Name: Tips for high-performing teams from enterprise experts
Uploaded: 2025-02-20T19:30:04.289Z
Duration: 59 min 20 s
Description: Tips for high-performing teams from enterprise experts

Transcript for "Tips for high-performing teams from enterprise experts": Hi, everyone. Welcome to MURAL's webinar, Tips for High Performing Teams from Enterprise Experts. I'm your host, Mark Tippen, Director of Strategic Next Practices here at MURAL. We appreciate you joining us today. We'll kick things off with today's two guests shortly, but I first need to cover a few housekeeping items. As far as technical issues, if you're experiencing any issues with viewing, please let us know by utilizing the Q and A chat. Should be on the right side of your screen and you can refresh your window if this is a web based platform. If you're running into problems, refreshing your browser should be fine, should help. Q and A. Also, please use the Q and A chat to ask our experts any questions that you may have. Feel free to submit questions as they come up and we'll get to them at some point during the Q and A or, if they're relevant to the topic, I'll try and draw them up in the moment. Recording. We will be recording this webcast and you will receive an email with a link to the recording within forty eight hours after we conclude today. Okay. Allow me to introduce our two guests. We have Cruz Beza, a Six Sigma black belt at Cummins. Cruz is located in Columbus, Indiana, which I believe is Cummins' headquarter and he is the master black belt for corporate IT where, not only does he teach but he coaches and mentors other IT professionals who wanna build these methods into their daily work. Also joining us, is Frank Kazas, who's the director of enterprise agile practices at Hyatt. Frank is located in the Chicago area where it's been quite cold and that here Indiana is cold as well, and he is focused on leading business agility transformation at Hyatt. Welcome, Cruz and Frank. Thanks for having us. Yeah, for sure. Well, I thought before we dive into the questions, I thought we could paint a picture for the audience about the worlds you inhabit at Hyatt and Cummins. Each of us may have our own experiences of these brands from a vacation stay or a business trip that involved a Hyatt or we may own or know someone who owns a truck with a reliable Cummins diesel in it. But there's a lot more to appreciate in these orgs and I thought maybe we could start with a big picture. How might you just describe these organizations generally and then zoom in to where your work impacts the organization? And, Frank, it's okay. Why don't we start with you? How might you describe Hyatt? Yeah. Thanks, Mark. So Hyatt, as you probably all know, is a global hospitality brand. We have over 1,300 properties globally across 78 countries and under 25 brand names. We cover 130,000 employees total, so that includes our a lot of our hotel staff for our managed and owned hotels as well as our corporate functions. As you guys can imagine, we've had an interesting journey the last five or so years post COVID. Hospitality got hit obviously pretty hard during the pandemic. So it's been an interesting journey kind of coming back from that, seeing some strong, leisure demand and so forth. But our our organization really, and this is where my team comes in, has been really looking at kind of retooling our operating model to make sure that we're building organizational agility into just everything we do so that we can more like more easily or better react to these unexpected maybe disruptions like COVID in the future. And so my team, like you mentioned Mark, is really helping embed agility into everything from our c suite all the way down to our frontline employees at the hotels. So we're just thinking working differently, having a different mindset, and really adapting rapidly to change that might happen either in the industry or in the broader environment or with our consumer preferences. Yeah. And I look forward to hearing some of those little crisis opportunities or crisis tunities that show for Hyatt out of the pandemic and and how you're able to shift there. Thanks, Frank. Cruz, same questions. How might you describe Cummins generally and then zero in on your day to day impact? Sure. Thanks, Mark. So Cummins is, has been around since 1919, always based here in Columbus, Indiana. We are, a 30, $34,000,000,000 company last year. We're based in a 90 countries with 70,000 employees, and our focus is power products. So we if you are passing a semi on the highway, in The United States, Fifty Percent of those have Cummins engines in them. We also do power generation and power systems, components, for that we sell to other manufacturers, as well as for our own products. And then increasingly where we're going into the future is, into new power. So we're going into electrification, hydrogen. We're we just released an engine, that can run on multiple fuels, renewable fuels, which makes it a lot easier for, a large trucking company, for example, to customize their renewable fuel mix, to their operations, but but can have much simpler maintenance while still getting the reliability of a Cummins engine. For me, I work in IT. And the big thing, for us is, you know, we are in the the age of software now, and we need to become, an agile and product oriented, IT organization. So that involves a lot of transformation, and a lot of work across the globe and across, and across Cummins, to make that happen. And so the, things I'll be talking about today are are, are important not just for for IT, but also for Cummins because they are so integral. If we don't if we don't get good at at at power and especially at, new power, renewable powers, then, you know, startups will eat our lunch, so we've gotta move fast. Yeah. Wonderful. I I appreciate hearing, you know, on one hand, Hyatt is really, has to lean into human behavioral sciences and understanding what motivates people and that that's not something you would just normally associate perhaps at a surface level. Then also, the absolute cutting edge of high-tech as it pertains to power machinery and things. You really are involved right at the edge and it takes teams to make all this happen. I think I'm going to start. Our first question is going to focus on the challenges you're facing in fostering collaboration. Both of you are coming at this with some Venn diagram somewhere between Six Sigma and Agile, maybe some design thinking. There's some overlap there, but I'd like to hear from each of you, what's a big challenge, maybe the biggest challenge that you face fostering collaboration across different teams, and then what did you do? What are some practical things that you can put in people's ears to go, this is where to look for solutions? Maybe, Frank. Shares all. Yeah. So, I mean, the obvious one is hybrid work. I think since COVID has been a challenge just in general where, you know, in the past, we might have just walked up to a colleague's desk or done an ad hoc whiteboarding session to collaborate on something. Now we've got colleagues kind of either remote in The US or North America but also globally obviously as well. So it just gets a little bit harder to kind of naturally collaborate I think because of hybrid. And again we've got hotels all over Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia and so forth in addition to North And South America. And so, I think a lot of times the barriers that that creates is a little bit of an out of sight out of mind kind of perceived silo almost where people may not naturally go or think to go to their colleagues to ask questions or collaborate or get a diverse set of ideas and so forth. And so you know one of the things that we've done with that is I think just giving people tools, number one, like mural for example, to help collaborate because then it almost bridges some gaps, right, where if everybody's familiar with the same tool set and working in a similar way, that really helps to kind of break down some of those perceived silos as well. And then the other thing I think that we've been doing is just with part of the agile ways of working, that we've been incorporating into into things is, really pushing the understanding of the benefit of diverse perspectives and getting people from the nontraditional functions or regions that you might not normally collaborate with and bringing them in to help give sort of, just fresh eyeballs, right, and new perspectives on a problem that you and your team might be struggling with. So, you know, tools like Mural and other, you know, frameworks that we put together around agility and so far they're a big one. And again, I think some of that education around just some of the benefits of thinking and working differently and how to collaborate more radically, I guess, has been a really big boost for us to help people cut across those silos. Yeah. You've reminded me, I had a flashback to the days of the Polycom where I was a remote employee and either someone forgot to dial you in or they dialed you in and then put you on mute. Yep. Immediately isolating. In some ways, we're having to struggle against returning to some of those poor habits and bringing in the voices, the diversity of thought and experience, especially as you might be impacting something that's got to get implemented overseas somewhere, you need that perspective of what's happening. Absolutely. Yeah. And, Mark, quickly, one thing we noticed, like, really post COVID when everyone went kind of fully remote was this thing that it wasn't that conversations were happening over Teams or Slack. It's that they weren't happening in some cases where, again, people would just get up to talk to each other and it's like you're not going to set up or stand up a Teams call or call somebody, just have a quick question or conversation. It was like people would just kind of move on or maybe make an assumption and and keep pushing forward. And so just being thoughtful and purposeful about it and getting it front of mind for folks that, you know, we need to make that extra reach out sometimes, to bridge the gap is really really important. So hybrid's helped a bit with that because you have, you know, it's kind of helped us close the gap a bit. But, you know, the fact that we have geographical, dispersion for the company is one of these challenges that's gonna be more difficult to make away in the near term. So Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Cruz, any of that resonate with you? Or Yeah. Yeah. I don't wanna I don't wanna repeat Frank's answers, but I have most of the same, you know, especially post COVID, with the new normal way of working. We're in a 90 countries, and we've got IT people, in in most of those. So it is not just, that we don't we aren't all in the office at the same time. We're on we're in different hemispheres. And so we need to be able to work asynchronously, besides, you know, besides collaborating within our time zone. You know, and one thing that is maybe a little different, I could add a little different flavor is for us, our IT department is now in our second transformation in the last five years. And, for good reasons. We are trying to respond to to the business. We're trying to set ourselves up to be the the IT organization that the company needs for the future. We wanna future proof ourselves, and so we decided to take that step, to do that. So that's all to say we need to we're we're we're building the plane as we're taking off, because we've gotta move fast. And, you know, to be agile, we need to move fast and and break things. Right? So, the challenge with that is that when I we need to get people together to collaborate. We need tools that are intuitive and easy and instant. We don't have time for a learning curve. That's not gonna work. So, people need to be able to get right down into the meat of the discussion. They need to get right down into where where where we're pulling out good ideas, where we're being intentional about using design thinking methods or six sigma methods, to get to the to get to the best idea, not just the first idea. And so, you know, that that's where I think especially MURAL has been helpful. We have other collaboration tools too. Right? But, there isn't one that is as good for that kind of work, that I've used. Yeah. And, I appreciate what what what, HU, you're getting at in terms of, one, the impact of suddenly having to negotiate your time through a calendar. And the default settings and calendars are are pretty chunky. Like, I mean, some sometimes a fifteen minute increment creep in at some point in some UIs, but it used to be a half hour and calendars are a friend of mine, at least Keith, used the phrase weaponized meeting technology and the ability to lock up as many emails as you can cut and paste into an invite. You can lock up all those people for half hour or an hour without an agenda, without any intention, without you know. When you just have that little question, some of the benefits of asynchronous or having a persistent digital artifact somewhere that different teams can touch at different times helps get their input in ways where you like you Frank, you were saying you might just I don't have time. I'll just make some assumptions. I think I know what they do. And that one decision maybe not has an impact, but thousands of those decisions can take you so far away. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's, there's a great book by Adam Grant called Originals, and, he talks the book is essentially about how to get better ideas. And one thing that is so useful, about MURAL and about, you know, a whiteboard in general, it would be great if we were all in the office, but we're not. So one one thing that's great about it is we can be more intentional about collecting a larger number of ideas and a larger number of voices, so that we can get a better result. And, actually, you know, I think it's it's better than it was in the past even when we were all in the same office. Yeah. Yeah. And and I also I'm I'm curious if this has been your experience as well. I I'm old enough to have been working in the days where you do your work and then you have to have the executive summary and you do the PowerPoint and you spend all this effort and it goes off and you never hear anything, you spend all this effort. I've really appreciated a space where I'm doing the work, the team's doing the work. We can plan research if, you know, we're in a kind of a beginning of the process area. We can plan our research, figure out the questions, conduct the research, and then if someone higher up the chain for absolutely legitimate reasons, they need to know the status or something, You just give them a view only link so they can't mess anything up. I mean, is this is this something that that you've seen or been able to do? Yeah. We've had a ton of actually benefit from that, Mark. I'm glad you brought that up because as we've started to stand up some of our kind of dedicated agile teams, we are, we're pushing them and getting our leaders even comfortable with this idea of fast feedback loops, of seeing things that are not fully polished or baked, just so that we can get guidance and make sure they're on the right path or make tweaks as necessary. And so it's been interesting because the teams at first were terrified of getting in front of, like, an SVP or a C level person with something that was, like, you're saying, like, kind of in flight, messy, sticky notes all over the place kind of a thing. But over and what was interesting was we actually got a ton of appreciation from the senior leaders saying, this is so cool. I love seeing this. And the fact that as they were giving us comments, the teams could make notes and stickies live felt the leaders like, they felt like they were heard. Right? And, like, the feedback was getting collected and so forth. But this idea that we were able to give people work in process as opposed to the exec summary polish deck, A) saved us time because now the team was focused more on value added work rather than just putting polish on their their work, and B) was they got the leaders and the teams more comfortable with these fast feedback loops on unfinished products to make sure that we were on the right path. So really really powerful ability to do that just using the mural and then having the the asset like you said kind of over time and being able to build on it and evolve it and not have to, you know, tear down a whiteboard at the end of your ninety minute session or whatever, but it it was persistent and and stayed for a while. So it was good. Yeah. Yeah. And if if I could add to that. Please, Chris. So so, like, you know, a big a big part of my work is, what we would call a green belt project. So it's this defined piece of work that's usually cross functional across at least across IT, often including the business. And what we do increasingly is we will have the whole project in MURAL, where we'll have, every tool or every method just kind of in a nice row. And so that it's so much better than making a final presentation slide deck and spending time on that. It's so much more powerful to bring a leader in, and and they can see the work as you go and see how you got to the result. And then when they're asking questions, when they're when they're critiquing the work, It's based on the full scope of the work, and it it makes it so easy for the belt, and and satisfying because then that leader gets to see just how much time, and effort went into it and just how many people contributed. You can see it. It's all right there. Yeah. I I I just I think about the the amount of times I've I've seen people trying or organization stand up some formal cascading communication protocol and all this. This is how we'll learn what and then just sending a link, you can say, well, this is actually what this is what all that is trying to achieve, just complete transparency and immediacy. And you reminded me early on in my design career, I learned a lesson. I met with a client, was so excited about the potential that on the flight back, I filled out a couple of pages with the diagrams and notes and everything. I was so excited. I photocopied and sent really cruddy sketches and then I stopped and went, Wait, I'm a designer. I should have polished. I should have. What won was the immediacy and the the the clear excitement and the ideas, and it turned into a co creation, a participatory that, surprised me. It was not at all the polish your portfolio always look. Those things are important at certain circumstances, but how delightful just to be in the meat of the work and working with the customer, the client, or the other team. Mhmm. One other thing I'll add too, Mark, on this is that I think the team has felt the most freed with a a mural type tool too because PowerPoints tend to be very constraining. Right? There's not a lot of real estate on the slide. And so what was helpful for our teams, especially early days of adopting agility and so forth, was that they could sort of just, like, let themselves run wild a little bit and just do the work and be messy and let it, you know, grow and and be kind of big, and then eventually figure out how to, like, put it into a slide if needed. But it just got away from this. Like it's got to be like three columns because that's how it fits on the side or it can only be two rows or whatever it is and the team just, like, it opened up their creativity to just think more broadly and not feel that subconscious constraint that I think might have been there for them before and that was really powerful for them and, like, an unlock for their, just mindsets going forward. Absolutely. And and, I just saw a comment. Yet another factor from David. Thank you. The fact that, there is a leveling of getting voice more voices heard, when you you have the ability to contribute maybe silently, you know, or, you know, with notes or asynchronously from voices? Are or is that, something you've noticed as well? Like, you're you're actually getting a richer input, with the multi with multiple ways in which people can can have a voice heard? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I know I know for us, you know, I'm sure it exists everywhere. But, if the boss says something first, what are you what are you gonna say second? Nice. So so what's what's really important for me is is I think about myself as the you know, like, the in my role, I'm I'm the voice of quality. I'm supposed to be making sure we're trying to do things very well, to a good process so we get the best result. I don't have all the all all the answers, but I know how I'm supposed to know how to run, run an effective problem solving or or creative challenge. So, yeah, the the the great thing is that, yeah, you can begin with silent exercises. You can be and and there are no names on the sticky notes. Right? You can you can you can right click and you can figure out who wrote it. But, the the big advantage is that the intern, the the hourly employee, can give you the the best idea, and it can it can rise through the top through through voting or through discussion, and you get to a much better result. Almost always. Yeah. Yeah. I would agree. We had an interesting example where there was a team that was Chicago based doing some prioritization for q four and then into '25, and, they needed some input from the Asia Pacific team as well. And that team sometimes feels a little bit out on an island because they're far away and in a different time zone and all that kind of stuff. But Mural helped us sort of democratize that a bit and, like, even it out where the US team did some work and then while they were sleeping, the Asia team took that same document and added their stickies kind of secondarily and then they got together a couple days later to kind of discuss and sort sort through it basically. But, yeah, the the idea that it's like, again, to your point, Cruz, doesn't matter if it's the analyst or the vice president or whatever. All the ideas were on there and captured and got a a seat at the table essentially so that we made sure we were pulling from the best ideas, not just the loudest voice or the hippo's voice. Yeah. They have a highest paid person's opinion. Yeah. Right. Right. As a facilitator, you know, you often find the quiet voices are not quiet because they don't have anything to say. They're likely you know, there may be questionable psychological safety, it's like they're picking their battles. Okay, it looks like that's where leadership is gonna go. And, and so often you hear after the fact leadership is saying, why didn't you know, why didn't we get this input beforehand? Parts of the org, we're interfacing directly with the customer or directly with the product. There's some also often isolated for that goodness back into the decision. Yeah. If if you're problem solving or or working a creative challenge and you aren't considering how to work best with introverts and with people who are new, you know, maybe they're not in in the group yet, then you're missing out on a lot, of human potential. Yeah. Absolutely. Appreciate it. Well, I wanted to drop I'm gonna, open up a poll here, for the audience because I'd love to hear from them. It's, it should have just popped up and gone live. Just, at your leisure, answer that. We'll look at the results later. Question is, the biggest challenge your team faces when it comes to collaboration. We have some options there. I wanted to shift a little bit. We've talked about how generally we try and break down silos and the processes we use to get collaboration happening in general. How do you approach aligning teams that have different goals and priorities, and especially when it comes to this, everyone's got to perform at a high level, but maybe those things are not aligned. What are some of your go to strategies? I can go first. I think for us, a lot of, our we're calling our agility movement Highways of Working just because we're trying to really embed it in everything we do. And a key part of the Highways of Working really is breaking down silos and making sure that we're sort of aligning on priorities cross functionally. I think what was happening a lot of big companies that I've worked from the past struggle with this too, but different departments, different regions, different functions would kinda go in their little silo and maybe create priorities for the year and not really do a lot of collaboration because no individual department or function can do everything on their own. Right? There's always a need from somewhere else or or collaboration needs to happen. And so what we've tried to do more and more, especially with our senior leaders now, is focus on how do we look horizontally and and and align that way to make sure that I think these five things are important, but I need help from over here. Can you guys make this a priority for yourselves too to make sure that I'm not battling for resources all year and kind of fighting against the current because my priority two might be your priority 14 or whatever? So that's been really helpful just providing again that visibility to, you know, let's check with our peers and our partners to make sure that we've got alignment on what's important for this quarter, this half year, year, and make sure that we have that, you know, alignment with our our folks, with our leaders, and everybody else. So huge huge unlock for us and just, again, educating people on that that practice of looking horizontally rather than vertically because it just helps everyone up and down be incentivized kind of by the same things as we're all trying to get the same goal, but, also, it it kind of eliminates a lot of that friction that we were feeling in the past where people just had mismatched priorities and there was, friction all year. Right. Right. Yeah. We've faced we've faced some similar, challenges, Frank, and especially when we're going through this transformation where we are, we still have to deliver for the business. You know, if IT goes down, the business stops. If, if our enterprise resource, planning tool goes down, the whole company stops. You know? So, but we're also trying to transform at the same time. So there have been a lot of competing priorities that we have to deal with. And, you know, the one of my favorite tools for this is the abstraction ladder, to because I think the where people often get hung up is that they're focused on maybe their their why, their reason. But there's a greater there's a greater why that we should all be living under. A reason why we're why we're doing this. So, I like to I like to do some some five whys or some abstraction ladder, and then, get to a better common reason for why we're here, and then start to move downwards about how we do this and how we do it and maybe our different teams. Again, a thing that's easy to do in Miro. But that's a that's a design thinking method that I think can be really, really useful. Yeah. I'll double down on that too, Cruz. Sorry, Mark, real quick. And we have, just and you mentioned the book earlier as well, but we've been following one called outcomes over output, by Josh Seiden. And that one's been it's a really quick, easy read, short book, but it's really, really powerful that does exactly that. And we've sort of taken the five whys and abstraction laddering and hybrided it with Josh's method of thinking about outcomes, like business results versus just getting stuff done. And it's been hugely powerful to the point where well, something we just call generically outcome maps has been a really key tool and, of course, powered by Mural, for us because it's just the best collaboration tool for visualizing that. But it's this idea that, like, let's map the work to the business results we're trying to get to and then ladder it up to sort of our enterprise level metrics that we care about. Right? Those, like, metrics that matter kind of a thing. And, again, hugely powerful because we've had people with that, Cruz, which sounds like you have done too, but, who were thinking, oh, I just work in benefits or I just work in this department. But when you actually ladder it up, what they're actually helping us do is get more owners to sign new hotels with us, for example, because they can help keep cost structures in place and be like this. Right? So having that sort of context and big picture has been so eye opening for folks, and it just gives them a bit of, like, extra motivation and energy to say, like, wow. I'm actually contributing to an enterprise goal here. I'm not just, like, a person over off to the side on some random team. So that, a, the exercise hugely powerful for just getting everyone aligned to the why, but, b, it helps, I think, again, just make sure everyone's pulling in the same direction for the same ultimate enterprise goals that we're shooting for. Yeah. I love that. I, My colleague, you may know Jim Kalback, who's our Chief Evangelist. He's written a couple of books. One of them is on jobs to be done and we're having a conversation about this, the methods that like abstraction laddering or five whys that help you get to that altitude and blending it with jobs to be done where some people say, when you're trying to put a hole in the wall to hang a picture, what you want is to enjoy your art. But sometimes if you are a manufacturer of the drill bit, you're actually needing to focus on how to optimize that step in the process. I think looking at these things is like either or is missing the point. Finding that altitude of inquiry where more of the organization can get genuinely excited and can get behind in that outcome is the first step, but then everyone might need to go back down and ask how. But doing that and getting practice to coming up and aligning, you know, prairie dog around, we're all aligned. Okay. Cool. And then when you go back down, you're you're working in harmony by changing altitude. Yeah. And I think to that point, Mark, having that alignment at the right altitude is important because sometimes it's your picture analogy, the the solution might change. Right? Maybe it's not a hole in the wall. Maybe it's a Velcro strip or whatever or something else. And so that's when the the interesting unlock too where sometimes we get myopic into, like, beating our heads against wall with similar solutions that we've tried before. But if you reframe it to say we're trying to solve this business problem or this business challenge, how might we do that? Right? The collaboration tools obviously help with ideation, prioritization, all those kinds of things, but hugely powerful to help people reframe even the solutions that they're bringing to the table and all the things we've talked about with making sure we get diverse perspectives both kind of horizontally but also vertically. Right? People close to the front line. You can get some really interesting ideas that come out of the woodwork that we would never would have thought of otherwise. So just doubling down on what you guys are saying, but it's been a really big unlock for us to get that alignment and clarity. I was gonna take this opportunity. I'm gonna go ahead and close the poll, so we can kinda look at the, the results because it's bridge to my next question. But, It looks like when people were focusing on the challenges they face when it comes to collaboration, misaligned goals. To your point, finding that alignment that everyone can agree to without getting bogged down with the how are we gonna go about this, the solutioning that sometimes might need to go in different directions. That was at the top. Silos between departments which I think we've talked about as well, just the inertia of where your influence and gravity tends to be. And, there's some interesting research by, I believe his name is Michael Arena, who's got a lot of data about teams and the networks of teams. And one of the insights, profound insights that really stuck with me is if you remember heading into the pandemic, everyone thought productivity is going to tank, right? How can we maintain productivity? Well, some productivity went through the roof, and it was that individual productivity. So individual teams, right, they we pulled in and we said, well, our sphere of influence is this. And, well, we we already had rituals and a cadence and we were talking. So we can impact now. Since we're not commuting, we've got even more time to impact in these areas. But what fell apart was the cross team collaboration because, Frank, to what you were saying, just that we'd go up to someone's desk and there are people that were the connectors in one job function and I don't have anything really to do with our business group or our finance team. We both like board games, so we're just talking about something. What would happen with those people who are the social connectors is they're playing a role almost like a troubadour of helping bridge those silos and that huge hit that we're trying to recover. Yeah. I I mean, I don't know what what your experience is like, Frank, but, I there's just no substitute for sitting across the table from somebody and getting to know them, and and learning who they are as a human, as a person. So at least I'm grateful. The staff I'm on, we make a point to get together in person at least once a year, and then as a as a smaller team, a couple more times a year. And our the point of those, that time together is just to is almost just to get to know each other as much as it is that we wanna work on things together. I think that's gonna just continue to be a a real challenge that we don't run into each other in the hallway anymore and ask how your Right. Kids' baseball game went. Mhmm. You know, nobody's bringing in we're not doing potlucks in the office, you know, chili cook offs the same way we we used to. So, you you really do miss that, and I don't know how we replace that without being intentional about it and without, and without leaders who under who understand that they have to spend money on plane tickets and hotels to make it happen. Yeah. It is an investment. I agree with you, Cruz. Totally. We've had, we just recently did return to office for three days starting in November. And I've personally have seen a ton of just improvement in the just like you're saying, you run into people in the hallway, in the cafeteria, getting coffee, whatever it is, and you have a quick chat about something that you never would have otherwise. Or a, hey. Let me help you with that that thing you're working on, or let me connect you with this person who's working on something similar. Just incredible value from it. Right? So agree with you, Cruz. I think that face to face time, at least some of it, is hugely important for collaboration and just, you know, alignment and and success eventually. Yeah. And culture. You know? I think about I I really I think about, like, our interns and our new hires, people who I've been with Cummins for fourteen years now. So I I know everybody. I I'm I'm good. But, and I was here before COVID. So, you know, I I'm good. I I I've got all the connections I need for my network to be successful. But if you're new, that's really hard. You've gotta set up time with people. You've gotta it feels a little more constructed. It doesn't feel as natural. So, yeah, that is a it's just a big challenge. Yeah. How do you and and also not only the culture of the company is is part of it. And certainly, even Mural, we were established as a fully distributed company from the beginning but through rapid growth and then some contraction and everything, it's, you know, the culture of the company itself is put under strain. But then there's also understanding the culture of the people that you serve, your customers. Their language and what are their preferences and what motivates them and why are they attracted to your brand. That's something that's really hard when you show up at a new company and you're like, I'm thankful to have a job. I don't use our own software. I'm not a purchaser of this heavy equipment myself. I see it on TV occasionally but where do I go to actually get that sense of belonging not only to my company but belonging to my customers passion as well? But on the poll, I found it interesting. There were no votes for remote work challenges being something that's getting in the way of collaboration. I think as difficult as the pandemic was, we all got some chops down. But to that point, we've spoken a little bit about leadership and making investments and appreciating what it takes to create conditions for better success. Well, in your views, what is the role of leadership in driving that team performance and maintaining motivation and focus in that diverse teams and creating that environment for collaboration? Mhmm. Chris, do you wanna go first? Sure. Yeah. So for for me, you know, I deal with a lot of, a lot of green belts. So people who are running a project that crosses many functions, in the company, and they've got to build a team. And we we assign, for we we get, two leaders for each of those projects, a process owner and a sponsor. So the process owner is gonna be the one who's accountable for whatever changes make, and the sponsor is supposed to remove barriers. And that's the person where I I always challenge them to set a very clear vision of what success is for that project, for for the for the people working in it. You know, if you if you ask the right question, you're halfway there. And so in along the same lines, if if I can get that leader to set a very clear vision of success for the team and what their boundaries are, once you have that framework, it's easy to work through. General Patton once said he doesn't tell a private how to do anything. He just says what needs doing. And then he says you'll be surprised by the ingenuity of a private. And so, I I try and get our our leaders to do that. That's at least that's my philosophy of of the best role that that leaders can play is, not just setting a vision, but but setting what the finish line looks like. Yep. I would echo some of that, Bruce, as well. I think one of the big things we've done with our shift towards agility and highways of working is really this idea that making sure leaders understand your job is to set context and be crystal clear on the what and the why. What do we need to accomplish? Why is it important? And then from there, like, turn your teams loose and get that creativity going to figure out the how, basically. So, it's been really really powerful. Hard to undo, right, because there's been muscle memory in place where, you know, some of the older school leaders are more of the command and control of I'm the boss, I'm going to tell you exactly what to do, when it needs to be done by, and that kind of thing. But this this pivot to get crystal clear on what needs to be accomplished and why and by when, and then turning your team loose has been really interesting to see. So you know seeing our leaders kind of walk that talk has been really powerful for our group too because it's a bit of like you know, twofold. One is that the leaders are kind of leaning into a little bit more too, but we're also empowering some of the teams to ask those questions where if someone comes to you and says, I need you to build a dashboard that does x, the question should be okay. Like, help me understand what we're trying to accomplish here. Maybe there's a better way to do it that's faster, cheaper, better, or whatever and so forth. So there's just better dialogue happening, I think, when both, you know, leaders and the kind of teams themselves are open to those conversations and have the same sort of frame of reference, I guess. But seeing them just even collaborate with each other, and make sure that there's alignment on goals and priorities and so forth has been a huge help for us as well in that standpoint. Yeah. And I think this is really gonna be a differentiator, actually, like, in a competitive advantage if companies can figure out how to do this well. Because if I think about what happened after COVID, you didn't have your manager sitting next to you anymore. They weren't looking over your shoulder. So they had to shift. And, I mean, this was a big, shift for our managers here, and the company was very intentional about, in HR, and our talent development was very intentional about making sure we started to shift towards outcomes based objectives. And that Mhmm. It wasn't it wasn't nine to five. You were at your desk. It was, this is what you need to do this week. This is what you need to do this quarter. This is what you need to do this year. These are what outcomes you need to achieve, because it's the it's the only way you can really manage towards success in a hybrid remote global environment is is based on the outcomes. And so I think companies that get good at that and cultures, that build up around that will be a differentiator. Yeah. I'd agree. I think and we found that some legacy kind of mindsets or behaviors around people getting so caught up in just, like, getting stuff done, like, almost like productivity measures. But it's it's more about, like, we'll pick your head up and ask the question of why. Like, what happened when I delivered to y or z? And, that's been really important too because I think, you know, I used to work in a digital organizations and before this current role and stuff, and teams would get hung up on their Jira points and their velocities and all this stuff. And I'd ask them the question that say, like, if you deliver three points and you move the needle 10%, do you think anyone's gonna care about your points? They don't. They care about the business result. Right? And so that's the idea is, like, really to get people thinking that way, Chris, to your point of, like, outcome based, you know, goals is really, really important because not that it doesn't matter how you get there, but it kind of doesn't matter how you get there. Right? And it's more about what are we trying to accomplish and how do we do it in the most efficient and effective way. So, you know, we talk a lot about we're always going to be in capacity constrained environments, whether it's budgets or headcount or whatever else. And so the idea is with what we have, how do we maximize that group of people's focus on the highest impact items? And it's just been, like, a really big unlock for us too in that way. And you just get rid of a lot of the noise, a lot of this sort of busy work that was happening that people felt good about because they were busy. But we start focusing that energy more on the stuff that actually moves the needle. And it's been it's been interesting. Yeah. Eighty twenty battle. Yeah. Mhmm. Exactly. And then and in many cases, you know, we all in in our roles of of knowing, a discipline, six sigma, agile, or something, leadership, that would do well to kind of engage us. We can help conversations at different levels in the org as well. You know, and and the benefits we're getting in these teams that you want to be co creating and imagining as well, there's a lot of this unlearning that can happen at executive levels as well to to get those incredible gains and build trust and engagement. All these all these things that they're hoping improve on employee engagement scores happen through the way you work, the conditions you create, what you model. Yeah. Well, before we transition over into we have some some great questions, coming in. I just I want to pivot us to a last question here. Looking ahead for both of you, what emerging trends and technologies do you see having the biggest impact on collaboration and high performing teams? I'm not fishing for anything here. I'm just like in IT, in experience design, what are the trends that you're seeing that you're going to have to inculcate or understand better? I I can go first. I think there's a few of just there's definitely shifting centers of gravity for us geographically. Obviously, there's a lot of growth happening in the Asian markets and so forth. And so some of the approaches we were taking, the things that might have been more North American centric have to shift and so forth. That's an interesting one for us. Technology wise, AI is obviously on everybody's mind, and how do we leverage that to to be more effective and efficient as an organization. But there's already some really interesting work happening, where we're finding a lot of efficiencies and ways to just, you know, re shift resources and focus to more high impact things and automating stuff away. Right? So that's been great too. But just the use of data, I think, is a big thing that goes along with the AI is making sure that we've got, you know, robust datasets and we're tracking and measuring things at every turn so that we can really unlock the power of the of the AI and the the data analytics in general, is gonna be a big thing for us going forward. And, all of that stuff, I think, for us selfishly feeds into the agility play because, again, making data driven decisions are a heck of a lot easier if you either have an AI tool to your benefit to help you do the analysis or just having data period. Right? And then that in turn helps us collaborate because we can make better prioritization prioritization decisions by using data, and it's not just gut reaction or people doing things, kind of on a whim. So it's just something even as an ecosystem, right, where this just data AI kind of movement is gonna help empower us to just really embed these ways of working and help us hyperfocus on the highest impact things so that we can kinda win in our space. Yeah. To play off of that, Frank, and I think you're totally right, for for for us, the the what we're looking at in using increased automation, data in better way and then better ways, and then AI, and some advanced analytics, that can learn learn with us as we go, is that we can do more value added work. We can do stuff that machines can't. We can be more creative. We can focus on our customers more and spend more time focusing on them and less time on the systems and the busy work and the things that as we're able to use technology, to to do stuff for us, we can do stuff that is, more satisfying, and, that that's gonna make a bigger return on investment. Mhmm. So I think that it it's it's so amorphous because who knows where where it's gonna go, and who knows what for for an IT organization, who knows what AI is gonna do to us. I think it I think it would be best as a they'll be best as a partner. That's the best case, where where we learn how to use it, as a as a as an assistant, as a as a super smart assistant that can get get things done for us. But, it it's gonna be a big challenge because it'll change how we work, how how you manage work, how you define success. Everyone's gonna have to learn new skills. There's a lot a lot of unknown, ahead for that, I think. Yep. Yeah. It was, I I work closely with our AI team at Mural, and some of this stuff is starting to show up Canvas. And, in my head, I started building a little logic flow. My first question is, are humans still relevant to anything you're trying to do? Like, okay. If humans are still relevant, then the role that AI plays, I think is finding pockets of where it can definitely add value. But to use all this data to leverage AI and to make decisions, you still need to draw the circle back to the customer. Is this actually in their lived experience making a difference? You know? Because I think we've all experienced to certain extent even back to trying to get support over an automated phone system. Right? When you go into the labyrinth of of that kind of system, you you invariably have a question that it's not going to answer and you have no feedback mechanism. And I think a lot of things are rolled out and people go, alright, we're done and we can help scratch this off our bottom line. And what's brewing out there is growing unrest or dissatisfaction. Missed opportunities, if you wanna say glass half full, missed opportunities to actually engage more, build the company, all that kind of stuff as well. Right. Yeah. I think thoughtful application of those things is is the key to your point, Mark, because I think it's really easy to just, like, bolt an AI thing onto something and, like, call a good check a box, tell your investors or whatever that you're doing AI and stuff like that. But is it really serving your purpose? Is it serving your customers in the best way possible? Is it helping achieve and support your business goals? Things like that is really are the important questions. So, it's it's, I think, easy to fall into that trap with the new shiny objects, the new tech that comes out, but I think an important piece is just being really thoughtful about utilizing the tool where it can help you, not just having the tool drive solutions for the sake of solutions. Absolutely. Well, I saw a question here. We we talked a little bit about methodologies, methods, and and each of you are coming at it in a Venn diagram, some overlap. How do disciplines like Six Sigma, Agile, Design Thinking, how are these things, people where they're just starting a journey and trying to understand all of these options, how do they complement each other in in your world? Mhmm. Yeah. This is, this is my daily life. I'm a six sigma master black belt. I got a LUMA certification in design thinking in '20 in human centered design, in 2017. And then I joined, IT four years ago and started working agile. So I'm using all three of these all day. I think they complement each other very well. I don't think you have to do, do them all. But if I think about Six Sigma, it's it's it's Six Sigma is is like, you know, you're trying to get to maybe three or four defects in a million, a six sigma. It came from Motorola in the eighties. It transformed manufacturing. It's why our phones are so reliable. It's why our computers are so reliable. It's about getting defects out, from a from a system. So it's it's deductive in that way. It's narrowing in that way. Design thinking is inductive or abductive. You know, you're going from a problem and you're trying to come up with generalizations or or use cases that probably will work. And then you go out and you test them, and that's where agile comes in. And the testing and then iterating, getting to minimum viable products, but not needing perfection, in order to start to implement something. And so I think they can complement each other very well. I do a lot of recipe writing, for my green belts where we talk about their problem, and, I can pull one up, actually. This is the one I was thinking about sharing. Yeah. Mark, just for a moment. Just for a moment. Please. I'll do something like this with my, with my belts where we will write a recipe for an exercise that they're trying to do. In this case, we were trying to figure out, this part of the company wanted to do this part of IT wanted to figure out what can they do around automation, this year. So we started with an abstraction ladder exercise. We, we picked some of those, some of the best hows. We did a creative matrix. You can see we've got a lot of votes here. We we used quiet time and voting. Again, lots of quiet activity. And then we prioritize them in an ease and effect matrix, which is, you know, a very common Six Sigma tool. People use it in design thinking a lot too, but it's very common in Six Sigma. And then we we ended up prioritizing a handful of ideas that then they carried forward and turned into features, agile agile features. So all three were right there together, and I do a lot of recipe writing like that where I'm trying to work in an agile way, but use the best of six sigma design thinking, whatever is going to apply. But I'm not dogmatic, which I think also helps. Yeah. I I kinda have the same thing, Chris. I think that for us, we found that the best, approach is sort of a custom, you know, recipe of things that we brought together as well for Hyatt because, you know, taking something like even like scrum or any form of agile off the shelf and just trying to shove it into the system doesn't really work. So for us, similarly, we've taken components of lean design thinking, agile, a little less six sigma for us probably than what you guys are doing given our industries and stuff. But it's that sort of we've cherry picked the things that make sense and and work in this environment in our kind of culture and our industry and stuff like that and have formed it into our own kind of flavor of this thing and I think that's what I would echo the same thing that getting hyper dogmatic about a specific framework is generally not super productive I would say because it's not about being the best you know student or the best scrum you know implementer it's about getting your business results and stuff and understanding the whys behind some of the practices I think are really important component of this as well of like why do you do sprints, why do you do retrospectives or backlogs or whatever. And having a clear understanding of the spirit of the tool or the approach or the ceremony, whatever you want to call it, is critical because from that understanding then you can kind of make it your own, right, and and do the things that make sense and so forth. So we're really big on that of, like, making sure that we help educate folks on the spirit of it and sort of the the why behind it and then figuring out how to make it work in a specific scenario. So I would agree with pretty pretty much everything you said. Yeah. And and, you know, the beauty of you know, the the core for me of design thinking is empathy. And then the core for me of agile is iteration. And if you can do those two things, it doesn't really matter what you do along the way. You're not gonna stop iterating and stop empathizing until you get to the right answer for your customers. So because there are hundreds of design thinking in Six Sigma method, but there's no one right way to to solve any problem. But agile and empathy will get you there. Mhmm. Love that. Well, Mike, I'm I'm I'm so appreciating this conversation because I'm it's putting it's connecting a couple dots for me, genuinely. The, the words that you had to share about, clarifying with leadership about what needs to happen, what's the outcome and why it's important. Once you have that in place and then you look at, you know, without getting bogged down in in method details in general, you need to understand what the problem space is. This is Design Council's double diamond. Someone comes with you with a problem, you can just race to execute it, solution right away and execute it. But you get a little bit better results if you at least evaluate a couple of different options, pick one and then go to the end. But you get much better outcomes if someone comes with a problem. I need a website. I need a new IT solution, I need a new experience for a hotel or a seat. You back up and you say, Okay, well, what problem are we trying to solve? What do we know about the problem? What do we know about the people for whom we're developing? Building that empathy. But leaving it up to teams to understand crews in a manufacturing context is defects. Removal of defects is a lens that is inseparable from customer satisfaction. Frank, in hotel experience, you're really leaning into empathizing with customers. UX being more than just you know, pixels on a device. Right? We've we've so narrowly focused UX when it should be from the moment they think about taking the vacation. How do you show up? Where do you show up? And that whole journey that when they're done, that that journey continues as well because the photos that they took at the locations you put value into. Highest level, it's just that looking, understanding and baking so you can go back and show it to someone and do some more looking, some more understanding. That to me is if anyone's just starting a journey, like having that to begin with is gonna carry them very far. Absolutely. Yep. Well, I see that we're coming right up on the end and I wanted to just thank you both for your insights. I really appreciate the conversation. We're going to wind it here, give everyone thirty seconds back to their day. I did want to let the audience know this is going to conclude our webinar for today. And we hope you learned some practical steps for building maybe employee advocacy strategies to help build better on fire employee advocacy programs inside bringing some of this stuff to light in your own organization. And as a reminder, we'll be sending out an email with a link, to the recording and you should receive it within forty eight hours. Feel free to share with your colleagues, anyone who may be interested. Thanks for joining us and, and I'll just mention if any of you are curious in continuing the conversation, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. I won't speak for either of you but I'm always happy to engage with anyone who's got questions or some some things that that I might be able to help with outside this context. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Thank thank you, Frank. Thank you, Cruz. I really enjoyed, the conversation. And to begin Yeah. And thanks for thanks for what what for what you do, and I'll just make a plug. You know, Mark isn't paying us to be here. We're here because we like MURAL, and it makes such a difference in our work. And they are very proactive about coming out and asking us at Cummins, what do we need? How can Mural be better for us? So in that true design thinking, empathetic spirit. So thanks so much also, Mark, for what you guys do, because Mural is, I mean, great. It it's made my my work life so much better. You guys make me look good. Yeah. Well well, thank you very much. You you make you make it interesting and exciting to to keep doing and keep working. Yeah.