Flexability | Lived experience and high-performance teams

The other day I watched a movie that got me thinking about that phrase that we in the diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) sector use so often – “lived experiences”.

You know something’s become jargon when you use it all the time – yet, when you sit down and think about it, you can’t come up with an accurate alternative definition for it!

I did some research. I like the Cambridge definition of lived experiences: “the things that someone has experienced themselves, especially when these give the person a knowledge or understanding that people who have only heard about such experiences do not have”.

In the DEI sector, there is a lot of talk about managers and business leaders working to understand the lived experiences of the people in their teams. This is something our grandparents would have described as walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, and there’s a lot to be said about not judging someone before you know their lived experience well.

The thing is, how do you do that? I confess, I don’t have a clear answer.

What I do know is that the exercise of trying to understand someone’s lived experience is worthwhile, even when it’s not done perfectly. For those of us who want to manage high-performance teams, getting to know each individual in the team and what makes them tick is integral to ensuring that they thrive at work. When individuals don’t thrive at work, you don’t get the very best out of them. Simple.

When managers and other business leaders impose strategies, policies and processes without thinking about – and, even more importantly, asking about – how they will affect individual team members given their lived experience, they can chip away at individuals’ levels of engagement. Chip away enough, and you’ll be working with someone who is completely disengaged.

How do you build a ‘trust space’?

The million-dollar question is: how do you get people, especially individuals from groups that are used to being “othered”, to share the details of their personal lives so you can get a full picture of their lived experience?

One way that I know works is to be brave and share first – be vulnerable, in other words. You have to be mindful, when doing this, that your sharing is viewed as an “I’m happy to go first” conversation-starter and not as a way of shutting down the conversation – you know what they say about the road to hell …

For this conversation-starter, you do need to pick something about yourself that makes you socially vulnerable. Are you a single dad? A black professor? A queer sports captain? Find something about your experience that conveys your vulnerability and then keep your story short before inviting reciprocation.

For this to work, every member of the team needs to feel as though they are in a safe space, so that they have the courage to share. Most workplaces fail at this, often because assumptions are made without questions being asked. It's so easy to resort to sending out a survey, but that’s generally not a great idea. Surveys lack nuance and don’t form a “trust space”.

Also, it’s best to get these conversations going when there isn’t the stress of, for example, introducing a new policy, so that the trust and openness are already there. Then it will be far easier to get honest reactions to a proposed policy.

There is a lot of research available on how diversity increases a team’s effectiveness. Workplaces really do benefit from all the varied perspectives emanating from each member’s particular lived experience.

For the kind of sharing that is required if managers are to know each member of their team’s lived experience as much as possible, there must be trust – what business author Charles Feltman defines as “choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person's action”. Not easy, I know, especially if you have bought into the idea that managers must be strong and decisive.

Worth it, though, because trust is the bedrock on which high-performance teams are built.

B.R.A.V.I.N.G

Doing all this thinking, I found myself turning to Brené Brown, the researcher known for her work on vulnerability, leadership and shame. As Brown says, building trust takes care and time.

As a manager or business leader, you need to prove your trustworthiness, and you can only do that by being brave – or, in Brown-speak, braving. It’s her acronym for how to build trust. Here’s what each letter stands for …

First you must set boundaries (the B in braving), making clear what is okay and what is not, and why.

Next you must prove your reliability – do what you say you will do. To get this right, you must know your limitations so that you don’t over-promise and find yourself unable to deliver.

Brown says the next word from the acronym is hugely important. It’s accountability, which means quickly owning up to mistakes, apologizing and making amends. Then comes the word vault – you must act like a vault, never sharing information or experiences that are not yours to share. Your team needs to know that information given in confidence stays in that vault.

By now the next word won’t surprise you – integrity. This is the act of choosing courage over comfort; opting for what’s right over what is fun, fast or easy; and practicing your values, not just speaking about them.

Then there’s nonjudgment, or being able to ask for what you need and allowing others to do the same without judging them for their needs, and, finally, generosity – extending the most generous interpretation to other people’s intentions, words and actions.

So, go on, get braving!