
Meet Christina Luo, and prepare for a treat, because her insight and approach to stability is worth dropping what you’re doing right now to dive in.
First, a little about her. Christina Luo writes about mindful productivity, decision making, and the creative process. She works in strategic program execution at ATB Financial and has served on advisory councils and working groups with the Government of Canada’s Women and Gender Equality, UN Women, and Plan International Canada.
Read on, or click here find Christina’s thoughtful, and dangerously strategic approach to stability. It’ll be tough to a locate a more actionable write up on stability, anywhere:
1. Lead with curiosity through Heart-Head-Hand: Building onto the 30-60-90 day onboarding plan when joining a new team or organization, is what I call the Heart-Head-Hand framework.
- Heart (Day 0-30): This gets at immersing yourself in the “heart” of the culture, the business, and the people and processes that bring it to life. It’s about building empathy for why things are the way they are, without immediately jumping to solutions or conclusions. Anchor your curiosity, intuition, and early assumptions into a set of guiding questions that can help you bring others along to learn and validate.
- Head (Day 30-60): This step is about synthesizing your learnings to shape and scope the vision for the future. This can be a defined problem or opportunity to address. It’s also about effectively articulating and creating alignment on this vision. Alignment doesn’t always mean agreement across a team, but a shared commitment and ownership in the outcome.
- Hand (Day 60-90): Even though this is the last step, starting with the end in mind should be in your peripheral throughout the process. While execution can look additive: Starting new initiatives, bringing in new methods and tools; at its core, it’s about taking things away: Removing barriers, unlearning outdated beliefs, and helping teams get out of their own way.
Throughout this, sharing your journey with your team allows them to see their part in the design and decision making process.
2. Build up your team’s trust battery: I first heard about the concept of a “trust battery” from Shopify’s Tobi Lütke. Think of your phone battery. It doesn’t just display a binary full/empty indicator. Instead there’s a spectrum of various levels. Similarly, on teams, trust is a gradient that recharges or drains at every interaction. Its initial charge varies by person, depending on whether you believe that trust is to be earned (0-50 percent) or given (51-100 percent). Trust, including self-trust, is built through repeatedly bridging the distance between what you say you will do, and what you actually do. Bolstered by your ability to effectively communicate the intent, initiative, and impact. The trust battery charges gradually with new teams, particularly after a change, over each email, meeting, project, and especially during moments of conflict. But once you do establish that reliability and rapport, like operating with a full charge battery, it makes it easier to drive progress together.
3. Create a team user manual: An exercise I’ve run with new teams, including for short-term projects, is creating a team user manual. I usually set this up as an ice breaker at the beginning of a broader team meeting or workshop. It’s an opportunity for members of a team to learn how they can best work with, and engage one another. At the start of the session, each person independently fills out a template (often a slide) reflecting on their working and communication styles, strengths, and areas of growth. Then, after visualizing these differences and similarities together as a whole (often another slide or a whiteboard), there’s a share back together as a group. Some questions I’ve found work well include:
- I am energized by/My energy gets zapped by…
- I do my best thinking/focused deep work during…
- The best way to engage me on an idea or decision is by…
- Others see me as the go-to person for…
- You can support me by…
- I am working on improving…
- The ideal way to give me feedback is…
- I see my role on this team as…
Along with some “this or that” questions like:
- Morning meetings/afternoon meetings.
- Email or chat/phone or video call.
- A written brief/a presentation.
- Give me the backstory/cut to the chase.
- Work through together/distance to digest.
Teams walk away with an artifact they can reference, refresh, and put into practice in their daily interactions. While the workshop itself takes around 30 minutes to complete, the discussion and deeper understanding and consideration it generates, often goes beyond the initial session.