How to Turn a Team of Leaders Into a Leadership Team?

We call them working groups or self-directed units, are not working on shared goals or collective work products together. They're not working together to ideate, problem solve, and make decisions. Instead, what you see is a majority of the time is spent information sharing, silo by silo.

Is your leadership team truly operating at its truest potential? You meet every week, you share updates, you make decisions, but if every conversation flows through the CEO or team leader in a hub-and-spoke manner, you may not have a team at all. What you might just have is a group of functional leaders sitting in the same room and operating at less than 50% of their truest potential. My guest today, Janice and Alexander Kaye of Currentis have spent decades helping leaders turn these groups into high-performing teams. In this conversation, you'll learn, one, how to spot the hub-and-spoke pattern that quietly kills collaboration. 2, how their Raft framework can help you see how your own thinking and emotions shape the results your team gets. 3, why every executive needs to wear 2 hats. a functional hat and an enterprise hat. And fourth, how one leadership team eliminated hundreds of hours of meetings a year while cutting their strategic planning process time in half with much higher effectiveness and efficiency. If you lead a team of people, this episode may completely change what you think great teamwork looks like and transform that team of leaders into a true leadership team. Janice and Alexander, I am so excited to have you both on the Flourishing Edge podcast.

Thank you.

We are happy to be here.

Very happy.

So look, I had an opportunity to experience the power of your work around creating really high-performing leadership teams, just really these working groups that are way more than a team of leaders. They're a true leadership team. When we did a session together as part of the Next Practice Institute, and your work has stayed with me. And the power you bring to team coaching and kind of what gets wrong, and I see it all over the place. I see 80%, 90% of teams that actually call themselves leadership teams, but they're not really a leadership team. They're just a team of leaders reporting into something. So I want to kind of start with that and really jump deep in to say, when you engage with these teams, and you've worked with thousands and thousands of teams. What is the right immediate sign? So what's the clearest sign if you are leading a team to know that you're not really functioning as a team, but just a group of individuals?

It's one of my favorite questions, and it goes something like this. The telltale signs are the following, and they show up both in meetings primarily, but outside of meetings. What you'll see in meetings is that this group of individuals, we call them working groups or self-directed units, are not working on shared goals or collective work products together. They're not working together to ideate, problem solve, and make decisions. Instead, what you see is a majority of the time is spent information sharing silo by silo, where the actual information shared, the subtext is either a sense of advocacy or negotiation for whatever they're sharing. So that's the first thing you notice. So you're walking into a situation where you're not seeing real work. You're just seeing that a majority of the time. And then the second telltale sign is what happens outside of the meetings. And there, what you'll see is that the members of that group spend time in bilateral conversations to renegotiate, relitigate, rearbitrate issues, or they go to the CEO to do the same. Or they triangulate. So a lot of the actual work of problem solving and decision making happens outside of the team context.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then we wonder why we are drowning in meetings. Right.

Exactly. And why not enough high-valued work actually gets accomplished. I mean, if you're looking at executive teams or senior leadership teams, the organization really needs them to come together for that collective work product. Collective work product being like collective decision-making, strategy, goals.

So you had a powerful example that you shared with me that I would love for you to bring to life in terms of this $2 billion organization that you worked with. And what did meetings look like before you intervened? And then we'll go to the after. But just start with like, you started working, and what did you notice?

Right, so this is one of our darling clients who engaged in team coaching years ago. And when we came in, the CEO and CHRO who brought us in, there were many challenges, but one of them was our meetings are not effective. They're not producing outcomes. We're not making decisions. People arrive late. They skip out. Like, we're not making use of this. And what I saw, at least in the meetings, was again, this idea that the CEO who's team leader would kick off the meeting. There would be something on the agenda, a topic name. There'd be no outcome described for that topic, no process. And the person would then pull up a PowerPoint of X number of pages sent out the night before. And then they start going through the PowerPoint. They debate slide 3, 4, and 5. They'd get stuck. It would go nowhere. And that was the— and there was a series of these in the meetings. And there was a lot of what I would call frustration. Just disappointment. And then, you know, team members going to their phones, opening up their laptops. And the thing that was really critical that was absent was there wasn't any discussion, Ashish. There wasn't any real conversation, cross-pollination of ideas, debate. It was just hub and spoke. So I had a topic, I present, people Q&A it, and then we're done. But where was the conversation? And there was no facilitation of such conversation. So it felt flat and ultimately nonproductive because not much was coming out of those meetings or sessions.

It's a pattern I've seen so often, right? Even when, let's say there's a team of 10, and then you have a leader of the meeting, right? Or the leader of the group. Somebody presents. First of all, there's so much information sharing. And I always wonder why we couldn't actually share the information ahead of time so people come prepared. But then there might be 2, 3 people who maybe will ask questions. But in the end, everybody looks at the central figure to decide, OK, where are we going forward?

Right.

Right? And I think this hub and spoke is so, so, so common. And so what's an alternative? What— when you worked with them, what did the post look like? And what were the steps that actually allowed you to get there?

We did a lot of work on different dimensions, but I'm going to point to the critical ones. First of all, there was the establishment of what the CEO began to term as collective work products based on shared goals. So first was the establishment of what are the goals that we're all signing up for, for which we are mutually accountable, and what collective work products fall out of that. So strategy, succession planning, the board of trustees, meetings, those were collective, and the annual operating plan, those became collective. As such, it became work for the team to work on together. And that was followed by the second big piece around really designing intentional meetings, which is when you have a session in a meeting, you have to identify the outcome for the meeting, the purpose of that meeting, and the process you are going to use to drive your conversation. Do a little ideation, drop into some problem solving, move into some decision-making, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 20 minutes. That became a prerequisite to be on the agenda. And finally, decision-making, Ashish, because the default is that, is that you default the decision-making to the team leader and the team is not making collective decisions. So we taught the distinction between unanimity, consensus, democracy, authority, and how you select those modes for different decisions. And then we taught a wonderful process to do real consensus-based decision-making called 0 to 5. And when they found that and they started to do real consensus-making through 0 to 5 facilitated, they realized that they were able to make decisions. You have a collective work product, you have well-defined work sessions, and you're making collective decisions. The energy and the buoyancy in those meetings was like night and day. It became, it became like real work and they leaned into it much more now. It took a while. It's not overnight. It took months, but they ultimately shifted and they got it.

Yeah. Little by little, they felt the joy of what it's like to achieve together.

Yeah. So I want to dig into a couple of pieces to kind of bring the clarification, right? So let's take an operations team that's working together. And I want to create that distinction because many teams will say, yeah, of course, we have common purpose, right? We have to drive X million dollars in productivity. And I've got this group that has these number of plants, and they have a portion of it. And then there is this group, and they have a portion of it. And then here's a third person who runs procurement, and so they have their component of the material savings. And there might be something else that's actually doing lean across, and they have a number. And so they're like, yes, we have a common goal. We have to drive $100 million out, and we are all kind of doing our piece. But what you're articulating is actually different. So you would not call this where I am presenting and responsible for my $20 million, and I'm going to talk about that, and this one's going to talk about their $20 million. What you're describing in terms of shared goals and how we work together is different. And so bring that to life of how, if I kind of hold my number and kind of present on what I'm doing versus the collective, what we are achieving, what's the difference between them?

Yeah. I mean, I think just the basic one that we keep underscoring is if it's an information sharing meeting, right? You can just feel the energy decreasing and the value of that meeting of all those people in there together decreasing. And therefore the joy and the buoyancy is almost nonexistent. You start having those meetings, having information sharing happening before the meetings and people being disciplined In doing that. So you've got to have both, right? Because they need the information. You just don't want to have that happen in the meeting. And the meeting is such valuable time. People talk about the cost of meeting, but there's also the cost of an information-sharing meeting, but also the opportunity cost of them coming together and not doing something collaborative, like ideation, decision-making.

Let me build on Janice and give you an interesting example. Working with a client right now, this is the chief revenue organization of a systems engineering organization. They're responsible for about $1.5 billion in sales. Now they have a strategy on how to go to market across different segments and customer offerings, et cetera. And it was, it was created by the CRO, Chief Revenue Officer, handed down. And then every one of the different groups is kind of implementing it their own way. And they're struggling because they're diluted. They're offering too many products to too many customer types, and they're investing the same amount of money in big and small and enterprise versus mid-market, et cetera. So what they realized is that they really do have a shared goal, which is the revenue. That's something they all have to achieve. It's not just their individual contribution. And so the CRO pushed that up and said, now what's our collective work product? Well, we need to come together on an account segmentation model. And I'm not going to do it. We're going to figure it out together. So that was mind-blowing. We're going to work that together? The second piece was around understanding enterprise versus mid-market mix. And then the third one was the go-to-market strategy. And they're working it as a collective work product. And they're engaged. And they're going to come out with something for all of them because they all owned and participated.

I love that, right? I mean, the other one that I'm curious about with that group, if you saw happen too, was When you have functional leaders working on a joint number, very little, partly because you don't want to upset the other person or you feel, hey, I don't want to get into your lane. Even if I have something to add, I might not, one, ask for help from others. But more importantly, I might not offer a different solution because if I'm approaching the $100 million problem as 5 $20 million segments, then while you are presenting your $20 million, the other 4 are silent. And they feel like, well, I don't want to ask Alex. About his 20, he's got it. Or worse, if I ask Alex and give him a suggestion, he's going to give me a suggestion. I'm going to look like an idiot because I didn't think about it. Versus recognizing that 5 heads are actually better than 1 head. And while today you might be driving this segment, you bring expertise beyond that segment. You bring your life experience. You bring your work experience that actually, as a team, we can be stronger together.

voice so much there.

Exactly right.

So here's a bit of a tangent. And this is really important, Ashish, which is one of the ideas that bubbles up in teams that are high functioning is the realization that they're in it for something bigger than themselves. Okay? Call it that. There's a bigger purpose and a bigger goal or goals. They make a contribution to that. But ultimately, as they're all talking about how they're all going to get there, it may just be that one has to give something up. To another. And it's the art of compromise and trade-offs. You can't always get what you need or want. So the powerful conversations that happen in, in high-performing teams are the conversations where you come in with your need advocating for your unit. And everybody's doing that, but you realize that to get there, we're going to have to compromise and trade off. And maybe I'll lose this time, but maybe I'll win next time. And that's sort of a fact or a reality of high-performing teaming.

I love the distinction that you bring in this work. And Janice, I would love to get your thoughts. You say every leader, if you have a team, every leader who's in that team needs to wear 2 hats.

At a minimum.

Can you talk about this? No, at a minimum. So bring about the distinction of 2 hats because oftentimes I see, I have an operations team and I'm the chief procurement officer. Or if I have an executive team, I'm the CFO, I'm watching the finance, I'm marketing, I've got my marketing. Here's the operations person. Here is the R&D person. Here's the supply chain person. They're all wearing that hat. They're having the conversation. What's the second hat that is missing, or a third?

Well, the hat that tends to be missing is them being a team member of that executive team. They still wear the hat of being the team leader of their functional team. In the executive team. So one of the things we bring in is that identity transition, right? Identity shifting. So we talk about hats as just a visual kind of way of understanding that you are identity shifting from being a leader of one team, say your functional team, to being a team member of the executive team. And having those transition moments, whether it's transitioning between one Zoom call to the next Zoom call, or going from one office to the conference room, take that time to really pay attention to that transition of one identity to the next. And if you're fully in as the identity of a team member of that executive team, you're going to be way more valuable and that team is going to be way more high-performing.

Yeah. It almost forces you to step, go back and actually action what Alexander, you just highlighted, right? So I will only be willing to compromise if I actually think of myself as solving for the enterprise. And so I'm not losing. We're actually winning.

Exactly.

Because collectively, we are able to choose something that we all care about.

That's exactly right.

That's right.

And the trick, just to build off of Janice, the trick I would say is that when you walk into the team meeting or the work session is that you hold both identities or both hats at the same time. That you're able to say, look, my unit is XYZ. We're here and we need this. Yet I know we all need, the enterprise needs that. Help me. Let me help you. What do I need? What do you need? And those are very robust conversations, which are difficult, Ashish.

Yes.

It's not easy to have those conversations because they're fraught with tension and a little bit of advocacy and negotiation. But if you can navigate them and facilitate them, they yield the ripest fruit.

Yeah. It's the more sophisticated someone can get in terms of holding which, which identity is primary in what meaning and which one's secondary and then shifting it.

And that's why you so importantly highlight before you can actually hold the 2 identities, right, and know where you're playing, self-awareness is so important. And I love your RAFT model as kind of a very apt acronym for people to think about, what am I bringing into the room? I can think about how to dance in the room, but I have to first become aware of what am I bringing into the room. And so walk us through that, what RAFT stands for and how to activate that.

So RAFT is a model we've been using for years. It starts with the results in mind. So R, RAFT, results. The A is for actions or the behaviors you are draw, you are utilizing to achieve those results. Feelings are what engages you to take those actions, to take those behaviors. And the thinking, which you were talking about, the thinking behind what elicits an emotion, elicits feelings that drives you to take an action that has you to achieve a certain type of result. So it's looking at each one of those 4 layers of self-awareness, And seeing what needs to shift or what you need to underscore to keep getting the results you want or to shift to get results that you want that you're not actually achieving right now.

Yeah. So let's bring this to life with an example. Let's say I'm the CMO and I have proposed an idea where we're going to spend X amount of dollars in this Super Bowl ad, and I'm going to get all these eyeballs. It's going to help us get out of this problem. And the CFO steps in and says, I think that is— I actually don't think that is the right use of money, or we don't have this money, strongly challenges me. Walk me through using this Raft model, like what might be happening to the CMO who just proposed this, and what's— what will be the result of that versus if I become aware of what's happening, what's a move that becomes possible for me?

Because I'm kind of seeing, I think what you're asking for actually involves another model in parallel. Because that's a tough conversation. That's loggerheads. So they each have their own thinking. They're probably feeling something about that through that thinking. And they've said certain things that are actions. And then the result of this is going to be maybe a breakdown, a breakdown, or maybe a standstill. One of the things that we advise is to use a very simple framework that we call— so I'm going to add another acronym in here, but it's called SPINS and it comes from a conflict management and conflict resolution theory. And it's very simple. It says, when you see a standoff and things are really not moving forward, you need to— S of SPINS is stop and just label it. The labeling. The next thing you do is the P of SPINS, which is ask each other for what their perspective is. So Ashish, what, let me really hear your perspective. And you hear the perspective, then you paraphrase that perspective. And then you say, Alexander, what's your perspective? And you paraphrase. If you do just that, it's already amazing and it's half of SPINs. The N stands for needs. I've heard your perspective, Ashish. So what do you need? What's the need there? Now it's also known as interests. Let me paraphrase your needs. What are my needs here? And then we go to S, final S, solution. So given that we know each other's needs are, We've heard our perspectives. What's a joint solution? That doesn't always work, but what we find is that many times it does. And it actually gets the feelings out in the perspectives, and it gets the needs out. So you get all of RAFT that comes out through the SPINs process.

Love it. It does spin the conversation from an advocacy, advocacy to an advocacy inquiry move.

Yes. And it stops people from spinning out of control.

I like it. But it's so interesting because even if we go back to that CMO, CFO intervention, without this frame, this SPIN's frame, I interpret it, I might think about my thinking if somebody questions me as, wow, you're trying to undermine me. My feeling might be threatened or defensive. And the action I might take is actually raise my voice and say, you don't know what you're talking about without this. We might get defensive. I might interrupt. And the result is just going to be, I don't know, till one person decides to step down, it's not going to go anywhere. And what you're offering is, if I recognize this is happening, and if I stop, as per the SPINs, instead of just assuming they're undermining me, now I get curious about what is the real issue here? Why do they feel this is actually not going to work? What are they solving for? There might be a financial issue that I don't even know about. Which automatically starts to kind of bring my nervous energy down. We ask them for what do they need for this campaign to work. I want to spend X, but what's the result we want to see? Is there a different agreement? And then we solve for it together versus I state, I need this money to drive revenue, and the CFO says, you don't have the money. I can't give you the money. And it goes nowhere.

And if it goes nowhere, at least you've heard each other out and you've You've lowered the temperature. Because what happens when we speak, it's like what you said. If I say something and somebody says something else, we trigger our threat centers. And when we trigger the threat center, we go into that sort of sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight mode. And as you said, we raise our voice, we attack, we push back, we withdraw, and we've lost it. You can't move forward from that, those positions, and then you end up getting in bad places with people.

Yeah, I love that. And so how often do you find, you know, how often do you find that when you're working with a team, what's really the team problem is actually more of an unexamined pattern problem with one of the leaders, where they're actually operating out of a whole different belief system or kind of a habit that's become conditioned, that's actually getting fundamentally in the way of this team truly operating? As a leadership team. This conversation is brought to you by Happiness Squad, where we help leaders build new mindsets, new habits, and transform their ways of working to truly flourish. If you're ready to unleash the untapped human potential in your organization and operate at your best, come visit us at happinesssquad.com and start your journey today.

Well, in the RAFT model, there's a concept called thought habits and the understanding of the science of how our neuronets come together and they get myelinated and their thought habits, right? And we've found that in sharing these models or, you know, just sharing this approach, there's a distance someone has with their, almost their own thinking and how they feel about their own thinking and someone else's thinking. It's the use of a model that, you know, that allows that at times, most times, allows people to sort of, you know, take the steps necessary that they didn't have before to gain a little perspective for themselves, self-awareness for themselves, and then to share and have more interpersonal awareness that they didn't have before. And Alexander, you want to take it from there?

Well, here's a series of thought habits that I've worked on with team leaders. Thought habit number 1, team leaders must make decisions. That's the way it is. That's the way I was brought up. That's the way I've worked. That's the way it is around here. Thought habit number 2, conflict is best managed offline. Another thought habit that can be right there for you. Another thought habit, you know, this idea of information sharing, meetings are most useful when everybody is on the same page. Another thought habit. Another thought habit. You know, people naturally don't get along in executive teams. I had a leader tell me that people don't really get along in these teams. I was like, really? That, yeah, I know why. Okay. That's a great thought habit to walk into a team with, but you get a series of these and they're very ingrained. And given that thought habit, they feel, and then as Jenna said, they act out a certain way and they get a familiar result.

Yeah. You know, the other one I often see is, I need to know the answers.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, in today's world, how fast things are changing and how specialized things are being, most people don't know 90% of the answers. But the team collectively can help know it, right? There is the team wisdom versus an individual. And I think there is so much harm that comes from not being vulnerable when you don't know. There's a lot you should know. But there is also a lot that's happening that you don't know. And being able to differentiate and create that space for us collectively to solve from a place of unknown to get to a known answer is— I think I see it do so much damage. Most leaders think they step in, I should know the answer, otherwise they won't respect me. So look, I want to shift from this notion of self-awareness and really, as individuals, also when you step into the room, consciously being able to step in with 2 hats, always check myself, am I actually just wearing a functional hat, or am I actually wearing an enterprise hat? I think that's a powerful move for individuals. I'm curious, recognizing that there are so many teams, Alexander and Janice, right, that are truly operating as hub-and-spoke teams, as you mentioned. And so why is it that so many successful leaders actually end up creating that structure? What's underlying these thought patterns you identified? I mean, everybody knows collectively you can be better. So then why do we actually— and by the way, most leaders don't want themselves to be holding all that mantle. And yes, we see that pattern playing out of the hub and spoke.

We don't have as much teamwork type of experiences as a social being As I think we could in society. We have a very individualized, focused educational system that's changing little bits by little bits. So if it's individualized, we are habituated to that student-teacher, student-teacher, one student to one student type of throughout all of our childhood. And then we're expecting these people to go into teams and to work collectively. They just spent the past 25 years of their life getting myelinated and habituated into a particular mode of communication that's comfortable. So I blame early childhood education.

And I would add 2 pieces to what Janice said. The first is, you know, most people in organizations are praised, they're promoted, and they're compensated on their individual achievements. Just to add a finer point on Janice's point. And that's ingrained in terms of how I perform. The other thing is, this is a nuance. It's interesting to take a look at culture, national culture, you know, and Hofstede's dimensions of the individualism versus collectivism. And I think what we might find is in cultures that have more of an individualistic orientation, there might be more of a challenge to work in teams than the collective.

Well, we work with multiple multicultural teams so frequently, so sometimes you get a team of of opposites in that arena. So it's interesting.

For sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Right? And so one, I always believe in theory and practice. So one way for a team to practice being a true team rather than functional, if that's how I've shown up, is if we actually work on some collective work products that only we as a team can do versus us give information in our silos. Can you give some examples from your work around what some of these collective work products could look like?

So at the executive team level, the classic list is the strategic plan, 3-5 year strategic plan, which can be a hub and spoke process or a collective process at an offsite. So strategic plan, number 1. Number 2, the annual operating plan, which comes out of that strategic plan, has a nice operational focus, but everybody can contribute. The next one is succession planning. For the team, the top 2 or 3 candidates, which can be a collective work product rather than managed independently by the CHRO. Another one which is often there is the, the board of trustees or board of directors meeting, which is typically CEO and chief of staff, but there can be greater participation even by those who don't go or present there. And that can become a collective work product. Other collective work products are large-scale organizational transformations. I mean, you, you, you. definitely have some large scale. I'm thinking of ERP implementation, or you have a nice— and those can rise up at a strategic level as a collective work.

I would add a couple more, just starting where Alexander went down and across, going up, sort of being more visionary orientation. So really helping either, you know, reestablish a new vision or reinforcing the current vision.

Yeah. I'm assuming the other things are like these cross-functional processes or standardized ways of doing across multiple units, right, where individuals can't do it, but collectively, we can stack our hands. Or talent management, but talent management across the whole function rather than the silos within the function. If we really think about our people all the way 2, 3 levels down and really creating those talent pathways, that could only be done when you have a cross-functional group that comes together. Otherwise, marketing goes up in marketing, supply chain goes up in supply chain, but we're not actually really doing that work of saying our top leaders need to be cross-functional, need to have these experiences that could benefit.

I would add to the list we just shared leadership development for the top 2 layers. Another one, which is often the case, is when you do a culture change that is owned as a collective work product by the top, that can be a very powerful uniter and catalyst for teamwork.

And I love this list because these are the kind of things, when we work on them together, we are actually creating— we are forced to shed our identity as individual or functional leaders because you can't do it from that place. So I loved the story you shared around strategic planning, often something that is cross-functional, but that's not how most people do it. They do it as each function submits their process to somebody at the center who negotiates their way through, sends it back, 2 or 3 iterations. Then we present this group plan, and we all kind of align, but we are never really aligned. There is so much heartburn, et cetera, on executing. And you took this team that was spending over 250+ hours in ineffective meetings, and you took them through a process that actually the process for strategic planning was not that, but completely different. And so bring that to life for what's an alternative to a standard rolled-up process versus something different.

So I don't often say this, but this was a game changer for this particular executive team. First of all, they were doing 256 hours of meetings per year. And when they did intentional meetings, they reduced it to 152, saving therefore 100 hours of meetings a year.

Amazing.

And that is such expensive time at the executive team level. The strategic planning is simple. I'll make it very quick. It was hub and spoke, as you said. CEO owned it. Each team member submitted their strategic plan for their unit. There was a consolidation effort with a team around the CEO. And then he would have one-on-ones with each team member to negotiate. It was grueling for that CEO.

Yeah.

And it took 5 months. And the insight was, why don't we just go offsite and construct a really good strategic planning process and have it facilitated and crank this thing out together and have all the tough conversations? That's— and he, as he said, we're going to butt heads and we're going to do this thing. And they did that over the course of 3 mini offsites. They got it done in 2 and a half months, half the time. And the Again, game changer. They were thrilled. They thought it was one of the—

You did that with them.

Yeah, but I—

Just saying.

Yeah, I helped. But they leaned in and did the work.

Yes.

Well, I think it comes from also a deep place of trust, knowing if I share, right, as a CEO, I don't need to be the person saying this works or it doesn't. I can have other people actually live, real-time challenge, question, suggest, brainstorm. Think about the interlinkages together, and the answer can be something that actually everybody has a great chance to give inputs on. I think it's beautiful.

Yeah, thank you. It was nice. It's been— we've done it several times since. And then, you know, what's interesting is in retrospect, the team goes, why haven't we always done it? Like, this is so obvious.

I think part of the reason I feel is, you know, because many people think when they do strategic planning, they also need budgets with it. And Again, it goes back to this notion of thinking about this as an enterprise rather than a functional leader. I don't want to do it that way because, number one, I'm like, if I present my stuff and Alexander presents his stuff, Alexander might get more than me. And he knows where I'm going, and he— and versus I'm saying, hey, collectively, this is where we want to go. Let's actually challenge each other because, as we build the plan, it is our plan as much as individual functional plans. And we can have the real honest discussions.

And, you know, in that particular instance, there was a really interesting exchange between 2 units where they needed to transfer human resources. So I was going to lose about so many people and you were going to gain those people. And that conversation where the CHRO was in the room was fascinating. So it, I'll take them. I'm losing them. What am I getting back? And they realized there were trade-offs. And so if you do that, I'll do this. And if you look out for me here, I'll look out for you there. That alone, Ashish, creates the collaboration. And I'm going to use the big word, the trust that you've got my back, I've got your back, and we can work this out. And then you plant the seeds of true, true team performance.

It also is a very natural way to surface collisions. I'm going this way, you're going here. Or I am going in 6 months, you have something planned in 24 months. And now there is this 12-month gap. And if you could just align when these things happened, it might need half the time. So I want to shift from teams. So, right, as individuals, we need to think about where are we operating. We go to teams where we show up as the work that only we as teams can do, really show up as wearing 2 hats, really think about the work that our team collectively should do rather than work that should happen within silos. So that gets rid of so much information sharing. I want to shift to the system. And you bring a very powerful— you mentioned, as executive teams, you create an echo throughout an organization based on how you operate. So talk a little bit about this echo effect of when teams operate as functional leadership teams rather than enterprise teams. What is happening?

I mean, part of it is the contagion effect of people in power or authority. Right? So people are going to, as social beings and part of who we, you know, human nature instinctively, we look to people with power and authority for a number of reasons, safety, security, et cetera. So knowing that people in power and authority have that echo of contagious effect, they are role models all the time, whether they want to or not. They have no choice. They've taken on that leadership level and therefore they've taken on the responsibility and the accountability of being a role model. So whatever they do, it's going to have that echoing effect.

I would love to add to that with the following. Leadership is a public act. Everybody's watching, and everybody below is watching above to see how they're getting along. Are they aligned in their messages? Do they make clear decisions? Are they communicating with each other? And what they notice is when that leader comes back to our unit, he or she talks negatively about him or her. Denigrates what's going on, says, I wasn't really a part of that decision. Therefore, I, in my little silo, now believe that it's going really bad. And if she's not on board with them, then I'm not going to be on board with them, the other function. So it actually, the cascading effect is the role modeling, as Jenna said, of that unit leader drives the behaviors below and breaks up cross-functional collaboration. Because we follow the leader. And it's insidious because you shouldn't do that. You can't do that. You know, you have to hold the sacredness of your team. And you can say, for example, you know what, we had a meeting, we disagreed, we're on the same page, but we decided and we're going that way. That's legit. That's honest. And that says, okay, they argue, but they go together. And that just drives confidence and trust in the organization.

When we look at flourishing as a construct and we say, are organizations and team flourishing, I'm blown away when we do these assessments. We find most teams are only tapping 30% of actually the human magic that's potential. And one of the biggest drivers is lack of collaboration and conflict, right? It's a massive— the other one is meetings. You ask most executives, And you're like, yeah, I spend 80% of my time in meetings. And then you ask them, what percentage of that do you think is wasteful? And you come up with a number like 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%. Even if it's 30%, which is on the conservative side, that's 20% of human capacity just wasted in meetings that are not collaborative. We are butting heads, one function against the other. And they show up in that way before a word is even said because that's what they've seen from their leaders. When the head of R&D says all procurement wants is to cheapen the product, Do not let them do that. The procurement manager 2 levels down in a cross-functional meeting is going to push back, right? The R&D person is going to push back on an alternate supplier recommendation without even getting into the details of it because they've just assumed their leader said all they want to do is cheapen the product. And you see these wastes that, frankly, I mean, I find it really, really terrible, but I think the invitation that you're making is a powerful one. Is if you want to improve collaboration, if you want to reduce the number of meetings that are consuming the human energy in the organization, start by looking at yourself and the team that you're a part of to see how what you're creating is echoing through the whole organization. So my friends, just looking at the time, so if you're a leader, you've said, OK, I get the individual. I get the team. I get the system. What might be 3 experiments that you invite them to run this week for them to become a more effective team and an organization?

One is a— what some people call an after-action review, an AAR. But after a meeting, what did we all notice? And can we make that better the next time? You know, sort of continuous improvement. I mean, even if it's just that, people are smart, right? They notice it. And sometimes just giving them space to share openly, safely, that can solve a lot.

I'm going to add one. Maybe you're thinking of another. The one that I would do is I would have them do a very simple experiment, which is in a meeting, have a little table and write information sharing, ideation, brainstorming, problem solving, decision making, and write down the percentage of time spent in each one of those and do that over a series of meetings and watch the trend lines across how are you spending time in meetings. I think that'd be a fun little Analytical experiment. That's another one.

You know, one that I picked up from about 4 years ago, I still remember. That's how much impact that time we spent together was. And I loved it, which is, you know, literally go create a circle where every person is and actually see what the pattern of communication actually is in the room, right? Today with AI, you can do it. What percentage of time did people speak? How much of what people spoke was actually positive versus negative? What was the type of questions? How many comments were advocacy questions versus inquiry questions? And so the more data that you make visible, you'll start to notice the patterns that are actually playing that we are often blind to because we are not actually looking at how we are operating.

And we call that behavior charting. And I do remember doing that with you. And I like the ones that you pointed out, number of questions asked, Number answered, open questions, closed questions. Interesting. Who's talking to who? Um, you can look at interruptions, you can look at monologues, but then you can look at good things like affirmations and builds. And, and the beautiful thing is you do have data that you can feed back to the team and say neutral data. And the team can work with that because people will listen to the data.

And that is the utilization of AI. To increase our humanity. So many people look at AI saying, you know, oh, it's, you know, taking over humanity, but we need to evolve. We need to increase our ability of being more human in the face of AI. And sometimes it's using AI tools to do so.

And one last thing on experiments. I would take a collective work product, like identify with a team, a collective work product, clarify it. Put it in the middle of the room, set up a little process, and get some facilitation to work through it and see what happens. Because you'll discover a lot by doing just that. And it can be a small one, but the devil's in the details, and you're going to get a lot done with that.

Well, friends, this was so power-packed with unbelievable insights, interventions that I think our listeners can apply right away. Thank you for the powerful work you both continue to do. We started Happiness Squad with a mission to democratize flourishing. And if you don't flourish at work, you can't flourish in life. And teaming or ineffective teaming is one of the biggest drivers that can either help you flourish or can take away from it. And my 25 years, I don't know of any better team coaches and people who have trained so many who can really help us shift teaming to truly be the most powerful amplifiers of performance and health. So thank you for all the powerful work you've done.

Thank you, Vishen.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining me on The Flourishing Edge. If today's conversation inspired you, share it with someone who's ready to flourish too. Subscribe, leave a review, and stay connected for more tools to achieve breakthrough performance through flourishing. Until next time, keep learning, practicing, and growing into your fullest potential.