Simple Ways to Grow an Extraordinary Team

Arguably one of the most important questions I get is about building teams. So this can be a small business owner who's building a team of employees and contractors, vendors, or it could be a large organization. I'm hearing more and more from business leaders at the C-level suite, but also managerial leaders. I'm hearing from squads and team leaders or cell leaders. Those are all different terms that I hear in every industry from professional services to sports teams. So I spent the last, oh now, 5 or 6 years researching out what builds extraordinary teams, what keeps extraordinary folks on board, what sustains the momentum of an extraordinary team. And there's no question it boils down to the leader and it boils down to, surprise, surprise, the understanding of behavioral psychology.

So I want to dig into a lot into the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

This is such a fundamental consideration of what you need to address as a leader. So I'm in New Jersey. They have the famous World Cup. For soccer coming up here. And imagine this, that one of the teams is the best players versus another team that has the best players, but team one knows all the rules. They know all the strategy. They've worked together. Each player is put in the best position that complements their extraordinary talents. The perfect goalie or the person best suited to be goalie is their goalie. The person best suited to be the forward or in defense those people are designated. Now look at Team 2. They have the exact same quality participants, if you will. Each athlete has the same skills and so forth, but they haven't been told the rules. The rules are always changing on players, are not necessarily matched up with any skills, they're just thrown on the field and they have to figure it out as they go along. There's no— they don't even know how to start off. They don't know what, what counts as a score or gets points. They don't know what's a penalty. Which team's gonna win? But well, team one's gonna dominate. And I think there's perspective here in that great leaders have to organize their teams to get everyone on the same page moving collectively by defining what the rules are of engagement, how a win is measured, by allowing people to lean into their extraordinary talents by leveraging that. And I think that sets the stage for what we're gonna experience in this session together, in this learning together on what you can do to build an extraordinary team. I believe one of the misnomers we hear is hire slowly, fire quickly. And I want to challenge that in this session together. What we're gonna explore is how to hire thoroughly and how to fire slowly. The hiring practice is done appropriately. It's the process of engaging with that person in a way that allows them to exploit their talents and their abilities, to put them in the best position within your organization so that their talent can be expressed. There's interesting research— I don't have the source for this, so count this one as hearsay— but this is an interesting perspective of European employees versus US-based employees. In Europe, particularly Western Europe, there are certain regulations, uh, that I'm aware of that if someone is terminated from employment, that they can't necessarily be removed from the organization immediately. Conversely, in the US, an at-will, effectively country, it goes, I think, by state by state, but there is much more freedom for the employer to say you're not a fit and you have to leave, or the employee to leave. Well, the performance in European companies, what's interesting is, and again, I'm not giving you specific research, so consider this hearsay, but I wanna give a perspective, is it looks like people who are required, mandated to stay with an organization, ultimately are given more attention to matching their talents to their task because the employer can't say, mm, sorry, you're not a fit. They have to find the right fit for a person. So the performance from these employees is generally much better than someone who's not working out and then it's removed. They're found the right position. Now I wanna give you a little story because, uh, I started doing some research on it. I couldn't find a data source to point to. So again, qualify based on that. But my mother is of German descent. She was born and raised in Germany, moved here when she was in her mid-20s. Her first employer, she was there working, I think, for about a month or two, and the employer came up to her and said, you're just not suited for this job. Unfortunately, I have to let you go. By the end of the week, you're terminated. Well, my mother, interestingly, was so ashamed and embarrassed that she got laid off that she was afraid to go to her parents and tell them that she'd been laid off and that she doesn't have a job anymore. So the one person that she did feel most comfortable with was her grandmother. So she went to her grandmother and said, um, I don't have a job anymore and I don't know what to do and how do I tell my parents? The grandmother said, I don't know if you know, but the rules here in Germany are that you cannot be terminated within a week when you're notified of termination. You have, I think back then it was up to 6 weeks, maybe it was 4 weeks, 4 to 6 weeks. So she said, tell your employer that and then you're going to seek out a new position. My mother returned to work the next day and said, And sounds like how she said it was just very respectful and understanding that the employer may not know and said, you may not be aware, but, uh, the rules are that I have 4 weeks or 6 weeks of employment. And I just wanted you to be aware of that. Is that true? And the employer came back and said, my gosh, I didn't realize that. Yes, you can work here for the next, we'll say 4 weeks, but then please, you know, seek an opportunity elsewhere. So my mother continued to work there and 3 weeks later, the employer came back and said, I'd like to revoke the determination. Your performance is more than meeting my standards. And, you know, would like to continue on. And my mother worked there for a few more years. She was a teenager at the time, never had to tell her parents. But what's interesting is that story just gives a perspective of, are we firing too quickly without consideration of what we can do as a leader to give the opportunity for someone that we've hired through good consideration, ensuring they're a fit, to really leverage their talents to be a best match for that. So interesting perspective, and maybe, maybe this concept of hire quickly is causing some of us to be too flippant. Maybe this concept of hire slowly is also mismeasured. Maybe we're hiring too late. In many organizations, I find the hiring practice starts when we feel an urgency to hire. I need someone now. Who are we gonna get? And when, if you're in a panic state, It's gonna be very difficult to get the best talent for your team. So the better approach is to actively, or proactively I should say, seek out candidates. So we are affording ourselves the time and then bringing the right people on board. In fact, in our own organization, just recently we interviewed a candidate and said, we are not actively hiring, but we'd love to have a dialogue with you so that we can see if there is at least preliminary interest. We're going through other processes. Skills assessments, other ways to ensure there's an ultimate fit. But at this stage, is there a degree of interest? So the interview process for us is really, is there a rapport? Is there an interest and demand? Someone's applying, yes, there's interest for us. We now have them in our, or on our bench for ultimate consideration. They're gonna go through a sequence of processes to ensure they're a perfect fit for our organization. But we have that consideration, those needs that we have proactively being addressed. So hire thoroughly, hire proactively, fire slower. That's, that's what we're going to be considering in our session today. All right, back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

I think the biggest consideration around this, this chart that we need to understand is that this is how our minds operate. Foundationally, every human being, myself, yourself included, has physiological needs. These are basic level needs of food and water, without it we can't survive. The next level of needs are safety. We need protection from harm, injury, and so forth, a roof over our head. And if you ever feel that you don't have any food or any water, you're starving, you're dying of thirst, this becomes the most critical need. So what Maslow argued is that unless these foundational needs are not adequately met, they become the absolute priority. We need this addressed first and foremost, and only once it's adequately satisfied We go to the next level, safety, protection from harm. Belonging is a degree of significance that we participate in a community. Maybe in grade school or high school, I don't know if you were ever kind of kicked out of a group, you weren't the cool kid.

By the way, that's exactly who I was.

I wasn't the cool kid, so out you go, and you feel this emotional pain. Well, the reason behind that is because you don't belong and you have to now find a way to belong again.

But what's interesting is, hopefully you've never been in a situation, but if in the grade school a fight breaks out, you're not cool anymore and you start getting into a fight, I'm not sitting there lamenting, "Oh, I'm not part of this clique anymore." Now it's about safety. So you try to protect yourself.

So what's interesting is we revert to base level needs. And only when they're adequately addressed can we concern ourselves with higher level needs. Esteem is, you know, the need for significance that we are a relevant and important participant in the endeavors that we're doing. And the highest level is self-actualization. It's where you are living one's life's purpose, where you feel fulfillment, that, that you are impactful.

Why is it so critical for employers?

We can only have the highest performance— people can only live up to their full potential, which is at the self-actualization level, if these other needs are being addressed. If, if you're the boss who's like, you suck, you don't work, and you're going crazy, well, Oh my God, you are putting in psychological safety needs are being violated, belonging may be violated, esteem. How can you expect someone to perform under that level? So, you know, ridicule and those forms of attack, I laugh at it because there's so many employers that I've seen do this.

I wrote in the book "All In" about a good boss, bad boss kind of comparison. The bad boss, I'm not saying he's a bad person, the dynamics. Bad. He would discipline employees in front of other employees. We had a group meeting every morning, and he would be there yelling, sometimes at the top of his lungs, at another employee.

And you just felt this, like, fear, like, who, who is this I'm working for? And am I next? So you have these kind of safety needs, and then you're expected to perform at the highest level.

It's like thinking that, you know, we're going to improve happiness by whipping you, and they're going to keep whipping you until you're happy.

It's this kind of perverted perception, but it absolutely does happen.

Other environments, there isn't a sense of safety. I remember one case study of a manufacturer who, they manufactured metal parts, and what the employees would do is you had to push these metal sheets into a fabrication system. You'd push the sheet in and this press would come down and cut out the formation. Well, there was, once you pushed the metal in, there was these two buttons, these two red buttons you'd push to activate the machine. Then it would make the form. You take out the discarded or scrap metal, and then you put the new sheet in and repeat the process. Well, these employees are being incented by the quantity of cuts that they were doing every day. The more cuts you got, the more you paid. So what did they do? They started taping duct tape over one of the buttons so they could stick the metal in, slap it closed, and do the next one. And you're not gonna be surprised here, people got severely injured. Some people lost their hands.

And the employer said, well, We can't, you know, have this, remove the duct tape.

And that worked for about a day. The problem was they had unintended consequences from the incentive. You were incentivized to go as quickly as possible, jeopardizing your health. When the company said you'll be reimbursed or receive a bonus based upon the number of days of safe days, the safety of the organization exploded when they weren't measuring the quantity.

So it's interesting, even with the, you know, best intentions, we are compromising these levels.

So we're gonna revisit the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs frequently. I just wanted you to have an understanding for that because how important it is. One final story before I really dig into this. In my own experience, I didn't understand Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I didn't understand the need that we have for safety, including financial safety and belonging and so forth. I had a business in the computer forensics industry with a business partner, and I was running the numbers one day. I was crunching the numbers. I came out of the office, my gosh, we can do $10 million in revenue this year is our third year in business. We called a huddle. Everyone came in the room. There was about 25, maybe 30 employees at the time, brick and mortar. And I said, you know, with great flair and so forth, "We're going to do $10 million in revenue." It was the big reveal. I had Eye of the Tiger playing in the background just to get people excited. In retrospect, it was very corny, but I thought we wanted to get the energy because I was saying a corporate vision. No one was excited about it. And I'm like, "We're going to get $10 million in revenue." And everyone just shuffled out. My assistant, her name was Patty at the time, And she said, Mike, if we achieve $10 million in revenue, that's your vision. You get the bigger house, you get the new car. What about our visions? Now, maybe that wasn't her exact words, but that's what she was pointing out. And it sat with me and it took a long time for me to understand this. And this became the thesis for my book, All In, and for all the research I've done in the development of the book and subsequently. This is the big take-home. Here's what I want you to know. Most leaders set a corporate vision. Great leaders set a collective vision. If you're following along here, write that one down. A corporate vision honestly satisfies the goal of the person or persons who set it. That's significance to me. But why should my team care? Great leaders identify all their team's vision. I meet with my colleagues regularly on what they're looking to achieve. I know someone's looking to move to a new home. Someone's looking to buy their first home. Another person's looking to learn a new language. Another person has a health challenge that they're overcoming, have overcome, and they want us to keep it that way. I know all of their goals. I don't know if it'll fit on this camera, but maybe you can see it right below— am I pointing to it?

Yeah, right below where it says eradicate entrepreneurial poverty.

Those are my own personal goals there that I've set for this year. And we do it every single year. Our team comes together and we start the year off by saying, what are we looking to achieve for ourselves? We then meet every month and how we're doing. I aspire— I'm not saying I am a great leader. I'm better than I was in the past, and I aspire to get better and better What I've known, or what I've discovered for myself, is that when I care equally about the achievements of everyone's individual visions for themselves, no matter how big or small you can define them, they're important, meaning they're all equal. When I understand what my colleagues are looking to achieve and I remind them and myself of the importance of them, we keep an eye on their achievements. Reciprocity kicks in and they keep an eye on what I see as achievements. It's the greatest way we, we walk arm in arm in achieving our goals. So What is the collective vision of your organization? It's not to satisfy a particular outcome that the leader has set or the shareholders have set. It is what is everyone looking to achieve on this pathway? There's something of significance for everyone. We just need to elicit what is it? Okay, so now you have Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I want to move on to a concept that we can use to bridge the leader, you, to your team, the people you're serving. I also wanna give context to what the team is. So when I meet with many entrepreneurs, they say, well, I'm a smaller business owner. I don't have a team. It's just me and a few contractors. Well, that's a team. But I also ask small business owners, do you have any vendors? Do you have a software provider, people that are providing other services for you or technology you use, right? Absolutely. Well, that's part of your team. Those vendors are part of your team. It's the collection of different individuals and even componentry that's backed by individuals that you use to move your business forward and serve your clients. Oh, oh, and by the way, your clients are part of your team too.

So team has a context where it's not just the full-time employees that work for you. It is the whole community, and you're part of that team too. Now, what connects you, the leader of an organization, to your team?

Well, there's 4 core elements that I identified in my research that's absolutely critical to master.

And it does move in sequence. Now we have to consider this first part, which is fit, and we're gonna dig into that first. Is the person a fit for an organization? Is the organization a fit for the person, that individual team member? Is there a click there? And we're gonna talk about how you identify that. Does that person's ability match up with the talents that you need? So you need specific talents to move your different tasks forward.

Does that person have it?

It's part of the fit. And we're gonna explore how to identify ability. Safety is do you have an environment where someone can excel?

You know, we talked about this, let me pull our, our sheet here.

We talked about this extensively and leaders that are not addressing this, either you are harming that and that's fixable, you gotta stop that, or there's elements that you can give relief to.

You can take actions and stuff to resolve it. That's safety. And we'll, we'll talk about some things I experienced in my own office around that.

And the last element here is ownership.

When someone feels like an owner, they act like an owner. We're gonna talk about concepts called psychological ownership. Let's start off with a common challenge I hear. What it is is, my gosh, I need everyone on my team to be an A player. I want all rock stars. How do you get all A players? Well, when I survey audiences and ask, you know, what percentage of the population's A players, most people say, you know, less than 5% or 10%. I'll then say, who's an A player in this room? And every hand goes up. So I'm like, oh, there's gotta be some kind of discrepancy here. How come everyone's an A player, but no one or very few people are an A player? A player, what's going on? Well, these are rooms where it's usually business leaders and entrepreneurs are doing what they want to do. That's part of being an A player. Secondly, that's self-perception versus outside perception, right? So we see ourselves in a light, but the outside may see us differently. What's the truth? The truth is this: every human being on the planet is an A player. Everybody is.

They just need to be matched up with the right opportunity, may not be with your company.

Now, if you have 100 employees or 10 employees or whatever it may be, you have 100 positions or 10 positions or wherever it may be. So not everyone's a fit, but everyone has a potential, meaning everyone can be an A-player when their natural talents— there's an opportunity that matches up with it. Again, I'm not saying for your company, so that's why we have to analyze the fit extensively. Let me share something I learned from a fellow named Kip Tyndall.

If you don't recognize that name, he is the co-founder of The Container Store. I was at a conference, I ultimately got a chance to speak with him for a bit. He shared this formula that 1A 3B and 1B 3C.

Now if you're not familiar with The Container Store, they sell— I know this is gonna be a shocker— they sell containers. But you can get containers at any big box store. The Container Store has a reputation for excellence. And how do they do it? Well, they do it because they have such extraordinary employees. In fact, if you visit Container Store, you'll notice that they generally have fewer employees there than many retail stores, but the employees are highly engaged. What's the strategy? How they do it?

Well, what Kip pointed out is that one person that's performing at an A-level performs level as 3 B-players, and one B-player performs level of 3 C-players.

Well, what I wanna do is, I don't like the traditional notion of this concept of A-player versus B-player. A is great people, B is marginal people, and C are sucky people. I hate that. I think that's abusive and damaging of the concept. Let me show you at least my opinion of what an A versus a B versus a C fit is. Remember, we're looking for fit.

This is what it is.

An A fit is someone who sees the job as their identity.

So A is identity. And I think another way of saying this is I am the job, the job is me.

So therefore the job is representative of me and my performance within that job is representative of me. So A fits, see the job as their identity. B's see the job as a property, meaning this is something I possess, I have a job.

So this is I am the job and this is I have a job. So there's a disassociation here with it. If I don't perform well, it's disassociated with me, so it's not my property.

So the motivation declines.

Remember back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, esteem, belonging. When I see the job as my identity, I need to perform the highest level cuz it elevates my esteem, it elevates my belonging, it fulfills self-fulfillment. But if it's a property, I disassociate with the Maslowian hierarchy of needs. If I'm flowing down or not performing well on the job, it may not affect my self-actualization or fulfillment. It may not affect esteem. Maybe I like the people I work with, or that's important to me. So maybe these elements are addressed., but it's not a big deal to me.

So when I have this disassociation, I don't aspire to have this within the job.

The C-level players identify the job as a necessity. I think the best way of seeing it for some people is, is a necessary evil. And this is, I have a job, it has me.

I want you to see it this way. For the A-fits, we call them 5-star fits because there's different elements you can measure for A-fit, a 5-star fit. They see it as their identity, meaning I am the job. For the B fits, I have a job. And for the C fits, the job has me. It's a necessary evil, and therefore you as the leader are the evil.

Well, what Kip Tyndall pointed out in this hierarchy was simply this, that 1A 3B. You can pay a person here, I'm just gonna pick random numbers, this is definitely dated numbers and it's not necessarily appropriate for the work you do, just because it's easy.

$20, $15, $10.

So I'm going in $5 increments. If an A player gets paid $20 and Bs, maybe you can pay them less because they see it as a property, it's a requirement. C players see it as a necessity, meaning that the job has them, it's a necessary evil. Maybe you can pay them less to do the work. But you're going to need 3 of these folks to get the output, the performance of one of these 5-star fits. Well, how's that work? This is $20 versus 3 times 15, which is $45 an hour. This is hourly, I'm pretending. And this is actually 3 Bs, so 1 B equals 3 Cs, so it's 3 times 3, which is 9 Cs, which is $90 an hour.

This is the actual cost you incur. So the most effective thing to do is to ensure that you have 5-star fits, the rock stars. It's actually the most cost-effective thing. So that's what we need to achieve.

Let me show you how we're gonna do this.

We need to move away from the traditional pyramid structure.

So the traditional, structure of organizations is like this.

You have your leadership at the top, and then you have down to different levels, however it may be. We're not going to go too far into this, but it looks— could look something like this. This is what's called a command-control environment.

So commands, direction, is sent down, and controls are sent back up.

Well, there's an interesting study on how this works, and there's a great book I encourage you to read called The Spider and the Starfish, talks about how organizations are set up.

And in the control-command environment, we run the risk of there being direction sent down, but the control, the feedback, may be ignored or filtered up. Or there can be the telephone game. If you ever played that, a command gets sent down, there's misunderstanding at this level, and then information comes back. It's now a looped telephone, and you may get misdirection.

Great case study was Eastman Kodak. You may be familiar with the name Kodak, and they were the makers of film.

They had an employee named Steve Sanson, and he worked at this lower level, and what he pointed out was that the future was no longer traditional film, it was digital, and he sent that information up and it was ignored by the top. It wasn't listened to, it was filtered out, and they kept on saying, well, the opportunity is within traditional film, photographic film, and so forth.

Here's the interesting thing: Kodak was the inventor of the handheld digital camera. In fact, it was Steve Sampson himself in 1975 invented the handheld digital camera and was the first version of this. They were the ones who saw the future. It's actually Steve who saw the future and the feedback was disregarded. And look at Eastman Kodak today. Look who's dominating the space. It's the smartphones and all these things. They had this opportunity that they missed because of command and control. So I want to introduce you to a different model.

We're going to look at a more like a web-like structure. I'm just drawing circles here. This could be an individual and this could be the task that they have.

And this is the expression of a person's talent.

So I have the talent to do this task, I have the talent to do this task.

Here's another individual.

I have the talent to do this task and this task. And here's another individual. The talent to do this and this and this.

And what you'll see is it starts making this web-like structure.

This is a much leaner organization. Here is the key learning. Most businesses in the pyramid structure match the talent of individuals to titles they have, and it results in a command control.

I'm suggesting is don't match talent to title, match talent to task. What are the individual tasks you have within the organization?

Who can serve those tasks and move toward it?

In fact, I'm a little bit concerned about titles.

Let me show you why. Because a title has the word, maybe you've seen this before, entitled around it, right? When you give someone a title, they can become entitled.

I had an organization where we made someone CFO. We were a small organization, we wanted to look big. We said, you're the new CFO. This person was a good, great bookkeeper, good at accounting, was not a CFO, did not interpret the finances, did not understand mergers and acquisitions, didn't understand that higher level stuff. It wasn't their skill set. But that person came back And she said, "Hey, I was looking at what CFO makes and, you know, in job ads they make, what, $1.5 million? You guys are paying me $75,000," or whatever it was. "I think there's a mismatch here." It's a form of entitlement. I'm not saying that was an entitled person, but they saw themselves as something that they weren't. And I said, "Well, you're not really a CFO. We're just using that to make the company look big." And they said, "No, no, I am a CFO." And I lost a great individual. And I'm not sure what, how their story played out necessarily, but I'm the one who made the mistake. Was signing a big title. So when it comes to fit, we need to ensure that we're getting, call that 5-star standard, a 5-star fit. And how you do it is you need to evaluate people. We're going to talk about a process to go through it. Be very careful about using titles. I know many organizations use that. They do have its benefit, but misassigned titles results in the problem that people will expect that as the standard for them and the compensation, even though they may not be capable. One of the most common needs, and this happens very often in large organizations, is to get managers and they take an excellent technician, someone who's very skilled at a process, sales or something, and say, oh, 'cause you're so good at it, I want you managing it. It's a whole different skillset, managing people versus doing the thing. That person that's now been elevated to this new title fails to fulfill it, but they can't go back because it's seen as going back. And now you set that person up to depart and you see this over and over again. So be very careful about the use of titles.