Teaming With Ideas

Ulf Hahnemann, Chief HR Officer, AP Moller Maersk

In 2016, Ulf Hahnemann became the head of HR for AP Moller Maersk, a global shipping company responsible for those big blue container ships that carry about 20% of the world’s trade. Ulf launched his career in Human Resources at Mars in 1989, and has lived and worked all over the world including Norway, Australia and in Tennessee in the US prior to accepting the role of Chief Human Resources Officer at Maersk. In this interview, Ulf shares some brilliant stories and lessons learned.

Carlos: Do you remember when you led your first team?

Ulf: Yes, I do. I led my first team when I became a sales manager for Mars in Norway. I led 8 people in the Impulse team who managed impulse buying of chocolate in gas stations and kiosks in Norway.

Carlos: Reflecting on that, is there a lesson learned, an event or incident that sticks with you?

Ulf: There is, actually. It was quite a forming time in my life or at least in my career. My brother-in-law, an American, was in the Euro fast food business. He was probably 25 years older than me and was visiting Norway just when I’d been assigned my new team, and he asked me, “What are you going to measure them on? What’s the goal with this team?”

I came up with a lot of things I was going to do with them. As I listed off all the things I’d planned, he answered, “No, that’s not going to work. You have to focus on three things. There are 3 things that drive sales with that team.”

I said, “That sounds too simple.”

Then he gave me the task of figuring it out overnight. At breakfast the next morning he asked me, “Have you worked it out?”

I replied, “Maybe it’s the number of visits each salesperson does. Then the number of displays in each store, and maybe the number of each distribution point of chocolate in each store.”

He said, “You’re going to do that for the next 2 years. That’s how you’ll measure them, and nothing more.” And I thought that was crazy, but I tried it. And it worked.

Carlos: So wait, he asked you to think about it overnight, you came up with those 3 things, and they were exactly right?

Ulf: He didn’t really question them, he thought they were good enough. He was more interested in me rationalizing it. I think they were about 80% correct. His point was, you focus on those 3 things and you do nothing else, that’s your job. You get everybody else focused on those 3 KPIs for the next 2 years. But the truth is, I did it. And we increased sales week by week by week. I learned that I always focus on 3 things that I do. Always. And I think the team really got obsessed with these numbers. I think we probably changed one or two of the KPIs over time, of course, but work became easy in some ways. We uncomplicated it by focusing on a very few things that were really instrumental in driving sales. Then we had some fun around it, a lot of competitions, etc.

Carlos: As you know about me, I’m a fiend for focus. “Let’s focus on the things that matter most”, right? One of the barriers I encounter is people who say, “Yes, BUT, all these other things matter, too. Certainly we are going to be held accountable for them” What’s the conversation you have with the person who says that?

Ulf: The reason why it’s difficult for people, including myself, at times is that it’s counterintuitive. It’s just not human nature to focus on 3 things. It doesn’t make sense that that can be really effective. What I say to people is come up with these 1, 2 or 3 things that you’re going to do. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to come up with other stuff because that’s just the way that life and business. There are other things that happen and other things you have to focus on as well. But these are the 3 things that really matter. So forget this notion that nothing else matters, that’s not the case, but these are the things that really matter.

Carlos: So do they become decision tools? For example, when we have to invest money somewhere and therefore not somewhere else,  can you use it as a decision aid?

Ulf: Absolutely. Basically it becomes your strategy. It’s a simple way of talking about strategy. It’s a prioritizing tool in saying therefore we’re going to invest in these areas or spend most of our time on these things. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be other things that come up but you don’t need to talk so much about them, you just do them.

Carlos: When, along your leadership journey, did you make a choice about what to do or not to do that didn’t work out as well as the big 3 did?

Ulf: I don’t know if it was specifically a decision, but I was definitely put in positions where I wasn’t particularly good. So, at the time I was an Organizational Development and Design director for Mars in Europe, and I was an individual contributor doing a lot of org design and managing restructurings, and I was really not very good at it. I realized at the time that I’m not good on my own. I’m good on a team, and I’m good at leading teams, but being by myself as an individual consultant I was horrible. 

Carlos: Of course, that’s exactly what I do! So teams and teamwork, you feel like that’s your milieu where you really do well. Was there a time leading a team where you look back and shake your head think, man I wish I hadn’t done that? Let’s assume you learned a valuable lesson from it, are there things you look back on and think if I were to do it again I might make a different choice?

Ulf: Yes. There was a time when I was leading a team in Mars Petcare North America. I drove this team like I had all the answers. I was giving everybody directions. I didn’t have great people on the team or at least I didn’t necessarily get the best out of them because I was giving them all the direction, I had all the answers and they just needed to go and do. It suddenly occurred to me that that didn’t work. They were very unhappy and it was chaotic. We didn’t achieve anything. We had lots of conflict. And I suddenly realized that the role of the leader wasn’t to have the answer. The role of the leader was to bring people together to create the capacity for us to create change in the company. And my role was to bring the right people together, to create an environment of trust where people could be at their best and that they had the answers, or we had them together. That’s how I’ve tried to lead ever since.

Bring a team together with the right competencies, and build capability. You build a team that has an ability to affect or impact the organization to enable a strategy, or has the capacity to do that, and have a positive impact on the organization versus a leader coming up with a lot of workstreams, actions or decisions, etc. I think it’s much more powerful to create an atmosphere where people feel trusted and comfortable enough to use their brains and intelligence, and they come up with the solutions that are the right ones for the organization. 

Carlos: Creating the capacity for the organization to change: do you believe that, as an HR person, HR has that, as part of its role, to be an agent of change for organizations?

Ulf: Absolutely. I have no doubt that that’s the role of HR. At AP Moller Maersk, which was quite an old-fashioned shipping company that has been incredibly successful but was stuck in a situation where the share prices hadn’t appreciated in a decade in a very difficult industry and capital-intensive industry, my job as head of HR, and my team’s job, is to create the conditions for change. And that’s in many different aspects. I see myself and my team as absolutely responsible for the results of the company, and if we’re stuck then our job is to enable us to get unstuck.

Carlos: Change is considered a discipline. There are people who do change management. Do you have generalists on your team as well as specialists? And you hold everyone equally responsible for being agents of change even if they’re a generalist?

Ulf: Yes, for sure. I think we all have to anchor ourselves in the success of the enterprise but also in the strategy, and do our work in a way that slowly but surely moves the corporation or the organization, which is then made up of individuals or teams, in the direction of where we want to go. That’s everybody’s responsibility.

Carlos: Speaking of change, COVID, lockdowns, pandemic, etc. How have you adapted? What have you learned about yourself, about leading teams in the face of this pandemic? 

Ulf: We have 750-780 HR people across the world. I myself have a colleague in Colorado, one in Spain. It was already a remote team. But still I think I have learned to be even better at proactively following up with people and checking in with them. Checking in with them individually but also doing team check-ins on how we are doing mentally, etc. But I also would say that I have always worked from home, personally, a lot. I’ve worked remotely a lot and worked with people who were remote a lot so I don’t think it is significantly different. 

Carlos:  What is it about you, both as a team member and leading a team, that has caused you to feel that that is where you are most effective?

Ulf: I think my talent or main competence is bringing the best out of people. Making people believe that they have the answer. I’m much more comfortable doing that than having the answer myself.  Let me give you an example. I was asked to be an interim general manager for a Mars Pet division, which is a $500,000,000 business which I did for about 14 months. This was a business that was in dire straits – really, really in trouble. I was asked on a Sunday night in January. It was announced on Monday Morning. The CEO of that division was asked to leave. I was the head of HR being announced as the interim CEO.

On Tuesday, everybody asked me for the solution to get out of this catastrophe. We were declining by 6% in revenue. The Friday before I was the head of HR and nobody asked me then. Four days later everybody asked me the answer, which made no sense, and frankly said something about those who were asking to some extent. I was really shocked about this. It made me nervous because I really didn’t know what to do.

After a few days, I decided that my job was to help the organization believe that we had the answer in-house. We didn’t need anyone to come in and tell us the answer. The answer wasn’t with me, and it wasn’t with the management team, but it was collectively somewhere within the organization.

We created an unusual project team. For example, we took one of the lowest level sales planning managers because the sales forecast was a political number. It wasn’t true. I wanted the truth. We added the sales director, the marketing head, some research people, etc.  They worked for 4 or 5 weeks on analysis and some solutions, then we decided on a strategy. We took 16 brands and decided to focus on 5. I wanted 3, but they insisted on 5. We called it Drive Five and it became super successful. My point is, everyone was looking to me and I knew I hadn’t a clue what to do.  But I did know that I had this talent of getting people to believe that we knew what to do as a team. There were 700 people in the office who got super-excited about this process, and we turned it around.

Carlos: Was there anybody who influenced that thought? Was there a mentor or a leader who role modeled that for you or was it just a situation-based inspiration?

Ulf: Carlos, I know exactly what happened. It was that Tuesday when everyone questioned me, my second day in the position. They wanted me to actually sit in the CEO’s seat to show that somebody was in charge. I thought it was crazy. Mars has an open office, and I was already sitting in the management circle area, but they wanted me to literally sit in his chair at his desk. I thought this was nonsense, but it showed me the psyche of the organization, the fear, the search for solutions and leadership. But I thought we needed almost the opposite.

When I got home that Tuesday night I was scared. I didn’t sleep well. The next morning I drove to the office at 8:00 in the morning, I sat in the parking lot, and I looked at this building with 700 people in it, and I thought, I can’t go in there. I’m frozen. I’m paralyzed. I cannot go in there because everyone is looking to me for the solutions and I didn’t have one. I hadn’t a clue what to do.

So I called a headhunter I knew in New York. A woman in her late 60s. I told her I was sitting in the parking lot, I can’t do this, and I think I’m going to call my boss in McLean, Virginia and tell him I can’t do this, they have the wrong guy. After about an hour of speaking with her, she asked me what the leader who can solve this looks like, and how this leader acts. I described it for her – somebody who could come in and facilitate this, and get the people to provide the answers because I thought the expertise was in the house.

Then she does the classic trick and asks me to role-play as this person. So I acted this person, who was probably myself. Then I gathered everyone for a town hall meeting on Wednesday morning, The first thing I did was tell everyone that needed to stop asking me for the solution because I didn’t have it no matter how many times I’m asked, but we have it together and we’re going to find the wisdom here. And we did.

Carlos: What a great story! It was a headhunter that was able to hear you and then ask that wonderful question, “What would that leader look like”.

Ulf: We all have it within us mentally.

Carlos: Great example of one person having an impact with the mere asking of a question. Are there other leaders who have influenced your thinking and philosophy of leadership?

Ulf: I had a session in Austria with Linda Gratton from the London Business School who is an iconic professor in HR. She was teaching a group of 30-40 people which really shaped my views around HR. I have used her principals ever since. The main themes were around an organization being systemic: everything is linked. We think we have impact on one thing, but we have to impact multiple things at the same time and affect the system.

The other thing was moving an organization from the cycle of despair to the cycle of hope by building trust in the organization. This is exactly the principle I’ve used at Maersk.

Carlos: I think a lot about trust because I’ve encountered a lot of bad thinking on the subject. I think we have to consider it when we’re building teams and organizations. I think there are more effective ways to build trust, and there are less effective ways. So, gathering everyone in a town hall and saying, “Ok everyone we’re going to do a trust fall to build trust” or going out on a ropes course. Those are fun things to do, and they help you feel better in relationships, but they don’t necessarily help you build organizational trust in my experience.

Ulf: I used interviews and my onboarding program to help form a hypothesis of what our organization needed to change, and to get some inspiration and  ideas of what we needed to strengthen our weaknesses. Also to determine what the level of trust was in the organization which is more intuitive than anything else. We basically focused on 5-6 areas to build trust.

1. Make sure we had a really clear, engaging strategy that people understand.

   1. To build trust, people must be anchored in an exciting future, to hope and believe they’re working for something that makes sense.

2. Ensure people are communicating in an adult-to-adult way. 

   1. We worked with our communications team to encourage speaking the truth and eliminate the common parent-child form of communication within organizations.

   2. Discuss the sweet AND the sour. 

   3. We can handle it at home so we can handle it at work. What we can’t handle is being told just a little bit about what’s going on.

3. Create line managers who were people managers responsible for managing people. 

   1. Managing people is a responsibility and a privilege, not just an entitlement.

   2. We introduced Gallup Q12 to measure the quality of line managers and give them a tool to raise them and their teams up to a higher level.

4. Eliminate triangulation when communicating.

   1. Go directly to the person and speak with them instead of talking to a 3rd person about them, which is poison in an organization.

5. Ensure the right people are in the right roles – performance management.

We’ve done a whole range of iconic moves on the culture to let everyone know we’re empowering them and treating them as adults. 

Example: We had a very formal dress code: suits and ties, white shirts, black shoes, black belt, etc. That is not a way to treat adults. You don’t need a policy to tell adults how to dress in the morning. You can assume 99% know how to do this and you don’t need to design anything for the 1%. So we took the dress code away and people were super-confused. But it relayed the message that I have the responsibility and power to do it and people just loved it. 

Carlos: Ok, so we have to have a clear business strategy, and that creates hope and trust. I didn’t hear any trust falls or ropes courses in there. Truth – tell people the truth, manage people like adults. Don’t  just manage the work, manage the people. And tell the truth – don’t be political, don’t go behind people’s back. Pretty straight forward.

Ulf: Well, we are pretty straight forward people. I think in HR we complicate things a lot.

Carlos: HR has become known for imposing processes on people, and compliance. We forget the dynamic and strategic role of the people function.

Ulf, thank you so much. I will never forget the conversation with the headhunter in the parking lot – that one is sticky.

From the Actually Curious deck, I have one final question: What does a life well-lived mean to you?

Ulf:  To have some kind of purpose and positive impact with 

• family, creating good fun with my family 

• work, doing something that’s meaningful – I find what I do at work extremely meaningful 

• friends, having a positive impact with good friends.

It gets harder as you get older because kids grow up and things change a little bit. I think the purpose of life is to be as happy as you can.

Arturo Arteaga is a Mars compensation and benefits leader from Mexico. You can read his transcript at https://www.carlosvdapena.com/teaming-with-ideas.

Carlos: In this Teaming With Ideas episode, you, my brilliant readers and listeners, will meet Robert Ginnett, a teams practitioner and researcher with a bachelors in Psychology and Criminology, an MBA and a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Yale. I met Robert a few years ago at the Center for Creative Leadership where we did some work together. In this interview we explore common myths and misunderstandings about teams and team building. And, you’ll hear Robert’s fascinating stories of his work with teams in the US Military, at NASA; in hospital surgical suites and in commercial airline cockpits. Enjoy!

Robert: I have a rather sordid background of how I got into studying teams. My first introduction to teams was in the military where I was assigned to lead covert action teams.  I tried reading everything I could on leadership. At the time, everything I read was written by generals and presidents, about how to lead huge organizations and armies of great proportion, and I was interested in how I get my two or three guys in and out successfully without anyone dying. That carried on as I advanced and eventually ended up at the Air Force Academy where they decided I should get my PhD in Organizational Behavior.

So, I shopped for universities that were interested in teams and virtually no organizations or universities were at that time, except Yale. Richard Hackman and Victor Vroom were there and they thought it would be okay to have somebody who was interested in how you lead small teams even though they admitted there had not been a lot of work done in that, which as a graduate student turns out to be perfect.

I came back to the Air Force Academy where I was a tenured professor and then moved on to the Center for Creative Leadership. 

Going back to when Richard Hackman and I were writing a book and it was originally supposed to be entitled Groups That Work, which is what people hoped would happen, the more research we did on it, and the more others were asked to contribute, we found out that almost all the teams had at least some degree of failure. The editor for the book said, “I'm not sure you've chosen the right title.” So we changed the title and it became Groups That Work and Those That Don't so we could include more of our groups in it. That's where we got started in looking at some of the reasons this happened. Perhaps the biggest overriding cause is that we live in an individualistic culture. With few exceptions in the global economy, we are focused on individuals and how individuals perform. That's sort of the root of creating the problem. 

I worked with a football coach once, and I believe his favorite saying to tell people was, “If everybody gives 100%, 100% of the time, we will win.” He was a fairly successful football coach and certainly knew more about it than I did, so we believed that was true, although their football team was not perfect and had a number of failures as well. It wasn't until I got into the academic side of it that I stumbled on something called Systems Theory, which we're not going to go into here today.

One small part of Systems Theory says. If you have a big system and it has a number of subsystems supporting it, if any one of those subsystems optimizes, the system as a whole cannot optimize. And I thought, well, now, you know, this helps me understand what was going wrong with that football team. A short example would be if they have a very fast running back, and they're going to do kind of an end sweep where everybody's going to move to the right side and theoretically block for this fast running back. If that fast running back catches the ball from the quarterback. and then pauses just a moment to remember what that coach has told him over and over again, “Give 100%, 100% of the time,” he will take off running as fast as he can. That's his 100%. And every time they do this he will outrun the blocking backs and they will lose five to seven yards. That's because the subsystem has optimized and the big system cannot. So, the myth is that's what happens. What really happens is people learn to give appropriately so the system can optimize. The whole team is more important than the individual. So there's myth #1.

In business settings, believe it or not, in our research we found this happening most frequently on executive teams or C-level teams because oftentimes the people who are selected to be a C-level team have a long history of splendid, individual excellence. 

The CFO, for example, might come up as a brilliant financial analyst or contributor gets selected for the executive team and in his career or her career. That person may have never actually had any team experience, so we've sort of placed them in an unfair vacuum because they haven't learned anything about teams. They've excelled by individual performance and that's all they know how to contribute. So, they might do things from a financial standpoint that is their best shot, but it might be very harmful in terms of sub-teams in the organization.

Here's a classic one which kind of helps illustrate how sometimes academics have tried to contribute, but it gets misinterpreted when put into the work setting. When I'm doing consulting training exercises with teams and groups of teams, I will often ask them how many people here know about the group formation process, according to Tuckman. And there may be one or two hands that goes up, typically people who are taking an organizational behavior class at the time or something, and I'll say, okay, let's try it differently. 

How many people have heard of group formation using Forming Storming, Performing and Norming? Well, virtually every hand goes up. Everybody knows about that. That's how groups form, and we've been trained and taught that. You can even find books where that's what they claim. 

So when I first started actually out of the classroom and into the real world, my first teams that I looked at were surgical teams at Yale New Haven hospital. And I spent about two weeks: I probably observed 10 to 15 different surgical teams, and I came back to our research team that was doing the work, and I said, “I'm not so sure I'm good at this.” And they said, “Well, why Robert?” And I said, “Well, I've watched like 10 or 15 surgical teams and we all know Tuckman. I can clearly see when they form. I can tell you the moment the team is formed, but then they move right on and they're performing surgery. I'm unable to see the storming phase or the norming phase. I'm just not good at it.” And they said, “Well, maybe it's something to do with surgical teams. Why don't you go to what our research contract wants us to look at it - air crews - and start with that?”

I spent about a month getting familiar with the airline crews and I flew in the cockpit with them and I came back to our meeting and I said, “Here I am again. I really don't think I'm good at this because I can tell you when they form, and the next thing I know, we're lifting this plane off the ground and flying and I never see them storm or norm.”

In almost all cases, both the surgical teams and the airline crews had never worked together as an entire team. In fact, an operations researcher who once studied airline crews said, “If you and I worked together today as a pilot and copilot, the next time we are likely to work together is 5.6 years from now.”

If you get surgical teams that have a very unique specialty, that team might work together over time, and that's a good thing. But nope, these were not familiar with each other. They just jumped in and went to work. More often than not they were effective, but they were not as perfect as we might like. And we have data on that. But somebody said in our group, “What do you mean they don't storm?” And I said, “Well, we've all seen storming when we watch students, we know what storming is. But as for forming in the surgical suite, you never see the scrub nurse say, ‘you know what? I've been doing this job for 15 years. I've never done it with you, but I actually think I could cut better than you cut.’ “ That would be storming. You just don't see that. 

And so Richard had the genius to say, “Well, maybe we should go back and read Tuckman.” Of course we're all graduate students saying, “Geez, Richard, everybody knows Tuckman.” He said, “I didn't say you didn't know Tuckman. Let's go back and actually read his research.” So we did, and we found out Tuckman was absolutely right... about what he researched. 

But what Tuckman researched only contain two unique kinds of groups: 

• Students in learning laboratories. 

• Mental patients in group therapy sessions. 

I have confirmed that if you watch either of those two groups, you will see forming, storming, norming and performing, but not if you're having teams in a relevant organizational setting. They pick up so much information from being in the organization that they really don't need this and they don't do it.

That actually leads us to a third myth. The counter side of what you were just talking about is teams will get stale. We always need to bring in new people and churn the team when in fact the exact opposite is true.

Our research has never found a case where a team makes a serious error because they get complacent. What happens is they usually never get a chance to get to complacency because there's too much churn going on. And since we'd been talking about airline crews, and I've done a lot of work with airline companies and crews, let me give you a statistic from the National Transportation Safety Board, the NTSB. When they looked at accidents in commercial aviation, they found that 73% of the accidents happened on the first day of the crew’s working together. And 44% of them happened on the first leg, the first flight with these crews. It's because they didn't know how to work with each other. Yes, they knew who the pilot was and who the co-pilot was. They knew the role of the flight attendant, but they hadn't really gotten a chance to work together. So it's not the churn. That's the problem. It's that we don't allow teams to build and develop appropriately. 

Of all the airlines we studied and air crews the most effective were the ones who were the pilots of military bombers, B-1s, and B-52s that we studied. These guys aren't even allowed to touch that airplane until they have worked together, trained together, gotten to know each other. Then over time, before they're really required to do anything critical - they were training to deliver nuclear weapons…that's sort of like the ultimate let's-get-it-right - they built a high-performance team first. That is the ultimate ideal setting. We talk about building sort of high definition training that's very close to what we're going to do. That's the objective.

Sometimes I'll come into an organization and I'll ask, “Have you done anything in terms of teams?” and they'll go, “Oh yeah. Yeah. In fact, just last month we had a team development session.” I go, “Really? Well, tell me about it.”

“Well, we went out and played golf all day.”

Not only is that not the work you do, golf is an individual sport. I'm not sure how you learn about teams doing that.

Carlos: Regarding the panacea of “teamwork” which is not the answer to everything: When is it appropriate to use teamwork, and when is it better to let capable individuals go do what they do so well without jamming the imperative “teamwork” down their throars?

Robert: Let me cite my mentor, Richard Hackman, who used to say, “There is no doubt that teams can do magic, but all work is not teamwork And teamwork can indeed produce magic. Teams can do wonderful things, but all work is not teamwork.

There are a number of criteria for declaring teamwork. First of all, as you pointed out, it does need to be a task that requires a team. Not all tasks are team tasks. And we need to get it off to a good start. 

• Define your team’s collaboration. Know what requires collaboration and what doesn’t.

• Differentiated skills: If it's really going to be something that a team can do, it should require differentiated skills, different people have different specialties that they bring. If everybody brings the same specialty, we might have a fun group, but it's probably not a task for a team. And lastly,

• Interdependent in real time. If I can do my work and then just mail it in and you can work on your part whenever you get around to it, even if you can use mine as boosters, that's not really a situation that requires a team. A work group can do just fine there.

If tasks are done sort of more the old fashioned way where it's done with emails, it’s really more of a workgroup. Here's my work for the day. I'm sending that on. There has been some work done recently where sort of a group room is built. It's not a real room, it's a virtual room, but then we work our problem to the point where… we haven't got the answer, but it's time for us to go home, and then that is picked up in Japan by real time workers. Now that's their first chance to see it. That counts almost as real time interdependence because they're working based on that. If the technology supports it, not just an email system, but you can move around the globe in sort of virtual real time.

The most important thing a leader will ever get to do with a team is get it started off, right? So we looked at air crews as, again, one example and we found out, although this particular crew that may have never worked together before is going to spend a week together flying a schedule. What is really important is the first 15 minutes that leader gets to spend with them. That's where they get to get them started off right. And the two components of this that we think are critical is first of all: 

Now that may sound silly to most people, but when we actually studied real teams and real organizations, we found that very rarely did everybody on the team know what they were even supposed to be doing.

Let me give you an example. Two things that often conflict in a flying organization are 

1. Safety. I mean, there shouldn't be any conflict about safety and people will often tell you safety is our most important job. Okay, well, that's good. 

2. Saving fuel. You're also getting all this information from the corporate headquarters that the second biggest cost in our industry is fuel. And anything you can do to help us save fuel we'll support that. 

Well, that's fine. Except there are times when you’ve got to figure out whether to save fuel or be safe? If you want me to say fuel, I'm going to stay up at 30,000 feet until I'm right over the airport and then all out of the sky. That'll save fuel, but that's not safe. So those are the kinds of things that are important that get discussed.

The second component of getting it right up in front, this may sound crazy, is the team needs to be appropriately bounded. Now that's almost an academic thing. There are two components. 

1. You need to know who's on the team and who's not. This is the one that surprises people.

2. Not all tasks are team tasks

With an air crew it turns out that was an easy one to study because once we locked the door, I knew who the cockpit crew was. Nobody left midway through my project. But if you study executive teams, very rarely do they all agree on who's actually on the team. 

I worked with the General Motors Corporation for a while and they told me their executive team for North America had 18 members. Well, I could never get the same 18 in the room. And that was part of their problem too. So, on the other side of it is, you don't want to be too bounded so that you only think it's you against the world. No, you have to have some permeability in that boundary too. So, getting that right is the leader's job and it's not easy.

It's hard to put this on an absolute timeline because of the demands. But for example, we studied project teams in the Department of Defense and found out sometimes the best team leaders were the ones who didn't let them get started on the task right away, that they did some of the things you were joking about in the name of traditional team building. They took them offsite and had Myers Briggs analyses done, and they did ropes courses and things like that to get them at least talking to each other. Then they would start on the task. 

For airline crews It's 15 minutes. Sometimes for surgical teams it was five minutes. But when Richard Hackman asked a symphony conductor, “Are the first rehearsals important for you?” He said, “First rehearsal? I get about 15 seconds to get them started.” So, it varies. 

Regarding differentiated skills: it's now football season. So, if you look at a college football team, they don't all look the same. They bring different skills. You have a guy who's really good at throwing the ball, some guys who are tall and skinny and really good at catching the ball, some guys that are the heavy jumbo guys who are really good at blocking or tackling, that's the way you make up a team. If everybody looks exactly the same, has the same skills, then maybe you have a work group like all accountants, but that's not really a team. Teams by design bring differentiated skills, which again makes a challenge for the leader. And how do you appropriately coordinate those?

We know where we're going. We know who's on the team and who's not, and we've got differentiated skills that each bring that make us more powerful. But if we're not interdependent, then we could do our work in different space and time. And, if you can do that, that's not saying that's bad. It's just saying that doesn't require a team if they're not interdependent. 

I suppose a surgeon could do the surgery all by herself. I've never seen it, but I suppose it could be done, but not effectively or efficiently or collaboratively. You're going to have to have somebody who's responsible for anesthesia; somebody who's responsible for getting the appropriate instruments to the surgeon; somebody who's monitoring time. There are all kinds of roles that go on and they are truly interdependent. 

Carlos: In the corporate world, people use the term “team” fairly loosely. Are we a team if lines connect us on an organizational chart? That’s why I like to use the word, “collaboration” instead. What does the team actually need to collaborate on?

I worked with a CEO one time. who said, “I want my whole organization to be one team.”

I said, “How many people are we talking about here?”

He said, “We have 600 people. I want a 600-person team.”

I said, “I don't think that’s going to happen because you have people that didn't even know each other much less what they do or how they contribute.” So, it's virtually impossible for that team to be interdependent.

My rule of thumb is I like single digit teams. If we get to seven, we're about as big as I like to get us. And if we got 18, we're not a team.

There are probably 25 things that are important. One that absolutely helps but isn't quite essential is it's nice to have a supportive team culture. It's nice to have an environment to work in that understands teams.

I got a chance to work with the Navy Seals for a while. That's an organization that understands all the real work is done in teams. We needed to set up everything so it supports teamwork, not individual work. In a kind of weird twist sometimes organizations with what we would traditionally call the most effective HR systems are not very helpful for teamwork.

They've got brilliant people that define the work and brilliant people that figure out testing to go out and select the right person to hire. Then they do training to get that person's skills up, but they don't look at the team as a whole. And so they're very supportive of individual work, but not of the group as a whole.

Would I prefer that my organization really understands teamwork? Yes. It makes everything easier. On the other hand, when we were at the Kennedy Space Center, we did research down there for six years. When we first got there, the director gave us a license plate frame that said “Launch work is teamwork” We were thinking, “Wow!” It turns out that was about as much as the organization did to support teamwork. Everything else was individually supported.

Keep in mind, there were some really effective teams that we would get to see. And we mostly were in what they call the OPF, the Orbiter Processing Facility. Anybody else would call it a hanger, but NASA has to rename everything. And there were some really great teams. For example, nobody was allowed to touch those main engines on the shuttle except Rocketdyne. And when Rocketdyne guys showed up, they were an intact, high-performance team. 

But otherwise, we've got a task to perform today. The computer has told us what skills, the person needs to have, so a person from that shop shows up and he or she may be working with two other people they've never worked with before in their life, and they're on a time schedule. They just go and do their work. And it's not teamwork.

We didn't get asked to come down there by our NASA research monitor until after the Challenger accident. Immediately after that the pendulum had swung way over to absolutely control every single moment and action. Well, that works into the individual's favor, not to the team’s.

I should mention, though, on the other hand, within this system, we found one amazingly small organization that always had great teamwork, and we couldn't figure it out. How come the rest of the organization doesn’t do the same thing? Well, the rest of the organization was under constant scrutiny. It's where the astronauts came. The senators came. That's where we were working in the Orbiter Processing Facility. 

There was one organization that was so dangerous, it was five miles out in the swamp down there. They had really great teamwork. First of all, they couldn't afford not to because it was so dangerous. And secondly, because it was so dangerous, nobody ever wanted to go out there. So, they were in essence buffered from this other kind of non-supportive environment and it worked out great for them. 

Carlos: Organizations I work with tend to be large, cultures tend to be messy and ill-defined. A great thing for teams and organizations to foster is developing organizational systems and processes to support collaborative work vs. reinforcing individual efforts.

Robert:  That is the best summary of what we do you could possibly have done, Carlos.

Carlos: Thank you, Robert. You are a deep well of wisdom I hope to continue to draw from.

In this episode I speak with Brian Graczyk. Brian has been at Mars for 30 years. He’s a finance guy who has worked in a variety of functions in industrial engineering, research and development, and marketing. He has worked in all the major Mars segments. He’s spent time working for Mars ice cream factory in Burr Ridge, Illinois; in Albany, Georgia’s factory where they roast peanuts to use in Snickers and Peanut m&ms; and in Hackettstown, NJ, a major site in making m&ms in the US, and for Mars Drinks which has since been sold off. He’s currently based in Chicago working for Mars Food, known best in the US for Uncle Ben’s currently, but his team is spread out around the world.

I wanted to talk to Brian because he’s been working remotely for more than 10 years. He’s had to be especially resilient during the pandemic because since it’s started, he’s changed jobs twice.

He’s still never met most of his current team.

He’s experiencing what many of you are, and then some. So, I wanted to talk with him about how he’s managing it.  Here’s my conversation with Brian Graczyk.

Managing a remote global team

I’m looking forward to you talking about how to do teamwork when you're sitting at home by yourself.

Our ice cream business is transitioning some of our wonderful, candy brands into an ice cream version. There’s Snickers ice cream, there's M&Ms ice cream products, but the company was actually founded on the Dove bar, which I'm sure everybody knows and loves, but for those who haven't been fortunate enough, it's ice cream on a stick with a chocolate coating.

Mars bought that company quite a few years back. So that's the origination of the ice cream business. And then on the food side, in the US folks would know Uncle Ben's as our rice, which will be transitioning to Ben's Original as a brand. And we also have a company called Seeds of Change, which is more of an organic rice-based products. Globally, there are about 15 different brands. but the one you'll see on the US side, I know in the club stores, is Tasty Bites purchased in 2017.  It's really more Indian-based flavors and there are some rices, too. Go out there and try some!

What’s it like transitioning to 100% working from home after traveling for work so much?

Carlos, I was actually a little bit nervous at first from having been in an office for 20 years.  But a couple of years prior to that, I'd been traveling 60 to 75% of the time. So, if I was totally honest with you, it was actually great to not have to also travel into an office as well, but I was still traveling quite a bit while working from home.

 I was home maybe 50% of the time and traveling to the other offices. As travel cut back more and more, I was probably doing about 30% travel. Working from home, was definitely different because not too many people had a really home-based position. I had no desk in the office for Mars.  There were a lot of people at Mars insisted, “No, what office are you at?”  “I'm at my home office in my house.” I’d reply.

And they're like, “No, no, you can't do that. What are you talking about?” It was very foreign to them. It was still a little bit strange probably up until the last few years of people being based in their home location versus having a desk in the Mars office.

Pressures on a remote-working manager

Not necessarily. A lot of people asked, how do I get that gig? I think the funny thing of all this will be, how many people are going to want to still work from home once this pandemic is over, because if you’ve got the right setup, it's great, and if you don't, I'm sure it's awful, thinking of those poor people who have small children and babies screaming and dogs barking and all that.  This probably does not work for them at all, but for myself, I was pretty fortunate.

I've been fortunate - for the past, 10 years or so, I've been working from home. All my roles have been more program management. I'm working with many other people who've all been in global roles. So really, none of them is based altogether in one location anyway, so it's worked out pretty well for that kind of a setup, and then being part of the team. It's the physical part that’s actually a little strange because you're not going into an office and physically being around other people and having lunch with them, et cetera. That part's a little different. But the connection - you couldn't do that anyway because the work I do is global. There's really no way I'd ever get the people in London connected with people in the US all in the same location anyway. So, in terms of creating more of a team environment, I've been fortunate that, when we used to be able to travel, there was a period, once every four weeks, we’d get together as a part of the broader team or as a project team or in a workshop. So, there was always some sort of a physical connection piece there. And then, through just a normal working operating day-to-day phone calls, project calls, people are engaged.

I was really lucky, here in Chicago, that the folks I was working with would actually do things like happy hours after work and try to do some kind of a social thing. I'd probably go about once a month, and then you're actually creating some personal and social bonds outside of the work environment which helps tremendously. That's probably the thing that I miss the most. That just doesn't happen now.

I've been very lucky that all my direct managers were supportive of this because it worked just for the job itself, but I've had some people I've worked with who just really struggled with the fact that you could have a person working remotely.

 A couple of years back I was working on a project and the overall project leader worked in another country in Europe. Most of the work was based out of the Chicago office, so I would go into the office maybe once a week, sometimes twice a week, just because I interacted with some of the folks there, but he would come in two weeks on and two weeks off.

And it was like, Hey, when I'm here, you need to be here. And I was like, well, why do I need to be here for two straight weeks? We don't really interact a whole lot. There was a tension where I actually had to lay out, what exactly do you need me here for, because I'll be here for the things I need to be here for, but it takes me almost a four hours round trip to commute? So, let's come up with a mutual reason of why you would need me here for the whole time you're here. But then he said, okay just be here two days a week. So, when he was there, I would just come in and it was a bit frustrating because I’d spend a whole entire day and not even see him or talk to him. I just made sure that those days I would go find him and be like, “Hey, how are you doing? I'm here”, just so he knew I was physically there, but in hindsight, I would just encourage you to be mutual, for both people. It's not that I'm working from home because I just want to sit at home and not do anything. It's literally the opposite. I find myself tremendously more productive working from home than when I'm in the office. I mean, it's a five-fold increase in productivity when I'm at home versus going into the office.

That's the beauty of this new situation. Those people who thought working from home was great are probably thinking this isn't so great. Maybe I should give those who do work from home a little bit of a break here.

The 3 ways working remotely has changed

I think there's actually three things that have really changed for me. We'll start with the first one. It was that social interaction. So, the fact that not only can you not go in into the office and have a coffee with somebody and just catch up and see their face. But none of that after work happy hour, going to a Cubs game, all that's gone now, which is very strange. It's so different. So, what we've done to try and replace that, and it doesn't quite work is we've created this group in, WhatsApp so that people can just say, Hey. It is all personal. Hey, I just cooked. I showed pictures. I just grilled a steak. Hey, I just took my daughter out picking apples. It's a non-work-related social thing and it's better than nothing. It's still not the same. but that's one way to replace that.

The second thing has to do with those who said, “Well, Brian, you've been working from home for 10 years. This should have been really easy”. And at first it was, and I actually had offered and helped some people who had never worked from home before, not even for the day. I counseled some people on some things to try: try to set up a dedicated space, close the door, those kinds of things that I think everybody now knows. But for me, the new learning was, Oh my God. Now everybody else is also working from home. And all of a sudden, everybody now schedules a meeting to talk to you. Whereas before, in the office stage, you just walk over to somebody's desk and you chat with them.

We have an open office at Mars, which means nobody has their own private office. So if you want to talk to somebody, you just walk up to their desk and talk to them. Well, that's gone now. now you have to either try and get them on the chat function of the computer, or set up an actual meeting and say, Hey, I need to talk to you for 15 minutes about something and actually put a meeting on the calendar.

So my calendar now is booked anywhere from 6:30 in the morning, till 6:30 at night, with 15 minute meetings, 30 minute meetings and things that would either normally have been done before when I bumped into somebody in the office, or they would just hit you up on the chat. And you had time because your calendar wasn't full meetings. So now, nobody has time to just have a free chat because the calendar is overloaded with meetings.

The third thing has been a very positive thing. The fact that I could work globally now with a whole bunch of people I've never even met personally. I never physically have met these people. I moved into a brand-new job during the pandemic, having worked in Mars for 29 plus years. I moved from our global services business into our global food business. I think there might've been one or two people I had worked with before. So now I probably work with two dozen folks on a daily basis in the food business that I’ve never physically met.

They're in Australia and London, Germany, the US, Canada.  I've never met these people face-to-face physically. it's very odd, it's very different. I've been working with these people for six months now and I've never physically met them.

Remote Onboarding

And today I have somebody new working for me. I onboarded her today, had to do a virtual interviewing, virtual onboarding, virtual training. I have one now, another one starting in a couple of weeks.

The first thing is, one works in Brussels, Belgium, the other one's going to be outside of London in the UK and I'm sitting here in Chicago. We have a time zone difference. And then the second thing is, again, I haven't been able to physically meet them in person, which is very odd, but that's okay. This is a new way. That's fine. I'm really just asking them a lot, how's it going? Is this making sense?

 I've shared files with them to read. And today was just doing a walk through some of the foundational things of what needs to happen in this new job and making sure the person understands. They only kept it at two hours. I took a break an hour through because it's a lot of material to cover.

I just checked in with her and say, is this making sense? She asks questions. I guess it's really no different if you're physically together, because you'd want to do that anyway and make sure they're comfortable, but it was very hard because you can't really see the body language and you can't tell if this is really making sense to the person.

It's really just trying to read slides on the screen. We'll have the little video down there. I was trying to look for those visual cues. That was really tough. I'll tell you.

Today was day one, it was two hours - only scheduled two hours. I haven't tried to do an eight-hour session in one day. I'll just do two hour chunks this week: every day we'll do two hours together and then give her material to read, which will keep her occupied for a few hours and give her some other people to connect with. It's basically going to be about a three-week onboarding: 50% on this job, 50% on their old job. Hopefully by then she'll be able to jump in. She’s already in Mars. Thank God.  I couldn't even imagine trying to onboard somebody external.

Actually, I would say just while we're on that subject, there's a bigger program that we're working on that the program team developed, I call it an Onboarding Deck to the program itself.  It's 228 slides long. But it's not as bad as it sounds because it's actually really good foundational information. It's laid out in sections. That's what I went through today in the two hours with this person saying, here's how this is laid out. Pay attention to these six or seven slides in this particular slide here, the rest you could just browse through. And I wrote it out for her last night and just said, “Skip through these sections focus on these eight pages.”

Right at the beginning when we started the call she said, “I really appreciate how you laid out where to focus and where to skip through.” I would take that as a good lesson learned for probably for a global team, but even in this way of working there is some foundational structure that you can bring a person into. When I hung up that call, I thought, Let me send this to the person who said, “Although it was a ton of PowerPoints thank God you created this because I don't know how the heck I would have onboarded somebody without this.”

What does the future look like?

Obviously, I've been working from home, so I'd like to continue that, but the fact that we actually have a global team that I work with, connected all around the world, and having some of these protocols in place, the 228 pages of structure. It's cool that I could actually have two people working for me that I never physically met and they’re six hours apart, it's developing a new muscle. I think this is the new way of working. that's something that I'm looking forward to.

I can't wait to drive four hours round trip into the office to see all the people I haven't seen for months. I can't wait. I can't wait to do that, seriously. Because some of the folks I work with are in Chicago, across the street from the other office I used to work in. I’m looking forward to seeing a few people now in the food business that I haven't even met and working with them as well as seeing multiple friends in the other building. We have a campus where there are multiple buildings on Goose Island in Chicago, so in one trip I can hit three different buildings and see a bunch of different people that I haven't seen in a long time. And I'm sure I owe somebody a dinner who did a favor for me. I owe this guy big time. The dinner is a small price to pay for those kinds of things. That's what I'm looking to be able to do: actually have that physical presence that just hasn't been there since way back in March.

I know we've talked about this before, I have a low need for affection in my psychological profile. I don't need to be involved in everything. I don't need to be included. I don't need to be in the parties. I don't need to be close to people.

And I'm dying that I haven't seen people, shook their hands. I can't even imagine people who have that high need for affection. This has gotta be really psychologically traumatic for people. It's bothering me and I'm pretty low in the need for affection, contact and all that.

This has to end sooner back to your point.  We gotta find a way.

Oh, thank you. I mean, anytime Carlos, and hopefully your listeners can get a piece of the gold nugget out of this.

 We'll set a date for that. Maybe we can do it in Vegas again!

I met Vidula Bal when she was leading management and leadership development at Mars. Author of the book, MANAGING LEADERSHIP STRESS, Vidula got her PhD at UT Austin. She has worked at the Center for Creative Leadership, and at Mars, of course. She also had a senior learning and development role at Target. She’s currently the Vice President of talent an development for AP Moller Maersk, the global shipping and logistics company.

Vidula is one of the clearest thinkers I’ve ever met on the subject of teams and collaboration. You’ll see that here as she talks about team building that works, team building that doesn’t and why teams are the real unit of organizational change.

Vidula was instrumental in the development of the team effectiveness framework we created at Mars. That same framework has become the focus of my writing and speaking, so I owe her a debt of gratitude.

Vidula: First of all, Carlos, let me say thank you for that kind introduction. you sure do know how to make a girl feel welcome. So thank you for that. I really it's touching to hear you say what you said, so thank you very much. I might share about myself two things. The first is that, I'm a big fan of Peter Block's.  I call him my intellectual boyfriend because I love his brain and the way that it works. One of the things that Peter Block believes and, really through reflection and thinking about Peter's work I've come to believe as well, is that the small group or the team is always the unit of transformation.

If we think about transformations in companies or in societies or NGOs wherever, it's always a group of people that get together and make magic to change what exists today. That's a fundamental belief that I hold.

The second belief that I hold, and maybe this fits into the contrarian point of view, is I think we in companies are wasting a lot of money, when we try to support and kind of generate. Team effectiveness. And so that's something that I can't wait to talk to you about. I'll share other things about myself as we get into the conversation, but those are probably the two most important things to know.

Vidula: I am the vice president of talent and development for AP Moller Maersk, a global integrator of container logistics. That's a lot of words to describe the fact that our vision as a company is to become the FedEx of moving containers around the world. In my role, I have a number of HR centers of expertise that report to me: Leadership development, functional development, talent management, diversity and inclusion, for example. And I have to say that the company has been super supportive of me because it's a company that's based in Copenhagen, Denmark, where I lived for a year. Then I missed my home here in the US and they've been kind enough to let me live in the US for the past two years. My team and I are all pretty well globally dispersed.

We team virtually. At first it was a challenge, and also an idea that was challenged when we first brought it up, my moving back to the US. I had some team members who were quite concerned. I actually think we've been able to be pretty effective in spite of the distance, and in spite of the challenges that COVID-19 has brought about.

I really think COVID-19 has been a bit of a dance in different parts of the world. There have been moments where people are in the office. And when people are in the office, I have four direct reports that sit in Copenhagen. I also have two that sit elsewhere: one in Spain, one in the UK, What's happened recently, with an increase of cases in Denmark, is that our office has shifted to be there only if you need to. A lot of people are working from home right now. What that means for us is we're all working from home.

I sit in Colorado, so we're eight hours behind the central European time zone. One of the very first things I committed to is that I would be present and online.

Maybe it's worth saying something about, Denmark and about Maersk in our culture as well. As you may or may not know Denmark’s office culture is very focused. People are generally in the office from 9:00 am until around 4:30 pm. The culture in Denmark is such that there's an importance put on being with your family. People think nothing of it on a regular day, if somebody leaves the office at 4:30, would that person be a man or a woman, to go pick up the kids from school, make dinner for them, etc. Then maybe people get back online, but the office hours are quite limited compared to other companies that I've worked for, say for example, Mars,

Because the office hours are fairly well-defined, and since I’m in the US, then my commitment is that I would be online and available and having meetings beginning just after their lunch hour. My earliest commitment was that I would start my day with calls, etc., at 5:00 AM. That's one of the commitments that I've made and stuck to for this entire two years.

The other commitment that I made, I'm not sure that I made it explicitly, but I've demonstrated it on a number of occasions, is that when there are important calls, let's say with our CEO or somebody of his stature, then I'll be available for a call at any time.

 I don't do that every week, or even, every few weeks, but there are exceptions where I feel like it's my responsibility to shift my working hours a bit because they're being permissive with me, or they were prior to COVID.

Prior to COVID I was traveling to Copenhagen one week a month, and there for the whole week, Monday through Friday. I think in the beginning it was necessary. The team in Copenhagen had been used to having their bosses on site and I think it was helpful that I was there frequently. However, the last time I was on a plane was in March.

One of the things that I'm doing to maintain cohesiveness among my team members is finding meaningful opportunities for collaboration that I may have overlooked or assumed would happen in some other way before. I'll give you an example.

I'm a part of the HR leadership team of our company. One of the pieces of work that we're doing right now is trying to identify what our HR priorities are going to be for the next three years, let's say, and what's the roadmap to get there.

What will we do when? How's it going to serve the strategy and the business? One of the things that I ended up doing with my team in a virtual offsite last week was using them together to get input on some proposed initiatives that had come from other sources. 

They thought that it was meaningful work. Somebody said, at the end of our meeting, how much they appreciated being asked about this future focus task, Even knowing that not everything they propose is going to be accepted or show up in the final version of the strategy, they valued the opportunity to input and influence.

I think it was meaningful for them. I don't know that leaders default to that when forced to be virtual, to try to do meaningful work like that together.

My first pet peeve in team building: group debriefs of assessment. Everybody takes the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Everybody takes the FIRO-B. We debrief the assessment as a team. Now, I am not saying that there is no value to that kind of exercise because I do think revealing information about ourselves and about each other can serve us. I think we often equate that kind of fun conversation with meaningful development as a team, and I don't think the two are the same.

Carlos: So, when I learn that you're an introvert and I'm an extrovert, or I learn that you're more of a sensing type where my preferences are more intuitive, certainly I can use that to work with you. Because you have certain preferences when we work together, you're going to be better at some stuff - that's valid, right? If I know you're an extrovert and I'm an introvert, we can probably make some use of that information and how we work together.

But it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to stay out of conflict anymore than we might otherwise, or necessarily get a better outcome.

Vidula:   I'm not saying there's no place for it, but I find that MBTI becomes the default intervention and it makes an assumption that it's interpersonal conflict or personality conflict.

That's at the core of any issues that a team might have. I think there are often other more structural causes of conflict: task-related conflicts, role conflicts like, “I thought that was my job.” “No, I thought it was mine.”

Have you ever had to, when you're in a new team, do a life timeline of your own life and share it with people? I think the thing that bothers me is that it becomes a bit of a forced disclosure. I'm a fan of Wilford Bion. I do think teams cycle through phases, but I think that kind of attempt at forcing closeness with people is just misplaced. It makes people feel good for the moment, but it's not a lasting closeness.

I have to tell you a story. My best friend in college was a big dater. She dated many people. She would come home from each of her first dates, and our conversation at the end of her dates would start off saying, “Oh my gosh, I went on a date with person X and we had an awesome talk.”

Awesome talk. That meant that she was a good enough listener and encourager of men that they would divulge their deepest, darkest secrets to her on the first night that they were on a date. Those relationships rarely survived because people disclosed too early. The next day they're like, “Oh my gosh, I'm super embarrassed.”

So here is my analogy: I think that the lifeline exercise is the equivalent of the awesome talk and my best friend's dating career.

Carlos: What about the escape room - really popular now as a team building event? The team leader says, “Oh, we're going to do this awesome night at an escape room is to really teach us how to do teamwork together, solving a problem.” The assumption is we will be a better team. What do you think?

Vidula: No. Number one, you assume that the tasks in an escape room are team tasks versus a person knows how to solve clue X. They solve part of it and then the team successfully gets out of the room or whatever. By and large, I would argue that they don't necessarily build a more effective team unless the team actually sits down and has a meaningful debrief about that experience.

I'm not sure how many teams actually do that and debrief.

• How did we solve the first problem that we encountered?

• What did we do that we'd want to continue to do the next time we have a challenge in front of us?

• What would we do differently?

That, to me, is the meaningful way to get value out of an escape room.

Carlos:  I think most of our brilliant listeners would agree that after the escape room, the thing you do is drink beer, right? Go out for dinner and have a few cocktails. I've only been a part of one of those adventures. and that's what we did.

So, similar things like ropes courses, for example - the outdoor challenges, same view on those, too?

Vidula: My friend, Robert Ginnett, has long said they're interesting afternoons, but unless there are some kinds of debriefs… right? And there's an old rule that says for any activity that you do as a team, you should be spending two times the amount of time debriefing as you've spent doing it. Because in theory, If you've got a team that's working on some kind of challenge, whether it's fun or a real one, there's so much going on that frankly, to do a thorough enough debrief of what's just been executed and done together should take a while.

Carlos: Yes, when you have a strong consultant / facilitator feeding back observations about what they noticed, asking questions based on the behaviors they saw, getting people to reflect deeply about how they responded to the situation and think about the effect that had on their colleagues who were working this challenge together could be very powerful. That's a very practical piece of advice that to take away.

Vidula: I've found it to come really handy in designing team interventions.

And of course, people roll their eyes, “Geez, really? We did that for 90 minutes and you want to talk about it for 180??” It's not all just sitting in a circle and chatting.

Carlos:  My belief is that the only sustainable form of teams spirit is learning together. It's when we learn together around meaningful stuff that we get stronger as a team.

If my Myers Briggs workshop and my escape room are not going to make my team awesome, what is going to make my team awesome?

Over the course of my learning about teams and working with teams, I've become quite a structuralist about them. I use that term loosely, I don't mean it from a philosophical perspective. I think the org design and the way you put together your team has more to do with its effectiveness than the personalities in it. And if something's wrong or missing in the structure or support to the team, you can do all the MBTI debriefs on the planet and it's not going to work. Let me give you an example.

An executive team for one of the businesses I worked with a while ago had a really ambitious business transformation to deliver, but they never quite got together as a team. They needed to be collaborative to deliver the output that the business expected them to see, and they never really pulled it off. Part of the reason was a structural reason because there was one person on the team that had an overabundance of responsibility for the key area that they were trying to transform.

The rest of them were just sort of players around the edge. The guy that owned the 80% had no need to talk to the other people. We could have done all the debriefs we wanted to do around the MBTI or FIRO-B and why this guy was taking all the control, but it wasn't an interpersonal issue. The fact that the work wasn't spread equally meant there wasn't a need because there was one person that owned most of the responsibility.

It goes back to involving your tea in meaningful work, the work that leads to better team work or collaboration. if I'm not mistaken, and to give you credit for what I think is a really amazing idea, team leaders don't often enough spend time thinking about what that meaningful, collaborative work is. They're not explicit enough.

Am I not correct in assuming that that's what professor Richard Hackman really impressed upon you? I think that's a really enlightened idea. As leaders, we sometimes just make the assumption that people will sort it out and figure out where and when they collaborate on what, but there's something around leaders being explicit about collaboration. I think at most we usually say, “I expect you to collaborate.” That doesn't go far enough.

There's a part of me that says, “Yeah. Whether it's in a COVID moment or not, the work is generally hard.” And collaboration is exhausting, as we all know. So if people want to have fun, that's great. But I think our responsibility as coaches and consultants is to tell people what they're getting for their investment: for example,

• You're going to invest, let's say $10,000 in bringing Carlos Valdes-Dapena to your organization to run an MBTI session for two hours.

Here's what you're going to get.

• You're going to get an opportunity to know each other better.

• You're going to get an opportunity to understand why people act the way they do.

But what you're not going to get necessarily is

• Sustained improvement because we're dealing at an interpersonal level.

To be honest, it's a battle. And especially if you're an internal consultant in my experience, it's a battle that you fight for forever because people want a little levity, and if we can do it in the guise of being a more effective team then, okay. But let's be honest about what they're getting.

Carlos:  I've got a lot of colleagues in this business who are making their living selling the sorts of team building initiatives you and I have been is criticizing. I have to get them on board with this notion. I'll see what I can do.

I just want to say thank you. We've come to the end of our time speaking. This has been the most fun I've had in a long time, with your candor and your good sense of humor about it.

Vidula: Oh, Carlos, this was super fun. And thank you inviting me and, it makes me miss working together with you.

Carlos: Yeah. Well maybe there'll be a time in the future, right? So everybody for listening, thank you, Vidula Bal, and if you haven't read Peter Block's work, go buy some of those books!

Take care,

Carlos

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Carlos: Welcome back to Teaming With Ideas. I am your host and resident contrarian, Carlos Valdes-Dapena. Today we are privileged to have in our company for conversation, Dana Wasson.

First of all, let me say I've known Dana for 15 to 20 years. Dana has been a consultant for as long as I've known her, and I think that makes up the bulk of her career, external consulting. We met when I was working at Mars, Incorporated in my early days. I first got to know Dana as a graphic facilitator, but she is so much more than that. So, Dana, tell us a bit about yourself.

Dana: Thank you, Carlos. I am a trained OD consultant for all of what that means. I really love working in the space of strategic planning and change management. More recently in the last five years or so, I have gotten attached to the employee engagement / employee experience space.

I am a native Californian. I moved to Colorado a couple of years ago, just to have a change of scenery. I'm an abstract artist on the side, my side gig or side hustle, I guess they call it now. And I really just love the work I do.

I am really missing people these days as we are mostly online. So really, really missing the interaction I have with people, but feeling lucky we have tools like Zoom to be able to do at least some interactive work with groups. It keeps me connected.

Carlos: Dana, I think you did a TEDx talk, right? Can you tell us about that?

Dana: Yes, I did. I did a TEDx talk. It was a bucket list item I got to knock off in 2019. It was called “Messages to My Younger Self”. It was kind of a reflection of all the things I would love to go back and tell myself if I could and would be able to do.

Carlos: So just as a point of clarity, you mentioned you're an OD consultant. I am too. And for those who aren't familiar with that abbreviation, it stands for organization development.  Both Dana and I are interested in helping organizations, and the people in teams within them, be the best they can be. Do you think that's an accurate description of what OD is, Dana?

Dana: Yeah, pretty good. I always like to just start diving into the specialties within it, but you're absolutely right. Great summary.

Carlos: I want to talk a little bit about your history if I could. You were, among your many talents and among the many things you practiced as an OD consultant, a graphic facilitator. I've learned that not everybody knows what that is. Can you tell us a bit about that and how it helps teams,? And then we'll move on to discuss employee experience and engagement.

Dana; Sure. And Carlos, you probably gave me one of the best definitions of how it helps groups because you and I were working together on a meeting.  I'll back up a little bit and then talk about that meeting in specific.

Graphic facilitation is the ability to capture in words and pictures what people are saying live, as they're saying it. There are two modes that people work in that capacity. One is kind of in a silent, more observing role, meaning they're not actively facilitating the meeting themselves. That's more of a graphic capture, graphic recording role. But it's an important role because it helps the group, the team, whoever you're working with, see what they are saying, and sometimes work out some issues and problems that they have. Because sometimes when we put it on the wall, it's not about you or me, it's about what we've put up on the wall.

Then there's the active graphic facilitation, which not a lot of people can do, which is to actually work with the group and facilitate while capturing on a big piece of paper. That takes a bit more skill because your focus is split. You're working with the group and you're kind of managing the paper.

I don't know a whole lot of people who know how to do that. I have also learned on Zoom it’s pretty much impossible to do that because you really can't split your attention with a technology in front of you and something that you're writing on, whether it's a pad or piece of paper or whatever. That's what those two roles are, the active and more passive role. It's not really passive. I just mean you're passive, not working with the group. It's a great way to engage groups in what their conversation is, and their discussions and deliberations and things.

As you remember, Carlos, we worked together with a team and the visual is what really helped the team understand what was going on with them. We were doing that historical perspective, remember? And it showed that, just in context, this team had been working together and I was visually capturing the different projects or outcomes that the team had had. Along the same piece of paper, if you will, we talked about what team members had joined or left and it became very, very visually obvious,

Carlos: I think we created a 5-year timeline moving from left to right, so that you were capturing these moments, events, coming and goings in a sequence on the wall.

Dana: You're exactly right. It was a retrospective, it wasn't a forward strategic plan, it was what had happened. It was so very interesting for the team to visually see that when they had more people join the team, a lot more output happened as a result. Sounds dead obvious as we talk about it sitting here right now, but it wasn't that obvious to the team because they had been enmeshed in it. And when they saw it, they really acknowledged what had happened with the team.

Carlos: The thing that stuck with me from that, Dana, is the power of graphic facilitation. It wasn't just people joining the team. It was when people left the team. They sometimes left because… they were fired. Let's just keep it simple. They left because they were told to leave, and new people were brought in. And that six-month stretch of time where there was a big turnover and new people came in with new skills and new approaches, that's when the big change in the function started to happen. And it was really clear from looking at that timeline you created.

Dana: It was a great partnership that you and I had because you had much more context of the team, and I was more neutral in capturing kind of the process and what had happened as the team told the story. But the power was having the two of us together, which is often what happens when a graphic facilitator works with an internal facilitator. The story becomes more powerful because you know more than I do. In a neutral sense, I'm capturing things that maybe as an internal person, you wouldn't necessarily note.

Carlos: Just as kind of a button on this: I think the power of using visuals of any kind comes through in graphics facilitation, but you don't need a graphic recorder or facilitator to use visuals with your teams. I'm a big fan of having people draw pictures, having people create their own timeline. I step back and let the team do it themselves and then see what they notice. It's very powerful. And while I think you've had great impact doing it, I think your work in this space of the employee experience is probably more far reaching, right? So, for those of us who are managing teams, just remember use visuals when you can. Stop the over-talking. Stop the PowerPoint slides with a million words and bullet points. Get graphical.

Dana: To that point, I think this is the brilliance of David Sibbet and The Grove Consultants who actually founded the whole field of graphic facilitation. He created a set of templates because people were very intimidated when he would create his visuals, because they were very complex and frankly, very overwhelming to people who had never done or seen it.

What he did is he stepped back, and he said, “I want to make this more accessible. I want to make this for the people” if you will. He took some of his frameworks and made them into templates that he sold. It made it much more available to people because it meant that there was a frame that was really pretty and sexy on the wall. When you unrolled it, you already had a wow factor. Then either somebody in the team or the whole team together could fill in the templates, and it became their artwork as opposed to some magical facilitator that comes in with a magic wand and does all sorts of pretty pictures. To your point, it becomes exactly that. It becomes theirs, and the nastiness and all of what contributes to a really great visual that has content that's useful, is owned by the people who made it, not by some third party.

I've really exploited that in the last 20 years, creating my own templates. At Mars, for example, years and years ago, with the presidents group, when the family moved out of day-to-day management and turned it in over to the hired folks, if you will, I created templates for that presidents group to work with to create their business strategies. 

It doesn't matter what level you are in an organization. There's something about a blank piece of paper that has a framework that makes you want to fill it. They really got into it. And instead of handing them blank flip charts and having them come back and comparing apples to squirrels to clouds, we actually were able to compare apples to apples to apples because they had had the framework, all the same, in their breakout groups. We saved a whole lot of time, to be honest, when we had that framework.

Carlos: I see. So if I'm understanding, you're saying they went off, these groups of company presidents, (Mars has many, many businesses within it) for some stretch of time, you sent them off into separate rooms, but all with the same templates.

Dana: Yes, exactly.

Carlos: So, they come back, talking about the same stuff in the same way. Again, I'm still learning how to do this well as a guy who facilitates teams, how to use graphics instead of words, but the power of it is undeniable. So, thank you for taking a few minutes, Dana.

I know you're so excited about the work you're doing today and your most recent book. I just find that people benefit from the knowledge of what graphic facilitation is and how you can use graphics to bring your team together and have them be more effective.

Employee experience. I spent years at Mars, Incorporated, a family-owned company to this day.  What Dana mentioned a moment ago, when the family stepped back and they brought in professional managers, that was a really big deal for Mars, still owned by the family, but generally managed by very experienced business professionals. I worked with engagement at Mars, specifically the Gallup engagement process. It was great. I think it got managers and teams working better together. I think engagement and experience are the same thing. Dana, what do you think about that?

Dana: You did throw out the provocative question because I couldn't agree less. It was one of the key points so that I put up front in my book. You know, the reason we haven't moved the needle on engagement is surveys are a very flat document of a very three-dimensional thing that we're trying to measure.

I think engagement is an outcome. I don't think it's the thing that we can go after to hunt down and make better. I think that employee engagement is something that happens at the end of having a really great experience. So that flips me over to employee experience, which is what are the experiences? What are the touchpoints that we have with employees in businesses small to large? For example, my editor, who took charge of my book, read the book. She has a very small firm and said, “Wow, I'm going to take some of these ideas and use it with my team” and I thought that was really great because I'd worked only with multinationals big companies. So, to hear the things that I was saying were applicable to a small company, it was really heartening to me.

Carlos: I want to add something, Dana. We haven't moved the needle on engagement. Let me be clear for our brilliant listeners, what that means. Gallup regularly does studies of engagement at companies using their methodology and tools. The number of highly engaged people has not changed, the number of people in the middle, somewhat engaged, but not really has not moved - 20 years of work on engagement and Gallup admits it has yielded little.

Dana: Exactly. My book is called Talk The Walk, because it's really about how do we actually start doing something different and then be able to talk about it so other people can do it, too. My book is loaded with graphics, not surprising. It's very tricky to write a book about engagement because you've got to have everything engaging, right? So, the title has to be engaging; the look of the book has to be engaging; the inside of the book, it has to read, “engage”, the whole thing. So the employee experience is really about, what are all the touchpoints that we have with our employees? From the very first time that they contact us about wanting to work at our companies, to the hiring process throughout; to the onboarding, to what equipment we give them when they start their job and throughout their job. How do we communicate with them? How do we recognize them? All the way over to when they are actually walking out the door, whether they're retiring or they're going to another company, how is that departure handled, so people still feel engaged and still walk out the door saying, “I would still recommend this company to any friend of mine”?

Carlos: Is this the same as what people talk about as an employee value proposition?

Dana: It's a little bit, because I think that employee value proposition is really more geared towards the very front end. So, what's the value proposition?  What's our employee branding that we have that we want to use to attract new talent? Whereas, I think of employee experiences, all of those touchpoints, and what are the ways that we can change our volume, tone, bass, treble, whatever, on those different touchpoints so we can make it a better experience? We can always improve those different experiences.

Carlos: One of the things I know about engagement is it tends to be most affected by what happens at the level of the team. So, a company may have a marvelous employee value proposition. But my experience with those in my group / team is what really shapes my engagement. By the way, that's true for the way Gallup approaches it, it’s also true for another approach I studied when I was working for IBM. They talk about climate, the climate of a team, how that affects individuals and how the manager shapes it; very similar, in my view. Should we be saying to managers, “you’re largely responsible for employee experience”?

Dana: I totally get where you're getting tripped up.  There's a great quote. Could've been Gallup. I can't remember who said it, but it's people join companies, but leave managers. To your very point, the manager has the direct contact with somebody from day-to-day, they control their schedule, their work product, their bonuses. You could have joined Google because you thought it was the greatest company around and it's your dream job. But if you have a crummy manager, that's going to affect your experience more than the name, Google, on your free t-shirt you got at your orientation. There's only so much Google product that's going to make up for a crummy job and a crummy manager.

I absolutely agree with that. I think it is the manager's job, not to create engagement, but to really look at that experience that the employee is having, not necessarily exclusively individually, but holistically as well, and see how they can make that a better experience.

When engagement surveys first came out, remember we came out of satisfaction surveys and kind of morphed into this engagement survey, and it became the assumption that HR was going to be responsible for it. HR doesn't have that daily contact with a Carlos like the direct manager does. HR can administer a survey, distribute the results. Maybe you have a process for how the manager talks with their team about results, because I know at least for Gallup, Gallup's results are team-based.  In other words, Carlos, you get to have, as a manager, your team's results. And I know at least at Mars, you're responsible for figuring out how you can arrange those scores if the scores are mediocre, let's just say.

If I had my way, I would just eliminate employee engagement surveys. I just really don’t like them.

Carlos: Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. I'm an OD guy! If I don't have surveys, I'm lost! What are you saying??

Dana: I know it's crazy, huh? Well, I'm going to save you a little bit of money. I'm thinking that you could just have some regular conversations with your team about how it's going. There's a conversation point to say, let's check in: How are we doing as a team? How's recognition going? What could we improve? What's going well? - these types of conversations. But I get that I'm really pushing against the establishment. People like spending money. So, go ahead, have your survey, but then have a very productive conversation afterwards to turn it from a two-dimensional survey that may or may not ask the questions that are on your team's mind, into more of a conversation, more of a robust three-dimensional discussion about what are the answers to this mean.

For example, the process I put together was Beiersdorf actually.

Carlos: What is Beiersdorf?.

Dana: Beiersdorf is a multinational company. The product that we most know is NIV-ea, we say, in this country. NivEa is how they say it in the entire rest of the world. They produce beauty healthcare products, personal care products. No food.

With Beiersdorf we developed a process so that they would take the results that they got from their engagement survey - could have been a Gallup Q 12, I can't remember. There's a specific process. There was a before, during and after process. So, they would meet with the HR director, go over the results, kind of digest as a manager by themselves, because sometimes there was some bad feedback, right? This is what their survey is supposed to give you. The good, the bad and the ugly. They would digest that with the HR manager, get out, maybe their frustrations or, “Gosh, darn. I wish that Mannie wasn't on my team. He's a problem”, blah, blah, blah. Have that conversation with the HR person rather than a team, and then come up with a strategy for how you're going to debrief the team around the results, and then how we're going to move forward.

It was a really, really good process because it allowed the team leader, if you will, to get that out and then put a plan together. Given the results and the team and whatever other dynamics, did they want to have assigned facilitator, meaning do they want some help from HR to have that conversation, or did they feel like they could handle it themselves?

Then we distributed the results to the team ahead of this meeting, which was a four-hour meeting. So, it wasn't like an all-day thing. Not offsite. And they gave specific questions for the team to think about like, what do you remember was going on when we took the survey? Another one of my pet peeves about surveys is often they're distributed and sent out say February and March, we don't get the results till September, October for all the reasons of tabulating and all of that. Well, I mean, here's a great example of a year that February's results of a survey in October are going to be completely irrelevant. This is a landmark year, but in most companies the difference in six months can be astronomical. There can be a lot of changes that could have happened, so the results don't necessarily tie to what's happening today.

So, we set that context of having that conversation and then talk about, going forward, what are the areas that we want to change. And the leader commits to making some changes as well. It's really good for the team to have that conversation together and for the leader to acknowledge some things that they could do differently to make a more engaging experience for the employee.

Did you notice I got engagement and experience in the same sentence?

Carlos: Well done! A couple of things. One, for those who might be listening to this not in 2020, the reason I think we're talking about the month of February is it was before the pandemic shutdown happened, people were feeling very differently from how they might be feeling in September or October when we're still dealing with a shutdown.

Dana: What I call it as BC.

Carlos: Yes, before COVID-19. I want to go back to the HR point for a second. You said on the one hand, HR is not responsible for levels of engagement or they're not the ones who own employees’ experience, managers have the bigger influence. And yet we brought HR into this process. Can you talk a little bit about why you would recommend that or why that worked in the case of Beiersdorf?

Dana: Well, because HR is response well for people, they have the greatest knowledge of people and people and how they work. And maybe in specific cases, people who are considered to be problematic employees, for example, or stellar employees. They have, hopefully, a more high level view, a 10,000’ high view of the team itself. They can offer more suggestions from a holistic standpoint, as opposed to Carlos, the manager, is looking at your project team. So, you're kind of on the ground with them.

Carlos: Okay. So, they have a level of detachment from what's going on.  They can have an objectivity, for example.

Dana: Exactly. Not to discount HR’s role at all, I think they have a really important role, but it's more consultative than it is directly making a difference.

Carlos: So, we are not shifting ownership from the manager to HR, we're simply saying HR helped me be objective by bringing their objectivity. Okay. I got it.

You just talked about Beiersdorf. Can you share with our brilliant listeners a story of a team you worked with where it either went exceptionally well, or where you think you might've learned something because it didn't go so well?

Dana: I'm really happy to say the process that I designed often started bad, like you're thinking, Oh gosh, where's this gonna go? And it does actually land pretty well. There've been some close calls. We did one, in fact, Carlos you may have been there. It was in Ohio, it was a Mars project, and it was a really big group because we were doing a train-the-trainer of facilitators for the process, as well as doing the whole site. It was exhausting because it was a really, really big group.

We gathered data from employees about what's working and not working, and obviously the not working tends to be the bigger bucket rather than the what's working, which is fine because that's what we're there to hear. How do we unravel some of the things that are not working? And then we bring together our employees, a smaller subset of the whole to say, “Okay, here's all the data, we're going to trust you, your colleagues are going to trust you to pull out what are the biggest issues, and then what are some solutions? It was very empowering and it's really, really heartening to watch the people step up and take on that big role of being responsible for coming up with solutions that aren't self-serving but are more globally serving. So that's fantastic.

So anyway, we're doing this meeting and as facilitators, we stay in touch and see what's going on, because there's a leadership group and then there's an employee group. What was coming out of the employee group was, “We want more pay.” Well, that's typically off the table because that's not really something that even the highest level of the organization can control automatically. It's not like I can sprinkle over and say, “Everybody gets 200 more dollars.” We try to keep that out of the equation and try to do more doable things.

Well, this was not going off the equation. The plant manager was starting to panic a bit and somehow, we landed that plane, and it was all okay. We just had to be very specific to the employees and say, “We're just going to be straight up with you at this point. We're not going to monkey around with this. This is not going to be possible, so come up with other things that we can do that will make a difference. But changing the pay: we're not going to be able to bump everybody's salary.” There's an important point in there, which is don't promise something you can't deliver.

Carlos: In our field, the rule of thumb is you let people speak. They need to feel heard, even if it's about something that we have no control over. Yeah. I remember that extremely well. I remember the process and how uncomfortable it was. And it’s important to say how much of an employee experience has to do, in all the studies that have been done, has to do with compensation.

Dana: Yeah, it's very little. It's up to a ceiling and then it's really not about compensation. It's about all the other things that surround our day-to-day work environment.

In fact, there's a great company covered in Inc Magazine, I think it's based in Seattle actually, and Dan Price, CEO / founder of Gravity Payments, started everybody in the company at $70,000. He said, I'm just going to take this off the table as a factor. And I'm going to have everybody at the salary. And then all the other things that contribute to a great employee experience we can work on, but I want to have everybody at this base-level salary so this just doesn't become a thing that we talk about.

Carlos: That's an interesting organization-wide approach.

Let's bring it home. What one or two pieces of simple wisdom might you share with managers? Sort of saying, “Okay, I get it. Employee experience is important, and I get that I have a major role to play in shaping that experience.” What are a couple of big ideas you want to make sure that people take away?

And first of all, everybody, go buy Dana's book. Talk the Walk - Go buy the book. Lots of good stuff in there.

But what can we tell them right now, before they buy the book, that you think would be immediately useful?

Dana: I think one thing I would say is I've already made my opinions about surveys pretty clear, and I recognize that as a manager in a company, you may not have any control whether there are surveys or not. Make the best of it. Take that data and turn it into a three-dimensional conversation.

So, take the data, sit with your team, sit with your group of people that you work with and say, “What do you think about this? What are the things that really stand out for you that are right? And what are the things that we missed? What are some of the things that we can improve?” When I've talked to managers about this, they get very anxious and I say it’s OK to be uncomfortable. That makes you human. And I think if we've learned anything from this crazy year of COVID it’s that being human is pretty much part of the experience. Everybody's now used to a child running through, or a dog jumping on somebody's lap or whatever, screaming or crying. It could be from the employee themselves. I think the uncomfortableness of the conversation will dissipate, because people will become more comfortable and aware that the manager's genuinely interested in them and their ideas.

And back to the point you made earlier, that's really what people want is they want to feel acknowledged and heard and feel like they are actually contributing to making a difference. No matter how uncomfortable it might seem or feel, and the fear that you might have about what will come out, trust me, it will be so much better afterwards when you allow that valve to be released for people.

The second point is, going back to what we were talking about earlier, don't be afraid to use visuals put up big pieces of paper even are better than a flip chart. People really are so sick of flip charts. Some way to capture it because it makes people feel like they're being heard.

Carlos: Or a virtual whiteboard because we're all working apart. You got a couple of apps out there, like Miro that allow you to do virtual whiteboards in amazing ways.

Dana: Yes. Great, great point. Miro or Mural, the confusing two titles of the whiteboard products that are out there. Those are great.

So much of what people say often falls by the wayside, and when people see you don't have to be a stellar graphic facilitator to do this, when people see that you are listening to their words and you’re capturing them… The first time I ever did this was with a group of very frustrated maintenance people. And when they saw me write on the board what they were saying - and it was all frustration and anger and pent up hostility about things that had happened place- I could viscerally feel the energy in the room calm down. It’s so hard to explain, but it was amazing when I wrote it down, people felt, “Oh my gosh, I got heard!” When I've done the engagement sessions and we do this over and over and over with employees, people will come up to us afterwards. We're using a template, capturing their words as they say them, not translating or changing them. People will come up and say, “Thank you so much for listening”! And one person said, I'll never forget, he said, “I have held that in for 30 years. Today is the first day I can go out on my job and not feel frustrated”. It almost brings tears to your eyes or at least chills on your bones.

Carlos: It does. That's a beautiful, simple understanding, right? It doesn't take a lot to help people feel engaged. And listening, not just listening, but affirming that listening, whether it's writing down the words or jotting in your note book, letting people see that you are taking to heart, they may not agree with you, but they are taken to heart what you have to say.

What a wonderful conversation. You are a wellspring of knowledge and experience. Again, I encourage everybody listening to go out and get ahold of that book. It's so practical. I think I said in a review, I wrote it that it's like a mini-MBA because Dana covers so many aspects of how a business operates and how you can use those aspects of the business to affect the experience of employees. So I encourage you all take a look at Dana Wasson's book.

Dana: Thank you. And I think Carlos, I think one of my favorite words or phrases for this year is the importance of leaders exhibiting compassionate listening - it kind of sums up all of what we were just talking about. It's just this idea of compassionate listening. We all need it.

Carlos: Thank you, Dana Wasson, for being with us today.

And to my brilliant listeners, thank you for joining us. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Teaming With Ideas.

Carlos: Hello, everybody and welcome back to Teaming with Ideas. I am with my guest today, Sam McKee. Sam is the founder and I guess the principle consultant for Evergreen Leadership. Sam has worked with Mars; he's worked with Columbia, Bridgestone, big companies. Every time I talk to somebody about the work Sam does all I hear is how brilliant he is working with leaders and with teams. I could not but have him as a guest on this show. Sam, let's talk about you for a minute and how you came to the work you do. Please, would you tell our listening audience little bit about you and your journey to the leadership work you do today?

Sam: Carlos first of all, it’s an honor and a good chance to say thanks to you, and also to Mars because when I came into leadership development I came completely outside of the corporate world. I’d never worked for a Corporation. I was working with teenagers, and community service, and cross-cultural, building houses in Mexico, and helping start orphanages and things like that. So, when I came into working with corporate leaders, Mars really took me under their wing. And every time I got to participate in a leadership program they’d give me a page of feedback and I would fly home with a sore backside from all the feedback on what I could improve in my development plan. I would say the other thing I'm thankful for is your research on teams. But more so the practical approach you've taken in that HPC framework that actually isn't just about “feel good,” but it's how we operate and collaborate not on everything but what on what matters most. Those early tools from you and Mars have really shaped the way that I shape leaders and teams with all the companies that we work with.

Carlos: Well Sam, you're welcome. How did you get here? I mean you came from work with teenagers how do you even get into that?

Sam: Yeah, so Carlos, I was I was born in a family that put the nuke in nuclear; born in Chicago, raised by an alcoholic father and a mother who were on their third marriage. We had four kids from three different marriages living in a 3 bed, 1 bath house and my father was working 12 to 15-hour days in a print shop. It was a very violent upbringing. I was the baby of the family, so I had it the least. I'll give you one example. At 10 years old my dad was barely making his payments on his bills. When he got home from work, he took my brother to get his first pair of glasses spent. His whole paycheck went to getting my brother glasses. And I walked in the door as the baby brother and called him “four-eyes” and a few other things. So, my big brother goes chasing me down the street and he throws me in the ditch and he's ready to punch me. But, Carlos, I was raised right. Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris movies the whole way up. I kicked him in the face. I broke his glasses and then my brother dragged me in by the scruff of my neck and put me in front of my dad. My dad said, “Why'd you do it? That's my whole paycheck!”

I said, “I don't know.” And my dad didn't say a word. He just punched me right in the face. I woke up on the floor, Carlos, I'd lost a tooth, and again, I was the baby of the family, so I got the least amount of violence. That was at 10 years old. At 11 I started drinking; middle school I had started a forest fire and a fire in a vacant lot between two homes. I mean, I was Trouble with a capital T. My grades were terrible. At 17 years old I almost got a DUI on the Main Street of our little town. I was going nowhere fast. My grades were at the bottom of the barrel.

Then one day this homeless guy said, “Brother, you look lost.”

And I’m like, well “Why do you say that? Is it because I have a mullet and it's 1993?

And he’s like “Well, you gotta get that fixed. I'm not judging, I'm struggling with a crack addiction, but you look lost. There's a place where you can find hope and help, and they'll take anybody. They take me, they'll take you; they don't care what you look like or where you come from.”

I thought,  “Well hell, I've tried everything else.” So, I wrote down the address. And Carlos, it turns out when, I pulled up that weekend, in this inner-city area near North Chicago, it was a machine shop garage that this all black church had turned into a church community. And as I'm walking up I'm like the only guy that looks like me so I thought, “Well, I'm just going to sneak in the back door I can be inconspicuous.” But I'm wearing jeans with holes in them and a white T shirt and everybody looks like they're fit to go to a wedding

Carlos: OK, so hold for a second. Listeners can't see you and you haven't been overt about it but you are a white male.

Sam: Yes Carlos. I'm actually pasty white. I tell people I come in white, red and peeling. And so I'm there with those crappy clothes looking like a tornado hit goodwill, and I walk in the back door and I sit in the back row, and I think, I can ride this out back here, because I'm scared to death of public speaking or any kind of being in the spotlight. But my homeless friend stands up front and he says, “Brother Samuel's gonna testify this morning.” and I'm like timeout like testify? What is this traffic court or something?

So I go walking down the aisle nervously, and I just tell him “Look, I grew up Catholic. We roll in there, the priest does all the talking, we flash some gang signs you know the sign of the cross and we're out of there, baby.”

And he's like, “No, no, no, brother Samuel is gonna tell his story and give the Lord some glory.”  and I’m like, Dang! He just rapped! I'm not going to win a rap battle North Chicago! it's not like I'm Eminem or something. So, I'm just gonna have to like talk. So, I tap on the microphone nervously and I just told him like I told you, Carlos, I grew up in the tough family, going nowhere, not living up to my potential. And they all looked at me, just actively listening, and said, “Welcome home, brother Samuel.”

 For three months they just fattened me up with soul food, collard greens. They're just loving on me. Then, after that point of like caring personally, they challenged me directly to my potential just like they did their own kids. They said to me, “Brother Samuel, you got a good head on your shoulders so tell me why do your grades look like you're stupid, boy?” And I was like, Damn, they just called me out. And when they call you “boy” you know you've been adopted. They checked my quizzes and my test scores. From then on, Carlos, I got virtually straight A's and I got scholarships through undergrad and graduate school.

My father, who had been my worst enemy, looked at me and said, “All that bitching, punching and complaining couldn't get you to do what they got you to do, so I'm gonna go check it out.” My father had become a dry drunk. He quit drinking but never went through the 12 steps, so he was just kind of angry, and this was the place where he found his peace and his purpose. He went from being my worst enemy to being my best man in my wedding. He handed me the ring when I married my wife.

Carlos: That is in so many ways a remarkable tale. I come from a very large family. My original family had ten siblings - I’ve lost one of my sisters. But it was not a healthy place to be. It occurs to me, and certainly my wife would voice the same opinion, that my family life shaped the way I work today. Some of the lessons we learn early in the family system for guys like you and me, who work with groups and systems, never leave us. Well, you had more than one family, right? You had your birth family then you had your church family. In either or both of them is there anything you can point to, to say , “There's a lesson I learned in that system that has served me well?”

Sam: Carlos, that is a brilliant question. It's a deep one. The first one that comes to mind is…you know how much of a buzzword it is right now, diversity and inclusion. So, for me this is a core passion because, if you think about it, I was the baby of the family, so it was his, mine and ours. And I was the only one in that family unit that was blood related to everyone. My father may have been the stepfather of my brother Jimmy, but whenever I saw a conflict, Carlos, I could see it through the other person's eyes. And I didn't buy into the villain-ization, that destructive conflict. I knew there was always another side to that. And so diversity and inclusion was a great pain point for me because there was a lot of unfairness in my family based on stepparents and lack of blood relation. To see the opposite of that modeled in that church community where, here I am, the guy who looks like a lot of people who maybe haven't treated them fairly, and yet they welcome me in with open arms. They include my voice in their community. They leverage my strengths, and they make me a vital part of their team. So, I mean diversity inclusion from the very core for me, you know, being able to see from someone else’s street corner, so to speak. At Stanford we helped work with them on diversity inclusion as a piggyback to what they were doing with this thing called “looking from the other person's corner of the street” and seeing that perspective. Join instead of Judge. I think from the start I was like the peacekeeper or the Gandhi of my family because I was blood related and could empathize with different parties, just like within a company we've got to empathize with different personalities and functions.

Carlos: That is very clear. I did not know you were involved in doing diversity and inclusion work and that is not a surprise now that I reflect on it. So, as you know this is a podcast that focuses on the way people at work, work together. and I know that your organization is called Evergreen Leadership. I do know that you have done a lot of work with teams. You’ve used the Mars framework for high performance collaboration that I was part of creating. How long you've been at this, Sam? How long you been in the consulting game?

Sam: About a little over 12 years, Carlos.

Carlos: I hold it to be true that if we're awake, we never stop learning. By awake I mean obviously more than just getting out of bed in the morning. I mean aware. In your recent history, in the last couple of years, can you recall any instance where you were working with a group, and you learned something, something occurred to you - maybe it was one of those cases where you had to learn something again? That happens to me all the time, I've learned something but somehow it slips away, and I end up making the same mistake again later, and I have to learn it all over again. What comes into mind when I ask that question?

Sam: Probably one of the most important things that I've been learning lately is just how important it is not to rush to purpose and priorities, but to start with that human connection. To have people understand each other, their context, their values, and then from that they can lean into those tougher conversations. The example I think of is I was called into work with the most dysfunctional triad of leaders in this billion-dollar veterinary practice. It started with one jerk as most problems often do. That person wasn't held accountable. So then, these high performers around him started to become part of the problem. They started rolling their eyes in meetings, they started picking up phone calls in front of market leaders undermining each other. And it got to the point where the regional vice president said, “Look. All three of you are about to get fired. I'm going to give you one day to get your ‘ish’ together and then a little time after that to show progress. I don't even want to know what you talked about but just fix it.”

We started off with an exercise that I've found to be powerful in person, virtual, etc, and it's almost always where I start with teams. it's the Four H. It's basically having these three leaders sit down in a room and share

·         What's your hometown? What did you like or dislike about growing up there?

·         What's a highlight that you're proud of in your personal and professional life?

·         What's a hardship, a challenge you face? And then lastly

·         Who's the hero that you look up to?

As these three leaders began to share, they dropped their guard. In fact, the guy that was the root cause of dysfunction on the team, when he shared his hardship, he said, “Look, I grew up in a developing country. My father was a workaholic, never gave me the time of day. I started working in his factory at five years old at quality control, and my job was to find the flaws in the parts. and the only time my father came up behind me, patted me on the back and said, “Good job, son” was when I found flaws. So I thought being a critic is how you add value. The other two had this epiphany like, “Oh my goodness! that makes sense! You still need to quit being a critical prick, but now I don't think you're a villain. Now I don't think you're trying to hurt us or the team, but you gotta knock it off.” It was like the lights went off and all of a sudden  he said to them “Look, you might think I act like I’m perfect and I’m condescending, but when I look in the mirror all I see are the flaws in myself. When you give my critique, I may not respond great, but I take it to heart.”

Then we all shared those things: personality style; where you grew up; hometown; hardship. Then we got to the contracting part of it and we said, “OK, everybody go to a flipchart. Don't look at each other’s flip charts, but write, what is our mission? what are our top priorities?” No surprise, Carlos, they were completely aligned in the vision and the purpose.  Next thing was, “I want you to own what are you doing that is a barrier to our team success. What are we going to stop doing that is dysfunctional?” and they literally owned it. And if they didn't own it someone else called it out. Then then we said, “What are you going to ask for?” Your light bulb about contracting with each other very specifically, totally worked here because they all made specific commitments. Then we checked in on those commitments for 1/2 hour every Friday. Within two months their market was up 20%

The amazing happy ending to the story for two of them was ten months later I was speaking at their central division meeting and the medical director who was going to get fired was named medical director of the year. The field trainer had gotten a Leadership Award. Unfortunately, here's the realistic part, Carlos. That original root cause of dysfunction? He did everything he could to turn things around but there was too much water under the bridge with the hospital teams and they had to let him go. He turned to his regional vice president said, “Thank you. I will never do that again and I'll be a better leader for it.” He has landed on his feet in another organization. He's a vice president and he is a much better leader than he was before.

Carlos: You know, what's remarkable to me about that is the degree of self-awareness you have to have to be able to go there and say something about, you know, “This was part of my upbringing” for example. The way you talked about your understanding around diversity and inclusion or what this gentleman did around his schooling and how to find what's wrong. I have some empathy for that. I'm pretty much the same way myself. Great, great story. Now, you did say you've done this virtually?

Sam: Carlos, I've been so amazed. Like yourself, my whole business transitioned from 95% in-person to 100% virtual, and I really struggled to find how can we build that human connection. So, I've started to leverage pre-work. I have people on an executive team fill out a bio-slide where they have their picture of their hometown, and then a picture of a highlight, and a picture of a hardship, and a picture of a hero that they look up to. It is amazing. I'll give you one example of an executive who shared just one picture that covered hardship and hero. It was his wife. He said, “I wasn't the brightest student. There was a good chance I wasn't going to finish my bachelor’s. But my wife saw something in me I didn't even see myself and she held me accountable to my potential and she got me through undergrad and MBA. Then she battled cancer. She is still battling it. And when I watch how she has built her career, built my career, and then is an amazing leader in her home and with our boys, she is my hero. And he choked up a bit. Everyone on that executive team will never see him the same. They will always understand this guy, as driven as he is, has a huge heart and a huge respect for his wife. He is fighting a battle none of us may have ever known. So when we're in executive team meetings, and he sounds a little pressured or tough I'm never going to assume negative intent because I know he's got good bones in a good soul. We say a lot, “Assume positive intent”, but it's so much easier to assume positive intent and root for our peers what we know where they came, from what matters most to them, and it allows us to overcome that fundamental attribution error. We know that in psychology that when I make a mistake, Carlos, I tend to attribute it to, “Oh, well, the kids had me up last night at 2:00 in the morning so I'm just sleep deprived.” But if you make a mistake in a meeting, I’m like, “Oh, Carlos is just a slacker.” or “He's just selfish.” When we hear each other’s stories we’re less likely to slip into that attribution error and more likely to actually assume positive intent.

Carlos: So, you call this the 4 H’s - I love it. I think you mentioned to me at some point that it came from a basketball coach at UCLA?

Sam: Yes, there's a female basketball coach at UCLA who shared this concept with John Gordon and that's where he got it from, and he's popularized the 4 H’s.

Carlos: The pandemic's been with us, Sam, since March of this year, 2020, and has rocked our world in so many, many ways. As you were talking about earlier, we've had to adjust our businesses, how we operate, how we get things done, how we make money and we make a living. What's the biggest impact you've seen on teams that you've worked on? What are you noticing and, if it's an impact that needs to be fixed or addressed or adjusted what are you seeing people do to account for it? 

Sam: That's another great loaded question. The first thing that I notice is the erosion between work and personal life, and the exhaustion people have by being promoted sometimes to school principal of their own home school that they never wanted, to being a teacher of their children, to just the ceaseless connectivity. And I found some groups like the Stanford Department of Energy has asked me to come in and work with them on managing energy because people are in an endless marathon. So, they had me talk to them about not really work life balance, but making sure that were charged physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. So, I'd say that managing energy for people and that human connection is so important. I think people not feeling part of a team, being distracted, distanced, not as much huddling around a coffee machine, no natural points of intersection. So, how do we proactively bring people together in a way of building the team where it's not just another Zoom meeting with more Zoom marathons and Zoom fatigue but it really creates a connection and clarity, so that we are tracking on what matters most while not burning ourselves out or getting two disconnected running or swimming in our own lanes?

Carlos: Is there a team your recent memory that you've given some practical advice to around how to manage energy, manage their time and Zoom meetings, etc., that you could share with us - that wouldn't divulge any confidentialities, of course?

Sam: Yeah, I mean both that Department of Energy at Stanford and this ad agency that I work with that's based in in Portland, San Francisco, and also out in Providence, RI and Philly. We basically dedicated time in a webinar to really talk about how - it's old school in a way. It's just a new packaging of Stephen Covey and the sharpened saw - it really is. And it's that idea that we care about you as a human being not just a human doing. And so what are we all doing connected with our wellness programs if they exist to eat, move and sleep better and be physically energized? What are we doing to have that mental energy and focus on what matters most? If your best time of the day is 10:00 AM to noon, are you giving your best energy and mental focus to the projects that matter most? Or did they get the leftovers after you've dealt with everyone else’s priorities filling your inbox?

Carlos:  By the way, that is a great question to ask folks: What is your prime time of day? Are you an early morning person? Mid-morning? I myself am a late morning person, 10 to noon, like the person you just talked about. Others are at their best from 3:00 o'clock on. Great questions.

Sam: So true. And how do we maintain a positive emotional energy on a team? Are we celebrating wins like you talk about in Sustain & Renew? Do we celebrate enough? Do we share successes? They say that at any given moment there are 11 billion bits of data around us, but our brain can only lock in on 40. So, out of all these different possibilities, we can choose a reality that really sucks and makes us anxious and angry and 10 to 15 IQ points dumber. Or we can focus on the opportunity or the challenge that we can tackle. We can look at our whole big project or we can take a circle around one little chunk of it and say, “I'm not going to look at the big picture, it's too depressing and scary”. But we're going to take this one process in our team and we're going to make it better. They call that Zoro circles. Zoro was struggling as a swordsman and this old guru said, “Draw a circle in the sand. This is your world. That's the only place where you can live and fight.” We need to draw Zoro circles around our problems. In fact, in the movie The Martian, what did he say when he was in that really crappy situation with the odds were not in his favor? He said, “I'm gonna start with one problem. I'm gonna solve that problem. Then I'll solve the next, and if I solve enough problems, I get to go home.”

Carlos:  Well said! Marvelous recollection you have, Sam, movie quotes.  If I were to ask you out of the blue, “What’s on your mind right now?” what are the big ideas that are occupying space in that amazing gray matter between your ears?

Sam: One of the things that I'm really excited about that surprised me: we have had to pivot our main leadership programs to virtual, and with one of those we're working and partnering with an escape room that is partnered with Carnegie Mellon. They've looked at 5000 teams and their performance in escape rooms. I asked him, I said, “Well can you just drop on me what pattern are you seeing?” and he said, “Well I have a question for you: which teams do you think would perform best in an escape room? We studied four different categories:

1.       families

2.       work teams

3.       friends

4.       strangers who met in the lobby of the escape room

 Which do you think would perform the best? Surely corporate teams. I mean you know they're trained for this right?

Carlos: No, that would not have been my guess.

Sam: What would you have guessed, Carlos?

Carlos: Strangers. I’d guess strangers.

Sam: Man, I hate it when you're right. So, yes Carlos, strangers who met in the lobby where were the best, followed by friends, followed by work teams, and the worst was families. Any thoughts on why that might be?

Carlos: There we go! Think about the patterns that are formed, right? In a family we have habitual patterns of interactive behavior that just keep coming up! I come from this giant family, as you know, and we have reunions every so often and people will comment and say, “You know, we just fall back in. Suddenly we're 12 again.” I think groups of friends would have that same dynamic operating.

Sam: It's 100% true. He said hierarchical structure… when roles are solidly formed, people in a family will step back and say, “Well mom or dad are supposed to solve the puzzle. I'm not going to speak up. I don't want to get corrected or sound like I'm dumb. it's not my place.” Then in work teams we often have that hierarchal structure. I was impressed at Mars with the Associate Principle. Equal playing field, every opinion counts. Well, with friends there's less of that structure. We chose those people, we weren't born into that structure. And then with strangers who met the lobby, it doesn't matter who you are outside of this room, we all have an equal voice. And in my opinion on the best teams we create the kind of environment where people can speak up, share their opinions, share the diversity of thought and approach and critique. What was fascinating in their research is that they found that in this escape room that was especially difficult the highest performing group was with 10-year-olds. 10-year-olds! Think about a 10 year old, Carlos: when they have an idea that pops into their head, whether it's great or asinine what do they do with it? They do it! they do it! They speak up, they try it, they bang on something, they spin something, they experiment. They fail fast, and in the highest performing teams in their toughest escape room it was 10-year-olds that were testing and learning, testing and learning, sharing, critiquing, speaking up.

Carlos: These are 10 year old stranger groups? So just think about that. You know I love a good paradox. Here we are on the one hand sitting people down in a room, having them share their 4 H’s, opening up, binge vulnerable, “Tell us about who you are in a deep level so I can know you and therefore that adds to our relationship and creates for ideally more effective working together.” Contrast that to a room full of 10-year-olds, who've never met each other, being the best at what they do. So, we have this paradox about you need relationship, but you don't necessarily need relationship. You can create the relationship to meet the needs you have. I love working in that space, right? Because it's both, isn't it? It's brilliant.

Sam: It's so true and often with adults in the corporate setting we're having to work against a lot of teaching in the world that it's not safe to speak up. Sometimes we may have to use some of those tools and tricks to maybe get us back to ground zero where a kid in a healthy environment knows that his or her voice counts, that their ideas and their perspective may contribute. That's a powerful thing. So maybe we’re working our way back to where we would have started in the healthy environment where we can speak up, learn from each other, embrace and leverage diversity for better success.

Carlos: Sam, tell us a bit more, going back to what we talked about at the top about what people are colloquially calling D&I - diversity and inclusion.

Sam: Carlos I couldn't be happier to see so much emphasis on diversity inclusion. From my childhood upbringing, to my greatest heroes being people who weren't always included and respected the way that they should. At the same time, I would say that a great letter from a CEO about our position on diversity and inclusion, or a great virtual training on implicit bias won't turn the tide and create an environment at work that really leverages diversity and inclusion. Diversity and inclusion lives or dies at the leader and team level. So, that's why I think it's so important at the team level to reinforce diversity and inclusion to bring that leverage, the diversity of the team.

Carlos, you shocked me the last time that we talked when you said that hiring diversity in and of itself will not give you a competitive advantage.

Carlos: Correct. Just bringing in people who don't look like you, or talk like you, or have the same value systems as you, by itself is not the thing that will bring change.

Sam:  So true! And sometimes a team that's more alike can be faster making decisions, and you hire diversity, but you don't really create an environment of diversity inclusion. It's not like you're coming to agreement, alignment and leveraging that diversity of thought. You may be even more dysfunctional. So, the quick band aid of just hiring a head count diverse doesn't get us where we need to be. How can we as a team really engage each individual and then bring them together as a team fostering that diversity of thought? One of the great examples in my mind of diversity of thought is Pixar. They say every great story starts off as an ugly baby. The idea is, you’ve got a concept for a script. Well, we're going to put it on this this white board here. It's not yours anymore. We're going to spin it, shoot holes in it, twist it around. You won't even recognize it when it debuts because it's not going to be shaped by one IQ. It's going to be touched by 150 minds. And that's why we don't have those tired, overcooked animations, but ours are breakthrough, inside and out, like neuroscience, in such a brilliant way that a kid and a PhD can understand it. Trying to leverage that kind of environment of diversity of thought to come up with the best strategies, the best ideas. That's where a leader is what brings diversity inclusion to life.

Carlos: So true. Being able to lead diverse groups effectively so that they contribute maximally; so that they feel included and their ideas are included and their impact is felt. Doing that is no mean feat I would imagine 1 to 2% of the population of leaders have that as an innate skill and the rest of us have to learn it.

During the next conversation you and I have at some point in the future, because I'd love to circle back and talk in a few months as we move, I hope, out of the pandemic and into another phase, maybe we come back and talk about that because I think it's  desperately needed.

Sam: Carlos, I always love your emphasis on micro behaviors. Now we used to end leadership at Mars II with a quote from Arthur Ashe, the activist and athlete; “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” You're welcome here. Bring your full self to this team. We're going to savor that diversity; we're going to leverage it; it's going to create some conflict and we're going to work through that together to be aligned, to be one voice, one team with an inspiring purpose, clear priorities and amazing collaboration.

Carlos: Thank you, Sam.  If somebody said, “Sam McKee, hmmm. I want to know more about this interesting guy!” Where do you recommend they start?

Sam: LinkedIn is great. Look for Sam McKee with Evergreen Leadership.  You can also look at EvergreenLeadership.com. My story, my values and my approach to teams are on there.

Carlos: Sam, this has been enlightening, inspiring, energizing – I can’t imagine a better way to have spent the last 30 minutes or so. My profoundest gratitude to you for your openness, and your smarts. Thank you.

Carlos: Hi, and welcome back to Teaming with Ideas. My guest today is the esteemed Matt Cronin, professor at the School of Business at George Mason University and a guy who I met three or four years ago when my book was published. Matt was an early reader and we got talking about teams and teamwork and collaboration as a result of that. And, I've stayed in touch over the subsequent years. Matt? How are you doing?

Matt: I'm good! Thank you.

Carlos: Good. I am delighted to have you on board here. By the way, GMU, George Mason is down in Fairfax, Virginia, where I lived for a fair amount of time. I'm now up in the New York City area and we are doing this, of course, via Zoom. Matt, so what I know about you is that piece about you being a professor. I do know also that you are a musician, you play a bit of bass. Do I understand that also that you are biker?

Matt: Yes. I do ride a motorcycle. I crashed it around this time last year. But you know, now things are better and I play a little guitar and drums, too. So I'm obviously, like you said, a professor at the School of Business at George Mason, I'm active in the conflict management division of the Academy of management. And I serve as the Chief Scientific Officer for Process Metrics at our University Research Institute, which is actually also what you and I started talking about early on when we were looking at how to increase collaboration and large scale hospital construction teams.

Carlos: That's right. Yeah. I remember that project you were working on. Yeah. I want to begin with one of your books, one that you wrote, and I actually have it with me here. Jeffrey Lowenstein is your coauthor on this, right?

Matt: Yes.

Carlos: It's called The Craft of Creativity and I bought your book after we met. I've always been interested as a person myself who came out of the arts - my first master's degree was in theater- all I really wanted was to be a professor of theater, misguided youth that I was…

Matt: A lot of jobs there.

Carlos: Yeah. Ton of jobs. Big, big bucks. But creativity is fascinating to me. So, I bought the book and I remember reading it because I'm pretty much a guy with a one-track mind. All I could think about is teams and creativity, and collaboration and creativity. And I didn't find much. I was just the other night leafing through the index again, saying, “Maybe I missed something.” And I started to go through my bookmarks and my highlights in the book. And, I didn't find a whole lot, but I wanted to ask you about that.

Matt: You break my heart with your question, because I actually got into studying creativity through teams. I felt that team creativity was in fact best but was the most fragile. Which is why it's so rarely works. And, ironically, the canonical example I give to that is: think about bands that break up and good people do solo work. In almost no cases do those people make more impactful, meaningful work than when they were with their original band. So, there are lots of people who go off and make more money or even get Grammy's. The one you usually hear in that case is Simon and Garfunkel. Right? So, Paul Simon won a Grammy for Graceland.  But my guess is that in 200 years, we'll still hear Sounds of Silence, those songs. But, I'm not sure we're going to hear Graceland. Similarly, one of my favorite bands, The Police, was my other example. And I was very gratified when Sting eventually got on and did his little Ted Talk and said all this work he had done as a solo musician was garbage and he needed to get back to his roots. ‘Cause you know, I feel like a million people will say they were influenced by The Police.

Carlos: Right, yeah.

Matt: Anyway, so that I feel like to make any idea work, no single person does it, right? There's always a team involved. But really there is a magic when there can be a synergy among team members that is really special and really important, but it also is really fragile because we all have these biases that make us think, “I'm the genius here.”  Or, when it's creative, we can think, “You may disagree with me and since it's creative, we don't have any authority to appeal to.” Right? We have to sort of work through what might be right. And that requires a lot of conflict management and a lot of mutual respect. And so, it's really, really difficult to maintain that over the long haul.

Carlos: Alright. So, let's hang with this for a minute ‘cause I think it's fascinating. I'm sort of glad we've never had this conversation before because it makes for good rich content. You use the word “fragile” to describe creativity in a team. And I hear you talk about that there's a tendency to conflict.  Intuitively, I understand what you mean by “it's fragile in a team.” Let me just check that that intuition is directionally right, anyway. Is that because we have lots of different personality types; different needs for being heard; different interpretations of what we mean by creative; different thoughts about what's right versus what's not right?  That kind of stuff?

Matt: You could probably be a little more narrow and say that creativity is fragile because when we are producing something that is of our own self, which is usually what good creativity is. Of course, the people who study creativity like Theresa Amabile, they say intrinsic motivation is key. We create about things that we really care about and are deeply concerned with even if others may be like, “Oh, well, whatever,” you know. If you think about - well, you know this as an actor, right - think about the amount of time a director puts in to getting people to say the lines the right way.  Right? Just the amount of attention and focus and all of the, the “sturm und drang” that can go into getting it right. Fixing problems that most people would never even notice. Right? Creativity has to come from sort of deep in the person. When it comes from deep in the person, it means they're not going to be so happy when you say their kid's not too cute. You know what I mean? You know?

Carlos: Wait, wait, what do my kids’ faces have to do with creativity?

Matt: No, like, so I guess…

Carlos: Oh, wait. So, their kid being their creation. Sorry. I'm a bit slow.

Matt: Right. I mean, and it's one of the things they say in the video game industry where there's a lot of creativity going on is, “Kill your babies” It's not a phrase I like particularly much being a father and all, but that's the point. Creativity is very personal to people. And so when you and I both want to bring something into the world and there's conflict, it's very easy to get wrapped up and to take it personally and to not let go. That's the fragility. The fragility is that it's really difficult for us to be dispassionate and objective. But the most successful creative people actually are. They're ironically, passionately dispassionate, right? So, I've interviewed artists who say, “Yeah, you know, this is a product that I'm making and the user has to like it and it has to fit the style. And so there are these parameters. But it's always got my signature.”

Carlos: Got it.

Matt: So, in a team it's very hard to navigate that sort of shared sense of what we're trying to bring into the world that we think is really important. And again, think of parents. Right?

Carlos: Yes. Being a parent myself. Yes. Finding the shared point of view on whatever it may be. So, let's go to something you and I mentioned before we started today: diversity. Because everything I hear you saying that fragility, it seems to me, would only be exacerbated or made more apt to happen if you had folks with a lot of different points of view, perspectives, backgrounds. And that could also include gender, race, sexual orientation, that kind of thing. That diversity - I think the trope is - diversity is good for creating innovation because you've got all these different points of view and therefore you're going to have richer solutions and maybe more interesting ones. I'm getting the sense that may not be true from what you’re saying.

Matt: Yeah. Unfortunately, the marketers love to say that. But that's not the actual research truth. And there's a lot of meta-analyses on these because diversity is a double-edged sword. It can bring different experience, but it also brings social categorization, right? “Us-Them”. So, for instance, you can have in a group, this set of people thinks we should do A, and that set of people thinks we should do B. And because it's identifiably different sets of people, “Oh, they always think like that,” right? That's the problem. Now, of course, where this also gets muddled, is we like to talk about the visible racial, ethnic gender, those sorts of things. But when I was doing my dissertation work at Ford, it was designer-engineer. Engineers, “They thought like Blockheads,” and “They've got no imagination!” And then designers were, “Children who just wanted everything and everything was important,” and right? It's very easy for us to categorize. And so when there is diversity, it makes that harder. The frustrating thing is that the process that gets us over that is respect. And in all of my work and I've seen it in bands and I've seen it in Ford, right. You know, respect is that, “I think I should listen to you even when I disagree with you, because I hold you in some level of esteem.” And when that's true, even when you say to me, “No, that's, that's not a good idea,” and it's a really important idea to me, I'll get angry, but I'll still listen and I'll still be civil.

So, I'm all for diversity for the social good. But it's kind of frustrating that people don't…they almost lead people to believe that,  “Diversity it's great, no problems.” And then people get into diverse teams there's conflict, and they're kind of like, “Wow, we didn't expect this.” And we should be providing some tools to say, “Okay. And when there is conflict…

Carlos: Right.

Matt: “Here’s the way to deal with it.”

Carlos: By the way, just for the listeners, Ford being Ford Motor Company, the car people.

Matt: Yes. Yeah.

Carlos: Wow. That's cool. You worked with them when you were working on your dissertation. Now, let's go back to that conflict thing for a second.

Matt: Yeah.

Carlos: You teach teams. You've studied teams. You've written about teams. I'm imagining a listener to this podcast thinking to him or herself or themselves, “Okay. So, creativity is a good thing.” And by the way, Matt's book is extremely practical in terms of creativity and how you go about fostering it. So, you might want to look into that. It's called the Craft of Creativity and Matt Cronin's name is on the front with Jeffery Lowenstein. These managers can look at your book, but I'm thinking they're also wondering, “So what can you tell me today? Because my company's a good company and we want to do the right thing socially.” Right? I worked at Mars for a long time. Mars is profoundly committed to social justice and environmental justice and things of that sort. And I'm proud of that. So, doing the right thing, Matt, how do I make the most of the fact that I've hired a really diverse group of people? All, by the way, functionally competent; they're all good at what they do. Right?  I don't have any dummies on my team. But what can I do? Any thoughts about that?

Matt: Yeah. Manage conflict. That is the key. And there's a thing called task conflict, right? Conflict over what we should be doing to get things done. And it's supposed to be good. ‘Cause the theory is when you and I disagree, when we talk about why we disagree, we unearth more information and that gives us sort of a richer well from which to draw, to make better solutions. The challenge though, is that when we're in conflict, we naturally get frustrated. Always. Right? So, the only kind of conflict that is really unemotional is the conflict that you don't give a crap about. Right? But when you give a crap about it, then unfortunately the emotions, like it or not, creep in. Again, respect is one of the ways to manage that. So, trust is another thing, as well. Trust, you know, when I know that you're saying you're disagreeing with me, not out of malice or for advantage, but really, you know, because with genuine concern and legitimate cause it's easier for me to not get as upset about it. So, the managing of diversity…. And by the way, this is the same with non-diverse people working together, as well. Managing conflict is about trying to understand where the other person is coming from and working with it. Not necessarily agreeing with it, but literally working with it. There's a lot of shortcuts. So, unfortunately, a lot of the shortcuts that get played out is things like, “Yes, and.” Like we should just say, “Yes, and.”

Carlos: Wait. That tried and true improvisation technique? You're going to trash that, Matt? You yourself having studied improvisation!

Matt: If you're improvising, I'm going to say it’s may be different than if you're making a product and resources are limited and time is short, right?

Carlos: Fair enough.

Matt: There are important contextual differences there. And so, when it comes down to, “We can't do everything,” what do we cut? Do we cut your idea or do we cut mine? That's what I'm saying about the capacity to legitimately work through in good faith to what the answer is. So, whenever people come at it from a different angle, the typical reaction is not to understand, it's to convince. Look, when you tell me, “I think we should do something different.” I don't say, ”Well, why do you think that?” I say, “Well, no, I think we should do it my way because…”.

Carlos: Okay. That's when we get into counter-convincing,

Matt: Right. And that's what starts the cycle and that's what starts frustration. And once we get frustrated, then we stop listening. That is why if we can build beforehand, we can have a good solid relationship.

Oh, and it's funny that you say this because one of my favorite peak points about your work is, “Skip the trust fall,” I love that. And I say that all the time in every class I teach because what people miss is that when we work well together, that's what causes us to trust and respect each other. Not, “We go swing on the ropes and now we're ready to work well together.”

Carlos: I was going to ask you, if we go do a ropes course, then we're going to have better creativity because conflict is managed. I want to go back there for a minute because you schooled me pretty nicely last year at some point when we were talking about trust and respect. And people often throw those two together in teams, right?

Matt: Yes.

Carlos: “We don't have enough trust or respect,” or, “We really have a lot of trust and respect,” as if those two things go hand in hand, and, almost as if they're the same. Now, maybe there's some overlap, maybe in that Venn diagram, there's a little overlap there. Would you talk about that for a minute? I'm fascinated by it.

Matt: There is definitely a lot of overlap, but the key difference is that when I trust you, I don't think you're going to harm me. I think that when you make decisions, that you're not out to gain advantage. You're capable of making a decision that is going to be good and will not cause me pain, right? So, you can lack trust because you're not on my side, you're looking out for yourself. So, that's a lack of benevolence. Or, you can lack trust because you're a clod and you're going to mess up the project and then I'm going to have to fix your mistakes, right? Or because you lack some kind of integrity, right? So those are the things that make us not trust others. When we worry about their intent and its harm to us. Respect though, is about the value I placed on your ideas and your capabilities. So, it's possible that I might - what we saw at Ford – “Yeah, I trust that the designers are good designers. In fact, they're some of the world's best designers. It's just that I don't think design matters that much. I think design is kind of like, ‘Whatever, who cares.’”

Carlos: So, is that a lack of respect for the category of design?

Matt: The value of that thing that they do is not high, right?

Carlos: And that's a little different. So that's not at all about the person. That's about their discipline

Matt: In all cases, it's when you can trust or respect what comes from another person, because of who they are, because of their discipline, because of whatever. That was just an example, right? You know, you can think about respecting enemies. Enemies that you respect, you pay attention to ‘cause you think they're good at what they do and you know you have to watch out for them. You would never trust an enemy because they are out to harm you, but you can respect them. Similarly, again, you might trust somebody very much, but just not think too much of what it is they're good at or what it is they're trying to do. You may just think, “Eh.”

Carlos: Could you give me an example of what that looks like in a workplace team? So, I trust them, but I don't respect them. I feel like that's not something I see very much.

Matt: I bet you see it a lot. This is not going to be a popular thing. But when the bureaucrat comes in and says, “Here are the new rules we would like you to fill out because the organization thinks this thing now. “Here's a million more administrivias is that you have to do.” You might think that person is just doing their job but what they're asking me to do is stupid. And that's a lack of respect. You may trust that they're not out to harm you. And they may even have the benefit of the organization in their mind, but you may think what they're asking you to do is just busy work.

Carlos: You're absolutely right. Yes. Those are things we see all the time, especially in large organizations, where there is a lot of bureaucracy and rule following and compliance to pay attention to. So, we've teased apart trust and respect a little bit. We've mentioned trust falls, ropes courses, knowing our Myers-Briggs is not necessarily a pathway to trust.

Matt: Yep.

Carlos: We have said working together - this has been my experience and your research, I think, and research you're aware of confirms this - working together tends to build these things, both trust and respect, I would imagine - certainly trust. So, if our point is we are a marketing team or an R&D team and creativity is important to us, the thing we need to do is start the conversations about creating this new thing, and be ready for when the conflict comes up to manage it so we can continue to be productive. Am I putting it together right?

Matt:  Why don't we even pull back before we get to the point of needing creativity? When we have to go in and do our regular old job, find a way to demonstrate competence and benefit to the other and that will increase trust and respect. Carlos and I had a great experience where he came in to teach for one of my teams classes and the power went out in the building. We had no PowerPoint, no nothing, right? So, we went outside onto the stairs or the walkway and Carlos kind of held court with pen and paper and got it to work. Didn't complain. Didn't say, “What kind of slipshod university do you work for?” And that was awesome. That totally increased my respect because it was adaptive. It was helpful.  You didn't make me feel like an idiot, though. Even though it wasn’t my fault, I sort of, I felt foolish that this is what we had to do. Those kinds of experiences are the things that build up that trust and respect. And again, at Ford, though the designers and the engineers often got into fights, every one of them had a story about working on a project with someone from the other function, about something that needed to get done, and, they, they really brought their A-game. And they were so impressed by the A-game that was brought and the work they did put in and the outcomes, that is how we build that foundation. Then we're ready to be creative.

Carlos: Right.

Matt: And we can do that before we ever have to be creative. We don't have to be creative all the time. Creativity is like salt and food. You need it, but very little.

Carlos: So, I'm sitting here thinking about conflict resolution because it's an area that I've struggled with as a guy who's thought about, written about, worked with teams. I've got a client right now where I've got some task-related conflict. It's all about the way the work is supposed to move through the pipeline and the business, and then get out to the client/customer. I want you to help me with this. I believe these people respect each other. This is a fairly sophisticated business. It's in the health sciences area, and these are all smart people, who have demonstrated a mastery of their various fields, yeah? Some of that technological, some of it medical, some of it interpersonal, but they're all like…

Matt: Listen, if you're smart and mastered your field, you're obviously very personally competent and mature and all sorts of other things.

Carlos: Obviously, right? There are, indeed, some science-type nerds in this group who lack people skills and I'm trying to help them because they're stuck now… they've got to keep pushing out stuff. They're going through some other changes in the organization. They have to keep the factory running. They have to keep the business going while they add on a couple of functions and they know they need to just get along, right? And it's difficult to know where to start when you've got folks who are well-meaning, respect each other's functional capability, but there's some sort of suspicion there that the other person who's in the marketing function or in the R&D function doesn't have the best interests of…they don't have my best interests at heart. They're just doing it for themselves. I guess that's what's going on here. The respect is there.

Matt: Well, I think that what you just said is the trust is not if they're worried. But part of it is also that we worry easily when we don't know what's going on, which is why communication, especially when there's conflict, is really critical. I always reduce my negotiations course to, “You get what you want by helping others get what they want,” which is an old Zig Ziglar tagline. But it's a really good one, because it means you have to understand what they want. And most people don't try to understand what the other side wants. They're telling you why you should understand what they want. And, when we do that, when you really tell me, “Hey, listen, this is what I need to know”, and, “This is what I'm struggling with,” and, “This is what I'm trying to get at,” then I can think, “Well, I'm going to try and help you do that. Can you help me?” And then, if you help me, then that's what gets the cycle of reciprocity going. The challenge is that somebody has to take the first step. And most people when they're in conflict, they play their cards close to the chest. But if I don't tell you what I want, you can't give it to me and we're done. So, really the thing to do is to sort of say… have everybody start by just explaining the problems they're trying to solve. And then, at least that will get the information ball rolling. And then as people know more, they can trust more.

Carlos: So maybe even a step before that is take the temperature down, create some sort of setting where we can get the emotional level down a bit so that I can talk to you about what's on my mind without coming across as if I've got an axe to grind, right? So, “Here's what I want,” without a lot of emotional baggage to it. So, there is a place for a person who's good at calming everybody's nerves a little bit before you get into that.

Matt: And honestly, I will teach people, you have to ask questions and understand. And then I'll give them an exercise that shows them that. And then I'll say it again and I'll give you another exercise and they won't do it. So, I'll say it again and then I'll give them another, right? This is only because we are habituated to defending our positions. And nowadays, jeez, it's I mean, that's like nobody's listening, right? Nowadays the answer is shout louder. So, it is really almost like a habit. It's one of these things…you know, you want to lose weight, eat fewer calories. That is the truth, but that's a lot easier said than done.

Carlos: Yes.

Matt: You can take away the emotion, but they still have the habit of justifying why they want what they want. Right. So, it's almost like you have to sort of be there to sit and sort of say, “Okay, but wait,” and ask them why they want that. Try to understand, ask questions, seek first to understand then to be understood.

Carlos: To quote it…that was Covey, I think. Maybe it was somebody before him…

Matt: I think maybe it was.

Carlos: It’s funny. We've got Zig Ziglar. We got Stephen Covey, the elder. We're pulling on some oldies but goodies here from a guy who's like Mr. Academic and knows all kinds of research from obscure people. But I love it. Look, at the end of the day what I want is my brilliant listeners to have something to take away. And I think-what were the words again? “To get what you want, help other people get what they want.” How did you put it, Matt?

Matt: Yeah. You can get what you want by helping others get what they want.

Carlos: That alone… just apply that to a group setting and saying, “Okay, for team leaders out there, you might need a little active facilitation,” right? As, as people start to go into their defensive routines, you might need to say, “Hey, Carlos, you know, you don't need to defend your position here. Talk about what you want. And let's think about how others might help you get what you want so that they can get what they want, ultimately.”

Matt: Yeah. And again, the idea of asking questions. When someone else is telling you what they need, ask questions. Don't correct them or redirect them.

Carlos: I sometimes think of that as, “stay curious.”

Matt: Yeah.

Carlos: So, stop looking for the answer and wonder, “What's the next question? What else might we know?” What else could we understand about this that would help us move forward on it? Wow, this did not go at all where I thought it would go. You know, we haven't even talked about COVID-19 and the pandemic that we're still dealing with and what that means for collaboration. And it's a big deal.

I think just briefly before we wrap up: certainly, this team I mentioned to you before, I'm having to do this work with them entirely over Zoom. They know each other well. Most of them, anyway, have been together for years. So, there's some comfort there with each other, anyway. But it's harder to work through the conflict bit, to get people's nerves settled. I find, as the person facilitating, I miss some of the more subtle cues, right? We're not sitting around a table. I don't pick up a vibe.

Matt: Yeah. They haven't done this work yet. But I'm telling you… well, I guess they have. Daft & Lengel a while back when they talked about media richness, they said cues kind of get filtered out by the different media. I think because we see and we hear each other and those are very salient senses, we think that's it. But being in the room, that feel, that feel is gone - that energy…, I don't think people are studying this yet. It's almost like when you're trying to teach or hold sway, broadcasting that energy through this medium is really challenging. And that energy is critical to this getting along and understanding. We don't have any research on it yet, but this is my call to any researchers listening - get on that because we've got to figure out what the hell's going on here, you know?

Carlos: Yeah. Make your name, be the next Zig Ziglar or Stephen Covey by figuring out how to add some human richness to the virtual experience. It is challenging. Let me say this and then we'll wrap it up: what I found is I have to do what you've talked about. I have to ask questions because I don't know, I'm missing things. I simply have to say, “Matt. How are you feeling about that? What's going through your mind right now?”

You are having to teach remotely and I think you even said you're teaching your course on teams asynchronously.

Matt: Yes. Yes.

Carlos: All right, man. We will explore what that means at another time. But this has been a really full conversation. Thank you for entertaining some of my questions. I'm sure we have provided value to my brilliant listeners who can walk away and feel like they've got something they can take back to their teams remote or otherwise. So, Matt, thank you.

Matt: Yeah, thanks for having me on. I mean, like I said, I'm glad to see you continuing the mission. It's always nice to see your various blogs and books and workbooks because when we first met your scholar practitioner view is much needed and I'm glad you're building that bridge.

Carlos: Well, Matt, thank you. That's so kind of you. And to my listeners visit my website, Carlosvdapena.com. Leave your comments. And we'll look forward to having you with us on our next episode of Teaming with Ideas.

Arvi Dhesi, Senior Client Partner, Korn Ferry

 Carlos: And welcome to teaming with ideas, the podcast about people at work, working together. I am your host and resident contrarian, Carlos Valdes-Dapena. And I am delighted today to welcome as my guest an old friend and colleague. Arvi Dhesi. Arvi, how are you? 

Arvi: Hey, Carlos. Great to see you and great to hear your voice again. 

Carlos: I'm delighted to have you. Arvi's based in the UK. He is, like many of us at this point, working from home as pandemic precautions continue to hold force. I'll give a quick intro to Arvi and that they just want to get him  talking to you about his feelings, thoughts. Arvi is currently working for Korn ferry in the UK, but he's got 25 plus years working in corporate, working as a consultant. He focuses on helping organizations perform better through working with senior teams. He's brilliant at talent strategy and organization succession management. He’s an experienced coach to top leaders and organizations. He's also an amazing speaker; he’s delightful to be in a room with, and he is a passionate advocate he says - and this I'll read directly from the bio - for what he calls the Magnificent Middle. So again, welcome Arvi. I'm so glad to be talking to you as colleague, as friend, but also as someone who knows a lot about how organizations and the people in them function. Now, I warned you about this. So let's start with the Magnificent Middle. What do you mean when you say that? Where's that? What is it? And where’s it come from?

Arvi: Well, my wife always thinks it means that it's referring to my waistline. So, I have to correct her there. So it's…

Carlos: Sorry! I missed it. I missed a rim shot there. I should have been on top of that. Carry on. 

Arvi: You can, you can attest to that, right? It's really about the middle of the bell curve. If I'm honest, it's not about the middle in terms of hierarchies. Although it can be applied to that, it can be applied to, are we talking just about the top of the house, C-suite, or are we also talking about the so-called middle layers of management and leadership in organizations. It's an area of passion and expertise for you, and I'd be very happy to talk about that. In addition to the hierarchical view, it's also a reference to the often forgotten masses in our organization who don't make it into any so-called “hi-po” category and they don't get the notice and attention of being in any way, under-performers, but untapped, often forgotten, and that this might sound rather soft, but there is a very hard commercial, mathematical edge to it. Because if you do think about it as a bell curve you probably have a hundred times as many people in the middle of the bell curve as you do at either extreme. And a 10% improvement from the middle is probably far more likely and cumulatively delivers a much bigger return than simply focusing on the smaller numbers that you see at the end. So that's my real passion. 

Carlos: And so what I remember, I think you wrote an article about that some years ago, didn't you, published in that in a paper in London?  

Arvi: I did, yeah

Carlos: Good. That's very cool. So, as we sit here - by the way, in the U S it is a bank holiday. We wouldn't call it that, but you, you foreigners would, it's Labor Day. And for our listeners, by the way, Arvi and I have years of history together. So, when you hear me, give him a hard time, it's only out of the deepest love. 

Arvi: And expected 

Carlos: And it should be an, I expect the same from you. So, anyway, it's Labor Day here and poignant in some respects, because labor has changed so much over the past - what's it been - seven months now since we went into lockdown. The pandemic has had its biggest impact. And so we're going to talk a little bit today about what you're seeing as a result of that. From your perspective, how has work changed, especially how has collaboration changed? How have the ways your clients work together, how have they had to adapt and what are you seeing that's both problematic, and at the end of the day, what's working? Because I think we're going to be dealing with this for some time to come. So, we're looking for some thoughts about what do we do more of? And what do we stop doing? 

Arvi: Yeah, yeah, I mean my headline over the last seven months has always been - the emerging headline has been - you know, with the dark clouds come lots and lots of unforeseen and unexpected silver linings, as well. And I think the balance of appreciating the both is really, really important. In terms of the world of work and labor, yeah. I mean, I don't want to add to the list of clichés and hyperbole that we've heard already, right? But the reality is that this is, and I have said this before in a previous writing, this is one of those epoch changing events. But by that, I mean, it is the kind of thing that we will tell our grandchildren about in years to come. And we will be able to say, let me tell you what life was like before this. And they will look at us like we're from a different planet as my children do.

Carlos: They do anyway, right?

Arvi:  They do, anyway. But I mean, when, whenever we use that phrase, epoch changing, it's like my teenagers now look at me when I describe, when… I don't know what it was like for you, Carlos; I'm thinking it’s the same. But when I started work, you know, we didn't even have PCs or laptops on our desks and my children… 

Carlos: I believe you used a slate, right, and chalk. 

Arvi: I had an Underwood typewriter. 

Carlos: Yeah, of course. 

Arvi: But they can't believe it. They said, well, how did you get anything done, you know. We kind of said, well, we did. And describing the world of work now, I mean like many, many of your listeners on this podcast, you know, I was one of those people that on a typical day spent three hours of my day, every day, in some kind of commute. That included a long walk, a train ride followed by a tube journey. And then another long walk. That took an hour and a half door to door, to be with other people in a major conurbation and a major center with beautifully architected, tall buildings, lines at the elevators. And somehow, somewhere we've managed to demonstrate - certainly in my line of work and as a knowledge worker - that we're looking back and saying was that all really, really necessary? Some elements of it are without doubt. But part of these and you know, one of the silver linings I would include in these seven months is I've done more global work in the last seven months than I have done in the last five years. 

Carlos: So for a guy like you working at senior levels organizations, global organizations that are dispersed at business capitals around the world, that's a real boon. Does that have any kind of knock on effects to folks reporting to the folks who you ended up working with most directly? 

Arvi: I think it does certainly in some industries and we should also appreciate the reality for many, many tens of thousands of jobs out there in the world of work that by necessity require some element of face-to-face interaction, whether you like it or not. It came to the fore really with the top team I was working with where well over 75 or 80,000 of their employees are frontline workers. 

Carlos: What industry was that, Arvi? 

Arvi: Retail, food retail. So this is absolutely at the very forefront of society's response to the pandemic. I mean, in the early days, if you think back to March when there was panic buying and there were people going crazy about toilet roll, there were people who had to get food and other materials on the shelves, no ifs, no buts. And, with, with that particular team there is naturally been a desire for the top team to demonstrate to their tens of thousands of employees, who have no option but to go into work, that we are side by side, that we're with you. That we appreciate that when the infection rates were their highest that these employees were in many respects, possibly even putting themselves in harm's way. But in that element, you know, you see the bravery and the dedication and the service that emerges. And that I would also class as one of the silver linings people stepping up and saying, “Here's my service. Here's my contribution to this terrible time.”

Carlos: So, what did that look like? So if I'm on a senior team and I've got thousands of employees in the face of the public with mask or without, every day, what are the sorts of things that one does to lead based on that desire to show support, to show gratitude, to show leadership to those folks in the front lines, just on a behavioral level. 

Arvi: It's all of the above and you articulated the list very compellingly there, Carlos, what you just said. I wish I had written it down.

Carlos: There you go. Push, rewind!

Arvi: That’s right. Everything that you just said…I think it's about, you know, being visible. Over communicating and then expressing the heartfelt, genuine, authentic messages of gratitude and thanks. I think that does go a long way both symbolically and verbally, to be able to say that we're with you. 

Carlos: Would that include in the case of these leaders going into these retail sites and being, instead of just visible the way you might be on Zoom or Microsoft Teams but visible in the building, in the space?

Arvi: Yeah, absolutely. And, actually some great examples of where then actually letting it be known throughout the workforce through electronic channels to say, “I'm here. I visited here I am with,” and I think that goes a long, long way. The key thing here is that part of that magnificent middle and making sure that those people are feeling supported, appreciated and listened to is to say, “I've been alongside you.” And the real danger here is that, you know, the smug satisfaction that you and I could have, which is to say, “Hey, my life hasn't changed much at all” Right. I can, I can run my business sitting in my, a comfortable home office. but also saying, have I been, have I understood and appreciated and heard from those people who, without who, let's face it, we would have been in a serious mess. You know, imagine not being able to get food on the table, just imagine on top of every other crisis here that we are talking about.

Carlos: And that's certainly happening for large swaths in countries where there are big wealth gaps. For example, it’s certainly true in the U S hunger - is a huge issue. Even in my relatively affluent town, there's a food bank that's being run out of a local park. So it's, it's, it is a tough time. So aside from that, the list you just provided, are there other things you're seeing leaders do that are particularly effective? We're staying focused on the silver linings here because I think as you suggested earlier, there's enough negative stuff we could blab on about. What else is working in terms of, even in the room? So, for a moment, that broader idea of leadership to my thousands of employees is really important. Bring it into the room. What are you seeing senior leaders do, or leaders of any level do, with their teams at this point? I would imagine they're working with their teams remotely, especially the global ones. What else? What do you see? 

Arvi: I mean, the thing that appeals to me personally, and I've seen some amazing examples. The client I alluded to earlier, but in many others as well, just a breathtaking…breathtakingly impressive ability of some, not all leaders to, run towards the fire.

Carlos: Wow. Okay.

Arvi: Figuratively speaking to say that it's in these moments of crisis that there are some individuals who say, “What are my choices here? Do I, do I hunker down and wait? Do I run away or do I run towards it?” And that's what I'm talking about. The drive, the energy that can elevate groups of people to say that this is not of our choosing, it's not by design. But nevertheless, we're called upon to respond to this situation in a, in a way…that's what I would really allude to that, that I found the, the most impressive.

Carlos: Yeah. So tell me a story about that. Is there, think of one leader and let's keep names out of it for now, but the image of running towards the fire is very powerful. How does that look in reality? There isn't an actual fire. 

Arvi: I mean, there isn't an actual fire, but in terms of the scale and the magnitude and the potential disruptive force that we're living through… I mean, compared to the other epoch changing events I've lived through, this is probably the single biggest, right? So, the ones that you and I… I'm thinking of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the end of the cold war, you know, 9/11, the global financial crisis. So, the running towards the fire is a willingness to see that... and again, this is an oft used, now cliched, hackneyed phrase, but, there is no more going back to normal. We have to reinvent and reconfigure and rethink how we're going to operate. And for many businesses that has included, doing what needs to be done in order to survive in the short term, and take some quite painful action and see what needs to be done there. But also simultaneously thinking about saying how can we then make sure that we can get through this, you know, we can turn into this… I mean, I don't want to give too many quotes, but…

Carlos: Quotes are good. 

Arvi: The Churchill one, I love I'm a big fan, as you will recall, “Never waste a good crisis.” which is the… it's the embracing the opportunity that this presents. Now to some ears that can sound opportunistic and almost even, can be interpreted as being somewhat mercenary. You know, if you're, if you think about commercial organization. But it's still saying, on any topic, there are opportunities that need to be explored. Right? As I mentioned earlier, why are we doing more global work now is, guess what? I'm not stuck in airport lounges and on planes for significant chunks of my month means some more available and we can take the opportunity to connect. It's less ideal. but we can connect, take the opportunity to connect around the world. And we can see how that will reimagine the whole world of work. Now, obviously there are whole industries that are facing existential threats because of that very thing that I'm now talking about. 

Carlos: Travel for one. Yeah. I mean all the related…, so that's airlines, that’s the airports themselves and the businesses, etc., etc.

Arvi: I mean, even if you think about the larger conurbations. So, apparently here in the UK, it's affected smaller cities less. But in larger conurbations, big cities, you know, there are huge implications for just the day-to-day maintenance industries, cleaning, security, reception, catering, lunches. The local sandwich shop. Here in the UK with there's already evidence that smaller towns have been affected less harshly than the bigger corporate centers and bigger conurbations. 

Carlos: Help me understand that. That's interesting.

Arvi: In smaller towns there was there's, there's been a more rapid return to work in percentage terms. The return to work meant that there were more local anyway, and that's been less of an issue. And probably smaller buildings, I'm guessing. But in cities like London  where there was a longer commute and many millions of people who are living in the dormitory towns around, and I count myself in those, there is a bigger knock on effect of the ancillary industries that support larger concentrations of people coming together. 

Carlos: I love your perspective ‘cause it's global. It's sort of a 35,000 foot look at this. I'm going to take us back to this idea of running towards the fire. Is there a particular leader - again, we'll keep names out of it - you can think of who did that? I'm not sure if it's about courage or just pragmatism, but who inspired you by his or her action in terms of how they stepped into what this pandemic is creating rather than stepped back in waiting mode.

Arvi: Yes. I'm going to share with you an amalgam of three people - at least three, possibly four people I've got in my mind. The reason why I'm going to do an amalgam is it's not to embarrass anyone of them and because they are also the types of leaders that would scoff that I ever used them as an example and say, “Hey, I didn't do anything that anybody else wouldn't.” They don't realize it. They would also say that they're not perfect. And I think that in itself tells you a lot, right? Which is in the midst of this crisis, is there is no playbook. Nobody knows for sure what they should be doing. 

Carlos: Yeah. No one has been through an executive training program or a management development program that teaches what do we do when there's a global pandemic, right? It's not, it's not in the curriculum. 

Arvi: Yeah, that's right. And, I think, so, one of the things that running towards the fire is embracing the “Not Knowing.” And the other quote that I love is, “Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is responding despite the fear.”

Carlos: So what…I’m really…what is, Embrace the Not Knowing? So, so just think about, I'd like you to reflect for a second, in the room with eight or 10 people where someone, whether it's the leader or someone around the table embraces not knowing. I guess I'm asking because I want my listeners to be able to emulate that if you will, in a kind of a specific way. 

Arvi: Yeah. I hope the thing that I've learned from this amalgam of three heroes (who wouldn't call themselves heroes) is the willingness to step away from the central casting of leadership, the historical view, which is command, control, stand up on top of a tank and say, “I know for sure we're headed this way. And I know, and I'm correct. And I'm always correct. I'm the best there is.” And recognizing that that is not the kind of leadership that is inspiring in this situation. It’s to say in this moment, of madness and however much we may have planned before, but our role now is to lead even when the fog of battle is at its thickest. And we can't see but it behooves us to step up and take action and do what we believe is the right thing. Anticipate in the right way, anticipate at pace with a rapidly changing environment and be willing to say, “You know, what we thought yesterday is wrong. What I said yesterday is wrong.”

Carlos: Wow. Yeah.

Arvi: Because what we found out today is this.

Carlos: It would have been in the, in the leader-on-the-tank analogy that would have been seen as a weakness. 

Arvi: Absolutely. 

Carlos: In fact, what I think I hear you saying is that's a stunning strength. 

Arvi: It is.

Carlos: That vulnerability; is that a good word?

Arvi: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's the right balance between vulnerability is, you know, how do you… the vulnerability isn’t overplayed to the extent that it means that people say, “Well, what do I follow?” You know, I do believe that essential to leadership is some seed of optimism. 

Carlos: Yeah. Okay. Yep, absolutely. Right. To get things done, one has to envision the things that need doing and the place that those things take you.

Arvi: Yeah. Nobody's going to follow you if you say, “Follow me this way, it's this disaster,” or, “It's gonna get worse.” Right? 

Carlos: Well, they won't do that, you hope. Will they follow you if you say, “Follow me this way, I'm not sure where we're going?” 

Arvi: Yes. If the, “Follow me this way,” is articulated with sufficient… and say. “I'm not 100% sure. But given everything that we've had to do at pace, in the moment, listening to all of the inputs of knowledge that we're getting and the best that we can do, I think this is the right way to go for now.” And that you are giving them sufficient reassurance that that's a thoughtful, “This way,” rather than just a wild guess, you know.

Carlos: Right? So that you're, you're giving evidence that you've given thought to it and it's not just a random, “Oh, well I rolled the dice and they came up with this. Let's go that way and see what happens.” Though, I might imagine from time to time that even that may be necessary. Let's back it up a little bit again. We've got this leader sitting at the head of the table who's embracing the “Not Knowing,” and we want to get to a point of choice saying, “Okay, we're going to do this.” And then you used a really interesting word there: “for now.” We'll do this for now, acknowledging that we don't know where it may land. What of those around the table - so I'm speaking here of the team - how does the leader involve them in this, “acting-while-not-knowing” process?

Arvi: Yeah. Well, so this, this is another allusion to the magnificent middle metaphor earlier, which is to tap into the collective genius of those around you. Right? Uh, that's absolutely essential. It's gotta be a partnership. In this kind of situation, all of those people, especially in a top team or in any team that feel a collective responsibility to the achievement of what we're trying to solve here. It isn’t just about an individual that was at the top of hierarchy. This has got to be a collective. This is almost…somebody that you and I are big, big fans of and have worshiped from a distance for many years, Peter Block. He talks about replacing the pyramid with a circle. But genuinely creating a circle and saying that, “How do we, each of us, partner and contribute our collective knowledge or collective duties, our collective doubts. So, have I given expression of doubt? “Hey look, I'm not so sure.” 

Carlos: That is such a shift. Look, I think we've been talking about this kind of leadership for decades. And, speaking of silver linings, how can you lead remotely where you aren't in a physical room with people for…I mean these executive meetings I used to be a part of would go on for two or three days, right? It doesn't happen anymore. You have to let go. You have to do that thing that I think folks have been urging leaders to do for decades, which is….but you have to say to people, “I am not there. You've got to take leadership in the sphere that is yours,” right? You've got you have to. I have to give up my illusion of control and allow you to start to experience, that sense of you're the one with the ownership and the control here. Although again, the control being a bit of a messy word because they don't really control anything. Do we? 

Arvi: No, not anymore, not anymore, but people do hold on to the myth of control.

Carlos: Desperately. And I, and I think that silver lining is so powerful. We just gotta let go. Much of what one reads nowadays is about the anxiety being cause

Arvi: Yeah. Yeah. 

Carlos: I think some of that may have to do with the fact that I can't see my people. I can't feel that sense of I'm guiding where they're going in that old model of leadership, right, that says you've got to have your hand on the tiller at all times and guide this, the ship you're captain of.

Arvi: Well, I've got a particular thought on the, on the word anxiety. I think it's been overused. And I think we've inadvertently created something of an anxiety industry…

Carlos: Out of COVID?

Arvi: Not out of COVID, but in general it was building up anyway. And I think we've got… I'm a big believer that anxiety is a pretty good signal that you are alive.

Carlos: Yes, the dead, rarely show up in psychiatric clinics and take very few drugs. 

Arvi: Yeah. And imagine a world with zero anxiety. “I have no anxiety about anything at all.” You'd either be, you know, fast asleep or, as you say, under some kind of disguise about the reality of what's going on. So again, that comes to embracing that the anxiety is there as an action step, as a signal for you to respond, hopefully in an optimal and well equipped way. But not in any way trying to diminish or deny the prompt for that anxiety. But, and again, this is something that we've been talking about in our field of leadership development for decades now, which is, “I will respond to everything; I will react to nothing”, is the real signal there of the anxiety. I would say.

Carlos: Let me write that down. I'll respond to everything, but…

Arvi: I will react to nothing, react to nothing. 

Carlos: React to nothing. Beautiful. That's a wonderful piece of guidance right there. Yeah. Let me speak for the anxious in the world because I have been one of those people and then I think we have to start to wrap it up. It seems to me that anxiety is about the future, right? I become anxious about what might or might not happen. 

Arvi: Yeah. 

Carlos: Living in this time when even the most gifted people, the most privileged people with all the resources at their control or who benefit from multiple resources. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. We don't know if our kids are going to go to school. We don't know if we were able to walk out the door without getting sick. We don't know if we can go back to the stadium for the football match. By the way, you notice how you use that UK football match, not the American football game.

Arvi: Yeah. 

Carlos: Just trying to work with you. 

Arvi: I like it.

Carlos: It's completely connected, anxiety, to the thing I think might happen or worried it might happen. Right? 

Arvi: Absolutely. 

Carlos: You're right. My wife has a particular problem with pharmaceutical commercials, which in the US  for years and years, you couldn't advertise on television for pharmaceuticals, and now you can. And all these drugs to make you happy, all these drugs to sort of shut off the anxiety channels in the brain.

Arvi: And the immediate commercial following it is from all the lawyers saying , “ If you used that drug 10 years ago, and you're suffering from any of these side effects, please get in touch so that we can be part of the class action lawsuit.” 

Carlos: I take your point. There is an anxiety industry out there. I wake up every day thinking about the things I'm going to get done. Living in that fantasy of control, whether it's COVID or not. You never know whether in a pandemic or the world is in some new way of being or the way it used to be, control is just not real. It is comforting. It is comforting to think we are in control. So, enough on anxiety, but, look, I'd like to close with going back to something you said a minute ago, because the point of this podcast is to give listeners something that they can take home. And I had not heard before, “Respond to everything, but react to nothing.” I just think that's a beautiful, easily remembered piece of guidance. And I want you to just spend a moment on that, another minute or two. What's the difference between responding and reacting? 

Arvi: It links back to the conversation we just had about anxiety, actually. And I'm going to paint another picture for your listeners. I don't know if it's a fact, but there is some evidence and this itself may be apocryphal, but the ancient city of Jerusalem had one of its gates in the walls of the city was so narrow that it was called The Needle. So they called the gate, The Needle or the Eye of the Needle. The only way you can get the pack camels through is by unloading them outside of the gate, get the camel through and you reload them. The two heavy burdens that we carry our anxiety about the future and regret about the past. These are heavy, burdens that down on us in any moment. Now, particularly in the moment of crisis in responding rather than reacting to any crisis is to notice these two heavy burdens that all of us as human beings - we wouldn't be human if we weren't carrying them. Anybody who says that they don't have any is a liar. The moment of responding is to consciously and choice-fully - if that's a real word. I've made it a word. Consciously choosing to put down those burdens of anxiety about the future and regrets about the past and noticing that the only way I'll get through this moment, the present…and It feels lighter, it feels lighter.  

Carlos: There’s nothing you can do about either. I mean, in reality, right, really nothing you can do about it either. But you just put them down and go through the gate and see what's on the other side. Wow.

Arvi: Absolutely. 

Carlos: That sir was a lovely way to bring this conversation to a close. I really appreciate that. So, so smart, so useful. Arvi, I'd love to get a link to the article you wrote about the Magnificent Middle. If you can, if you have that somewhere, we'll get a link, put that up there. Super good reconnecting with you. Maybe we'll come back and do this in six months or so. See where we've landed.

Arvi: See where we've landed, yeah, and all the things we didn't know. Right? 

Carlos: All this stuff we didn't know. So, we continue to embrace not knowing. You have my, deep, deep gratitude for joining me. 

Arvi: My pleasure, Carlos. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. 

Carlos: Thanks again, Arvi Dhesi, Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry for sharing the perspective of an external consultant working with top teams and their leaders.