Team Gestalt and the 5 Dysfunctions

Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (here's the GetAbstract abstracted version) describes five Maslow-like pyramid levels of dysfunction of a team, from most basic to highest order: Trust, Fear of Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results.

To build a strong team, a good leader needs to bring counterpoints to each of these dysfunctions and build a culture that allows the team to bond and Gestalt, or become greater than the sum of the parts.

Management Zen Experienced During Television Production
My first career was in television production.  Multi-camera studio shoots.  When the noon news went live, our cameras were up and going, whether we were ready or not.  Every production was an opportunity to Gestalt--become more than just the production plan.  Every nerve was firing and everyone's senses were on high alert.

The productions that went without a flaw received many kudos, but the productions where we had to deal with unforseen circumstances in some brilliant way--if we got out of them with flying colors--we celebrated.  It was those productions, when we were up against the clock, in adverse conditions, where something unexpected happened, where we really came together to create miracles.

If daily you have an opportunity to enter that Gestalt state, where everything is clicking at an optimal level, then you know how to recognize what the feeling is and what you're trying to get back to.  Conversely, if you deal with long development cycles where you only enter do-or-die mode every 18 months or so--then chances are you have felt the Gestalt state, but it has been so few and far between that you don't remember it.

I assert that we, as Leaders of teams, should be focusing on how to bring our teams into that Gestalt state as often as possible.  It doesn't mean you need to manufacture fire drills, but it does mean you need to get the team exercising the "end game" skills more often than just the end game.  The more opportunities for flexing the muscles that can bind the team together and make them click--the more times it'll actually happen.

Gestalt and the Five Dysfunctions
To bring your team to a place where they can Gestalt requires a solid foundation that the team operates on.  This is where the five dysfunctions serve as good milestones on the path toward a Gestalt state.

Trust
The first level of dysfunction is around trust.  James Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of The Leadership Challenge (GetAbstract version), a seminal book on the five fundamentals of great leaders, write: "In almost every survey we've conducted, honesty [...] emerges as the single most important factor in the leader-constituent relationship." (p.32).

One of the outward manifestations of trust is the perception of a leader's honesty.  If a leader is exhibiting traits of honesty: genuineness, authenticity, and vulnerability, then the individuals interacting with that leader will report greater trust of that individual and their decisions.

Actions you can take: Repeated trustworthy behavior motivates.  Act in ways that are consistent with your ethical values; leaders go first, so be the first in on a risky item or controversial topic; show some vulnerability, and invite others to do so by example.  Then wash, rinse, repeat.

Fear of Conflict
The second level of dysfunction, once you get past trust, is calling bullshit.  You have to build a team ready to engage in constructive discord--a team willing to challenge each other in a way that is healthy and brings you to better solutions because you've identified pitfalls.

The problems people express today are the land mines you may hit on the road tomorrow.  Treat them seriously and engage the whole team in moving from acting like a patient--ouch, doctor, it hurts when I do that--to walking into your office as the doctor: "Here are the problems we've identified, and here are some ideas for how they could be resolved."

Conflict should be embraced courageously.  Meet it head on when it appears, with no after-the-fact passive-aggressiveness.  It also means giving personal feedback in private--some conflicts are inappropriate to air in front of the entire group.

Actions you can take: When your next big controversial issue comes up, don't shirk it, call it out right away and then reframe the problem in a positive context.  Instead of "Those designers are giving us horrible designs!" reframe and ask, "How can we be more clear about our customer needs and requirements?  How can we own this problem together as a team instead of making it an us versus them?"

Commitment
Lack of clarity or buy-in prevents decisions from sticking, because individuals aren't clear on what is specifically being required of them.

Steve Roesler's edited version of the Tannenbaum and Schmidt leadership decision-making model: tell/sell/test/consult/join, is a useful approach to assuring commitment.

First, start with the actual perspective of the manager, yourself, who is coming to the team with an issue to resolve.  Then ask yourself where on the Tannenbaum/Schmidt model you can approach the team.  If you have an issue that the team truly has the ability to consider and not act on, then you can bring it to them as a join decision--where they can choose to take it on or not.  If you have an issue that they must take on, that's a tell.

I've observed this doesn't work: managers approach the team with a consult, but then devolve to a sell, and then further to a tell.  Those conversations leave most demotivated, with no clear commitment.

It's always better to sit down and make it clear exactly where you're at with an issue, "Hey folks, this is a tell right from the top, so get your gripes out now and then let's turn to discussing how to deal with this the most productively."

Actions you can take: Be candid, and honest, when an issue must be addressed, and call it that right away and move forward from there.  Look for other issues that truly are flexible and make sure to be clear to the team, "Hey, here's an issue we really can treat like a consult or a join..."  Otherwise, if you only ever call out your tells, your team may feel like those are the only times you're clear with communicating the priority and commitment level required for an issue.

Accountability
Four questions drive accountability: What are we accountable for?  Who is accountable?  To whom are they accountable?  And what are the consequences?  Some answers get us above the line--being accountable for results not just activities; understanding that delegating responsibility doesn't absolve us from accountability; being accountable first to ourselves, our ethics, our morals, then wrangling the other stakeholders; and delivering consequences that are in-line with the behaviors we want to incent.

Below-the-line behavior is blame and excuses.  The focus needs to be on results.

As individuals move up and master the art of delegation, a false assumption is that delegated activity then transfers accountability.  Ultimately, the individual made responsible for something is accountable to you, and you are accountable for the task as it was given to you by your boss.  Two different parties holding parties below them accountable, usually with different expectations.

Actions you can take: When trying to gain commitment of the team, be clear and use explicit language on who is accountable for what and to whom.  Then discuss what consequences will result from which outcomes, both positive and negative.  Encourage a team culture where individuals feel safe to step-up and take accountability for results, especially mistakes, and then make sure you follow-up to do the same for positive results, too.

Results
An individuals' career is ultimately their responsibility.  In the pursuit of advancing their status, it may erode the focus on collective results.  Ultimately, the team wins or loses together.  Having measurements and metrics that are focused (ex. 3 top issues, not 20) keeps the team clear on what results are expected.

In one of my first companies, I made the newbie management mistake of allowing every individual to work on their own pet projects, thinking each one could potentially be a goldmine.  Meanwhile, our only product that was out the door and making money was floundering due to sales leads that were going unattended to.  Having clear success measurements for results around the product and its sales, and holding the entire team accountable for that specific success, would have assured that all individuals would have turned their attention to the top priority and we would have had drastically better results.

Actions you can take: Whenever you have an assignment, specifically ask, "What will success look like here?  And how will we measure it?"  And have a board, even if its just a white board in the hallway, where you write the success measurement and its current status.  (Ie. Number of widgets upgraded: 1,000).

Finding Your Gestalt State
Once you've climbed and overcome the Five Dysfunctions of a Team pyramid, you're now in an optimal place for the team to reach their Gestalt state.  It will be brief interludes where you will really feel like everything's aligned, clicking, and you're meeting deadlines with flying colors.  Watch for it, see if you can call it out when it happens, and try to internalize what it looks like, and feels like, so you can encourage everyone to try to find that state again.  It's fleeting and impressive.  It will often happen when you end up with an emergency or hot issue that will require you to scramble.

Using transparent, open communication, with clear decision making and accountability, will get you to solving the problems ahead with greater alignment and quality of work--because you'll be able to spend more time on satisfying the customer need and less time on fixing team dynamics.

###

CodeHawgs

Originally written: Mon 28 Apr 2003
From: Andrew Coven
Subject: The origin of CodeHawgs

I was asked for some graphics and background of CodeHawgs. I thought I'd include a few more of you so you could take a break from your hectic lives and enjoy a fun historical moment.

Back in 1997 when InDesign 1.0 and its SDK were under construction, we thought it would be clever to come up with a fictional company that you could follow their pursuits as they tried to create a set of plug-ins to help a client integrate their workflow with InDesign.

The original name was CodeDawgs, a fun play on words, since "Who let the dogs out?" was often slurred "Who let the dawgs out?" and was still a popular song. It also was sort of fun to think we're "tearing up code like frothing dogs." Kind of some nice high-throughput connotation. We liked it. We were, after all, geeks, with low humor thresholds.

So I engaged my friend Elena on the Photoshop QE team to do a mockup of a dog for the logo.

See "01_Dog.jpg", attached.

We started legal on the trademark search to make sure we weren't completely stepping on someone.

In the meantime, we came up with a funny slogan, "Our code smells like roses!"

Well, this was particularly funny to us geeks with that kinda humor, because the original insult is, "You think you're so good, that your poop smells like roses?" So the phrase "Our code smells like roses!" was a cute play on words to indicate we didn't take ourselves too seriously, since of course our code was going to be crappy sometimes and we never would think we're pristine code writers and could learn nothing from our external developers.

A humility I hope carries through the group to this day.

So I asked Elena to do a mockup of the dog taking a dump and pooping out code, perhaps 0's and 1's? She was confused, she didn't understand what I wanted to see. So I explained to her, "Make it like the 'No bullshit!' bumper sticker!"

"Huh?" she said. "What's that?"

"You know, a bull taking a dump with an international 'NO' sign over it?"

"Huh?" she said again, "Show me!"

She hadn't seen one before, so I quickly drew one up in Photoshop and sent it to her.

See "02_NoBS.jpg", attached.

Once she saw that, she understood. And the poopin dog was born.

See "03_PoopinDog.jpg", attached.

You'll note, she hadn't yet gotten the memo on the trademark (tm) symbol. More on that below.

Legal then got back to me with the inital results of the trademark search. Bad news. There was a software consortium in Cupertino called "CodeDogs", and trademark law indicates spoken similarities are just as important, conflict-wise, as written similarities. So the argument that CodeDawgs was distinct from CodeDogs completely falls apart when spoken. And a software consortium certainly is in the same venue as a software application development company.

So then we talked and came up with a clever alteration--CodeHawgs! Even funnier, because it suggests we're hogging all the code! Again, a play on our, of course, humbler side.

We're nothing, if not humble.

Trademark searches on CodeHawgs came up in the clear. We were good to go! Although, the legal searches always ended with an interesting caveat: Do NOT use (tm) after any "CodeHawgs" icon or name listing. Why? Because, while we didn't want to conflict with any known trademark, there was no one in their right mind that was going to PAY the USD$7,000 to trademark it. I mean, we had budget, but not THAT much budget. It wasn't THAT important.

We DID however grab www.codehawgs.com and www.codehawgs.org. I had hoped that someday we would be able to publish sample code and integration suggestions on a very special, fun section of our adobe web site (such as partners.adobe.com/indesign/sdk/codehawgs or something like that) that the www.codehawgs.com/.org domains would redirect to.

If you do a whois on codehawgs.com you'll see its still owned by Adobe. Unused, but we still got it.

While they checked the trademark on "CodeHawgs" I asked them to also include the check for "Our code smells like roses!" They did find a few "smells like roses" references, but never related to computers--another green light! Again, we didn't care enough to actually pay the money to trademark it, so we can't use "Our code smells like roses!"(tm), but we can use it--good enough.

Back to the drawing board Elena went, converting the poopin dog to a poopin pig, with our fancy approved slogan.

See "04_PoopinPig.jpg", attached.

Note the removal of the (tm)'s.

Our current director, being a geek at heart, got a great chuckle out of the whole thing as he amassed the correct budget to put this stuff on hats and jackets (which took over a year. See final note below.) In a moment of clarity, he said to me, "Andy, why don't you run this logo by HR before we imprint it on anything?"

"HR? Why would we need to run anything by HR?" I asked.

"Just do it, just to cross all our t's, dot all our i's."

"Ohh, all right."

Off to HR I went, sending the details of the fictional company and logo and the graphic for, what I thought for sure would undoubtedly be a flippant, quick, dismissive-like approval.

After the HR person was done being completely flabbergasted, and explained to me how engineers aren't allowed to do marketing FOR A REASON, she concluded with the final nail-in-the-coffin remark:

"Scatalogical humor is NEVER appropriate at ANY company."

Hmm. Maybe she just didn't get it?

Dismissed with a sound, spanking-like rejection, we pondered, "Now what do we do?" Fortunately, the movie The Matrix had just come out and we were quite smitten with it.

Of course! NeoPig! A stroke of genious.

An e-mail and a phone call to Elena, and slap that baby over a green background, to simulate how it'll look on the jackets, and the CodeHawg was truly born.

See "05_MatrixPig.jpg", attached.

I've also included the final of the back-jacket art, symbolizing the arduous mountain-climbing-like task it was to get InDesign 1.0 out the door. Elena and I chose to make the person explicitly gender-neutral so that it could be perceived as a male or female, since this was a multi-gender, multi-cultural accomplishment.

See "06_Mountain.jpg", attached.

The final note, the jackets, at $300/piece, were the last expensive "Shipping gifts" ever given out by Adobe. Right after we got those, the official "Shipping gifts policy" became $25 per person.

It took exactly 1.25 years, from the moment I started politicking to get the hats and jackets into the budget, to the day the team received these awards with Thank You notes from John and Chuck.

And now you know The Rest Of The Story.

...A

IVF

It's difficult to know how to support friends as they go through IVF. We tried for two years to have children, then did three years of IVF and were successful and have beautiful twins, Jonah and Abigail, as a result of our fertility struggles. Here's a list of what I've recommended to a friend when they contemplated IVF, as well as some of my notes about it.

Go to the presentation
Any clinic you go to gives regular presentations of this on a weeknight to describe what the process is that they do and how it works and what the language is.  If you haven't yet, you should go to one of these presentations, even if its to a local clinic that you may not do business with.  We went to one local presentation but then went with a different clinic based on rankings and our OB/GYN's recommendation.

Live vs. Frozen cycles
Live cycle means growing a bunch of eggs in the woman's ovaries and then harvesting them out, combining them with the man's swimmers, and then either re-implanting or freezing all the good embryos.  The average is 8-12 good ones from this process.  People with low counts could go as low as 2-6, and people with high counts, can have 30+.  You don't want to be one of those.  You want to be average here.  Because, if you're lucky, there's one good egg in the whole batch.  So more isn't better, it means more trials to get to the good one.  Because initially you'll only put one back in.  Then if that doesn't work you'll try two.  Then maybe three or four.  When you freeze then thaw and reimplant later, those will be called "frozen cycles."  Your body is hormonally controlled to go through the entire same cycle except no egg production.  Then when it's at the right point the embryos are introduced and the hold your breath waiting game and HCL monitoring begins.  It's unfortunately more stressful because you've now paid a bunch of money to get to this point and it still may fail.

Live cycles are 1.0 cycles.  Frozen cycles are 0.1 cycles.  So you do a live cycle, that's 1.0.  Then, if you've frozen some embryos, when you thaw and implant those, that would be your 1.1, 1.2, etc. cycles.  Then when you do another live cycle, that's a 2.0 cycle.  So a 3-pack would be three LIVE cycles, with however many frozen cycles that ends up containing.  When they tell you that statistically if it doesn't happen by the fourth trial it isn't going to, they're talking about the fourth live cycle with an average success rate of about 25% per live cycle.

Our three year journey included 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, then 2.0, 2.1., then 3.0.  Each time we implanted more and took other additional "filtering" steps that try to get you to the heartiest embryos.  As a basic rule, the stronger the embryo, the more likely it will survive the thaw process, the more likely it is to result in a live birth.

This is how I wished my friends talked to me when we went through this:
You're allowed to be blue.

You're allowed to be thankful for your blessings yet still resentful of your losses.

You are officially given permission to be judgmental and pissed off at the parents who did it accidentally, easily, too young, and don't know the preciousness of what they have.

It's okay to be freaked out and worried.  I'd be concerned if you weren't!  You just went from an intimate act to enlisting an army of people to probe yours and your husbands crotches constantly!  Invasive and ego bruising.

No one's perfect.  We all have different parts that break down and age--the definition of normal is "average working order for most parts with a few of them functioning oddly but just barely within tolerance."

It's very likely the main problem is "egg quality."  It will be impossible for you to not take it personally, but try your best to remember that you just need to keep trying until one strong one survives.

Avoid the shoulda-coulda-wouldas--look forward, not back.

Or, beat yourself up that you waited til you were 40, didn't save enough, didn't leave your legs straight up long enough after the transfer, did too much strenuous exercise after, ..., and realize that beating yourself up doesn't make this easier so stop doing it.

The IVF doctors often don't mention this: the fact that you've gotten pregnant more than once via IVF means you have already beaten the odds and now you just have to wash-rinse-repeat until a good egg sticks around.

Take a day to mourn your loss with your partner when a miscarriage is pronounced.  Let yourselves embrace the loss, acknowledge it, then share your hopes and dreams and reasons for continuing. We did a ritual where we burned the ultrasound images and let ourselves cry together before talking about how--and if--we'll try again.

Remember that we guys act strong for our women but we too are experiencing loss too, and we may or may not be able to talk about it like you can.

If you need a day away from other kids or seeing newborns give yourself permission to say no to those things.  When we had a failure we had a rough time hanging out with others' little ones for a couple weeks after.

You can't speed up the waiting between a failure and your next attempt--your body has to go back to its natural rhythm and cycle.  This is where it starts to really drag out the timeline and the waiting is often the hardest part.

Money inevitably becomes a tangible factor in how many times you'll try so ask about three packs and other ways to make as many attempts as you can as you're comfortable with.

Know this, whether it happens via IVF, adoption, or other means: this new child is out there waiting for you with so much love to give and so ready and delighted to receive all the love you have.

Be patient.  With yourself.  With each other.  Give yourselves permission to be in this for all it is.

###

Management Credo

A few years ago I completed an MBA from Santa Clara University's Executive Program. I had a great time and felt like the education I got was top notch, especially with it fitting into my very busy schedule of rebuilding my house (see previous post) and working full-time shipping Photoshop.

Dean Barry Posner, co-creator of the seminal Business Leadership book The Leadership Challenge was our Professor for the Leadership module, which was administered throughout the program as bookends at the beginning and end and then different assignments that were layered on top of the core curriculum over the 17 months the program progressed.

The "You've Been Called Away" Letter
One of the assignments was to write up a letter to the other leaders in your organization as if we were going to be out for some long but indeterminate amount of time. (A-la "I've been called away, I won't be back for 7-8 months, while I'm out, remember to...") One of Dean Posner's points was that you're not going to tell people, "Remember to fix bug 1112233.'  It's more like a eulogy; instead you're going to want to tell people large overarching values to go by.  So that they could channel you ("What would Andrew do?") while you're gone.

The "Expectations of a Manager" List
This assignment fit well with another thing I had done for a long time, which is produce a set of expectations for any new direct report of mine. I had two 30-bullet handouts, one titled, "My expectations of an admin" and the other titled, "My expectations of a manager." They each had simple rules such as, "Come to me early to renegotiate deadlines the moment you realize they won't be met" and "Present all your issues to me in the form of solutions that you've been pondering for the problems you're facing--don't just come to me with a gripe list."

This list was adopted from my first director at Adobe, Tracey Stewart. She was one of the exceptional people that influenced my career early on. One of her greatest lessons for me was when she reminded me that she preferred having people in positions they were positively challenged by than doing work they were great at but bored by. That resonates still today for me.

My re-crafted form of Tracey's "Expectations" list still lives on today. Adobe HR took a copy and created their own generic version that is given to all new managers to use for themselves and their directs.

I put Stewart's concept together with Posner's, and added one additional fundamental perspective. A question I challenge all manager's should be able to answer when the CEO asks them in the elevator ride up from the lobby to the 17th floor:

What's Your Management Philosophy?
Any manager should have a handful of descriptions that explain how they make decisions about their job and their conduct. "I believe in an inverted pyramid, where we all stand on each other's shoulders." "If I'm doing my job right, at least two people should be cursing my name because I'm unflinchingly demanding our peers meet our deadlines." Those sorts of things.

Management Credo
Combining all these elements results in what I call a "Management Credo". Like Posner, it's far-thinking and focused on my beliefs around leadership philosophies; like Stewart, it's a bullet-like list of my expectations both of ourselves and others; and like the management philosophy question, it's a group of elevator-conversation points that speak to who I am as a manager and a leader. Feel free to liberally steal, or comment on how this matches or mis-matches your own thoughts on leadership.

ANDREW COVEN'S MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY
Stand on the shoulders of giants.
Management is the bottom of an inverted triangle. We create the foundation that allows others to soar. Together we reach higher than we ever would alone.

Quality first.
Quality is the number one priority: Quality of life and quality of product. Quality trumps schedule, which trumps feature set.

To teach is to lead.
One of our company's core values--leadership can occur at all levels of the organization--is exhibited when you share, coach, teach, train, and mentor.

Be the teacher everyone loved but gave really hard tests.
Demand excellence from yourself, our colleagues, and our partners. Keep the bar high.

We are ethnographers, forensic scientists, and detectives.
Observe our customers and solve the mystery of what they really need with solutions that are elegant and thorough, fixing problems they did not know they had.

Leave it better than you found it.
Document complexities; re-factor spaghetti; clarify obscurities; clean up after yourself. It is good for the Earth and the product.

Walk into this office as the doctor, not the patient.
You have the power to fix problems. First identify where it hurts, then come discuss your solutions, no matter how controversial. Constructive discord is welcome here.

You are the company's greatest asset.
My greatest challenge is, and always will be, how to show you how valued you are--by me, our business unit, and the company.

Your ears should be ringing.
Whenever I am away I always tell others about what incredible people you are, and how lucky I am to work with you.

Have fun.
Smile a lot, and laugh even more.

…A
v9 4-Oct-2010

Home rebuild and transformation

Many friends have asked how the rebuild/remodel of our home has gone. As of April 2, 2008, we officially moved back into our house after over two years of planning and then construction. Specifically, we bulldozed the house in October, 2007, but we had started with our architect a little over a year before that. This home took us over two years to plan and construct. We worked with Bob Bryant of Flury Bryant Design for over a year. We then used DeMattei Construction to build our beautiful home. And it has taken a tremendous attention to detail to get there.

The house actually started like this:

We bought it from the grandchildren of the original builder, which we believe was a tailor by trade, but when all his friends were building houses he figured he should build one like theirs, too. They tell a story about the last time he came to visit them at the house before they sold it, he said to them as he crossed the threshold, "This thing's still standing???"

And then after a couple years of planning and work became this:


We were selected to be peek of the week at lookiloos--they've got a great story there under "Craftsman in Los Gatos".

I'll try to post some before-after specifics in subsequent entries.

Applied Media Aesthetics

Herbert Zettl, the creator of Sight Sound Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics once gave me a tremendous compliment. At the end of a talk I had created on Virtual Reality, he mentioned that I was one of the few people he's interacted with in his entire time representing new media and new television technology that could take very complicated concepts and present them in a very reasonable, palatable manner.

I remember this compliment fondly as I launch this blog to discuss my thoughts on new media and the world of multimedia we now live in.