Archive for category It Takes a Team to Tango Blog

I got some shocking news last week: my brother, who has been my partner in New England Crane School for the past year, is taking off for greener pastures and leaving the business behind.

My first thought was—good lord, we’ve worked our tails off for a year and now it all goes down the drain.  All the potential clients we have lined up for this winter, who wanted to wait until the slower construction season to start working on their crane operator’s licenses, will be disappointed and have to find other providers.  Of which there are very few in New England.

My second thought was, why can’t I continue the business on my own?  Just because I’m not a subject matter expert in crane operations doesn’t mean I can’t still run the business.  I think I’ve learned enough about it over the past year.  I just have to find and hire and good trainer, someone who really knows his stuff.

And with that thought I’m off and running.  We have a potential candidate already and he’s coming to interview in a couple weeks.  The phone is still ringing and we’re starting to put our winter class schedule together.  To my colleagues who look at me funny when I say I run a crane school I respond: What better business could I be in right now?  The construction industry needs better safety standards for crane operations.  Crane operators need understanding providers who will help them get through the written testing rather than seeing it as a nasty little ‘gotcha’ process designed to knock the most experienced operators out of the game.  I’m proud of the work we do and proud to be able to continue it.  New challenges?  Bring ‘em on!

I love it when this happens.  I had another video teleconference session to facilitate this past week, and where is the conference room I’m working from?  In the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  Perfect.

So I left two days early, took my dog with me, and rented a little cabin on a river with a fireplace.  Here’s the view from my screened-in porch over the river:

Here’s my dog, Jave, enjoying the view from the top of Mount Flume:

Here’s Jave not enjoying the steep, rocky hike up.  I had to lift him up on some of the ledges.

After two days of hiking my training session began, and I felt refreshed and full of energy for the session.  While I was hiking I had lots of time to think about the material I was facilitating and make decisions about my approach.  It has never made much sense to me when people complain about work crossing over into their personal lives and vice versa, and about how they need to compartmentalize.  I respect whatever people need to do to make their lives work, but for me, I need things to intersect.  I need to sit on a mountain top and get creative ideas about work.  (And yes, sure, sometimes I’m in the middle of work and I get distracted by wishing I was back on that mountain top.)  My life is made of whole cloth, so it doesn’t work to split it up into a neatly labeled filing cabinet.

And while we’re on the subject, yes, I’m one of those annoying people who takes cell phone calls from the trail.  The alternative is that I don’t get to go on the hike on a weekday, so why not?  Here’s what I want to say to the folks who complain about technology and harken back to the “good old days” when you were cut off from work-related communications during vacations.  Technology is a great thing in that it gives us more freedom.  You can turn that phone off or leave it your car if you want, but I choose not to, and that’s the point—I have a choice.  In the days before we were so connected, we didn’t have those kinds of choices.

Gervase Bush, one of my favorite organizational development theorists, likes to talk about teams, tribes and federations.  Here are his definitions:

• A team in the truest sense of the word is a group of people who are so task interdependent that they sink or swim together.  We call many work groups “teams” who don’t actually meet this definition.
• A federation is a group of people, usually managers, who share common goals but have their own areas of responsibility.  They compete for resources, and usually that means they don’t work very well together.
• A tribe is a group of people who aren’t task interdependent and thus don’t meet the strict definition of a team.  Like a federation, they work toward the same overarching mission but they have their separate areas of responsibility.  What distinguishes them from a federation, however, is that they have a strong sense of identity with the team and care about the group to the extent they they will look at the good of the whole before putting their own needs first.  An extreme example of a tribe is a family.  Each family member pursues their own work, recreation, education, etc. but they care so much about the family that they will sacrifice their own needs for the good of the group.

So what most organizations really want, Bushe says, when they call consultants and ask for team building, is to turn a federation into a tribe.  That sense of identity with the team is the elusive thing that we know we want but can’t figure out how to get.

I think this is interesting on a personal level, because when I look back at my life, the best times have always been when I belonged to a tribe.  It wasn’t always a work tribe; sometimes it was just a group of friends.  What really distinguished it was that I was proud to be part of the group.

There was the tribe I belonged to in my first job, when I was a corporate HR director at a hotel company—my two colleagues and I slept, ate and breathed our work, spending most of our time outside of work with each other and sharing ideas (and drinking beer, of course).  We had passion for what we were doing and we were great friends as well as colleagues.

Then there was the tribe of ski instructors I hung out with for a few years when I taught skiing, and most recently the mountain rescue team I belonged to (which was truly a team but also had all the best qualities of a tribe).  Once again, what distinguished us was a shared passion for what we were doing and a sense of pride in the group.

What was hardest for me when I moved from Colorado back to New Hampshire last year is that I lost my tribe, and I haven’t found a new one yet.  What does one do, run an ad in the personals reading, “single white female seeking a new tribe”?

As consultants who work from home, people like me have a distinct disadvantage in finding a group to bond with.  We often have to look outside the traditional work-related sources to find one.  But on the positive side, I have the ability to go out and help other work groups become tribes.  And when I’m successful, that’s the greatest reward of all.

Sometimes I do things that I think are really smart and proactive and they turn out to be the stupidest thing I could have done.

I was supposed to be in Rutland, Vermont this week to do another three-day training session via video teleconference.  It’s an hour and a half drive, so I decided to get a room this time instead of commuting.  Then when I saw the news of Hurricane Irene coming I decided I should get a room in Killington, which is about 15 minutes away from Rutland but is on high ground and has no major rivers running through it.

I left early on Sunday to make sure I wasn’t held up by road closures.  As I walked out the door my friend Mark said, “They’re saying on CNN that the flooding will be worse in Vermont than on the coast because of all the waterways.”  Instead of thinking maybe I shouldn’t go, I took that to mean I’d better leave now.

I made it down Route 4 east just about an hour before they closed it due to the Ottaquechee River washing it out.  All day and night Sunday, I watched the news of flooding in many lowland Vermont towns, including Rutland, and I felt smug because I’d been smart enough to book a room in Killington.

In the morning when I got up, I had no power and one of the Rutland Herald headlines was Killington is an island with no way in and no way out.  My session was canceled because I couldn’t get to it.  At first I didn’t care; I had my dog with me and the Appalachian Trail was only a couple miles away, so I went hiking.  But when I came back, people started saying that Route 4 was so badly damaged that it could be weeks before it was fixed.  The Killington Base Lodge collapsed.  And while I was relatively lucky, having a dry hotel room which had gotten power back, there was a lot of talk about running out of food and supplies in the area.

Of course, elsewhere in Vermont things were much more dire.  In some places small communities were still flooded, houses had washed away and they were completely cut off from help.  I should not have been complaining.

On Tuesday I went hiking again and thought about my situation.  I decided I would start walking the next morning.  After all, I was only about 45 miles from home, and I could probably get a ride after about 25 miles.

Then when I got back to my room there was this news: a temporary route would be open for a two-hour window the next morning to get stranded people from Killington to the interstate.

I lined up at 7:30, along with about 200 other cars:

While we waited I talked to a bunch of people from New Jersey.  They said they came up on Saturday before the storm hit in order to avoid the flooding they expected at home.  I guess some people were even smarter than I was.

We started moving at about 8:15.  The road alternated between patches of “just fine, what hurricane?” and “was there really a road here?”  Before each damaged piece of road, there was usually a very nice man in a police uniform stopping each car and telling us, “Be very careful.  One car at a time on the bridges.  Go slow.  You’re traveling at your own risk.”  I did everything they said to do, except maybe it wasn’t very careful to take pictures while I was driving.  Here are some of the things I saw:

I couldn’t take pictures in some of the worst spots because we were driving on dirt and I didn’t want to take my hands off the wheel.

After about three hours I made it home.  Next time I will see “smart and proactive” differently.  If you want to learn more  about the Vermont flooding and how you can help victims, visit this Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vermont-Flooding-2011/212455332141871

I just finished up a three-day training session via video teleconference.  It’s been a long time since I had nightmares before a delivery, but this one really had me worried.

It’s not that I’d never used VTC technology before; I had, but only for short, several-hour sessions.  Everything you read says that VTC and webinar formats are not meant for multi-day training sessions, that it’s too long a time for folks to be sitting and staring at a screen.  Not only that, but my participants consisted of a mixed group—nine people in a boardroom together, and ten people sitting by themselves in front of a laptop webcam.  I thought surely the laptop folks would be comatose by the second day, and I worried that they would feel too isolated.

While I still have a lot to learn, I can now say that the session went better than expected.  Here are some things I learned:

1.  We had a couple additional video conference bridges set up in addition to the main bridge, and this was critical for keeping everyone involved because it allowed me to do small group activities, discussions and case studies with the folks who were by themselves.  The boardroom folks would stay on the main bridge and just work with each other in the room, but the other participants would log out of the main bridge and connect with each other on the breakout bridges in smaller groups.  I would give them specific time limits and then they’d come back and report out.  This worked beautifully, and there were only a few activities in my program that I wasn’t able to adapt for virtual use.

2.  It’s critical to spend time setting norms for a session like this.  The main things I asked of people were to wave a white sheet of paper at me when they wanted to speak, and to synchronize their watches with mine and be very conscientious about coming back from breaks and breakouts on time.  We did well with the timing, but not so well with the white paper.  I could not always see people waving paper at me, particularly in the boardroom, so I began to let people speak up whenever they wanted to and the result was too much “stepping on” each other’s audio.  I will need to work on this next time.

3.  Lastly, we all know about the time lag with VTC but I learned that even when you’re aware of it you don’t really know what you’re doing without practice.  It wasn’t until the end of the session that some of my folks told me I wasn’t waiting long enough after I asked for questions and comments.  I guess I didn’t really understand just how long that time lag truly is.

Can I say that it was great fun to do a virtual session, that I enjoyed the interaction as much as I do when I have everyone in the room with me?  No, definitely not.  But I will say that I have finally gotten on the bus.  Especially for those of us who work with federal agencies, we must be sensitive to restricted travel budgets right now.  We can find ways to work around the need for travel or we can watch that bus leaving without us.

Confirmation bias is one of my favorite topics, in work and in life.  We all tend to pay more attention to observations that confirm our beliefs and filter out observations that challenge them.  Where there are differences amongst us, they lie in the degree of awareness we have about confirmation bias and the efforts we make — or don’t make — to resist the bias and expand our perspective.

Jeffrey Saltzman recently blogged about a phenomenon called “filter bubbles,” which refers to a trend in internet search engines.  “It used to be that when you searched the internet you got results that were wide open… (but) today’s search engines are becoming smarter,” he says.  They filter your results according to your browsing and purchasing history, so that you get the kind of results that agree with your previous interests, opinions and consumer behavior.  So instead of broadening your perspective on a topic, they confirm what you already know and believe.

It’s institutionalized confirmation bias.

This can’t possibly be a good thing.  One of my biggest pet peeves is people who have strongly-held political, social and economic opinions and very little knowledge to back them up.  They derive their opinions from Fox News or MSNBC commentators and spout them belligerently at every opportunity as if they were subject matter experts.  When highly educated, experienced experts in a field can’t even agree on something (e.g. how to fix the current problems with our economy) why does someone with no education or experience in the field at all think they know the answers?

But many of us live in this filter bubble.  Google a topic and you’ll get whatever you’re looking for, already sorted and selected to confirm what you already believe.  I’ve left many a cocktail party early, in a state of annoyance, because of this very thing.  Looks like it’s only going to get worse.

I love a good lawyer joke as much as the next guy, but here’s where the training that attorneys go through puts them at an advantage.  They learn to always question what looks obvious, always look at it from the other perspective, always play the devil’s advocate.  We would do well to learn a thing or two from them.  Especially when we’re browsing the internet.

Shawn Achor had a great blog post on Harvard Business Review last week called “What Giving Gets You at the Office.”  Two decades of research, Achor says, prove that the level of social support you receive in your work directly correlates to your level of engagement and job satisfaction.  But recently he learned something by asking the question in a new way; the correlation is even higher if you are a provider of social support than it is when you’re on the receiving end.  In other words, what goes around comes around.

I like this.  I spent hours this morning thinking back through all my work experiences and categorizing them, and sure enough, all my most fulfilling experiences were in organizations where I felt secure and accepted enough to focus on supporting and helping my colleagues.  There’s a chicken-and-egg dilemma for me though: I only felt like I could be a supporter of my co-workers if I felt that I had their support too.  In low-trust environments, I was too focused on watching my back.

So where does it start?  What has to happen first?  Like most things I think it comes back to senior leadership.  They must create that supportive culture first, and if they don’t, it will be tough for even the most altruistic-minded worker to focus on helping colleagues.  Where the right leadership is missing you have a classic “CYA” culture, where everyone is focused on defending themselves.  This is something I’m seeing a lot of in federal agencies right now, no doubt because the public is so focused on fixing blame for the problems with our economy.

But I also have to say something that I always tell team building participants.  Don’t get stuck in never-ending vicious circle of “I’ll do it if someone else does first.”  Take the first step to change your workplace culture and show your colleagues some support.  If you always wait for someone else to make the first move, everyone will just keep standing still.

I moved back to the east coast recently, to be near my family again.  The cool thing about that is I get to spend time on the lake where I spent summers growing up.  I have friends here that I’ve known for 40 years.

I think we all go through that momentary shock when we can say we’ve done anything for 40 years.  How did I get to be so old?

The shared history is fun.  Here’s my friend Allison:

We go back to when Allison was five and I was six.  We were neighbors and we did everything together in the summer; we made clam soup and built dock forts and blanket forts and pine needle forts.  We wrote “drop dead” plays and produced them for the neighborhood.  I’m sure you’re wondering what a drop dead play is.  It’s a play where the only requirement for the script is that all the characters drop dead at the end.

Everything was great until we burnt Allison’s house down in the middle of the night.  No really, we did.  We didn’t do it on purpose, but our summer cottage caught fire and the fire spread to the houses on either side.  After that, Allison’s parents decided that they didn’t want to live next to us anymore, so they moved down the beach and built a new house.

The good news is that Allison and I are still friends and she didn’t get mad at me about the house.  In fact, now I have my own bedroom at her new house.  Here’s what our dogs do at Allison’s house:

It doesn’t look like they’re having fun, but really they are.  They just wish Allison and I would stop reminiscing about the past and take them for a hike.

The thing about moving back home is that people really know who you are.  That can be good, and that can be bad.  On the good side you don’t have to work very hard to feel connected, to have a sense of community.  On the bad side sometimes your friends bring up things you really would rather not remember.  But I’ll take the good with the bad.

In 2001, I quit my job, sold my car, put all my furniture in storage and traveled around the world for seven months, backpacker-style.  When I came back, everyone said, “Wow, the trip of a lifetime.  You must be glad you did it while you’re still relatively young.”  And I said, “That’s not the trip of a lifetime.  I’m going to do this all the time now.”  And I went on to plan my next trip, a four-month jaunt through Central and South America.

Here it is ten years later.  I never took that trip to South America; in fact, I haven’t been out of the country since, until two weeks ago.  Two weeks ago I popped over to Germany for a couple days to teach a team building class and it was like a wake-up call.  There isn’t any culture shock in Western Europe, but there’s just enough culture difference to make you think about how different cultures expand your mind.  And so I thought, what happened to me over the past ten years?

I was reading posts by my favorite blogger Penelope Trunk this morning.  She had a really popular post  last year called Test: Is your life happy or interesting?  The gist of the test is that you can get out of your comfort zone in search of learning, or you can stay in your comfort zone and be happy, but for the most part you can’t do both.  It’s not that I haven’t sought adventure in the past ten years; I’ve done a lot of adventurous things.  But something was lost, especially last year when I moved east to be near family again (which gives you a point in favor of happy over interesting in Penelope’s test).  The older I get, the closer I move to the comfort zone.  No wonder I haven’t been blogging so much lately; I don’t have anything interesting to write about.  Who wants to read about happiness?  We want to read about interestingness.

All the same, I can’t take off to South America right now.  Besides, I’m not going anywhere without my dog.  But I’ve decided to do something different with this blog for a while.  I’ll use it for virtual journeys, a revisiting of my adventures and everything I learned.  And while I’m sure we’ll still get some workplace lessons from that, more importantly, I’ll be interesting instead of happy.

My dog that I can't leave

During a recent team building class with an agency group, employees began to complain about their headquarters back in Washington, DC.  “They have no idea what we do out here,” one of them said.  “Yeah,” said another, “and they just sit there and issue directives that make no sense, given how much our funding has been cut.”

I was thinking this morning about what a ubiquitous paradigm that seems to be.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s a private sector organization or a government agency, there seems to always be an “us versus them” mentality between the field offices and the headquarters or corporate office.  The field believes the head office people sit around creating policies and procedures that are out of touch with reality and designed simply to drive everyone crazy; and the head office people believe that the field people have no empathy for how busy they are and no recognition for the importance of their work.  It’s a classic case of everyone thinking that everyone else needs to walk a mile in my shoes.  And rarely is anyone willing to try those other shoes on.

Why is that?  It seems like a classic case of fundamental attribution error.  Lacking information about corporate mission, vision, goals and objectives, field staff members fill in the gaps in their knowledge with stories about the HQ’s motivation for every directive and assume they must have bad intentions, a lack of competence, or poor work ethic.  HQ, likewise, assumes that when something doesn’t get done or doesn’t get done to specs, it must be deliberate on the part of the field staff.

So how do you fix it?  Cross-training and shadowing opportunities between field and corporate staff would obviously be a step in the right direction, but it’s expensive and most organizations have had their travel budgets cut lately.  I think it comes down to how you create more virtual communication avenues between offices.  More and more I’m seeing federal agencies using video teleconference technology for meetings rather than having people travel, and in fact I’m even starting to get requests to do multi-day training workshops via VTC.  What about having “walk a mile in my shoes” sessions by VTC?  Participants could share information about their objectives, challenges, communication preferences and daily routines, with the goal of understanding how to work better together.