66. How do we work together?

Hi everyone. I’m Saralyn Hodgkin, and this is the podcast to practice your leadership.

Working as a team takes work. It is part of the work. It’s invisible. It’s not in your job description. It’s unrewarded, it seems, unrewarded hard work. We’re not scared of that. We can do that. But, you know, I’ve been working with a lot of different teams across the country, coast to coast to coast, um, in the last year and the same things are coming up.

So I thought it might be useful to talk about them here, which is, you know, everybody’s trying to get their work done, right? Hey, I have this job. I’m connected to it in this way. It’s important to me because I just want to get my work done. And I want to maybe even have a little bit of joy in the, along the way, please, or whatever your, your, your perspective is.

And I want to develop my career or I want to, um, like I have these, I have these yearnings and goals and needs in my work. And it keeps turning out that for many of us, we can’t do our work on our own. We need to work with others. We need to work in teams. And so a lot of the spaces I’ve been holding around, you know, put whatever big jargon you want around strategic planning, uh, governance, governing structures, there’s a whole bunch of different ways, you know, around operations, uh, org capacity, right?

All these different lingos and jargons and so on and it comes down to a place of how do we work together as a team and function as a team so that I can get my part done well, learn from it, grow from it, you know, and whatever else my goals are for me, yes, but also collectively it comes down to a question that I hear over and over in some way, shape or form is how do we work together.

And when you go in for that job interview, You are asked usually about your education, your experience, you know, those are all the very typical, not necessarily all reasonable, but anyways, all the typical things that you are interviewed on and whatever stage, whatever process they have to see if you can do the job, even to see if you are a cultural fit.

Right? You’ll hear that a lot in job interviews and so on, right? And of course, you’re looking, uh, just as a note, right? You are also looking the other way, asking your questions about whether this place is a fit for you to try for the next three months or not, right? Anyways. Um, another podcast maybe, but the point being is that when it comes down to it and we’re all trying to get our work done, no one’s going back and looking at your resume.

You’re not looking at other people’s resume. What you’re looking at is how do I talk to you? Where do I ask you for X, Y, and Z in a way that doesn’t create drama and dynamics? How do we all move together? So that we can get to this destination without leaving anyone behind, and we can bring everybody’s brilliance to the table.

It comes down to, well, people say like, what’s our strategic plan? What’s our governing structure? And what capacity do we need? And they’re all important questions, and they all have their due. And it will lead to things like, what’s our key performance indicators and our KPIs? And what does our RACI model look like?

And yeah, yeah, yeah. All of that important. Not to be over indexed, but important and useful to look at. And I talk about that stuff all the time. I get it. And when you start getting into the different things, I don’t know, it’s just trending for me folks that the question comes down to like, how do we work together?

How do I know I can trust you? I am totally avoiding it because I don’t want any conflict. How do I deal with my emotions when emotions aren’t allowed here at work? Like, I know that I’m supposed to report to you and I know I’m not supposed to talk to you unless I talk to your boss first and then, and then I can come over and not directly ask you, but I can answer any questions about the thing that I told your boss about that they’ve now given to you, though they had no nothing about, right?

And how do I not get into some big cockfight around like, Um, whose ego is better in whose work and did you give me cred and did you take my cred and like, Oh, yeah, blah, blah, blah, the drama that gets created. And so here I’m just standing in a place where what I’m seeing trend, and I don’t know if you can resonate to any of this or little bits of it folks, but it comes down to, we can have the best strategic plan, key performance indicators, those KPIs, they’re clear as day. We have a structure that the board or management has approved, but it comes down to like, how do we work together? And you know that I like a little bit of milk with my coffee and look, you just, you just did that and brought me a coffee and you remembered that.

Wow, thanks. Oh yeah. You saw I was out of the office yesterday. You want to make sure that that dentist appointment that, you know, I had that I was nervous about, you asked me about it. Appreciate that. Appreciate that. Wow. You remembered that I celebrate this holiday, not, not that one. And you, you, you called that out for me when we were standing over there.

And I appreciate that, right? It’s like, okay. Where do we, I think, is it Brené Brown, I think, talks about marble jars. I think there’s a couple of thought leaders that talk about marble jars and it’s like, okay, after all the strategic plans and the governing structures and so on, when we look at how do we work together, if we don’t stay just in our rational over intellectualized brain and we come down to kindergarten rules and we stay in the heart, it’s like, wow, how do I work with you?

How do I be with you? Like, it’s not even, how do I work with you? What’s the RACI model? And da, da, da. It’s like, how do I just be with you? Could that actually lift some intelligence about how we be together so that we can work together so that we can deliver X, Y, and Z? What does being together offer? What would it mean knowing that conflict is going to come?

What does it mean to be with one another in conflict rather than conflict being in between us. What would it look like for conflict to be in the room, but not be between us, but you and I standing beside each other, looking at the conflict out in front of us and figuring out how to deal with that together, where you’re owning a part of it, I’m owning a part of it.

And then we say, yeah. So, it really is a bit of grit that you really like to work hybrid and I really like to work in person. And there’s a bit of a conflict here for us out in front of us. So okay, let’s stand side by side and tackle that together. Versus the drama that can be created of, I can’t believe her.

Like all she does is expect me to come into the office and she knows that I have other things that have to happen and that the traffic of 45 minutes to get there and get back and I can’t believe she did it. And then on the other side, I can’t believe he just completely works hybrid. Like does he not care about us?

Does he not see just how much better we are when we’re in person? Why is he being so self, blah, blah, blah, drama, right? It’s like, Whoa, what if you turn that around and said, Hey, how do we want to be together? I mean, remote working and hybrid working and how you figure that out. That’s a whole nother topic.

But when we see conflict, whatever the content of that conflict is, how do we be together to navigate that conflict together? How do we be together when emotions are running high, when emotions are joyous? Um. As a side note, folks, in every room, everywhere in the world, no matter your race, ethnicity, any gender, whatever, like, breath, emotion, always in the room, folks, always in the room.

Breath is always in the room. It’s always a tool you can use. It’s all you can always connect to that tool, emotion, always in the room, emotion acceptable at work or not. I don’t know. But I’m telling you, it’s in the room. Now, how do we be together when that emotion is in the room? What’s that look like for us?

Can we design some kind of way of being together? Can we do that intentionally outside of conflict, drama, heat, deliverables, madness? Can we step outside and say, hey, there’s going to be emotion in the room, there’s going to be conflict, and we can have the best strategic plan and know where we’re going, but can we design an alliance of how we want to be together when times are difficult?

Can we design an atmosphere that we want to work in together? And then can we talk about how we operationalize those behaviors like trust? We want trust between us, okay? What does trust look like? What are the behaviors of that? What does that look like for us? What builds trust for you? What models, can we use a Gottman model of trust or Brene Brown’s anatomy of trust in braving?

Can we, can we use some kind of framework and language together so that we know what we’re talking about and we know what it means to build the behaviors of trust because we’ve decided that that’s important to us and how we be together. So that we can work together so that we can hit it on that strategic plan, right?

Part of how do we work together as a team starts to get at these really tactical or over intellectualized tools, conversations, and they’re needed. There are places for them. And what I’m seeing trend is the lack of conversation of how we be together so that we can work together, so that we can tackle that project, the elements in that strategic plan. We can go in and talk with that client, figure out this impact strategy, whatever it is. Right. And so we got to have some of these things figured out, but then like governance structure and strategic plan, but then part of it starts to curl into, Hey, how do we be together?

How do we navigate chaos and change, which will always be here? How do we want to be together in chaos and change? Can we write down five words that demonstrate that and then walk through an example of chaos using those words and say, Yeah, so if what we want to do is be kind and chaos, like what would that look like?

And what would that look like for us together? And what would that look like for me? How do I need to be in order to show up kind and chaos? When I’m with all of you in my team, when I’m with you, dear colleague, what would that be like if we know that collaboration is key to how we work. What are the behaviors of collaboration?

How do we need to be with each other when collaboration and brokering that collaboration gets really difficult? Where we want to bring our values to the table and like all these words, right? We want to bring trust and joy and confidentiality, I don’t know whatever you need for collaboration, curiosity, innovation all these words and it’s like, okay can we dial down on the quantity of the words and dial up a conversation of what the behaviors look like on how we be together when we are in collaboration, what does being innovative mean?

Well, it means giving each other feedback in a way where it’s yes ands, not, well, that’s stupid or saying something that makes me feel stupid or, or, um, why are you even thinking that? Whatever it is, right? What does it mean to be innovative? All ideas are welcome. We call out phases of, of innovation that we’re in, hey, we’re starting to converge now.

So let’s get tactical on these, this type of world. Like what does it mean? What are the behaviors of collaboration, of navigating chaos, of trust, of how the atmosphere is in this team that we want to create so we can be together to do the work together. Anyway, that’s my rant. Call it a TED talk or whatever you want, right?

I just keep seeing in all the work and all the teams that I work with people talking about how do we work together as a team and they they lean on strategic plans and governing structures then they lean towards KPIs and such but there’s something here there’s just this one nugget of asking, okay, whatever it is, wherever you’re taking that conversation, how do we be together in order to work together?

It’s a practice all, do your own work and do your teamwork. Stay in the practice.

Thanks all. I’m Saralyn you can find me at holonleadership.org. I walk alongside you as you practice your leadership