Encouraging workplace intimacy
However and wherever we all end up working over the next 12 months, intimacy might just be the secret weapon you can deploy to drive higher organisational performance.
Now that the dust is settling on the shortest, sharpest revolution in working practice the world's ever seen, we’ve all become familiar with the three option bosses seems to be offering: 1) ‘ok fun’s over get back to the office right now’, 2) ‘Wow not having physical real estate sure juices our margins - let’s go fully remote!’ or 3) ‘Have cake. Eat cake.’ aka the Hybrid model.
Despite my Stockholm Syndrome-like affection for Zoom, I think it’s clear that for some businesses there's no substitute for everyone being in the same place for a significant part of the week. Even if it can also be true that, “most in-person work is actually 16 people sitting around a table breathing carbon dioxide that makes them stupid while they listen to someone reading them a PowerPoint deck” (organisation designer Rodney Evans in the Brave New Work podcast).
Whatever option your team chooses, if I was going to choose one secret weapon to team success that gets results regardless of where and how you work, organisational intimacy might just be it.
Intimacy? That sounds…erm... personal
How well do you know what your colleagues in other teams do at work? What's their day to day? What are their project objectives? What are their personal motivations? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
These are the critical questions of organisational intimacy and having facilitated dozens of company workshops over the past decade I still find teams who have worked together for years who don’t know these basic facts about each other. Intimacy is about the process to address this ignorance by becoming more open with each other about our work. It can unlock a number of benefits including avoiding duplication of work, identifying areas of collaboration, and predicting future resourcing issues and if done right it can be a game-changer, because all of this will happen automatically and horizontally across the organisation at a peer to peer level, without leaders having to direct or manage it.
Organisational intimacy is my take on what Stanley McChrystal describes in his book ‘Team of Teams’ as ‘shared consciousness’ - a term you might expect to overhear at your local CBD infused candle-making workshop, rather than from the lips of a United States Army special forces general. He describes shared consciousness as a 'constant update of contextual information' that builds a deep understanding of the overall common mission/purpose resulting in better effectiveness. But the reason I love ‘intimacy’ is the other words it evokes - trust, empathy, respect and, most powerful of all, collusion; an exciting conspiracy among a community of talented people which, to me, is a uniquely helpful description of what modern team-based work should feel like.
But why is intimacy especially important now?
Many companies have long recognised the need for greater levels of inter-team intimacy by making the silos between them more porous. For example, matrixed reporting lines that involve people being supervised by more than one leader are a way of forcing the integration of multiple and diverse company perspectives - reflecting an enlightened decision to deliberately reduce individual efficiency in return for better organisational effectiveness. But for many smaller organisations at least, lockdown seems to have reversed much of that positive trend. During a workshop I led for a SME back in August for example, it became apparent that remote working has exerted a gravitational pull back towards siloed behaviour in the business. If you think about it, the Gods of Tyrannical Efficiency couldn’t have wished for a better way of working than the one forced upon us by the pandemic. One in which diaries are filled with neat back to back meetings and where compartmentalisation naturally occurs because we stop, not just speaking to, but actually seeing anyone from another team. For all its faults, at least office-based work offered a habitual reminder that there were other people working in different teams than your own and who shared, in theory at least, the same organisational mission.
And while siloes certainly are good for establishing a strong sense of affinity to the team we work with on a day to day basis, this bottom-up esprit de corps comes at the cost of diluting the overall organisational one. It happens everywhere – from the sales team that rolls it eyes when you mention the marketing team, or the person who has such strong loyalty to the division they work for, it feels almost as if they are competing against other internal divisions rather than external challengers.
Collusion; an exciting conspiracy among a community of talented people
So what's the plan Stan? Here are three practical tried and tested steps that I've used to accelerate organisational intimacy.
Work out loud
Someone, somewhere in your business may have already solved the work question you are trying to answer right now. If only you knew who they were! And even better, if only they knew who you were and what you were working on, and then proactively came to you with the solution! Think of the work calories we'd save not having to reinvent the wheel on each project.
Working out loud is an evocative phrase that speaks directly to the ‘helpful visibility’ that allows peers in different teams to learn from one another in a frictionless way. In a 2010 blog post US IT consultant Bryce Williams was one of the first to use the term which he summed up with a simple formula: "Working out Loud = Observable Work + Narrating your Work." Where ‘observable’ means creating spaces where others can see what you are working on (you can do this by using communal spaces like reception, corridors, bathroom and kitchens) and ‘narrating’ means ‘telling the story’ of your work to others (think about regular all-hands meetings or company update emails). But due to the innate twentieth century-rooted bias most organisations have towards compartmentalised efficiency, it’s not always easy to get them to switch from ‘need to know’ to ‘need to share’. In Team of Teams, McChrystal describes the resistance he got when trying to introduce ‘louder’ working, saying it brought a level of transparency, “that those of us raised in the comfort of bureaucratic silos found uncomfortable… we were trying to normalise sharing among people used to the opposite”.
A way to mitigate this reluctance is to focus on the benefits of this new way of working by showcasing trailblazing examples of when sharing work has resulted in success for multiple teams. Many companies have also embedded the idea of ‘stealing with pride’ which cleverly reverses the onus on teams to share their work and instead encourages them to be relentlessly curious about others’. I love the idea of ‘stealing with pride’ as it’s precisely the opposite of the ‘not invented here’ syndrome that tends to plague over-siloed organisations.
Discuss the undiscussable
Have you ever worked in a team in which attempts to challenge the boss in public are met with the icy stare of a dog that’s been shown a card trick? That reaction tells everyone else to just put their head down and get on with it; the opposite of a team working with high intimacy.
These teams suffer from low levels of psychological safety (PS) – which I describe very reductively as the level to which you feel comfortable looking silly in front of your boss. High silliness = high PS and that's a good indicator of a healthy, innovative culture. Of course no-one wants to look like an idiot in front of their superiors, but if you can't have moments in which seemingly outlandish or supposedly 'stupid' ideas can never be proposed then an organisation will find it hard to rid itself of what engineers call 'path dependence' aka 'the way we've always done things round here', and therefore be resigned to trying to evolve the business through painfully slow small increments rather than the ground-breaking ideas so often needed to achieve transformational growth. (I'm also sort-of happy to accept that some businesses can be sustainably successful and also have low levels of PS, but they are in a very small category of businesses with unassailable and proprietary competitive advantage i.e. they have a good argument to spend their resources not on innovative thinking, but rather to focus simply on selling their competitive advantage at scale. I guess Google might fall into this 'unassailable' group (Note - I'm not talking about their level of PS here - I've no idea about that) on account of their pre-eminent search algorithm, but you probably don't. No - for the rest of us low levels of PS are a killer because it's impossible to talk honestly about performance and issues like relative strengths and weaknesses, not because we're bad people but because our team culture tells us to do so would be to expose ourselves to unwanted negative interrogation. A good diagnostic to evaluate your team's level of PS is to consider what topics are considered ‘undiscussable’. Some are felt to be undiscussable in most teams, for example how much money everyone makes (I should say it's really only management, rather than team members, who are most concerned with ensuring this topic remains undiscussable...). But alarm bells should really start to ring if the 'undiscussable' topics start to spread to simple questions like ‘what mistakes did we make on our last project?’ or ‘who needs more help to perform and why?’.
Every organisation needs a Fool; someone to ask dumb questions and say the unthinkable out loud. In fact the permission to ask dumb, foolish questions is one of the main reasons external faux-naïf facilitators are hired. During an 18-month long transformation programme TwentyFirstCenturyBrand delivered virtually for the global marketing function of Mars Inc. I went as far as actually creating and role-playing the role of a Fool called Larry Letsgetreal, the fictional ‘EVP of Tough Questions’ who we used as a useful vehicle to surface tensions that could otherwise be difficult.
But you don’t have to go full Daniel Day-Lewis to invoke the powers of the Fool. Psychological safety can be increased tactically for short moments in time by deploying the power of playfulness and the hypothetical. Alchemical questions like ‘what if all the barriers were removed?’ or ‘how would our biggest competitor deal with this?’ give others permission to put aside for a moment the façade of professional competence that can so often inhibit innovative thinking.
How an organization runs its status meeting betrays much more about its cultural norms than anything on the company website or what the CEO might say in speeches - so use them wisely!
Find a place for the ‘Informal In-between’
Much of what we know about our colleagues’ goals, motivations, and relative strengths and weaknesses is learnt during informal moments in-between actual work such as overheard conversations or lunchtime gossip. Those opportunities quickly dry up in a remote setting as every moment spent with colleagues on a Zoom call is likely to be task-oriented on a specific project; the time to hang out and shoot the breeze for more than a few minutes simply isn’t available. As a way to address this, many remote teams have started to have 'open' Zoom sessions where everyone leaves their cameras and sound on but works away on their solo tasks for an hour or so. Having done a few of these they do feel odd at first but they quickly start to feel more natural and closer to the type of synchronous in-office environment that keeps teams feel connected. It’s such a growing technique there’s even paid software like Focusmate to help to do it with stranger, although it’s easier to organise for free with colleagues.
Put it all together in the status meeting
The good news is that all of these tips can be easily deployed in one of the best vehicles for better intimacy - the humble status meeting. For example, a check-in exercise at the start of a status meeting asking for people’s hopes and fears for the week ahead can be an accessible way to understand objectives and deeper motivations. Discussing the undiscussable can be kickstarted with a standing agenda point called ‘Wouldn’t it be crazy if...’ where at each meeting a different person is asked to do a 3 minute presentation suggesting a new product idea or way of working, which might have a nugget of golden insight that would otherwise fail to surface.
How an organization runs its status meeting betrays much more about its cultural norms than anything on the company website or what the CEO might say in speeches - so use them wisely!
The 20th century ingrained our everyday business behaviours with practises that favoured neat siloed efficiency, which has been compounded by years of lockdown working. Of course even the most intimate practises can’t 'solve' work cultures that require more fundamental improvements in psychological safety or incentives to collaborate, but even for those teams, small moves that begin to prioritise shared knowledge over protective fiefdoms, and internal collusion over internal competition, can help to deliver the more intimate, empathetic and effective organisations demanded by this new anxious age.