What humans need at work?

0:06 Lara Hogan, fondatrice et leadership coach chez Wherewithall, va maintenant intervenir. C'est exceptionnel. Dans son talk, Lara Hogan présente les outils que vous pouvez utiliser pour tirer parti de ces besoins fondamentaux afin de mettre en œuvre les changements positifs dans votre vie et d'obtenir aussi un bon feedback. Tout ça pour profiter à la communauté. Hello, Lara, how are you? Hello, I'm good, thank you. How are you? Fine, and I'm very, very happy to hear you talk. So please, that's up to you now. Thank you so much. Hello, I'm Lara Hogan. I used to be the VP of Engineering at Kickstarter. And before that, I was a Director of Engineering at Etsy. And now, I'm a coach and trainer for managers and leaders at a bunch of different companies. And I have the honor of talking today about what we as humans need at work. I am so excited to chat with you. So let's start by grounding this in real world stuff.

1:07 So you know the superhero, the Hulk? He's known for what? For getting angry and transforming into a different version of himself. So while most of us don't turn green and grow three sizes and start tossing cars around, the creators of this character were referencing something that is core to all human beings. which is those moments when we feel so overcome with emotion that we transform into different versions of ourselves. Before we dig in, I want everybody here to take a moment and think about one moment like this that you have had. When did you last become a Hulk version of yourself? Just to give you a real example of a Hulk moment that I have experienced. I used to live in New York City. And if you've ever taken the subway in New York City, you know that once the car doors close, they will never open again. I was heading to a workshop and I had all of my bags and I was stressed about getting there on time.

2:13 And two people got onto the train car and stopped moving, thereby blocking me and everybody else from being able to get on the train car. And I heard the doorbell chime, and I knew that those car doors were going to close. And I did something that I have never done before and never done since. I shoved them. It was horrible. I was mortified. Everybody was in a bad mood. I was super embarrassed. And that is what we are talking about with Hulk moments. So now, do you have a past Hulk moment in mind? Because I want to talk about our brains. So I am not a brain scientist, but I have learned a lot about being a better manager and teammate. some light reading on how brains work. This red bit in the front is the prefrontal cortex, and it's right behind our foreheads. So this part of our brains is considered the rational, practical, intellectual part of us.

3:16 When you're involved in deep, complex problem solving, this part of your brain is fully engaged. It doesn't fully develop until you're somewhere between the ages of 20 and 24, but this part of the brain does super different work than my other favorite part, the amygdala. Many of you may already be familiar with it because it is one of the most important parts of the brain for processing fear and anxiety responses. Half of the job of the amygdala is to be constantly on the lookout for data in our environment that could be bad news. It takes in that data and it categorizes it as either a threat or a reward. That's it. There is no other data that is interested in. If it happens to get data that a threat is headed our way, it reacts and it goes into fight or flight mode. And if the threat feels significant enough, it tells our prefrontal cortex, the rational, practical part of us, go on standby, I'm taking over.

4:26 This is called amygdala hijacking. This is called amygdala hijacking. This is what's happening when we turn into the Hulk. Your amygdala saw a bear headed your way. So it told the prefrontal cortex to go to sleep mode. Because what has helped us survive for thousands of years as humans was the fact that our amygdalas react fast enough to run, duck, etc. To avoid danger. If split hair dangerous situations were left up to our prefrontal cortex, we would would never have survived the many woolly mammoth and bear attacks that helped us humans be here today. However, when you reflect on your own Hulk moment, I'm going to guess that there were no bears involved, right? It turns out that our limbic system, our amygdalas, are activated by more than just direct threats to our physical safety. Social scientists, anthropologists, and neurologists have been studying this, and they have found that in the modern workplace, there are six core needs that we need.

5:40 Beyond the needs for physical safety, food, shelter, etc. When one of these core needs is threatened, our amygdala will wake up and our prefrontal cortex will turn off. The thing is, not all of these core needs are equally important to everyone. That means that you and each of your coworkers might care more about one than another. I'm going to illustrate each of the six core needs that might make you go into fight or flight mode by talking about one big thing that happens with some routine in our workplace. I joke that in the course of my career as a manager, I have seen the biggest displays of human emotion during something that's otherwise very logical. and straightforward. Reorgs. Anybody go through this recently? For those of you who have never dealt with an emotional reaction to a reorg, you're probably confused.

6:44 This is just logistics, right? You have a group of people working on one thing, and you need them to start working on or with someone else. That is the rational and logical part of your brain talking. Reorgs are one of my favorite examples of how our amygdalas freak out by things that aren't physical threats, and how we each might freak out for different reasons. Watch how this works. The first core need for the modern human is huge. It's the need to belong to a group, a clan, a tribe, etc. We all want to understand how we relate to this group, and we don't want to ever feel othered or left behind. When your team is affected by a reorg, how might your belonging core need feel threatened? You won't be a part of the same group as you were in before. You might feel isolated or alienated. You might feel left behind.

7:45 Maybe your team is being distributed, so you fear you won't be able to relate to these people in the same way. If you're thinking, what? No. When I went through my last reorg, I was frustrated with it for a completely different reason. Yes, this is the tricky part. The same stimulus can threaten any of the six core needs. And the one that you're feeling might be completely different than the one that your teammate is feeling. Next up is the core need of feeling improvement or having a sense of making progress. So this sense of progress could be for your organization. You're moving towards an important goal or mile marker. It could be about your team's goals or your team charter is really mission driven and you're making a hugely positive impact on your end users. It could be seeing improvement in your own career or life. An announcement of a reorg may surprise someone who doesn't see how it fits into the broader picture or plan.

8:49 Reorgs can disrupt that feeling of moving forward, and it can feel like a ridiculous distraction from the impact that you are aiming to have or the goal that the organization is trying to achieve. See what I mean about how the same stimulus might threaten different core needs and different people? Let's keep going. Our third core need is choice. Choice is the power to make decisions about your own life and work. You might call this autonomy. We need some balance of this one, however. Not too much, not too little. If a reorg is dictated to you, rather than allowing you to choose which team you're a part of or what you're working on, your sense of control, stemming from choice, might feel threatened. Especially as organizations grow, there might be fewer and fewer opportunities for you and your coworkers to have full choice and autonomy over different aspects of your work life.

9:51 Reorgs can also be a representation of a larger shift in a company's culture or scale. So you might see it as an overhaul. overwhelming representation of more loss of control to come. Equality is the idea that the world is fair and people are treated as they should be. Everyone has equal access to succeed and have their needs met. When humans feel that something is not fair, we start riots. We will literally take to the streets, right? This is equally true in the workplace. Organizational psychologists see teams ripped apart, companies destroyed, and usership decline if there's even a perception of a lack of fairness. It's huge. Reorgs may feel unfair. Some people and groups are treated better than others. They're working on shiny new things. They're reporting to a popular VP. They're doing highly visible work, stuff like that.

10:54 Some groups may have had more input or choice in the reorg, while others didn't. While that obviously could also be the choice core need, you can see how it might also flare up the equality and fairness core need too. Predictability. If every moment was 100% full of surprises, what would that feel like? Overwhelming? Exciting? A little bit of both? It turns out most humans need some balance of predictability and surprise. Too much surprise and our brains are overwhelmed with constant new data to process. Too little and our brains are bored. Science shows us that we need a pretty decent amount of stimulus to stay thriving. The predictability core need may be threatened by a surprising reorg announcement, especially for those of us who are analytical and data-driven. You had an idea of what your quarter or year would look like.

11:57 You had a sense of your roadmap and how you were being assessed and what your benchmarks or OKRs were. When even one small thing in that plan and level of certainty shifts, it can be challenging. And lastly, significance. This is essentially status. We want to know where we sit in a formal or informal hierarchy. If we're uninvited to a decision-making meeting, we might be a McGill hijacked because it could mean we're not as important to decision-making as we were before. But how might this core need be affected by a reorg? Maybe you were working on a high impact project and now you won't be. Maybe you were getting ready for a promotion, but now the reorg has thrown that plan out the window. Or maybe you were lauded for the work your team has been doing, but now you won't be with that team anymore. These kinds of changes can absolutely tap into that significance core need.

13:01 So these core needs make up the acronym BICEPS. Paloma Medina, an organizational trainer and coach, crafted this acronym to help us remember what humans'core needs at work often are. So even with the most standard or routine or logical events, the same stimulus can cause a wide variety of reactions from folks. And multiple core needs can feel threatened at the same time. And I can't emphasize this enough. Not all of these core needs are equally important to everyone. Think about which of these come up. most often for you. Historically, I found out that significance comes up most often for me, but truly everyone is so different. So now that you know what these six core needs are at work, I want to share with you the many ways they'll be helpful to your day to day. There are so many places where they come up in our daily work life, and they will be really handy anytime you want to figure out why things are going sideways.

14:11 Or when you want things to change. So we're going to talk about three places you can use them. First, we'll talk about how you can use the biceps core knees to gain alignment with other people. Then we'll talk about how to use them when giving feedback. And then we'll talk about how you can make sure that your core needs are met. Let's start with gaining alignment. I have had the privilege of working with a lot of incredibly caring people throughout my career. People with phenomenal ideas who were optimizing for supporting other people, like helping small business owners succeed or helping to correct inequities like the wage gap or retention rates. When we are trying to get someone else on board with our idea, really easy when they care about the same thing as we do. We speak the same language. We both care about this issue. Here is an idea on how we can tackle it. Easy. That person's already on board and ready to help.

15:15 But it is surprisingly rare for us all to care about the same thing or to be motivated by the same thing. I noticed that this is often a big stumbling block for my coaching clients when they can't figure out why other people aren't already on board with their idea. They're thinking, doesn't everyone want to correct the wage gap? Don't we all want to make our site faster? Don't we all want to help our users? There is so much nuance here. And that is why understanding the biceps core needs is important, because we need to get really good at understanding other people's perspectives, their why. When you think about the six core needs, they almost always correlate to what someone is motivated by or worried about. Every single person has their own hierarchy of which of these matter most, which are the most valuable in your world. For example, since the start of the pandemic, predictability has been the most valuable core need for me above everything else.

16:25 So if you come to me with an idea that threatens what I've been planning for the future, no way, I will fight you. But belonging is one of the lowest needs for me. So if you come and tell me how your idea is going to help me feel more included with your team or your group, I'm just not going to care. You might as well be offering me monopoly money. It means nothing to me. We tend to think that the core need that matters most to us is gold to everyone else. But the thing to learn here is that the number one most important core need for us is not gold. It's just gold to us. And other people's core needs are not wrong. Each of us are wired or culturally brought up to value these differently, and all of them are valid. I see this come up most often when we are guessing why someone is reacting so strongly to something. We project our own core in our onto them.

17:28 Whatever might be threatening for us, we assume that's what someone else is worried about, but that isn't true. So it's time for us to get curious about what those around us are motivated by or worried about. To do that, we can start asking some open-ended questions. Here are a handful of example questions you can ask. When you ask these questions, be sure to ask them to expand on their answer so you can understand the underlying values and passions. If they say, I'm really worried about this deadline, ask them to expand. Oh, say more about that. Or, ah, which part do you think is the most likely to lead to that? Then always confirm if your inference is correct. Say something like, so if you and I checked in more frequently over chat, you would feel better about this. Did I get that right? After a while, you'll start to notice themes.

18:30 This person seems to be trying to have more choice or autonomy over their work. Or the need to work remotely is really messing with their sense of belonging. Once you have a better sense of which of the core needs comes up most often for them, then it's time to do some translation. You can translate it by restating what you know they care about and then using it to frame the idea you want to get alignment on. or inspire some change. This works in any direction, managing up, managing down, managing sideways. Here are some examples. I know you care about getting this launched before July. Here's how reducing stand-ups to once a week could help with that. I know you care about getting that promotion. Here's how mentoring our new hire could help with that. I know you care about creating a more flexible work schedule. Here's how rotating team leadership responsibilities could help with that.

19:32 It could be anything. The key here is to make sure you know what this person cares about first by asking those questions, asking them to share more thoughts, and triple checking your assumptions. Because if you get that first part wrong, they won't be listening and they won't care. We aren't mind readers. And even the folks who are really experienced at this will still get it wrong sometimes. change. What people care about will evolve. And sometimes it's just not possible to please everybody. Start practicing these two skills of figuring out what folks care about and then gaining alignment by translating it into those core needs and see where you can create the change that you want to see. Okay, so we've covered how to use these six core needs to gain alignment. But what happens if you want somebody to change their behavior? How can we use the biceps core needs to effectively give some feedback?

20:37 See, humans are mostly bad at giving feedback. We're also really bad at preparing ourselves to receive feedback. This is true no matter the situation. Hearing that we do something at home that drives our partner up a wall, or our coworker, or our boss. And most of us are paralyzed by the fear of having these awkward conversations. It has everything to do with those biceps corneas. We're afraid we'll be othered from the group. We're afraid we'll cause someone too much surprise. We're afraid that our significance won't matter as much anymore. So in this next section, I want to help you deliver specific and actionable feedback that actually has a chance of being heard by someone whose biceps core needs might be threatened. Because routine, helpful feedback is necessary to help us grow. As you get ready to deliver your feedback to someone else, I would definitely recommend writing it out first to make sure that it makes sense and to do a gut check to make sure it's not going to straight out amygdala hijack the other person.

21:51 To do this, I'm going to walk through what I call a feedback equation. I've seen this be the healthiest way to structure and deliver feedback, the kind of feedback that someone will actually absorb and be motivated by. The feedback equation starts with a statement of your observation of someone else's behavior. Who, what, when, where? Observations can be recorded with a video camera, but this isn't how you feel about someone's behavior. Let's say that someone is steamrolling everyone else in a meeting that I'm in. We have an agenda, but this person starts talking and they don't stop. They focus the entire meeting on their issues. My observation should not be, you're a steamroller or You seem to think that your topic is more important than everyone. and else's because those aren't observations. Those are my judgments or assumptions. So how could I state a factual observation to start?

22:56 In our meeting last week, you spent 25 minutes out of our 30 minute meeting talking about your project. Or in our meeting last week, we had five agenda items to get through, but we only spoke about yours. Next, you can describe the impact of this behavior. So this is where you can share how you feel. However, I would suggest see if you can describe an impact that they care about. Maybe this person cares about their reputation. Maybe they care about speed or business impact. This is going to be custom to the situation. In the meeting example, I could describe lots of different impacts. This person's behavior impacts how people feel. This person's behavior makes our meeting inefficient. But this is where the other person's biceps core needs come into play. Let's say that this person who I need to give feedback to cares most about getting everyone else to care about their project.

24:00 They're really focused on that sense of belonging. They want everyone else to listen and be excited and feel like they're a part of it. So I could say in our meeting last week, we spent 25 minutes out of our 30 minute meeting talking about your project. I know that you care about us all learning more about and being invested in this project, but the impact of talking that much is that they'll start to tune out and not listen to what you're saying. Again, you've got to know their core needs and describe an impact of their behavior that they care about, not just one that you care about. Then you finish it up with either a question to them or a request to behave differently. A request might be something like, could you please keep your update to five minutes? But usually by this stage, if you've objectively described someone's behavior and an impact of it that they care about, that other person is already trying to figure out what they can do to address it.

25:06 So ask a question instead of making a request. A question might be, when you share your updates, what are you hoping people do with that information next? Or when we have that meeting, what's the number one thing you want everyone else to walk away with? Asking an open question like this is often way more powerful when delivering feedback. It opens a dialogue with this other person, so you can support them through changing their behavior. It also lessens the likelihood of a magdala hijacking the other person, because you've just asked them a good, curious, open question. And the best part? It can increase the empathy that you have for them, which is really helpful when delivering feedback. So try asking an open question instead of just telling them how to behave differently. It often works wonders and it can be so easy. Just think about making it easier for them to problem solve themselves.

26:10 Voila, feedback equation, observation, impact, and question. If you structure all of your feedback this way, not just big, important feedback, but even tiny little pieces of feedback that you might casually have throughout your day, you'll find it's really easy to give successful feedback. Feedback that people will actually hear and actually walk away from understanding what they need to do differently and why. And hopefully, no amygdala hijacks in sight. One last feedback tip, since we've been talking about avoiding hijacking someone's amygdala. As you get ready to deliver this feedback, think about what medium you're going to deliver it in. The obvious choice for giving feedback is face to face, right? But honestly, everyone is so different. I have coworkers who prefer to receive written feedback so they can digest it first before talking about it. I have coworkers who prefer to receive feedback right away and others who would prefer to receive feedback in more routine meetings like one-on-ones.

27:21 If the feedback you have for someone could be hard to hear or surprising, ask them, is now an okay time to share it? Give them space to say no. Ask them what medium they prefer, face-to-face or written or something else. And a pro tip, before you even need to give your teammates feedback, ask how they would want that feedback in the future. That way you know ahead of time. And last but not least, let's make sure that you are getting what you need. Since I'm a coach, I am professionally obligated to ask you to chew on a couple of questions. What's most on your mind right now? What keeps you up at night? What words do you find yourself saying every day? Just think about it for a second. Okay, one more. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing at work or at home, what would it be?

28:25 Think about it for one second. Okay, do any of these feel relevant to your answer? I mentioned earlier, predictability is the number one thing that I need right now. It took me a while to figure it out, even though it feels really obvious now. I was feeling kind of jittery every day in April 2020, but not just about the pandemic and all of the fear involved in that. I found myself talking a lot about this one big project that I had planned for the year. I had spent all of 2019 planning for it and mapping it out and scheduling it. And suddenly, everything that I was gearing up to do evaporated. I referenced this list of core needs basically every day in my work. And at one point it hit me. It was predictability. So I made a little sticky note and I put it on my laptop. It's a really helpful, constant reminder to me of what my North Star is.

29:31 As I take on new projects, I run it past the sticky note to gut check that it's helping me move towards this goal and not adding more unpredictability to my schedule or brain space. If I have a choice between two things, it's helpful to ask myself, which one will create more predictability right now? It's a good reminder to ask myself, what can I do today to increase predictability? for my work. What can I say yes to that'll help me move towards getting this core need in a better spot? At some point, this core need won't be at the top of my list anymore. Something else will become more pressing, or this one will feel chilled out enough that I can move forward. Some folks I know have a less clear idea of what their core need is. So I recommend that they start by measuring how each of their core needs is feeling at the beginning of the week and at the end of the week.

30:33 On Monday and Friday, they have a little reminder to rank each of their core needs from one to five. Where one means I really need more of this thing, and five means this is feeling fine. It doesn't need to be fives across the board. Doing this on Monday can help you figure out what to prioritize for this week. It's important to see the two at the beginning of the week become the five at the end. You'll start to notice patterns, and when that happens, it's going to be so much easier to figure out what to prioritize. Getting creative about getting your number one core need addressed is all about experimenting and prioritizing. For me, with predictability, there were some obvious things I did, like creating some new routines so that I had more predictability in my daily life. One weird thing that really helped me with this core need was saying no to more things.

31:38 By saying no to things that were going to add more stress and confusion to my priorities, it weirdly gave me a lot more certainty about the coming months of work. There became this peace in saying no, because I knew what officially was not going to happen as everything was rapidly changing. I had had a fear about losing a ton of business, but saying no in April allowed me to say yes to exactly the right things afterwards. So my predictability core need is in a tremendously better place now. This is what I mean about getting creative. You're going to have to sit and think about how else to get your number one core need met. Because the obvious stuff that you already know how to do hasn't been working. So no matter what kind of alignment you want to create or feedback you want to give or internal peace you want to find, keep these core needs in mind. Print them out, bookmark them, just keep them handy so that when you sense your own amygdala getting hijacked or someone else around you is hulking out, You'll be ready to help everyone get to a better place.

32:53 Your prefrontal cortex and everyone else's will thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Lara. I'm very happy because I'm sure that all the community will be very happy about the sharings you've just done. So thank you so much and have a nice day or evening. I don't know exactly what time is it for you. Thank you so much. You too. Yeah. And you know what? I'm going to say no now to say yes, maybe next May. Thank you so much for this piece of advice. Wonderful. Bye-bye.