Welcome to the Liberating Teams podcast. I'm Holly Breeding team psychology practitioner and org effectiveness consultant. Every week around here, we dismantle the outdated hierarchical leadership systems that keeps leaders like you stuck in the weeds and break down how to build a self-managed team that thrives without you at the center.
Because when your team has the clarity systems and ownership, they need to lead themselves. You finally get to lead strategically. It's time to liberate the way you lead.
Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are dismantling the corporate Kool-Aid around collaboration, and you're like, wait, what? Collaboration is a good thing. That's something that we're wanting more of. Yes, and I actually believe that we have hit with a lot of teams, the point where collaboration has actually become a negative.
It is what I call. Over collaboration and today on the podcast, we're gonna be breaking down exactly what I mean by over collaboration, how it happens, and what we need to be doing instead.
So over collaboration is when we get to the point where collaboration is no longer benefiting us, getting work done, in fact, it's actually become a hindrance. And this was actually studied in Brooks Law, which talks about when you add more people to a project, a meeting, a decision, whatever it may be.
It. There's a point to which it in increases productivity and effectiveness, and then there's a point where it dramatically falls off. So like, imagine a bell curve where it's like, okay, we have one people, two people, three people, okay, it's going up. It's effective because we're getting diverse opinions, we have more, hands on deck, things like that.
But then there's this very specific point where suddenly it becomes ineffective and actually hurts our ability to get work done. More so than had we just done it ourself. And this is where I see a lot of teams operating from, is they've gotten over the top of that bell curve, and we are now in a place where collaboration is actually negatively impacting our productivity and effectiveness as teams.
And oftentimes it stems from. This mindset that everyone needs to be a part of everything for the sake of collaboration.
We all need to be in the meetings. We all need to be a part of the thing. We all have a say in the decision because collaboration, right? It's happening out of a place of. People pleasing of feeling like we have to, of not wanting to rock the boat or upset anyone's feelings, or even what I say, CYA, cover your butt.
Because if I included everyone, then everyone knew about it. And if it goes wrong, then it's not going to fall back on me. It's not happening out of a place of. Purpose, intentional collaboration now, I really wanna start by talking about where this obsession with collaboration even stems from. So if we go back the obsession with collaboration started in the eighties where we saw the rise of the matrix org structure. So this was a time where work was inherently getting more and more complex. It no longer was, black and white. Here are the specific departments you need to have to run a business.
There's product development, marketing, sales. Distribution operations, and everyone stays in their perfect little silos because we. Run these smaller, businesses. But then work started becoming more and more complex with these. Multiple different product lines spanning across multiple different regions and multiple different customer segments. And as the complexity of the modern workplace really grew, we realized this very siloed, functional way of organizing teams no longer worked. And that's where we had this rise of the matrix structure. So yes, you are on the sales team, but within the sales team we have these regionally based teams, and then cutting across those are different product streams.
So you are on. The reporting line for the southeast region sales team, but you also have a dotted line to the product that you're focused on. Let's say it's, sodas, you are the main seller for sodas in the southeast region. So you report into two different leaders. You have two different teams, and this type of, niching down got even more complex as we went into the nineties and the two thousands where we started to see the rise of these super niche, super technical expertises. There was no longer just you develop products and there is one team and one role who oversees the development of products. It's like within products, there is, the product owner, the product engineer, the, user experience specialist, the design specialist, a product analyst.
There is no longer these broad generalist roles who really. Own a span of work from end to end. We've chopped up work to make these really specialized niche roles, and because of that, these roles are highly interdependent. No one truly. Owns anything. Everyone owns this little piece of it, like you are the product owner.
You get to figure out requirements and what the priority is, and then you need to hand it off to the next person who's going to actually, start to develop it and, test it out. And then they're gonna have to involve the user experience person and the design team who have their specialized niche in it, work has to pass off through so many different hands for it to get done because we've really become obsessed with these hyper niche, hyper specialized functions and roles, which has made collaboration not just a nice to have, but. Teams truly have become interdependent on one another. So while those are more like the structural history of how we've become really ingrained in this over collaboration, everyone involved in everything, there's also some cultural elements that we're seeing rise through corporations as well.
Like we said at the beginning of the podcast, there's this big, fear of conflict, fear of stepping, stepping on people's toes, wanting to, include everyone. Mentality to where we just add people into projects, into work, into decisions without ever weighing the risk.
We solely see collaboration as a positive, the more the merrier. And we very rarely ever consider, okay, what is the negative side of this? What is the impact on productivity? What is the impact on focus? What is the impact on actually. Making this decision or driving this work forward in a reasonable timeframe, and that wasn't as much of a concern.
20, 30 years ago when the world of work that we were living in wasn't as fast paced, you could take time to socialize an idea with 15 different people. You could have, the giant meetings with the 20 different people where we talk around in circles for three hours but now we're in a world of work where literally. Things are moving so fast that if we want to keep up, if we want to stay competitive in the market, we have to be making decisions driving work forward at a much faster pace, especially for those of us who are in anything around technology or digital type fields where the speed and amount of change is relentless.
And then on that note, I think we also have to talk about the change to the ease of which collaboration can happen. And I know I saw this within my own team when, the events of 2020 happened and most of us were working virtually. It has become so easy to collaborate, almost to the point where it can actually become a negative.
When I first, I had my first internship, I remember that if you wanted to send something for another department to sign, that admins would walk around with an envelope. You would have to, put the paper in the envelope and there was like a sheet on the front of the envelope where you would say I'm sending this to department at this time, your signature.
And then the admins would go walk around the different departments and drop it off. So because of that inherent friction within that process, you really thought twice before saying, okay, what do I actually need to share here? You are, consolidating things and you're saying you're stacking everything up and you're like, okay, on Thursdays is when I'll send all of these out for a signature.
So you're not having to do it all every day. You get strategic, you get very intentional. With how you're collaborating. Now, that's just one very small example, but the same thing happens with, how hard it used to be to, align everyone's calendars. It wasn't just a click of a button where you could look at everyone's calendar and find an open slide.
Auto finds it for you. Now, it also auto finds the room for you, and it's just a click of a button. It's all set up. Versus when you had to personally walk around to everyone's cube and say, okay, when's everyone good? Then you had to go talk to the admin to see if there was a room open and they had to go talk to the other admins, and you were much more intentional about it because there was that inherent friction, but that friction doesn't exist anymore.
If I wanna collaborate, it can happen at a click of a button. If I need to hold this meeting about something, I'm not thinking twice about continuing to add to that invite list because all I gotta do is say, oh look, available at that time. Let's add them in too.
I can see they're available, let's throw it on their calendar. I don't have to think twice of, oh, this idea just popped into my head. This question just popped into my head. I'm just going to ping. So and I found myself guilty of this a lot in 2020 is instead of me taking the time to think through something, to find the file, whatever it may be, to even, think about is that idea actually a good idea that I need to go share with other people instead of taking that moment? Slack was there, it was open. I could see their light was green. I'm just gonna ping them without any thought process of, Hey, what am I disrupting and doing so. We have made collaboration frictionless, and while there's a lot of benefits to that, it also takes out a lot of the intentionality, the thoughtfulness in collaborating.
I don't have to think about anything alone. I don't have to make the hard call. I can just include everyone in a click of a button. We can make this a joint decision and a click of a button. I can socialize this with, 12 different people in a 45 minute meeting at a click of a button, and it'll make me feel good because now I got validated by all these other people when really I didn't need that validation to begin with.
We've seen this obsession with collaboration really happen both from the structural and how we think about getting work done, but also this cultural push and this, trying to include everything, everyone and everything. And there being no friction to stop that really leading to this over collaboration.
And as I alluded to throughout that there's a lot of inherent negative costs that come with over collaboration. And the first one that we have to talk about is lack of ownership. When everyone owns everything. When everyone has a say in everything. No one truly owns it. This is one of the biggest themes I see across teams.
So one of the exercises we do in Liberated Leader that I've been doing throughout my consulting career for over a decade now is mapping out a team's value stream of understanding, okay, where does work come in? How does work flow through the team, and how do we create value at the end of the day as a function?
And as we map out this value stream, we also map out, okay, who owns what. If we were to give every team, or if are leading a smaller team, every function or person on your team a different color, and we gave them this value stream and said, okay, in your color, highlight what you own.
When you get these all back and you lay 'em on top of each other, the chaos that you will see come to life, it is so eye-opening for leaders when they see this value stream and it is just a hodgepodge, a mess of colors everywhere. One little task has four different colors in it because four different teams touch that.
And if four different teams touch that, that means, four times, three different people. Per team, we now have 12 people involved in getting that one task done. And every single time I pull this together and I show this to my leaders and they take it to their teams. They're like, yes, this is what it feels like to get work done on our team.
A hodgepodge of colors. And a lot of that is a product of over collaboration. It's how we've designed work where we've super niche work down where everyone needs to be a part of everything. And also that cultural aspect of, not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings. And so when we have everyone involved in everything, it significantly decreases ownership because no one owns anything.
How am I supposed to take strategic ownership and be that problem solver and innovator and ideator when I literally have to do so with 12 other people on this one tiny task of the 12 tasks that my team owns or my role owns? It's impossible. I can't be an owner of anything if I don't actually truly own anything or I can't move forward on anything without, stepping on 12 people's toes. I hear about this a lot, especially in roles. I picked on product managers and product owners. I hear this a lot of I have the ability to prioritize things and strategize, but at the end of the day, I'm not the executor of it. So I'm at the mercy of this other team.
I don't actually own end to end anything. And that's really frustrating for teams and individuals because they're constantly blocked in by those around them. They can't take one tiny step forward on anything without having to, get sign off from 12 people, socialize it with 12 people, be in a cross-functional meeting with 12 people.
The over collaboration has led to a significant lack of role clarity and role ownership and where a lot of the times when I come in and leaders are like, my team's not TA stepping up, they're not taking ownership. The number one root cause of that has nothing to do with the team, their skillset, their drive, their motivation and everything to do with the lack of clarity.
And a lot of leaders will oftentimes say no. Like my team's clear. They have, job descriptions, we have race's, but it doesn't matter if you've documented the chaos, if your value stream and how you get work done still looks like a hodgepodge of colors, but you've now documented it on a job description with a list of tasks and everyone's tasks are stepping all over each other.
They still don't have role clarity. You've just documented the lack of clarity. And I also am not a big fan of RA's for the same reason is we think RACI provide clarity, but oftentimes I see it just continue to exasperate the over collaboration because we have all of these letters, we might as well use 'em, right?
So we, we put these different, tasks or decisions. And we put like all these people who are responsible and then we try and pick one person who's accountable, but we never really do. And so it's like a joint accountability situation. And then we put 12 people who are consulted and another 15 who are informed.
We're not actually making any tough calls about who owns what work and where work starts and stops. Documenting. The chaos does not create clarity. Clarity happens when we actually get really cut and dry about who owns the different pieces, the different outcomes along our value stream, and we get very intentional and very strategic about where collaboration happens and even how work moves from one team to another.
And a lot of this comes down to reversing a lot of decisions around how we design the work around old school legacy systems or, people, we didn't design work around the work, we didn't design it around what makes most sense for the work to get done efficiently. Instead, we said, 20 years ago, Sarah, when this team was just, three people owned this body of work and then, she was the expert, the only one who knew how to do it. And as the team grew and expanded and took on different tasks. We glued this other type of work to her bucket.
And then, she also got interested in this other thing and we said, you can take that on too. And then what we create is these hodgepodge roles that, we like to refer to as unicorn roles, which really makes no sense for these buckets of work to all live together in one role.
But because Sarah's been here for forever, like we designed the work around her, or, we gave that bucket of work to that leader because we needed to justify their promotion and they didn't have a big enough scope. We make decisions around structuring work. Very much around people. The way it's always been hierarchy, and this is a huge problem when we focus on org design.
So my background is heavily in org design. And a lot of leaders just see it as sticks in boxes. We're moving around roles and people on paper, but what you're not considering when you do that is how work flows and is tied together.
So if you think about it like an iceberg, the org structure is literally just the tip of that iceberg. It's what above the water. It has nothing to do about how works actually gets done. It's just a visual representation. Where work actually gets done is below the surface. It's in, the value stream we talked about.
Where we're getting very clear about how our team creates value and that flow of work, and then structuring roles around that flow of work. So it's very intentional. We're being very specific around grouping work together, where we're creating ownership instead of, like I talked about when we chop up work and.
Create these like super niches or start chopping it up in all these different odd odds and end pieces because that's what the role Sarah wants. We make it very hard for work to get done. 'cause you're creating that value stream that's a hodgepodge of different colors. And the more, abstract colors you have on your value stream all overlapping each other, more confusion. You have the lack of ownership. The lack of clarity, stepping on toes, more handoffs more opportunity for confusion, for errors, for dropped balls. This is why Liberated Leader is so different than every other leadership program out there.
'cause they're gonna talk to you about sticks in boxes and span of control and things like that. But like none of that matters. That's just that tiny little piece on the tip of the iceberg. What you are learning and liberated leader is actually understanding, okay, how does my team create value in the business?
What is the flow of work and the outcomes we own in order to create that value? Now let's think about how we structure roles around that work and do so in a way that generates. Ownership and autonomy and empowerment and decision making authority. So we're actually setting up these people for empowerment, to be those strategic thinkers, to be those innovators, those thought leaders, because we've actually given them ownership over something.
And then how can we be very intentional about what I say, gluing the work back together, which is. Unless you have a very small team, you're going to have to dice up your value stream and who owns what amongst different roles and different teams. And because of that, we do so very intentionally, and then we're very intentional about how we glue those teams and roles back together.
They're not just, throwing work over the fence or like a lot of the times what I see is, I do my part and then, oh, now it's your problem. You do your part. No, we don't do any of that. We have this very, okay, yes, we operate in our own teams, but we also operate as a cross-functional team, and we're very intentional about how that handoff and anywhere where we have joint outcomes happens.
All of that gets overlooked. When you are just looking at an org structure. And that is why we see so many teams repeatedly, time and time again, obsess over these reorgs and shifting the org structure. And maybe if I just do this or add this function or add this management layer, everything will be fixed and it won't.
I can tell you, because I've been an org designer for a decade. And I used to believe that too when I first started out in my career, all shiny and new and thought that it was about following the textbook. And if you just have the proper span of control and job descriptions, everything will be better.
Yeah, I got a reality call real quick. That's not how work happens. And the more that we obsess over these massive org structure shifts, thinking they're gonna save the day without actually thinking about how work actually happens, then we're gonna continue to be disappointed.
Okay. I'm sorry I had to go on my rant there. But bringing it back, clarity doesn't come from documenting the dysfunction. Clarity comes from actually getting clear about your ownership, who owns what, making the tough calls, and no longer operating from this place of everyone needs to be involved in everything or hyper niching where niching isn't needed.
That's another big thing that we talk about in Liberated Leader, is we're very intentional about where we need to niche. Because there is complexities that come with niching, so we're very intentional about where we pull that card.
So this lack of clarity, this, everyone owns everything mentality, leads to the second impact that we see with over collaboration. And that is teams spending more time talking about work than actually getting work. Done. So here's the thing, if we are unclear about what we truly have ownership over, because everyone kind of has a little piece of it and we feel this need to, socialize and consult and inform and all the things with everyone.
Then what happens is we don't feel we're empowered to act on anything. So because we're terrified to step on toes and because we don't want conflict, what we do is we spend tons and tons of time in these cross-functional team meetings where no one actually knows who has the decision rights or who owns what, and we all just sit there and talk about it.
What work are we doing? What should we be doing? What should be a priority? We just sit there and debate, and I love debating. I think that is so critical in teams, but it needs to be intentional and productive. A lot of the times we're just sitting there, everyone's coming at it from their own different silos.
What's best for us and our function, and we're just sitting there frustrated with each other because we're all seeing things through the lens of our function and what we think is the answer. Because we come from this specialty. And if I come from, if I'm a data scientist and I look at a problem, guess what I'm gonna say?
The root of that problem is. The solutions in data science, right? Because that's what we're trained in. That's our lens. We are biased to see things through our lens. And so when you put all these people in a room to solve a problem and they're all looking at through their lens. The goal of that, collaboration of that cross-functional meeting is not, , we're one team who is driving towards this shared outcome.
A lot of the times it's we all have a stake in the shared outcome. We're all on the hook for it, and we all have different metrics that we're expected to hit and different goals we're expected to hit. And so it's really becomes a fight to the death over our own priorities and our own focuses and the performance of our own function.
It is highly unproductive, and even if we are all on the same page
around, what the outcome is. We end up spinning on how we're actually going to achieve that outcome and who plays what role and who gets to make what decision. And, what's a priority because we're all trying to prioritize this thing amongst all of our own individual functional priorities.
And so where it might be your priority number one, it's our priority number seven and therefore we're stalled in moving it forward at all. So the shift that we are needing to see is, like we talked about in the last one, about getting really clear about who owns what outcomes, and very strategic and intentional about if that is more than one role or team.
So I am very hesitant about breaking work up.
But in those scenarios, because there are scenarios where we benefit from those different perspectives. There are scenarios where we benefit from the checks and balance. People coming at it from two different lenses, like especially if you have scenarios where, you know. One person is the voice of the customer and the other one's the voice of, product or operations, et.
You need those different perspectives. But in those cases, we do what we talk about contracting around the work, which is your not in that scenario representing your different functions. You are a cross-functional team, meaning you are a part of your. Whatever team you came from. So product development.
But in this scenario, for this body of work, you are a part of this cross-functional team focused on achieving this outcome. And because we run it as a team, that means. At the very beginning, when that team comes together to deliver on that outcome, we are very clear on setting it up as a team, as any other team would.
They have specific roles. They have specific decision rights, they have specific cadences about how they meet and get work done. They have working agreements. Everything that we teach you how to do in Liberated Leader. For, your overarching team. We also teach you how to quickly set up in these cross-functional teams.
Therefore, it goes back to what I said about we don't collaborate or invite people unless it's intentional. And by intentional, this is what I mean. It's very structured, it's very thoughtful, so we're not spending wasted time, talking about work and trying to figure all this out month after month,
so then the last one I wanna touch on, is that cultural feeling of, we need to be. Inclusive because we're afraid of, stepping on toes or somebody feeling left out or the other side of this, which is also if I'm not in it, then I'll be left out or I'll miss something critical or I won't seem like a team player.
And all of that is good stuff. We're not trying to say it's bad to try and be a team player or to be inclusive and thoughtful of others, but what we're saying is yes, and we also need to be respectful of protecting our teams time and capacity, and also making that a cultural norm. So I want to be inclusive when it's respectful for their time and capacity, versus, actually this is something that it'd be nice for them to know, but ultimately it's a distraction from the very critical, important work that they're doing.
And it's the same thing of having that same respect for our own time and that I love how base camp they talk about instead of fomo, fear of missing out, creating a culture of jomo, joy, of missing out, it's this understanding that our team's time and capacity is the biggest advantage we have to actually achieving our strategy and the goals that we set out.
And so unless this meeting, this invite, this offsite, this project is absolutely mission critical to achieving that vision, I'm going to joyously say no because I am so focused and bought in to where we're going as a team. And now, as you can see, this only works. If you have a clear strategy that is super hyper-focused on the most critical outcomes, not like a list of 15 objectives or projects that your team is clearly aligned around, otherwise, everything does seem like a priority.
Otherwise, it seems like they do need to be in every meeting because they don't have any clear direction telling them what's important and what's not, and therefore everything becomes important. So having this cultural norm around respecting our team's time and capacity and seeing that respect. As mission critical to achieving our vision and paying that same respect to the teams around us is such a big shift to actually collaborating with intentionality.
So I'm gonna call some of y'all out here for a second, which is that I see so many teams who have things like collaboration and teamwork as like values and core beliefs that they talk to a lot, which is great. But have we also talked about how we do so with intentionality, how it's not just blindly, including everything in every one.
And feeling like we need to be a part of everything for the sake of, being a part of the team, but instead talked about how we are very intentional about where we collaboration and respectful for each other's time and our own time to ensure that we continue to stay focused on that larger vision, that larger strategy.
Okay y'all, we are at time. I could continue to talk about the cultural aspects of collaboration especially when it comes to, you trying to have this very intentionally collaborative environment in your team, but maybe that's not respected in the larger organization and company that you work for.
Let me know over on Instagram and we can do a part two. And if you are interested in Liberated Leader and putting in a lot of these practices that we just talked about in this episode, DM me over on Instagram and we can talk more about if that's a good fit for you, or check out the link in the description below.
Okay, y'all. Take something that you learned today and go implement it in your team this week.
