My name is Lukasz Szyrmer. If you are new here, I am the author of the book Align Remotely. I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. In this episode of the Managing Remote Teams podcast, we speak with Patty Beach. Patty is a true alignment expert and facilitator. Based on two decades of experience, she recently wrote The Art of Alignment which is a proven process for achieving alignment, particularly when you need to make a tough call. The most important underlying concept is that of shuva, a practical way to achieve psychological safety for everyone on the team.
Upon listening, you will discover:
- how to achieve psychological safety with specific actions you can take
- when to drive towards a decision vs when it's worth exploring more
- how to look at alignment within a company, to identify exactly where the blockers and why removing them can cause exponential improvement
About Patty Beach
Patty Beach is the CEO of LeadershipSmarts, a firm that combines leadership best practices and coaching to help managers and executives build a better world in a better way. Her approach to leadership and psychological safety evolved over twenty years of coaching leaders in companies, non-profits, universities and government agencies.
Before earning a master's degree in organizational development from Pepperdine University, and becoming an ICF Master Certified Coach, Patty was a geologist and manager leading initiatives in new technology and emerging markets in the energy industry. Patty and her husband, Roger Toennis, are also managing partners of Founder Advisors, a consulting firm that helps Startups quickly scale and grow.
Show Transcript
Patty Beach, welcome to the managing remote teams podcast. How did you get into this topic of alignment in the first place for the benefit of the listeners?
I'm an executive coach and leadership development organization, gestational development consultant. prior to that career, my early career, I was a geoscientist. So as a woman working in oil and gas and geoscience often found that the way ideas were deliberated were just, awkward and difficult.
And I think a lot of it was because I was in a male dominated system that had a very masculine point of view, which was more about selling and telling and top down alignment. And while I thought it was really valuable, there were a number of incidences where we proceeded with, decisions that I felt were unsound and everybody in the room knew it was on sound, but we did it anyway.
An example would be, drilling a well that we all knew was going to be dry, which is a lot of. Time and money and contamination of the environment. And a lot of that was we have these contracts, we've got the sunk cost, et cetera. But a lot of it was really just not feeling comfortable talking about the fact that we had made a mistake of some point or that there are risk factors that we should be considering.
I started thinking about it in terms of how could we codify a way of talking about things to slow things down so that everybody felt safe to say what they needed to say?
So another example of this is, I'm a woman I'm in a room full of, 12 engineers guys, a lot of them seniors to me when I first started. It's daunting because every time you want to do anything, it's so expensive, , it's a very capital intensive project. It was very political environment. It's a lot more data-driven now than when I was in it, , because they have fancy, , processors and geophysics and all that back when I did it, , you'd have five points in revelation and use your magic as a geologist. I got what's going on down there, so a lot of times in geoscience, there's one of you and a lot more engineers and moving that forward. And so it can be intimidating. You're the marginalized person, because you don't necessarily have the same point of view. So that's where I got started thinking about it. When we would go to drill a well.
I was much more interested in how we talked about what we're going to drill, why are we going to drill it the way that we talked to each other? I almost looked at it like an anthropologist looking down, , seeing little dysfunctions here and there , and wanting to fix it.
So that's where it got started.
Aiming for psychological safety
How did you go about trying to fix it?
I ended up switching from geology to organizational development, going to grad school around that. And then my master's thesis on understanding masculine and feminine energy as an organizational intervention. So my goal was , to combine masculine and feminine thinking and decision-making and how people perceive it to do things.
And while that was super interesting, it was hard for it to take hold. , it just basically took the idea that I was working on, codifying it into these three principles, four steps, and five CS. So that the process basically exemplifies the best of the masculine way of thinking of putting things on the table of, , allowing people , , to look at it in the feminine, thinking it really integrating ideas, having more, , space for people to bring their feelings to the table.
So once I codified it, it started to work every time. And then I thought, okay, time to publish, get it out there so more people can use it.
Shuva as the path to psychological safety
One of the first things you bring up is this whole idea of shuva. Can you explain what you mean by that assume, assuming that
you do want people to say what's shuva it sounds like a religious word or something, or it sounds like a Jewish word. And I think that's very close to a Jewish word, but anyway, shuva is an acronym and basically it describes a universal set of needs that everybody has.
And so that's the need to be seen, heard, understood, valued, and appreciated. And what I like about the acronym shuva is in a way it's is describes. Love or fondness or, really care, caring attention, but in the workplace, we can't use the word love anymore. After me too, everything got awkward and you don't want to, fuzzy there.
So shuva kind of breaks it down into specific behaviors. What I'm trying to do is to help people understand that shuva is the pathway to alignment. So if I don't, I see you if you're not in the room, which happens, a lot of times decisions are made and that person's never even invited into the room. How can we have alignment? So I don't actually hear what you have to say, give you time to voice your opinion. Can't reach alignment. If I don't understand what you're saying, let's say you said it, you were there. You, I heard it, but I didn't get it. Can't reach alignment. , if I don't allow my judgment to be suspended long enough to incorporate in your point of view, then it's my way or the highway. That's not going to get us anywhere. So I have to actually believe that what you have to offer is going to inform my judgment. And then the last one is appreciating. So when I can send you a little message that thank you, whether we agree or disagree being grateful for the fact that you brought your time and energy to a room, then, the likelihood of alignment is a lot greater.
So in companies that I'm working with or teams are working with, we're trying to create the shoe of a culture, when we use the word shoe, but we say, Hey, I need a little shuva. So that, which means slow down, I've got something to share with you. I want to make sure you're really listening. and things like that. And just crisis positive feeling of, quality, attention, very powerful.
Raising difficult, , topics, for a group, how would shuva Help or how would you apply it to help that happened better? Like how would you have done it in the context , of your previous job? If you could go and consult with yourself, , back in the day, what would you do?
I actually worked in with two teams. One team had a lot of shuva and the other team didn't, there was in one team where we had Shuva. I had a still like super great manager and he would listen to you. So even though I was a junior geologist, he was always really interested in my opinion, he would come and ask my opinion. And so I thought really, free to share my ideas and a lot of the ideas too called that probably they didn't even know that they needed or wanted, but because I was able to bring them to the table, that was the experience.
And then I worked with another boss who it was the opposite. It was like, you. You were just supposed to do your work and then not bother anybody. And they may or may not ask you for anything, to be a part of the equation. So half the time, what would happen as things would be moving forward and you would know full wait a minute, like we've got to slow this down because that's not, like decisions were being made in a vacuum.
Back then, I don't know if I might've been able to shift that, but I do know that, , it's when I became aware of how important this is to the high functioning of a team, like really peaked my attention. , now when I'm coaching leaders. I teach in the shoe, an acronym, like right away, very first coaching session.
And I get them really thinking about places where they have misalignment, because that's where, oftentimes you're challenged to give shovel when you have alignment, it's easy. I like vanilla. You like vanilla. We're all copacetic. Everything's good. But when you have misalignment, it's when it gets hard.
I'll even walk them through you're Joe and you're working with Megan, so do you see her, often enough to stay in alignment? Do you share airtime with her? To what degree do you ask clarifying questions with the, you, do you understand her? If you don't get her, do you let her know? You don't get her? Do you value her? Do you allow her. Do you just think, Oh, she's clueless? Or do you actually think maybe she knows something I don't. Do you send appreciation? So I walk them through each of those things and oftentimes they'll come up with something. Oftentimes it's just, I should meet with this person, regularly, we should have a 15 minutes check in once a week or something.
So sometimes it's simple, other times, it's not about what Meghan's doing. It's about, what am I doing? How am I putting my shuva down the pipe to improve this relationship? Give Megan an opportunity to co-create with me. usually something shifts just by going through that, just slowing it down and really thinking through each of those letters, seeing people make breakthroughs, Pretty fascinating, honestly.
I think this, this whole topic of psychological safety seems to be coming up a lot, certainly in tech circles. playing in the same area. What I like about the way that you articulated is that it's also tied with specific kind of questions and behaviors and that kind of thing. Quite practical actually. You could talk about psychological safety, but it's not that clear what you actually need to do. And with shuva, there's a verb for every one of these, like I said, there's something you can do.
How Patty works with teams to achieve psychological safety
How do you work with teams? What's an example of a good exercise that helps with the mechanics of alignment?
So one of the things that I do with teams is they have a map out like they might put their name in the center of a page and then they would take all their team members and map them out.
So they're like a spoke around them. If you imagine, or like planets revolving around them. And then I asked them to map out what I call the Pipeworks. So every relationship has like a pipe that connects that leader to their rather leader. And if that pipe is clean and clear, you have a relationship where you have trust and you can make a mistake, but you can work it out with each other.
Or when you ask somebody for something, you can count on it, then you end up with a really great relationship. So that's what we'd call like a green pipe. It means that they, have that good relationship. Sometimes I have relationships that are a little hitchy, where you've had maybe promotion and that person, did enter something next to you. So sometimes there's little, , friction in the pie, or maybe you've got a different idea of how to do something in the business. And then you might have what I call that would be like a red pipe. Sometimes you have a blue pipe, which means, I don't know that person very well. Maybe they sit next to you, but you didn't really talk to them in the office or on zoom, right? At times you may not have ever met that person in person. And so that kind of might make it feel a little awkward. So then I challenged the leaders that I work with to really think through how do they create alignment with every single player on the team. And when everybody on the team does that, even if one relationship goes from red to green pipe, improvement and the whole team dynamic.
Because everybody is really paying attention to the quality of every single relationship. So I think I like the team lifetimes, you go in, you go let's build a better team and be a better team, but really it's those one-to-one relationships day to day that if any, one of them are broken, it impacts the whole team.
So being able to resolve those misalignments on a one-to-one level is really as important as working with the team and getting the whole team to align.
Consensus vs concordance
Let's shift gears a little bit. , one of the things that I felt it was quite fascinating was the different approaches for arriving at a decision. Can you talk about the difference between a consensus and a concordance?
Yeah. So a lot of people, say we want to have consensus decisions and, there's a reason why that's valuable, but, oftentimes they confuse consensus with concordance.
So a concordance decision is the highest level of agreement. It would mean that everyone in the room that is involved in the decision is a hundred percent onboard and psyched about the decision. Let's say you had four decision makers. So in the decision, those four decision makers would value that outcome of the decision.
, if one is they hated it and five, as they loved it, all four would be at a level five. So most of the times in a working environment, while it would be ideal to reach concordance, to have everybody walk out of there yeah, let's go do this. Hell yeah, most of the time we just don't have enough time to deliberate things to get it to that level of agreement.
So then the next level of agreement you would settle for, it would be consensus. Now consensus would mean that all four people in that decision-making group could live with the decision. So they may not love the decision may not be their preferred outcome, but the way the decision is. It's good enough that they could stand behind it.
So generally speaking, that would be a desirable level of agreement because it doesn't take as long as concordance. You don't have anybody actively undermining the decision or feeling marginalized or left behind by it.
Now, then we go down one more level. That would be like a democratic decision. We all vote. So if you have four people, you might have three people love it. And one person hated and that one person, it only pays one person to sink an idea. So more democratic decisions are not generally as desirable as consensus decisions. although sometimes you just have to go with it because time doesn't allow for, to reach consensus every time. I'm generally shooting for consensus when I facilitate meetings,
was the way you're using democratic here. You mean? So it would require a concordance that everybody votes in a certain direction or, yeah, democratic war. It went democratic, maybe not the right word, but I would just say majority rule, like if we have four people, we have three people could vote.
Yes. And one person vote. No. then the majority rule would go forward with the three people. However, that one person could be extremely unhappy with the decision. Whereas in consensus, everybody can live with the decision. There's no one that just absolutely hates the decision, as a part of the final decision.
Amazon’s disagree and commit rule
What do you think of , Amazon's disagree and commit rule?
Disagree and commit is fine. A consensus decision would say I disagree with the, it's not my preference, but I commit as long as I have the ability to, every once in a while throw a deal.
In my book, right about this, fist to five decision-making, which is really not mine. It's used by a lot of people, but basically a fist would be a block. If I can disagree and commit most of the time, however, if there's something that you're going to move forward on, that I had the opportunity to block, then I'm more in favor of the Amazon style and where a block might be something you use like once or twice in your career.
Not like every time, but. Over time. What happens when you have disagree and commit is sometimes , you're really shooting for efficiency and you're running into further and further misalignment where there's several people disagree and commit every time, disagree and commit. And sometimes that's practical, you move forward.
It's okay. We know that not every decision is going to be loved by everyone, but, if you're not really trying to seek alignment, so it works for everyone and everyone's able to voice their opinion than, , than misaligned was just stack up over time. And you also have people who have ambiguous commitment, they're, you're asking them to carry it out and they just don't have it in their feet. If they don't have it in their heart, they're not going to have it in their feet.
It's not a bad practice, but I wouldn't want to preps it too much if there was a lot of disagreeing going on, I'd want to find out what's going on there.
Consensus and psychological safety
I find it interesting how there's so many different, , for lack of a better term algorithms for this. It intuitively seems like consensus is what I gravitated to.
I think it just depends on the situation. Consensus is desirable in any group. You wish you for consensus as often as possible. You could reach consensus with a person who's disagreeable to it and commit when they feel like, , I don't like it, but it's okay. But if they really disagree, if they wholeheartedly feel like this is a big mistake, you should rarely overlook that you should continue to pursue what that's about.
Actually had, did happen, had 15 people. Involved in a decision we deliberated for two days, this decision about where they're going to move an office from one location to another location.
And there was this one guy who had been saying wasn't great idea because it was going to be hard. If they moved from Colorado to DC area to get, the developers they needed and for their people to make those moves, et cetera. And everybody had heard him. It's not like cam said it before, but we get down to the decision and devoting and everybody was, voting one to five level of agreement with it. Five, meaning they loved it. One meaning they hated it. Out of 15 people, 14, like all but one were at a level four or five.
And that one guy was at a level two when he was really not happy with this idea.
Yeah.
And so we took the time to go back around the guy and say, okay, , what would it take for you to go, up? Is there some, change that might be made?
So then he just doubles down on his case. look, if we miss them, we'll be so way late because we won't be able to get those developers. There's no way there are, people will move the last person we lost. It took us almost a year to replace them. I think that this is a really, deadly way to go.
And we revolted again. And what we saw was 14 people finally heard this guy and switched and went , Oh yeah, we get it. Now we see what you mean. Now we understand. And so it was because we pursued really understanding each other. Now they might not have switched over to him. , he might've switched more over them or he might've had to just disagree and commit, meanwhile they all would have lived with the consequences. Had they moved. The office not been able to get the developers, they needed to do the work, for what they'd been working on.
Anyway, yeah, that's an example of that. Like how do you stay in healthy deliberation until all the information comes out? So the best decision can be made, especially if it's a high stakes decision. Like it's a big capital intensive project, or it's a feature change is going to impact a lot of of your customers and there's consequences. , what happens unfortunately is people just defer to the loudest squeakiest wheel or the more senior person, they're not really allowing for all of the intelligence to emerge.
so right. Decision can be made. Yeah, it gets shut down too early.
Making decisions quickly vs making the right decision
I'm thinking about. This whole idea of making the best decision versus making decisions quickly. How do you think about that? in terms of when to drive towards a decision versus when it's worth exploring more?
Deadlines definitely have consequences too. I worked with a lot of startups and they got their money and they have high burn rate, so they have to run efficiently.
just like any other constraint, as you're moving towards a decision, you need to take that into account.
If you have a super tight deadline. What I often do is recommend that a leader maybe allow for a lot of people to voice their opinion, but not necessarily get them too involved in voting. Because that would allow for them to proceed, not in a vacuum, but more efficiently gathered the information and data.
So for every decision there's, the leader needs to be thoughtful about which goals am I really trying to serve here. Efficiency a time commitment, a commitment I've made to my customer, for example, the most important variable here, or is there some other risk factor? Is there a safety issue that I need to be considering in that case, a more thorough deliberation is important, or if I have, like I said, lots of customers, so oftentimes with automation, you can make one change and have the consequences to, you know, millions of people.
It's you really want to be thinking about it before? Yeah. Do something like that. It really is variable in, and I tried to write about those decision points for the leaders. They could really think about it because I don't think pursuing consensus and every decision is worthwhile. Oftentimes I think it should be consultated.
It should be maybe authoritative where I'm in charge. I have all the knowledge, but I'm still asking other people's opinions. So I'm not creating unintended consequences. Cause I wasn't aware of things.
One of the things that I'm working on as I'm developing a software to support decision-making so people could put a proposal in and gather feedback from stakeholders could be faster than if you needed to wait until the next meeting together or everybody in a room.
I think the other thing about this is that's really important is being able to be efficient in making decisions. That's why I wrote into the book, this four steps in five C's process that allows for every voice to be heard and for it to be in this kind of productive, glide kind of conversations so that it doesn't grind on each other.
Herding cats and psychological safety
And ideas can be synthesized into a better idea as a result of being put on the table in the right order. And so what I found is that sometimes you can get a lot of people in a room and make a decision pretty fast if you do it the right way. Unfortunately most people don't, it's herding cats and, discussion goes all over the place and it's disciplined.
Whereas in my process, he moved from divergent thinking to conversion, thinking over four steps. And when all of the group understands what these four steps are. And they use the five CS process to gather feedback. Then generally speaking, the person who's in charge of the decision. It doesn't take them that long to get all the information they need to make the right decision or a better decision than they would have otherwise.
Yeah, it feels very much like an efficiency versus effectiveness kind of thing where the effectiveness being all of these other things, like the the safety concerns or something like that. So going on a bit further, this distinction between who decides versus who is given a voice , is it generally true that you only want one person making the decision, but lots of voices to be there , or is it more nuanced than that?
I think it is more nuanced. I think that having one decision-maker is efficient and oftentimes in a business, you have a person who has a lot of expertise and a lifelong career, and really understands all the variables more than just the general public.
So for example, if I'm an it person, and I'm trying to decide whether we're going to use like Slack or teams or, some engagement platform, I may ask people what they like. And a lot of people have heard of Slack, and they think it sounds cool. So great. It's good to know everybody likes Slack.
Meanwhile, maybe I've got a bunch of systems that work better with teams. And the people who I'm asking don't really know all of that information, what it would take for us to integrate , this platform with other things. So as I'm making the decision, I want to give that voice to people. I want people to let me know why do they like Slack? Or why do they like teams?
But in the end, if I'm an expert about it, I may want to just reserve the vote to myself or maybe a small, group of it. People who are a part of this decision-making process are in charge, held accountable for it. So I believe in delegating decisions to people and allowing them to have the autonomy, to make the decision on their own. Meanwhile, I don't think they should make those decisions in a vacuum. I think they should involve people. Now the more that you want a lot of people to do something, the more it helps you use distributed decision-making.
Case Study: delegating with psychological safety
As an example, I was just talking yesterday. To a CEO of a hospital. And she said in the past the hospital and all the CML made all the decisions.
This is the chief medical officer. And we just come in and make these edicts and mandates and people would have to follow them because it's the chief medical officer. Meanwhile she wanted to get her sort of director level leaders that are more mid-level to be more involved in decision-making and also to develop their ability to make decisions.
So she was going to create this council. She called an alignment council that was representative of people from multiple parts of the organization. So that if let's say a new policy came down from the CMO about. COVID cleaning or something, that they could all debate about it and give feedback about the consequences of that decision being the way it was like how much time it would take, how it might deter from quality for patient care.
And so the idea of being that it's the people that are involved in that work day to day, that understands what it takes to get the job done. So this this council, in some cases, the CMO may delegate decisions down to them and they make decisions. And in other cases, CML may make decisions and get feedback from the bottom up, which is not how it's ever been.
Usually the feedback only came after some, decision happened and everybody was like, Oh my God, this is really not going to work, but whatever, you just ran it by him before that chaos.
Yeah, so she's really excited about this being a new way of creating distributed Leadership and also developing the leadership skills of these, people who eventually one of them might become a CMO someday.
The more involved they are in those decisions and hearing from each other the better off they are to be a great CMO in the future. I really liked that idea, it was kinda like, dang, that was awesome. Really great.
So is this council it's not at an equal level as the CMO it's below, but adviser.
Yeah. So CMI would be like a, C level person, whereas this council would be mid-level managers, admin, mid managers are great because they see the day-to-day work of their teams that report to them, but they also understand more things at the upper management level.
Then. Like you could have representatives just from people that do the job every day. But in this case it was a dual process. Let's empower these mid-level managers in decision-making more than we have in the past. So they'll get better at making decisions and help us inform decisions before we implement them.
And she was also saying that, you've got these millennials, they like to be involved in decisions. They don't want to have be told what to do. And they're more egalitarian in their thinking. So she thought it might be helpful to get them
Get a more engaged and involved in creating the work environment they really wanted. Just being the pair of hands, doing the work for someone, the way that they thought it should be done.
I guess another important part of this is you can make a decision and even create a rule, but then how much it's actually used and implemented in practice varies. This goes back to, the need for alignment in the first place.
Yeah. I wrote this book for leaders who have power and authority and think through, okay, do you have to hold on to all that yourself? Or can you spread it out a little bit, get more people involved and how would you do that in a practical way?
It doesn't take forever. Yeah, for some of them it's as simple as just start asking more people before you do something
good to Jack with people, and they can also use this process to just relegate the decision down and get a group to make a decision, a lot of times groups make better decisions than individuals do just takes more time.
Another thing I really liked was your insight that you articulated that to include people that are affected by a decision, even if they aren't either making the decision or informing it. It's one of those obvious things that. You might miss anyone. So I think it's great that you called it out explicitly.
Yeah, I think that, most people know, Oh, it'd be good for me to ask. I shouldn't be asking these people what they think, but they're afraid because they feel like it's going to be hurting cats. If I ask them, then I got to do what they say and we're make them happy, so they avoid it, they avoid the conflict or the misalignment, meanwhile, and misalignment's there anyway, so just cause you're not talking about it, it's not going to go away. So this helps you deal with it more proactively and transparently than if you just pretended like everything's okay.
Team building by improving leader behaviors
You've mentioned this as somewhat of a off-hand comment, in the context of team building, , as a leader for you to ask the team what they see as your disruptive behaviors. Where did that come from? That sounds like there's a story there.
A lot of it actually came from my husband, . He's technology leader worked in telecom and he worked for Gardner and he worked for NASA. Watching him over the years he's very visionary and I'd seem run up against stuff, like you're in there, in the corporate machine, et cetera. Every time I would see something like that, I do my little, armchair coaching. Like you're not supposed to coach your spouse, it did happen trying to help him out through his career. And that became like, Oh, here's another thing people do. And here's another thing that people do. Of course, sometimes I catch myself doing it. He wasn't the only person doing it, but his name's Roger and we actually have little jokes. My Frank and Roger made in my laboratory because as a coach, he's always, looking for ideas for how to be a better leader.
That's where those disruptors came from. You run out too fast in front of people and they can't see you anymore, or you get attached to your idea and then, create room for other people to co-create with you, you come in let's say to an environment where people have been working their butt off, but it's all kinda messed up and you started credit sizing them right out of the gate, and you bring your ideas forward. And they're like, not that happy about it,
lot of those disruptors also came from coaching people, I've been coaching for 25 years. Classic stuff, that happens over and over again. And usually it's kinda got one or two flavors. So one flavor is the leader's too gung-ho and energetic and just, pushy with their idea. They're not creating room for people to come in. And then you have the other flavor where people are just swimming around and they're not clear on where they're going and they create too much swimming room and they, keep asking you more and more people's opinions and then just gets more and more muddy. And, they're not comfortable articulating their own point of view.
A lot of my coaching actually is focused on this particular challenge that leaders have their own special flavor of their disruptor, that goes on and I do encourage my leaders to talk to their teams, not only about what their direct reports can do better, but what they can do better to be a better leader of their direct reports, Pete, a little humble pie.
How does it change the team dynamic when this is done?
When leaders are transparent that they have a growing edge that they need to work on, it creates permission for everyone to have that. A lot of times you have teams where people have to pretend like they're great at everything, that doesn't really work.
One of the most painful, things as a manager is to have someone working for you that is struggling, that won't admit they're struggling and he can't talk about it. So when you, as a leader, I meant that you have your own struggles that you have your own learning curve, or it can be really inspiring to them team to be in that growth mindset.
I may struggle with being this organized. For example, we see leader to go through lots of conversations, never take notes, never close a decision, stay open-ended for example . If they can just admit that this is an issue and bring it to their team as a challenge that they're wanting to overcome, then their team members can service there.
Partners to help them get better at it. Remind them about the notes or help them take notes, really support them and growing through that challenge. And I see less fear in the team and more innovative when there's that frame of mind from the leader.
Create psychological safety with a shuva shower
Do you have any other little actionable team-building suggestions?
This is a really simple one. I just created this new little process called the shuva shower. And so when a team gets together like on zoom, for example, I would write into the chat. One of the team members names like, luke there, and then everybody, I say, okay, I want everybody to take to the one word that describes Luke's best quality and write it in the chat, but don't hit send until I say go. So they write the word in the chat, like thoughtful and, wherever it is, or inspiring, put that word in there and then boom hit.
I say, ready, rock paper, scissors, shoot. And then they hit the button. And all of a sudden, you just see all of these wonderful words go up about, Luke, so it just, you can take a team of 12 people and, six minutes and have this sheer of a shower of positive words about each other.
And I have seen people like say the chat, creates this like more buoyant feeling and it reminds you that, wow, look at all this talent we've got on our team. Half the time, we're just feeling cranky about the last thing that didn't go. Meanwhile, we've got so much horsepower on our team and the sewer shower.
Not only makes the one person feel great cause they feel appreciated by their team. It helps the whole team become appreciative of the, the richness of having this collective wisdom on a team.
Contacting Patty
What's the best place for people to find out more. And where do you hang out online in terms of reading
well, leadershipsmarts.com.
That's my website. And it's a great place to go to pick up, free tools and resources about alignment and to learn more about our services. And then also, I just think grabbing the book of Amazon is great. It's a lot of people seem to be liking it cause there's these, really simple formulas and actionable advice there.
So that's also a really great place to just pick up and learn more about how to be an inclusive leader. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much, Patty.