I was joking with a friend the other day that the world isn’t made for a five-foot-tall, curly-haired, left-handed woman.
I had just come back from speaking at a conference where I had to ask the staff to bring a cocktail table to the stage — because if I stood behind the podium, no one would have been able to see me. The hotel, like most hotels, didn’t have a hairdryer with a diffuser attachment, and the blower was too big for my travel diffuser.
While these are minor inconveniences, they got me thinking about all the small frustrations we ask our employees to endure every day.
Think about your new hires trying to figure out the unwritten rules of the organization. Do people actually take a lunch break, or do they eat at their desks? Which of the many internal communication tools are they supposed to use — and for what?
Do your employees understand how performance is evaluated? Do they know how their work, and the decisions they make, affect the business? Other departments? Are they aware of all of the resources available to them? And, are these resources easy to access? Are forms and approval processes cumbersome and convoluted?
Want to know what gets in your employees’ way? Ask them! Simple questions like:
• What do you wish you’d known sooner?
• What’s getting in the way of doing your best work?
Be transparent that you might not be able to fix everything, but you genuinely want to understand.
Engaging in these dialogues does several things:
- It surfaces obstacles your employees face that you may not be aware of.
- It increases trust and psychological safety as employees feel seen and heard — especially as they see the issues they surfaced being addressed.
- It opens the door for your employees to bring forward issues as they arise.
The truth is, we all face obstacles that make our work harder than it needs to be. For leaders, the opportunity is to notice them — and to listen when your team points them out. Sometimes it’s not the mountain that slows progress, but the pebble in our shoe. When leaders take the time to remove them, they create space for people to do their best thinking, collaborate more freely, and feel genuinely engaged in their work.
How might you begin to identify the small changes that would help your team do their best work — with more ease, focus, and engagement?
