Lia Garvin:
We have different ways to approach how to do it, but at its core, at its foundation, we're completely aligned. And when you start the conversation from there, not at a place of us versus them, they're not listening. They don't understand me. Defenses, pointing fingers. When you start at a place of alignment, you have such a better foundation to have a productive conversation.
Lia Garvin:
Welcome to the managing simple podcast. I'm Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money and stress. It doesn't matter if you're a business owner who realized that running a team isn't as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game. Everyone is welcome to hang out with managing made simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more. We leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between.
Lia Garvin:
Let's go. Welcome back to the show. Well, the jury is in. It is official. The unstoppable team is a number one bestseller on Amazon. Top new release. This is such an exciting moment because it means the book can get out to help more and more people. And if you haven't picked up your copy yet, what are you waiting for? Pause this go to Amazon, grab the unsupport team because this is the playbook that you need to bring more ease into managing to have simple strategies and tools to save time, money and most of all, stress, which results to your team satisfaction.
Lia Garvin:
Proving folks sticking around longer, that's always a good thing. And really being able to scale your business. So if you haven't grabbed it today, head to Amazon.com, pick up unstoppable team and I cannot wait to hear what you think. With that said, let's dive right in. Today is a fun know. This is diving into a topic that has been a predominant theme in my career of managing team operations, of working in the design operations space, predominantly in big tech. And this is about rationalizing those conflicting motivations on teams. And a lot of us have them.
Lia Garvin:
We have creative versus account, we have product versus engineering. And we create these us versus them sentiments that actually start to really chip away at the quality of the work, the experience of your employees. And again, this us versus them, it creates factions that makes it hard for folks to work together. At the end of the day, it's hard to grow your business because everybody's not really aligned on that shared goal. Now, when I worked in the design space, there was beliefs that creatives are just kind of working on an island. They don't care about timelines, they don't care about budgets. And then creatives were saying about account people. They just care about making money.
Lia Garvin:
They don't care what the product quality looks like. They don't care what the design is. And those two beliefs, again, it creates conflict, and it's hard to rationalize. It's hard to get a team working cohesively when that's the way. When I worked in engineering teams, it was engineers believed product people just want to shove a bunch of features into the product and get more stuff in there. And product people felt like engineering just wanted to kind of spin their wheels on stuff, or they didn't want to kind of do more. They just wanted to prove the current thing. Whatever these beliefs are, these will slow your team down.
Lia Garvin:
And so we have to recognize, whenever you're hearing they just, or us versus them, any of these little signals that you have a team where there's conflicting motivations, you want to address it head on. And so I wanted to talk about, well, what are three ways that we can do that? How do we get everybody aligned? Because at the end of the day, we are working in the same company. We do theoretically have all the same goals. So we have to bring people back around to really acknowledging that. Now, the first thing we need, and this is critical for every team, every business, no matter what, is to have your team values. Now, I want to do a deeper dive on values in a future episode. So I'm not going to talk around how to create values, but what I want to really drive home is you must, must have team or company values that everybody understands, everybody has agreed, they have signed up for, and everybody is really operating against. Now, team values are these deeply held beliefs.
Lia Garvin:
These are the non negotiables. These are the behaviors that we want to embody or the qualities we want to embody. They can be current, they can be aspirational, but we're all really clear on what those are. And when you have team values that everybody's aware of, everyone's bought into, now, we have a common language that we're all operating against. If one of our values is customer experience above all else, let's say, then that's some language we can bring together product and engineering or creatives and accounts or whoever this sort of us versus thems are looking at and say, well, how do we address this challenge? Mapping it to our value of customer service above all else. And that's the kind of thing that can help frame conversations, right? Because you have something to point back to. If we say our value is delivering the utmost cutting edge technology, world class, right, something like that. Well, then when we're rationalizing product quality versus more features, things like that, that's going to help us govern that decision.
Lia Garvin:
So values help us figure out how to prioritize, how to make decisions, how we're operating. And it can create that common language for you to reconcile some of those what seems like conflicting motivations. Because at the end of the day, we're not at odds. We share these values, we have the same goals in mind. Now, this feeds right into the second thing that's critical is having very clear, overarching priorities for the team and the company. And this is how we see our values and our mission translate into actual measurable goals. And I talk about this a lot in the unstoppable team that we need to have clear priorities. We can't have a million priorities and we can't have two vague priorities.
Lia Garvin:
Having very clear priorities, and I love to map them to smart goals, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely. That's the smart goals framework. So that we say, hey, this is what we're trying to do, here's how we're going to do it. Here's when we've done it, and here's how we know if we've done it. When we have priorities like that, we take everybody on the team and we say, hey, are we all clear on how we're going to deliver, on hitting these priorities? And that's another way to build alignment, because everyone sees that, hey, this is what we've all signed up for. Again, we don't really have conflicting motivations. We all are responsible for this revenue goal, or hitting this number of customers or clients, or opening the second location of our store or facility, whatever, or creating this new line of business. We are all signed up for it, we're on the hook.
Lia Garvin:
Then we can get into brass hacks about how to get there and there's some nuances there and some levers we can pull. But there's not a question of like, does some people feel like they're working towards this big priority and other people don't? We have to build alignment that yes, we are all responsible for delivering on these priorities. We all have our marching orders on how we're going to do that. And I talk about how to do that in the unstoppable team. And then once we've established that there really is not a conflict, if you get to a situation where you have, let's say you have a revenue goal of doubling your revenue next year, and you have a team that has creative and account folks, and those folks are at ODS a little bit. Creative folks want to keep tweaking and fine tuning, and they're going over timelines a little bit. They're going over budget on projects, and account folks are saying, we got to get tighter, we got to get tighter, we got to take tighter their hours. And the two feel like they're at ODs.
Lia Garvin:
Well, going back to the team and saying, hey, here's our revenue goals. Here is where we're landing on the spend on each project. Creative. We've gone a little bit over now, what are some of the things that we can do in the future to kind of optimize that time? And you ask them to proactively share ideas. It's not just we're taking sides with account here because we want to say, hey, we don't want to lose quality here because some of the reasons we have repeat clients and folks coming back to us and folks recommending us to others is because of the high, high quality of the creative. And so account folks, what are some levers we can pull on the streamlining of operations side on figuring our packages or retainers, whatever that looks like on the client services, so that we make sure to give creative the space to deliver the highest quality results. But we're operating under that shared understanding that we have this revenue goal and that we have these shared values that we've already talked about. And then we have a conversation where we've already checked several boxes that, yeah, we are aligned.
Lia Garvin:
We have different ways to approach how to do it, but at its core, at its foundation, we're completely aligned. And when you start the conversation from there, not at a place of us versus them, they're not listening. They don't understand me defenses, pointing fingers. When you start at a place of alignment, you have such a better foundation to have a productive conversation. And you're asking the different departments or the different folks with different focuses to propose ideas that account for the other's perspectives. Another thing that can be really, really helpful here is to ask folks to play the role of the other person's perspective, just to understand, like, hey, are they even able to kind of bring in some empathy here? Are they able to do a perspective shift? For example, asking an engineer, hey, share what you think is going on for the product team's perspective. Where's their head at? And asking them to do that with engineering, asking folks just to try on that hat for a minute. This is a really helpful thing to do, to get people to kind of take the walls down and realize there's perspectives that aren't my same ones that I can acknowledge.
Lia Garvin:
I don't have to agree, I don't have to change mine, but I respect it, and I can acknowledge that it's a part of the conversation. Now, the third thing that I recommend so much to break down these walls, help with these conflicting motivations and get people aligned, get back to collaborating, seeing that they really are on the same page is to find opportunities where folks can collaborate across organizational boundaries, across role type, pairing up an account and a creative person to solve a problem. Maybe it's saying, hey, we want to optimize how we're doing our creative reviews. Let's put the two of you together to figure out what's the best way to do that. Figuring out projects where you get people that think about problems in different ways and have a very different purview into the business, to work together, to cross pollinate, to share ideas, to build more empathy about each other's experience. And the more you do this, the more you're making well rounded employees that understand the full surface area of your business and you break down these walls that we really believe no one sees as things our way, because it's not true. And when you start to see the way that other teams think about problems in your company and in your team, you start to see, hey, we are way more aligned than we thought. And you get out of this us versus them thinking.
Lia Garvin:
Those are the three things that I would suggest to try. If you are finding this us versus them, this account versus creative, the engineering versus product, whatever this posing forces feels like, really get clear on those team values, reiterate them, talk about what they mean, talk about how they translate to the work. These values inform the priorities. Okay, being very, very clear on your priorities and how every single role maps to that. And making sure everyone sees, yes, I am bought in, I see that I am accountable to delivering on these priorities. And then third, finding opportunities for folks to work together across roles, across organizational boundaries so that you create a more wellrounded set of team members that really understand all facets of the business and have empathy for what each perspectives that each person embodies in their different roles. So give those three things a try, and I cannot wait to see how that brings more ease into your team, fosters more collaboration, reduces conflict overall, and starts to help you deliver on those results faster because you're not getting stuck in the debating and the disagreeing that comes when people don't see each other's perspectives. That's something that really slows things down.
Lia Garvin:
And I think it's underestimated that when we deep down believe someone's against what I'm doing or they don't get it, we might drag our feet, we might go a little bit slower, might hold on tighter to an opinion or perspective than we need to, even if we kind of know we don't need to keep it anymore, but we don't want the other person to be right. The more we open up communication, the more seamless interactions become and the faster work goes. All right, so if you like this episode, share it with a friend. Definitely. If you are seeing those opposing forces, pass it along. Because this one, I think is going to help folks just find a little bit more ease in the way they're working. That's all I have for today.
Lia Garvin:
Thank you so much for tuning in to the managing made simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job.
Lia Garvin:
Of people management so that together we.
Lia Garvin:
Can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.
Lia Garvin:
With that said, let's spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass.
Lia Garvin:
It along to someone who might benefit. See you next time.
