Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders - April 2022
Welcome to the April 2022 edition of Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders, your monthly leadership learning blog.
Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders will take a deeper look into each of the Friday Shares from LinkedIn and build on them, as a supportive learning resource for all leaders.
As a Purple Sky Consulting subscriber, you get first access to Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders. You can access previous Purple Sky articles and resources through the open access Purple Sky Thinking pages or through these members only pages.
A big thank you and welcome to the new subscribers…here goes some #purpleskythinking
Friday Share 30 - “Psychological Safety - When you have it; When you don’t” - Adam Grant
Enabling psychological safety is critical to a high performing team and as the Leader, this should be a top priority. How you behave, act, respond and hold others to account will shape the level of psychological safety felt by your team.
This helpful summary from Adam Grant looks at the behaviours and beliefs you can expect from those who do or don’t have psychological safety.
Knowing how best to approach and develop psychological safety is an important foundation for who you want to be as a leader. Understanding the role psychological safety plays in performance, wellbeing and the culture of your team and wider organisation.
This article “9 Strategies to Create Psychological Safety at Work” from Shana Bosler, based on the work of Amy Edmondson is a great place for you to start considering psychological safety and what this means for you.
Activity - Based on the behaviours and beliefs you see on display from your team, do you feel they have psychological safety?
Capture what you think you see currently
For the next month, be deliberate about the attention you pay to the behaviours and belief on display
What is your conclusion, do you believe that your team are operating and acting in a way that suggested they have psychological safety?
What is contributing to your conclusion?
Based on the 9 strategies suggested above, which are your priority areas to enable psychological safety for your team?
Consider talking to your team about this topic and get some feedback from them in terms of how they feel about some of the contributors to psychological safety. You may also want to consider whether you feel you have psychological safety and whether that is contributing to where your team are.
Friday Share 31 - “The Promises of Giants - I promise to take care of mind and body” - John Amaechi
This clip from the fantastic John Amaechi OBE sharing some key points from one of the chapters of his new book “The Promises of Giants”. It is a great book (or listen for me) and really captures the mission for those who want to be great leaders. This may be doing myself out of a job but I can’t recommend highly enough that book!
The theme of Chapter 6 is a leader accepting the need to take care of themselves and John using the phrase “you can’t pour from an empty cup”. You can’t give of yourself to others, who really need you, if you have nothing or not enough to give. Taking care of yourself isn’t selfish, it is essential so that you can be the best for you but also for others.
Activity - What are you doing to #Fillyourcup?
Consider how full your cup is?
What helps you keep your cup full or at least topped up?
Are you talking about this, especially with those in your team who lead others?
How are you keeping the promise to look after your body and mind?
Set 3 actions to support you in committing to that promise, capture these and review your progress. What difference has it made committing to those actions? Consider sharing your story with the team.
Bereavement
Supporting those in your team experiencing loss
You’ll notice that there are only 2 Friday Shares for March, there should be 3. The reason there isn’t 3 is because the week that a #FridayShare was due, I experienced a significant loss. I took the decision to take care of myself for a few days and rather than stress about creating content that week, I accepted that I couldn’t.
Now that I’m putting this edition of Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders together, I wanted to add in something that may be useful. You might not need it right now, but I think that as a leader a positive way to respond to challenging and personal moments is to be prepared. If you consider in advance the best way for you to respond when faced with something unplanned and potentially emotional, this should be a support and comfort.
There aren’t a huge amount of resources directed as Leaders and how best to navigate this sensitive topic as a leader, but this article from the team at whatsyourgrief.com is very helpful place to start with other resources on the rest of the website: Grief Support vs. Comfort (whatsyourgrief.com)
Activity - Get prepared by understanding the role you will play if someone in your team experiences a loss. Think about how you want to show up and use the resources shared to help you to prepare.
See you in May
I hope you’ve found the topics and resources shared in this month’s Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders useful.
I’d love to hear how you are using it and also if there are any topics that you’d like covered in future editions.
If you do have any feedback or ideas you’d like to share please email me at: anwen@purpleskyconsulting.co.uk