High Performance Teams with Dr. Krister Lowe - OrgDev Episode 20

Our podcast this week is with the fabulous Dr Krister Lowe where we delve into achieving team excellence. Krister has dedicated his career to researching and developing teams across the globe, bringing a wealth of insights and expertise to our discussion. 

Join us as we explore the transformative power of the 6 Team Conditions framework, which is built upon the foundation of best-in-class research by renowned social scientists Drs. Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman, and discover how it can elevate your team's performance to new heights.

💼 About our Guest
Dr Krister Lowe
Chief Innovation Officer - 6 Teams Conditions
https://6teamconditions.com/
 / kristerlowe 

Dr. Krister Lowe is the Co-founder and Chief of Innovation at www.6TeamConditions.com a groundbreaking platform focused on optimizing team performance. Renowned as the pioneer of the Team Coaching Zone Podcast at www.TeamCoachingZone.com, Dr. Lowe is also recognized as the Co-Editor of The Practitioner’s Handbook of Team Coaching, a trailblazing resource in the field.

With a background in Organizational Psychology, Dr. Lowe specializes in coaching top-tier and mission-critical teams, offering invaluable insights and strategies for enhanced collaboration and effectiveness. He is deeply committed to training team leaders and coaching practitioners, empowering them to navigate complex organizational landscapes with confidence.

Thanks for listening!

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Our professional and highly skilled consultants focus on delivering engaging, results-focused and flexible solutions that help our clients achieve their business objectives.

Find out more at https://distinction.live/how-we-can-help/

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Transcript

Speaker 0: Hi, and welcome to the Org Dev Podcast. We're really pleased to have doctor Christa Loew join us today. He is cofounder and chief of innovation of 6 Teams Conditions. Now Krista is skilled in many things, but he's especially focused on developing senior leadership teams and mission critical teams. He's a trained social organizational psychologist and brings 20 years of experience in organizational learning and development.

In that time, he's worked with dozens of leading organizations in more than 30 countries, and he's worked across many different sectors, including technology, energy, professional services, financial services, telecoms, and pharmaceuticals. And he also has, throughout his career, developed many different skills, including things like conflict resolution and mediation as well. He has extensive academic qualifications. So, Kristen, make sure I get this right here. You have a a master of arts, a master of philosophy, and a doctor of philosophy in social and organizational psychology from Columbia University.

Got it. Amazing. I guess the question we always ask is, do how do you do all this? Do you have any free time with all

Speaker 1: of this? No. I'm old. That's what it is. It just takes years.

Right? I was in school for a long time. Nice to be here with you, Garren and Danny. Thanks for having me in the Org Dev podcast. You know, I've been a podcaster myself, so it's really always a pleasure to be on the other side where, I'm I get to be the, in the focus or the one being interviewed.

So thanks for having me.

Speaker 0: My introduction to Krista is through a variety of reasons. Number 1, I have listened to a lot of your podcasts. I think you said you've got a 150 in particular. I've listened to the vast majority of them. And And also, I've done the advanced practitioner course for 6 conditions as well.

And so so that was really great. And I was working with your colleague, Ruth Ruth Weatherman, on that as well. So so we're absolutely delighted for you to join us. And we have so many questions, don't we, Danny?

Speaker 2: We do. Absolutely. Lovely to have you here. Thanks for joining us, Christa.

Speaker 1: Thanks for having me. Let's get into it.

Speaker 2: Fab. So we're gonna kick off just with an easy one really. So co founder and chief of innovation at 16 Conditions. What does that involve? What what what's your your role involved?

Speaker 1: Yeah. So, you know, as I kind of telegraphed a little bit before, I I started a podcast in 2015 called the team coaching zone, and I was interviewing people in the field of team coaching, which at that time was kind of like on the edge, the pioneering edge of the coaching field. But, anyways, along the way, in episode 39, I interviewed Doctor. Ruth Wagaman from Harvard, who was one of the, the creators of the 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness Framework and Assessment. And I hosted her for a master class in New York City, and I had been hosting you know, I'm training, like, 5 or 6 different team coaching approaches.

I was hosting master classes with all lot of the guests that I was interviewing on my show. But, we decided to, you know, team up together. That framework and approach hadn't really been brought out to the market. So really starting around 2017, 2018, we started to bring, the 6 conditions framework and team diagnostic survey out. And then that kind of has just spawned you know, lots of, you know, add ons and innovations and moving into lots of different areas.

So I think just like anything, you know, having a business, it's like, it's, you know, it's like a tree. You grow it and it grows and it goes into different directions and different branches. And so, you know, I've always been a kind of person who's, an ideas guy. I love dreaming up ideas, and then I move to action really quickly. Sometimes that's my my great strength, but also my Achilles' heel, which is I oftentimes move ahead too quickly into action.

I don't do enough of the relationship work, building, buy in, and all that. I just wanna get into the action and, you know, maybe I don't do as much due diligence. But, anyways, so as, you know, I think chief of innovation, my job is to do a bit of dreaming, but, hopefully, you know, as a coach and in my work in conflict resolution, I've, I picked up a few skills along the way about how to do that in a way that brings people along, but that that's always my perennial tension. But to get just to your question, so I'm doing all kinds of things, you know, coaching teams, training practitioners, but a lot of it

Speaker 3: is really around you

Speaker 1: know, I think one of the insights I've I've been in,

Speaker 3: you know, small boutique consulting training for over 20 years. And one of the

Speaker 1: things I learned is that it's really hard to differentiate yourself around services. You know, everybody and their brother and cousin and sister, has can do services. And it's oftentimes things like having a podcast or really products is what I think can differentiate you. And so a lot of my focus is really on the product portfolio at 6 Conditions because I think that's a bit of the shiny object that brings people in. I'm not really podcasting anymore.

So I think the how do you attract people to your company is always, you know, is always the marketing and sales question. But, so for me, innovation really now is sent is really focusing around the products because peep there is something about products which are scalable, and they're shiny objects that can help you get into the conversation and whether that leads to just buying a product or a service. Right? You know, it it goes from there.

Speaker 2: Fabulous. And for people that don't know, tell us a bit more about 6 Conditions. So it takes a real scientific research based approach, doesn't it, to to teach?

Speaker 1: Yeah. So you may know, you know, Peter Drucker is always kind of, you know, highlighted as one of the top thinkers of management science, right, in the 20th century. But in the area of teams, there was a man out of Harvard named Richard Hackman. And so Richard Hackman was really, I think, in history is probably the one of the leading, if not the leading thinker on teams and researchers. So he dedicated his life to the study of teams, all kinds.

He wrote some great books and you know, which I came across in graduate school. When I was in graduate school, I wasn't focusing on teams. I was more into conflict resolution and change management, but I had to take some classes. So I was aware of his work. And it wasn't until I did the, you know, team coaching zone podcast and met Ruth who is his pro you know, his protege and student became his partner that I really got into this more.

But 6 Conditions, basically, there's a group of folks at Harvard, MIT, and Yale, and they were interested in asking, you know, what is it that really drives effectiveness in teams? And so they kinda looked at everything. And what they found was that while behaviors that we oftentimes think of, like trust and communication and conflict resolution and the like, while those play a role, what they found was actually trying to do direct intervention around trust building, for example, or psychological safety doesn't tend to work that well. And what they found was actually what what's a better, you know, place to put your energy is in the structural drivers or the what we call the design conditions that drive the behaviors in the first place. And so I think that's a really powerful framework.

I think sometimes we yeah. At 6 Conditions, we get stereotyped as not caring about relationships and people and behavior, and we totally do. But I think what our research says is that that is a lever, but there's an even bigger lever, which is really around the design conditions. And in this framework, there are 6 conditions. These are very designable things that you can work around a leader and a team can work around that really puts in place think of it as like, really a healthy ecosystem.

So if you wanna grow a you know, like, creating a great team, you can't create a great team. What you can do is create the conditions where a great team emerges. And so it's kind of like a garden. You can't force plants to grow, but what you can do is make sure you've got really fertile soil, sun, water, get the weeds out of the way. And so I think that's really a good metaphor that captures 6 conditions.

So helping a team get really clear on who its stakeholders are, what is really their unique purpose, What talent do they need on the bus to get to where they're going? How about the ways of working, the work itself? What's the best way to approach that, and what kind of coaching and support do they have? These are some of the things that we really help teams think through. And what you find is a lot of teams are struggling because there's there's a lack of alignment around design.

You know, teams are just put together. Leaders get teams or inherit teams or take over teams. And, you know, I think in the absence of really good training and and design around how to set up a team well for success, we then resort to more behavioral interventions and use of authority to try to keep the the the train on the track. So

Speaker 0: yeah. You're sis nodding profusely there. Yeah. Because I I think I think and and sort of building on that, one of one of the things really stood out for me was sort of Ruth's principles about the amount of time that leadership put into sort of setting up and leading a team. So I think she came up with sort of the equation of 60, 30, 10, which is I think you talk about, you know, we just throw teams together and expect them to work because people get on and we'll create some social interaction.

That should be enough, and the task should be clear enough. But that 60% is about the leader actually sitting down before the team is given life and and doing the design and making sure that those things are right before they get started. Is that right?

Speaker 1: Yeah. But also, you know, leaders oftentimes don't have the luxury to design the team. They oftentimes inherit a team. So I think design in an ideal world would be, yeah, we can sit down and design a team well. And what we say, Put 60% of your energy into that, then 30% into launching and getting the team moving with enough momentum to break through the forces that are gonna try to keep it on the ground.

And then the final 10% is really around coaching. But, you know, in a pure sense, yes, that would be ideal. More often than not, we find teams and leaders already existing, but it doesn't mean that leader and the team with the support maybe of a coach who has the skills around this can help them, you know, relaunch or redesign themselves or just take a look at their design to see what what do they have in place that's working well, but what are some of the missing pieces that might really create some, acceleration or, you know, some breakthroughs?

Speaker 0: Yeah. So I guess, what are the components there, Ophir? So you've got, like, the essentials, the enablers, and and task process. It's just a little bit more detail with that because I think it's really interesting principles there, aren't there?

Speaker 1: If if the listeners are familiar, you know, the 6 conditions model is an input, throughput, output model. This is like an open systems theory. And the whole idea is, you know, just kinda like you as a human being, you take in inputs from the environment, food, air, water. You process that. That gives you energy.

And then, you know, there's the other end. And then that leaves your system in variety of ways. Right? And so in like manner, teams are open systems. So they take in inputs.

They process that. Those inputs might be resources or other things, or in this case, might be what we will call the design conditions. That sets them up then to kind of hopefully do good work and then generate some kind of impact. So in the 6 conditions model, you can think of it as the inputs are the 6 design conditions. So what we find is that if you put in place these 6 things and they're broken up into 2 subsets, the essential conditions which are, are you a real team?

Do you have a compelling purpose? And do you have the right people in terms of the talent

Speaker 3: and the diversity of

Speaker 1: perspectives to do the work? That's, like, the basic building blocks. Those are 3 really essential ones. And then we have 3 additional ones called, Those are 3 really essential ones. And then we have 3 additional ones called the enablers.

These are like accelerants. And that's really around the design of the work. What is the work and what are our norms and ways of working? Do we have the support from the organization that we need? And finally, team coaching is the last one.

Those are the inputs. So what we find is when you when teams have good clarity as much as possible, not perfection, but as much as you can, around those 6 things that then drives the throughputs. And in our framework, this is where the behaviors come in. It's around motivation, it's around adjusting the strategies that the team is working on. And then the third is really around learning and leveraging the talent.

You may have been in teams where you have these rock stars with amazing talent, but they are unable to leverage that talent. They're like driving in 1st gear because it's not safe or they're not aligned or for whatever reason they're struggling around authority issues. So the middle of our model really focuses on these we call these the key task processes, but these are basically the behave observable behaviors that, you know, leaders and coaches and teams can can work on. Now interestingly, we have found that in a team cycle, whether it's 3 months, 6 months, a year, teams are receptive to different kind of interventions depending on where they are in their cycle. So at the beginning of a cycle, they're open to what we call motivational coaching, so coaching around motivation, purpose, where they're going.

At midpoints, teams become very open to coaching around strategy because they've covered some ground. They see what's working, what's not. They're usually willing then to make some adjustments in how they're approaching the work. And as you get towards the end of a cycle, teams become much more open to after action reviews, retrospectives, trying to harvest lessons learned. And then ultimately those things, you know, lead to the the, impacts.

Right? And we have 3 measures in the way we measure team effectiveness. So, you know, is the is the team performing to meeting or exceeding stakeholder expectations? Are they becoming better over time? So are they increasing in agility?

And then 3rd, are the individual members growing? So we have a couple measures there. But, you know, we have we have found in our research that about 80% of these outcome measures are predicted by those 6 conditions. So they're very predictive. And, you know, because I came up in team coaching, and in coaching, one of the things I found interesting in 6 conditions, what we show is that actually if a team is poorly designed on the first five conditions, the 6th condition team coaching doesn't do much.

So there is a sense that in order to be coachable as a team, you need to have some things in place. You need to kind of clear on who you are, where you're going, what you're working on, how you're gonna work together. If you have done that basic design work, we call that design work, then coaching can really act as a catalyst. But if those things are not in place, you know, the coaching really just doesn't have much impact.

Speaker 0: Fascinating. I'm learning. Yep. This is how you get I I guess what it does as well is it adds a real kind of precision so you know where to focus the intervention. You know, teams only have a limited development budget or limited amounts of time to do design.

So I guess what this is proposing is, look, rather than sort of chaining wholeheartedly or followed sort of typical kind of approaches to team development, you can be very precise in where to focus your efforts.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And, you know, I don't have the luxury oftentimes to work on all 6 conditions with teams. It's usually 2 or 3, but that's usually enough to help create the alignment. A lot of times it's around the purpose and it's around the work itself and the ways of working. I think a lot of times we have just inherited ways of working that are very, you know, 20th century still.

And, there's a lot of creative ways we can be working together, way we prioritize work, the way we team up. You know, how do we use the talent in our team? Maybe tasks need 1 person or 2 or 3 or 6 or 7, visualizing work, you know, using some of the agile principles and practice. There's a lot of creative ways to work more effectively, but a lot of teams are just, you know, haven't really thought about this. It's not their space.

They don't tend to think about that and wake up every day to think about smarter ways of working. And then that also, you know, aligns with leaders. You know, one of the big things that we get called in is because being a team leader is hard. Most team leaders have no training in how to lead teams. So much of leadership development is focused on competency models and individual, you know, individual characteristics of leaders that we get called in a lot because leading teams is hard and leaders don't know how to do it.

And so, I think this goes a long way as well to help leaders have something more than just charisma and authority in terms of how to lead their teams well.

Speaker 2: Brilliant. So what advice would you give to a leader who's looking at their team thinking this team isn't as effective as I'd like it to be? Where would where would where would they start? Where would what first steps would you suggest they take?

Speaker 1: Yeah. I think it's always, it's not rocket science. Right? But, again, because most leader haven't leaders haven't had anything, they will try harder rather than smarter. So I think the whole idea is Richard Hackman in one of his books called Leading Teams, he studied flight crews.

And this was, you know, during a period where there were there was a number of high profile air accidents in the United States. And so the Federal Aviation Association had Richard Hackman come to study. What was it that was, you know, leading to, you know, the errors? And they were usually human errors. I mean, there were some technical things, but the technical issues are rare.

There were tend to be more. And so he talked about 2 ways that you can land a plane. One of them is about 30 to 40 minutes out. There's a sequence of things that get put in place that basically allows the plane to land itself. That's how most planes land and it's it's verily much human involvement because the conditions have been put in place for the approach for everything to kind of go through a series of sequences.

Think of that as the metaphor putting in place the last minute kind of, you know, putting out the

Speaker 3: fires or

Speaker 1: trying to just figure out last minute kind of, you know, putting out the fires or trying to just figure out how to get the plane down on the ground. So I think this is a good metaphor for leaders that by slowing down a little bit just to really create clarity and alignment in your team, you will prevent a lot of the issues that end up soaking up your time when you have a poorly designed and aligned team. And it's really just around I think a lot of it is around clarity. It's around prioritization. Most teams have an explosion.

I I work with one team in IT, and they had 300 software projects going on. It was a huge team of 500 people that they were leading, but, you know, it was really clear that, you know, that whole principle of the 80 20 rule, you know, we should be treating the 20% of the project product projects that do 80% of the lifting. We should be treating those differently than the 80% of the projects that are only doing 20% of the lifting. But we tend to, in teams, treat everything equally. And so I think prioritization, focus, a lot of those things are really missing.

As with individuals, they tend to be missing in teams as well. So if you help teams get really laser focused, you know, it just creates a lot of alignment and then, you know, people have a sense of why, how they fit in, and, you know, if they can have some involvement in that, you know, then, you know, as soon as the gates open, the team really can move forward.

Speaker 0: Yeah. And, obviously, this this tool is done as a diagnostic. As you're starting to sort of build up quite a lot of data, what what kind of things you noticed? What's the data telling you about teams in general? What what do teams sort of generally tend to struggle on?

Speaker 1: Yeah. A couple of things. So I think, you know, there's like I I think of there's like 2 kinds of teams. We call sometimes teams 50, a 100 people, we call them you know, like, a leader might have a 100 people in their team, say, Oh, that's my team. So, yes, on one level, any group of people that's working together, we could call a team.

But in 6 conditions, we kind of say just calling a team a team doesn't make it so. That actually a team is a social technology that might be the right tool to use, given what you're trying to accomplish. So the first thing is, our first condition is, is this a real team? Meaning, is there a need in the organization or community or system that the team's a part of that actually demands a level of interdependent collaboration that requires a team. Because if a piece of work is better done by individuals working separately and then you just add that up, those those individual efforts up, then trying to get a team to be a team, is is probably not the right idea.

So I think the first thing we notice with a lot of teams is that they're not oftentimes clear about what they're interdependent around. And because most of us grew up in organizations where it was the group with the manager and there were individuals who each had their roles and sometimes there might be some interdependence, but a lot of times we're working autonomously. You know, I think, but a lot of times, we're working autonomously. You know, I think, that's that's part of it is getting really clear around, what is the thing we need to do together that demands a team and getting really clear about that. It's striking you talk to a lot of teams.

They don't they're not customer centric in the sense of really being clear on who their stakeholders are. They're probably not outward facing enough because they're if the inside of the team is not aligned, it's hard for them to focus on the value creation that comes by creating value within for stakeholders. So I think the first thing we we try to really help teams get over, which is a trip wire, is do you need to be a team? And if so, why and who are your stakeholders? And getting really laser focused on that.

That then usually leads to purpose. Now in our team diagnostic survey, when we measure this in teams, there are 3 sub dimensions of purpose. 1 is challenge, is the team being appropriately challenged, not too challenged or under challenged? 2nd is, is the team does the team have clarity about their purpose? And then 3rd, is the purpose actually, does it matter to the lives of stakeholders?

We find over and over again a massive pattern, and this is particularly true with leadership teams, that they will rate their teams as being consequential, that what they need to do together matters, but they're they rate clarity low. So it's really interesting. So this is, you know, it's kind of like the interdependence thing as well. It's, you know, there's a lack of specificity or refinement or focusing that we tend to do in teams. And, you know, purpose is one of them.

We know that what we're trying to accomplish matters in the world, but we're not really laser focused on what that exactly is or what the purpose is. And so I think those 2 things and then the final one is really prioritization of work. What are what is the work actually that we need to do, and what's the best way to approach the work in terms of use use of the talent, but also methods of designing work and visualizing work and using sprints and other kinds of techniques to really accelerate, have the team be accountable, and find creative ways of working, especially now in these, you know, more hybrid types of environments. Right? So after the pandemic, people working virtually a lot.

Right? So

Speaker 2: That was a question we were gonna ask you in the kind of post COVID, post pandemic world where people are working more remotely and hybrid. Does that change anything about the 6 Conditions, or are there any elements that are kind of taking more or less importance in our

Speaker 1: UO framework? I think what's really interesting about 6 Conditions is we have shown that it can apply to a team that's only gonna be working together for 1 or 2 hours. So by actually, in the case of pediatric surgery teams, I'll come around to you to answer your question. But that actually having a team just for 8 minutes or less talk about how they're going to approach the work and kind of cover some of the six conditions leads to less errors in pediatric surgeries, in flight crews. It's been used in all kinds and then teams that go on for months or even years.

So in terms of time, we have found that the six conditions, you know, is adaptable depending on the time and speed of the team that you're part of. You just may not go as deep. You know what I mean? If you're a team that's gonna be only working together for 2 or 3 hours, you might only need 5 to 10 minutes to design how you're gonna work together. But then also in terms of context, right, teams work in a lot of settings.

They work in offices. They work in field locations. Right? And now virtually. So I think, you know, human beings, regardless of the context they're in, have some fundamental needs, which is, you know, some basic questions of why are we working on what we're working?

Where are we headed? People wanna have a sense of direction. They wanna have a sense of what it is that we're focusing on in terms of the work, and that that's those are smart choices, that we've made some thoughtful choices. I'm not just doing busy work. And that maybe some thought has been put into about, when when do I need to deliver this?

Do I need to work with some other team members on this? Are there you know? So I think that regardless of whether that's being done in person, fully virtually, or hybrid, those things still are needed in order for human beings to flourish at work. Right? And so I do think that conditions apply because it is, again, an input, throughput, output model.

You know, maybe when AI comes in, we'll see how much that disrupts how we approach work. But, you know, it's interesting. I think work, is constantly changing, but there are some probably some fundamental underlying principles that, you know, are timeless. And, I don't think human beings after 1,000,000 years of evolution are gonna change. We're pretty changing pretty quickly, but I think we're gonna still need to be you know, involved in the visioning of the work and determining what to work on and how to approach it with or without technology.

Speaker 0: So you talk about this being used for senior leadership teams. And, obviously, the challenge of being a senior leader is you're kind of you have 2 teams. You have your senior leadership team in which you're part of, and then you've got your own. And that creates all sorts of different kind of challenges in itself. When when you do actually sit in and and observe senior leadership team meetings, they're often quite boring.

Speaker 1: They're Yeah. It's pretty striking.

Speaker 0: Pretty they they they're actually doing the most interesting work in the organization, but they're kinda status updates and whatnot as well. And and often, it is because the sexy stuff is all in people's day jobs.

Speaker 1: Exactly.

Speaker 0: And therefore, the team doesn't necessarily have a task to attack. Yeah.

Speaker 1: I have a good story for you about that.

Speaker 0: Please. Yeah. Because I I think it's something we really need to sort of recognize about why. Like, why should this team that's focused on the most interesting thing ever have the most boring meetings?

Speaker 1: Right. Right. So I was working with, like, one of the large global banks, and it was the CEO and top team of a of a global bank. There are 15 people on the top team, which is a whole which is an interesting story in and of itself. These these were people who led a 100,000 people, $34,000,000,000 a year in revenue.

So It's like a massive global organization. Each individual leader by themselves was a very powerful individual that had a large budgets and large numbers of people reporting to them. But strikingly, when they came together, because there's an absence of a lateral authority, their lead leaders at that level tend to be good at going up and down with authority, but not laterally. So in so, you know, one of my colleagues said that when they get to as individuals, they're like lions, when you put them together they like fold up like lawn chairs, is what one of my colleagues said. It's really true.

So I went into Observe one of their team meetings and, they did the classic mistake, which was 15 people, 90 minute meeting. Everybody was supposed to get 7 minutes or something where they got to give an update from their area. Now this interestingly is the least interdependent work a leadership team can do is just give updates. But because, again, a lot of teams don't know what to do differently, that's they just default to that, and updates are important. But, anyways, what we noticed was the first three people took up the first 45 to 50 minutes of the meeting.

All the best thinking and, you know, problem solving and and consultation came for those People started to get up to go to the bathroom, to get some coffee, to get on the People started to get up to go to the bathroom, to get some coffee, to get on the phone, to do things. So the attention was gone after 45 minutes. And then the rest of the, you know, the time the meeting, you know, everybody else, you know, if you were later in the meeting, you you just really didn't get much out of it. So that is a classic thing we see over and over again. And and, you know, our research shows that only about 20% of senior teams are really effective teams.

Almost half of the teams in our database are poor performing because, like you said, being on a senior team, yeah, I have my day to day responsibilities of leading my team and multiple teams maybe, but then also to be a part of this team. And so if it's not really clear what we need to be doing together at this level, then I'm just gonna show up for these once a week or every 2 week or whatever the frequency meetings are, and get back to business. Right? And so that's something we we have to help a lot of. You know, leadership teams become real teams, because most are not real teams, they're groups.

And that might be okay, but I think unfortunately in the world we're living in things are just too dynamic, and there's a need for collective leadership that goes beyond just the the cult of the CEO or the the top leader. Right?

Speaker 0: So so you're that frustrated chair sort of senior leader who's looking out at your team, and they're just not responding. There's no good dialogue. There's nothing where where would they kind of begin? Is it is it is it with design? And and is the is the challenge with the sort of the chair of the meeting to help work that through?

What what are their options?

Speaker 1: So I I think, you know, there's there's lots of options. I mean, yeah, typically, you know, with a senior team, we we help them think through some of the we use data and research and help them understand what does the research say about top teams. And so we do a little bit of that and share with them some, you know, the trip wires of what we notice about teams around, you know, lack of interdependence or around purpose. Or, you know, a classic one, this thing around having 15 people on the team because in the desire to be inclusive, everybody and and their relative all their relatives are on the team, but they're not of equal decision making authority. And that's great for inclusion, but terrible for efficiency.

So we we kind of start with, here are some classic tripwires and pitfalls that leadership teams get in. Now let's see where you guys are against that. So when we can, we usually do interviews and when we can, we'll do the team diagnostic survey. So we actually have some data and that leads oftentimes to a really rich discussion around beyond just information sharing, what else do we need to be doing as a leadership team? Is it decision making?

Are there some mission critical things that we actually need to do together? A lot of times, it's around culture and engagement that we need to be doing together that we're not visible. Most senior teams are black boxes to the organization. And so and, again, it's not surprising because they themselves really don't know oftentimes what they should be doing. So yeah.

Yeah, so these are the kinds of things. We get into some rich dialogue with them. And I think it really the the thing is, what are the 1 or 2 things that the stakeholders need this leadership team to do that only they can do? And, if they don't do, it's gonna be a a a really missed opportunity. I was working with a innovative health care organization and helped them navigate, the moving from the founder to a new CEO.

And so this leader started off this is in 2023. At the beginning of the year, 7 people on her leadership team. She wanted to hit the ground running. She actually hit the ground running too fast. But as we slowed her down a little bit, but wanted to get her team aligned.

And what was interesting is we had 7 leaders. Each were in some of them had been around for years. Some were new. But they weren't a team. They were each really focused on their pillar, on their silo.

It was the typical, you know, weekly leadership team meeting updates. The the CEO was exasperated because she just felt like she was always driving everything, and everybody was just sitting there just waiting for her to orchestrate things. And so through a series of 3 half day sessions every 6 weeks, I would meet with the team and they started to really grapple with questions around, are there smarter ways where we could do information updates so we could spend more time on decision making or having strategic conversations? We did some work like that. And with this one team, I actually took them out in the where we were doing the coaching session outside.

It was a beautiful day. We did a walking team coaching session. And during that walk, we really grappled with what is it that our organization needs of us at this time in the life of the organization. And, you know, the Chinese have the saying that the eye sees everything except itself. And what was you know, just, in hiding in plain sight was the fact that they had just gone through a massive leadership transition.

It was a turbulent transition, so a lot of people were shell shocked and kind of traumatized by the history. They had spent the previous year, the senior team, doing mostly a strategic road mapping exercise for a pivoting of the organization. But it became really clear to them that, actually, you know what? The biggest challenge we have is that our people are not engaged. They're not feeling safe.

They don't know where we're going. And it was kind of just painfully obvious. But the fact that nobody owns that, Who owns engaging the staff as a whole and getting them on board? You know, that kind of falls on every individual leader. But so it just became really clear that for them, before they could really move to a much more outward facing customer, putting this strategy in place, they were gonna spend 6 months really working with the staff, not delegating this to some task force, but they themselves leading a whole engagement piece around really communicate, showing up as a leadership team with a clear vision, clarity involving the team members.

Instead of them micromanaging the roadmap, they wanted to get the team involved, and that became the focus of our work. So that was interesting for them because I think none of them could have guessed at the beginning of the team coaching journey that that's what they would end up focusing on. Because, again, that wasn't in anybody's individual job description or remit. So I think that's kind of one of the things we can really help leadership teams do is to step back a little bit, look at the forest and say, you know, what's coming over the horizon? Who are your most critical stakeholders now?

And, you know, and usually that inquiry leads to, you know, insights and discoveries of some shifts that need to be made. So Fascinating.

Speaker 0: I have so many questions. Okay. I was gonna say Kate, do you wanna go with your question first?

Speaker 2: I was gonna say that really resonates for me, and I think for a lot of the organizations

Speaker 3: and teams we work in

Speaker 2: I think that would that would that would really resonate for them. So one question I had, so often we'll talk to senior leaders who who come in and they inherit a new team.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: You know, they'll often be drawn to bringing in new team members and replacing kind of the people there. What's your what does the research say about kind of established teams and bringing in fresh blood versus just keeping

Speaker 1: going? That's a good question. I I don't know the research op that's not my that's not my area of specialty, so I I can't speak off the, of a basis of knowledge about what the research suggests around that. I can understand why when leaders come in, they wanna bring in some new people because sometimes, you know, more often than not, it's especially when you get higher and higher in the organization, like, you know, people are not welcoming you with open arms. Right?

You usually get a little bit of a honeymoon. So if you don't transition in well and I've seen it. You know, usually, it's done poorly. Lack of support, lack of good like, this team design and coaching work, I have one of those cases right now. A year later, after transitioning a new leader in, it's, you know, it's requiring a lot of surgery, you know, the kind of situation.

So I I understand why organizations have this pattern of just cleaning out the leadership because there's just too many entrenched things and it's really hard to create change. I would think that maybe a balance of the 2, like in this case of the Innovative Healthcare, the CEO had a few stalwarts who had been around I think 4 members 3 members or 4, and then 3 new ones came on. So that balance of old and new, that also can create some tensions. But in some ways, break I think the bigger issue is how do you break up the enculturated team that exists so that you can kind of relaunch it? So, I I would think it'd be a hybrid of a bit of the old and the new, but, I guess if I had to choose, I would probably wanna go more with the new team then because you'd have a bit more carte blanche, but then a lot of learning is lost.

Right? Yeah. So, I guess it depends on the type of business you're in and, you know

Speaker 0: Picked up a point now that, the organizations are very bad at onboarding senior leaders. Yeah. It's they put a lot of effort into inducting people, but the whole onboarding and, you know, really helping them integrate well. They don't necessarily do it in a very structured way. Another dimension I was interested to hear your view on is that sort of senior leadership and kind of like the the the middles as well, that kind of integration.

Again, because we often live in or work in hierarchical organizations, that's a critical piece there, isn't it? How how do you integrate those two areas well, and what are some of the mistakes you maybe see the organizations make or or see do well?

Speaker 1: Well, I think you're right. It's the mid level leaders is where, you know, they're sitting in the middle of the sandwich, so they can, you know, go up and down. So they're really critical for execution. Right? In an ideal world, we would really, align the top team, get them really flowing.

So, like, in the case of the health care organization I mentioned, like, after 4 months of working with them, they were, like, a real leadership team that was really clear on who they were as individuals, you know, what their priorities were as individuals, but also as a collective. That, I think, is, like, kind of putting in place, you know, to keep using this idea of conditions. Now an environment and a set of conditions are in place for them to scale and start projecting themselves out on the stakeholder context, including alignment of their teams and cascading that down. So I think in some of the best cases we have, that's kind of how it's flowed from starting with that team, but then flowing down to the next level. And, and then you can bring that cadre of the top 40 or 50, 100, whatever the size is, leaders of that that system in a team of teams kind of way.

Because then that starts to get exciting where if all those individual units are pretty well aligned, then you can start to look at the cross the cross team and division collaboration and and see where there's, you know, opportunities there. So I think that to me is still the exciting the most exciting work in the team space is not the one off teams, but it's the multiple teams and getting them in the room together.

Speaker 0: Get it wrong. The consequences for organizations are huge, aren't they?

Speaker 1: But to answer your question, you said, you know, where they they kinda get it wrong. Like so we get brought in a lot on transitions, where transitions of leaders haven't gone well. Also, when change management like, mission critical teams or large change projects are derailing. And the classic thing we see there is, you know, the big consulting firms get brought in, big ticket, you know, projects. And then usually, it's not the technology or the technical part of the change that's the problem.

It's usually the people side, and then that's when we get brought in. And it's usually after they're it's late in the game and, you know, they're way behind scope and budget and all that, and then it's emergency work. So we're actually working with 1 of the big four consulting firms now on a research study, looking at the role of team effectiveness in large scale in in transformations, in organizational transformations, because it's not something that is really thought about as being a really super critical factor upfront. It's kind of a nice to have. It's that's HR and OD.

You know, they're supposed to deal with that, but it's not considered as a really critical element. But as an organizational psychologist, I look at organizations as social technical systems. Right? There's a technical side to the work, and there's a social side. And we've always privileged the technical side, and then we wonder why we get into so much trouble because, again, we're not treating the social side as important as the technical side.

And that always leads to all these issues, right? We just throw a leader in and because they're a leader, they're expected to lead well. Well, leading people is becoming increasingly difficult, right? People are very empowered. They've got social media.

You know, they're very yeah. It's not not easy to lead people.

Speaker 0: And just looking at your journey so far Yeah. Your your background in, like, conflict resolution and mediation, how how's that informed your practice?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, like, most people I've had you know, I'd spent a good decade doing conflict resolution. A lot of it was in international organizations, like in the United Nations. I was all over the world working with teams, as to was my shifting over to team coaching because I was doing a lot of repair work and a lot of damage, you know, doing trainings, work shops, mediations when it got really bad, where teams you know, in the United Nations system or in these international organizations, you have a lot of smart people, but they're working in really challenging context, a lot of diversity. There's a lot going on.

So this the conditions are right for conflict. So we go back to the whole idea of conditions. And, again, in the absence of good training and knowing how to lead teams and lead systems, we tend to default to authority. So a lot of leaders will just kind of default to, this is what we're gonna do because I'm the leader, and if you don't like it then And that leads to all kinds of behaviors that just really you know, I I saw things in those organizations that I I dare not even speak about. And nobody would go into an organization ending up behaving the way they behave, but if you're in an environment and this is, you know, for anybody who's been in war torn or post conflict settings, human beings are a function of their environment.

And so you put people in certain environments, you will get behaviors that none of us could have ever imagined committing or certain kinds of acts. And so, anyway, so I saw that, you know, early on just that we were doing a lot of this damage control, truss, super broken. Things were left to fester for a year, 2, 3 years sometimes. So it was like really miracle work trying to repair that. And at some point after you know, working with hundreds of groups and, you know, training people, I just saw the limit limits, first of all, of training.

The training people in conflict resolution skills when they're already broken is kinda too late. Conflict resolution skills are useful if you have a generally healthy system, and then those kind of things can help keep the train from going off the tracks. But a lot of times, it's like the train would go off the problems. We could alleviate some of the pressure problems, we could alleviate some of the pressure. But, you know, more often than not, you know, it was kind of dead on arrival.

And so that's why I shifted a bit more to how do we get proactive around setting teams and leaders up well, So, a, they don't have to go down these really dark I mean, I just saw people's career, really great people whose careers were just destroyed on the rocks of organizational dysfunction. And it was really just sad because a lot of mission driven people trying to do good work and not being able to fulfill their purpose. So so I do think this whole thing around setting people up to succeed and putting in that environment is just so worth the effort. It's so much easier to do it before than after because if you do it late, then you're trying you're having to rebuild trust, which is hard.

Speaker 0: Prevention is always better than cure, isn't it?

Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah. But, you know, we won't spend on those things until we get into trouble, right? So that's true. You know, we're still in that case where it's like your health. You tend not to focus on it until, you know, your blood pressure's through the roof or you have other more serious issues.

Speaker 2: So if you look at all the work that you're doing at the moment, what what really lights you up? What do you enjoy doing most? What's a really good day for you?

Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, it's interesting because I've been in, like, kind of the trenches for 20 years just working with teams. You know, I think that's a younger person's game a bit more just I don't have the I don't think I have the stamina anymore. Because, again, like, when I'm I generally don't get healthy teams or leaders that have transitioned well. So it's usually a lot of psychological pressure, you know, and that kinda gets displaced on us, and we try to put it back and, you know, not take on the client's work.

But there's a lot of pressure and stress. I used to travel a lot. And so, I'm still doing a a number of I have a number of teams that I'm working with, and, I still enjoy that. Although, I think just sustainability wise, I'm probably on the tail end of that. What's got me excited more is the innovation.

Right? So thinking about the products, team of teams, some of those things, just really the learning. You know, like, the pandemic forced us to how do we actually do team coaching in a 100% virtual environment where you can't do all day long. I know some people still do this crazy, like all day long meetings online. Like, we would never do anything longer than 90 minutes or 2 hours online.

So we had to learn, how do we do this in 45 minutes or an hour or 90 minute sessions rather than half day, one day, 2 day blocks? I think the model pre COVID was, let's go do a 2 day off-site, and then we'll come in and observe some of your meetings, and we'll do a few team coaching sessions here and there. And, you know, that model still can work, but I think during the pandemic, we just we had to really reinvent of how do we do this in a way that's, you know, faster. So, anyways, I enjoy those kind of challenges around nothing is staying static. Everything is dynamic and you know, but I do think especially I I noticed a lot that people are really struggling post COVID with they're trying to get people back in the office, but the offices are like ghost towns, at least here in the United States.

They're trying to get everybody to come in 3 days a week, but something got lost. And so a lot of the clients that I go into, they're struggling around that. And I think this is where being part of a team really could meet a lot of psychosocial needs. That if you're part of a team, you're doing meaningful work, you're connecting, you can get a lot of your psychosocial needs met. And so I do think there is something interesting around how do we crack the nut of helping people stay engaged in these new work environments as we're experimenting with how to design, you know, workplaces for the world that we're we're living in now.

Speaker 2: It's real intentionality, isn't it, about the purpose of people coming into the office rather than just an arbitrary 2 days a week or 3 days a week? And then people are like, why are we doing this? So what's the biggest lesson

Speaker 3: do you think you're taking away from your if you look back at your your all your work, what's the biggest lesson you take forward?

Speaker 0: Is he allowed more than one lesson? I think you've earned the right stuff to to Shaf T.

Speaker 1: 2 or 3. You know, I'm in my early fifties now, and, you know, I always like to say it only it only feels like yesterday that 20 years ago I was a graduate student, and, like, the years have gone by like a dream. And maybe that's a function

Speaker 3: of age that your perception of time really changes. But, you know,

Speaker 1: I think at the end of the day, really, people people. But we do spend probably sometimes more time at work than we do even with our at home with our loved ones. And so I do think, you know, relationships at work are huge. Nothing oftentimes compares to being part of a great team. And so I think for me, if if anything, I've just seen just a lot of life lost by not really taking the social side of work seriously, and designing these things well, and equipping leaders with the tools.

And, again, it's not blaming anyone, I just think we are learning and moving along. But most organizations in the 20th century were the command and control corporate model, which really worked well in at a certain time to scale things. But now things are more dynamic and turbulent, and I think we we need a different form of social organization, and I think that's evolving. But yeah. So I would say, really, it's around for me around organizational design.

And if we can be smart around design of work and around people and the work and technology, you know, it it can be a really peak experience rather than some of those horror stories that I shared with you. And I think that's that's probably the big lesson. But, you know, right now at 6 Conditions, we have a big focus on team leaders because after training, we've trained like 2,000 team coaches or something in the last 5, 6 years, and what we learned was training team coaches is great. We love to do that. It's really meaningful.

But they the average team coach only reaches a couple of teams a year. And so and there are millions and millions of tens of millions of teams and leaders that are just not gonna have the budgets to have a team coach. And so I think a big insight that has come for me is most organizations are still leader led. We have a lot you know, there there are self managing teams and other kind of innovative forms of team organization, but still team leaders are still dominant. That for me is a big one because we are still developmentally, emotionally, and cognitively highly dependent on authority.

If we could really equip team leaders with the knowledge and skill, how to design launch and coach their teams well, I think that could be a game changer if we could do that seriously because that's I think that's a massive gap that really feels missing to me. And leadership development is the largest it takes up the most budget for learning and development. It's the most studied social science topic. Tens of hundreds of thousands of articles, books, and yet the state of leadership is pretty sorry from a global interstate level, from the nations down to companies. So leadership is in bad shape, and I think a lot of that is still our dependence on the heroic individual leader.

And, boy, if anything, that is really an outworn model. And, yeah, so I think if we could really crack the nut around that, that would be I think that's where the opportunity lies. So So

Speaker 0: And one question we always ask every guest that we have on there is, obviously, you've done an extensive amount of academic study and Mhmm. Countless, sort of psychometric tools as well. But how do you sort of currently invest in your own learning and development? What do you do?

Speaker 1: Well, I would say, you know, my secret weapon was the podcast when I used to podcast because, you know, I think it's interesting, like, how we consume information has evolved. Right? It used to be print, and then it was audio, and then it's video, and now it's memes. Right? It's like 5 words and an image on Twitter for x is like how we take in information now.

So but for me, the secret weapon for me was podcasting because I was doing an episode every week at that time in 2015. And so every week I would interview a peer or mentor or somebody of that stature, and I would do the interview and I'd learn there. Then I'd go back and listen and edit the episode, and I would listen to it again. And the editing and stopping and pausing you know, I was thinking. So I would go over an episode 3 or 4 times before I released it.

And just the space of reflection for me was the, you know, was the wicked learning edge because then I would take a couple of concepts and I'd go immediately apply them next week, throw spaghetti at the wall and see what worked. And doing that, I did 50 episodes my 1st year and I slowed down a little bit in the subsequent years. And then, you know, it was that kind of relationship building. It was really a reflection. Right now, I mean, if I could if I if I took my own medicine, I should start podcasting again because that's the thing that I think really accelerated my learning the most and probably was the best business decision I ever made.

I didn't do my podcast with a clear business idea in mind. I just wanted to learn about team coaching, and I was excited about podcasting as well. But that led to building relationships. It indirectly built business. You know, I discovered 16 conditions.

And so I think there is something about creating content and knowledge that is the best learning. Right? Because being a content creator rather than a consumer of content, because we all consume a ton of content, but there is something about the act of creation that I think is is the thing. I I think I get my most now from my the teams that I'm a part of, that I'm a member of, and when we meet and we have in really in person soaking time for a day or 2 is when I think the really good ideas come out. And that's hard to get on just 1 hour Zoom calls.

Right? So I I to answer your question there. But, yeah, for me, historically, the podcast was the game changer in my life and was the best learning edge. Wonderful. If I could have gone back and told my early career self, do that 10 years earlier, but, you know, get going out and getting 10 years of experience in the field and dealing with all these problems and teams struggling was a lot of good context.

So when I was doing the podcasting, I had a lot of context against which to, so it's it's a combination of the practice, but these spaces of reflection. Right?

Speaker 0: I wanna say a huge thank you, Krista. I have really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Really enjoyed it.

It's I've Yeah. I've learned so much. I I Danny and I was sort of thinking about some takeaways. And I I think, my sort of three takeaways from this. One of the things that really stood out is sort of the type of development for the team in terms of where it is in its life.

So at the beginning, looking at motivation, at the midpoint, sort of the strategy, and the towards the endpoint. It's like those are the retrospectives and and the learning elements there as well. I love the sort of the idea of lions into lawn chairs and how senior leaders are very good up and down, but they don't have a lack of capability. So that really resonates as well. And and there was that, the Chinese say that you came up with, which I thought was really insightful, which is the ice is everything except itself.

And I think that's a really

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 0: Useful way of thinking about how people can often develop a lack of self awareness, can't they, and the importance of sort of looking within too. Dani, what stood out for me from this?

Speaker 2: Yeah so much so much but I'll condense it down to 3. I think the 3 things probably the the importance of slowing it down enough to really get that, create that clarity on the team needs to be focusing on and prioritising is really important. I think I love the fact that the 6 team conditions really apply however short a time the team's together. So even if you

Speaker 3: go The

Speaker 0: 8 minute team.

Speaker 2: The 8 minute, yeah, 8 minute. So that's brilliant. And I think also that question for senior leadership teams, what are the 1 or 2 things you really need to be focusing on or your people need you to be focusing on in the short term? Such an important question.

Speaker 0: Yeah a huge thank you. And Chrissie just just keep doing what you're doing because you are inspiring the next generation of practitioners to come through And it it's so important that we keep emphasizing the importance of design and taking a step back and really being intentional in terms about how we put things together. So just wanna say a huge thank you, and thank you so much for being so generous with your time as well.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. It's been an honor being on with you guys. So, much luck to you guys and success with the Org Dev podcast and to all the listeners out there. Definitely, just my closing comment will just be I think the time we're living in now couldn't be more dynamic and turbulent. And sometimes it almost feels like with just the forces at play in the world that we can't They're just too big, the forces.

But each of us has a circle of influence and, you know, focus on what you can focus on. But this kind of work, organization development, teamwork, I think now is needed incredibly. So, massive opportunity out there for folks who have the courage and vision and, you you know, to get out there and find a niche and and really contribute. So

Speaker 0: Brilliant. And if anybody wants to reach out to you, Krista, what's the best way for people to reach you?

Speaker 1: Yeah. So it's 6, the number 6, team, t e a m, conditions.com. You can find me on there. I'm Krista at t 16 Conditions. I'm on LinkedIn.

Kristerlowe. If you Google me, it'll I'll probably pop up out there. So

Speaker 0: Alright. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. We we've loved it. And I'm gonna enjoy editing this, actually.

It's gonna be my reflective time as well, so thank you. Super.

Speaker 1: Take care, guys. Yeah.

Speaker 0: Thank you.