Holly Breeding
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[00:00:00] 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 Every week around here, we dismantle the outdated hierarchical leadership systems that keeps leaders like you stuck in the weeds and break down how to build a self-managed team that thrives without you at the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.
So these past couple of weeks we've been talking about this concept of the strategy gap. Where is the gap between where we're trying to go, this, big dreamy vision we have for our team and the current reality that we're living in. And we started to explore some of the biggest barriers, that cause that gap, right?
And so what I wanna talk about today. Is change because it's one [00:01:00] thing to start to identify what those barriers are. It's another thing to start addressing them through change. And one of the reasons why I am seeing more and more and more strategy gaps go unresolved is not because you as the leader don't know they exist, it's because they are out of your control.
You need approval, you need budget, you need buy-in from your peer or some other department or some other team that you are dependent on. They are cross-functional, super gnarly, super sticky problems. And this pattern is becoming more and more, common because worker is becoming more complex. We've talked about this before on the podcast about how work is not something that can just exist within one department anymore.
You know, it's not just finances work. It's not just sales work. It's not just [00:02:00] marketing's work. Because of the speed, because of the complexity of today's world, work is becoming highly cross-functional, which means in order to deliver on any one thing, to solve any one problem, it requires multiple teams, multiple skill sets to get it done.
There is higher interdependencies. And that means many of the problems that you are facing right now are cross-functional, interdependent problems, and those are the hardest problems to solve because they are outside of your control. You do not have direct control over what that team or department over there does, what they utilize their resources for, what they find to be the most important.
And the reality is that we still operate in silos. And I think a lot of people are like, no, we don't. But it's [00:03:00] true. We say we don't because we like collaborate. We're in all these meetings together, right? I have a million cross-functional meetings on my calendar.
But that still doesn't mean that, that you are not siloed. Sure you're collaborative, but siloed doesn't mean, you know, we don't work with anyone. Siloed means that we operate as individual departments with individual priorities and individual performance metrics we're being measured against. So I have more incentive to look after my own team.
And my own team's success than I do the greater good of the company. A great example of this is I was working with a cargo team, for example, and their sales function was separate, under separate leadership from their ops function. They were completely separate [00:04:00] departments.
So the people who sell. , The spots for cargo are separate from the people who actually deliver, actually put the cargo on the trucks, and so they were running into the issue where sales was making these promises, whatever they needed to do to complete the sale. And then they were dropping it on ops who was like, what the heck?
We can't deliver on this. And then customers, expectations were missed and customers were upset and they dinged operations. And, customer satisfaction started tanking and they were struggling to remedy this. And you would think, , of course sales should be concerned. Why are they continuing to make these promises?
Well, if you look at it. It. These are siloed departments. They're working together every single day. They're in meetings together every single day, but at the end of the day, when you look at what sales goals are, they're around revenue, [00:05:00] right? Driving revenue. Every single one of those sales folks are,
have goals that they need to hit to keep their job and to get bonuses. And so that's going to motivate their behavior, not the overarching, end-to-end experience, not what that does to operations. We're humans, so they're going to do whatever they need to do to hit those sales goals, to hit the revenue that they need to hit, even if it's expensive operations.
The problem is that operations. They're rewarded based off of customer experience, how happy customers are with the process. And the more that sales does whatever it takes to hit those revenue goals, the more that they dump the impact on these operations teams who now they're starting behind in their goals because they're set up to fail because it's not one team.
We [00:06:00] see the same thing a lot in any department that has a COE. Another example is I was working with a digital team and they had created back when, digital transformation was really popular, this digital center of excellence that was supposed to be the standard, right?
And every other department had homegrown these digital folks. So every customer service had their folks, marketing had their folks, all HR had their folks, everyone had their own little folks doing digital work. And now there's a COE here who's trying to figure out how do we bring these all together?
How do we get, clear standards? How do we make the best of these resources? And what they ran into was these constant struggles of the company had these overarching digital priorities that they were trying to execute against, but then departments had their individual priorities. [00:07:00] And guess what, where those resources focused?
There was no motivation for me as a department head to give any sort of capacity or resourcing to these company-wide digital efforts when at the end of the day, my job is based off of me hitting my departmental performance goals. Like I'm going to prioritize if I'm a customer service rep overseeing a call center.
Or if I'm a customer service, VP overseeing a call center, of course I'm going to focus my resources on the initiatives that are going to help me reach my goals in customer satisfaction, in downtime, in, resolution time. I don't have any motivation to give resources and capacity to these overarching company-wide digital transformation efforts.
[00:08:00] Even though that supports the success of the company as a whole, that's the siloed mentality, and this is what you're feeling every single day when you are trying to. Deliver value in your team, but you are dependent on these other teams, on these other stakeholders, on these people above you. And every single one of us has different priorities.
Every single one of us has different motivators. Every single one of us is under different pressures, and so it's incredibly hard to solve these problems. And what it leads to is you spending a ton, a ton of time in meetings trying to build PowerPoint decks to get buy-in, to get approvals, to get everyone on the same page, to get people to prioritize solving this issue.
And then when that doesn't work, we start building workarounds. How can we do ourselves? How can we build the shadow function? [00:09:00] How can we, bandaid it together? And each one of those comes with capacity drains. Each one of those drains routine because either one, they're continuing to have to deal with this issue over and over and over again, and we're not getting anywhere solving it.
And isn't that sometimes like the most draining thing of all? It's like we've all recognized as a team, this is an issue. And we are going, we are desperately trying to get buy-in to solve this, and it's going nowhere. And more draining at that point. I find that it also, it starts to create toxicity, right?
Because it's like, these people don't want the best for us. So , it starts to create toxicity in those relationships that those stakeholders, those other departments that we're working with day in and day out, it starts to become an even bigger divide. Now as an us versus them mentality or with the workarounds, it's the same thing.
Now we're diluting our value as a team because we're having to put [00:10:00] capacity and resources and focus on things that aren't even within like in our scope. But now we're having to to fund those, and then there's a tension. Because lo and behold, they figure out that you're starting to step on their toes and get in their territory, and then they feel threatened.
And now it becomes an even bigger thing that we're now having to manage. So this skillset right here, being able to solve these gnarly, cross-functional, highly interdependent problems is going to be so, so critical y'all to succeeding in the future of work. Because work is only going to get more complex.
The lines are only gonna blur further. Things are work is only going to get more interdependent. And if we're not able to solve these, then our ability to deliver value as a team is going to get harder and [00:11:00] harder and harder. And so the idea of . Just letting it go. I see that happen a lot too. It's like so and so will eventually retire and then everything will get better.
Right? Once they get new leadership or once, , maybe one day the higher ups, we'll see what's happening then like everything will get fixed. We'll just kind of wait it out and that may work for this one, but it's gonna keep happening. So what about the next one and the one after that, and the one with that stakeholder over there?
If we don't build the capability, we're going to be constantly at the mercy of those around us. And so I wanna ~just ~talk a little bit about some of the themes and just kind of nerd out on how we're thinking about solving these super gnarly cross-functional problems. Obviously, I could spend hours, actually, I've designed an entire program around this, so we're not gonna be able to get into all of it today, but I just wanna start, putting a bug in your ear.
About [00:12:00] how we can start to think about these differently shifts that you could tangibly take and start to make a difference in your team tomorrow. So the first thing is going to be to step back and understand the context. I think a lot of times as teams is really easy to view things from our lens.
And so we diagnose the problem based off of what we see based off of our current reality. Right? But I, based off of everything that we just talked about, we understand that every single team, every single role is under different pressures, is being measured on different metrics. And so one of the things that I find is so helpful is simply stopping and asking, okay, what is driving this behavior?
Because the reality is. Most people aren't out there just to make our lives harder. It feels like that in the moment, right? There's some, stakeholder relationships where it's like they [00:13:00] literally exist to make our lives miserable. That's what it feels like, but that's not the case. But is something that's driving this behavior.
And if we can figure out what's driving the behavior, we're more likely to come up with a better solution that's going to work, that they are gonna be agreeable to. So the first thing is starting to understand, okay, how is their performance measured? What do they get rewarded based off of? What external pressures are they facing right now?
Sometimes it's just about understanding who's higher up on the chain than them, right? Sometimes the person, a few levels up has a little bit of a different working style than the person. A few levels up from you and the demands are different, and their focuses are different.
So I know it can feel super elementary, but simply stopping and asking, okay, what's the bigger picture here? What is driving this behavior? And I love to do this with my teams. Whenever they come to me and they're like, so and so is making my life miserable or they're impossible to work with, [00:14:00] I ask them, have you stopped to think about what the bigger context is here?
Have you gone to them and asked them these questions? Do you understand why they're behaving in this way? Because that's gonna make us 10 times more effective in solving this. Now the second thing is going to seem a little bit counterproductive based off of everything we've talked about today, but hold with me.
The second one's gonna be focus on what's in our control. What can we do tomorrow without getting any buy-in, any approvals, anyone's opinion on it. And I say this for two reasons. One, because I find almost every single team can tell me something. Their other stakeholders, the other teams they depend on needs to change.
It's funny how many times when I am working with teams and I'm, we're, we're coming up with, our biggest barriers [00:15:00] and what are experiments that we can try , to, to solve these. And it's like they, they're really good at coming up with things that other people could change. And it's much harder to come up with things that we should change.
And that's just innate human response, right? It is so much easier to judge others. I mean, just scroll through whatever social media platform that you utilize and you will see it come out just reading through things and your ego response is to say, oh, well they shouldn't be doing that.
They should be doing it this way. If they change this, I can't believe they do it that way. It happens, it's, it's a human response, and their psychology behind it is we as humans like to protect our ego. We like to protect the things that we're already doing. It is much easier to find fault in others and what [00:16:00] others should change than it is to stop and reflect and do the hard yucky inner work of saying, what's actually working here?
What's not? What should we be changing? What's failing? What's breaking down? That feels a whole lot yuckier than simply sitting away from afar and making judgements about what others should change, and I know. That's not the type of leader you are. I know the leaders in this community, we are not judgmental leaders at our core, but like I said, it's it's human response.
Whether we intend to do it or not. You don't even realize it. It just happens. It's our default because that is how we protect ourselves. It goes back to, I always say like the caveman mentality. If, when the pressure is on, it's easier to point out than to look inwards because it, it keeps us safe. It keeps our livelihood safe.
[00:17:00] The second reason why we do this is simply because it's more productive. I see so many teams spend months and months and months and capacity and time trying to come up with this perfect solution that is dependent on someone else, and then they have to get buy-in, and then they have to get approval, and then they're going through meeting after meeting, trying to convince and persuade and influence and go up and down the chain to try and get this prioritized to try and get that other person involved.
We put. All of our eggs in a basket dependent on someone else that is not in our control. And what often happens is either one, it fails, it doesn't go anywhere. We can't get it off the shelf. Or two, what I see happen a lot is that idea that we had, that solution that we had gets watered down to something that's everyone can agree upon that's palatable to everyone.[00:18:00]
And then it's very rarely effective. Because we had to do what appease the masses to get it across the finish line. So whenever we come up with a barrier that's cross-functional, we always ask, what can we do? What shift can we make that's in our control? That requires a no sign off, no approval, no buy-in from anyone you know around us or above us.
So this includes budget. This includes, headcount. This includes resources. This includes any sort of approvals up above us that we can go implement tomorrow. This requires you to get creative and innovative and really push your thinking and to do that hard inner work of , what could we change?
How could we optimize our own backyard before looking at others? And I wanna be clear, this does not mean creating a shadow function. This does not mean you going out and doing the work , [00:19:00] for them. This means focusing on what is in your control and saying, how can we fix our part of it? How can we do something that's going to show them what's possible?
So I wanna give you some examples. So the first one I wanna talk about when you are trying to change with, another stakeholder, you're dependent on who's not willing to change. So let's go back to that ops example where, ops is having to, try trying to react to these commitments that the sales teams sales team has made.
And it's continually. Impacting their customer service. So maybe an example here could be that they go to a specific sales team, a specific sales region, , a few sales reps that they have really strong relationships with that understand that, that feel what's happening, and they have a [00:20:00] conversation, Hey, what, where is our service?
Constraints preventing you from making sales. What are the, what's the number one biggest barrier? And they talk through it and they say, people want this like semi, custom option. Okay, cool. What if for, the next eight weeks we make that happen for you guys and we test it out. We don't put a lot of resources towards it.
, We just make it happen over the next eight weeks. I always say, do it manual. How can you do the experience manually before we invest anything? And we see what happens. We see the cost, the impact it's going to have to the operation. And we also see the impact it has to sales and we get data.
So suddenly those sales reps are, , locked in 2, 3, 4 more deals than everyone else. Guess what everyone else is gonna be doing? What happened? What you did differently? What's going on over [00:21:00] there? We show firsthand this is, we recognize that hitting your sales goals is a priority for you. Now here's what happens when you also recognize that customer service is a priority for us.
When we work together, this is what we can deliver on. Help me help you. Now, are those sales folks directly in our control? No, but they're people that they already are bought in, they're already interested. So it's that path of least resistance. We didn't need to build a PowerPoint deck. We didn't need to convince them there. We already have built that relationship. So we're just using that to test and experiment on, to get tangible data that's going to make others take notice, and then we can use that data to scale and drive that go bigger.
Okay? If this is something that more people need, we will open up this option to you and it's planned so we as an operation can plan for it. [00:22:00] And now you have something that you can actually close sales with without, going rogue , and coming up with a bunch of different packages , and standard customizations and things like that make it impossible to deliver on, but work with us.
Another example that. I wanna talk about is more so culturally, so we run into this a lot. It's like we as an organization, love to experiment and innovate and then we're agile and all these different things. But we are working in an organization whose culture is the exact opposite.
Super old school, super slow, super, content with the status quo. And it's like we can only get so far because it's like we're working. At, lightning speed and then we hand off to this next team, and it's like bumba bum, like it all comes through a screeching halt. And I do this exercise a lot in teams where it's like, talk about how your culture and, and we just rapid fire it out.
Tell me all the ways your culture actually helps enable you in delivering your [00:23:00] strategy. And tell me about all the ways that it actually hinders your ability. To deliver on your strategy to deliver good work. And it's a really interesting exercise. And you learn a lot from it. And then based off of that, I think the real key here is saying, Hey, we can't tackle the entire culture of the organization in one go, but we can focus on one or two things.
And we pick as a team, we prioritize what are one to two things. , We are going to intentionally and actively challenge the culture. And so an example might be, we actually had this, with one of the liberated leaders in the program, is they were implementing this super agile planning process that was much more, structured , and much more effective for their team.
They were running into this issue where as a culture that there, there just wasn't any planning process. It was like, there was this culture where [00:24:00] planning was, you set it at the beginning and then essentially goes out the window and everything's super chaotic and ev all the priorities get overridden.
And there the planning activity was essentially, theater. There, there wasn't any value to it, and that was making , their job impossible as a team because. Everything was constantly shifting underneath them, and so instead of sitting there and trying to get the entire company to change their planning process, which wasn't going to be effective because if you've ever tried to put a bunch of people in a room and get them to agree on a change, yeah, that takes months and then usually very little comes out of it.
Instead, we said, okay, how can we focus on what's in our control? How can we clean up our own planning process? What's in just our team? How can we make it as effective as possible? And so that's what we did. We hyper fixated there. And guess what? The more that they were able to show within [00:25:00] this little bubble what they were able to achieve when they had a much more agile but structured planning process, the more other people start to take notice.
What are you doing? Hey, can you tell me about that? How can my team start to adapt that? And then you create pull versus trying to push change. We see it a lot with, in Liberated Leader. When we start implementing this culture of experimentation and these eight week cycles, we're constantly, tackling these massive barriers.
These teams have through small change that, builds momentum and builds. As it scales, people start to take notice. What are you doing? Like, how have you been able to solve it? Like why, why are you suddenly blowing these metrics outta the water? And it's like, why is your team suddenly, in these meetings coming up with all these ideas and asking all these good questions?
And it's like, because of the culture we've been able to create within this team, I saw it happen in [00:26:00] my own team, in our own department. When we started doing innovating, running off of these, experimenting sprints and working and, and implementing some of the agile principles and things like that, other teams in the department started asking questions, can we come sit in on that?
~Study what you're doing? And ~they took it back to their team. We didn't push it on them. That wouldn't have been effective. They saw the success we were having and they got curious, and then it started to become commonplace throughout the department. You build change by modeling at first.
That's much faster than had we gone out and tried to push it on people, because we're immediately starting to feel relief, right? Every single oh, there's my alarm. Okay guys, we gotta wrap this up. I gotta go pick up my kiddos. So every single time, like you're making change from day one, had we sat there and tried to change like an entire planning process.
Maybe by the end of the year we could have made some sort of shift, but I could literally next week start making changes that are going to have a positive [00:27:00] impact on my team. And then we use that and we build momentum and we make another change, and we build momentum and we make another change.
And then that other team starts to get interested. And so we bring them into the fold and now things get easier because we have somebody, an ally with us, and then we start to build that momentum. This is why teams inside Liberated leader are able to drive change so much faster than traditional teams is because we focus what's in our control.
And it's hard, y'all, like I know some of you guys are thinking right now, it's like, that sounds good in theory, but like the problems, there's nothing we can do in our control bet. It's just that we haven't been challenged to think in this way. It's that innovation, it's that creativity that we have to put into place.
And guess what? The first couple of experiments or solutions that we try out, they might not get us anywhere, and that's okay. We're gonna learn from what works and what doesn't. We're gonna change and, and evolve each cycle after that. So focus what's in your control. The third one I [00:28:00] wanna talk about is seeing resistance as a sign to get curious.
So let's say, you've gotten to a point where you have really solid data and people are really starting to take, a hold of it and they're getting excited about it and you're able to start to scale the solution. But there's, one group or one team or one leader who's like super adamant against it.
I think it's really easy again, , to see like, oh, that's just 'cause they're change resistant, but oftentimes there's something going on there. So if somebody is resistant change or a team's resistant change, let's ask those questions. Hey, I'm just curious,, what's going on here? What about this don't you like what?
What about this doesn't feel good? What about this seems risky to you? And have the conversation? Because resistance, like I said, there's very few people who are just resistant for the sake of being resistant. There's something underneath it that's driving that behavior, something going on. Some sort of external pressure, some sort of something driving their behavior.
And do it with your own team as well. If you are talking about a change [00:29:00] or rolling something out and you're feeling resistance, that is a sign to get curious, not push harder. Hey guys, I'm seeing, I'm seeing some, tension here. Talk to me. What's going on? What are you feeling have make resistance? I feel like when we talk about resistance, it's like this immediately defensive.
Defend the change. I see this a lot when leaders are like proposing change, like they're presenting a change to a group and people start asking questions or, or, or start, you know, poking holes and it's immediately defensive. I've gotta defend it at all costs. Again, that's that human response, caveman response, ego response.
I've got to protect. Instead of just saying, Hey, this is a great opportunity to have a constructive conversation. , Let's talk through it. , Let me understand your perspective. Let me share mine. It's seen resistance as a sign to get curious.
And then the fourth one follows up on that in instead of trying to find [00:30:00] consensus. How can we simply find something that's safe to try? I mean, this is a whole premise that we operate with in Liberated Leader. We don't do change management through comms plans or change templates or anything like that.
We do it around human psychology and what truly drives behavioral change and what we know is that behavioral change doesn't come from understanding. That's what a, there's a huge misconception in corporate culture today is the more that I help people understand the change, understand what's possible, the more they'll be bought in.
But I use the example a lot. If you think about like a new resolution or something you've always wanted to do or achieve you, you know why it's super healthy for you to get out every morning and run. You want to be that runner. You've bought the shoes you, you've downloaded the running plans, you've got the fancy Apple watch or whatever it is that, that it's gonna track it.
You want to do [00:31:00] that. You understand why it's good for you, but there's barriers that make it hard for you actually to implement on that. There's reality and that's what stops people from changing their behavior. It's the reality that they're up against day in and day out. It's the habits that they've been doing for the past 20 years.
It's the fact that regardless of how good that other alternative sounds, it's much easier for me to continue doing what I've always done than having to learn this other way. Learning a different way will always be harder than continuing the status quo. That is human psychology. So because of that, no amount of understanding.
Is going to get somebody to drive change their behavior. So I'm not gonna try and convince somebody, I'm just gonna say, Hey, we've come up with this idea that we think could be really effective. Would you just be willing to try it out over the next eight weeks and see what happens? Just a test, a trial, just to see how it [00:32:00] feels.
What is eight weeks in a span of a year? Could we just try it out? And instead of you being fully bought into the solution, instead of you saying, yes, I'm a hundred percent on board, if there's resistance, all you gotta do is ask, okay, what would make it safe to try? What do we need to do to get it to a place where you would be okay?
Saying yes. To those next, next eight weeks. So then it's not an a, a yes or no question. It's not a, should we do this or not? Do you agree with this or not? Is this a good idea or not? It's just simply, we really wanna test this thing out. What will we need to do to make it safe to try for you? Do we need to, lower the scope?
So instead of, doing it across all teams or all regions, we just do it over this like small subset of people, of accounts, of teams. Do we need to add in, a check or a, or something? What is it that would [00:33:00] make it safe to try? And the definition of safe to try is not I approve of it or I agree with it.
The definition of safe to try is that if it blows to shit, it's going to be irreversible. It any damage caused. Will be irreversible. Not that it won't cause any damage, because there's always that risk that there is something's gonna go wrong. It's gonna cause a problem, it's gonna make your life more difficult.
That's just how change is. It is always going to be easier to follow the status quo, but is it reversible? Can we switch it back? If the answer is yes, then let's give it a go, and a lot of the times you'll find people are much more willing. To get on board. If it's small scale, if we say that it's an experiment, it's not a finite change.
It's not. It's not something that you have to agree like you're, we're writing it in blood, like this is it for the rest of your life. It's like we're [00:34:00] just gonna test it out. It has a solid end date, and at the end of that end date, we're gonna go right back to the status quo. And at that point, hopefully we have some solid data that we can show why the status quo isn't worth it.
If we don't, that's fine. We learn from that. We can attest and evolve, and we can adjust.
But through this process, we're playing to human psychology. We're lowering the risk. We're lowering the perceived fear that comes with change. And this is why I actually just did a post today. Why so many teams? Come into liberated leader in their application, talking about how a, a part or all of their team is change, resistant, change, fatigued.
They are super complacent with the status quo. And then they start getting into this process and suddenly their team is getting excited about change. , They're recommending ideas, they're proposing their own experiments, , and we win. We're doing a lot more change than they've ever [00:35:00] done. Like every eight weeks, we are implementing two to three experiments in their teams.
Small shifts where we're actively changing how they work for the better. So that is a massive amount more of change than they typically are used to. But it doesn't feel like that because of the process where small scale, little experiments, small shifts that build momentum over time. . We create the safe to try environment that actually works to change human behavior versus spending all of our time developing plans and trying to convince and influence and get approvals and buy in and build out PowerPoint decks and all of these things.
We say, how fast can we actually change how we work? And we do that through these things we talked about today. So I want you guys to take one thing that you learned today and go put it into practice. Think about that [00:36:00] one gnarly cross-functional issue that's continuing to block your team. And I want you to start trying some of these out.
Is it going to solve it all tomorrow? Heck no. It's not what we're talking about. We're talking about that progress, that builds momentum over time. And if you're like, I needed a solution now, okay, well guess what? We're gonna get more progress going through this than we will. Spending all that time building PowerPoint decks and trying to get approvals and sitting in another meeting where we talk in circles and don't make any progress.
Focus on what's in your control. Get curious, do something safe to try. And if you're like, I want support, I'm, this is exactly what I need. I need to be doing more of this. I want this culture in my team, then you need to be inside liberated leader. I'll drop the information about that below. We're actually about to kick off a new cohort on Monday.
I'm super pumped. We already got a great group of leaders inside [00:37:00] about representing a ton of different functions. So if you're interested in that, click the link below and let's chat. Let's go do some work.
Thank you for listening to the Liberating Teams podcast. If this episode hit home for you, don't forget to share it with another leader. Or if you've got 10 seconds, drop a five star review and it would mean the world to me so we can liberate more teams together. And if you try something for today's episode, come tell me how it went.
DM me on Instagram over at Liberating Teams, and I'd love to chat more about it. Now. Let's go change the world of work. One liberated team at a time.
