Teaming With Ideas: Introducing New Podcast Series on Team Collaboration
Janet Aldrich, Producer, interviews Carlos Valdes-Dapena about his podcast series, Teaming With Ideas
Where did you get the idea for “Teaming With Ideas”?
I’m all about the big idea of collaboration and teamwork. It’s what animates me, and it’s what I’m interested in hearing about from others. What are the ideas they hold, they promote or even they think are rubbish? It’s really the big ideas. I found myself pondering that aspect of myself, and the sandbox I like to play in, and it was teams and teaming. And I thought, “Ah! That’s cute – Teaming With Ideas!” Just one of those serendipitous moments.
I must say, of all the people I know, if there’s anyone who’s really teaming with ideas, it’s you. Do you like being in a team, or working with a team?
Oh, do I like leading a team or being a team member? Yeah, yeah! All of us I think like to be successful, and I’ve been a leader of a team and felt successful from time to time. I used to be focused on leadership and leadership development, and I have a very clear idea of what great leadership looks like. Even how to help people get to be great leaders, but I don’t think I’m one of them myself, quite honestly.
Now, as to being a member of a team, I love it. It’s the most rewarding think I ever did. I worked at Mars, as you know, for 17 years, I worked at IBM before that, and it was always those times when we got together and created stuff together, solved problems together, overcame obstacles together – nothing gives me or gave me greater joy or a greater sense of accomplishment. Oh, I love it.
Therefore, I love it when a team is well-led and at its best. That’s what got me into the work.
You co-created the High Performance Team Collaboration Framework at Mars with your team. What was that inspired by?
Well I think that was pretty practical actually. Mars was spending millions and millions of dollars a year on team effectiveness, and they were looking for something they could give to managers as part of a manager training program to help them help themselves. Most of what you get in the team building space is facilitated by very skilled, knowledgeable, experienced people: people who spend their time focusing on helping teams grow and be better, and doing fairly specialized things whether they’re ropes courses, or Myers Briggs workshops or whatever. Managers, day to day, leading a team don’t have those capabilities but they still need some sense of how to lead a team. In fact, Mars had a competency called “building effective teams”. Consistently, when we looked at the compiled competency data across Mars leaders, that competency came out on the bottom. So they were just looking for something they could do that didn’t involve bringing in outside experts all the time. Something we could give to managers to enable them to build great teams themselves. That’s what led ultimately to the High Performance Collaboration (HPC) framework.
How many teams have you worked with at Mars?
Oh, man. Somewhere in the high hundreds – close to a thousand over the six years I was doing it. Now, some of them were 2-day intensive workshops, others were teleconferences for a few hours, but always with the same aim which was to enhance their effectiveness as a team. I worked with a lot of teams. And I worked with teams at IBM before Mars, and also at DDI when I was an external consultant in the 1990s. So, a lot of teams overall.
I’ve just got to put a plug-in here, for the fact that you have 10 siblings, and that you grew up as part of a team. Collaborating was how you all got fed, right?
It’s true. We were not able to keep folks on as childcare givers with 11 kids in the house, so we ended up having to clean house, cook, feed ourselves and prepare entire meals for everybody, make sure things were tidy – we looked out for ourselves and often that involved getting along. Even though as we know, families don’t always get along well – and we didn’t – but, we had shared interests. And that’s kind of what we talk about in my profession today but also back then. We needed to eat, some nourishment, and the only way we were going to get it is if we had some way of working together to produce it.
And by the way, I’m talking about 10-year-olds making dinner for 13 people here, 11 kids and 2 parents- 10-year-olds! – as well as doing the laundry, etc.
How many were allowed in the kitchen at the same time?
Not more than 2 usually. The kitchen was huge. It actually had a big picnic table in it. So when we weren’t eating dinner at the big dining room table with our parents,
So coming at this from a team-like family life, you went on to study what in college, and why?
Both my parents were medical professors, by the way, and I went on to I think their disappointment, to study theatre. I had no interest in business, no skills with numbers and therefore sciences, but I could stand up in front of groups and carry on, and I thought, “Well, you make the most of your strengths…” so I went on to get a BA in theatre and then a MFA in theatre. It wasn’t an actor I wanted to be, it was a professor, not surprisingly because of my background, following in my parents’ footsteps, I thought I’d go teach acting That was my early academic background.
Seems to make sense, you having collaborated with your brothers and sisters, and then having gone on to study collaboration in the theatre. Do I have that right?
Of course I never thought of it as collaboration, whether it was working with my brothers and sisters or in a play, but you’re right. I think theatre, of the 2 sets of experiences, is the more collaborative of the two. It’s more of a discipline around collaboration. You do not pull that show off unless you are collaborating with the lighting person who has put the light on the spot where you need to be for the most dramatic moment, and the director is trying to help you get there, and your fellow actors are trying to clear out so you can do that… There’s a lot of give and take that way. It’s an immensely collaborative art and it taught me an awful lot about how you work together with others successfully – even if you don’t like them!
We could do great shows, and you and I have done a few together, but we never sat down and did any team building.
In terms of team collaboration, how did a show’s team grow so tight in just a few weeks?
The work was the team building. And that’s what we tried to give the managers I talked about earlier. We tried to give them a framework that they could work within, using their work as the foundation. That may well come from my background in the theatre where the work was the growth.
Why do you state that conventional team building does not lead to collaborative results?
Conventional team building doesn’t help teams become more effective collaborators, right. Look, conventional team building including ropes courses, trust falls, escape rooms – tick on down the list – they’re fun, they can help us get to know each other, I question whether they help us build trust or not when you’re shooting your colleagues in the back with paint balls, I don’t suggest that does a lot to build trust, but they’re fun. They’re relaxing and teams need a place to let off steam. So, that’s all good. But do they make teams of any kind more effective at collaborating and producing results? Not that any study that I’ve ever seen shows. In fact, my experience with all those teams attests to the same thing. Those events don’t move a team forward in terms of their collaboration.
I think of rehearsals as a great way to get used to telling the story, but don’t you really learn to trust your fellow actor front of an audience?
They do what they do and we respond, right? We work off of them there's a term we use a lot in that discipline. We work author fellow actor sometimes our fellow actors are terrible! When I was in grad school we had paid actors on stage with us from New York. We were the grad students doing the little tiny extra roles and I will never forget marveling at just how bad some of these people were and they were getting paid for it! But my job was to not let that get in the way. I had to deliver the goods, I had to be part of telling the story collectively. Sometimes your fellow actors are great. They give you a lot to work with, you build a rapport that's really magical and you work off each other in a dynamic and exciting way, and sometimes you're struggling with it, but the job is you just work with what you get.
Now in the workplace it's a little different, right? If my colleague isn't carrying their weight we need to have a conversation about that. I suppose onstage from time to time I would have conversations with people about what we were trying to achieve in the scene in the workplace. And the director is there to help as a team leader but ultimately in the workplace we are accountable for working through our own stuff with people. We can’t always be running to our manager to solve our differences and our problems, right? We have to do what we can and only involve others where we think we might get some useful coaching
There are a lot of bridges between the world of the theater that I thought I would end up in the work I do today, for sure. It's kind of fun talking about it. We haven't had this conversation before. It brought us together, right? it did!
Briefly, how does team collaboration factor into engagement?
I will be having a guest on actually down the road, someone who's been an external consultant for many, many years. Dana Wright specializes in what she calls employee experience versus engagement. Employee experience is the thing you do to get the high levels of engagement that you want. Engagement means how committed people are to their workplace. How much do they show discretionary effort; someone who's willing to go above and beyond, as the cliché goes, typically is highly engaged. They're willing to do it because they really like their work. That's engagement.
But what do we know about engagement and collaboration is? I had a colleague at Mars, Damian Welch, specialized in engagement, and I was the collaboration guy. We knew that doing a formal study would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to design and execute so we just had to work from the data we had in front of us which said that teams were adopting the framework for high-performance collaboration in order to address their desire to have higher engagement. In other words, teams were getting their engagement surveys once a year, and the numbers weren't great. They would turn to what we called HPC, high performance collaboration, as the first tool and then they found it worked really, really well. Anecdotally, we could tell you that teams using the framework had higher levels of sustained engagement and growth in their engagement over time. Did we do a rigorous academic study? Again, no, we didn't. We didn't have the resources, time or money. But experientially it looked pretty freaking strong that that correlation between using this structured approach to helping teams work better together, and engagement.
How did this high performing teams or high performance teams thing come about? Did you create that or was that was that already in existence?
There is quite a story there and if you read my book Lessons from Mars: How One global Company Cracked the Code on High Performance Collaboration and Teamwork or visit my website for more - if people read that book they'll learn that story. I'll try to summarize it here: Mars was investing at millions of dollars in a fairly conventional approach team building using external consultants. This is 2002 -2003. So, this one consultancy who we used, New Jersey-based, talked about what they did is high performance teams, HPT they called it. Very conventional methodology based in the four stages of team development that has been around since the 60s. So there was a commitment there, and Mars was spending time and money on, but it wasn't producing sustainable results into changes that made a difference to teams. There was an important change that happened. What that HPT approach did was force people to have conversations they had not been having. So it encouraged/forced teams to have some of the uncomfortable conversations about what they disagreed about; what they didn't like; what were they unhappy about with each other. It brought to the surface a lot of nasty stuff that had been pushed down and was driving some very political behaviors with people going behind each others’ backs. So, the HPT approach really succeeded in getting Mars leaders to talk to each other honestly and candidly: much needed and really an important building block for what would become HPC high performance collaboration, the framework my colleagues and I developed.
HPC is all about people working together on how to structure their work so that their collaboration is optimal you can't have those conversations with each other if you're not telling each other the truth, right? In HPC you need to be able to speak your truth. It's fundamental to it, and HPT really set us up to do that. What we found, now we've taken HPC out of Mars we've gone into companies, and what they're saying is “This is great! We have some bridges we need to cross getting people to talk to each other to make it work.” So, we've actually expanded what HPC means at least in my practice What we know about HPC is it benefits from some of that preliminary work. How do we just talk to each other? How do we have those courageous conversations we need to have so that we can then use HPC optimally?
And we've built that into our practice now. just because you and I are now telling each other the uncomfortable truths we've been pushing down for perhaps years doesn't mean we're going to work any better together. It just means we’ll stop getting in each others’ way.
This all ties into building trust first doesn't necessarily need lead to good collaboration, correct?
That is something I talk about: trust is an outcome of doing things well together, right? So is psychological safety, that sense that I can speak my mind in the team and not get put down for it, or be dismissed. It's how we approach our work together that produces those things, trust and psychological safety, and HPC is designed expressly to foster those things; anchored In the sense that I can speak my mind in a team and not get put down for it or be dismissed.
It's how we approach our work together that produces those things trust and psychological safety and HPC is designed expressly to foster those things, anchored in the work that matters to us. So, a generic trust building conversation between you and I that has nothing to do with the work we're doing doesn't usually get much traction because I’ve got nothing at stake. If I don't have to work with you why should I bother trying to go through the real discomfort of awkward trust building conversations when you and I have nothing to say together? We might as well just keep going our separate ways and we'll be fine. But if we intersect, if we have to work together, start the conversation about here's this thing that we're doing, this thing that we're expected to create an outcome from, here are some differences in how we approach it, let's talk about those. Let's talk about how we can bridge those differences to get this job done together. First of all, it enables the conversation between people because it's based in something that they both care about, right? And it has more lasting effect because it's based in something real. We've seen each other in action in the trenches doing the real work.
You said every episode every interview will end with So what? What’s the call to action?
For the listeners I'm interested in having them listen to these podcasts to learn more about effective collaboration. Subscribe, or at least listen to a few. A couple of things to be aware of: I'm going to have on some people I disagree with which I think is going to make for some really powerful conversation, so don't expect just to hear the Carlos take on collaboration in every episode of this podcast. Expect to hear me probing, exploring and learning from some really smart and experienced people, whether they’re consultants or professors. I'm going to have on regular old team members talking about the changes they've been through; how they find collaboration to work. Just subscribe and see what you learn on my journey of learning from these experienced, capable people.
Well, I'm excited like it share it review it
And look, if there are listeners you think who've got a story to tell in the space of working with others at work, visit the www.carlosvdependa.com and sign up to be a part of our podcast.
Who is your next who is the person you're speaking to in your first episode?
The first episode will feature a guy I met working at Mars incorporated. He was an import: he was on assignment to the US from the UK. Arvi Dhesi – Arvinder Dhesi, who came over to be a part of our organization effectiveness team at Mars North America based in Hackettstown, NJ. Brilliant, beautifully-spoken person, articulate, creative, iconoclastic - all the things I'd like to be when I grow up. Arvi was my boss. And in fact, he said he couldn't be my boss we had to be partners. He worked very much that way. We were in partnership with another guy named Todd Freiling, who's gone on to become a partner at a small consulting firm in Tennessee. But Arvi will be my first guest. He now works for Korn Ferry, he worked for Towers Watson for awhile, both big HR consulting firms. And he's really distinguished himself in his field working especially with senior leaders. He will be my first guest and I cannot wait - I cannot wait! I think our listeners are going to really get a lot out of it and probably wish they could get to know Arvi a little better than they will be able to 30 minutes. We will go as deep as we can.
Thanks for listening, and thank you for the music John Wallerich and Brent Pederson.
If you found this podcast useful please subscribe, review and share. For more visit Carlos’s blog Teaming with Ideas at www.CarlosVDapena.com. Questions? Click on the Contact-Carlos button and we’ll answer promptly. To be interviewed on the Teaming with Ideas podcast, visit www.CarlosVDapena.com/podcast-contact and complete the questionnaire.
Thanks again for listening and keep on teaming with ideas!