Ep. 242 - Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams on What it Takes to Align Teams, Build Trust, and Get Better Results

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams: Five Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust and Get Results Faster. This is part of our IO Live was recorded in front of the live audience. And Stefano and I talk about what it takes to align teams, build trust, and get better results. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to our IO Live event. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. As always, we have another amazing guest. This is our first Inside Outside Innovation podcast of 2021, that we're doing live. We're super excited to have a special guest here. Stefano Mastrogiacomo is the author of High Impact Tools for Teams: Five Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust, and Get Results Fast. Welcome Stefano to the show. 

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Thank you for inviting me. It's an honor and hello to all of our listeners and viewers. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on here. I think you wanted to show some slides and give the audience a little bit of background on the book and then we'll get into a Q and A session. 

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Yes, of course. Thank you. So, I'm going to share the screen right now. This book, High Impact Tools for Teams, fully integrates with the Strategizer series. And as you know, the Strategizer series proposes amazing tools to help team innovate and deliver creative products and services. In this journey, in delivering innovation, I started working with teams in 2000.

So as a project manager, I've been using many of these tools, starting from delivering a banking application for large teams. We thought that there was a gap to be covered, which is the human side of innovation journeys. And mostly what I'm talking about here is how can we help cross-functional teamwork do better. 

In particular, make us more successful team members, because these are journeys in very difficult conditions. A lot of uncertainty. Things keep changing all the time. And so the idea was how to help us become more successful team members and more successful project managers, knowing that there is real room for improvement. This was a study entitled we waste a lot of time at work. Where they reported that 50% of meetings are considered unproductive and a pure waste of time.

And that was true before the pandemic. I don't know about you, but at least for me, I've participated in numerous Zoom meetings now, where actually I felt that that statistic could be even worse when the meeting isn't structured, unfocused, and on top of that, we have the barrier of distance, and all the constraints of these new communication channels.

So, we published that book. It's been a long journey, been like 15 years in the making. Where we designed, experimented, draw into many various disciplines like psycholinguistics, evolutionary anthropology, things that could help us design tools that help create better alignment in the team. As things keep changing all the time, build more trust and psychological safety. And we know the, I'll come back on that later, the impact of trust, the direct impact of trust, on the capacity to innovate in a team, and in more generally, how to communicate better. 

So, this was prior to the pandemic. You know how important it is for us, that things are visually shared by the team. That's why we designed these canvases. And that's how we used to work prior to the pandemic. And if you allow me and let me share you a workshop that took place last week. Same setting, but this time online having in parallel Zoom and digital whiteboard. 

So, what you see here is 110 agile professionals together. Establishing a team contract. You have 110 agile professionals arguing and exchanging, brainstorming on rules of the game to hold more productive meetings, using one of the templates that is presented in the book, namely the Team Contract. So that tool, called the Team Contract, is a tool designed to help teams very quickly define and agree together on team rules and behaviors.

Why do we believe this is important, but first of all, let me show you an example of how it works. So, the idea is we sit together in front of that poster, whether it's in the same room or on a digital whiteboard. This is a simplified version of a real Team Contract. And that's where every team member, before we enter the journey, especially if we are a newly created team or if the project is very different from what we're used to do. The idea is let's sit together and respond to these two questions.

One. What are the rules and behaviors that we want to abide by in our team during that journey? And as individuals, do we have preferences to work in a certain way. I mean, we all have maybe certain preferences, so let's put it that, all these things out there, and you can see here, some of the examples of what people put on these team contracts. 

It changes a lot the fact that these are said, and shared in the beginning versus not doing it, and keeping all this in our mind. Presupposing that the other think the same thing we do. That actually is a potential source of conflict. As you know, given the pace at which innovation journeys take place. 

So, this is a very simple example. A team contract conversation typically lasts between 20 minutes to one hour, depending on the complexity of the rules the team wants to put in place. And the rules we agree are in the center. And also, we can define things that we don't want to see in the team. For example, here, not apologizing, if not attending, to give a very simple example.

Now that has implications, that very fact of making the rules of the game visible and transparent by everybody in terms of psychological safety. As we know how to position that increases our confidence that we know on which rule we will play. And psychological safety, I'm quoting here at the amazing work of Amy Edmondson is the belief, that the team is a safe place for me, for interpersonal risk-taking, that I will not be punished, humiliated if I speak up.

And that is crucial for innovation journey, because I guess one of our worst enemies in innovation journeys is silence. When we don't feel confident enough to share our ideas with the rest of the team, because that might backfire on us. So very simple poster, but with the domino effect of important consequences, for the later unfolding of the innovation project. 

Another tool, for example, very quickly here presented in the book is called the Team Alignment Map. And this is a co-planning tool. This tool is as information keeps changing all the time. The idea was to have a very simple poster on which we can align frequently whenever we actually needed. But especially in the beginning of a project, where the level of alignment, the need of alignment is the highest because we have all different views.

So that poster, what's new with that poster is that we plan together. It's no longer a ping pong mechanism. We're sitting together and we talk about each other's role and negotiate a few...