Building adaptive, self-managing teams in a culture of continuous improvement - Interview with Lizzie Benton (Part 1)

Lizzie Benton specialises in workplace culture and has made a name for herself by helping create workplaces with a clear purpose and teams that can make their own decisions. She believes in being straightforward when it comes to changing how organisations run, and she supports ways of working that help people grow. Benton has worked in many different fields, and she’s good at coming up with new ways to work and setting up organisations where people manage themselves.

In this talk, she tells us what she thinks about dealing with the tricky parts of today’s work world and building teams that can bounce back and change when they need to.

Q: With numerous factors shaping the future of work, what do you see as the most critical challenges facing HR leaders today?

A: Everything about work has changed, and continues to change. There is not one singular point of challenge, but numerous challenges – and for many leaders that’s not only overwhelming, but calls on them to develop a more diverse skill set in order to handle the uncertainties.

We can’t rely on predicting patterns, outdated blueprints, or forcing things back into the shape they once were. Instead, we have to look at the choices we have, and the options available to us. For many leaders, this is a tough pivot from a place where knowing the answers, and having a plan was the default response, and where their success was rewarded.

But the future cannot be balanced on one person’s, or a blessed few, shoulders.

It lies in a far more participative and collaborative way of working, that enables us to tap into all the knowledge and wisdom of the group in order to adapt. Metaphorically, leaders can no longer stand on an island, they must bring together all the pieces of the map to understand how to move forward.

The true critical challenge is deep personal work for all of us; facing uncertainty, handling complexity, building an awareness of our bias, challenging the status quo.

Q: How can leaders develop their own adaptability and resilience in the face of constant change?

A: I believe it’s time to invite in change and play with it. Yes, change is uncomfortable, and we all deal with change in different ways. But if we can change our mindset to change, the hardest part is over.

It’s our tendency to resist change that causes the most problems – not the change itself.

If people want to increase their tolerance to change, then my recommendation is to invite in the change and experiment with what you can do with it. What if you could try something new and different for a period of time?

By taking on small experiments, we begin to learn that we have some agency over change, and can open ourselves up to alternatives we never thought of before. It’s like micro-dosing change. Taking the smallest things and building up your tolerance.

What happens along the way is that the perfectionist tendency drops away, and rather than being stuck by change, we feel more open to the possibilities.

Q: In your view, how does organisational culture contribute to a company’s ability to navigate change effectively?

A: An organisation’s ability to navigate change hinges on its company culture. The collective beliefs and practices that exist are all predictable factors in how an organisation will be able to respond and adapt.

There was no better test for this than the pandemic, where companies who were trusting and agile quickly transitioned to work from home, and then later to hybrid working.

Whereas those who were heavily bureaucratic and stuck in their ways, struggled to pivot, and were soon strong-arming people to come back to the office as soon as the threat was over.

Those are two starkly different cultures which influenced their response to change.

Of course, the pandemic is on the extreme end of change. There are other major changes such as wars, climate crisis and technological advancements. But then there are even smaller waves of change which are just as unpredictable in our hyper-connected world.

In an instant, a company can be called out for bad practices on social media leaving them fighting for their reputation and having to navigate a crisis. In other instances, a more disruptive start-up can suddenly compete with a legacy organisation. Change can be sparked quickly and without warning.

Organisations that are rigid and stuck in their ways, struggle to adapt to change because their energy is always spent on keeping the status quo. Every time something shifts or moves internally or externally, they waste their energy on putting everything back in order, rather than learning and adapting. They have a strong belief that things are predictable and controllable, when we all know control is a misguided illusion. 

Organisations who effectively navigate change have created a culture where they are always learning and developing how they must work. They bring people together to share ideas and solutions, and have a firm belief in the power of the collective.

Change happens, but how a company responds to that change says everything about its culture.

Q4: Can you share some practical strategies for leaders to create a culture that embraces experimentation and learns from failures?

The foundations of a culture where learning and experimentation thrives, is psychological safety. The work and research of Dr. Amy Edmondson has played a vital role in addressing this requirement to develop high-performing teams.

Psychological safety is the belief that you won’t be shamed, judged, criticised or embarrassed if you were to speak out.

Without developing this within an organisational culture people will not have the confidence to share failures or new ideas. 

To build psychological safety it has to begin with the vulnerability and authenticity of those leading.

Leaders must share their failures, must be vulnerable about how they feel about things, and must invite participation.

A common practice that companies have used to develop this is a simple ‘town hall’ meeting. In this style of meeting, a team can ask the leader any question. The idea is not to prepare so it feels staged, but for leaders to give honest and transparent answers. When people feel heard, and they see that leaders have challenges it starts to create greater trust.

Making space to also share failures and learning from them is also a strong practice to support psychological safety. Even doing a simple monthly retrospective, sharing what went well, what went wrong, and what needs to change, can make a big difference in how people respond to mistakes and begin to treat them like lessons rather than something to shy away from.

The path to self-management and adaptability continues. In the next part of our chat with Lizzie Benton, we’ll dig into the ups and downs of trying new work methods. Benton will give hands-on tips on how to begin, ways to gauge success, and stories of companies that have done well by embracing change and building a culture that always aims to get better. Stay tuned for the rest of this eye-opening talk as we look at what’s next for work and how self-managed teams can make a big difference.

HRD Connect Curators of the New Business Landscape. HRD Connect produces industry-recognized content for senior HR leaders. Through articles, case studies, Q&As, podcasts, events, and more, we offer truly progressive and cutting-edge insights designed to help people leaders address core HR challenges and add greater value to their business.

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