Tag: culture

The One Non-Negotiable Trait of Great Team Leaders

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

At a workshop I facilitated a few weeks ago, we asked everyone to share, in small groups, the characteristics of the most effective leader they had ever worked with.

The most common behavior they mentioned was: this is someone who always has my back.

It makes sense, and aligns with Reed Hastings’ / Netflix ideas about how to think about our working relationships: we are not a family, we are a high-performing sports team. From the Netflix Culture page:

A family is about unconditional love. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best possible teammate, caring intensely about your team, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever. Dream teams are about performance, not seniority or tenure. It is up to the manager to ensure that every player is amazing at their position, plays effectively with others and is given new opportunities to develop. That’s how we keep winning the championship (entertaining the world). Unlike a sports team, as Netflix grows, the number of players also grows. We work to foster players from the development leagues so they can become the stars of tomorrow.

The best teammates, and the best bosses, are the ones who make you better, the ones you can rely on, the ones that will back you up if someone comes after you and catch you if you fall.

The story could end here, but it doesn’t.

Back at the workshop, we moved from small breakout groups to the full group.

In the report out, the “someone who has my back” headline subtly got transformed into “someone who protects their team,” and not everyone noticed at first how different these two things were.

Yes, great leaders protect—give cover to—their teams. But that is hardly enough.

“Protection” and “having your back” are not the same thing.

When I have your back, that means that I am there to support you, to be your advocate, to ensure that you are operating in a context where you can always succeed.

And that also means that, in private, I am telling you the hard truths, sharing where I think you have more to give, expressing to you what I know is possible for you and for us. I’m a coach, to be sure, and I’m one who tells you the whole story.

That’s a much broader remit than someone who only protects her team. Someone whose headline is “protection” is prioritizing safety and may be shying away from productive conflict and from the messages that need, over time, to be heard.

You can see this distinction play out in Google’s lessons from how to create great teams, based on research they conducted over two years looking at 180 teams.

The five characteristics Google identified as mattering the most were:

  1. Dependability: I talked about this in Teamwork, partnership, culture, and passing the ball
  2. Structure and clarity: well defined roles and goals
  3. Meaning: “the work has personal significance to each member”
  4. Impact: “the group believes their work is purposeful and positively impacts the greater good.”
  5. Psychological Safety: “A situation in which everyone is safe to take risks…A culture where managers provide air cover and create safe zones so employees can let down their guard.”

Someone who protects their team is likely providing psychological safety, and that’s important enough that it makes the Top 5 list. But limiting ourselves to “protecting” team members means we’re playing a narrow role, one in which we’re more likely to see ourselves as a filter or a buffer between what we see and what they see.

That’s certainly helpful some of the time: when a team member lacks confidence in certain tasks; when they are newer; when the team is forming and the bonds between folks, and the resilience of the team as a whole, is low.

But in the long run, protection alone is not enough.

We have each other’s back by buffering sometimes, filtering others, but, also, by providing real clarity of role and expectation, of potential, of upside.

And, most of all, we have each other’s back by communicating our clear conviction that we know this person can be great, and that we will walk with them down the path to greatness.

“Para Espanol, Oprima el Dos”

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

We’ve all heard this message, when we’ve called our healthcare provider, or our bank, or what used to be the cable company.

“Push 2 if you’d like to continue in Spanish,” is what it says.

In the last two weeks, struggling with the byzantine American healthcare system, I’ve had recorded voices at the start of the customer care maze say this sentence….with the most outrageously, embarrassingly American accent you could possibly imagine. It’s a caricature of bad Spanish.

Only two things could be happening here, one worse than the other:

  1. The company doesn’t know that the Spanish being spoken is abysmal
  2. The company knows that it is abysmal, but doesn’t care enough to fix it

Think about this: if you press the number ‘2’, presumably the company will have native Spanish speakers for you to speak to. Which means they don’t have an access-to-native-Spanish-speakers problem, they have a caring about the customer problem, or a bureaucracy problem, or a “I just do what the boss tells me” problem.

Both ignorance and not caring are a terrible place to end up, but we don’t get there all at once.

We get there because those in charge enable a culture tolerates disengagement, and because those not in charge decide it’s easier to follow the rules or to hide than it is to take things personally and to take pride in all of our work.

Teaching caring at scale is a hard thing to do.

It’s also the only thing that separates us from the gravitational pull of mediocrity.

Can Can’t Will Won’t and 3-D Management

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

In Danny Meyer’s interview on the Tim Ferris podcast, Danny shares the world’s simplest 2×2 for how to think about who on your team to invest in, and how much of your time and energy to give them.

The CAN / CAN’T describes the person’s skill. The WILL / WON’T describes their will.

This gives us a shortcut to understand the people on our teams, those who:

  • CAN and WILL: highly skilled and highly motivated. Your top performers today.
  • CAN’T and WILL: people who don’t have the skills but are highly motivated to learn them.
  • CAN and WON’T: people who have the skills but are unmotivated / have a bad attitude.
  • CAN’T and WON’T: people who have neither the skills nor the will.

How to Spend Your Time?

The first question Danny poses is: how should you spend your time as a supervisor? His answer (which I agree with) is that he has the most time for the people on the top half of the chart, those who:

  • CAN’T but WILL: people who are super-motivated to learn, but just don’t have the specific skills today. It’s hard to teach motivation, dedication, professionalism and pride; it’s much easier to teach skills.
  • CAN and WILL. In some ways it’s easy to just “leave these people alone” because they’re crushing their jobs, but this is exactly the wrong thing to do. Give them attention, praise them, nurture them, both for the impact this has on them directly and because of the positive multiplier effects this will have on your culture.

Then we get to the bottom part of the chart. This is where moving decisively is important, around those who:

  • CAN and WON’T: folks who have the skills but are unwilling or unmotivated. These individuals are likely a drain on your culture, though it’s easy to get tricked into thinking you need to keep them, because they are so skilled. This is a trap.
  • CAN’T and WON’T: a simple category, and where you need to move fastest. These people drag down any organization.

From 2-D to 3-D

Now, there’s the 3-D chess version of this, which is where things get really interesting.

This is another way to illustrate the concept of situational leadership, which is one of the most useful approaches to managing others with the world’s worst diagram.

Here’s my take on how to illustrate this:

The idea is that each person cannot accurately be plotted on a 2D graph of skill and will.

Instead, each job requires a collection of attributes, and each person will plot to a different point for each attribute. For example, a member of your team might show:

  • High will and skill doing analytical tasks
  • High will but low skill in drawing cross-cutting insights from those analytical tasks
  • High skill but low will in checking others’ work for errors
  • Low skill and low will in client relations

How to Manage in Each of the Four Quadrants

In my version of the chart, above, you would mentally plot each of these four skills—analytical tasks, insight generation, checking others’ work, and client relations—on one of the graphs, and, as a supervisor, you’d work with your team member differently on each of the tasks. The supervisor’s job is to be:

  • DIRECTIVE for low skill, low will tasks
  • COACHING for low skill, high will tasks
  • SUPPORTING for high skill, low will tasks
  • DELEGATING for high skill, high will tasks

This is what’s explained in the terrible (but useful) standard illustration of situational leadership. Each quadrant describes three things: the employees’ skill, her will, and her bosses’ desired behavior when working with her on a task in each of the four quadrants.

Pulling it All Together

Our job, then, is to have a mental model of how we think about the skill and will of our employees and use that to determine, in the broadest sense, who to invest in and how much time to give them. This is what Danny Meyer is talking about, starting in minute 50 of the podcast.

And, at a more granular level, both employees and their supervisors have a nuanced job to do as they show up to work each day:  diagnosing different requirements of the job across skill and will; communicating this diagnosis to one another; and then using that mapping to partner differently in support of the execution of tasks and the development of these various skills.

It becomes clear pretty quickly—especially as we think about this over time—what a gross simplification it is to talk about “good” and “bad” employees; or to talk about whether it’s better to be a “hands on” supervisor or one who “gives lots of freedom.”

The reality is that people are a collection of attitudes and abilities for different things: we might love sitting in front of a spreadsheet and hate managing teams; love building relationships and hate writing a budget. Our skills, our willingness to deploy these skills, and the collection of skills that make up our jobs is constantly evolving.

The one constant that bridges people through all of this evolution—from one role to the next and to the next; from one set of skills to the next and to the next—is the willingness to keep on doing one’s best and to continually learn.

And the best bosses are the ones who realize that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to management, just as there’s no team member who has mastered all the skills she could possibly learn.

Daring to Care

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One of our professional values at 60 Decibels is to “take the work personally.”

We define that as “We take pride in the work and deliver work that hits the highest standards. Anything we do reflects the best we can do.”

Because we’re a mission-driven organization, I think it’s easier for folks to take the work personally. Most of our team is here because the mission speaks to them. And, if we achieve our ambitions, the world will have changed: we will center the people who are the “beneficiaries” of social change work—whether done by nonprofits or companies, whether as customers, employees or suppliers—in the conversation about whether social change is happening. It’s rare to get the chance to be a part of something with this type of ambition.

But the idea of taking the work personally is bigger and more fundamental than any organization’s mission.

It’s a stance that we take.

A daily choice to care.

A daily choice to show up as a professional.

Which means deciding on living our own version of the U.S. Postal Services Creed, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”  Lots of things we don’t control will go wrong. Nevertheless, we will do our jobs.

A daily choice to honor the accountability we have to our colleagues.

Because we respect them and want to see them succeed. We do our work in partnership, as part of a collective.  The work I do will either lift others up or pull them down. And this ripple effect plays out across our organizations, our clients, and the world.

Of course, this is all a lot easier to see when the people in charge remind us, when they connect the dots for us, when they help us draw a line between our role and organization’s mission and strategy.

But the connection exists either way, a direct line between:

Daring to give a damn.

The quality of what we produce.

How others feel when they interact with us.

And whether we are strengthening our culture and organization.

Every group is just a collection of its people, the stories they tell themselves and each other, and how they choose to act.

What choice will you make today?

Teamwork, partnership, culture, and passing the ball

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

What does a great, two-person partnership at work look like?

It’s a dance, an interplay between two people, one in which the undertaking develops a natural momentum. Synchronicity emerges. The mingling of the best two people have to offer gets the project to a better place than either person working alone.

The feeling reminds me of two athletes passing a ball as they advance down the court. There’s a grace and a fluidity to the way the ball, and the two teammates, move. The players look like they have a shared mind and a shared purpose. Together, they make magic happen.

What are the ingredients of great partnerships? Both players:

  • Have spent meaningful time in practice talking about how they’re going to work together << >> pre-project communication and expectation setting.
  • Are skilled at simultaneously paying attention to the ball, to their partner, and to the field of play << >> self + partner + situational awareness
  • Know, and act upon, their own, and their partners’, strengths and weaknesses << >> self-knowledge; partner knowledge; self-confidence coupled with humility
  • Always catch the ball that is passed to them << >> good comms, staying present, being willing to prioritize this thing now despite competing priorities
  • Communicate when they’re open, and when they’re well-guarded << >> effortlessly share their own availability, workload, mind-space for this job
  • Keep the play moving forward << >> even with competing priorities, demonstrate that, especially for shared work, forward momentum is non-negotiable
  • Know the goal, and have a shared intention to score << >> both keep track of the external deadline and will do what it takes to deliver on time
  • Place equal value on moving without the ball, receiving the ball, dribbling the ball, and passing the ball, << >> players don’t care about authorship or about getting credit for the part each played, they care about the result.
  • Full trust in one another, so that each will make the right pass, even under pressure << >> establish a foundation of “I’ve got your back” through repeated actions over time
  • “I know where you’re going to be, often without even trying / looking, and I’m going to pass the ball there.” << >>

In new, two person teams, there is time and space to walk through all these steps at something short of “game speed” – setting aside time in advance to talk about how we’ll work together, norms, expectations, our plan and timelines for each step or the project, etc.

And, in best pairings, that explicit pre-preparation and rigid timeline management ultimately give way to something more creative and improvisational. This allows the work to move faster, with more fluidity, less effort, and more positive surprises. This is the evolution from co-workers to true partners.

Having looked at and dissected the best pairings in this way, we can now zoom out and ask:

How do to replicate this kind of teamwork at an organizational level?

We are, after all, grouping and regrouping constantly in our organizations, forming new teams all the time. This means pairing up with people with whom we’ve communicated less often; people who we know less well, who might be on a different team, geography or both.

That sounds both challenging and important.

And yet we spend most of our professional effort (and our professional development conversations) our individual aptitudes, and very little on how well we partner with others.

This needs to change (how to do that is a topic for another day).

But there is a secret that gives an edge to everyone on your team. It’s culture, of course.

Culture is “the way we do things around here.”

It is born as the outgrowth of whatever was created by the founding team. It is then expanded, amplified, reshaped and transformed by each and every member of the team (for more on this, check out my post on Culture Graphs).

While each organizations’ culture will necessarily be unique, in all organizations, great teaming will lead to better results, and poor teaming will gum up the works.

So, now might be the time to ask how much your culture reinforces the elements of great teaming:

  • Upfront communications to set expectations
  • Self-awareness; situational awareness
  • Self-knowledge on the part of your team
  • Open sharing of strengths and weaknesses
  • Excellent, predictable communications
  • Teaching folks about high-quality, dynamic prioritization
  • Skillful sharing of priorities and workload; coupled with the willingness to flex when necessary
  • Embodying the inherent value of forward momentum
  • Prioritization of collective goals over individual ones
  • The importance of supporting one another
  • An unwavering norm that we keep our promises to ourselves and to others (around deadlines, around everything)

If good partnership is indeed universally valuable, then even though no two organizations’ cultures should be the same, all successful organizations must reinforce a set of behaviors that underpin successful partnership.

Without this, each team, of whatever size, has to both (1) Quickly and effectively create their own norms and behaviors for successful teaming; (2) Do so while pushing against the prevailing culture at your organization.

Why not have culture work in your favor instead?

What’s Holding You Back?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A senior Partner at Bain, who I used to work with often, maintained that decision-making ability was the best way to assess the long-term potential and effectiveness of an organization.

According to their research, good decision-making boils down to: speed, effort, quality, and yield. The best organizations make decisions that tend to be the right ones (quality), quickly (speed), with relatively low effort, and that they nearly always turn into actions (yield).

The thinking behind this is: you might do everything else well, but if your organization is bad at making decisions, that’s going to hold you back in a fundamental way.

We can apply this thinking across multiple elements of our organizational DNA, and reflect on things like our:

Decision making

Internal communications

External communications

Who we listen to

How well we hire

How well we fire

Feedback

Time management

Quality and number of meetings

Management skills

Purpose

Trust

How much we are focused internally

How much we are focused externally

Strength and resilience of our external relationships

Risk management

Etc.

Each of our organizations is all over the map for this list of attributes—good at some, great at a few, OK at a handful. But, most of the time, one of them is the most important, rate limiting factor for us. One of them is the cultural elephant in the room, the biggest thing weighing us down and sapping the momentum we garner from so much other good work that we do.

As you lay out plans for the coming year, remember: culture eats strategy for breakfast  (meaning: the best laid plans will fall flat if our culture doesn’t support them.)

What’s the one thing that, if you could change it, would change everything? And what are you going to do about that?

Culture Graphs

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Culture (organizational or otherwise) can most simply be understood as “how we do things around here.”

There are a million “things” that make up an organization’s culture: things like meeting norms; how we talk to each other (in person, online); what it means when someone says “the deadline for this project is November 6th;” how inclusive we are.

To imagine this visually, imagine an N-dimensional chart with each element of culture on one axis.

And now, to keep things simpler, let’s collapse that N-dimensional chart into two dimensions – because otherwise all of this will be too hard to visualize.

Envision an organization’s culture represented on this graph. To explore what we mean here, let’s imagine two organizations.

Organization 1 has a loosely defined culture: we represent that with the broad shape on the graph, and the light color to show ‘low intensity.’ In organization 1, a wide spread of behaviors “works” because the culture is not strongly defined.

Conversely, in organization 2, the shape of the “culture graph” is much tighter and the culture is much stronger (darker color).

In organization 1, nearly anyone can “fit in” because anything goes in that organization. In organization 2, with a stronger culture, only a certain set of people will feel comfortable there, but, for those people, the culture will have a stronger pull that will keep them motivated and make them more productive.

Now, moving beyond thinking about the impact of the culture on the employees, let’s think about the impact of the employees on the culture.

Here’s where things get interesting, because culture is not static: each team member has their own influence on the culture, either pushing against (weakening) the existing culture or strengthening it.

Let’s visualize this as the cultural “force field” that each team member brings to our organization, each and every day. Like our two organizations, each person has a different cultural force field that they exert on those around them: it has a size, a shape, and an intensity…all of which affect how that person impacts the organization’s culture over time.

(I understand that the visuals might be breaking down a bit…stay with me here. The point is: the shape and intensity of your ‘culture graph’ today and tomorrow are a function of all the behaviors of your team between now and tomorrow: how people act, what behaviors are rewarded and punished, what people say, what they do…)

With this backdrop, we can ask a few questions about our organizational cultures, things like:

  • What is the shape and intensity of our own ‘culture graph’?
  • How does it differ by location, function, and seniority? Are these differences intentional?
  • When we think of the future, what do we imagine happening to our culture graph? Does today’s culture remain in place? Does it morph? Intensify so we stay true to ‘who we are’? Weaken so we can accommodate more people?
  • What do we do about people who supercharge our culture, who will serve as ballasts between today and the future?
  • And what do we do about people who perform well but who push against our current and future culture?
  • Most important: if you asked your team whether their job is to create and accentuate your culture, or to accept and adapt to it, what would they say?
  • What would you like them to say?

I share all this not to offer answers to the above questions, but in an effort to make the invisible visible.

Our culture either accentuates and accelerates everything we do, or it stands in the way, gumming up the works. Yet, despite these powerful multiplier effects, we often act as if culture will take care of itself.

Perhaps, then, it is time to bring it out in the open.

Perhaps it is time to invite ourselves and teams to see and own our active role in defining, strengthening and reinforcing “how we do things around here.”

Leading Indicators

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Most of what we do today is going to bear fruit in a few weeks, months, or years.

This means that the feedback we’re receiving today–about how things are going around us, the results we are getting, the way people are feeling–are mostly the result of actions we took in the past.

Consider our oceans: they have absorbed 93% of the excess heat from greenhouse gas emissions since the 1970s. They are a buffer between yesterdays’ actions and today’s reality. They lull us into a false sense of security that what we’re doing today will lead to a safe tomorrow.

We are often blind to this time lag. We see what’s going on around us and falsely attribute today’s results to our current or recent actions.

Figuring out how long our actions take to create results—whether in our organizations, our families, or in the world—is one of the best ways to learn where to look to see if what we’re doing is, or is not, working. When looking for the right organizational KPIs, we’d do well to home in on those that tell us what will, or will not, happen in 6 months’ time (think: new sales leads generated, not new sales closed).

The high-leverage we should be asking ourselves is: how early do I need to adjust to make a meaningful difference?

One number(s)

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We all have one big, headline line that we want to see move up and to the right—that could be revenues or profits, funds raised or grant dollars dispersed, or number of people reached through our programs.

Underneath this are the gears of our enterprise, the everyday of what we put in to get that output.

Three conversations you can have, either alone with your notebook or with your team.

  1. This leads to that: What are the most important things we do to make the numbers we want to go up go up?
  2. We do a lot of this, but it doesn’t create that: What are the things we spend a lot of time doing that we could strip away without impacting the results that really matter for us.
  3. These things create short-term results, but might hurt us in the long run: What are the things that are going up today (stress, eroding trust or joy, command-and-control) that create results in the near term but risks in the long term?

Culture(s)

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Cultures, like personalities, aren’t just one thing.

There is our organizational culture on our best days…

…on days when things are going badly.

…when the going gets tough.

…when we are facing a risk.

…when we are balancing between the short and long term.

…when we are stressed.

…when faced with a crisis.

…or an unexpected challenge

…in different offices, functions, geographies.

…when we talk about ourselves to others.

…when we talk about ourselves to ourselves.

In each situation, different elements of culture show themselves. Most of the things that come out aren’t the things you’re writing on the wall or in the employee manual.

What you should care about are the elements of your culture…

…that don’t change regardless of the situation, or the ups and downs, or the people involved.

…that you’re willing to uphold even if it means sacrificing immediate results.

…that make you different from everywhere else.

…and that help you deliver sustained, differentiated performance over time.

Here’s a hack for a culture exploration.

Step 1, the easy part: get a group of team members together and ask them to jot down, privately, how ‘we’ act in the long list of situations on the first list.

Step 2, which is tough and daring: have an honest conversation about what everyone wrote down.