L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Swear by Your People: Achieve Peak team performance through enduring relationships

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

Who knew that swearing can be beneficial? Not just for individuals that swear, but for teams who swear among–and by–each other. Those who feel a sense of safety and trust around their colleagues tend to have greater success in their collaborations… and they’re more likely to swear because, well, they’re comfortable with each other. As a leader, how can you get your team feeling that level of cohesion and rapport (swearing optional)? Speaker, leadership team performance expert, and author Adrian Baillargeon is here to offer his insight from 20 years working with corporate and sports clients all over the world.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential and building a culture of learning in your organization. Today on the show, we have Adrian Balardian. Adrian is a speaker, leadership team performance expert and author with more than two decades of experience working across Canada, Australia, and Africa. In addition to supporting leadership teams with global corporate clients such as

Biogen and DoorDash, Adrian has worked with organizations in the sports industry, including Major League Baseball and Cricket Australia. Beyond that, Adrian has a healthy roster of clients in the education and not-for-profit sectors as well. A master at helping teams achieve peak performance, Adrian draws on his experience with both the C-suite and professional and amateur sports in his book Teams That Swear, By Each Other, Not About Each Other. Today, Adrian and I discuss his tried and true frameworks for leadership development, teamwork, and conflict resolution. Let's dive in. Adrian, thank you so much for joining. It's a pleasure to have you on. Thanks, Tyler.

So one thing that fascinates me about your experience and your inspiration, if you will, is that you don't just draw from the corporate world and the conference room, the boardroom, if you will. You refer a lot to sports. In fact, the foreword of your book, Teams That Swear, is written by, I believe, a former Australian cricket champion. Is that right? Is she a cricket champion? Yes. Belinda Clark is arguably one of the best females ever to play the game of cricket. And actually, about three months ago, there was a statue unveiled at the Sydney Cricket Grounds, which is the holy ground of cricket in Australia. And she's the first female to actually have a statue put up in her honor. Anyway, I think it's so fascinating that you draw both from sports and from the corporate world. As I said, I'm a former athlete myself, a former organized athlete in high school, but I still play lots of sports. And I think it's so important to think about teams in the context of athletics, because those are the teams inside the major corporations, even though we keep our eye on what's going on and, you know, big tech and all the major industries that are pumping out the products that we use. We don't really observe too closely what those teams are doing until, for instance, books like yours come out. And it's always kind of

after the fact. But what we see a lot of in action is sports teams together. So I think that's a great place to draw some inspiration. And one thing that I can say for sure from personal experience is that there's a good amount of swearing going on on sports teams, probably more so than when you're looking at corporate teams and teams within a company or an organization. So why don't we start there? What's the deal with teams that swear? Where does that title come from? And what does it ultimately refer to? Well, the inspiration for the title, Tyler, it came from a colleague of mine. So I'm originally from Canada. I moved to Australia. And one of the things that I observed just in general, but also in the workplace is that

I felt there was more swearing happening in Australia than my experiences back home in Canada. And I had a particular colleague who is absolutely fantastic, great teammate. And that teammate loved to swear. And not necessarily in a negative way, but in jokes or if they're frustrated with something would let out a well-timed profanity. And I would give that teammate a little bit of a hard time. I'd say, geez, you've got a potty mouth.

And the person would say, no, no, no, it's good for you. And this swearing is actually, you know, it's quite cathartic and it feels good. And I said, no, it's got to be an Aussie thing. And so we would have these debates in a fun way going back and forth. And me being a little bit stubborn, Tyler, I thought, I'm going to check this out. Like, is swearing actually good for you? And if you actually Google and look at it or do some research into swearing, the research behind it is phenomenal.

And what I found out was that we were both right. So Aussies do swear a lot, the top five countries in terms of countries that swear the most. So I felt quite good. I was like, okay, I got something right. But my calling was also correct when they said swearing is good for you. So there's research out there that has been conducted that's demonstrated that when you're doing exercise, particularly in terms of strength training, when you're doing it, if you actually use swear words, you can actually, you have higher levels of strength is what the research showed. Another piece of research indicated that it increases your pain threshold. So they had participants stick their hands in these ice cold buckets of water,

and they would time how long they could keep their hands in. And they would have a group talking about, hey, don't say anything while you do it. Let's see how long they could keep their hands in and they would have a group talking about hey don't say anything while you do it let's see how long you can keep your hands in it they would get them to say a neutral word while they kept their hands in it and they would time them and then they would get them to choose their favorite swear word and hold their hand in that bucket and see how long and lo and behold the research showed that the people that used a swear word while holding their hand in that ice bucket could keep their hands in there up to 40 seconds longer. So it's really interesting to see that the power of that word, but probably more related to what we're going to talk about today in terms of teamwork and team development was another piece of research was done in Australia and New Zealand. So maybe there's

something to do with these countries that swear more that validates why they swear. But what they found, a piece of research was done looking at different types of teams and wanting to identify why do some groups of people work better together than others? And one of the underlying factors, and this won't be a surprise, was that the teams that performed better had higher levels of trust. But the research wanted to dig in more. It's like, yeah, we know that, but what creates that trust? And in the teams that performed the best, one of the observable traits that they were able to identify

were that the people were swearing more in front of each other. So the teams that performed the best had the highest levels of trust, swore more. And the people behind the research suggested that because people felt like they could drop their guard, they could be authentic, they weren't worried about being judged by their teammates if they dropped a swear word, that actually created higher levels of trust. And it created more trust because people could truly be themselves. It's an interesting way to look at swearing. And I have to be honest with you, Tyler, I'm not a huge advocator in general for swearing. Like if my kids swear, there's a little bit of a stern look giving to them. So I'm

not necessarily suggesting that if you want your teams to work better, just start swearing all the time and things will get better. But it does demonstrate that the power of your words can have a big impact on how you work together. Yeah, of course. I'm excited to dive into this because I am a big advocate of swearing, being a Bostonian myself. And if you've ever seen any single movie about the boys from Boston, of which there are many, you know, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and all those guys, all we do is swear. And basically, anytime I'm not recording for this exact podcast, I'm shouting the F word. So that's not entirely true. But anyway, I'm excited to dive into this and talk about team dynamics and how we can

improve our teams as leaders and as groups. Another statistic that you start off with in the book is general engagement. So the Gallup poll, which I'm sure we're all familiar with, you cite in 2017, pretty low levels of engagement globally in terms of people at work, you know, what percentage of workers are actually considering themselves engaged. I think the numbers were something like 41% for America, for North America, Australia was around 30, 32, or something like that. And then Europe was down around 15. I think Western Europe was down like 15%, really low percentages of engagement, however, they sort of define that word.

I checked the most recent poll from Gallup this past year for 2022. The numbers are almost the exact same. So despite what we've experienced in the pandemic, we had a bit of a dip right after that. And it's kind of come right back up to where it was in 2017. We are experiencing the highest level of engagement globally, though other places have seen increased engagement, I think like Asia and some other spaces. 22% though globally, that's basically saying that one out of five workers are engaged. That isn't a great number. And I'm curious what your perspective on this is. Have we just hit engagement equilibrium here? We're going to dive in deeper to this question of how engaged can someone really be in a

company when the question of purpose comes up and aligning one's purpose with their organization's purpose and their societal purpose. But can we be more engaged? Can leaders of teams really do more to increase that number? Or have we just kind of hit this overarching equilibrium that we just can't get much better because of the state of things. What do you think? Yeah, I think what you think about those numbers, we're at the highest of maybe where we've been. It sounds good, but we're talking 20 to 30%. That's not good enough. And I say that not in a way that's looking down on organizations.

But if I'm an employer, if I'm a leader, if I'm the owner of a business to say that only one in five of my people are engaged, they like being here, they like doing what they're doing, I feel like I'm letting them down. That's how I would feel. I think when it comes to teams and people and engagement, it's fascinating because as humans, we're social beings. We've relied on each other for survival from day dot. Whatever book you subscribe to, whatever day dot looks like to you, but we've had to work together. So we've had hundreds, thousands of years to get this right, but it's still hard. I'll share a couple of other statistics with you, Tyler. The Journal of Family Psychology reported that families that have adolescents in the households, and I suspect if there's any listeners out there that have adolescent children, they know what I'm talking about. But families with

adolescent children on average experience six conflicts per day. So this is what the people that mean the most to us, that we love the most, we still struggle to get being together right. In the workplace, Salesforce did a study a few years ago, and what they found is that 99% of their leaders said that open collaboration and open communication are critical to business success, but only 51% of them said that they actually do it well. So I think it's fascinating that we've got this data

that suggests we're at a certain stage. We know that working together is extremely important, but we still don't have it right. And my view is this, it's because we're complacent when it comes to working together. So to give you some insight to what I mean by that, Queen's University did a piece of research and surveyed a number of project managers from around the world. And what they found is that three quarters of the people they surveyed said that open communication is absolutely critical or very important to the project's outcome. So most people say, yeah, collaboration is important.

We have to do it right. But only 18% of them said that that was part of the end of project review. So that suggests to me that people, yeah, yeah, we know it's important, but we're just going to take it for granted. Because if only 18% of the people reviewing how well they did it, to me, it's that they're overlooking what I would suggest is one of the most important factors in terms of whether it's a project that you're leading or initiative or working together. And complacency is costly.

Hidden issues will always fester. Or if they fester, they'll always explode. And when they explode, it's never pretty. So that's why my view is that if we're looking at those engagement numbers, have we hit that equilibrium? No. I think there's absolutely room to improve. But we have to be deliberate.

And when you're deliberate with how you do teamwork, it pays dividends big time in the short term and the long term. So then let's talk about the science behind actually building a team. So there's plenty of frameworks for the process of how a team develops over time. You talk about several, but you focus on one,

which is Bruce Tuckman's research. He has sort of four phases, or actually five, you give an additional one there, but forming, storming, norming, and performing. I feel like I'm listing off dwarves or something like that, the dwarves of team development. But I would love to just have you kind of explain very briefly those four stages and why you think that's the field of research to focus on, or why you think that's the body of research to focus on. Yeah, so a gentleman by the name of Bruce Tuckman developed this concept back in the 60s.

And I think the fact that we're in 2023 and it's still relevant just shows you how powerful something, I call it a simple framework, but it's very powerful. And obviously, it's lasted the test of time. So Bruce Tuckman talks about these four stages. So the first one around forming, this is typically when a new team comes together. Now, typically, people will think about a new team coming together means it's a new team that's formed or there's five new people coming together for the first time. I would suggest anytime you get a new team member, your team is going to go through this stage because it's not

just say you have five people in the team and somebody new comes in. It's not just 20% of the top people that have changed. Every single relationship has changed within that team so it's actually got a bigger impact than people give credit for so in that forming stage this is where people are coming together they're excited about their role they've got an idea of what they're going to be working on they look at everybody else and they go everybody's got the same motivations and they're kind of just kind of testing each other. They're kind of feeling each other out. How do things work? How does that person work? How am I going to be able to do what I need to do? And what's really critical in this stage, if you're a leader and you're in this stage, we've got new people joining the team.

What you want to be able to do is place some emphasis on creating connection and understanding. So you want to over-index on some team activities, whether that's in the work time or outside of the work time. And also as a leader, you need to be really direct. So I know there's a lot power in leaders being able to empower their people. In the early stages, the leader needs to be really clear on what are we trying to do? What are we trying to achieve? Be clear in the objectives and really provide some direction on roles and responsibilities. That will give people confidence, allow them to settle in. The next stage, storming. This is where it can get quite interesting.

This is typically after people have worked together for maybe three or four months. They've got an understanding of what they're trying to do. But what they start to find is that roles overlap, objectives may clash. And that's typically what starts to happen when your team is storming, is there's more conflict. There's a little bit of in-house fighting. No, I'm doing this. No, you're supposed to do that.

Well, you're trying to achieve this, but I'm trying to achieve that, right? And they clash and they're pulling each other apart. They typically start to, they're fighting over resources, so budget and people. And this is where the leader's role when you're storming is don't try and fix the problem, but try and help the people work through the problem.

So don't get stuck in the content of what they're trying to do. What you want to do is more manage and coach the behaviors. Once you do that, then what happens is the team start to develop their own way of working. And that's what the norming is. There's typically ways of working through conflict have been established. There's a little bit more trust in the team so they can work through more issues. And once those ways of working are established, that's the norming. And then that allows then the team to then hit that stride and really get into that performing stage where the team are working well together. They're kicking goals.

And because they're working well together, that allows the leader to focus on different things rather than just being stuck in the detail of the group. Your book is more or less divided into two major focuses for building teams correctly. So this is sort of the overarching framework. But then you have two points of focus, clarity and the relationships. And I've had a lot of experience with the term clarity, having previously worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and business builders, if you will. And I'm just going to say that that word is kind of abused by those people who say, you know, you

have to get clarity to really succeed in your business. And you have to know exactly what it is that you're striving for. And it's used very, very broadly in that sort of way. It's kind of like your big why or the overarching mission statement. And that just doesn't really cut it for me. I don't think it cuts it for teams in general. And I think you would agree because you give four-part framework for what clarity ultimately means and how to engender that within your team. So can we go over that sort of framework

as well? Team purpose, objectives, roles and responsibilities, and team behaviors are the four components of that. Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny, Tyler, how that word clarity for you doesn't work. We talked earlier about swearing and the power of words. If clarity doesn't work for you, think of the word alignment. It's when I'm talking about clarity, my view is that clarity creates cohesion. When people are on the same page, it allows them to maximize all the resources, eliminates overlapping work, spinning around, not sure what we're supposed to be working on. When people are aligned, this is when they have the most power. So when we're talking about creating that clarity, or let's call it for alignment today,

because clarity may be an overused word from your context. What teams, the teams that truly shine, they're the ones that are aligned on the purpose of the team. Now, this isn't about what's the purpose of the organization or the purpose of my role or even the purpose of, say, a department. This is probably most relevant for leadership teams because when I'm talking to leadership teams, often their focus is on leading their group of people, their department, their function. But when you're on a leadership team, you actually serve two roles. You need to lead your function, but you have to also be part of the leadership team, which is looking up a

level. You're focusing on the bigger picture down the track for the whole department. So leaders need to realize they're wearing two hats. I'm leading my department, but I'm also leading this function. I'm one of the members that's leading that. So when leadership teams get really clear on what's the actual purpose of us being on the leadership team, what are the things that we talk about when we get together as a leadership team? What are the things that we can do as a leadership team that's different than just leading our own function? That's when those teams start to work really well together and can achieve a lot more than just ticking boxes of their own individual departments. So that's the purpose piece. Roles and responsibilities. There's a couple things here.

It's what's the role of the leadership team. So it aligns with that. But also what I find is when you get a job now, you get a job description. And that job description is based on the current context of what's needed at that moment in time. The way the world changes so quickly, the way the workplace changes so quickly now, we live in a much faster world. We watch Netflix on average at one and a half times the original speed. I think that related to podcasts, I think that this recent statistic I saw that came out said that we listen to podcasts on average at 1.2 of the original speed. So our world works much quicker. What that means from a roles and responsibilities perspective is

that jobs change so quickly. And in the context of the corporate environment, it's important that as our roles and responsibilities change and evolve over time, that everybody understands what those changes are. So it's important for teams to talk about roles and responsibilities change and evolve over time, that everybody understands what those changes are. So it's important for teams to talk about roles and responsibilities. I would say every three months, review, talk with each other. Okay, what are you responsible for? What am I? You're going to get some real black and white answers. Yes, you do this. No, you don't. Then there's going to be some gray. The gray is fine as long as people are aware that it's gray, because when it comes up again, you'll be able to talk about it.

So that's roles and responsibilities. The third one is around objectives. So again, there's two things when it comes to objectives and teams. Share what your KPIs are. If you've got objectives that you're working towards or that you're scored upon or the success of your work is measured, share it with each other. Because more often than not, your objectives will be similar to somebody else's, and you can actually start to leverage budgets, people that you both have to achieve your common

goal. The other thing that I say, particularly with leadership teams, is building off some of the work that Patrick Lencioni, who wrote The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, building off his concept of overarching objectives. If you're a leadership team, what brings a group together is typically when there's something that they're all striving together to get. So in sports, whether that's the NBA, whether it's Major League Baseball,

I'm from Canada, so ice hockey, NHL, and the Stanley Cup. That's what really brines people together. Typically in teams, everybody has their individual KPIs, but leadership teams, you should look for one thing that you're working, that all of you can contribute to, and you'll find that that group works together. And then the last piece is around behaviors. And this is where, if you're a leader, you look at your team and go, look at everything that we're dealing with right now. What are we trying to achieve? What's the context? Who are our stakeholders? My team, is it an experienced team? Is it a new team? Take all those things into

consideration and then ask yourself, don't ask yourself, ask the team, if there was three behaviors that are going to drive our success in terms of how we work together, what are those behaviors? What are the three promises that we're going to make to each other that's going to help us succeed as a group? If the team can get aligned on that, then it gives them this framework to keep each other accountable and also keep them at an individual level accountable to those behaviors that will drive success of the group. Thank you so much for going through all four of those so expertly. I really teed you up to just take off there. You should write a book on this stuff. No, I'm just kidding. I want to go back

to purpose though. You mentioned very quickly at the beginning, purpose doesn't necessarily refer to organizational or sort of individual purpose, but toward the end of the book, you also talk about there is a sort of trifecta concept. If you could see the visual of what I'm doing right now, I'm trying to create a three-way Venn diagram, which I realize I don't have enough fingers for. But what happens is you have organizational, personal, and team purpose. Theoretically, if all of those things align, you're going to have a great time at your organization. That's sort of the ideal way to be as an individual contributor. And this is kind of why I asked that question about equilibrium at the start, engagement equilibrium, because it doesn't seem totally reasonable to me that every single person can find a company that

truly aligns with their own personal purpose, that the product or service that they're giving to the world really aligns with what they want to do. There's so many people with such disparate and diverse interests, and there's so many companies with similarly disparate and diverse interests, but competition for positions and just what's available doesn't always mean that we can be perfectly aligned in a perfect world who knows. But theoretically, is this possible? Do you think to increase the number of people who really experience that center of the trifecta by making our teams better by having leadership that better communicates purpose or communicates purpose differently? Is it just by having leadership that better communicates purpose or communicates purpose

differently? Is it just by focusing on that team purpose that really brings it all together? What do you think? Yes, when it comes to purpose, is it possible? Absolutely. Right. And I think this is what organizations, leaders, and individuals all have to work towards together. It's not just the responsibility of the company to make sure that the purpose aligns to each individual. On the flip side, it's important for the organization to be able to articulate their purpose in a clear way, because what that will allow people to do is to find their connection to that. So when it comes to individual purpose, there's different ways that people can do it. And I think this is where some people feel this is a little bit fluffy or it's like, well, how is my purpose going to align to,

I don't know, if I had to work for a tire company, I might struggle. But if I double click on that, I actually think I could find a way that would get me excited. But at an individual level, there's a number of different ways you can find your purpose, right? You can choose it. Some people feel like there's a calling. So for me, my purpose is to help create a sense of belonging. And I feel like that's been a theme throughout my life. And for me, it feels like it's the right thing to do. Others might have something particularly that they enjoy doing, or they get a particular kick out of, and that's how they choose that. I think with organizations to help create that trifecta of purpose is to ask their people, is to say, here's our organizational purpose.

How is that relevant to you? Which part of that do you think is important? Which part of that do you think you can contribute to? And Google did a piece of research, I think it is about 2015, 2016, called Project Aristotle. And there was five key findings that they found in the highest performing teams. And Dr. Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety got a massive boost from that because she's done some great work in there. But in that piece of research, Google identified psychological safety as one of the biggest factors impacting or being able to differentiate high performing teams and low performing teams. The best teams had high levels of psychological safety.

But one thing that gets overlooked here, Tyler, is one of the other findings was that the teams that performed the best, the people in those teams, A, it had personal meaning. They could find that personal meaning in the work that they were doing. So they believed in it. And the second thing is that they could see the impact of the work that they were doing. So if you're an individual or if you're a leader and you're struggling to, your people are struggling to find, where's my purpose? How's my purpose serving, aligning to this? Maybe get off that word purpose and think about impact. Try to make sure, how can you demonstrate the impact that those people are making?

How can they see that what they're doing day in, day out for 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 hours, what's the outcome of that work? And if you can actually be able to draw that out and give the people the opportunity to see the impact, that actually starts to align to purpose. I appreciate that you're willing to change the terms that you use so prominently within your book, you know, going to impact and going to alignment. You know, I think that's good leadership, just being willing to sort of reframe your own thinking around something that you originally thought up and created for the purpose of growth in this way. So I want to pivot slightly

to looking at relationships now, sort of the end component of the book, the section four. From my observations, usually when a team just isn't succeeding and action is taken to fix that team's processes and systems and workflows are looked at and questions of skill come up and how good are you really at what you're doing? And it seems to be more of an individual focus. When relationships are actually taken into account in these cases, it only seems to happen when there is overt conflict that takes place between people or among the team. That's when some sort of intervention is made when in regards to the relationships. Do we need to start observing relationships as

the relationships within a team as the primary catalyst and determinant of success? From all the research that I've done, Tyler, from the 20 years that I spent working in the corporate space across Canada, Africa and Australia, when it comes to relationships, they matter most. When you've got things like trust, you've got high levels of connection amongst the group, you've got things like psychological safety, they actually open the door to deepen the relationships with things like feedback and conflict, and conflict in a good way, not just a bad way. So I can't stress enough that it's relationships matter most. You think when you talk about process, if issues are going wrong, what's the process? Have we done the right research? Are we saying the right message? Whatever it might be. I'd like to ask you a

question, Tyler. When you think about when you've been on some of the most successful teams and the people in those teams, think of somebody who you would swear by, right? We'll bring swearing back into it, right? Because when it comes to swearing in teams, it's about how you swear. Do you swear by people? Do you swear about people? Obviously, the good kind of swearing is swe it's about how you swear do you swear by people do you swear about people obviously the good kind of swearing is swearing by but i want you to think about something you don't have to say their name if you want to you can put their name in spotlight but who is somebody that you swear by and what were the things why do you swear by them so i've had two really strong work experiences that come to mind anytime I talk about my career path historically. And they're similar. So right now at Get Abstract, I create content, you know,

one category of which is this exact show, but also social media. And in the past, I've done something similar where I was on a content team creating video content of various types. And the teams were somewhat similar, although the previous one was entirely in person, a little bit bigger, and the types of people were slightly different. But my point is that I worked very closely in those teams. And they were the closest teams that I've had ultimately in any of the four or five careers that I've experienced. And I think the consistency of the collaboration there really, in both cases, made sure that we had to develop relationships one way or another. I'm not saying that they were forced into place, but it almost felt like it was made to succeed because everybody had a very, very distinct role within what they were doing.

And I would say right now I swear by three of my teammates, Brian, Vanessa, and David, writer, designer, and Vanessa is our social media manager. They have all done a really impressive job of sort of picking up what I have taken on, which is entering this world of learning and development. Frankly, I've only really been deep into this for about a year now, learning about development as a corporate endeavor. year now learning about Beltman as a corporate endeavor. And even though they were not expecting to have to do that, you know, sort of as a byproduct of this podcast, they have done an incredible job, not only of sort of learning alongside me, but creating really strong content about this and, you know, supporting what I'm doing, learning the language and just creating things with me at a really high rate and really effectively. And it's made for some really strong collaboration. It's made for some intriguing side conversations. In addition to this conversation, I often reflect

on what we talk about with those folks. And it's just been really fulfilling to kind of take this new thing on as a team and see how we've been producing things. So those are the people that I swear by. It's really just my direct team, the people that I work directly with, all of them. Actually, they technically aren't even on my team. Vanessa is, but the other two aren't. But in any case, I definitely swear by those people. And it just feels like we've all kind of attacked this endeavor of learning and development in a very cohesive way, I guess, if that makes sense. So I'm going to double click on that, if that's all right. So I hear that there's a common goal you're working towards. Let's go a little bit deeper. What are the think about one of those people?

What is it that they do or they enable for you that makes you swear by them that says, we've got a really good relationship? Is there something tangible that they've done or a sense of feeling that you've got when you're with them? So Brian and I have a lot in common outside of the workspace as well, the music that we listen to and our respective histories with filmmaking and that sort of thing. And I think that's significant, but also the research that he does when it comes to writing, it feels like it is very similar to my research process in that we're very thorough almost to the point of like perfectionism and that we want to make sure that what we're looking up is not only

accurate and correct, but relevant and important. And that's always been my biggest question when creating content. Do people really care about this? Is it actually impactful? And I've always felt like that's, I've had a little bit too much perfectionism around that, but Brian, And I've always felt like I've had a little bit too much perfectionism around that. But Brian, I would say, also resembles that sort of that level of care. And I hope we're not both just being too much perfectionists here. But at the end of the day, I think we're creating some pretty cool stuff a lot of the time. So I think our energies match when it comes to creating what we create and how thorough we are and just how good of a writer he is overall also is very important.

So those are some things. Yeah. What I've taken from that is that you and Brian, first of all, there's a personal connection, music, right? Somehow you guys have identified that you have a similar taste in what tunes you listen to. Also, you also have this other connection around how you approach things, how you view the world, this idea of perfection, right? Things need to be really, really good. You both have that in common.

So that to me right away, there's a demonstration of a strong relationship. And when I talk about relationships, there's four things that I say. To have a really strong and mature relationship in the workplace, it starts out with having a connection, which leads to trust. Joe Madden, the manager of the Chicago Cubs, you know, they won the World Series a little while ago, first time in 108 years. He talks about connection. He says, before I can build trust with anybody, I have to find some kind of personal connection. And he says, once I get that connection, it puts me in a good place to build trust. Now, this is talking about creating a deep

relationship, right? It's not a superficial one. So right away, I'm going, right, you and Brian have established that. I also heard you're learning together. You're relying on them. They're relying on you. When we learn from people, that means we're being a little bit vulnerable. We're saying, I don't know how to do something, or I don't know about this particular area. There has to be some level of safety, so psychological safety in that relationship. And that's the second one. So the first one is around connection and trust, the concept of being safe, being able to say, I don't know, I made a mistake, I need your help without any worries of any negative repercussions. So that's the second component of relationships.

And if you can get that connection and trust, as well as creating a safe environment, then things like feedback can be used really productively. You actually get to a place where feedback isn't feared, but it's actually encouraged and it's sought out for. Because people understand that they trust that people are coming from the right space. You're not attacking me. You're actually trying to find ways to help me be better. That's going

to help the group, but also me be better. And then the other thing is when you have connection and trust in a safe environment, we talked about conflict before. Conflict is always something that people want to avoid, right? And my view is conflict is inevitable. We're humans, we have different contexts, we have different stresses that people aren't aware of, and there's always these little triggers that can set us off. So when it comes to conflict, there's the negative conflict. And because it's inevitable and no team is ever perfect, the best teams are ones that can find ways to get through that conflict in a productive way. When teams can get through those imperfect times, they build great power, they build great

momentum. On the flip side, when that momentum is stalled by the clash, then they just spin their tires and they get stuck and they don't move forward. The very best teams actually create conflict on purpose because my view of conflict is it's simply a difference of opinion. And when you have this diversity of thought within teams, and you can fully leverage it, that's when you're going to get innovation. That's when you're going to find ways to overcome things that you never thought you could. The Wright brothers are a perfect example of this. They were brothers, and they were known as quite feisty. And people said you could walk by their shops, and you just hear that the brothers going at it, arguing with

each other. Loud voices, getting quite emotional. What people don't realize is they were arguing on purpose. So one of the brothers would be arguing, saying, ah, you know, the wing needs to be, I don't know, this long. And the other brother would have a different view and say, no, no, no, no, it needs to be this long. And they would debate. And then they would actually stop and flip sides and force each other to argue for the other person's view. And what it did was it forced them to think about, well, maybe there is another way to do things.

And if we did it this way, why could that be a good way to do it? And often what they would find is that they actually wouldn't necessarily choose either person's idea. They would come up with a third way because they allowed themselves to look at things a different way and go, right, I might not be right here. Or there's a possibility that another way could work. And that's where I go, teams that absolutely shine. They actually use conflict on purpose. They make it part of their regular routines. And as a result, they get much better outcomes. You talk about the inner and outer sanctums of debate in the book. And I would like you to extrapolate on that as well, because I think that's a good framework for how we can

think about healthy versus unhealthy debate. Would you mind going into that? Yeah, absolutely. And hey, there's another great example, Tyler, of words, right? Conflict and debate. They're actually the same thing. It's funny, here in Australia, the word conflict automatically goes to negative connotations. And I've had people say, oh, it actually doesn't feel Aussie conflict. Okay, whatever word you want to use. So like for today, let's use the word debate. So there's kind of three areas that you can go into when you get into debate. There's the inner sanctum, the outer sanctum, and then there's a space in the middle. I call that the arbitration area.

But the inner sanctum of the debate is when debate is accepted and it's actually advocated for. It's encouraged. When people are in the inner sanctum, what they're doing is focusing on the issue and focusing on finding a solution rather than focusing on getting my solution through. So the things that you'll see often in the inner sanctum of debate, like people are listening and they're asking clarifying questions. So it's listening, questions, listening, questions. What's happening is persuasion.

The intent of that debate is to persuade or, and this is the bit people always forget about, but it's still a good outcome. It's okay to be persuaded because you're focusing on getting the best solution, not your solution. So it's about persuasion or being persuaded. And people are really getting emotional, but they're getting emotional about the outcome. So that's the inner sanctum. The outer sanctum, on the other hand, and I suspect when it comes to arguing or debating, people are quite familiar with this.

Typically, what happens with debate in the outer sanctum, it's either avoided. So people just don't want to get stuck into it, or it becomes an argument. And the emotion, it's more about emotional responses, and it's typically focused on the individual instead of the issue. This type of debate is inefficient. Typically, you'll see things like manipulation or bulldozing. People just, it's actually, they're not there to persuade, they're just there to tell. And that type of debate, much more harm than good. People

who advocate for the right kind of debate are 20 times more productive than those who don't. I talked about the third area. This is kind of the, I call it the arbitration. So we're talking about circles before, right? You can enter in this circle of the inner sanctum, then there's the outer sanctum. There's another circle in there. This is the bit that I call the arbitration area. And this is kind of, think about going to mom or dad to solve your issue, right? Or within a team, there's a conflict, there's a clash, there's a debate, there's a disagreement. And rather than sorting it amongst yourselves, you have to go to your leader to get them to make the decision. This is a last resort. As a leader, if people are coming you to be the arbitrator, I mentioned this before, you have to be really, really disciplined. You do not have to

get stuck into the content, meaning you don't have to get stuck into the details to make a decision. What is best, and this will serve leaders best in the long term, is actually supporting the people to come in their process of coming up with a solution. If people are arguing, asking my people, right, so what have you given in on? What have you considered? What are the strengths of what the other person is bringing forward? Are the behaviors the best? Are you in that bulldozing, manipulating, emotional about the other individual? Or are you showing some vulnerability?

Are you asking questions? Are you seeking to understand? Most often when there is that clash as an arbitrator, you should probably be recommending people to apologize because there's most likely some behaviors there that are not conducive to those people continuing to work together to come to a solution on their own. people to apologize because there's most likely some behaviors there that are not conducive to those people continuing to work together to come to a solution on their own. So there's the inner, the outer, the arbitrator, and where you can, the most effective by far is that inner sanctum. I want to rewind a little bit to when you brought up the importance of having an initial connection

with somebody. I think it's not always easy to find that unless it's pretty deliberately made to happen. I just so happened to see that Brian, who I was speaking about, had made a film about punk music in South Dakota, Sioux Falls. Check it out. It's called I Really Get Into It, directed by Brian Bieber. Punk music in South Dakota. It's an incredible documentary. It blew my mind. But I saw that he made this documentary. And I right away, I was like, Oh, this is a cool human being. So we're going to talk about this the first time I meet him for sure. You know, not everybody has

that sort of experience or that sort of creation, you know, publicly available on their social media, their LinkedIn or whatever. And you don't really know how to jump into a conversation about that sort of thing. So one of the manners that you advocate for having this sort of initial connection is the 3H method, the HHH question, where you go over hardships, highlights, and heroes with the people in your organization. And my team, actually, the larger marketing team that I work with has been doing something very similar where every week we go over a pretty intense question with each other, something that, you know, brings in sort of global thought and questions of society and justice and psychology, but also just like, you know, personal preferences of things like music and art and that sort of thing. Just a simple weekly question, but I'd like you to explain the HHH question because I do like that method as well for kind of starting that conversation.

Before I answer that, Tyler, I want to point out something that you did to create that connection is you were deliberate. Somehow you took the effort to find out that Brian has something to do with punk music and South Dakota. I'm from Saskatchewan, which is North Dakota. And again, Saskatchewan is probably not a place that's do with punk music and South Dakota. I'm from Saskatchewan, which is North Dakota. And again, Saskatchewan is probably not a place that's associated with punk music.

Anyways, I digress. You were very deliberate with that, right? You made the effort to do some research on Brian and you're like, hey, I found something really cool. And now I think, man, we've got something else to talk about. That just aligns with my view on being deliberate. Deliberate pays dividends. So, Triple H, HHH or Triple H, it sounds like a WWE wrestler. It's a great exercise where leaders

and teams can be deliberate about finding connections with each other. And the idea actually came from sport. Here in Australia, there's the Aussie rules football. That's the ball where they just kick it up and guys are jumping up all the time. And anyways, one of the teams that had gone through long drought in premierships or championships, their coach implemented this exercise. And what would happen is during a team meeting, an individual, they would take turns

and each meeting would be somebody different and they would share their Triple H. So their hero, a hardship and a highlight from their life. And what it did was the players talked about this, how they actually began to see each other as humans versus just a positional player or title. They found that there was different parts of their lives that had overlapped, whether it was similar experiences through hardships. It might be through relationships that they grew up and they might've both had tough upbringings. And they go, you're like me. And what they found is it brought people together. They felt like they wanted to fight for each other. It started to build this level of trust because they go, you get me and I get you.

So, but it's a great example. And your team sounds like they're on the right track as well by just having a question. I think the more personal and the deeper the question, the more you can really learn about somebody. So that's why the idea of sharing a hardship. You know what, we're all broken as humans. We've all gone through crap times in our lives. When people do those exercises, what I found when I'm working with teams is that people all relate and they just say, you know what, we've all been through similar things. And it actually makes people feel reassured that, hey, it's not me that's broken. This is just the way life goes and everybody else goes through this. So yeah, Triple H, it's a great way you can allocate like, man, allocate seven minutes in your team meetings to some kind of connection exercise, whether it's a question or, you know, the next one, it's Tyler that's sharing his Triple H. Adrian's going to share it. The next one and then the next one, Brian's going to share it. Seven minutes at a meeting isn't much, but I'll tell you what, I bet you that's probably going to be the most engaging part where people are on the

edge of their seats wanting to get more. I like it a lot more than two truths and a lie, which seems to have prevailed beyond even college and university intros where it was most popular. I love that tactic. Anyway, I want to wrap up with, I want to put you on the spot, the sports question for you here. And I think you're going to be able to handle it pretty well. So I'm not a huge baseball fan anymore. Growing up, I was a massive Red Sox fan. Being from Boston, it's hard not to be.

And I good at baseball. I played in high school. I was on a championship runner-up team. I was a leadoff hitter, pretty damn good shortstop and second baseman, middle infielder. But these days I'm not as keyed into it anymore. But there's one thing about baseball that I do like, and that is Shohei Otani. He, as of, as of today, he's leading the league, the MLB, in home runs, RBIs, triples, OPS, slugging, like almost every single major statistic, except, of course, batting average. Luis Arias is fighting for 400 right now, so not quite Shohei. But he's also a pitcher.

Shohei Otani is also one of the best pitchers in the league right now. And this has not happened since Babe Ruth. So there are many conversations that I've heard on ESPN and that sort of thing about, you know, is this guy the best baseball player in the history of the sport? And it's difficult debate conversation to have because he's, you know, relatively new to the league. He's somewhat young and he's just ultimately a unique player. But this team, the Los Angeles Angels, they also have Mike Trout, who's historically regarded as one of the best players in the history of the sport. They have what appears to be, from my perspective, to be a pretty strong

team. And just a couple of years ago, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Joe Madden was, in fact, their coach. He went from the Cubs to the Angels. You talk a lot about Joe Madden, how successful he was and how he made history. Everybody knows he's a pretty strong leader, but they have not been able to figure it out. The in the al west i think right now that's where they ended up last year they're just above 500 they just look like another baseball team despite the fact that they have these magical players out there and i know that this is a big team sport you need much more than one two even three players but i would love to hear your perspective. What's the deal? Why don't they have back-to-back-to-back championships right now? And it's funny because obviously I'm a little bit of an advocate of teams.

Baseball is an interesting one because it's a team sport because you have multiple people playing together. And I coach baseball. And we often talk about sport, baseball being a team sport, but it's probably one of the most individualistic team sports because as a pitcher there's one person that's the impact often it doesn't matter what's happening in the outfield although statistics are starting to show trends so where people can line up but it's reliant on that one person when you're up to the plate

it's reliant on one person so the equivalent i'm going to come back to maybe why the angels aren't the best, but in corporate, I think this is something that people just assume because you have the same leader, you're a team. I think the best definition of team is when you're interdependent on each other. So I look at basketball. I think basketball is a sport that's interdependent on each other because there's plays that you run. There's certain things that for, I don't know, for LeBron to get open, one of his other teammates need to do something to block a player. I'm obviously not a huge basketball player, but there are things that teammates have to do to get somebody in a position of success for them to win. In corporate, it's not always the case. Like sometimes I've been on

teams where what I've done had nothing to do with the rest of the people on my team i was like kind of the leftover area and they're like where can we put adrian oh we're just sticking with these guys because they don't have a lot of people or for whatever reason so i think when looking at teams you can ask yourself are we interdependent if the answer is yes then it's critical to create that alignment, particularly around roles, responsibilities, and objectives and behaviors. If the answer is no, I'm working with a senior leadership team right now, which essentially is two teams, same leader, they do not cross over. They do not rely on each other. It might be just a structural thing within the organization.

So with this group, they had the decision, do we want to act as a team or not? This is at the senior leadership level. And the decision was, yes, we want to work as a team because we've got a lot of knowledge and a lot of smart people here. And that's where that purpose of the team and an overarching objective. They decided what their overarching objective was. So I know I digressed a little bit to the angels and I'll come back to baseball. Don't worry. But I think if you're a leader and you're struggling with the team, you're working together,

go A, is our work interdependent on each other? If yes, then continue to focus and be deliberate about creating that alignment and strengthening the relationships. If the answer is no, ask the team, do we want to be? If the answer is yes, create an overarching objective that the group works towards. Let's come back to baseball. It's funny. There's some research done at MIT. Dr. Stanley Pentland did some research around high-performing teams, and they found that

the number one success factor amongst teams was patterns of communication. So this was in the corporate space. But they found it didn't matter. The best teams didn't have the best players. They didn't have the best technology. They didn't have the best strategy. But what they did was they talked a lot amongst each other. Everybody communicated with each other.

They had a lot of face-to-face time. They did a lot of social activity together. So there was formal communication and informal communication. It's a great example where you don't have to have the best players to be the best teams the angels what's troubling them you know what tyler i've got no idea because on paper they should be and if you hand to a man as your manager you'd think that hey we've got a pretty good leader here i just thought he wants to show you how hard playing 162 games in a season is so hard. So

I'm stumped. I've got no idea. If I do, maybe I'd be over there and be doing a different job and that being the manager of the Angels, which would be all right. What would you advise them at the very least from even just your outsider perspective? Would it be something along the lines of more bonding or anything like that? What would you say if you had to give them a few sentences of advice? Do you know what I would do? I wouldn't give them advice. I'd get the players together and go, you guys tell us.

You know it better than anybody else. You're in here day in, day out. What is holding us back? And I guarantee that they would have some of the answers. They would come up with ideas and initiatives that would go, this will make us better. I love that. Perfect place for us to wrap up there, Adrian. Thank you so much again for joining me.

And before we knock off, can you just let our audience know where they can learn more about you and your work? Yeah, absolutely. If you visit teamsatswear.com, that will take you to where my book is, but it's also taken to my broader website. So if you're interested in having a chat about how I'm working with senior leaders,

teamsatswear.com. It's much easier to remember and spell than adrianbelarjan.com. So that's why I direct people there. Again, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. And for our listeners at home, thank you for listening. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action,

a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a rating, leave a comment, and share the episodes you love. Help us keep delivering the conversations that turn learning into action. Until next time.