On axiology in project management with Traci Duez

My name is Lukasz Szyrmer. If you are new here, I am the author of the book Align Remotely. I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. Find out more at alignremotely.com. In this episode of the Managing Remote Teams podcast, I speak with Traci Duez an expert in axiology, or the study of value, in the context of project management. It's all too common to focus on the mechanics of delivering projects, while missing the whole point of the work in the first place.

In this episode, you will discover:

• What the three hierarchichal dimensions of value are, and why they matter on every project you will ever run
• What axiology has to do with a Nobel peace prize nomination
• When a discovery phase creates or destroys value for the customer and how to go about it effectively
• How to collaborate while taking into account potential biases

About Traci Duez

Traci has been teaching project managers, program managers, and portfolio managers for the past 10 years for the Project Management Institute. how to implement the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) with the human souls that work on your projects and in your organization. Traci uses the little-known science of axiology - the study of value and human value judgment to show leaders how to use all three dimensions of value to create an engaged and productive team.

• Traci Duez on LinkedIn
• Traci’s company website: Break Free Consulting

Key Takeaways

People matter more than than the mechanics of projects, particularly how they perceive and generate value.

Transcript

Tracy Duez welcome to the managing remote teams podcast.

Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Sure. So can you say a few words about how you got into axiology in the context of project management?

Oh, yes. Great question. Axiology was presented to me when I was the director of an it consulting company. I had a lot of project managers that I employed and and it was more from a personal perspective.

At first, when I was introduced to axiology, I took this assessment and I had. Never taken an assessment like that before it took 10 minutes to take and rank two sets of 18 items, and then it spit out this report. Didn't tell me about my personality or behavioral style. Cause I know how to manipulate that.

I know how to make sure those assessments say what I want it to say, but this one this one I couldn't trick in any way. I didn't know how my boss would want me to answer it so that I could show him that I was brilliant. And so I started to look into axiology to say, okay what was this?

Now? I would love to say it was because I wanted to know the science behind it. And I was really curious, but I'm going to be very Frank with you and that it was so that I could manipulate the assessment. The next time I took it. So I could tell my boss what I wanted to tell my boss. But anyways, I found this science and axiology is the science of value and human value judgements.

And I think that's what project managers do is they create and generate value. And so that's one side of it. And then the other side of it is it measures how you think and how you make value judgements. Which is the other side of project management from the project manager side in terms of how do I think and how do I make the best choices in the best decisions in order to create the greatest value.

So how did your boss actually reacts after he saw it?

Great question. He didn't know what to do with it either. My boss didn't react to my assessment in any way. He reacted to his, and it said that he was a creative genius or something. So he was like, yes, this is the best assessment ever. And that he should be running a strategically running the company. See, I told you guys.

It really measures your capacity to think in a specific dimension of value, it doesn't measure whether you actually do it or not. So that's part of it, but he assumed that, because the assessment measured that he's obviously that way and that we just didn't appreciate how strategic and how much of a big thinker he was.

Yeah, it wasn't about me.

Okay. So if axiology is the study of value, then how does it, or you define value then?

That's terrific question. My background is my degrees in chemistry, which, makes me a little bit of a nerd. I was really a lazy chemist. And so I got into kind of robotics and computers and became a geek, which is how I ended up leading an it consulting firm. And so axiology, while when people look at it, they think, oh, this is like psychological or psychobabble or something along those lines. It's actually based in math, it's based in trans finite calculus and set theory. So I told you I was a geek and a nerd. However, it's also very practical.

It's very practical. So when it comes to relating to project management and the science is really about three dimensions of value, where most of our lives, we just deal with. With two dimensions of value. And so that's basically what it taught me and it taught it from a mathematical perspective.

People always say who determines the correct order of these things that you rank? Cause when you take the assessment, you ranked two sets of 18 items and People will say who determines the right? Nobody determines it, math determines it. And so it isn't based on statistics, which most behavioral assessments are like, they'll have you rank these things and then you, they go and they observe you.

And then they come back and statistically say, oh Because she did this, or he did that and these measurements match up then statistically that's relevant. So this isn't based in that at all. It's just based in math. And it's basically, we were asking you does your personal hierarchy of value, which is what we ask you to do rank a hierarchy of that between two sets of 18 items.

Does it match with the mathematical hierarchy of value and then where it does. Is where you have the strongest capacity to see value and to make great choices and where it doesn't. You have what we call a cognitive bias, meaning your brain has filtered out some of the information that it needs to make a decision, a good decision from that perspective.

And so you might not want to use. That thought habit or that perspective to make your decisions. So anyways, it can be very powerful for a leader as well as for a team.

What is, what's this mathematical hierarchy of value? Exactly.

Let me give you the kind of layman's. Terms of this value rather than getting in to transplant that calculus and losing your audience, let's just do it kind of high-level.

So there are three dimensions, hierarchical dimensions of value that everything on the planet falls within. I'll start with the lowest. So the lowest dimension of value is what we call systemic. And so this deals with. Systems as in the name, but it deals with things we make up in our head. So ideas expectations as well as policies and procedures and rules, that those aren't things that exist in nature.

We as human beings create them in our brain, right? So a project plan, perfect example is systemic where we're trying to lay out a system of how things will work. So that's the lowest dimension of value. Now it's not worthless. It's just worth less when you take that system and create something measurable or tangible from it.

So you have your project plan and you create a thing. Yeah, I was in it. You create a program, an application, whatever it happens to be, and now it's measurable and tangible. And so anything that you can measure, you can sense in some way, see taste, smell, measure. Those are extrinsic. So that's the next dimension of value extrinsic.

And when we work in project management, I've read the different versions of the PIM Bach from a project management Institute. The whole book is almost in those two dimensions of value. What are your best practices? And then what are the metrics? What can you use to measure them? Which by the way, that's still a system, but when you actually do the measuring that work that's extrinsic.

And so axiology tells us that those are the two lowest dimensions of value. Again, not that they're worthless. There is value in all dimensions of value. The highest dimension of value is what's called the intrinsic. And so I often ask project managers like what's a successful project. So Luke, what's a successful project.

How do we determine if a project is successful? So I come very much from a products, slanted angle, and I think it's largely based on whether or not it was the customer was satisfied. And not necessarily the internal machinations of it. Obviously you don't want it to be late and all of that, but that only matters to the extent that the customer cares about it.

I love what you just said, because if you talk to. Typical project managers, they're going to say is it on time? Is it on budget? Is it within scope? That's determines a successful project. Those things are systemic and extrinsic. And so I ask project managers when I speak in front of the chapters or different organizations as, Hey, have any of you ever had a project that was deemed successful?

That was over budget late. And maybe outside scope and they say, yeah, sure. Yeah, we have you ever had a project deemed unsuccessful that was within scope under budget and on time? Not so much, but yes, there have been people that do that too well. That's because you're only measuring in two dimensions of value.

And Luke, what you talked about was is the client happy? Intrinsic is about the personal or spiritual. It's about the human experience of the extrinsic thing that we've created from the system. So every project plan creates a product, something, and it, that isn't the greatest value that you can get from it.

It's what does that product do in the lives of the people who are paying for it or the people who are using it? And that intrinsic value is infinitely more valuable than the product itself or the plan that's used to create the product. Does that make sense? Yeah. I It makes sense to you cause you, you had basically said that early on, but we can show that mathematically.

So the system is a one or a zero. And the extrinsic is a number you can place a value on a pen that I have or an iPhone or whatever. There's a certain value, a thousand bucks or whatever it is, but that tool, that product is invaluable depending on how you're going to use it. So taking the iPhone, especially now in the pandemic, that's the only way we get to see people's faces sometimes.

And. When my mother-in-law passed away last April, that's the only way we could say goodbye was through an knife, not, I was one of those frugal people that said, God, who would pay a thousand dollars for an iPhone. Then when it came time to use it in that way and experience that thing, that extrinsic thing in that way, it was priceless.

I'd have paid whatever I needed to pay in order to say goodbye. And that's how axiology fits into to project management. Although we've been trained so often to just focus on the low or two dimensions of value, the extrinsic and the systemic, even our schooling teaches us that right.

Is it just a matter of perspective on that this the customer perspective on to all of it? Or is it more than that?

Yeah, that's a great question because. It's a little bit more than that. The whole basis of axiology, if you trace it back to, and I'll talk about formal axiology, which came about in the fifties and sixties a guy by the name of Robert S. Hartman put this together. And he was it was actually German raised in Germany fled the Nazi regime and. He was a genius. He had a PhD in math, PhD in philosophy. He had a JD law degree just an amazing man. And when he fled Germany, Nazi, Germany, he made it his life's mission to organize good the way he saw Hitler organized evil, and that.

Mantra went with him throughout the remainder of his life. And he passed away in 1973 after he was nominated for a Nobel peace prize. So here's a guy who had to figure out one thing. If he was going to organize it, he had to know what is good. And so how, and this goes to what you were saying in terms of subjective, right?

So how do you know what a good product is? How do you, what's a good project. Let's just say you're running a project, Luke. What's a good project.

Something that's serving some kind of needs of a particular person or a group and yeah, and fully serving it, not just attempting to, but actually doing so. That would be my definition.

Yes. And that's not too far off by the way, from what Hartman discovered, because people, if I were to say, okay, what's your definition of good. How would you define good.

Good. Okay. Nothing is good when.

Clearly when it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. This is where people go, look, thank you. Because this is where I went to. It was like it's not bad. It's not evil. So we're describing it by telling you what, it's not right. We're giving you a definition. And then some people will say, oh it's it's beneficial.

It's productive. That's what. That's what good means, right? It's it doesn't cause any harm. Okay. If that is the true definition of good, how can we have a good criminal? Wow.

Because you can say, oh, that guy's a good criminal, but what are you really meaning? You're not meaning he's beneficial. Robin hood is in that category now. Yeah. A good criminal is a guy that gets away with whatever crime he's committing or she's committing. That's what we would consider.

Yeah. Good, good. As an effective, but not necessarily good as in. Good. Not in terms of that, right? If it all depends on how we define the word. Good. So Hartman spent a decade trying to figure out because of this mess that we'd gotten ourselves into here, he's trying to figure out a definition of it.

And he said that a thing is good. This is what he came up with when it has all the attributes needed to fulfill its purpose.

When it has all of the properties. Needed to fulfill its intention. So now the subject, if part is the intention or the purpose, and then we come up with the attributes to it. So for a good criminal, I'll just go with the criminal, right? What's the purpose. The first let's say they're they steal stuff, right?

The purpose is to steal stuff and get away with it. And maybe even resell it on the black market, whatever. Okay, great. That's your purpose? What are the attributes that you need to be a good criminal? And in this case we could come up with some, would you agree? They need to be stealthy. I don't know what fine black clothing.

I don't know what it is, but you can just put a little cartoon together. Okay. So thinking of your current project, what's the purpose? And this is where most project managers, I just want to say fall short, but I don't mean that it's intentional or that it's just that we end up focusing on attributes and properties before we fully focus and hash out the intention or the purpose of the project.

Part of that, I think is just that it's actually quite hard. you need to do discovery and that costs time, that costs effort, it takes a while before you really get at the essence of the problem that you can solve often. And if you make a plan before you've gotten there, then you know, the value of that plan is limited.

Absolutely. And that's where we see people cutting back as well. We see people cutting back on the discovery and the requirements and coming together to decide, Hey, these are some of the requirements that we have. Are we going for all of them? Or which ones are we really going to focus on? And what's the clarity around the purpose and the intention of this project. That's what we need to spend a lot of our time.

There and okay. What are the attributes that we need in order to complete this so that it satisfies all dimensions of value. So that delivers systemically it's effective, it's efficient in getting it out. It creates a product or service that is measurable, tangible, according to the parameters that we decide. And then it impacts the lives of the people. Who we want to impact who are going to be impacted by this and focusing on all three dimensions of value here at the very beginning, because the rest of the project will fall out.

And if your team knows very clearly what the purpose and intention of this project is and what the intentions are of it are not, which is where scope creep comes in, right? They start this with make up their own things. What it's not intended to do now. Those self leading teams that we want. We start to have them because we all go always go back to this purpose or intention and we know what a good one is.

So how do you going back to this discovery? How do you make sure you don't burn too much of the resources you have on discovery?

Another great question, right? How do you make certain that? One of the key reasons why we either a burn too much or B end up creating a product or service that doesn't serve our clients full, fully their needs fully is because we don't Keith Ferazi calls team out.

We decide who is going to be impacted by this work. And those are the people we talk to. That's it. And so this is going to be I used to work in pharmaceutical. So this project is going to impact the quality assurance laboratory. And so we'll talk to the quality assurance laboratory and we'll talk to.

The people over the quality and we'll talk to the VP of quality and then that'll be it. But we don't talk to finance. We don't talk to research and development. We don't talk to any of those folks. And so we end up with a perspective that's very narrow. Now. I'm not saying that we take the attributes from finance, from R and D from the other marketing.

We don't necessarily take those as part of our equation, but we take time to go talk to them and say, Hey, this is what we're doing. Does this, can you see this impact you in any way? And you may get some really amazing ideas that could actually save the quality assurance department. A lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money.

Yeah, we don't team out that way typically, because we think it's going to add more scope to the project. When in fact it doesn't have to, it may actually take away scope from the project because you may find out that they have a system that you were going to recreate that you don't need to recreate. No.

I don't know. So for me, that part of it, how do you know when it's too much? It, I think we always assume that we've done enough and we haven't and you don't, it doesn't need to be a big burn rate to do that. Just include them at the very beginning.

I'm just trying to figure out how to fit it into more of a project framework, as opposed to product as in product there's concepts like continuous discovery. In certain contexts, it's going to be much more natural to work towards more of a project. You don't want to burn a lot of just the lapse time, not even resources, but elapsed time on discovery when you've got to go and create value or the sum of it, even if, because then you won't have enough attributes to actually. Create the thing at the end, that's going to make the customer happy in the first place.

Part of that loop is also, we tend to focus a lot on it, more so than the team, more so than the individuals and people on the team. Do we typically figure out who on our team can see intrinsic value really well. Can see extrinsic value really well or systemic. I will tell you the answer is typically no, in the tens of thousands of people that I've worked with because it's usually the systemic person who is the loudest. And that's usually the one that we listened to. It's the one who understands the systems and the processes and this, and they dig into these details and blind everybody too. The other dimensions of value. And we ended up focusing there on the lowest dimension of value and then the loudest, because they're usually the most emotional direct demanding, because systemic thought occurs near the part of the brain that is right next to the emotional part of the brain, the rational logic peer in your prefrontal cortex, doesn't create a whole lot of emotion, but that's where the extrinsic part.

Of our project is thought of. And then the intrinsic is in the deeper part of the brain where the feelings and emotions are around. What's this going to feel like when it's done, what's this gonna look like? And so certain people on your team have abilities and capacities in each of those dimensions of value.

And. We don't always listen to them, especially the intrinsic people. Cause it's hard for them to come up with the words while the systemic guy is going through all of this stuff. Or even the extrinsic is going through all this knowledge and stuff that they have. And and we're not listening to the other side of it.

Because there's no place for emotions in business. Is there.

To change topic a little bit and slightly? What about dependencies? So things like resource dependencies or dependencies within a plan in terms of like task breakdown, that kind of thing. How do you see that through this extrinsic view this third view, third eye view,

the third I view the intrinsic. As you're putting that plan together,

how is that typically accomplished?

Okay. So for example, on the resources side, I think quite often you've got a fixed pool of resources in the company you've got, would say a handful of projects going on at the same time. And then there's a certain people whose skills you want on certain projects at certain moments in time.

The thing that I've always been trying to avoid in that kind of a context is that we don't want a situation where the client is forced to accept things that are only possible because of internal constraints, for example, such as resource constraints. That's just like the resource one, then there's similar, like ordering task type dependencies, you can also potentially talk about, what are your thoughts?

so I find that, and I don't know if this is the case for you, Luke, but I find that in many organizations. The project managers are given the project and they put together the plan, and then they're given access to these resources and then they've got to figure out how to use those resources to deliver what they've been asked to deliver. And it's a very non-collaborative problem-solving process to get these things done.

And. I believe in a more collaborative problem solving process where we get together. And we talk about what's going on and we talk about what this means to the company, what this means to our clients, what this means to the team, because there are some team members who they're in this bucket of having these certain skills and they're just tired of it.

Like they're really good at it. I was really good at managing projects and I hated it, but they just kept having me manage and manage more projects because I was good at it until finally I had to quit in order to do something I really wanted to do. And that's the intrinsic side of it. You can get so much more from people when it's measured between 40 and 80% more cooperation productivity, and buy-in from people when you see them as human beings, but most of the time in a corporation and in these kinds of environments, we see them as human doings and we are actually lowering their productivity, lowering our delivery,

our effectiveness, are efficiencies because we don't see them as human beings. And so how can we collaborate more? What collaboration is all around questions. And so we teach a collaborative problem solving process where we bring people together. And not only that, but we understand what a person's skills are, but also what are their desires?

Who is it that they want to be? Not just, what do they want to do? And why don't you sometimes when I ask people, who do you want to be? They'll say yo, no, that's not. That's still what you want to do. Who do you want to be? Is a completely different one question. It's what kind of man, woman, individual do you want to become like at your funeral?

What do you want people to say about you? Do you want them to say, oh my gosh, that Luke, his Gantt charts were priceless. The colors. He had really great risk management plans. Oh my gosh, that Luke was just, this might not be like the top of the list thing you want people to say about you. So what is one thing you want somebody to say about you at your funeral?

And just for instance, I don't mean to kill you off.

I'm dead. I'm dead. Okay. They'll say that. Yes. Yeah. How do you want to be described? What kind of words do you want to hear? From your family, from your colleagues, how do you want them to describe who you are?

I think I've already heard some of it, but certainly kind is something that seems to come up and it's something that I try to focus on with varying success, but yeah. Yeah. In that let's use that as a that's fine. Absolutely. And so the, every role that you play in your life, you want, you only want to take on roles where you can practice being kind, which is probably almost all of them, but you want to have all of your roles, your extrinsic roles, support, who you want to be intrinsically.

And when we have that matched up, there's a formula. It says be times do equals have when, who you are aligns with, what you do, you're going to have great success. You're going to end your Workday feeling fulfilled. In organizations, when you allow that when you create an environment that allows that to happen. That's when your question about dependencies, not that there aren't arguments, Luke don't get me wrong, but that's when they take care of themselves because you know what a good organization is. You understand what the purpose of your company is. Then you understand what the purpose of your projects are. So you can understand what good attributes are to those. And then you use the intelligence, the emotional intelligence, as well as the technical intelligence in your organization. To keep everybody moving in that direction.

The other aspect of it is you understand what people want, who they want to be and what they want to do, and you get them all moving in that direction. So dependencies has to do with this collaborative problem solving where you pull everybody together. You talk about the problem. The problem is we have limited number of resources and we have these three high priority projects. Okay. So how can we accomplish our goals for our customers with this constraint?

And you break everybody out, three people into a group, and here's the question. What's your solution. What's your solution. You will end up collectively with a much better solution than any one, two or three project managers could have ever come up with on their own. And people say, oh my gosh, we don't have time to do that with every question.

Okay, then keep delivering lower level projects, but it doesn't take that much time. It can take 15 minutes, 30 minutes and you will come out of there not only with a great solution, but with buy-in from the rest of the people, they will feel intrinsically valued. Like you valued them as human beings, not just human doings.

And those are the processes that a lot of companies are missing. And so when I go into a company, these are some of the things we implement and right away, they start to see value from those processes. It's not just about the technical side in many cases.

How does this apply in an agile environment?

I give talks on agile all the time and how the agile manifesto fits right into The hierarchy of value.

I forget the agile manifesto. Now it's been a few months since I talked about it. They say, Hey, we value the things on the left, but we do things on the right more. It's true. Actually, illogically the things on the right are more valuable. Then the things on the left. So it fits very well into that framework and in agile and a lot of when we get into like self leading teams and things like that being able to take a look at. And teach people the hierarchy of value and how to use their best thinking to make choices rather than using their biases to make choices.

But just raising that level of awareness increases the results and productivity seven to 10%, just one simple that level of awareness. I love working with folks who work in an agile environment. Because. It is about short sprints to value, basically.

More and more. I hear the opinion that, especially these big scaled agile frameworks, they're becoming almost more waterfall than waterfall yeah, precisely because they don't have that manifesto aspect to it. It's just super, detailed monitoring and planning out months ahead of lots of teams. This isn't what it's about supposed to work. If you really get at the essence of the spirit of it. Even though you're using the rational the first layer stuff, the system stuff.

For me, my perspective on seeing that happen, exactly what you described is because it's more from an emotional standpoint, people are afraid. And so they believe that if they get all of these months and months planned out in advance, we have something to which to hold people accountable and that makes them feel good that they have somebody to yell at when the value isn't delivered.

I believe I'm going to yell at people. Yeah. And excuse me. Fear has a lot to do with what you're talking about because agile isn't meant to be that way. You have to trust in order for agile to work. Yeah, absolutely.

How was this approach relevant for team leads or leaders?

For leaders themselves, this is all about self-leadership. And I think a lot of times we want to go learn leadership skills when we can't even lead ourselves. How many times have you said, oh, you know what, I'm going to start. I'm going to start my exercise program on Monday. Because you can only start things on Monday. For some reason. I don't know why you can't start on a Thursday or whatever, January 1st.

Yeah exactly. And so we can't even lead ourselves to do the things that we say we're going to do, but we're going to learn leadership skills in order to lead others. And I think that putting the cart before the horse, as they say sometimes gets in our way and it erodes our confidence.

And so we think, oh crap, I can't even eat a salad instead of those big burgers or whatever. Even though I told myself I was going to, how am I going to lead this team? When you become a better self leader, leadership naturally flows from that. And that's what this can help with figuring out what's going on up here in a way that allows you to be a better, you.

Which allows you to do better things and then have greater success.

During the last year, has there been any difference in terms of how it applies to remote teams compared to how it used to be?

What we're discovering? As a use of this over the last year is really helping. And this may not be directly associated with specifics of project management, but it's just of people in and employees.

And we've really looked at it from a mental wellness perspective because we've noticed that teams that previously were thriving are now. What they call languishing. So it's not that they're depressed or terrible. But they're not thriving either. They're not flourishing, they're in this language.

And so what this, what we've found is that this, our tool helps people understand what's going on up here and how to shift their perspective so that they can see. See ways to thrive in ways to F to flourish and really increase their own emotional intelligence of what's going on. So emotional intelligence, I believe in a model where thoughts create emotions.

And emotions, give us the energy to take action. And the action leads to our results. I call it a tear model T. And so a lot of us see our actions and we see the results. We see the top of this model, but the emotions and the thoughts, we don't really have any insight into. And so this assessment gives us optics into our thinking.

That's creating these emotions. And once you can see that you really are able to. Look at it and make your own choices and decisions and get out of the languishing and shift into the flourishing again. That's fascinating. Yeah.

When you get started within you company that you're working with or somebody wants to just even get a sense of, is this the right approach? What do you do or what should they do?

One of the things that as I talked to, I don't know how many, it's over 70, 80 PMI chapters around the world.

One of the things that I do is I offer a free assessment so that you, that assessment, that Dr. Hartman put together that measures how individual people think and where they think the best, but also where you might have some cognitive biases. I offer a free assessment and a, like a really short. It's four, 15 minute videos course that shows you how to use the report. This report, isn't about putting you in a bucket it's about helping you understand how you think and how to use your cognitive assets better.

by the way, in this assessment, unlike personalities and all that, you don't need to share your results with other people because this isn't about.

Your boss treating you in a certain way, because you're a green or you're a yellow or you're, whatever. This is about you taking accountability and responsibility and ownership of your, of yourself, of your thoughts of your talents and bringing them to the world. So what we do is we assess your team and we compile the results.

And I can get a link for your listeners to just go try it out, take that phrase and you'll learn more through that process. We can probably put it in the, we just put it in the show notes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's pretty simple. It's my VQs VQ. M Y V Q S because as we measure value judgment, quotients.com and then we'll put slash.

Great. Where can people reach out to you to find out more other than your survey?

Then my survey LinkedIn is usually the best place to to reach out to me, just I don't know that there's too many other Tracey do as it's Tracy with an eye out there, but delete, reach out to me on LinkedIn. And and then we can continue the conversation and you can ask any questions there as well.

I'm there almost, so that's the best way.

Great. Thanks a lot.

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.

Remote Accountability with Jonathan Raymond

Today's guest is really special guest, whose body of work I found really helpful as a practitioner in the context of delegation and remote accountability. Usually the topic is full of platitudes and hot air when you read stuff online, but Jonathan has thought very deeply on the topic and come up with frameworks that empower you to go and solve real-world issues you face, as you'll hear on these episodes.

In this episode you will discover:

• how to hold people accountable in a respectful way, without feeling like you've been taken for a ride
• what accountability really is, and what it means for you as a leader
• how lockdown has changed how leaders hold their remote teams accountable

About Jonathan Raymond

Jonathan Raymond is the CEO of Refound, a leadership training company that helps organizations unlock high-performance through transparent conversations about growth and accountability. Jonathan spent 20 years building careers in business development and personal growth before realizing he could have the best of both worlds by starting his own company. Now, he uses those skills to advise CEOs and organizational leaders on how to create a people-first culture that drives results. His goal is to provide Refound’s clients with a partner they can trust and a program that gives managers an experience of how they can make work a better place, one conversation at a time. Jonathan is an experienced CEO, Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker (Inc. 2018) and the author of Good Authority, How to Become the Leader Your Team is Waiting For. He lives in Encinitas, California. He is madly in love with his wife, tries not to spoil his daughters, and will never give up on the New York Knicks.

• Refound.com
• Jonathan Raymond on LinkedIn
• Download the goodies Jonathan promises here

Transcript

Luke: Jonathan, Raymond, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks. And

so can you say a few words about how you got into the topic of accountability and delegation?

Jonathan Raymond: Fairly simply realizing that I was a lousy CEO when it came to delegation and remote accountability and feedback and coaching, and I was pretty good at the vision and strategy and okay, where do we want to be?

And what does it look like and thinking about products and things like that. And I thought I was okay at the delegation and feedback and remote accountability and I wasn't. And so I realized back in this was probably 2013, 2014, seven, eight years ago that I needed to change something. Something substantial about my approach to leading and managing teams.

I also saw my managers who were mostly around my age, a little bit younger at the time, like mostly in their thirties. They were really struggling and people, this was, pre way, pre pandemic, pre all the crazy things that are happening in our world right now. And people were really struggling with how creating a space for their teams to perform at a high level based on the company goals or the team goals.

And. Be really human and give people the development that they were looking for, the autonomy they were looking for. That's where I started. We'll get into where I ended up, I just became really passionate about. This topic of conversations and where every organization that I was a part of, whether it was part of organizations that I was in a leadership role in, or that I was consulting or coaching to that everybody seemed to be struggling with this.

And I was like, okay there's gotta be a better way. So that's where I started.

Challenges with remote accountability

Yeah. That's how I discovered the book too. I was looking for , anything around this because it just felt like I wasn't doing very well. With this particular thing so in terms of the the process of getting into it, what were the first. Challenges. That you overcame as you started getting into this area?

Luke: The first was really a mindset that I had talked about a lot in good authority, which was like, like most people, I grew up in a education system, family system, cultural system that rewarded and incentivized me based on my individual contributions.

So I became really good at my individual contributions. Knocking off the things in my inbox and, moving things forward that were, that seemed important to me. And I started to shift that perspective and I started to see that was not my highest value anymore as a team leader, while it was my highest value as an individual contributor, that, that mindset of solving problems and fixing things had become a liability.

And all of a sudden I had a team of people, whether it was eight people, 20 people, a hundred people surrounding me in some sort of way. The more that I used that muscle that I re that I really knew the worst things got. So the more I was the one who was the fixer of problems and the solver of things, the less the team performed.

And the less that I did that, the more that I said I don't know. I've got an idea for how to do that, but how would you do that? Or, Hey, I've got some ideas for how we might do this. And of course I've got some ideas, but I don't want to put my ideas out there first because the tendency will be to go with my ideas and they may not be the best ones.

If we want to go deep, pretty soon in our conversation here, it's really about identity. It's really about who do I think I am. And what, and how do I think I add value in the world? And as an individual contributor, we think rightly that we add value through our individual contribution and when we're called into a position of leadership, at least in my view.

And I think this is a widely shared view these days more so is that we have to change that self value. We have to say, Hey, wait a second. My self value is about empowering others. It's about lifting up others and creating the conditions for other people to go to places that they've yet to go. I'm good at taking myself to places that I, you have to go, but my job is to get other people to go to places where they you've got to go.

And I had a CEO of a fortune 500 company recently say to me, something that you never would have said to me a year ago, where he said. Jonathan, what I realized is that it's my job to create the emotional conditions for high performance. And I was like, wow, okay. My job is done here. That's the kind of stuff you don't hear.

It takes a while. So that's the mindset shift from individual contributor to team leader. 80% of it is mindset. There's tactics. We'll get into the accountability dial and we'll talk about delegation there's but it's about a mindset shift and that's the hardest part.

What is accountability, really?

In terms of accountability. Let's start there. What is it really when it's working well?

Jonathan Raymond: Here's what it's not, or it's not only a lot of people say accountability is like doing what I said I was going to do. Okay. Fine. That's fine. But that's the table stakes, right? And most people don't even do that. And especially in big companies, they suffer from a lot of people, not doing the things that they were going to do.

But to me, accountability is about the way we go about things, it's not just about the tasks in your inbox, but it's the way you go about it. Did you communicate in an effective way? Did you collaborate across the team? Did you give people fair warning around changes? Did you acknowledge when you messed something up and you didn't just say oops, You said, oops, that was on me.

And because it was on me, here's how I'm going to fix it to make it easier for you. Nobody does that in our world. That's accountability. Accountability is I screwed up. I made things harder for you. I made your project go slower. I messed something up for you saying I'm sorry is worthless. It's better than nothing.

But accountability is going to saying Hey, of course say, Hey, sorry about that. And I'm going to take it upon me because I'm the one who took the action that resulted in harm in some way, I'm going to take the next action, which is I'm going to fix it. I'm going to undo. I'm going to, I'm using the word damage, even though it's a bit extreme, but I'm going to proactively undo the damage or the harm that I did.

That's accountability. That's where that's the top of the mountain, what we're going for and what we coach leaders and executives on. And the more and the higher you are up in the org chart, the more meaningful it is when you do accountability like that. And the more obvious it is when you don't and the more harmful it is when you don't, because everybody goes this culture talks about accountability.

We talk about ownership. We talk about living our values, but they don't do it. The work that I do is oftentimes with, senior leaders, but, or, but we're working organizationally and that's so to me, accountability is about how we show up in our roles.

How to avoid beating people over the head with accountability

Luke: How do you move from accountability being this code word for beating people over the head with a bat, the type of accountability that you described?

Jonathan Raymond: Organizationally, what we do is we ask a lot of questions. We're a pain in the ass that way. So when we'd go into an organization, we're typically not working with one person we're working with a team or a division, oftentimes it's a whole company. And we ask a lot of questions that people like, Hey, so if I use the word accountability, what does that mean to you?

What does that mean in this organization? And people have a wide variety of answers. And then we asked them, we said what should it mean. It should mean X, Y, and Z. It should mean if somebody is going to delay a project that they should come across the hall real or virtual. We let the organization define what accountability should be.

And then oftentimes we'll ask questions like, okay. So let's assume the level of accountability in the organization like, Oh, let me say it this way. I had a CEO come to me and say accountability is one of our core values. So that's great. That's wonderful. What happens if somebody isn't accountable and he said, what do you mean? And I said what are the consequences? If you said accountability is a core value, what are the consequences? If people don't behave in an accountable way? I guess there really aren't any. Okay you don't have accountability as a core value. If there are no consequences and it doesn't mean firing people, although sometimes that happens, like if there are no consequences to accountability, then you don't have accountability.

So we ask a lot of questions around what does accountability mean? And different people have different assumptions. And, it's if we use the word excellence, if we asked 10 people, they're gonna have 10 different definitions. So we ask a lot of people in the organization. What does it mean?

What should it mean? Now, what would it look like if accountability was operating at a really high level in this organization? Okay. We would be doing this, and this. Okay. Does everybody agree that those are good things? Yeah, that would be awesome. Okay. So now we move it out of the realm of of a negative and something. People don't want to, something that people do want because it's attached to an outcome that they care about.

Remote accountability and delegation

Luke: Let's move on to delegation, because I think that's actually the thing that probably helped me the most. Why do people struggle with delegation so much?

Jonathan Raymond: Especially in larger companies and where there's know layers of leaders and managers we're afraid of the poor work coming back on us. Or it's not happening fast. Like we oftentimes have a manager or a leader who's in some form or another, under a lot of pressure breathing down our neck about a results.

We talked about the conditions for a second, though. A few minutes ago, the conditions are ripe for me to not delegate or to not delegate fully. I'll give the easy stuff. I'll give the stuff that has like a list of one to 10. Go do these things, but it's, but at the conditions are ripe for me to hold back.

The parts that are, that involve a little more creativity that involve more context that involve a bit more risk. The inertia is in favor of me holding back. Versus letting go. So you have to proactively work against that. That's the reason why it's so hard is because we believe even if it kills us, if you look at the inner world of most managers and leaders, you'll see a lot of burnout and a lot of overwhelm, we believe that the only way that we're going to survive.

And get promoted is by doing it ourselves, getting it done, making sure like we're a constant, this constant state of making sure polishing, finishing all of that kind of stuff, because we were afraid. And as a parallel to that, we don't know how to do it any other way. So what would be the alternative? I don't do that.

If I let go. I know it's going to happen. It's going to be a disaster. This person's going to be sloppy. This person's going to be late. This person's going to be blah, blah, blah. This person's going to do an okay job, but I'm going to have to redo it. Anyway, we have this whole sort of in the legal world, we'd say they say the parade of horribles, right? This parade of horribles that goes through our mind of all the things that are going to happen if we genuinely truly delegate. So we don't do it because we don't have an alternative for how would I do that in a way that doesn't necessarily guarantee me that doesn't happen, but reduces the risk. Substantially. And without that, I'm not going to delegate.

And that's what the accountability dial in. A lot of the other tools in the book are for how do we mitigate the risks? How do we create moments where we can delegate and give the people feedback in real time of what happens when we do, what did they get, right?

What did they get wrong? How do they improve so that we can improve our own abilities to delegate and the flexibility in our system.

Delegating under uncertainty with remote accountability

Luke: So the difficult thing to delegate is the thing that's big and hairy and uncertain and unknown, which especially nowadays there's a lot of that. Yes.

There's a lot of that.

How do you start? Do you need to break it down into specific tasks? Do you need people to do it for you suggest how they would do it?

Jonathan Raymond: I'll give you one example. One example. A lot of managers would benefit from thinking a little bit more like a mentor apprentice type of relationship.

I think people do this in engineering to some degree. If I want someone on my team to be able to do something well, me telling them to do it well, isn't going to work most of the time, me explaining to them what looks like it might have a little bit of effect, but nothing is going to have the same effect as me showing them how I do it. Step-by-step. What are the micro moments? What are the questions that I'm asking of myself as I'm going through a piece of work? Because they don't know what those questions are.

So as a leader, who's who grows through the ranks, who gets promoted, what people don't understand is the reason why you're promoted.

Nobody ever talks about this. The reason why you're promoted is because you've demonstrated to somebody that you understand, context, it's that simple. You understand the context of the work. And so they're willing to give you more of it because you understand the little bit of the why and you show up to it the right way.

But then we bring it up. People will keep a team of people around us and we don't delegate. We delegate the work, but we forget to delegate the context. And so the way to delegate the context is to go.

So let's use sales for example. So if I, rather than me telling a sales person a hundred times how to do a good sales call, I want to go through one minute. Of a sales call that I did and stop the tape a hundred times and say, okay, right there. Why do you think I asked that question? Oh shit. I don't know. And then I want to get them thinking about why do I do the things that I do relative to this really important task they're going to learn way faster and what managers think that is.

So they say, Oh, I don't have time to do that. And it's nuts because you spent so much time now managing around the absence of that. So if you would just say, Hey, look, I'm going to spend five minutes a day this week in a spirit of learning where I'm going to sit down with one person on my team on Monday, and for five minutes, I'm going to really teach them how to do something that I know how to do that.

I suspect they don't know how to do, or they don't know how to do it the way I know how to do it. That's how you start to break it down there. There are other things we could talk about as well. But what I've seen over and over again,

I'll give you another related example where a manager and she's a very senior leader, but in a very large company and she's struggling with delegation. And she said I keep going to these meetings. I keep going to these regional meetings because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The why I'm afraid something bad will happen, but whatever. And I said, okay, great. So I said, Catherine, what are the questions that you ask yourself? As you're sitting in on those meetings and she thought, I don't know, I just do. I just do it. Okay. I bet if you take, let's take five minutes right now and I want you to write down. What are the five most important questions that you're asking yourself, as you're listening to this other team share this information. She did it in 30 seconds. once I asked her the question, she knew exactly what the things were and I said, okay, great. Now write that in an email and send that to your direct reports and say, Hey, here are the questions that I ask myself. When I go to these meetings, these are the questions that I want you to ask with whatever other questions you think are important. I'm not going to those meetings anymore. And that's what she did.

And she hasn't been, since it's been six months, she doesn't go to those meetings anymore because she'd got it out of her head, she got the context out of her head onto a piece of paper, into ball, an email, and sent it to the people, explained why those things were important. And then let them be smart.

Let them go too. And then they made it better. Because there's a bunch of questions she wasn't thinking of. Cause she's operating at a different level. Hope that's helpful.

Why context matters when holding remote teams accountable

Luke: Let's go into context a little more because this is something that I've been thinking about lately. It's this thing that obviously is there but what is it exactly? And then an organization, for example.

Jonathan Raymond: Think about it this way. One of the things that leaders often struggle with myself included all leaders struggle with this in different ways is that we say a thing. And we don't understand why our team, even though we said the thing, and maybe we even said the thing three times, we don't understand why our team doesn't understand the thing that we said in the way that we set it. We don't understand it. It's reasonable. Why we don't understand it. And the reason why is they lack context. So what does that mean? They weren't in. The 50 meetings prior to that moment where people hashed out all the nuances and debated the ideas . They didn't marinate with that content. They didn't work on them in all of these passive ways, over a period of time. Leading up to that moment when we said the thing, we've all of this context for what's behind it and why it matters and how it's different than this other thing that we could have said, but we didn't say how, why it's white has to happen on this timescale. And, but we spent a bunch of time arriving at that statement and then we make that statement and we think someone else, another human being is going to understand it in the way we understand it. It's crazy.

So it doesn't work. So that's one form of all of the nuance, all the debate, all the critical thinking or lack of critical thinking, all the pressure, all the stress, all the emotion.

Maybe there was a heated conversation about why that was so important. And then somebody shows up on a team, a couple layers in the organization and says, Hey everybody, we're doing this now. And everybody's what are you talking about? I thought, why is that important? Like yesterday you said this was important and all the context got lost in that conversation, right? All the, why all the, why does it matter? Who does it matter to? Why does it matter more than this other thing? All of that stuff gets lost and then we wonder why doesn't the team perform at a really high level?

How to delegate with context to new employees

Luke: In the context of people, especially junior people who are very good, who joined and then I want them to be more involved for example. And then if you give them too much context there. Practically doing my job. Which obviously isn't good for them or good for me either in terms of it's a waste of their time. And yeah. On the other hand, I want them to have enough context so that they bring their full selves to the work. So it isn't this kind of thing where I just go and tell them what to do and give them to do this. How do you give enough context without overwhelming people to, to basically go and do their job?

Jonathan Raymond: for me, it's a line item that should be in your one-on-ones that's sometimes spoken about, and sometimes is it depending upon the week or the month? click on that a little bit? Exactly. As you said too much context, not helpful. It can be debilitating, not useful to little context. So it should be a conversation. It should be, from the moment somebody is like, starting with me, so I have a new guy on my team, but I'm going through this right now. And we're trying to figure out that balance of like how much context is enough, how much is debilitating, where he's swimming and how much of it is not enough.

And so we talk about that, right? So rather than me. Trying to figure out exactly how much context he needs. It's a regular conversation or a one-on-one. It was like, Hey, do you feel like you have enough context for this? Some things he surprised me. He was like, Oh yeah, I totally get it. I talked with Sarah and blah, blah, blah. I totally get it. And other things he's I don't really know. Can you say a little bit more? And so that's a feature. A line item in our one-on-ones is context maintenance, so to speak where we're in conversation about that. And I'm going to give him feedback, which you with accountability dial, which maybe we'll talk about in a couple of minutes, I'm going to get some feedback.

When I see him operating either without enough context or being debilitated by too much context. And that's the purpose of the accountability dial. And the feedback methodology is to be able to say, this thing right now. I feel like we're spinning our wheels on the strategy piece of it.

And I want us to live in a tighter box there. So can you think of about that and how would we move that forward? If we just said Hey, we're going to, we're going to lock in. This is what we know. We know that it's imperfect, but this is what we know. How do we move it forward over the next. 30 days, 60 days.

So I'm going to give my feedback at that level as well, so that he can understand, from my perspective, is he operating at the right level of context? Some people use like the right altitude. Is he doing the work with the right level of altitude? So I think it's an ongoing conversation.

And people will tell you, right? They will, if you do a survey and they say I don't like, if you do a survey and whatever tool you use and people say, I don't understand my job. I don't understand what I do here. It's the most frustrating thing for like HR leaders and CEOs. How do people not understand?

Like we tell them we, what we do, all these things right. Because they're lacking context, right? And so they need managers to help them understand why their role matters. And what's important about it. And also to remove things that are not important. That's the fatal flaw of most managers and leaders. They don't declutter the inboxes of their teams in an effective way. And so people are like you never took those other things away. So I guess I have 27 priorities. Yeah. I'll try to work on all of them, yeah. Yeah.

What is the accountability dial?

Luke: So accountability, dials. What is it?

Jonathan Raymond: I realized painfully not only as a CEO, but as a manager, when I was giving feedback that I thought was reasonable and was reasonably toned and was reasonably challenging. I thought that the way that I was doing that was okay. And I realized this is, back in that same period, seven, eight years ago, that what I thought was reasonable and properly toned and reasonably challenging was way too heavy handed was way too intense, was bringing way too much authority for people to be able to hear.

And so as a result, what I was getting was defensiveness, victimhood, people blaming other people blaming other systems, people shutting down and I didn't understand. I cried. I was like how is this happening? Like, all I said was blank. And what I didn't realize was that the binary nature of my position in the organization and I can be an intense guy, but it wasn't just that the combination of my position and my own personal intensity was causing people to shut down.

So I decided to create a better way for myself. Refounded and exist. The book didn't exist. I was just working as a leader in the team, senior manager, but it was working in it on a bigger team. And I started to slow down and I said, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bite-size this.

Instead of giving my feedback, I'm gonna break it down into five components and see what that does. And what ended up being the accountability dollars. These five stages mentioned invitation conversation, boundaries, and limit, which we talk about extensively. And we'll share some links for some people to check out some things about this is I said, okay, I'm just going to start with a mention and see what happens.

I'm just going to say to the effect of, Hey, I noticed in this morning, stand-up I noticed this, I don't know what to make of it, but I noticed it. And then I'm just gonna shut up. And I wasn't going to make a theory or maybe I had a theory, but it wasn't going to out my theory or a conclusion or make a judgment or dictate an action.

I wasn't gonna do any of those things. And what I found was by just starting with dimension, I started to spark self-reflection. I started to spark curiosity in people. I started to spark people's taking on the thing that I saw as their own. And taking it from me, which is what I wanted because I saw something, I didn't know what to make of it.

I just knew it wasn't good, but I don't have the context that they have about the customer ticket or the product sprint. I didn't have that context. I just knew something was off. And so what evolved from that was these five stages where the mention is just the simple Hey, I noticed this.

I'm not making grand conclusion, tell me what you think of this. And that was the key that unlocked it. And then we went to the invitation, which was, Hey, I noticed a couple of things. I noticed the pattern. I don't, I have a theory about why that's the case, but I'm not sure that it's being addressed in a compelling enough way.

And then we went to the conversation to talk about the impact that it was having. And then we went to the boundary to talk about what happens if this doesn't get fixed? And then we went to the limit when we said, okay we're, we've done all the coaching that we can do. And what I found was when I started to do this for myself, and then I started to teach people this, 70 years ago that it unlocked something really magical on a team where people felt like they had space to work on themselves without feeling undue pressure.

Are feeling under the gun to make the dramatic behavioral change because people are not capable of making dramatic behavioral change in short periods of time. It doesn't work that way. Behavioral change takes time.

So the feedback cycle, the accountant ability to doll is honoring the true nature of behavioral change is we need information. We need information that comes from a place of curiosity. We need pressure. We need someone who keeps their attention on the thing that they want us to change. Doesn't just go away. It doesn't say it once and then forget about it forever. Every teenager knows how to work with their parents, right? If you say the thing once, and then you forget about it, they learn. Okay. All I have to do is duck. For a minute, the storm will pass. I don't have to change. So there's a bunch of ingredients for how to facilitate behavioral change that we've honored with the accountability doll. And that's the primary tool that we teach, not just for managers with their direct reports, but a lot of the times with peer-to-peer co managers, co-leaders, co executives in an organization.

And we also teach it for people how to give feedback up. So it's a framework for how to start and maintain. A conversation in a way that doesn't create defensiveness and people shutting down and people feeling like you don't understand, why is that coming out of left field? Because it's has consistency.

It has care.

Luke: Yeah, I think that it helped me the most was that it allowed me to say things that I was noticing how without feeling like I'm going to be cutting someone cutting out under the legs or something.

Yes, exactly.

In my particular case, I had, certain situations that I wanted to do something about it, but at the same time, I didn't really have a good structure. This way of looking at it from the point of view of a coaching conversation helped a lot, I think in terms of being able to actually raise issues, but in a way that was exploratory and collaborative.

How to delegate with undermining people

Jonathan Raymond: There's something you said just before, which, which is I can't impress upon enough. It's so important is that we, what we don't realize is how easy it is to undermine people. It's so easy to undermine and disempower and cut the legs out from somebody. And it's so difficult to recover. You've done that. And that's it. There's one thing that people get from the book is how exactly what you described.

How do I say what I see? How do I talk about what I see in a way that doesn't do that? Or at least minimizes the likelihood.

If you've got somebody on your team who's just gets triggered at anything and you'd be like, there's nothing you can do. You're gonna have to deal with that in another way.

But how do we operate as leaders and managers, especially because people have so much going on outside of work, our world is so screwed up. And so many ways there's some, depending upon where you live, the version of the screwed up is different. But people have a lot going on. And it's so easy even before all of that to undermine and disempower people.

So we need a way to talk about what's real, to be honest, to be truthful, but in a way that doesn't undermine people and take the legs out from them before they've had an opportunity to get better.

Remote accountability when letting someone go

Luke: We talked about the beginning of the noticing and the deepening what about when you're getting towards the end, when you do realize someone just isn't interested or capable to do what you want or what the organization needs? How does this mindset help them? And you?

Jonathan Raymond: So a couple of things with her, which I found really interesting what the what the data has shown over time is that when you use the accountability dial, and again, the mindset that we talked about at the beginning, not the accountability dollar as a weapon, but as a coaching tool, When you do that, you will find that you have far less of a need to have those difficult boundary termination conversations.

Because one of two things will happen. People will receive the feedback earlier and make the changes that you want, or they will opt out. And this has organizations that are using the accountability, though. What happens is that people, when they're getting feedback, Where they can't hide. Where, how they're behaving, how they're showing up.

They're not being collaborative. They're not doing the things that they said they were going to do when they start to get feedback about that. People go, you know what? I don't want to be here anymore. I don't like, that's not a good feeling right now. Some people will keep going, right? Because some people will push through for one reason or another.

But so those two things that knocks a lot of people off, some people will change. That's the hide, the ideal outcome. And some people will leave. And then you have this third group, of people who won't change or won't change fast enough or can't right. And maybe that's just, it's just not, they don't, there's a capability issue.

There's just not, there's a talent gap. That's fine. It happens. Is there, it starts with framing that up to be able to, and this is a question that I will often ask, I'll say, okay, give me a behavior. I'll ask you. So Luke. Give me a behavior. It doesn't have to be a current person on your team, but someone in the past that was behaving in a way or showing up in a way that wasn't what you needed from them at the time.

What were they doing that wasn't good or effective or good enough? What was the behavior?

Sure. So it was a developer who would finish a piece of work and give it directly to the quality assurance team without checking that what you just did actually works.

Okay, great. So I'm going to give this person the ability to stay on your team, doing exactly that thing.

Not following the process that you need handing it directly over instead of that intermediary step. And they're going to do it exactly that way for the next 10 years and stay on your team. How do you feel about that? Not great. How about five years and and more importantly, not just me. I think other people that we're both working with also so five years you want to keep me for five years.

There was a pattern. I was escalating it and yeah. At a certain point I realized that this, yeah this isn't working.

So what, where we get to without exercises, we should note in larger organizations, especially, but even in smaller ones, sometimes what I'm about to describe isn't as clean a process.

Like you, you have HR, there's a lot of messiness to this, but to frame up that conversation, and what I've found is that we, the behavior like the one that you were describing, there's a timeline that you have in your head, by which that behavior needs to change. And it is almost never longer than 90 days.

It's not a day. There's some willingness. Hey, if I saw some progress, if I saw some willingness, if I saw a little bit of movement, I would be willing to let this play out for a little bit longer. So it's not a day, but it's not 90 days. And somewhere in there is your boundary in your head of how much longer you're willing to deal with this.

Remote accountability and the invisible 90 day boundary

In its current state, the only problem is we haven't told the person that. So the boundary, which is stage four in the accountability dial is to have that conversation. Hey, so we've been, and this is the key we've I've made some mentions about it. We've been in this conversation. We've been talking about the impact, you've been, doing your part to try to work on this a little bit, but for whatever reason where I think we are is it's not changing or it's not changing enough or fast enough, That's how I'm seeing it.

And I want to talk about what are we going to do about that right now that might happen in 90 days for a certain type of behavior? Probably not. Most of the time it should happen pretty soon, right? Like within a couple of weeks or 30 days, or we can't let a lot of time go by before we have that, what the conversation is and then the boundary.

And once, once you've used the first steps of the accountability dial and you're coming from from a coaching mindset, that's why I'm being a bit of a broken record. What you'll find is that conversation's a lot easier to have. And then you're in this, you're in a room, maybe it's a zoom room, but you're in a room with a person and you say, Hey, here's how I'm seeing it.

How are you seeing it? Oh, and then what you will get is people feel like, yeah, I know what you mean. I'm really struggling because of these, in these things. And I've really tried and, whatever it's okay. So let's put a frame around this. What would a boundary look like? What would a consequence look like for you to, that would help you.

Inverting responsibility on the employee

Make this change. I get that. It's hard. I get that you've been operating a certain way for your whole career or one year or whatever. I get that the last manager didn't make a big issue of this. And I get all of those things. What's an agreement that you and I can make so that you can change this behavior in a way that's positive.

That feels like a meaningful change for you. And that I also get what I need from your performance. What would that look like? Can you take, can you, my direct report, I'd love for you to sleep on that. Let's stop her one-on-one or let's finish our one-on-one today. We'll talk about some other stuff and let's revisit that next week.

And I'd love for you to do some thinking. I don't want to be the one to say this and this doesn't happen then blah, blah, blah. That's not how I want to lead this team. I would rather you come and say, Hey, I get it, Luke, I get it, Jonathan. I understand why you're frustrated. I understand what the problem is.

Here's my plan for how I'm going to change it. What do you think? That's the outcome that we want, right? We want them to author like people, you hear people say smart people say the employee should offer the one-on-one. Great. How often does that actually happen? Very rarely, except in the supremely motivated person.

So this is one of the ways that you get the, you have to get your, the people on your team to be offering their own destiny by asking them questions. Hey, rather than me come up with a plan how about you come up with a plan. I'll do this. I'll give you feedback. I'll we'll talk about it. It's not, it doesn't have to be perfect, but you come back with the first draft.

That's what the boundary conversation should be like.

Remote accountability under lockdown

Luke: Yeah, this tool was super useful in the context of remote teams. I'm wondering how. You, your clients, people around you, how they fared now that everything has moved to remote only with the benefit of these tools or as or if they're learning them, let's say during the lockdown period, what they're getting out of it.

Jonathan Raymond: I've noticed two primary themes that have emerged. So when we used to do everything in person I'm almost everything in person. And then when COVID hit and, whatever it was, the last February. March. And we sent him, I was like, okay what's the, what are we going to do now?

We shifted the entire business to online as we had to. What I've found was two things happened at the same time was managers and leaders who were already under enormous pressure already under enormous strain that went like TEDx. Where the level of burden, emotional and mental space that managers and leaders were being asked to hold TEDx off the charts.

And now we don't have the social benefits of physical space from that. A lot of teams were remote already, but for teams that were in person that had gone through remote, it was really difficult. The first theme was things got way harder.

And the other thing that I found was. People almost defaulted into becoming more of a coach out of necessity was they ended up in so many more conversations that were the types of conversations that I was trying to get them to have in 2018 and 2019. But in 2020, they started doing it out of necessity and they started, ended up doing a little bit of therapy, right? A little bit of life coaching, a little bit of. Ministry in some is they ended up doing a lot of the things that people like me have been telling people that they needed to do for a long time. People started doing this and they started using the accountability dial to frame and create boundaries and structure around that conversation.

Because once you open that door, it's really easy to go too far. It's really easy to find yourself making excuses for people being too understanding, being too empathic. And then it comes back on you because you're not delivering the results that you need to deliver as an editor. So that was so things got way harder.

The team one and the accountability dial really helped people create boundaries around those conversations. I'm a coach to my that's my job. My job is to facilitate the growth of my team. But it's not my job to be their therapist. It's not my job to be their marriage counselor. It's not my job to be their relocation specialist. Those are not my jobs, but I need a way to talk about that. That doesn't undermine the good relationships stuff that I'm building.

Luke: Where can people find out more?

Jonathan Raymond: We've got some links. I'm assuming it'll be refound.com/launch tomorrow. If it's not, we'll fix it in the show notes. I'm sure.

More like refound.com/managingremoteteams.

Jonathan Raymond: That has a video course on the accountability dial that people can check out. A link to good authority, which you can get everywhere. Of course, Amazon, but other places too. And a one-on-one meeting guide, we've got up there on the page, a ways to get in touch with us. So there's a bunch of free stuff. There's some other stuff in there too for people to check it out and learn more about this approach.

Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you very much.

How to setup your remote team for success

My name is Lukasz Szyrmer. If you are new here, I am the author of the book Align Remotely. I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. In this episode of the Managing Remote Teams podcast, we speak with Joe Houghton. Joe has seen the long and the short of it with respect to remote work, and now teaches and consults on the topic of how to setup your remote team.

Upon listening, You will learn:

• Why it's easy to assume everyone has the same setup, even that's rarely true
• Useful kit and tips on optimizing your WFH setup as a manager-somewhat back to basics but still practical as I picked up a thing or two
• how to be more intentional about casual interactions
• how to relax your brain in 2 minutes, if you are constantly in front of a screen
• how to combat team member loneliness, a big challenge nowadays especially for extroverts who like being in the office
• how to communicate standards of performance when everyone is remote

About Joe Houghton

Joe is a professor at University College Dublin Smurfit Graduate School of Business and a management consultant and coach with a 20-year career in international business with multi-national companies running IT and Business teams developing

• remote salesforce automation software,
• then telemetry systems and
• later managing teams all across the globe.

By the early 2000's he was a global manager with General Electric, before moving into his current academic career following an Executive MBA at Ireland's top business school. In 2005 he co-created and now directs the Master's in Project Management at University College Dublin Smurfit Graduate School of Business, Joe teaches and advises on remote team setup and learning to businesses, and charities via Houghton Consulting.

• Joe Houghton on LinkedIn
• Houghton consulting website

Transcript

Joe Houhgton, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks very much. Thanks for me. Yeah.

So can you say a few words about how you got into the topic of remote and helping people adapt to remote work?

Yeah. I've been using remote for 15, 20 years now, I do management consulting. I'm a professor at the business school in Dublin where I teach business. And one of the courses that I teach is remote working and managing virtual and distributed teams. I've done many. Contracts and stuff where I'm running teams remotely and I had 20 years in big business up until about 2000 where I ran multinational teams for large corporations in to include GE.

So I've got a lot of experience of working out of a laptop and out of a suitcase and also managing and interacting with teams. Yeah, all over the world.

So how have things changed relative to the nineties? It would seem a lot of technology would have shifted since then and how have people's attitudes towards it change?

The technology has become more accessible. If you cast your mind back to the nineties, that's 30 years now, isn't it? It's scary. We didn't have laptops like we do now. They were big luggable if you had one at all, we didn't have tablets. We didn't have mobile phones and stuff like that. Whereas these days we just don't even think about this stuff. We have a screen in our hand or to our hands, almost all the time. We had very early. Connections very slow connections. All that stuff has improved for a lot of people, but not for everybody.

I'm in Dublin, in Ireland. In, in main Dublin, you've probably got pretty good internet. You go outside of Dublin and head West, even in Ireland. And you've got people living 30 miles away from me who have a calling. Connections. And I finding it very difficult to work from home. So even though perhaps the accessibility to the technology has improved over the last 20, 30 years, it's by no means for everyone. And it's by no means ubiquitous even today. Perhaps styling we'll sort it out.

Setup for remote team performance

From what I remember when working in the nineties, I think most of it was email-based in terms of communication, out of necessity between offices. So it still was in the office, with much higher bandwidth, I think certain things become possible, which weren't before.

Indeed. I remember being in charge of teams, writing kind of Salesforce, automation, software, early distributed databases working with things like Lotus notes. Early, early kind of systems to, to share sales information or marketing information across large sales forces, for instance.

But we were hugely constrained by bandwidth and very often, People would have to leave their computer plugged in overnight for that big presentation to download at 56 K or whatever it was that we were using at the time. So yeah, it's gotten a lot easier with the speed increases.

Setup for remote team communication

So let's go here. You help a lot of people. Adapts to remote working individually. What's the most common thing that you see that they believe that's true about remote working, but actually isn't, especially when they're first getting started.

Communication fundamentally is the thing that drives the way we do business together.

Whether you're in person or whether you're working on the end of a zoom call or a WebEx or teams call or whatever the fundamentals around communication don't change, but they just get more difficult. And I think people who are forced into or find themselves having to work remotely, underestimate the challenges around communication that not being in-person.

Boring. And particularly for managers. If you're responsible for managing teams or coordinating projects, that kind of stuff, it can be very easy to overlook the added managerial load and current in terms of time, in terms of being proactive, in terms of ensuring things that you've got.

One big problem that I see a lot of people do is that they assume that because they've got a good connection and they've got the right care to, and they've got a fast laptop and everything that everybody else in the team has to. And almost always, that's not the case, particularly you've got a global team and you've got people in different parts of the world. So access to bandwidth will be different. People will have different types of kit. People will be running different versions of the software and they're not all upon same space.

So what you have to do is you have to be much more intentional. You have to do things like an equipment audit. You have to do a skills audit. You have to find the lowest common denominator between all your people, wherever they are, and play to that because you can't play to the highest common denominator.

You can't assume everybody can download stuff on 5g within 10 seconds. If somebody is on a really slow dial-up connection and some people still are.

Can you unpack communication a little bit more? Because that's a previous guest has pointed out that within communication skills, you've got everything to what, a nurse might mean when dealing with a patient to, making a presentation in front of 75 people online while sitting at McDonald's like I did in the past. What do you mean by communication?

The most important part of communication is actually seeing each other as people and not as cogs in a machine. It's very easy in business, particularly when you're remote to go to task based interactions immediately. .

What that loses is the five minutes before the meeting that you would normally have had in the office where you meet around the coffee machine. Yeah, all the water cooler and you're just having that catch-up chat and you're asking about the kids and how your weekend went and all that kind of stuff. But when we get onto zoom, we don't tend to do that. We don't tend to do that chit chat. It's two o'clock. Let's start the meeting first agenda point bang.

We don't know whether you're having a bad day. We don't know whether something's happened at home or whatever, and because we're all remote because we're not physically connected. I've not had time to see your body language before the meeting. I've not had time to see that you're down the line and you've put your game face on and you've jumped in and we missed that perhaps.

That's the first bit of communication is just be aware of each other as people and know that everybody's going through a hard time, because I don't think anybody isn't going through a hard time at the moment. And I don't care whether that's the president of the company. Or whether that's, some mid-level manager or whether that's somebody further down the food chain, everybody's going through problems. So we've got to treat each other kind of like human beings.

Then there's the stuff that you, you mentioned, that they're doing the presentation from the middle of McDonald's. You've got to adjust your delivery. To the small screen, talking to camera is really difficult if you're not used to doing it, just getting used to talking, into a screen and into a camera is very difficult for people.

Physical setup for remote team work

For instance, just the physical setup of your office. The best thing I bought last year was a $15 laptop stand. This laptop stand allows you to put a laptop up instead of sitting flat on the desk. It allows you to put it up at an angle which eases the top, where the webcam is to Island.

Just that completely transform how you come across on screen. Yeah, so because my camera's at eye level, if you look behind me, all the verticals are vertical. And the horizontals are horizontal and it doesn't look like the camera's looking at my nose or whatever, we're at the right angle. And there's no kind of cognitive dissonance in terms of what's in the background.

So you got to think about how you're coming across. I've got you on a second screen behind my laptop. Okay. And I'm talking to you to, to your image on the screen and I've got you right next to the webcam. So it looks like. I'm looking straight at you because you were right next to the webcam. So little things like this can actually cause quite a lot of difference on how you come across in how you're perceived by the other people in the meeting, by the people that you're trying to communicate with.

And that you're also trying to listen to them and you're trying to communicate to them. But if they, let me move my eyes down to the bottom of my screen. Now, if I carry on talking now, It's a completely different beast. Isn't it? In terms of the communication. Cause I'm not looking at you. I'm my eyes are down.

Whereas when I come back up and I'm looking at you again, we've got that connection. So there's a bit of training for people I think required for a lot of people. Who've moved online to just be aware of this stuff, get some decent lights, have some lighting from the front because so many people will sit themselves with a window behind them.

No lighting, it looks like that old queen video, the fishermen video where, you know, all the lighting in the wrong place and everybody's eyes look dark and horrible and all the rest of it. So coming across well on screen is something that doesn't just happen. You need to actually work at that.

And I think you need to help your people. Do that. I spend a lot of time with my university students coaching them on this kind of stuff, because at the end of that course, they're going through a job. And at the moment, all those interviews are going to be over zoom or they're going to be able to teams.

So they better be able to come over well within that first five minutes, because you only get that one chance to make that impression.

Kit suggestions for remote team setups

Yeah, absolutely. I guess the good news is that these are mostly things that you do once and then take advantage of it.

Yeah. Yeah. You only have to buy what and you only have, but you probably do need to buy a little bit of kit.

If you're going to be working remotely, don't just assume that the laptop webcams going to be good enough because they're, most of them are not. Most of them pretty awful. You need to maybe invest 5,000 books in a decent webcam. You need to buy a couple of lights. Yeah. And these ring lights that you see advertised now, they're great.

One or two of those, either side of you just giving you a bit of lighting, stuff like that can make a huge difference. And as I say, a laptop stand. As well, because that makes a huge difference. So an external keyboard so that you can be a little bit further back and a decent microphone. Yeah.

The most important thing about video is the audio. You know that you run a podcast, but most people don't get that. they don't even think about it. So buy yourself a little USB mic. It will. So below triple the quality of your audio. And again, that means that you come over more clearly, that what you've got to say is heard better and people will, take you on more credibly if they can hear you well.

And if you come over well,

Yeah. And one of the, one of the things that came across sorry the that I found super helpful as a one of these docking station things too. Cause then you could hook up multiple screens and see more at once, that's another piece of gear.

And some research done on the fact that, you tend to be more productive as a remote work. If you have a second screen that you can use, you've got more real estate, you can have more windows open at the same time. You've not got that switching cost of switching between applications on one small screen. So that's pretty, pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, cheap these days. So you don't have to to splurge out a lot. A little trick there , black Friday last year I went online and enriched Mr. Bezos a little bit more. But I spent, I think 250 $300 on a 42 inch 4k TV. Which is now mounted on the kitchen wall I'm very often down on the kitchen table, but I have that second screen.

Now I have a two inch 4k TV on the world. Now the children still don't know that's a TV. We will monitor HDMI cable into the laptop. Good to go. Yeah. And that was $250-$300. So yeah, I'm not paying through the nose for a super-duper computer monitor. The high-def TVs are great now.

So going back to communication, so one is “Treat people like people when you're connecting remotely”. Two is get decent gears so that you aren't facing kind of difficulties getting the message across. Is there anything else in particular in terms of communication that on a kind of day to day operational basis, particularly when you're with a team of people that comes to mind?

You've got to be more intentional if you're running a team or even if you're part of a team because you don't have the casual interactions.

Now there's this technology that can help these days, with Slack, we've got things like, all this presence technology that lets you know, that the other guys in the team are wrong. If you like, they've got the little green dot next to that thing, and you can ping it quick texts, or you can mention them and exchange information.

So set up something that works. And it might be WhatsApp. It might be Slack. It can be, any of these different tools, but set something up that allows multiple channels of communication. Because for most people sending a zoom link and everybody connecting at a particular time. And so it's easy now.

It's very easy to do, but it's a hoop to jump through. And what you need to do is you need to break down as many barriers to. They the general chit chat, interactive type communication as you can. So the more ways you can set people up to, to be able to interact easily the better.

I've heard of some teams now. Where, they all agree. They're all working from home between certain hours or whatever. And they'd just say we'll just open up a Google meet or we'll open up a zoom call or whatever, and we'll all just be on. And if you no in the room, you're not in the room, doesn't work.

Don't worry about it. But it just means we can all have seen each other in the screen and we can chat to each other if we need to unmute ourselves. If we can't. And that kind of stuff works quite well. Now, not everybody likes that. And you've got to respect people's home spaces and , it doesn't always work, but that kind of stuff can be quite useful.

Meeting setup and how to plan them beforehand

Do you have any tips on organizing meetings?

Another little tip that I've used is. Are you finding at the moment that some days your kind of schedule is blocked out hour by hour and you get to the end of one meeting and it's 10 o'clock and you're straight onto another meeting at 11 o'clock and then another one at 12.

O'clock another estimate. A little trick that I've started to use with some of my teams is we always stop meetings at tend to. Yeah, we start meetings on the hour and we stop meetings at tend to the hour. So we never run up to the hour that just gives everybody 10 minutes of downtime because most people don't do that.

Maybe the next meeting that they're going to be, it probably starts on the hour because most meetings tend to stuff on the hour or the half hour don't they know. And when I have a staff meeting at 17 minutes past Just think about building in those little chunks of downtime in the day.

When I schedule a meeting, we never run a meeting more than 50 minutes without a break. So if we're running, say a two hour meeting, the tend to is a break time now, so tend to up to the hour, right? Go outside, walk around.

There's a little exercise that, that I saw out of Stanford university a few months ago. And it's really simple. You just hold your finger up in front of your face. Like this. Look at something 30 yards away and look at your finger and do that five or 10 times quickly. It forces your eye muscles to move in and out. And it gets you away from that. What, one meter away from the webcam that you've, your eyes have been fixed to for the last 20 minutes, half an hour, 45 minutes or whatever.

And it's incredible how that actually just relaxes your head. During a break. So I put that in, when the coffee cup comes up from break or whatever, I just go and do the, I exercise as well, walk outside for a minute little things, but these things make a difference.

And then if you can schedule a few minutes at the beginning of the meeting before you start the meeting, just to do catch up. Just to say to her, Hey, how is everything, how are you doing? Yeah. And tell everybody we're going to spend the first 10 minutes of each meeting, just doing catch up, just bring you a cup of tea or your cup of coffee or whatever it is. And we'll just tell each other how things are going. No, no work discussion. That's for a little while longer you got to build this stuff in now. Cause it does happen and you have to be much more intentional. With your remote teams and your remote people for this stuff.

So speaking of promote teams, you were saying that you teach about management and virtual team management. From a teamwork perspective, what are the differences between in-person versus remote? Let's say in the literature and the academic literature.

It's funny. The academic literature doesn't specifically differentiate a lot of the team bonding stuff and a lot of the tin communication stuff is the same.

It's just more difficult. Okay. The only kind of classic definitions of a virtual team are that you are separated by distance and you're communicating electronically. And that's it, so that's most of us, most of the time, these days, isn't it. But. It's the fact that there's more hoops to jump through and the communication isn't quite as effective.

On a zoom call, as it is in-person because you do lose the body language. You do lose the verbal cues that you just pick up better. Somehow when that person's in the room and you're listening to them, even though our cameras are pretty good these days, the microphones and the speakers are pretty good.

You don't actually get quite the same amount of information back. So you've got to be more intentional. You've got to listen harder. Don't always feel you've got to come back with an answer when people are talking sometimes just. You don't have to come back with an answer. You don't have to give them anything, but you just have to let them share. And really think about what they're saying and then reflect back. What you've just heard. This is a really effective technique in remote working.

Okay. So you said something and I say okay. Can I just tell you what I think you just said and then you tell them back in your own words. And that's called reflection, but what it does is it .Confirms understanding. Cause they're hearing back. What you thought you'd heard. There's now a confirmation that what they just told you was heard and understood.

Now that's really important because remote workers very often feel isolated. They very often feel unheard. They very often feel unseen. Feeling positively heard is a really important skill for everybody who is working remotely to develop.

It keeps people motivated and it keeps people feeling that they're part of the team rather than just this person, out wherever they are in the world that we're just using to get a job done.

Is there anything that you see that related to working from home that people should start doing that they aren't, or that they aren't doing enough.

Okay. As I say, I'm in Dublin, in Ireland, yesterday the Irish government released the new legislation about disconnecting. So now in Ireland it's enshrined in law now that you're allowed to disconnect that you were allowed not to be on all the time.

And I think this is important. And I think increasingly we're seeing it in, in, in different countries around the world. Because it's a problem. I'm just as bad as everybody else. Yeah. I live in my laptop but it's what I've started to do now. Sundays, for instance, Okay. Unless there's just some crazy fire going on that, has to be dealt with.

I don't open the laptop on a Sunday because the drawer is too much. Isn't it? It's almost like a drug, isn't it? We're almost addicted to our devices now. I don't open my laptop. I don't do emails. I don't. Anything, I don't process any videos. I try not to do zoom calls. Nothing, a laptop free day.

Now, not everybody can do that, but getting to a point in the evening, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, whatever it is, close the laptop. Have dinner without a screen setup for remote work. Yeah. Talk to the wife, children, and or the husband or whoever you've got it around or whatever. So the disconnection thing is important.

I think that's really important.

Another thing that a lot of people perhaps haven't done on, and again, it depends on your home situation, but if you can find a space at home to make the work space. And it could just be a desk under the stairs. Okay. But if you can find a place that you can make the work space, try and just work in that one place.

And then when you step away from that, your home is your down space, because what we're doing is we're losing that disconnect. When you go to the office is work and home is home. But we've lost that to a large extent, recently. And it's very easy to lose that when you become a remote worker, if you sit on your bed or you sit on the sofa with your laptop.

Then your bedroom shouldn't be. A space where you've got work in your head, your bedroom should be a safe space to relax and to sleep. And the same with you, sofa.

I never take the laptop in the lounge. So when I walk into the lounge, I'm not working, I'm going to be playing with the kids over, maybe watch a bit of TV or whatever. So try and create some kind of separation within your home environment between a workspace and a non-work space.

Is there anything that you see that you think people should stop doing that it's really unproductive or not good for them or something else?

Give yourself breaks. I find at home, I can sit down at eight o'clock in the morning and the next time I get up, it's one o'clock and I've done four or five straight hours staring at a screen, working solid all the rest of it. You're less productive than you think when you do think. I'm working really hard.

I'm working. I'm really busy. Yeah. This is fantastic. I've just done five solid hours. Yeah. Who are you fooling? You've done five solid hours and you wrecked and your hands are act. And probably those last two hours were pretty unproductive.

So set an alarm every hour. Yeah. And just give yourself five minutes. Walk away, walk outside. Breathe. Yeah. Do your eye exercises , twice a day, take half an hour and walk around the park or walk around the block. Okay. Get a little bit of exercise. People are not doing this. Not everybody is doing this. And this is so simple. And there's loads of research to back all this stuff up about, the need for regular short EXOS and you only need 10 or 15 minutes.

If you've got one of these watches on it, it beeps at you doesn't it. And it says, get up and walk around, get your next standout or in, and stuff like that. You need eight more minutes to get your move goal and all the rest of it. Listen to these things. Cause they're actually those algorithms are quite clever.

And it's nice, they've gamified it. So do get exercise and do, give yourself breaks. That's why, the 10 to the hour thing works really well. Encourage your people to just give themselves as little bits of downtime and set the working expectations for your teams. We have to allow people to set these schedules because they're now sitting at home. And the schedules don't set themselves automatically by having to commute to work and then come home. So that there's still has to be more proactively managed. I think. Bye. Bye everybody.

I was talking with a friend about the standards that you set as a team lead of when you send emails to the team for example or how you communicate. There is a certain element of showing an example that. At least implicitly people are going to expect to follow. What are other specific things, that leaders can do themselves to help model the right approach to their team?

I think that's a great question. And the question is almost the answer, isn't it?

So you have to model the behaviors that you're looking for your people to, to take. So if you don't want people bugging you as a manager at 12 at night or whatever, don't be sending emails to them at 12 at night saying, is that presentation ready? I'll need to do it in the morning.

Okay. Once you people know what's expected of them, and they know that you've got these kinds of breaks, Allowed, if you like then you stick to those as well, because if you're sending emails outside those times, that's no good.

A very simple little thing is adding something to the bottom of your email. So it says, you may have received this email outside of normal working hours, however, Yeah. I don't expect you to answer it outside of normal working hours. Feel free to leave it until the morning or after the weekend or whatever. Because again, when we're working in different times zones, I might be sending it in my working hours and it comes into your email in the middle of the night.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's very common when we're working across multiple times and instances. Having something like that in your email and getting all the team to, to use that type of thing again, it's just a little visual signal, isn't it? That that things are okay.

How do you think things will look a few years out in terms of the worlds of work and teamwork and we're, where are we going in your opinion?

Anybody who doesn't have to have hands-on in a physical location. I think we'll be in a hybrid mode going forward, but that's going to need all kinds of changes. That's gonna need legislative changes. That's going to impinge on things like insurance. We've got a tsunami of insurance claims coming

because to be honest, the last year has been this honeymoon period. I think where everybody has said, you've got to work from home and don't come into the office. So many companies haven't done anything about. Sending proper chairs home to people or getting them the right equipment.

And I think there's going to be, there's going to be some interesting times ahead around all that stuff. Interesting. Yeah, I never thought about that.

So where's the best place for people to reach out and find out a bit more about the consulting they do?

Consulting: https://www.houghton.consulting is the website.

I do a blog as well at substack.com. And I quite regularly put articles on there about, working from home and optimizing , remote working and stuff like that.

And yeah I enjoy doing, mentoring and training both in-person where that's appropriate, but increasingly remotely via zoom now. So yeah, anybody's interested and I can help feel free to reach out and give me a shout.

Great. Thanks a lot.