Your Lens Becomes Your Team's Lens

Vultures fly over the desert looking for dead animals. Hummingbirds fly over the same desert looking for life.

Same desert. Different focus. Two entirely different meals.

Your team flies over the same work culture every day. What they find depends largely on what you, their people leader, train them to look for. That single truth opens F.R.A.M.E. @ Work, the first book in the Work Positive Core Practices series. F.R.A.M.E. is the camera-lens stack a people leader applies to the team's collective view of work. This month we walk all five lenses. We start with how you focus the team's attention and reframe the unfamiliar.

Focus the Team's Attention

Roy Baumeister's research reveals that bad events carry far more psychological weight than good ones. Your brain evolved that negativity bias to keep your ancestors alive. It also quietly drains your team's engagement.

Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina documented the other side. Positive emotion broadens what a person sees, solves, and recovers from. Negative emotion narrows the field to a survival-sized window.

So two teams of equal talent produce dramatically different results based solely on what their people leader trains them to perceive.

You lead more than work. You lead attention.

Look at your team's last week. What did you praise out loud? What did you talk about for ten minutes before you reached the agenda? The answers reveal where your team's attention rests right now.

The F in F.R.A.M.E. is for Focus the Team's Attention.

Reframe the Unfamiliar

Four horses arrived at our farm from a hundred-foot paddock and met a five-acre pasture. The herd leader stood in four square feet for an entire day. It took him twenty-one days to gallop the whole field.

Your team works like that herd.

Daniel Kahneman described the fast, pattern-loving System 1 that runs most of your team's day. It sorts every new idea with one question: have I seen this before? If no, it tries to delete it. That is the moment someone says, "I've never done it that way."

The unfamiliar feels unwelcome because it is unfamiliar, rather than because it is bad.

Carol Dweck's research shows mindset spreads through a team. As your people meet the unfamiliar, your face is the first data they read. A curious face teaches them that hard means human.

The R in F.R.A.M.E. is for Reframe the Unfamiliar.

Your Focus and Reframe DOT Challenge

This week, do these three things in order.

• Before your next team email, name one specific positive contribution and lead with it.

• The next time your team meets something unfamiliar, take a breath and say, "Of course this feels hard. Let's figure out the next step together."

• Catch yourself once midweek and ask, "What am I training my team to look for?"

Work Positive Bottom Line

The leader's lens becomes the team's lens. Focus it. Reframe what it filters as strange. Next week we turn to the A, what it means to affirm what's working.

Do One Thing today.

This post is from Dr. Joey Faucette's new book, F.R.A.M.E. @ Work: Five Lenses That Transform How People Leaders Cultivate Their Team.