Is Your Team ‘Checked Out?’ Re-Engage With Trust And Belonging

The learning zone approach to effective management

"Bad bosses" are a major reason people leave their jobs. There are others, too: family reasons, wanting a higher salary, or feeling unchallenged, underappreciated, uninspired, or burnt out. But many of these reasons can be influenced significantly by bosses.

Who among us has not experienced an ineffective leader creating toxicity within a team? Or a supervisor who gives feedback in a way that leaves team members demoralized and voiceless? Or a leader who talks about the importance of taking risks only to penalize team members when those risks don’t yield the hoped-for results?

For more than twenty years, Gallup has conducted extensive surveys measuring employee engagement. These have shown that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores and that only about one-third of Americans are engaged in their jobs. One in two employees has left a job to get away from a bad manager at some point in their careers. Checking out is even easier to do when working remotely. Unsurprisingly, this has a dramatic impact on company performance.

The impact of a “bad manager” affects people outside of the workplace, too, as employees bring their work misery home with them, compounding their stress and hurting their relationships and overall well-being.

In recent years, employees have become increasingly disillusioned about the value and merit of work in their lives. This has led to massive shifts in where, when, and how people work, and even whether they will work at all.

Leaders at any level need to create the relationships, environment, structures, and support systems that will enable employees to get excited about what they do and engage with others in both learning and performing. In many cases, this will require managers to use the Learning Zone to figure out better strategies and systems to lead and strengthen employee engagement and collaboration. When people thrive, the organization thrives.

Any of us can enter the Learning Zone to improve, expand, and strengthen our leadership toolkits—the set of tools we can use to envision and communicate the future we are driving toward, develop a strong culture, and organize, inspire, and support people to achieve the change we want to see in the world. In this and the next chapter, we will meet leaders who model the way. Remember that the goal is not for you to copy everything they do, but to develop a vision for how you want to lead and identify a few things to work on.

As always, all practices are rooted in the two core principles: always portray abilities and qualities as malleable, and set up mechanisms for the two zones. More holistically, the goal is to foster the cornerstones of change along with the social context that reinforces them. You want to foster the belief that people can learn, an understanding of how to do so, a shared purpose that generates energy and direction, and a sense of belonging in a learning community.

Start with Care and Develop Trust

Francesca Lenci has worked for Siemens for sixteen years. She started out as a junior financial analyst in Lima, where she was born and raised. Over time, she took on significant challenges, moving to foreign countries and joining operations that were often in crisis. She earned many promotions along the way.

Francesca was working in Germany when a new opportunity arose to become the chief financial officer of Siemens Mobility in Italy. She took on the challenge, but when she arrived in Italy, she sensed that her team didn’t believe it could become high achieving. An ambitious professional and leader, Francesca wanted to transform her team. She sought to show her colleagues that they could be recognized as exemplary. But she didn’t take a command-and-control approach.

Siemens holds a yearly contest within finance departments called the Cash Award, for exemplary management of cash. The award is given to countries that hold the highest cash management metrics, based on things like how quickly customers pay and how well supplier contracts and bills are handled. Italy ranked toward the bottom, but Francesca saw this as an opportunity to inspire her team members to reimagine what they could achieve together. She told her team she wanted them to go for the award and that, while they may not win it in the first year, she believed they could win in the future. But she didn’t start with a hard focus on performance and metrics. She started with care and trust.

After she joined the organization, Francesca took time to meet with each of her reports to get to know them, not only professionally, but also personally. This was significant Learning Zone work for her. She made sure to remember details of what was important to each person, such as the name of a special pet or a family member who lived far away or who was struggling with a health issue. She checked in with them about how they were doing.

She emphasized her desire to support their career development and helped them clarify their growth goals, encouraging them to devote thirty to sixty minutes to their personal development plan each month.

When the pandemic hit, Francesca noticed that people were struggling. In Italy, it wasn’t a standard part of the culture to openly discuss mental health, but she created a weekly thirty-minute meeting where anyone could talk about anything—except for work. This deepened relationships and opened up communication for peers to support one another.

Different regions have different norms for how much information people tend to share about their personal lives. Francesca observed that in Italy, people in group settings tended to share more about events in their lives and less about their personal feelings and deeper struggles. But when she met with people one-on-one, they opened up much more.

After Francesca created social bonds and fostered team habits for the two zones, a year after she arrived in Italy, her team was recognized as a top-three finalist worldwide for the Cash Award. The same was true in the second year. In the third year, they were a finalist and were also formally recognized as the “winners of the heart” due to their “sustainable and promising cash performance.”

Clearly, the team has been transformed. They got there by searching for strategies to better manage financial systems and processes in the Learning Zone and by implementing them in the Performance Zone. But it started with Francesca’s thoughtful and observant leadership and her genuine care for her people and their development.

Belonging can be fostered in any team, anywhere, even remotely. It’s the result of genuine care, explicit communication, support, shared experiences, and emotional bonds.

Excerpted from The Performance Paradox: Turning the Power of Mindset into Action by Eduardo Briceño. Copyright © 2023 by Growth.how LLC. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Eduardo Briceño is a global keynote speaker and facilitator who guides many of the world’s leading companies in developing cultures of learning and high performance. Earlier in his career, he was the co-founder and CEO of Mindset Works, the first company to offer growth mindset development services. Previously, he was a venture capital investor with the Sprout Group. His TED Talk, How to Get Better at the Things You Care About, and his prior TEDx Talk, The Power of Belief, have been viewed more than nine million times. He is a Pahara-Aspen Fellow, a member of the Aspen Institute’s Global Leadership Network, and an inductee in the Happiness Hall of Fame. Connect Eduardo Briceño