Episode 288: Teamwork for Modern Leaders with Erik Kruger

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Welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On today's episode is Eric Krueger. He's a global speaker, bestselling author, and accomplished expert in leadership and team development. I took so many pages of notes in this episode, and I believe if you are leading a team, want to be a leader one day, want to continue to grow in your leadership, this episode is for you. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Eric Krueger. Eric Krueger, welcome to the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Bradley, thank you for having me, man.

Excited to have you. Well, I've enjoyed getting to know you over the last, uh, few minutes as we chatted before we really got rolling. But we always start with background and origin story. People, you know, may not know you, your journey, and I think it's just fascinating hearing people's kind of how they got to where they are. So why don't you take people back and share a little bit about your journey?

Yeah, thank you. So I'll take you back to 2007 because that's when I graduated with my first degree, which was physical therapy. So I graduated from med school, come out as a newly trained physical therapist, very excited about getting into hospitals and doing rehab and everything that we've been taught in, in SA, South Africa, where I stay. You always have to do a community service year first. So giving back to the community. Typically working in a sort of public hospital setting. So I do that in 2008, 2009. I start working in private healthcare, and I spend most of my time actually working in intensive care units. So, uh, working across different hospitals, but mainly in intensive care units in those hospitals. And it was a, a very interesting time for me because I got to see people go through immense trauma. And like, there was this one lady that I remember very well. She, uh, she came— I still get a bit emotional when I talk about it— but she came into the hospital. Um, if you, if you've been to ICU, you'll know that, uh, you know, you have the cubicle and then on the outside you have the chart. And I remember arriving at her chart on the day and it said multiple GSW. And the chart never tells the full story, but multiple GSW stands for multiple gunshot wounds.

Mm.

And so what happened to her is that she arrived at home the previous day, a day just like any other day. And as she was pulling into a garage, 3 guys slipped in underneath the garage door as it was closing. They were trying to hijack her, take her car from her, and they didn't get the car, but they did manage to shoot her 4 times, uh, 3 times into the chest and abdomen. And one bullet went through her jaw. And so by the time I got to her, she was extremely unstable. In fact, that first day we couldn't even touch her. We couldn't treat her at all. Her BP was up and down. Her cardiac rhythm was completely arrhythmic. And I remember, you know, we weren't sure if she was going to pull through and they actually had to sew her jaw shut. You know, like when they when you fix a broken arm or a broken leg, you have to fixate it, immobilize it. And we had to do the same thing with her. Like, her jaw was sewn shut for that period, not to move it. So it was incredibly intense. And fast forward a couple of weeks, 12 weeks later, she walked out of that hospital.

Hmm.

And she had been given the second lease on life. She was talking, she was smiling, she was leaving there with her friends and her family. And in that moment, I, I realized the immense power of teamwork, because what got her to that point wasn't just the doctors or just the nurses or just the physios. It was a group of highly skilled individuals that all came together with a single purpose, which was to help this lady get through this traumatic event. In her life. And so we had the surgeons who saved her life initially. You know, they, they stopped the bleeding. They did all the fixing that needed to happen. You had the nurses who were looking after her 24/7, checking her vitals, giving her medication. Physios were helping with rehab. Occupational therapists were doing activities of daily living. Dietitians were making sure that she was well-fed and nourished. List goes on and on and on. And what was striking for me is that even though teamwork was such an important factor of getting her through this ordeal, we never received any training, training on teamwork while we were in med school, which was a very weird thing, you know, like everything hinges on us being able to work together to get patients from point A to point B, but they never teach us how to do it. So that was one of my first experiences thinking about, you know, the power of teamwork, the power of collaboration, and how it helps us to move from point A to point B. Fast forward a little bit and I realized physio isn't really my thing. Like, I enjoy being able to serve others, to be of help, but I don't want to be a physio, man. Like, I don't, I don't want to be doing this all day long. So I get introduced to the world of online business and coaching. I start up a website called Better Man, which was really my sort of like 20th or 30th attempt at getting some sort of business online up and running. And Better Man was really just, how do I share my own journey of self-development every day with men who care about the same thing? How do we go to bed at night a better man than when I woke up that morning?

Hmm.

And it was quite strange, you know, like with all the effort I put into my previous businesses, I couldn't really get it off the ground. But with this, there was just something different to it. It was just so natural. I think it was just because this was my journey and I was just sharing it over the course of about 2 years. This thing just ignited and we had about 18,000 men as part of the community. It was— I was sending out a daily email as well. We had events, we had— well, guys were asking for coaching. And so as, as the community grew and as these events and requests came in, I was just pushed in different directions. And so one of the things the guy said to me is, can you do coaching? And I was like, well, I can't really. I know nothing about the coaching space, but I'm happy to try. And so I got all the books I could find about coaching, started coaching a little bit, uh, fell in and out of love with it over time. And then eventually found my groove, decided to go do my master's in business and executive coaching. That pushed me a bit more into the business space, uh, coming into the business space and into corporates. I thought, well, you know, I know how important teamwork is from when I was in, in the healthcare setting. And I was like, surely in corporate, like, we have this figured out. Like, being good at teams is sort of the sports of business. Like, this is an important part of how we do it. And I was quite shocked to realize that coming into, into business, teams don't have it figured out. Leaders don't have it figured out, but the stakes are so high, you know, like whether it's in healthcare or in business, there are lives and livelihoods at stake. So we need to get this teamwork thing right. And since coming into the space, that's been my obsession is how do we help leaders and teams to perform and be their best.

No, it's awesome.

So that was a very long-winded intro. Sorry, man.

No, don't be sorry at all. I love the details of the details of the, of the story that you gave that to get introduced to teamwork. One of the things that was resonating with me, and I'm curious, are your thoughts around this as you were sharing that story about the gunshot wounds is that while even if it was unspoken, and probably in this case it was unspoken because it was fairly, um, obvious that the, for lack of a better term, goal was to, for her to be able to survive and then to be able to walk out of that hospitable-xylophone, right? It was kind of an assumed goal. But even if it was assumed, everybody was on the same page as to what we are trying to do for this person. Can you speak to whenever we take that idea over into business, the importance of in order to have teamwork, we all have to be working in unison to a specific end goal. But oftentimes that path or that point B, as you said, which I actually like that because I use point A, point B quite often to myself. So I like that visual. It's like, it's unclear. It's unclear as to, well, where, where are we going? So we're going to try to all work together towards one end. Thoughts on that? What has your experience been?

Well, yeah, I'll just, uh, I'll echo that, and all I will add to it is we have a lack of clarity regarding where we are going. Uh, we, we know that exists for multiple reasons. It might be that leadership is unclear about where to go. And oftentimes we have to— I want to say be respectful, but it's not really the right language here. We have to understand that they are also trying to chart a way forward in an environment that is extremely chaotic and extremely uncertain. So it can be difficult to articulate and to know exactly where it is we want to go from a leadership point of view. And of course, if we don't know, then we can't communicate it down. So that's one of the challenges. The second challenge then is that communication component. How are we articulating where we are going? How are we articulating what the change from point A to point B might be? But to further add to that, where I think a lot of confusion happens for teams is that we also have a lack of clarity around what it means to be a high-performing, cohesive team.

Hmm.

And that makes it very difficult as well. You know, when every team as it exists has a team operating system, and this is a system that guides how we make decisions, it guides behaviors for the team, but ultimately it's invisible. You know, it's something that just kind of starts existing over time. We develop it over time. But unfortunately, what this means is we're not very intentional in how we develop it. We just accumulate habits, behaviors, routines, mental models, and these things then shape how we act as a team. But because it's invisible, we never get the opportunity to really reflect on it and to ask, Is this going to get us to where we want to go? And the way I kind of think about it is whenever we form a team, because we don't have this moment where we sit down and ask ourselves, what does it mean to be a high-performing team, a good, high-performing, cohesive team? What happens is, let's say we have 5 different people in this team. Each of those people in the team have their own blueprint, their own mental model of what a high-performing team should be. And they've developed that over time through experiences in other teams, sports teams, business teams, good teams, dysfunctional teams. But now we bring them all together. Everyone has their own blueprint and we never take the time to say, well, what is our collective blueprint? What will we be building this team off of? Like, instead of just going, well, we kind of hope that over time this team gets to some level of cohesion and some level of high performance and miraculously living to its full potential. That, that to me is one of the things that blows my mind the most is that we don't have those conversations and create that clarity for the team.

Yeah. One of the things that, that's landing with me is there's a couple of words, intentionality and design versus default. I actually like the fact that you mentioned, you said there's the accumulation of things that happen over time. So it's a conversation that happens and you say, hey, let's do it this way this time. And so then there's like, okay, we change how we do things and how the team interacts. And then we do this. And before you know it, it ends up becoming almost a hodgepodge Frankenstein accumulation of things that wasn't really designed intentionally to be doing that way. And it just kind of happened over time. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, there's a, there's a phrase I love to use, accretion. And it— I can't remember who, who said the quote, but they said that all men who are successful in the end will be successful as a result of accretion. And accretion is just the, uh, the gradual accumulation of additional layers. And so when we think about that in our lives, we are always accumulating behaviors, decisions, habits. And the one thing to know about accretion is that accretion has no bias. So it doesn't care. You need to think about accretion as this process that is always running in the background. Yeah. And it's all— its only job is to collect what you feed into it and then to give that back to you.

Uh-huh.

And so it doesn't care whether you are feeding into it toxic behaviors and toxic habits and poor communication in a team. Or whether you are feeding into it good behaviors and good habits and good communication, etc., etc., it doesn't care what you feed into it. It'll just accumulate that and give it back to you. And that's why it's so important to be highly intentional about what we are trying to accumulate, knowing that that's going to be ultimately the destiny or the fate of the team, but also in our personal lives.

Let me ask you a question. What What is your definition of a high-performance team? I don't think I've— one of the, um, things personally for me, but, uh, that I've really worked probably over the last year more than any time is to come to terms, come to terms with what things mean. In other words, if you say blueprint, that means this. If you say roadmap, that means this. If you say plan, that means this. If you say playbook, that refers to this. If you say system, I mean this. Versus this intertwined, uh, we can just— we'll be loosey-goosey with our language and, you know, everybody kind of knows directionally what we're talking about. Versus no, no, no, this means this, this means this. So I've actually never thought about what is the actual definition of a high performance team. And so obviously for you, I'd love to hear you, like, how do you define what a high performance team is?

Yeah, I love that granularity around, you know, what, what does it mean? And I think language is very important in this way. To me, a high performance team, very simply, is that it's a mission, a team that accomplishes the mission of the team. Is that we get together as a team, we set a certain goal that we want to achieve, and hopefully it's not some mediocre goal but actually a bit of a stretch goal. And as a team, we are able to achieve that. I think in the most simplest terms, that is a high-performance team. Where that definition falls apart, for me at least a little bit, um, which is, is a bit challenging, is that If we compare two different business teams and the one business team is, uh, they're achieving their goal, but let's say their goal is to create revenue of $1 million per year for a business versus a team that is responsible for $10, $15, or $50 million per year. Um, obviously one team is— it seems that they're functioning at a higher level than the other team and yet they're both achieving their targets. So according to this definition, we would call both of those teams a high-performing team. But, but something seems to be— there seems to be a bit of a mismatch, right? It's like if we have a Kia that can do 120 kilometers per hour, but you also have a Ferrari and it's doing 120 kilometers per hour. But you know that the Ferrari can— like, there's obviously a difference in the makeup and the build of this high-performance car. To a Kia that might also be able to achieve the same goal, like in, you know, what it's able to do from a speed point of view, but it's obviously not built the same way. Yeah. So there's still something I'm grappling with in terms of that definition myself. When I'm working with a team, what I'm always looking for is, are we as a team really pushing ourselves hard enough to be the best that we can be in this team? And I find often that we don't do that simply because we don't have the right frameworks and mental models for how to be a good team. We just try and wing it and it doesn't work. You know, teamwork, performance, these things are very complex. There are many things that go into it. And unfortunately, we are so busy with the day-to-day activities of the team, the tasks of the team, that we don't spend enough time reflecting on the team itself. And so as a result, we kind of limp along with a dysfunctional team instead of sorting out those interpersonal issues or communication issues or alignment issues that could just get us to a higher level of performance, a more effective level of performance.

I mean, uh, You know, I think we're all past COVID, but the reality is COVID did accelerate a lot of things, right? And changed the world in a lot of different ways, especially as you and I were talking before we hit record about the globalization and being common. You're in South Africa, I'm in Huntsville, Alabama. And now it's, you know, I mean, I know we had Zoom before and obviously, but it's just changed a lot and accelerated, pulled things forward a lot more. But there's also just a tremendous amount of turbulence. I, I know you use that word often, and I think that's actually a great word. There's just turbulent waters, turbulent skies, you know. There's just a lot of, seems seemingly friction that's there. And I think that in the best of times, leading a team is hard, like really freaking hard. And then you add in turbulence with it and it gets at times to be really, really difficult. Um, I, I like to say business is hard and it gets harder. Like the further you want to go, the faster you want to go, it's, it's going to get, it's going to get, you're going to have a lot more challenges. Um, and that's actually healthy versus thinking it's going to be easy. And then when you hit turbulence, then you're like, oh my gosh, you know, whatever. So what are some of the things that you believe in around navigating through some of that turbulence and being able to still have a high-performance team in spite of that?

You know, previously, I think where I would have gone with this question would be probably around resilience and antifragility. And even though I think those are important topics to talk about when it comes to navigating turbulent times, I think where I am today is that we have to talk about team environment first, whether we're talking change or turbulence or performance. I think for all of that, we have to start at team environment and team environment is simply how does it feel to be a part of this team? Does the, the, the feeling that I get in this team, the support I get in this team, Does it lead to nurture, to growth? Does it feel like a place where I get to be supported, or does it feel like there's always friction? Does it feel like things aren't quite clicking in the way that I would like it to click? And the reason why I, I want to default to that is because team environment to me has two components. One is recognizing the criticality of teamwork. So just understanding that for us to accomplish our mission, we need to work together as a team. But secondly, and it's a topic that we've been hearing a lot about recently, is psychological safety. Is that I feel that when I'm a part of this team, I can be myself, I can ask questions, I can raise concerns, I can admit mistakes, and I'm not going to be ostracized from the group. And I think why that's so important is because what psychological safety creates then is a feeling of belonging above everything else. And during turbulent times, one of the things that we crave the most is to know that we have a support structure and that I'm not going to be ostracized from the group the moment I say something wrong or do something wrong. We already— turbulence is already scary as it is. Turbulence and having to navigate it on your own, I think, is even more scary. And so knowing that you're part of a team and you get to navigate this with the team brings a certain level of maybe certainty and assurance. And that's why I think starting with team environment is going to be one of the most important things to do if, as a leader, you want to help your team navigate turbulence.

So, man, okay, I gotta ask some questions around number 2 because I get this. I've experienced this myself. And then I was thinking as you were discussing so many examples where people have expressed, you know what, this is the leader typically is expressing this. They are afraid of having the tough conversations. Because they don't want to. And I know that that's not exactly the only part that you're sharing there. I think it also goes the other way, is that we haven't, as a leader, created the environment where the team members feel safe to call us out on our own bullcrap and say, actually, I think that's a really bad idea. And typically in small businesses, you're talking somewhere between 2 and 10, 15, 20 or so. Most of our listeners are going to be in that 2 to 20, you know, staff, employees, team members. And so then, like, there's just not a lot of times that you have to really work at it, don't you agree, to create a psychological safety is that somebody can say, hey, I don't think that's a good idea and here's why, versus like, well, that's what we're going to do because that's what boss man or boss woman says, that's what we're going to do. So everybody just goes along with it even if they're thinking this is a terrible idea. Does that make sense? Like, is that— that, that's kind of where I went with that.

Yeah, for sure. Uh, depending on the stat you read, 76% of employees don't feel psychologically safe in the teams they are in. 1 in 4 leaders don't create psychological safety in their teams. And so it's something that is difficult to create. It's not— we shouldn't pretend like it's, um, once we know that this term exists, that it's easy to create that environment. It takes a lot of effort And what makes it difficult is that there's a catch-22 built into it, which is that psychological safety is an emergent property that comes over time. And so what we need is to see certain behaviors in a team that when we see these behaviors and live into these behaviors, they create the property over time of psychological safety, the same way that trust is built over time. Creates psychological safety. But the catch-22 is that sometimes to get these behaviors, we need psychological safety to be in place to start with. So having a difficult conversation, calling someone out on a behavior that, you know, isn't congruent with the team environment, to do that, I kind of need to have a certain level of psychological safety that if I raise this, I'm not going to be named and blamed and shamed or kicked out of the group. But then kind of to get to psychological safety, I need to take that first step as well and just do it and then see what the response is going to be. So there's definitely a catch-22 that emerges. But what's important is to realize that that's where the work needs to happen, is at the level of team environment. You know, if you go to Project Aristotle, which was Google's big study on this, they— I think it was 2012— they looked at what creates effectiveness in a team. They found 5 different factors that were important. They said meaning is important. So meaning is work that I do is personally meaningful to me. They said impact is important. So the impact on the community and the people around me. Number 3 was that structure is important and structure is processes and roles and all those kind of things. And if you think about it, where do we typically want to intervene? You know, when, when we want to have difficult conversations, where do we want to intervene? We want to intervene at the level of conversation. So we want to create structure around how to do that. And so you might go and say, well, let's look at Radical Candor as a framework. And like, we're gonna, from now on, we're going to be a team that gives Radical Candor or lives into Radical Candor. That's what we're going to do. We're going to give each other honest and straight feedback, it doesn't work because the environment will crush that behavior. Yeah, without an environment that supports the behavior, it's never going to work. So that's what we wanted to be at the level of structure. Uh, secondly was dependability. Dependability was more related to trust. So I trust you to do the work that you're supposed to do. And then the, the most important thing that emerged was psychological safety, uh, in this Google study. But what I like about it when you look at the, the order in which they, they flow from, let's say, least important. I mean, all of these are important, but from least important to most important is you realize we intervene at the wrong levels. We want to fix structure, but we don't fix structure by fixing structure. We fix structure by first fixing environment and then filtering down into structure. When, when I was working with teams in the past, I made the same mistake. I would, I would default to frameworks and models because they give us a certain sense of clarity and a certain sense of structure of how to do things. You know, it's just, okay, I follow these steps and then I know how to do it and I have to give someone feedback.

Sure.

But that's not going to work if the team environment doesn't support it. And so these days in my head, I have a very simple model that we use which I believe is sort of the 80/20 of, of team development, which is we focus on the team environment first, then we focus on coordination, which is alignment, and then we focus on communication. And if you have those three things in play and you, you do those well, a lot of the other things regarding teamwork and team performance will just start falling into place.

Yeah, I love that. You know, I've heard, uh, the quote— it's not original to me— but environment dictates performance. Environment dictates performance. You know, I've said that on the podcast before. So in, in, in the South where I'm, uh, in the States, college football is huge. And so, you know, there's— it's all about the, the culture at Alabama or at Georgia right now, uh, etc. If you go to Navy SEALs, there's a, there's a culture that you're going to be shaped by the culture. You're not going to go in and shape the culture. It's just not going to happen.

Yeah.

Is going to shape you one way or the other, right? You know, I was thinking around, so I'm gonna share this, but this is from one of my mentors sharing this with me and I never forgot it from a few years ago. We just onboarded a brand new team member. She's a CSM, Client Success Manager. And so this is just within the last 2 weeks. Her name's Elizabeth. Doing a great job. Well, in her very first onboarding call, which was a one-to-one call that she and I did, I shared with her, um, and it was part of my kind of onboarding process, I, I talked about her objectivity. And I said, you will never be more objective than you are right now. As a matter of fact, even after this call, I will have already started to shape some of your thoughts. That said, I want you to absolutely challenge anything you see. Why do we do it that way? Why is it— why wouldn't we do it this way? What about this? What about that? Because 3 months from now, 6 months from now, our culture and our environment will shape you, and that's a good thing. But you're going to be very objective. You're never more objective about the way you see things than now, and we want that, that fresh, you you know, perspective on certain things. And so I said, you have permission to challenge anybody, including myself, on certain things. And now, of course, we very much know there's a way to do that in a respectful way, right? There's decorum and professionalism of calling something out, etc. But I wanted to try to put that in play as much as possible for her to say, you know, be willing to ask why. Why is it that way? Because 6 months from now, she's just gonna know, well, that's just how we do it, right? Thoughts on that?

Yeah, I love that you would tell or say that to her up front. The— not the challenge, maybe in your case, but in general, it would be— it's good to say that, but what does the environment actually do? Like, once we've left the call and I've been told I've been told to question what happens when I actually step into that team environment. Does it still support what you've just told me? And, you know, when you think of Timothy Clark's definition of psychological safety, he says that psychological— and I love his because it's, it's very actionable to me. He says psychological safety is an environment of rewarded vulnerability. And so what happens is that when we enter into a new environment, team environment, organizational environment, our threat detection radar goes up. And what we are looking for is to see how are people being treated when they are vulnerable. So, and vulnerable here being you admit a mistake, you raise a concern, you ask a question, you share an idea. So what happens? Well, if someone is punished for being vulnerable, then we are going to self-censor. So irrespective of what I was told to be open, be honest, and all those good things, I've seen what happens to the environment. I'm going to self-censor. I'm going to keep all my best ideas to myself. I'm not going to raise any questions. I'm not going to rock the boat. I'm just going to try and fly under the radar for fear of being punished. If I see that that vulnerability is rewarded, and rewarded here means that there's an openness, there's no judgment when I'm being spoken to, then I'm more likely to open up as well. And so I think what you were saying is spot on, but it's often the challenge for leaders is that we say one thing, we say, you know, what is the typical advice that you might hear in relation to psychological safety? It'll be something like, well, encourage open and honest communication. That doesn't help if the environment doesn't support it. And so you have to just make sure that there's congruence between what is being said and what the environment actually looks like.

Okay, so that's good. So let me, let me ask it this way because I'm actually, I have a genuine curiosity around this. If, if somebody then says, okay, that sounds good, and then they go to share an idea and it gets squashed, I get that, that like, well, that didn't cope, that did, that was not didn't coincide with what you said. Okay, I get that. I think for me, I'm thinking around more so, is the actual— is the opportunity made available to do that, right? That's the thing I'm thinking about versus like, oh, immediately we're going to squash an idea. And then that person goes, oh, I'm going to self-censor, which I think is great. That actually really landed with me too, just hearing that. So I'm going to self-censor. I'm not going to say anything because last time I did, they made me feel, you know, shame and guilt for even speaking up. And okay, get that. I'm almost wondering, though, if more often we just don't even make the playing field open for that person to share.

I think it's both in that how do we create a psychologically safe space? Well, as leaders, we have to go first. We have to be vulnerable first, and we have to invite people to to ask these questions, to raise the concerns, whatever it may be. But I think the, the more important thing is everything comes down to— so you've issued the invitation. Everything that follows that is our response to how people are showing up. And so you have to think of your response across two timelines. If someone comes to you and they raise a new idea, in that moment, how you treat that person is going to dictate how you leave that room. So will you leave that room feeling energized, optimistic, like we've just had a conversation, or did it just get squashed and you feeling down and like you feel like, what's the point? But what's more important isn't just what happens in that moment. It is that that interaction leaves the door open for a next conversation. Yeah, that's the big one to think about. And if you've just shut someone down, they're not going to come to you the next time. And that's the problem. Now you've created real issues around psychological safety. And of course, you know, I think of this a lot in terms of personal relationships as well, because I think the same happens there. You know, when I'm having conversations with my wife and she's confiding in me, or there was a frustration or irritation that, that she's bringing to me, or a mistake that that she might have made, I'm always thinking, is the way that I'm interacting with her and treating her right now in this moment gonna ensure that she comes to me in the future? Because that's what I really want. I want to make sure that she's always willing to come to me. Yeah. And that I'm never shutting down that opportunity. And so we have to think about it in the same way for our teams as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love that you mentioned conversation because— and that brings up a topic I wanted to ask you about. You discuss 7 conversations that you believe teams must have. What are those?

Well, I, I do not have them in front of me. I have them written down. I do not have them memorized, but it's essentially that when I was thinking about the facilitations that I often do with teams and I thought about the conversations that have had the most impact, these were the conversations that I found were most important to bring up that really move the needle in those moments. When I, when I work with teams and we go through different facilitations, you know, ultimately at the end of the day, what is a facilitation? It's us having a guided conversation. And as we sort of alluded to earlier, what often happens or one of the biggest challenges for teams is that communication just breaks down. And so I created this little sort of outline of 6 conversations that I think teams should have. And you can actually use this as a bit of a team build that happens over 6 weeks. So like allocate time, hour, week, and have this conversation with your team over the span of 6 weeks. So the first conversation is the vision conversation. And what we said earlier is, are we clear on where we are going? But addition, in addition to that is, Are we clear on who we are as a team and who we are becoming as a team? Because if we want to transform over time, that transformation requires planning. And unfortunately, what I've seen is most teams just have no idea of how to create a team development plan that'll take them from where they are to where they want to be. The second conversation is the brutal fact conversation, which is where we call each other out for subpar performance or things that aren't congruent with team behavior or the team environment that we're trying to create. The third is the growth conversation. So where are our areas for growth? Where can we empower people to grow as a team? What does that look like? Because it's often, you know, when we give feedback, it's often in individual pockets and we have these one-on-ones and and that's where, where feedback happens. But we don't think about it as a team. Where— how do we as a team grow together? One thing the listener should really think about is that when I ask people, you know, what do you do for team improvement, they'll often say to me like, oh, we have a Monday morning session, uh, where we, you know, get our people to reflect on X, Y, or Z, whatever it may be. And I'm like, cool, like, I'm, I'm glad to hear that you're doing something, but really what you're doing is individual development at scale. You're not doing team development. Those are two different activities. And so the growth conversation is, how do we grow together as a team? The fourth is the undiscussables conversation. This is something that I learned from two researchers, Bo Su and Secondly, the second one for like, uh, I can't remember it right now, but they spoke about undiscussables that emerge in a team, and there are 4. The one is things that we think but don't say. So I mean, it's quite clear where those, those emerge from. Uh, the second are things that we say but don't mean. Then we have the things that we feel but can't express. And then we have the things that we do but don't realize. And especially in teams where psychological safety is low, you'll have these undiscussables coming out pretty strongly. The fifth conversation is the What I Need From You conversation. This is one of my favorite facilitations to run with teams, because what we do in this facilitation is everyone gets an opportunity to tell every person in the team what they need from them in order to be their best. And it's always such a— it's such a vulnerable conversation to have, but it's also— it highlights that we are in this together, that I need you, that I need something from you so I can be at my best. And sometimes it might be superficial. Sometimes it might be, you know, I need you just to like get your reports in on time. And other times it might be, I need you to believe in me a bit more, you know. So I've seen some great things emerge from these conversations. Um, another one that could be potentially latched onto this is appreciation and recognition, because what we also know from high performance teams is that Typically, there's a 5-to-1 ratio of positive to negative comments. And in most teams, those, that ratio is kind of off, not because we have more negative comments, but because we don't take the time to appreciate and recognize people for what they, what they are doing. And what I've, a typical pattern I've seen in high performance teams is because we are high performers, we think people don't need the recognition because high performance is just what we do. but they need recognition. And so you could all— you can almost tack that on to this conversation as well. And then the last one would be the psychological safety conversation, and we've discussed that at length now, but it'll be a conversation around where are we as a team, um, what are the levels that we might be at, because there are 3 levels. Level 1 is belonging, Level 2 is diversity of thought, and Level 3 is innovation. So at which level are we currently sitting and what do we do as a team to create more psychological safety as we move forward?

Man, those are great. So I have a question. Where would I integrate? So if I'm a leader, I can't have— okay, so those are amazing. Like, absolutely amazing things. Like, especially even the 4, think that don't say, say don't mean. Feel, can't express, do, don't realize. I was like, oh my gosh, those are great. What do I need from you? So what's the cadence? That's the word I was looking for. What's the cadence? Is that something that we would do on a, like, in our quarterly as a team, right? Because like, I mean, push back on me if you agree, if you disagree with this, but like, that, that would be heavy conversations in every week's one-to-one. That'd be like, oh man, we can't, we can't go here every time. Those are deep conversations. It seems like quarterly feels about right to me. What are your thoughts?

I feel like the first run-through would probably— you'd probably benefit more from compressing the time on that a little bit, purely because most teams never have these conversations. That's fair. And yeah, and all of these are really important conversations, and I think the longer we postpone them, the longer we postpone the benefit we could get from, from having these conversations. So I've been running team sprints now for a while. So with a team sprint, we, we do it virtually. We have an initial sort of kickoff workshop and then we sprint for 5 weeks where we focus on specific behavior. So, you know, I mentioned team environment, Coordination and communication. So that creates a little framework in my mind. So during the initial, like, workshop, we'll talk about what is the team environment that we are trying to create, what are the behaviors we want to align around. Then for the next 4-5 weeks, we just revisit this every time and we debrief every time. And every comp— every debrief is a conversation related to one of these things. It is how are we growing, it is the psychological safety conversation, and it doesn't have to be earth-shattering every single time. But what happens is because we bring it into people's awareness, it starts changing them a little bit. And, you know, that's one of the great things about— and why I appreciate, you know, your— you being pedantic around language is that when we introduce language, it changes how we, how we think about things because we take something that we didn't quite have the words for, we put some, and like a name to it, and now we're like, okay, I know what to do with it now. There's a, a great psychiatrist that, that said with all of his patients, the way he helps them to deal with trauma and to be more in control of their emotions is he has this phrase, name it to tame it. And, and that's what I think about when we're going through these conversations. It's like We are just naming things, and because we've named it, it becomes part of our awareness. And because it's part of our awareness, we can pick it up. I just finished a sprint with the team now, and the leader said to me, the biggest change is that people are calling out behaviors that aren't conducive to the team environment we're trying to create. And we covered all of these conversations, but that, that's been the biggest takeaway for him. So I think compressing the timeline of these would probably be a good idea. Doesn't have to go deep on every single one. Something will hit at the right time for the right person, and that's actually what you need.

I love that, Eric. This is great. I've learned, picked up several things myself that I'm gonna use, and I just wanna make one comment is that at the very end, you, you talked about language. Words are very powerful. And I was, had been my whole career very loose with language. Loosey-goosey, you know what I'm referring to, you know, you get it kind of thing. And it was like, ah, sort of, versus no, let's name that. That is what this means. And, you know, this is what we mean by psychological safety as an example, or this, this word means something. And so I'd encourage our listeners that Um, uh, be intentional. I'll even give you, like, let's go, like, super practical for a second, and then I'll let people know how you can share with someone. I looked over a job description with a client. They sent it over, and I— we were having this discussion. They actually were working with one of our sponsors. They just signed up with Autopilot Recruiting, and I said, fantastic, did you send Autopilot the job description template? That you have for this job? He's like, no, but I'll get it together. And I said, let me see it. Let me see it. I'm a show me, don't tell me kind of person. So he sends it to me. We look at it and it says salary range $30,000 to $60,000. And I said, is the salary range literally $30,000 to $60,000? He said, oh no, no, no, the salary is like $30,000 to $35,000. So I said, So what's the $60,000? He said, well, that's, that's what they potentially could make. And I said, well, then you need to put the salary range as $30,000 to $35,000, and you need to put total compensation is going to be $50,000 to $60,000 or whatever his number was, because that matters to someone because they're going to be thinking that you're going to give them a $60,000 base salary because we're loosey-goosey with the language. Oh, it's what's good enough. It's not good enough. Right. And so that's something that, you know, even down to like a job description, don't be loosey-goosey with the language. Think words really matter. And obviously, Eric, you're really great with your words. I've learned a lot from you today. People want to connect with you, work with you. How can they do that?

Easiest is just to Google my name, Eric Kruger, and you'll find websites, you'll find social media handles, all of that.

Awesome.

Well, you've been great today. We'll make sure we put the link.

Thank you for having me.

Well, I mentioned in the intro that I picked up several things and took several pages of notes. There was a couple I wanted to write jot down my key takeaways. Psychological safety— that has come up before on with different guests that we've had. And admittedly, I didn't really— I knew what it meant, but I didn't feel like I had really as good of an understanding as I got from Eric. And what that means is not just sharing it, okay, and telling someone to create the environment, but I appreciated him pushing back on me and sharing, hey, that's true, but is the environment there on an ongoing basis after that initial conversation? And that has really made me think. And that leads me into number 2, which is environment dictates performance. Now, that is a quote that I had picked up, uh, years back, but everything he talked about is what is the environment actually like. And I like to say environment dictates performance. I love that. Number 3 is having a team development plan. So we have a plan, or what I would call a blueprint, for where the business is going. 3 years, 1 year, 90 days— here's our blueprint. Okay, great. What is my plan to develop my team? Do I have a team development plan in place? And then I would just add, I guess, 3.5 number, kind of have a one, is we just, it came up a couple of different times, but words matter. Words matter. And I encourage you to work to really define what words you use and what those words mean. So if you use the word system, You've defined this is the difference between a system and a process as an example, or this is what a process is. This is what a checklist is. This is what a system is. This is what a playbook is. Those as just hypothetical examples. If you want to learn more about Eric, go to erickruger.com, erickruger.com. You know, honestly, this is a great podcast guest to have because really our Sponsors are all about how do you get the most out of your business and how do you get the most out of your team. And our newest podcast sponsor, Today@Pro, they're going to be able to help you to give for your team the word tracks, the things that you want them to say, right? Not loose with our language, things you want them to say right there where they actually are working through and managing their bonus and compensation structures, if you want a system that is going to be compliant for you and your team, is going to work with your corporate CRM, today@pro is the absolute best solution on the market. The investment that they made— make in the technology on an ongoing basis, the seamless interchange, the simplicity, yet the robustness of the system is second to none. Go to todayapppro.com. That is todayapppro.com. And with a lot of Today App Pro, they— it comes preloaded with a lot of different similar word tracks that you already may be familiar with. But if you work with Coach P, you're going to get some plays, you're going to get some of the behind the scenes of what they actually do. And you may want to go in there and customize some of those word tracks that you picked up from David In Today@Pro, you can do that with them. And obviously you want to get what is the best of the best, somebody at the highest level getting it done. What are they actually doing? Well, go to coachpconsulting.com. David, just for our podcast listeners, is going to let you sign up for free, get your first month completely free. It's like a completely money-back guarantee. What do you have to lose to not be a coach P member and see why so many people are jumping on the calls twice a week with David and his team. And he does a once a month agent-only call with them. So go to coachpconsulting.com, coachpconsulting.com. You're going to develop a team. You've got to have a team of A players that you are constantly, consistently recruiting. But there's so many different hats for you to wear as the business owner. And that's where Autopilot comes in. I literally meant it that one of my clients signed up with Autopilot just recently, have had a great experience. They are world-class in what they do to help you do the thing that you know that you should be doing, but they're going to help buy back your time so you can focus on doing the things that's actually going to grow the business. And then once they deliver to you some high-quality candidates, you'll be able to follow up with them, take them through your— the rest of your recruiting system, which I hopefully you have documented somewhere in your operating system for your business to say these are the steps that we're going to do. Work with Autopilot, they're going to take that front side off, they're going to make sure that they measure the person, talk to them so that you're not spending time with really low-quality candidates or people that— not low-quality people, just people are not the right fit for you. And that way you can work with someone, they're going to get to know you, they're going to get to work, uh, know exactly what you're recruiting for, uh, what are the ideal character traits, what's the job description going to look like, etc. So go to autopilotrecruiting.com, autopilotrecruiting.com, and make sure you ask them about their concierge onboarding, which is absolutely something that they've added for their— all their clients with Autopilot Recruiting. Ellie, Ali, if you'll edit that. that they've added for all of their clients. Ask them about that. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com. You may want to be able to know, okay, I want to develop, I want to hire more sales team members, I want to be able to hire some account managers, customer service people, maybe I want to hire my very first EA, but I don't know how is that going to affect financials and what's— how's that going to affect profitability, but what's the long-term going to be, what's the forecast going to look like, etc. That's where Club Capital comes in. Go to club.capital, book a no-obligation demo. Let them see, let you see why they are absolutely the number one accounting CFO service company for insurance agents in the country. Go to club.capital. All right, everyone, this is a good one. Till next time, lead well.