Team Tips - 21 {Ouch, that hurts - Part 1}

You've been to the doctor, right?

There's always the moment when the doctor or nurse has to give you a needle, or draw blood, or otherwise inflict some unmentionable procedure on, or in (ew), some unmentionable part of your humanity.

That's when you hear the phrase:

This won't hurt a bit.

Just like when a “best friend”, or business associate, or the boss at performance evaluation time thinks you really need to hear some feedback, some constructive criticism. After all doesn't everyone want to improve? See their mistakes and learn from them? Make themselves a better person?

This won't hurt a bit. This is for your own good!

It's a wonderful idea if you are the “helper”: being a good friend, advising someone with your pearls of wisdom. But it's not so much fun being the “helpee”. Particularly when it is “inflicted help”. (I think every instance of feedback should be automatically matched in strength and duration with a return message; not as defensiveness or revenge. Just to return the favour.)

Ah, Reeves, you just don't want to hear criticism. You just don't want to be a better person. I'm, like, trying to help you here!

Hmmmm: right; wrong; wrong.

Right: I don't want to hear criticism. I may not respect the source; I may not like the intent; and I've already got my own imaginary critic whispering in my ear.
Wrong: I do want to be a better person. Returning as a dung beetle isn't at the top of my list (see previous post).
Wrong: You really aren't helping. If you really intended to help you would ask me how I would like to receive the “feedback” you have for me.

What I would like you to do, when I ask, for the topic of concern:

1. Tell me how I'm doing numerically, roughly, on a scale of 1 to 10. 
2. Tell me what you like and think I should keep doing 
3. Tell me what I should do differently, or add, to make the score a perfect 10, from your point of view. 

Now:

• I have a quick idea of how I'm doing: 10 out of 10 means I'm good for now; 1 out of 10 means you have lots of improvement ideas for me. 
• And I know what things you think I should continue doing. 
• And, best of all, I know what you think I should do more of, or do better, or add to my game. 
• The final component is that I can decide to use, or not, any of your suggestions. Nothing inflicted. 

In fact, this can be seen as a game. We could even call it, say, the Perfection Game. Crazy! 

It could be part of the Core Protocols. 

Oooops; Jim & Michele McCarthy already thought of that.

10 /10 from me.

Team Tips – 16 {An abundance of Angels}

When I was a District Manager of Customer Service at Xerox Canada one of my managers told me she had seen an Angel. The spiritual kind, the God's Helper kind.

Lizzie (almost her real name) was a professional, logical, coherent, mature adult who was a very “by the book” manager. I realized as she talked about her Angel experience that she was taking a big “career limiting” risk by sharing this with me, her corporate boss. Happily that meant that she trusted me enough not to judge her as crazy, or rat on her in to Human Resources.

I'm glad to say I listened quietly, kept my skepticism to myself, so she could share this secret. My task was to support her, not make things more difficult. In my mind I could conjure up some extenuating circumstances: her mother had just died, her husband was unusually introspective, she was stressed with a tough job.

Nonetheless, it was just plain weird in our cultural circle to admit to seeing Angels.

And I'm reminded of that situation when Vickie or I encounter some people's reactions to the Core Protocols or BootCamp.

We get:

• these concepts can't work, won't work, aren't feasible, won't be accepted
• the Core Protocols are too ... (insert negative adjective here)
• people won't use these Simple Rules and Tools
• people need to build their own
• there's no means to enforce compliance
• this is dictatorial
• people won't share emotions
• groups need facilitation
• we can't spend the time to come to BootCamp
• and several billion more

What's fascinating to discover, when a conversation is possible with an objector about any of these reactions, that the objector hasn't actually read the Core Protocols document, or has not attended a BootCamp, or seriously tried to investigate this material. Nor does the fact that thousands of people have found it helpful over the 15+ years that teams have been generating these ideas seem to make any difference to them. Or that an investment of five days is worth the value of changing one's life.

So what is preventing the level of understanding that all this might be genuine?

One possibility is fear.

When we talk about the potential for BootCamp to be a life changing experience and to effect your success for the balance of your life, that can be very scary. We know that some people don't really want to challenge their belief systems, or to deal with their true potential.

So when objectors deny the 15+ years of BootCamp success is possible, we just listen quietly, share the facts we have, and leave it at that.

If a world of abundance isn't what you want, if you don't want to realize your potential, or reach for the sky, then BootCamp is not for you.

You probably just aren't ready for a universe of possibility, or Angels either.

On April 21^st. Vickie Gray and I will conduct another Great Teams BootCamp. The details are at http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07e6w31ovda52cdbb5

Team Tips – 11 {Myth busters}

One of the many, many, many things that one learns from the Core Protocols and the concepts in Software for Your Head by Jim & Michele McCarthy is that axioms we have been taught elsewhere about teamwork just aren't necessarily true. In other words, these “axioms” are more correctly  accepted wisdom, rules-of-thumb, even assumptions, that need to be verified and validated.

Just as once we thought the universe revolved around the earth – with really obvious evidence – we have learned that this knowledge, once taken to be fact, is actually wrong. Similarly, a lot of the accepted wisdom about the behaviours of successful teams, has not survived the living laboratory of teamwork we know as BootCamp. From teams' experiments in BootCamp we have captured essentials of great teamwork in the Core Commitments and the Protocols – the Core.

Some of these axiomatic falsehoods about teamwork we previously accepted from training or experience include:

• teams need to be led by an appointed leader
• teams need facilitation
• team decisions need consensus
• effort matters
• all team members have to work equally hard
• the best ideas come from the tenured members
• unsolicited feedback is useful
• emotions shouldn't be allowed
• conflicts should be set aside
• there is no “I” in “Team”
• etc. (I'd like to hear about your list)

But one of the bombshells concerns a myth of Project Management in an intellectual property development world.

Anyone who has worked on a project, or been taught classic project management thinking, knows about the scope, time, resources triangle. Given X resources on the team, to produce a Y scope of work, in Z time, we can visualize the triangle with sides X, Y, and Z. If one of these sides is to shorten or lengthen, then clearly the other sides must flex or else the triangle breaks and the project fails.

We can all think of many examples where that appears to be self-evident. If I decide I want a second story on my one floor bungalow in the middle of building the house, then the contractor will certainly tell me it will cost more money, more materials, more equipment, more builders – in short more resources.

So how can it be that teams using the Core and the experiences of BootCamp are successful with the Intentional Development Protocol which says:

There is not a rigid triad of time, resources, and scope as you may have been told in your project management class. The triangle is in fact an angle with an infinite space between the two lines. The infinite space is the “resources” space. Maximizing the human potential of your team, your resources, can overcome any deficiencies you feel in the time and scope domains. Your belief that you don’t have enough time or too much scope is the signal to you that you are not being receptive enough to what’s available to you.

And that statement is from Jim McCarthy (Bell Labs, Microsoft) who had previously promoted the classical triangle is his previous book The Dynamics of Software Development!

What gives? How can a finite team have indeterminate / unlimited / infinite resources?

One clue from the BootCamp experience is that in the realm of creative production one never knows when or from where the next good idea will appear. When the resource constraints are simply the minds available to the team, and the team knows how to best access these resources, that side of the triangle starts to bend, balloon, flex, wiggle, and expand, if not vanish.

If the team's focus is on delivering quality features for this milestone at this deadline, and the Simple Rules and Tools of the Core are familiar to them, then there is virtually no limit to whom, and when, they might ask for help in getting results.

Compare that to a team not having been to BootCamp, working the traditional paradigm of time, scope, and resources. The resources they perceive available to them are primarily, if not exclusively, the individuals on the team. They may or may not even ask each other for help on their own tasks. If they do ask for help, it is often restricted to non-significant issues - certainly nothing that is frightening to them: challenging egos, being vulnerable to appearing lacking in knowledge or capability, giving up on positions of power and influence from seniority or status, etc. They don't naturally ask for help quickly and easily from those outside the team, the department, the company, their locality, the world at large.

When this group gets into trouble with delivering quality on time, they do all the standard things: put in extra hours and effort, de-commit from scope by dropping features or the depth of features, ignoring quality, asking for more team members or different skill sets, changing timelines on task achievement or overall deadlines, focusing on "easy" stuff, not testing, not prototyping the end product, getting sick, spending more energy on working out options, excuses, blame, tossing the issues in the project manager's or boss's lap, etc.

The team that has been to BootCamp knows they don't need to do any of the above.

• They know they can ask anyone anywhere around the world for help. Just asking alone often provides the answer that was waiting to be found in their own minds.
• They make quick unanimous decisions about this new insight based on their shared vision of the outcome.
• They convert planning time into building prototype solutions to check the boss's and or the user's acceptance.
• They spend their energy on results – the results they agreed in advance they could produce.
• Their focus and energy dilates time – they get better work done faster.
• They are receptive to opportunities that appear spontaneously, perhaps are strange, unclear, yet somehow align with their vision and resolve an issue, add quality, provide a shortcut, help meet the deadline. This receptivity is key.

Impossible isn't it? And of course, the sun revolves around the earth – until one gets a new perspective. Then...

Myth busted.

Software for Your Head 4

Finishing the project team kickoff meeting story from Software for Your Head by Jim & Michele McCarthy.

(from page 8):

Well, hell, if he did all that, you would consider him to be all the way checked in. Hmmm. What’s more, you think maybe, just maybe, that scenario might just do the trick for the whole damn team. Tell you what, you’d bet your bottom dollar that his teammates will at least respond with their fullest, focused attention. That’s just what people do whenever someone reveals himself a bit. If he’s talking and acting with just the least little bit of enlightenment, something new, they’re going to listen up and watch closely. As long as the person says what he says and does what he does with thoughtfulness and truth. But if it is true, you’d predict that the team, just by witnessing a more honest, genuinely new engagement level, will then be much more likely to act on questions of shared vision (which, you remind yourself, is the top-level symptom). At least, you figure, they’ll be more likely to act on things they care about, anyway, and that would be all to the good. Moreover, everybody who watched this thing unfold from just one person will have been really informed, and maybe even inspired, by the difference made by his acceptance of personal accountability for how he has been spending his own life. Really, not only for his own results, but for the results of all.

You half listen to the team struggling to cram everything in the agenda in the last few minutes. Maybe the others would also begin to experiment with the new power they are seeing and feeling (and there is tremendous power in accepting individual responsibility for achieving results together). If your guidance would help one or more of them to engage more deeply, and not to waste any time and never to do anything dumb on purpose, why, you’d have made a huge difference. Hell, the dumb quota can always be met by doing things you thought were smart to begin with. You don’t have to do anything dumb on purpose to meet the quota.

You imagine that a newly awakened team member would see a whole bunch of things, maybe all at once; the problem is not a case of a team without a shared vision, a case of just another stupid project, or another example of bad management or poor leadership. No, when he thinks it all the way through, he’ll see that the trouble is not “too few people,” or “not enough time,” or some other cockamamie story about how the mediocrity was out of his control. The crux of the thing is that he, personally, has been accepting less than he wants, and less than he deserves. What’s more, he has been doing so without making any genuine creative effort to get what he requires to efficiently create what he wants. He’ll see that the problem is his own lack of integrity and his shallow engagement. The problem is rooted somewhere near his deficient caring about his own life. To persist as it has, the problem requires his repression of passion, it mandates that he fail to accept his own wisdom, and it seduces him into daily acts of cowardice that promulgate rather than abolish the general foolishness of which he is such an important part.

But should just this one person truly check in, you think, the whole team will be moved to a better ground. Even if team members backslide, and all do,they won’t forget this vivid instance of accountable behavior and the simple, unambiguous actions that supported it.

One self-respecting person, you reflect, with even a modest degree of personal engagement, is all it takes to start this team on the path toward much greater achievement. No permission is required for the pursuit of greatness, no consensus to improve your own results. All the orgs and re-orgs in the whole damn corporate universe, all the resources consumed and processes proceeding can’t stop one honest person from making sure he spends his time wisely. And that’s all that is needed to get the ball rolling.

Why not believe, you think. Pretend. OK. So from this one moment of surpassing individual and dawning team clarity, this whole group will quicken, will revive. Of course, team members will need some new supportive structures; they’ll require whatever information there is about highly effective connection and collaboration. In particular, they’ll damn well want more moments of clarity, and will be willing to adopt whatever practices create just the right conditions for genuine checking in.

They can’t hold it, probably. And would they spread it around? You have a spike of unease, but then you reassure yourself that the team you are envisioning would of course look for any behavior patterns that would achieve its goals. If there weren’t any, team members would just figure a way to create them. And put them in a book.

But first, one of them must check all the way in. Just one. Who? All this, after one of them has decided that his life, time, and creative output really do matter. But not before.

Interrupting your reverie, your nascent vision, the meeting suddenly stops as people scatter and depart, ceasing to meet rather than finishing their work. Finishing is way different from ceasing, you muse. As you gather yourself, one of the team newbies, together with the team’s most infamous cynic, approach you. You bet they want your take on things. Your help.

So that's the kickoff meeting that we've all been to, and all have wished was better.

What have you done in this situation? Thoughts? Comments?

Software for Your Head 3

The project team kickoff meeting from Software for Your Head by Jim & Michele McCarthy continues.

(from page 7):

The problem with this team is that not one damned person on it is speaking the truth. They don’t really lie, not much; they just focus on the smaller stuff, because the bigger stuff is too scary. So they don’t tell the truth. Not all of it, anyway. Hell, not even the pieces of it they have.

So now what? You lean back and think. Well, your first impulse—to get them going on a shared vision—was wrong. And the second impulse to get someone to say something about the Case of the Missing Vision, or even better, get someone to do something about it, this impulse is also wrong. After all, these people are smart: They know they lack a compelling vision. They don’t need that tidbit from an advisor, or even from one of their own. Who really wants more meetings and retreats in which people don’t speak the truth, even if the topic is vision? More going through the motions won’t help.

Then what? What would be most helpful? You reason, the most helpful thing you could do would be to encourage someone—just one—to examine his1 own personal failure to speak the truth at this meeting.

Now you’ve got your guidance. Anyone smart enough to ask for it gets it. It would be simple but difficult at the same time. You would tell him that he should think, feel, and engage more deeply, and really participate as if it mattered, as if he cared, as if his time counted. You would advise him to examine what he believes in right now, what’s happening in his own heart and mind, and to honestly assess his engagement with his work, values, and team. And then, he would want to seriously question his evident willingness to tolerate— hell, endorse—wrong action. Does he act on his beliefs? Or does he just like to believe in them?

That sounds about right. You wonder what impact this question might have had on teams where you and your teammates expended large amounts of effort for only mediocre results. If just one person on this team who believed in something that the team was neglecting, something important (like, say, the necessity of a team having a shared vision)—if just one person who knew he was doing the wrong thing and yet let himself go on doing it; if he would just answer this question: Why is he willing to accept less than the best possible results, even though he is the one investing his time and effort in this project?

If he answered that and also really saw how this self-betrayal wasted his time, then he couldn’t say he was “too busy at work” to the family anymore. He’d just have to say he was “too wasteful” or “too cowardly” the next time his little girl wanted him to play pretend with her on a Saturday. If he answered that, you figure he’d probably nearly soften up enough to actually engage with the others.

But wait. That’s not the important thing, the talking with others. That’s a trap, a diversion, like fighting for quality instead of creating it. It’s what he does about it, not just what he says about it. They have to balance; what he says has to mostly be like how he acts. But, geez, if he just shared his true thoughts and feelings with the rest of them without preaching or dictating; if he could just tell them what he actually believes about the vision problem, say, and could describe how he hasn’t consistently acted on his beliefs in a way that makes any difference, then he could tell them what he is going to do. He could say, “I’m not ever going forward with another project on a team without a genuine shared vision.” Or, even better, he could say, “I’m going to work on this vision, starting at x time and place, and I’m going to keep working, with whoever wants to work on it with me until I clearly know where we’re taking this product. Will you help?”

Thoughts? Comments? More soon.

Software for Your Head 2

Continuing with the stereotypical project team kickoff meeting from Software for Your Head by Jim & Michele McCarthy.

We left off (from page 5) with:

My, but you’re feeling anthropological today, aren’t you? Is it maybe the presence of the cynics nee idealists? Does it touch you somehow?

Whatever. The scarcity of vision does strike you as interesting, even though it’s not a major topic of conversation (or even a minor one, for that matter). You know that most of these team members would agree that “shared vision” is a vital thing for a team. Why, if you went around the room and asked who was for and who against a shared vision, almost all would vote for it. Some would hedge or go technical on you (define this, what do you mean by that, it depends). But none would vote no. And yet, despite this general conviction, no one seems committed to a particular shared vision, or attempts to achieve one on this team. Of course, catching a shared vision, that’s a tough problem. Who knows where lightning will strike? Who has mapped the rainbow’s end? You note that there are a few who absolutely believe that a shared vision is the vital ingredient for a successful team. Still, no one speaks up about this obvious vacancy.

Instead,while you drift in and out, they plod on through the usual meeting follies, cracking a few minor jokes, interrupting without reason, talking overlong and repetitively, sporadically fighting for control, while somehow meandering through a poorly conceived and prematurely written agenda. Yet all the while the people on this team are somehow numbing themselves to a frightening lack of vision of where it is they are going. You wonder, why doesn’t anyone speak up? Don’t they care? You are willing to bet dollars to dog biscuits that plenty of perfectly good beliefs and values are lying dormant within the members of this team—beliefs and values that would make all the difference, if only they were put into practice.

But, because you are acting as a kind of mentor or coach, and are really troubled by this curious vision oblivion, you decide that the obvious first step is to get them going on a shared vision.

This would help. Short-term, anyway. Now that you’ve decided how to help, you can barely restrain yourself from saying something that might awaken their somnolent vision-building potential. But you say nothing now, and not only because of the difficulty of fighting the others for precious airtime, and of suborning the agenda, but because you intuit that jumping in with that straightforward and inarguable direction (get a vision, people!) might be a long-term mistake. You are having a growing belief that there just may be bigger, tastier fish for you to fry here. No sense settling for little crappies, you think, when some big ole lunker bass might be about.

You are increasing your degree of presence.

The problem, you think, is not merely that they ought to acquire a shared vision. Clearly, they need one, and they aren’t about to get one, not with their present behavior, anyway. And yet, your intuition whispers that the lack of a shared vision is not the most important issue to address. So, trying that on, you think some more. What was that about fish to fry? Teach a man to fish, etc. Yes, that’s it.

You know that some of these team members do believe in having a common purpose. You know the whole team would really catch fire if team members just had this one big, energizing, lightning-striking, all-solving vision! But here, on this team, almost unbelievably, not one person will even say anything about this AWOL vision.

You wonder why would they lie and betray their beliefs. A little more of your dwindling supply of innocence goes poof. There must be some explanation.Maybe the lack of shared vision is the symptom here, not the problem. The problem with this team is that not one damned person on it is speaking the truth. They don’t really lie, not much; they just focus on the smaller stuff, because the bigger stuff is too scary. So they don’t tell the truth. Not all of it, anyway. Hell, not even the pieces of it they have.

So now what?

Continues soon. Sound familiar? Please comment.