‘Fun Dad’-Stef, and ‘boring mum’-G

We’ve recently been exploring how problems at work show up for people so we can build something truly valuable for work. Part of what will make it truly valuable and unique is what Stef and G bring to the table as individuals.

So, we asked 2 people who worked with us both what they think. We know and trust these people to tells us what they really think. They both have high business acumen, and belief in the power of engagement for work. Their perspectives were different but offered some useful insights that we can take to the world through Playgrounded.

What skills do Stef & G have as a combo that are of value and unique to Playgrounded? Why did you hire us? What did we do together that was most impactful?

We were lovingly described by one as ‘fun dad’ and ‘boring mum’. While that makes Stef sound frivolous and G sound like a real bore, the point was made that as a leader you need both - you need to be inspiring and engaging and ‘fun’, and you need to hold boundaries that help people feel safe enough to play with work. The other talked about G’s big picture, business thinking and Stef’s emotional intelligence.

Our hypothesis is that the first person feels like G, and plays like Stef. Whereas the second plays like G, and feels like Stef. So, they got different things out of us, and the solutions we built.

The brilliance of us as a pair is that we both separately embody both fun and seriousness, empathy and directness in very different ways. Different people connect with different parts of each of us, and the experiences and processes we build cater for both ways of connecting with humans, and getting work done.

The most impactful thing? Welcoming. Bringing a new person into a company shouldn’t just be about ensuring they can access all the things and know where to find their things. In knowledge-work, to do our jobs we need to work with people, collaboratively. You can only do that if you know and understand how people work. A new person needs to feel ‘safe enough’ to do their job. How do we expect them to do that when all they knew about the people they work with before they started their job was what they got from the interview process. A simple checklist of ‘how to work with me’ or an intro post in Slack that gets lost in the stream of posts. It has to be more than that. We built an embedded process that decreased time to productivity and improved outcomes for new hires.

So, what does that mean for what we’re building at Playgrounded?

We’re taking this thinking through the whole people experience lifecycle - engage people from the start with each other, in company mission, through the way you communicate strategy, in feedback and you’ll get awesome results.

We’re making a Stef & G pie full of fun, boring, practical, business, emotional support: practical process, embedded systems, real human connection, scalable beyond a person focused systematic, repeatable, awesome group of things.

It’s going to be pretty great.