Working With Others

It’s hard to work and play well with others if expectations don’t get shared. If both were still alive, today would have been my parents’ 70th wedding anniversary! They were married for 52 years and I was around for 41 of those.

When two people are in a relationship that long there will always be ups and downs and good times and bad. The longevity of any relationship really depends on how well those in the relationship find ways to make it work. One of the things that I noticed when times a got a little rocky between them was that they would forget to share their expectations of each other openly. Instead they just assumed the other knew what those expectation were. A case in point was usually the holiday season. Each would have expectations about what a great holiday season might look like, yet each would never share those expectations with the other. As a result, both were disappointed more often than not.

How many times have you experienced a situation where your boss assumed you knew what was expected or you were a member of a team that just left a meeting assuming everyone knew the assignment – yet those expectations were never openly shared.

Why are we so afraid to share those expectations openly, when not sharing them usually results in hurt feelings?

Today would have been my father’s 90th birthday. He died in October, 1991 of a smoking related cancer. With Father’s Day just two days ago, he has been in my thoughts a lot.

My father did not have an easy childhood. He spent his early years in the coal region of Shenandoah, PA. His younger sister drowned when he was nine. At age ten, his parents separated and he was sent to live with his Uncle in Philadelphia. By the end of the summer of 1929, he had learned how to navigate the trolley system to get to Shibe Park to watch the Philadelphia Athletics. (Some argue that the ˜29 Athletics were the best professional baseball team ever-and my dad saw them play.) I don’t know this for a fact, but I would guess my father made two promises that summer. The first was that if he ever had children they would learn how to swim. And he would take his kids to their first professional baseball game so that they would not have to go alone. He kept both promises.

To be honest, there were many times when my father and I did not see eye to eye. However, I am grateful for the lessons he taught me and I want to share them here because each one contributed to the work I do today in helping people work and play well with others.

1. A deal’s a deal. I’ve written about this lesson before.(See On Commitment.) My father maintained that one of the best things someone could say about you was that you were dependable and that you would do what you said you were going to do. He lived his life by that rule and I’ve tried to do the same.
2. Baseball. My father marched me out into the backyard as soon as I could walk and taught me how to throw and catch and how to hit a baseball. On a warm July evening when I was six, he took me to see my first big league game – the Philadelphia Phillies and the BROOKLYN Dodgers. The players were larger than life and the grass was the greenest I have ever seen. And this was the season after the Dodgers had finally beaten the Yankees in the World Series. I was hooked. Baseball is a team game. A collection of super-star players does not automatically guarantee a great team. Building a great team is hard work and I have never forgotten that lesson.
3. Don’t give up. Both of my parents were of Polish ancestry. There is an expression in Polish that translates literally to “don’t give up. Whether it when I was trying to complete an impossible school assignment or fight my way out of a batting slump, my father would use that expression. To this day when I am feeling overwhelmed, I hang in there because I can still his voice. Years later when I visited Acoma Pueblo west of Albuquerque, NM I learned that there are words in their native language that are almost exactly the same that every child learns – “never quit.
4. Sense of humor. My father had a wicked sense of humor and he also loved to laugh. I have very fond memories of Saturday evenings spent in hysterical laughter. What is significant is that I remember the laughter and not necessarily why we were laughing.
5. Interdependence. My father was self-employed. He had his own shipping room supply business and his office was in our basement. In fact, it wasn’t until I got to High School that I discovered that most of the other parents actually left the house in the morning to go to work. So I guess the fact that I have been an independent consultant since 1991 is genetic. What my father was very clear about, though, is this: We all need to find out what our gift is – what we can do really well. And we need to appreciate what everyone else’s gift is as well because we need each other to create a better world.

When my father was born nine decades ago, the United States was less than a year from being out of World War I, the Great Depression would start ten years later, and World War II was twenty-two years away. When he died, my aunt told me “John, your father was a good man; you could always count on him. Thanks, Dad.

I found zenhabits.net when I was googling (never thought I’d use that as a gerundive , or is it gerund, Chris?) to find websites that address minimalism. I also came across a couple of sites by a couple of minimalist twenty-somethings (http://www.lucasallmon.com and http://www.betterthanyourboyfriend.com.) A guy named Tynan authors the latter blog. His bio reads as follows: Hi! My Name is Tynan… I’m an egomaniac vegan pickup artist who sold everything and is traveling around the world. I generally do whatever I want whenever I want, even when I’m pretty sure it’s a bad idea. I like singing gangsta rap, writing, working out, working on my business, traveling, and finding adventure. I always wear a sequinned hat with stars on¦ OK, so maybe Tynan is a little non-mainstream kind of dude. However, I’m picking up that there is a trend emerging around earning a living , or at least making money to support oneself , in an unconventional manner that does not link one to a specific place. There are others who have decided to “sell everything, travel around and support themselves on the road and they are able to do it-or so they claim.

When more and more people opt for flexibility in work, which could be as simple as, working at home, I wonder what “working and playing well with others will look like in the future. In the good old days when everyone worked in the same location , or at least a finite number of multiple locations , you could actually see if people were, in fact, working (and playing well) with others. With situations like Lucas Allmon where he may never even meet a client face-to ,face, the only thing anyone will see are the results , not how they are produced. And that scenario may drive the control freaks of the world off the proverbial bridge. About a year ago, I wrote a blog about my first job. I had a boss who believed that if you are not sitting at your desk with your pencil poised, you were not working. That was a long time ago and that is a good thing because this example of control freak behavior would not work today.

I’m sure no one would be surprised that the management cognoscenti have coined a term for people who work together in multiple locations and who may never see each other but are accountable for a collaborative work product , that term is a “virtual team. Here’s the deal. A virtual team is no different than a traditional team. Apart from the fact that members of a virtual team may never meet face to face (they could teleconference or use SKYPE), they still need clear goals and expected results, defined roles and responsibilities, established systems and procedures (like how they will communicate and make decisions) and clear definition of the kind of relationship the team will have in working together , that is, its sense of community. As I think about it, the longing that some have for a different kind of relationship is not only possible, but there are a number of great practices for building effective and satisfying relationships that still apply. If only some managers could get over the control thing¦

People in my seminars and workshops often ask me “what business books do you read?  I answer, “I don’t read business books. The group is usually stunned.  What I found through the years is that  many business books don’t really offer any new ideas and often lead readers to the conclusion that there are simple answers to complex problems. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate my point.

Patrick Lencioni is a writer and consultant that a number of people admire.  His books often have a number in the title: The Five Temptations of a CEO; The Five Dysfunctions of a Team; The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive; and The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. Let me be clear that Patrick Lencioni and I probably have a great deal of common ground in our shared passion for making workplaces better.  His books are very accessible and seem to have struck a chord because his book sales are off the charts.  And I do not disagree with the major themes in the books above.  What is a problem for me is how the work gets applied.  Most people in organizations who cite his works tend to have read them non-critically and believe that, “if we can only overcome these five dysfunctions we will be a better team.  What is missing is the question, “might there be a sixth or seventh dysfunction or temptation that is really tripping us up?  Patrick Lencioni provides an example of what philosophers refer to as reductionist thinking – the tendency to reduce problems and solutions to the simplest set of principles.  Another example would be Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  The finite number of principles that reductionist thinking yields are not necessary bad or incorrect principles.  I have worked with teams that, in fact, exhibit all five dysfunctions about which Lencioni writes – as well as others!.  However, reductionist thinking has a way of making people lazy.  Instead of asking “are these really the three, four, or five things in play or better yet, might there be other principles that would apply, there is a tendency to accept as true the results of this reductionist thinking.

Another book that I have seen get mis-used is Jim Collins’ Good to Great.  Collins talks about great organizations making sure that they have “the right people on the bus.  I have talked with a number of executive who extol the virtues of this book and especially cite the part about getting the right people on the bus.  The way this passage gets interpreted is to hire (that is get people on the bus) who look like, think like, and act like the people doing the hiring.  So without real diversity do we really have businesses that can be as great as they could be?
So what do I read?  I read biography, history, and poetry.  I am currently reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.  This is the story of how Abraham Lincoln selected for his cabinet four of his rivals for the Presidential nomination in 1860 and forge them and others into a team that lead the United States through the Civil War. If you really want to learn about getting the right people on the bus and building an effective team read this book. But read it with a critical eye, ask questions, then decide how you want to move forward.

At the end of January, I attended my first “Snow Down festival in Durango Colorado. I would describe it as Durango’s version of Mardi Gras , five days and four nights of midwinter silliness. Each year has a theme and this year’s was “Ye Olde Snowdown 2008 , where everyone was encouraged to don Authurian costumes! There are a ton of events including an evening parade and the usual and customary late night reverie. And there was the ultimate team-building event , the annual outhouse-stuffing contest!

As you might imagine the contest consists of teams of people trying to stuff themselves into one of those construction or event site biffys. The team that manages to cram in the most bodies wins a gift certificate to the local restaurant sponsoring the event. (I don’t know the last time you have been in one of those port-a-potties, but there is a little placard inside that states; “Maximum occupancy 100 persons , that always made me laugh!)

The event was highly entertaining, but what struck me was the teamwork required to succeed. First of all, this is not an event that a serious team would try to wing. It takes some major-league planning starting with the make up of the team. One would think, that you would want to just assemble a group of little people and call it a day. Well, the people who go on the bottom need to be strong enough to hold up the people piled on top of them and the way that people enter or are stuffed into the biff (depending on where you are in the process) is highly choreographed. And once you fit everyone in the door closes for 10 seconds before everyone gets to pile out as the crowd counts off the number of people exiting the outhouse. The day we were there the winning team managed to cram in 17!

Now I would never recommend this activity as a team building exercise for the usual corporate client. The liability would be too great. I think all of the participants at this event had to sign waivers that they were doing this contest at their own risk. However, what I do think you can learn from this activity is the importance of planning in any team activity or process. I’ve seen countless teams plunge right into a project with no planning at all only t have backtrack, slowdown, and actually redo work. So come to “Snow down in da Nile 2009 and see how teams can work effectively!

I heard a story a while back that shows the power of a team , in an unexpected way. One member of a departmental team in a business organization had fallen on hard times. That person’s six-year-old daughter had a serious illness that really impacted his presence at work and his performance, and as a result, his team’s performance. Without any coaching from the team’s supervisor, the team came together for a meeting. They collectively realized that anyone of them could be in the other person’s shoes at some point in their lives, so they decided to do what it takes to carry this person’s load. In addition to covering the work responsibilities, they also collectively pooled their sick leave and vacation time to minimize for this person’s having to take days without pay at a time when he could least afford it. To make a long story short, his daughter completely recovered and as a result of their actions the team was stronger.

In looking at the relationships in your life do you have friends at work or in your personal life who would go to “hell and back for you when you are going through a rough time. I made a choice a long time ago that that was the kind of friend I wanted to be. I’ve certainly had my rough spots and my friends were there for me in many different ways. So when I tell someone, it is OK to call me anytime, I mean it. And what is important, it is not a quid pro quo kind of thing. It is just the right thing to do. In the above story, each team member was clear there was no other way they would have wanted to behave.

I have a few minutes before I head back home after doing two days of training and based on some of the emails I have received about yesterday’s blog “On Commitment, I think an addendum is appropriate.

I do believe that “a deal is a deal.  However, I also remember one thing that my father added.  Sometimes things come up.  Sometimes things change and the nature of the deal changes. Sometimes something gets in the way of following through on a commitment. In that case, as my father would say, you need to communicate that fact to the others involved.  If circumstances change, maybe the nature of the commitment (or the deal) needs to change as well.  To those who have emailed me, I hope this addition helps.

Whenever I work with a group around the topic of commitment, someone usually offers the following quote: “In a breakfast of ham and eggs, the chicken is involved and the pig is committed. And in the spirit of true confessions, I’ve also shared the same quote with organizations. And it has always bothered me because taken to its logical end, one could conclude, commitment involves death. That is a rather grim image of an otherwise honorable term.

So what is a good way to talk about commitment? One of the terms that my friends Will Stockton and Marjorie Herdes use is committed action. And I might add that Marjorie is quick to add as a corollary to the above quote that the pig was really coerced!

A few weeks ago I happened to catch the HBO documentary titled, “Brooklyn Dodgers – The Ghost of Flatbush. It is mostly about the love affair that the people of Brooklyn had with the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. Now for those of you who have a passing familiarity with the history of baseball, the residents of Brooklyn adored their Dodgers , even though they would repeatedly disappoint their fans , until, of course, 1955, when they finally won the World Series by defeating their hated rivals, the New York Yankees. In the documentary, when asked why after so many years of disappointment the fans would continue to support the Dodgers, one of the interviewees simply said, “You stick by your guys. In other words you hang in there through thick and thin because your guys are there for you and you are there for them , to accomplish something greater than any individual could. Brooklyn fans would refer to their team as “Dem Bums (there is a certain way of casting the English language that only people from Brooklyn know how to do) , and woe be tied to anyone not from Brooklyn who called the Dodgers bums. As loyal fans would say, “they may be bums but they are OUR bums¦

My father also had a way of talking about commitment. He would say, “a deal’s a deal. In other words, if you are member of a leadership team that agrees to a certain approach to move forward, you have made a deal with that team. And you stick by your guys (or girls!). If you renege on the deal , in my father’s frame of reference , that is one of the worst things a person could do because a deal is a deal. It does not entail death , but it is serious business. It does mean that you don’t let others down. It means you can count on each other!

The performance poet, Sekou Sundiata died on July 18, 2007. I first learned of his work through the Bill Moyers series The Language of Life that I have previously mentioned on this blog and I became quite taken by his poetry and performance presence.

Sundiata performed most of his poetry to a jazz backdrop and the combination of his words and the progressive music was magical. He remarked in the Language of Life segment that featured him about “how important it is for each jazz instrumentalist to develop his or her own sound. And it is only when that occurs that the jazz ensemble really cooks. I think there is something to be learned from this viewpoint that applies to any “ensemble that has to work together.

The teams that I have observed that truly reach the level of a high performing team find a way to come together so that each person’s individual voice remains strong while blending with the other members of the team. When both the strength of the individual joins forces with the power of a team, then really amazing results get accomplished.

Last night I had the opportunity to hear the jazz quartet Canela in Santa Fe, NM.  The group consists of pianist Patrice Rushen, saxophonist Justo Almario, bassist Abraham Laboriel, and drummer and percussionist Alex Acuna.  Words fail me when it comes to describing how great this group was last night.

As I was listening and watching Canela, it occurred  to me that this is a group that personifies the spirit behind working and playing well with others which is the central theme of this website. Each of these musicians possesses their own unique style.  Yet, when the four come together the music they produce is magical.  And they do it in a way that does not require them to give up pieces of themselves for the success of the group.  Just seeing the sheer joy that exudes from each of their faces, and the supportive appreciation that each has for the other during the solo riffs speaks volumes about how it is possible to get the best of a group without losing one’s individualism that makes the group so special.

I think organizations can lose sight of the gifts that each individual brings to the table when people are required in subtle ways to fit in or conform in unnecessary ways.  I hear often how organizations want employees at all levels to bring their “whole-selves to work, and yet when they do, they might get feedback that suggests that they leave a certain part of themselves at home.  If you ever have a chance to see Canela, you’ll see the magic that can happen when individual talents are able to blend in such a profound way.