Connie Noonan Hadley: Loneliness, Psychological Safety, Team Effectiveness, AI | Work 20XX Ep33

English Transcript
Connie Noonan Hadley: Loneliness, Psychological Safety, Team Effectiveness, AI | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep33

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Jeff Frick:
Hey. Welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here coming to you for another episode of ‘Work 20XX’. We turn the calendar to 2025. I don't believe it got here so fast. Well, we're excited to have our next guest. She's been an expert in the field, both academically and writing for a lot of institutions and great articles and research. So she's joining us all the way from Boston through the magic of the internet. It's Connie Noonan Hadley. She is the Founder and Chief Scientist at the Institute for Life at Work, and also an Associate Professor at Boston University writes a lot for Harvard Business Review. Connie, great to see you.

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Thank you so much. Great to see you. And good to be here.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. Thanks for thanks for coming on. So you've been at this for a while and most recently, congratulations. You had a cover story, on the Harvard Business Review on loneliness at work. How did you get involved with loneliness? We think about loneliness in terms of mental health frequently. But I don't know that it always comes up in the context of work. So what is special about loneliness and work, and what are some of the things you found in your research?

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Well thank you, yes. One colleague referred to me as the ‘Queen of Loneliness’ which is not really the title I was going for, but, and also, I want to acknowledge, that yes, it was a great thrill to have our article featured on the cover of Harvard Business Review's magazine. That was research done with Sarah Wright, who is an amazing Professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. And so I don't want to take full credit for that. What we were really trying to figure out is not just why work loneliness happens, and we know it's happening quite a lot. So Gallup's latest survey of the global workforce said about 20% of people in the workforce are feeling lonely, on a regular basis. So we know it's happening a lot. So we wanted to find out more about why. More importantly, because I spend so much time talking to managers, I wanted to find out, like, what can we do about it? What should we be telling companies to do to address this issue? And Sarah has been studying loneliness at work for a long time, more in the scholarly literature. And so it was a great combination between the two of us. You know, me spending a lot more time talking to managers and her spending so much more time thinking about it from a theoretical standpoint. And we, it’s our second study together. We've also written two book chapters on work loneliness. So we've really got a thing going, I guess we’re the ‘Queens of Loneliness’, actually, I shouldn't take this sole title there. [laughter]

Jeff Frick:
So why does it matter? I mean, I'm sure the cynics out there will be going, you know, you're at work, you're getting paid to be there. One thing to be lonely at home, but. Why is there an expectation that you shouldn't be lonely? Or why is loneliness an emotion that somebody at work should be even worried about?

Connie Noonan Hadley:
It's a great and valid question, and I do get that a lot. So I'll come at it though, by answering it how I really got into studying loneliness was not direct, at all. I actually started off studying people who love their jobs and why. And then my second project when I was in on my doctoral program was, how do people do really, really tough jobs and not burnout? And the answer to both of those questions, how do you love your job and how do you avoid burnout? Turned out to be having a really strong connection and social support system at work with your colleagues. And that really was the focus of my research for a while was so how do we create more teams and organizations that have this kind of interwebbing among the coworkers and so I could tell it was good for outcomes that mattered when it came to job satisfaction and lack of burnout. But over time, what we've realized is those social support networks also really make a difference for the bottom line. They help with creating more innovative solutions. They help with reducing conflict. They help with inclusion. They help with creating a more meritocracy. Like, you know, there's like a better system than just worrying about organizational politics or other things that may be, a little bit, below the surface. And so having a strong interconnected workforce is really good for the bottom line and for each individual employee. So then the problem, of course, is that, well, It’s not consistent across workplaces that this is in place. And there are many, many people. And this was before the pandemic, we were studying this that don't feel that way. And they were kind of like this hidden, invisible population of suffers. And that was a real problem for me. You know, I wanted to help bring this into the light, normalize the fact that it's happening because it's still really stigmatized. And do something about it. Again, let's, you know, really. So I'm really trying to always take this action orientation in my work.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right. So I’ve pulled a couple of the myths, that you had listed in the article that I wanted to highlight. One was that, you know, loneliness, can be solved by in-person work. You say that's not necessarily true. Teams by themselves will solve loneliness. You're like, no, that's not necessarily true. And that loneliness is a personal problem, not an organizational problem. And I would imagine a lot of people would grab on to that one because I think, you know, their first inclination might be, this is you, this isn't us. So how or what did you find out in terms of dispelling some of those myths?

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Well, the first one on the remote work, issue. This, you know, I think it's been unfairly maligned, that, you know, remote work is the problem here. And it's way too simple of an explanation. There are far more factors involved in that and I was just reviewing some of the data across multiple studies. And even in my own research. The answer is not five days in the office, in person is what leads to lower loneliness. You do see some perils associated with five day remote work if the people are never in person, but hybrid work seems to be like a really good compromise, you know, in terms of workplace loneliness. But in some of my studies, I even see that the in-person folks are less connected than those who are remote, even the ones who are fully remote. So it's, it's variable. And the myths we were trying to dispel was that it's like x equals, you know, or X will determine Y. Remote work will determine loneliness. That's just not true. Nor will in-person work determine connectivity. It's more than that. So that was myth number one.

The second one about teams not being the answer is based on some earlier research I did with Mark Mortensen out of INSEAD’s Business School and we have been studying teams for a long time, team effectiveness just in general. And, we were just really surprised that so many people who are working on teams were feeling lonely and disconnected from their colleagues, even on their own team. And that was a puzzle to us because we thought, well, at least the team is going to provide that level of connection. And what we found is that's not always the case. And a lot of it’s because of how we design teams these days. They're designed in such a way that they really aren’t promoting long term connections, or even the amount of time that and opportunity that people need to get to know each other. So when you think about like an agile team, for example, that’s like you know, maybe 2 or 3 weeks long, you can develop some bonds from an intense work project in a short amount of time. I'm not saying that, but if you want to have like a sustained relationship with people, that just may not be sufficient, especially if you have somebody who's more reticent to not as gregarious, not as open to others, they need more time to warm up. And other things like just the fact that we're staffing people on team on multiple teams at once. Mark [Mortensen] studies multi team membership. And again that makes a lot of sense from an efficiency standpoint. But it just means that you're constantly scattered. You know, it's like having just so many different people that you're trying to stay connected with. And it can really erode your ability to invest in those in those connections. So that's what's on the team front.

And then finally this notion of it's an individual problem is one that we hear a lot, particularly from managers who don't really buy into the fact that this might be a problem they need to tackle. They just don't really feel like this is their responsibility. And the issue is, is that you can't be lonely I mean, I don't know if this makes sense, but you can't be lonely by yourself. So And what I don't mean by that is that there is in fact a difference between being by yourself and being lonely. And those are not always the same. But what I mean by ‘you can't be lonely by yourself’ is that it's a reaction to the feedback from other people around you and the culture and the norms and the systems that you are living and working in. And so If that's your responsibility if if the way we operate as an organization is your responsibility, then that’s where your culpability in terms of creating connection is. Because, you know, if I'm lonely, it means that I'm getting negative feedback from my environment. This is not a place to to reach out and connect to people. This's not a place where maybe I particularly am welcomed or included, or maybe it's a place I'm just really not valued as an individual. And so if I'm getting that feedback, like I can't correct it by myself,

Jeff Frick:
Right

Connie Noonan Hadley:
I can't change that. The individual cannot.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. That's interesting. So you've got on your website, you’ve got like a loneliness assessment tool. With some really interesting questions that I think kind of tease out the differences that you were just talking about. So I got it here. So like ‘People in my organization understand who I really am.’ I mean, wow, that is a super deep question. Depending on how deep you want to go there. There are enough people at work who would have my back if I needed support. Again, a really, well crafted question to get people to really think. And the answers are never, rarely, sometimes, often, or always, and then another one very powerful. I feel left out by others in this organization. So I think it's an interesting tie back to what you just said. You can't feel lonely at work by yourself that it is really more this kind of reflection of what you're getting back from the people around you.

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Right. And so therefore it's a shared collective problem. And those questions, by the way, that I developed with, with Sarah Wright as well, and there's, these are freely available to people if they want to use them for their own research. But they were originally what we were using as a, as a scholar a scholarly field was an adaptation of the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which has long been used for decades to measure loneliness in the general population, so often it was used just for example, to understand, like what's happening with senior citizens in a community. But we did have to over time, we realized, you know, some of those relationships, the questions about like friends, for example. You'll see we don't really use that word in the work context. We have to adapt and understand the fact the relationships are different. Expectations are different. So there are parallels to what you might expect from a family member or a friend outside of work. So, for example, when we say like they understand who I really am we don't necessarily mean like every aspect of yourself. Right. But if you're putting up a facade or if people aren't asking questions that allow you to reveal something about your true professional background and skills and abilities, as well as your personal interests, then you know that’s where you can feel lonely at work. Or similarly, if you don't feel like people have your back, as you know, there’s it's inevitable. There will be some level of competition in an organization. We are all trying to succeed and get ahead. But if you feel like you are literally on your own and you're struggling with something, or you need some support to to get that, you know, so people advocating for you to make that next leap in your career, and nobody's there for you. Like, it's It's a really painful experience. And I think that does, again, have some parallels in the friend and family, arena. But, you know, it's a different if it's a different set of pressures that we feel at work and the isolation, it's It's really hard to achieve and succeed by yourself again at work without some kind of ally.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. And you offer solutions, right? Because you're a solution-oriented person. So what are some of the solutions that people can put into place to reduce loneliness?

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Well, we first always are going to advocate doing a diagnostic. So figure out what's going on. And that's why we made these questions available to anyone because sometimes people will try to guess who's lonely, you know, by looking at things that don’t aren't really indicators. And that could be on a culture survey like people might use, like a very general culture question, like, you know, this is a culture of belonging. And that's a good start. But it's not really at the individual level of whether you feel like I personally have people who have my back or not. So I think you want to get a little bit more directed in your diagnostics.

The next thing that we talked about is designing slack into your workflow. And this is usually not welcome news to senior managers. But it's a reality check. You need time to actually talk to other people and that requires, releasing a little bit of that time pressure. Now, I think it's worth it. I think you'll get paid back in the long run. But, you know, you can't have it both ways. If an organization is like, Oh, my people are working ten-hour days, but I really want them to be connected. That's like, that's not really a realistic request of them unless they want to spend the 11th hour hanging out together. You do have to kind of be recognizing that. And we heard this a lot. We did a collected, stories from people. Of times they felt connected and disconnected at work and there were these beautiful audio transcripts that I could listen to. People talked a lot about how, like everybody's running around like crazy here. Like, there's just no time. So that's another one.

We also spent a lot of time in the article talking about building some kind of social infrastructure. And one of the advantages that we had in our recent study is that we actually tested specific types of opportunities that organizations could offer. There were eight of them, and this is just based on collating what was happening in the marketplace and what some of what we've seen in some of our previous studies. So, a range of things, like all the way from meeting chit chat to doing like a retreat. And we asked people like, What's happening in your current organization? How often are you having these? And how many of these different things that you have been having? And we can see just this such a stark difference. It's one of the biggest statistical results in our study, that the people who are reported being highly lonely in our sample had far fewer of those opportunities. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean cause and effect. You know, it doesn't mean like, okay, throw a bunch of events out there and you'll automatically make everybody less lonely. But it's a good step. And so we also provide some information about why it helps, I mean. Getting into a routine of offering well-crafted opportunities that are based, by the way, on employee input. So like make sure you're actually asking people what they want to do. It reduces some of the strain on people of trying to figure this out on their own. Right. It provides that forum. It gives a sense of certainty. A sense of welcome, a sense of routine, a sense of priority. A lot of companies are trying to do that. But we want to make sure they're investing in them, whether they're doing it in person or remotely. So that's the other thing to, you know, don't give up on remote work. There's so much you can do as well to build connection that way.

Jeff Frick:
Right, Right. When Covid first hit, we had a bunch of remote work specialists on because no one was very familiar with hybrid and remote. So we brought in a bunch of remote people to talk about best practices. And Darren Murph, at that time, he was at GitLab said. Just a really amazing thing too, He’s like a) be intentional about everything you do which reinforces what you said. You know, you just don't throw everyone in a bullpen and now that's culture and they're all going to get together. The other thing that I listened to you in another one of your podcasts is you talked about the role of silence and, and the role of managers misinterpreting silence as ‘Everything is Okay.’ And again, it goes back to that intentionality, You have to draw it out of people. You have to spend the time. And the other piece that you talked about, is doing it during the workday, right? This expectation that a lot of these social activities and these teamwork things happen after work or I think you pointed out so well if you cram them in the workday. Now, do I have to do my real work after the kids go to bed or, you know, at four in the morning or these types of things? Oh, and it was Darren's point was really about the async. What async allows you to do is to move a lot of the kind of tedious, routine, rote, you know, things, out of the face to face, out of the direct connection time so that you can invest that time into doing these types of things that build bonds, build strength, build relationship, you know, strengthen the team. So it's a really it's a really easy thing to take from the all remote world because they had to do it. They had to be good at what, what all businesses should be good at, which fundamentally is communication.

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Yes, and there are plenty of examples of those companies out there started remote first and are still remote first. Who have this incredibly connected culture because you're right they, they had to figure that out. And I wish those lessons were being adopted in other places more. You know I wanted to, to also just pick up on a point to that you referenced in terms of, of the silence. Again, because it's so stigmatized, you probably have no idea who's lonely. I mean, I could be incredibly lonely, even though I'm sitting here having a very, you know, open, lively conversation with you. Those are not the tells of whether someone's lonely. And you have to really get into what's happening in their, in their world to, to understand that. And then even if you do find out who's lonely, the challenge is that once you've become lonely, it's harder to get those people to engage, even if you offer social opportunities. And it's like a double hit because they become and this we know from studies of loneliness outside of the work world as well, that you just sort of develop an armor, a defensiveness. You know, I remember listening to one of the, the participants tell a story, and he. The question was you know Tell us a time when you felt disconnected? And he said, well, I don't feel disconnected because I don't need relationships at work. And then he went on to talk about how everybody gets together without him. And so it clearly was bothering him, you know and he wanted to be part of those, you know, get-togethers or just chit chats. But now at this point, he turned it into like his choice that he didn't want to do that. And so, you know, when you understand that psychology, you realize that's why this is not an easy fix. Because not only do you have to design appropriate things as the general population of what your workforce wants you have to really reach out and connect with those people who may be resistant, It's better obviously, like everything else in organizations, if you have a clean slate. Like if you’re starting an organization from scratch, you can prevent a lot of loneliness. But if you have an established organization, especially a big one, you probably have tons of it going on right now. And now you got to do that extra work of trying to remediate it and break down those walls.

Jeff Frick:
Right. Well, let's shift gears a little bit to talk about something that's very related but slightly different. Which I've actually spent a lot more time talking about. And that's psychological safety. And you've defined it really simply just make it safe for people, for employees to speak up. I talk about it often really around risk-taking because, you know, the way business is moving so quickly, you know, you really need to leverage the experience and, and kind of the depth of attitudes and life experience and perception so that people will ideate much quicker, have a lot more different ideas that you'll get to better solutions faster. But really, it kind of goes back to this lonely thing and how do you help draw it out? We had an interesting conversation, about meetings and, you know, trying to draw people into the meeting to contribute. And it's this really delicate balance where you don't want to bully them into participating. You don't want to make them feel compelled to have to. But truth be told, sometimes people need that little tug, you know, they need the pump to be primed to get over that initial reaction, to get into a position where they can start to realize some of these benefits.

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Right. That's true. You know, people talk about it, nudges and so forth. I mean, we have this winning formula for creating psychological safety that Amy Edmondson who I have to give full props to really put this concept on the map, building on the work of Bill Kahn and others earlier. So Amy and I and Mark Mortensen, who I already mentioned, wrote an article for HBR [Harvard Business Review] on how to create psychological safety. And we promoted this winning formula. And it's pretty simple. But again, I think underestimated in terms of how hard it is to accomplish and so the winning formula is and we have like this little math diagram. But it says the first thing you need that rationale. So as a leader to bring out someone to speak up, you have to clarify, like why they should not just for the good of the team or good of innovation, you know, some broad, high level sort of goals like for them personally. And so, you know, again, we're all at some point self-interested as well. If we can make this case for how this is going to help my career, help me get my job done more efficiently, you know, that’s going to get my attention.

But then you also have to provide like a really clear invitation. That's the second variable. And invitation means so example in a meeting it's I can't stand it when there's like five minutes left in a meeting and the leader will be like ‘Okay, any questions or any comments?’ you know and I was like, who's going to start that? Everyone wants to get on to the next meeting, you know, like right, right. You haven’t created a real forum for people to speak up. So you need to be really thoughtful and again, intentional about what are the structures for people to add that contribution to them. And it could be like a separate chain or it could be a one-on-one or whatever it is. But like you actually have to provide like a really clear channel to speak up, and then you have to at least double, maybe triple the amount of positive reinforcement that you give. And that's also where a lot of leaders fall down. They may ask for input and then not like the input they get which will quell any further contributions. Or they just fail to say thank you, you know. And so there are a lot of ways that, that psychological safety can be accomplished, but it requires the discipline and the follow through that is often absent.

And then just to bridge my two those two topics that you just covered, I also studied psychological safety and loneliness in combination and I have multiple data sets where there's a very, very strong correlation between that psychological safety and a sense of connection and lack of loneliness. And conversely, the most lonely people in my studies also have low psychological safety. And so, you know, we're still debating in the research whether it's an exact what we call like a mediator like this is a they seek psychological safety, the thing that makes people less lonely or is it just a modifier or an enhancer? To that, so we don't know. I don't know that exactly, but I will tell you that it's certainly highly related. And I think that you can think about it as a risk to even just reach out and ask someone to coffee. And having psychological safety will make you feel less vulnerable by making that kind of overture, because you'll have seen in other ways people can take a risk. They can take a risk and made a mistake, or offer that really tough criticism in a meeting. And if I'm seeing all that happening, then I'm probably going to extrapolate and say, ‘Well, actually, I could probably also ask this person to chat with me and they're not going to reject me. So, you know, for me, psychological safety is not the cure all. But like, it's certainly provides so many varied types of benefits to organizations. And one of the things you’ve talked about quite a bit is is modeling and signaling and really leaders demonstrating through behaviors and actions not only within the meeting when somebody has an idea that's maybe not so smart or, you know, how do they react to it, but also who gets promoted, who gets to go to all the cool events. And so these behaviors are almost more important than than the rules and the regulations and what you actually say you're trying to do. Well, as with everything else, people are watching their manager and their leaders to discern what's really appropriate here. What's really going to help you get ahead and picking up on the, the relationship building, if your manager is not not only setting aside time for you to connect with other people, but they're not doing it themselves, then you're getting a mixed signal that this probably isn't, a high value, at least to your manager.

But yes, and psychological safety that's another big area where I, I love speaking to senior leaders because they bring me in often to say, like, how can we get our people to speak up more? And I turn the tables on them, and I usually try to give them like an exercise or some simulation where they're like performing an actual work task. And I'll be like, ‘Well, how many of you spoke up?’ you know, or the last time you were meeting with your boss? So last time you met with the board of directors, did you bite your tongue? It's so easy to say these things, but really hard, no matter what level you are in the organization to take those kinds of risks. And so the best managers are those who do that. And I have another new area of research that I'm playing around with is, this notion of being secure. I've always had this theory based on my own personal experience as a junior manager at General Mills in Minneapolis. Two fabulous managers, but one in particular was so secure and he really taught me how important it was to have a manager who was secure enough to allow you to make mistakes. And that's really a great way to create that sense of psychological safety. The question is also, how do you make your managers more secure? How do you help them be able to speak up? How do you help them to admit their own mistakes so they can enable other people to do so? So that's some future stuff. I’m working on

Jeff Frick:
Wow, We don't hear much about that. You don't hear about doing it for the managers so they can model it for the, for the other people. I wonder, have you ever looked at psychological safety in terms of intrinsic motivation? There was a great interview. Actually, Toby Redshaw I got it written down, talked about discretionary effort, and a lot of people don't talk about these things in terms of discretionary effort. But his point was, if someone is showing up, they're going to give you X, but if they're actually motivated and really want to contribute and excited about the opportunity, you know, what is the difference in their effort or their output. Is it 10%, 20%? 2x, 10x? You know such a big difference. And I think that safety. And to allow me to invest, for my own cognitive dissonance. So I don't, you know invest invest invest and then just get slapped down or beat down because I make a mistake. Have you ever tied it back together with engagement and employee satisfaction? How do those things relate?

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Yes, definitely. On engagement and satisfaction. People with psychological safety are far less likely to quit. And they'll stay with the team that has it, even if they’re in an organization where it's not that prevalent. You know, so they may even sacrifice a little bit of career mobility just to stay with it because it is good. I think you have to ask yourself if you're not promoting psychological safety again, I would question yourself like, is it because I am afraid? I'm afraid of my own reputation? But also you have to ask yourself, What is your philosophy about the people that work for you? Is your underlying philosophy that people are lazy or you know, not very smart or not willing to put in the that effort unless you sort of stand over them and, you know, corral them and manage them in a really intentional way. Or do you believe that your job is to release their natural interest in being productive and high performing and I think my evidence would say that given the chance, most people have that drive. They want to put in the discretionary effort. If I mean, going back to, as I mentioned, my very first study in my PhD program was on loving your job. And who doesn't want to love their job? I really believe that that actually is what most of us would like. And when you do, you know, put in that extra effort.

Do you know, the other way you can get people to put in the extra effort is to make them feel bonded to each other. So this other study, that Marilyn Zakhour from Cosmic Centaurs in the Middle East and I just published. We were looking at rituals, team rituals, and we were amazed at the degree to which these teams had these rituals, whether it’s professional information sharing or personal information sharing, their whole commitment to the team escalated. So it, yes also increased their psychological safety. Yes, it also increased their personal satisfaction. But what I loved was that it was like, I'm now really in it for this team. So that's when you get people going above and beyond. In some ways like you could have the same exact purpose, the same exact set of goals, one team that feels connected, another team that doesn't. And you will see that difference in the pursuit and the intrinsic motivation that you just mentioned. Right, right. And you know, and that's, I think that's just great for everybody.

Jeff Frick:
Right? Right. A tale as old as time, right? Army men fight for the other person in the foxhole. They don't fight for the politicians back in the Capitol. Before we get off psychological safety, though, I do want to ask you one more thing about it. In terms of, just the environment in which we live. You know, starting with Covid. And if you remember back, it was always like we’re six weeks away we’re six weeks away we’re six weeks away for, you know, two years we were six weeks away. We get through that. Now there's the whole kind of back and forth about hybrid work. Is it on? Is it off? We have all of this craziness going on in Washington DC and just this barrage of headlines like Him or Hate Him. It's just this barrage of change and uncertainty. So that's kind of a, you know, a foundational, rocking to our core a little bit in terms of what we can expect when we get up in the morning compared to what we had yesterday. How have you seen, you know, kind of managing external shocks, inputs for managers to have this kind of extra layer of complexity, and ambiguity that they have to help manage through with their people.

Connie Noonan Hadley:
First, I'll just, I'll echo your observation of the escalation of uncertainty and change that has happened recently in the United States. You know, and across the world. But I'm more of an expert on what we're doing here. I've had a lot of conversations with senior leaders in the last few weeks, and I'm just thinking about also a conversation I had with a colleague at a different university yesterday. I think right now we're in a period of, some people are thrilled, and that's that's great. Some people are really scared, and there are a lot of people who are waiting for more information before they act. And this is, in fact, going back to that article on psychological safety that I wrote with Amy and Mark, that we wrote that as a reaction to the layoffs that started happening at a wide scale after the pandemic receded, because we knew that any time people were scared about their jobs anytime job security is at risk, psychological safety tends to to go way down and it's, you know, natural. It’s about risk taking. We're just going to reduce our own risk the scarier and more chaotic the world seems. So I do think that this is the time to get that same message we got out then to everyone, particularly the leaders, to say that this is not the time that you want to let people retrench and go underground and silent, because this is the time when to meet the challenges of today to meet the change and resolve the uncertainty. You actually do want everybody contributing.

Jeff Frick:
Right

Connie Noonan Hadley:
It seems counterintuitive that the scarier things get the more you you have to invest in this. But it is true. You know, when you think about what do people look for when they're scared, they look for safety. So now is when we want to provide that. And you do need to continue to provide it to no matter what people's political persuasion is. Because I've also had lots of research where people have said like hey, my organization has only declared there's like one candidate in this race and I'm not allowed to talk about my favor for the other candidate. So, you know, psychological safety has to include the ability to speak about whatever your interests and your preferences are. But it has to be done sort of in a fair and open and an equitable way across that so that no one's voice is silenced.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Connie Noonan Hadley:
But right now is is a, a real transition point. I feel like in American workforces that we need we should be addressing more proactively and intentionally.

Jeff Frick:
We'll get to AI in a minute. But the ambiguity and the uncertainty for all kinds of reasons. War in Ukraine, I mean, there's it just seems like it's been a never ending gut punch, since March of 2020 that we've just had all these things kind of coming in and upsetting the apple cart in terms of of the way things were done in the past. So definitely challenging times. So let's jump back over to team effectiveness. I definitely had that one on my list. And you talked about it briefly. What are the main keys to bringing that team together to creating a coherent team?

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Well, the first thing I'll say, like, I want to talk about the rituals a little bit more, but and this goes back to my training in graduate school. I had the benefit of working from Richard Hackman at Harvard, who is one of the world's leaders of team scholarship. And, you know, you also have to design your team well. So before you even get to figure out what your team does together, like actually figure out how to design it well and there's some key characteristics that we know that again, aren't often employed and it starts with having a clear and compelling mission that the group is rallied behind, but also has things like having a stable membership. So making sure you actually know who's on the team and that, believe or not, is not that common. Often if I go speak to someone, I ask for their team list. I'll get a different list from each person who is supposedly on the same team. So, you know, and that's not going to create the best outcomes. But other things as well, like really having, a sense of role clarity. Okay. So I'm on the team. Now, what's my What’s my job? Like, what am I here to contribute? How do I fit into this? How do I contribute to that mission? And other things like having, you know, a shared mindset and a shared set of norms that often you have to explicitly establish up front like here's how we do things. And this is a great advantage to if you're trying to create psychological safety, is to really call out what are the consequences, what are the expectations, invitation, rationale, all that.

So that's the first thing is like actually just design the team well set it up for success. And then once you have that in place, then there are many things you need to do, including, you know, having the right kind of cadence and performance management systems and lots of other stuff. But the thing that that I feel like is an under tapped asset that teams can employ is this sense of, creating rituals. And I came into that study. I was invited by Marilyn [Zakhour] who's the CEO and founder of this, teams consulting company out of Dubai. [Cosmic Centaurs] Because she's really fascinated by scholarship and wanted to sort of help, investigate more. How do we create better teams? We looked at different types of rituals, 11 different ones. In our study, we did two different rounds of survey cross-sectional surveys. We had like over 900 people and then we did interviews. And then we also did a field study where we changed some stuff in a team. I wasn't sure how powerful they would be in reality I was kind of going in a little bit skeptical, but it turns out that we saw a really great benefit from the teams that were. And it’s kind of like the social infrastructure and the routine of it that I mentioned with loneliness in this case though we saw that I’ve already mentioned the outcomes like commitment to purpose and greater satisfaction.

But I think the reason these things can work, is because you're tying them like there's a real clear reason why you're doing each ritual. So maybe you're having a stand up every day for example. Does the team know what that's about? Are you there to improve your operations? Are you there to bond? Are you there to do a course correction on your strategy? You know, whatever it is like, It’s often not explicitly made, what the clarity of that is. So that's like a big deal. That's where we see the. I think that where you start to see the benefit of rituals, and then you do have to also execute them. Again, like within integration of what the employees want to do. You have to check in. You have to have metrics attached to make sure that they're actually doing the things you thought they're going to do. You have to employ them regularly. So there's lots of things that companies get wrong when they're even if they have the idea of doing a ritual. But to me, it starts with this idea of like, why are we doing this? What is the stated purpose and how? And what is our hypothesis behind? Behind this idea that this is going to create that? And so, you know, I've now become a believer. I would say that, you know, rituals really can make a difference. And, one of the main ways I see them affecting not only the these other outcomes I mentioned but is the team relationships get better, too, because you have a structure now for people to share that exchange to share that information and get to know each other, build trust.

Jeff Frick:
I've got the list here of all the different rituals, stand up calls, creative catch ups, client reviews, brand audits, etc. the thing that kind of struck me though, is they're crashing a little bit into where those things become rote, unproductive and, next thing you know, my whole calendar is filled with recurring meetings and, you know, a big theme that I preach a lot in terms of meetings is cancel all your recurring meetings, basically to run them all through a review to see whether you need them anymore and why did we start them and do we start or, to your point, being super intentional about what is the point, what is the objective? Are the right people here? Are we going to get to a decision? We start with the best intentions. You know, you put that thing on the calendar, it’s every two weeks we're going to do such and such and And without intentional consistency over time, becomes a negative as much as it's got a possibility to be a positive.

Connie Noonan Hadley:
That’s right. And some but absolutely. And I've experienced that kind of situation and it's extremely painful. So that's why like you do in order to do them well, not only do you need to start with like this clear intention and what you're hoping to achieve but you have to, have to also build into your structure a way to check, like it shouldn't go two years before you find out that no one likes this meeting. You know. And the other thing is sharing responsibility, because it's not just on the team leader to make all this stuff happen all the time. That's a great way to make them not happen, because the team leader has got a lot of other things going on. And if they can't show up to one meeting, next thing you know, it's not happening and so forth. So, you know, this has to be a democratic team-led project as well. And then the other thing I would say is also don't get too carried away. Like don't add too many things at once. I'd rather see like two great rituals than ten bad ones. I love people's enthusiasm, but sometimes we get a little too carried away when we start throwing things against the calendar.

Jeff Frick:
I had a hypothesis on the push back against, remote and hybrid work that I think it exposed a lot of people, didn't have great performance management practices in place, didn't have great metrics as to what they were judging people on, weren't doing a great job. People would say, ‘Well how do I know people are doing work?’ It's like, ‘Well, don't you check in on them?’ Aren’t they working on things that you want them to work on and do you check in on those? So it seemed like a real kind of pulling back of the curtain for a lot of people that hid maybe less than great performance management. You know, there's still too many annual reviews, which is way too long of a frequency to be to be giving feedback. And then where do you come down kind of on one-on-ones in terms of the manager to to get a lot of these things accomplished? I had a really interesting interview with Dave Montez at PayPal. He has one-on-ones with every single person in his team, 80 people worldwide, at least once a quarter. And it just struck me, as you said, you know, can you list the members of the team? He could list the members of his team, their spouse, their kids, their dogs, and what's their favorite flavor of ice cream? Because he puts in the effort. Where do you come down on one-on-ones [1:1s] and frequency and, did Covid expose a bunch of bad performance management practices that had a lot of room for improvement?

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Well, to answer the second question, in terms of did it expose, I think we've known for a while. I mean, I've been teaching MBA students for a long time about how we still, for some reason, can't figure out how to manage knowledge work, which isn't as easy to measure as something like, you know, producing something on a manufacturing line. So I'm not sure that this is new. In fact, actually, if anyone wants to read like, I highly recommend this wonderful article about incentive systems. That was written in 1995. Oh gosh, what's the title of it? It’s something like "On the perils of expecting A while rewarding B" [On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B - Steven Kerr, 1995]. We've known this it's been a problem. I do think that remote work though made it clearer for sure to a lot of people, because suddenly we had this productivity paranoia. And managers realized I'm worried they're not getting their work done when I can't see them. And the workers were like, well, what do you want to see? I'll show you. And they were like, I don't know what I want to see, you know? And so, you know, I think that and that’s I think underlying some of the reasons that people are asking people to come back to the office. It's like, ‘Well, I don't really want to have to define it, but I'll know it better if I just can see where it's.

Jeff Frick:
Right, it’s all substitute attendance. I mean, it's so silly because most teams are distributed anyway. I mean even if you're on the same team in the same building, there's going to be a big portion of your team that isn't. And even if you're on the same campus, I mean, you go to some of these campuses, they’re giant, you know, you're not necessarily going to be in the same building, the same floor. So again, I always go back to Darren's great point. Intentional communications and effective communications is something every company should be good at. It just that the remote ones had to be because you couldn't ever tap somebody on the shoulder to ask a question in real-time, because that's just not a viable solution for most people these days in most big knowledge worker situations.

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Right, and so I think we haven't solved that yet. I mean, even in my own work, you know, when I hire a research assistant, I don't think I do the job I should. In setting up really clear expectations for what high quality output looks like. You know, I kind of wait till they provide something, and then I give feedback on it and hope over time it kind of, you know, becomes clear. But that's not a very efficient way. So, you know, I think we need to get better about proactively defining performance standards. And by the way, I feel it's important because people may think that like, my only objective is to create like, happy employees. And that's not the case at all. Like, I'm super interested in high performance, you know, that ultimately is, is what's going to keep the lights on and allow people to have employment. So I do think we have to elevate people's expectations for performance all the time. But defining it in advance is tough.

And then coaching it is the other problem. And that's why getting back to your question about one-on-ones, it's hard to find a substitute for a great one-on-one, even if it's a half an hour where you has taken the time to review the person's work, and then you sit down with them and ask questions like, where did you get stuck? You know, help me understand. When someone does provide to me their output, I'll say, you know, well what did you take away from this? Not just what did you learn from doing it? What did you take away from the experience of producing it? Like, how could we make this better? Did I give you enough direction? Did you feel, you know, you couldn't reach out to me at one point, you know, where did you get stuck? How can I facilitate this work? And also, you know, what examples do you need so that you can independently figure out how to do this better? If I find you're finding it too hard to get my time and attention. So that, you know, it's hard to replicate that, it's very, almost impossible to do that any more than I wouldn't do like a group grading feedback with my students. Like wouldn’t gather five of them into my office and be like, ‘Okay Jeff, here's your paper’s problems.’ Now Noreen, here's your paper’s problems. You want to give that kind of feedback and coaching one-on-one. And I think it's a great use. You know, I think it's remarkable that that executive is spending one-on-one time with 80 people every three months, but I'm sure it's incredibly valuable.

And going back to your whole meeting aversion, you know, I have a different paper that I published a little while ago with some people, Leslie Perlow and Eunice Eun at Harvard and. And we were talking about, like, the scourge of meetings, like, you know, and one of the things we did with people was helped carve out meeting free days just to get away from that rampant proliferation, as well as the poor timing of them on their schedule that really pockmarked their days. They couldn't get any long breaks to really think. Even though I'm advocating for one-on-ones, that’s not to add on to an already overloaded calendar of meetings, it would mean changing how you spend your time and using the tools that we have to do more async stuff so that the one-on-ones can land a place on the calendar without creating more trouble.

Jeff Frick:
So we're getting kind of towards the end of our time. So we have to talk about the big elephant in the room that impacts all these things. And that's AI. And the impact of AI, AI in terms of, of threatening my job, I'm not really sure. But I keep reading in the headlines that it's coming to take my job. AI as a thing that I need to learn, and spend time with. And everyone's telling me I need to learn it and manage it. In terms of an additional thing that a manager now has to worry about and manage, are there people using AI? Are they giving them the tools? Are they giving the restrictions because everyone is telling you, you know, if you’re not doing your work with AI, somebody who is using AI is going to take your job in the not too distant future. So when you look at how AI now fits both for the employee as well as the manager in terms of the pressure. To incorporate it in just a little hindsight, Brian Elliott, who's a big future of work guy, you probably know him, Future Forum. You know, his whole take is that it's the mature managers who could handle the move to distributed work are the ones that kind of have the mindset to be able to start moving into adoption of AI and helping their people adopt to it because it's really about learning. It's about experimenting. It's about giving people space. It's, you know, kind of a lot of the same kind of higher order behaviors that will put people in a position that they can take advantage of this thing because this is another giant, uncertain, scary thing and just when you think you got, you know, OpenAI figured out, DeepSeek, comes out. So what what's your take on where we are with AI today and where it's going to be tomorrow?

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Well, I’ll, I’ve several reactions building on some of the topics we've already covered. One, what you just described in Brian Elliot's perspective resonates with mine and when you think about that, that winning formula I mentioned for creating psychological safety same principles I would apply to encouraging your workforce to experiment with AI. I mean, I was just at this fabulous, like AI leadership conference a couple weeks ago in New York and I mean, my mind is blown about how fast and furiously this technology is advancing and changing and I was also blown away by how all these experts in the field were saying that, like, you can't teach this, you can't wait for the class, you can't wait for things to settle. You have to get into the middle and the deep end of the pool and just like, start swimming until you figure it out. And so that is the mandate, I think, for managers. But how do you incentivize your people to do that? Because framing it as another example of risk taking, just like what you know, need psychological safety for, you need to provide their personal rationale, not just the organizational rationale or not just some sort of like generic sense of like, well, we should do this. Like, how is it good for you and your job? Why should you do this? And then the invitation, what's the what are the rules? Because there are a lot of people using it without telling their managers because they're afraid something bad will happen if they reveal it. So providing that invitation, that clear way, like, How can we talk about this? How do you want me to use this and not use this?

And then reinforcing all those positive reinforcements are just as important in that case and removing the negative consequences as well. So that's sort of like a generic framework of how I be thinking about getting people to overcome their hesitancy to either use it or to tell people they're using it.

But then the other thing that I want to just pick up on is I feel like AI in with its great promise, offers two different potential outcomes for us when we think about the employee life. Option One is that AI allows us to become our highest and best selves at work. By removing a lot of the, the lower level stuff and freeing up our time and our mental energy to do the high quality, creative work that we're capable of and learn and advance at a rapid rate, as well as going back to this designing slack into the workflow, carving out time that was otherwise occupied by doing these menial tasks or whatever other types of task we were doing that AI can now do by using it to bond and to learn and to grow together as a team, as a collective. So that's the ideal outcome. And there is one, research project I did with Kate Kellogg at MIT, where we talked about, for example, how we were seeing that certain AI tools were allowing managers to do more of that one-on-one coaching we were just talking about. It freed up their time from trying to figure out how people were performing and gathering data and analyzing data to ‘Boom’ I've got this information right in front of me. Now let's talk. So that half an hour could now be devoted to coaching this employee on how to get better based on that. Like that is the ideal outcome in my mind from AI. It's going to free up time to use it better.

What I worry though, the other option is going to be the that AI. All the productivity gains will result in reducing our workforce and pushing more work on to the remaining employees so that there's no personal benefit for them, there's no relational benefit for the collective. And we still end up in this rat race where people are feeling disconnected, overworked and burned out. I think we have choices now with what to do with this amazing technology. And I do hope that we will use it wisely for those goals.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, and not just say ‘You need to kick out twice as much as you did last month because you're using AI’

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Yeah

Jeff Frick:
I need twice as many reports, twice as many papers graded, twice as many students taught. So, We are getting to the end of our time. So anything really cognizant that we didn't touch on that, you want to share that people should really be thinking about as we head into this new year with, with all the uncertainty ahead and, and that fast change, I mean, it's not going to go any slower, right? Today's the slowest day of technological change for the rest of our lives.

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Now you’re making my anxiety rise

Jeff Frick:
So with AI, I mean look at an old iPhone Right? Or if you look at your old PC and say, Whoa, where's it going to be in five years, ten years?

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Well, I mean, I do always want to leave people with sort of a sense of hope, though, too, like I mean the fact that you are inviting me to talk about these topics, I'm not sure you would have done that. You know, maybe five years ago. Ten years ago. And, by the way, one thing we haven't revealed is that you and I do have a bit of a history from way back 30 years ago in graduate school. Even with that, even with that relationship, I'm not sure you would have rung me up. And, so I say that is a great sign. And I do talk to many, many managers who are saying we're not going to let up on trying to promote a healthier, workplace where people can really thrive. And so let's continue those conversations. Yes, there are problems to fix and there are perils to prevent or overcome. But I think there's we still have a lot of advantages here, with this collective attention that maybe it's the pandemic that brought it, maybe it's just, you know, further enlightenment as a human species. But, you know, I think there are a lot of people out there who are rooting for for better days ahead for life at work. And so there's a lot we can do. And I don't want people to feel discouraged, like it's hopeless.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, well I think you shared that in a number of your podcasts where, you know, the future of work could be so much better. I find a lot of people I talk to in the field do have that, encouragement because it's been kind of crappy. We're still kind of treating paper and desks like they were a factory and we're taking stuff out of the inbox and stamping it, and signing it and sticking it in the outbox and sticking it in the manila envelope with the little red string and, sending it on to the next location, which we're not, you know, we're not doing that anymore. It's not the way.

Connie Noonan Hadley:
No, it's not the way. And also, all of these topics apply to people who don't work in knowledge work too. Like, you know, there are lonely people working in restaurants and, and hospitals and other places as well too. So I don't want to forget about the other occupations that exist out there too. Let's keep making those better as well.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. All right. Connie. Well, thank you.  Thank you for your work. Keep publishing. Keep the papers rolling. Keep the research going. So people can go to the Institute for Life at Work. [https://www.InstituteLifeWork.org/] You've got your research papers are available. I'll put lots of stuff in the show notes as well, but I really appreciate the time. And it's great to, to catch up after 30 some odd years. Oh my gosh, where did the time go?

Connie Noonan Hadley:
I know It is great. Well, you look the same. So,

Jeff Frick:
So do you.

Connie Noonan Hadley:
Thank you so much for having me, Jeff. This has been a lot of fun.

Jeff Frick:
My pleasure, my pleasure. All right, she's Connie, I'm Jeff, you're watching ‘Work 20XX’ Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening on the podcast. We'll see you next time. Take care.

Cold Close
Excellent.
All right.
All right, well, thank you.
Thanks again. It's great to see you.
Thank you. You too. Take care.

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English Transcript

Connie Noonan Hadley: Loneliness, Psychological Safety, Team Effectiveness, AI | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep33

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