Speaking

In “Return to Office,” Melanie helps leaders unearth both the recognized and hidden mental health issues at play. Because the experiences of the past year have been wildly different for a workforce about to share the same elevator or office space, thinking through the common connections and divisions is critical. A senior exec may have spent the year in a large vacation home while a colleague served as parent, teacher, cook, and elder caregiver and accomplished it all from a small apartment. These differences will inform each person’s RTO experience—and state of mind. Some are depleted, exhausted by work hijacking their home, and demoralized when their employer talks about lost productivity while revenue rose to new heights. By contrast, others are eager for the office embrace, a return to in-person camaraderie, client lunches, and conference room meetings. 

What should leaders be thinking and doing individually and collectively to make RTO more successful and sustainable for all? Melanie walks you through the core issues—and delivers much needed insights that invite you to go beyond policies and procedures to consider factors that impact psychological safety.

Ideal for:

• Back to office “reset”

• Navigating an unpredictable future with compassion

• Bringing together teams with very different personal situations

• Organizations with high defection rates

Questions to Explore

• How can you recognize and address rising anxiety and mental health considerations linked to RTO?

• How are your communications being received and interpreted? Is there a way to infuse them with more humanity and understanding?

• What can you do to promote better well-being now—and in the long run?

• What programs and initiatives can you put into place to provide a safe, welcoming workplace?

• Studies show organizations that successfully fostered micro-connections among employees while work was remote, faired best. How will those connections continue to be cultivated with RTO? How can they be ignited now?

The future of work (FOW) depends on each of us (all of us) acknowledging this truth: Emotions are not a sign of weakness, they are our power tool. Housed in the “animal” part of the brain, emotions are critical to our existence. Importantly, they’re the starting point of our shared connections. Too often, though, we’re told to box up our emotions; that they have no place at work. We slip out of our skin and into a corporate role. In a single-minded push to advance a project or meet a milestone, it’s easy to forget how to be human at work and that emotions have the potential to either undermine us or set us up for success. The universal desire to feel respected and valued, for a sense of security and a feeling of belonging—that is the basis of how great teams are formed and goals realized. 

Fostering connections, recognizing and embracing emotions at work, fuels personal energy and momentum—and institutional growth. In a recent McKinsey study, for example, two-thirds of organizations that reported growth during COVID noted a 65% increase in micro-transactions (networking, coaching, collaboration), while the laggards (companies in which overall productivity declined) reported a 50% decrease in connections during COVID work from home months. Building and sustaining human connections is a foundational element of work, but it’s a process that many assume happens naturally or is inevitable; in fact, it’s those who are intentional about fostering connections who reap the rewards. 

In “Your Best Power Tool at Work,” Melanie will share practical insights on how to tap emotions for fostering connections, advancing leadership, navigating challenges, and cultivating a culture of inclusion.

Ideal for:

• Teams ready to take their interactions to the next level

• Organizations struggling to establish a positive corporate culture

• Companies responding to a rising number of departures

• Exhausted individuals and teams in need of energy and renewed motivation

Questions to Explore

• What connections among team members became stronger during COVID? What can you do to build on those successes?

• How are you supporting employees as they navigate challenging conversations about race and equity?

• How do employees view your organization’s culture? Warm and inviting or competitive and isolating? What contributes to their assessment?

• How do new team members connect? Are there ways to onboard them that would foster stronger bonds?

Melanie is often asked—How do we get a more inclusive culture? That, she contends, is the wrong question. An inclusive culture is not something “gotten,” it’s something earned. It requires the conviction shared across the organization to flourish.

Inclusion begins with a basic tenet—the willingness of every employee to deactivate their neurophysiological alarm system that is instinctively triggered by the unfamiliar; by someone outside our trusted circle. It requires us to address our latent fears and hesitancy to connect with someone different than ourselves—to overcome a “like likes like” mentality. To fully engage the talents of diverse minds (and hearts), we need to create a sense of belonging and affirmatively invite individuals into our discussions. A core factor for an inclusive culture is valuing difference not as part of a diversity checkbox, but for the bonus realized when individuals with different backgrounds and ways of seeing tackle and solve complex problems. 

Want a more inclusive culture? Find ways to nurture leaders who are open, honest, and empathetic, and hold others accountable for the same. Encourage employees to engage in conversations about belonging, to listen and find common ground as a way of fostering dialogue and a stronger sense of connection for all. While senior leaders set the tone, inclusion is everyone’s business.

Ideal for:

• Leaders overwhelmed by the demand they become more inclusive but don’t know how

• Groups for whom the old way of working isn’t working and the new answers are elusive

• Organizations struggling with employee engagement

• Teams facing a rising number of departures among diverse employees

Questions to Explore

• How do your employees describe your culture?

• In meetings, does open dialogue dominate?

• Do professionals at all levels feel supported and valued?

• Do you know the names of the people who play an important support role in your daily work? Do you give easy to pronounce nicknames to individuals whose foreign appellation is difficult for you to remember or pronounce?

• Do you make eye contact with everyone? (yes, everyone!)

Studies show organizations that successfully fostered micro-connections among employees while work was remote faired best. How will those connections continue to be cultivated with RTO? How can they be ignited now?

With Melanie as your guide, you’ll learn techniques for decoding emotional cues, reducing the noise and getting to the essence of the dilemma or decision. As a clinical psychologist, she knows that by stripping away the distractions, the answer is often right there: Be human. Start lowering the volume by finding your common point of connection—that’s the most natural “way in.” 

Drawing on scientific data, she’ll coach you and your team to take productive action by identifying patterns that are hiding in plain sight. Her tools will also help you determine when inaction is your best response—sometimes “doing nothing” isn’t  abdicating responsibility but instead is making space to decrease the tension and allow others to step up. Most of all, with Melanie’s “Demanding or Toxic?” toolkit, you’ll quickly discover her actionable tips are as applicable in navigating high-stakes negotiations as they are in working through day-to-day challenges. 

Once you learn to decode the emotional clues, you will have the opportunity to act with intention and determine exactly what’s at play (and what’s not). Achieving better outcomes isn’t always about working harder or speaking louder, it’s about understanding what’s really going on.  

Ideal for:

• Teams/organizations seeking deeper, more productive work relationships

• Silo’d organizations grappling with territorial, internal team dynamics

• Teams where individual achievement is rewarded, despite the spotlight on a collaborative culture

Questions to Explore

• Do you assume you know how others feel? Or do you take time to anticipate a colleague’s reaction?

• Do you know what small gestures can fuel a big difference in shaping organizational culture? In creating stronger relationships with colleagues?

• When deadlines are tight, does you team focus on getting it DONE vs. showing respect?

• Is more information exchanged in the hall and over Slack than through “official” forms of feedback?

When we let our mind set up these types of internal battle lines, we fall victim to what Melanie calls the “Dualitas” syndrome. It’s a narrow view that can be limiting, and sometimes harmful. We continually pit people and decisions against the other and forget about the liberating idea of “this and that.” Joy and job, not one versus the other. With return to office (RTO), the issue of opposites is in the spotlight: Some eager to return, even buoyant, others just the opposite—hesitant and fearful. Finding common ground between the two “camps” will prove challenging, but it’s in that middle ground where connections are made.

With a rigid mindset, we ultimately shortchange ourselves and our performance. Instead of viewing deals, dilemmas, or workplace situations as dichotomies, Melanie shares insights into how to seek points of connection, of overlap—how to nurture them and, ultimately, how to achieve the inviting alignment that leads to innovation, inclusion, and success. 

Ideal for:

• Teams or organizations that feel stalled

• Organizations with a corporate culture employees describe as challenging, overly competitive

• Teams ready to take their interactions to the next level

• Organizations ready to expand leadership training

Questions to Explore

• Do you find yourself “digging in” to confirm your point of view is right?

• When is the last time someone changed your mind? What did you learn from the experience?

• Holding two opposing thoughts isn’t always natural—but it is freeing/liberating. What small steps can you take for fostering a stronger “this AND that” mindset?

• Do you feel compelled to always “weigh in” and have your opinion heard?

• Be honest—do you tune out when people with opposing views to yours speak?