Human Being vs. Human Doing with Sam McKee
Carlos: Hello, everybody and welcome back to Teaming with Ideas. I am with my guest today, Sam McKee. Sam is the founder and I guess the principle consultant for Evergreen Leadership. Sam has worked with Mars; he's worked with Columbia, Bridgestone, big companies. Every time I talk to somebody about the work Sam does all I hear is how brilliant he is working with leaders and with teams. I could not but have him as a guest on this show. Sam, let's talk about you for a minute and how you came to the work you do. Please, would you tell our listening audience little bit about you and your journey to the leadership work you do today?
Sam: Carlos first of all, it’s an honor and a good chance to say thanks to you, and also to Mars because when I came into leadership development I came completely outside of the corporate world. I’d never worked for a Corporation. I was working with teenagers, and community service, and cross-cultural, building houses in Mexico, and helping start orphanages and things like that. So, when I came into working with corporate leaders, Mars really took me under their wing. And every time I got to participate in a leadership program they’d give me a page of feedback and I would fly home with a sore backside from all the feedback on what I could improve in my development plan. I would say the other thing I'm thankful for is your research on teams. But more so the practical approach you've taken in that HPC framework that actually isn't just about “feel good,” but it's how we operate and collaborate not on everything but what on what matters most. Those early tools from you and Mars have really shaped the way that I shape leaders and teams with all the companies that we work with.
Lost in An Abusive Home
Carlos: Well Sam, you're welcome. How did you get here? I mean you came from work with teenagers how do you even get into that?
Sam: Yeah, so Carlos, I was I was born in a family that put the nuke in nuclear; born in Chicago, raised by an alcoholic father and a mother who were on their third marriage. We had four kids from three different marriages living in a 3 bed, 1 bath house and my father was working 12 to 15-hour days in a print shop. It was a very violent upbringing. I was the baby of the family, so I had it the least. I'll give you one example. At 10 years old my dad was barely making his payments on his bills. When he got home from work, he took my brother to get his first pair of glasses spent. His whole paycheck went to getting my brother glasses. And I walked in the door as the baby brother and called him “four-eyes” and a few other things. So, my big brother goes chasing me down the street and he throws me in the ditch and he's ready to punch me. But, Carlos, I was raised right. Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris movies the whole way up. I kicked him in the face. I broke his glasses and then my brother dragged me in by the scruff of my neck and put me in front of my dad. My dad said, “Why'd you do it? That's my whole paycheck!”
I said, “I don't know.” And my dad didn't say a word. He just punched me right in the face. I woke up on the floor, Carlos, I'd lost a tooth, and again, I was the baby of the family, so I got the least amount of violence. That was at 10 years old. At 11 I started drinking; middle school I had started a forest fire and a fire in a vacant lot between two homes. I mean, I was Trouble with a capital T. My grades were terrible. At 17 years old I almost got a DUI on the Main Street of our little town. I was going nowhere fast. My grades were at the bottom of the barrel.
Then one day this homeless guy said, “Brother, you look lost.”
And I’m like, well “Why do you say that? Is it because I have a mullet and it's 1993?
And he’s like “Well, you gotta get that fixed. I'm not judging, I'm struggling with a crack addiction, but you look lost. There's a place where you can find hope and help, and they'll take anybody. They take me, they'll take you; they don't care what you look like or where you come from.”
I thought, “Well hell, I've tried everything else.” So, I wrote down the address. And Carlos, it turns out when, I pulled up that weekend, in this inner-city area near North Chicago, it was a machine shop garage that this all black church had turned into a church community. And as I'm walking up I'm like the only guy that looks like me so I thought, “Well, I'm just going to sneak in the back door I can be inconspicuous.” But I'm wearing jeans with holes in them and a white T shirt and everybody looks like they're fit to go to a wedding
A New Family: Church
Carlos: OK, so hold for a second. Listeners can't see you and you haven't been overt about it but you are a white male.
Sam: Yes Carlos. I'm actually pasty white. I tell people I come in white, red and peeling. And so I'm there with those crappy clothes looking like a tornado hit goodwill, and I walk in the back door and I sit in the back row, and I think, I can ride this out back here, because I'm scared to death of public speaking or any kind of being in the spotlight. But my homeless friend stands up front and he says, “Brother Samuel's gonna testify this morning.” and I'm like timeout like testify? What is this traffic court or something?
So I go walking down the aisle nervously, and I just tell him “Look, I grew up Catholic. We roll in there, the priest does all the talking, we flash some gang signs you know the sign of the cross and we're out of there, baby.”
And he's like, “No, no, no, brother Samuel is gonna tell his story and give the Lord some glory.” and I’m like, Dang! He just rapped! I'm not going to win a rap battle North Chicago! it's not like I'm Eminem or something. So, I'm just gonna have to like talk. So, I tap on the microphone nervously and I just told him like I told you, Carlos, I grew up in the tough family, going nowhere, not living up to my potential. And they all looked at me, just actively listening, and said, “Welcome home, brother Samuel.”
For three months they just fattened me up with soul food, collard greens. They're just loving on me. Then, after that point of like caring personally, they challenged me directly to my potential just like they did their own kids. They said to me, “Brother Samuel, you got a good head on your shoulders so tell me why do your grades look like you're stupid, boy?” And I was like, Damn, they just called me out. And when they call you “boy” you know you've been adopted. They checked my quizzes and my test scores. From then on, Carlos, I got virtually straight A's and I got scholarships through undergrad and graduate school.
My father, who had been my worst enemy, looked at me and said, “All that bitching, punching and complaining couldn't get you to do what they got you to do, so I'm gonna go check it out.” My father had become a dry drunk. He quit drinking but never went through the 12 steps, so he was just kind of angry, and this was the place where he found his peace and his purpose. He went from being my worst enemy to being my best man in my wedding. He handed me the ring when I married my wife.
Carlos: That is in so many ways a remarkable tale. I come from a very large family. My original family had ten siblings - I’ve lost one of my sisters. But it was not a healthy place to be. It occurs to me, and certainly my wife would voice the same opinion, that my family life shaped the way I work today. Some of the lessons we learn early in the family system for guys like you and me, who work with groups and systems, never leave us. Well, you had more than one family, right? You had your birth family then you had your church family. In either or both of them is there anything you can point to, to say , “There's a lesson I learned in that system that has served me well?”
Diversity & Inclusion
Sam: Carlos, that is a brilliant question. It's a deep one. The first one that comes to mind is…you know how much of a buzzword it is right now, diversity and inclusion. So, for me this is a core passion because, if you think about it, I was the baby of the family, so it was his, mine and ours. And I was the only one in that family unit that was blood related to everyone. My father may have been the stepfather of my brother Jimmy, but whenever I saw a conflict, Carlos, I could see it through the other person's eyes. And I didn't buy into the villain-ization, that destructive conflict. I knew there was always another side to that. And so diversity and inclusion was a great pain point for me because there was a lot of unfairness in my family based on stepparents and lack of blood relation. To see the opposite of that modeled in that church community where, here I am, the guy who looks like a lot of people who maybe haven't treated them fairly, and yet they welcome me in with open arms. They include my voice in their community. They leverage my strengths, and they make me a vital part of their team. So, I mean diversity inclusion from the very core for me, you know, being able to see from someone else’s street corner, so to speak. At Stanford we helped work with them on diversity inclusion as a piggyback to what they were doing with this thing called “looking from the other person's corner of the street” and seeing that perspective. Join instead of Judge. I think from the start I was like the peacekeeper or the Gandhi of my family because I was blood related and could empathize with different parties, just like within a company we've got to empathize with different personalities and functions.
Carlos: That is very clear. I did not know you were involved in doing diversity and inclusion work and that is not a surprise now that I reflect on it. So, as you know this is a podcast that focuses on the way people at work, work together. and I know that your organization is called Evergreen Leadership. I do know that you have done a lot of work with teams. You’ve used the Mars framework for high performance collaboration that I was part of creating. How long you've been at this, Sam? How long you been in the consulting game?
Sam: About a little over 12 years, Carlos.
Carlos: I hold it to be true that if we're awake, we never stop learning. By awake I mean obviously more than just getting out of bed in the morning. I mean aware. In your recent history, in the last couple of years, can you recall any instance where you were working with a group, and you learned something, something occurred to you - maybe it was one of those cases where you had to learn something again? That happens to me all the time, I've learned something but somehow it slips away, and I end up making the same mistake again later, and I have to learn it all over again. What comes into mind when I ask that question?
Sam: Probably one of the most important things that I've been learning lately is just how important it is not to rush to purpose and priorities, but to start with that human connection. To have people understand each other, their context, their values, and then from that they can lean into those tougher conversations. The example I think of is I was called into work with the most dysfunctional triad of leaders in this billion-dollar veterinary practice. It started with one jerk as most problems often do. That person wasn't held accountable. So then, these high performers around him started to become part of the problem. They started rolling their eyes in meetings, they started picking up phone calls in front of market leaders undermining each other. And it got to the point where the regional vice president said, “Look. All three of you are about to get fired. I'm going to give you one day to get your ‘ish’ together and then a little time after that to show progress. I don't even want to know what you talked about but just fix it.”
Building Relationships: The 4 H’s Exercise
We started off with an exercise that I've found to be powerful in person, virtual, etc, and it's almost always where I start with teams. it's the Four H. It's basically having these three leaders sit down in a room and share
· What's your hometown? What did you like or dislike about growing up there?
· What's a highlight that you're proud of in your personal and professional life?
· What's a hardship, a challenge you face? And then lastly
· Who's the hero that you look up to?
As these three leaders began to share, they dropped their guard. In fact, the guy that was the root cause of dysfunction on the team, when he shared his hardship, he said, “Look, I grew up in a developing country. My father was a workaholic, never gave me the time of day. I started working in his factory at five years old at quality control, and my job was to find the flaws in the parts. and the only time my father came up behind me, patted me on the back and said, “Good job, son” was when I found flaws. So I thought being a critic is how you add value. The other two had this epiphany like, “Oh my goodness! that makes sense! You still need to quit being a critical prick, but now I don't think you're a villain. Now I don't think you're trying to hurt us or the team, but you gotta knock it off.” It was like the lights went off and all of a sudden he said to them “Look, you might think I act like I’m perfect and I’m condescending, but when I look in the mirror all I see are the flaws in myself. When you give my critique, I may not respond great, but I take it to heart.”
Then we all shared those things: personality style; where you grew up; hometown; hardship. Then we got to the contracting part of it and we said, “OK, everybody go to a flipchart. Don't look at each other’s flip charts, but write, what is our mission? what are our top priorities?” No surprise, Carlos, they were completely aligned in the vision and the purpose. Next thing was, “I want you to own what are you doing that is a barrier to our team success. What are we going to stop doing that is dysfunctional?” and they literally owned it. And if they didn't own it someone else called it out. Then then we said, “What are you going to ask for?” Your light bulb about contracting with each other very specifically, totally worked here because they all made specific commitments. Then we checked in on those commitments for 1/2 hour every Friday. Within two months their market was up 20%
The amazing happy ending to the story for two of them was ten months later I was speaking at their central division meeting and the medical director who was going to get fired was named medical director of the year. The field trainer had gotten a Leadership Award. Unfortunately, here's the realistic part, Carlos. That original root cause of dysfunction? He did everything he could to turn things around but there was too much water under the bridge with the hospital teams and they had to let him go. He turned to his regional vice president said, “Thank you. I will never do that again and I'll be a better leader for it.” He has landed on his feet in another organization. He's a vice president and he is a much better leader than he was before.
Carlos: You know, what's remarkable to me about that is the degree of self-awareness you have to have to be able to go there and say something about, you know, “This was part of my upbringing” for example. The way you talked about your understanding around diversity and inclusion or what this gentleman did around his schooling and how to find what's wrong. I have some empathy for that. I'm pretty much the same way myself. Great, great story. Now, you did say you've done this virtually?
Sam: Carlos, I've been so amazed. Like yourself, my whole business transitioned from 95% in-person to 100% virtual, and I really struggled to find how can we build that human connection. So, I've started to leverage pre-work. I have people on an executive team fill out a bio-slide where they have their picture of their hometown, and then a picture of a highlight, and a picture of a hardship, and a picture of a hero that they look up to. It is amazing. I'll give you one example of an executive who shared just one picture that covered hardship and hero. It was his wife. He said, “I wasn't the brightest student. There was a good chance I wasn't going to finish my bachelor’s. But my wife saw something in me I didn't even see myself and she held me accountable to my potential and she got me through undergrad and MBA. Then she battled cancer. She is still battling it. And when I watch how she has built her career, built my career, and then is an amazing leader in her home and with our boys, she is my hero. And he choked up a bit. Everyone on that executive team will never see him the same. They will always understand this guy, as driven as he is, has a huge heart and a huge respect for his wife. He is fighting a battle none of us may have ever known. So when we're in executive team meetings, and he sounds a little pressured or tough I'm never going to assume negative intent because I know he's got good bones in a good soul. We say a lot, “Assume positive intent”, but it's so much easier to assume positive intent and root for our peers what we know where they came, from what matters most to them, and it allows us to overcome that fundamental attribution error. We know that in psychology that when I make a mistake, Carlos, I tend to attribute it to, “Oh, well, the kids had me up last night at 2:00 in the morning so I'm just sleep deprived.” But if you make a mistake in a meeting, I’m like, “Oh, Carlos is just a slacker.” or “He's just selfish.” When we hear each other’s stories we’re less likely to slip into that attribution error and more likely to actually assume positive intent.
Carlos: So, you call this the 4 H’s - I love it. I think you mentioned to me at some point that it came from a basketball coach at UCLA?
Sam: Yes, there's a female basketball coach at UCLA who shared this concept with John Gordon and that's where he got it from, and he's popularized the 4 H’s.
Managing Energy
Carlos: The pandemic's been with us, Sam, since March of this year, 2020, and has rocked our world in so many, many ways. As you were talking about earlier, we've had to adjust our businesses, how we operate, how we get things done, how we make money and we make a living. What's the biggest impact you've seen on teams that you've worked on? What are you noticing and, if it's an impact that needs to be fixed or addressed or adjusted what are you seeing people do to account for it?
Sam: That's another great loaded question. The first thing that I notice is the erosion between work and personal life, and the exhaustion people have by being promoted sometimes to school principal of their own home school that they never wanted, to being a teacher of their children, to just the ceaseless connectivity. And I found some groups like the Stanford Department of Energy has asked me to come in and work with them on managing energy because people are in an endless marathon. So, they had me talk to them about not really work life balance, but making sure that were charged physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. So, I'd say that managing energy for people and that human connection is so important. I think people not feeling part of a team, being distracted, distanced, not as much huddling around a coffee machine, no natural points of intersection. So, how do we proactively bring people together in a way of building the team where it's not just another Zoom meeting with more Zoom marathons and Zoom fatigue but it really creates a connection and clarity, so that we are tracking on what matters most while not burning ourselves out or getting two disconnected running or swimming in our own lanes?
Carlos: Is there a team your recent memory that you've given some practical advice to around how to manage energy, manage their time and Zoom meetings, etc., that you could share with us - that wouldn't divulge any confidentialities, of course?
Sam: Yeah, I mean both that Department of Energy at Stanford and this ad agency that I work with that's based in in Portland, San Francisco, and also out in Providence, RI and Philly. We basically dedicated time in a webinar to really talk about how - it's old school in a way. It's just a new packaging of Stephen Covey and the sharpened saw - it really is. And it's that idea that we care about you as a human being not just a human doing. And so what are we all doing connected with our wellness programs if they exist to eat, move and sleep better and be physically energized? What are we doing to have that mental energy and focus on what matters most? If your best time of the day is 10:00 AM to noon, are you giving your best energy and mental focus to the projects that matter most? Or did they get the leftovers after you've dealt with everyone else’s priorities filling your inbox?
Carlos: By the way, that is a great question to ask folks: What is your prime time of day? Are you an early morning person? Mid-morning? I myself am a late morning person, 10 to noon, like the person you just talked about. Others are at their best from 3:00 o'clock on. Great questions.
Sam: So true. And how do we maintain a positive emotional energy on a team? Are we celebrating wins like you talk about in Sustain & Renew? Do we celebrate enough? Do we share successes? They say that at any given moment there are 11 billion bits of data around us, but our brain can only lock in on 40. So, out of all these different possibilities, we can choose a reality that really sucks and makes us anxious and angry and 10 to 15 IQ points dumber. Or we can focus on the opportunity or the challenge that we can tackle. We can look at our whole big project or we can take a circle around one little chunk of it and say, “I'm not going to look at the big picture, it's too depressing and scary”. But we're going to take this one process in our team and we're going to make it better. They call that Zoro circles. Zoro was struggling as a swordsman and this old guru said, “Draw a circle in the sand. This is your world. That's the only place where you can live and fight.” We need to draw Zoro circles around our problems. In fact, in the movie The Martian, what did he say when he was in that really crappy situation with the odds were not in his favor? He said, “I'm gonna start with one problem. I'm gonna solve that problem. Then I'll solve the next, and if I solve enough problems, I get to go home.”
Escape Room Insights
Carlos: Well said! Marvelous recollection you have, Sam, movie quotes. If I were to ask you out of the blue, “What’s on your mind right now?” what are the big ideas that are occupying space in that amazing gray matter between your ears?
Sam: One of the things that I'm really excited about that surprised me: we have had to pivot our main leadership programs to virtual, and with one of those we're working and partnering with an escape room that is partnered with Carnegie Mellon. They've looked at 5000 teams and their performance in escape rooms. I asked him, I said, “Well can you just drop on me what pattern are you seeing?” and he said, “Well I have a question for you: which teams do you think would perform best in an escape room? We studied four different categories:
1. families
2. work teams
3. friends
4. strangers who met in the lobby of the escape room
Which do you think would perform the best? Surely corporate teams. I mean you know they're trained for this right?
Carlos: No, that would not have been my guess.
Sam: What would you have guessed, Carlos?
Carlos: Strangers. I’d guess strangers.
Sam: Man, I hate it when you're right. So, yes Carlos, strangers who met in the lobby where were the best, followed by friends, followed by work teams, and the worst was families. Any thoughts on why that might be?
Carlos: There we go! Think about the patterns that are formed, right? In a family we have habitual patterns of interactive behavior that just keep coming up! I come from this giant family, as you know, and we have reunions every so often and people will comment and say, “You know, we just fall back in. Suddenly we're 12 again.” I think groups of friends would have that same dynamic operating.
Sam: It's 100% true. He said hierarchical structure… when roles are solidly formed, people in a family will step back and say, “Well mom or dad are supposed to solve the puzzle. I'm not going to speak up. I don't want to get corrected or sound like I'm dumb. it's not my place.” Then in work teams we often have that hierarchal structure. I was impressed at Mars with the Associate Principle. Equal playing field, every opinion counts. Well, with friends there's less of that structure. We chose those people, we weren't born into that structure. And then with strangers who met the lobby, it doesn't matter who you are outside of this room, we all have an equal voice. And in my opinion on the best teams we create the kind of environment where people can speak up, share their opinions, share the diversity of thought and approach and critique. What was fascinating in their research is that they found that in this escape room that was especially difficult the highest performing group was with 10-year-olds. 10-year-olds! Think about a 10 year old, Carlos: when they have an idea that pops into their head, whether it's great or asinine what do they do with it? They do it! they do it! They speak up, they try it, they bang on something, they spin something, they experiment. They fail fast, and in the highest performing teams in their toughest escape room it was 10-year-olds that were testing and learning, testing and learning, sharing, critiquing, speaking up.
Carlos: These are 10 year old stranger groups? So just think about that. You know I love a good paradox. Here we are on the one hand sitting people down in a room, having them share their 4 H’s, opening up, binge vulnerable, “Tell us about who you are in a deep level so I can know you and therefore that adds to our relationship and creates for ideally more effective working together.” Contrast that to a room full of 10-year-olds, who've never met each other, being the best at what they do. So, we have this paradox about you need relationship, but you don't necessarily need relationship. You can create the relationship to meet the needs you have. I love working in that space, right? Because it's both, isn't it? It's brilliant.
Sam: It's so true and often with adults in the corporate setting we're having to work against a lot of teaching in the world that it's not safe to speak up. Sometimes we may have to use some of those tools and tricks to maybe get us back to ground zero where a kid in a healthy environment knows that his or her voice counts, that their ideas and their perspective may contribute. That's a powerful thing. So maybe we’re working our way back to where we would have started in the healthy environment where we can speak up, learn from each other, embrace and leverage diversity for better success.
Making The Most of Diversity
Carlos: Sam, tell us a bit more, going back to what we talked about at the top about what people are colloquially calling D&I - diversity and inclusion.
Sam: Carlos I couldn't be happier to see so much emphasis on diversity inclusion. From my childhood upbringing, to my greatest heroes being people who weren't always included and respected the way that they should. At the same time, I would say that a great letter from a CEO about our position on diversity and inclusion, or a great virtual training on implicit bias won't turn the tide and create an environment at work that really leverages diversity and inclusion. Diversity and inclusion lives or dies at the leader and team level. So, that's why I think it's so important at the team level to reinforce diversity and inclusion to bring that leverage, the diversity of the team.
Carlos, you shocked me the last time that we talked when you said that hiring diversity in and of itself will not give you a competitive advantage.
Carlos: Correct. Just bringing in people who don't look like you, or talk like you, or have the same value systems as you, by itself is not the thing that will bring change.
Sam: So true! And sometimes a team that's more alike can be faster making decisions, and you hire diversity, but you don't really create an environment of diversity inclusion. It's not like you're coming to agreement, alignment and leveraging that diversity of thought. You may be even more dysfunctional. So, the quick band aid of just hiring a head count diverse doesn't get us where we need to be. How can we as a team really engage each individual and then bring them together as a team fostering that diversity of thought? One of the great examples in my mind of diversity of thought is Pixar. They say every great story starts off as an ugly baby. The idea is, you’ve got a concept for a script. Well, we're going to put it on this this white board here. It's not yours anymore. We're going to spin it, shoot holes in it, twist it around. You won't even recognize it when it debuts because it's not going to be shaped by one IQ. It's going to be touched by 150 minds. And that's why we don't have those tired, overcooked animations, but ours are breakthrough, inside and out, like neuroscience, in such a brilliant way that a kid and a PhD can understand it. Trying to leverage that kind of environment of diversity of thought to come up with the best strategies, the best ideas. That's where a leader is what brings diversity inclusion to life.
Carlos: So true. Being able to lead diverse groups effectively so that they contribute maximally; so that they feel included and their ideas are included and their impact is felt. Doing that is no mean feat I would imagine 1 to 2% of the population of leaders have that as an innate skill and the rest of us have to learn it.
During the next conversation you and I have at some point in the future, because I'd love to circle back and talk in a few months as we move, I hope, out of the pandemic and into another phase, maybe we come back and talk about that because I think it's desperately needed.
Sam: Carlos, I always love your emphasis on micro behaviors. Now we used to end leadership at Mars II with a quote from Arthur Ashe, the activist and athlete; “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” You're welcome here. Bring your full self to this team. We're going to savor that diversity; we're going to leverage it; it's going to create some conflict and we're going to work through that together to be aligned, to be one voice, one team with an inspiring purpose, clear priorities and amazing collaboration.
Carlos: Thank you, Sam. If somebody said, “Sam McKee, hmmm. I want to know more about this interesting guy!” Where do you recommend they start?
Sam: LinkedIn is great. Look for Sam McKee with Evergreen Leadership. You can also look at EvergreenLeadership.com. My story, my values and my approach to teams are on there.
Carlos: Sam, this has been enlightening, inspiring, energizing – I can’t imagine a better way to have spent the last 30 minutes or so. My profoundest gratitude to you for your openness, and your smarts. Thank you.