Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - ‘Best Of’ Finding Mastery – How To Build High Performing Teams

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

To date, the Finding Mastery Podcast has been running for 8 years and for over 400 episodes. In that time, we’ve gained extraordinary insights and timeless wisdom from some of the top thinkers and doers in the world.While we have come to realize that there is no singular “golden thread” to how the best in the world operate – we’ve noticed some common themes, skills, and insights that many of these people have utilized on their path to mastery. And that’s why we’re so thrilled to bring you the all new Best Of Finding Mastery series. In each episode, we’ll take a deep dive into a specific skill or topic – pulling together the best insights and gems from years of interviews with the best in the world. These are tools and insights that have stood the test of time. For this inaugural episode, we’re highlighting conversations with a remarkable group of leaders who’ve made a game-changing impact leading high performing teams in the worlds of sports, branding, technology, retail, business and the military. You’ll hear from game-changers across industry like Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO), Pete Carroll (Seattle Seahawks Head Coach), Jan Singer (former Victoria’s Secret & J.Crew CEO), Toto Wolff (Mercedes Benz F1 CEO), Julie Rice (Co-Founder of SoulCycle), and more. Though each of these individuals comes at leadership with unique personal philosophies, core values, and historical experiences, you’ll hear quite a bit of overlap when it comes to their central drivers for success in building high performing teams. Now, we could have cut this episode a dozen different ways — we’ve had so many incredible leaders on this podcast, it was nearly impossible to choose which conversations to highlight. So, let us know if you like this format and what subjects interest you. There’s plenty more to choose from for a volume two, three and beyond. And with that, we hope you enjoy the first installment of our Best Of series on high-performing teams._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I don't know everything, but I'm going to learn how to be a better leader. I'm going to learn how to have the right conversation. And that is exactly the mindset you need to have. You need to be able to recognize your mistakes, your own mistakes and your own failure. You do need to come together as a podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. And today I'm excited to welcome you to our inaugural best of episode. The Finding Mastery podcast has been running for about seven years now. We have over 400 episodes. And as a result, we have gained extraordinary

insights and timeless wisdom from some of the top thinkers and doers in the world. While there is no single golden thread to how the best in the world operate, there are some common themes and skills and insights that many of our guests have utilized on their path of mastery. To that end, in this best of series, we'll be compiling insights from some of our favorite episodes organized around a specific topic. This episode is about what it takes to build high-performing teams. You'll hear from game changers like Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, Toto Wolff, Executive Director and Managing Partner at Mercedes Formula One, former CEO of J.Crew and Victoria's Secret, Jan Singer, and so many more.

Though each of these individuals have unique personal philosophies and core values and historical experiences, you'll hear quite a bit of overlap when it comes to their central drivers for success in building high-performing teams. Now, we could have cut this episode a dozen different ways. We've had so many incredible leaders on this podcast, it was nearly impossible to choose which conversations to highlight. So let us know if you like this format and what subjects interest you. There's plenty more to choose from for volume two and three and beyond. And with that, let's jump right into the first installment of our best of series on high performing teams. The first guest we'll hear from is an extraordinary leader

and someone I was fortunate to work with for many years, Pete Carroll, head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. We had him on the podcast in front of a live audience. So this is a special one for many reasons. In Seattle, we committed to building a high performance team on the foundation of a relationship-based culture. The approach involves deeply committing to helping individuals discover who they are, what makes them unique, what drives them,

how to best communicate to effectively forge a connection so that we can help bring them closer to expressing their unique potential. When I hear you talk't I don't hear coach I hear an animated human that wants others to do well right like living with passion dealing with the hard things having an idea of what is possible staying with it day in and day out even when it's hard and having deep care for other people. So by profession, you're a coach, but it doesn't seem like there's a limitation in, in the way that you're thinking about your life, right? So you're not bound by, I'm a manager, I'm a coach, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a, there's something larger than that. Yeah. Well, there's no way. Let's take another step here. I don't think there's any way that you can be really good at what you're doing unless you have a real clarity and kind of a

clear vision of what you're trying to do. And I don't think you can do that unless you have a really good understanding of what you're all about and where you come from, what you stand for, what are your uncompromising principles, what are your beliefs. Because you're in a coaching aspect or in a leadership aspect, you're exposed. People are looking at you, they're hearing you, they're watching you. You're challenged by the issues and the concerns and the decisions that you make. And if you can't find the consistency and the clarity that you can exhibit of what you stand for and what's important to you, I don't know how you make it. You know, if you're trying to be somebody else, you're going to falter. You're not going to be able to be that somebody else consistently. So there's an understanding and a depth that's

really important. And I think it really goes back to the individual. Again, I would say, whether you're coaching, whether you're leading, whether you're managing, whether you're running a business, whatever it is, there's people around you that are responding to you and they'll respond best when they can clearly understand what you're all about. And so that takes work. Okay. So walk us through some of that work. And then I want to also put a pin in this because I want to go back to one of the things you talk about with passion. So where do you want to start? Do you want to also put a pin in this because I want to go back to one of the things you talk about with passion. So where do you want to start? Do you want to go back up to passion for a minute or do you want to walk through like how you develop your philosophy?

Let's go there. I think it's really important to understand what we represent and what we stand for in our beliefs and really the work that we do together and the partnership that we have. It begins with caring for the people around us. And if we're going to care for the people around us, how far are we going to go? How, when will we stop and start? I mean, how, how far? I'm care, but not that much, you know, well, the way that we think we're, we are really committed, you know, our, our formula is being committed to the individual so that no matter where we have to go or what we have to do, we will compete to figure out what it takes to help that individual person figure out who they are, what they're all about, how we can communicate best with them, how

we can generate a connection with them so that we can eventually take them where they potentially could go. And so to me, that goes all the way back to philosophy. And where we start is in helping people discover who they are and what they're all about. I've been kind of trapped in this thought forever that everybody has a philosophy, but they might not know what it is. You know, and they have a philosophy because you have things that you believe in. You have things that govern your life. You have the decisions that you make exhibit who you are and what you're all about. But you might not have taken the time to step back and take a look at that collection of all the things that represent what you do on a regular basis and what you stand for, the car you drive, the toothpaste you choose, what radio

station do you listen to, what music do you listen to, what colors do you like. Those are all choices that we make, but often, most often, people don't take the time to step back and put those thoughts together and say, oh, that's who I am. That's what I'm all about. You see it in glimpses, but I think through the process, you can come to a point where you can find real clarity. And it's such a powerful discovery process once you go through and do the work. It's not impossible work. It's just you just got to do it. And so I think it's so important to start there.

Let's say, let's go like in, I don't know, to coaches, to your coaches. How do you demonstrate deep care? Or maybe I know to coaches to your coaches how do you demonstrate deep care or maybe i'm adding the word deep how do you demonstrate care by listening first in in accepting you know right whatever they represent who they are without questioning i noticed that from you that's i mean I want to listen and care and show that what they think, what they stand for, what's important to them is really important to me to understand it. And the idea is, the base idea that goes way back, with my coaches or the people we work with, it's learning the learner.

I need to learn the person that I'm dealing with so that I can understand who they are so that I can best serve them. And so being a great teammate is being someone that serves others. And so I'm just trying to be a good teammate and make sure that I'm doing my part. And that comes from caring so much that you are willing to listen, even when they're telling you stuff you don't want to hear, or even when they're representing something that you don't understand. And then caring enough to try to figure out why would they think that, you know, where are they coming from there? As opposed to, no, that's not right. You're not, you know, I don't, I don't agree with that. Do you get frustrated? Sure. Okay. So then when you're frustrated, it was clear, wasn't it? When you get frustrated,

how do you stay? Now we're getting into the art of coaching, right? Because there's, there's something going on inside. All of this is about the art of coaching, right? Because there's something going on inside. All of this is about the art of coaching. Everything we're talking about, from my perspective, that's what we're talking about. So when you got something going on inside, your trigger, so to speak, and somebody comes to you with a new idea or something they're frustrated with, and you're already activated. And I can think about this scenario where it's like with a kid or you know your child or it's a peer or it's a somebody you're reporting up to not in your case but like but when you got stuff going on how do you regulate so that you can do that thing to listen if as a demonstration

of care really well okay good I'm sorry try to do it really, really well. And that's, it comes back, as we know, it comes back to being willing to be connected in the moment, to care enough that you'll, whatever else is going on, you're going to be there. Now, my mind, my mind races quite a bit. You know, I mean, I can, I can get distracted. So I have to really practice. I have to really focus. I have to be really good at it because I don't want to miss the moment. I don't want to miss the opportunity to hear somebody say something to me that's going to make a difference in the rest of our relationship. It might be coming. So that's as we try to stand for how valuable it is to have the discipline

to be mindful. It's so important. And that's being in the moment, being present, being open to whatever is going on around you, no matter what else you might be wanting to do, you know, in that moment, that exchange, you got me, and I'm there. That's the challenge.

That's frustrating for me, being frustrated. Because, you know, you have to work at it. You have to really care. And there's a discipline to that. Let's, let's talk about confidence and building confidence. It's an extraordinary endeavor when, uh, when like you coach a big team with a lot of players and all that. Um, because the effort is what is most important is that you figure out how good somebody could be, and then you help them uncover the fact that they are. Some people have a false sense of confidence. We work our way through that. But the confidence level is so... The confidence level that

we're trying to find has to happen through experience. And we have to help them understand what they're worthy of believing in themselves. Because if you're in the model of performing, in performing really well, you have to have a level of confidence that you can believe in and trust. So we have to put them in situations to be successful. That's hugely important. And give them an opportunity to start to feel their value and their connection and what they're capable of so that we can then begin to ask them to repeat that level of performance.

And in essence, my job is to prove to somebody how good they are. That's how I look at it. I got to prove to them how good they are. So how many ways can I go about doing that? What do I have to do to get that done? We'll show film. We'll put them in situations. We'll show highlights. We'll compare them. We'll talk their way through it. We'll walk their way through it in every way to get them to understand what they're capable of. And as we start to build on that and build on the successes, then now they have a reason to be confident. As you build that, you give them a chance to trust themselves. That's what we know. Trust is so, so valuable in performance. And trust in yourself is what's most crucial. Let's use this. Jump the

example. Let's be this. Jump the example. Let's be Michael Jordan. Did you think Michael Jordan ever worried about a game-winning shot? Well, yeah, he did. He worried about, give me another chance so I can make another one. He was so confident. Well, not everybody's like that, but that's what you're shooting for. You're trying to take people to the level of confidence where they have so much belief in themselves and so much reason to trust that they're going to come through when the time comes because they have a clearer mentality.

Confidence leads to the ability to trust, leads to focus, so that now when you can focus at your best, you've ridden yourself from all the discursive thoughts and issues and concerns and expectations that you can perform like you're capable whether you're an individual whether you're a team you know a whole group it's the same thing if we take that scenario of the individual and then try to we're talking about like this relationship based approach which is an important word for your important phrase if we were to take that that's about an individual. How do you help a bunch of me's turn into the we? Yeah, well, you know, we've had in our history, we've had a lot

of colorful players. Let's call them colorful players. And they've been extraordinary, extraordinary competitors and contributors and champions and all of that, world class. And I've always been asked, you know, how do you blend the big egos that some people would see it as, you know? Well, the challenge is to keep them connected to the common bond, which is team, which is the overall collective effort that we're all about. The most colorful players are sometimes the greatest contributors. They're also going to be the greatest detractors as well if allowed to hang too long. If they don't fit, you've got to go.

They have to go on and do something else. But as long as they're willing and it's crucially important to them that they are part of it, then the colorful side of it, the attitude, the approach, the gregarious nature that they may bring, that only adds to the whole complexion of the whole thing. So that's an openness, and also it's a willingness to accept unique, extraordinary, special people in their own way. I like to think that everybody is unique and special in

their own way. And we just need to figure out what it is and uncover and bring that to the surface so that they can truly be everything that they can possibly be. So we have always encouraged the uniqueness and encouraged the spontaneity and the individuality that makes them them, you know, and not discouraged it. If you were to coach, and we've talked about like coaching a team, so a group of individuals, if you were to go way upstream and have a thought that you could, well, let me back up. There's two ways I want to ask this. In football, I've heard the phrase a bunch like, this is the install phase. Like you're going to install information into the person. And then in some of the ancient traditions,

they talk about seeds. Like this non-conscious, this gets a little weird, right? But we all have these seeds, the seed of love, the seed of greed, the seed of jealousy, the seed of hope. And how much time we spend watering those seeds, thinking about those seeds, those grow. Some are weeds, some are flowers. Okay. So the question is like, if we were to go way upstream to coaching the planet, coaching humanity, okay, whether it's watering seeds, you take this whatever way you want, what seeds would you water or what would you install?

Yeah, that's really fun Can I throw a couple lightning bolts down to anything You know I the I'm pretty stuck on this thought that it's pretty hard for me to come away from finding the willingness to care so much that you can help other people be extraordinarily themselves. How could we share that care

that we would accept people and love people for where they are, who they are, and celebrate that, regardless of whether you understand it or you get it or you recognize the color or the shape or whatever they are. You know, that would be the coaching I would want to share. How can we reach out and help people be so open-hearted and so open-minded and so loving that they would receive those that are around us and help them become everything that they dream of being. You know, that's a, I mean, that's a big thought. But that's, and it doesn't matter to me where you go or what you, that's,

that's kind of what I wish we could do, you know. And I hate when we see other stuff and people working against that thought and not acceptance and not openness and not caring. We're just missing life. I think we're not doing that. I mean, it sounds like you're speaking to the choir, but I also just want to affirm, like when I hear that, I go, of course. I didn't know you were going to go there, but of course. I either yeah right it's a really good thought it's it's a powerful thought it's you know it's one of the core principles love care for other people i think when you

you have some basic needs met um if we go back to maslow you got some basic needs met the need to belong is satisfied then it's kind of love and esteem. And then you can get into that flourishing self-action. See, I think that's winning. To me, that's winning. And, you know, you can't always win all the games. You know, you can't win every challenge that we face. You just can't. It just doesn't happen that way.

But if you're working towards being your best and giving your best shot and bringing your best, to me, that's winning. And that's what winning forever was a long time ago when we first first shared that thought and the title of a book and all, um, it was about striving to, to live fully, to be the best you can be. That's, I think that's a pretty cool thing. Success for Pete is not only defined by records or standing or points scored, but on bringing your best self to any situation. And more, being committed to seeing the best in others so that you can help them understand and realize their own unique and impressive capabilities. In Seattle, Pete and I agreed to develop a relationship-based, developmentally-minded program. We worked to create a culture and the conditions and the psychological best practices

to help people be their very best. And in doing so, the media would often point to or say, you let the players be themselves. That egregiously misses the mark. Pete created an environment where it was psychologically safe enough for the players to be themselves. There's no letting taking place here. There's no letting people be themselves. He didn't give players permission. None of us hold that power or responsibility over another person. We set the conditions and then supported and challenged the players to be their very best consistently. We made a commitment to see the uniqueness of the person, celebrate that uniqueness and challenge them to bring it to practice and get right to their edge every day to not have to hide from or worry about or wonder if they're okay. Oftentimes, getting clear on that special part of an individual

requires someone else to help wrestle it down. What is that? What is that special part of you relative to your unique life journey, your struggles, your celebrations, your talents that you have? What is it that makes you special? And how are you going to bring that forward? When you get it right, you get a bunch of people who feel seen, who feel supported and held to a standard to do that consistently.

The results? Increased creativity and innovation. You're not overly concerned about what people think about you. You're not constantly monitoring or censoring yourself out of fear of criticism. You are free to think outside of the box because there is no box. Enhanced performance happens. There's less energy that's wasted on managing perceptions and leaving more energy to focus on the task at hand, to be in the present moment. Authenticity fosters trust. When you're true to yourself, you lay the foundation for deeper, more meaningful connections with teammates.

And of course, fun takes place. At the core, we are social animals. And when we live and work in environments where we feel connected, we thrive. There's no reason we can't have fun while being in intense environments. Fun is part of it now. Okay, quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people. It takes the right tools, the right information at the right time. And that's where LinkedIn Sales Navigator can come in. It's a tool

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Finding Mastery that our team lives and breathes by. If you're ready to start building stronger relationships that actually convert, try LinkedIn Sales Navigator for free for 60 days at linkedin.com slash deal. That's linkedin.com slash deal for For two full months for free, terms and conditions apply. Finding Mastery is brought to you by David Protein. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat, and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm traveling or in between meals, on a demanding day certainly, I need something quick that will support the way that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David Protein Bars. And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put

him on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening. I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike. I love them. One a day, one a day. What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here. Don't tell. Okay. All right. Look, they're incredibly simple. They're effective. 28 grams of protein, just 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. It's rare to find something that fits so conveniently into a performance-based lifestyle and actually tastes good. Dr. Peter Attia, someone who's been on the show, it's a great episode by the way, is also their chief science officer. So I know they've done their due diligence in that category. My favorite flavor right now is the chocolate chip cookie dough.

And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters and that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. And with that, let's jump right back into this conversation. Okay, sticking with the spirit of world-class coaches, the following conversation is with Jack Clark, the iconic and influential rugby coach from the University of California, Berkeley. Jack, the former head

coach of the U.S. national rugby team, has led Berkeley to 29 national collegiate championships and doing that in 40 years. He's built a high performance program that is, in many respects, the model for collegiate sports. I learned about Jack from my colleague and friend, Kevin Lake, who won a couple of national championships while playing under him at Berkeley. His appreciation and near reverence for Jack and the time they spent together shows up every time I bring up the name Jack Clark. Self-funded, a near 100% graduation rate with student-athletes who make an impact across culture, have a lifelong connection with the program, and continue to live long after they've left school.

By the program's motto, grateful for everything, entitled to nothing. His players graduate from Berkeley with, as Jack describes it, a PhD in team. Coaches come across the campus and across the world to get Jack's insights into team building. This is a man who has clear ideas about the value of team, what it takes to develop a high-performing team, and he even touches on what teams are not.

Jack speaks with a credibility and an authenticity that's hard to come by. Let's listen in. I think sport does a poor job of explaining its value. You know, I hear my colleagues talk about, you know, the value of being an athlete or a student athlete is around hard work. And it's around, you know, commitment, but I mean, at a world-class institution like this, I mean, you can find students in the library at midnight, you know, and, uh, you want to talk about commitment and hard work. I don't know that that's proprietary to sport. I don't believe that. Um, I think the thing that is really proprietary to sport is team. And I have this belief, right, that we're not one bright person away from solving the big issues. You know, we're not going to, not disease, not the environment, not education.

I mean, just list the big problems that we're going to have to solve going forward. And it's going to be groups of people that solve those things. People that can stand shoulder to shoulder, you know, point their nose in the same direction and work together, passionately work together. And I think that's what we're doing here, right? And that feels valuable. It feels, you know, I'm happy to go toe-to-toe with any professor on this campus. And I don't diminish any of that, but it's not taught anywhere else on this campus. I'd like to believe that, you know, our players are, you know, are getting the unofficial PhD in team.

They're getting a really an acute understanding of team. You know, they know what a good teammate looks like and the effect that they can have. They know what a bad teammate is, unvariably, right? I mean, these young people are, they're past, they're past the 10,000 hours, 10-year moment. I mean, they're becoming an expert in team. And especially if we make that, that's what we're doing here. And it's going to help us win some rugby games. But at the end of the day, that's the thing that is going to be the takeaway. I mean, I don't want to overstate it because I do believe that if you care about one another, that's pretty important. You know, I think if, you know, we genuinely care about one another, it's going to help the team perform.

It's going to, you know, really contribute to the culture of the team immeasurably. So I think it's the right thing to do to have empathy for each other and be kind to each other and care about one another. It might just be semantics, but I just, you know, I roll my eyes sometimes at the notion that, you know, we describe ourselves so frequently as a family when family is, as you point out, Mike, it's unconditional, where high performance teams are highly, highly conditional. There's a requirement to contribute to the middle, to do your job, to perform, to put your guts into it. I mean, I, you, you can't really research, um, a high performance organization of any type where you don't, you don't come to that, um, conclusion that there's

a lot of conditions here and it's not right for everyone, but those conditions help this, help this organization operate and succeed. And I think that that's how high performance teams are. I think they're highly conditional. And that doesn't mean they don't care about one another. It just means that it's not like you've got to accept me for who I am. And if that means, you know, you can't trust me or if I'm not punctual or if I break rules or if I don't give full effort, you've got to accept that. That's not true. You don't accept that in high performance athletics.

Meaning that people get fired. People get fired. People get cut. People separate from the team, coaches and players, right? There's an expectation in a high performance team that everyone is putting everything they have into it. How do you, technically or tactically, how do you pull out the best in people? Well, I think there's probably various, you know, various methods. I'm more interested, to be honest, about trying to learn over time. And I don't think it's something that you know during the recruiting process. And sometimes it might take a couple of years, but to really know, you know, the mentality of an individual, their athletic makeup, their athletic strengths, and to be able to build an approach to playing the game based on their strengths. You know, that's pretty powerful. I mean, every conversation I've ever had with a superior, typically, you know, I'm on the other

side of the desk and people are telling me, you know, what are the things that I need to do better? And, you know, I've never wanted to be that person necessarily. I mean, the fact is there's some requirements in any sport and you have to do the requirements well. There's basic skills that you have to be able to execute. But beyond that, I think building the team, it's about building an approach to playing, a technical approach based on what the players can do anytime, anywhere. And therefore, you know, once you get down to the individual level, it's the same thing. It's build a blueprint to play in the game based on what they do well. And sometimes you've got to be able to really understand what somebody does well, maybe even better than they do.

And the process is you sit across from one another and you have notebooks out, you know, no phones, no laptops, just notebooks and a writing instrument. You know, I have a friend that says, you know, you code the brain writing longhand. And I think you just make lists. What are the things that you're doing well? And a player might say, well, my ball handling skills are good. And if you agree, you say, yeah, they're good. They're good off either hand. Your left-hand pass is remarkably good.

Your right-hand pass is very accurate. You weight the ball. I mean, you need to be able to do more than just, you know, create a line item of handling. You know, you need to be able to touch it, taste it, smell it, be able to really make that skill come alive. So where hopefully at the end of that process, that modeling session, if you will, where you really sit down and you model an approach to playing based on what a player does well, you come away with something that can be leveraged, a skill set that they know they have.

They know they can do it anywhere, anytime. They have confidence in that skill set. And now it's time to leverage that for the good of myself and my team. Okay. So I'm imagining that you sit down across from an athlete and you've done the lonely work first to be able to think about what makes them special. And then what I'm just hearing now, it sounds like tactically you ask them, Hey, what are you good at? And then, so then you hear them first. Is that how you do it? And then they say, I've got good handling skills. And then you, because of your frames of reference and your lonely work, how you thought about that person, you take it deeper.

Yes. And then you work to get the fabric of it in such a, so clear that both of you can nod your head to say, I understand the fabric of what we're talking about. So it's not conceptual. That's right. Okay. And then you build a strategy around that person to position them in, yeah, to position them for success. That's right. For their personal success.

Personal success. Is that, when you say personal, is that different than sport success or personal inside of sport? It means that you could have two players playing the exact same position and it's really a coin flip which one of them is better. But they have very different skills. And it is really, let's say it's tackling. And let's say one of those players has great range. And they really get around the field and they make a lot of tackles. And maybe the player that they're competing with doesn't have the same range, but their tackles are more forceful. Their tackles have a higher quality to them in the fact that they might change the game. So maybe half the tackles, but those tackles are so forceful

that they create turnovers potentially. I don't know which one of these players is the best, but I want them to both play to their strengths. I want them to know what their strengths are, and I want them to play to them. I don't want the player that has a lot of range to their game to try to be the other person. I want them to be themselves. So I think the blueprint is personal to them. And when you coach people, do you try to shore up their weaknesses or how much time do you spend on that? It's fluid, but 70, 30 or so, right? I'm always trying to keep some kind of a ratio in the back of my head that, you know, what I don't want to do is build this long list of all the things you can't do. Now, there might be a couple of

things on that list that you're not going to get on the field until you do these things. So we're not going to be able to ignore them. We're going to need a lot of honesty in this kind of audit modeling session. It's going to be important that we can be direct. But what we're not going to do is we're not going to talk about the ninth most important thing you're not doing well. We're never going to go there. And I do think that people should improve over time. I mean, I shouldn't draw a paycheck unless I can develop athletes.

So we should have a training curriculum, which is going to acquire new skills. And over time, we should get better. We should move deficiencies into the asset column over time. What I don't want to do is always be chasing deficiencies and not putting enough time into strengths and how do we leverage strengths. or the more intense the person is to achieve or experience high-level sport, is that if they're paying attention to their deficits and the coach is amplifying their deficits, and it's not like they purposely want to create the scenario I'm going to create, but it's easy to find the things that are not working well. They scream at you, right? And when a coach says, hey, listen, I really want us to work on A, B, and C,

and the majority of those conversations are about getting better at A, B, and C that the athlete walks away saying, yeah, I, man, I'm not really that good at A, B, and C. Then when it's time to compete, that's the programming. I'm not sure if I have what it takes because the last 200 days of training, I haven't had what it took. And so that sets up this model. You're nodding your head like, yeah, that makes sense to me. I'm nodding my head like you should come talk to my team. I'm from the McAfee clan, right? And I have to force myself to be positive sometimes, right? It doesn't come natural to me to not be the guy pointing out mistakes. And I think I probably spent a fair bit of my career being

only that person on the way to winning championships, mind you. So I completely agree with you. And I can wear out my welcome pointing out all the things we can do to get better sometimes. And I've got to find some balance in my coaching. I need to have you come in and talk about that confidence. It's really hard. It's really hard to do to find what's good. And especially when the adult mind, the cognitive brain of ours that we're straddled with is always scanning the world to find what's wrong and broken and dangerous and hostile. That's how we survived. To override that, to find what's good, what could be good, what's amazing, what's an opportunity, it does take a lot of discipline to do. And that's the word, discipline.

Yeah, it does. Yeah. And so that's why we spent a lot of time thinking about we, it's like the folks I work with, Coach Carroll from the Seattle Seahawks and the team of folks that we work with about how to program and train optimism. Because that requires us to find what could be amazing so that when we're in the trenches and it's not working, we've got that mental discipline to continue to find what could work in our advantage. Right. As opposed to saying, there it is again. See, we're down by 42 points. How are we going to get out of this hole? We should just call it in now. But we can win a game and we can win a game pretty substantially. And we're in the meeting room the next morning. And it's my favorite

session of the entire week. And I get to be at the board and the question is, okay, guys, what do we do well? And guys are going to be pretty stingy about putting up their hand, you know. But eventually, they understand the process. We're eventually going to have to say we kicked the ball pretty well. And then somebody else might say, well, I don't know. I don't know that we – I think we kicked the ball pretty well until it really mattered and we didn't kick the ball well. And I want that collaborative discussion. I want the team to decide, does this go up on the wall or does it not, that we did something well? And at the conclusion of that, I'm going to say, okay, what do we got to work on? And the hands are going to fly up. The hands are going to fly up. And I'm

almost going to have to take another approach now, which is, well, I don't know that that belongs up there. I think we did it pretty well. Let's not let's not go too far with that. But the culture of the team is going to be to identify the things that we can do well. And they're pretty good at talking about the things that we are doing well. What are what are our strengths? What are we demonstrating that we can do well? But I love that process. I love that over time, especially the upperclassmen, they're highly engaged in this process, highly engaged. And the honesty in that room is

phenomenal. If you walked in the room, you wouldn't know whether we won by 40 or lost by 40, to be honest. What you'd have is a bunch of people talking about performance and in what areas can our performance improve and what areas can, you know, listen, three weeks in a row, this has been up here as something we've done well. How do we leverage this in our next game? I mean, we're obviously good at this. And then maybe, hey, you know, three weeks in a row, we've talked about this is something we can do better. You know, what do we have to do with training by way of volume and by way of exercises to, you know, to put this behind us, to show some improvement in this area? Now, I want them to be involved at that level. I'm not going to stop every practice and ask every player what they think of every situation. I know there's some coaches doing that, but we're going to be collaborative at the right time. We're going to, you know, they're going to

know. I mean, you know, when that meeting's over on Sunday morning from a Saturday game, you know, come the new week, they almost know what's going to happen in training because we sit and we made that prescription together in that room. Where did that come from for you? You know, I mean, everything I've learned, I almost learned from our players. I mean, it's been an unbelievable laboratory over the years. You know, it used to be that, you know, you'd get players one-on-one and you hear what they had to say. And it really would influence me. I mean, their perspectives were so pointed and so accurate in many cases that we just, I just start doing it together as a group.

And now there's some people, to be honest, I mean, keeping it real here, there's some people in the room going, oh my God, I mean, I don't even know what they're talking about really. I mean, it's just too much for some people to be able to have that really, you know, this is sport is study is what this is. This isn't like I play a sport and the game's over and hey, I'm going to give it a lash next week as well. No, this is wanting to know, this is being curious. This is really creating that performance audit where you want to know. You want to know what you're doing well and how you can continue to do it well and use it better in more situations. And what are the things you got to work on? And again, I mean, it's my favorite session of the week, bar none. And I get to add my bits into that,

which I appreciate. Sometimes if I think that we've understated something that has to be stated more strongly, I do it. If I think that we're off on the wrong track because somebody put up their hand and took us down the wrong track, I'm going to move on to the next guy. And, you know, it's important that there's a body of work in this session. It's not, is it important that everyone is able to have a say? Yes, it is. But it's also important that we come to some real conclusions that can really help the team. I mean, this is week to week to week. And, you know, I want to see the team improve. I mean, this is week to week to week. And, you know, I want to see the team improve. I mean, if we're not doing that, I mean, how how do you justify the hours that you put into this? How do you justify, you know, being a coach?

How do you justify, you know, the leadership within the ranks of the team if we're not getting better? It's really one of our, you know, constant performance improvement is one of our values. I mean, we say it as a value. I mean, if we're not going to get better at this, what are we doing? What would you hope an entrepreneur or a seasoned president or a CEO of a company could glean from your insights in a sentence or two or a thought or two? I have thought about this and it's around culture and it's around scaling culture is what it really is about because that's the hardest thing I think for them is, I get to know every guy that joins my team, right? I mean, I recruit him. I mean, I think there's a lot of chief executives and a lot of people in the

corner office with the best business card. They don't even know who gets onboarded anymore, right? I mean, they're relying on some corporate training documents and some, you know, and the idea that, you know, and I bet when they started that company, it was different. I bet they knew every person and they all believed in the same stuff and they knew what they were doing. But over time, in all businesses, in all organizations, really, it becomes the hardest thing. I use the word embedded culture here, you know, but the idea of being able to embed in scale culture as your company grows. And, you know, I mean, we have one office and I know everybody on

the team. I mean, in some ways people should look at me and say, well, I hope you can build culture in that situation. Try it in mine. And I think that's interesting. That really does point to the challenge. And then do you have a practice that helps embed culture? Talk about it and test it. I mean, I'm not afraid to, you know, have a young person come to the front of the room and say right up on the board, you know, one of our values and explain it to us. I mean, at some point, these have to be more than just words. Because, I mean, we see it all the time, don't we? We see words on the gym wall. We see a section where you can hit about us and you can hear an XY They wouldn't even know anything about it. I mean, these things have to be real. I mean, this is how, I mean, our beliefs, our culture, we're going to process every transaction we have, human or organizational, through those values. I mean, they're to be used.

They're to be used to make these value-based decisions. And that's how we're going to use them. We box car them all together and we use them as a system. And, I mean, you say there's five. You mentioned that I had five core values. Well, I've never been able to be asked a question about what we do that I couldn't refer back to the influence of one of those values on the question. I mean, I don't think you need 50 things. I don't think, you know, I think you can get by with three or four or five or seven

or 10, but they have to be complimentary, not contradictory, and they have to function as a system. They have to be a touchstone to guide you. They're just not these wooden sayings that end up somewhere. They really are beliefs. Jack is right. A team is not a family because the relationship has high performance conditions attached to it. That condition fundamentally impacts the relationship. It's not that it's good or bad. That's too simplistic. I think it's really

important just to honor it. Rather than mask that conditionality, a leader is best served by being honest, thoughtful, and direct about it. When building a relationship-based culture, be clear that the relationship is in service of a shared vision during a specific, discrete amount of time. And that, in its best form, those relationships and what you learn will carry forward in your lives after that mission is over. Clearly, that's the case with Kevin and the players who have passed through Jack's program. But framing it as a family is misleading and can definitely undermine trust. I was on a bus with a player coming back from a game

and he said, Doc, relationship-based? Do you think any of these coaches are coming to my dad's funeral? I looked back at him with lifted eyebrows and created the space for him to respond. And he said, You know the answer,

maybe. It's a relationship for what we're doing right now. He was right. That's an honest framing. He wasn't going to be disappointed down the road because he knew the conditionality of the relationship. And at the same time, he could also feel the care that the coaches and teammates shared for one another. It's a thin line. Is it caring in service of success? Or is it caring as an end in and of itself? The answer is yes and. It can be both.

Just be clear about the framing. You also heard Jack Clark touch on this thoughts around scaling culture. And I'm glad he brought that up because later in the episode, we'll hear a lot from the importance of culture within high-performing teams from Toto Wolff and Satya Nadella and Vice Admiral from the U.S. Navy, John Muston. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put

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Let's jump right back into the conversation. We're going to jump into a conversation with Julie Rice, the co-founder of SoulCycle and former chief brand officer at WeWork. Julie and I dug into the significance of relationship building and how to create a sense of trust and safety amongst teams, no matter the size of the organization. What's so interesting about Julie's insights is they come from someone who dialed in her approach after creating an immensely successful organization and brand. She's a great example of a leader who understood that she didn't have all the answers going in. She relied on psychological agility, learning on the job, remaining flexible, and adjusting her leadership formula as she evolved, but always returning to relationships as her first principle. I love that. So you and I are going to snap into place really eloquently that I've got an axiom

that I live by, which is that through relationships, we become. And it's through first our relationship with ourself, with others, and with Mother Nature. No particular order in the last two, really, but the idea of, like, we need to know what it's like to be in a relationship for us to fully become the person that we want to become. And for me, relationships are hard,

and they're wonderful, and they require difficult conversations. Now, what's difficult about conversations is the emotions. It's not the choosing of the words, it's the emotions that are snapped to it. And so how do you do difficult conversations? And before you dive right into the heart of that, can you just shape how many people at SoulCycle at one point you were leading and how many people at WeWork you were leading? When I left SoulCycle, we had a little over 2,000 employees, which is ironic and funny because Elizabeth and I started the business and we were the only two employees that worked there. I absolutely never set out to be the CEO of a large company. I had an idea to create a product, which was something that I desperately needed.

We were simply looking to create something for ourselves, finding joy and community through exercise, which was something that didn't exist. And so when we started this company with $250,000, we were the only people that worked there. I mean, and so when we ended up with, you know, 2000 plus employees, it was not at all what we had planned to do. And so leading that many people, like you had just said, you know, really took work on understanding how to build relationships and how to be a leader. And that is really one of the most profound things that I learned, both in my marriage and in my time at SoulCycle. I would say that those are two really fundamental relationships, that one with my business partner and the one with my husband,

that really I have put a lot of work into, very intentional work, not just sort of like, oh, let's be nice to each other. Let me buy you a gift, but real work in terms of understanding how you create successful relationships. I think it's important here to take a second to highlight that Julie's commentary on leadership includes an intentionality or even an authenticity in relationships outside the workplace as well as within. That if relationships is one of your core values as opposed to a strategy, your alignment with it is vital across all aspects of your life.

You don't turn it on or off depending on the environment you're in, which pulls on one of my first principles, how you do anything is how you do everything. Not surprisingly, a big part of successful relationships in Julie's experience is mindful communication, something that we talk a lot about here at Finding Mastery. Okay. So before we get to the difficult relationship or difficult conversation part, what goes into building from your experience? And I'm not asking you to point to any science or any of that, like there is some of that, but from your experience, what goes into building a great relationship? Yeah. So it's interesting because I have actually, actually, this is what

I'm working on for my next business. Elizabeth and I are working on creating a new category, and we're actually calling it relational fitness, which is really interesting and something that we've been working on and studying for quite a few years with different researchers and scientists and all different types of things. But I think that people assume, right, that, you know, you wouldn't get your dream job and then never go to work again. You wouldn't run a marathon and think that you could just, you know, run a couple miles and then go out and hit it. But somehow people just assume that, you know, you meet the person that you're going to marry, or you find a business partner, and everything is just going to work out. And so I think there's this real misconception around, you know, the work that people need to do on relationships. And I absolutely think that there are a few skills that people can really learn

and practice. That's the thing also, right? You know, you can't just have one great conversation and think that it's going to change an entire relationship. But we've really done a lot of studies on active listening, on creating containers to have conversations in. There are real ways to have conversations. I think, you know, when you talk about having difficult conversations, what we've really learned over time is that it's not what you say, but how you say it. It starts with everything from when you say it, making sure it's a good time for the person that you're talking to, that we're not bombarding somebody, to explaining something, being the way that you feel, not judging their actions, but using the right sentence stems so that you're not putting

somebody on the defensive. And then also having a conversation in a way that somebody else feels heard, that they can just sort of have their time to air out the way that they feel and they can feel understood. I think so often we are not actually having dialogues with people. We're each having our own monologue. You're letting me know how you feel. And while you're letting me know how you feel, I'm already thinking I'm going to tell you how I feel about how you feel, which is really not a dialogue at all. That's me judging how you feel. And there's definitely a lot of science out there that shows us that we can create environments and we can create containers and we can create formats.

That if people are willing to practice those three things in the same way that we all have exercise regiments, in the same way that we all have diets, in the same way that we all get different types of degrees, I think people can really learn how to have difficult conversations. I love how Julie hits on this idea of learning how to have difficult conversations, as opposed to creating environments where these conversations don't exist. Difficult conversations are unavoidable. The higher the stakes, the more stressful the environment, the more likely and necessary they are. It's about learning the tools that we can use to stay in hard conversations instead of tightening up or turning away, leaning into that challenge. Approaching someone with a sticky subject doesn't come without fear,

but staying open and trusting that if you're both mindful in the process, you can find resolution. That's the marker of great teammates. So the point of your first question, you know, very early on, we were lucky enough to get pretty successful. I mean, our business started to rock and roll after about six months. You know, we were profitable after a year. We were really cash flowing. It was more than we'd expected. I mean, we started out with this tiny little business model, really, again, doing it for

the love of creating a product that we ourselves wanted to use. And sooner rather than later, we found that we had actually a third business partner. That was not working, which became an issue for us when you talk about having to have a difficult conversation. Plus the fact that we were starting to have employees and bunches of them at a time. We would have 10 and then 20 and 30, and neither of us had ever managed large teams before. And so we actually decided to see a business therapist, just probably the same type of person as you and your wife saw, but for your relationship. And she probably was the best,

one of the best things that we ever did for the health of SoulCycle. I think that Elizabeth and I committing to work on our relationship after just one year of being in the business, it taught us to be leaders. It taught us to be listeners. It taught us to understand how to have conversations with our employees. And the most amazing thing it did was as we learned these skills, we were able to teach them to the rest of the organization. So we learned skills like how to empty your bucket, which is really how to have a difficult conversation, right? And the next thing we knew, we would codify it and turn it into a lesson. And everybody at SoulCycle would have to, you know, spend a morning learning how to empty your bucket, or, you know, how to get unstuck. And we did, I'm sure this is a lot of

the work that maybe you do with people, but it was fascinating. And really, we learned on the job, which was so great, you know, and as we learned, we actually had a great, our employee number one, who sort of was a jack of all trades and ultimately turned into our chief culture officer. And she would just sort of run around after Elizabeth and I with notebooks, and we would learn something and she would codify it and she would teach it to everybody. And I think it was a combination of, you know, the DNA of Elizabeth and I being real people, people, you know, we both really, it is definitely in our DNA lot of difficult conversations. As you know, having a business partner is difficult. You know, sharing money and workloads and responsibilities, and everybody has different types of things going on at home at different times. And you want to sell the business, and I want to keep the business. And, you know, we should

grow, we should stay the same size, we should take money out, we should leave money in. There's a lot of decisions to make together. And I think that, you know, learning and really working on this relationship was one of the things that I think created not only the internal culture of Soul Cycle, but I also think that it helped us to create community with our customers, because we really understood how to have conversations with people. I think that at SoulCycle, because Elizabeth and I sat on top of the company, and because we were sort of role models in the fact that we were absolutely willing to work on ourselves, that we were willing to raise our hand and say, you know, I don't know everything, but I'm going to learn how to be a better leader. I'm going to learn how to have the right conversation. I think that, you know, making that commitment to that, when you do that, you create a space that feels safe, right? And so much of what has to happen in terms of these conversations is that

they have to happen in safe spaces. And when you create environments like that for people, then your employees can have a conversation like getting unstuck where they can say to their colleague or their boss even, hey, I'm really stuck because you don't seem to make me a priority. And when you cancel meetings with me 50 times a day, I can't get what I need to get from you. And so I can't get my work done, which is making me feel stuck both physically in my work and also creatively or however that is. But I think that it allows when you set the stage for people to have conversations like that, not only set the stage, but you actually make it a norm, that it's kind of a requirement of the job that we are all, we used to say like, nobody goes home with lumpy carpets. You know, at the end of the day, it is everybody's job to make sure that we're all coming back tomorrow clean. Nobody's going to be punished for it. And you might not always get your way, but people was to create an environment, a tribe that felt wonderful to be in. So you were being lifted by being a co-creator of something that

was much larger than you. I think that it really was, you know, from every way, you know, in every way from compensation to recognition to, you know, praise and the way that people were treated. It was really all about people were really rewarded for treating each other well and helping each other rise. Okay, quick break here for one final word from our sponsors and stick around because we've still got some incredible insights from legends like Jan Singer, Toto Wolff, and Satya Nadella that are coming up. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day.

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more. It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. And now back to the conversation. Now let's hear from Jan Singer, former CEO of J.Crew, Victoria's Secrets and Spanx, and also served as corporate VP at Nike for over 10 years. She spoke with us about the importance of understanding

someone's individual belief system in order to inspire maximum investment. In other words, asking how can I make this ask personal for someone so he or she wants to show up every day and make a concerted effort toward our mission. The future of leadership is demanding an understanding of human psychology, how motivation really works, how emotions impact our decisions, and how our thoughts impact our emotions, how to help a workforce align with their personal purpose in life, how to live well, to flourish with a zest for life, both at work and at home.

Now, I'm not suggesting that leaders become psychologists. Far from it. Rather, that the best practices of psychology become interwoven into the rhythm of work, where we shift from extracting the best from people to helping them unlock their potential to live and perform more freely in the present moment. Like Julie Rice, Jan offers a perspective on leadership and teamwork that has informed her incredible success in corporate retail. Let's jump right in with Jan.

From that vantage point, you have a real high regard for a person's autonomy and determination, self-determination. So I think that is how you lead. important to understand what their belief systems are and what's going to bring them value, especially when they leave their families every single day to come here and make money for themselves, but also for the company shareholders. And what is it? It doesn't matter. Like I always have parts of my presentations for them about, you know, what if, and most of my, what ifs are things that they're going to find valuable that we have to work on together. It's part of like, hey, I can put any plan you want up there. But if you don't understand the value in it, and I don't mean the technical financial value, but I mean the personal value in it, you're not going to do anything I tell you to do. The Nike example I use all the time, I've had a wonderful, wonderful leader boss, you know, Eric Sprunk up there. He's amazing.

And I remember the first week with him going through a strat planning session with the guys on the running team. And he was the head of footwear, like the head of Nike footwear, right? Big job. And the guys are sitting there and they're taking him through the plan. And he says at the end, you know, hey, fellas, any thought about that little project around the sock liner that we talked about? And they were like, yeah, yeah, Eric, you know, hey, fellas, any thought about that little project around the sock liner that we talked about? And they were like, yeah, yeah, Eric, you know, we thought about that. We looked at it. We're looking at it. We're thinking about it. Yeah, we'll keep thinking about that. And they left. And I was shocked, right? I was like, what? He's the head of footwear where I come from

in the East Coast. It's like the head of footwear says, do something, you do it. And so I asked him, like, why didn't you just tell them, like, why did, why didn't you just tell them to do the sock liner? It's like, yeah, cause they're not going to do it. They're going to do it, but they're not going to do it with all their heart and soul. They're not going to do it with conviction. It's going to take their time off of other things that they are going to do well. And there must be a reason that I have to learn about why they think it's not important. They know running. And that was like, whoa, you know, you're right. You can't just come in. Like I didn't, I didn't come in graduating from an Ivy league school confirmed that I was brilliant and therefore was going to tell people what to do.

I came in with like, Hey, I don't have this all figured out. I'm going to need a lot of help. How can I inspire people to see what I see and hear what they see and combine those thoughts? And how do we move forward together? And I really mean that. Because if I'd come in with all the credentials, maybe I would have come in bossing everybody around. Maybe if Eric had been a world class runner, he would have told them to make exactly what he needed. But when you're not, you have to figure out a way to really share what you're seeing and hear what they're saying and find the path in between, you know? Oh, find the path in between. Because that's my question was like, when you've got an idea and then you listen to another person's idea and your idea to you, whether it's either confirmation bias or you've already made up your mind and you're just, you know, really kind of closed but want to be open to other people's ideas. Like how do you deal with when something outside of you doesn't quite make as much sense as what's happening inside you?

And you've also – you value other people's opinions. Like how do you make that decision to move in the direction that you already kind of pre-ordained super hard right you it's like stopping your backswing you're on a momentum you see the path you may i have a bias for speed like i work pretty quickly and i'm a pretty quick study so i can get some time someplace that people can't get to yet and that's always hard for me. Like I go, okay, I have to remember where I'm at. Got to meet them where they are. And sometimes it's a matter of time.

But sometimes it's a matter of, you know, shifting. I have to really get quiet in my brain and hear what they're saying, like hear what they're saying. And even when I hear what they're saying, I have to ask a lot of questions so that I understand the essence of what they mean. Sometimes people aren't great communicators and they're not saying what they mean, but they're telling you, wait a minute, they're telling you slow down, or they're telling you another way. And if I hear the other way, and I still, and I've considered that already, and they're not on board, and I still think I'm right,

then I have work to do to help them see what I'm seeing. If I hear them, and I think they might have a bigger and better idea, then I just go into it. Like, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more. And generally, to your point, the truth is somewhere in between. It's not usually like, holy cow, you're way off the reservation. It's usually like, they build on it, or it adds another dimension, or, you know, you bring to them. I had the opportunity to speak with Coach Joanne McCauley or Coach P, as she's well known, who helmed the women's basketball team at Duke University from 2007 to 2020. She was the first Division I head coach to win a conference title in four different conferences, which to me demonstrates that she understands

how to build a culture, a culture that consistently brings the best out of people. It's really interesting to hear about her evolution as a leader. What remained for her throughout was a real clarity of standards for her players, challenging them to meet certain demands, to see the highest vision of themselves, and asking that they be accountable to this agreement. An essential contract for a high-performing team is clearly defining the standards of optimal behavior and then anchoring individuals to that standard. Coach P's career record proves that her leadership style does in fact produce winning results and more enduring relationships. If we were fortunate enough to have, let's say 15 of your athletes and not your favorite athletes that you've coached, but 15 athletes, okay. Just kind of across the years

and just a fun little stat that I came across. You won 150 of your first 182 games. Is that right? I don't know, but I'll trust you on it. That's a big one now. I mean, think about that number. So you were rolling. You didn't know losing. You didn't come from that place. And I want to get to like how you did it and your insights and practices on how to bring the best out of people. And I am really curious, this is, I'm setting up this question. I'm really curious if you left a shine of regard on them or if early, early days,

they were more tools in the mechanics and the machine of winning. And so if we had in those early days, the first 182 games where you won 150 of them, and we had, let's say, 15, small little room of your folks, what would they say about you? Oh, they would say, as a young coach, I was a head coach at 26, that I definitely was a driver, very passionate, very demanding, sometimes could obviously upset them with my challenge and future image that I saw as well, certainly as a young coach. And I don't like the word you used relative to it, but it's true, tools, you know, as a means to getting to proving oneself. I guess, sadly, at that time, you're trying to prove yourself. Of course, that's a more singular concept. And it does engender this idea that the players you're coaching are sort of the means to getting there,

you know, versus celebrating the efforts. And my early teams, I was by far toughest on them. But what's ironic is those are some of my closest relationships, not just from time away, because they're obviously older than my other former players. But, you know, you think back and you kind of cringe when you think about yourself as a young coach trying to prove yourself and overstepping here and there. I mean, I definitely have players that would sing my praises and I have players that would not and say that she pushed me too far. So on the support challenge mechanisms, right on that axis, I should say you are much more on challenge than support.

I think I was more on challenge, pretty good on individual support, you know, smart enough to seek out individuals. But only later in life did I really understand how you could individually motivate in a team sport. So I would say my, you know, the team components critical as you know, um, but I got better at the individual motivators and how they were different and how it's okay to be different in terms of trying to pull the group together. But I just, I, again, I look back at that time and, you know, I was supposedly a very good coach, lots of wins. But if I was talking to my younger self, I would have things to say. Okay. Like?

Like slow down. Like don't try to, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day. Don't try to get it all at once. Watch your tone on occasion. You are British Italian. I did swear in there, but never to a person, you know, to the group, like at halftime, if we weren't getting it done. Reflectively, I battled with that, the swearing thing. Part of it was actually natural. I guess I had heard some words around the household or somewhere, but then part of me never wanted to do it. And so all my career, I kind of fluctuated with this authenticity that's so critical. And then I had a player tell me once, it works better if you swear sometimes. It gets our attention. And I thought, oh, that's kind of interesting.

What drives me a little crazy is when I see a coach talk to other coaches in one way and then talk to athletes in a completely different way. And it feels so phony. And so that part of, for me, i think athletes might not know but i think that they can probably suss through it and because they don't see the other conversations the tone and tenor and cadence of language and choice of language but that drives me absolutely nuts like if you're gonna be you is my point and so how else are we gonna teach others to be you, is my point. And so how else are we going to teach others to be themselves if we're putting on some sort of, I don't know, charade? Okay, but let me go back to demands.

What were you demanding out of people? Always effort, intensity, focus, demanding that they be present-minded. Whatever was happening off the court was something different demanding that they play off each other respect each other try to make each other better you know get beyond individual play understand the past before the past that made the great play I think that that was the good thing that I was never really off base relative to what I was demanding. So if I crossed the line and tried to change the physiology, which is such a cool way of saying that relative to using profanity in some way,

it was directed authentically and in the right space of what I was asking for relative to the intangibles. Okay. Who taught you that those are the right levers to demand? Who taught you that those nine that you just listed were the right ones? Well, part of it's your inner self combined with what you learned from mentors. So I had a mentor at Auburn. We went to a couple of final fours, you know, national championship, a higher level of performance. And I could learn from him relative to that kind of presentation of demand. And I'm a military, you know, my dad was in the Navy and the gentleman I worked for at Auburn, Joe Champy, was also, he was Army. I had this real sense of military and duty and honor. And that was another thing I tried to pull from, extrapolate from the women, is a sense of duty and honor in terms of how they serve.

But that also made me more comfortable, I believe, with some pretty strong intensity, pretty high demanding situations. Okay, because in the calm of this conversation, you're demanding things that are in their control. Yes. And so that's actually psychologically really healthy to have really high standards for the things that are in

your control. So I think I want to toggle between demand and standards in just a moment, and then go back to the values that were true. And so you're demanding of those values. What did you want them to be in service of each other? Or was it for the shirt for the brand for womanhood for athletics for like for humanity what what were you laddering up to for being in service in service i think sort of like concentric circles building out i mean service within relative to their own peace of mind and what they brought to themselves so there had to be a piece or a balance amongst themselves. And then of course, the next circle being the team and how they would, how they would fit and blend with the team dynamics. And, you know, what we do, we do to the team. One of my favorite

quotes, what we do, we do to the team. And then of course, broader relative to coaching staff and folding in mentorship, you know, mentorship matters, very relative to coaching staff and folding in mentorship. You know, mentorship matters, very important there. And then getting more broad is our place as female athletes of power, women of power. If you were to help a room of business people become more agile? I would first ask them to think about what they are most afraid of. You know, what are they most afraid of? What really gets your anxiety? What really gets your breathing up to your heart space?

You know, the public speaking thing. What really gets you there? And I would ask them to think about it, maybe write it down. Or if they were able to talk about it. I mean, some people like to talk about what they're afraid of. But I think agility, it's like a rubber band. I mean, you've got to be able to increase it and contract it. And you can't expand it without expanding your mind and getting past your fears.

And the fear factor is huge. And then you can contract it a little bit for some comfort, you know, to get back to what's more comfortable for you. But it's that expansion and that pull that people don't really want to do. And so I would ask them, like a rubber band, I would ask them to work on their agility by being able to pull apart what they're afraid of. Okay. The science that supports what you just said is really strong. So you're asking them to get out into the edges of something that's uncomfortable for you. And therein lies, I see it more, less like a rubber band, but more like a balloon. When you blow into the balloon, it expands and then it can contract. But when you blow into it again, it expands easier. And that is like another kind of mixed metaphor that there's more space inside the balloon.

And with more space, then you can be more agile. You could play a little bit more. You can access creativity and other people and whatever, whatever, whatever. And so I see it that way. But the rubber band definitely holds up as well. The balloon is better because when you initially start to blow a balloon, we've all struggled with starting. And then once you pull that balloon up, I mean, it just, then once you get past a certain point, it blows up more easily with air from, you know, from within. And so I,

I kind of like yours better. We'll see. We're, we're being agile. We're being agile right now. Okay. So let's go back to standards and demands. So you're demanding a list of things that are a hundred percent under their control, which is supporting a sense of autonomy, supporting a sense of mastery. That's a mastery climate actually. Did you have standards that you had set? Or was it a demand for more, better? Because like the horizon, or the frontier is still out there. How are you toggling between those two concepts, standards and demands? Well, I think standards, of course, you have standards relative to training,

you know, bench press, pushups, you have standards. Those are very easy for everyone to understand. The big standard is the future image of the individual. And that's the standard that a coach often has over the individual. In terms of what I see in the future for this person, that's where the push and shove comes because somebody's own vision of themselves is often quite a bit smaller than some, you know, somebody else's, particularly a coach's vision. And so standards there and how they, how you push those standards for that particular athlete is the, is the trick. And it's, it's often getting over their own fears and their brain limit, what they limit themselves to thinking. So standards come, I think, in a variety of packages

and some are more easily accountable than others. I mean, I know exactly, I can hear that you know exactly how you do this. And this is the art. And I get asked all the time, well, so how do you help create a vision for somebody? Or how do you, you know, how do you capture what you think is possible for somebody? Because you and I can both be wrong. And I'm sure we've been wrong plenty of times, overestimating, even underestimating. But usually, as an optimist that sees potential in people, I'm going to make an assumption for you and me here both is that we'll overestimate or we're seeing what could be at a very high standard, or I'm sorry, at a very high potentiality. Now, whether that can be expressed or not is another question. And potential, I have such a

complicated relationship with it because it's the thing that can really get people turned or could be true can take place, then we're not alone in it and it becomes more of a grounded approach. And so I think, let me just answer how I do it. And I'd love to see if you can push back and say, that's, you know, there's a better way. Let me show you. Is that I would just use all of my might and my ability to be fully present and watch and observe and get snapshots of waiting for the snapshot of brilliance for somebody. And that can be physical or emotional or psychological and sometimes all three, but I'm using all of my might to be focused to capture the snapshot of brilliance. And when I see it, I go, Oh, what if that would take place more often?

What would that look like? Oh, that's the image. And then I share that with the thinker or doer. And then that's where we calibrate it. How, how nutty does that sound to you? Or how aligned does that sound to you? Very aligned. And what we do as coaches, I often feel you show what you want to, you show what you want, or you want what people to be. It's not a highlight reel. You show people the action. You show them in the space that they really didn't recognize. We've all talked about the positive, negative, positive approach, you know, that sandwich approach, show a positive, show a little bit of a negative, bring it back to where you want them to be. There's a lot of that going on, obviously, in film reviews and things of that nature. But I think

talking with athletes one-on-one, you know, there's, they want to be reminded and see visually what, what, what they're capable of. And once you've shared that experience visual and shared it in the same space, then there's no denying it. And the only thing I feel that gets in the way is some blockage that often refers back to trauma or something in their lives. And this is where the psychologist,

this is where you come in. This is where I wish I was, you know, had more background in this. Because once you remove the blockage, the freedom is overwhelming. And, you know, if you can push someone to the point of where they hit that space and can, you know, get through it. I mean, I can't imagine the feeling. As promised, we're going to shift gears a bit from this theme of individual relationships to an exploration of culture as we hear from several notable leaders changing the model of leadership. Each of them has been tasked with managing large organizations full of high performers and, in some cases, incredibly high stakes. First up, Toto Wolff, legendary team principal and CEO of the Mercedes-AMG Formula One racing team.

Toto's incredible success has definitely not gone to his head, and you'll hear how committed he is to creating a culture of consistent improvement, to mitigate complacency and to inspire his team to continue to operate at the upper limits of performance. And then when you talk about shaping success and failure, I've asked this question a lot, and it's me trying to sort it out. What does it mean? How do you think about success?

Off the top of your head right now, where you are in your life, how do you articulate or think about success right now? For me, it's very easy. It's about winning Formula One World Championships. It's pretty simple. It's a very simple target. And how many times have you done it?

Three times. Three driver championships and three constructor championships in a row. So winning one is a real challenge. Back to back to back, it's a whole different category. Has been done in the past. So it's not like that you can say that is an extraordinary achievement. I think it's a whole different category has been done in the past so it's not like that you can say that is extraordinary achievement i think it's not bad and uh it's i i would say we we are we are part of the better group but we are in a particularly interesting situation now because

no team has ever won back-to-back championships in an environment where the regulations have changed dramatically. And that's happened from 2016 to 2017. So we've just done our first race. Oh, so winning back-to-back or multiple championships inside of the regulations. So you figure out the game early. Some teams have figured out the game. The game inside the game inside the game. And then maximize the return.

And now you're having to retool, maybe probably literally, your approach in the mechanics of having a great car and a great system. Yes, if you have a head start, it's easier to maintain that tiny advantage. In an environment of marginal gains, that can help you through a longer period. But when the rules change, it provides opportunity for your enemies as well, for your competitors, and risks for yourself if you have been the benchmark. And therefore, we embrace that situation. It is actually, it came at the right time. After three years, there is the risk of getting used to results,

setting expectations in the wrong way. Complacency is a word that is easily said, but it's a very subtle danger. It's just lacking motivation, lacking objectives. And if rules change and you know that you are going to face adversity, that provides a great source of energy. For you? For many? For all the people here in the team. Is that something you've selected for or cultivated in your culture, is to look forward to challenges instead of being overwhelmed by them?

Is that something that you look for specifically? Yes, it is a culture that you need to embrace in a sports team, and you need to live words. know everybody can put words on a powerpoint and present them but you need to really embrace that every year every day and and live it every day and cascade it through the organization and i had an interesting encounter with our chief designer a couple of weeks ago when we faced those first test days and they were not easy bits were breaking off the car um and i came into the into the design office and everybody was busy fixing the car and it just was a difficult phase and he said that is so exciting and and that is exactly the mindset you need to have you need to be able to recognize your own mistakes and your own failure.

Only that is going to make it able for you to assess them and avoid them in the future and grow. This is something which we are really working hard within the team is to have the ability of pointing at the problem, blaming a decision or a blaming situation rather than blaming a single individual. And you need to have a safe environment. People need to be sure that they are allowed to stand up and say, I've done a mistake. And it's something I see all our senior guys doing within their groups.

I have some amazing experiences, meetings where the most senior guy in the room starts the meeting by saying, I screwed up. I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have decided that. And you can see all the people junior to him start to pick that up. And you create a culture where you can really get rid of problems rather than hiding them and we have a motto that is see it say it fix it and whenever there is difficult things coming up i try to you know i tend to to use that and say somebody speaks up

his boss gets angry about it because you know is difficult sometimes to cope with that situation. And then reminding yourself that this is part of our mindset is good. I'm very skeptical about my own achievements. And generally very skeptical of whether what we do is good enough. But then I have great confidence in the people within the team. I know that they can fix it. And for myself, I think it is important to surround yourself with individuals that you trust,

that you're providing them with a safe environment so they can speak up. So how do you develop trust with others? How do you do that? I want to go back to the, because this is, there's, you and I have a trust, and that's why I think part of this was easy for you to say. How do you develop trust in a harsh environment where if there's not success there's public awareness there's financial costs like how do you develop trust amongst your team members when in even even deeper than that when you've got two drivers that are competing for the same thing and you're you're in some ways responsible for creating success for both but only one really gets the success that

maybe that they wanted which is to win. Trust isn't established by words, clever sentences. Trust needs actions. And trust happens or grows in those difficult moments when the other person realizes they can rely on you because you haven't let them down, although it would have been easy to let them down. And I had a situation here when I started at Mercedes five years ago. I held this, what seemed to me, great speech at the beginning of what I would want to achieve here

and how I would protect the organization. And everybody left the room and nodded. Everybody, how do you say, acknowledged, not nodded. And at the end, there was a guy from the machine shop that left the room and I said, bye-bye. And he turned towards me and said, nice words. Let's see whether it happens. And he turned towards me and said, nice words. Let's see whether, whether it happens. And, and that is very true. Uh, there's a lot of opportunists out there that stay, say nice stuff that make, make up nice stuff. But, uh, when times are getting difficult, they will be the first ones to protect themselves

and blame somebody else. And that is the moment you can build trust and that is going to be sustainable, that is going to make a relationship sustainable and long-term sustainable. Yeah, so well said. Where did you figure that out? I must have read it in one of your blogs or something.

Yeah. said. Where'd you figure that out? I must have read it in one of your blogs or something. We're starting to hear about how cultivating a strong culture is imperative to building high-performing teams. From Toto, we learn that his F1 team is encouraged to embrace challenges, to find the excitement that lives within it. He also indexes on accountability with the understanding that owning one's mistakes requires an environment where it's honored, not condemned. The culture that he's co-created at Mercedes thrives on trust, each member having self-confidence, but also real confidence in their teammates, knowing they're all committed to meeting the challenges with action and not promises, having each other's back, even in disappointment, and knowing that winning means little without the

right mindset behind it. Someone else who understands how culture contributes to a company's success is Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. In this conversation, you'll hear how Satya and his team are creating a purpose-based and learn-it-all rather than know-it-all culture with a vision that compels creativity and collaboration and the ability to redirect and improve when the moment calls for it. You know, I've been at Microsoft for really all my life, essentially, 25 years. And the thing that I've come to realize is companies are also, like people, have a core identity. And we do well when we pick and do things that fit with our core sense of purpose. And that's really what you see us really exercising a lot more at Microsoft, being both proud of who we are and what

we do, but at the same time also having a culture that pushes to learn, to renew, so that we can express ourselves and express this identity in more meaningful ways to have impact. So that is rich. What you just said could be dissected in 14 different ways, but the main words about purpose and meaning, where did you come to understand that purpose is so important? Is that from your introspective arc of growth yourself? Or is that from studying people that do extraordinary things? Like where did that come from you? I mean, quite honestly, for me, a lot of it is something that I've learned as I've grown in this company. For example, one of the things that I write even in the book about was virtuous cycle that gets created in successful companies between the original idea or concept that you had, the capability that you

built around it, and the culture that implicitly grows. And so in some sense, you get into this amazing lock between your concept, capability, and culture, and round and round it goes. Except there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. You run out of gas at some point on the idea or the concept. You would have had to build capability long before its conventional wisdom to go after even new ideas and new concepts. And the only thing that enables you to do that is culture. And so that's why I felt that coming in as a CEO, having grown up inside this company, I went back and essentially pattern matched and said, hey, when were we at our best and when did we go astray? And it was always when we were purpose-driven, mission-driven, and we had a culture which allowed us to build

capability. And that's where we have anchored, which is we really need to have those two necessary conditions. It's not sufficient because you ultimately have to build great products people love and what have you. But you're not going to even get to do that if you don't have a sense of purpose and a culture. Okay, so that maps almost identically to how people develop. So you're taking basically the insights on how people grow and mapping it into an organization. Like you said at the start of this conversation that they're very much similar. Do you see that the organization has one heartbeat, one mind? Are you speaking it that way with having all the sensitivities that every human is completely individual?

Are you speaking as if it was one body? That's an interesting one. I've not thought about it as that, which is, in fact, you need amazing amount of diversity, diversity of skills, gender, ethnicity that makes up a successful organization. Because otherwise, if you really take our mission of empowering every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more. So if you really take that to heart,

then you have to represent the planet. But having said that, then you do need to come together as a collective where that collective also has an identity. And it's captured in our mission. So for example, when we say, wow, we want to think about people and organizations, very explicitly, that means even in any product we create,

we think about the institutions people build that may even outclass them. It comes as a first-class software construct to us. That's a collective attribute of Microsoft. Another one that's ingrained in our business model and in our mission is it's not about celebrating any technology breakthrough of ours. It's about what people do with our technology. It can be a student writing a term paper, a developer writing an application, or a small business becoming more productive productive or a public sector

institution becoming more efficient, that's what we celebrate, not just some technology for technology's sake. That's the collective identity. So I think you're absolutely right in saying that what binds us, what gives us that ability to think as one is that sense of purpose that's shared. Okay. The reason I want to ask that is because I want to try to understand your model of how you've done something extraordinary. And I think that if I understand your process well enough is that you challenge and harden ideas with your peers and you work with them to make sure that it's a lockstep approach where they understand what you're wanting to articulate or wanting to activate.

And then so you have this way that you bring people along with you. Or maybe it's their idea, but you know how to bring the entire organization along. So that's what I wanted to understand. It's like, is it intellect first and then intuition or intuition first and then back up to intellect? It sounds like it's a feedback loop between the two. So I don't know what's the thing that starts. It's definitely, I don't even know whether I'm explicit about it, because I definitely can build on other people's ideas. And that's the synthesis part. But then you can add to it, because one of the things I've realized

is, you know, one of the greatest powers, which is a force multiplier is to be able to take one person's idea and another person's idea and make it more powerful by bringing them together. It's not to say, I mean, you just talked about even, say, our leadership team and the dynamics. I've come to realize even four years into it how important it is to use the collective bandwidth. And that's an art, and I'm imperfect at it at best. I mean, in fact, the thing that I catch myself more often than not is showing more impatience, which is a problem because when you're impatient and you have made giant leaps, but the team is not yet there with you, it's all to a waste. And at least what I find myself doing perhaps is I can at least acknowledge those mistakes, not maybe as efficiently as I should be, but I'm getting there. Can your staff do the same?

Are you creating a culture where they can also raise their hand and say, hey, I made a $20 million mistake or I made a massive mistake that caused lives, jobs and whatever? Do you encourage that as well? I mean, I completely, in my book, that kind of intellectual honesty is something that, quite frankly, Steve and Bill, like if anything I've learned from them is that. I mean, they had just such brutal intellectual honesty. There were two people whom I could see, wow, they just would call it as they saw it. And they would be willing. If you push back and you actually were right, they'll acknowledge it. But you had to be right. So they had just, you know, I think that's something growing up at

Microsoft. You could make mistakes. And, you know, some mistakes would be such that, you know, your career could be in jeopardy. But it's better for you know, some mistakes would be such that, you know, your career could be in jeopardy, but it's better for you to acknowledge those mistakes because that's how we, you know, we individually get better and the company gets better. Last question. Thank you for your time. How do you articulate, think about, or even describe the concept of mastery? I think for me, it comes down to being in touch, deeply in touch with what gives you purpose. One of the things that I say a lot is, what if you sort of took what you do at Microsoft and flipped it? And you said, hey, I don't work at Microsoft. Microsoft works for me.

And that is because you are someone who has a particular passion, a particular personal philosophy, and you're able to, in fact, turn what is considered work into an instrument of you realizing the deeper meaning in pursuing your personal philosophy or passion. And to me, mastery is that. That ability to lead a more purposeful life and then take all of life and turn it into that platform. Because I think that's all we have. And so you might as well make use of it. You're a legend. Satya is a legend, perhaps to the overall efforts of the team.

It's clearly no small feat to consistently see that through in a company of Microsoft's magnitude and influence. But as we all know, their enduring success would indicate that Satya has found a style that works. Okay, when we talk about collective identity, one high-performing and extraordinarily substantial team comes to mind, the U.S. military. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Vice Admiral John Muston of the United States Navy Reserve. This conversation was so rich. It ended up being two episodes, but I wanted to share a piece of it with you here. Building high performing teams on a global scale when the stakes can't be higher is something that Vadim Muston has spent his career fine tuning.

Take a listen here to some of his wisdom. Let's talk about some frameworks that make sense to you. And then I also want to double click on the idea of how to help create a vision and then cascade that vision, because that's a super practical. And I'll tell you how I do it. Not the scale, of course, you're doing it. But are there models that you think through that have been meaningful to you when it comes to leadership? There certainly are. I mean, there are some that I would look at as a problem-solving framework. I mean, we use something called DMAIC. I don't know if you're familiar with DMAIC. Yeah. So make sure I look that up. Well, and it's interesting that this is something that we're investing heavily in training all levels of our teams. I mean, from the most senior person to the most

junior person. And that framework is important to us because again, as it relates to problem solving, I just don't feel like we've got the time or the bandwidth to flail. You know, we want to be ruthlessly efficient in addressing the root causes of problems in ways that is commonly understood. So in my case, what I tell people is, here's how I want to take a brief. You know, I have some basic expectations before we sit down to talk about an issue. And I want the problem statement to be explicitly stated. Because what I've learned over the years is sometimes I get a 40-page PowerPoint deck that talks about all the reasons that the world is hard, and yet there's nothing actionable in

there because they're trying to boil the ocean. Instead of saying, the root cause problem is the following, and there are 10 stakeholders involved. This is what is required to fix it. Here's where I need your help. Or I don't need your help, but I want you to know what we're doing. And after agreeing on the problem statement, like a lot of times we don't get past that first slide because I'll say, I don't think you put enough effort in the problem statement. And that is drilling down to the central root cause. And not treating the surface symptoms, which it's easy for us to leap into activity and say something broke, slap some duct tape and bubble gum on it and declare victory. When in fact, what we really need to do is think about

why did this happen and what was it systemically? You know, in many cases, when we're talking about human beings, there's a degree of variability that we have to accept. But I always look at it as kind of the owner of the system to say, what could I have done differently to either train or enable the people to perform better? That's your central question. That's my question. I look in the mirror every day and say, okay, someone, it would be easy for someone to say this sailor did something stupid and we should throw the book at him. My first thought is what could I have done differently that might have prevented the decision that that person made? And again, I just, I agree, or I assume that no one wakes up saying today I'm going to do dumb things. Right. So, yeah.

Yeah. So, and I don't think people are the villain in their own story. No, of course. Right. But I wake up and I, and I think to myself, okay, today I get to make some decisions. One is, am I looking for the good in this day or am I looking to complain about all the things that are difficult in the day? And so the other thing that I realize is I've got a staff and I've got a team and they're looking at me. And if I come in and I am moping and grouchy and pissed, they're going to be too. Instead, I want to greet them every day with a sense of optimism like, hey, I don't care how hard this challenge is that we're dealing with.

We're going to figure it out and it's going to be awesome. And if you want to be a member of this elite high-performing team, then that's the way you carry yourself and you work that down echelon with your folks too. So in order to participate, you know, I'm pretty candid saying I only want high performers on my team. And granted, in the Navy, sometimes we are forced because of timing and inventory issues. You don't always get to pick everybody that you work with. But my expectation is we're starting from an opening salvo where I say, welcome to the team. It's a pleasure to meet you. And I greet everyone on my staff within the first week of their arrival. And I sit down with them and say, OK, you're coming to work in my manpower shop. Thrilled to see you. Your reputation precedes you. I've read your biography. I got a couple of questions about where you live and what are your interests.

Just so you know, you're relieving a person who was the best in this job that I've ever seen. And my expectation is you're going to be better than him. And if that doesn't sound good to you, then now's the time to mention it to me because I can find you another job. But my hope is that you're going to fit in and you're going to pick up that baton and run fast. And then honestly, everyone says, I can't wait to contribute, sir. I mean, I've never had anyone go, you know what? I thought maybe I don't want to be here. So that's interesting.

So we've got a model that we work from support then challenge. Right. You're coming right out the gate with a challenge, with a standard, maybe it is. And then so how do you think about that idea of support then challenge? I like it very much. Yeah. In fact, I describe this approach when I do meetings with my team, when they're new, when we do kind of an indoctrination period, I'll say, here's what you can expect from me. I am going to envision, enable, and encourage you. Envision, enable, encourage. Encourage, yeah. So we're going to talk about what we want to achieve. Wait, hold on, hold on. Admiral, where'd you, because that is like, that's something that I don't like the word enable for me personally, but the envision and encourage bit is so, so right down the center of how I've operated. Almost intuitively.

I don't have a model for that. I mean, I made it up. So I will give it to you. I want you to use this. Great. But it feels for me right now, hearing that from you, it's like, I feel not validated. That's not the right word, but I feel like I've been doing this part, right. You know? Right.

So I, I really appreciate that you're doing it that way. So the envision and then the encouragement part, I really get, and I want to hear how you think about enabling. So enabling is I'm going to give you the tools you need, the training, you know, what does that mean? Hey, in some cases it's, it's the hardware, it's the connectivity. If you're going to be in the field, you need to be able to communicate. I mean, that's, that's a non-trivial task. So, so the enabling piece is in order for you to do your job, I don't want you to say I had a million great ideas and I was ready to go, but the system didn't allow me to do what I wanted to do. So that's the enabling part. Okay. The encouragement can be problematic for me in my own head when it's not authentically sharp as well. So encourage is not like pat on the back. Encouragement for me also is,

well, you can go a little further. You can go a little deeper. You can stand your ground a little more clearly or kindly. Sure. Whatever. Like, is there a sharp edge to it? There is. But it's interesting. I don't think folks who work for me are going to say, oh, my God, he's a tyrannical ass.

You know, I think most folks would say. Is that your epithet? No, it's going to be my tombstone. No, I think they're going to say, I love working with him. I learned from him. It was a great tour. But I will tell you, I heard one of my subordinate commanders vision is. Come back to me. The next discussion with us ought to be either I'm on it and it will be done by Friday or by June or whenever it may be, or I need your help somewhere, but I don't need the daily updates with status. I mean, I trust you. I mean, the enabling piece is you got the tools you need, right? Do you need

additional support, top cover, up echelon communication? Where do you need me to roll in on your behalf? If not, then why isn't it done? Do you give trust or earn trust? I start from a basis of, I assume that everyone is trustworthy. Assume best intent. Exactly. Yeah. Positive intent. And then I say though, in fact, when everyone checks into my staff, I give them a little sheet. It's basically what to know about working with John. Oh, you do? Yeah, yeah.

Oh, that's cool. And one of the things I say is we all start from a basis of trust. If you lose it, it will be very hard to get back. So my point is I will give you the benefit of the doubt, but if you take advantage of that or you lose my trust, you probably need to go somewhere else. You give trust. And then when trust is broken, the water table goes to negative or does it go to like so low that it's... I mean, it depends on the nature of the break. But the point being, we start from a foundation of we're all trustworthy, we're all working together, we assume positive intent. But as it relates to the telework thing, the reason I bring that up is I say, look, I trust you all. There are going to be times when your child has a bloody nose at school or needs to go to the doctor or you need to meet the cable guy or your

car breaks down. Go take care of that. I'm not worried about you being productive and I'm not worried about you being gone. You know the work that you're responsible for and you're accountable for. And as long as you can do it, I don't care where you do it. It's like you're treating them like adults. Exactly. Yeah. So, okay. On the trust thing for one more bit, I think we all have this water table of trust and it's based on our genetic predisposition. It's based on how we're raised. It's based on the neighborhood we grew up in, the geographic location. And I think we have this water table of trust that we come into relationships with. And we've got this idea, and this goes back all the way to Aristotle, like long time ago, there's three legs to trust, ability, benevolence, and authenticity.

So if you can walk the walk and talk the walk, like, I should probably trust you. Like, you can get, you can get, kind of get it done. Are you in it for me as well as you are for you? The benevolence. Are we in this together? Or are you trying to take all the chips off the table? Yeah. You know, is this just for your gain or is this, am I involved in your success as well?

That's benevolence. And authenticity, are you going to show up consistently across conditions bringing, being your very best? You can wobble on any of these, but if there's enough consistency across those three, like that's, I think trust has to be earned. So it's interesting that you want to give it. I want to, I want to, I think I'm more afraid of being burned than maybe you are. And that probably has to speak to my childhood. And so, and I want to earn other people. I'm not saying that I shouldn't earn. You should give it to me, but you got to earn it.

I'm not saying it that way. No, I understand. Let's, let's, let's get in the mud together. Yeah. And let's see if those three hang together even when it's messy. Yeah, it's interesting because one thing that we didn't talk about with my approach and this nature of the transformation we're taking is really comfort with risk or risk tolerance. And I, as an entrepreneur, have been very comfortable with the fact that, hey, we're going to try some things that are not all going to work perfectly. And so even as it relates to the nature of trust, I will say, I will start. It is probably born with confidence that even if it goes south,

I can solve it or I'm okay with it. So I have that actually. I have a high level of self-trust. Like if it goes sideways, I have a deep, like deep roots that I'll sort that out too. Yeah. So that way, like, I feel like you can bet on me. I'm going to bet on me that, and I don't say this arrogantly, like, I feel like there's a privilege and an honor to be able to be in service in that way for, for people I care about. Right. And so you can bet on me because I got these deep roots of, well, we'll keep going, like relentlessly, uncommonly, you know, like we'll keep. So you have a high self-trust. So how does that relate to your teammates?

I think the sense is that it allows me to transfer that risk. Well, the way I describe it to them is I'm comfortable delegating to you and I will accept the risk. I want you to feel comfortable trying it. Yeah. And I'll provide the air cover. Oh, I like that. Like if this doesn't work, I'm the one who's going to say, hey, boss, we tried it. It didn't work.

You know, but I don't want you all to artificially filter things out that I might say, great idea. Try it. So by saying, look, I'll transfer the risk to me. You try it, I'll accept the risk. That's cool. I like that a lot. Okay. So when you think about building teams, you're giving trust, I want to say that, and you're taking the responsibility for the risk. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, especially as a leader, I would say, you know, the risk is resident with me. We always say, if it works beautifully, the credit goes to them. Yeah. This is like 101. If a microphone's ever in

front of you and there's ever a moment. Exactly. And we fail miserably. It was my fault. I didn't resource them properly or train them properly. I should have known better, you know, but, but it's true. I mean, that's how you get teams to trust you too, is to say your failure is you're never going to be critiqued for trying. What an outstanding group of humans. I feel so incredibly fortunate to have been able to sit down with each of them over the past several years to understand how they organize their inner lives, the mental skills that they use to excel, and their most meaningful practices that allow them to keep leading at the tip of the arrow. It's these practices, often evolving as teams do, that help create the kind of space and freedom and capabilities that are necessary for high-performing teams to do what they do best.

We started with this idea that having an authentic understanding of the members on a team and leveraging that knowledge in caring ways not only enriches each individual's experience, but brings forth their best qualities, their highest efforts. Whether it's developing confidence and encouraging individuality, learning the values and beliefs that give someone meaning, or actively listening to and implementing people's perspectives. Driving success by building strong relationships is a common theme among these leaders and the high performance of their teams. These leaders are a testament to the axiom we live by at Finding Mastery, that no and curiosity and a real commitment to accountability is also part of the mix of these extraordinary leaders. Prioritizing psychological safety so that people can own their mistakes is integral to both the resilience and the trust a team or organization needs to function well. Having the freedom to

take accountability when things don't go as planned allows people to take risks, to embrace discomfort, and have confidence both in those leading them and the people they work alongside. Trust, as we have heard several times in this episode, is paramount to the success of any team, organization, or ecosystem with a shared mission. Speaking of shared mission, the other thread we pulled on throughout this conversation is culture. How the collective is as important as the value each individual brings to a team. It's important to recognize that this pursuit, building high performing teams and understanding how to be a great teammate, has so many possible paths to a successful outcome. And we're only able to touch on a handful of those in this episode. I'm hoping that the varied insights and the common threads from this impressive slate of guests lit you up in the same way that it did me.

It's been an absolute privilege to share these conversations with you over the years, and now streamlining some of them in our best-of format is a wonderful gift that I'm receiving, and I hope you are as well. Please let us know what you think, and if there are any topics that you feel would make a great episode, we can't wait to bring you more installments of this series. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.