Catherine Stagg-Macey is an executive coach who has undergone a remarkable career transformation. Driven by an early fascination with understanding human behaviour, she transitioned from a successful corporate career to pursue her passion as a coach. Drawing from her own experiences and invaluable lessons, Catherine serves as a trusted mentor for mid-career professionals, empowering them to reignite their spark at work and navigate successful transitions. With a unique journey and unwavering commitment, she guides individuals in achieving fulfilment and fostering professional growth.
In this episode of Never Mind the Pain Points, our in-house performance psychologist Suzie Mossman-Monk chats to Catherine about the art of leading high-performance teams. They explore the essential components of effective leadership and team dynamics, including defining behaviours, fostering psychological safety, and aligning expectations. With a focus on modelling desired behaviours and embracing coaching, Catherine shares valuable insights on creating a collaborative environment that inspires and empowers individuals to thrive within high-performance teams.
Listen here or read on for an edited transcript.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Suzie Mossman-Monk and I am the in-house performance psychologist here at Clarasys. I’m joined today by Catherine Stagg-Macey, who is an executive and team coach, and also the host of a great podcast called Unsaid at Work. So you can find that wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome Catherine. Thank you for joining us.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: Thank you for inviting me. Looking forward to this conversation.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Amazing. So today we’re gonna talk predominantly around high-performing teams. Something I know you have a lot of experience in, and link to that specifically talking about leadership coaching and how can we get people within our organisation to be engaging in high-performing teams. How do we keep our teams being high-performing. I know at Clarasys as a consultancy, we work a lot in teams internally, but also we work a lot with our clients and within client teams. So bringing both of those lenses.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: So I guess my first question to you would be how do you view leadership? What’s the role of leadership in a high-performing team?
What’s the role of leadership in a high-performing team?
Catherine Stagg-Macey: I think it’s two things you gotta break down there. What do we mean by a high-performing team? It’s a cool term and everyone goes, yes, I want that, but what do you actually mean? And I don’t think there’s a perfect definition. I was looking for research on high-performing teams and there’re something like 2,300 research papers on what a high-performing team is and a different model for each of those papers. So if you don’t quite know what you mean when you say it, you are in good company is the first thing I would say.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: I think what we mean by a high-performing team is that it would be well running in a place that we would enjoy showing up in. And I think the myth that most leaders have around high-performing teams is that if I hire a bunch of smart people and put them in the room, we get a great team. It’s completely not true.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yep.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: Lots of metaphors to kind of unpack that if you think about it. But I think the role of leadership is understanding, what do you mean by a high-performing team and how do you wanna measure that? Take your pick. There are lots of models out there. But don’t just throw it around as a cool term.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: To understand that, I find leaders take a lot of responsibility in saying, especially if the team is not working well, that it’s theirs to fix. So there’s almost like a parent-child thing going on there. It’s like, it’s not yours. As a leader, you probably don’t have the skills to fix it if it really is not working well. So you probably need some outside help, either working with the team or someone working with you to work with the team.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: So you’re mentioning around leaders feeling it’s their role to fix teams and actually often they won’t have the skills or, or they could do with some external help. Is that something that you tend to see quite a lot of, of leaders then trying to put their own values or their own preferences onto a team? So kind of doing things to the team, how, how does that tend to play out for you?
Catherine Stagg-Macey: I think you’ve hit it on the head there. I think people, and if you talk to a leader about what’s going on, like if it’s not going well, what’s going on on the team? And they say, well, you know, Bob does this and Mary does that. And you’re like, well, there’s a misunderstanding of teams are systems. And when you put a bunch of people together, things happen that are bigger than the individuals that are a part of that. And so leaders often see it as sort of a whack-a-mole game. Like, if I could just get Bob to stop doing that, everything would be fine. It’s like, well, that’s not how it works. There’s a invitation, I think for leaders to understand more about systems and how systems work and how to influence that. So, you know, you’re looking to influence, as the leadership role of a high-performing team is, and I’m moving my body as I say this, how do I see what needs to happen and how do I nudge certain behaviours? How do I not be attached to the things I’m nudging? Cause if that doesn’t work, then something else needs to happen.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: How would you, if you are a leader who’s part of a team, how would you encourage them to take that perspective? Cause I think, as you say, it could be really easy, particularly if you are a leader of a team who is engaging in that team day to day. I think you do, as you say, become quite attached to the ins and outs and the intricacies, but maybe you don’t have that wider perspective to see the bigger picture. How would you encourage people to actually do that?
How should leaders influence a team?
Catherine Stagg-Macey: One of the great exercises you can think of is if you think of your team as a thing, So let’s say if you think of your team as an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I asked this of someone recently and I gave her a broader remit to like, what’s the metaphor for the team? And she thought about it and she said, you know, we’re like the big five in a game park. We occasionally meet at the watering hole, but we’re pretty mistrustful of each other.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: I’m like, that’s great. So now that you know that you’re, so, there’s a lot of individual strengths in the Big five, they do come to a watering hole at some point. They could probably kill each other if you put the wrong combination in there. So if you’re a leader of that team, what needs to happen now? And she’s like, oh, well we need to build more trust. I’m like, that’s great. Great! So how do you wanna do that? So I think systems feels like a big word. But often the metaphors, the analogies are helpful ways in. Another one I say is like, what dance is everyone doing? And they’re like, oh, what it feels like, you know, we’re 14 at the high school disco and everyone’s standing on the outside watching some person in the middle doing the jive and fitting incompetent and uncomfortable. And you’re like, great. So what do you want? I want everyone on the dance floor dancing the same dance. Great. How do you make that happen? And how does that translate to your team? Yes.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Amazing. I’m a sports psychologist by trade, so immediately my brain goes to football teams and what we see there. So, for example, Chelsea, this season, great bunch of players. Terrible form.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: Can’t comment, I know nothing. I’m just likely to call it soccer as I am football. So I think I could get myself in trouble in this country.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Okay, so we’ve got that bigger-picture perspective. We’re encouraging them to think out of the day-to-day rather than getting stuck on the detail of maybe some of the specific challenges that they’re facing. In terms of maybe then making the changes, or you mentioned before, if we’ve identified, okay, we need to build more trust within the team, what’s the role of a leader to facilitate that? How would you kind of get them to actually go about making the changes that they’ve maybe identified?
Catherine Stagg-Macey: So they’ve identified outcomes and we want more, you know, more trust, higher levels of trust is an outcome. And then you look at, well, how do you go about, let’s take that as an example, how do we go about doing that? And does the leader feel skilled? And that sometimes it’s just an explicit conversation of can you have a conversation with the team, which is, doesn’t feel like there’s enough trust. What do we do about it? There is an assumption I think, in a lot of leaders that I have to have the answers for everything. So there’s a trust problem. I have to solve the trust problem. I’m like, well, who says you have to solve, you know, you can be accountable and responsible for guiding the team through that, but the wisdom lies in the system. Like there’ll be things that are being unsaid. There’ll be longings and yearnings in the team that you don’t know until you give space for people to have that conversation.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Mm-hmm. Okay. So the previous podcast in this series landed quite explicitly on psychological safety as a mechanism, and I think Phoebe, who was on that podcast kind of said, it doesn’t mean that we have to be really nice to each other all of the time. That’s absolutely not what we mean by psychological safety. It’s about giving people the space to share their concerns, feel that they can give an honest opinion, give challenge, and that obviously helps the team to be more high performing over time. I guess as a leader, are there certain behaviours that we would be hoping for or looking for in order to foster that feeling of psychological safety? What can leaders do to give space to allow that conversation as you say, to let the team solve the problem themselves?
What can leaders do to create psychological safety in teams and allow them to problem-solve independently?
Catherine Stagg-Macey: Well, the first recognition is that they may not be able to have that conversation. Like you may not be able to create enough psychological safety for that conversation to happen. I got a client of mine who I keep calling out, he goes, ‘but I tell them it’s a safe space. I don’t know why they don’t speak up’. I’m like, ‘just ’cause you are the most senior person in the room calls it safe, does not make it safe’. It’s like, it’s not the premise of it at all. The more work I do in this area, the more I feel like you’ve gotta do your own work to do this work.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: As a coach, and therapist, as you know, you can only take people as far as the work that you’ve done. And so most of us as coaches are on this perpetual personal development journey ’cause we wanna be able to hold more for our clients. And I think there’s a parallel for that with leaders, like you have to get out this idea that you just know stuff, you know, and I’m pointing to my head, right? Like, it’s beyond what’s in your head. It’s what’s in your body, it’s what’s in your heart, and how do you exude that? And if you wanna talk about, take a big topic, if it’s racism that needs, a conversation we need to have in the room, would I look to my leader and go, yeah, I think you could probably cope with that. That’s a very big topic, by way of example. But I think two people are gonna have a fistfight, if we open up this can of worms, do I feel that my leader can manage that or would flip out or would shut it down, or would shame people? Like that’s the stuff that we’re asking of our leaders, which I think is a very, it’s a very much higher level than perhaps with the way I grew up. You know, when I did 20 years in consulting in Oliver Hyman, KPMG, and it felt like the leader was the smartest person in the room. Yeah. It was about IQ it wasn’t about EQ, it wasn’t about social relationship intelligence at all.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: And I think Clarasys model is a different way for sure. Which gives me tremendous hope. I’m often saying to clients of mine in toxic environments, like, I promise you there are better ways. I know. Cause I work with one of the companies. It is possible.
The importance of self-awareness and knowing your limitations as a leader
Suzie Mossman-Monk: I really like that. And I think, so a lot of the work that I do as a performance psychologist is I use a model called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and that stems from noticing and knowing yourself. So a lot of present-moment awareness and just being conscious of, okay, I’m in this situation, this is what’s showing up for me, and this is the potential response to it. And giving people that I guess awareness, but also it’s a choice, right? It’s a choice of how we choose to respond to the internal events that we have, thoughts, feelings, et cetera. We do have a choice in that, and I really like actually getting our leaders to be conscious of that and how they’re responding and the environment that they’re creating.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: And knowing your limitations as a leader, like a lot of leaders I work with have, uh, fear, no other word of it, of uncomfortable or hard conversations.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: It’s like, well my friend, that is an ed, you gotta get over. And I appreciate it, I wasn’t taught the skills for hard conversations. I still get it triggered and hard conversations, but I have a much better capacity for it now. And even within that, knowing your limits. I was facilitating slightly unplanned on the mastermind group that I was in last week, not my mastermind, I was a participant. I’m trying to give people the experience of sitting in circle and just reflective conversations. And racism just landed in the room between two people that had a thing outside it came into the centre, one person was crying, the other person felt, uh, felt very hurt. And in the moment I’m like, do I have the skills to see this through? And I was right up my edge, you know, facilitating conversations about race has me very close to what I feel I’m not capable of doing.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: And that’s okay.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: It is the awareness of that right?
Catherine Stagg-Macey: It is. And that’s our invitation, I think, from both of us to people listening to this. Right. It’s like you don’t have to be able to facilitate racial conversations or bullying or sexism. I mean, those are the big ones, but there are smaller conversations, you know, so-and-so doesn’t get on with so-and-so.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: A team that I know, somebody was, having an affair with someone else in the organisation. It went across hierarchical lines. No one in the leadership team called him out. So not only did he jeopardize, because it’s an American-based organisation, puts the company in line of some sexual harassment suits, but also the sense of, things spoken in the leadership team were finding their way into the rest of the organisation. And the assumption was, it was pillow talk. But this grown-up leadership team has not once had a conversation with this person.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah. And the impact of that on the rest of the team and the company.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: And it’s also like, well he means okay, they’ll be okay. They’ll work out and you’re like yeah, but this is a conversation. You need to sit in the discomfort of having this. And if you can’t, as the leader, the CEO, if you can’t have that conversation, find someone else to facilitate it.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah. And that’s that, knowing your limits, but being aware of it enough that actually this is something that needs to happen. If not you, then who, I guess? So we’ve spoken quite a lot around the traditional leadership role maybe we’d say. And I think the key points of actually being able to take a step back, not being too stuck in the detail, being able to try to identify what’s going on and then I guess not taking it on yourself as a traditional leader to try and solve all of those problems and being aware of your limits in that space.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: At Clarasys we talk a lot about having a flat hierarchy. And I guess what we mean by that is that everyone has a responsibility, but also the ability to be a leader in any given team, whether that is internally, you often have people of different levels working together, but also on client, we want people of who maybe are perceived as more junior or earlier in their career, we want them to be able to bring their ideas and challenge people who have 20 years experience because we want that diversity of thought and we think that produces a higher performing team.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: How would you, start to help other teams to have those kinds of conversations? And if you are someone who is a part of a team who you feel maybe your team isn’t performing as well, but you’re not in a traditional leadership role, how could those people start to have influence or make changes to help the team move forwards?
How would you empower team leaders, not in a traditional leadership role, to have difficult conversations?
Catherine Stagg-Macey: I think there are two things I would unpack there. Like what is your definition of leadership to that individual? Like is it about positional power? Is it something bigger? And then certainly Clarasys offers a broader concept of leadership that you can step into leadership at any time. Helping someone cross the street is a moment of leadership,
Catherine Stagg-Macey: I mean 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have seen that myself. So I just wanna, you know, if this is new to people listening, like I get it. I think there’s a very traditional white male, cisgendered idea of what leadership looks like, and the invitation for us is to break through that. It’s like we choose to take on leadership moments in every moment of the day. So that would be my first invitation to someone who’s just “a team member”. What does leadership mean for you and how do you wanna step into it in this moment?
Catherine Stagg-Macey: The second one is like, if you’re not speaking up, ’cause I’m assuming the person feels like, can I, should I, would I? It’s like, well, what do you need in order to speak up? So go back to that sense of what you help people with here is, if I don’t feel safe, great, well what do you need to feel safe? Is it a side conversation or do you just need a little chat to yourself? Do you need to lean on your values? Like there’s something unfair, will leaning from your values help you over that edge that you’re feeling? So I think there are a few ways into, really stepping into that.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah. I really like that. I think asking yourself that question, of okay, well why do I want to make this change? Why do I care? What is it about, you know, as you say, whether it is someone being treated unfairly, or actually you just really wanna deliver what’s right by the client, or, and actually there are things that you are seeing that you think could be better or improved or, even if you just wanna challenge yourself, right? Like that growth piece.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: Yeah. I think one of the ways I like holding the concept of leadership is what do you wanna bring into the world? Like, what’s your body of work? You know? Maybe it’s kindness. Maybe it’s social justice, maybe it’s just doing the right thing. I mean, it can be whatever. There is no morality on whatever angle you choose, but that often helps us get out of ourselves. When there is a group think or a group dynamic going on that you’re feeling counter to, but if we carry on this path, the client isn’t gonna get the best from us. Okay. This is bigger than me, therefore I can speak up. It often helps me to get out of my own ego to go, what’s the bigger thing here that I wanna play a part in?
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah. I really like that. I tend to use the analogy or metaphor of values as the direction that we wanna be going in, right? So you can never complete kindness or growth, whatever. So actually having that perspective of, okay, this is the thing that I’m moving towards and this step of speaking up or having a conversation is a stepping stone in that direction. Which is a nice way, as you say, to get out of your head.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Particularly if we take teams and we go onto clients, we maybe are working in two different organisations. Sometimes the culture could be very different. You have to form teams very quickly and build that trust and feeling of a team really quickly, often under lots of pressure and challenges and, you know, timelines and all of that good stuff that consulting involves. When you have a team that needs to come together very quickly, do you have ways that leadership across the board is important in that, and how would you encourage people to, you know, become a high-performing team in a very short space of time?
How can high-performing teams develop quickly and what part does leadership have to play?
Catherine Stagg-Macey: If you take the tack men model of performing, norming, storming, and performing, there are different ways you show up as a leader in each of those. And one of the things I think leaders find hard too, is that storming phase, when people are comfortable to work through the hard conversations.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: And mostly people veer left off the highway at that point and go, uh, no but it actually is an important thing. So there’s a fundamental idea that conflict’s good. Conflict is a sign of something happen to happen and we need to move through it.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: So what, how do we drop a team into a client organisation and get them up fast? It’s having these really grown-up conversations referring back to psychological safety. What do we need to be, what are our team agreements? I might even dial a back girl. Here’s my user manual. This is what I look like when I’m pissed off. This is what I look like when I need help. This is my preferred email communication. These are my values. Da, da, da. So, you know, we’ve never worked together. Boom. Here’s my user manual. So we know a little bit about each other. Starting to build that trust. So that’s the individual focus. And then the team focus. Okay, so there’s X number of us here. What do we need? What do we need to thrive? What are we gonna do when it’s hard? What are our ground rules for difficult conversations? And that might change a lot of the time. That’s fine. And then talk about, there’s an exercise I like a lot called the High Dream Low Dream Exercise, which I think really works well in this scenario, which is, so we’ve just dropped in this client. Great. We’re starting tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. Fantastic. We have assumptions about this client. We’ve heard stories about them or this kind of work, whatever, like this. So we’re bringing in all this stuff. We have a facilitated conversation about the higher dream, which is weird coaching language, but if this was the best project we had ever been on, ever, what would be going on? This would be happening. That would be happening. Great. If this was the worst project of your entire life, that you were still talking about 20 years’ time, what would be happening?
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: And that’s important we marginalize the fears in ourselves, in the team, in systems that we’re in, we’re like, oh, we don’t wanna go there ’cause that’s a hard conversation. But the thing is, if you get both of those out, you go, great – here’s our nightmare and our dream scenario, what would happen to happen for the nightmare scenario to have become a reality. And now you start to get, oh, well we ignore the client. We never go into the client office. Like, okay, what do we need to be doing to have the good scenario more likely? So you start to get behaviours like, oh, these are behaviours. Oh yes. Then how do we bake the behaviours of the dream scenario into our contract so we kind of know what’s here? It also goes, oh, I was also worried, I’ve heard really terrible stories about how the sponsor works and the… ah, you, you’ve also heard, oh, okay, I just thought it was me. You know, there’s a sharing and an empathy building and an alignment building that happens in that, and I think that’s very powerful grounding for dropping a new team into a consulting client.
Agree on team ways of working and communicate behaviours
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah. I love that. And I actually wrote down, behaviours because for me, that’s the thing that I see most often is people are like, well, we just wanna communicate. We wanna be a team that really communicates. And it’s like, what does that mean? How are we defining communication? What does that look like? It’s gonna be interpreted differently by different people. How do we hold each other to account? How do we know if we’ve been successful? All of that kind of stuff. So actually being able to say, we are going to be in the client office, as you say, X number of days a week, we are going to have a biweekly retro, or, you know, we are gonna reflect on how things have gone twice a week and we’re gonna give tangible things that we want to be working at, or it’s really kind of getting those behaviours well defined so that you can hold each other to account. I think that’s really important. You know, you commit to this stuff upfront and then you can say, actually, you know, part of that psychological safety is we can be honest. If we see behaviours that are not aligned to that dream scenario, as you say, that’s a safe way to call it out because we’ve all agreed to it. We’ve all bought into it.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: That’s a really important point. Cause I think when we talk about, oh, we want to be honest as a team, we want trust. That’s an outcome.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: What are the behaviours that we need in this team? And this is where I find talking about leaders earlier, we’re talking about teams here. We live in a high-performance culture in the world. Consulting is a particular pinnacle of that, I think. And it’s all about doing.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Mm-hmm.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: And you have to attend the relationships in order to do the doing. If you know that, that African proverb of if you wanna go fast, go on your own. If you wanna go far, go with others. Yeah. But to go with others, you have to slow down. And I find teams find it really frustrating. They’re said like, why are we still talking about our agreements like an hour in? I’m like, we could spend half a day talking about agreements and you’d still not be clear in two weeks’ time about something.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Definitely.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: So I would always, if people are feeling uncomfortable about these relationship/behaviour conversations, you’re in the right space.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah, definitely. And I like that both from a team perspective as we kind of touched on, and equally as your own user manual. So really calling out, okay, my behaviour is, if I’m stressed or under pressure, I will do X, Y, or Z. And that again, opens the door for people to notice that behaviour. And that then is a much more welcoming space to be like, Hey, like are you okay? I’m noticing some of this stuff that you yourself highlighted as potentially being one of your stress behaviours. Can we talk about it and, and I think that’s a, I guess the summary of that bit is have these conversations upfront if you possibly can.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: Yes. Yeah. They’re a lot easier upfront because it forms the foundation, right? It’s like the foundation of the house. To have those in the midst of a conflict where everyone’s hurt and triggered and upset is very hard. Yeah, it’s very hard.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: And just touching on that, we’ve spoken a little bit about what we would want people to be doing and the kind of behaviours we’d want them to be engaging in, both as an individual and as a team – in your experience as a coach, and knowing a bit about the coaching model that we have at Clarasys whereby everyone has a coach and they speak to them weekly, and you have that support, I guess the conversations, we’ve spoken a little bit about awareness of self and that being crucial to aligning the behaviours – what other conversations would you be wanting to have, either as a coach in your experience? How would you, if I’m someone in my business who wants to encourage people to engage more in this way, how could I maybe have those coaching conversations? What would that look like?
The importance of modelling
Catherine Stagg-Macey: If I understand your question correctly, I think it’s about modelling.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Modelling of the behaviours, the conversations?
Catherine Stagg-Macey: Modelling the conversations. Like let’s sit down and, you know, if you and I work on a project tomorrow, I’d be going. Great. Let’s take an hour.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: Let’s do that contracting as to how we’re gonna do it. So, you know, and that’s the leader, that’s leadership. It’s like, this is how I want the world. I wanna live in a world where we are conscious of how we are in a relationship with each other, which means that the leadership role that I then take is being the first one to invite that in my fellow coaches, in my clients, in whatever context that I’m in.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: And what I love about that is that anyone can do that, right? You don’t have to be the, as we kind of started from, you don’t have to be the traditional leader of a team. Anyone can say, Hey guys, why didn’t we have a conversation about how we show up when we are maybe stressed or what we want to agree to as a team? That would be one of my messages to take away from this podcast is anyone can do that. If you model it, you can introduce it and, and kind of be the, the one who’s making that change.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: I think, if you go back to the user manual, if you start, if you do that first and then you go in like, well, I’ve written my user manual.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: You know, you and I are gonna work on a project. I’d love to see at least talk through what your stuff is so we can get to know each other. Again, that’s leading, like taking the first step, taking the leadership role in that relationship.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Yeah, definitely. Amazing.
Suzie Mossman-Monk: Well, thank you so much, Catherine. That was a really insightful conversation and I look forward to catching up with you soon.
Catherine Stagg-Macey: Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you for joining us for another episode, nevermind the pain points. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favourite podcasting app or site. We would love your feedback, so please leave a review or drop us an email at podcast@clarasys.com.
