Episode 121 – Successful Teams = Successful Projects

The podcast for project managers by project managers. Projects are more successful when we play to the strengths of the team. Hear about a new technology platform for building high-performing and successful teams. Create a winning team culture by identifying the unique preference, proficiency, and personality that an individual brings to the table. Table of Contents 00:05 … New PDU Claim Process00:54 … Meet Darrin02:53 … Cloverleaf: How it all Began04:56 … Consistent Team Performance09:19 … Choosing the Right Tool for a Successful Team12:10 … When to Pivot your Plan14:39 … What can Cloverleaf do for a Project Team?17:53 … Partnering with Other Assessment Tools19:49 … After the Assessment: Getting Stuff Done24:09 … Tools for Team Members27:06 … Application for Traditional or Agile Methodology27:57 … Keeping Remote Teams Motivated31:25 … Being Authentic32:32 … “Corporate Bravery”33:45 … Get in Touch with Darrin34:53 … Closing WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  New PDU Claim Process Just a little update about claiming your PDUs. The steps to submit a PDU for our podcast, as well as for our InSite courses to PMI, has changed. Our PDU claim page has been updated with the new instructions. Make sure not to use the auto-fill but type in Velociteach and the title, when you are submitting your PDUs. We do apologize for the inconvenience but thank you for listening and please contact us if you need any additional assistance. I’m Wendy Grounds; and as always, here in the studio with me is Bill Yates.  Please make sure to visit our website, Velociteach.com, where you can subscribe to the show so you will never miss an episode.  While you’re at it, if you find value in the show, we’d appreciate a rating on iTunes or a comment on our website.  Or if you’d simply tell a friend, that would help us out, too.  Meet Darrin We like to share stories of interesting projects, and we like to talk with experts who are doing new and exciting things which can impact the world of project management.  And that brings me to today’s guest, Darrin Murriner.  He is the cofounder and CEO of Cloverleaf.me.  It’s a technology platform for building high-performing teams.  Prior to founding Cloverleaf, he managed large and complex teams at companies such as Arthur Andersen and Fifth Third Bank.  And he is the author of a book called “Corporate Bravery,” and he’s going to tell us a little bit more about that book later on.  But Bill, do you want to tell us a bit about Cloverleaf? BILL YATES:  Yeah.  We have had conversations and dedicated podcasts to talking about team building and talking about assessing strengths.  We’ll reference some of those later in the ‘cast, I’m sure.  But we know that successful teams lead to successful projects.  So any tools that we can put in the hands of our listeners that will make them better at equipping their teams and making them more effective, man, we’re excited about showing those. Someone brought to our attention this toolset called Cloverleaf.  And fortunately, we’ve got the CEO, Darrin, who’s going to talk with us about Cloverleaf.  It’s a teambuilding tool.  And you can take something like StrengthsFinder or Myers-Briggs or DISC or other assessments that you do on your team, and you have all this data, and then you need something to help you take those next steps.  So I think this conversation will give us some ideas. WENDY GROUNDS:  Right.  A thing to note, I just want to say to our listeners, is that we don’t receive any compensation for talking about Cloverleaf.  We just came across them.  Someone told us about them.  And we want to share that with our audience.  We’re not getting a free subscription to Cloverleaf for our team. BILL YATES:  We need to ask Darrin about that, yeah.  We’re not getting anything for this.  Again, this is just a toolset that we wanted to make people aware of. WENDY GROUNDS:  Right.  Let’s talk to Darrin.  Hey, Darrin.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for joining us today. DARRIN MURRINER:  I’m glad to be here.  Thanks for inviting me.  Cloverleaf: How it all Began WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to find out what inspired you to establish Cloverleaf, how it all began.  And I want to know where the name comes from, as well. DARRIN MURRINER:  Yeah, I’m happy to provide some background and context.  I’ve always just really been interested with management and what good leadership looks like and these different concepts.  So I don’t have a background in HR.  I don’t have any certifications in that space.  But just I have always been interested in that. In the last job I had before we created this business, which is where I met my cofounder, one of the things that we did is we had cross-functional teams of five or six people.  And this was a design video agency.  The process that we used was very consistent:  eight to 10 weeks in duration, kind of the same delivery model, the same stages in the process.  And we did anywhere from 100 to 150 of these concurrently.  What we saw was the distinction between what made a successful video project and what made a, I don’t want to say “unsuccessful” video project, but like subpar, right, was really the combinations of people that we put on these teams and how we resourced and equipped them to be effective in that eight- to 10-week team experience.  So we got to just see this Petri dish of people working together and how that was the “it” factor, right, of success. And if you think about it, that might have been a digital video agency.  But our economy in general is primarily how we create value is through collaboration and taking my ideas and putting them with your ideas and creating something of value for organizations.  And whether you’re like in a product role, or you’re in technology, or you’re in a creative space, more and more that’s just how we create value for the organizations.  It just really started us down a path.  We wanted to create a technology product that could provide transparency to that process and equip leaders and anyone on a team with the tools to be effective with that knowledge and that understanding. Consistent Team Performance BILL YATES:  I love your analogy of a Petri dish.  And I take no offense; I’ve certainly been in an HR situation before where I think I am the virus growing on this team, infecting everybody else for good or for bad.  Now, you mentioned that you had a cofounder that you were working with at that time. DARRIN MURRINER:  Yup. BILL YATES:  So tell us more about that.  How did you come up with this idea as you were working and getting this consistency and then determining which teams really outperform or perform more consistently than others?  How did the two of you stumble into that? DARRIN MURRINER:  Yeah, it really was just a conversation.  I mean, it was the observation, which again kind of that’s part of the reason why I say the Petri dish, because it’s truly just like a scientist, where you’re kind of stepping back and looking at things with a really unique perspective.  That wasn’t in the project on a day-to-day basis.  But I got to kind of step back and ask questions that maybe other people weren’t asking on a day-to-day basis because they were just so into the weeds. And Kirsten, my cofounder, her role was leading those project managers.  So her and I both kind of had this really unique blend on these teams at a higher macro level.  And we just really started a conversation around hey, you know, the culture of these teams, the culture of our organization, we had a premise that how culture is created is through the unique preferences that people bring to the table and to the conversation, and that if you really want to try to either measure culture or identify culture, it needs to start with those unique individual preferences that the people that form a team bring to the table.  It’s less about this kind of like top-down view or top-down perspective of culture, and it’s more this bottom-up kind of approach.  And we felt like that was a very unique way to approach this. One of the questions you asked earlier was about where did the name come from, and it really stems from that.  I kept using those term preferences just now.  Whenever we would talk to people about this concept, so like, hey, we want to build this business, and it’s going to be a technology, and it’s going to do these things, and I would always draw these three concentric circles.  And one of the questions that we would ask leaders before we launched Cloverleaf is, “Hey, how do you staff people on teams?”  Right?  “How do you choose the people that are going to be on teams?”  And they would say, “Well, are they available, how much spare capacity do they have, and do they have a technical skill set that is needed for the job?  So if it’s a technology team, do they know Java?”  And that’s as far as it ever went.  No one asked questions beyond those two questions. And what our experience was in this digital video agency is that neither of those questions really had a significant impact on performance; right?  You had a ton of people who knew how to animate and knew how to do video editing and knew how to story-tell.  But it was that combination of putting those things together that really made that outsize differentiation.  And so when we drew those three concentric circles, we said, “Hey, the first is just proficiency.  What skill set, what experience do you have and bring to the table?”  And that’s where most organizations stop. Then we said, hey, there are these preferences, these cultural norms.  They could be values.  They could be any number of other words we might use to describe it.  But it’s these things that motivate you, that inspire you, that drive you to do the work that you do. And then the third thing, just to kind of keep the whole “P” alliteration,