We Not Me

When you help people help, you help people hope. Gillian Coutts, Country Director at Potential Project discovered this when working within her community during Australia's border closing following the COVID outbreak. In her work, she saw teams come together in extraordinary ways, but she also shares findings from a UK study that has been replicated elsewhere, that show how we often see ourselves as having compassion, but not our neighbours.

In her discussion with Pia and Dan, Gillian explores the differences between empathy and compassion, and the importance of self-compassion to resilience.

Links

• Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman
• Perceptions Matter: The Common Cause UK Values Survey
• Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, by Dr. Kristin Neff
• Squadify

For global leadership consultant Sahera Sumar, "diversity is a fact, but inclusion is the mindset", and it's possible for teams to be diverse but not inclusive.

Sahera felt like she denied her heritage in order to feel accepted and fit in at work. Many organisations run programmes to try and combat unconscious bias, but this is only the start of the journey, and there's much more work to do to foster inclusivity within teams.

As part of her work as a leadership consultant, Sahera builds on the foundation of unconscious bias training, and helps move people from a space of judgement to awareness and understanding, and then onto acceptance.

Links

• Worldwide Sheroes
• Squadify

Customer-centric companies are laser-focused on providing great experiences for their customers. For Stuart Dalziel, teams play a pivotal role in bringing experiences that create ease in customers' lives.

Using examples from café chains to high-end hotels, Stuart breaks down how teams share knowledge, roles, and responsibilities, in service of the Peter Drucker axiom: "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer".

Links

• Squadify

Every member of a squad is of equal value, regardless of their department, seniority, or pay scale. It's important to check egos at the door when forming a squad and embarking on a new project. Those are some of the principles held by Natalie Peters, change and transformation lead at Australian bank NAB.

After 20 years working in HR, Natalie began exploring the world of agile project management and human-centred design. In this discussion with Pia and Dan, she debunks some of the common myths around agile, and runs through effective structures, which are typically flatter than more traditional or waterfall management styles.

Links

• Bridges' Transition Model
• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
• Squadify

Actor Erik Thomson is no stranger to being part of a team, whether that be on the production set of a feature film or TV series. In his conversation with Dan and Pia, Erik discusses the importance of recognising everyone's role in a production, from lighting a scene to walking the red carpet at Cannes.

For Erik, building a solid working team is about breaking social barriers away from work. He emphasises the importance of clearing the eyeline so the actors can work distraction-free, and explores the role of psychological safety on set, especially when the action gets a bit more steamy.

Links

• Aftertaste
• The Luminaries
• Coming Home in the Dark
• Squadify

Sports teams have been evaluating their effectiveness for a long time, with the singular goal of improving performance. This week, Dan and Pia are joined by former Australian rugby player Owen Finegan, to look at the way businesses and not-for-profits can use data in the same way sport has for decades.

Owen played and coached professional rugby for 16 years before moving into the non-profit world, where he now sits as CEO of the Kids' Cancer Project. He took his learnings about honest – sometimes even brutal – feedback from the rugby pitch, and has adapted it to the way he leads teams, encouraging analysis combined with honesty and constructive feedback rather than criticism.

Links

• Squadify

For civil engineering General Manager Lucy Hovanec, purpose can breathe life into teams, and in order to lead, self-knowledge is crucial.

In this discussion, Lucy shares with Dan and Pia her toolkit for working with teams across cultural divides and around the world, to help them wake up excited to come to work:

• Asking questions to make sure everyone is aligned on the task at hand
• Assessing the climate of a team and creating conditions for success
• Using the Example, Impact, Change model of delivering feedback

Links

• Psychological safety in teams – Episode 3 of We Not Me
• Squadify

Google iterates in 30-minute increments, which is part of why this massive company is able to innovate so quickly at scale. This involves making mistakes, but recovering and correcting quickly. The pace at Google is a far cry from the stereotypical image of people lying around on beanbags or playing foosball.

As Managing Director for Global Public Sector Strategy and Sales at Google, Todd Schroeder has to work across multiple teams who are serving markets at different stages along the maturity curve. This means the idea of clarity can change from a traditional sense of certainty into becoming clear that things are uncertain.

In the midst of a global pandemic, the job of leading multiple teams moved from knowing what to do, to finding out what to do.

Dan, Pia and Todd discuss the process a new Google employee (a "noogler") goes through to becoming a full-fledged Googler, and some of the challenges they face along the way.

This week, Dan and Pia are joined by Anna Britnor Guest, who has over 30 years of technology sales experience and who now works to develop and coach salespeople within the SaaS industry.

They talk about whether sales "teams" are really teams and not just groups of people, pivoting the mantra of "don't lose alone" to "don't learn alone", and maintaining a common language around the sales process.

Anna also shares three key things teams can do right now to work more effectively to meet the customers' needs, and to meet their own needs.

Links

• Alate Business Growth
• Squadify

This week, Pia and Dan discuss psychological safety with Dr Jessica Tonissen, leadership and wellbeing coach, Doctor of Psychology and Associate Director at InLightening in Melbourne.

Dr Tonissen dispels some of the myths and misunderstandings around the term, how psychological safety does not have to come at the expense of performance, and that there's a difference between safety and artificial harmony.

The conversation also touches on our ingrained fear of rejection, and how it stimulates our fight-or-flight response.

Links

• Psychological Safety Isn't the Same as Being Comfortable
• Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, by Amy Edmondson
• Rejection Really Hurts, UCLA Psychologists Find
• The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, by Amy Edmondson
• Squadify