Imran Rehman: Belonging, Psychological safety and Flow - is that the recipe for meaningful work?
This conversation is a rich conversation with Imran Rehman, employee experience specialist. We speak of some of the fundamentals of his work and some unconventional yet powerful insights into how we can do culture work. Here are some of my (Amit’s) favourite takeaways from the conversation:
Structure, spaces and stories.
Imran relates that he often works with these three components initially as he steps into an organisation. To create a structure, usually one that centers around the team since, in his experience, teams become increasingly important in times of change when power is distributed away from the center of the organisation towards the periphery. This means a structure that empowers team leads with what they need to run effective teams is critical. The second parameter spaces are the meetings and context. When can we actually get out of the ‘getting things done’ and checking the boxes type meetings and think wider and broader about what we are doing? Fostering the conditions for belonging, psychological safety and ultimately flow experiences. The stories are the way that we understand what is going on. As we start changing the meetings (spaces) we might start having room for other stories and with those new stories we will start seeing the culture take form provided that we allow structure to follow.
Kokoro - mastery of the fundamentals
Kokoro is a tool for empowering teams to get control of data to follow their own progress over time. As Imran states clearly “Team comparison can and should only be done through temporal comparison, social comparison [editors note: between teams] is not helpful. Even if a team is deceiving themselves that will sooner or later catch up and the team will start to perform. That is our experience.” This is why Kokoro focus on Belonging, psychological safety and flow experiences in their pulse measurements. It’s a short survey that you can keep coming back to. Then the data is put in the hands of team leads and Kokoro helps the team leads implement retrospectives in their organisations. Based on those two components they will start creating the structure and support they need. This rhymes well with one of the meanings of Kokoro: to master the fundamentals and allow leaders to practice them again and again.
We speak of many more things in this conversation like why it’s important to realise we are more than just one identity. How we can get to meaning through simplicity if we remove the obvious (like profit). And we speak about emotions and their primary place in forming culture, that it’s time to put the story of the stimuli and respons model to rest when it comes to emotions and realise they are culturally conditioned primarily.
A few more words about Imran:
Imran is an employee-experience specialist with an expertise in strengthening and building belonging and psychological safe environments in groups and teams. Based in Austria, he is a leadership coach as well as CEO of Kokoro, a web-based tool that helps busy leaders get the best out of themselves and their teams with a data-informed approach. Reach out to talk about coaching, team development, leadership and also about dogs 🐕.Connect with him here:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/imranrehman/
Twitter: @ImsRehman Email: imran@bekokoro.com Webpage: https://bekokoro.com/
Links to further resources:
Marcus Buckingham on Engagement
Lisa Feldman Barrett on Emotions
Gabór Maté - The myth of normal (Youtube talk on the book)
Self-determination theory and autonomy (There are 3 parts in this podcast that are really rich with resources)
The problem of transfer in leadership training - a motivation to why training should be done in the job context not removed at leadership retreats.