EP 43: Task Cohesion is More Important Than Social Cohesion

March 7, 2024

Show Notes

Ever wonder what makes some teams run more smoothly than a well-oiled machine while others seem to fall apart at the seams? It’s not always about having the brightest minds (though that doesn’t hurt) or even the best culture; it’s about how well a team works together towards a common goal. 

Task cohesion is the glue that holds successful teams together and keeps them moving together seamlessly in the same direction.

This episode is a deep dive into what task cohesion really means and why it’s a game-changer, especially in today’s digital workspaces. Tucker and Sarah break down how getting your team on the same page isn’t about avoiding conflicts; it’s about amplifying everyone’s strengths and moving together towards creating real, lasting impact. 

Throughout this episode, Tucker and Sarah share real-life examples and practical tips to help make task cohesion a reality for your team. Whether you’re leading a team or you’re part of one, this episode is packed with insights on creating a work environment where everyone feels connected to the mission and empowered to contribute their best because they know it’s moving the needle towards impact.

Building a cohesive team is more than a one-and-done deal. It’s about continuously nurturing an environment where everyone understands their role in the bigger picture and feels genuinely excited to contribute. It’s about creating a space where the team’s success is everyone’s success. 

Listen in to get the full scoop on making task cohesion your team’s superpower.

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Transcript

Tucker Wannamaker:
Welcome to Thrivers, impact-driven leadership for the next normal. I am your host, Tucker Wannamaker, the CEO of Thrive Impact, and if you’re listening to this, you’re probably someone who doesn’t just want to do nice things in the world, but you want to create positive change in people’s lives and not burn out while doing it. Well how do you do that? Well, that’s our mission, is to redefine what normal is for workplace leadership, to be about co-creating impact from the inside out. We believe that burnout is the enemy of creating positive change, and we want to connect you with impact-driven leaders and ideas so that you can learn to thrive in today’s landscape. I’m joined as usual by my wonderful co-host, Sarah Fanslau, our chief of impact. Sarah, good to be with you on the show today.

Sarah Fanslau:
Great to be here.

Tucker Wannamaker:
And we’ve had a doozy of a week, would you say?

Sarah Fanslau:
I think it’s the month. No, it was last month. It’s the whole-

Tucker Wannamaker:
It’s been a year. It’s been a doozy of a year. We have been stepping into our 10X selves and we’re like, “Whoa, this is a learning curve,” a little bit.

Sarah Fanslau:
A little exhausting, I’m not going to lie.

Tucker Wannamaker:
We listened to our last podcast that we just came out with, is our whole A team, as we call them, talking about our 10X journey. I encourage you all to listen to it if you’re an organization who is yearning for the next normal of your own. We went through a process that was not exactly clear, but it was actually really supportive of where we were going. But with that has been coming learning, as consistently keeps coming. But today we have a really important topic here that I will not say I’m excited about. I will not say. Because it is an area of growth for me. I just want to be honest about this. But I also have seen the power of how important this is.
And Sarah, especially in watching you and your leadership and how you work, you have brought such an important lens to how we all can actually work together and not just feel like we belong to something, but we’re actually working towards something together that matters. So today’s topic is task cohesion, and I want to let you, Sarah, just tell us a little bit about what we’re talking about here and why is this an important topic that I’m grateful that we have a subject matter expert on the call, AKA not me, to be able to share a little bit more about what this is and why it’s important. So tell us what it is first, Sarah.

Sarah Fanslau:
Yeah. Well, I wouldn’t call myself an expert in it yet, but task cohesion is something that I think I felt before I had the words to put to it, and a meta-analysis, which is basically analysis of all of these different types of studies, recently came out looking at task cohesion, and I started to dive a little bit into it. So really what it is, it’s an aspect of team functioning in essence. So it’s kind of a shared attraction bonding or sense of pride among team members that can be driven by social or task-based elements that are associated with team membership. And all of this is really… We’ll put the link to the study in the show notes, but really it’s about team functioning. And I think what’s interesting here is often when people used to think about team cohesion and team functioning, it was primarily about social belonging. And what this meta-analysis has found, and other research into this space has found, is that actually task cohesion is in some places and in some ways even more important than social cohesion, which is fascinating.

Tucker Wannamaker:
Well, and I’m curious in a simple way of thinking about, do I know what my role is in the things that I need to do that work together with others as well? Sort of the alignment of our strengths and our tasks and how they coordinate together to work towards something that matters.

Sarah Fanslau:
Yes. This study, they describe it as a shared commitment to task, a shared commitment to basically the things you want to get done together.

Tucker Wannamaker:
I saw this quote, and Sarah, when you were sharing with me about this… And by the way, I actually would say you are an expert in the practice of it. Maybe you’re noticing all the research that’s speaking to what’s there, and the research is validating what I have seen you do within Thrive Impact and within these organizations we work with. So that’s why I just want to put that out there, that you are an expert, in that you are a practitioner of doing this on an ongoing basis and have a lot of skill in it. So there you go. I just want to throw that out there.

Sarah Fanslau:
Thank you, thank you.

Tucker Wannamaker:
Because it’s true, but there was this quote that I saw in an exchange community that I’m in that I’ve mentioned a jillion times, so I won’t say who that is, but you can go look them up, exchange [inaudible 00:05:29] dot com. But there was a great quote by a guy named Brian Solis that said, “Community is much more than belonging to something. It’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter.”

Sarah Fanslau:
Yeah, I mean, that’s it in a nutshell. That is task cohesion, the importance of it in a nutshell.

Tucker Wannamaker:
Well, Sarah, I’m curious just to give some for examples here, some tangible examples. Where have you seen this happen, maybe even in Thrive or organizations that we’ve worked with? Do you have some examples that can help our listeners grab onto what is the feeling of task cohesion or what is an example of when it is happening?

Sarah Fanslau:
So I think that we see a lack of this probably more than we see the existence of this, honestly. I don’t know if you agree.

Tucker Wannamaker:
Yeah, probably.

Sarah Fanslau:
And you know what, I’ll also just say it’s not just nonprofits. I have a lot of folks I know who work in big corporate environments, and there is… At the root of so many problems that folks talk about at their work is a lack of direction, of knowing ultimately what folks are working towards together. And that’s why it’s like this commitment part, that commitment, and the definition I think is so important, because it is a shared commitment or agreement to work towards the same thing together. So for example, we worked with an organization not too long ago to do a three hour refresh of a strategic plan, and we’ve actually talked about this on the podcast. And one of the things of course we asked at the start of that engagement, “Hey, let’s see your strategic plan so that we can work from where you’re at.”
What we realized in there was that there were a lot of nice words about what they wanted to do, but no tangible measures that would help folks align on what they needed to do. And this I think is the thing we see most often when it comes to task cohesion is folks think they have aligned on a goal, but because there’s no measurement of it, actually they’re not aligned at all. So I’ll give you an example. One I think was around increasing or improving the number of folks accessing services. It was about improving services. And when we asked the group to brainstorm around what this might look like, we got 15 different types of answers. Increase the number of LGBTQI folks we’re working with, expand to rural populations, bring therapy services in-house.
So when you started to look at the examples of what different folks’ mind went to when we asked how would you measure improving your services, all of a sudden it got really clear that nobody was on the same page about what that meant. Because it meant totally different things to every person in the room based on the charity that they sent in. And I want to note that that diversion is not uncommon, and in fact, it’s great. So the problem isn’t the difference of opinion, it’s the fact that most of the time we’re not making it explicit, and then from making it explicit, creating a shared commitment to what exactly and explicitly that means for us together.

Tucker Wannamaker:
That’s so powerful, Sarah. And by the way, if you are curious about which podcast that was, I literally actually just had it up earlier and it is the one that’s called Operationalizing Your Goals: Connecting Strategy and Activity. So we did a podcast on that. It looks like it was back in September. But that’s what it’s called. So if you want to go to our podcast website, thriveimpact.org/podcast, you can go scroll down a little bit and look for operationalizing your goals. And that’s the one where we went through actually the agenda of the sequence that we took this particular organization through to be able to help them to do this in a workshop form. But Sarah, you always use an example whenever we’re in one of these workshops that I appreciate because it’s really accessible, which is around exercise. Share a little bit about how you bring that forward to help us all understand, because you just hit it with what your example was. But I love how you bring it so forward and make it so accessible with your exercise example. How do you typically bring that out to help people understand this?

Sarah Fanslau:
So I think it’s interesting. The first thing is we often use a logic model at the start of these conversations to help folks visually see the connection between resources, activities, which are things we do, outputs, which are a measure of activities, outcomes, which is some positive change and impact, which is that longer term positive change. So we often ask folks to reflect on, as you think about the goals at your organization, where do you think y’all are at? Are you doing activities? Are you in outputs? Are you outcomes? And it’s interesting to see what folks think. And then I’ll say, “So let’s use an example here. Let’s say our goal is to get healthy. How would you measure that? How would you know if you got healthy? Pop it up in the chat.” And people go, “Eat healthy, lose 10 pounds, start to meditate.”

Tucker Wannamaker:
All over the place.

Sarah Fanslau:
All over the place. And then I say, “So what do you notice about all these things up in the chat?” And usually folks have different answers. No one yet has said what I’m really looking for, and I say, “What I notice is that they’re all different things.”

Tucker Wannamaker:
Nobody can see it either.

Sarah Fanslau:
Nobody sees it.

Tucker Wannamaker:
In all the times we’ve done that, nobody’s like-

Sarah Fanslau:
Nobody’s ever seen it.

Tucker Wannamaker:
They’re like, “Oh, those are nice ways to get healthy.” It’s like, “Wait, did you notice the hole?”

Sarah Fanslau:
So then I say, “So think about what the resources you need and the things you would do if you wanted to lose 10 pounds versus improve your meditation.” They’re totally different. Totally different. And then the light bulbs start to go on. “Oh, you’re right.’ If we haven’t defined and agreed on that measurable goal, the things we’re doing to get to that may be totally misaligned with each other, even though we’re agreeing at a higher level on what we want to do.

Tucker Wannamaker:
So Sarah, what are the pains or the issues that are really facing impact driven leaders in terms of this? Why does this happen so much? Because I’m with you. Most of us feel the lack of task cohesion more than the existence of task cohesion. Why is this such a prevalent problem and challenge?

Sarah Fanslau:
Yeah, well, one great thing that this meta-analysis pointed out that made a lot of sense to me was that it’s really particularly hard in this modern landscape where folks are not working face to face and in the same environment anymore. And also, though, even when they are, folks are likely to be members of multiple teams, and potentially with one team for shorter periods of time, and they’re spending less face to face time. So what we always talked about and what you talked about, Tucker, is the speed of change, is actually really impacting this idea of team functioning. Because no longer are we in the face-to-face environment that used to create more social cohesion and potentially even group pride, which is another part of team functioning.
So it’s in this environment that the research shows that a greater emphasis on task-based elements of the team are going to be even more important, because the time and opportunity for social cohesion is more limited. So I was like, “Oh, that makes so much sense.” If we’re not all together, some of these social pieces are going away, but that doesn’t mean that team functioning has to suffer if we can get aligned on what we’re doing together, on what we’re doing together. And I know you’ve seen this too.

Tucker Wannamaker:
Well, it’s interesting. We’re a totally remote staff. You’re in Maine, I’m in Colorado, Alan’s in Italy, Aaron’s in Western Colorado. I mean, Julie’s here in Colorado, because she’s my wife, which is great, and Nico’s in Austin, Megan’s in West Virginia. We’re all over the place. Riya’s in the Philippines. We’ve got people literally all over the world. And I was just trying to think about what are the ways that we’ve been figuring this out in a fully remote experience? And some of the pains I think that we had before, we’ve wrestled around with having social cohesion and task cohesion. To me it’s a both and. It’s not we’re going to pick one. It has to be a both and. And some people, I think in our binary way of thinking, I think this is actually one of the pains, is that we tend to have a binary way of thinking and thinking that if it’s just task cohesion, then we’re good. Or if it’s just social cohesion, then it’s good.
But it’s actually a both and. It’s a collective of both of those coming together where I do have a sense of belonging, but I also have a sense of my role and specifically what it is that I ought to be doing or in co-creating what that is. So I just keep thinking about some of the rhythms that we’ve been trying and learning. But to your point around the speed of change, I mean, we’ve hit on this a lot about being learning organizations, is we need to constantly… And we do this on a monthly basis in our A-team meetings. We do monthly reports on… And the reports are on how’d the month go compared to our quarterly big rocks that we do. We do constant rhythms of learning to be able to continue to realign and say like, “Hey, I’m struggling with this,” or, “Hey, I had this dependency,” or, “Hey, I need your support.”
And I think that that’s been a thing that I actually want us to continually grow better in in our work. And I think that one of the pains is that people don’t have rhythms to be able to continue to adjust and align. So even if you did create something, it’s kind of like the old strategic plan sitting on the shelf gathering dust. It’s like, “Yeah, but if you don’t apply learning into that and quickly, then it becomes… The more and more you don’t apply learning, the more and more irrelevant your strategic plan becomes.” So it’s the same thing at different altitudes, at lower altitudes. That rhythms of learning, weekly rhythms, monthly rhythms, quarterly rhythms, that you explicitly have on the calendar to literally give space and time to this. If you don’t have that, the more and more irrelevant your tasks are going to be ultimately-

Sarah Fanslau:
Because you’ve learned, right?

Tucker Wannamaker:
… and the less cohesion you’re going to have.

Sarah Fanslau:
And things have adjusted. And unless you communicate that and really dig into each other, you’re no longer aligned, and therefore there’s no longer cohesion. Exactly. I think the other thing that I see in this research suggests is that they’re both important, and the sequencing here is important, especially in the virtual world. I think oftentimes we think of team building. We’re going to get to know each other first, we’re going to love each other as humans first, and then we’re going to get to the work. And I think part of what this research suggests is that a way into relationships with folks is also by doing things together first, which is naturally then going to lead to some of this social cohesion.

Tucker Wannamaker:
That’s really powerful. And that totally goes against my own intuition. Then as I’m thinking about what you’re sharing… I’ve thought about this with different partners that we’ve had, and I know that once… It’s like how can we come up with our minimum viable project to work on? Small scope, it’s a new relationship or whatnot. Or I can think about this too on the staff side. What are simple things that you can just start to do together and then do a reflective process around that that also improves the social cohesion piece too. So instead of social cohesion into task, what if as quick as possible you got into task. And maybe there’s an alignment around… Maybe from a social cohesion perspective, there’s an alignment around philosophy, like, “Yeah, we want to learn a co-creative process together.” So maybe there’s a little bit of that, but it’s like get into the project as quick as you can and learn.

Sarah Fanslau:
Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. And it makes a lot of intuitive sense to me because… And folks, we always find in the partners we’re working with, some are really down for the team building and the connecting and reflective. And some folks are like, “This feels so uncomfortable to me.” And it takes a while. So I think what you were just sharing, just jump into a project first. We developed that because we realized we were in some environments in particular, in particular where there was an older form of leadership that was more top down, that our approach to working with folks, which is bottom up and co-creative and all voices and music and all the things, felt so far out of the comfort zone that we needed to figure out how to connect on something that we shared first, which is getting something done.

Tucker Wannamaker:
Well, it also goes to the concept of… And I know we’ve been really deeply reflecting on our whole strategic planning process altogether, and it’s been some of the core of our work and lots of podcasts about it that are so fun to watch or listen to. I guess we can watch too. But I know that one of the areas in particular that we’re looking at in our own learning is even in a strategic planning process, how can we move up the implementation part to get to quick wins quickly for people to start to feel? Because part of what we do in strategic planning is of course, not just the strategic plan, which is we call it the cheese. The medicine in the cheese is teaching people how to be a learning organization. That’s really what we’re doing underneath the surface and that with the outcome of a strategic plan, but really we’re helping to help create real culture shift for you to lean into and learn into this next normal.
So part of what we’ve been looking at with that is how do we move implementation up even faster? When can we get them into rhythms as quick as possible? Is it possible in the early stages. And this is what we’re really discovering and learning is once people get into this implementation, then it’s like, “Okay, I’m starting to learn.” And then the task cohesion, to your point. Task cohesion starts to come together. They’re like, “Oh, this is what I’m doing. Oh, this is what we are doing.” TBD here on how we’re going to be adjusting our strategic planning process, but that’s definitely been something that’s emerged pretty strongly for us of bringing the implementation up quicker, faster, get to quick wins around adjustments based upon implications of the strategic plan, things like that.

Sarah Fanslau:
Folks have to feel it.

Tucker Wannamaker:
Which speaks to this. They have to feel it. They feel it in their routine, in their work. Which is where a lot of the learning happens, not in our heads, but in our bodies. So how do we get them quickly into the doing of things?

Sarah Fanslau:
Yeah, exactly. Even today, Tucker, we had a great workshop with an organization that’s also working on a refresh of a strategic plan. And I think at the root… And it’s a big organization, lots of complexity. And that’s another organization that had some great activities, like how we’re going to do things, but not tangible measures of what it’s going to look like if we’ve done that well. And I think that that was really at the root of what was challenging for that organization. It didn’t feel like it fit because they didn’t know what it meant. But in our workshop today, one thing… So we’ve helped each department identify their goal and their measures, and they shared them with each other today, and this really astute young woman said, “One thing we’re missing here is kind of connecting the dots between the measurable goals at the department level.”
And I was just like, “Yes.” Because I think task cohesion, we often think about it at a team-based level, and it’s super important there, but then it kind of rolls up to the organization level, and it’s how are we aligned on the tasks that we’re doing in support of our ultimate goal or vision? And those things also need to be cohesive. And in some ways, if there’s a break in cohesion at either of those levels, especially for folks whose brains go to the weeds, I think it can feel really anxiety producing, because you’re like, “No, I see a break in the logic.” And then I have to go do it, but there’s a break in the logic.

Tucker Wannamaker:
And you just hit the nail on the head, is how much is a lack of task cohesion anxiety producing? I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Wait, how do these fit together? Oh, shoot, am I going to have to be the one who’s going to have to take care of the thing, that gap that I see? How much does that bring up, ultimately, reactivity, which we all know based on our conscious leadership work that we’ve talked about too on the podcast, that reactivity only perpetuates more reactivity, so it creates downward spirals of reactivity in our culture. That was anxiety producing. I didn’t even think about that until you said that. I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s the core of why this is-”

Sarah Fanslau:
I could see it for her? I could see she was feeling anxiety about the dots not connecting at a higher level. And in some ways… It’s almost like, sometimes, especially when you’re really starting in some places from scratch on this, start at the team level and then roll it up. Because I think in some ways, trying to eat the elephant at the same time can also be anxiety producing for folks. So in some ways, it’s set the smallest set of shared goals together and targets that you can, start working on those. And then as you do it, figure out how or whether there’s a lack of alignment between your department level tasks and that of another, so you can start to align. But I also think an important piece here is not waiting to start until things are perfect, because they won’t be. They won’t be.

Tucker Wannamaker:
In fact, don’t ever wait until things are perfect with really anything in life. Start by starting is the only way to do it. Start by starting. Start by learning into it. Well, Sarah, I’m curious in one of our questions here around what’s made possible. In spaces of task cohesion happening, whether you’ve seen it within Thrive or others, or even this last podcast we did with Dr. Cynthia Whitaker, and it was a year and a half after their strategic plan and their implementation work we did with them, and just what emerged from there, I’m just trying to think of the different examples. But as you’ve heard some of those stories and you felt some of that experience with us too, what is made possible for these impact driven leaders if they’re able to implement more task cohesive practices?

Sarah Fanslau:
I think it’s a surprising answer because you think task and you think narrow, but I think what’s actually made possible is the ability to innovate and some freedom to explore. And that sounds counterintuitive, I think, because you’re like, “Well, it’s just task cohesion.” But when you have that, what you’re then able to do is take a look at… You’re allowed to take a look at some things that are maybe outside of your regular day to day, you’re able to stretch, because the things you know need to get done, you’re aligned on. So it gives you freedom. I think the first thing is it gives you freedom, and then the second thing is it allows you to be creative and innovate. We saw that with Greater Nashua, and we’ve seen that right now with this other organization we’re talking about where even today they were saying people are excited about being able to innovate. But the potential for innovation only comes when we are aligned on the things we already know we need to do. So we can put some down and we can focus.

Tucker Wannamaker:
Well, and I think, too, part of the reason why I like where you’re going with this, Sarah, is that we’re able to be more creative because we’re not confused.

Sarah Fanslau:
Clear as time.

Tucker Wannamaker:
Because confusion is a stealer of energy and creativity because we’re like… We’re using our creative energy on trying to figure out what happening in the first place. Why are we doing this? How much energy… I mean, we do this from a facilitation perspective. We work a lot on our enrollment into something which is to help people to come into an experience and answer the questions that we think that they may already have that they’re not verbally asking, but they’re probably asking within their own minds. Do I really want to answer this question? Why do I need to go into a small group? Is this safe for me to share? Or why is this an important question? We’re always asking these questions of why, and that takes energy, that takes creative energy to actually figure those out. So if we can get to the space where we don’t have to think about and use our creative energy towards the confusion we have, or why is this again, and instead use our creative energy towards the task itself, I think that’s where that innovation can start to really come out.

Sarah Fanslau:
Yes, for sure. For sure. And it will bring up, as we continually see, and I think feel, feelings of discomfort. Because as you’re working towards alignment, it feels uncomfortable. It’s two steps forward and one step back sometimes. But ultimately I think the journey of alignment and cohesion around what we’re doing at all altitudes is the journey. At my last job, a few weeks in, we had an office in LA, and the executive director there, I was on a phone call with her and she said, “Sarah, your superpower is focus.” And I said, “Thanks.” I didn’t really think about it, but that stuck with me because I think she may have been right. And it’s that ability to focus and get clear on the task and then execute the task that ultimately allows us as organizations and human systems to move forward.

Tucker Wannamaker:
It was so interesting, the same organization you were just talking about earlier today, I would plus one that person’s view of you, of focus, which is that podcast we just did the other day, which is around your no’s give power to your most important yeses. And I think it was called… What was it called? It was something around the power of saying no or something like that. Let me see. I’m going to find it. Let’s see, where is it? Mastering the art of saying no. That’s what it was. I knew it was a different title. Because I think that one of the challenges, including this organization that we were just talking to and working with, is the lack of task cohesion around too many things. Too many tasks also can be an issue. Complexity is a lack of task cohesion.
I’m trying to think of these different areas where the lack of task cohesion comes out, and that complexity, hence the art of saying no, which ultimately is an art of focusing. Because whether we like it or not, we have limited capabilities. We have limited creative energy. We have limited time, and the more yeses we have, the blander they are. So a complexity, and so much happens, especially in nonprofits, is we keep adding things without subtracting things, and it becomes a significant complexity now that we’re juggling too many things and now we’re continuing to lose our cohesion of the tasks because we were like, “I don’t know how to do all of them.”

Sarah Fanslau:
Well, it was funny, I was reflecting on that quote, your no’s give powers, and I was like… And we were having a conversation the other day with somebody about that podcast, and I was like, “Am I really…” I think it’s actually that who I want to say yes to is the people out there in the community that we’re serving. I want to say bigger yeses to them, you know what I mean? So it’s saying yes, but it’s saying yes to the folks out there, and if we want to say yes to them, we need to do it well. And to do it well, we need to focus and only do a few things.
It’s that example I’ve used a few times of, “Oh, sure, we’re serving middle school students. Let’s just start to serve high school students.” Well, actually, I’m saying a yes to the middle schoolers, not a no to the high schoolers. And my yes to the middle schoolers is that if I add high schoolers, I’m not going to be able to do as well on middle schoolers. So it’s almost like I’m saying a bigger yes to the things that are most important rather than a no to the thing… I mean also a no, but…

Tucker Wannamaker:
Well, Sarah, I need to go pick up my daughter from school, but I wanted to end with one quick, rapid round question, which is you got me hooked, I get it, task cohesion. If I would ask the exercise question and how do I get healthy, my team would’ve said the same thing, and nobody would’ve noticed that there were all different and so many of them. So what do I need to do? How would I start by starting? If I’m a nonprofit leader or impact-driven leader of a company or an municipality, what is a practical step I can start to take to develop more task cohesion?

Sarah Fanslau:
I think the first and most important thing is to establish team or department level goals that are measurable, that have specific quantitative measures of success, that every individual in your team or organization can then create a smaller measurable goal in relation to. That’s where I would start. Because then if you have high level measurable goals and team level measurable goals and individual level goals, all of those things can and show the line, and that’s how you start. Because then it’s the conversation around that alignment and the doing of it that really makes it happen.

Tucker Wannamaker:
And you can co-create that by asking a question like a year from today… I mean, this is what we did with this organization talking about earlier. A year from today at the end of 2024, what would you want to be celebrating about insert topic or insert category? And gathering the voices of all the people in the room and the staff that were across departmental and the board too, and then do a co-creative process, which I think would be a really helpful piece for us to really hit on around the opening the aperture of the divergent process into the convergent, because I think that’s a big piece of gathering task cohesion in a way that actually also generates social cohesion at the same time.

Sarah Fanslau:
Correct, 100%.

Tucker Wannamaker:
But that’s a good question, to do what Sarah was asking of. What do we even want to celebrate and what specific things would you like to see, feel, or hear? What data points or increases in different things would you like to experience in our work or in the people that we’re serving? So that’s one way to get to some of those thoughts. Well, cool. Well, I’m excited about continuing to dive deeper into this around… Which really to me is co-creative leadership. This gets into one of our main seas of leadership is how do people co-create their futures together and how much joy and healing and excitement and ultimately impact that that can bring, and that ultimately creates impact from the inside out. Hence why that’s our work is how do we really do that?
Sarah, I really appreciate you bringing this research forward. We’ll put some of these resources in there. I’ll put the logic model link, you mentioned the logic model earlier, and some of these podcast links that we talked about. But I do recommend if this is something that’s of interest to you, to go check out some of our other podcasts like the mastering the art of saying no, the operationalizing one again, which is a workshop process you can take your own organization through. It was very specific and very granular of how we did it. That should hopefully be helpful. Or if you want us to help you do it yourself, let us know, because this is what we do. We help organizations quite literally create social and task cohesion all at the same time.

Sarah Fanslau:
That’s true.

Tucker Wannamaker:
Thanks for listening in. Sarah, great to be with you, and we’ll see you on the next podcast. Bye everyone.

Sarah Fanslau:
Thanks, y’all.