Communication has got to be one of the most emphasized and underdeveloped work and leadership skills. How many times have I heard or said, “you need to communicate better”? If its so important, why do we struggle to get it right?
Mid-way through my career, communicating effectively as a leader, is a skill I work on daily. I spend a lot of effort un-learning what I thought good communication to be usually through trial and lots of errors. I’ve written emails that I thought were perfectly fine but received angry responses in return. I’ve had conversations with employees and the employee quit by the end of it. I’ve posted things social media that didn’t sit well with our audience.

By definition, communication is simply the exchange of information between individuals. Effective communication, however, is a much more complicated phenomena and fraught with land mines where it can blow up in your face. In my experience, communication has gone wrong for me because I believed that the goal was to impart information to another person and make sure they understand what ever that information may be. When in fact, there is really just one goal, for every kind of communication: to build trust.

Who are you most likely to take advice from? – A friend you trust. What advertisements convince you to buy a product or service? – Those that come from a company or brand you trust. When do you best receive feedback in your work? – When it comes from a manager you trust.

Effective communication starts with a genuine mindset shift that when we are exchanging information, we are also open and genuinely receiving what is coming from the other. When the other person, or your target audience believes in our authenticity, trust begins to form. There are practices that support this trust building.

1. Being present – having a clear mind free of distractions.
2. Being prepared – demonstrating that thought and research was carried out before the communication occurs.
3. Checking in with recipient – making sure that the communication happens at the right time with the recipient or audience and is thoughtful and respectful of their needs.
4. Following through on commitments – modeling responsibility for agreed upon actions.  
5. Being self-aware – reflecting on your own mistakes, checking in with your ego, assumptions and biases.
6. Being direct – as Brené Brown would say “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind”.

The above is no means an exhaustive list of trust building practices or elements of effective communication. However, having the above practices in mind before starting a conversation, email, presentation or marketing piece, is a great place to start if you are looking to increase your communication efficacy. 

“What got you here, won’t get you there”…

I’ve learned that lesson many times over the years, especially as a business owner. Typically here’s how it goes. I set a goal or an expectation to achieve more and I hit a brick wall. Effort and my existing set of resources, knowledge and experiences are no longer helpful in getting me to where I need to be. This is the moment that I start thinking about where I’m going to get those things so I can move forward.

In 2019, my husband and I came to such a moment. We knew we had come to a cross-roads with our restaurant and attractions business. We felt that we lacked foundational knowledge and some skill sets to run that part of our business more professionally and to produce better results. To address this, we brought in a restaurant consulting firm. They conducted an assessment, shared their expertise and systems and provided insight on where we could go move forward. It was a big investment but it paid off not just in our confidence levels but also bottom line results.

Learning has been a value of mine since as far back as I can remember. Even though it didn’t always come naturally, I found it rewarding to come to a point where I knew something that I didn’t know before. In these early years traditional education was my main source of new knowledge and trigger to change my performance. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to be exposed to a wide variety of opportunities to learn in different formats. From this process I also discovered that not all forms of knowledge and resources have the same kind of impact and different formats are better for some things than others.

It wasn’t until more recently, however, that I uncovered the reason why some formats are better at different times than others. In their book “Leading Beyond change: a Practical Guide to Evolving Business Agility”, the authors provide the context to answer this question. What they describe is that different learning approaches can fall into three categories 1) Knowing, 2) Practices, Techniques and Skills, and 3) Being. As you employ different approaches the impact they have on your evolution increases.

Its not always easy to know what approach to apply for which situation and when. In the story above we were missing key pieces of knowledge. Neither my husband nor I had any formal training in restaurant management or the culinary arts. We also didn’t have the time to do a lot of self-study. This is why we brought in the consulting firm. They had the knowledge we needed, they had nailed repeatable processes from their many years of experience, and we could get that knowledge relatively quickly from them. The approach with this consultant also included some skill building. They didn’t just hand us a report and call it a day. There was an on-going exchange and interaction in which we discussed our weaknesses and they helped us formulate methods to improve upon them.

After about five or six years of running our hotel and attractions business, I found that knowledge and skill building, including a two year hospitality certificate with Cornell, was starting to reach its limit in terms of what it could do to improve my performance. Patterns became apparent related to my behavior, the consequences of my behavior with others, interpersonal relations, confidence, ability to make decisions, job satisfaction and my general professional and personal well-being. These patterns of behaviors were beginning to become serious obstacles to high performance. All of that just described, are examples of the “being” referred to above. For this, I needed a different approach.

To “be” a different person, I doubled down on my reading about personal and organizational development. The turning point came when I engaged with a coach. The journey has continued with efforts including creating a leadership retreat for women in travel, developing a meditation practice and finally, becoming a coach myself.

The impact of my focus on the “being” vs. the doing, has been profound. I’ve developed a different mindset which enables me to address almost any challenge with a new sense of confidence and stability, even if I don’t have the immediate knowledge or skills needed to address it.

In a nutshell, it was for me like having all the best components and parts for a car (knowledge and skills) but the car still kept stalling out. Once I cleaned up the engine and made it run better (being) I could really put the pedal to the metal and accelerate.

I’ve put together some examples of learning and development approaches that fall under the three categories as described above 1) Knowing, 2) Practices, techniques and skills, 3) Being. This resource list is far from exhaustive and its not always black and white what sources of learning might fall in which category. Some sources may fall into more than one category and impact people differently. Get access to the resource list here and feel free to reach out anytime with questions around this topic or to learn more about coaching with PEAK. 

Operating a business with a third of your staff and record-breaking revenue will teach you a few things about yourself. The return of travel is a welcome change, but the labor shortage conditions are like a new kind of pandemic. What there isn’t a shortage of is opportunities for growth and discovery in the face of these extreme challenges.

Scarcity eats perfectionism for breakfast
If there was a perfectionist fan club, I would be the first member. It shows up everywhere in my life. I struggle with letting my kids leave for school with un-matching clothes. I clean my house before the cleaner comes. If I start a terrible book and realize its terrible by page 5, I will painstakingly continue to finish all 500 pages because I just can’t abort.

At work, my perfectionist tendencies have me ping ponging across the hotel lining up lawn chairs in a perfect row, scrubbing carpet stains and shifting my path so I can greet and chat with hotel guest. On face value, there is absolutely nothing wrong with these things, and I’ve always felt that my perfectionism helps drive my achievements. However, this trait, can also be a crippling handicap.
​
I’ve learned a lot about perfectionism through many of Brené Brown’s books. Her research has revealed the roots of perfectionism in our negative self-image, shame and self-blame: “It’s my fault. I’m feeling this way because “I’m not good enough”. For me, not being able to provide the perfect experience for my guests because we have limited operational human resources, becomes very personal and identity defining. I feel responsible for not delivering on our promised experience.

Here's the thing: perfectionism is soul sucking and a wasteful use of time and resources. With the current labor shortage time and resources are fundamentally scarce. I have had no choice but to change my mindset to what Brené Brown calls “healthy striving”. What this looks like: today we did our best. Tomorrow we will try again. I am not defined by the weeds growing in the garden. It’s good enough.

Serve me up some humble pie
Business owners, general managers and directors are being called away from the corner office to serve on the front lines all over the country. In our business I went from helping one day a week in housekeeping this past winter to four days a week at the peak of this summer. The physical labor of housekeeping presents a stark contrast with the mental and intellectual pursuits of marketing, business development and strategy. Its hard not to feel sometimes like I’m being taken away from the “important” work sitting on my computer. But what if the “important” work at this moment, is taking out the trash? What if doing laundry is exactly where I’m supposed to be?

The benefits of working on the line are not new lessons for me. I wrote about them when labor shortages started becoming a problem already four years ago. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-employees-hard-come-roll-up-your-sleeves-rachel-vandenberg/. What is new for me is the idea that one set of tasks is not necessarily more “important” than others. I’ve become increasingly humble about the work that really drives performance on any given day. This humility has also been closely linked with increased empathy and understanding of what the day to day is like for our staff.
 
“Feed your faith and your fears will starve to death” - unknown
I could hear it in his voice. He was frustrated and short with me the moment I saw him when I came into work. Oh boy, I had a feeling what the source of the problem was and all I could think was that I didn’t want to have this conversation, because there was nothing I could offer him as a solution.

A deluge of words and emotions spilled out: I’m overwhelmed, I’m tired, I don’t know how we are going to fill all the shifts. We just had two more people quit. Not a single person is applying for our open positions…

This is where I often go into hyper problem-solving mode. I wanted to fix it. I wanted to just be able to wave a magic wand and take away the frustration. I wanted to have the solutions at my finger tips.  But I didn’t have anything.

I brought this experience to my coach. Some very important shifts happened for me in that conversation. The first was the insight around what drives me to go into hyper problem-solving mode: FEAR. What happens if I don’t have the solutions? Will the person leave? Will the situation get even worse? Was I letting him down? Would he be okay in terms of his mental and physical health if I didn’t solve the problem? What I learned was that leading from fear creates disempowerment. The exact opposite of what I intended. What my staff member really needed in that moment was someone to listen.  What they needed was my faith in them that they were strong enough to handle it and find their own solutions.

As far as the current labor crisis goes, there are no easy answers but hospitality and travel leaders have already demonstrated how resilient they are through the pandemic. We’ve got this.
 
 
 

Just because she’s famous, doesn’t mean that the hazards of her chosen occupation won’t wear her down. Tennis player Naomi Osaka’s refusal to speak to the media after her French Open tournament match and her subsequent withdrawal is keeping the topic of mental health on the agenda – not just for famous people, but for the working world in general.

You can bet that every organization has a Naomi Osaka. But how many leaders really feel comfortable with just how to address mental health issues in the workplace?

What happens when a mental health issue arises and threatens the ability of the professional to fulfill their duties and subsequently the working relationship? Who is responsible for addressing it? How do leaders balance the obligation to get results while at the same time fostering a culture that addresses mental health of employees responsibly?

​When my husband and I took over my family’s hotel business, I had no idea about the amount of time would be spent leading and managing our staff (not to mention ourselves). It turned out that the work of a leader is far heavier on the psychological aspects of the job (vs. strategic and operational) than you could ever imagine. The reality is that we all spend a lot of time at work and that the personal and professional are much more blurred than we may want to admit. It really should come as no surprise then, that when it comes to mental health, there’s no sweeping it under the rug. Over the year’s, I’ve been confronted with both the mental health of my staff as well as myself. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Acknowledge it
I’ll venture to guess that many leaders out there still think that mental health issues are personal and should be left out of the workplace. I thought that too. Come to find out, the personal is always professional. People show up to work as human beings, not robots. There is no switch to turn off what might be affecting them, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with work. This does not mean that leaders should jump on every bad day of one of their staff. Sometimes its just that – a bad day. But when patterns begin to develop, a leader may need to take action. Ignoring the signs of a potential mental health issue with an employee will only prolong and potentially escalate the impact at work. Sometimes simply acknowledging that you see that a staff member is struggling and that you are there for support is enough. It may make them aware for the first time that what is happening with them on the inside, is now showing on the outside and that they need to take their own steps to address it.

Know the limits of your expertise
Mental health issues can be caused by a myriad of both personal and professional circumstances. They can also manifest themselves differently. Some people might react by calling out of work, missing deadlines or demonstrate a signs of a declining attitude. Other’s might respond to mental health issues by working more and becoming so intertwined with their job that they lack a healthy separation between the personal and professional. Whatever the cause and the result is, its not our role to judge or draw conclusions, especially if we have no experience of our own. No one is a better expert about their mental health challenges, than the person feeling it.

It is not our job as leaders to diagnose or to treat serious mental health issues. This is tricky, because in my experience, its not always clear in the first instance what you may be dealing with. A few years back I learned first-hand with two employees that separating performance issues from mental health issues is extremely difficult. In both situations I spent hours and hours for almost 3 years supporting and coaching these employees to address what I thought were work performance issues that I could influence. Nothing worked and no matter how hard I tried, the same problems came back again and again. If an employee demonstrates repeated patterns of behavior that don’t improve with performance feedback and you sense that the behavior is linked to past unresolved experiences and/or trauma, it may be time to open up a conversation about getting professional help.

Reflect on your role
What happens if an employee expresses that their mental health challenge is directly related to their work environment? If that’s the case, your role as a leader is to take that seriously and to evaluate what factors around their job could be changed. Is there a culture of overwork? Is feedback constantly negative? Are employees punished for mistakes? Is the employee experiencing micro-aggressions or discrimination and nothing is being done about it? Does the employee have a verbally abusive boss? Are you the problem? Acknowledging your own possible role as a leader is one of the hardest things you will do, but you and your organization will only be better for it. Take a step back, invest in organization and leadership development, hire a coach.

Give space to heal
In a work environment that values and models psychological safety, employees are given space to be human and show up as a whole person. If an employee is addressing a mental health issue and recovering, giving that employee some time and flexibility to support their recovery process can go a long way. In my organization we have had multiple experiences with losing loved ones to untimely death. These experiences can have a significant impact on mental health. In this process I have found that tailoring the professional response as an organization to the individual needs of each employee has been successful. I check-in with the employee regularly, foster an environment of open communication and ask how I can help.

Establish boundaries
Addressing mental health issues at work, comes with boundaries on both the part of the employee and the organization. An employee has the right to their privacy and can refuse any support offered by their leadership or prefer to not communicate about it. On the other side, a leader and an organization has the right to draw the line when un-resolved mental health issues continue to impact bottom line results. As a last result, either side may conclude that the job is no longer the right fit for the circumstances.

Strengthen your own mental health
Leaders face a barrage of challenges every day of all kinds. Constantly being in a state of reaction and problem- solving mode can take a heavy toll on your own mental health. As a leader of a growing company I was not prepared for the amount of mental health issues of employees that would come across my path. The impact on me has swayed from deeply emotional to the other end of the spectrum where I experience a state of dissociation where I feel almost no emotion at all. Neither extreme is healthy and I have found that when I’m operating in those extremes that I need to look inward at my own mental health and engage in strategies to re-cooperate such as taking time off, exercising, sleeping more or engaging with outside professional support.

Reactions from leaders in the tennis industry to Osaka’s continue to play out this week and most likely reflect the kind of varied leadership personas that exist in most organizations.

The punisher - The USTA fined Osaka $15,000 for skipping the press conference.

The ally – The CALM app donated the equivalent amount of Osaka’s fine, $15,000, to a mental health organization.

The emotionally intelligent boss – NIKE expressed support for Osaka and applauded her for opening up about her mental health challenges.

I’m excited to go to work today and talk about mental health – said no leader ever. However, whether or not you want to, mental health in the workplace is a topic that every leader will be confronted with especially as more companies re-open and expand their workforces post pandemic. The question is, what kind of leader do you want to be when it happens?
 

 ​Do you remember the 1996 romantic comedy Jerry McGuire? Its hard to believe I was just 16 when that movie came out. In it, Jerry (Tom Cruise) has an emotional breakdown after a series of injuries puts one of his clients back into the hospital. In the middle of the night he writes a “mission statement” about what he thinks his work as a sports agent should be all about and prints it out for 150 colleagues to read. For all of its biased representations of women and Black characters for which we could do without, the underlying story of the loss of purpose and meaning is just as relevant today as it was back then. ​

When Jerry distributes his mission statement he takes a leap of faith, and a risky one at that. But, would anyone follow him?
​

In a recent practice coaching session of mine, a colleague made an important discovery about her own struggles with taking leaps of faith – like presenting ideas in a group or launching her new venture. In discussing her struggles, something familiar washed over me. Oh yeah, I know that feeling all too well. I put my personal experience aside and we continued the conversation.

​Towards the end of her session she took a deep breath. I asked her what the deep breath was all about. She said:
 “If I’m going to ask others to take a chance on me, I need to take a chance on myself”. Later in the day as I was rolling this around in my head as it sunk deeper into how much I could relate. It dawned on me:

The difference between preparing for success and being successful is taking a chance on yourself. 

​A year ago, almost to the day, I started training to become a leadership coach. I too, have been fearful of taking a leap of faith. I’ve mentioned my new profession to a few people. I’ve hidden it in a piece of writing here in there. I’ve even added my company to my linked in profile and to my title. But, secretly…I was kind of hoping no one would notice, that no one would click on my website. I kept telling myself I wasn’t ready.  

I’m not experienced enough. I haven’t graduated from my training. I haven’t received my certification. I haven’t ______, _______, and _______.
​
Ready: what does it mean to be ready? Will I be ready this coming Tuesday? Will I be ready when I finish that project? Will I be ready when its spring? Will I be ready when my website is “finished”? Will I be ready when someone gives me permission?

The truth is, I’ve been preparing for this for at least 20 years! Maybe even my whole life. It started with my long held values. I’ve always been someone seeking to contribute and connect with people, in whatever job I held. I’ve been reading and studying organizational development for 20  years – soaking up as much as I could about business, psychology, social science and leadership. I have a Master’s degree, and don’t forget about the last 10 years I’ve spent putting everything into practice in my own business – with success, failure and everything in between. I have a management certificate in hospitality and I’m just one test away from graduating from my coach training. I have also sat on a couple of boards as well and founded a leadership retreat for women in travel. How much more prepared could I be?

So what is holding me back? Hmm.

I haven’t given myself permission…to take a chance on myself.

In the beginning I knew I wanted to bring these leaders together, but I hadn’t nailed down what would differentiate this event from others. Then someone introduced me to a corporate coach in my area. At the same time we also distributed a survey asking women leaders in hospitality what challenges they were facing. It all came together, what we all needed was professional development support. 

Creating Accelerate Women Leaders in Travel was the final inspiration I needed to realize that in addition to my hospitality career, I wanted to become a coach. I didn’t know it 20 years ago, but everything I did and experienced in those 20 years lead to this moment.
​
Jerry McGuire’s relationship with his one and only client Rod Tidwell (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) shines a light on the power of the coaching relationship. Coaching is about partnership and the coach learns as much as the coachee in the process. In one of the final scenes of Jerry McGuire, Jerry and Rod have an intense conversation about the things they are struggling with. Throughout the movie Jerry shows that he is driven by heart and passion in his professional life. But in his personal life, its all about practicality. Rod on the other hand, is all heart and passion in his relationship with his wife Marcee (played by Regina King), but in his professional football career he wants Jerry to “Show me the Money!”.

In the final scenes when Rod Tidwell makes a miraculous touch down catch and in the celebratory aftermath, both Jerry and Rod, having influenced each other, make a connection with what was missing in the other part of their lives.

​Who will follow me on this journey? Jerry showed, that it took only one client with heart and passion to make all the difference.