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Exploring how humans connect and get stuff done together, with Dan Hammond and Pia Lee from Squadify.
We need groups of humans to help navigate the world of opportunities and challenges, but we don't always work together effectively. This podcast tackles questions such as "What makes a rockstar team?" "How can we work from anywhere?" "What part does connection play in today's world?"
You'll also hear the thoughts and views of those who are running and leading teams across the world.
[00:00:00] Dan: Have you struggled to find your team's purpose? It's a common problem and can even seem like an esoteric concept in a world where we just need to get the job done. Our guest on this episode of We Not Me, is Professor Peter Hawkins, who's the Chair of Renewal Associates and the author of several books, including Leadership Team Coaching. He inspires us to find our purpose by looking out at the system and to the people we serve.
[00:00:29] Hello and welcome back to We Not Me, the podcast where we explore how humans connect to get stuff done together. I'm Dan Hammond,
[00:00:36] Pia: And I am Pia Lee.
[00:00:38] Dan: And I believe congratulations are in order, Ms. Lee.
[00:00:42] Pia: I dunno whether that's,
[00:00:44] Dan: of the, on the many, on the many fronts in which you're involved, the um, I think you are now an official associate at Monash University. Am I right in saying that?
[00:00:54] Pia: Yes. Which is very kind of, of them. So, Monash Corporate Education, we, we've got an exciting collaboration together with Squadify and um, really looking to bring evidence-based methodologies, so things that are founded in behavioral sciences but that are really practical and related, relatable for people who are busy at work.
[00:01:22] So they call, this is a new type of person that's being created here. So they call it pracademics which, you know, this is not a made up word, 'cause I do have a lot of made up words, but that one, actually no, someone else said it, but I think it's a really it's a really interesting field, and totally relates to our guests today, but where you've got that thirst for knowledge, the science behind, organizational behavior, performance, teams coaching, but it's practically related, so it's not a theory that
[00:01:58] tells you. It's actually almost utilizing the theory in the work that you are doing and sometimes even developing the theory from the work that you're doing, which I think is just a really really exciting I'm that, that I find that incredibly appealing.
[00:02:15] Dan: I love the name of that and the the spirit. I think we've always had that approach, sort of when we're working with someone that there's some academic background. I think you, as you said there you're taking this to the next level there. So how do you build the practice through the research and the data that you can get through the work? I think this is a, just a really exciting field, a much needed.
[00:02:34] And our guest today, professor Peter Hawkins is definitely a pracademic. And he, well he's has a lifetime of work, really absolutely doing we not me work and helping people to see things differently. This conversation is broad ranging, inspiring and in some places quite challenging for us. But certainly gave me hope when we spoke to Peter. So let's go and hear that conversation now.
[00:02:59] Pia: Professor Peter Hawkins. Welcome to We Not Me.
[00:03:05] Peter: Lovely to be with you both.
[00:03:06] Pia: Yeah, we're really looking forward to diving into the topic of systemic team coaching. And I think we're gonna have a really rich conversation, but there is a, something you have to do first before we get into the juicy conversation. So I will pass you over to Dan, who's going to do the three card trick.
[00:03:24] Dan: indeed. And I've cut the card. You get it. You have a green card. Peter, this um, this, we've had this before and it's quite nicely revealing. When I was growing up, I wanted to be, what did you wanna be when you, was it
[00:03:36] Peter: I wanted to be at various times, a forester, a writer a teacher, and I've beat all three.
[00:03:43] Dan: This is good.
[00:03:43] Pia: And which one was the best out of those three?
[00:03:46] Peter: The, the, the combination.
[00:03:47] Pia: Right.
[00:03:48] Peter: Because I still I take at least a month off of the summer to write my next book but actually. One of the things that helps write in the book is going out and looking after our woodland that we planted in 2005 and and some of the old woodland that we have on our property. So, a mixture of gardening teaching, and then when you've written the book, you know, that helps you clarify what you need to teach.
[00:04:12] Dan: It, it's a perfect combination of the three. Excellent and no astronaut in there to me to mess things up, which is very helpful. So, Peter, why don't we, why don't we keep zooming back to that sort of time, give us a little potted bio of you.
[00:04:25] Peter: Oh well, when you get to my age, it is quite hard to stay within the pot, but I was very into. Drama and theater. So I thought I was gonna become a, I did a lot of directing of plays when I was at university and films, and I had the opportunity to go work for the BBC. But what happened is I got more and more interested in what happened in the rehearsal room rather than the performance.
[00:04:48] And that led me to, in the early seventies to do a lot of developing of going into mental health, being a pioneer in drama therapy and psychodrama in the UK. By 26 I was running a therapeutic community for people coming out of psychiatric prison and psychiatric hospital. Became a senior manager and head of training for a global mental health organization.
[00:05:15] And I started to realize that, that many mental health organizations, 'cause I got drawn into consulting, to others were more disturbed than the people they were treating. So, as my middle son described it when he was at junior school, I became a, a, well, I, I did a PhD on organizational learning, pre Peter Sen this is way back. And my middle son described it at, when he was at primary school is my daddy's a doctor, but not of people. He is a doctor of organizations, sick organizations.
[00:05:46] Dan: Sick organization. Very good. Very good.
[00:05:49] Peter: So I thought that was quite smart age seven.
[00:05:52] Dan: Yeah.
[00:05:53] Peter: so I did the PhD and was teaching at um, university of Bath Management School and, uh. I realized I didn't really wanna be part of an MBA factory. And three of us left in 86 and set up Bath Consultancy Group. And what we would try to do is very much link strategic change, culture change, and leadership development. How do you shift the leadership culture to create the organizational culture that could deliver the strategy to make the organization future fit? And I guess all through that, or since then, we sold Bath Consultancy Group in a 2010, and then I set up Renewal Associates, which is still doing that work.
[00:06:38] And I think very much as our work's developed, it's about how do we connect change at the personal level, the team level, team of teams level, the organizational level, the organization, stakeholder, ecosystem, the wider ecology. and planetary issues. So how do we get change joined up across all those levels?
[00:07:00] Pia: That's really amazing to hear in some respects, Peter, 'cause I'm thinking you must have been ahead of your time. 1986 and looking at, you know, organizational development, change management. I mean, I entered into the profession much later in 2000 and it was still early days in many respects. What, you know, what was the work like and what, how receptive were Managersm and leaders to your thinking at that point?
[00:07:26] Peter: Well, one, one of the things I've always tried to do is not try and convince them of my thinking, but I I, I've always been interested in start where the challenges and where the heat is. I like challenges where that there isn't an answer. Now in my work, now I talk about the learning edge, and I define the learning edge as where the organization, the team, or the individual don't have an answer and I don't have an answer, but we both know that life is requiring us to find one.
[00:08:01] Dan: Peter in this time of sort of complexity and speed and lack of attention where are you finding people? How receptive are people to that, to say, this is a problem, we don't know the answer. Let's really spend some time exploring it?
[00:08:15] Peter: I think how you approach it has had to have changed. So a lot of the work we would do with organizations is alongside business as usual, not taking teams off for, you know, a week retreat The other thing is I think to do deep work, you've got to deepen the change in learning hunger. So, we'll spend quite a lot of time with top teams helping them, if you like, deepen their frustration level of realizing they've been around the loop several times and realizing, and cutting off the cul-de-sacs, you know, the false exits. So teams have to say, oh, what we need to do is x, and I'll say, and where have you seen that work?
[00:09:02] Dan: That's a, it looks like an attractive road, but actually it's going nowhere.
[00:09:07] Peter: So, so gradually you are building the partnership to, to do the harder work. And by the way, you mentioned problem. I, here here's a tip. But ever someone uses the word problem, I just gently reframe it into challenge. And that just simple change of language. And moving to a challenge that none of us can answer individually, gets us into the right territory of doing real work.
[00:09:33] Dan: So moving through your life's work, you're now talk, talk us through the road to becoming a professor and what you do in this uh, this, this current role.
[00:09:42] Peter: Well, somebody once introduced me as a pracademic. I've always. Been on that cusp. I've never been a full-time academic, but I've always been, you know, let's try and occupy that balance line where we're learning off real live work and dealing with the cutting edge of real challenges. And then how do we make sense of that? How do we do research on that? How do we. Put together what theories and models?
[00:10:12] What was it kurt Lewin said, there's nothing as practical. It's a good theory. There's some truth in that insofar as we, we need frameworks to actually manage the complexity and the fact that all real challenges are massively interconnected. So, so we need frameworks to not kind of atomize problems, but understand the complexity of the pattern of the challenge.
[00:10:39] Dan: And just picking up one strand of that Peter, the prac bit of academic. How do you practically help people to see that bigger picture? You talked about that those layers really from self to team, teams, organization up into these big ecosystems to the planet. How do you help teams to build that sort of muscle of being able to see the system and to be able to therefore be able to operate better in it?
[00:11:04] Peter: Well let's look at that at whether we're helping an an individual CEO or a team, or a, an organization at the individual level. if I'm coaching a CEO one, one of the things I might do is in, in, in the room or even on screen, ha have a whiteboard, a. Flip chart, get them. I'll say, look, rather tell me about your team, draw, map the team out for me. Have little images for each member of the team. Show me who's close to whom, who's further away.
[00:11:34] Now draw what's happening in the spaces between them, because that's one of the things about working systemically is you have to be able to. to notice what's happening in the spaces, not just what's happening in the people.
[00:11:46] And then I'll say right, now draw around that, or all your kind of key critical stakeholders let's bring them into the picture. Because often in teams, and I often say this that they don't have too much conflict, they have too little conflict, but what conflict they have they take two personally. So by actually mapping the stakeholders and the connection between the stakeholders and the team members, you know, we can see that that there is conflict between the interests of the shareholders, the customers, the employees, the suppliers, the communities where they operate, and the more than human world of the ecology. And that's my minimum stakeholder set.
[00:12:27] And once we could get a team to actually see all the key stakeholders, they start to recognize the reason why the sales manager and the HR director and the finance director are arguing is because they're carrying different stakeholder needs. And for me, if I'm working with a team, I'm trying to help them move from being a team of leaders to a leadership team. And for me, those are very different. You know, a team of leaders is where the only person holding the whole is the CEO or the team leader. And you know, the HR person is holding their function and the finance person, their function. And our leadership team then we're all holding not only all the stakeholders, but the interconnections between them.
[00:13:13] And so, so just give another very simple example that your listeners could utilize, one of the simplest thing I do with boards or top teams is I bring in three empty chairs, sometimes more. And on them I'll put. Customers, employees, investors, funders, the ecology. And now I sometimes bring one in that says our collective grandchildren. And when there's a kind of heated discussion I say, pause, time out. I need three or four people to go and sit in the stakeholder chairs, comment on this issue and this discussion from their perspective, and speak as our collective grandchildren, or speak as the ecology, or speak as the investors.
[00:13:53] So we're constantly, if you like, bringing in that wider world into the boardroom, into the top team, into to other teams.
[00:14:03] Dan: That's so practical. I think that makes really good sense. And I can imagine that really working well. What is the, the from state? If you take that CEO, what's a typical sort of from state if you are, we're trying to get to a point where they see the system, they're aware of the stakeholders around their team and their different needs and the impact that has on their team. What, how do you find CEOs now? What's their, if you can, it's probably an oversimplified question, but what's their, from state, what are they focusing on? How are they thinking? What, how would you describe that?
[00:14:32] Peter: Well often, particularly senior leaders, I say that they're all dealing with what I call the unholy trinity, which is they're having to do more at higher quality with less resource. And you know, given that I've, I think I've worked in over 50 countries, across all sectors, and I never find today an organization that doesn't have that treble challenge. And you know, what I say to them is, well, you know, the major choice you've got is either you pedal harder or you work smarter.
[00:15:01] And I say the job of the team leader is to articulate the collective challenge, but then to say to their team, but I can't solve any of that. And to be able to ask from their heart for help from their team members. And often for me, that is a turning point. When we get to the point where we can get off the, uh. the escalator of trying to be the perfect leader and realize that leadership does not reside in individuals. Leadership is a team sport. Then I think we're at the beginning of the leader kind of giving up their heroic ness and moving into a collective collaboration.
[00:15:42] Pia: And I, I wanted to sound out our experience of working across organizations is that teams are actually ill-defined in many people's minds. You know, some, someone might define a team as a thousand people that are inside their organization, or you often have. Groups that sort of masquerade as a team, but they're not, they're individuals. And sometimes those individual ways that they are, uh, remunerated, rewarded their objectives, pull people apart. So is this a moment in time when the team is becoming more important than ever?
[00:16:21] Peter: Yes, it's becoming more important than ever because we're dealing with levels of challenge and complexity that cannot be integrated by one person. And secondly, what I say is it's not the team members that create the purpose, it's the purpose that creates the team.
[00:16:41] So if you want to decide whether a team or not, what you have to look at is, what is it? Our stakeholder world and the world of tomorrow needs from us that we can only achieve through collaboration? When I say it's the purpose that creates the team, if you think about it, the purpose is there. Before we, we set up a team. The purpose precedes the team, but the difficulty is the purpose keeps changing, right? 'Cause the world around us keeps changing.
[00:17:08] You see, I think traditionally, we've started at the wrong end. With team development, we've started from thinking if we get all the people relating well together, liking each other, having effective meetings, we'll have a great team. But the research doesn't support that. The place to start, as in my, five disciplines model is what is our collective purpose? What could we only achieve through collaboration? Once we've got that sense of purpose, you don't create your purpose. You discover it by going and talking to your stakeholders and looking at what they value and what they're gonna want difference in the future.
[00:17:42] Once you've got that, then you can go to the second discipline, which I call clarifying, which is a purpose without a plan is a pipe dream. So how do we turn that into key team priorities and objectives and team KPIs and clarity of roles and processes? Then we can get from the why to the what, to the how. You know, the traditional area where team development happen.
[00:18:05] But now it's not a, you know, how do we wanna be and what do we want from each other? It's what do, how do we need to meet differently and engage differently in order to achieve the what and fulfill the why? It's driven by necessity, not by, you know, some abstract value as we've written on the wall.
[00:18:24] And, and then the fourth discipline is connecting. Once we've laid that foundation, who is it we create value with and for, and how do we turn those relationships from critical demands to partnerships? How do we partner with all our stakeholders, including the ecology? And then right at the heart is how do we become a learning team that's learning faster than the world around us is changing? How are we not just driven by, by meeting this quarter's demands, but how are we growing our collective capacity to do more higher quality with less resource, and growing our capacity to meet the next waves of challenges that are coming over the horizon?
[00:19:09] Dan: Peter, just in terms of the order that you mentioned, that it's, you know, the research doesn't back this sort of, let's all get all matey together first before we do these things. Interesting, you know, so in, in Google's Aristotle project, for example, we keep seeing that, you know, psychological safety is the foundation. But you are saying that is not the first thing.
[00:19:29] Peter: If we're clear. About, our collective purpose and what we rely on each other for the, the issues of psychological safety starts to improve anyway. You know, if you're in the, if you're in the trenches, you are being fired at, your ability to trust the person next to you goes up exponentially. And so it is not that, I'm not saying psych, you know, we do work with psychological safety, but psychological safety in order to do what, and why?
[00:19:57] Having trained back in my mental health days as a psychotherapist and taught psychotherapy and have worked with couples and been with my partner for 49 years. It's the same with with partnerships, right? It's the purpose that creates the quality of the marriage, not the partners. It's having something you could do together that you cannot do apart.
[00:20:20] And it's the same with coaching. You know, I spent a lot of time trying to radically shift the coaching paradigm, and I've written a lot about this. From seeing the person opposite you as your client to seeing them as your coaching partner. It's the same if I'm working with a team or organization, I don't see them as my client, I see them as my partner.
[00:20:40] I used to years back, I used to go around and I worked with the top team and say, what do you want from team coaching? What a dumb question.
[00:20:49] Pia: Hmm.
[00:20:50] Peter: A, it presumes they know and, and B I'm asking individuals. So now I'll say, you know, tell me who and what does your team serve and who else and who, beyond that? And what do those people value about your team and what are they looking to be different? What are they leading different in over the next, you know, two or three years? So rather than starting from personal want, I'm starting from how do we get not on the, so-called client's agenda, or my agenda, how do we get on life's agenda?
[00:21:23] Pia: And I think that actually plays into, you know, we talked briefly about this before we started recording, this is the we element. 'Cause if it was me, it would be my own objectives. But I think what you're asking here is the crucial question is, you know, what are we trying to achieve collectively? And, you know, what difference does that make and who does that impact? That's a very different question than asking about what I'm bringing in my individual technical capability or wizardry to the table. It's a very different element.
[00:21:54] Peter: And it's a double we, isn't it? Because it's, if I'm working with a team, it's not just the we of the team it's the we of their stakeholder world. So, having got to my age now, I realize that also, if you really wanna have a good life, you don't pursue your individual agenda.
[00:22:12] You see, I think we should stop asking children, what do you want to be when, when you grow up? Because 90% of boys will say I wanna be a top football player, and 90% of girls will say I wanna be a a Taylor Swift or a a a pop singer. And you are condemning 99.9% to disappointment, What we should ask is what are you good at? Where does your heart sink? Where do you make a contribution to the world?
[00:22:40] My, my favorite question, which your listeners can use, 'cause you can use it at the individual level, the team level, the organizational level, the country level is what can you uniquely do that the world of tomorrow needs? And you know, I, I've started five organizations and I didn't set out to start any of them. I just was so aware of, of a need out there, and I couldn't see other people meeting that need. So I thought, oh gosh, there's no one else doing it.
[00:23:11] Dan: Yeah, just have to fill the vacuum.
[00:23:15] Peter: Yeah. But it is finding that place where your place in the wider system and, and the needs around you meet. And that's why I think the phrase I often use, all good organizational work begins future back and outside in. What are we being asked to step up to? And that's the same for, you know, us as a species, we should be asking what is the wider ecology asking us to step up to? Not, how do we solve the climate problem?
[00:23:44] Dan: It's an amazingly we, not me, and I think you talk, talk about IQ to We Q, Peter, which is one of the things I spotted you, you talking about is, and that's a very pure, a very inspiring vision of that actually to, to, to shift our mindset into that.
[00:23:58] You've given a number of very practical things people can do. How, How would you what's a really great place to sort of start that our listener could start to shift their mindset, things that they do in their everyday work, something practical that they can take just to start to experiment?
[00:24:13] Peter: I mentioned earlier in your team meetings, translate every problem into a challenge and focus on the challenges that can only be addressed collectively and collaboratively. Don't spend time doing things that could be done in one-to-ones.
[00:24:29] But the second one is always locate the challenge, not in a person or a part of the system, but a connection. And this is another aspect of WeQ, of collaborative intelligence. You know, as CEO said to me, Peter, I've got lots of coaches who coach my people. I've got lots of consultants who consult to bits of my organization, but that's not where our challenges lie. All our challenges lie in the connections. Not just the connections between people, between team and the team of teams, between our functions and other functions, between our organizations and its stakeholders, between the human and the more than human world. All our challenges, line connections not, and yet we tend to locate problems in people and then we get into the blame game.
[00:25:17] So turn the problem into a challenge. Always located in a connection. So not, oh gosh. We've got a problem with the board. We have a challenge. We haven't, we have not yet found a way of partnering with the board to create more value than we could separately. It does change the whole focus.
[00:25:37] Dan: It's cha challenging from where we start, but I can see that really working.
[00:25:41] Peter: Oh. There, there's probably a couple of thousand books in just this room and 6,000 in my house. So a, avericious reader. But I've just finished, it's coming out in December, a new book called, beauty in Leadership and Coaching and the, the Transformation of Human Consciousness. Because I've got the stage of realizing that there's no way we as humans can actually address the great challenges of our time, whether that's climate, uh, weirding, whether it's growing inequality, whether it's increase in mental health, loss of biodiversity. All of them are symptoms of a failure of evolving our ways of thinking, being, perceiving.
[00:26:26] So this book is about how do we shift fundamentally, and how do we get out of our left hemisphere neocortex and, and use our whole brain, our whole body mind? How do we move back into participatory consciousness with the than human world. So this is WeQ on a, on a grand scale. You like
[00:26:45] Pia: Uh, there's definite need for that at the
[00:26:47] Dan: Huge. Huge. Yeah. It's fascinating just thinking about that, defining the challenge in the connection, how so many of our problems of division in society now are about defining the problem in the other person, and um, so I can, I think that's just a hugely powerful idea among the many you've shared with us today. Peter, thank you so much for being on the show today. This is a wonderful episode and we've really, I've really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you.
[00:27:11] Peter: It been a pleasure talking with you both.
[00:27:17] Dan: That point Peter made about where you see the challenge uh, really hit me actually. I think it's something I've been aware of and we've been aware of, but it's such a great way to, to put it, you know, do you see the challenge?
[00:27:31] And let me talk about some practical examples when you talk to team leaders, CEOs. They'll often talk about their team for a start as individuals, as we've seen, it's sort of, I've got a high performing team 'cause I've hired these great people. But when they've got problems, they see them in the people. So it's sort of, uh, yeah, that person there is, is difficult or that person not doing their job.
[00:27:52] And whereas actually what Peter's saying is no, see the space in between. Yeah. Sort of map them out. What's actually happening between them is the thing. So see the challenge in the space. I feel that's just a great way to see this as a way of being far more constructive. And to find, it widens the lens actually on finding solutions to these things, rather saying, that person's a problem, right? We're gonna get rid of them, or they need to be sorted.
[00:28:17] Pia: And, and our data backs that up because understanding how to work together is one of the largest gaps across the Squadify dataset, and that is the interdependencies. And quite often the leader themselves becomes the hub and spoke model. So you know that everything comes through the leader and there isn't that flow and that interdependency and that collaboration. You know, as Peter called it, that collaborative intelligence that exists.
[00:28:45] And then put an overlay of that, of, you know, individual KPIs and how I'm measured, then becomes a group of individuals, and we, I think lose the value that, that the opportunity as a team, the ability to problem solve, to create, all of those things.
[00:29:02] Dan: it's a real sort of bundle of things there, as you say, that hub and spoke thing, I've seen so many teams that where, as Peter said, in fact, I had the CEO sort of exclaim this spontaneously in a meeting. The organization joins at me. You know, that's the point, the single point where, because it doesn't, it's not joining at the top team, the first person to see the whole organization is them.
[00:29:24] So if you can raise that, bring all of that team in and say, right, we're all involved in this, then as you say, you get that collective intelligence, you can, you can do the things, as Peter said, that only you can only do together. And that's a bigger, more powerful thing. So it's, it was a really um, yeah just very inspiring to hear that and such important work in these days.
[00:29:46] Pia: And I liked I liked his positioning about clarity of purpose and plan and strategy. And that actually totally, again, aligns with the work that we are doing in Squadify. So the traditional view is that teams are about engagement and about psychological safety. Now, it's not that they're not, they're not those things, but what we've found through our data is there is so much opportunity in getting better clarity as a team, and you're gonna find it much harder to create that psych safety and that engagement if you don't know why you're together and what it is that you're actually there to do.
[00:30:26] And we've seen that again and again, and actually how teams have got a huge uptick in performance in a relatively. Short period of time because they've really been able to identify that issue.
[00:30:38] Dan: And in building that, if it's done right, in creating that clarity you know, you're building that, that safety. You're learning to work together, aren't you, in a better way. It has to be sort of shepherded a little bit, but but that's what it's gonna be. He has, as. As Peter said, you know, you have psychological safety in order to what? And that what and why needs to be really ironed out first. Because that just brings people together immediately.
[00:31:01] And I really like, it's so, such a powerful idea that, and actually really sort of pracademically simple, if you like, to sort of say, right, here's your team that Connects between them. Right, now let's draw a circle around that. Who are your stakeholders? And ah, these are the people that we, that are depending on us, that want outputs from us. And suddenly you see they're the client, as he said, they're the people you're serving. And that pushes us together to, to sort of not look at, oh, that person's difficult to work with, but to actually say, right. We're both, we're all working together to serve these people.
[00:31:35] And um, I'm definitely gonna be using the additional chairs method that Peter talked through. I thought that would be so, so powerful. And our collective grandchildren. Boy, that's going to change some conversations, I think.
[00:31:49] Pia: 100%.
[00:31:50] Dan: Wonderful conversation. I think this has gone really deep on the whole subject of we not me or as Peter would say getting from IQ to EQ. But that is it for this episode. We Not Me, is supported by Squadify. Squadify gives you and your team the data you need to connect and perform. You can find show notes where you are listening and also at squadify.net. If you've enjoyed the show, please do share the love and recommend it to your friends. We Not Me is produced by Mark Steadman. Thank you so much for listening. It's goodbye from me.
[00:32:20] Pia: And it's goodbye from me.