Employing Differences, Episode 100: What does success look like?

Karen: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:15

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:17

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:19

Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "What does success look like?"

Karen: 0:28

So this is one of those questions that nobody asks because we all know the answer. We're all very sure that we know the thing that we're looking for. In my clients, "Well, success is that we have a community and we all support each other," or in a corporate environment, it could be, "Well, we sell our product, we are profitable." We have this language, we have values conversations. Success looks like we have good communication and people are dependable. You could go all sorts of places with that. And what we find in our work is we were talking about just before we got on is, most of the time, if you start talking about what those things actually entail – what it would really look like what's your day to day life like in your job environment or in your community environment? What is actually the thing that you're aiming for? With a little more detail around it, with a little more clarity around it, avoiding the sort of big, broad, feel-good words, and getting into what does it actually mean, what we find is that we are not all the same. And this thing that we thought we were all invested in together? We were actually headed in very different directions that might both work or might not. And that it's actually pretty important if we're going to be collaborative with each other, that we get clear about what the objective is that we're all invested in, or at the very least clear about our different objectives and how they're going to work with each other.

Paul: 2:03

Yeah, when we talk about things that live in the space between, what we're really talking about here is sort of shared purpose, shared vision, a shared understanding of what it is that we're trying to do together. And if we aren't clear on that, then it's very hard to get there. And what's interesting... I notice a couple of different ways that this goes wrong. One is the thing you've pointed to, which is that we've said these very generic words and so we believe that we have a shared understanding of what success looks like. And so that seems good enough. Another way that it goes wrong is we actually try to specify in too much detail what it looks like. And oftentimes, it's one person or a small subset of people within the group, who are defining what success looks like. And either that doesn't match with what other people are thinking, or that is only one possible set of solutions to the challenge that we're facing, and it excludes other possibilities that we might explore collaboratively as we move together. So too vague, not super useful. And too specific, also not super useful. And so what I'd like to explore here a little bit today is how do we help groups and individuals hit that sweet spot in terms of when we talk about what success looks like. How do we come up with something that is useful to the group? Because ultimately, it's about how do we use this thing. Because when we lack it, it's very hard to actually work together, to collaborate, to work towards some common purpose if we don't have one. And so the other failure mode that I notice a lot is groups just don't have it. They think they might, but they don't have a clear picture of it. And the reason why this shows up a lot for me in a lot of the work that I do, because I'm as a consultant, I'm often brought in to achieve some sort of result, to help go from A to B. Well, I can figure out what A is when I'm when I'm working with the group. But if I don't know where they're trying to go, if I don't know what B is about, what will be different when we're done doing this work together – if I don't have a clearer picture that, I'm not sure necessarily what skills that I need to be bringing. The other thing that I've seen with that – and I've fallen into this trap before and I'm sure I've told this story – is being brought in by someone to work with a team and basically saying, "I want the team to get better at X." And I go to start working with the team on helping them to get better at X and discover that person had never told the team that they weren't good at X, that X was important, any of these things. And so they had no idea what success looked like. So when we don't talk about what success looks like, when we talk about it too vaguely, or when we talk about it too specifically, all three of those are things that can get us into trouble. And so we want to explore how do we avoid those traps when we're talking with groups.

Karen: 5:22

Yeah. So I want to start by just acknowledging I think there's a reason that we don't talk about this. And the reason is that we're really comfortable when we're all the same. When we all believe in diversity, and we all believe in affordability, or we all believe in creativity, and we all believe in communication, and we all believe in every individual being invested, and we all believe in teamwork... All these nice, big words and we all believe in that? Gosh, that feels good. We're all aligned, we're a team, we're all invested together that feels really comfortable. And it's quite predictable that if we start doing the work of actually sorting out what it is specifically – with the right amount of specificity, to your point – but what is it actually that we want to do with enough detail that we can identify a thing... When we do that, it's almost guaranteed that we are going to reveal differences. And differences for humans are scary. Because differences can break apart groups. Differences can mean that I don't fit into the group anymore. Differences can mean that this thing that I wanted, I'm now alone in wanting, that others aren't wanting it, too, and so then what do I do about that? And so I don't think we consciously go there. But our brains are pretty well wired to fit in, to belong, to feel that sense of common purpose and connection. And getting into the the grit of it enough to reveal the differences is scary explicitly because it's likely to reveal differences. And so I think the first thing we just need to get aware of is, what is my own personal reaction to this kind of work? Why am I resistant to it? And what's the work I need to do to feel safe enough, comfortable enough, vulnerable enough, courageous enough to step in and say, this is actually what I'm seeing? To participate in this kind of process? Because I think until we do that, we don't even tell ourselves what we want, or what our goals are, or what our vision of success is. We just sort of don't go there, because that's dangerous. And so I think the first step is just each person within ourselves, getting enough clarity and ability. And really, it's the courage for vulnerability to say, I'm gonna step into this thing. And before I can step in and tell everybody else what I want, I probably better figure out for myself what I want. And be prepared for the first thing that comes to mind on closer examination turns out not to be your thing.

Paul: 8:11

Yeah, it is absolutely the case that as we start to have the conversation about what success looks like that we will discover that we don't agree. I mean, that's the whole purpose of having the conversation is to discover where we don't agree. And that's scary. Right. And that is not a thing that many of us look forward to doing. And so I do think that that's one of the reasons why we end up there and why we avoid it. Another reason that I see is people are impatient to get started. Sitting around and talking about what success looks like feels like it's not work. Whereas actually building something and doing things, moving towards this thing, something concrete that we can point to that we said we've done, that feels a lot better. And as I like to point out, you may have done a whole lot of work for nothing. Let's not confuse motion with progress. If we haven't actually figured out what direction we're trying to go in, then we don't actually know whether or not the things that we're doing are moving us that direction. And so it can be counterproductive, but it feels useful to be doing, to start working on something. And we've talked before about when we talk about vision, because this is kind of a visioning thing. What is shared vision or purpose here? We've talked about, we do want it to be at least a little bit controversial. But we also talked about the anxiety that groups are going through as they're trying to figure it out. And I think that managing that tension, having just enough, just a good enough definition of what success looks like that we can start so that we can learn more about it as we are doing it is both a useful way of managing that tendency to want to get started – and so to avoid spending the difficult work of talking about what success looks like – but also gets us useful information. And I think that's also one of the ways of avoiding trying to nail down all of the specifics, before we get started, is getting just enough that we know that we're all pointing in the right direction– we're aligned – and then start doing some things and revisit our definition of what success looks like.

Karen: 10:39

Yeah. And another way that I think about what you're talking about is that this,"What does success look like?" applies to layers, applies to stages, applies to parts, applies to elements. And so yeah, you want to have the big conversation about we exist as a group to do what over the next six months, two years, 10 years, whatever your timeline is. So you want that big conversation about what does success look like? But you also want to have this conversation whenever you're starting a thing. When a team forms together, what is this particular team's reason for being and goal and objective and marker of success? Or if you're creating a policy. Why? Why are we creating a policy? What would success look like for this policy? What would be the outcome that would tell us that we had accomplished what we wanted? Or you know, you finished phase one of development, and now you're headed into phase two. So what success looks like at different phases is likely to change – both because it's a different phase and because of what you're talking about it, which is we learned a bunch of stuff in phase one. And there was some stuff that we didn't include in our vision for success in phase one, but boy, we missed it when it wasn't there. What's included now? Let's readjust. So this isn't a one time, we've had it, that's our vision of success, that's going to carry us through for the next five years conversation. This is an ongoing, periodic check-in. And particularly anytime a new thing is starting to happen, you want to check in with each other and say, "What's the success of for this?" And if you know that that's coming, that it's going to happen kind of each stage, you can avoid the over-specificity that you were talking about at the beginning, because we don't have to get all the details for the next 10 years of all the things we're trying to do. We want a big overview that we're pretty clear and is detailed enough that we know that we're really on the same page. And then we can go to okay, for the next step the goal is or the success would look like, in whatever chunk makes sense for your project.

Paul: 12:52

The idea of doing it in layers is a is a super useful one because you've got these overlapping horizons. But I mean, I think about this in terms of, "Great for our team, what does success look like for today." Like when we're getting together, like in Scrum – I work with lot of agile teams. We're doing our daily Scrum at the beginning of the day. Great. What does success look like for us for today? And tomorrow... we have an idea. We had an idea yesterday of what we were going to be doing today. But now that we're here, what does success look like for today? How do we refocus on that? What does success look like for this meeting that we're about to have? And it is a question that I think the more we get good at asking it the better off we are. Because it means we're actually directing our energies as a group in a useful direction. And so it's something that you never stop asking about the same thing and you're always asking about every new thing. And I noticed that the more we ask it, the more we get better at answering it. Like any of these things that we talk about with working in groups and working collaboratively – working with the space between – it's a skill, it's a muscle we can build with use. And so you can start doing it in the small and potentially grow it to something bigger. And in a lot of ways, the important thing is just to ask. "Hey, before we get started with this, what does success look like?" So I do this just in meetings where there hasn't been an agenda defined, but it's like three of us getting together on a call to talk about a thing. Almost always the first thing that I will do is, "So before we get started, I just want to hear from everybody, what do you each hoping comes out of this call?" And so we just we collect those things, we write them down, and we just knock them out. Right so that that way we don't get to the end of the call and somebody goes, "Well, I thought we were going to talk about..." I would I would much rather know that up front and then we can figure it out. And that's the just enough to get started. So for that we're on a call for 45 minutes, defining what success looks like it's sufficient to just go around, hear from the three people what they hope to get, we build the list we go, we don't need to necessarily get deeper than that. For a project that's going to change your organization over the next five to seven years, you probably want a little more than that. But I think the more that we do that, the more we practice it in the small, in the medium, and in the large, the better we get at it, because then it helps us to sort of figure out in any given moment, are we actually still heading in that direction or are we doing something that's pulled us off course?

Karen: 15:45

Yeah, and I think there's this nice synergy between this that we're talking about on a sort of organizational level that we do in groups, with what really becomes a pattern of thought. And that is an individual discipline. I think about what if we each did this before we wrote an email? What is the outcome that I like to have of that email? And especially in interpersonal spaces, and communication spaces... Very often I will put in my email the thing that feels good to me to have said, or the thing that I feel justified in, accusing somebody, or blaming somebody, or like those sorts of things, because they feel right to me in some way. Or you know, I just really want somebody to know, I did this thing, so I go on at great length about all this stuff that I did. And if I'd stopped at the beginning about "What is the outcome I wanted from this email?" Well, the outcome I want is for this person to agree to meet with me. That's it. Well, now my email just got a lot shorter. And I filtered out a lot of blame and judgment that might have felt good to me. And I landed in okay, if I'm clear about the outcome that I want, I'm very much more likely to both get that outcome and that outcome is likely to be a better relational thing than what my just instinctive do the next thing is going to land me in. So I just I want to bring it to that little microcosm within the broader macrocosm because it is, as you say, a pattern that we get into it. It's a thought muscle that gets exercised, and when we start applying it, it shows up all over the place.

Paul: 17:24

It absolutely does, it absolutely does. So to sort of track where we've been here today.. We talked about the idea of – in this sort of thought pattern, as you lay it out – of before getting started on things too deeply, being clear about why it is we're doing them. What is the outcome that we want to get? Being conscious of that at all different levels: in our individual work, in our small group work, in our group work, and bringing that to the forefront. We talked about how there are ways we go wrong with that. One is we don't do it at all. We don't really think about that. We don't discuss it at all. One is that we discuss it, but we talk about it in super vague terms that aren't useful to us. And the other is that we fall into it in super detailed terms. And so the skill there is really about having the conversation, but hitting it at the right level of detail – perhaps iteratively, where we do a little bit and then we work some and we learn more and we can add more detail, as we go. Don't overdo it. We talked about the barriers to having the conversation about what success looks like and what the outcome we want is one of which is the realization that it will be a difficult conversation. There will be disagreement. When we turn over the rocks, we'll find stuff under them. But that it's probably more useful to find them before we invest too much effort going down the wrong path. We're gonna find them eventually anyway. Let's find them now. And then the other is that we often have an impatience to get started. Because talking about what success is and what the outcomes that we want are can feel like it's not work. And we have this desire to feel like we're actually accomplishing something. So let's not spend time defining what success looks like, let's just work towards it. And when you say it that way, you realize how ridiculous that all is. So the idea of building up this pattern of thought, this habit of looking at what it is the outcome we're trying to create. We're trying to go from A to B, we need to talk about what A is, but really what B is before we dig into doing it. The more we do that, the more we're actually individually and as a group able to align our efforts towards the outcomes that we've actually agreed we all want.

Karen: 19:49

I think that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 19:53

And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.