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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.
This episode is for you if you're part of a senior leadership team or if you coach one. Deep down you know it's not working as well as it should, because most senior leadership teams don't struggle with intelligence or experience, they struggle with behavior. Meetings get hijacked, conversations go in circles, and decisions quietly get pushed offline. So today, with our guest, Joël Cass, former Global Head of Leadership Development at Nokia, we're going to explore what's really going on beneath the surface and how leaders can shift from being a group of individuals to becoming a team that actually delivers together. [upbeat music] 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. And I am Pia Lee. And Pia, we were just talking about a senior team that you've been working with, haven't we? And the patterns that sometimes emerge, and it's the topic of today's show, so it sounded like, uh, it was a perfect intro actually, and these things happen, don't they? Yeah. I was on a debrief with a team that had some low psychological safety scores as much as anything else, and then I noticed a pattern starting to sort of build up that, you know, my gut feeling of thinking, "Hmm, this feels a little uncomfortable to share." There was one or two people that were more dominant in the conversation and in a way, and instantly you could feel that everyone was really leaning back and not leaning into the conversation. You know, that's quite unnatural. I don't think there's any sort of ill intent, but when somebody's tone and their point of view becomes quite insistent, and then their language is used in a way that you feel a bit of an idiot by challenging it- Yes ... yeah, it becomes quite difficult, and then that builds a pressure cooker of people feeling like they're not heard, and it's not necessarily a safe place, and it's a difficult scenario. And this wasn't the highest paid person, this wasn't the most senior person in the room? This was a team member? No, it was a senior person. It wasn't probably the most, but... And then it roped other people into it, and then it became a bit of a diatribe between two individuals. And whilst we were trying to get to the bottom of things, it kind of railroaded things. There's a subtle piece, isn't there, about communication where you can advocate your point of view and still leave space around it, but others manage to sort of- [laughs] Yeah ... there was another way of doing it, which is actually, here's the case, and you're not invited to have, really have a view on it. I think it's one of these patterns that emerges, doesn't it, in these senior teams, and that's exactly what today's show is about, because today's guest is Joël Cass, who is a really seasoned team development expert in large corporate companies, most notably recently Nokia, where he was head of leadership development, and team coaching, so he spent a lot of time watching the senior team. So let's go and hear a little bit more about the patterns that emerge in those teams now. [upbeat music] Hello, and a very warm welcome to Joël Cass. Lovely to have you on the show, Joël. Thank you, Pia. So I'm looking forward to digging into the topic here. We've got team nerds all together with an exciting topic. [laughs] You know Dan well. He could treat you really nicely, but I'm not sure that he will when he gets the cards out, so you might be looking for a red one. [laughs] Transparently, I'm using virtual cards, so they are a little bit less random than usual, so you spotted my evil plan. But I thought this one could be a good one for you, Joël, because you're sort of in transition at the moment. This is an orange card. What's the last big thing I learnt about myself? What's the last learning you had about yourself, Joël? The last big thing I learned about myself is the fact that I undersell myself. I've just left Nokia, so I'm now an independent person, and I was reworking my CV, and just before leaving Nokia, I sent some farewell messages, three waves, if you will. One wave was to my HR colleagues, another wave was to the executives, and the third wave was to all the VPs in the organization. And I got some fantastic, lovely emails that came back to me, basically appreciating the work that I had done, whether it was, uh, leadership development or team coaching, and I then put it into Claude. Oh. I posted my CV into Claude, and then I copy-pasted all these comments that came in through the three waves, and I asked Claude, "Please analyze and tell me what I need to do with these comments. What's the takeaway?" And the takeaway from Claude was, "You're underselling yourself." [laughs] "The way that you work with the participants, you really try to put yourself in the shoes of the leaders, and you're able to inspire them." So that's the last thing I learnt, and I thought, "Oh, now I need to go complete back to the drawing board and rewrite my CV." Brilliant, and a great use of AI as well. Love it. We do tend to undersell ourselves, particularly when we've been inside a big organization for some time, don't we? We can get a little institutionalized about our value. [laughs] We don't necessarily get to see it until we're out, parting out through the back door. [laughs] Exactly, and I think it's partly also the constraints of the size of the CV, right? You have to boil it down to one page or maximum two pages, and they want to see evidence, hard evidence, not the soft evidence. So there's some issues with CVs and how we are expected to fill them in and send them out. True. Very true. Well, it's good to know you've got something to keep you busy now, Joël. Rewind a little bit. Tell us a little bit about Joël, where you came from, and how you got to this point today. I've come from initially a consulting world, right? So where I had to work with different clients across different industries, do some surveys, uh, some research vis-à-vis their customers to see where are the bottlenecks, where are the gaps, and that led me to address those gaps to develop some kind of, uh, skill-building trainings, and so on and so forth. And then eventually I grew tired of consulting, and then I joined industry, and I joined, uh, Novartis, and then I joined, uh, Nokia. And always, for the last 20-odd years, I've been in leadership development, talent management, succession management, and oftentimes I triangulate between three things, contentThen delivery and then design. And I've also gotten into delivery, facilitating, and training, but then l-little by little, I started to look at, I need to get the spotlight away from me and put it to- on the participants, right? So that led me to more team coaching and letting things emerge by just watching and observing and playing back what I saw. So that's a little bit of where I've come from. I've had a lot of experience, you know, designing and delivering training, so I have the content. Then I have the impact through coaching and facilitating, and that's where I'm at today. I've really transitioned from basically owning the agenda and basically having the spotlight on me th- as a facilitator to shifting and really more doing the team coaching, which is me doing less of the hard work, if you will. [laughs] I think a little bit more intimate as well, actually, when you're right in there with the team, rather than standing at the front of the room. It is. I mean, I'm no longer standing so much in front of the room. If it's a day or two, I may be in front of the room for maybe 30 minutes, an hour collectively. I still think I lose one or two kilos every time I'm working with a team coach, a team, because you never know where it's gonna go. Are they gonna pick up the ball? And there's a lot of silence sometimes, so it can be nerve-wracking, testing on the nerves. And how did you get into this whole field? What led you into becoming really interested in leadership and team development? The leadership is through my consulting. I had to address some of the gaps, so then I had to look at, okay, well, what is required? So for instance, one organization I worked with had just finished their strategy, and then the next question was, do we have what it takes in our senior executives? So we drafted the skills that were required in this new strategy, and then we delivered or launched a 180 assessment, and that gave us feedback on how do each of the senior leaders match up towards the expectations to deliver on the new strategy, and then that evolved into, well, now we know what the gaps are, let's design and deliver a training. So that's on the leadership side. On the coaching side, initially, as I said, the spotlight was on me. I had a tight agenda, I had exercises, I had assessments, and I would somehow walk away thinking, "I don't think I've had much impact. I think that there's still some things that aren't right with these teams." And I just reflected, and I'm a big fan on reflection, I just reflected, what am I doing wrong? What can I do differently so that I walk away thinking that I have had more impact? And that's when I really came across a book, which I will talk about at the very end, that really made me pivot the way I show up in front of teams. Lovely bit of foreshadowing. I'm looking forward to that, actually, for the end. So Joel, when we were talking a couple of weeks ago, you mentioned that obviously you've, you've coached so many senior teams through your career, and that you'd observed some patterns. So it would be really interesting to explore those. So just take us into the topic, could you? What do you see about these strange beasts, really, of these senior teams? What I've noticed at a higher level is when I'm working with executive teams, one day, two days are packed agendas. Packed agendas, presentation after presentation, with perhaps one or two hours reserved for the soft stuff, the team. And this is an observation I've had. I've also seen increasingly larger teams, and this could be because of these tools that are available to us, whether it's Teams, and the fact that we're having to work more and more virtually, right? We have this hybrid way of working, and I've noticed that teams are getting larger, which then also has knock-on effects. So for instance, decisions being kicked down the road, people joining teams because of the fear of missing out, not necessarily contributing or making comments or speaking up, but just there. And sometimes they do ask questions, which actually railroads conversations or takes teams down rabbit holes they don't need to go into. I see this immense need, what I call bias for action. It's content, content, content, content. And I often see debates or discussions rather than dialogues. Debates is, "I'm right, you're wrong, and let me prove it to you." Discussions is more about, well, finding what is the best way, looking at alternatives, which is a better form of conversations. And then dialogues is trying to understand each other, trying to build on each other's perspectives. And what I see is often debates. It's trying to have a one-manship over others and show to others how bright you are in persuading and influencing others. So that's what I see. Now, that's at a meta level. At the lower level, what I see is the way they interact. So one of the things I commonly see is a lack of presence and preparation. Oftentimes, they are distracted. They are having sidebar conversations. There's no preparations with pre-reads, never mind even having pre-reads. So that's one thing. The other thing I see is egos, [laughs] especially the higher up you go. [laughs] And you know, there maybe is a right behind that because they've had a long career, they are at the top of their game, they're often presidents, vice presidents. There are egos. It's about also showing your brilliance. And so there's a lot of high IQ, and I wouldn't say a lot of EQ, 'cause there's a lot of shutting down each other, talking over each other, rather than exercising the art of listening, of asking powerful questions. So that's the ego-driven part, and that's especially true the higher up you go. And then there's this kind of division and disengagement, being distracted, having, uh, hidden agendas, having this loyalty to the function that you represent is a big one that I often see. This is a very common thing. So there's a lot there, Joel, but it's... You're painting a vivid picture, actually, of these top teams that, uh, is totally consistent, I think. These top teams and senior teams are strange in their own way, aren't they, in that they're made up of people who are very successful. They've made their way up.There are obviously some, often some traits of those people that lead to these team dynamics. Joel, could you sort of dig into that a little bit? What are the root causes of these behavioral traits? The root cause is, I think, is the emphasis for action and results. There's quarterly pressures, there's targets, there's objectives that need to be achieved. There's this, "I've gotten a promotion because of my technical and functional expertise, so let me chime in on those." And sometimes the real art is putting aside your own perspective. I mean, what I also see is this tyranny of the average. Team performance is supposed to be one plus one equals three, but what you have is individuals coming into these meetings and trying to showcase their own experience, their own functional technical experience, and safeguarding their own teams and their own budgets, all this because they know there's cost containment, there is pressure on delivering, and that's the angle that I see about protecting my own team. If, let's say, if I'm, uh, finance, I'm not going to let go anything that's going to distract or penalize my team. And this is where it's challenging to get the team to put that team hat on, and it's challenging because oftentimes I see that teams are not acting with a common goal, but with individual goals. Teams don't have this kind of dependency on each other. They're independent, and they don't have a common fate. In other words, "Dan, if you fail, well, that's your problem. You failed." Yeah, right. [laughs] "It's not gonna affect me." And so it's the art of also, how do you set up the team? Teams tend to be a collection of people, a group, not necessarily having a common goal with interdependency and a common fate. So it's not just individual traits, but it's also how the team is formed that is the issue or the challenge. One of the things that I've noticed, and that's why these behaviors, I, I created this self-assessment called the irritating team behaviors, is these traits aren't necessarily addressed, this kind of lack of preparation, ego-driven behaviors, or disengagement. They're not addressed because peers won't challenge each other, won't hold each other accountable eventually. You know, who am I, Joel, to challenge Pia and to hold Pia accountable for some of these distracting, irritating behaviors? That rarely happens, and the line manager, the president, the CEO, doesn't want to babysit these executives, and definitely is not going to hold them to account. So hence why I think that the neutral coach facilitator is the person who has to hold the mirror up and say, "Team," and I have some stories to share, "this is happening." That's an interesting point about the babysitting, isn't it? Because you're in this field as we are. We would call that leadership, wouldn't we? [laughs] Yes. But it's being couched as babysitting at that level. That's fascinating. I hate to say it. Maybe I should... I've overspoken there. But- [laughs] ... you know, the challenge is there's a wonderful model by Roger Harrison called the waterline model, and it's back to my point about this bias for action. Oftentime teams are supremely focused on the task and the content at the expense of the processes and the relations, and this is where there's an issue, is presidents, team leaders need to focus on the content and on the task at hand because they have all these objectives to achieve. And what I ask teams to consider is, let's go slow to go fast. Let's look at our team processes. Let's look at our interactions. How do we interact? Because that's gonna pave the way for better decisions, better interactions, better ideas and creativity, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is teams typically focus a lot on content and tasks until they hit a brick wall. Right. And then all of a sudden they have to go what Roger Harrison calls the load or waterline. What is it that is preventing us from making a decision? And I think that's where team leaders aren't necessarily trained or taking the time in these busy agendas to take a step back. There's some wonderful methodologies that I use, for instance, balcony and dance methodology, asking anyone in the team to go to the balcony. So there's, the balcony is going up and observing from a different perspective, and the dance floor is busy doing the doing, talking about the content and the process. And I rarely see a team leader or a team member going to the balcony and just sharing an observation. "Excuse me, team, can I just share an observation? We've been going around and around in circles for 20 minutes now. How is this working for us?" And leaving it on the table for somebody to pick up there. To give you an example, I was coaching an executive team, a president and his leadership team, and in the span of 20 minutes, I heard the following phrase, "Can we take it offline?" Eight times. [laughs] That's good. Eight times in 20 minutes- [laughs] ... "Can we take it offline?" I called timeout. I said, "Sorry, team, can I jump in here and just share an observation? The last 20 minutes I've counted eight times the following phrase, 'Can we take it offline?' Or, 'Let's take it offline.'" And then I just asked them, "How does that work for you? How does that work for alignment, for follow through, for commitment?" And then what was just a shared observation ended up being a two-hour conversation about how the team makes decisions and how they follow through on commitments. That was a balcony moment where I paused and went to the balcony and just shared an observation, and it pivoted, right? The team all of a sudden went below the waterline and said, "Right, how are we interacting here? How are we making decisions? How are we communicating?" So often I think some of thoseBehavioral patterns are subconscious, and they're triggered by one person, and then other people respond. You know, I once observed a team, and for two hours they never asked a question, so it was comments towards one another. So I think sometimes the pattern that a team has in its communication is a form of acceptance. So people are looking for, well, that's part of the way of being part of the team. It's very primal instinct, and they don't really want to be doing something different. So unless a third party calls it, everyone's actually just trying to be in, even if they're not really constructively doing what they need to get in. Do you see that? I see that particularly at the very beginning. You know, the storming, norming, forming process. Everybody wants to show how bright they are and why they deserve a seat at the table. So there's a lot of that. There's also these kind of... It, it's back to the debates versus discussions versus dialogues, is the art of asking questions. I came across an interesting fact, is when as a leader is doing 80% of the talking, there's a fair chance that the team isn't doing well. They're not learning. They're expecting just the top-down, to be told what to do. And the art of asking questions, "Well, Pia, what do you think?" Or, "Dan, how do you see it from your function and your perspective?" Or, "How might our customers perceive this?" Right? It's this kind of perceptions, changing from the first person to the second person to the third-person perspective. I hardly ever see that. And it's back to the kind of conversations. I just read a book by Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators, and he talks about the three types of conversation. One is the practical conversation, which is usually around task [laughs] and content, and everyone's pitching in from their perspective, versus the emotional conversation, so that's number two. And then the third is the social. And how I tie this in is typically when I'm working with teams is I try to get them to work on a team map, if you will, and the team map will include, for instance, the team charter. Will include things like our purpose, our vision, common goals, core values, working agreements, how will we work together, how do we make decisions, how do we communicate? And many of those are focused on the emotional, i.e., core values, what's important to us, and also the social, also core values, but also how do we communicate and make decisions, and how do we work together? Oftentimes it's a one-off exercise. They do a team charter, pretend it gets filed, forgotten, and then here we go again, back to Roger Harrison's conversation. We're on top of the waterline. We don't go below the waterline to say, "Hey, wait a minute. Hold on. How are we doing against our team charter?" Rarely do I see that. I'd love to hear some more examples, actually, from you, Joël, 'cause these practical examples of where the coaching and the balcony view has really had an impact. What else have you seen? I'll try to tie it into the emotional part. Remember Charles Duhigg, this kind of practical conversations, emotional and social. I was working with one senior leadership team in Paris on an offsite, and again, for a good 30 minutes they were going around in a conversation on one specific topic, and after 30 minutes I couldn't take it anymore. [laughs] My Oura Ring was telling me- [laughs] ... stress level is high. I don't feel comfortable. And I went to the balcony and I said, "Team, can I share something with you? I am in pain. I've been in pain now for the last 10 minutes, in these last 30 minutes. I'm in pain." And then I asked them, "On a scale of one to 10, reflecting on the last 30 minutes, one being I'm not in pain at all, 10 being- [laughs] ... I'm in extreme pain, where are you on an individual basis?" And then we went around the table, and collectively, on average, they were between a seven and an eight on pain. So then I stopped them and I asked them, "Why hasn't anyone spoken up and shared this is not working?" And what I observed is that they weren't building on each other's ideas and points. Pia would suggest one thing, talk around it for five minutes, then Dan would say, "Yeah, okay," and then Dan would open up another rabbit hole, and then Joël would open up another rabbit hole. There was no building on each other's ideas. It was just like a wedding cake piling on idea after idea after idea without saying, "Hold it. Out of these 10 ideas, which do we feel is most relevant to our goal and our purpose?" And we had that lovely conversation. Does this happen all the time? Is this a frequent occurrence? How will you stop it? What needs to happen? And again, as a coach, I don't have a tight agenda. I do have a toolbox, but I don't necessarily come forward with, "Here's a suggestion." I let them grapple with it. Well, what have you done in the past that has worked with you? What can we build from your own brilliance, your own experiences? Make it yours, not mine, so that it has a reasonable chance of having some stickiness. So that's another example linked to the emotional. Why does no one want to talk about the emotion? I don't feel comfortable with this conversation. I don't feel comfortable with the decision. It's against our values. This is not representative of our team. Hardly anyone will speak up because they want to fit in and belong. So true. It's so true. It's that point where everyone's pretending that it's all okay, and it's clearly not. No one's prepared to make that first move. Until you come to a decision and you get stuck in your decision, oftentimes if you go behind the why is this, are we stuck in this decision, it's usually because of emotions, because there's something that you're irritated with. I've not been heard. My view has not been considered. I don't feel comfortable with this. Typically, leaders won't... or team members, I don't want to always put the pressure on the team lead, but anyone in the team can say, "Before we finalize this decision, how do we all feel about this? Is this in line with our values, our core values?"There isn't that kind of conversation. Or even afterwards, when we do a lessons learned, before we go into lessons learned, how do we feel about what has happened? It's that feeling conversation. I don't wanna go too much into the soft, but if you think about the waterline, oftentimes teams get stuck because of there's an issue there, and it's usually the interpersonal, intrapersonal issues. Joël, can we just jump on one area that I'd love your thoughts on, and that is decision-making in teams. Because there's a sort of ritual that we've all picked up somewhere that getting around a table, virtual or wooden, and then talking about it will lead to a decision. But I've rarely seen that actually being the case. How have you seen that... You've talked about how it's sometimes done badly. What's the non-irritating version of this, if you like? How have really good top teams made decisions together? What's the actual process and everything else around it? I think very good teams don't jump to immediately the answers or to a decision. They take the time to thoroughly understand what is the context, what is the situation, what is the problem, before going into, well, what's the question and what's the answer. So I use the model, the SPQA. S for situation, P for problem, Q for question, A for answer. Typically, you go from problem to answer- Right [chuckles] ... without thoroughly understanding what is the situation. Are we asking ourselves the right question? How could we reframe this? Powerful questions to really ensure are we all on the same page with this problem? And this is this reaction to immediately go to, "I have the answer because I'm bright. I've been there, seen it, done it before." It's this kind of knee-jerk reaction. You know, it's back to the, the dilemma between subject matter experts. The ambulance driver that comes at an accident, at the scene of an accident, they immediately see there's a big pool of blood. They immediately know this is a major artery, so they immediately know what to do. This is the problem with subject matter experts around the table. They immediately jump to, "I know what to do." Without hitting that pause button, what is it that we are missing? Can we have a conversation about what is the problem first? So that's what I see excellent teams doing. That's great. You painted a picture of these behaviors at the start. What is the downstream impact of that? When you've got a team at the top that's displaying those behaviors, what does it actually look like down in the organization? What happens with the executive teams that I work with, they typically try to replicate with their own teams. [laughs] Oh, great. So I've heard team members who are reporting into a president I've worked with come back to me and say, "Hey, Joël, so-and-so just did a check-in with us. He's obviously been working with you." Or, "So-and-so just did a balcony and dance." So I coached a president that was going to work with a team that was not working well together, and they were two fractions. 50% of the team was from headquarters, and 50% of the other team was outside of headquarters, so they were not getting together. And this president wanted to have a offsite with them, and he asked me, "What do I do, Joël? It's gonna become war. It's gonna be us versus them. How can I mitigate, how can I address this?" And I suggested to him, do the balcony and dance. Don't get involved. Try to be the neutral party. Share your observation. Let them start working with it. Anyway, what happened is that he did use that balcony and dance. One of those team members who was in that offsite came to me and said, "Joël, so-and-so did the balcony and dance." So oftentimes, what happens is that t- team members see the value. They get the aha, oh, yes, we're too much into the task. We are too much into the practical conversation. They try to replicate it with check-ins, with balcony and dance, with calling out, "Hey, team, this conversation has been all about practical content and task. How are we doing? How are we feeling? How was that decision?" And that's a knock-on effect because sometimes when you see that the senior executive teams are dysfunctional, it peters down to the next level, and you get these kind of silos. That's one of the things that I've also been working with, is trying to get two teams who have interdependencies, who are dependent of each other, to work together, right? And I do multiple things with them, like, for instance, this accusation audit. "Dan, Pia, what would you accuse my team of? And before you answer, let me guess what you would say." [laughs] "We are drawing up the bridge. We are delaying. We're sabotaging you. We're overwhelming you with information. Am I right? Is this the way you see my team?" This is what we call the accusation audit, or the, what is it you need from me, Dan and Pia? What is it you need from my team? That paves the way for teams to collaborate and work together as well. So those things trickle down as well. That's great. For sure. That's good to hear. That's really good. Joël, so you've seen a lot of senior teams. If you boil it all down, what is one thing a team could do, maybe a leader could encourage a team to do differently? If you boil it down to one baby step that a senior team could change today that might help improve their outcomes and the, that, that of their organizations, what would it be? I focus on the interactions. Go on the balcony. Share your observations. Call out the irritating behaviors because the irritating behaviors become a norm. We all have norms. All teams have norms. Unfortunately, sometimes they are irritating norms. So I would ask leaders to go to the balcony, call out the way that the teams are interacting, they're making decisions. It's a first step, rather than focusing solely on the content and this task. Manage the agenda would be the second one. I see the least important topics being talked about or positioned on the agenda first and ending up taking a lot of time. I ask leaders to ask themselves what's the most important conversations they need to have in this hour that they have. It's really getting focused, making sure you own that agenda, and not getting sabotaged and railroaded would be my second one. That's really interesting that these minor things come up first and take time. Without breaking any confidentialities, what sort of thing does that fall into? What sort of categories are those? Like administrative conversations, things that really can be taken offline, can be done in an email. Not the heavy strategic or P&L conversations or budget conversations. Are we gonna invest more on our patents, or are we going to invest more on our sales? I mean, that's a heavy topic. You're not gonna cover that, uh, at the end with 10 minutes to go. Yeah, no. [laughs] After you've figured out the admin of something, yeah. Exactly. And then you have sometimes people who just sabotage. They don't wanna get into that conversation, so they railroad by talking on something that's not even on the agenda.And our final question for you is a media recommendation, Joël. What are you thinking there in terms, it can be either a book or a series You mentioned a book earlier, so maybe we're going to get the big reveal Ah. Yes, the big reveal. What made me pivot from being a facilitator, where I owned the agenda, where I had came in with a watertight agenda, we're gonna do an assessment, we're gonna do an exercise, we're gonna talk about this. What made me pivot to a real coach, where I have a loose agenda, and I let the team go where they need to go, and let things emerge and discuss around those emergence. It's a book by Georgina Woudstra, W-O-U-D-S-T-R-A, Georgina Woudstra, and it's titled Mastering the Art of Team Coaching, and this is where I connected the dots. She refers to George Harrison's waterline model, and I connected the dots with the team charter and the three types of conversations by Charles Duhigg. And then I realized, mastering team coaching, the waterline, it's about difference between task and content, and the relations and the process, and then the way we have conversations more on the practical, less on the emotional and the social. And then it started all fitting in for me. It sort of still works together, yeah. [laughs] That's it, and actually, that framework, you've managed to knit those together for us today, actually. I think the listener will have a sense of h- of your mental model to some extent, how those work together, and it's very consistent. Thank you, Joël, for doing that and for sharing your huge experience of these crucial teams. I mean, if we think about the impact that these teams have on the planet we live on, it's immense, and so the work that you've done is hugely valuable, and it's been wonderful to have you on the show to share that with our listeners. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Pia. It's been an immense pleasure. Loved the questions. Thank you. It's been wonderful conversation. [upbeat music] Oh, there's a lot there. That's so juicy. These top teams are fascinating, I think partly because they're made up of people who've made their way as individuals through the hierarchy, and so you can end up with these super individualists in these teams. And also, as Joël said, even at a CEO level, a senior level, you get these people who still don't see leadership as a key role. I mean, some do, but that's fascinating, isn't it? So they see leadership as babysitting, but also it encourages baby behavior, is what I would say [laughs] if I was exaggerating slightly. Do you know what I mean? It is a strange thing. It sort of... When Joël was talking about that, I did sort of wonder, is part of leadership as a practice inside teams, has that died a bit? I think it might have done. If I think about what we observe in enterprise, we may have talked about this on the show before, but I think if I go back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth, in the '90s- [laughs] ... you know, when I was working in big pharma in the States, you- leadership was just one of these that you'd hear that word, it was with hushed tones, and it's what people wanted to be. Yeah. It was almost like in the military, that your leadership is your primary role, and then you've got this functional role, but people wanted to be a good leader. They wanted to be seen as a strong team leader, and now it seems like it's just, "No, I am this role, and how can I minimize my leadership?" Obviously, it's not across everyone, but something's happened. Something has definitely happened. It's a little bit like it's too much. It's a bit like it's the side dish instead of actually, "No, that's your main course." Completely. I think it might even be a tiny little pot of condiment that you don't even have to have if you don't want to, if you know what I mean. Kimchi. [laughs] Kimchi. I'm not having a bad word said about that. That is excellent. [laughs] Um, [laughs] but yes, something that's sort of very much optional. So I think that's the case, and you see this, where, so that when these bad behaviors are going on, uh, unhelpful or irritating behaviors going on inside teams, the person at the top and the people around the table are all senior leaders in theory, that they're not acting or they're not seeing it. And the balcony, I think, is just the best analogy, is are you getting above it to see, not pitching in on the conversation. Are you observing the patterns? And I think that, as Joël ended the conversation on that, and it's just a crucial thing. It's almost that f- first step of the leader. Are you on the balcony, or you're in, are you mucking in? And there's a lot of mucking in going on, I think. Yeah, and it's not the other one, which is grandstanding. Oh, nice. [laughs] Yeah. That's on the balcony. I'm g- I'm going on the balcony in order to make a speech. [laughs] Yeah, and then the grandstanding's like, you know, I'll criticize or I'll separate, but I'm not taking responsibility. Yeah. You can get those insights from a more objective viewpoint, but you're always responsible. Yes. That is not babysitting. Now, the level of which you are supporting your team and how much you have to hand hold, yes, that's, you know, that, and different seniorities hold different expectation. But that's on abdication of responsibility, which is what I'm starting to sense that- We're seeing it, yeah ... yeah, and it's okay. And even, to be honest, we will hear this in Squadify. People will say, "Oh, how long will this take to do?" Which is a reasonable question, but when you say, "Takes about five minutes to answer the questions, and then it'll take a bit of work up front, but we s- end up with, you know, an hour, an hour and a half, a quarter with these formal sessions to actually accelerate," you see sort of slight sucking of teeth going. I think, boy, oh, boy, that is tiny, and also, by the way, what things are you doing in your team that are a total waste of time? You know, there's that sort of, ooh, wow, that's quite a long time. It sort of says 90 minutes, a, a quarter to spend on leadership is sort of too much. I think it backs what you're saying. I am still fascinated by the way in which top teams work, though, these conversations around the table. You know, Andy Chevis, who's been on the show, friend of the show, and, you know, he talks about those plastic bag conversations, where you've got a carrier bag wafting around in an alley. I think generally they are very much like that, and can take other forms, like Joël said. You know, just people making their point but not building, and so on. So even the conversations are pretty poor, I think. There's not a good way of doing it even, actually, even though that's what we think we do around a boardroom table. That's our vision, but it's really ineffective. And it's not a conscious conversation, and it's a point of view, and it's functionally led, so there's a whole piece of strategic leadership and enterprise leadership that gets missing, and there's a real art and science to that. So yeah, no, I think Joël's conversation will be really interesting, because he's given us some food for thought to really be thinking about to raise that level of consciousness, to take the conversation below the waterline and bring a depth to it, and understanding. Absolutely, and CEOs listening, that's your job, because it's not babysitting to lead those groups. [laughs] And all of that time, while people aren't, someone's not on the balcony observing and giving feedback and making sure the process works, you're really wasting time with very unhelpful or irritating patterns, as Joël said. Yeah, really action-packed episode, that one, but that is it for this episode. We Don't Meet is supported by Squadify. Squadify helps any team to build engagement and to drive performance. You can find show notes where you're listening and also at squadify.net, and if you've enjoyed the show, please share the love and recommend it to your friends. We Don't Meet is produced by Rob Lawrence. Thank you so much for listening. It's goodbye from me. And it's goodbye from me.