Unlocking The Lies Leaders Believe About Performance With Karina Mangu-Ward

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Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Cold Start & Intro
00:02:03 – Meet Karina and the Book Launch
00:04:58 – Why Companies Say Agile But Act Rigid
00:06:37 – The Say-Do Gap Nobody Talks About
00:08:48 – What “I Don’t Know” Actually Does to Trust
00:12:31 – When Leaders Protect People From the Truth
00:15:49 – What Kills Learning Faster Than Failure
00:20:28 – How to Actually Build Psychological Safety
00:24:14 – Goals vs. Purpose: What Really Moves Teams
00:34:13 – What to Do When Your Team Hits a Wall
00:41:54 – Takeaways and the Know-It-All Problem

Karina Mangu-Ward (00:02.00)
It’s really simple. It’s called candid comms. And it’s when you’re communicating, you always have to answer three questions. “What do I know? What don’t I know? And what am I going to do next?”

You have to pair higher purposes with shorter term outcomes that you’re going for.

So, you have to say, “we don’t know. I don’t know how this is going to unfold. I don’t know how we’re going to adapt to this, but here’s what we’re going to do next.”

Skot Waldron (00:34.00)
When I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the world. I’m helping leaders and I’m helping teams communicate better. I’m helping them build trust faster and actually enjoy working together. I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot. I’ve spoken at national architectural firms. I’ve spoken for pharmaceutical company offsites. I’ve spoken at associations, you name it.

With 99% of attendees of all those events, over 1800 people have reviewed me at this point. 99% of them saying they got some value. That’s pretty awesome. Even the caterers have thanked me. And if they are thanking me and they’ve heard a lot of talks and they’re busy doing their jobs, that’s saying something. If you’re an event planner looking for a speaker who’s really easy to work with, trust me, I want to be the last thing you’re worried about on event day. I’m going to take care of you. And who actually delivers value for your audience that they are going to use on Monday morning when they return to the office, then let’s talk.

Today I’ve got a really fun guest. She’s really smart, really articulate in how she talks about organizations and teaming and how we do that better together. It’s a lot of give and take back and forth. A lot of opinions are shared and thoughts are shared. And I think you’re going to be intellectually stimulated, yes, on this interview. So, thanks for listening. Thanks for being here.

Karina Mangu-Ward is a partner at August, a consultancy that helps organizations transform the way they work to thrive in an uncertain world. At August, she’s had the privilege of working with some of the most impactful and complex organizations in the world to rethink their teaming habits and build cultures of experimentation, trust, and learning. We’re talking a lot about experimentation, about trust, about learning, cultures of learning. Big, big, big reveal there.

She has something there that’s really cool. I’m not going to spoil it, but anyway, I wanted to, but I’m not going to. Before August, her adventures included conducting research on implicit bias, helping arts organizations behave as creatively behind the scenes as they do on stage, and running social innovation labs. She is a fun spirit. She’s got some good energy and is very casual, very easy to talk to. And I think you’re going to get the vibe from the interview. So here we go.

Welcome to the show, Karina. It’s good to have you.

Karina Mangu-Ward (03:08.00)
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Skot Waldron (03:11.532)
Okay. Well, you have just launched something awesome that I’m super envious of – A book. You did it.

Karina Mangu-Ward (03:21.00)
Thank you so much.

Skot Waldron (03:22.00)
Congratulations.

Karina Mangu-Ward (03:23.00)
Today was launch day, it was just two days ago. And yeah, the book is called Teams That Meet the Moment and it’s out there. It’s like 2 years in the making. It takes a long time to make a book; did you know that? You probably know that. It’s so long.

Skot Waldron (03:37.00)
Oh my God. I know. My first book, it took me like 7 years. This is one of those adaptive – we were talking beforehand about structured and adaptive thinkers; this is one of my adaptive thinking things. It took me like 7 years to actually write my first one. And then when I did, I decided to write it in 6 months. But that one was self-published. This next one’s going to be a lot longer and I’m going to go through the process you probably just went through.

Karina Mangu-Ward (03:59.00)
The funny thing with this stuff is like the book is, it did take us about two years from committing to writing the book, but it’s really 10 years in the making. I mean, our firm has been around for 10 years. We’ve been doing this work with teams and helping them thrive in uncertainty for 10 years in all of these clients. I was talking to my publisher, and she was saying that some people write the book that they need for themselves. Like they write the book that they need to read, something they need to learn.

But this book is not that. This book is a summation of everything that we have been doing and have been learning in helping teams inside big organizations actually get shit done for 10 years. So, it feels like this big capstone, milestone, after 10 years of practice. I think that’s why it feels so momentous.

Skot Waldron (04:52.00)
I bet. That’s amazing. Very cool.

So, let me talk about this for a second. Organizations, they say they want agility and experimentation and innovation, right? Because they put that on their values, every company does, but most teams seem very allergic to uncertainty. They don’t like it. So, let’s start here. Why do you think humans create so much rigidity when the world actually keeps demanding adaptability?

Karina Mangu-Ward (05:31.00)
I do have hypotheses about these. And I think they’re both generous because I don’t think that people are doing this for bad reasons. I think the first is that humans are wired to seek predictability and certainty. That is, from all of my research and all of my being with humans in the world, we really really need that. And so even when it’s not possible, we try to manifest that for ourselves. And I think in organizations, what that can often look like is getting obsessed with developing a strategic plan, right? Like even though I cognitively know that the world is on fire and that everything is changing, my nervous system still wants to try to write down a three-year plan that I can just go ahead and execute.

And I think that the leaders that understand that that cognitive yearning is real and like where that comes from, and that it’s actually not something that can be satisfied are the ones that are most fit to survive in ambiguity.

I think the other piece is many people that I work with come up through MBA programs or they’ve been mentored by senior leaders from the boomer generation or even Gen X and they learn a certain way of doing things. They learn how to plan and predict and build elaborate strategies and focus on superstar talent. We just got to get the right people in the right seats and like we’re going to let them go after whatever we need to go after. And I think that a lot of getting good at closing the say-do gap, I think what you’re talking about in my language is the say-do gap saying, “let’s be agile, let’s be innovative,” and then actually “what is your team doing on a Tuesday? Is it actually practicing that?”

I think closing the say-do gap requires a terrific amount of unlearning about what being a good leader and being good in an organization looks like. We think being a good leader is about knowing the answers, when actually nowadays being a good leader is being able to say, “here’s what I don’t know”. They’re not teaching that in MBAs. It’s like only the new edge of companies are starting to mentor future ready leaders with those skills now. And I think that’s really exciting, but there’s just so much more work to do to unlearn what great leadership and teaming has looked like for the last, you know, hundred years, I guess. but it doesn’t work anymore.

Skot Waldron (08:05.00)
What about the, what’s the power in saying what you don’t know? What does that do? Because I will tell you that I work with the leaders too that say, I had one woman that she got moved into a new leadership role and she was very self-conscious about the “I don’t know word”. She thought she had all the answers and that was beaten into her and I guess that’s what the expectation was of leaders that she had worked with and the culture they had created there. So instead, you’re advocating this “Well, this is what I don’t know”. What’s the power in that?

Karina Mangu-Ward (08:48.00)
Leaders think they’re protecting people by withholding their knowledge about uncertainty. What they’re actually doing though is creating a vacuum that people fill with their own stories about what is going on. People are very tuned to the fact that things are shifting and uncertain.

And so, when a leader says, “we’re good, we’ve got a plan, we’ve got it, here’s everything that I know”. I think people experience that as being gaslit. I think that people actually, if you give them our chance, are surprisingly resilient. They’re able to accept that there are many things that we don’t know. What they’re not actually able to accept is the dissonance of a leader telling them, I got this, we’re all good, with their experienced reality that it’s not all good, that AI is eating the world and the geopolitics are wild and that leadership changes are constant. There’s so much going on and so I think leaders actually need to do a lot more, a lot less protecting people from uncertainty and what is unknowable because the world is changing so much.

One of the practices that I teach every leader that I work with, it’s really simple. It’s called candid comms. And it’s when you’re communicating, you always have to answer three questions. “What do I know? What don’t I know? And what am I going to do next?” and this is grounded in the research of Amy Edmondson, who is, you know, the leader of all things – psychological safety. And having a leader model and say, “here’s what I don’t know yet”, is a powerful indicator that it’s okay for other people to not know and to not be certain and to not pretend that they’re certain about things that are actually unknowable.

I think it takes an incredible amount of humility and courage, though, for a leader to say, “here’s what I don’t know.” But listen, the unlock is saying, “here’s what I’m going to do next,” and actually avoiding the impulse to say, here’s my 15-point plan, because everybody knows that 15-point plan is going out the window. Those 15 points are never going to come to be. But if you say, “What I’m going to do next is I’m going to come back to you with an update in a week and here’s the question I’m going to try to answer for you”, that is a cornerstone of trust, which is where you’re making promises you can keep, and then you’re keeping those promises.

And I actually think in moments of uncertainty, it’s actually less of a communication challenge and more of like a trust maintenance challenge and answering those three questions, “what do I know, what don’t I know, and what am I going to do next?” I think they’re really powerful. So, get out there leaders. I mean, one of the big shifts that I talk about in my work with leaders is from being a leader who knows it all to a leader that learns it all and that’s really hard especially for more seasoned leaders, to let go of their identity as someone who knows it all.

Skot Waldron (11:55.00)
That’s powerful. If I don’t know at all, I mean competency is a big driver of influence within circles and work culture, workplace culture, and the way we work together. And if I say, “I don’t know,” is that a knock on my competency? I think people start to wonder, if I say that am I throwing my influence away? What do you think about that?

Karina Mangu-Ward (12:27.00)
I think absolutely not and it’s because a leader needs to know the difference between things that I should know and I don’t because I’ve been competent. If you should know how to do something and you don’t, your team can tell that, of course, you’re going to lose your influence and you’re going to lose your trust because people want to know that you have competence. It’s when a situation is fundamentally unknowable. I mean, I think about when the pandemic hit, right? If a leader had stood up there and said, I know how we’re going to get through this. Like how ridiculous. We’ve never done something like that before.

And so, you have to say, “we don’t know. I don’t know how this is going to unfold. I don’t know how we’re going to adapt to this, but here’s what we’re going to do next.” And it’s the same in all these micro moments, you know, like when all the tariffs were hitting. I was inside many, many companies where leaders felt a lot of pressure to say, “we’re going to get our strategy together, we’re going to get this right” and the reality is there was a lot that was unknowable about that situation, about what was going to happen and where the wind’s going to shift again.

And being able to say, “here’s what we do know”. You know, we know we’re going to hold prices, we know we’re not going to compromise our values.” You could there’s always a set of things that you can say that you do know. And then having the humility to say what you don’t know. I actually think that being able to handle uncertainty is a new kind of competence. Like that is a leadership competency. And we talk more about competency as like domain expertise. Like I’m great at leading supply chain. I’m great at leading marketing. I know everything about my domain. But I just think you lose legitimacy as a leader if you pretend to know things that are fundamentally unknowable. Do you agree? What do you make of that?

Skot Waldron (14:17.00)
I think that’s really good. I think that’s a good point.

Authenticity has become such a bigger issue, I think, in the world. It kind of started with the whole realm of social media in that sense. And the generations that started coming through the Gen Xers as they started getting older and not wanting to start calling out the BS a little bit more and I think that our society as a whole started looking through the lens of authenticity and what is real and what isn’t and what’s being thrown at me, I’m emotionally responding to in a bad way or reacting to. And I think that that’s a problem.

And so, when leaders get up and try to blow smoke, I think that a lot of people see it and they see through it. And that’s a really quick indicator that I can’t trust this person because I don’t know what’s going on. Either they’re for themselves, they’re against me, but they’re not for me, right? Because they’re blowing some kind of smoke somewhere.

Now, this whole idea of know it all versus learn it all, I really like that. It’s really good. And you work a lot with organizations about trust and learning. What do you think destroys learning fastest inside organizations?

Karina Mangu-Ward (15:49.00)
I do a lot of work on failure and the anatomy of failure, and I think what destroys learning is a lack of sophistication around understanding that there are many different kinds of failures. And that if we treat them all the same, particularly if we overreact to ones that don’t need punishment, then we create a culture where people feel they get into self-protective mode. I think you kind of talked about this maybe in our pre-conversation.

I think the thing that most damages learning is when people fundamentally think it’s their role to protect themselves, protect their reputations, protect their jobs. I mean, the job market is so volatile and wild right now. I really understand people’s instinct to hide and protect, like why would I put my neck out? Why would I experiment and try something I’ve never tried before? I need this job. You know, I’m really, really empathetic to folks that are in that position.

So, I think it takes a heroic effort on the part of leadership to both message and create incentive systems and promotion systems that reward people for trying, failing and learning in a wise way. And again, I’m really influenced by the work of Amy Edmondson here. Have you heard of the failure spectrum that she created? She got a spectrum, and on the one end, it’s avoidable failures. Like, so think of someone who’s fully trained and falls asleep at the machine, right? Like it’s negligence, right? And in the middle is kind of complicated failures where it’s like a 10-person team and 16 processes and we were moving too fast and we missed a step and it led to a downstream error. It’s not any one person’s fault, but like we need to retrospect it and make sure we get smart and don’t make that mistake again and make sure we catch it early.

So avoidable failures, complex failures, and then intelligent failures, which is we fail because we’ve never done this before, right? So, it’s like you’re starting a new business line, you’re launching a new product, you are dealing with a pandemic or dealing with a major market fluctuation, these are things we’ve simply never done before. So, it’s impossible to know exactly what the path is. And if you ask most leaders how many failures in their organization are kind of in what buckets, they can say that most of them are complex or intelligent failures.

Like cognitively they know that most of what’s happening when we try and mess up and need to learn is because it’s just it’s hard and it’s complicated. But most of them treat failure as though it’s blameworthy, as though it was avoidable. And our culture is set up that way. I mean, and our nervous systems are set up that way. I think a lot about, again, like the kind of we’re humans and we’re set up to look for who to blame, right? Because that gives us certainty. Well, you’re to blame. So don’t do that and it won’t happen again.

Skot Waldron (19:09.00)
Alright. So based on that, I want to go to the idea that I think that there’s a tension of these companies wanting experimentation, but they’re also kind of risk averse at times too. But like you said, I think in our culture, we look for somebody to blame, to point the finger to. Who’s next on the chopping block, and who’s going to pay for this? And when something goes wrong, you start seeing fingers pointing everywhere. And you see this in the news outlets all the time. It’s like when something happens, it goes wrong, they sit there and you see the left and the right are pointing fingers at who this is and who that is. And instead of understanding what really happened. The first reaction is to point the blame.

So, we punish failure socially in our culture. How do you actually create a culture where people feel free to try things? Yes, we create an ideal culture of psychological safety. But what does that really mean? How do I know that it’s safe to experiment and try stuff?

Karina Mangu-Ward (20:25.00)
Yeah. I think it’s not actually that big of a mystery to me. I think it’s one of those things that’s simple but not easy. To me, it’s as simple as a leader knowing that it’s their job to create the conditions where someone is able to fail and learn. And that the way they do that is quite specific. They have to create a learning frame. So, they have to say something like, “we’ve never done this before, we’re probably going to get something wrong before we get it right”. Or “we’re trying something new and I need all of us to speak up and share our opinions early and often, especially if we see something going wrong, because we want to catch things early rather than late”.

Leaders have to say those words out loud over and over and over and over to create a belief that they mean it. And then when the shit does hit the fan, they have to actually not blame and not finger point. They have to do structured retrospectives that allow people to safely name what happened and went wrong.

So, to me, it really really rests with the leader and what they say, I think the other skill that organizations can build is around disciplined experimentation. So, this is where I really believe making the implicit explicit is so powerful. So, if your team is going to do something that you know they’ve never done before again, something like launching a new product or trying a new internal process, like write down what your hypothesis is. You have to write down what you believe is going to happen. And you have to be able to say to each other, “how will we know if it’s going right?” I think experiment design is a really under-leveraged skill inside organizations.

But if we can align on our hypothesis and assumptions and our risks, then when things go well or go south, we all were clear from the beginning what we were doing and what we were hoping to learn. And I think leaders can play a really critical role in setting that up for teams, saying, like anytime a team is doing something new, a leader’s saying, What’s your hypothesis? What do you think is going to happen? And what signs might you get that it’s not working? I think a lot of it rests on the leaders, but it’s also about the habit of retrospecting, the habit of naming hypotheses, the habit of naming risks and trying to mitigate them is something that teams can get good at. It’s not a mystery to me.

Skot Waldron (22:57.00)
Why don’t people do that?

Karina Mangu-Ward (22:59.00)
I don’t think that they know to. I don’t think that they’ve been taught to, you know, like I think that they have been taught through business school and internal mentorship programs and watching leaders model for them that they better get their shit together and get it right the first time, or they’re not going to get that promotion or they’re going to lose their reputation, or someone’s not going to listen to them next time.

I think that the feedback cycles inside organizations are really powerful. You see someone next to you go out on a limb and try something and get, you know, their wrists slapped for it, you’re not going to do that. And people are highly attuned to signals of retribution for failure. So, I think that leaders just don’t have the skill yet. Which is why I think we should be. We focus a lot on developing individuals. And I think we need to be focusing a lot more on developing teams and developing team cultures who are able to do what we’re talking about. But our organizational development systems are not really set up for that.

Skot Waldron (24:14.00)
Are you a goals person or are you a “nah, I think goals are overrated”?

Karina Mangu-Ward (24:25.00)
I am an outcomes person. I’m a purpose and outcomes person. I think that all work should be organized around higher-level purpose. Like if a group understands what it is they’re trying to achieve, particularly in the context of the organization’s mission, like if they can connect their work to higher purpose, I really believe that humans have good instincts about how to steer together when higher purpose is clear but you have to pair higher purposes with shorter term outcomes that you’re going for.

So, one of the practices that we really focus on in August is called the “team charter”. So anytime you’re putting together a new team, the two fundamental questions you have to ask are, “what’s the higher order purpose of this group?” And “what is this group, what outcome is this group sprinting towards for the next 90 days?” And that can be something as simple as like, launch phase one or finish our plan or do three tests or validate an answer to this question. But that’s what gives humans that feeling of predictability and stability that they need to say, “great, we know what the next chunk of our work is”.

So, if that’s what you mean by goals, yes. You know, I also do a lot of work around like OKRs, you know, helping organizations set objectives and key results. I think that’s helpful. I think it’s better than ambiguous, wordy, goals. Clarity is kind. But if we’re talking about at the team level, to me it’s purpose and what I call sprint outcomes is what I find gets the juice flowing in teams the most. What about you? Are you a goals guy?

Skot Waldron (26:09.00)
Here’s the thing. I’ve wanted to be because that was the culture I was brought up in and what I understood was supposed to be how you run a business, right? You build a business plan, and you have certain goals and measurements in there that you want to reach. And that’s how you know if you’re doing okay or not, is by making sure that you’re exceeding or meeting certain criteria or thresholds that you’re working towards.

And my wife is constantly coming to me and saying, “so are you setting goals for your business? Like, how are things going?” I’m like, “I do once a year. And then I might review them once a year.” And it’s like, I’m kind of like, I think I should be doing that thing because that’s what society and business has told me, but I don’t. And I’ve had, regardless, a very successful business and I look at, I’m reading a book right now. Oliver Burkeman, who’s a philosopher, is writing a book. It’s all about anecdotes for people that hate positive thinking, but it’s how do you still move forward with that idea, right? And it’s interesting because I just finished the chapter on the anti, the counter argument of goals and how they’ve done a bunch of studies on people that really set goals within their culture actually performed worse than teams that had no real goals put in front of them.

Now, the organization up top knows the goal, but they never told it to the teams. They just kind of let the teams perform and operate. And of course, you have to have good people that are going to want to perform. And maybe it links to what you’re talking about is that higher purpose. Like, “why are you there? Are you aligned with our purpose and what we’re doing?” Cause I think that’s where alignment really comes into play. I’m on the fence back and forth between I think you have to have something to measure against, especially if you’re a public company. You’re going to have to meet some criteria, but I don’t know. It’s an interesting discussion.

Karina Mangu-Ward (28:25.00)
I think it’s such an interesting one. And I do think it comes down to that there’s a more fundamental alignment, a more fundamental motivation that I think is more powerful than goals. I think sometimes we set goals that are really actually just metrics. Like “I want to get X number of followers, or I want to do X revenue”, that’s just a metric that we should be tracking against how we’re doing. And metrics are helpful for directional steering.

But I think the deeper long-term “why” for what you’re doing. I imagine you know that the work you’re trying to do in the world. And like that animates you more so than any little goal sentence you’re going to write down on paper. And you’ve got projects, probably, right? You’re like, I’m working on this now and that now. And like the feeling of achievement, accomplishment that comes with chunking off a big piece of work and getting it done, to me is more meaningful than like ticking off a particularly a numeric goal that’s written down on some page somewhere.

Skot Waldron (29:38.00)
And I think that’s a part of the problem is when we start chasing the metric. And that’s what gets in the way. Simon Sinek wrote a book called The Infinite Game that I reference all the time in philosophy, but with our finite thinking versus infinite thinking. And the way that finite thinking, meaning we win and lose by the quarter, we win and lose by the month, we win or lose by our metrics and our sales numbers, and I think that destroys culture. And I think it destroys our mentality and why we’re really here to do what we do. Because I’ve seen so many sales teams that come to me that don’t meet their number and all of a sudden, they’re all failures for that quarter. And I’m like, is that how you’re basing your whole existence? And does anybody remember how you did in Q2 of 2022? Like, does anybody remember that? And I think that that’s what’s perpetuating this problem that we have when we measure all like the goal culture.

Karina Mangu-Ward (30:43.00)
And I think it connects right back to what we were talking about before about the learning culture and the failure culture. Like if what Wall Street, you know, sees as your success is hitting the quarterly numbers again and again, it creates no room to take risks and to fail and learn for things that will generate much more infinite benefit because it’s going to compromise the numbers right now. We work with publicly owned and privately owned businesses. And we do see more of that kind of creative spirit and that willingness to play in the privately owned businesses because there’s less of that exposure, the metrics exposure.

I do think though that that’s where organizations overall, the culture is determined by the organization overall, but value is created at the team level, at the team unit. And I think it’s possible for teams inside big organizations to do this differently, to be more driven by purpose, to see metrics as helpful and directional, but not the ultimate, you know, thing that we are measured against at all time, to see learning as more important than success today. And I think that when teams start operating that way and we can see that they can be creative, it starts to create a ripple effect outward. So that’s why I’m certainly bullish on teams, but I’m with you that the kind of rigid goal setting culture is yeah, it’s not good. It doesn’t feel good for people either to constantly feel in a failure narrative when what we should be in is a learning narrative.

Skot Waldron (32:29.00)
I saw an email from a CEO written out to his entire organization that was a result of not meeting numbers and feeling the pressure. And it came out and it was, you know, it was horrible. I read this, I couldn’t believe a human had written this. You know, I was just like, “do you hear what you’re saying?” I mean, he’s like, “we’re going to put in those 12-hour days, y’all and we are going to not rest until we meet this criteria and this number and if you’re not dedicated to this, then you know where the door is.” I mean, it was just blatant language. I was just going, so your finite men says you want to meet your numbers this quarter, and then you’re going to lose all your people. And then how are you going to do? And this culture of learning is not there. And people aren’t motivated to want to learn.

So let me ask you this. I know we’re coming to the end here of our time. And I want to talk about your book too, but I want to ask this question before we go into that. Maybe you can lead it into the book conversation. If there’s a team out there that’s listening right now and they feel overwhelmed, they feel reactive because they’re feeling the pressure. We feel pressure. We need a little pressure, y’all. But we feel the pressure of meeting those metrics and what we’re doing and maybe they feel buried in unnecessary complexity. Sometimes I’ll call it unnecessary complexity. What’s the first thing you think is your recommendation that they should stop doing when they’re feeling this way?

Karina Mangu-Ward (34:13.00)
What should they stop doing? I know this sounds counter intuitive, but “stop panicking and get back to good habits” would be my recommendation. I think when teams feel under pressure, there’s this instinct to add more meetings, have more back channels, revisit, revisit and revisit decisions. Like the pressure feels like it goes up. And I recommend that teams go back to basics and ask the question: “what is our fundamental purpose? What are we doing here?” Like get really clear with each other about what matters the most about our work together.

I like to say that panic loves ambiguity. Panic feeds on ambiguity. And where things are fuzzy, everything starts to feel urgent and equally important. And everybody feels entitled to weigh in. And that creates a ton of churn and a ton of politics. And I think the other place where I see teams always getting stuck is around decision making. So, when things are feeling complex and churny and panicky and ambiguous and on fire. Just asking the question, “what decisions do we need to make and who’s going to make them? Who’s going to make the call, even if others are going to disagree? Who’s going to make the call even if it’s imperfect?” And empowering those folks to actually do that and know that we have their back, regardless of how it turns out, because the call was made in good faith with the information that we had.

And then I think it comes back to what we were talking about before, which is like keep communicating in a way that builds trust. Churn is created when we’re lying to each other or withholding information from each other or pretending to be certain about things that we’re not. And or if we’re being silent because we’re waiting until we’re ready to communicate. So being in the communication of habit of communicating frequently and often, even when the news is kind of shitty, is a way to reduce the meeting before the meeting and the meeting after the meeting that drains all of our energy out when things are hard. Make sure that the right conversation is happening, the candid conversation is happening in the moments that you have. So that the rest of the time you can do real work, like tick things off your list, get stuff done with the people you need to be collaborating with.

The last thing I’ll say is like when teaming is working really well, it’s both good for people and good for outcomes. And we often think that those things are a trade-off. Like it’s like you’re talking about with this leader. Like we need to get to our outcomes. So, burn yourself out. Like 12 hours, you know, at the desk is how we do it. Or we say, “well, we’ve got to be nice to our people and we’ll compromise our outcomes.” But when we’re teaming well together, we can have both – joyful days with clarity and enjoying the people that we’re working with and achieving like whatever it is that we’ve set out to achieve.

Skot Waldron (37:30.00)
Very good. I mean, I hear this whole idea that strategy isn’t the thing that fails first. It’s really teamwork. It’s really our trust with each other. It’s really the way we communicate. It’s all the systems we built in the background that are supporting the strategy. And then we blame the strategy when it really wasn’t probably the strategy in the first place. There’s a couple of assumptions that I think you challenge, which is really cool that better strategy equals better performance, right? Superstar talent equals superstar teamwork.

And this last one that I found is really this idea of harder work equals better results. And those things that you challenge, I love that you challenge them. I’m perfectly aligned with you on those things. I mean, do you talk about those in your book? So “Teams That Meet the Moment” is the title of the book. And I mean, are you talking about those things in there too?

Karina Mangu-Ward (38:22.00)
Yeah, I mean that the book is framed affectionately around what we call these lies we love, which is the three that you just named, that we just need to get our strategy right. We’ve got to get superstar talent, and they’ll create superstar teamwork and like just have to work harder. And the book is framed with the idea that like those things are fine. We do need strategy, we do need talent, we do need people working hard, but they are just not enough. And if we don’t have teams that can execute, we’re not going to achieve our most ambitious aims. And that is what keeps people engaged and in for the work and exciting and helping organizations like have the impact on the world that they want to have.

And the book is about the fact that teaming is like it’s messy and hard and human. And it’s not something we can get right, but it is something that we can get better at one habit at a time. But it’s actually not something we can do alone. Like I can’t get good at teaming, if we’re a team, Skot, we have to get good at teaming together. We have to have shared language and shared practice about what good teaming looks like. I think the book is really an act of hope that we can actually work well together, even in a world where change is the new norm, and that we can have some joy as we do that. And that comes down to shared practice, shared habits, shared language, shared mindset about what high performance teaming looks like.

And so, my deepest wish is that the nine little micro practices in this book are, we talk about them as like the starter stack. These are the starter puzzle pieces of exceptional teaming inside complex modern organizations. If every team in the world was aware of these, I think that work would be better and I think that the world would be better and it sounds like a big hope, but I genuinely believe it.

Skot Waldron (40:20.00)
Well, I always say hope is not a strategy but hope better be part of it. I just did a little podcast episode on hope a little while ago. And that versus optimism and how hope is really about this thing that helps drive action when optimism can sometimes seem non-actionable. It just kind of seems like this fluffy thing that’s out there. So, I love your element of hope. I think that every book should instill that in some way, shape, or form, or else we’re not inspired to transform and that’s a big piece of what we’re here to do.

So, Karina, you rock. Thank you for being on. People get in touch with you how people get the book. I’m sure wherever books are sold, tell us.

Karina Mangu-Ward (41:07.00)
Yes, books are everywhere online. Find us at aug.co/book. You can download the first chapter. We’ve got a really cool assessment. So, you can get an answer. “Does your team meet the moment? And if not, what are some of the practices that you can try?” we’ve got a bunch of resources up on the website and follow me on LinkedIn.

Over the next year, we’re going to be doing a big campaign sharing a lot about what we wrote about in the book and just, you know, having folks follow along on the journey. So, I would love to connect to anybody who cares about teaming and culture.

Skot Waldron (41:44.00)
You’re awesome. Thanks. Keep working the good stuff out there.

Karina Mangu-Ward (41:47.00)
Thank you, Skot. Great interview, appreciate it. Thanks for the time.

Skot Waldron (41:54.00)
Know it alls versus learn it alls. I kind of want to steal that because it’s so good. Know it alls versus learn it alls, and if we can create cultures around that, I think that that is going to empower a lot of our leaders, a lot of the people that feel a little bit insecure about what they’re saying to their people and how they’re leading their people. I think that that’s so so so good.

The candid comms that she talks about, try this out. Try this out next time you’re having conversations in your one-on-ones. It’s like, “what do I know? What don’t I know? And what will I do?” That is pretty cool. And I think we should encourage that from the people that are reporting to us as well, to have them share what they know, what they don’t know, and what they’re going to do. That transparency, it builds trust.

And then I think this other thing about how do we build conditions for teams and not just individuals? We have a very individual performance culture. And if we can bridge that into team culture and team performance culture, then I think we could do some things that I think we feel a little bit held back from doing in our workplace and the things we’re trying to achieve.

Karina, thanks for being on the show. Thanks everybody for being here.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay Unlocked.