Transcript

Team Habits · Humanity Working

0:05
SPEAKER_02: I did daily stand-ups as a battalion plans officer.
0:09
SPEAKER_02: We had troops on the road doing things every day, ambushes, that information was changing so quickly and lives depended upon it that the daily stand-up actually made sense.
0:18
SPEAKER_02: Most civilian businesses not like that.
0:20
SPEAKER_02: Like, do you really need a daily war room?
0:23
SPEAKER_02: Like, think about the artificial urgency that you're creating every damn day, and how many businesses actually have that?
0:29
SPEAKER_01: All right, today I'm delighted to be joined by Charlie Gilke.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: He's the author of the book Team Habits.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: Now, Charlie's also the author of another book you might have read, Start Finishing, How to Go From Idea to Done.
0:40
SPEAKER_01: And today we're actually going to talk through some of the themes mentioned in both of those books.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: Now, Charlie's background includes the US Army and the National Guard.
0:48
SPEAKER_01: He was deployed as a transportation platoon leader in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: He later worked as a battalion plans officer, battle captain, primary investigator of after action reviews for a convoys.
1:02
SPEAKER_01: Charlie has a significant life outside of the military as well.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: He founded uh Productive Flourishing, and to date uh he has advised hundreds of teams in everything from tiny nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: So welcome to the podcast, Charlie.
1:18
SPEAKER_02: Paul, thanks so much for having me.
1:19
SPEAKER_02: And I'm excited to get into this conversation today.
1:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, me too.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: So you'd finished your previous book, Start Finishing.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: It would be bad if you didn't finish a book on Start Finishing, wouldn't it?
1:31
SPEAKER_01: But it but then it seems like you'd got some unfinished business yourself.
1:35
SPEAKER_01: So what were your goals for writing this one?
1:38
SPEAKER_02: So when I started writing Start Finishing, I knew right before, even before I had the manuscript done, that it was a part of at least a three-book series because of the work that I do.
1:48
SPEAKER_02: And so Start Finishing really addresses the challenges that we face in doing our best work.
1:54
SPEAKER_02: And not best work, I don't mean just to sort of piddly like checklisting stuff, but why don't we get to the big ideas and the dreams that we have?
2:01
SPEAKER_02: What like what's that about?
2:03
SPEAKER_02: And so a sort of cartoon version of saying it is start finishing was about how an individual can do their best work.
2:09
SPEAKER_02: So I knew that was book one.
2:11
SPEAKER_02: Book two, I knew was going to be how do teams do their best work together?
2:15
SPEAKER_02: Right.
2:15
SPEAKER_02: And so when I wrote Start Finishing, I the code name for the project was Start Finishing Together, because that's really what it's about.
2:20
SPEAKER_02: That book became Team Habits.
2:22
SPEAKER_02: Um and then it was another third book, which is really what leaders need to do, to leaders specifically need to do so that they can basically get out of the way and let their teams do what they do best.
2:32
SPEAKER_02: That's the book that's forthcoming in different ways.
2:36
SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure how I'm going to publish that one, but um it's you know part of that unfinished business that you talked about.
2:41
SPEAKER_02: So I knew that before going in to start finishing.
2:44
SPEAKER_02: But then as I was doing a lot of the conversations and the touring and the book talks and the all the things you do around a book, I kept having managers and leaders come to me and say, Hey, these ideas are great, or individual contributors come to me and say, Hey, these ideas are great.
2:58
SPEAKER_02: But like, what can you do to get management to like let us do these things?
3:02
SPEAKER_02: And Paul, it was always this funny question I was like, really?
3:05
SPEAKER_02: You need you need the CEO to tell you you can do some of these things?
3:09
SPEAKER_02: And you know, by the time I unpacked it, it was always one of those things where they look around the room at each other and be like, oh yeah, we we can do that.
3:18
SPEAKER_02: Um and so it was those conversations that just put some additional fuel on the fire.
3:22
SPEAKER_02: It's like, okay, got to get to this next book because that's the next logical question that people are asking.
3:28
SPEAKER_02: And so that's what Team Habits is about.
3:30
SPEAKER_01: That's great.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, plus, every great author has a trilogy in them.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: So so you you you can't buck that trend, can you?
3:37
SPEAKER_02: Well, actually, it's a it's a four series.
3:39
SPEAKER_02: The fourth one is really about something like the fundamentals of finishing, like what makes some things easier to finish versus not?
3:47
SPEAKER_02: So, and can you design that into it whether versus an individual or team?
3:50
SPEAKER_02: That one's the nerdiest of the bunch that I don't know will ever see the light of day, but I knew it was like, okay, those are the four books.
3:56
SPEAKER_02: But trilogy, yeah, easy to understand.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: All right.
4:00
SPEAKER_01: Um, so we're gonna get into some of the detail of all of this, but I actually want to start with a term that some people will have heard of, but I suspect quite a few will not.
4:09
SPEAKER_01: So VUCA.
4:10
SPEAKER_01: Uh, talk to us about what VUCA is and why do you think it's relevant right now in the world at work.
4:17
SPEAKER_02: So VUCA is a word that comes actually from a lot of the military strategy.
4:21
SPEAKER_02: So, my my one of my backgrounds, and it stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
4:26
SPEAKER_02: That's that's really what it means.
4:28
SPEAKER_02: And it's a paradigm shift in the way we think about the world because how you make decisions, how you lead, how you organize team in a non-VUCA environment that's stable, that's pretty certain, that's um, you know, not as not as complex and not as ambiguous is fundamentally different than how you show up as a leader, teammate, and manager in a VUCA world.
4:51
SPEAKER_02: And um, so it's a term that's been kicked around a lot of times in a lot of different contexts.
4:56
SPEAKER_02: It's native to me.
4:57
SPEAKER_02: It's actually where I started.
4:58
SPEAKER_02: And so when I do executive coaching, when I do organizational design, one of the first things that I roll in is tell a lot of leaders who've been in it for a couple decades that, okay, I'm just gonna state what you already know is true.
5:11
SPEAKER_02: The world is different than it was when you learned how to manage and lead.
5:16
SPEAKER_02: Those some of those rules apply, but a lot of them don't.
5:19
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so let's adapt to that environment.
5:22
SPEAKER_02: Um, and it turns out that the world was really VUCA before, in the before times before the pandemic, but then the pandemic just added some extra spice on it that made most of what we knew, like it just took it out and dumped it on the table and said, you know what, it doesn't work anymore, figure it all out again.
5:38
SPEAKER_02: So so much of the stress and anxiety that happened in the work context after the pandemic was basically it took all of our team habits and it took all of our organizational workways and said, you know what, those don't apply anymore, those don't work.
5:54
SPEAKER_02: So, how are you going to have a meeting now when you can't be in a room together?
6:00
SPEAKER_02: Like, that's a question that no one had really thought that much about before.
6:04
SPEAKER_02: Like, remote and hybrid work was kind of one of those experimental things that companies might may or may not get to.
6:10
SPEAKER_02: Overnight, the world was hybrid.
6:13
SPEAKER_02: Overnight, the world was remote.
6:15
SPEAKER_02: And so we had to rethink and reagree, which is the important part when we get into talking about team habits.
6:20
SPEAKER_02: We had to consciously reagree that this is how we do things.
6:24
SPEAKER_02: Um and that took a while.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:29
SPEAKER_01: You know, when I think about this, I think about it from the perspective of how we work with organizations.
6:35
SPEAKER_01: We call it um, we call it designed for change, um, which is again sort of like this acknowledgement that the uh that the world around us is changing and probably in many ways changing um more unpredictably than it uh than it has in the past, in part because the ways in which companies would often change um realistically in the past were really centered around business strategy changes that were driven from the top inside organizations.
7:03
SPEAKER_01: But now you have these really interesting other things that kind of invade you from the outside.
7:09
SPEAKER_01: So COVID being a classic example of that, right?
7:12
SPEAKER_01: So this monumental event happens outside us and it changes overnight our workplace environments.
7:21
SPEAKER_01: Um and as that's happening, the ability to be able to be able to use technology in order to facilitate things like v teams and changing how people work, changing work practices, that's happening.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: And now, almost like layered on top of that, you've got things like artificial intelligence that are massively changing the way in which people work.
7:43
SPEAKER_01: And so all of these things are kind of kind of all happening simultaneously.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: And what that implies, we believe in it, I think you do uh based on on your book as well, is that that means leaders have to lead differently.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: It means employees in many cases have to work differently and figure out how to thrive in that new type of environment.
8:05
SPEAKER_01: And it means that organizations need to be designed differently in order to be able to enable that.
8:13
SPEAKER_01: So I love that you're you're honing in on one real aspect of that, which is how do teams work well in that new kind of environment in the book.
8:26
SPEAKER_02: Precisely.
8:27
SPEAKER_02: And one of the things we have to accept about the VUCA world that we live in is there's no going back.
8:33
SPEAKER_02: Like there was a long time in which when we looked at the rate of change, there was, I think, a paradigm that, like, well, it's going to slow back down.
8:40
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
8:40
SPEAKER_02: And then like we'll get back to normal.
8:43
SPEAKER_02: No, this is normal, right?
8:45
SPEAKER_02: This is the new normal.
8:47
SPEAKER_02: And to your point, you have to design around that, which is why when you know sometimes people come as like, hey, I want to help you, I want your help to future-proof my business, organizational team.
8:56
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, yeah, so here's the thing: I'm not doing that.
9:00
SPEAKER_02: That's not what I do.
9:01
SPEAKER_02: I will help you be future ready, but I'm not going to be future-proof.
9:04
SPEAKER_02: That that we can't do that, right?
9:06
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
9:06
SPEAKER_02: What we can do is create an organization and teams and resiliency in ourselves such that no matter what happens, we can adapt and evolve and do that pretty quickly.
9:18
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, we've moved from a world in which the best performing teams were the ones that were able to do the same thing consistently.
9:27
SPEAKER_02: We're moving the world we live in is the best performing teams are the ones that can adapt the quickest.
9:33
SPEAKER_02: Um, and that's that's a paradigm shift.
9:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: All right.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: On that, on that topic, particularly at a team level, there's another related concept that you bring up.
9:44
SPEAKER_01: And and I've I don't know if you invented the word, but it's a cool word.
9:48
SPEAKER_01: Work ways.
9:49
SPEAKER_01: Uh tell me, tell me what a work way is.
9:52
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so this is one that I did coin.
9:54
SPEAKER_02: So um the sociologists, well, there's a term in sociology called sociology called folk ways, which are the a lot of times the implicit ways in which a society works together.
10:05
SPEAKER_02: So if you remember sociology 101, there's folk ways and more ways, right?
10:09
SPEAKER_02: And so I was thinking about that around the time of the pandemic, and but I've been thinking about this for a while, and I was like, well, we have folk ways, but we also have workways, right?
10:18
SPEAKER_02: That are just the work equivalent of folk ways.
10:21
SPEAKER_02: They're largely unconscious agreements about the ways we work with each other at the organizational level.
10:28
SPEAKER_02: And so when I first started writing what's now team habits, the title is actually workways.
10:32
SPEAKER_02: But as I wrote about it, thought about it, talked about it more, I realized, oh, well, team habits are a subset of workways.
10:38
SPEAKER_02: There are other things like organizational design, policies from the industries, and things like that that sort of determine how we work with each other.
10:46
SPEAKER_02: But team habits are the things that every member participates in, every member can influence, every member can change.
10:54
SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, workways are just that, how we work together.
10:58
SPEAKER_02: And the key point is um same thing about team habits, is they are largely unconscious agreements that we have each other.
11:07
SPEAKER_02: So I'll give a very concrete example here.
11:09
SPEAKER_02: Um, think of the CC threat of hell that plagues so many teams and organizations.
11:13
SPEAKER_02: We all know what it is.
11:14
SPEAKER_02: Like we all need to get a bunch of information out.
11:16
SPEAKER_02: So none of us takes the time to figure out who exactly needs to get it.
11:20
SPEAKER_02: So we just CC everybody, right?
11:23
SPEAKER_02: We spend a lot of time reading CC, CC threats from hell just to see if we need to know what's going on.
11:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
11:30
SPEAKER_02: Right.
11:30
SPEAKER_02: Just for that reason.
11:32
SPEAKER_02: Now, the reality is, because I've I've had this conversation a lot with with people, Paul, no one actually wants like the CC thread from hell.
11:41
SPEAKER_02: This is not something that we raised our head and said, yes, let's do it that way.
11:47
SPEAKER_02: And yet, it's something that we all do.
11:49
SPEAKER_02: And because we do it, we reinforce that workway and team habit.
11:55
SPEAKER_02: Um, and then we get organizational and team inertia going.
11:59
SPEAKER_02: And then because that's the way we do it, that's the way we do it, and yet we're plagued day in, day out by this really, really counterproductive, sometimes frustrating um experience that we have at work.
12:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love that.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: I love it because um what that what that illustrates is that um policies exist even if they're not written down.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: Ways of ways of work exist even when they're not written down.
12:33
SPEAKER_01: And so what this implies is that um, and obviously culture exists even when it's not written down, in fact, especially when it's not written down.
12:43
SPEAKER_01: So what that basically implies that if you're not being thoughtful about some of these things, then there's still a thing.
12:52
SPEAKER_01: It's uh the stuff is still happening.
12:54
SPEAKER_01: It's just it's just invisible until you until you start to name it, until you start to look at it, examine it, and figure out is it enabling what you want to happen or inhibiting what you want to happen.
13:06
SPEAKER_01: And so the the the concept I think is a very powerful one.
13:10
SPEAKER_01: I'd encourage people to not just read about it in your book, but but think about it quite deeply.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: And I think you're dead right.
13:17
SPEAKER_01: It's the the habits piece of this is a part of it.
13:21
SPEAKER_01: It's not the whole picture.
13:22
SPEAKER_01: But what it is, which is really interesting, is it's a practical thing that you can get your that you can get your head around and you can uh and you can actively change.
13:31
SPEAKER_01: Um that leads me, the concept leads me to an interesting point.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: You say, and I'm gonna quote you directly here, let me grab the book here.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: Um you say countless books focus on changing people to make better teams, whether that is improving the manager or empowering individual contributors or upskilling leaders, but the usual result is that the team and the organization basically stay the same.
13:59
SPEAKER_01: Now, all of those things sound important, right?
14:04
SPEAKER_01: As in empowering uh individual contributors sounds important, improving managers is obviously important.
14:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think you're getting at something a little bit deeper here, which is that in isolation, they're not going to accomplish what you need.
14:20
SPEAKER_01: And these workways are kind of a missing link.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: Have I got that right?
14:23
SPEAKER_02: You've got it perfectly right.
14:25
SPEAKER_02: And um Team Habits is a Trojan horse book, which you probably figured out, Paul, right?
14:31
SPEAKER_02: It's Trojan horsing a few things.
14:33
SPEAKER_02: One is that it's a systems book that doesn't really call out that it's a systems book.
14:37
SPEAKER_02: So how do we change the system of working with each other?
14:40
SPEAKER_02: Because we know if you do any organizational design or executive coaching or any any real work in teams, you know you have to change the system to actually create to create different outcomes.
14:49
SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, you're gonna have individuals always working upstream or working against the system, and over time the system will win.
14:56
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so when we talk about things like perverse incentives, which are part of workways, where somewhere in the stated or unstated culture are ways or are um responses and behaviors in which people are actually penalized for doing the things that advances the strategy over the organization, or they're rewarded for doing things that create bad team morale into bad team behavior.
15:22
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
15:22
SPEAKER_02: Reverse incentives.
15:24
SPEAKER_02: Um as long as those exist, you're going to have some individuals who will fight against those perverse incentives, but won't last long, right?
15:33
SPEAKER_02: Because they'll figure out that the game is rigged against them, or they'll just get worn out and tired and don't want to do it.
15:40
SPEAKER_02: And you'll have many more people because of, you know, um basically um peer influence and things like that who will do things that actually goes against their natures because that is the way the organization does it.
15:54
SPEAKER_02: So as long as those perverse incentives exist, you're going to have wonky outcomes that no one can understand.
15:59
SPEAKER_02: Like the leaders will say, I don't understand why people do this thing.
16:02
SPEAKER_02: Right.
16:03
SPEAKER_02: And people later in lower echelons of the organization are going to be like, we do that thing because we're rewarded for doing that thing.
16:11
SPEAKER_02: Or there is no benefit or not a high enough benefit for doing this other thing that you want us to do.
16:17
SPEAKER_02: And so so many books, um, well, so many books focus on people because we are people who understand stories about people, right?
16:27
SPEAKER_02: And so we have to market that, we have to talk about that, we have to make that understandable.
16:31
SPEAKER_02: But unfortunately, the real problems at work are systemic.
16:36
SPEAKER_02: The real problems at work are institutional and or just workways and team habits that we just show up and do because that's how we do things.
16:46
SPEAKER_02: And it takes a lot, it seems like it takes a lot of effort to change things.
16:50
SPEAKER_02: But the trick here, Paul, is if you start small and if you use everything we know about personal habit change and just apply it to your team, over time, you can make work better.
17:02
SPEAKER_02: And you can, because so many of us spend so much of our time at work, if you make work better for your team, you have made their lives better.
17:11
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
17:12
SPEAKER_02: Right?
17:12
SPEAKER_02: There's a very clear connection.
17:14
SPEAKER_02: And last thing I'll say here is in my conversation, when I say team, I mean the four to eight people that you spend 80% of your working time with.
17:23
SPEAKER_02: Doesn't matter what's on your org chart, doesn't matter like this, the four to eight people, in that way it gets personal.
17:28
SPEAKER_02: So for the rest of the conversation, I'll use myself, Paul, and Matt, because I want to make it personal.
17:34
SPEAKER_02: So if Paul and I, Paul, Matt, and I show up to a meeting, and it sucks.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: Matt's our producer, I should say.
17:40
SPEAKER_02: You'll hear his uh voice at the end of it.
17:42
SPEAKER_02: Um if we show up for a meeting and our meeting sucks, right?
17:46
SPEAKER_02: We're not mere victims of that.
17:49
SPEAKER_02: We can look at each other, Paul, Matt, and Charlie be like, look, that wasn't it.
17:53
SPEAKER_02: None of us like that.
17:55
SPEAKER_02: We can do something different, right?
17:58
SPEAKER_02: Um, should we choose to.
18:00
SPEAKER_02: And that's the point that I want people to do.
18:02
SPEAKER_02: One, I want to illuminate some of the absurdities of the ways we work with each other.
18:07
SPEAKER_02: And two, I want to remind us that in our team, we can fix a lot and we don't need our managers writ to do that.
18:15
SPEAKER_02: Like I didn't mention that any of us were the manager, it could just be us three, yeah, peer-to-peer, that can solve that.
18:22
SPEAKER_02: Because if we do that, that is one less frustrating experience that we're going to have over and over and over again.
18:31
SPEAKER_02: And the studies show time and time again that our work morale and happiness and satisfaction is more guided by those small, frustrating setbacks, those annoying things that we show up.
18:42
SPEAKER_02: I call broken printers.
18:44
SPEAKER_02: We're more um influenced by broken printers than we are the every six-month big win or the raise or whatever we're doing.
18:54
SPEAKER_02: Like those day-to-day frustrations where you just are like, oh, fork my life, I can't do this again.
18:59
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
18:59
SPEAKER_02: Are what's going to get you to bail from that job.
19:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, but we, a lot of those we can fix.
19:04
SPEAKER_02: Paul, Matt, Charlie, or your team and the individuals on that team can fix those.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we should explain the the broken printer concept, which is interesting, which is basically it's kind of that that the physical instantiation for those of us that have all been to a physical workplace, which some of some of us have not, right?
19:22
SPEAKER_01: Some of our some of our audience might have never worked in a physical workplace, but for those of us that have, and somewhere there's a printer that basically either doesn't print or prints, uh, you know, has a big line down the left-hand side.
19:36
SPEAKER_01: Everybody complains about it, nobody fixes it because nobody's either got time to fix it, feels empowered to fix it, or you know, in the moment that they could have fixed it, they're off doing something else.
19:48
SPEAKER_01: And so it persists, it carries on, and it irritates the bleep out of you, but you persist, you work around it, you work with it, right?
19:56
SPEAKER_01: Because we can, because we're adaptable and all that kind of stuff.
19:59
SPEAKER_01: But it it these things add up and they add up to an overall experience.
20:05
SPEAKER_01: This actually, Charlie, I for me, this is the heart of why I think your book is actually very important, right?
20:12
SPEAKER_01: So um the this way in which we work with each other is not only something that if it's nurtured appropriately and paid enough attention to can get much better.
20:27
SPEAKER_01: But to your point, um, in our research, what we've seen, people talk about people leaving managers all the time.
20:33
SPEAKER_01: But people, what we've seen is people leave experiences.
20:37
SPEAKER_01: They leave a the experience of working in one environment and they this there's that broader experience of work, which includes your manager, but not limited to, which includes the day-to-day experience of working with your colleagues, it includes what you do, it includes how you do it, and it includes how it interfaces with the rest of your life.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: And if those things are all functioning well, you're not going anywhere.
21:04
SPEAKER_01: And especially if you can grow during that that process.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: But if those things are not functioning well, then ultimately you're gonna give up and leave.
21:13
SPEAKER_01: And when you give up and leave, it's not just gonna affect you, it's gonna affect all uh affect all your teammates.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: And so I do really think that there's a that the focus that you have on that kind of stuff is is really, really important.
21:25
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for that.
21:26
SPEAKER_02: You know, I mentioned Trojan Horses.
21:28
SPEAKER_02: The the other the other thing that Team Habits is a Trojan horse for is it's really a book about power, too.
21:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
21:34
SPEAKER_02: And I would say yes, they leave experience, but the particular experience that I've seen time and time again in a lot of research shows it is the experience of powerlessness.
21:44
SPEAKER_01: Yes, definitely.
21:45
SPEAKER_02: Right.
21:45
SPEAKER_02: And so what Team Habits like there's a reason, I'll tell you.
21:49
SPEAKER_02: I'll tell the the listeners.
21:50
SPEAKER_02: I didn't make it a book about power because those very quickly get political and go into the like, oh yeah, we'll get to it or we'll talk about it, or maybe we need to do an org design.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: Thing.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: Um, and I'm like, we don't need to do all that.
22:02
SPEAKER_02: But three dimensions of power at work.
22:04
SPEAKER_02: I can be brief here, Paul.
22:05
SPEAKER_02: So dimension one, well, back up.
22:08
SPEAKER_02: We talk about two of these all the time, yeah, but not the third, and that's the problem.
22:15
SPEAKER_02: So, first dimension is personal power.
22:18
SPEAKER_02: That's the power that Paul, Charlie, and Matt have just because of our skills, our learning, you know, our backgrounds, what we can do.
22:25
SPEAKER_02: So think of personal power as power to.
22:28
SPEAKER_02: On the other end of the spectrum, we have institutional power.
22:32
SPEAKER_02: That's power over.
22:33
SPEAKER_02: That's what Paul, Charlie, and Matt can do because of their position in the organization.
22:37
SPEAKER_02: We have power over people, budgets, you know, stuff, projects, whatever it might be.
22:42
SPEAKER_02: Um, those are the two poles that most business books talk about.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
22:46
SPEAKER_02: I want us to focus on the middle pole or the middle dimension of interpersonal power.
22:52
SPEAKER_02: That's power with.
22:53
SPEAKER_02: That's what Paul, Charlie, and Matt can do together, that none of them could do alone.
22:59
SPEAKER_02: But the important part here is we don't need institutional power to do it.
23:04
SPEAKER_02: So we could look at that broken printer, maybe, and to say, you know what, this makes our life bad every week.
23:11
SPEAKER_02: We're tired of it.
23:12
SPEAKER_02: Let's just fix it, right?
23:14
SPEAKER_02: Let's figure out what we need to do to do that.
23:16
SPEAKER_02: And none of us have to be the manager, right?
23:18
SPEAKER_02: If our meetings suck, none of us have to be the manager.
23:21
SPEAKER_02: And the paradox that I want to want everyone listening to think about is think about all those real but also, you know, analogous broken printers, a CC thread from hell.
23:32
SPEAKER_02: The link, the link permissions never work.
23:35
SPEAKER_02: The whatever, you can go down the list.
23:38
SPEAKER_02: Um, think about how much we let them persist.
23:42
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
23:43
SPEAKER_02: And how much they end up costing us versus how quickly we will call a meeting with each other that takes more time and cost our organizations more.
23:53
SPEAKER_02: Meetings are free.
23:55
SPEAKER_02: Free and something we rely on.
23:58
SPEAKER_02: Right.
23:58
SPEAKER_02: Very much in air quotes.
24:00
SPEAKER_02: They're free and something we can do really quickly.
24:02
SPEAKER_02: Hey, Paul Matt, let's just have a meeting.
24:03
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
24:04
SPEAKER_02: When no one can say, like, do we really need that meeting though?
24:06
SPEAKER_02: Right?
24:07
SPEAKER_02: And there are a lot of teams can't say that.
24:09
SPEAKER_02: But this printer, this broken printer, employee number 47, that's been there for 17 years that we all know is broken, we can't fix that.
24:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
24:18
SPEAKER_02: And yet I can hijack your time, I can hijack your attention, and I can hijack organizational dollars to have a meeting and show up and for the first 30 minutes, figure out what the hell we're actually talking about.
24:29
SPEAKER_02: And then maybe have enough time to figure out what we need to talk about next to solve whatever thing we showed up to do in the first place.
24:36
SPEAKER_02: That's the absurdity I want to pull out.
24:39
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24:41
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24:59
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26:09
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26:10
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26:12
SPEAKER_01: To get to another reason why I why I think this is actually very important, um, again, coming back to some of the some of the research that we've done, we've seen that as work is becoming more distributed and asynchronous, in many cases, um, while there are great positive side effects associated with that, right, in terms of people being able to manage their work in the context of their lives and the flexibility that they get and all of that great stuff, um, which we've talked about a lot on this podcast, there is one thing that we've observed that is starting to happen, which is that as people are working more asynchronously and as they're doing more work on their on their own in isolation in their home offices or wherever, the the muscle, if you like, this the the the teamwork muscle, the collaboration muscle is for many people starting to become degraded.
27:09
SPEAKER_01: And we've measured that independently.
27:12
SPEAKER_01: We've seen we've also seen it self-reported as well, that people are finding it actually a little harder to collaborate effectively with their teammates.
27:19
SPEAKER_01: And so I think your timing on this is really is really good because it actually reminds people that um any team um that is actually just a group of high-performing individuals is not a great team, right?
27:37
SPEAKER_01: And if if you don't pay attention to it, you've got the equivalent of, I don't know, 11 soccer players running around doing tricks and never scoring goals.
27:46
SPEAKER_01: Um and so I'm guessing that you've seen quite a few groups of individuals that are high-performing individuals but are not forming a high-performing team.
27:58
SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
27:59
SPEAKER_01: That's correct.
28:00
SPEAKER_01: And I'm glad you pointed that out.
28:01
SPEAKER_02: Um, there are two of the categories of team habits that specifically address that, but they're the ones that are falling by the wayside in async and hybrid work.
28:11
SPEAKER_02: And so the first one, which is what I open the book with, are team habits around belonging.
28:16
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
28:16
SPEAKER_02: Right.
28:17
SPEAKER_02: But the back end of the book, which is around core team habits, which are the personal productivity or effectiveness habits that we decide to do as a team.
28:25
SPEAKER_02: So Paul likes planning on Monday morning, Charlie likes planning on Monday morning, Matt likes planning on Monday morning.
28:30
SPEAKER_02: Oh, so what that means is we can sync up around that and all commit to doing that together, but also remove other things like stupid Monday morning meetings that keep that where we're basically going to the meeting to try to figure out what we're doing, that if we had our planning session, we can go into the meeting already knowing what we're doing, right?
28:50
SPEAKER_02: So just small things like that.
28:51
SPEAKER_02: So it turns out that there are broadly two orientations.
28:56
SPEAKER_02: And I got this from the book Eight Dates, and oh, the name of the author eludes me.
29:01
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I need to phone a friend on that one.
29:02
SPEAKER_02: Anyways, read the book Eight Dates, um, The Gotments.
29:05
SPEAKER_02: There we go.
29:06
SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, that's it.
29:07
SPEAKER_02: And while they're talking about personal relationships and intimacy, I was like, oh, that's true of working, right?
29:13
SPEAKER_02: Because I think people think that work is some sort of special domain of life that has different rules than our personal relationships do.
29:23
SPEAKER_02: That's fundamentally false, right?
29:25
SPEAKER_02: Um, there's a different context, similar, very, very similar rules in the way we show up.
29:30
SPEAKER_02: So, broadly speaking, some people um bond by doing hard things first, and then they feel that sense of bonding and belonging after that.
29:42
SPEAKER_02: So that's a very in American culture, that's a very masculine approach.
29:45
SPEAKER_02: Like we we get together, we win the championships, we do all the grueling stuff, and then we're like friends for life.
29:50
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
29:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, on the other hand, some people need to belong and bond first, and then they can do hard things.
29:58
SPEAKER_02: Right.
29:59
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so for those people, showing up for the damn trust fall thing, it makes no sense whatsoever to them.
30:06
SPEAKER_02: It's like, why would I just trust these people that I've had no relationship with, and you want me fall off this 10-foot thing, right?
30:13
SPEAKER_02: They need a lot of the rapport and relationship building first, and then they will they will go to hell and back with their team, right?
30:22
SPEAKER_02: And the reason this is important is the book starts with belonging because I think it's the missing piece that we don't think about a lot, but it actually ends with the how we do hard stuff together and come around that because they both sort of feed into each other and bit fit both orientations.
30:37
SPEAKER_02: And so if you as a teammate are experiencing that lack of feeling like you're part of a team, you probably, if you pick up the book, start with belonging and go to the back chapter of core team habits.
30:51
SPEAKER_02: Because, for instance, one of the core team habits is um, you know, really talking to your team about what support you need when you fall behind or when you fall down.
31:00
SPEAKER_02: Right.
31:01
SPEAKER_02: Turns out, given life, at some point in time, someone is gonna be behind on something, someone's gonna fall down or something, or life is gonna make them sick, they're gonna have a family emergency, whatever it is.
31:13
SPEAKER_02: Right.
31:14
SPEAKER_02: And there's a way in which we can say, we, Paul and Matt and Charlie can come together and say, okay, here's in the inevitability that I fall down on something, here's what supports me.
31:27
SPEAKER_02: Paul, what supports you?
31:28
SPEAKER_02: Matt, what supports me?
31:29
SPEAKER_02: So that we don't do the thing that so many people do, which is like, oh, Charlie's having a rough time at home and life.
31:34
SPEAKER_02: So what I'm gonna do is take a bunch of responsibilities and work from him without knowing that Charlie might be one of those souls where work is actually where like he's feeling that sense of control and autonomy and purpose and appreciation.
31:49
SPEAKER_02: If you take that from me, then I have whatever's going on outside of life, and then I come to work and I have that happen too.
31:56
SPEAKER_02: That's not good for Charlie.
31:57
SPEAKER_02: That's not good for someone like that.
31:59
SPEAKER_02: Whereas some people might be like, yes, I actually am overloaded.
32:03
SPEAKER_02: Please take that from me.
32:05
SPEAKER_02: There's no one size fits all here.
32:07
SPEAKER_02: And Paul, the beauty about team habits is they don't have to scale.
32:12
SPEAKER_02: I cannot stress this enough.
32:14
SPEAKER_02: It needs to go to four to eight people.
32:17
SPEAKER_02: We can do that.
32:18
SPEAKER_02: We can figure out these four to eight people that, largely speaking, we're going to be spending the next two to three years with no matter what.
32:24
SPEAKER_02: So we can either choose to show up with and for each other and do great work together, or we can choose to be isolated for two or three years and wondering what's going on and why we're not fitting in and why work is not what work is harder than it needs to be.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: So I I think that is a really interesting topic.
32:47
SPEAKER_01: Let's I wasn't intending to, but let's let's let's dive into a specific example um that I that I I think might be on some people's minds is on mine.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: Um we had a discussion on the podcast, uh, I think it was the last podcast we did, um, that got into workplace toxicity.
33:11
SPEAKER_01: And what's kind of uh shocking um and kind of saddening is that almost everybody that has been in the workplace, let's say 10 to 15 years or more has a story of some sort about an individual that has behaved in a highly toxic manner and they work with closely with that individual.
33:39
SPEAKER_01: Maybe the individual is trying to take them down, right?
33:43
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they see that maybe they see you as a as a threat, and so they want to diminish you, raise themselves by diminishing you.
33:53
SPEAKER_01: Um that's one of the really interesting things about this, right?
33:57
SPEAKER_01: We can choose our friends, but we can't, in most cases, really choose our colleagues.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: So I hear everything you're saying, and I think it's right.
34:08
SPEAKER_01: I think it's absolutely right.
34:10
SPEAKER_01: But how do you go about dealing with the situation where you're on that page, three of your colleagues are on that page, but one of your colleagues is definitely, definitely not?
34:22
SPEAKER_01: Um, I think it's one of the areas where things like um moving at the speed of trust, I think it's called, etc., they kind of like brush that under the carpet a little bit.
34:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, like you say, well, just assume trust, assume trust.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: Well, what if you can't trust the best?
34:36
SPEAKER_01: So um, what what's your take on that?
34:39
SPEAKER_01: What have you have you dealt with it when you've encountered it?
34:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I need to, that's a great question.
34:44
SPEAKER_02: I'm so glad you brought this up, right?
34:46
SPEAKER_02: And so I need to introduce a Charlieism real quick, because I'm gonna help with this, right?
34:50
SPEAKER_02: And the the one that I'm gonna introduce is rocket practice.
34:53
SPEAKER_02: So much of what we're talking about is not rocket science, it's not hard to understand, it's incredibly hard to apply consistently.
35:01
SPEAKER_02: Right.
35:01
SPEAKER_02: And so typically when something comes up like that, I'm like, okay, great, great, great.
35:06
SPEAKER_02: I understand.
35:06
SPEAKER_02: Let me just go through the basics, like go through the checklist.
35:09
SPEAKER_02: One, has any one of you pulled that person aside and said, Hey, Charlie, don't know what's going on.
35:19
SPEAKER_02: Not gonna assume any intention, I'm gonna assume good intent.
35:22
SPEAKER_02: And this is what your behavior creates in the team, or at least makes me feel this way.
35:30
SPEAKER_02: I want you to know about that first so that you know, you may not know this, right?
35:37
SPEAKER_02: Um, whatever, right?
35:39
SPEAKER_02: But I'm coming to you as a peer.
35:40
SPEAKER_02: Remember, interpersonal power.
35:42
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
35:42
SPEAKER_02: I don't need my boss, right?
35:44
SPEAKER_02: Because most of us would want our teammates to come to us.
35:48
SPEAKER_02: If we're being the asshole, we would want our teammates to come compassionately but firmly and say, hey, I don't know if you know you're doing this, maybe you're having a bad day, whatever.
35:59
SPEAKER_02: Here's what's happening.
36:01
SPEAKER_02: So, round one, that's that's part of the checklist.
36:04
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
36:04
SPEAKER_02: Right?
36:05
SPEAKER_02: How many of you have done that?
36:07
SPEAKER_02: Is it just one person?
36:08
SPEAKER_02: Because then if it's just one person having that one conversation, then you know Charlie can be like, hey, Paul, well, that's just you.
36:13
SPEAKER_02: That's your problem, buddy.
36:14
SPEAKER_02: Deal with it, right?
36:16
SPEAKER_02: But if Paul and Matt and Taylor and Angela all come to me and say the same thing, oh shit.
36:22
SPEAKER_02: Sorry, I'm I'm using that language.
36:24
SPEAKER_03: Don't worry.
36:25
SPEAKER_02: Oh crap.
36:26
SPEAKER_02: You're good.
36:26
SPEAKER_02: Now I'm actually the problem.
36:28
SPEAKER_02: Like now there's enough of them, and peer pressure starts to work in our favor, right?
36:32
SPEAKER_02: Because what is encoded is that behavior is not cool and it's making us uncomfortable.
36:38
SPEAKER_02: And we have primal wiring that actually kicks in.
36:43
SPEAKER_02: And notice I have not said talk to your manager.
36:47
SPEAKER_02: At a certain point, you may have to escalate that.
36:50
SPEAKER_02: Talk to the manager.
36:51
SPEAKER_02: Hey, Ann, we've all had this conversation with Charlie, right?
36:57
SPEAKER_02: Um doesn't seem to be changing.
37:00
SPEAKER_02: It feels like this behavior is going against both our team values and org values.
37:05
SPEAKER_02: We've done what we can.
37:08
SPEAKER_02: First, do you have any suggestions for how I might be able to approach that?
37:11
SPEAKER_02: Or two, do you believe that it's your point that now it's actually your problem?
37:16
SPEAKER_02: Then the manager gets involved and might have different sort of things.
37:20
SPEAKER_02: And if the manager can't do anything, that's where we go into that broader concept of workways.
37:24
SPEAKER_02: What is in the system that allows the toxic behavior to persist?
37:29
SPEAKER_02: Um, I come from the army, right?
37:32
SPEAKER_02: There are enough checks and balances that bad leaders and bad performers can't exist that long, right?
37:39
SPEAKER_02: They get run out, right?
37:40
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
37:41
SPEAKER_02: And so by the time you're dealing with someone high enough up the uh shit up the chain, you can assume they're a good leader.
37:47
SPEAKER_02: Because if not, they would have been run out, right?
37:50
SPEAKER_02: But in a lot of civilian organizations, there's not that sort of thing to where, you know, Ann can go to Charlie and say, hey, team, let me know that they told you about this.
37:59
SPEAKER_02: I've experienced this too.
38:00
SPEAKER_02: This is unacceptable, right?
38:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, should you continue to behave in this way, there are consequences for this, and let's talk about it, right?
38:09
SPEAKER_02: And the manager actually having enough backbone to have that conversation because her team has done some of the pre-work, right?
38:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
38:17
SPEAKER_02: The thing about creating, unfortunately, what many of us do is neither talk to the person or the first thing we do is run and talk to the manager.
38:28
SPEAKER_02: And when we do that, we actually invoke the dreaded triad, the dreaded triangle.
38:35
SPEAKER_02: And importantly, when that's our first vector, we choose institutional power as the vector to solve that problem.
38:43
SPEAKER_02: When you choose the paradigm, you reinforce the paradigm.
38:47
SPEAKER_02: So by going to Anne and saying, Ann, you need to get involved, what we're saying is, hey, now this is your problem to solve.
38:55
SPEAKER_02: I'm out.
38:56
SPEAKER_02: It's not my job anymore.
38:58
SPEAKER_02: You go do the thing.
38:59
SPEAKER_02: And even if it's a good outcome, Charlie then no longer trusts the rest of his team.
39:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
39:06
SPEAKER_02: Because none of y'all came and talked to me.
39:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
39:09
SPEAKER_02: Right.
39:09
SPEAKER_02: So when it comes time for you, like you fell down, Paul had a hard day, Paul didn't do his thing.
39:16
SPEAKER_02: Am I going to be the one that's like, I got you?
39:18
SPEAKER_02: No, hell no, I'm not going to do that.
39:20
SPEAKER_02: Right.
39:21
SPEAKER_02: Because you have shown me that we don't have that relationship.
39:26
SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, there are two when we talk about trust, and I mean functional trust, meaning can I count on you?
39:31
SPEAKER_02: Two different things.
39:32
SPEAKER_02: Some people are trust earners, meaning Paul needs to earn my trust before I'll give it to him.
39:38
SPEAKER_02: And other people are trust givers.
39:40
SPEAKER_02: I will give Paul my trust and hope that he gives me my trust.
39:43
SPEAKER_02: But in that circumstance that you just mentioned, if your first vector is to run and talk to your manager, then you have corroded both versions of trust.
39:54
SPEAKER_02: And even in the ideal outcome that the behavior changes, that teammate now is less likely to feel like they belong.
40:02
SPEAKER_02: They're less likely to collaborate with you, they're less likely to show it for you.
40:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
40:07
SPEAKER_01: And I think one of the things that this highlights as well is sort of like the interdependency between underlying systems and underlying culture and the sorts of things you're talking about.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: So I think for many people that are listening to this, they're going to think about that uh as something that they've really not thought about before.
40:27
SPEAKER_01: They've not thought about dealing with it in the way.
40:29
SPEAKER_01: Other people, and this is going to be situational, are going to be like, well, I can't do that.
40:33
SPEAKER_01: I don't feel safe doing that.
40:35
SPEAKER_01: Right.
40:35
SPEAKER_01: So it almost implies, in a way, that there has to be like an underlying psychological safety to the uh to the environment to uh to allow you to be able to do it, um, which implies that the team needs to be not broken enough to allow it to happen, which ties it all the way back to your first point about belonging.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: In an environment in which there is a baseline of some level of belonging, you can totally go to that person and you can explain uh what you're talking about, which is why I think another reason why you emphasizing belonging at the start of the book makes so much sense because it allows it allows those types of discussions that you're talking about to happen in a way that is safe and you're not worried about the consequences of the conversation and all that kind of thing.
41:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
41:24
SPEAKER_02: Well, and my point in that is that yes, there are some common assumptions that I have, because there are some truly terrible teams.
41:31
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
41:31
SPEAKER_02: Right.
41:32
SPEAKER_02: If you're like, Charlie, this team is fundamentally broken, and and or some people come and talk to me individually and they're like, this is what's going on my team.
41:39
SPEAKER_02: And I ask a few of my tech list questions, and I get to it, and it's like, you probably need to leave that team.
41:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
41:45
SPEAKER_02: Straight up, right?
41:46
SPEAKER_02: I will say that.
41:47
SPEAKER_02: I would say that's an outlier case.
41:49
SPEAKER_02: That's like five percent of businesses or teams are so broken.
41:53
SPEAKER_02: And here's what I mean by that: go back to the team of four to eight people.
41:57
SPEAKER_02: It's possible that there are four to that there are three to seven other assholes on the team.
42:06
SPEAKER_02: Um, because of hiring processes and things like that.
42:08
SPEAKER_02: That's possible.
42:09
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
42:10
SPEAKER_02: It's unlikely, right?
42:11
SPEAKER_02: When you look at the band of human experience, most of us lie within that 80% of good people trying to do our best, right?
42:18
SPEAKER_02: They're exceptional saints, right?
42:20
SPEAKER_02: And just fundamentally great people that like we all want to work with and we all want to be.
42:24
SPEAKER_02: And then there are the dastardly folks on the other 10 where they're just gonna cut and do things, or they're borderline sociopathic, right?
42:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
42:32
SPEAKER_02: Um, that's how we show up in the world as humans, as the type of beings that we are.
42:36
SPEAKER_02: So it's reasonable, I think, Paul, to assume that most of us fall within this 80% band.
42:41
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
42:42
SPEAKER_02: We might respond differently, like we might have higher EQ, we might do all of that, right?
42:47
SPEAKER_02: But it's highly unlikely that in your team of four to eight people, that there are three to seven other assholes.
42:53
SPEAKER_02: Um, if there are, if that's the case, one thing you need to be worried about is maybe you're the asshole, right?
42:58
SPEAKER_02: If that's the case.
42:59
SPEAKER_02: So I'll start there.
43:01
SPEAKER_02: But it might be that there's one bad actor.
43:05
SPEAKER_02: Well, guess what?
43:06
SPEAKER_02: If you build belonging with the other 80% of your team, you will be able to still show up to work, sequester the one bad actor in all the different ways, and still your life is better.
43:21
SPEAKER_02: And I know it sounds like a tautology, but better is better.
43:25
unknown: Yeah.
43:26
SPEAKER_02: When you go back to experiences that we talked about earlier, that experience of powerlessness, and just like, oh, we've got that one toxic person, there's nothing we can do about it.
43:34
SPEAKER_02: And we focus so much on that.
43:37
SPEAKER_02: What about the other great souls that are on your team?
43:40
SPEAKER_02: What about them?
43:41
SPEAKER_02: What if we let go of the negativity bias and come together and say, look, for whatever reason, that pain in the ass is we have to deal with it.
43:50
SPEAKER_02: But here's how we're going to do that together.
43:54
SPEAKER_02: Here's how we're going to do it so that that one person doesn't make our entire work.
44:00
SPEAKER_02: Experience suck, right?
44:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, maybe they could be habituated or habilitated, maybe not.
44:06
SPEAKER_02: But you, Paul, Matt, and Charlie, we're gonna get together and we're gonna figure this out and we're gonna make work better together.
44:12
SPEAKER_02: Turns out you can do that.
44:15
SPEAKER_02: And sure, that person's gonna throw a temper tantrum or sabotage a meeting or stab somebody in the back, so and so forth.
44:21
SPEAKER_02: But it's kind of one of those absurdity that's known like the broken printer, right?
44:24
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
44:24
SPEAKER_02: You're not so frustrated and mad about it when it happens.
44:26
SPEAKER_02: Because like, oh yeah, it's a scorpion frog parable, right?
44:29
SPEAKER_02: Right.
44:30
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so it's like, yeah, he's a scorpion, he's gonna sting me.
44:33
SPEAKER_02: That's what he does.
44:34
SPEAKER_02: I don't have to be mad about that, right?
44:36
SPEAKER_02: He's well on whatever journey.
44:38
SPEAKER_02: I don't need to be surprised by it.
44:40
SPEAKER_02: But it doesn't mean that Paul, Matt, and Charlie are going to sting me.
44:45
SPEAKER_02: And so this is where when I want to say, well, my team, like sometimes that's useful to say, my team does this, my team does that.
44:51
SPEAKER_02: Other times it's incredibly useful to say, no, that one person does that.
44:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
44:56
SPEAKER_02: Um, we have to deal with that for a lot of different workways and stuff that none of us agree with.
45:02
SPEAKER_02: But Paul, even just showing up, I believe, and I've seen this in my research, I've seen this in my coaching.
45:09
SPEAKER_02: Even showing up and having other members of your team that can validate the absurdity and the BS that you're dealing with, so that you don't have to self-gaslight yourself, right?
45:20
SPEAKER_02: You don't have to self-be like, oh, like there's nothing I gotta do about it.
45:23
SPEAKER_02: Even that increases belonging, it increases cohesion, it increases performance.
45:28
SPEAKER_02: And that can be enough to get you through a rough day, rough week, so on and so forth.
45:33
SPEAKER_02: So that's where I don't let people off the hook with this, right?
45:36
SPEAKER_02: You might want to check out, like, oh, we can't do anything about the toxic person.
45:39
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
45:40
SPEAKER_02: Okay, cool.
45:40
SPEAKER_02: I get you.
45:41
SPEAKER_02: I hear that.
45:42
SPEAKER_02: Fundamentally got you.
45:43
SPEAKER_02: What about the other three, three to seven people?
45:46
SPEAKER_02: How are you building belonging?
45:47
SPEAKER_02: How are you working on your score team habits?
45:49
SPEAKER_02: How are you making work better with those folks?
45:51
SPEAKER_02: Understanding that that person eventually is gonna, the one person you're you're concerned about is eventually gonna roll off the team.
45:58
SPEAKER_01: It will happen.
46:00
SPEAKER_01: Um so to make it just a little bit practical for people, uh, we talked about belonging, you talked about the final uh thing core team uh team habits.
46:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, you've actually got eight categories overall.
46:13
SPEAKER_01: Uh belonging, which I mentioned, decision making, goal setting, and prioritization, planning, communication, collaboration, meetings, dreaded meetings, and as I mentioned, the the core team habits.
46:26
SPEAKER_01: Um I'd love to zone in on just one of them a little bit, um, just to give people a bit of a deeper flavor.
46:33
SPEAKER_01: Um, let's talk about communication.
46:36
SPEAKER_01: Um I want to delve on on this one because this is one of the ones that we've seen people struggle with quite a bit as work is getting more asynchronous and distributed and things like that.
46:46
SPEAKER_01: Um and a lot of what was very casual communication that would sort of happen organically inside organization now needs to be a bit more thoughtful.
46:54
SPEAKER_01: It's often more written than it was previously and things like that.
46:58
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot in the section, but I was really interested in the how you talk about this in terms of people getting it wrong by I guess kind of running too hot or too cold.
47:10
SPEAKER_01: Um so, for example, you say communication can be too infrequent, but it can also be too frequent.
47:16
SPEAKER_01: You can provide too little detail, but you can also provide too much detail.
47:20
SPEAKER_01: Kind of talk about that um that uh environment.
47:25
SPEAKER_01: I think you talk about in terms of uh faders kind of thing.
47:27
SPEAKER_01: Uh so explain that concept a little bit, but I'd love you to talk a little bit specifically about the too afraid or too courageous thing, because I found that quite interesting.
47:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so um I wish there was a one size fits all here.
47:39
SPEAKER_02: It'd make my job a lot easier when it comes to doing things, but that's the beauty and both the downside of this is every team and every member of the team is going to be different.
47:48
SPEAKER_02: Again, it doesn't have to scale four to eight people, same beat over and over again, right?
47:52
SPEAKER_02: So to your point, you've already mentioned sometimes you're just talking too much to people.
47:56
SPEAKER_02: Like I one of the first things I try to kill when I come in and talk to teams is the daily stand-up, right?
48:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, it tends to be a waste of time.
48:03
SPEAKER_02: And for many people on the team, it's like we're talking too much.
48:06
SPEAKER_02: Like we don't need the damn daily update.
48:08
SPEAKER_02: Like I can I can do this.
48:09
SPEAKER_01: All right, let's well, wait, wait, let's let's pause on that because I think that is quite controversial to a lot of people.
48:14
SPEAKER_01: So so uh just to make sure people heard that.
48:17
SPEAKER_01: So you you try to kill daily stand-ups, right?
48:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
48:20
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
48:21
SPEAKER_02: Um most daily stand-ups, what do you do?
48:22
SPEAKER_02: You show up and you say, okay, here's what we're gonna do.
48:24
SPEAKER_02: Boom, boom, boom, and everybody sort of goes around a circle, tells what they're going to do, and then you sort of adjourn.
48:29
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
48:29
SPEAKER_02: But I think the thing about the daily stand-up that really irritates me is people are not thinking about the hidden cost of the meetings.
48:35
SPEAKER_02: You have hijacked not just that 30 minutes, but you have hijacked a focus block, a key critical piece of time for every member of that team and the 15 to 20 minutes leading to it and the 15 to 20 minutes afterwards.
48:50
SPEAKER_02: Right?
48:51
SPEAKER_02: So you can basically blow a good morning just by having a 15-minute stand-up, which is basically people saying, here's what's going on, so on and so forth.
49:02
SPEAKER_02: The other thing that stand-ups do that many people don't think about is they create ghost plans, meaning you talked about something two months ago, and then you start the stand-up process and you start modifying that plan over and over and over again every day.
49:14
SPEAKER_02: Oh no, change this, change that.
49:16
SPEAKER_02: If you're not careful, no one's documenting the changes.
49:19
SPEAKER_02: And so the stated plan that you started with two months ago and where you are is now so different that the only way you can know what's going on is to do what?
49:29
SPEAKER_02: Show up to the daily stand-up.
49:31
SPEAKER_02: So if you're out for two weeks, well, I guess you're just gonna spin however long it takes you to get caught up.
49:37
SPEAKER_02: So I really sometimes like if you're really in a high-tempo VUCA fast-moving environment, like I did daily stand-ups as a battalion plans officer.
49:48
SPEAKER_02: We had troops on the road doing things every day, ambushes, that information was changing so quickly and lives depended upon it that the daily stand-up actually made sense.
49:57
SPEAKER_02: Most civilian businesses are not like that.
49:59
SPEAKER_02: Like, do you really need a daily war room?
50:02
SPEAKER_02: Like, think about the artificial urgency that you're creating every damn day.
50:05
SPEAKER_02: And how many businesses actually have that?
50:08
SPEAKER_02: Right.
50:08
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
50:09
SPEAKER_02: A far better way of doing that would be to decompose it to teams, and maybe there's one teammate that keeps everybody else up to date with changes of the plan, and it doesn't have to be the manager, right?
50:18
SPEAKER_02: There are different ways to solve that same problem, but just hijacking people's time because an extroverted, charismatic leader needs to socially process what's going on.
50:28
SPEAKER_02: Come on.
50:29
SPEAKER_02: Like maybe there are different ways to go about going about that, right?
50:32
SPEAKER_02: I'm one of those charismatic, extroverted leaders.
50:35
SPEAKER_02: Like, I would do that, but I also know the cost of that.
50:38
SPEAKER_02: And I'm unwilling to pay that cost for all of the workdays of a year.
50:44
SPEAKER_02: So when my team is going through a major launch where three to four days does matter, we might do for that period of time a daily stand-up to figure things out.
50:54
SPEAKER_02: But we have what's called a red zone channel, which is a reference to my previous book, where we will literally stand up basically the war room channel in Slack for the project where we can have that conversation and there's an all clear when it's done.
51:06
SPEAKER_02: All clear.
51:07
SPEAKER_02: We're back to normal operations, carry on, right?
51:10
SPEAKER_02: And it turns out that it works really well.
51:12
SPEAKER_02: Like we're in this intense period.
51:13
SPEAKER_02: This makes sense.
51:14
SPEAKER_02: Everybody can buy into it.
51:15
SPEAKER_02: But it's my job as the leader to do the all clear and say go back to normal mode, right?
51:20
SPEAKER_02: But so many teams live that way day in, day out.
51:23
SPEAKER_02: And no wonder people are burnt out and frustrated.
51:25
SPEAKER_02: Um, they have no agency in that, they just have to show up and say what they're going to do, which is largely saying what I've already put into the task management system that you told me I have to do already.
51:34
SPEAKER_02: So why am I doing that work and then telling you what I'm doing on that work?
51:38
SPEAKER_02: Right.
51:38
SPEAKER_02: Anyways, I have a lot of things to say about the daily stand-up.
51:41
SPEAKER_02: There are some situations in which it is really a powerful tool, but it's way overused, and I don't think people are really taking the cost of it into full account, into full view.
51:53
SPEAKER_01: All right, last question.
51:55
SPEAKER_01: So you point out that this work is basically never done.
52:00
SPEAKER_01: Um as you look at your own team, what do you think of is your biggest priority to work on right now?
52:09
SPEAKER_01: And how will you know when you're going to be successful on that?
52:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, so right now we're probably most working on goal setting and prioritization in the sense of um we're on the backside of a major launch.
52:25
SPEAKER_02: We've had, you know, some other things going between starting, you know, it's launching an app in 2022, a book in 2023, like all the stuff that we did to respond for and with our community for COVID.
52:38
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so 2024 is a reset year for us in so many different ways.
52:42
SPEAKER_02: And so I was just talking to one of my teammates yesterday.
52:44
SPEAKER_02: It's like, I, you know, I know here are the buckets of work that we're doing right now.
52:50
SPEAKER_02: I'm unsure of how to prioritize myself and the team amongst those.
52:54
SPEAKER_02: I'm just gonna be honest about that, right?
52:56
SPEAKER_02: Um, there are different ways that this can go, and I'll be working over that on that over the next couple of weeks, you know, to really figure out, okay, here's my best guess of that.
53:04
SPEAKER_02: But in the meantime, the team has, you know, buckets of work and the streams attached to them that are like, I don't know, it just seems like a whole lot.
53:11
SPEAKER_02: I don't know which way to go.
53:12
SPEAKER_02: And so we're having to work on prioritization because I, you know, uniquely in my role, haven't said, okay, here's here's the 80-20, here's here's what's important, here's the thing, here's the biggest win that we want to do.
53:24
SPEAKER_02: That's on me.
53:25
SPEAKER_02: Right.
53:26
SPEAKER_02: Um, because we're just not operating in a um standard cruise mode as much as this liminal period that we're in.
53:35
SPEAKER_02: So I'll know that we're done when um the teammates don't feel as shaky in their conversation.
53:42
SPEAKER_02: So it's a very subtle thing.
53:43
SPEAKER_02: But if you work with your four to eight people and you actually learn about them, you can tell when they're confident and on it and they know what they're doing versus when they're like, yeah, I'm kind of like, I think this is what I should be doing.
53:54
SPEAKER_02: It's like when that rolls off, I'll know, like, okay, you know, they're I'll use my military and my army background.
54:03
SPEAKER_02: They're firing at the right targets with the ammunition that we have.
54:06
SPEAKER_02: Like, we might be missing shots, but that's okay.
54:08
SPEAKER_02: We're always gonna miss shots.
54:08
SPEAKER_02: But we at least we know where we're going, and at least we know how to marshal these resources to get there.
54:14
SPEAKER_02: And then, like, that's when goal setting and prioritization will be done.
54:17
SPEAKER_02: And then it'll probably fall over to, you know, um, either belonging.
54:21
SPEAKER_02: That's another period we're working on because we're a smaller team now for a lot of different reasons.
54:25
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so how do we rebuild that?
54:27
SPEAKER_02: And it'll just be all right, we've got goal setting, we've got the prioritization going with it.
54:32
SPEAKER_02: So communication, do we need to turn some of those knobs?
54:35
SPEAKER_02: Are we talking too much, too little, too much detail, too little detail, or too afraid, or you know, um too courageous where like it's just brash, like that's probably what will be next.
54:47
SPEAKER_02: But to be honest, Paul, I don't know what team habits we're gonna be working on in three months because, well, I don't know in this massive system of work that we have, which is going to emerge as the new broken printer that's annoying us the most.
55:02
SPEAKER_01: That's a great spot to leave it.
55:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh, once again, the book is uh Team Habits.
55:08
SPEAKER_01: Author Charlie Gilkey.
55:09
SPEAKER_01: Charlie, thank you so much for joining us today.
55:11
SPEAKER_01: Really enjoyed it.
55:12
SPEAKER_01: Paul, thanks for having me.
55:14
SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
55:18
SPEAKER_00: Our interviewer is Paul Slater.
55:20
SPEAKER_00: Music is by Dolo Records.
55:22
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55:26
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55:28
SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.