Podcast
In this episode of Get Reworked, we speak with Deb Mashek, founder of Myco Consulting, LLC to learn how companies can move collaboration from a platitude on their office walls to a capability found throughout the organization.
Listen: Get Reworked Full Episode List
"If you want to see a lot of collaboration, if you want to have a collaborative culture, first of all, you need to make collaboration possible. That sounds so obvious, but it means that you can't create weird infrastructures where people can't actually contact each other, which we saw when in 2020, a lot of us migrated very quickly from being fully in person to being fully remote, where there weren't a list of people's email addresses or phone numbers and so it wasn't clear even how to contact people. We didn't have a lot of us access to videoconferencing yet," said Deb. "So the modalities the infrastructure wasn't there to actually collaborate. And thankfully we a lot of us were able to onboard that fairly quickly."
Highlights of the conversation include:
- Why organizations aren't teaching collaboration.
- Whether collaborative efforts are ever a waste of time.
- How to hire for collaborative mindset.
- The broader collaborative ecosystem businesses should keep in mind.
- The five questions to establish if your organization is equipped to collaborate.
Plus, host Siobhan Fagan talks with Deb about how she came to specialize in collaboration, why helicopter parenting stunts collaborative skills growth and how to avoid running your business like a filthy dive bar. Listen in for more.
Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].
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Show Notes
- Deb's website
- Deb on LinkedIn
- Deb's write up of her collaboration study: "Collaboration Is a Key Skill. So Why Aren't We Teaching It?"
- Deb's book: "Collabor(h)ate: How to build incredible collaborative relationships at work (even if you’d rather work alone)."
- Arther Himmelman's "Collaboration for a Change: Definitions, Decision-Making Models, Roles and Collaboration Process Guide"
- Deb's Reworked articles
Episode Transcript
Note: This transcript has been edited for space and clarity.
Deb Mashek: Often we say, 'Hey, we want to see more collaboration!' — but then all we do is reinforce individual performance. It's what we track. It's what we base merit raises on. And as any parent or pet owner will tell you, what gets rewarded, gets repeated.
So if you say you want collaboration, but all you're really doing is celebrating the heroics of the lone wolf who goes off and solve the problem all by themselves, and they get the big raise, and they get the write up in the company newsletter or something like that, then guess what — you've just told that person and everybody else that this is what we really value.
Siobhan Fagan: That was Deb Mashek. We brought her here today to talk about collaboration, and how to make it work in the workplace.
Deb has a really interesting background that she brings to the topic today. She is a social psychologist who applies relationship science to help people and business leaders collaborate better. She's also an experienced business advisor. She's a professor, she's a higher education administrator and national nonprofit executive.
On top of all that she is the author of the book, "Collabor(h)ate: How to build incredible collaborative relationships at work (even if you’d rather work alone)."
Deb is the founder of Myco Consulting, and I can't wait to bring her on today. So let's Get Reworked.
Welcome to the podcast Deb.
Deb: Thank you so much for having me.
The Path to Becoming a Collaboration Expert
Siobhan: I am so happy to have you here. And I think before we jump into collaboration, the topic du jour, I have to ask the question, how does a social psychologist become a collaboration expert?
Deb: Right? It's not like I woke up one day, it was like, 'You know what I want to do? I want to study collaboration!'
I think about it as the trailer park, my parents alcoholism and my PhD that these were at my three great teachers of collaboration and the stories kind of all weave together to bring me to the point where professionally, this is what I am all about.
So I grew up in a double wide trailer in North Platte, Nebraska, where it was like the ultimate free range kid experience where the parents, you know, this was in the 70s, so the parents weren't around much and so it was up to the kids to go out onto this incredible play lot that was the asphalt of the trailer park and figure out how are you going to play together? What are you going to play? What are the rules is going to be? What are the consequences gonna be if some kid violates one of those rules, so that they're you know, both ostracized slightly, but not so bad that they won't come back and play with you tomorrow.
So a lot of the the social skills that I developed in that space led to some of my interesting capacity, and intuitions about collaboration. And then also, within that context, both of my parents were alcoholics, and any kiddo who's grown up in addiction of any sort understands that you need to be able to read social situations that, you know, you can't necessarily count on other people being stable and responsive to your needs and available to respond.
And so figuring out ways of reading people to get those needs met, typically from adults outside of the household, to be able to come in and play nicely with others to be palatable to be of interest to others so that I could get my needs met was part of it, I think those two things together, created this interest to start studying psychology and managed to find my way to graduate school, managed to find my way to this class on the psychology of close relationships, and totally fell in love with all of this research that was out there, and realized that it's a topic I wanted to learn about.
Siobhan: Honestly, like, I'm just kind of sitting here with my mouth hanging open, because that was such a fabulous response. I did not know your background. And honestly, it sounds like such a natural and more connected way to learn something than potentially going through an MBA program, let's say.
So thank you for that. I will also say as a fellow Gen Xer I speak the language of just playing outside and trying to figure out, and yet it sounds like you were far more socially aware than I was as a child.
Better Parenting Can Produce Better Collaborators
Deb: Yeah, I mean, one of the topics I love to talk about is how we could or should be parenting to increase our kids capacity to collaborate well in that future workplace that they're going to be going into because I think we're way too obsessed with telling them what the rules are of their games and being way too intrusive. And it's undercutting not just our kids future, but the future workforce. So that's a topic we can explore at some point if you like.
Siobhan: I definitely want to jump on that because we are talking specifically about the context of collaboration in the workplace, within teams and all that. But obviously, these methods of parenting, which have been changing over the years so that we now have the helicopter parenting where kids aren't allowed out of the parents site that every hour of every day is planned for them, is that going to impact their skills and their ability to collaborate in the future?
Deb: I think so. I mean, I think, you know, as I hinted out with the trailer park story, it's like, one of the amazing capacities is when you let kids figure out for themselves, what works and why, in terms of engaging with other people and maintaining connection and autonomy simultaneously.
And if as adults, we're always telling our kids, OK, you, you have done this thing wrong, this is how you need to apologize, here are the words you're going to say, or we tell them out on the playground at school, you know, I'll tell you what the rules are. And if a if anyone does anything wrong, the right thing to do is to go get an adult who's going to then mediate that dispute for you, as opposed to kids figuring out on their own, which is really the deep learning that you're going to be able to then get kind of that generalized application of the learning, whether it's future classrooms and future workplaces.
So yeah, I think we need to lay off the helicopter parenting, head into the free range parenting, it's going to be good for the chickens, good for the kids good for the workforce.
Collaboration Needs to Be Taught
Siobhan: So you just gave me the window to go into the workforce situation, because you talk about educating the children and sort of part of this is self education.
And I wanted to bring up a survey that you did back in 2022. It was a workplace collaboration survey, and you wrote up the results in an article called "Collaboration Is a Key Skill. So Why Aren't We Teaching It?" I guess, I want to know the answer to that question.
Deb: Why aren't we teaching it? Well, first of all, I think it's important to note that in this study, one of the questions I asked, I love this question, is how much professional development have you received and how to be an amazing collaborator.
And a whopping third of the participants are about 1,100 people in the study, said, none. And another handful said a few minutes, which I think means that they're watching TikTok to get their development. And only it was roughly a quarter who said they had received more than a couple hours, which to me gets to the level of okay, this is real training, so people aren't learning it.
And the question is, well, OK, why? So one of the possibilities is that collaboration actually doesn't matter. Why would you bother investing professional development dollars in something that's, you know, just ridiculous and totally not related to work. But, of course, we know that's not true. Because in the workplace, if you have strong collaborators, that means you're also having quicker timelines, more robust bottom lines, you're going to get more innovation, your people are going to be happier. So you know, collaboration matters. Okay.
So other reasons why maybe you don't teach people how to collaborate. Here's what I think is happening. I think there's a cultural assumption that these relationship things, you're either good at them, or you're bad at them, and there's not much you can do. It's a sink or swim situation. And one of the reasons I think this is true is we also don't teach people how to be parents, how to be partners, how to be friends, it's like there's this whole social world, that because we're social creatures, we think you either good at it or you're bad at it. And you know, if you suck at it, you know, it's just you're lost there. So I think that cultural assumption is one of the problems.
I think, another challenge is that people feel collaboration is this black box, like, what could we possibly teach? It's just like this hand wavy word that stands in for all sorts of ways of working together, like we value collaboration, you know, it's on the letterhead, even stenciled on the wall. And therefore, that's all you have to say, to get great collaboration. But that's just not the case.
And so I think there's that cultural assumption is one of the challenges, I think this misunderstanding of what collaboration is not understanding what the key components of it are. Those are all some of the challenges. And then I think, for the leaders who are listening, you know, if you haven't yourself had some specific training or insight or some lenses on how collaboration works, then what the heck are you going to be teaching? It's like you don't know, either. So it's a lot of people who don't know how to collaborate in positions to teach other people how to collaborate. And sometimes it's just easier to skip over that because what are we going to talk about anyway?
Collaboration Ecosystem: People, Software, Processes
Siobhan: You said something in there that made me wonder if part of the issue that happens is that most people think of collaboration as a transaction of sorts. So not necessarily down to that human level, but more, we're just getting things done kind of thing and you have to because you're in a workplace.
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Deb: Love that insight. So they're collaborative relationships and they're like, what are the knows and those are the relationships we have that enable us to do something together. There are also collaboration tools and collaboration processes. And I think a lot of where we are now with our tech and I, for fun, always look at the LinkedIn ads around, or the position descriptions around collaboration. Right now, they are overwhelmingly focused on helping software talk to other pieces of software, that that's what collaboration means, as opposed to helping people work with other people.
So there's the people, there's the software, and then there's the processes. And a lot of the processes get relegated over to project management. So where you end up with these systems of doing together, but you can have incredible project managers who are really, really good at systematizing everything but who are not particularly people oriented, and so their relationships suffer.
And really, there's a large collaboration ecosystem that's multifaceted, that includes the people, it includes the processes, it includes the tools, it includes culture. And if you really want to see more collaboration in your workplace, you need to think holistically about how to get that.
Siobhan: I love the idea of collaboration as an ecosystem. And I know that you also talk about the collaboration continuum, this is a good place for me to bring in your book collaborate, "Collabor(h)ate: How to build incredible collaborative relationships at work." And let's not forget this part of the title, even if you'd rather work alone.
I guess part of the question that I have is, every collaboration is different there is the merely transactional like, hey, do you have this person's contact information? And I guess that's sort of a brief collaboration. There's more involved ones. Are there any common characteristics that make up a good collaborative environment?
Deb: Yeah. So that continuum comes from Arthur Himmelman. And it's such a fabulous resource. So he talks about how like you said, you can have these very transactional, smaller collaborations where it's really just about exchanging information. And then you can move up from there, where you start to modify activities in a way that helps, helps you meet some sort of shared goal, you can move up from there to actually sharing resources, whether those are people or money or space or instrumentation.
And eventually you get to this idea of collaboration where all of those things are in place. And you're actually learning from each other, to enhance each other's individual capacity. So love that model.
And if I could wave my magic wand for everybody and say, here's what you really need to have in place, if you want these collaborations that I call collaborgreat because that's different from collaborhate, right? That these are truly collaborative, great relationships, they have obviously a clear purpose and goal. So everyone throws around this word of alignment are we aligned and you know, asking, have we aligned on this and great word, but unless we've actually specified what we mean by that, and have taken the time to figure out that the assumptions and expectations and visions that are in your head have anything to do with those that are in my head, then we're definitely not aligned, we don't have a clear vision or purpose already there. And we absolutely need it.
And I feel like this is one of those things that sometimes we're not supposed to say out loud. But we need competent people who can actually contribute meaningfully to our shared work. And what that means is they're the right people with the right skills, and the capacity to be able to invest in this project in a real deep way, in a sustained way, that's going to help us give rise to the outcome.
So one of the many, many ways that collaborations go off the rails is you have somebody who is all in at the beginning, they're excited, they're volunteering for everything, but then they don't do squat because they have no free minutes in their week to follow through on anything. And that's, of course, that's going to take a project, of course, it's going to create frustration and drag, you know, so this idea of Do you have competent people who can actually contribute? That's one of the key ingredients.
Another one is the clear expectations about how we're going to work together. So it's one thing to say, oh, we're gonna, you know, build the bridge or something like that, that I'm a huge advocate of at the beginning of every project, or every team to have this conversation around things like, what is our expected response time to an email? So if you're somebody who thinks that I should be responding within two minutes of receiving your emails, but I'm more of a two day kind of gal, then I'm going to be frustrated with you, you're going to be frustrated with me. And it's such an easy conversation to have. It's just we don't do it because it's so obvious in our own heads, what our expectations are.
So those are three of the things I think in my head right now, I'm thinking about collaborations on a team within an organization. And I also work a lot with people who are doing inter-institutional collaborations, and two really important ingredients that are special there are deciding how to decide. So making sure you know, if you have a group of five peer institutions, and there is no boss, how are we going to decide when we hit the sticking point? Which way we're going to go? Do we have a process in place?
But also, this is number two, what does our governance model look like? So I was working with a group of 16 institutions recently, and they realized they didn't necessarily have a way of bubbling up ideas, or that was unclear who had veto power, or, you know, are they using a majority vote or everyone needs to agree sort of model, and it created an incredible, gut wrenching set of conversations that the group had to have before they can move forward.
So those are some of the key ingredients.
How to Balance Team Leadership: Management vs. Individual
Siobhan: So much to unpack in what you just said, I think that one of the ones that I'm wondering about, and I'm bringing it back to the internal workplace, because that cross-company kind of collaboration is super interesting. But I think, for me, I'm really curious about how you balance the team leadership, the management role versus the individual role.
And I'm thinking specifically, like you were talking about how you needed to have a clear purpose and goal. And so that seems to obviously falls to the management question like, are they setting those expectations? But then, how much? Is the individual responsible for communicating their own collaboration needs their own collaboration styles? And how much is it up to them to actually monitor the people who they're working with?
Deb: I'll share one fun fact from that workplace collaboration survey. And these are all respondents who were employed full time in the United States. And one of the questions I asked is, have you ever been in a collaboration that you would characterize as absolutely horrendous? And I had tried to pick out the most intense amplifier I could. So it's like, it's absolutely horrendous. And seven out of every 10, people said yes to that, which is huge.
So what that means for you as a manager is you got a heck of a lot of people that you're working with, who are coming in with significant battle scars, for this whole go play well with others thing, and that, of course, is going to make people more reticent, it's going to put them on edge, it's going to orient them toward distrust at times, you don't necessarily know what their triggers are. And so you're walking across a lot of eggshells. So I think that's important.
So then to this question of 'So whose job is it to create an amazing collaboration?' And I think for the individual contributors, it's super important, A) that they know what's in it for them? And I don't mean like, oh, I'm gonna get a big bonus out of this one, but what can I learn? What is my opportunity here to develop or to show my competencies, but really, what's in it for me, if I'm just engaged in this collaboration, because someone told me I have to do it, I'm not going to be able to sustain my attention, I won't be able to sustain my effort, I won't do a particularly good job when a bunch of other little notifications are popping up. And you know, other fireflies are there that I can go off and chase.
And so I think one of the things a manager can do is to help those individual contributors look at like, what is here for you? How is this going to help you develop? How is this going to be meaningful? What network opportunities might this open up for you, but presentation opportunities, visibility, whatever it's going to be?
Siobhan: I think I might tease it out a little bit more. And I want to return to something you said earlier. And you talked about organizations having we're collaborative culture painted on the wall, and that makes it so.
Deb: Bam, magic.
Collaborative Cultures: Real or Unicorns?
Siobhan: Exactly. I'm wondering if collaborative cultures exist? And if so, what would a collaborative culture look like?
Deb: Yeah, they do exist, and they tend to have, and I'm gonna go into a very short model, so this won't be too long of an explanation. But for any sort of cultural thing, we know that you need to have these five pieces in place. It's true for collaboration, for instance, which is, if you want to see a lot of collaboration, if you want to have a collaborative culture, first of all, you need to make collaboration possible. That sounds so obvious, but it means that you can't create weird infrastructures where people can't actually contact each other, which we saw when, for instance, in 2020, a lot of us migrated very quickly from being fully in person to being fully remote, where there weren't a list of people's email addresses or phone numbers and so it wasn't clear even how to contact people. We didn't have a lot of us access to videoconferencing yet. So the modalities the infrastructure wasn't there to actually collaborate. And thankfully we a lot of us were able to onboard that fairly quickly.
So, so you want to ask five questions. First of all, is collaboration possible? Second, is it easy? So have we lowered the activation threshold? So it doesn't take five steps have reached somebody, or there aren't a bunch of weird barriers in place that mean that we can't actually find share time on a calendar, for instance, to sit down and have a conversation. So is collaboration possible? Is it easy?
This next one is super important, is it normative? So if I'm a newcomer to the organization, can I look around and see evidence that people are in fact working together in meaningful, sustained, productive, ideally, happy ways? If not, then I learned right away that this is not something that's expected here, or that it's not how we do business here.
And then next step, you need to be able to answer yes to is collaboration rewarding? And this for the leaders who are listening to this conversation is so important, because often we say, hey, we want to see more collaboration. But then all we do is reinforce individual performance. It's what we track. It's what we base merit raises on. And I'll make another nod here back to parenting. But as any parent or pet owner will tell you, what gets rewarded gets repeated.
So if you say you want collaboration, but all you're really doing is celebrating the heroics of the lone wolf who goes off and solve the problem all by themselves, and they get the big raise, and they get the write up in the company newsletter or something like that, then guess what you've just told that person and everybody else that this is what we really value.
And then finally, you can ask, is collaboration required. And that's a stick sort of thing. But if you absolutely want to see collaboration, there are ways of hardwiring it into your processes into your procedures.
Siobhan: Are there cases where people are forcing collaboration for collaboration's sake, and it's actually doing more harm than good?
Deb: I'm laughing because this is part of the H and collaborhate, it's like, we have to talk about this hard stuff. And there's so much rah rah like, ooh collaboration, and it becomes the thing we do because we think we're supposed to, and it drives me bonkers, because I believe that we should not be collaborating, because we think it's the right thing to do, or because it's fun. We do it because the end results clearly advance the interest of the participating parties.
And so telling people to get together and the five of you are going to co-design the billboard or the bulletin board in the office? Like, how ridiculous is that? Like, that's such a waste of people's time. And a lot of the rote meetings that we see on calendars where if you ask people, what is the purpose of this particular meeting that's on your calendar every single week? What are you guys supposed to be doing or thinking about? And people say, I have no idea. We're not even sure who put this meeting on the calendar, or, you know, we have the same meeting over and over and over, it's like, I could put a mannequin in my seat, and I won't have missed anything, because there is no forward momentum.
That sort of stuff is such a waste of resources. To me, it doesn't count as collaboration, it counts as some weird shell behavior, of just trying to force people in believing that collaboration equals being in a room together, which is so short of the deep possibilities that are really there.
Siobhan: It sounds like we might have to make up a German word for that kind of collaboration like schadenfreudencollaborationiming ....
Deb: I think you're onto something.
Siobhan: Yeah, maybe a few more syllables. Yeah, we'll work on it. We'll collaborate on what that term should be.
Zombie Collaborations
Deb: A friend of mine calls it the zombie collaborations.
And I created this little infographic for Halloween where it's scary collaboration monsters, and one is the jackal landlord who just smiles the whole time and doesn't actually contribute anything or tell you how they're feeling. And one of them was the zombie where they just they move forward. And they're like this lumbering paces, like nothing's really happening here.
Siobhan: So I want to go back to another thing that you said in that previous response. Again, I had an outline, and I'm throwing it out the window while I'm talking to you.
Deb: I'm rambling and go like, oh, and there's this and there's this. So yeah, feel free rein me and give me some direction here.
I Don't Want to Run a Company That's a Filthy Dive Bar
Siobhan: No, so many, so many interesting points. And you said, and I'm going to take a very literal interpretation of it. You said, Is it normative? And the way that somebody would know that is by looking around and seeing people working together.
So we're at a time where a lot of companies are arguing you have to return to the office specifically to collaborate. Is it possible to do that looking around online? Can digital tools provide that kind of transparency?
Deb: Yeah, so I'm going to go into a little story here.
So back when I was 21/22, you know, legal drinking age, I go out one night, and it's my first time shutting the bars down. I had never done this, I didn't know there was this thing called closing time. But now I do. And it's been about 25 years since I've seen it.
But what was striking to me is that, you know, it was 2 a.m. And the bartender's like closing time, and the fluorescent lights came on, and the music died down. And this bar that I thought had been just a bustling, fun, festive, hip place, come to find out was absolutely disgusting. There's like an inch of dust up above the cash register, the bar was sticky with some sort of weird misolored stain, there was a guy in the corner passed out. And it's not that anything about the bar had actually changed. But my ability to see what was in the bar had changed because of the harsh light of closing time.
And this is, you know, another one of I think the lessons from the COVID transition out of, you know, the in person work is, it's not that all collaboration suffered, the solid collaborations, the ones that already had these, you know, the essential ingredients in place, they did just fine moving to digital or hybrid sort of situations.
The ones that tanked were the ones that were disgusting all along. And they just, they had been cobbled together and papered over, by physical proximity, where, when so and so didn't respond to that email in two days, I could just oh happen to walk by their desk, and oh, glad I ran into, let me check in on this.
And when we are not having saved small talk and getting to know your conversations, before a meeting, there's always that person in the room who is going to take that effort and do it. And when we're online, when we're all sitting in those little Zoom cells. It's a different sort of activation threshold. And so they're still often the person who will have the small chat. But there are also processes or just practices we can put in place that say, you know, it's normative for us to all show up five minutes before a meeting, just to check in with each other. We do that with our cameras on we're not paying another invoice while we're doing that our camera is not on and we're running to get a coffee while we do it. But we actually show up five minutes early to see how everyone's doing.
And then you do it. And when someone doesn't show up and isn't doing that. There's an opportunity there for an accountability conversation. And I, I love Leanne Davey talks about accountability a lot. And she says, you know, it's not about holding other people accountable. It's about holding yourself accountable. So finding out what are the expectations and then following through on those expectations for yourself. And if you aren't able to then having the conversations with your leader, your supervisors to say, hey, I'm struggling with this one. What else can we put in place to help me be successful here? Because I don't want to let the team down. I don't want to let myself down.
Siobhan: Because I don't want to run a company that's a filthy dive bar.
Deb: I think that would be a really good title for an article.
Siobhan: I think so too, I love that image.
Hiring for a Collaborative Mindset
Siobhan: So if a company wants to increase collaboration in its workplace, one of the tools that it has is hiring, is it possible to hire for a collaborative mindset? Or would you say that that's a waste of time, and you should just develop the person into a collaborative mindset.
Deb: So definitely not a waste of time, we know that there are people who by virtue of say, either their personalities, their learning histories, their backgrounds, their prior professional development, are going to come in with two secret ingredients that you want to look for.
The first one is that they actually like collaborating. They feel good about it. Or if they do have a ton of scars around it. They're also there's some self insight there about what they could be doing differently. So they, they like collaboration, and do they have the skill sets to actually be able to do collaboration. And those are really important, different things. Because just because I like doing something doesn't mean I'm good at it. And just because I'm good at doing something doesn't mean I like doing it, you want to look for both of those pieces.
And so yes, you can hire for collaborative capacity and skill sets and mindsets. And you can also, because we all have space to develop, there are also professional development opportunities where you can help people become better collaborators and raise the bar not just for that person, but for the whole team.
Siobhan: If I'm that hiring manager, and I'm interviewing somebody, what would be a red flag in your mind for somebody who is not going to be a good collaborator and probably doesn't have a good chance of becoming one?
Deb: Yeah, I would definitely ask for that. And I know people dodge the so what's your weakness sort of thing, but also, tell me about a time when you had to work with a team and it was on a say a really high stakes project, whether it was about a lot of money or really tight timelines or really intense interdependencies in terms of the workflow and how'd that go? What went wrong? What would you do differently? What did you learn, and I would be looking for anyone throw somebody else under the bus. To me, that's a red flag, I would also be looking for a lot of taking all the credit. And this one is a hard one because I think in interviews, we are also told, you need to take, of course, you need to take credit and show off your skills and capacities. But look for the candidate who can do that, while also giving due credit for everybody else on the team who made it possible. And not just for the person who was able to pull out the heroics at the top of the hour.
So that would be I guess, one red flag and one green flag that I would be looking for. I was talking to a managing editor of a magazine. And she said one of the things she looked for when hiring journalists is if they would only talk about their stories, and it was always like my my mind, and I did this, I did that I did that. And they never talked about the team that was behind the creation of the stories. That for her was a red flag. So looking for pronoun use was one of the tricks that she used when hiring collaborative people into her newsroom. Their newsroom I should say.
Siobhan: There you go. Good catch. Good catch.
I've enjoyed this conversation so much, I guess I'm going to hand you a magic wand now. And ask you, if a company were to invest in collaboration, what would that look like to you? What would the ideal company just really going all in on successful collaboration looks like to you?
Deb: Yeah, they would be thinking about the entire collaboration ecosystem.
So they would be hiring collaborative people, investing in their professional development of those collaborators, not just as individuals, but investing in the relationships among the people. And thus the teams.
They would be thinking about how to structure measure and reward the work to create the kinds of interdependencies where we know that you don't need, you know, a pitcher and catcher on the same baseball team, you need an amazing picture and an amazing capture to create the team. And how do you actually do that that takes intention. That doesn't happen by accident.
They would be developing systems and processes and investing in collaboration tools. They would be thinking about their collaboration strategies around how do we figure out what could we do? How do we think about what should we do and they would be doing all of those cultural things we were talking about around making collaboration possible and easy and normative and rewarding.
Siobhan: All right, any leaders out there listening, you've got your marching orders. We're gonna follow up with each and every one of you.
Deb, thank you so much for joining me today. I know that you have a presence online, where is the best place for people to find you.
Deb: The best place is debmashek.com. And there you can connect to all of my socials, the newsletter, all those good things.
Siobhan: Awesome. Thank you again, Deb, and I hope to speak to you again because I think there's a lot of ground we didn't cover.
Deb: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Siobhan: If you have a suggestion or a topic for a future conversation, I'm all ears. Please drop me a line at [email protected]. Additionally, if you liked what you heard, post a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you may be listening. Please share Get Reworked with anyone you think might benefit from these types of conversations. Find us at reworked.co. And finally, follow us at Get Reworked on Twitter as well. Thank you again for exploring the revolution of work with me, and I'll see you next time.
