Patricia Kong: How to Get From an Average to a Great Team With Emotional Intelligence and Psychological Safety

Richard:

To support this podcast, visit my website, kasperowski.com. Hello, Patricia. Thank you so much for joining today.

Patricia:

Hello, Rich. Thanks for having me back.

Richard:

My pleasure and yeah, having you back. Did you, oh, I so here’s a quiz. Who is the only person in the world who has ever been invited back as an interview guest on this podcast?

Patricia:

Patricia Kong.

Richard:

Good answer. Yay.

Patricia:

Oh my God, imagine if I got that wrong.

Richard:

And name some other random person.

Patricia:

Yeah, Santa Claus.

Richard:

Santa Claus. Yeah. Hey Santa Claus, who’s your best team ever? How to go?

Patricia:

The Elves.

Richard:

Yeah, of course. Hey, is there? I actually copy pasted the introduction from that podcast episode. I think it was episode 60 for anybody who wants to go back and listen to it. It was awesome. I think it was one of our first video podcasts as well. Is there anything else you’d like to add on to that introduction? Anything else about Patricia Kong that we should know?

Patricia:

It was funny because as you were, as you were introducing me and I was thinking, who am I really? So I’m like stuck in.

Richard:

Who Patricia Kong?

Patricia:

I’m stuck in that space. Yeah, I guess for me, I am that introduction, I suppose. And I’m also just a woman living in Boston, Massachusetts, used to live in the Boston area. I used to live in France and I came up through finance and organizational behavior and startups. And I’m just really interested in how people work. And I think I’m a, I think today, the thing that I learned about myself is that I might be a really terrible methodologist.

Richard:

Oh yeah?

Patricia:

Yeah, like I’m just not, I think I might not be a good, which is not something I aspire to be, but I’m not a good methodologist. This is for another conversation.

Richard:

Wait, well okay. So I’m like, I’m in interviewer mode and you just gave me something interesting to talk.

Patricia:

What? Oh my goodness.

Richard:

Wait a minute. How could you not be a methodologist? You’re co-author of the Nexus framework and you helped develop this thing called the evidence based management.

Patricia:

Yeah, the EBM framework, which is that’s my baby.

Richard:

Yeah.

Patricia:

Yeah, I think I don’t know what it was today, but there was something triggered to me, that triggered me that said I’m a really bad methodologist, but maybe that’s okay.

Richard:

Okay wait, is there any evidence of this? There’s no evidence that, is there?

Patricia:

We don’t know.

Richard:

Misevidence based management.

Patricia:

I probably would say there’s a lot of evidence and people just doing their willy-nilly things, which is why I actually am much more principal based of the things that we’re trying to do, as people could see from my work. If they listen to the other podcast or read some stuff online or listen, or look at anything else out there. But yeah, that’s not why we’re here Rich. You said I could come back and ask you questions.

Richard:

Wait, you’re turning the tables on me? You’re going to ask the questions?

Patricia:

Digitally, yes. Virtually, I’m going to turn the tables on you.

Richard:

We’ll turn the interview script around. So wait we did this webinar a few weeks ago, right? Hosted by, well, you were the host and it was a scrum.org brand webinar. Is there recording of it?

Patricia:

There is on the scrum.org website and resources webcast. And I am looking at it now. So we had a session that’s titled, “High performance teams, core protocols for psychological safety and emotional intelligence.” It was from April 5th, 2022. You did an awesome job. It was super interactive. I don’t know if people like when they watch that recording, how they’ll be able to engage with it. I hope they do, cause they can have those same reflections. Cause you were asked a lot of great questions of the group.

Richard:

Yeah, we had a lot of fun and the group was, the group played along really, really, really nicely. And yeah, there was a lot of interaction. It was super cool.

Patricia:

There was, there was too much interaction.

Richard:

Too much interaction.

Patricia:

Yeah, that’s why you invited me back, remember? So there was like, there were tons of questions and because I’m a great host, I said that let’s make sure we get back to these people. And that allows me to spend more time chatting with you and asking you questions, so that’s why.

Richard:

So now you’re the host.

Patricia:

Now I’m the host, give me host rights.

Richard:

All right, so let’s, I’m going to make believe, we’re starting over hello friends and welcome back to With Great People, the podcaster high performance teams with your host.

Patricia:

Patricia Kong.

Richard:

Patricia, it’s so nice to see you. Thanks for having me.

Patricia:

Hey, hey, thanks for showing up today. Well, I mean, one of the interesting things actually, why I was really keen for us to continue the conversation was because the number of people that, not only the interaction, like we had chat going, we had questions going, but just the number of people that had signed up and I’ve been watching it. So I do feel, you know, this is a great way to get back to some of those questions because it must be something that might be helpful to other people.

Richard:

All right, let’s do it. This will be fun. So in this episode of the podcast, I answer the questions that Patricia asks.

Patricia:

Yes

Richard:

So these are questions from the audience, from that webinar back in April.

Patricia:

Yeah. I’ll try my best, okay? Well, you know what maybe what we should do is give people a little bit of a high overview Rich of what we were exploring there and what were you were trying to offer.

Richard:

Yeah, yeah. So let’s see listeners and viewers of this podcast might know a little bit about this topic, cause we were on episode 80 something, close to episode 90 now with the podcast for high performance teams. So we’re talking about high performance teams. We’re talking about the stuff called the core protocols, which are patterns of behavior that people on high performing teams engage in together. That we’re pretty sure, there’s strong evidence that high performing teams do indeed engage in these behaviors and probably if you engage in these behaviors yourself with your team, your team will also be high performing. We talk about psychological safety because of the strong evidence that teams on which people feel safe to take risks, they perform better together and these core protocols behaviors help build that sense of psych safety. Sometimes we say psych safety. We’re so cool. We’re so cool. We have these shortened ways of saying psychological safety. We say psych safety. And we say EI or TEI for emotional intelligence or team emotional intelligence.

Patricia:

Team emotional, not total economic impact. Team emotional.

Richard:

Economic impact, not the total economic index. No, but the team emotional intelligence, which is, it’s kind of like kind of like individual EI, we’re so cool. We shorten it. It’s about knowing how we’re doing internally as a team, orienting our behaviors appropriately so we get what we want as a team and understanding how the system works outside of our team and being able to influence things outside of our team to get what we want as a team and as a bigger organization together. And these core protocols behaviors are all correlated to things that get measured in TEI and psych safety. So there’s evidence that if you do these behaviors with your team, you’ll get what you want. You’ll then, you’ll be a, what we call a high performing team. So that’s what we did in the webinar. We talked about these ideas a little bit, the origin story there, and we did a lot of interaction to practice some of these, something funny. I don’t remember if it was the webinar or a different speaking gig that I did. Somebody gave me feedback that they hated that I used the word science when I was talking about the origin story. They’re like science is so controversial these days.

Patricia:

There’s a lot to tap into there. I dunno.

Richard:

I can’t trust science because science is contro. So I’ve been saying, I’ve been highlighting the word evidence more since that for the last few weeks, last couple of months versus science be. And I usually preface it like this because science, the word science is so controversial. So I’m going to avoid saying science and I’ll just say evidence.

Patricia:

Oh boy, are you trying to get away from these questions?

Richard:

Give me a question.

Patricia:

Okay.

Richard:

What do we got? So some people ask questions. We didn’t have time to answer them in that awesome webinar. What’s one of the questions?

Patricia:

Well, actually before I dive right into the, a specific question, I think there were a group of questions that led people to question this notion of like a team, a normal team and a high performing team. And you were really talking about the behaviors of a high performing team and not like a mediocre plus team. So how do you close that gap when you were talking about.

Richard:

The gap? Like about what I was talking about? What the different kinds of teams or the behaviors or?

Patricia:

Yeah, like if I’m in an, if I know I’m in an okay team and we’re trying to become a high performing team, you know, what are those things you know, what is something that I could try? Of course we were I’m from scrum.org, as a scrum master, as you know a coach. What is something that I could try because I felt that from the questions that were coming in, a lot of people were going, whoa, and we don’t see any of those things. And we go, well that’s because this is kind of something else.

Richard:

Okay, yeah. So, okay. Most of us, most of the time we’re on average teams, right? I mean, just by definition, I don’t want to get all sciencey here, but maybe a little mathy. Most of us are average. And most of the teams that we’re on our average, most of the time, sometimes they’re better than average. Sometimes they’re a little worse, but most of the time we’re on average teams and.

Patricia:

Like the New England Patriots.

Richard:

Like the New England, you’re going to like get us in trouble now, with New England, with NFL fans worldwide.

Patricia:

I didn’t say which spectrum or how they were performing.

Richard:

Oh, but we could use that as an example, right? Over the last, what, 15 years or something, 20, I don’t know, 15 years, I suppose, they are measurably better than other teams. There is very strong evidence that they’re better than other teams. They win a lot of championships. We compare the teams every week and every year and for the last 15 years or something, they’ve gotten more of those best team in the league awards than any other team. So they’re over the last 15 years, they’re a measurably high performing team. Other teams are also high perform, I suppose, any teams that make it to the playoffs, we could call them high performing, the teams that don’t make it to the playoffs, well that’s most of them. So actually, I don’t know any NFL, do most teams go to the playoffs or not?

Patricia:

It’s like, you’re not talking to the right person.

Richard:

Me neither, I don’t really know this stuff, but this idea in sports, in sports, professional sports and amateur sports, we actually take teams and compare them. And we know which team is better at the end of the assessment. At the end of the evaluation, we call it a game or a match. And there’s a score at the end. We know which team was better that day. We don’t have really good ways to do that for most digital product or service teams in the world. Although there are some good ways to measure their actual performance. But yeah, most of us are on average teams most of the time. What is something very concrete that we could do to move in that better than average, that average plus or average plus plus direction. We could start by making things optional. This was the past protocol. Do everything by invitation. Invite people to come make it so that people want to come. I was looking in my son who helps me with digital. We call him digital media or something. But what it really means is, he handles social network stuff for me, cause he’s younger and gets it better than I do. So he’s been encouraging me to read the agile Reddit, right? There’s a Reddit called agile and.

Patricia:

Kind of embarrassed.

Richard:

Somebody asked a question and the question was like, I’m not getting really good engagement in my scrum activities. How can I make them collaborate with each other more? Right, and my answer is like, well, you can’t make them, first. You know, you can’t make anybody do anything. It’s just the way it is. And what if people wanted to be there? What if it was fun? What if it was awesome? What if your daily scrum really was great and people looked forward to it? People would come and people would collaborate with each other and they would accomplish the goal of that daily scrum, which is make the team better. Help us achieve our goal for the sprint. So first try making everything optional and imagine ways to get it so that people want to be there. I mean, it’s play music. I don’t know what it is. Make it fun, make it like a party. How do you get people to come to your party? You don’t say, how do I make people come to my party? And how do I make them have fun?

Patricia:

Hmm, some people do that.

Richard:

But think about it like your party every morning, you’re having a, I don’t know, a coffee party or something.

Patricia:

You’re happy to be there.

Richard:

Yeah, how do you make it so people want to be there and they’re happy to be there? And you’re getting what you want together, which is what you do with friends. If you were having a morning, how would you make it? And we talked about this in the high performance team stuff. They actually look like they’re friends. They act like they’re friends. They do friend things with when they’re together. How could that morning meeting or whatever time of day it is. I usually say morning, how could that morning in daily scrum be a group of friends getting together, sharing ideas on their progress, toward their goals.

Patricia:

That second part is really important, right? Like part of when I think about when I was looking at some of the evidence, things in EBM was really, this podcast is not about EBM, but the people who are friends and they don’t get anything done.

Richard:

Ah.

Patricia:

So that’s the other part of high performing teams, isn’t it?

Richard:

So I would say it’s a team, right? So they have a shared goal.

Patricia:

I love them.

Richard:

And Scrum is this nice framework for making sure, we’re, for helping us achieve our goals together.

Patricia:

Thank you for that reminder I guess.

Richard:

I mean, it is. That’s really all it is. So make it optional, make everything optional. And we’re talking about like this question maybe came from a scrum master kind of person, make everything optional and set up the environment so that people want to be there. Think about it like a party, I suppose. And how do you get people to want to come to your party and have fun at your party and do the right things at the party. And one of the things we introduced in that webinar and people who are, have heard of core protocols, maybe you’ve heard about is this emotion check in. What if, our current emotional state was one of the data points that we used in that daily scrum? People do this when they go to the, when they coffee with friends, you meet up and you get coffee and you talk to each other about lots of different things, including how you’re feeling. And you’re like, I’m so mad about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah or I was really happy when blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And just add that data to your daily scrum. And your team will start, you’ll start to feel well first, because you’re all there cause you want to be versus because somebody commanded to be, you’re going to feel a little safer. It’s all optional. You get to decide whether to be there or not. And you start sharing how you’re feeling with each other, which at first is really weird and you feel a little bit naked, like you’re vulnerable, you’re sharing things that aren’t normally shared on average teams that aren’t normally shared when you’re not in a group of friends that you feel safe with, but when you start doing it regularly, you start to feel safer. That you can do this and it’s totally okay.

Patricia:

I love that data check-in and you talked about that and you gave examples of it. So there are three questions that I’m remembering that won’t they’re on my screen, but one of them and maybe it’s this, but one of them was, how do you, they, the person said, I’d like to know if it’s possible to measure psychological safety.

Richard:

Yeah. Yeah, there are, I don’t have these references right in front of me. We could add them in the podcast notes maybe. There are instruments. This is what the fancy people call them. They’re, an instrument is a thing that helps you measure something, right? A ruler is an instrument that helps you measure length. Scale is an instrument that helps you measure weight or mass. There are instruments that help you measure psychological safety. And you can find these. I have notes about, it’s been distilled down to four questions that you ask teammates. I have these all in my notes. It’s been distilled down from, the studies have been going on since at least the 1990s, maybe before that, people have published these lists of questions that they’ve used to measure the psychological safety of teams. And over the decades, it’s been honed down to, these are the four questions or the three questions that if you ask these to your team, you’ll know how safe they feel together. So yeah, there are easy ways to measure psychological safety. And then you can’t collect data about this and you could do it periodically. Maybe every sprint, maybe not maybe every month, maybe every quarter, something like this. So you have a gauge of how things are going over time. Is it psych safety? Yeah, let’s leave it at that.

Patricia:

Yeah, I was thinking somebody had suggested like, could you count, could you measure the safety based off of like, if you ask a question, right? And people just opt out, could you just use that as a measure? And I was thinking about it and I was like, you could, but maybe there’s some other reason why they’re opting out. It’s not that they, you have to feel a degree of safety to even opt out sometimes.

Richard:

Oh really great point. Yeah, even this idea of passing or opting out, the ability to do that helps build safety. Yeah and if people pass on answering a question, I suppose there is some safety there. Just because they felt that they could pass, but you really don’t have any other information, right? Like if you ask somebody a question, they will answer it or not answer it. If they answer it, you have information. If they don’t answer it, you don’t have, well, you have some information, but you don’t have information about, hey, how safe do you feel right now on a scale from one to five? Which is really, you know, a super simplified version of what these instruments are asking. And if somebody doesn’t answer the question, all you know is that they didn’t answer the question.

Patricia:

True. That’s what you have evidence of. Well, one of the other things, the themes that were coming up is what about, well, so first of all, it’s, there’s a question that revolves around who is responsible for a psychological safety in a team and a scrum team. And, it’s tied into this notion of, you know, I’m a scrum master and I think what they’re thinking about is the people need to attend the events, right? That’s what I understand. And that might be a beginner, I understand. But what you’re supposed to be doing is facilitating scrum, making sure all these things are coming together, right? And you do what you need to do to help that team. So what happens if people want to opt out of like the retrospective, the event that they just stop showing up. What do you do then?

Richard:

I think of it as data, that people don’t want to show up. Right and back to that first question, awesome, people aren’t showing up. Now I know something about the team, these meetings, aren’t working, these scrum events aren’t working, they’re working so poorly that people aren’t even showing up. How can we make them more effective? How can we make it so that people want to come? What do we have to do differently? There’s all kinds of things you can do differently. You can read more, you can study more, you can get help from a friend. Maybe you have somebody you work with as a coach or something or there’s some class you can take, some video you could watch for five minutes that gives you an idea of how to do a sprint review, better. You know, make it, do what you can to make it better, make it more effective, make it so that when somebody doesn’t show up, they feel like they missed out.

Patricia:

Yeah and I think there would be an agreement too. Like we can have something that I’ve tried is we can do this, but it is not on the onus of the people who are there to catch you up, if you choose to opt out of these events that are there for a reason, right? And so hopefully what I’ve seen actually is that people start to bring, they start to participate, which is a great thing. So that’s for the existing team. There are several questions here that were around like new teams, like, or you are new to a team, or you are walking into a new team. How do you encourage psychological safety there? And then again, who’s responsible for that?

Richard:

Yeah, I don’t know if I told this story during the webinar, but I was on a team once. It was completely temporary team. It was a group of jurors. And for people outside of the US, this might not make sense, but maybe they probably will cause you’ve probably seen a TV, some TV series or some movie in which there was a jury in a trial and people on.

Patricia:

Like Law And Order.

Richard:

Yeah, something like this. This was a jury of six people because of the venue, the particular crime, all these things. So it was a small jury. It was actually a perfectly perfect team, size, six people. It was a great team size. I walked in. So we had one day of sitting in the courtroom, listening to all the evidence and watching the defendant and all the witnesses and all this stuff. And one day of deciding guilty or not guilty, and the decision has to be unanimous. How interesting is that? And I know a thing or two about teams and team performance and safety and all this stuff. And I thought about this jury as a team and I wanted to make sure we got the right decision. So I went in and you know, I didn’t tell anybody, I’m this expert on teams, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, cause it didn’t matter. I just started doing the things, we sat down together, you know, so I packed up all my supplies and I seriously, I brought.

Patricia:

You did this for jury duty?

Richard:

I brought this stuff with me. I brought this stuff with me because I wanted to facilitate having a great team. And I knew this would help if we started to visualize the ideas and not just talk about things, a lot of us need to need to visualize what’s happening. We can’t keep verbal ideas in our heads. I’m one of these people in scrum and agile, we talk about visual management tools, right? It helps people. So I brought those things. I brought food because I had read about this is in the book thinking Fast and Slow. The author talks about some study that was done on trial decisions, in a probate court or something in Israel. And then in a particular courtroom where they decide whether somebody gets early parole or something, right? They’re already in prison and do they get to leave early or not? And the data showed, there’s evidence of this. There’s strong evidence of this, that the judge lets people out first thing in the morning. And then I’m sort of drawing a graph, but I’m not making any sense, early in the morning, the judge is more likely to let you out. And right after lunch, the judge is really likely to let you out of jail early, just before lunch, you have no chance you’re staying in prison and late in the day, you’re definitely staying in prison. Right? So what it’s actually showing is that when we don’t have enough blood sugar in our brains, we don’t make good decisions.

Patricia:

Oh my goodness, what did you bring to eat?

Richard:

So I just brought snacks. I just made sure we had snacks. I brought healthful snacks.

Patricia:

Oh, not like.

Richard:

I stopped there. We’re both in New England. And I suppose it’s an international chain now. I went to Dunkin Donuts and I brought coffee in and I made sure we had food to eat. I made sure that we had all the things we would need to facilitate making the right decision. And then the first thing I said was I feel glad, oh, so now I’m doing this emotion checking, but I wasn’t didn’t make any big fuss about this. I didn’t make any big fuss about bringing in the food or the post-its and pens. I just did.

Patricia:

I’m just going to saying that as a New Englander, I would’ve been immediately very suspicious. That guy’s trying to kill us, so that we agree with it.

Richard:

Well, there was a guard just outside the door too. So everybody was physically safe. Physical safety is a given, right?

Patricia:

Oh, yes.

Richard:

I was like, I’m glad I’m here. This is so cool. I’ve never been on a trial jury before. We get to do something really important. And I wasn’t being corny about it. You know, people say this and they’re like being corny and I added on and I’m afraid this is so important. I want to make sure we make the right decision. I want to, I’m afraid that we might take somebody who’s innocent and commit them to prison. I’m also afraid that we might take somebody who’s guilty and say they’re and release them back into the community and the community won’t be any better off, continue to be unsafe. It was like, and that’s it. I didn’t do anything else, but I don’t know if we mentioned this in the webinar, mirror neurons, whoa, so effective. This, the next person shared how they were feeling. Same thing happened. The third person shared how they were feeling. And then the coolest thing happened. The fourth person said, I don’t want to share how I’m feeling.

Patricia:

Were you sitting at a round table?

Richard:

Kind of, yeah, I guess a square table. Yeah so we were all literally sitting around the table and okay the fourth person said, I don’t want to share how I’m feeling and nobody reacted. It was totally okay. Passing was totally okay. And I didn’t make a big deal out of this. Hey, you just passed. Hey, that’s so cool. Hey, we can all do that. It was just cool. Fifth person shared how they were feeling. Sixth person didn’t feel like sharing how they were feeling. So right away, brand new team group of strangers. We’re a team cause we’re a group of two more people, aligned with a common goal. We started instantly building. I facilitated, our instantly building more safety and more high performing capability together as teammates.

Patricia:

I love that, like the notion and that story really perfectly points to the, whether you are new to the team or whether the, you know, there’s somebody new to the team is just those invitations and being vulnerable really.

Richard:

Yeah and just doing it just, you don’t even have to introduce these behaviors. You just do them, you just model it and people copy each other.

Patricia:

You didn’t bring your book?

Richard:

Like. Hey look, am I getting stuff now? I’ve got, hey, I’ve got a book for everybody. And I’ve got some stickers And everybody gets, hey, look, I’ve got branded pens and everybody gets free prizes.

Patricia:

Woo hoo.

Richard:

No.

Patricia:

Oh my goodness.

Richard:

Can you imagine?

Patricia:

I actually got in trouble when. I actually got in trouble around jury day. I thought I wasn’t supposed to show up and their system is kind of broken, but I was supposed to show up. And so I’m dealing with that right now.

Richard:

Oh no.

Patricia:

I will practice these skills.

Richard:

It turns out somethings in life are compulsory. Oh.

Patricia:

I was ready to show up. Something happened. Oh, let me see how to segue. Speaking of showing up.

Richard:

It’s true, how about showing up.

Patricia:

The, there seemed to be kind of like a stream and a conversation, a lot of questions, basically about psychological safety performance, not even high performance and management and leadership. And I was recently talking to some people and I was saying, you know, there are absolutely moments when I feel like, well, where you’re in a team and I want to win and I want you to win. And I know you want me to win, we’re in here to be successful, whatever win is the word, right? We want to win. And, but outside of that bubble, that’s not true. We don’t feel like we want people want us to win or that we even want those people to win. And so there were questions really that were just framed around, how do you do this? How do you deal with, and how do you exist? How do you deal with this when there’s that conflict of us versus them, business versus IT, whatever that is. And also just like the doers and management and leadership.

Richard:

Hmm, it’s so interesting, this sense of us against them. And I’ve definitely experienced it. And I’ve definitely experienced something different that we’re all in it together. The, some of the best, best is such a weird word. Some of the most successful, most satisfied clients I’ve worked with, we started with the people in leadership. Leadership, this them, if we’re the people on the doing the work teams, is people, this folks in leadership, they’re a team. Oftentimes they’re an average team because of the way they’re oriented and they’re.

Patricia:

Rich says tweet leaders are an average team. Management makes up average teams.

Richard:

Richard Kasperowski says the average team is average.

Patricia:

Especially if they’re managing.

Richard:

I did not say that. Let me finish my darn story.

Patricia:

Okay.

Richard:

This, the story is like it’s akin to the book, “Five Dysfunctions of a Team.” The author of that book told the story really, really well, and that’s fiction, but I’ve experienced it with real leadership teams, people in leadership teams, the way our companies are oriented by default, the average company is oriented this way. There’s a chief or a VP or a director of marketing. And they focus on marketing. There’s a chief or a VP or director of, you know, name something else, sales, IT, product development and they focus on their specialty area. We use the word silo a lot, they’re silo. They act like they’re competing for resources. I need more budget. You can’t have more budget cause it would take away from my budget. I need more people. You can’t have more people cause then I would have fewer people. They act like they’re competing against each other versus working together. So they’re not performing well as a team of leaders. They act like they don’t have shared goals. They don’t feel safe together in that measurable, psychological safety sense. And if you measure ’em they’re measuring low on psych safety. Again, we can measure it. We can measure that. We can measure team EI. They’re measuring low on these things. They’re probably measuring low on performance. If we measure the performance of them as a leadership team or the performance of the organization. If they want all of the teams doing the work for them to be awesome teams above average teams, high performing teams, it starts with them. I’m not saying you can do this at every organization, but sometimes you get lucky and there’s an organization where the leaders want this. They want everything to be better. And they heard somewhere that they themselves might be part of the problem and they want to do something about it. And just like me in that trial jury story, they just, they model it and other people imitate them. And the best clients and organizations that I’ve worked with, the leaders get together as a team, they learn these skills. They learn all these core protocols things. So they actually start building more safety and EI together as a team. They might even start scrumming their work or doing something similar to that. So they’re modeling that it’s totally okay to share how you’re feeling. They’re modeling that we know how to make decisions. We actually know how we make decisions and how we resolve conflict, core protocols, ideas, and high performing team’s ideas. We’re very clear about what our goals are and we’re very transparent. Everybody’s invited to help us check our progress and make sure we’re always reorienting toward getting our goals accomplished. And they model it for everybody else in the organization. They make it safe for everybody else in the organization to do the same thing. So then all of the do the work teams can do the same thing and it’s totally okay. And in fact, they kind of feel like they need to cause they need to keep up with their leaders. Now the leaders are actually leading and all the people on the worker teams, they feel like they need to keep up with their leaders.

Patricia:

I would say that’s a sign too, just from what I’ve seen from enterprise and you know, working with different organizations is that some of that behavior where it is not safe, where you feel that it’s like they’re breaking up their safety cause they’re, you know, the wrong rock game or like you’re not doing this or whatever is because the leaders want to be leaders or managers want to be managers, the teams want to be doing the work. But because those goals aren’t transparent or the direction is not transparent. That’s when that control, they need to control it. That feeling, that behavior comes in and it’s directly, there’s a thing from, you know, our little notes of on, from the webinar and the spreadsheet. It was it’s literally, how does this work from leaders? Because if I tell my manager, my leader about this, I want better performance. I will get fired. Speaking about, you know, not feeling safe, but like.

Richard:

That’s not safe.

Patricia:

Yeah and I suppose if you want to, I mean, if you know, that’s either, you know, fight the fight or maybe it’s time to leave. Like when you are thinking about this notion of winning and you want people to win and they want you to win on your team, show gratitude. But if those people are not there to help you win, you don’t want them to win, maybe that’s another thing.

Richard:

Yeah, I mean, we’re talking about digital product or service delivery teams here for the most part, there are all kinds of other teams that this evidence applies to. I’m not saying science or anything. That might be mistaken for science.

Patricia:

Should we just talk about numbers?

Richard:

I’m not going to get mathy. No, no, no numbers involved.

Patricia:

Should we just do zero, one, one, zero, zero, two, one?

Richard:

But yeah, in the kind of work that many of us do, you’re in demand. If you don’t like what’s happening at this organization, go find the better one, you know, started talking about these NFL players that they’re in demand. There aren’t that many of them in the world and they can go find a team they want to play on. With leaders they want to play under.

Patricia:

I think they can aspire to.

Richard:

And you can too. And you can too.

Patricia:

I think I know enough about football. They don’t just walk on.

Richard:

Well, no, I mean, they have to audition. They might have a contract with a number of years, term on it, but you know, once you’re free agent, you get your, turns out all the rest of us, normal people are free agents. I suppose it depends on the employment laws in your state. Patricia and I are in Massachusetts. We all are free agents in Massachusetts, at least. And we get to decide who we work for. And we can change. You hear this funny saying, I learned this from somebody in our community, Patricia, you can change your team or what did they say? You can change your company or you can change your company.

Patricia:

Yes.

Richard:

Deep, huh?

Patricia:

I was going to, yes. I’m going to have to think about that later.

Richard:

Oh, we’re all working so many of us in this kind of work. And I’m not saying this is applicable to all kinds of work. Many of us are working in digital space now. We’re not even going to an office. So state boundaries, national boundaries, we’re not as constrained by that anymore. There’s some organization you want to work for? Go do it.

Patricia:

Rich says, quit your boss. Quit your average team.

Richard:

Don’t just quit. Find your next team first. This is the way I grew up thinking. I know people are, different people are different, but I always thought you should find, I like having income. You should make sure you have income before you.

Patricia:

No, I think we just say you do you.

Richard:

You do you okay. You do you, whatever works for you, you’re responsible for you.

Patricia:

So there was, there’s this kind of this last grouping of questions and I don’t, if people have like more topics or questions or things to want to dive on, you know, feel free to contact Rich. Obviously he has all the answers. I just have the questions. So one of the things, so psychological safety, emotional intelligence, this brings up obviously the topic around conflict. And one of the things that, you know, you had talked about is how you facilitated. You showed up in that stance to facilitate when you were going, when you’re you showed up for jury duty. The, a lot of that can sometimes I think remove what we automatically think is conflict, or it can edge out the conflict because we’re having, we’re showing up in a certain way. It’s well facilitated. So we’re kind of focused on the right ways and the goal, we’re focused on progress, but in general, like, you know, are there other things that you would comment upon in terms of conflict and teams in this, us versus them because it’s, you know, how do I want to, how do I approach as a square master team when it’s just, it’s full of conflict?

Richard:

Yeah, so what about conflict? I mean, starting with everything is opt in. We share our feelings with each other. That’s going to, I love the way you said it. It’s going to just mitigate a lot of that conflict, right away. If we’re more connected, we’re going to be more connected. We’re going to be less in conflict more. If we’re more connected, we’re going to be more harmonious and less in conflict with each other. We’re talking about piano before we started recording, I think we’re going to be more harmonious and less dissonant. A really okay, a characteristic of better than average teams is we know how to make decisions. We have, we know how we make decisions, right? So on the average team, we have meetings where we make decisions, but it’s not really clear how decisions are made. Is it that we vote and majority wins and a bunch of us are dissatisfied? Is it that we all try to lobby the leader and the leader decides based on whatever the leader thinks is the right decision? Is it, sometimes we do it this way. Sometimes we do it some other way. On the better than average teams, we know how we make decisions and we do it consistently and it could be majority vote, it could be unanimous decision like on that jury and many of the best teams, small team size groups, six people, five people, unanimous decision is super effective and it’s, what’s recommended. It’s, what’s one of the core protocol ideas to use unanimous decision making. How do we resolve conflict on the best teams? We have ways to resolve conflict. There’s a core protocol for it that you could use. It’s related directly to the decision making protocol. I think it’s called decider and resolution. The behavior titles tell you what they’re for, but, and in general, how do we resolve conflict? A team that’s really dissonant. Couple more of these behaviors documented as core protocols. Intention check, is a really good one. It’s sort of like the opposite of on many teams, they have an undocumented behavior pattern called accuse and another one called blame. When something goes wrong, you accuse people, you blame people cause we’re thinking like, or we’re reacting like we’re low on resources and the way I get more is that you get less. So when something goes wrong, I need to blame you for it so that you’ll get even less. And when you get even less, I get even more, what about it? We probably have shared goals. We mentioned transparency and we all know what the goals are together and maybe we’ve all agreed on what the goals are together. How about instead of blaming somebody or accusing somebody of doing something wrong, dive deeper, try to figure out what happened? Try to resolve that conflict with each other using words, ask more or more generally the investigate pattern, which is really just ask questions, try to learn more about each other or the one where we’ve made decisions. They call it protocol check. But it’s really just that when we’ve made agreements and we don’t live up to them, how do we resolve that? On the best teams, on the above average teams, it’s the observed behavior is that people safely call each other out. When we’ve made a commitment to each other and we don’t deliver on it.

Patricia:

And there’s healthy conflict, right? There’s just a healthy.

Richard:

Healthy conflict, yeah. It’s not conflict avoidance. It’s not constant conflict, constant dissonance. It’s conflict sort of thinking about it as I talk, which is unusual. I usually can’t do both at the same time for real. This is why I need to write down ideas. See, what happens when I try to think at the same time as talking, I lose what I’m thinking or I lose what I’m saying.

Patricia:

That’s okay. You were doing your.

Richard:

If we were aligned in our ideas, if we’re aligned in our goals, which is Scrum, the Scrum framework facilitates this, which is part of why it’s so effective and we’ve made commitments with each other, we can check back on those commitments and it’s safe to gauge whether we’ve actually come through for each other.

Patricia:

Yeah.

Richard:

With each other.

Patricia:

Yeah, what I appreciate is, you know, at least from a strong context it’s can we try something? So I’m, you know, can we try something actually, I was just asking someone, join my team don’t know or not. I see some dependencies in there or whatever, but I’m like, you know what, let me talk to the team. But I think we should try it first. Let’s just see. And so that boundary, those boundaries are really, really important and trying to approach, in my opinion, things with curiosity is, and sometimes you just need like a break. Like that’s a, let’s just let step back, you know, kind of like what you were doing a little bit, just step back. I need to, I can’t think. That’s okay. That’s okay.

Richard:

We can literally step back.

Patricia:

I’m sitting, so I cannot, but yes. I think that kind of gets through a majority of the questions and the themes, but we, I mean, you laid it out really well in the webinar. So again, that’s from April 5th, 2022. And here you really were talking about, here are the steps to try to approach different situations. We’ve talked about conflict. What else did we talk about? I’ve lost my mind now, too.

Richard:

You have all the notes in front of you.

Patricia:

I know we talked about.

Richard:

I don’t know anything.

Patricia:

Oh, we talked about a lot of stuff we talked about, yeah. I really appreciate though, the leading, the data points, all those things, those examples that you gave, whether it’s, you are new to a team or, you know, somebody else is coming into your team, those were, it all just makes sense there. And I think your message was just try something.

Richard:

Do it, yeah. Yeah. Oh, and I wrote this blog a long time ago about, you know, this isn’t, this really isn’t fair to my mom, but when I.

Patricia:

Where you’re going with this?

Richard:

Say it, so my mom would understand it right? Is like one of the things I try to do myself and guide other people on, you know, somebody has this new product idea. What does it do? And say it so my mom would understand it, right? Scrum say it, so my mom would understand it, right? What if we just got together at the beginning of the week and agreed on what we’re going to do for the week? What if we talked to each other at least once a day and checked in on our progress and made adjustments? What if at the end of the week we reviewed what we got done and came up with some idea to do even more, better stuff next week, right? Boom that’s scrum and my mom gets it.

Patricia:

Well, that was, so not that, you know, the mom thing, but I was talking to the Schwaber, right? So Ken Schwaber owns scrum.org and he’s the co-creator of Scrum. And I was having a conversation with him and his wife, Christina Schwaber and we were talking about, you know, Scrum, cause that’s actually, we do talk about Scrum over coffee. Like we’re just talking about Scrum and we’re talking about the point I think, of Scrum, the point of actually the daily Scrum. And you know, Ken says this, you know, grandiose thing and ask great questions and Chris, she says, honestly, it’s just a point during the day to make sure that people get together and check in to see if they’re okay.

Richard:

Yeah.

Patricia:

Just get together and talk and that’s it.

Richard:

All right. I’m going to, this is going to be on the record. Now I’m going to say something that I’ve said off the record or when it’s not being recorded. Sometimes I think Scrum, okay. It’s for software development teams, at least originally, sometimes I think it’s an awesome framework for people who work, well the kinds of people who work on software development teams, which many of which, and I would include myself here. Many of us are neuro-atypical, neuro-diverse, maybe, almost diagnosable as mildly autistic. I’m almost diagnosable as mild autism or ADHD or something. A lot of us actually don’t know how to have good social interactions, but we are so good at reading and following instructions. So how do you get good interactions in this population of people? You give them instructions for how to do it. And hey, it turns out like Chris Schwaber said, it’s a really good idea to talk to each other, at least once a day.

Patricia:

You got it.

Richard:

Totally, totally. And we need an instruction that tells us, go talk to each other once a day.

Patricia:

Yeah and I think more so now as we see the use of these practices and frameworks elsewhere, it is for the people who are busy all the time or for the people who are just your heads, you’re doing something it’s alright. Let’s lift your head up, you know, do whatever. However let’s collaborate. So, but yes. Yes, I think that, that was down to the point where they were like, here’s the question you ask, but.

Richard:

They were previously, but now it’s more generalized.

Patricia:

Yeah, so that’s it. I mean, there were like 30, so I tried to group ’em up.

Richard:

Oh, that was awesome. That was awesome. And it feels like you’ve been the host of this podcast. So I like I feel awkward wrapping up. Do you want to wrap up the podcast or should I?

Patricia:

I don’t know.

Richard:

I think you’re saying I should do it. So I do it like this. We’ve got this script, the script, the next thing on the script is, hey Patricia Kong, it’s been a great pleasure having you here with me today. I really enjoyed this conversation for real. Thank you so much. This has been amazing.

Patricia:

Well thank you for having me as your second guest. And I’m glad it was for real. This is, it’s always fun. Catching up with you and talking.

Richard:

Absolutely, I love it too. And this is for listeners and viewers. Hey, listeners and viewers, remember to support this podcast, visit my website, kasperowski.com.