170:Taking Personal Responsibility for What You Want

//We know that people want to be happy and fulfilled at work and that healthy organizations want to provide an environment that allows people to feel happy and fulfilled. The organization’s culture, the leadership style, and the individual employee all play a role in whether or not that desire becomes a reality. 

What aspects of our work environment do we determine directly and which ones can we influence?  In this episode, we address some of the crucial dynamics that impact employee engagement.

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Transcript

Andrea: Hey there! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Rosanne, would you like to introduce our topic for today?

Rosanne: Sure!  Well, we know that people want to be happy and that they want to be fulfilled at work.  And healthy organizations want to provide a work environment that allows people to feel happy and fulfilled, but many people in organizations struggle to accomplish that goal.  So how do we know that, Andrea?

Andrea: Well, the fact of the matter is we see it all the time.  I mean, clients that we work with, organizations that we’ve been in…  I mean, this is a consistent problem for organizations and for people who are working in them because you’re right.  People want to feel good about the work that they’re doing.

They want to feel good at work, but there are so many different factors involved with people’s satisfaction that it’s a difficult thing to really tackle and do well.  I mean, even organizations who really focus on creating an empowering work environment, they even have a hard time making sure that everybody feels fully engaged.

Rosanne:  Certainly we all feel that right now with things that are going on, but that’s not unique to this time.  Why is that?  What do you see?

Andrea: Right.  I mean, you’re right.  Right now we’re in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.  And hopefully there are plenty of people listening to this episode once it’s all over, and you’re looking back on that going, “Oh yeah, I don’t even want to hear about it,” but…

Rosanne: Right?!

Andrea: Nobody does.  But the way I see it, there are three different kind of factors in employee engagement.

There’s the organization’s culture, the supervisor leader, and the individual employee. So the culture can be awesome.  I mean, the culture can be fun.

It can be engaging.  There can be a lot of dialogue and conversations where really every voice does matter, and the leaders really do want that to come across.  They want people to be empowered, and we’ve worked with organizations that feel that way.  And yet, if an individual leader communicates using fear and shame, shutting people down, it’s going to be hard for individual employees to speak up.

But then when an organization or culture and  the leader are aligned – even if leadership is completely aligned with it – really, the individual employees can be carrying all kinds of wounds, personal baggage, experiences that they’ve had in other organizations or, who knows, maybe from childhood that still impact them now in whether or not they believe their voice matters, and whether or not they really do have agency and can make choices, whether or not they have power  to change things for themselves.

So all three need to be addressed for this to happen.

Rosanne:  Can you talk more about some of the ways that we do that when we work with teams, some of the ways we address those?

Andrea: Sure.  Really, we start with working with clients who actually want that.  If there is at least that desire… Even if there’s not an understanding of how to do that, if there’s at least a really clear desire that, “This is what we want.  We really do want everybody to feel engaged.”  And in order to feel engaged, they’re going to need to feel like they have agency here, that their voice matters, which means, “What I do and say matters. It matters to the organization. It matters to my own happiness and fulfillment.” 

So if that’s what the organization wants, then we can work with them and help them get there.  One of the things that we do is to make sure to get honest feedback.  Then we have training programs, and embedded in all these training programs is the opportunity to hear  from employees.

What is it that is a struggle for you? Is it something that has to do with what you know in your head? Is it that you don’t totally have clarity on some things, you need to learn something or get clear on something? Is it something that’s going on inside of your heart? Like, you really don’t care, you don’t understand why it matters, that emotional engagement?  Or is it something that’s going on with hands?  So, is it something that you just simply need to learn the skill? 

Rosanne:  All of what we do starts with the premise that everyone has gifts and the world needs the gifts that we have.  And so having leadership that wants to bring that to the fore is crucial to what we do, but then also having everybody on the team recognize that they have something to give.

And not just being, I think, worried about taking home a paycheck – although that’s part of it, certainly – but all of the things that you were talking about.

Andrea: Yeah.  And so getting that employee feedback is super important when we’re doing any kind of training program.

Rosanne: So, one of the things that we kind of wanted to do today with the series that we’re setting up was we were talking about what are the things that get in the way of people feeling happy and fulfilled at work?  What are the things that have people feeling powerless?  And as you and I were discussing it ahead of time, one of the things that you talked about was understanding the difference between sphere of influence and sphere of responsibility.

Would you say more about that?

Andrea: Sure. This is a concept that I think is really foundational to our work.  We all have a sphere of influence, and that sphere of influence goes out farther than we can possibly imagine because what we do has ripple effect on others.  And so my influence can reach so far and wide, but we also don’t have control over that kind of influence.

So, it’s exciting because you know that what you do matters, and it’s going to impact somebody else.  But it’s also difficult to track sometimes.  And one of the more important things that we talk about is the sphere of responsibility.  So if your sphere of influence is this big, your sphere of responsibility is this big – it’s much smaller.

So, I’m holding my hands out wide and then putting them together pretty, pretty small. So that sphere of responsibility then is simply the things for which we can actually take responsibility.  I might feel like I need to take responsibility for things that aren’t actually mine.  I can only truly take responsibility for myself, for how I show up, for what I provide, for the learning that I accomplish so that I can do a better job for the way that I communicate with people, and most importantly, for getting centered.  So that the way that I show up is from a centered place where my voice is most authentic and most influential.

And so that sphere of responsibility is super important, but the only thing we can really be responsible for is ourselves, getting centered, and then what we’re going to do as a result of being centered.

Rosanne:  And sometimes that feels like a small thing, but actually there’s a lot more power in taking responsibility for yourself than sometimes we give credit to.  I think when we get caught in feeling like everything is out of control, feeling like a victim in a situation at work, or that kind of thing a lot of times that actually does come from not being clear on the responsibility that we can take. 

Andrea:  Yeah, absolutely.  I don’t always realize that the things that I don’t like, I can actually do something about.

So, I’m really excited about sharing Carson Tate’s interview with you next week because she’s the author of Own It. Love It. Make It Work.: How to Make Any Job Your Dream Job.  And it’s a very empowering conversation, it’s a very empowering book for people who really want to feel happy and fulfilled in their work, but maybe they don’t and they’re not exactly sure how to do it. 

So, we talk about that in a lot more detail there.  But it’s important to realize that you have a lot more power than you even know to be able to make a difference wherever you are, whether it be at work or anywhere, and that the skills that we talk about – the heartset, the mindset that we talk about at Voice of Influence – that’s what it’s all about.

It’s about, how do you have and wield that power that you do have?  How do you build it up?  How do you build relational capital, you know, the ability to have these conversations and make a difference with what you’re doing and what you’re saying?

So thank you so much for being with us today.  I hope that you will join us next week for our conversation with Carson Tate.  Your voice matters.  Let’s make it matter more.