Power Up Your Team

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Christina Comaford. For over 30 years she has been a leadership and workplace agility expert serial entrepreneur. I really want to hear all about that, by the way, and New York Times bestselling author. She has helped leaders navigate growth and change. Her coaching, consulting, and strategies have created hundreds of billions of dollars in new revenue and company value for her clients. Christine. Thank you so much for making time today.

Christine Comaford: You're welcome. Thank you for the opportunity to be here, Anita. I'm very excited to be here.

Anita Brick: To be honest, I'm looking at the book we're going to talk about today is Power Your Tribe. Create resilient teams in turbulent times. You're very, very practical, but really a little bit on the edge in a good way. Bringing neuroscience in, but making it very practical and accessible. So we'll jump in. Let's do it. So this first question is something troubling students. And he said how important is trust in creating a resilient team. If it is crucial how can you accelerate trust among your team members? And actually this is an alarm.

Christine Comaford: If we don't have trust, what do we have? We need to depend on each other. That's trust. Count on each other to contribute. We need to have communication that is upfront and honest. That's trust. We need to collaborate. That's trust. We need to align the same mission vision values if you will. That's trust. I think trust is absolutely essential.

Here's what's cool. We have a formula for this. Everybody grab your pencil. Safety plus belonging plus mattering equals trust. I see this again and again and again. When we can create a team environment that is rich in safety, freedom from fear. Enough certainty as we can actually create. You can't have certainty in everything. The world is in constant, perpetual, fast change.

If we can know that people have our back, if we can know that we fit in, that we have value, that our voice is heard. If we can know that we belong, know that we matter, that each of us is contributing something unique and beautiful and important, then we have that structure of trust, and no matter what comes at us, we can reframe it and we can say, oh, here comes a tidal wave, let's grab our surfboards. Well, instead of, oh my gosh, here comes a tidal wave. Let's run screaming.

Anita Brick: Right? It's interesting because it smells like a question from an exec MBA student, she said. In an environment that isn't flourishing at the moment, how can you make what outcome you want to create today and make it a reality? How do you make that real and not a cliche slogan?

Christine Comaford: This isn't Pollyanna. If things aren't going great, many people will generally resist. Resistance takes a tremendous amount of energy because you're all pushing against something. So one of the first things we need to do in an environment that isn't flourishing at the moment is to consent. That doesn't mean, say that it's okay. That just means to say, okay, wow, this is stressful.

Overwhelming. Irritating. What? Scary. Whatever it is. So first we consent to it. So we start putting all that energy of resistance against it. Then once we go, okay, let's just be present to it. That's what consenting is. You can use the emotion wheel. You can use maneuvers of consciousness. You can use all the great tools. In chapter three we get present to it and then we can say, what would I like?

But as long as we are resisting it, we can't get there. So with this team, I would first consent to all the stuff that's happening, trash what's happening, negative evaluation for three minutes, then go into curiosity for three minutes. We walk you through it in the book, then go to amazement for three minutes. Wow. It's amazing that all this stuff actually is happening.

Then go to full appreciation so we can at least shift our emotional state and stop putting so much energy on resisting. Then we ask, of course, the outcome frame question: what would we like here to turn our focus from the problem to the outcome? What will having that do for us? How will we feel? What benefits will we get?

How will we know when we have the outcome we want? When we're with whom do we want this outcome? My favorite question: what value might we risk or lose? We have to get present to the cost because until we can answer that question honestly, what do we value? Might we risk or lose? What side effects might occur?

We can't have the outcome. This team I betcha, is really swirling around resistance. And then next we ask, okay, what are our next steps? And before you know it, you've got that team aligned. Doesn't matter how challenging it's going to be or it's been in the past, we're in our prefrontal cortex instead of in our reptilian mammalian fight flight freeze, limbic system down.

We have to shift this team. Businesses go through cycles. Sometimes you're not flourishing the way that you act when you're not forcing your behaviorist beliefs, identity capabilities, when you're not flourishing, actually setting things up to flourish. Does that make sense?

Anita Brick: Yeah it does. There are a handful of questions. I think that the answer is the same, but the scenarios are different. So let's plunge in and look at a slightly different one. And Allen said my team feels like second class citizens after being acquired by a larger company. I actually don't disagree with them. What would you suggest as a next step for me so that I can empower myself so that ultimately I can empower the team.

Christine Comaford: So when we feel like second class citizens, we are having a belonging challenge. It's us. It's them. We're not in this together. Together as a really important word. In my experience, it brings rich levels of safety, belonging and mattering. If your team feels like second class citizens, let's first consent to that. When we feel we don't belong, if we feel like second class citizens, we've got to turn that around.

So we've got to at least feel like we matter and we belong, and we're safe in our own little tribe. So what I would first do is I would see if there's a way that we can actually do a company wide survey so that leadership of the new parent company understands what everybody's emotional experiences are then. And we map this out in chapter seven eight, we show you all the different cultural rituals to put in place to actually boost the experience that's missing, boost the experience of belonging.

Boost the experience of mattering. We have an opportunity here to create a new identity. If we have just been acquired and we're sort of the outsiders, what is the identity we want? That's more empowering because the outsider, second class citizen identity is going to affect people's behavior, capabilities, beliefs. They're not going to show up as powerfully as they could.

We have to show them that they actually have more status. Let me give you a quick example. One of my favorite stories is about Bill gates. When windows was launched, it was a total disaster. Everybody was making fun of it. It was just a horror show. And Bill kept saying, it doesn't matter, underworld standards. People just haven't figured it out.

It's gonna be world standard. He hung on to that and kept saying that for five years, and his belief was so strong and he was definitely being excluded by the press, definitely being laughed at. And his belief was so strong. He built a team around him. We were creating this stuff for the future and everybody else just didn't understand that yet.

So it was important to be compassionate. Everybody got lab coats. Were the scientists designing the future? What's the identity you can create for your team? Are they architects of the future? Are they Star Trek people looking at the next frontier? We have to create a tribal identity for our people. If you go to power your tribe.com, please log in and grab the tribal identity resource that shows you how to forge a new tribal identity for your people so they feel more powerful so they can show up.

And you know what might happen? You might find in six months or so that your little renegade team is creating amazing results. And then the corporate will say, what are you guys doing over there? Can you clue us in? What do you do that I hope we don't have?

Anita Brick: Good point. Let's do another belonging from the opposite side so we can. Students said I inherited a team six months ago, and while they feel that they belong to one another, I don't feel that I'm part of the team to get their work done. But I'm clearly an outsider, almost like I'm an external consultant. What advice would you have so that I can begin to belong to them as a leader and as a team member?

Christine Comaford: Good. I don't know if you're using the words we or not, my friend, but please start using we. This is a great opportunity to sit down with everybody and to do an outcome frame together. Hey guys. As we look at whatever the coming quarter of the coming, the year, the coming, whatever, what would we like? If you do at least 15 minutes, you've got to do 15 minutes with the outcome frame.

You guys. It makes a huge difference when we spend 15 minutes doing it. Outcome frame. These are the questions from before. What would we like? What will having that do for us? How will we know when we have it? When we're waiting? Would we like it? What do they make us risk or lose to get it? And then what are our next steps?

When we do an outcome frame for at least 15 minutes with a group of people, you can also use a solo. What I would love to see is as you do that, you will then be firing up visual, auditory, kinesthetic cues as everybody is designing their future together. We don't have that experience together right now. So with this and heritage team, you actually need to create shared experiences together.

If we go in, remember the recipe for emotional engagement oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine. If you can actually go in there using an outcome frame, bring everybody together. Oxytocin. Feeling bonded. Connected. Designed this glorious future. Dopamine anticipation of reward. Serotonin feeling good then you're all going to be firing off all these neurotransmitters together. As you have those next steps, you will have the next step.

Make sure you have next steps, not just them having next steps. Because we're going to create this glorious future together. I want to stress how important that is. And also I want to ask you to look at how you are separating from them. Good question. Not belonging to them because it's a system, right. So what role are you playing that's causing you to separate from them?

Anita Brick: Very important question. It can be this whole thing that once you get started you feel separated from them and then they feel separated from you and then you feel more separated from them and someone has to stop it. And in my opinion, it has to be the leader.

Christine Comaford: Absolutely the leader, the count. What if there's no such thing as a sales problem, a marketing problem, an operations problem, manufacturing problem? What if the only type of problem ever is a leadership problem?

Anita Brick: That's like so here's another leader who's feeling a little out of the loop. This is an exact MBA student. And he said in your book you talk about safety, belonging and matter which we talked about, which of course covers virtually everything. I work on these with each member of my team and this works well. How do I ask for what I need from senior leadership? Because they don't really seem to care about this as long as I get my job done and I produce the results that are needed.

Christine Comaford: I'm so curious about the organizational rights that this MBA student is experiencing. I'm so curious as to whether this person experiences having a right to exist. I have a right to have needs. Our prior question was also about that person's needs aren't being met. I don't think he or she was present to their needs. Do you have a right to have any existing MBA students?

Do you have a right to take action? Do you have a right to have consequences for your actions? And then do you have a right to love or be loved? My hunch is it's probably more around the lower experience of the right to exist and the right to have needs. First, I would look at your senior leadership and find out what they want from their experience with you.

Do they want in their interactions with you for you to help them better? You do your work so that they look good? Do they want you to belong with them? Sounds like maybe that's not the case. Do they want you to create safety for them? You do all this stuff so they get the data so they can make better decisions.

For instance, So what experience are they asking for from you? And then what are their specific goals? How do they get compensated? How to get their bonus? Let's say what they really like about me. Look at that example. Hey, you know I really want to make the most powerful difference here that will help you and the department company achieve its goals.

I'm doing this, this, this and this. Can you let me know what is working best for you to achieve these particular goals? I have these particular ideas. Someone that I see who has a big perspective. Which of these will make the greatest difference from you? I want this person to change their brand. This person who's asking this question has an opportunity to change their brand, instead of being a kind of worker bee producing results to being strategic, to being a strategic asset.

But we can't rebrand ourselves as a strategic asset until we're speaking the language of the person who actually could use us as a strategic asset. So what is metaprogramming for this person? Is the leadership team more toward get, attain, achieve or away? Solve problems, mitigate risk, prevent disaster? Is the leadership team more about having tons of options, choice and possibility?

Which would you then serve up? Or are they more compelled by a proven step by step process which you would serve up then? Instead, are they more about taking rapid action? Go go go, just do it. Or are they about considering, pondering, understanding, analyzing? I don't think you guys are in rapport. If we start to look at how they experience the world and now start to speak with them so they get that deep experience of being the same as them, then you will loop your arms. Subconsciously you will march forward to a mutually beneficial future. It's a rapport opportunity. Great.

Anita Brick: This sounds like another rapport issue or opportunity. We can. Students said not to be cynical, but I believe I am a diversity hire. That said, while I'm on the senior leadership team, I don't feel included. What can I do to take responsibility for the situation and make myself easier to include?

Christine Comaford: Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Okay. Thanks for calling that out, Anita. Let's look at identity and beliefs. I am a diversity hire. I am not a member of the tribe. They are checking a box with me, you know, etc. there's lots of beliefs and identity going on around here. So what I'm super curious about is back to what we said before.

This is the hardest part about leadership, guys. We see stuff outside of us that we don't want, and we need to pick up that mirror and go, okay, what's my role here? What I would love for this person to do is to start to look at how to create the experience of, like I say, this is a little bit different.

I'm just going to touch on the same thing for one fact. In the prior conversation we talked about the same as speaking the person's language using meta programs, giving them the emotional experience that they want. That's the same as helping that creature's brain go, so I can relax. To this person like me, bias is one of the 150 cognitive biases we all have.

And like me, bias was something that we all created. Our case people ancestors created to make sure that we didn't get killed. The problem with like me bias is we look at all this external, superficial stuff and we decide that they're not like me. And if they're not like me, they probably don't have the same interests. They probably don't have the same desires.

They probably aren't marching to the same beat of the same drum. Your opportunity, my dear friend, is to do the three minute journal that we talk about when we talk about cognitive biases, I believe it's in chapter eight. It's going to be really important for you to start doing that three minute journal where every day you look at those people and for three minutes you write all the stuff you have in common.

My hunch is that you are putting out the message of I'm an outsider. Remember when we talk about emotions and power, your tribe and how emotions have energy? David Hawkins, PhD and MD, did tremendous amounts of work on the magnetic field that comes off of our body and how it actually affects one another. Part math has done work on this science institute.

There's tons of work. So our friend here is broadcasting. Exclude me. Yes, please, my dear friend, please do the three minute journal and start putting out how much you belong with them. Because as you start doing a three minute journal, you're gonna be blown away with how much you have in common with them. Then you can release that diversity story and you can say, I'm here because I have tons in common with them. I belong with them.

Anita Brick: Yeah, absolutely. And his book is wonderful. Power versus force. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really cool. Here's a question from another MBA student. And he said this isn't exactly a team question, but applies to my leadership. I'm working on a career goal. And others keep disappointing me, either because they're incapable of helping me or choose not to. In your book, you talk about appreciating things like this. How is that possible?

Christine Comaford: I could appreciate it as the final step in the maneuvers of consciousness, but it sounds like our friend is still resisting this. I'm curious about this. If people keep disappointing you. Oh, this is an opportunity to expand rapport with yourself, to increase rapport with yourself. If people keep disappointing you, do you have the right, the organismic right to have needs?

Is it okay for people to actually fulfill their needs? Sounds like maybe it's not. I would really encourage you to grab chapter four to go through the org, right? And then to do the parts process. There's a part of you that's running the show here, and that part has a belief and a behavior, a set of behaviors that ensure that people keep disappointing you.

You have created an experience that will keep perpetuating until you choose a better feeling. Alternative. Please do the parts process, my friend. Totally get this disappointing thing. I have struggled with it myself. I do the parts process on this probably once a quarter and each time it gets easier. Parts process. What was that first initial disappointment and what is that part of you that keeps creating disappointment?

Asking for it because somehow there's something good tied to the experience of disappointment. We need to rewire that and put alternative experiences in there that will actually feel better.

Anita Brick: I think that sounds great. And while I have an MBA from here and I have an analytical mind, I can hear in my brain that part of MBA students and alumni hear it saying, oh my gosh, that sounds so squishy to me. Can you give me an algorithm instead? When you think about a study that was done in the workplace where this made a big difference in the company and the individual, does something come to mind?

Christine Comaford: Oh my gosh. So I can't think of a study, but I can think of about seven clients where the executive that we were coaching kept creating this experience because it was familiar and what we finally had to do once I'm thinking of one particular man, once he was actually aware and was willing to look in the mirror and say, how am I creating this?

It's extremely powerful. If you don't want to go that deep, you could just say, what would I rather experience? You've totally trashed how bad the experiences go into curiosity, go into amazement, go into full appreciation, and then do an outcome frame. What would I like to actually see how well I support it? Because if we keep telling people they're going to disappoint us, I promise you they will.

Anita Brick: Oh yeah. No question at all. Do you have time for a couple more questions?

Christine Comaford: Yeah I do.

Anita Brick: Okay. An alum had a question about taking a negative situation and reframing. I think the whole concept was reframing. Reframing seems like a mind game to me. Like taking a negative situation and tricking yourself to be positive. I can see that that works in the moment, but how can I make this approach real and enduring?

Christine Comaford: So Shakespeare said this hundred years ago. Shakespeare said nothing is either good or bad. Only thinking makes it so. If nothing actually inherently is good or bad, what is the most useful way to experience whatever it is that you are experiencing? We talk about one of our clients in how your tribe in Latin America dictators, currencies crashing, supply chains drying up, totally affecting their revenue, totally affecting the morale of their team.

Their team was super defeated. It did take us about two and a half years. We took the lowest performing division for the parent company, lowest performing division, and now they are the top performing division, delivering over $7 billion of revenue each year and 50% of the Motherships growth. Here's what we did. Instead of going, all these things are happening outside of me that I can't control.

We had to say, you know what? When all these things happen, look at the trigger, look at the routine and look at the reward. We talk about this, the trigger event, all sorts of scary stuff happening outside of us. The routine used to be to get freaked out, say we can't meet our sales numbers, throw in the towel and just go outside and smoke a cigarette at the reward as the person got to feel like, I can't control this anyway.

I just have to give up and roll back and belly up instead. Once we did some reframing work, we did some anchoring work, etc. we were able to say, hey, all these things outside of us that we can't control. Awesome. That means it's time to get new ideas. It's time to create new strategies. All those trigger events are simply signs saying, time to roll up our sleeves and find a whole different way of doing this.

Do some brainstorming. Time to forge some new alliances. Time to do that. The reward then empowerment. Confidence, etc. the question is what would you like to come back to the outcome frames? What would you like? And how do we want to tell people how to feel? Because based on how they feel, that would determine how they behave. That will determine what they believe. Nothing is good or bad. Only thinking makes it so.

Anita Brick: I agree it's not Pollyanna. How do you create the most value?

Christine Comaford: Yes, yes, all these tools we're talking about are about resilience. You are so much more resilient than you guys all realize. So we use these tools. They're a little bit uncomfortable in the beginning because we haven't used them. It's myelination. It's forging new pathways. There's a term Hebbian potentiation. Think about an LP record. There are grooves. And let's take a step back.

Anita Brick: Let them know what an LP is. Okay.

Christine Comaford: Okay. Thank you. A vinyl record for those of you who remember what vinyl records are, but they're also coming back in vogue where you can listen to music on an LP. A big black disc that's made out of vinyl that has other songs on it. We have grooves of meaning, grooves of deeply ingrained behaviors, and our system will always choose the behavior with the deepest groove, the behavior that we have done the most, the behavior that is most familiar, the behavior that.

Thus, since it's most familiar, we've done it so much, it feels the most comfortable, if you will, or even good in some cases. In order to forge a new groove, we will have to do some deep practice, like when you learn something new and you can feel that you're kind of pushing, oh man, this is kind of hard, but I'm going to figure this out.

Great examples are learning a new language, learning how to play a new instrument, learning how to choose a different behavior in a given context. As we do that, we create new neural pathways and as we struggle, not trauma, but struggle. Because sometimes we have to really work at creating a new pathway, a new behavior. That new behavior becomes insulated, called myelin.

White matter insulates that gray matter. New neural pathway. As we keep using that new behavior, myelination gets bigger and bigger, thicker and thicker. And what's cool is that it becomes our new default behavior. Your system will always go for the most heavily trafficked, the optimized behavior. You are going to need to do a little bit of discomfort. When you're doing your early reframes, it can be a little bit uncomfortable. You're developing the pathways around resilience as you get more and more emotionally resilient, you then become emotionally agile and everything just flows. You don't have to think about the tools. You get into a situation. You go up reframing. All these tools we're talking about today are to help you become more resilient, have more choice, have more emotional choice, more behavioral choice, which then helps us create more choice for others.

Anita Brick: Got it. So this is great. There's a lot to absorb and very, very powerful. So what are the top three things that you would advise someone who wants to create resilience teams in turbulent times?

Christine Comaford: Number one, when people are looking at the problem, there's no action there. Help them start to look at the outcome they want. Instead, use the outcome frame to shift from problem focus to outcome focus. Outcome focus is actually where you have momentum. Next, human beings are always choosing the behavior that feels best on their behavioral menu. So if they're choosing to be flaky instead of accountable, it feels better to be flaky.

If you can decode what they want safety, belonging, or mattering and give them that most delicious emotional food that they are craving safety, belonging or mattering, and tie that to accountability. In this example, you will start to create that accountability behavior. You're going to start to create a behavior that feels better as leaders, we have that gift, that opportunity.

And then last I would say when people are super, super stuck, let them actually be present with that. Don't tell them to squish it down. Let them negatively evaluate, let them do maneuvers of consciousness and just trash what's happening for three minutes until they get a big juicy three minutes. Then they've got to go to the other three stages to start to shift. We don't want to pretend stuff isn't happening. We want to get present to it, consent to it, and then say, all right, now what would I like? We don't need to dwell. There's no value.

Anita Brick: There. Very, very good point and great way to close. Thank you. You gave us so much to think about. Not things that are just far off. And while somebody else can do it, I think this is accessible for each of us. So thank you for thinking that way and making it actionable and accessible to everyone.

Christine Comaford: Thank you for having me. You know power, your tribe is full of really practical tools. So is the power your tribe website grabs everybody. Go through a tool a week, a tool every two weeks. Help your team become more resilient.

Anita Brick: Thank you very, very much. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.