Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Ever felt like your team is busy, but nothing really moves forward?
In this episode, we tackle the silent productivity killer, draining your time and profit and the simple, repeatable way confident leaders fix it fast. If you want your team owning results, not just tasks, you'll want to hear this.
Henrik, welcome to the Cultural Leadership podcast. How are you going?
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Thank you. My pleasure. I'm doing very well. Good morning from Singapore.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Good morning, mate. Singapore, a lovely place. Probably a bit warm over there at the moment. Is it like always?
[00:00:31] Speaker B: It is, but I love it. I often say I doubt that my gene pool is truly Scandinavian. My passport still says Swedish, but I love this climate.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a little bit warmer than Sweden. No doubt at all.
Let's dive in. So you've written this book called X Teams.
Tell us a little bit about that sort of high level overview of the book and we'll dive in a little bit further as we go along.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: All right, I'll give you a little bit of background and then I will give you license to interrupt me. I am a professor and professors can get seduced into just starting to profess. So you interrupt me when I thought.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: You were used to being interrupted.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: And so really the idea of this book is that we need to reimagine how we build and lead teams. The background, I think, is interesting enough to just share a little bit about.
There is a traditional model of how to build and lead teams that's been out there for decades and decades, which is really focused on alignment internally in the team across goals, roles, processes and interpersonal relationships.
And we're not going to throw out this baby with the bathwater here. I'm getting back to that. But it turns out that this model, it lacks something fundamentally important. And it really came out in some studies I did with my co author, Deborah Ancona, who's a professor at mit.
And what we found was that this model, it no longer worked. It didn't predict performance in our statistical model. It did predict a few things. It predict, to some extent, harmony in a team.
It also predicted very often how well teams thought they did, but it did not predict objectively how they actually did. We describe a few of these studies in our book, and one of them is telecom teams. And we could see that this model just did not predict sales attainment, which was the objective measure of performance in that context.
At first we actually thought that perhaps these data were wrong, but then we realized they weren't. What had changed? We thought it was wrong because of course, these models have been shown to be true Again and again and again. And then we realized something had changed. The world had changed. The world in which teams operate has changed at a high level. We found that, well, the world is exponentially changing. It's volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, increasingly asynchronous, we find after the pandemic, and changing at a furious rate.
This fundamentally has changed the context in which teams operate.
And we identify three specific dimensions.
The knowledge dimension, which is really around where do teams find their knowledge, used to be pretty defined and now it's more spread out or is changing constantly.
The power structure, this power dimension has changed. It used to be that you could look at an organizational chart and you basically saw where power and authority lie no longer true.
Finally, you have the work dimension, the work structure, which is now characterized by far more interdependence.
Let me give you an example. One of the examples in the book is we did a bit of work with Microsoft.
If you work for the team that is in charge of the Word app, you got to know exactly what the people over there in the PowerPoint app, people over there with the Excel app, what they are doing. The interdependencies are absolutely critical to success. And all of this boiled down to a critical insight. What we found was that the traditional model, it did not work because. Because it was just half the story.
And with only half the story, which is the internal focus on these dimensions of goals, roles and processes and relationships, we're still very likely to fail because the other story has become more important. And that's the external part, and that's the X in X teams. External outreach, external connectivity. These changes in the knowledge structures, power structures and work structures all point to the need for. For teams to go out before they go in. They need to go out before they go in. They need to care as much about the external world as the internal world. And that's a challenge. And we can go back to talking about why that is easy to say and difficult to do, but that was the key insight. And then the book is about what works, then if the internally focused model doesn't work, and then how to make it work and why it's hard to make it work. Some themes I'm going to get to, but now I'm going to stop myself.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Mate, that's great. You've given us a nice overview of where that's at in the background. What I also like to know is that I know the pandemic. It's sort of a trigger point for so much of different thinking in business. Absolutely. But was There a moment that sort of you and your co author, or maybe separately came to this sort of point, say, hey, there's something going on here, there's something different.
Attack this from an academic perspective and see what we find.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Well, the moment was really when we saw that our data was fighting back. It didn't show us what we thought we would show. So what we do as researchers is that we find anomalies and then we try to make sense of them. And it was not one moment.
I wish I had one of those cool stories about the aha moment. It was something that crept in over time and then we collected more and more data using this external lens and we realized this is obviously what's going on.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: And again, I'm just trying to set context for my own head as well. Is that why were you originally tracking the data and then sort of it started to show different things?
[00:06:51] Speaker B: So me and Deborah both obsessed about teams. I mean, I have this fundamental view based on. I actually did have a real job before I became a professor. My first job after college was in a large electrical engineering firm. I then worked in the startup world. I worked a bit as a management consultant, which most people don't consider a real job either.
But over this time I, I really come to believe that the fundamental unit of leadership was the team. Regardless of where you are in a hierarchy or an ecosystem, most of the consequential leadership is done in the interactions in a team. And that's the fascination I came in with as I started to do my Ph.D. many, many years ago. And I was curious, what, what really, what makes for a good team in today's world?
And that's where we started to find these anomalies.
And, and that was 20 years ago and we're still working on it.
[00:07:50] Speaker A: So we're going through it. There's always anomalies that pop up from time to time. Isn't it the. I guess before I get off to the, the knowledge areas and power structure and all that sort of stuff, what is it in your DNA? Like what, what took you in this path of being so fascinated about teams?
[00:08:06] Speaker B: So I think like many people interested in leadership, it starts with frustration that things don't work the way they are supposed to work.
You see all, all of this messiness.
Actually here was a key aha experience for me when I worked for this company that everyone saw at the time as this AM company and I started to work there and it was a mess. And then I realized that the game is not about perfection and building some Kind of perfect algorithm or engineering architecture.
It's just working through that mess, making sense of that mess and perhaps being a little bit less messy than the other guys. And that's how you win.
And teams is just at the core of that sense making and leadership to, to try to make sense of the mess and make it better. Hopefully that start to answer your question, but that's really how it started, leadership, how hard it is, why it's hard, why it's worthwhile. And I just found that teams were at the fundamental unit of analysis, if you're interested in those questions.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I do love it, mate, because I guess I feel that as well. Certainly my journey was off the back of my own frustrations in being not as capable as what I could have been as far as leading a team and going into those leadership roles. So it sort of does drive a lot of us moving forward, doesn't it? But it's one of those things. It's just I just find leadership and teams, there's so much great stuff out there, including your stuff, but it's like there is no secret sauce around these things like the contextual nature of everything and people are people.
I guess it's why the industry is so big. There's just no one silver bullet. Even when that silver bullet worked this time, it's not necessarily going to work the next time.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I will say that I've really started to think about what I'm doing when I'm writing a book or when I'm out giving keynotes or coaching or teaching. Is that I often say, really echoing what you said, that I'm not here to give out silver bullets because I don't know you, I don't know your context as well as you do. What I hope is to help you ask better questions, questions that you might not have asked if we hadn't had this conversation. And then the answers will be exactly.
It will be unique for every context. So everything that we found in general is true for these teams that are high performing and looking outside and perhaps we'll get to some of those examples.
What it actually looks like in reality is wildly different. If you are a software development team at Microsoft, if you are a family business where your team basically is your business, or if you're a C suite team. Wildly different. But we find that the questions are remarkably similar.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Yeah, agree, mate.
Let's look at knowledge first. You mentioned that a little bit of time ago these three things. So it feels like to me that the journey of this conversation we could and you tell me if I'm wrong or right here, that we'll unpack each three of these things. But you can dive into a little bit, what does an internally focused team look like around this knowledge structure? And then how should they look at from an external focus and what takes it forward? Does that sound fair?
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And so where we're going to go here, I think, is that these three structures that I laid out, they're specific actions that teams need to take to connect to these structures outside the team.
So let's start with the knowledge structure.
The traditional team, to go back to your question, they tend to focus on what they know as a team. In fact, often the team is composed based on what people know and whether this is conscious or not.
They try to contain all the knowledge they need in the team. And what I would say to that is that's not possible because so much of the team knowledge that is needed is actually reside outside of the team. So very often you need to compose the team of team members not based on what they know, because you would never be able to compose a team that knows everything they need to know, but perhaps more about who they know so that they can reach out and get access to the kind of knowledge that they need that will be outside.
We call this sense making activity to go out there and making sure you have the latest knowledge about the competitors that the customers, the latest technology, that you have an accurate map of the world out there. So that's the knowledge dimension here. You need to engage in external sense making to update your map, which is exhausting. And that's one reason why teams don't do it, even though they may know that they need to. So that's the first one. And I'll stop there and see what you have in response.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: Yeah, well, let's unpack that a little bit. So I get the internal nature and then sort of looking out there and understanding the patterns and what's happening in the markets around you and those external factors, if you don't do that over time, it's almost like one of those Kodak moments again, isn't it, Where Kodak sort of happens and they had this technology many, many years ago and the story's been shared so many times, but they've shelved the digital technology and all of a sudden, 10, 20, whatever years later, it sort of happened. So they've been very internally focused, I guess from that view. Could you also apply that? And I'll take it back to the teams in a minute, but could you also apply that from an individual leader or a business owner leading a team which is made up of individuals. But then.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: Sorry, yeah, I'm just saying. Yes, absolutely. I'd love to go.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: Yeah, please do. Because I'm sort of seeing. Again, I've just had this conversation with a friend and a client of mine this morning that he's moved into a business or moved into a business about 12 months ago, because he just needed to have a bit of a break on some stuff. So he wanted to take a slightly lesser role.
He's not achieving the influence side of things that he needs to in his position, which is one of the things we're working on. But he's being so underutilised, they're probably using about 10% of his capacity. It's not that he's hiding it, he's trying to share it up, but it's like this barrier. So again, people in that there's looking internally, not externally, what's in their immediate range of use, talk to that a bit.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: So I think that the first thing to recognize is that this is easy to say and difficult to do. And that's the business that I'm in. He should say, difficult to do. You need to recognize. Why don't you do this? I mean, I talk about this. Let's go out and find out about your customer. And people might say, yeah, that's not brain surgery. Why don't you do it? Well, because if you go out to a customer and ask what they really think, the response might be punishing. You don't like that. So it's not always a conscious process of closing off. It's something we do because it's hard and it can create paradoxes and contradictions. And so let me go back to the Kodak example. It just so happens that I know some people who did research on this back when it happens, and they've gone in and look at memos and sort of internal communication. It was not that they did not know that this was coming. It was that they did not know when it was coming. And in the meantime, to make the argument to your owners, your shareholders, that we need to completely shift our technology, and yes, we'll take a big, big hit in our revenue and the share price, and then maybe, hopefully we'll be able to get onto a new curve of development. That's a really hard argument to make. They knew that this was a problem. It was not that it caught them unawares. They couldn't deal with it.
So I think a key thing here Is not to tell yourself, oh, we should go out there and find more knowledge that we need.
It is two things. One, to recognize that. Recognize what might block you from doing it. Why haven't you done it already? So I'm telling you here, yeah, you should go out and you say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We go out and ask for help when we need it. And then I'm asking, so why haven't you done it? And then the second piece that I also always clarify is that you need to do it from day one. Teams, also, they don't think about it as a modus operandi in themselves, particularly in inexperienced teams. I find that inexperienced team leaders, they want to make sense of things internally first and get a sense of control and competence. And then they go out, and that is very often too late because then they've created a map of the world that doesn't actually work internally. Does this make sense?
[00:17:14] Speaker A: It makes perfect sense. What's coming through my head is like we're sitting there waiting for that perfect moment to go external. But what is the perfect moment? Just go external. And maybe you're looking at both angles at once.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. And it won't come. It will always be messy. And you always have to deal with the fact that a lot of it comes back to the fact that you will be caught unawares.
You will learn things out there that perhaps you don't want to learn in the sense that that causes a little bit of a disruption in your.
But that's better than being unaware of it, because in the long run, you will in the short run. And this goes back to something I said about how the internal model actually predicts harmony in teams in the short run, because you have this illusion of control if you don't open up.
But in the short run, you will fail because again, you operate according to a map that is no longer accurate. So dealing with that disruption early will make for better performance in the long run. And then I felt I can take this in so many directions. I feel like I'm a little bit unstructured here in my responses. Let me try to go back to what you said. What does this mean for business owners? And I think I've said many of the things already, but let me try to be more focused. Try to find out the reasons why you might not ask some questions that you actually know somewhere that you do need to ask and start this process from day one.
That's the two things and what that means for your clients and these particular business owners. I can't Tell, of course, because I don't know them, I don't know their business. But those are a couple of absolutely fundamental questions to ask.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I like those. And when you say start from day one, what do you mean? Because I'm sitting back thinking, well, hold on, how does business owner take that? Hey, my business has been around for five years or 10 years or whatever. What does day one mean?
[00:19:12] Speaker B: It means that you need to have a map of the world out there before you can start to make strategic decisions. So if you're a hundred year old company, well, day one, is tomorrow.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: Typically a reset.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Do you really have that map? And also be generous to yourself and don't beat yourself up for not having done it because it is, it can be punishing, it is hard work. That's why so many teams just don't do it.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Again, I love what you're saying. From the fact I can resonate with that a coach that I've had sort of over the years, so one of the things that he's got me thinking more intently about because of my personality of trying to do the right thing and be as accurate as possible and as close to perfect as possible, whatever the hell that means. But is really just Brendan, you need to treat everything as a test. And that's been my mindset shift for when I'm launching a new product or I'm trying something different with a client.
It's a test. And in my mind, as silly or as basic it may sound when I'm thinking test, I don't care if it fails because it's a test. But if I treat it as a this is a launch or this is a thing I'm going to be doing and it doesn't quite work out, I'm always wanted to upcut myself a bit more. So I just like that it's a test mentality for me that works.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Absolutely. It's such an important insight.
And here a colleague and friend of mine have done some absolutely amazing work on this. Amy Edmondson, she's a professor at Harvard. She wrote a book about how to fail. Well, the Right Kind of Wrong is this book and I highly recommend it. After you read mine, of course.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: Of course.
[00:20:51] Speaker B: And what she, she talks about so eloquently is that the reason why we don't do this is that, well, of course all failures aren't great. They need to be intelligent failures.
So these tests going out there, testing, that's great, it's necessary and there are certain conditions under which they're great. We all. And that is when you actually have a theory about why they would work.
And it is new territory. You're not reinventing wheels here because if these things aren't fulfilled well, then perhaps it's just sloppiness and people tend to mix these things up. I'm a big believer in what you said, testing and thoughtful testing is critical in a changing environment.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's the professor skill you've just added. Thoughtful testing. It's not just testing for the sake of testing, it's making sure you're thoughtful and deliberate about whatever you're testing and where that's going.
Again, sorry to turn this around again, but so much of this conversation I had with a friend client this morning is because he feels like he hasn't got the influence that he'd like to have and he feels like his leader is the limit to his own performance. There's that angle coming in now. He is seeking something else. And so he spent the last sort of three to four weeks doing some internal type stuff like updating resume and updating LinkedIn and doing things and whatever. And the light bulb moment for him was as simple as this morning of why don't you get on the phone and speak to people?
I didn't use that term. I mean, God, I'm talking to you now. If I talk to you before, I maybe use, hey, look externally, but like, go out to your network, find out what they're doing, where they're at, you know, let them know what opportunities you're looking for and stuff. And that's the stuff that's going to move the needle.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: I love that example because as an academic I can sometimes forget to make things practical.
And I get into these theories about the X teams and the different structures. That is how easy it could be. Pick up a phone, you know, you're running this team. Just speak to one person you wouldn't normally speak to a week, like spend 15 minutes on that.
That's progress.
So many of us get caught in this bubble. It's also about time pressure and habits and all of these things. And just that one thing, say one call where I'm going to collect some data that I wouldn't otherwise have collected. A week, 50 of those weeks, and you will know a lot more in a year. That's an excellent piece of advice.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: There's a lot to be said for talking to people, isn't there?
Yes, let's go to talk about time pressures. You know, we're going to. We're keeping ourselves to A time pressure for both of us today. So let's move to power structure. Give us a bit of a flavor again, a rehash of what that looks looks like from an internally focused team. And then where should we looking from an ex team's perspective? External focus.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: So the sense making is the first fundamental activity that's connecting to the knowledge structure out there. Ambassadorship, that's connecting with the power structure that is about going out there and representing the team. It's about understanding where the lines of resistance are and how you can deal with them. It's about developing a language that you need to use to connect with these powerful stakeholders out there who you need to have on board to get the buy in you need to get the resources you need and so on.
So what does this mean? Well again it will mean very different things depending on what kind of team you are. So two kinds of teams I worked with.
You're a software development team at Microsoft. Well then ambassadorship means making sure you have a connection to Satya Nadella, who's the CEO and his C suite team. So it's external to the team but internal to the company. If you're a startup company where basically the company is the team, well then ambassadorship means that you need to make sure that you speak the language of the VC that is funding you. So very, very different things in implementation, but it's the same thing.
Making sure you have on board the people have the resources and the power and the influences to make you or break you.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: I love that. So two things.
I can't remember the name of the company but there is a company, I'm pretty sure they're out of Denmark that actually created a tool that you could do some like a survey type thing in your organization. Obviously it's a little bit more lean towards large organizations, but you could identify the unofficial power structures and the people with influence. Have you heard heard of that?
[00:25:45] Speaker B: I should go back to Scandinavia more often. No, I, I haven't. I. What I will say many years ago I found something similar at.
This is an American organization called MITRE M I T R E. It's a research organization.
Very early on they developed these informal knowledge, these informal structures that they, they shared with the people working there in addition to the formal structure because that could be let them know who people go to because of what they know, the opinion leaders, the people who people go to because of who they know, that's the network leaders. So that general idea I'm familiar with, but I'm really interested to Find out more about what that company might be doing. Because that's a more recent example, it sounds like.
[00:26:35] Speaker A: Yeah, look after the call and when we send you some stuff, I'll dig out the company and get the details. But definitely happened. A friend of mine out of Singapore, actually, Heather Hanson, who's a global sort of speaking coach and accent coach and stuff like that, she's the one that told me about it. She uses them quite a lot.
You tell me if this is an example we could use. I think we're on the money as far as power structure and looking external. But let's say again, my audience, my market is really that small, medium, enterprise and business owner type people.
If as a business owner you're taking some time to look externally, that is somebody within your team, they're internally in the organization with someone in the team that has some level of influence or you're seeing them influence in the team, is that what you could relate to, this external power structure viewing that because they're your lever point for what's happening on the ground in your business?
[00:27:30] Speaker B: Tell me if I misunderstood.
I think the question is how you can use the influence of internal team members to leverage as you work externally. Is that.
Is that the question?
[00:27:50] Speaker A: No.
To your point, if I'm understanding it correctly, is that initially when you started talking power structure and external, I'm thinking, okay, external to the organization, that makes sense. But then you gave an example, if I understood where it could be a leader in software, but then they need to understand the power structure and a connection to the CEO and the C suite. We might be talking a small to medium operating business which might be 50 to 100 people, but they've still got some team structure. So the business owner may need to be aware that he or she has connections with the team, but they need to be deliberate about where more of that influence power could sit in their organization and use them as a lever for getting stuff done, maybe for changing mindsets around change happening in the organization, those sorts of things.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: I think I understand what you're saying now and it's absolutely fundamental. I mean, one of the saddest things I experience, my job is in organizations like that where you have a business owner and very often that's the size of organization, where the leaders are overwhelmed because they are bottlenecks, they are supposed to know everything.
And then when people get overwhelmed, what happens very often is that they drop that they haven't people. I have a very positive view of people generally and their intentions and they want to create A good culture and they want to empathetic and know the people in the organization. But then you add time pressure and then very often they default to top down. They make decisions without really explaining them well, that affect people that they don't mean to affect, but they do. And what can kill a company like that is when that affects people who turns out to informally are incredibly influential. And very often that's because of what they know. And then you lose people like that because they feel insulted because they haven't been consulted.
And only later does the business owner realize how much they damaged the company because they did not know that informal structure. That's how I connect to what you say. It's absolutely, absolutely critical. And I see it again and again and not because these people are stupid.
Now if you explained it like that, they would say yeah, of course, but is it say difficult to do, really important and it's worth. So here's what I would say about that is it's just the one reason why this typically falls to the website is that it's always important but never urgent to figure out the informal networks in an organization. In fact, there's a famous study by a friend of mine, David Crackhart, he's a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He did this big study, thousands of managers across industries where he found that most people thought they knew the informal structure of their firm. And most of the time they were wrong.
So the message is it's really important, don't go with your gut.
And it takes discipline and it's something you need to invest in over time. Otherwise it will go back and come back and bite you.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: Yeah, well, that's what this Danish company found through the organizations taking the assessment and stuff like that was that, you know, whatever crazy percentage, it was very high that the majority of the time that the real influence didn't sit with people that had influence based on their role title. It was outside of that.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Yes, yes, exactly.
So there is one more thing, the last structure, I just want to briefly say. So you have sort of the comprehensive sort of the three fundamental things. It's sense making, it's about the knowledge ambassadorship, it's about the power. And then you have what we call the task coordination activity, which is around the work structures, the interdependencies. And it's so critical because very often teams fail because they have not figured out the interdependencies across the system where they work. So they tread on teams and people's toes without meaning to, they create enemies without meaning to. And One way of thinking here, it's a very concrete example of how the X teams model is different from the traditional model. Traditional model is all about aligning around the goal and that's absolutely critical. We're not again throwing that away. The X teams model says yes, and equally important is to know the goals of other teams that you are interdependent with because very often the best way to reach your goal is to help those teams reach their goals. So that's sort of a way to think about how these models are complementary. It's both and it's not either or.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: Yeah, it's starting to remind me of Lencioni's model around one team and the team that you're a part of is the most important team, not the team that you lead. Because you need to have that cross view and making sure you're sharing resources, having that power structure understanding. And then those underneath aren't fighting battles that they can't win because that's where silos are created.
[00:33:02] Speaker B: Yes, that's a very good point.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: What I was going to also ask around power structure before we move on to the work structure is again back to the business owner side of things. That if a business owner was to make a move to seek external from their organization, what would be sort of a standard sort of route for them to take? What do they need to look at in relation to their industry or something like that for an external power structure view?
[00:33:32] Speaker B: That depends so much on the, on the industry. I would say.
I. Here's a test.
[00:33:38] Speaker A: Let's go with an organization.
[00:33:39] Speaker B: Here's a. I would sort of emphasize something that I touched on but perhaps I wasn't directly emphasizing is, you know, map, map the external structure of stakeholders and then the ones that you feel most uncomfortable approaching maybe is where you should go first.
Whether that is, I don't know if this business is a. Is a family firm that might be a family member out there.
And that's as we know, often very, very complicated. And you might decide that yeah, I'd rather do that thing. Well, maybe what you feel uncomfortable is where you should go, but for another company it might be no family implications whatsoever. So then it's whoever are the part owners.
Customers can be extremely powerful. Of course if they own some standard and you might want to know more about how you can make sure that you're not held captive. It could be all kinds of things. The important thing is to go out there.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: Okay, so I see again just to use it some language from my side of things. It's really about the external power structure, but you could call it the old term around stakeholder management, even categorising your key stakeholders, impacting your business and how you interact with them, the relationships you're building with those people and all with that purpose of making sure that we're looking after the right people in some sort of order and some sort of structure.
[00:35:05] Speaker B: That's right. And I guess so in one way, this is. It's not new to talk to if you frame it in terms of we need to make sure we're connected with our external stakeholders. That's. I mean, we didn't invent that idea. I think what we add is that there are these different categories that are important for different reasons, and then we dig in quite a bit about why we don't do it. There's a lot of books out there talking about, here are the. Here are the stakeholders you need to be in touch with. Well, why don't people do that? And that very often has to do with this discomfort with conversations and so on. And you need to. One piece we write about quite a bit because it can be so punishing and because if you lead change, you will get incoming as an incoming fire. It's critical to build psychological safety in the team so you can actually absorb that pressure outside and discuss the disappointments and have a good conversation about contradicting influences that you absorb when you're out there.
[00:36:15] Speaker A: It does feel like a bit of a pattern, Henrik, if I'm following that, the focus of X teams, which I am definitely on board with, is that there's this sort of comfort zone and then there's the out of the comfort zone, or what I term the challenge zone. And people are spending a bit too much time in the comfort zone, which the internal. They need to be making sure they're moving into that challenge zone, which is the external. And why do people don't do it because it's uncomfortable, it's not safe. Something could happen that hurts me.
[00:36:45] Speaker B: Building an X team is by definition being in the challenge zone.
And that's challenging. And part of it is challenging get out of the comfort zone. But it's also challenging to stay away from the. The. Let's call it the panic zone, where you really don't want to be because the anxiety is so high, so that you can't use all your emotional and cognitive capabilities.
So you need to stay out of that. And this is actually part of the challenge of team leaders today, to be able to stay in that middle, keep people on their toes. And challenge them, but also when things get too hot to then be able to lower the temperature a bit to stay there where you can be challenged and yet productive.
[00:37:37] Speaker A: Henrik, I think you've just answered why you're a professor and I'm not. You call it the panic zone. So articulate. I just normally call it the holy shit zone.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: Yep. Well, I might borrow that from you.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: Feel free.
You'll be less professorish. Maybe.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: Maybe. Well, but.
But I'll borrow it anyway.
[00:37:59] Speaker A: Absolutely no drama, mate. I'll probably borrow it myself, so don't worry. Let's move into work structure again. Let's follow this flavor of work structure, the internal focus and what does external look like when we can move on from there.
[00:38:11] Speaker B: Yeah, so it is really. And sorry for going ahead of you where you were going here.
[00:38:17] Speaker A: Oh, it's absolutely fine.
[00:38:19] Speaker B: You talked about you had a conversation with a client this morning and I guess I had a prior conversation also in mind where we forgot that part.
So therefore it's always going to forget it this time. But of course it's about the interdependencies.
And so I'll add.
Here's one a little bit cute, but I use it sometimes because I think it makes the point that the way to think about task coordination, which is about coordinating and getting feedback across these interdependencies, is that you start with the golden rule. I don't know if you're familiar with the Golden Rule.
It's an ethical rule.
You'll find some version of this in most world religions. The idea is that you treat others the way you want to be treated. Are you familiar with that idea?
[00:39:14] Speaker A: I've heard of it.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: And as an ethical rule, I think that's a very good rule. However, when you're a team working with a fast changing environment, that very often backfires. It's self centered.
It doesn't take other teams needs and goals into consideration. So what you do here is that you apply what I like to call the Golden Rule 2.0.
You don't treat others the way you want to be treated. You figure out how they want to be treated based on their interests and their goals and you treat them that way.
Again, not brain surgery. The reason why people forget this is time pressure. So they assume that others want to be treated the way they want to be treated. They assume that they have roughly the same needs and wants and very often they don't.
And then you hit a brick wall without meaning it because you just don't understand the people you're dealing with. So that's the work structure, really.
It's, it's about what can it be?
I mean, very often I worked quite a bit with pharmaceutical companies, including a big Danish company, and their simple example would be that they are rushing to, to do all their tests and everything. And, and then they run into each other because they haven't coordinated their schedules for when they need this very expensive equipment and all of this stuff. That would be very concrete example where someone takes the initiative and say, look, we're all going to need this at some point. Let's sit down and come up with a reasonable solution here to, you know, when you're going to do it, when we going to do it, when we need it, and then maybe we can help compensate you by helping you with something else if you can't get it exactly when you want it. That kind of work, that's task coordination.
[00:41:08] Speaker A: What sort of, what tool or what advice do you give people to start to have that view about your words? Treat others the way you want to be treated, but it's more about treating others the way they want to be treated. So how do you start to shift the mindset to do that? It's very powerful. Absolutely. And personality profiles and all that sort of stuff can help understand yourself and therefore also help to understand others. But again, the challenge in the application is the challenge, isn't it?
[00:41:39] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I will say we talk in the book about how, as a team leader in particular, but this is true for any team member, discovering your own leadership signature is absolutely critical. And the idea there is just like we all have our unique hand signature, we have our unique leadership signature. And once we discover that what we're good at, where our limitations are, we can then develop it, but we also importantly communicate it so other people get some stability from knowing who they're dealing with with.
So I'm just reinforcing what you just said. But then there are some very simple tools. And here, this book that we're talking about has three parts. One is why the traditional model does not work and it has to do with the fact that it's too internally focused. And then we talk about what works. And the first principle is that we need to engage in these three activities.
The third piece of the book is how to make it work. And we are very concrete there where we literally have, we have lists with questions to ask and we find, and we, we think that those questions are very helpful. But just stopping yourself and asking questions, are we really engaging with these stakeholders or do we have the knowledge we need. Do we have an updated map map. Do we have the powerful stakeholders on board? Do we have.
Do we have the interdependency under control? Just having a process by which you stop yourself and ask these questions. And then there's, there's also a process over time we, we talk about three phases. It's exploration, when you first figure out the map, then it's experimentation back to your testing and execution. That's the second piece piece and then the final piece is exportation. That's when you go out there and really educate people in what you're doing and why they should care. And of course it's not perfectly linear. And you do see we like X's here, everything there. We like the alliteration with it, with the X of course and that. And then we have questions along every one of these. And I don't want to, I feel going into specifically what questions to ask partly because I don't know your listeners context, I might lead them astray. And then there's the book if you want to have some ideas of how to, how to get started.
Just the act of stopping yourself and thinking what are the questions we aren't asking. Simple and very, very powerful.
Now I. Sorry, I realized that. Well we do also, we develop based on the book, we develop a few other things and one thing is that we actually developed a simulation that people can run and learn many of these concepts in a safe learning environment.
And in this case we throw a lot of these external pressures at the team that is running the simulation and it's sort of a fun and challenging. Puts people in the challenge zone. That's sort of a little bit more advanced way to do this. The simple way, ask questions.
[00:44:55] Speaker A: Couple of points. I love a good simulation. You actually just made me think just by that word is that I was lucky enough to spend some time at Insan for a couple of weeks back in early 2000s with a company I was in. We did a two week intensive leadership program or whatever.
But there was a fantastic simulation on change and things and God, I struggled and really stuffed it up. I had to do it three or four times to get where I needed to get to. But anyway I definitely learned a lot but it was definitely good fun. The other thing that it just keeps coming to mind in I guess from a leadership perspective, business owner perspective, whatever business leader context you're in is that ultimately I think what you've sort of said in a way is that if people are leading a team and they remain inquisitive Then they'll ask the right questions or they'll get better at asking questions, they'll seek information. And if you're on that evolving cycle of education through inquisitiveness, then you'll go, okay.
[00:45:48] Speaker B: I often say this to people I work with. The biggest gift you can give to yourself is to develop your capacity to ask questions. And the starting point, I just want to add a little bit to that is to understand why we don't ask these questions that somewhere we know we need to ask.
And I usually mention there are three key reasons why we don't ask those questions. And I really believe in understanding the blockers. Why we don't do things that we need to do.
Why don't we do the work of leadership naturally left to our own devices? One is that the most important questions are usually uncomfortable because they implicate us.
Something about our blind spots, something that we don't know. And there's something about being the leader and acknowledging that there's something you don't know that that tends to block us. That's number one. Number two, this is reinforced by the fact that particularly in fast moving environment where we don't know the answers, the people working for us, they demand that we give them the answers because they are anxious and they want a leader to tell them what to do. Now, even if you don't have a clue, if you tell them what to do, they will probably love you. If you say no, we need to stay over here in the problem zone a little bit longer and ask more questions and figure out what's going on before we actually move to a solution.
People won't thank you. They might actually be quite frustrated with you. And then the final thing is that all of this is reinforced by how our brains work.
Our brains are constructed in such a way that we have more access to our experiences coded in memory back here than what we see in front of us. And so very quickly our brain tells us, all right, I've seen enough, I have a solution. Boom. And we go into solution mode. These three things together makes it really hard to continue to ask the questions that we need to ask. Being aware of that perhaps I hope our listeners will be able to muster some self compassion and say, look, we are not wired for asking the questions that we need to ask and that's why we need practice. So I expand a little bit on that because I really find this quite an important challenge for leaders wherever they are.
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Yeah, mate, I couldn't agree more. And look, I'm glad you got an opportunity to expand on that. I think you said it in a word, awareness. Like, if we could unpack those three things and probably do a whole other episode or two. But if people have some awareness, then that's the starting of change, isn't it? So be aware of the situation, those three things from this episode, and then you can start to put in some things that work for yourself.
[00:48:34] Speaker B: That's right. Very good.
[00:48:36] Speaker A: I feel like it'd be remiss of me to if I didn't ask this question.
Given you're a professor, you're always thinking. I mean, that's your job. Thinking about stuff and researching and stuff. But what's one thing leaders need to do or business owners need to do in order to stay relevant over this next sort of five years? There's so much changing in the world.
[00:48:55] Speaker B: Stay relevant.
Well, different ways of answering that question. I would say that I would boil it down to know yourself, know your context, really understand who you are and who you are not.
Know what your leadership signature is, and then combine that with an understanding of the external piece. This is what we talked about at the team level, which is that teams need to align internally, but also externally.
It's true for individual leaders, too. You need to understand yourself and your context, and once you make progress there, well, then you have a chance to be the best leader you can be in whatever context you choose to be.
[00:49:38] Speaker A: Mate, we've unpacked so much today. I know you said earlier that you felt a bit unstructured, but I feel like there's some structure to it. And actually, I take a bit of glee if a professor says to me that you're making me feel a bit unstructured. So maybe that's just my little.
My antagonistic streak in Brendan. But look, I can almost think I know your answer, but let's ask it anyway. But what's one thing you've done to build a culture of leadership in your journey?
[00:50:05] Speaker B: So this actually does go away a little bit from where we were. The one thing that comes to mind, which was my big aha for me, actually, was to understand how important the small things are in building a culture. The big things really, really matter, of course. The goals, the purpose, how you pay people, the organization, design. Absolutely. But unless you make the small pie pieces align with the big pieces, people won't believe it and it won't become a culture. Well, you will always have a culture, but maybe then it will be a cynical culture. It won't be the culture that you want it to be. So Big things and small things pointing in the same direction over time, consistently through repetition, is what is required to create a cultural culture mindfully. And because we are in a world that is changing so fast, it is so hard.
It is really hard.
But you have no choice to keep at it if you want to lead and succeed in today's world.
[00:51:03] Speaker A: Love that, mate. The 1% is just every day improving that little bit at a time. It's amazing what you can do in a few weeks or a year and stuff like that. So, mate, I want to thank you now just in relation to your book. We'll put all this stuff in the show, notes and links, so people can access.
One thing I learned over the time of doing a podcast. I think this episode is going to be about 100 episodes, episode 144 or something. So we've done quite a few episodes. And I used to actually get people's books before the episode or well before the episode. We had them booked in and I'd try and read. I'd put all this pressure on myself. But what I learned and actually what made it efficient for me was that we're talking a bit about the book. I didn't want to have too much knowledge around it because I wanted to be really inquisitive about the questions. But then I also, without saying this to you before we hit record, I want. I want the person I'm talking to to almost sell me the book and why I should read it. I feel like I've got that today. So I will be getting your book. I will be putting the time into reading it because again, I love this topic. It's so fascinating to me. Rather than me just getting it and putting all this pressure on myself, I just want to say thank you for selling the concept. And I believe in this concept. And there's so much of you thinking that I think I'm aligned to that and some of the stuff that I want to learn a bit more about. So I will be getting it. So thanks for.
Thanks for convincing me today and hopefully you've convinced me.
[00:52:23] Speaker B: Really, really. My pleasure. And I learned a lot from this, too. Thank you so much.
[00:52:26] Speaker A: Thank you very much for being a fantastic guest on the cultural leadership.
[00:52:29] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:52:30] Speaker A: These are my three key takeaways from my conversation with Henrik. My first key takeaway. Confident leaders turn activity into accountability.
They don't just track tasks, they track outcomes. By focusing conversations on what's delivered, delivered, not just what's being done, they create a team culture where everyone owns their results and takes pride in progress.
My second key takeaway Confident leaders don't rescue, they coach.
Instead of jumping in to fix everything, they ask better questions and hold the line on accountability.
This empowers their team to solve problems, grow in confidence and perform at a higher level without constant hand hold.
My third key takeaway Confident leaders protect time for big thinking.
They don't get trapped in day to day firefighting. With a clear meeting system, they create space to step back, plan strategically and lead their team towards the bigger picture without drowning in busy work.
So in summary, my three key takeaways were Confident leaders turn activity into accountability.
Confident leaders don't rescue, they coach and confident leaders protect time for big thinking.
Let me know your key takeaway on YouTube or the culturalleadership.com thanks for joining me. And remember, the best outcome is on the other side of a genuine conversation.
[00:54:02] Speaker B: It.
