The Leadership Vision Podcast

Unlocking Team Collaboration: The Role of Personal Backstories and Narrative Intelligence

• Nathan Freeburg • Season 7 • Episode 22

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In this episode, we take a brief pause from our regular schedule to honor the holiday and reflect on the importance of collaboration. Instead of a new episode, we’re excited to re-share a valuable episode from 2021 that delves deep into the nuances of collaboration—a topic that has become increasingly relevant for us at Leadership Vision. Enjoy!

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The Leadership Vision Podcast is a weekly show sharing our expertise in discovering, practicing, and implementing a Strengths-based approach to people, teams, and culture. Contact us to talk to us about helping your team understand the power of Strengths.

Speaker 1:

Hey, there it's Nathan. Happy Memorial Day. We are taking a break from releasing new episodes here, but we're going to return next week with some fresh content, so don't go anywhere. And in the meantime, we're re-releasing an older episode that we think that you're going to appreciate listening to again if you didn't hear it, because, in the spirit of reflection and honoring the importance of working together, we wanted to share this episode all the way back from 2021. That gets into some of the, I guess, calm nuances of collaboration. See, here at Leadership Vision, we are finding ourselves collaborating more than ever before with all kinds of different people, and so this episode seemed particularly fitting, if not, I think, instructive, for us as well as you, because sometimes I think we all need reminders just about the fundamentals, about going back to the basics of effective teamwork, and so hopefully you will enjoy this. Now, this episode is a conversation between Dr Linda Schubring, brian Schubring and myself, and we discuss the essence of collaboration, sharing some personal and professional experiences that have shaped how not only we work together as a team, but as we work together in other settings as well. But I think the crux, or the meat, or the biggest takeaway, is about how our individual preferences and, I guess, early experiences how those things really influence team dynamics and can offer a little bit of insight into how you, as the team leader, can foster a cohesive and productive collaborative environment. So enjoy this throwback episode and we'll see you next week with a brand new episode. Enjoy episode Enjoy, as we have reflected on the myriad of teams we have worked with over the past 18 months.

Speaker 1:

We've learned new things about how people collaborate. Our participants have learned new things too. We don't ask how people collaborate, looking for a one size fits all type of answer. No, we are asking how they have collaborated their whole life, maybe to survive, or maybe because that's how they found success. Now, there are no right or wrong answers when it comes to collaboration. Well, okay, there are some, maybe positive or maladaptive answers, but what we are seeking to reveal is this In true collaboration the give and take or the back and forth of working together, we bring our personality, our culture, our strengths and our beliefs, and we also bring some pretty well-worn behavioral patterns and preferences as well.

Speaker 1:

Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Freeberg and today on the Leadership Vision Podcast, we are talking about what we've learned about collaboration in the context of who you are as a person, who you are as a team and who you are as an organizational culture. So keep listening. You're listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, sharing our expertise in the discovery, practice and implementation of a strengths-based approach to people, teams and culture. For more resources about developing your strengths the strengths of your team or the strengths of your entire organization, click the link in the show notes or visit us on the web at leadershipvisionconsultingcom. Hello again everyone. My name is Nathan Friberg and today on the podcast, I am so pleased to be joined once again with Brian and Linda Schubring, our president and vice president. Brian Linda, how are you guys doing today?

Speaker 2:

Very well, thank you, me too, wonderful you, me too, wonderful wonderful. Me too.

Speaker 1:

Seriously. I'm glad to hear that we record these on Monday mornings, and so I think we're always just in such great moods, coming off of wonderful weekends and whatnot. Sound like you guys had a really fun weekend. I did as well. But I want to jump right into this today. In the last episode we talked about some of our earliest memories of collaboration and we all shared some interesting and funny stories, learned about Brian's saxophone mullet hobby, which I thought was just fascinating, and 4-H and jump roping with Linda. But my first question is why does any of that matter? We talked about some of the ways that you know we remember collaborating, but why does that matter? Why is it important to know yourself as a collaborator as we move into this discussion today about collaboration as kind of a helpful component of a team?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, healthy and functional teams know how to collaborate well. They often have a certain pattern and preference as a team and it's important to know the individual's preferences when it comes to how they interact on a team.

Speaker 3:

So to be a successful team that collaborates well, we have to start with each member of the team as a collaborator. So what we want to do is always begin our conversations with a focus on the individual and how they show up, because that individual has unique patterns and preferences to how it is that they desire to collaborate, what their expectations are when collaboration is over and in the middle of it. You know how they navigate. We each have those unique patterns and preferences.

Speaker 1:

So I wonder if it's helpful right off the bat here to talk a little bit about how you know our approach to collaboration, helping teams function better. We're not coming in and saying here are you know the 10 steps to collaboration, 10 steps to collaboration. We're more focused on understanding those individuals, as you said, and helping them kind of plug their style into a team. It's almost like those cooking shows where you have to prepare a dinner, a meal of some kind, with whatever those ingredients are in front of them and they're a little cooler next to them. They don't get to run out and select all the most perfect ingredients to apply to that. So why is that our approach? Why don't we apply the five or ten things to help everyone collaborate well? I'm sure that someone has written about that.

Speaker 3:

Oh, I'm sure someone has, but we have found that the reality is simply this you never really know how a team is supposed to collaborate until you understand the individuals as collaborators. What we know as human beings is all of us have behavioral patterns and preferences that we rely on to navigate the world that stands in front of us. Yet those unique behavioral patterns and preferences are formed very early in our life. They're reinforced often and repeatedly as we grow up in order for them to still be around when we're in our 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond. And that same truth is a reality when it comes to collaboration, meaning each one of us has collaborative patterns and preferences that we kind of play by when it's time to collaborate as a team and that we have come to known as our collaborative style.

Speaker 2:

Nathan, get serious. We could write a book about some of the best practices, because good teams will listen with curiosity, they will accept compromise, they will commit to working together with a shared purpose for a shared purpose. But it's the how, the how. So when we talk about collaborative style, it's important to know that in some of those patterns and preferences that listening with curiosity in one person could be like it looks like they're like growling at you, but they're just listening. That's just their face.

Speaker 1:

That's a listening growl face.

Speaker 2:

And it could be the real active listening where there's lots of words and someone really engaged. Both kinds of people could be collaborating One. They just have to know each other, and we say that it starts by knowing themselves.

Speaker 3:

And those unique characteristics of collaboration that Linda mentioned. Like we were saying, sometimes that's the easy part is to name what collaboration should look like, or what collaboration should feel like that you have when you were actually asked to collaborate with someone else or with a group of other people. Think of some of those early memories and ask yourself how did the environment shape the way that I collaborate? What was the event or the events around which you were collaborating and what were those shaping experiences and here's the critical question before the age of 22, what were some of those early memories? And what we want people to do is to spend time reflecting on how those early shaping experiences have kind of carried on the behaviors and patterns that they've learned early. How are they showing up today in their unique collaborative style? Thus what we did last week with talking about our stories same thing with each participant.

Speaker 2:

So we try to seed people in their context and remember like, what did it look like to collaborate there? And one of my favorite responses that a woman gave was well, I had four sisters and we had one bathroom. So you tell me about collaboration. I learned, and it was so you could apply some of those same principles. The give and take looked for your family and she learned it by sharing a bathroom with her sisters. Now we invite people to think about the playground, the first paid job that they had any time, that they were invited to work on a group project which some people dreaded and other people really loved, and whether it was a sporting memory or rooted in family music, some kind of club organization.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we're inviting people to think back in time and think about how some of the core environments are shaping who they are like their family of origin, the culture they grew up in, the environment, their neighborhood, their small town, their urban center or their time in history Some of the same fundamental things that we're asking people to consider in other areas. We're asking them to consider this here, too. Think of those moments and times when collaboration patterns and preferences were being shaped.

Speaker 2:

As we have invited people to share those with each other. It is amazing to watch. And when I say amazing to watch, it means some people their eyes are wide or they'll say things like you have three kids too. I have triplets. I'm like how random is that they start to build into the health of their culture by understanding who they are individually and they're drawing a shorthand and people often realize that they have more in common with each other than they thought and it actually helps with a shorthand when it comes to collaboration.

Speaker 3:

Because part of this methodology is asking people to retell their own story. And when you have people talking together, retell their own story. And when you have people talking together, sharing their own story, that becomes a collective story of how they've learned about each other's way of collaborating. And we know that the brain thinks in story and remembers strongly when story and metaphor is used. So even there, we're applying very specific principles to how people are going to learn about each other. Yet in the background, we're knowing it's not just about each other, but it's how they are going to show up as a collaborator, and that's fundamentally important when it comes to collaborating on a team.

Speaker 1:

So how do we, how do you connect all that? And what I mean by that is so you've spent all this time sitting around in a circle. You have people sharing these stories.

Speaker 1:

They're memorable, memorative that's a great word. We're going to be talking about communication in future episodes. Folks Very memorable, they're listening. But how do you connect and I'll use the three of us if you listened to last week's episode Brian's saxophone with Linda's jump roping, with my 4-H experience how do you actually help them connect all those experience and draw some lines to oh, and this is how that's going to help us collaborate on this next project that we have coming up, because that's where I think would be really helpful for people to understand and not write this off as a, you know, kumbaya circle type of type of a thing.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's less like a circle and more like Hollywood squares when zoom right now but that's okay, that's okay.

Speaker 3:

Well, we take this process in three steps. We just covered step number one, asking for those early shaping memories of collaboration. Step number two, which is the bridge into a deeper conversation on collaborative teams, is this Think of an early professional experience where you are collaborating and that collaboration was a success. And what we want to do then is we want to then illustrate that early in our professional careers we also had behavioral patterns and preferences to how we collaborated and oftentimes we forget maybe how important those preferences were at the time, lessons that we learned, or even how much experience and wisdom we've accumulated over the decades of professional life. That brings us to the collaboration right now.

Speaker 3:

So that's the three-step process personal story, early professional experience and then moving them into a current professional experience where they're experiencing collaboration. And why is that important? Because oftentimes teams kind of get locked into certain patterns of behavior, because the current team you're on has a very strong influence on behaviors and expectations and oftentimes we can kind of get like tunnel visioned on how we collaborate just because of some patterns that we've established with this team over a period of years. In this process we're asking you to zoom out and think of how you would prefer to collaborate if that tunnel vision weren't so tight.

Speaker 2:

Because that early shaping experience and the early professional experience, early shaping experience and the early professional experience we invite our participants to think about what role they played and often you know so you think back, nathan, to your 4-H, your 4-H, the role that you played there as you were a part of creating these ideas for your team name. Was it a team name it?

Speaker 3:

was this.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 3:

I want to have more Chicago Cubs.

Speaker 1:

Go get them. We were the go-getters though, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Go-getters. So but it's understanding the role that you played and that you're maybe playing the same role, just a little bit different version, before you're 22. And then, as you move in your career, you start to realize, oh, I kind of play this role wherever I go For me, I cannot shake my situational leader tendencies.

Speaker 3:

Totally true.

Speaker 2:

Yep, yep, and it has only, I think, matured.

Speaker 1:

in some ways it has been shaped by my other leaders that I have led with, but it traces back early yeah, it does this sounds like and maybe we'll cut this out but a form of narrative therapy, if you're familiar with that, but apply it on a in a in a business, social context, not one-on-one with a therapist, where you're, as I understand it I'm not a therapist, obviously where you're basically identifying your past, to inform your present and future, to see what worked, what didn't work. How do you replicate that? How do you stop doing that? Is that sort of what we're talking about here?

Speaker 2:

Narrative intelligence, so it's a storytelling.

Speaker 2:

So what we're, what we are inviting participants to learn, is you know, it's not therapy, and we will say that but we will say we want you to practice storytelling, and we all can name those storytellers in our lives that just have a knack of capturing our attention and using humor at the right times. And with this it's how do you tell the story of yourself as a collaborator, of you being a part of a team and attaching story, not just the best practices that I learned in business or working with people.

Speaker 1:

Well, and I was just reading something about how to help people change their minds or influence them or get them to really think differently, and someone who's telling an authentic story can help people change their minds on different issues and view them differently. So I imagine that same thing applies here. When maybe you know Me and I'll pick on Bob from accounting, who's not a real person, he and I always butt heads over the way we should enter things into Excel. But if he tells me a story about, well, I've done it this way and I found success, I will develop more empathy, more understanding for Bobby, more willing to say, oh okay, well, here's how I'm doing it, and then we can understand each other. And then boom, we've figured out a way to collaborate better that isn't following the latest top 10 list of, you know, business leaders weekly magazine.

Speaker 1:

I really think this is such a great, a great approach. How do we move this then into the organization? Because you know we talk about these three levels individual team and then the larger organization. Is there another level of this that can be applied, not just on our team here, but the broader organization? Or how do we? I don't know if that's influencing up down, left right. Is that the right?

Speaker 2:

next question I think the right. Next question is how does this apply to teams? If I just boil it down, really simply Because that story part is incredibly important.

Speaker 3:

There is so much research that reinforces what you're saying, including Linda's with her doctoral program but we remember in story or we remember in narrative. We tell story to make sense of the world around us and, like you said, Nathan, our brains are doing the best they can to tell a story where there's a happy ending and there's a happy middle and a happy beginning and we're the hero or the heroine. That's what our brains are doing. So for us to be able to tell a story about how we collaborate, that's extremely important. So we want the teams to dive into their own narrative intelligence on how it is that they collaborate, tell stories, begin to share some memories about what they're going through right now, so that they realize we are living a common organizational story on what collaboration means here, Because there are so many outside pressures that are pressing in on team culture to collaborate a certain way.

Speaker 3:

And yet we're saying you know what? You can still have a healthy and positive team culture within the midst of a large organizational culture. You just have to work on it. So part of what that we're doing is we're inviting people into their own narrative intelligence. What is it like to be a collaborator on this team, but then also give them the pen and the paper to say now, how can we write a new ending or how can we continue to write this positive story as collaborators that listen to each other, that respect each other and have a place for other people's opinions?

Speaker 2:

And in the midst of sharing these stories, we'll often pause in the middle and do some kind of application. After they've been sharing stories with each other, we'll stop them again and say, okay, what are some of your collaborative preferences? And we'll give them a list to choose from and we'll either invite them to number them you know, the one to five, the ones that they really really, you know, resonate with, or just picking two of a list of five. And the five collaborative preferences that we were looking at and that we've used in this is healthy relationships, clear purpose, what work needs to be done, everyone contributes and ensuring we finish. And so, in the midst of telling stories, we'll pause and say, all right, of those collaborative preferences, which two are most important to you? And we've just stirred their story to consider some of the responses.

Speaker 3:

So, nathan, what this looks like is. We will often lay that out as a picture of this is what we're going to do, and we will listen to every individual, tell us what their two preferences are Again returning to personal preference and then we'll take tally marks to keep track of what people are saying and the reason why we're doing this. Because if we have a team of 20, we can use this exercise to give some type of indication as to the collaborative culture of the team. Saying this team overwhelmingly says clear purpose is our number one priority when it comes to collaboration. Well, that says something as opposed to maybe everyone contributes, if that's the highest preference for your team when they collaborate, that's a whole different style or feel of collaboration. So we want to help the teams get just the beginning understanding of what is the collaborative culture of our team.

Speaker 2:

And some of the things that we've learned in these last 18 months is that clear purpose is the number one collaborative preference. And so imagine in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of COVID. Sometimes it's hard to be specifically clear. So understanding what those other preferences are help teams move forward. Or to say I know that you all are looking for a clear purpose. I can't give it to you right now. I can tell you we're going to continue to serve people, we're still going to do the work, we're going to get action on some of these task lists.

Speaker 3:

And one of the funny things is is this is the topic of collaboration, and one of the most like, one of the least frequent areas that people say is important to them is everyone contributes. Now, you'd think that you know the topic is collaboration. You'd think that people would say that that's important, but it just comes. Our data does not show or support that people want everyone to help.

Speaker 2:

And we often. We often let the leader go last, so the leader isn't affecting the whole group. So we'll ask them to to give their two cents at the at the end, because we have found there was one group where we asked the leader first and he said well, everyone needs to say ensuring we finish. So, nathan, what do you, what? Which one would you choose then, if your leader said that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly, well, clear purpose, since that's what Brian just said. So I'm going to go with that. You know I'm thinking of.

Speaker 1:

I ran with a buddy of mine, frank, the other day, who he has a small business who's hired 30 people just in this year, which for them is is ridiculous, and I was like that has got to be a challenge. And he said, yeah, it's so hard getting everyone to work together and learn our culture and how we do things because we've like, since they kind of came out of last year's COVID problem, now they're just hiring and they're growing and whatever. And so I imagine a benefit of this process is when you get teams to figure out all this collaboration stuff that becomes part of their culture, that becomes part of the onboarding process. It's so much easier, you know, once that first core group or whatever has gone through, it's easier to hire people, to bring people on when there's transition, onboarding, all of that. So this isn't just you know. I know somewhere in our notes here you say sometimes we come into work with teams who are in crisis, but this is also like can be a very proactive thing for organizations to do as well.

Speaker 2:

Right, yes, in the absence of crisis, sometimes that's the best time to have these conversations.

Speaker 3:

And so what we do is we always end with a cultural emphasis, and the reason why we do so is because we want to take culture, which is usually like some big, scary word. People think about the organizational culture, the larger business culture or, like Nathan with the example you just shared, like adding 30 people to however many he had already. What we want to do is we want to give people a sense of hope by breaking this down to a team's culture and we ask people what can you contribute to this team's collaborative culture that will either implement the changes necessary or continue with the positive collaboration that's happening. That's what we can control. There's a culture that we can control. There's a culture that we can shape, and usually that's the culture of the team that we are working on, and that's, to us, is usually the way that we end is by saying you have a chance to create a positive collaborative culture on this team, and guess what? You probably already know how to do it.

Speaker 2:

So, then, what surfaces in the context of that cultural conversation is understanding what teams need, because sometimes teams need greater alignment. Sometimes they need agreement like not forever, but for Sometimes they need agreement like not forever, but for now. They need action, something to move things forward, or the team just needs some accountability in order to improve the way that the culture interacts with each other.

Speaker 1:

So, listeners, what about you? What does your team need right now? Do you need greater alignment around what it is you're supposed to do? Do you need agreement, perhaps, about who's supposed to do what and maybe not forever, but just for now, like Linda said or do you need action? Do you just need to step in and do something, get something done to get the ball moving? Or, finally, do you need accountability? Do you need to hold each other accountable to do the things that you say you're going to do?

Speaker 1:

Think about that, maybe talk it over with your team, with your team members, your team leader, perhaps. If you're not that person, and let us know, shoot me an email, nathan, at leadershipvisionconsultingcom. We'd love to hear from you, and maybe you don't have any answers about you know how you're going to do one of these things, but you just maybe have an idea of this is, I think, what we need. Let us know. We'd love to hear or leave a comment on the blog post, the Facebook page, the wherever, itunes, whatever. Brian and Linda, thank you so much. This is a great conversation that I hope more teams can have, so thank you for the time. Thank you, nathan.

Speaker 2:

Great collaboration.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. Speaking of collaboration, should we try to collaborate on the outro together? Sure, I'll start. Thank you for listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, sharing our expertise in the discovery practice and something else that I just forgot People, teams and culture for all your listening needs, go to stritcher and mitcher and podcast downloads for more resources. For more resources, strengths and strengths of your team and strengths of your whole strengths of your entire organization. Click the link in the show notes in the show notes and visit us on the web at leadershipvisionconsultingcom you got that one yeah, I got

Speaker 2:

that one, our whole team wait. I'm nathan freeberg.

Speaker 1:

I'm linda strubering show notes and visit us on the web at leadershipvisionconsultingcom.

Speaker 2:

You got that one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I got that one. And on behalf of our whole team.

Speaker 2:

Wait, I'm Nathan.

Speaker 3:

Freeberg.

Speaker 1:

I'm Linda Shubring, I'm Brian Shubring and on behalf of our entire team, thanks for listening. That was pretty good. If people listen to that entire thing, we'll send them a free box of cookies from somewhere in the world. Yeah, where are the cookies?