Transcript of Great Leadership Teams Move Beyond Assumptions

Welcome to this month's edition of Great Leaders Build Great Leadership Teams webinar series. My name is Jack McGuinness and managing partner of Relationship Impact, a consulting firm that works with executive teams of growing companies to help their leadership teams get in shape both structurally and relationally.

This week's topic is a pretty cool one. It will be one of our shorter webinars. The topic is pretty rich but frankly pretty, pretty easy to describe and hard to execute on but pretty easy to describe. So just a couple of words on notes on logistics for those of you who participated before, sorry for boring you, but our slides are chock-full of content so you'll see a lot of words on each slide. I try not to read off the slides, but you'll all get a link to the slides and an article and some other cool materials tomorrow when I send out the link to everyone so you'll appreciate those. I hope you'll have those as a resource for you.

Secondly, if you have any questions during the course of the webinar, please just use the chat function of Zoom and just ask me a question and I'll get to them throughout the course of the discussion.

All right. So let's get to it. Great Leadership Teams Move Beyond Assumptions. Before I start, I mean as it's cliche, I remember my father telling me early on, assumptions are tough, right? And so you make too many assumptions, you make an ass out of you and me. And that has lived its way up for me throughout the course of my life, particularly in my marriage. But I think the same applies to working with leadership teams. Assumptions are natural. They're a way we deal with life, that's the way we ... We have to make assumptions to help us solve problems. But sometimes when we make assumptions about each other, we can get ourselves in trouble. And so what I'm about to talk to you about is, what are we talking about in terms of assumptions that can get in trouble, and what can we do about it when assumptions are, in fact, making a leadership team less than ... Not as functional as it otherwise could be.

All right. Let's get started. The challenge from our perspective is that diversity on teams is obviously great. Diversity of skills, diversity of talents, diversity of experience, diversity of backgrounds. All of that is great, but it also, when you have people with different backgrounds, different experiences, it's not surprising that sometimes teams have difficulties working well together. Those backgrounds and experiences are often different, the ways of behaving are often different. And then you pull a group of talented people together and oftentimes those can lead to some relational challenges and hinder the team's ability to engage what we call productive dialogue or the ability to challenge each other well, debate well in a way that pushes the most important issues the team is facing forward in a productive manner with sort of minimal relational damage.

So part of the challenge is that building and maintaining great teams, even with a great group of senior executives is not an easy challenge just by simply the diversity of skills and talents on the team. And oftentimes what we find is that with teams is that they get themselves in trouble by making some assumptions. Here's a chart that my partner Gil came up with several years back that sort of gives you a pretty cool picture of how this assumption work and can build.

On the left side of the screen, you'll see on this [inaudible 00:05:00] slide, this is how you see yourself. You understand what you're motivated by, you know what your intentions are and you behave according to those motivations and intentions. It's sort of what you're trying to give off in the world. And importantly, most times, particularly on when new teams are formed or even new members are brought on a team, what you really get to see the perception that others see is really based on how you behave.

People don't really, until they really get to know you, understand what your intentions are and what your motivations are. And so this can often lead to people making assumptions about what our motivations are and what our intentions are, and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong and vice versa. We make assumptions about how others are behaving, and often use the example of two polar opposite folks on a leadership team, one person is very results oriented, wants to get to the solution right away and just driving towards, let's get an answer.

So that behavior is not necessarily a bad behavior, but when other people see that, particularly if folks that are maybe more analytical or contemplative, that causes a conflict. Someone that's more contemplative or reflective might think, “God, he's just trying to steamroll over us.” Rather than, that's not really his motivation intention, he just wants to get to results. But his behavior causes us to form an assumption that he's rigid, he's too aggressive and he's trying to steamroll us. And his behavior might not fit those motivations of getting to results from our perspective. But in fact, that's all he is trying to do and his behavior is increase incongruous with how we would do things. And so that can cause some natural tension.

There's a great article that I often use with my clients called The Problem With Assumption and the Power of Inquiry. The image of it is right here on the right side and if you click on that when I send you this list, it will slide, you will be able to see the whole article. But it talks a lot about how assumptions can get us in trouble. Clearly assumptions, as I said before, are a natural part of our day to day lives. We have to make assumptions, we have to make business assumptions, we have to make assumptions about a level of risk and all those types of things. However, when we make assumptions about how we see our colleagues, particularly as it relates to a leadership team or any team really, those assumptions are, as the article says, are often fraught with risk. Meaning simply that our assumptions, while sometimes they may be right, oftentimes they're not. And we build our relationships oftentimes on faulty assumptions, which has a way of spiraling and causing additional friction, which I'll talk about in a second.

That's kind of what this article talks about and it's a great article that talks a little bit about assumption and the power of overcoming poor assumptions is inquiry, and I'll talk to you about that in a couple of minutes here.

So assumptions are natural, but when we make assumptions about our colleagues sometimes in terms of ... And again back to the bubble chart I just showed you about particularly how we're observing their behavior and not really understanding necessarily their intentions and motivations, we can sometimes get ourselves in trouble.

Okay, so this is just another cool slide that reflects the same concept. By acting on our assumptions as if they were true, we've constructed a reality that doesn't necessarily reflect what is happening in the moment. You might be sitting there saying, I'm sure, I can picture some of my clients actually saying, “Yeah, well, you know, Joe really is a loudmouth, aggressive, jerk who just doesn't want to hear anyone's point of view.” And yeah, that's his behavior and that behavior is getting in the way. And I'm not suggesting that the behavior doesn't have to morph, but assuming that he is selfish and that he only cares about himself rather than the good of the whole team is maybe true but not necessarily.

Any questions at this point? It's kind of basic stuff, right? Not, not stuff we typically think about, but important nonetheless.

And assumption cycle. This is something that I'm my partner Gil and I have come up with. It's basic patterns of behavior that we see, particularly as it relates to the executive teams that we're working with. A behavior is displayed. That behavior doesn't necessarily fit with the way I would approach something, and we then make an assumption about that behavior in an attempt to make sense of what the behavior means to us. Sometimes the assumptions are correct and sometimes they're not. Oftentimes, they're not. And it's been our experience over the last 10 years of working with a lot of executive teams that oftentimes assumptions are what get leadership teams in trouble.

And then unfortunately, because we don't like that behavior, we've made that assumption, we keep seeing the behavior, and then we have a reciprocal behavior that is not as productive as it should be. And then that behavior escalates. So we're digging our heels in or being passive aggressive or whatever the patterns of behavior might be, but we're not moving important issues forward as productive as we can be because we've escalated it into sort of this rhythm of assumption and behavior and a reciprocal behavior and new assumptions made. And it's just an unproductive cycle.

For example, he doesn't listen very well. My assumption that he only cares about his viewpoint. My reciprocal behavior might be, I will stop raising issues when he is in the room. And it might escalate to, yeah, and then our folks that work for us see this and they display similar behavior. They're not working as effectively as they can. And so this assumption cycle is what we see in a lot of the teams we're working with is that assumptions are made based on behaviors. We have a reciprocal behavior. And the behavior that the tension between the parties escalates and it sort of gets in our way. And so you may ask yourself, well, what do we do about it?

In a nutshell, what you do about it is, before I even move on to the next slides, is you call a time out and you say, we got to get to the root as a team on the assumptions we're making about each other. I know that seems stupid. It may seem silly to folks, but I'm telling you, until you do that, until you start uncovering what some of these potentially faulty assumptions are, we continue to grind out in a fairly unproductive manner. And so simply, you got to step back and focus on it. And so there's three steps, three pieces that we think are important to move beyond the assumptions that we have made about each other.

First is what we call take action or be proactive. You've got to step back and you got to do some work, and the subject of a another webinar, but I'm not going to spend on today, but do some work on getting to know each other at a little bit different level of detail, back to the bubble charts, getting to know what each of us are motivated by, what our intentions are. And again, we're not saying that the behaviors you know, someone yelling or someone talking over someone is an okay behavior. But what we're saying is let's check our assumptions about that behavior.

One way to do this is to really do a little bit of inquiry to understand each other's experiences, technical approaches, step back and reflect on that with each other. Work to appreciate the things that actually motivate each other at work and beyond. And then importantly, the most important part is to actually gain some commitments from each other on, you know, if I am that aggressive moving stuff forward and I'm not listening as well as I should be, making a commitment to my teammates that says, okay, I hear you guys, I am going to slow down. I do care about the work of this team. It looks like I just care about my own stuff, but I'm going to slow down adapt as best I can. And when I fall down on that, I want to get some feedback from you all.

So be proactive take a step back, make sure that you're taking time to get to know each other at a little bit of a different level of detail. I know this sounds, for some people, it sounds, “Oh my God, we're going to talk about our feelings.” Not really what we're going to be talking about is the way you view the world is a little bit different than the way I view the world, and that can lead to some assumptions about how we each behave and we need to check those. And so that gets to the next piece is be curious. As the article points out, the anecdote to unchecked assumptions is inquiry or curiosity.

Being curious about a behavior that seems different or odd or different than the way I would approach it can just open up some new realities. So asking questions when someone behaves in a different way, and you say, “Well, tell me more about what you're thinking about?” Or, “Could you just slow down a little bit and take us through that again.” Rather than just digging in or sitting back and saying, I give up, right?

When we're curious, we often tend to view situations more creatively and have fewer defensive reactions. And believe me folks, I see this every day in the work that we do. When you ask questions and genuinely ask questions rather than form responses that can be somewhat defensive in nature. It disarms people. So another great book here that I referenced by Edgar Schein called Humble Inquiry. It's a little pamphlet book that I read over the summer. It's really just about asking great questions, which you don't already have the answer to, right? And really, really truly being curious.

Next piece of how do we deal with this is you know, so we take action to get to know each other and have a deeper level of detail. We shift from defensiveness and posturing to curiosity. And then it's what we call the adult in the room syndrome. Someone's got to be the adult in the room. If your colleague is digging in or your colleagues are digging in, you got to help, be the first one to offer the olive branch sometimes. Just say, “Hey look, it's a really good point. I understand where you're coming from, but can we slow down just a little bit and step back and take a look at this? I think you're making some good points, but I have some questions.” And this next bullet point I have up here is very easy to say, harder put in practice. Team members assume good intentions. And so this also gets back to the first point of being proactive and getting to understand each other.

It's really hard when we've built up some assumptions about each other to then move to a place where you're assuming good intentions, and I recognize that. But when you're doing the work to move beyond assumptions, it's really important to step back and assume that your colleagues actually have good intentions and take it upon yourself to be curious and [inaudible 00:19:58] to get beyond and to get to the root of what, as the assumption I'm making, is it really accurate or not?

Because the sad part about assumptions that we make on executive teams is that they have a tendency to help us focus more on trivial issues or less important issues at the expense of what's most important because we've built up a wall of, I don't want to hear what he has to say. I don't want to hear what she has to say. She's just going to pontificate same old behavior. And so then we're either ignoring the important issues or we're dealing with symptoms of larger problems like, issues like worrying about executive teams, worrying about the snacks in the break room versus dealing with the merger we got in front of us. I know that's an extreme example, but you know what I'm talking about. Assumptions can build up walls that lead us to act less than adult like.

And so I'd love to ... If anyone has any questions at all. In a nutshell, what this webinar's all about is when making sure that you're stepping back and looking at the assumptions we're making about each other. And mostly you, as a leader, as a member of a leadership team saying, you know, I have been making some assumptions. The things that make me uncomfortable about Bob, Jane and Jerry are these things and I'm going to write those down and I'm going to think about whether I believe they're really true and I'm going to challenge myself to check them and see if they really are or not, by getting to know my colleague a little bit more, being a little bit more curious about when someone says something or does something that's different than maybe I would do it and ask them good questions, ask them to slow down.

And then when you are struggling because teams do struggle, be the adult in the room, the person that steps up and says, “Hey, we need to step back and reflect on this and here's my olive branch out to you all.”.

That's this month's webinar. It was a short one, but a really important one because assumptions do have a way of getting in the way of the executive teams.

Thank you so much for your time. I wish you all a great Thanksgiving. These slides will, along with the articles I referenced and an article I've written on the same topic, will be sent to you in a link to our webpage, a page on our webpage. As always, we have this complementary assessment offer for general managers, presidents, CEOs to take on their leadership teams. So anyone that wants to take that, please go ahead. And then look for our January ... We're going to take the month of December off. It's a busy one. We're going to take the month of December off and regroup on January 22nd for our next webinar. Four characteristics of Great Leadership Tams. Sorry about that. That was a poor editing job, leadership teams. So thanks again for your time and I look forward to talking to you again in January.