Show notes
Powerful Collaborations with Stewart Levine Hugh Ballou: Welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange. Russell, here we are again. Week after week, we have amazing people. Yet today, this is a friend from years ago. I sent out an email asking people if they wanted to contribute to the magazine or be on the show. Immediately, Stewart Levine responded. How are things in Denver today, Russell? Russell Dennis: It’s a little cloudy, a little bit cooler than it has been. But we are in the fall season. All is well otherwise. Welcome, Stewart. Thank you for coming. Stewart Levine: My pleasure to be with you guys today. I will be landing in Denver early tomorrow morning and then driving up to Vail for some American Bar Association meetings. Interesting, because I have a new book called Becoming the Best Lawyer You Can Be: How to Maintain Physical, Emotional, Spiritual, and Mental Health. The American Bar Association, 27 authors, I curated it and edited it. I’m actually very excited about it. Hugh: Look at that. Let’s back up. I’m sure there is people watching who want to know who this guy is anyway. Why don’t you tell them, Stewart? Stewart: Thank you, Hugh. Here’s the short synopsis. I practiced law for about 10 years in a reasonably traditional number of contexts, starting off in the New Jersey Attorney General’s office. Then I got tired of fighting with people. And it was before the whole ADR, Alternative Dispute Resolution, movement came on board. So I decided to do a little career change. I spent six years inside of AT&T as they were going through huge organizational change and transformation with major law firms as my clients, not in a legal sense, but in an account representative sense. On a parallel track, I started divorce meditation because I wanted to use the skills I had developed as a lawyer. I learned a lot about communication, about collaboration, about conflict resolution working with couples getting divorced because no one is in worse shape than that. Over time, I moved that work over into working with organizations, teens, organizational transformational cultural change work, individual coaching. For the last 30 years, that essentially is what I have been doing. The last 10 years, I have learned a ton of teaching programs and all the soft skills, relationship skills on behalf of the American Management Association. I have done a number of collaborations over time with various other individuals, all in the organizational space. That is the short synopsis, except I have also written a couple of best-selling books. The first one is called Getting to Resolution: Turning Conflict into Collaboration. It was endorsed by Stephen Covey. It was named one of the best business books of 1998, second edition came out in 2008. A follow-up called The Book of Agreement: 10 Essential Elements for Getting the Results You Want. That was endorsed by a number of notable people. That’s the short answer. You and I met in the context of both being on the faculty of an organization called CEO Space. It’s a pleasure to see your face again, Hugh. Hugh: It’s a pleasure. Thank you for stepping up when I sent out that probing email. Actually, we were standing in those groups out in the lobby, and someone was addressing the group. I whipped out my draft of my workbook, Dealing with High Performance Teams, and I said, “Would you do me a favor and review this? Tell me what it’s missing.” You sent me an email saying there was nothing about agreements in here. So I asked if I could quote your book of the 10EssentialElementsofAgreementsso I could give you attribution. I refer to those all the time. I send people to Amazon to get that book. It’s really a treasure. We are speaking to people who are in the social benefit/for-purpose sector. They are clergy running a church or synagogue. They are executive directors running a for-purpose community-based organization. They are running a membership organization. I see a lot of conflict because people haven’t been really good in creating this agreement. They don’t write it down. They haven’t decided how we are going to define expectations. I would guess, we’re talking about collaboration and alignment today. I would think one tenet of alignment is to be able to have your expectations written down. Where do you start with alignment? What is the starting point? Stewart: Sure. Just to frame this, what I always say to people is you can pay me now or pay me later. If you pay me now, you’ll pay me a lot less. Essentially what that means is spend a little time on the front end, making sure you have alignment, making sure you have shared expectations. Otherwise, the root of conflict is when people have different understandings of what they are doing together, and they have a different sense of metrics in terms of how we are going to measure whether or not we were successful. Critical piece is spending time on the front end. TheBookofAgreementcontains about 30 models of agreements for getting to a place of alignment. Those ten elements are actually so good I put them on the back of my business card. It’s not like I’m trying to keep any secrets. I am happy to give them away. You start off by having a conversation. What is our intent and vision? In other words, what are we doing together? What’s our intent and vision? By the way, as a little aside, most legal agreements are something that I refer to as agreements for protection. What if this goes wrong, and what if that goes wrong? There is not a huge amount of time spent on what we are trying to achieve here. That was the perspective that I took. What is our intent and vision? What is the role that each one of us is going to play? In other words, what is each party or person responsible for? What are the specific promises that each person makes? In other words, what is each person going to do to bring that vision into reality? How are they going to contribute? What is the value that each person receives? Why? Because if people don’t receive, if they are not getting value out of any form of collaboration, they will stop contributing. They will stop performing. Metrics. How will you measure whether or not you were successful? Get it to a place of objectivity. Concerns and fears. People often have concerns and fears that they don’t want to talk about. They are shy. What I like to do is put this in the model. No, this is something you have to talk about. Renegotiation. The idea that when we begin, we know what we know, but we don’t know what we don’t know. As we work together, moving down the road, we discover things, and we constantly need to be mindful of renegotiating that agreement to make sure we are back in a place of alignment. Consequences or benefits. What’s at stake here? What’s really at stake in this collaboration for the individuals involved, for the organization, for the community that is being served in the world of nonprofit and benefit organizations? Conflict resolution. We know that things happen. How are we going to resolve the conflicts and differences when they come up? After you have talked about those nine things, you look at the other person or the group and go, Yes or no. This is a project that I am engaged with. What I like to say is if you got good alignment, you don’t have to worry about loose panels flapping off the rocket ship that you are trying to get to take off. I’m not sure where that came from. A little feedback from the universe. That’s okay. The last element, number ten, is agreement and trust. Are we aligned? This is what is essential to do at the front end. People who start to use this and discover it think it’s like sliced bread. It’s just amazing, the simple ten element model, what it can create and what it can save you in the long run. Hugh: Absolutely. I call it paying the upfront price. You quoted the oil filter pay me now or pay me later. That’s a great commercial. It’s so true. It’s the price upfront is far cheaper. That’s a brilliant model. What happens when you get to #10 is you really know that you have an agreement. Stewart: You know you have an agreement, or you know you don’t, which is of equal value. You know that Okay, this is, we’re not in alignment. I don’t think we can get to alignment. This is not a good project to work on together. Hugh: I don’t know if you know I do lots of group board meetings and staff meetings. I am fundamentally a music connector who helps build ensembles, which is synergy in group interaction. In the South, y’all can tell I’m in the South, we say none of us is as smart as all of us. How do you get the best collective thinking without going into groupthink? My answer to that is we teach people how to build consensus. I find most people confuse consensus and compromise when they are the exact opposite. A consensus is a win-win, and compromise is lose-lose. What dawns on me as you are describing that model which I have read so many times is that prompts people to talk in a different way, discover new things, and come to some sort of consensus that whether we can work together or we can’t. Is consensus part of alignment? Stewart: Absolutely. Consensus is essentially alignment. I’m glad you mentioned the word “compromise.” You said it exactly correctly, Hugh. Compromise means to lose-lose. People giving up what’s important to them. Consensus is we are all in agreement, we are all in alignment, we are all moving forward toward the same things with the same end result in mind. Hugh: It’s very misunderstood. What setting it is. A corporate setting, a boardroom, or anything like that. I think it’s really misunderstood. It’s important that we can build that synergy if we are going to work together as teams. Why is alignment essential in today’s world? Why don’t you go to D.C. and teach them? You can skip that second part. Stewart: I want to go back a second, and I will come to your question. I want to punctuate this point, Hugh. What also happens in the process of having this conversation is you start to develop a real deeper relationship. I don’t mean an intimate personal relationship; I mean a working relationship. And as we all know, when you have relationship with people you are working with, it’s much easier to resolve differences, which will inherently come up. The only reason people end up in lawsuits is when relationships break down. That’s the only time they resort to those 100-page agreements that attorneys prepare, when the relationship breaks down. Otherwise, they work it out; they want to keep working together. Having said that, why is this more important in today’s world? I think it’s more important in today’s world because we have a lot less face-to-face interaction. So much of what we’re doing transactionally is virtual. In those kinds of situations, it’s easier to be a jerk. And people don’t consciously spend time to build relationships. This is a way to do it. That’s one piece. The second piece is it’s too costly when things break down. When you end up in conflict and any kind of lawsuits or legal process, you can’t afford it. You can’t afford to waste that time removing so quick. Three is if you look out at the world, it seems that there is a movement toward a much more values-based business and organizational culture. Much more. Because people realize what goes around comes around. You can’t treat transactions as a one-shot deal. We have to be more relational and values-based. Even the millennial generation coming up, for them, it’s real important to be part of a mission-driven organization, whatever that mission happens to be. To frame for-profit missions as having a “missionary” value. Business organizations in some sense are becoming a place where people get in culture. Business, nonprofits, in that context, it’s where we spend so much time. Bringing values and alignment into that are critical. Probably more than you wanted to hear. To go back to that other question about Washington D.C., about 10 years ago, I was actually doing a two-day program for the Federal Executive Institute, which is run out of the Treasury Department. I had about 75 people for two days. At the end of the program, a bunch of Navy officers came up to me in white uniforms and said, “You need to go down the block and teach those guys in Congress.” Bottom line is, I don’t know if you remember those old jokes, “How many blanks does it take to change a light bulb?” How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but it’s got to want to change. The guys in D.C., I use guys generically, they don’t seem to want to change. They are sitting in some old cultural model, and that’s why the rating in D.C. of the folks that we elect as representatives and our employees, the ratings are so incredibly low. Hugh: They are. We are shaped by the culture that we have experienced and the culture we have been injected into. We don’t have to accept that. I can’t imagine what it’s like on the inside. Some of the large companies and some of the large churches I have served have a culture. You refer to this topic of conflict. Before we leave the alignment and agreement piece, what I have experienced when people have those kinds of conversations. By the way, another piece Russell and I present and attend is the Business Acceleration Summit with your cheerleader Shannon Gronich, who studied your program with you. She uses it quite well. In going through that process, there is a transformation that happens with people’s perspective, even those who want to change. There is a substantive transformation that happens. Give us the story. Am I right? Does that happen with people exploring those options? If so, is there an example without giving away names of the kind of transformation that happens when people can have a different kind of conversation? Stewart: It creates connection. Connectivity. To me, human connectivity is the key to productivity. That sounds like a rhyme. Connectivity is the key to productivity. It is. If you think about high performance teams, what was it about the teams that made them great? The human relationships. The high levels of trust. When you create alignment, that is naturally going to happen. For religious organizations, go back to the words of Christ. Wherever two or more of you are gathered, there is one. When you create alignment and connection, you create a different kind of energy. It’s there. It’s there. One other thing I wanted to say about this, Hugh. You mentioned the word “culture.” I do cultural transformation work. People often ask for that. It’s a very amorphous concept. When you think about what is culture in an organization, culture is actually held in relationships. Relationships are a function of agreements, implicit and explicit. I say if we can make our agreements explicit, we can change the culture. By having agreements with how we will be with each other, how we will treat each other. I have done this in many organizations over time. It always comes up value-based because people use their highest aspirations when they are creating these kinds of agreements. Culture. Huge piece. Hugh: Let’s focus in a minute. As a conductor, I create high performance cultures in choirs and orchestras. If you are familiar, the person at the front influences others. I have a lot of leaders say, “I want other people to change.” I point out, “That ain’t gonna happen unless you change.” I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Murray Bowen, the psychiatrist who has a whole leadership methodology. Bowen’s wisdom is if you want to change people on your team, you change yourself, and they reflect that. What you are talking about is the vulnerability of the leader willing to open their brains to something new. Stewart: Jim Kouzes, favorite leadership consultant, and his partner Barry Posner. Talk about as one of the key elements of leadership modeling the way. That is a validation of what you just said. Modeling the way. Change yourself. Show others how you w…
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