Name: Culture Club: Collaboration Lab
Uploaded: 2024-08-13T18:48:28.252Z
Duration: 55 min
Description: Culture Club: Collaboration Lab

Transcript for "Culture Club: Collaboration Lab": Labs, learning. Thrilled to facilitate today's culture club. Today, we're talking about collaboration. It's called the co CoLab Lab, but, I think we actually don't brand this as well as it could be. Sofia, a a colleague of mine, is on the call. So so Sofia Molinaro, welcome. So glad you're here. Sofia is actually under the weather about facilitating this space for us today. I think this this conversation Conflict is Conflict is more interesting to me than collaboration. Both of them are very related, but that's where we're gonna go today. For those of you who've been dropping into the chat, where you're calling in from, thank you so much. I am hailing from Atlanta, Georgia. And if you haven't already or maybe you've already put in your location, I'm gonna invite everybody. Just jump in there to the chat and put in what company are you here with and then what role do you play. If you haven't already put your location, put your location. But what company, what space are you in, and then what role do you play in that organization and that company? Maybe you're you're working, in a for profit, not wherever you're at. But let's all just pay attention to this chat and see who else at Culture Club today. If you've never been a part of a Culture Club, we are a space for people ops people both meet one another, to talk about what's relevant and happening in the world of people operations, and then also to make introductions to one another. So if you see folks that you perhaps are familiar with their organization or you maybe even know them from another space, say hello, take care of one another in chat, and I'm gonna guide us through a conversation today again about how to collaborate at a high level, which necessitates and really facilitates this conversation about how do we have conflict. How do we have conflict? So, again, welcome, everyone. A lot of you are still entering the room. Right now, my number says we've got a 184 folks in the call here from all over the world. We're putting in a chat. Where are we calling in from? With what organization? And then what role do we play in that organization? So glad to have all of you here. And then as we get started, as we're getting into this today, I'm gonna go ahead and jump in and get into this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart and I it might be to yours, and it's because of a number of of things. It's because of the role I play at LifeLabs. Again, I'm a facilitator lead, But it's also because of the role that we as people play when we work in organizations. We as people in organizations on teams solving problems together, a necessary function of our job, a necessary function of these organizations is to collaborate. And so I'm interested as we think about collaboration and as we think about the type of work that we do, how much of your day, how much of your week, how much of if you were to give a percentage, how much of your job do you think requires collaboration? What percentage of your work is collaborative? Alright. So we got 80, a 100, 95, most of it. 95, 70. Okay. So we're all well past the 50% range. We got a 50. I brought as I said that day is 50%. Says, yeah, 75%. And this is pre pandemic study. Research indicates that no matter what role you play in the organization, where you're at in that level within that organization or the type of work that you do, most of us across domains spend an average of 80% of our time needing to communicate with, work cross functionally with, depend upon, and have some sort of communication and interaction with other people to solve the problem we're trying to solve. And if you look at the study, it was actually in 2016. My guess is that number's only gone up as we've gone more and more remote. And we've actually placed ourselves in these various places where we're working in hybrid situation or maybe we're fully remote or, you know, I think that this number's creep creeped a little bit higher. Now as I talk about this, there's a really, really strong, link. Studies demonstrate a strong link between effective collaboration and a lot of benefits. And the benefits to be able to to be able to collaborate a high level are these. And what we know I want you to think of a time when you've been on a team and it's really gelled. You've performed at a high level. Doesn't it feel good to be on that kind of team? Don't we achieve more when we're able to communicate, trust one another, depend on one another, and trust that each other can do the part they're needing to do and then we actually do it? Today's conversation is about collaboration, and I wanna really hit at the benefits of collaboration. But I'm gonna go at it from an angle that, you know, really will be, I think, more intriguing than just talking about, you know, collaboration. And that is understanding what gets in the way of collaboration. Now this is where the research gets troubling. Most employees at all levels of organizations report difficulty collaborating. They report difficulty collaborating. In fact, it's the number one cause of project failure. I'm gonna share with you on this next slide here a number, and I wanna ask all of you just a moment, what you think this number represents. Anybody got a guess? You can drop it into chat. Also, at any time, if you want, you can raise your virtual hand. If you have a question, I can bring you on stage. You can ask your question. Average people on the team, hours lost. Gloria, hours lost to what? How well, collaboration is on a scale of 1 to 10? Turnover rate. Okay. So the closest in these yeah. 7.7% think collaboration is great. Amanda, I love this. The most people don't like collaborating. It's not great. Sarah McFar Fadden, you say hours lost per week to poor collaboration, and that's where it is. The 2022 study found this is the amount of time per week the average employee wastes on poor communication, miscommunication, and collaborative efforts that fail. I'm gonna say that again. The study name that we spend on average across lots of domains of work per week, 7.47 hours wasted to poor communication, miscommunication, not dealing with the elephant in the room, not talking about the thing or solving the problem that we need to solve, and just general missing it with other people. Now when I name this, how many of you have been here? And I can't see your hand raised. I can't see all that's happening here, but I can see that many of you have been here. Ashley Regas, you've got your hand raised. I'm gonna a lot of people got their hand raised here. I see all of you raising your hand. I love it. Thank you all for raising your hand. What does this look like? How many of you have been in a meeting where you've had that meeting before and the reason you're having it a second time is because someone didn't actually do the thing or there was miscommunication about who's responsible for what. Can we all just kinda, like, raise our hand and appreciate that? How many of you have been in a in a meeting or a space where you said, oh, snap. I'm actually not supposed to be here. This is a waste of my time. Why was I invited? Or why is this team in this space? What's going on here? Yeah. Checked out during the meeting a 100% all the time. A lot of plus ones in chat here. How many of you actually, this is interesting. How many of you have needed to have a hard conversation but because it wasn't had or maybe somebody on your team needed to have a hard difficult conversation and they didn't have it. And because it wasn't had, you actually never deal with the issue you need to deal with, and the work doesn't get done in the way it needs to get done. And this is where we're going. This is what we're talking about today. In order to get to a place where we are at a high level collaborating with a team, we need to talk about, how we collaborate with one another. And the way that we do this by the way, all of you, 7 point 4 7 hours a week. I don't know how many hours you work in a day, but you already have a 4 day work week. It's just not the kind you want. Most of us spent meetings thinking this is a waste of my time. Oh, snap. They're still not talking about it. Or I gave that feedback. You mean I gotta give that feedback again? Why are we still here? Surprise. You got a 4 day work week. You just didn't know it. Now today, where we're gonna go is we're gonna talk about what's going on in this space and the content from how we fix this comes from and many of you may know LifeLabs Learning. If you don't, welcome to LifeLabs Learning, Culture Club today. We are in the space of learning development. We care about people ops people. All of you people in people ops are our people. We're so thrilled to be here with you. And all of our content, we're focused on solutions that will help your team navigate conflict so that you can be more collaborative. But all of it comes from evidence based research that's in the space of industrial organizational psychology. And today in particular, we're gonna talk about collaboration, and I'm gonna focus on 2, really 2 of these 5. We have a, like, a full 2 hour workshop that we offer our customers and clients and learners. And what we'll do is we'll talk about the the the key places where conflict happens and where we miss out on the opportunity to actually collaborate. I'm gonna focus on 2 of them today while we're together. And the things we're gonna focus on, we're gonna start with conflict avoidance. But The things we're gonna focus on are gonna be very simple. And when I say they're simple, I don't mean they're simplistic. Okay? Now simplistic is is something that you can just dismiss because it's too simple. Simple just means that it's a small thing that you can do. And when it's done effectively, it actually results in a high level of, impact on either yourself, the team, the project, the thing that's right in front of you. And so the first collaborative hot spot collaboration hot spot where collaboration often occurs is when there's a conflict and we know we need to deal with it. And instead of dealing with it, we avoid it and therefore accentuate it. And so as we talk about this, what's the solution here? And the first thing is to kinda reframe what are we doing with conflict. I'm gonna say something bold, and I don't wanna put you off, and I don't wanna dismiss or or, you know, kind of downplay some of the things that are happening in the world today at a geopolitical level. But I will say I believe that conflict and we we at LifeLabs believe that conflict is not something that we should avoid. In fact, I would go so strong as to say there's a lot of geopolitical conflicts and actual wars going on in the world today. That war isn't actually a conflict. War is the inability to conflict. 2 people have different perspectives. 2 people have things that 2 sets of people 2 2 nation states in some cases have things that they disagree on, different needs, and and things that are going on, and their inability to communicate and conflict through what it is that they actually need to talk about leads and results in war. And so this is where conflict is not something to avoid. It's actually what we wanna do is we wanna get to this place where we have productive conflict. And so as a binary, we want conflict, we don't want conflict. Let's avoid conflict. Let's avoid it all costs. We want no conflict. That's the wrong binary. The better binary is we want our conflict to be productive, not for our conflict to be unproductive. And so how can we have productive conflict? I'm gonna offer you 2 solutions. Again, in our content, if this was a full on workshop, there's a lot of content there that we could offer, but I'll give you 2 solutions. The first thing is to normalize conflict. I just had a workshop where we were talking about adaptivity and resilience. This is the title of the workshop. I led led it with some clients, just for the the last couple hours before this workshop, before this session today with the culture club. And I asked people I love this question. I wanna ask you all. How many of you have started a book in the last year and you didn't finish it? Has anybody not finished a book they started? Yeah. I have. And I'm trying to get better. My partner will just finish the book. I'm like, babe, just shut the thing down. How does 2 more hundred why are you still reading? Okay. How many of you let's maybe this is more relatable for some of us. How many of you have ever started a a Netflix series? Or maybe some friends tell you, oh, you should watch this show, and you start it, you get into it, and you can't you're like, why in the world? How do they watch this? You just can't get into it. You just shut it down. Yeah? Okay. A bunch of us have. So why do we shut the book? Why do we close down the Netflix or or the, you know, Amazon prime or whatever the, the, the portal is that you watch your shows? Why do we turn it off? Because there's not enough conflict. Yes. Or the conflict doesn't make sense. Yes. Or the conflict never resolves. And everyone is just like this. It's just, a tragedy and you don't wanna feel, like, come on now. You're avoiding it. You're avoiding it. You're avoiding it. And so be yeah. That's exactly it. Because of the lack of conflict, we lose interest. And so the the ending of this other workshop, Adaptive and Resilience, we talk about reframing conflict in the first place. That conflict is actually the interesting stuff that leads us to the solutions that we all wanna pay attention to. And, so don't dismiss the need to be persevering. Don't dismiss the need to actually have a hard conversation. Don't dismiss the opportunity to step into a space you're not sure what's gonna happen because that's the good stuff that makes you feel alive. That's a different workshop but I just wanna name, we need to begin doing this with the old concept, the whole concept of conflict. And normalizing conflict begins with understanding how teams form in the first place. We got a lot of people ops people here. I'm sure many of you are very familiar with IO psychology, industrial organizational psychology. One of the grandfathers of IO psychology is Bruce Tuckman, and his research around how teams form. How teams form begins with this idea that teams come together, either formally you hire people to be on a team or maybe you got a project people are working on, maybe there's an acute working group that's gonna be together for a little while trying to solve a problem. And every single one of those scenarios, when the team is coming together, they experience 4 different, very specific stages of that team formation. Forming, norming storming, norming, and performing. Forming, storming, norming, and performing. Now the forming stage, just to briefly high level tell you what that is, is people are coming together, a lot of glad handing. We're being nice. We're getting to know each other. We want this to go well. Storming, people start sharing their ideas. People have expectations. Those expectations aren't being met. Maybe there's some communication that's dropped, and then we actually feel a different kind of way about that glad handing that just went on. And we start to butt heads. We start to miscommunicate. We start to have competing priorities. If you can push through the storming phase, you can begin to reach this norming phase. And the norming phase is where I begin to understand the gaps that exist on this team. I begin to mitigate against those gaps. I begin to make sense of and communicate in ways and channels that make sense to other people and that, you know, align with their tendencies or expectations. And if you can reach that norming stage, you can then get to this other stage known as performing. There's, really interesting research that was done, by this guy by the name of Scott Peck building on top of Bruce Techman's work here. And what Scott Peck argues is that the feeling or the felt experience of each of these stages are the things that you see on the screen here. Pseudo community. How many of you have been in that group where you're like, you're all glad handing and we're not being real yet? And you wait for it. When's the real come in? And once the real comes, it's it feels like a storm. It can feel chaotic. And you get this point of fatigue, almost I'm done. And because you reach the over like, kinda getting over your ego and people over their ego, you feel empty, then you can start to normalize. Oh, this is what I expected and I missed it. This is what you expected and I missed it. And if you can push through that, you can get to this level of, like, not only do we perform at a high level, I trust you. There's both relationship based and task based trust elevating psychological safety, and we we we take risks together. Bruce Tuckman would argue that only 30% of teams reach the performing stage. And so I'm interested, if if we call forming 1, storming 2, norming 3, and performing 4. So storming 1 or forming 1, storming 2, norming 3, performing 4. Where would you say your team currently spends most of its time? And you can use team loosely. It could be your acute team, could be your department, could be your company. 1, 2, 3, or 4. Forming, storming, norming, performing. Okay. Let's just look at chat. I'm just gonna look at chat for a moment. We got a lot of twos, some threes, 1.5. I love how some of us are are leaving the forming, starting to realize, oh, snap. We're all human beings in this space. There's some threes in here. Yeah. 1 because of new staff changes. Karen, I love this. Karen and, Adriana are the only fours I see. Rachel, it looks like you're moving from norming into performing. What's fascinating about this, every time you could have the same team, but every time you introduce a new team member or the project scope and scale shifts, you go back through Tuxman's phases every time. And so it's cyclical. The thing I'm trying to hit at here is that conflict is a necessary function or stage of high performing teams. And a part of normalizing conflict, a part of realizing, you know what, it's why the book is interesting, it's why the Netflix show is continually worth watching. It's a part of our our our lives, and it's gonna help us get to where we need to go as a team. And so and so instead of vilifying or demonizing the fact that we have conflict on our team, realize it's a necessary function, welcome it, do it in a productive way, which we're gonna talk about how in just a moment. And then that well, that resistance to conflict in and of itself is often what keeps many of us from actually getting to that place of community and high performance. I see that there's a a question in the q and a. I'm gonna take a moment. Sarah McFadden asked, how do we influence the c suite that the rooting out of organizational dysfunction is going to move the needle regarding strategic priorities? They often treat as desperate symptoms. So this is a a conversation about leading up, and Sarah might my so I don't know where you're at in the organization. Sarah, can I would you be willing to come up on stage and share a little bit more? If not, that's totally fine. You can say, nope. Please no. But I'd love to just ask you a question briefly in front of everyone if I can. Alright. So I'm going to I'm gonna ask Sofia, how do I bring someone up on stage? Folks, forgive me this, portal. This Sophia, how do I bring someone up on stage? And and by the way, the fact that I'm having a little conflict right in this moment, we're getting kinda meta, I don't care. This is a part of we're gonna collaborate today. We're gonna have a high level of collaboration. I want Sarah on the stage, and please click the raise hand function, Sarah. So, Sarah, you raise your hand. Alright. So Sarah has raised her hand. Sarah's here. Okay, Sarah. Will you do me the favor? Welcome. So glad you're here. So help me understand, this this specific situation, and maybe more general talking about seed suite. How do you lead up in such a way to help them recognize that conflict needs to take place? Is that what you're asking? And they're they're avoiding conflict? Is it that C Suite's avoiding conflict? Yeah. Can you hear me okay? I can. Everyone can hear you. I can hear you just fine. Yep. Perfect. Yeah. I think it's really just sometimes when we look at the tactical goals of an organization, this is what we have to do. If we're not ready and willing to look at the human dynamic of how we accomplish those goals or we don't, they're like, oh, well, that's just the people thing. You know, like, that's separate from what we have to do. And someone like me who's in charge of really trying to level up, manage up, you know, influence. Hey. Yeah. You have to look at that. A human dynamic if you want to be able to make good on your goals for this year. They're not separate things. So any thoughts or advice would be great. Yeah. Sarah, thank you so much. And can we all give some love to Sarah for for coming off on stage? I appreciate it, Sarah. Thank you for fall following on, a little bit more with that. So as we think about, wanting to lead up and influence and help, it sounds like the c suite folks to understand and, Sophia thank you. Yeah. Sophia's got it. People in an organization and changes that take place or, decisions that are being made, a key function of the need to to really get where we wanna go or move the needle where we wanna move the needle is to understand it. And and I'm taking I'm speaking literally the choir. I'm just gonna say something we all know. People very much matter. And if the C suite individuals aren't understanding that story, that narrative, that hook, they perhaps need to be given some feedback. And and I would argue that the best way to help people who have more power or leverage in the organization pay attention to something is to speak it in a language to the things they pay attention to. So maybe people, understand and care most about return on investment. Maybe what people, you know, understand or care most about is some specific product offering or some sort of new widget that you're gonna put out in the world or some some some big push this this next quarter or what have you. Frame the thing that they're not paying attention to within the context of what it is that they do. And so if you're familiar with our feedback skills workshop, we talk a lot about naming a behavior that someone's doing or not doing and the impact it's having. When I give feedback up, I start with the impact. I name, hey, someone who has a lot of power in this organization. There's something that's really negatively or positively impacting this subset of either people or in this case, this this return on investment, this project that you're working on that you really care about. There's a really negative impact to this. Can I get your attention? Typically, people with a lot of leverage, when you speak about something that's negatively affecting the thing that they care a lot about, will give you some time. And then the link the task of linking up what the behavior is that they're doing or not doing is the opportunity you now have. This thing is actually being carved in large part because of something you've done to ignore our people or to ignore the conflict that we need to have or do I don't know. Again, Sarah, we didn't get into the weeds here. But, basically, if you're familiar with this idea of naming the behavior, naming its impact, and then having a conversation, when giving feedback up, start with impact. It gets people attention people's attention, name their behavior, how it's contributing to that impact, and then have a conversation about what they can do about it. Natalie, is dropping some stuff. Yeah. There's a lot of people offering feedback to you in the look at you all taking care of each other. Thank you, Sarah. I'm gonna push forward, from that question. So as we get back into here, again, conflict is a necessary function of communication. Those that avoid conflict aren't communicating well. And so what we wanna do is introduce conflict, normalize conflict, recognize that it's a necessary or stage of every team's formation. So as we push past this, what's another thing that we might do, and that is to engineer conflict. Quite literally, one thing that we can do to help our teams conflict to to to avoid this conflict avoidance is to introduce it as a function of every single project timeline, as a necessary step in any strategy we're trying to to, you know, execute. Now this could show up as we're gonna do some scenario planning. This could show up as we're gonna do what's what LifeLabs calls a pre mortem. Before a project, why might this fail? What's going on here? One way that we think about this is what's known as red teaming. If there's any engineers or if there's any kinda, people in develop the developer world on the call here, you'll maybe be familiar with this term. It's after you've released, an iteration of a product or service. It's getting people to put on a proverbial red shirt and just act as those folks who poke holes. Literally, share your critiques. We need some devil's advocate on this team. I need somebody to poke holes in what's going on here. And you will try your darnedest to extract or illustrate or or or facilitate the rising of the critiques that no one's seeing. Here's the unfortunate truth about people who come up with ideas. They have 2 strong biases that show up. 1 is optimism bias. They look for things that, you know, really will try to, they're they're into it, the things that are positive, not negative. And then they're really gonna be concerned with trying to see where their idea is gonna solve the thing versus understanding where their idea might fall out. And so what we wanna do is create a space where everyone on the team, especially those who came up with the idea, actually poke holes. I actually wanna do this together. I wanna do this together. When we engineer conflict, we look for pros, look for cons and mitigations. We're gonna focus on the cons and mitigations in this moment. I'm gonna give us a scenario, and I want us all can I ask every one of you? Right now there's 276 of us on this call. Can the 275 of you listening to me put on a proverbial red shirt? Proverbial red shirt. I want you to put holes in this yeah. That we're about to execute as a team. We're so excited about we've been planning this for months. We're thrilled about it. We are going to have a no meetings Monday policy. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Aren't you all excited? Let's do this. No meeting Mondays. Alright. Now what might go wrong with this idea? What haven't we considered? What are the unintended consequences? Who might be impacted in a negative way? Alright. Here we go. They're dropping them in a chat. People won't follow it. They're still gonna do it. We need to do interviews. Sometimes the interviewees may only have the opportunities for Mondays. What about emergencies? Our product function breaks down. We can't actually sell our product or something, and we need to have a meeting, but we have this policy. I can't keep up with everything that's going on. What about urgent issues? People are dropping Star Trek references. I didn't see the Star Trek reference, but I'll go back in the chat in a little bit. What about new employees who need to be onboarded? What about people who don't work Monday to Friday? This is fantastic. Yeah. Folks who come in and start their work on Wednesday and end on a Saturday. Do they just have meetings no matter what? Yeah, we have no meeting Friday and it's totally ignored. Karen. I appreciate how many of you had a no meeting day. That's a good idea and you've never done it? You've never actually yeah. Starting the week without clarity. There's a lot of, challenges here. Now I want us to take the red team. It's not just about poking holes, but it's also offering solutions. What are some mitigations? So if you poked a hole, how might you fix or think about, we still have a problem we're trying a gap we're trying to close with no meetings Monday. What might we do to help service giving people more space? And, really, what we're trying to do is create space for people to do deep work time, for those ICs and managers to stop, you know, having all these management meetings and and really, you know, talking about it all, but have time to do the work. What might we do? Okay. Have an open chat that everyone checks. Have a half day per day per department where there are no meetings. And if some things do come up, you can then schedule it during those hours. Deep work blocks and try to try to, you know, support those deep work blocks as best you can and not schedule over them. Ella, how many of you I love this. Take an inventory of how many meetings are actually needed. Harvard Business Review did a study. It's like a 10 year study. They do a similar study, but Harvard did this thing. They said, how many meetings do we have and how many of our meetings are a waste? Unfortunately, over half of our meetings actually don't need the needle on what the meeting's about. And so I think a meeting audit around every organization is really well worth this time. Prioritize small meetings. Yeah. These are all look at all these. We're all coming up with these ideas versus and this is unfortunately I'm gonna go back to what the the question was earlier. What if the c suite has this idea? And unfortunately, a lot of special technology companies, a lot of, folks who started the company or folks who are higher up, maybe you've even got user research data that says, our users want this. Our members want x y z. But they're like, no. Our competitors are this other thing. I wanna do that. Or this other company does it this way. Let's just do that. And they stop listening to actually the input of the people. It's really important to understand and do what we just did. Red team engineer conflict, build it into our projects and timelines. Alright, team. I'm gonna push forward. We're given 1 solution, and if you're in our co if if you're in our workshop, our collaboration, skillful conflict and collaboration is the name of the the title of the workshop, we would actually do a breakout room. We would talk about the conflict we're not dealing with. We'd actually talk about elephants that are in the room. What's interesting is, you know, sometimes people will say, I don't there's no elephant room. There's no conflict. We don't have to worry about it. It's just a baby elephant. What do we do with baby elephants? They grow and they become big elephants. And how they get fed is by not talking to them, is not dealing with them. And so we talk about that in the workshop and how to actually really engineer conflict and deal with the elephant in the room. I'm gonna push forward. The second collaboration hotspot where, there's a lot of collaboration opportunity left on the table is when you have a perspective, and maybe I have a divergent perspective, and we never actually connect. We just we just miss each other because our our priorities are different. We literally have different things at stake and different timelines for what we wanna do. And so I'm gonna speak to 2 things that we can do to help not just engineer conflict and really put it on the table, but when we're in the conflict, how do we make it that much more productive? And so, another binary I want us to hit at here, Is it about getting everything done that is on your to do list? I would say it is not. That is the wrong binary. The goal isn't for you to get everything that's important to you done. Instead, the way that we collaborate is we try to understand what do we need to get done and achieve our shared goals. Because pretty much every individual or siloed goal, if it's not linked back up to a shared goal, why is it there? Get our shared goals accomplished together. And so this is where I'm gonna take us back into when we have competing priorities. The first thing that can really help us is what we call set the frame. You may know it as cognitive reframing. Our brains have evolved to the point where we're so good at sniffing out potential threats and enemies that we will the moment we disagree with somebody, we will choose sides. And I don't have to go very far for you to agree with me on this. Right? I could say I could say something as banal as, man, I really I think the beach is better than the mountains. I love going to the beach over going to the mountains. And 273 of you have made a choice. Kevin's wrong or Kevin's right. You're not even trying. Right? The brain by default makes makes a choice. I would call it judge judging. Not for good or for bad, just a judgment. A label saying in or out, up or down, left or right. And what we might need to do is to recognize the brain's tendency to do this in conflict with an individual. The moment someone has a competing priority to you, the brain is so good at kind of, like, keeping safe and and and finding its way. What we'll do is we'll other the other person, and we'll say, that's your priority, but I have my priority. And oftentimes, we get in conflict and we need to negotiate conflict. I think of I've got my set of problems and needs and you're against them. And the way that we will wanna set the frame or reframe this is to stop thinking of you versus me, us versus them, and othering people who don't share our same goals or the same stakes that we have in our specific department, on our specific team with this specific project, is just to reconsider. Am I thinking of you versus me in this conflict, or is there a possibility for you and I together frame a new problem? And so I want you to think of, like, may maybe 2 people are are having a conflict and we're in a negotiation space. Okay? We're in a conference room. I'm actually gonna go back a slide, and there's a conference table. I don't know if you all can see my pointer. I'm using my pointer as if you can. I don't think I don't think you can. I haven't been in here, but but Zoom allows you to see my pointer. So in between these two people thank you, Amanda. That helps. There's a table where there's that rope. And at the table, we asked them to sit down. You both got a conflict. Let's negotiate this problem. But still, on the other side of the table is the other person. And so quite literally in the physical space, you are opposite that person. And so what we invite you to do is actually get up, walk around the table, and together, both of you name your problem. And when you name your problem, you're gonna begin to get at why does the problem exist. Not just what is your what is your position, but why do you have hold have and hold this position in the first place. And so you can understand the needs that someone has. And then you can start to frame it's not me versus you. It's us versus a common problem. Okay. So this isn't a part of this workshop nor is it a part of this deck, what I'm about to say. And I can't really ask, can I have your permission all to do this, but I'm just gonna do it? So are you good? Let's let's go. How many of you are familiar with doctor Marshall Rosenberg in nonviolent communication? Nope. I love those who put nope in chat. You're just like you sit on the other side of the table. No, Kevin. No. Thank you. Alright. So doctor Marshall Rosenberg was a peace builder. And he since passed away. But what he would do is, broker peace deals, negotiation, situations he would go into, rival nation states. And what he would do is he would go into these people who are just just vilified each other, hate each other, can't even be in the same space, and he would orchestrate them to have a conversation. And his whole pedagogy, his whole idea is that a really strong emotional charge, I'm really angry, I'm really sad, I'm crying, I'm yelling or whatever, is actually something most of us avoid. The name of the book is called nonviolent communication as is the organization that is still going that does this work. But what he would do is he would say, when you ever have your really strong emotional charge, the reason that motion is so strong and charged is because that individual or that set of individuals has a need that's gone unmet. And what's fascinating is if you can get past the vilification of the other or the I don't like you naming that emotion or what have you, and you can begin to connect on the needs level, you can then begin to find resource. And it's really interesting to test this out. How many of you does anybody really enjoy when someone in a meeting starts breaking down and crying? Can we all say no? Or when somebody comes in and is yelling and just, like, hurting people in the room or what have you? It's interesting. If you judge that, that's fine. It's probably natural. But if you can get past your judgment in labeling and set the frame and say, wait a minute. They actually might have a need that's gone on net. Then you might be able to get to a place where you can join them in solving a a a a, like, a combined problem. I don't mean to to, dismiss what what this is, but, or or or, like, belittle any of us on the call here. But I'm a I'm a parent. I have 3 kids. Anybody on the call who's been a caregiver knows what this is. Your kids throw a tantrum, have a have an outburst, and, really, they just don't have the communication skills to tell me their needs. Or something's going on and they're just going, you know, whatever they're doing, conflict, yelling, screaming, crying, and really what they do is they lack the capacity to actually express the need that's there. Now sometimes they are acting out. Right? But I, as a parent, if I react to the emotion, if I live in this space of it's me versus them, I get nowhere. But But if I can actually get to a place where I'm recognizing and understanding that they have a need that's gone unmet or in this case a problem that needs to be solved, we can solve it together. In the workshop, we go way in-depth on what is our need, how do we name our problems. We'll break a problem down into those 2 note words I used earlier. When people have a conflict, they plea, there's a position. The position is what I believe should happen, and there's, behind the position, there's the interest. And the interest is, why do I hold this position? And if we can get past the position, I want you to do x y zed versus here's why I hold the position in the first place. That's when you can begin to combine the problems and find a common problem and work towards a solution work towards a solution. Alright. So I'm gonna pause here for a moment, and I'm gonna ask so we're in the midst of this. We just got about 10 or 15 minutes left. I'm getting pinged here. I've skipped over. I wanna invite you all. There's a poll here. What do you think the top challenges are in collaborating across your team and your organization? And I think that should pop up to you. And go ahead and we'll see what's happening here. Looks like the majority of people, there's a lack of alignment across the team on priorities. That's great. That's very timely. That's where we're going next. Teams are very siloed with little overlap, either in stake of what they do or, like, the the, the type of work they do or perhaps the roles that they play towards moving the needle with some greater initiative or quite literally they just don't interact with one another or employees are remote hybrid making communication a struggle. Right? I would totally agree. Don't you all think that a communication gap leads to information loss only accentuating what it is that's happening? I'm gonna push forward here. I'm gonna look at chat. There's been a few things named in chat. Marissa Wilner. Brilliant. An unregulated person can't regulate an unregulated person. A little further down, or maybe it was a little bit higher up. Yeah. How do we get people to put aside egos? We're gonna talk about that in just a moment. 2 things. I have to have well, I have to have a conversation about what do we want versus what do you want. And then the other thing is to get back to what was asked earlier. Stop dehumanizing people, by being aware of the people behind the thing that is your your thing. That's a whole other workshop. But, Janet, it's a great question. How do we help people put aside their ego? Hurt people. Hurt people. Yeah. By the way, if I just wanna state, if you look up doctor Marshall Rosenberg and nonviolent communication, some of his anecdotes are dated, but they're brilliant. If you go to YouTube and you were to Google this guy and go on YouTube, you'll know it's him because he uses hand puppets and he has a guitar. It's I mean, you're gonna be, like, taken aback Kevin. What did LifeLabs, what did you put me on to? But if you can get the content from outside of the form or the container in which the content's in, there's a lot there that is really, really helpful. And so the last thing I wanna hit at here and I'm gonna go back, and look at the slides. Let me go back down to what slide were we at here. We were here. The last tactic or or skill to help us again when we have competing priorities. And this will help us get past our egos. This will help us understand how to think about when we're dysregulated, And this is to do what we at LifeLabs call clarify your BPS. BPS is a moniker or an acronym that you we use internally on any project or initiative that has more than one team at stake, and it's known as or called that because it stands for business priority score. And what we'll do is we will have a group of folks that are director level and above and when projects are being decided upon, when things and initiatives are gonna be given resources and time and attention over whatever given period, whether it's a year, you know, h one, h two, or it's a quarter, or even smaller than that, it will be given a BPS. And whenever you go to a project outline, you can look at the top of the top of the form, and you'll see what the BPS score is. VPS score 5 are things that it's like all hand deck. This quarter, we must do this thing. Otherwise, we don't reach our objectives as an organization. And what I want you to just pay attention to, this isn't a TPS, which is like a team priority score, or it's not a IPS, an individual priority score. This is business. This is for the entire business. The priority for us this quarter or this whatever time period is, VPS, whatever. And typically they are given on a scale of 5, sometimes there's a half so it could be a 3.5 or a 4.5. But largely speaking, anything above a 3 gets attention. Anything below a 3, we ignore. We try to avoid. Anything that's a 1 is like it's on the do not do list. Okay? And when you have a VPS score of a 4 or a 5 and you and I are in disagreement about I need your time and attention. No. But I have this other priority. We can then just have a conversation about, okay. I know you have other priorities and things that you're working on. I have things that we are you know, have priorities around and are working on. But the VPS score for your project is x y zed. Mine is whatever it may be or vice versa. You've got the higher VPS. Now I can begin having something that is at a a larger level than just myself or my own ego. It's it's agreed upon at a a business level. This is something that we must do. How do you evaluate? There's a lot of decision criteria that go into it, Gloria, but again, it's a baseline level. It's a a conversation that's had typically from the CEO down to director level. And so we have directors, we have the equivalent of, like, VP or or or head ofs, and then we have the c suite individuals. They will have conversations before every quarter predeciding what's gonna get VPS scores of x y whatever. And then the people who are the drivers or the approvers or what have you, they will all agree. And the decision criteria, things that would go into it would be, obviously, return on investment of some sort of, initiative that you've invested in. So as an example at LifeLabs, we've just developed this platform to support all the people who are gonna be our our learners. It's it's back end thing we spend a lot of money on to help it make it easier for people like yourself to take and participate in Life Life Study. You can go in and you can figure out how all your learners are doing. You can kinda scale what the return on investment has been. So if we have a project that's something's broken in that in that that tool that we just bought, this platform that we built, with this other vendor. If there's something wrong with it and we need to fix it and it's go to market in 3 weeks, we might say a BBS is gonna be really high on that. And so it's gonna get attention to maybe we put other projects on hold. Right? There's any number of decision criteria, but I would say the stakeholders are typically director level and above. And so I'd invite you to try this. Is there something where you have a conflict with someone? And, actually, I'll go back to this slide here. And maybe the reframe where you need to start is to stop demonizing and vilifying that individual and ask what is their problem? How are problems related? And then once you get to that, what are the BPS scores for the various things that we're bringing to the table? And then you can begin to prioritize together what needs to get done. And a goal here, again, is to bring, to bring conflict to the forefront so as we can communicate and not avoid it, but to do the work of reaching collaboration. And so these are the hot spots. Turfing is this conversation around when we do vilify and demonize, how do we get past we answer, like, how do you get past your ego? How do you begin to understand and bring down the tone? Many times when we get into a place of we're fighting or we're at in a conflict, we're no longer thinking with our neocortex. We're living from the limbic system. How do we move around that? Roll confusion, one of the simple ways, and I'm just giving you the whole workshop right now. It just really bullet pointed. Roll confusion. A lot of conflict happens because we're not knowing who's in charge or who's responsible for what. And there's very specific ways that you can help name how people are supposed to to, engage with a project or an initiative that you're working on. And then comms logistics, just naming the channels we use, how they're intended to be used, and how to, you know, get a hold of people in an emergency emergency without naming how people expect to be communicated to. Let me just ask this question. How many of you have ever gotten an email and it should have been a phone call? How many of you have ever gotten a Slack or Teams message and you thought that was a meeting? How How many of you ever been in a meeting and you thought that could have been an email? Comms Logistics create all day. Is this the guy who's like, yeah. That's my that's how I that's how I live. And so I would name with all of these actually, I see it now. With every single one of these, and I could probably say every single behavioral unit or skill that LifeLabs teaches, here's what we do, and here's what we do when we have conflict that's being avoided. What we wanna do is we wanna make the implicit expectation as explicit as possible. That which we're already thinking, maybe we haven't articulated that. We don't know. We wanna name that expectation, name that understanding or lack of understanding and implicitly and make it as explicit as possible. In collaboration, skillful conflict in collaboration workshop, we give you lots of ways, and hopefully they have given you a few different on ramps to help yourself be more collaborative by making that implicit as explicit as possible. I wanna, offer one more poll. How important is this to you? How important is this to you? Sofia, if you're there, can you, launch the poll now? Look at the polls tab here. How urgently are you seeking solutions to these challenges when it comes to getting better at collaborating, navigating conflict with impact. A lot of folks in the exploring option. Some of you are already partnering with LifeLabs. Fantastic. And, you know, this I I get the context of of what we're in. What I'm not asking is how many of you wanna hire LifeLabs today? I'm just saying in general, how many of you were seeking solutions to better collaborate? So whether you go with a different vendor or what like, literally, that's what I'm asking. Urgently seeking solutions. We got a number of you Exploring options, a number of you. Not currently seeking. Love your candid candor. And then always already some clients implementing solutions. Love it. Alright, team. I'm gonna go back, one last slide, and then I'm gonna answer any questions that are in the or speak to any questions that are in the chat here. So, that's where we came today. If you're interested, again, in partnering with LifeLabs at any level, Sofia's gonna drop some stuff in the chat. But we have a lot of workshops and offerings that that we do speak to this. Namely skillful conflict and collaboration, feedback skills, all of managing core one, really any workshop that I think all of them do speak to making the implicit explicit will help you. I just got out of a workshop called Adaptivity Resilience where we talk about how to deal with stress and how to at an individual level stop where we get stop the brain and that literally the central nervous systems overwhelm and regain a sense of agency. And how can we do that at a team level? Also really important for conflict and collaboration. I'm gonna pause here, and I'm gonna see if there are any questions in the q and a. We got a lot of them here. So I'm just gonna work in successive order here from the last one. How do you transcend conflict, which is healthy and necessary when ineffective leadership perpetuates it? Again, Sakaiyah, I think it's it's a great question. There it's multi multifaceted answered. Can I answer can I answer with an anecdote real quick? What are you gonna say? No? Maybe it's too much to share the anecdote. 1st, decide that which you can control. A lot of unnecessary conflict internally and on the team is when you focus on that which you actually don't have a lever to move the needle on. And so distinguishing what we call a 2 hander at LifeLabs, that which you can control and that which you can't control, understand what you can't control or that someone else can control, and then identify what you can control. That's the first thing I would do and there's a lot more there I can talk about and there's an anecdote behind that. But once you identify that internal locus of control, my guess is you're gonna identify having a conversation. I can have a conversation with someone who has stake, with someone who has power or leverage in this organization. I need to make aware of the behavior that I'm noticing, the impact it's having. And even if you can't make them do something or maybe you've had that conversation and they haven't moved, they haven't done anything. Now you have a new conversation. We had the conversation and you haven't done anything. So I would say name what you can control, what you can't control, and then speak into, step into that space by having a conversation. There's a lot more to it than that. Thoughts on how to engage folks on the team who are stuck in the storm. Normalize the storm. Name what I've even steal my anecdote. How How many of you read a good book and shut it? Or had a bad book and shut it? Or a Netflix series that somebody recommended you said, no way. Conflict is good. Another way to frame this is understand that all the things that are, all the things that are good things in our lives, we've had to work for, typically. Most everything in my life, most everything in your life, most everything in your team's life, the stuff that is the stuff that you look forward to have asked something of you. Another way to frame that is everything worth anything will ask something of you. Everything worth anything is is is gonna ask something of you. And, just normalize that conflict is is is a part of it. Work isn't something to avoid in the same way the conflict isn't. It's a good thing. It gets us where we need to go. How do we get people to put aside egos? Yeah. It's a great question. Janet, the the ego works the whole conversation, but one way is to make sense of ego. First of all, do you need to to label it ego? Maybe they're they have a need that's gone unmet. Right? And I'm not judging that you've called it an ego. I'd call it an ego too, but, like, that make that oh, that makes that inspects me at some way. This person's doing that thing. What unmet need is going on for them? And maybe you can speak to that. Are there limits to the number of each score given during a quarter? Yeah. Or time period? Yeah. There won't be that many initiatives. It's it's resource dependent. Right? So we can't have, you know, given the number of people and the amount of money or resources you have to put towards or or quite literal time and and eyeballs and energy towards a project or initiative, we can't have 145 score VPS projects. But maybe we could have 2 or 3 fives, which would then limit the amount of twos and threes that we could have. And just because something's of EPS 5 doesn't mean it's more work. It just means it needs more attention in this moment. How do you encourage leaders not to be conflict avoidant? Feel lies like the the global context. Let me jump here. Oh, the glow the the the, like, the trend of not talking about or people having a you don't not wanting to touch certain things that may not be politically, you know, sensitive to to deal with this moment? How do we encourage leaders not to be conflict avoidant? A big thing in incentivizing people to do something is to name the benefit. What's the benefit to doing the thing you don't wanna do? What's the benefit to paying attention to this workshop? If I don't name for you the benefit of being here, you're gonna disengage. If you don't name the benefit of doing the thing so get really clear why. What's your true north? What's your vision? Why should we care about conflict? Why in some specific conflict avoidant thing that, like, why should they not stop avoiding it? What's the benefit of of of of actually seeing it and doing something about it? Naming that, letting that your be your true north north, it'll help have you the conversation, 1. But 2, give you so much more confidence to let go of your own ego because you believe in the thing versus believing in yourself. Believing in the thing that they must hear it, we have to do this. That will help. Alright, team. If there are any more questions, please please, ask them in the chat. I see those questions. I'm gonna step off the stage and stop sharing my slides. And I have one last actual slide that I wanna share with you if you will wanna see it, and that is this last slide here. Can you give us some feedback on how this went today? There's still over 200 of you in the room. Pull out your phones, or you can just go to lifelabsfeedback.com/event. How engaging was this? Is this webinar gonna be shared a 100%? Everybody who showed up today, you will get a copy or a link is being recorded as well as some content from today. And I'm looking at the other chat. Thank you all for your time today. I hope that you, I mean this with so much love, have more and better conflict in your lives. I don't know if more, but better, more productive conflict, more productive conflict as you move forward. Thank you all for being here. Have a great rest of your day. If you have any other questions, drop them in the chat or feel free to run the q and a or feel free to raise your hand. I can bring you on stage. We can have a brief conversation. I will end at the top of the hour just to respect everyone's time.