Lip flap? Sync up!
Lip Flap? Sync Up!
Every Saturday morning when I was a kid, my mother dragged me to the grocery store at 7 AM in order to beat the crowds. We would run all our errands for the week including going the dry cleaner, the gas station, the hardware store. By 11 AM, after putting all the groceries away, I would sit in front of the TV with my sandwich looking forward to watching an old movie. One of the 6 TV stations we received (we lived across the border from Canada) had the Saturday Movie of the Week. Sometimes it was an old Japanese movie like Godzilla or Mothra vs. Godzilla. Those movies were generally dubbed into English, and there was always a lag between the moving of the Japanese actors’ lips and the actual English audio of the words. If you are too young to remember watching movies like these, think about watching a You Tube video with a slow internet connection. It’s either mildly funny or very frustrating.
There is a technical term for when the video and the audio of a movie don’t match up: Lip Flap.
Not only movies can deliver Lip Flap…corporations, too, can produce Lip Flap when their stated values or vision don’t match up with their communications and actions. I was once in a meeting to discuss an initiative designed to benefit a segment of our customers and increase revenue. The company’s values stated that “its people were its most important resource,” but the initiative would significantly impact the work of a large group of employees without any plan to balance the workload. A quiet but respected leader pointed out that our video was not matching our audio. Lip flap!
Leaders might also produce Lip Flap, which is most likely more frustrating than it is funny for team members and colleagues. When the video of a leader doesn’t match their audio, it can cause confusion, an eroding of trust, or worse, a lack of psychological safety with colleagues and direct reports. In these cases, we might also hear the phrase “they aren’t walking their talk.”
A simple example of this might be a leader who consistently talks about work-life balance but sends emails or texts with action items during evenings or on weekends. Of course, the leader might just be catching up on work after meetings or might be doing work late because they want to be there for their children in the evening. For them that is an example of supporting balance between their work and life. However, team members may believe that any communications from the boss demand a quick answer which may impact their own work-life balance. Or, perhaps the leader continuously extols the virtue of recognition, but rarely takes the opportunity to recognize excellent work, either by praise in public or by the simple act of sending a handwritten note. These are simpler examples of a disconnect between the video and the audio of the leader and are easy to correct—there are tools to delay the delivery of an email; and it is easy for a leader to Sync up, to change behavior and ensure they recognize team members in a meaningful way.
But consider these examples which may cause more harm: The leader who extolls recognition but actually takes the credit for the good work of their team, or the leader who wants team members empowered to respond to customers, but demands that any decision involving monetary expense be approved ahead of time. In this last case, are the customer or the employee really the most important focus of decision making?
In my coaching work with leaders, this type of discord frequently arises as we explore issues around team trust and engagement. The leader might be either the recipient, or the unwitting perpetrator of Lip Flap, which could be caused by misalignment of the leader’s beliefs, passions or values. Some powerful questions might help the leader Sync up and align their video with their audio:
What qualities in your leader are important for you to feel a sense of trust and alignment?
What do you know about what qualities might be important for your team members?
What are your beliefs or values that would help you make an aligned decision?
If you make that decision, how might the team experience it?
What does your team need to understand about you to feel that “you walk your talk?”
If you or your teams are experiencing issues with trust, retention or engagement, sometimes it can be caused by actions or communication not aligning with the stated values of the company or the core values of the leader. In those moments your video might not be matching your audio, and the questions above might help you sync the two.
Are you experiencing Lip Flap? Sync up!