Our new webinar explores the relationship between trust and performance

The rela­tion­ship between man­ag­er and employ­ee is lop-sided. 

Well, yes. So far so obvi­ous. But we’re not talk­ing about influ­ence or senior­i­ty. The issue here is psy­cho­log­i­cal in nature. A manager’s default posi­tion is to judge and eval­u­ate. No mat­ter how close the man­ag­er is to the team mem­ber, the lat­ter is always aware that their career prospects and remu­ner­a­tion — the very things that ful­fil and feed them — are depen­dent on the for­mer. Con­scious­ly or not, an employ­ee will base the way they behave on this pre­cept. Did I say that in the right way? Do I look the way I’m expect­ed to look? 

HR pro­fes­sion­als know this bet­ter than any­one. They get to see the rela­tion­ship between man­ag­er and employ­ee from their own unique per­spec­tive. And we don’t need to be tal­ent man­agers or HR direc­tors to know that rela­tion­ships with inher­ent bias are unhealthy. You couldn’t build a suc­cess­ful mar­riage or friend­ship along those lines, nor would you want to. A con­struc­tive rela­tion­ship needs to come from a place of psy­cho­log­i­cal safety. 

Google led the way with their now-famous Project Aris­to­tle: an exten­sive look into the fac­tors that pro­duce the high­est-per­form­ing teams. Their research found that no sin­gle ele­ment affect­ed team dynam­ics more strong­ly than psy­cho­log­i­cal safe­ty. For peo­ple to real­ly achieve togeth­er, they need­ed to trust each oth­er and be secure about their place with­in the team. It didn’t mat­ter what the group’s idio­syn­crasies were: they might be calm speak­ers or loud voic­es; they might socialise togeth­er or only meet in the office. The point was that the strongest teams con­sis­tent­ly had a shared belief that they could take risks with each oth­er. The mem­bers knew that they wouldn’t be ridiculed or reject­ed for shar­ing their opinions. 

So that brings us to our lat­est webi­nar, fea­tur­ing as its guest star coach, well­be­ing expert, author and — inci­den­tal­ly — Advanced Clear Review’s new head of Per­for­mance and Well­be­ing, Natasha Wal­lace. Natasha has had an incred­i­ble career as both HR direc­tor and per­for­mance coach, and we’re extreme­ly proud to be work­ing with her. In this webi­nar, she shares the cru­cial psy­cho­log­i­cal dri­vers that pro­duce a cul­ture of anx­i­ety, across busi­ness in gen­er­al and the appraisal and eval­u­a­tion sys­tem in par­tic­u­lar. In the process she draws on sources and exam­ples as diverse as Google, the the­o­ries of edu­ca­tion and the influ­ence of social media.

As well as Natasha’s wis­dom, we’re also delight­ed to be joined by Lynn Rodgers to share her insights. Lynn was a key part of the team which suc­cess­ful­ly deliv­ered a cul­tur­al trans­for­ma­tion project at CYBG/​Virgin Mon­ey, work­ing with Advanced Clear Review to ditch annu­al appraisals and imple­ment reg­u­lar con­ver­sa­tions and a real-time feed­back per­for­mance model.

Please do enjoy the webi­nar and feel free to share your own thoughts and expe­ri­ences in the com­ments sec­tion. We’d also love to hear from you if you have any thoughts on what you’d like us to cov­er next: you can reach out to us by email, on Twit­ter or via Linkedin.

If that’s just not enough for you, 

1. A look at Project Aris­to­tle, Google’s search to uncov­er the chem­istry behind high-per­form­ing teams, from Charles Duhigg at the New York Times. Read more here. It’s a long read, so set 30 – 40 min­utes aside for this. 
2. “How to man­age pay with Con­tin­u­ous Per­for­mance Man­age­ment”, an eBook that exam­ines the ques­tion we’re asked per­haps more than any oth­er here at Advanced Clear Review. Down­load it free here.
3. Natasha Wallace’s new book, ​“The Con­scious Effect: 50 Lessons for Bet­ter Orga­ni­za­tion­al Well­be­ing” is avail­able for pre-order now.