just about optimizing processes and achieving targets; it’s about fostering a culture of growth, empowerment, and collaboration.

As you continue to refine your skills, never underestimate the impact of empathy, continuous learning, and adaptability. Embrace the challenges, celebrate the victories, and keep pushing the boundaries of your leadership capabilities. The road ahead is rich with possibilities, and the tools we have outlined here will help to steer your team and organisation towards a future of sustained success.

How Then Somehow Can Help You

At Then Somehow we help managers in organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation perform better, get in touch here.

The post How to be a more effective manager: 12 top tips and tools for modern leaders appeared first on ThenSomehow.

The people affected can struggle to understand the reason for the change. They frequently feel that “leadership isn’t listening to us.” Equally, the people leading the change are often confused and frustrated by the vocal and passionate resistance they experience.

Frustrations and emotions run high. Communication is poor. Tempers rise.

People are very easily triggered, and because no one does anything differently this pattern keeps being repeated.

Institutions reorganise for many reasons. Sometimes they are compelled to do so by changing markets, reforms to regulatory landscapes, or financial pressures requiring a different approach to programme and service delivery. At other times, a reorganisation is needed as organisations evolve and grow. It can be a painful process and research from the corporate world has shown that 80 percent of reorganisations fail to deliver improvements that were hoped for. Whilst some are successful, one thing is definite: organisational change is disruptive, transforming roles and leading to a variety of reactions from the people involved as they navigate the change.

In one case, when we brought together the people who were affected by a change, they spent most of the sessions complaining about how awful this thing was that was being forced on them and that no one was listening to them.

After working to de-escalate their anger, using tools such as I Statements, FONT and Circles of Influence, by the end they were saying things like, “Oh actually, we’ve got more power here than we realised. I just assumed we had no choice and no control. It is up to us to shape this.” Which was great.

They were still angry, but now they had some agency, which helped them to engage in a different way.

When we talked to people higher up, they said, “We did consult and we are listening. We keep saying, ‘You are free to design your own solution.’ It’s not true that we just tell them what to do.”

In many instances, from where we are standing it appears that people struggle to feel heard and understood, are quick to blame each other and are confused as to how to behave differently.

All sides make assumptions about what is happening and base their responses on those assumptions. They all believe everyone thinks the same as them.

What happens in organisations

This reminds me of that story about the blindfolded scientists who are touching an elephant. One is touching the tail and thinks it is a rope. Another is touching a tusk and thinks it is a spear. Another is touching a leg and thinks it is a tree. They all think they are touching something different. None of them can see that they’re holding a part of a whole.

This is a useful metaphor for what happens in organisations, where people make the mistake of believing that everyone else shares the same viewpoint, and fail to recognise other people’s points of view. If everyone could pool their knowledge they might have a clearer view of what is really going on, as other people do have different views to us. That is not surprising. They have different roles. They’re sitting in different parts of the organisation. In terms of power, they’re experiencing different things. Their whole context is utterly different and even if you do agree on one or two things, you are still holding a very different perspective.

Why listening is important

In most organisations people don’t have enough time – or don’t make the time – to make sure they are listening to other perspectives. Then some people don’t speak up because they believe they are not going to be heard. Other voices get louder – indignant even – because they are trying really hard to make sure they are heard. Leaders get swept along thinking that everyone is on the same page and run into difficulties later because it turns out that some people are not actually as committed as they thought they were, because they hadn’t done enough work to include them.

A common refrain we hear from leaders is, “I feel really confused and frustrated, because we did talk to people. We set up meetings where they could contribute. Yet they are all saying that they weren’t heard. Truth is I didn’t really notice that they hadn’t said things.”

If you’re in a position of power, do you need to do more to make sure other people in your team feel heard? What could you do?

The reality is that even leadership teams don’t work in this way. They are often too busy focusing on tasks, and not thinking about raising concerns, or creating space to challenge and discuss.

And sometimes progress can be achingly slow: in our work with clients we can spend a whole afternoon just getting to a point where we’ve clarified that there’s stuff people agree on but there’s also quite a lot of difference.

The solution? Practise bringing people together and try to acknowledge what’s going on for everyone. Be patient, and in those spaces people can discover that they do have things in common and that they may have a lot more power to influence good outcomes than they realise.

This is a really important aspect of our work.

If any of this resonates, or if you’re taking steps to create supportive environments to ensure people feel heard and bring out difference, we’d love to hear how you’re getting on.

At Then Somehow we help universities and institutions build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation perform better, get in touch here, or if you’re looking for 360 feedback review for individuals – have a look at our new 360 service: AdviceSheet.

The post Organisational restructuring is hard. Listening makes it less painful appeared first on ThenSomehow.

In our recent survey of the things that managers struggle with the most, one thing that wasn’t mentioned – partly because of its nature – is blind spots.

Most of us have a hard time being objective about ourselves – we all have weaknesses that we may not be aware of. Which means you may be doing things that are limiting your own and your team’s success without you even knowing it.

7 common leadership blind spots

Here are seven examples of the most common blind spots, with tips for how to find and overcome yours.

1. Not listening

A common blind spot is to think you’re listening when you’re not, and by not listening, people don’t feel heard and don’t feel empowered.

Here’s an extreme example: there was an awkward situation at one of our clients where people turned up to a Teams meeting online, and all the senior leaders were physically together in one room, joining the meeting via a single laptop. That meant they couldn’t take part in the breakout sessions.

In the end, half the leaders went off to find places they could login individually. The rest decided to stay in the room but join the breakouts on their laptops with their microphones off and their videos on. However, when one of them rolled their eyes, everybody else in that breakout room turned their cameras off and stopped being as open. In another breakout, the leader could be seen laughing with someone off camera. They weren’t listening, they were telling jokes! None of the others felt safe. It made the meeting a lot less productive.

2. Me first attitude

If you focus on your own achievements at the expense of collective results it can be really discouraging for team members. In a previous career I once promoted my best salesperson to be the sales manager. It was the thing he most wanted, the highest level of recognition he could think of. He kept asking for the promotion and in the end I gave it to him.

It was a big mistake. I completely failed to help him understand how different the new role was. He carried on smashing targets, but he now had the power to pick and choose the best clients. The team could see he was just making their job harder while their new manager’s life got easier and his new car got bigger. The manager couldn’t see that it was no longer his job to hit the target. It was his job to help the team to do it.

By focusing on himself he alienated the team, created lots of resentment and ended up cutting corners to make a target. It didn’t end well. I lost my best salesperson, had to find a new manager, and had a lot of work to do to make it up to the rest of the team. A team can only deliver better results when all team members place the team’s results first.

Approachable, or not? Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

3. Not being approachable / closing people down

Managers often say things like “my door’s always open,” but then don’t display any of the behaviours that would make them more approachable. For example, when was the last time you walked on the shop floor? Or stopped to talk to people at their desks, or checked in with them over zoom? It takes a lot of nerve for a junior member of your team to walk through your open door. It costs you nothing to walk out of it and meet them where they are.

Another example is responding aggressively in meetings. If you shut people down, they will feel less inclined to back up what they said – and you are not enabling debate and discussion. And nobody else will back them up, because you’ve been so aggressive in your tone.

(Once when this happened to me, somebody emailed me after the meeting to say that they also disagreed with the manager, but they felt they couldn’t say anything.)

If you feel your team are being too quiet in meetings, and you feel you have to do all the talking, ask yourself what you might have done to shut them down. Think about what you could do to create the space for them to contribute.

4. Talking over other people or hijacking other people’s comments

If you do things such as step in after someone has contributed in a meeting, and say something like, “What I’m hearing you say is…” and then take their words and make them yours, and everyone else says, “Yes, that’s right.” The person who had originally said it feels like you’re getting credit for their suggestion. That’s not empowering. This is behaviour many of our female clients experience from their male colleagues.

Not seeing you’re being racist or sexist is a blind spot. Photo by Gemma Chua Tran on Unsplash

5. Causing harm without realising it

Someone told me a story of something that happened at a meeting they went to. There were four people in the room. One of them was a BAME woman. When the meeting started, someone said, “I think one of the toilets is leaking.” One chap turned round to the BAME woman and said, “Can you go and fix that, please?” She skipped a beat: did he think she was a cleaner? Was it because she was a woman? Was it because she wasn’t white? What was it about her that made it her job?

The chap denied he had any conscious negative attitudes when he said it. But unconscious bias and microaggressions – inadvertent and subtle messages that demean a person usually based on race or gender – have consequences.

The person said she felt humiliated, mistreated, angry and she carried the pain of it all day, all evening, all week. It was brushed away at the time, and no one thought to deal with it nor probably the many other microaggressions she has had to deal with all her life.

How many times might we do something like that to others? Waiting for a female colleague to make the tea in a meeting rather than acting as host yourself? Or automatically expecting women to take the minutes on behalf of the group? Or being a serial interrupter of others?

This kind of thing goes on much more than you think – even MPs have to put up with similar everyday microagressions.

Think about what you could do to reduce the chance you might be causing harm in this way.

6. Micromanaging others

Nobody likes being micromanaged. Having a boss who stands over you, checking and changing every minor detail of a project is demotivating. It can lead to a drop in morale and hurt productivity — which can lead to staff turnover. To stop micromanaging, get better at delegating using CPORT, set clear expectations and ask your staff how they like to be managed. Treat people like grown ups and they will usually respond in the same way – you can read more about this in our blog about transactional analysis.

7. Breaking promises

From making ‘loose’ promises about career and salary progression when hiring someone, to breaking promises about getting back to people knowing that your workload makes it unlikely – the classic over-promising and under-delivering syndrome – means people won’t trust or respect you. One manager said, “It’s only when I received direct feedback from a number of people that I was known as not trustworthy that I cleaned up my act. It has taken me years to rebuild people’s confidence.” If that’s you, make “under promise and over deliver” your mantra instead.

The thing about hidden weaknesses and blind spots like these is that they can become a huge barrier to success, but by their very nature we are not sufficiently aware of them. Others may see them, but they either assume you already know about it or choose not to tell you.

If you want to grow as a manager and a leader you need to recognize that self-awareness leads to better performance and better relationships with others. It might not always be weaknesses, you might have strengths you weren’t aware of too.

Listening and asking for feedback are two ways to shine a light on blind spots. Photo by Parabol on Unsplash

How to find your blind spots and work on them

Five ways to increase your self-awareness

• Ask for feedback – formally or informally

There is a brilliant way to begin shedding light on your blind spots, but it takes courage: ask others to share what they know or think about you. You might get this formally in a performance review or in a 360 review. 360’s done well can be very powerful. They can generate rich feedback from a variety of colleagues and can lead to properly good development conversations. 360 review software such as our tool AdviceSheet will help you find your weaknesses and greatest strengths, and is one of the easiest ways to gather rich feedback on your self and your team.

• Observe other people’s reactions to you

55% of communication is through body language, so scrutinizing how others react to you when speaking with them will give you important clues as to how you’re being received. Look at their eye contact, posture and facial expressions. If they hold your gaze, turn towards you and even mirror your own actions, then it’s a good sign. A closed stance, or looking anywhere else other than directly at you, means you may not have them on side.

• Get a coach

A good coach can help you gain self-awareness, achieve your objectives, unlock your potential, and act as a sounding board. If you’ve been wondering about hiring a coach, here’s a useful flow chart to help you with the decision.

• Ask your boss to help

Asking for help can be one of the most difficult things to do at work, but not asking can do you much more harm than good. Hint: it’s always better to talk to them in person.

• Start listening more

Effective listening is the greatest motivational gift you can offer. So turn that advantage on yourself. Listening well means interpreting new information without making it fit your pre-existing narrative. It means reining in your impulses and challenging your own assumptions. It’s tricky. You might need a devil’s advocate in your team who can challenge you!

Need help uncovering your blind spots?

Finding your blind spots and working with them is one of the best things you can do to help you become more effective.
If you need some help with working on this – get in touch, at ThenSomehow we help you and your team build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

And if you’d like to discuss how we can help your team deal with blind spots, get in touch here.

The post How to spot your blind spots: 7 common leadership behaviours that hold you back appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Why We Feel Like Imposters at Work

Whether you’re feeling like an imposter because you are making a lot of mistakes, or because you’re not keeping up with the number of jobs on your plate, or because you’re losing confidence and thinking you’re not good enough to manage your team/ make that speech/ close the sale (ie “imposter syndrome”) – you’re not alone.

Most of us have these feelings from time to time.

You’re not alone — even astronauts feel it

There’s a great story about a man who went to a conference and introduced himself to the guy in the seat next to him: “Hello, I’m Neil,” he says, “what’s your name?” “Oh, my name’s Neil too,” comes the reply.

The second Neil says, “I don’t know… everyone here seems so capable and qualified. They’ve done all these studies and stuff. I just feel like a real imposter.” And the first Neil replies, “Neil, you were the first man to walk on the moon. I think you’ve earned your seat!”

(Yes it was Neil Armstrong in the seat next to him.)

The point of the story is that even Neil Armstrong, a global household name, feels like an imposter sometimes.

3 Ways to Overcome Imposter Syndrome

The thing about imposter syndrome is – while your feelings are valid – it’s also fair to say that your version of the truth is fuzzy and you might have lost perspective on everything you’ve already achieved.

If you feel like you’re failing, here’s how to turn that around:
1. Reset your expectations
2. Change your mind about what constitutes success
3. Do things that help you feel in control

Here’s how to deal with imposter syndrome

Reset your expectations. Photo by Yasin Yusuf on Unsplash

1. Reset your expectations

• Have a short to do list
• Use buffer zones
• Lower the bar

Years ago when I was working in sales for a radio group, I’d make a to-do list on a Monday morning for all the things that I wanted to get done that day. Then the phone would ring, one of my team would have a problem, and so on and so on… and I would only start actioning my list on Friday. I felt like I was failing, but only because of the work I hadn’t taken into account such as email, interruptions, and all the unexpected stuff that happens.

If that sounds familiar, the way to deal with it is to set yourself up for success – that list you make on a Monday morning, make it your weekly list instead.

I was chatting to a client the other day and he told me how he makes this work, “I have a look at my calendar, and I plan one thing I want to get done that day. If I don’t have a lot on, I plan two or three things. But if it’s a busy day: only one thing.”

The point is to set yourself targets you can hit.

As a way of helping yourself do this, use buffer zones to limit your ambition: put a half an hour gap between everything in your diary – it means you’ll get two less meetings into your day. Not a bad thing because back-to-back meetings leave you with no room to think, have a comfort break, or a cup of tea. This isn’t lowering the bar. It’s being realistic instead of wildly ambitious.

2. Rethink your signs of success

A few months ago my co-director Katharine was anxious about her ceramics exhibition. She told me how a friend helped her reframe her expectations. Their conversation went something like this:

Her friend asked her, “What are your signs of success? …Is it how much money you make?”

“No, I don’t expect to make much money,” Katharine replied.

F: “So is it the number of people who come through the doors?”
K: “I would like lots of people but there’s not much I can do to control that. I’ve posted on Instagram and Facebook and sent out emails… I can’t do anything else.”

F: “So what you get is what you get… So what does success look like? …Does the exhibition look great?”
K: “Yes, it looks great.”

F: “Do people tell you how much they enjoyed it?”
K: “Yes, they do.”

F: “Do you sell anything?”
K: “I’m actually selling quite a few things.”

F: “Are the workshops you run as part of the exhibition successful?”
K: “Yes, they work.”

F: “Do people enjoy making the things they make?”
K: “Yes, they are really pleased and they say they feel much calmer and they’re proud of their work.”

F: “These sound like really good success measures. Yes?”
K: “Yes.”

F: “So…was it successful?”
K: “Err, Yes! ????”

One of the challenges when you work for an organisation is the number of demands on you – failing might be keeping saying yes to so many things that you can’t deliver on any of them. Success might be when you start to say no to some things. It’s worth reflecting on how many things you have said no to this week.

Ask yourself: what does success actually look like?

Can you re-define your signs of success?

It’s a game changer.

Do things that help you feel in control. Photo by Thomas Bormans on Unsplash

3. Do things that help you feel in control

If you feel like you’re failing or out of control – can you look at what’s going on? Try the Circles of influence exercise – the point of it is to help you realise you can’t control everything… so let go of the things out of your control, and focus instead on what you can do and what you can influence instead.

Stepping back and working out how much you have on – for example by using Project Mapping (that’s explained here) – and then looking at what is and isn’t in your control using circles of influence – both of those things are designed to help you feel in control again.

Need Help to Shift Your Mindset?

If you’re struggling with feeling like you’re failing and need some help, get in touch. At Then Somehow, we have tools and programmes that can help. Get in touch here.

The post How to deal with imposter syndrome appeared first on ThenSomehow.

In this 10-step guide to better culture in your workplace we cover:

1. How to work smarter not harder
2. How to avoid burnout
3. How to be better at project management
4. How to return to the office in the right way – a charter
5. How to get feedback that makes a difference
6. How to focus when you’re working from home (WFH)
7. How to trust your team when they’re working remotely
8. How to have better conversations with your team
9. How to be a better listener
10. How to overcome dysfunctions in your team

Read more below

1. Work smarter

If you work hard, but often find it hard to focus, or if you are expected to do more in less time (and often run out of time), or feel overwhelmed by competing demands and a tidal wave of email and other communications, it’s time you learned to work smarter.

Working smarter is the key to greater productivity, not working harder or longer. Working smarter boosts your effectiveness, your creativity, and saves you energy for the things that really matter like your friends and family.

We spent much of the last year creating online courses – including how to apply Inbox Zero, how to make space for your important projects, and how to prioritise – where you can learn simple yet powerful techniques that will help you change the way you work and become more productive.

How to boost productivity

Try out our free course for managers on Empowering Your Team with Circles of Influence, it could be particularly useful to help your team maintain a sense of control and agency at this most ambiguous time. See it here.

Our aim is that your way of working will never be the same again.

Interested in this? Read more on our courses page here

2. Avoid burnout

As workplaces become increasingly demanding and fast-paced, burnout – the complete mental, emotional, and often physical exhaustion brought on by long term work related stress – is a more serious and widespread issue than you might realise. Nearly seven in ten people experience burnout because of work at least some of the time.

One of the 5 key factors that correlate with burnout is lack of manager support. Employees who feel supported by their manager are about 70% less likely to experience burnout.

So as a manager what can you do about it? It may be that you’ll need to have a difficult conversation with a colleague, or work on resolving some dysfunctional culture together.

It may be that you’ll need to adopt new behaviours and processes.

Simple behaviour shifts to prevent team fatigue

Here’s 3 behaviour changes that can help your team deal with burnout:

• Getting clear about their priorities
• Helping them say no and set boundaries
• Changing and reframing mindsets

Interested in this? Read more on our post on burnout here.

Photo by Danie Franco on Unsplash

3. Get better at Project Management

Project management is hard. From brutal deadlines to constrained budgets, with the need to take care of many things at the same time, it is no surprise that getting a project completed on time and on budget is a challenge.

In fact, it turns out that only 2.5% of companies successfully complete 100% of their projects.

Why is this? Mainly because unexpected obstacles or events pop-up to derail and hamper the progress of the overall project. But also because good project managers don’t always have team members who understand how and why everything fits together – so project steps get missed or communication goes awry.

So how best to do it? We recommend thinking about this in 3 stages:

Before you start: set up for success

i. Before you start:

• ensure you have a common language and work to get everyone on the same page
• work out the plan and allocate roles together

During the project: adapt and communicate

ii. During the project:

• Consider being Agile
• Review and feedback on the go
• Going off track? Use the GROW method

After it ends: pause, reflect and learn

iii. After the project has finished:
All too often teams just crash from one project to the next without learning anything. If you don’t learn anything, next time people will perform in the same way, you’ll encounter the same frustrations, and you’ll get the same results.

Instead, if you pause at the end of a project to do an End of Project Wash Up and a Retrospective, you can ask your team: what did we learn?

It turns out that doing this makes a team great.

Interested in this? Read our post on project management here.

4. Return to work charter

Working remotely can be hard. As we start to return to our workplaces many organisations are blending remote and back-in-the-office working, but not all have figured out how to best make this work in practice, which could be a concern for people when they are looking to bosses and managers for guidance.

Questions every hybrid team should address

The questions to think about include:
1. What should you be doing when you’re remote and what should you be doing in the office?
2. How do meetings work if some people are in and some out?
3. How do you manage projects?
4. How often do people come into the office?
5. Just how important is it?

We’ve come up with 10 design principles to make dynamic and blended working better.

Interested in this? Read our post on returning to work here.

5. Get to the feedback that makes a difference

Obtaining employee feedback can be challenging but it is key to people’s development. Performance reviews may only represent one person’s point of view, so many organisations use 360 reviews to gather all round feedback.

The trouble with standard 360 reviews is that they’re usually based on number scores, but numbers reduce something complex and nuanced to something that seems definite and objective when it’s not.

And most of the dimensions explored in standard 360’s don’t actually reveal anything about a colleague’s true competencies or what it is like to work with them.

However, 360’s done well can be very powerful. The trick is to use narrative and not numbers, then you get really considered 360 reports that really help people develop themselves.

Why narrative feedback works better than numbers

In 2020/21 we built a tool to do this. Called AdviceSheet it has been used by teams at The University of Oxford, Bristol City Council, Metricell and Breathe. Breathe loved it so much they also added it to their marketplace of HR tools.

AdviceSheet surveys are easy to use, though they do take a little effort to take part in. Good questions are not necessarily easy to answer. You can’t knock out your feedback in five minutes. This is really important stuff and deserves considered attention.

Interested in this? Read our post on feedback here.

Photo by Christina Wocintechchat- on Unsplash

6. Stay focussed when you’re working from home

One of the hot issues of the moment is how to manage your focus and attention when you’re working from home.

Some people prefer working on their own and love the freedom from distractions and the ability to focus that WFH provides. Meanwhile, others find remote working feels lonely and makes it harder to concentrate.

Tips to improve concentration and motivation

Whichever group you or your colleagues fall into, here’s a summary of our tips for staying focussed and positive whilst working from home to use and share with your team:

1. Make sure your workspace is well defined
2. Let go of what you can’t control
3. If you’re distracted and can’t focus – try the Pomodoro Technique
4. Use your calendar to structure your day
5. Focus on what you can do

Interested in this? Read our post on working from home here.

7. Trust your team when they’re remote working

We often hear leaders and managers telling us their team is communicating better than ever because they are making much more of a conscious and deliberate effort to talk to each other.

Partly this was because people have to get their heads around working differently with their colleagues. In many cases, it works out fine and leads to more trust in the team.

However, it can also bring up tensions, when for example you trusted Jon to do the work, he didn’t do it and he stayed quiet in remote team meetings…

How to build visibility and accountability

One thing that helps solve these kinds of issues is to combine regular team check-ins with using planning tools such as Trello, or Microsoft Planner (inside Teams), to visually capture the work that people have on.

They’re a great way to encourage people to share their ideas on how they will approach a task and invite input from their colleagues, and we’ve seen that they help to build and maintain trust.

But building trust in a team is not just about tasks. Practising connecting builds trust too. Deliberately creating a social space where it’s not about work helps with this, as well as having mechanisms in place to help people communicate when they’re harder to reach.

Interested in this? Read our post on trusting your remote team here.

8. Have better conversations with your team

Despite how much time you spend in meetings, or how many plans you make, it can still be really hard to reach a common understanding and make anything happen. However, there are tools that help facilitate better conversations with your team, that’ll help you get things done.

Four tools to reach shared understanding

When so much depends on conversations, and when everyone interprets things differently, we recommend these four tools, they can really help – they’re all frameworks for the right kinds of conversations.

Team Canvas – a framework for a structured conversation that’s designed to bring everyone onto the same page. (Literally, because it’s done on a big sheet of paper.)

Expressive Drivers – a model that has four quadrants which identify four social styles: Analyticals, Drivers, Amiables, Expressives. Based on this, Expressive Drivers is a very simple profiling tool that gives you a colour to indicate your communication style.

Planning Poker – a quick and dirty tool for helping a group to reach agreement, especially if you can’t agree on something. It’s also fun.

Circles of Influence – created by Stephen Covey, it’s a great way to have conversations with your team as it helps people take responsibility, and thus be more proactive, productive and happier.

Interested in this? Read our post on tools for team conversations here.

Photo by CoWomen on Unsplash

9. Be a better listener and why it matters

Communication is a really important skill in the workplace. Pretty much everything you do – from initiating new projects to empowering staff, from sales calls to asking how team members are getting on – involves talking to someone else.

Of course, there’s never going to be 100% understanding of meaning – we’re all so different and each of us sees the world in such different ways – but we believe it’s worth striving for the best chance that someone else understands what you mean, or at least for that to emerge.

Why listening well is harder than it seems

One way to do that is to focus on your listening skills.

By becoming a better listener, you can improve your productivity, as well as your ability to influence, persuade and negotiate.

Try this: the Active Listening exercise

We have an exercise to practice listening and help you be a better listener – Active Listening.

Interested in this? Read our post on better listening here.

10. Overcome the 5 basic dysfunctions in a team

One of the key things we look at when we go into any organisation is team dynamics.

Especially the dynamics and patterns in the leadership team. Because these patterns cascade down the organisation, causing all sorts of effects. If the leadership team is high performing, all well and good. But if they’re not, it can usually be traced back to the relationships between team members.

Business writer, Patrick Lencioni has a model that explains why relationship dynamics in leadership teams are so important.

It’s a model we refer to a lot.

What are the five dysfunctions of a team?

According to Lencioni, there are five basic dysfunctions that teams commonly struggle with. These cause confusion, misunderstanding, negative morale and can impact entire organisations.

The dysfunctions are:

1. Lack of trust
2. Fear of conflict
3. Lack of commitment
4. Avoidance of accountability
5. Inattention to results

If you can get better at developing skills to counter the dysfunctions, and change the patterns and the problems, you will build confidence and capability, become much more effective, better at collaborating, and your organisation will benefit.

What happens when you overcome them

It’s a slow process, but it’s worth the effort and can yield big results.

Interested in this? Read our post on overcoming team dysfunctions here.

Need support to shift what’s stuck?

If you need help with working on any of this – get in touch, at ThenSomehow we help you and your team build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your team, get in touch here.

The post How to improve workplace culture: 10 practical steps for remote and hybrid teams appeared first on ThenSomehow.

The likelihood is that your team already has one project on the go, if not two or three.

But even if you’re using a linear Waterfall approach to project management, it’s a much better idea for everyone to pause to mark the end of a project and review what happened.

Then you can ask yourself and your team: what did we learn?

Why learning after a project matters

All too often, teams just crash from one project to the next without learning anything. And if you don’t learn anything, people will perform in the same way, you’ll encounter the same frustrations, and you’ll get the same results.

Even if the results are great, you could be missing an opportunity to make them even better.

What is an end-of-project review (or wash-up)?

Reflection and review at the end of a project is an idea borrowed from the Agile method of project management. Agile does reviews very well and recommends two separate and very different kinds of reflection.

The aim of the review or wash-up meeting is to look at things such as what did we achieve? Did we do all the things we said we’d do? What’s still in the pipeline? What have we learned that we need to respond to?

It is very task orientated. It’s about what you did, how much progress you made against your plan and how good it was from a technical perspective.

In the agile approach to project management, this is done before you decide what you’re going to do in the next sprint, because it’s a key tool for deciding what you need to do next.

Retrospectives make a team great

The end-of-sprint wash-up includes what you did, by contrast a retrospective is about how you did it. This separation of retrospectives from end-of-sprint reviews is interesting.

Separating out the work from how you did the work in this way is important.

Say what you like about techies – and Agile was originally designed for tech projects – at the end of a project they actually make a huge effort to talk about their experience of working together. They talk about how they communicate. They talk about how they felt, about their interactions, the whole dynamic of the team. They give each other feedback.

It’s very powerful. And useful for project management.

Talking about these things isn’t necessarily easy, but there’s much learning to be had from doing it and it’s a great way to build continuous improvement into your organisation.

We encourage our clients to do them even if it’s not a tech project, because great teams are born from it.

“what makes great teams are the ones who are confident enough to talk about this stuff.”

Why retrospectives aren’t just for tech teams

Retrospectives force you to pause, talk about what could be better, think about ways that you can improve and then apply that to the work going forward.

Then you’re building a culture where feedback happens, where learning happens, where you are iterating processes. It’s intelligent, it’s wise. It’s built in.

How to run a retrospective

Here’s how we structure retrospectives:

1. 1. Start with a check-in to set the tone
   2. Clarify the purpose of the meeting
   3. Explain the process – we suggest using a simple matrix with four questions (see below for more formats you could use):
      • What went well?
      • What could have been better?
      • What questions have you got about it?
      • What recommendations would you make for us to take forward, or practical steps?

A simple structure for running your retrospective

1. Everybody writes their answers to these questions on sticky notes.
2. Put the sticky notes up on a whiteboard or a wall – using quadrants for each question – and gather round them (or use an online whiteboarding tool like Miro or Mural).
3. Do a sorting exercise – look at the clusters and review what it means together. For example, does everyone agree on what went well? If someone says something didn’t go so well, when everyone else thought it did, have a conversation about it.
4. Go through each quadrant in the matrix, have the necessary conversations and answer any questions that people have.
5. Move on to recommendations: what concrete proposals could you implement to try and ease problems that came up?
6. And perhaps within this, there might be subcategories: What about relationship dynamics? Was anything edgy? Was anything particularly good?

Depending on the scenario you might choose to find ways of anonymising this feedback using a whiteboard tool, a form or a survey before the session. Then bringing it out in the meeting.

What could go wrong?

There are so many benefits to introducing retrospectives to your team. However people often have concerns and might avoid trying them because of a fear they’ll feel awkward or it’ll go wrong.

There are probably two worst case scenarios here, and both have silver linings:

1. If people are reticent, don’t contribute much, or stick to safe subjects.
Acknowledge it and suggest that it’s limiting your progress.

Then ask what ideas people have for how you could do things differently next time. So rather than forcing the issue, you can all get involved in how you might be more comfortable with it in future.

If I was leading that group, I might do some homework and check-in with people afterwards to try to find out why it was weird in that session.

2. What if someone gets angry, or upset or has another extreme response?
If this happens you could try…

i. Pause
ii. Ask everyone to write down how they’re feeling in the moment, why they’re feeling that, and what triggered it.
iii. Invite all to agree to listen.
iv. Go round and ask everyone to say what is going on for them using an I statement (so it doesn’t get into blame or attacks.)
v. Then you could explore what questions people have about the different perspectives.
vi. Ask people for proposals for what to do next.
vii. Commit to some of these.

This process might derail the retrospective but it could be an essential diversion, as you’ll end up dealing with an elephant in the room or dissolving a tension that might otherwise block everyone.

As a result you’ll have helped to build trust in the group, and you can always come back to the original conversation at a later date.

It’s worth saying that retrospectives might not be brilliant the first time you do them. They get better with practice. And of course, the more you practice them, other things get better too. It doesn’t mean that difficult things get easy, but at least you’ll have created a forum for raising issues and dealing with them.

Plus it makes it easier to give feedback generally because it normalises it, and that’s helpful in one-to-one situations too.

Retrospective formats: find the one that fits your team

Ways to do a retrospective

As well as “What went well, what could have been better” there are dozens of other ideas and formats – try googling retrospective frameworks. These are our favourites:

1. Start, Stop, Continue
Focus the team on processes, and form new team habits by defining what to start, stop and continue doing.

2. Make the Boat Go Faster
Define the vision for the team and identify any problems along the way.

3. The 4L’s: Liked, Learned, Loathed, Longed For
Look at the current situation from a factual perspective.

It’s good to try different structures, or mix them up. Some people find some of the questions harder than others.

Tips to make retrospectives successful

What’s important

It works best if you allow a good chunk of time to do the retrospective – say a whole morning or afternoon, just spending half an hour on a review meeting won’t dig up the gold.

You don’t necessarily need to use a structured approach to do a retrospective. It’s not disastrous if you don’t use a tool nor follow a predefined format. Those are available to make it easier to have the conversation, to allow you to approach it with some sense of security and safety. This makes it easier for your team to be honest and open.

What’s important is that it’s not about blaming. It’s about learning and talking about whether you need to change anything to make things better, if at all.

Extra tips for running great retrospectives

What to do when you’re all remote

There are several good tools for running retrospectives online. Try Miro, Mural or Retrium. Doing it online is a different experience to doing it in the real world. But in some ways it’s better too.

Make sure someone owns the process

It’s really helpful if someone owns the process. Make a commitment as a group that you are going to do this, and then have somebody be responsible for making it happen. That might be the project manager, the product owner or an external facilitator.

The size of your team doesn’t matter

The bigger your team, the more important it is to do a structured review, though it’s still relevant even with tiny teams. There’s a cliche about small teams: two people work well together, three people is tight but you can handle it. But with four people work starts to fray: you suddenly find the dynamic of four is such that it’s hard to keep everyone aligned and clear without someone feeling like they’re being taken for granted, or being left out of the loop.

So once you start getting bigger than three people, you will find it much easier if you have an agreed structure, stick to it. And if it doesn’t flow, use a tool, learning and iterating as you go.

Think about power dynamics

The boss almost always has the most to say in a review but it’s best if they don’t always run the meeting otherwise they’ll dominate. Instead rotate it amongst the team.

In addition, you want feedback and input from the people that have been most involved in doing the work so you don’t necessarily want the big boss or the sponsor of the project at the review meeting. Have a separate conversation with them.

Would you want to talk about all the things that you messed up in front of the boss? You may not. You just want the boss to be pleased that you got it out the door, she doesn’t need to know the rest of it. But the team needs to know. So keep it casual to get honest feedback.

Real-world examples of project retrospectives

Here’s some examples
At Then Somehow we often operate in very small teams to produce things quickly. When we do reviews, they’re incredibly useful. For example when we were building the first version of AdviceSheet – there were three of us in that team – to stop progress getting stuck it was important that we talked to express the frustration of our different working styles.

For another project last year where we piloted webinars for a large organisation, there were five of us on the team, plus two or three people on the client side. It was really important we had wash-up meetings at the end of each pilot phase. Because the client was there and we had a good relationship, we were able to say things such as: “you guys are incredibly slow at feeding back,” which they acknowledged and accepted.

Because we spoke about it, we were able to come up with actions to improve the process:

• we included the client in the project update emails
• we warned the client when we were going to send them something that we needed a quick response to, in order to avoid bottlenecks.

That was enough to make a big difference.

The long-term value of regular reviews

Your projects will benefit

End of project reviews are a way of bringing learning behaviour into your organisation or a team. It’ll benefit your projects and you can also use them as a way to talk about things that really matter. You’ll build trust, you’ll enable healthy conflict, and you’ll be able to acknowledge the good stuff and the bad stuff. They’re also an opportunity to praise people and thank them.

Then you can move on and do better work together.

How ThenSomehow can help

If you’re struggling with projects and project management, and need some help, get in touch. At ThenSomehow, we have tools and programmes that can help. Get in touch here.

The post Project Management Part 3: After delivery, how to review, learn, and improve appeared first on ThenSomehow.