We engage in a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Deb Mashek, business advisor, professor, and author of the book Collabor(h)ate: how to build incredible collaborative relationships at work (even if you’d rather work alone.

Deb shares her unique perspective on collaboration, highlighting its importance in various settings and debunking common misconceptions. She believes that when people collaborate and learn from diverse perspectives, they can increase their effectiveness by embracing new resources, viewpoints, and identities.

In our conversation, we explore the key ingredients of a successful relationship and dig into seeking growth through connections with others.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Podbean, or your favorite podcast platform.

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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: Deb, I am going to the origins, sort of speak, of your life. And one thing that I read, I think it was in your book was that three factors, which included your parents, your PhD, and your upbringing in a trailer park, have been your inspiration to learn and focus on collaboration. And I thought that was really interesting.

Deb Mashek: Yeah, absolutely. So I call those my three great teachers of collaboration. So the trailer park piece is, I grew up in a double wide trailer in North Platte, Nebraska and there's some people like, Ooh, trailer Park, that sounds horrible.

Thought it was fantastic because what we had was this play mat, which was the trailer park. So we had a chain link fence that said we couldn't go beyond it. But other than that, the kids were really left to their own devices.

So I grew up in the seventies and in the trailer park would spill out at, you know, 9:00 AM and we had to figure out together how we were going to play, what we were going to play, what the rules of our play were going to be. And if somebody violated the rules, we figured out what those consequences were. And that person who violated those rules had to figure out how to make amends and words through play.

We learned the social skills necessary to live and work to do, to be with others. So that was the, the trailer park piece.

And then both of my parents throughout my life struggled with alcoholism. So it's kind of a, a perverse sort of teacher of collaboration. But one of the things kids who grow up in, you know, within these neglectful households or households that were had a lot of addiction and whatnot is you figure out, I mean you still have needs, but the parents in that environment are not particularly well equipped to be able to provide for your needs.

And so I figured out really early on how to form connection with other adults outside of my family who were then able to provide for needs. Whether that was fair enough friction, sometimes it was food, sometimes it was clothing. It was very often things like rides to school and things like that.

But it was through relationship and through being able to connect with others that I was able to get those needs met. And those are incredibly important skills when it comes to collaborating and figuring out what, what somebody else's needs and interests are and being able to monitor those and being able to state yours in a way your needs and interest in a way that is accessible and interesting and even palatable, I guess, to other, to other people. So that was important.

And then the third one you mentioned is the PhD. So it was never assumed that I would, you know, go to college, much less graduate school. And it was just by virtue of getting to interact with a lot of really positive teachers, great cheerleaders throughout my life. And when I got to graduate school at Stony Brook University out in Long Island, New York, very first seminar I enrolled in was the Psychology of Close Relationships.

It was taught by Arthur Aaron and I was the dork in the class who I read every single paper assigned I, my hand was raised for every discussion, I had things to say, and I just absolutely fell in love with this research, you know, that that, well first of all I had no idea that there was a research area dedicated to the psychology of close relationships. So that was really cool to discover.

And then to read this research, I totally fell in love with it. Like it was just really powerful. And I realized like, oh, there is knowledge out there about how to do relationships well. And I think I hadn't grown up with a ton of models of that. So there was also this personal void that I was able to fill in some way through the academic literature. And so I kind of came at that relationship development through the side door. And those, all three of those experiences I think were critical for how I ended up studying and thinking about and helping people do collaboration.

Stephen Matini: When you say relationship, are you thinking about any kind of relationship or are thinking about a specific type of relationship, like personal relationship, professional relationships?

Deb Mashek: The research area that I was in was about romantic relationships. So when I would teach the psychology of relationships, it was about picking up, breaking up, everything in between. That's what I had been researching.

But there's also research literature on everything like parent child relationships and friendship development and workplace relationships. So any time you have that sense of us notion that there's an us involved, that is relationship, there is a research literature out there about it.

But I started in romantic relationships and then it was in my research fellowship that I started to think about jail inmates. And then when I eventually became a professor out at Harvey Mudd College in California, I started to think about or the, the students' sense of connection and relationship with their dormitories, their residence halls and their sense of connection to the campus. And it wasn't too long later.

And then I started to think about how institutions can be in relationship with other institutions and that you can start to form collaborations. And it turns out to me one of the really big fabulous insights I had, and I'm so grateful that it dawned on me, is that those theories that govern a lot of the individual diadic relationships, the people are still involved at the institutional level.

So it's not really that the institutions are collaborating, it's that the people in the institutions are collaborating and those same people have hopes and dreams and fears and anxieties and needs and desires just like we do dally. And so figuring out how to leverage those exact same theoretical models in service to these collaborations that ended up being really valuable in terms of how I could be useful to people.

Stephen Matini: As of today, based on all your experiences, all your studies, when you think of the word relationship, what is the first thing that comes to mind?

Deb Mashek: That's such a good question. I'm a mom, so right away i, I go to my relationship with my child. All relationships is that sense of mutuality, that sense of coming to care for and contribute to the wellbeing of somebody else. And also expecting that to happen in, in return that there's reciprocity, mutuality, care, concern.

When people look back at the end of life and they talk about their highest highs and their lowest lows, often they end up talking about relationships. That relationships are pain, relationships are exquisite and fulfilling and loving.

Thinking about our work histories too, it's, I remember the colleagues that I loved working with. The second thing that really popped for me is the role that expectations play in terms of that there are all these scripts out there about how relationships ought to be or should be.

We're like these are the good relationships and whether it's the Hollywood manifestations of those, there's like that one really good relationship. We all know and we're trying to have our relationship look like theirs. Oh my gosh, there's so many ways we can fall short of expectations, ours and others when it comes to interpersonal relationships.

Stephen Matini: So if I had to ask you what in your opinion are the ingredients of a good relationship, what comes to mind?

Deb Mashek: The theory that I do most of my research under would land on exactly the same two. So the idea is it's called the self expansion model. And the idea is that we're all seeking to increase our efficacy in the world, meaning our ability to achieve our goals, our dreams or whatnot.

And how we do that is by seeking out and taking on as our own, our new resources, new perspectives, new identities. And that relationship is one of the ways we do that. It's called including the other and the self.

So imagine you are and I are in a relationship over time I come to see the world through your eyes, your perception of the world starts to change and enhance. Because of our relationship, I start to take on new identities. Maybe that's the identity of the us or the we or that of the couple.

So relationship is a way of becoming more energetic in the world or being able to take on the challenges. You can imagine two circles, but this is me, this is you. And as those circles become closer together, that us that shared interstitial space of the Venn diagram, that's part of who I am.

But there are parts of my circle that are not you, and parts of your circle that are not me. And that's actually, that's how the wealth of other perspectives and what can come in.

My dissertation research many, many moons ago actually looked at this idea of feeling too close in the context of a relationship. So feeling smothered by closeness. And when I asked the circle question of the people who were in my study, people were saying, I feel suffocated by the other person. I don't know who I am.

You don't wanna do anything that takes away the autonomy and individuality and identity of the other. Likewise, if they start doing that to you, you feel less than you feel minimized, you don't feel yourself. That's a really yucky place to be.

Stephen Matini: Of all possible titles for your book. You chose a funky title, which I love, you know, Collabor(h)ate. How did you come up with it?

Deb Mashek: Yeah, so Collabor(h)ate. Some people love that title and some people hate it, but I figure at least we're talking about it.

I personally love collaboration. I think it really is this incredible tool, but having also been in a heck of a lot of collaboration, some of them that have absolutely vibrated with amazing energy and good effective outcomes and whatnot, others have been absolutely miserable.

As a psychologist, I think we have to talk about the hard stuff if we have any hope of making collaboration more bearable and more productive for more people. So I put the H in the title so it's, you know, instead of collaborate, it's Collabor(h)ate, thinking it's my way of giving voice to the hard stuff that's in there and it's by giving voice that we're able to make it better.

Stephen Matini: Is there something specific that as of now is dear to you that readers should pay attention to?

Deb Mashek: Yeah, so for me there are a couple parts, but I can say them quickly and I think they'll make sense. The first one is that collaboration is essential in the workplace.

The second one is that collaboration is actually really hard to do well there are a lot of moving parts, there are a lot of ways that we get it wrong and a lot of negative consequences if we don't get it right, it's hard to do well.

And the third one is that we don't teach it. So very few of us have received any formal professional development in how to be good collaborators. So what we have learned, we've picked up by osmosis or we've learned on the job trying to watch other people who don't necessarily know what they're doing. And so we pick up their bad habits. Some of us may have gone to business school where there were a lot of group work of people think back to their own experiences in doing that group work.

Was there formal instruction and how to do it? Well, most people say no and a fortunate few say yes. We I think have this cultural misunderstanding that relationships, you're either good at them or you're bad at them.

So for instance, we don't teach people how to be good parents. We don't teach people how to be good friends, how to be good romantic partners. Sometimes we find ourselves in the therapy room and think, God, we get some of that tutelage. At least in the United States, parents often go to prenatal classes where you learn how to do labor and delivery and then once the baby pops out, suddenly it's like you, you're supposed to just know how to parent, which of course we don't.

But I think the same is true of collaboration. We're not teaching people how to do it. And so that was the, the big thrust of the book. It's like, well here, here are some really concrete strategies and things that you can and should do to make these relationships better to take the H out. So you know, to make these collaborations less painful, more productive

Stephen Matini: Based on what you said, I’ve noticed there's a lot of common misconception about collaboration. You know, a lot of things people like to give an example, collaboration is great, but in organizational setting, if you want to be collaborative most of the time you must have time.

You know, the whole notion of collaboration is for us to discuss an option that does not exist in the present moment. And very often to get to the point you need time. And so if you're under a time crunch, well then very likely someone has to make a decision.

What would you say are some of the misconception that you've heard from people about collaboration that doesn't help them out?

Deb Mashek: The one that you're talking about elevates for me. So the idea that somehow collaboration is the right tool for everything and that we should always be collaborating and it's like collaboration, let's do it.

So that's a misconception 'cause it's not the right tool for everything. There are some situations where you need to move fast, you need to move within as an established structure and hierarchy. And so you go.

The other misconception is that collaboration just means working together as though any form of working together equals collaboration. That's actually not true. So there's a whole continuum of different ways that people work together, whether it's networking where you're just exchanging information or there are ways of taking a step up where you're both exchanging information and modifying your work in some way to achieve a shared goal.

And then eventually you can get to the level where you're also sharing resources, whether that's people power or knowledge or money or equipment or space.

And then there's this other level which is collaboration where you're truly learning from the others in that group so you can become better at your job. And so the magic of what you can create together is something that none of you could have actually done on your own.

And then there are all these mistaken beliefs and I'll just kind of rattle them off about collaboration. One is that you know, if you want a ton of collaboration in in your organization, all you have to do is hire collaborative people. It's actually not true.

Another one is if you want a lot of collaboration, all you have to do is have really great tools and processes. So really good project management, really good project management tools and then you'll get great collaboration, not true.

And then the third one, and this is at the organizational level, is this one that says, you know what, if you want tons of collaboration in your organization, just declare collaboration, a core value put out on your letterhead, paint it on the side of your wall in the office. You know, it takes way more than a a little bit of spirited energy around a keyword to create the conditions for that complex behavior to really manifest.

Stephen Matini: So if a client comes to you, and says my people don't collaborate, they're not accountable and I really want them to work together, what is the first step to move in the right direction?

Deb Mashek: I come at it as a social psychologist. So I'm a researcher at heart, that's really hard to shed that armor.

My first step is assessment. So whether it's go in and talk to as many people as possible and kind of a qualitative research way to figure out what really is governing up the works. I wanna talk one-on-one with people. I don't want anybody else to be in the room because I don't want the social dynamics and the power dynamics and the coded language to get in the way of what people really need to say.

You know, when possible, I love running a quick survey and figuring out is this a people issue? Is it a relationship issue, is it a tools and systems problem or is it a culture issue?

And on the culture side it can be anything from the boss says we're supposed to be collaborating. That collaboration is absolutely not possible or it's onerous.

They say everyone's doing it, I don't see it anywhere. Or they say they want collaborative behavior, but the only thing that's rewarded around here is individual performance. Individual effort. And what gets rewarded gets repeated. And so I'll start to look at, you know, what are the incentive structures actually in place and are those at odds with collaboration? Because typically they are, you can't say you want one thing and then reward another

Stephen Matini: Has it ever happened to you to work with a group of people, let's say a team. And somehow the team worked well together and was able to figure out how to be more collaborative. But the team is an organizational environment that is not collaborative, let's say with no cross-functional synergy. Is it possible to have pockets of collaboration within an organization whose culture is not collaborative?

Deb Mashek: And just the way you described it, so there can be these pockets or these isolated moments or where you might have a particularly charismatic connector. There's like a little synergy around this one charismatic person. Or it can be there's particular leader who's created the conditions within their division or within their department for this magic to happen.

And that's all great and then everybody else wants it on that team. But of course, you know, in most organizations you need those people to be moving back and forth across teams or looking forth across division. So people will tell you, they'll describe it to you, yeah, when I'm over here this is how we work, but outside of that bubble, this is what it really looks like.

And so organizationally, if you know, if you're driving for more collaboration, you wanna look inside under the hood of that group that's working well and figure out what's really happening in there to make that possible.

Stephen Matini: There are so many project management tool, there's a plethora of stuff that people can use from Slack. I mean you name it. What, what would you say that could be a first step in order to ensure that in terms of tools you foster the information sharing.

Deb Mashek: First part here would be to not confuse a good tool with just adoption of that's gonna create collaboration. So in other words, don't put too much stock in the tool itself being the thing that's gonna fix the collaboration.

Number two, I think it's valuable to have organization-wide decision around these are the subset of tools that we're going to use. Because otherwise what can happen is every individual team within the organization starts adopting their precious tool.

What that means is that any artifacts that they create will be locked within that tool and it will constrain any individual's ability to move over to other teams because like, oh well that's not the way we do it. Or I know what you're talking about with this new tool I've never used.

The third piece of advice would be think very carefully about what you're really asking that tool to do.

So I personally love the virtual whiteboards, like a mural or a mural. I use those every single day. I keep trying to adopt things like Asana and click up and Monday and it just doesn't work with my head.

But if I were on a team that required that I would of course have to learn it. But does it make sense for me as a a small business owner to adopt all of these tools? No, it might for a large corporation.

Another piece of advice, for instance, if you're using say Slack or even Google Drive or something like that, is create some structures around how those channels or how those storage places will be used.

So create some shared vocabulary, some shared naming conventions, shared folder structures, anything like that that are, that's gonna make it possible for your future self to find the relevant information or for the person forbid you get hit by a bus, for your other collaborators to be able to find that important work that you are doing.

Stephen Matini: And what I've noticed, I've noticed that every single group that tends to go towards whatever makes sense to them. And I've noticed that the simpler the tool, the more likely is going to be adopted. When something is overly complicated or it takes an extra step, people simply don't use it.

Deb Mashek: All of us are busy. And so when a new tool comes on board, it takes real activation energy to get us to the point where we can use it. And if we really, really want people to adopt a new collaboration tool, we have to give time, you know, figure out a way to give time for people could to be able to learn it and to integrate it into their workflows and some patience with ourselves and others. 'cause It is hard.

When I was at Heterodox Academy, we adopted Salesforce and oh my God, it took people like slapping my knuckles to get me to actually document emails and whatnot because I was out of the habit and it took forever. I don't even know if I ever really truly got up to speed on it. I had the best intentions, I was the executive director, I was the one who made the decision that we were adopting this dang thing.

And I struggled. I heard just this week a a guy who teaches people how to be effective on connecting through social media. He dislikes Calendly because it makes you appear lazy and that you're not, that you're trying to automate relationship building as opposed to truly being present with that other person and saying, you know, you let me know what can work for you.

Here are some options that that email back and forth or LinkedIn back and forth is actually part of the relationship building. So I thought that was a valuable perspective too. I dunno that I wanna forego in all situations, but I was thinking, well yeah, I could, I could see that.

Stephen Matini: You said something about intellectual humility. Would you mind telling me something more?

Deb Mashek: Yeah. So intellectual humility is this idea that knowing that we can't possibly know everything, and by virtue of my mere humanity, I am limited in my knowledge, I'm limited in my perspective. I can't know everything, nor should I know everything.

And for me it opens up then this possibility that it's through relationship and through doing and being and creating alongside other people who see the world differently. That's truly how we come up with the well-rounded perspective.

So if we were on video, I would show you, you know, a coffee mug and hold it in one direction and say, what is this? And you might say, oh, it's just the shadow of it. For instance, you would say, oh, it's a rectangle. Or you might say, oh, it's a circle or something like that.

And it's only by working alongside other people who have a different vantage point on the problem that we're truly able to weave together a holistic understanding of what the problem is and thus the solution that needs to be created to solve that problem.

And so to me, intellectual humility is one of the foundational cornerstones of effective problem solving, effective collaborating. Other pieces, there are curiosity, so wondering and being sincere when you ask somebody else how do you see it?

So from whether it's from your disciplinary lens or your cultural lens or your seniority lens or the division that you're in and thus the interest that you're advocating for, what really elevates for you about this problem? What are the key variables we need to be thinking about within this solution?

And there are so many stories of ego and the bravado where, you know, people assume they have the one right answer or they strong arm their perspective into the group and it shuts other people down. It shuts possibilities down. Like it really forecloses certain considerations before they've even been considered. And I think intellectual humility is the key to doing this all differently.

Stephen Matini: How do you keep that humility? Because it seems to me that a lot of people as they age, they become more convinced of knowing. they become even more black and white, somehow, instead of humility to me is a mixture of bunch of things, including curiosity, giving yourself a chance, you know, how do you keep that humbleness?

Deb Mashek: Here's something I do again, if we were on video, I would show you that in my notebook on the front page, I always write the question, how do you see it? So for me it's a reminder to ask other people or their perspective on something, scanning the environment and finding those things that tweak your intuition that you're not sure how in the heck can this reality or can what you just saw doesn't lap on or map on, or could it map onto some preexisting notion?

So this for instance, is why I love going to magic shows as a way of triggering the intellectual humility where the thing my brain is telling me, I just saw, I know for a fact it can't truly be true, which means I'm missing something.

So reminding myself that I, I don't know at all in that situation, letting that sense of awe come up.

And the third one that I love is when I encounter someone who sees the world really differently than I do, rather than turning away and distancing, I lean in closer and say, tell me more. How did you come to think of that? Where does that belief come from?

You know, that for me has been really important in my advocacy for viewpoint diversity on college campuses. It just this idea of we've gotta, we've gotta be surrounding ourselves with people who see complex issues, whether it's policy issues, political issues, how we're gonna solve social problems.

I need to hear from as many different people as I can and not, not necessarily so I can come up with the right answer, but so that I have a, a better hope of understanding the problem in the first place.

Stephen Matini: What would you say that truly is a simple step to people that cannot be more at the opposite, to somehow advance to a different level?

The story just quickly was that I previously was a, a full professor of social psychology out at Harvey Med College. I was tenured at the top of my career. And then the 2016 election happened in the United States presidential election.

And there were a lot of people who were so surprised that Donald Trump won and they couldn't believe anybody would've voted for this person. And this I think was especially true on college campuses and we saw a lot of people shutting down and be like, oh man.

And what I saw is, okay, as an educator we're not doing what we need to be doing to help our students encounter a diverse range of perspectives. And long story short, I ended up walking away from that tenured full professorship, moving cross country as a single mom.

My kiddo was eight at the time. I moved from California to New York to help launch this organization called Heterodox Academy, which was or is still focused on advancing viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement on college campuses.

And what I learned in that work is that the two simple things are ask other people how do you see it? And two, to ask how did you get there? Why do you believe what you believe? In other words, I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything. What I'm only exercise there is can I see through somebody else's eyes for even a microsecond in a way that opens up my understanding of the world.

Stephen Matini: As of now, professionally, you have so many projects, so many things. What would you say is the most important endeavor for you now that takes a lot of your time and attention? Is it something you're doing now, something you're building for the future?

Deb Mashek: Yeah, so what I'm doing now is I am a collaboration consultant, which is hysterical to say at dinner parties for two reasons. One, collaboration is kind of a fuzzy word and consultant is actually a really fuzzy word also. So people are like, I still have no idea what you do.

So what I do is I work with organizational leaders to deliver high stakes collaboration across silos and stakeholders. So you know, it, it includes things where you need people from different sectors coming together or you need people from that division in that division to work together or there's something involving a lot of money or other resources or there's a huge reputational hit at stake or some really big strategic advantage to be gained if we're able to work together well.

And I love being at the ground level when those are building up. I think people tend to underestimate the importance of some of that ground setting. So I often get called in when things start to fall apart. So I do both some of the crisis management of getting a collaboration back on track though I really love being there at the ground floor to help build it and to build it well.

Stephen Matini: Does it ever happen to you as a result of your commitment, of your work, that your energy gets depleted. If if that happens to you, when you feel down, is there anything you do in order to bring yourself up?

Deb Mashek: It really does get hard. I mean if it was easy, everybody would do it. And if it was easy, everybody would do it in a sustainable positive way. But they don't because it's hard. And I think it's worthy of that hardness because, and this is one of the things I do to bring myself back up is I, I ask, so why is it worth it?

Why is what we're trying to do worth this slog worth, this incredible activation energy that we're putting into it to get this thing rolling? And for me that's very uplifting because I can see like this thing we're trying to do together could not exist unless we were doing it together. It's worth it because it's gonna solve a big problem in the world. It's going to offer a really cool innovation that's gonna bring in a heck of a lot of money for the company.

If we can figure out how to work better together, we're gonna end up with staff who are more engaged and more constructive. They're gonna stick around longer. So there's like this more morale and wellbeing argument. So whether it's timelines or bottom lines or wellbeing or innovation, this collaboration thing really matters. And that to me is very uplifting.

The other thing I do when it really, really gets challenging is I go into my hidey hole and hide out and be alone for a little bit to re-energize. So as that whole together apart thing again too, where you need the separateness in order to do together well.

People are messy, we're all messy, we're inconsistent, we're unpredictable. Things trigger us, different needs will be activated at any particular time and it might change over the day or over the week or over the month. And so there are so many moving parts. And to to care enough about not just the individuals who are involved, but also the project or program or service, whatever it is you're trying to create, to be able to track all of that movement and then optimize your engagement.

Stephen Matini: We talked about so many different things. Is there anything that would be important in your opinion for our listeners to take away from this conversation? Out of all the things we talked about?

Deb Mashek: Ask for input on how you are as a collaborator. Ask your direct reports, ask your supervisor, ask your peers, what is it like to work with me and what would be helpful if I did differently or better would make it easier for us to work together. I think that's important.

And then along those same lines is take seriously your professional development and this whole collaboration thing. So whether you're a top executive or the brand new individual contributor, chances are you haven't learned as much as you could or will need to learn ultimately in this domain that that's gonna make you just even more of a rockstar than you already are.

So it's worth it to invest in in that development. So you benefit your team benefits your organization does. And I would say society as a whole does when we can work better together.

Stephen Matini: Thank you so much for sharing your ideas, your hard research, your experiences. This is really, really, really great. Thank you.

Deb Mashek: My pleasure.