The Leadership Grind meetup held a lightning talk night on 15 August 2018. A few of us from the team went along and took away some learnings and insights.

Here’s what stood out for me on the night.

Recognition and Feedback

It’s great to see Xero performing internal research on it’s own ability to give recognition to employees. Not many companies travel down this road of retrospection and are comfortable with sharing the results and learnings.

Certainly the topic closely resonates with my work. Recognition is a core part motivation because it plays to the feeling of mastery, one of the core intrinsic motivators for doing great work. This is another tool for fostering an awesome team environment.

This talk triggered my own curiosity:

• How do we want to give feedback to each other within the team? Within the organisation?
• How do we want to give recognition? And receive recognition? And what sorts of things do we want to recognise?

The idea that opportunity can be a form of reward was something I haven’t paid attention to before. It would be a valuable exercise to inspect what things we’re holding onto and currently not giving others the opportunity.

Moving forward:

1. Include discussion on feedback and recognition in team start-up. Can be discussed when coming up with team norm / charter.
2. Ask the team — what would make it fun and rewarding for you to work in this team?

Gradients of Agreement

This talk introduced another model of thinking about agreements. We’ve always had the struggle for making decisions in a larger group, and we’ve often resorted to reducing the group to few ‘core’ people we identify. Reflecting on it now, the consensus forced people into a binary state - either you agreed or didn’t agree.

Having a gradient for agreement means that we’re able to reflect more closely to the different levels of agreements that are present in humans.

Another dimension that the speaker introduced was the impact of the topic in discussion. This changes the level of alignment you need in an agreement.

Low impact agreements include those that are:

• Not many people are affected by it
• It’s only temporary
• The consequence of the decision is minor

Low impact agreements do not require as strong of an alignment as high impact agreements. From my experience, this is a dimension that often gets forgotten about. We fall into the societal norm of trying to include everyone as equals in the decision making process, so we end up aiming to have consent rather than consensus.

So how would you go about applying this?

1. Ask and explain about consensus — it’s a level of agreement necessary for the decision, does not mean everyone needs to be in perfect agreement.
2. Ask the group what level of agreement is needed. Explain with examples: Choosing a place for lunch vs choosing a technology to work with for the next 10 years.
3. Write down the proposal clearly — this is strongly recommended to clarify any differences in understanding because of verbal communication.
4. Poll the group. Interpret the results depending on the level of agreement necessary.
5. If it’s not enough, focus the discussion on the people who are least in agreement. Ask them what needs to change to allow them to agree more.
6. Repeat the polling.

Moving forward:

1. For us, at the next group decision, introduce this.