Friday Faves - What We're Reading This Week - Ripple Effect Group

Friday Faves is our weekly blog series highlighting a few select pieces from the REG team’s reading lists. You can catch up on past Friday Faves on the archive.

Stop telling women they have imposter syndrome

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Anne says: Monday (8th March) was International Women’s Day (in case you didn’t notice!). Plenty of events, celebrations, and acknowledgments of inspiring, amazing women and their contributions to society. But while there are many, many examples of achievements, they are many more issues that still create inequity. This article highlights the impact of imposter syndrome on women. Embedded in the story are issues of racism, sexist bias and being a woman.

Imposter syndrome is defined as: “…doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud…”. It’s not exclusive to women, many men experience uncertainty. It’s complicated, laden with a corporate culture that enables successful women to have their achievements questioned, while men’s are celebrated.

Even the terminology is loaded. Being an imposter implies fraudulent activities, while syndrome is a medical term, a pathological condition even. The examples are too familiar and relatable. Just yesterday I participated in a webinar about diversity in the workplace where one of the speakers, as the only female executive team member in a large organisation was asked to make tea and coffee for the rest of the board. Seriously? That is STILL happening?

Confidence does not equal competence. Again, a constructed context, where men are rewarded for confidence, women are questioned if they are being overconfident. It’s the social constructs, not only for women, but racial and other minority groups. It’s systemic bias. It won’t go away overnight, but being able to call it out, or take a multivitamin as the authors suggest, will take steps to address the labelling of imposter syndrome as a condition that needs to be fixed by the individual – it has to be a collective, cultural shift.

And as a postscript, the executive woman asked to make tea and coffee? She responded: “It’s not my turn, I did it last week.”

Read: https://hbr.org/2021/02/stop-telling-women-they-have-imposter-syndrome

6 ways to keep change fatigue from wearing down your teams

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Jakkii says: Change fatigue isn’t a new concept, and it certainly isn’t unique to pandemic life. But it is something many people have struggled with over the last year, grappling with so much change all at once, along with ongoing change, and, of course, uncertainty. To me, the uncertainty and lack of truly clear timelines or an ‘end’ to the current state is one of the most challenging parts of these covid times.

This article gives 6 tips for helping our teams manage change fatigue, and stop it from becoming overwhelming. As the explainer under the first tip says, for many, it’s not just been change at work but change across their entire lives, with a great many things upended. While things in Australia are, at present, very different to many other countries such as those in Europe or North America, things are still not pre-covid ‘normal’. We have some restrictions still in place, many people are months away from being vaccinated, and with recent snap lockdowns, people have been reminded that things could change at any time, without warning.

The 6 tips are:

Show empathy and give hope
Build empathetic leadership teams
Communicate in clear terms
Take it one change at a time
Support employees through all stages of the change
Make employees part of the change

Anyone who has worked in change management, or been involved in change programs, would likely immediately recognise at least the final four ideas here, as they’re typical – and proven – approaches for managing change in organisations. I think to me what’s a little different here is the upfront focus on empathy, or at the very least calling it out as such, and not just ‘how can we tell people what they want to hear so they’ll take the steps we want them to take’. Empathy is important for all manner of reasons, not least in helping our people feel heard, understood and validated, which is a useful basis for then guiding them through change (and more change, and more change). It also helps us learn what is and isn’t working with change and how we might need to adapt and change in order to improve, whether at the team, program or organisational level.

Change can be hard at the best of times, and doing what we can to support one another is all the more important as we begin our second year of living with covid. It may be worth reflecting on how your people are coping with change and whether these tips could help prevent change fatigue from taking over.

Read: https://www.fastcompany.com/90610589/6-ways-to-keep-change-fatigue-from-wearing-down-your-teams

Friday Fives

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Hybrid workplace

Remote work

Communication, engagement, and culture

Community management, moderation and misinformation

Privacy and data

Extras

when i donate my body to science they will be like wow. i do not want this.

— alicia (@nerdjpg) March 1, 2021

This is interesting: A brief history of sea monkeys

Things that make you go hmmm: Heartbreaking stories of people who got scammed on Tinder during the pandemic

Space: Scientists received a radio signal from the furthest reaches of space yet

Podcast: Unexplainable

Friday playlist: The Great British Breakfast

Sydney Business Insights – The Future, This Week Podcast

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This week: we discuss how digital ownership through NFTs creates value and new kinds of assets, and what the GameStop saga reveals about new forms of spontaneous digital organising.

Sandra Peter (Sydney Business Insights) and Kai Riemer (Digital Disruption Research Group) meet once a week to put their own spin on news that is impacting the future of business in The Future, This Week.

The stories this week

11:00 – Kings of Leon will be the first to release an album as an NFT (but what’s an NFT?)

24:18 – GameStop still surges (but that’s not what’s interesting)

Other stories we bring up

Listen: https://sbi.sydney.edu.au/nfts-and-gamestop-on-the-future-this-week/