We Not Me

In times of crisis, community collaboration can be a powerful force for relief efforts.

Gaz Breen's coordinated efforts during the 2022 Burringbar floods demonstrated the importance of identifying our strengths and assets to contribute to a larger effort. Pia witnessed the recovery efforts that Gaz organised, and in their conversation, they discussed the significance of being an asset rather than a liability when facing difficult situations.

Takeaways from Dan and Pia

• In a disaster, every team member's contribution is essential. By recognising and utilising individual strengths, the team can work together more effectively to achieve their goals.
• It's essential to ruthlessly exclude anything that doesn't help, and prioritise effectively. By doing this, individual strengths can be recognised and utilised, allowing the team to work together more effectively towards.
• All team members have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to match their own skills to the wider needs of the team.
• If your higher intent is clear, what some might call disobedience, others would call innovation.
• Diverse teams need integration and synergy, not simply combining different people together.

Links

• ‘Next level destruction’: NSW residents detail the moments floods devastated their homes
• Arthur Schopenhauer quote
• Will it Make the Boat Go Faster? Olympic-Winning Strategies for Everyday Success, by Harriet Beveridge and Ben Hunt-Davis
• Leave us a voice note

With the challenges of hybrid working and resource constraints, team leaders need to create a shared vision and a set of meaningful goals. By putting the team at the centre and leveraging the interdependencies between members, organisations can achieve greater improvements in performance and outcomes.

In this first episode of the season 6, Dan and Pia look back on highlights from season 5, and what these conversations can teach us about collaboration.

Episodes to check out from season 5

• Leading teams of volunteers – episode 51 with Jim Goddard
• Purpose, people and football – episode 60 with Richard Giles
• Building communities: playgrounds for adults – episode 56 with Robin Hutchinson
• Can the four-day work week really work? – episode 50 with Joe Ryle
• What is the data telling us about psychological safety? – episode 57 with Juliet Hammond
• Why “culture fit” may not be what you want – episode 55 with Marsha Ramroop
• A boarding school on the water – episode 54 with Jens Lee
• Building a thriving culture from the outside in – episode 58 with Marcus Swalwell and Tom Wedge
• A team’s guide to Design Thinking – episode 59 with Adam Billing

If you want to build a community asset that promotes teamwork, communication, and resilience, focus on the positives, have a vision, and stick to your values. These are some of the things actuary Richard Giles discovered when taking up the position of Chairman at his local football club, Ilkley Town AFC.

Richard has a growth mindset and the courage to make changes when needed. He believes in promoting good examples and having flexibility in streaming players to achieve the best outcomes for each individual and the team.

Takeaways from Pia and Dan

• Tricky calls must be made when coaches don't live by the values and purpose of the club.
• Inclusivity and performance can be balanced with an "and" mindset.
• Richard has effectively engaged with people and got them to take ownership of the club.
• He’s driven by the purpose of promoting teamwork, communication, and resilience.

Links

• Follow Richard on Twitter
• Ilkley Town AFC
• Leave us a voice message

Innovation is a team sport and design thinking is a team activity. A great team involves multiple disciplines, diversity of perspectives, and a culture of permission to help guide each other towards good behaviours.

Adam Billing is the founder of Treehouse Innovation and Sprintbase, and an expert in how design thinking can be used to fuel innovation. In his conversation with Dan and Pia, he explains the principles of design thinking, which involves deeply understanding what the customer cares about, inviting diverse perspectives to generate ideas, and rapidly moving those ideas towards solutions that are grounded in customer insights.

Adam also talks about the importance of team dynamics and how a diverse team with individuals who have self-awareness, collaboration skills, and humility can make design thinking work effectively.

Takeaways from Dan and Pia

• Design thinking is a team sport and meeds diverse perspectives to generate ideas.
• It protects from leading with assumptions and quickly getting attached to ideas.
• Design thinking is a slow process that requires psychological safety and co-creation.
• Innovation requires letting go of expertise and dealing with your own internal workings to be open.
• Curiosity is fundamental to design thinking and can be applied to life.
• Don't spend too much time polishing the perfect thing before launching it.

Links

• Connect with Adam via LinkedIn
• Treehouse Innovation
• Why “culture fit” may not be what you want – Episode 55 of We Not Me, with Marsha Ramroop
• Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers, by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie
• Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey, by Jeanne Liedtka and Karen Hold
• DesignKit by Ideo
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When companies put the customer at the heart of their business and empower employees to improve the customer experience, they form stronger relationships with satisfied customers.

Marcus Swalwell and Tom Wedge worked together at a large optometry firm, owned by Novartis. They transformed the company by putting customers at the heart of the business, using a variety of methods from forming a virtual board of directors made up of customers, to encouraging employees to work in customers’ shops so they could see the business from their perspective.

By implementing these practices, they improved their customer relationships and become the supplier that customers most wanted to do business with.

Takeaways from Pia and Dan

• Customer focus can galvanise an organisation from the outside in.
• Involving everyone in crafting the vision can lead to a real sense of ownership and accountability.
• Metrics can drive employees to achieve customer-centric goals.
• A culture of positivity and customer centricity can improve climate.
• Personal development can help create a common language and mindset without requiring excessive funding.
• Employees are often let down by the conditions behind them, rather than their own competence.

Links

• Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn
• Connect with Tom on LinkedIn
• Six Thinking Hats: The guide to running better meetings and making faster decisions, by Edward de Bono
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the latest dataset from Squadify reveals how teams rate psychological safety. Juliet Owen joins Dan and Pia to go through the numbers and add some context.

Carl Rogers defines psychological safety as an individual feeling unconditional worth. This forms the basis of the movement, continued on by Amy Edmondson who defines it as a shared belief held by team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Timothy Clark's model defines four stages of psychological safety: inclusion safety, learner safety, contributor safety, and challenger safety.

Takeaways from Dan and Pia

• Team leaders should recognise that feeling psychologically safe may be biased towards individuals with high status. It's a common mistake to assume everyone can speak their minds freely.
• We need to reimagine how to create personal connections within a hybrid environment, both virtually and face-to-face. If we don't, the foundation of psychological safety will be compromised.
• Challenger safety might be seen as a momentum killer and a pain. However, it's important for leaders to take on challenges. The comfort levels of the team leader themselves play a big role in creating a sense of safety for their teams. And doing so without being controlling can be difficult.

Links

• Connect with Juliet on LinkedIn
• Psychological safety in teams – We Not Me episode 3 with Dr Jessica Tonissen
• Building psychological safety: a how-to guide – We Not Me episode 41, with Stephan Wiedner
• Leave us a voice message

“I don’t fit in”. It’s something everybody feels, at least at some point. We're all struggling to find our place. And if we let systems define us, we'll always be at odds with ourselves. But as Robin Hutchinson discovered, if we identify the situations where we feel more comfortable and can cope better, then we can take ownership of it all.

Robin describes himself as a very lucky person who has had opportunities come his way. His organisation, the Community Brain, creates playgrounds for adults that allow people to reconnect with joy and passion, and to have permission to be brilliant.

Robin believes that the joy of his imaginative events is taking people to a place of absurdity and allowing them to play, which changes their attitude towards where they live and brings communities closer together.

Takeaways from Dan and Pia

• Engagement means that everyone involved is able to write a sentence for themselves in the story of the project at hand.
• Robin’s organisation gives people “permission to be brilliant”.
• He sets the bar for his team, but knows when to step aside when someone has a skill that can fill a gap.
• We are bound together by the fact we all share different and unique challenges.
• In any relationship, we must give 100% of ourselves. If we only give 50%, then the other person only gives 50%. We must contribute our whole selves.
• Be brilliant, not grey.

Links

• The Community Brain
• GloveWatch - The Lost Gloves of Seething
• Surbiton Ski Sunday & The Seething Luge 2022
• Ilkley Live
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Organisations think a lot about culture “fit”. But inclusivity strategist Marsha Ramroop believes people need to think more about “culture add”.

Hiring for culture fit leads to homogenous teams and groupthink. Hiring for "culture add" on the other hand, leads to the creation of diverse and inclusive teams.

Organisations need to be aware of bias in the recruitment process and take steps to mitigate them. This means investing proper time and money in the recruitment process and evaluating it for improvements. Also having conversations with teams to take ownership of the recruitment process and working together to create an optimal culture.

Takeaways from Dan and Pia

• There’s a crucial difference between culture fit and culture add. That said, it’s important to engage in culture inclusion work with the team before bringing in a new person. This will benefit the team as a whole, leading to a more inclusive environment.
• The sense that everyone should want to belong is in itself a bias that can exclude others.
• Cultural values can always be a way to exclude people who just want to be a high-performing part of a solid team.
• Homogenous teams can operate just fine. But diverse and inclusive teams will always outperform them.
• If you’re working with a difficult person you don’t get along with, no amount of cultural intelligence is going to help!

Links

• Connect with Marsha on LinkedIn
• School Culture Rewired: How to Define, Assess, and Transform it, by Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker
• Racism at Work: The Danger of Indifference, by Binna Kandola
• Reinventing Organisations: A Guide to Creating Organisations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness, by Frederic Laloux
• How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
• Leave us a voice note

Whether you’re facing off against pirates or catering for celebrities, life on board a megayacht is about teamwork, reciprocity, and pulling your weight.

Jens Lee is a deck engineer who has spent the last five years working on various large vessels. Jens describes the adventure of a lifetime, including working on everything from small sailing bases to 100-metre megayachts, catering for world leaders and A-list Hollywood stars, and even meeting pirates. He explains that life on board is “like a floating boarding school”, with the captain acting as the headmaster and the crew living together and spending 24 hours in each other's company.

Takeaways from Pia and Dan

• Bold choices can lead to exciting new paths.
• Reciprocity is a key part of social capital within a team. This can be as simple as holding a door open for someone.
• Corporations, small businesses, organisations, teams, even yacht crews face the same fundamental challenges of getting on and facing challenges together.

Links

• Atomic Habits, by James Clear
• Bringing head and heart to teams – We Not Me episode 6, with Lucy Hovanec

Teams need clarity in order to function. Without clear leadership or a shared goal, people can feel unheard and undervalued. This is all the more critical in a hospital setting where patients also need to be heard and valued.

Dr Tim Arnold is a family medicine physician in Northern Minnesota, with 22 years of experience delivering babies, providing care in the ICU, emergency room, clinic, and hospital.

Liz Dean worked for 20 years with Tim at the same organisation, focusing on business development and innovation. Now, she helps leaders in healthcare schools and businesses improve their skills and optimise for greater success.

Takeaways from Pia and Dan

• Titles are intriguing but can create issues when they are used to create deferential ranks. Calling Tim by his first name removes a critical barrier without undermining the important work he does involving people's lives and sickness.
• Removing rank can simplify things and lead to more authentic human relationships.
• Organisations are flattening their structures and finding new approaches to work. Consequently, the fixation on titles is decreasing.
• A title can be a form of acknowledgment for our work, but it doesn't necessarily indicate our leadership skills. Genuine leadership is more about relating to people and inspiring them to follow.
• We don’t always have control over our environment. But we can control the way we relate to people and collectively think through problems.
• When we don't know enough to understand the result of our actions, we end up with complexity and chaos. We must get multiple perspectives, and forget about finding a perfect answer.

Links

• Connect with Tim on LinkedIn
• Connect with Liz on LinkedIn
• Cynefin framework
• Leave us a voice message