How To Reset Your Team To Achieve More Together

0:00Hi, I'm Helen and I'm Sarah and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast where each week we borrow some brilliance and turn that curiosity into action which we think will help your career. And today we're going to talk a little bit about teams but we're going to talk about how you can reset your team so that you can achieve more together. And we are borrowing brilliance from Colin Fisher and his book. So if you are watching now, I'm sort of holding up the book, which is called Collective Edge. Now, if you can see me holding up the book, it hasn't even got its wrap on it. I read books in the bath and then I clearly ruin them.

0:32So I got it really wet and it went all crinkly. But at least it proves I've read it. Yeah. And it's quite nice. It looks nice. And Colin actually is, he's interesting to do some research on because he's naturally very squiggly. Because before becoming a professor and a researcher, he was a jazz musician. So some of his work on kind of groups and teams was like very much inspired by, you know, was like how do you get the synergy of what it's like to play in a jazz band where it sort of looks spontaneous but he's like actually no it's very intentional and very like thoughtful and well I guess sort of like how you bring together the right people so that then like the brilliant spontaneity just happens you know as in like you don't plan a jazz set I guess I don't know it's about jazz but but equally he's like but his point actually the words he uses is you need to create the right conditions and then you can outperform so his definition of collective edge is that as a group you are achieving outcomes so you basically you're achieving more than you would if you just added up like individual capabilities okay so if like you're smart and i'm smart and the rest of the team is smart you've got lots of smart people that doesn't necessarily mean that you've got a super smart team you have to do something different with that group of people for it to be better together.

1:48Yeah, so I suppose you could, if everybody's smart, you'd still have a smart team. But I suppose I think what he's really saying is, it's almost like there's an edge to be found. If you can achieve this synergy, he uses this word synergy quite a lot, from being very intentional about creating some of these conditions. And his argument is that most teams don't. So probably what most teams have is just lots of smart people, essentially. But you don't quite get the synergy or the edge because of things like coordination losses, free riding. I was like, ooh, Helen, you're doing a bit of free riding.

2:23Or process breakdowns. And actually when you start to get into it, it's some surprising things I think sometimes that give you the edge that weren't always what I was imagining or perhaps what I was expecting. So I haven't read this book and I'm not familiar with his work. So I'm going to be learning and questioning and sort of thinking, I guess, to you. But one of the things when we were talking about this before, hand it was this idea of sort of a regular reset that this is something that you it's not a one and done there are things that we need to regularly improve in teams to get the collective edge so what's interesting so he's done quite a lot of work on what you would do if you were setting up a team from scratch okay so how do you create like brilliant conditions like what would you do in what order um but then as you get into it like my observation certainly is most of us are not in that position that's quite a privileged position right to be like oh i'm setting it up from scratch I've done it.

3:14We've done it. Yeah, we both have, I suppose. It's really nice. But not very often. No. And so then you can take the principles of kind of what works, like kind of to create these really good teams, and then you can apply it to your own team by doing these resets or refreshes. And actually, I chatted to him, and we were both talking about Katie Milkman's work on the fresh start effect. And he was like, you sort of need to apply that to your team. you don't just want to keep doing what you've always done I suppose you know like every team you fall into bad habits perhaps some of the things that we're going to talk about today you might think oh we have not really focused on that or we've perhaps done some things in the wrong order and rather than just feeling helpless like oh we've we've got this wrong and we can't really reform yeah you can't probably start from scratch but you can reset it's also interesting in the context of in a squiggly career I think you also join lots of different teams so what you might do more regularly is join a cross-functional team or a project team and say like that would even be true in our company maybe I would start a new piece of work and then suddenly be working with two people in the team who I don't work with as much and so you could apply lots of what we're going to talk about today in sort of smaller team ways.

4:29I think this works sort of more informally as well as more like we're a team of 10 and we're really going to do a very thoughtful and intentional reset. So it's not radical team redo, it's just regular team reset. That's what we're doing. I would say so. Albeit some of the actions that we get onto might feel quite radical, you know, if you've not done them before. So shall I talk about some of the resets in terms of what we're trying to go from and to? Because you and I always find that helpful. We're like, yes, that's how we'll make sense to me. this will make sense and I picked out three things that have just really kind of stuck with me from my conversation with Colin from reading the book um the first one is around trust so unsurprisingly collective edge teams high performing teams um and he refers to Amy Edmondson's work obviously they've got high trust but he talks about actually there's a lot of focus put on relational trust like do you and I trust each other like as people like do we get on and those kind of things and actually what we need to focus more on is task-based trust okay so kind of tasks over relationships and task-based trust would be do I believe you're going to do what you say you're going to do yeah and do I believe you're going to do it to the quality that we need and if you're not going to do it do I think you'll tell me okay that's task-based trust sort of trying to think it's like having confidence in your competence but it's more than just competence it's that and your commitment maybe.

5:54Accountability maybe was the other word I was like we often hear actually from companies like how do we help people with accountability and actually what's really clear on the emphasis for everything we're going to talk about today is this is definitely a group endeavour. This is not a leader's job or like one person you're it's like it needs to be very much we based. So this is not like me telling you how to do this. It's like you almost need to agree it together. So that's the first one. Okay. The second kind of from and to, and this one may be controversial for you and I, given we wrote a book called You Coach You, is structure is typically way more important than coaching to help a team to get even better.

6:36Okay, so a coaching team might be saying, what do we do well? What could be even better if? How do we build more bonds? Bring out the best in each other? Take a coaching approach as a leader and for each other. for your peer-to-peer conversations, taking a coaching approach. And it's not that he says coaching is bad. It's just that structure is much more important. So it's definitely an and, not an or. And he's kind of really clear about that. But he just talks about how most teams miss out on lots of the upsides that come from very clear structure. Question. Yes. What do you think is the most well-structured team you have been in and what are your reflections on the performance of that team?

7:23interesting so I think probably the best structured team I was in was one of the leadership teams I was in at Sainsbury's and I think that's because a lot of effort was put into you know like how are we going to work together how am I going to work together with my manager took that very seriously how are we going to work together as a leadership team but not as much around like we talked about like coaching relationships it was much more like well who does what and how does this bit uh work with your bit and how do those bits work together um and I think probably the leader that we worked for kind of cared about making making it all work and it was a very was a very good team still I don't think I've ever been in a team where I felt the structure was incredible I don't think you know where like oh the systems and the structures were also clear and well defined I'm not sure I've had I'm not sure I've had that experience yeah i'd agree i don't think we really talk about like team structure i don't think we hold it as a like a thing to value and improve and invest in um so yeah it's quite interesting area i was thinking probably when i was at eon i felt that there was a lot of clarity over who owned what and and then that team had was quite a new team as well so maybe it had put the had that put in place and it hadn't kind of gone rogue hadn't gone rogue yet um but yeah i don't think i've been in a brilliantly brilliantly thought through in terms of the structure there's obviously a structure but I don't think it's been intentionally thought through to optimize performance.

8:47Well when you look at the research I was like oh this is really interesting. If you've got a well-structured team so the structures are really good structures and systems and then they have coaching that's good quality coaching they do get even better. Take that same team and they have like rubbish coaching it's not very good coaching they still perform they still perform really well. If you get a team that is badly structured so not good kind of systems and those sorts of things and they have brilliant coaching they don't get better okay so you're like there's just it's just interesting to think about I suppose where might you start and we'll reflect on when we've been building a team at amazing if where we've started but knowing this now whether you do some things differently big questions and yeah the last one is um agreed over assumed so this idea of within teams there's a lot that is implied and that goes unsaid and you couldn't point to something that sort of tells somebody maybe who was new to a team how things get done around here or the processes that matter or even as a team sort of what we stand for I have worked in a few teams I've had team charters yeah that was quite fashionable for a while wasn't it like on project teams as well I've had that like the yeah and those I think those it's it's kind of a version of that um and it's also sort of moving away from relying on everybody having a shared understanding and so one of the things actually that really stands out for me from Colin's research is that um a mistake that lots of teams make is they assume that everybody understands the team goals you know that everybody understands exactly what we're here to do and how it happens and if you maybe if you spoke to a leader they'd be like yeah we've all got shared understanding we're all on the same page but then if you individually go and talk to people everyone has like different interpretations of what should be exactly the same so you know when you think about what needs to be consistent in a team and where can you have lots of freedom I suppose it's like where do you have the freedom within the framework what you don't want is inconsistency around the goals yeah well I thought we were here to do this oh I understood something like slightly different because then you're not all kind of pulling in the same direction.

11:02I've done a fun exercise on that before where you get everyone to write down on a bit of paper. So I think it probably works better in person, to be honest, for the impact of it than virtually. You maybe could do it. But everyone wrote down on a bit of paper, like what they thought the most important goal the team was working together was. And you kind of put it on a bit of paper, fold it up in the middle. And then the moment of truth was when you like, you looked at all the papers and you realise that everybody had like, well not everybody, but largely there was a lot of variance in the goals that the team thought were most important to go after.

11:32And it sort of makes the point that well how can we all be working together to achieve important things if actually we're all thinking we're working towards different ones? I wonder what our team would say if we did that. I think we have a, well my assumption, but this is the whole thing you shouldn't assume yeah my assumption is that everybody would say the same thing around if we said well why are we here as a company like what's our ambition as a company people would say make careers better for everyone or make squiggly careers better for everyone i think everyone would say one of those two things i think if you then said what's the goal that matters most i reckon we would get 10 different answers i'm not sure even you and i would say the same thing you know we probably wouldn't no so you're like okay you know like if you want I suppose if you want that collective edge that's that's important I'm gonna put you on the spot now um I would probably say to make squiggly synonymous with careers first so dissimilar I would say to increase the influence and impact of squiggly careers across the world yeah so but you still got two the different versions and also if you're then going i've got to translate that goal into action you you talked about like around the world so like oh should i be focusing more on global opportunities whereas that wasn't even in mine yeah you talked about influence and impact so you differentiate you want to dive into well what's the difference between them so whereas i was just like make squiggly some careers you could argue that's also a bit vague as a goal you're like well what what does that mean how will you know when you've got there okay so we've got some work to do we've got reactions that you could take together with your team if you wanted to do one of these resets.

13:16And we've tried to make them specific and useful, whether you're a team of two or whether you're a team of 22. And each one of them is linked to one of those from and twos. So the first one is about moving from kind of relationship trust, which obviously you still do need, I should say, to this thing about task trust. And our idea here is something that actually we have been testing out and we are still very much experimenting with kind of work in progress on which is something called a clarity creator because I think we recognize actually that people's roles have changed which is true I think in everybody's jobs in their squiggly careers and if we want people to be good at prioritizing to figure out what matters most people need to know like what their job is like what tasks matter most um do you want to talk a bit about the clarity creators because I feel like you've had some really good conversations with the team.

14:09I really enjoyed the conversation with it. So we're going to share a template so that people can try it out for themselves and you can try out your teams. So you have what matters most. And then really, that's like three things. So like really, really focused. And then we have the metrics that people are measured on. My favourite bit of the Clarity Creator actually is the not for now section. That was a bit of a kind of aha moment for you and I when we came up with that section, I think. I think it's really important with the task thing because the not for now is, I think, where some of the messiness occurs.

14:37So these are the things that we might quite like to be worked on, particularly for me and Sarah. We're like, oh, we want that to be better and that should be worked on. But in reality, there's only so much that can do and that might not be the priority right now. And so if it's on the not for now list, I think there's a sense of clarity of we're still recognising that it's important, but we are also being clear that that is not being worked on right now. And so you kind of get rid of that confusion and even frustration when we don't see something being moved forward. If it's on the not enough and out list, that's a very conscious decision for us to be aware of.

15:12And so I'm really enjoying the conversations, the discussion, also the team seeing each other's clarity created. I think that's the next step for us. We're putting them in place. We're discussing them so it feels like, you know, it's not being done to the team, but we're doing it with the team. And then I think the next thing is for the team to talk about them together. Yeah, so we have chosen to be transparent with our Clarity Creator. So we've put them all in the same place. And I know for some companies that can feel quite hard to make happen. But I do think it is really helpful because nobody works by themselves.

15:44Like we all kind of need to know. And if you've got the same task as somebody else, you're like, well, that's duplication already. You can see that's kind of inefficient. Or if there is something missing. Oh, but I thought that was in your job. and it's not in your job either. And I think really helpful for everyone to know what's on everyone else's not for now list. So we can all sort of hold each other to account. The other thing that we're trying out in the Clarity Creators is we have kind of behaviours as a company, which are a bit newer than our values. We've had our values for a long time.

16:14And we've tried to, for everybody's role, go, what do those behaviours mean to me? So rather than just saying like one of them is like responsiveness or care, you could just go, well, I care. I care about my job. that's not that useful it's like well what does care look like in the context of the job that you do and again I think that's helping the team to connect to those behaviors and also for us to figure out like are they the right behaviors because I feel we're kind of holding those lightly for now to see whether they they are the right things or is there something we might have missed or that we want to change or we've not quite got the word right so the second area is about structure over coaching which I was like this is a really interesting one so with this when you dive into it you could go in loads of different directions with structure this could be about how you structure your time as a team how you structure your energy as a team meetings moments yeah so you could delve into it in lots of different ways so we were trying to pick out one thing that we thought would be universal for most teams and decided that communication might be a good place to start because I think that inevitably slips over time goes in different directions we were observing that it's a tricky one sometimes because everyone sort of has their own preferences around how they like to communicate the tools they like to use bad habits creep in with communication so you end up yeah some people are messaging on one platform and then some are messaging on another and messages happen at different times of the day and when you're thinking about achieving more the issue is that you actually end up spending more time like responding to messages or searching for things or actually that's another thing that's the volume of messages does it need to be a message I feel like sometimes we kind of go does it need to be a meeting we don't often say did we need to send that message because every message is something that someone needs to read even if they don't respond to it it's something they need to read it's time spent so I do sometimes wonder whether it's lazy like we just message if I think about me sometimes I message maybe more than I need and that's a message that takes a minute for someone else yeah I don't think I send that many messages so I don't you send long voice notes oh yeah to you I mean like that's different but you're you're the only one who gets those I actually what's weird is I think my communication structures to you are very different to my communication structures to everyone else I mean that's probably something for me to think about one of the things that really stuck with me actually we have an expert insight in learn like a lobster about collaboration overload and I think if this feels like you this is where this would be a really good reset to do and that's where companies um looked at people's diaries and they can often see that things like meetings are double booked so I see that sometimes like I look in my diary I'm like well I can't I can't be in both of those places so what's happening there so are you double booked or sometimes even triple booked and then like things like the number of unread messages because the volume is just so high you're like well I just there's no way you could keep up with that amount of like emails and team messages and those kind of things and they were saying now that some of the really big companies almost every three months do a collab they call it collaboration rather communication but a collaboration reset because they were finding that almost like loads of time was going into collaboration versus is you know like doing the work yeah yeah and you're like it's a yeah yeah yeah you know and you like it's a really I think it's just a really interesting one to like challenge yourself on isn't it you're like yeah if a team with collective edge has better outcomes you know like an outcome is not collaborating an outcome needs to be you'll like achieve you need to be achieving the thing I do wonder as well giving a very knowing smile over there it's just it's just I think it's interesting that we used to spend a lot of time in the office together and and I think now as lots of teams you know some people work from home for a couple of days a week so tools like teams or whatever people are using are becoming a much bigger part of the day and I think if you when you start adding up well I've got emails here and I've got teams messages there and they've actually got meetings um I'm not sure it is always more productive I think having a team reset around communication is actually a really valuable thing to do and then the last one which is this idea of how do you make things that are implicit explicit?

20:30And I think what's a helpful kind of question to ask yourself here is how many things am I assuming? Now, initially you think, oh, you know, not that many. Everybody knows these things. But if it isn't written down somewhere, so if it's going unsaid and it's not really on the same page. So you and I were talking about, like we just then started to say about some things like in our company and we were like, oh actually it would be quite unfair for us to say oh these are definitely agreed norms in our team yeah these are things that we all 100 sign up to because where would you point to that says that that's true um it's basically in our heads and you and i agree like often these are areas that you and i have quite strong agreement on and we might have said out loud like sometimes i think that's happened we've said it and so then i assume well that's it yeah everybody is as committed to it as I am will remember it because I care about it so everyone else cares about it as much as I do and I think especially when and probably not only like smaller companies and smaller teams but when things are changing fast and everyone's very focused on like getting work done this is definitely something that gets missed because it probably does feel like a bit of a nice to do yeah you know something we'll maybe try and get around to at some point like we've never done this we've never written this down because you would always think oh well it doesn't feel as important as but then you get frustrated don't you so when it doesn't when these things don't happen that's when it becomes an issue it's like well why hasn't that person sent that summary on a friday but it's because to your point well we're we've assumed that everyone knew how important that was but it's never really stated and signed up to like it might be stated once and forgotten but it's not it's not agreed by the team and this also goes back to the kind of the i versus the we so um if you don't do this i guess to your point you get everybody gets quite individualistic and then that means you get more like frustration but you also get more blame yeah why they're not doing it yeah um and it's almost not then anyone's fault it's that actually yes but there was never there's never anything that you could point to where you go well this is what we are all kind of here to do that's never been made as explicit as you need to make it I think the point here and actually with kind of all of these the thing that I kept coming back to was obviously you have to be really careful not to do team overload with this stuff and you don't want four million different documents and you know like some sort of massive handbook that no one can make their way around but I sort of wonder whether you do need you know something that is like it's all in one place it's no more than three pages but you you keep coming back to it i don't think this is i don't think anything that we're talking about today can be a one and done also what's going through in my mind is you know like sometimes you can say oh ai can help with that ai can help with that i think this is this is not something i think that ai can help with this is a team conversation yeah about what what is important to how this team works are we all clear and are we all agreed that that's it i feel like this is a very human conversation that we have to have and we can't just outsource?

23:37Yeah, I guess you could use it for ideas. So if one of the things you wanted to do around structure was, we want to be very clear about decision making. So that's apparently one of the things that you could do as a team. We've chosen communication today, but you could do decision making. I think you could put into GPT and Claude, there are some companies that share openly how they make decisions in their company. So you could be like, we'll use that to find those things, borrow a bit of brilliance. How have they laid those out? I've looked at those before but ultimately it's very much a then it's an ownership thing isn't it like a shared ownership we agreed that this is how we will work make decisions or what do we do like a good you probably want some like good questions to like help you guide these through these conversations like um so what do you do if you know you're going to miss a deadline like in our company if you said to people what do you do if you know you're going to miss a deadline we don't have anything that's i would say oh you do a fast flag but would everyone say that and probably not and it just definitely doesn't happen consistently and that's probably not words people would always use and so again you're like that's a gap yeah you can't expect people to do that just because you like you know like i just assume that everything in my brain is in everybody else's brain the whole time so we had a go at this so we were like right if this feels important and we don't have this today how do you also not make this unwieldy and you also don't want it to take ages.

25:00So we came up with for our company, five statements. So we're on the same page. We like that as a kind of a title. So we're going to talk those through. To be clear, we haven't talked to our team about these. So we think that that's a very important thing to do. And they may be listening to this at some point. So we will have that conversation. But it's just a, I think it's just to share our thinking. So it's more real for people now. Yeah. So I think ideally, you'd either create these together, or I often do observe people find it much easier to have something to critique yeah so maybe if you are the leader of a team you might do these five statements but you're very clear these are five work in progress statements so that we can make sure we're on the same page then you do challenge and build you ask people what we have we missed what would you take away what would you replace it with are there any words that don't feel like hers like which one of these do you love which one's the best one so again asking some really good i mean they're quite coaching questions which But as long as we've got some structure, it's okay.

25:56It's an ant rather than an ant. I'm like, oh, and I've defaulted back to something I've just said. It's not as important a structure. So I'll read our five statements again, just to bring to life for people what these could sound like. So one, we don't see each other often. So when we do, we take it seriously. Two, spot what works, what doesn't, and do something about it. Three, mistake moments, win of the week, squiggly shout outs are how we learn, grow, and celebrate success together. four we don't stay in our lane we all support each other five flexibility works both ways so we can all do our best work when the work needs to get done and again we were like we didn't think these were perfect we don't think we've got these exactly right but we were trying to reflect on I think the things that felt like they were part of our DNA at Amazing If kind of in our company the things that were most important so we were sort of trying to I wanted to have 10 initially and actually unusually Helen talked me down I was like 10 statements that were on the same page and Helen was like no I am normally like how many ideas can we cram into five minutes and this was like no this is I do think five is a good number because also these have to be things where you know you don't compromise on these things and there has to be a lot of things that you do compromise on or things change or you make choices and I think these things can be fluid but I guess you wouldn't want them to change too often because then it's just quite confusing as a team I think as well as statements that show we're on the same page I also think it's sort of sticky statements so you you kind of want these to be repeated so your point earlier around if someone new joins a team how do they know how we work here I think if these statements are easily shared and memorable that is much more likely to happen whereas if you've got this like I don't know a paragraph on on something it's probably not then people aren't really probably going to connect with each other and it's not it's harder for people to share and work out what actually means.

27:48And I think for each of those statements like the more I think about it probably you need an example to bring it to life so when we say you know we don't see each other often so when we do we take it seriously you might just be like oh what does that what does that mean because essentially what we are trying to say there is everyone our team works in different places and spaces and so actually when we are together as a team we like really we're really thoughtful about that time we really design it we want people to learn but we also want to challenge we also want people to have fun and I think we put we kind of over emphasize and put a lot of effort and energy into that time and also we expect other people to kind of to do the same um so I do wonder whether with some of them you've then got to come up with short almost like this looks like yeah and I think then especially if you were new because I think if I read that first one I would be like oh do I need to show up being very serious at a team day and I'm like well no that's not what that looks like it looks like we put energy into that time and we kind of want people to turn up with their own with their own energy yeah and I think I see that from our team kind of already and that second one when we're talking about spotting what works what doesn't and do something about it is like don't wait for permission it's about initiative so you've probably got to talk to teams about them and also go well what what feels right what words feel right what words feel memorable also be interesting to see what people could remember you know the whole have five and then after three months how many of the five can you remember because if you can't you probably don't need to remember the exact sentence but you probably would need to remember a bit of a shortcut yeah or like one word or something i think my general reflection on this conversation and colin's work that you shared is the acceptance that team performance might almost like worsen over time just because of like bad habits creeping in yeah and actually regular resets are quite useful but having this specific set of things to look at it helps you make that reset happen how often when we say regular reset as a kind of final point on this how regular do you think teams should look at the points we've talked about i would probably say for a team like ours where you know it's not changing loads it's not you know some companies they're like wow those teams are doubling in size every three months or something probably the more the team changes the more regularly you need to do a reset is like a hypothesis I think I would have our team doesn't change dramatically it's not like we suddenly have a massive influx of people so my instinct for us would be like every six months every six months you'd vary intentionally you'd know the when you'd have time to do it and you know you'd kind of really invest in looking at these things and also it might not be the same every time so when you're looking at structure we might start with communications but then we might to feel oh actually that's not really changed we want to look at decision making or we want to look at a different part of the structure um or we might want to look at we've not talked about it today but one of the other areas is around like conflict so putting structure around saying the hard thing or conflict i think probably if you're moving from team to team quite a lot you know maybe lots of like project roles you'd basically want to do it every time you were starting a new project yeah i like it thank you for sharing it i feel like i feel like i want to do some of this stuff with the team which is you know i really want to review those say their statements with people and see what they think so if you want to dive a bit deeper you can um have a read of the mckinsey article where mckinsey actually interviewed colin um that's a good kind of shortcut to some of the different ideas and also a few things that we've not talked about that just didn't quite fit into kind of the team reset um which was our frame for today uh you can also listen to colin on bruce's podcast eat sleep work repeat so they had a great conversation together um and we'll put all the links to his book in all the show notes as well.

31:34So thank you so much for listening today and we're back with another episode next week. Bye everybody. Thank you for listening.