Avoid Making Your Bias the Norm in Your Team or Business with Rachel Pacheco, PhD

Rachel Pacheco author of Bringing Up The Boss: Practical Lessons for New Managers

Bill Ringle and Rachel Pacheco discuss research-backed, counterintuitive insights to help you become a better manager, team leader, and rising star in your business.

MQ4B Booster 22.0 — Experienced managers cultivate 1+1=2 relationships

Interview Insights

Top 3 Takeaways

• Observation is a potent way to know what motivates your people, which lets you figure out how to best reward them.

• An actual team is not a collective of self-serving individuals who are just there to contribute their skills. Instead, it functions as a whole, driven to achieve a common goal, and thinks about what’s best for the entire organization and benefits everyone in the group.

• Highly efficient teams have explicit, agreed-upon norms like how they operate and behave. When members know what is expected of them, there is accountability and trust.

Read the Show Notes from this Episode

• Rachel’s mom inspired her through her example as Rachel was growing up.[01:23]
• How does her mother’s work ethic applies to her professional career? [02:50]
• Attributes of a highly effective manager. [04:47]
• The false notions of putting an effort and managing towards the wrong direction. [07:48]
• Obstacles are caused when managers and team members do see eye-to-eye about what motivated them. [10:26]
• Why being an observant leader can make all the difference. [12:17]
• CASE: Mark’s interview where he shared what motivates him. [13:56]
• A fine distinction between an actual team vs. what Rachel calls a ’TINO’ or team in name only. [16:37]
• What makes an incredible team? Contributions from Patrick Lencioni and Google’s Re: Work project define a great team. [18:00]
• Psychological safety is also a critical common ingredient present shared by top-performing teams. Psychological safety musts: conversational turn-taking and empathy. [21:56]
• The Abilene Paradox — why it is not always ideal for a team to decide as a collective. [23:41]
• My Quest for the Best lightning round begins. [26:23

Expert Bio

Rachel Pacheco, PhD is a management author, lecturer and researcher at The Wharton School. She is passionate about teaching people what it takes to be great managers and coaching executives and leaders on how to build thriving teams and organizations.

At Wharton, Rachel conducts research on management—specifically on power and conflict—and is a member of the teaching faculty. She is also a founding faculty member of the Entrepreneurship in Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches multiple courses for budding entrepreneurs that focus on the practical side of working in a small organization.

Rachel serves on the board of advisors for numerous start-ups, primarily in the digital health and wellness space. A former chief people officer, she was on the executive teams of start-ups in the healthcare and big data space. Rachel has also lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Indonesia, and Kazakhstan, and thus has experienced the joy (and pain!) of leading and managing organizations across many distinct cultures.

She holds a PhD and MBA from The Wharton School and a BS from Georgetown University.

Contact Info and Social Media for Rachel Pacheco Pacheco

• Primary website

• Travels from: Washington, DC

• Connect on: Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

Resources Mentioned During the Interview

Below are key people, places, books, quotes, websites and other resources that we discussed, so you can explore further.

• Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and other excellent business books on trust and team effectiveness

• The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael Singer
  
• Google’s Aristotle Project (now called “Re:Work”) on Teams

Authored by Rachel Pacheco