#014 - Rules of Engagement

Robert Greiner 0:04

What's new with you?

Tiffany Lenz 0:05

Right before you rejoined, cleanfeed, you missed my kitten time I was holding in petting her on zoom. And that was cute. What's new with me getting through QAs and getting this. I'm a little bit excited about this after COVID response that I'm working on with Stephanie around complexity. Okay. Yeah, so making this a bit of this meta argument. So these of the other points of view, or perspectives that we'll be working on are very industry centric. And she and I are looking at one that would, you could even think of it as an umbrella, or you could think of it as like a force multiplier, or something that would help. The implementation would serve as an implementer. For the others, meaning that if you if one is unwilling to embrace complexity, to be honest about the fact that management is not simple, and we've moved out of a complicated space into complex, then another another point of view is just going to have to appeal to nothing but logic. But if you're willing to say, yeah, there's something here in my industry that I don't know, that I can't know. And so I need to completely read, like, reboot, have a paradigm shift on the way that I think you'd be interested in some of our ideas. So Stephanie, and I come along and say, we're bookending saying, you need to change your mindset and be willing to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And at the other end, we're going to introduce a governance model to you something that does allow for you to service a wide number of stakeholders, because it's not reasonable to just start telling firms that everything is unpredictable, and they can't know. And they can't measure that. Remember, the Agile movement was misinterpreted, as that a number of years ago, and it was one of the biggest criticisms for why large companies couldn't adopt it, blah, blah, blah, until folks like Ross started coming along and saying that's not true, we actually have governance for this, we can create governance for this, and we'll iterate on it for the next X number of years until we get it right only to find out that the process itself is iterative. But I think that's similar for this after COVID response in that there needs to be another kind of governance structure, another way of measuring, looking at metrics, and having regular feedback loops. So something that allows for those other viable and valuable parts of the business to create some structure and machinery around the business itself. Those things are, that whole idea can't be thrown out the window, nor would the economy allow it to be

Robert Greiner 2:47

you have to, you're in the position of I guess you have to unwind or change or readapt, all of these short term decisions that were made that have long term implications, like where your people are working, for instance, where you may be making a decision to survive in the short term. And that's totally fine. And maybe it was the optimal decision, but at some point, that has to come back to normal. Consider those things. And otherwise, it'll catch up to you on the back end, right, like technical debt or something like

that.

Tiffany Lenz 3:16

So it's pretty fun, because we're going to, we're going from incredibly macro of saying, let's just all get on the same page and be honest with the state that we're in, and that we have to be comfortable with a lack of predictability and embrace that so that once we're honest, then we can move on to some solution ideas that will admittedly need then iteration. And I'm pretty excited about that. Yeah. Sounds like fun.

Robert Greiner 3:38

Yeah, that

sounds really interesting. Cool.

Tiffany Lenz 3:40

It's

pretty meta right now.

we're writing just like some insight statements and looking at different kinds of design abductive reasoning. And so we want to keep it there for now, but then not forever, because we do need to come up with a few ways of testing it.

Robert Greiner 3:55

Yeah. That's great. I can't wait to talk about it when you're a little bit more baked out. That sounds good. Awesome.

Tiffany Lenz 4:00

And you What are you what are you up to and excited about right now? Yeah. So you just sold some more work. So congratulations. Yeah,

Robert Greiner 4:06

thank you. We are in QA season in performance review season. So that's very draining, which is every quarter. So my q one and Q three are extra busy, because I have more reviews to write based on how the review seasons go. And so q two q four are a little bit lighter for me. So this is one of the heavier ones. And then Diana and I are going to volunteer at this vaccine mega center next week. So kids are on spring break. And we'll do Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And if you the deal is if you volunteer for 15 hours, you're eligible for a vaccine. And so they set one aside for you at the beginning of the day, and then you can get vaccinated. So hopefully we'll get that Friday of next week. Yeah, yeah, a lot of people have done it already. We're actually a little bit late to the game. And people have had good experiences like it's good to volunteer and you're helping People who are 90 and maybe didn't register online properly, make sure that everything's in order so they can go and get vaccinated appropriately and stuff. So it's there's a lot of logistics around, they give 150 million people shots, that kind of thing.

Tiffany Lenz 5:12

Yeah, it gets even even more complicated when you're talking about people who are not tech natives or even tech savvy at all. So you mentioned older people, but it that can also apply to people that are of like lower economic classes. They not only they may be not tech savvy, but they don't have ready access to technology. So

Robert Greiner 5:32

already, it's a massive scale problem. And I saw this open letter. I don't know if you saw it, but someone from AWS wrote it to Biden when he took over, but it was this open letter. And Amazon said, Hey, we can handle the logistics. We can do vaccines at the at our warehouses we've already partnered with and at this certification, so it's all aboveboard, and we're ready to go if you want to, if you want our help. And that would have probably been more effective. I don't know how that would. I don't know how that would work out than being a private company and things like that, because there's a lot of volunteer effort right here. But I know like in Denton. So that's a city, but 30 minutes away from Dallas, at their mega center that the person in charge didn't know what to do. They went down to chick fil a and got one of the managers there who had manages all the lines for this massive drive-in effort that happens every day, had the manager come in and reset things up and direct traffic and things like that. So it was like hyper efficient. Yeah, that's really the key is that the chick fil a logistics? But it's, it's crazy. I don't I wouldn't have been able to do it effectively, it would have been

Tiffany Lenz 6:33

I can't wait to see somebody, somebody write that article, like how chick fil a processed 1.5 or 150 150 million vaccines or whatever?

Robert Greiner 6:43

Yeah, we get food from there quite a bit. And it's crazy that the efficiency of there's a line of cars all the way back out to the street. And then there's three lanes when you get into the parking lot. And it's 20 minutes in and out. It's really fast.

Tiffany Lenz 6:56

Yeah, well, I don't have one super close to me. But I've been through that a couple times and some neighboring towns. And there you go. And your chicken is good.

Robert Greiner 7:05

Yeah. And every time you go, it's like a little bit different. Like they keep optimizing it. It's really interesting to watch, like while you're in line.

Tiffany Lenz 7:11

It's pretty cool.

Robert Greiner 7:12

Yeah, really cool. So what are we talking about today?

Tiffany Lenz 7:15

I think we're going to talk about some how to form rules of engagement for your team to build trust,

Robert Greiner 7:21

excellent rules of engagement. So

what do you mean by that?

Tiffany Lenz 7:23

Rules of engagement, that's my term for what one might call team norms or Team logist. Not logistics, like overarching agreement that teams have with one another by

Robert Greiner 7:38

ground rules, working agreements,

that kind of thing?

Tiffany Lenz 7:41

Yeah, sometimes ground rules. And I I hid away from some of those expressions, just probably why I came up with the one that I use because they mean other things. And they often turn into a very long list of things, and tend to be quite logistical in nature, where the this, for me, these are reminiscent of the way back in the day, like the Extreme Programming Bill of Rights, where there was just a short list of things that gave one group of people right to behave, and another group of people are right to choose, but they were supportive. They were tightly interconnected and supportive of one another if executed well. So yeah, just trying to think about ways of addressing team interaction issues and measuring success, but not on a set of metrics, such as how many hours were you working? Or how many, how much data Did you log or how much revenue did you make? Those are important, but they weren't for me, they weren't the definition of success for this particular team. So I was trying a different experiment,

Robert Greiner 8:44

and rules of engagement that has a heavier kind of feel to it. Is that intentional,

Tiffany Lenz 8:50

it was intentional to make sure that the team realized that what they were signing up for was something that was it was not optional. And and I remember rolling this out and meeting with each person, the team wasn't very large, it was 12 people on my leadership team. And I remember rolling this out and meeting with each person and saying you bring a specific skill set to this team. But these I'm doing a full experiment here. So these things aren't optional. And if you really don't believe you can opt in, that's okay. I'll have to find somebody else.

Robert Greiner 9:23

And that's key. I'm trying to think of other experiences in the past that have been similar. And I was at this workshop one time and the presenter came in and the first thing they did is they picked up a whiteboard marker and said, hey, let's do some ground rules, which I know is not what you're talking about.

But it's interesting because you get the typical, be respectful, participate, those kind of things. And somebody said no phones and the facilitator wrote no phones, and nobody refuted no phones. And then 20 minutes in, someone leans back gets on their phone and is called out. Say you You're breaking the ground rules, and then put the phone up. And it's oh my gosh, there's there was some kind of authority with the ground rules list. And everybody you had an opportunity to object you didn't nodded your head, yes, or you weren't paying attention or whatever. But you agreed to these ground rules as part of being in this facilitated meeting. And then all of a sudden, you got to break one. And it's normally hard to get people to put their device away anyway. But now that it's it's written on the board and black and white, you can point right to it, it becomes like a maybe an ethics thing or a hey, you're going back on your word. And there's a little bit or it's maybe it's easier to call you out on it, because it's in black and white on the dry erase board. And then it helps with making sure people know what's expected of them and allowing the group to self govern behaviors is that have you seen that benefit and something like rules of engagement,

Tiffany Lenz: 10:51

I have, but it was not nearly as easy as, as the way you describe it. I, the whole narrative, you told made sense to me around needing reinforcement. And typically, it's constant reinforcement, but it wasn't easy to change behavior.

Robert Greiner: 11:09

So there's some errors here. Because this is more serious, because it's not as it's not as concrete or straightforward or surface level as your phone up, the leader still has some work to do. And it making sure that the ground rules are constantly communicated, or the sorry, the rules of engagement, are constantly communicated and adhered to and talked about and respected. Yeah,

Tiffany Lenz: 11:31

sure. But then those items were used as drivers for productivity, they were used as drivers for bringing this collective together and allowing them to solve problems together. Like we're breaking down barriers by using these rules of engagement. So probably, there's some more kinship to the first one, you mentioned around being respectful. But when I reflect on that, because I've seen that one in retrospectives as well, that's almost too vague. And some because respectful to one person means something very different. Even in the US, you get this massive, this massive difference. If you're say if you're talking to if you have a mix of people in the room, and some are from you know, the deep south and some are from New York City respect, being respectful just carries a whole other weight and how thick your skin is. So that that was far too vague for me. Because I was, in my particular team, I was combating a number of interesting factors, some being timezone, culture, gender culture, very, I think out of 12 people, only three of us had English as our first language. So we're talking about what does respect the difference between respectful from a white female to an Indian male who lives in India and was raised in India, not an Indian male who was raised in the US. Now there's one dynamic there. And then there's a different dynamic between an Indian male and an African female. And so I had all of those dimensions, and had to keep, like, looking for common language that would easily be interpreted by each person, so that we could know what sort of foundation we were standing on. What does respect mean? What and so I couldn't be either so specific, like no phones, or nor could I be so vague, as to say, Be respectful or be present. Because the those concepts just mean different things in different cultures.

Robert Greiner: 13:29

What is an example? Or are some examples of rules of engagement that you might put on a team that has more nuanced, like the one that you're talking about, or even a sort of standard run of the mill accounting team?

Tiffany Lenz: 13:42

I'll give you my three because I ended up going through some different iterations, mentally, and needing to just distill down and pick something.

Robert Greiner: 13:50

But let's pause right there, though. So

you said three, it's an earlier you alluded to this isn't a long list, right? Like you put it in Confluence and insure agile team working model, and you get out all the come in at nine o'clock. And all of those things, is three, the right number, is it three plus or minus one? What do you think there?

Tiffany Lenz: 14:08

I picked three, because one, the group of people I was working with our executive level. So while I want something challenging, and something that encompasses a number of concepts, I also don't want something that's that is too hard to remember. At the same time, I don't want to baby them. You don't need pages and pages of details of details telling us how to treat one another. We needed a few concepts that would accomplish the stated goal. And so I think we need to back up for a little bit because one, like I was asked to create a new leadership team to build out a social sector business. And the social sector business was going to touch multiple countries we had we already had clients so it was just being brought under one One umbrella or intensive one, one pillar of the company. And the clients were everywhere from going east us, Uganda, South Africa, China and the Bhutanese Bangladesh like this, this whole area is covered. And I also had a client in Brazil at the time. So it was important to get to take into account that one rule for me was I have a lot of skilled people, I got to build my own team, which is a rarity. I use the example of Snapple a lot, meaning like, was it made is your team made from the best stuff on earth or not? 99 times out of 100. It's not, because you know, people are imperfect. And there they are. They're complex. In this case, I did get to pick my team. But it became pretty evident to me quickly going into this, that skill wasn't enough that I can have the best fundraiser possible or like a great public sector doctor, a public health care doctor, but I wasn't going to have the I just I couldn't possibly get every single skill set I needed in every single person, and also not have these other elements to worry about this guy may be the best doctor. But does he understand business and also scalability and sustainability? Where this woman may be the best operations person I've ever met. But where does she live? Will she be able to interact with all of our customers? Or will I have to help her with the connection points because some of the customers are in one timezone or another and she lives in India, there were so many dimensions that I didn't think that skill was going to be enough. So I had to come up with a different common denominator.

Robert Greiner: 16:38

Okay, yeah. So what were the three then that you came up with?

Tiffany Lenz: 16:41

My I have to start with the common denominator, though. The denominator became, I just went to take a look at Patrick lencioni. His work and so like how to how to you and I are both big fans. And we've talked about that probably mentioned, Patrick on almost

Robert Greiner: 16:55

almost everyone.

Tiffany Lenz: 16:56

Yeah. Because his work as I picked is affected dysfunctional teams, pyramid. And I looked at the bottom, and it was trust. And I thought, goodness gracious, if I could get an African American doctor, who's an expert in his space, and Ugandan woman, and an Indian man living in Bangalore, to eat to all trust each other, that would be incredible. They're not in the same timezone. They don't have the same first language, but they all and they all bring different skills, but they care deeply about this work. How would I get them to trust each other. So that's what I started, like looking at human dynamics and breaking down. And that led, like, my lowest common denominator was trust, I didn't have an absence of trust, because the team was brand new, I was just assuming that all of these hurdles, were going to be excruciating. And just everyone would be difficult. I went out I and while I was asked to set to set goals and initiatives for my team, I just kept backing up and backing up till I could find what was the common and what I thought would actually drive business results, if I could get that I ended up with now we're to the point of the three rules of engagement that I believed would build trust for this leadership team, I would say the average age was early 40s. So it wasn't they were a very experienced group of people and not malleable, but also they've all been in this rodeo for a while. So certainly have some bad behaviors that would need to be changed over time. So I was walking into some of that eyes wide open. And I ended up looking at three different dimensions. So the first one was judging positive intent. Another way to say that would be giving the benefit of

the doubt,

Robert Greiner: 18:43

that's a really great one for all relationships.

Tiffany Lenz: 18:45

Yeah, all relations, the number of times and all the research I did around this, I just kept coming back to this concept of it is a mental drain like just a time suck, even if you're unaware of it, even if it's happening psychologically, or you're just backburner during if you do not give someone the benefit of the doubt, if you assume the worst, there's an instant erosion of your connection to that person. And it just drains you over time, because you can't seem to believe the best in them. And you look for mistakes all the time. And then there must be a pattern in those mistakes, and they are flawed individuals and all that we just we naturally spiral that direction. The second one was talk to one another, not about one another. And I felt like this was going to be mission critical. And also they all three of these hinge on the first one which is giving the benefit of the doubt we are we're kind of bred in society in corporate America to to write down feedback to escalate to a manager to talk about people at the watercooler or now it's the proverbial water cooler now it's text messaging or slacking about somebody else instead of just talking to them because talking to them is hard. If we don't love conflict as humans, and so I just I'm looking at this team that has, in the worst case, like a 12 hour time difference and thinking, if there is one instance, that like a domino effect kicks us off in a negative way, let's say someone in the US sets up a meeting, and they inadvertently leave someone in China off of that invite this person in China now has a choice, they can either say, Oh, that was an innocent mistake, reach out to the person, hey, next time, could you put me on that meeting, or they could choose a fence. But either way, we're looking at a cycle time, that is pretty extraordinary. Meaning that each one of these people is only able to respond to one another probably once, maybe twice in a 24 hour period. So the amount of time you're left with silence that allows you to spiral negatively about that person is pretty long. Hence, we have to judge positive intent. And we have to assume that something was an accident versus assuming that it was intentional hurt.

Robert Greiner: 21:07

In an experience, though, that

is typically true, right?

Tiffany Lenz: 21:11

Which

Robert Greiner: 21:11

like that, it's most of the time, an accident

Tiffany Lenz: 21:14

time, I think it's an accident, we're not talking about this, these edge cases of toxic patterns of behavior, we have all worked with people who exhibit that. And even when confronted, they don't change or they have oodles and oodles of excuses. But that does surface over time. And I had an instance of that on this team and did end up having to exit someone because they just they the rest of the team was jelling around like the best for the, for the collective, and starting to produce some really solid results. And this one person that just became an outlier of disruption. So it does happen, but it took it by allowed that pattern to to emerge on its own,

Robert Greiner: 21:55

not helpful to try and codify that in your rules of engagement like that. That's a trust, that's a high trust activity to stipulate or assume that everyone is generally professional and doing their best and you can handle when that's not the case, you can handle that, as an exception, not trying to force that in. From the beginning, I

think that might send the wrong message,

Tiffany Lenz: 22:16

it actually enforces the fact that we have an absence of trust, or actual distrust, as opposed to we're starting from a neutral space. And I was assuming that we were starting from a new place a brand new team. So we're starting from a neutral space. But we are likely very soon to run into these hurdles. So I was not coming at this from a perspective of things that were broken just yet. The how when when things started to break is when we started to hold one another accountable to these rules of engagement. And it did actually it worked. But it took time. And we did have to all hold one another accountable, including the team holding me accountable.

Robert Greiner: 22:55

So that was get to in just a sec, because I think you were at two out of three. And then I yeah, a question I interrupted you with. So we have assumed positive intent, talk to one another, instead of about one another. And I don't think you finished that one. So the idea is you can't talk about someone behind their back or if they're not present with you unless you've talked to them about it first.

Tiffany Lenz: 23:17

Yeah. Yeah. So even coming, even someone escalating to me, the immediate response I had to get accustomed to voicing was, have you spoken to that person yet? And if the answer was no, then let's pause on this conversation until you do that there is a personal responsibility that a leader needs to take on it. Remember, these were not Junior people, they were very experienced, very well paid executive level people each one in their own. So I didn't have any problem setting a high standard for the way they needed to interact and take personal responsibility. Now, once that has happened, once there's been that, that confrontation, nine times out of 10, what I found is if there was first the belief that I'm going to judge positive intent in this person that a mistake was made. So let's go back to the the email instance, the meeting, what would be my first step, I'm going to assume that, that there was an innocent mistake, and I'm going to email that person directly. I'm just going to ask, could you please, please remember me next time. Now, if that continues to happen? Now, it's probably worth talking to me about but let's talk about it as three people not to so that we can get right to the root of the issue and resolve it. The third, and this one was also hard. But again, they all hinge on the first This was we make one another look good. So bringing a team of this is about the collective, not the individual. And bringing a team of leaders together. I immediately got the question. Someone came to me privately and said, How is my success measured? How do I get promoted? And my answer one question, great question. Reasonable And an excellent question. And my answer was, well, if the whole team is successful, you'll get promoted. So what the behaviors I'm trying to drive here are, I want this person to feel safe enough to share ideas to collectively problem solve, if someone's having a problem, help them with all you've got, because it isn't going to take away from you getting recognized. If that person is successful, and thus, the whole team is moving forward with our business results, you will get credit for that. Now, if an idea or a solution is withheld, and therefore the whole team is held back, it's gonna be pretty evident who didn't help whom. So the team wasn't so big that we couldn't discern that either. But if your intention is that I'm judging the best in one another, and I'm keeping open lines of communication at the micro and the macro, and my goal is to actually make the collective look good. We've removed almost all inhibitors to actually moving fast and building a very well oiled machine.

Robert Greiner: 26:11

Yeah. And then you're also aligning incentive structures for people to ice, which is always a good thing. I do agree with the data and the research around you can't just offer someone more money. You can't just offer perks, tangible things, those break down over time. But it is a healthy thing to do to align sort of these incentive structures and how we're wired and as people, especially the kind of person who asks, hey, how do I get promoted? It's, hey, this is a clear expectations, it really makes things more straightforward on how to behave and what those expectations are, which is hard to get, we've probably spent most of our careers not really knowing what the expectations are of us in our role, right. And so that's definitely helpful.

Okay, cool.

Tiffany Lenz: 26:53

These's worked pretty well, for us, it was certainly hard out of the gate from the first time by I did discuss it with each person and then presented them again as a team. And this is what I want to do this experiment, because I really think this can give us the business results we needed to produce. Were developing a product with kind of multiple facets for multiple clients across multiple countries, and being able to deploy it easily plug and play deployment. But it also needed to have an ability to swap out some different features. And there was an interesting, just complexity, and the solution itself needed to be beautifully simple to make it work. And I just didn't see how we would ever do it if our only goal was a certain number of deployments, or if our only goal was to bring in a certain amount of revenue, because like you didn't really believe that this team would solely be driven by that many of them came from very large foundations or nonprofits, or were internationally renowned, the one guy who's an internationally renowned public health doctor, and I needed him to really head up the healthcare strategy, that like these are folks who were already giving of themselves and less interested in money, not nobody had taken a vow of poverty, but like money wasn't their driver. So if I brought them into a business context, and I said, let's just go get more customers who can pay us for this product. And then you'll all get bigger raises, like, that's not even a motivator to them. So it had to be something else, it had to be that we were creating a product for doctors and clinics that needed it, there was some other element there. But even the how mattered and how we got there being the human element of building a trusted relationship with these people I work with and that I run alongside of the idea that I am making the rest of this team successful, that we are we the collective are successful, those were much more motivating factors to them. And it was it was an agreement actually to go on a journey together, it turned out quite successfully for us and have some very positive long term impacts. I still hear from some of those folks today. It's been a number of years. So the two that seemed to resonate the most are either judging positive intent, or talking to one another, not about one another is this is the way I operate my life. Now, giving people the benefit of the doubt relieves a lot of anxiety and stress. A lot of overthinking.

Robert Greiner: 29:21

And those are skills, right? So you've taught someone how to wire their brain and enforced reinforce that over time to have the instinct to talk to one another to another person first, or to judge positive intent and stuff. That's a skill that you can take with you over time and build on it after you're done with the team. Yeah,

Tiffany Lenz: 29:39

I believe so. That's certainly how I've experienced it in my own life. I've tried this experiment now twice with two different leadership teams and found it to be successful each time each team struggles with a different

Robert Greiner: 29:53

based on the composite like behavior profile, the team

Tiffany Lenz: 29:56

Yeah, but overall, they do act as force multipliers for The business I mean, you layer the business results on top of that, but getting the team to actually this is Patrick lencioni, his whole argument, if you can fix the thing at the bottom of the pyramid, the thing at the top of the pyramid happens, and you and I broke that one down a week or so ago when we were talking about kind of indexing on fear and commitment. But those are just manifestations of not having trust. And so you're never going to get to results or accountability, if you don't have these all three of these elements at the bottom. So I just went after Well, with this really odd configuration of team, what do I think would build trust, if I have language barriers, I certainly still need to force people to talk to each other. Like they have to get past those language barriers together, not me as a mediator, I just become a bottleneck. Or if I want them to give the benefit of the doubt, I need to I still need to force them to have a conversation. Because again, we're talking about gender, and culture, and also language getting in the way each time. So by forcing people together in smaller groups, to try to understand one another, I'm tearing apart the differences. And we're getting right back to this core of we all joined this team, this team to make a difference. We all join this team because we want to work together. And so slowly, but surely we're building trust in one another. And you said this takes time, you're really you're asking people to rewire to read format to recalibrate the way that they work. Give me an idea for how long this took to really start flowing to where it wasn't such an uphill push and the flywheel maybe it was spinning on its own? Yeah, that's a great question. Because the third one was actually the most logistically difficult to rewire. Because I had to rewire it in inside of a larger organization. So I did have to come up with a way of measuring that was a complete, complete opposite of the way the organization was measuring. And so I did have to work quite a bit with HR on that one. So there's a kind of a different timeline. But for I think, obviously, different reasons, they're the other two, I saw us put them into action right away, and then struggle instantly, I would say it took a year, a solid 12 months for this to become standard behavior.

Robert Greiner: 32:16

So worth doing. But you got to know going into it, this is gonna take some time, it's not just or you send an email about what the rules of engagement aren't just expected to work. This is an ongoing labor here, it was

Tiffany Lenz: 32:29

pretty heavy lifting for me initially, because I did have to watch for people to be breaking these rules, again, I'm giving them I am also judging positive intent. And knowing that this is hard, it was observing what was happening, and then constant reinforcement. And also being very vulnerable with a group of people who in any other universe would have just been my peers and saying, and this spy may be the figurehead leader of this, but in this space, I'm your equal. So please tell me when you see me violating us, call me out one on one, give me the benefit of the doubt, come to me and talk to me period. And so that that helped as well. But I'm certain that it took us a year for this to be a nice steady stream of action. And just like our standard behavior. Now, we didn't also we didn't wait for that magic moment to happen before we started working on our actual business, by the way. So we were working concurrently on selling work and meeting with different clients and coming up with you know, our business strategies and developing features on this product. So all of these things are happening concurrently. But

Robert Greiner: 33:35

which is reality, right? The team is that current state, you're either improving or not over time,

right? And good things or bad things are happening largely as a result of that.

Tiffany Lenz: 33:44

And I only stress that because I've talked about this at a couple different conferences, and I've had people ask, if if I got to wait to run my business? No, we were actually we had 200 people, the 12 of us and 200 people reporting up to us. And we had 10-12 or more clients that were waiting on our software. So absolutely not, the work had to continue. But there was this undercurrent of human interaction improvement. And it did become evident that we were working on becoming a saw a team that trusted each other a team that communicated really effectively and operated at a different kind of level of maturity, because there were different times throughout his team was together for four years. And there were and throughout. throughout that time, there were some different C levels at our company who would come to me and say there's something different about your team. There's something different about their dynamic, their morale, and it wasn't just the work. It wasn't just that they felt good about their work. There was something else and all I could do was point back to this experiment and say I had these sort of odd hurdles to overcome. And a team that had more on paper they have more qualifications than you could find anywhere but those two things don't just match up perfectly without work, and then all these hurdles, and we tried it a way of building things. A lot of fun.

Robert Greiner: 35:05

Yeah, it sounds like it. So, one quick my final question really is what would you change? Is there? Did you miss a rule of engagement? Would you have swapped one out for another? Should you have had for looking back being reflective? What? What would you change? If you could?

Tiffany Lenz: 35:18

Oh, my goodness? That's a great question. I think, I think if I had to change something, I would, I can't even tell you what the verbiage would be. But I would change something about the third one, the first two are hard. And yet they do cognitively and emotionally makes sense. Something, I can choose to give people the benefit of the doubt until something becomes a pattern, I can choose who I talked to manage my own mouth, basically, we make one another look good. The second time around, that one was even harder. Because I did have the second time around, I had a group of executives who were on variable compensation. So there was already and that was not my decision, but it was what aligned with the rest of the business. And so it became harder and harder to find things that would measure around giving, just giving what we refer to at our VEDA as I just ideas are infinite. So I give away my ideas as gifts to you, knowing that we'll come back to me sometime in the future, that mindset that I just described, that you and I are both very intimately familiar with did not exist this other company. So there, it was harder to make that a reality in a way that for all fine reasons, some people who are more driven than others, or more dependent on that that variable compensation model, this was hard this was it was hard to make this actually work, both literally and figuratively. So I don't know what it would be, I might break it into pieces and have four or I might replace it with something else that was a little more related to human interaction, like the other two, as opposed to something that had ties to compensation or Yeah, or, you know, value. If you're, if you're constantly not hitting the top of the sales leaderboard, because you're giving leads away to somebody else that is hard to make sense of.

So it's much more culturally like work cultural, in the way it can be implemented, if that makes sense.

Robert Greiner: 37:33

And there's a little bit of art to that science, too, right? If you're a leader, and you need to adapt to the culture and the team and things like that, that are around you not just copy and paste what you did a few years ago.

Tiffany Lenz: 37:43

Yep. Yep. So I didn't have time in that role to make that work really well. So I almost just tried to do it as a little bit of like, team altruism and focus more heavily on the first and second, you know, were I to do it again, I think I'd have to think about the third and how that made sense in in a particular organization. Got it.

Robert Greiner: 38:03

Okay, cool. Hey, we're right up on time, any parting thoughts on rules of engagement and how to get started with it as a leader?

Tiffany Lenz: 38:10

I would just say be very open minded about what problems you are trying to solve or what hurdles you're anticipating. That's how you would I still I think building trust is the right answer. I think you and I both, admittedly have believe in that. But would should you pick my three or even two of my three? Maybe, but not necessarily. I think one needs to look at their own team and the problems they're solving before they decide which human behaviors are likely to get them the most bang for their buck,

if you will.

Robert Greiner: 38:42

Okay, thanks.

Tiffany Lenz: 38:43

Thank you.

Robert Greiner: 38:44

Yeah, it was great.

Tiffany Lenz: 38:44

Fun, great

Robert Greiner: 38:45

hanging out with you.

Tiffany Lenz: 38:46

Thanks, you too.

Robert Greiner: 38:47

Alright. Have a good one.