Micro-skills and teaming in Casa de Papel (Money Heist)
“They all have an essential characteristic: they have nothing to lose (speaking up & collaboration) and they really want to try (leadership & reflection).” — Amy Edmondson
Recently, a colleague told me about the importance of having the right persons for a job. I don’t really sure about that … at least, it is missing other ingredients. Because we can have the right people but if team members do not work in a coordinated way at the right time it is likely that we do not reach our goal.
I remember, a long time ago, I work with my colleagues on some marketing stuff. Not very funny but we had to do it quickly. We are all agile, clever, and witty guys. But we get some mixed reactions from this work team because everyone worked with good communication and interaction but in asynchronous and separate ways.
Some person had another point to make and wants to do more. Another person comes with another point of view. It slowed down those tasks quite a bit. It is like some kind of eternal scope creep. I guess we could have gone a lot faster in a room at the same time sketching, talking to each other, and finished it to achieve our goal.
Our responsibility is only to our own objective, instead of, doing our job and handing it off to the next.
Teaming
What do I want to reflect on those examples? Does this happen to you? Take days or weeks instead of a few hours for very simple tasks?
The answer lies in teaming! Teaming is about attitude and mindset. It requires coordinating and collaborating on the fly. We could have to collaborate with the right people but also at the right time in a very dynamic way to achieve a common goal.
Everyone could bethink that a team whose members don’t know themselves can’t achieve objectives. But any team should be able to learn because expertise is a moving target in almost any field. The team should assimilate, compile and create new expertise while executing. Teams members must be working and be learning together… collaboratively.
This means that this new paradigm has colossal implications for managers, leaders, workers, and anyone working in a team or an organization. In this complex business world with dynamic contexts, people need to both work and learn together using network models to solve problems and create innovative products.
“Success in today’s complex and volatile business environment requires flexibility, coordination, and collaboration.” — Amy Edmondson
And of course, I highly recommend the book of Amy Edmondson on this topic and underlying theories, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy.
In the Netflix TV show called Money Heist (known originally as La Casa de Papel), eight robbers are locked up in the Royal Mint of Spain, in Madrid, with dozens of hostages, while their partner in crime orchestrates the operation from outside, from a gloomy shed. This TV show gives us a good example of teaming.
WARNING: This article contains spoilers from Money Heist!
The success of the operation is based on an oiled plan whose implacable mechanics will inevitably end up being curbed by the human factor and unexpected impediments. The robbers analogically wired the Royal Mint system to speak with the teacher, without mobiles, without radio frequency, and also sealed the doors without anyone knowing that they had taken the Royal Mint.
That sweet peace was only transitory before the storm fell and the police intervened to try to rescue the hostages and enter into a dynamic (sometimes unpredictable) between different agents: robbers led by the teacher, police, and hostages. Two agents were injured by Tokyo (which embodies a profile similar to Nathalie Portman in Leon of Luc Besson), although they also shot indiscriminately, injuring Rio with an M16 rifle.
The protagonists have to learn quickly in situations of instability and moral dilemmas in addition to other internal conflicts. They have the mindset required to incorporate and provide a collaborative leadership that can supply specific strategies for successfully teaming.
The ability to learn is crucial for organizations operating in today’s fast-paced complex environment. Depending on existing knowledge and skills succeeds only if you know exactly what should be done in a job with a relatively fixed process for a considerable amount of time.
In today’s environment, that’s the exception, not the rule. Instead, what is needed are dynamic, flexible teams that mix employees’ strengths, experience, and knowledge to achieve organizational objectives.
Teaming and learning are vital when the answers are still being discovered and when processes are still evolving. Learning requires experimentation. Teams promote a proactive search for opportunities to experiment. In agile teams, for instance, team members can experiment with the sprint length to improve the way of working.
This kind of teaming needs leaders who have the imagination and courage to figure out how to act without answers. Leaders who work to create good conditions for teaming and learning can build organizations that are better able to achieve their goals through continuous improvement, problem-solving, and innovation.
Micro-Skills
What makes a team achieve very impressive results?
In this context of teaming, there is a very important something that could not be visible: the micro-skills.
To make positive results happen, the micro-skills of team members must be used, by the team itself, to jointly develop a new effective way of working, which calls for very great synergy.
What is it? The word “micro-skills” refers to all these little competencies for communicating and collaborating effectively with others.
Some examples of micro-skills: empathy, reflecting feelings, knowing how to listen, intellectual rigor, metaphoric or paraphrasing, summarizing, to be challenging at the right moment, fixing objectives and impulse others with motivation to achieve it, asking the open and closed questions, using body language or facial expressions to demonstrate listening, and so on.
The TV show, Casa de Papel, gives us other examples of micro-skills too. “El Professor” aka Sergio Marquina (played by Álvaro Morte) or Nairobi (Alba Flores), characters have both a flexible personalities and understand complex situations. These characters are very interesting in my point of view. They know how to meet the expectations of team members through natural empathy.
These utopists are really useful in the context of crisis, change, or intense activity. They are also very comfortable dealing with multiple constraints or managing teams composed of big egos in difficult times. They soothe the tensest situations and listen to their surroundings with goodwill.
For instance, in the last season of Casa de Papel, Palermo winds Nairobi up and he mocks her for being in love with Helsinki and not being reciprocated in that love, but she answers that sentence (To love, you need courage, I dare … You see, this is courage, I feel it and I say it) :
Para amar se necesita coraje, yo sí me atrevo,… Lo ves, esto es valor, lo siento y lo digo — Nairobi
Doing this, she creates a space to surrender to others. And the others have no choice to listen to her.
She enables active listening to others. She is empathetic and doesn’t hide her emotions. She believes that her mission is to protect and support her team, collaborators, or friends. This kind of micro-skill can also be seen as a type of leadership that makes it a duty to help others to develop their potential. She wants to create a comfortable and safe work environment.
For sure, we can not follow fiction literally but these heroes of TV shows look like us. They interrogate us about our way of working and teaming. So, thinking about it. Are you teaming and learning dynamically? Are the team members aware of their skills?
Don’t hesitate if you want to share your experience with me.
Source:
« Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy. » — Amy C. Edmondson.
Money Heist, season 3 — Netflix.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Heist
Credits:
Images from Samuel Zeller — https://unsplash.com/@samuelzeller
