Finding Flow For Your Teams

Rachel Cossar: Everyone, and welcome to another episode of conversations in the future of work. I am your host, Rachel Cossar. And today, I am really excited to focus on the flow of teams with none other than our very special guest, Caroline Vial. Welcome. Hi, Rachel. It’s good to be here.

Caroline Vial: It’s so nice to have you.

Rachel Cossar: Would you share with our audience, just a a few notes on your background and what you’re up to these days? Absolutely.

Caroline Vial: Well, I’m the founder of Upward Bound, and I’m a board certified executive and career coach. I work a lot with individuals and teams to help them find clarity, inspiration, and impact in the workplace. And so I work with people who have a lot of career transitions, very interdisciplinary backgrounds, and who want to get to the next level in their careers. Awesome.

Rachel Cossar: Such, that, like, transition period is always so fascinating, and I find people face it more often than maybe they either want to or or realize. K? Absolutely. Awesome. Alright. So let’s dive in with our first question. You know, you you do a lot of work with teams, and one of the terms I feel that you’ve coined is this idea of team flow. So can you share what you mean by that? And, also, you know, how can a team know when they’ve achieved it or whether they have it? Yes. And that’s a great question.

Caroline Vial: And and when you hear team flow at first, it might sound elusive. So it’s helpful to kind of understand the background that I’m drawing from. So I tend to draw from two evidence based models in the leadership and, organizational psychology dimension. So, leadership innovation is one model that I work with a lot, and the other one is positive psychology. So in the space of leadership innovation, there’s wonderful authors such as Amy Edmonds Edmonson, Brene Brown, Daniel Coyle, who coined, who’ve who’ve coined a lot of kind of terms and thoughts around psychological safety, what it takes to be successful on a team, and and what are the conditions for innovation that need to be there. Right? And there’s an an amazing link between innovation, diversity, and kind of the concept of failing forward. Right? Diverse teams are more successful and lead to better outcomes and a healthier bottom line, but you can’t have that unless you have psychological safety that goes with it. And then in the realm of positive psychology, that’s where we think about we there’s a lot of interesting models to draw from around, flow states and what it means to have optimal performance, whether it’s for an individual and on a team. So the father of flow was, Mihai Chishant Chishant Mihai, who is, who coined the term flow. And he real he was drawing from people who came from, you know, troubled states, who had survived World War two and had built a lot of resilience in their lives. And he analyzed data around what it what it looks like to be successful and to have optimal work conditions in people from all walks of life, from musicians to scientists to athletes. And what he he realizes, in order to reach optimal performance, you have to create this balance in your experience in learning creativity, inspiration, and challenge. Right? The task has up to your challenge, but it can’t be too much so that you’re not overwhelmed in the process. And and and by balancing all of those conditions, you can reach peak performance and flow individually and, in my opinion, on your team. And a lot of the ingredients around leadership and innovation come into the fold in in my perspective in order to build optimum team flow and performance. Right. Interesting. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: Because I I know, like, this concept of flow is actually, at this point, referenced in so many different, either frameworks or, you know, thought perspectives that I think a lot of people are always trying to reach that, stage. And so when when a team is in flow, is that is it like everyone has clarity around their their individual roles and responsibilities, and they’re kind of aligned perfectly with those of others. Is that or or, like, you know, like, what what does it actually look like for a team to be in flow? Well, there are a lot of different ways to look at it. Right?

Caroline Vial: So when you think about how to manage a team, how to lead a team towards success, it’s a set for everyone to have very clear understanding of what are what’s their role, what are their responsibilities, what are their strengths and areas of growth, and how does that all align with respect to the goals of the team or the organization? Right. Right? And once you you build enough self awareness in terms of individual and team collective goals, you start to get a sense of what that alignment looks like. And then it’s a matter of organizing up the team dynamics and the collaboration within the team in order to create proper conditions for projects to just get underway. And once everybody knows how everybody works well, what their areas of growth are, how to kind of collaborate and create conditions for creativity and innovation. That’s there’s a lot of success in the process. Right. You know, Daniel Coyle talked about how the Pixar had created amazing conditions for innovation, across all levels of the organization. For example, people who worked at the coffee shop down the hall could come in every day and provide feedback on the new slides that had been created that day for the movie. And that was the environment of psychological safety they were trying to create. And that’s kind of a one element that I find to be really interesting when you think about how do you create conditions for teams, successful team outcomes and team dynamics. And that’s about including all the voices in the room and even outside of the room. Right. Right? So that’s one ingredient among, among many others that create that balance. Yeah. Of more conditions. Right. Right.

Rachel Cossar: And this actually is gonna feed us into the next question beautifully. But before we go there, you also mentioned the awareness, like, awareness and, clarity around goals. Right? Where, like, everyone really needs to know where we’re going and why. And, you know, I feel like in so many instances, even just from a very micro level of, like, day to day meetings, those goals haven’t necessarily been set. And then people end up kind of talking around in circles and, like, wait like, wasting really valuable time. Right? And I think, that combined with effective processes that allow the behaviors to become, something that feels natural. Like, I think that’s a really interesting part of it too because at least when as I manage my team, that’s one of the things I noticed is, like, sometimes I’m like, wow. I I, like, keep having to, like, check-in on how things are going specific to this. You know? And it’s like, it would be better if if, there were processes in place that, like, allowed these things to flow more naturally. Like, otherwise, it’s it starts to end up feeling like you’re pulling teeth. Absolutely.

Caroline Vial: And that’s where it’s really helpful to to build a clear plan with your team around Totally. Expectations and around what what enables everybody to do their job better. Mhmm. I talk a lot to clients actually about how to how to run meetings so that it actually improves the outcomes. Right? And how to manage their calendars and their time. Because, actually, in our saturated work life these days, there there’s meeting after meeting after meeting and very little time and space for leaders and their teams to, build creative ideation and to draw inspiration and to kind of cocreate in ways that are really, intentional and effective for outcomes. So as much in meeting in meetings as outside of meetings, those conditions have to be built with a lot of intention and a lot of outward expressive communication. Totally.

Rachel Cossar: So when so you’ve mentioned this, disability or the safe space and psychological safety that enables, like, sharing. So I I’m curious. Like, I initially, I was thinking this question from your perspective of, like, as a facilitator, like, what are some of the techniques that you use to help people share like, bring their voices into the space and into the room? Because, of course, that’s just one example of of a meeting or of of a very collaborative experience, oftentimes with strangers, right, who may not be comfortable. So what do you do when you’re facilitating to quickly create that safe space and encourage people to participate authentically? Right? Yeah.

Caroline Vial: Well, you know what’s interesting is I find that people are actually starved for moments of reflection, introspection, and creativity. And so, once they’re they’re aware that they have the opportunity to tap into a flow state in in conversation with me or in facilitation, they tend they they tend to build comfort quite rapidly. And I think it’s as again, they’re starving for this, opportunity to reflect and and think about the creative possibilities around their goal setting for themselves and for their teams. There’s never enough time to do that, and they’re learning ways to actually build time and build intention around, being more focused on the big picture with their teams and on improving their processes so they can have more room to reflect and be creative. So it’s as much of a meta conversation as it is in practice in the sessions, a lot of time. And and to as a coach, what I’ll do is I’ll I’ll sit with the client and I’ll sit with the team, and I’ll ask them really targeted questions to start to help them think about the possibilities and the big picture of the solutions that they could, come up with in the process of their vision for their team, their vision for their organizations. Can you give us some examples of what some of those questions are?

Rachel Cossar: Sure.

Caroline Vial: I mean, it really depends on what they’re looking to achieve. So for example, when, I work with teams on, some startup projects that they have going on, for example, at the engineering school. But what comes up a lot is, well, what are we what are the big picture goals that we’re trying to achieve here? Yes. We have this startup, initiative. What are we trying to solve? What are the collective values that are in place? And what are the collective strengths? And how do we start to build, collaboration and inspiration by drawing from individual strengths and talents in the process. So there’s a lot of ideation and reflection around the different ways in which to work both as a as a team and in terms of the creative, problem solving of working toward a business problem together. Right.

Rachel Cossar: And so that’s, like, you know, the the questions around, like, where are we going in goal setting and all that is kind of the higher level thinking reflective work. And then you have to get down to the tactics. Right? And, like, the, okay. And how are we how are we actually going to get there? Right? It’s like those two kind of components have to be addressed. Like because I feel like oftentimes people depending on your nature, you can either get, like, you all you, like, almost always wanna just be in, like, the visionary, like, I ideation phase. And then when it comes down to brass tacks, you’re like, oh, I just want to, like Yes.

Caroline Vial: And that’s where it’s essential to always leave a session with actionable steps and outcomes if you wanna take a look at you. So so absolutely. As a coach, I always hone in on what are the tangible steps that you can take here today and in the next few weeks and months, right, with your goals in mind. So, absolutely, it’s always about finding that balance between the vision and the execution. Yeah. Totally.

Rachel Cossar: So switching gears a little bit, but continuing on the path of, like, how you coach and facilitate, how, and I guess to what extent and how do you use AI and incorporate that into your, into your impact with clients? Mhmm. Well, it depends on the on the project.

Caroline Vial: You know, some teams and individuals really wanna work on a business challenge together. Yeah. So I’ll help them use AI in order to, kind of organize a lot of their ideation and thoughts and synthesize it in order to come up with tangible solutions and and sometimes even tangible outcomes to what they’re thinking about. Mhmm. When they’re focused on, you know, building a team charter, they have to understand do a lot of in inner reflection on their personal brand, right, and on their individual strengths and the areas of contribution and areas of growth. And how do you tie that all together into a team charter, for example? Well, that’s something that we can create through supportive AI as well. Right? Kind of bringing together all the pieces that they drew from in their ideation phase in that process. And it’s interesting to me because some folks, in some industries have used AI in the opposite way. Right? They start AI because of writer’s block, for example, and that that creates a foundation that they could draw from Right. To to edit and revise. And then and a lot of the work that I do, I actually help them reflect first on the fact of who they are, what why they’re doing what they’re doing. So really thinking about the why behind the action. And with that foundation of reflection, then use AI strategically afterwards. So a lot, synthesizing and putting structure around the thoughts in order to come up with some, tangible outcomes. Right. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: I like that because, it’s great to use AI to help you get over that writer’s block. You know, it’s really efficient. It’s an efficient use case. But, once you see something written in a certain way or expressed in a certain way, it can sometimes be hard to change that. And so the influence that AI ends up having on the, you know, end product or final product is, like, so significant that you’re like, wow. That’s kind of crazy. Right? So it’s nice to yeah. I like that. To to encourage the creativity from the human first and then and then maybe use the AI to help, yeah, draw that out into a tactical plan of action. Right? Yes.

Caroline Vial: And I’ve heard of the distinctions between AI and HI, and I love to use, the work I do with clients with a lot of human intelligence. Yeah. Totally. Okay. What’s the foundation of what what we’re working with? What’s your why? What are your what are you about?

Rachel Cossar: What are your goals first?

Caroline Vial: Or even jumping onto AI as a knee jerk reaction. So that becomes more of an intentional use of AI in a structured way so that the outcomes also look authentic and don’t look like they’ve been prescripted, with perhaps less substance to the process some of the time. Right? There are many ways of making it, more intentional and more authentic, and I like to kinda start with the human element first. Totally. Yeah. No. We feel the same way at virtual sapiens.

Rachel Cossar: You know, like, we’re there are a number of AI coaching platforms out there or, AI technologies that are, like, so intent on, like, removing that human aspect or replacing it and or or amplifying it to the point where you’re like, that’s, like, not even that. That’s, like, just not that person anymore. It’s become this, like, completely, like, fabricated perfect whatever. And it’s so and we’ve we’ve always felt that, like, our our AI is at its best when it is being used as a tool to amplify either the individual who’s using the tool, their communication, their authentic communication. Right? Like, developing these these human skills, communication being one of the most important ones. But then also when the AI is being used by coaches, right, or managers who are trying to help give their coachees or their team members a safe space to actually experiment with different communication behaviors and, and responses. And that, you know, that tends to be where we think the, the magic happens is when those two things are using being used in tandem and for their respective strengths. Yes.

Caroline Vial: And I love how virtual sapience is a solution that’s, in my mind, very much an equalizer in the workplace. When you think about responsible or ethical use of AI, you know, we know we can’t turn away from AI now. So how do we foster an environment where there you know, the algorithms don’t mirror or reinforce society’s biases? You know, we all we’ve a lot of us have heard the stories about or read the store the studies on facial and voice recognition that’s distorted and biased and AI taking over women’s jobs at an alarming rate. I think it’s important to rewrite the script and think about how, about ways that are grounded in the human experience that enable people to enable AI to be used in service to everyone and to and to move away from, hopefully, a dystopian future here. Totally. Absolutely.

Rachel Cossar: So, you know, as we wrap up, last question I wanted to ask just to leave with the audience is, you know, what would you most like to see young leaders lean lean into? Right? There’s there’s so much opportunity, and I feel like there are so many different either, like, not distractions, but paths that people can really invest in in terms of their their their thought capital? Like, where would you like to see young leaders really spending their time?

Caroline Vial: Well, as an executive coach who works with a lot of emerging leaders Yeah. I see a lot of common patterns in the workplace. And what I recommend for emerging and young leaders is to really focus on first building self awareness. I think we’re we’ll never get to a place where there’s enough self awareness in the workplace until we have all the tools and resources and processes, in mind. Self awareness is where it starts. You can’t influence or empower a team before you know your own strengths and your areas of growth and your clients. Right? Having courageous conversations, not avoiding conflict or taking on other people’s burdens instead of facing the truth of communicating around what’s expected. Explicit communication, courageous conversations. A lot of what Brene Brown talks about. Right? Dare to lead, have vulnerable conversations. Those are strategies to develop and strengths to to hone. And also understanding your why. Right? Having a clear vision around why you’re doing things and communicating that to your team or and the people around you. When people are informed as to why something is done, they’re more likely to to to have buy in and to wanna support the team. And that that’s what creates that flow and that collaboration and that mutual support that’s that sometimes is really lacking in in the workplace. Nurturing, trust on teams, that comes with that explicit communication, with self awareness. Right? And so leading by example, kinda showing your consistency in how you show up, and having a continuous growth mindset makes for great leadership. So those are kind of the ingredients that I see with a lot of, leaders in the workplace that I think would really support emerging and young leaders. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: And and and if you had any, like, words of caution or, you know, be wary of, what what would that be?

Caroline Vial: I think be be wary of the stories you tell yourself without seeing the evidence. Yes.

Rachel Cossar: Absolutely. That is, yeah, the narratives our own narratives are some of the most powerful things. So very, very good. Yeah. Caroline, thank you so much for joining us today. I know this these conversations are always, like, nice and quick little snippets of of thoughts and perspective. Anything else you’d like to share with our audience before we sign off for today? Well, I think it’s been really fun chatting with you, Rachel.

Caroline Vial: And, you know, if I mean, I’d love to see in terms of the future of the workplace or future of AI, I’d love to see a solution that helps individuals and teams collaborate better, tap into those flow states. And, ironically, you know, to sometimes screens get in the way of flow, but I think there’s a way where, technologically, we can break through that paradox and and support individuals and teams in that direction. So it would be great to see that, in the future of work and AI in my opinion. Totally.

Rachel Cossar: And where’s the best way people can hear more about your work, follow you, get connected to you?

Caroline Vial: Well, you can follow me on LinkedIn, and, upwardboundcoaching.com is my website. So, I share lots of information there. Feel free to reach out to me anytime with questions, email, or InMail, LinkedIn. I’m always happy to connect. Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much again for joining us.

Rachel Cossar: And as always to our audience, great to see you. Thanks so much, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you, and take care.