Tony Morales Interview

• Process for forming a consulting team:
  • Forming the consulting team happens on a case by case basis, as it depends upon the industry, function, and available people
  • Team is formed of principals, executives and residents at Inter-Growth, staff members, researchers, and experts
  • Experts are one of:
    • Functional experts (e.g. have deep experience in executive search, or deep experience in culture transformation)
    • Industrial experts (e.g. deeply familiar with transportation and logistics)
• Generating ideas on how to tackle the issue:
  • Need to understand first. Research team does the following:
    • Extensive analysis of the organisation from the outside perspective
    • Looks to understand the industry
    • Looks to understand competitors
    • Looks to see what’s going on in terms of industry trends (cyclical or not)
      • How are their competitors operating?
      • What changes are happening?
      • Are there any emergent trends in the industry?
• Client process and structure:
  • Seek to understand first from an outside basis (see above)
  • How can we learn about lived experience, the culture, the design, beyond what you can see written in a document?
    • Interviews and assessments
  • Cultural interviews:
    • Team members visited 100 client sites in a 90 day period to interview people, collect their notes, and put them together
    • These are ethnographic, and so it takes on an anthropological skill set
    • Don’t seek to guide or bias, just looking for the “grand tour”. Asking questions like:
      • What’s your job like?
      • What’s this organisation like?
    • This can give a piecemeal picture of what’s happening across the organisation
  • Assessment:
    • Inter-Growth uses a tool called “total for index”
    • This is an algorithmic assessment, that measures things like:
      • leadership
      • culture
      • experience
      • capabilities
    • Model comes up with actionable data which allows insights about what’s happening across the organisation
  • Deciding who to interview:
    • There’s not enough time to interview the 20,000 employees
    • Think about more than employees: what are consumers, partners, competitors all thinking?
    • Instead, draw a diverse sampling across the organisation
    • Looking to get information from different perspectives
      • geographically
      • seniority level
    • Broad bases, then focusing up on the executive team
  • Diagnosing team dynamics issues:
    • A lot of the problems that emerge will be cited time and time again in the interviews
    • Start off by looking for areas of shared concern from the interviews
    • Core findings will be common, but there may also be smaller one-off or isolated issues that could be addressed
  • Diagnosing organisation design issues:
    • Organisational design should be fit to achieve the target culture
    • There’s a culture that exists, and a culture that’s desired. Inter-Growth helps their clients move between these two states
    • Secondary to culture issues, business fundamental issues are also manifest in the organisation design:
      • cost saving
      • revenue generation
  • Other diagnosis tools:
    • Top team problems are always sensitive and delicate
    • Making sure that there is alignment with strategy and each other on the team level is important
    • Inter-Growth seeks to understand where there are areas of misalignment, and leading the executive team towards better alignment
    • Transport company had an executive team with different histories, and hence different ideas about what works and what doesn’t.
  • Other considerations:
    • Our client is a business who are looking to maximise shareholder returns
    • Culture and organisational design need to be aligned towards what will help the business most through:
      • driving revenue
      • cutting costs
      • maximising output
      • quality

Environmental Misalignments

• VW pollution masking scandal
  • Consumers have become less accepting of environmental scandals
• The external environment – something outside the team changes, but the team does not notice or adapt.
• Causes of misalignments:
  1. focus on shared information
  2. ignoring alternatives
     • recency bias
     • over-valuing outcomes
  3. Focus on self-interest
     • motivated blindness
• For all these reasons, teams fail to adapt.

Individual Misalignments

• One of the main causes in Microsoft’s decline in the 2000’s.
• Stack ranking assessment – reduced trust and damaged Microsoft’s ability to innovate
• Team goals should align with individual goals (WIIFM)
• Individual goals can change. Some examples:
  • Junior colleague develops new skills, gains new career aspirations
  • Things change at work (conflicts develop over time)
  • Things change at home (e.g. start a family)
• Psychological safety: an environment where team members can take risks.
  • Examples of risks:
    • admitting mistakes
    • addressing conflict
    • offering competing ideas
  • These are risks because no-one wants to feel left out of a group.

Systems Thinking Frame

• When attending a meeting, we must represent our own frame. However, it is also important that we adopt and listen, and take on other frames. Systems thinking is all about that.
• Analytical thinking: separate something into parts, understand the parts, and then see how the parts fit together
• Systems thinking (as opposed to our analytical framing) asks us to do something else. Take the part we are trying to explain, and see how that works in a larger system.
• Metaphor for Systems Thinking: Concentric Circles
• Example of car:
  • You can pull a car apart and understand all the individual pieces.
  • However, you won’t understand why it is the size it is, or why the size has changed since the 50’s.
  • Instead of viewing the car as a transportation machine, think of it as something to move families.
  • You only understand that when you think about the car’s role in society.
• Example of education:
  • School classes, 1 teacher, 20-30 children.
  • Why that configuration?
  • Need systems thinking to answer:
    • What is this preparing them to do?
    • What is being taught?
    • What role does that play?
• When we want to get the purpose, we need the systems thinking piece
• Getting rid of a problem does not necessarily led to what you want
• Is thinking about the system as a whole too much information?
  • It’s a different set of questions that we’re asking
  • If you’re really trying to understand purpose and possibility, that’s a different space
• Discovery space: not about getting rid of problems, but formulating problems in such as way that we can see possibilities that were not clear before
• By thinking of a goal and working backwards, we may avoid the constraints that block us going forward
• Analysis and synthesis
• Example:
  • People leaving a group
  • Was told this was because of monetary compensation
  • In the larger system, compensation is only part of the rewards system
  • What are the various monetary and non-monetary rewards?
• Considering the system rather than individualising issues or problems
• Win/Lose frame
  • If I give you something, I have to take something away from someone else
• Reframing: changing win/lose to win/win solutions

Diagnosing Problems in Groups and Teams

• We tend to think we bring together a group of people, and they will be high performing
• It doesn’t always work! How can we identify the problems?
• Example: steering committee on an organisational development initiative
  • Interesting patterns:
    • Every time the team met in person, lots of laughter and jokes. The were agreeable on almost anything that was discussed during the meeting
    • However, after the meeting, lots of emails sent raising numerous issues, which were not discussed during the in-person meetings
    • The next time they met, none of the issues were raised
• The culture of politeness
  • We’re interfacing with each other, face to face, we’re going to be polite
  • “Real” issues are secondary to being polite
  • Being polite gets in the way of learning in organisations
• The pattern of repeating
  • Even when contentious issues are raised, other people in the meeting disengage and lose focus. They’re not wanting to signal agreement or disagreement.
  • The speaker worries that they don’t get acknowledgement, so they repeat the same thing, a bit louder and more exuberant.
    • “I’ll do it again, and they’ll get it this time”
  • Not breaking the the frame, not stepping back or taking some sort of time-out.
• Conflict is often avoided
  • People don’t feel the need to confront each other
  • They’re not comfortable dealing with conflicts
  • Undiscussable issues are not discussed during meetings
    • Conflicts are discussed outside of formal meetings, over a lunch or a beer
• How to interrupt the negative cycle
  1. Pause, and raise the question of “What’s going on here?”
     • Make the pause part Ground rules.
     • Allow the team to re-frame and refocus
     • It needs to be a deliberate activity
     • The leader needs to help establish that this an effective and acceptable practice in the team
     • Examples:
       • work teams in factories can stop the whole production line
       • retrospectives
  2. Try to identify what the issue is
     • Where is the team is getting stuck?
  3. Collect a little data.
     • Ask everyone on the team:
       • What’s working well?
       • What isn’t working well?
     • Do an anonymous survey if people are uncomfortable talking in the open about what the issues are.
     • Don’t just make assumptions. Really try to figure out what people are seeing

I’m studying the course Culture-Driven Team Building Capstone on Coursera. These are my revision notes for week 1.

Tony Morales Interview

• Intergrowth:
  • a global leadership advisory firm
  • helping with talent and organisation issues, such as executive search, executive coaching, leadership development, organisational design, risk, culture transformation, strategy
  • Tony is a senior consultant at Intergrowth
• Logistics and Transportation Corp approached with an RFP:
  • Need an executive search firm to help find new CFO
  • Intergrowth was selected on the basis of that tasks, and then continued to engaged with the company in a number of other practice areas.
• CFO search – first impressions:
  • The problem looked a little funky for an organisation of this size ($2b enterprise)
    • No succession plan in place for their CFO
  • There were many other organisational dynamics issues that stemmed from their history
    • Origin story: two blue-collar immigrant workers, saved enough money to buy a bus, slept in it while building capital and expanding the business, until eventually became hugely successful
    • Problems with this:
      • the founders were never really operationally sophisticated
      • struggled moving from old economy thinking to digital age of transformation enterprises (e.g. Uber, Lyft)
      • there may be disconnects between how the company is currently operating, and how it ought to operate
  • This is a great story about how critical thought around leadership and leadership intervention can really benefit organisations
• The transportation industry:
  • is going through a lot of change (e.g. Uber, Lyft, Tesla)
  • Transportation isn’t what it was 30 years ago, or as it had been 100 years ago
  • An organisation in the transportation industry that is still being run in “mom and pop” style would have some problems around innovation management

What Are Teams?

• A team is any group of people that performs some collective task on which they have to work together, that is, they have to cooperate
• In businesses, there are many tasks that require coordination. It’s the job of management to make sure that people coordinate on these tasks.
• It is the cooperation in the performance of a task that makes a group a team
• “We” intentions versus “I” intentions

A Closer Look at Culture

• Culture is whatever people learn from other people, and transmit to other people, especially by interacting with them.
• Culture:
  • ways of behaving and speaking
  • how to think and reason
  • values and goals
• Embodied culture is the things we don’t event need to think about (e.g. dribbling ball, singing anthem, attitudes to horse meat)
• Values and goals that guide our actions
• Teams need their preconceived routines, their ways of reasoning about the world and their goals and values

Being Unaware of Culture

• We are not even aware of a lot of culture we acquire from others
• For example, how close we stand to each other
  • Proxemics is the study of the amount of space people feel necessary to keep between themselves and other people
    • Intimate zone (0 to 18 inches in America)
    • Personal zone (18 inches to 4 feet in America)
    • Social zone (4 feet to 12 feet in America)
    • Public zone (beyond 12 feet in America)
  • These distances vary based on your cultural upbringing
• Cooperation on teams involves expectations of this sort.
• When the expectation are violated, the performance of the team can suffer

BART

• BART stands for Boundaries, Authority, Roles, and Task
• BART is a way of thinking about teams that emphasises psycho-dynamic processes
• Boundaries
  • e.g. time, physical setting, psychological, etc
  • Time boundary examples
    • people arriving late, checking mail during meeting, etc
    • In many cultures, commencing a meeting on time is considered very important, a trademark of being very professional at work.
    • In other cultures, they’re very lenient. It’s OK to stary a meeting 15 minutes later than the scheduled time.
  • Perhaps the team does not value boundaries.
• Authority
  • e.g. who wields authority, who has formal or informal authority
  • e.g. the person who was the designated leader was not the actual leader. The acutal leader was another team member who was a subject matter expert.
  • Who is considered to be an authority in the context?
  • We have formal and informal authority
• Roles
  • e.g. formal and informal roles
  • e.g. one team had a member who was seen and designated as the contrarian
    • every point that was made, he felt called upon to disagree, contract, argue
    • he was really their critical thinking partner, so that turned out to be positive
  • Think about what the role says about the group or team and how you can understand that
• Task
  • e.g. at least 2 tasks
    • work task
      • What is it that we’re assigned to do?
      • What is our purpose?
    • survival task
      • How do we sustain ourselves?
      • How do we continue our activity?
  • Teams can often get confused between their survival task, as opposed to their assignment

Managing Reward Systems

• Reward systems in the workplace like performance reviews, bonuses, and promotions are powerful ways to shape culture and create an atmosphere of inclusion
  • They can also be a source of implicit bias.
  • Disadvantaging certain groups of people, even if they appear to be totally neutral.
  • If you’re serious about boosting diversity on your team, you have to think about the unintentional forms of bias that could be hiding in your reward systems
• Symphony orchestras
  • Few of them reflect the population of the cities they represent
    • Just over 10% of orchestra musicians are people of colour
  • This is due to:
    • unequal access to music education
    • hidden biases in systems of reward and advancement from an early age
  • People of colour are tenured at a rate of about 30%, which is way lower than their white colleagues
    • Peers nitpick small imperfections in their performances and character that they would normally let slide with white musicians
    • This can happen totally unconsciously and in small ways
    • Those small unintentional forms of bias lead to fewer opportunities for people of colour at a large scale
• Same effect can happen with informal rewards systems. Such as praise from supervisors, recognition for team members’ achievements, or even just who we listen to at meetings
• How to combat biases?
  • Measure outcomes
    • When you set specific targets for diversity, and measure progress toward achieving them, you can uncover unintentional bias in an objective way and that leads to better accountability.
  • Post results publicly
  • The Shield (see Promoting Diversity in the Workplace)
    • The unspoken rule on the team was men direct the conversation at meetings
    • Mazzara created a new rule for the team. He told them that no one should be interrupted when they were pitching an idea

Addressing Representational Gaps

• Representational gaps: gaps in perception about team problems, including the team’s ultimate task and what’s important to execute team goals
• Representational gaps arise from:
  • differences in knowledge sets
  • differences in value sets
  • conflicting interpretations of new knowledge
• How to reconcile incompatible views?
• An intentional effort is needed on teams to reconcile different perspectives.
  • This is important because functionally diverse teams often lack shared knowledge
  • Compatibility is established by providing adequate time for team members to build relationships and get to know each other
• Key is for team members to mutually understand the values, beliefs and attitudes represented in the team
• There needs to be a shared understanding of how individuals within teams identify problems
• Four keys to representing any problem: GAEO
  • Goal hierarchy: how we prioritise goals
  • Assumptions: how we assume others behave, or how we assume others are limited in time or resources
  • Elements: components of the problem that are changeable
  • Operators: the ways that the components of the problem can change
• Companies can set ground rule expectations that establish these shared ways of understanding problems.
  • Teams can recognise that different behaviours may exist, and these behaviours are unique to particular countries or cultures
  • This recognition and acceptance of differences helps to establish shared knowledge, and creates opportunities for mutual understanding among team members
• At an organisational level managerial staff must set an example for valuing diversity on teams.
  • Examples:
    • Mentoring relationships
    • Job shadowing
    • Relationship building time
    • 360 feedback
  • Watch out for the potential to blur roles and to reduce creative solutions
• Managers need to be strategic in drawing out their teams’ creativity
• Jim Shaw, former executive vice president of MTV networks
  • a “left-brain” guy in a “right-brain” organisation
  • Initially responded to creative suggestions by discussing possible ways where the idea could go wrong
  • This had the effect of shutting down the idea
  • Instead of diving in with his perspective on the suggestion, Jim learned to incrementally share contingency planning information.
  • This way creative people can fully explain themselves and get their ideas on the table
  • No two people on Jim’s team thinks alike, and this needs to be accounted for
• Example from the last section of team that broke apart (Beth & John):
  • Remaining four called themselves the “Small Beautiful Team”
  • Set out to reestablish goals, roles and norms for their team
  • They managed representational gaps between them through establishing frequent check-ins for information sharing and goal setting
  • The norms of active and deliberate listening where critical to their building compatibility across their views and mutual understanding of each other’s perspectives
  • Decisions were much slower and more deliberate than before.
  • One conversation when the new CEO (Nigel) called attention
  • Roles because more evenly distributed and more clearly defined
  • Representational gaps will inevitably exist, but with thoughtful intention, compatibility across individuals and high function can be achieved when mutual understanding is the goal

Course Structure

1. Write a paper:
   • What are the potential issues you think this company could be facing
   • What factors would you as a consultant need to consider?
2. Peer Review
   • Read someone else’s paper and comment on it
3. Make a diagnosis
   • Write 5-8 questions down that you would want to ask the client to find out more relevant information about their situation

Late last year (the end of 2016), Andy Parker and I were talking about a frustrating problem common to many senior people in teams: how to improve or positively affect the people we work with so that we were all happier and more effective? These discussions have lead me through one of the more intensive periods of growth and learning that I’ve experienced for a long time, and have ended up with a nice gem of a study on the effectiveness of stand-ups. This post is a description of the journey I’ve taken over the last 6 months or so…

Culture and Ethnography

Our first problem: how to get people to change? Andy and I agreed that we can’t make people change. It comes down to a matter of ways to influence people. We thought that this was an aspect of culture, and so our thoughts went to the tools of anthropologists. Perhaps we could learn something there? We knew that anthropologists use ethnography tools to study people and cultures. Perhaps we could look in that direction?

Fieldwork

Andy had heard about Fieldwork, a company that specialises in the study of company culture. Most interesting to us, they had published a guide on how to conduct ethnography fieldwork and a DIY Ethnography Kit.

With this guide, Andy and I both started observing and documenting events that we saw about us at our companies. I started writing posts on our internal company blogging platform, and Andy did the same.

I spent a number of months making observations between my daily work duties. I found these enormously useful, and it helped spark a number of productive conversations.

However, it got to the stage where we had a lot of observations, but no clear idea of what to do next.

On a whim, we searched for online courses which might help us in our quest. As it turned out, there was an excellent course available on Coursera…

Culture-Driven Team Building

Culture-Driven Team Building is a specialisation run by the University of Pennsylvania through Coursera. It is made up of five separate month-long courses. Each course lasts for four weeks, and takes about four hours of study per week.

I’ve learned a huge amount of useful information in these courses, and I can recommend them as a good way expand your skills on leading and influencing teams.

Some of my key takeaways:

• The Secret to Successful Culture Change: the new culture must appear to grow organically out of the old culture (from Effecting Cultural Continuity and Change)
• Team culture types (from Diagnosing Team Problems)
• The importance of Psychological Safety (from Diagnosing Team Problems)
• Social Identity Theory (from Team Diversity Basics)
• Techniques for reducing bias (from Team Diversity Basics)
• The importance of framing and reframing (from Introduction to Framing and Systems Thinking)
• How to observe teams and groups (from Developing Groups and Teams for Positive Organisational Impact). This was particularly relevant to the ethnography fieldwork I had been conducting earlier
• The conditions for learning (from Fostering Innovation in Groups and Teams)
• Liberating Structures (from Fostering Innovation in Groups and Teams)

There’s lots more, I’m glad I kept details notes. I’ll be referring to them for years.

Grounded Theory

Remember the fieldwork we were doing earlier? I all my coursework I never really picked up on how to turn the observations into theories and models. Jeff Fredrick hit upon the key phrase and sent me the link: Grounded Theory. This is a systematic methodology in involving the construction of theory through the analysis of data. Finding this was a bit of an a-ha moment for me.

I think when I finish all the coursework, my next point of call will be to return to the ethnography study and apply some more powerful tools as provided by grounded theory.

Daily Stand-up Meeting: A Grounded Theory Study

This all leads me to the last gem: I found a link to a study on the effectiveness of stand-ups:

• The Daily Standup Meeting: A Grounded Theory Study

I love to see some real scientific studies on the effectiveness of our practices. There’s too much gut-feel and cargo-culting in team practices, so some hard data is always welcome.

Some key recommendations and guidelines from the study:

• Don’t use stand-ups for reporting status (plan for the day instead)
• Keep the stand-ups short
• Keep the number of participants small
• Don’t hold the stand-up first thing in the morning

Since March 2017, Andy Parker and I have been studying the Culture Driven Team Building specialisation from the University of Pennsylvania (delivered through Coursera). The specialisation is composed of 5 different month-long courses. I have published blogs containing detailed study notes for all these courses. This post collects links to all those blog posts in one place.

• Course 1: The Power of Team Culture
  • Why Culture Matters in Organizations
  • Corporations in Culture
  • Team Rituals and Symbols
  • Effecting Cultural Continuity and Change
• Course 2: Building High-Performing Teams
  • Setting Team Foundations
  • Diagnosing Team Problems
  • Coaching Emotionally Intelligent Teams
  • Managing Common Team Types
• Course 3: Optimising Diversity in Teams
  • Promoting Diversity in the Workplace
  • Team Diversity Basics
  • Managing Conflict
  • Diversity Case Study
• Course 4: Creating a Culture of Continuous Learning
  • Introduction to Framing and Systems Thinking
  • Diagnosing Strengths & Barriers to Learning on Teams
  • Developing Groups and Teams for Positive Organisational Impact
  • Fostering Innovation in Groups and Teams
• Course 5: Culture-Driven Team Building Capstone
  • Capstone: Introduction of Case
  • Capstone: Diagnosis of Organisation
  • Capstone: Candidate selection
  • Capstone: Final Recommendations