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Exploring how humans connect and get stuff done together, with Dan Hammond and Pia Lee from Squadify.
We need groups of humans to help navigate the world of opportunities and challenges, but we don't always work together effectively. This podcast tackles questions such as "What makes a rockstar team?" "How can we work from anywhere?" "What part does connection play in today's world?"
You'll also hear the thoughts and views of those who are running and leading teams across the world.
[00:00:00] Dan: Sporting analogies are often used to help us to lead better teams, but do they really help us in teams off the field? Conversely, is sport actually a foundation of societies, how they welcome newcomers and build a sense of community. Our guest on this episode of We Not Me, Patrick Skene is Chief Creative Officer at Culture Pulse. He uses storytelling to explore all these questions about sport, teams and, society, and has concrete takeaways to help anyone to become a better team player.
[00:00:32] Hello and welcome back to We Not Me, the podcast where we explore how humans connect to get stuff done together. I'm Dan Hammond.
[00:00:40] Pia: And I am Pia Lee.
[00:00:41] Dan: Pia,, I'm a proud parent.
[00:00:44] Pia: Oh,
[00:00:45] Dan: And you're gonna get it between the eyes, I'm afraid.
[00:00:47] Pia: So, you've stopped paying for your children?
[00:00:49] Dan: Not that proud. But still proud. Proud and poor is still the status. But yes, my younger daughter who's at university, she's playing for the medics football team. Which is all years and they won the cup actually. But she was voted player's player at their annual dinner last this weekend, so, which we are very proud of. It's a lovely award to get, I
[00:01:12] Pia: that is, that's a real accolade from your peers.
[00:01:14] Dan: it's very nice. She's a really cohesive force. And she's a, she's sunny. So, yeah, we are very proud of that. So I'm afraid you're gonna get, you and the listener are going to get that, whether hear it, whether you want to or not.
[00:01:25] Pia: I, I, I saw something on Instagram the other day saying that the most anxiety driven person on the pitch in a soccer game is the goalie's mom. And that is me. 'cause my son now wants, yeah. Wants to be a goalie. And I do, and I feel absolutely sick when the ball goes in, you know, because it's all there. Yeah, it is success or failure moment.
[00:01:47] Dan: It's a really, oh God. I used to play in goal actually, and it's a very tough position. I think it's physical and you put yourself among the feet, the boots. And I think I did it because I was pretty useless as everything else. But I think there, there are people who are genuinely talented at that. But it is a strange position that mostly it's either, you are sort of, you are neutral or you are failing. There's not, there aren't many moments of real glory, these great saves and everything, but oh my word. That's the, an anxious mum, absolutely. It's a great opportunity for wee not me though. 'cause obviously by the time the ball gets to the goalie, a lot of people have failed to stop it.
[00:02:23] Pia: that's, well, that's what you tell them in the dressing room at the end.
[00:02:25] Dan: That's right. Exactly. And that's why goalie's always shouting at the defenders, I think. But sport is the theme for the day, isn't it? To a large extent. Because we're talking to Patrick Skene, who's the chief, chief Creative Officer at Cultural Pulse. But his, I. Passion is sport and the impact it can have. And actually his work is all around, the multicultural marketing of sport. So, he's a fascinating character who I think you discovered on LinkedIn with some amazing content and I think the interview will not be disappointing.
[00:03:02] Patrick: Great to be on We Not Me, subject very close to my heart. Being a sport fanatic, it's all about being part of something larger than yourself.
[00:03:10] Pia: Well that's fantastic. Well, I didn't even get to introduce you, Patrick, so, but we have never met until tonight, so this is amazing. So we've been LinkedIn buddies, and I've seen you create some amazing creative content and with really strong messaging. So I really wanted to get to talk to the man behind that.
[00:03:29] Patrick: Okay. Thank you. Thank you, and thrilled to talk all things positive.
[00:03:33] Pia: Oh, exactly. Well, it is positive we're not downbeat
[00:03:35] Patrick: Oh no, there's some experts. There's some well paid experts on the negative side doing, churning it out every day, so.
[00:03:41] Pia: But we also don't let you get away scot free. So you have to go in and answer these really somewhat tricky questions that Dan's gonna throw at you. So we, that it's a way of warming you up, getting the creative juices flowing. So I'll hand you over.
[00:03:53] Dan: Thank you. So this, they're color coded. Patrick, these cards, they go green, which is simple. Tell us a bit about you, Amber, which is just a little bit more tasty and I've, but I've, my cut card. Give me a red card. And it's this one, something I've never told anyone.
[00:04:11] Patrick: How much I love, pork scratchings.
[00:04:14] Dan: Oh, yeah,
[00:04:16] Patrick: I keep it to myself because it's a bit gluttonous and whatever, but yeah, it's it's my secret. Great love.
[00:04:22] Pia: Oh, so do you have one when you go to a pub and you have a pint and a packet of port scratchings?
[00:04:28] Patrick: Wherever, wherever I can find it. I've gone down and then I discovered I, when I was on the keto diet, it's the only acceptable snack that is low carb, so it's gone to atmospheric levels.
[00:04:39] Dan: It is perfect. Absolutely perfect.
[00:04:42] Pia: And is there a country that produces the very best? I mean, is it an English thing or an Australian thing, or, you know, is it something that
[00:04:49] Patrick: All I know is that there's six or seven brands down here that do roaring trade in the places I know, because a lot of the Asian community love them as well and see them as a, a source of of protein and, you know, it's culturally aligned with their ancestral country. So I'm not alone..
[00:05:05] Pia: So now we've added your pork scratchings habit. tell us a little bit about yourself and a bit about your career, how you've got to this role, to things that you're passionate about.
[00:05:15] Patrick: i've had a little bit of a corporate career and then I moved into sport in the early 2000s. And worked for the Sydney Kings Basketball Club and we did some segmented marketing and marketed to the Filipinos who loved it specifically, and got some big crowds. So that led me to a career in multicultural sports marketing. So we do a lot of fan engagement to bring multicultural communities to sport. Our crowning achievement was the recent Women's World Cup. Our, my company was responsible for all the away team games and there was 31 sellouts in matches, not involving the Matildas or the football fern in New Zealand. So that was an unbelievable success just by, by marketing videos in language information sessions, just, you know, fully arming people with what they need to make a decision. So I've been doing, luckily working across all sports.
[00:06:01] But my other hat is as a storyteller. So I've been telling stories for a long time, corporate stories, brand stories, and I've moved into, in about 2013, I started writing about sport and the meaning of sport, and the values behind sport and why sport is not just kicking a ball around why it has come to mean so much more, focusing on leadership, focusing on teamwork and the emotional side and write for the Guardian, write for the local papers down here, have written for the Telegraph, written for the Sydney Morning Herald. But LinkedIn, uh, has provided me with my own audience and it's a highly intellectual audience for whom the concepts I write about in sport, it's very fertile. I. Fertile ground, everyone. 99% of people are respectful, which I haven't found on other platforms when people almost go on a diabolical mission to undermine your work. And I found a new, new community on there that's starving for positivity amidst the shameless self-promotion and people telling you, you know, they caught up with their best friend Jenny at the charity do.
[00:07:04] In between all that. We have the greatest democratized platform in the history. 900 million people, everyone, the top of the tree, all the thought leaders, everyone together being positive. I think it's the best place for women. I think people can have really respectful relationships on there that they may not even be able to have online. Some of them, but everyone's equal. You can be, you know, the big six foot, four alpha in the meeting is just another person on LinkedIn. It neutralizes some of those elements that cause inclusion and exclusion.
[00:07:34] And really it's brought back the written word we were getting down to Twitter, 140 characters and you can do 500 words. I sometimes push that outer echelon and LinkedIn has determined for all of us that's about the limit of our concentration spans, which I'm sure you saw that experiment that we've fallen behind goldfish in where 9.7 seconds where we think of something new in the goldfish are storming past us now in the attention span stakes.
[00:07:58] Dan: Much mocked, aren't they? The goldfish. So Patrick, let's dive a bit into this, the subject of sport.
[00:08:04] Patrick: At the essence of things, human beings are herd animals. We do things together, we protect. Even if you look at old British towns, it's the, you know, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, wrapped around the village green who had all to come together on a Sunday. A village was effectively a team of complimentary skill sets that were all working together. In the barter days, that's what it was. I'll make you two swords and you give me one of your, one of your lamb, a couple of your lambs.
[00:08:31] And sport is the extension of that. I love to use the Pua New Guinea example where, when the british and various communities first went there in the 1930s. They found a highly sophisticated culture, but they still did war on the traditional lines of two, two lines of people, you know, one would come out, throw a spear, one, one would come out, throw a spear. And they yearned for to end that. And rugby league provided right through the Highlands and everywhere. And it's almost the same. You're separated by 10 meters. One person runs out with a ball.
[00:09:00] So, so sport has replicated their warfare replaced. It allowed the two villagers adjacent to each other to have great, friendly relations, and bring them all together in a unique way that you couldn't thread. A country that has 800 different languages. The diversity in PNG is mind boggling.
[00:09:17] So sport is about this unifying element. And I look at Ipswich at the moment, you know, from down in the dumps in, you know, lurking in division three, wondering what it all means, and they've shot up in two years. And the rewards those fans the only people that really get excited by that are the ones that experience the dark times together. And it's such a microcosm of life's, supporting a sporting team, you get taught that not everything is ever going to be fair, that things can happen outside your control.
[00:09:45] You see the value of strong leadership, structures and systems versus weak ones in just who reigns supreme with the same re in, in the event of a salary cap, where you have the same resources. You see the importance of culture and team culture and how some people can derail culture. But the posts of mine that go the biggest are the emotional ones. Either, ironically, the lowest funded group in the sporting industry are the disability group, yet five of my top 10 have been posts about disabled athletes. So it's really quite weird that the group that gets the biggest traction, reach, and engagement is actually the least funded in a world of digital where the money should just basically follow the clicks. It's just a little, a little insight I've discovered.
[00:10:29] But I've got a segment called Kind of Dusty in Here, which is, you know, an emotional one. Often parents congratulating their kids on playing the first game for a club or someone helping someone across the line. I love excellence. I love female excellence. Rags to riches stories. People love people that come from nothing, that they love, people that backed themselves and took a took a punt.
[00:10:51] And these stories are hardwired into our DNA like the hero's journey, these archetypes, they're pretty much guaranteed to win. So if you can find the stories that that, that are those archetypes and you tell those stories, you're going to get traction.
[00:11:05] And for me it's, I've got, I used to go to coffee when I was single. I'd go to, you know, 10 coffees a week with people, but life gets in the way. And these posts are what I would like to share with my coffee buds on, you know, something I saw fascinating and I get to do it with tens of thousands of people and deliver a dopamine hit.
[00:11:24] Do you think that at this time people are wanting those good stories because there's something missing going on in the workplace or in their lives? Do you think people are wanting to connect with that more now?
[00:11:37] I think automation, a lot of things have ripped away a lot of the meaning. And without meaning, we are amoeba in many ways. So for me, a lot of the things we used to get great meaning out of work. Now the relationship between employer employee has been destroyed. There's no trust. And people don't, I believe they just move from job to job. They, you're forced to be quite mercenary to keep up with cost of living.
[00:12:02] So that people used to be incredibly proud, particularly blue collar. And to a degree the blue collar guys still are, but white collar's been decimated. To be a bank worker now is a shriveled role of what it once was as the centerpiece of the community. Now they're getting rid of branches. And you know, didn't, the bank manager used to go down and hand over a check to the small club and all of those things are gone. So if you're working in a bank now, it's a soulless digital hellscape from what it was where you sat in the community as the, as you were the center of the community. And I'm sure the same was in England, it was here.
[00:12:32] What I most get out of sport is, is leadership, because you find incredible leaders and they just emerge on their own and they're the ones people naturally want to follow. And then you have people like Alex Ferguson and Ange Postecoglou who I'm following now has gone through a bit of a dark time, and the jackals are all over him. Someone like Alex Ferguson, who personalized, you know, realized to win. He had to do customized they called it back then, man management.
[00:12:55] Take your portfolio approach to humans, like a property portfolio, might have a retail that's got its own strategy there and a commercial building that's got its own strategy. And doing that with the players, not just spraying them or giving them all a, kick up the asrs and hoping for the best. Coming up with these customized plans that get the best outta people, and that then that manifests itself in a championship winning performance or a run with Man United like, like Sir Alex had.
[00:13:19] So I love the leadership in sport. 'cause leadership often in corporate environments, often half emotional manipulation and all quite weird, but it's a lot more pure and crystalline in sport when you see, you know, oh, I'd follow that guy into this particular battle because he leads from the front, or he's calm, he doesn't panic underneath the post and starts shouting at people or, you know, you see plenty of great female leaders on in sport now.
[00:13:44] I love that and I love the leadership people take in in good behavior, in compassionate leadership. That's another big one of mine I really enjoy where someone does something compassionate and it affects it, it goes around the team like a positive virus.
[00:14:00] So that for me the leadership side is is a really beautiful outside the skills and the endurance and resilience and determination and grit and all those other elements I like to write about the leadership one. For me, when I see good leadership, it's very exciting.
[00:14:13] Dan: As you say, when you're playing the game, you know you've got all those wonderful challenges, teamwork, teammates, you know, challenge, you know, just the hard times are good to all of that stuff. But if you zoom out and look at sport as a whole in a society that's quite divided, as you say, you know, the media attacks, individual players, individual managers have a couple of bad games and they just, as you say, the jackals are on them, the fans, you know, it's quite tribalistic in a time when we're quite divided. Obviously everything is a balance, but you are, you are looking at all of that and saying, this is a force for good. What's your thinking on the sort of whole, if you like?
[00:14:54] Patrick: I think my thinking on the whole I, I would say there would be 2% negative stuff. Go on. Let's look at your five levels of professional football over there, where the, we don't really have a hooligan thing going on here. People might still yell something racist or homophobic and they'll be removed instantly. Now there's a lot of self, self-policing by the crowd, so it still goes on, but it's improved to a ridiculous amount.
[00:15:20] I wouldn't want to live in an England that didn't have football as its unifier. With everything else tearing us apart there's a currency. In fact, the lower level team you support, the more respect you get as a hardcore, which is a really weird reverse pyramid. If you know it, you've got the FFA cup, this absolute winter wonderland ferry world of opportunity and little trains that could and underdogs.
[00:15:47] But I think the civic pride, your local football team gives you it gives you colors, it gives you something to support, it gives you that once in a lifetime victory where the whole town comes together. There's literally nothing that I, I felt it in choirs sometimes. Choirs are a unifier where you know, you can be tall, short, whatever, male, female. I think they've been a bit undercooked. But again, once you turn something, that's the good thing about sport is it's not subjective. You lose two, one.
[00:16:17] To say that the Shopshire choir beat the Windsor and Eaton choir in a national choir competition, it's as subjective. It is as subjective as the cooking shows, ' cause it's all down to, it's all down to personal taste. But football gives you that cold nill draw, or sorry, you are out of the FA Cup now by as neutral as possible referees and. To make it as one in 100 measurements of failure or success on and off side. So sport is clumsy. Sport sometimes bubbles over into tribalism, but it also brings towns together in a way.
[00:16:54] And the thing about sport is that it has respect for elders where a lot of other cultural pillars don't have like. What do you know? Old man you pretty much won't hear in sport. In boxing, the trainers go to 90, 95 and their wisdom is respected and music, food, what else can great grandma and grandson troop off to do and share a complete common relationship with? It's the intergeneration nature of it. The father son stuff that comes through is heartwarming, even down at local cricket level. You know, you'll get the dad that stayed on two more years, so his 14-year-old son could make 16 and come and play seniors.
[00:17:34] It's all around us in sport and without that binding element. Particularly in multicultural suburbs, everyone just retreats to their own food and their own entertainment, and you're not really gonna go out and search out Bangladeshi music and the Bangladeshis aren't gonna, you know, search out English soft rock from the seventies and eighties. It's, they're all very narrow cast. But sport is just is a broad cast and anyone can come down and become a member of Ipswich. There is zero exclusion from joining.
[00:18:04] The problem is without sport, you don't have things accelerating people's sense of their new British identity or their new Australian identity. Because you're not part of a tribe, being part of Medicare down here doesn't make me feel more Australian. It just, I just have the peace of mind that I can pay for the operation or not get skinned alive. But the sport is often the first institution that a migrant will voluntarily engage with out of their own. They'll walk their kid down to the local park, or they'll go and watch, I say Windsor and Eaton because that's where my Irish grandmother lived for a a while, and I used to go and watch the, maybe it was Windsor and Eaton back then. I think it was Windsor and Maidenhead and I used to find outrageous meaning in just sitting in the terraces and hearing them yell at the latest striker who hasn't delivered. And I, it just stayed with me forever that this, without this, what would the town have to look forward to on a Saturday night where anyone can go and do it? It's not a closed disco or some nightclub where the oldies feel outta whack or square dancing where the youngsters are all at sea. This is just 90 minutes of togetherness. The ultimate we, not me.
[00:19:08] Pia: And I, I mean you mentioned before, about the women's soccer cup, I took my son to watch his very first game at Brisbane, which was Australia versus France. I mean, you couldn't have picked a better game, you know, when they did the penalty shootout. But, I think seeing what happened to us during Covid when we were very separated and we couldn't have that humanness, and then putting all those bodies together, cheering towards a common goal, literally, and having all those emotions under a stadium, you get such a palpable sense of what it is to be human. And the only other thing that I can relate it to is again, is like a concert.
[00:19:48] Patrick: Concert where you'ree all singing together is that, that can equal that as well. But it can't equal a last minute goal as far as jumping up and down and totally losing yourself. Sport sits there, but in the sense of community, definitely a concert. Because you've already at a concert, you've already got the frequency alignment of, Hey, at least we've got Bo Scags in common. You can't be too bad a person if, you know, we stumbled on feeling this artist was meaningful enough to them to pay 400 bucks or whatever it is.
[00:20:18] Pia: We talked about leadership, but what do you think people learn about teamwork? Are we seeing good examples of that? And what that is because we're being worked in incredibly hard and operate largely as in as individual silos. So that looks very different when you're watching a sports team.
[00:20:38] Patrick: Well, sports have guaranteed losing built into them, and often the losing comes about from lack of teamwork. So you get a direct ability to redress and the ultimate incentive of coming together as tightly as a team, like why, why do people not hog the ball? Why do they pass it even when they're in scoring positions? Because they might've thought that person was 20% better chance of scoring. And all of the championships, the guys holding the trophies, the ones building the legacies, are all great teams. The old adage star team will always be to a team of stars, and it's absolutely true.
[00:21:14] So in sport, you are so incentivized to become a team, become one unit, because when you're losing, you're getting your bums kicked by someone that is playing like a team. So you get to, you get, if you're losing, you get delivered these prime examples of what you could be if you did come together and function as one unselfish unit, where every decision made is in the interest of team. They're the ones that hold up the trophies.
[00:21:41] That's why sport is, because the losing is so cold, you gotta front up a Tuesday morning, the front office is all sad and gloomy. It's like the radio stations when ratings come in, everyone's champagne or oh God, you know, talking to head hunter and you think, you know your entertainment careers over. And sports people risk being humiliated, and that when people find that absolutely compelling as well. And being humili when you're being humiliated because you've fallen apart and lost six nil, if you don't bind, you're going to be constantly humiliated, so you've got such a powerful incentive to form these bonds and to get the very best out of each other.
[00:22:17] In Rugby League, for example. What is it about rugby league that's so compelling to the working class? Well, it's the accountability of the game. You've got a guy there and a guy standing next to you, either side, and you can't be the hole that they keep running through, or you've let your whole team down because it's like a siege. You've got the other teams trying to find the weak spot in the castle, you know, go up the garbage shoot or whatever, what, whatever it may be. And you don't want to be that. So the accountability and teamwork.
[00:22:44] And then that, when you've been in those little mini closest thing, you'll get to war without shooting, holding off an attack for 20 minutes that was just raining down and, but no one broke the line, the bonding you get in that is second only to war. Because you know, you've been stomped, guys are wounded. When they come back in, they, no one lost their nerve or they somehow they stuck to their process and it came good, it's um, difficult to replicate anywhere else at the emotional level where, you know, at 3:00 PM on a Sunday morning, a Sunday afternoon, groan sober men will hug each other like they've won the lottery, you know, in a meaningless, relatively meaningless division two relegation game in Sunday League, you know, dad bod league.
[00:23:27] Dan: Yeah. Dad bod league. I love it. Might have to start playing again. So Patrick, and how do you, you run a business, how do you bring some of this into your work in back in the corporate world?
[00:23:38] Patrick: Well, for me, I'm at the mentoring stage, so I like to share. I love seeing people's development. So I'm like a special teams coach. I don't, I was CEO for a long time and now I've, now I'm Chief Creative Officer just because that's where I want to live. So I mentor a lot of, a lot of young ones. I try and keep it light and funny in the office and make it enjoyable workplace. 'Cause I've learned from all the great coaches in sport that the more fun the environment, the better they'll play, the more they're enjoying themselves. Not dreading the coach or punishment comes down on everybody at the same time. Shared pain is. Is, you know, is reduced pain if you're all going through it together.
[00:24:13] And I'm also good at if we don't win, you know, you miss out on a tender or you lose a client. I've learned from long lean patches in many sports, in many countries in the world, that the sun does shine and. There's often a silver lining in these things. So I'm a bit of a cheerleader when we miss out on an account as well from years of having to talk up sort of wretched individuals when we lost seven games in a row, and you know, you just gotta point out and put everything in perspective and, you know, in a hundred years time it won't matter anyway. And like,
[00:24:42] Dan: uh, the role of the elder, as you said earlier, that's
[00:24:46] Patrick: Yeah. Well, you got no choice when you've got a gray beard, but you get thrust into it. May, May well play up to it.
[00:24:52] Dan: Talk us about your multicultural work that you do in different communities that jumped out from your bio.
[00:24:59] Patrick: Australia was white Australia. Policy until 1975. So it had three generations or four generations from 70 to 75 without any diversity at all. It was just basically an Anglo Celtic nation with a few exceptions, but vast majority. And then after 75, we opened up migration. It was a crazy clash where Vietnamese, Chinese Indians came in, engaging with these three generation old rusted on Anglo-Celtic institutions that were resistant to change because we were the center of the universe for that for that historical period.
[00:25:32] The Asian communities, like in England, they've become they were brought in initially as unskilled labor and now they're being brought in as skilled labor. But they're getting to significance. They're providing the growth and the ones coming in now are on big money and brands sports, nobody knows how to reach them. They just keep doing the same old ads and not getting responses.
[00:25:50] So in sports participation and sports fan engagement, we are the leading consultancy to link sports and all of the multicultural communities. And that allows me to engage on all the big Commonwealth games, cricket World Cup, rugby league World Cup, the FIFA Women's World Cup, Asian Cup, soccer, we do all of the, fan engagement for the multicultural communities.
[00:26:12] if I had my way, I'd be traveling the world with a backpack just sampling food and checking out sport. But I can't do that. I've settled down and, so this is the second best way that I can because Sydney's unbelievably multicultural. I can be up at an Iraqi shisha shop within half an hour drive and having them explain the latest geopolitical developments in Iran, or we watch an Iranian AFC. I've got very close to the Iranians in the Asian Cup in 2015. So I can go and have the food and the culture and ask the questions of the local multicultural communities here. And also if I ever go overseas. Now I've got fantastic contents from the communities here who pass me back to a cousin, particularly the Arabic world, hospitality, as you know, is off the charts as a cultural pillar.
[00:26:54] I do a lot of videos in language, do a lot of scripts. I direct a lot of one, two minute short stories. A lot of, do a lot of storytelling for brands and tell a lot of stories of multicultural heroes, so that's work, and then I tell the sports heroes in my uh, other whole slew of endeavors of sports storytelling, wherever I can.
[00:27:12] Dan: Fantastic. Patrick, it's time to make use of that gray beard one last time. You,
[00:27:17] Patrick: I wash. I wash this in by the way. I can charge double.
[00:27:22] Dan: So, of all your thinking around sport and multi multiculturalism what would you say to our, what's your gray beard tip for your, for our listener to take away? Something they could possibly do differently that they hadn't thought of before?
[00:27:34] Patrick: In leadership terms, probably the biggest thing I've found on my journey is the one is the failure of the one size fits all leadership model in sport. And a wise man once told me that the same hot water that boils an egg also softens a potato. And it's just different that, that customization, that personalization piece to get the best outta sports people, and not a one size fits all, has been the biggest thing in.
[00:27:59] Because that really is we, not me. That is treating someone as an individual with special needs and the gratitude you get from that person, from acknowledging their situation brings the best outta sporting teams. And I love the Sir Ferguson. Sir Graham Lowe was a rugby league coach. You would say Jürgen Klopp now is the, you know, the latest of the great man managers, but I really love that. I love great leadership through customized customized, strong and personalized leadership.
[00:28:25] Dan: It's a top tip. Yeah, certainly when you read of those leaders, like Ferguson, a lot of it's about his one-to-one conversations, isn't it? His deep connections with individuals. Where he is the public viewers of the team. It's quite interesting.
[00:28:37] Patrick: Well, he went for the second father model. He provided, in some cases the first father to a lot of those guys. That's what sport just brings, you know, with lost boys, it brings these positive male role models they can trust and invest in them. It's without sport, you know, it would be chaos.
[00:28:52] Pia: I think that's very true. And there can also be some negative side of
[00:28:56] Patrick: Oh, with every positive there's ne but I think it's overwhelmingly positive in sport. When it goes negative, it's not good. Or, you know, some of the stuff we hear on the terraces over there. But often it's just a, a microcosm what's going on. If they're throwing a banana on the pitch, go outside the stadium, the black people aren't being treated well there. If they feel brazen enough to do that within that, in, in that fan group. So if you look at the broader racism problem in somewhere like Italy and in and Greece right now, they feel like they're being overwhelmed with migrants. There's the classic scapegoating in an eco economic downturn that's happened for millennia, and it's just an unfortunate situation.
[00:29:30] But sport can bring the African kid and the Italian kid together as well, and we don't have that many things that can do that clumsy, uh, Clumsy and, and it might over, the passion might overflow into antisocial behavior at times.
[00:29:42] Dan: If they did the same around choirs, it would be very amusing, taking you earlier point. That would be very good. And so Patrick g give us a, our final question for you is around a sort of media recommendation. Where would you point people to a, a book, blog, LinkedIn posts, anything any media. What's your recommendation?
[00:30:01] Patrick: The thing that has blown my socks off this year is Shogun, which is on Disney slash Hulu. It's a 10 part series based on the book of James Clavell. And it is roughly a, roughly a story that happened, but they've it, it was fictionalized. Lord Toga is the main is the main samurai in it. He's the leader, the take all, and his leadership is simply unbelievable. Apart as far as a leader setting the ship to the North Star and just staying on course, regardless of what comes in from the sides.
[00:30:34] Probably the biggest revelation is this lead from, there's two women in there that lead from behind, but they're super staunch and we, there's one in particular that has incredible leadership through deed and, and honor, even though she doesn't have the title. Lady Mariko probably my favorite character of all time, but it has Game of Thrones level writing. Is the Japanese have gone nuts on it. There were 2,600 costumes, I think, put together. They brought in every expert in the world on accent, locations. They went, it was 10 years in the making, and what's come out of it is absolutely magnificent. Every single episode of the 10 is bursting with leadership, leadership tips, and I, I, I was writing down quotes like a maniac. It was, it was, It was wild.
[00:31:18] Pia: Well, you've convinced me. I'm Definitely, No.
[00:31:21] Patrick: Well, I, well, I'm confident that you will absolutely love it. I haven't heard a negative word about it, and I've thrown a very broad church of people into, you know, your life's not complete un unless you watch this. And I'm getting all sorts of messages from people. I even posted it on LinkedIn as its own, as its own post the other day.
[00:31:38] Dan: I just saw that actually, yeah, wonderful. Patrick, that's a great recommendation and thank you with the details of, that'll be in the show notes, but it sounds like it's on Disney. If people wanna find it as, I think Pia and I both will. Thank you so much for being on the show, Patrick. It's been enlightening and I have to
[00:31:53] Pia: Yeah, it's been great. Really great.
[00:31:55] Patrick: Yes, no, I've enjoyed it. I get to stretch my legs a bit. And Pia, I'll see you on link. I'll see you guys on LinkedIn.
[00:32:00] Pia: Definitely will. Thank you so much Patrick.
[00:32:03] Dan: Cheers.
[00:32:03] Patrick: My pleasure, thank you.
[00:32:07] Pia: Patrick is incredibly articulate and he's also quite big picture so he can see the impact of the way that things are. And so I really liked how he focused initially on the players, but actually really I think our conversation was much more the belonging impact for the people that watch sport. So it's the actual, the visceral emotion that you go through and how that, as he said, mirrors life, creates that sense of belonging. You have the team strip you, you're part of something. And that's, you know, it's a tribal DNA. And then it's so important to pick out, well, what are these great lessons that we're watching? You know, and what is the positive element of it in our lives?
[00:32:51] Dan: Definitely. I thought the way he zoomed right out when he said this is, sport is the way that immigrants first really connect with their community and the sport's almost the only way to, you know, the best way to do that. Not the only way, but the best part. I thought that was really powerful.
[00:33:05] I must admit, living in the UK as I do, I'm, as one of my questions probably betrayed, I'm a bit skeptical about football in particular being a force for good. I see, you know, I think rugby generally has some really good values. Other sports seem to have good values, but football just, you think, wow. You know, that if we, we're just harnessing that sort of rather pointless tribal male thing that's going on there. But actually he was very convincing that I am missing the positives. You know, I'm not giving football enough credit for all the good. He's doesn't diminish the bad things that happen, the mo homophobia, the misogyny, the racism and all those things, everything that goes on. And. But I'm under underestimating the positives inside the sport, and he was very compelling on that front, I think.
[00:33:55] Pia: And I think also we have a bias towards, you know, particularly in the UK, the Premier League, and that's all that we sort of see is the big names, whereas he's really looking at it on a much broader scale, right down to the, you know, to, to the league division three and four, which, you know, but you're still getting people trotting out in their team colors, observing that, being part of that.
[00:34:15] Dan: That is true. The only thing I'd say is I've seen appalling behavior in a, when we're playing, you know, even at the very ba bottom level, you know, this football culture of tribalism seems to excuse all kinds of behavior that would not be tolerated in other sports. I think so, which is interesting. But, yeah, I think you're right. There's a. Much bigger pyramid of positive impacts there. If we are open to looking at them which he was urging us to do, I thought it was um, it, it's a really, really, really good one. I think more broadly in a, we not me sense that's, it's really a good reminder,
[00:34:48] Pia: and I liked how you talked about the winners are the, are the one, are the teams that become a unit That's a good reminder for us. You know, not the star players, but the star team. And, you know, reading, I've been reading Adam Grant's Hidden Potential, his new book, and he actually has, they've done the research on it and the high performing teams don't have the star players, they have the star team.
[00:35:13] So it's these, these skills of collaboration and working together, having a common goal, and you know, putting your own interests below the needs of the team. And I guess when we see that and we see elements of that almost, you know, like in a fairytale win, that's when we sort of go, it's there. That's what we believe in.
[00:35:32] Dan: Yeah, exactly. And it's, and yes, it's amazing to see a solo effort. It's sort of impressive. But when the team is united, I saw actually happen to see a little bit of Australian, of an Australian team in a trial. It might even be one of Patrick's post, but you know, the, that ball went from, went 75 meters and it was touched by, you know, about eight people because they were really together and you know, that really made it. And if one of them had tried to get over the line, it would've failed 'cause they're against a really good team.
[00:35:59] And I think in the, it's really interesting you say that 'cause one of the questions in Squadify is about putting team interests above the individual. And I dunno about you, but that's the question I have to explain most that people just don't quite understand. What do you mean? And actually the sporting context is that I'm in front of the goal. I've got a 50% chance of getting it in. That person over there has got a 60% chance they're getting the goal, you know, I'm gonna pass it to them. That's not you taking the glory, but it's really interesting how that um, that question itself can sort of give, it can be a little bit confusing for people.
[00:36:34] Pia: A hundred percent. So I, we've got the Olympics coming up, and that's gonna be, you know, that I know my kids are gonna be glued to that. They absolutely love it. And I, what I love about that is it's timeless. I remember that as a child watching that, and it still holds all those archetypes that he talked about, you know, the hero's journey and the, you know, the struggler, the dark times. They're all there. So it'll be compelling viewing.
[00:37:02] Dan: It really will. It really will. And I've, and even those teams that look individual, of course, they've all got big teams behind them and they have to all be pulling. So, yeah, that'll be very exciting. And I've had to put one final word in for the egg and the potato, if there's a, ever a little phrase that people could take away to remind them that, while leadership of teams is a sort of, there's a team task, there's a, they're individual tasks and, and it's an individual, primarily an individual act to, to lead. So don't apply the same hot water to the same people.
[00:37:34] But that is it for this episode. We Not Me is supported by Squadify. Squadify will create a star team from your team of stars. You can find show notes where you are listening and at squadify.net. And if you've enjoyed the show, please share the love and recommend it to your friends. We Not Me is produced by Mark Steadman. Thank you so much for listening. It's goodbye from me.
[00:37:56] Pia: