KF #34. Builds Effective Teams Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Mark, welcome back!

Mark Murphy
Thank you for having me. I’m glad I got invited back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, you know, well, it took seven years. What’s that? It’s almost like a biblical punishment. You were exiled for seven years, Mark. But now…

Mark Murphy
I had to go wander out there for a bit and I made my way back now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about teamwork, team players. And could you maybe kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising, fascinating discovery you’ve made about teams in the seven years since we chatted last?

Mark Murphy
So, the biggest thing, one was not surprising, and that is there are plenty of people that find that the teams they’re on, that they’re forced to sit on every day, aren’t always great uses of their time. But the bigger issue was that, when we started studying this and we asked people, “Listen, is the team you sit on presently, is it actually taking advantage of your talents? Like, do you feel like you get to use your real abilities?”

And two thirds plus of people were like, “No, not really. Like, I’m forced to sit here. I have to go through, I’m part of the group and, you know, that’s good. But I don’t really get to use my strengths. I don’t get to do the thing that I am really well suited to.” And that led to the big kind of aha discovery about teams is that the most successful teams are teams that aren’t focused on trying to make everybody operate the same.

We have this kind of cliche definition of, “What is a team player?” Well, a team player, it’s usually like, they’re kind of outgoing, they’re very friendly, super agreeable, very conscientious, and they have high-end followership, they can get along, all that.

But it turns out that the best teams are more like a rock band, or a symphony orchestra, or an NFL team, or an NBA team. That is, if you look at an NFL team, you got some guys are like 350 pounds, you got others that are 220, some are six foot eight, some are five foot seven, some are really good at throwing a ball, some are good at catching a ball, some are good at pushing people, some are good at running fast.

There’s a weird mix of talents and abilities, and the best teams in business in the real world are ones that assemble sometimes weird seeming groups of people and let everybody do the thing that they’re really good at, rather than trying to stuff us all into a room and go, “We all got to act the same way. It’s all about cohesion. We can never say a cross word.”

Best teams are like, “Nah, no, no, this is, like, I need a center. I need a point guard. I need a forward. I need a shooting guard. I need a bunch of different talents. And y’all don’t have to look the same or act the same or think the same. In fact, it’s better if you don’t.” And that was kind of the big aha moment of this.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. And to your point about high agreeableness, well, we’re going to get there in a moment in terms of the five critical roles, one of them is a trailblazer. And, indeed, they don’t agree so much, and that’s super useful. And I think that’s just great to highlight right off the bat in terms of being a team player does conjure up images of what that’s “supposed to be.”

And I think I’ve even had moments in team conversations where it’s like, “Hmm, this doesn’t quite sound right to me, but I don’t want to cause trouble and I want to be a good team player. So maybe I’ll just keep quiet for now.” And, occasionally that’s the right move and, often, that’s the exact wrong move.

Mark Murphy
We just are releasing a new study next week on teams, and one of the findings was, we asked people, “Have you ever had an idea that you raised to the team and the team rejected out of hand?” And that was like nine out of 10 people. Or, “Have you had an idea that you were afraid to bring up to the group because you were afraid how people were going to react?” And that was, again, like, nine out of 10 people.

And it’s like, “How many brilliant ideas and innovations are we leaving on the table because people in the room were just afraid to say the thing that the emperor has no clothes, or there is a way better, faster way of doing this, or we are heading down a path that is going to waste all of our times?”

And if the idea of having a team is to get the best thinking possible out of all the people in the room, well, what good is that if we have people that are afraid to speak up because we told everybody, “You know, you got to go along to get along”? No. It kind of runs counter to what a team is supposed to be in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we heard some of those messages before when it comes to the benefit or value of diversity is, “Hey, we get to have different people with different experiences and that’s great.” And so that’s why we can see some relationships between, mathematically, in research, associated with diverse teams and better outcomes. But my understanding is that you get none of the benefit of that diversity if folks don’t feel like they can, in fact, speak up and share from their unique different experiences.

Mark Murphy
That’s exactly the thing, is that you can even assemble a great diverse group, and all various kinds of diversity, you can have – racial diversity, gender diversity, cognitive diversity, take your pick. It doesn’t matter. But if there is not an environment where we are actively seeking out the input from those folks, or we are telling everybody, “Listen, this is what it takes to be a team player.”

And again, usually, whenever we use the word team player, we’re usually using it in a pejorative, like, “You need to be more of a team player, and here’s what that means.” And we’re trying to, like, sand off the edges of people. And, well, it’s like, “Listen, sometimes it’s the edges that give us the brilliant insight.”

So, if I’m not making it safe enough for you to actually come into this room and do what you do well, if you don’t get to come in here and use your strengths and leverage them, well, then, I’m not getting any of the advantages of having diversity.

And the other side of it is, one of the reasons that so many people, I mean, and every one of your listeners, I would venture to guess, has, at one point or another, sat on a team where they’re like, “Well, there’s an hour of my life I’m never getting back. And it’s like this is an absolute nightmare.”

And one of the reasons people will sometimes feel like that is, like, “I don’t know what I’m doing here because you’re asking me to either be something I’m not, or you’re ignoring the thing that I am. Like, I have this particular set of skills and talents. Let me use those skills and talents. And if you’re not going to let me use them, then I don’t know why I’m here.”

Pete Mockaitis
A particular set of skills. Shout out to Liam Neeson. Well, yeah, so your book, Team Players: The Five Critical Rules You Need to Build a Winning Team, whenever I hear a sort of a typology, like, the five, I have to grill you a bit, Mark. What is the underlying research that says, in fact, there are five and not nine and not three? And how do we know that there are five and that this is real as opposed to something that Mark slapped together because he’s got to get another book out?

Mark Murphy
Yeah, a great question and a very fair one. So, the way this all came about was we started looking at teams, really effective teams and really ineffective teams, let’s say nicely.

And we started to look at, “Okay, well, what are the functions that actually get fulfilled in this team? Like, is there a task function? Is there a decision-making function? Is there an interpersonal smoothing over function, kind of a diplomacy function. “Is there a brainstorming or an ideation, an innovation kind of function? Is there a tracking function like, know, to-do list, milestones, Gantt charts, that kind of stuff.”

And as we started to dissect the various functions, one thing that quickly became clear was that the best teams are pretty good at making decisions, and we didn’t even care at the moment who was making the decisions, just, “Do decisions get made? Okay, cool. Is there a tracking kind of function on this team? Like, do you have any mechanism for ensuring that to-do’s get met? Do you have any kind of a peacekeeping function? You know, is there anything where, when conflict arises or conversations get a little tense, etc.?”

And so, the first thing was we identified that there are five kinds of rough buckets. Now, you can cut these buckets more finely. At one point, we had these cut into like 13 different functions. And we looked at that and said, “Well, okay, probably half of those are like played by the same people. And so maybe 13 is a little much.”

And so, we threw some, not to go too deep into this, but through some K-means cluster analysis, we kind of distilled this down into five that were notably distinct from each other, kind of buckets of work. And then we started to look at, “Okay, who are the people on the team? And what roles are they actually filling?”

And that’s where we discovered that, most of the time, for example, there’s usually somebody on the team, and a really good team, who is capable of making a tough decision. Maybe the group can decide for themselves, they take a vote, “Poof. No fuss, no muss.” But when the rubber hits the road and there you get a sticking point, is there somebody in the group who’s willing to raise their hand and go, “Wait a minute, okay, we’ve debated this long enough. Here’s the path we’re taking, let’s just go.”

That role was often not the same person that was playing that kind of peacemaker sort of role. Because as you might imagine, to play that tougher decision-maker role is a different kind of personality than the person who is kind of smoothing over ruffled feathers and smoothing over hurt feelings and bringing people back into feeling safe and comfortable in the group. Those were very distinct personality types.

So that’s how we came up with the five. It really wasn’t about the people, initially, as much as it was, “What does a team actually have to do to be successful?” I mean, you can take any kind of team. If you can’t make a decision, hey, it’s not going to be a good team. If you can’t hit a deadline on time, not going to be a good team.

When things get really heated, if you don’t have a way to resolve conflict, team’s not going to work all that well. So that’s the origin of this.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, tell us a bit more about the subsequent research associated with the outcomes that teams that have these roles see better stuff than teams that don’t.

Mark Murphy
Then, once we had these five roles, and so the five roles are there’s the director, and that’s the person who makes those decisions when necessary. They’re not making every decision, but they’re capable of making that decision. There’s the achiever. This is the person that they don’t necessarily want to be in charge. They’re the person who’s like, “Give me a task. Let me go do some stuff, and I’ll be the worker bee. Okay, cool.”

There’s a stabilizer, and that’s like your to-do list Gantt chart calendar milestone person. Then you have your harmonizer. That’s like your peacekeeper. And then there’s the trailblazer, and that’s the person that, you know, will come up with the crazy innovative ideas, the out-of-the-box, even if it’s sometimes annoying and irritating, but they will shake things up a bit.

Now, when we had those roles, we then went back and started to look at, “Okay, the really effective teams versus the less effective teams.” And what we discovered was, number one, that the best teams, really, really good teams, if you ask somebody, “What’s the best team you’ve ever been on?” start there. And in 97% of those teams, all five roles were filled.

Then ask people, “Okay, well, what’s the worst team that you’re currently sitting on?” Okay, and look at those teams. And what you would find is only about 20% of those teams actually had all five roles filled. They were missing roles.

So, for example, if you think about a team that, when you go, “Hey, can your team, does it actually decide anything? Like, is it capable of just pulling the trigger and making a real decision?” and they say, “No,” well, nine times out of 10, that’s because that team doesn’t have a director. It doesn’t have somebody who is willing to ante up and say, “Even if this is unpopular, I will make that really hard decision.” Every team needs somebody.

Or, if you ask the team, “Hey, do you guys actually hit your deadlines? Like, when a team decides it’s going to do something, do you actually deliver that thing on time?” And people say, “Nah, not really.” Well, it’s usually because you don’t have that person, and every good office has one, it’s the person who keeps the calendar, and is like, “Hey, wait a minute, timeline here. We got a deadline to hit. Like, let’s move this along. Don’t forget the to-dos.” You need that kind of task master.

And when you find these lower-performing teams, the ones that kind of drive us all nuts, what we find is, overwhelmingly, they are missing at least one, sometimes two or three of the roles. And then on the other end of the spectrum, sometimes those teams had too many of one role. If you think about teams where the team is, like, always in a fight over what the decision is going to be and who’s going to get to make the decision, usually, it’s because you got, like, two or three or four directors.

You got like a bunch of people that all think they should be in charge of making the final decision. And then half your team meeting is spent with those people kind of fighting with each other over what it is we’re going to decide. And that becomes every bit as much of a nightmare as a team that can’t make a decision.

That’s basically it. Sometimes you will see in a team, like, “Yeah, we got 10 people who are great at keeping the calendar, but we got, like, nobody actually willing to roll up their sleeves and do the work. We just got 10 people who, you know, want to keep us on track, but nobody actually like doing stuff.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when you mentioned the effective teams and the ineffective teams, what’s the data set?

Mark Murphy
So, this was across, we started with about 1200 teams that we looked at. It has since broadened out to now we’ve got over 100,000 people, and that’s spread across, now I think it’s broken 10,000 various teams. But the initial study, well, the very first pilot study was about 400 teams. Then it went up to about 1200, and then it just started scaling up from there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, but like where do you find the teams and assess the performance?

Mark Murphy
So, the teams initially come from either our research or our survey clients or our training clients. And so, we start with pools of people there. So, we’re dealing with organizations, so 95% of them are business organizations. And I say business because some of those are not for profit. So, there’s hospitals, there’s libraries, there’s a few government organizations.

But then the majority are your classic kind of for-profit, but it runs the gamut from organizations that, our initial cutoff, was an organization had to have at least a little over 50 people, and then all the way up to organizations with tens of thousands. And we set that limit, usually in studies like this, initially, because if you have a company with three people or eight people, and that’s like the entirety of the company, there can be a lot of confounding factors when you’re looking at a team.

So, we usually don’t touch the really small companies until later in the process, just because it’s, you never really know exactly what you’re getting because they’re so variable from each other. But then once you have a model, that’s where you can start to get some of the smaller shops.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And so then, how do we know? Part of it, I guess, you just recognize immediately from these descriptions, “Oh, yep, that’s a director. Yep, that’s a stabilizer. Got it.” But how do you recommend we understand and assess the makeup of a team?

Mark Murphy
Simplest, easiest way is at your next team meeting, go, “Hey, folks. Let’s try a little something. Here are these five roles. I want everybody to jot down, ‘What role do you think others would say that I play?’ and we’ll just go around, okay?” So, I’m Mark, I’m going to ask, “Okay, what’s the role that I think others would say that I most typically play on this team?”

“Okay, Jane, what about you? Oh, Pete, what about you? What role would you say people are most likely to say you typically play. Frank?” and we just go around, and we each identify, “Okay, what’s the role that we are probably most typically playing?” That’s one.

Once you have a pretty good sense of that, if you look around the room, and you’re like, “Huh, everybody said that they’re the director. Huh, we might have a problem here.” That’s step one, is just see what kind of distribution of people you actually have.

The second thing then is, based on those descriptions, is go, “Okay, well, what role really feels like it’s one that I would want to play? And maybe I’m not currently playing it, but what’s a role that maybe I would like to try out?” So, if I’m somebody that I am always in the role of stabilizer, I’m the one who is always keeping track of the deadlines and the to-do list and nagging people to get their work in on time, blah blah blah.

And maybe I look at this and I go, “You know what, I would love to just be the achiever. I would love to not have to manage the to-do list for this group, and I would love if somebody would just give me an assignment and let me go make the PowerPoint presentation. Just let me go roll up my sleeves and do some work without having to manage all of the other to-do’s for this group.”

And sometimes what you’ll find is that the role that we’re currently being forced to play isn’t the one that we necessarily really want to play, but we’re, for whatever reason, sometimes there’s just nobody else to do it, but we’re kind of forced into it.

But if you know, “Here’s the role that I’m usually seen as playing. Here’s the role that I most commonly play in the team. And here’s the role that I would really love to play,” it’s not that you’re going to magically be able to instantly do 100% of the role you would love to do, because you might still be necessary in the role you’re doing.

But if you can start to bleed this out a little bit and merge those two and go, “You know, some days, I want to be the stabilizer, but some days, I want to be the achiever. Some days, I want to be the harmonizer. Or, some days, I want to try that trailblazer thing.” Cool. Now you have a way to kind of identify something about the work you’re doing that might be more interesting to you, something that might get you a little more excited to go to this team meeting.

If your team can come together and say, “Listen, let’s give each other a chance to actually make sure, A, all the roles are covered, but, B, if you want to try and do something a little different in this group, okay, cool, try it. And let’s see if we can make it work because, if we can get you doing something that gets you excited, you’re that much more likely to be invested in the group and committed and feel good about the job.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so let’s say we’ve done this good work, we’ve identified the roles where people are doing the roles that light them up, they’re feeling good about it, we’ve got a reasonable balance or mix on the team. Once that’s in play, what are some of the best and worst practices for really rocking and rolling together?

Mark Murphy
So, a couple of things, and these are going to, some of them are a little weird. So, number one, every group needs somebody to make decisions, yes. So, sounds like I’m advocating for some kind of hierarchy. But one of the things we discovered was that, in really good teams, there’s always somebody who makes the decision, but it’s not always the same somebody. And that was kind of the big aha moment.

So, if you think of it like this, you got a basketball team. You have your Hall of Fame, All-Star player. It’s three seconds left in the game. They’ve got the ball, but three defenders converge on them. They’re looking around, and they’re like, “Okay, I could try and shoot it, but there’s three defenders on me. This is going to go terribly.”

And so, they look around and they see that this guy on the other side of the court, who’s a good shooter, but is not a Hall of Fame, not an All-Star. And they pass them the ball, and they’re like, “You know what, you’re in the best position to take this last-second shot. You’re in charge. You take the shot. Because I got three other bodies draped on me. There’s no way, whatever I do, it’s going in. But there’s a chance that you could actually make the shot.”

That’s what we call an adaptive hierarchy. NASA, very famously implemented the idea of adaptive hierarchies. If there’s a rocket ship that is having problems and you got somebody on the team that’s, like, the expert in fuel cells and knows everything about rocket fuel, and they’re like, “Listen, all the rest of us are pretty good at trajectories and telemetry and all the rest, but we’re not the expert in rocket fuel.”

They go, “Okay, well, who should be in charge of decisions about the rocket fuel?” “I don’t know that person over there who’s the expert in rocket fuel. When it comes to fuel related issues, they’re in charge.”

But the thing that is cool, and this is one thing that makes groups really interesting when they’re really clicking, is that it’s not so much everybody gets a turn necessarily, because that’s not the idea. It’s that everybody who is the expert in that particular area, gets to take charge of that particular area they’re expert in.

So, it’s how you get a team that can always make decisions. They have a clear hierarchy, but it doesn’t feel rigid and like some, you know, royal family thing where I always have to bow and genuflect in front of so and so. No, it’s maybe today is my turn to be in charge of making this particular decision, because it’s an area that I’m really good at.

And so, that’s one big thing that you can do as a team that is trying this out for the first time is just go, “Let’s have whoever is most expert at this thing be in charge of making the decision for that thing. And tomorrow it’ll be somebody else. The day after that will be somebody else, but let’s rotate this a bit.”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And you also mentioned in the book the research showing that teams generate three times as many valuable ideas when the rules are each thinking independently before coming together. And can you dig into that a little bit and give us an example of that?

Mark Murphy
Yes, it’s, you know, one of the things that every team has tried at one point or another is brainstorming, right? So, you all sit in a room and you just start ideating. There’s no bad ideas and we’re just going to throw some stuff up on the whiteboard and just toss as many ideas out there as you possibly can. Okay, cool.

The problem is that a herding effect starts to take place. And sometimes it’s known as a conformity bias, is that, as people start throwing their ideas up on the wall, it starts to become clear that some of these ideas are more kind of mainstream than other ideas are. And what ends up happening is people start to coalesce around a very narrow set of ideas. And the crazy ones, which might hold your best thinking, kind of get pushed off to the side.

So, what researchers discovered was that you would get much better ideas, when they put people in a room and had them brainstorm, okay, that was level one. But when you told people, “Okay, we’re going to come into the room and we’re going to have a brainstorming session. But before we do that, you think by yourself for 10 minutes, just come up with your own brainstorming ideas for 10 minutes, then we’ll all come into the room together.”

And what they found was that the ideas got better, more innovative, even more profitable and valuable when people took 10 minutes of thinking by themselves before coming into the room to do the “brainstorming” because they were not filtering themselves when they were thinking alone.

And so, the next time you have a team meeting, one great thing to try is tell your group, “Listen, I want everybody to think about this alone. And I want you to come in with your ideas written down.” One reason for making everybody write down their ideas, or type them up, whatever, before coming into the meeting is that they can’t say, “Oh, I didn’t have any more ideas,” because you wrote them down.

So, this way, it really forces everybody to have their crazy, big innovation ideas, whatever, out of the box, and put it down on paper, and then come into the meeting room. Now you know that you are not going to get people who are afraid to speak up. You’re not going to get people that are filtering themselves and holding back their great ideas because they don’t want to seem like a weirdo. You get all those great crazy ideas and that’s where some of the best stuff comes from.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Mark, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention?

Mark Murphy
I think the one other thing to think about is that, and this is just a way of making teams more effective, is going back to something we talked about earlier, Pete, is the, “Listen, what role would you love to play on this team?” I think this one is really important because, one of the things that I found when we were doing this research, is that there are a lot of people who are like, “Listen, I’m kind of quiet. I’m more introverted. I’m not predisposed to love groups necessarily.”

But when we found that even the most introverted of people, when they got to play the role that they were really good at, they’re like, “Yeah, I love groups. This actually isn’t so bad. This isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be at all,” just because they got to do the thing that really mattered to them. And it’s just such a simple thing, asking people, like, “What’s the role you’d like to try out in this group?”

Give it a shot because, if it gives somebody on your team that maybe didn’t love teams, the chance to actually enjoy working on a team, man, it can make all the difference in the world and it’s not that hard to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mark Murphy
Well, the one that relates to teams, and it’s going to sound weird, Michael Jordan was walking off the court one day after practice in the late ‘90s, one of his assistant coaches, Tex Winters, hollers out to him, “Hey, Michael, there’s no I in team.” And Jordan looks back at him, and goes, “Yeah, but there is in win.”

Now, what Michael meant by that was, “Yeah, you know what? I’m the most important person.” But what he later came to find was that what that really means is that, “I have a role I have to play, but you know what? I got to be willing to pass the ball to the other I.”

So, when he learned to trust Scottie Pippen, when he learned to trust Dennis Rodman, when he learned to trust Steve Kerr, for example, to take the last-second shot, all of a sudden, the idea that there are a bunch of I’s on a team that really do make a team successful, you know what, yeah, they’re not technically an I in team, but there is a me.”

And my whole thing is, listen, find the me’s, allow the me’s on your team to be themselves. And you’re going to have one heck of a higher-performing team.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mark Murphy
So, one that I quote in the book, but it’s just such a classic study, Solomon Asch in the ‘50s did this study, and this speaks to what you were asking me about with brainstorming, for example. So, there’s eight people sitting in a room, and these eight people have to look at a sheet of paper and there are lines drawn on the sheet of paper.

So, like maybe one line is like the length of your thumb, and then another line is like the length of your first finger. So, there’s clearly a big difference in the length of these lines, right? And so, the people in the room, they were all asked like, “Okay, well, which line is longer?” Now, seven of the eight people in the room were actors. Only one of the eight people was the actual subject of the study.

And so, the seven people would go, “Well, the thumb length line, that’s the longer one.” And the eighth guy in the room, or gal, would look and go, “What? Are you nuts? Like, that’s clearly, that’s the shorter line. That’s not the longer line. Like, anybody could see this.” But because the other seven were like, “Nope, that’s the longer line,” they started to doubt themselves, even though their eyes told them crystal clearly, which is the longer line.

Three quarters of the subjects in that study changed their answers at one time or another through the course of the study to conform with the group. Thirty percent of all of the answers, people knowingly gave the wrong answer because they wanted to fit in. That, I think, is such an important study to bear in mind.

And even though it’s 70, what, 75 years old now, it is still as relevant today as it was back then. Because if you really want to get some innovative thinking in your group, and you want a team to perform, the last thing you want is somebody in the room to lie to you just because they don’t want to look, to be the only one who is willing to tell you the truth. That is just absolute death for a team.

So just always kind of think of that, “If seven other people are saying something, how am I going to get that one person to speak up?”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Mark Murphy
The one I love, still, is a book by Erich Fromm and it’s from 1940-41, somewhere in there, called Escape from Freedom.

And the book is basically an exploration about, “Why do, sometimes, people give up their freedom? Why do they not want to make decisions?” And it comes back to a lot of what we’re talking about here, is that sometimes, it can feel lonely to be the only person making this decision.

And while, you know, it’s, again, it’s what, 80-some odd years old now, there’s a lot of great wisdom in it. And while not everything in it is perfect, it does raise the question, I think, for every team leader is, “How am I taking this into account with my group? Am I making it okay for people to make decisions?”

Like, when we talk about adaptive hierarchies and rotating responsibility, all of this is to try and grow people that are more capable of making decisions so that I don’t have to do everything. I want people to have more freedom and autonomy. And to do that, I have to do some of these things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Mark Murphy
So, there are a bunch. So, I’m going to give an AI answer and I’m going to give the either ChatGPT or Claude, but one of the things that we started doing with it was, so we have statisticians on our team that, when we create new studies, we’re running all of our statistics. But we started using ChatGPT and Claude, both of them, to model out different scenarios with our statistics, not just to get another set of eyes and error check it.

So, like when we, you know, “Let’s run the K-means cluster analysis and see how these groups come up.” But we can then run scenarios that, if we were doing it just like in SPSS or R or something, would take weeks. But now we can just throw it in and say, “Okay, here’s the model we developed. Here’s the statistical model. Here’s all of our data. Now, run this scenario this way. Now run it again this way.”

And so, we can model out a hundred different scenarios in a day, where it used to be, if we wanted to model out five different scenarios, it would take two weeks. And I know it’s kind of a weird use case, but one of the things that AI does exceptionally well is it will take an idea you’ve already developed, with data you already have, and allow you to play with, “What would happen if kind…?” of scenarios, “What would happen if these people weren’t in the study? What would happen if we had 10 more months that looked like this?” and just model out and do a little more scenario planning.

So, that’s one of my favorites, it’s a tool everybody has access to. It’s just, I don’t see as many people using it in that way, but it’s such a fun, cool use case for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Mark Murphy
One habit that I do try and maintain, even when I’m traveling, is just 30 minutes of showing up for some kind of exercise. Even if it is nothing more than squats and pushups and sit-ups in my hotel room, it is one habit that does help set the day on a more effective path. And it is sort of like, you know, when you hear retired military folks talk about making the bed.

It’s something over which I do have control and it is something over which I can do pretty much regardless of where I am or what part of the planet I happen to be traveling to. It’s even if it’s just, you know, 15 minutes of some pushups and then some squats and then even not good sit ups, whatever. It’s something. And it’s something you can check the box, and go, “You know what? That’s something done today.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Mark Murphy
If you go to LeadershipIQ.com, there’s a Team Players section on the website. And one thing that I do encourage people to do is there’s a free quiz on there. It’s called, “What kind of team player are you?” Take the quiz and see what comes out. And then, listen, the thing is free, have your team take it, too, and see how you come out. There’s a bunch of different research studies and resources like that, but it literally takes less than five minutes. So, not that hard to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. Mark, thank you.

Mark Murphy
Thanks again for having me. Hopefully, it won’t be seven years next time.

Pete Mockaitis
Vanessa, welcome!

Vanessa Druskat
Thank you, Pete. It’s great to be here with you and your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. I’m excited to be chatting about emotional intelligence today. And so, since we’re going to say the word a lot, I think it’d be helpful to do some defining upfront. It’s a popular term. What exactly do you mean when you say emotional intelligence?

Vanessa Druskat
I like to think of it as recognizing emotion and using it as data. So, we now know that we never turn our emotion off, and people around us don’t turn emotion off, and we send signals to one another through emotion.

And so, the question is whether or not we recognize it in ourselves and what it channels to others, and whether or not we recognize it in others. And then once we know it’s there, do we manage it? Do we think about it? That kind of thing. So, emotional intelligence is using it as data.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And I think some people might be just sort of brush aside emotional intelligence like, “Well, yeah, of course, you know, I’m going to be respectful and not a jerk and try to listen to people and understand where they’re coming from.” So, am I doing it? Am I doing the things to be emotionally intelligent there, Vanessa? Or is there more to it?

Vanessa Druskat
Oh, a good one. Well, it’s not about just being nice. It is about fulfilling the goals in the moment. And, of course, I like to think of those goals as being humanistic in intent. So, for example, sometimes you have employees that just don’t listen to you unless you get harsh. You recognize their emotions, that they’re not affected by your feedback, and you got to get tougher with them. And so, you can read that in them and you modulate your emotion and get it tougher.

Let me give you an example. I tend to be very empathetic. And so, I have a lot of students, you know I’m a university professor, I have a lot of students who come and argue with me about their grades. One time, I had a student come and say, “I’m going to lose my scholarship if you don’t change my grades.” And in the back of my head, I was being very empathetic and thinking, “Oh, no, there goes her scholarship.” But I had to be fair. And she had many opportunities during the year to come talk to me, and I had said that to her.

So, anyway, point being that I had to manage my empathy in that case and think about the whole, all the other students whose grades I wasn’t going to change. So, anyway, it’s not just about being nice. It’s about thinking about, “What are your goals?” Fairness is always a goal for me and I override my empathy in order to become fair quite often.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, to your definition there, it’s, like, you’re recognizing your emotional instinct, like, “Oh, shucks, that sounds really tough for this person. I’d hate to put them in a tight spot. Oh, I really don’t want them to suffer.” So, you’re recognizing that empathetic emotion, and then you’re using it as data, it’s like, “So, therefore, I’m going to need to dig deep and kind of present something counter to what is sort of naturally would bubble up inside of me.”

Vanessa Druskat
Exactly. And another great example is nervousness, anxiety. So, I talk to a lot of leaders, especially since I work with MBAs. They’re just starting out in their career and they’re not feeling confident. And I have to coach them to turn their nervousness into excitement. So, if they recognize they’re nervous, it’s easier to work with it and to manage it. People don’t want to be led by a leader who doesn’t sound like they know where they’re going.

It’s a really key skill. We now know that emotional intelligence is the heart of social skills, interpersonal skills. We never used to know how to measure interpersonal skills. Now we do, because interpersonal skills, every interaction involves an exchange of emotion. And, by the way, if we want to merge into why do I study emotion in teams, it’s because teams are hotbeds of emotion.

Think about all the interactions that are going on at any time, “Who’s talking? Who’s not talking? Who’s saying things? How are they saying? How is that affecting me and my ideas?” And so, if you think about teamwork, it’s really a place or a situation in which you want to have an emotionally intelligent environment.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. And you say, “Now we can measure it.” Tell me how is this measured?

Vanessa Druskat
Well, there are several different measurements for emotional intelligence. I would say that there are probably four really great ones out there. You can Google it. You can go to the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. The acronym is CREIO, C-R-E-I-O. And we list all of them.

I’m on the exec board of that organization. We list all the assessments that are out there on that website. And you can take a look at critiques of them, pros and cons of all of them, but there are a lot of options now. There are self-assessments. It turns out self-assessments tend not to be so great.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was going to say, if you were going to go there, I was going to challenge you. Because, I mean, I’ve taken some of these, like, “Yes, I strongly agree,” or, “I very frequently take into account the other emotions of the people on my team,” or, “Yes, I respect norms in my team.”

And so, it’s like, well, we’ve had Tasha Eurich on the show a couple of times talking about self-awareness and how people tend to be not as self-aware as they think that they are. And so, yeah, the self-assessment, I think, has some value, but also has plenty of potential to be wildly off for many folks. So, how is it done in practice then beyond the self-assessment?

Vanessa Druskat
Well, there are some scales that, first of all, ask others about how you come across, “Are you empathetic?” and various permutations of what that looks like. And then there are some that ask sort of deep questions, like, “What would you do in this circumstance?” And you have to make selections about how you would manage your emotions or help others manage their emotions or how emotionally aware you’d be. So, there’s a lot of good options out there.

But I got to tell you, you know, there’s also a lot of different ways of measuring IQ. And so, you know, and there’s a lot of disagreements. I’ve been in meetings with a bunch of IQ researchers, and they can’t agree on a definition. And it’s pretty well the same with emotional intelligence. I mean, we do tend to agree on the definition, but there are nuances.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Well, that’s interesting. And I guess I’m curious in terms of, if anyone is continuing to discount like, “Oh, yes, emotional intelligence, that’s just common sense. Of course, that’s a thing that we should just do as kind humans who are thinking through stuff.” What’s something that’s often overlooked or undervalued or counterintuitive? What’s some stuff that people think they know or understand about this emotional intelligence stuff that, in your experience, you realize, “Hmm, au contraire, many folks are quite mistaken here.”

Vanessa Druskat
All right, two things I’ll say. One is that they think this is a fad. They just think it’s another one of these things. But there has been so much research done on it. We now have meta-analyses, many of them. So basically, that’s studies of hundreds of studies. That train left the station a while ago. This really does predict leader effectiveness. It does predict the performance of your employees.

Let me give you an example for that, and then I’ll come back and say more about what people don’t realize. One of the things that we don’t think a lot about is how much we demonstrate care and respect to the people who work for us. It turns out that something like 50% to 70% of people don’t feel respected by their bosses.

Now, I don’t think any boss goes in assuming that they want to be disrespected. They just don’t know how they come across. And so, that’s the kind of thing that will turn off motivation or will turn off your ability to think clearly. I don’t know whether or not your audience realizes it, but we are emotional beings and our emotion affects our ability to think clearly.

So, when we’re nervous, we simply, our cognition is not as strong as it could be when we’re feeling what we consider homeostatic. A little bit of nervousness is good. It sharpens our focus. But overwhelming nervousness just destroys our ability to think.

And so, if you’re the kind of leader who comes across as disrespectful or skeptical or many different negatives that can be taken, any behavior, any nonverbal behaviors that you send to your workers can be construed in ways that reduce, not only reduce their ability to think and work well, but that turn off their motivation.

So, we’re more motivated when we feel we’re part of the picture, when we’re cared about, when we think we add value, when we know. One of my doctoral students, I write about this in my new book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team. One of my doctoral students did a study on which leaders sort of jumped on board to a huge organizational change that she was studying.

And she thought it’s going to be personality, it’s going to be all kinds of things. She was in the organization for a full year while they were going through the change, and so she did a whole bunch of data collection up front and then looked at who jumped on the change, what ended up happening. And the one question that threw out every other piece of data she collected was, “Do I feel respected and valued by my boss?”

And those who did, jumped on the change. They were more amenable to the change. They helped their leaders roll out the change. If you felt like you were replaceable, in the eyes of your boss, you were much more reticent about it. You were more defensive about the change. So, those little behaviors have huge consequences.

And so, coming back to your original question, which is, “What do people not know about emotional intelligence?” I think the people who don’t understand, haven’t bothered to look at it, don’t recognize that humans are emotional beings. There is so much neuroscience out there now. Neuroscientists are saying, “Look, we’ve got so much data. We have to change the way we operate in organizations.”

It’s crazy to go along and operate as usual because so much of the way people behave depends on their emotions, how they feel about being in the environment that they’re in. And so, you can’t just treat people as if they’re objects. You’re going to have motivation problems and you can do it for a while.

It’s kind of like the cheapest way to build a team is to have an enemy, going into battle, “We got an enemy. We got to beat them. Everybody’s going to.” The esprit de corps automatically comes. We’re wired that way. But you can’t do that more than once in a while. The tight deadline will motivate, but you burn people out, and that’s not your everyday motivation.

Everyday motivation comes from emotion. There’s no motivation without emotion. And it can be fear, or it can be a sense of belonging and a sense of social worth and contribution, which is what everybody wants. We get a high. We literally get a dopamine hit in our brains when we feel cared about and part of something, where people include us and value us. And it’s not that hard to create that if you know what you’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so much good stuff. Now when you say in the research associated with change management, one question threw out everything, by that language, do you mean this one question was so predictive that all of the others were kind of inconsequential to consider?

Vanessa Druskat
Yes, everybody focuses on personality. Everybody wants to focus on personality. And I got to tell you, personality is not a great predictor of behavior in complex situations. People have said that for decades. We just like it. It sounds so clear. It’s intuitive, you know?

Personality is very easy to study. It’s very easy to blame. There are many other things that are harder to study, emotional intelligence being one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so feeling respected and valued, is the top and, apparently, most people don’t feel this. Could you share, like, what are some of the best practices or worst practices that are common? Because, in a way, it doesn’t seem like it should be that hard to respect and value people such that they are feeling respected and valued.

And yet, apparently most managers aren’t getting it done right now. So, what do you see are the top behaviors that you think folks need to start doing because they’ve overlooked it or stop doing, because they don’t realize how damaging it is?

Vanessa Druskat
Well, there’s two things I want to say there. One is I think that leaders need to start working on their emotional intelligence. When I look at what it requires to send those messages of respect and value, it often requires managing your own emotions, managing the point that you don’t feel respected.

So, what happens is that there’s a cascading effect that goes on in organizations. And we’ve long known that a lot of managers, a lot of leaders are kind of stuck in the middle, where they’re not getting the love, if you will, just call it love, from people above them. And yet they have to turn around and pass it on below. So that’s not easy.

And so, it really has to start at the top. But if it doesn’t, you don’t have to pass that kind of negativity down. And, in fact, when you do, your team won’t work as well as it could. And that really requires recognition, understanding, understanding self-awareness or yourself. So, for example, back to this idea of me being empathetic. I really fundamentally think it’s one of my biggest skills.

Well, I periodically do these EI assessments just because I use them so often. I want to know how I’m coming across. There was one point at which my colleagues all rated me about as low as you can get in empathy. And I thought, “What’s going on there?” And the reason was that I was so busy, I was running past them in the hallways. I was cutting off conversations. I wasn’t being my best self. And I had it in me. I just wasn’t demonstrating it. And I didn’t realize.

So, again, sometimes you don’t know how you come across. Leaders are often the last ones to know how they come across. And so those assessments can be really useful. But moving the conversation towards what my area of expertise is and what I wrote the book about, which is, “How do you build this into a team?”

Because what we don’t do well is teach leaders how to build good teams. And teams, what matters in teams is how team members interact with one another. Teamwork is not about how the leader interacts with each individual or each individual’s interpersonal skills that they never get to use in the team. Teamwork is about how we help our team members to interact with one another.

And because teams are really interactions, and as I mentioned earlier, they’re hotbeds of emotion because there are so many interactions, and so what you want to have in a team, what you want to build in a team, are expectations, routines, norms that helps team members interact effectively with one another.

So, just simply, do your team members listen to one another? Okay, probably not. The average team members, they don’t. They’re thinking about what they’re going to say. They’re not thinking about what the other person says because they’re trying to impress. They’re trying to compete. So that’s a norm. A norm is that when you make comments, you’re trying to impress others. You’re not really trying to add on to what others are saying.

And so, what you need to do is change the norms, change the routines, build an environment where the expectations that people have for one another are about listening, caring, building on one another’s ideas. And when you don’t do that, you get called out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, how does one build that environment?

Vanessa Druskat
Yeah. Well, the first thing you got to do is you got to take a look at the norms that define how people interact in your team. So, every team has norms. And so, what are norms? Norms are, they’re our perceptions of how we’re supposed to act in this environment. So, every time we go into a new environment, we analyze what’s going on, we look at the people with status, and we figure out how things work around here.

And so, every environment, every team, differs a little bit. And so, what I’ve tried to figure out is, “What’s in the environment of those teams that are doing really well, that are surpassing their goals and performing at the top?”

And I tried to define those norms. Well, I haven’t tried. That’s what I’ve done. My colleagues and I have done that. And we’ve come up with this model of specific norms that build that environment. And so, I can lay out what those norms are for you. But the idea here is that you change expectations about how you’re supposed to behave.

And we usually don’t think about the norms, but behavior is not random. We always look to others. And so, what you want to have is not a team where everybody listens to the boss and everyone listens to the people they think are the smartest or the ones with the most social power in the room. But you want to have a team where everyone contributes and you’re not wasting talent in the room.

Because we know, we know, and we’ve known this for decades, that the more participation you have, the better your team’s performance. We’ve also known that you don’t have to have stars. You don’t have to have geniuses in your team. And, in fact, if you have a team of geniuses and stars and top performers, they won’t perform as well as a mediocre group that has norms that use the talent in the room.

Because, think about it, the stars are often each trying to show who’s smarter. And again, back to what I said earlier, they’re not building on one another’s ideas. They’re not listening. They’re not integrating. And that’s where teamwork really happens. That’s where we solve the complex problems. Every worthwhile innovation in the history of humankind has been developed by a team of people working together well.

People like to think that it’s Steve Jobs who developed the iPhone. No. Maybe you’ve heard the stories, but he didn’t want the iPhone. His team had to convince him. He used to take the iPhone and throw it against the wall when everybody, or the phones that people would give him. He always relied on his teams.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, let’s hear a few of these norms that make all the difference.

Vanessa Druskat
Sure. So, we have collapsed them into three different categories or buckets. The first one is about what we talked about earlier. And that’s really a focus on the individual and about getting to know people, building a sense of belonging and respect in the team, and building enough belonging that you can give one another feedback and people will take it. So, if people feel cared about, they’ll take feedback.

So, that’s the first cluster. And we consider that as just your launching pad. Because we’ve always known, and again we’ve known this for decades, that if you don’t take care of the individual, the individual is not engaged, and that’s especially true in a team. If you’re just doing your individual work, it’s fine. But if you’re supposed to share your information with others and build on their ideas, then you really need to feel part of that whole. So that’s the first cluster.

The second cluster, we call it, “How we learn and advance together.” And there are four norms in this cluster that get the team meeting together and talking about what’s working well, what needs to be changed, what’s coming down the pike, what are some things that the team needs to be looking out for. So, basically, being more proactive about changes and also being hopeful.

So, we talk about that as being allowing in the pessimism and also allowing in the optimism. Not toxic optimism, but really thinking about, “What are we doing we’re doing well? We want to keep doing that.” And, anyway, allowing all voices, you create a shared mental model for how we’re moving forward. There are no dumb questions. Everyone’s voice is included.

By the way, this is, again, what we see in the top performing team. So, I’m not making this up. These are all norms that we see over and over again. They get in the room together and anything goes and they’re pretty efficient with it. If you do this as a routine, if you do these things routinely, you’re not wasting a lot of time.

The third cluster of norms, there’s only two in that cluster, those are about reaching outside to your stakeholders. So, again, the highest performing teams have a sense of humility about their level of knowledge or what they know. And they recognize that there are people outside that can help them think more proactively, think about what’s coming down the pike, and also just think more innovatively.

And so, they reach out to stakeholders, they’ll invite their boss’s boss into a Zoom meeting or whatever, or Teams meeting, just for a 10-minute Q&A about, “How’s our work? How’s it affecting you? What’s keeping you up at night so we can link into that and know what’s coming down? What do you think we need to know right now?”

You bring that in, it changes that conversation that happens in the middle bucket. So, anyway, they reach out and bring people in, experts, and things like that. So those are the three buckets. Care for your individuals, make sure you’re aligned and you’re constantly assessing and anticipating what’s coming down. And everyone is involved.

And I want to say, I mentioned earlier the sense of respect and belonging that’s in that first bucket, but if you’re not included in these conversations about the future, you know you don’t really belong. It’s a fleeting kind of thing. And so, you really want to bring everybody into that. And then, finally, reaching out.

So, anyway, those are the three buckets of norms. We’ve taken them out on the road. We’ve helped leaders build them and improve their team performance, better decisions, more market share in their area, and things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could we zoom in on two specific norms and maybe let’s pick some norms that are extra transformative and extra easy to pull off and yet somewhat uncommon?

Vanessa Druskat
Sure. All right, I’m going to pick two, one in the first cluster it seems nobody ever wants to make time for, and then one in the second cluster, which is about aligning and learning together. The first cluster, the number one norm in the model is what we call “Understand team members,” understand your team members.

And so, this norm is about getting to know one another, “Who are you? What do you care about? How do you analyze problems? What are your skills? What are your weaknesses?” Personality surveys can help with that, but that’s just one of many things. What you need to do is you need to know how to pass information to one another.

You need to know how to speak to one another, “What does that person care about? What keeps them up at night? What are they excited about? What’s their busy season?” Let me give you a couple examples. I had a team that I worked with where one member, a team member said to the others, “You know, I don’t answer the phone.” And they were like, “What? Who doesn’t answer their phone?”

This is, by the way, a multicultural team, and so they were in many different locations, very high level, and it was a leadership team. And everybody in the team thought that the person was just a jerk. We stereotype people. And for one reason or another, the person just, who was an introvert and didn’t like talking on the phone.

So, anyway, we started peeling the layer of who that person was, and it enabled people to interact with him more fully. And guess what? He started sharing more information with them. And information is gold in a lot of organizations. And when everyone, we started peeling those onions of who we are, what we know, and what’s on your mind right now, I can say, “Well, Pete, if that’s on your mind, I got some ideas for you. That’s what’s worked in my division. This may work in your division.”

And so, when you peel the onion of who people are, it does a few things. A, you can’t belong if you don’t feel known and understood. And, B, it brings you more into the conversation. And, by the way, I mentioned Steve Jobs a while ago. He had a coach that coached his teams. And one of the number one thing that coach did was get people in the room talking about what he called trip reports, “What happened to you over the last week? Where were you? What did you notice? What did you see?”

And his motive was to help one another understand what was on this person’s mind, and to learn more about one another so that they could work together more effectively and they could feel more connected. So, anyway, that’s a norm. Nobody wants to waste the time to get to know one another, but I got to tell you, I’ve never seen a high-performing team where members don’t know one another.

Especially when the teams are remote or hybrid or dispersed in any way, there’s a psychological distance that people feel. And a lot of team members feel like they’re the only one who isn’t known, or, “Everybody else knows one another, just not me.” And that’s a recipe for disaster. So, anyway, let me stop there. That’s one norm. Do you want to ask any more about that, or I’ll move to the second one?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I want to know then, when it comes to understanding team members, what are some of the behaviors, practices, the things teams do regularly that facilitates that?

Vanessa Druskat
Yes. Great question. The most obvious one that a lot of teams do and that really does work is something called check-ins at start of meetings.

Pete Mockaitis
We were just talking about check-ins at great depth with Bree Groff, and about how great they are.

Vanessa Druskat
Oh, cool. I’m glad. Bree, I know Bree. I’m glad that she talked about check-ins. Maybe a difference between what I would say, because I know her emphasis is on enjoying the workplace. What I would say is the questions need to be good ones. A lot of the teams that I work with, people don’t want to talk about their personal lives. But they will talk about, “What’s on your mind? What are you excited about? What are you nervous about right now? What are the biggest challenges you’re having?”

You have to cap these check-ins with 30 seconds each or something. But you can get a sense of what’s going on in a person’s life and how you can work together. You don’t feel so alone when you find out others in your team are having challenges like you. It’s a brilliant way of building a more supportive environment in the team.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in practice then, that might just be asking that question, “What are you excited about? What are you worried about?” And just going around each person at the beginning of a meeting or something like that?

Vanessa Druskat
Yes. And as I mentioned in the book, I wouldn’t start with that if it’s the first time you’re doing it. I might start with an easier question, you know, “What was the best job you’ve ever had? Where did you work before this?” you know, little things. And then I would get deeper. But you know what I advise leaders to do is to pass those questions off to team members.

So, put somebody in charge for a month in the check-in questions. And help them realize that they need to start light, but you can get deeper as you go. The other thing is to find out whether or not anyone in the team wants to talk about their personal lives. There’s a lot of teams where people just don’t want to, they just want to have a clear demarcation between, you know, what’s going on with their kids or their partner and what goes on in the workplace. So, anyway, that’s that.

Another, one of my favorite ones, let me just say this, because this can be even, take you even to deeper levels of understanding, something I like to call a gallery walk. And this is where whoever’s in charge of the questions gives everyone a flipchart paper, if you’re meeting face to face. I’ll tell you how to do it if you’re not in a minute. And then you answer a bunch of questions.

So, “What does this team need to know about you?” or, “What do you like most? What do you like least about this team? What do think we need to change? What’s working well? What do you think is working well?” Or, “What was the best team experience you ever had? What were the ingredients in it that you want to replicate in this team?” you know, little things like that that can teach you.

You can also do it with pictures. So, I’ve had team members bring in pictures of their old rugby team or pictures of them skiing with their, of course I lean towards sports because I love sports, but skiing with their family and the camaraderie they felt on that holiday. But, anyway, and you put it up on the wall and people walk around and read one another’s and they can comment on it, and it’s over with pretty quickly.

You can do that virtually by just having everyone bring in a PowerPoint slide and you get 30 seconds to read off your PowerPoint slide, your answers. And it’s a powerful way of getting a lot of information pretty quickly. I am constantly trying to get to the point where I know you well enough to give you feedback. And I care about you. I’m no longer stereotyping you. Because I really believe that giving one another feedback is important in teams. I’ve seen it work so well.

If you can build that level of respect and knowledge of one another, there’s different ways to give feedback. Some people want to hear it, boom, like that. They need to or they won’t listen to it. Some people want it very gentle. And so, caring about how you give the feedback allows the feedback to get heard. And I think, again, this individual cluster of norms, we call it how we help one another succeed.

Okay. So, the second norm is one that we call proactive problem solving, and team members love this. And leaders don’t often involve their teams in thinking about, you know, “What are we missing? What are the opportunities we’re missing? And what’s getting in the way of our success?” One of the things I use, which many of your audience members will probably know a lot about, is a SWOT analysis.

So many team members are anxious about what’s being missed. I mean, as a team member myself, there are so many things I know that I never have the opportunity to share because we just never have those conversations. No one said to me, “What are the threats that you see, Vanessa? And let’s talk about it and let’s prioritize those threats. Yes, what you care about Vanessa is important, but it feeds into something that’s even more important right now.”

And that aligns me. That helps me feel in control. We all have a need. This is one of our fundamental core needs. Belonging, by the way, is the most fundamental core need we have. Social neuroscientists will tell you that, psychologists who study it have long known that. We’ve evolved to need to not be rejected, but to be included, which is what belonging is.

But we need to feel a sense of control as well. That’s another core need. And you help me feel more in control when I’m able to have those conversations in the team. So that’s the other norm that’s often, those are two really key norms.

And then just a third one that I would focus on. You didn’t ask for a third, but would be this norm that we call “Understand Team Context,” which is about understanding what’s going on in the broader organization that we need to know about, or in the client’s world that we need to know about. It helps you be more proactive, and it helps you be more successful as a team.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so then, earlier, you also talked about listening and how we’re not doing it right. And if that’s the case, we’re called out on it. Can you share, how can we tell if poor listening is happening and how do we call out as best practice?

Vanessa Druskat
Great question. Well, it’s the norm, and it becomes the norm in the team. So, are we building on one another’s ideas? Are we writing down? What I love to do when I lead a team discussion, I write down everyone’s ideas. And I’ll come back to, “What do we think about what Pete said, what Vanessa said?” And I just make sure that everybody’s ideas are heard and entertained.

We know about listening with nonverbals. So, for example, I talked to a colleague recently who served in a team where the team leader would take notes on what people were saying on her computer. And whenever my colleague started talking, she’d stop taking notes, those ideas. So where does your brain go with that?

We have a hyper, hyper, hyper – I can’t underline this enough – sensitivity to whether we’re being heard and valued. This is linked to our core need to belong. Back in the day if you were ever kicked out of the tribe, you were dead.

And so, we have evolved to have an emotional brain that is really sensitive to reading the nonverbals of others and knowing whether our ideas and things are valued or not. And so, we look, we look around, and we notice, “Are people checking their email while I’m talking? Are they looking at me?” Eye contact. Now, we’ve got a lot of focus on neurodivergence these days around how people, whether or not they want to receive eye contact.

But, in general, the research basically says that when you make eye contact with me, it tells me that I’m accepted by you. It’s really powerful, even more powerful when it’s online. When you’re meeting electronically, when a person feels like the leader’s looking them in the eye when they’re talking, they feel a greater sense of acceptance and belonging and validation.

And so, it’s more than the eye contact, it’s the attention. Attention is a gift. So let me just make this practical for you. I had a team of very masculine engineers who were, their team wasn’t doing well and their boss couldn’t let go.

But, anyway, they decided, in order to enact this norm of what we call caring behavior, which is demonstrating respect. We said to them, “How do you demonstrate respect?” And someone said, “Well, you nod your head while someone’s talking.” And so, anyway, they decided that they were going to nod their head and look people in the eye while they were talking.

The consequence was huge. People started sharing more information that they had not been sharing. They started giving more ideas, helping one another more. It’s a motivator. When people are listening to you, now you got to start cutting people off a little bit more, but the participation is more full. And one of the biggest, biggest costs of not having a good team environment is not having people share their best knowledge and information with one another, not supporting and building on one another’s ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Now we had a guest, and he said it just so clearly and simply, it’s that, people see stuff that’s dumb all the time. And if you don’t have an indication that you have any interest in hearing about it, you just won’t hear about it. And so, the dumb stuff will continue. And that is rampant in organizations everywhere.

Vanessa Druskat
Yes. Yes, absolutely. And so that’s why that middle bucket of norms matters so much, which is talking about what’s working and not working. And it’s why the first bucket matters, because the first bucket checks the box on belonging. Typically, we try to belong by conforming. We don’t want conformity. We don’t want people just saying, “Yeah, yeah, that’s how we do it. We do dumb things here.”

We want people to able to raise the truth in that middle bucket, right? People always ask me about the teams I’ve observed, and I got to tell you, the difference between the way the outstanding teams perform and the way your average team performs is stark.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, the way the performance difference is stark, and then just the way they conduct themselves in terms of a meeting is stark. Like, one might be shaking, nodding their heads and saying, “Mm-hmm,” and the others are just, like, dead in the eyes.

Vanessa Druskat
Yes, they’re thinking about the next, or they’re competing with one another, which, the higher you get in the hierarchy, the more you get into these. Because who goes higher in the hierarchy? Highly competitive people, which is great. You don’t want to squish that competition. I mean, that can be useful in a lot of cases, but there are times when you don’t want it. There are times when you want collaboration, and that’s how the organization gets ahead.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Could you share your favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Vanessa Druskat
So, there’s a guy, Robert Sapolsky, who’s at Stanford. He’s a neuroscientist and a sociobiologist and does all kinds of things. He’s a MacArthur Genius Grant person.

And someone asked him, “Well, are human beings altruistic or are we selfish by nature?” And he said, “We are neither. It’s all about context. In some contexts, we’re selfish. In some contexts, we’re altruistic and pro-social.” And so, his quote was, “Context, context, context.” And I love that quote because it reminds people that building a team is about building a context. That’s one of my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Vanessa Druskat
A favorite study is a great study that looks at how good human beings are, how good we are at talking without really saying anything. So, when we’re in a team meeting, how we know just the right amount to say and how to say it to make it look like we are really in and to really not really be sharing our best information, our best ideas. We’ve learned that throughout our lives. And if you’re not careful, that’s what your team members do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Vanessa Druskat
I think everyone should read Matthew Lieberman’s book Social.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job.

Vanessa Druskat
The Stakeholder Analysis Worksheet. So, this is basically a worksheet some colleagues of mine developed that, basically, where you list your stakeholders, who’s got information and ideas that could help you perform better as a team.

And so, you list all of them and you list how well do you know them. And then you list who’s going to be the ambassador to that person, and go out and connect with them and find out what they know and bring it back to the team. I just love that tool. It’s so clear, it’s so easy to do, and it has huge impact.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Vanessa Druskat
Question asking, and follow up questions. So, I just feel like we, in conversations in teams or elsewhere, we talk too much about ourselves and we don’t ask people enough questions and dig. People are fascinating. We can learn so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share or a Vanessa-original quotation that people mention over and over again?

Vanessa Druskat
Well, the biggest one would be that you don’t build high-performing teams by hiring stars. That you build them by shaping social norms that bring out the best in everyone and that use the talent in the team.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Vanessa Druskat
I’d point them to my website first, so VanessaDruskat.com. I’ve got resources and information on there. And then I’d also point them to my LinkedIn account. I do a lot of posting on LinkedIn these days. And it’s just, again, Vanessa Druskat. You can find me there quite easily.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Vanessa Druskat
Assess your team norms. Find out if they’re working well. Find out what’s working and what’s not working. You can change them quite easily. And it’s not hard. It’s easier to change team norms than it is to change people. A lot of bad behavior is the result of bad team norms.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Vanessa, thank you.

Vanessa Druskat
Thank you, Pete. It’s been really a pleasure to talk with you. I appreciate you having me on and your excellent questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Keith, welcome back!

Keith Ferrazzi
Pete, I’m excited about the call. And I love the name, that’s my father’s name. So anytime I get a chance to talk to a Peter, a Pete, or a Pietro, it always brings a smile to my face.

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, Pietro. A Pietro Ferrazzi.

Keith Ferrazzi
Si, è vero. È vero.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Oh, we already got some life, some energy in this. That’s good. Well, I’m excited to chat about your book, “Never Lead Alone,” and I am going to accidentally say Never Eat Alone, because I read your book back in the day.

Keith Ferrazzi
That’s okay. That’s what most people know me from 20 years ago. This is the anniversary, 20th year anniversary of Never Eat Alone, the book that redefined “How do you build relationships that open doors of opportunity for yourself?” And now, 20 years later, “How do you build the kind of relationships among the team that you work with that won’t let you fail?”

Pete Mockaitis
And just for funsies, we were talking before we pushed record, I want to know, Keith, are you still a conference commando?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, I just came back from Davos, which is probably the holy grail of conferences, and I had the blessing of facilitating a roundtable of the CEO of two of the largest high-tech companies, the CEO of one of the biggest banks, the head of AI for Salesforce. What an amazing place, and it was all utilizing the simple practices of “How do you deepen and build relationships in this crazy world we’re living in today?”

And that’s what we’ve done. I mean, the book Never Eat Alone was so successful because it was like eating popcorn. “Try this, do this, 15 tips to be a conference commando.” And this new book is the same way, 10 shifts from traditional mediocre leadership to having your team step up in high-performing teamships, and 10 shifts and a bunch of little practices and it’s not that difficult. You just got to pick up and start trying some of the practices.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I know your style, your practices are based on a boatload of underlying research. Can you tell us a little bit about that research and any startling discoveries that made you go, “Whoa!” when you saw it?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, 3,000 teams in our dataset. And what do you think the average team’s courage and candor is among a team on a scale of zero to five? What’s that?

Pete Mockaitis
Two point one.

Keith Ferrazzi
You read the book. Actually, it ranges between 1.8 and 2.2, and that is just shocking. How we could be sitting in collaborative dialogues and people aren’t courageous enough or transparent enough or desirous enough to make each other successful to be telling the truth in the room? That’s just sh**. And the average team is mediocre at best. And what I just kept discovering time and time again was how mediocre the average team was.

Now, there are some teams that crush it. Amazon’s team does an extraordinary job on many of the most important shifts of a high-performing team, and so do a lot of the young unicorns that are coming out of Stanford, disrupting large corporations. These companies are doing incredibly well. But the average entrepreneur and the average big-company executives, pretty mediocre.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, courage and candor at a two-ish level, what does that look, sound, feel like in practice as compared to a dream state of a five?

Keith Ferrazzi
Well, okay, we’re having a conversation about the lagging sales numbers this quarter, and we have a polite dialogue in the room, and then we leave the room, and the real talk happens, and that happens all the time. Or worse, people are DM-ing privately during the meeting, saying the sh** that they won’t say out in the meeting itself.

Keith Ferrazzi
So that’s in the average state. In the powerful state, and I’ll use a company that, really, is a lovely place to work, it’s called e.l.f. Beauty. At e.l.f. Beauty, everybody agrees when they’re hired that “We will have the fastest, most compelling growth as professionals while we’re working here. And a part of that is a commitment that we will always tell each other the truth. We’ll never let each other fail. It’s not throwing each other under the bus. It’s assuring that everybody is successful. We cross the finish line together,” all those kinds of words.

And as a result, in a meeting, somebody will say, “We’re lagging sales numbers,” and the head of sales will say, “You know it’s been very difficult to get the kind of leads we need for marketing because of our lagging competency in digital marketing.” And then the head of marketing will say, “You know, like I appreciate that. We’re down a gal that we used to have in that particular role, and it is an issue. But let’s talk about how we could reallocate resources.” And then the head of HR will pop in and say, “You know what? We’ve got an analytics person over there we could move.”

So, it’s that kind of a collaborative dialogue. Now, all of those one-off conversations would have happened in DMs or behind the scenes, and they wouldn’t have happened from a sense of what I call co-elevation, where people are collaborating in service of a mission, pushing each other higher. Instead, it would have been done in a more eviscerating-ly, kind of passive-aggressive way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like whiny, defensive, “Can you believe so-and-so?”

Keith Ferrazzi
Pointing fingers, and that just happens. I am so shocked by the most prominent businesses in the world. So, I have another one. I’m not going to say the name of the company, but this is a company I’m coaching right now, Fortune 50 company. And this business has self-professed that their candor levels are at 1.3 on a scale of 0 to 5, 1.3. And in one meeting, we practiced some practices.

So, my practices are researched. That was the original question, 3,000 teams, I’ve observed practices of successful teams. I take them out, dust them off, package them, put them in other teams to a point where I can prove that “If you do this practice, you will move the needle on the diagnostic and likely move the needle on performance.”

And the 1.3 company did this practice called a stress test. So, we had three critical initiatives that were being, or that are absolutely important for this company to thrive. Three critical initiatives presented. The first one presented and said, “Okay,” and they all present in the same way, “Here’s what we’ve achieved. Here’s where we’re struggling. Here’s where we’re going.”

But everybody knew that they had to individually write in a Google Doc what the challenge was. Like, “I listened to you. Here’s what I disagree with. Here’s a risk you’re not seeing, something. Here’s where I might offer an idea. And here’s where I’d be willing to help.” The entire group is writing this in, and then they go into breakout sessions, and they corroborate as small groups in three. Then we come back in and have a conversation.

And then I asked the team, “What’s the degree of candor you just experienced?” They all put into chat fours and fives. So, literally, one practice moved them from a standard of polite, passive-aggressiveness, and political dialogue to full transparency where they got all the stuff on the table and we were at fours and fives levels of candor in less than an hour of the meeting starting. This is what high-return practice is, and what the book can do for any team.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I’m curious, what do we think is underlying the low levels of candor?

Keith Ferrazzi
First of all, there’s a wrongheadedness about feedback and candor that was born within our culture as children. So, when your parents gave you feedback, were they giving you input? They were telling you something. They were giving you a directive, “Sit up straight,” “Don’t eat that way,” whatever. Feedback has always come in the forms of a directive. And when you got it from your teachers, coaches, bosses, it’s always a directive.

Now I’m telling your peers to unleash feedback. But if everybody thinks that what they’re doing is giving each other directives, that is a cluster. But that’s why we don’t do it. Right now, we think that feedback and directive are intertwined. We don’t do it. We don’t like when we receive it because we assume that it’s coming with a directive.

I unbundle that when I’m working with teams. I say, “Listen, what we’re looking for is bold, inclusive, direct, challenging data from all of the points of view. In fact, let’s get more inclusive. Let’s go ask people who actually have a dog in the hunt down at the front lines. Let’s go ask innovators outside. Let’s get insights that just blow us away. And then let’s just treat it all like individual datapoints that we don’t have to do anything with, except use to analyze for better answers.”

So, one of the reasons why I think the feedback is so supercharged and the ability to get it more fluidly is to disaggregate what supercharges it. That’s the connection to directive.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. So, right there, it’s just like, “If you have a different perspective about what we’re doing, what we’re giving, what we’re receiving, that can be big right there,” because some folks might say, “Well, it’s not my place to direct this person because, I mean, I’m their peer, or I’m even at a lower level in the hierarchy of the organization.”

Keith Ferrazzi
That’s right. And instead, now it’s just like, “Oh, I want to give this person my data, my insight. They can do whatever they want to it,” but we start celebrating the desire to be bold and to throw out crazy ideas, and that’s the powerful element. Look, I think the other thing is, you know, in some places, there’s a sense of politicization, “So, hmm, if I make this person successful, do I look less successful?”

And the reality is that’s another reboot, which is the leader needs– and this is, by the way, everything I’m talking about, you can either learn it as a teammate and be the best teammate on the team, or you could read the book and learn it as a leader and get the whole team to behave that way. So, leaders lead differently when they’re asking teams to become high-performing teams.

So, if a good leader gives feedback, a great leader gets the team to give each other feedback. A good leader holds the team accountable; a great leader gets the team to hold each other accountable. A great leader will actually get the team to have each other’s back to the point where they won’t let each other fail.

Now, those are 10 shifts. I just gave you, three of them, you know, a shift from conflict avoidance to candor. The shift from accidental relationships, serendipitous relationships, walking down a hallway, to purposeful, engineered, more powerful relationships. So, there’s a whole series of these shifts. Everyone has simple practices that bring it to life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us another, a couple shifts and practices that you’ve seen be tremendously transformational?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned, so I became a venture partner at a company called Lightspeed. It’s one of the largest VCs in the world, and I coach their portfolio companies. These extraordinary, thoughtful, fast-growth unicorn companies born out of Stanford University or IIT in India. And these companies, they very much collaborate differently than most other teams. They don’t use meetings as the way in which they collaborate.

So, one of the shifts is from collaborating in meetings to collaborating in technology. So, if I said to you, “We’re running slow on the sales this quarter. Let’s have a meeting on it,” we all get in the room and we start having a dialogue. There’s 12 of us, and four of us would think that we’d been hurt. It’s just, you don’t have time to hear everyone’s point of view. Some people aren’t bold and aggressive in meetings, others are more introverted, etc.

But if I said, “Let’s not have a meeting on it. Here’s a Google Sheet, and here’s all 12 people’s names. First column, what do you think the real problem is that has caused the sales to slow down? Second column is what is a bold solution that could get us back on track? Okay, now everybody writes that up and reads it before we show up in the meeting. Now we show up in the meeting, we probably already landed the plane and all we have to do is agree that one of those solutions or a combination of a couple is the way to go, and we’re off and running.”

The old way would have been the meeting, the meeting after the meeting, the meeting we walked down the hallway, the lobbying behind each other’s backs. I mean, meeting shifting is a major shift that these young, hot unicorn companies, they organically know how to collaborate in asynchronous formats, not meetings. That’s another shift.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot because, you mentioned Amazon being high performing, and I understand that Amazon very much has a writing culture in which folks do some writing about some things and they might start a meeting with “We’re just reading the writing.” And to some, that sounds very intimidating, like, “Oh, my gosh, I have to write essays and pages and pages.” But what you’ve described sounds super easy, “I got two cells. I might be generating nine sentences, and we’re off to the races.”

Keith Ferrazzi
I love the purposefulness of the Amazon culture, but I do, on this particular issue, I see the value of it, but I would rather not read in a room. Also, I think that by the time you’re writing up a five-page document, you’re putting a stake in the ground relative to what this thing is. I’m talking about, like, that’s fine if you’re down here on the funnel of collaboration, you’re ready to close something. That’s editing where somebody, where we think we are.

But if you’re up here, and you’re trying to break through a problem, I don’t want you, I don’t want five pages of your opinion. That boxes us all in to your opinion and your solution. I want, “I’m up here. I want to hear what you think the problems are.” Because I’ve seen this where, in a large manufacturer that was retooling a significant part of its product line, they were falling behind, and everyone’s pointing fingers. And I said, “Let’s just do a meeting shift. Let’s everybody go online and we’re going to write ‘We are falling behind. But what do you think the reason is we’re falling behind and what’s a bold solution?’”

And, all of a sudden, we had all of these opinions from different functions. Some people said, “I want to send it down to the plant level and see what they think,” and etc. And, gosh, it just revealed itself. Truth came out of this tapestry of insight. And the person who came up with the boldest idea that worked, that we ended up implementing, was L4 from the people who were actually in the meetings originally, level four underneath the levels one and levels two that were naturally there.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Okay. So, one, we’re exiting the meeting, and we’re getting all the bold thinking, just straight right out there in a Google Sheet or some sort of easy collaboration platform. Lay some more on us, Keith.

Keith Ferrazzi
The word “agile” is a word that came up in the 2000s as a way to re-engineer how you develop software, and it, frankly, was a genius re-engineering of workflow that should be used by all of us in all the projects we do. And, ironically, even companies that develop software don’t practice agile on other project management solutions.

Look, agile can be pretty time-consuming and very in-depth. It can be a bunch of spreadsheets. But here’s what I would say if there’s a critical initiative that you have this year, a wish, a desire, a hope, have your goals for the year around it, but ask yourself very clearly, “What does success look like after month one?”

And after month one, pause and say, “Okay, what have we achieved in month one? Where did we struggle in month one? And what are we planning to do in month two in order to make sure we hit our year goals?” If you work in those short agile sprints, month by month, or if there’s a lot of volatility in what you’re doing, you could do week by week sprints, and at the end of those sprints, utilizing the practice that I’d mentioned earlier called stress testing, where the group of people who are involved in that project, beat it up at the end of every sprint.

They go into breakout rooms and they write, “What risks or challenges do I see that they’re missing? What innovation might I offer? Where would I offer help?” And now, all of a sudden, the whole team is on one page beating this thing up, all full transparency on the table. The person now says, “Thank you. I’ve got all this new information. Here’s how I’m adjusting my next month, and I’m now on track to hit my annual goals.”

Whereas, in the past, we’d wake up at the end of Q1 or Q2 realizing, “There’s no way in hell we’re going to make our one-year goals. We’re already so far off track and we haven’t been listening more and robustly to all of the input.” So, just using simple, agile sprints and adjusting through stress testing at the end of every one is an amazing operating system for the world we’re living in today, the volatility, the need for change, etc.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, lovely. All right. So, we have a big goal, a big timeline, we split it up into segments, so we’re checking in regularly and seeing, “Are we on track and how do we fix it?” getting all the wisdom from the people. Nifty.

Keith Ferrazzi
So, I’m going to harken back to my first book a bit because one of the problems I saw in our coaching of teams is that most teams, do not effectively define what a team is. So, what I mean by that is, in most large companies, the big problem is we think our team is who reports to us, and we’re constantly banging our head against the wall because there are so many other interdependencies that are getting in our way of achieving the things we want to achieve. Well, that is the first shift that I talk about in the book, shifting from hub-and-spoke leadership, where control is what defines a team, to a team being the critical network of people you need to get the job done.

So, as a leader, your team is who you need to get the job done. I don’t work in a big company, I’m an entrepreneur, and my team includes other entrepreneurs, like Peter Diamandis, who’s a good buddy of mine, who’s a futurist in technology. He helped me design an entirely new business at Ferrazzi Greenlight that I hadn’t thought of, that was basically, it’s called Connected Success.

We take learners, you know, entrepreneurs, leaders. etc. who want to live the life of Keith Ferrazzi in terms of great relationships, transforming your life, transforming your career, etc., and we take them through an eight-week program. That is very different than the business model that I’ve always had, which is coaching executive teams. So, this is a very different business model.

And my teammate, Peter, incubated that with me, and he doesn’t work for me. I don’t pay him. I’m a partner of his and I do things for his and his teams, and he does things for me and my teams. All of a sudden, he’s a teammate, and if I didn’t define myself that way, I would have never tapped into his genius.

And in large corporations, you know, the software company that I was talking to you about earlier, the hardware and the software division are the same team in the growth of the business, and yet they think of themselves as other. And so, one team collaborates, and then they go try to get buy-in. Buy-in is BS. Buy-in is you’re trying to sell your ideas to people. You need to configure your team around the people you need to get the job done, independent of work charts.

And once that’s done, then you get that group to adopt what I call the social contract, “We’re going to be candid with each other. We’re going to push each other hard. We’re going to keep each other’s energy strong. We’re going to build strong, trusting relationships. We agree on this stuff, and then you do the practices.” So, just redefining team is such a critical component of high-performing teams and team-ship.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And I’m curious, when you lay out this contract, do you encounter resistance? Or do people sign up readily, and then later on have trouble? Or is it smooth sailing through and through?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, there’s usually, in every third team, there’s one a**hole that is just digging in out of self-preservation, fear, insecurity, selfishness, whatever, and they don’t want to really adjust to become a high-performing team. The reality is, in most teams, once they see, “Oh, wow, our score is 1.3? That’s pathetic. 

So, once you do the diagnostic, people are like, “Wow, that’s not who I want to be.” And now the question is, “It’s fine to be aware, but that doesn’t do anything. What are the practices? So, okay, I’m aware, now you’ve given me a stress test as a practice.” Or another practice is called a candor break, we’re in the middle of a meeting, everybody goes into groups of two, and they say, “Okay, what’s not being said in this meeting that should be said?” What a powerful question. They talk in groups of two, then they come back in the main room and they all share.

That’s turning the culture you wish you had into an assignment. It happens all the time in these practices. So, you become awake, you do the practice, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s a better way to live my life. I’m not banging my head against the wall about my frustration about another peer. I’m able to have a conversation with them about it.”

So, I think that the adoption rate is very high. Very high. Every once in a while, you get one that’s not, but then it also becomes very evident that that guy is the jerk that probably doesn’t last very long in the team.

Pete Mockaitis
I do love that question in the candor break, “What’s something that’s not being said that should be said?” because it kind of reverses the emotional pressure dynamics, you know? Whereas, before, it’s like, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable to say this thing because maybe it’ll hurt someone’s feelings, maybe I’ll look dumb, etc.” Then when you shift it, it then feels like the pressure is reversed. So, now the wrong answer is, “Uh, nothing. We’ve said everything.”

Keith Ferrazzi
Right. That’s the ridiculous answer. All I’ve done in most of these shifts, in the high-return practices, I have seen and curated practices that allow you to turn the kind of culture you dreamed of into simple assignments, and people don’t mind simple assignments, and in fact they’re pent up. You know, most organizations that are so overly polite that they don’t share what they’re thinking are usually highly political and they share behind each other’s back.

If you tell them, “Hey, we’re going to step up to a new standard of courage and transparency. Here’s how you’re going to do it. You’re going to go in small groups of two. You’re going to talk about what’s not being said. I know psychological safety is 85% higher in those small groups. Then we’re going to come into the main room. We’re going to have that discussion because you were assigned to do it so everyone has to have something to say,” and, boom, it’s all of a sudden on the table.

So, it’s actually, there’s a Fortune magazine article I wrote recently that says, you know, I’m tired of hearing people say, “Culture change is tough.” It’s not. Culture change changes when you just adopt simple new practices that change the culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you also talk about the importance of praise, so this stuff isn’t necessarily all like, “Oh, say the hard courageous thing that’s going to upset people.” But also, we’re sharing some happy stuff, too.

Keith Ferrazzi
Praise and relationships, both are very happy. So, praise, there’s, “How do you shift from paltry limited leader-led praise?” which most companies don’t have enough praise. So, limited praise from leaders to abundant praise from peers. How do you create, and what do you do? If you’re a leader, let’s do a practice. Once a month, we’re going to do a gratitude circle where everybody goes around and shares one person on the team that they’re grateful for and why. Really simple practice. And you can do them even more frequently than once a month.

So, there’s a whole set of practices that shift from the leader being responsible for all the praise to the team. You can still do leader-led praise. You want certain behaviors dialed up on your team, you do an award for that kind of behavior, and you call out who that is. Very simple. It’s Pavlovian in nature, actually, right? It’s like the dog rings the bell; they get a treat. So, if you change your behavior, you get a treat, you get praised. So, that’s on the praise side. Very simple practices breed that kind of energy.

And relationships, you know, most teams have mediocre level of connection. I will go into a team, I’m like, I’ll do diagnostic interviews, “How close is your team?” “Oh, we’re so close. We grew up together. This team’s been together forever. Deep relationship. Deep caring relationships.” “Okay.” And we get in the room, and I ask the question, “Does my team have my back? Do I care about my team and what’s going on in their lives? Does my team know what I’m struggling with? And are they there to help lift me up?” “Oh, well. that’s kind of a high standard. That’s low twos, you know?”

And then I do a practice where everybody goes around and says, “What is my energy these days and what’s bringing it down?” And, all of a sudden, people come over to me, like, “Holy sh**, I’ve known this person for 10 years. I had no idea that their mother was suffering Alzheimer’s,” “I had no idea that they had an autistic son,” “I had no idea that they were struggling so much with this business leader that they serve in the business.” It’s amazing. We just don’t curate purposeful relationships.

Now when you have that, then you have a team that has more empathy, has more care, has more commitment. Yeah. So, I think of all of the interviews I’ve done, I think we’ve gotten through, like, more shifts here. Usually, I get to like three shifts. We got through, moving from candor, moving from conflict avoidance to candor, redefining the team itself as not an org chart but a network.

We moved from serendipitous relationships to purposeful relationships. We sort of threw in there the idea of moving from individual, “I got my own back. I’ve got to take care of my own resilience,” to team resilience. We talked about agile. We talked about celebration. We talked a little bit about peer-to-peer growth.

That’s one that I love where teams actually give each other critical feedback on a quarterly basis using an open 360 where everybody goes around, and says, “Pete, what I most respect and admire about you in the last quarter is X. Thank you. And, Pete, because I care about your success going forward, I might suggest,” everybody goes around. And they go, “Keith, same thing.”

That kind of peer-to-peer coaching, I call it an open 360 practice, really starts to prime the pump for a team to become each other’s coaches. Anyway, you’ve been abundant in navigating around the book, so this has been a fun interview.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote?

Keith Ferrazzi
”You don’t think your way to a new way of acting. You act your way to a new way of thinking.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite book?

Keith Ferrazzi
The Great Gatsby.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Keith Ferrazzi
I do a morning ritual, my fiancé and I, and I’ve just gotten engaged and we’re going to be married in June.

Pete Mockaitis
Congratulations.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thank you. The alarm goes off, we push snooze, and over the next 10 minutes, we both lie and meditate on what are three things we’re grateful for at that moment and three things we’re looking forward to in that day. And the three things that we’re grateful for, we’re never allowed to repeat the same one twice, ever in our lives. So, it’s a beautiful way to realize what kind of abundance we have around us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Keith Ferrazzi
Look, this is more of a gift. If you’re excited about using the book, you can go to KeithFerrazzi.com, and we provided a video course around the book that you can certainly buy but you don’t have to. If you’re buying the book for your team, you get the video course for free. So, I think the challenge is just try some of these practices on. They’re so easy.

Can’t afford the book? Just go online and type “Keith Ferrazzi TeamShip.” I’ve published a lot of things on Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, etc., so just try some of the practices. You’ll learn how game-changing they are.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, thank you, Keith. This is fun.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thanks, Pete. I appreciate your time.

Pete Mockaitis
Paula, welcome back.

Paula Davis
Hello, it’s so good to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear you talking about Leading Well, and mindsets for engaging, retaining, and inspiring folks. Could you kick us off with any of the most surprising discoveries you’ve made when it comes to what it really takes to engage, retain, and inspire colleagues these days?

Paula Davis
One of the things that really surprised me was actually seeing the data around when companies take, not only at a performance focus, so looking at numbers and metrics and quarterly earnings and all of that, but also layer on sort of a people focus side, so combining that performance and people focus, the great business outcomes that come from it. So, really amplifying the business case was one of the things that I wanted to do in this book because I think it’s a piece of the puzzle that’s oftentimes left out when we’re talking about some of this human-focused psychology stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what kind of performance boosts are we talking here?

Paula Davis
So, we are talking about much lower attrition rates, sometimes cut in half. We’re talking about higher earnings. We are talking about, 4.3 times more likely than the average company to maintain top-tier financial performance for an extended period of time. And one of the pieces of the puzzle that I think is really important is that, because I hear from a lot of professional services firms, in particular, and other companies who say, “We’re meeting our numbers. We’re doing really, really well. We got lots of money rolling into the company. Like, why should we switch? Why is taking a performance focus so wrong?”

And the answer is it’s not wrong. But what the research talks about is that, in good times, you know, companies that perform financially well, those financial performance-focused companies do great, but when it comes to down times, when it comes to, say, the period of time during the pandemic, what have you, companies that have that balanced approach, that really add that people side to the equation, tend to go through the rough patches in a more smooth way. They take less bumps.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you perhaps paint a picture for what that looks, sounds, feels like in practice in terms of, “All right, this is what being in a company that has the hardcore financial performance focus feels like in terms of the vibe, and the messaging, and the experience, and infrastructure, all the stuff,” versus what a more balanced place feels like? And maybe share a story for how that plays out in practice.

Paula Davis
Sure, yeah. And so, what was interesting is the research that I just talked about found that only 9% of the companies that, this was a McKinsey report, researched actually fell in that balanced approach. So, we’re not talking about a lot of companies here. And one of the companies that I think comes to mind for me is one of the companies that I talked about in Chapter 3 of the book.

It’s a really large healthcare organization that has taken kind of its mindset around recognition and appreciation and has really codified it in some unique ways, not only within the organization but they’ve actually elevated it, that notion that, “This is what we’re going to do. This is one of the values that we’re going to really, really hit hard and kind of walk the talk about.” They’ve elevated it all the way up to the C-suite and board level strategy.

So, very rarely do I hear a company that either read about or that I’ve worked with actually say, you know, like, “Some of this well-being motivational engagement stuff is actually baked into the highest of the highest-level strategies that we’re thinking about.” And so, clearly, looking at this concept from a dollars and cents standpoint, right, because it’s part of the entire financial strategy that we’re looking at for the company, but that it trickles down throughout the organization in a number of different ways.

So, they have a Making Moments Matter platform where they are able to send these recognitions and appreciations to each other via a platform of technology that they have in the organization. They have a yearly event where they actually nominate people at every single level from around the entire system. And they have different categories of folks who are finalists, or what have you, and they pick somebody who, out of the entire organization of 50,000 plus people, most truly espouses these values, and then they honor them at a dinner.

And so, there’s just all these different ways that they have decided to take this one particular piece, this human piece of the puzzle, and actually build it in a number of different ways. And they actually have told me that they see this as their most, from an economic standpoint, valuable retention tool and talent attraction tool. And they can tell that when the people in the organization are truly kind of walking these values, they see better outcomes with their patients in a whole host of ways. So, that’s the best example I can think of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can we zoom in into like a Making Moments Matter type thing? Like, if I were there in that organization, like what would be happening as we do this stuff?

Paula Davis
Say, you had a wonderful interaction or encounter with a colleague, or you noticed somebody who was really walking the values of the organization, you could put a little message into this platform, and that would register and it would go not only to the person, but it would go to the person’s manager, and I think it might even go one level above that as well.

They’ve collected multiple millions of these individual sorts of appreciations and recognitions, and just talking about how that has really just helped to build a really strong cultural fabric.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, I like that so much. It sounds really good. I read the book The Fund by Rob Copeland, which was talking about Bridgewater and their unique computer stuff and culture. And, at least the way he writes it, it sounds like a nightmare, like just a miserable place to be from Rob Copeland’s perspective in the book, because it was sort of doing almost the opposite of that in terms of like everybody was continuously tracking and ranking and rating and scoring everybody on all of these competency dimensions, they called it their baseball cards.

And so, there’s always sort of like this looming threat of, “Oh, someone could ding me for behaving in such a way,” and then others would pile on and you’d see your real-time, I guess, status, score, baseball card figures plummeting relative to the other people in the organization. It sounded horrendous, as Rob Copeland told it. And this is like the opposite. It’s like, “Here are some cool stuff that went down. Hooray! Let’s celebrate you publicly.”

Paula Davis
That does sound horrendous, and I didn’t dig into this, but I think you bring up a really good point, or he brings up a really good point, certainly, is that I think when you’re talking about making moments matter, or taking time to appreciate someone, or highlight something that they’ve done well, or recognize them, whatever word you want to use, I think that really has to be done authentically. And that’s I think one of the things you got to watch out for, I think, with any type of platform like this. It’s not about, like, “Ooh, I’ve got to get to 20 by the end of the week.” It’s about making them the most authentic that you can.

But I think that most of us zoom through work with our heads down, just, you know, we’ve got so much work to do, we’re just trying to get through the day, and so we’re at zero. So, kind of finding that balance between nothing and a race to get to a certain number.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s funny how these things naturally come up in our brains in terms of, “Oh, wow, that was a really cool chat I had with Paula. That was great.” And then they do, they fly right out of our brains as we rush to finish the next thing that needs to be done, oh, so urgently. So, if you have an institutionalized system process methodology by which these things are captured, and you just know, “Oh! I know just the place to park this fun pleasant thought I had. Here we go!”

Paula Davis
And because I think a lot of organizations have, the recognition policies. So, like, “At five years we’re going to send you a something or at 10 years we’re going to send you something.” They have sort of codified ways to express appreciation and thanks but they don’t necessarily support or talk about or think about or highlight, like, everyday day-to-day practices.

And so, I talk about how important it is to start to kind of go in that direction because it kicks the door open to something much more deep, a fundamental human need for us to know that we matter. So, that’s whether we are at, you know, talking about our families, whether we’re talking about work, whether we’re talking about our communities, we want to know that we’re making an impact on some level, right?

And so, mattering is about both those moments of appreciation, but it’s also about those moments of achievement where I also know that I’m contributing something. I’m contributing something and other people are noticing or affirming or telling me that I am having that level of impact.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. So, the research is backing this up and, boy, 9%.

Paula Davis
A lot of room for improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess if we find ourselves in an organization that’s doing some nice stuff this way, I guess we should feel grateful because it’s apparently rare.

Paula Davis
Based on, certainly, that one research report from McKinsey, yes. In fact, I think they found it was 55%, which was the bigger category of the quadrants, so four quadrants. I think it was about 55% who actually didn’t show a high level on either category, not outperforming on the performance side and not outperforming on the people side either. So more than half are just kind of, you know, “Here we go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s some cool research. And would you say that’s the big idea behind Lead Well? Or how would you articulate the core thesis?

Paula Davis
Well, I think that’s definitely a piece of it. I think the big idea behind it is, I think wanting to let the world of work, and particularly leaders know, that they’re really driving the conversation when it comes to the fact that we’re looking at “Work has changed. And how has work changed? And why has work changed? Because that’s happened, what do we have to, how do they, how do leaders have to be thinking differently about that?”

If we want to continue to have or see good outcomes, if we want to sort of reverse this trend of burnout, if we want to reverse the trend of, we’re at an all-time low level at least for the last 11 years of disengagement, things that we keep seeing come up consistently over and over are taking root. And if we’re going to go in a different direction with that, how do we do it?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when we talk about change, what would you say is the most pronounced change difference that the worker, let’s say the knowledge worker, is experiencing now as compared to, say, 15 years ago?

Paula Davis
So, certainly, I mean, we can’t avoid the conversation about AI, right? I think that the explosion of just new technology and new ways of thinking about doing work and really, honestly, potentially, being at a point where we might see some of those lower-level tasks, eventually at some point, potentially, be consumed by technology and other things, I think is much more realistic than it was 15 years ago.

I think, certainly, the outcomes associated with the pandemic, and I know we’re largely beyond that or however we want to word that, but I think, psychologically, what a lot of people and a lot of leaders don’t understand is that we’ve carried the effects of going through something so traumatic for a lot of people and cataclysmic for a lot of people with us.

And we’ve really, I think, very intentionally, started to look very differently at “How do I want my life to unfold? How do I want my world of work to look? How do I get both of those two things to integrate? And if I am not seeing a workplace that’s going to be supportive of my well-being and supportive of some of the human-centered aspects of work that I feel are much more important now, I may seriously consider going somewhere else.”

So, I don’t think we really– I mean, 15 years ago was when I stopped my law practice and I started down the path toward this work. We weren’t having these conversations at all about wellbeing in work. And so, I think the fact that that’s amplified has been a huge change as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, that’s intriguing, the COVID pandemic impact. It’s so funny, I think back to 2020, it was like another lifetime.

Paula Davis
I know.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d heard that people don’t want to make any movies or TV shows set in that time, it’s like, “We all just want to forget that happened. That’s not entertaining in the least to return to such memories.” And so then, is there any cool research or data saying, “Whoa, here’s something that feels very different in 2025 as compared to even 2019”?

Paula Davis
Well, I think one of the pieces that helps explain why people feel so differently now because of that is something called post-traumatic growth. So, I think a lot of folks are familiar with the term post-traumatic stress disorder. Less people, I find, are familiar with the term post-traumatic growth. So really understanding that when we go through life’s big adversities, when we go through life’s big challenges and traumatic experiences, most of us will take a look and go, “I do not want that to happen again. I wish this thing hadn’t happened because it kind of changed things completely for me.”

But what we oftentimes find is that humans do come out the other side at some point and they share some characteristics. They talk about a renewed sense of connection. They really, really amplify the importance of their relationships. They really want a sense of meaning and some deeper sort of connection involved in their lives, and it’s not something that they can just erase or have go away. It’s sort of like a permanent shift in how their world has changed.

And so, I think that that helps to explain why a lot of people have come out of this now really talking about how “I would like meaning at work, and I would like to have a little bit more indicator of my impact,” or, “I do want a workplace that’s going to support my mental health and well-being. And if I don’t get those things, yeah, I might stay for a while.”

But, I mean, I don’t think our workplaces, our leaders really want to have their teams be thinking about how they’re going to be plotting their next choice of where they’re going to work. We want our workers to feel engaged and motivated and staying. So that has been a big piece for me to think about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us then, what are some of the top mindsets and practices and cool stories that show them in action, come to life, to give us a picture here?

Paula Davis
Yeah, so the first one, and I sort of alluded to this already in the story that we were just talking about, but it’s called “Prioritizing Sticky Recognition and Mattering.” And so, this chapter honestly really changed how I have looked at my friendships and my relationships with my family, and certainly my relationship with my eight-and-a-half-year-old, “Am I telling her enough?” Because I think a lot of times, we just assume that people know, like, “Hey you’re in my universe and so all is good to go.”

But, like, really amplifying that sense of showing people their impact, and then blooming that fundamental human need to matter, I think is really a cool starting place, and really low-hanging fruit for a lot of organizations. But then I talk about also the need to amplify what I call ABC needs. So that’s a lovely combination of autonomy, belonging, and challenge.

So, we need a sense of, in our lives, in our world of work, we need a combination of “Do I get to choose my own adventure?” That’s how I think about autonomy. “Do I belong? Do I show up to a place where people care about me and my leader has my back, and I know I’m part of a group that is doing something well? And do I feel challenged? Am I able to grow and sort of build my skills within my current world of work?”

And then workload sustainability. So, this was one of the hardest chapters for me to tackle, but I felt like this book would be incomplete unless I did, because unmanageable workloads are one of the, if we’re looking at the root causes or sources of disengagement and stress and burnout, by far and away has been the number one unmanageable workload that I have seen with all of the groups that I have worked with. And so, trying to unpeel all of that, getting into what makes for a more sustainable workload, was a big piece of the puzzle.

The fourth one is building systemic stress resilience. So, to deal with all of the uncertainty, and the challenge, and the change, and the setbacks, and the obstacles, and the stressors, we have to not just be thinking about resilience at the individual level, but how do our teams become more resilient and how can we fortify organizations to become more resilient?

And then lastly, I wanted to talk about values alignment and practices associated with leading in a meaningful way. Certainly, with the generational conversation, I think that notion of values alignment and meaning has been pushed to the forefront. And values misalignment is also another one of the core drivers of chronic stress and burnout and disengagement. And so, it’s that whole kind of piece, puzzle pieces together in terms of the mindsets that I want leaders to be thinking about.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say workload sustainability, I’m curious, what do we know in terms of what makes a workload sustainable or unsustainable?

Paula Davis
Yeah, so basically it comes down to really two big buckets, and I decided to write about one of the buckets, and it’s really about better processes, procedures, and teaming practices. So, if I’m going to get my arms around building more workload sustainability, I got to figure out, like, “Why do we have so many open projects? Why are we doing so many things that are draining money?” and trying to get my arms around just even sort of where all of that is coming from?

And then the other piece of the puzzle, is recovery. Like, “Are we making enough time to really stop and pause? And what does that actually mean and look like in our day-to-day, in our week-to-week, month-to-month?” It’s not just the taking a vacation once every three years, that doesn’t do it.

So that notion, though, of really starting with leaders trying to dig in and just see, like, “What do we have? Why do we have so much? Why are we not focusing on certain things? Do we have Band-Aid initiatives going on where we’ve got so many open projects, but we don’t have the funding or the people or what have you to actually finish things and push them through, but they remain open?” So, there’s a lot of first steps, or kind of digging that leaders really need to engage in.

And then it becomes, “How are your meeting practices? Do you have information that’s located in places where everybody has access to it? Are people really clear about their roles and responsibilities? Do teams understand how we’re supposed to communicate with each other?” So, it gets back to a lot of very basic sort of teaming practices, very basic procedural things that I think when they’re done with more intentionality, can then start to help us understand how we can bring workload back into more of a sustainable realm.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a quantity, a number of hours or projects or something by which we can start to see, “Ah, this is where a workload begins dipping into the unsustainable level”?

Paula Davis
That’s the hard part because it’s so subjective, and I talk about this a lot associated with my burnout work, too, is that when we’re talking about an unsustainable workload, what’s unsustainable for me may be very different for you. What was unsustainable for me when I was 25 looks very different than what it is right now when I have an eight-and-a-half-year-old and a whole host of other just life obligations that I have to attend to at this age.

And so, I think it’s a fluid, subjective thing to be thinking about, and that’s why it can be so hard, I think, for leaders to really wrestle with “What does this mean?” because for one team in one department, it may look one way, and for a different team, it may look completely different. And so, you have to take it on kind of a team-by-team, case-by-case basis. So, there isn’t like a hard and fast metric. Like, I can’t say, “It’s seven projects for you, and three projects for you.” It’s totally like team and industry dependent.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about things in a similar light in terms of if what you’re doing is fascinating, riveting, engaging stuff that lights you up at your core and resembles play, it’s almost like there’s no limit in terms of like, “As long as you can, like, eat and exercise and sleep and see your loved ones, you might be able to bang out a massive number of hours.” And yet, if it feels like drudgery, then maybe even 20 hours a week is too much.

It has been sort of my subjective experience, and as I look at stories of like, I don’t know, I think about like hackers, it’s like, “These folks are just cranking away at their computer for hours upon hours upon hours,” and yet, it’s fun, fascinating, interesting, and juicy for them, because it’s so cool, “I’m learning, I’m exploring, I’m discovering. Oh, my gosh, this thing worked! Wow, I did not expect that to work! Oh, I made a discovery! I should probably share this with the world so that the world becomes safer! And I’m contributing to that and making a little bit of a name for myself.”

And yet, at the end of the day, they’re still seated, tapping on keys, looking at a screen, whereas another person can be doing the same distributed across dozens of inconsistently interrupted projects that they don’t really care that much about how they work out to be, and feel tremendously stressed, burnt out, flustered by the matter.

Paula Davis
Yes. And so, that’s an interesting example, but I think it goes back to the power of knowing and understanding the impact that you’re having and the impact that you’re making. And do you feel that C in the ABCs, right? Do you feel a sense of challenge and growth? Do you feel like you’re able to learn new things? Do you have people who are around you who can show you the ropes and help you get from point A to point B or wherever it is that you want to take in terms of the next step in your career?

And it’s interesting what you were just talking about, and I don’t know that you’ve talked or thought about it through game theory, but one of the small kind of strategies that I talk about in that particular part of the book is sort of adding gamification thinking to some of your work, for leaders to kind of introduce gaming concepts and practices.

So, when you think about playing a game, or like, for me I just inherently go to video games, part of the reason why they’re so consuming and they’re so enticing and you want to stay with them and it’s hard to break away from them is because the objective is really clear, “I have to get to level 20,” or, “I have to rescue this particular person.” So, there’s a clear end point, and there’s clear goals along the way, and while you’re going and trying to achieve that particular goal, or whatever getting to the next level looks like, there’s all sorts of phenomenal feedback cues.

There’s bells and whistles, and the point total gets higher, and you’re getting such immediate feedback that you’re on the right track or that you’re doing the right thing or that you’re not doing the right thing, so you can course correct. So, it’s the same types of concepts that can help leaders think about, like, “How do I build some of that into helping people still stay engaged and have fun with the work that they’re doing?” because a lot of us aren’t.

Pete Mockaitis

And so then, what are some of the coolest ways you’ve seen folks implement some of these principles, these gamifications into normal professional work life that have been fun and effective?

Paula Davis
One of the companies that I talk about, it’s actually a really big law firm that I talk about in the book. I don’t think we oftentimes think of like law firms as being, I certainly don’t, as having been in that world for a long time, as being ultra-forward thinking when it comes to these types of concepts.

But a big law firm that I talk about in the book really has created sort of this, almost like this separate sort of leadership education for their lawyers, and they actually give them titles. So, normally you’re just an associate, and then you’re a partner. But they actually give them new titles as they ascend through different pieces of this leadership academy.

And so, in addition to the titles, they get one-on-one coaching so they’re getting, I think, some of that more strategic feedback about how they’re doing and how they can continue to get better at each level. And there’s also, I believe, like a notification or something that goes out to the clients as well. This is an indicator to their clients that, “Hey, the lawyer who you’re working with is now ascended almost right into the different, the next level of the game of sorts, and here is the wealth of talent that they continue to bring.”

So, again, I don’t know that they or I were looking at that through the gamification lens, but you can see how, when you start to build sort of larger scale intentional programs like that, you can have those types of game theory sort of built in or used as a way to explain some of the beneficial outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I would love to get your viewpoints in terms of, let’s say we’re in an organization where, unfortunately, not a lot of these cool best practices are at work, but we have our little sphere of influence in terms of a team, or even just a couple direct reports, or even ourselves. Any pro tips on how we can take advantage of some of these principles to make some good things happen?

Paula Davis
I think that the best place to start, and certainly where I advocated in my first book too, is with your team, with a team. And even if your team is just you and two other people, that’s a team. I think sometimes we think that teams have to be these really large entities, and that’s certainly not the case.

And so, I think starting with some of the best practices to implement some of that sticky recognition and mattering, just because the outcomes are so strong with that. So, that’s just simply, you know, one of the researchers I interviewed for that chapter said, “Sticky recognition and mattering lives at the day-to-day moments in your interactions.”

So those 10-minute moments when you’re walking down the hallway with someone or you’ve just patched into the Zoom and it’s a few of you just kind of hanging out, what do you say? Like, do you interact with somebody? How’s your day? How’s your family? What’s going on? What has your attention right now? Just sort of, I think, getting back to relearning how to see people when we’re so consumed by our work in technology, I think, is a really important starting point.

And then, one of the things that kept coming up as a thread in a lot of the successful companies and people that I interviewed was this notion of just, like, I call them Seinfeld meetings because Seinfeld was a show about nothing. And so, it’s these one-on-one moments to talk to people really about nothing, purposely without a business outcome associated with it.

So, again, just spending 15 minutes every other week just checking in on someone and asking them, “What has your attention right now?” can be hugely beneficial. Just talking to each other about just best teaming practices, “Are we all aligned together on how we’re communicating with each other, about how we see our team, about what the end result is? Are we all clear? Do we all have clear guardrails about where we’re supposed to start and where we’re supposed to end up?” So, again, I think some of these human practices in combination with some basic teaming practices, I think, is always a winning combination.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And could you share with us a cool story of a team or organization that really just put these principles into practice in a beautiful, illustrative, transformational way?

Paula Davis
One example that I mention is, it’s really a framework, so it’s less, I think, about a company, although there’s a few companies that are implementing this. In the Work Sustainability chapter talking about it’s called the US Bank Guidelines, where US banks’ in-house teams of sorts, have really intentionally thought about, “How do we want to create relationships with our outside vendors, our outside counsel, the outside people who we work with, and our internal folks that’s going to be supportive of intentional delegation; that’s going to try and minimize the fire drills and the urgency; that’s going to honor and respect communication practices and work-life integration boundaries and things of that nature?”

And so, talking about the different sort of principles that they have, that have become these guidelines that do just what I said, talking to them about how they’ve started to implement those, both internally and externally with the people who they work, have certainly been eye-opening. So, I think a lot of where we’re at right now with some of this is we’ve got to just try it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Paula Davis
So, I think, for me, one of the big takeaways from the book is that this comes down to this being leading well. It comes down to what I call tiny noticeable things, or TNTs, that are a combination of a little bit more human stuff and a little bit more team stuff that together, I think, become a really powerful source of motivational fuel for folks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Paula Davis
One of my favorite quotes is “Between what is said but not meant, and what is meant but not said, a lot of love is lost.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Paula Davis
One of the research papers that I found really fascinating talked about how, and this is just kind of an interesting way that they were able to measure a team’s heart rate synchrony. And when teams’ heart rates were in sync, they, I think it was like more than 75% of the time, made good decisions together.

And so, it was really indicative of psychological safety and trust. So, I thought it was just really interesting look at some of these things from a physiological perspective and see how when heart rates were more in sync, there was more trust and better decision-making among teams.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Paula Davis
I love Brigid Schulte’s latest book is called Overwork, so I’m obviously digging into all of the things work-related about how we can do work better and make work better. I keep coming back to, over and over again, Kelly McGonigal’s book The Upside of Stress.

Because I have spent so much time in the burnout space, I think, really, taking an interesting look at “What is stress meant to help us do?” It’s meant to help us connect. It’s meant to help us find meaning, and that a meaningful life is a stressful life on some level, and so that reminder is helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote back to you often?

Paula Davis
Yes, there’s a skill that I talk about with that sticky recognition and mattering piece called a thank you plus, where so if you don’t say thank you very frequently, this could be at work or outside of work, start there. But the plus piece is to add the behavior or the strength that you saw that led to the good outcome.

So, it can be as simple as saying, “Thank you so much for summarizing the reports. The way that you did that helped me find the key takeaways quickly, and it made my life a lot easier and the conversation with my clients simpler.” Just that extra little smidge of peace really resonates with people. And so, I oftentimes will have people trying to practice a thank you plus to me or emailing me and calling out the fact that they were trying to do a thank you plus or mentioning that to me in some way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Paula Davis
They can go to my website, which is StressAndResilience.com, or they can find me at Paula Davis on LinkedIn.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Paula Davis
I would say just don’t forget about the fundamental human need that we all have, to just make sure that we’re making an impact in our world, and just being really keen to share that with people when you notice it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paula, thank you.

Paula Davis
Thanks so much, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, welcome back.

Mike Michalowicz

Dude, it’s awesome to be back. Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it’s awesome to be chatting. I have enjoyed so many of your books over the years, and I’m excited to hear about your latest All In: How Great Leaders Build Unstoppable Teams. Lay it on us, I know you go deep with your research. So, tell us the tale of how you came to understand the problem and the solutions that you’ve put forward in your book All In.

Mike Michalowicz

So, basically, what I do in my research, I say, “What’s the desired outcome we have in a circumstance?” So, in this case, it was recruiting high-performing employees, people that are super engaged, great people for our company. Then what’s the actual outcome? And most businesses have horrible outcome.

When we have a desired outcome, and the actual outcome is far off, I look in the middle, which is the method we follow, I call the DMO, desire method outcome. And the method we’re using is interviews. So, this is not a shocker but the solution is. It’s no surprise that most people we interview don’t work out for the long term or aren’t high performers. The percentage, which shows about 5% of people we hire are rock star employees for long term in our company.

But what I found is the solution kind of blew my mind. So, I said, “Well, is there any example of any organization that doesn’t use interviews or use a different method, and has a high percentage rate?” Well, sure enough, there’s an industry, it won’t be a surprise in a moment, but they’re over half a trillion dollars in revenue, that does not run a single interview, they only do performance-based and what they call workshops or camps, and the output is like 95% extremely high performers.

So, here’s the industry. Sports. And that’s not the surprise now, it’s like, “Well, of course.” If I’m a football team, I won’t go, “Hey, why don’t you come for an interview? Where is the green light?”

Pete Mockaitis

Actually, throwing balls, catching balls, running with balls?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, you get on the field and do. But there’s two forms of interviews. There’s one where I’m considering a candidate and I want to see your functional skills, but there’s an even greater level, and this is the big opportunity for all of us. There is what’s called potential assessments, and it’s not done in the interview process. It’s through an education process.

So, I’ll give a personal example because I didn’t really appreciate experiences. I played Lacrosse in high school, and, admittedly, I was not such a good athlete but, whatever, I played. I went to Hobart Lacrosse campus, which is in the northeast where kind of where I lived, and this is like the preeminent school in this area, there’s 300 kids there. And while we were practicing over this week’s period, certain students were tapped on the shoulder, brought to another field, and invited to play more advanced skills, whatever.

The people who had potential in the beginning were quickly vetted out to perform on more competitive fields and try new skills. By the end of the camp, I think two or three students were invited to play for Hobart, this elite team. I was not one of them. But here’s what’s cool. I played Lacross in college, and it’s in the big part because of what I learned at Hobart. The lesson is this, that we, as employers, can put on camps, an educational event, where everyone gets elevated and used also as an observational medium to cherry-pick the best candidates.

Now, the last thing I want to share, because I get so excited about this. This is happening in the real business world, just not enough. And for the folks listening, I bet you no one’s doing workshops right now, but I’ll tell you a major company who is, it’s Home Depot. And the next time you hear they’re doing a Build a Birdhouse workshop, that is a recruiting platform, and this is how it works.

You see this ad, Build a Birdhouse, Bring a Kid, whatever, and you go down there, and you have experience. They’re there to educate you, you’re having fun, you get ingratiated at the store, it’s cool, we build a birdhouse. They have an employee there that’s observing participation, and if you’re the parent who is learning quickly, helping other parents, asking good questions, really enthusiastic about it, they will tap you on the shoulder, and say, “You’re the exact candidate we’re looking to work in Home Depot. Have you ever considered us?”

So, here’s the lesson. Don’t setup an interview platform, saying, “We’re interviewing people to build birdhouses.” Simply say, “If you’re curious, you can learn,” because the best candidates are curious. The other thing that’s interesting is it’s a recruiting platform that doesn’t follow where the standard fair is going. Everyone is going to the platform DuJour, or Indeed, or whatever it is nowadays. We go there, and everyone keeps going after the same 2% of unemployed people and a few people that are looking for a job right now.

But in an education format, I can go to my competition. I can go to anyone, and say, “Are you looking to get better at what you currently do?” Because, at the end of the day, top performers are always looking to learn. They’re learners. So, put on a learning environment, now people come, they learn the skills that you are looking to hire for, or they have the prerequisite skills and you’re giving them new education, and now you can observe and cherry-pick the people you want. I mentioned in the book, we were testing this other company, and, sure enough, we had a bookkeeping agency that, to a great effect, they preschool, the last organization is using this now.

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, I love so much of what you’re saying here because, well, I actually own a podcast production company, and that’s how we do hiring, is we just put people through sort of a gauntlet. They’re from all over the world, so it’s hard to get them together physically but we’ll just have a series of things, it’s like, “Okay, show me what you can do here and here,” in terms of one of my favorites is “Tell me what’s wrong with this sentence and write a better one. What’s wrong with this sentence, and write a better one? Summarize this podcast episode, etc.”

And so, then when we get together, it’s like, “Holy schmokes, you really sure know how to write very well. Go figure. And I guess you have to in order to pass this gauntlet of assessments.” And then this is also connecting in that I have coached many, many candidates through what I call case interviews for consulting jobs in which they have to solve real-time, live, a business case in front of the interviewer, like, “Hey, our client is this business, their profits are down, what do we do?” and they have to do this all dance of asking clarifying questions, and doing and putting forth a structure, and doing some calculations, ultimately generating a solution.

And, go figure, the folks they hire at the consulting firms tend to work out and not leave early. But I think the coolest experience of this was with, have you heard of the Fossey Foundation?

Mike Michalowicz

I have not.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, this is a nonprofit and, on their website, they identify and recruit and train individuals with extraordinary leadership potential, and Fossey scholars get full tuition leadership scholarships from their colleges and universities. And so, the idea is they want diverse students in colleges, and their students’ brilliance may not show up on the ACT/SAT GPAs. And so, I volunteered several times. It’s so fascinating.

Mike Michalowicz

That’s cool.

Pete Mockaitis

So, we observe high school students as they engage in these activities and we’re all just watching and writing down who’s impressing us with the leadership things they’re doing and who is not.

Mike Michalowicz

I love it.

Pete Mockaitis

And then when all the students leave, we talk about them. And so, that’s like one way that this talent is surfaced, and it’s like a camper workshop for “How do we find great high school talent that should be going to college who isn’t showing up on the ACT/SAT GPA?”

Mike Michalowicz

And you used that term students, which is perfect. So, when you talked about the gauntlet, that’s what’s called a skill assessment. The challenge of the gauntlet is these are people who are already applying for a job so they know they’re in a test environment, and it is a powerful tool. It’s kind of, like, I’m looking for a football player throw-catch-run, but there’s also camps, and that comes prior to this. This is for students, so this is people that they don’t know they’re being vetted, and that’s not even the primary intention, it’s to educate.

So, I can run a workshop, saying, “Learn to be a podcast editor,” or whatever it may be, and now I can invite in my competition, I can invite all these people, and they learn the experience. A couple keys to running a great workshop. Charge for it because people who are curious will pay, and it is educational. Give a certificate of accomplishment. Now they have a piece of paper, or digital paper, that they can use, if you decide not to employ them, maybe you can benefit them with another employer, but in the process always observe.

And that last example, as we said, they are students. So, they’re going through an education and learning, but we’re cherry-picking. The analogy I use, I put this in the book, is pretend you and I, Pete, we want to start a rock band, and we want just like trashing guitarist, and we’re like, “You know, let’s pick a guy from the ‘80s, let’s pretend Eddie Van Halen is still alive. We want Eddie Van Halen.” Now, how do you find Eddie Van Halen without knowing who he’s going to be?

We already know Eddie Van Halen is a qualified person, and if we called him, he would reject us, he’d laugh. The A players are gainfully employed, they’re making Goku box, and they’ll say no. But if we could have Eddie Van Halen when he is 12, that’s when he discovered guitar, I bet you we could’ve secured him. So, the big question, of course, is “How do you know Eddie is going to be Eddie Van Halen?” Well, you do a workshop. We could put on a guitar shop. If we need a future guitarist, we need a great guitarist. Let’s put him in a workshop.

I actually play a guitar but I don’t play it well. We need somebody that’s really a trasher, maybe you do, but we’ll bring in someone from the outside, and say, “We’re going to pay you for a five-day workshop, or one day, or one hour online, whatever it is,” then we reach out to all 12-year-olds, and say, and their parents, “A hundred dollars, learn to play a trashing guitar.” Then we look for the indicators of potential.

It’s always in three stages. Curiosity is the first stage, “Oh, I will do this or not.” So, people vet themselves out right there. Second stage is desire, it’s like, “Oh, I really like this.” Eddie couldn’t put the guitar down. He’s asking tons of questions. That’s what Home Depot was looking for, the parents that help other parents, ask questions about building birdhouses. The final stage is thirst. Thirst is, “I can’t stop.” It’s almost an addictive level. The job of the instructor is to provide an education so everyone comes out better.

Then, or additionally, observe for desire and thirst. When you find those people, that’s when you pull Eddie aside, and say, “Hey, by the way, we happen to be starting a band. Thanks for joining our class as a student here. Do you want to join a band? Do you ever think about that?” That 12-year-old Eddie may have said, “Yeah.” And we don’t know he’s going to necessarily be the Eddie he became, but those desire and thirst are the strongest indicators that he has that potential to become that guy.

Pete Mockaitis

And in the setting of the workshop, I can see curiosity, what are some of the telltale signs, “Ooh, there’s some desire. Ooh, there are some thirst”?

Mike Michalowicz
So, usually, if there’s homework assignments, they actually do the homework. Another part is lots of questions. So, curiosity will come after questions, but desire is also indicative of questions. It’s the person who’s raising their hand the most. The second one is attendance. So, you’ll see if someone is really into it will often arrive early, stay late. They’ll usually be distraction-free. That’s actually the biggest indicator.

When people try to multitask, it means they’re not engaged with the task at hand, so they’re trying to do other things. So, you can see someone online, or wherever, if they turn their cameras off, those are awesome indicators. In a workshop, someone is checking their phone regularly. Well, when someone gets immersed in it, it becomes this tunnel vision. So, we’re looking for the tunnel vision effect.

Thirst may not present itself right away. It may come later on but thirst is an inability to quit. It’s the person that stays for an extra five hours. It’s the professor that says, “Oh, my God, I wish this person will go home now,” or the instructor will go home. That person who can’t quit it has thirst, so we look for those elements.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s so phenomenal. And this reminds me, I was doing a workshop for a pharmaceutical company, just a series of workshops, what you said about the homework was striking. And I thought, “I need to encourage these folks to do the exercises outside of our workshops.” And so, I thought, “Okay, we got gift cards,” I thought a little bit of accountability, a leader board might embarrass them, like, “Hey, your boss and everyone is going to see that you’re not doing the exercises,” and that didn’t really motivate very many people.

Mike Michalowicz

Unbelievable, huh?

Pete Mockaitis

I was surprised, like, “I’d be so self-conscious about my name being at the bottom of the leader board.”

Mike Michalowicz

I know.

Pete Mockaitis

But, sure enough, there were two people who were smoking it, like, with great consistency, getting it done. And so, we stayed in touch, and they might be listening to this show. Hello, guys. And it was so funny, they said, “Hey, you know what’s really interesting, Pete? The two of us were the ones who got promotions, and we were also the ones who scored highest on doing all of the homework.”

Mike Michalowicz

No surprise.

Pete Mockaitis

And I was like, “Yes, that is interesting.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, very interesting.

Pete Mockaitis

Because they had the desire, it’s like, “Ooh, I really want to develop these professional skills,” and they went after it, and then they signed up for my email list and other stuff afterwards because they were just into learning these skills, and it so happened that those skills are the ones they needed to flourish in their careers, which is why that was the subject of the workshops in the first place. And so, that’s really telling. If I can give, set a stage to create an opportunity whereby people can distinguish themselves by choosing to proactively do the thing or not, that’s supremely telling. I love it.

Mike Michalowicz

I remember I was doing a presentation last week in front of 200 folks, and these are all business owners. And I said, “Who in the room here is an A player?” And I said, “Please don’t be bashful. This is an opportunity to brag, if you feel that’s appropriate.” And every hand went up. And they defined A player, drive and all the stuff. And then at the same group, I said, “Keep your hand up. I’m curious, what percentage of the population is A players?” And they’re like, “Five percent, 2%.” The most gracious was 10%.

I said, “Okay, we have 100% of the people who are A players, yet, at the same time, saying 10% of the population is A players.” So, this is some bizarre statistical phenomenon happening. There’s some warp in the universe right now, or something is not right. And what I believe is not right is everybody is an A player in the right circumstances. These people, and we all see the best, we all have the potential to see the best in ourselves, some people don’t, but we do have the potential to see the best in ourselves but we have to be put in the right environment.

Eddie Van Halen is probably a pretty crappy, or was a pretty crappy bookkeeper. And so, we’d say, “He sucks.” Yeah, but you give him a guitar. The thing is my little business, I got 20 people here, I have maybe one more role available in the next year. Of all the people in this planet, there’s a small percentage they will be a match for that. But what I had to realize as a leader, as an employer, everyone coming in is an A player. The question is, “Are they an A player for my needs?” And it does change the perspective.

When we think most people aren’t a fit, it’s all about just, “Oh, everyone sucks.” When we think everyone is great, then we start saying, “Well, what will be an indicator of their greatness in compliance with what I need or in alignment with what I need?” It just changes the vision a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis

It is, yes. And it feels more kind and hopeful.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, totally. And I think it’s the truth. Pick any person, in the right role, they can crush it. And I’m not saying everyone is going to be great nine to five. Maybe some dude, all he does is sleep all day. Maybe he can test mattresses. Like, you got to figure it out.

Pete Mockaitis

“Dude, get in a sleep clinic.”

Mike Michalowicz

He’s a sleep clinic tester.

Pete Mockaitis

“You’ll be giving so much data for the scientists.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, or maybe he watches training videos to see if he can stay awake to any training videos. And if he does, he’s a great tester.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Mike, you’re so fun. I love these perspectives. Okay. Well, that’s such a huge takeaway right there, is creating these workshops or camps. I’d love it if we could get a few more examples for how this can be turned into reality. So, Home Depot, build a birdhouse, sports camps, we talked about the Fossey Foundation. What else?

Mike Michalowicz

So, we worked with a preschool, and this preschool is what’s called site directors. This is a multi-location preschool and they need teachers that can review the performance to ensure all standards are being achieved in their multiple locations. And the prerequisite is you need to be a teacher already. And so, you can get people with advanced skills by having prerequisites.

So, what we did is we reached out to all the competition. And this is the beautiful thing, the competition will send people. We said, “We’re putting on an educational event,” it’s always educational, “We’re going to charge $150 or whatever it was, for a one-day training on site directors services and how you’d manage it. The prerequisite is you must be a teacher for five years, blah, blah, blah.” Our competition sent teachers, so now, at our location, all the competitors’ teachers there, and we teach in this process, we start observing who shows desire and thirst.

By the end, everyone has a certificate, they had accomplished the prerequisite skills or the tests, whatever, but we also identified three of those teachers, we said, “Well, gosh, you’re perfect to be a site director. We happen to be hiring,” but they’re also ethical, we said, “Hey, listen, you have a current employer. If they have a site director opportunity, it is clearly your talent. We invite you to talk with them and consider that, but if there’s not an opportunity and this is something you want to pursue, we’d love to have a conversation with you.” We got our best two site directors that way.

There was another case where a company of bookkeepers, they’re based out of the US, the founder, her name is Tuesday, she is originally from Kenya, an African country. I think it was Kenya. And she teamed up with the University of Nairobi, and said, “I’ll give you a bookkeeping course, all remote.” Actually, she even prerecorded the videos. She had an adjunct professor, she taught bookkeeping. They didn’t offer this course before at this particular university. I think it was a dozen students who went through it.

By the end, the onsite director, she gave them direction, saying, “As an adjunct professor, give me feedback on who’s doing the homework, who’s engaged the most, and I want to talk to those people, and I’ll start doing one-on-one coaching.” So, they did additive education, and she started coaching them individually, and she vetted down about three people that she hired. They’re her best performing employees. But the beauty of that story is the remaining nine people all got jobs as bookkeepers at other companies.

Now, here’s the last thing I want to share, this kind of feels overwhelming. I got to put on a course, I had to do a webinar. Even if it’s an hour, I don’t have the skills. Here’s the ultimate shortcut. Whatever position you need to hire for, find the workshop, the course, the education, the class that’s teaching it, and go as a student to observe the other students. That’s the shortcut. Just go and watch the others, seek desire and thirst, talk to them, and say, “Hey, I’m looking to hire, not deal.”

Pete Mockaitis

This is beautiful. All right, workshops is huge. Well, keep it going, Mike. What are some other pro tips on building these unstoppable teams? And I want to hear, generally speaking, interviews aren’t the method between desire and outcome that we’re after. Workshops are a cool alternative means of selecting folks. What are some other things you suggest that are not interviews?

Mike Michalowicz

So, the most common other thing I heard, and this was also mind-blowing to me, is the desire was, “I want my employees to act like owners.” The method was if you achieve certain goals, you’ll get rewarded. And the outcome is most employees see their job as just a job and don’t function as owners. They don’t put in that extra effort because they don’t have a desire.

What I found is a concept that was buried away in the 1970s-1980s called psychological ownership which is ignored by leaders, but, my gosh, it’s the tool that makes any of us, leader, owner, or not, to feel like owners. What it’s called is psychological ownership. So, there’s two types of ownerships. There’s legal ownership and psychological.

Legal ownership is just a contract of sorts but it doesn’t give you the feeling. Psychological always does, and we need to amplify it. The best example is I own stock in Ford, a hundred shares. I recently drove by a Ford factory, and I was just driving by, I didn’t look at it and say, “Oh, my God, I own three of those bricks on that building.” I just drove by, and I go, “Oh, there’s Ford. Where’s my money?” which is entitlement even though I have legal ownership.

Now here’s the irony, I also own a Ford pickup truck, and I feel that I own it but I actually don’t. The bank owns it, I’m making installments but I feel like I own it. So, the question is, “Why do I feel that way?” Because I treat it with such care. The reason is three elements. First of all, I have the ability to personalize it. I can program the radio stations the way I want. I can put bumper stickers on the back. When you can personalize something, you feel a sense of authority over it, and it becomes part of you. It’s an expression of identity.

The second part is I have control, authority, meaning I can park it where I want to park it, I drive whenever I want to drive it, all those elements. And the last part is I have intimate knowledge, I know all the bells and whistles. I went through the whole manual. I know what every button does. So, the more intimately we know something, the more we can personalize and put authority or control into it, the more we sense ownership.

So, as employees in an organization, within the confines of their job, where can they assert control? Part of it is idea generation. When someone comes up with their own idea, they feel control. Say, “Hey, here’s where we want to move our company, here’s your capacity in it, what do you think you could do or want to do to help us move the business forward?” So, now you’re asserting control, “How can you make this more your own? How can it be an expression of yourself?”

One thing we do when we have an SOP or standard in our own company now, I used to have the person that does it, currently teach it, and everyone follows a script, no control, no authority. Now, we do is we have a script, we give it to the new person, and say, “Learn from this. And then how can you enhance it and create the new training video because it’s going to be your standard?” The irony is the best student in every room is the teacher. So, they’re teaching, which means they’re learning, but also because it’s an expression of themselves, they have more ownership in the role.

Pete Mockaitis

I want to put you on the spot with, like, this really tricky example. Like, let’s say, “Hey, there is a standardized process by which this needs to be done for the sake of compliance or for the law.”

Mike Michalowicz

Right. Right. So, you can’t change the coding or anything.

Pete Mockaitis

So, there’s a few things that are kind of immovable. But could you give us some cool examples of how, even within such environments, folks manage to feel a lot of that cool personalization, control, and intimate knowledge?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, so a quick simple personalization tip, trick, is to change the name of something, maybe not publicly but internally. So, if there’s some kind of compliance document, I can call it Kelsey’s compliance, and right there, with the assigned names, you have a sense of authority, and really personalization over it so you can give it unique names and lingo. It’s a real simple technique.

Intimate knowledge, I would exploit that. So, I’d say, listeners, “Rules and regulations, we had to follow it to the tee. I want you to be the master at this. So, research it, study. Can you find loopholes, which is an opportunity?” When you find a loophole, it’s a technique of personalization, it’s like, “Oh, there’s a little button here that no one knows about that I can get through.” So, explore it. But even if they don’t find “loopholes” the fact they know the protocol better than anyone else, they’re building intimate knowledge.

Control and authority. There may be protocols they have to follow but can they control the submission times? You can say, “Hey, when is the optimum time to get this in? Does it always have to be Monday at 10:15 a.m.? Or, can we work with a schedule that suits you?” That’s giving them a sense of control so you can assert it. Again, what we’re looking for is for them to say, “This is my responsibility. This is my job,” and that means they’re sensing that authority.

I will give one word of warning though. There is a risk here of fiefdoms. And what a fiefdom is it’s where a person has so much knowledge that they start blockading other people from access. That’s dangerous. So, we want to move to a higher level of psychological ownership which is called collective psychological ownership.

What we do here is you have multiple parties involved, you make teams around it, so if there’s something, a risk of a fiefdom being built, invite multiple people to work in concert, in that way you prevent those walls from being built.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny how into things we can get in terms of if you feel like you’ve got your own little touch on it. In terms of like if I am getting into my own audio editing, which I do from time to time, here and there, even though I’ve got great supportive teams, I love to do certain things which are just sort of my little style. It’s like I’d like to do a gentle downward expansion to attenuate the intensity of a breath sound as opposed to a harsh noise gate that have layers of rich complex gradations of silence. It’s like, “Okay, that’s so dorky but I own it. I am invested in this.”

Mike Michalowicz
Amazing.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny, if someone were to take that away, in terms of, like, “No, Pete, that’s not how we do it here. Actually, you’ve got to comply with the situation where we use XYZ software,” I wouldn’t like that.

Mike Michalowicz

Totally, right, because when someone asserts control or authority on you, we start building resistance. I was saying, when forced to comply, we seek to defy.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, Mike.

Mike Michalowicz

The classic study, and this works from poise, but the classic is with rental cars because we’ve all experienced this. The next time you go to Herts or wherever, you go through a protocol of compliance requirements. First, you got to fill out a hundred forms for an hour. Secondly, if you don’t return with a full tank of gas, we’re going to penalize you by charging $10 a gallon for us to fill it because it’s so hard. Secondly, no scratches, no dents. Third, must be clean. Fourth, good luck passing the DMZ zone where there’s going to be flashing lights, spikes coming up, and some dude coming out with a gun asking for your ID, all that compliance.

So, when forced to comply, we seek to defy. What do we do the second we pull out? We do donuts in the parking lot, or we fly into the light and skid in sideways, or we punch it when it turns green. We definitely drive it more aggressively. Rental cars get beat up on compared to our own car, where we’re, “Hey, this is my car. We’re going to take care of it.” No one washes their rental car before returning, but we wash our own car. Why is that? When forced to comply, we seek to defy.

And this is one of the things that great leaders realize. Most leaders focus on compliance, achievement, and so employees are seeking for elbow room to get back at the boss. Great leaders embrace the internal human and allow them to take charge. Yes, there’s rules and confines. You can’t let people just go wild. We have to work as a team collectively. You can’t have a football team where you say, “Everyone just run any way you want.” We have to serve the plays.

But if we can give them self-expression, they can expand.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then as we speak, there’s a world of work, there’s these back-to-office mandates. Tell us, as we think about personalization and control, what’s your hot take on these?

Mike Michalowicz
Is that in the best interest of employees? Sometimes you have to require something that actually serves people, and you’ll get resistance, a.k.a. if you ever had children, that’s the world of raising children. My kids, “You have to take a shower at our house after a week.” There are some minimum requirements. These stink bombs walk around, and it’s really in their best interest.

Some employers are doing this because we’re losing the socialization at home. Everything is going virtual. And we’re losing that tactile experience. So, the employers that are requiring come back to the office to promote socialization are building connectivity among people.

It’s funny, they used to wonder that the water cooler, that business got done there, good ideas. No, business didn’t get done there. Connection happened there. People talk about their kids. When we have connection, we understand each other from a tactile level, we have trust. So, it’ll actually rebuild trust. But employers that are mandating it because they want to track time, or trying to assert authority, “I got to make sure you’re producing, so come on in.” That’s not going to work. People are going to, when forced to comply, they will seek to defy. That definitely won’t work.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, it sounds like what you’re saying is there are certain rules, guidelines, times, places, contexts where it is good, right, proper, and necessary for there to be some, “Hey, we’ve all got to be here” stuff going on, but if it’s from a perspective of authoritative, “I’ve got to watch you,” we’re in for bad news.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, if there’s a kind of a nourished, flourishing, comply to fly. So, if you are nourishing people, have demanded to come back because you’re going to nourish the team, “Go team,” and it’s really in the best interest of people, they will flourish, that’s a great move. If you’re doing to force compliance, measurement, control, authority over, you’re going to get that resistance, and it’s not going to work long term.

Pete Mockaitis

Awesome. Well, Mike, tell us, anything else we really should know before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Michalowicz

So, one last thing, it’s about safety. Leaders have to build a safe environment. Now, I’m not just talking only about physical safety. But ironically, this is a concern with many companies, including mine, and I didn’t even know. We’re a knowledge-based business, we’re writing books and speaking engagements, and other stuff like courses and classes. So, how can I have a safe environment?

Well, we ran a survey, and my colleagues said, “You know the back alley that goes to the cars…” we have a parking lot behind the building, “…is dark at night, and it’s kind of creepy going out into the pitch-black walkway.” I’m like, “Oh, my gosh.” So, starting at 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, the sun sets in the winter by 5:30, people get nervous about going home, I’m like, “This is crazy.” We just put lights up, string lights, it’s always bright.

And now my colleagues are like, “Oh, I can see what’s going on. I feel safe.” So, we got physical safety, but the bigger thing is relational safety. Do people feel comfortable expressing themselves as they are? Because if they can’t show up as they naturally are, they’re going to start faking it, and now you get a depleted version of that person.

The leaders got to express themselves naturally. Lead with humanness. Show the warts. I’m not saying have a cry fest and talk about how miserable you are. What I’m saying is you can share your struggles. Be integral about your own experiences in life and talk about the wins and the losses, and you’re going to encourage your team to do the same, which actually builds connectivity.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, Mike, could you share with us now a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, this is attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite research is, oh, there’s a book that came out called The 3.3 Rule by a guy named John Briggs. And what he did was he researched out productivity and found that people can work up to three hours max without needing recoveries, safe recovery, and you need 0.3, which is 30% recovery time. So, if you work three hours, you’re going to need 90 minutes of recovery time, if that works right, and so forth, 3.3.

Pete Mockaitis

Three times 180 minutes.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, I mean it’s not 90 minutes, but you know what I’m saying. It’s maybe 48 minutes. So, yeah, 30% of the time used is needed to recover. So, if I worked for one hour, it’s going to be 18 minutes or whatever that works out to be of recovery and so forth.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Mike Michalowicz

I just finished reading 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan. Really opened my mind to perspective.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite habit is sauna, I do it with my wife. And I’m going to try to convince her to do it again tonight. I will tell you this, when you’re in a hot box, it is so hot you can’t have your phone in there, which is great. And the only thing you can do is talk, and it’s hard to think. So, when someone is talking, you’ve got to listen deeply. It’s like the best connection device ever.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that folks retweet and they quote back to you often?

Mike Michalowicz

Yes. What I say often is that the number one job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job. It’s to be a creator of jobs. So, I get that retweeted often.

Pete Mockaitis

And, Mike, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where shall we point them?

Mike Michalowicz
MikeMotorbike.com because, similar to your last name, no one can spell Michalowicz. MikeMotorbike rhymes with motorcycle. Everything is there. I got book downloads. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal, you can get those articles, plus I have a podcast archive there.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, your clients want you to be profitable. And this isn’t just a final thought, but when you look at your clients, are you proud of your surviving check by check, to say, “I’m barely making it. I’m struggling,” or, “I’m very profitable”? I’ll give you context. Say you had an emergency, and you go, “I got rushed to the hospital. I have a heart attack,” or something. Doctor one comes down, and says, “I’m making no money. I need clients. I need patients. Let’s get this done quickly.” Or, doctor two says, “I’m very profitable and wealthy because this is all I do and I’m exceptional at it. I have all the time in the world to do this with you and do it right.”

Who do you choose? Option two. When your life is on the line, you want to be catered to. When your life is being altered or served in some capacity by us, we want to be catered to. Your clients want to be your number one customer. They want your undivided attention. And if you aren’t profitable, you can’t do that, so they want you to be profitable. You should be profitable.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mike, thank you. This is a treat. I wish you many, many fine colleagues who are all in.

Mike Michalowicz

Thanks, brother. It’s been a joy.