Archive for category It Takes a Team to Tango Blog

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.

One of my favorite things to do in a team building class is to take the participants through a shortened version of an interpersonal style model (I use the Merrill-Reid model, but DISC or any other four quadrant model works just as well).  We do a simplified version of the assessment, walk through the model, and then get in groups by style and practice “flexing” to meet the needs of one’s opposite style.  It gives me a great platform to talk about the importance of knowing your own preferences well, knowing the preferences of your teammates, communicating about those preferences, and most importantly, developing the ability to step outside one’s own comfort zone to meet someone else where they are.

That’s not what’s fun about it though.  (Ever notice that what’s fun is often not the same thing as what’s productive?)  The fun part is that it gives everyone permission to be who they are for the rest of the session, and they start to ham it up.  The Drivers start barking orders, while the Amiables start helping me facilitate the interaction.  The Analyticals, who have typically been quiet up to this point, ask more questions and demand more data.  And the Expressiveness go off the wall, to the point where I have to keep shouting at them to keep it down.  I think what makes it fun is that suddenly people have a new filter for looking at the behaviors that they often drive each other crazy with.  And suddenly it’s not about judging those behaviors anymore, it’s just about understanding and accepting them.  There’s a sense of freedom that comes with that, and a sense of self-acceptance.  And yes, a sense of humor.  Sometimes I leave them in their style groups for the rest of the afternoon, just because they enjoy it so much.

If your team has been through a personality or style model before, try this in your next team meeting!  But don’t say I didn’t warn you.  You might not get anything done on your agenda that day, but you’ll strengthen team relationships and give people some new tools for talking about what bothers them.

Penelope Trunk, my favorite blogger, had a post recently about how prom is a career stepping stone for teens.  Why?  Because it’s about learning how to fit into a culture.  Here’s what she says about careers and culture fit:

“The thing that is most difficult in work life is adjusting to different cultures as seamlessly as possible. People do not lose jobs because they don’t get the job done. People generally lose jobs because of poor cultural fit. If people think you fit on the team, they’ll cut you slack even when you don’t get the job done. In fact, the Harvard Business Review reports that people don’t even care if you don’t get the job done if they like you…The question is not ‘how to always know the rules for blending in’ because you can’t—especially if you are constantly challenging yourself with new work environments. The question is, instead, ‘How can you recover from a cultural misstep?’”

I believe this is true.  I lost a job once because of poor culture fit.  Well, I quit actually, but if I hadn’t quit I was going to get fired soon.  Everyone said it was because I wasn’t getting the job done but I believe the perception that I wasn’t getting the job done stemmed directly from my failure to read and understand how the organizational culture was different from any culture I’d ever worked in before.  It was a culture where “employee engagement” was supposed to look like hyper-attention to detail, documentation and follow-up rather than like passion, creativity and big picture thinking.  For some reason I just couldn’t get that through my head, and once the perception of me as “disengaged” spread through the organization I could not recover.  Hell, I couldn’t even see that it was happening until it was too late.

I’m troubled by this prom analogy though.  Because I think teens learn to imitate each other in middle school and high school in order to be accepted, and that’s different than being your own person with your own thoughts and ideas and simply knowing, in a utilitarian fashion, how to modify your behavior in order to fit in with a particular group of people.  Teenagers believe in conformity, and if they never get shown another way, they grow up doing things because that’s what they’re supposed to do.  They get a solid job with a government agency or a Fortune 500 company and stay there for ten, twenty years.  They get married and have 2.5 children and buy a three-bedroom house in the suburbs.  And one day they wake up and realize they’re 50 years old and haven’t seen the world or climbed Kilimanjaro or gone out for that “crazy” job they once dreamed about or done anything else they really wanted to do.

Am I out of touch?  Is it possible that today’s kids are different than they were when I was a kid, that they understand “fitting in” as a  tool instead of a mandate from god?  I never had kids so I just don’t know.  I hope so.

I just finished reading Seth Godin’s new book Poke the Box.  At first I thought it was just a long restatement of the truism that you must not be afraid of failure if you want to innovate; in fact, maybe I still think that.  But there was a  story towards the end of the book that brought it all to life for me.  Godin quotes a man named Cory Doctorow at length as he’s reflecting on becoming a father for the first time.  It begins, “Mammals invest a lot of energy in keeping track of the disposition of each copy we spawn…we invest so much energy and so many resources in our offspring that it would be a shocking waste if they were to wander away and fall off the balcony or flush themselves down the garbage disposal.”  He goes on to draw an analogy between the way we think of our offspring and the way we think of our ideas and inventions, and this is why we get upset at what we see as the theft of our intellectual property (or, I would add, the failure of our ideas).  What if we used a different reproductive strategy as our model, he asks?  The dandelion produces 200 seeds a year, “indiscriminately firing them off into the sky at the slightest breeze, without any care for where the seeds are heading and whether they’ll get a hospitable reception when they touch down…the important thing is that every spring, every crack in every pavement is filled with dandelions.”

We should see our ideas in the same vein, Godin says.  Spray the world with them and be prepared for some to land on cold, hard, unyielding pavement and fail.  Be ready to nurture the ones that take root.  It’s an inspiring way of looking at the process of innovation.  I can’t help but think of my brother, who constantly comes up with new ideas.  Sometimes my family says, “there he goes again” because we know he won’t follow most of his ideas to fruition.  And he hasn’t had the big million dollar idea yet.  But Godin would say that he’s got the right attitude and will probably get there some day, because he doesn’t let failure get him down.  He just goes on to the next idea.