Teaming With Ideas

Meet Professor Mark Clark from American University, and author of Six Paths to Leadership: Lessons from Successful Executives, Politicians, Entrepreneurs, and More. I got to know Mark just as my book “Lessons From Mars” was being published. Mark was kind enough to invite me in to talk to some of his students. 

And that works both ways in terms of kindness, because I'm always looking for folks who can bring the real world into the classroom. Carlos, what you were able to talk about, actually resonated with my point of view with how we tried to teach teams at least within business schools and mostly within psychology and other areas that cover that as well. 

But you know, if you're offering this semester is just starting, There's always room.

Mark, what is your background and how did you get into this work?

I'm currently an associate professor at the Kogod School of Business at American University. I've actually been in academia now for 20 years, so I always say that long enough to be part of the problem. And what I mean by that is we get away from the impetus that drove us into studying teams and studying relationships and people in organizations as I do, the further we're in academia. Now, most of us try to be out there in the world and through our students through our collaborations, making sure that we're keeping abreast of what's going on in real organizations. But it can be hard and so I facetiously say I’m part of the problem. But I tried to remedy that by speaking to folks like you, by having my students do live projects, and usually in teams, not always. 

But what got me into teams in the first place was way back, I worked at something called Boysville of Michigan, which was a residential juvenile treatment facility. We had most of the drug runners in the 80s. They were incarcerated, but in a developmental treatment context, which was one step away from juvie hall and jail.  We used a collaborative model at the time. We called it a positive peer culture. And the idea was to help these kids realize that they are not only part of a collaboration or a peer model that influences them, but they can also influence others. 

We basically followed some of the Tuckman’s stages stuff that you'd be really familiar with Carlos. You know, the forming and storming and norming and performing. 

But, we did it in a kind of a loose clinical way. That's what really got me going with the team environment. 

Were you then licensed social worker, or psychologist at that point?

I was actually a psychology undergrad major in college. And I started working there nights to get myself through school, and was able to get promoted into the day shift because in social work, there's such a shortage of qualified people that they cast an exemption for me before I actually had my undergraduate degree. Anyway, I did that for three years. While I was doing that, I learned a lot of facilitation techniques, because we're always trying to put it back on the group, let them be responsible for themselves and each other and teach them how to build their own positive peer culture. That meant that I was able to see a lot of dynamics that go on within groups and teams and how the individuals play a role in that. And how, of course, it can shift over time, over people and over situations. When I started applying that to other areas, I realized that those dynamics that I saw were pretty much the same whether I was working with executives or whether I was working with juvenile delinquents. In fact, the juvenile delinquents were often more honest.

That's a sad fact. One of my favorite clients years ago, when I worked at IBM was an adult juvenile delinquent. He was great. I loved working with him because he held nothing back. He was fairly senior. Years later, he would get a little more polish after they sent him off to leadership development programs. Smart as a whip. 

And the thing that you're talking about is essentially that we learn in more sophisticated groups or careers that we're supposed to be a little bit more subtle about our goals and our actions. That's why I said that the juvenile delinquents were more honest, because they were right out there. They still need to collaborate to get things done, but their bold ideology was, “Hey, this is what I want out of it.”

Did you go right off to grad school or did you go work in other places for a while before you went and got your advanced degrees? 

I did my master's degree at Ohio State while I was working two-and-a-half hours away. 

That's because I was a Michigander, right, living in Ohio. But Ohio was paying me and Ohio State was paying my tuition. So, I owed a debt of gratitude to them. 

While I was there I did Community Economic Development, I did youth development, I worked with the University Extension, and was able to then start my own side training sort of thing. That's where I first started working with executives, and others, as a trainer. I’d go into companies and do industrial training, look at work units. We would maybe call them teams, but they were just looser than that. It was sort of the equivalent of a production line, where they would have a collaborative unit per se, that would need to get something done, and they needed some skills to do that. So, some of my initial forays into this were simply training people on some content related stuff. Like here's the math that you need to get this done to make sure everybody was up to spec. But more importantly, here are the collaborative aspects of this; here are the things that you have to do process-wise to make sure that other people are getting the information that you're trying to impart. And I continued doing that for years, even while I did go back to grad school formally.

Alright, so you got your PhD, and all this time, it sounds like you were thinking about teams and teamwork

All the different dimensions of that. To me, it wasn't so much about the team itself. It was about what they are getting done? I was always very interested in looking at what are the factors that affect people's ability to collaborate? My initial dissertation, if you look at that, you’d say, “What does that have to do with teams?” because it was on perceived relational diversity. I was looking at, what are the wide variety of categories which change the way a work unit is able to work together? People have done a lot of work on demography, the visible characteristics, but not so much on knowledge differences, value differences, personality. So I incorporated that into my research project and looked at how that would affect people's ability to get things done. 

And you've been at American University. How long? 

Since 2001. So, this would be my 20th year, I guess.

Most of your professional teaching life you've been at American. 

Yeah, my academic life has been here at American University. I love it, love the city, great students, great place to be, a lot of ways you can collaborate outside of the university walls in a city like this. So it's very, very cool. 

And one of the reasons I was particularly interested in working with you and coming in and talking to your classes is that I myself have the degree from American, my Masters of Science in org development.

That's what caught my attention when I read your email. Besides the Mars thing, I’ve always wanted to have a Martian in the classroom. But it was also, “Hey, this guy's from AU,” and students love to hear from alumni. 

I've mostly taught MBA students but actually loved teaching the undergrads when I get a chance, and you've come in a couple of times to the undergrad class, my high performing teams class. And you've also come into my grad teams class, as well. 

So, let's talk about your research. You're on the front edge of things. You're out there doing research and thinking about things that might make their way into the mainstream later. Or testing things that are out there and seeing if they're real. 

I consider it iterative, following and leading what's going on in organizations. We take ideas from what businesses and what organizations are doing out there in terms of their teams, their collaborative processes. We also come up with ideas and test them. One of the things that really motivated me to get a PhD in the first place was when I was out there doing these training programs, it was hard to tell what was “the flavor of the month,” versus what was the basis of that and understanding the science behind it, understanding what is true across a variety of situations. I can give lots of examples of that sort of thing. But it basically comes down to finding all kinds of new systems, whether we call it design thinking, or looking at sprints, and looking at total quality management, or the latest personality measuring device. And yet those have a basis in science. Until we understand that basis in organizational and human science, then we don't really understand how it compares with other things that we've learned. 

So my challenge as a trainer at the time was trying to figure out well, then what's the commonality? What works across this? And what can I say that actually has some basis in truth, rather than it just sells very well? When I started doing the research, as I mentioned, I talked early on in my career, a lot about the diversity aspects of teams. But what part of the diversity really interested me was the knowledge. I was really inspired at the macro level. These guys wrote a book called The Knowledge Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi, and their idea was that organizations create innovation by pairing tacit and explicit knowledge. That means that something tacit is something that I might have knowledge of, but I might have a hard time explaining it, putting it into words. It's procedural very often. So, if you think about routines that you engage in every day, how do you ride a bike, for example. Explaining that as a lot harder than just simply demonstrating it.

When you are in an organization, then you're putting these people together because they have different bases of knowledge, different perspectives. And if you pair that tacit knowledge with explicit, you'd then have to explain it to other people when you put them together, then that's going to give us a combined or integrative perspective that results in innovation. Obviously, oversimplifying it. 

It's putting people together and figuring out how to make it work. It's not just putting people together and hoping something will happen, it's not that garbage can model. It's, “No, I'm actually going to manage the process.” To me, that was inspiring because I thought, well, alright, we do this, or at least we try to do this, in teams. This is what we're after.  Teams are supposed to be about creating value. There's got to be a reason to have a team, there's got to be a reason to put people together. It's not just for the sake of having teams. And there are plenty of times that teams are a drag on the system. 

Yeah, I mean, you've heard me say before Carlos, I tell my students all the time, we all take our own paycheck home. There is an individual in that team, and you have to learn how to manage the individual and manage broadly. You have to look at performance management systems, incentive systems, motivations, things that make people tick. And then you also, when you're putting it in an organizational context where the organizations want to get things done. They don't want to waste people's time. They don't want to waste their own resources. They have goals, they want to create value. So, you can't just throw people together and expect it to work. You’ve got to have processes that work toward a particular value-driven goal. 

So, I'm thinking now about the people and the diversity part. Of course, diversity, inclusion, and equity, big topics. That's diversity along a number of dimensions, gender, race, ethnicity. Then you're talking more about diversity of knowledge here. Every bit as important. And now if you're talking to a manager, average, Jane, the manager, and she's building a team. The organization chart says you lead a team, there are five or six boxes underneath your box on the org chart. It's your job to build that team, to staff it. Is there a suggestion in what you're talking about here, Mark, that as you're putting people into that team you look specifically for this diversity of knowledge? Let's say it's a finance team. So they're all going to be finance people. How would this insight you've been talking about apply in this case? 

  That's a great question, Carlos. I think that you need to look at the task itself. What do you need to get done? If you're just trying to apply brute force to something, it's a tug of war. That's an

additive task, right? There's an old thing, the Steiner task topology that talks about, is it additive? Is it conjunctive? Is it disjunctive? What are you trying to get accomplished here? A disjunctive would be that there's one right answer. It's like you're putting a group of people together and trying to come up with something that matches reality, something correct. 

Another kind of task, like an additive task, is I might need you as a teammate on my tug of war team, Carlos, we're all using the same sort of strength, even if we vary in it. It depends on the task. Even within finance, of course, there's an in-group, out-group thing. So, you're looking at this and going, “hey, it's a bunch of finance majors, or a bunch of finance experts”. But within themselves, they probably look at each other and go, “Oh, well, you come from this type of perspective.” And, “Oh, you're really good at this aspect of finance while I'm really good at this other aspect of finance,” So, the in-group, out-group, plays very strongly here. Within that task, you might choose people who still have varied perspectives. So, you and I are teams guys, to some extent, and some people would lump us together. But you and I know that even though we share a lot of commonalities, we also have a lot of differences and experiences and opinions and things like that. 

I'm talking about matching to the task. You have this goal, and you have to construct whatever work unit is best able to fulfill that goal. If it's something where I'm trying to produce innovation - which is what people very often talk about when they're looking to put together a team - then you want the sufficient and necessary perspectives that will actually help you to arrive at the answer or the innovation that you're after. 

You were telling me about work you're doing on design thinking and teams. 

Yeah, to me, it's not quite a “flavor of the month.”  Design thinking is an established area. But it is to guys like you and me who work with teams and collaboration: it’s just another process. Design thinking is basically trying to figure out, how do we take the team – could be an organization or a group of people from divergent thinking to convergent thinking, people with a lot of diversity of opinions and perspectives - to align on something useful? 

Let's tackle that term, design thinking. It does have a specific underlying definition. Could you just touch on that for a second? 

Design thinking comes out of the design field, largely, but it's basically human-centered problem solving. Guys like you and me, we go, “Well, no kidding, of course, you need humans to go through a process to solve problems.” But when you're talking about some of the engineering sciences that relate to the design field, to them this is different, because they're thinking it's not just the design itself. It's not just the engineering process. It is actually the human-centered problem solving that gets us further. So that's what design thinking is, it emphasizes collaboration, creativity - and this is key - empathy, 

Right. Empathy. Empathy, in particular, for your customer who's going to be using this thing.

Or any stakeholder.

We work back from the need and what they're saying is the problem, and then we bring our collaborative efforts to help create that notion of empathy here. Because we have to constantly be thinking, we're not designing for the sake of design. We're designing to a human need. 

That's it. So, design thinking says there's a user, and you can call that the customer or the stakeholder or whatever, and that user needs to solve a problem. So, what do we do? Well, we don't just say, “Okay, let me solve your problem.” First, we empathize. We say, “Okay, let me understand you. Let's talk, let's go through a process here, where I really get a feel for what that problem is, from your perspective.” And then you start the process of, “Okay, let's define that.” Lets then ideate, come up with ideas and go back and forth, iterate, until we can make a prototype. And we might make 1000 prototypes, because the ideas come quickly, let's make some quick prototypes. 

-and use a feedback process so that it loops back and so we're constantly getting more ideas, more empathy, more definitions, more ideation, multiple prototypes, until we get something that fulfills a user's need. That's design thinking. 

I could do that by myself. I mean, I could say you're, you're my stakeholder Mark, and you have a problem you want to solve around here. And I could say, “Well, let me just ideate around it. Let me create some prototypes, test them, fail fast and learn from my failures and keep refining until I come up with something that works for Mark Clark”. You said in a collaboration it’s an important part of how design thinking gets done. Why?

To collaborate, you need at least two different perspectives. So you're right that you could do this as just a one-on-one. Usually though, what you find is that more perspectives help more, especially if you're talking about complex problems, which benefit. The problem that we have can only be solved by these different perspectives. 

I'll give you an example. I was working with the Alto Design School with my colleague, Daniel Graff. This is what the start of some of our research on design thinking with teams. We did various things with clients in Finland, this is in Helsinki. And we went through the Helsinki airport doing a user interface, empathy exercise. We tried to experience the airport in the way that a typical traveler might. And we said typical, but in a diverse sense. So, we had students who sat in wheelchairs and tried to negotiate the airport through wheelchairs. We had students leave something purposefully in their bag that they knew would be found. This is pre the security measures that we have now. But the idea was that they would then come across these situations that would give them insights or empathy into the traveler, which they can then use to feed back to Finnair,  was the company that we were working with within the airport. Now, if you’d just done this one-on-one, say, with a Finnair rep, and one student or one consultant, then it would have been really hard to get the diversity of perspectives that were needed to actually give them good feedback on this operation work. 

We keep coming back to that term, that diversity of thought and perspective. 

Or variety, if you want to say it that way. Right? 

Yeah, it’s all valid. The collaboration as a part of design thinking, I get at that level. Let's say that we go back to that finance team for a second. And this is a person who's trying to run the accounting part of a company or small business. They have four or five people, but slightly different disciplines, and so forth. Is there any application in day-to-day business for design thinking? 

Well, yeah, yeah. I don't want to get too macro here. But if you look at organizations and how they've evolved over time, right. They've gone from being these very often functional silos and very tall hierarchies to flatter organizations that need to be more nimble to respond to the environment, right. That sounds like a lot of hash, but really what we're saying here is that people have gone from saying, “I can be this specialist and just do what I need to and filling out this spreadsheet as an accountant,” to, “No, I really need to understand what's going on with our product development folks. Because we need to be a lot quicker about developing new products; about reaching new markets with diverse needs.” That means that I have to have some understanding - a “requisite variety,” from the operations point of view - that I have to have requisite understanding and that empathy helps me to get that. Because I realized that they're doing a job like I'm doing a job. I can benefit from understanding, and I can also create value for them by understanding. 

Now we're getting to some of the areas closer to some of the research that I've been doing: trying to understand how people share these perspectives, and how they share knowledge within the team environment. 

And that's as part of design thinking? 

It extends design thinking. This is almost like design thinking could be considered one application of team process tools and team process approaches. The research that I do has touched on design thinking and has been published in a couple of design journals, as well as publishing my research in other mainstream management or groups and teams journals. 

So, you continue your work in this area of design thinking and teams? 

Yeah, absolutely. From my perspective, we're just looking at the processes that help people share their perspective and share their knowledge and information. When I started working with my colleague, Daniel Graff, at Alto University - now he's in Tongji University in Shanghai, which is very well known for their design - we were looking at how to bring together what's already known in teams, but then applying it to this new area. And then, of course, reciprocating back: what can we get from design thinking that can help us to understand what's going on in teams? There's some well-known or least well accepted practical aspects of design thinking such as how do you get divergent perspectives to be understood by others within your environment, whether those are stakeholders that you're trying to empathize with or other team members? 

How could John and Jane manager help foster the understanding of diverse perspectives? 

This is a process tool, if we think of it in that way. A process tool could be the use of analogies and metaphor. And that's where my research with Daniel and with our other colleague, Nicoleta Meslec who is in the Netherlands, comes in. What we've done is say, “Well, folks have a fairly decent acceptance of when we're trying to get a point across, we tell stories,” what they call design thinking - the narrative approach. 

Or we give visualization. Visualization is very important in design thinking, you can think of things like the Back of the Napkin concept that if you can't sketch your idea in the back of a napkin of a graphic, or some short bullet points, then you aren't really going to be successful in getting the idea across to anyone else. 

So, we know about narratives. We know about visualizations, charts, graphs. But we aren't so good at understanding “how do I actually get across to someone, a concept that they otherwise are not familiar with?” We conceived or borrowed this idea of looking at the use of metaphor, and the use of analogy as a form of metaphor, of how people convey meaning within teams. And we looked at this with applied design teams that were doing work with clients. We did some work in labs, we've published a few different things on this, that basically the more that you can try to use an analogy that's understood by both sides, that will enable you to convey your meaning or to bridge the perspectives of people who are diverse, in essence. 

So is there any analogy or metaphor you can recall from your work that struck you as a good example of how it helps people understand a diverse point of view?

You know, I should have known that you're going to ask that question, Carlos. And I should have had one in mind. The one that my colleague was always talking about was a car brand: A Ferrari is like a passionate kiss. “Well, what does that mean?” Well, then that enables you to puzzle this out. So when you're trying to convey that aspect of this car to somebody, then you're saying, “Look, it's not about how fast it goes. But to me, it gives me a feeling right of something that I experience when I have a passionate kiss.” I hope almost everyone can understand what it's like to have a passionate kiss, and they go, “You know what that means something to me, too.” And then that helps you to start bridging the perspective and exploring a little bit more. 

What I like about that, Mark, is it is a little bit confusing. It's like, “A passionate kiss? Those things at first blush don't seem alike. You got a car and then a physical act of intimacy. It’s like, “Wait a minute, hold on!” But you're right. It opens up a really interesting area to explore when you consider the aspects of the two things that are similar. I love it. Great example. 

Well, if you think about why does somebody buy a car? Here I was thinking it is because of the specs. Maybe I'm the guy who wants the fastest half mile, that sort of thing. But is that what it's about for every consumer? 

And if you want a more pragmatic one, even just the metaphor of understanding way back with Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor, his guru who helped him understand the scientific management, Henry Ford said building a car is just like any other factory. Rather than that custom craft pursuit that building a car had been before that: the Mercedes Benz approach where you go, like, we have a team, and that team assembled one car. Instead, Henry Ford said, No, it's more like a factory. Then he created the vision from that. 

The use of metaphor is powerful, because it transfers meaning in a different way than what you might explicitly see on paper. That, as you point out, gets the conversation going, because it kind of sparks something in you. And that's what we found in our research is that it's actually not only effective, but it adds value beyond what other methods such as narratives and visualization do within a team that's trying to share their diverse perspectives. 

I worked for a guy once who was nominated as Entrepreneur of the Year. He ended up being a runner up, but he attended a couple of social events. And he came back to the office one morning, and he said, “You know what I noticed about being with a bunch of CEOs, they use analogies all the time to make things clear.” I thought, Oh, man, I have to learn how to do analogies better. So I can be a big important CEO person. You notice it stuck with me. It is an art. It is a skill we can learn. It is like a muscle that if we work it enough, we can flex it, I find I have to plan for these things. You know, I've written a couple of books, and I am not a natural analogizer. But my editor said, “Come on Carlos, you've got to bring more clarity to these things you're explaining for people. I love that as a practical application. So get out there brilliant listeners and start practicing your analogies and your metaphors and see if you can help your team grok some of this stuff they might otherwise not be getting.

You got to communicate with others, right? If you're trying to get that information that perspective across, you’ve got to figure out a way to do it. That's what I love about design thinking as applied to collaboration in teams.  It offers this set of tools that we can enhance by looking at our group processes that we know something about. Daniel and I were amazed that no one had really done research on the use of analogies and metaphors in teams to help them in their diverse information processing. 

So there's got to be a book in there somewhere and Mark. 

And it's a lot of fun to speak with you, Carlos. I read your book on collaboration at Mars and I steal ideas and examples from it all the time when I'm talking in class. I really appreciate your perspective on it. 

I have truly enjoyed the partnership I’ve had with Dr. Mark Clark over the years. After this interview, Mark’s book was released on design thinking, Six Paths to Leadership: Lessons from Successful Executives, Politicians, Entrepreneurs, and More. Enjoy it!

. You can learn more from and about Mark Clark here at his AU profile.

Meet Nevada Lane, MSOD, ACC, a visual facilitator, teacher and coach who started a company called Lane Change Consulting in San Francisco. She works with teams in the US and Europe and has been for about 18 years, really focusing on visual collaboration and graphic facilitation. Read what she has to say about the power of visual communication and thinking.

18 years. So what were you doing before you got into this – just curious?

I spent most of my time growing up obsessed about going into the Foreign Service and so I studied abroad and studied political science in undergrad. Then I went to DC my senior year in college and realized that was not for me. I made a huge pivot, moved to England and ended up in marketing communications. I did MarComm work before moving into the OD work.

 So you went from marketing and communications into visual facilitation. Just a quick refresher: what the heck is visual facilitation?

It’s such a good question. I often interchange the terms visual facilitation, graphic facilitation, but others refer to it as graphic recording, scribing, harvesting…

Harvesting? That sounds like a horror movie.

There’s a group or practice called the Art of Hosting, and in that community they call this work of capturing ideas in a visual format “harvesting”. It’s kind of interesting how the same term can apply to many different things. I think of it as combining visual thinking and facilitation, mashing those two together in service of the client to help teams collaborate.

In your bio you talk about your work with teams. I have been to conferences where we’ve had a graphic recorder on the side of the room with a 20’ wide “taking notes” using images and some words to capture the flow and the content. Do you do that sort of work, or do you really focus on working with teams?

I used to do more graphic recording work which has less interactivity between the participants and the graphic recorder at the wall. That person often has their back to the audience because they’re in deep listening mode, they’re just in their zone doing the visual thing. I don’t do any of that any more. I have a team that will do that work for clients because I love working with the group so much.  I’m really grounded in dialogic OD work, and thinking of that pull communication, which is what helps teams and team leaders be successful. That’s where my first love is.

We are nerding out a little bit in our space of organizational development. We’re talking now about dialogic OD which is a fairly recent way of labeling various ways of working with groups that have been around for a while. I think at the root of that practice are things that everyday people can use. Tell us a little about what dialogic OD is.  

For me it’s that change comes out of talking with people and listening to people. That’s how I think about it. Then there are different methodologies in there from Open Space Technology and World Café and the art of hosting. But basically it’s listening to talk, having people talk together and figuring out what is happening and where this organization or team needs to go. That’s how I think about it.

Peter Block used to say that the role of leaders is to convene people. When I work with team leaders I encourage them to be conveners: not the ones with all the answers, not the ones who establish the agenda and drive to the finish line, but who convene people to have the conversations about the stuff that matters, draw conclusions accordingly. It’s a term for something that inspired leaders do naturally. 

What comes up for me is that core skill of listening as a leader. If we don’t convene we can’t listen. I think most leaders and team leaders know how important listening is, but we have to do that convening in order to listen. 

Every day there’s an article out there on how to work better remotely. There was an article about that one person who does all the talking, and finding ways for those people to talk less and listen more. It’s funny, this idea of getting people to listen more is so foundational to leadership, to collaboration, and here we are talking about the visual and we’ve veered off into a discussion about how to hear. But I think that the visual does help us to hear. 

I was just talking to you about having just finished this graduate school course at USF on Visual Thinking for Organizational Development and how I framed it up to them. These are folks that didn’t know anything about visual thinking and don’t know anything about facilitation particularly. But the core theme there was the reason we want to make the invisible visible is so that we can go from complexity.  to clarity. There’s just something around taking the intangible in the field, in the air, and bringing some kind of tangible-ness to it so that we have something that we can do something with. This mental model that you might have is going to be different than the mental model that I might have, or that people on my team might have. If we can align on some visual of that mental model, it becomes a shared visible thing that we can now work with and move forward with. It doesn’t have to be fancy. That visual does not have to be fancy. 

So, COVID. It’s been a long time.  All of us who work with teams have had to adapt. Helicoptering up to 35,000 feet for a moment, we’ve learned a lot. We’ve adapted. What’s the most persistent challenge now for your clients?

To me the two things I’m seeing are meeting fatigue, Zoom fatigue, overall fatigue. And then prioritization. People aren’t doing that work to make the invisible visible. There’s a lack of alignment. People are working really hard and it’s very challenging to get people together and aligned to work toward the same goals. That may be recency bias, but that’s a big one.

It does seem to shift every 3 or 4 months. I’m seeing an interest in sorting out what really matters. 

So, staying with virtual teams for a moment, you went from using markers to what? How have you adapted your practice to working in this remote fashion? Because I know you’ve stayed busy, you’ve kept working. What’s worked for you?

It was a pretty dramatic pivot because my hands used to be covered in marker ink at the end of the day working with groups, large paper, off in a lovely conference room somewhere in the wine country was awesome. That beautiful energy in the room, we got to draw these beautiful pictures in real time with the team and have these incredible conversations and meals, it all felt great. And just reflecting back, we had so much time together. We could spend 8 hours with this executive team, or 2 days, and now it’s crunched to working in 2-hour increments in a virtual setting. 

The tool that’s helped me the most in making that transition and trying to mimic the visual collaboration as much as possible has been using a tool called Mural. It’s very similar to Miro. Mural has been a lifesaver for me in helping re-create the environment as much as possible that we had in person. 

I know you have to subscribe, it’s a monthly or annual fee. Does every team member have to sign up? What does it take to get using something like that? 

It’s subscription-based but it’s fairly reasonable compared to some of the other tools that are out there.  The team can have one and then you can invite collaborators. I have one account, and we can have a session with say, 70 people on it just using my account. They come in as a visitor, so they don’t have to create an account, it’s super easy set-up, and then they can collaborate in this. Think about it like a scalable whiteboard on steroids, so anything you can do on a whiteboard or a wall in a room you can do with Mural with images and adding .pdfs and adding video and drawing, lassoing things, stickies that can resize, the possibilities are endless for collaboration. 

I find that, having experimented with Miro, it’s almost overwhelming to me. There’s so much you can do, and I can’t keep track and remember it all. I keep telling myself if I could find a live coure where we could try stuff out together I would do that. It’s impressive technology. And sometimes the most impressive technology can be the most intimidating to use. It has an endless length. You can keep going from left to right, and adding more stuff. 

Yes, you never run out of room. And for graphic facilitators and visual facilitators who had this set piece of paper, maybe a 4’ x 8’ where you would eventually run out of space, this is endless. And I’ve heard you’re not alone in feeling like it is overwhelming to get up to speed, I do think that with a 2-hour investment with someone guiding you in how to use it, you would be ready to facilitate using the tool. 

The work I do is to help teams, and team leaders in particular, become self-sufficient. I make a fair bit of my income by people paying me to come and do things with them/for them. My wish is that I could impart my knowledge to teams so that they could do it themselves. Self-sufficient teams is the goal. 

What would you say to someone who says, “I like this idea of visual thinking and using some graphical device or other to help me get my team where we want to go, but I don’t even know where to start.”

It always surprises me how much capacity for visual thinking people have without knowing it. Your grandchildren drawing on the floor: everyone has done that at some point in their life. Most people have had, as a child, the chance to draw something in a squiggly line and a circle. They’ve had some sort of experience using tools to create visuals as a child, and that capacity is human. It’s in each of us. What I’ve found with folks is they just really need permission and space to do it. 

It’s amazing what people can actually create. For example, I do an activity in my workshops called Graphic Jam. Everybody gets a stack of Post-its, and I say, “I’m going to tell you a concept, and you’re going to draw something as simply as you can that represents this concept: Global.” Well, most people can draw a globe. Then we say, “What else can that globe represent?” It can represent diversity, it can represent travel, all these different things. So people start realizing they actually draw more concepts than they thought. It’s almost like the freedom or the permission to do it is all people need to actually be able to draw something. 

I love that – the permission. I’m reflecting on teams that have been through a lot, and I’ve given them scented markers and a big sheet of paper and asked them to draw the past five years in a timeline. What about the one who says, “Oh, I can’t draw…” What is some good language for those folks? Because I think it’s very much about the language we choose. How do you talk to that person about getting engaged and not being too self-conscious about it?

People have art trauma. Maybe in 3rd or 4th grade, a teacher said something about something they drew, and from that moment on they decided they were not good at drawing. And they’re going to hold onto that for their whole life. I have a 2-day Visual Facilitation Boot Camp that I teach. I’m so proud of people who come and say that they can’t draw, and sign up for this 2-day intense deep dive into drawing. And the truth is they can draw. The crazy thing is that they can, but they have this belief that they can’t. Are they going to be Leonardo DaVinci? Absolutely not. The number one thing I tell folks is it doesn’t have to be fancy to be effective. We’re not going for representational drawing, where I want you to draw exactly all the light hitting this coffee cup. I just want you to simplify it down to the basic lines so you’re communicating, “coffee cup.” That’s it. 

So it’s a much lower bar to set for folks so that they can feel like they can do it. They’re holding themselves to this standard of representational drawing when we just need icons. 

Icons! I’m looking at the bottom of my screen and seeing all kinds of icons. If you can outline something that looks vaguely right, boom. It’s like symbolic thinking. And those bashful people will get up and draw their symbols and icons, and then we’ll talk about what the story is that all this is telling us, and they’ll get a good laugh about what some people have drawn, what they’ve drawn. It’s really very disarming and quite charming, I find. They do become a little more child-like, a little more innocent. 

I love where you’re pointing there because there’s a humanity in the hand drawing that is important for the team. If you can get the team doing that there’s some level of psychological safety that hand drawing helps to create. We’re all on the same page, we’re all humans trying to do our best with this marker on a paper, and there’s something that supports the connective tissue of the team when we’re all in that space. There’s a different hierarchy. The boss obviously usually can’t draw better than anybody else on the team, so there’s this egalitarian thing that happens. 

Interesting point. I’ve read that with Zoom or MS Teams, there is no longer a person at the head of the table anymore. And I love the idea that drawing or creating icons brings us all to a similar level.

What’s interesting is, there’ll be times when we create in the room a hand-drawn graphic where the team has contributed, and it looks kind of messy and a little childish, but the team has connection to that graphic. Sometimes they’ll say, “Nevada, can your team make this look nice, make a nice piece out of it?” Then we come back with a digital version of it. And sure, it looks good, but it doesn’t have the same resonance for that team as the original piece did. So the digitalization, I find, creates a remoteness. It moves in the direction of a graphic design and we’re all so inundated with amazing graphics, digital graphics, video graphics that it’s not even impressive anymore. We expect that level of amazingness, and what we’re missing is that human connection in the hand-drawn. 

And that’s the nice thing about Mural or Miro, you can go hand-drawn. I think Zoom has a whiteboarding feature, too. You can get a virtual marker and use your mouse to make shapes. You have a little less control than you do with an actual marker.

Yes, it’s a little wonky. The workaround is if you have an iPad and an Apple pencil, you can log into the Zoom as a separate user, than use the whiteboard on your iPad and have a little more control on that whiteboard.

Good to know if folks are using Zoom and want to do this kind of stuff.

I noticed in your bio that you are certified in the Enneagram. I’ve known about it for years but I hadn’t heard a lot about it, but in the last couple of weeks it’s come up about 3 or 4 times. Can you tell folks a little bit of what the Enneagram is all about?

Sure. I just love Enneagram, it’s so powerful. In short, Enneagram is a map or a framework for thinking about self-development and human development. People tend to think about it as a personality typing system, and it is. There are 9 points around a circle, so there are 9 personality styles that are depicted on the Enneagram, but the personality typing on the Enneagram is fairly recent in the 2000+ year history of the Enneagram. 

We don’t know where the Enneagram came from originally, but it shows up in all these amazing places from the desert mystics and Christianity to Sufism to Kabala. So it’s fascinating that now it’s become very popular when we think about personality types and understanding each other.   

What is the other application? So if the personality type is a later development, is there another use that’s valid?

Yes, the deeper tradition of the Enneagram is about spiritual growth. The 9 types of the Enneagram really looks at the core motivation of each type. It’s less about what you do and more about why you do what you do. You can think about it as a spiritual development tool in the past. 

I just want to re-ground us in the practical application of visual thinking for managers and teams. One of the things I spend time doing is to help teams think about their collaborative purpose, their team purpose. The idea groups of individuals in a conventional organization all reporting to the same person, for example, they know why they are together technically. Because of the shape of the organization, they know they’re together because their boss is their boss, or they all work in finance or marketing, or they’re all working on the project to build “XYZ” brand. So they’ve got a functional reason for being. That collection of people can very well contribute as individuals. I’ll do my bit, you do your bit and it will all get done. The person leading or coordinating the team will bring all the bits together, and we will basically be the sum of all our various contributions. 

Then there’s the idea that if we worked on things collaboratively, we could produce something that is greater than the sum of our individual efforts. That our actual collaboration – not just working near each other or in parallel with each other but actually working with each other, we can exceed the sum of the individual efforts. So the purpose is meant to capture what that potential is.

How might you start that conversation if you were using some concepts from your world if you were a manager and you wanted to get your team thinking about their higher purpose? (not in a spiritual sense.)

There are a number of things I’ve used over the years. The work of Simon Sinek thinking about their deeper why as a team is a wonderful tool to use. It has that simple golden circles framework that he uses.

There you’ve got three concentric circles. Would you have people just start throwing up words into that golden circle or would you have them draw images in it? 

Yeah, they even have a book about it called “Finding Your Why” that is very word-heavy. I always have to do a twist on it to make it more visual. I think if we want to tap into people’s deeper aspirations for the team, to me visuals can be really important. 

Don’t abandon the words. We have this thing called dual coding theory: the words and the visuals together is what actually creates the amped-up memory and recall retention. So don’t forget the words. But adding visuals any way you can - you can draw something, you could have the teams collectively draw what successful collaboration looks like for them, for example. Or you could have them do a collage. I’ve done that with a number of teams where you bring in old magazines and have them cut out pictures and create this huge collage. 

And the important thing there is, don’t leave it at the collage. I think this is an important mistake some people make. You have the collage, in the same way that if you brought in Lego bricks, and say we’re going to build something that represents collaboration. Cool. That’s step one: you’ve done something around visual thinking there. 

The most important part is the storytelling that happens around after you’ve created that visual piece. You look at it, and then you have people tell the stories about it.

• What is it you’re seeing on the board?

• Why did you pick the images you picked?

• Why did you build that with the Legos?

That’s where the brain is doing the meaning-making, as they’re doing the storytelling. Then, you as the team leader or facilitator captures those stories. That’s really the essence of what people are aspiring to. That’s where the unified story or purpose comes together that you need to be listening for as the team leader.  

Lots of team leaders I work with have a hard time facilitating. It’s another thing I think there’s some baggage around, or some preconceived notions. “I’m not a facilitator, I’m a do-er.” What tips do you have for team leaders sharpening their skills as facilitators?

Yeah, you know I teach facilitation and it is hard. If you’re the team leader and you’re constantly feeling like you’re in doing mode, it is hard to take off your hat if you’re the driver and move into a facilitator mindset. It is like changing hats. 

There’s a great book that came out recently called “The Surprising Science of Meetings” by Steven Rogelberg. It’s really directed towards team leaders about how to improve their meetings. It lays out the case for 

• why it’s important, 

• the cost of bad meetings, 

• how to do a meeting audit

• how to know if you’re facilitating well in the first place

It gives some really practical tips. It’s a fairly short read, really practical. As I was developing my recent class that I teach online, Facilitation Fundamentals, which is a facilitation class but taught in a virtual setting, I went back to that book a number of times because I really liked the practical skills without getting fancy.

But it is something that I find, that producing results is the focus. And there’s an impatience for results: chop chop, we’ve got to get the work done. And by the way, when I coach people on how to run effective meetings, if it’s a collaborative thing, make the meeting about co-creation. We’re there to do something together, to create a tangible deliverable. We can focus our efforts around that. And I guess  in doing that, there’s a chance that I do a disservice to my clients, because there is a certain when you just need to be together. 

Pivoting a bit in our conversation, that’s been another issue in the pandemic. I just read a piece the other day about just making you structure the time to just be together, and make it just about that, because we need the connection.

I’ve seen clients do some really wonderful things with their teams as they’ve learned during the pandemic how to do that well. I found in the beginning people were doing happy hours, and people were wanting deeper connection. So with some of my clients we did a Mindfulness Hour. There was no work agenda. A space where we were going to be together but not just do chit chat. People could do chit chat happy hour, but they needed an invitation to go deeper and connect. This had nothing to do with visual facilitation. We started off with a mindfulness practice just to get centered, then we had a couple of prompt questions. 

• What’s the biggest thing you’ve been learning about yourself over the last few months?

• What’s the biggest thing you’ve been learning about this team over the last few months?

• What are you appreciating about this group of people that you didn’t appreciate before?

A few prompts that anchor the conversation and give them a little bit of space to be together. Of course, we’re still on a meeting, and yet it’s a break from the work. 

It’s a break from the work and yet it’s important work. In the framework I use with teams, one of the six practices is called Sustain & Renew. And there’s work to be done around sustaining our energy and our spirits and our engagement, and renewing ourselves. Sometimes renewal involves reflection: thinking about where we’ve been, where we’re going, it’s so valuable. In my opinion, it is a tangible deliverable. We are creating learning. We’re creating understanding and meaning. Shared meaning, which I think is the foundation for the most powerful teams. Not every team has it. It’s one of the reasons I work with purpose. What’s the meaning of our work together?

I love that. There’s a sense-making. And people are working so hard, and often need to be invited into deeper sense-making around the meaning of their team, their purpose, and what does this all mean that we’re doing together? This is part of becoming a learning organization. Or a coaching culture. There has to be this thing about reflection and tapping into something a little bit deeper. 

 I heard about a deck of cards called “Actually Curious” which I now have in my hands. I will reach into this and pull a card out. I don’t think all these questions are appropriate for all occasions, but here’s one that is very business-y sounding: 

• How do you measure one’s potential? 

• What cultural or moral values do you hold in high regard, and why?

These are kind of a nice tool. They’re available online. If you have a hard time thinking of those provocative questions, this can be an aid. 

Your questions were really simple and grounded in the team’s experience, something that managers could use. What have we been through? What’s it really about? You’re a great thought partner!

Nevada Lane, Lane Change Consulting. Reach out to her through her website or LinkedIn or Instagram.

Nevada is the founder and principal consultant of Lane Change Consulting, based in San Francisco. She is a graphic facilitator, teacher and coach, helping teams work better together using the combined powers of facilitation and visual thinking.  

Nevada holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and a M.S. in Organization Development from the University of San Francisco, where she is also an adjunct faculty member teaching Visual Thinking for Organization Development. 

Nevada is also an Enneagram practitioner, Certified Virtual Facilitator, and the creator of two popular visual thinking courses on LinkedIn Learning.  

I met Tim Creed at Mars. Tim has since moved on and is doing very exciting stuff. He recently co-founded Creed UnCo, an unconventional consulting firm focusing on culture & leadership, brand building, and franchising.. Listen to or read what Tim has to say about lessons learned on leading teams.

I'm a native Australian, although with the accent, you'll probably pick up a bit of a mutt accent. I've spent the last 10 years officially living in the US, but a handful of years prior to that in other parts of the world. I was born in Sydney to Australian parents. We quickly moved from Sydney to London when I was a boy to spend a few years in London. From London, we moved to New York and spent about six years just outside of New York City where my dad was working for Unilever at the time. Then we made our way back to Australia. I spent the rest of my childhood and teenage years in Australia.

When my Dad got a job offer in the US, I elected to stay in Australia and my parents moved off to the US with my younger sister. I finished high school and went to university in Australia, joined Mars, which is obviously a great company. I spent sort of the early parts of my years with Mars in HR in Australia, working out a couple of the factory environments, just outstanding opportunities. 

About 10 years ago, I took an opportunity to join one of Mars’s new ventures in the US at that time. That's what brought me to Nashville, Tennessee. One of the great things about Mars is the opportunity to jump around the business and get some really broad business experiences. While my early experience was in HR I then gravitated across into sales, took on a sales team lead role on the west coast of the US for a few years, then eventually made my way back to Nashville where my now wife, my then girlfriend is from and we decided to settle back down in Nashville.  

I spent three years in traditional sales selling to brick-and-mortar retail customers. At that point, I had a team of 10 reps that worked underneath me on the west coast. But then I was lucky to jump into the e-commerce space which is sort of a debate whether that's really a sales role or a marketing role or some hybrid role, and while it officially sat in the sales organization at Mars, it's a little bit more broad than that. I would say I've spent the last seven or eight years in sales in some form, and in the last five or six years I've been in the digital space. I joined Bridgestone about 18 months ago now, which is quite a shift in industry, in culture and all the rest.

It was about seven or eight years ago now. That was the role that I took on when I jumped out of HR and into sales. While there was the shift in function, there was a shift more dramatically from individual contributor to team leader. And geographically as well. First my wife and I married, then we moved to the West Coast.

Did you play any sports? Were you a member of any clubs in high school or college where you would have been a part of a team?

Yeah, I played rugby, cricket, a bit of soccer, golf. My biggest passions were rugby and cricket, which are obviously pretty prominent sports in Australia, not so much in the US. 

Let's go back to your first role as a leader. It was the move into the field sales role, and that you're changing, as you said, functions and going from individual contributor to a team leader. What was your learning curve when you did that?

It was extremely steep for a number of reasons. I felt on the one hand the move from HR to sales is a pretty uncommon one. But I was  pretty aware that our organization had a point of view about HR, which was at times positive, but also at times quite negative in the sense that they probably felt like HR was often driving a business agenda that had repercussions for them. So I was pretty mindful of that going in and trying to think through how do I make this shift, a genuine shift, which it was, but a shift that didn't come across like I'm here as sort of a spy from the organization in any way or, or trying to bring my HR experiences to a world that they probably weren't used to seeing every day, right? 

Just to give some context, the team was a team of 10 sales reps, pretty much all of them with with significant experience, aside from one relatively young guy who was probably two or three years out of college, but the other nine were 20 to 30+ year sales veterans, and most of them actually had spent that amount of time with Mars. So a lot of longevity, a lot of experience. And I felt quite humbled to jump into that and recognize that I clearly didn't have the functional expertise. So with the experiences that they had, in a lot of ways it was confronting to figure out how to  step in and figure out where I'm really gonna help? How do I create a mark as leader, given I'm making all these shifts?  It was generally a very big learning curve in those first handful of months, for sure.

That's daunting. Nine people with more experience than you in a whole new function. What did you do to get up to speed?

I reflected back on my very first job at Mars, which was in a factory environment in Australia at the Bathurst factory, which is a really small town, about two or three hours west of Sydney. A factory where we produced dog food. I wasn't a team lead, obviously. At that time I was in an HR support role. The majority of the workforce was working on the manufacturing floor. Their priority was having a solid safe day of work, making money to provide for their family: really fundamental stuff. My lessons from that experience were that they just wanted to be heard. They wanted people around them, especially the corporate associates, to spend time just making connections. And I took a lot out of that experience and tried to play it into that shift I made when I was becoming a team lead for sales. 

It took me a while to recognize I didn't have to try and be an expert in any way or prove functional worth. In fact, if anything, it was more about teasing out and bringing out the capabilities of the team. That's how I approached it. I spent really solid time, the first three or four months with each of the team members out on the road, spending time in the car with them, driving around, doing sales calls, really taking a backseat, observing them, getting to know them, and vice versa. Helping them to get to know me. So we really just built a relationship first and foremost. And it wasn't so much about having to make a mark, in terms of what my functional expectations of them were as it was a chance to learn and let them take the front seat, probably the biggest lesson of all.

How long were you in that role, and how long did it take for you to win over the team?

All in, about two and a half, three years. I'd say probably for half the team, it was a matter of weeks to a month. And for maybe two or three team members in particular, it was the good part of a year to 18 months to really, truly get that level of trust with each other. And there's plenty of reasons for it. Some of them aligned with my approach, while I had to adapt my approach to those couple of people with very different styles and backgrounds and understanding the history they had been through. There was also a group of teammates that had been working together for a number of years on a couple of brands that Mars had acquired. They had worked in a very distinctly different culture for a large part of their career, and when Mars took over the business, they felt quite a dramatic shift. I think despite all the great efforts to assimilate, they were lost along the way. 

I came in as a long term Mars associate, and I think there was always a level of skepticism for a few of them just based on their own experiences and their change journey. Through all that acquisition, what I learned is you've got to acknowledge that for some people change does take more time. And even if you think you've got a solid approach, where you're really trying to build the same level of respect and understanding for each member of your team, some people just take longer to get there than others.

So that's another complexity in this, isn't it? The fact that this was a fairly recently acquired piece of the pet care portfolio, and they were going through a cultural adjustment. I'm picturing you in this job, Tim, and I'm thinking there are just potholes, all kinds of opportunities to trip up. 

Do you remember any notable misstep you made and what you learned from it?

The lesson about managing people and leading is one that really stands out. There were 10 roles on the team, 10 sales positions. When I joined, one of those positions was open, someone who recently retired, so we had an open sales position in Northern California. I gave it a few weeks but I was feeling pressure to fill the role. With one person out, other members of the team had to pick up the slack, they had to cover that territory, they had to meet more customers than they normally would. So, there was definitely some urgency to get that job filled. In my first couple of weeks I assessed that the team had tremendous experience and longevity with the organization. I felt like there was quite a lack of diversity in terms of thoughts coming into the team that would probably be best fit from outside the industry. Probably eight of the nine members of the team had spent a long time in the pet industry. One was a couple of years out of college. I felt like there was sort of a myopic thinking within the team that everything had to be done the way it was done in the pet industry for so long. So I kind of made the choice in my head that when I was going to build this role externally, I would go outside the industry and look for someone with a different set of experiences than probably traditional sales reps would have had. The problem I had was I built the job so quickly and brought in someone that I thought checked those boxes, and I really didn't do a thorough assessment of how they were going to integrate with the team, and when they're under pressure, how they would really behave. That person just became a real misfit. So while I acted with good intent but really bad execution, it created a real issue where there was friction between that person and a number of legacy team members. They probably thought, “Well, this guy came from HR and should know how to recruit people pretty well.” So in my first job of recruiting as a team lead I made the wrong decision. That was a really big lesson: not jumping to conclusions in terms of what I thought has to take place, but more importantly, really take the time to hire for fit, to hire for true learning agility. It's not so much the background experiences that matter. It's more the ability to be agile in whatever environment that you're in and trying to create as a team. That was my lesson. So, unfortunately we had to take some time to move on through that process of exiting that person from the business and eventually we made a great hire after that. But that was definitely a big lesson in terms of putting us back as a team.

Obviously the team wasn't feeling great about this, to understate the matter. I imagine there was probably some frustration, maybe even some resentment. Just to get a sense of scale, how long was it before you were able to manage the person out of that role?

It was about five months, I'd say from when they first came on to when eventually they left. 

Pretty quickly, then. How did you deal with the team on this one, Tim? How honest were you with them about realizing you made a misstep? Talk to me about how you worked through it with the team.

To be candid, the impact was much more on a couple of people that had territory right next to this rep's territory. And they heard from customers that they had previously managed that this person was really just having a bad impact. So for a couple of team members, I was more upfront and candid with them. There was also the reality that this person wasn't a fit in part because they had some personal stuff to deal with. I was addressing those issues on the side with them with the best intent to really make sure they put themselves in a good position. That kind of personal stuff, obviously, I didn't share. But certainly the reality was that this was a misfit, and it was my decision. I took full ownership of it, and was really upfront with a couple of those team members who felt the impact the most. I think that honesty was what was refreshing for them. 

Now, obviously, I still had to deal with the situation, we had to sort of work around things for those five months. I couldn't disclose everything. In the end, I think it was good for us as a team and good for that person who found something else for their career. My actions demonstrated that I can make a mistake and address it as quickly as possible for the benefit of everyone. That eventually was meaningful to the rest of the team. 

I'm a believer in just telling the truth. When we've dropped the ball, to use a sports analogy, it’s best when we own up to it. It builds credibility. 

I want to go back to the notion of fit for a second. I've had a conversation with at least one, maybe two of my guests about diversity in teams. And diversity crosses a range of dimensions, gender, race, LGBTQ+, styles, etc. There are lots of ways to be different.  And hiring for fit can sometimes sound like, “I just want to make sure this person is like everybody else so they all get along.” It can therefore undermine you in a sense, because you're not bringing a difference of thought and difference of culture to bear on the work of the team. Do you still try to hire thinking about both fit and diversity?

Absolutely. I think you're touching on what's obviously a challenging topic, but critical. I think where leaders and companies get short sighted is defining diversity by any of those things - gender, age, sexuality, whatever it is. And while that's certainly critical, diverse groups will have typically diverse experiences. 

To me, it is about the diversity of thought which is most critical: recognizing that diversity of thought tends to lead to better discussions; avoiding the status quo that can stymie a team. Yes, I do think it's necessary, absolutely necessary. But you’ve got to be really mindful about how you go about it. It's not a checkbox exercise, or forcing myself to find this in order to deliver some level of diversity. It's more nuanced than that, so it's a challenging topic. 

Every time I hire, I try to understand how we can make the team as a whole more diverse in some form or fashion. I think that's what creates better thinking amongst the team, what challenges the status quo. And the reality is, for most businesses, that consumer base is diverse, right? That's what matters: if most people buying your products or services have various experiences, then you have to deliver that to them. I don't think you can get that by not being diverse. 

It's that tension between diversity and fit, because we need both. And by fit, maybe we need a new word for that. 

I don't know of any really super clear way to make that determination. It's why I guess we do things like assessments and interviews. Although I would say one thing: this is where company values or team values become really important, and not just the values that are on a wall, but the actual values. If an organization has defined values that are consistently lived, they tell you what it takes to succeed here, at a high level. So if I go back to my time at Mars, the Five Principles were incredibly well ingrained, anywhere you go around the world, any Mars associate will tell you the Five Principles, and they are non-negotiable. You know, when I was hiring for external roles into Mars, that was the framework for me, that was the fit. It had to be someone that could at least live those five values, the norms that just weren't going to change within Mars. It was things like an openness to collaborate with people, to certainly think mutually - what's good for us, and what's good for the industry as a whole. That had to be a non-negotiable. If someone came in and was so selfish, that it was all about them and delivering results for the business regardless of the costs. They could be diverse on so many fronts, but it clearly wasn't going to be a fit. So I do think values that are well defined, well understood, well lived become a good framework for helping the fit question while still looking for diversity of thought,

Great point. I think clear values, a clear sense of purpose, actions and words aligned with what we believe, is the right thing to do. I was just talking to someone recently about their organization and the values that they have. And it was a laundry list. This is an organization that said, “We’ve got values, we got values.” But to your point, they weren't lived, weren’t the basis for day-to-day decision making as they were at Mars. They were just something somebody had told the organization they needed to have. If I'm leading a team in an organization like that, what do I do? What could a leader do when there aren't clearly articulated values to anchor his or her decisions?

You’re right. Mars is incredibly well defined in this space. Bridgestone, to their credit, also has really strong values that are well articulated and I think well understood. As a team leader, I do think you can really make a massive impact on culture more broadly, just through your own team. You can be a role model for your team to live and behave in ways that are very constructive, and can have a flow-on impact throughout the organization. I go back to my time when I led that sales team at Mars, a really well grounded context around us. But we still had a lot of dysfunction, like any team or any business. I thought what was probably true for our sales organization across the board at the time, and certainly my team, was that the norm for the team was to deliver results through hard work; to basically do as many calls as you could do a day; put up as many displays as you could do. And really try and grow your business through just hard work. Now, that's certainly warranted to a degree. One thing we did was kind of take a step back and assess what's really important here. Is it about the number of displays that we put up? Is it about the number of calls that we make? Or is it something more than that, and I think it took a while. But we did get ourselves to a place where the team recognized that the end result was more important than the inputs in a lot of cases. So sales calls, display units: do they always deliver the right result at the end of the day? If you spend more substantial time with fewer customers, the bigger negotiations can provide category insights to retailers they may not have seen and which can help them reorganize their entire pet food category to drive more substantial growth. Then you can tweak things and make a bigger difference. It's one living example. It was still in the context of a very healthy culture overall, but we did things differently that had a bit of a ripple effect. Other sales teams picked up on some of the behaviors. Ultimately some of the metrics that we were held accountable to as a sales organization reflected how critical it was to focus on outcomes instead of inputs, if that makes sense.

So it wasn't about how busy everybody was, it was about the quality of the effort they were making, to get to the final results that really mattered. As a friend of mine at IBM used to say, “Activity does not equal results.”

Exactly. And we can feel good about working hard. But if it's not getting us more revenue, more sales, stronger, deeper relationships, is its value necessarily worth focusing on? 

Did you have a boss who was really special and from whom you learned something about leading teams?

I've got to say, I worked for a manager a couple of different times named Malcolm Armstrong. He's a classic Brit that spends time in Australia who claims to be Australian. Other than that, he's a good guy. Now, I worked with Malcolm in Australia for a few years.  I worked for him in Nashville as well: two different settings, same company. 

I'll forever be grateful to Malcolm for a few reasons. He is a leader that really empowers his team. And I know that's probably a buzzword, but he would spend a long time to think through building his team, and by doing so he trusted the people that he had on his team. He would get stuff that would hit his desk, and typically speaking as the head of HR, would be the one resolving it. But he trusted the competence in his team and would push that back down to us to tackle and resolve. 

There were plenty of examples, but one really stands out to me. We were trying to launch our brand over in Japan, which as you can imagine, was a big challenge. Malcolm had obviously built enough trust in what I was capable of doing to say to me, “Hey, look, this is a big issue. I know you don't speak Japanese. But I want you to take it on.” It wasn't even a negotiation. Talk about empowerment, trust. But I think on top of that he is a leader that gives not just honest feedback, but really constructive feedback. 

While it was intimidating to take on some of those projects, like the Japan one, he would always give me constructive feedback along the way to get through it, even if I was struggling. That's just an incredible situation to be in where your boss really believes in you and has your back along the way. They're not going to throw you out there to the wolves, despite the fact that the work is a real stretch, and a real learning opportunity. So yes, Malcolm stands out for numerous reasons. 

I'm struck by the number of times you've talked about people saying, “Tim Creed, go do this thing you've never done before.” Whether it's lead a field sales team or fix a problem and a culture in a place where you don’t speak the language. Obviously, you bring something to the table where people believe you have learning agility, the ability to figure it out as you go and to ask for help when you need it. That's pretty impressive. Right? 

If you had to turn around and offer a piece of wisdom to somebody who's their taking the first people leadership job, what one or two things would you say to this person?

I would say, number one, be real. Don't try and be someone you think you need to be or fit into the mold of other leaders that you may have seen, but really be yourself. And that's so much easier said than done. It's gonna take time, I would be hard pressed to think of anyone stepping into that role to just automatically achieve that. But I would give them that advice to think that over those first 6 - 12 months, when they really are likely to come across those challenges like the ones I faced, that they just cannot try and become someone else. It'll take its toll and it won't work in the long run. So, that's the first thing: really be real, be yourself. 

The second thing is just take it as a learning opportunity. What's the worst case scenario? I'm sure there are bad scenarios, but it's all about people and behavior. Go in there and be incredibly humble and recognize that leadership is about the people you lead. It's not about you. It's all learning. You're learning about the people that work for you. You're hopefully giving them a chance to be better than what they are today. And you're gonna learn a lot about yourself along the way. Recognize it's a learning journey. It's not that you have to perfect it straight away. That was probably my biggest challenge. I've always been someone that sort of prided myself on getting it right quickly, whether doing well in school or competing and trying to win rugby games. And it's okay to lose. Sometimes it's okay to not always be perfect. That would be my advice. It's gonna be tough because of the nature of the job. It's not about delivering the results. The people underneath you should be the ones delivering the results. It's still a learning journey in terms of human behavior and bringing the best out of people.

I love what you said, “Remember, it's about them. It's not about you.” Oh, and take care of yourself along the way. Would your advice change at all in a world where we're still being forced to work apart so much? Or is it still basically those two same principles?

Same two principles. But I think you touched on a great point, which is the last 12 months have been tough for everyone, because you lose the connection we were probably experiencing before the pandemic. And I think you're right about taking care of yourself. I've found myself and certainly people around me this last 12 months have struggled a lot with the fact that you lose community. You're spending time on zoom calls all day long, and you need to really take care of yourself. Nothing changes whether this has to linger on longer, or we go to some kind of hybrid working model, or if companies go back to the office. I think always be yourself, and take every day as a learning opportunity. 

Tim, thank you so much. I'm sure my followers will be grateful to hear those simple messages from you. Take care of yourselves.

Clint Kofford is a colleague, a friend, and an exemplar; a guy who has taught me a ton about leading teams, working effectively with people, and about leadership.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

My name is Clint Kofford and I’ve had a really interesting career. I’ve been able to work for a lot of cool brands and companies. I currently am the head of the Human Performance Institute at Johnson and Johnson where I get to lead all of our talent development efforts. When you think about executive development, manager development, any of the broad professional skills that many of our people are looking for in their careers, that’s what I get to help lead, and lead a team doing at J&J.

Prior to my time at Johnson and Johnson, I worked at Nike where I was the head of our talent management organizations for the geographies: within all of our marketplaces, all the integrated talent management practices. Prior to that, I had a number of different roles in talent and leadership development at Mars, Inc. for about 7 years, which is kind of where I grew up in the corporate world. Previous to that, I spent some time at the US Olympic Team and a midsize startup. 

So, it’s been a really interesting career because I’ve never worked in the same industry twice. I’ve worked at all kinds of organizations in terms of life cycle: startup, a very big mature non-profit. I’ve seen the upsides, the challenges, really kind of fun to see the full cycle of business.

The US Olympic committee? What did you do there? 

I was brought there by a previous boss, a boss that I had worked with at the startup at the beginning of my career after I finished grad school. The intent was, and what we did was set up Olympic University. The intent was to provide additional value for Olympic sponsors that really only get to activate that sponsorship every 4 years. So as a way of increasing value we attempted to take some of the lessons learned in sport, and translate that into executive development that could then be offered to these sponsors. So when you think of VISA, McDonalds, Home Depot, etc., could we provide them with more additional value more regularly than just every 4 years by helping them lean into the lessons learned from sport as applied to leadership development.

Probably the most fun I’ve ever had and could actually call work. I learned how to bobsled, how to play judo and all sorts of different sports, but all truly kind of as work, as we worked with leaders from various companies.

Do you remember the first team you led and any lessons you learned? 

The first team I remember leading was when I was a missionary for the Church of Latter Day Saints. I was leading a team in St Petersburg, Russia. I was 19 years old, thousands of miles from family. We had one president that oversaw a group of 120 of us volunteers. I had specific responsibilities for about 12.

At 19 years old?

Yes, at 19 years old in the suburbs of St Petersburg, Russia.

And were all of these folks native English speakers?

A majority. There were a few native Russians, a Mongolian, and a Bulgarian. That was my first team. Super challenging because 1. In essence what we’re trying to do is share and spread religion, and that’s not necessarily what most people want, at least in Russia at the time. Inspiring and helping the team, and even myself tap back into why we chose to be there and what we were trying to accomplish I think was the essence of leading the team and other components played into that, such as setting some goals for us, some targets that could be met. But a lot of it was around helping people to tap into purpose and what made them want to be there, get up out of bed every day, to continue to work hard despite -40°F in the winter, being outside on your feet in that type of weather and other conditions as well. That’s not easy. It’s not easy to motivate people in that situation.

Was there a need for interdependent collaboration among you?

There was less inter-dependency required. But for me it was just more of the first time trying to unite everybody in a collective goal and vision, and trying to support and tap into the purpose that would motivate them, drive accountability. There were conversations that had to be had around how time was used and not used. Despite the volunteer aspect of it there were still some performance metrics just to help inspire and then improve the capability. Providing feedback and what not. In some cases, it was around the language capabilities and how well they could understand Russian, but in most cases it was around their capability to teach, providing feedback and coaching, etc. 

How was it that a 19-year-old was asked to lead?

I was assigned. I was assigned by our president, the one “adult” in the area. Mine was a “district” or a group of 12.

Somebody recognized in you leadership potential. Was there any you learned from what went wrong that sticks with you?

Oh, yeah. Power is a very delicate item. I never considered myself to be overbearing, but I think there are definitely lessons around how you motivate, how you inspire, how you wield power. I think what I learned most in that situation was trying to prove that you’re right. Whether it’s because you actually are right or that you have the power, from the positional power perspective. 

What does that look like, trying to prove you’re right?

In this situation it would be working with different groups and trying to help them see that they could have been more effective in teaching or taught more, or provided more hours of service. There were guidelines for us. As an example we were supposed to serve a certain number of hours in the general community and that could be accomplished in a number of ways. If others weren’t doing that I needed to have conversations with them even though the rule might be set at 2 hours a week at a minimum, and I asked them if they’d done that and they hadn’t done that, in my mind they should have put in their 2 hours of community service. Realizing that just honing in on the hour or the rule because I’m the leader of the district, those don’t work. 

There were performance expectations, somebody did not meet those expectations, and you as the boss had to provide feedback. What I’m intrigued by is you were right in this situation and they were not. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that’s not how human dynamics work. I think the reality is nobody wants to be wrong, and nobody wants to be proven that they’re wrong. Fast forward into our careers and how we worked both together and collectively at Mars. Influence is so much more powerful than telling or prescribing or directing. I think, in those moments as I reflect back and take those lessons learned it’s really about how you approach these situations. Yeah, you could hold people accountable for having missed these things. It doesn’t mean they’re going to hit those targets next time. It doesn’t mean that they’ll feel inspired or have a desire to change any of their behavior. 

People leading teams is a lot about influence and the way you connect in a way that means something to them personally. The more you can stitch together individuals’ unique purposes into a collective purpose, it really provides the foundation for what meaningful progress you can make together as a team. 

This topic of influencing vs. telling: an individual who has missed a performance target that’s clearly defined, and as team leader you have a responsibility not just to that person but to the entire team to make sure everybody’s carrying their weight because if one person doesn’t do their thing, it does in some ways let the team down. So you’ve got a situation where you have to provide the feedback. What’s the influence technique you use when the task could be seen as very black and white? How do you go from telling to influencing? What does that look like? What are the behaviors?

As leaders, whether we’re at home or in our community or formal work organizations, I think we come across this all the time. It may feel to us, as leaders, often that it’s very blatant, but I think on the other side there are some really good reasons and issues that somewhat justify or are at least legitimate in the minds of those that miss these targets that warrant some deeper understanding. 

One of the things that throughout my career has helped me be successful that I certainly learned from my time in Russia is Covey’s classic “seek first to understand and then to be understood.”  Too often as leaders of teams we’re feeling under pressure as you think about your responsibility for this wider group of people and you’re trying to move them so quickly, that you end up only moving yourself vs. stepping back and realizing that it takes a lot of time. Humans are emotional creatures. We’re messy. We like to think in black and white but the reality is we live in the grey. I think understanding what people’s situation is, what their motivations are, what is going on in the background that you may not see or understand. In today’s terms we might call it “psychologically safe” to be able to have that dialogue. I think that’s what inspires people to bring their best and collaborate, and work together and make progress. If you don’t, I think the risk is  that all those behaviors go underground. You might get the answer that you’re looking for verbally, but the behavior won’t match that because we tend not trust those that lead us. Even if we know we’re in the wrong, if we don’t feel understood and appreciated then we’re likely not going to be motivated to change any of our behavior.

What you’re talking about is a kind of empathy. When’s it time to just say, “I got it, AND, now it’s time to get the job done?”

Yes. It’s not all puppy dogs and unicorns. I guess where I was coming from was at the beginning you can’t just sit down with someone for the very first time and say, “I’m going to hold you accountable. This is the standard… It’s this way or no way. ” I think it starts off with understanding. After you’ve done that and there continues to be challenges to meeting performance standards or violations of the agreement, I think it really comes down to having those conversations along the way and narrating as a leader what is in your mind. What you're frustrated with, what your expectations are so that there are no surprises. I think part of that has to be retelling the story of where you’ve been. You have taken time to listen, to hear them out, you see things perhaps differently or that you would expect that based on grace or space that has been extended in the past that performance begins to improve.

In the volunteer world that’s a little bit harder. You’re still at the mercy of what people are willing to give you. At work we obviously have to do a good job providing that space up front and building the relationships. But the time comes when people have to be held to account. I’ve had to let go or work out of the organizations that I’ve been with a number of folks that haven’t met the targets and the expectations, behavioral or performance for our teams.  That comes through a number of conversations. There are no hard and fast rules. I generally try to go three strikes and you’re out.  I’m working with you, I’ve tried to understand. We can come back a few times but at some point it has to escalate to “Do you really want to be here?” 

I think that the biggest challenge is fear.  People in organizations are going to tell you what you want. They’re going to say the right things usually because there’s a fear of losing the job. A fear of loss, of the unknown.  

I think helping people navigate that so that ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s not a surprise. I can’t say I’ve been perfect at that in any way, shape or form, but I have been fortunate enough to have numerous times in my career people who have been let go actually thank me on the way out. They’ll leave me a present or write me a thank you note because of the way that it was handled.

So I think there is a way to hold people to account while also extending grace and helping them maintain their respect.

Grace is the root of gracious. It’s remembering we’re all people and are trying to do our best. Establish a human relationship with the people on your team, and within the context of that relationship you can then manage their performance in a more effective way using your influence skills.  Is that a fair summary?

Yeah. Good information leads to good decisions. When you know the people holistically, you can make better holistic decisions. 

I’m curious to know about the best team you were ever on or lead: one that just felt exciting and vibrant and affirming.

Thankfully I’ve been a part of a number of teams that are like that. They are few and far between. These times are what I call lightning in a bottle where these periods of life where you manage to be on one of these teams and everything clicks. They’re certainly not to be taken for granted. A couple of those teams occurred when I was at Mars, like when I lead learning and development for North America, I had a small team that was in that situation, full of great talent, everybody on the same page and we were able to move a big agenda forward very quickly and have a lot of fun along the way. 

I feel like I was able to replicate that at Banfield, so another division of Mars, Inc. And I feel like I’ve got the same situation going on with my current team.

Is there a time when, as a leader of a team, you did something you regret? 

There’s lots of things I regret. As a leader, I wish I was more perfect. In terms of good examples, the one that comes to mind the most was in the beginning of 2019, here at J&J, I knew that I was going to be needing to change things up with my team, both from the talent perspective as well as the organizational structure. As much as I legally could be, I was extremely transparent about what was going to happen. At the beginning of the year I was extremely clear that our team would be going through a massive transformation. How we were organized would likely shift. Skills and capabilities that would be needed for the future would need to be evaluated.  I continued to be clear and straightforward as the year went on. 

In this particular situation the changes that ended up taking place ended up being much bigger than just my team. It ended up influencing a broader department as some of the ideas and concepts that I was pushing for on my team were also recognized as needed in some other parts. So, it led to a much bigger organizational transformation. And I think the lesson learned here for me was that I was trying to be so transparent along the way that I probably did more harm to my team than good. 

There was so much anxiety about what could happen every step of the way, that it ran a little counterintuitive to what my grand experiment was. I had this vision of creating a grand experiment that was really as simple as, “How do we run a re-org or a transformation process that could be as positive as possible, as transparent as possible?” 

What I believe I was able to do was deliver on that. Regular, very clear updates on what was happening, as much as legally could be shared, certainly all the cues shared very, very early. The interesting part for me was that it caused more anxiousness and emotional fatigue through the process than it fostered energy and resilience based on people knowing what was coming.

I’m a big fan of transparency, but just like I was suggesting that empathy can be over done, transparency can be overdone.  It sounds like it’s possible that we could overshare. Are there any lessons you learned that could be generalized as guidelines.

I think, in this situation, I needed to be more empathetic in this situation.  I was trying to be empathetic by giving people information and cues, the reality is that with that kind of transformation taking place, it only causes stress and anxiety. It’s like ripping the bandaid off very slowly which can be more painful. Being clear and upfront in the beginning like I was, but not sharing regular updates, trying to make sure everybody was apprised until it was actually time to move forward, perhaps would have played out a little bit better. 

Well, the conventional wisdom would be if I’m transparent, if I demonstrate to my people that I’m sharing information and that I trust them, they will then trust me. But it certainly sounds like it also has a dark side. 

I think so. I think there’s limits, appropriately, to what we can share and I think, again, if I’d taken more time to really put myself in the shoes of my team, process that and realize that information is power but sometimes we’re not ready for everything. 

We’re back to that idea of empathy again. I just started reading about how to grow a business, and the guy makes a really valid point about giving people what they want, not what you think they need. I’m certainly one with a story to tell and has what I think my clients need. But at the end of the day what people will buy, is what they want. Now, if those things coincide, great, then they’ll buy it from you. But if it's you giving them what you think they need instead of addressing what they really want, then you’ve missed the mark, and I think that’s what I hear you talking about.

With all the best intentions, you gave them what you thought they needed to have psychological safety when in fact, maybe they would have wanted it differently had you taken the time to build that empathy.

I think that’s well said. 

Yeah, empathy. It’s such a powerful, natural human thing , and when I started in teams and leader development we taught these principles of management, the first one of which was Show Empathy. I hadn’t thought much about it since those days, so this is kind of cool. 

What’s old is new.

Yes, what’s old is new. 

 You spent your time focused on leader development and I’m sure you’re getting exposed to lots of cool ideas, is there some idea out of the last 5 years that you think is really exciting and new and different that you think people should be aware of?

When I think about the work that you and I did together at Mars, Carlos, to me that is the tried and true, the foundational steps that create a recipe for amazing teams to collaborate. Whether they’re intact or cross functional, that notion of Inspire Purpose and Crystallizing Intent to being able to focus on how we build trust and harness the collaboration, and then getting into the tactics of how we work together, and then the sustainability part. 

I think what has impressed me the most about the Human Performance Institute and being influenced by the work of Dr. Jim Loehr, one of the co-founders of the Human Performance Institute, is the notion of energy.

At J&J we’re now talking about and defining leadership as the ability to direct human energy. We focus very much on the energy that we bring. Not just physical energy, but mental and emotional and spiritual energy. Spiritual energy being purpose and how that purpose translates into meaning for you. And then, motivate and move all that energy in the right direction. I think that has me most fascinated around the application to teams. The energy of teams. It’s part of where the purpose plays and the focus and the priorities of the team through the intent and some of the other practices. I think it’s a new dimension or area that I’m really excited to dig in more to. 

Who are we on our best days as individuals? Usually that’s a representation of the energy that we’re able to bring. I think the same has to be true for teams. How do we bring out the best energy and marshall that energy to really make a difference.

I am not the biggest NFL fan but if my memory serves me right, the Kansas City Chiefs were in the Super Bowl last year against the 49ers. They were down considerably before mounting a massive comeback, and then completely demolished the 49ers by the end of the Super Bowl. 

The same kind of situation this year, but there was not the same kind of energy that helped them to resurge and take command of the game. I think it’s that factor. Clearly the Chiefs were an amazing team this year, and what they were able to do in the regular season, the statistics of the players, the unity, I think if we checked all the traditional boxes of were they an effective team I think absolutely. 

The question is, on that day in that moment what sparked the energy comeback in last year’s Super Bowl vs. the inability to mount that comeback this year. I think that’s the new frontier that I’m excited about. The principles of the Human Performance Institute that can be applied in this space.

It’s all about managing energy. I get a lot of energy from chatting with you, Clint Kofford, so thank you very much. I know you’re a very busy guy with a broad responsibility, so thank you 

Thank you, Carlos. It’s great to be with you. I appreciate all you’re doing in the world of teams and collaboration. 

Well, it is a delight when I get to work with folks like you, Clint. 

To my brilliant audience, thank you, and I look forward to having you come back.

Take care.  

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Juliana Saretta, who I knew when we were both at Mars, Inc, has been leading teams for years. Juliana is now Supply Chain and Procurement Leader at Keurig Dr Pepper. She’s one of those leaders with an instinct for leading groups or teams who is always interested in doing the best she can for the team. Team development is innate to her. In this episode/blogpost, Juliana discusses leading with dignity and respect. We’ll start with Juliana’s description of herself. Welcome, Juliana.

As my name indicates, Juliana Saretta, I’m of italian descent, born in Brazil, and have developed my career through different places, literally: geographies. I started working in procurement, my profession of choice back in my native Brazil where I joined Mars. I moved around. I was in Argentina for some years, then moved to the US where I spent most of my career working across different segments, also adding responsibilities along the way. I spent about half of my career in procurement and the other half in integrated end-to-end supply chain. I left Mars  a couple of years ago and I’m now working at Keurig Dr. Pepper leading a portion of the procurement portfolio since it merged in 2018.

You mentioned segments: what products or brands did you have experience with?

When I was at Mars, I started in Petcare. That was the largest segment in Latin America. Brands like Pedigree and Whiskas were the biggest ones back in my time. I worked in confections with m&ms, Snickers, Skittles, those iconic brands when I moved to the US. I also worked in Mars Food with the iconic Uncle Ben’s brand. My last assignment with Mars was in the coffee business which was sold to Lavazza at about the time I left the Mars business. Now, with Keurig Dr. Pepper, I’m back in the coffee and soft drink business.

Some big brands that people use and know about?

Absolutely. That has been a source of pride for me. Something that I always try to remind people of: how important it is to feel a connection with the brand you represent, that you contribute to. I think that makes the work more enjoyable when you think that way.

Absolutely. You remember the first significant team you led, right?

Yeah, it was in a moment of personal change for me when I relocated from my native Brazil to the neighboring country of Argentina. That’s when I moved from individual contributor to team leader. I was transferred there to establish the procurement function for what was at the time a developing business unit for Mars - the Southern Cone.

I love that name - the Southern Cone. Can you explain what the “Cone” is? 

Yeah, I think it was just a visual of South America which has many countries in it, and there’s this cone  on the bottom of it that is Chile, which is a very lengthy country, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and that slice which is very distinct from big Brazil and the north part of South America. The cone just describes the shape of those countries.

So, there you are, you find yourself in Argentina leading a procurement team, was it?

Yes, because Mars used to serve those markets in the Southern Cone through factories and distribution companies that were somewhat outside of the region. At that point it was starting to manufacture products in Argentina. It was the entry point to what became a very established business unit in those countries, multiple factories since being installed there, Mars actually taking charge of distribution. It was the creation of the total business unit for Mars and the procurement function had to be developed. That was my assignment. 

What was hardest for you? Where did you struggle?

It’s great to see the same struggle as other people go through that first job as a team leader because it gives me a chance to revisit my experience and advise people. I think what I struggled with is what many people struggle with as they first step into the role of leading vs doing. It was that very fact of having built some success as an individual contributor, having a certain approach to my work that I knew worked, was successful, and how do I move from doing it all myself or at least believing it should be done my way to creating the space for people to do it their way. And also to realize that in that line to develop an opportunity for them. How do you move from doing work yourself or at least imposing your views to doing work through others and enabling their views? That was the very first moment of truth for me: to reconcile all that.

We as adults learn by doing. We learn from our success and our mistakes. Do you remember one or two particular “learning moments” from that experience? 

It wasn’t easy. It was not like I was cut out and naturally started leading and making wonderful strides with a team that was following me. It was actually far from it. I was very conflicted in that transition. Also, considering personal elements, I was moving to a new country where I didn’t know the language. So there’s lots of factors as the business of Mars entrusted me with that team. I inherited a group. There was a group of people doing the work of establishing that factory, which was the very first task. When I got there, the factory was built and starting to produce, and it was about assessing the talent and taking the agenda forward, establishing policies and creating the frameworks that would sustain the functions going forward. 

I was coming from a little more mature business unit which was Mars in Brazil. By no means was it perfect. It was still a developing market for Mars at the time. So you think you know what a good team performance looks like and you look at the talent. I think that was one of the first learnings. I kept looking at the talent and thinking, it’s not exactly what I need but do I need a star in every seat? Do I need to replace all these people? Because I don't know if I can, and how do I do the work if I don’t have anybody to do the work? Do I do it myself? 

It was very turbulent because the lesson or mistake in all of that was that it paralyzed me. I had all these different perspectives of what I thought good should look like, the sheer reality of what I had, the talent in the seats. I didn’t feel that I had the caliber that I needed. I didn’t have enough experience to get to that conclusion quickly and act on it.

Talk about a story, yes, I sat and contemplated for a little too long. I remember all this convergence of factors from what was going on in my personal life with that move, to the expectations the business had of me, to my previous success doing certain things, to what good looked like in my eyes, to the realities of the situation with the team I had. And as I contemplated and I kept wondering, of the people and the process, who do I retain?  Who do I replace?

A long time went by, and then I learned by fire once the results started derailing and all of a sudden I was forced to action. You’ve got to be way more proficient in assessing those situations, the talent situation, the talent pool early.

You asked what you do when you start a team, when you inherit a team, and that is the first thing you should do: get a pulse in the team of the talent.

As a brand new leader and, again, I’ve seen people come to me with those questions before, you start hesitating. “Oh, I could do better here. But if I replace this person then I have to invest the time on that replacement. Maybe I just muscle along a little longer and I can fill in the gaps myself” Those are the traps that I think I was a victim of: my own traps. I carried on contemplating, muscling along, and probably doing more myself than I should have done vs. creating my own burning platform to just make the changes that were necessary. 

How long went by that you found yourself standing on a burning platform that you hadn’t created yourself?

I think a good part of a year. Probably 9 months. Because the results weren’t there. We were faced with a crisis right away - a massive recall of product. And that also contributed to me being gun-shy about enacting some of the changes because I did not have the confidence. 

The other thing that I often advise people on is you’ve got to seek the support of others who might be bringing the perspectives you need to finally make your move. And I did that at the time, probably later than I should. Everybody was very involved with solving the crisis, myself included. It was very easy to throw yourself at the crisis of today without thinking about preventing the crisis of tomorrow. The sense of urgency, the quick diagnostics, the urgency of making the changes and when your gut is not completely clear just seek others to help you clarify the view.

Others? That would be peers, and more senior people?

Yes. When I think about that experience, HR played a great role in advising me, and people that were very experienced in HR, senior leaders in HR, to help me frame the thinking: 

What were the most critical roles on my team? How do I act on those first? Things like that. It just comes from experience.

Today I have an easier time doing these assessments and diagnostics, and moving to action, but that’s because I’ve done it dozens of times by now. The first time is always the hardest. I think that’s where I try to help others: to accelerate their thinking on acting faster.

Sometimes we learn from mistakes, sometimes we learn from what went right. Can you think of a time that was a peak experience that taught you something about you and collaboration?

The last team I led at Mars was a peak experience for me because of the caliber. Again, it starts with that. Having the right caliber of folks in the right seats. I built possibly the highest caliber team that i have ever had which was the supply chain for a global small coffee business at Mars. We had all the diversity of thought and background that I could have asked for. These folks were extremely cognizant of the business needs and how we needed to transform our functions, supply chain, in order to support a growth trajectory. Our team became an enterprise cohort of thinking. How we could best connect our agenda in support of the business needs. It was very intertwined across as team members, and with the business. We transformed results at a pretty rapid pace even though the business ended up not growing the way we aspired it to. I think our function contributed exponentially to the profitability of that business. I looked at my direct reports as advisors. It was really a fantastic collaboration method that we created. I can’t even describe it as being intentional. I think the trick was to create a space recognizing that this group was highly talented. To create the space for their voices to make their way through the business. I think the more that space was obvious to them, the more confident they felt. We had the best discussions: frank, honest because there was space. And I felt like I was a facilitator, really, which was a great feeling.

So, facilitative leadership. Was there a person that wasn’t up to snuff that you had to act on and how did that work out?

That’s great that we’re going in that sequence because when I realized that there was one particular function that happened to be in procurement within that supply chain that was lacking the caliber. Within 45 days from taking the job, I acted on that function and even though it took me probably another 90 days to replace, that was where the learning comes and says there’s no sense in waiting. By making a move very swiftly you send a signal to the organization about the caliber you’re looking for, or the profile you don’t want to be a part of your team. And it pays dividends because naturally the organization steps up not only to help you, which was the case, to help me fill the gap, but also to embrace the new hire. The person I hired into that job turned out to be really, really successful at what he did till this day to Lavazza and is making great strides.

Now I want you to tell me about the worst experience you ever had. Is there a team experience you can look back on and the pain is still palpable?

I have a couple of memories of when being a team member was very painful. It was about not feeling valued and welcomed at the decision table, at the big kids’ table, which is super important because leadership is about making people feel valued and appreciated, and giving them the opportunity to keep learning and growing. It’s how you pass on the wisdom. How you articulate things in a way they can understand so they can take it and run with it, apply their own talents to it. How you recognize their contribution. 

I was getting none. I was not getting the appreciation and the support. I was not getting much knowledge, I wasn’t learning much. So that combination can be fantastic to engage and retain, but the lack of it can be toxic, can disengage and lose talent.

If you don’t feel you’re valued or given the opportunity to grow…

And feel like your work matters. Everybody wants to feel they contribute. That’s very basic. Being respected and acknowledged for what they do. I think as a leader you’ll be cultivating a successful environment for people to thrive in. 

What was the wisest thing anybody ever said to you about leading? Do you remember? I’m pretty sure that you went to some offsite program like the Center for Creative Leadership. What stuck with you?

There’s this idea, this nugget, kernel of an idea that the thing that gives the most value back to any endeavor is the people you leave behind when you’re no longer there. It’s not necessarily the dollars you saved or the factories you built or even the brands that you helped build. It’s the people that did it. You’re leaving those people in a position to pass that forward. You’re always passing forward a level of wisdom that prepares the next generation, and the next generation, that’s how things perpetuate.

To be the best possible leader you’ve got to teach. You’ve got to help people charge their path by being both generous with your time, with your knowledge, and your attention, And making people feel like they matter to the enterprise, to the agenda. I think those are very basic human traits that go back to respect and kindness and generosity. I think if you lead from that space, you’ll leave something behind. You’ll leave a mark that people will be able to build from in their own ways. It’s like you’re passing a torch with your little imprint on it, and it keeps going on and on. That’s how I think about it. It’s not about anything lofty or grand.

Oh, I think that’s pretty grand. What I think I heard you say was it’s people. They become your legacy.  

Yeah, now that you said it, it sounds pretty grand. So thanks for putting a better word for it: legacy sums it up. The people you touch. How you help them. How you create opportunities for them. How you take risks on them. And how you help them move on when it’s not the right thing.

Do you mean how you fire them?

-With dignity and the respect that they deserve. I think everything I’m saying boils down to very basic human relations elements.

What does a dignified separation sound like?

It’s one when you as the leader and the decision maker has put enough deep thought into the consequences and ramifications to the business and to the individual. When you get to a very solid place of conviction.

A conviction that this person is not the right fit, as we say?

Yes. And then how you translate that conviction into a positive thought pattern that this person would be better doing something else. They would be happier, more fulfilled. Once you gain that appreciation of the situation, I think you can extend that appreciation to the person. 

Sometimes the person might embrace the thought right away and feel a sense of relief, sometimes they might make no connection with that angle and might still be frustrated or upset. But I think you’ve got to do that soul-searching yourself, and get to that confidence about your decision being the best for the person and for the business. Then project in every possible positive way how this move can enable other things for this person. If you do it in a genuine way, I think it can really help the person move on. 

I’ve reflected on the times I’ve waited too long, and the times when I acted quickly, it’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do as a leader.

Has it ever happened that you’ve had to separate or let somebody go and they’ve genuinely been grateful for how you handled it?

I think I can measure that by the instances in which I remained an active part of those people’s network. That frame of mind of doing it with dignity and helping the person move on was helpful and beneficial.

What’s the one piece of advice you would give me as a young, aspiring team leader?

That you peel away the layers of titles, experiences and levels, and think about people as that:  think about them as human beings like you are with needs and fears and aspirations. When you boil it all down to that, it makes your role as leader a little simpler.

I’m reflecting on what you said about that team you led where you felt like they were your advisors.  You were the boss, and they were like your cabinet. That had to be because you didn’t worry about whose title was what. It was just, “we have to get this done: who has the good ideas?” 

Absolutely, yes. That’s exactly how I felt, and it was the best experience I had in leading that bunch.

Juliana Saretta, thank you so much for joining me on Teaming With Ideas. 

Everyone take care.

Tom Russell, CEO of InkyThinking, not only helps teams draw out their vision, but trains people in graphic facilitation. The results are magnificent. Getting people on their feet, drawing their ideas, collaborating in a way that overrides obstacles, a team’s ideas are heard AND seen.

We have guiding principles in organizations that say fact-based decision making certainly makes sense. And certainly in scientific organizations, that makes a lot of sense. 

But I also noticed that there's a lot of people holding back their ideas, their perspectives, their gut sense, because they've not been able to say, I am basing this idea on a fact. It's just a hunch. What I understand is, the higher up you go in an organization, the more important intuition becomes because it makes you a better listener, a better strategic planner, a better problem solver.

Devan Bailey offers knowledge and practices to people who want to live their lives fully, thrive creatively, achieve their maximum potential and have the life they really want. He spent 13 years in the corporate consulting world before striking out on his own as a personal development coach. He’s most passionate about emotional freedom, which enables us to be at our best while managing our emotional state. He’s the author of the book, HOW TO ESCAPE FROM PRISON: Emotional Freedom Doesn’t Just Happen – It’s Claimed. Here’s How.

Carlos: So Devan, tell me a little about emotional freedom.

Devan: I don’t love the term, “nervous breakdown”, but a brutal experience led me to an extreme physiological response to prolonged psychological pain. It was a complete meltdown and it destroyed everything I held dear in my life – my pride, my reputation, how people around me saw me in the workplace, and gave me what I see now as a wonderful opportunity to start again. I realized that how I was feeling had nothing to do with the facts and circumstances of my life. I didn’t realize it 6 or 7 years ago, but now I know that how we feel has nothing to do with what is going on around us. It has everything to do with our thoughts about what’s going on around us. That is at the heart of what I now lovingly refer to as emotional freedom: the ability to cultivate the emotions you want irrespective of what’s happening. If your emotional state is dependent on what’s happening in your life, you’re probably on the wrong planet. If I want everyone and everything to be just so in order for me to feel good, it is not a sustainable strategy.

Carlos: So, if emotions are not necessarily a result of what’s going on around us, and emotions have an important place in our lives, can you explain where the right place for those emotions is?

Devan: Let’s not relegate them someplace, or ignore them. In fact I feel more deeply now than I ever did before because of this path of enlightenment we are on, or maybe it’s my meditation practice. I think our emotions are the most amazing guidance ever: if you feel shitty, it means you’re thinking something shitty. 

I think the place for emotions is two-fold: one is a guidance system so that you know when it’s time to clean up your thinking. If you’re feeling a negative emotion like embarrassment, anger, resentment, frustration, irritation, they all feel bad, don’t they? So really there are only 2 emotions: one feels good, one feels bad: there are just lots of names for them. If you’re feeling bad, you know that you’re focused on something negative, fearful, lacking, contracted. So, it’s time for you to reassess and ask different questions. That’s number one: knowing that you alone have the power to determine what something means.

The second one is it’s a reminder for you to intervene consciously, because so many of the emotions that we experience are just patterns. We are triggered by something. Example: Someone cuts you off in traffic. It happens a lot in New Jersey. In fact In New Jersey they should probably make cars without turn signals because no one uses them. So, when you get cut off in traffic, your response is anger/frustration. Well, you don’t know what that person is going through. You don’t know that they meant to do it. I’m pretty sure they didn’t wake up that morning with the intention of seeking you out on whatever highway to irritate you. Sometimes it feels like they did, but my point is a lot of it is unconscious: you’re triggered and tricked by certain events that just fire off a pattern, a programmed response in your brain.

So that negative sensation you’re feeling is an alarm bell to say, “Hey Carlos, it’s time for you to intervene and consciously decide to feel something different so you can feel better.”

Carlos: We’ve been focusing on the negative, bad feelings. When I hold my grandchild in my arms, and she smiles up at me or cuddles into my shoulder, I feel good. Should I be doing something with that, or should I just languish, just dwell in that moment of bliss? I’m starting to feel like my emotions are this tool I have to use all the time. 

Devan: What a beautiful question. So, languish in it, enjoy it, soak it up, absorb it, don’t do anything different. Maybe take a note, in that moment, of 3 things: what it is that you’re paying attention to, the kinds of words that you’re saying to yourself in your head, and what you’re doing with your body. Those are the 3 elements that trigger an emotional pattern. You can actually replicate that strategy again in the future. If you want to remember that feeling, you can replicate those three things even in the absence of your granddaughter and feel the same way.  So, if you wanted to do anything, it would be to enjoy it and maybe make a note of the strategy so you could feel it again.  

I call these 3 things the “meaning makers” because our brains are meaning-making machines. Anything happens, our brains just have to know what it means. There are 3 levers we can pull to shape that meaning to be something empowering vs something disempowering. Those 3 things are: 

1. Attention – what are you paying attention to in that moment?

2. Expression – how are you articulating, mostly in our heads but sometimes aloud?

3. Position – what are you doing with your body?

For example, if you were feeling a sense of contraction or lacking or depression, chances are you’re probably not jumping up and down. Maybe you’ve sat in a chair, your eyes are drawn, you’re looking over. The position our body physiologically takes powerfully informs our psychology. 

Carlos: I will admit to being a little disingenuous in my line of questioning. In my first book, Lessons From Mars, I write about our feelings being our own. I do it in the context of conflict. So, “This guy Devan, he’s such an irritating so-and-so.” And I attempt to put the cause of my feelings onto you, “The way I feel is because of you.” And I come right out and say the only one who owns or controls our feelings is ourselves. It’s up to us, therefore, to do something with them. I’m completely on board with the idea that my feelings are mine. 

In fact, in my trade, Organizational Development, we talk about use of self. What that means is, as a consultant watching a group go through a process, I was trained to pay attention to what I was feeling as I watched this group, as I paid attention and as I listened. To note what those sensations were, and to ask myself what those mean, what might those sensations be suggesting about what’s happening in this group? I was playing the devil’s advocate there – thank you for bearing with me.

Devan: Thank you for that. And your point about why we naturally gravitated towards what we can do to overcome the negative as opposed to how we can promote the positive, I love your bringing that up. Unfortunately, the reason why I tend to focus on helping people overcome the negative is because for most people, that is their emotional home. They deal with stress response, negativity. I think for the most part people have a harder time dealing with their negative response than enjoying the good ones. 

None of us need a reason to feel bad, but we do need a reason to feel good. A silly example: you go into work one day and you see Joe Blogs, and he’s grumpy. He’s moping around. You say, “Oh, no, Joe - what happened? Did you get some bad news?” and he’s like, “No. I just hate Wednesdays.” You might say, “Oh, I know, man. But it’s hump day. It’ll be Friday soon.” It’s completely fine that he feels that way for no apparent reason. 

Now you imagine you come in, and you bump into Joe Blogs, and he’s humming a tune to himself, he’s smiling, doing a little dance at the photocopier, and you say, “Joe, what happened, dude? Did you get some good news?” and he says, ‘Nope! I just feel great today.” You would think he was crazy, wouldn’t you? Because no one needs a reason to feel bad, but they do need a reason to feel good. I love that you called me out on it. That’s why I naturally tend towards the negative emotions rather than starting at watering the roses.

Carlos: My wife will tell you I always focus on the negative, what’s wrong in the world – I’m always looking for what needs fixing. It’s been a life’s journey learning how to value and appreciate what’s working already and what doesn’t need intervention, and the power of appreciation to reinforce what’s good. I completely understand the tendency to default to the “what’s wrong” or the negative. 

Devan: I think that’s a gift for all of us though, buddy, because it means that you are solving important problems and you’re helping communities, and mankind at large because you are turning your ship into the storm. I would say for the everyday person who is struggling, the reason perhaps is because most of us haven’t trained our minds. Our brains are programmed over tens and thousands of years to focus on what’s wrong. It’s part of our ancient survival software. If left unattended of course the mind is going to find what’s going to kill you. It’s always looking for the saber-toothed tiger. I think your situation is a little different in as much as you’re doing it from a place of conscious awareness. Doing it from a place of abundance rather than scarcity to try and zoom in and solve a problem. Your state is an elevated state. You’re just trying to help others as opposed to being at the mercy of what’s going on around you. 

Carlos: That’s very kind of you to say, Devan, thank you. This idea has come up a few times in this series, this idea that worry confers an evolutionary advantage. And, at the same time, emotional freedom depends on our identifying when that worrying comes up because there are times, I think, when a few moments of concern are completely justifiable, and other times when we are spiraling, producing no good outcomes, no good feelings. 

I know you work with leaders in the business world. One of the observations I’ve had in my 35 years of work is that leaders tend not to show very much emotion. One of my challenges is I’m this outgoing, emotionally expressive person. My clients tend to be more contained. In the worst cases we are speaking different languages almost. And when I’m trying to build my business and win over a new client, my emotional expressiveness can be off-putting to those who are studied in their control of their emotions. Are you seeing a similar thing at all? 

Devan: One hundred percent. I could not have described it better. And the challenge I would put to these individuals is, “How’s that working out for you? Keeping it all in, keeping it all buckled up, putting on a brave face when actually you want to express yourself in a different way.” For many of my clients it’s resulting in a lot of anxiety and stress disorders, and a lot of difficult conversations, dysfunctional relationships at work and outside of work. So yes, I experience it in a very similar way. A lot of what we’re talking about today and the tone in which we’re discussing this subject matter, a lot of traditional leaders in the world see this as hippy-dippy, woo-woo BS. I don’t know if we’re going to overcome that because it’s new. This stuff hasn’t been taught in schools. You’re not taught, as a kid, to honor your feelings and to communicate with impact and empathy, you’re told to hide your weaknesses. Pretend that there’s nothing wrong. To  fix your weaknesses. To never be seen to be wrong. To not make mistakes. You’re not taught to be an authentic human. You’re taught to be in-human, at least I was. 

Carlos: I had a boss at IBM who had what I call emotional storms. I was intimidated. I was not impressed with her vulnerability. I was scared. She controlled my fate, and there she was, just going off. How can  leaders gage their emotions, temper them so that they’re not over the top in some way that would hurt or intimidate their people, and still be genuine and authentic emotionally?

Devan: Great question. I think we should clarify what you and I mean by emotion or emotional because what I’m not advocating is for people to fly off the handle and be emotional in a meeting. What I mean is being authentic. From my perspective, 2 words are really important: Calm and measured. For me that is the barometer even if there’s a storm brewing inside; I am going to find a way to communicate in a calm and measured fashion. It’s not about unleashing and being hysterical in a meeting because that’s how you feel, I’m saying take control. Be in command. Be calm and measured and communicate with impact and empathy. 

That’s what I mean about letting your emotions out. To actually say, “I’m afraid, too. I’m not entirely sure what the outcome is, I feel what you’re feeling.” This is what I propose we do. All those in favor say aye. That’s a way of being softly vulnerable and authentic, as opposed to how many leaders will show up with frustration, irritation, anger and forcefulness. They’re actually trying to combat how they feel on the inside. So, I don’t think it’s about being emotional, it’s about having practices in place that enable you to be calm and measured in the moments that matter so that you can communicate in that way.

Carlos: You used a word I love: practices. Practices are great because they’re tangible, they’re concrete.  We can describe them and say, “Here, here’s a practice. Do that.” What are those practices and how would you suggest folks think about them?

Devan: Number one is meditation. Just go find yourself a teacher. Someone that you resonate with. You don’t have to sit in a cave of nothingness to meditate – there are modern practices that work. To this day, the most transformative thing I’ve brought into my life. I meditate twice a day for 15 minutes, non-negotiable. It makes you an emotional ninja. I can think of countless times where there’s been a storm going on and I felt myself dissociate from the experience. I sat back in this seat of consciousness seeing everything play out in front of me, and I came up with these wonderful solutions and suggestions. 

You’re in the midst of an argument, you’re really frustrated and can’t get your words out. Then 20 minutes later, you’ve calmed down and come up with some witty comment that would have been hilarious in the moment. Meditation enables me to not necessarily be the witty person, but be the calm and measured person actually in the storm as opposed to 20 minutes later. 

The second practice is to start your day with space. How many people, especially in business, start their day with their phone straight in their face? Emails, texts, demands, news, pressure, stress. Your first waking moment is spent consuming shit from the world around you. I highly recommend we don’t do that. You just wake up 15-20 minutes before everyone else in the household, and you go take some time for yourself. I wake up, take my dogs for a walk, I have some lemon and water which helps alkalize the body, I stand outside, I look up at the sky, I do a little gratitude practice, I do my morning meditation, and then I read something thoughtful, meaningful, faithful to tune my brain to say “This is our intention for the day, Devan. It’s to be this guy.”

It seems small, it’s just 20-25 minutes in my day that without it leaves me starting my day on the back foot, I’m starting at the bottom rolling the boulder uphill.  I want to set myself up for success. That’s how I start my day. 

Carlos: Any practices for a mid-level manager struggling with hard times?

Devan: Ok 2 more practices that, by the way, aren’t easy: 

First, this is a habit I call “Challenging Your Thinking.” It may take days or even weeks, but from moment-to-moment be consciously aware of when you feel stress, discord, pressure or discomfort of any kind. In that moment you know you are feeling something shitty. You know you are, that’s why you feel that way. When you feel that way, immediately ask the question, “Is that true? Definitely? It Joe really going to say that? Is it really going to take longer than we think? Is there something else happening here? What else could this mean?” Ask a better question, get a better answer. Moment-to-moment challenging your thinking to get to a better question. Meditation can help put a healthy space between you and your thoughts, and help with this practice.

Second, the Power of Physiology. Before this podcast, I went for a power walk and listened to energizing music so you could have the energetic me. Which version of me do you want to call: 

• The one who's tired, a little bit sore from the gym, who's got some concerns about how to move something forward with the business?

• Or who's calm, measured, comfortable and enjoying himself?

Which one do you want? Hopefully, the second. Lots of people say you have to exercise every day. And of course, I'm going to advocate that for health reasons, but I'm talking about very short physical practices. 

Here’s a quick story to explain this. I recall a big conversation I had with my superiors, extremely senior individuals within the largest professional services firm on the planet. It was when I broke the news that I was leaving to go do my own thing. This was the conversation, what stood between me and my future; me and my mission; me and my reputation - I imagined ridicule and embarrassment. It was THE conversation. About three minutes before the conversation I was terrified. Fear just takes over thoughts of what's going to happen. It’s somehow going to stop me. I'm going to be ridiculed. There's going to be financial consequences. Just all this nonsense comes up. And I decided, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not the guy I want going into the meeting, being on the backfoot, apologetic, asking for permission. I want the guy who's calm and measured and centered. So I found myself a little office. And thankfully, it had smoked glass doors and a lock. I shut the door. I locked it, I put my headphones in, and I jumped up and down like a hooligan to one of my favorite dance tracks for about 90 seconds. Big old smile on my face. I felt like I was at some rock concert, and I felt incredible.

I took my headphones out, I turned my phone off. I unlocked the door, I opened it, I walked into the meeting, would you like to know how that meeting went?

Amazingly.

They were supportive. They were thoughtful. I was kind, I was assertive, I brought certainty to it. They totally understood where I was coming from. They were incredibly kind. They even said the door's always open, you can come back whenever you want. At one point, a partner actually sat down and basically said she admired me for what I was doing and kind of wished one day that she had done that. Do you think it would have gone that way if the scared, wussy version showed up? Maybe. Maybe not.

So I think my point is this: managing our emotional state is not going to get rid of the problems, it's not going to cure a health crisis, in the moment it is not going to mean that the global pandemic is a thing of the past, it isn't going to mean that someone isn't going to get rid of that mean thing that someone said about you, it isn't going to suddenly get rid of imposter syndrome and all your fears. It's not. it's just not. I'm not going to sit here saying life suddenly becomes easy. 

It is however, going to make you infinitely more likely to take the actions necessary to overcome those challenges if you are in that state, versus the contracted one. So for your sweet, thoughtful, eternally optimistic manager when she's about to walk into one of these tough meetings, if she could just take 30 seconds, 45 seconds to “pump herself up,” the better version of her shows up and things go better.

Carlos: You do a lot of work with leaders. Do you ever work with leaders and their teams in this space? 

Devan: Yes, I do a workshop, though less frequently, when leaders ask me to do this with a wider group. 

Carlos: Any last thoughts for early-to-mid career team members about emotional freedom and how it will enhance their work with others, and their happiness at work?

Devan: I would say it starts with you. I'm going to lean on your comment about your emotions being your own. I'm not trying to paint a picture of some utopia where everyone is floating around the office like a bliss bunny. I honestly don't think that future exists. I think these companies that we work with are big and important and profit-oriented and trying to solve problems. It isn't a stress-free, demand-free environment and that's not the future we're trying to create. 

I believe we're trying to create a future where people in these positions of authority and people in these teams with lots of demands on them are equipped with the knowledge and practices necessary to handle that demand. So, what I would say to dovetail that with emotional freedom is, be consciously aware of what's happening between your ears. Just know that when you feel bad, it's because you're focused on something bad. It may or may not be true, but have the intellect, have the consciousness to question it and think about it. Because even if it's a 2mm shift, even if it's a one degree rotation upwards over a period of time, your general state of emotional wellness will be unrecognizable. If one in five terrible thoughts you have you are able to squash and replace with a good and positive one, then a week from now, a month from now, six months from now, a year from now, you will be an unrecognizable person.

Carlos: A lot of people and organizations in the past 20 years have put money and time into engagement and engagement surveys. I don’t think I’ve seen one survey that asks, “On a one to five scale, where one is ‘strongly disagree’ and five is ‘strongly agree,’ I have a meditation practice.” Or, “I take time to jump up and down and listen to uplifting music.” Almost every one of these surveys are about what’s happening around you. “My boss values my opinion.” “I have a friend at work.” “I’m getting sufficient development.”

I wonder if we aren’t missing the boat here because what I think I hear you saying is – are you ready? - this could be a t-shirt – “Engagement Starts Within.”

Devan: Oh, it does. I love it. I could not have described that better. And let's think about this. Our strategy is that how we feel and how we're going to show up and how we're going to act is dependent upon being praised by someone liking the project I'm doing, by getting a pat on the back. I'm sorry, brother, that's not a good strategy. There's some hypocrisy in my voice because obviously, I'm human. We both are. And I get triggered. And I have down days. I was really struggling a few days ago with a particular issue. And it took me a couple of hours to get out of the funk. Normally, I get myself 90 seconds. So we're all human. We're all going to get sucked in. But the point is, I know that it starts with me. it has to. I can't wait for someone or something to happen. I could sit here forever, miserable, waiting for it. I lead the charge. I have to otherwise I'm never going to be able to control my emotional state.

Carlos: I think the whole idea of “Engagement begins within” has potential to change a lot, including how we train our leaders and managers, and how they work with their teams. I have struggled with the managers I’ve worked with over the years who are emotionally contained, who lack an emotional vocabulary. Most people I’ve worked with use only 2 or 3 words to describe their emotions. They’ll never say they’re angry or sad. They’re frustrated or they’re delighted.

Devan: One of the meaning makers is how you express it in your head. For example, you talked about asking people,” Were you angry? Were you pissed off?” And they'll say, “I was kind of frustrated.” They're saying frustrated out loud, they're saying angry, they're saying bad things about you in their head which is shaping the experience they're having and shaping the meaning they attach to you. So I agree. If we had a better vocabulary and there was something in between angry and frustrated and you could genuinely use that word, it might bring you down slightly, maybe not as far down as frustrated, but down from angry. 

Carlos: Once we move the emotion from the amygdala up into the prefrontal cortex, we’ve stripped it from some of its power because we’ve named it.

Devan: I’d like to share another story about the power of language. I realized not that long ago that I don’t like getting cut off in traffic and that it triggered me, and that’s unacceptable. If I teach this stuff, I’ve got to be able to apply it to myself, so I decided to home in on language. I realized that when I was being cut off in traffic, I realized that sense of anger and frustration within me. That wasn’t the only emotion I was feeling. It was also because of how I was describing it in my head. I asked myself, what are the words I’m using? And words like, “disrespect”; “unthinking”; “danger”; all those words came out and they really fueled the sense of anger and frustration and resentment for the other person. Then I thought to myself, we know how powerful language is. It’s shaped our world. And if there isn’t a word for something, you can’t feel it or see it. You have to name it. And I asked myself, what other words came out when it happened? I recalled a specific instance when someone cut me off at the traffic light,  which resulted in me catching a red light. It was the word, “sneaky”. 

It was really quiet, it was way down the list after all the other bad words, but “sneaky” was in there. Do you know what happened when I said that word? I smiled! It’s kind of sneaky when someone nips in front of you! It might be dangerous, disrespectful, dishonorable, but it’s also sneaky. 

So, because life/the universe/God/whatever you believe in is never short of opportunities, the very next day it happened again right in front of me. Couldn’t be more dangerous. I almost hit this person, so I dialed up the word “sneaky” in my head and instead of getting angry do you know what happened? I laughed out loud.

That is how easy it is to change an experience: I just messed around with the words!

Carlos: Well, that is certainly a testimony to the power of language and, once we take control of our thought processes rather than letting them control us, what’s possible. Even if it’s something as minor as laughing instead of screaming, if we practice it enough, life changes. We get happier and the world seems like a better place. 

Thank you very much, this went places I couldn’t have anticipated and thank you for playing along!

Devan: Can I just say, Carlos seriously, I love what you do, I appreciate you as a friend and a peer in this industry, and I honor you for all the work you’re doing, your passion, your relentless desire to solve problems. Keep up the good work!

Carlos: Thank you, Devan. To my brilliant listeners (and readers), I’ll see you on my next episode. Take care!

Connect with Devan. Visit his website, https://www.shapingreality.com

Angela Mangiapane is the President of Mars Global Services at Mars, Inc. She received her MBA from York University in marketing and strategic studies, and studied strategy at the London Business School. She joined Mars in 1990 in her area of expertise, finance. Angela speaks 4 languages, and has worked in Latin America, North America and France. In 2007, Angela pursued an opportunity in People & Organization, or HR, at Mars Latin America and quickly rose to be Vice President P&O for Mars Global Chocolate. In 2017 Angela became President of Global Services, which provides global operational support for IT, Finance, Procurement, Marketing and HR.

Carlos: Angela, I'm thrilled you could find time in your very busy schedule to be here! You and I have known each other, 18 years.  I think we first met when we were both working at Mars in the early 2000s You came over from Mars IS, right?

Angela: That’s right, which has now changed to becoming Mars Digital Technology. A whole different ball game. 

Carlos: It’s been a big, full 18 years of stuff. So, tell me just a bit about you, where you come from, a quick bio if you will.

Angela:  Sure. So first of all, Carlos, I’m just thrilled to be here as well. Anything I know that has to do with teams and leadership I'm speaking to the right person, and so I want to thank you for all the support that you have given me during my time and career this 18 years. Just a little bit about me :I'm Canadian, born and bred in Canada.

Carlos: Alright well we won't hold that against you.

Angela: …and I had a great opportunity to join Mars back in 1990, so I’m celebrating 30 years. I didn’t actually think I was going to be at Mars as long as I have been because I was planning to stay in Toronto pretty much the rest of my life. But this came along and gave me this opportunity to work across various countries. So, from Canada I moved to the US. I had an opportunity to work in Latin America and then after that into the beautiful South of France and then here back now into the US. My background is finance. I’ve worked across many of the different areas within finance. Mars gave me an opportunity to work in other functions. What brought me to the US actually was a stint in the IT world, that's where we met. And then I went over into the world of P&O - People and Organization, known elsewhere as HR. Then I dabbled a little bit in some other operational areas. Then, as of four years ago, had the opportunity to head up what we call Mars Global Services which externally would be called a global business services type of organization.

Carlos: So today you're sitting atop a fairly large organization, right?

Angela: It's an organization that's made up about 3200 Associates – we call our employees Associates. We have a few towers or centers. So, we do finance; HR; indirect procurement; there's the IT which we call Digital Technologies; we do laboratories; and then we also have a small insights team that does our consumer insights.

Carlos: How long ago did you lead your first team?

Angela: It was 1995 and the reason I remember that is we had a GM by the name of Brian Lauzon who came from the US. He wanted to put in place a whole new area called Demand Planning which was essentially, what's the forecast from our consumers, right?  So I had a small team made up of about four people. And so it was a new team, and to be honest with you, also a new concept. At that time it was something very different for us to have a separate area. So 25 years ago.

Carlos: We are still in the throes of the pandemic. You sit atop an IT organization which I’m sure had a lot to do with holding the entire organization together as people were forced apart physically.  I would imagine it was a huge challenge to confront this, and to rally your team, which covers a lot of areas, to execute together to do this. Can you tell me what it was like in March 2020?

 Angela: I would say that the attributes of what Mars is very good at is coming together in a time of crisis. There was so much uncertainty. We were already, in one sense, seeing it in January because we have a hot site in China. They were already starting to experience some of these challenges and by March  the dark days hit. We were seeing what was going on in Europe and made a few changes, then started to see things change here in the US. 

I would say what was really great was from the senior leadership team at Mars, was essentially them saying, what are the things that are urgent? Their clarity of purpose of keeping our associates safe was first and foremost their priority. For our group, keeping our associates safe in an environment where we are seen as an essential service.  Our food business, for example, responded to people’s need to keep food in their pantry as who knew how long access to food would be constrained? Back in March 2020, very little was known about how long this was going to last.

So, keeping our associates safe while keeping our plants running for our consumers was very important, particularly in the categories of petcare and food. The senior leadership team was focused on how to empower the force to keep connected, and to keep the business going. 

Of course, big or small, every organization’s cash became very critical. We were very proud that no one’s pay was affected, no one was furloughed, we kept the business running.

The Digital Technologies team did a brilliant job of getting 40,000 people access to a secure VPN from home, virtually overnight. I have to give them a lot of kudos to them for 99% success, including onboarding and our intern program run virtually. Getting laptops into their house, phone support in connecting. Where previously we’d discuss going onto a platform for months, suddenly we moved into MS Teams over a weekend and found opportunity in what was really a crisis. It was okay if things weren’t perfect: we knew we’d have to get it up and then fix any bugs instead of taking time and making it perfect before releasing the technology. We had to decide who needed to get what done to implement all this practically overnight.

Carlos: You are the president of an organization. It is not even a function. This is an enabling organization at a time when that organization has never been more important, and when execution was never more important. That wasn't always true for you. You've worked your way up. You led your first team in 1995. What made it possible for you to participate in this amazing feat of keeping this massive organization running and connected and executing and delivering? What were the lessons you learned along the way? I want to know about your leadership journey and what you learned in particular about how to lead a team.

Angela: I certainly don't profess to have all the answers. I think I'm still a work in progress 

Carlos: Wait, you don't have all the answers?? Why did I invite you on my podcast?! Come on!

Angela: I would say my journey has been fraught with lots of successes as well as failures and I have to say that it's been the failures that have taught me the most.  Because you then reflect.  When you have success, you move on. When you have a failure it does give you that moment to pause and say, “OK, what am I going to learn from this?” and I'm a big believer that it is all about learning that it's not about an indication of “OK, let's go and bury your head in the sand.” So no, you pick yourself up and you move on. 

If I had to say a couple of things in terms of what I’ve learned: One is really being clear about what you stand for, and being very clear in terms of the sense of purpose that you want for the team and for the organization that you’re leading. Why are we here doing what we want to do? It's less about what I'm going to do; I didn't sit there and go “I'm now going to do the financial transactions for the business”. It was, “Why am I here? Why is this organization called MGS here? What’s it in service of for the greater good of the purpose of Mars?” And then putting that back in. So, starting with purpose for me was always important. 

Carlos: So even from the beginning in 1995 you felt that sense of the importance of purpose or is that something that along your journey you came to understand?

Angela: I think that’s along my journey… so if I think about when you're in the early stages of your career…because this is all about experiences, not about so much the level that you're at; it’s more about the experiences that you gain. If I were to start today, going back to the role that I had, we would do things differently. I would say, “Let's look at our purpose.” But at that time when you start and you're young and you are very much looking at delivery. So you look at, “What do we need to do?” So, you say, “OK listen up folks. “Here's our task, here's our objective, here is what we need to do”. You look less at, “Well, why am I even doing this?” and what you miss then is with your team as well as yourself is, “Hold on a minute: Is what I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing?” and I may have missed the boat totally. And therefore, that's why I was grounding myself in the why, Why am I doing what I need to do? What's that purpose? Because what I've learned is that people then would become less dependent on you. What you don't want to do is create a team where everything then goes back to you to decide. You really don't want that because you want to be able to have an environment where people can grow, develop, feel they can be who they want to be and they can activate, figure out how to do it in a way that they believe will fit that purpose and will drive the objective.

Carlos:  I think as you know I'm a huge proponent of purpose and its power. It is part of creating a powerful group identity, something people can connect to at a gut level.  I had a moment of awakening around this. People love stories, they love to hear things put in the context of how an individual got to their understanding. Do you recall a moment when a light bulb went off around that idea of purpose?

Angela: I don't think this was like somebody kind of gave me a smack on the head and said, “Hey it's now purpose!” I think these are things where you start to collect over time and it builds and builds. If I had to give an example of where I ah- ha moment came for me, it was actually my time in Latin America. I had a bright group of P&O folks who were managing each of their markets with the GM, and these were professionals that had Masters in psychology and organizational design and here I am, I'm leading this group  but I'm thinking to myself “I’ve got a finance degree.” 

Carlos: So this was this was a P&O, or an HR group, P&O in Mars-speak?

Angela: This was a HR group and they were down in Latin American I was leading this group. And initially when I connected with them it got to be very much around what the businesses or the markets are expected to do in growth and earnings, and so forth. Each one started commenting about the kind of talent and capability that they needed, and yet they were operating very much in this mode of, “You don't understand about my markets…” Everybody was saying how different the Colombia market was versus Argentina versus Brazil. Finally we said wait let's take this step back. What do we want Mars to be? So we kind of did a little bit of a dreaming exercise where we said, “What could Mars look like in 10 years’ time?”

Carlos: Was that to dream about the function or was it to dream about the whole business down in Latin America?

Angela: It was actually to dream about the business of Latin American, what it was going to need. 

Everybody kept saying that we were different. Everybody kept saying we need to grow. And then one of the things that always struck me when I first joined Mars is somebody telling me that Forrest Mars, Sr. had actually talked about the two most important assets in a business: the brands and its people.

Bringing that back to talking about growing this business, and recalling that sentence, which was, “Our brands and our people.” What kind of talent will we need? Then the dreaming started going with, “Well, actually, given the potential in 10 years time, what could the dream of Latin America be?” And remember this was 2007 where there was a lot about The BRIC, the growth of Latin America, Brazil, was seen as on fire.

Carlos: So the Brick is Brazil, Russia,…

Angela: India, and China. At the time back in 2007 there was lots of excitement in the emerging markets. And so we dreamt Latin America would double its size. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Because these were some of the aspirations that we had. So, what does that mean for the talent? Is this talent going to be part of the Mars, Incorporated leadership team? And all of a sudden I could see the energy in the room shift from “my market” to How might we look if we actually are anticipating and saying, “How do I grow with my Latino talent to be part of the Mars top 200 one day?” Because Latin America is going to be a big part of that portfolio. 

Carlos: That is a fabulous, fabulous story, Angela. And I think that notion of dreaming together is very potent. And: you used that language with these very pragmatic Mars folks? Because Mars people are really very feet-on-the-ground, let's keep it practical. 

Angela: You have to respect the culture of the area. This worked because of the culture that I saw there.  I'll tell you the story. When I first got there, I introduced myself as Angela Mangiapane. I have a finance background. I'm now entering this world of HR and I'm here in Latin America, period. And then we went to the next person. Next person said, “Let me introduce to you my beautiful family. I have a beautiful wife and two wonderful children. They are my heart. They are my life,” right? And I'm sitting there thinking, Gee, I’ve got two kids and a husband, too. And I said nothing.

What Latin America taught me was you have to bring your whole self to work. You cannot just leave at the door…Okay. I'm going to click. And now I don't even think about my family and my other life in my life outside of work. I go into work mode. You bring everything because you don't click it and shut it off, right? You do think of your family during the day, things are happening. It's life, life is messy, and you're going to bring that mess in with you. It was their acceptance of me, and me getting to know them. 

And it's not something I did right at the beginning. To be fair, this was a year in. I felt there was something that was missing, it was ripe to take. And I know that they're very much of the heart, the corazón. 

 To your point, do I use this language all the time? You really need to look at and determine what leading is about. Leading is about getting people to do things that they did not think was possible. So, you're bringing change. Am I here to lead or am I here to manage? Manage, is about getting your stuff done. It's providing that consistency of performance management. Actually, if I think about even how I'm leading my team right now, we always say we need to have brilliant execution and we should never be embarrassed by that, but that's managing. 

We also need to start looking at tomorrow and what we need to start building for tomorrow, which is where you can do the dreaming. 

We started building a lot more credibility because when I first took over this role, we had a lot of challenges. It was a reset and we had many challenges: the way IT was perceived, the way finance was perceived, we were just kicking off the HR side. There were a lot of naysayers. We needed to start delivering, do what we said we were going to do. Now we're at a stage where we have more and more credibility. 

Where do we want to dream going forward?  We went through a dreaming exercise and it was amazing. When you unleash that purpose is not about making money. That comes. If you figure this out, the money comes. It was about the contribution, what we're doing, from a human capital perspective. How do we increase the capability of our associates as the world is quickly, quickly changing and we need to increase our competency of analytics, as an example?

Carlos:  Let's think about purpose/dreaming as a tool in somebody's team toolkit. Would a more frontline team, like the ones you probably led in the middle-to-late nineties, still benefit from something as lofty as dreaming together? Or is it just for big leadership teams? 

Angela: I think we've got to get rid of the hierarchy kind of concept that says, “If you're a leader, then this is what you do - you think about dreams. And if you're on the line or, you're the sales guy going out there to visit the customer you're not allowed to dream.”  If I were now back at that time I’d say It is important to dream. Because dreaming unleashes your own potential. I have an example of that. 

We've been doing a pilot and we didn't take the typical section of folks from the organization. We did a bit of a diagonal cut. We were able to get people that were on the front line of sales, of finance, an account receivables person, and the overall VP of sales. Now, while we went through a dreaming exercise, we stated, “What would it look like if we had zero defects in our order flow?” So, it's a dream, right? 

Carlos: Yeah. 

Angela: And, seeing the reaction of the AR folks or that salesperson who actually has to go in and speak to the account was just great to see, because they actually felt they could come up with a solution. They weren't waiting for me or for the VP of sales. All we did is open up the sandbox or we gave them the environment that It was okay. 

Carlos: How many people were involved in this exercise?

Angela: I think when it was about 20 people. Every two weeks we have a one-hour - I call it a standup meeting because now we have 20 people and everybody just comes in and talks about what they've done. I was talking to my other colleague because he and I basically had kicked this off. and we sat back and said it's getting to a point where actually, I don't even think we need to be in it anymore. We start it off, we just say, “Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Great for coming. What’s on the agenda?” and they're managing the agenda. They're doing the updates. They figured out what the next steps are. And I said to Joe, “I'm feeling like, you know, I'm kind of in the way. I should just get out of the way now.” 

We seeded it.  The green shoots came out and we're just ensuring that we keep watering. And, let them handle it. 

Carlos: So, let me be sure I understand and that our listeners are coming along on this journey. This is a slice diagonally. So, we've got people who are frontline folks as well as more senior folks. 

Angela: Yeah. Like the AR clerk.

Carlos: So, we've got a clerk in there and you've got a director, I imagine.

Angela:,The Director of Sales who reports into the VP of Sales at Mars Wrigley attended. 

Carlos: Are these building towards some grander output, like a big report that gets issued at the end of the year? Or is it really just about what comes out in the moment? 

Angela: What comes out in the moment. We set up sprints. One of the other things that we've looked at was what needs to get done over six weeks’ period of time. We went through the data, and we said, “Why do we have so many imperfect orders?” Because ideally what you want to do is you send out the invoice, you ship to the customer, the customer pays you and you're done right? Instead, we had an activity that was taking over 20 people involved and, at times, six months to clear. Lots of waste in the system. Plus the markets talking to the actual customer. This was selling a Snickers bar to a customer.

We got involved with the folks in the market that we're selling to because we take it on from invoice to cash. There's the other part that takes the order. There's also getting the customer and ensuring that everything is fine. In reviewing this whole activity set people always talked about why it costs so much money to process this. And everybody was saying, “Well, let's just automate,” That was the answer to everything. Let's just automate it. Great. We're going to automate a mess. 

Carlos: I'm sorry. “Automate a mess,” is a great phrase. 

Angela: Let’s all just automate a mess. So then we said, “No, no, let's eliminate it. Why do we even have these disputes with the customer?  The customer is saying, “I only owe you $8” and we're saying, “No, no, you owe us a hundred,” And so always keeping that in the front of mind is what made people go, “Okay, well, what is my involvement then?” It goes back to purpose.  What's my involvement in ensuring it is flawless?

Carlos: You've got this cross-sectional team that has grown and its job is to help solve that problem of order-to-cash. Every two weeks this group gets together and talks about things they've done that have cut down the time and cost. They also talk about new ideas. People are testing out theories and ideas?

Angela: That's right. And it can come from anybody in that team.

Carlos: It sounds like it's an energized group, even without your leadership. 

Angela: At the beginning Joe and I needed to be there. Now my sense is that people are really getting excited. “Why am I doing what I'm doing?” Initially, people would have said, “Okay, I just transact something.” Now they're actually understanding that what I do has an impact with my customer, let's say a Walmart or Kroger. I can see, I can make a difference. It can make my life easier, by the associate who’s dealing with the customer, but more importantly  I just see that I don't want to be with the waste because I can then redirect my energy towards actually growing the business, giving them an idea that helps them add value to that customer relationship 

 If I ask people, “Can we map out the process of how we do order-to- cash?” it'd be like watching paint dry on the wall.  Now, I love process, but I gotta tell you it's hard to get people motivated by it.  You say, “I want to have zero dispute with Walmart. What can you do to figure it out?” And you get everybody who's associated with Walmart. 

Carlos: I'm excited by what you're talking about, because I think what it offers people is a super simple way to think about bringing their teams together and centering them around a concept or a notion that's important to everybody.

Angela: That's right. What I'm also hoping to do out of this,  whether it's in work or about what's going on currently in our society, is that it's easy for someone to feel I'm just a small cog in this big wheel and what is my action going to do that's gonna make a difference? And I think if somehow, even just with this one exercise, we can get that team to believe that everybody on that team is relevant. “I can make a difference,” People want to feel that they actually are relevant. That I have done something that is going to be of value.

Carlos: Angela I think it's time for us to wrap up this conversation, which went a direction I never imagined. I struggle sometimes with helping teams understand why having a shared purpose is useful,  necessary to create productive collaboration. You've put it so simply. You have inspired me with these stories.. I want to say a huge thank you for the way you're thinking about this, for what you've brought to the teams you've led, and for what you bring to our listeners today. 

Angela: Well, thank you very much, Carlos. You were one of the many seeds that I have had, but a very important one. And I want to thank you for all the coaching and mentorship that you have given me when you were at Mars. 

Carlos: We've been speaking today with Angela Mangiapane who's the president of Mars Global Services. And until the next time, everybody, keep collaborating.

Angela: And keep dreaming!

Lindy Greer, Associate Professor at University of Michigan Ross School of Business studies team dynamics. She’s the associate editor of the Academy of Management Journal. With a BA from Wharton, Lindy did her PhD research in the Netherlands where she taught social psychology for many years. She then followed her “academic grandmother” and mentor to Stanford where she taught for 6 years. In 2019 Lindy was recruited by Dean DeRue at Michigan’s Ross School of Business where among other things she is the faculty director at the Sanger Leadership Center.

I read an article on teams and power by Lindy and found it so compelling, I reached out to Lindy who joined me for the following interview.

Carlos: I’m really curious about how you found your way to this topic. Can you tell us about how you came to focus on hierarchy and power?

Lindy: Sure. I started my dissertation in 2004 researching diversity and inclusion back in the days when nobody knew what it was, and I was in the Netherlands. In one of my studies where I wanted to study race and gender differences, I asked people to describe the different types of diversity in their team. Most people were more fixated on the power structures of their group than gender or race. Granted, gender or race probably correlated to the power structure, but the universal type of difference in teams that most people were thinking about was the power difference. 

At that point, in the literature, we didn’t know a lot about power and teams. There was a whole lot in psychology about how power can change individuals. If you had power you were more creative, you think more abstractly, you’re more likely to chase your goals. But all that research was done in laboratories and experiments where it was one person on their own. No one was trying to understand 5 people in a room within a team: how does power play out there? How does my power get nuanced or changed by the power someone else has in the room?

So I became very interested in power structures, hierarchy being the one we talked about the most, so I started doing research in hierarchy. I was still living in the Netherlands, junior faculty, and the Netherlands is one of the lowest power distance countries in the world. And I really appreciated how empowering it was. So my thesis in my 20s was that hierarchy was terrible. It was the root of all evil in companies. There were a few famous studies that came out around that time in social psychology claiming that hierarchy is functional. These studies were done at the individual level again where they showed someone a hierarchy and the brain would work more quickly because there was structure.

And people were taking that finding, then going out to a team of people and saying hierarchy is good. But at least my lived experience was that, no, this empowering flatness of the Netherlands is great, the hierarchies I’d been in weren’t always legitimate, there’d been a lot of conflict. So I went out on a limb for a long time trying to document all the many nefarious ways in which hierarchy is terrible. 

I did a meta analysis even at one point and did find across all the literature and my own research the net effect of hierarchy was negative – small, but negative.

Carlos: When you say the net effect was negative, how does that effect show up?

Performance, broadly stated, across indicators. So if you separate out different indicators of performance - so productivity, creativity, innovation, efficiency  - we didn’t find differences. But across the whole barrage of team performance outcomes, the effect of hierarchy was negative. Small, but negative. I think with 95% certainty it was going to be small but negative. Not a big effect meaning that it’s highly moderated, the different aspects of the situation, leadership, etc. could potentially change or reverse that effect. And that was on average. Looking at 60 some studies in science, each study had several hundred teams - a very highly powered sample - that was the main conclusion: the more hierarchy a team has, the more likely it is to perform worse across a range of outcomes.

Then I had to go talk about these findings, especially with students who wanted to go do something with it, and realized saying, “Don’t do hierarchy...” well, what do you do? There wasn’t a great alternative. And if you looked into practice, things like holacracy, they’ve turned out not to do very well because the guidebook to holacracy is over 100 pages. And the bureaucracy it takes to make holacracy work is even more rigid and slow than good old-fashioned hierarchy.

Carlos: And you mentioned in a talk I saw that Zappos, among others, implemented holacracy.

Lindy: Yes, and Tony Hsieh (Zappos CEO) was one of the biggest evangelists for it, and he has quietly backed away from in recent years which is interesting. And I see that in startups in Silicon Valley who are trying to emulate Zappos doing holacracy, and they just got so bogged down in the details of it. I also went through a lot of companies during this period trying to look for examples of how teams were trying to organize that isn’t hierarchy, and at best you could find small innovations within a team but certainly not across an entire organization of not having hierarchy.

Then I started to wonder what then? What do we tell our students?

One of my questions at the time, especially after being around teams that were high-performing that had hierarchy, was,  “If it’s not hierarchy that’s the problem, is it how we structure it and how we use it?”

Around this time I had an MBA student who was a Navy Seal. I was very curious: how does this high performing organization do hierarchy? He shared a great story that I found very inspiring. If they’re on a mission on the ground, very clear hierarchy or chain of command. If a commander says, “Get out now.” there’s no devil’s advocacy or questions asked. You just move. However when that same team goes back to base to debrief, they literally take their stripes off at the door to the meeting room. They sit around a round table in the meeting room with everybody sitting there having a voice, they flatten out. They all brainstorm and share ideas of what worked and didn’t work in the preceding mission. For example, it could be the youngest person on the ground who saw a sniper that no one else saw. That’s critical information for the team to surface for the next mission. They’re able to do this by symbolically removing the hierarchy and empowering even the most junior people in the hierarchy to speak up.

So they brainstorm, share information, go back out of the room, put on their stripes and fall back into hierarchy. This is really interesting to me because maybe hierarchy doesn’t always have to be experienced as hierarchy. Maybe the same team is not always equally hierarchical. That maybe it can change how it feels during the day, maybe in slow moments, like in the Seals, they feel a clear chain of command, and in other moments they feel that it’s flat.

I did some studies that didn’t work trying to see if maybe the optimal team has hierarchy and equality. They have an organizational structure but it never feels that way. I found that balance just didn’t work. So I started looking at sequences like the Navy Seals, and can a team fluctuate across a day or a week or a year in terms of how much hierarchy is enacted by a leader vs. not. So we did about a 6-month study of Silicon Valley startups to see if startups’ CEOs would flex the way that Navy Seals did. We found that about a third of the time we would see startups do flexing. The leaders, similar to the Navy Seals, would intentionally enact hierarchy, or intentionally enact equality, but it was always intentionally done in these companies. Even within a meeting there’d be a clear segment of hierarchy where the leader comes forward, makes him or herself big, gives direction, the goal or the vision of the meeting, then makes themselves smaller flattening out the hierarchy and says, “I hired you all because you’re smarter than me. Tell me your opinion.”

Carlos Do you find any confusion among team members about when it was time to go flat? If not, what were the behaviors of the leader that signaled and cued that it’s time to go flat?

Lindy: The flexing like in the meeting, and everything that we saw in the startups that flexed effectively: there was clear signaling primarily on behalf of the leader. Sometimes by the team but more often than not, the leader was the conductor and there would be often a ritual. In the Seals they removed their stripes. What we saw in the startups was that there were often artifacts that were brought out. For example, whenever the Post-its came out everyone knew it was time to share their ideas. Another company had a basketball that got passed around the room whenever they really wanted people to speak up and whoever held the basketball had the right to speak and everyone else had to listen. It was very much enculturated and people knew the signal. 

I’ve had companies that were a little more informal than using an artifact. There was a catch phrase that everybody just knew what it meant such as, “I hired you all because you’re smarter than me.” Everybody immediately transitioned into “Yup, and now’s the time I’ve got to speak up.”

Then when the hierarchy went back you’d see signals. It could be a catch phrase, but also a leader’s body language, whether it was conscious or not, often would visibly show what role they were playing. Were they leading from the front trying to be big, were they leading from the back trying to be small? One leader I saw would go to the back of the room in moments where he was trying to flatten out the team. I’ve also heard stories of leaders who would even leave the room during those moments to physically remove their presence and then come back in. Sometimes you could see, even within a brainstorming session, if a team gets into trouble, there’s a conflict or they cannot see their way forward, if the leader’s in the room you can see them going from being in the back of the room and being smaller to sitting up, lowering their voice – all the cues you have for power – and saying, “In my experience, this is how I would deal with the situation.” Then the team would move forward again, and the leader would make themself small again.

Carlos: It seems to me there’s a balancing act here between using the hierarchy effectively and switching gears to that flatness. Regarding all the work they did at Google, Amy Edmondson’s work on psychology safety: have you looked at how all this plays with psychological safety in the team?

Lindy: It can predict psychological safety. You could also argue that psychological safety is a prerequisite for the flat burst to work. It’s definitely inter-related. Psych safety is defined as a willingness to take a risk. Then if you look at the behaviors in a team that predict that, one of which is knowing that the leaders is going to give you a time and a place to share your opinion, it certainly would be a way to enhance psych safety in a team. 

That means that we also saw a few flexing fails which were painful and a little bit funny, at least from the outside. The leader would say, “Hey, I hired you because you’re smarter than me. What’s your opinion?” and the team would stare blankly for 5 minutes and the leader would say, “Ok, great meeting. Let’s go on then.” So clearly on those teams, flexing is also contingent on there being a pre-existing level of safety. What we found in our study is that teams that were able to flex effectively there was a lot of work done to enable flexing such as building trust between the leader and the team members.

In order for a leader to ask that question and empower the team, the leader had to trust the team which means hiring a team the leader believes is competent. It also means for the leader, especially in terms of micro-managing younger leaders, to just have faith and to try to trust and share the power. 

For the flexes that went from flat back to hierarchy, it took a strong sense of trust to go from the team to the leader because no one likes to have their power taken away. In that moment when we all have a voice and then, “Wait, now the stripes are going back on?” No one liked that. That was showing us that that type of flex is hard. What we found there on teams that were more willing to accept that is they trusted the leader to do the right thing, which comes from the leader’s competence, communication skills and the relationships the leader built with the team members.

Also, interestingly, teams that had a very strong sense of mission were more willing to accept a flex into hierarchy because they understood the purpose of it and why it mattered. For example, one of the quotes from our qualitative study from a CEO was, “When I pull up the reins, I explain why.” So recently we were going out for funding and it was a bomb run, and everybody knows what funding is like in life in a startup, heads down, there’s a hierarchy.”

That was really interesting to me because it really resonated with the Navy Seals example. When it’s life or death that’s on the line, and we know why we’re doing it we accept the hierarchy. So startups that didn’t necessarily have the Glory For Country or whatever like the Seals, were still able to inspire people around a mission enough that they were able to accept the hierarchy. 

What was interesting to me was that the normal state of being in most of these companies that were effectively flexing was hierarchy. About 80% of the time, more or less, they were in hierarchy because during task execution the hierarchy was there. So these moments of flatness – really, bursts of flatness- it wasn’t as though these teams were usually flat and then the leader pulled the leader card. More often the team had a hierarchy they accepted, they worked with, they lived with. And every now and then, the leader would say “Now we need to remove the hierarchy for a moment. Let’s everybody speak up.” And then end that and go back into the hierarchy.

Carlos: There was a term you used, “emotional unpredictability”, the one in the talk on YouTube, that clearly relates to that switch from hierarchy to flat and back again. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect of leader behavior?

Lindy: We’re starting to understand the different things we can do on teams to signal power vs. signal flatness. One of the interesting things is emotion. Emotions have an amazing ability to either push people away and accentuate power differences, or to bring people closer.

I just gave a talk for the IESE in Barcelona for their research group there on the emotional unpredictability paper, so it’s very top of mind right now. One of the things we’ve seen that increases power distance between a leader and a team is when leaders are unpredictable in their emotional display. So often leaders interact with many different teams, they have many different inputs. Leaders have a lot of emotions, but if you go to any given follower, they’re only privy to what happens in their team with that leader, and 100% their life is that leader. That’s their boss, their day-to-day, whereas for the leader that follower is one of many. This asymmetry where the leader has a lot of emotions that have nothing to do with the follower, but the follower thinks the leader is everything so the follower thinks the leader’s emotions are always about him or her. And so, leaders are often perceived as being emotionally unpredictable. 

Certainly for me when I was younger, I was in a research group where I was convinced the leader of it was just crazy because I never could just understand the emotions which were so very hard to predict. There was a lot of power struggles in that lab, a lot of people throwing each other under the bus daily which is when I started this research. The older I got, and the more I have my own teams, and when I’ve gotten feedback that said, “Lindy, we think you’re angry at us.  What’s going on?”

“Oh, wait. It’s not you. I just got a paper rejected. Nothing to do with this team.”

So I started to understand there is often this information asymmetry. One of the job responsibilities of  leaders is to make sure their emotions are showing the right amount of power they want to show. If you do want to  be very powerful, pull up the reins, be hierarchical or even dominate another group, if you’re unpredictable in your emotions it keeps people on their toes. However, if you want to be able to have a team that can flatten out, that can trust you and be safe, giving predictability to your emotions is very helpful. 

And so is providing clarity. If you walk into a meeting and say, “Hey, I just had a paper rejected, I might be a little bit off. It’s not about you all.” That actually can help flatten out a team and help humanize a leader. Those are some signals that we’re finding for how you can use emotions strategically to flex a hierarchy in either direction.

Carlos: You have to be willing to be vulnerable, be willing to open up about your emotions.

Lindy: We’re showing emotions even though we don’t realize it. If you’re irritated about something, even if you don’t show emotions, there’s a lot of research showing that those in lower power, the followers, are fixated on the emotions of those in power because it determines their daily life.

Carlos: So, there’s emotional seepage happening? 

Lindy: Yes! And then if you’re slightly irritated, they don’t know why, they think it’s about them. Then they get upset and irritated, too, and all of a sudden you have a terrible meeting and as a leader you don’t know why. You want to think everyone on the team is doing a great job and now everybody’s upset because you walked in the door with tension from your last meeting.

Carlos: I have a question about culture. You’ve worked in the US, in the Netherlands: does this 80%-of-the-time-hierarchy finding apply across cultures?

Lindy: That’s a good question.  There isn’t enough data in cultures outside of western cultures to really give a good answer to that. I would expect, of course, that it would vary a little bit. Some cultures, say like China, naturally are in hierarchy more than that whereas other cultures like the Netherlands really dislike hierarchy and try to avoid it.

That being said, the Netherlands is a country of paradoxes. While they pride themselves of being the most egalitarian or flat country in the world, it was very hierarchical under the surface. Always. For example, everybody should address each other by first names, but when you hire a professor for the department, usually with a decision done by whomever the department chair was, no one else had a vote in it which is even more hierarchical than say, a typical American department where all the professors above tenure vote on all the hiring of all professors. So even though on the surface it looked like it was very flat, I wouldn’t be surprised they also fit in the 80/20 rule, but it’s just much more behind the scenes.

Carlos: I worked for many years at Mars, incorporated which is a family-owned business and very flat, at least that is always their objective. They fluctuate between sometimes too many layers and sometimes too few. But anyway, that egalitarianism is an ethos that pervades that culture, and don’t kid yourself for a minute that it isn’t extremely hierarchical, especially where it concerns the Mars family who are still actively involved in the business. I think I heard you say this, but I wrote down, “Hierarchy seems inevitable in human organization.”

Lindy: Yes, it’s literally hardwired into our hormones. From evolution we’ve been working as human beings to coordinate our actions. So if you were hunting for a mammoth back in the day, you needed a hierarchy for someone to say, “Throw the spears now”. There’s an interesting hormonal study showing there’s a natural preference to sort people into in-groups and ou- groups as well as to who is the leader and who is not. The trouble is, though, that our evolutionary preference for hierarchy often gravitates towards more dominance-based hierarchies which are highly ineffective for collaboration. You need an expertise-based hierarchy for collaboration. 

So, hierarchy is ubiquitous, but then it’s a question of how can we make sure that if we’re going to go with it, that we design hierarchies that are effective. The flexing work I mentioned is a lot about how to use hierarchies. There’s also a lot of research coming out about how to design hierarchies to work. One of the basic takeaways is basing hierarchies on expertise to the best of your abilities so that the leader knows most over the whole project above anybody. Maybe there are specialists within the team, but at the oversight level the leader does know most. 

Carlos: Based on your book, the expertise-based hierarchy makes a ton of sense. I’ve noticed one of the missing pieces often is something like emotional intelligence, the ability to read the room, to have empathy for your people and interact with them based on it. What is the right balance between expertise-based leadership and some kind of emotional acuity?

Lindy: You need both. You want the leader that knows most but also has the social skills to use the hierarchy effectively. I prefer the term social skills over EQ or emotional intelligence. When I do leader development I get irritated by things like Strengths Finder and or leadership styles or even EQ  because it implies this very fixed mindset that is also tied to inequality and a lack of inclusion over you’re born a leader or not, and that there’s a certain prototype of what a leader is and if you’re not born that way you should never dare to lead. And that makes me very unhappy. So, based on the data in this area I very much prefer language that has a growth mindset around leaders. Leaders need to have a toolkit of skills, the skills just like math or reading are skills that can be broken down and taught to anybody. It just requires intentional effort. Just like you had to do your problem sets for math at school, you need to be doing your leadership behavior experiments as a leader to get better at it everyday. And there’s many behavioral skills that leaders need and the more the leader has those tools the better they are at leading.

Carlos:  One of the things from your book that I cherish the most is the Hippo Pond Analogy.  I think the Hippo Pond has some application for your average day-to-day team leader, and how they think about how they show up with their team.

Lindy: Yes, and also how to design your team, how to structure hierarchies well. The way I like to talk about hierarchies anymore is that you first off, if you’re the only person on the team, you’re the leader: you’re the hippopotamus. Now, what do we know about hippos? They’re very large, ferocious, scary, they have a lot of power. Hippos often live in water. They can go above water be big and scary, show their teeth. Or they can go under the water and you just see their little eyes floating around in the pond.

As you start to bring employees onto your team as a leader, you can imagine them having different islands in your pond where they have ownership.  We know from research the best hierarchies have horizontal differentiation where each person on a team has a clear area of ownership they can stand on.

As leader, as hippo, you still own the entire pond including the islands. But when someone is on their own island, they have the most expertise, the autonomy and the decision power to make decisions for that area. So maybe within your own pond, your startup, you’ve hired a CTO. He or she lives on the technology island. They may hire more employees who live on the island, or they set up camp, too. Everybody has a clear plot of land that is theirs. That level of their own power and autonomy is very important for effective teams.

At the same time, as the hippo, you are allocating land to these different groups and factions, maybe you have a marketing island, too, you never forget you are the hippo.  It is your pond, you are the leader. However, and this goes into the manifestation of leadership and hierarchy, you need to be very intentional as the hippo if you’re always out of the pond snarling at people, which means it’s going to be a very hierarchical little area where no one ever speaks up even though they have their own plot of land. Or, you’re willing to occasionally go under water and let people do the work of their plots of land. You just have your eyes there. You’re still there, you’re still watching. If there’s a problem, if marketing  technology get into a fight, or if they’re not coordinating, you rise up out of the water in hippo ferociousness and save the day.

A couple of things about this are really important. 

A lot of leaders are scared to share power, especially early on. They think that if they give power to someone else, say to make a decision on marketing, it means that they have less power as a leader. Yet we know from research that power isn’t necessarily a zero sum. Actually sharing power with others makes you more powerful. So how do you get someone to have more confidence? The metaphor of the hippo going under water. When you go under water, you are still a hippo. Still the exact same ferocious creature with the same amount of power, you’re just under water. So how can you become more aware of your body language, your signals, how you manage meetings in a way that you can intentionally go underwater in those moments when you want to flatten out? Then, if the team has a problem, you rise up and you’re still a hippo. But the whole way through you’re still a hippo, you’re just choosing how much of your power you’re showing at any given moment.

Carlos: How do you define power?

Lindy: Control of resources. Resources could be a job title, expertise, your network, others’ perception of your status. All these are different types of resources. If you look at the older definitions of power they discuss the bases of power, and different types of resources. I really admire the work of Jeff Pfeffer at Stanford who has a great book on Power, Why Some People Have It and Others  Don’t. He says one of the skills of leadership you should have in your toolbox is being able to read a power landscape effectively, and knowing how much power you have. I think people often over- and underestimate their power. So having an actual understanding of exactly how much power you have under any given situation, as well as those of others, and understanding the dynamics entails how you should be leading.

For me, as I came to Michigan Ross to run the leadership center, my power at Michigan is much more than I had at Stanford. At Stanford I was used to having to show power to be heard, to get people to listen to me. Now, if I already have a larger power base here, and I’m a big hippo, I terrify people. I had to unlearn some of my behaviors and spend more time under water. Showing power or submerging power is sticky, so the more that we can get really flexible, changing the amount of power you’re showing moment-to-moment to match the power landscape you’re in is really important.

When I had the privilege of being around CEOs, who were eons better leaders than I am, it’s one of things I noticed a lot: how quickly they shift their power. If you see them in a roomful of people, you can see them going higher out of the water, or lower person-to-person, moment-to-moment. I’m not that quick. It’s still a skill I’m trying to polish.  Read the power landscape and  imagine the power I should be showing to what’s happening in that moment.

Carlos: Imagine you’re talking to a fairly junior leader, someone who has been leading teams for maybe a year or two: Is there one piece of advice you might offer someone in this area of power in the Hippo Pond to help them accelerate their development as a leader of a team?

Lindy: Get regular feedback from those around you. There’s a research article that just came back that said that leaders who ask for negative feedback perform better over time. For me it took me a year before I realized how many people I scared. If I’d asked for that feedback earlier… Especially for young leaders that feedback is critical, and that growth mindset, over how to intentionally work on a behavior when you walk into a meeting, as well as being intentional about what you need to do for that specific team for that moment, and each week have a new behavior.

This summer I worked a lot on my inclusive behaviors. Can I ask more questions than give statements in meetings? Can I speak more slowly? Can I speak less? And each week I would have a different behavior with an inclusion I would work on, and then I asked my team what worked and what didn’t? Sometimes stuff didn’t work. For me as a scientist asking questions for me meant saying “why?” I hadn’t realized that “why” sometimes can be a bit of a hostile question. They’d give me the feedback the next week saying, instead of asking why could you please explain your reasoning?

As a leader, especially as a young leader, you can have an executive coach which accelerates development more than most things, but if you can’t have the luxury of having an executive coach, I do believe that we can coach ourselves leadership. For example, on our website,  sanger.umich.edu, we have a framework for how to coach yourself leadership with 5 steps. i think the more leaders get on that type of development journey where they choose categories of behaviors to work on each week, try a new behavior, and then get the feedback and then update - that’s the quickest way to get better at leadership.

If you go to our Philosophy tab, to Journey, we have a whole 5-step process with videos and workbooks on how to teach yourself leadership.

One of the things I’m very geekily excited about, It might be the coolest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m a geek so bear with me, is we’ve made the world’s first searchable encyclopedia of data-driven leadership behaviors. You can say, I want to be more inclusive, and it pulls up everything we know from science on specific behaviors that allow you to be more inclusive. It will give you a behavior to work on each week. So maybe there are 10 behaviors that come up right now for inclusion. Our encyclopedia, right now, will allow you to choose that. And, if you follow our social media, every Tuesday we do a Tech Tuesday. We bring out a tips from the encyclopedia and give people a specific behavior to work on for the week.

Carlos: Lindy, thank you so much for this fascinating interview. You can check out the amazing tools Lindy describes at https://sanger.umich.edu/journey/. 

Take care!