EP383: Deb Mashek - The Power Of Collaboration

Michael Palmer: By having the opportunity to work with and work beside and learn next to and learn with people who have a different vantage point on whatever the problem is, whether it's a global issue or how we're going to help this particular client. But it's when we get to be with that other person that our ability to understand the complexity actually increases. And that's where we are able to innovate more impressive solutions. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com. The proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to the Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a fun one. Our guest is the founder of Myco Consulting. She's also the author of Collab-Hate. Interesting. How to build incredible collaborative relationships at work Even if you'd rather work alone. Deb Meschek, welcome to the show. It is such a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Michael. Yes, absolutely. Well, it's our pleasure to have you. Looking forward to this. And the title of your book is definitely interesting. And we're talking about collaboration today, or collabor-hating. And I love it. So before we get into it though, please share a little bit about you, your journey leading up to this point.

Guest: Thank you. So I'm a social psychologist, which means I study how the context, our social context, influences our behavior. And what I do at Maiko Consulting is I apply relationship theory to help people build better collaborations, especially high-stakes collaborations, things that are happening across silos, across stakeholders, across institutions, where there's a lot of, typically a lot a lot of complexity, and I come in and help people figure out how to do together better. My background is I grew up as an academic. So up until, I guess, 2017, I was a professor out at Harvey Mudd College. It's one of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. And there I was teaching and researching on the psychology of relationships and the psychology of collaboration and community building. And then the 2016 election happened. Here in the United States, and a lot of campuses melted down. And I thought, holy smokes, what's, what's going on here? We