Charlie Gilkey, Founder of Productive Flourishing, on Tackling Productivity Gaps and Fixing Broken Processes

Transcript

Charlie, welcome to the show.

Charlie Gilkey 00:02:39

Aydin. Thanks so much for having me. I’ve been pumped about this podcast for a long time.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:02:44

Yeah, yeah. Very excited to do this. There’s so much stuff for us to talk about. One of the places that I thought could be interesting for us to start is so you started in the military, right. And then transitioned to where you are today, where you spend a lot of time thinking about management constructs, coaching, advising, speaking. You’re author of a few books. But how did that begin? How did you transition from the military to where you are today?

Charlie Gilkey 00:03:11

Well, that happened completely by accident, actually. So nowhere on my career ladder was I become a executive coach and workplace consultant. Not a thing. Right. But I was. I come back from being deployed to Operation Iraqi freedom in the mid-2000s, and I was also working towards completing my PhD in philosophy. So yeah, I came back and I had this weird problem, Aiden, in that I was trained and did well, moving lots of equipment, working with lots of soldiers across multiple different companies. And I came back and a 5,000 word essay was kicking my butt.

Charlie Gilkey 00:03:47

And it didn’t make sense to me. How could I do this really complex thing over here with facility and ease, but struggle over here on the creative side? And that’s actually what started the website Productive Flourishing. And so I started writing about it because I wasn’t the only person dealing with this. So like any good scholar, like any good officer, I’m like, well, what are other people trying? What’s worked here? And my body of work grew up around that. And along the way people were like, hey, you’re really good at strategic thinking and planning and leader, like, can you help me with my business? Can you help me with my organization? And Naden, at first I was like, no, no, no, no, that’s not what I do. I’m an officer. I’m a, I’m a philosopher. I don’t know what you’re talking about on the business side of things, but enough people kept asking me, I said, sure, let’s give it a shot.

Charlie Gilkey 00:04:29

And that was the start of it. And that’s what I’ve been doing since the mid-2000s. And it’s one of those things where a lot of people start their companies because they hate their jobs. I was not one of those people. I liked both of the jobs I had. It just turned out that the way that I’m able to show up in the world this way was the best possible alternative. So I chose that.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:04:47

So a lot of people talk about writing as a means to come up with good ideas or to just a way to think. And so I wonder, from those early days when you first started writing, are there things that you recall that you almost thought up for the first time while doing the writing back then?

Charlie Gilkey 00:05:05

I thought that until I did more research. And so the gift and the challenge of being an Academically trained philosopher is you realize that it’s almost impossible for you to have a new original idea. We’ve been talking about the same thing for three or four thousand years that we know of. But I think a lot of my novel ideas were in the synthesis between what I was learning in the military and what I was learning in academic knowledge work. And so a lot of that felt fresh and original and I hadn’t heard it somewhere before. So talking about the air sandwich or the way that I talk about time blocking, I sort of backed and was like, oh, other people are talking about it this way. That was like, oh, I’m not the only one thinking about it, but I think my approach was different and useful for a lot of people.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:05:47

Did you say air sandwich?

Charlie Gilkey 00:05:49

Air sandwich, yeah.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:05:50

What’s an air sandwich?

Charlie Gilkey 00:05:51

Oh, an air sandwich. So this applies to both individuals and teams, right? So let’s imagine the top slice of bread. I’ll. I’ll talk about it from an individual perspective. The top slice of bread is your big dreams, your big vision for yourself, your goals in life and sort of those aspirations you have for yourself at the top level. At the bottom is your day to day reality, your constraints, your schedules, resources you have available. And for a lot of people, there seems to be a lot of air between that top layer of like how I want my life and work to be versus how it is. But it’s an illusion because in between those two slices of bread are five core challenges for individuals which are competing priorities.

Charlie Gilkey 00:06:32

Head trash, which is just the negative self talk and the stuff that we’re socialized to have. No realistic plan, too few resources and poor team alignment. And so when you really start thinking about like what’s in the way of me living that best life or doing my best work, it’s usually a combination of those five things. So you don’t believe you can. That’s head trash. If you don’t believe you can, you’re not going to align resources to get there. Competing priorities get a lot of people because they, for instance, want to be great parents and have an idea for how being a great parent in the world means. But they also want to be a high performer at their job.

Charlie Gilkey 00:07:12

And sometimes that’s a very real competing priority. And they have to choose one or the other or they choose mediocrity in both, which is kind of sad when you think about it. So those are the challenges that just come up over and over again. So when I wrote start finishing, that comes from start finishing, the real interesting challenge for Me was not why we don’t do the stuff that we don’t want to do. That’s the normal procrastination conversation in the productivity space. It’s pretty simple why we don’t do the things we don’t want to do. We don’t want to do them. Right.

Charlie Gilkey 00:07:41

I was more interested in the challenge that many of us find like why don’t we do the things we most want to do? Why don’t we do the things that matter most to us? That’s interesting because you would think we want to do them, we’re aligned to it, it matters to us, therefore we would get them. But that’s not at all the way the world works. And so the air sandwich explains for those things that I call your best work why we don’t get to those teams have their own component at too right. I get to say there’s what the team wants to do, there’s what the team knows it can do, there’s the impact the team is having in the world and then there are the meetings and the broken printers and all the things that happen at the day to day. And there seems to be a lot of air sound which it can play out in team versions too. And it’s usually a lot of those same reasons those same things come up. I would substitute instead of head trash. What I would probably say is belonging is not there in a team setting.

Charlie Gilkey 00:08:35

But that’s the fundamental difference.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:08:36

This was one of the concepts and so I love the title by the way. So start finishing. And so what is the core premise of the book? Is it more about getting to the things that you want to do or, you know, talking about people that tend to not finish things? The reason I ask is I’ve often observed people in the teams that I’ve worked with, sometimes there are people that that are really good at starting things. Like they’ll do an amazing job but they can never finish anything. And it’s just like the last 10% could take years, it’ll never get done. Some people are just really good at taking something and driving it to completion. And so you kind of need to recognize that on your teams and you can’t really change people. I’ve tried.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:09:17

It doesn’t really work. Maybe it kind of works, but doesn’t really work. And so it just knowing how to compliment the right sorts of people on the team. So is that the premise of the book or does it more about getting the things that you really want to do and making sure you do them?

Charlie Gilkey 00:09:30

So when I started writing Start Finishing, I knew immediately that it was book one of at least a three book arc. So Start Finishing is about how an individual can do their best work, but I knew the follow on book was how we can do our best work as teams. That’s what Team Habits is about. And then the third book I knew would be in the series what do leaders specifically need to do so that their teams can do their best work? So the premise of Start Finishing, it really is on that individual side. It’s saying, hey, let’s not really have the standard conversation about hacking shoeboxes and doing stuff you don’t want to do, right? Let’s really talk about those soul deep dreams and purpose things that are in there that are not coming out and let’s get those unlocked. That’s what Start Finishing is about. Team Habits is takes that and says what is the best work you want to do as a team? And let’s cut out the crap and figure out how we’re going to get there doing that. Because it turns out if we as a team are doing the work that fires us up.

Charlie Gilkey 00:10:30

A lot of the traditional manager paradigms and models, they either are not needed or they don’t apply. Well, I wrote Start Finishing is its own book for individuals because I personally read too many books that tried to do all three in one book and nobody got what they wanted. And so I’m like, I’ve got time. I’m going to be writing and doing this for a long time. So I’m going to write the book in the order that’s coming to me so that I have a chance of people who are approaching that book getting what they really want versus it being a meatball sundae and too many things that don’t come together.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:11:02

Well, thank you for clarifying. And so I’d love to dig into Team Habits. So this came out end of last year, end of 2023, and it’s all about creating the right habits for your teams, like you said, to get the most important work done. So what are some of these habits that you’ve uncovered?

Charlie Gilkey 00:11:19

I’ll first start with a few things to get this set up. So I’ll start with the broken printer because I’ve already mentioned it, but it’s every leader listening to this will not understand what I’m talking about. So every organization that I’ve ever worked at or consulted with has at least one broken printer that everybody knows about that remains broken and doesn’t get fixed. And sometimes they’ve been there so long that they’ve got names and employee numbers. It’s like, employee number 48 is not showing up today. And everybody knows and kind of laughs. But too few stop and say, hey, why is that damn thing broken and why can’t we fix it? And it seems to be about the printer. Like, it’s like, who cares? Not that big of a deal until it’s crunch time.

Charlie Gilkey 00:11:56

And however that printer is broken shows up at exactly the wrong moment and really kills the performance of your team. So the big boss is coming and someone forgets not to send it to employee number 48, but they do, and it spools out whatever it does. And then they’re scrambling last minute to try to figure out how to fix that because I hadn’t planned on employee 48 being doing what. What it does. Or you gotta sort of slide into the big boss with printouts that are jacked up because of the printer. Those downstream effects have a huge, huge cost. And as it’s been pointed out across multiple studies and books like the Progress principle, small setbacks like that have an outsize influence on your team’s morale and belonging and performance. So those little broken printers that pop up every day are those little things that happen.

Charlie Gilkey 00:12:46

They make a big deal. Now, I talk about broken printers because they’re ubiquitous, but it’s not just about literal broken printers. It could be the CC thread from hell, right? That we all have decided that in an organization of a hundred people, whenever we need to send out something, we’re just going to cc everybody on a group and therefore spend so much of our time reading CC threads just to see if we need to read the CC thread. How much of our time gets clocked over that gets sort of tied up in that. The thing about it is, I’ll talk specifically about the CC thread from hell because it’s a great example of a bad team habit. None of us showed up and said, hey, let’s start the CC thread thing. Let’s do that. And none of us signed or really talk about the fact that, like, this is a conscious way in which we have decided to be with each other and to work with each other, and yet we all do it.

Charlie Gilkey 00:13:35

If your company is plagued by it, everyone just does it. It’s unconscious and it’s agreed to despite what it’s costing your organization. That’s an example of so many bad team habits. Bad meeting habits are like that. None of us said, hey, we want to do it this way, we just do it that way. And fundamentally, Aiden, where I really want to get into this is it’s not upper management that said, hey, let’s do the CC thread from hell. Because I’ve been in rooms where I’ve asked upper management, did you all agree with this? Is this your policy? And everyone’s like, no, we hate it. And I’m like, well, why do you do it? So much of what we do with bad team habits or what we do with our team habits are what we do to our fellow teammates.

Charlie Gilkey 00:14:16

So Charlie participates in the CC thread from hell pattern and team habit every time. He sends Aiden, Manuel and then Taylor a broadcast that they have to figure out. So most of the approach that I want to take in team habits is to say, hey, let’s stop this idea and let’s stop participating in the idea that we need upper management, we need the C suite to tell us how to behave with each other as a team, and let’s have real honest conversations with the four to eight people that we spend 80% of our time with and be like, hey, Aiden, I don’t like the CC thread from hell. You don’t like the CC thread from hell. Manuela, Taylor, Adam, none of us like this. Let’s stop. Let’s figure out another way to not continue in this behavior together. And we don’t need permission to have that conversation.

Charlie Gilkey 00:15:04

And we get to respect each other as adults and workers and say, we are not going to continue to do that to each other, at least without talking about it. We may decide consciously this is a team habit, this is what we want to do for these reasons. And then when we get the CC thread from hell, we’re not low key pissed about it because it’s not happening to us. It’s something we agree to do and be in relationship with each other. So you asked about team habits. I can go through all sorts of team habits across the eight different kinds of team habits, whether they’re meeting team habits, whether they’re goal setting team habits. But I want to go down to that level of granularity in teams specifically. So when I say team throughout this call, I mean the four to eight people that we spend most of our time working with, they’re personal.

Charlie Gilkey 00:15:50

We have personal relationships with them, we know who they are. And fundamentally, most of the time, we want to do better with and by each other. So let’s start there and build our team habits around that.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:16:00

I love the example. As you were talking about the broken printer problem, it became very obvious to me that you’re not talking about printers. I mean, you may also be Talking about printers. Not necessarily just printers. Yeah, there are all these sorts of things that are just. I always kind of thought about it this way though, which is something may be broken, it may be a problem, you know that it’s a problem, some people may even complain about it, but it just doesn’t feel like it’s a big enough problem to divert your attention and to focus on it. I would imagine the CC problem is like one of those things. I’ll tell you a funny story.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:16:33

One of my colleagues who’s this entrepreneur, been successful, started a few different companies. I remember him telling me, like, the way that you start a company is you figure out big company XYZ roadmap of the top 10 things and then you do number six because they’ll never get to number six because number six is never important enough. And so it just makes me think about the art of problem solving and where you focus on. So how do you deal with that? Where the CC problem never rises to the point where someone is going to do something about it.

Charlie Gilkey 00:17:04

I’m glad you see that it’s not just about the broken printer because really what it is, it’s a way in which we make decisions and we set priorities. So they’re goal setting and prioritization, team habits that happen underneath them. Which is why employee 48 has been there for five years, right? It’s always been number 32 on the list of things to get to. And I want to push back a little bit though, because the funny thing about it is we make the broken printer like a problem. Like, oh, we can’t get to that. We can’t solve it. Yo, it’s a 30 minute decision and at most a 500 purchase. That’s really what we’re talking about, is the 30 minute sort of challenge that we can get to.

Charlie Gilkey 00:17:42

We can’t solve that. And yet we can call a meeting in a heartbeat, right? About nothing, right? Turns out we can call a meeting with five to eight other people on that call, spend way more money, way more team tall and end up at the meeting with some version of, well, we need to have another meeting to figure out what we should have figured out in this meeting, right? And to be clear, I’m not an anti meeting guy, I’m an anti bad meeting guy, right? And so I just look at some of these problems like the CC thread from hell. And because we make them outsized and difficult to solve, we don’t say, hey, as a team, we spend 75 minutes a day just reading through CC threads. Let’s have a 15 minute conversation and figure out a way to get out of this loop indefinitely. Today it’s the Quadrant two, like the important but not urgent problem writ large at teams. It’s never going to be urgent enough until it’s so painful that then you can’t solve it. So for instance, the printer with the big boss, when that happens, everybody right then wants to fix the printer, but they know that the meeting with the big boss is more important and then there will be some fallout and there’ll be some stuff that comes from the big boss and it’s going to come back. And so until it’s right at the point of maximum pain, it’s going to remain number 38 on the priority list.

Charlie Gilkey 00:18:59

And because of the way that it shows up, it’s going to be that thing that never gets to so what I want more managers to managers and teammates to be able to do is say, hey, let’s carve out some Quadrant two time in our schedules so that we can fix some of these things along the way so that we don’t continue to keep paying stupid taxes over and over and over again because we didn’t carve out 30 minutes to solve this problem. We spend eight hours a week as a team dealing with the consequences of not having solved that problem. So I see it as a yes. And managers, please, please, please in your prioritization team habits create some room for these types of fixes, right? Because if you don’t, you’re not ever going to have time to fix them and your team is not going to be doing their best work because they’re just going to be sort of undertow of all these broken printers and bad team habits.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:20:40

We’ve had a lot of engineering leaders on the podcast and there’s always this notion of do we spend time building new features or do we pay some of the tech debt so that we can build faster in the future? And it’s always difficult. The tech debt fixing doesn’t get seen in the same way, but it feels the same way with these teams. The team is the product. You’re going to have to pay some down so that you can move faster in the future and also produce things. You mentioned the term Quadrant two time. What’s that?

Charlie Gilkey 00:21:10

It’s from the Eisenhower matrix. Think of a two by two grid with important or non important and important on the x axis and urgent and not urgent on the Y axis. Right. I might have done that upside down, but anyways, Quadrant two times, if you’re familiar with the Eisenhower matrix, is the important but not urgent types of tasks that we need to spend more of our time individually and as a team working on. And we want to get out of the constant whirlwind and firefights which happen in quadrant one, which is the urgent and important. Because so many managers and teams are so target locked on the urgent and important all the time. The important but not urgent, never. It gets crowded out.

Charlie Gilkey 00:21:54

And you mentioned product technical debt. A lot of times when I’m talking to technical teams, I’m like, hey, how is it we can talk about technical debt but we can’t talk about culture debt? Because that’s what we’re doing every time. We just steamroll over people and we brute force this and we make people work incredibly late hours and that’s the default. We add culture debt until it breaks. Every C suite leader here knows what I’m talking about, because you either push your organization to that point and it gets stuck and it’s painful to get out of that, or it crashes because you never address the technical debt. So one of the reasons we see a recurring cycle of tech winters in the tech space is about every three to five years we go through these same rounds of push product, push product, push product, make it better, faster, faster, push product, push product. And we don’t address cultural debt until we have to. And then one or two of the giants start.

Charlie Gilkey 00:22:47

Then it gets on everybody else’s mind to do that. So typically we lay off a bunch of people, the storm comes over, the winter comes over, and then we hire up people and start doing the same thing we did that led up to that very thing. And no one says, hey, how do we address the cultural debt? Because it turns out in a lot of those decisions, the people who stay on the team are the programmers and the developers and the people who are just going to push product. The very people who are not able to address cultural debt are the ones that stay on the team and the very people who are able to address that get laid off. So we’re going to be in the cycle indefinitely until we get smarter about how this works and really address some of the cultural debt that happens from bad team habits, work ways and inattention to people and inattention to sustainability.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:23:33

I’m trying to think about there’s probably habits that you recommend people that you work with develop in order to uncover these sorts of broken printer problems. Right. And it just makes me think of maybe there’s a retrospective process that happens every so often and then you kind of create like a backlog of culture debt issues that you want to fix and you can kind of go through them. Is that how you recommend people go about this?

Charlie Gilkey 00:23:59

Pretty much. So much of what I’m saying here today and listeners, I want to put this out there. Nothing that I’m going to say is rocket science. It’s not hard to understand. Not going to come in with some new novel, complicated business theory. Not that I couldn’t, but it’s not going to be useful. I call it rocket practice because the difficulty is putting it into practice. Let’s take what you’re talking about, retrospectives or ars.

Charlie Gilkey 00:24:22

We know that after a high profile event, it’s just good standard team practice to do that every time. In the military, we do it every time. It’s just part of baked into there. So very rarely done on the civilian side. Like a lot of times I’m coming, I’m like, I had a client that just had a huge gala and it was a super successful gala. I want to do an ar, right? And a retrospective. What went well, what didn’t go well? What do we want to do different last time? And I know they’re going to look at me like, well, I mean, okay, we can move on to the next thing. And I’m like, but no, see the thing about retrospectives, this is another thing.

Charlie Gilkey 00:24:54

So you asked me in the green room what I get fired up about? Pretty much anything, Aiden. But I get so frustrated when we only do retrospectives when things go poorly. How many times do you have a super successful event and you pause and say, hey, what did we do that made this, this next level success here? Can we do that again? Like, who were the key players? What did we do? Like, that very rarely happens on the civilian side of things. And yet it is one of the most powerful things you can do for that event. Because you’re building upon strengths. But the other thing that it has is it takes a term like retrospective and makes it so that it doesn’t mean it’s going to be a team beat up situation. Right? Oh, we need to do a retrospective. If you only do it when it’s negative, what that means is it’s going to be some gauntlet.

Charlie Gilkey 00:25:40

This one is going to get beat up during this process and feel bad. And that’s what retrospective mean. You have removed the neutral and positive power of a retrospective because you only use it as a cultural when things go wrong, that’s a terrible bad team habit that I want people to stop doing. So if you do retrospectives, make a list of the types of things you do retrospectives for. Make sure that list is not so heavily weighted against negative outcomes that basically it means whenever something goes poorly, we do a retrospective. It’s not about the outcome, it’s about the event and the importance of learning from that event and applying the lessons learned for the next thing. We want this project to make the next project better. So even if we did not reach our goals with this project, we can learn why we didn’t and do the next one better.

Charlie Gilkey 00:26:29

Even if we had extreme success on this project, we can learn from it and make the next one better. That’s the point of a retrospective. So a good team habit, this would go in core team habits, right? A good core team habit is retrospectives about any project that matters, regardless of the outcome. Set aside the time. Rather than the stupid update meeting where we go and we talk to each other about something we can put on the slide, let’s instead spend that 20 minutes to do a real good retrospective, document those and oh, by the way, have the good team habit around planning that before we start the next project like that, we look at the last retrospective. What happened? What can we do better? So and so forth. So we actually learn from the project we just did and pay it forward for ourselves and future teammates.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:27:22

What I love about this is it’s a great habit and you talk about it being more important than an update meeting. I fully agree. And it really does create discussion. We just had one. It’s interesting. We just had our board meeting. We called it like board meeting recap. But if it was effectively the same sort of thing and it gets people talking, it gets people giving each other feedback, it just starts creating a bunch of other micro habits which are good for team bonding.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:27:49

Like it feels like something where everybody’s working on the same team, doing things versus just if you spend your time updating each other and saying, just playing that sort of game. So it is very smart to review things when they go right. I have a fun story for you on this. I remember back in the day I was applying to go to business school to get an mba, which I never did. But I took the test. I took the test and I remember my initial test I took. And then I took a class and then at the end of the class I took the test again. And I was shocked.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:22

But I actually got a lower score after taking the class than before. And what I realized was even though I got a high score the first time, it was because I never reviewed the answers I got right. So I got them right, but I got them right for the wrong reasons. And so I was not able to continue that performance. But that lesson has stuck in my head forever and ever. It’s really important to know why something went well. Possibly more important than why. Why things went wrong.

Charlie Gilkey 00:28:48

Absolutely. I talk about this in the book. What we are teaching is the meta habit of cultivating good team habits. Right? That’s really what we’re about. And so, yes, the point of a retrospective is that it gets people thinking about how to make work better and putting ideas down and understanding that we’re not victims to work here, especially in our team. Again, four to eight people that we know we’re not victims. We do this to each other. Right? We can stop that and continually be like, hey, let’s get 1% better, let’s get 3% better, or hey, our meetings always go 20 minutes over.

Charlie Gilkey 00:29:24

So let’s do one of two things. Let’s either make the meeting time to be 20 minutes later. So we’re not stressed about that. We just know this is the time it takes. Or we can decide what part of these meetings, what’s the 20 minutes of fat that we can get rid of together. But let’s not keep this idea of pretending that the meeting is going to be an hour. We know it’s 80 minutes every time. What are we going to change? And again, we can fix that together.

Charlie Gilkey 00:29:50

And it doesn’t take the manager to do this. But so here’s the thing. I learned a hard lesson with team habits. If I were to ask you, Aiden, and most people listening to this podcast the following question, we would have some version of the same answer. So the question whose job is it to make the team better?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:30:07

Okay, I feel like I’m going to say manager, but you’re going to say. You’re going to say no. That’s not the right answer.

Charlie Gilkey 00:30:14

Manager would like an asterisk. Most of us would say, like, you know, it’s ultimately kind of the manager’s job, but everyone can do this, right? Everyone can be a part of it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:30:23

That would be a wonderful world.

Charlie Gilkey 00:30:24

Yeah, that would be a wonderful world. The challenge of working with executives and founders and people who are deep into things so much is that we don’t think like the rest of the world does. Because most people are going to say it’s the manager’s job to fix the team without realizing. Most of the time your manager hasn’t actually been trained on how to fix teams. It’s not a skill set they have. Second, they don’t have the time to do it. Third, sometimes they’re not close enough to the work to even know what to fix. And so what so few people understand is just complaining to the manager about meetings is not actually going to change things.

Charlie Gilkey 00:30:58

Going to the manager and saying, hey, I would like to change some ways that the meetings are run and I’m willing to be the champion for that. I’m willing to do the work, to prepare the agenda agendas and to do the ars and lead that forward. Are you okay with me running with this? A lot of managers are going to say, sure, thank you, keep me apprised of it. What do you need from me? But if we just take the problem of bad meetings to managers, they’re going to do the same thing you talked about, Aydin, where they’re saying, well, that’s like priority number 72. I’m not going to get to that. And I, first off, I don’t know how maybe I think the meetings are great, right? So much of the power of making our team better comes from the ways that we non managers can work with each other. And as much as I want to use the word coalition, I know that can be politically charged, but it’s like, hey, we five don’t like the meeting. Our manager, when we look at bell curves, yes, there are some terrible, sociopathic, narcissistic bosses.

Charlie Gilkey 00:31:54

They’re just buttholes. But that’s going to be very few. 5 to 10%. On the other end are going to be the super managers, right? Those saints that are going to be the 5 to 10%, but most are going to lie in the 80% of people doing the best they can that want to do right by the team and one of their teams to do the best work possible. So if you talk to those 80% and be like, hey, I want to do a thing I’m willing to do the work. I think it will make our jobs better. They’re going to say, sure, right. They might give you some parameters like don’t touch this.

Charlie Gilkey 00:32:23

We got to make sure to do that. But fundamentally we can fix some of this together. Or let’s go back to the very literal broken printer. Hey Amy, employee 48 has been here for like 52 years. I’m tired of it messing me up and messing the team up. If I do a little bit of research and come back with something that costs under $500, can I work on getting the printer fixed or what would I need to do to get the printer fixed? If you take that to Amy, you got a much different conversation than like Amy, the printer’s broken again and just walk away. You have some agency here. And that’s what I want.

Charlie Gilkey 00:32:54

Team habits. I want team habits to be able the book, I should say I want leaders to be able to give it to their teams for ideas of what their teams can do. But I want non managers on teams to read it and get ideas for how they can approach that so that we’re not victims to CC threads from hell and broken printers and so on and so forth. Because if we just make it the manager’s job, it’s going to be number 68 on the priority list and we’re going to show up for the next six months and deal with whatever bad team habit that we’re dealing with because we’re waiting on someone who has much higher priorities to do that. Like, we want our managers to be better advocates for our work with their peers. We want our managers to be able to have a good case for making, for giving us promotions. We want our managers to be able to tell the story of our great work. And we want our managers to fix the problems that we can’t solve each other by like with each other.

Charlie Gilkey 00:33:48

That’s what we want from them. If we want those we can do better about taking care of each other so that they can focus on those.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:33:56

And once something does get solved from a non manager on the team, it almost becomes a self reinforcing thing, right? So here’s an example. So and so brought up this thing and it got fixed and those sorts of things can happen and then you shout out that person at your next all hands event and it just can kind of perpetuate and just build stronger teams over time. So one thing that I did want to ask you about and you kind of mentioned a few things in passing meetings, always running late or always going off topic, I’m just curious, like, in terms of team habits as it relates to meetings, are there certain things that you recommend or that you see all the time? Just wondering what you think about in that area.

Charlie Gilkey 00:34:41

So I’m going to switch a little bit and start giving more positive team habits because I’ve been beaten up on the bad ones, right? This is one that, if I were president of work for the day and my edict got to stick, it would be one rule. No agenda, no meeting. No agenda, no meeting. If you don’t tell me what this meeting is about and what we’re going to be discussing, what type of meeting it is, I can automatically, as a teammate, decline, because how many meetings did we show up with? And we spend the first 15 to 20 minutes figuring out why we’re there and who needed to be here. And so, like, we can cut that piece out. And by agenda, it doesn’t have to be a long minute by minute, sort of definitely use fellows, but you don’t have to use fellows. But it can be like, we’re meeting to decide about this thing. Okay, great.

Charlie Gilkey 00:35:20

I know what I’m showing up for. I know the energy I need to have and I know the topic. I can prep myself for that. That can be enough. So that would be one thing that I would just say as a rule, and again, I’ve been saying this throughout the episode. I’m pretending that Aiden, Manuela, Alex, myself are all on the same meeting with us. We can make that rule with each other, right? And then what’s that do? I’m like, hey, Aiden, I need to grab some time and put it on your calendar. But why, though? What are we talking about? What’s really the thing here? And then I’ll be like, oh, well, I need to know about Decision xyz or I need to know about Policy xyz.

Charlie Gilkey 00:35:53

And you’d be like, oh, well, here’s the link to it. And be like, oh, I didn’t need to have a meeting, right? Because turns out we’d already done that work. So that’s one thing that I just say. It really empowers team and it cuts both unnecessary meetings, what I call crutch meetings, but also can shorten the meetings because when people go off topic, it’s like, well, that’s not really what we’re here to do today. Let’s do that in some other setting where we can be prepped about that. So it gives you some parameters as a team for this very important time that you have together. The reason meetings come up so often. As far as one of the things to fix in teams is because it’s the context in which all of your team habits are on display in a short amount of time.

Charlie Gilkey 00:36:33

If you have great habits, that’s fantastic. People are going to love your meetings. If you have a mixed bag, you’re going to see people who get talked over and you can see and feel people who don’t feel psychological safety and feel like they belong in the team. You’re going to see poor communication team habits, you’re going to see poor decision making habits. You’re going to see them all in 45 minutes to, you know, an hour. And that’s a lot. That’s a lot to take on. So that’s why they keep coming up as a thing to fix.

Charlie Gilkey 00:37:01

Because again, it’s just a fishbowl for all of your team habits in a short amount of time.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:37:06

Yeah, it’s funny, a lot of the feedback that people give each other usually comes from meeting time. And so you’re right, it’s a place where you can display all of those habits. Charlie, this has been an awesome conversation. As we get close to time, we talked about everything from the concept of an air sandwich to the broken printer problem and how to fix that. We’ve talked about building in retrospectives after action reviews into even the most successful initiatives and so much more. I wanted to maybe end by asking you a few rapid fire questions and let me know what comes up. And so one of the first questions is, is there anything that you think is an underrated advice for leaders?

Charlie Gilkey 00:37:50

Spending time to get to know your team and to really create those touch points throughout that? I think too many managers don’t spend enough time on it. You kind of know it, but it’s entirely underrated.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:01

And is there anything that you wish that managers would stop doing?

Charlie Gilkey 00:38:06

Stop being the first person to try to fix the problem, open it up so that your team can at least attempt it or that there’s space for them to do so. So that would be the thing that I would have them stop doing. You’re not the first problem solver. What if you were the last and you figured out how to get your team to solve problems on their own?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:25

We’re going to leave the links in the show notes for everybody to check out. Team habits. It sounds like there’s going to be a third book in the series, so we look forward to that. And whenever that does come out, we would love to have you back on the show. But yeah, for all the managers and leaders listening in. Are there any final tips, tricks, or words of wisdom that you would leave them with?

Charlie Gilkey 00:38:45

Your team is stronger than you often give them credit for, and when you lean into that, it makes your life so much easier.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:52

That’s great advice and a great place to end it. Charlie, thanks so much for doing this.

Charlie Gilkey 00:38:56

Thanks so much for having me. I hope to come back soon.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:58

And that’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Supermanagers Podcast. You can find the show notes and transcript at www.fellow.app/supermanagers. If you like the content, be sure to rate, review and subscribe so you can get notified when we post the next episode. And please tell your friends and fellow managers about it. It’d be awesome if you could help us spread the word about the show. See you next time.