I need you to pay attention to this part of this article:
On the day I visited the Spurs, they were going to look at tape because they had lost the day before. What Popovich put on the screen wasn’t tape from the game, it was a CNN documentary about the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1963. He created a discussion around that. He was genuinely curious about what the players thought. Would you have stood up during that time? What did your grandparents do? That sense of being connected and curious and engaged with not just the job but with the person is what really happens across these cultures. It’s not magic. It’s sending a clear, targeted signal that we are connected.
Let’s unpack.
What’s the article?
It’s about “unlocking the secret of successful work cultures.” Admittedly most articles with that title are complete bullshit.
Why this part?
So many reasons.
I was working at ESPN in 2008. Regardless of your specific political bent, it was a big year politically. We elected an African-American. That had never happened before. It was so hard, for a variety of reasons, to discuss this type of stuff in a work setting. It was always about the tasks and the deliverables.
You see the same stuff all the time with school shootings, big events elections, etc. People are spending 10-12 hours/day at work. It’s like “a second family” to many. But when we’re there, we’re just supposed to be heads down chasing KPIs. It can be pretty isolating, which you have to think plays into broader feelings of isolation and loneliness in society.
Imagine a scenario like the one above: you had a shitty day the day before, and you come in expecting a new to-do list and probably to be reamed out about yesterday. Instead, your boss calls the team together and you watch a comedy special and discuss it. Or you watch a documentary. Maybe you go eat Vietnamese food and discuss different cultures.
For an hour or two, it’s not about the work. It’s about the connection. All the stuff that always gets lip-serviced is now both present and real.
Wouldn’t that be cool?
Just a note on Popovich
By any measure, he’s one of the most successful coaches in NBA history. It’s not just his understanding of the game and the players he’s gotten. That’s a big part, sure. But it’s this stuff above too. That is the stuff that really makes a “team” into a TEAM. The good leaders understand that.
In fact, Phil Jackson — the coach some probably have ahead of Popovich — did the same stuff around team-building too.
Why is this so hard for managers?
Simple: they are evaluated off tasks being completed, often. So that’s what they want to see. Despite how much we deify and discuss innovation, most workplaces are heads-down target-hitting factories.
Could more managers do this?
Sure. We’re talking about 1-3 hours/month. It’s not a big deal at all. And the rewards are immense — but you cannot see them on a spreadsheet. That’s part of the issue.
There are other ways you can work on building teams, sure — see here, here, and here — but moments of connection, context, and community are so beautiful and so easy to achieve. Let’s do that more.
Ted, what you propose may be so easy for an NBA coach to accomplish, he is so free to do what he wants with a team that pretty much knows what they need to do. Regular work settings other than some of the more higher tech type (who have massive captive profits) are usually understaffed and always seeking more profit and lesser expenses. When in that mode (which is a hard one to break) you are just going thru the motions. If you are actually or even perceived to be always behind (maybe again because of not enough staff) its hard to even break away those 1-3 hours to see a movie.
Point taken Roger, but I think Ted’s observing that type of understaffed/rush-rush-rush culture is a big part of the problem. For context, I currently work in one of these types of environments (understaffed/rush-rush-rush). It’s often hellish, and even smart people routinely make stupid decisions because they’re pressed for time and don’t have any room to reflect before acting.
It’s a cultural problem, and contributes significantly to burnout and turnover. The biggest issue, as I see it, is getting people who drive this type of culture to understand its ramifications. It’s been my observation thus far (not necessarily in my current org, but in past orgs I’ve been at) that people with those qualities often tend to be highly obstinate, and/or are quick to blame employees for issues that are really more systemic in nature.
While I don’t personally subscribe to the “sense of urgency” school of thought (though I do have to labor under it for the time being), it would be nice if folks who subscribe to it would accept that it drives turnover; folks who behave in this way should also not hound prospective employees for “job hopping”. Many people get branded with that dumb title, people who, under closer inspection, were probably just doing their best to navigate their way out of toxic work environments.
Cheers, Dan
So Dan been thinking about what Ted brought up and what you said. I work for a small company 27 employees that serves the Wind/solar construction and Operations & Maintenance Market. We are well known and trusted in the industry. I’ve worked here the longest (15 plus years) and at one time it was just the owner/founder and me. Being that said I have the embedded history of the business and the market and I am very good at what I do. I am the technical and organizational specialist on all issues and I am good at what I do. But if I get overloaded I make mistakes and this last week I’ve been overloaded performing QA/QC functions on a 4000 plus line item Request for Quote for our largest customer. I have to rely upon many others to fill the RFQ details from inside/outside staff to outside suppliers who put the information in various formats and in various ways. I am passionate about what I do the others (mostly Millennials) just are not. They try but they don’t have the skill set to move fast as needed and even worse they don’t seem to want to build that skill set. Got to the point yesterday that I said this has got to end, others need to be hired to provide responses as needed, I can’t do it all. I am regretting coming in its like I am dying piece by piece each day spending my eyes on spreadsheet’s after spreadsheets. And it seems never ending. I get paid good but am just tired. It’s almost as if because I know so much I get so much to do but again the lack of the youngins as we call them to really want to build up a skill set is missing. At least I was able to get another week to complete the RFQ from my customer because the lead buyer knows me going back even before my time here. Enough bitching but I just had to.
What ?
Hi Roger,
If I understand correctly it sounds like there are a couple of issues here at play:
1) You are overloaded and management needs to hire people to take some of the work off of your plate. I’m with you 100% on this and recently went through a similar situation myself.
Have you communicated to management that your frustrations and the mistakes you made last week are the result of understaffing? In other words, letting them know that the work cannot reasonably be done by 1 person regardless of how skilled or experienced that person is?
I would think that after 15 years your opinion would carry some clout (as opposed to being read by management as being “difficult”, which might happen if you weren’t there for as long and they didn’t know you as well), that you are seen as a highly valued employee, and leadership would want to do what they can to make you happy and keep you around.
If you’ve had the conversation with management already, what are the reasons they give for not wanting to hire new people to relieve you?
There are a couple of ways you can frame this: if the owner/founder is still present, I’d assume your relationship matters a lot to them, so expressing your frustration and asking for help in the form of additional staff could motivate them to act.
If, however, your company is not one to put much stock into feelings of long-term trusted employees (which would be a big red flag for me), I’d approach framing it in terms of the business’s bottom line. “Hey, boss, I’m not here to make excuses—you know me and I’ve been our longest serving employee and want to continue to be an integral part of this company—but if we continue to have me fulfill 2-3 (or more) different roles that aren’t really congruent with each other, there will be issues with orders and our customers will get frustrated with us”. They know they can’t can you for being incompetent because you clearly aren’t after 15 years in the biz; also, I’d take it your skills are really hard to replace on the open market, given that you cited young people not being interested in learning the ins and outs of the job. Thus, I’d say for these reasons you’d have a good shot at getting through to management (and if they still don’t want to listen, that’s what I’d deem an unfixable cultural problem and it’d be time to look elsewhere—I’ve been in that situation and ended up leaving, which was good for my mental and physical health).
2) RE: the issues with younger employees not wanting to/not being able to cope—there are actually 2 separate issues here as I see it:
a) Are the skills needed for these roles easy to find on the open market? If so, tie it back to conversation #1 to have with the boss—i.e. “I’m burning out and no one has the skills to keep up, but I know we can find this on the open market. We need to get out there and look for talent who are skilled and who would make a good fit for this company, or we will fall behind/lose out to our competitors/(some other reason that gets the owner’s attention)”. Maybe offer to mentor the new talent so they don’t show up and act like jerks—the goal here is to find decent, team-oriented people who are cooperative and agreeable.
b) If it isn’t possible to find the skills you need with outside hires, what is it in your opinion about these skills that young people at your company don’t want to learn? Is the work not appealing to them, is the technology about to become obsolete? Is this a problem that’s shared by and large by most young people at your org, or just a few vocal people?
What do you think you could tell these people to get them to be interested, i.e. what would motivate them to want to learn these skills? Would they be able to make more money with these skills? Have more organizational clout? Be able to shop those skills on the open market for more $$ when new opportunities open up? Are there any young people among this set who you feel are promising, who you could mentor and develop into a leader in this area?
I think young people by and large want to learn and want to feel included, so I would be curious to learn more about what is driving the lack of interest among the youth at your company to be able to offer a more precise action plan. If it is, on the other hand, a matter of them being a bunch of obstinate jerks, well—I’d say they’re probably just assholes, regardless of age.
I am usually in favor of encouraging in-house talent to develop rather than going elsewhere as it is cheaper, more satisfying to develop your “own” people, and more practical (retaining institutional knowledge). I wonder if there is a way to “sell” this to the younger set in your organization and what it is that is driving the disinterest in picking up these skills.
Anyway, best of luck, hope that helped and take care.
Dan