Building a Culture of Care + Safety
Meet people where they’re at.
The role of an excellent leader is to your people achieve more, together. Hold space to explore new ways of connecting and serving one another. This helps us improve our decisions (faster, smarter) in an uncertain and unpredictable world. From the front lines to C-suite, helping people feel heard and seen is a critical leadership duty.
Listening to your people enables insight into critical information that can unlock solutions. When you grow a culture of listening, you will solve seemingly unbeatable problems.
How might we listen and imagine new ways of working together, better?
Find the shared gems + focus.
Vision + values are central to a culture of care and collaboration. How can you help your team find more meaning and motivation at work?
What are you doing to help every employee see themselves in the vision? How are you measuring actions to maintain a culture of integrity — what you say matches what you do?
As a leader, you can create spaces (virtual, physical, and a combination of both!) for people to share their viewpoints. Focus on what matters the most to your people. Bring your key stakeholders together and invite them to imagine the future, together.
Seek to understand the diverse perspectives and motivations in the collaboration equation. Teams perform better when they believe they’re part of something bigger — more than a list of tasks.
How much more effective are we leaders when we listen to one another deeply and authentically?
Bring people together to make the dream work.
Daily habits are the foundation for positive change. What are the roots of our shared work experiences?
Daily rituals, storytelling, and creative problem-solving. You have the power to integrate good change, everyday. With small steps, leaders can reinvigorate an organization. Restore passion for the work experience.
Science tells us that it’s the little experiences — especially shared experiences — that help us get our brains into the best shape! Space, practice, data, discipline, learning, and communication.
How can you create new rituals and co-creative learning experiences to motivate and inspire your workforce?
“Nina’s passion is infectious! She truly is one-of-a-kind and has the vision and ability to move beyond today and guide you to future possibilities that are difficult to articulate and conceptualize. She makes intuitive jumps, often connecting what at first glance are unrelated topics, to realize a desired future state. All while maintaining a person-centered focus. Before working with Nina, I knew next to nothing about health IT, and have now become a go-to person on conceptualizing possibilities with machine learning + artificial intelligence.”
— Dr. Samantha Finstad, Cancer Research Leader
How can leaders better maximize their organization’s potential?
Many organizations are riddled with divisions, offices, and centers — different silos within silos. Organizations as a big city. We are citizens in neighborhoods. We need each other.
We can have different cultures in different neighborhoods and that’s perfectly normal. We can be good neighbors, taking cues from the resilient people in my hometown Detroit. When disaster strikes, we come together. We build things. We work together. We reimagine the future when there are no instructions.
We collaborate not only to survive but thrive. We are resourceful and use what we find around us. We make the impossible possible. We bring people together to make dreams come true.
“Nina changes the way people think.”
— U.S. Food and Drug Administration Health Regulatory Official