#79: Powerful Team Habits

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading and managing and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Charlie Gilkey, a business author, speaker, coach, and entrepreneur specializing in leadership, teamwork, and productivity. Charlie has advised hundreds of teams from Fortune 100 companies to tiny nonprofits through productive flourishing, the coaching and training company he founded. Charlie is the author of the critically acclaimed Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done. He is also a former Army logistics officer. Today, we're going to be focusing on Charlie's new book, Team Habits: How Small Actions Lead to Extraordinary Results. Welcome to the show, Charlie.

Erika, thanks so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

Yes, I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled to have you. We were talking a little bit beforehand about teams and how that kind of fundamental atom of, you know, work. And you note that someone's immediate team, the 4 to 8 people with whom they work more closely, most closely, is critical to the quality and the productivity of their work life. And so I can't wait to give our listeners access to your thinking about this. So— Let's dig in. Can you explain to us the team habits that you found are most important and why?

So in the book Team Habits, I actually break up 8 different team habits. And these are like the universal habits that any team is going to have to do. So I don't go into things like hiring and financial management because not every team is going to have to do that. But every team is going to have to have conversations around goal setting and prioritization. They're going to have to have conversations around decision making. They're going to have to have conversations, and they're going to be involved in collaboration, communications, and so forth. So I break down the 8 different types, but because we have limited time today, I want to focus on the 3 that I think are going to be the biggest service for everyone, which are going to be belonging, decision-making, and actually meetings. Because we under— I think we under-index on belonging team habits and think about how do we be better humans with each other. And then when it comes time for us to be better coworkers, we don't have the trust glue to be able to figure that out, right? Decision-making is such an important topic because when you get that right as a team, it eliminates a lot of the friction. And lastly, meetings, because, you know, there are so many bad meetings. And I want to be clear, I'm not an anti-meeting guy. I'm an anti-bad meeting guy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So how do we get rid of the bad ones, keep the good ones, and do better work together?

Oh, those are great, Charlie. Belonging, decision-making, and meetings. I Boy, yeah, all 3 of those are things that we've really focused on helping people with, and they're just right at the heart of whether or not it works. Can you talk a little bit more about belonging?

Yeah, so a few things on this one. So when I say team habits, it's what it sounds like, actually. It's like, take everything you know about personal habits that we really don't need to talk about anymore because there's so many great books, including James Clear's Atomic Habits and Charles Duhigg, but then add one element to it. Which is team, the things that you do as a team together. And a lot of these are implicit agreements that we make with each other, which means some of them can be really bad and we just accept it as normal because we've never actually talked about it before.

Yes.

So I'll give an example of a bad one that many people know of, right? It's the weird thing about team habits is that it's easier to see them when they're bad. It's harder to see them when they're good, right? They almost become invisible.

Yeah, they're invisible and they're just working.

They're just working. And also, we humans have a negativity bias. If something is painful and frustrating, we're going to pay outsized attention to that than the things that just work in the background, right? And things— and this is how, like, on the personal side of things, you can be in a great relationship with somebody, but they might do one or two annoying things. And those one or two annoying things color the entirety of whether— of how you feel about that person instead of the many good things that they do.

Yeah, yeah.

And so good team habits are like that. Like, they become invisible. And part of what I want teams to start doing is actually talk about their good team habits, because when you talk about them, you can also not just approach the perspective— approach it from the perspective of like, work sucks and it's hard, right? It could be like, actually, there are a lot of really great parts. But this one right here, not so much. So as far as a bad team habit that a lot of people know is the CC thread from hell, which think about it. If you've ever worked in a large organization, there are 15 to 20 CC threads where everybody's a part of it. And we spend so much time reading those threads just to see if we need to read them.

Yeah.

Right. Um, but here's the trick. We do that to each other in our small team of 4 to 8 people. We do it to each other. I have to say that again because we're not victims. We're not merely victims of the CC thread from hell. We actually promulgate it. We actually participate in that pattern and thereby affirm it.

Yeah. Right?

And so that's a— that's an example of a team habit or organization habit. And it also shows an implicit one because who— when did we stop and say, hey, this is just how we do things, right? We love this and it works for us. We didn't do that. We just We just do it, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's the type of example of a bad team habit that I want to make visible, because when you make it visible and you see that in the team— and for our conversation, I'm going to assume that Erika and I are on a team because it's going to make it personal. This may come back later.

Yep.

Erika and I on a team can say, you know what, we really don't like sending this CC thread back and forth. Yeah, like Can we stop that? And Erika and Charlie and Tom and Jerry and Taylor can all get together and say, you know what, let's stop doing that to each other.

Yes.

Because even if we can't get rid of the other 15, we've gotten rid of 5.

Right.

And it's going to sound like a tautology, but better is better. Right?

Also, one of the things I love about what you're saying, Charlie, is that it's very— although this word is wildly overused— empowering to bring all this to your conscious awareness and say, oh, We can choose not to behave in this way, or we can choose to behave in this way as a group of people, right? We have that power. That's wonderful.

Yeah, it really ties into— so one of the secret codes of Team Habits is that it plays with an underused and underdiscussed dimension of power. So when I started writing Team Habits, I knew it was about power. And I was like, I don't want to write a book about power because it's going to have a whole different flavor. And I know where that book will end up. And it won't end up actually doing the work that I want it to do.

Right, right.

And so I hid those elements in the book. And so you can kind of see them, but you know, the 3 dimensions of power that are at work are the first, personal power. And that's, you know, Charlie's power to do something because of his own capabilities, know-how, expertise. This is just what I as an individual can do.

Yes. Yes.

That's power 2. On the other end of the spectrum, we have institutional power. And this is power over. Because of my role, I have power over people or projects or budgets or resources or something. Yeah.

Right?

So much of the work conversation stays between power to or power over, between personal power and institutional power. And even well-meaning books like It's the Manager, which is a great book, still puts so much of team change on one person.

Yes. Yeah.

Right?

What we forget is there's this middle layer of interpersonal power. That's power with. That's power that Erika and Charlie can tap into together that neither one of them have individually. But also, and importantly, we don't need managerial power. We don't need institutional power. We don't need to go to the boss. So again, if Erika and I are having a meeting, And that meeting sucks, Erika and I can own our own. So you know what? Let's do something different.

Yeah.

Right?

We don't have to do it that way. And the other thing that I want to open up is that team leaders and team managers are also part of the team. And I know that sounds obvious.

Yeah, yeah.

But we forget that.

Yep, yep, yep.

Right? And so we invoke institutional power when we involve them. When we don't need to.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right.

And the trick here is when you choose the paradigm, you reinforce the paradigm. When you choose the paradigm, you reinforce the paradigm.

That's great.

So if we look at problems in our team and we make them about institutional power, we like reinforce that it's about institutional power and it's somebody else's decision to solve. It's not somebody else's, right? We lose that. If we choose interpersonal power, we reinforce co-agency. We reinforce interdependence and that we can do something together and we don't need anybody else to.

I love that. And I've seen, as you're talking, I'm remembering this senior— sometimes even the senior team in an organization falls into that trap. I was working with the CEO and his team of this tech company. And I said, you know, you guys don't have to do X. I said, and they, they were like, wait, what do you mean? You can decide to do this differently? It was like they were almost giddy. It was liberating for them to suddenly get into that interpersonal power space.

Precisely. Well, and even in some of my conversations with senior leaders around this, I'll say, hey, which of you decided to do the CC thread from hell? Which of you like this? Which, which of you, if you are asked to raise your hand, would vote Right. We keep doing this.

Make that conscious decision. Yeah.

Right. And none of— no hands go up. And I'm like, so if you don't think you can change this, how do you expect people further in the echelon to think that they can change this? And why are we doing it this way?

Yes, that's right.

And so it's kind of that eye-opener for them. It was like, oh, and then it starts to unravel. And that's what I really want to do is start to unravel all of these sort of things that we just accept The absurdity of the normal.

Yeah. Yeah.

As a given.

I love that.

When we can say, you know what, like, I know we have a lot of things to do, but let's take 10 minutes to fix that broken printer. Um, the broken printer is a metaphor I use for all, like, every organization that I've ever worked at or consulted at has a broken printer that everyone knows about it.

Right.

Sometimes it's been there so long. It has like, it's employee number 47. It's just been there. Right. Or it's got a name. Or webs on the Yeah, it's got cobwebs on it. And, you know, it's not the printer that's important, it's the downstream effects of the printer.

Yes.

Yeah, it's that we, we know the printer's broken, we can't use it, we don't have a paper budget, so we don't print out agendas for team meetings, right? So we show up for team meetings in person and we're fighting with each other's phones and tablets where we're fighting for the attention from that, and we wonder why we can't focus. Well, it's a broken printer. I could go down the list. And the thing about the broken planter as a coach and as a consultant and as just a lover of humans that cracks me up is it's like, you know, that's a 30-minute research project and a $500 fix.

Yeah.

And we can't or won't solve that. And yet I will plop a meeting on someone's— on my team's calendar and soak up way more time and treasure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

than actually addressing that thing. So when I say fix the broken printer, it's a metaphor. The CC thread from hell is also a broken printer.

Yeah.

And so it's like, look, I know we have a lot of things to do, but let's take 10 or 15 minutes and address that one broken printer. Because tomorrow when Erika is going to be super busy, employee number 47 is going to act up and mess her up.

Yeah.

We can avoid that together. Let's get it done. And what happens if we just make these small fixes time and time again?

Yeah, so it sounds like, and I love this, it sounds like you're saying the biggest negative habit to avoid on a team is just unconscious acceptance of these things that don't work.

Precisely, precisely. And shirking it to someone else to solve. So, oh, Erika will solve that, making it a personal power sort of thing, or shirking it to the manager to figure it out for us.

Or making it the organization's problem when the organization probably doesn't even know about it. Oh, the organization never fixes broken printers. Has anybody asked? Has anybody ever, you know?

Yeah. And that's why there's— for— that's one of the many reasons why there are few real broken printers in an executive's office.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right. It gets so much traffic and people see it that it's like, it's unconscionable. Or like, you wouldn't think about it.

Oh, you can't be unconscious about it. Oh, gotcha.

Yeah.

Right. But when it's further down and in the 3rd building over on the left side of the block and no one's over there, there's all sorts of stuff that can happen because no one sees it. And the people working there for different reasons don't feel that sense that they can change it.

Yes.

And so it remains the same.

A variety of reasons. Feeling lack of power, being unconscious, not knowing that they— oh, over and over. Well, that's great. So as we said before we started talking, we really could spend a day talking about this. But I always promise our listeners we're going to keep it short and sweet and also that we're going to give them practical takeaways. So what do you want to give to our listeners? What can they start doing right now to improve their, their own teams?

Learn your teammates, the names of their partners and pets, and get used to that. Use some of the weak ties, like spend some of that time in chitchat time that many people are like, oh, we're just chitchatting and we need to get to work. No, the chitchat's part of work, right? It is actually the relational and bonding part of us being humans with each other that enables us to do the other things. You can personally allow teammates to personalize their desk or the background. Right? So that you can actually see who they are and celebrate who they are versus it just being something that you have to blur out because there's no distractions or whatever that means. Right? And so it's like, what would happen if we made the effort to treat our teammates like they were friends? They might not ever become friends, right? Because that's a different dimension.

Yeah.

But what if we took that effort and led the way? Because the number one rule of being a great teammate is be the teammate you want your teammates to be.

Yeah.

Right. What if we led that? And again, doesn't need a boss, doesn't need a budget. We're going to be doing this work together anyways. Why not do it better together? And so just making those things habits. Another simple habit, starting your meetings, right? Instead of just getting the business and looking over your goals, start with 5 or 10 minutes where teammates can celebrate their non-work wins.

Yes. Yeah.

Right. And non-work is important because You want to learn who they are as a whole human, right? And you'll find out all sorts of great things about them. And even for the introverts, right, it doesn't have to be something huge. You don't have to divulge your life. It can be that like your peppers grew last, last week in there. Like it can be that, but you learn that teammate and you learn about their hobby. You learn, you learn a whole lot in just that statement that you would never learn. And that's how you build strong bonds in a team.

You know, this is such a valuable insight. And I'm thinking, especially as you're talking, how, how even more valuable it is in this hybrid work world, because we tend to do these important small things even less when we're not physically with each other. So this is so wonderful. So thank you so much, Charlie. This is a wonderful start, I think.

Thanks so much for that. Yeah.

And listeners, if you'd like to learn more about how to build better team habits, Just go to betterteamhabits.com where you can also order Charlie's new book, Team Habits: How Small Actions Lead to Extraordinary Results. And to find out how Proteus helps leaders build great teams, you can go to proteusleader.com, click on topics, and choose high-performance teams. So thank you so much for listening, and until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at ProteusLeader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.