Sensemaking is the New Talking, Really

We have finally made it to the final technique for rebooting your leadership right now. In the last three weeks, we have discussed the importance of teambuilding, working agreements, and decision-making processes within your team culture. Each of these techniques require vulnerability from the leader and deeper relationships with team members, which decrease employee turnover. How? When people feel safe and more connected to their teams, they are more likely to stay with the company.

If I asked you what is most important in a team today, you might have answered communication. And you would have been right. However, the word “communication” is so much more now. Communication is a two-way interaction between people and grows to multi-way interactions within a team. When dismantling dominant culture, communication becomes expansive and inclusive by flowing within every direction of a company. As the great author Maya Angelou once said, “A leader sees greatness in other people. He nor she can be much of a leader if all she sees is herself.”

Communication routines are methods for relationship building, knowledge transfer, gathering feedback, and reflection. Think of these routines as emails, meetings, texts, web-based applications, and in-person events. These are all regular methods in the workplace. Yet I continue to learn about another communication routine becoming more relevant in today’s workplace. It’s called sensemaking.

Sensemaking is a group discussion where individuals share how a specific event or issue is impacting them. Running a sensemaking session with the team allows each voice to be heard and any issues to be surfaced. A sensemaking session is just that – a facilitated space where voices and feelings are supported. These sessions are important because they allow us to bring our full humanity to work while not disconnecting from the world. Change is everywhere these days, and the global pandemic waves continually push each of us to renegotiate our relationships with people and time.

Before I go any further, let me emphasize strongly here that sensemaking is not some “woo woo” concept or therapeutic technique. Sensemaking allows us to collectively practice emotional intelligence in the workplace. For leaders who are looking to grow, one study says that nearly 90 percent of what sets high performers apart is emotional intelligence. Sensemaking allows us to practice social awareness, which is a key component of emotional intelligence. Back to the changing workplace…

Sometimes we just need time to take a few breaths and speak with other people about things. I led a retreat for a group on May 25, 2022, the day after the mass school shooting in Uvalde, TX. As the leader, I could have just jumped right into our pre-planned agenda, and the group would have participated in some way. However, after seeing another leader model sensemaking the week before, I decided to use the first hour of our retreat to check in with people about the shooting. Honestly, I was ready to just pack up and go home because my grief overwhelmed me. Many others felt the same. However, just talking about the events in Uvalde helped our group reconnect to work we were doing in the community. Talking with others brought healing and hope.

While you may not have capacity to conduct sensemaking sessions for every public event, you can just focus on what’s happening in your team. An example is an employee leaving the company. People that work with this employee will experience different feelings and impacts from this departure. What would it look like for your team to spend 15 minutes in a sensemaking session about this new team void? I really like the S.E.L.F. model that we use in trainings for the Center for Trauma-Resilient Communities. The flow goes like this:

·       Safety – What safety concerns do we have? These may include physical, psychological, cultural, and racial.

·       Emotions – What emotions are you experiencing right now? FYI – “good” and “fine” are not emotions.

·       Loss – What losses are you experiencing as a result of this event? An example may be someone feeling loss of freedom to take a vacation due to an increased workload.

·       Future – How can we move forward now? What help is needed?

The questions are fairly easy, yet just asking them in a supported space allows all voices to be heard. If you have a bigger group, you could even give individuals time to reflect in silence, discuss in small groups, and have a big group discussion about what people heard in their conversations. For more sensitive issues, I recommend asking for help with facilitation. Facilitating a supported space is very important here.

Gallup Research released a study in March 2022 that highlighted why people are leaving jobs (also known as the Great Resignation). Not surprisingly, 62% of respondents noted that pay and benefits were the driving factors. Pay and benefits are a whole other discussion, which we will save for later. Forty-two percent of respondents said they left a job recently due to bad bosses and toxic organizational cultures. The four techniques of teambuilding, working agreements, decision-making processes, and sensemaking sessions can directly build and enhance your team culture right now. The world is changing. Shifting workplaces, workforce, and global economy are here to stay. You can make a different today. Go for it.

This is the fourth article in a four-part series on rebooting your leadership momentum. Come back next week to see a video summarizing these concepts.  

Facilitation is so important. Read this blog post for tips on engaging virtual team meetings.

Photo by Kate Kalvach on Unsplash