Ep. 040 – Jim Tamm - Radical collaboration
Our ability to collaborate and collaborate constructively is one of the key predictors of productivity, innovation and success overall.
Working well together is not just a set of skills, it is also a mindset. Together with Jim Tamm we explore what Radical Collaboration means and dive into the capabilities we need in order to take radical responsibility for how our teams and collective environments work… Hint, it has everything to do with looking at yourself in the mirror…
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Want to connect with Jim;
linkedin.com/in/jim-tamm-883b161
Radical Collaboration
https://www.radicalcollaboration.com/
About Jim:
For most of his career Jim was a Senior Administrative Law Judge for the State of California with jurisdiction over workplace disputes. In that role he mediated more than a thousand employment disputes, including more school district labor strikes than any other person in the United States. After retiring as a judge, he has served on the faculties of:
Leadership Academy of the University of California
Management Education Program at NASA (US Space Administration)
International Management Program of the Stockholm School of Economics
Executive Education
Harvard University Talent Development Program
His book, Radical Collaboration: Five Essential Skills to Overcome Defensiveness and Build Successful Relationships has been on Amazon’s top seller lists for workplace, organizational psychology, and negotiations books for most of the past 18 years. The 2nd edition was published in January 2020.
Jim is President of RC Group, with certified Radical Collaboration trainers in 29 countries. He specializes in building cultures of collaboration within organizations.
EP. 040 Transcription
Welcome to the experienced designer, Jim.
Thank you. It's good to be here.
Yeah. I'm really happy that you agreed to come on and yeah, and share some of your knowledge. So we met by proxy in previous workplace when we were working with the team and leadership development. And I always found the work that you do really fascinating.
So I wanna maybe let you tell the story of that a little, because what I know of you, you spent a long career as a judge and somewhere around early 2000, you made a pivot or an evolution into working with radical collaboration. So I'm really curious what brought that about.
[00:02:06] Jim: Actually, the pivot was much earlier.
It looks like it was in 2000, but actually in the 25 years that I was a judge, I was dealing with employment disputes for mostly collective bargaining disputes. So it was, highly conflicted issues in the workplace. And I enjoyed being, I loved being a judge actually, and writing decisions and holding hearings and everything.
But the work that I was most proud of. Was the settlement work that I did the mediation of trying to help the parties work something out themselves because people always underestimate the damage that happens when you litigate something or the it's such a crapshoot sometimes.
Nobody really knows exactly how it's gonna turn out. So I always felt that the parties were always significantly, farther ahead if they could work out their own settlements. So I did a lot of that and in fact I believe that I've mediated more school district labor disputes that, or labor strikes than anybody else in the United States.
So I had a lot of experience trying to build collaborative relationships from parties that were warring with each other and at conflict. And that was throughout my. 25 years. But I think because I was successful at that and liked it and did a lot of it, I was asked to take part in a special project that was funded by the state of California and the Hewlett Foundation and the Stewart Foundations, where we were trying to work with parties who were very adversarial and not very effective at collaboration to try to teach them how to be more effective at collaboration.
Because we found in the state agency that I worked for, we kept seeing the same people over and over again, and we were trying to figure out how come some organizations were so adversarial and so conflicted and other organizations seemed to be fine and we never saw them because these conflicted organizations were costing the state of California a huge amount of money.
Not so much in, in judges salaries and courtrooms and things like that, but, Primarily in lost productivity. So a small group of us got together within the state. We got a, this big grant to do a lot of research. We did a huge amount of research and then based on that research, we put together a pilot project to go out and try to teach the more adversarial, conflicted organizations how to be more effective at collaboration.
And we were just wildly successful. Beyond our dreams. We reduced the amount of measurable conflict. Things like the number of unfair labor practice charges, or the request for mediators or fact finders, things where we had really accurate records for a period of 20 years. We reduced that by almost 70% in almost a hundred different organizations over a three and a half year period.
Wow. This saved the state of California so much money that the state legislature created a nonprofit foundation to keep offering it in the public sector in California. The trust went up. The number of people who said they had high trust in their work relationships went up by 50%. And it just had such a powerful impact that you know we kept offering it.
We, we revised it depending upon what the situation was, the parties that we were working with, but eventually we started offering it internationally. It's, that was the precursor of radical collaboration. That's where the radical collaboration program came from. And then we finally ended up with, we've got three different international studies over a long period of time that show that the participants that are good at collaboration, that, that have these skills increase their ability to get their interests met anytime they got into a conflict by over 30%.
Now for most of us, that would make a big difference in the quality of our life. This was going on, way back before 2000. And then eventually after I'd been a judge there for quite a while. The state of California was in deep trouble financially, so they were looking for people to retire.
So I took an early retirement and went out and started teaching in some programs I teach at the leadership Academy at the University of California. Taught in the, in Santa Clara University law school for a while. Taught in the talent development program at Harvard and teach in the international management program at the Stockholm School of Economics and their executive education program.
So now I'm working in a more, global situation. When I'm not teaching, I'm usually working with. Large multinational organizations in their high-end leadership stuff, teaching 'em these collaborative skills. That's a story of how I move from dealing with conflict into dealing with collaboration, basically.
[00:07:03] Shani: Yeah. It's also sounds like the answer to conflict or the antidote to conflict is collaboration by the way
[00:07:10] Jim: you tell this. And what we found over the years was that, nobody really wants to deal with conflict. When we first started this program, we called it the Radical Collaboration Program.
We called it beyond Conflict. And then we realized, When I wrote the radical collaboration book that really people don't wanna deal with conflict, but everybody wants to be better at collaboration. So instead of making it what you don't want, we made it what you do want and changed the training in that direction more.
And it's just has spread all over the world. So Sweden is the hotbed for radical collaboration. Right now we have more trainers active in Sweden than probably the rest of the world combined.
[00:07:54] Shani: Wow. Yeah, I can imagine. It's a very consensus driven culture. So I would imagine that people desire that skill maybe Yeah.
Even more than in other
[00:08:02] Jim: places. Yeah. And I think that effective collaboration not only helps the parties that are involved in that, but it has huge ripple effects in the community and in the organizations.
The last school strike that I mediated this went on for five weeks. We had 52,000 kids out on the street for five weeks. It became about this close to a race riot. It was a really ugly situation. And if we can go into those situations and we can teach the unions and management people how to resolve their differences in a more effective way.
Without doing that kind of damage to the community, it not only helps their lives, their lives are significantly improved when they're not out on strike or when management don't, doesn't have to deal with that. But they're also modeling for their kids. So then you got, 50,000 kids who see a different way to resolve their differences.
So then when they go home and they're angry at their parents or their siblings, they don't start slugging their siblings, maybe they'll talk it out. They realize we don't have to fight when we have some differences. So we see the, the improvement for the teachers union and the managers.
But then we also see it for the kids. We also see it for the families of the kids and the neighbors of the kids. And it just spreads like this. It's a, it's very rewarding. To see that kind of happening. It, it happens in organizations where we see the impact on teams, but then it spreads through the organization and then it spreads through the business network and the organization's relationship with their clients or with their suppliers, so it is, rewarding.
[00:09:46] Shani: I can imagine. I'm just really curious to dig in also. Cause one of the big things that, one of the big questions that I sit with is, So what does it look like when it's good for people? Yeah, when, and of course, like conflict occurs, right? We're humans, we're different. We have different points of view, and we're bound to disagree from time to time.
So I also don't think it's necessarily about, there not being any conflict, but more about how we're actually managing with it. I would love to hear a little bit more about what and what you know and teach in terms of yeah. What is it that works
[00:10:22] Jim: well? Effective collaboration is like motor oil in a car.
It just makes things run smoother. And if you don't, if you have that effective collaboration, everything runs better. And if you don't have it, everything runs worse. It's if you're running outta motor oil in a car, the parts start grinding together and then people keep replacing the parts, thinking that's the problem.
But it isn't. It's the, they don't have the ability to stay in that smooth relationship. And we see this in all kinds of situations. In all if you look at what the hot topics are these days, like in the tech world, I, if you look at all of the Agile skills, and programs that are going on, they're all based on effective collaboration, on building trust.
It's like you can't move fast if you don't have that effective collaboration. If you don't have that trust in design work, you don't have creativity. If people can't collaborate together in sustainability with organizations, they used to just look at the profitability of an organization to value the company, but now they're, in fact, they're even coming up with reporting requirements and things like that.
They also look at the ecological impacts and the relationship impacts, the social impacts and the governance issues. So they might look at the profitability, but they also look at the carbon emissions, and they also look at how engaged employees are, or how transparent the governance is. You can't do that if people aren't effective at collaboration.
You just can't make those improvements or solve those kinds of problems if you aren't skilled. So maybe it would be helpful now for me to talk about just what those skills are, because what we saw in looking back on it is that there are five skills that we believe are absolutely essential.
If what you wanna do is resolve conflict or build, collaborate a more collaborative environment, or if you simply want to get better at building interpersonal relationships yourself, and they're both a skillset and a mindset. They're a set of competencies and a set of attitudes, and they're competencies that are pretty practical.
They're, it's not something that takes, years to learn. You can learn this stuff pretty quickly. It's all pretty practical stuff. The first one we call collaborative intention, and this is more the mindset.
The skill is to be able to be focused, stay focused on mutual gains in your relationship. When you hit one of those speed bumps in the road, when somebody makes a mistake or does something that you don't understand can you get curious or do you get furious, and paying attention to what your attitude is.
This, whether you have this collaborative intention can it make a big impact? Just doing that if you don't do anything else in the the International Management Program at the Stockholm School of Economics, where I've been teaching for 20 years or so they have to do, or they used to have to do a class project every year and several years ago they took on a.
A class project about the impact that attitude has. And these were all international managers from all around the world, wherever they were at a at several times during the day. They had to note down in a little notebook whether they had a collaborative attitude or whether they had an attitude that was more adversarial or conflict avoidant.
They didn't have to do anything about it to change it at all. They just had to note it down. Just be aware of it, note it down. Then they collected all this data that they collected over a long period and analyzed it. And what they realized was at the beginning of the exercise, the when they were collecting the data, more often than not, the majority of people fell into this adversarial or conflict avoidant type of pattern By the time they got to the end of the project.
More often than not, most of the participants were operating in a significantly more collaborative way, simply because they were paying attention. Whenever I'm working with a group, I always say one of the things that you need to start doing is paying attention to what your own attitude, ishmm, because that whatever your attitude is, that's gonna be the, step number one in the direction that you're going.
So that's the first skill, collaborative intention. The second one is openness. There's just been a lot of research showing that. One of the more important things you can do is improve the level of openness within an organization to make it more effective in an organization or a relationship. A lot of the research was done by one of my mentors, a fellow named Will Schutz in the military.
But the most recent research has been done by Google, where, everybody knows Google is one of the most data-driven companies in the world. And Google realized some time ago that almost all of their work in the future is gonna be done by teams. And so it was really important for them to figure out how do we set up high performing teams as opposed to low performing teams.
And so they studied very intently for several years, 180 of their own teams, both high performing and low performing to see what the factors were. And if you could think of something, they measured it. They looked at the age differences, the gender balances, the types of degrees they had.
They looked at things like whether the employees went to lunch together, did they socialize, go on vacation together. Everything they looked at then they analyzed it. And what they realized when they were looking back on it, was that almost every single thing that they were looking at, you could do just as good a job picking a team by throwing a dart at a dart board.
It just had no impact at all. They had the same thing on the high performing teams and the low performing teams, but there was one thing far and above everything else that was present on every single high performing team, and that was something called a very high level of psychological safety, meaning it was an environment where people felt safe enough to raise difficult issues and deal with them directly.
So anything you can do to improve the openness within the organization is generally gonna be helpful. The third skill we call self-accountability, and this is people paying attention to the choices that they're making on a daily basis. A lot of times people in organizations feel they don't have much choice.
The boss tells 'em what to do and they have to do it, but a lot of times people confuse difficult choices with no choice. It's no, I can't leave this marriage because, I have kids. Yeah, you can leave the marriage because you have kids. People do it all the time.
It's a difficult choice. It's a painful choice, but it is a choice. And so if we get people to start thinking anytime they get into a difficult situation that they might actually have more choice than they think they do, that can be very empowering to not only the individual but the organization.
Then of course the second part of that is making people be aware of and responsible for, and accountable for the consequences both intended and unintended of the choices that they're making. So if we're working with an organization that is very high on self-accountability and choice, they're recognizing that they're allowing the situation to exist or they make some changes on it.
Those organizations tend to be very low on whining and s sniffling and complaining because they don't like something. They'll change it, do something about it, the fourth skill is self-awareness. And the biggest things that we try to get people to focus on there is their own defensiveness, because in my 50 plus years of helping people and organizations try to build better relationships, there is nothing that I've seen that will help them more than better managing their own defensiveness.
I, I've seen defensiveness undermine more people in management roles or leadership roles than anything else. We, we get fearful and we screw up the situation when we get defensive. In my role as a judge for 25 years or so, I almost never had to deal with pure legal issues. People were almost always before me because somebody would start feeling fearful and vulnerable, and then they would get defensive.
And when we get defensive, our thinking becomes rigid. Our IQ drops about 20 points and we simply become stupid. And, not only are we terrible at solving problems then, but we tend to invite everybody else in the room to get defensive then. And then you have a whole room filled of defensive people who are just terrible at solving problems.
Helping people work with their defensiveness is just such an absolute key to effective collaboration. And then the fifth skill is negotiating and problem solving. And in any situation, especially ongoing working situations close interpersonal relationships, there's bound to be some conflict.
If you're in a long-term working relationship and you don't have any conflict there, it's probably not as productive of a relationship as it could be. So what we're trying to do is help people figure out how they can deal with that conflict in a way that supports the relationship rather than undermines the relationship.
Because there is gonna be conflict there. Unless you're, in complete denial or overly medicated or just not paying attention, you're gonna see that conflict. So it's good to be able to negotiate your way through that conflict Now. One of the mistakes that we made, or at least that I made when we first started out was when we went out to road test this, we went out looking for the organizations that were the most screwed up, dysfunctional, highly conflicted organizations we could find.
And I thought since they had so much conflict, that if we simply taught them how to negotiate their way through that conflict, That oughta solve the problem. But what we learned over the years was that we could teach people the best negotiating process in the world. And if they came to the table with a bad attitude or they got defensive when they were at the table, they would screw up any system we could teach 'em.
So over the years, we've had almost reverse the amount of time we spend teaching. And so it's the ability to stay, with that collaborative mindset, have that collaborative intention and create that open, safe environment and be aware of the decisions and the choices that you're making and not get defensive.
It's those skills that make the negotiating work. It looks like everything's being solved through the negotiations, but it's those other skills that make the negotiations work. And then we find that organizations that are high in those skills, they're significantly better at just about everything.
They're more creative. Employees have more engagement. There's lower turnover. It just goes on and on. The list is immense there. So it just, it helps everything.
[00:21:56] Shani: I love what you're saying.
Where we're in a space looking at how do we redesign the space of the workplace to be more conducive to the human in it. Yeah. Yeah. And what I'm finding is very similar to what you were saying is exactly this, that there are lots of tools and lots of skill sets that we can teach people.
But if we are not different when we come to the table, if we are not coming in with these different mindsets and different attitudes, we're not capable of producing different outcomes because we are the same. Yeah. So there has to always be that desire to actually want to learn and change and evolve from within.
[00:22:40] Jim: Effective collaboration we've found always starts with the individual. We see some organizations that will tell a group of people, all right, you're a team now, so we want you to collaborate and work together.
But it doesn't work that way. You can't just dictate that you're gonna have a team working together. It has to start with the individual having that intention to be collaborative, to work together, to put the organization goals, a little higher than maybe some of their own individual interests to, to work together like that.
And then it spreads from the individual to maybe the team or the working relationship, and then out into the organization and out into the world like that. But if you don't have people that are skilled and have the right attitude, individuals that are skilled with the right attitude collaboration won't work you.
It's not something that you can impose on a team.
[00:23:34] Shani: No, and it's not a toolbox, right? As you're saying, it's this combination of the two things, right? So if you're only giving them the tools, but you're not creating that motivation from within then there is no movement. Yeah.
[00:23:47] Jim: You could have an individual with the absolute best attitude in the world, and if they don't have a clue how to negotiate their way through conflict or talk to somebody else, or if they're not good listeners they're simply not gonna be effective, or you can have people who have a lot of negotiating skills, and they have no intention of collaborating. They're not gonna be effective at collaboration either. So you gotta have both.
[00:24:13] Shani: I'm just thinking also, cuz you brought up defensiveness. Oh yeah. And a lot of the things that you're also bringing up here are about actually looking at yourself, being self-aware.
How do people respond to that? Because that can also bring about a lot of defensiveness in people just being faced with this kind of need to improve.
[00:24:34] Jim: Yeah. We always start off talking about how we're gonna, we're gonna work on defensiveness, deal with defensiveness, and everybody assumes we're talking about how to make the other person less defensive.
And then we always circle back and say no, we're gonna be talking about how you're gonna deal with your own defensiveness. How you can spot it at an earlier point in the process and then what you can do about it, and people grumble and, it's not as much fun to have to deal with your own defensiveness, but that's where the effectiveness is.
If you can deal with your own defensiveness there's nothing that's gonna help you more, I think. So first what we do is we try to help people better understand what defensiveness is about. It is always about fear. It's fear-based. When we start feeling vulnerable, what we're trying to do when we get defensive is we're trying to avoid feeling that fear.
And most people think that when we're getting defensive, it's because somebody has done something to us. And so we need to protect ourselves from that other person. We need to defend ourselves from the other person. But what's really going on is we are defending ourselves from fears inside of us that we don't want to feel.
So three big fears that come up all the time are fears about our own significance and our competence and our likability. So let me give you an example. Say I have some fear about doing this podcast with you today. And then, maybe I'm tired and I'm not doing a good job, and I'm jet lagged and I'm forgetting things and I'm taking 'em out of order, and it's just not, it's just not turning out to be a good program.
Now that could cause me a lot of discomfort that I'm not competent to, to do this, so one of the ways that I could reduce the amount of discomfort that I'm feeling is I might start blaming you. After all, you're not asking the right questions and you're not giving me enough time and, we're doing this at the wrong time of the day and, blah, blah, blah.
Now it might look like I'm defending myself from you, or a bad audience or a bad situation, but what I'm really doing is I'm behaving in a way that lets me stay unaware of that fear inside of me. So what that means is that if you want to get better at dealing with your defensiveness, you need to let yourself feel that fear because it is always fear-based.
Always. Now, that's helpful information for us to know. If we're sitting across the table from somebody who is being very defensive, it's good for us to know that underneath that defensive behavior is fear. Because if that's the case and you can dig skillfully enough and deep enough, you might be able to figure out what that fear is about.
And if you can make a safer environment for that person will not be behaving defensively. Now this is even more important information for us to know this about ourselves. Know that anytime we're getting defensive it's because there's some fear there, and most of us are not sufficiently aware of that fear until.
Long after we've gotten defensive, long after we've screwed up the relationship. Because the whole point of a defense system is to help you not feel it. We stumble into these situations. So what can be more helpful for most people is to start paying attention to our outward behaviors when we're starting to get defensive, rather than trying to un to figure out what that fear is right at the beginning.
For example, I've learned over the years that when I start getting defensive, oftentimes I start, breathing faster. I start talking faster and talking louder. Maybe sometimes I withdraw into silence, so if I know that's my typical behavior, when I'm starting to get defensive, And then I noticed if I'm in a room getting some feedback from people and all of a sudden, I'm talking louder and faster and breathing faster, the alarm bells can go off in my head, ding ding.
Hey Jim, pay attention. You're doing that thing again. Then I can say to myself, okay, I'm getting defensive. What can I do about it? You can't do anything about it unless you first notice that you're getting defensive. So that's the first thing you have to do is notice that you're getting defensive, acknowledge it to yourself, cuz you won't take any other action if you don't.
So you start by noticing it. Then what else can you do? There's a strong physiological, biological basis to our defensiveness too, so anything you can do to slow down your physiology. Maybe take a walk around the building, get some fresh air, maybe go into the restroom and splash some cool water in your face.
Just take a break. If you're in the middle of a meeting and you can't get up and leave, it's not appropriate for you to do that. Maybe you can take a few center deep centering breaths just to slow down your physiology. Again, then what you want to do is you want to disrupt the automatic patterns that you get into when you're getting defensive.
For most of us, what happens is part of our brain shuts down, the prefrontal cortex shuts down, and it starts getting tunnel vision. So it looks like we're, we're looking through a telescope at one very tiny issue, and we're losing track with everything else that's going on here. One thing that, another thing that can be very helpful is to try to reengage the rest of your brain.
So you're on your full brain power, so you're out of that tunnel vision. You can do that by maybe paying attention to other sounds in the room. I can hear the car going by and there's a helicopter up there, and I hear my computer hum mean, and I can hear my, the chair squeaking, that kind of stuff.
Maybe look around the room and seeing how many different colors you can see. Anything to reengage your brain. Then it's helpful if you can try and figure out what the fear is underneath there. Oh I'm not gonna look good here, or, I'm gonna, people are gonna think I'm stupid or I'm incompetent.
That kind of stuff. That's oftentimes that can be difficult. So sometimes, if you can't do that in the moment, we encourage people to come back to it later on. But then we encourage each person to come up with some kind of an action plan every time they see their outward behavior there.
So first they spot their outward behavior, and when we have a list of 50 different signs of defensiveness to tip them off, in fact I'll read some of 'em. Like high charge of energy in the body, sudden drop in iq, wanting the last word, flooding with information to prove a point.
Withdrawal into deadly silence, all or nothing thinking, obsessive thinking, blaming or shaming, attacking all the time, or maybe doing exactly the opposite. Being too nice, being conflict avoidant, so you spot those patterns. You gotta be on the lookout for what your behaviors are. You spot them.
You try to slow down your physiology, check out, what the stories are, what your thinking is. If you're going into a meeting with the little dialogue up in your mind going, the self-talk going on, saying something like, this is terrible. I'm gonna look like a fool.
They're gonna think I'm an idiot. Try to turn that into something a little less poisonous. Then we encourage someone, everyone to come up with their own personalized action plan that's designed to counter the impact of their signs of defensiveness. So if your sign is high charge of energy in the body, maybe you take three deep breaths.
If it's a sudden drop in iq, maybe you go hide in the bathroom for five minutes and let your brain catch up with the rest of your body. If it's fast breathing, slow down your breathing. If it's obsessive thinking, maybe get some kind of an image of you being a gerbil on a wheel, and stepping off the wheel, or write down what you're obsessing about and make an appointment with yourself to come back to it and deal with it later on.
So there's lots of different things, action steps that you can take depending upon whatever your type, particular type of defensiveness looks like. So you implement that and then you, after you've done that, we encourage people, let it go and move on. It's never in your best interest to keep beating yourself up because you get defensive.
And gradually over time, if people start noticing how they behave, when they get defensive, they start implementing their action plan right away. They do those other things, it can really make a difference how they react. It slows down their reactivity when they're with someone else, when they're starting to get defensive.
Now, ultimately, they're not gonna be able to get rid of that particular defensiveness issue until they face the fear that's underneath their, either the fear of not looking good or, being competent or whatever it might be, not being important enough. They have to deal with that in order to do that.
But this is, the other stuff is like first aid to get you through the situation, get you through the meeting. But if you can do that, it makes a big difference to your ability to work effectively with other people.
[00:33:44] Shani: I love that. And it made me think of I used to practice yoga with this online program and in one of the classes, the teacher would always say, the greatest gift you can give yourself is observation.
And ah, that saying really stuck with me so often. And we all have these things, that we notice little things that we wanna evolve or that we are not feeling good about, or there's some kind of friction, whether it's defensiveness or something else. And then it's so nice also that, that what you're sharing around, just start from observation.
Give yourself that moment of paying attention to what you actually do. And maybe that's sometimes a process, not just one day or an hour, it's maybe a week or a few weeks. And just tying back to the research you were talking about, cause I've heard a few different versions of that. Yeah, exactly.
That. Just pay attention to what is happening, what you're feeling. Are you feeling. Tense or open? Are you feeling, avoidant or defensive or what's going on? I like the theme of observation. It's such an important thing. And,
[00:34:46] Jim: and the key to that is to do it without judgments or self-criticism too.
With the, with a charitable mind, with a sense of curiosity. I noticed that. I'm really feeling uptight right at the moment. Now what has triggered that? I wonder what that's about, or, wow, I noticed that I felt this way every time I come to this particular meeting about this particular issue.
What's going on there for me? If people can get curious anytime they have a strong reaction about anything, about what, that's reaction, what's my contribution here? How am I, why am I feeling that, Ah, it's, it just opens up a whole nother world of way of behaving there, yeah, I agree with you that observation is very important.
[00:35:28] Shani: It's really interesting also because, and I'm curious maybe what's been your observations throughout all the years of teaching this? Cuz I find also the more curious you get about yourself, the less assumptions you make about other people.
Because often when you're in the space of defensiveness and then you're also making assumptions to people outside of you Yeah. He or she's doing this because this and that. Yeah. And you're also not giving them the grace of going, Hey, what's going on with you? Why is that happening with you?
[00:36:01] Jim: Yeah. When we are our, Defensive.
We are fabulous at projecting. And we, so we see the issues that we're dealing with out there in the world with everybody, and we project it outward. It's if I'm feeling angry, everybody in the world is angry, if I'm feeling fearful, these are all, people are so fearful, out there too.
So we project it out there. So yeah, if you can deal with your own stuff, it makes it so much easier for you to be less judgmental towards other people. To get curious. Wow. That person is really having a strong reaction. I wonder what that's about. I wonder if I did something to trigger them.
I wonder what I can do to help them. Without, without whipping yourself over it or, taking it on is your problem but still having that awareness.
[00:36:44] Shani: Yeah. And that also ties back to one of the other things that you mentioned, which is that openness and. In my mind I was also, my head was ticking away towards also thinking about that.
You're talking about conflict and friction and so many studies and so much data also points to this very same thing that, good teamwork and good leadership knows how to not just deal with conflict and friction and knows how to turn it into something better, to transform it into opportunity or transform it into creativity.
Because when you look at the, on the creative side, very rarely can you create anything without friction. Yeah. There needs to be friction. Otherwise there is no advancement. There needs to be something, some kind of dynamic, otherwise you don't go anywhere. Yeah. So there is also that, that I thought about, which is I.
The sadness of really when we're avoiding friction, we're avoiding conflict or what we perceive as conflict, that we're that're really putting a lid on a lot of really positive ripples
[00:37:51] Jim: we have found that environments that are high in conflict, that are very adversarial, or environments that are very conflict avoidant it can go in either direction are terrible at creativity because if anytime you try something new and it fails, you worry about losing your job.
You're gonna stop. Trying new things because it doesn't feel safe enough to do that. So in order to to have an environment where people feel safe enough, they have to be able to try and try out new things and fail, and not worry about losing their job, the attitude should be, what can we learn from that, rather than who are we gonna blame?
A great example of this is taught at NASA for the, for 20 years or so, off and on, and I was invited to sit in on what they called a lessons learned meeting after the last shuttle disaster. And we heard a lot of comments from people saying, here at NASA we say safety is number one.
It's the most important thing, num safety. And we drill it into everybody's head. In fact, at nasa, you can't go more than 50 feet without seeing a safety poster someplace. But we also heard comments from people saying, have you ever noticed that if you're a rising star at NASA and you take a job in the safety department, it's a career killer.
So we're saying one thing, but we're doing something else. So how do we get the best and the brightest folks here at NASA to take those jobs in the safety department and then reward them for doing that? So they weren't looking for who to blame, they were looking for what can we do about it?
How can we encourage that more? And I think as a result of that kind of an attitude, NASA is it's clearly the most creative organization that I've ever worked with. And they're, they have that as a good attitude. It makes a difference. Yeah.
[00:39:46] Shani: Another thing I'm curious about is the thing I always heard about when I, when we were talking about radical collaboration in my old workplace, Uhhuh, it was Red Zone, pink Zone and Green Zones.
[00:39:59] Jim: Yeah. The Red Zone is a more adversarial environment. People are more hostile, they're more conflicted, there's more fighting going on, more arguments going on. The pink zone is exactly the opposite of that. It's conflict avoidant where if there's gonna be any aggression, it's passive aggressive.
In a red zone environment, if you're gonna get stabbed, you're gonna get stabbed in the chest. In a pink zone environment, if you get stabbed, you'll be stabbed in the back. There's more triangulating going on in a pink zone organization. It's if I have a problem with you, I don't come talk to you about it.
I go talk to them about you, and we have this triangle going on here, and it's these red zone and pink zone environments that are just terribly ineffective as opposed to a more collaborative green zone. So much of our efforts have been to help both Red Zone and Pink Zone organizations move towards the Green Zone.
Now, people in the Red Zone, Oftentimes when we say you need to tone it down a little bit, you need to be paying more attention to other people. You need to move towards that green zone. What they're afraid we're encouraging them to do is become more pink zone. And they see the red zone people see the pink zone people as being a bunch of woos and the, when we go to the pink zone people and we say, you gotta, step up your game a little bit, pump it up a little bit.
You need to be more aware of what your own interests are. You need to speak up more. That kind of stuff. What they fear is that we're telling them to be more red zoned, to be turned into a bully. So they're fearful to move in that direction. But really the pink zone people, they've gotta speak up, be more direct, more assertive.
The red zone people need to pay more attention to what's going on with the other people, but it's an easy way to identify. A culture and there are a lot of implications for it. Red Zone is a more hostile culture. It's easy to spot. Pink Zone is difficult to spot. Because it looks very nice. It looks subtle. Yeah. It looks, in fact, we, for years we just talked about Red Zone and Pink Zone, and then we started hearing a lot of people say we're obviously in the green zone, this more collaborative environment because we never fight. If there's a problem, I just keep my mouth shut, I keep my eyes down and my mouth shut.
And they were assuming that this absence of outright warfare was evidence of effective collaboration. And it's not. It's simply a lighter shade of the red zone. Which, so that's how we ended up come calling it the Pink Zone, yeah. But it can be just as damaging. I, my, my favorite pink zone story this is a story about my in-laws.
And they gave me permission to tell the story. They're both dead now, so I can say, but they did give me permission ahead of time. My, my mother-in-law no, my father-in-law was a professional athlete and when he was younger he was fairly abusive aggressive and abusive. And because he was an athlete, he was always getting leg cramps.
And my mother-in-law, she would wait. She would never be direct with him about this, but she would wait until they would go to bed and he would fall asleep and then she would haul off and kick him in the leg as hard as she could. And then he'd grab his leg and she'd grab it too. And she'd say, oh honey, are you having to cramp here, let me rub your leg for you.
So it looked like, oh, so sweet. But it was really damaging, to the relationship what was going on there, cuz she didn't have the ability to speak up and do that. So she did it through this passive aggressive, these passive aggressive conflict avoidant organizations are very difficult to deal with.
Because, people won't speak up. Everybody's playing nicey with each other, and you go into a meeting and everybody's going oh. Okay. Yeah, we could do that, we could do that. And then when they leave, guess what happens? Absolutely nothing. So now it turns out that about 80% of the organizations that I, and people and organizations that I'm dealing with these days self-identify as a pink zone organization.
Wow. It is. And there's been a lot of other research that supports that too. But it is, it has, I think, be easily become the predominant culture in organizations today, a conflict avoidant culture. And it's hard to get past that if people are fearful. Oftentimes pink zone environments are created by red zone managers and so companies sometimes then they'll change the manager and then they wonder how come we still have pink zone?
Employees here, they're still operating the pink zone. It's because it takes a long time to build that trust back up. It's easy to destroy very quickly, but it takes a long time to build it up. So these employees are just waiting for the shoe to drop from the next manager that comes in.
You could have a good manager who's very collaborative, very supportive, and it takes a while to, to build that up. It's not easy to turn something like that around. It's difficult to work with organizations in the pink zone, and that's where most of them are.
[00:45:10] Shani: I'm also curious, we talked a lot about the individual of course and the accountability that we need to have and the awareness that we need to have as individuals. And then as you're saying, we're also in this collective corporate setting. The companies who succeed in moving themselves out of red or P zone.
Maybe not every team, but as more as a general rule. What do they do? How do they operate? How do they support their people?
What, yeah. What does that look like?
[00:45:40] Jim: First and foremost, they have the right attitude. Second, they get their people trained. Because no one learns this stuff in school. Now in, in most, MBA programs or graduate schools, the work that they're doing is team based. A lot of that stuff.
You, if you're getting an mba now, you know you're gonna be working on teams, but. People aren't taught how to be on a team. You don't get that in high school. You don't get that in college. You don't get it in graduate school. They assume that you're gonna pick that stuff up. So what that means is that training their employees to solve problems and have the right kind of attitude falls on the organization.
So first of all, they have to identify where they are because if you don't know where you are, it's gonna be hard for you to figure out, how to get where you want to go. So they have to identify what kind of a culture they have. And we have, different ways of doing that. We've got a culture survey that can talk about how skillful they are, and then they need to give people these skills that we're talking about, these five skills.
And there's lots of ways of doing that. And some organizations are very good at some of them and not good at others, so you can, target them and if you have people that might have the right attitude, but they're terrible at negotiating, you give 'em some negotiating skills.
If they're, if they know how to, do some negotiations, but they have a bad attitude, then maybe you need to take a look at some self-awareness stuff and focus on their defensiveness and focus on what their attitude is and look at how that's playing out. So it's recognizing the situation that they're in, recognizing where the employees are, where the employees need to be in order to be effective.
And then take a look at the gap. Between, where they are and where they need to be and figure out what's the best way to close that gap. And usually it's through a combination of training and awareness and talking about it, and bringing it to everybody's attention that this is an issue, this is an important thing.
[00:47:48] Shani: It sounds like it's also radical responsibility beyond radical collaboration is actually a common effort Yeah. From the individual and the company. Yeah.
[00:47:59] Jim: And when they can do that, they get radical results too. When we wrote the first book, the first edition of the book, this is a long time ago we called it radical collaboration because the level of collaboration that we were advocating at the time really was radical at that time.
Now it is now, it's a basic survival skill. If an organization can't be good at collaboration, they are not gonna be successful over the long term. Now, it wasn't like that 30 years ago. There was, you could still survive. You might not thrive. And being good at collaboration could help you thrive.
But you could still survive. But when we had the world economic meltdown number of years ago, organizations tend to cut to the bone when that happened. And that's when we started seeing the differences in the effectiveness between the organizations where people were good at collaboration and bad at collaboration.
Because there was no place for people to hide. At that point, when they started cutting the cutting to the bone and either they could work together with other people or they couldn't. And so organizations then realized we can't cut anymore. We, there isn't anything we can do other than try to get our employees to be more effective working together.
And that's when we saw this wave of organizations really interested in collaboration. And we were just a little ahead of the curve on that. And so it's become more a standard within organizations now to take a look at how effective they are at collaboration. But a lot, but organizations weren't particularly looking at that when we first started doing this a long time ago.
[00:49:39] Shani: No, I can imagine. Just thinking, I've done scale up in big corporates and a lot of organizations are very siloed and set up in a way where competence is very isolated from one another. And the movement now is really to have a more holistic approach, a more collaborative approach across the departs.
Yeah. Towards a common customer, towards a common employee, towards some kind of common user. Yeah. And it's really requiring us to open up our perspectives and reach out. And even in my work life, I've, as much as people desire to collaborate, I've still, encountered a lot of challenges.
Even getting people to realize that you should be working together. Yeah. Because we're so used to the boxed in structures.
[00:50:30] Jim: Yeah. And a lot of times it requires more than working with the individual, it requires some of the structure of the organization to change. For example, if you consistently pay salespeople based upon their own individual performance even though you tell them, we want you to work together and help your colleagues, on their sales too. But if they're only, if their bonus is completely dependent upon their own sales, guess where they're gonna put their energy, so that means not just paying lip service on your employee evaluation.
How well does this person collaborate but putting some money behind it too, that, 40% of your annual bonus will be based upon the feedback of other people about how helpful you are to their success or something along those lines. Now if you wanna change somebody's behavior, that's gonna change their behavior.
Telling them to be more collaborative isn't gonna do it.
[00:51:28] Shani: No. And I've also heard some studies that even say, don't measure performance so much on an individual basis. Look at teams, because most of us today Yeah. With few exceptions, actually have to collaborate in different structures, project teams, your normal teams in order to get something done.
Yeah. But I also, I understand also the difficulty in that from a corporate perspective because I. There are so many structures that we contribute to. So where, yeah. Where do you look and where do you start?
[00:52:01] Jim: Yeah. And it really, you really need to do both because on most teams, there are some people that are more valuable than others.
We have o I've often been on work with negotiating teams and you could take a third of the people and chop them off and it wouldn't make any difference at all. If you're just basing everybody's performance on the performance, on the outcome of the team, yeah.
In some situations that would be a very effective and could work, but other situations, if the team is being carried by one or two people then that's not gonna work. So you just need to be aware of what the circumstances are.
[00:52:38] Shani: Yeah. And then I also often think that I like to turn around the.
The perception of a performance review, because I've also been a leader in teams where it's even hard as a leader to build the right context for people to succeed because different things are unclear. The strategy is unclear, the goals are unclear, the mandates are unclear, and then people can be in super, super competent, but they can't do anything.
Yeah. And so sometimes they also think the inaction or the kind of perceived lack of contribution is also sometimes due to the context not being set up right by the company. And of course, there's always the radical responsibility of the individual to be asking questions and driving it. But often there's that balancing of both sides.
So yeah I've seen both, I have to say.
[00:53:37] Jim: Or organizations oftentimes think that they're mobilizing their employees by telling them to, to do things. And in fact, they're paralyzing them. Because they haven't given them the structure to work with. They haven't given 'em clear direction, they haven't given them the goals or the vision, to do what they need to do.
So it's that's one of the things that makes creating a green zone environment, a more collaborative environment. So difficult. It's, if you look at the things that are required of our people in leadership roles today, creating a green zone environment and maintaining that is one of the more difficult things that they're asked to do.
It takes a lot of attention consistent attention over time. It takes a lot of skills, it takes a lot of awareness. And so that's why people who are really good at it really thrive too. One of the things that, that we noticed in California when we first started this project way back in the eighties was in school district.
School districts where they went through this training and were able to turn the whole atmosphere and culture around the superintendents in those school districts. Just, they were like bottle rockets. They were getting promoted like that and it was hard to keep track of 'em because if they were, if they had such success, everybody wanted them.
Now in California you probably cannot, no one would probably ever be selected as a school superintendent if you didn't have some collaborative skills, training some at some point in your career. If you haven't shown that, you can do that. And it's the same with, other organizations.
If people are really good at it, they're gonna be in demand.
[00:55:21] Shani: Yeah. I think a lot of these skills that you talk about, they come up in a lot of contexts. A lot of the discussions I've had on this podcast, but also many of the contexts that we explore with clients and one thing that, the terminology that I hear a lot of people and that I use myself as well, is referring to these skills and the, this mindset as a muscle.
That you need to practice. So as you're saying, it's not just like getting there, you also have to practice it continuously, maintaining it over time. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, yeah, it's a different thing. I know when I was younger, I used to be this kind of straight A student and everyone would always say, oh cool, that's amazing.
That's so easy for us that guys, you have no idea. It's one thing to get the grade and it's another thing to keep the grade. Yeah. It's always it feels easy till you get there, but then when you're up there, you have to stay there. And it's a, that's a very, it is a very different, experience from the path there.
Yeah. So the maintenance work is also, a huge factor, I think.
[00:56:24] Jim: Yeah. And a lot of people, you're talking about practicing it and practicing the skills. If you're practicing the wrong thing, it's not gonna help. No, if you have a bad, if you have a bad golf swing and you go out and you do that 10,000 times, you're gonna get really good at being bad.
You do need to know what the skills are that you're gonna be working on in the first place. And then you need to keep that awareness up. And it's hard work.
[00:56:51] Shani: It is hard work. So the way I usually wrap this up is by boiling it down to some little tips or actions. Yeah. Because usually we talk about these kind of ideas or conceptual things and we've been pretty practical.
But I always like to bring it back to the individual what can I do? Or what can somebody listening do today, tomorrow to start practicing their collaborative ability.
[00:57:21] Jim: I would say number one is pay attention to your own attitude. Notice if you're feeling conflict avoidant or adversarial or collaborative.
Notice if you have a red zone or a pink zone or a green zone attitude yourself, because that's gonna make a difference. And if you notice that you're in the red zone or the pink zone, get curious about it. Try and figure out what that's about. So that would be the number one thing. Second thing, pay a lot more attention to your own defensiveness.
What's the underlying fear that's driving you into being defensive? Pay attention to that. Be on the lookout for your signs of defensiveness and come up with some action Plan to try and moderate the damage of that, and then practice that. And then the third thing is anytime you have any differences that you need to resolve I encourage you to do that in a way that.
Supports the relationship rather than undermines the relationship. We didn't talk much about the negotiating skills that, that fifth skill, but it's an important one. And typically when we're, when most of us try to resolve a conflict now, or we're going into negotiations, we try to understand the situation from our point of view.
We come up with our favorite solution. We go to the other party, we try to convince them that our favorite solution is better than their favorite solution. And then through trade-offs or compromises, we try to come up with something that we can both live with. And I've seen this in every type of negotiation you can think of from the United Nation is down to a family trying to figure out where to go on vacation.
What we're suggesting people should do is spend less energy in the beginning trying to find solutions, coming up with their own favorite solution or their own positions, and spend more time trying to understand what the underlying needs are for all the parties. Because you have a much greater chance of reaching some kind of an agreement if both parties really, truly understand all of the underlying interests and the needs of the other party, even if they disagree with them, if they understand them.
And a lot of times we don't take the energy put in the time and the energy to try and figure out what the other side needs. So if you can do that, anytime you have differences, pay attention to your attitude. Try not to get defensive. Focus what the underlying needs are of all the parties before you start looking for solutions.
You're gonna be, miles ahead of the game. I think. I love that
[00:59:45] Shani: those things. We talk about spending time with a problem in our work, and it's something that we see again and again, how when something happens, we just start throwing solutions at it. Yeah. We have actually no idea what the problem is.
We don't know what the root cause is. We don't know anything. Yeah. We just throw solutions and hope for the best. Yeah. So that's is very similar strategy that we have in design work, which is really saying, Hey, let's stop here. Listen and agree. And it also reminded me of a conversation I've had with Ava Humboldt who is working on on a different type of feedback model.
And she w would like feedback to be more of a meaningful conversation. And so what she talks about is that feedback can be very Can send us into defense because it's a very, it's an act of judgment. And so it can be a very threatening thing to receive or anything to give. But then what she talks about is very similar to what you're saying is if you're having a meaningful conversation, it's first about grounding in some kind of common goal.
Even if that common goal is the single person's growth or something else, then you know, really okay. Aligning on what are we seeing and where are we wanting to go. And then that kind of makes it meaningful for both parties and also easier to reason around why and how I might be contributing in a good or less good way to this.
Yeah. Yeah. So there is, there's a lot of perspective, and I see it both in design and what I hear from neurology as well is very much similar to, to the negotiation that you're
[01:01:24] Jim: bringing up here. Yeah, I like that. One of, one of the things that I found really helpful in mediation is working when I work with the parties individually, is I try to get each person to be able to articulate the other side's interest and position to the satisfaction of the other side.
Now, a lot of times people are really hesitant to do that for fear. It sends a message to the other side that they agree with them, but it isn't that you're looking for agreement there. You're just looking for understanding and if you really understand what's going on there, you just dramatically improve your chances of finding a solution.
Because usually if you really understand what the interests are, there's oftentimes, there's lots of different ways of satisfying an interest. But you have to really understand it first. So that's a key part to the, of the solution there. Yeah.
[01:02:13] Shani: As you say, there can be many solutions, but Right.
But you have to first know what you're solving.
[01:02:19] Jim: That's right.
[01:02:20] Shani: That's right. I love that. Thank you for adding that flavor in because we didn't touch upon it, but the super important point. And yeah, I really appreciate your generous sharing. It was great having you on.
[01:02:32] Jim: Oh, thank you very much.
I, I love to have the opportunity to talk about this stuff. It's been an important part of my life for 50 years and so I'm pretty passionate about it and I welcome the opportunity to share it. It's a
[01:02:45] Shani: great thing to be sharing these days, for sure. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you for listening to the Experienced Designers. I hope this episode brought you some new insight and some new topics to stop and wonder about. Special thanks to Jim for bringing his passion, experiences and actionable tips. And don't forget to click subscribe, and as always, get in touch with any questions or suggestions.
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