“If he or she doubles down with more armor and no owning, the dynamic grows, and it gets exceedingly more difficult for the leader to lead.”Leaders who stand up in front of the room and discuss their threats and armor make a positive impression. The more leaders and team members talk about their armor, the more they can advance their team and their organization to a healthy culture.

Courageous leaders powerfully inspire others by owning the impact of their own armor first.

“Armor is justified on the inside (to self-protect), but it almost always irritates others on the outside.”To return those people or that team to a functional state, you first need to identify the nature of the threats in your workplace. Do they come from the outside or do they signal poor chemistry among team members?

Fight-or-flight reactions cause armor to build up in a team when there are threats in the environment.

To contribute to your team’s dynamics, ask some insightful questions, such as:<ul><li>Pinpointing threats – “What frustrates me most at work?”</li><li>Owning your armor – “How do I tend to react to what frustrates me? What are the things I do that I use to protect myself? What less-optimal behaviors come out for me?”</li><li>Owning your impact – “How could my reactions to frustration look to the people around me? How might my armor make things more difficult for others or add to tension in the team?”</li></ul>

For team members to take off their armor to restore good communication, they first have to own their armor, beginning with hones

“The key to changing culture is to remove armor and return to interacting with each other.”Owning your own armor and admitting that being armored up may threaten others is the most effective way to encourage your teammates to be more open.

When members own their armor, that changes a team’s culture, unlocks everyone’s true potential and restores optimal team product

“The root of team dynamics problems is almost always a pileup of armor.”Communication breaks down when people feel threatened and strap on their armor as a defense mechanism.

When people feel threatened, they build up their protective armor, and that fuels a perpetual cycle of workplace dysfunction.

<ul><li>When people feel threatened, they build up protective armor, that fuels a perpetual cycle of workplace dysfunction.</li><li>Bad culture often bubbles beneath the surface and isn’t talked about, but people must address it in order to improve it.</li><li>Fight-or-flight reactions cause armor to build up in a team when there are threats in the environment.</li><li>Armor can make reasonable people seem like “bad apples” and can cause chain reactions that affect the whole team.</li></ul>

Own Your Armor (1/2)

<ul><li>For team members to take off their armor to restore good communication, they first have to own their armor, beginning with honest self-assessment.</li><li>When members own their armor, that changes a team’s culture, unlocks everyone’s true potential and restores optimal team productivity.</li><li>Courageous leaders powerfully inspire others by owning the impact of their own armor first.</li></ul>

Own Your Armor (2/2)

“The armor we choose tends to be aligned with our preferences for flight or fight in stressful situations.”To transform your culture, you must confront the root causes of problem areas. Once you acknowledge that threats and armor are fueling the flames of dysfunction, you can begin rehabilitation.

Bad culture often bubbles beneath the surface and isn’t talked about, but people must address it in order to improve it.

If you ask employees to diagnose the cause of dysfunction in their workplace, they will typically single out the instigators, those people they believe are disrespectful, uncooperative, credit-stealing or prone to shirking their professional responsibilities.“Armored behavior comes across as less professional behavior.”“Threat/armor cycles are a very common feature of all kinds of conflict (including between couples!).”

Armor can make reasonable people seem like “bad apples” and can cause chain reactions that affect the whole team.

Efforts to change culture by pointing fingers at the leader or “difficult” members of the team tend to backfire because defensiveness and dysfunction spread when everyone “armors up” to protect themselves. 

Working with other people is supposed to make things more productive and efficient but, too often, work gets bogged down by the bad dynamics that develop on teams. It's so easy for undercurrents of tension and poor communication in the workplace culture to affect everyone's motivation and productivity, and when the culture gets really bad, people leave.Own Your Armor by Michelle Brody presents a dramatically different way of approaching the difficult problem of ineffective workplace dynamics. Dr. Brody is an executive coach who gets called in to help teams when the people dynamics have gotten too disruptive that they can't be ignored. In this book, she shares the true causes of why teams experience bad culture and shows a practical way to talk about moving a team toward greater health.Own Your Armor is meaningfully different from other books about team behavior because it uses a visual method, which employs drawings and diagrams that provide a normalizing, lighthearted way to rapidly deescalate conflict, engage responsibility, and achieve real resolution by focusing attention on the underlying dynamics rather than surface content.While both leaders and team members want things to change, fixing an unhealthy culture at work is very hard problem to solve. Our good intentions often backfire; reasonable interventions bring about defensiveness and greater frustration. Own Your Armor takes team members - at all levels - beyond good intentions to reap good results.

productivity

Productivity

communication

Communication

"I love my job, but the culture here stinks ..." "I work with some seriously difficult people ..." "Managing 'people issues' is the hardest part of my job as a leader ..." Working with other people is supposed to make accomplishing goals more efficient, but when there's bad team dynamics, undercurrents of tension and poor communication affect everyone's motivation and productivity. Bad dynamics are notoriously hard to change. Even the most capable leaders struggle to manage tense relationships on their teams because conflict eats leadership skills for breakfast. The same skills that help create visionary, productive and efficient organizations (like forward action, decisive problem solving and driving accountability) don't make a dent in changing the interpersonal defensive cycles that gum up collaboration. In her groundbreaking new book, Own Your Armor, executive coach and psychologist Dr. Michelle Brody presents a dramatically different and proven way to improve ineffective workplace dynamics and repair toxic cultures. She shows our "people dynamics" problems in pictures - engaging and instructive illustrations that are memorable and mindset-changing - you will never look at workplace drama the same way again. In the refreshingly lighthearted pages of this book, we find the levers to changing tense team situations: by understanding the armor that everyone wears when things get tough. Passive-aggressiveness, micromanaging, and resource-grabbing are all forms of armor that good people sometimes resort to when under threat. Once people start armoring up, mistrust in a team grows, causing more need for armor, and locking up the culture even more. For a team to take off armor to restore good communication, armor has to be owned.Brody explains the 10 principles for "owning armor" in the workplace and offers a practical path for moving a team toward greater health. Owning armor allows teams to defuse vicious interpersonal cycles, build trust and unlock individual and team strengths. "A master class on team dynamics in a picture book -- yes! Only someone with Michelle Brody's experience and wisdom could do that! Read this book and learn from the best!" -- Amy Hayes, Global Head of Learning and Development at Meta (Facebook)

When members own their armor, that changes a team’s culture, unlocks everyone’s true potential and restores optimal team product

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