Jennifer Selby Long
speaker
698 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Jennifer Selby Long’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, I think it's a great question because it is very much our current situation for many businesses. And I wish the answer were super simple. It's not quite as simple as I wish it were because it does depend a little bit on your situation. So, In the hybrid work model, are people going into the office to just work on their own work?
If so, I'm not sure you're going to get huge benefit out of that in terms of lessening politics or political alliances because they're not really interacting that much. Nor do I think you're going to get, you know, much of the benefit of obviously of working on very complex problems together if you're not really there to work together.
The other particular challenge I'll play you in is most of the clients that we work with are distributed not throughout one metropolitan area, but across the globe. And so... Sure, if your team is largely local and you can get together fairly regularly with intention, with the purpose of working on complex problems, right? Coming to very challenging agreements together.
Sure, you want to do that in person. You are going to get a better result. But if your team is distributed around the globe, I would question how much significant benefit there would be to going into an office. You would all just be in different offices.
So I think you really have to look at being incredibly purposeful for when you get together and to work on the talk stuff when you are together and not just simply trust that. The fact that you can have a lunchtime conversation in and of itself is going to be a nod.
In fact, one of my clients is working on what they call more a sense of belonging or connectedness across their very global organization. And they're experimenting with all kinds of things to help build more of that personal trust. I'll let you know how those experiments go across time, because this is a significant challenge. People who are lonely at work and don't feel connected.
It's a big problem. It's a big problem in a lot of places. It causes a lot of additional problems. And from my point of view, it feeds notions of politics because there are people who feel connected and people who don't feel connected. And if you feel more connected, you're going to be more of an insider, right?
You're going to have more of an understanding of the political dynamic and the needs of other people. So I think that this is one we need to keep observing, assessing, and experimenting with across time. It's a super new way to work when you look at how very many years people work together in person. And it's really only been the last few where the majority do not work together in person.
Yeah. And if you notice this pattern insistently with your boss, I would say this is where you do have to really step back and navigate for yourself. Go out into the future 10 or 20 years and look back on the current situation. And ask yourself truly in your heart, what is most important here?
Because in that situation, maybe there's one employee who has two little kids to support and they go, what's most important is they keep my job for the kid. And so I'm just gonna, I'm gonna stay, right? Even though it means that I'm gonna have to carry some of the workload for others. And someone else might be in a situation where they're going,
No, the most important thing is for me to go find an environment where the leadership is not threatened by me and where I can really flourish. I would never, as a coach, tell someone which of those choices is the right choice because it's whatever is the right choice for you and what you need to do, looking at your situation and looking in your heart.
Because if you find a consistent pattern where the boss is just simply easily threatened by the stronger performers, That is what it is, right? There is not necessarily a lot that you can do to influence that. Not in a real significant way, not from where you sit as an employee. Exactly.
Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the reasons that I think it is so important for leaders to not just somehow think we aligned on our goals and now we just march forward because goals are pretty dynamic, right? And the different pressures that businesses are under change as markets change, as the geopolitical environment changes, you need to stay well-seeked up and well-aligned as a leadership team.
or you're going to be giving differing direction to the people who work for you. And then those people will find themselves at loggerheads and starting to do some infighting with one another, in part because you did not stay aligned at that higher level. And really, also, I would say of great significance, didn't learn how to raise and address conflict in a way that was healthy and effective.
Yeah, we could probably eliminate a good chunk of politics by just improving the ability to raise and resolve conflict in a healthy way.
Sure. I think that often when people get together to have conversations about business or whatever it is that they're accountable for within a business, they talk about the goal that's passed, the things that seem very concrete and hard and in a plan. And then when one person believes that one thing is true and another believes the other is true, they just start talking at each other.
Instead of stepping back to say, wait a minute, it seemed like we're in conflict here. How many times have people done that in the business environment? Pretty rare to step back and say, it seems that we're in conflict with each other. Let's step back. Let's put ourselves in one another's shoes. Let's ask some more questions. Let's make sure we understand the situation.
And I've had a number of early clients say, oh, I don't have time to do that. How much time are you wasting now on the political battles because you didn't step back and try to put yourself in the shoes of all of these other people and understand where they're coming from?
Check to make sure you actually understand where they're coming from and what's driving them because you're probably making some false assumptions about what that is. I can just about guarantee it. Are you stepping back to list the areas where you're in agreement? Probably not. Most people don't. As you start to work through these things, differing dialing is another one.
Oh my gosh, I've had teams that were leadership teams. See, you said we're just starting to backbite one another and get into a little bit of gamesmanship. And when we analyze the different styles on the team and we were able to step back objectively and look at that and say, can you come to some agreements? on your behaviors? Because you all have naturally different styles.
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