Quick Fixes: How to build a strong team fast, embrace conflict, and be an effective middleman (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Anne Morriss: Frances, something I really love about our show is the variety of workplaces our listeners come from. 

Frances Frei: Oh, we've gotten questions from county clerks, teachers, scientists, people at all levels of their organization. 

Anne Morriss: And all over the world. India, Spain, Mexico, Australia. And I'm delighted to say, Frances, that we've now gotten questions from all seven continents, including Antarctica.

Frances Frei: Antarctica is today?

Anne Morriss: Yes.

Frances Frei: Woo!

Anne Morriss: Yes, for real! Yes, one of our Fixers is stuck in the Arctic Circle.

Frances Frei: And it is not a metaphor, people.

Anne Morriss: Welcome to Fixable, a podcast from TED. I'm Anne Morriss, i'm a company builder and leadership coach.

Frances Frei: And I'm Frances Frei. I'm a Harvard Business School professor, and I'm Anne's wife.

Anne Morriss: This week we're answering questions from listeners in different corners of the planet: Portland, Oregon, Mexico, and Antarctica.

Frances Frei: It's another installment of the Quick Fix.

Anne Morriss: Yes, it's Quick Fixes: Extreme Addition. I'm already getting cold.

Today we're gonna cover team building on the fly when the team itself isn't a stable group of people, and then we're gonna continue to explore conflict and potential conflict from a couple different angles. 

Frances Frei: We're getting so many questions about conflict these days. I can't wait. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. On the show, in our work lives, in our not work lives, a lot of people are asking how to keep disagreements healthy and productive. And as we've talked about before, teams that perform well actually embrace the conflict among team members. They accept it as normal and useful, and so we wanna get into the tactics of what that looks like in practice, how you keep disagreements healthy and productive.

Frances Frei: I'm excited. Let's do it.

Anne Morriss: Alright, our first question comes from a Fixer who leads polar expeditions. You and I love to learn in the extremes, and this is quite literally as extreme as it gets. 

Caller 1: Hi Anne and Frances. I have a leadership and team building conundrum. I'm blessed to have a dream job as an expedition leader on a small ship expedition cruise line. Think 100 guests, remote locations and extreme environments. I manage a team of 12 to 15 naturalist guides from all over the world as we deliver life-changing natural and cultural experiences each and every day. The challenge? The team is different every voyage. A few guides rotate on and off each trip about every two weeks. I've got very little time to build trust and cohesion before we're managing complex logistics and delivering amazing guest experiences together in a pretty intense setting. Teamwork is the magic sauce, of course, but everything I read about fostering great teams all call for one main ingredient that I just don't have: time. Do you have any insights on creating fast, meaningful team connection in a high turnover, high stakes environment? Thanks so much for all you do. 

Frances Frei: I often wonder if our podcast is successful. Yes, because somebody called in from Antarctica. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, it's gonna be my favorite new metric. Uh, how far away are you when you ask for our help? Um, so Frances, you have a colleague, we have a dear friend, Amy Edmondson, who coined the term teaming, which is a description of exactly what this Fixer has articulated.

Frances Frei: Teaming is when you're getting a team up and running fast, it's coming together for this thing and then it's gonna disband after this thing, and then you'll come together in another teaming environment. And Amy says that we are increasingly in teaming environments. 

Anne Morriss: Even when we're not, uh, leading Arctic expeditions.

Frances Frei: Even when we're not leading Arctic expeditions. 

Anne Morriss: This increasingly defines the work environment that the rest of us are navigating as well. 

Frances Frei: And so the way I think about it is, how do you get up and running fast? Like what are the key considerations? And so I'll give a few of those to start us off, but we have to be more explicit about everything. More explicit and more deliberate. Because we don't have, as our caller said, time. So we need to articulate the clarity of purpose. Why are we coming together, what's the shared goal and what does success look like, in the first three minutes of doing it. Like this has to be crystal clear. We also don't have the time to let roles evolve. So who is doing what? Who has the decision rights? You can pour liquid cement on that right up front. We have to create an environment that she would call psychologically safe, which means that people are willing to say the quiet parts out loud. And to create an environment where it feels safe to say the things we agree with and the things we disagree with.

As a leader, we have to role model that. So one, we have to seek it out. So when we say Here's what we're gonna do, it's very helpful for the leader to say, am I missing something? We wanna purposely and explicitly early on ask for alternate points of view. Ask what we're missing. When we do a debrief, at the end of the day, we wanna talk about what went well. We wanna talk about what didn't go well. So the seeds I would plant are make sure that you are really intentional about people experiencing your authenticity and your logic and your empathy. Trust will naturally follow. Needn't take a long time, but it does require those three ingredients. And so I think in the meantime it's really important for our expedition leader to, whoever he is, to be beautifully him. To be super transparent about the rigorous logic he's using and to make it super clear that it's not just the guests that are at the center of all of his beautiful calculus, but so are the team members. They are also at the center of the beautiful calculus that he's doing.

The final thing I will say is that we wanna have rapid onboarding processes.

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm.

Frances Frei: So, while it's a different team every time, it's not a different role every time. And so I would work on the one page sheet, the three minute video. I would work on really beautiful, tight onboarding collateral that people can digest and people learn in different ways, but that they can have, so that they can get up to speed.

Anne Morriss: Yeah. That's one of the places where my head went too. So the people are changing, but what is staying the same in this situation? And I think roles is a beautiful example. As you know, I started my career in an organization called Amigos. It was a mini Peace Corps, spent a lot of time in, in rural Latin America. It was a teaming environment, so teams would come together and disband all the time. There were very clear protocols around everything that made it easy for the humans to switch out on a regular basis. So one of 'em was very clear role definition. Which you just articulated. Another one, which was included in your initial list, I thought was beautiful, was very clear rules around conflict, which is the theme of today's conversation. But this is what you do when you disagree, and here are the habits of conflict resolution, which include a weekly meeting where we discuss the undiscussable. And we were trained in how to do that even we were, everyone was very young in this environment. It was actually quite shocking for me to go out into other organizations where the rules of conflict resolution were not defined. And then when speed is one of the issues as it is for our caller here, what we know is that the absence of conflict resolution slows things way down.

Frances Frei: And leads to mediocrity.

Anne Morriss: And leads to all of these other byproducts that we don't like. So the thing I would add to that list is what else stays the same? And can we codify those things? Can we ritualize them? Can we document them? Can we send them out in advance so everyone knows what they are doing and what everybody else is doing on this team before they even step off whatever godforsaken vehicle or plane or helicopter they're stepping off to come do this job? And then let's really map out the rules of engagement, particularly around conflict. So when things go wrong, what do we do? And when disagreements between us arise, how do we work through them? What's the game plan?

All of this, we can work out in advance and we can use these same rules of engagement for all of the new humans that come in. This can be stable. 

Frances Frei: Yeah. And I would add to your list, and when there aren't enough disagreements, what do we do? Because that means people are holding it back. And that we're not high enough on the psychological safety for people to actually articulate them. So what do you do to harness all of this? But it's no new problems, it's just new specifics of it. And so put in place lots of structure. And I think the last thing as you were talking I didn't realize is we probably want communication norms as well. So maybe a daily standup, an email at the end of the day. We use Slack, we use whatever it is. I don't think it much matters what it is, as much as it does matter that it is ritualized as this is the way that we communicate. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. And then what I wanna emphasize is you don't have time for these norms to be absorbed the way they're typically done on teams. You have to document. So my big message is document, document, document, document, document. Send it all out in advance, right? Send all of these materials out in advance and so people really have a running start on the rules of engagement when they get there. 

Frances Frei: And an intact team might end up deciding, well, how do we wanna communicate with each other? Not the teaming. 

Anne Morriss: No, no. You're the decider.

Frances Frei: You're the decider.

Anne Morriss: And you've earned it because you have the pattern recognition of countless other Arctic expeditions. 

Frances Frei: And what I hope you do from expedition to expedition is have a feedback loop of what went well, and then you can incorporate that into your future best practices going forward. In fact, I would have a debrief at the end of each expedition, the sole purpose of which is to learn to help prepare you for the next team.

Anne Morriss: Frances, our next question comes from a Fixer who wants to bring a devil's advocate to meetings, both literally and figuratively.

Frances Frei: Ooh. 

Caller 2: Hey, this is Mark from Portland, Oregon. I'm a project manager and I lead interdisciplinary teams working to solve challenging problems in the public interest. Several years ago, I came across an idea to assign a team member to be a designated " devil's advocate" at some team meetings as a way to encourage differing opinions and spark critical thinking among the team. I really liked the idea and immediately went online and bought a small devil doll that I could hand to an assigned devil's advocate during the meetings. It's been sitting on my desk ever since. But after listening to your podcast about how to help your team manage change, I got to thinking that maybe it was time to dust off the devil and give it a shot. My question is, do you think this will be an effective way to challenge the team to think critically and reduce the risk of falling into groupthink, or are there other better methods you would recommend? Love your show. Thanks so much. 

Anne Morriss: Oh, I love this question.

Frances Frei: Oh!

Anne Morriss: Um, Frances, what do you think? 

Frances Frei: Well, all aspects of the idea are great. So one, it's a really good idea to assign a devil's advocate because otherwise one person on the team is gonna become that guy. They're just gonna think they're the devil's advocate, and they're gonna do it all the time. And then that's gonna only bring out like a two dimensional caricature of them. And they're not gonna have enough peripheral vision to do it. So assigning a devil's advocate, and it's a rotating and honored position, and then you can talk after having meetings, how are we doing as Devil's Advocates? Or a Devil Advocates? I don't know if it's Attorneys General. I don't know. I don't know how to do the plural.

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm.

Frances Frei: Alright. Um, so I, and we can have feedback on how well that's going. We can ask people, have the Devils Advocate been helpful to you?

Anne Morriss: I love it as a rotating position. Like let's not just give it to the person who, who relishes the job. 

Frances Frei: No. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. Because you're gonna get really different engagement.

Frances Frei: And we need that person to not become a narrower and narrower version of themself. And so everyone doing it, and then you can watch other people do it, and you can learn from their doing it. So I love it. The idea of a devil doll, I love them having something. And then I think one of the things you can say to the team is, here is the first attempt, but I'm not wed to this. Anyone who wants to bring in a replacement to the devil's advocate, can. You can bring in your own version. 

Anne Morriss: Oh, why are we replacing? This is a gorgeous artifact.

Frances Frei: Okay, but...

Anne Morriss: This is a gorgeous artifact. 

Frances Frei: Okay. But let me just explain something to our listeners. This, let me just explain the disagreement that Anne and I have.

So if you come to our home, half of the art is terrifying and half of the art is beautiful. And the terrifying, well, all of the art comes from Anne, but she's got like an angel devil thing going on, quite literally. And she loves scary art. Frances doesn't, she gets very sad from scary art. So yes, you think the devil is gorgeous. Yes, you do. And I know that 'cause there are some rooms in our house I don't go into because they're too scary. Anyway, just wanted to give context. I'll let the listeners decide. 

Anne Morriss: Okay, so for the Franceses on your team, you may need to, to send them an object that is less provocative. Uh, but I, I love it, you know, n of one. I love it. I think it's a very powerful, visceral reminder that this is a really important job that this team has to somehow accomplish and it's shared. It's a, it's a collective responsibility.

Frances Frei: It's not the devil's work.

Anne Morriss: So, but you may wanna, depending on the sensitivity of your team members, you may wanna do it with different objects and that's perfectly reasonable experimentation to do.

There was a question that our caller asked around is this, is it harder to do in a remote environment? I think for this question, for this particular...

Frances Frei: I think it's easier.

Anne Morriss: It, it may be easier.

Frances Frei: Yeah.

Anne Morriss: And so yes, you may have to buy more than one object, right, and send it around to everyone. 

Frances Frei: You could put, you could put an icon on there, but here's why it's easier, because usually when you're in the room you can only speak in a physical room, but when you're on Zoom, you can speak and use chat.

Anne Morriss: Yeah.

Frances Frei: And so you automatically have two dimensions, and that's just, gives you more tools at your disposal. 

Anne Morriss: So Frances, what else can teams do to promote this kind of dialogue and this culture of curiosity, this foundation of psychological safety, where it's not just okay to speak up, it's our obligation to speak up.

Frances Frei: Yeah. So you know, we often recommend, does someone have an alternate point of view? But a devil's advocate would take that one step further and go after what are the implicit assumptions that we're making? So it's not even an alternate point of view. It's going, it's climbing further down the ladder of inference from the great Chris Argeris. So if our assumptions are that the market is gonna remain stable, that's what it all sounds like. The devil's advocate would be, what if the market is not stable? 

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm. 

Frances Frei: So it's really, you have license to ask much more fundamental questions than surfacing all of the disparate ideas. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. It's sometimes called red teaming inside organizations. And we could not be more enthusiastic.

Frances Frei: We could not be.

Anne Morriss: About ritualizing this and formalizing it in some way and making it clear to the team that this is a very critical step to improving our decision quality. 

Frances Frei: And we want people to spark joy as they're using it. Like, we want it to feel good. You wanna make sure you thank, lavish the devil's advocate for what they did well during the meeting. If you have feedback for what they can do differently, you can save that. But in the beginning, lavish, 'cause it's gonna be a new behavior for people and we wanna begin to make it contagious. It's a great idea.

Anne Morriss: Alright. Our final question focuses on what to do when you're stuck in the middle of a conflict between senior leadership on one side and more junior employees on the other side, and you don't have any formal decision rights. I'm gonna read the email. I'm gonna try to do a dramatic, dramatic reading, interpretive reading, which is my favorite thing to do.

I'm a product manager at a video game company, and I've recently transferred into our central technology department. We make software solutions that the game teams at the company can use to solve common problems like processing payments or having leaderboards. I've been put in charge of a newish product that management is very gung-ho about, but the games teams don't really want. I think there was a certain amount of product market fit due diligence that wasn't done when the product was originally designed before I came on. There are also issues with top-down culture. Nevertheless, I'm in charge now and I'm struggling to get customers. I have tried to adjust the strategy in response to feedback from the game teams, but I've yet to be successful. I feel like my job performance is being graded on my ability to convince people to take up this product that they don't really want, and I'm not sure what to do. What I'm looking for is some advice on how to navigate this situation, whether it's strategies for being more persuasive, trying to convince senior leadership to cut our losses, or I guess continuing to struggle and stop caring that I'm not successful.

As painful as this is, I think it's an awesome opportunity to develop skills that will be useful to this Fixer for the rest of their career. Because she has to both influence informally without decision rights about people who have more power than she has, and also people who have less power than she has. And those are two really big categories of what work actually feels like. So where I go first on this one is a campaign to bring senior leaders along on what's not working with their internal team. So very thoughtfully, get a lot of clarity around what the original product was trying to solve. What were we trying to do here? And essentially treat it actually, energetically, in the way she communicates, like a great V1 of an experiment. And the point of experiments is to try something, see what happens next, learn from it. And so where I would push her if we were coaching her is to, okay, what is this? Create a structured process around learning from it and then find a way to bring that data back to senior leadership and come back and say, we agree with the diagnosis here, and here's how we're doing on the prescription. And then, hey, what, adult to adult, let's figure out together what our next steps are. 

Frances Frei: Yeah. I, what I love about the opportunity is I'm glad she doesn't have decision rights or persuasive, because she will have to learn how to be persuasive. And the things to be persuasive are, is exactly how you said energetically learning with curiosity and data. Right? Those are the magic words. So you wanna make sure you increase the metabolic rate. 'Cause when people are like dragging their feet, I can just feel how slowly this thing is going and it's gonna make everybody crazy. So we're gonna have a fast cycle time. But restating what the problem is, make sure you're stating it in a way that all sides agree with it. Show what has the early data. And so that can be a chart. That was the dotted line is what we were expecting that was going up. And the solid line is what's happening and it's going down. What's a pivot that you did? Was there a change? What's another pivot that you did? Because what your ideal is that, not that people agree with that, whatever your interpretation is, that people agree that we are pivots away.

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm.

Frances Frei: Because if we can get everybody into a pivoting mindset, we're gonna get there. It's just a matter of when. So I love increasing the metabolic rate, learning, curiosity, data, and as always, if you understand something deeply, you can describe it simply. And I think with one sheet of paper, not a lot of words, but charts that show how things are going so that you are not delivering bad news. You're objectively showing this is how it's going, here are ideas for pivots. You can get different people to weigh in, but you just wanna remove the liquid cement that it sounds like the senior leadership team has poured onto the solution. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, I get the sense that our, uh, our, our Fixer here is an empathy anchor. Empathy is helpful in the workplace. You will hear us talk about it all the time. It's one of the essential pillars, but it can also get in our way, uh, in the sense that we can over index on the signals in our environment and which can slow us down, even lead to paralysis in taking action. So she's very aware, as she reveals in this email, that she, she sees the politics of the situation, she sees the kind of passive aggression of the games team. She's reading this top-down culture that's not playing well with a lot in the organization. That's also, that's helpful data. I also want coach her to move that data to the side.

Frances Frei: Yeah. To be able to ignore it a little bit.

Anne Morriss: And, and ignore it a little bit and move through this at, with this competent adult to adult energy, both with the games team. Like, okay, you know, this solution isn't working for you, so, like, let's talk about it. What, what's not working? I'm gonna document it. I'm gonna bring this feedback back to the other teams in this organization who are trying to set you up for success. So you don't like what they're building? Great. Let's make something better together. And I think it is an opportunity to, to, to have leadership impact in all of these different ways. And that's one of 'em. So let's get the data and now let's come back to my senior leaders and not tell them what they wanna hear, which is a fundamentally kind of child to adult response. But let's have an adult to adult conversation about, okay, you tried something. I understand you're invested in it, fantastic. You know, you were trying to solve an important problem, and here's how it's going. Those are the muscles that are available to her to build in this situation. These are gonna be so helpful to her in anything else she does at work going forward. 

Frances Frei: And increasing the metabolic rate is going to be your friend, even if it's not welcomed.

Anne Morriss: Yeah. So factor speed into all of this.

Frances Frei: All of it.

Anne Morriss: Don't go slow.

Frances Frei: No.

Anne Morriss: Uh, be, you know, out of respect for people. Let's go fast and see what happens here. Yeah, I think that's exactly the right move.

All right, that's our show. Thank you everyone for listening to this episode. Your participation helps us make great episodes, so please keep reaching out. If you wanna figure out a workplace problem together, send us a message. Email, call, text us at fixable@ted.com or 234-FIXABLE, which is 234-349-2253. Frances, tell them how much we like your messages.

Frances Frei: We like your messages so much.

Anne Morriss: Fixable is a podcast from TED. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.

Frances Frei: And me, Frances Frei.

Anne Morriss: This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Daniella Balarezo, and Roxanne Hai Lash.

Frances Frei: And our show was mixed by Louis at Story Yard.