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Episode Transcript
Lisa: All of you at the Ian Martin group have been responding in lots of interesting ways to coronavirus as a company, and your kind of teal self-managed ways of organizing and being together have really come into the foreground in terms of how you’ve been responding to this time. So what are some stories that you could share with us in terms of how it’s been?
Luz: I think for us it started—we locked down a bit sooner than most. We went home a few days earlier than our government sort of urged us to do that, and that’s because there were a handful of people paying attention to the news and more sensitive to the issues and what might come, and started urging people that if at all possible to stay home. From my perspective, the transition to working from home was pretty seamless. I never work from home under normal circumstances—I don’t like it—but I took my laptop home the day that people said that maybe we should, and I’ve been home ever since. A few days after that, governments put out the same directives urging people to work from home as much as possible, and I think we officially closed down our offices and have our entire workforce, other than one or two people who have jobs that have more physical demands, still in our headquarters office. But everybody else, whether in Canada, the US, or India, are working from home. I don’t know about you Edwin, but I haven’t really heard that it was difficult for people to make that transition.
Edwin: Yeah, the thing that’s been remarkable to me is I remember in 2008-2009, in the last sort of major crisis like this, I was working at a different company, one with a much more traditional hierarchy. I remember the management team making the decision—we did a large layoff and then also a mandatory salary decrease. I just remember as a manager trying to manage the general temperament and the attitude and the feelings that people had going through that time. And I keep thinking about that in comparison to what it’s been like now working at a company that doesn’t have a hierarchy, that is self-managed. Just the attitude has been remarkable. I mean, immediately people got together and worked—got on to a like a “green hat” brainstorming call: What are all the things that we can do? What are all the cost savings that we can drive?
And that has led to a number of self-initiated projects, initiatives, movement towards trying to control the things we can control. At a high level, it’s been really inspiring. And then instead of managers going and trying to make speeches and try to fix the general mood, you have people interacting with each other, checking in with each other, and having micro-conversations and micro sort of attitude shifts across the organization. So it’s been a much different feeling for me. I don’t feel the weight of responsibility the same way that I did, and yet I also feel more empowered, like I’m making more of an impact in these more micro ways than previously. So it’s been a remarkable difference, I’d say.
Luz: I have a better example. I have a friend that works in another company—we were talking early on—she’s in HR, and when their company announced that people should work from home, she said immediately there were questions about, “Well, what about our free lunches in the office? And what about this and what about that perk?” Like that was the immediate reaction, people being frustrated about their entitlements and perks that might not be available to them.
And we’ve had the exact opposite experience. Someone proposed that—we do have one office where a meal is provided—and someone proposed that if everyone was going to be at home, we didn’t need that. And many of the staff actually went further and said, “I’ll give up mine from an earlier date, from the beginning of March. Don’t worry about anything that hasn’t been reimbursed, I can live without that.” And I’ve had calls from staff offering to take pay cuts or leaves. There’s no central coordination—there’s been no call to do that. The opposite—our CFO has sort of put out a message that it’s not urgent—and people are still putting up their hands to say, “I’m willing to go without whatever it is” in their case.
Lisa: Yeah, it’s amazing. What comes to mind as you both are describing this is a difference in mindset between an employee mindset and more of a co-owner mindset: “This is our company together, and immediately thinking like, okay, what can we do? We’re in this together,” which is such a different mindset and such a different way of relating to something like this. That’s really striking in what you described.
Edwin: I think it just doesn’t feel like things are happening to you. I think that’s a big distinction between our culture and more conventional work culture. There’s not a group meeting in private deciding what’s going to happen to you. Information is shared freely, and you should respond in a way that is responsible to the company and to your peers. That’s the expectation.
And in fact, one of the first things that happened is we use a Patrick Lencioni idea of creating a thematic goal for the company which answers “what is most important right now.” So when this crisis hit, that obviously changes what’s most important right now. Very quickly, an “anyone can join” meeting was convened to brainstorm what is now most important—what is our new thematic goal, at least for this crisis period. Some ideas were formed, and then a proposal was lobbied out. We use Loomio to make group decisions, and that was improved via Loomio. Everyone, all hands on deck, and then it was ratified and agreed upon, consented to by the entire company.
This happened without any central command, without anyone taking responsibility for setting the strategy or trying to convince anyone of anything. It was so fluid and agile—it was really amazing to watch. And the two people who made that proposal, one is from compliance and one is from sales. Neither one of them is on our central coordination team. It was just like they saw an opportunity, they organized people and ideas, and their proposal was consented to by the whole company. So there really hasn’t been one central decision-making emergency management office calling the shots, and it doesn’t seem necessary at this point.
Lisa: I’m wondering, how transparent is information in the company? Does everyone have full access to company finances and stuff like that?
Luz: Yes.
Lisa: I thought so. So that I think also makes a difference in terms of this mindset. I’ve noticed that in self-managed companies, people immediately say, “Well, hey, I’ve been thinking about—we spend this much on this per year and on this, and maybe we could cut back on—” I think that also helps that once you know what the figures are, what we have to play with, it’s like Yves Morieux’s quote that “people without information can’t take responsibility, but people with information can’t help but take responsibility.” I think that’s true here.
Edwin: And we don’t just make things accessible. Our CFO in particular, she does monthly updates on that month’s results. She does COVID special updates on how our business has been impacted, how it might be impacted in the coming months, what government programs we’re eligible for in different jurisdictions where we operate. And I think people really love to hear from her—they love to read those updates and use the information to inform their decisions.
I have one colleague who thinks he will take a 20 or 25 percent pay cut. It’s completely his own initiative. He asked me for advice last week, and I said, “Sure, whatever you decide I’ll support, but why don’t you wait? Karen’s about to do another update”—Karen’s our CFO—“why don’t you at least wait, get the information from her, and then make a more informed decision.”
Lisa: Right, because that’s your—is it called your compensation advice process? Is that what it is, I can’t remember correctly, where you can—
Edwin: Yeah, it’s different in different teams, but that’s right. And in normal circumstances, typically that practice would be used to increase one’s compensation, but that’s not the case at the moment. So it’s not exactly that practice, but the principle is the same of gathering advice and making a decision about your own compensation.
I remember when we were thinking about moving towards self-management many years ago, the promise was better, faster decision making. That’s very much a theoretical benefit that we’ve now seen so clearly in this crisis. We just consented to the biggest, most strategic, big-bet decision the company has ever made last week on Friday. And it was done with all of the information, all of the numbers, all of the details of the strategy, all of the pros and cons. More than half of the company participated actively in making the decision.
We chose to make a decision that—I remember when we were thinking about moving towards self-management, someone actually said, “Well, how could we ever make a decision like moving off—we have an applicant tracking system, a CRM system that we use to power all of our recruiting. How could we possibly ever make a decision like that engaging the whole company?” Well, interestingly, a few years later, that’s actually the decision that we made last week, and we did it in a week. It was open and closed in Loomio within a week. So it’s just amazing to see how much more quickly we can move, but then also clearly the decisions are better when more than half the company is involved in helping to evaluate the pros and cons.
Lisa: That’s amazing. Did you find, on that note, do you in your experiences there—for companies who are also interested in having that benefit—is there kind of an upfront investment you have to make to kind of adjust and get people used to making decisions in a different kind of way that might at first (this is a super leading question) that might at first take longer, but once you get practiced in that, my sense is that then you start to get really good at it, and then they tend to be much better decisions? Did you recognize a pattern like that in Ian Martin Group as well, or was it fairly quick from the beginning?
Luz: There was definitely—there was and is—work to adapt to collective decision-making or advice process. My perception is that it has less to do with time, that decisions might take longer—that may be the case. I think there’s more, or what I notice more, is an attitude around conflict where maybe some people don’t believe that their opinion really matters, and other people maybe think they have the one right opinion or the one right decision. So undoing some of those patterns that people have become used to in more conventionally organized work, for me, has been the big obstacle to overcome.
Edwin: Yeah, I think it’s that in combination with transparency, releasing more information, or working out loud as we like to say, so everyone has the opportunity to see and engage in any of the work that’s happening. But also there’s a bunch of habits that you have to undo. We all—literally the whole company, hundreds of people—read this book called “The Decision Maker,” which was written by Dennis Bakke, who was featured in Frederic Laloux’s book. And that’s a business parable, like a story about managers realizing that it’s much better for people on the front lines to make the decision, or “take the shot” as he would say, than it is for all of the managers to always be making all the decisions.
So it felt like, and it felt like for years, we’re sort of working on two levels where we’re going to former managers and saying, “Hey, try to empower others as much as possible. Have the people closest to the action not only weighing in on the decision but making the decision.” But then also, as Luz is indicating, there are people who aren’t used to making bigger decisions, and we’re basically supporting, encouraging, and not, you know, leaving it to them to make that decision, and then supporting them when they do make decisions, both in taking responsibility and accountability but also in basically moving forward and trying to make it a good decision.
Lisa: What I’m hearing a lot from people is that they’re finding it really tough now in working from home and working remotely as teams. People are really struggling with back-to-back Zoom calls, being collaborative online, reading nonverbal cues online, having tough conversations online. How have you guys been navigating keeping your culture alive in the remote space?
Luz: I think we had a good set of software tools already that support working out loud, like Edwin said. So we use Microsoft Teams for that, and it’s common that people have debates and discussions and updates and everything very public for us, so anyone that is interested in that topic can follow along. We use a weekly update software called 15Five. We’re very used to video as a means of work because we have offices in many different locations, so I think we were well supported by our tech.
And then I think we do have strong values around wholeness or humanity at work, which is also something I’m hearing in contrast with friends in more conventional businesses. Maybe it’s not okay to have your kids screaming in the background or your dog running through a call, or—I don’t know—“I’m not wearing pants.”
I’ve found people just really tolerant and really human and reaching out to each other and organizing fun social stuff online or doing their usual meetings online. I don’t know—I’ve just found people very adaptable to changing their habits, and it’s come up from the grassroots.
Edwin: I mean, I remember at this previous company in 2009, I felt like I needed to play a role in trying to create initiatives to lighten the mood, to make it okay. Here, it’s just happened all over the place. I remember very quickly there was like a Bollywood dance contest meme thing that went around the team. There’s someone who initiated a weekly yoga session that they’re teaching. We’re doing a step contest and encouraging walk-and-talk meetings. There’s the Ian Martin Times—someone said, “Let’s create a thread in our Microsoft Teams which is just all good stories that are happening during this crisis,” and people are piling on.
So it’s not like there’s HR or some team that’s trying to figure out how do we keep people feeling positive. It just happened—people sensing, “Oh, there’s a lot of people feeling down and struggling with this—how can I help?” And so there’s just dozens of different things that are happening without really any central coordination at all.
Lisa: That’s really cool to hear. I really feel for people—I’ve been speaking to a lot of people in HR and people operations and culture-type roles who are turning themselves inside out: “What different sessions should I run for people? Then people started showing up, and now they’re not showing up anymore. Should we open it?” It’s such a relief, I imagine, to be like there’s no one person or no small exclusive group responsible for doing that. It happens out there in the system with that mindset shift. It’s for all of us to keep the culture alive, for all of us to look after each other, for all of us to get through this.
Edwin: Yeah, something else that really stood out for me, and Luz actually played a huge role in this: in our business, in recruiting, we now have most of our clients that are not hiring at all or probably laying people off or furloughing, and then you have a small percentage of our clients that actually are hiring and are facing increased demand, and a bunch of net new clients to us that have increased demand that we don’t know yet.
So if you imagine, we’ve got about 400 people in our company—75% of the people have to find something else to do quickly that is actually adding value. So imagine if we were a traditional hierarchy, then you’ve got some central planning commission that’s trying to reassemble the puzzle pieces: “Let’s put this person here, this person here,” trying to do some kind of a reorg on the fly. Instead, here it’s been amazing to see everyone raising their hand who has capacity, and then people who have additional initiatives are going to people like Luz and saying, “Hey, I need some help.” And then it’s just some kind of a basic central coordination to try to connect opportunity with people. And then again, that’s just been happening very quickly and very organically. And Luz, it must have been fun being in the middle of that.
Luz: Mm-hmm. One of my favorite moments in this pandemic work-from-home situation: I was on a call with a colleague who works in Atlanta, Georgia, and I can’t remember exactly what we were talking about. Oh, she’s on a team that is traditionally very successful and sort of one of the teams that others in the company look up to for their success, and they’ve been particularly—their clients have been particularly hard hit in COVID, and so their work dried up.
In our call, she—she’s usually a very calm person, very level-headed—but she got quite emotional and was choking back tears. And I said, “Oh no, are you worried about losing your job?” And she said, “No, but I can’t earn a salary and not contribute to the fullest degree that I possibly can, and I don’t know what to do.”
So we brainstormed—like Edwin said, I knew of a couple of teams that might need help—and then she said, “Actually, I’ve always been curious about the Matchfield”—it’s one of our brands—“the Matchfield part of the business.” And I said, “Great, why don’t you call Jeremy from Matchfield and just check if they have anything to do?”
I didn’t know this, but sure enough, he had a huge piece of sort of data entry and data cleansing work that he was about to outsource. It’s not the sexiest project in the world, but my colleague was like, “I will take this on.” She did an internal posting—she was looking for 10 people to help her manage all of the data—she got 25 people volunteer and say, “I can help you with that.” She took a selection of people, they’ve started working on the project, and again, all that was just—it was almost instant. She called Jeremy, Jeremy had a need, the posting went up, the 25 people volunteered. All I did—I did nothing. I didn’t even suggest that she call Jeremy.
And I think that story is typical in the high degree of personal responsibility—“Okay, the company’s still paying me, so what can I do in return?”—and the way that people get to where the information is or where the action is without somebody overseeing it.
Lisa: Yeah, the image that comes to mind is like this spiderweb, like this kind of anti-fragile sensing that there’s a need somewhere and repairing the web and connecting more parts of the web. Everyone just sort of going to where things are needed, which is such a different paradigm to a top-down centralized committee—“Let’s go away into a cave for a while and unveil some big response plan,” by which point people are like, “So uncertain—what’s going on? Am I going to lose my job?” Yeah, that’s the difference.
Edwin: As you can imagine, people during this time have this kind of fear, scarcity mindset. But when you feel like things can’t happen to you, it’s much easier to have the optimistic abundance mindset. And it’s not only even that people are feeling needed—they’re going above and beyond.
We’ve got two examples which are just so amazing. In one of them, there was a new customer service line that was created to answer some COVID pandemic responses and questions for one of our clients. And they needed not only some new additional contract workers, but they actually needed laptops and technology to be sent to these people’s houses. Usually we only ever supply the people, and they go and work at our client site, but now in this case, we actually had to buy laptops, configure the technology—we did that ourselves—and then not only hire the people but send the technology to their homes.
And so we had people—even the CEO of the company—working over the weekend to actually get all this done, which not only put people to work but also helped to do our part in terms of the response.
Another business unit that we had had a client in a long-term care facility, which are really being hit hard almost everywhere by this, and they needed more personal support workers and more registered nurses—like a couple hundred more. And we had an entire business that didn’t have any experience in recruiting for these sorts of positions—all hands on deck, putting out posts on Instagram and Facebook and personal networks. Basically turning the entire company into recruiters for these types of people so that we could fill those roles.
So it’s not only that we’re filling the needs, but when people are seeing, “Oh, here’s an opportunity” or “How can I help,” they’re just putting everything they can against that. And it’s just, it’s so amazing to see—it’s quite inspiring.
Lisa: And it’s interesting because I’ve heard sometimes leaders of organizations being fearful of opening up finances, for example, in times of crisis. And of course, it helps if you’ve opened them up before times of crisis, but particularly when I’ve spoken to some leaders, they felt like, “Well, I don’t think that would be responsible because people would people would feel scared, and they would just go into complete panic mode. They would feel insecure. I think it’s better that we kind of protect them from some of the scary stuff, and we can manage that and take that off their plate.” What do you think about that?
Edwin: They have a very low opinion of others and a very high opinion of themselves. Aaron Dignan in his book “Brave New Work,” he talks about this as being “people positive”—having a belief that people are smart and capable and up for a challenge, and the best thing that you can do is not to lower your expectations of them but raise them. “We expect that you’re gonna do some great stuff with this, and here you go.” So it’s just about trusting people and believing in people. When you have that as your mindset, why would you ever want to hold back from them? It just doesn’t make sense.
Luz: I mean, the other side is hard—like if we were traditionally organized, I would have a big people management kind of a role, and it’s daunting to think I’d be responsible for their tech working from home, for the ergonomics, for “Do they have enough work to do?”, for their performance. Really, the diversity of skills and activities that you would have to take on your own shoulders, as opposed to saying, “Okay, here’s a new set of challenges. Let’s address as many of them as we can together,” and not having to be in the position of having all the answers and protecting people from the scary bits of life or work.
Edwin: Yeah, and I think that’s something that’s maybe not emphasized enough in the self-organization literature—is the impact on people with management roles to have all the answers and call all the shots, including in areas where they may have no talent or interest.
But I mean, it’s at the same time, it’s not all unicorns and rainbows at this time either. This is a very difficult time emotionally for people individually in your family, obviously with the uncertainty around future work, employment. And at least the last time you and I talked, we talked about that sort of—the teal adoption process and moving from head into heart and then into habits. I feel like this crisis has almost put the entire organization into that heart phase, into that emotional phase of examining themselves when you’ve got a tough situation at hand, and then untangling your feelings around that. And is it a love, a positive, optimistic response? Or are you stuck in some kind of a fear, scarcity mindset?
And I think the organization has responded really well, but we still—both myself personally, all of us as individuals, but then also as teams—have had to go through a lot of difficult emotional untangling through this process. But again, the difference is instead of, let’s say, Luz being in charge of the emotional well-being of an entire team, we have people helping each other. It’s like a network, a web of people having these more in-depth conversations and reaching out to those people who are struggling or need to work through or talk through things, instead of some kind of a program that tries to do that job.
Lisa: I think sometimes in organizations—I mentioned before this idea of like protecting employees from scary finances—it is this kind of parental impulse in a way. I think it’s often well-intentioned, but I think it’s limiting in terms of how we see people’s potential. And I think the same can be true in times of crisis—I think that the traditional, the old paradigm of management is to try and minimize emotions, try and put a lid on them. “Let’s try and make everything okay,” as opposed to, “Hey, it’s so natural that people are feeling unsettled and anxious. Let’s be with that and let’s see what conversations need to happen, and what we can do to support each other through that,” recognizing that it’s the wholeness piece—that’s part of it, that messy middle, the hard stage.
What have you noticed in reading about or perhaps talking to people in your networks about other examples of how organizations are handling the pandemic in terms of how they are responding to people, culture stuff? What stories have kind of made your skin crawl, and what stories have you drawn inspiration from?
Edwin: I could think of lots of things that have made my skin crawl, but initially, there was a movement with some large companies, especially in the tech space—Microsoft, I think, was a first mover. Airbnb—I listened to an interview with the Airbnb co-founder where it sounds like some of the big tech companies, and clearly like they can afford it, made some decisions that put people ahead of profit. And that’s a good sign. There’s also been many governments that have done that, and I think society at large has generally done that. I mean, a lot of the people that are most vulnerable are being protected right now by social distancing and the lockdowns, and so that’s all been really good to see.
But what I’m actually afraid of is that what we’ve seen in our organization is that it’s actually not some heroic leader or executives that are doing the right thing—that’s not what it’s about. It’s actually about the mindset, like you said at the beginning, Lisa. What’s the prevailing mindset at the company, not in the executive circle? And then whenever there’s a crisis like this, you actually see what the company is truly made of. You see what the culture is truly made of.
And that’s what I’ve found so inspiring is that the culture was ready to respond well to something like this generally. And I haven’t read any stories about how cultures, corporate cultures, are responding well to this, but you certainly see lots of stories about how cultures at certain hospitals and long-term care facilities have responded well. So I think that’s what it’s about—what is your culture like, and how ready is your culture for this?
Lisa: Yeah, I was wondering, do you think that because often times of crisis are opportunities for innovation—do you think we’ll see a new kind of wave of self-managed, teal organizations as a result of this pandemic? In times of kind of scarcity, in times where adaptability is needed, do you think we’ll see some more examples popping up?
Edwin: This always wants a couple seconds to think about it, so I’m gonna go first.
I absolutely—I’m in fact sure of it—that there will be stories, maybe not now but six months from now, twelve months from now, about not even the entire companies but maybe even the managers, the department leaders who, in response to this crisis, didn’t say, “Okay, I’ve got to take this all on myself and orchestrate,” but rather changed the mindset or empowered the mindset of their entire team to respond as they saw fit. And I think what we’ll see in those stories is those teams that had this mindset were able to outperform and to maintain a better culture through this.
And so I think this myth that if you want high performance, you need to have a tightly controlled management hierarchy and process—I think that’s going to get totally busted because those are the things that are going slowly right now, that are going out of business, that have a lot of cultural entropy, whereas these agile, networked teams where people are very empowered—those are the ones that are gonna succeed right now. And I would hope, or I believe, we’ll see stories of it not now but probably later in the aftermath, when we see who did well and who didn’t during this time. Luz, you just thought of something?
Luz: I mean, I’m usually more cynical than Edwin is.
Edwin: Yeah, that’s true.
Luz: And I also—I hope that’s true. I think that that will be true in pockets. I also think that some management beliefs reinforce themselves. So if you respond to a crisis by controlling people, and then they seem disempowered, then it confirms for you that they need to be controlled. And it’s a bit of a vicious cycle. So I think that will also happen.
Edwin: Yeah, sad but true.
Lisa: Yeah, and I guess any companies that have that mindset and way of operating that survive or do well out of this would be like, “See, people need to be told what to do,” which would be sad. But I also hope that, in a kind of—and maybe this is a bit of a tragic way, but I think about some of the examples in “Reinventing Organizations,” and Frederic Laloux often talks about this—that sometimes in making a stand for “I want us to work in this way because I can no longer work in the old way, it hurts my soul too much.”
And some of those stories that I’ve read—just like staggering levels of inhumanity in how companies are treating people. I hope that some people will be emboldened by that: “I know I can’t do this anymore. I want to—I don’t want to be that, and I want to be something else.” And hopefully, that would be some phoenixes that will rise from the ashes of that, I hope.
Edwin: I remember having that feeling in 2009—“This is what we have to do, this is what I have to do as a manager, there’s nothing else. We have to do the responsible thing for the bottom line. We have to lay people off. Let’s try to do that as humanely as possible. We have to deliver this salary cut”—we were a public company—“because we owe it to our shareholders. I owe it to the company as a manager.”
But if I would have known then that there was another way, then that would have been a much different decision, I think. So I think it’s very important to be telling these stories, that there isn’t only one way to respond to something like this. So then you’re in a way empowering managers to say, “Oh, okay, this is what I choose,” and then you’ve got to live with your choice of how you respond right now. So I think we’re in a different time. We’re a lot, like, new things are possible today.
Lisa: I guess on that note, in kind of starting to wrap up our conversation, what words would you like to leave listeners with? Some will be in self-managed or teal organizations, some will not be, or maybe they’re somewhere on their journey. But what advice or what tips for the journey would you offer them in these times?
Luz: People are endlessly adaptable, and if you believe in your own ability to adapt, situations like this are a lot less scary. No one knows exactly what’s going to happen—how long the lockdowns will last, how many people will get sick, how economies will be impacted—but if you believe in your own adaptability, then you’ll deal with what comes. And organizationally, if you have designed for adaptability, the same principle is true.
So adaptability is a strong word in the situation, and the other one is humanity. And I think we’ve talked a lot about that in this conversation—like accepting that your emotions will be messy through something like this, taking care of each other, being tolerant of the way that different people will respond or adapt to the situation. So those are the two words that come to mind for me.
Edwin: The word that came to mind to me is something that I had a lot of conversations about, especially lately, and that’s vulnerability. I think whenever you’re in a tough spot, to think about “What am I afraid of? What do I not know? What kind of help do I need?”
And we’ve been sort of instructed through the zeitgeist that strong leadership is being confident and saying what you know and trying to drive change. And I’ve seen in my own experience that vulnerability is like a leadership aphrodisiac. When I say, “I know what I’m doing, you should listen to me,” you don’t want to listen—especially Luz doesn’t want to listen. But when I say, “I’m struggling, here’s what I don’t know, I need some help,” then Luz will lean in and say, “Okay, I’m in this with you. Let’s figure it out.”
And so I think wherever you are on the self-management, on this mindset journey, if as a leader you can start with your own vulnerability, and then invite people to work on something together by naming what you don’t know, what you’re uncertain about, what the challenge is, what the problem is—I know you mentioned “Reinventing Organizations”—so there was a great story, I think it was Favi, where they faced this huge crisis. I think they lost 80% of their revenue or something. And the CEO just got on the soapbox and went out to the machine shop floor and said, “Here’s the deal. What are we gonna do?” And very quickly, the whole company figured out what to do, and they set forward.
So I just think it’s amazing when you can just put your problems and issues and vulnerability out there and ask for help. I think this is the time to do that.
Lisa: I’m curious, from both of you as leaders—and I know you, Edwin, have had a career as a traditional manager, so to speak, and I get the sense that you, Luz, also have—I’m wondering, those two pieces of advice you both gave, are those new discoveries, or are those things that you had always known?
Edwin: Mine is very new for me, definitely. And actually, Luz has played a big role in helping me to see the power of vulnerability. And for me personally, for most of my career, I didn’t realize that I was in many situations driven by fear—fear of what wasn’t going to happen or what was going to happen if I didn’t assert some strong leadership.
And Luz and other people have helped me to see that instead of being afraid of something and then therefore trying to railroad to make sure that that bad thing doesn’t happen, by just saying, “Here’s what I’m afraid of,” then people either respond and say, “Oh, I’m not afraid of that. Here’s why. Let me help you out of that,” or “I’m also afraid of that too. Let’s work on it together.”
So that, and the power of vulnerability, have been relatively new learnings for me. And unfortunately, the only way I’ve seen people learn those lessons is by doing it the hard way—making a whole bunch of mistakes, leading in such a way that isn’t effective. Then you get some bad feedback, or there’s some situation where that blows up in your face, and you have to learn that hard lesson. Yeah, I think right now, this crisis obviously is an opportunity for lots of those lessons, and it’s just an opportunity to try doing things differently if what you were doing wasn’t working for you before.
Lisa: Luz, you said it was also a new discovery for you?
Luz: I think so. I certainly have been thinking a lot about adaptability right now, probably rooted in my own questions about, “Well, if I lose my job or if I’m to reload, or the part of the business I work on goes away, what am I gonna do?” I have those conversations in my head a lot, and at the end of those conversations, I don’t usually come up with any answers but just remind myself, “It’s okay, I’ve adapted to many things, I’ll adapt to this one.”
And the sense of humanity for me is watching how different people are able to emphasize different aspects of what needs to get done. Like today, this morning, I was involved in a conversation about all the aches and pains that people are getting from working in bad home setups, and what can we do? And that’s not an area of expertise for me at all, but I know that there’s a woman in our business named Diane who knows a lot about that topic and is already thinking about it and has already helped, ready to help the people who need that. There’s other people whose focus is people’s mental health, and there’s other people, like Edwin said, who have started dance contests in our Teams feed.
And just how everybody has a different thing to contribute, and each one of those is valuable and addresses a different need or a different opportunity. And I just get a kick out of watching all of that and remembering that if it was a manager, I would be responsible for all of them, and I would be doing them badly because I don’t have aptitude for a lot of those things. So it’s just way more fun to watch the people that do have an aptitude for them doing it.
Lisa: Yeah, it’s amazing—that kind of rich tapestry of humans contributing their gifts in different ways, exactly. So anything else that you both want to share that we haven’t touched on, or anything you would like listeners to hear before we finish our conversation?
Luz: Teal organization is a lot of fun, and it works. And I don’t—I’m the opposite of Edwin, I don’t actually like to talk about teal organization. People—I’ve had enough of my friends and family saying, “That’s crazy, that doesn’t—what kind of a company do you work at?” And I sort of do me talking to other people.
But my honest experience is that it’s a blast, that it’s not that difficult, that it is able to deal with a great diversity of problems and opportunities simultaneously, that most people can thrive really well working this way. And I would encourage anyone who’s thinking about doing it to do it. It’s really hard to make the transition, but it’s worth it.
Edwin: I just looked up, there’s a quote that someone brought to my attention the other day, which I think is good. It’s from Rahm Emanuel, who was the former mayor of Chicago, and he was an Obama advisor. And he said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
And I think for anyone listening who wants to move forward the self-management aspects of their company, wants more empowerment—I think that quote is very instructive. You’ve got an opportunity now to change some things you probably couldn’t change before, to try some things you couldn’t try before. And it starts with being vulnerable and empowering, believing in the adaptability and the competence and the actions of others.
So, and then in a few months’ time, you could look back and say, “Look what I tried when no one was looking, and look, let’s see how this worked. And now can we build off of that?” So I think it’s a really great time right now to try different things. And I’m really inspired to hear the people you have on your podcast in a few months from now that went and tried some crazy things and had good results and were able to shift their mindset, move the mindset of their culture forward during this time.
Lisa: Thank you both so much for sharing all of those stories. I think about what you mentioned about the crisis in 2009 and responding to that, and I think about people who are going to go through future crises and these stories, and how important these stories will be for them and for people dealing with them now, of course. These stories are so valuable, so thank you very much for sharing them, and thank you for being who you are and for cultivating this culture that you have.
Edwin: Yeah, thanks for having us, Lisa. And please keep going—please keep telling these stories. I think they’re really important, and I find them very inspiring.
