- Megan Alexa Watson: [00:00:00] And so getting deployed into something different when potentially you've cultivated an identity of self that is centered on certain types of work, it can be pretty jarring. It can disrupt what you've come to understand about yourself and your value to the organization. 

This is a podcast for leaders who want to drive change in their organization without losing sight of the people behind it, the purpose that fuels it, or the principles guiding it. I'm Megan Watson, joined by Carl Watson, and this is the Watson standard.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: So today's topic, is really to talk about flexible deployment or squading. I think about, two ideas there. The core idea is that you move talent to problems, regardless of role. You really focus on the capability that you need against the [00:01:00] problem. You can move a talent out of role for a temporary period of time to solve a business challenge, or you can have them partially focus on that, either as part of a broader team or as an individual.

That's an important way that organizations are really trying to manage the ongoing tumult in the business world, also just being more flexible with fewer resources. 

 - Megan Alexa Watson: It's interesting, as you know, I've had conversations with folks that are trying out some of these different work styles. I am finding that often employees and leaders work really hard to define the edges of what each of these are. So like, "What's a squad?", "What's a sprint?", "What's agile teaming?", "What's a partial deployment?", "What's a full deployment?", "What's a redeployment?" And while that can be useful, the thing that comes to mind for me immediately is, we are being asked to [00:02:00] operate in a way that inherently comes with a bit less structure than we are used to. I think, for many of us the first thing we do is try to put structure around it, try to define it, try to put it in a box, try to constrain it.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yeah. I tend to think of, just to respond to that, our ability to do important things, do work, require some scaffolding, right? 'Cause we have to not only have it orient on what to do, most frequently that work is part of a system of things getting done, other people also doing work, and that structure can allow us to understand how it fits in that system to produce outcomes. If the structure is oriented towards that, that's I think, a positive approach. If the structure is oriented towards comfort, 'I'm uncomfortable, and I'm going to add random structure ... to be more comfortable', then that's not, I don't think, a good idea.

 - Megan Alexa Watson: Yeah. Yeah. What's the signal [00:03:00] that tells you that it is useful structure, versus comfort creating, or attempts to create sort of false certainty?

We talk a lot about, there's a difference between clarity and certainty. When you are being clear, you can be clear about all the things you don't know or all the things that might change or are unstable. Certainty is very different, and especially right now, that's challenging to create for people even as senior leaders.

So I'm curious, what signal would you look for if you were consulting for a system from the outside, that says, "Yep, this is good structure and process," or, "This is comfort creating"? 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: I would start with the idea of, are we clear about the outcomes or the value of the work that needs to be done? If you can't be clear about that, then it's really hard to be clear about the skills, talents, capabilities you need to apply to that work or the timeframe or any of the structural elements anybody's gonna ask about. If we [00:04:00] can be clear about what value we're trying to create, what outcomes we're trying to create, then we can also start to frame out these other elements associated with that, and so that's where my anchor is.

There's a split, right? What the leader or framer, whoever owns the outcomes or owns the work is trying to accomplish, are they doing the work that they're supposed to do- ... on their end on framing and structuring so that the individual who's gonna do the work doesn't feel adrift? And then there are areas where the individual who is being flexibly deployed, what do they need to do?

And so, split that work in a way that's useful. 'Cause a lot of the time, a lot of this work is matrixed work. it's work where one person is doing work outside of their management chain, and that becomes a situation that has a lot of interesting challenges associated with it, along with how you evaluate the work... whether you get credit for it and ... reward for all those things. [00:05:00] How the person gets feedback and development. It's super important to figure out as well. But one of the ways in which, the leader needs to be clear is creating space for that work to get done in a system that is already ongoing and doing work.

They have to be a real sponsor for that. They have to create the sponsorship for that work and that individual to drop into the system and to take ownership for whatever pieces of work they're gonna take ownership for. Leaders frequently don't do that, and it's super frustrating to the individuals because they end up negotiating a set of agreements that may not be sufficient authority in the system, even if it's informal authority in the system, to get the work done.

One of the, core leadership responsibilities is to say, "How do I use my authority to create enough space in the work so that person can actually [00:06:00] have the negotiation? So they don't have to do the negotiation on the ground, in order to get this work done." But that doesn't mean that they have to detail all the relationships; some of that, the individuals involved have to figure out. That's on them, as opposed to a leader trying to structure every piece of the work. There's a balance there that I think is interesting and important.

In terms of other kinds of signals, it's really understanding, asking questions about the value of the answer to the question. As an example, "How long will this engagement last?" If it's a full deployment, that person's saying, "Well, I'm gonna be away from work that I'm supposed to be doing, that has value in the system. Can that work wait? What part of the work can't wait that other people have to pick up on my behalf? Who is going to negotiate that in my system? Is it my responsibility? Is it my [00:07:00] boss's responsibility? Is it the responsibility of the leader I'm gonna be working for to get that done?" If you can unpack the question a little bit, then you can get a little bit more clear.

If it's just, like, "I love the work I'm doing, and I don't love the work you're asking me to do," that time question is a different kind of question. Then it's sort of a minimization problem. "How long am I willing to tolerate doing work that is not my passion versus doing work that is my passion?" That's a different set of things to solve for. I mean, you have some experience with this, and so I wonder, how have you explored questions in order to get clarity? Because clarity is important. Do you have your own sense of where that balance is between comfort and real information, real structure you need to do the work?

 - Megan Alexa Watson: Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I am lucky enough to have experienced this both as a manager and as an employee. And so the thing that I've been reflecting on in the context of partial deployment or full deployment into work, [00:08:00] is in all of the conversations that many of us have been having in recent years about purpose-driven work. How do you do work that is connected to your sense of self, or your mission, or what you're here for? Especially in major organizations, the sense of getting to do purpose-driven work is even, in some cases, categorized as a benefit of getting to work at an organization that allows you to follow your purpose.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Absolutely. 

 - Megan Alexa Watson: And so getting 

deployed into something different when potentially you've cultivated an identity of self that is centered on certain types of work, it can be pretty jarring. It can disrupt what you've come to understand about yourself and your value to the organization. 

I've done a lot of reading on network development and relationships in teams-- you've learned a certain set of people and players to get work done. You've built relationships, especially in a highly matrixed organization, that have allowed you to be successful up to this point. [00:09:00] Deployments very often unseat that. Whether it's a matter of, 'I'm going into new work where I don't have those same relationships, and so I have to figure out how to create those from scratch and become successful', or even to your point about 'what happens to the work that I left behind, how does that impact the relationships that are behind me?'

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes.

 - Megan Alexa Watson: Whether it is my peers who may have to pick up work, whether it is my manager who has to figure out how to cover or drop things, or even the stakeholders that I've come to maintain ongoing dialogue with... and especially depending on the length of a deployment, your knowledge and your network freshness gets stale really fast. It's so easy to feel like if I step away from what I've been working so hard to refine and to cultivate and to hone into something perfect so I can get things done in the system... any departure from that can be a real challenge. It can be pretty unsettling to have to navigate.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Absolutely. I think that part of [00:10:00] the solution to that is to be very choosy about what you allow to add to the system. The work is the work; there may be capability somewhere else in the system to do that work, being able to pull that person over is not the first answer to the question.

The first question is: "Why can't I get this work within a team and remit I have to deliver in the system today?" Does it sit between teams? That happens a lot, there's no natural team to take it up, and so you need to actually create a soft structure, a squad, to go tackle a problem that sits between teams. Makes a lot of sense. But even then, the proliferation of work in the system can spread very quickly, and so everybody becomes overworked because you try to tackle every problem that the system produces, and no organization can do that. You have to choose. Prioritization is a key role of management, and [00:11:00] managers who refuse to prioritize fail their teams. Their teams do less, they do less, they do it less effectively, and they're less satisfied by the work that they can get done, and that's a failure of management. Has nothing to do with the individuals in the system.

And so being choosy, prioritizing what new work gets stood up, is your first goal to limit those. Ideally, that's done as a management team, right? A higher level group of leaders makes choices about what work gets stood up that sits outside of the prioritization that happens by team. And when work is part of the prioritization is in the team, but the capability doesn't exist in that team, again, the first answer isn't to flexibly deploy somebody. The [00:12:00] first question is, "Do I need this capability on a routine basis in my team in order to do this work consistently?" And then if I'm going to deploy somebody in the team, "How do I build that capability in my team so that I don't have to borrow talent in order to get work that's important for my remit to get done?"

How do you make sure the system isn't overwhelmed by work? And I think with flexible deployment and squading we talk about other dangers, individual level dangers like career and rewards and credit evaluation. But for me, the biggest danger is that everybody tries to do all the things that are possible to do within a set of remit, and people refuse to prioritize. And that's-- that just kills everybody. People working way too hard to produce less than they can.

 - Megan Alexa Watson: In the context of prioritization, the other thing that I'm thinking through when you talked about 'what's [00:13:00] the first questions you should be asking', 'where should you explore first before going to these steps', I also think about very large, highly matrixed organizations where potentially multiple teams are solving for the same thing without awareness.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes. Yes. 

 - Megan Alexa Watson: And very often a, "I don't have the capability on my team, let me go pull someone in, deploy someone into my team to be able to solve for it," can also sometimes be a signal of have you actually checked if there is already a team with the full capability set that is taking this on, that potentially you're not aware of, or not aligned with?

And so similar to prioritization, I think there's a real tension right now as people are experimenting, as they should be, and they're innovating to do the sort of 'thousand flowers bloom' approach to leadership management. "Yep, I'm gonna let three different teams all chase the same thing, and whatever gets done fastest, [00:14:00] shiniest, cheapest," --insert other word here that really matters to your strategic priorities-- "that's the work that will get surfaced or the work that will get shipped".

I'm curious about, what are the repercussions of that, and of making those choices, and the way that potentially deployment may exacerbate --or not-- those tensions. 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: The first thing I think about is that the teams are demoralized, right? It's like, "Why am I working on this when there's two other teams working on it?" There's, "Let me tackle a real important problem that I can uniquely contribute to." Everybody wants that kind of runway in order to show what they can do, and to have impact. And the other thing I think about is conflict. Conflict often results from a failure of pre-negotiating things that should be pre-negotiated.

And so as a VP in an organization I have fewer peers to negotiate with than the people [00:15:00] who are senior directors who are below me in the organization, as an example. I used to say this all the time, "I have three people I have to negotiate with in most things, to stand up a project or to make space for something. The people on my team are dealing with 10 or 15 people they have to negotiate with, and that's exponentially more difficult." And leaders often don't realize how much conflict that creates in the organization because it's not, 'Are you skilled negotiator? Are you skilled collaborator and teammate?' That's not the issue. The issue is it's actually a lot harder for them to do that work than it is for you to do the work. 

 - Megan Alexa Watson: Yeah. 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: And so as I said a bit earlier, sponsoring that work, part of it is making sure left to right that it is accepted by your peers, such that part of [00:16:00] that acceptance is if I was thinking about doing the exact same work, and you're thinking about doing the exact same work say, "Hey, let's do it once". And if I have people who are relevant, and you have people who are relevant for the task, "Let's combine that effort and get the best out of it," as opposed to competing teams. But this gets into organizational politics, and those... that's real, and it's very challenging. But again, you need to do that negotiation at the right level in the organization, and too often leaders push it down, and you don't solve the problem. You make it worse. You make it harder. And it slows things down in a way that is not useful. 

 - Megan Alexa Watson: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe this is actually a great segue into the conversation around how we think about squads because as you're sharing this, it's also making me think, in some cases, the 'thousand flowers bloom, a bunch of different people deployed on a similar challenge', to me, can often feel like avoidance of having to create the conditions for [00:17:00] different perspectives to be heard and seen and valued in one work group.

Very often the argument for is, "Oh, I have a bunch of teams working on it. Well, they all may have different ideas, and they may come with different solutions, and I want the best one to win". For folks that do what we do for a living, the obvious question is, should they not be able to share their different perspectives and come up with the same thing in one team ... or in one group? 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Right. Yeah. And you lose the creative tension. You lose the ability to come up with actually something better by separating those different ideas into these different components, and you don't actually have that, uh, that- 

 - Megan Alexa Watson: ...'productive friction', we say.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes ... productive friction. Yeah. Exactly. 

 - Megan Alexa Watson: All right, so let's talk about squads a little bit. I would love to hear how do you talk about squads, or how would you define one and think about it in the context of other ways to deploy talent? 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: I think fundamentally I think about a squad as a cross-functional team that is a temporary work group to do work that is [00:18:00] outside, even if it's slightly outside, of a team's normal work.

You set it up as a temporary work group to accomplish a set of tasks that have some priority associated with them. Again, it's important work. It's not just random work. And ideally, it's also cross-functional. It requires a mix of capabilities to get that work done.

The challenge of squads is, the authority is fluid. Everybody on a squad has more than one boss at that point. The squad is a mix of people who have bosses outside the system, and you maybe have some people on the squad who have the same boss, whoever's sponsoring the work.

That's part of the important challenge of squading. It's part of flexible deployment. It's just that it's temporary. And a squad, by its very nature, is a team, a working group of people who are coming together to accomplish a specific, short-term set of tasks.

 - Megan Alexa Watson: It makes me think about what it takes as [00:19:00] an individual to plug into some of these different sort of ways of working. A thing that I love about squad models based on how I have seen them is the fact that these are all individuals coming from different places into a shared team to be able to deliver together something they wouldn't otherwise be working on.

Whereas deployment often shows up as there's a team that's already together, connected, has a culture, has ways of working that's functioning, and someone from the outside gets sort of 'airdropped' into that team. The interpersonal and group dynamics are fraught in a different way when the system has a single external source entering the system.

We talk a lot about organ rejection from systems. What are the ways that they're either accepted or not? What does it signal to the people in that group? 'Oh, this person got deployed into my group, that means my bosses don't think I can do X, Y, Z work'.

Sometimes [00:20:00] it's super obvious. Sometimes it's a really clear skill set.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Hopefully it is.

 - Megan Alexa Watson: Yes, yes. And sometimes it's not. 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Sometimes it's not.

 - Megan Alexa Watson: And sometimes it's not. 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes. Yeah. 

 - Megan Alexa Watson: And so to your point again about sponsorship and the clarity of the leader and what you're trying to solve, making sure that leaders and managers in those moments communicate clearly and consistently, 'cause nobody's gonna hear it just the first time.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Right. 

 - Megan Alexa Watson: What is this person bringing that others don't have? Why are they plugged into this? What are the roles that they expect those who are already on the team to continue to drive? And how do you avoid the sometimes inherent feeling of "Oh fine, this person is here on this deployment, I'm gonna throw up my hands like, 'I'm not gonna work on this anymore they're here.' 'Cause that's never the intention.

Whereas in squads... you know I am passionate about contracting... How do you get super clear between peer parties what is or what isn't how we're gonna work, how we're gonna operate, what we're committing to?

It feels like the squad model allows for more intentional [00:21:00] contracting across, which could set the group up to be more successful in how they go after that opportunity. 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: If you teach them how to do that. 

 - Megan Alexa Watson: Yes. Accurate. Accurate. 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: In my last role, we did a lot of this as part of the HR strategy. Squading was an important part of new ways of working as part of the shift in how HR worked.

We went around the world and taught people how to contract, how to think about roles and responsibilities, and make explicit decisions about those aspects of the work that need to be done in the work, as opposed to those roles and responsibilities that need to be done by the leaders sponsoring the work. And those are important and different.

Part of the challenge is you're bringing together different expertise into oftentimes a new problem, right? A problem the organization is not used to [00:22:00] facing, which is why you're putting a squad against it. Otherwise, some other team probably already has the remit and the capabilities to solve the problem. You don't need a cross-functional team to go and solve it. And so there is real negotiation that has to happen within, the squad itself, and giving them the framework to how to think about how a team evolves. What you decide early on, is not necessarily what you're gonna need for the full life of the team, because somewhere about a third to halfway in, you actually know more about what you're actually trying to get done and how to get it done, and that's the time to sort of reset actually how you're gonna go about solving those problems, and working together as a team.

You also discover lots of information about individuals on the team. Who you thought that person was is not who that person is necessarily. And so there's a [00:23:00] good productive emphasis on good team building, and what I mean by that is that it's team building that's focused on the work and focused on what people bring to the work. It's focused on debate about how each person is thinking about the work and what needs to get done, and that debate is super valuable. They call it storming in the phase of the team. But if you don't have that debate, then you actually miss important nuance because, if you're coming from finance, you're thinking about the problem very different than I am as an organizational expert. And I need to understand that because finance, as an example, controls a lot about how authority is deployed in a system through the P&L structure and the like. Their perspective matters for me as an organizational expert, and if I don't spend the time understanding how they're approaching the problem, then I'm [00:24:00] losing critical data for how this works, and the same is true vice versa. That debate and that storming has to happen, and if you can be too polite you can be too focused on getting in and getting things done. Taking the time for the debate, I think is critical.

 - Megan Alexa Watson: I'm gonna build on that because what you're talking about, that idea of recognizing what those from other functions or professions are bringing to the work, we talk about that as mutual value recognition. I think a lot of organizations and teams have worked really hard in recent years to increase diversity of perspective, of background, of experience, of profession in our groups. I think there is a recognition that all of those things are true, and there is a difference between, 'Yes, I understand that different perspectives and different professions and lenses to things are valuable,' and 'I truly can see, understand, [00:25:00] and interpret the unique value that your function or profession brings to this work'.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes.

 - Megan Alexa Watson: I think your example just now of the way that finance influences authority through P&L choices and how that then impacts org design, and leadership, and all those other things is a great example.

And I'm not sure that folks always pause to take the time to reflect on that, to understand that, or even as an individual to communicate it to others.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes. 

 - Megan Alexa Watson: When I mentor people or as I manage people, one of the things I always talk about is for me, for my development, it was really important to understand what's the uniquely Megan-shaped problems out there.

And so I tell everyone I work with, be able to identify your uniquely you-shaped problems... 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes

 - Megan Alexa Watson: ...and then know how to articulate it to others. So that if you walk in one of these rooms or join one of these squads and it's clear that others aren't seeing 'Why are they here?', 'What are they in the room for?'... you owe it to yourself [00:26:00] to actually share that, and to articulate that, and to put that on the table, so that there's space for your voice, but also so that the work can actually be influenced by you in a meaningful way.

The other thing that pops out for me, based on what you were just saying, is the tension around when the squading becomes... a farce, a pantomime. The place that I see it go wrong most often is when there is one of the players in the squad who has some level of additional authority, subject matter expertise that people naturally defer to, and it turns into sort of a forum for everyone else trying to convince that one person that their ideas are right, and that person's sitting there with their arms crossed in the corner, judging the hell out of everybody.

Those situations I think have caused a lot of people to get frustrated by some squads and feel like it's not worth the investment. Because it just becomes like a Shark Tank session, versus a true space for co-creative ideation, and innovation [00:27:00] on new things.

And so I think your call-out was really critical. How do you teach people how to do this well? This isn't something you can just flip a switch on or just watch a video on. There has to be intentionality to shift ways of working. I think a great conversation we can have in the future is, what does it mean to teach new ways of working to an organization?

How do you bring that to life? How do you model it? How do you reward it, and how do you make it real? 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yeah. That's excellent. And just to understand that it's actually difficult for people to do well... because it takes the team dynamics that get built up over months and years, for intact teams, and then you're narrowing that down into a two-month, three-month project, and that's not always easy.

But as you ramp up the difficulty of the task, and you ramp up the criticality to organization, how much heat and focus for leadership is on [00:28:00] the problem? All those dynamics become much more challenging as people are trying to get this done in a microscope.

And so the grace that we can give people, and the support and the help we can give people to work through these, I think is super important. But also I'd emphasize, we think that teaming, teamwork is the same for an intact team versus these cross-functional squads, and there are some fundamental differences associated with them.

Most importantly is the authority structure is split and diverse, and these competing priorities from people's home teams actually matter for the work, but also create conflict. The core challenge is taking those and making productive use of those competing priorities so that you can actually get a better outcome than you would if it was [00:29:00] homed in just one of those teams. 

Here are four practical takeaways. One, start with the outcome, not the staffing model. Two, when starting a cross-functional squad, it's on the leaders, not the team, to negotiate across organizational boundaries. Three, to create space for your contributions when joining a squad, be clear on the unique value that you bring and proactively communicate it to the team.

Four, competing priorities, while difficult to navigate, can help cross-functional teams produce better outcomes. These key takeaways will help us all get flexible deployments right.

 - Megan Alexa Watson: And that's it for this episode of The Watson Standard. We've shared some things to think about, talk about, and put into practice. Follow the series and join us next time as we continue redefining leadership and redefining organizations.