Episode 4 - Identify and Assemble Compatible Team Members
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[00:00:00] Lauren Marie: Welcome to The Integrated Leader Podcast. I'm Lauren Marie, and I'm with my partner in business and in life, Loren Kutsko. We are the founders of Kutsko Consulting, an organization that enables human collaboration by providing the right data and technology to lead your people.
[00:00:20] We are introducing a learning program for leaders called the 8 Dimensions of a Healthy Team. As a leader, management and coaching is something you need to be doing every single day, so why not be excellent at it?
[00:00:32] In this eight part series you will be introduced to the basic principles to engage, grow, and align your team for success. It's simple, but rarely is it easy. If you want to reflect on the current status of your team as you listen along, we have a free assessment at teamhealthscore.com that will give you a baseline of where your team stands today.
[00:00:53] You can also learn all about our other products and services like hiring assessments, individual coaching, group coaching and certifications. Thankfully, there's a growing awareness in many organizations about the benefits of Emotional Intelligence and the importance of self-reflection. More and more executives are discovering the impact that these have on the multiple bottom lines they are accountable to scale. Business is personal, So let's be good at it.
[00:01:19] Today, we are talking about the fourth of the 8 Dimensions of a Healthy Team, Team Compatibility.
[00:01:24] Loren: Our goal is to define what we mean when we say team compatibility and have a conversation about how and why it impacts the health of a team.
[00:01:32] Lauren Marie: Listen along as we explore this topic from our experience. I like that you included compatibility in the dimensions, because for me it feels very fun to be compatible with someone. Yeah. It is fun. And that it's okay for you to like your teammates. And in fact, that's actually really important.
[00:01:52] Loren: Yeah. I mean, what we're trying to capture here, and I assume everybody listening has experienced this, but it's chemistry, right?
[00:01:59] There are certain people that when you interact with them, you feel more energized. And then there are other people that when you interact with them, you feel more drained. And we know how to identify that and predict that that's going to happen ahead of time. When you're dealing with a work team, when you can assemble those people based on data and write job descriptions, and hire them and give them roles to do, we believe that there's a right way and a good way to be able to identify who you're looking for and build a team that's compatible with one another so that generally speaking, it's going to be a more energetic environment and not a draining one.
[00:02:38] Lauren Marie: Our current definition of team compatibility is your team's enjoyment of working together and history of effective conflict resolution. How did you come up with that?
[00:02:48] Loren: I wanted to be able to measure each of these and wanted people to self reflect and self-report on, how energizing does it feel when the team is together?
[00:02:58] Is that a draining experience for you as the manager? Is it a draining experience for the people on the team or is it an energizing one that feels synergistic and it feels like you're building something better than you could do by yourself. It's a pretty subjective feeling, but we think it's important. We think that that instinct and that gut that you have about how it feels to be together with the people on your team is valid.
[00:03:23] We also think that conflict is an important part of it because there's always conflict. It's inevitable and you need to be skilled at moving through it like a tunnel, not getting stuck in it or trying to avoid it. It's normal. Humans have conflict. So we can assemble a team that's highly compatible. It's still going to have conflict. A less compatible team is going to have more conflict and they're probably not going to have much energy when they're together. We're going to show you how to make adjustments to the team to alleviate that stress.
[00:03:56] Lauren Marie: What is the leader's role in compatibility? As a leader, you can set up the environment for compatibility, but you can't actually make people get along.
[00:04:04] Loren: No, that's true. I mean, it is a lot of setup. And I think there are facilitation steps that you can do to incentivize the environment, to stay compatible.
[00:04:16] And honestly, I think a lot of it is you yourself as the leader of the team, not breaking the compatibility, so you can do things, and that's what we're talking about in the other seven dimensions. If you do these eight things, you will create an environment that's conducive to the compatibility of your team and the enjoyment of people working together.
[00:04:33] If you start not walking the talk yourself and you're modeling unhealthy behaviors yourself, then it's never going to work. So you can be your own worst enemy in all of this as the leader of the team.
[00:04:47] Lauren Marie: How would you know if you're your worst enemy, like, are there red flags that you can find in yourself?
[00:04:53] Loren: Oh man, it's such a good question. People come to us all the time and they say, what if I'm the problem? Yeah. Which is a great question, right? And in and of itself, that question shows a level of humility and the potential for self-awareness.
[00:05:08] And that's why we start with a lot of leadership coaching and training programs by doing an Emotional Intelligence assessment, because we want to measure their level of self-awareness. And it's important that you stay humble as the leader and being humble is about what guides a lot of these behaviors that you're willing to do the thing that's harder for you so that the people who are working for you have to do less of what's harder for them.
[00:05:33] Lauren Marie: So you're saying, compatibility is a set up and we can't make people get along, but you and I have been trained in data and psychometric assessments to help us understand different ingredients that go well together and have some fun and ones that are like oil and water, and naturally have an energy that repels each other.
[00:05:55] Loren: Right. And there's a couple of different kinds of conflict that we want to talk about. And one of them is we're not going to go super deep into, but we just want to mention that you can have conflict with yourself. So there is such a thing as me/me conflict. The other kinds of conflict are a little bit more related to team compatibility.
[00:06:12] So there's conflict between me and my role. So I can be trying to do a job that incentivizes behaviors and uses motivation that are opposite of what I am like. It is up to the boss to be able to identify when that's happening and do something, change the job, or develop the person. The other kind of conflict is between the people.
[00:06:37] So you can have conflict between two people. This accentuates when it's the boss and the employee, but any two employees can have conflict with one another. And then the environment, when you aggregate all of the ways that the people are the way they're motivated and the way they behave. And you take the average score of everybody that defines the culture.
[00:06:58] And if one person is very different than the bulk of the culture, that's going to create a lot of conflict between the person and the culture.
[00:07:05] Lauren Marie: Yeah. I like to say in my debriefs when I sit with them, that no matter how much therapy, self-reflection work, inner peace we channel, we still have conflict and tension in the world and that's with ourselves with each other and it is how we recover, and create pathways of communication and grow our empathy...
[00:07:23] What is our ability to say we're sorry? And appreciate where someone else is on the map of personality. Yeah, because it's obvious when you look at a map of like, I don't know, say Arizona, say you look at the map of Arizona. There are so many different climates happening.
[00:07:42] It is a wrong expectation to expect a saguaro cactus to live in Flagstaff. And that it creates a tension for that saguaro cactus, just like the pine trees would struggle down in the Valley. When we can understand that people on our team are that different from one another, then it’s like, of course you get frustrated with me in a meeting when I try to side-rail us into some laughter. That's so irritating for someone who is quality control, we're here for a reason, stay on task, which is irritating to me.
[00:08:14] Loren: So it's obvious that people are different from one another. And what do you do about it? A lot of times what we talk about is you said, the first thing you've got to do is understand, and that's called empathy, right?
[00:08:25] When you can understand someone who's different from you, then you have empathy and you can develop a skill of being empathetic and understanding differences by putting yourself in the shoes of another person. Once you understand it, what do you do? Okay. So now I know that this member of my team is different.
[00:08:40] I was hoping they were a pine tree, but they're a saguaro cactus. So now what do I do? Well, you need to do the work of appreciating those differences. And you can do this however you need to, but write down the pros and cons of having a saguaro on your team. Saguaro cactus, right? Write down the pros and cons of somebody.
[00:08:59] It’s okay. Just like we were talking about in episode two, making the implicit explicit is okay, you're a leader. Your job is people. Having pros and cons less about the hard parts of them and the easy parts of them is good practice for you to do. Appreciate the differences, develop the skill of appreciating the different people on the team.
[00:09:19] And then the third skill is adapting to them. So once you know how they're different, you can choose to behave the way that they prefer that you behave and that's called adapting.
[00:09:31] You can adapt yourself towards them to have a more effective relationship. But I really wanted to get into some detail with you in this episode, because one of the things that you do in our consulting work with our clients is we give everybody a one-on-one with you. And I just thought it might be good for you to talk about what that's like and why we do that.
[00:09:55] So that our listeners can understand, what is it that you're going through in that one-on-one session? What are you reviewing? And why is that important to the teams that we work with when we're trying to create a healthy culture on the team?
[00:10:06] Lauren Marie: I believe that the first part of understanding how to participate on a team and learning to move in the world is through self-reflection and understanding and building our own self-awareness. I can't really learn to adapt myself to you unless I understand who I am.
[00:10:27] And I think a lot of us walk around the world, not really knowing who we are and what happens is we weaponize ourselves. We're actually like this intricate tool that can be used to do a very specific job and serve the world, but we don't really know how to use it yet. We don't know ourselves well enough to participate.
[00:10:47] And so we weaponize it and we hurt other people with this tool because we're using it for the wrong thing.
[00:10:53] Loren: Or, or we're weaponizing and against our own selves, right, so without the data coming from the inside out, maybe our primary data source is from the outside in.
[00:11:01] So we’re understanding ourselves by listening to other people’s perspectives on us or listening to what we think the world is telling us that the world needs us to be. And so then we're modifying who we are and stretching and contorting into a position that we don't actually work very naturally in. Part of the big problem with that is meanwhile, there's a need in the world that we are perfectly matched for that is not getting met because we're contorting ourselves into this other position.
[00:11:30] Lauren Marie: Right. In my one-on-one debriefs with people, we spend two hours together. We talk about two psychometric assessments. One is talking about how you do what you do, we’re measuring human behavior. And the second one is talking about what really drives you into action. What gets you out of your chair? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What do you really want and need to feel accepted, appreciated, and how do those two psychometric assessments interact with one another?
[00:12:03] Loren: Right. It's almost three categories, right? It's sort of how you behave, why you do what you do in the first place, and then how these two things intersect and blend together. Sometimes creating conflict, sometimes creating synergy.
[00:12:14] Lauren Marie: Yeah. It's really, really a fun time.
[00:12:16] Loren: The reason that we do that with every individual on the team is because we recognize that teams are made up of individuals. It's a group of individuals. In each individual it's that amazing tool that you've described. And we don't want to use tool to necessarily say that you're a “human doing”. We do believe that you are a human being.
[00:12:33] So, tool isn't meant to say like your own only value comes from what you do in the world, but I think because we're doing this primarily in a work context, maybe a symphony is another way to think about this, right? We've got all these different instruments and each one can kind of have a solo act, but when you put them together, it can sound even more amazing.
[00:12:52] And putting them together in the right way is really important. And as the leader of this, you're like the conductor.
[00:12:59] Lauren Marie: But the point of understanding where you are on the DISC graph is so that you can come out of yourself and adapt towards the people that you are working with and communicate in their style.
[00:13:11] So we're not measuring your skill or your ability to do different things. It's what, it's how you would naturally go about the world. Would you agree with that, Loren?
[00:13:21] Loren: Yeah, I think that's a great description. We talk about the assessment measures both. So it measures your your default. I like to think about it as your default setting. And then it also measures your adapted style. So when you're answering the survey questions in the assessment, you're answering them about a specific environment that you're in, work, personal, school, and you may be adapting specifically to that environment and so we get both of those readings from the results.
[00:13:52] So when we’re talking about that team that feels exciting and energizing to you versus the team that feels draining, one of the things that we've noticed is that you really need to pay attention on each of these scales, to the extremes. So if you imagine on a scale of zero to 100, the middle is obviously 50. Anything between 40 and 60 is pretty much flexible for somebody. What we've noticed is a lot of times people will have a very, a score that's far from 50, so close to zero, close to 100, and we've got somebody else on the team who has a score that's far away from their score, the opposite.
[00:14:35] They will tend to have conflict with one another because they are very different. They'll walk into the room and walk into an interaction or a conversation and notice friction. That does not mean that they shouldn't work together. That doesn't mean that they're incompatible, but it does mean that they both need to put work into adapting towards the other person and getting the visual of the two different DISC scores can really help them understand, okay, on this scale whether it's D I S or C, you and I have extreme differences. So this is going to be a challenge for us. And we are committed to working through that challenge and adapting to one another. We have definitely noticed that when you have, particularly the leader of the team with very extreme scores on one or more of the DISC scales, that they tend to attract people that are like them on the team.
[00:15:26] And when they somehow end up with someone who's very different from them. It can be difficult for that team to overcome that in compatibility. So we don't want to necessarily disclude anybody from joining the team because they have extreme differences, but we want to notice that exists, and that it's a potential for a problem of incompatibility.
[00:15:50] So pay attention to the extremes when you have two people's DISC styles, Driving Forces are quite different because they are the why, the motivation. So sometimes the conflict that comes from Driving Forces can actually be much deeper, much harder to identify and harder to get out of. It's very difficult to adapt your Driving Forces to somebody else.
[00:16:14] So it's not behavior. Driving Forces are about what's going on inside of you and your motivation. It's difficult to observe, and some of them when they're very different from one another, just like DISC, they create a lot of conflict. Sometimes with Driving Forces, the similarities create a lot of conflict.
[00:16:30] We notice this a lot with, on the Power continuum when you've got more than one person on the team who's Commanding, which means they like the power to be focused in themself, as opposed to be distributed collaboratively throughout the team. There can be a lot of conflict that needs to be worked through.
[00:16:44] So, part of what we're talking about with compatibility is that you can see it in the data. So humans are very nuanced, layered beings and we do have the ability to understand them in a way that can be assembled to achieve the greatest compatibility. When you don't have compatibility, you've got conflict. Then you need to have the skills to guide your team through conflict.
[00:17:08] Lauren Marie: It feels like, the theme again, of making the implicit explicit is at work. We are trying to say, you feel this tension between another person... let's find out why. Right. We have tools to help you understand how to resolve that tension, or at least know it's there. And both of you can have a conversation about it so it's not a surprise, Oh! here we are again….
[00:17:33] Loren: Right. And we love these tools because we think that they can be almost like a cheat sheet to understand other human beings. And we've seen them work over and over again, whether you're trying to figure out how to work in a compatible way, with someone that you're already in a working relationship with.
[00:17:47] Or if you need to identify who to hire onto your team and predict it before it gets bad and you have to then do something even more difficult to solve it. But we also really think that you need to develop some baseline of skills as a leader that are basically just people skills on how to make slight judgements about people when you don't have their assessment results in front of you.
[00:18:09] There's some tricks of the trade that you can learn to be able to identify someone and you can do that through your observation and through asking quick questions of them so I think the bottom line summary then on style for compatibility is that it is identifiable.
[00:18:26] You can see it in the data and that the leader of the team can assemble a compatible team. So then we all also want to talk about what happens when you encounter conflict on the team. How to add someone on the team through an effective hiring process. And then how to fire somebody with empathy and compassion when you need to transition somebody off of the team.
[00:18:47] Lauren Marie: Yeah it seems like a lot of times we are asked to come into an organization specifically at the time of hiring someone. Right. Because it's a big responsibility to hire the right person, especially if the team is running well and working. But even more so if it's not working. Do we work with clients specifically to help develop their team culture or identify what their team culture is so that they can hire someone that will more naturally fit?
[00:19:16] Loren: Yeah so those areas of conflict that we talked about earlier are what we want to then use the assessments in the hiring process to predict it. Most people when they just are learning to hire and they're hiring the first time, but then also people that have been hiring for a long time, end up going with their gut.
[00:19:33] And there's just a lot of bias built into instinct based gut based hiring decisions. So we think that you need to include some gut in your hiring decision. We also think that you need to include some data in your hiring decision. And we also think that you need a really strong process.
[00:19:54] And those three things should make up ⅓, ⅓, ⅓, of your hiring decision. We want the human part of the process that you've probably already been doing to be up to a third. We want leveraging the data that shows up in psychometric hiring assessments that we use for selection to be a third. And we want you to be standing on a really strong hiring process. That leads to a good hiring decision.
[00:20:17] Lauren Marie: As a leader, sometimes it feels like when they have to hire someone, they are exhausted, they are frantic and they just want the process to be over.
[00:20:27] Loren: Right. And that's one of the biggest risks that you need to have the self-awareness to know about in you is that you really want to be very careful not to make your hiring process a task, like any other task that you're trying to get checked off your to-do list. That's not necessarily the win because there's one of four ways that it can go when you hire somebody: 1) You can either hire the right person, 2) You can hire the wrong person, 3) You can not hire the right person, or, 4) You can not hire the wrong person.
[00:20:55] And if those are your four choices in the hiring process, hurrying to check off and then getting one of the three bad ones for that is far worse than getting and hiring the right person. So your actual goal, as you're going through the hiring process is not to complete the hiring process and make a decision as expediently as possible.
[00:21:17] It's to avoid hiring the wrong person. And you really need to frame your whole hiring process around avoiding getting the wrong person onto your team because that wrong person on your team will have so much detriment to the rest of the team, that whatever reason you initially set out to hire somebody, probably to advance the team's progress, will take so many steps backwards from putting the wrong person on the team that it will be like you had to go back at least 18 months into history. And probably that's not why you're hiring somebody is to go backwards in time. If you accidentally don't hire the right person, that is not as bad as hiring the wrong person. So you want to orient your process around eliminating bad hires, not trying to find the best person.
[00:22:09] Lauren Marie: Yeah. And when people hire us to help them hire someone else, it is a grueling process because we are forcing them to state, explicitly what this person is going to do, how they're going to spend their time. And it forces them to define the role with objectivity.
[00:22:29] Loren: So many hiring managers approach this like, oh, I mean, and this is really good news. This is really good news. You've gotten your department, your organization, your team, your business, to a place from your vantage point margin in your budget to bring other people in, to do this with you.
[00:22:47] Great news. Whether you've got a bunch of people and you're adding one more, or this is the first person you're adding to your team, like finally, you've got some financial margin that you think you want to take a risk and bring somebody onto the team. Unfortunately, you're probably looking at going, I don't really know what they need to do, I don't necessarily know how to write a job description. I don't know how to read a job description in such a way that I can measure fit for the job before I hire them, but I've got the budget. Let's get somebody in here and if I hire the right person, we'll figure it out together.
[00:23:16] I don't disagree with that process as long as that implicit thing is made explicit. So if in your recruiting you tell somebody, I don't really know what you're going to be doing here, but I would really like to be working with you. Do you want to join the team and figure this out together? Are you okay with not knowing what we're doing?
[00:23:29] Are you okay with that? Then that's one way to hire. If you fudge it and kind of make it up to try to sound confident, like you do know, but you really don't and then they get in there and you go... Yeah yeah yeah, all that stuff we put in the job description... I just, I had to type something into Indeed. Nope. That's not going to work.
[00:23:47] And you're just setting yourself up for failure. Whether your person's coming in making $50,000 a year or $75,000 a year, $100,000 a year or more, doing this process again in three months, six months, even 18 months is extremely costly. So if you're finding this exciting room in your budget to bring somebody on, you can't afford to do it wrong.
[00:24:06] Lauren Marie: It's just, it's hard work to hire someone.
[00:24:09] Loren: You want to posture your whole process towards identifying a reason not to hire somebody. And when you identify a reason not to that's where you really want to be able to sort of settle on that item in the cons list and be like, if I can, if I can afford to, if I've got enough, good candidates, then as soon as I identify one reason not to, I can just discard that person.
[00:24:30] If I don't, then I've really got to sort through, what is it going to take on the other side of this hire for me to develop this person to grow through this bullet point on their cons list. And am I willing to do that? And you just it's so much of this is about being honest to yourself.
[00:24:45] The other thing that we want to take from implicit to explicit is firing. We really want you to be careful as the leader of a team to not be so afraid of getting fired yourself, that you are so afraid to fire everybody else in your team. And that they are extremely afraid of getting fired. Being fired is a rite of passage in every career. It needs to happen. If you haven't been fired, I would advise getting fired so that, you know what it feels like. If you're living in an environment where it feels like the end of the world to you, if you were to get fired, you're not going to be able to fire the people on your team as effectively as you could.
[00:25:29] And with the empathy and compassion, you need to do it well and stay in relationship with them past the firing. So the goal of a good fire, the goal of transitioning somebody off of your team in a good way is to still be able to have a relationship with them afterwards, to give them a positive recommendation, to work in their next role, for them to be glad to send future hiring managers that they're working with to you for that recommendation.
[00:25:58] And if you feel like you can't do that, that likely means you need to go back and listen to episode two about accountability because you haven't been giving them the positive and the constructive feedback throughout the process with them. Most likely if you've been doing that all along, you're not going to be in a situation where you need to fire them.
[00:26:14] But when you are, there is a process to follow, to do it well, and we can show you the details of that process.
[00:26:21] Lauren Marie: I got really excited when you were talking about that person that finally has money to hire that first tire, that is such a crucial hire that you have to hire us to help you understand what is the best person for that role. That is just everything.
[00:26:38] Loren: Right. And what we're going to do is we're going to look at the data we're going to help you write the job description.
[00:26:44] We're going to write the job description in a certain way so that the job description itself can be assessed. Just like a person can be assessed. We're going to look at your assessment results as the manager of the team, so that we can compare the candidate, both against the manager and see where they're likely to have conflict.
[00:27:01] There are parts of them that you want to complement you and be different and there's parts of them that you want to be very similar and get synergy from just naturally. There's parts of the job that you want to be different from you. There's probably things that are tasks that need to happen, that you're not doing well.
[00:27:18] That's why you want to hire someone. So when we define the job description in a way that can be assessed, then you can start assessing the candidates and predicting before you make a hiring decision who will be a good fit for the role, who will be a good fit for you and who will be a good fit for the other people on the team, if you've also assessed everybody else on the team.
[00:27:36] Lauren Marie: Right, so what does having compatibility on a team do? Like what's the win on that? Because we can all go to work and hate our jobs and then still do it, right?
[00:27:47] Loren: Yeah, but that would be a pretty sad existence. I mean, I think that is part of what you were describing when you were describing the saguaro cactus in Northern Arizona or the pine tree down in, you know, the 3000 to 4,000 feet of elevation where saguaro cacti can grow.
[00:28:00] I think that is a sad existence that can't always be avoided, but when it can be avoided, we think it works really well to avoid it. When you can build your team by putting the tools already oriented to do the work that needs to be done, people will thrive.
[00:28:16] Work can feel like play. You get into the flow state and you lose track of time. Your 40 hours a week doesn't feel like 40 hours, it feels like 40 minutes. You can get to a place and probably not a 100%. But you can get to a place where a majority of everybody on your team's work week feels like that.
[00:28:33] A lot of people disagree with me about that.
[00:28:35] Lauren Marie: Yeah. I mean, even when you say it, I'm skeptical.
[00:28:38] Loren: Right. Why?
[00:28:39] Lauren Marie: I hear my dad's voice saying, “That's why they call it work.” and it's not fun. It's not supposed to be fun. That's not why we're here. We're here to do a job. And I don't really care if you like it or not. Do the job.
[00:28:51] Loren: And I think that that's a helpful attitude to bring into work with you because it is true. We are here to do a job and in some moments it's not going to feel good. And that doesn't mean I'm going to give up.
[00:29:04] Lauren Marie: We have character here,
[00:29:05] Loren: Right? So I don't necessarily want to create this mindset either that everything's always going to be fun and feel good all the time.
[00:29:13] But I do think that there is science behind aligning a task with a person who is set up as in your metaphor, a tool to do that task. Right. And if you can list out the tasks that need to be done at your workplace and evaluate them about how people are built and then hire people who are built to do the tasks, those people will feel excited to do those tasks. If on the other hand, and I see this happen a lot with administrative assistants, I see a lot of people who are in leadership and say, I'm not good at details and admin. And I don't like doing those things and nobody really likes doing those things, but I'm going to find some poor soul and I'm going to pay them less than I make, because I can't afford, our organization can't afford, to have me doing those tasks because they're lower value tasks. So I'm going to put a lower value person onto those tasks and pay them less to do the tasks that are lower value to me. I think while the economy may define things financially that way we know that people are no less valuable than one another based on the tasks that they do.
[00:30:21] You need to get that attitude out of yourself so that you can truly find someone who is good at administration. And they will feel as excited about doing details and administration, as you feel about doing whatever it is that you want to free yourself up to do by not having to do the details and the administration.
[00:30:42] Then if you want to get into a conversation about how valuable those tasks are, and if they should be paid twice, your salary, your same salary or half your salary, that's a totally different conversation. But in your body, you can't be putting people on your team to do lower value tasks, because then you're inherently objectifying and dehumanizing them by putting them on those tasks. And as soon as you're dehumanizing your team, you're not doing humble servant leadership.
[00:31:07] Lauren Marie: One thing that brought up for me is we've talked about teammate compatibility, but what you brought up was my compatibility with my role and that is everything to the purpose of your team.
[00:31:22] Having someone that can do the job and want to do the job is everything right? Because I assure you I've had many jobs where I was not the right fit for the role.
[00:31:32] Loren: Absolutely and that's, there's a lot of brokenness in the systems of work. And that's why I think the statement is difficult to ignore that “if it was fun, it wouldn't be called work” because there's so much that doesn't work in work. And there's a lot of things that need to be done that we're able to get economic, financial resources to pay people to do because of the broken economy that then requires a human body to do that work.
[00:32:03] We're able to pay people to do things that don't feel good to them. And we were able to incentivize them to do those things by paying them more. Then they end up making decisions to orient their priorities around finances instead of feeling good at work. And that's not something anybody should be accused of doing, but there's a great story back from the times when, during the industrial revolution, to get into a historical diatribe, which I know you don't like where Ford was the first company that innovated the assembly line. And it took the specialization of building a car. It made it specialization. So it took it from one craftsman would build a whole car, start to finish.
[00:32:43] Lauren Marie: Wow. Can you imagine?
[00:32:43] Loren: They had all the tools and all the know-how and Ford, Henry Ford realized that they could produce way more cars if they had one person, you know, put the tires on and one person put the windshield on and one person... They specialized everything. And what happened was these car builders that were craftsmen and they were taking their time and doing the whole thing, not in an automated assembly line, fashion would come in and they would get a job at Ford and they'd get paid a wage.
[00:33:12] And immediately, they went into depression because they weren't taking their time. They were doing one thing. They were operating, not like a human being, but like a machine. What Ford did when they started to get depressed and then leave their jobs, was they decided to pay them more. It drew people from the farms and from the craftsmen and from private, you know, sort of being, you know, an artisan into being essentially human robot and their sense of dignity in their work went away, but they were willing to do it because now they had extra money.
[00:33:45] Because they’d be able to buy a house or their kid needed it for college, or they could go to college or whatever. We've been doing this for about the last a hundred years where we've been operating in this, this paradigm where now you need so much more money to live than you used to. And so we're sacrificing work that aligns with who we are for a bigger paycheck.
[00:34:07] We do it and we wear ourselves out doing it. And we can only last a certain amount of time. That's why retirement was created. And so when you, as a manager can align your people with the work that they are inherently designed to do, they will get joy from doing it. They will be able to do it longer.
[00:34:25] They won't burn out, they'll get sick less. There's all kinds of benefits from doing this. As a society, we're probably never going to be able to implement what I'm talking about, but as a manager you can get and you need to get as close as you can to aligning the roles on your team, with the elements of the people that you have to do those tasks.
[00:34:49] Lauren Marie: Have you ever been in a role that wasn't a good fit for you?
[00:34:53] Loren: I mean, this is where I shift from, you know, being an optimist to being a pessimist. I mean, I think my experience has been the same as everybody else's right. Like work is called work for a reason cause it's not fun. Every job that I'm in as the worker, I think I would take a different attitude and have a different message when I'm talking to the worker, then when I'm talking to the team leader, because they don't have that authority to be able to make these kinds of modifications.
[00:35:16] So if you're talking to an individual contributor about how to align their own role with themselves, that's sort of a different approach that you need to take. For me as a worker, I've always felt like I need to do everything I can also. I don't necessarily believe and trust that every boss I've had has my best interest in mind and wants to make that alignment happen.
[00:35:41] So that's why it's really important for me to know myself and how I work and then to try to modify my job where possible to match and 100% isn't really the goal. It's sort of an unrealistic goal, but I mean, if I can get as close to 80% as possible where I'm spending 80% of my time aligned and 20% of my time, one day a week, that I can just try to put my head down and get through the pain...
[00:36:03] Lauren Marie: In my debriefs, I talk about this time, like knowing where you are adapting and that it is going to cause stress in your body and you are going to have to do things that feel hard. If you know that... I feel like in work, we're like, oh yeah, that's just what I'm going to do.
[00:36:20] But if you were going to go do a workout, or if you were going to do a home project that was going to require some extra energy from you, you would do it when you were well rested, you had had breakfast, you'd be fully caffeinated. And then after you're going to set up some recovery time. And to have that mentality at work, like, okay, I know I'm not really good with Excel spreadsheets.
[00:36:42] I don't really like doing this detail orientedness but I have to do it. I'm going to time it Tuesday mornings at 9:00 AM. I'm going to shut my door. I'm going to get my favorite latte. I'm going to sit here and I'm going to do this, and then I'm going to shake it out and have a lunch meeting with whoever it is that I need to have lunch with.
[00:36:58] Loren: And again, it's about making what's implicit explicit. So I know that there are certain things I don't like to do, but I haven't necessarily sat down and processed it and analyzed it. Right. But if I do that, then I can start doing that kind of thing with my schedule. And I can say, I'm going to make this as painless as possible, right.
[00:37:12] For the pain stuff. And then the other stuff I'm going to put it the best time of the week when I have my best energy.
[00:37:17] Lauren Marie: Right. I really like that rule for my life. I would like to hear how other people process the hard things in their work. Is it explicit for them or they just kind of sitting in this abstract feeling of dread? Still? Because it doesn't have to stay that way. We have data. Use it. What else do we want to say about Team Compatibility?
[00:37:37] Loren: I mean, those are the main things. We really wanted to show people that compatibility can be measured, that you can assemble a team that's compatible. That conflict is inevitable and how to get through it. How to add people to the team who will be compatible and how to take people off the team who are not compatible.
[00:37:54] Lauren Marie: It's a lot. Loren: It is a lot.
[00:37:56] Lauren Marie: Today we talked about the fourth dimension of a healthy team, team compatibility.
[00:38:00] Loren: Today, we talked about the fourth of the eight dimensions of a healthy team team compatibility.
[00:38:06] Lauren Marie: Our goal was to define what we mean when we say. Have a conversation about how and why it impacts the health of a team.
[00:38:12] Loren: It's been a pleasure to be here with you. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.
Lauren Marie: Thank you for joining us today. We are thrilled to have you here. It's important to remember that as with all learning, just having the information does not automatically lead to transformation. We can give you all of the analytics and methodologies, but team transformation will not happen without you incorporating new behaviors into your leadership practice.
Listening to a podcast without beginning to practice better management is a lot like learning about exercise without moving your body. Starting anything new will feel awkward and funny at times. This is normal and doesn't mean you should stop. Discomfort is a sign that it is working and that your brain is getting stronger. Stick with it.
Commit to trying our methods for eight weeks to six months and then observe and see what's next. See you next time on The Integrated Leader Podcast.
