3.16 - The Psychology of... The Team

Ultimately, the head coach is the mental skills coach. Their bearing on the environment is so vast because of the power dynamic that exists and the way that teams have grown over the last 20 or 30 years.

Hi, everyone, my name is Dr. Pete Olusager and this is 80% Mental, a podcast all about the psychology of sport and performance and just some other stuff that we throw in there from time to time. After taking a few weeks off, we're back to continue this third series of the podcast where I'm exploring the psychology of various types and various aspects of performance. We've had actors, singers, dancers, as well as endurance athletes, strength athletes, coaches and speed demons. But one thing we haven't really considered yet, this series is the psychology of the team. How do we get a group of individuals to start performing as a high functioning team? Do we need to get along to survive? Is it all just about the job at hand? What are the factors that bring people together to work as an efficient unit? I'll be exploring all of those questions and more with today's guests, who I'm really excited to have on the podcast with me. So I've got two brilliant guests to help me out today, Alex Auerbach and Cody Royal. Now, whenever I invite guests onto the podcast, I get them to write a couple of lines just so I can introduce them properly. I'm going to start with Alex. Alex, for your bio, you wrote performance psychologist. Now, this is factually correct, but factually sparse. I mean, you've worked in elite sport, you've worked with Olympians. I believe you work with the military. Alex, can you just give us a little bit of a potted history? Tell us a little bit more about yourself for our listeners.

I'm sorry for being so factually sparse there and I appreciate the opportunity to join you. So, yes, I am a performance psychologist. For the last four years, I've been the senior director of wellness and development for the NBA's Toronto Raptors. So I've been overseeing mental health, mental performance, and what we call off court player development for players, coaches and staff. I've also done some work with elite military units. I did work with army rangers and live demolition training. I've done work with parents, pair jumpers and diffusing bombs. I've worked with Fortune 500 executives and done a little bit of work with musicians and entertainers, too.

Well, fantastic. Well, I cannot wait to hear your insights onto the psychology of the team, how teams work. My next guest, my second guest today is Cody Royal. Now on Cody's bio, Cody wrote coach of head coaches, which, again, is factually accurate. But I would say we can. You can do more. You can give us more than that, can't you? I mean, you've been a coach yourself. You're a blogger turned author, a podcaster. Tell us a little about your move, maybe from Australia to Canada, and some of the work that you're doing at the moment.

Yeah, thanks for the setup. Yeah, that is factually correct. But I'll give you the abridged version of how I ended up coaching head coaches. Yeah, Rules was my sport. I got into coaching very Young. I was 23, moved to Canada when I was 25 and kept coaching. Ended up coaching the national team here for about 10 years, the men's national program. And alongside that was writing books. I'm a writer by trade, and it was more so a journal of my coaching thoughts to get out of my own head. Like an early version of journaling, I guess, turned those into blogs, those turned into books. And a couple years ago, I wrote a book called the Tough Stuff, which was about the emotional toll of head coaching. And I started getting approached after that book by other head coaches to say, can you help me with all these things that you've written about? So it was about identity and sense of belonging within teams. And your biggest critic often can be yourself in a head coaching environment. It's lonely. And so I hadn't found anything about those topics within coaching, and so I went and wrote that book and, yeah, now spend all my time coaching head coaches. I've worked with Alex and the Raptors. I worked in the wnba. I work at the Premier League and with Arsenal, and Yeah, about almost 16 coaches now across about eight different sports. And so I'm. I have to learn about eight different team invasion sports. So I love this topic, talking about teams because I've got about eight of them.

Brilliant. Well, again, I can't wait to hear what you've. What you've both got to say today. So, Alex, Cody, thank you very much for. For coming on 80% mental.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

The other thing I want to point out about Cody is that I asked guests because I want to pronounce people's names. Right. So I always have a. I send a form before the podcast and I get people to write their name phonetically in case it's difficult to pronounce. So Cody Royal, on his form put Royal like the queen.

That's one way to do the phonetics. Cody, good job, man.

Yeah, just in case I couldn't Pronounce it, but I appreciate it.

Well, you know, I've seen how much, how much of a fan of the Royal family you are, Pete, so I thought you would like that one. That was a joke for you.

Well, thanks very much. All right. All right, let's get into it then. First question, we'll start with Alex and I guess really I would like to hear your opinion on what are the defining characteristics of a high performing team.

Well, that's just a giant question to open up with and I'll try to be short and sweet, but I think the way I've broken it down in my work is really thinking about two dimensions of good team. So the first is what we might call task cohesion. It's kind of agreement on goals, alignment about roles and understanding what everyone's responsibilities are and how to get the job done, basically. And so of course, if you want your team to be functioning well, people have to understand what's asked of them and know how to execute. And then there's team cohesion, which is just this idea sort of that we like each other, right? That we get along well, that we understand who one another is and we know how to get the, the most out of each other. And in an ideal world, you're high on both of those dimensions, right? So the athletes understand what's being asked of them. They also feel connected to one another. Each of which sort of drives like supportive behavior and other effective team teamwork behaviors that we'd be looking for as psychologists in the team environment. So I think that's the framework I've used to sort of understand at a foundation, you know, what makes teams successful or unsuccessful and those often point you in directions of places you could intervene. If the team is not performing as well as it could, I think you can then look to other sort of dimensions that would be important, right? So having effective leadership I think really matters for having a high performing team, whether that leader is the coach or another athlete or some combination of the two. I think having a team that's also built around healthy players is pretty critical and becoming more and more critical for understanding high performing teams. Like if you've got, I guess you could use the saying, like you're only as strong as the weakest link. So I think that's becoming, in my view, more and more important and clear and how we need to address that to get the most out of teams. So those would be the things I'd point to as a starting point for talking about high performing teams.

So leadership is being important but also this idea of task and social cohesion. So understanding what the task is and also just getting on with the other people in the team. What does that look like in, like, in practice? Like, have you got any examples? What, what does task cohesion look like? What does social cohesion look like?

Sure. Well, task cohesion, I think the basic way to think about it would be do people understand the playbook and are people kind of bought into what's being asked of them? And it sounds like it's kind of a given in sports, but, you know, at least in the NBA and having worked in the NFL a little bit, I can confidently tell you that regardless of what playbook you've put in place, there are always going to be times when players do not want to run the task that you've asked them to run. And so, you know, that's a, that's an important part of that high performing team is people sort of accepting and executing their role. And so, you know, to look at that as an example, right, it's the degree to which players sort of play their part and do what's asked of them. Not because they're, you know, rigidly following rules or quote, unquote, good soldiers, but because they believe that this is actually what matters to help the team perform well. And so it's not this kind of, you know, forced execution, but a willingness to kind of participate in the task in a way that allows the whole team to be successful and sort of trusting that, you know, if I do my part on these five plays, eventually something good will come to me, which is often what happens if you just execute the game plan the way coaches have drawn it up. And there's a reason we leave all that good tactical stuff to the head coaches. And then on the social side, you know, it looks again like what you'd see with your friends, right? You know, does the locker room have good energy? Do people smile, laugh, joke, talk to one another? How much infighting do you have or not have? Is there a degree of support when, you know a player's not playing well or when someone gets injured? These are all sort of things you could be looking for to see how connected is this group. And again, you can see it in high performing teams, you know, the kind of the dynasty teams of the last several decades. You know, whether it's the New England Patriots in the NFL or the Golden State warriors in basketball, what you see is an incredibly tight group of people. Whether they all like, quote, unquote, like each other or not is somewhat less Relevant, but they do respect each other and they are willing to go the extra mile for one another and support each other as teammates. And I think you see that then elevating what they're capable of over the course of several years and getting just better and better at the way they operate together.

Cody, bring you in here. Alex made a really interesting distinction just then about the difference between a group of people liking each other and a group of people respecting each other. And I think when we talk about social cohesion, we all kind of have this image of everybody getting on and, you know, going to each other's houses for barbecues and all that sort of thing. But what's your take on this? Is this the kind of thing that you see is task cohesion or social cohesion maybe more or less important than the other? What's your, what's your take?

Yeah, so I've been obsessed with teams my whole life. It's why I love head coaching in particular, is because you have this framing of the whole team. And I really do look at it like that. I hate goat conversations in team sports. I don't like any of that. I'm really interested in, well, this question, for starters, what does it actually look like? And one of the things that I've observed is that when you look at dynasty teams, you know, or anyone who's created some sort of juggernaut where they're consistently competing for championships at the top level, one of the things you observe behaviorally is that they seem just as likely to implode as they do to explode.

That's interesting.

So they, they have this kind of, this rigidness to them and they have some characters in there that you wouldn't traditionally associate with, like social cohesion, for instance. Like, they're prickly and they're, they're a bit of a, an asshole, maybe on the court or on the field and maybe even to their teammates.

Yeah.

And so it's not this kind of hand holding kumbaya environment that, that people think. And some of these terms kind of lead us to maybe think it is like that. But then when you observe, you know, groups doing really difficult things and like, winning after winning is so compelling because it's the hardest thing to do. To win and then win again in, in elite sport is by far and away the toughest thing. And I, I think you, you see these teams and this is why the leadership part is so important that Alex mentioned someone has to hold that together, where you've got a chemistry amongst the team that could just as well, go south as it does go north. And you know, so that's one part. And then to answer your real question, like the task and the social side of things, I would agree with what Alex has raised. Like at a foundational level, those have got to be in place and you want high, high execution on both of those. The other thing that I track, I have my own matrix that I use that's called like team mat maturity. And it kind of steps through like the evolution of a team from becoming kind of, you know, emerging and young and they're developing and maybe they can't grasp all of those task pieces that are required at that level or they don't quite know how to interact. And it kind of goes through from developing to emerging to mature to a clinical team. Right. Which is the teams that are competing at the top. And, and what do clinical teams look like both on the field and off the field? And so I think even within task and social, there are elements of like a life cycle of a team that need to be accounted for as well. And then there's regression at the end. Right. Like, and you start the cycle again. But that would be my piece that I would add would be there's, there's a maturity of a group and it's not just age maturity that we're talking about. It's their, their ability to comprehend the tasks and the social cohesion that's being asked of them to compete at that level.

I love the idea that there's always somebody there who's kind of just on the edge. And I'm thinking back to some of the kind of great teams, really high performing teams, the dynasties that you talked about, the Chicago Bulls, the Golden State warriors, the Patriots, and like, yeah, there are always those characters who are kind of just on the edge of being absolutely insane, to use a psychological term. What are the best teams do really well, you talked about that kind of the leadership of somebody there to kind of guide that. What do the best teams do really well? Well, again, I mean, that's a huge question, but I want to see where you go with it.

Yeah, well, I can kind of. This is what that little matrix that again is not informed by or underpinned by anything other than my own observations. But I would say that, you know, they, like the words that I have listed out for a clinical team, is that they're ruthless, they have ownership, so that the team have actually started to own their culture and their leadership. They've taken on a lot of the responsibility from their leaders and they kind of almost self govern and then. And again these are, these are kind of on field things. But one of the interesting things as well is that when you have a really mature team that's quite clinical and, and you know, playing in the top four and competing at the, the highest levels and, and reaching kind of end of knockout tournaments and all those kind of things, their problem solving changes in that a great team often avoids problems as opposed to gets themselves into problems. And so they're able to manipulate the game in a way collectively where they might know either what the opposition is good at and they'll avoid that, or they won't put themselves in situations that they know they can't get out of. And so they have this really heightened ability to manipulate the game within the game collectively with like one Arigo Saki calls it like the one brain or the one mind. And all of them are thinking the same thing at the same time. And so those are the really mature teams. They've got those elements to them that they're quite cutthroat. They scare teams even when they're behind the team ahead of them is like hard. They're coming for us. They've got this aura to them that they've often taken on their own ownership of their leadership and culture. And they tend to avoid problems in the game, avoiding problems off the field. Again, to go back to that kind of prickliness that they often have, maybe a little bit different, but those are some of the, the kind of elements that I look at. And again, that's just one small portion of it. I haven't talked about the locker room or anything, but in terms of the actual outcomes and playing, I look at those elements as pretty consistent.

Yeah. Alex, you're kind of sitting listening to Cody here. What's your take? What do you think about this?

Yeah, I like the dimensions Cody's pointing out and obviously I have my own psychological frameworks for making sense of that kind of collective intelligence or the shared mental models. And I think I'll bring in the psychologist perspective for a minute. But a couple other things I'd look for or think about, and Cody's sort of talking about this tangentially, one would be, you know, very high standards and high expectations. I think the best teams not only believe in themselves, but actually expect themselves to do well consistently, regardless of who they're playing or operating against. And when they show up on the field, you can kind of see that whether that's a, you know, collective confidence or you know, a willingness to support one another. Take some Constructive risks. I think those things show up in the best teams and. And then the other one would be in the more I've thought about this, like, I think this is a challenging dimension to get right, but. And be really curious what Cody thinks about this as a head coach having to navigate some of this. I do think the best teams find ways to make room for both individual goals and the team goal. And I think one of the kind of myths I've been thinking a lot about in teamwork and in particularly challenges coaches deal with is this idea that you have to choose right, you have, you need to give yourself over to the team for the team to be as best as it can be. And I just think that cuts so deeply against natural human evolution and what it means to be a person that it's almost impossible. Like I can't imagine a scenario where someone could just completely give themselves over to the team without at least thinking a little bit about themselves and what they want to accomplish and what it means for them to behave in a certain way, way even in the most extreme scenarios. And so rather than try to do away with that, I think the best teams, high performing teams, have found a way to integrate and synthesize those things and to lean on the team goal when it's most impactful and to lean on the personal goals when it's most impactful. So that you can constantly sort of play with the levers of motivation for each individual performer, but the collective group as a whole.

Yeah, that's really interesting because you do hear that a lot, don't you? Especially in coaching, that coaches kind of have to give everything that I've got over to the team. When you're saying that maybe there's a bit more of a balance to be, to be had there with that. What you mentioned, the role of the psychologist, you know, what is the role of the psych here?

My view is that the role of psychologist is really to support the head coach and moving the goals of the team forward. That's how I have done my work. This maybe brings us down a whole other rabbit hole here as a psychologist and operating in North American sport. But you know, I think in my field, you know, there's been for a long time, and I'm sure you can relate to this, Pete, kind of a struggle to establish the role and value of a psychologist because so much of what we do is invisible, right? It's through relationships. There's not like a clear measurable outcome that you can point to. It's sort of like a Feeling people have, right. I trust this person. I believe that this person can help me. But we can't say, you know, the psychologist adds four points to the scoreboard every game in a way that we can say adding a new head coach changes our overall point differential or changes how well we rank on defense. And so I think that's led to this sort of prickliness, to use a Cody term here, around the role of a psychologist and how they can best help. And I think oftentimes we've been sort of positioned as almost like a safe space that's oppositional to the head coach or something separate from the head coach, where you go to the psychologist and they hold key information that nobody else can know and that's how they help the team. Right. Is there a confidential resource that offers services to the players and has a bunch of observations that they keep hidden in a chest somewhere and don't share with everyone? And I think what that does is really undermine trust and ultimately creates like an unnecessary tension that exists between two very important members of the same team. And so my view, long winded answer here is that my role is to support the head coach and to align my goals with the head coach's goals, which is often honestly the same thing. Right. Like, I got into elite sport because I also want to win, I also want to compete, I also want people to perform well. I just have a special skill set to bring to bear on the same tasks that the head coach has. And so while the head coach is responsible for technical, tactical, skill development, culture development and team building, right. I have a skill set that can either augment that or bring that forward in a different way, or maybe help the head coach move around a specific obstacle. And so I try to align my work around supporting the head coach and what their mission is, because I think that's how you get as far as you can. And so sometimes that means you're doing work without the head coach present, but you're kind of a vehicle for exploring and understanding where might the head coach be getting stuck and what can you do to move both parties forward. It may mean observing the team differently. So Cody sharing examples of what he looks for when he's observing a team. I might look for different things like how players interact with one another when they come off the court or what pre practice looks like or what decisions players do or don't make. That suggests a degree of closeness in the game. And I know coaches look for some of those things too, but we might have different language or frameworks for how we think about that. And so my role is to then find creative ways to surface that information for the head coach so that the head coach can use that information to drive their team forward. And I come from the view again that it's really the head coach's team and my role is to help elevate them in the work that they do with the group of players. And ultimately that rising tide lifts all boats.

Alex and I talk a lot about this topic, so I'm glad you raised it. Yeah, I would agree. I think the. Because it's been such a mad scramble to get psychs in for particularly the mental health angle with athletes and young people. You know, there's been a lot of different organizational structures, but the one that I think you'll see prevail is what Alex is described. And I heard Mike Gervais talk about this as well when on Dan Abraham's podcast, actually maybe last year or two years ago, even kind of his role changing from, you know, mental skills with the players and the players would approach him directly to actually coaching through Pete Carroll at the Seahawks. And so his role kind of changed. And like the coaching group, he was almost this like center of excellence for psychology. And the coaching group would come through him even about a drill, like, hey, I've got this, I've got this tech and tack element within this drill. But you mentioned this, this little psych principle before, like, how do I weave this into this drill? And so they would then go and co design that. The coach would go and deliver it and you know, and they could use that as the cycle because ultimately, and I say this, and I'm sorry if this shocks you, if you're doing a sports psych degree, the head coach, the head coach is the mental skills coach. Like they, they're bearing on the environment and the skill development and the culture development and the leadership development. And you go down the list, their bearing on that is so vast because of the, the power dynamic that exists and the, the way that teams have kind of grown over the last 20 or 30 years is they have the biggest bearing on that. And so to Alex's point, I, I don't see this prevailing kind of the psych is off to the side and they hold information that no one knows about kind of, is it therapy? Is it mental skills? Is it like game development, you know, off in the corner that no one ever hears about that I don't see that sustaining much longer.

Foreign.

This is the 80% mental podcast. I am Dr. Pete Oluseaga and I'm here with Alex Auerbach and Cody Royal and we're talking about the psychology of the team. So far we've talked about task cohesion and social cohesion. What brings teams together, the role of the coach and the role of the psychologist as well in helping teams mature into high performing units. Just before the break, Cody, I think you mentioned the locker room and we hadn't really talked about the locker room environment yet. Something that seems pretty popular in high performing teams at the minute, just in sport and outside of sport, is this idea of psychological safety. And I wonder whether you could maybe explain a little bit about what psychological safety is from your perspective and why that's so important in a team environment or if it's so important in a team environment.

Yeah, this is a hot topic in elite sport at the moment. Well, like, look, I wouldn't be doing Dr. Edmondson justice without using her definition for it. Right? So of course the, the belief that no one, that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes and the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Of course, of course that is beneficial. Like there is just, no, there is just no doubt. But you know, again, it's, it's maybe one of these concepts that is misnamed either through kind of the, the need within literature to kind of link it to something else or I don't know how the term came about, but particularly in, you know, high functioning teams, I think the name has, has not helped it in terms of it. It generates a kind of a lack of understanding and it's almost become this like, guarantee of, of safety and my feelings won't get hurt and that everyone always gets to speak up and question everything and, and kind of. So it took on a life of its own. And then I was, I was hearing Amy talk recently on again, a friend of mine, Brian Levinson, had her on his podcast and she was talking about it's, its need to interact with a lot of different other elements, even within psychology. So they were talking about grit and she's like, you know, psych safety is about creating a learning environment, but it's, it can't just be its own standalone thing. You can't just have psychological safety without a bunch of different elements within a culture or a locker room environment. And so yeah, I think that the setbacks have been in terms of particularly my, my cohort, head coaches looking at it being like, well, there's this, this term that I don't really understand that doesn't really describe Anything, unfortunately. And then it's just saying that everyone can question everything and, and speak up at any time, but we have, we have time restrictions and so what does that mean? Like can. So we just fill our week between our games with just everyone asking questions and disagreeing with everything. And you know, it took on that life but in a well structured, well considered environment. Like of course, gathering information and allowing risk taking and interpersonal risk taking and the ability to say, hey, I don't understand that concept. Like what Alex talked about earlier, being a player being told to run a particular play. He described an option where the player didn't want to do it. The other one that's more prevalent is the player doesn't understand what's being asked of them, but they don't have the confidence to speak up and say, I don't understand that. Particularly at the top level where, you know, you're playing with the best of the best. They're often intimidated even by their own teammates. Maybe don't really understand how they've ended up in the NBA or the NFL. They don't really love the game is another thing that that happens. They've just been really good at it so they kept going with it and, and so, you know, maybe they don't study as hard because really they're not that passionate about it. And so they just don't understand how to run the play. But they won't put their hand up and say, I don't understand that for fear of any sort of retribution or, or worse being kind of shunned from the group and that sense of belonging being taken from them. And so yeah, I know I've, I've gone kind of wide and far on that, but it is a, a vast question. But you know, of course it's beneficial in, in teams and I think you, when we do this show again in a couple of years and we're talking about the, the things that, you know, high performing teams execute on, I think we'll be talking about task cohesion and social cohesion bolted onto psychological safety. It'll be the kind of one I answer from Alex next time.

I was hoping this was going to be the place we argued more. Cody, I was ready for you to like really double down on psychological safety.

Jeremy, I can re, I can re record that bit if you want. I can do the answer.

I appreciate your injection of some nuance, Pete. When you, you sent this question over, I was excited to see this because I just don't believe in this right now. And I think a Lot of it is an extension of what's happened for a lot of terms in psychology like Cody's mentioning, right. You know, growth, mindset becomes like the end all, be all of what everyone needs to work on and mindfulness is going to save us all. And like to a degree there's, there's value in it and then it just becomes like way overdone. And I think that's what we've seen. And I actually think high performing teams need a bit of tension that it's not necessarily like safety that they need in the sense that it's never going to feel uncomfortable or we're going to be okay if we fail. I mean, the reality is like there are real consequences to failure at the highest levels of sport. And so everyone is going to be a little bit afraid of that and you're not going to get rid of that because if you fail repeatedly, you lose your job. If you fail repeatedly, you get a pay cut. If you fail repeatedly, you might not be able to take care of your family. And so to sort of imagine that we could just erase that by creating this great sense where everyone can talk about failing, I think is, is a bit misguided. And it's not to say that the concept isn't important or that we shouldn't try to create a space where people can share more openly with each other. I mean, I think that interpersonal part of this and the interpersonal risk taking has value, but the idea that, you know, it's always okay to fail is just not true. And it's not helpful for people to believe. I don't think at the highest level, it doesn't mean that, you know, you should take failure and like run, you know, to the edge with it. Right. It just means that there are, I think we've often tried to find ways to make failure less painful and to make failure more acceptable. And I think there's value in a group experiencing failure together and sitting with some of the pain and not necessarily feeling like totally safe in those spaces to sort of drive more adaptive behavior in the future. The other part of this that I think is interesting is like, I do think you need maybe it's still psychological safety in its own way. But to go back to Cody's prickly players, right. You do need someone who is going to create a little bit of like interpersonal ruffling of the feathers. I think if you have too much psychological safety, what you get is a bunch of people also afraid to speak up because they're more focused on not hurting than they are on the ultimate objective of the team. And so I think it maybe requires a bit of, like, tension between both creating an environment where people are willing to speak up and also letting people know that, you know, there are still real stakes on the line here and that it's not all rainbows and butterflies if we fail.

And that's why, that's why sport is so interesting, is because we do have that time limitation. Right. Like, it's the, the one thing in sport that doesn't get enough discussion around it is that, to Alex's point, is we have a result and those results are meaningful. But also we have a game in Alex's world right now every second or third day, and there's another game coming. And so the learning needs to be fast and you have to show the learning. And so some of the environments that psych safety gets measured in don't have that repetitious time restriction that we have to deal with. And that's why I think, yeah, we've seen a little bit of a struggle with its kind of implementation more broadly. But, yeah, the core underlying ideas are solid. But I think, yeah, those can also be created through, you know, a good sense of belonging within a team because it does need that. To Alex's point, there needs to be a bit of a ruffled feathers.

Yeah, I think those, those misconceptions about lots of these concepts, like you say, can be really harmful. So one of the things that I've heard that you've kind of spoken to is this idea that a psychologically safe environment's one where we can just screw up and there's no consequences. Well, it's elite sport, of course, you can't screw up. There's no consequences. That's not how this works. But, you know, speaking to the benefits of an environment where people can feel challenged and it's the interpersonal risk, it's the interpersonal, that's the kind of key here. Like, what are the real benefits of an environment like that? What does it allow a team to do differently?

To me, I think the most important piece of that is it allows a team freedom to be honest. And I think in a lot of team environments, even at the highest levels, there is still a fear of being honest. And I think, at least in Western culture, we're kind of like conditioned to first worry about how other people will receive the feedback, which often leads us to cushion the blow or say things in ways that are not maximally useful or accurate. And so I think if you've created an environment where you have some interpersonal risk taking, honesty and service of helping someone gets better becomes a much higher priority than just making sure everyone feels comfortable, which is what less psychologically safe environments ironically would probably have. Right. Is the sense that we should all just sort of make sure everyone feels okay, but we're not actually going to, you know, do the hard things together or say the tough things together. So I think that's valuable. I think Cody raised some good examples around, you know, players speaking up and addressing things that they don't know. And I saw the sort of twist on that, I would add is, you know, this level of interpersonal risk taking I think allows for people as a team to take more constructive risks together. So maybe it's, you know, try something new or improvise or go off script in a critical moment where the team has this degree of trust in one another, that's pretty important. And that goes both between team members, but also between the team and the head coach. That I think if you can have, you know, a real conversation about that and have that interpersonal sense of support and like, you've got me. If I do this, I think is where that dimension adds a ton of value.

Yeah. If anyone's interested in what this can look like, I'd actually point you to my sport, AFL in Australia, where, geez, 20 years ago now, the Sydney Swans were really looking to reinvent themselves. They'd had 75 years of mediocrity, hadn't won, and they took a counterintuitive approach at the time and not looking at just outcomes, they really went and digged into the history of the team and they created team behaviors and vision and values for themselves. And then they started self governing through that lens. And what it allowed for was the rookie to go up to the captain and say, I saw what you did there. And that's not like a, you know, that's not a team behavior that we agreed to when we all set out on this voyage together, like that's not good enough. And that level of like interpersonal risk for a rookie to go up to a captain or a veteran and speak like that, all in the, the in the mission of helping the team self govern, develop trust and like really go to the next level of team dynamics has now become mainstream. They went and won their first championship. Now every team in the AFL, all 18 for them, basically have exactly the same structure. But it was that, that those core foundational ideas that we've been talking about around even taking some risks, just when you've joined the team. Yeah. And be able to, you know, say to the captain, you know, you left your jersey and your boots on the locker room floor and that's not what we stand for here. And it doesn't matter how long I've been here, it's my responsibility to pull you up on that. And it's in, it's not about you. It's in service of us going where we want to go. And particularly in North American sport, that type of environment doesn't tend to exist because there's other dynamics that have evolved, but they can be achieved, you know, with the right leadership and the right people, you know, kind of finding the right culture for the right team at the right time.

Yeah, I mean, I can imagine maybe one or two raised eyebrows as that starts to get implemented. Some, some teething issues. Perhaps. The other thing as well is that the Australian Rules Football, I think, Cody, you and I are gonna have to have a sit down and chat at one point because it's the one sport in the world that I can watch where I have no idea what's happening. I've got zero idea what's going on. So maybe we can sit down and chat about that sometime.

No, we need to, we need to. I'll do you one better. We need to go to Australia and I'll, I'll sit with you at a game. It's hard when you can only see X amount of the field. You can't players are doing, of course, it doesn't make sense. Yeah.

No idea what's happening.

Sign me up for the Australia trip, please.

Let's kind of switch gears a little bit. I want to talk about maybe some of the challenges and I guess we've spoken to this a little bit already, but what do you see in your experiences as the real challenges of, of just being in a team environment, perhaps from that, that leader perspective? Alex, I'll start with you on this one.

I think the biggest challenge I've seen is that, you know, in the NBA, for example, by the time someone emerges as a leader, it could happen really early in their career or a little bit later. But most of them have really no experience leading anything before they get there. And all of a sudden you're in charge of a group of, of 14 to 16 multi million dollar athletes with their own egos and their own agendas and a head coach who wants a specific thing and you're right in the middle and your job is to make everyone work well together. And it's just very, very hard. It would Be hard for anyone who's been the CEO of a Fortune 500 company struggles with these exact same things. And so I think oftentimes there's just really a lack of knowledge about what to even and means to lead and what the most effective leaders do. And so what you often find is these players who become leaders just lead like whoever led them, which may or may not have been effective and may or may not fit the current group that you have. So I think that's one challenge, and I think the second challenge I've seen is and heard from players about is really learning to tailor your leadership to the individual person on the team. If you think about, like the. The research on transformational leadership, this would be that idea of individualized consideration, right? Recognizing that each member of the team that you're leading has different things that they need from you. And it's your job as a leader to extract what that is and figure out how to apply it and use it in a way that helps that person become the best that they can be. But again, that is very, very hard. It requires skills in building relationships. It requires a great degree of patience. It requires stepping outside yourself when you're playing 36 minutes every other night and you're trying to figure out how to connect with and lead the guy who may play 30 seconds to a minute and a half every fifth game, who's scrapping to try to stay in the league. You know, it's just two incredibly different experiences to be having, and someone has to bridge that gap. So on the player side, I think that that can be very challenging. And then on the head coach side, you know, what I've observed both in college and professional sports now is sort of the tension between being a colleague and being a coach, I think is an interesting one. Like, you know, how you feel like you're kind of part of the team and also leading the team and helping the team buy in. And then I think accountability is a really hard one. I mean, we talk a lot about how important accountability is in sport, but again, I don't think people are really taught how to do that effectively. And I think it's actually very. Speaking of interpersonal risk taking, I think it's honestly very scary to hold people accountable. And in particular in the NBA, where you have a history of head coaches trying to hold players accountable, and then the head coach is suddenly no longer employed and the players around for five more years, it's not really creating an environment where the head coach is empowered to actually do the leadership and do the accountability holding in a way that would ultimately make the team successful.

Yeah, it's really interesting what you're saying there because there's that, you know, you're talking about that balance between team goals and individual goals a little bit earlier on and you kind of come back to that again here. It's complicated in elite sport by the fact that. Well, actually a lot of players contracts and salaries are tied up with individual performances. So, you know, the challenge of managing.

That time is the element that we don't talk about enough. The tenure of coaches, contracts. And this is what I mean, like there's so much about time that governs the, the behaviors or the lack thereof. I would actually say, you know what, as Alex was talking there, I was trying to transcribe what he was saying because my answers for head coaches are exactly the same as what he just said. And this is one of the, one of the great ironies of, you know, when you start to do what I do and map the performance environment for head coaches, which hasn't been done, by the way. No one understands what they actually go through and puts them in an environment to succeed. Including what Alex said first, the, the unknowns of the role itself. The, the pathway that we've built for most head coaches in most sports is to just be an assistant coach. So be high, high tech and tack and that's it. And then we go, oh, here are the keys to a multi million, sometimes multi billion dollar organization with 12 departments in the sporting area. You, whether directly or indirectly manage all of them and all the staff and you're going to do all these other things as well. And we trust that all the assistant coaching that you've done is going to set you up for success. They walk in on day one and see what the actual calendar looks like. It's like, what, what is all this? And I'm sorry, like observation doesn't help you. Like having 20 years of observing head coaches do the work is not the work. And so we need better pathways for people who want to go into a head coaching role because it's not setting them up for success currently. And so that would be the first one that I would look to like the unknowns and then same like the individual leadership that Alex talked about for the players is the same for coaches and being able to have a multitude of players from a multitude of backgrounds come to you and looking for different things. One of the big challenges now is global playing rosters and that changes everything, particularly when you're the ultimate leader. Like if you Think about just how different cultures either revere or can address or can't address someone who's more senior than them. Those, those cultural elements come with that human being into your team. And so it's not always easy for people from, let's say Asian cultures or Polynesian cultures to speak up to a leader because their social background, their cultural background says that that's not, that's not how we operate. And so then you've got someone who maybe has never interacted with that cultural group before, bringing in a player from that cultural group and trying to, you know, coach them and lead them in a particular way. That's really only a structure built probably from western backgrounds. And in coaching it's mostly a militaristic background. And so those things are a little bit disjointed at the moment as well. And then, yeah, we talked about, I mean, the tenure statistics are horrifying. Again, time is one of the biggest challenges. I think the, the last stats to come out of the LMA was the championship. The average tenure is 0.8 years. Yeah, come on, man.

I think it's something like if you've, if you've, been, if you've coached 500 games, you've been sacked eight times or something like that. So they're ridiculous. Who'd be a coach?

Yeah, yeah, well, you know, and so there's two dynamics at play. There is one, my role is to set you up for that so we can use that as a framework of. All right, well, if you're going to get fired in 0.8 years, what can we do to give you the best opportunity to get the 0.9th part? But then also you've also got to build out the three to five year plan because that has to become the vision. Still have to have a long term vision, even though you might be on a suicide mission. And so now you're talking about essentially having two plans for a coach walking into any new role.

And by the way, you know, I just, I mean, we're talking about teamwork, right? Like, one of the best predictors of good teamwork is just time. It's time together. Right? And so if your head coach is changing every less than one year and you see this all the time, I think it was recently in the NBA, it was like Kevin Durant played for three head coaches in under 365 days or something. Like how. And I know he's one of the best players of all time, but how is this guy supposed to actually be a good leader, a good Teammate in that circumstance, it's just impossible. And I think he, by the way, did the best he absolutely could. But, you know, I don't know. I wasn't around him, but I'm just imagining as a world class athlete, he's figured that out, but still, it's. It's absurd.

So this is the 80% mental podcast, and I'm having a fascinating conversation on all things team and leadership with Alex Auerbach and Cody Royal. Guys, I want to take a little bit of a break here, and one of the things I'm doing on this series of the podcast is trying to get to know our guests a little bit better. And I've got a little bit of a game to play with you, if you're up for it, that is.

Let's do it. Is this a psychologically safe podcast, are we.

It's a psychologically safe podcast, absolutely. There's no wrong answers here. So basically I've got some sets of questions here. Four sets of questions. Got deep and meaningful. Have you ever. Either.

Or.

Or the last time. And I've got four different envelopes. Envelopes, envelopes. And I want you to pick a number between 1 and 4. You can agree between you. On. On a number between one and four.

One.

Go for the.

We'll go. Yeah.

One.

Okay.

Don't overcomplicate it, you know.

Yeah, it seemed like you agreed on that. Okay, so no number one is either or. So it's quick fire.

Mostly.

Quick fire questions. All right, so again, no right or wrong answers. Psychologically safe environment. All right. No, no.

A bit of prickliness, though.

A little bit of prickly. All right, let's start off nice and easy. First one, Alex. Superman or Batman?

Superman, Cody.

Superman.

Oh, really?

He's actually. Actually got powers.

Yeah.

I mean, Batman's just a dude.

Yeah. An absolute sociopath. All right.

Pw, Are you taking. Are you taking Batman? Is that what you're saying?

Well, I mean, there's no.

There's no wrong answers, but that's the wrong answer.

Reluctantly accepting Batman.

Yeah, I mean, it depends which Batman, I suppose. Michael Keaton Batman, maybe George Clooney. Batman. No. Pen or pencil?

Pencil. Pen.

Okay.

I just got given a really good pen. It's game changer. Like, what's good about it, stupidly? Oh, just the smoothness. Like, not a. Not a biro. Like, not bought from, you know, the store. Yeah, Proper pen. Wow.

Proper quality pen.

Game changer. Yeah.

Yeah.

Would you rather travel alone or travel with friends?

Friends alone.

I actually like that. I actually like the Experience of traveling alone.

I do, actually. I like the experience of traveling alone. I kind of enjoy just hanging out in airports and I went on a. I flew to the ASP conference recently in Florida and I got on a flight from Manchester and I've never had this before. The entire section of the plane was empty. There's me and one other person. I was like, this is awesome. Never ever had that before. I stretched out, got up, walked around.

Yeah, fantastic movies on at the same time.

But no, I get that. I do like traveling alone, actually. Okay. Would you rather listen to a good album or read a good book? Cody?

Book. But. But yeah, album close, actually. So I don't know if you saw this complicated when I was. No, no, no. But when I was. When I was writing. When I was writing Second Set of Eyes, I asked people to send me the best albums. And I mean like this best structured album. Like there's actually some artistry to like, how the songs are put together in terms of like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I got some good. Some good answers. So I was trying to listen to a good album whilst writing a book. So yeah, yeah, not book is first, but album would. Is a close second.

Okay, break from the format then. What is the one album you could listen to without skipping a track? Oh.

This goes back to my. My kind of adolescence, I guess. But Wolf Mother, I don't know if you remember them. Australian rock band. They. Their self titled album.

Wow, okay.

That's a artifact right there. I love it. I. Yeah, I would also be booked, but I. I must say, like, my. My partner has really changed my appreciation of music. So right now we're on a Taylor Taylor Swift world tour for the last, you know, year, just like everybody else in the. In the world. And you could at least like, come to appreciate, you know, the incredible artistry that goes into like a really well crafted album. I think there's something like elite and excellent when you see an artist put something like that together. So the first album I think I listened to from start to finish with the intention of listening to it as a story. Less than listening to it as just like a podcast or, you know, Spotify, like playlist. You know, I'm like one of those guys. My. My wife always makes fun of me, but, like, I just skip around. It's like, no, you have to. You have to listen in order. Like, the whole point is to listen in order. They've done this intentionally. And I'm like, man, you know, I'm just listening. But then that. That changed with Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer prize winning album. Like, I think if you listen to that start to finish, you hear a really neat, painful, but interesting story.

Awesome. I'm glad we deviated from the. From the format. There some interesting answers. Okay, lions or monkeys, what's the meaning behind this?

Is this like a projective. Is there something deep?

I don't know. I didn't write.

Seems like we're. Are we going to get a report after this? And high green, high red. Like, you know, this is how we're.

Getting scored as guests. Cody, right here.

I'll pick my. My son would pick the monkey, so.

Okay, I'll go lion because my daughter would pick the lion.

Breakfast for dinner or dinner for breakfast?

Oh, this just feels like such an easy one. Sorry to go out of order here, but it's always breakfast. It's breakfast for dinner, it's breakfast for lunch. It's breakfast for breakfast. This is like. It's always breakfast.

Always.

You can. I think there's nothing in the world that compares with a world class breakfast meal.

Would you agree?

Are you. Are you familiar with the. The full English breakfast?

No. Please educate me.

So the full English breakfast is sausage, bacon, beans, eggs, toast. What else is in English breakfast? Yeah, Hash browns, maybe some. What's that. What's that horrible stuff called? It's made out of pig's blood.

Gone blank pudding, white pudding, red pudding.

Yeah, yeah, but it's basically like a huge meal that you have for breakfast.

I don't know that I would opt into that. But a good, you know, good brunch spread, you know, something like that. Yeah, you know, eggs, little fruit, little toast. Be fine.

I could eat that all day.

Cody, you're pulling faces at this.

I'm breakfast. I would. I would have the full English in a. In a wrap. Like a burrito. Breakfast. Breakfast burrito.

Breakfast burrito. Okay.

Give me breakfast 24 7.

You guys come down to Tucson, we'll get you some good breakfast burritos. We'll take care of you.

Okay. All right, last one then. Pineapple on pizza or no pineapple on pizza?

I basically exclusively eat Hawaiian pizza, so.

Okay.

I mean, yes, I'm a no, no pineapple on pizza guy for me. I don't have a good rationale for it, though. It's just. Just a preference, just a rule. Yeah, exactly.

Fair enough. All right, well, thank you for playing. I feel like. I feel like I know you a little bit better now. So thanks for playing the game that I still haven't thought of a name for. So this is the 80% mental podcast. And I'm here with Alex Auerbach and Cody Royal. If you are enjoying what you're listening to, don't forget you can subscribe at 80percentmental.com. You can find us on Twitter PMPodcast or on Instagram @80percentmental. We're on threads as well, but I don't really use it, so don't bother going on there. Okay, so back to the topic. We're talking about team and leadership. Just a couple more questions before we finish, really. What do you think about the idea that behind every great team is a great coach? We've talked about that a little bit already. We've sort of alluded to it. But, you know, I'm trying to think of examples of great teams and great coaches and, and I just wondered what your take on this was. I start with you, Cody. Behind every great team is a great coach. What do you think?

I would somewhat disagree only because I think there are just as many examples of the, the, you know, the Bulls and the warriors and all these kind of teams. I think for every one of those, there is probably Spain, World Cup, Women's World Cup. Right. And so, you know, to win the Women's World cup with essentially not listening to your coach and running your own team, you know, is. It's obviously the toughest competition to win. And so the part that I would disagree with, I guess, is every. I think there are certainly some. Some coaches who have won things where they're either not up to it and the team are carrying themselves or. Yeah, but I still think it's most, most that are on some sort of long journey with the team certainly shape the, the way particularly the players play together. Like we've been talking about teamwork. And that's, that's what you hear all the classic examples.

It's.

It's like Ferguson teaching them to all play together and bringing through a group that, like Alex said, had time together, like class of 92, and they, they didn't change the team very much. And then you've got, you know, same with, with the classic Michael Jordan story about do you want to win scoring titles or do you want to win championships? And, you know, I think most have a great coach who is the right coach for that team at that time. And that's one of the nuances of coaching, is that doesn't mean you're a great coach. That means you are the. A great coach for that team at that time. You may not be able to do a rebuild, for instance, just because you can win championships. That might not be what you're best at coaching wise. And so yeah, I took that a bunch of different ways. But yeah, the every is what I would disagree with, but I still think it's most.

Sure. I just want to follow up on that a little bit because I'm sort of interested in the example that you gave there of the. The Spanish women's team. And I wonder if you've got any experience or if you've got any other examples of, you know, what are the. What does a team have to do in that circumstance? Like what. What makes them able to perform well when they're almost fighting against leadership as opposed to having leadership that really helps them to move forward? What are the differences?

Well, I think it's some of what I described before. Like they have a team maturity where they're able to actually take on a lot of the leadership and cultural elements.

The.

They can make the tactics kind of work within whoever's out there. You know, like some of the stories were, you know that I think they had their Ballon d' or winner like on the bench because of some like political things. And yeah, that obviously wasn't what was best for the team. Again, I don't know a lot of the in depth detail about it. I'm just reading what was in the newspaper.

But.

Yeah, I think they, those types of teams who do take on or having some sort of fight with the coach is they have those team maturity elements where they actually understand themselves as a team and can self govern without the intervention of really anyone else. And potentially the, the disagreements with the staff or whether it's the governing body also galvanize a group at a level that doesn't get enough recognition in that it creates a. An us and them and a challenge that they maybe wouldn't have had if they were just kind of fighting against the other teams. They also had this internal dynamic that. That helped spark something that yeah. Maybe help them achieve something that they wouldn't have otherwise as well. So whilst that would never be the recommendation to. To be in conflict with the governing body and the coach.

Yeah.

You know, maybe success.

Yeah, it can be this thing that brings. Brings the players together almost. Yeah. Alex, what are your thoughts on this?

Well, I'm listening. I'd be really curious what you both think. I mean, I'm listening to Cody talk and I guess what jumps out to me is I don't know that behind every great team is a great head coach. Maybe for some of the same reasons Cody's laying out But I do think maybe in the best teams, the head coaches actually give themselves over to the team versus asking the team to give themselves over to them. And I could see that that be maybe one of these things playing out in this team Cody's talking about, where the coach doesn't sort of recognize, like, ultimately the players are out there on the floor, field, whatever, executing, and there's nothing you can do. Right. You can call timeout in soccer, there's really nothing you can do. There's no timeouts. Right. The clock just runs. You can whatever you want, but as soon as the ball is in play, it's up to the players to execute. And I think the best coaches find ways to sort of make themselves of service to the team when they're executing rather than expecting the coaches or rather than expecting the players, excuse me, to execute exactly the way that the coach wants. And I wonder if, like, in this instance in Spain, for example, the players just realize, like, look, there's actually nothing these people can do to sort of control this. Right. Besides, like, pull funding or sort of implode the whole thing, which no one's going to do because they want to see their team compete. And so they've sort of taken control over. And now you've got this, like, resistance point that ultimately, honestly, like, the coach is never going to win. I don't think, you know, almost every organization is going to choose the roster of players that costs $500 million over the head coach that costs $2 million million dollars. It's a pretty easy choice. And so I think. I wonder how much. I'd be curious what you both think. I wonder if that's like, a dimension at play here where if the coach can sort of, like, see themselves as part of the team and give control over to the players and use their knowledge and expertise to help the players make the most of their control. If that's when you get a really, really great team versus a great team comes about by a head coach leading a group. Exactly. To the promised land.

Yeah. One of the things that I do is, and it's actually a different avenue into it, but I implore my coaches to think of themselves as a participant in the team and in the game as opposed to separate from and from my avenue. It's more so for their own performance and their own, like, conceptualization of what a coach is. And the, again, mapping the performance environment that coaches actually go through is they have to think of themselves as a participant because they are. Even if they're just. They can't Intervene, like Alex said. And it's a football coach that can only kind of stalk the sidelines. You are still in the game. There's still 60,000 people at Old Trafford, you know, screaming your name positively or negatively. And so you are participating in that with them. And even though you're doing more, you know, high performance knowledge work as opposed to high performance athletic work, you are still in the cauldron with them. And so, yeah, I, I would tend to agree with that being one of the elements, Alex. And then, yeah, similarly with, I think, you know, coaches who just come with the same game plan and don't adapt any of that game plan once they're hired to the types of players that they have. I think that's a big failure point as well, is that the idea that you don't even shift tactically anything based on who's actually out there, I think that's a big miss.

Yeah, there's a great, great saying, coach the players you have, not the players you want. Right. And I think that that's like, you know, part and parcel of what it means to be excellent. And I think that's what really great coaches do, right, Is they. They figure out who's individually on their team and how to get the most out of that group. And especially at the highest level in sports, in both in EPL and soccer, but also in. Maybe it's a little different in epl, but certainly in North America, head coach has basically no roster control in 95% of the situations. Right. And so to be great at that, you have to work with what you have. You can't fight it or swim against it or push against it too much. And I imagine in any sport you kind of bump up against that limit everywhere.

So what you've both inadvertently done there is you've preempted my final question, which was what makes a great leader? And, you know, you've kind of spoken to a few different things, but let's be really reductive about this. If you could. I know, if you could boil it down to one thing, you know, in your experience, the coaches you've worked with, the teams you've worked with, is there something. Is there something that those great leaders, and I guess this can be coaches or kind of leaders amongst players as well. Is there something that they have in common? Is there something that stands them apart from the rest?

How long are you going to give us to think about this? We have to answer if we have to. If we have to be super reductive and get it down to one thing.

I think both of us looked up then, so you can see how much we're thinking.

Yeah.

Searching.

Yeah. So I, I'll. I'll preface my own answer with saying I'm not a fan of trait theory in leadership.

No, me either. I'm just throwing the question out there because. Just to annoy you. So.

Yeah, actually, I, I will.

I'll.

I'll. I'll do you a solid.

Given.

Given the show, I like, I'm gonna say I actually think they're. They're psychologists. I think if you look at whatever traits they. They show through their leadership or how they set up their instruction and their culture and. And I actually think they're pulling on psychology whether they know it or not. And so that can be your kind of hard lines, you know, old school, 1970s, you know, Vince Lombardi kind of militaristic version of it. Or it can be your, let's lay down in a circle and meditate before the game, Phil Jackson style psychological underpinning. And again, it goes. It kind of ties together all of the things that we've been talking about here throughout the whole show. Right. Like setting up team environments that are, you know, kind of on the edge and prepared to win and adapting your leadership to individuals and seeing yourself as. As part of that because you are. Because you shape the behaviors of the people, people, particularly through the power dynamic that exists, but also because they want to follow you. And like, all of those are psychological principles. And it's not to say I don't think that we all need PhDs in it as coaches. I think you can have. I think Suzanne Brown calls it like natural psychologists, people that kind of understand what they're doing through those lenses. And yeah, I think the best ones that I see, they. They do understand and intentionally go about structuring their team and the activities within it with an underpinning in psychology. Whether. Whether we agree that that's the best practice at the current day and up to date with the. The immediate literature is beside the point. Yeah, I think there is some real intention behind what they do, and they, they do understand how that's going to shape behavior.

Can I steal Cody's answer? Like, is that. Is that fair? Can I just say the same thing?

I mean, I feel like you've had quite a while to think about it now, but honestly, yeah, I mean, you can still. Because it was a great answer. So.

Yeah, it was a very good answer. I mean, part of stealing it is I just don't think I can come up with anything to compete. Compete with that. You know, we've got to have a little bit of that. So I'll. Maybe my way of competing is. I'll give you two. Two answers that I'll try to go towards traits since Cody. Cody was not willing to go there. I think. I think one is recognizing that it's simultaneously both not about you at all and all about you. And what I mean by that is recognizing that, like, you play as a leader, a really huge part in how the overall team functions, performs, and yet you also have to, like, give yourself over and sort of erase your own presence in service of the team. So kind of going back to that, both individual goal and team goal, you have to have a bit of a mindset around how important you are and also the humility to recognize that, like, at certain points when. Especially in sports, when it comes to performance, you basically are at the mercy of the group that's on the field doing the execution. And then the other thing I would say is the best coaches I've been around have incredibly high standards, and it seems, like, really simplistic. And you asked me to be reductionist, so I think that's fair. But you'd be surprised, I think, at just how lax some head coach standards are or just how unclear some standards are when coaches are trying to put a system into place. And so having high standards or high expectations and real clarity around that, I think does make for a really great leader and allows the team to execute well.

Well, Alex, thank you. I appreciate you coming up with that answer. No, guys, I think that is as good a place as any to finish up for today. And honestly, it's been a brilliant conversation. So I just want to thank you both so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Pete. Cody, always good to verbally spar with you for an hour, even if we didn't. Didn't disagree as much as Pete would have liked.

Yeah, I know. I think next time we should really set up some. Some proper disagreement.

Yeah, fair. Fair enough.

Just to see. Just to see where we can go.

Cody, I can't let you go without talking about your new book.

Sure. Yeah.

Because I contributed to it, you know, so you did.

And. And I really appreciate that. And I have a copy to send that I'll mail when I'm in the uk. Next. Yeah. Second Set of Eyes is available on Amazon. It's really about the work that I've been doing for the last number of years coaching coaches. So what is that? You know, really addresses a Lot of the misconceptions that I still run into around how does that work? Does that mean you're coaching the team? Are you telling the coach what to do? Can you save my Coach? What's the ROI on the coach having a leadership coach for themselves, etc. Etc. But yeah, I've lent on. Well, each chapter is based on a particular piece of research and so it's really underpinned by some great work that's being done around leaders in high performance knowledge work and the types of environments that they find themselves in and how we can set head coaches up for more success, I believe.

Awesome. Well, what we'll do is we'll put a link to that in the episode description. So if people are interested in Cody's book, just go to the episode description, have a look and like I said, there'll be a link there to. If you want to, if you want to buy Cody's book. Alex, you got anything?

Nowhere. Anything nearly as in the book too.

Alex is in the book too.

Alex is in the book too. So two reasons to go and check out the episode description.

I am in the book too, and I also want my copy. Cody, next time you're in North America, America, since you're going to Australia tomorrow, you know, you, you let me know.

You, you work for Toronto, you come here.

Is this, is this it? Is this the argument.

You know, not to trust Canada?

That's true. I do. I do know that. But this, that takes us down a whole nother rabbit hole. I will, Yeah, I point people to, you know, my newsletter, I, I write a good bit. I'm nowhere near, nowhere near as talented as Cody on the writing front. But my newsletter is called Perform. You can find it at perform.substack.com. i've written a good bit about teams and leadership and coaches and Cody and I have had the opportunity to do some cool collaborating there too. And now, now I guess it looks like me and you, Pete, we have to do some of that outside of Cody's book to really make it happen.

Awesome. Fantastic. Well, what I'll do is I'll put links to all of your social media profiles as well. So if people want to find out a little bit more about you or if people want to reach out to you, then like I said, go to the episode description and you can, you can find these guys on social media. So just once again, Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show, taking the time. I know it's early in the morning where you are, so I appreciate you getting up early and coming on the podcast.

Appreciate you very much for having me. This was a ton of fun.

And Cody, same to you. Thank you so much. I know you're flying to Australia tomorrow, so I really appreciate you taking time out to come and talk to us.

Always love spending time with both of you. So thank you.

All right, well, this was the 80% mental podcast. And if you enjoyed what you heard, Again, subscribe@80percentmental.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Or you can follow us on Twitter @epmpodcast, on Instagram @80% mental. Leave us a message, leave us a comment, leave us a review. Even better, and we will see you next time. We won't see you because it's a. It's a podcast, isn't it?