Frances Frei is a Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School, and her research involves understanding how leaders create the conditions for organizations and individuals to thrive. Frances discusses her new book, Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. She dives into fixing broken cultures by creating an environment of psychological safety.

Key Takeaways

[3:50] Trust can be lost in three critical ways: authenticity wobble, logic wobble, or an empathy wobble.

[5:50] The logic wobble typically means you have sound logic but you lost the person in communication somewhere.

[11:40] When it comes to delegation, it’s on the leader to delegate well and to really examine where the process can be improved if tasks aren’t being performed as expected.

[12:35] Take radical accountability for your team member’s success.

[13:35] To achieve high-performing teams, they need to have psychological safety. In this climate, it can be hard to navigate this safety because people become guarded by another person’s opposite opinion.

[18:55] Cultures really like a redemption story.

[21:25] It’s on your shoulders, it’s your obligation, to build trust when there is no trust.

[25:35] If you want people within an organization to behave and act differently, you must get them to think differently.

[29:15] Cultural values can become weaponized. When this happens, you have to scrap it and create a new one.

[35:00] When it comes to diversity and inclusion, Frances wishes those words were reversed. If you are inclusive of difference, more and more difference is going to want to come and flourish.

[38:00] We are instinctively tribal and try to find people who are similar to us. This means if we can’t think differently, we have to go through our instinctive nature and put in new processes to help us think differently.

[41:30] Listener challenge: Seek a room where you’re the least smart person in that room.

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Quotable Quotes

Resources Mentioned

• Frances’s website & book: Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You
• Frances on LinkedIn
• “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

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