Maria Brett The Growing Edge, Melbourne (2026)

15/09/2023

Yesterday I ran a training session on how to build an engaged and productive team. I always love exploring this topic because I believe it’s crucially important that leaders take responsibility for engagement.

Employee engagement is the level of an employee’s commitment and connection your organisation. What I’m talking about here is the strength of the emotional connection people feel towards their places of work.

Engaged employees are enthusiastic about their work, and willing work hard to contribute to the organisation’s success. They are psychologically invested so they really want to belong. This is a big motivator to do great work and to stick around.

If any members of your team are not engaged, that largely comes down to you and the action you are taking – or not taking – to engage people. Research by Gallup found that:

“The Manager or Team Leader alone accounts for 70% of the variance in team engagement.”

When an employee is engaged, the way they show up at work is noticeably different from when they are disengaged. Here are the words I use to describe the visible signs of engagement. If you’re in a leadership role, remember this could apply to you too.

An engaged employee is:

· Optimistic and committed
· Supportive and flexible
· Selfless and hard-working
· Clear and communicative
· Caring and curious
· Passionate and open-minded
· Productive and punctual

Wow! Imagine if your people showed up in that way every day. You will probably be able to come up with other words to describe what engagement looks like.

So what are leaders doing if they are successfully engaging people? What would you see? You would the leader doing these five things:

1. Giving autonomy to the people they lead and delegating to them effectively, trusting them to get on with their jobs without micro-managing
2. Demonstrating respect for the people they lead, and the stakeholders and clients they serve, through their words and actions
3. Working with others collaboratively, harnessing their talents and encouraging their contributions
4. Meeting regularly with the people they manage and providing them with support, guidance and coaching, to help them excel and grow
5. Making sure they celebrate the successes of their team and providing rewards to recognise excellent performance and innovation

29/08/2023

Learn how to lead your business with emotional intelligence in a 90-minute workshop which I am presenting on Thursday this week.

This is an opportunity to do some low-cost, in-person learning with me, and also to network with other business owners.

Thursday 31st August
7.15am - 9am
Quest Mont Albert
The price is only $33 - includes light breakfast

Emotional intelligence improves leadership effectiveness and is a key skill all leaders need to develop. Leaders who avoid dealing with emotions in the workplace do so at their peril because work is not an emotion-free zone. Emotions impact on behaviour, performance and decisions in the workplace, in both helpful and unhelpful ways. Rather than avoiding emotions, leaders need to learn how to manage emotions in the way they lead people.

In this workshop we will dive deeply into emotional intelligence to learn what it really is and what it looks like in a leader. Participants will learn how to improve their leadership effectiveness by practising emotionally intelligent leadership behaviours. You will reap the rewards of emotional intelligence with increased awareness of the impact you have on others, and greater capacity to build effective working relationships.

To book a place, click on the link in the comments below.

22/08/2023

We can get stuck in a groove in the way we lead – indeed in the way we live our lives. When this happens, we are operating from habits that can be challenging to break.

I remember starting a new leadership role some years ago and it occurred to me that I could be whoever I wanted to be in the role. No-one really knew me so all my pre-conceived ideas and judgments about myself did not have to apply. This was a great idea, but it wasn’t as easy as I hoped to be different in my new role and to change the way I was leading.

My LI posts offer lots of leadership advice, with specific strategies you can apply to change the way you’re leading, but if you read them like a cook book, you might not get the transformation you’re hoping for.

I confess that I don’t like cooking very much, and the many cook books I’ve collected over the years rarely get used. Instead, I just cook – spontaneously – with pretty mixed results. Sometimes it seems to work out ok, but more often, my cooking is pretty basic.

Occasionally, I decide to follow a recipe I love, adapting it to reflect my preferences and the situation I’m in, and staying open to the possibility that it might actually be worth the effort. I’m often amazed by how good the food tastes, and surprised when people compliment me on my cooking. This is when I become a great cook I actually am, but I just never realised it.

This change principle also holds true in leadership. Follow a system but be flexible and adaptable and you will be surprised when people love the way you lead. It’s all about staying open to possibilities.

To change the way you lead, I want to suggest the most helpful place to start is by cultivating beginner’s mind. This is the change in attitude, and the spirit of curiosity, that is essential to becoming more aware, and the transformational growth that awareness brings.

Shunryu Suzuki famously said “In beginner’s mind there are many possibilities but in the expert’s there are few.”

In the expert’s mind we believe we know every-thing there is to know. With nothing more to learn, the expert will probably find it confronting to admit to themselves or others that they don’t know, or that there’s something they need to learning, or even worse, that they’ve got something wrong.

By contrast, with beginner’s mind we are free from expectations, judgments and limitations. We are freed from our habitual ways of being and perceiving the world. Instead of being caught in our version of the world, as experienced through our thoughts and feelings, and our fixed sense of who we are, we begin seeing the world from the perspective of awareness. With beginner’s mind, nothing is fixed, so anything is possible.

10/08/2023

I heard some thought-provoking conversations yesterday in a training session I ran on Emotionally Intelligent Leadership. It’s always heartening to see emotional intelligence in action when leaders talk about their awareness of their own and other people’s emotions, and the impact of the way they lead has on their teams.

For emotional intelligence training to have an impact, it’s important that we don’t just look at the topic theoretically, but that we consider what we ACTUALLY DO as leaders.

The Growing Edge EI model is a simple way to understand what emotional intelligence looks like in leader. It’s a simple Quadrant Model that gets to the essence of emotional intelligence.

The horizontal axis illustrates the inward and outward dimensions of emotional intelligence (Self and Other), while the vertical axis illustrates the reflective and action-oriented aspects of emotional intelligence (Reflection and Action). This gives us four quadrants at the intersections of the axes. At the centre is emotional reasoning because we use emotions to reason and make decisions in relation to all four quadrants.

When you drill down into each quadrant, you can identify the emotional intelligence competencies that leaders can put into practice. These are important competencies for leaders to master because all the research confirms that emotional intelligence is a key skill which improves leadership effectiveness.

I’ve come up with 20 leadership competencies emerging from my EI model, but you could come up with your own depending on the skills you need to develop for your own leadership.

Self-Awareness
✅ Knowing how you feel and why
✅ Seeing your strengths and weaknesses
✅ Understanding how others see you
✅ Being your authentic self

Self-Management
✅ Controlling emotions and impulses
✅ Caring for your health and wellbeing
✅ Showing up with integrity
✅Cultivating a growth mindset

Awareness of Others
✅ Seeing others’ feelings & perspectives
✅ Understanding relationship dynamics
✅ Appreciating and respecting others
✅ Seeing the impact you have on others

Relating to Others
✅ Collaborating towards shared goals
✅ Inspiring and influencing others
✅ Navigating conflict and differences
✅ Building trust and rapport

Emotional Reasoning
✅ Considering feelings in decision-making
✅ Consulting others about decisions
✅ Being aware of biases in decision-making
✅ Making ethical decisions

Imagine if you managed to do all of these things in your leadership. What an awesome leader you would be!

I know it’s a pretty big list of skills you could develop in order to lead with emotional intelligence. Please don’t be daunted! Start by choosing just three you need to work on. Think about the SPECIFIC actions you could take to start putting them into practice in your leadership every day.

02/08/2023

Get set for real impact by putting strategy first!

Strategy is crucially important for leaders who want to have an impact, and yet organisations and their leaders quite often get strategy wrong. One way strategic planning can go very wrong is the planners get hold of it, and they focus on the planning rather than the strategy.

Another pitfall is having a strategy that is too rigid and is not able to adapt to changing circumstances. Even worse, some leaders make their strategy so flexible, they're actually failing to make strategic choices which means they have no strategy at all!

In my latest article on strategy, I explain how to navigate some of the pitfalls of strategic planning and how to create and implement a strategy that will help you increase your organisation's impact.

Read the article at https://lnkd.in/gt9bir9r

I’m not talking about any old strategy here. I’m talking about a purpose-led strategy that will support you as a leader, and your organisation, to have a meaningful impact for the clients or stakeholders you serve.

A purposeful strategy won’t be achieved by the leader alone – this is not about you. People at all levels of the organisation need to engage with your purpose. When every-one is pulling in the same direction behind your purpose, individuals can see how they are contributing to that purpose, and how together, your impact can be so much greater.

27/07/2023

Help, our culture is toxic! 🥵😨It only takes one toxic person to undermine the great, culture you've been nurturing over a long time, and for people to feel unsafe and your whole culture to be derailed.

Toxic culture is actually more common that leaders realise. The impact is magnified when it’s the leader who is the toxic person.

I’ve never met a toxic leader who was deliberately being toxic, although I’ve read plenty of stories about them. These are the narcissists, bullies, sociopaths, and passive-aggressive personalities that can be difficult to spot during the recruiting process.

Some toxic leaders are unconscious of their behaviour, moving in and out of toxic behaviours when they’re under significant pressure. This is not to excuse these behaviours. They are a big issue to address – especially if you are the person who is falling into toxic behaviours!

The impact of toxic culture is very significant. One of those impacts is poor staff retention. Recent research by Revelio Labs found that the great resignation is principally about people quitting their jobs because of toxic workplace culture. They found that toxic culture is 10.4 times more likely to contribute to people’s decisions to quit than their pay.

Let’s consider the bully. 😡😈 This is perhaps the most common type of toxic person you will encounter in the workplace. Bullying is defined as repeated exposure over time to negative actions with the intention to inflict injury or discomfort to another person. You can spot a bully when there is a pattern of deliberate demeaning behaviour that repeatedly puts the target person in a position of weakness.

While bullying is defined as an intentional behaviour, there is also unintentional bullying. This is where the person is not aware of, or in control of their bullying behaviour. You can spot an unconscious bully when they constantly criticise people, or yell at them, falsely accuse them of making mistakes, belittle them in front of others, or gossip about them behind their backs.

This type of bully may become aware of their behaviour only after the event, but that moment of unawareness is a real failure of mindfulness. This is not something minor that leaders don’t need to worry about – especially if it’s your own behaviour in question. It that moment when awareness fails you, you are being a bully, and you are causing harm to another person. 😢☠️ That’s definitely not ok.

I am willing to confess that I have been there. Under pressure, my awareness failed me and I fell into toxic behaviours. It was a wake-up call that made me do a lot of work on myself, and the way I was leading. 😴 😇

I won’t shy away from saying toxic behaviours need to be relentlessly rooted out and addressed. Sometimes this work takes time and is exceptionally difficult.

If your organisational culture is toxic, it’s very urgent that you begin detoxing today. 🛠📈 Reach out to me to ask me how.

24/07/2023

Subcultures can form when a group of people in your organisation share something that ties them together. Teams or departments could develop their own cultures based on the things their people share, such as geographical location, specialist functions, seniority, job roles, and so on.

Sub-cultures are not necessarily a problem. In fact, they are very often to be embraced. We are all individuals and we do our best work when we are free to be ourselves, and find our own ways of working together as a team or department. 😃👍

A team of social workers will have a very different culture from the IT Department. A senior leadership team will have a very different culture from the customer service team, or an occupational health and safety team.

We can understand how sub-cultures actually function by looking at people’s visible behaviours. A behaviour that would be great to see in your customer service team would be a focus on listening and empathy. This is how they can really understand what customers need and how to best serve them. 🚀🎉

The culture of your occupational health and safety team will look very different. They will need to focus on doing things correctly, in accordance with documented processes, in order to reduce risks and keep people safe.

In these examples, there is the space and need for both cultures to co-exist. Sub-cultures are only a problem if the behaviours coming out of the sub-culture contradict or undermine the overall culture you are trying to create.

Imagine if one team in your organisation has a sub-culture of fierce feedback, where critical feedback is seen as a good way to toughen people up, but the feedback culture you are trying to create for the organisation as a whole is to give feedback with kindness to support people to learn.

🤬😟The sub-culture of fierce, unfettered, critical feedback will be unhelpful, possibly even harmful, when seen within the overall culture you’re trying to create. It’s the type of feedback that borders on bullying. This is where you could end up with pockets of toxic culture. It only takes one person behaving in an unhelpful way to undermine the great, people-centred culture you may have been nurturing over a long time, and for your culture to become toxic. Toxic culture is actually more common that many leaders realise! 🤮💩☠️

I won’t shy away from saying that toxic behaviours will need to be rooted out relentlessly and addressed. Sometimes this work takes time and is exceptionally difficult.💣 🔍

Do you need help with toxic culture? Do you need to better manage sub-cultures in your organisation to get every-one pulling in the same direction? Ask me how.

07/07/2023

On Wednesday I held a Masterclass on Sparking Culture Change and it was heartening to see participants so engaged in learning about culture.

I shared my model of People-Centred Culture as a framework for leaders to think about their current culture (which was not always where they wanted it to be), but also as a way to think about the culture they aspire to create.

It’s a simple Four Quadrant Modal that highlights 4 key types of people-centred culture.

Quadrant 1 – A Support Culture
Supporting people enables them to perform at their best so they can achieve excellence and results. Support is felt by the people we lead when we demonstrate care, and commit to wellbeing and safety, both physical and psychological. We offer flexibility in work arrangements, while also having systems in place to ensure accountability.

Quadrant 2 – A Connection Culture
We inspire the performance of teams and empower them to provide great service to customers or clients by building team connection. Connection grows and becomes embedded in our culture when we relate to each other with kindness, building inclusion and trust. We then have the courage to give and receive fearless feedback, and work together to build collaboration.

Quadrant 3 – An Excellence Culture
Excellence becomes possible when we embrace and model the type of curiosity that supports growth and learning, and discover new ways to work with adaptability in the face of 21st century challenges. This creates the conditions where people are ready for challenge, and innovation flourishes.

Quadrant 4 – A Service Culture
With service, we inspire customer loyalty because customers can see and feel the culture you’ve created, and they’re aligned with the purpose and values you demonstrate and communicate. Customers value the quality and responsiveness you offer, and report satisfaction with the services you provide. There are no better results than this!

Get in touch with me of you’d like to have a 1-to1 conversation about your organisation’s culture. It would be great to explore what people-centred culture would like life for your organisation.

21/06/2023

Peter Drucker once said “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. I love developing strategy, and I believe it’s crucially important, but I’m with Peter Drucker on this one. Even the most visionary strategy won’t be implemented successfully if it doesn’t align with your organisation’s culture, and if your culture is not healthy.

Similarly, systems are essential. Without them, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to effectively implement any strategy, or to harness people’s energy to do their best work and engage productively in the implementation process. Engagement depends on how people feel about your organisation, so this takes us right back to the central importance of culture.

The key point is, culture can’t been seen isolation, because no single factor determines your success. Culture needs to be seen as part of an interconnected system. Culture is often viewed as a stand-alone element within the organisation and the tools used to measure or improve culture reflect this limited view. This is why attempts to bring about culture change so often fail.

I’ve illustrated the interconnectedness of culture in my model for a People-Centred Organisation. It illustrates how your efforts to spark culture change won’t get very far unless you see culture in relation to the whole, interconnected system.

Think about your why, your what and your how as a model for the development of your organisation. Your why is your strategy, your what is your systems, and your how is your culture. All three are important, are constantly intersecting, and depend on people. When you put people at the centre, you will strengthen the effectiveness of your strategy and your systems, while also driving culture change. This is how leaders support people to continuously improve engagement, accountability and performance.

Having made this important point about culture being part of an interconnected system, we do need to have a starting point when we’re leading culture change. I suggest the starting point actually needs to be your organisational strategy. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to know what kind of culture you’re trying to create if you’re not clear about the strategy you’re trying to implement.

So although culture really does eat strategy for breakfast, you will need to start your culture change process by looking at your strategy and making sure you’ve absolutely nailed it. Then you’ll be ready to start creating the ideal culture that will enable you to fulfill your organisation’s mission, and have a meaningful impact as a leader.

Talk to me if you need help nailing your strategy, or sparking culture change.

14/06/2023

Psychological safety is really a very simple concept, but it’s not always easy to achieve. It takes consistent and thoughtful work, and empathy, to create psychological safety, but the outcomes are well worth the effort. When people feel safe, that’s when you can start talking about even the most challenging subjects that leaders and their teams often avoid.

Read my latest Blog article to find out how leaders can create psychological safety at work.

https://lnkd.in/g6hBHzBP

If you follow the strategies I offer, you and the people you lead will no longer be silenced. Instead, people will feel safe to speak up, and leaders will be able to start challenging their teams. This is when you and your team will move into the Learning Zone. You will be ready to start having courageous conversations and to give and receive feedback with empathy.

Your feedback conversations will go something like this.

✅ I'm curious about your struggles so I ask questions to find out what's going on, rather than making assumptions about you, or judging you.
✅ I am aware of the impact my words may have on you emotionally, so I offer my feedback with kindness – the type of kindness that is genuine, not fake.
✅ We’re both willing to be vulnerable because we have established a relationship of trust, in which it feels safe to speak up.
✅ You feel affirmed because I'm offering you support, and communicating my appreciation for your strengths.
✅ We work together to make the feedback process more effective, and we both take responsibility for being accountable for following up on our conversation.
✅ My feedback really makes a difference by helping you to learn and grow.
✅ But I’m open to learning as well, because it’s pretty likely you’ll also have some feedback for me.
✅ We both relish the opportunity to give and receive feedback because, together, we've created a feedback culture at work.

08/06/2023

Wow, I really enjoyed the session I ran yesterday for leaders at Windana Drug & Alcohol Recovery on Courageous Conversations. Yes, leadership development can be so much fun!

We started by exploring psychological safety which is the essential pre-requisite for any courageous conversation. We then learnt and practised some practical skills which help leaders to have conversations about the subjects they dread talking about – and sometimes avoid.

It’s worth considering whether you actually feel safe to speak up to your own leaders and whether the people you lead also feel safe to speak up.

Psychological safety is simply the feeling that it is safe to speak up with your concerns, questions and ideas, or to acknowledge your mistakes, without fear that you will be embarrassed, shamed, rejected or punished.

It takes some work to create psychological safety but the outcome is well worth the effort. When people feel safe, that’s when you can tackle even the most challenging subject without fear. You will be ready to give and receive feedback more effectively with a high level of empathy.

Here are my ten strategies that will help leaders start creating psychological safety for your teams and organisations. But you need to be doing these things from day one when you employ some-one. It’s too late when the bullying complaint lands on your desk!

1. Always behave ethically – honesty is key
2. Be clear about expectations
3. Follow through on your commitments
4. Acknowledge your own mistakes
5. Take an interest in people and show them you care
6. Ask questions rather than assuming or judging
7. Provide support
8. Express your appreciation
9. Consult people on changes that affect them
10. Create a positive team climate

Which of these strategies are you consistently putting into practice? And which ones do you need to work on?

I invite every leader to think about one action you could take today to help create psychological safety in your organisation.

Maria Brett The Growing Edge

15/09/2023

29/08/2023

22/08/2023

10/08/2023

02/08/2023

27/07/2023

24/07/2023

07/07/2023

21/06/2023

14/06/2023

08/06/2023

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