Own Your Armor: Revolutionary Change for Workplace Culture

Book excerpt: "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) We all experience workplace conflict. Now, SEE the solution in a new way. What if workplace teams that are pulled apart by conflict could be “drawn together” by actual drawings – playful but pointed illustrations that help us see ourselves (and each other) in normalizing, lighthearted ways to rapidly trigger breakthroughs in team tension? Using a “visual method” developed for couples therapy, high-stakes and high-emotion team situations are captured in mindset-changing pictures so that teams can deescalate conflict, engage responsibility, and achieve real resolution. In her groundbreaking new book Own Your Armor, executive coach and psychologist Dr. Michelle Brody presents a dramatically different, refreshing, and proven way to improve ineffective workplace dynamics and repair toxic cultures. She helps us see our “people dynamics” problems in new ways so we can craft lasting solutions. A Book Like No Other, Now for Your Unique Team There are a lot of books for leaders on “how to fix your team” when they are difficult, which suggests that the team is the problem and the leader is the change agent, pushing or pulling strategic levers to improve the situation. Own Your Armor approaches team dynamics with a completely different set of assumptions: -- The problem isn’t just the team, -- The solution isn’t just the leader’s, and -- The levers aren’t “strategic.” The levers are psychological, and they belong to us all. Team dynamics are co-created and are circularly reinforced over time. Unwinding them requires everyone (leaders and team members) to recognize their contribution to the culture problem and to rejoin the team with their best self. In the engaging pages of this book, which is filled with instructive illustrations and framed by 10 principles for “owning your armor” in the workplace, Brody shares the true causes of why teams experience bad culture and offers a practical way to talk about moving a team toward greater health. Revolutionary Change for Workplace Culture “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 ...”. Fixing an unhealthy work culture isn’t easy, but it’s impossible if we don’t get at what is causing it. The root of team dynamics problems is nearly always a pileup of everyone’s defensive armor. “We can all show up as our regular selves at work,” Brody explains, “but when we’re under threat, we put on some armor.” Passive-aggressiveness, micromanaging, finger-pointing, 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.” Own Your Armor shows how to help everyone on a team to: -- Own your threats -- Own your armor -- Own your impact. The result? Your team will build trust, reduce defensiveness, shift stuck mindsets, defuse vicious cycles, and unlock individual and team strengths to finally get the dream team everyone wants. Note to the reader: Own Your Armor is an immersive, illustrated eBook in a fixed format – like a textbook, reference book, or graphic novel – and is therefore optimally viewed on larger desktop or laptop screens, rather than on smartphone screens or small ebook readers.