5 • how to help others develop a 212 mind
4 steps immersed in trust.
This is part of the 212 life series—an ongoing exploration of living and working at 212°. The premise—Water is hot at 211 degrees. Heat it to 212, it boils and creates steam. And with steam, you can power a machine. 1 extra degree changes everything.
Helping others develop a 212 mind begins by modeling it yourself—a reaching mind.
You find joy in it. It’s exciting.
Now you want to help others get and keep the same thing. You want to encourage an optimistic curiosity with the people you care about—an enthusiasm for thinking, learning, and continually improving things.
Not everyone will want that help. That’s okay. Let them be.
Some will want it only briefly. Briefly is good. If you can plant that seed quickly and the person can effectively develop it on their own, wonderful! Maybe your only part in that is sharing a 212 life with them. Be that spark.
But, if you’re in a leadership role—parent or team leader—you’ve got a responsibility to stay close.
Parenting
If someone doesn’t want your help in the parenting role, that’s a different challenge than other leadership roles.
If you have kids, for the first 15 to 18 years, humanity will appreciate you giving your parenting work attention, regardless of any lack of interest your child may have in development. It’s important to help your future adults learn to think. It’s part of Parenting Simply.
At its core, the steps to helping your kids develop a 212 mind are similar to those of a leader at work. Although for some leaders, it’s not quite as personal. They don’t see their team’s work as a reflection of their leadership efforts as much as parents often do with their children. Ego and rationalization thing, I think.1
At work
Leaders of people in an organization are usually obligated to keep the pursuit of ongoing improvement out front.2
If someone doesn’t enjoy that pursuit, after helping them understand the importance of it a few times, you might need to make a change to make things better for everyone else—internally and for the people you serve. Too much patience for one at the expense of many can be painful.
If the call for fanning the pursuit of ongoing improvement isn’t your thing, there are all kinds of other work you might enjoy more. Production, support, and all that includes are important too.
° You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals.
To that end, each of us must work for our own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
Madame Curie | Polish physicist and chemist | 1867–1934
Leading people involves staying with the work of helping people grow and do better work. Here’s how to…
Help your team develop their 212 minds—
Model the 212 mind yourself.
Establish it in the culture by introducing it and explaining how to practice it.
Discuss it to help people be heard and encourage buy-in.
Coach and nurture it through ongoing discussion, example, and vigilance.
To make it possible, you have to cultivate an environment of trust.
Not corporate speak trust—212 trust—something special that should be easier than it is to create and keep. It’s the human condition and all we experience that makes it the challenge that it is.
No fear.
Few people are comfortable looking bad in front of others or being made to feel less than by another person. Getting caught in someone’s line of condescension, disrespect, anger, correction, wonderful talent, or superior intelligence can make a person defensive or offensive pretty quickly. Some might just go quiet.
Fear enters the room, and keeping the work in the center gets hobbled. That’s money, time, lost opportunity, and pain. Ugh.
Grow trust.
People need to feel confident that their thoughts and actions—risks—while pursuing improvement are wanted, and that you’ve got their backs through it.
Nurturing a 212 mind with your team requires continual cultivation of trust through deep and consistent attention. It’s not a once-a-week or quarterly meeting interpersonal transaction. It’s what you do all the time and encourage among the team all the time.
The scale of trust continuously strengthens or degrades, with and without your involvement. If you’re not attentive, trust will be weak—fragile—and the team will never really enjoy the profoundly positive impact of a collective 212 mind.
You can settle in the shallows. But once you get out past the break3, you’ll find it much more fun to reach.
How to cultivate 212 trust—
Be trustworthy yourself.
Respect everyone.
Communicate clearly and often.
Give people agency.
Cultivate safety.
Genuinely acknowledge and appreciate people.
Develop relationships beyond the work.
Encourage your team to do the same.
(212 trust points expanded below.)
You see how this is similar to developing a 212 mind?
It’s doing what you’re asking others to do, talking with them about it continually, and adjusting things when necessary (approaches and sometimes people).
1 challenge
Helping people develop a 212 mind while cultivating a high-trust environment requires a split approach. Not only do leaders need to be trustworthy and model a 212 mind themselves while coaching people on both, they also have to be diligent about protecting the effort.
Leaders need to actively watch and listen for things or people that might undermine or erode the team’s trust and enthusiasm.
It’s tough to be positive and vigilant at the same time. It can be a pretty slick slope from vigilance to distrust and control if one’s not careful. Vigilance is objectively noticing and staying with it. It’s vigilance on vigilance. And leaders are humans—flawed.
But that’s the work if you want to cultivate a level of trust that enables a team of people to collectively practice and develop their 212 minds.
Once you’ve got your base of trust, you’ll need to love that thing just like you do anything else you care about. Lock it in and make it better. Stay attentive. Stay vigilant. Go for 212 trust while you…
Help your team develop their 212 minds—
Model the 212 mind yourself.
Establish it in the culture by introducing it and explaining how to practice it.
Discuss it to help people be heard and encourage buy-in.
Coach and nurture it through ongoing discussion, example, and vigilance.
Most difficult?
All these things should be obvious for a leader. But, as we all know, too often we do and don’t do the things we should and shouldn’t do.
Most challenging will be regularly modeling the 212 mind yourself, being consistent with the details of cultivating trust, and staying with the coaching of your team. Shouldn't be, given the joy it can create for everyone, but again, we're a challenged species😉
That’s where our resilience practice comes in.
Quiet mediocrity is a sad thing. Cultivating 212 trust can help you minimize it.
Cultivating 212 trust with a team—
1—Be trustworthy yourself.
Be transparent. Share what you can openly. Explain the reasons behind decisions. Do what you wish others would do now and would have done for you over your career.
Follow through. Do what you say you’ll do as much as possible. Why not always? It’s the human thing that gets in the way.
Own your mistakes. Apologize quickly and genuinely. Get back to the work faster.
2—Respect everyone.
Listen more. Give undivided attention to people. Don’t multitask conversations. Ask clarifying questions. Don't interrupt.
Stay objective. Do your best to hear things as they are and ask more clarifying questions.
Assume good intent. Minimize skepticism and cynicism.
Be consistent and fair. Avoid favoritism.
3—Communicate clearly and often.
Set clear expectations. Reduce anxiety and the invention of stories in people’s minds.
Over-communicate with important things. Be certain of full awareness. Risk being a little annoying. In a high-trust environment at its peak, over-communicating about important things won’t be annoying. It’s beautiful.
Invite feedback. Encourage open communication both ways. Be careful to avoid being discouraging.
° We would proof our pages like they were going to the Smithsonian. We would check every detail on a set ... it doesn't matter if it's a school play or a dumb TV show. It's your work. You should care about it so much that people get annoyed with you.
Tina Fey | American producer, writer & actor | 1970 -
4—Give people agency.
Trust. Give people real responsibility. Avoid micromanaging. If you find yourself doing it, ask yourself why. You’re the leader.
Let others lead. Encourage people to facilitate meetings and manage projects that might fall to you. Expose people to those experiences. Spread the opportunities around for the sake of development. Make a future leader smile. Be that person.
5—Cultivate safety.
Respond calmly to pushback or ideas. Ask questions. Invite more thoughts.
Appreciate candor. Thank people for engaging. Smile more.
Reframe setbacks and mistakes. “What did we learn?” “How should we handle it in the future?” Lift people up. Help them get back to the work faster. Improve the mood quickly.
6—Genuinely acknowledge and appreciate people.
Recognize contributions. Be specific, authentic, and public where appropriate. Avoid BS. Don’t force it.
Celebrate good. Results, of course. But effort, risks, and values in action, too.
7—Develop relationships beyond the work.
Know your people. Learn about their lives and what’s important to them when they want to share. Be careful not to intrude. Read cues and respect boundaries.
Let people know you. Do what’s comfortable and appropriate. Remember you’re in the leadership role.
Care. Give people time if they’re dealing with things. Listen. If asked, help if appropriate and you can. Again, be very careful with boundaries, comfort levels, and what is appropriate and not.
Caution: This is a complex issue. Practice it lightly over time. Be attentive and learn.
8—Encourage your team to do the same.
Talk with people more. Share with them your goal of sustaining a high-trust culture. Invite them to make it their goal. Open things up and share these points with the people you care about. Ask them often how they’d improve things.
Be diligent. Don’t settle. If you want something special in terms of trust, the need for attention never ends.
Please email me with typos, thoughts, comments, or suggestions (or put them here in the comments). Please don’t be shy or worry about my feelings. Quick, blunt, and maybe interesting or helpful4 is always welcome.
Culturally, a responsible parent is going to feel their kid is a reflection of them. It’s hard to offload that to other things when society tells us this in so many ways. Although reality is genetics, peers, and other influences handle most of the parenting work after the basics of providing food, safety, love, and healthcare-related things.
An organizational leader has all sorts of reasons things might not be going well other than themselves—true and rationalized.
This might not be as important to leaders who have a boss who’s floating in their role.
You can still make it important on your own. Just be careful how you go about it. Floating bosses can get upset when people start splashing around.
I know. I could’ve and maybe should’ve said, “You can settle but in the long run…” Struck me as boring.
Then a Dave Matthews Band lyric popped into my head and I was influenced—”No, you can't cross the ocean if you can't get past the break.” A great line among many in the song, Monsters.
“Maybe interesting or helpful” is meant to free you of concern.
I’d rather you risk sharing something with me than being concerned it might not land well. If your thought implies I’m stupid or an asshole, you might be right. If so, I’d like to try to fix it.