From Friction to Flow: How Teams Thrive Together

Part 3 of our 4-part conversation on shifting our leadership from friction to flow..

What does a team in flow actually look like? In this Relationships at Work episode, host Russel Lolacher is joined by Margaret Graziano to unpack how leaders can shift their teams from defensive, draining dynamics into collaboration and empowerment. Discover why the “magic number” for team problem-solving is five to eight people, how laughter and trust fuel flow, and what leaders can do to unlock their team’s best work.

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: So from the poo poo pie to the future, how So, we've done the work as leaders. We're getting the data, we're moving the needle. We focused on these five things. How do we start bringing the flow into the team? 'cause they're on very different paths and they may be seeing very different things?

Margaret Graziono: Very good. So in my book, Ignite Culture, the whole first third is about the leader's development. And there's a lot we didn't cover because it's a short podcast, but one of the things is the leader creates a vision for their life, like a calling a, a Dharma, a purpose. And then they define their values and the environment that they wanna create inside and out in the family and at work, in the community, all of it.

And then they look at what structure they're gonna take on, like the five things to improve or the getting a coach or having different kinds of meetings or having an accountability partner. Now they take that triangle the same. Triangle and they look at what's our noble cause for our organization, what will have people connect to our purpose so they could be more interested in purpose and less interested in their own individual goals.

Then the leader needs to take that out to the community. Meaning the employees in either small group meetings or all hands-on meetings, and then the leader needs to take responsibility for the environment that has been created and that needs to change. If the leader pretends that they have not been a perpetuator of friction, people will not trust the leader.

They will think it's all bullshit. So the leader needs to take a hundred percent responsibility. I'd love to get this video from you because I'm going into a intervention tomorrow and I'd love to play it for them. The leader needs to take a hundred percent responsibility for the environment that they've caused and then promise a new environment and stake their job on the new environment and give themself a consequence.

If I cannot create this environment, I will resign. No shit, sherlock. And then what's the architecture that the organization needs? What's the loose structure? Architecture is like rough framing that the organization needs to, to support people in thriving. Well, one of the, the, the disciplines of change is sound and current data.

Another is feedback loops.

Russel Lolacher: Right.

Margaret Graziono: Regular feedback. How are we doing? What's working? What's not working to transform a culture? Depending on if it's transactional culture and tangled culture or toxic culture can take between one and three years. And sometimes the leader that started the transformation that took responsibility, actually get so enlightened that they leave the organization and they go do work in what they shared, they move forward. Like for example, I interviewed this woman named Mirabai Bush, and Mirabai was along with Danny, they call him Danny Goldman and they all went to see Maharishi in India years and years and years ago. And they came home and Mirabai started a company, the Center for Contemplative Studies, and she got the head, the CEO of Monsanto.

That guy was all in. He was doing all his work. He was developing himself, and one day he woke up and said, I don't wanna run a food company anymore. He left. Unfortunately, the transformation below him crumbled because the new CEO didn't want that kind of environment. And now we know what Monsanto has become.

Russel Lolacher: So how do you know it's working or not working as you're getting through flow with you and your team? Because I'm thinking consistency. You got a perfect example there of somebody's left and it crumbles well. Then they didn't do a great job of instilling it into the organization.

Margaret Graziono: Right. That's right. So how Michael Lowe did it, which is one of my clients and now he's partnering with me in consulting and bringing this to other people. He retired. He was working with that company in the CEO role for eight years, best eight years by the way, in the company history. What he did is he level set it with the executive team, then he level set it with the senior management team. Then he level set it with every single department in the organization. 20 people at a time went through this response agility training, so everybody got the training and there's many organizations that do it that way. Then he brought in leadership training after people got to the root. Then he had a culture catalyst group of people that were five to eight. I think he had seven. But we recommend five to eight people who are your kind of your task force in the organization. They're the fire keepers and they're meeting with different departments and different groups and tracking progress. The measures of success, change happens 180 days faster.

So if you have a change initiative, that would've taken a year. It gets cut in half. You measure how fast are we, what's our rate of change? How fast are we adopting change? Because when people are free, when they experience autonomy, agency and authority, they are much more productive. So production numbers will go up At his company, profitability went up by eight points to the bottom line.

That's a lot. So you'll see less bS in the system, you'll see fluidity, you'll see things flowing like water flowing higher profits, reduced time to change, reduced go to market for new products. Flow Research Collective says 200% improvement in productivity and 400% improvement in problem solving. So at Michael's company, they had to do a plant shutdown because there was something going on in the, in the, for the environment because they were a hard metal hard manufacturing, heavy manufacturing, and they needed to do a shutdown because they needed an inspection. Normally that would be a six month planning process.

We did it in two days and Michael was the director of the play. He, he was actually, he wasn't directing, he was witnessing sitting back, watching them work and just giving them feedback on, on track, off track. It was beautiful. All of those people have moved on to higher level roles. That's another piece of evidence.

When you are in a state of flow, there's more people to promote. It's succession planning is not like, oh my God, this sucks. Nobody's capable. And that's, that's another thing we see is when there's a lot of friction, there's a lot of talent that is being overlooked. A lot of genius that is not optimized.

So I think it's important for me to say, I started my career in recruiting. I went into executive coaching and then wound up in organizational effectiveness IE culture and change. Not culture change, but culture and change. Because as a recruiter I saw firsthand how many people quit jobs because they were underutilized, because they felt they didn't have autonomy.

They felt they didn't have agency or authority in their role. People leave, people get disengaged. In recruiting, it was all about how do we, how do we hire? Then I got a certification in retention and my eyes opened and I started actually doing consulting. This is way back in the day. 25 years. I mean, probably 18 years ago I became the person leading the certification and retention for the National Association, and that got into more of organizational curiosity and behavior.

Then I went into psychometrics. The point is, along this journey, why I can do what I do now is because I saw firsthand the impact. So if retention is a problem for you, if recruiting is a problem for you, if organizational effectiveness is a problem for you, you need to look at the root of those behaviors because you can throw money at people.

I have a person in my family who makes more money than I've ever made every year, and if he got an opportunity for a couple hundred or even half the money he's making to go work for a better company, to work for a company who valued humans, he would bolt. It isn't the money when it, when it's your life at stake and your happiness.

And the last thing I'll say is. We have 112 waking hours in our life. If we wake at 5:00 AM and sleep at 10:00 PM every day, 112. If you're working 70 hours out of 112, you can do the math. Is it worth being miserable?

Russel Lolacher: Right.

Margaret Graziono: Life goes fast. A few weeks ago, I was 25 and I opened my eyes and my grown sons are having kids. It, it, it went like that. And it went like that, and I stayed at that first job long enough to learn and as soon as I saw there was a better world, I left and I took all my clients with me.