00:00:00 Paula: And hello, everyone and welcome to Tesse Talks with your host, Tesse Akpeki and co-host me, Paula Okonneh, where we share with you top leadership and management strategies. TesseTalks is a journey of discovery because we are learning that leadership is personal, but it’s also professional and we, that’s Tesse and I hope that you will walk with us in this adventure.
00:00:29 Paula: Today we are talking about Teams, and we are delighted to have a guest, Stephen Light. I’ll tell you a bit about Stephen. He’s a very courageous communicator with a depth of knowledge in various communication and conflict resolution models. He works across multicultural groups employing a systemic team relationship focused on solutions. While enjoying facilitating the creativity that stems from such diversity, I could say a lot more about him, but what I’ll do is welcome him to the show and then he’ll take it from there. So welcome to TesseTalks, Stephen.
00:01:10 Stephen: Thank you Paula. Yeah, very good to be here. Tesse, lovely to be here with you, and thank you for that great intro. I will expand on that as we go through the podcast for sure.
00:01:19 Paula: Absolutely. Okay, Tesse.
00:01:22 Tesse: Yeah. Stephen, I am thrilled, and I don’t use that word lightly. I’m thrilled to have you on the show, and you just bring such wealth of excellence. You know, the passion for teams and teaming comes across. But today I thought I’d lean into your thoughts about what makes teams resilient. You know, resilience is banded about here and there. And I’m not always sure that people know exactly what it means and how a team can be stronger or weaker, linked to resiliency. So over to you, your thoughts.
00:01:55 Stephen: Oh, Tesse, this, it’s so nuanced and when you think about resiliency and individuals who are resilient, and you can align it with the experience of the world and people having burnout. If you look at the way the world is at the moment and the level of uncertainty that people are facing. And the challenges that businesses facing around hitting the numbers that they are, are challenged by shareholders to deliver. What tends to happen is they don’t hit the numbers. The market is driving some meta environment that they can’t seem to get there, and then they’ve gotta manage costs. And when you manage costs, the thing you start doing is you stop hiring people. You stop investing in people, you cut away things that are considered like extra nice things. And in reality, what you do is you burden people. You burden people, you burden teams. But what doesn’t change is the output that people have to deliver.
00:02:48 Stephen: So, all of a sudden, I’m arriving at work. I’m being paid the same amount of money. I’m now working longer hours, and I’m doing more work to help this organisation meet the numbers they want to meet. And you know, that has a huge impact on me personally, and it has a huge impact on teams. So, what does resiliency actually mean? How does it fit in with all of that? What I have seen and experienced with the teams that I work is that the teams who stick together, the teams who understand that we have each other’s backs. They feel safe around each other. They trust each other. They are aligned on a common vision, a common effort that they working towards. They talk each other. They recognise where each other are. They are human to human with each other. And what that does is that helps people’s resiliency come out. ‘Cause when you are alone in the job that you do and you are operating in a silo in the team that you operate in. You don’t have meaning, you don’t have fulfilment, and life is hard. And I’ll tell you what, that will eat away at any sense of like a resiliency, strength, courage, grit, that I have to arrive every day to this job, to do the job I have to do, and to deliver what I need to deliver. All in service of getting a paycheck so I can live the life that I really want to live with the responsibilities that I have. Sorry. That was a mouthful.
00:04:08 Tesse: No, that is absolutely beautiful. You know what I like? I like human-to-human. You know, people talk from business to business, but human- to-human. That is awesome! Really, Stephen. Paula, what are your thoughts? Did you hear what Stephen is saying?
00:04:21 Paula: Well, Stephen, that wasn’t a mouthful. That was great. That was excellent. Yeah, that was awesome. You know. And you know, as Tesse said, she loves human-to-human. B2B is so cold, and so, so not 2025, let’s put it that way. But in some ways, it is because, you know, we are dealing with human beings in teams, and human beings come with all sorts of baggage, for want of a better word. How do you lead in a toxic relationship within a team?
00:04:48 Stephen: Yeah, that’s such a great question, and so human to human. We are all human beings. We arrive at an organisation in the job with the skills that we have to deliver something, and we part of a team setup. Now, I bring with me as, as who I am, as who you are, I bring all my experiences. I bring my conditioning, my beliefs, my views on the world. And so, I will see situations different to you. And when a team isn’t skilled on how to navigate these differences that they have between each other, what tends to happen is you get polarisation, and then you get this boom, this grip, butting up against each other. And so skilled leaders, leaders who understand systemic approaches. Who understand high performance in teams. They realise that the ability in a team to communicate. To be able to have dialogue, to have difficult conversations with each other without taking it personal, with the ability to listen to each other and hear the other person’s perspective. Without having to maybe subscribe to it, but just to respect that that person’s different. That is a crucial component of creating an environment, a culture, a space where people, as I had mentioned earlier, feel safe, that they can be who they are and share their view around whatever’s going on. The moment you don’t have that environment and people are judged and isolated, and penalised for having a different perspective, is where you start walking down the path of toxicity. So, we talk about toxic cultures, toxic relationships. And what you are describing is a combination of Dr. John Gottman and his wife, Julie, have run the Gottman Institute for many years. And they talk about, they call the four horsemen of the apocalypse, four ways that we communicate. And so, you talk about criticism, where people, uh, like attack each other and, and make each other wrong. And that creates the second one, which is defensiveness. And then people get defensive. And so, when I’m defending, I’m going to then deflect and probably blame you. Because I might be coming from a victim role that you attacking me. Even though I might be playing a role in this situation. And then you have the other two, which are stonewalling. So, I’m just gonna avoid you. Or contempt where I will personally attack you, belittle you and that’s our role at Youth Sarcasm. And those four toxic communicating traits create a toxic environment. And so working with teams and leaders who recognise that, can recognise the behaviours that are aligned to some of those toxic communication styles.
00:07:28 Stephen: And what they’ll do is they will address them immediately, name them, and help people have antidotes to dealing with those toxic cultures. Because I tell you what, the outcome of a toxic culture and not addressing it is that people will arrive what I call with hands and feet. I’m have to do a job check and check out. I will do the bare minimum, and that’s what you will get from me. Don’t expect any level of engagement. And what you want when you address toxic cultures is you get hearts and minds. People arrive, and they give you what we call discretionary effort. They will go above and beyond because they love this team. They love the people. They know that they can be who they are. They know they can have those difficult conversations. They won’t be judged. They can have different views. And you know what? That is what makes a high-performing, resilient team is when people know that they feel safe on that team.
00:08:21 Tesse: Oh, that is so beautiful. You know, I’m just here and I’m like, poetry in motion, Stephen. Poetry in motion, you know, hands and feet. Heart and mind, you know? And you know, one of the things that is coming to my mind as I’m listening to you is, I call them delicate conversations or sensitive conversations. People call them difficult conversations. They could be. But actually the essence I think is, is creating that environment where people feel safe and are able to, to share without judgment, or to hold on and listen well. So, my inquiry here is actually how would you, and from your 00:09:00 experience, you’ve done a lot of this, upskill a team or an individual to actually have these delicate conversations? To be that holding space or those holding hands for what is sensitive and maybe very, very, very tricky.
00:09:16 Stephen: Oh ok, it’s like whenever I’m working with leaders, with groups of leaders, cohorts, teams. There are two key things that I say to anyone, whether I’m coaching them, working with teams. That if you master these two things, you’ll be amazing in your career, in your roles, in your personal relationships. And it’s not difficult stuff. It’s being emotionally intelligent and it’s mastering communication. If you get those two things right, you can have any conversation. So, let’s talk about what do those two things mean. Being emotionally intelligent, Daniel Goldman has written many books around emotional intelligence. Just recognising your emotions. Understanding them in the moment and how they are impacting your behaviors. Whether you might be shutting down, withdrawing, attacking people verbally, like making them wrong.
00:10:08 Stephen: Which will align with some of those toxic behaviours I described, Paula. So, it’s recognising your emotions and managing them in a way that’s more effective. To create an environment where you can recognize others’ emotions and their behaviours, and you just manage that to create the right environment for those conversations. So, every conversation you have, there are two big things at play. We are talking about something and I call that the content. We are discussing this; it might be sensitive, whatever it is. So, there’s always a content involved. And then there’s what I call the conditions. Which is the emotional undercurrent that sits with every single topic, every conversation. And emotionally intelligent leaders recognise that ebb and flow of the emotional conditions. And when it becomes unsafe, they stop the content conversation and they address the conditions. And that’s what I work with people is around, being able to recognise that in every situation, personal workspace. So, if you can master that, now you pin the second area, which is around those communication skills, and there’s only two things you need to master. How to listen. But listen from an active place like being over there and really empathising, understanding this person, wanting to know what’s going on, and the questions that come from the listening. How do you ask open questions to invoke that dialogue, that space of coming from no judgment. I really do wanna understand you, and the principle there is seek first to understand, then be understood.
00:11:37 Stephen: And if you can master those two things, you can navigate any sensitive, difficult, contentious conversation.
00:11:44 Tesse: Beautiful.
00:11:45 Paula: Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. I love how you broke that down. You know, emotional intelligence and mastering your communication, and those are two things you said. If we put that into play, we can never go wrong. But I also read an article that you wrote today on Meta emotions. How does that come into play here? Because, you know, I was fascinated by that article you wrote.
00:12:12 Stephen: Yeah. So that article around meta emotions. The author was actually, I think it might’ve been Gottman, yeah. So Gottman had written the article and what we are saying is that our emotional state is shaped from when we are very young. And so, we experience these emotions and, and so they get embedded into our memory. And so, Neuroscience and I’ve been studying Neuroscience and doing a series of courses at the moment through an organisation around Neuroscience and understanding how does the brain react to situations. What are the emotions, what are the parts of the brain that are reacting? How are these things triggering us? And so, what happens is our emotions are stored as memories, with certain situations. Now, you would’ve probably in your life had experiences where the emotional reaction someone’s having doesn’t meet that situation. It’s like that doesn’t match something else is going on. And that’s the Meta emotions that are playing out. And so, what’s happening is my experience from the past is being triggered by whatever’s going on here, and I’m having a much bigger reaction to that. So how do we manage that? It starts with a place of self-awareness, is recognising the moments I am triggered around that and the whole emotional piece around, if I’m aware of it, I can manage it, which is emotional intelligence. What emotions are at play at the moment? Now I’ll say that, but I’ll also caveat it with a perspective that when you are emotionally triggered, it is hugely difficult to pull back into a very conscious, empowered place and state to have a conversation, a like, you know, a sensitive conversation.
00:13:46 Stephen: And there are times when people go into what we call realm and they flood it. They just can’t engage in that conversation. And those are the perfect moments to say like, you know, Paula, this conversation important. I’m flooded at the moment. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to have it. Can we pause? Can I go and spend some time and just recover from this? And then let’s carry on. That’s, this is a good strategy for dealing with when we are flooded by Meta motions in a particular moment.
00:14:13 Paula: Thank you for answering that because it brings me to my next question. So how do we design like alliances within teams that allow for accountability and responsibility when you know we have all these underlying emotions involved? What are your top tips for that?
00:14:31 Stephen: And this is a beautiful tool. So, through studying OSC, organisational relationship systems coaching, which is a systemic approach to team coaching. Through studying that through the Centre for Right Relationship. It’s a very tool-rich approach to working with systemic relationships, and the one key tool that we use is called a Designed Team Alliance. It’s called A DTA, and it’s so simple and what it does is it helps a team answer two very important questions. The first one is, what do you need from this team and in this team to feel supported so that you can flourish, so that you can thrive, you can feel safe, you can bring your A-game. And you get teams to unpack what that means, and there’s a process you can follow to arrive at what are the key things that this team needs. And the other question you ask them is like, so what do you need from this team and in this team when it gets difficult to hold each other accountable, to ensure that you as a team are, able to deliver what you need to deliver. And you get the team to workshop that as well. And what the outcome of that, it’ll produce what we call our design team alliance. I normally work where they get them to come up with three to four, four things. This is what we commit to every day. We’ve collaboratively created it. It’s our team-designed alliance and that’s what’s gonna help us manage any situation we find ourselves in.
00:15:57 Paula: So taking ownership, in other words, as a team.
00:16:01 Stephen: Ownership’s a big one. And and let me talk about accountability quickly because we throw that word around like, I’m accountable. I’m accountable. What does that actually mean? Uh, a company, Crucial Conversations. They’ve written many books, I can’t remember, Vital Smarts. They wrote Crucial Conversations. And it’s a such a beautiful model around how to create dialogue and how to have conversations that create meaning. That lead to shared discovery, shared answers and outcomes that work for all. And one of the things they talk about is through one of the organisations they work with is this principle of 200% accountability.
00:16:37 Stephen: What it means, and, and I’ll give you the history of how it came about. They were working in the medical field and hospitals, and what was happening is that the data was showing that people who start in hospital from what they called hospital acquired infections. In other words, I come to hospital for an operation, I get sick in hospital and I die. What’s happening is the data was showing an increase in this. They couldn’t figure out why, and the nurses knew why. It was because the doctors were not washing their hands, as they were going from patient to patient. But the nurses were not empowered to speak up. What they introduced was this concept of 200% accountability, meaning I am 100% accountable for my behavior. I have to wash my hands and I’m 100% accountable for calling you out on your behavior, if you do not wash your hands. And so that principle of 200% accountability ensures that as a team, we have a accountability and ownership.
00:17:42 Tesse: This is again, it, it’s not just beautiful and elegant. It’s actually very pragmatic. And there’s something that comes into my mind about compassion. You know, compassionate accountability, which I’m really big on. You know, that we can be compassionate with care and empathy and, and love and action. We can be that way, and we can be compassionate in terms of competence. Is this person capable and resourced to do things? Is this person trained? Is this person coached or mentored? You know, is this person resourced enough to do these things? And those things hold very, very, very beautifully together. And I sense that when we’re rushed, when we’re not keeping that pace, a lot of these things get missing. They get lost in haste because different sides of our brain are kind of not connected. You know, I just love, you can tell I’m loving. I’m loving this conversation and I’m kind of wondering, Stephen, as we kind of unpack these very, tricky in terms of making them happen, and very easy in the sense of when it’s easy, what becomes possible, what kind of metaphors come into your mind, you know, what kind of things arise for you as we speak, we have this conversation together.
00:18:54 Stephen: There is something about a light, and it links with my surname. But there is, in situations, there is always possibility. You know, we talk about this principle of 2% truth. Even in the worst situation, there is 2% truth about what’s going on. There is 2% hope, there’s 2% accountability. And so, holding onto the light of any situation, and you can equate that to intent there. So you can think about the metaphor of a torch or a candle, let’s say. Holding on to the light around any situation enables you to to lean into the hope, the positive intent versus the circumstances of what I’m experiencing right now. And I think that’s really what we have. We have hope. Because I know this in business and I know this in our personal lives and in my life, is that the shit show never stops. There is always something that’s going to go wrong, and it’s how you deal with it. And so, holding onto the light is so important. And if I extend that, it’s like, you know, just helping someone else’s light, by helping them shine a brighter is powerful.
00:20:03 Tesse: You know, holding onto the light. That can be my next poem. You know, I. Holding onto the light. It’s beautiful. And I love the other thing that you said that life happened. Those difficult things. Those tricky things, those things that knock us off our guard will always be part of life. I mean, awesome. Stephen, Paula, what are your, you know, your thoughts? What’s your questions for the wonderful Stephen?
00:20:28 Paula: Yeah, you know, as in the book said, you know, holding onto the light. And life happens in difficult circumstances because, you know, and I think you, you hit the nail on the head, Stephen. When you talked about it, said your surname too, because it reminds me of, you know, in tough, tough times. What has sometimes kept me, and I know probably other people going, is the light at the end of the tunnel. Looking there, not looking at where you are right now. Looking at what’s happening, not looking at the circumstances around you, but looking beyond that like, this is where I wanna go. I see light there and I am going to go there no matter what is seeming right now to be preventing me, I’m overcome that to get to that light. And that what I, for me, has given me hope during tough situations, knowing, hmm, it’s a place I know I wanna go to. I see the light there. I’m putting one foot in front the other, and by doing that, I’m not on a treadmill. I’m going to get to that light. It’s not a mirage for me. It’s the light. Thank you for bringing that up.
00:21:36 Stephen: You’re very welcome.
00:21:37 Paula: So, in light! I’m using that as a pun deliberately of that, how can people who’ve listened to this, if they’re interested in knowing more about you, how can they find you? How can they get in touch with you?
00:21:51 Stephen: Yeah, the best ways, for all that I am and what I do. I do not have such a great website. But I’m very active on LinkedIn. So, and Tesse, I know you and I engage on LinkedIn. So, Stephen Light on LinkedIn, MCC. Anyone’s welcome to engage with me on that platform. You know, I come at life and I come at relationships, teams. I come at them with an abundant mindset. And anyone that cross my path, they always walk away knowing I’m a resource for life. They need something, they reach out. I’ve shared facilitators, guides, and workshops with people, and, whatever content can help people. So, reach out to me on LinkedIn, Stephen Light, MCC, and absolutely connect with me on that platform.
00:22:33 Paula: Thank you so much. I love LinkedIn as well as I know Tesse does.
00:22:37Tesse: I, adore LinkedIn, and I have to say that Stephen, you are my LinkedIn champion. You know, Paula is my LinkedIn ally. Because, Paula, you coached me very well. And I remember back in the day you used to say to me, Tesse, every week you go in, see what other people are up to, see what they’re doing, notice their pets and their birthdays. And you told me all that and I literally took it and I do it till tomorrow. And Stephen does the same. So, I wanna use this opportunity, Stephen, to thank you for all your encouragement and for your generosity because you live that. But guess what? As you are resourcing others through your generosity, I hope you’re feeling the love right back at you.
00:23:18 Stephen: Thank you! Thank you, Tesse! And right now, absolutely. Just being here with you two is exactly that, so I appreciate that.
Outro:
00:23:27 Paula: This has been amazing and to you are amazing, a wonderful, loyal audience. We thank you so much for tuning in. And we encourage those who haven’t yet done this to head over to Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, anywhere else that you listen to podcasts, and please click subscribe. Subscribe to TesseTalks. And if you like what you just heard, I always say that, who wouldn’t? We have the best guess! Please write us a raving review. If you do have questions or topics that you would love for us to cover related to leadership and governance. We ask that you send us a note. Remember that your note can be personal, as well as professional. And last but not least, if you’d like to be a guest on the show, please head over to www.tesseakpeki.com/tessetalks talks to apply. Stephen, thank you so much. This has been absolutely amazing.
00:24:22 Tesse: Even just fun shining because you are really a light, shine on.
00:24:31 Stephen: Very great. Thank you.