Greg Kihlström

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S6 | 526: Building extraordinary teams with Martin Gonzalez, Google

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About the Episode

We talk a lot on this show about how it takes people, process, data, and platforms working well together to make a successful company.

Today we’re going to talk about the critical principles needed to effectively build an extraordinary team to help achieve your goals, whether you are an enterprise organization or a startup.

To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Martin Gonzalez, Principle: org, talent, leadership development for AI research, Tech & Society, Core Engineering at Google and Co-author of The Bonfire Moment.

About Martin Gonzalez

Martin Gonzalez is the creator of Google’s Effective Founders Project, a global research program that decodes the factors that enable startup founders to succeed. He also works closely with Google’s engineering and research leaders on org design, leadership and culture challenges. Martin is a frequent lecturer at Stanford, Wharton and INSEAD, and has advised leaders across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. He has been recognized as a Fellow by the Aspen Institute's First Movers Program and as a Thinkers50 Radar awardee, both for his contributions to shaping the future of management and leadership. He studied organizational psychology and behavioral science at Columbia University and the London School of Economics.

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Swell AI Transcript: 24ABMartin Gonzalez_No Ad.mp3

Greg Kihlstrom:
Welcome to Season 6 of The Agile Brand, where we discuss marketing technology and customer experience trends, insights, and ideas with enterprise and technology platform leaders. We focus on the people, processes, data, and platforms that make brands successful, scalable, customer-focused, and sustainable. This is what makes an Agile brand. I'm your host, Greg Kihlstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on Martech, Marketing Operations, and CX, best-selling author and speaker. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems, an industry leader in full-stack technology services, talent services, and real-world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that my latest book, Priority is Action, Seven Principles for Better Strategies, Decisions, and Outcomes, is now available. In it, I give ideas and insights for leaders and teams that need to make meaningful progress on their priorities. After all, our priorities are what we do, not what we say we'd like to do. You can find Priority is Action on Amazon or learn more on my website, gregkillstrom.com. Now let's get on to the show. We talk a lot on the show about how a successful company requires people, processes, data, and platforms in order to work well together. Today, we're going to talk about the critical principles needed to effectively build an extraordinary team that will help you achieve your goals, whether you're an enterprise organization or a startup. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Martin Gonzalez, Principal, Org, Talent, Leadership Development for AI Research, Tech & Society, Core Engineering at Google, and co-author of The Bonfire Moment. Martin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Greg. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Why don't we get started with you giving a little background on yourself as well as what you're currently doing.

Martin Gonzalez: Yeah, no, that sounds great. So I tend to explain my background in three platforms. So platform number one is really my core role at Google, which is I advise a lot of our very senior leaders at Google, especially in our AI research and engineering spaces around a lot of their people issues. So whether that's culture challenge, leadership challenges, talent development challenges. That's the first platform. The second platform is I do a lot of work with startups outside of Google, initially through Google for Startups, which is our accelerator program. And these days through the book that's coming called The Bonfire Moment. Here we've scaled leadership and culture workshops. to about 70 countries now, and it's my way of engaging the rest of the world with all the evidence and research that exists today around why we should be doing this well. The third platform I would just quickly add is my work in teaching and research. So I do, my primary affiliation is with Stanford University where I lecture on the importance of building strong culture as you scale your businesses. But also then lecture quite a bit at Wharton, where I was just recently an Insayad among others.

Greg Kihlstrom: Nice, nice, that's great. Well, yeah, so let's dive in and we're going to focus a lot on your new book and wanted to start there. And why did you decide to write the Bonfire Moment?

Martin Gonzalez: So the Bonfire Moment is actually based on a workshop, a very no frills leadership workshop we had built about nine years ago now, where we piloted it in Jakarta. And it was within our accelerator program and At that point in time, we had a really strong program with a lot of great content around machine learning, around growth and internationalization and whatnot. And there was nothing on people, so I looked at the research and I discovered that there's some history of research on venture capitalists that says 65% of startups in their portfolios tend to fail because of people issues. Co-founder conflict is up there, not being able to hire and retain the right people is also up there. And so I wrote a simple proposal, sent it to Josh, who's my co-author on this paper, and said, hey, give me a little bit of budget and let's pilot just something simple. And so we ran an early version of the Bonfire Moment, which is this workshop in Jakarta, and it received the best ratings across the board, across all the other kinds of, you know, workshops that we offered through that accelerator. And then we said, well, look, let's try it out again. This is probably an anomaly. And so we brought it to Bangalore and again, received the same kind of ratings, brought it to Sao Paulo again. And so at some point, this program kind of took a life of its own. We have a few dozen trained up facilitators around the world running it. And so this book really, what it does is it does two things. Over the course of the nine years where we've brought this to founders across 70 countries, we've summarized from all the data we've collected on them as we went around the world. We summarized some of the traps that we see founders and startup teams and really teams that operate in a startup like environment. the traps that they tend to systematically fall into. That's part one of the book. And then part two is we actually open source the workshop and we give it out to the world and all the tools that we've road tested all across the world for teams to then pick up and run themselves. And so you'll find in there, baked into that book, just a very clear how you go about having your own bonfire moment? What are the, you know, the watch outs? Do you need a facilitator? How do you, like, what are some of the materials that you would need to do to go through this really intense day of leadership and culture building for your team?

Greg Kihlstrom: So if you had to break down the bonfire moment, you know, whether it's the workshop or the book based on that down to fundamentals, what would you tell, you know, how would you describe it?

Martin Gonzalez: So I'd say the number one message we really want to make sure is very clear with any leader, any team, is that the people stuff matters and it matters a lot. And so we lay out in the book. quite a bit of the evidence, whether it's from our data or we looked at really the last decade or so of cutting edge research around organizations and teams and innovation type environments. And we laid out for the reader to really make a judgment on their own to see that a lot of these things really matter a lot. So that's number one. The second one is to say that, What it doesn't mean is that we're not saying therefore have happy teams. This isn't a happiness book. It's not a book about how do you just make things comfortable and easy for the team so that they can engage. It's how do you engage in some of the toughest conversations and deal with some of the trickiest, most difficult issues early on. in a team so that you de-risk it from, you know, from breaking down the line. And so if I were to break down what the bonfire moment really is, it's, you know, we take an eight hour block or a full day and we break it down into four different parts. And we start the day with giving people a chance to self-assess how they do in terms of a lot of the effective leadership strategies that we've summarized from our research. And so we have them go on, do a self-assessment. There's an option to do a 360 degree assessment where you get feedback from your partners and your colleagues. And we have them really face hard truths about how they're showing up. Part two is where we invite them to start talking about, well, how, you know, how do we, if we were to start with a premise that most teams amplify errors and most teams actually tend to do less optimally, how do we begin to understand, like, how do we get the most out of members of the team? We invite people to, to write up what we call a user guide. It's similar to I mean, when you buy a piece of software or back then when you bought a printer, it would come with a user guide. How do you install it? How do you uninstall it? How do you troubleshoot issues? And it's kind of the same idea. How do you, as an individual being a part of this team, you know, what are the ways that you can, you know, engage with me effectively, troubleshoot, give me feedback, you know, resolve conflict with me. So that's the second part. The third part is we And it gets a lot more vulnerable in the third part is we invite people to really think about and reflect on some of the insecurities and self-doubt that is very much a part of the journey when you're trying to do something bold and exciting. And we invite them to have what we have very fondly called the bullshit circle, which is a structured way for people to reflect on these deep insecurities and the masks that we tend to wear to really cover up a lot of this. And we find that when we invite people to reflect on this, really does a couple of things. So one is it gets members of the team, it gives them this cathartic moment to just be a little bit more open and to feel seen by the team. I think secondly, for the team that's listening to what their teammate is sharing, it helps them also decode a little bit of the, the behavioral signals, those stress responses, those difficult moments in collaborating with them. And it helps the team to really comprehend and understand where they would be coming from and how to then support them through these difficult periods of time. That's the third block. The last block is simply, we lay out for the team a list of conflict that we see tends to be most damaging for people in startup-like environments. And we have them look through that list and then talk about the ones that they feel they haven't yet given voice to as a team or that they're currently going through. And it's a way to really resolve some of the hidden conflict in the team. And so that wraps up the entire day, which as you can probably tell, isn't the most relaxed and comfortable day. It's actually a day of a lot of self-reflection, a lot of confronting difficult challenges in the team.

Greg Kihlstrom: You know, so one of the things I know from my personal experience teaching and even from writing, I love to share what I know, but I also learn a ton from teaching and writing and researching and all that stuff too. What have you learned by teaching these workshops? What are some of the things that you've kind of gotten in return?

Martin Gonzalez: Yeah. Oh, Greg, I am with you. I think teaching for me is mostly about learning as opposed to dispensing what's already in my head. The thing that really comes to mind is very early on in this work, about nine years ago actually, right at the beginning, what really took me down a really important path was I was teaching a workshop on culture in San Francisco. And we had founders from, many of them were from Asia, but we had a few from Europe as well over. It was a crowded room and as I was sharing, you know, how Google thought about culture and how we went about, you know, the different culture defining practices at Google, you know, hand raised at the back of the room and they asked, okay, great, this is all really helpful to see how Google thinks about it. But what do you think I should do for my team? And it was a good moment of like, it's so important to remember that things that work in one place may not work or may receive the opposite effect in another place. And I think I gave a really dissatisfying answer, but that moment haunted me for a few days later and I realized, I could do so much better in backing up whatever I say with good evidence. And that's what took us down the path of, soon after, as we were scaling this workshop, we built what we called the Effective Founders Project, which is this global research effort that really put the most effective founders under a microscope. And we use the most, the latest kind of people analytics protocols to really make sure that as we were offering advice to founders who were not in a large company like Google, that we were offering sound advice based on evidence and data. And I think that has really stayed with me and I've been a lot, I have orientated myself quite significantly around the data and evidence. It helps that I'm not myself a founder. I think a lot of founders, especially successful founders, I think it's so much harder for them to give good advice because they're kind of trapped in their own experience in some sense. They know what worked for them and it's very salient, it's very front of mind for them. And so it's very frequent that they pull on that knowledge and that's sometimes very useful if your context is exactly like their context, right? And that's where I think the value of having evidence And data, I think, is a more useful way to go about it. Because then you're qualifying the advice based on the patterns as opposed to one single data point, which is experience for many successful founders.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, definitely. And I can definitely relate to where, you know, getting that, that question, you know, from, in the moment, maybe it's, it's really uncomfortable, because, you know, I, in my case, like, I don't have the answer for it, but it sticks with me, like you were saying. So like, I think there's some some power in that. And I think that's, that's what's powerful about teaching and doing these, these kinds of activities, to go to the research and you know, what you did find, you know, if you could elaborate a little bit on what are the traits, the mindsets, et cetera, that you found are most important to cultivate in teams to be more successful?

Martin Gonzalez: Yeah. So in the book, we actually talk about a few of the traps we've seen teams fall into. The first is really the trap of speed, which is I think there's an important reality when you're under a significant amount of pressure, which is things that have more immediate term benefit tend to take precedence or tend to take priority over things that maybe have just as much value. But the benefits come far into the future. And unfortunately, what that means is the pitch deck, the fundraising round, the big presentation, the big product launch, all of that. you know, take high priority. And then things like, you know, fixing a toxic work culture, you know, hiring properly and not, you know, not taking shortcuts and bring people into your team. A lot of these things around the people actually take take second priority. And yet the research shows us almost quite the opposite, which is, you know, a lot of smart investors and a lot of leaders know that, you know, ideas are a dime a dozen. It's execution that really matters. And so there's some really fascinating research out of Stanford, maybe about 10, 15 years ago now, where they looked at, across eight years, they looked at some 200 companies and they looked at how they set up their cultures differently. And they basically show that very early decisions you make on your culture can predict things like your likelihood to fail, or your likelihood to get an IPO, or if you do get through an IPO, your likelihood to grow your market capitalization. And so we encourage founders and leaders to really not take this for granted. This is a day zero consideration. It's not something you can push out for later on. So that's the first one on the trap of speed. I think the second one is really about the trap of the inner circle, which is we found that When you're under a lot of pressure doing some really high, things that feel like high stakes, you want to surround, our tendency is to surround ourselves with people that we can trust. And many times people we can trust will tend to think similarly, have similar backgrounds, perhaps might even be in the specific case of startups, of which maybe some of your listeners are a part of. Many startups found, co-found with friends and family. And the tricky thing when you're building a team with people in an inner circle is the cost of the relationship tends to be not just the professional cost, but there's also some personal cost to the relationship. And so the value of these relationships can be so high. And as a result, our ability to have the difficult conversations to talk about the elephants in the room drops quite significantly. And so we talk about how do you, you know, increase the quality and the quantity of disagreements within the team. And you need to invite those disagreements. You can't just expect them to come because your team, who don't have as much power as you do in that setting, will assume you don't want it if you're not inviting it. So that's the second one. I think just the last one to highlight is the trap of confidence. And just, we find that a lot of leaders and a lot of teams are are held hostage by moments that bring a lot of self-doubt and feel like a real setback. And the reality is that when you have big goals, the way many innovative and ambitious and startup-like teams are, If you have big goals, you're not going to meet them all, but you need to figure out a way to be resilient and to manage through that process really well. And what we found in our data is that founders and startup leaders will tend to expect that their confidence increases over time as they become more and more confident in what they do. What we found instead is quite the opposite, which is confidence tends to be highest at the beginning of the journey. And you need that confidence to even get started. If everyone knew just what it would take to succeed in a venture, whether it's entrepreneurial or inside a company, many of them will actually not start. So you almost need that overconfidence at the beginning. But as they begin to see what great looks like and what just excellent needs to look like in achieving those goals, they quickly realize that they're so far from that paragon. And so a lot of their confidence declines. And then they assume that that drop in confidence is a signal of future failure when actually a signal of growth. And so we try to help leaders and teams to really understand that those uncomfortable moments is a signal to keep on going and not necessarily to quit and throw in the towel.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, with experience, you gain the knowledge that you don't know as much as you think you knew at the start, right?

Martin Gonzalez: This is true. I mean, this is very much the Aristotle at its finest, right? It's the more I know, the more I know I don't know.

Greg Kihlstrom: Right, right. Absolutely. Yeah, I want to go back actually to the second point you were making as well on the, you know, the the group think and the, you know, kind of surrounding yourself with a bunch of people that that agree with you. So the, the constructive, I would say opposite of that would be to surround yourself or at least foster constructive disagreements, right. And I've seen that work very well. I've seen it work not as well sometimes too, maybe, but I've seen it work really well, which I know I want people that disagree with me respectfully, but disagree with me so we can get to a better result. How do you foster that as a leader?

Martin Gonzalez: Yeah. First of all, what you want is… You want a lot of conflict, but you want a lot of conflict of ideas and not conflict of personalities. So I think you want to really separate out the idea from the person. But I share with a lot of teams that you want to think of the quantity and the quality of disagreements. On the quantity, on increasing quantity, a very simple hack that I like doing that really helps beat groupthink. let's say the scenario is you're in a meeting and you're about to make a decision on something. Firstly, leader needs to go last. Leader shares their opinion last because the moment the leader shares their thoughts suddenly, ever so slightly, others will kind of anchor somehow to that. Also, what you want to do is this two minute hack where you invite people to take out a post-it or take out a notebook, write their thought on the question at hand. And by writing things before anyone speaks, you capture their original thinking. And then you ask each one to share and give them two minutes of uninterrupted time to just share their thoughts on the matter. And that way you get the maximum variety of opinions out on the table. If you start with you sharing or someone else sharing without capturing things on paper, Again, you'll see a lot of this anchoring by as it gets into place. That's the first one on increasing the quantity of disagreements. Quality of disagreements. There's this character in the history of computer science. His name is Bob Taylor. Bob Taylor was a lab manager in Xerox Spark. Xerox Spark in the late 70s, early 80s was probably the most prolific place where innovation thrived. That's where we get the personal computer. That's where we get Ethernet connectivity, that's where we get kind of user interface. Essentially from that place, we get the technology that fuels Apple, Pixar, Adobe, 3Com, so prolific place. And he had a really great way to think about increasing the quality of disagreements. He says that there tends to be two classes of disagreements. There's a class one and a class two disagreement. A class one disagreement is what maybe we've started to call the strawman argument, which is Let me hear out your argument, represent it in the most fragile, the weakest way possible, and then easily refute and attack the point of view. And then there's a class two disagreement, which is what you might call a strong man disagreement, which is I hear your argument, let me represent it back to you in a way that you feel satisfied and where I highlight the strengths of your argument and then only then Do I respond and share my point of view to debate yours out? Now he says, Bob says that it's not his job as the leader of that lab to resolve disagreements. His job is to make sure that all class one disagreements graduate to class two disagreements. And so he focuses his mental energy and his time with his team in facilitating that process of making sure people heard. the merits, the virtues of each person's point of view before they go about disagreeing with them. So I'd say leaders, ensure that you only have class two disagreements in your teams.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, that's great. Well, Martin, thanks so much for joining and congrats on the new book. I wanted to ask you one last question before we wrap up here. As a fellow author, I always like to ask about the process of writing as well. So in writing The Bonfire Moment, Clearly you'd been doing the workshops for quite a while before that and had learned a lot, but was there anything that you learned through the writing process, or what would you do differently in writing a follow-up?

Martin Gonzalez: Yeah. So first of all, I learned that authoring a book is such a team sport. I leaned a lot on my editor and, you know, not just lean on my editor for good language, but also for a little bit of, you know, validation around, well, you know, is this really crap on a page or will anyone actually read it? And so just as a first time author building up, again, this whole idea of the trap of confidence, right? So I think that had been a huge part of the writing process. I think the second one is, in the corporate world, you're taught to think in slides and bullet points and writing a book. When you write sentence after sentence and you build it out paragraph after the next, it exposes to you just how perhaps your bullet points aren't nearly as logical as you imagined they would be. And so, I don't know, it trained me quite a bit on what it meant to lay out a cogent argument. So I think the next time around, for book two, I think I need to let go a little bit of the bullet pointed outline and really think more in narratives so that people can really understand the ideas in my head.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Martin Gonzalez, Principal, Org Talent Leadership Development for AI Research, Tech & Society, and Core Engineering at Google, and co-author of The Bonfire Moment for joining the show. You can learn more about Martin and his book, The Bonfire Moment, by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand, brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.GregKihlstrom.com. That's G-R-E-G-K-I-H-L-S-T-R-O-M.com. While you're there, check out my series of best-selling Agile Brand Guides, covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics, or you can search for Greg Kihlstrom on Amazon. The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina-owned, strategy-driven, creatively-fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging, and informative content. Until next time, stay agile.

Martin Gonzalez, Principle for AI Research, Google