Webinar: When Everything Feels Uncertain
In the second session of the Leading in Turbulent Times series, Alison Cebulla of Tend Collective explores how uncertainty — at the societal, organizational, and interpersonal level — erodes the conditions needed for accountability to thrive. Drawing on the brain science of stress, she connects the polycrisis moment (political instability, AI disruption, economic anxiety) to what happens inside workplaces when mission, structure, roles, and decision-making authority are unclear: people flip their lids, collaboration breaks down, and accountability becomes nearly impossible. Alison introduces Tend's Awareness, Attunement, and Acknowledgment framework, Brene Brown's Rumble as a tool for brave leadership conversations, and the powerful distinction between expectations and agreements, drawing on a Steve Chandler audio clip to illustrate how consent-based workplaces outperform coercion-based ones. She closes with a practical "rule of three" for managers: before concluding someone is not a fit, first ensure you have offered clarity, resources, and support at least three times in a structured, caring way.
Recorded with live attendees on April 16, 2026.
Transcript:
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Alison Cebulla: Awesome.
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Alison Cebulla: And this will go on,
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Alison Cebulla: This will go on YouTube after.
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Alison Cebulla: So let me share my slides, and then we'll get started.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, so welcome to Part 2 to the,
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Alison Cebulla: Leadership in Turbulent Time series. So, thanks everyone for being here.
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Alison Cebulla: So, we are gonna talk about leading with accountability when the ground is shifting.
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Alison Cebulla: And this is the outline of what we're gonna do today, so we're gonna go through, we're gonna do a check-in in the chat, or you can come off mute if you want and share, and that part won't… I won't put that on the… in the YouTube recording, so that part will be cut out.
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Alison Cebulla: And then I'll introduce myself, and we can introduce, kind of, who we are and what brings us here today. And then, today we're gonna talk about
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Alison Cebulla: Uncertainty and workplace stress, and the solutions and tools that we offer at,
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Alison Cebulla: That you could start putting into practice immediately, actually.
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Alison Cebulla: So, my name is Allison Cebula, and I founded 10 Collective along with 3 others. We're pictured here, so Marianne, Danielle, and Bree.
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Alison Cebulla: And Marianne and Danielle and I worked at Paces Connection together, and Bree and I worked at the University of Massachusetts together, and we realized that, people who worked in child-serving organizations, which is who we were serving at these organizations.
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Alison Cebulla: We're being asked to care a lot about the people they served, but we're not always being shown that same care.
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Alison Cebulla: at work. So we founded 10 Collective two years ago to help bring the trauma-informed care and psychological safety principles into the workplace, the same ones that you all offer in your roles.
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Alison Cebulla: So that's… that was the inspiration.
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Alison Cebulla: So, I have a master's in public health from Boston University, I have a career in nonprofit management, education.
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Alison Cebulla: the environment and human rights, and maybe some of you, may have attended my events at Paces Connection in the past. So then I worked as the director, the Associate Director of Curriculum at the Center for Child Wellbeing and Trauma at UMass Medical School.
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Alison Cebulla: So…
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Alison Cebulla: And you can learn more about us and our team if you go to our website and click on Team.
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Alison Cebulla: So the types of services that we offer at 10 Collective is that we help with low morale, we can help you integrate psychological safety. Welcome to the new folks.
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Alison Cebulla: And we can implement structure norms and agreements, we can train managers on people skills, and we can teach teams self-regulation skills. We can build custom programs.
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Alison Cebulla: And we offer one-on-one coaching, training, assessments, educational content, and more. And so you can reach out to me if you, want help with that. And so, I just want to go back to this slide and our check-in question.
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Alison Cebulla: What is… and so go ahead and find the chat. If it's missing now that we've entered full screen. Go ahead and take a moment to pull up the chat.
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Alison Cebulla: And type one thing from the world or from work that feels uncertain and stressful right now.
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Alison Cebulla: I would say, for me, it's, are we… Headed to a full-scale war?
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Alison Cebulla: That feels kind of uncertain and scary.
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Alison Cebulla: The cost of living for you and for clients, Medicaid and SNAP loss, yeah, absolutely, holding space for that, Sarah.
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Alison Cebulla: Welcome, Mosan, MSW student, great.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, awesome.
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Alison Cebulla: Political talk. Okay. That's feeling, uncertain. Sure.
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Alison Cebulla: more difficult population and regulations. Yeah, there's been a lot of maybe policy changes, different programs, different funding changes, all of that is feeling very uncertain right now, and that's affecting the people that we serve in our roles.
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Alison Cebulla: The lack of productive communication, yeah, absolutely.
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Alison Cebulla: Holding space for all of those. There's, yeah, there's a lot, for sure. And certainly at 10 Collective, we have experience serving clients who, lost funding, or weren't sure how they needed to switch their funding strategy, so that has happened in the public health space right now, for sure.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, feeling like, yeah, people are not listening. And that can be such a result of having a really uncertain,
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Alison Cebulla: outside environment and inside the workplace environment, too, because, as we talked about last week, and we'll go over again today, when the brain is in fight-or-flight mode, we have trouble collaborating with other people. We have trouble listening. That's a direct result of high stress in a high-stress environment. So, thanks for bringing that one up, Heather.
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Alison Cebulla: So, okay.
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Alison Cebulla: So, now go ahead and, introduce yourself in the chat. So, you can share, we can see your name, but you could share, like, where you're located and what you do for work, if you feel comfortable.
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Alison Cebulla: And, what brings you here today?
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, Jeanette, yeah, sure, yeah, a lot of this does fall under politics, that's for sure.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, so welcome, Sarah, Chicago Legal Aid, an attorney repping low-income kids. Thank you so much for the work you're doing. Wow, that's, really important work.
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Alison Cebulla: Christ Child House, great. Welcome, Erica. Thank you for your work.
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Alison Cebulla: Jeanette, MSW student in healthcare in Maryland, awesome, welcome.
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Alison Cebulla: And… Heather, assistant principal, overseeing two dropout prevention schools in Columbus. Wow.
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Alison Cebulla: Thank you so much for the work you're doing.
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Alison Cebulla: And Erica, Workforce Development and HR Director in Detroit. Welcome, Erica. Very important work.
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Alison Cebulla: And Mosun working in adult neurodevelopmental Disorder Clinic. Wow, amazing. So, I'm so glad that you all found your way here, because, this is… this is exactly the types of folks that all of us, had been… had been working with in our careers when we…
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Alison Cebulla: Realized that…
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Alison Cebulla: all, you know, all of us that work environments were often just not as supportive as they could be. So, thank you all for the, yeah, for the amazing human services work you're doing. And it's not easy to help
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Alison Cebulla: populations in need every day, and then especially if you're not feeling supported at work. So, let's get into it.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay.
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Alison Cebulla: So, as we touched on a little bit last week,
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Alison Cebulla: There's, you know, this term, the polycrisis era, is starting to catch on, where we're just feeling, you know, it's very intense, like, all of these, all the various things that are… that are happening.
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Alison Cebulla: And so, I won't go over this one again, but we did talk about it a little bit last week, and so I'll send out the slides for everyone, and you can read this article, but basically just saying that people are feeling very overwhelmed and overstimulated right now, and bombarded with bad news every day. You know, we get, like, the bad news right here, where it's, like, constantly in our hand, and we're constantly seeing it, and that can be really overwhelming, and this is the
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Alison Cebulla: First time in history where we have such immediate access to every piece of bad news Anytime it happens.
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Alison Cebulla: So,
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, there's global and economic political instability. As someone, you know, mentioned in the chat, there's, the rising cost of living, which someone mentioned, job insecurity, right? There's the climate crisis,
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Alison Cebulla: And so, these things can be feeling really overwhelming, and there's a lot of uncertainty right now.
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Alison Cebulla: this… the cursor is bugging me because, oh, okay, it corrected itself. It was pointing the other direction, even though it was on this side of the screen, so it's good now, okay.
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Alison Cebulla: And also, I want to acknowledge, because this is so hyper-prevalent right now in the news cycle, that AI is causing a lot of uncertainty. It's sort of like, wow, am I going to have to integrate that into my job? Am I going to have to know what all these tools are? And…
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Alison Cebulla: is this gonna change life as we know it, like, really quickly? And it kind of already feels like it is changing our life really quickly, like, I would say I started using ChatGPT about a year and a half ago.
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Alison Cebulla: And now, I'm using AI chat, I'm using Claude. I use it, like, every day. And that's a really fast uptake on something new.
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Alison Cebulla: And I'm curious to hear in the chat, maybe you guys want to share if you also are using AI, and in what capacity. But, you know.
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Alison Cebulla: things are accelerating really quickly, and I just want to acknowledge and hold space for the way that that feels really unsettling, so…
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Alison Cebulla: from this article, and the link is here, it said that it took ChatGPT 5 days after launch for the chatbot to hit 1 million users, whereas it had taken Facebook 10 months, and it took Twitter 2 years. So that's a really swift change.
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Alison Cebulla: And, here is a really interesting chart.
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Alison Cebulla: visual of technology over time, and this is something you could probably spend a lot of time looking at, but I found it, and it's just kind of like, when you really grasp how much change we're experiencing right now compared to other moments in humanity's history.
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Alison Cebulla: It's really a lot. It's a lot of change very quickly, and I want to hold space for how unsettling that can feel, that uncertainty of where this is going and what we might have to adapt to next, when it already feels like we've adapted to so much.
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Alison Cebulla: And so, I'm curious if you want to share in the chat what in your life is feeling hard to adapt to right now, and what has changed dramatically since you were a child, or a teen, or a younger adult?
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Alison Cebulla: And so, I was born in the 80s, and for me,
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Alison Cebulla: Having a phone always in my hand, and always scrolling.
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Alison Cebulla: it does feel really weird, and sometimes it almost feels like life isn't real, you know, if I'm on my phone or I'm looking at screens too much, compared to my childhood in the 90s, where there weren't so many screens.
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Alison Cebulla: So I would be curious to hear from you in the chat.
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Alison Cebulla: What in your life is feeling hard to adapt to, and what has changed dramatically in your lifetime, if you want to share?
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Alison Cebulla: No, everyone's… everyone's, adapting really well.
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Alison Cebulla: Everything's feeling really good and easy? Okay, good, okay, here we go.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, the unpredictability that Trump causes on the daily.
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Alison Cebulla: And every day, a new crisis feels unmanageable. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's feeling, like, very chaotic and unpredictable compared to other
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Alison Cebulla: Leaders that we've had.
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Alison Cebulla: Getting your students to stop recording TikToks?
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Alison Cebulla: That is such an interesting challenge, Heather.
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Alison Cebulla: Thank you for sharing that one.
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Alison Cebulla: Lack of morals, okay, and everyone entitled, yeah. That's possibly something that lots of generations have struggled with, but it may be feeling more acute now for certain reasons, like,
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Alison Cebulla: It does seem like a society goes through cyclical patterns of forgetting that
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Alison Cebulla: psychopaths and sociopaths exist, and then we just let them have power, and we let everything get very corrupt and unequal, and then that always crashes, and then we kind of have to start over again. So, yeah, you know, we're kind of in a weird time period where we have let the…
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Alison Cebulla: Let the people who want the most power take over, and then that kind of influences our whole society.
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Alison Cebulla: And Erica, I would say that's one of the ones that's hitting me the hardest as well. It's sad to see people not engaging with one another.
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Alison Cebulla: And always on a device, yeah, and I think that we're all really experiencing the downstream negative effects of that, where people seem really lonely and detached, and then in the public health realm, we're seeing that that is leading to deaths of despair at a really high level, so…
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Alison Cebulla: As well as, you know, loneliness being kind of the precursor for other regular health events that you wouldn't think of, like heart disease. So, that's such a big one, yeah.
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Alison Cebulla: Yep.
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Alison Cebulla: Thanks, everyone.
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Alison Cebulla: So, we looked at this slide last week, and I wanted to include it because it's always a touchstone in my teachings, that the research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress. Uncertainty, the lack of information, and the loss of control.
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Alison Cebulla: And so, uncertainty being number one. And so, I really want to hold space for everyone right now that we've just named all of these different things. Things that are uncertain in the world, things that are uncertain at work, for our own households, for the people we serve,
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Alison Cebulla: and politically, so there's just a lot, and this is something that is going to universally lead to stress, okay? And you may not be holding really kind, nurturing space for yourself lately, like, you may forget, oh.
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Alison Cebulla: It might be really hard to feel regulated and safe and clear while this is all happening.
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Alison Cebulla: So, I just want to acknowledge that.
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Alison Cebulla: So, uncertainty is not knowing what is coming next, and it causes the nervous system to remain in a state of high alert, okay? And when it's combined with
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Alison Cebulla: A lack of information, or really mixed information, that's gonna increase stress, and then feeling like we don't have any ability to control or influence the outcomes is going to add.
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Alison Cebulla: And I can think of a lot of situations where I'm… we're feeling like that.
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Alison Cebulla: So let's get into workplace uncertainty factors. So we're going to kind of move from the world at large down into the workplace.
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Alison Cebulla: And so, workplace uncertainty may look like, well, we don't even know what our mission is.
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Alison Cebulla: It's unclear what the scope of work is, or, what we're doing with this program or project, or it's unclear what tasks and decisions certain employees are responsible for, or,
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Alison Cebulla: We don't know,
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Alison Cebulla: how… what results are we aiming for, and how is that going to be measured? And so, if you think of something else, feel free to drop that in the chat.
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Alison Cebulla: What else is workplace uncertainty?
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Alison Cebulla: These are some of the factors that…
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Alison Cebulla: I think lead to high stress.
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Alison Cebulla: When you, when you have high uncertainty at work, and so… and this is, after consulting for many, many years.
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Alison Cebulla: And working with many different nonprofit groups, and also working in leadership roles at nonprofits, government agencies, is that you kind of think everyone has a lot of these things put together, but a lot of them don't.
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Alison Cebulla: So, some folks don't have a clear mission statement. And it should be written down, it should be accessible to everyone, and it should be touched upon regularly. This is why we exist, this is the work that we're doing.
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Alison Cebulla: And even just having that amount of certainty is really comforting to employees, okay? Oh, I know what our mission is, I know why we're here, I know what we're doing.
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Alison Cebulla: A lot of organizations lack a strategic action plan that relates directly to the organization's mission. And I see this a lot, actually, in my consulting work. It's absolutely something that 10 Collective can help folks create.
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Alison Cebulla: But you want to have… this is the actual plan, this is our mission, and this is the actual plan of how we are going to achieve that mission. And it's really important that these documents be in writing, and that they be really clear, and that they're available to all the employees.
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Alison Cebulla: And of course, it's gonna look a little different if you're a teacher at a school.
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Alison Cebulla: But essentially, these, these things, people need to feel that the work they're doing is matching the mission of the organization or the… the agency.
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Alison Cebulla: So, lack of structure as to which tasks employees do that are part of that plan. So, if I am an employee somewhere, and I sit down, and I have
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Alison Cebulla: three tasks that I'm responsible for, it's really important for me to be able to understand how what I'm doing every day relates to the plan, and our shared goals, and how we're going to measure those goals and account for those.
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Alison Cebulla: And how, we're gonna celebrate them when we complete them, and how that relates to the mission as a whole.
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Alison Cebulla: inconsistent or unpredictable leadership behavior. I talked about that a little bit last time, how I was in a situation with a toxic leadership, a toxic boss, who seemed possibly to be,
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Alison Cebulla: a dark tetrad-type personality, where they were really hungry for power and affirmation all the time, and this person was extremely unpredictable, and it was very stressful. We were not able to have strategic plans and tasks as it related to the mission. It was, yeah, it was really stressful.
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Alison Cebulla: You can share in the chat if you've ever had a work experience like that.
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Alison Cebulla: And if you don't want to share, please know that I'm also holding space for how stressful that must have been.
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Alison Cebulla: Poor or withheld communication, unclear decision-making rights, like who has the authority to make what decision. A lot of meetings, which, you know, people pretty much universally, universally find meetings stressful, but a lot of meetings can be avoided.
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Alison Cebulla: if more people were clear on which decisions they had the authority to make, and were actually empowered to make those decisions. So a lot of meetings run around in circles because no one knows who is supposed to make the decision. But if that was clear to begin with.
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Alison Cebulla: There actually might not be a need for a meeting.
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Alison Cebulla: And then constant change without context and without communication.
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Alison Cebulla: There are structural factors,
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Alison Cebulla: that I've kind of already touched on,
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Alison Cebulla: Sometimes you may feel like you don't have the time to create workflows, structures, and standard processes. I hear that sometimes. Well, it often becomes our last priority to create that process document, or, or to create that workflow.
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Alison Cebulla: There can be external things that I want to name, you know, like unclear goals from funders and partners, and there could be a lot of uncertainty built into the work itself. You know, you may not know if the populations that you serve are going to get all of the resources that they need, or whether a program is going to be shut down on any given day.
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Alison Cebulla: So, there's some things that…
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Alison Cebulla: You can work to add structure in.
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Alison Cebulla: And we'll talk about how to do that, but some of these things will just always be somewhat unpredictable. And sometimes.
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Alison Cebulla: sometimes that's very enjoyable, right? Sometimes people feel very bored by too much routine in the work, and we move towards certain vocations and careers because we know, like, if you're a case manager, you know that your cases are always going to have different stories and different challenges, and that can be very stimulating and energizing to you to tackle, you know, different issues every week.
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Alison Cebulla: So, but uncertainty and a lack of structure at work can create a chaotic and stressful work environment. It can create incivility between employees because of that unclear authority and decision-making on tasks and projects.
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Alison Cebulla: You could have higher turnover. It could be unclear when a project has been completed, because you're not sure, like, why are we doing this? Where are we going? Unclear what the goals are,
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Alison Cebulla: And so, all of these things can be outcomes, and again, that not knowing if this work is making a difference can really lead to pretty low employee morale. And if you've ever experienced any of these, go ahead and share in the chat.
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Alison Cebulla: And as well as if I missed anything else.
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Alison Cebulla: So, let's talk about the brain science of uncertainty. It is… there's overlap with what we talked about last week with urgency, and urgency in the workplace.
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Alison Cebulla: So, the brain is designed to seek certainty, and when it cannot predict outcomes, it often will enter, especially if it's chronically uncertain.
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Alison Cebulla: with, combined with maybe a sense of urgency, then it could enter a high alert and stressed state. And so, you know, obviously when people are chronically in a stressed state, our ability to think well
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Alison Cebulla: starts to deteriorate, as well as our physical health. So constantly being in a state of stress is going to
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Alison Cebulla: Also create more sick days and, and worse health, in addition to mental fatigue, difficulty concentrating,
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Alison Cebulla: you know, reduced decision-making ability, memory issues, and worst-case scenario thinking. And last week, we talked also about the hand model of the brain. This is something from Dan Siegel, and so that's where the… the hand is the brain. Welcome, new folks joining. And,
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Alison Cebulla: The outside is the cortex, and so the prefrontal cortex is often what we're talking about as the decision-making center, or the rational center, and then
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Alison Cebulla: On the inside is the amygdala, which puts us in fight or flight, which, when it does that, it's actually trying to keep us safe. So when we perceive that something is uncertain.
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Alison Cebulla: the amygdala may come on board and go, oh, I just want to make sure that we're safe, but then we get thrown into this state where we're not… we don't have access to our rational decision-making anymore. And so Dan Sewell calls that flipping the lid when that happens, where we've lost our cortex, and we're just now
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Alison Cebulla: trying to stay alive. Now we've sensed a real stressful event.
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Alison Cebulla: So, so, what we kind of want to think of is when we have, like.
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Alison Cebulla: uncertain stressed state at work, and it becomes chronic. We may end up in fight or flight quite regularly, which means we're not using our best, the best, most rational part of our brain to make decisions.
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Alison Cebulla: And it makes it so that we're often unable to collaborate with others,
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Alison Cebulla: And we're not able to look at the challenges in front of us and think about how to solve them in the very best way possible.
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Alison Cebulla: So, here is,
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Alison Cebulla: journal article, some research from 2017, uncertainty and Stress, Why It Causes Diseases, and how it is mastered by the brain. And so when… this is from the article, we feel uncertain when we anticipate that outcomes will turn out to be something other than expected, and that we are unable to avoid surprise.
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Alison Cebulla: And reducing uncertainty requires cerebral energy. So basically, in this article, they're talking about how anytime that we have too much uncertainty in our environment, it is going to take a lot of our mental energy to
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Alison Cebulla: To try and resolve that. You know how oftentimes we'll ruminate, ruminate, ruminate, and we keep thinking about the same thing and turning it over and over and over, and we're trying to figure out the resolution? That is gonna take a lot of energy, and we're not gonna have much energy left to do great work.
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Alison Cebulla: So, it's something to think about. So…
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Alison Cebulla: There's something called allostatic load, which is basically the amount of stress that we're able to
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Alison Cebulla: take before our systems kind of start to shut down. So, and it contributes to systemic and brain malfunction, so just like I mentioned, like, impaired memory and, as well as physical ailments.
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Alison Cebulla: So…
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Alison Cebulla: Some of the effects of chronic uncertainty and stress over time. Weakened immune function, increased inflammation, higher risk of chronic illness, depression, burnout, decreased focus, cognitive decline, weakened prefrontal cortex.
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Alison Cebulla: Decreased memory and learning. Being more reactive and less connective and collaborative.
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Alison Cebulla: disconnection from meaning and losing touch with what matters. And then, of course, many of you know that chronic or complex stress from childhood compounds work-related stress. So if we're bringing in adverse childhood experiences, these are the 10 ACEs.
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Alison Cebulla: Then we're gonna have an even harder time putting that lid back on and getting back to a regulated space once our lid has been flipped and we're in fight or flight.
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Alison Cebulla: So, when we have clarity and structure at work, we can have increased productivity and efficiency, reduce stress and improve mental health, stronger accountability and ownership, and enhanced teamwork and collaboration and communication, faster decision making, and higher employee engagement and retention.
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Alison Cebulla: So let's talk about the solutions. And,
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Alison Cebulla: leading with accountability for increased employee and company wellness. So, I started to notice in…
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, looks like Sarah said she had another meeting, yeah. So,
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Alison Cebulla: In my consulting work, I started to notice that sometimes, in chaotic environments, accountability was the first thing to go.
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Alison Cebulla: So, we don't have structure, we don't know what we're doing, we're not going somewhere, people don't know what they're in charge of, and so it's really impossible to say, hey, did you get that thing done? If it's very convoluted to understand what we're each accountable for. So, let's talk about that.
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Alison Cebulla: So, practice number one, which a lot of people said was really helpful from
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Alison Cebulla: the part one we did a couple weeks ago was just naming and framing, and just noting that, yeah, you know what? There is a lot of uncertainty out there right now.
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Alison Cebulla: The news is overwhelming. We are experiencing high turnover. We are feeling uncertain about the future of our funding. Like, helping to name the things that are uncertain so that people feel more psychologically safe at work.
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Alison Cebulla: We don't know which political policies will happen from day to day. We don't know who's gonna be impacted. We don't know what kind of future AI is creating for us. We don't know what kind of climate events they're gonna be, and we're worried about the future. So just naming the uncertainty can do a lot, and starting there.
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Alison Cebulla: So, Practice 2 is Brave Leadership.
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Alison Cebulla: As a manager, if any of you are managers, or looking to become managers, or even just working as a colleague to other co-workers.
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Alison Cebulla: being able to say the hard thing, but especially if you are a leader, being able to say to someone, hey, I'm noticing that you're having trouble focusing. How can I be supportive to you? What's going on? Is it a work factor, or is it something outside of work? These are often really brave conversations, especially if we're new to management and supervision.
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Alison Cebulla: And we're new in these roles. And these aren't always the easiest things to do and say, just intuitively. Oftentimes, we have to practice, and we have to learn.
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Alison Cebulla: So, that is something that we offer at 10 Collective. We do manager coaching and training, so, increasing those skills. But, essentially, I do highly recommend reading Dare to Lead, and she's kind of talking about being brave at work, and saying the hard thing.
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Alison Cebulla: And go ahead in the chat to write down, how comfortable do you feel as a manager or supervisor on a scale from 1 to 10, so 10 being very comfortable, 1 not comfortable.
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Alison Cebulla: To say the hard thing to those you manage. Okay, so 7, mostly because I'm very new to management, and I'm reading that book right now. Awesome! That's amazing!
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, it's a great book.
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Alison Cebulla: Highly recommend it, because we do have to be brave at work.
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Alison Cebulla: And so these are some of Brene Brown's principles here. Rumbling, which just means having a tough conversation with vulnerability, living into your values, and so at work, what that looks like is, like, hey, this is our mission and our value at work, and I notice that it's not happening, and I want to make sure and check in with you about that.
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Alison Cebulla: And,
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Alison Cebulla: And so… and these other ones are covered in the book. Anyone else want to drop in? How comfortable they feel? On a scale from 1 to 10, having a hard conversation at work? Maybe if you're not a manager, you could just, like, in regards to having a conversation with a colleague.
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Alison Cebulla: Go ahead and drop that in. 5 depends on the person and the topic, yeah.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, it can definitely be situational, for sure.
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Alison Cebulla: So, tool number 3 is,
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Alison Cebulla: is to understand uncertainty and stress in the brain. So this is something that we offer. We do trainings on the brain science of stress, we offer resilience and regulation tools, communication and conflict resolution trainings.
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Alison Cebulla: And de-escalation. Okay, 8.5, awesome, that's great. Thanks, everyone, for sharing. 6, I'm a student leadership role on a few boards. Okay, cool.
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Alison Cebulla: So,
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Alison Cebulla: There's no… no one has said, like, a 1 or a 2, so that's nice. Everyone's feeling a little bit of comfort to have a hard conversation, so that's… that's great. And then with practice, it will just get better over time.
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Alison Cebulla: So, number 4 we touched on earlier, which is having very clear processes, procedures, and roles.
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Alison Cebulla: So, the must-haves. You must have a mission statement. You must have a strategic action plan that matches the mission.
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Alison Cebulla: You must have work plans and workflows for each employee that match that plan. You must have very specific, clear, and up-to-date job and role descriptions for every employee, and so if you hired someone to do something and that's changed, you need to update their job description. And it does have to happen
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Alison Cebulla: Pretty frequently if the job changes, because what someone agrees to come and do for your company.
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Alison Cebulla: If that starts creeping and creeping and, you know, that scope creep of their role, pretty soon they may have something that they didn't agree to, and that doesn't feel good to people, right? We want to make sure that we have really strong consensual agreements, and that it doesn't feel like people are being coerced to do things they didn't sign up to do.
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Alison Cebulla: And clarity on who is the authority for which decisions.
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Alison Cebulla: How much, on a scale from 1 to 10, how much clarity do…
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Alison Cebulla: Do you think that you have, or your team has?
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Alison Cebulla: And so if a couple of you are students, I think, how, or maybe you have an internship? How much clarity do you have in your internship? On a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is very clear, 1 is not clear. Okay, an 8? 8?
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Alison Cebulla: Wonderful.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, lots of eights. That's wonderful. That's great.
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Alison Cebulla: Love to see that.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, so practice number 5…
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, and then I'm seeing 7 again. We have a couple of communication issues, but mostly good. Yeah. Of course, organizations always have a couple of things, yeah, wonderful.
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Alison Cebulla: So this is a framework that, we teach at TEND Collective, and it's called Awareness Attunement Acknowledgement. And today, I'm not going to go into the whole framework, but I'll outline it. Awareness is our ability to know how we're feeling at any given moment, and to offer regulation to ourselves and get regulated. And then, if we're in leadership, then we can attune
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Alison Cebulla: to the people that we manage. So first, we have to know how we're doing and feeling, and then we can notice better how other people are doing and feeling. And then acknowledgement
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Alison Cebulla: Is, in this situation, a synonym for wisdom.
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Alison Cebulla: being able, and judgment, being able to know and acknowledge what the situation may need in any given moment. And that is something that we develop over time with a lot of practice, and including sometimes we make the wrong acknowledgement, the wrong decision for what the situation may need. So it's this idea of.
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Alison Cebulla: being aware of how we're feeling, tuning in to how others are feeling and caring about how they're feeling, and then being able to say, I wonder what this moment really needs, what this challenge really needs, and being able to acknowledge that, and being able to take action on that.
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Alison Cebulla: So that's something that we… train on.
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Alison Cebulla: So I want to focus on acknowledgement, okay? And so this is where, leading with accountability
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Alison Cebulla: is really huge when we think about, as a leader, it's my job to acknowledge what this moment needs.
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Alison Cebulla: And,
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Alison Cebulla: And so… and then seeing, was that the… was that the correct thing that this moment needs? So, does the person I'm supervising need me to hold space for their emotions? And so that might be something like, hey, I noticed that you're feeling overwhelmed, could you want to talk about it? Okay?
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Alison Cebulla: Coaching and encouragement. Do you need some strategies on what to do when you feel overwhelmed?
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Alison Cebulla: Or…
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Alison Cebulla: Oh, you know, I know you've made it through some tough spots before, and I'm sure you could do it again. An assessment on whether the tasks they're responsible for match their level of skill and experience, or whether it's too easy or too difficult.
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Alison Cebulla: So, morale can decrease when something feels too easy, in addition to feeling too difficult, and it could be that you need to assess, is this person in the right role for their skills?
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Alison Cebulla: Does the moment need strategy, direction, structure, and accountability? All the stuff we've been talking about today, and if so, what does it need?
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Alison Cebulla: Does this person need more resources? Do they need to learn something new? Do they need a bigger budget? Do they need another person working on the task with them?
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Alison Cebulla: What, what resources might they need? The… they may need permission to make a decision, and the safety to fail. Like, hey, I know this is a tough call, and you may not do it
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Alison Cebulla: correctly, but it's okay to fail. Do they need that? Do they need permission from you?
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Alison Cebulla: Do they need you to step in as the supervisor and model something for them? Here, let me show you how to do it.
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Alison Cebulla: So, what are some other things that supervisees may need?
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Alison Cebulla: That I missed.
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Alison Cebulla: these are all, these are all things that we can think about when we're managing others that we may want to run down the list and say, gosh, what does this challenge, you know, in a one-on-one supervisee meeting, what is… what do I need to acknowledge here, and what is going to be the best, most wise decision moving forward?
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Alison Cebulla: Confidentiality? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That's a good one. Really good.
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Alison Cebulla: If you have any other ones, feel free to put them in.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, so we do have time to listen to a little audio clip.
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Alison Cebulla: So, let me… see if I can… do that.
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Alison Cebulla: We are gonna listen to a short audio clip, and then I have, one more practice, and then we will conclude. And so this is an audio clip called Expectation vs. Agreement, and it helps clarify what is the difference between an expectation and an agreement at work.
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Alison Cebulla: So I'm going to share… This And I think it's about… 5… 4 or 5 minutes.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: This is Steve Chandler.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And I wanted to talk to you today about expectation, and expectation contrasted with agreement. Really, we have two choices in life when we relate to other human beings.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: One is to have expectations.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And the other is to create agreements.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Expectations are toxic, And they ruin…
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: people's chances at a good relationship. Let me give you an example of that. I went to work with a company recently, and they had all kinds of performance breakdowns and productivity breakdowns, and I was asked to go
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Train them in the owner-victim choice, so that perhaps morale could be lifted a little bit among the people on the line who were creating the products.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Well, the real problem was in the leadership.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: The leaders had expectations of their people.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: So they would walk around expecting certain things. They would expect certain levels of job performance.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: They would expect quotas to be met, they would expect certain quality standards to be hit, and they had all these expectations.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And then there were the people themselves who were trying to live up to the expectations of the leaders, and really resenting the leaders because they said most of the expectations were unreasonable.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: They didn't really realize how understaffed they were and stressed they were. So, the whole place was in a morale crisis, I would say. A total morale crisis.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And as I moved among the leaders and talked to them and tried to figure out, how can we fix this.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: They would tell me about a certain employee who wasn't living up to expectations, and I would say, well, okay.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: So what's the expectation? And they would say, well, we expect them to get this job done by Friday, so the customer can have it. The customer expects it. We promised the customer the job on Monday, so we want it finished at the plant by Friday.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And I said, okay, great. So what happened? Well, it wasn't done. And it wasn't done until next Thursday. So, the customer was very upset. Pretty soon, we lost our preferred status with the customer, and everything went downhill. Well…
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: I said, very quietly.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: who's in charge of that product being done? And he said, well, the supervisor in the plant. I asked him a question that startled him, or at least quietly left him speechless.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: I said… What was your agreement with him?
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And he looked at me as if I had asked him, have you taken a ballet lesson lately? Or some very strange question.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And he didn't answer.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And then he said, well, what do you mean by that? And I said, well.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: On the matter of getting this done by Friday, what was your agreement?
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And he said, well, you mean I have to have an agreement with everybody? I gotta go around and get an agreement?
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: He knew I expected it by Friday, he got my email. He knew the customer was expecting it by Monday. I don't want to have to go hold his hand. He's a professional, I'm a professional.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And I said, well, look, Here's what doesn't work in the workplace.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Expectations.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: People do not look forward to living up to expectations. In fact, People rebel against expectations.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: They don't like it that you expect things of them.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: They would rather you agree with them about something.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And so we worked together. I brought the foreman in, we sat down. He said, do you agree to have the next job ready by Friday?
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And the foreman said, well, I would like to, but I'm a little understaffed, so I can't promise it for sure.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And the leader looked a little startled and said, well, what can you promise for sure?
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: If you gave me one extra person to work on it, I could promise it Friday for sure.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: If I don't have an extra person, I can promise it next Tuesday for sure.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: The leader thought for a while, and he said, I'll give you an extra person.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Now, with an extra person, what can I count on? Well, you can count on Friday. Thank you. They shook hands.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Now, that's an agreement.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay…
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Alison Cebulla: Let's go back to this.
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Alison Cebulla: So that, is a much longer audio,
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Alison Cebulla: audio lecture, but that was just a small piece of it. If anyone wants to share in the chat, or… actually, you could even, if you wanted to come off mute, you could share your reaction to that clip, and the difference between expectation and agreement.
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Alison Cebulla: I first heard that clip, while you're sharing in the chat, or again, if you want to raise your hand, please feel free.
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Alison Cebulla: I think about… 12…
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Alison Cebulla: years ago. And it was really… it really changed a lot for me, because I realized how often our expectations go unsaid, and how we're not asking the person to make a consensual agreement with us. And a lot of workplaces are coercion-based.
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Alison Cebulla: We have a recording of a lecture I gave on our YouTube channel on the difference between a coercion-based and a consent-based workplace. And a consent-based workplace is what he's talking about in his example, where you meet with
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Alison Cebulla: your colleague, or someone that you manage, and you say, hey, I really need this done by Friday, how can we work together to get it done? I'm sure we're both here to get work done.
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Alison Cebulla: But, how can we come to an agreement together? And that feels a lot better than, you have to do it because I said so. So when people, are working together, it feels better. Yeah, go ahead, Heather.
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Heather Fidler: Oh my god, I actually get to talk on here. I've typed so much. The… I remember when I first started at, the school where I am,
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Heather Fidler: about a decade ago, I had a principal who got mad at me and said.
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Heather Fidler: I don't understand why you keep saying you don't know how to do this, that you didn't know that you had to do this. That's always your excuse.
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Heather Fidler: would say?
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Heather Fidler: That's not an excuse, it's an explanation. If I have not been trained.
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Heather Fidler: How am I supposed to know what the heck I'm doing?
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great… that's a great example. That's… I'm pretty much right in line. How would I… did anyone ask if I had the knowledge, and the training to be able to do these tasks?
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Alison Cebulla: And it should feel collaborative, and it should feel like they… I put this at the bot… It should feel like they care about you.
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Alison Cebulla: And that's one of the things that we are very passionate about at 10 Collective, that we want to create work environments where people care about each other. Hey, like, what do you need? Oh, okay, seems like you probably need some training. So, really holding space for that, Heather.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, and so I think I just have one more slide.
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Alison Cebulla: Let me see… yeah.
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Alison Cebulla: So, yeah, this is the last slide.
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Alison Cebulla: really firm accountability, okay? And I know that some organizations struggle with this, and so when issues arise, you always… when it comes to the workplace, you always want to start with the work. Is the work getting… because we're all here under the agreement that I'm going to do some work for you, and you're going to put money in my bank account every month.
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Alison Cebulla: And so, when you're leaning and managing and supervising others, and a challenge comes up, and they always do come up, you want to start with the work.
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Alison Cebulla: Is work getting done? Is it the work we agreed to? Is the work high enough quality for what we need? Does it support our organization? And does it move us forward? And we talked about all the different pieces and challenges that could make it so that the work is not getting done, or it's not the right work. And so some of that's going to be on you as the leader or on the organization to clarify
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Alison Cebulla: But some of that's gonna be on the person. And there's… there do tend to be issues that arise where the work is not getting done.
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Alison Cebulla: And the organization has provided all of the needed things, the clarity, and it's still not getting done. And so as a leader.
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Alison Cebulla: You may need, to have some tough acknowledgements. And so, what we recommend at TEND is kind of a rule of three. So, the acknowledgements may… acknowledgements may be, like, as Heather just said, maybe someone needs proper training, okay? So, you're gonna offer it.
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Alison Cebulla: Maybe they need more resources. They need to understand more about what the challenge is so they can make great, critical decisions.
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Alison Cebulla: Maybe they need, more time, more flexibility, more support.
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Alison Cebulla: Right? So, if 3 acknowledgements are made and have been offered, and the person has been supported and coached, and there's still no change, then it's time to reconsider and to think about whether this employee in this particular role is a good fit or not.
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Alison Cebulla: And so, we do talk to folks who are saying, wow, like.
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Alison Cebulla: we're just, you know, we're just not getting any work done anymore, or this certain department is really not meeting their goals. And so, as long as those goals and the outcomes are really clear, and the tasks are clear, and their job description is clear, and you've gone through the acknowledgements, and you've been offering them.
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Alison Cebulla: then it is time to start thinking about, okay, maybe this is not working out. We've tried 3 of these. And so, sometimes this can be a problem where, at an agency or a nonprofit, there, is no one holding anyone accountable.
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Alison Cebulla: And so…
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Alison Cebulla: it should be this balancing act of the leader and the organization offering really good clarity and structure, and trying to figure out, are we being clear enough? Are we offering good enough structure? And then once those are all addressed.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, now we really need to hold our team accountable to move this work forward, and if that's not happening, then we probably need to reconsider.
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Alison Cebulla: So… That's all the slides today.
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Alison Cebulla: So I am gonna go ahead… And stop the recording.
