194: How PEERNOVATION Builds High-Performing Teams

If you're using 360 feedback, here's something to consider: Is it actually changing behavior? GSL 360 helps leaders turn feedback into measurable action. When accountability is visible, growth becomes real. You can find details at growstrongleaders.com. Welcome to the Grow Strong Leaders podcast. I'm your host, Meredith Bell, and I interview business leaders who are committed to their own growth and the development of everyone on their team. If you enjoy my podcast, be sure to subscribe and rate it on your favorite podcast platform. Welcome to the Grow Strong Leaders Podcast. I'm your host, Meredith Bell, and I am delighted to have you join me in these wonderful conversations I get to have with leaders who are focused on their own growth and development, and also committed to helping others realize their full potential. And my guest today has been involved in doing both of these things for a long time. He's very good at it, and I would just love to welcome on my show Leo Bottary. Leo, welcome!

Pleasure to be here, Meredith. Great to have— great to be on the show.

Excited to have you here because we've had just some great conversations, and your wisdom and expertise is wonderful. And before I share who you are with my audience, I want to give a shout out to Jacqueline Wales, who is the one who, when she and I first met, and she realized, oh, you, you must meet Leo. The two of you will have a lot to talk about. And in fact, we do. So kudos to Jacqueline for realizing that potential. So let me tell my audience about you. Leo is the founder and managing partner of Peer Novation LLC. He's an award-winning author of 3 books, including this one I have right here, Peer Novation: What Peer Advisory Groups Can Teach Us About Building High-Performing Teams. He's also a keynote speaker, podcaster, workshop facilitator, advisory board member, and opinion columnist for CEO World Magazine. He's also an adjunct professor at Rutgers University. So Leo, tell us a little bit about your journey to the work that you do today with CEOs and peer groups.

Yeah, it is really interesting, right? I think if you asked me 10 or 15 years ago if I would be doing what I'm doing today, you know, I don't think I would have guessed it at all. So it's really interesting. Actually, for me, the journey though started when I was in graduate school. Now think about the fact, to date myself a little bit, as you said, I've been doing this for a very long time. I graduated college in 1983. And back then when you attended classes, you know, you're sitting there and the professor's lecturing and you're taking notes and you're taking quizzes and tests and shielding your paper from the people, you know, next to you and all this other kind of stuff. So fast forward to going to graduate school, which I did much later at Seton Hall University between 2006 and 2008. Now I'm part of a cohort. Now I'm part of kind of a group learning situation, right? And so if you think about it, group learning would have been considered cheating back basically when I was in college. But here I'm in graduate school in this incredible environment where It was totally set up for you learn most from one another. Maybe you learn second from the material that we study and third from the professors. And the professors wouldn't regard that as a slight at all. It's exactly how they set up the program. We had a lot of mid to senior level executives who participated in this program. Each of us had a lot to share and learn from one another, and it was an extraordinary learning experience. So, you know, I graduate in 2008. I was later, you know, given a real gift to actually teach in that program for a number of years, which I did and loved it. But it was in 2010 where I joined Vistage, and Vistage of course assembles and facilitates peer advisory groups for CEOs and business leaders, you know, in more than 25 countries around the world. And people were saying when I first joined, oh, it's going to take a little while for you to kind of get kind of how this works and what we're all about. And I said, I think I got this. I mean, I feel I've done this, I've participated in this. I get the incredible value that people get from one another in those environments. And I've just really been, you know, a student of it ever since and remain so today. And it's exciting and I love the work I do. I work with CEO peer advisory groups and business leader advisory groups, you know, of all kinds. But then I also take what they do so brilliantly And basically help people apply those principles to teams in their organizations to make them higher performing. And given the challenges that teams are facing today, uh, you know, the work is just, um, you know, very timely and it's really effective.

That's so great. There's so much you've said that I want to go deeper with. Let's start though with the word peer-novation. I think you created that word. So tell us what you mean by that so my listeners will get the context for what we'll be talking about.

Sure. So there's a couple of things. First of all, you've got peer, like people like you and me, right? And innovation, creativity realized. It's kind of a combination of those two words. And it's basically what can happen when you've got a group of people who come together who can make each other better and create something larger than themselves, which is essentially what it does. And it's part of really kind of an evolutionary process if you think about it. So we all, have experienced and intuitively understand what peer influence is all about. It's how the people who surround us shape our behavior. In the first book, The Power of Peers, we felt— this is my co-author Leon Shapiro and I— felt strongly that we didn't want to talk about this just in terms of like peer influence plus or something like that. We wanted to give it a name. So we came up with peer advantage. And peer advantage is what happens when we are more selective, strategic, and structured about the people who surround us. So that could be whether you decide to join a peer group, and you're obviously very considerate about who the other members of that group are and how you can give one another value, and you're strategic and structured about how you engage one another. In the same way, when you hire someone to work at your company, you're very selective. You— there's rounds of interviews, there's assessments, there's all of these things that we do to try to make sure that we're getting that right person. But by the same token, we have to be strategic and structured about how they engage one another in a way where we get the most value out of individual and people can create more value for one another.

That's great. So you were also mentioning, you know, things that the CEO peer advisory groups do brilliantly. Talk a little bit about what are those things that they do.

Sure. So to be clear too, I, I came at this when I was at Vistage, uh, just very brief story. I headed up brand communications when I was there. I'm there for about 6 and a half years. In late 2012, a private equity first purchased the firm. And in 2013, I led a brand refresh. And so I'm going around the country and I'm talking to CEOs and I'm asking them like, how do you learn? How do you grow? How do you bring new thinking and ideas into your company? And they tell me things like, well, I read books, I have a coach, hire consultants, I go to events and conferences. Some said they went to executive development programs at places like Harvard and Stanford, but nobody was saying that being part of a peer advisory group was even in their consideration set. So it was kind of amazing. So I was reporting out to the board on the brand rollout, and I was sharing the story with them saying, look, Vistage has been at this since 1957. There are other organizations around the world who've been doing this for a very long time as well. And I said, every one of us is trying to sell a Mercedes to someone who doesn't even know what a car is. So I said, what if in fact we stepped back, not to write some kind of hardcover brochure about Vistage and how we approach this and what we do, But how about actually really taking a thought leadership position and stepping back and looking at how everyone does this? What are the things that really make for the highest performing peer groups? So as we work with organizations around the world, we essentially partnered with them to have them identify for us what were their highest performing groups. And of course, everybody kind of judged that a bit differently, right? Some use net promoter scores, some used just membership survey data, or they used compound annual growth rates for members over a period of time, or retention, or whatever. But we looked at these high-performing peer groups as assessed by the, the organizations themselves. And when we dove into what was it that made them so high-performing, there were two things we really came up with. One is that they had a robust learning-achieving cycle. Now, basically what that means, it's kind of a reinforcing loop of we know that we learn better when we learn together. We— Josh Burson actually did a wonderful piece on this where he talked about the fact that let's say you and I read a— pick a number— 800-word blog post. And if we read it one time, on average, we'll likely remember about 28% of it for about 24 to 48 hours, and then we'll plummet from there. Typically. If we read it a second time, the number goes to 46%. If we, in fact, maybe you and me and others who read that same article, can engage one another and share ideas and experiences and grapple with the concepts a bit, now that number goes to 69%. And the thing about these groups, though, is they're not just a book club. They don't come together just so they can understand concepts more deeply. They actually give one another the confidence, the courage, and the encouragement to apply things they've learned. And then when they apply them, even if there's some trial and error, this idea that they achieve it, they celebrate that achievement, which is so critical to giving you that inspiration to keep learning, sharing, applying, achieving. This is how we grow. This is how we get better. And what's interesting is it's not only something that groups do extremely well, but if you think about the best teams, and oftentimes I will use sports as an example largely because it's more visible, to us than business teams. But if you look at organizations out there, winning organizations that are either winning championships or in the playoffs a lot, you'll find that for them, winning the championship is not their goal. Winning the championship is the reward for a robust learning-achieving cycle. Their goal is how do we get better every day? Because they know if they do that, they'll put themselves in a position to win championships. And it's a completely different mindset. I think it's something that groups do extremely well, and if we can get our teams oriented in that way, it's the same situation. The second thing is we identified that when you learn in a group or team situation, you experience both intentional learning, where we get content, we take it in, and we do whatever we want with it. It's very kind of direct. And then there's the collateral learning, and it's what we learn from how we learn. So when CEOs engage one another and they really get into deep conversations about various challenges or opportunities or things that are in front of them, what do you have to do? You have to be really present. You have to listen well. You have to ask great questions. You have to try to not jump to conclusions, make assumptions, you know, rush to judgment on certain things, right? And the more you build muscles around those things, it not only helps you be a more effective group member, but you will model those behaviors back at your company and you will be a better leader as well. So the tie is really undeniable in terms of those two things that I think groups and group learning is so— where it's so powerful and how it applies to teams that are really, really excellent. And many of the teams that I've been working with lately out in the workplace, these aren't teams that are troubled that need help. These are really good teams who just want to take their game to the next level, and that's what's a lot of fun.

Yeah, I was just thinking about those two areas that you were talking about with these peer advisory groups, and how does that translate to the work you do inside an organization to, you know, existing teams? Not, not CEOs coming from different companies, but people within one team of an organization.

Yeah, so those two things that I talked about that were common to high-performing groups, and I believe to high-performing teams as well. They don't happen by putting a bunch of people in a room and hoping for the best. So this is where we use both for CEO groups, and I use it for teams as well, where we have a 5-factor framework that is also a reinforcing loop, and we have very intentional conversations about each of those areas. So when we actually give people the time to dig deep in each of these areas and really talk about what they want for themselves, kind of what they expect of themselves, what they expect of others, certainly what they would expect of any new person that's either going to join their group or team. The more clarity they have around that, the better. Um, think about, you know, Grammarly and Harris Poll just came out with a study recently that basically said that U.S., in the U.S. alone, companies are losing $1.2 trillion annually because of ineffective communication. So part of what this whole thing does is get people together so they can create clarity for one another. So they're not making assumptions and jumping to conclusions and judging others on false premises and things like that. So these 5 factors are basically, do we have the right people in the room, whether it's in the group or on the team? And what are the behaviors that we believe make for an effective group or team member? What does that look like for us? And this kind of defines our culture. This kind of defines on how we do things around here and what our values are. And what that's all about and the behaviors that are, you know, that exhibit those values, right? And then of course you want a team that has diversity as well. So on one hand, it's kind of how you're the same and the things that you share, but by the same token, you want all the voices around the table that are going to give the necessary perspective, right, to make for that rich conversation and help us make really good decisions, whether it's a group or an organization. Second is psychological safety. Obviously, Google, you know, made this part of our business lexicon through Project Aristotle when they were studying high-performing teams. And the idea is that you can have really great people, and it's a great place to start, but you've got to unlock that talent. And that talent has to have an environment where they feel they can ask questions, admit mistakes, contribute ideas, challenge the process, even challenge the leader if it's for the good of the purpose of the organization. So having them enjoy psychological safety, again, as part of this reinforcing loop, unlocks their ability to be productive. In a group situation, it is very much that the, the more psychologically safe they feel, the better the topics are and the richer the conversation. Same holds true for teams in terms of their ability to get to the heart of what it's all about, because it isn't about who's right, it's about what's right. And they're able to really have that conversation, which makes them, you know, productive. When it comes to accountability, we definitely found that with groups and with teams, it is very much about accountability of team member to team member. So the point being that people really bring their best, not because there's KPIs associated with it or they're doing it to impress their boss, they believe their personal currency and their professional currency with their colleagues depends on them bringing their A-game every time they come in. I work for an agency called MullenLowe, which by the way, the logo, if you check it out, is an octopus with boxing gloves because it can be very challenge-oriented environment. And, but really wonderful because the reality is that people there don't fight against one another. They fight for the best idea. They're there because they believe it's a place where they can maximize their potential as a professional and where they can be part of an ensemble committed to creating the best advertising in the world. And I think when you have that kind of a team committed to one another with a clear purpose, it's pretty unstoppable. And then on the leadership front, you know, we really found that regardless of what model, because we're looking at organizations all over the world, some like Vistage are run by chairs, You know, some are run by members who have, excuse me, facilitation training who may lead the group, or you have whoever hosting the group that month may lead the group meeting. But regardless of the model, what we found made the leader effective and what the leader was responsible for was really that they were a servant leader, that they were there to make the group or the team better. It wasn't about them. Right? Um, that they were a part of the group or team, not apart from it. And this is really kind of key when we think about— and I think it's something you want to ask yourself if you're leading a team out there. If you ask your employees, do they consider you a part of the team or apart from the team? Are you the person on the other side of the desk, you know, pointing fingers and making demands, or are you in it with them in order to accomplish what you all need to do together? And I think it's a real Important dynamic to think about. And then also that servant leader serves as the steward of the other 4 factors, that their role as leader is to make sure that we've got all the right people here exhibiting those great behaviors that we know are important to being a good contributor, that we enjoy psychological safety and we actually leverage it and use it. You know, it's one thing to have the environment, it's another thing to have people dive in and participate in it, that we're as productive as we can be, and that we have that healthy culture of accountability where we are absolutely committed to just being at our best, you know, each and every day. And so that's where these two, um, that's where these frameworks that were kind of come from the world of peer advisory groups, you can see how easily they transfer and translate to high-performing teams.

Yes, absolutely. And, and they're so integrated, you know, it's hard to talk about one without the other. And I like the fact that you you know, followed up that getting the right people with, then you have to have that aspect of psychological safety because they go hand in hand. You can have great people who hold back because of not feeling safe, and it affects productivity, their willingness to be accountable. The— so I love the integration of all of those. I know another fundamental for you is you say the power of we begins with me. So talk about how that relates to everything you've said up to this point.

So, you know, some of this too, in fact, where I started really getting connected to this idea was Angela Myers has an organization and it's largely for kids and it's called Choose to Matter. And it's the idea of recognizing how much we matter. And what's really interesting is we think sometimes all too often that, hey, if we don't make a meeting, well, the meeting's still going to go on without us. What we have to recognize is that it won't be the same meeting. That each of us, when we come and we participate, we're on a team for a reason. We have something to give. We have something to contribute. And I think it's important that we own that. I know you and I talked about this a bit. Where I had a CEO in a group, for example, who when there was a big conversation going on around attendance and he realized that he doesn't attend as many group meetings as he should and he kind of felt this was about him, got a little upset. He stands up and says, look, I make the meetings when I can. I'm here. I'm one paying the dues. You know, he went on and on and on. He finally said, and you know, when I can't make a meeting, I'm the one who loses. And he sits down. So now we've got this moment, right, Drama here, but I wait a second or two and I actually pointed to the person sitting across from him. And I said, and we'll call him Richard just for sake of anonymity, right? And I just said to the member, hey, would you mind giving me 1 minute on what's lost when Richard can't be at the meeting? And the person was like, oh man, Richard offers a perspective that no one else in this room provides. And he went on to detail what that looked like. Then I went to a second member. By the time I got to a third, Richard was welling up in tears next to me. So now, of course, I'm going back over to Richard saying, look, I didn't do that to show you up. I said, if I asked that question about any person around this table, you all would've responded exactly the same way. And the reality is that you know how much you matter at your company. You're the CEO. Now you just found out how much you matter in this room. And he just literally said, I just never knew. I said, I just never connected that in that way. And he said, you know, he kind of laughed and said, I'm not sure I can promise I'll never miss another meeting again, but I'm certainly going to look at it differently from now on. I'm not going to be so dismissive of that. And I remind groups and teams in that you're like a jazz ensemble. You can't remove instruments and expect it to sound the same. And so I think once we recognize that, you know, you can't talk about your team like my team is terrible, but you're on it. Like, I want to know, well, what are you doing to make it better? You know, so we all comprise that, you know, and again, I think about teams in sports and we look at schools and, you know, we think that just some— because someone puts the jersey on that, that team is going to be as great as the team the year before. No, there's new players now. You know, there's a whole commitment and a whole culture and everything that makes teams like that great regardless of, you know, who happens to be putting on the uniform that given year. But I think when we are participating in teams in our company, I think we owe it to ourselves and the people around us to, to bring our best, you know, every day.

Well, you know, as I was listening to you describe that story— I love that story— I was also thinking about what is it that leaders can do to help people, individual members of the team, realize their importance to the team on a regular basis? Because, you know, this goes back to the whole topic of engagement and a sense of belonging. How valued am I? How valuable am I seen here? And that was one of the things that you did for Richard is helping him discover how much he was valued. What can leaders who are leading a team or leading the whole company do to help create and foster that kind of sense of I matter?

Well, they can tell people that they matter once in a while. That would be nice. That would be a good start. I think the other thing I've seen, you know, teams and groups do really well is let's say, for example, that you are on our team and, hey, Meredith's been on the team 1 year today. Okay. Or maybe we do it at 6 months or whatever. Right. And then we say, I would love— let's go around the room and tell Meredith what we appreciate about her and the value that you bring to this team. And you get to hear from everyone in terms of their perspective on the positive influence and positive value you bring to the table. And oftentimes you'll hear things that you may not expect, and it's important for us to hear those things. I think it's particularly important for us all to recognize when we look at millennials and Gen Zs right now, They want that feedback. They want that dialogue. And they want the freedom, by the way, to give us— assuming we tend to be their supervisors or managers— they want it flowing both ways. They want that dialogue. And I think that that's really important that when we can, excuse me, be in an environment where it's much more of a coaching model than it is, hey, let's have an annual review and surprise one another about what we're all thinking after a year. Right? That it becomes much more about dialogue and much more about, you know, recognizing, you know, people for their gifts. And it also maybe brings us to something else that I know we've chatted about offline too, and that's the importance of celebrating in the workplace and how much that means. Because, you know, how often do we have longer-term assignments, longer-term projects that are just— they're— it's just rough, you know? It's just when you go in every single day You know, I tell a story about my daughters and taking them to climb a mountain, and it was their first peak, and we climbed it together in Colorado, and they were probably 11 or 12 years old. You know, we're— it's like a 12,800-foot peak, but it considered more or less, you know, easier than other things we could have done. So it was a good first mountain, but still difficult. But anyway, so we get above the tree line, they're kind of all excited and everything. But the more we climb— if you've ever done this, you can be on a mountain like that and you can look at that peak, and then you can climb for a while and you look back up at the peak and you look like you've made zero progress. You're not getting any closer. And it's really— not only is it physically demanding, but now it gets emotionally debilitating, right? So anyway, I start hearing comments from them like, um, hey Dad, I think the view looks pretty good from here. Or, you know, oh, they're looking at the, um, like a little cloud up near the peak, you know, because we talk about weather and the importance of not getting caught in storms up there. And they're like, Dad, is that weather coming up there? I said, no, I think we're all right, you know. So then they finally just copped to the— they're like, look, this has been great, but we're exhausted and we're not making any— and that's a long way away— we're not making any progress, right? So I said to them, tell you what, I said, give me 15 more minutes, and, um, if we can do that, then if you decide after 15 more minutes of climbing that you don't want to do this anymore, no questions asked, we'll down the mountain. They're like, okay, deal. So there was a bush coming out of a rock, it was rather large, and they didn't know why I was saying this, but I said, let's just kind of see where we are, let's kind of mark where, and let's get started. So we climbed the 15 minutes, of course, to the second, they're like, all right, 15 minutes is done, we're ready to go now. And they, the first thing they do is they point up to that peak and they said, um, you know, look, we haven't made any progress at all, it looks the same, as it did 15 minutes ago. I said, look behind you. And that bush was a tiny little dot on the landscape. And they were astonished at the progress they made. They're like, wow, we went that far? And I said, yeah. And next thing you know, they're climbing another 10, they're climbing another 15, whatever. They summited that day. But what, you know, we often don't realize is this idea of keeping our eye on the prize, if you will, or just staring at that peak is really highly overrated. It's really important for us to look at measuring our progress, right? Appreciating that this is where we were 2 weeks ago, here's where we are right now, and that's pretty good. We're— we have to celebrate that, that progress. And, you know, there are other examples of things like that where I think it's important for us in the workplace to make sure that we continue to celebrate how far we've come as opposed to being, you know, daunted by how far we still have to go. Another brief story is that when I was running marathons, you know, about 20 years ago now, but I did have long run days and did these 20-mile long run days. And every once in a while, you know, I'd get to like the 18-mile mark and I probably just wasn't feeling kind of either physically or mentally kind of up for it. So, I might walk-run those last 2 miles. And I remember explaining to someone, you know, I'd run until I couldn't I couldn't, you know, run anymore. And then I'd walk for a while, and then I'd start again. I'd run until I couldn't run anymore, and I'd walk for a bit. And the person says to me, you know, I get that, and everybody runs into that from time to time. But he said, you're going about those last 2 miles all wrong. He said, what you need to do is pick a spot, run to it, and declare victory, and then walk for a while. And when you're ready to run again, pick another spot way out there and run to it and declare victory. He said, the difference between Declaring and having those victories one after another versus the repeated failures of having to stop because you just can't do it anymore is all the difference in how you will feel during those last 2 miles and the confidence it'll give you next time. Think about how often we can be at work, for example, and, you know, maybe we're, you know, we're working late and, you know, we know we're not going to finish, but all too often we just work until we can't work anymore and then we shut our computer We still don't feel very good. Then we wake up the next morning having to go through the slog of dealing with that the next day. Where how much more effective it would be if we said, you know what, here's my stopping point tonight. And when I get there, I'm going to go, woohoo, I'm going to declare victory. I'm going to do my thing. I'm going to put it away. I'm going to get a good night's sleep. And I'm going to attack that again in the morning. And the difference in mindset there, I think, is enormous. But this is what we can do when we work as part of a group or a team where we can really have good conversations with one another and be open with one another about these kinds of things, we can help each other through, you know, a lot, and we can accomplish a lot together. One thing we didn't mention, I'll just do this briefly, is I felt that in peer innovation it was important to distinguish the difference between what's a group versus what's a team. Because all too often people will talk about a group as some kind of lesser-than version of a team. They'll say, well, they're a group, but they're not really a team. The reality, at least as I see it in the book, is that both are incredibly powerful and very effective. A group, however, is assembled for the benefit of the individuals, right? So if I'm a CEO and I'm in a CEO peer advisory group, I join that group so that I can be a better leader and where I can take things and my organization will benefit. If I'm part of a team, it's usually to create a shared work product. Product or do something as a collective that you can only do together by bringing the various disciplines into the room to create whatever it means you need to do. So, you know, but in either case, we are still helping each other be better and creating something larger than ourselves. And that's really what this is all about. And once we own our part in that and we are actually willing to, um, you know, own the contribution we can make and appreciate and value others and see the very best about the other people on the team, and we can do some really great things.

That's great, Leo. There's so much to unpack. We could talk for, you know, hours. I know there's one thing though that I do want to bring up before we wrap up because I, I just loved it in your book. It was in the preface of your book. I think it was the very last sentence in the last paragraph. You said "with love and kindness in our hearts, anything is possible." I so agree with that. I so love that. How does that statement tie in with everything else you've talked about so far?

You know, all too often it can be easy in the workplace where conflict often arises, and I think 9 times out of 10, it's largely because we are making assumptions and we're not assuming positive intent. And I think that if our default position that we are kind to one another, we are kind to others, and you can be just kind to each other, being good to each other. Think about COVID for example, and I think this actually helped a lot of teams be more productive, quite frankly, and happier. I thought one of the great ironies was that the employees came closer together once you pulled them out of a central workplace. Because the next thing you know, they're on Zoom calls and they are— there's dogs and there's kids and there's craziness around the house and there's, you know, artifacts in the back and all these kind of things going on. And people started seeing one another and they kind of tapped into their shared humanity a little bit. They didn't just see each other as a fellow employee. They recognized that in addition to all of us really trying hard just to get our jobs done, we had incredible challenges at home as well. Whether it was homeschooling kids, and we might have been worried about elderly parents or things like that, you had leaders now who were beginning meetings by asking, how is everyone doing, not just what are you doing? And so when those things— when we started actually caring about one another in that way, we became more understanding, more cooperative, more collaborative, more forgiving. And that goes a long way on a team. So I think if we do approach it from a place of kindness, or Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, who are, in my view, kind of the scholars in the leadership field, will tell you that leadership is about love. End of story. And when you really think about that, it's love of the work, it's love of others, it's all of this. And if we can harness that, we can do some extraordinary things, both as in whether we're a group or a team.

Thank you. What a beautiful way to close. I so appreciate your tying that in. So Leo, I know that many of my listeners are going to be curious to learn more from you and about you. So please let them know how they can connect with you, how they can get a copy of Peer Novation and learn more about your work if they're interested in building stronger teams in the world you were just describing.

Yeah, so they can go to leobottary.com, L-E-O-B-O-T-T-A-R-Y dot com. They can certainly connect with me on LinkedIn, and there's a number of ways that you can kind of test drive peer innovation, if you will. I do webinars all the time. I obviously do workshops and keynotes and all of that, and then the peer innovation book is really the third of three books, the first one being The Power of Peers, which talked about groups and and how and why they're so effective. The second is what anyone can do, which is really not just about formal peer groups, but all the people who surround us in our lives. And if we do a better job of enlisting and engaging their support, we can do those things that anyone can do far more often, which is often the difference between people who are really successful and not. We don't have to be capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound, right? And then of course, peer innovation really deals with how you can take I think some very simple ideas and simple principles, but with some intentionality, get people together so that they can decide for themselves how they truly want to be successful. And I think we love to identify with being part of a really great group and great team. So if you want to do that, feel free and let me know.

That's great. I highly recommend peer innovation if you are interested in building stronger teams. I love those 5 factors, the descriptions you gave. And of course, there's so many wonderful stories couldn't get into today. It's a very rich book, and I really recommend my listeners get that. Leo, thank you so much for being with me today, for sharing your wisdom, insights, and experiences with my audience. I love the work you're doing, and I'm so glad to have you in my world now.

Well, likewise. Thank you so, so much.

Thanks for tuning in to my podcast. Now head over to growstrongleaders.com and check out our two books, Connect with Your Team and Peer Coaching Made Simple. While you're there, download the free facilitator guide to find out how to implement our unique peer coaching system. Until next time, I'm Meredith Bell.