Can We Operationalize Relationships at Work? w/ Sinéad Condon, Guidewire’s Chief People Officer

Anyone can do this in any situation, in any room, in any meeting. Hold on a second. What are we in service to? Nice, beautiful. How do we operationalize empathy? How do we normalize vulnerability? Let's not get backlogs and burn down charts. Let's have the conversation now. Let's facilitate what is in the moment as the most important thing. The definition of a relationship is actually from Daniel Siegel's work: to know and to be known. Oh, look at that, right? Are you listening to win? Are you listening to learn? Are you listening to understand? Wow.

I know my name is Sinead Condon. To me, to belong means to feel that I'm a part of something, to feel that my contribution matters, and that together within community we can accomplish something great.

I'm delighted to be here. I'm super excited.

Yeah, and how is that influencing my choice? Because if I am coming through three years of a pandemic, if I am experiencing layoffs whether I'm the impacted or the retained population, if I'm experiencing my personal traumas, my personal life is going to shite, right? Like whatever that is, how do I get held in my experience in an organization where I am really encouraged to engage, yes, to perform, that's right, to accomplish and execute this really long list that are my OKRs, that are my goals? And where's the authenticity in all of that?

Yes, it is. Because you know, I always say, when you walk into an organization, you have signed a contract. And I don't mean the offer letter. I mean you have leaned in, as has the company, and you've met in the middle and said, 'We have a working agreement together that we are both going to show up and bring our best selves.' That's incredible. And we owe it to ourselves, the company owes it to us, to find that sweet spot on how we are going to thrive together in the ecosystem that we are creating. And the self-advocacy part is to lean into that and to say, 'What is that working agreement?' And I think that's where it can get a little messy. And I encourage, when we talk about the ecosystem, I encourage every single person to find ways, even if they have a support system around you, but find ways to get clarity around that working agreement. Sure, there was a job description. Sure, you have these tools in your back pocket. Sure, you came in and you interviewed and you checked all the boxes and they checked all the boxes for you. But there is an unwritten part often in that working agreement, which is what I'm talking about, extending beyond the job description and the offer letter to how do I want to be treated? How am I going to treat others? How am I going to create relationships and build upon those relationships so that I can be my best self and I can help create best selves in others?

One of the most important things for me as a human being is the relationships that I have with the people around me. And if I go back to the value system part, when we come into ecosystems where we are unknown, often times as we start to build relationships there is some sort of a veneer attached to them. We build relationships based on what we do, the decisions that we make, the authority that we have. But are we building relationships based on who we are as people? Are we building relationships based on the experiences that we've had that have made us who we are? The answer to that is probably no, right? And I get it. There's lots to get done. Often you're in a hustle mode and you're trying to build agility into the organization, you're trying to build operational excellence, and all of those things are really, really important. But if we could go that step further and start to think about these worldviews that we all have, which really is what makes up our value system, our worldviews, how we think about the world purely because of the way we've been brought up and the experiences that we've had. I like to describe it, for your listeners, close your eyes for a moment. Think of the palm of your hand. You've got five fingers. You have judgments, opinions, biases, beliefs, actions, and values that are your imprint of who you are. But if I take my hand and I put the palm of my hand up against my chest, whereby my value system is hidden, nobody knows who I am unless I share that. And so it is incumbent upon me, if I really truly want to build authentic relationships and be intentional about it, that I can share some of that with others to deepen those relationships, to deepen the understanding of those values, and to give people clarity because it helps people to understand why I make decisions the way I do, why it's important to me that I have various perspectives in the room so that I not just make a decision but I make the right decision. And having the intentionality to bring different perspectives, not because they have different jobs but because they have different worldviews, because they have different value systems that all play an integral part as data points to making the right decisions.

That's a great question. What a right decision is. I love that you're asking me that question. Here's what I think about when I hear you say that. In the process of me making decisions, your listeners, we all make decisions every day. So how do you know what is the right decision? I guess the first thing for me is to ask a very, very important question, and that is: what are you, what are we, what am I in service to?

What are we in service to? And the reason that in any given day I probably asked that question 20 or 30 times is because it's so easy to get caught up in everything, in all the minutia of just everything that's been thrown at us. And it is very easy to lose the plot. It's very easy to lose the plot. And part of the working agreement of teams working together is this idea of holding each other accountable to making sure that we don't lose the plot and to aligning on what it is that we are in service to. And so much of working in human systems, and by human systems I mean any place that there are humans running around working together, making decisions together, being together, doing together, is that the dynamics of all of these different value systems coming together can often times derail what we are in service to. It can blur the lines. It can become very abstract. And to a large extent, often times because we all have our own agendas, and there's nothing wrong with that. I have an agenda. My remit as a Chief People Officer is something very specific. Somebody else coming to the table may have an agenda, their remit that's very specific to them. And so we honor and acknowledge what each of us brings and our own individual outcomes that we need to execute on. But when we are collaborating, when we are a collective working together in collaboration, there is an element, and I invite anybody to do this, is to facilitate, lean into facilitating the question. And anyone can do this in any situation, in any room, in any meeting. Hold on a second. What are we in service to? Nice, beautiful.

Let's talk about holding each other accountable for a second, because I'm a big believer in throwing the word assumption. Let's put a visual around it. Take assumption, throw it in a bucket, put some oil on it, and burn it. Let's do that. That's quite vivid. And the reason that I suggest doing that is because we make assumptions all day long about people and things and the world around us that are completely inaccurate.

Yes, for sure. In the ownership element of this, I want to go back to the working agreements that I was talking about. Working agreements, often called designed alliances. I say to everybody, have working agreements about everything. Put some structure around it.

An example of that would be, let's say we're working on a project. We're just starting off a project. We get the team together. First conversation we have is, what are we trying to do? What are we in service to? And then the next thing is throwing out the assumptions. What's a good example of an assumption going into a project? Oh, Raj Kamari and I worked with each other before in another project, and so I know all the things about Raj Kamari and how she shows up and how the work gets done and how decisions are made, yada yada yada. Assumption, assumption, assumption. Well, guess what? Let's use COVID as an example. Bear with me a second because I know I'm jumping around a little bit. We all just came out of three years, three and a half years at this point. I am a completely different person three and a half years later. The skills that I have now, the way I think about things, the really leaning into what are we in service to, the constant calibration in my brain of what outcomes are we driving, what value are we really trying to create. All of these things are much more intentional for me now. Thankfully, if I was to say there was a silver lining coming out of COVID in that respect, I think all of us have come through with new attributes, characteristics of ourselves, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And that's fine. So when we talk about how do I pull all of that together, we come out the other end of that. I'm a different person. I don't want somebody making an assumption of me that I am what I was three years ago. I am a different person now, and how I show up is different. And so what I look to facilitate going into a project even is taking a moment as we're kicking off to craft a co-created working agreement, which looks like this: simple questions. How do we want to be when we are together as a team? When it's working really, really well, what does it look like? When it's not working well, how are we all showing up? If it's not working well for me, am I withdrawing? Am I turning my camera off on Zoom? Am I somehow disengaged? And it manifests in me in a certain way. You want to create ownership? Then we all have to own who we are and how we show up in these moments, but we also have to share them. We have to talk about them. Because otherwise, what happens? We all make assumptions about each other, and most of the time they're faulty. So having the working agreement, being clear collectively, and it can always grow, it can evolve. You get to know each other. You're halfway down the project. You're learning more things about each other. You're settling in and you're getting into the flow of things. Maybe you recalibrate the working agreement.

Well, you always obviously have to start with yourself. This is very, very true. So let's continue with the example that you gave. Let's say we've been working together for seven years and all of a sudden we start a new project and you already are making all these assumptions about how we've worked together in the past. How do I take ownership to recalibrate who you are and how do I recalibrate who I am?

Oh, say more about that, please.

So this is really interesting. You're normalizing vulnerability. That's what you're advocating here.

You know, it's interesting. When I think about it, oftentimes people ask me this question: 'What kind of programs do you have at work to operationalize your culture?' And I have a little organ rejection to that a little bit. An organ rejection. My heart struggles with it a little bit because shouldn't we talk more? Conversations are so... there's a vulnerability to conversations that is just a natural part of sharing, saying words out loud. And when you programize things, sometimes the art of the conversation gets lost. And I would love to see, and this is something that I'm so committed to in the work that I do now, is let's have a conversation. Let's come together and have a conversation about it. Let's not get backlogs and burn down charts and a whole bunch of things that are going to take us six months, and then we'll come out the other end of the wash cycle and then we have something, and by the time we have it the conversation has been lost or repurposed or recalibrated into something that is now deemed as more important. Let's have the conversation now. Let's facilitate what is in the moment as the most important thing. Because as soon as you programize it or programmatize it, whatever the word is, then you kind of get swept up and guess what? Halfway through the program you're saying, 'What are we in service to? What was that again?' Because you're prioritizing the doing versus the being.

One of the things that Meredith Haberfeld, who is the CEO of Think Human, does phenomenally is facilitate conversations. She is just mind-blowingly brilliant. I have been in several fishbowls as a participant, as a guest, and I always just stare at her because just witnessing her skill is an art form. The way that she facilitates the conversation, the way that she asks the questions, the way that she pauses and then names what just occurred that allows the depth of the energy in the room to go even further. Not everyone has that skill set that Meredith just really innately exudes. How does one go about learning this? How does one go about reconnecting in order to facilitate a conversation? There has to be a level of vulnerability. There has to be a level of willingness to be curious. There has to be a willingness to be in a place of uncertainty and in flow. And if I am so busy doing and executing and making sure that all my data is lined up and all my ducks are in a row, how do I learn this?

Yeah, yeah, wow. And oh, that's amazing. I love that. And so when I first read the 'listening to win,' I was like, 'Oh my gosh.' And what that can look like sometimes, it's so funny because sometimes when I'm doing some session on coaching skills or something with managers or whomever, I go in and I say, 'Okay, how many people here like to solve problems?' And everybody puts up their hand. And like, great, that's fantastic. Of course we all want to solve problems, and we're hired to solve problems. But are you, when you are wearing your coaching hat, when you are leaning into coaching others, are you listening so that you can solve their problem? Are you listening to create space and to understand and be curious, knowing that you are in service to helping them to solve the problem themselves? And when I read 'listening to win,' there's a winning element to that. It's like, 'Oh my God, I know this one. I know the answer.' Somebody is saying to you, 'I have a problem.' 'Let me help you. I know. Let me...' And that's a listening to win mentality right there.

Well, my journey to Spiral Dynamics, which people can Google as well, really comes back to my foundations in agile, which you and I have talked about before. Those that are listening may think of agile as a project management methodology used in engineering, but in reality agile is really about ways of working. There's a myth out there that it only works in engineering teams because people hear the ceremonies of agile being retrospectives and daily standups, etc., which I think everybody should do a retrospective after everything that they do because it's all about what did we learn. Even in your personal relationships, because it's all about continuous improvement, and who doesn't want to improve? And so as an agilist, and I've been an agilist for many, many years now, I was lucky enough on one of the agile transformation retreats to be introduced to this idea of Spiral Dynamics through a number of mentors of mine. Spiral Dynamics, which actually was kind of born out of research that a professor called Clare Graves at Union College in Upstate New York had done on the experimentation of human systems and how human systems evolve. And he called it something else, but it was fundamentally about our levels of consciousness as humans and how that evolves depending on how we progress or regress, depending on our life experiences and the natural evolution of things. There are kind of two pieces to it. One is, is there a natural evolution to the human system that typically happens every five years? In other words, where you are now, what you are at this very moment, will in time evolve as your level of consciousness evolves, to a large extent because your experiences will teach you and you'll form new ways of thinking about things as you mature, etc. But that can also happen through trauma. So anyway, Spiral Dynamics is really all about how we think about human systems and the evolution of those human systems. So why would somebody like me, who is a software geek that has worked in companies my whole life, be interested? Because we are constantly changing, and in order for us to transform organizations, we must seek to understand and learn and know what makes us as humans take and what brings us to the next level of our understanding, what brings us to a level of understanding by which we understand and we become part of what the tipping point is to change or whatever that is. And you had said Spiral Dynamics has lost its traction a little bit. Well, the person, and I was very honored to be certified by Don Beck, Dr. Don Beck, who really took Clare Graves' work and carried the torch of Spiral Dynamics for 30, 40 years after that. And he just passed away in 2017. And I think there are a number of people now, certainly considering as we look at the complexity of the world, and gosh, the backdrop of the world is just in such flux, it would appear all the time, that so many of us, in fact I would probably venture to say that every single human on the planet, even coming out of the pandemic because it was something that we all shared and to some degree galvanized around because we all drew parallels to it in some form or fashion, have all asked ourselves one question: in its raw form, 'What the hell is going on?' And 'What the heck am I going to do in it?' And 'How do I be in it?' And that's where I draw on my experiences as a practitioner of Spiral Dynamics to try to facilitate that. And if you look at it as some sort of stage theory, which I know there's controversy about kind of stage theory, but if I... I don't even know stage theory. It's just having different stages, different phases to the process in terms of the human system. And the one thing I would probably say, as I think back 15, 20 years ago, what I called myself, and people have heard me say this, this is another moment of vulnerability, I think I would have called myself a transformation strategist. And now looking back, I would have said I was a fraud. And what do I mean by that? I'm going to be very intentional when I say this. I would go into organizations, whether it was as a consultant or in whatever role I was in, and I would be looking to create some sort of change and recognize that what I was trying to do was difficult, was going to be hard to a large extent because the ecosystem itself, the system was complex. Got a bunch of humans running around with all different value systems. But when they didn't understand me, when they didn't get what I was selling, I would literally go into my office or wherever I was and go, 'What's wrong with these people? Why are they not getting it?' Because I didn't for a moment recognize or acknowledge that they were where they were for a reason. We're all on our own journey.

Yes, for sure. And I think one of the things, and if any of your listeners want to educate themselves a little bit on Spiral Dynamics, what one can see at face value sometimes is that because they can be illustrated as stages of consciousness or evolution of thinking, which is to some degree from an organizational standpoint inaccurate. Because first of all, it's important to recognize that in any ecosystem there are all different stages of understanding and consciousness going on at any one time. And often times, all of those stages have different manifestations. Some are more collaborative by nature, some are more order-oriented by nature. It depends where they are. And I'll use an example to just ground it a little bit. If you are working in an organization that has predominantly in its characteristic being startup-esque, so you have a product, you have iterated on that product, you've come out the other end, that product now has grown legs and you want to scale the product. But the getting there, the ideation, the innovation of getting to that point was a system in itself that is most likely very, very different to what the company is when it's mature and now has a portfolio of products and now has a thousand more people. So all of these stages of an organization have different characteristics purely by the stage, the level that they're at. Even the person that you hire to foundationalize that part of the organization might not be the person that you scale to the next 10,000. That's right. And an example I would use even in designing in hybrid right now is this question that a lot of companies are asking: should you be in the office or should you be remote? Or what would that look like? For engineering as an example, if you have a fledgling product or a product that's not quite yet realized its potential, you're still thinking about it, you're still ideating on it, then it probably makes sense as you're going through that creative process and bringing people together to collaborate on what it could be, probably makes a lot of sense to be together on a whiteboard and in a room with each other. That's very hard to do on Zoom. If the product is a product that's already been scaled, it's already out in the market, and you're just adding a feature to it, then maybe that's okay to do through Zoom at a different stage in the life cycle. I love this. And so the same can be said for organizations. Think about where your organization, the company that you work in, is right now. What's it going through? How is it reacting to the market? How does it manifest in the way you all show up? The market in that case has triggered a set of characteristics within the company. I love this, whereby behavior has shifted to do something exactly. And that is a catalyzing moment. And we don't often recognize it in those terms. Your listeners might be like, 'That's right. We are in profitability mode. We are operationalizing everything.' There might be somebody else that's like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm in a startup. We're on our second round and we're in a very, very different place.' And those are all okay. But pay attention to what's going on in the system at the time. Why is the system reacting that way? Why is it responding that way? Why are those the manifestations of the behavior that are showing up in that moment? And that's okay. Now, what's really interesting is when you look at an organization that has the complexity of different functions and different things going on, there may be a startup element going on in one function, a more mature thing going on in another function. And that's okay. And how do you as a leader manage all of that? That becomes the key question.

100%. That's such a beautiful way of bringing it all together. I want to ask you this question. This is really coming up for me in such a huge way. In biology, when talking about ecosystems, there is something called the Law of Requisite Variety. And what this means is the organism in that ecosystem that has the most flexibility survives. That's brilliant. What comes up for you when I say that? Because here we're talking about maturity and consciousness. Where there are varying levels of maturity within my organization, how do I as a leader contend with that?

I love this so much. Last question. You talk about if only the world were more kind. How do we get there? How do we make the world more kind? If everyone's on their own journey, if everyone's trying to be exactly as they are for all the lessons that are in front of them, why we come here as humans, why we have this human experience?

Stop listening to win. W-I-N. Stop listening to win. Meaning, don't be driven by the win. Be driven by... When I think of the reason, the reason that I say it is because winning is important. And I don't want anybody to think that I don't believe winning is important. I like to win. I look to create an environment where people can thrive, but also that they feel that they are accomplishing something, that they are feeling that they are rewarded for the amazing job that they're doing, that they're winning in that. So I don't want anybody to think that winning is not important to me. Winning is very much important to me. Your whole career exudes that. But the selfishness that can often be associated with winning, the arrogance, all of the connotations of just, we used to say, 'How many bodies do you leave in the wake of your win?' And I just think there are ways to do it. Just take a moment to think about what it is you want to win at, which is fine, but design for it. We can still win. We can still achieve. We are hardwired to be satisfied. We are hardwired to achieve. It is part of our left hemisphere experience. And we can bring our right hemisphere forward even more by doing it interconnected, by doing it collectively, by really prioritizing communal aspects in organizations. I think that for me is where we're headed.

I love that. And I hope that we get there in my lifetime. Sinead, I could speak to you for the next 14 hours. It is such an amazing honor and pleasure to have had you. This conversation was just spectacular. Thank you for being here.