A Different Approach to Company Values: Start with the Individual

All too often, company values are just words on a website or a poster on the wall which were decided by the people at the top and are expected to trickle down into the behavior of each team and each individual. When this top-down approach is taken, company values don’t always connect with individuals on a personal level, and therefore, they aren’t easily actualized in the workplace. So, how do we get individuals to truly connect with organizational values? Work to integrate values from the other direction – upward. This means starting with the individual and their own values and setting them up to successfully connect those values to their work in a meaningful way. In this blog, we will discuss DILAN’s unique process of providing a space to accomplish this alignment of personal, team, and company values.

Understanding Shifting Values in the Workplace
Values help create a sense of purpose for employees, in their work and personal lives. Being able to clarify and articulate a personal set of values allows employees to connect more meaningfully to their work bringing more intentionality to their contributions. But what happens when people’s values change? Research supports that individual values can shift and change as people move through their life cycle and adjust to challenging environments, and after a turbulent last few years, many employees have experienced a shift in what matters most to them–maybe that’s their health, their family, their sense of stability. Whatever changes in values they’ve experienced, they are now left trying to find ways to accommodate this new shift in values in the workplace.

If we want to create an environment where employees are engaged and find meaning in what they do, we have to prioritize the alignment of values as we come out of a hectic few years and move forward into the future.

How can you do this effectively in an organizational setting?

Facilitate an opportunity for employees to identify what has shifted in their personal values. This will help provide clarity and understanding around how to connect their new values to their work. Setting aside time to refresh and renew your team’s values will help deepen their sense of purpose in their work.

How to Align Personal Values with Team and Company Values

Step 1: Have people identify and acknowledge their own values
First, it’s important to create space for your employees to clarify their own personal values. They may have a strong sense that their values have shifted over the past few years, but they may not have ever vocalized or organized these thoughts.

DILAN uses a technique called Values Edge 2.0 to help align personal and team values by having team members sort through a core group of 56 values and identify 15 core values. These core values should clearly reflect their personal choices and actions. Once these are identified, they are then challenged to sort the 15 core values into a ranked pyramid to give them a solid understanding for making personal decisions. A thorough understanding of their own values is the foundation for bringing values to life at work.

Step 2: Identifying team values
Once team members have identified and ranked their own personal values, they can choose which they want to bring forward into the workplace. Take time together to identify a core group of 6-10 team values based on the individual ones that overlap. As a team, which values do you want to focus on? Which can you commit to prioritizing together?

This will help guide and clarify how team members will behave and will bring a sense of shared alignment about what will guide the team’s efforts moving forward. Even just discussing these values and determining together which will influence team behaviors will help your team feel a sense of ownership and agency over the team culture and work.

Step 3: Translate these team values into behaviors
Once team values are identified, the team should determine together what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like when these team values are being upheld. Have discussions about the behaviors that demonstrate values like “respect,” “trust, or ”positivity” and create shared clarity and agreements about how people live out these values at work.

For example, if a team value is “positivity,” it may require that the team remove certain phrases from the workplace vocabulary like “this won’t work” or “I won’t be able to do that in time” and work to optimistically come up with solutions. Discussing clear, tangible ways to exhibit your team values deepens the connection between employees and helps unite the team around the values that actually matter to them. It’s also important to create a safe space for acknowledging when the values aren’t being actualized and for figuring out how everyone can improve together. This alignment creates a guide for making decisions and communicating with team members when faced with challenges.

Connecting to Organizational Values
Once your team has a good understanding of the values they are committed to upholding, you can help them identify how these values connect to the values of the organization. This creates a stronger connection to the overarching mission of the company and more tangible action steps to actually uphold the company’s values rather than just having them on a poster on the wall.

When there is a clear connection between an employee’s personal values, the team’s values, and the organizational values, you create a more cohesive company culture that results in more meaningful work.

Using Pronouns in The Workplace to Foster Inclusivity

For those who don’t have to worry about being misgendered, pronouns may not seem especially important. For those that have diverse gender identities, however, constantly being misgendered can feel exhausting and invalidating.

Imagine you’ve just spent the last hour getting ready for work, choosing an outfit that feels comfortable and represents who you are. On your commute, first the bus driver and then the barista misgender you and this happens again later in a meeting at the office. If you identify as a female, you are called sir. If you identify as male, you are called miss or ma’am. How might this make you feel? Do you correct them or let it go? Imagine having to think about this day in and day out.

Misgendering, unfortunately, happens often, and it can affect someone’s feelings of safety in the workplace. So, how can we create a more inclusive environment that makes people of all gender identities feel safe and welcome?

First, it’s important to acknowledge and respect diverse gender identities.

Traditional gender language privileges people who identify as binary, and until very recently, it has not successfully included those who identify differently. As we progress, it’s important to continue to be curious, to listen to how people are speaking, and to learn the language. Below are some key terms around gender to become familiar with.

Key Terms Explained

This list of terms is not comprehensive, but it’s a starting place to begin to understand different experiences of gender and how they may be expressed in the workplace.

Gender Identity: Who someone feels they are regardless of biological sex/sexual anatomy.
Gender Expression: How someone demonstrates who they are in terms of gender.
Gender Expansive: Someone whose experience and expression does not match up with expected societal norms. They may feel both a man and a woman, neither a man nor a woman or somewhere in between and this may or may not be fixed.
Cisgender: Someone whose gender identity and sex assigned at birth match.
Transgender: Someone whose gender identity does not correspond with their sex assigned at birth.
Non-binary: People who describe themselves and their genders as not fitting into set binary category of either male or female.

Pronouns & Their Rules

Pronouns are words that people use when referring to the gender of others—she/her, he/him or they/them. Some people use a combination like he/they or she/they, which may mean that they identify both ways, or it may be driven by context related to safety. If they don’t feel safe, they will opt to use the binary pronoun he or she.

The rules around the way we use pronouns in relation to other’s gender identities may feel like they are constantly changing as we all learn more, and this is ok. This just means that we need to pay attention and be mindful about the way we speak as the shift toward more and more inclusivity will take time.

Why Do Pronouns Matter in the Workplace?

Pronouns are used to reflect someone’s gender identity—a fundamental aspect of who a person is. Using a person’s name and their pronouns correctly is a form of respect and validation that should always be expressed in the workplace.

A recent study found 1.2 million people identify as nonbinary in US (the majority being under 29, white and live in urban areas). Additionally, according to Harvard Business Review:

More than 12% of U.S. millennials identify as transgender or gender non-conforming, and a majority believe that gender is a spectrum rather than a man/woman binary.”
In the U.S., 56% know someone who uses a gender neutral pronoun and 59% believe forms should include options other than “man” and “woman.”

This means that, in most workplaces, there is likely representation of diverse gender identities, and it’s important that, at work, we learn to talk about gender and use pronouns in a way that creates a sense of psychological safety for all employees. Getting misgendered can feel like one’s identity is being compromised, and if this happens over and over, it can take a huge emotional toll. At work, all levels of leadership should set examples for becoming allies to shift the culture toward inclusivity.

First Steps to Becoming an Ally at Work

To contribute to an environment of safety for all employees, each person has a part to play in respecting one another’s pronouns. Here are some easy ways you can be an ally in the workplace.

1. Make it easy for people to communicate their pronouns

It’s key to discover other’s pronouns so you can use them correctly. You can find out a person’s pronouns by introducing yourself with your own: “Hi, I’m Sam and my pronouns are she/her, what are yours?”

Now, this may be awkward at first, but the more we lead with this, the more it will feel natural. When asking for pronouns in a group setting, ask everyone at the table and be careful not to single anyone out.

Remember: how a person appears on the outside, does not necessarily reflect how they experience their gender. For those who use multi-pronoun like he/they, she/they: ask which pronoun the person would prefer you use to create communicate a sense of safety.

You can also make it easier for people to share their pronouns by placing your own pronouns in your email signature. The more people who do this, the more opportunity it creates for people to share their pronouns easily and comfortably.

2. Handle mistakes gracefully

It’s important to realize that you will likely make mistakes when using other people’s pronouns, and that’s okay as long as there is a commitment to improving.

When you make a mistake, apologize briefly and correct yourself, making a mental note about that person for the future. Be careful to not over apologize—when you do this, it puts extra spotlight on the person they may not want. The key is to always be respectful and commit to learning and getting better together.

3. Be curious without being intrusive

Curiosity can show you care about someone enough to get their pronouns right, but there is a distinction between being curious to learn and being intrusive or inappropriate at work.

If you’re unsure about someone’s pronouns, you can ask sensitively and let them take the lead in the conversation. If it seems like they don’t want to elaborate on their answer, don’t pry. If they begin to explain more about their pronouns, listen with humility and be willing to learn in the moment.

No matter your starting point along this journey, working toward more inclusivity will take a collective effort from your organization to make the workplace a welcoming, safe place that dignifies each individual person. The more we look to respect, validate, and include our colleagues, specifically those with diverse gender identities, the more human our business becomes.

Four Steps to Renegotiating Psychological Contracts with Employees

Originally written for and published by Forbes.com.

As we continue into the third year of living with the pandemic, most employers are aware that their employees are feeling burned out, overwhelmed and exhausted emotionally, mentally and physically. Employees and employers have been forced to deal with an immense amount of change during these past few years, from going remote to complete shifts in business strategy and overall direction.

This shifting work culture has felt unstable, to say the least, and it has shed more light on one specific area of the employee/employer relationship that in many cases has gone unaddressed for quite some time: the psychological contract.

The psychological contracts we hold with employees have likely been breached many times over, especially in the past few years, and this is extremely destabilizing for employees. As we reestablish what work looks like going forward, with new ways of connecting and future business priorities being established, we must consider renegotiating psychological contracts in the workplace to get back some of the stability that has eroded over the years.

What Is a Psychological Contract?

Originally coined by Denise Rousseau, a psychological contract is “an unwritten set of expectations between the employee and the employer. It includes informal arrangements, mutual beliefs, common ground and perceptions between the two parties.”

In other words, it’s an unofficial contract between employer and employee that determines much of the behavior seen in the workplace. It’s distinguishable from the written contract that an employee agrees to with their duties, pay rate, etc., and is more so the “fairness or balance” perceived by the employee around what they put into the job and how they are treated in return.

Below are a few examples of what a psychological contract may include:

Virtual meeting behavior (camera on or off)
How feedback is presented and how often
Overtime or travel expectations
Available development opportunities
Pay increase or promotion expectations
Work-life harmony prioritization
Transparency
Expectation to be treated with respect

These aspects, though not formally written in a contract, are typically understood between employer and employee based on informal conversions or commitments made by either party. When upheld, this mutually understood contract creates a sense of stability that can lead to employee retention and engagement. When there is uncertainty around the elements of the contract, however, and behavior outside the norm occurs, the contract is breached. If the psychological contract breach goes on for long periods of time without being addressed, employees will start to feel the ground beneath them waver, and feelings of resentment and frustration can easily start to emerge.

How Psychological Contracts Have Changed Over the Years

Technology and the digital age have changed many of the components of the psychological contract in the past decade — how work is accomplished, expectations around travel, meetings, office hours, etc. Most of these changes have occurred in line with society’s natural progress, making breaches in psychological contracts incremental and, possibly, harder to notice and/or perhaps easier to manage. However, over the past few years, new, major shifts have occurred at a rapid pace, making it difficult not to feel the effects of the breaches in the contract. Cue employee burnout.

Employee and employer expectations have drastically changed as a result of the pandemic, from hybrid and remote work to concerns around health and safety. With these changes in how we work and connect with one another, our employees’ sense of stability has become fragile. If we want to support our employees and ultimately see them succeed in the workplace, we must acknowledge that psychological contract breaches have been expedited, and we must shift to more sustainable expectations — an updated psychological contract.

How to Renegotiate a Psychological Contract

To bring back a sense of stability and help our employees feel less disoriented and more engaged, we can do four things regarding the psychological contracts we hold with them.

1. Be transparent and explicit. First, we must acknowledge that there is a psychological contract between the employer and employee. It can be helpful to define what it is if they are unaware and to not shy away from it. Psychological contracts are a normal, long-standing, working part of life and exist in many realms of our lives, and it’s okay to call them what they are. If your employees are clearly struggling with workplace expectations and staying engaged, set aside time to explicitly have this conversation.

2. Acknowledge where the contract has been breached. We must determine if we have breached the psychological contract with employees without knowing — or worse, without acknowledging it. This will look different for each employee, but it’s important you have a dialogue with them about their expectations that have gone unmet. Maybe it’s a string of layoffs that has left them worried about their job standing, an inability to give promised raises,

or a lack of work-life harmony being provided. Seek to understand each party’s part in the breach and work to create mutual understanding and respect for each other in these areas.

3. Set clear expectations moving forward. Whatever aspect of the psychological contract has been breached, engage in productive dialogue about why these things happened and how you intend to prevent them or adjust behavior in the future. It’s also important to establish a shared vision and objectives to ensure alignment going forward.

4. Agree on guiding principles. This is about how you will work to stay aligned and how you will communicate these unwritten expectations. You should mutually agree on a move-forward plan about how to check in about the validity of the contract and how it’s being upheld.

These psychological contract negotiations aren’t one-and-done. In fact, in order to avoid future employee burnout and increase employee buy-in long term, they should continuously flex with time and change with evolving circumstances. Renegotiating the psychological contract doesn’t have to be scary or taboo, but it ideally will instead become a normal part of the employee-employer relationship that has been missing for quite some time — a commitment between parties to communicate and adjust the terms of the psychological contract as circumstances and the workplace climate continue to change.

Include Mental Health Wellness in Your Return-to-Work Strategy

As COVID restrictions are being removed, many organizations are returning to the office. With the shift in how and where employees are working, there seems to be a heightened sense of anxiety about figuring out the new normal.

It’s safe to say that most people’s mental health has been tested over the past few years and that returning to the office brings new challenges and adjustments for all. After years of long hours on video conferencing platforms, little distinction between work and home life, and disheartening world events, many employees are feeling burned out and mentally drained. As we come back together, one of the new challenges that we face is that we have been conditioned to react negatively to cues that weren’t threatening before. For example, facemasks, someone coughing, people being in close physical proximity, and travel can all be triggering and threaten our sense of safety. With many people back in the office, it’s going to take time for people to remember that these triggers aren’t as threatening as they were at the height of the pandemic. Leaders need to be prepared that it may be a while before employees let their guard down again. As we get used to the new normal, there will be an adjustment period that may feel disorienting and cause stress to our teams.

For marginalized groups, the return to the workplace can be especially challenging. Those who experienced stress that was triggered by microaggressions or biases at work before the pandemic will be coming back to a vulnerable, potentially unsafe place in addition to dealing with all the mental stress that comes with returning to in-person work.

As we make this long-awaited transition, here are 3 ways your organizations can prioritize employees’ mental health:

1. Destigmatizing Mental Health

The number of workers who reported mental stress increased during the pandemic in 2022 jumped to 43% as compared to 38% in 2019. In the US and Canada, that number was higher: 57% of people reported workplace stress. To make employees return-to-work more manageable, it’s important to acknowledge that everyone’s mental health and well-being have been challenged. Here are a few ways your organization can help destigmatize mental health and promote caring for employees more holistically:

Including mental health support and resources in your organization’s wellness package
Providing days off when sensitive world events occur in order to provide extra support for those directly impacted
Providing well-being days off for mental recuperation once a month in order to make it easy for employees to participate fully on-the-job

2. Create Space for Marginalized Groups

For marginalized employees, a lack of feeling included may be an additional stressor when returning to in-person work. Neither biases nor microaggressions have gone away, and the thought of re-entering a workplace where marginalized employees may have to deal with these experiences again can add additional stress. After major events like social injustices, health inequities, and global conflict, the idea of inclusivity is top of mind for many, but it may not be felt or actualized in the day-to-day employee experience. For employees affected by this, going “back to normal” means feeling excluded and not feeling safe.

Organizations should not only be conscientious of these additional stressors, but they should also be intentional to ease these employees’ transitions. Ways to increase additional support include:

Creating or leveraging your existing Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to help foster belonging and to give people a voice to offer recommendations on what would help them feel a sense of belonging as they return to the office
Creating or leveraging a mentorship program so that employees from marginalized groups can engage and get support from leaders, and ideally from leaders who are also a cultural match
Partnering with a mental health firm or bringing clinicians on-site who are a cultural match with your employees if additional support is needed

3. Provide Education to Empower Managers

On a team level, it’s every manager’s responsibility to support their team’s mental health and promote inclusion. However, these soft skills aren’t always talked about or taught, so managers must be provided with the proper education and training to assess when employees need additional support or when to intervene to reduce strained team dynamics. Here are some ways that managers can support their employees in this effort:

Finding educational opportunities to become more knowledgeable about mental health in the workplace
Articulating values and behavioral expectations for inclusion with your team
Modeling this behavior and holding those accountable who do not engage in this behavior
Look for nonverbal cues from your BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), women, LGBTQIA, and other marginalized groups to determine if these individual contributors are feeling included and safe at work — are they disengaged or withdrawn from discussions? Is this behavior atypical for this employee?

To see a change in the way mental health affects us at work, mental health itself must be prioritized at every level of the organization: leaders, managers, and individual contributors. As we all look at the return to in-person work and at what stressors each person may be facing, we must integrate mental health wellness into the return-to-work strategy. The post-pandemic world calls for more acuity around mental health and how to manage and support it in the workplace. As we work together to make this a priority, we are reminded that Business is Human^®.

Four Steps To Expanding Servant Leadership To Promote An Economy That Serves All

Corporate personhood is the concept that a corporation can exercise certain constitutional rights that a person has. This concept was established in 1886 as a result of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road case.

While corporations can’t exercise all rights that a person can, they are able to sue in a court of law, enter into a contract with other parties and, as of 2010, financially support political campaigns.

Essentially, corporations can operate as humans in certain aspects. This topic, specifically to what extent corporations should be able to exercise their personhood, is widely debated. This article isn’t intended to favor either side of the argument, but simply to introduce a different perspective.

It’s not hard to see how many corporations have used the idea of corporate personhood to their own advantage—using it to protect themselves from legal trouble or to support certain policies that benefit their bottom line—but few corporations have leveraged it otherwise. Now think: What if we expanded our idea of what corporate personhood can mean? What if companies started to use their personhood to make business more human, focusing not on the rights it possesses but the impact it can make?

In 2019, 181 CEOs made this concept a reality for their organizations by signing a new Business Roundtable statement that redefined the purpose of a corporation—“to promote an economy that serves all Americans.” Their goal officially shifted from simply promoting a thriving organization to “creating long-term value” and “better serving everyone—investors, employees, communities, suppliers and customers” as Bill McNabb, former CEO of Vanguard put it.

This kind of paradigm shift has started to gain traction, but as corporations have possessed personhood for over 100 years now, it’s time that every company takes a look at how they view their purpose and measure their success.

Use corporate personhood to serve and impact others.

We’ve all heard the term servant-leadership, coined by Robert Greenleaf, and most of us have pushed for it in the workplace. Putting the needs of others and the community first is the distinguishing factor between this type of altruistic leadership and more traditional, leader-first types.

If we can expand our understanding of servant leadership to involve an entire corporation, not just its leaders, then through whole company servanthood, we can start to make business more human. By expanding our company’s purpose through serving, we will be able to have a greater impact on our communities and their futures. Here are four ways to make an impact.

Serve the environment.

Corporate social responsibility doesn’t always need to be strategic for your business. In fact, CSR initiatives should be chosen simply based on which would make the most impact, and any benefit to the company should be just a bonus. Caring for the environment is every person’s responsibility, and a corporation can use their sense of personhood to be better stewards of the resources they have.

Whether it’s a commuter benefits program to decrease cars on the road, replacing disposable cups with mugs or donating to causes that champion a better environment, choosing to take part in the larger environmental picture can align your teams and create a greater sense of purpose in the work they do while serving the environment around them.

Serve your community.

The next layer is to serve the community your business operates in. It’s innate as individuals to desire positive change in our communities. So, why can’t we further involve our organizations in the same goals beyond an annual community service day? Whether it’s monthly food drives, regular volunteer work, partnering with local nonprofits or internship programs for students in underserved communities, there are many ways your organization can support its local community.

Community is “the social glue that binds us together for the greater good,” and as companies work together to build up communities around them, they gain a deeper sense of their own community. The main point is, serving those outside of the organization has to be ingrained in the way a company operates if they want to expand their purpose and permanently make their business more human.

Serve your employees.

Serving those outside your organization should be a priority, but serving a broader, more human-centric purpose through your organization must start internally. Servant leaders will be the ones paving the way for whole company servanthood to take place. They are the ones that set the expectations that the needs and well-being of others come before their own. The key role of a servant leader is “serving employees as they explore and grow, providing tangible and emotional support as they do so.”

This includes supporting your employees’ career goals, giving them opportunities to shine above yourself and intentionally supporting them in what they need to be successful as people, not just as employees. This communicates their value and increases the sense of unity and purpose within the organization. A culture of servanthood must be present internally if companies intend to turn this servanthood outward toward their communities and beyond.

Track the change.

This paradigm shift has to take shape in real form rather than just words on our company’s values or mission statement. One very tangible way to do this is to start reporting on more than just financials. Organizations can begin to implement and track their progress by annually reporting on how they performed on environmental, social and governance issues. The only way that corporations will successfully implement change over the long run is to monitor it and set goals to be achieved.

Serving the greater good through your organization makes business more human and creates a better work culture and a brighter future for your company overall. Care for others can extend to the way you do business and ultimately have a long-lasting impact on your employees, stakeholders, suppliers, communities and the rest of the world around you—and that’s something your whole company will be proud to stand behind.

How to Handle Negative Self-Talk in the Workplace

Most humans have an internal dialog going on, and it’s rather easy for negative self-talk to creep its way in. We tend to be harder on ourselves internally than we would be to anyone else, and we can easily become burdened and sandbagged by this kind of negativity.

Many studies have shown how self-talk can affect our feelings and our actions, and in turn, psychologists have started to emphasize how important it is to train the brain to improve the tone in which our internal voice speaks to us. The national bestseller Chatter by Ethan Kross dissects why the voice in our head matters and how best to harness it to work for us instead of against us.

A consistent stream of negative, unproductive thinking can begin to influence our emotions, how we feel about ourselves and our efforts, our confidence, and eventually, it can affect the way we act. Essentially, our self-talk matters and can change outcomes in our tangible world. Simply put by Brian Pennie, author, speaker, and recovering addict, who attributes his own negative self-talk to pushing him toward his drug addiction, “When my self-talk shifted, so did my willingness to act.”

Negative Self-Talk in the Workplace

Our own self-talk is important to pay attention to and to deal with, but what about when we see it in other people? If negative self-talk is playing in the background of everyone’s operating system, it no doubt finds its way into the workplace, affecting your team’s performance, morale, and overall culture.

So, how do you identify when this is happening for others? And is there anything you can do about it? Here are a few key things to look out for in those around you to indicate the presence of the unfriendly inner companion of self-sabotaging self-talk.

Self-Limiting Speech. Examples may include comments such as, “That’s too complicated for me to figure out”; or, “I don’t have the capacity to deal with that.”
Jumping to Conclusions. This could sound like someone saying “I just botched that presentation” right after walking out of a meeting; or, “Jim didn’t say hi to me today, he’s upset with me for something.”
Ruminating on the Negative. For example, someone who can’t let small mistakes go or can’t stop talking about how disappointing their recent review was.
Over-apologizing or Over-compensating for Mistakes. This shows that someone may be ruminating on their mistake and, internally, that they’re likely beating themselves up about it.
Self-Deprecating Humor. This probably shouldn’t always be laughed off. If someone is always throwing punches at themselves, it could be an indicator that their inner dialog is looking for validation of a negative perception they hold of themselves.
Catastrophizing. Someone who always jumps to the worst possible outcome may have more negativity swimming around internally than they even realize.

What to Do About It

While, as a leader, your role is not to be a therapist to your team, if you notice that someone’s negative self-talk starts to affect their performance or bring the morale of your team down, it may be appropriate to play a part in combating it.

Below are five key ways you, as a leader, can help shed light on and work against the negative self-talk of your team.

1. Normalize Mistakes as a Part of Growth

It’s easy for people to be hard on themselves when they’ve made an obvious mistake at work. When you recognize someone being particularly negative about their mistake, you can bring an element of psychological safety to your team by reminding them that mistakes are a part of the learning process and by being transparent about mistakes you’ve made and how you have overcome them. Being honest about your professional struggles can normalize the feelings of your employee.

Use yourself as an example: “When I was at your tenure I would get so down on myself when I couldn’t solve the problem quickly … until I researched other ways of dealing with self-doubt.”

2. Limit Expressions of Worry

It’s also helpful to limit expressions of worry about what may happen as a result of an employee’s mistake and keep the focus on solutions and actionable steps to solve for them. Encourage them to talk through their thinking about the problem, and point them toward a solution if they need guidance. This will help shift the focus in a positive direction and hopefully away from their negative self-talk.

3. Make Encouragement a Regular Practice

It’s easy to pick out ways your employees can improve, but to help keep their negative self-talk at a minimum, you can regularly find ways to encourage specific actions or qualities in people that you sense they may be struggling with. If they are feeling poorly about a recent project, you can pick a handful of things you saw them do well and sensitively address any areas that may have gone wrong.

When you do give feedback, the 3:1 rule is helpful– three positive points of feedback to one negative. However, make sure your feedback is always honest, because people have a way of knowing when you use fluff to prime them for a harsher critique.

4. Show Your Trust in Them

You can also encourage your employees by showing you trust them. Avoid micromanaging them in areas they are insecure about and empower them to step up and make decisions where you see fit. You can selectively give them opportunities to

make decisions in these areas to help them see their negative self-talk isn’t right about everything.

5. Bring a New Perspective

When your employees are overly negative about a mistake, ask them: “How would you talk to your colleague who you like and respect if they made a similar mistake? Probably a lot more gently and with more encouragement than you speak to yourself.”

You can also suggest that they do a thought experiment over the course of the challenging project where they speak to themselves as they would someone they cared about and wanted to genuinely motivate.

When you sense negative self-talk in the workplace that begins to take root, seeping into an employee’s actions or demeanor, it can be easy to ignore it or deem it “their problem.” However, if we want to see business become more human for everyone, it’s important to treat our employees as humans who deal with the same inner-dialog many of us have before.

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