Friday I met with the non-profit team still figuring out how to “merge“. On the highway the way you merge is to yield. Unfortunately the only yielding this team had done so far was to FEAR.
Unlike last time, the acquiring CEO was present. And I could tell that everyone who had wondered aloud why he WASN’T there last time were nervous that he WAS now. What was he going to do? What was I going to do?
When I had called Toto before practice to prep, his simple advice was this — “No Fear.” Translation? “Trust the framework.” “BE the framework.”
Thank you, Toto.
If you’re familiar with our 8 Essentials of Leading Teams playbook, you know how it starts out. It’s with a familiar refrain about how normal leaders don’t take the time to connect with their team – they create fear instead. That’s followed on the next page with the lyrics of a song by Coldplay called “Talk”. The last line is “let’s TALK, Let’s TALK, LET’S TALK.”
It’s there for EXACTLY that reason. After they found the melody line at their tables and discussed why the playbook starts this way, we practiced “tapping” out the beat to a song that was obvious to the tapper but not to anyone else — and TALKED about the Curse of Knowledge. Which is that once you KNOW something (like the song you’re tapping out the beat to), it gets harder and HARDER to imagine what it was like to have NOT known it.
Which is why we mostly SUCK as leaders at connecting with our team. Instead we just bitch about why don’t they just “GET IT?” A poignant point about the tapping exercise is that when the tapper realizes his audience doesn’t have a clue as to the song they are tapping, in frustration the tapping just gets louder and more vehement. Which makes the audience feel even more stupid and frustrated.
And LESS connected than ever.
After music class, we reinforced the Curse of Knowledge with math class, figuring out that if you buy a donut & a cup of coffee for $1.10 and if the coffee is a dollar more than the donut, the price of the donut isn’t $.10 it’s a nickel. And that in trying to connect someone to a different answer that’s not so obvious to them, we as leaders repeat the same error as we do tapping — we just repeat ourselves speaking our language louder & more vehemently.
With the same result. Our team feels more frustrated and less connected than ever.
They ALL got it — especially the CEO. When I asked him where HIS mind was — in September 2011 (when the merger happened), or in September 2013 — he said “hell, no — my mind is in September 2015”. For him, the merger was ancient history. He’d moved on long ago and assumed everyone else had too.
THIS is when practice got magic. And when the “M” that made so much sense on paper finally happened.
Because instead of tapping, the COO (the acquired CEO) and the CEO shared from their heart WHY they were here, and why the merger was the right thing to do. They acknowledged their Curse of Knowledge, and asked their team to forgive them. They talked openly about their Tears, Fears & Cheers pertaining to the merger.
And lifted the curse. So that in the rest of practice, the team finally moved ahead in becoming mustangs, running together as ONE.
Which is the BEAUTY of practice. And of trusting the framework.
Why? Because it WORKS.
BUILT TO LEAD 