Building a Functional Team - Team Series #1

The best way I know to measure is that people want to be a part of it. People like it. And I don't mean everybody, but the people who are staying, who are consistently a part of that team, enjoy being a part of the team. They want to be a part of the team. They like performing as a part of that team. That's functionality.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host, Joe Hudson. Good morning, Joe.

Good morning, Brett. Good to see you.

Yeah, you too. So we've been talking a lot about teams lately, and it's just come up that perhaps this would be a really good series to do.

Yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of time there, right? So the 12 or so executives that I coach, I spend a lot of time with their teams. I'm totally fascinated and love creating functional teams. I'm really excited to talk about it.

Yeah, so let's dive right into the meat. We're going to have a couple of different episodes on teams in general, but let's just start with the core. What is a functional team and how do we build a functional team? What does that even mean?

Yeah, so it is super simple and super complicated at the same time. What is a functional team is not an answerable question. I don't think there is such a thing. And the reason I say that is because a functional team that is a cryptocurrency hedge fund is gonna look different than a functional team that is elite Navy SEAL group, which would be different than a functional team of a canned tomato processing house. So functional is context-dependent on some level. There's some way in which that's the case. And at some level, it is the case that all teams that are functional have some shared quality. Mostly that quality is trust. There's a lot of ways to take apart what that means, what does trust mean, but generally that's the main thing is that the functional team has trust for each other.

Yeah, and you can also have different kinds of teams. What are we referring to as a team? There might be the team within your company, but there also might be the team that forms when you're in a relationship with a client and their team, or producers in your movie, or investors.— or your family.

Or your family. Yeah, exactly.

Or your community.

Yeah, what's amazing often is that you see executives who can run really super functional teams at work, but they don't apply some of those learnings to their own family, right? Where they're like very interested in hearing the wisdom of all the people on the team and at work, but they're not interested in hearing all the wisdom, or they don't make a point to hear all the wisdom of the of the family team, the husband or the teenage kids, right? So they're—

Or they run their family the way that they run their military unit.

Yeah, I've seen that. I've seen that. Yeah, that doesn't work so good. So, right, and that's a great example of how different teams are, like a military unit's gonna run different than a family, and both are teams, And the way to get to functionality is the same. And both of them need trust. So that's what I would say. Yeah.

Yeah. So it sounds like there are things that are specific to the context of any team, any group, things that would be specific to how they build trust. And also things that are specific to whether or not they're functional.

Yes.

And what their definition of functional even is. And what are some different examples of a definition of functional that might highlight why it's different in a family versus in a company?

Let's say you're working— recently I've been working with a whole bunch of AI engineers, and one of the things that they need to do to stay functional is to agree on the context in which they're speaking about. So basically somebody comes in, and you'll see this happen in families sometimes too, right? Where somebody comes in and uses an example to articulate a point and then they argue over the example, right? So in a family situation, for instance, it's somebody's trying to explain that they feel unheard and then they say, yeah, remember with the dishes the other day, you know, I felt like I was unheard with the dishes. And then the other person goes, yeah, well, you shouldn't, you should have done the dishes. And then there's an argument over the dishes instead of the fact that the person felt unheard. That's what I mean by So if you're doing complex engineering, one of the things that you have to do to stay functional is to not go down rabbit holes that are meant for examples, that you need to be able to agree on the context. But if you're doing a sports team, that's not really required so much to understand the context, right? It's like, you don't have to, what exactly example you're using when you're talking about like you throw the pass more accurately, or the context is so agreed upon and it is uniform for their team activity that you don't have to do that. So that would be an example of how different teams have to create different functionality to be effective. Whereas the engineers don't need physical prowess to be functional, but a soccer team sure as heck does.

Yeah, and you might trust a soccer player to be in flow physically with their body and be intuitive, and you might not trust them to be the most thoughtful planner of a date or something. Right. You know? Right. There might be a different way that you could trust them if you understand the way that that person is. And they may also be, I don't know.

Right.

They may also be great at dates too.

I don't know.

I'm just saying there's different types of trust.

All soccer players suck at dates. Let's just—

Yep.

Publish. Publish.

Excellent. So, okay, so we've got this, we've got these ways that are ubiquitous across teams that all teams need to be functional. And the core one you've mentioned here is trust. And then there's other, there's all kinds of measurements and you could get lost in the details around how you measure your functional team and argue about the measurements while not addressing the functional team.

Right.

How can you tell how functional your team is for the context that you're in? What does that look like?

There's two possibilities there, generally speaking. The first one is, are you meeting your goals or are you achieving results better than other teams in that place, right? In that field, in that market, in that— So that's one way to say, am I functional? And that's somewhat limited because if, let's say, you're playing in a field where everybody's dysfunctional, You could be dysfunctional and not know it because you're the best in the dysfunctional. Also, it's limited because in strong enough— there's a quote in venture capital, "In strong enough winds, even turkeys can fly," which is a weird quote because turkeys fly actually, but they don't fly for very long. But it means that if the market forces are so strong that It's easy to be successful even though you shouldn't be successful. You don't have to be a great investor if you just happen to get into Bitcoin 10 years ago, right? Because you thought it was cool. That doesn't make you a great investor, but you might think you are because you've had success. But you know, it's, you don't have a long-term thing. So, so those are the two reasons why just meeting your numbers or meeting your goals or having your goals compared to other people's goals be successful. So it's a good way to measure, but it's not the only way, and it has some shortfalls. The best way I know to measure is that people want to be a part of it. People like it. And I don't mean everybody, but the people who are staying, who are consistently a part of that team, enjoy being a part of the team. They want to be a part of the team. They like performing as a part of that team. That's functionality. And the reason I make that very particular thing about it's not for everybody A functional team knows how to get rid of the wrong people quickly, or get the wrong people into the right position, so to speak, or get the right person in the right position even if they're in the wrong position. But it basically means that getting rid of people and attracting the right people is part of what makes a great team.

You know, you talked about trust a lot, and I think also safety. Yeah. Safety is something that makes people be able to be efficient and be able to be successful in what they're doing. If they feel safe, which comes from trust, if they can trust their team to receive them and give them feedback on their work and they trust their processes and they trust their system.

Yeah.

Then they'll be able to do good work and they'll be able to perform.

Safety's a weird one. Let's talk about that. I talk about trust. I steer away from safety a little bit, but it is a really important thing. So it's kind of an interesting, question. Football players get on a field and they're not gonna feel safe. They're not gonna be like, oh, I feel like I'm gonna win, right? Like, there's, there's a lack of safety inherent in any challenge, or it's not a challenge. So, so there's a level of safety where that isn't— if you give too much safety, it's kind of like a string on a guitar. If there's too much safety, then it's strung too tight and it's out of tune. And it's not enough safety and it's too loose and so it's out of tune. So it has to be really clear that these are the things that are inherently unsafe about the challenge that we're undertaking or about this job. And then everything else should be safe. Everything else should be safe. Meaning if you are climbing up Mount Everest with a team, you need to feel safe to say, I don't feel right about this. This isn't working for me. I think this is gonna happen. You need to feel safe to be able to express your opinion. You need to be able to feel safe to say, okay, I'm having a hard time, I need some help. All those things are necessary to feel safe, but you're not gonna get the safety of the fact that you might not die on Mount Everest.

Right, absolutely. There's no way out of the inherent unsafety of existence. Correct, correct. In this reality, but You can feel more or less safe showing up as your full self to your team, bringing all of your wisdom, all of your fears and your anxieties, all of your concerns, and then trusting that they will be included in such a way that brings functionality to the team. Trusting that the things that you're afraid of in yourself are also signals that bring functionality to the team.

Yes. And the— The other thing that happens with safety is people, especially in this, in the modern culture, they use safety as a form of control. So they say, I don't feel safe. And then that means other people need to change their behavior. So that's, that's a whole nother level of dysfunction that can happen within that word of safety. Trust, however, for me is very, it's like trust is multifaceted. If I'm working with you, we work together. So I have trust for you. I have trust that we will talk and we will listen to each other and we will be true to ourselves. I have trust financially that you're not gonna screw me and that I am not going to screw you. I have trust in you that we can have conflict and we can resolve that conflict and be stronger on the other side. I have trust that you're gonna do the things that are important to making the podcast successful and you're gonna do the things you say you're gonna do. I have trust in your capacity to perform on the podcast. Trust is multifaceted. And there's lots of ways to get to it, but trust is like a very key thing, and you can't say, like, it's very hard to control somebody out of trust. You need to be more trustworthy by X, Y, and Z usually is a pretty solid, like, yeah, you've stolen from me and I can't trust you, so. This is gonna end the relationship, or you need to figure out how to convince me to trust you again, or whatever that is. So it's harder to manipulate other people with trust.

Yeah, and also I think there's something valuable in recognizing where there is not trust.

Yes.

'Cause I think sometimes we can be, we can fall into the belief that we wanna be in a team that trusts one another, so we just lead by, feigning trust that we don't actually have. And then we get either burned or we subtly defend ourselves in ways that we don't own without just being clear about where—

There's no trust in that. Right. If I can't tell you, if I can't tell you what's going on with me that might affect our relationship, there's no trust in that. And you see that all the time, particularly with executives, particularly with CEOs, is that they don't share with their team how they're feeling because they have this idea that they need to that they need to take care of everybody, that they're responsible for everybody. So they have to handle it all on their own. And so they're not saying to their team, hey, I'm really scared about X, Y, and Z, or, um, the way you said that doesn't work for me, or the way this team is functioning is off for me, because they think that they have to fix it. And therefore their team can't trust them. Then their team is sitting there going, okay, when's the bad mood going to happen? When's the reaction going to happen? When's the So in that example, if you're not sharing what's wrong for you, then you're not trustworthy. If you're not sharing what's happening for you, you're not trustworthy.

And you're also not trusting the team. This brings me back to some of my experience as a CEO where I would take things on from a self-reliance perspective of this is mine to carry, this is my fear, I don't need to let this trickle down through the team. And there's a way that that's not trusting them to handle the reality of a, you know, scary situation. Instead, what would happen if I owned it and said, wow, I noticed that I'm not trusting you guys to hear the difficult information or this, the thing that's scaring me, and I don't wanna be in a team that doesn't have that trust. So I'm gonna try sharing this.

Yeah.

And like, beautiful. What, what, what would it be like? Yeah. How, how would that go? How much would they trust me after sharing that?

If it doesn't go well, then you really know what you have to fix.

Right. Yeah, then you find out which people on your team aren't ready to hear difficult information.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Which ones you can trust.

Exactly. So trust is multifaceted, and there's different things that you have to trust each other for, but they're built in really similar ways. Trust is built in similar ways. It's having the difficult conversations. It's not avoiding them. Any conflict avoidant manager, if you are listening to this and you are a conflict avoidant manager, your team does not trust you. I guarantee it. I guarantee your team doesn't trust you. You think you're being nice, but what you're doing is you are destroying the trust between you and your team. So I forgot where we were. I just went on a tangent. I wanted to say that so badly.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's great. How could somebody tell if they're a conflict avoidant manager? Let's say somebody who has conflict brought to them all the time. And so they're, from their perspective, they feel like they're not avoiding conflict, but what are, or maybe they bring conflict up on their own terms. What are some of the ways that people might not be aware of their conflict avoidance?

If you have people bringing conflict to you all the time, then you are conflict avoidant. 'Cause you're not dealing with the conflict. And so it just exacerbates and gets worse and worse and worse. Oh yeah, it hits me in the chest.

Yeah, looking back on like, life? Yeah. Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So good question. Yeah.

Great.

Yeah. So building trust is critical and conflict avoidance is one of the ways to destroy that. Not doing what you say you're gonna do, allowing people to be in a non-accountable situation, like not dealing with the dirty laundry. Whether that's dirty laundry between two people, whether that's the fact that this product isn't selling, whether that's the fact that, you know, you want to have sex with people outside of your marriage. Not dealing with that, not talking about it, not bringing it up, that is a way to destroy trust. Bringing it up is a way to create trust. It might be hard, but it's a way to create trust. Doing what you're gonna— you say you're gonna do, I mean, that's how trust is built.

Okay, so we've talked about ways of building trust, like, you know, doing what you say you're gonna do, bringing up the difficult conversation, having the difficult conversations. And I think there's also a level of trust that's built that you can trust that you can bring something difficult to somebody and it'll turn into a productive, difficult conversation.

Yeah, so there's a great study that Google did on this where they measured all their teams, and the study is called The Aristotle Project, I believe, and we'll put it in the show notes. They basically found that the teams that were most functional were functional even if they changed their goals. So, oh, you're on Chrome, okay, now you're on YouTube. That might not be a real-life example, but they could switch their things and that team would still be functional. So they were like, what makes those teams functional? The things that they came up with were that people felt free to express themselves and everybody did express themselves. That's what they could measure that showed the functionality of the team. I think that there's a subtlety there that people don't get, which is that works inside of teams, but it doesn't work outside of teams, meaning if, I think people should all have their voice heard if they're willing to contribute and put effort and they're trying to solve the problem. But if you're just standing on the outside and you think you have the right for your voice to be heard and you're not actually addressing the problem, it's not your thing to do. It might be great for someone to get your advice, you might have great stuff, but you shouldn't have power over the project. So it gets really dysfunctional in teams when people want their voices heard and think that their voices should be heard, but they're actually not contributing to the solution.

Yeah, reminds me of that CIA document that we've pointed to a couple times in the podcast that showed how to destroy an organization is to make sure that it's, you know, board-controlled decisions with at least 6 people.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. Reaching consensus or something.

And then the other thing is the, the correct kind of safety, meaning people need to know, a team needs to know what they need to do to be successful. And that means clear goals, but it also means clear principles. It means clear kind of behavioral norms. It means that the they're not gonna be hired and fired over their boss's whim. That it's, there's just some sense of like, I know what I have to do here. And it's funny, it's like one of the least safe professions is professional sports as an example. And however, in professional sports, there's a way that people feel safer 'cause they just know if I perform at this level, I stay, and if I don't, I go. And so it's, the hard part is that people in organizations, they don't know often when they're gonna get fired. And if they know that, it's far more secure feeling for them, and therefore they can perform better.

Or at least their anxiety can be like directed in the like—

In the right direction, correct.

In the right direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The direction of their, it directs their attention to the thing that is actually most valuable for them to—

Correct.

You know, to perform.

That's right.

Instead of some other thing.

And yeah, and that's where politics, all politics in a team comes from that. If you create a team where people, it's not clear and cut and dry what will make them stay and what will make them leave the team, what will make them successful and what will make them fail in that team, then politics arise. So if you're sitting in a company right now and you have, and it's a political company, it means that the success is based on relationship, not on performance.

Yeah, and then that politics is just misdirected anxiety.

That's correct.

Well, perhaps correctly directed, but just the system isn't properly defined.

That's what I mean by trust. That's the thing that's ubiquitous. Could you imagine how effective a soccer team would be if you weren't kept because of performance on the field or because of the relation, how well you played with others, you know? But instead it was how much the, the owner's wife liked you. They would not win very much.

Or an arbitrary number of goals scored by you that isn't flexible to the actual state of the game.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that brings up a good point here. How do you then set goals that are safely and accurately measurable so that people can understand how they, what is expected of them to succeed in a way that is actually directly tied to the performance of the team and not to something arbitrary?

So this is the specific thing, right? So when I said that there's, at the beginning, there's no such thing as a team, a way to describe a team that's functional, it's because goals are different and how to set them is different and the metrics that you run your business by are different or your family by are different. Even a family who's living in sub-Saharan Africa is going to have a different set of goals to make them functional than, say, a family that's living in Silicon Valley. So I can't say what should your goals— what you're— how you do the goals or how you define the metrics of your business or of your team. But what I can say is the process to find them. And so that is an experimental process. So you have your thesis and your thesis is your goals. And then you run the thesis and you see how performance happens through enjoyment, through sustainability of your company. And then, and you, and in that process you also have, this is how we operate, a set of principles. And I would say that's how you do it is you just kind of, so I remember when I was a venture capitalist, I was constantly thinking about what are the metrics for the business, which is a way to say what are the goals for the business, what are the leading indicators, and I'm constantly thinking about how to refine them in a way that's more and more functional. And a great example of this is in a book, I think it's Good to Great, and they talk about Walgreens when they were taking off and all the other drugstores weren't. They were beating the market substantially. And they talked about how their main metric wasn't sales per store, their main metric was sales per customer because they were measuring the customer experience. Did the customer buy $9 of things on average or $11 of things on average? And so their whole metric was based on customer experience rather than just revenue. And so what you measure And how you measure it is a huge— I mean, it's an art form and a skill set. But the more you understand your business or your family, the more the metric is. So for instance, for me, the way I measure the functionality of my family, the bottom line of my family is connection. Do we feel connected with one another? Do I come home and I feel connected with my kids? Do my kids come home and feel connected to me? Do we feel connected with ourselves? That's the bottom line for me. That's what I am constantly monitoring to, not constantly, but I monitor to see like the health of the family. And so it's different for different things. And so it's an experimental process. And the two parts of the experiment are like, how are we gonna exist? I would call that principles. And what are we measuring? That's what you do.

Yeah, in that story, I think there's also something else about like, how are the measurements that we take impacting our culture.

Correct.

'Cause you could set a goal and then measure how much that goal is being achieved. And you can also measure when we set this goal, how does our team respond to the goal? What kind of stress does this create or what kind of performance does this produce? What kind of excitement does it bring? What impact does the goal itself have on the team?

Well, it gets even more confusing than that 'cause it's not just the goal that's on the team, it's how the goal was rolled out to the team. Did the team create the goal or did you create the goal and give it to your team? Here's the thing that I think people don't get. Everybody wants to do a good job. There's nobody, I'm sure there's somebody, but there's very few people who are like, you know what, I just wanna do a shitty job. Everybody wants to be successful. I've never met anybody who's like, you know what, I'm gonna try to be unsuccessful this year. It's like everybody wants to be successful. The question is, what is the environment doing to take away their desire to be successful? What's the environment doing that is allowing them to be victims to the machine rather than the creators of the machine? And I think that oftentimes people are worried about how the company is going to take this new thing, this new change that comes from management. That's like the worry that you see with a lot of CEOs. I'm gonna make this move. I wonder how the company is going to take it, instead of, oh, the company has all this wisdom, how do I harness it? How do I harness the wisdom to sharpen my own ideas of the company? And if you do that, then the first issue of how is the company going to take it is never particularly an issue. It's very similar to the wisdom that so many managers know who do, who Create product, which is if I'm creating product, I don't say this would be a great product, build it and sell it. I go out to the world and I say, what's the product that you want? What are the features? And if I built this, would you buy it? Oh, and what would make you not buy it? And so then you find the product that the people would buy naturally. That's the idea that you don't even need to advertise for. That would be a great way to make a product. It's also the great way to run a company is to, And this has been done through the years through different things like management by walking around or, you know, there's a great example of the guy who ran Boeing whose name escapes me, but when he went to Ford, he just waited until somebody gave him bad news. I think it took months and then somebody gave him bad news and he's like, "Okay, you're COO." Right, which is—

Wow.

Because it was all, everybody was showing up, "Everything's great." It's like, "No, it's not great. The company's losing money." So it's that kind of a thing. Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah, then how do you measure the measurements that you are setting up in your— how do you prevent this from being an infinite recursive loop?

Yeah, I don't know if it— that's a great question. I don't think it's ever not an infinite recursive. Well, it doesn't have to be recursive, but it is an infinite loop, meaning evolution changes You can get some things that stay pretty for a long period of time. I don't think you're going to run a company and not be measuring your revenue. I don't think— there's the typical measurements which are on a balance sheet and a cash flow statement and income statement that you're going to probably want to measure no matter what. But what Apple measures today, I hope, is crazily different than Apple measured in 1984. And so I do think that there's a constant wrestling with the measurement system. And, but the more important part is, and I think the part that escapes most folks is, it is very much like the scientific method. That you say, okay, this is this, for me, that when I walk into companies, it's like, what's the thesis? How do we test it? What's the way of acting that we think will be right? What are the measurements? That we test it and then we start running it. And in that, the measurements get refined as does the thesis gets refined about how we wanna act and be, what are the principles we wanna run by. And what most people seem to do is they either do it by default unconsciously. This is the way the CEO is and therefore this is how the CEO runs. And it's amazing. What's amazing to me is especially in Silicon Valley, you'll see this all the time. CEOs who will measure frickin' everything, but they don't measure culture. Or they measure culture, but they're not aware that basically the culture they want isn't the most effective culture. It's just the culture of their behavior patterns. They're just reflecting their behavior patterns into the company. I can't tell you how many, you know, people I've spoken to are just like, the company is run by trying to make the CEO happy. Which is wholly ineffective. So they're either that way or there's just, there's an assumption that this is the way that the culture should be based on some reading. So it's either the culture should be this way because of who I am as a CEO or because of some reading instead of, oh, well, if we tweak this part of culture, what happens to performance? It's not iterative. It's not, you know, an interactive thing.

Yeah, linking the culture to the mission of the company rather than linking culture to the preferences of management.

Yes, that's exactly it.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Another example of that you've brought up before that can bring this kind of experimental system down to something like concrete that we could talk about to close out the podcast. Something that you've said is that when you walk into a team that you're working with and you watch them have a meeting, You can tell how functional the team is by, and correct me if I'm wrong, but by how many people speak up.

One of the ways, correct. Yeah.

One of the ways. And of course, there's some nuances that you described earlier as to they're speaking up to something that, you know, they're involved in and that's constructive. So how do we create, if we were to measure something as simple as that, just somebody who's walking away from this podcast curious and they're thinking about their next meeting and they're like, How is it in a meeting that I'm in? How much are people speaking up? How much is the wisdom of the company arising into the meeting versus just, how would you measure that and how would you start to create more trust in that team?

Yeah, bring up the difficult stuff with compassion and kindness. Ask the person who is most quiet in the meeting what they're thinking. If people aren't speaking, ask them what's making them not speak. I remember, I remember I walked into a company once and the CEO talked for about 7 minutes and then to introduce me and then handed it over to me. And the first thing that came out of my mouth was, so what I just noticed was that he spoke for 7 minutes and none of you were listening. And I asked each person what made them not listen to the CEO.

Oh, wow.

And then I asked the CEO what made him speak for 7 minutes when he wasn't being listened to.

Yeah, what came up from that? After some jaws were picked up off the floor.

A lot of fucking discomfort. There was some discomfort, and there was also some, like, oh, I was listening to them. And I would have to be like, I don't consider you typing on your phone listening, or I don't consider Like, there was no eye contact. You were not involved. So there had to be some argument to kind of like— So the first thing that happened was avoidance of the truth of the reality. And then the second thing was discomfort. And then the third thing was they were talking about the real stuff. Then they were talking about what's really going on in the company. And it got really good really quickly because it became really clear that the team felt like the CEO needed to be right rather than to to get it right and that the team had lost trust in the CEO. And it became really clear that the team themselves were divided into different like little fiefdoms who had paired off to go, it's us against the, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so it all got out on the table inside of an hour, right? So it's intense, but like, what's funny is if you're listening to this and you're a CEO and you're like, oh my God, that would be scary. If I had a way for you to figure out the 10 reasons your product doesn't work inside of an hour, would you hire me to do it? Yes.

Right.

So it's that, again, that emotional thing that people don't want to feel, which it prevents them from finding the truth about their company quickly.

So, okay, now I could imagine somebody walking away like, oh great, I'm gonna walk into my team tomorrow and I'm gonna be like, all right everybody, I noticed you're not paying attention to me. I can't trust you unless you're paying attention to me, so pay attention to me. And I see that that might not play out the way that it did for you. And I'm like curious, what are some of the nuances and differences there in like really speaking to the trust versus using it as a power move?

I was being brought in to help the team get to functionality. So the context was different. When you're doing it for yourself, you just say what you want. Oh, I notice I wanna hear you more, Lisa. I wanna hear you more, Ben. I wanna hear what you have to think about it. Or, oh, I noticed that I want more trust in this group and it seems like there's politics that get in the way. I go into teams and one of the things I'll do almost immediately in the team is I'll ask everybody what they want from a team. And they almost always agree on everything that they say. And if they don't agree, it's usually semantics. So it's like one person will say, I want a team that supports each other. And I'm like, does anybody else want a team that supports each other? Everybody says yes. And so everybody really wants the same thing. So if you start owning your wants and you start creating the vision of the way that you want the team to be, whether you are the head of the team or not head of the team, it doesn't matter. Everybody wants it. No, there's nobody's like, you know what? No, you know, I want a fucking political team. I want a team where I don't feel safe and I have this backstabbing and there's no support. Like nobody feels that way.

Right.

There's people who feel like that's the way all teams are and it's gonna be that way, so I need to protect myself and I need to win the game. But there's nobody who actually wants that team. And so if you own your wants, you can be assured that it's what everybody else wants as far as trust.

Yeah, even if they don't want the same thing as you, they just— you owning your wants helps them more clearly define and see the path to getting their needs met.

Correct. Yes, that's right. Yeah, they might not want the same actions as you, but they definitely want the same kind of team as you do if you're on the same team. Yeah, everybody wants to be a part of a winning team. Everybody wants a supportive team. Everybody wants to be in a team that they can trust. Everybody wants a team where they know that people will tell them their problems instead of telling other people about the problems they're having with them. Like, everybody wants that.

And for those who don't, Tune into our next episode, which is on how to build a dysfunctional team.

Team, yeah.

Not joking. Coming right up.

That'll be fun. Okay.

Bye.

All right.

Thank you, Joe.

Good to be with you again, Brett.

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