Episode Transcript
Elizabeth McIsaac: Welcome to Five Good Ideas. My name is Elizabeth McIsaac and I'm the president of Maytree, a Toronto-based human rights organization. Five Good Ideas is a monthly program designed to strengthen the capacity of the nonprofit sector. For each session, we invite experts to share their practical advice on key issues faced by nonprofit organizations today.
Now, let's get to today's conversation.
So, we are beginning our new season of Five Good Ideas. We kick this off in September each year. And I think we can all agree that the world of work has changed in the last few years and so have workplaces. But how exactly? And how do we adapt so that we can be effective and that we can do it in a way that creates a good workplace? Demographics have shifted, new external pressures are affecting the workplace, and overall, we live in a very different world than we did several years ago. Our guest speaker today, Dave McKechnie, Toronto office managing partner at McMillan LLP, will help us make sense of this complexity. Fifteen years after his first Five Good Ideas session on managing a workforce, Dave returns to talk to us about what has changed in the modern workplace and what it means for management strategies. We also had Dave join us and share his insights with us during COVID, early into COVID, during another period of significant workplace change, arguably perhaps the starting place for a lot of the changes that we’re feeling today.
So, Dave, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
Dave McKechnie: Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you for having me once again at Maytree. I always enjoy presenting in the Five Good Ideas session.
Elizabeth McIsaac: Great. Over to you.
Dave McKechnie: Thanks. So, as Elizabeth mentioned, I first presented on this topic in 2009. The video is available on YouTube for anyone who’s interested. I admit that I tried to watch it in preparation for this session, but seeing the effects of 15 years of parenting, career advancement, and the world catching on fire was a little too jarring, so I couldn’t quite get through all of it. Now, as Elizabeth also mentioned, I’m going to start today from the premise that workplaces have changed drastically since when I first did this in 2009, and I understand that’s not exactly a bold take.
But what I also believe is that the pace of the change has really accelerated coming out of COVID, that it continues to accelerate. And even that pace is going to increase over the next five years, leaving workplace and workplace managers really struggling, not only to try to keep up, but try to think about what are the principles that I have to have in mind as I try to develop my work organization and my own managerial style. Even if the work itself hasn’t undergone substantial change, how we work, how we show up at the workplace, and how we manage our workplaces have fundamentally changed.
What I’m going to be speaking about today is not going to be so much about the law, but that certainly is the lens that I use in thinking about my own workplace. When I work with clients on workplace disputes, inevitably, there are opportunities for clients to provide training to managers to address what is causing a lot of the issues that are at the centre of those disputes. Yes, there are fundamentally bad employees that even the best manager will not be able to correct and make a part of that organization, but that honestly isn’t as often a case as we might like to think. Often, workplace disputes come down to challenges that managers were just not prepared to handle. Now, whether that’s an inability to have tough conversations on performance, a lack of policy, unequal application of policies, a lack of knowledge on the part of the managers, fuelled by apologies, or a failure to create an inclusive space, there are opportunities for employers to develop better managers, which helps prevent legal disputes.
So today, I’m going to talk to you about five principles that I believe sit at the heart of strong workplace management. They are not complicated principles, and arguably they’ve been around for a long time. It’s just how we apply them. They’re heart principles because every single one of them requires managers to do something that most of us are not naturally comfortable with, which is to look inward and question our assumptions about ourselves in the workplace. The five principles are introspection, intention, improvise, include, and insulate.
So, let’s get started with introspection. It requires us to ask what are our strengths and blind spots as a manager, what are our strengths and blind spots as an organization, and what are the strengths and blind spots of my management team. In the chaos of managing people, deadlines, clients, competing priorities, the one thing most managers don’t have the opportunity to do is stop and look within. And really, you cannot lead a workplace if you don’t know yourself. So, introspection has two contexts. Dimensions, sorry, in a managerial context. The first is personal and the second is organization.
So, we’ll start with personal. Obviously, all of us have genuine strengths. Our managers could be exceptional communicators. They could be brilliant at task management. They may be able to read a room and understand where their employees are coming from. They may be great at networking. Knowing your strengths is not arrogance; it’s just awareness. It allows our managers to understand where they can deploy their strengths in the best way possible for their teams. So, the harder conversation is cataloguing your blind spots. Everybody knows that a blind spot is a weakness that you’re just not conscious of, and you need to consciously recognize it in order to improve or to address it. For those of us who drive vehicles, we learn that all of our cars have blind spots, and that we know we got to check those blind spots before we change lanes.
Every single manager in every single organization has blind spots. The good managers know that they’re there. They check them before they take action. The bad managers know that they are there and just go ahead anyway. And think of any moment that you’re driving on the 404 or the 401 here in Toronto, you know who those bad managers are. But really, most managers are likely just not aware of their blind spots. If you manage people, that’s one of the things that you can do is help address those blind spots. But it also, as I’m saying, you really got to look within as well to see. Do you have blind spots that you’re not constantly checking? Now, it’s outside of the scope of what I’m going to talk today about unconscious bias, but if you have not done that training, your organization has not done that training, and at absolute minimum, if you’ve not put your managers through Harvard’s project implicit, and I’ll put that link in the chat after I finish my presentation, it is important to take steps to understand the concept of unconscious bias.
So as a lawyer, some of the common managerial blind spots I see are favouritism. So that’s where a manager is unconsciously investing more time, more opportunities, more goodwill in employees who either remind themselves of themselves, which is likeness bias, or who are just easier to manage. So, they don’t want to have to do the hard work or give the opportunities to people who might be more of a challenge to them. Changing power dynamics in a workplace. So, I often see this with junior managers who are close in age to the people they manage, even worse if they were peers of the people they manage and have now been elevated to a supervisory or a managerial role, or those who just want to be best friends with their employees. And that is a blind spot that is incredibly difficult for an organization to deal with.
Obviously, you’re going to have managers who are conflict avoidant. Telling yourself as a manager that you’re being kind by not having a difficult conversation, it’s actually unkind. The more that you allow somebody to walk down the garden path, especially in terms of performance, without addressing it, the harder it is to deal with it at the end. If a manager undervalues what is easy, if something comes naturally to that manager and they just struggle to understand why others find it difficult, they become impatient and ineffective as a manager. And then overconfidence in the manager’s perspective. So I’m a firm believer that diversity makes us all stronger, but actually, in order to capitalize on that strength, you need to understand where your own perspective is shutting out other voices.
These blind spots can have pretty serious legal consequences when the files hit my desk. Whether it’s coming up under workplace harassment or discrimination or performance management, managers who cannot take an honest assessment of themselves create risks for an organization. So from an organizational perspective, you also have to do that introspection work in your own organizations. The first blindspots most organizations have is to think that your best worker is going to be a good manager. There’s a concept in managerial theory called the Peter Principle that employees rise to the level of their own incompetence. Simply put, employees continually advance based on their success in previous roles, until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent.
The fact that you know a job inside and out does not make you a good manager. If anything, it can make it more difficult for you to manage. Think of that blind spot of undervaluing with that what you found easy. And you can also think about the sports world. The best players rarely make the best managers or coaches because they simply cannot teach what came so naturally to them. And when you look at what the players say, they can read that frustration. They can read the frustration on the manager, who just cannot distill the knowledge they need to do their job. Managers can then forewrite somebody off because they cannot do something as quickly or as well as they could, and they lack the awareness that this was a superpower that they had and it’s not something everybody can do.
So from an organizational level, you need to ask yourself, does your organization focus on managerial skills or just position competence in determining who to promote? Does your organization invest in managerial training, or just expect that because someone knows the rule, they will be a good manager? Does your organization say it values inclusion, development, and wellbeing, but managers frequently act contrary to that or what they’re really valuing is productivity just under a different name? Do you have structural blind spots, gaps in representation, in how feedback is gathered, and who gets access to stretch opportunities that no one is talking about because, simply, this is the way it’s always been done? I find that organizational blind spots are particularly stubborn because they are often invisible to those who benefit from them, but painful to those who do not, who have to watch that manager get elevated knowing that they have absolutely no interpersonal skills. The first step for an organization is simply to acknowledge they exist and then go through a change management process to determine how you’re going to correct them. So, that’s introspection.
The second principle is intention. And I commonly deal with files where managers have had a great conversation about an employee’s performance or development goals, gone through the annual review, they’ve set new goals, they’ve said how wonderful the employee is, then they don’t have another discussion until the next review 12 months later. They then look to dismiss an employee for poor performance, but I have to go back to them and say, “When I look at this file, you rated them four out of five on every single thing, exceeding expectations. I got nothing that shows me that there’s anything different. What’s going on?” That allows a space to creep in about what the motive is for any kind of discipline that could come up. That’s where human rights issues come up, discrimination issues come up. And so intention is really, really, really important when we talk about managing a workplace, and it’s one is most common failure I see in management.
So, it is absolutely critical in our modern workplace that you put intention at the forefront. We have a massive generational shift happening in our workplace, as Elizabeth mentioned. One that, frankly, COVID revealed when remote work became the norm and not the exception. Now, this was a shift that was building prior to COVID, and it really does show itself up in performance management feedback and mentoring. I’m 52 years old. I’m firmly in Gen X. When I was coming up as a lawyer, my mentor made it abundantly clear that he was always available to me. If I had any questions, I could come to him. And whether that was about work or life, it didn’t matter. He was always going to be there, always had an open door, and that he lived up to that promise. He was always there for me. What he never did was come to me and ask how I was doing, or tell me I did a great job on a file, or talk about whether I had enough work, not enough work, even though our offices were three doors apart.
I was completely fine with that. I was raised in a bit of a different time, so my expectation was that, through all my academic experiences, through my sporting life, managers were those where I needed them. They were there when I needed them, but they were not following up with me on a regular basis. I think a lot of people know that newer generations in our workplace have a different expectation. The effective manager will be one who checks in with them and not the other way around.
Now, in remote work, this becomes a matter of intention. You cannot expect to pass by the employee’s workstation and see them and check in on them. You also can’t expect that you’re going to have an immediate phone call or you’re going to have somebody connect with you on Teams to have a conversation. You simply cannot provide effective feedback through chat or, even worse, emojis. And I can do a whole session on why you should never use an emoji or a GIF in a work chat to comment on performance. Every expert’s going to tell you that constant feedback is critical to developing strong performers in the generations coming into our workforce. And you can shake your hands at the sky and say, “This was not how it was done in my day,” until you’re blue in the face, but you’re not going to have a good, strong organizational management system if you don’t have managers who are acting with intention to provide that feedback. You need to be intentional about how you interact with your employees, how you set performance goals, how you deliver feedback, and how you show up yourself in the workplace.
And that’s whether it’s in person, on screen, or in chats. Now, you do not need a complex system here to be intentional. You need a consistent one in order to effectively be a good manager. So, there’s a few principles I think are worth considering. First is make the invisible visible. And what I mean by that is write everything down, not just the goal, but the steps on how you get there. Think about, again, the manager who has been promoted because they’re extremely competent at their work. Them saying, “Do this task,” doesn’t really help. The good manager is going to say, “I need you to do this task. Here’s the steps that I think we need to do to get there. What do you think?” Shared documentation, when you’re writing it down, it creates accountability. And you need to be clear, fair, and as a manager, be prepared to explain the why for what you are asking, particularly as it comes to tasks that might be described as menial, something that’s not going to grab the interest.
“What is the point of doing this one task? I’m not interested in it. I know how to do it. Why am I organizing all these files?”
“Well, you’re doing that because we are going to be setting up this next project. And so, you need to know exactly how we do steps 1, 2, 3, and 4 before we can get to step 5.”
In terms of being visible, I would also strongly recommend that you set an expectation that if we’re going to have an online meeting, that cameras are going to be on. We do that at our firm. We have a policy that the camera is on so that we can read each other’s facial expressions and we can show up in the workplace just as if we were live and in person.
Another piece of being intentional is building in check-ins. So ensuring that you have biweekly, monthly meetings with your staff, that you are doing those follow-ups, it really makes a huge difference in how you manage the new workplace. You want to be able to deliver both positive and negative feedback consistently and constantly, and you want to intentionally distinguish between outcome goals and behaviour goals. So if you set a goal for your team of, “Look, we’re going to achieve 98% client satisfaction,” that’s an outcome. It provides no steps. It really doesn’t assist the team on what they need to change, what they’re going to do. If, as a manager, say, “Look, I want you to develop the habit of following up with clients within 24 hours,” that’s a behaviour. Behaviours can be coached. They can be taught and they’re also clear. Whereas just outcomes, that’s fine to have it, but without coupling that with a step-by-step process that you’re intentionally laying down, it becomes much more problematic. So introspection tells you where you are, intention tells you where you’re going and how you will get there.
But here’s the thing: not everyone starts from the same place, and that brings us to our third principle, which is improvise. Now, something that can run counter to our management training or our thinking is that treating everyone the same is not fair. It is actually the opposite of fair. All of our employees are coming to the workplace with different experiences. Fairness is not uniformity. Fairness is giving people what they need to succeed, and what people need is different. So if you think about your team or your organization, you almost certainly have a range of experience levels, confidence levels, communication styles, life situations, and people who have different relationships with power. Some people will need you to step back, give them space to grow, allow them to take things away and think. Others need you close. They need you to check in frequently. They need you to provide that reassurance. They need you to help navigate any uncertainty or complexity that they’re facing.
Some of your employees will have grown up in environments or cultures where speaking up to authority was dangerous or discouraged. They’re not going to raise their hand in a group meeting, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have important things to say. Conversely, the person who’s comfortable speaking in any room doesn’t mean that they have anything of value to say.
So, expecting all of your employees to adapt to your communication style, your way of thinking, limits the trust that we need them to have in our managers and just makes them unproductive. It can also lead, often unintentionally, but it definitely can lead to workplace complaints. If you think back to that boardroom setting where people aren’t comfortable speaking, they can feel like they’re being ignored because they’re not giving that opportunity in a different communication style than what you’ve just always done. So as an organization, as a manager, you really have to think through all of these various things to understand that we can’t just have one style for everyone.
So in the workplace, what does improvising actually look like? Now, you’ll see in my resources that I recommend taking an improv class, and there are classes at Second City. They come in and do these training for litigators and firms like myself. They do this training in all sorts of settings. What I’m recommending here doesn’t mean that you’re going to suddenly change your career, go on stage and join Second City or Saturday Night Live. It really means learning how to listen and react. You may hear that improv’s fundamental principle is “yes and.” And really, what that means is you’re accepting a premise as true and then you’re building on it. That doesn’t mean you’re accepting something that is clearly wrong in the workplace if the employee’s entirely misguided, but you’re accepting what the employee’s position is as true and trying to build on that. You’re listening to where the person is coming from, and you’re allowing them to get to a starting point so you both can get to where your goal is.
So as a manager, being under this big I improv, you’re listening to the need and you’re using your brain to react. Immediate emotional responses are the least helpful thing you can do as a manager. If an employee needs something from you, don’t default to yes, no, but accept that there’s a need. Ask the question about what more do they need, what could be of help. Then, if you need to, take it away and consider the best approach. I had this happen just this morning where I got a work product back. I didn’t get the complete work product. I got grumpy. I sat back, I looked back through the emails where I gave the instructions about the work product, and I totally screwed up the instructions. I was not clear at all. If I had just gone back and reacted immediately to say, “Hey, you didn’t do this,” and then they’d say, “Well, what do you mean? You didn’t tell me to do this.” So that’s where you’ll have to have that moment of reflection to say, “Okay, what did I maybe do wrong? What’s the premise? How can I react to it?”
You’ve got to adapt your communication style to the individual, not just to the message. You want to vary your level of oversight based on someone’s experience and confidence, not your own comfort. I see this a lot, and you’ll hear the term “micromanagers.” So people who will look at somebody with years of experience but still lay out steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, instead of allowing them and giving the confidence in their experience. And maybe, what you’re going to get is a different way of thinking or a different way of doing something that’s actually better. Remember, diversity can be a strength, but only if you acknowledge that there are different ways of thinking and you’re not overpowering that. So look at your team, look at their credentials, look at their experience, not just within your organization or outside your organization, and say, “Okay, what’s the actual right level of oversight I need and when do I need to step in?”
You want to be able to meet people where they are, not where you think they should be, and ask rather than assume. “What kind of support is most helpful to you right now?” is one of the most powerful questions a manager can ask. When we think about a remote workplace or a hybrid workplace, it’s not just the support of the technology, it’s the support of, “When do you want to have a team meeting? Do you want to do that on every single day? Do you want to do it weekly? What could be of value as we work towards completing this project? Is that a training piece? What is it?” So, you can’t just assume that everybody is at that same level.
Now, as I’ve said, I’ve found improv to be incredibly helpful to my job, not just as I’ve moved into leadership roles, but also in managing clients and managing employees, managing other lawyers. It’s helped me to actively listen to what the goal is, agree with that being the goal, and then figuring out how we’re all going to move forward. It promoted flexibility and acceptance, so I really do encourage you to consider it if you’re looking for ways to either be a better manager to level up your management course.
One thing I want to make very clear, though, when we’re talking about all this work and these sorts of lofty ideas, I don’t want you to come away with any kind of expectation or thought that you have to lower your standards or you have to have inconsistent standards. Your standards, whether it’s yours or the organization’s, the quality of the work, the commitment to the team, the values you want your employees to uphold, those remain constant. The fact that you’re having individualized discussions or meeting people where they are doesn’t mean that you are devaluing the work product that you want out of them. What you’re adjusting is just your approach. You’re just figuring out what’s the best way to get people to that standard that we expect as an organization.
Now, the fourth principle is include, and what I mean by this is you need to be hyper-conscious of your words, actions, and behaviours. I mentioned earlier unconscious bias. So, are there unconscious biases that you need to address? This is coming up more and more in my work life as I deal with workplace disputes, harassment, discrimination complaints that are either made to an organization or made at the Human Rights Tribunal, or the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. So, I want to talk about the fact that inclusion is not a diversity program, okay? It’s not a checkbox, not a statement on your website. It’s a daily practice of conscious behaviour. And for managers, it is critical.
The most important word I want to talk about is hyper-conscious, okay? It’s not just conscious, it’s hyper-conscious. Because I think everybody who’s probably attending this call, everybody wants to think of themselves as being inclusive, not certainly intentionally engaging in discrimination or harassment or contributing to a poison work environment. So, what we’re talking about are those unconscious biases or, for lack of a better word, stereotypes that are just not obvious ones. They’re the ones that operate below the surface, the ones we’ve grown up with, the ones we’ve been trained on. The ones that feel to the person who holds them like intuition or common sense, or simply how things work.
You’ll see in my resources a recommendation to read Suzanne Wertheim’s book, The Inclusive Language Field Guide. It’s a fantastic text. It’s digestible for most people. But it opens with a story of an interviewer trying to build connection but doing so from a heteronormative perspective. So they’re in an interview, the interviewer tells a married gay man that the candidate’s wife will really enjoy the area. So, the interviewer makes that assumption. He sees the wedding ring, he makes the assumption that this candidate is married, and married to a woman. So immediately, it leaves that candidate wondering whether the employer would be welcoming to him as someone in the LGBTQ+ community, whether the candidate wonders if they should correct the interviewer. Does that now create a potential conflict in a very short interview, or should they hide an important identity just to get the job?
If you put yourself in the candidate’s shoes, you immediately realize that the interviewer’s unconscious bias created a seriously distracting bump in the road. It doesn’t mean that the interviewer was discriminating against the candidate, but it automatically shifted that relationship for one of openness, inclusion, and trust to one where there is concern. It’s put a dent in the trust that’s needed in the employment relationship right from the beginning.
Words are incredibly powerful. It’s not an issue of popular parlance being woke or liberal. It’s not political. Being inclusive in your language is about trust and value. As we’re going to talk about in a minute, people are stressed. This is our new reality. Using non-inclusive language means forcing someone to either having to advocate for their own identity in the workplace or forcing them to hide a part of themselves in the workplace. And ultimately, it’s going to lead to a conclusion that the manager or the workplace doesn’t value them as a person. Either way, if you’re not using inclusive language, you’re destroying the trust you need to be an effective manager and you’re potentially setting yourself up for workplace disputes if you cannot adapt. So common issues are misgendering, not using the proper pronouns, not respecting pronoun use, even… Certainly when you get into event planning, not being considerate and inclusive of various different people’s needs or restrictions. There are a thousand things, and the book does a really wonderful job of laying out how you can become more inclusive in your language. So, I highly recommend reading it.
So, some practical steps though to get to greater inclusion. First, slow down your decision-making on people. When you form a quick opinion, as we all do, about someone’s performance or potential, ask yourself, “What is this based on? Is it evidence or is it pattern matching? Am I just recalling the employee we let go three years ago, two years ago, six months ago, and we see the same characteristics without actually getting into the why?”
Obviously, consciously think about your language. Are you using the pronouns throughout work, not just in how you speak to them directly, but in performance reviews, in chats? Are you guilty of misgendering, even accidentally? Are there unconscious elements that are coming into your language, unconscious assumptions about your audience, about your employees? I really recommend you expand who you are listening to. Whose voices are you not hearing on your team? So, think very carefully. We talked about a little earlier the idea of who’s going to raise their hand, who’s not going to raise their hand. Think carefully about who isn’t and why? What can you do to elicit the opinions? Because you may be sitting there thinking, “Well, they just don’t care,” which isn’t true, in fact, at all. They just might be concerned about raising their voice or engaging directly with their manager about an idea they had. Whose ideas are you dismissing without realizing it?
I do recommend expanding voices you listen to outside of the workplace, whether that is TV, movies, books, arts, podcasts. Broadening your inputs will make you a better manager. So I’m not a huge fan of just reading management theory texts because they tend to get lofty, a bit academic, certainly a bit repetitive. A lot of ideas I’ve had actually come from the podcast with Amy Poehler. You’ll see it in the resources called A Good Hang. Yes, it’s entertainment-based, but they talk a lot about overcoming rejection, of having hard conversations through their working life, through their personal life. You want to try to expand as many voices as you have. You want to create spaces for different kinds of contributions.
Not everyone performs their best in real time or in a group setting. Some people need time to reflect, build in mechanisms, to have written input, one-to-one, asynchronous feedback that give different people different ways to contribute. This is incredibly important when you’re dealing with the neurodivergent community to really think through what limitations, unseen or seen, in the workplace are impacting how they contribute, impacting your managerial style. Most importantly, hold yourself accountable publicly. If you get it wrong (and you’re going to), say so. Nothing builds trust faster than a manager who models accountability.
And so, as part of this, I cannot emphasize enough the power of apology. When I do training for clients, particularly on this topic on workplace harassment discrimination, I use the example of Christian Ronaldo, who’s the football player. There’s an incident where he left the field before the end of the game. He got called out on it, and then he posted a lengthy statement on his Instagram that he said was his apology. And so when I’m doing this training, I put the apology up on the screen. I ask people to read it, identify if they think this is a good apology, bad apology. People eventually realize it’s missing the words, “I’m sorry,” and it’s also missing any acknowledgement of accountability. It was basically 500 words of nonsense about how great he is. So instead of saying, “I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I should not have done that. I’ve embarrassed myself, my organization. I need to do better.” It was just basically gobbledygook.
We make mistakes. We’ve made mistakes yesterday. We’ve made mistakes today. We’re going to make mistakes tomorrow. Acknowledging your mistakes allows you to model accountability and build trust, and it lowers the temperature. And so if you have entered into a situation where you have not used somebody’s preferred pronouns and they call you out on it, don’t say, “Oh, this is all new to me. I’m sorry you took it badly.” That’s not an apology, that’s a deflection, and that’s going to tick somebody off.
If you say, “I’m sorry, that was my mistake. I’m really going to try to do better and make sure I’m correct the next time.”
“Thank you.” That’s it.
So, the last principle I want to talk about is insulate. And again, Elizabeth alluded to this earlier. The concept here is you are in charge of a workplace, you’re in charge of a team, you need to control what you can control. Be conscious of the outside world but understand you can’t control it. So, if you’re a manager of people right now, you’re doing so against a backdrop of extraordinary complexity. Economic uncertainty, you pick up the news every single day; you see what our situation is with funding, politics, our relationship or lack of a relationship now with the United States. We’re seeing geopolitical disruption, AI-driven change in pretty much every single profession, every single workplace. Obviously, mental health pressures are going on across all workplaces. It’s probably the number one thing I deal with right now. Political polarization among employees. The boundary between work and the rest of life has never been more porous.
And the issues of the outside world are landing on your team’s phones every single day. Social media, as you probably all know, has the capability to not just distract, but absolutely emotionally devastate you before you arrive at work. If the first thing you do is pick up your phone and go on social media or read the news, you’re already starting yourself at a bad place. We are angered by things we have no control over. Previously, it would not have come to our attention. We believe things that aren’t real and we accept as true opinions that are not based on fact. And with the rise of AI, social media bots, it’s a very challenging world to manage in the workplace.
And as a manager, of course, you cannot fix any of that. But within the workplace, you can create a space with your team, your group, your direct area of influence that is characterized by clarity, stability, trust, and a model of how we show up in the workplace. You can be the thing that doesn’t wobble when everything else does, and you can set the expectations that you want for how your team is going to relate.
So, insulation is not denial. It’s not pretending the outside world doesn’t exist. Everybody knows it exists. We are all living in it. And we also shouldn’t deny that it’s going to impact us in various different ways, but you can install a discipline of insulation. So when that happens, be honest about what is uncertain without catastrophizing it. In the public sector, if there are news articles coming up more and more about budget cuts or changes in priorities or what’s going to happen, be honest and say, “Yeah, that is happening.” But we can’t control that. We’re going to start thinking about what it means right now, what do we have to pay attention to. Protect your team’s focus. Not every piece of external noise needs to become an internal agenda item. Distinguish between what you can influence and what you cannot and spend your energy accordingly.
And most importantly, just be a regulated presence. If you’re anxious, your team is going to feel it. If you’re calm, and genuinely calm but not performative, your team feels that too. It’s really important for managers to understand that their emotional state is contagious, and they have to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself. But if you are looking at your team or looking at your management team and seeing that things are not sitting right, things are going off the rails, it is very appropriate to pull somebody aside and say, “Hey, you doing all right? Want to have a chat?” They can engage in it, not engage in it, but turning a blind eye in the world that we live in carries with it not just organizational risk, but legal risk if you’re not paying attention.
So, there’s a simple question that is worth returning to regularly, both for yourself and when your team is feeling overwhelmed or stressed. What is within our control right now? Not what is happening out there, not what might happen based on what you’re reading in the news. What is within our control today in this team with the resources and relationships and skills we have right now? Think about that as you go into every single team meeting and be prepared to really try to insulate your team as much as possible and focus on the workplace.
So, the five I’s – Introspection: know yourself and know your organization honestly. Intention: be deliberate about your goals and the steps you need to reach them. Improvise: meet your people where they are, not where you think they should be. Include: be hyper-conscious of your words, actions, and the biases you may be carrying. And, insulate: control what you cannot control and be a steady presence in an unsteady world.
None of these skills you require once and then possess forever. They’re practices. They require reputation, reflection. They require you to be wrong. They require you to be resilient. The best managers I work with are ones who don’t have it all figured out. They’re the ones who are generally still working on it. So, I hope today gives you something useful to take back with you and thank you for paying attention.
Elizabeth McIsaac: Thank you, Dave. That was extraordinary. I’ve taken copious notes. Someone asked in the chat, “Are we going to have this available?” So, I’m going to repeat myself. This will be available next week on our website and we will also have a transcript available.
There’s so much there, and I want to dive into some of the questions. I want to first remind the participants that this is also your session, so please use the Q&A box. I’d love to pull some questions from what’s going on in your mind. I think we are all on fire with a ton of ideas that we have in front of us. I want to pick up, Dave, you said probably the most common question that you’re getting now is the workplace stress, anxiety, mental health, because I think we feel that across the board. I think we feel it in schools and families. We’ve collectively gone through a lot as a society, as a globe, and we are still finding our feet again and carrying some of that with us, and we carry our whole selves into the workplace.
Sometimes, and I’ll speak for myself, but I think I speak for others as well, there’s a lack of clarity about when are you being empathetic and supportive by asking and saying, “How are you? Where are you at? What can I do to support you?” And that fine line of, “I went too far. I’m invading your space.” And so, I wonder if you have any advice around navigating that line, because there’s sometimes some ambiguity about when you’re hitting the line and what to do with it.
Dave McKechnie: So that’s a great question, Elizabeth. The most important thing is, again, on the introspection, what is my relationship with that employee? If it’s somebody who’s new to your team, new to your organization, suddenly sit down and say, “So, tell me about you. How are you doing? You seem sad.” You’ve not created that space yet. And so, you can start feeling that tension of, and I get it all the time, of like, “Oh, this is awkward. I’m pushing a little bit too far.” As a management-side employment lawyer, I start saying, “Oh, are we going to start getting into things that we may not want to know as an organization?” So, the first thing you do is check yourself to say, “Do I have the kind of relationship with this team member where I can have a conversation, I don’t have to worry about guardrails, I know that there’s going to be an open and willingness to have a discussion so that we can get to where we want to get to?”
The second thing, again, on the introspection, why are you having the conversation? Are you having the conversation… Hey, I don’t want to say for an improper purpose. But are you having the conversation because you’re curious? Are you having the conversation because you need to control your workplace, and somebody is showing up in a way that you don’t want them to show up, and so the performance isn’t there? You may have to sit there and say, “Okay, let’s have a discussion. We were supposed to be meeting. Let’s use a simple example: working three days a week in-office. I’ve looked through the attendance; you’re not here. That’s not acceptable. We got to talk about what’s going on.” That’s where you may get a lot of things that you don’t know. So you have to make that judgment of do you just want to leave it there? Do you want to say, “You’re not meeting what we require of you?”
And then the last one is, again, this comes down to the training. Do your managers know what the duty to inquire is under human rights law? I did a whole presentation on this on Tuesday, and one of the things you used a very common word that’s coming up is “anxious” and “anxiety.” Human rights law means you have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. That’s where the duty to accommodate comes in is because somebody actually has a diagnosed anxiety disorder. Saying, “I’m anxious,” doesn’t engage human rights law. And so, you want… Because that’s a word. It’s a common, “I’m depressed. I’m anxious all the time because I read the news. It’s crap out there. So yeah, I am absolutely anxious,” but that doesn’t mean I actually have a diagnosed anxiety disorder that requires protection where I have to actually offer accommodations. So, a lot of training now needs to go into your management team to understand where that line is.
Elizabeth McIsaac: And so, are you allowed to ask for a… If somebody says, “I’m anxious and I need accommodations,” are you within your rights as an employer to say, “Good. Bring me a letter from your doctor that says that that is what it is”?
Dave McKechnie: That is absolutely the first step. So if somebody says, “I’m struggling. I’m anxious,” and then they disclose that, “I have anxiety.”
“Okay. Well, we’re a supportive workplace. We have a whole policy for that. We have a whole accommodation process. You’re going to meet with HR and…” So in many organizations, HR and the leader, and the finance office, they’re all one person. And so, that person really needs to be trained. But yes, we’re not going to do anything until we understand exactly what the accommodations are and confirmation that there is a disability that we need to accommodate.
Elizabeth McIsaac: Great. I want to move a little bit to the intergenerational thing. And I’m with you, I’m also a Gen X’er, and I have different generations on my team. And it’s great. It enriches us because their perspective is so important as we think about our work in this time and moment, and all that diversity is great.
Have you seen good practices in building out those bridges? Because we can laugh and make fun of the fact that you don’t know what a record player looks like or how to use it, or I don’t understand how to do X, Y, or Z, and that’s an endless list. But how do we do it beyond the light and chatter or fun way of doing it? Is there a more meaningful way of engaging the question of generational difference?
Dave McKechnie: It’s a good question. I think there is. I don’t have all the answers for you on this, so let me talk about a common situation I hear from professional services firms like myself or like our firm is that the newer generations don’t want to work as hard. And again, that is just something that… Again, Gen X, Boomer, we look back at what we did and say, “Well, look what we did.” What we don’t often ask is the why of what we did. In my case, coming up as an articling student, as a lawyer, somebody assigned a task, I did task. I didn’t ask questions. They just gave me task. I did task. And if that meant staying here until 8:00 at night waiting for a task, that’s what I did, because that’s what I thought was expected of me. It didn’t occur to me ask why.
The generations coming into the workforce now have that question of why, and they are entitled to ask why. “What is the reason? What is the value? Because I would like to go do other things if you actually don’t need me to be here.” And so, the why and questioning how you were brought up and the pain points that you had as you developed into the professional or into the spot that you are, and then saying, “Why am I inflecting those pain points or why I’m expecting people who are just coming into the workforce to go through the same thing I did?” And a lot of that is, again, you have to turn inward and sort of unpack, and particularly I see this in training with not just in professional services firms, but elsewhere. People were trained one way, doesn’t mean it was the right way.
So, having those kinds of conversations and talking about the why, there’s, again, one of the resources I recommended. He gets into the why in a way that I find kind of cheesy, but if you take a bit of that out, you realize that the good organizations, the good leaders are willing to explain the why. And that can be, “Yeah, I do need you here at 8:00 at night because in my context, we’re working on a transaction that involves three different time jurisdictions. We have no idea when the instructions are going to come through. Let’s figure out ways we can be engaged during that eight hours, but I can’t have you leave because we’re all going to have to come back and we can’t afford another 45 minutes for you to come back.”
That’s the why. It’s not because I said so. And if you want to show me that you want it, this is what you got to do.
Elizabeth McIsaac: And that’s a bit of a theme. I think you pulled the theme out on installation, but the issue of transparency, and being explicit, and sharing that. But on this, however, and I’m just going to take advantage of your legal perspective, is there a slippery slope in any of this where we slide into ageism. And is that an engagement of a human rights issue in terms of that prejudice or that attitude?
Dave McKechnie: You slip into ageism if you are making negative employment decisions that take into account someone’s age, and that works both ways. That works the way of “I’m not going to engage an older worker because I don’t think the hustle is still there, that they’re not going to be willing to put in the late hours, they’re not going to be willing to do shift work, they’re not going to be willing to do this, therefore I’m not going to do it.” And it flips into the younger generation of, “I don’t think you’re going to work as well, you’re not as well-trained, I’m not going to hire you,” or discipline and things like that. So, ageism can creep in on the legal side if you’re making any kind of decision that is really negative that takes into account someone’s age. So, that’s where you see it on the legal side.
We’re going to have diverse teams in a bunch of different things. Again, that’s where the unconscious bias can kick in, of making a preference for one way or the other, and you’ve got to question that and question why you have that preference.
Elizabeth McIsaac: A lot of the audience and people joining us today are in small organizations, very small, micro. Maybe fewer than five employees, probably fewer than 20. And so, there’s a real issue around organizational capacity. And so if you are leading, if you’re the executive director, and all of what you’ve talked about is for the executive director or manager, whatever the term is, people having oversight. But where do you begin? You talked about having the skills, policies, knowledge, and culture. In some ways, policies help create the culture because you’re creating an explicit expectation of how things are going to be. If you were advising a startup or a small organization, what are some of those key policies that are helpful to have in place so that it is explicit, so that it is in writing and you can point to it?
Dave McKechnie: That’s a great question. So the first thing I’ll say is policies can be… You can pay me a ton of money and I’ll write you a wonderful policy, and if you just shove it in a drawer, you’ve just wasted a ton of money. And so, the very first thing as you think about policy development is it’s got to be practical and useful, given the size of your organization. So, having a complicated annual review performance feedback process that you’ve taken off the internet that was used by the University of Toronto and you have five people doesn’t help you. So, you start first with what are the things that we need to have? Typically, in this current world, you’re going to have something on remote work, that’s critical, and what your expectations are. But that also means, as a leader, you are going to hold to those yourself.
So if you’re telling everybody, “Look, we’re going to be in-office 3, 4, 5, 2, 1,” whatever the days are, and you’re phoning in from the cottage, that doesn’t fly. So whatever policy you write, you have to be, especially in a small organization, the one who upholds that policy. So, remote work is critical. There are legal requirements to have a written harassment discrimination policy depending on the size of your organization. I believe it’s five, but don’t quote me on that. And so that is also very critical about how you’re going to do it, and whether you’re going to go bare-bones, pull something off the ministry’s website, or you’re going to think about your organization, particularly in the nonprofit sector. Think about the client base you serve, the services you provide, what do you need on that? So we got remote, harassment, discrimination; you’re going to have attendance and then leaves, leaves of absence.
So, those are the four that you really want to spend some time focusing on, because that really goes to who’s in the workplace, when, how. You don’t have to have a written policy on feedback. You just got to do it. But at the end of the day, regardless of how many policies you have, if they’re just in a drawer or on your website, you have to live them. Same with values.
Elizabeth McIsaac: Exactly. Modelling it.
Dave McKechnie: You’ve got to model it.
Elizabeth McIsaac: One of the issues that… I mean, you can do certain things and you’ve spoken a lot about being the supervisor, the manager, and that responsibility, but sometimes you’re overseeing a workplace or a team where there may be inter-team issues. There might be some toxicity. That’s a word that probably gets overused and is stronger than it usually is. But there is bullying that happens in the workplace, and there are new tools for that. There’s email. There’s social. There are other things that are creeping into the set of ways that we communicate and impact each other.
Do you have advice around putting some, as the manager of that, or even as the team member, engaged or feeling the effects of that, how to get in front of it and quell it?
Dave McKechnie: Yep. And so in your discussions that you have with employees, whether it’s a written policy or not about respectful workplaces, that is something you want to cover very clearly on how we show up and how we communicate with each other, whether that’s in person, by video, and even more now by chat in whatever platform you use, whether that is… If you don’t have a captive Microsoft Teams, then you can guarantee your employees are on a WhatsApp group. And so, being very clear about respectful communications and being very honest that you’re going to have workplace disagreements. That’s fine if we disagree about how work is going to be done or if we disagree about whether this is the right goal that we should have, but that’s the common conversation we want to have in an open, respectful manner. We will not tolerate any kind of communications that are belittling and then bullying, harassing. And then when that does occur, you immediately have to take steps to correct it.
And honestly, whether that is offline or in the workplace, that line is blurred. And so, one thing I’ve been telling all of my clients is assume all of your employees are connected offline in a WhatsApp group or whatever it is. Things are going to happen that are beyond your control, but that are going to come into the workplace. There are a number of cases that have come up in this area, particularly in the labour context, where WhatsApp groups have become abusive. Back when people used Facebook, Facebook chats became abusive. And normally, you wouldn’t care about that if two of your employees had a chat in the bar. But back in the now, everybody’s on that list, and so you can have complaints that come up because of something that happened, what we call off-duty conduct.
Legally, there are ways to deal with it, but ultimately, you’re trying to foster the kind of workplace through your communications that are respectful. And if somebody says, “Elizabeth, I disagree with this new policy,” you have that choice of saying, “I’m Elizabeth, this is our policy.” But you also can sit there and say, “Okay, let’s have a chat about it. What is the disagreement?” And sometimes it’s something you missed, but then it also allows you to give that opportunity of answering the why. “Well, this is why this policy is here.”
Elizabeth McIsaac: We have about one minute left. I want to give that minute to you. You’ve covered a lot of territory, but is there a final piece of advice? I mean, part of me would love you to give in 30 seconds why never to emojis and GIFs because that sparked my curiosity, and apparently there’s a whole other session on that, but over to you for the final word and then I will wrap up with some final messages.
Dave McKechnie: So, the final word is just be comfortable with being uncomfortable. We talked a little bit in your questions, Elizabeth, about what we don’t know about how managers figure out that line. You’re going to get it wrong. As I said, you’re going to make mistakes. That’s okay. Apologies really go a long way in diffusing workplace situations. A lot of the cases I deal with are because people have dug in and are at loggerheads. And instead of recognizing that maybe there just wasn’t something I saw in the workplace, in this employee, that I need to address, you can instead of just saying, “I’m right. You’re wrong,” We’re living in a world where we hear about a lot of dichotomies. Instead, be comfortable in the grey because that’s really where progress gets made.
