the Watson standard
A podcast for leaders who want to change their organizations without losing sight of people, purpose, or principles along the way.
the Watson standard
We're Squading Wrong: Getting Flexible Deployments Right
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Getting deployed into something different when you potentially have cultivated an identity of self connected to certain types of work can be pretty jarring. It can disrupt what you've come to understand about your value to the organization.
SPEAKER_00The proliferation of work in the system can spread very quickly. And so everybody becomes overworked because you try to tackle every problem that the system produces. And no organization can do that. You have to choose. Prioritization is a key role of management. And managers who refuse to prioritize fail their teams.
SPEAKER_01In some cases, the thousand flowers bloom, a bunch of different people deployed on a similar challenge to me can often feel like avoidance of having to create the conditions for different perspectives to be heard and seen and valued in one work group.
SPEAKER_00Conflict often results from a failure of pre-negotiating things that should be pre-negotiated. As a VP in organizations, I have three people I have to negotiate with in most things to stand up a project or to make space for something. The people in my team are dealing with 10 or 15 people they have to negotiate with. And that's exponentially more difficult.
SPEAKER_01If you walk in one of these rooms or join one of these squads and it's clear that others aren't seeing why they are here, you owe it to yourself to actually share that and to articulate that so that there's space for your voice, but also so that the work can actually be influenced by you in a meaningful way.
SPEAKER_00Most importantly is the authority structure is split and diverse. And these competing priorities from people's home teams actually matter for the work, but also create conflict. The core challenge is taking those and making productive use of those competing priorities so that you can actually get a better outcome than you would if it was homed in just one of those teams.
SPEAKER_01The place that I see it go wrong most often is when it turns into a forum for everyone trying to convince one person that their ideas are right. And that person sitting there with their arms crossed in the corner, judging the hell out of everybody. Those situations have caused a lot of people to get frustrated by squad because it just becomes like a shark take session versus a true space for co creative ideation and innovation on new things.