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Helen's business book: The Future of Time: how 're-working' time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing

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The December edition of my newsletter Viewpoint, and you can subscribe here.

'The Tomorrow People', my article for December's TheHRDIRECTOR magazine.

The top 5 business books and top 5 novels that I read in 2022 - watch the video here.

Deb's book Collabor(h)ate: preview it here and preorder it here

Deb's website https://www.debmashek.com/, Deb on Linked In and TikTok

The Good Fight by Liane Davey

Transcript:

Helen: I'm delighted to welcome this week's guest: Dr. Debra Mashek PhD is an experienced business advisor, professor, higher education administrator, and national non-profit executive. Previously Full Professor of social psychology at Harvey Mudd College, she is the author of Collabor(h)ate: how to build incredibly collaborative relationships at work even if you'd rather work alone. Named one of the top 35 Women in Higher Education by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, Deb has been featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Atlantic, Business Week, the Hechinger Report and Fortune, and she writes regularly for Psychology Today. Deb is the founder of Myco Consulting, where she speaks, advises and provides professional development to those seeking to build better workplace collaborations.

Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant, Deb!

Deb: It is such a pleasure to be here, Helen. Thanks so much for the invitation, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.

Helen: Me too. I can't wait to get stuck in talking about collaboration, where we go wrong, how we can make that better. And I know this topic is going to really resonate with a lot of listeners because pretty much everyone has had some experience of some kind of collaboration. So when did you first start to get really fascinated by the topic of collaboration?

Deb: So I go into the book a little bit around my background, having spent my formative years in a trailer park in Western Nebraska in the middle of the United States and what it was like to grow up amid a lot of addiction in the household. So that, I think, laid the groundwork.

But professionally, I really got interested in this during my first day of graduate school.  So I happened to be in this class called the Psychology of Close Relationships with this professor who was fascinating and I could not get enough of the content. So I was reading every single article that was assigned, I was that student raising my hand with every single question, really excited to unpack this thing that I frankly found very mysterious. This idea that there are ways that you can actually do relationships that are healthier and less healthy. And so I got curious there, decided that my focus would be on the psychology of close relationships, so I seriously have a PhD in the psychology of close relationships, which still just baffles me 25 years later.

And I went from there to study everything from hooking up and breaking up and I was teaching classes in the psychology of close relationships and the psychology of community building and the psychology of collaboration. Then this amazing opportunity came up out at the Claremont Colleges where I was a professor there at Harvey Mudd College to run this grant where the whole goal was to figure out, okay, so you've got these five independent colleges, they're all co-located on a single square mile of property.

How do you compel people to work together? Because there are all these amazing resources in terms of the financial resources, incredible students, and amazing faculty. How do you create situations where they want to come together to co-create things that are more magnificent than what any one of those colleges could have done on their own? And it was my job to lead that effort for five years. So I totally realized that all of these relationship theories that I had been chewing on for a lot of years were very relevant to inter-organisational relationships as well. So that was this stepping-off point.

Then the 2016 election happened here in the United States and the world kind of melted down on campuses. So I decided to leave my tenured full professorship; I moved cross country as a single mom with an eight year old in tow to help launch this national nonprofit called Heterodox Academy, which was focused on viewpoint diversity and helping people understand each other from different ideological divides.

And then after that, I decided I wanted to go ahead and get back to what I felt was a, a more fun thing of helping people just build better collaborations, not necessarily being there in the center of the culture wars. So that's when I decided to launch Myco Consulting where, as you mentioned, I work with business leaders to improve the collaborations that are unfolding in their spaces.

Helen: That's so fascinating to hear. I would never have known that you can have a PhD in the science of close relationships. So I've learned something straight away about that and really interesting to hear I guess the different applications that you can use it for and how you've chosen to focus organisations, the world of work, and how teams and people work together in organisations.

And as an expert on collaboration, I do have to ask you (laughs) so what's the best collaboration you've experienced and what's the worst one if you're happy to describe them?

Deb: Yeah, so first of all, I'll say that having a great lens for understanding collaboration, I think it helps a little bit in creating great collaborations. But man, I still have struggles! So just to say oh, yeah, no, this is real. And in fact, when I collected data for the Workplace Collaboration Study, I did ask people 'have you ever been in a collaboration that you would describe as absolutely incredible?

And I'm delighted to report that 85% of people said yes in fact they have. But for the record, 72% said that they've been in a collaboration that was absolutely horrendous. So if, if you're like me, and you have in fact been in great collaborations and in horrible collaborations, it's kind of 'a join the club' situation.

So let's see. You want to talk about the best one? One of the best ones first? Okay. So one of the best ones that pops to mind right away is when I was at Heterodox Academy. It was a brand new organisation and we were really working to put the organs in the organisation and I knew right away that I needed an operations person to come in with me.  And I hired this woman, Mannel, who was just an absolute rockstar because there were a couple of features that made this collaboration especially robust and satisfying. One is that she was incredibly competent, incredibly conscientious, so we partnered really well there. And then there was this complementarity where I love to talk about vision and she was able to take that idea and move it into these really specific tactical things. And we both love talking about strategy. And we would always just take the whiteboard off the wall, we would set it on the floor, grab our coffees, sit there with our sticky notes and our markers, and just think together.  And we would leave these meetings with crystal clarity on what each of us needed to do. And then there was this incredible conscientiousness and follow through on both of our parts. So it felt like magic in a bottle to get to work with her. So that's an example of a one-on-one collaboration that was absolutely inspiring and it's one of the reasons I dedicate the book to her.

Helen: That's wonderful to hear. And are there some painful collaborative experiences that stick in your memory, or do they just kind of merge into a few lessons on how not to do it?

Deb: When I interviewed people for the book, this one interview described the idea of burn marks that when you've been in these bad collaborations, they stick with you and it's, it's like this residue that is really hard to get rid of and it colours your perception and your eagerness to jump back into another sort of collaboration.

So absolutely. I've had my fair share. Some of them, they really fit a type. As a recovering academic, you know, for those who don't know academia, one of the things you do, especially in psychology, is you have to write a lot of papers for peer review. And a lot of those papers are co-authored and the number of authorship experiences where, you know, big visions where we're going to do this great thing and then...... crickets where you would write something and you wouldn't hear back from the co-author, or they were supposed to write this section and you haven't heard back from them for weeks and then months, and then you're just like, is this paper over and done with? Is it actually still going to happen?  And just the incredible frustration knowing that there's also this huge evaluative component. So, you know, in those situations, your ability to get positive reviews and promotions within the academy depend on those papers being amazing. So a lot of pain around co-authorship, I would say, is some of the biggest residue that I feel.

Helen: Yeah. Yeah. Because it sounds like there are some real consequences from not collaborating well, in that example. There's some real career consequences and the comment you shared from the person who commented in your research about burn marks, it made me think that we might feel emotionally scarred after a personal relationship has ended badly or has not been a successful relationship, it's been painful in some way. But actually I hadn't made the connection that we may also carry that baggage with us when we've had a difficult work relationship and it might affect our outlook on how we collaborate with others after that. That seems to be what you're saying?

Deb: Yes, and you nailed perfectly what I think is so interesting about this book - i s it too self-aggrandizing to be like, I think this part is really interesting?! - to come at this topic of workplace relationships, workplace collaborations from the perspective of the science of close relationships, because all of the dynamics are playing out.

Like we have to figure out who are we interested enough in to pursue a collaboration with? What are our expectations around that relationship? What happens to us internally when people fail to meet those expectations? Are we actually communicating our expectations?

All of these things are relevant in our close relationships with our friends, with our families, and certainly in our workplace relationships. So this idea that we have learning histories in all of our relationships that a) inform how we approach future relationships of that type - so my workplace history informs my future workplace willingness - but also there's this flood over where if I believe that I am worthy of other people's care and responsiveness, I carry that belief with me into the workplace. It's not like you just walk into the office and somehow all of those very human needs and wants and histories disappear. So there's a bit of a mutual information going on too there.

Helen: Mm. Yeah. That's fascinating. It affects our mindset as well. So let's dig a little bit more into the book and some of the theory and the knowledge and the amazing advice and tools you share in it. So the book comes out on the 24th of January. It's published by Practical Inspiration Publishing. In the UK for UK listeners, the paperback is £16.99 and the e-book is £9.99 and it is available to pre-order now.

And if you're listening and thinking, Hmm, I'm liking the sound of this, it sounds really interesting, shall I buy it? I'm going to share what Adam Grant no less! Number one, New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and Host of the TED Podcast Work Life, this is what he had to say about Deb's book:

"We've all gotten stuck working with people we don't like. Thankfully, Deb Mashek has written a lively, actionable book to fix that. Combining her expertise as a psychologist and her experience as a consultant, she reveals how we can earn trust, repair relationships and create collaborations that bring out the best in us."

When I saw this, I was like, wow! As a business book author, I think nothing would make my life better than having an endorsement like that from someone as knowledgeable in your field as Adam Grant. So that's just an amazing review to get.

Deb: Yep, that felt quite amazing to hear Adam say those kind things and yeah, quite a thrill.

Helen: And so who did you write this book for and why did you write it?

Deb: So certainly I was one of the audience members. I think so many of us who write these books are noodling on some sort of challenge. And so figuring out for myself and then wanting to share it with others, around this question of what is relevant about the psychology of close relationships to these workplace relationships that are so critically important.

So we know when our collaborative relationships at work are going well, that we're more engaged at work, that we're more satisfied at work, that we have better mental health, so lower anxiety, lower depression. So all of these things matter.

And I imagine we might talk a little bit about some of the things that we get wrong about collaboration, but it's ... It's really hard to do well, and so the goal was to make this curriculum, as it were, about the psychology of relationships available to a wider audience, because so many of us really do want to collaborate well. We know it's essential. We can see how good things happen in terms of how we solve the world's most trickiest problems through collaboration. But if we don't have a roadmap, we encounter problems, we encounter pitfalls, tension mounts and projects fizzle, and you can end up with really good people walking away.

So I wanted to bring some wisdom to this shared challenge.

Helen: Fantastic. And you make the excellent point that we are typically not taught how to collaborate. Not explicitly anyway in schools, I guess university and then in early careers. So what is it that you see that we are getting wrong when it comes to collaboration?

Deb: I think one of the big mythologies out there is that people are either good at relationships or they're bad at relationships, and there's nothing you can do about it. And I think that belief gets in the way of offering concrete strategies, whether it's professional development or thinking more intentionally about how we're creating and structuring our work worlds to facilitate the collaboration.

So what we do know is that there are better or worse things you can do to make healthy collaborations, to make healthy relationships, and that those things are learnable. And I think that surprises some people because a lot of us haven't received any professional development in how to do this. In fact, the data from the Workplace Collaboration study suggests it's around a third of people have received no training in how to develop these relationships.

One of the funniest details I'll share from the data is that another couple of people thought they had received a few minutes of training.

So I think that means they might be like reading Dilbert cartoons or watching TikTok because I don't know otherwise what a few minutes of training might look like! Only a quarter of people have actually received substantial training in this. So what that means in terms of what we're getting wrong is I think, there's this impulsive yes, collaboration is good and I'm just going to, as a director, as a manager, say yeah, go work together! And that envisioning it as some sort of mysterious black box that we can't unpack. And so, you end up with people who haven't received any education in this themselves, trying to train other people how to do it. So you have a lot of confusion.

Or you get people who are really good at it and they're not quite sure why it works so well for them. So it's hard internally to diagnose what the secret sauce is. And so, I with my relationship researcher lens on, can look at it and say, oh, X, Y, and Z. This is why this is working. This is why that isn't working.

So I think that's what we're getting wrong. And then the end point of all of that is we're not actually providing this sort of professional development and training that people need, or we're not looking diagnostically at how the organs in our organisations are working. And it's getting in the way of everything from morale and timelines and bottom lines and the quality of the products we're developing.

Helen: That makes complete sense and describing it as a black box, this mysterious black box is a really good metaphor. I totally get that and how you help people unpack it and see inside the box and. both provide the skills but also the diagnostics and the expertise to look at how people are collaborating.

I think that sounds fascinating. Just understanding what's in the black box of collaboration because it does seem a bit, you've either got it or you haven't. And as you say, if you've got it, you're the lucky one, but you might not know why you've got it! ,

Deb: I think you just stumbled on a fabulous topic for a webinar: unpacking the black box of collaboration! I really like that because it's like, let's demystify this, it doesn't need to be a big mystery.

Helen: I think that's it. I think it does feel a bit mysterious. And when you talk about collaboration, do you mean any time you work with somebody, any work that involves other people or just certain kinds of joint work?

Deb: Another great question. I think this is one of the things that collaboration struggles with is this word is bandied about culturally as being everything from a CoLab in marketing, where you have, I swear, like a bag of potato chips teaming up up with a tennis shoe to save the environment or something, and you're like, what is that? But we use collaboration very generally, like, 'oh, let's do something together'. The thing is that there are a lot of different ways of doing together. So co-labor literally means 'together work'. So a lot of different ways you could do together work.

y specific understanding of it, the one that I organize all of my work around and that the book is organized around, is the idea that you have two or more people who are working together intentionally to advance a specific shared goal. So there's a lot of nuance in there, but it's different from just lightly exchanging information as you would say, in a networking situation. And it's more involved than maybe what you would do in a coordinating situation where you're altering your activities for some shared goal, and it's different from what you might do in a cooperating situation where now we're actually sharing resources and tools and whatnot, but you're actually trying to learn from others that it's through this relationship that you're making each other better at what you're doing, and that's where the real gold is. That's where you can get these 'collabor-GREAT' relationships . And I should say that continuum I was just talking about, to give credit where credit is due, comes from Arthur Hillerman's collaboration continuum model. So he has this beautiful model and the idea is that the resources and the capacities we need organisationally to do those different kinds of together work very tremendously. So if we're not sure what it is we're trying to do together, it's hard to actually equip us to do it well.

Helen: Yeah, that's really helpful to hear, the different points along the collaboration continuum and help people figure out, okay, is this a genuine shared goals, ' we help each other succeed' kind of collaboration. And I guess sometimes, people will be in a collaborative piece of work, but they haven't chosen who they're working with and that is probably one of the occasions when sometimes there's some collaborative friction, for example, because we don't always get to choose who we collaborate with, right?

Deb: Especially, yeah, in a lot of workplaces, you're 'voluntold'. It's like 'you must go do this. I volunteered you to do this', and so sometimes our choice to be in that relationship is not ours, but our choice about how we show up in that relationship is ours to choose; choose to conduct ourselves, whether or not we're willing to take the time to get to know the other person, to get to know their interest. What would they really like to get out of this experience together? What's here for me to learn, or what impact can I make? There are a lot of mindset moments available to individuals even as they go into those ' voluntold' relationships.

Helen: Yeah. So how we show up in a collaboration is one key to creating a successful collaborative relationship. Can you share one or two other ingredients of a really good collaboration? I know you can't distill the whole book in the next two minutes, but just a couple of things to hang out there that people might go 'aha! ok!'?

Deb: Right, right. Let me tell you about the Mashek matrix, which I realize is like this very self-referential way of talking about collaboration, but you know, my idea, I'm going to own it! The idea is that there are two main ingredients. One is you need high relationship quality and relationship quality is your subjective sense of how good or bad the relationship is. And I won't go into them here, but in the book I offer these nine different strategies you can use to increase relationship quality. So that's ingredient number one.

Ingredient number two is interdependence. And interdependence concerns the extent to which my outcomes are contingent on your behaviours. So let's imagine Helen and Deb are in a collaborative relationship; if we have structured the work such that you and I are 'sink or swim' as a team and it's super, super interdependent so we have this mutuality there. But I don't like you, I don't trust you.

I mentioned I'm from Nebraska, so I like a good farm metaphor. If my wagon is hitched to your ill mannered horses, whether I like it or not, that's a miserable existence! I'm going to be stressed out, I'm going to be carrying that stress home. And it's when you have that low relationship quality combined with this really high interdependence that you get collaborHATE.

But when you get high interdependence and high relationship quality, that's really where the magic is. That's where I call it collaborGREAT. And what I think is really one of the gems of the book is I talk about how you move from one space to the other, and it's actually fairly counterintuitive that you don't necessarily want to rev up on the relationship quality first because you're going to hit a bit of a brick wall.

What I can do is make available to your listeners a really cool printable that describes this visually. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous graphic that Amy Trin created for me, and I'm happy to make that available if you like.

Helen: Yes, fantastic, I think people will be really interested to hear that so I will put a link to that in the show notes. And thank you for describing the matrix. It's starting to give some clues as to how you define great collaboration and not so great collaboration. And obviously your book's all about moving into the right box there.

And so at an organisational level, how would an organisation know if they have a collaboration issue? If someone's listening thinking, hmm, well maybe we don't do collaboration that well, what are the warning signs? Or the red flags that would tell them that they've got a collaboration problem?

Deb: Yeah. So when I talk to CEOs and directors and managers and ask them what's going on? How's it going for you? Here are the kinds of pain points that they're talking about. They're talking about turfiness and power plays, about things that should be fairly simple, taking way longer. They're talking about morale being in the gutter, things like it's as though we are separate organisations even though theoretically we're all one organisation, but it doesn't feel like that. It feels like there's competition between sales and marketing, or it feels like production and customer relations are at odds with each other. Those are huge warning signs because it means the organs and the organisations are not actually acting harmoniously, which means there's a lot of wasted effort, a lot of wasted time, certainly wasted money. And the one that makes me perhaps most sad is the wasted potential.

So imagine what would be possible if all of those organs were working more harmoniously. So in that case, what I would recommend to that executive is to take a look at the layers of the collaborative culture that you have.

So is collaboration actually possible in the first place? If it's not possible, it's not going to happen. Is it easy? If it's easy, you're going to get more of it. Is it normative? Such that this is just the way we do things and we can look to other people and see like, sure enough, this happens. And the fourth question is, is it rewarding? So are the incentive structures that are in place actually supporting collaborative work and at the very tippety top of those layers is are you requiring it? I don't encourage you to require it, but sometimes that can help trigger some of the the good behaviours.

And so you look at that full stack within an organisation diagnostically, and it tells you what you can start intervening on. So whether you might want to start working on infrastructure or interfaces or communities, or the reward structures or policy, things like that.

Helen: That makes sense because it could be any one of a number of those or a combination of those factors that are causing the collaborative friction. And so first you have to figure out where the real problem lies. So your diagnostic approach helps leaders understand, okay, this is the nature of the problem that's behind this slow progress. Power plays, as you said, because it'll manifest in any one of those business outcomes, won't it? That you won't see work happening smoothly and successfully and cheerful, productive, engaged employees. So they've got to get under that and figure out where the barriers and the blockers blockers are.

Deb: Yeah, exactly. And it could be that you have a handful of really uncollaborative people -some individuals. It could also be the case that you've got a bad barrel over there where it's just that the relationships on that team have become toxic for some reason. And maybe that's bubbled up into the whole organisation, or maybe not, but diagnostically you can figure out, are we talking about, is this a problem with collaborative individuals, collaborative relationships, or a collaborative culture?

Helen: Yeah. That's so fascinating. So that you can equip people with the tools to help them figure it out, and hopefully fix it.

Deb: Exactly. So it's like once you know where the problem is, there are interventions and you can fix it.

Helen: Yeah. And is there a particular resource that has helped you in your own thinking and in, in your own career that you would mention and share with others in case that's helpful to them too?

Deb: Sure. So let's see. I'm going to recommend one resource of somebody else's and a resource of mine. It's not totally in the spirit of the question, but because I think it'll be valuable. So I love Liane Davey's book, The Good Fight, about a) the value of conflict in an organisation, and b) how to actually ensure that your different stakeholders are contributing their value when needed to do amazing things together. So I love her book, I love her LinkedIn feed, I love her newsletter. So go check out Liane Davey. She's amazing.

The second thing I I want to point out is that on my website there's a tab called Perspectives. And there I put just tons of free resources and articles and any handout I've ever made is up there. So it's a treasure trove; it's there for the taking. So please go, go make use of it. And of course, let me know if there are any questions or if you're looking for something that's not there and I might be able to create it.

Helen: Brilliant, thank you. I think someone had mentioned to me ages ago about The Good Fight and I've not read a good book about conflict, it's been a gap in my business book reading. So thank you for reminding me, I'm definitely going to be reading that in 2023. And thank you for pointing people towards all the fantastic available resources on your website.

And for people that have enjoyed listening and want to find out a bit more about the work you do or follow your thinking and your writing, how can they connect with you after the podcast?

Deb: I think the easiest way is to go to debmashek.com. You could also do collaborhate.com, it gets you to the same place, and there you'll find all of my social links, access to my newsletter, all the things, and I love being in conversation with other people who are noodling on these topics so please engage.

I will say there you'll find a link to my TikTok which I still can't believe I'm doing TikTok, but I'm having a lot of fun posting videos and content there that's not necessarily available anywhere else. And then on LinkedIn, one of my personal goals is to post daily there things that are actually of value to the broader community.

So when you go to my website and you're trying to figure out where should I connect with her, I would recommend TikTok and/or LinkedIn.

Helen: Brilliant. Thank you. And I know from having been talking with you over several months now that you absolutely walk the talk when it comes to collaboration, you are one of the most collaboratively minded and gifted - although I know it's not a gift, it's a skill! - people I know. So it is been such a pleasure talking to you about collaboration, about your brilliant new book and just getting a little bit under the skin of, okay, how do we collaborate better? When do we get it wrong? And at organisational level, how can we improve collaboration across all our teams? Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Deb, you've been a brilliant guest.

Deb: Well, it's such a pleasure and I hope you don't mind if I give you a shout out too and recognize your contributions to Collabor(h)ate. So, just so your listeners know, I reached out to Helen and I was like, I've got this manuscript, I don't know if it's going okay. Would you mind looking at it? And you were so kind to give really detailed, actionable, thoughtful feedback on this very rough first draft.

And when I look at this final product, I see your fingerprints all over it. So I'm so grateful to you for your contributions and obviously for this opportunity to get to talk about the book with you.

Helen: Oh, you're very welcome. It was a real privilege to have an early glimpse of the book, and I can't wait to get my hands on the final version, so looking forward to celebrating the launch with you. Thanks so much, Deb.

Deb: Thank you.