Interview José Juan Agudo
Today I would like to share with you a conversation that I have had the opportunity to enjoy with José Juan Agudo, a great colleague expert in accompaniment and development of talent in teams, as well as a great adventurer and passionate about life. It’s a luxury for me every time I share reflections with him and I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did.
José Juan Agudo is a specialist in team development, training and coaching, he has been working for more than a decade with the management teams of organizations such as Sony, Repsol, Bayer, Ikea or Philips among others. She combines her professional consulting work with university teaching, research and writing. He teaches in different Master’s degrees at the University of Valencia, Alicante or the EDEM Business School. In 2014 he published his first book, “Teamfeeling”, a biographical account of Mountaineering, Teams and Management.
He frequently participates as a speaker in forums and congresses on Personal Leadership, Team Development or HR.
He is a partner and founder and Atman S.L. www.grupoatman.es
defines himself as a restless mountaineer passionate about the profession of developing equipment.
INTERVIEW WITH JOSE JUAN AGUDO
Q: José Juan, in your opinion, what are the most important challenges in accompanying teams in their development?
A: I am noticing a paradigm shift. We have gone from a stage in which the accompaniment of teams lacked methods, keys or frameworks of reference to improve group efficiency (that stage is coming to an end, due to all the free and open access to information that there is now) to a current stage in which the challenge is: okay, We already have the knowledge and the theory, but we continue to find ourselves in the “ego-system” dilemma. This dilemma consists of realizing to what extent any person who works in a team has to learn to control and regulate their “ego” because from a certain point of non-control of the ego the system (team) begins to deteriorate.
Systemic Coaching
It is a type of dilemma characteristic of systemic coaching (which is the essence of team coaching), where a team or system discovers itself as an entity with its own autonomy, with its own rules and where often things happen that no one wants but that the system itself generates autonomously. I think that’s the biggest Achilles’ heel currently when it comes to evolving as a team. Of course, there are still the lifelong challenges: teams that are not well configured, that are not clear about their goals, where there is not a good balance of roles, a good framework of action or clear work processes.
Those challenges are still there, but the ones I am currently encountering the most are challenges in which very good teams in technical terms (professionally speaking), are not able to manage their egos and end up paying the consequences. Finding that balance between the importance of the ego and the needs of the system is the most common challenge I encounter lately.
Emotionality in teams. Interview with José Juan Agudo
Q: Reading between the lines, I interpret that we are also talking about the management of fears, what role does emotionality play in teams?
A: I think that emotions in teams are like water to fish. Imagine an aquarium in which the fish are in the water all the time and, therefore, do not have the perception that they are moving in a certain ecosystem in which they are born, grow, feed, etc. For me, emotions in teams are like that water, where if you don’t take care of the PH, if you don’t prevent algae and germs from growing, you risk poisoning the environment and ending up affecting the health and life of the fish. Emotions in teams are that invisible element but that affects, from a psychological approach, how motivated or unmotivated people are, how much commitment they have, if there is an excess of fears, reservations, etc.
Now, for example, I am working on a project where in a corporation, which has been immersed in a merger process, it is beginning to be perceived that there are fears, duplicity of certain positions and functions and many people are “defending” their needs and interests, for fear of being left out of the picture. There is a clear emotion, fear, which is responsible for people acting the way they are doing: they stop sharing certain information, they communicate but not in a fluid or sincere way, there are “hidden” agendas… And that is being decisive when it comes to managing the motivations and commitments of the people who work together in certain teams.
Emotions in teams
I see two large categories of emotions in teams: expansive and restrictive. Fear would fall into the second category, that of the emotions that make you not be entirely yourself in the team, but that you are keeping something to yourself, simulating, adopting a role to protect yourself, perhaps it is not yours in essence, but it arises from that lack of confidence or fear. On the other hand, when the team’s emotionality is expansive, that is, there is support among colleagues, there is trust, solidarity, behavior changes a lot. Collective emotions are essential, they contribute to the ecosystem in a decisive way in one way or another.
Follow the interview José Juan Agudo
Q: Speaking of team coaching, which you also explain in your book Teamfeeling, you have often accompanied teams in difficult environments, even remote ones, (mountains, deserts)… What are these experiences used for in teams?
A: We work with two very specific programs of this kind, depending on the equipment and its needs, (of course it is not for all equipment). One takes place in the Sahara desert and the other in the high mountains (Pyrenees). They are programs that are designed for certain types of equipment, which are at certain times where what must be caused is a paradigm shift, quite radical, that is, to stop working and being in a certain way and start being in another in a short space of time. That haste is what makes you resort to emotional experiences that have a high impact because of what is different, because of what is experiential and because they automatically take you out of your comfort zone (as you get off the plane).
Anyone who travels knows that traveling is one of the best ways to learn, to open yourself to new paradigms.
Change of vision in the team
We use it in teams and people who need that paradigm shift, in times such as a change of vision or strong culture, mergers between different departments or companies, or with changes in senior management that imply changes in how the company is going to be managed, for example. The fact that they are the scenes of so much exposure is what justifies going to these places. We have all heard many times that it is necessary to “get out of the comfort zone“, but it is also true that if you do not change the environment no matter how much you want to leave that zone, if physically there is nothing to show it to you, if you do not go to an unknown or new space, which you do not control, it is more difficult to get out of that zone. In that sense, the mountain, for example, treats everyone equally, there are no positions or hierarchy, all the members of the team are equal. Normally, in addition, an emotional and collaborative learning anchor is sought that is, if not indelible, at least quite difficult to forget.
Expansive Conversations in Team Coaching
We know that in the world of coaching or training, sometimes what is learned in a session or workshop lasts until routine or haste makes you forget what you have learned because the emotional anchorage has not withstood the tsunami of day-to-day life or stress. That is why resorting to more extreme desert-mountain scenarios makes people have an emotional impact that will not be easily erased: they are experiences that are on the border between the challenge zone and the panic zone. There are some extreme situations where the person comes out, their character, their essence, comes out (when you have been in the Sahara for three days there are things that cannot be disguised or faked) and people experience their own limits with the team as a witness. We try to combine a part of our work in the field of the mental, the analysis, the cognitive-rational with a much larger part that happens in the experiential-emotional plane. We all learn from what we experience, we all learn by “doing”.
High-performing teams have expansive conversations, the kind that transform people, communicate intelligently and orderly. José Juan Agudo
Team coaching. Interview José Juan Agudo
Q: Do you remember any specific case in which you can share what the initial situation of the team was and what was the situation that the team reached after the accompaniment?
A: Sometimes 100% of the total transformation that is sought does not occur in situ, it is not magic, of course. But a process of transformation of the catharsis type is unleashed. I remember a case we developed in the Sahara: it was a senior management team that had fallen into the “Silo Thinking” syndrome, that is, each manager functioned thinking only of his department as the alpha and omega of his reason for being. They had very good results individually but without the feeling that together they were something. The threat of deteriorating global performance was beginning to become a palpable reality.
Silo thinking
After analyzing the situation with the Management, we defined the objective of breaking with that “silo” thinking and that they lived a team experience that would facilitate them to have the shared emotion that together they were something much more valuable. We decided to venture into a team challenge in the middle of the Sahara desert for five days and as the start of a coaching process with the team that took longer in time. That experience in the Sahara was a powerful start in which to ensure a certain emotionality for the rest of the accompaniment process that lasted a year. In the middle of the desert, decisions and changes were already quite transcendental for the team. There was a great transformation at the level of team consciousness where a climate of openness, trust, and camaraderie was created that later served for the rest of the process and decisions. It was an initial emotional catharsis that allowed the subsequent paradigm shifts necessary when working on fears and resistance to change.
The best teams. Interview José Juan Agudo
Q: Speaking of the best teams, what is a high-performance team for you and what are its characteristics, especially on an emotional level?
A: For me it is a team in which when we compare the objectives that are achieved related to the people and the resources they have, you realize that they are not proportional, that is, they achieve much more than they are and have. On the one hand, in order to define them as “high performance” there must be something that we consider “average or normal performance” and thus be able to compare it and know how they do it. In the sports world it is better understood when we observe the elite teams. They are characterized by the fact that sport is their life, they live for it and dedicate themselves vocationally to what they like, that is a good learning.
High performance
On the other hand, we also have to define some kind of parameter to know what we are talking about when we talk about high performance: it can be the productivity or satisfaction of customers/users or the motivation within the team to be part of it (these are the three indicators that I find most often that identify high performance teams). Another characteristic is a great clarity in what unites them as a team, why they have to make an effort, what is the goal they have as a team. This is not easy because on many occasions it means renouncing individual motivations and being clear about why the team’s mission prevails, it involves effort, discipline.
The example of the mountain
In the example of the mountain, which I always use, it is like when you lose sight of the summit, (which is the goal to achieve), that is when all the problems of the day to day of a climb begin. It is very important in these teams that there is a strong sense of cohesion, to define what high performance is for that team, I usually observe that teams that are like this are very clear about what this idea is for them and they live it from interdependence.
Internal rules of operation in the teams
Another thing that strikes me about these teams is the existence of “internal rules” of operation, defined by them and that they have self-imposed. Somehow they know that they help them function well as a system and they respect them. They may have to do with day-to-day habits, (for example, that there are no technological devices in meetings and communicate in a certain way, how to show commitment to group actions, or the way in which they relate to each other, for example). In other words, the important thing is not the rules themselves, (I have seen that they are different depending on the sectors, sizes or cultures of the company), but they have in common that they all have internal rules.
In addition, there are also two other things that I do not want to fail to point out: on the one hand, in high-performance teams there is great professional and technical competence, (they dominate the sector and have extensive knowledge) and on the other hand they have high conversational skills, they communicate in a way that I call “expansive”.
Communication in teams
Q: In high-performance teams you have observed that what you call high-level conversations take place, what are the characteristics of this communication?
A: I love seeing them in their conversations, which are, as I say, expansive. In many teams it happens that people use communication that restricts, that interrupts, even one has not finished speaking and another is already expressing their disagreement, they do not listen to each other, they feel attacked, they speak defensively, trying to justify themselves, there is no order, the topics are not closed, etc. Thus, in these meetings the teams end up with energy and motivation, they do not flow, they do not grow.
In high-performance teams, conversations transform people, they are intelligent, orderly, and how they are going to communicate is agreed. This involves a period of training, it involves learning to listen in a group, to speak without prejudice, not to speak to defend the ego and to follow a “conversational discipline” that they have previously had to learn and train, (it is not something natural or innate, especially in Latin cultures). For me these are the keys, along with the emotion of trust that some authors call the “psychological safety factor” to lay the foundation of a good high-performance team.
Conclusions. Interview with José Juan Agudo
Q: What would you like to add to conclude these reflections?
A: I continue to see that the field of teams in the development of human capital is one of the areas that is growing the most and that continues to have the most potential for evolution, because it is an area where there is no technology that can replace the human factor. When it comes to synchronizing between people, although technology or artificial intelligence itself evolves a lot, I think that from the perspective of coaching and talent development it is a field where there are many needs and that is growing at very high rates compared to other fields, I see a lot of future for it, I think there is more and more sensitivity to this.
And you, what do you think about these ideas? What reflections on this topic would you like to share?
