Five Factors and High Performing Teams with Peernovation's Leo Bottary

Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name is Dane Grunewald, CEO of Huddle3 Group, and today I have Leo Bottary joining me. Leo is the co-founder— or sorry, founder and managing partner of Pinnovation, author of a number of books, and, and does some really interesting work and thought leadership around the power of peer advisory groups and innovation within and outside of companies. So looking forward to the conversation today and Leo, welcome to the show.

Pleasure being here and really look forward to our conversation.

Excellent. So Leo, for the benefit of our listeners, could you tell them a little bit about your backstory? You know, how you came to be such a fan of this space of peers working together.

Sure. I spent about 25+ years of my career in corporate communications, really both in the advertising, public relations, agency, and client sides of the business. And, you know, I went to get my master's in 2006. I graduated college in 1983. So I waited quite a bit of time before doing that. And when I went to my master's at Seton Hall University, it was a Master of Arts in Strategic Communication Leadership. We learned in a cohort. You know, we were part of a group that learned together. So of course, graduating from college in 1983, when education was such where anything like that collaborative learning would have been called cheating, you know, basically then, right? So now you've got this whole, you know, opportunity to learn from others. And the whole program was basically set up that very way. It was designed for the students to learn most from one another, second from the material. And if you could pick up something from the professors, great. And they designed it very much in that way. And that's exactly how it played out. I was, um, you know, again, part of a cohort of mid to senior level executives, incredible people, many of whom I remain connected to today, but it was the first time I really saw what peer-to-peer learning could really be all about. And it, and it really inspired my interest in opening Vistage at the time in 2010. Vistage, of course, assembles and facilitates peer advisory groups for CEOs and business leaders around the world. And so the idea of CEOs coming together to help each other, you know, run their companies more effectively and be better leaders and all of that was intriguing. So because of my experience at Seton Hall, I kind of got it right away, really dove into it. And it was actually in late 2012, early 2013, it was the first time private equity had actually purchased Vistage. And in 2013, I led a brand refresh of the company because I was heading up corporate communications and brand and all of that. And I'm going around the country and I'm talking to CEOs and I'm asking them, how do you learn? How do you grow? How do you bring new thinking in your organization? And they all told me things like, well, I read books. I have a coach. I hire consultants. I go to events and conferences. Some talked about going to executive development programs at places like Harvard and Stanford. But nobody, zero, mentioned that being part of a peer group was even in their consideration set. So as I was reporting on the rollout to the board of directors, I basically said to them, look, I want to share this experience I'm having with you regarding my conversations with CEOs, because it's not just us, it's everybody in this space, no matter where they are. Every one of us is trying to sell a Mercedes to someone who doesn't even know what a car is. I mean, really, they just— the whole category was so unfamiliar. And when you look at the number of CEOs and business leaders that could be part of peer groups and those who actually are, it's, I mean, the gulf is enormous. So I think the opportunity here, which is why, and basically it inspired the first book that I co-authored with Leon Shapiro, which is The Power of Peers and How the Company You Keep Drives Leadership Growth and Success, designed not to be a narrative about Vistage and what Vistage does and all that, and some kind of hardcover brochure. The idea was, let's pull back and let's look at this entire category and look at how and why these groups are so effective.

Yeah.

You know, I wrote a second and third book. You know, the second book really focuses on not just formal peer groups, but all the people who surround us in our lives. And if we enlisted, engage their support more often and more effectively, we'd all win for it. But the peer innovation piece of it and where this all leads and I think why we're sitting here today, is what peer advisory groups do so brilliantly can be applied to make teams higher performing in the workplace. Right. And so being able to make this translation, this transition, and, you know, show folks how they can take, again, what makes these groups so effective and they can bring them into their own companies. And I think at a time where teams are struggling in many cases, right, they're I mean, post-COVID, they're all, everybody's just trying to figure out how we work together. How do we more productive? Are we home? Are we in the office? Are we not? What are we doing? How do we make it all work? So it's been a lot of fun.

A lot of fun. And it is, it's exciting the way that you describe taking those learnings of the peer advisory groups at that CEO executive level and bringing it inside of the business and looking at peer groups within a company. I think I think that's something that's been lacking. A number of our guests have come on and talked about some key themes, whether it's psychological safety or having fierce conversations. And ultimately, when you look at just the way organizations have been designed for the last 50, 60, 70 years, there hasn't necessarily been a lot of peer interaction outside of the tasks. And from what I'm hearing from you, your approach is actually let's get away from just the tasks of our jobs and start bringing the conversation forward about how we engage and support each other.

I think the task's about a lot of it. I think when you look at most— well, not most, I'm going to pull that back a little bit. There's a lot of thought leadership articles out there that'll give you the 5 ways to do this and the 7 ways to do that, the 3 ways to do that. These are tips articles. These should all come with a warning label, every one of them, I think. Because part of what— when you're dealing with things like psychological safety and accountability and you tackle these subjects one-off, you've, you've got to put it into a larger context. You have to have a place for this in a system in terms of how this all works. Now, I'm not the only person out there advocating a lot of the things that I'm talking about, but I do come at it from a different perspective. And I think that's what brings value to this whole space. There wouldn't be thousands of leadership books out there if there was only one way to talk about it. One book resonates with one person and inspires them to do great work. It's another book for someone else. And I think it's all incredibly valuable. So whether people want to be looking at Patrick Lencioni or any of the countless other people out there talking about teams, or they want to look at my work with peer innovation, I simply come at it walking through the door of the peer advisory group experience, deconstructing that, looking at what they do well, and people very easily see like, wow, this is very powerful. And it's pretty simple and largely because it's not prescriptive, right? It's much more about frameworks and models and finding the answers within those constructs than it is saying to someone, you should do this, you should do that. This is the right way to do this, right way to run that. When I work with peer advisory groups or teams, I don't assess anything. I just give them a framework for which to have the conversation. That's what's right for you. What feels right? You know, for everyone's personality, for their industry, for how they work, for who they are, all of it. And that's what makes it fun. And I think that's why people who engage in the work with peer innovation recognize how liberating it can be, number one. And, you know, two, I think just how powerful it can be. Simple stuff, but not easy. But it is simple.

Yeah. But it's easier. It's not easy, but it's easier than sticking with the status quo, right? Because some of the meetings that we've been having, particularly through COVID and post-COVID where we're sending people videos or we're saying, here's something to read ahead and let's all get on Zoom. And as one of our guests said, you're on Zoom, you don't know who's doing a Sudoku and who's got the baseball game in the background. I think some of these frameworks, certainly from my experience, because I'm still part of a Vistage group, some of these frameworks at least create some ground rules and create some momentum to be, to your point, working out what works for you and, you know, being very present in that conversation or development of insights that's required to run that meeting.

Sure, sure. But, you know, part of what we ended up doing, look, was we basically, when we were trying to answer the question, what makes high-performing peer groups so effective. And the first question people ask, well, what's a high-performing peer group? What's that look like? And I thought, well, part of what we did in the original research was we allowed the organizations who are running these groups to tell us, who are your high-performing groups? How you measure it? What does that look like? And everybody used different models. Some used net promoter score, some used compound annual growth rate over a period of years, some used member surveys of retention rates, any number of things they did. But what's interesting is when you looked at all these groups across all of the different organizations and some that were even independent, you know, who were kind of using Bill George's, you know, True North Groups model back from 2011 about creating your own groups. Yeah. There were really two things that came about. One of them was that really high-performing groups had what we identified as a robust learning-achieving cycle.

Uh-huh.

Which essentially means, you know, we learn better when we learn together, right? So when, you know, when we learn and we share what we learn, we learn better, right? Yep. Um, um, the thing about it though is that groups like this aren't book clubs. I mean, you guys aren't just all coming together so you can understand things more deeply and everyone feels, you know, more learned, you know, as a result. Yeah. You also give one another that confidence, courage, and encouragement to apply things that you learn. And even if there's some trial and error in the application of that, once you do that— and I actually have added a fifth element to the learning-achieving cycle, largely because I always felt it was part of achieving until over time I realized how few people do it— and that's celebrating.

Yeah, I saw that.

We've got to celebrate those wins, and that's a really important part of kind of fueling us to kind of keep that cycle moving forward. Now, the, the application to teams on this is if you think about the very best teams in business or sports or whatever, and I use sports as a great example largely because it's so visible to us, right? If you look at the top-performing sports organizations out there, pro, college, whatever, who are either winning championships, who are pretty consistently in the playoffs, right? They're just playing at that level all the time. What's funny is those organizations, now they may use different language around this, but the reality is that they don't view winning the championship as their goal. They actually, they look at getting better every day as their goal. And when they do that, they are rewarded with championships, or at least the, you know, they put themselves in a position to play for it. Right. Because you're, you're at that level. I don't, I don't know that it's much different from if you're playing poker and you want your pile of chips to grow. If you stare at the chips, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. You need to spend time on your cards. Yeah, that's the only way that's going to do anything, right?

Good analogy.

So oftentimes we stare at Excel spreadsheets and we do all the other stuff and we're not really focusing on what it takes to make all this happen and how important getting just a little bit better each and every day is. So that's one of the things. And then the other really important component is that when people learn in groups and teams, they experience both intentional and collateral learning. So, as a member of a Vistage group, for example, you'll maybe spend your morning and you have a speaker and that speaker may talk about sales or finance or marketing, whatever happens to be, and you're getting that content and you're taking that content in and kind of in a very traditional way doing something with it. It's more of a passive learning experience in many respects, even if you're actively involved in whatever you're doing. The collateral learning piece comes from what you learn from how you learn. So when you're going through issue processing and you're dealing with whatever challenges, opportunities, and helping members kind of work through these things, what do you have to do? You have to be really present. You have to listen. You have to ask really great questions. You have to do so without jumping to conclusions. You want to suspend assumptions. You don't want to make judgments over things. You know, you have to play what's going to make you a better, a good member is to do all those things really, really well. The thing about it is the more practice you get at that, not only does it make you a better member, but it's going to make you a better CEO. Yeah, because now— and by the way, people are going to start modeling those behaviors, as many CEOs have told me. Now their senior leadership team, they're just being more thoughtful, more empathetic, more open, more vulnerable, more all of these kinds of things that make for good group members. Because when you really think about it, Um, you know, as we talked about, and I think, um, you know, so those were kind of the two major things that happened. And then of course, the five factors that I know you're aware of come into play when you kind of realize that, okay, those are really great signs of a high-performing group, but they don't happen by just putting a bunch of people in a room and hoping for the best. Yeah. So the five-factor framework, which we can get in whenever you like, um, It just kind of creates that construct for people. And then we use that framework for very intentional conversations where we can dive into what people expect of themselves, what people expect of others, and whether it's a group or a team, any new person who wants to be a part of group or this team, we have real clarity on what the expectations are for that ability, for that person to come and be part of it. Yep.

Now, well, I want to jump into the 5 factors here in a minute, but just to pull back onto something that you talked about with issue processing, Leo, and the whole learning and achieving sort of cycle. I think you're really onto something there. And for the benefit of our listeners who haven't done a more structured issue processing exercise, you use the word suspend assumption. So perhaps could you slow that down and just explain for people that haven't done a issue processing in a peer group, how that structure, how that discipline creates the sharing and that intentional learning there too.

Yeah. So in a kind of a classic issue processing construct, the idea is that a member frames a question that he wants to bring to the group that basically may say, hey, how do I grow sales in X area of my company, for example? Whatever the question may happen to be. Now you get into and you get some sense at the beginning. Okay, what have you done so far? You know, why is this important to you? What help do you really need from the group? What are you looking for from us? Yeah. And now you get clarity on that. But as you dive into the issue now, now all of a sudden you may ask a question about something. Someone gives an answer and usually that answer, not by any— not by being intentional about it, is, is not always complete, right? It, it, it puts us in a situation now where if someone did this because of this, we're assuming why they did that. Yeah, we don't ask, we just make the assumption why. Yeah. And so when we get really good at suspending assumptions, we know I'm not going to assume I know why this person did what they did. I am going to ask because so often, right, we found out, oh, that's why you did that. Now that makes sense to me. And you start really getting— so when you get really good at asking clarifying questions, you really, you don't leave it up to, you know, as human beings, let's face it, we are horrible with gaps in information. Yeah, right. If there's something that we don't know and someone hasn't told us, we'll just make it up. We fill it in with our own narrative. We come up with something, you know. And I think what we're talking about here helps people not do that.

Yeah, you know, and I like that. I like that explanation. And I think my current Vistage chair, Mark Murphy, he also has a really good sort of visual analogy to your point right then, not making assumptions, understanding the why. So he'll talk, he'll draw a circle and say, this is the issue. He'll draw another circle and say, this is the person's relationship with the issue. And we need to ask all of those questions so that we can give that person a 360-degree view of the issue before we start jumping into the suggestions. And, and that kind of resonates with me because often I get very fixated on what I think the issue is without understanding other people's perspectives first.

It is. And you know, if you think about it, sometimes people get tripped up a little bit with this whole issue processing, you know, but the reality is that if you had a friend who called you and said, hey, I've got a problem with this, or I'm having a challenge with that or whatever, you wouldn't just blurt out, hey, let me tell you what you think you should do about that, right?

Correct.

You would try to get as much information as possible, not the least of which is, yeah, why do you care about this? How do you want this to play out? Where do you want this to go? I'm not going to make an assumption about what success looks like for you. But, you know, the other thing, and I think this brings up a little bit of a point with what the issue is. Classic example, and I've sat through this twice. I had meetings where a CEO said, how do I know it's time to fire my CFO? Now the CEO proceeded to tell the most god-awful stories about what was going on. Now everyone's respectful and empathetic and listening, but you know what was in the back of everyone's mind is, all right, timeout. We're going to stop the meeting, go out in the hallway and fire this guy like now. I mean, yeah, because you know, I mean, the question wasn't how do I know? I mean, everybody in the building knew it. He knew it. Anyone who you would bump into in the street would tell you in 30 seconds that this had happen.

Yeah.

The real question was, why is it, in the face of a decision so obvious, that you won't pull the trigger on this?

That what is the real—

yeah, you won't make the decision. So now you're not only helping this person in this instant maybe make the decision they need to make, or that they know— they've already knows what the decision is— but now maybe it'll help them be a better decision maker with a lot of other things they're dealing with, because they're getting to some root cause of what is it that you're afraid of? What is it that is really at the heart of this? So, this is where I do think, you know, to your point, and I like the way Mark, you know, creates a diagram there where now we're not talking that issue that we thought we were talking about, that ain't it.

Correct.

What we're really talking about is something inside you that we need to look at. And these are the kinds of things that we get I think when we have a lot of people in the same room who have shared values and an understanding of what it takes to be a good contributing member of the group, but by the same token, bring a lot of different experiences and, and resources and ideas and expertise and all of this kind of stuff. And it's, um, and it's extraordinary when we can be around that, as you all know, um, day in and day out.

No, that's cool. That's a good segue into the 5 factors because you just talked about shared values in the group. But when you think about the 5 factors, so right people, psychological safety, productivity, accountability, and leadership, if I've got those right, how— you said something really interesting earlier about how that can frame the way that you onboard new members into the group and you set expectations on how you're going to work together. Can you kind of unwrap that a little bit more for the listeners?

Sure. And it's not just onboarding, it's just selecting. Is there right out of the gate, is this group even right for you? Are you right for us? What is this going to look like? Because you So the idea of these 5 factors, which by the way originally had some different language and they were kind of set up more as pillars. Today they're much more of a reinforcing loop. So the idea is that it starts with having the right people. That's not the be-all end-all, but starting there really, really helps, right? And that can mean the right number of people for whatever the group wants. It could mean having people that have those shared sensibilities and those values about what does it take to be a good contributor here. And we want to have all the voices around the table that we think are necessary to get that diverse perspective and bring value. Right. So that's kind of where that starts.

Yeah.

Same holds true in a company. We are very careful about who we hire. We have interviews, we have assessments, we have all these things we do. Why? Because we're looking to get the right people there. So I'll kind of go back and forth and make these links because now when you say, so now you've got this great person in your group or you've just hired this amazing person on your team. Imagine bringing on that person with all that talent and all of those ideas and all that and putting them in a situation where, yeah, you're not really encouraged to speak up though. We don't really want to hear what you think. We don't want to hear any of that. So we think about that sense of belonging, right? That ability to be open and vulnerable, that we can ask questions, we can admit mistakes, we can share ideas, we can challenge the process, we can even challenge the leader. And do so for the greater good of why we're all here, because we know our why, we know our purpose of why we're here. I worked for a company called, advertising agency called MullenLowe, who I thought was extraordinary in that, by the way, if you look at the logo, the logo is an octopus with boxing gloves because that's what it used to be like. Oh yeah, that's what it was like to go to work there every day. Very combative. But here's the thing. If you are outside that culture, you think these people are fighting against each other. The reality is that they're fighting for the best idea.

Yeah.

They're really all about the passion and all about digging in and doing that. And what they realize is that the more they do it, the better the work gets. And the reason people come to Mullen or MullenLowe today is because they want to be— they believe it's a place where they can maximize their potential as a professional and where they can be part of an ensemble that they get to self-identify with that creates some of the best advertising in the world. And it's like, how cool is that? Right? So, so we don't take things personally. We don't get into all this stuff because why? It's all about the work.

Yeah.

Good work tells you what a product does and why you should buy it. Great work conveys what a brand stands for and invites you to share in its beliefs. That was Edward Boetsch's quote from— he was the executive creative director there. So when you had set those high standards and you're in it for one another to actually achieve those standards, You can do all kinds of stuff, but that requires incredible psychological safety to be able to do that. Yeah. And the other thing is, when I've been part of groups, there are group members who will say, we have, on a scale of 1 to 10, we have a 10 psychologically safe environment. Great. How well do you think you leverage that environment? I go to each person around the table, 6.5, 7, whatever. And it's like, whoa, wait a minute now. We have all of this value that we're leaving on the table because we're not willing to step in. And what's interesting about that is that about 75% of the time in CEO groups, it isn't that. If I were to ask, so give you an example, if I were to ask them, do you find it easier to share business challenges with the group or personal challenges with the group? 75% of the time they will tell me business challenges, even though that's the reason they're there. And why? Because they feel that anytime they put themselves out in there and sharing a business challenge, it kind of compromises their business acumen with everyone else in the room.

Right.

So, you know, personal stuff, I'll talk about my kid's drug problem or my spouse's spending habits, whatever it may happen to be.

Yeah.

Yeah. No problem doing that. But it is kind of interesting. So that's the kind of vulnerability. But right people, now it's unlocking all of that, all of those gifts. And when you do that, what happens? You start being more productive. We know it from a group experience. Why? Because clearly the topics get better. They get more consequential. You get deeper. You do all these kinds of things. And when you do that, when you've got that psychological safety and you're driving that level of productivity, which then raises everyone's standards of what does excellence look like? How do I need to show up? And how do I make sure that we're all following up and following through with each other, doing what we say we're going to do? Why? Because that's the purpose of of why we're here. And, you know, it is huge. And then on the leadership front, the leader is that servant leader, right? The leader is there not because they're not trying to pad their resume. It's not for their own self-aggrandizement. They're there because, you know, they are all about each member and their success as individuals and their organizations. The other thing that we learned also, though, and I think this is kind of instructive, particularly for companies that are kind of come out of COVID and everything right now, I'm still kind of sorting things out, is we found that the most effective leaders saw themselves as a part of the group, not apart from it.

Interesting.

So the idea, if you think about it less in terms of the leader up here with everyone else on the other side of the table, you know, reporting up and all of that, to being more of a triad where you have the leader who has his or her role, Yeah, the individual member of a group or a team and the group or team itself. Yeah, all having a shared responsibility for whatever result you're trying to achieve in the middle. I don't care if it's how much fun you have, the quality of your work, how accountable you want to be, whatever it is. Everybody owns a piece of it. And when you do, it's far more— it's far less likely you're going to have a blame culture in that situation because you're all on the same side of the table. You know, you're all trying to work together doing this. It isn't about a finger-pointing, negative culture. That leader also, however, in addition to being a part of the group, does serve as the steward of the other four factors. That leader's job is to make sure that we got the right people in the room exhibiting those behaviors that they were enjoying and leveraging psychological safety, that we're using every minute of our time together as effectively as we possibly can. And that the members themselves— I should have brought this up earlier in terms of the accountability I'm really talking about is member-to-member accountability, not member-to-leader accountability.

So, got it. That's really important.

And, you know, and so the leader doesn't— the leader obviously is not the enforcer of member-to-member accountability. That doesn't even make any sense. But the leader can serve as the backstop. Yeah. And one quick example of this would be Let's say that I'm part of your group and I bring an issue to the group. You guys give me some really great things to think about. I say, great, here's what resonated with me, here's what I want to do. And then come next meeting, I should be the one volunteering and saying, hey, let me tell you where I am with this and all. Well, let's say I get a call on, you know, as I'm walking into the room and, and it kind of throws me off my game a little bit. So now that's not on my mind, assuming the other members are somewhat prepared about what happened last meeting and they're kind of in the space, someone might ask me, hey Leo, what about that issue you had last month? How's that going? Oh yeah, thank you very much for reminding me. I should have brought it up, but here's where I am. In the unlikely event that I don't bring it up, now one member asks, this is where the chair gets to play that role of the backstop, right? He plays the role of the backstop, make sure that we don't— what? That we don't lose that accountability piece and we put it right back among the members where it belongs. But the other real issue here is that it's a learning opportunity lost every time that we don't have that kind of follow-through and follow-up. Up with everybody because, you know, think about how many times we can all sit around a conference room table and come up with the most genius ideas and plans and stuff only to have those plans hit real life and kaboom, right? Something, you know, goes awry that we never expected. It's really helpful, obviously, to bring those findings to the group and say, hey, none of us saw this coming, but here's what happened. Note to self for everybody, right? So all of that stuff is really good. And I think when you can get people, groups and teams, and really get them into deep conversations about, in fact, on the team side of things, the cool question to ask team members is, what do you think is the difference between the person who makes it on this team or in this company and the person who doesn't? Because we've all made our share of hiring mistakes. I don't care who you are. If you've hired any number of people, you know, Great resume, great interview, team interviews them, we love them. 3 months later, we're like, why is this going so badly? What's going on here? And usually, it's not that that person was necessarily so terrible, but they couldn't work in this culture. So like the MullenLowe example, if you all of a sudden someone kind of pulls it off in the interview, but you realize that this person takes everything personally that happens—

They're not going to fit.

Forget it. They're done. They're toast. They're never going to survive. They'll hate it. And it'll be god-awful for everybody. So when you start asking team members to say, what's the difference between making it on this team and not, they will tell you. And presumably you've got good players on your team, you know, and they'll say, you know, and with a little pride, right? Here's what it takes to make it in this company, right? And they'll talk about what that is. And that's their expectation of themselves. It's expectation of everyone around them. And certainly the expectation of anyone who wants to join this team, you know, or in the case of your group, you want the privilege of sitting around your table with you and Marc and your members? You're going to have to chin the bar to be up here, or this is probably not going to work out for us. But having that clarity is really important because clarity obviously gives people that understanding about what it takes. And it's only fair because they may not be there when they first joined the group, but now they have something to aspire to and they're really super clear about it.

I like that last point too, Leo, because I think when people do join groups, you're not, particularly if they haven't been a part of an accountable, psychologically safe group in the past, they're not going to walk straight in and nail it.

They don't even know what they've joined. Correct. They really truly don't.

Yeah. And that goes back to your point on the Mercedes. People don't even know what the category is. So when they come in, whether that's a CEO peer advisory group or a group internally, which I want to come back to in a minute, they get to see the model behavior and they get to sort of learn up, level up.

Exactly. Yeah.

No, that's very cool. And this triad of yours, now that you explained it that way, it means a lot more to me. I think I read a quote somewhere on your website that talked about the power of we starts with me. So is that that bottom left corner of the triangle, the fact that I need to be accountable to my role as a team member? Is that where that really comes from?

I think it's everybody. I think everybody owns their role. If you're not the leader of the team, it's very likely that you will either be called upon or have to step up and be a leader in your team. Right? So yeah. So everybody kind of, I think, plays in that.

No, I like that. So everyone leads at some point in some function. I like that.

Sure. Cool.

Which ties in well to sports analogies too. You might be the guy that just came off the bench because your star quarterback was injured and you have to make that throw or make a dash to get over the line.

So you're leading in that moment and you got to be ready to be called in at any given moment in time.

That's it.

And that's, that's a, you know, that's a, that's a thing, right?

Yeah.

No one's giving you all the time. Like sometimes you do. Sometimes someone's hurt before the game. But when it happens in the game, next thing you know, next play, you're up, you're in. It's like, okay, here we go.

I always hated coming off the bench for that reason. It was way easier to be psychologically ready and focused with the warm-up, knowing what position you were playing from the very first kickoff, but coming off the bench is hard. And we require that of so many of our team members now, particularly post-COVID. We're calling on people to do a whole bunch of different stuff.

So that is, you know, last but not least too on this is after you have these conversations and you get this kind of clarity, what's then is really important to develop an action plan. That we look at, well, what does this look like and how do we go about getting there? So, if we actually, which I've done with a lot of groups and teams, we'll conduct a gap analysis. We'll say on a scale of 1 to 10, where are you in these areas? And then we look at, okay, great. If we're an 8.5, what's it going to take to get to a 10? And what are the action items required in order to make that possible? And by the way, even when you start getting toward 10, you also are looking at everything. Right? Because it's like any relationship, anything like the moment we start feeling like, oh, I got this and you check off the box, you don't have to think about it anymore, is the day you have to start thinking about it. Because once you take your eye off that, you know, it's just, it's not good.

And I would imagine in a high-performing team, which is really the last question I wanted to dive into when you come back internally, but in a high-performing team, if you've got an action plan, if you're starting to to score 10s, the reality is that you're achieving things that means that your company's growing or you've now got a new product to bring to market or marketing's blowing up and you've got all of these new customers to serve. That's going to be creating tension and more gaps in the business. So it is a dynamic existence.

Yeah, very much. And by the way, the better the teams are, the more opportunity they see for themselves to get better. Very few teams are ranking themselves a 10 in anything over any period of time, at least. You know, it's— there's always that dynamic, which is why we use a peer innovation scorecard that we make available to groups and teams so that you can actually know where you are at the start of any meeting. And at the end of the meeting, you say, hey, how well did we, you know, exhibit the behaviors of the right people as we see it today? And that could be, well, maybe if we're missing 4 people, that's one of the things that we need to do. Or if we, you know, we were like, you know, we could have been more this, we could have been more, you know, whatever. And you at least identify what those things are and you kind of pledge to be a little better at them next time. And you can at least see where you're faltering or where you're getting better. You know, which is, I think, very much the case when people start being more intentional about it and they know much more specifically what to be intentional about.

And so that's cool because that's what I was going to ask you. When you bring this into a company and when you're using it to drive performance and innovation within a team in the business, it sounds to me from what you just described with the peer innovation scorecard that you're really looking more at how we're operating as a team by those 5 factors than, you know, how much did sales lift this month and did, did this IT project get finished on time? Is that fair?

It is. But first of all, there's a lot of things that affect numbers that have nothing to do with whether the team is high performing or not.

Yeah.

And there, and most of the time when the team is higher performing, they're going to put itself You're going to see it in the numbers. I mean, there's just no doubt about that. I mean, it's, you know, and then when you, when you don't see it in the numbers, it becomes obvious what, what are some of those external factors that are causing, you know, any of that lack of performance. But, you know, I think all of that stuff is just really about how do we be intentional about it? How do we pay attention to it? How do we have clarity about what we want, you know, for ourselves? And I think the more that leaders kind of include people in that process, this is why this tends to be a very empowering, unifying exercise when it isn't, you know, the leadership. Back when, you know, I first started business, you know, and I was at this large public company and the executive leadership team would go off to the Greenbrier for like, you know, a week and then they'd come back with all of their wisdom and all the tablets and all the stuff that they would, you know, impart onto everyone else and be like, all right, now I don't feel like doing that, you know? And then the next thing it would all fall apart.

Yeah.

You know, and not always getting input from the people closest to the customer or getting everyone's buy-in on this. And, you know, talk a lot about this is where the power of peers becomes really crucial because what happens vertically in your company, right? Our SVPs, VPs, directors, managers, that's all well and good and important. Structure for a lot of organizations. But by the same token, if you're not paying equal or more attention to the horizontal dynamics, to those sense-making conversations that take place about what we're doing and what we're not and what our alignment engagement is around those things, that's an issue.

Yeah, it is an issue. That is an issue. No, I really like that point on empowerment and on horizontal sort of team engagement. I think it's in the world that we live in today, which is fast and digital. And to your point, customers are very distributed now, more so than ever before. It's critical.

Yep. And what people are seeing too, I'm working with more organizations now also who understand the importance of having groups work alongside teams in their company. So if you define a team as working on that shared work product or whatever that collective has to be, and groups about the individual benefits, of what a group brings, right? So, when you're in your Vistage group, that's about you as individuals being better leaders and going to your companies to do better things, right? So, it's a very different dynamic. In business, we typically don't have practice, right? It's game day every day. We're showing up, we're doing all this. So, to be able to have groups that can help us be better individual contributors so when we go to our teams, we can be stronger players, that really helps a whole lot. It also gives people, you know, a really good opportunity and a forum to talk about things that only they know because they're all living in it, right? And they can, you know, share with one another, with other people who can really understand what it is we're talking about. And how do we make something better? How do we address, you know, maybe an issue that we're having? And so the groups can be great. I think about, especially when you look at learning and development, I find that there's some learning, very little development, and it does nothing to do with the quality of the content or anything. It's just there's no mechanism to be able to take what people have learned and operationalize it. There just isn't. You learn this stuff. I don't care if it's microlearning or going off to an offsite or whatever it happens to be. You get sucked back into your job and those things become forever separate. And so, this is where groups can say, "Hey, remember that thing we just all did together? What was the one thing that if we work together and applied it tomorrow would make a difference for our organization?" That doesn't even happen. So, imagine if just that happened, let alone the deeper things that I think could occur. Yeah.

No, that's really cool. I mean, we've shot through 40 minutes, Leo. I've had a wonderful time. It's interesting because I've been in and around a lot of this material for 6 or 7 years. The fact that your work kind of had its genesis in looking at these advisory groups, CEO advisory groups, and yet you've now evolved it into these frameworks, models that everyday businesses and teams can apply. There are a lot of key takeaways here around what works for you, how do you make it fun, what's right for you. I noticed down here as well, the importance of celebrating, the importance of empowering the team. But that last point really captures my eye, which is, and ear, which is, you know, that if you have a group alongside a team, you probably put that learning achieving cycle into play much more frequently with just little steps regularly.

Talk about something simple. When you put cross-functional work teams together, In most cases, if I say to the marketing person, hey, what does the finance person do all day? I don't know. I have no idea. He says no to me all the time, stuff like that, you know, and they laugh. But this is what I mean about information gaps, right? Because I don't know this person. I don't know their job. They say no to me. Now what? I start coming up with my own ideas about why they say no.

They don't like me.

Oh, kinds of crazy stuff, right, that we do. So, something as simple as people getting to know really what each other does so that when they need help, they actually know who to go for it. You know, I mean, oftentimes people, their reluctance to asking for help isn't always because they see it as a sign of weakness, you know, because I think, I would like to think most of us recognize it for a real act of resourcefulness. But you need to know who to ask about what.

Yeah.

And, and so getting to know one another better professionally and personally opens those doors. So it's a lot of fun.

No, I love it. So if people— if our listeners want to come on and talk to you about peer innovation and how your group can come in and help them, you know, achieve some of these positive steps, how do they best find you, Leo?

So, uh, you know, reaching out to me and, um, through LinkedIn is an easy one to do. Um, of course they can go to my website, um, leobottary.com, and they could schedule time with me. We could sit, you know, and have a virtual conversation for 30 minutes just to get a sense of what your particular needs are and whether this is kind of the right fit for you. You know, I'm really careful about that. I make sure— but by the way, if someone shares something with me and says, here's kind of what we're dealing with and I'm not the right person, fortunately, because I know a lot of other people who do a lot of this kind of work, I'll just at least give them some recommendations of some people that I think would be a better fit. I'm far more inclined to do that than I would be to take somebody's money in something in an area that I'm not— it's not in my wheelhouse, you know. So yeah, feel free to, to just use me as a resource in that regard as well.

No, that sounds great, Leo. Well, thanks again for sharing your work and, uh, for doing the great work that you do, and I appreciate you taking time to join us today.

Oh, thanks for having me on the show. Thank you.