S2 Ep. 10: How Do You Achieve Radical Alignment?
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Intro:
So many organizations struggle to get aligned on critical decisions. Why? Because it’s not the organizations that need to get aligned, it’s the people, the human beings in those organizations. Some people make the decisions. Some people deviate from those decisions. Some people believe in those decisions and why and how they were made, but more often than not there is one missing ingredient that is so important and so powerful to reach and sustain alignment yet isn’t actively nurtured. What is that ingredient that helps us get radical aligned? In this episode of Fearless Product Leadership, the final of 3 episodes in the “Alignment” miniseries, we’re going get the answer when we fearlessly answer the question: How do you achieve radical alignment?
Welcome to the Fearless Product Leadership podcast. This is the show for new product leaders seeking to increase their confidence and competence. In every episode I ask experienced and thoughtful product leaders to share their strategies and tactics that have helped them tackle a tough responsibility of the product leader role. I love helping emerging product leaders shorten their learning curves to expedite their professional success with great products, teams and stakeholder relationships. I’m your host and CEO of Fearless Product, Hope Gurion.
In this episode I have a conversation with Alex Jamieson and Bob Gower, authors of the new book, Radical Alignment: How to have game-changing conversations that will transform your business and your life. Alex is the author of five books and co-creator of the documentary Super Size Me. She coaches woman to create epic lives, and her work has been praised by Oprah, NYT, Elle, and many others. She is also a chef, painter, and the host of the podcast Her Rules Radio. Bob is a consultant who cares deeply about the financial, social, and environmental performance of organizations. In addition to their most recent book, Bob is the author of Agile Business: A Leader’s Guide to Harnessing Complexity. Bob is a sought-after speaker and advisor to innovative tech companies and startups.
Hope: Thank you, Bob and Alex for joining me. I've never really done an interview format where we're recording the whole thing. it's traditional podcast, and I've never done it before. So, thanks for being my guinea pigs.
Alex: Thanks for having us.
Bob: Thanks for having us.
Hope: Alex, you're an experienced podcaster, so you can tell me when I'm veering off course and get me back on track.
Alex: Let's just have a convo. It'll be great.
Hope: Perfect. I was really excited to have this discussion with you because so many product leaders and teams I see struggle with this concept of alignment. Like, “Did we get aligned? Are we still aligned? What does that even mean to be aligned?” and so your advice and techniques that you're sharing in your new book, Radical Alignment, I think are going to be so valuable to the product community and so I really am excited to dive into that today.
Bob: I'm excited to be here. My background is, as a product leader a decade ago, back when the game was very, very different. So, excited to be back in some somewhat home turf, I guess. Yeah.
Hope: Yes. Well, I know you can relate to the situations that product leaders are in and how challenging this is. I wonder if you could just even start by like, why were you motivated to create this book? Tell me more about that.
Bob: Well, we're a little slow. We've been motivated, I think, to make the book for a long time. I'm excited how to describe this. We had this technique, and we were using it in our relationship. We were teaching it to other people; and then, people kept asking us to teach it to them again, you know, because it said they didn't get it the first time. So, after, I think it was like two or three years of having, hour long conversations with people or I would use it in workshops, I've used it with many product teams. I've used a lot of leadership teams, in different organizations, and then eventually, we were like, “I think we should write a Google Doc. So, we can point people to that. So, we don't have to, be on the phone for an hour again next time.” Then, as we were writing the Google Doc, we were like, “Wait a minute. We are getting signals from the market, that we have something valuable.” So, that's what I mean, we're kind of slow. So, I think the motivation was, Let's create something together, we have something valuable, and I don't know, am I am I catching all the motivations?
Alex: Well, it's interesting. The woman who wrote the foreword to the book is a dear friend and I shared the process with her, six or seven years ago, and she reported back almost immediately, like, “This has saved my marriage.” She's a mother of five, and she's an author, and now over the last six years, she's grown her little like, “I'm going to be an author and coach thing” into now she's publishing other people's books. So, she's becoming a mini publishing empire. So, talk about I mean, it's a different kind of product, but she credits this process in radical alignment with helping her grow and develop a very complex business structure now. So, it was her excitement and enthusiasm for the process that kept reminding us how valuable this is.
Bob: Yeah, it was really her who basically she sat us down and said, “You have to write this book” so, it's great. Now, she's including us in one of her books. It's a children's book. So, now this process is going to be in a simplified version aimed at younger children, it's going to be in a lot of K through 12 programs. Starting hopefully, in November/December.
Hope: That that is awesome. What an endorsement. These to me, signal is that smart, capable people, this does not come naturally, these are not techniques that we have been taught. No wonder it's so difficult.
Alex: Exactly.
Hope: If it can help you at work, and it can help you in your life, it seems negligent to not take advantage of these techniques, because how would you know?
Bob: Yeah, well, that's the other thing, is that I think one of the reasons it took us a long time to realize that we should make something out of this, is because it's really simple. It's not a very complex process, but every time we teach it to people, people are like, “Oh, yeah, we should do it.” and they get that as simple. I mean, there's no kind of smoke and mirrors to it; but it's simple things that we forget to do. And when we forget to do them, we pay the price. I think that’s really at the heart of the book and the heart of the process.
Hope: Well, I'm so glad that that you're bringing this and I think even just to punctuate that point, when people aren't doing it, especially if you're working at a company and there's a lot on the line; the success of the company, the success of your career, the way you feel coming to work every day. What does lack of the ability to get aligned cost people at their work?
Bob: Oh my gosh, it costs so much. I work as a consultant with a lot of organizations, and I see kind of two big costs: one cause is very, very obvious, and we talked about it in the book. Which is, if I go around a company, and I pull people on how much of their effort has actually created value for the customer over the course of the last year, a lot of people give me really depressing numbers. It's weird that the bigger the company, the more depressing the numbers. I work with some very big companies and sometimes it's like, “Oh, yeah, maybe 10% of my work.” and these are people that are coming to work every day, staying late, coming early, feeling stressed, and then to feel that they're not delivering value.
I think that's where the second piece really comes in, which is, life is too short to spend time doing things that we don't enjoy. I know that I sit in a very privileged position, and so I just need to acknowledge that, but I do think we all have more power to choose how we spend our days than we actually exercise. What I like about this process, conceptually, and then also practically as you go through it, is it reveals that to us, it reveals sort of, kind of put it in product language, it reveals the design criteria for the interaction or for the team for the process that we're going through. Then, once you have the design criteria in place, you can see different ways to get there. Ways that are more efficient, ways that are more fun, ways that are more joyful, potentially.
Hope: It's definitely depressing to think about how many hours, times how many people, times how many companies are not doing things that are beneficial to customers and probably very draining to themselves as individuals. When you dig in on why that happens, what did people tell you is the why behind why they just keep going in this unproductive path?
Bob: Yeah, well, it's interesting. Actually, I'm working with a product organization right now, and it's a relatively small company in a mature space, and they have a fairly mature product. What they have is not so much misalignment on the customer or even the value of the product, but what they have is misalignment around the future, you know how legacy products go, right? They can be cashed cows, the money's just coming in, but each year, it's a little less money, a little less money, a little less money. You know the trajectory of the company; you can see that it's sunsetting. and, you know, that may be a valid strategic position, but then you also bring in like, “I'm going to bring in a dynamic new product leader, who's going to help turn this around, but I'm not really going to fund it right. I'm not really going to think about it.”
We were just actually arguing, I was talking with a colleague about it, and we're like, “Why are we arguing about a $5,000 tool that will help all the developers move faster, when all the developers cost $200,000 a year?” and it's not because anybody's a jerk. It's not because anybody's a bad person. It's just because one person sees the company as we're going to control costs, the other person sees the company as we're going to take over, you know, we're going to create a growth organization and take over a new market. Without having these kind of underlying sort of meta conversations and really getting into I think of it as kind of emotional alignment as much as anything as much as it is tactical alignment, then you're going to just sort of circle the drain all the time. You're going to be like having that same argument, it's another week I'm having another conversation about another tool. Why?
Hope: I want to get into the meat of your book, and then I'd love to sort of contrast that to some of the advice that we heard from product leaders in our last couple of episodes about how they practically get aligned. So, would you mind sharing a little bit about like the approach that you're talking about in the book, is this all-in technique to get to ‘hell yes!’? We want that level of feeling about how clear and aligned we are on the decision. Can you share a little bit about like, what the technique is how it works, and then maybe we can dig into how close did our product leaders get to that?
Bob: Sure.
Hope: Where could they get even better?
Alex: Well, we like to set the stage before we go into, again, this very simple, four step all-in method that we call and setting the stage means you kind of kind of lay out the rules of the game, how we're going to play together, let's pick the topic. Let's get just First of all, let's just get clear about what we're talking about. Honestly, for me, that has been one of the biggest challenges in my life when it comes to important conversations. I know I want to talk about this thing, but the conversation could go anywhere. Then I'll have to argue my point on everything that's ever happened. When you get very clear about ‘the thing’, it's very relaxing. So, you actually can show up more emotionally, like confident and secure and clear when you have a simple topic, but you also agree to not talking over each other, no crosstalk. We also encourage equal speaking time, and when you talk about engagement, or a level of trust, or why should we care about the people that we work with? Equal speaking time is one of those, really undervalued but incredibly important pieces of dynamic in the room, in the conversation. So, give everybody five minutes or two minutes, even use a timer, each person gets the same amount of time to talk.
Bob: What we're trying to do there, I think, is reverse engineer something called team psychological safety, which you probably know about and many of your listeners probably do as well. If not, go pick up Amy Edmondson’s book, ‘The fearless organization’, it's amazing. The idea is that when one person is dominating a conversation and another person's quiet, it probably indicates that somebody is not feeling like it's a safe place to take a risk, like you're going to bring out an idea and that idea is going to be shut down, there's going to be contempt, someone's going to roll their eyes, it can be very small. It doesn't even have to be like a big penalty, to begin to constrain. So, we actually really want people to contribute. We want people to be as honest and as open and as vulnerable and real as possible. Understanding of course, we're talking about a work environment and you need to use some discretion as well probably, like not every work environment needs to know everything about you but probably they can know more about you than you than you let on you can probably be more real more vulnerable than your than you're allowing yourself.
So, what Alex was saying, like agreeing on a topic, we might agree. Okay, we're a product team. So, we're going to talk about the next quarter, right? Just like it'd be as simple as that. It can also be, sometimes we add a little bit of why, we're going to talk about this, so we can make sure we're focused on the right things, and we can all feel like we've contributed it, and we can all feel like we're being heard. We can all feel like we're part of the team. Something really simple like that.
Hope: I love that. It's the why not just like, “We're here to create value for the company or customers” but what do we want out of this experience? What do we what does it mean for us personally? I love that you've sort of made that a part of it, so that it comes to the surface when people might otherwise feel like that's not an important consideration.
Bob: That's the real point. I mean, honestly, I'm working on a project right now. I'm super excited about my customer, but I'm not excited every minute of every day about my customer. Sometimes it's like, I'm actually really excited about the paycheck or I'm really excited about the thing that I'm learning that has nothing to do with the customer. We're all motivated for different things, and I've gone through periods in my career where, you’ve got a young kid at home, or you've got something else that you're focused on, and I am so not motivated by the customer, but I still want to be there and be a valuable part of the team, and being honest with myself, I think. Is the first step.
Alex: Do you want to share intentions and I’ll do the next part?
Bob: Yeah, sure. So, once we've gotten everybody together, the way this usually works is you're sitting in a room together, sometimes we like to get people out of an office environment, because again, this is a more personal conversation rather than a tactical conversation. Then we also want to make sure that we're that usually it's nice to have a an external facilitator, somebody who's actually not playing the game, but who's actually just there to make sure that time is kept, to make sure that people aren't talking over each other and, and framing the questions in the right way.
So, the first question that we have everybody answer is - there's only four questions that we're going to be able to answer - but the first question we have people answer, is around their intentions. This can be twofold in a product environment, so maybe it's even two questions, but one question is, “Why are we building this product?” It can be as really simple as that. It could be, “Well, we saw a market need and we're excited about serving this market.” I work I work with a lot of mission driven organizations that are really deeply dedicated to the market that they're serving. Or it could be, “We saw a gap in the market, we want to make a lot of money” or it could be that, “Well, the boss, freakin told us so” Like, which may be enough, right?
Hope: Let's call it what it is.
Bob: Call it what it is. Let's just be honest. But the other thing also, that we may answer and not in every environment is this is this a valuable question, but, “Why are you on this team? Why do you want to be on this team?” and we're all motivated by different things. I think that the more common things are. “Well I'm here to earn money,” and “I'm here to learn things” and “I like to play with others, I like to be part of a team” Those are the real common things we hear, but there may be other motivations as well.
Just getting really clear on what the motivations are, and kind of where they are in the stack, which is most important, which is least important, and it could be different for different people, which is totally fine. You can still do fun things together, even if you're doing them for different reasons.
Alex: Then once everyone shares their intentions, you go back around, and you share your concerns. Now fears, worries, concerns are often the easiest thing to come up with. Our brains are worried machines, and this is actually the place to put it all out on the table. Of course, again, being mindful, like what feels appropriate or safe to you to share in this room, but what we know is true is that when we speak of fear out loud, our own brain hears it and it actually calms our nervous system, when it's received in a safe environment.
So, the effect of this is a few fold: one, you finally put it out there and you're like, “Okay, I said it, and I didn't die, and everybody's still is here with me. They didn't abandon me” and that's a very primal reason to share our fears. The other is that often you will hear other people have the same worries; and that helps you spot landmines like, “Oh my gosh, we all have this worry. Okay, great. Now this is something that we got to address.” So, those are the two big reasons for sharing your fears and worries.
Hope: Those are powerful reasons, and it's good because I can imagine that kind of just simmer, and maybe aren't spoken, if you just dive into what do we want to accomplish?
Bob: Yeah and taking it back to a product context. We might talk about our concerns for our team. Like, “Do we have the right skills on the team? Do we have enough people on the team Do we have enough time?” and again, we're not litigating anything in this process, we're just getting stuff out into the room. Again, we're just trying to get the design criteria in place. So then when we do go to planning, and we got a team setup, and we go to tools, and we got all the other things, that we're operating from a very rich, informational landscape, we got all the information in front of us. So, we’re really just in information gathering mode. A little bit in also, empathy building mode, like, “I'm going to take your perspective for a moment, I'm just going to listen to you.” and I often encourage people to have like, crazy worries, crazy concerns, it's okay, throw out some dumb stuff because our brains are all doing it, like let's throw it out, but let's also throw out the real stuff too. Then it also could be deeply personal concerns like I'm concerned that I don't have the skill set to do this. Again, you may not want to share that in every environment, but…...
Hope: If you feel safe, that would be a good sign, about how you feel with your team.
Bob: Yeah.
Hope: I appreciate that you are saying that. This is not the session in which you want to solve for all those fears. This is just, “We want to just get it on the table, so that we can build that trust and understand that information landscape that we'd have to navigate.”
Bob: Yeah, and to Alex's point, like just speaking the fear, sometimes solves it, just getting it out is sometimes plenty. That's really all that's needed to kind of calm the amygdala and like calm yourself down.
Alex; It is and I want to speak to all the people out there like me, who are like fast action, let's just get let's just get moving. That's why are we doing this conversation? Listen, this information gathering that Bob has been so wonderful and helping me understand how product stuff actually works, like the information gathering part is often the most important part before you take action. So, for those of you like me, who love to rush in and start doing stuff, hold on, this works. What is it? Fast as smooth, as fast and…..?
Bob: Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
Alex: There you go.
Bob: The navy seals the thing.
Hope: That's great. It's the context for how your team's going to be working and what you're going to need to accomplish. So, better to understand the context.
Bob: Yeah, really, what we're developing is empathy for each other, trust with each other, and those things are, this may sound weird, but they're lubricants like they move things along, they speed things up, they just make everything run much more smoothly. The next step is boundaries, and I'm actually going to step back as Alex is so good on the boundaries. Well one, she has great boundaries. She taught me that, she taught me how to have good boundaries. It was something I didn't come into our relationship with, necessarily. I was always of such a people pleaser.
Alex: Oh, me, too. It took me a while to learn this. Yeah, nobody teaches us how to have boundaries for growing up. Anybody who's listening to this for professional advice or wisdom, you bring your personal self to work. So, learning how to have boundaries for yourself and in the workplace, it has a ripple effect throughout your life. I call it the deeply personal work of professional success.
So, boundaries we like to think of as, “What do you need to be your best? and what do you need to feel safe?” If you and if you can answer those two questions, you really start to form a cohesive, multi-directional set of boundaries. From that personal space, I have, I have an autoresponder or a signature that goes out on every email that I get more comments about than anything else I write, and it just says, “I don't respond to email immediately. It might be 24 to 48 hours. Like I'm only in my email a couple times a day.” That's a boundary for me, and I'm just very clear about it. So, that's like one example. I know, you have other examples for this particular product space.
Bob: Well, I always think about developers, we've all seen the charts, right? For the cost of an interruption to a developer?
Hope: The flow, interrupting the flow.
Bob: You interrupt the flow. So, asking people the question, “How are you at your best? What does it take for you to be at your best? What hours are you at your best?” I think there's a fair bit of research out there that really says, when it comes to sort of cognitive spend on a day, we probably have six hours maximum, of really decent quality cognitive work that is available to us on a given day, and for different people that happens at different times of day. It happens in different environments, and especially in product development; one you do need to collaborate, you need to interact with each other, you need to hear from each other, you need your work critiqued, and certainly and you need to know, is this what the customer wanted? You need to check in and that kind of thing, but at the same time, someone tapping you on your shoulder and saying, “Hey, can I have a minute?” can ruin an hour. You can lose a lot of time. So, having that conversation, I think is really important.
Right before we hit record, we were talking about like boundaries being something that we don't think about much, and I know for years, I'm 55 now, so I've been in business a long time, I've had a lot of different jobs; and it wasn't until probably the last four or five years that I really started deeply considering what it is that made me the best at my work. Instead, I would just be like, “Oh, if somebody at you know if a customer asks for it, or a boss asks for it, I should do it. I should have no boundary” and that's such a weird way to think about things. I now coach a lot of leaders as well and I really try to get them to think about this as well, because I think a lot of leaders, especially leaders who aren't necessarily, let's call it trained managers, which is the case I've been in lots of times in my career, I'm a doer who gets promoted to manager and then doesn't know what the hell they're doing anymore. We really expect a lot from the people, we expect them to be at our beck and call, and not realizing that we are that every time we behave in that way, we're damaging the performance of the team. Team engineering is such a unique and nuanced skill set, and I think it's really lacking, just because we don't even have the language to talk about it half the time. So, that's kind of what we're attempting to do here with this.
Hope: Yeah. I think boundaries was huge because you're right, like the stating of intentions personal intentions, the setting of boundaries, these are not elements - I mean, we can't even get meetings to have agendas let alone, discuss these things. So, I just think it's profound, the potential impact. It shows again, not only empathy but respect, and to me, it exemplifies how we need to figure out the best ways that we can work together in a way that really cares about our collective success. So, I loved that notion of making boundaries an explicit part of this process.
Bob: Not to put too fine a point on it, but when you have a team full of white men of a certain age, like a homogenous group of people who all share a very similar background, a very similar set of life circumstances, a very similar set of life goals, that it's relatively easy to reach some kind of alignment because you're homogenous and you're all like, “Oh, of course, this is direction where I go,” but now and I think diversity is such a hot topic, and it's been on my mind for a decade. That it's not just about hiring. It's not just about hiring people who look different into the same old position, into the same old team environment. It's actually, we have to create new teams environments, and we actually have to co-create that team environment and I think, talking about our boundaries, talking about our lives, talking about what we need, you know, to feel safe to feel productive, is vitally important. It's a vitally important conversation. If you care about creativity and productivity. If you don't care about creativity and productivity, that's fine.
Hope: In product, we care about this.
Bob: Yes.
Alex: Don't ever be ready to be replaced by somebody who does.
Hope: So, tell me about the last part of the process.
Alex: The last ones my favorite, it's dreams. What's truly magical and why we put this at the end, is when you share your dreams, we want you to think about yourself. Like if this were to go incredibly well, what would be true for you? What would be true for the other people on the team? What do you want to see happen for them? What do you want to see happen for the group, the organization, the clients? Really get into that imagination, expansive space, and what happens, it's more true when you're in person, but it can happen via video conference, we start to release oxytocin with each other. That is a bonding biochemical reaction that we have with other humans. It's actually really challenging to hear somebody else's wholehearted dream and not want that for them too. So, even though you may have uncovered some emotional or logistical landmines in the conversation, when you share your dreams together, you're more likely to work together for each other and make these things solvable.
Bob: Yeah, and they're contagious too. I'll hear other people's dreams and be like, “Well, I want that too” not only do I want it for you, but like “Hey, that sounds that sounds awesome.” I think again, we're echoing intentions because we might be getting into this because we want to deliver value the customer, great, or we want to make some money. Alright, how much money do you want to make? What kind of adoption curve are you talking about? What would really, really make you feel like this was the best project you've ever had the opportunity to work on? For me, what's interesting is over and over again, what shows up is, I didn't even realize this until, a few years ago, but every time I'm working on a project with a team, I'm actually much more interested in the team than the product. It's more like, okay, so we finished the product, or we finished this phase of the product. I want to feel like we're a stronger team. I want to feel like I'm on a high funk, because that feels so amazing. I'm actually in in the process of sadly losing my one of my favorite business partners ever because she's taken a very important, wonderful in-house job somewhere, which I'm so happy she's doing; but finding somebody who you work that well with, is really such a such a high, it's such a rush. And I think often that's really why we're doing what we're doing. We humans just like to hang out together.
Hope: We want that connection. Yes.
Bob: That’s why dumb team building exercise work. People get so serious about it, I play the ballpoint game, it's a little agile game about using these little plastic balls to signify work and you just sort of get the group together, people get super serious about it. I always point out like, ‘Okay, you just got really serious about something completely meaningless.” So, I think you can get serious about like, data migration, right?
Hope: Right. That's excellent. So, super simple, but very rare to see those components coming in to getting people aligned. So, hopefully we're going to see more people and I want to get into what you heard and didn't hear from the techniques; but you also have a great offer for people who want better alignment in their teams. Do you want to share a little bit about that?
Bob: Oh, yeah, the offer. Thank you for giving us the time needed to pitch. So, the book comes out actually next week. So, if anybody buys 10 copies, which the idea would be….
Hope: On August 11th?
Bob: On August 11th, yeah. You can probably buy it by Friday, we're still good. That's the pre-launch numbers that this is all about. We're offering an eight-week course to anybody who buys 10 books. So, the idea is, you know, you buy it for your team. then you get to be in the course, with us for eight weeks where we'll get really nuanced about all of this stuff, everything from facilitation, to understanding boundaries to doing values work and actually, we're going to be responsive to the people in the group. So, it'll be organized around the needs of the folks in the group because we're good product designers or we'd like to think we are.
Hope: Yeah, and you want to extend the experience and give even more value, which is fantastic.
Bob: Exactly. You had another question. Sorry, what was that?
Hope: Yeah, we heard advice from product leaders about what the practically they do to get aligned on decisions in their organizations, and there were some themes, there were some differences. What did you take away? What did you notice was helping them to reach alignment and maybe things that they could do differently that you didn't hear about?
Bob: Yeah. So, I heard some amazing things, and I think the main thrust of a lot of their techniques was about creating what I would think of as tactical alignment, what are we actually going to do together? What's the next set of decisions we have to make? Which is very tactically focused and very important. Like, let's be super operational about it. Then a lot of them hinted at the thing that sits underneath this idea which we think of as the relational iceberg. So, the tactical alignment is that little thing that sticks above the water, but there's all this stuff that goes on under what under the water that makes that thing potentially possible, potentially valuable. This is really, in our experience, this is an emotional experience. It is not something that's logical, necessarily. I think we've all probably taken reasonable requests from people at work sometimes and just said, “I'm not going to do that” because of some experience we had with that person previously. Maybe I'm the only passive aggressive person around.
Hope: You’re not. We are emotional creatures. That's unavoidable.
Bob: So, this idea of team psychological safety or trust, really is foundational. Again, it makes everything move faster and I heard people talking about that component in a variety of ways. So, one was, alright, let's have the pre-meeting, let's go around and meet with everybody ahead of time before we have the decision-making meeting together. I think that can be done in a couple ways; one that can be done in a beautiful way where I'm going to go listen to the concerns, I'm going to address concerns, I'm going to create a deep personal connection with somebody, I think those are all super valid. Or it can be done in a way like, “I'm going to go work this person over before the meeting.”
Hope: It’s like the battle before the battle.
Bob: Yeah, and it was a little unclear I think on what game people are playing and people operating in different environments, no judgement, but I think what they're trying to get to, is this sense of, “Are we really emotionally aligned?” and also, I heard the word consensus brought up a lot, which I hear all the time, but I heard it contrasted with essentially controller compliance; that you need to know who the decision maker is, which I think clarity about how a decision is going to be made, I would go to that level rather than who's the decision maker because a single point of decision making is a style of decision making. It doesn't it's not the only style of decision making is not necessarily the most effective, or creative, or creates the best outcome, but it is a style of decision making.
So, if that's the environment you operate in, if you're in a command and control environment, and the boss has a personality that just doesn't, bend or whatever, fine that's not a bad way to go. I think we're always thinking about things as well, as if we're in an environment where it's a little bit fear based, essentially. I was in newspaper design for many years, I had an editor who has now passed away. He was a legend. He was a giant of man, both physically as well as in the industry. He was a really intense human being. I was the design director of the paper and he would yell at me, “I don't want malicious compliance!” and I was like, “Then maybe, like smile at me” stop yelling at me. I was very young, you know, when I'm one of those jobs where I've been elevated to above my level of competence.
So, what we're not looking for, I wanted to sort of contrast like consensus is one way to make a decision as a group, there are other ways to agree to make a decision as a group.
Alex: Yeah. I want to bring in a quick story about our 13-year-old. So, our son is a budding entrepreneur and artist, and we have used this method that we just described, we have used this with him in conversations about everything you can imagine, since he was little and what we've seen is he has grown into a very young person who is very capable of talking about tough topics and listening to other people and making his own decisions. So, it's a really beautiful dance and I'm not trying to compare people in on your teams to children, but we are we're trying to have relationships that are right based on trust, where people are enabled and empowered to bring their best self forward and feel safe to experiment. The fact that our 13-year-old son says things like, “I'm really glad I'm being raised learning how to care about other people's feelings.” that's pretty remarkable. Well, what would our workplaces be like if people brought that kind of confidence and self-knowing and openness to our collaborations? It's totally possible.
Hope: I'm so glad you brought that up because after hearing the answers and thinking about my own approach to alignment and then reading your book, I think that's for me what I have recognized has been I haven't invested enough in. Which is I focus on shared understanding, understanding interest, like all of those, again, maybe more tactical things, with not enough emphasis on that trust building piece and how critical that is. We are going to support one another because we care about each other's success. We care about our collective success, customer success, company success, but that we do have these practical fears. We have these like realistic constraints and boundaries. All of that, to me was not at least explicitly talked about in most of the answers, but at the end of the day, these are not robots. These are people having to work together and collaborate together who all have lives and different experiences and vulnerabilities that I feel like we kind of suppress a lot at work because it makes us feel like we're going to be judged, attacked, not supported for those differences.
So, I really appreciate that this technique brings all that out into the open. You bring up one of my favorite topics, is trust and the nature of trust. There's a lot of different studies out there, that sort of highlight one truth that I always come back to and it was a mistake that I made over and over and over again, as a young leader or manager, is essentially you can sum it up is that people don't really care what you think until they think you care. This really actually speaks to that it's an evolutionary psychology thing. It actually is an underlying sort of nature of the way humans bond. It's one of the reasons gossip is so popular is because actually gossip is our effort to figure out if somebody walks their talk essentially. It actually serves a very, very powerful social function. People think of it as a bad thing and it certainly can be, but in band level society, it's very, very common, and it seems to serve a very, very distinct function, and basically, we're trying to figure out is, does this person really care? I don't know about you, but I've definitely followed leaders who appeared to care, but then later didn't and cost of that is really, really high, well, it's cost me money, it's costing me time, it's cost and it's also cost me, you know, like peace of mind and my ability to trust.
So, what we're really trying to do is help people. So, if I'm going back to product, so if I'm a Product leader, and I have an idea of the way things should go and I'm trying to get the team aligned around it. If I come to the team, and I just bring all the data and all of the reasons and basically, if I lead with intellect, intellect, intellect, and force, the issue and I speak from experience, I have done this, you will actually reduce the amount of trust in the room. The opposite of trust in this case is fear, you'll actually increase fear. Whereas, if I come in, and this is what I really liked about what several other folks said was, I like to go around and listen, like, I can't remember one of them, I think she said, “Here's what we've heard, here's where we are. Here's what's in process.” and I think with people, especially with people in power with people who have the have the power to derail what was going on. She just kind of goes on a quick listening tour, and just making sure that she's just in pure listening mode. Then this really builds both trust because that person feels you care. Also, you got all the information. If you're the person asking the questions, you're the person gathering the information. If you're going to negotiate in a negotiation, you want to be the person gathering the information, not the person giving the information because information asynchronous, asymmetry is power. For those of you who are Machiavellian out there. I think there are better reasons to do this, but that's a good enough reason.
Hope: That's the reason. So, I know we only have a few minutes left, but you may not get to a ‘hell yes’ after you go through this experience. Because again, you're still in information gathering, you may not have made all the decisions or addressed all the boundary constraints and fears and worries. So, can you talk a little Alex, about what happens after this conversation? What are the possible paths you go down?
Alex: Sometimes you, you realize, “Oh, we are all on the same page and we trust each other and like each other even more. This is awesome.” and that is a fantastic outcome. Sometimes you realize, “Oh, my gosh, we are not in alignment in any way. We should not work together or stop dating” Believe me, this conversation has been used in many a personal relationship. I have to say in my humble opinion, as someone who's been coaching for about 20 years now, finding out that things are not a fit, is a great realization; because boy, can you save time and resources and sweat and heartache by just ending things when you know, it's not a good fit? Whether that's a product or a team or your boyfriend.
But then there's also kind of the gray area.
Bob: Yeah, and the gray area, I think, honestly, in a product environment. You've already got the tools a lot of the time, because I think especially, if you're practicing some form of Agile or customer development work, like this idea of continuous improvement, retrospection, collaborative planning, and I use this often as a precursor or kind of an integral part, frankly, of, it's just the first step in what I think of as a team chartering process. So team chartering, the next step is, okay, we've got all the information on the table, and there's some stuff that feels like a little bit wonky, like a little bit like, “Uh, I don't know how we're going to reconcile that” you like to work in the morning, I'd like to work in the evening, and by the way, our data centers in India, so time zones just become really impractical. So, what are we going to do? How are we either going to change that situation or accommodate to it, and that really comes down to a few different things. So, I usually like to get teams working on working agreements next, which is very simple, like, we're going to use Slack for conversations, we're going to have one channel for bugs and one channel for features or whatever it is. We're just going to make some really strict agreements. We're going to meet weekly for a planning session. We're going to meet monthly for a retrospective to improve the team, you know, like really get the blocking. It's an acting term, like the stage blocking. Like, we're going to go here and do this and go here and do that, and this is the way this is going to work, I'm going to pick up the cup of coffee here. Just getting all of that stuff in place.
Sometimes I like to add to that, if the team is particularly emotionally intelligent or wants to be, like, “Let's talk about also how we're going to treat each other.” Things like, “Let's assume positive intent, let's call people in rather than call people out” If I have an issue with somebody, let me go and deal with that person directly, rather than ambush them in a meeting in front of everybody else, that kind of thing.
So, sort of working agreements and sort of behavioral norms, it's the way I think of that. Then we get into tools, you know, like requirements are going to get live here. This is our working environment. These are going to be our office hours. I find often, those just get really super explicit, like Alex and I when we wrote the book together; we had have an editing agreement because we're trying to write something together. It was so powerful when it didn't happen for the first month or two of writing, but it eventually did where we realize like, “Oh, we should be ruthlessly editing each other, and that's okay. We're just going to make an explicit agreement that you can stomp all over my prose.” We're using Google Docs. So, it's still there. You know, it's not disruptive. But you can stomp all over my stuff. I can stomp all over your stuff and what we feel happened. I feel actually, like an ‘our voice’ emerged from that process, and that's what we really needed.
Alex: Yeah, but we didn't get there until we really trusted each other in this new way, which happened because we used the all-in method together, we developed this trust, which in a creative relationship context is so important. I trust you and you trust me. Great, let's edit the heck out of each other. Imagine what your product teams are then freed up. We know we've got each other's backs. That is worth, I don't know how much money but a lot.
Hope: Yeah, that's a lubricates like you're describing, it helps things go smooth faster, and ends up in a better place and a better dynamic.
Bob: 100%.
Hope: This has been amazing. Thank you so much. If people want to find out more about each of you and the work that you do, where can they find you?
Alex: So, you should go to radicalalignmentbook.com. and from there, you get all the things there, but you can order the book, get your 10 bucks and sign up for the Radically Aligned Leaders Training, do that by August 11th. That would be amazing. Get that eight-week training with us. We're going to give you all the knowledge, go to radicalalignmentbook.com.
Hope: Excellent. Thank you so much for spending time and sharing your perspectives with emerging product leaders and experienced product leaders and frankly, any person having to work or live or want to have a productive, enjoyable relationship with another human. It's useful in all those contexts. So, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and wisdom.
Alex: Thanks for having us.
Bob: Thank you Hope.
Hope: Thank you for sharing these techniques. You book will help so many product leaders and teams learn how to be even more effective by creating and sharing the All-In approach to have conversations fueled by trust and understanding to achieve radical alignment. You can find the transcript of this episode and link to get more info on Bob, Alex and Radical Alignment book at fearless-product.com.