Hello everyone and welcome to The Upstream Leader. Today we are talking about creating the best team ever and how we do that in an industry that’s so focused on technical proficiency and frankly, a lot of busyness. So we’re going to step back a little bit from that, and we’re going to figure out how do we actually create a team and build teams that are going to function really well together? And for that today I have with me the author of Best Team Ever: Dr. David Burkus. David, welcome to the podcast.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
I am looking forward to the conversation. Everybody on the podcast knows that I read a lot of books and one of your books, Best Team Ever, was my final read of 2024, and it was such a great book. And then as it turns out, we were both in an online course together and I’m like, “Wait a second, I know that name. I just read that guy’s book!” So I was glad that we’re able to connect and talk about creating the best team ever. Before we do, I’m going to start the episode off the same way I do every episode: Tell us a little bit about how you became the leader that you are today.
Yeah, um, mistakes. A lot of mistakes. And not all mine, actually. I think one of the greatest lessons you can have in leadership is to work for a bad leader for a time, because you just sort of take copious notes on what not to do, right? So I mean, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes, and I’m a big fan of creating, you know, we’ll talk about it, but creating the psychological safety needed to really talk about drawing lessons from those mistakes. But candidly, my dad used to have this saying that when I was a teenager I’d roll my eyes at, but he would say that “Experience is the best teacher and tuition’s half off when it’s someone else’s experience.” And he said it enough to get me to roll my eyes, but I did actually internalize it because anytime I was in sort of a bad leadership situation, I started studying it a ton. Like, okay, why would they make that decision? What are the external factors? Who’s putting pressure on them? Is it just a personality difference? Like, what’s going on here?
And so not that I didn’t make my own fair share of mistakes on the teams that I led, both in academia and now with the team that I have behind me now, but I feel like I learned an awful lot about how to avoid some big serious mistakes by watching them happen in the wild and taking notes on it. So, yeah. Probably not the answer you were expecting, but that’s my answer.
Yeah, no, I’ve heard “mistakes” before, but I’ve not heard “other people’s mistakes” as the lead there. That makes a lot of sense. I love that. And I love, I’m sure I would’ve rolled my eyes as well as a younger person hearing that quote, but the tuition being half off when it’s somebody else’s mistake—what a brilliant line, and so incredibly true.
Yeah. Well, everything comes back to you. I say stuff that I think is brilliant to my 13-year-old now, and he just rolls his eyes at me, so, you know.
Yep, that’s fair, that’s fair. Well, we’re going to talk then about how do we create the best team ever, and I’m sure that, especially the older we get and the younger the workforce seems to us, there’s probably some eye rolling that comes into play when you talk with groups about creating the best team ever. You’ve got three core factors that really go into this. So talk to us a little bit about at the high level, what’s necessary to create a great team.
Yeah, so I mean, maybe we should say what’s not necessary—or rather, “not necessary” seems negative—but what is necessary, but insufficient. And that is, I think, the number one thing to say that is necessary, but insufficient is talent, right? I mean, in particular, if you’ve got people who are in highly skilled roles, there is a floor level of talent they need to have. You can’t build an accounting team with people who haven’t actually passed or aren’t on their way to pass their CPA, don’t have the right credits, et cetera, et cetera. But that is necessary, but insufficient for a team. And I think a lot of, especially when, you know, we hear people have said before, oh, don’t hire for skills, hire for training, et cetera—that’s hard to do because we have a very set job description and it requires certain knowledge, skills, and abilities. So we need to hire for that talent. But talent just gets you a great individual contributor, it doesn’t necessarily get you a teammate, right? It does get someone who can probably do the work, but when that work requires interdependence, their actual performance may suffer because they’re not great at being that individual teammate.
So I like to say it in the book that talent doesn’t make the team, the team makes the talent Talent’s important, but the thing that turns talent into performance on a team is the culture of the team. And when I say culture here, I don’t mean like a squishy, touchy feely thing, like, oh, you know, we have lunch every Thursday afternoon, or it’s casual, you know, Hawaiian shirt Friday. Yes, that’s an Office Space reference for those of you old enough, right? I don’t mean that. I mean specifically the habits, the norms and behaviors, the way in which we teach people to act on the team, the way we teach them to treat each other, and then what that looks like. And so in the book, that’s what we make the first argument for, is that as a team leader, the thing you ought to be focusing on is, yeah, please, I hope you get more and more talented people to your team, but you’re not going to turn talent into performance unless you start working on the culture. And then inside of that culture, we identify kind of three elements, three core elements, three habits, whatever you want to call it, which are common understanding, a sense of psychological safety, and a shared pro-social purpose. Happy to unpack all of those. But yeah, had to give my culture beats talent rant to begin with.
Absolutely. And I think that’s a well-placed rant. So a takeaway that I’ve already got from this conversation, and it was a great reminder for what’s in the book, is you can have a great individual contributor, if you hire for talent, but if you’re looking for a great team member, it’s gotta be more. And that’s really important to remember is look, if you’re just hiring somebody to go do a job, sit by themselves in a dark room and do the thing you need ’em to do, and you’re not going to ask ’em to interact with people or do any of that, cool, go get the most talented person you can find. And yeah, if that’s where they’re going to find success, great. But if you’re going for a team, and almost every firm that I talk to these days that’re looking for the team or multiple teams within the firm—we could talk about that in a minute maybe—but for that, talent is just the entry fee. Then you’ve gotta have so much more. So common understanding, psychological safety, pro-social purpose: Common understanding is, I recall it from the book, wasn’t what I hear a lot of people talk about, which is common understanding around the vision, the values, the mission, but you’re talking more about we gotta understand each other. Is that accurate?
Yeah. That’s exactly it, right? We’ll talk about vision values and where that is. That does fall into place. But yeah, we’re talking about how will I take the time to understand other people. This is sometimes called shared understanding, and sometimes it’s called social sensitivity. There’s a lot of different names for it in the research, but the idea is that teams work best when they understand how each individual works best. So I have to put my own sense of, “here’s the right way to do everything” aside, and actually take the time to understand people’s, not just their roles and responsibilities, but their work preferences, their personalities, their knowledge, skills and abilities. I have to know who knows what and how they like to do it so that we as a team can collaboratively plan.
There’s also this sort of misconception that, “Oh, that just develops over time if you spend unstructured time together.” What we see in the research—that stuff does work, but if you want it to get work fast enough, focus in on making sure the team has a common understanding of each other’s differences and appreciation for who’s strong in some areas, who’s weak in others, and what have you, and that then guides a better conversation about how we can execute on our team-wide objectives, because we know who we can actually, I can give Jeremy this task, or Jeremy’s going to need help on this, and even though I’m the best person for it, I’m maxed out, but I need to keep an eye on him. All of those things come out of, in the book, we break it down as both clarity and empathy, but empathy comes first. And understanding for each individual person what they bring to the table—knowledge, skills, and abilities—that comes first. And then that usually leads to teams who can execute with far better role clarity, sense of objectives, and even a sense of trust that people are going to deliver on what they’ve been assigned because they understand each other better.
So you say that doesn’t, you know, it’s a myth that it just happens over time. You know, just kind of, it’s almost like osmosis, right? Through unstructured activity. We just “get” that. You advocate for a much more actionable role, and you advocated at one point for something that I almost cringed just because of the way the word is typically used: If I recall correctly, didn’t you encourage people to try icebreakers?
I did.
Which might be one of the least favorite things in any business setting ever. So help me understand: Why should I do an icebreaker?
Yeah. Well, you shouldn’t do a cringe icebreaker.
Okay, that’s fair.
And you’re smart enough to know your team and know the difference. I mean, I should say that if you’re just spending unstructured time together, these things can happen, but they don’t happen as quickly, as efficiently, and as effectively as you want them. So sometimes you have to leverage that unstructured time by teeing up a specific question, a specific discussion topic, et cetera, that brings that out. And icebreakers can be one of those. And when I say an icebreaker, I don’t mean a big elaborate thing, like if you have to spend more than 30 seconds explaining the activity, you’re probably headed towards a cringe icebreaker. I mean, in the casual moments at the beginning of a meeting, that first three to five minutes when everybody’s just filing in, just pitch a question that gets people to self-disclose something about themselves. And sometimes I see teams do this as, oh, can you share a rose and a thorn, which is a really cute, creative way to just say like, what’s going on well and what’s going on poorly in your life? That can be a good one.
Keith Ferrazzi advocates a lot for what he calls an energy check, which is everybody just saying, on a scale of one to five, where’s your energy at? What can we do to help you get that up? Those are great. My favorite ones are ones that get people to reveal something you may not know about them. Like, a lot of times I used to ask, who’s your favorite superhero, just because it’s sort of fun. People tell a story from their past. Everybody has a favorite superhero or some other fictional thing they were into as a child, don’t care if it’s Care Bears or Barbie or whatever. Like, you’ve got that thing and we can learn about you. That’s a lot of fun. I use that with a lot of different people. It’s not exactly work related. My friend Al gave me this great one that he uses a ton, which is if you were on the cover of any magazine, what would it be and why?
Oh, interesting.
And so you learn an awful lot about what skills and what strengths people prize that you may not know about, and that’s ultimately what you’re trying to get at, with this sense of common understanding. I also, in the book, we talk about this activity called a Manual of Me, which centers around four questions, but each of those four questions is an icebreaker question. The questions are like, what are you at your best at? What are you at your worst when you’re doing? Where have you contributed to teams in the past and where have you needed help a lot in the past? All of these are questions designed to let people self-disclose to the level they’re comfortable more about them than just what they know and what their role is. They’re talking about strengths and weaknesses. They’re talking about hobbies or work preferences. They’re talking about things that become useful to the team. So yeah, please, we don’t need to like, we don’t need to make up some game where we all try and rhyme words together or some other cringey, weird icebreaker thing. But any kind of question you can pitch to the team that gets them to disclose a little bit more about what it’s like to work with them, surprise, it’s going to make it easier to work with them.
Yeah. Well, I like what you’ve said here that it can happen, just kind of casually over time. But if you’re deliberate, it’s going to happen a lot faster, and you’re going to see the benefit of that in a much shorter timeframe. So, you know, for everybody that’s listening in, if you want to create the best team ever, faster, make the time for this. And I realize this episode’s going to go live, it’s going to be after tax season, and everybody’s going to be thinking, oh, we don’t have time for anything. This is the time of the year you’re going to have more time than not, and if you’re thinking, man, it was rough working with some people this past tax season, it might be a great time to take some time aside to, you know, have some of these conversations and be really intentional.
And David, is it fair to say that if you get that common understanding that the second key factor that you’ve got here of psychological safety is a little bit easier to create? Does one come before the other? I know every time I’ve seen it, I think you had common understanding discussed versus is that intentional or is it just, it’s where you begin?
Yeah, no, it is. It is intentional. It doesn’t necessarily have to be where you could begin. A lot of times if you’ve got a long-term team, we might actually have them start with pro-social purpose and we’ll get to that. But when you look at the research on psychological safety, okay, let me give—the textbook definition is not probably what you’re thinking. I think a lot of this term has been misused or misconnected to things like safe spaces, and people not actually encountering ideas that they’re uncomfortable hearing or what have you. And that’s not actually what psychological safety is. Psychological safety doesn’t promise you’re never going to hear anything you disagree with. Psychological safety promises that when you disagree, you feel safe to bring that up to the team. In other words, you feel like you have a voice to share the different things. The textbook definition is that it’s a climate where people feel safe to express themselves and to take risks, specifically interpersonal risks. We’re not talking about like, risks like abandoning general accounting principles, right? We’re not saying let’s play fast and loose on the books, or like, let’s just have ChatGPT do this audit for me. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about interpersonal risks, like speaking up because you disagree is one, but talking about a failure is another. Asking for help can be a huge interpersonal risk. Sharing, like a new idea for how we might improve in the future that’s kind of outta the box. These are all forms of interpersonal risks. Because you’re risking judgment—you might be judged as too negative or too crazy or in, you know, if you’re talking about failures, you might be judged as incompetent. These are all interpersonal risks. But you want a team where people feel safe to share this so the team can learn from each other. Ironically, that’s kind of what I opened up with the top right, that experience is a great teacher, and it’s cheaper, tuition’s cheaper when it’s someone else’s. So we want a team that can learn together and psych safety unlocks that.
And when you look at the research, it’s really not one element, it’s really two—psychological safety breaks down into a sense of both trust on the team, and then a sense that when I take those risks, I’m respected. Now, where does trust come from? Well, ironically, a lot of it comes from that sense of common understanding. When I feel like I’ve been able to disclose about myself, and that’s been positively received when I feel like I have things in common with these people, and I believe that we all have our best interests in heart, that grows that level of trust, which encourages me to take these interpersonal risks. But the thing that I think a lot of leaders break down on is they think that’s sufficient, but it’s also about how we respond after people take that risk. And that’s where respect comes in. When they share that new kind of out of the box idea, what’s our default reaction? Are we looking for ways to shut it down? I mean, we’ve all had that sense in our career, unless we’ve only been working for, I don’t know, seven days, we’ve all had that time in our career where we share an idea we’re excited about and someone goes, nah, that’ll never work, and then we don’t feel respected. We don’t trust that person anymore. There’s this constant sort of virtuous or vicious cycle at play in this.
And so common understanding flows naturally into the trust piece of psychological safety, but we need to have a conversation about how we’re treating each other when we’re expressing differences and disagreements and those sort of things as well, in order to keep that level of psychological safety and trust high.
So what does a leader need to do to create that? Because it sounds like there’s almost a chicken and egg scenario because you said, it’s how you react when somebody does take those risks is going to build the psychological safety, or it could tear it down, I guess, if they react poorly. But to get them to take that risk so that you can have that reaction, bit of a chicken and egg here. So as a leader, what can someone do to create that environment where somebody else is willing to take a risk and maybe make that mistake?
Yeah. And obviously you can’t exactly encourage people to take a leap of faith. You can’t force them to do it right, because that’s not a leap, that’s a push. You have to create the environment where they want to do it. There’s kind of two things here that I would encourage. The first is the way in which you call for candor matters. A lot of leaders think that they’re opening up the team discussions to different voices, but at the, it’s like one minute left in the Zoom meeting or the teams meeting, and they say, all right, any questions and that’s it, or anybody else have anything they want to say. A very sort of short, like they open the door, imagine having an open door policy, but your open doors only open a crack. That’s effectively what you’re doing, right? So instead of that, how are you calling for candor? Are you taking the time to say things like, you know, it sounds like we’re headed to a consensus, but I feel like I’m missing something and I can’t put my finger on it. Can anybody help? That’s a totally different way to ask for a different perspective, but it’s one that frames it, it lowers the risk, if you will. It makes it seem like it’s not as big a leap because you’re saying, hey, who can help me?
So the ways you call for that candor matter, and then the ways you treat conflict and conflicting ideas as a form of collaboration. You’re not pushing back on the idea. Even if you disagree with it, when you hear it. I mean, you are going to hear when you try and create this sense of psychological safety, this is what kind of is—well, this is what sucks about it. When you try and create and call for that candor, you’re going to hear ideas that are stupid. It’s going to happen. As a leader, the thing you need to do is make sure that you’re still modeling respect in that moment, and you’re not pushing back on the person or the idea. We’re very territorial over ideas, especially if it’s the first or second time we’ve risked sharing what we’re truly thinking, we can tie a lot of our own identity and our sense of competence into that idea. And so as a leader, I don’t want to push back on the idea, I obviously don’t want to push back on you. If I disagree with it, I still want to show I respect it. And the way you do that is usually by asking clarifying questions, in particular, clarifying questions that get at the assumptions behind the idea. You know, and I might find out that that idea that I think is going to be way too expensive, I start asking questions, and we start to understand where our differences in our initial cost estimates were.
I mean, you hired smart, talented people. If they have a different idea than you, if they disagree with you, it’s usually not because they’re illogical or stupid, and you’re brilliant, or vice versa, it’s because you’re doing your, you’re executing logic from a different set of assumptions. So treating that conflict is like, this is an opportunity to collaborate, to widen our perspectives, to check our assumptions. One of us will probably end up right or a third option that would’ve never found itself had you not spoken up, and as a leader, I’m okay with any of those options. That’s kind of how you do it. You can’t force people to take that risk, but you can lower how much of a jump they see it as, and then you can be there to catch them when they take it.
Yeah. So when they take that leap and they share that idea that we’ll just go with it because I think it works well. It’s just stupid. In your mind, you’re thinking this might be one of the most illogical ideas I’ve ever heard. You’ve pushed for the questions and at the end of the day. You’ve gotta communicate. We’re not rolling with this idea. There’s nothing here that’s working. You’re thinking they’re not getting it through these conversations, these questions. How does a leader effectively communicate that while still maintaining psychological safety? Because there’s gotta be times where the idea’s just not a good idea, and we’ve gotta communicate that. How do they do it?
So two things here. So number one, the goal is not to tell them. The goal is to get them to realize it. And so when you’re asking questions about their assumptions, you’re either going to go upstream or downstream depending on why you think the idea is stupid. If you think the idea is stupid because it’s going to cost way too much money, then you’re probably going upstream: “Tell me about how many man hours you think that would take. How many people do we need to dedicate to this project? So tell me how much you think getting this new technology would cost all of these upstream assumptions from it.”
Or if you think it’s like, oh, we’re going to lose clients over this, you might go downstream. “Let’s say we implemented that out with a couple different clients. How would they react? And then what would happen after that? What would happen after that?” And eventually, there’s either a point where they say I don’t know, or they do know, and then they get it and they start thinking like you think, right? The “I don’t know” is actually great. ’cause the I don’t know is, “Okay, alright, so there’s something to research here. Why don’t you look into it a bit more, and you come back to me.” And when they look into it a bit more, they’ll probably find what you already knew. But now you’ve brought them there. You didn’t force them there. So that’s kind of the first thing that I do when I start.
Now, the second is, again, I think if you’re going to turn down somebody’s idea eventually, they did all the research, you talked about it, you had three or four differing opinions, and in the end, as a leader you have to make the call, that’s fine too so long as you gave them the time to feel heard, and you explained your decision afterwards. The goal there is to teach them how you think, so that in the process you are teaching them how to shape their idea the next time so that it has a better chance of winning. So you’re not saying, “Hey, yeah, we didn’t do that idea ’cause it’s stupid,” we said, “Okay, but here’s what I was really, when I was making this decision, what I really had to focus on were, were these two elements and that led me to favor this proposal over this proposal, okay?” You’re teaching them how you think, what you focus in on, et cetera, et cetera. So all of those things, again, you don’t have to always agree with people, you don’t have to give blanket amnesty for mistakes, you don’t have to create an environment where people never disagree—n fact, that last one is the opposite of psychological safety. You have to have an environment where people feel like they can respectfully disagree, but then eventually commit to an idea because they understand how you thought, and how the team thought, and they’re okay that they didn’t win that time, ’cause they know they have a next time coming.
Yeah. It’s not really about winning that situation as much as it’s about learning and moving the conversation forward. And is that where then this third factor comes in of pro-social purpose? Is that, you know, how we, in connecting the decision making to the why behind it or the bigger picture, is that where you see pro-social purpose coming in? Or help me understand what exactly pro-social purpose means as compared to just purpose?
Yeah. So sometimes it does, and other times I think it’s about—the easiest way to describe pro-social purpose is it’s how that specific team can answer the question, who is served by the work that we’re doing. A more complex answer might be, it’s how they internalize the mission, the vision, the values, et cetera, down to the work their specific team does. So, vision statements are great, mission statements are great, Simon Sinek would call those the big whys. It’s great to know why we do what we do. But most teams, especially in junior ranks, especially when they’re, you know, the ones actually doing, let’s say the auditing or what have you, they’re kind of disconnected from that work. They’re two or three stages away from seeing that impact. But it’s what are we as a team doing to get people to remember that their work matters and it has this kind of impact on a regular basis. So again, I like to have teams answer that question, who is served by the work that we do, but most importantly, it’s about drawing the connection between who and that why—whatever that overarching why is—we don’t want to replace it, we want to be in line with it.
But most people, this is the reason, like if you had the same child that I did, you remember like watching Saturday morning cartoons and every once in a while that sad music would come on and there’d be a fundraiser for something, whether it’s like animals or, or a poverty alleviation thing or what have you, like charities already knew a long time ago that people connect to stories, not numbers. So this is about those stories, those people, the community groups, the stakeholders, the way we can tell the story of why our work matters, not point to like, facts and data, right? Not an esoteric, like can we regurgitate the mission statement, but can we point to the people whose lives are made better when we fulfill that mission statement.
And it’s gotta be more than just the service or the task that they’re doing. If I recall, was KPMG—you had an accounting firm that was mentioned in your book, is that right?
I did, yeah.
So talk a little bit about that, and I realize that’s a Big Four accounting firm. Many of you that are listening are like, oh, but that’s Big Four. I would argue from the way that I recall how it was shared in the book, David, it doesn’t matter how big the organization is, you’ve gotta connect it, like you said, to the people. So talk a little bit about that.
Yeah. In fact, their size was actually kind of a limiting factor. So this was 2014 KPMG and some of the listeners might have been here when that happened. They noticed morale was really, really low. They noticed recruiting efforts were really low and they did something really bold rather than do the perks and pay increases. I mean, I talked to Bruce, who was the chief people officer at the time, or the partner in charge of human resources at the time. They did all those things and it moved the needle a little bit, but eventually, all of that stuff levels off. So they got really bold and they decided to start telling stories, and they did what most senior leaders do, which is they started talking about the why and the big stuff first. They’re a big company, they’ve been around a very long time, so they started talking about all these historical examples of how the firm had made a difference, right? And some of ’em were cool, like. President Roosevelt hired KPMG accountants to manage the logistics of the Lend-Lease Act, which is how the US entered and joined the allies in World War II. Like that’s pretty cool. KPMG Accountants certified the election of Nelson Mandela in 1992. First free and fair election in South Africa, first black president of South Africa. That’s cool, right? Of course, “I wasn’t a part of that. It’s 2014 now, it’s 2015. I didn’t do any of that stuff.”
And that’s where I think they realized there’s more power to going small than talking big. So after that, they called that the “We Shape History” campaign. This made all of these great, you know, corporate propaganda about what do you do at KPMG? We shape history. Then they flipped it and they made it small scale and they said, you tell us. And they launched this thing they called the “10,000 Stories Challenge.” They took all, at the time, it was around 30,000 members worldwide across the firm. And they said, you tell us, how you are making a difference with the clients you serve right now? You tell us you know who is served by the work that you do? And the goal was to get 10,000 stories collected inside of a year. If we have 10,000 different examples of lots of stuff, it might seem small scale, but it matters to those people, right? And so that’s the goal. Within a few months, they actually stopped the activity because they got 42,000 stories.
Wow.
Okay, so we’re doing the math. We’re all accountants—well, I’m not, but you’re all accountants here. You’re doing the math. Right? 42,000—30,000 person firm. Some people did the assignment twice, that’s true. These are accountants. Of course they went for extra credit. I taught business school for 10 years. It’s always the accountants doing the extra credit. And what I found was actually interesting is when they dove into their engagement numbers the following year, they found out that some people went for a lot of extra credit and a few went for none. A few didn’t do it at all. And they were actually able to split the engagement data and look at, this group, did the assignment, this group didn’t do the assignment. And the differences in answers, like “I feel that the work that I do has a purpose. I’m proud to work at KPMG.” My favorite one. My favorite one: Seven out of 10 people in the “purpose” condition said yes to, “I rarely think about looking for a new job.” So in other words, 70% of people were satisfied, were good, we like being here, I rarely think about working anywhere else. That number flipped in the on-purpose condition. Only three out of 10. In other words, seven out of 10 were looking, or were thinking about looking for a new job, not because they swallowed some giant corporate propaganda campaign that regurgitated the mission statement out to them, but because they created a program where individual team leaders could have a conversation about the work their individual team was doing and how members of that team were making an impact on it, that’s what actually moved the needle.
Why I emphasize that so much is it doesn’t matter what size you are, because it comes down to the team level. So if your whole company’s six people, or your company’s 300 people in dozens of teams of six to eight, like you can still have this activity ’cause you have it on a team by team basis. Have that discussion, have an answer for that question: Who is served by the work that we do? When we do a great job, what’s the downstream effect of that? Great. Let’s stay focused on that.
So when we’re thinking about these three key factors that we’ve just talked through—common understanding, psychological safety, pro-social purpose—I could see some folks, if a firm or a company decide, hey, we’re going to embrace this, and it’s a phrase that you just used immediately made me think of this, is I could see somebody saying, “Okay, well that’s just corporate propaganda. That’s just HR or that’s just, it’s going to look good on some survey that said that we did this thing.” How can leaders ensure that if they try to embrace these three factors to improve their team dynamics, what do they need to do to make sure that it’s not seen as corporate propaganda and just another HR initiative that leaders aren’t really bought into, but they’re being told that they have to do? What does a leader need to do to really internalize this and help the team see that they care that it’s not just another step in the, you know, the cog of the HR wheel.
Yeah. Well I think the biggest thing is you need to give the team a quick win and so you ought to focus on the place it’s most obvious and also sort of easiest to fix. And so I’ve got a couple questions I do for that, like, for psychological safety, I like to ask team leaders, “When was the last time somebody disagreed with you in front of the rest of the team, and how’d that go?” If you feel like it happens all the time and the team fully does it, great, ignore psych safety. There’s not really a quick win there. For common understanding, it’s often like, “When was the last time somebody was waiting on an assignment from someone else and that person had no idea.” Or “When was the last time there was some conflict on the team because one person violated the other person’s assumptions for how email is supposed to work or what you’re supposed to—you were supposed to ping me on Teams and you called me instead.” Like those little stupid, we just didn’t understand each other conflicts. Okay, great. Let’s have that conversation. On the pro-social purpose side, I would say it’s really just about what’s the energy people are bringing to their work and to their meeting. You as a leader know whether or not if there’s declining performance, is it a knowledge skills gap or is it a motivation gap? If it’s a motivation gap, then let’s have that conversation.
So I think it really just starts from where can I get my team that first quick win in which of the three? Please don’t try and do all three at once. They are synergistic, they will build on each other, et cetera. But get the quick win first. Get them sort of bought into like this was not about Jeremy read a book and then I listened to Jeremy’s podcast, so now I read a book and now we’re all going to do this like we do every year, right? This is about, hey, I’ve been feeling like as a team we could really grow in this area, so here’s what I want to do. And then when they do it and grow in that area, now you’ve got them bought in ’cause they found that quick win.
Yeah. I love that. I love that. David, what have we missed that we need to make sure that we cover in this conversation? Anything big that you’re thinking? We didn’t go there, but we gotta go there to make sure that this works.
Yeah. So I end the book with this kind of one sentence sort of summary of what I think actually truly matters in the book. And that word “matter” is probably at the core of it, right? The sentence is, “People want to do work that matters and work for leaders who tell them they matter.” And so that second part of that is really the core. We talked about pro-social purpose, and so people will know that their work matters, but how many people on your team actually believe that they matter to you? That as a leader, you’re actually invested in their success, you care about what they do. Even if they grow beyond the firm, you care about them as people, not just as tools to achieve objectives. There’s a whole other book there, I’m sure somewhere, but that’s probably the only thing we didn’t talk about is like taking that own inventory of us as leaders. What are we doing to make sure our people know that they matter to us?
And this is, look, this is coming like you said, this is coming out right after busy season. So now is probably when your people one are like super burnt out, but when all of the conflict, all of the tension, all of the, oh, my boss just doesn’t get it, work-life balance conversations happen. Now’s a great time to remind them how much they matter to you as people because of what you just went through collectively in spite of all of the tension, like you got it done. So now is a great time to push, reset on that and remind them like you matter and our work matters.
And it’s really connecting to people as people. So much of what we talked about, it’s humanizing them, it’s recognizing that they’re not just resources to get things done. They’re people, they matter, they care whether or not they matter, and that’s actually okay. It seems like sometimes it’s like, well, why should they, you know, why does it matter if they’re just a number? Because it does—it matters to everybody. And leaders—it matters to leaders whether or not other leaders see them and whether or not their work matters. So yeah, it’s not just a team member thing, an employee thing. It’s at all levels within the firm.
David, I really enjoyed the conversation. If somebody is wanting to learn more, obviously your book, it’s one of five if, if I recall correctly. Best Team Ever, it’s a wonderful book. Where else can they find you? Other resources? What would you recommend for them?
Yeah, I mean, if you are this far in, then you’re probably, you’re part of the back of the podcast club, you’re probably a loyal listener, so you know the real answer’s going to be the show notes, right? Swipe right or swipe up in whatever you’re listening to and check that out. But if you’re driving, please don’t do that. Leave your phone down. Stay safe, right? And DavidBurkus.com—honestly, you don’t even need to know how to spell Burkus, people misspell it enough that Google will get you there. So just type that into Google. You’ll find my site, you’ll find me on socials, and I’m happy to connect and keep this conversation going. I’m not naive. Your team’s not going to fix itself overnight. But in the process of trying to do it, like this is a conversation that will happen for a while. So please, if you’re listening, feel free to reach out and let’s keep that conversation going.
Outstanding. And yes, we will put all that in the show notes. David, thank you so much for the conversation today here on the show. I really enjoyed it and hope we can talk again soon.
Yeah, oh, thank you, and thanks so much for having me.
