Episode 258 Transcript:

0:00:00 Ramona Shaw: Welcome to The Manager Track podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have with us Alison Coward, a renowned team culture expert.

0:00:07 Ramona Shaw: And the author of the recently published book Workshop Culture, A Guide to Building Teams that Thrive. Alison is the founder of Bracket, a consulting agency that helps creative and digital teams work better together. With over 15 years of experience in leading and facilitating creative teams, Alison has become a go to expert for organizations looking to enhance their team dynamics and productivity. The reason why I wanted to bring her onto The Manager Track podcast is because we know that many of you as leaders are thinking about how to engage the team and build a team culture, especially if you have team members who are working together from different locations and maybe even across different continents and minimal time zone overlaps. So that is a challenge in itself.

0:00:59 Ramona Shaw: On the podcast, we often talk about leading leading individuals, and we often talk about managing up, working with your stakeholders, executive presence, influence, impact. But there is another component. There’s actually two more components. One of them is self leadership, and you hear us talk about that quite often too. And then the fourth one is team leadership. So how do you engage an entire team, not just individuals, but you create this strength that comes from having a network.

0:01:28 Ramona Shaw: And for those of you who can’t see me on the video, if you’re not watching this on YouTube, I’m collapsing my hands to show that when it’s not one finger holding one finger which.

0:01:38 Ramona Shaw: Is loose, it can easily break.

0:01:40 Ramona Shaw: When we look at building strong teams, we’re crossing all our fingers together. That enhances productivity, performance, retention, engagement. Because now we’re leveraging all the different aspects and benefits from being part of a strong team. So I’m excited to talk to Alison about how to navigate challenges with your team and how to strengthen team performance overall. And with that said, let’s welcome Alison to The Manager Track podcast.

0:02:10 Ramona Shaw: Here are the two questions this podcast answers. One, how do you successfully transition into your first official leadership role? And two, how do you keep climbing that leadership ladder and continuously get promoted? Although the competition and the expectations get bigger, this show, The Manager Track podcast, will provide the answers. I’m your host, Ramona Shaw.

0:02:31 Ramona Shaw: I’m on a mission to create workplaces.

0:02:32 Ramona Shaw: Where work is seen as a source of contribution, connection, and personal fulfillment. And this transition starts with developing a new generation of leaders who know how to lead so everyone wins and grows. In the show, you’ll learn how to think, communicate, and act as a confident and competent leader you can be. Alison, great to have you on a Manager Track podcast. Thank you for being here.

0:02:57 Alison Coward: Thank you for having me. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

0:03:00 Ramona Shaw: I was sharing with you before we started recording here that the aspect of team building, team development and team leadership is something that’s really important and also often gets neglected in the day to day in the business of work. How did you get into this field and what inspired you to then also write your books? I’m curious a little bit about what was it that fascinated you about teams?

0:03:25 Alison Coward: Yeah, it’s been a very organic journey, but I do feel like I’m in the right place right now. I’ve always been fascinated for a big part of my career, always been fascinated by collaboration and creative collaboration in particular. And actually studying an math coming up to 20 years ago now where I looked into what made good collaboration, particularly in creative teams. And when I set up my business, when I first set up Bracket, I was doing a lot of facilitation. But the facilitation was very much about bringing freelancers together to collaborate into projects. And for me, because I knew a bit about creativity and how to say, manage inverted commas, creativity, I knew that facilitation was one of the best ways to do that. Because there’s no point in getting talented people together and telling them what to do. Actually the best thing is to create the environment for them to be able to interact with each other. What’s the best things that you need to do so that everyone can bring their talents and skills.

0:04:22 Alison Coward: So I was doing a lot of facilitation and without realizing it was facilitation, but people were asking me specifically to come in and do what I was doing with these creative teams, with their teams, inside organizations. And that’s when I realized that kind of facilitation was a thing and it was something that could actually support teams to work better together. Not just in terms of helping them to deliver things, but actually supporting team dynamics.

0:04:51 Alison Coward: And because I got very interested again in taking this idea of collaboration and facilitation further, particularly within organizations and within teams that were already intact and wanted to improve the way that we work together, Bracket became more of a team culture consultancy. And that’s where we are today. And so I guess the story of me writing the book Workshop Culture kind of reflects that.

0:05:16 Alison Coward: I started off facilitating workshops, loved the format, but then also as I started to do more work with teams in organizations, realized how workshops as a format weren’t just useful, as I say, for generating content, but it actually started to change the way the teams work together when they were run well, when they were run effectively. And so I put two and two together and reflected on the work that I was doing with teams when I was facilitating, observing that in that moment, in that half day, in that full day, teams were working really well together. They were creative, they were collaborating well, they were engaged, they were connecting.

0:05:55 Alison Coward: And also seeing a bit of a disconnect with what they would do when they got back to their normal day after the workshop and thinking, hold on a minute, actually, we’ve witnessed that it’s possible and they need to work like this every day, not just in a special one off workshop. So I coined this term workshop culture to help teams really continue that feeling of a workshop into their everyday and start to think about what are the principles and practices that we use in workshops and in facilitation that we can take into our everyday team cultures to help teams work better together.

0:06:36 Ramona Shaw: Just for the benefit of the listeners. Can you distinguish for us what you refer to when you talk about facilitation versus leading? Because sometimes we say, oh, I lead a workshop, but you’re calling out notice this is facilitation. And hence workshop culture is based on this idea of facilitation.

0:06:56 Alison Coward: Absolutely, yes. So when I’m talking about facilitation, what I mean is a facilitator, I. E. Me, is brought in to support a team with their dynamics and their process. So in this context, a facilitator is not a content or a subject matter expert. They are more of a process expert. So the typical types of engagements a leader might come to me for are we’re experiencing conflict in our team or we’re not communicating effectively, or and we’re not as productive productive as we’d like to be.

0:07:31 Alison Coward: Can you come in and help us have a good conversation where everybody speaks, everyone’s engaged, everyone’s involved, everyone feels comfortable to speak up, and we have focused conversations about the things that we need to talk about. So as a facilitator, I will design that process. I’m not there to say, for example, I’m working with a marketing team. I’m not there to give any insights or tips on marketing trends or marketing insights or ideas for campaigns that they might develop, but I’m there to help them have the conversation about what they might do together.

0:08:11 Ramona Shaw: So before we talk about some of these principles that lead to a strong workshop culture, what does it mean when a leader says, okay, that all sounds great, but we don’t have the resources or the capacity to bring a facilitator in who be external. So the Leader then decides to facilitate a session. We often see this at off sites or team events. Leaders try to be the facilitator. What are some of the tips or almost the requirements that you have for leaders who shift their role into the facilitator?

0:08:47 Alison Coward: Yeah, I think one of the first things that comes to mind there is to really try and take the facilitator role as purely as possible. Because when an external facilitator comes in, they are slightly removed from the team dynamic and the history of the team and the work that the team does. So they can take a slightly more kind of removed view, an objective viewpoint. They’re not completely extracted from the team dynamic on the day, of course they’re part of that, but because they’re an outsider, they’re able to really keep an eye on the dynamics without getting involved in the content.

0:09:24 Alison Coward: One of the dangers of a leader wanting to facilitate is that they also want to get involved in the discussion. And that’s really challenging for themselves because actually that means there’s a lot to do. It’s also very confusing for their team and the participants because a facilitator might ask questions in order to move the conversation forward, but they’re not going to necessarily make decisions about what the team does. Whereas if you’re a leader of a team, then it might be quite difficult to stay separate from that part of the conversation. So I would recommend as a leader, if you want to facilitate a session, really do try to separate yourself out and signal that to your team, just say, for this, this part of the conversation, I am in pure facilitation mode. It really is about you having the conversation together. I’ll ask questions, I’ll prompt you, but I’m not going to make any decisions in this part of the conversation. And I think that’s the biggest tip that I would give.

0:10:20 Alison Coward: I think the other thing as well is I find this a lot with a misconception around facilitation. And just to rewind, one of the things is that I really do believe that facilitation is a skill that many, in fact, all leaders can definitely benefit from. And it’s one of the things that I encourage a lot for leaders to develop facilitation skills. Some of the reasons they don’t, and they don’t embark on that journey is because they find it quite intimidating.

0:10:45 Alison Coward: If they’ve been part of a workshop, if they’ve been a participant in a workshop where there has been an external facilitator come in, they don’t really Know what that facilitator does? It’s almost a bit like witchcraft in a sense, because they know this facilitator is doing something, but they’re not giving a presentation, they’re not like getting involved in the content, what is it that they’re doing? But yet they got to the end of the day and it’s been productive.

0:11:10 Alison Coward: So some of those things that a facilitator does can seem invisible, whereas in fact, a facilitator has done a lot of work up front to prepare and design the session for it to run in the way that it does on the day. And of course, there are things that you do on the day. You have to think about the mood in the room, you have to keep an eye on. Is everyone contributing? Are you making progress in the things that you, you know, intended to discuss?

0:11:35 Alison Coward: But there’s a lot of work that happens up front and so I would advise leaders not to think that if you’re going to facilitate, you just turn up on the day and then you just see how it goes. Actually really do put a lot of intention into what that session is, what you want to achieve and how you’re going to run it so that you can make sure that it goes in the way that you intend it to.

0:11:56 Ramona Shaw: Hmm. Let’s now talk about the five pillars that you’ve identified through this work that lead to the workshop culture.

0:12:05 Alison Coward: Yeah.

0:12:05 Ramona Shaw: Can you explain each of them and then just add a bit more detail what that looks like and how leaders can cultivate them?

0:12:12 Alison Coward: Absolutely. So I developed this five pillar framework and just again, a step back is that it’s based on workshop culture. So the five pillar framework is not a step by step guide to the things that you do in turn, in order to develop a high performing team culture, there are five sets of conversations that you need to have as a team. And that’s where the facilitation comes in. Because it’s not that a leader will work through all of these pillars on their own and then hand over to their team and say, okay, this is what I’ve decided.

0:12:43 Alison Coward: Actually, the leader is facilitating conversations through each of these pillars so that the team is almost co creating the culture. So the pillars are align, cohesion, communication, design and change. And as I said, it’s not quite step by step, although you can go through them in that order. But really the way it’s designed is that if you identify something that’s not quite working within your team, you can probably relate it to one of those pillars and then that will give You a signal of some of the things that you need to do or some of the things that you need to have conversations around in order to start fixing it.

0:13:21 Alison Coward: So alignment is taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture. Is your team all on the same page in terms of what your team’s purpose is, what your team’s vision is, what you are trying to achieve together, what your goals are and even what your values or working principles as a team are together? The reason this is important is I find a lot of teams, I wouldn’t say a lot of teams, I say every team is busy, we’ve all got lots to do, we’ve got massive to do lists and often our days are, you know, how much can I get through today? Or how much can I get through this week? What are the most urgent things that I need to address?

0:14:01 Alison Coward: And when that happens over a long term, teams start to get disconnected because they’re so focused on their individual tasks that it becomes a little bit distant from the overall goals of the team. And so I think that it’s really beneficial for teams periodically to take a step back from their day to day and connect around the bigger picture. Are we all moving in the same direction? Are we all clear that everything that we’re doing on a day to day basis is actually helping us achieve the collective goals of the team?

0:14:34 Alison Coward: And I think teams don’t do that enough. And there’s so many reasons why that’s valuable, not only in terms of efficiency and productivity, but for everybody in the team. There’s research to show that individuals are much more motivated and engaged in their work when they understand the impact of their tasks on a day to a higher purpose. So it’s a leader’s goal to make sure that that is cultivated. And also a team can be involved in developing some of that purpose as well, which is going to then make it more likely that you’ve got buy in for the things that you’re going to do as a team.

0:15:12 Ramona Shaw: Yeah, I want to just briefly pause there. I had an example where I was in a team where the leader would meet with us every three months. I believe it’s like on a quarterly basis. And we would look at our annual goals and then our quarterly goals and had a spreadsheet and everyone was talking about the order of prioritization, what were our three big rocks or top priorities and what versus the nice to haves and what are we going to put onto the parking lot for maybe to consider again, again next quarter.

0:15:44 Ramona Shaw: And it wasn’t the Leader saying, here is what we’re going to do. No, it was a conversation where the leader said, here’s what we have on the list. What do you all think? And in every such conversation that we had, I walked out just feeling so much more aligned with the team, but also having a way better understanding of how my work fits into the bigger picture of the team. And I felt bought in just by the fact that I was asked for my opinion.

0:16:14 Alison Coward: Absolutely.

0:16:15 Ramona Shaw: And the manager was listening. The manager was moving things around based on feedback. And I’m sure that manager may not have always agreed, but made some trade offs because they realized me giving in isn’t going to have a whole lot of negative impact, but they’re going to be so much more committed because then I realized I moved something up on the priority list and that’s the benefit that we’re reaping.

0:16:39 Ramona Shaw: So from personal experience, having been on the receiving end, I can 100% see how valuable these sessions are.

0:16:47 Alison Coward: Absolutely.

0:16:48 Ramona Shaw: The other thing I want to make sure we’re not in all of the things, great things that you shared already that we’re not missing is you talked about the work values and behaviors. And this is one that I think is so important and often leads to unnecessary friction, unnecessary stress, or even just uncertainty. When we don’t defy simple things as how do we communicate with each other, what channels for what, how quickly do we respond to each other, how do we navigate meetings?

0:17:21 Ramona Shaw: It’s very tactical things, but everyone goes off with their own ideas of what right or wrong is. And we never actually talk about what we think right or wrong is for our team in order to show up as the best version of, of the team.

0:17:36 Alison Coward: Absolutely. And I think in addition to some of the things that a team needs to do, it is the behaviors. Right. It’s looking at the goals that you need to achieve. And particularly if you’re trying to do something new as a team, what are the things that you’re going to need to do that are new? Like how are you going to need to behave differently if you’re trying to do move in a new direction or take on a new challenge, you can’t work in the way that you’ve worked in the past. And having that agreement as a team, we need to challenge ourselves to be more curious or we need to challenge ourselves to check in with our clients more.

0:18:13 Alison Coward: Just agreement on those things that you’re going to do to step up. Just go so far in terms of accountability. Like you say, having the team all on the same Page. And I think the key thing is it’s not the leader saying, I need you to do this. It’s the team having the conversation saying, look, we’ve discussed everything that we need to do. How do we feel we need to be in order to achieve those goals, and everyone agreeing on that together.

0:18:38 Ramona Shaw: Yeah, beautiful. Okay, that was one.

0:18:43 Alison Coward: Yes. Yeah. Number two is cohesion. And so cohesion is around how the team members connect not only to each other, but how the individual team members connect to the vision of the team. So it’s almost that kind of connection on two levels. And for me, this always starts with self awareness. Individuals reflecting on their own working styles, their own skills, their own attributes, their own characteristics in the context of the team, and then ensuring that everybody on the team also shares their own ways of working and skills and characteristics of what they’re bringing to the team.

0:19:23 Alison Coward: The reason this is important, first of all, self awareness, in terms of how am I showing up, what’s the impact that I’m having on other people, how do I like to communicate? What are some of the things that I might find challenging? I don’t think we do that enough in work. And it’s just useful information anyway to understand where sometimes we might experience friction or tensions with other people.

0:19:42 Alison Coward: We can start to understand why that stuff is coming up as a conversation. As a team, understanding all of the different working styles on the team is a way to. I wouldn’t say preventing conflict, but definitely navigating it more effectively. Because when those different styles aren’t articulated and aren’t communicated or spoken about openly, they are likely to cause frustration and it becomes very personal.

0:20:10 Alison Coward: So and so is so slow. They like to spend so much time on the research and going into detail. When I like to move fast and they’re slowing me down, or from the inverse, this person doesn’t think through their work enough. They just want to keep going. Actually, when you take a step back and you think about what your team’s trying to achieve, it’s likely that you need both of those personalities on your team for it to be effective. You need to make sure that you’re having those conversations about how fast should we be going or should we slow down a bit and making sure that you’ve got all those perspectives.

0:20:43 Alison Coward: And when those different working styles aren’t spoken about, as I said, it will cause conflict. But when they are spoken about, oh, this is who we’ve got on our team. These are things that we’re going to need to negotiate. I was working with the team recently, actually, we were in a meeting and this tension just surfaced of half of the team being very big ideas and just getting new ideas all the time and wanting to try everything and just stacks and stacks of ideas.

0:21:12 Alison Coward: And the other half of the team being a lot more operational and a lot more pragmatic and this was causing lots of tension because of prioritization. It was just like every time one half of the team had an idea, everyone had to run with it and everyone was just getting really confused. And so when I pointed that out to them, they went and had a conversation and said, look, this is a good creative tension because we don’t want to always get stuck in the detail and always think about implementation and tasks. We do want to innovate, but we can’t do that at the expense of the resources that we’ve got in the company or in our team. We need to make sure that we’ve got enough space and our workloads aren’t too heavy to be able to pursue ideas.

0:21:55 Alison Coward: So now having a regular prioritisation meeting every idea that comes through, like you mentioned, stacking it against other ideas and seeing what can we move forward with, what do we need to part, what do we need to come back to? So that’s the, in a long winded way, that’s the cohesion piece. It’s having the conversations really about the differences in your team, because the differences is what makes your team special. But if, if they go unchecked, it could actually be a big challenge in your team.

0:22:24 Ramona Shaw: Yeah. Because somehow our default isn’t to appreciate the differences, but it’s to point out why that makes my life harder or my work harder.

0:22:33 Alison Coward: Absolutely.

0:22:34 Ramona Shaw: Okay, number three.

0:22:36 Alison Coward: Number three, communication. So this pillar is, I guess the question is what kinds of information do we need to share, what things that we need to talk about and how are we going to have those conversations in the nature of our work? And like you mentioned, this comes down largely, not exclusively, but largely down to how we meet and the meetings that we have. I think it’s just a very common challenge in organisations that meetings are generally quite broken and the meetings that we run aren’t as productive and effective as they could be.

0:23:08 Alison Coward: And I think one of the reasons is that teams don’t differentiate between the types of meetings that they need to have. Like a meeting is a meeting, we just need to make sure that we’ve got time in the diary. Everyone gets around a table or into a zoom room and then we talk. Whereas actually a team will need to have different types of meetings. Even the example that you shared, Ramona as your previous manager, every three months there was a particular type of meeting that you had where you took a step back and you looked at the big picture and you did your prioritisation.

0:23:38 Alison Coward: There were also weekly meetings that you might need to have in terms of what blockers are we experiencing, what’s coming up next week? You might want to have project retrospectives where you delivered something. You want to get together as a team and review the success of the team. And differentiating between all of those will be valuable because they take different formats and almost you need to come to those different meetings with a different energy and a different head on.

0:24:05 Alison Coward: So differentiating out between those meetings is a really good way of making sure that your team has all of the types of conversations that you need to have and everything’s covered and everyone feels that they’re in the loop or whether it’s supplemented. I’m working with a team at the moment and we’re looking at a weekly team meeting that they have. But then we’re seeing that if they change this weekly team meeting, that’s also going to have an impact on some of the communication tools that they use, whether they use teams or email or some kind of shared workspace and how that interacts with the meetings as well. So it’s not just the meetings, it’s all of the communication around that and how it’s a system really, how does it all fit together?

0:24:45 Alison Coward: And so your team needs to have those conversations.

0:24:48 Ramona Shaw: Yeah. Versus just letting a bunch of people like go at it. We’re intentionally designing the system. On that note, what is one of the meetings that you think people underestimate or forget about that you think would be valuable for leaders to consider?

0:25:02 Alison Coward: Oh, I can tell you one that they overestimate off the top of my head, and I think they definitely overestimate status update meetings. On a bit of a mission to completely eradicate status update meetings, because I honestly think that information can be shared in other ways. Whereas if you ask yourself what is the value of my team coming together at the same time in the same space, the value is not just reading off a list of updates, it’s we want to problem solve together, or we want to brainstorm together, or we want to help each other out.

0:25:35 Alison Coward: And so I guess going back to your original question, underestimating the value of, of meetings being a format for creating value together as opposed to just a way of checking in and making sure that everyone is completing their tasks, would.

0:25:54 Ramona Shaw: You add to that the meetings that happen where a bunch of different people talk about what was accomplished with a particular project or where they stand with a client deal or a prospect that may be about to close, or would I talk about the financial component of an organization or department? Those are all, in a way, status updates, but they’re intended and justified by leaders saying, but we want people to know what’s going on in the different areas of the business. Even if it’s a status update, that’s one thing. And on the other side, it’s often also used as a tool to create visibility for the team to showcase across the organization or senior leadership what they’ve been working on. So what’s your take on that?

0:26:42 Alison Coward: Yeah, I think the question to ask is, what’s the outcome that I want from this and what is the value again of sharing it in a collective space? And so, you know, if you’re clear on those outcomes and those outputs. I have a format for meetings which is making sure that you’ve got the, got a clear purpose, you’ve got clear outcomes and outputs. What do you want this meeting to achieve or produce? If you can answer those questions and that format seems the best format for that particular purpose, then run with it.

0:27:18 Alison Coward: I think what I feel less sure about are those kind of cyclical Monday morning status updates where everyone just goes around and no one really wants to be like, people are sharing information that not everybody needs to know. It feels more of a kind of checking in meeting rather than this is information that people really need to know in order to do their work more effectively.

0:27:44 Ramona Shaw: Okay, and then we got two more left.

0:27:46 Alison Coward: Yes. Yeah. So we’ve just covered alignment, cohesion and communication. Design is the fourth pillar and that is really about being intentional about how you work together. And some of this might be covered in the communication pillars, such as the design of your meetings design. But there are also some things that might fall out of that, such as some other systems or processes that you might use. I like to talk about routines and rituals of teams as well.

0:28:15 Alison Coward: And I think particularly with the design pillar, we’re thinking, I guess we’re thinking about two things. We’re thinking, one, what are the things that we can set up for ourselves that give us the highest chance of achieving our goals? What do we need to put in place for ourselves, and whether that is the way that you use productivity tools or information sharing. But it could also be things like routines or rituals that enable you to connect regularly as a team. So it could be in a similar way to your quarterly meeting that you had with your previous manager, checking on the priorities.

0:28:52 Alison Coward: Maybe you decide as a team, every month we need to just get together and have a social outing. Because we’re a very busy team, we don’t often get to connect. And we’ve realized that the relationships within our team are really important for us to be able to get work done together and to feel like a cohesive team. So maybe every month you do a kind of social outing or some kind of social connection.

0:29:15 Alison Coward: And I think the other thing as well is that I talk about within the design pillar is this idea of building routines and rituals over team building. I feel like the term of team building is slightly out of date because often we think of team building as very separate from the work that we do. It might be this kind of very unrelated activity, which is good and it’s great for us to connect and have some fun together.

0:29:39 Alison Coward: And we can still do that. And we also need to build our teams as we’re working together. So we need to build into our work ways that we keep connecting and evolving our team working methods and making sure that we’re staying cohesive and we’re ironing out conflicts and tensions and things like that. So it becomes much more embedded in the team rather than this kind of thing that we do. Separ.

0:30:01 Ramona Shaw: I like how you’re pointing out that team building should be an integrated part in how we do work. Hence also your approach to the workshop culture. Okay, let’s talk about the final one.

0:30:13 Alison Coward: Yes. So the final one is change. The thing is, with the final pillar is it is embedded throughout all of the pillars, but it deserves its own pillar as well. Because I think we also underestimate how challenging behaviour change can be for a team. We have these great workshops or these great off sites where we have lots of ideas and we feel very excited by the end of it. And I’m sure I’ve experienced it, we’ve all experienced it.

0:30:40 Alison Coward: Three months down the line, we look back at the workshop and say to each other, that workshop was great, but nothing’s really changed in our work. And that’s because there is a gap between ideas and implementation. And so the change piece is really helping a team to understand what it takes to develop new habits. I talk about habits at three levels. Individual habits, which is what you do as an individual collaboration habit, that is how you interact with others and how you might naturally ask questions or ask for help or offer help to others.

0:31:16 Alison Coward: And the final one is team habits. What are the things that you, as a team, kind of Default to if you’re not really thinking about it. And we all will have habits at all of those levels, whether it’s how you email, whether it’s how you share documents, or don’t share documents, or don’t title your documents in a certain way. And regularly, you need to take a pause and review which of the habits that you have as a team are working for you and which are working against you.

0:31:44 Alison Coward: And make sure that you’re having that conversation regularly, particularly at key inflection points when perhaps something’s changed in your team. And then work through the steps, steps that you need to take in order to really shift those habits. If you’ve decided that some of those things aren’t working for you and it’s a shifting of the habits, that’s really challenging because again, we’re gonna bump up against all kinds of reasons why it’s challenging for us to implement a new behavior. And actually, I remember listening to a podcast of yours where you were talking about behavior change and all of the reasons why change is so hard for us to do. Because even if we know something is going to be better for us in the long term, in the short term, sticking with what we know feels safer.

0:32:27 Alison Coward: And so we’re going to have to work through all of that, not only as an individual, as a team, in order to make sure that we do the things that we know are going to be better in achieving our goals as a team.

0:32:38 Ramona Shaw: And what’s the leader’s role in that? Because I’m sensing there’s a bit of an accountability conversation that may need to happen along the lines.

0:32:45 Alison Coward: Yeah, so with the leader, I guess there’s two things. There’s the accountability, the checking in on are we shifting our behavior? But then there’s also the environment that leader creates to support and enable and appreciate that change is challenging. So taking on, giving the team a sense of we’re experimenting at this. Just because we say something at the end of this workshop, it doesn’t mean that we know that it’s going to work in practice when we’re back in our day to day. So this is an experiment. It’s not that this has to work. We’re experimenting with this. And then all of the conversations that might come around, experimentation. Okay, so we’ve tried something.

0:33:25 Alison Coward: Let’s stop what. Let’s take a break and review. How did that go? Is it something that we want to continue? What barriers did we face when we were trying to experiment with that? Are those barriers teaching us something about how we might need to change this experiment or change this action or change this kind of goal that we have and the coaching around that. So it’s not again, when I get to the end of workshops and everyone has an individual commitment when we do follow up, it’s not about blaming or shaming people if they haven’t been able to stick to a commitment. It’s having a conversation of, okay, so you said you were going to try this and it didn’t happen.

0:34:05 Alison Coward: What got in the way? Let’s talk about what got in the way and whether that is something that they might need to do to tweak their experiment, whether it’s actually something more systemic that the leader needs to look into. Having that conversation around the barriers is actually sometimes more useful than somebody being able to do something straight away.

0:34:24 Ramona Shaw: Yeah. It is the sort of follow up friction that often unveils new things to then work on.

0:34:31 Alison Coward: Absolutely.

0:34:33 Ramona Shaw: So thank you for walking us through those five components that then help us create more SOFA workshop culture. I want to touch on what that all looks like and specific tips you might have for people who work with teams who are located across different offices or different continents, different time zones, where communication or working together has this extra challenge attached to it.

0:35:01 Alison Coward: So I know that often when we think about workshops, we think about being in the room together with post it notes and flip charts. I think we’ve seen over the last few years that we can run workshops online. There’s some really great tools in order to do that. Now, with remote and hybrid teams and teams that are geographically dispersed, these conversations become even more important because some of the things that we might see that are more visible when we’re co located.

0:35:30 Alison Coward: We can also sometimes make more assumptions when we’re in person with each other, whereas when we’re not seeing each other every single day, a lot of that stuff needs to be much more explicit. When are we meeting? What we coming together? How do we communicate? You also have to be much more intentional about those connection points as well. So all of the stuff that I’ve spoken about, if you’re a remote team, if you’re geographically dispersed, it’s almost like you need to turn the dial up even more and commit to having those conversations not only on a deeper level, but much more regularly as well.

0:36:06 Ramona Shaw: Okay. So it actually just makes the case even more these principles, as you see people implement those changes, if someone’s listening and says, hey, I like that, I’m gonna get the book, I’m gonna follow these, where do you suggest they start? What’s the first thing for them to.

0:36:25 Alison Coward: Do a trick question. Because I think there is. Sorry, it’s not a trick question. There’s two sides to that question. I think there is practically what they can do, which is. I’ll say that first because that’s almost like the quick win. And I would say start with your meetings. Look at how you’re meeting as a team. That is your main touch point for almost demonstrating your existing culture. You can get a snapshot of what your culture is just by observing your meetings. So if you can start to make little changes in your meetings which enable people to speak up, encourage people to get more involved and engaged, you start problem solving together, as I mentioned before, you share common challenges and you’re collaborating more, that will start to shift people’s views on their team and how they work together and how they can interact.

0:37:19 Alison Coward: I would say the harder side of that is as a leader, if you want to start to implement a workshop culture, the first piece actually starts with you and taking that kind of self reflection and thinking about some of the skills that you may need to develop and also some of the things that might feel quite uncomfortable to you in starting to adopt this approach. Because facilitation isn’t. It’s not a widespread method of leadership.

0:37:50 Alison Coward: We’re still shifting into the role of facilitation within leadership. And so there are some things within facilitation which almost perhaps go against the grain of what a lot of people have been taught. There’s some things around listening and being patient and not having all the answers and being vulnerable and asking for help more. And that might be quite challenging for an individual leader that hasn’t perhaps practiced some of this before.

0:38:17 Alison Coward: So I’d say start with yourself and reflect on where some of those skills are. Reflect on where you might need to develop some of those skills. I think also going back to our conversation on change, understand, take some time to understand a little bit more about behavior change because it is challenging and these things don’t happen overnight. And so you have to be in it for the long haul. And you have to look at your role as someone who is trying to encourage and shift behavior and change and the ways that that might happen or not happen.

0:38:52 Alison Coward: I talk about, have a case study in my book, one of the most brilliant. All of the leaders I work with are brilliant. This leader in particular, so creative, so quick thinking, always wanted the best for her team. And she moved into an environment, she inherited a team where their leader, the previous leader, had been very different. The previous leader hadn’t been as invested in the well being of the team. They were much more focused on delivery and sort of output and getting things done. Whereas this leader, of course, was worried about concerned with the business results, but also knew in order to achieve those business results, the health of the team also mattered.

0:39:36 Alison Coward: And her job therefore wasn’t necessarily to immediately shift the behavior of the team. It was almost to change their mindset and give them the sense that, or give them, help them understand that it is possible to have both a healthy environment and a high performing environment as well. And so because of this, she hit up with a lot of barriers where she thought that if she created the space for people to speak, they would speak up. Whereas actually she had to do a lot more work in building the trust of the team.

0:40:08 Alison Coward: And so it took a lot longer. We had to really think about the long term, but check in much more regularly on little wins and the little bits of progress that we were making together so that she could see that things were shifting. But it was just going to take a lot longer than she envisioned.

0:40:25 Ramona Shaw: And so being patient by understanding that behavioral change just takes time and trust needs to be built.

0:40:33 Alison Coward: Absolutely.

0:40:35 Ramona Shaw: Thank you so much for sharing so much wisdom and suggestions in such a short time before we wrap up and would tell people where to find more about your work. What is something that we haven’t talked about that you think would be good for the audience to know?

0:40:57 Alison Coward: I think we’ve covered the, we’ve covered the elements of it, the main elements of it. I think the thing that I kind of want to underpin most is I guess a question I’d like to ask, a question that I would love leaders to reflect on is where in the work that you’re doing with your team would facilitation be useful? Where can you see opportunities to perhaps tweak a team meeting or run a session that creates this environment for your team to get a taster of what a workshop culture is like.

0:41:32 Alison Coward: And as I mentioned, one of the probably the first places to start is to look at your meetings. But I think that’s what I’d love to leave your listeners with is thinking about where there are opportunities to use facilitation more in your leadership to start to create that kind of team environment.

0:41:49 Ramona Shaw: And I also want to add, as I’m listening to you, sometimes the leader needs to get themselves out of the equation. Almost like we’re building a vacuum, like an empty space so that the team can actually elevate and engage. And so maybe the question That I would tag on to yours for people to reflect on is where do you maybe hold the strings a bit too tight? Where the team is really focused on you and what you say and your decisions and your approach, your ideas.

0:42:20 Ramona Shaw: Where if you let go of that and you took yourself out, you could observe what your team came up with individually.

0:42:29 Alison Coward: Yeah.

0:42:30 Ramona Shaw: And even if they struggle through the process, this is new. Speaking also about the behavioral change, to let that monitor it, of course, manage the risks and all that, but let that struggle happen in order to see what do they come up with where they’re all elevating as a team, as a network stronger together than sort of let by one strong leader.

0:42:53 Alison Coward: Yeah, that’s such a good point. I think allowing the conflict and the challenge and the tension to happen where it’s safe for it to happen, because it does two things. You may be surprised as a leader in your team working through it, but the act of your team working through a challenge and getting to the other side lifts their confidence and it gives them more confidence in each other to be able to do that in the future.

0:43:16 Ramona Shaw: Yep, exactly. Okay, tell us where to find more about your work, Ellis.

0:43:21 Alison Coward: So my book is called Workshop Culture, A Guide to Building Teams that Thrive. And you can find it as usual at all good bookstores. I do have a discount code for listeners that are either in North America or the UK if you choose to purchase it directly from my publisher. Practical inspiration. And the code is WRK C U L T30 and you’ll get 30% off.

0:43:45 Ramona Shaw: Okay, we’ll put that in the show notes because I don’t know who remembers. Yes, I didn’t. So find that coupon code in the show notes, including the link where to grab the book. Thank you so much. And then best place to find you directly would be website LinkedIn. Assume we have all of that in the show notes as.

0:44:02 Alison Coward: Absolutely. Yeah. Alison Coward on LinkedIn and my company name is Bracket. Website is Bracket creative.co.uk.

0:44:09 Ramona Shaw: Beautiful. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your approach. As I said in the beginning, the leading a team and you mentioned this with the system really designing it intentionally of how to communicate how information should flow, how should we behave in order to show up as our best selves and to do so to create environments and practices and habits that help us achieve our goals is such an important aspect of leadership.

0:44:40 Ramona Shaw: Thanks for really bringing that message across in this conversation today.

0:44:45 Alison Coward: Thank you for having me. Great questions.

0:44:47 Ramona Shaw: If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out@archova.org/masterclass. The second resource is my best selling book, the Confident and competent New Manager. How to quickly rise to success in your first leadership role. Check it out at archova.org/books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there. You can find all those links in the show notes down below.