Leadership

Do you check YouTube for reviews before you buy a tech gadget? If yes, the probability is high that you've stumbled upon a video by Linus Media Group.

Linus Media Group (LMG), a Canadian company founded by Linus Sebastian, runs multiple channels like Linus Tech Tips, TechLinked, or MacAddress. Their reach is enormous: Their main channel, Linus Tech Tips, has over 10 million subscribers. Overall, the company racked up billions of views.

They are a significant influence in the tech space. And they found themselves suddenly in a lot of trouble. In the following post, I will briefly summarise what happened and follow up with some lessons we can take away from LMG's example.

Warning Signs

Shortly before all hell broke loose at LMG, I watched a video called «What's It Like to Work For Linus?». My inner alarms immediately went off. A fraction of the more than 100 employees were featured; however, their statements were jarring. They unanimously complained about the workload and the quantity-over-quality-mentality. Some even stated that they are rarely proud of a project.

On the one hand, kudos to LMG for uploading such self-critical content. Imagine a traditional media company would ever do that. On the other hand, these warning signs would soon develop into a full-blown crisis.

The Crisis

It all started when a fellow tech YouTuber, GamersNexus, known for his meticulous approach, laid bare the company's shortcomings, constant mistakes, and several other critical behaviours. The backlash towards LMG was severe; the first response was emotional and destructive, then coordinated and corporate-worthy.

As an immediate action, LMG stopped all publishing for over a week to focus on reflection, new processes, and other adjustments. They now transparently communicated all they have worked on in the publishing hiatus.

I must also mention that a former employee has reported sexual harassment and general sexist behaviour at LMG. The company has responded by starting an external investigation into the allegations. There has not yet been an update.

What Can We Learn From This Story?

Time will tell whether the guardrails and processes that LMG has introduced will improve its work. However, there are already essential takeaways from this significant incident—even without having a deeper insight into the company's inner workings.

I. Reflection is essential

The team's statements in the video indicate a severe lack of opportunity for retrospectives and reflections. The productivity rush became too overwhelming as the company grew from a few dozen employees to a big corporation. Significantly, when scaling up, there always needs to be moments of pause to ask critical questions:

• Are we satisfied with the quality of our product?
• What are the employee's concerns?
• Where do our processes and guidelines fall short?

II. Invest in Culture

The culture is the foundation of a company's resilience and sustainable success. Culture enables or prevents toxicity and psychological safety, and it has a significant impact on employee engagement, productivity, and innovation.

LMG, as part of the creator economy, is highly susceptible to getting driven by arbitrary numbers, likes, views, and upload schedules. It can create an unhealthy hustle culture that not only prevents reflection but incentives something Simon Sinek calls «ethical fading».

Ultimately, the leadership has a critical role in shaping a trusting culture and has to collaborate with the team to set realistic goals that address quality and business viability.

III. Communication is critical

Communication, at least from an outside perspective, seems to be an issue at LMG. The first response was highly emotional and dismissive of the criticism. Further examples of such external communication can be found on numerous occasions.

Both the examples of external communication and the suggestion that internal concerns, although publicly stated by employees, were not heard or not addressed quickly enough indicate problems in this area.

Communication, followed by proper action, is essential in building trust, the most valuable currency any media outlet has: Say what you do and do what you say.

As a regular viewer of LMG's content, I hope they can resolve the issues. But for the most part, it is fascinating to dive into their specific example as they display classic corporate behaviour alongside more transparency often found in the so-called «new media industry». LMG's statements and plans might be polished and curated, but it's a rare case that a company pulls back the curtain as far.

Ultimately, the crisis at LMG proves that cultural issues are not only common at old corporations, but they also plague the new generations of organisations.

Trust is a fundamental element of all aspects of life and is especially relevant for leadership. Trusting relationships between leaders and employees foster high-performing teams, while those who lack trust will struggle to collaborate and innovate.

In this post, I will explore why trust is essential for leadership and how it can be built.

Building a Foundation of Trust

Jessy got the assignment from their boss—let's call him Steve—to do market research for a new product. Over the next couple of months, they read reports and analyses, conducted interviews, monitored competitors, and much more to finally synthesise all their findings in a comprehensive study to present.

Steve is satisfied. However, he tasks an external company to verify the results without telling Jessy. But obviously, Jessy eventually hears about Steve's decision.

Try empathising with Jessy. How would you feel in that situation? Are you angry? Or can you understand Steve's decision? Do you feel trusted?

Trust is the foundation of all relationships and is especially important for leaders. It's one of their most crucial tasks to ensure an environment that nurtures the genuine connection between people—and trust is the main component for those connections.

As humans, we are naturally dependent on a trusting environment. We're social animals, relying on a group to protect us from outside threats. Michael Tomasello even argues that Homo sapiens is an "ultra-social animal" in the European Journal of Social Psychology: "Our own view is that humans set off down their ultra-social, cooperative pathway when some changes in ecological conditions forced them to become obligate collaborative foragers."

Tomasello further explains that "interdependence of the human variety led humans to put their heads together in acts of shared intentionality in which they acted on and understood the world together as a kind of plural subject. Individuals came to feel commitments and obligations toward one another as they worked together."

Belonging to a trusting group lies deeply rooted in the human essence. And although we do not depend on the group anymore for our basic survival, this primal instinct still applies to our lives—and especially impacts the way companies and leaders have to create their environment. Building a foundation of trust is the leadership's responsibility who has the means and leverage to achieve meaningful changes in the company's culture.

However, trust doesn't emerge overnight. In fact, the phrase "trust me" uttered by someone you don't know or trust might make you even more suspicious. Building trust takes time, persistence, and intrinsic motivation on the leader's part.

The Components Of Trust

We're inclined to look for easy recipes to build trust, a simple checklist we can work through, and the job's done. But trust and relationships don't work that way. They're constantly changing and need to be worked on because if the work stops, they fall apart and eventually break.

However, a long history of research around trust lets you break it down into three components: competence, honesty, and benevolence.

Let's apply this to the fictional protagonists above. If Steve were a trusting leader, he would show the three components of trust:

• Competence: trust in someone's abilities
  Steve believes Jessy can do proper market research.
• Honesty (or integrity): trust that someone keeps their promises
  Steve doesn't blindsight Jessy about the external verification.
• Benevolence: trust that someone has your best interest at heart
  Steve explains why and how Jessy might benefit from the external verification.

To state the obvious: The feelings of competence, honesty, and benevolence apply to both sides of the relationship.

Leaders Need To Act First

The distinction between personal relationships and professional ones between leaders and employees is the difference in power. As leaders are inherently more powerful in an organisation, it's up to them to take the first step.

Simply said: Check your actions against the three components of trust. As a leader, you may also have to take a leap of faith by blindly trusting at first to gain experience and adjust your actions later accordingly.

Additionally, Paul J. Zak found that the following actions also help stimulate the brain chemical oxytocin, which is relevant for building trust:

• Recognise excellence
  "Recognition has the largest effect on trust when it occurs immediately after a goal has been met, when it comes from peers, and when it's tangible, unexpected, personal, and public."
• Induce challenge stress
  "When a manager assigns a team a difficult but achievable job, the moderate stress of the task releases neurochemicals, including oxytocin and adrenocorticotropin, that intensify people's focus and strengthen social connections."
• Give people discretion in how they work
  "Once employees have been trained, allow them, whenever possible, to manage people and execute projects in their own way."
• Enable job crafting
  "When companies trust employees to choose which projects they'll work on, people focus their energies on what they care about most."
• Share information broadly
  "Uncertainty about the company's direction leads to chronic stress, which inhibits the release of oxytocin and undermines teamwork."
• Intentionally build relationships
  "Help people build social connections by sponsoring lunches, after-work parties, and team-building activities."
• Facilitate whole-person growth
  "Numerous studies show that acquiring new work skills isn't enough; if you're not growing as a human being, your performance will suffer."
• Show vulnerability
  "Leaders in high-trust workplaces ask for help from colleagues instead of just telling them to do things."

Trust's Impact On The Bottom Line

Besides its fundamental benefits to the company culture, a high-trusting environment significantly impacts business success. As Zak's research found, people in high-trust companies outperform peers in low-trust settings in any critical metric:

• 74% less stress
• 106% more energy at work
• 50% higher productivity
• 13% fewer sick days
• 76% more engagement
• 29% more satisfaction with their lives
• 40% less burnout

It's hardly a wild guess that these metrics lower a company's costly turnover rate. Adding in the higher productivity, it's clear that organisations with a trusting environment will outperform those with less trust.

Trust is by no means a vanity metric but a relevant driver of success and, therefore, must be a top priority for any leadership position.

In today's fast-paced and competitive business environment, fostering collaboration in your team is more important than ever. And although digital tools might help to create collaboration more effectively and even asynchronously, the basis remains a human effort in building trusting relationships and culture.

There are many steps leaders can take if collaboration is a priority. However, the foundation isn't built overnight. It requires culture, communication, goals, and opportunities. Here are my recommendations for tackling each of these aspects.

Build a positive and inclusive team culture.

Culture is at the heart of any organisation. It influences the environment that a team finds and, therefore, significantly impacts behaviours and decision-making. For example, in a toxic culture, people are more prone to avoid responsibility and pointing fingers and are generally less engaged.

So a positive and inclusive team culture is an essential component of collaboration. Leadership has to create an atmosphere where every team member feels valued and respected and where different perspectives and ideas are welcomed. In short: They have to ensure psychological safety.

Some of the potential actions a leader can take:

1. Establish clear values and expectations for behaviour within the team to create a sense of shared purpose and ensure everyone is on the same page regarding how they should treat each other and work together.
2. Encourage open communication and dialogue among team members to create a sense of trust and inclusion within the team.
3. Provide opportunities to get to know each other personally as it builds stronger relationships and a sense of camaraderie within the team.
4. Offer support and resources for team members to grow and develop to demonstrate a sense of investment in each other's success and a sense of belonging within the team.
5. Lead by example and show vulnerability to prove to the other team members that you want a safe environment to share ideas, disagree, and grow.

Encourage open communication and dialogue among team members.

While culture is at the heart of collaboration, effective communication is crucial to business success. Unfortunately, we've all experienced miscommunication ruining an initially great idea or project.

Therefore, great collaboration requires open and honest communication among team members. Encourage your team to share their ideas, thoughts, and concerns—even if it means you may face pushback.

Some of the potential actions a leader can take:

1. Create a safe and supportive environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas. It can involve setting ground rules for communication, like respecting each other's opinions and avoiding judgment or criticism.
2. Encourage active listening and responsiveness among team members, which includes asking questions, seeking clarification, and providing feedback respectfully and constructively.
3. Provide opportunities to have regular, open discussions about their work and ideas. You need to carve out dedicated time for team meetings or retrospectives.
4. Be open and transparent in your own communication with team members. Sharing information about the team's goals, progress, and challenges and being open to feedback and suggestions from team members is essential.

Establish clear goals and expectations for your team.

Having a clear understanding of what your team is working towards can help to foster collaboration. When everyone knows the end goal, the team can work together and achieve it more effectively.

Some of the potential actions a leader can take:

1. Implement a structured approach to goal-setting and expectation management. One potential framework might be Objectives & Key Results (OKR), which fosters self-leadership and agency.
2. Ensure the team's goals are SMART, so specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound to reduce the amount of uncertainty and different interpretations.
3. Communicate the goals and expectations regularly. Goals and expectations should always be clearly stated, even in writing. It's also helpful to have frequent discussions to understand the goals and expectations to align everybody in the team.
4. Monitor progress towards the goals and provide feedback and support to team members. Whether you're applying a framework like OKR or not, regular check-ins to discuss progress, challenges, and successes are vital for collaboration to improve constantly.
5. Celebrate successes and achievements along the way. We tend to spend too much time on failures and miss out on adequately recognising our achievements. Carve out some time to celebrate success, as it's an important motivator.

Create opportunities for team members to work together.

Even with culture, goals, and communication all set, there must be appropriate opportunities for team members to collaborate, even more so if you're trying to break silos between different departments and teams.

While forcing teams and people to collaborate is risky, some nudging might be advised. However, it's also important not to judge success and productivity after the first trial in collaboration as the people require time to adjust and build trust.

Some of the potential actions a leader can take:

1. Assign team members to work on projects that require collaboration (for example, with other teams). It provides a natural opportunity for team members to work together and coordinate their efforts.
2. Encourage team members to seek out opportunities for collaboration on their own. It means you have to provide resources and support to identify those areas and communicate the added value of cooperation.
3. Provide tools and resources to collaborate effectively. It could mean implementing technology solutions (such as collaboration software) that make it easier for team members to share ideas, documents, and other resources but also frameworks and templates for collaborative workshops and meetings.
4. Recognise and reward collaboration. No matter the outcome of a specific collaborative effort, you should recognise collaboration to encourage it even more.