Employing Differences, Episode 113: What if we're not perfect?

Paul: 0:09

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

Karen: 0:15

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:16

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:18

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "What if we're not perfect?"

Paul: 0:25

I almost want this question to be, "So we're not perfect, what do we do?" Because that's the reality. The thing that Karen and I run into a lot when we're working with organizations, working with groups, working with communities, is that they want to make some change. They want to do something differently. And they have this vision of how they want it to be. And if there's one thing that we know about change, it's that it is not smooth and linear and instantaneous. And what we know is that, when we try to make a change, we're not going to do it perfectly the first time. And in fact, even when we're in our normal mode of operation, we're not going to be operating at our best all the time. As friend of mine likes to say, "That's why they call it 'your best,'" because it's not what you're normally doing. And yet, a lot of times, groups and organizations and companies operate with this implicit assumption that we have to be operating at our peak, that we have to be doing our best, that we have to be perfect all the time. And they make plans that are based on those things. So what we want to explore a little bit today here is the reality of our imperfections – both in change and in normal operating modes – and what what we can do about that. How we can compensate for that, how we can expect it, how we can work with the fact that we're not perfect, we're not going to be perfect, and we shouldn't plan on being perfect.

Karen: 2:05

Yeah, that came up in a meeting I had just this morning with a group who have been attending my courses and learning lots of things. And man, they've actually been working really hard at the learning side of things. And what they said is, "Okay, so we've learned all this stuff. But now how do we do it?" And they described a meeting that they'd had where – they basically said, "We had this meeting, that was terrible. And we didn't do this thing that we know you would tell us to do. And we didn't do this thing that we know. And I said this thing. And as soon as I said it, I knew I shouldn't have because it would have been better." And I just wanted to say, "You guys get an A+. You learned all the things that we've been talking about in class." But what they're saying is, "Okay, we learned them, but we're not doing them yet." And when they have done them, they've made these great changes. It's this fascinating thing. But that frustration with, "Okay, we have learned it. We know a lot of this stuff – and we may have more to learn – but how do we get from we know it to we're doing it?" And the first thing I want to just sort of breathe through is you're never going to arrive at the other side of that, actually. I mean, at least I hope you don't. I hope that you are always learning the next thing and growing into the next piece. And that the actual implementation is the hard part. And maybe we should say that more. The time that what you're doing with me, that's the easy piece, actually. When we send you back into your reality, after you've done all of this learning, that's actually the hardest piece and and I can't do that for you. I can't give you that. You're in it. So I think a certain amount of just acceptance of, "Yhis is gonna be messy for a while." Learning space is messy space.

Paul: 3:54

One of the things that's pointing to is the fact that we can see that we're not perfect is an indication that learning has occurred. Because previously, we might have done those things and not realized they were a problem. And so the fact that we kind of go, "Oh, we can actually see that we're doing the things that we didn't want to do, that we ought not to have, that were likely to not give us the results that we want to see," that's actually a cause for celebration. I think we've talked about this on the show before where the idea of as we're building skill at something and as we're building fluency in something, we start to catch sooner that we're not doing it right. And so the fact that after the fact they were able to say, "Oh, these were these things that we didn't do," that's actually sooner than they would have noticed it previously. Previously, they wouldn't have noticed it at all. And as we get better, we start to catch that sooner. Rather than three hours later, we go a half an hour later, or 10 minutes later, or 30 seconds after the words are out of our mouth, to the point where we get to we're actually noticing it even before we're doing it. And so we're catching it. So part of the "What if we're not perfect?" for me is accepting that seeing the imperfection is itself a sign of growth, is a sign of learning. We wouldn't have noticed that before. We need to acknowledge it and not beat ourselves up around it, and then not squander the opportunity for further learning. When we are imperfect, when the thing that we aren't expecting to happen happens – or the thing we don't want to have happen happens – that means we have a tremendous opportunity to learn from that situation about, "What do we want to do next time?"

Karen: 5:48

And the great thing about being in teams or groups, as most of our client groups are, is that I don't have to be responsible for all of it. So as I'm learning, and I'm making mistakes, or just having a bad day, or whatever it is the reason – maybe I didn't sleep last night, maybe I got bad news this morning, maybe.I'm trying out a new skill that I'm not good at yet, maybe a lot of things – but the reality is, I'm not at my best every day. And the great thing about a team if you structure it well – and I think this is one of the things I'm hoping for a takeaway from this episode is in a team – it's not up to me to always have to be my best. But what I'm counting on is that on the day that I'm not my best somebody else is. So when I jump in and say the thing that throws the meeting all off, I'm really hoping somebody else is gonna say, "Let's just timeout for a second. Let's just pause and resettle and think through." Now do I wish I had been smart enough to say, "Oh, I got triggered by a thing. Let's pause and reset for a minute." That would have been better. But it wasn't my day, it wasn't in the energy of the universe, it wasn't my day to know we need to pause and reset that. And if someone on the team can know to say, "Let's pause and reset," then then "Yay!" On the team, that got taken care of. And one of the things that this points to is how useful and important it is to have a shared responsibility for all of that kind of reset, noticing, let's check ourselves, let's recognize, oh, we're not doing that thing we learned in that course, we just took, or that we talked about in our last retrospective, or whatever that piece is. If everyone in the room has permission to say,"Wait a minute, I think we're off track." And not just permission, but a willingness and a sense of responsibility about it, that can make a huge difference. One place I'll see that, some of my groups have what they call a "vibes watcher," someone whose job it is to sort of track and pay attention and notice if there's something off, and I don't object to having a vibes watcher, except what I really like is if there's 16 people in the meeting, I'd like 16 vibes watchers. So what I would say is if you want to have one person who particularly is paying attention to that great, but I wouldn't want someone else to say "Well, I'm not the vibes watcher so I can't say a thing that I noticed," or "The vibes watcher's doing that, so I don't even have to think about what the dynamics in the group are." We don't want to do that. We want to hold that responsibility in each and all so that somebody's having a good enough day to catch it and get us all back on track.

Paul: 8:51

What you're pointing to is something that I sometimes call a recovery protocol. So I often work with groups where they want to have a set of working agreements. "This is how we're going to work together. These are our norms for behavior. This is what we want to do, what we want it to be like, the atmosphere or the culture we want to create when we're working together." And that's all great. And it's usually aspirational. The reason we're talking about it is because we want it to be that way, not because it's like that all the time. And so often a step that I will go through with them is say, "Okay, so when we're not doing that, when you're violating your working agreements, when you're not following the behavioral norms that you say you want, how do you want to get back to it?" What's the protocol for pointing out and recovering? When we're not perfect, how do we want to get back to the way that we want it to be? And this sometimes throws groups for a loop. Because they think that by describing what they want it to be like it will magically be that way. And what they actually really need to do is build in the concrete "What do we want to do to recover?" Maybe that's "We have a vibes watcher, and our protocol is that person will point out what are the elements of our working agreement that we're not holding?" Maybe it's,"Hey, we actually have an agreement that says, at any point where – for example, if we have an agreement that says treat each other with respect – at any point where I am noticing that I'm not feeling like I'm being treated with respect, I have responsibility to say, 'I trust that you intend to be respectful. And also, this is how it's landing for me.'" And then we stop and we pause, and we figure out how to do it. Building in some method –some agreed upon method – for getting back to closer to where we want to be is super important, because we should expect that that's going to happen. It shouldn't be a surprise that we're not perfect, that we don't follow this process, follow this protocol, live this way all the time. And so I think by talking about it in advance, we set ourselves up for getting back to success in a lot of ways.

Karen: 11:11

And I would add to thatthat this recovery protocol– or in the relationship space or therapy space we may call it repair which is another word for the same thing – this is an excellent place for redundancy. I just gotta say, because this is another thing I see groups do is, "Well, if you're not feeling respected, it's your responsibility to say, 'I'm not feeling respected.'" They may not be the one in the room who can do that. You don't want to say in order for this to work well, we're counting on one person being able to do a particular thing. We want that redundancy of we're counting on somebody catching it from somewhere and creating enough safety to make it happen. So yes, what we want is for each person to say when they don't feel respected, and we want each person to say when they think maybe somebody else isn't feeling respected. I mean, not to the point that you bogged down every meeting, of course, but that "There's something not right in the room right now." And to have protocols for that. And it really almost lands more deeply in culture than in some written process.

Paul: 12:32

What's great about that example is that it actually points to an even greater need for perfection. Again thinking through, as we're designing the"How do we get back to it?" are we relying on the person who is most psychologically and emotionally compromised to help us get back from where we don't want to be? Let's think about that a little bit more. And this goes to that place of how do we build into our normal ways of operating the ways of being more like we want to be. I was talking with a colleague of mine about a volunteer group that we're both part of. And we were talking about the fact that that organization is currently structured in such a way that it requires people in various offices to act in almost heroic ways to get things done. And so what's interesting about it is that they have an expectation that offices will rotate. You're only going to do this for two, maybe three years, before you hand it off to somebody else. And that's great for reasons that we've talked about on other episodes in terms of distributing power and helping people grow and maintaining much more of a sense of equity in the organization and leveling power differences. But we eventually realized that a lot of that is built on the expectation that no one could possibly do this for more than three years, because it requires super-heroic levels of effort, and they're going to be burned out by the end of it. And so if we're noticing that our structures and our policies and our ways of working require more of that, that's again getting to this, "Well, what if we're not perfect?" How do we actually start to think about the way we distribute these responsibilities, the way that we're actually working? How do we think about it in a way that it doesn't require us to be particularly good, or particularly on our game? That we can operate at that normal mode and still get the results that we want? Because that is way more resilient than requiring us to be perfect or heroic.

Karen: 14:43

What we're pointing to overall is being willing to look at our systems with an expectation of imperfection. Because humans. And learning and growing and trying to be in ever better spaces. So that's more of that celebration of "Oh, look, we're growing again." And then relying on each other as team members so that collectively, we're a lot more perfect. We're still going to be imperfect. But we're a lot closer collectively if we're all engaged in that. And then patience with the imperfect, and the attention to,"How do we have repair? How do we have a recovery process? What are the steps of that? And how do we make that redundant?" How do we build it into our culture into our normal ways of being that we have ways to say, "Oh, we're not doing what we said we wanted to do. Oh, we're not doing the the thing that we're aiming for. That new piece that we're learning? Oops, we fell back into our old pattern again." Having that language, in a very safe way, be part of our normal day to day conversations so that we are actually applying the things that we're learning, just maybe a little more slowly than we envisioned that we might.

Paul: 16:13

Exactly. Well, that's gonna do it for us for today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 16:19

And I'm Karen Gimnig and this has been Employing Differences.