KF #34. Builds Effective Teams

Pete Mockaitis
Ashley, welcome.

Ashley Herd
Thank you, Pete. I love listening to your podcast, so it’s a treat to be on here.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. You, too. It’s funny, I had to check. Wait, we haven’t met in person before, have we, right? No, I don’t think we have. Okay, well.

Ashley Herd
No, no, although it feels like it.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. All right. Well, I’m stoked to be talking about managers and methods therein. You said something intriguing, and I had heard that, “Oh, many managers don’t receive any training.” You went ahead and quantified that, depending on what segment we’re talking about. It’s a whopping 40-60% of managers have had no training whatsoever. Can you talk to us about this concept?

Ashley Herd
Well, what often happens, I’ve seen, is this idea of when managers are selected. And I say that intentionally because often it is this selection process that, when you get picked or told you’re going to become a manager or interview to become a manager, there’s this idea of, you know, “This person is great at their job, so we’ll take them. We’ll make them a manager. They’ll teach everybody else how to do it and magic. It’s awesome.”

And despite the fact that most people making that decision are actually managers, people-leaders themselves, that know the realities of doing a job and leading a team are very different, you just kind of forget that it’s a very different skill set.

And so people are put into this position, really focusing on the work without ever giving that consideration or actual training on how to do it with this idea of like, “Oh, they’ll figure it out as they went along.” Sometimes that’s what people did and it works out for you.

Sometimes leaders think that it’s worked out for them, but it has not, actually, and data shows that it does not tend to work out to just magically learn leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
So you just mentioned data, one my favorite words. What are the indicators? What are the numbers telling us about things not working out so much here?

Ashley Herd
Well, you can look at things the boards of directors and leadership levels are going to be looking at of retention, engagement, so people are going or staying. Engagement, sometimes that can be a little trickier to monitor. You often may have employee engagement surveys.

I, personally, now that I do manager training, frequently people come to me and say, “We did an employee engagement survey. It shows that we need manager training.” And the answer to that, “It’s okay.” Well, what does that say? Because generally it’s not going to be quite specific as our managers need training. It’s a lot of run on comments sections about the realities of what it’s like to have a manager or what they’re doing.

But then sometimes with manager training, I say, “Okay, well then employees, managers get training, but then employees want it themselves.” So I do think the reality is people are looking for tips on how to work. And so when you do look at factors like retention, engagement, performance, there’s great quantifiable data.

I personally have no affiliation, but I love Harvard Business Review, HBR.org. It’s great because the things that may seem very common sense to you and I, Pete, and those listening, that if you don’t train managers, you’re probably going to see negative effects from them.

HBR has done a really nice job of having examples of what that looks like. But all of those check-the-boxes that are ticked, that boards of directors and others care about, those do really, really trickle down to the idea of, “My manager isn’t the type of manager I want to work for. I’m either not going to care about my job or I’m going to go find a job where they do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, engagement numbers aren’t great, retention numbers aren’t great. Is there anything dastardly or shocking that you’ve uncovered about the state of manager effectiveness in the workplace nowadays?

Ashley Herd
Well, one thing that I’ve really been interested in seeing, including in the world of AI and whether you’re managing people or AI agents, and they are not one and the same, the thing, but some of the data has really continued. Like, I actually, before, like I was a lawyer, but before I even went to law school, I worked for a company called Corporate Executive Board. They were acquired by Gartner.

And they partnered with Gallup to do research on employee engagement. And I, like a lot of people, including maybe like a lot of people listening, didn’t really understand, one, what that means or what goes into it other than pay me more.

And I do very scientific studies all the time on social media when I post videos, and I see comments that say, “It’s simple. Pay people.” I say, “Okay, but I’ve had some of the higher-paying jobs that I’ve had, I actually would trade that and have actually in my life traded for a lower salary to have a quality of life and autonomy and a manager.”

There are other things that go into your experience. And the data that stood behind that, that Gallup had done on employee engagement, that we did with the company I mentioned that’s now Gartner, is the number one driver of employee engagement, meaning how much you care about your job and the work you put into it, it isn’t pay.

Like, pay will keep you in seat or not often, but it’s whether your direct manager helps you understand if you’re good at your job, how that impacts the organization’s goals. Like, really the human equivalent of, “Do I matter?”

And that research has been redone sometimes identically, but sometimes in other ways, and that still continues. I mean, that’s over 20 years later since that was originally done. And so I think one aspect is how continuous this idea of people really wanting to feel like they matter as a human at work, that that stood still, including as technology has evolved.

Pete Mockaitis
To feel like they matter. Yes, and I’ve seen a number of studies which say, you know, “Appreciation is the top thing.” And that’s in that zone of feeling like we matter. And what are the top drivers that contribute to feeling like you matter or don’t matter in so far as stuff your manager is doing or not doing?

Ashley Herd
Well, I’d say Gallup, and, again, like while there’s no affiliation, there are some organizations I really like and trust the research, and Gallup continuously is one of them. And so they’d have this idea of, “Okay, let’s look at regrettable attrition.”

What that means is it’s like the people that they leave, and the manager says like, “Oh, shoot. I really wish they hadn’t left.” Gallup did a whole study around that of like, “Okay, let’s take out times when someone is not a fit for the job or times when the employer is making the decision, lay off, things like that.”

“But when people quit and the manager or organization wishes they hadn’t, what would have changed their mind?” And they went through the factors on this. And it was incredible because, as I mentioned, compensation can keep people in seat. And about a third was compensation, “Compensation would have kept me here.” But also about equal to that, about a third was two things.

One, if they had more positive interactions with their manager, and, two, if they’d had less negative interactions with their manager. And so what that can look like isn’t some, you know, big question of, “Did my manager put me up for this promotion? Did they give me this strategic guidance?”

Sometimes it’s literally thinking about that of, “Okay, I have a manager. We’re in person. I’m sitting in my cube, and I sit there every day and watch my manager stop by this person across from me, and never stops by me. Like, I just literally feel like I don’t matter.”

Or, on the flip side, “Okay, I have a manager that they have a kid that’s in Little League. Okay, their team.” Sometimes team members will say, “I know more about my boss’s kid’s batting average than I know of my own. I can’t go to a single one of my games while my boss is somehow leading this team and coaching their team because they can take the time off, but I’m not allowed to.”

And so that type of environment versus, “Okay, my manager has a kid that’s in Little League. I don’t have children. I don’t really have nothing to relate to them on. But if I have a manager that says, ‘Oh, but I’m personally into fly fishing,’” meaning me, the team member, “That has nothing to do with my manager, but they stop and ask me about that…?”

Conversations like that and moments like that, I mean, those don’t pay the bills. But when you’re coming down to your decision of, “Do I apply for another job? Do I want to stay here?” When you have a workplace that you show up to and you do feel like you have those interactions, that can truly influence people choosing to stay even when they have opportunities elsewhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love it. And it’s funny that that comes up in terms of it seems so simple, yeah, more positive experiences and fewer negative experiences, like, “All right, let’s turn that into a tremendous prize for a research insight.”

Ashley Herd
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
But, nonetheless, it’s not a super common practice, apparently, as is showing in the data associated with people’s experience of their engagement and their retention. I’d love it if you’re familiar with any of the super simple behaviors – you just mentioned one, you ask about their life and the things that they’re interested in – super simple behaviors that are pervasively neglected would just make a world of difference for folks.

Ashley Herd
I’ll give you three because, from my time at McKinsey, I learned the power of three, and so I say sometimes I’ll give you four to go above and beyond, but we’ll stick with three, the magic number.

One is if you’re hiring somebody, so let’s say you’re a manager and you’re hiring somebody on your team. Great. They go through, maybe you call and let them know, “Hey, you’re going to get the offer. You’re going to hear from HR on the paperwork. Congratulations!” And, in a way, you almost treat it like a lottery prize, like, “Congratulations! You’re on our team. HR does the paperwork. They take care of things.” And so the next you see them is on their first day, virtually or in person.

But there’s a step that can often be missed. If you’re a manager, have you ever had a conversation with a new hire and told them why they got the job? Or, on the flip side, if you’re listening to this and you’re not a manager, how often have you gotten a new job and the person that’s going to be your boss tells you, “Hey, this is why you stood out in the hiring process, and this is why we’re uniquely excited to have you join our team”?

It doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t really take much time. But that kind of conversation helps tremendously with things like engagement, because you’re starting and you feel like you matter, that it really is that two-way street. And so that’s something I often recommend, especially as a hiring manager, because I’ve been in legal and HR.

Those are not two of the most popular departments in any organizations. HR is more popular when you’re giving people new hire paperwork, but to keep present and tell people that really sets it up as a two-way street. And so I say that’s neglected just because it doesn’t, most managers don’t pause to think about how impactful that can be.

The other, I’ll say, is during employment. So let’s say delegation. You listen to all sorts of podcasts, of course, including Pete’s here, and you hear, “Okay, I should delegate. Give opportunities to my team member. It’s going to help them grow. It’s going to help me not feel like I do everything.”

But one thing that happens is you have a conversation and you tell your team member what they’re going to do and you feel great about it. But that team member, they hear it and they’re not so excited. They think to themselves, “Okay, well, now my boss is just trying to pawn work off on me, and I already have a full plate. So I guess I’ll just have to work more hours to figure this out.”

And so what’s neglected is having a conversation to, again, one is get their interest in working on this, “Sometimes you’re going to be able to work on things you’re interested in, sometimes you’re not,” but also explaining why you picked this person out for this opportunity and how it connects to actual development opportunities.

But then also to have the conversation of, “I don’t want to assume. I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s on your plate, but I don’t want to make assumptions. Let’s talk about this and how it can fit in with other things. And if there’s anything that can and should move off your plate to work on this.”

Again, that’s something that’s often neglected, it’s that step of between telling you what you’re going to do and how it gets done. The last thing I’ll say, and then I’ll flip back is, sometimes what gets neglected is when people quit. So we’ll go back to that regrettable attrition.

I’m meeting with Pete. Pete sets up time with me. I kind of have a sense of what’s coming because Pete is on my team and he tells me, “Hey, I need a quick minute.” Pete tells me, “I’m sorry. I’m leaving to go to another company.” I’m pissed because I take it very personally, because I see all the time on the internet. I’m like, “People don’t leave people. Pete is leaving me. This is super personal.”

Well, sometimes that happens. Sometimes Pete wants and needs to make more money. Sometimes Pete is moving. All sorts of other reasons aside from just the manager. But what gets neglected is pausing by managers to think about how it matters of, “How I talk to you, Pete, in that situation and understanding that you may have been incredibly stressed before telling me that and felt super guilty.”

But people make professional decisions all the time. And as a manager, projecting calm and not taking it, you know, back personally or getting frustrated back at Pete, and also then how I talk about you, Pete, to the rest of the team.

So sometimes what happens is managers bash and say, “You know, Pete is leaving us, so we’ll figure it all out.” But in those three moments, each of those is often just a pause to think about sometimes what you can do or how you can react that make such a difference in leadership beyond those moments.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And that seems to be just a theme throughout is pretty much like and you’re going to share with us a framework. But you are, you just have a pause and think about the other, the human being in front of you, and where they’re coming from, and what they’re thinking about, and how they’re feeling, and then providing a little something-something, in terms of, “Hey, here’s why we picked you. Here’s why I think you’d be great at this.”

Or, “Hey, well, it’s going to be a bummer to see you go and we’d love to hear some more about what might’ve caused you to stay,” or whatever, you know, in terms of, in some ways, it doesn’t seem that hard, and yet it’s often not done. Why do you suppose that is?

Ashley Herd
Probably, some of the biggest doubts I’ve had about what I do is, like, “Am I going to write my book?” or, “When I put things out, is it just common sense?” But common sense really isn’t that common. And why I think it happens, and why a lot of research does back it up is that people do just get busy.

And some of it’s research, some of it’s just common sense, is we all have intentions about what we’re going to do and say. I mean, look at it. If you made a to do list this morning, Pete, hopefully it was have a fun podcast conversation with Ashley.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right, it is.

Ashley Herd
And anything else, I mean, we do this all the time though. We make these to-do lists for ourselves. Sometimes, morning me has this idea of, afternoon or evening me, and it’s two different people. I have no idea what I thought was going to happen, but the reality is we get busy and you’re just trying to get through things.

And no matter what your role or title is, how many years you have experience at work, you get busy. And so you do not pause. I mean, that just happens. And so you’re just reacting in the moment, and you’re trying to get through things, and you’re making assumptions just like you wouldn’t want someone on the other side to do but you’re doing that yourself. And I really do think a lot of it is because we just get busy and we don’t think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes sense. Well, I want to dig into your framework, but maybe we could just zoom out. Tell us, The Manager Method, your book, what’s sort of the big picture message here?

Ashley Herd
So the big picture is to meet managers where they are. So whether you are a brand new or aspiring manager, or an experienced senior executive, I have found that people in leadership have so much in common. And so I’ve taken from my experiences working at, including in the corporate departments, from KFC to McKinsey, and seeing that often managers don’t take time to pause.

And so what this is, is a framework that you can use in any situation as a people leader, and then all sorts of examples of how to bring it to life, whether you’re hiring, or whether you’re delegating, or whether it comes to taking time off for yourself and as well as your team. And so all of those different aspects of work. So it’s designed to be, hopefully, an easy read, but also one that sticks with you, that helps people actually lead better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share with us a story of someone who dug into some of these principles and saw a cool transformation?

Ashley Herd
So one is, and I think I actually saw this, this is somewhat spurred it on, but I once had a boss, a future boss that was going to interview me. As I mentioned, I’ve taken a pay cut once in my life from higher pay to lower for quality of life. That happened when I was a lawyer. I moved from law firm to in-house counsel.

And I was interviewing with a client, which has all sorts of aspects to it. It was a general counsel of a publicly traded company. At the time, I had a toddler. I worked 24/7. I traveled all over the country on employment litigation cases with the law firm. All I did was work. I didn’t really like the person I was, honestly, for myself or my family.

But this client I interviewed, and I had all these questions in my head because you hear like it’s kind of being a consultant, going to industry, like, “Oh, is it better? Hope it is.” But this general counsel, who was a man, had two teenage sons, but also stay-at-home wife and a nanny, had no idea or no reason to understand fully what I was going through.

But he said, proactively, “I want to be clear that moving in-house, in this role in particular, is a pay cut, about 20-25% pay cut,” which is true. But he said, “Part of your compensation package is a more predictable schedule. You will work eight to five, you will not be expected to work out of those hours. We have a lot of fun. We take our jobs seriously, but we do really enjoy each other.”

And these are conversations, I don’t know if any lawyer has ever heard in a job interview, certainly not proactively from a general counsel or senior leader since, but I saw this, in proactively having that. So what that did for me was communicate information about what I was going to be paid very transparently, but also for me, I was willing to take that for transforming what my life was like.

And so I’ve taken that, and now had conversations with managers, and included in the book, about things to proactively tell candidates when hiring. And I’ve had so many managers that have said, you know, things like, “What kind of decisions can you make? What are the actual hours that you have? What are the things that may drive candidates away because they’re so bad? And then can you rethink those so you’re not having people quit and you’re constantly doing the turning wheel of hiring?”

But I’ve had so many managers that say, “You know, there’s things about this,” or, “If I had a candidate that brought up to me work-life balance, I wrote them off. Maybe in the moment I didn’t, but I thought it was that showed me that’s what they care about. And I need someone that’s going to focus on work. We can figure out the work-life balance.”

But it’s when I thought about it and understood, “Okay, but it’s not a game. And it’s important to me to have people that start and understand the realities of the world, for better or for worse, in proactively providing that. Because people often aren’t going to ask that question, because for that exact same reason.”

And so that’s what I’ve heard is the feedback of whether it’s things from interviewing or otherwise, how helpful it can be for managers to have those conversations, but ultimately, how you can bring people on that are a fit for the realities of what your role is. And doing that can help everyone’s lives be a lot more effective at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s great. And I’ve had that experience and when I’m hiring people, and I’ll say, “Hey, here’s my personal opinion of why I think this role is really cool. And here’s my personal opinion of how this role, in some ways, will really suck. And you know you the best in terms of if that seems like appealing and a fit or like a, ‘Uh-oh, maybe we should just stop talking right now.”

And I think that that’s great for everybody, in terms of there’s no surprises, because that’s super costly, it’s like, “Oh, shoot, I thought this was that, but apparently it’s something completely different.”

Ashley Herd
Yeah. I mean, you see the cost of hiring and you can see the ranges from 50 to 200% of salary, again, depending on whether someone started their role, all of those things. But we know it is expensive by money. It’s expensive at time.

And then there’s the whole morale of you have someone that starts on Monday, and by Wednesday they’ve ghosted you and they are not coming back to work, and what that means to the rest of the team. And that just creates a lot of grumbles. But I love that you do that, Pete. What are the reactions that you get when you say things like that? Or, like what are the aspects of roles that may suck or not suck?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, terms of it’s like, “Hey, you know, this is kind of repetitive. I mean, we’re going to be doing another episode, then another episode, then another episode, then another episode. And you might have perhaps eight key things that you’re trying to accomplish with them again and again and again and again.

And so that might feel great, like, “Oh, I can get into the groove. I can master this craft.” Or, it might feel not great, “Oh, I’m bored out of my mind.” And so, hopefully, the variety of the topics and exchanges will be of interest and supporting.

And so I think, as I’m recalling those times, it’s just like, “Oh, good. Understood.” I think it’s just a little bit – relief might be a strong word – but it creates a little bit more calm and peace on a couple of fronts. One is like, “Okay, I could see what I’m getting into,” as well as, “Oh, okay, this person I’m talking to is real in terms of it’s not all rosy, okay? And that’s to be understood and expected.”

And then I think it creates a bit more freedom in the conversation to express what’s really on everyone’s mind, because we don’t have to kind of play a game in which these are…And I’ve seen YouTube videos on this, like, when the interviewer asks this, “This is really what they want. And so what you’re thinking is this, but you don’t really say that.” I mean, just this whole layer of obfuscation, it’s like, “Oh, we can let go of some of that. That’s nice.”

Ashley Herd
It is. And it sounds like common sense because you think, like, “Okay, well, this is work and I’m the leader. If people don’t like that, then they should look elsewhere.” And they can, but you’ll also tend to have consequences of that.

If you create, whether it’s a hiring process or a workplace, that your attitude is people can go work elsewhere, then probably the people that you want to work with you will be looking elsewhere sooner rather than later. And you and I both, if people wanted to work on our teams, that they have a lot of data they could look at.

Namely, they can listen to and watch your podcast, have and say, “Okay, I wonder what Pete is like in real life.” But you get a glimpse into what someone is like. Oftentimes, someone is interviewing and, aside from your LinkedIn, maybe it’s a profile picture from 20 years ago or all those things, but people are, they are, they’re just trying to find out the realities just like you are of them.

And I’ve just seen so many managers that they forget, not that they don’t care, you’re just not thinking about the fact of this is a real human on the other side. And so if we have 10 rounds of interviews, that can mean 10 times of them trying to figure out how to lie to their boss about exactly where they are at that moment. And so we may be making this process a lot harder than it should be.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And that’s a great point, it’s like, for most, the vast majority of humans have a very tiny public profiles, like, “Okay, you got a LinkedIn profile, but you haven’t posted anything for years, and maybe you haven’t updated some of the positions either. So I don’t know if you’re the guy who just screams, ‘You can’t deposit excuses, you know, every week’ or what you’re like at all.”

Ashley Herd
Yeah, and so they may look, it’s like, but I hear all the time, like, Glassdoor, and HR leaders will say, “Oh, you can’t trust Glassdoor.” And I say, “Well, sure, I know. I know from very real experience.” Sometimes you look at a Glassdoor of you, and you think to yourself, “I know who that person is.” And there’s some more context to that that could probably even it out a bit.

But when you do see themes like that, or if you’re a manager that has a reputation that people have identified you by name or by function, that’s what people are building their information on. And so knowing that the candidates you’re talking to, these are real humans with real lives. And those are people that, ideally, you want to have come join your team and want to be there and grow, and so providing as real of information as you can.

I totally love the way you put it. I think the value of having peace and calm and just feeling this is somebody you can have a communication with and trust what they’re saying, that is such an underrated skill in management, meaning underrated by managers thinking about how important that is for them to establish.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear about your pause, act, consider framework. Walk us through it.

Ashley Herd
Okay. So, again, three steps, all revolutionary. And I’ve mentioned the pause a bit. And this is a step that I do see people miss, whether you work in an organization that all your job descriptions say fast-paced, or you work in an organization where that’s not written down, but it always feels like it’s respond immediately, reply to emails, always be available.

Technology has made it often that despite the word asynchronous, you often feel like there’s this expectation that your value is in being fast in responding. And so you are, you’re getting things out. Sometimes you’re frustrated. You immediately respond with that.

The third word is act, so it doesn’t mean to stop or not do things at work, but it’s to take a breath, take a beat, sometimes take longer if it’s really something you need to think through, but it really is to give yourself an opportunity to consider other things, which is the second step because the pause is not just, “Okay, be quiet for a moment. Look strategic, like some YouTube trick of look strategic and then do exactly what you were just going to do. Just make it think and think that you’ve been thinking about it.”

But, yeah, this space. So it’s to consider, and you can consider things. The one thing I say to people, if you’re just going to remember one thing, is consider what you’d want to have happen if you were in that person’s position.

So, talking about job interview, for example. Like, if something is crazy, like my first job that I took, the title was marketing associate. This was not a marketing role. It was sales and it was cold-calling and it was called marketing associate, but, really, it was sales.

And so, whether it’s the titling of something or how you describe it or anything that’s going on at work, thinking about how you’d want to have the conversation on the other side because managers I really see, even if you’re not a manager at work, just thinking about the person on the other side of that, because we’re not thinking about that person from the receiving end.

So, okay, if something’s, this job is absolutely crazy, wouldn’t you want to know? And again, the way Pete phrases it, the things that might suck, the things that are great, but describing it, at least giving people the truth, and letting them decide.

Sometimes you’ll be disappointed because you really like someone and it’s not for them. Or, if you’re giving performance feedback and, “Well, I don’t want to do that. It feels mean.” Okay, well, what if I was on the other side and I knew my manager had feedback for me? I wasn’t doing something right. But they weren’t saying anything because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

But I’d probably say, “Well, let’s have the conversation. But maybe ask for my perspective or say it in a way that’s not going to hurt my feelings, or that doesn’t feel so harsh.” And so that consider is, really, I think the most helpful step to think about how you’d want to be treated.

Think about any other factors. Okay, they knew or they experienced. What are the what are the options? But then act is to actually do something about it. Like I mentioned, morning me often has a lot of expectations about how I’m going to act throughout the day. Sometimes I don’t feel like doing something. I say I’ll do it tomorrow. But making sure that you actually do the thing.

And so having the conversation, making the decision. If Pete and I are having a conversation, I give him an idea. And Pete says, “Let me think on that. Okay, I’ll get back to you.” Well, if you, Pete, never get back to me and I never hear anything about it, I assume that you’ve thought a lot about it. Maybe you’ve talked to people about it and you think I’m a complete idiot.

But reality, what’s happened is you probably forgot about it like a human being. And so the act is whether it’s making the decision, or if you are thinking about something, having a note for yourself, having a reminder so that you are getting back to people. And it’s really, again, not revolutionary, but three steps that, whether you’re in management or in any role, that can really help you be awesome at your job, no matter what that job is.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good, the pause, consider, and act, because, I guess, I’m thinking about, I’ve had a number of occasions in which I am in a meeting with my business partner and we’re talking to someone, maybe it’s a sales context, maybe it’s operational thing. And he keeps saying things, like, “Oh, I should have said that,” “Oh, I should have said that.”

And it’s usually because of exactly this. It’s the pausing and considering of that other person, where they’re coming from, what might they want to hear in this situation, as opposed to, you know, whatever, getting on to the next thing. Or, my hang up, I think, is more so that I get very excited and very curious.

So it’s like if someone sends me just an amazing piece of work, and so it sparks all kinds of new questions and ideas and possibilities. And so I say, “Oh, what about this? Well, what about this? Have you thought about that? And how about that?”

But what would be ideal is, before going down that, would be to talk about more positive interactions and fewer negative interactions to say, “Wow, this is a very impressive piece of work. Thank you so much. It must’ve taken a lot to pull all of this together. Wow, this opens up all kinds of exciting new opportunities and possibilities.”

Like, that took maybe 20 seconds. And then they say, “Well, yes, thank you. It was a lot of work and it feels good to be acknowledged.” And I’m not nowhere in my heart am I thinking, “I wish to punish this person,” or, “I take them for granted. And, of course, you just did your job. You don’t need a cookie or praise for…” you know? Like, that’s nowhere in my psyche, and yet I can blow right past it.

Ashley Herd
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d also want to get your pro tip when it comes to great meetings.

Ashley Herd
Well, I’d say two pro tips. One is for one-on-one meetings and one is for team meetings. My biggest pro tip for one-on-one meetings is to show up for them and show up on time and be focused. So that was kind of three things at once, but those are going to be things that sound very basic.

But it is wild when I do a scientific study of a video about one-on-ones with your boss, for example, and I make a video about you have a 30-minute one-on-one with your boss. The comment sections are much more than not comments of, “One-on-ones haven’t had those. They’ve been on the calendar, but I haven’t had one in about two years.”

Or, I’ll make a video about, “Okay, but you’re a boss that shows up 25 minutes into a 30-minute one-on-one, and says like, ‘Okay. Oh, I was meeting with SVP of XXYZ,’” but that happens constantly. And how you as a manager are probably thinking, “I’m giving an explanation of where I was,” but the team member is thinking, “Okay, well, wherever you are, you’re with people that are more important than me, but I have 47 things I really need to get through with you. So how are we going to make this happen?”

And so it is a step that, again, in the book, I have tips about things on agendas and how to make the shared agenda and how to make them more actionable. But it is amazing when you give people focus time where they know they’re going to be able to run through things, and you’re going to be looking at them, not at your cell phone, not at your second and third screens, all over the place.

But when you can have that time, it helps tremendously. It helps your team members, but it also often helps you avoid the people trying to reach you. Because you’ve told them, “Oh, I just have an open door policy. I don’t do one-on-ones. Come find me if you need me.”

And then everyone’s trying to find you, and it can feel crushingly stressful. And it’s, obviously, not effective. And so that’s my biggest tip for one-on-one meetings is to just consider how impactful that could be for both you and them.

For team meetings, I’ll just say one thing that’s a pro tip is in those, taking an opportunity to give opportunities to team members, including those that don’t speak up as much, but just to take a few minutes and you can rotate it, to talk about something that they do that feels super easy to them.

So maybe that’s a process they do. Look up, some people are going to be much more comfortable just talking about work and focus on a work thing that they know how to do. Other people, this may be the opportunity for them to say, “Oh, this is how I make this banana bread that I bring to every potluck. But these are my tips of how I do that.”

But why that can help is to give people an opportunity to explain something that choose whatever they want that really feels genuine. Or sometimes they’ve done something well and the manager say, “Okay, come and talk to the team about how you did that and some of the challenges you went through.’ But it also then can build that communication and confidence skills.

Again, it doesn’t have to happen every meeting necessarily, but it can absolutely be a way to give people who just show up to every meeting, otherwise, don’t feel like they have anything to say, but it can give them the opportunity to really have communication, learn from each other.

And I’ve sat through some of those meetings. And some of the things I can tell you, years later that I learned that stuck with me, even those non work-related topics, much more so than just any work-related thing. But it also changed the way that we work together because I saw those people as real humans rather than just super transactional.

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

Ashley Herd
Well, the one thing I’ll say is, because if you’ve been listening to this and you’re not a manager and you think, “Okay. After listening to this episode, now I really want to become a manager. So I want to be good at my job,” one tip I have is, is to think about if someone gives you something, like if your boss asks you something, finding out why they’re having it, why they’re working on it.

And also explaining why you want to ask. So, “Okay, I’m meeting with Pete.” Pete says, “Okay, can you give me three bullets on this status that you’re working on?” “Okay, I can do that.” I may have no idea what Pete is doing that for.

But so if I add and say, “Okay, let me know what that’s for. And I ask because, if it’s for an email, I’m happy to format that in an email to the audience, or if it’s for a slide, I’m happy to put that together to require less work for you and make sure I know the audience and I’m creating less work for you. Not more.” It takes about seven and a half seconds to say more.

But when you become known for thinking just a step ahead in doing that, whether it’s putting something in a format that’s helpful for someone, or asking those questions, it helps you to become the person that’s trusted. And, again, we always have to be careful about then not being the go-to person that just takes on everything.

We all could use someone that we work with that helps think that step ahead. And so when you start doing that, not only can it help your own career, but sometimes it’s the ripple effect of how other people start doing that as well. So it can even come back and benefit you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, those follow-up questions can change everything in terms of, “Oh, well, I would have done this in a completely different way,” or, “Oh, well, if that’s what you’re after, I don’t think what you actually need is three bullets, but perhaps instead is this other thing.” And it’s like, “Oh, fantastic. Thank you. You’re amazing.”

Ashley Herd
Totally, because you may even say at the bottom, one thing I did for managers constantly was say, “Okay, here’s what to say, and you don’t need to say this, but if someone asks this, this is what you can say. Just have some of that below this of the FAQs in case someone asks. And some of that information, again, can just help that person tremendously, but also also help in your career.

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

Ashley Herd
I do love the quote from Maya Angelou, that people forget what you said, but they never forget how you made them feel. And I know that’s one that is said quite a lot, but I see it. The more and more I live, the more years I have, which I wish I were Benjamin Button and reversing, but that hasn’t happened yet. But I think back to how true that is.

I first heard that years ago and I didn’t appreciate it as much as I do now. But so I think bringing that into the workplaces, it’s not just what you’re working on, but especially as a manager, you think about how you work with people. You can transform people’s work and also their lives outside of it.

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

Ashley Herd
There was recently research in Gallup, this was in, I think, January of 2026, that’s about how people are selected for management. And it really quantified this aspect of what percentage. I think it was 60. I may be misquoting that, but you can Google. But it’s how people are picked to be a manager and then what to do about it.

And so as organizations think about management, because I’m a huge proponent of not just selecting people for management, but exposing them, having a real two-way street considerations and career paths that don’t require you to be a manager. But it’s a really nice piece of research that just shows the reality that so many organizations have, which is how we started the episode.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Ashley Herd
I love A Separate Piece by John Knowles. I never went to boarding school, and it’s all about boys at a boarding school. But I read that when I was a sophomore in high school and it has stuck with me for some reason for decades.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool.

Ashley Herd
I’d say a calculator because when I was in elementary school, I was told I needed to learn math and so I worked really hard at it, and that I couldn’t talk for a living. And I do tend to talk for a living and I also relied much more heavily on a calculator than I’d like to admit.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Ashley Herd
I’d say a favorite habit is gratitude, both with yourself or with telling others. And sometimes it can feel super corny. And so if you have gratitude to express and it’s not something you normally say, and so, Pete, if you were to say, if I started telling people, I’m thankful for this because then people would call 911 because they think that you are being held for ransom and that’s your help signal.

You can say, “I was listening to Pete’s How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast, and the speaker, Ashley Heard at Manager Method, said to think about somebody that you’re grateful for and why you’re grateful for them, and text someone and tell them that, and tell them what you’re grateful for them for.

And any discomfort you feel for seconds will go away because they will likely feel delighted and they won’t think of it as, “Okay, you’re only doing this because you heard it on a podcast.” They hear this and think, “Well, of all the people that you know, you thought of me.” And so you can make someone’s whole day and far longer by expressing that gratitude.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that folks really connect and resonate with, and quote back to you often?

Ashley Herd
So in the book, I talk about how to not be a tight jeans manager, and also not be an oversized sweatpants manager, but to instead be a cozy joggers manager. So you can read in the book about what that means.

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

Ashley Herd
You can go to ManagerMethod.com, which is my website. You can kind of find me anywhere from there. If you go to @managermethod on different social media platforms, you can see some of my 59-second plays that I write and act most days.

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

Ashley Herd
It’s to try that. Try to do pause, consider, act. Like, if you find yourself immediately going to react to something, just pause and think about some of the different options and what you can do differently. You may do the same thing, but at least think it through, and I bet you may tweak something a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ashley, thank you.

Ashley Herd
Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks for having me and thanks to all for listening.

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.