Claire DeMarco: How to Bring Your Team to Perfection With the Core Protocols

Richard:

Hey, Claire. How’s it going?

Claire:

Good, thanks for having me.

Richard:

Oh, it’s a pleasure. Thank you for joining us here. What else could you, or would you add on to that intro?

Claire:

It’s interesting. I’m incredibly flattered to have that as my tagline. That’s an amazing tagline. Thank you for writing it so I can use it again. And it’s, of course, referencing a particular piece of work I’m extremely proud of, but I often wonder what other people think of when they hear that kind of summary and what assumptions that people will make about librarians or about Harvard. So, I’ve been at Harvard for over 10 years now, and I was transitioning to librarianship from a career in law and public affairs, first at Harvard law school, and then over to the library. And I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about that transition and thinking about the narrative. I like to draw on the common elements of my career that kind of can make it make sense. I think a lot of people look back at their lives and try to do that. And one of the common elements is building teams and, you know, learning from you, learning from others, about building high performance teams. So that’s definitely one of the elements I’m most proud of. So, I think it hopefully makes sense to have me here. So, thanks for having me.

Richard:

Totally. Again, my pleasure. We were joking before we started recording. Are you actually a librarian? What does it mean to be a librarian?

Claire:

What does it mean? You know, I have been in a couple of professions, right, where you use what you do to describe yourself. So, being a librarian, being a lawyer. I think that those things are about communicating information and sharing it with people. Both of those professions have a lot to do with categorizing information. And how do you share the vast amount of information we have to share with people across the world in ways that are going to be digestible to them? How can you make it findable? I think folks have a much different mentality today about what makes something discoverable. How do you find information on the web? And even that is just a fraction, you know, of what’s really available. So yeah, that’s what librarians are, I think, today, even more so than what they’ve been in the past, but we have a lot of room to grow and a lot of things to learn about ourselves as a profession, but it’s one I wear proudly.

Richard:

Yeah. And I love the product that you and the team built. I actually use it regularly. You know, I only teach one class at Harvard. It’s just a part-time gig on the side. The best, the single best job benefit that I get is I get to use the library for real.

Claire:

Yeah

Richard:

Like I read something in the “New York Times” or someplace, and they’re citing some research paper and I want to go read it. I want to see what the original researchers said versus the report about the research. And it’s so easy. I just type in like the name of the article or the researcher names. And I always find what I’m looking for.

Claire:

Well, that’s lovely to hear. I like that you’re what we’d put you in our user research category as an advanced researcher. If you’re finding what you need, you’re ahead of a lot. I think we also have to design for folks who don’t know what they’re looking for, and that’s a much bigger challenge.

Richard:

It’s harder when I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. I’m like, “I think it was this who…”

Claire:

Yeah, right?

Richard:

Yeah, no, like it always works. It’s way better than it was in the olden days, back in the early 1990s when I first started using it, for sure. Before it even had a graphical user interface on it.

Claire:

Right, that’s what I was going to say. I think there are times when we’re outpacing expectations and times when we’re woefully behind. But at the moment I feel like we’re in a pretty good space where we’re, we just did a, this is an aside, you can use it or not, but we just did it a usability study on our main library catalog. Because for us, we’re always going to see the faults and it’s kind of like, you know, the feedback that we get is kind of like Yelp reviews. Like, you’ll hear from the people who aren’t finding what they’re for, you’ll hear from them. But what are the vast majority of people who used the catalog, what’s their experience like? And are they pretty satisfied with it? You know, should we be making huge investments here or should we be making investments in other places? So, I think it was really good for the community to hear, the library community to hear, we’re doing pretty well in the places where we’ve tried to make an impact. Now let’s think about other places we could have an impact. So that’s really exciting.

Richard:

Two thumbs up, five stars for me. So, that was a great team that we worked with on that project. And really, we, I shouldn’t say we. You get all the credit. I just dropped in a little bit at the beginning. This is the podcast about teams and you’ve been listening to the podcast and I shared with you the little outline of, you know, it’s not even a real script that we have, but just talking points. We’re always talking about your best team of your entire life, right? And it could be a work team, it could be a not work team. Any group of two or more people aligned with common goals. What is the best one of those of your life?

Claire:

There are a lot to choose from. And I really appreciate the contextualizing that it may not be a work team. You and I have talked in the past about how your primary team can be your family. And that, for me, is a huge driver of everything I do. But I would highlight for this, when I hear that, especially from you, kind of what is your best team ever? My gut is that there’s one team that stands out above the rest. And the reason for that is that it helped to form how I think about teams and the work, kind of, how to successfully reproduce the things that are going to make good teams. And I took the most from this team into my personal life, my family team, into job transitions and other teams. So, this was kind of that setting the stage team that really did that hard work. So, it’s one that grew out of the team that you are referencing in terms of the work that we did together. It’s a team that was known as digital solutions within the Harvard library. And we were a small team about six people, and we were responsible for some of the largest and most impactful innovations at the library. And I mean that in terms of products, product development, digital products, but also the way that we worked together.

Richard:

All right. Obvious follow up questions. What are some of these projects? What are some of the ways that you worked together?

Claire:

Yeah. Well, I think for me, we can take the objective question first, maybe the objective measures,

Richard:

Oh, sure. just ’cause it’s naturally flowing here.

Claire:

You can sub it in however you want. So, objectively, it’s all the hallmarks of good work where you say, “How do you reward good work with more work?” Right? So, the most successful teams keep getting pulled into other aspects of the organization, and our scope of where we would consult and where we would give guidance just kept increasing and increasing over time. So, this is a team that built a new interface for exploring digital exhibits, mostly of very rare, special collections. It’s called Curiosity. And it’s intended to give researchers in a very niche area, a really deep dive into things that have been digitized within that space. That same team was then asked to consult and help build the interface for picking up a book during the pandemic, when we were all closed down. How could you order a book, safely go to a library location and pick it up. And this was before anyone was, you know, we’ve all become accustomed to kind of touchless pickup, contactless pickup. How would we do that in the library context? And all the libraries of the world were trying to figure this out. Our team was brought into consult on the user interface for how would someone make that reservation? What would their expectations be? So, that didn’t necessarily seem to fall within our scope, but people wanted to hear from us. They wanted to learn from what we had done, the great user research that we had done to inform our design practices, how we could apply that consistent design, and people, in hearing from us, understood that from a user perspective, they wanted to be in the catalog choosing the book and then in the interface to schedule their time. And they didn’t want to be disrupted in that transition. So, of course, it made sense for the look and feel and the interactions for those systems to be the same. So, we did a lot of internal presentations and consultations, and then we also were invited to a lot of national conferences to talk about how we could push things to production really quickly. By library standards, we were moving fast. And, you know, because we had these kind of objective measures of people wanting to hear from us, we got a bit of freedom from that. We had some autonomy. So not only were these kind of, you know, myriad projects coming our way, we could identify some areas of need for ourselves. So, the university put into place a new digital accessibility policy. We pulled together a group to do accessibility audits of all our public-facing systems. And we did that work differently. We used different inspect and adapt frameworks that we had developed as protocols and practices of this team to a very distinct area of work. And being able to choose your own adventure in that way, in alignment with the organization’s priorities, of course, but not kind of being fed work by a hierarchical kind of controlling funnel, that’s a great kind of measure of success, I think, for that team.

Richard:

Totally. And even the first bit of that, that you shared, how do you get rewarded for good work?

Claire:

More work.

Richard:

More work, and that’s so cool. You got invited to do more work. You identified important new things. When you look back at this team, is this a current team or is this a look back at this team kind of team?

Claire:

It’s a look back at because an interesting thing happened. And I think this probably resonates for a lot of folks who have been on a great team. The organization looked at us and said, “Wow, how can we infuse other teams with this?” And we actually kind of, organizationally, there were some administrative changes that put us in different buckets so that we could help infuse those practices into other areas. So, I’m now overseeing different teams than I was before. There are some of the same people that came with me, but I do think, you know, relaunching teams, you know, frequently is important. Anytime a new person joins or leaves, right, we have a new team. And so we really live and breathe that. When we bring in new interns, we try to relaunch teams around bringing those folks in. When we had a lot of people take the voluntary early retirement that was offered during the pandemic, trying to now kind of relaunch in light of those departures. So, yeah, it’s not pleasant to have a team that you love come to an end, but I think we’re at least able to, most of us, still work in the same organization and still see the value of what we built together.

Richard:

Yeah. Yeah. And I bet a lot of people have this experience of a team that’s really good and then other people around them want that goodness.

Claire:

Yeah.

Richard:

So what do you do with a great team? You split it up. Sounds right, but it sounds like it’s working for you and your folks.

Claire:

Yeah, it’s a gamble. I think it was important to recognize the pain of that. It’s important to give people time to grieve a team. Especially while we’re all grieving, you know, through the past couple of years in so many different ways, giving people space for that was really important.

Richard:

Yeah, for sure. You used the word protocol earlier. Do you have a protocol for grieving? Is there a way that you do it? Is there a protocol for relaunching?

Claire:

Yeah, so, I won’t say it’s always the same, that I use the same protocols every time. I think it definitely depends on different folks. In terms of grieving, I think I experimented a lot with when my presence as the leader of this team was helpful for their grief and when it was actually inhibiting their grief, because they needed to be able to share how they were feeling without me present and then decide how they wanted to share that information with me. So, usually, you know, when I think of teams, I think of, you know, self-directed groups and there’s relatively flat hierarchy, but in this instance, you know, some people are going to have more organizational power than others. And so, knowing when my presence was helpful or not was important. I think that was modeled to me by the folks above me. In terms of relaunching, that can be really fun, I think. We recently just did an exercise as we brought on a new person to our UX and discovery team, which is the smaller of the teams that I manage. We went through the McCarthy Core Commitments and we did an exercise where we put up three boards. We said, one board was, “this speaks to me”. One board was “what does this mean?” And the other was “not into it”. And people took the commitments as they had been drafted and put them on these different boards. We used Miro for this. And then when one was on the “what does this mean?” board but somebody else had put it in one of the other two boards, I invited people to kind of speak for those. So if you know, one, if you have a question, let’s talk through. Somebody else found that one meaningful, either positively or negatively, what was their response? And then from that, we were able to get the shared commitments pretty easily, right, the ones that we all agreed on. And then the others were an opportunity to redraft. And so we framed the commitments as they were presented to us, but in some new and different ways. And it made people feel really engaged that they were building the commitments that they want to make to each other, rather than just, “Claire says these are good ideas.”

Richard:

Right. That’s a really cool relaunch activity or a launch activity.

Claire:

Yeah.

Richard:

Yeah. I want to learn more from you about that later on after this.

Claire:

OK, good.

Richard:

How about, okay, this team we’ve been talking about, this best team ever, what’s your one word that describes the sensation of being part of this team?

Claire:

Well, I, as a student of yours, it will come as no surprise for me to tell you this, but the word is love. Like, the word is love. I talk about that. Anytime I’m in the position to talk about high performance teams, I think your teachings are right on the money. I, present tense, I love those people. And past tense, I loved the work we did together, and I loved how we did it. And, for me, that love manifested and informed those subjective measurements of success. So, subjectively, I knew it was a great team because I knew that team was going to help me further my own personal goals, my own alignment, at every stage. At that time in my career, my alignment, and actually I think this probably resonates for a lot of people right now, my alignment was to find a place of safety. There was a lot of disruption going on around me. And I wanted to know that the trajectory of my career was going to be solid, that I was going to be able to demonstrate value for the organization, that I was going to be able to take care of my family, that I would be safe and supported at work with the people around me. And as the result of that work that I did with that team, even though that team doesn’t exist in that same formation anymore, I still feel that. I still feel that value, feel that safety, that sense of personal alignment fulfilled by my workplace, because we built it into the fabric of how we do our work.

Richard:

Wow. You know, some sometimes I’m trying to think of really, you know, clever, intellectually reflective follow up comments and questions, but wow.

Claire:

Well, that’s why I was asking it first about how many students have you had. ‘Cause I felt like you could take some of this and use it for your marketing too.

Richard:

And dear listeners and viewers, that’s not the purpose of this. I just wanted to hang out with Claire a little bit and see it was on her mind.

Claire:

Yeah, you can cut that.

Richard:

Or not, or not, we’ll see.

Claire:

Or not.

Richard:

Let’s see, how about, okay. So we’ve got this relaunch, which is kind of like a relaunch protocol, sounds like you’ve got a way to do it consistently and get the result you want consistently. You’ve got giving space for grieving. Are there any other concrete behaviors that go into this team being so great?

Claire:

Yeah. I think two more that come to mind that kind of further the things we’ve been talking about. I tend to categorize, like, my top three practices or behaviors and there’s kind of three categories. One is demonstrating engagement, the other, positive bias, and then just the value of the inspect adapt framework generally. So, for inspect adapt, I think the grieving piece kind of fits in with inspect adapt because, you know, the one constant that we all have is that we’re moving through time together. And we may experience time differently, but we’re moving through it together. Things are happening around us. And so, to exercise a framework that’s going to give you control over what you decide to work on, how long you decide to work on it, and when you’re done. When it’s ready to be worked on, when you’re done working on it, how that work happens, whether you should change it for the next period of time, all of that, you know, I’ve been told many, many times that people can zone out when I start to use too much business jargon, or it seems like I’m talking just from a software development mindset and using capital A Agile, but I see it everywhere. I see it in every type of work. So, that kind of time boxing is the technique that I’m trying to roll out to the most kind of traditional parts of a library organization could still have a value in time boxing. Another one I think to promote the engagement piece, you know, is check-in protocol, but a couple of things that we’ve adapted about check-in protocol, I think, in part, because our, you know, my teams have changed and have added to it over time, but also because of the moment that we’re living in, we adapted our check-ins as a result of hybrid and remote work, right? And there’s a lot missing from our remote interactions that unless you make that space to share, people aren’t going to read it naturally through Zoom or through a video medium. And so, that idea of my check-in as my self-awareness and my own weather report, like, what’s going on in my climate zone, and then the larger climate conversation of the team is me making space to hear them when they talk about their own weather report. And then thinking about how those different climates around us, those different zones, are going to interplay with the work we decide to do today. Or do we decide today’s not the day let’s do it tomorrow. Just kind of having that as part of it, that self awareness and that team awareness. A couple of the reframes that we did on some of the core commitments language, I think get at this, one of them was we added one that’s, I’ll just read it to you. “I will recognize my own energy levels and those of others and support the need to check out from the team at any time without judgment.” So that the value of checkout, I think for people living through the most trying times that we’ve all worked through in our present work lives, I think, is hugely important. And then another one is, “I will utilize resources and expertise available to me to achieve shared goals and will be mindful of the impact of my request on others.” So, when we ask people to work in a team, or we ask them to go out and look for solutions to their problems, being mindful that the people they ask might have their own things going on that day and bringing that mindfulness into your practice I think is really important. So those are a few of the different kind of concrete ways we’ve put those together.

Richard:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you already said the L word, love. That mindfulness of what’s happening with others, that sounds like another expression of love.

Claire:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, caring, I think we also reframed one of the protocols. You can choose to use this or not, Richard, it’s not a critique of you per se, But one of our staff members pointed out that “I will never do anything dumb on purpose,” actually uses some ableist language, which I knew, but I had not internalized and thought that that might be promoting any harm within the team. So we changed it and we actually changed it also because we had been doing an abolitionist study group as part of our work together. So we changed it to say, “I will actively work to avoid and redress harm.”

Richard:

Beautiful.

Claire:

And thinking about, I’m going to work to actively avoid or redress harm, and I know you are committing to the same thing, it kind of got at the same goal of that original commitment. But I loved the idea of how do you counter, what is love out there to do, to avoid and redress harm. We’ve got to acknowledge and try not to harm one another. And I think for a lot of people, it feels awkward to say out loud, I know it doesn’t for you, but we’re working on that one.

Richard:

That’s a great modification. I love it. I love it. And that one definitely bothers people a lot. That core commitment, I won’t…

Claire:

It’s one of my favorites, too. So it was hard, you know. I put on the relaunch board, I was like, “I’m into this.” And somebody was like, “Not into this.” And I was like, “Oh, we have to have the dialogue.” So, it was good.

Richard:

Yeah, that’s awesome. That is awesome. Okay, so we’ve got some really good ideas here. What, in addition to, or including these good ideas we’ve already heard, what advice do you have for listeners and viewers? How could they reproduce some of this team’s awesomeness?

Claire:

I think, for me, the space and time that we gave to what did it mean to do things differently? So we can’t just assume that you want different outputs on a team, you want them to be the innovative team. You want them to be the agile team. You want them to be different or disrupt kind of traditional modes of operation. I think sometimes we say those things and we don’t actually give people, you know, we send them to a training, we have them read a book, but I learned by doing this, right? And so that first team that you and I worked on together, laid the foundation for the learning. And it was not just hearing you say certain words or reading certain things that was the learning. The learning was, “How do I apply this when it’s actually hard?” “When do I see the opportunity for something like decider protocol?” So, I would, I think the advice I would give is you can launch a team today and you can put a small time box around it. You can say, “Me and this one other person want to try new things. We want to try new practices in our day. So we’re going to do a week of this daily practice. And we’re going to, then at the end of the week, we’re going to see how it feels. See whether we need more time for it, less time for it. Did it enhance the other work we’re doing? Are we able to then demonstrate that to other people? Can we teach other people and let them in on what we’ve learned?” And, that, I think, rather than let me passively learn, let me actively engage and through that engagement, I will learn. And then the kind of proof in the pudding is can I teach it? Can I show it? Can I adapt it? And that would be my biggest advice, ’cause I have a lot of folks on my team right now, this new team that I’ve been managing for about a year, I’ve been modeling a lot of behaviors and a lot of practices. And I still have some people come and they say, “Will you do a presentation about what you mean when you say a project mindset?” And sometimes I say, “Well, we’ve been doing that. So, in this thing that we’re working on together, that’s what I mean when I say project mindset.” And they say, “Oh, we’re already doing it,” right. Taking credit for the effort that they’re putting in, to try something. Giving people that support, you know, and saying, “I value your try. I value the effort. It’s not the outcome that I’m looking for. It’s the effort.”

Richard:

Yeah, and inspecting and adapting. Things are always getting better, yeah.

Claire:

Yeah.

Richard:

All right. Is there anything else you’d like to add on to all of this?

Claire:

One thing I will say, I said this in my interview for this job actually, is that another narrative through my career has been I’ve worked in places where people assume that the work is individual. So, I worked in a law office and they assume, “Okay, this is your docket of cases. You’re the lawyer.” Maybe you have an assistant. Maybe you have a paralegal you work with, but like it is individual work. And I saw that by transforming the approach of that work from an individual practice into a team where I peer managed other attorneys and we worked together to say, “We’re all doing cases that follow a similar pattern. Let’s look at them on a calendar and see how we could inform one another’s work.” That was early time boxing. That was early team approach for me. Then I got to kind of a reference library and context where, you know, people think about folks coming up to a reference desk and asking a question. And then you think about that research being highly individualized. “Okay. Let’s, you and I, I will impart the knowledge that I have to you person asking the reference question.” But when we transformed that into a team of liaisons for different student journals, and clinics, and faculty groups, we were able to learn from one another, the ways to have a good reference interview and the ways to look for themes, what kinds of questions are people bringing. That came out of the team-based approach. And then when I came to managing software developers, you know, that world was already starting to go into a space where we were doing, you know, peer work and pairing up for programming, but the flavor of high performance teams that you put on it and that the community that listens to this podcast put on it, you know, we’re still really getting that normalized because the folks at the administrative levels don’t really understand the structures that are necessary to make that successful. And then, now, I’m in the same situation where I am managing people who catalog books, or journals, or electronic resources, and they’ve historically thought of that work as individualized. “I have this list of titles I need to get through and I’m going to apply an objective standard.” We’re learning and realizing we’re not neutral. We’re not subjective. We’re human beings. And we should do that in front of one another and together, and see what we can learn from one another. If two catalogers can spend 45 minutes in alone together time, you know, with a Zoom window open, and then in the last 15 minutes say, “Hey, so what, what book did you just work on?” “Oh, I was working on, you know, one of these French materials and I’m not a native French speaker. You know, what language are you working with?” And they can inform one another’s work just for 15 minutes. Right? That becomes a shared alignment between them. That they’re going to reflect every 45 minutes for 15 minutes on what was hard, and what was easy, and what was successful, and what wasn’t. And we haven’t gotten there yet, but that’s my dream for how this moves forward. I think any of that work can be better for us as human beings, if we do it together. And it doesn’t mean you have to be a super extrovert, it just means that you put some structures in place to check in with the other human beings that you work with at regular intervals and ask them how they’re doing.

Richard:

Yep.

Claire:

And demonstrate caring.

Richard:

And you just shared, I don’t know if this is like a new protocol that you use or a thing that you actually use that name for, this alone together time.

Claire:

Alone together time. Oh, I do a lot of alone together time over Zoom to replicate that feeling that we used to have when, you know, you’re waiting for a meeting to start and a bunch of people are checking their emails or pulling some things together. In my world, I end up putting music on. I find that facilitates work. There are a few people that agree with me and we’ll open up a virtual room and put some music on and maybe not be speaking to one another for long periods of time, but then we’ll kind of go heads up and say, “Hey, you want to check in for a few minutes?” And then we do that. And it’s great.

Richard:

That’s a really cool practice. Thank you for that.

Claire:

It actually comes out of librarianship. I’ll tell you like, really a lot of that phrase alone together time also reflects why students like studying in a library. They like individual study. It doesn’t all have to be wonderful group study rooms with big whiteboards and dry race markers, although that’s cool. They just want to sit at a long table in a study room, that’s relatively quiet with other people who are studying. So, that’s where that term came from in my lexicon, at least.

Richard:

All right and now we have a way to do it together in digital space too.

Claire:

Yeah, for sure.

Richard:

Thank you. Thank you. What a great contribution. Is there a way, if somebody wanted to get in touch with you, is there a way they could do that?

Claire:

Sure. So, I am on Twitter a bit. So it’s C underscore A underscore DeMarco on Twitter. I also publish some things on Medium, occasionally. I haven’t in a while. I need to get back to that. That’s a lot of where I’ve written about check-in protocol, about some of the adaptations that we’ve made as a team. One of my internship programs, we use some of these frameworks for that. And then, I will self-promote the product that you helped that we talked about at the very beginning, library.harvard.edu as a staff directory and I’m in there. And that’s a way to send me email.

Richard:

All right. Perfect. Library.harvard.edu, great. Look, Claire DeMarco. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really, really loved reconnecting and I’m grateful that we could have this time. Thanks.

Claire:

Absolutely, me too.

Richard:

And dear listeners and viewers, remember to support this podcast, visit my website. Kasperowsky.com.