PsychTalk Interview – Dr. Paul Friga
Intro:
Dr. Paul N. Friga is the Director of the Consulting Concentrations for undergrads and MBAs at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He teaches award-winning courses there in management consulting and strategy. Dr. Friga completed his Ph.D. and MBA at UNC Chapel Hill and previously worked as a management consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers and McKinsey & Company. His wide-ranging research has appeared in top journals and he has presented it at conferences worldwide. He coauthored the book The McKinsey Mind and recently wrote The McKinsey Engagement. He has joined us on PsychTalk to present some of his ideas about strategic decision-making, intuition, management consulting, and teamwork.
Questions:
I gave a short introduction, so I’d like to start by giving you a chance to tell us a bit more about yourself and your career. How and why did you transition from the private sector to academia? Give us a birds-eye view of the various projects you’ve worked on. What are you working on now?
One idea I’d like to start with is that the frameworks that consultants use can help individuals and organizations in many contexts. Tell us about how you have applied your consulting skills to help your church and community with strategic planning.
You open your most recent book, the McKinsey Engagement, with a scene of a Green Berets sniper team. What can military operations show us about team problem solving? Where else can we look for good ideas about teamwork?
You’ve distilled guiding principles for effective teams into the acronym“TEAM FOCUS”. First, could you tell us how you formulated this model? How do you think it should be used? Let’s break down what the model recommends and why. (Explain the interpersonal vs analytical clusters, and talk about each component.)
Last year a big study came out on the collective intelligence of teams, finding that the IQ of individual members was not an important factor, but that social sensitivity was very important to team performance. How does this affirm or supplement the interpersonal aspects of your TEAM FOCUS model? How does this mesh with the skills recruiters say they want in MBAs?
In your book, you have various “field stories” from the business world that illustrate your principles. Could you walk us through a couple of your favorites?
You wrote a paper walking through how you created a strategy for UNC Chapel Hill’s consulting programs. Tell us about how theoretical frameworks (e.g., “Paul’s 4 Ps of Strategy”) guided your implementation.
You’ve written academically about what intuition is and how it affects entrepreneurs. What’s your perspective on when people should trust their gut during strategic decision-making?
Your book The McKinsey Mind emphasizes the value of gathering data when addressing business problems. What do you do when teammates or clients don’t see as much need for data as you do?
In your consulting courses, you cover the important but delicate process of giving feedback to coworkers and teammates. What are some of the emotional hazards of this process, and how can feedback be made constructive?
Is there anything I forgot to ask?