Mastering Productivity As a Team

The leader could be anybody. Don't shoot the messenger. I just define the game. You're the one who plays it. Your mind is a great servant, but it's a terrible master.

That struck my interest. I thought, we need to talk about this. My God, we have so many pointless, stupid meetings. I don't know why I go to them.

The big stuff is hard enough. That's kind of dumb. Like, who's supposed to handle this? We actually enjoy losing because it lets us enjoy winning.

You're challenging me here, David. I like this.

Today's special guest is absolutely known as a guru globally in the world of productivity. David Allen created the framework called gtd and millions of people and companies and organizations and teams have adopted this way of being productive. Getting things done is what GTD stands for. Now, I had him on the show maybe a few years back. It was an amazing conversation about gtd. But today we're talking about his latest book, Team Getting Things Done With Others. He's discovered one term that I find very, very enlightening and interesting, which is ambient anxiety. And we identified that I might actually have a little bit of that. And he challenged me on something. I think you'll get a giggle halfway through the show. And I really love being challenged and it forces me to level up. So I know that there's going to be something in this episode that really resonates with you if you want to work better with others. Team being you and a friend, you and a partner, you and your taxi driver trying to get somewhere, you and your child, you and the people you work with, people that you lead, a team that you run, whatever it might be, this conversation is really going to serve you. David's one of the world leaders and he's getting into his later years in life. But I'll tell you what, he is so switched on. We had a chat afterwards about the age that he is and I'm thinking, wow, if most 35 year olds were doing what you're doing and thinking the way you think, man, oh man, they'd be very fortunate. He's a world leader, great thinker, an absolute, just great human. So please sit back and enjoy the show. David, a huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

Bloody to be here. James, thanks for the invitation.

Hey, it's so great to have you back. And it's interesting we've only had three guests that we've invited back, one of those being our former prime minister. And the reason we invited you back is because you bring such value to our listeners that and the book that you wrote many years ago, GTD has transformed many companies, organizations and teams. And we'll talk about that book in a second. But you've just released another book. It's available today for pre order and it's called Team Getting Things Done With Others. So that sparked my interest. I thought we need to talk about this more now than ever. So thank you for taking the time to share.

Yay. My pleasure. Let's have fun.

Yeah, let's have a lot of fun. I'm going to put a link to our previous episode, which was quite some time ago, maybe a year and a half or maybe a couple of years ago. I'll put a link to that so people can go deep with getting things done, gtd, your methodology. But for those that don't have the time to listen to that right now, what is GTD and who's it for?

Well, second thing, who's it for is anybody who's got a busy life, who wants to surf on top of their life and work instead of feel buried by it. So that's. That could be. That could be pretty much anybody these days.

And the methodology itself is simply a curation and a compilation of best practices that I researched and have tested, you know, many, many thousands of people, you know, over the last 40 years. And it's really just it, it's advanced common sense, but it's like, how do you surf on top of your game? How do you keep your head clear so you're focused on whatever you are going to be focused on without being distracted? And so your brain is really a crappy office, but most people are still trying to use their head as their office with your head. It was not designed to remember, remind, prioritize, or manage relationships between more than four things. Otherwise you become suboptimal in terms of how you're thinking and how you're focused. Now that's, don't shoot the messenger. That's now, you know, current cognitive science data. I just uncovered that 40 years ago that your head's for having ideas, not for holding it. And so, you know, a lot of the methodology is how do you get stuff off your mind? Even if it's not finished, you're still committed to do something about it. And I just figured out that algorithm. So that's what getting things done is where you have to just capture the stuff that's got your attention, got to it, clarify exactly what it means, what you're going to do about it. If anything, you need to organize it, where it goes, if it's trash if it's reference, if it's incubate for reminding later, or if it's actionable thing, what's the next action I need to take on it? If one action won't finish it, what's the project that I'm committed to complete? And then you need to make sure you review that inventory. You can't finish it when you think of it. You need to make sure you review that inventory on a consistent basis and keep it current so you feel confident about what you're doing as opposed to just being driven by latest and loudest. So there's a short version of a long story.

Well done. Amazing elevator pitch. I love it. No, I. I have to say, after we chatted last time, I started to think about how I did things, how productive I was, how organized I was, and realized it was a bit of a hot mess. And I started a central capturing system. And you talked about having a place, one place that you can trust to capture all your thoughts. And I just did it on my phone on a note. And I've got different categories in that note, but I've really been solid with that. I haven't kind of strayed from that. And that has helped me a lot with managing my team, managing my time, dealing with priorities, and realizing when I capture something that seemed like a priority at the time. Actually, no, that thing could wait till next month. So it's been really valuable. Very simple methodology, but a very, very powerful one.

Continue.

Thank you. It's all down to you.

So I just define the game. You're the one who plays it.

Right? I'm not a motivational speaker. I'm not out there trying to change people's habits. They have to transform themselves. I just find what the game was and then just trying to put out the game in such a way that people who might want to get a clearer head, more clarity, more focus, more since relevantness in their life could take advantage of it. Whether they do or not, suck with them.

And every high performer, I feel, you know, the clearer they are, the more clarity they have around their vision, the easier it is to move towards their outcome. So having a cluttered mind, holding all these things in their head, it's a disadvantage.

Sure. Yeah. See your head, your head is.

As I said, it's a crappy office. But see, your mind has no sense of past or future, so. And it doesn't have a brain. If your brain had a brain, it would only remind you of something when you could actually do something about it. But it'll wake you up at 3 o' clock in the morning. Ah. Oh my God. I need Catholic or I need a vice president or whatever and you can't do anything about it at 3 o' clock in the morning. That's kind of dumb. Very. So, yeah, it's really just. Understanding your mind is a great servant, but it's a terrible gesture.

And if left uncontrolled to its own devices, I guess it can drive us bonkers.

Well, it sucks. You know, I used to say that, you know, my methodology was helping people deal with overwhelm, but frankly. Overwhelm? You, you deal with overwhelm. You know, if you're overwhelmed, you. You'll do whatever you need to do, good or bad, but try to get out of the overwhelm itself. The real issue is what I refer to now as ambient anxiety. That vague sense that there's stuff out there you told yourself you might woodcock on. Dude. Don't know exactly what it is, but it might be more important than whatever you're currently doing. So whatever you're doing, you're doing to avoid thinking or you're doing it because it's latest and loudest and you hope that's the right thing to do.

Ambient anxiety. I like that. Yeah, it's a beautiful way to describe it. It's interesting. Since we last spoke, I read a book that really transformed my mind and that was Stolen Focus. Have you came across that?

No, I haven't.

I'd love you to read it at some point if you enjoy reading. So Stolen Focus is by Johann Harry and he went very deep with his research around what has happened to humans ability to focus and how distracted we are and what, what's happening with the speed of the news that we're given and the information and what it's doing to our ability to actually focus on the tasks that are most important in it. It really changed the way I interacted with this thing. The old mobile phone, majorly so very much worth a read. I think you'd enjoy it.

Okay, good, thanks.

Now let's talk about your latest book and for anyone that's as we start to talk about it is keen to get it right now I'm going to put a link in the the show notes where you can get it from an Amazon etc but I'm going to encourage you to walk into your local bookstore and grab a copy and support local. So David team getting things done with others. What's the book about?

Well, my co author and I decided about three years ago we Needed to fill the gap, you know, for I've done for 40 years and Ed, my co author for 20 years. Anyway, we've been coaching thousands of individuals 101 about how to get individually productive work. Millions of people out there using GTD and the methodology to improve their lives. And then they go back into dysfunctional teams, dysfunctional cultures that make it very difficult for them to then maintain that kind of focus. We said, you know, because over the years people get my methodology and they go, God, I wish everybody around me got this. It would make life and work so much easier if I didn't have to go gang people in or.

Getting things done. And I never really had the bandwidth or the capability to be able to sit down and figure out how to, how to figure out what that manual needed to be. How would you do that? Because it's so individual in terms of each people's, their, their teams and their cultures in terms of, well, what are the critical elements of that? So Ed and I sat down and have spent the last three years figuring out the critical elements of what works, when things really work. And back to your point that healthy high performance, high performance for sure has produced the results or better than the results by whatever the intended times are that you need to produce those results. But healthy means how sustainable is this? And you recreate this. There are a lot of high performance teams, but if their team disappears or half the people leave, can they recreate that? Do they know what the principles are that made them a high performance team? So teams could be doing all the right stuff. They may not know what those right things are and be able to duplicate them or replicate them. And I think that's what we've done is we've really curated all the best practices we've seen or accumulated. 60 years of working with teams, productivity.

What works, what doesn't work, what's functional, what's good, social. The strange thing about it, James, is that basically all the principles of getting things done applied to teams as critical. It's just. See, you could be clear, James, about your productivity of what you're doing with, have a clear head. I can be clear with myself about what I'm doing and have a clear head. But we get together and then we have to come up with something together. We've now expanded exponentially the complexity of what needs to be managed and how it needs to be managed. Well, is that yours? Is that mine? Who's going to do that? What are you responsible for? What am I responsible for and what's the Purpose of our even getting together. So all the basic principles so we go through in the book, it really is taking all the different principles, the three major models of getting things done, which are the five steps for how do you get things under control, the six horizons of focus in terms of the commitments and then the natural planning model. How do you take a situation or a project and get that under control and focus again? So we take all those and expand those and unpack those for this is what that would look like for a.

Team and that's what a team needs. And while you're sharing this right now, I'm like, this feels like it's so tangible, so accessible, there's no complexity to it. But often we confuse, hey, it looks simple with it's going to be easy. I know it's not, I know it's not easy. Now for the listeners, before we hit record, we were chatting about high performance and I was sharing that my definition is consistently exceeding norms whilst maintaining healthy relationships and well being. And the reason I was so excited to talk to you is I felt that the ethos of your new book was all about healthy high performance. And I know there's a difference because I've met many high performers on high performing teams that have burnout, overwhelm, suicidal ideation, all these things going through crap relationships, awful ill health. To me, that's not high performance. And I'll be honest, David, sometimes when I was at my best and I was winning world championship titles, people on the outside would be pointing, going, he's a high performer. But actually if they had a scratched under the surface a little bit, they would have seen a guy who was 60, 70 hours a week burning himself out, focusing on everything about winning and very little about nutrition, relationships, rest, none of that mattered. I was not a high performer. I was doing things at all costs. So I really love that you're saying this is about healthy high performance. Why is that important to you? Why, why do you think healthy high performance is, is the focus here?

Well, it creates sustainability of the good work a team might be doing, you know, especially these days. Who, who's even on your team who just left. Oh my God. And they're in China or they're in South Africa or they're in Brazil. Oh my God. How do we make sure that the team itself is focused on what it needs to be focused on and that as things change, do we have the flexibility, the agility, do we have the strong capability? Do we have the ability to be able to take new information, new Data and change and integrate that rapidly without again burning people out. Without.

Overdue stress, you can't get rid of stress. You'd never grow or win anything if you didn't have some level of stress. But you want healthy stress. Wow. Here's where we want to go and you know, a lot of what we've done with the book, James, is that we identified not the big stuff. The big stuff is hard enough. Like where do you really want to go with the team, what's the real vision and what you know, where do you want to be? That's great stuff and great stuff to be clear about. But the truth is the mechanics of how you work together as a team, if those are sub optimal, it then exhausts the ability to focus on the cool stuff and to get the really cool stuff done. So what you want to do is you want to eliminate the stuff that's getting in the way of the team being able to focus clearly on where it wants to go and what it wants to do. So you could have, you could have a high performance team that's working people out, but you could also have people doing the kumbaya stuff and not producing anything. Yeah.

You kind of need, you need the combination of both of those. And we use the model which is, it's a pretty obvious model, let's say soccer or football. You know, something where you have, you need to have individuals who have great skill as a, as an individual on the team, but you need them, the team to be able to work together really well. And you could have individuals that are really good themselves, but if they don't know how to work on a team and how to cooperate and collaborate for a team goal, you know you're gonna lose. And the other way around too. You could have a, you could have great processes and a great team coach for whatever, but you got people that can't cheat or can't kick or can't pass.

So you, you actually have to have both in order to have a healthy, high performance team. You need to have both good processes about how you're working together as well as individual capabilities to be able to implement.

I can't agree more. And in the research for the book, plus your extensive experience in the field, are there specific traits that you see in healthy high performing teams?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a bunch. And a lot of them just are doing it in a high performance team. They're just automatically, they have a real purpose, they know what they're trying to accomplish, they have a vision why a success.

They have a culture that keeps supporting that. They also have processes where they know how to practice, they know how to work together with each other and course correct. They know how to pay attention to what has people's attention. But they need to have a, a culture that's open so that you don't let your extroverts run rampant over your introverts, you know, in meetings and in collaboration. So you need openness, you need trust. Trust is a huge one. You need to be able to trust. If I kick the ball over there, they're going to do something with it, the right thing. And so anyway, so building a culture of trust, a culture that actually focuses on the purpose of the team and the vision of success.

Being able to identify the real stuff that shows up that may be in the way of all that, that needs to be course corrected and a process to make sure that that happens, that's safe and open.

And stays flexible and real with whatever the current realities are. You know, I can go on and on, but that's. Those are all traits, I would say of a high performance gene. And you know that, that, you know, the real high performance teams are the ones that have built a culture of winning.

And I forget, I think Ed, my co author quoted somebody that said, look, we actually enjoy losing because it lets us enjoy winning.

I love that that much more.

Anyway, so all those are factors that have to do with it actually. Any of the traits they know how to capture, they know how to clarify, you know, how to organize, they know how to reflect and review on the content, they know how to make sure that there's actionable items that people know what they need to do about that and they trust each other to follow through on that. And they, they, they need to have a purpose and they need to have a vision and they need to make sure that the, whatever their goals are, the short term things that they need to accomplish and develop to make sure the vision happens, that those are clear and reassigned as needed and then they employ roles. Is that yours or is this mine? Boy, that's one of the biggest issues out there. Dysfunctionality is people being unclear about their roles, like who's supposed to handle this? You know, they go to meetings and they talk about all sorts of stuff that nobody decides. Wait a minute, whose role is it to fix this? Then they have to have another meeting.

You know, and meetings and emails are the two crushers for most executives. Yep. And the. But meetings and emails are only symptoms of dysfunctionality. If you're getting too many meetings or Non purposeful meetings or meetings you don't need to go to. You're going, that's, that's a symptom of dysfunctionality. Or if you're getting too many emails, you don't know how to deal with that. You're just letting this barrage of, of input just pile up on you. Right. With things falling through the cracks and you feeling this sort of angst about all the stuff that might be in there that we should be doing something about or might be thinking about or making decisions about. Those are symptoms of dysfunctionality, of the protocols that you need to set up to make sure that you and the team and the people around you are agree upon. Do we, do we use texting for that? What are we using slack for, by the way? And by the way we are. Where are we keeping track of stuff that the team needs to see? And these are again, back to the mechanics of how a team is actually working together. But if those are unclear.

So I guess, you know, we high performance teams have got that.

Figure that out or research or making it work a hundred percent.

And the word team, I want to just look at that for a second. So often we think of a sports team, we think of an organization in a corporate setting as a team, but equally me and my partner, we're a team. And you know, you were your kids. Yeah, me and my son Finn were a team.

You're in a taxi driver.

Yeah.

Anybody that you're in relationship with that, in that relationship, you want to get something done together as a team.

Some people have sort of mistakenly defined teams as only something where everything works. No.

Anytime you're trying to get anything done with anybody else, you're a team. And some of those teams are short lived. Look at movies. Yeah, right. You bring together all kinds of people that never knew each other or whatever and have in a very short period of time have to work together quickly and then dissolve and go in another movie. So there's all kinds of examples that has to happen. So it doesn't have to be something that's long term. It could be immediate. It could be just that. You could have something that, look, the committee I'm on was just good for this afternoon, then we'll dissolve.

So I see this book then being applicable not just to the corporate team, not just to the sports team. This is applicable to any of us that interact with other humans.

Exactly.

It's incredible. So take me through the book. Is there specific sections that we will experience as a reader?

Yeah, but you know, James, the book is Such an intensely full manual of all the different best practices and worst practices that we've seen. And so you can stack on the book, you could open up to any page and go, oh, oh, that applies to us. Oh no, we do that one. That's fine. So it's, there's kind of a pick and choose. The book has a structure to it. We talk about the first part of it's like, what's the problem out there? People disengage with their work and why, how unhealthy that is potentially and what the need for this book is and why it's important now, given the new cars of work that are out there and the hybrid works that out there in the post pandemic world that we're now trying to live in. You know, what are all those issues out there that now had brought up stuff that teams may not have had to deal with before, but do now? We talk about Matt, that's the first part of the book. Then we talk about the best practices. Okay, now here's what a team here, all the different factors that you may or may not be doing already. And so.

We'Re not going to build a training out of this. This is going to be more of a manual for people who are consulting the teams or who on a team give everybody the team the book and then have a conversation. What ranger dull out of this book in terms of what we're doing, what we're not doing, what we could do better, what we could enhance. And virtually every team that we've ever engaged with probably could use some part of the book to do that. And then the third part is basically, okay, how do you manage a team? What does leadership really mean in terms of a team? And as you probably know, you're that's your field is that a leader could be anybody on the team.

It doesn't have to be a hierarchical thing. And we have a whole chapter on the new work and a lot of the new work has to do with, for self organizing teams, self organizing companies where there's kind of getting rid of the hierarchy. Users have rules and expectations and purposes for those roles. And then there's, you know, collaboration, you know, process that is being set up that's not for everybody. But given that I in your currently hierarchical, you know, kind of a situation that you may have inherited or be in, there are ways that even the team itself can function a lot more optimally given the culture that they're in. So we talk about all that stuff and then we, you know, a Lot of it when we refer to the Getting Things Done methodology. But you don't have to be a GED or Getting Things Done advocate to get a whole lot of value out of what this book is about. Because Getting Things Done is just a compilation of best practices anyway.

Stuff. Yeah, of course, you know, that works. And this is, this book is too. It's like. And we made this as evergreen as we could. You still use these things when you fly to Jupiter in 2090. This is, this is this. We've reduced it down to what are the key elements that just go into making it work when you're trying to get good stuff done with other people. And I think we did a pretty good job of that. So we have a whole big appendix about what the heck is gtd. And so I wrote that out so that anybody said, well, it is gtd. Well, they go to the appendix and see, you know, a short version of the Getting Things Done methodology.

It's amazing. As you see the manual on a playbook, people can jump in as they wish and apply it. So let's just dip our toes into the disengagement comment you made. So I've seen some studies come out around the engagement, or lack of around the world that it's pretty shocking. So in the research for the book, what were you finding around the lack of engagement in teams globally?

12. Same stuff. You probably say the Gallup polls and whatever. And, you know, there's a number of things out there that basically say, you know, 60, 70, 80% of the workforce, like.

Not particularly engaged, and that number is increasing. So I guess what we've seen, and the research shows that, you know, in different countries, different cultures, that in hatred factor is higher or lower, but not a big change. But they're not getting better.

Why is it getting worse?

Well, obviously the hybrid work, the virtual work, the globality of the work, the virtualness of the work have sort of shaken a whole lot of the old team structures. I think that's one of the reasons.

That'S happened. And the fact is that there's still old legacy ways of trying to manage a hierarchical organization in teams. It just doesn't work as well, you know, paying that much attention. And, you know, there's a new generation of people out there, the millennials or whatever, they're quite famous now for being really caring that their work makes difference and it's meaningful stuff. You know, in the old days that didn't make too much difference. You just get your paycheck and, you know, work from 9 to 5 and then leave and oh, and just be told what to do the next day.

That's change the lives.

And we'll continue to get rid of the need for agile and strong, unbounding all those great workflow processes. When we talk about the new work, we go back to a little bit of the history all the way from Deming back in Toyota and Japan and all that, then migrated and morphed into things like Agilent, Stone, Six Sigma and those kinds of things which are all great. They all have really good stuff to do, but they're all about external workflow and making those efficient. No waste.

That's somebody in the very big, in the agile world said they would. Well, getting things done is agile for the brain. It's lean to the brain. In other words, no wasted thinking. So it's the thought process and the focus that is really critical. You mentioned, you know, stolen focus. Well, you know, focus is probably the critical elements.

I'm a team, you know, what is its focus? How does it focus? Can it focus?

And that's. And you know, come on, if you suddenly have three people leaving, you don't know who left or what role they had and now what gaps do you need to fill? And you got three new people coming in, ones in Brazil and one's in Norway and one's in China.

And you get them on board fast because they're all bringing their history into the situation. They're all bringing their. And what they think are their standards. We have two whole chapters on standards and principles. On a team, what are your standards?

Standards? Because I hear a lot of people talk about values on a team. Our team values are this. What do you think is the key difference there between having values and standards?

Pretty much the same thing. Standards would be pretty specific. How late can meetings start? Until people feel comfortable. How many digital devices are you allowing people to have in a meeting?

How clear are you about what you decided at the end of that meeting and who's doing what about it? Those are standards and teams already have. They have whatever standards they are allowing right now. So it's not like they don't have standards, they have whatever they are. But are they optimal.

And high performing teams, I guess set higher standards, they hold themselves to a higher standard across all areas.

Yeah, for sure. And they recognize when things are off standard and they don't blame people or judge people, they just go, okay, what do you, what more education do we need to need? Or if somebody can't step up to those standards, they leave.

That's the amazing 100.

And if someone was listening, but also.

You need, you need to model them. Unfortunately, a lot of leaders, leaders think they, their teams ought to work better, but they're modeling crap. Yeah. They're not writing notes in meetings. They're making commitments.

They're not holding people accountable to those kinds of commitments that people make. They're not following up with people in terms of, you know, what they're waiting on to come back from somebody else. They're waiting till it blows up before it shows up.

So a lot of, a lot of it is the modeling.

Standards. And if you have, you know, if you as a leader, James, are keeping those standards yourself. For instance, your standard of catching, which you talked about earlier, you bought that in. You're working around people who aren't doing that.

Are you tolerating that?

And if I tolerate that, that's the standard I get to accept. Then if I accept the lower standard, that's, that's on me.

Exactly.

And you talked about best practices and worst practices. What are some of those key best and worst practices of the, the most high performing, healthy, high performing teams?

Oh, myriads of them. Any one of these things are talked about. High performing teams capture stuff. They have people's attention.

Worst practice is not doing that, just letting things lie or letting things fester around the coffee machine. You know, a lot of people are bitching, going about stuff instead of saying, okay, what do we need to do to fix it?

They could go on and on and on. Lack of purpose. You even have a team because there's a purpose to begin with. That's why there's a team. They should get something done. But oftentimes that purpose has been either forgotten or not reinforced. What exactly? Why are we exactly here? How about purpose for a meeting? How clear is that? We actually work with a client, big, very sophisticated financial firm in New York City. And once we coach them and sort of train them about all this, they, they actually legislated. Then if, if you've been invited to a meeting and the purpose is not clear, you don't need to go.

That's so good.

So that was fixing a worse practice of people just going at meetings because the cow in front of them went there.

We had a Monday meeting.

No dead cows. Must be the thing to do.

I love it. There's so many people listening right now. David going, my God, we have so many pointless, stupid meetings. I don't know why I go to them. So if someone wants to get clear on, hey, we want a company that has a Very clearly defined purpose for each and every meeting. How do we define a purpose for a meeting? What does that look like and how simple can it be?

Very simple. Why are you meeting? What do you want to accomplish by what time?

I mean, those questions can change a culture.

You know, what, what do we want to accomplish by what time?

Because people talk about all kinds of things and suddenly the time runs out. Everybody has to run to another meeting and be another five minutes late to that next meeting.

And.

You know, so it doesn't take very much. Just any other week. Why exactly are we coming together and what would the desired outcome be? Put us standing together. And by the way, what role are you playing in that meeting and why are you there? There's a second aspect to that as well. Lack of role definition is another key dysfunctionality for a lot of teams.

Your vice president of human resources, how do we know you've done a good job?

Well, to.

Your head of finance, how do we know you've done a good job when what's true? So titles don't mean crap if you don't know exactly what you're supposed to be doing and what your role is and what the purpose of that role is. And then whether you're going to do a good job or not.

It's hard to feel like you've done a good job if you don't know what your job is.

And this is interesting. You know, I sometimes meet with leaders, very senior leaders who have teams and a lot of their middle management and so forth, have very, very specific KPIs and very specific outcomes. But the leaders, the senior or the executive leaders don't have any measurables, don't have anything that they've got to report on. And to me I see such incongruence.

There's.

Why should one part of the business have to do it and not the other? So I agree with what you said earlier. The title, as in CEO, gm. It doesn't matter. That's actually irrelevant. Leadership is not title. It's how we influence ourselves and others. So how important is it for all of us to work well together as a team, to get things done together, to know our roles, our responsibilities, but also have measurable, say, KPIs or whatever you want to call them.

Hard to do for knowledge workers.

Easy to do, you know, granting widgets and widgets, we grant. But if you're supposed to wait till you have a healthy organization and your morales is where it needs to be, how do you guys do that? Yeah, you could do surveys and you know, we going up, we'll give it down and see what's direction everywhere. You can create measures about that. But.

Yeah, if it's, if there's something you can measure, make sure there are a whole lot of. There are a whole lot of. There are a whole lot of things you can't measure. It's all going to be anecdotal. You can start to trust that your anecdotal information will be sufficient. Like, you know the talk about.

Yeah.

You talk about meetings and people's roles in them. Let's take it to email for a second. You are a leader or you're a part of a team. And Jim has emailed sue and he cc'd you in. And you look at the email and you go, I don't know why I'm cc'd in. It doesn't mention my name. There's nothing for me to do in action on this, but I've been cc'd in. You're getting 10 of those a day, 20, maybe 30. So what do you think that leader needs to do? Who gets cc'd in? Constantly complains about how many emails they've got to check. What would be the best practice for them?

Well, they want to decide is there information in that email that they need to keep track of. Don't just go drag it into a folder. How are they going to work?

CC should be, just FYI.

Done.

You need to be cc'd on a lot of things you need to know. I want to be aware of what's going on in that thing. So you can't, you can't, you can't make such a hard and fast rule about no ccs. You say, well, why am I getting cc'd on this? It could be because there's information they think you might want to keep or have or be aware of. Can't blame them if that's true. All you have to do is, you know, go email back, hi, guys, I don't need to be CC loaders anymore, thank you very much.

Yeah, complaining and bickering about it. It's getting back to them going, hey, why am I in this? May I be.

Yeah. And also, look, either delete it now, I've seen it. I don't need to keep track of it. It's called delete. That's pretty, that's, you know, R and bu, whatever out here. Or I need to store it because it's information that I could need to have access to maybe in the future, in which case you drag it over there so there's no reason, you know.

James, do you, do you only take out part of your garbage?

Get pretty smelly?

Oh, this is really smelly stuff. I'm only going to take out the really smelly stuff. Everything else I'm going to leave there.

That makes about as much sense as people letting emails pile up. What I decided what to do about them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm one of those guys that my email. You'll laugh. There's 26,000 unread emails. Now, I could hit select all and mark them as red, but it doesn't bother me to see that number. And a lot of them are spam and a lot of them are things I don't need to see. But I know for a lot of people, email zero inbox, zero is an important number they want to get to for their own clarity. For me, I don't buy into it, I don't mind it, but I get back to the emails that I need to get back to and I have a storage system and a flagging system for the key stuff. But there's still things that pile up, that's for sure. So I could improve in that area, David. There's no doubt about it.

Your choice.

What does your email inbox sit at?

0. There we go. Well, it's never, you know, it's never zero, but seldom is. Never more than screenful. Yeah.

I decide. What is it?

On average, you spend on email roughly a day.

Amazing.

And what about the teams you consult to the, you know, large, say the big pharmaceutical companies as CEOs? How much time do they say they're spending on their emails?

Well, logging like you're getting a word.

And then let stuff pile up and whatever. And I just said, you know, do it.

Do it. Control a. Control text and pray.

Yeah, the email bankruptcy, you know, you could clean it all up and you should say, okay, let me just sort it by date and then just create a file over there called emails from March, emails from April, emails from May, and just, just drag them all over there.

I like it. I might get the team onto that.

Well, come on. I mean, your physical mailbox, do you just leave stuff in there?

You're right, it's empty. Empty. Every time there's a mail in there, I'm looking for it, taking it out. What's in there? 100% garbage. Same thing. It's getting close to full. Get that thing empty. Let's get it out for sure.

No difference.

You're challenging me here, David. I like this.

Your choice. As I said, I'M not a motivational speaker. I just define what the game is. It's just a whole lot easier than that. Four people jump, you're in a dark alley. You don't want 2,000 unprocessed emails hanging in your psyche. You need to be clear. You need to not have any of the ambient anxieties. I will suggest that 26,000 emails create at least a small little measure of ambient anxiety for you, James.

And you're just learning to tolerate it.

Honestly, this is good to hear. This is exactly what I need to hear, actually. This is great. There's others probably needing to hear this as well. This is good.

And I want to go back a little bit and talk about lack of engagement. Let's call it disengagement. That's the problem. Now, if we let problems persist, there's going to be major consequences or minor. But what do you think is the problem? If we fast forward 10, 20, 30 years, we're looking at all these teams globally. If we allow disengagement, if we don't get our teams working together and thriving together, what's the consequence for our economies, for our joy for connection? What's the consequence?

I don't know.

I know the consequences. The consequences, personally.

If you don't enjoy what you're doing, you know, you're gonna pay that price of some sort in terms of your health, your stress, your focus, your ability to enjoy life.

So.

People love to get stuff done. They love to accomplish, they love to win. Whatever they're doing, it doesn't have to be a big thing.

Hey, we. We took the dog for a walk and they both peed and pooped. Wow.

Every morning. And it's a celebration. I get it.

You know, it's like completion. We love to complete. We love clean new stuff and we love to actually do stuff that's meaningful. You know, I'm good. Showing a big champion. GTD Dan Pink wrote about this years ago, one of his first books. It's like, what do people really need to feel motivated? They need to feel like there's purpose to what they're doing. Doesn't have to be huge, just has to be, oh, this is meaningful. I do this and then this kind of thing shows up. I'm producing this kind of thing, which is a good thing. Those are. I mean, that's really critical and you need to be acknowledged for that and, and, you know, at least self acknowledged, you know, recognizing what I've accomplished and what I've done. So just being aware of purpose and being aware of why you're engaged in whatever you're engaged in. You know, it's got to be healthy, much healthier. I don't know. On a larger global meta scale. James, the answer to your question, I don't know what difference that's going to make just the world out there. I think, you know, one of the things that's happened, this may be a little bit, kind of, at least a sidebar of response, is the majority of the workforce are going to be subcontractors instead of employees.

That's a trend that's happening. Why? People like to work for themselves. They like to be in charge of their own destiny. They, they, they like the ability to be able to go, okay, now let me go over here, because that's a cool thing they're inviting me to do, as opposed to the legacy that I'm inheriting just out of my status quotas or comfort zone or whatever that, you know, I just want a paycheck, be told what to do.

And I want, I was there, watched the tv, you know, so I've known many people.

And that that's what they did and that was fine with them. But their, the organizations they were working in now are quite different than that.

There's a whole kind of different game up there. And I think, you know, there was this competitiveness.

You know, if you're the only people, if you're the only person who has a word processor and a spreadsheet, you run. Yeah, but everybody's got a word process spreadsheet. So, you know, you better be really good with what you're doing with that. You know, if you want to be competitive, if you want to make sure you have a business that works. So, you know, kind of.

You know, boats rise with the tide or something, whatever that phrase that, that saying is, lifts all boats.

Yeah. And a sinking tide sinks all boats.

So I don't know, there's a. Not answer to your question. Sorry.

I appreciate it.

No, it's fantastic. And you know, I think the whole idea of teams learning to work together and getting things done together, it makes sense. But common sense isn't always common practice. So I see your book as being a solution to allowing us to work better together towards a common goal and whilst we're doing it, have purpose, meaning, and perform above the norms. As in not be mediocre, but be high performers. So if there was one message from this book, just one message that you thought this is what the message is to the reader, what is the one message?

Be conscious of what your team is doing and how it's doing it and is it optimal? Could it be better?

I love that. It's interesting because high performance, it's not a destination. Right. It's a constant striving.

Well, not only that, James, I mean, as somebody, one of the Jim Tesla people who endorse, did an early endorsement of the book, said this is a book to be read over and over because you're going to change. Yeah, it's. Your life is going to change. You don't have the same team that you had two years ago, James, two years from now. And you're not going to be in the same situation that you are now. And you might need to then reconfigure, rethink, re. Look at how we're doing, what we're getting. Because then, you know, the status quo, not. Not staying the status quo very long these days. That's right. I mean, what's the only thing that's new is how frequently things are new.

That's really well put.

So you need to have it. You need to have your ammunition and the team to know that no matter what change happens, identify the formula here and then reconfigure, reconnect, refocus. What I'm doing basically on the change that's coming in. And that's a whole lot of, I think high performance is the ability, you know, the military call it situational awareness. How aware of you of now what the new reality is.

And how willing are you to then reconfigure, reintegrate, rethink, refocus with yourself and the people around you to be able to stay competitive and stay, you know, come on, look at all the organizations. If you just go south because they didn't do that, you know, success was their biggest seller.

Success breeds complacency often. Yeah, you see it with the greats, even athletes, they get to the gold medal or the Olympic thing and they never do it again.

You know, and it's interesting you get an endorsement like that. When you say that about the book, it reminds me of Jim Collins. Good to great. I've read that book maybe four times. Not from front to cover, but little bits of it. And every time I read it at different stages, it applies in such a different way. And I go, wow, I didn't see it that way last time.

Well, getting things done is the same thing. I've had people read the book 10, 15, 20 times.

Every year they pull the book out and read it again because things change and they always see something or recognize something. Because they're different. So they have a different filter to see different parts of the information.

It's really powerful. And your team, what's your team up to? When we talk about your team, let's say off field, not the book, but your family, what's on your horizon? What do you guys work towards? What are you excited about?

Well, we have the launch of the new book. That's big. And you know, we, we built a sort of a global network. We were able to change our company because we found a great partner to take over training and coaching. A couple of partners that takeover training and coaching in the US which was a lot of what our business was. So we, we had 50 people then, we have five now.

Wow.

Because we've become mostly in IP licensing.

We still have some digital products and some digital things that we're doing online. Yeah. And that, that, that's also vital. But there, there are five of us, you know, and me and Catherine, my wife, are two of us. And we have, we have John who's in Santa Barbara, handles sort of accounting and a lot of our digital stuff. And Nadine and Colombia, she does a certification of our trainers and a lot of our community of practice. She manages out of the certified trainers we have around the world and our licensees.

The Monterey area in California, it's kind of like eagle beagle and you know, there's a lot of that stuff that needs to be dealt with and all that. So.

You know, we adopted. Yeah, and we adopted Holocracy like you know, 14 years ago. That's how we let our cultivator. No, we have no titles. We just have roles and purposes as roles. We get together as we need to.

It's amazing.

And you're obviously using this philosophy that you're sharing with others and it's working.

Yeah. And actually, and I wrote that book, you said the principles.

That's brilliant.

Yeah.

Do you see AI having a role in teams getting things done with others? Or do you, do you see it having a negative effect?

You know, AI, AI, you might respect it. So far, I think I'm jury still out.

What going to do with all that. But frankly, I don't think it's anything other than reason, decision, support. AI is not going to buy your mom's birthday present. It's going to give you a lot of good information and perspectives that you might want to take into consideration when you go decide what to buy mom her birthday. Yeah. You see her favorite colors. Here's all the things you bought with her before, you know you might want to consider this. And how old is she? And then people that age probably would like these kinds of things. Yeah, all that. Just, just decision support, which is cool.

For years. I said, look, the ultimate thing is, you know, James, you walk into your office or whatever you use to work in and says, gee, hey, it's three o'. Clock. You usually like a beer at Friday afternoon at this time. Do you want a beer?

I love it.

So it'll know who you are, where you are, what you're doing, what you like to do, whatever. And I think that's, you know, come on.

Nothing wrong with transparency of what all that is.

People. You're still going to have to curate results. Okay. You're not going to. It's not going to. It's not going to replace your brain, not going to replace your decision making process. It's not going to replace your intuition. It'll support a lot of that or give you ideas and perspectives and all that. But nothing wrong with that. I mean, brainstorming is always a great thing to do. And mind mapping and all that stuff is a great way to potentially see options you haven't thought of before. But you still got to decide which option you want to take.

I like it. You have an optimistic, positive view in AI and I feel the same way. I look at it as a tool. It's a tool to support us in our thinking, to challenge us in our thinking, to do some research. I'm with you 100%.

No, it's a good tool. Well, I just want to say a huge thanks, David, for creating the space and the time to meet once again to talk about this amazing new book. And for the listener or the viewer, please go to the link, hit the link, get the book. And if you'd rather support local, which I would rather you do, if you can go to your local bookstore and get team getting things done with others. David, I wish you all the best with the launch and I know that pre orders are available right now and some people might be watching this many months in the future. So just go and get it. The book is live.

Hey, thanks, Terrence. I appreciate it.

Absolute pleasure. Look forward to seeing you again soon.

They don't.