Today, in episode #2 on building high performing teams, we draw inspiration from Jim Collins' "Good to Great," and explore why embracing our authentic selves will level up our own and our teams’ performance. We'll discuss the power of self-acceptance, of accepting others, nurturing a developmental mindset, why hustling gets a bad name (but shouldn’t) and ultimately, transforming ourselves into unstoppable forces at work. Enjoy!
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Transcript >
Welcome to Weirdos in the Workplace, the podcast that celebrates authenticity, passion and purpose in today's world of work. I'm your host, Erin Patchell, and today's episode is called on creating high-performing teams.
I expect this podcast to get weird, wonderful, and ooey-gooey. I decided to frame the episodes by stating that this is my perspective on high-performing teams.
Today, we will draw on inspiration from Jim Collin’s “Good to Great” and explore why embracing our authentic selves will level up our own and our team's performance, regardless of our role in that team. We’ll discuss the power of self-acceptance, accepting others, and nurturing A developmental mindset. We'll talk about hustling and ultimately transforming ourselves into unstoppable forces at work.
Enjoy.
It was essential to make it super crystal clear up front that I believe organizations exist to serve a purpose. Organizations exist to deliver value to customers as an agile list. That’s something that I think, and that's something I've learned to believe. Working in the world of work and especially in my previous role on a people and culture solutions team and developing products for customers that supported professional development. One of the things that I learned through my previous position was that you can only have a company with the performance of its people.
Performance is intrinsically linked and will always be linked to the success of an organization.
It's also very clear that there are a lot of different ways to develop the performance of your team.
I'll lump them into two different categories. There are ways to develop the performance of your team that create trust with your team, and there are ways to develop performance within your team that eventually break the trust of your team.
We've all worked for bosses that had the latter approach. We know how it turned out. Those are often the bosses that people leave, and that's not to say that you can't learn something from them. I mean, some of the people I've learned the absolute most from in my career have been the people who were hardest on me and helped me grow.
But the problem with that model is that it needs to be more sustainable. You know it's not sustainable for every individual human. So, the question in the class is, how do you develop the performance of the team?
Because in order to develop performance, we all need to be able to look at ourselves, and we need to recognize what our gaps are and what our strengths are and leverage our strengths in order to develop our weaker areas right, ideally focusing on our strengths if we can.
But how do you do that?
How do you Let people feel like it's OK to be themselves so that they can learn?
To be the best version of themselves.
How do we build the resilience of our team so that day over day, week over week, month over month and year over year?
They are consistently becoming, step by step, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, the best version of themselves, allowing that to be sustainable.
Now Jim Collins wrote a little book called “Good to Great,” and if you haven't read it, not just the HBR article, but the book, I would highly recommend it because almost every single page is full of amazing little tidbits and like thought.
One of the things that I always took away from this book is, you know, specifically about the Level 5 leader, the Level 5 leader, Jim Collins, Level 5 leader. The way he describes it is that they channel their ego away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a company. It's not that the level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they're incredibly ambitious, but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themself.
So how does this relate to authenticity?
Because authenticity is mostly self-acceptance, accepting who I am and being confident enough to let other people in, while the Level 5 leader is less self-interested and much more interested in the organization's performance.
So, taking the onus off of ourselves and the pressure off of ourselves and putting that on to the organization and focusing on the organization, I Believe, allows us to actually become more authentic in our own selves.
We can be who we want to be, especially when we're focusing on a bigger picture or a bigger vision, and that's why career specialists focus so often on the vision or the why, right?
The purpose what is your purpose?
Because really, your purpose and your authenticity are completely entangled, but purpose on its own isn't enough. Jim Collins also says the Level 5 executive builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.
I want to emphasize that professionals will be high performers; there’s nothing else you can say about that. They understand that they have to hustle. And yeah, I'm taking that word back, guys.
I like to hustle. It’s a great thing to hustle. I think, sure. Yeah, it can become toxic. Like, literally anything else in the world and hustle culture. I get it, you know; I get it that maybe you don't want to be there right now, or you need to take breaks 100%. We want to build sustainability.
That's the entire point we want to build performance and sustainability, but that doesn't mean that hustling doesn't have a place in time. Absolutely. I think it does. And you know what? The Level 5 leader.
Knows how to hustle better than anybody else, but they are singularly focused on their highest priorities. And so that is how we support each other to have performance and to make progress. To develop while also working really hard because we're also working smart, right?
So senior manager and you're trying to figure out how to nurture this mindset on your team. Maybe you've already got it yourself. You know your you, and you hustle, you develop. You're listening to this podcast, presumably. So, you're trying to figure it out.
How do I help my team develop this mindset?
I don't know that you really can. I think it's not one person’s job to do that. I think the entire team is responsible for developing themselves, and ultimately the individual is responsible for developing themselves. But I can tell you the first thing that you should do is accept them the way that they are.
Truly accept them the way that they are because I can tell you that if there is any fear in them about what might happen if they make a mistake, they will always be covering up their mistakes, and they will never be able to learn from them, and nobody else will either. Interestingly, all the research I've ever read on teams talks about complementary teams, meaning that individuals on the team have different skill sets and different Drinks, and they can leverage each other's complementary strengths to become stronger.
Some organizations even go as far as to buddy people together who have complementary skill sets and have them work together the majority of the time. This actually works, and it has been well-researched as a great tool in the workplace.
So use that if you're struggling with your team a little bit, but the really important thing to remember about development is that people can only learn from where they are. If you jump too far ahead, they're not going to have a foundation stone in order to grow up from that.
And so we really need to figure out where that foundation is right now, or is it where we think it is?
It could be in a different place. There may need to be a building block added.
I'll leave you with this short personal anecdote. A few years ago, my son James played a couple of seasons in a Kid’s Football League. Their team was absolutely amazing, and they had two incredible seasons. It was so cool to watch as a parent, of course, maybe you can say that the coaches got lucky when they drafted the kids, but I don't think it was luck every single year, no matter how many years the kids have been playing, they took them back to the absolute foundational elements of football and waited until everyone learned or remembered the fundamentals before moving on to more complex things.
So this did two things. One Every single kid who was new on the team felt included. Not a single person felt like an outsider.
And two, the kids who had been playing for years stayed humble, and it gave them an opportunity to strengthen what they already had in a lot of cases; it probably fixed a lot of bad habits that they developed as well. Sometimes you need to start at the foundation.
In football, it’s easier to know what those foundation stones look like in people, but that's not easy, and you need to learn about your people. You need to build their trust and demonstrate to them that you are who you say you are and that the only thing that matters is their development and hustling. But we'll talk about that another time.
That's all for now.
Thanks for listening!
If you like this episode, I'd love to connect with you on https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-patchell/ or https://www.positivist.ca/. I'm your host Erin Patchell, and remember, don't stay out of trouble.
