Shaping Leadership Culture: Adaptability, Hope & High-Performing Teams with Naomi Olson [Podcast]

In the second episode of the Berlitz Language and Culture Podcast "Shaping Leadership Culture: Adaptability, Hope & High-Performing Teams," Dr. Naomi Olson explores the evolving role of leadership in a rapidly changing world. From the power of psychological safety to the rising importance of hope, humility, and emotional intelligence, discover what today's teams need to thrive and how leaders can adapt to build stronger, more connected workplaces. 

Transcription Episode 2

Louisa Ajami: Hello and welcome to the Berlitz Language and Culture Podcast. On today's episode, we are delighted to have Dr Naomi Olson, academic, researcher and expert in cross cultural and team effectiveness, global business culture and leadership, among others, here on the Berlitz culture team. We've had the pleasure of working with Naomi on projects across North America involving team building, leadership and cultural training. Welcome Naomi.

Naomi Olson: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Louisa Ajami: Naomi. You have done a lot of research on people management. We wanted to know what are some of the attributes of a strong leader.

Naomi Olson: I think that's a great question. It's a question that is always on the top of mind of business managers. And I think one of the reasons it continues to be a salient question is that the answers change, changing times, changing circumstances. And so I would say one of the sort of perennial qualities that a leader has is the ability to be adaptable and read the moment and to show up for their direct reports and their team in the way that their team needs them to show up.

Most managers have the technical acumen, they have the business skills for their respective areas of specialty, but one thing that one area in which managers tend not to realize that there is room for improvement is recognizing that the way that they manage may not work best for every single one of their employees.

A lot of it's a cognitive bias. A lot of people think that what has worked well for me is universally a good approach, and that's just not true. So we end up working with a lot of managers who really benefit from starting to discern when and how am I helping a direct report to grow professionally? When can I notice that there's a professional maturity that I can help develop? And when is that different from a way that my direct report is wired that if I try to change it, they I won't be getting the best out of them anymore.

So sometimes my shorthand for this is, are you helping your employees to grow in the way that they want to and need to grow and or are you trying to force your left handed employees to become right handed and therefore not getting the best out of them?

So that's the the area that we really can see the most intervention.

Those are sort of the ongoing qualities of a good manager, right? The adaptability, the agility, ability to recognize the changing needs in their team and the changing needs of their organization, the changing needs of the moment in time. What we're seeing from the data right now, the research that's coming out recently in 2024, 2025 Gallup recently put out a report saying that one in two employees globally is currently actively or passively seeking a different position. What that says is that people are not feeling fulfilled in their current roles. Areas for improvement in terms of retaining and attracting top talent include, of course, salary. That's something that managers can't always have a lot of control over.

But some of the top reasons in Gallup's recent polls for employees who recently chose to voluntarily leave their positions include not having enough positive interactions with their managers, not having enough positive interactions with their managers, not feeling like they have a good work life balance or the workload is overwhelming, and then interpersonal issues.

And this sort of supports really long term research conducted by Google in Project Aristotle with Carnegie, where they found that, you know, in a 10 year study trying the idea. Identify the qualities that distinguish the most high performing teams. Essentially, what they were able to find was that the most high performing teams all had two things in common, at the very least, and that was people on the team all contributed, and people on the team all felt like they were cared about, that their colleagues cared about them, and so in a word, that's psychological safety. There are other elements that contributed to high performing teams, but creating an environment where people are seen, understood, and that the strengths that they bring are valued, and that their managers aren't trying to sort of force a circle into, you know, a round peg into a square hole. All of those things contribute. And then the last thing I'll mention is that another recent poll come, another recent poll that Gallup produced in 2025 found that globally, in their global leadership report, the number one quality that employees are seeking in their leaders is hope. We have a lot of managers coming to Berlitz asking for support around building trust connection in their teams. I find it very interesting that in this moment, what people are looking for, especially young people, the Gen Z generation, the workforce, they were looking for, hope for the future, clear direction, and many of those surveyed in Gallup's report on people who voluntarily left their positions recently, many, many cited the fact that in the previous three months before they voluntarily left, their manager did not reach out to them to ask them how they felt about their position, what kind of support they needed to thrive in their position, where they saw their their future with the company, how they wanted to professionally develop. So that's there are a lot of ways that we can make the workplace better for everyone, and oftentimes managers know this. It's just a matter of making it a habit and incorporating these practices into your daily approach.

Louisa Ajami: Now, I like how you mentioned that you know, managers can't necessarily control salary. They can't necessarily control the larger directives at work around whether or not their employees are allowed to work from home, for example, what their benefits package looks like, etc, but managers still have a lot of power, and especially with the younger generation. You mentioned Gen Z. People from Gen Z are in high school, college and beginning in the workforce. Right now, they're the newest generation we've seen entering the workforce. And for them, you mentioned that hope, feeling cared for and having a sense of psychological safety is very important, essential. In fact, would you say that that is the same across functions and sectors? A feeling of psychological safety, hope, feeling cared about in the workplace?

Naomi Olson: Well, I have sort of two different answers to the question the first is going to be based off of my conversations with leaders across various industries. And what I will say is that anecdotally, my experience has been that what Google has found to be true for high performing teams rings true to me. I remember having a conversation with pharmaceutical executive and I remember them saying to me, it's great that you're talking to me about psychological safety and making sure that my team members feel a sense of mutual trust, they feel a sense of mutual respect, and they feel welcome to learn from their mistakes, and they feel welcome to challenge authority when it feels appropriate to do so. So all of those are sort of the characteristics of a psychologically safe environment. But this pharmaceutical executive said to me, how can I create a psychologically an environment. How can I create an environment of psychological safety when I work in an industry and a team that is subject to termination if we don't meet our goals? And it's such a profound question, and so I think that there's obviously always going to be a tension there between then the reality that we cannot control for everything, and also the reality that whatever we can control can help to provide a sense of stability, hope for the future for our team members, even in the absence of being able to control external factors. So. That, I think is pretty true across all industries. What I will say the data has found in terms of across functionality, Gallup's report on global leadership and what followers want from their leaders, they have broken it down across a variety of sectors and across a variety of regions worldwide, but the statistics do not vary that greatly. For instance, hope is the number one by far the number one most desired quality out of a leader and the other the other four qualities they list are hope, trust, compassion and stability. So out of the four qualities, hope, trust compassion and stability that followers want in certain parts of the world, like Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and India, hope far outscores the next ranked characteristic, and I would say down to Lebanon, Jordan, Bulgaria, Japan. Hope still generally outscores the next ranking characteristic, which is trust. But it's pretty consistent worldwide. And I think that's very, very interesting.

Louisa Ajami: I do feel that that's interesting as well. And in order to help your employees thrive, you need to have them comfortable, have them feeling accepted. Do you think that hope trust compassion and what was the last one? Stability, stability. So do you believe that hope, trust, compassion and stability will not only create a more relaxed and engaged workforce, but actually help bring out creativity and productivity?

Naomi Olson: That's a really great question. I recently facilitated an off site and I was talking about the Google project Aristotle and the findings on high performing teams needing, you know, psychological safety. And the leader of this team said, so, if I create psychological safety, I will have high performing teams. And I, I said, I don't think it's that simple of a formula. I think creating psychological safety, offering an environment that includes hope, compassion, stability and trust. I think this is the foundation of an effective team, a creative team. I remember working in an organization where we had a we had a colleague who kept it was almost like a mantra or a refrain, and this person repeatedly said, we are being asked to dream in an environment of deficit. And so if you, if you want creativity, if you want high performing teams, I would think of hope, compassion, trust, stability, psychological safety as sort of that your basic life necessities, those are the conditions in which creativity can thrive. A lot of people talk about changing culture or being being a cultural change agent. And I, you know, I think most business anthropologists or cultural anthropologists would say that culture is not even knowable. And so what we can what we can do is we can create the conditions for the type of culture that we are hoping to see. But I don't know that we have enough control over culture to to really create cultural change. We can create the conditions for change because culture is something that is CO created.

Louisa Ajami: Yeah, teams, organizations, any sort of grouping of people under a larger banner, creates their own culture, exactly a third culture. Understanding how that impacts employees, understanding how that impacts the wider organization, is important for team leaders, especially when it comes to creating an environment that facilitates creativity and productivity as well. It's part of a larger package of things. You can't just change one thing and all of a sudden have a more productive team, but you can create, excuse me, you can create an environment in which productive and creative teams can thrive.

Naomi Olson: Absolutely. And I think I actually want to revisit a question that you asked at the beginning of the podcast, because I think I failed to mention probably what is the most important attribute. And I think this is a true across space and time for for leaders. And I, you know, it's telling that it's telling that, that I'm that I missed it in in our initial conversation. But I think at the at the heart of good leadership is humility. Yeah. How can you be agile and adaptable to your team's needs?

I think essentially, at the heart of every good leader is humility. How can you be adaptable and agile and responsive to your team's needs if you don't recognize that their needs may be different from yours, and that their differences bring something of value to the team, which is what you hired them for, and the beauty of working on a team, but without humility, I think, I think everything else goes out The window. So I think humility is absolutely the most crucial, crucial characteristic.

Louisa Ajami: Completely, yeah. I completely agree. And I would also say, as you said, that being able to work with the team you've got, you hired people for a specific reason. They have specific strategies, tools, skills to bring to the team, we have to be prepared for people who have different ways of expressing themselves, different ways of asking for things, different ways of teaching and learning and communicating. It's important to be able to work with with what you've got, regardless of what kind of structure you're in, in order to get the best out of the team that you already have.

Naomi Olson: And I would say that's backed up by some of the research and the trends that we're seeing right now. Internal mobility is up. I think it's been growing six 6% year over year. External hiring is down. Teams are changing at a much more rapid pace than they ever have been in recent times, and a lot of this is due to organizations trying to be adaptable. Given the advent of generative AI and new technologies, companies are trying to stay relevant, and it's easier, and when it's done right, it's much more effective to work with the workforce that you do have, because you retain that institutional knowledge, than to hire new new staff. And I think when we underestimate the workforce that we currently have, we do a disservice to them and to us, because we one of the one of the characteristics, one of the attributes that draws employees away from their positions to new positions, is the ability to do what I do well, and you can imagine that there's all sorts of missed opportunities to upskill and leverage the institutional knowledge of your current workforce, as long as you elicit their consent, find out what they're interested in and find out how do they Want to grow and find find a way to match the needs of what your organization needs and the the professional development interests of your team.

Louisa Ajami: And that absolutely does touch on something you mentioned earlier in this episode, which is that a lot of people, a huge proportion of current. Employees are looking for another role actively, and if they're not actively looking for another role, they might be dissatisfied and might be disengaging. Now, turnover is an enormous cost for organizations, and so in order to combat that, it really does make sense to invest in what you've got now learn how to get your team members working, producing together, experiencing positive, positive team working situation, so that we can leverage the skills they have, rather than wait for them to leave, hire someone new, and at the same time, lose, as you said, all of the institutional knowledge, all of the third culture that they've built within the team, and have to rebuild that with a new person.

Naomi Olson: I just want to add that there's also a missed opportunity on the level of the team. So what there was massive literature review conducted on the concept of psychological safety that looked at all of the research that has been done on the topic, and that literature review found that psychological safety is most important, not at the level between supervisor and direct report, not at the level between individual and colleague, not at the level between individual and organization, but at the team level. And I think a lot of interpersonal dynamics on teams can be addressed by investing in some cultural skills building not just recognizing that there are differences, or noticing them, but actually cultivating strategies to really navigate those differences and actually leverage the beauty of those differences and the sort of synergies that that can create in teams and partnerships. But again, it's not just a matter of learning the skills, but integrating them into your daily practice and really getting, getting the team to utilize these skills as a habit, make a habit of it so that it's doesn't seem like something extra to do on top of the work, but it actually is a means to more effective working together.

Louisa Ajami: Absolutely work with what you've got. Give people the skills to be able to interact, communicate, learn, teach, Delegate in any cultural environment, whether that's a local cultural environment, everyone's from the same town, everyone's from the same place, national, multinational. It helps to be able to gain the skill set, to be able to work in lots of different situations, and to be able to leverage different skill sets in different team makeups, different institutions, different types of configurations of teams.

Naomi Olson: Absolutely. And you know, the the the missed opportunity there is teams that think that they can leverage their differences well, but then I'll hear things like, you know, I'm really an introvert, and, you know, I'm in sales, and I've really, you know, had to try to unlearn that and and what I'm hearing is, you know, rather than trying to force someone who considers themselves to be an introvert to sort of change who they are. Can we change the practices? And you know, when everybody arrives from the airplane instead of going into the meeting right away, can everyone have one hour to recharge at the hotel before the meeting? It's not. It doesn't require massive shifts to accommodate these types of differences. We don't have to force everyone to change what feels natural and and most what feels natural, what what helps them work at their best. It doesn't require massive shifts. Small tweaks like this can really help a team to get the best out of everyone and work together well.

Louisa Ajami: For those at the very top of organizations, it's also extremely cost-effective to make those little tweaks to help bring out the best in everyone rather than force them into a mold they might not fit in.

Naomi Olson: Absolutely. And that's where that humility is so important to recognize. Just because you've been successful and it's worked well for you, it doesn't mean it'll work well for a whole team, and it won't work well for everyone, especially as we see, you know, changes with AI and new generations. We need to be open to change, and humility is underlying that.

Louisa Ajami: Now, speaking of that these days, of course, a lot of people are wondering if their skills are up to par in a competitive job market, especially considering the advent of generative AI making its way into our daily lives. What trends are you seeing around recruiting talent and what skills are HR professionals looking for when they're trying to fill these positions?

Naomi Olson: We are seeing quite a few important shifts in how recruiting is working. In the age of AI and in the face of many international we are seeing some major transformations in recruiting in the age of AI and rapid advancement of technology. So some of the changes that we are seeing is some of the trends that we are seeing in recruiting in 2025, 2024, are some contradictions. So managing talent, recruiting people, it often means being pulled into different directions at once. So we have a large percentage of the workforce seeking remote positions at the same time we are seeing a massive pull to return in major companies who are trying to return to the office. We are seeing massive hiring surges at the same time as we're seeing workforce reduction. So it's very inconsistent and a little haphazard in terms of, you know, you look at the jobs report, the filings for unemployment, they tend to be a little bit all over the place. We see companies really focusing on developing their AI capabilities, while also prioritizing very human skills. And I think you saw some of those contradictions in the Gallup report on why people are considering leaving their positions, a lot of the reasons why people are considering leaving their positions are a lack of some of those very human, human things, or human interactions, positive interactions, with their managers. We're also seeing this is very interesting. We're seeing virtual recruitment increasingly outpacing word of mouth networking. So virtual recruiting is actually more effective than word of mouth networking.

Louisa Ajami: What do you mean by virtual recruiting? Do you mean the entire process happens online?

Naomi Olson: Yes, so not, not necessarily online in terms of, you know, indeed, or we are seeing virtual recruiting through professional networking sites like LinkedIn. So people are private messaging people, and because it is so hard to retain talent, and we see so much change happening within teams, recruiters have started relying really heavily on poaching employees, so employees who are not even considering leaving their positions are being asked to consider leaving by competitor organizations. So this just underlies just how, just how sort of unstable many teams are currently, and that I think that really goes to needing that feeling of hope and and feeling a sense of insecurity. Another, another issue with recruiting that we're seeing is organizations have a lot of anxiety around AI, so organizations feel the need to quickly ramp up their readiness for comprehensive AI adoption, but only 10% of executives globally have reported that their organization is ready for that. 25% haven't even started. 80% of executives see the benefits of generative AI for their organizations, but without a comprehensive AI policy in organizations that is spearheaded by the company's HR team, what's happening is that we have 75% of workers using AI, but feeling like the more they use AI, the more fearful they are that their job is replaceable. So 80% of workers are eager to learn how to use AI, but only 39% have been trained and without oversight and proper training, what we're seeing is generative AI, um. Uh, increasing worker productivity by 40% when it's used well for the for the tasks that is well designed for. But when workers use generative AI for tasks that it is not designed well for, it actually reduces worker productivity by 19% so what all of this is to say is that the role of leaders now is really changing from one in which previously, you know, in previous eras, leaders were really expected to be managing tasks, but now leaders are really expected to be managing the team's energy, right? And this requires nuance. It requires emotional intelligence. It requires an understanding of how to how to bring out the best in the wide variety of their team members. And it requires the sort of humility and bravery and that hope to help guide teams through massive shifts that they're going to be experiencing, really, you know, there's just a demand for skills that spur organizational agility.

Louisa Ajami: Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you so much for all of your insights and all of your great points that you've made on this and thank you everyone for listening to this episode of The Berlitz Language and Culture podcast that, of course, was Dr Naomi Olson, and it was wonderful to have you. Thank you so much, Dr Olson, and please tune in for more expertise and insights from our guests on the Berlitz Language and Culture Podcast.

Explore more of our Berlitz Language and Culture Podcast, here.