Ep. 2 Structuring for Innovation, Anat Lechner, NYU

Join Suzan and NYU's Anat Lechner as they discuss the importance of psychological safety in building a structure within organizations to support innovation and realize change.


January 2023
ExecU Podcast
Episode 2: Structuring for Innovation with Anat Lechner, New York University (NYU)

BRIEF SUMMARY OF EPISODE

Anat Lechner is a Clinical Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at NYU Stern. Professor Lechner earned her Ph.D. in Organization Management from Rutgers University in 2000. She is also the recipient of the GE Teaching Excellence award. Professor Lechner's research focuses on how organizations can best structure to develop innovation capabilities and outcomes. Her research encompasses various areas including the effective leverage of multidisciplinary teams, leading adaptive change, and the development of workplace environments supportive of creativity and innovation.

Her current work looks at the complexities of managing high performance cross-functional teams, and the ways by which physical workplace environments enable organization members to cope with uncertainty, change, and the demand for increased innovativeness.

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KEY TAKEAWAY:

“When an environment becomes psychologically unsafe for people, many retreat, or in any case [are] thrown out of balance. So instead of being assertive you'll either become more aggressive or you'll become more defensive…”

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Transcript

Anat 0:00

when an environment becomes psychologically unsafe for people, many retrieve or in any case be thrown out of balance. So instead of being your assertive. you'll either become more aggressive or you'll become more defensive. And so the team is done irrespective of the fact that around the table there sit brilliant minds that are great experts, that if they only spoke with one another, they could have arrived at a magnificent innovation.

0:28

welcome to Executive the podcast, bringing you actionable insights from faculty at the world's top business schools. I'm your host, Suzanne Brinker, and today I'm really excited to share a conversation with Anat Lechner from NYU Stern School of Management, and she'll be talking with us about structuring for innovation.

Suzan 0:48

Andnot, it's so great to have you on the show. Welcome.

Anat 0:51

Thank you, Susan. It's my pleasure.

Suzan 0:55

Before we get into your research and the insights you're going to share with executives listening to this podcast, just wanted to get a brief introduction to your career and life journey. How did you get interested in your research areas and how did you end up at NYU Stern.

Anat 1:11

It's a long story, but I'll try to stay short as I can. I actually started as a therapist and my very first assignment I worked with alcoholics. It was a very difficult change journey to try and take someone through or on, and I think I got really disappointed with my results. I just did not feel that I'm efficacious at all. Of course, I was 26 or or about, and I didn't even give myself a true chance to succeed with it. But I back in then made a decision that if change management is so difficult at a personal level, perhaps it's a little bit more doable at an organizational. And I crossed the street and registered or enrolled in an MBA and later a PhD in business management thinking that enabling change in organizations in industry will be an easier task. And boy, I was so mistaken, that is a funny

Suzan 2:03

assumption, right? If you can't help an individual, then an organization must certainly be easier to say.

Anat 2:10

Yeah, I don't, I this is the kind of judgment calls that we make when we know nothing about the world. my own change management project started in a very perplexing set of assumptions. Nonetheless I spent the past 35 years growing my understanding of organizations, deepening my understanding of the human condition at work and else. And thinking quite deeply on the notion of change and the difficulties associated with that. And of course, while I'm pondering this question, the world inflicted on all of us some mega changes. Recent ones obviously have been felt quite dramatically, but I think that the past couple decades have given us a lot to think about when we think about change. So it had become a very interesting career journey to enjoy.

Suzan 2:56

I can only imagine. So you study how organizations can best structure to develop innovation capabilities and outcomes. Judging on your previous introduction, that's probably not something that tends to come very easily to organizations. They need help with that, right? They tend to struggle with that.

Anat 3:14

Correct? Correct. It's, you if you take a step back and you think on change generally, and how do we bring change about words. When I talk to you about change goals, words are important. You have to say, set a vision for people or have them think of themselves differently or else no change can begin, but even if you were able to excite me about a vision or incite me to an, incentivize me to try and pursue it, the art of change, in fact is not stopping there. You have to structure for a new reality to. And organizational structure and restructure efforts are meant to enable that. The stride, the vision and the strategy, they're important. The talent aspect, we can talk about this in greater length later. The talent aspect is critical. Leadership naturally leads sits at the, drives the bus. But the structuring is an interesting element that very many people are not fully aware of. I. What, what can structure do for you, so to speak? Yeah, and

Suzan 4:13

in fact, I think there's a little bit of a negative connotation associated with reorganization or restructuring. That immediately makes people's blood pressure go up because they're worried about, what will be taken away from me. Have you found that across organizations

Anat 4:27

you've worked with and that is very true. It's exactly that because when you structure, what you naturally do is not. Sometimes it's involving eliminating positions and creating difficulties for people to adjust even if they're staying within the company. There's a new boss, there is a new process, there's a new unit, there is a new mission. There's a, the newness with that is, is usually raising quite a bit of objection. So to the point you're making blood pressure does come up. But if the structural intervention is not explained, rationalized, then naturally as a standalone it can never succeed. It's a piece within a puzzle. So if it's if it's coming on the hills of a thorough. Analysis and then a good communication plan with a solid vision that you just help people see the why as. Simon Sinek likes to say, start with the why. See the why. It's a good TED talk. Yeah. It's see the why behind the what if. If the why is clear, then the what you know is digestible. If the why isn't clear, then there cannot be any, what people will object. That makes total sense.

Suzan 5:34

You also study high performing teams and cross-functional teams. How does this fit into the larger research interest around organizational structure and innovation capabilities and how do you define a high performing team?

Anat 5:48

Yeah, there's a bunch of questions here. I'll say to you. This going back to my therapy days I was I was actually schooled as a group therapist and half of the work that I did was not one on one. It was within groups and it was amazing to me what groups can achieve that. Individuals cannot. As a young professional, I was sitting within a group looking at how alcoholics talk with one another and support one another and achieve. A level of say, containing of their challenges that I could not achieve in a one on one session. And I was so puzzled by that because it was my first encounter with the power of the group my first professional encounter. Then when I was doing my studies as a PhD student, I started to think on how innovation happens within companies, and this is back to the early nineties. So people don't speak much about innovation back then and how innovation happens consistently within companies. And innovation is not a process that you can command and control. I cannot tell you to please surprise me with a delightful innovation by next Wednesday at 2:00 PM when we meet again. It just doesn't work this way. Bummer,

Suzan 6:56

I wish I had that superpower.

Anat 6:58

Exactly. Innovation has emergent quality to it. And so came a question on if you were to induce it, if you were to manage it, if you were to. By will, what are the organizational instruments, if you will, or tools or processes or that we could leverage to, to create innovation repetitively structure for innovation. And it occurred to me back then that one of the better ways to I'll say induce innovation is by. Creating a cross-functional arrangement in 2022. It's a trivial statement. In 1992, when I started to work on this, it was everything but trivial. I had to convince people that there was something down that path. So they'll let me research that and I spent. At least seven or eight years studying the power of cross-functional arrangements as means to introduce innovation. The plain idea is actually quite simple. We're looking for what's called the wide space. You know, The space between your knowledge and mine, and if around the table there sit six or seven or 15, but not that very many actually, people with different backgrounds, they were schooled differently. They have different basic assumptions. They bring different knowledge, right? The white space between them is a very juicy place to try and tap. And from that place there can arise innovation. Because the white space is the place where the disciplines are not fully meeting. So finance and marketing and pharmacokinetics and chemistry are not fully touching each other. That is the untapped white space. If you can tap it and you can innovate and your only way to tap it is to bring different capabilities to one conversation.

Suzan 8:54

I love all of it. There's so much in there so much good stuff. A the idea that you can't have a repeatable recipe for innovation, but you can put some structural elements in place that allow you to repeat over time, innovation activity. That's number one. And number two, bringing together people with different background skill sets, mindsets, and allowing them to tap each other's knowledge in a systematic way fuels that innovation consistently. So what does that look like concretely? Let's say you bring marketing and finance. Cause that resonates with me. Yeah. So yeah.

Anat 9:32

So I'll take a step back for a second and come back to your question. Three shoes emerge, right? One structures or structuring works as a container for something they have to put a lot of attention on. What does that container look like? It's the same idea as structuring for right here. We structure the team so that innovation can have the potential to arise. Structure is a container within it. Things can happen if the structure is not right. It won't able to contain the activity that you would like to, again, induce

Suzan 10:08

deliberately. I also love that word induce in this context. It's

Anat 10:11

really, you bring it about, you facilitate, but you're not softly facilitating. You're intentionally facilitating. You know what you're after. So thinking it's like an, it's like the work of the architect. If you design the building well then you enable a certain activity within. If you don't design it well, there's gonna be, things will kind of flow out opposed to contained in. The second idea is, so what makes a team effective? We already have a definition. If you are able to tap the white space, then that, that is the holy grail. That's the most most important issue. So now you ask, so how do we go about it? To tap innovation we say put them in that container, but any container works like a pressure cook. All sorts of pressures emerge within that. You have to find ways to facilitate. They have to be mindful of that to begin with. Find ways to facilitate through and enable the pressure to leave, and the good is to stay. Just like when you cook with a pressure cook, there is this valve it just goes up, right? all the pressure leaves and the good is to stay. It's exactly the same idea. So for a team to succeed, it's not enough that we set the, market here, the finance and the legal guy to work on some whatever drug development proposal for the fda. That's not enough. The expertise are needed. So a necessary condition, but insufficient because what's innately or inherently what's going to happen by design, which is why it's inherent to the situation, is this diversity and inclusion in a broad sense is going to create conflict between people. And you would want these conflicts to emerge because through conflict ideas improve will they actually get aired and then improve. But you would need to be very mindful of being hard on problem and easy on people.

Suzan 12:14

So I love that. Yeah. Being hard on problems and easy on people.

Anat 12:19

Exactly. So that the conflict doesn't happen between us as people. It happens between our idea. I love

Suzan 12:28

that so much, and it reminds me of another conversation I had with Bill Kleer at Columbia Business School last week. We were talking about boardrooms and how historically boardrooms have been really homogenous, and now it's important that we diversified boards, right? About how difficult it is to bring about diversity in a way that doesn't also breed conflict. So need to cross reference that conversation here because it is really applicable. And I love how you put that, being hard on problems that not people allowing ideas to be in conflict instead of ourselves. That's amazing.

Anat 13:00

The difficulty there. Which it's easier said than done not right, because the difficulty is for very many people. Their ideas and their egos are entangled. So if I criticize your idea, you experience it as if I'm criticizing you, I'm not criticizing you. And we have difficulties holding our ideas as objects outside of ourselves. Absolutely. Yeah. So

Suzan 13:30

the rules that resonates, I think I fall under that category sometimes. We

Anat 13:34

all, it's very humane. So the difficulty is for, it needs to be managed is to continuously manage that separation between people and their ideas. Once ideas have been, we'll call this objectified, so there is no ego in the idea. Then all ideas are good for, are good as long as we allow them to be

Suzan 14:01

great. They're good for examination, for refinement, and then some of them even for testing and prototyping.

Anat 14:06

Exactly. Or for kill early. It's all okay because there is no, there, there is no attachment. Now, how do you manage that? So now you are borderline between the business conversation and the psychology of us.

14:22

executive. The podcast is sponsored by ViiV Higher Education, a full service marketing agency and enrollment strategy consulting firm for colleges and universities. ViiV is passionate about executive education and lifelong learning. Today's episode is brought to you by NYU Stern Executive Education

Anat 14:41

You need to take a

Suzan 14:41

therapist in the room with you, right?

Anat 14:43

That's right. That's right. Exactly. And the art facilitation had become so important. Exactly. For that reason. It's not to say that very many people are very good and very skilled that way, but it is to say that's exactly what's needed for a team to be success. Because to, to leave it to the team to manage, forget. It's just, it's not, these are not things that happen on their own. Just like many other areas in our lives, many people are parents, very few are good parents. It's the same idea. Many people are team members, or many people participate in teams. Only very few teams are actually success. So you can't live it to the team to manage itself because it cannot manage itself. It doesn't have an alter ego. It cannot step outside of itself to manage itself. You almost need a.

Suzan 15:34

Person to speak it into existence continuously. That it's okay that ideas are in conflict with each other and that's healthy and appreciated and necessary for innovation to happen. And then I assume people can step out of themselves, out of their own egos and say, oh yeah, I'm participating in something that's messy for a good reason. We want it to be messy. That's right. Because that's how we can

Anat 15:56

innovate. That's right. And people have difficulties with mess. Because some people need, closure, so they don't like things to float, and people have difficulties with conflicts and people have difficulties with the uncertainty. That emerges around both messy ideas and conflict between them and the rest of the Joes in the room. So it triggers a lot of emotionality and a lot of pressure in the pressure cook, and hence why the facilitation here has to be very clever for the team to succeed. So what is a successful team? The team that is able to innovate, the team that found the white space, but the pursuit is complicated. You have to find ways to externalize your knowledge as a professional. Our knowledge is internal to us, right? I, I don't know your knowledge. You don't know mine. We just can presuppose that we have a. But in the work of combining our knowledges and finding the space in between our knowledge areas where we can innovate from the first condition is to actually know what it is, wow. Yeah. Yeah. If I don't know what you know and you don't know what I know, then the whole exercise is done. It's just, it's dead

Suzan 17:13

and appreciate what you know. And also appreciate what you might not know and how I might be able to fill gas. Exactly. Exactly.

Anat 17:20

So now that's the second step. So first is the out of externalizing, which can only happen if it's just like what we're doing right now. The, those questions flowing right and questions help people externalize what it is they. And verbalize it. And some people are really good with the way they're, they verbalize and rationalize and some people are not. So go figure what it is they know. So somebody has to help with that too sometimes. All right. So that's step one. Step two is to gain appreciation for that knowledge.

Suzan 17:48

Ah, okay. I got ahead of

Anat 17:49

us here, Yeah. But look how interesting that is. Some some are schooled ver in a very analytical way. Some are schooled in a very creative intuitive. So what does it take for the intuitive conversation to meet the analytical one with respect? The analytical conversation favors, data favors deduction or deductive processes of decisions. The creative conversation favors intuition, inspiration. So, you know, It's like those jokes of, the marketeer, the financier and the legal guy went on a plane, right? The way they will arrive at, world peace. Oh, that, that's very, with respect to one another, that's very complicated. So somebody has to be the guard for the norms in the room. Set them and guard for them if you want respect. It's not enough that I'll say to you, the next 30 minutes that we talk here, we should show respect to one another because Yeah, we will until we won't. Until, you know, if the stakes are really. And if the team doesn't succeed and you know that you might be fired because of that, you'll fight for your ideas and you might not show as much respect to other ideas you disagree with. So it's one thing to talk, it's another thing to ex exhibit. And so the rules and the norms have to be put in place. Somebody has to manage them. It's the same somebody. That manages the container, so to speak. It's the same facilitator. So yes, they have to be a theme, a team therapist, so to speak, right? They have to understand those nuances. They have to call them when they happen. They have to know when norms are being violated when somebody sits and they begin to roll their eyes up, right? It's a violation of the normal respect. All right. Do you know what to do in that moment? Do you know if you were

Suzan 19:37

personally, I would assume. It's best to maybe call it out in a respectful way rather than to let it go.

Anat 19:44

That's right. That's right. You have to draw the line and as soon as possible because if you let it slide, the next one will come, and the third one, that's the end of the team. People will not feel that this is a safe, psychologically safe environment for them to function in.

Suzan 20:00

Any of us who've ever worked on a team, no matter in what size organization, we have been in the room when this exact scenario has played out and we have felt the discomfort. We felt the sort of loss of motivation. And I think it's so great that you're putting tools in place that you can give to managers and organizations to say, it doesn't have to play out this way.

Anat 20:23

That's right. That's right. Because when an environment becomes psychologically unsafe for people, many retrieve or in any case be thrown out of balance. So instead of being your assertive. you'll either become more aggressive or you'll become more defensive. Withdrawn. Yeah. And withdrawn. Exactly. And so the team is, is done irrespective of the fact that around the table there sit brilliant minds that are great experts, that if they only spoke with one another, they could have arrived at a magnificent innovation. So going back to the question of what makes a team successful, right? The ultimate success is the impact the team drives. In that case is usually innovation or some something to do with the objectives for which the team was put in place. But on the way there, what we call team effectiveness. Is essential and team effectiveness is made of the ability to go after problems in the most fierce way. But the ability to respect one another just as much. The ability to tolerate ambiguity, not rush to close. The ability to work through a process, which essentially has some sort of a diamond shape to wait or open. And then open, open, open some more. And then once you feel that you exhausted all the possibilities. You can now begin to narrow down in the open. You're in an inductive, exploratory mode, and some people become increasingly less comfortable. With the next open space. Yeah, sure.

Suzan 22:01

The ability to tolerate ambiguity differs across people. Absolutely.

Anat 22:06

Exactly. So they begin to pressure for uh, didn't we not speak enough? Can we come up with a conclusion and move on? Time is ticking. They don't have the innate intelligence of go slow to go fast. To know that you have to go slow first, you have to explore. And the more you explore, the better your solution will be and the faster it will actually arrive. So there is a bit of a dissonance there, a bit of a paradox there. Totally. Yeah. They don't have the emotional What shall we call it? It's some sort of a native, it's

Suzan 22:47

like an intuition, right? That,

Anat 22:48

To handle the ambiguity that comes with it. And the feeling that you're not on, you on schedule kind of thing. You are. Yeah. Or

Suzan 22:55

You have an idea that all of a sudden makes. Perfect sense to you, and maybe other people in the room are nodding their heads. Yeah. This might make some sense. So you wanna lock that idea in. You don't want it to be on the table to be dissected anymore. Yeah. You wanna decide that's what you're

Anat 23:09

gonna do. That's right. But incubation like foliage like cooking, You, you have to let. Sit and simmer and brew, and you have to be more appreciative of the process through which things get cooked. Ideas and all the

Suzan 23:26

cooking references, it sounds like the pressure cooker and the simmering and,

Anat 23:30

All very useful images, but all of this is, I rarely cook, but the analogies are there, right? If it's the same process, other people do cook so they can perhaps it perhaps resonates with them. Things take the time that they take. Okay. And you need to let them, let them be. People are pressured because they think that they will run out of time, and my advice here actually is to let that time to to manage time, not be managed by it. To manage time and to manage time is to understand what you can do with time. Slow first and fast later. Wow. If If you get out of the gate fast, you'll end up going very, Because you'll stumble and you'll make mistakes, and you didn't put the infrastructure in place and you didn't really see things effectively, and you didn't let them incubate. But if you get out of the gate slowly, you let things move, not in an a chilled way. But in, in figuring out their own pace.

Suzan 24:35

Yeah. And like a deliberate pace Exactly. Is being set. Because we understand we can't just rush this, even if we have the perfect idea in the first minute, it needs time to simmer anyway.

Anat 24:47

That's right. And it needs time to be subject to all sorts of tests, conceptual tests, before you know that this is indeed the perfect. Yeah, so ly or criticizing or, putting people in small teams to then generate alternative ideas or what have you, right? There is a slow process first. That's the open, open, open, or mm-hmm. at one point. You know that you exhausted the conversation. You un you, you spoke it all out. You saw it all, you understood it all. You, you, you, You're done. And you have nothing new to bring to the table. And that's it. And that usually happens around what we call the halflife point of the project. So everything has a half-life point to. Literally the halflife. The first half we schmoozing, talking slowly about things, but then you have a list of questions that you wanna go through and you become mindful of the time. In Halflife point, the whole conversation begins to move cuz you now know that it's gonna be done, we will be

Suzan 25:50

done so far, and it happens almost intuitively without people really planning. Exactly, and it happens collectively. So people are ready now. We're making decisions now we're gonna reach consensus. That's right.

Anat 26:02

That's right. And the readiness to the point that you're making arrived organically, so you don't need to fight it. It just arrives.

Suzan 26:09

A concept in qualitative research that I'm familiar with because I did a qualitative research project for my PhD and everything, and it's the idea of saturation. That you've asked enough questions, you've interviewed enough people, you all of a sudden you hear the same things over and over again. You've reached saturation.

Anat 26:30

That's exactly right and it's interesting how this happens. If you manage it effectively, you hate the saturation point almost always in the half-life point of the project. That's interesting. I had

Suzan 26:42

never heard that before.

Anat 26:43

It is so interesting. So if you know it as a facilitator, And if you know how to facilitate to that moment, you enter the room very confident because you have a good handle over time, you manage time, time doesn't manage you and you know the activities and you know they're all there. You will work quite hard first to just set the norms, get people to know each other, calmly. Put the first thing into motion, and then the second and then the third. And little by little get the room to explore all the possible options with respect to whatever it is you're doing, all the way to what you called saturation point. And if you. That you missed the halflife point or that you're nearing the halflife point in saturation is nowhere near is not seeing anywhere near then it's because you haven't pressed enough on exploration. So you have to, turn the dial, shall we save? Put some fire underneath, the work that people are doing to quickly expand beyond where they. Bring some experts, from outside of the room to ignite people. Send them on some crazy mission a moonshot mission. Something that's going to bring more and help them push themselves a little further. Before we can pull, begin to pull things back and say, okay, now let's take a look at everything that we've accumulated. Let's sew it out. As you go in that process, the more you can separate ideas from people, simple things like putting ideas on notes, and sticking them to the world. After a while, no one knows whose idea was it and doesn't really matter. You have an economy of ideas that you created. You have an economy of concepts or an ecosystem of concepts that you created together. And the interesting idea about practices like that is you don't need to talk, you need to do, you need to know what to do. So if you enter the room, you have a short conversation on mandate and what we're supposed to be doing all that, and then you split people into sub. To go do the first level of exploration, come back to report on what it is they found instantaneously. You legitimized that there will be different ideas because naturally four teams have gone to explore. Four teams will come back with naturally different ideas. Instantaneously you have okayed that there will be different ideas and there's no need for pressure on, the idea actually, there is a need for pressure on, let's see who's going to surprise us with something even more interest. And then you have each team talk about their ideas and present it to one another, and that ignites a second round of exploration because each team has thought of something that my team did not. So on behalf of Open open, open, This is what that process looks like.

Suzan 29:33

Yeah, and I think it probably is important for the people in the room who are more impatient and don't have that intuitive understanding that it takes time to make it very explicit why we're going slow at the beginning and why we're turning all the ideas on their head and. We're not trying to just do this because it's fun and we have all the time in the world. We're doing it because we know research shows that it's the best possible way to set the stage for an innovation.

Anat 30:04

Yeah, that's exactly right. And um, it's a very good point that you bring up because even if you said it, there'll be enough people that will write you off as a team lead because they don't think that you're right. You have to learn to be what I call democratic on content and dictatorial on process.

Suzan 30:23

Wow. Democratic on content, dictatorial on process.

Anat 30:28

Exactly. You as a team leader, you manage the process. You don't manage the content. It's the team that produces the content. You manage the process. How often do we meet for how long do we meet? What do we do when we meet? What are the outcomes? What is the agenda that's that we are supposed to follow? What are the outcomes that are expected? You manage that and you are dictatorial about it. Because you are facilitating and that's your job. Your job is not to consider and contribute ideas. For the, to, for the project's goals. Your job is to make sure that we will arrive with idea. that's different.

Suzan 31:07

You can always, no matter what the ideas are, that's not really my concern. Just as long as we have ideas that have been vetted and considered

Anat 31:14

thoroughly. E. Exactly. Not only that, if you could come up with the ideas yourself, what do we need a team for? right? So the whole point of the white space is to identify ideas between ideas. It cannot be the job of one person, and hence why your ideas as a team leader are completely. Unnecessary. Actually, there are noise. And they also disrupt you from seeing, managing the process.

Suzan 31:38

Because I'm so attached to them that I'm not able to listen to other people's ideas and new thoughts. Exactly. Now if I'm a team lead and I'm struggling because I feel like my team has gotten into a rod. There some tensions that are festering. I'm not really sure what the direction. Going to be from top leadership of the company, but I know I want to not just settle for that. I want to innovate. I want to have a high performing team. What's the best advice? Would you tell me to get a, to find a facilitator or what's the first step I should take to, to

Anat 32:12

improve? If you yourself cannot facilitate, then you have to have a facilitator in the room. You have to find a facilitator and add them to the room and work in the background. In other words, not be the most prominent figure in the room, in any case, because of your status in the company. Your voice is always heard twice as loud, so you need to learn to be quiet. I think in any case, most people, most of the time, myself included, need to learn to be more quiet. Because most of our interventions interfere. Absolutely. That usually the case. Yeah. you need to have a facilitator that's going to help manage the process and the processes. I earlier said open. Open, then close. All the way to implementation. No different than say strategic planning and then operational plan, right? The strategic plan is following a concept. It had to stay with a lot of, had to absorb and, and bring in a lot of uncertainty and put words around it, but then the action follows later. If there is no strategic plan, there cannot be an operational plan. There's no, there's just no, no shortcut there. So the process is quite clear. The process says go from, setting the team. That means composition, identifying the mandate, sharing the mandate, discussing it, clarifying roles, responsibilities. Just get that at, at the starting point. Then subject the team to a lot of push and pull, which what this push and pull is we push and pull on ideas and we work well together. The facilitator has to be able to manage both levels of the process, push and pull on ideas, and holding together as a team with respect, with fun, with laughs, with all that, all the way to where most of the ideas have been exhausted and saturation point and Halflife point have. And then switch gears to say, okay, so the conversations we held in the room for the past, as many meetings that we had have led us to understand. Call it out right? Then the, these five issues of which we are seeming to the, you know what the third idea is showing as a future direction for our work. Okay. Now let's take a look at what would it, what will it mean to translate it into action, right? To prototype it, to, to move past the point of discussion. And now we begin to narrow and close and implement. The facilitation here suggests that the more effective your push and pull, the greater the team equity that was built, that can then be useful in time of implementation. That

Suzan 34:58

makes total sense, right?

Anat 34:59

and it can only be formed through that level conflict. So

Suzan 35:05

conflict is essential to a cohesive team. It just needs to be healthy

Anat 35:09

conflict. Exactly. Exactly. Conflict is beautiful. Conflict has to be conflict, has bad reputation for the wrong reason because people are afraid of it. But you and I know if you take all the relationships that currently in of all types, right? Those that are voided of conflict are the weakest. Yes. Not the strongest, the weakest, yes. Yeah. Because the reason there is no conflict is not because there is full agreement, but because there is a lot of fear that if you air something, you will not be liked, you will not be supported. The relationship will go out the window. So we don't do, we don't dare, but if we do there, you see what happens. If we do dare, then we begin to understand each other a whole lot. I know what bothers you. I begin to understand why it bothers you. I understand all your buttons. I know where you're strong. I know where you are weak, and you know the same about me. So a new level of intimacy emotionality connectivity, and no knowledge of each other has come. We've arrived there. Now we can utilize our relat. And that knowledge of each other in a much better way. I know what upsets you, so why would I upset you? How is this gonna be useful and for what exact purpose? So maybe I shouldn't, I know that when I begin to philosophize you check out because you are a visual person and you like a different way to be communicated too. So if I want make sense to. Why would I use so many words? I learn how to work with you. I learn how to extract the best out of you, and you learn the same about me. That's team equity. That's relationship equity, and that becomes really precious, and that is what we leverage as we progress, because when we need to execute, It's who in your life will you go to IKEA with to buy something and then assemble it together? You know? Right. Then it's the short Exactly. But the Ikea test, because when we assemble something together and IKEA never leaves you any single additional thing. It's all right. When we assemble together, the incapable that we usually. There's all sorts of, oh, why did you do that? Why do you talk to me this way? And people get so upset so quickly over assembling a shelf together, right? All right. It's the same thing. If we know each other very well, then we know we learned how to work with one another. We can assemble all iCare furniture. Quite well. That's the metaphor,

Suzan 37:48

and it seems to me that the reason that the initial ideation stage or the time before the halfway point needs to be stretched out and calm is because it accommodates time for bonding. It's not just about the generation of ideas, it's also about getting to know each other and trusting each other.

Anat 38:06

One of the key mistakes that many people make is on day one of the team, they go to some team development exercise where we go to the wild, I stand on the rock, I fall back and the team has to catch me. Oh gosh. Like a complete waste of, so forced a complete waste of resource. Because on day one we don't know each other. There's no point in you catching, of course you'll catch me. So what? No, you let me roll down the hill. And that was the end of me. So what

Suzan 38:38

flash, how beautiful if I catch you after day five when we've had some real conflict in the room.

Anat 38:44

That's exactly right. So as a team lead or a facilitator, when you see fire emerging, your fire extinguish. Is a$400 budget to send all these people right now to go eat together or drink together or have a fun moment where they come out of the room furious and they'll come back to the room. Med in love with one another. So you also have

Suzan 39:14

to leave some room in your agenda, to make some impromptu decisions around what the team needs right now. And I assume as a facilitator you can also anticipate those moments based on past experiences, and you could craft your agenda accordingly. But still having that mindset of, I might need to shift things depending on how it's going with the

Anat 39:32

team. That's right. That's right.

Suzan 39:34

When you think of NYU Stern and the executive learning environment there, what would you say makes it unique? What have you seen, in the participants that they've really appreciated about NYU Stern, that they haven't really gotten anywhere else?

Anat 39:47

I think that the, I don't know what people get other places, cuz I've been at nyu for very many years. I have done executive education worldwide but I do know to say that the caliber of the professors, I think all executive MBA programs put in front of. Of students, their most seasoned professors, because of the level. Of experience that the students themselves bring to the room. So the issue here is to do, have that caliber of professors, which we do. We have an un unbelievable team there. And so that makes a big difference because these are people I'm proud to be one person within that group that. Decades of experience, dynamic experience, not stale, decades of experience, industry experience, industry leadership, and of course academic leadership. And that blend is phenomenal for the type of conversations that can get produced or induced again in the room. It's phenomenal. So between having very typically amazing people walking into the room as. Because what qualifies a person like that is for one, they're will to learn, which is fantastic, and then their own experience. Most people are very seasoned and the person they meet in the room, it's like going to a really good, seasoned physician. It's a, the multiply on expertise is the, is unbelievable, right? What you can, the ROI because of the level of expertise is just, it's just fantastic. This is something that we've invested in a lot. And that we are successful in turning great results. So the I don't know if that necessarily distinguishes us from, say, the top business schools out there. I would assume that this is a quality that most great shops share because that's what makes them great, but it's also the consistency by which you deliver this experience, we talk to industry every day. Our location is very meaningful in that sense. It produces a lot of opportunities for great connections and, sitting in the hub of the, one of the hubs of the world never hurts when it comes to this type of issues. Consistency is key ingredient for excellence. If you cannot be consistent you'll end up regressing to some level mediocracy. And we are consistent.

Suzan 41:57

I will end with the question that I ask everyone. In a nutshell, what does leadership mean

Anat 42:03

to you? Leadership to me shows in three ways. There are the people who lead from the front. They lead with ideas in mind. These are the visionaries that say, follow me. I know where I'm headed for that you have to be a person that's, I call it swimming in your own river, so to speak. You are exploratory. You you are in, you set your camp, so to speak. You don't join other people's camps, and of course you're a visionary, so you sit in 2030 where all of us are in 2022, and it's just an innate quality that you have. Then there are the people who lead with a system in mind. Not ideas in mind, a system in mind. They're not necessarily your visionary. They don't necessarily know to think creatively on where can we go or where can our future be. But they do know how to get there because they understand systems that are system thinkers. So if the first guy is your visionary, then the second guy is your architect. They know how to architect. Solutions. Putting resources in place, putting structures in place integrate culture into structure, talent into culture. They know how to work with the resources to create a reality. And then there is the third type leadership. They don't lead with ideas in mind and they don't lead with the system in mind. They lead with people in. What they're able to do is they're able to facilitate, they're able to take five people, put them in a team, and get out of that team where these people would never be able to achieve alone, and this is because they understand people and understand the emotional dynamics. They have this level of EQ that they bring in. So with the architect or if the visionary, the architect, and the alchemist came together. Then you have everything that you need within an organization to succeed.

Suzan 44:07

The visionary, the architect at The Alchemist. Yeah. We are so lucky that you were willing to share all this expertise and insight with us, and I can't wait to share this episode with the world. Thank you so much for being on the

Anat 44:21

show. Thank you. So that was fascinating talking. Thanks for the opportunity.

44:26

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