How to combat difficult situations at work with Jeff Harry

My name is Luke Szyrmer, and if you are new here, I am the author of the book Align Remotely and I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. Find out more at alignremotely.com. In this episode we chat together with Jeff Harry, originally a play specialist who started using play to help heal toxic work cultures.

Upon listening, you will discover:

• How to combat difficult situations at work, especially when it already feels unsafe to do so
• Why you can increase productivity by paying attention to when your team members have fun
• Why starting strong at a meeting helps improve how people feel about the whole experience
• How to apply improv theater techniques in a remote setting to get creative and bond your team
• How to express appreciation for specific remote team members

About Jeff Harry

Jeff Harry combines positive psychology and play to help teams/organizations navigate difficult conversations and assist individuals in addressing their biggest challenges through embracing a play-oriented approach to work. For his work, Jeff was selected by BambooHR & Engagedly as one of the Top 100 HR Influencers of 2020 and has been featured in the NY Times, Mashable, & Upworthy. Jeff has worked with Google, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Adobe, the NFL, Amazon, and Facebook, helping their staff to infuse more play into the day-to-day.

Notable quotes

A lot of people use the remote setting to not have a lot of discussions, but to avoid a lot of conversations, they're like, Oh, we don't want to deal with that toxic person to be bored because they don't see each other on a regular basis.

It was just like, okay, I guess what was the problem? Should they get and hope we get goes away?

We actually have a scapegoat. We had where the person where we're like, all right, I'll blame everything on this stuffed animal goat, and as people start to do stupid things like this, or try these things, they realize like it's a lot of this stuff is absurd. Really be gossiping, or getting really angry. David, because he didn't, refill the paper tray, or he didn't nail like that.

Biggest takeaway

As someone who's dabbled in improv in the past, a lot of what Jeff said felt right...although he was probably preaching to the choir when speaking to me, and that wasn't really news for me. What was surprising was his view that most companies have used the pandemic as a way to avoid hard conversations. If you aren't deliberate about facing people issues, they won't go away. It's even harder now with the pandemic. A good framework for these conversations is Jonathan Raymond's accountability dial from the last episode coincidentally, but beyond that trying to create an improv theater mindset with deep listening seems to be how to solve the problem for good.

I also really liked the practical tips around expressing appreciation for team members in a remote context. It helps if you really know the person, but if you don't, Jeff's advice should help you with coming up with a thoughtful gift or expression of appreciation.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Of the four main claims in the agile manifesto, “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” is the one which is the most violated and missed. Particularly by people keen on implementing agile processes by the book. It's easy to start thinking immediately in terms of processes and workflows. It's a trap. It's just a habit. In most cases, managers create processes and workflows to compensate for a lack of trust among people in a team.

individuals and interactions matter more

When communication breaks down, each team member does their own thing. It's just "heads down". While this may increase the lines of code they produce, it's unlikely to produce more useful and working software. Regardless of whether I've worked alone or in a team, quite often discussing a feature before I begin work on it, I get insights which I wouldn't have gotten on my own. The additional perspectives are invaluable. This ranges from how it might look on the UI, to what the main purpose of a feature is, to how to implement the relevant data structure or algorithm. This type of exchange happens because of good team interactions.

Good vibrations

It's really peculiar and hard to measure, but the feeling of interactions is still important. This "soft" part of software development, especially how it impacts effectiveness, is probably the most important part.

“Yes, And” in improv - Luke collaborating on stage

In improv comedy, there is a concept of "Yes, And". When developing a scene, two improv actors enter the stage with absolutely nothing but their imagination. Once one of them starts, the other immediately responds to the "offer" of the first. That offer becomes "reality", for the purposes of the skit.

This happens on the language level too. When coming up with dialogue, improv actors, dare i say comedians, always try to accept what the previous person said. Saying "No" or "Yes, but" kills the dynamic of a scene. It decelerates. Rapidly. This is the essence of collaboration. If the environment is such, that everyone can build on everyone else's creative ideas, it accelerates the rate at which these ideas come about.

It's not only about the "communication saturation" which scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland has mentioned in the past, where there is a larger number of connections among project participants. In particular, on the infamous Borland Quattro Pro project, they delivered 1 million lines of code in 18 months, with a team of a few people. There were many more discussions with project managers and testers than you would have on a typical project. Team leads dialed in individuals and interactions, thus achieving an incredible outcome.

The quality of individuals and interactions

Here the focus is on the quality of the interaction. At each step forward, you advance it. You are moving rapidly forward. You discover what you are making as you make it. It requires full attention. It requires being plugged into what your teammates are doing, as you want to run with any offer they make.

If you thinking giving a presentation in public is hard, try making one up on the spot, with a few coworkers. While this might seem a bit wacky, it's actually a highly refined set of skills practiced in the improv theater community. While the actors don't know what any particular scene will be about before they start, each actor submerges himself into what everyone else is doing. As a result, they find ideal ripostes to every offer. The scene’s conflict is discovered organically. Tension builds. It culminates. And then the troupe completes the scene. Pure creativity comes from being completely plugged in to the situation. And from listening closely to other team members.

This improv meme has been on the fringe of the agile community for a while. I suspect its because there is a strong desire for focusing on individuals and interactions over processes and tools. People never seem to stop amazing me, especially the amount of creativity which others find in themselves. In a team setting, the culture in which a team operates allows for this type of free-flow of creative ideas. This assumes that everyone feels safe enough to offer ideas as they are created. That's where this Agile principle of ‘individuals and interactions over processes and tools’ puts you.