The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Reimagine Teams: The Missing Piece in Team Building to Achieve Breakthrough Results by Mark Samuel

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

Reimagine Teams: The Missing Piece in Team Building to Achieve Breakthrough Results by Mark Samuel Traditional team building doesn't work and hasn't for decades, if ever. Reimagine Teams highlights why and provides a clear roadmap to create effective teams that get breakthrough business results. Using a multitude of case studies describing decades of implementations, you will learn how teams around the globe achieved transformational business outcomes and culture change in 3-6 months. Reimagine Teams teaches how to be accountable and accomplish goals, and how leaders can develop high-performing, positive relationships that produce sustainable results for years to come. These teams are flexible, adaptable and pivot quickly in response to the never-ending changes in the business environment, such as new technology, societal transformation, and industry competition.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. And here's your host, it's Chris Voss of the Chris Voss Show. Oh my god, it's the Chris Voss Show. I don't do a screaming Beatles type little girl at all.

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Give us a great review. We certainly appreciate it. We've had a lot of people do that lately. And we really appreciate the good things about the show. They really brighten my attitude the next morning when I wake up and I see a review on there and I go, wow, that's really nice. I think I'll keep doing the show after 13 years. So thanks for tuning in. By the way, the Chris Voss show turns 13 years sometime this month. I'm not sure what the exact date is. It's faded from my memory, but the 13 years this show is that old

and so is the site and all that crap. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Chris Voss Institute, or what is it called these days? Chris Voss Leadership Institute.com. You can see all of our courses and stuff over there. And also pick up my book, Beacons of Leadership. As always, we have amazing guests and authors on the show.

We just put them in the Google machine and Google amazing authors, and they appear like a magic. And we have them on the show and talk to them. Today, we have another amazing multi-book author, very prolific, if you will. Mark Samuel is on the show with us today. He's going to be talking about his latest book, Reimagine Teams, the missing piece in team building to achieve breakthrough results. And everyone's looking for breakthrough results these days. This book came out, for those of you seeing this 10 years from now, as people do on our videos, January 7th, 2022. So if he's got seven more books after this, don't write hateful comments on the comments on YouTube. Seriously, people will literally see videos from 12 years ago, and they'll be like, this book isn't new, Chris.

Shut up. Anyway, guys, he's on this show. You can hear him laughing in the background. But also, he's a transformational leader with over 30 years of experience in the business world. And he's helped hundreds of companies overcome stagnation, transform their businesses, and eliminate toxic work cultures to increase profits. I'm not sure why I'm emphasizing the middle, but it sounded fun. And customer service as well. And morale.

There's morale. I skipped that. He trains leaders on how to implement sustainable challenges. Is it Monday? How to implement sustainable changes within just one or two months. A revolutionary approach right now people don't know because, you know, welcome to the world we live in. But he does know how to spell sustainable. I just don't know because, you know, welcome to the world we live in. Approach, but he does know how to spell sustainable. I just don't know how to read it.

He's also pioneered with his team at Impact. He writes frequently with Forbes, probably better than I do, and tries Global and is the author of seven books. His newest book, of course, just came out, ranked number two on the Wall Street Journal. Best sellers list, definitely something of achievement there. And for nonfiction, let's hope it wasn't nonfiction. And number four on the USA Today list for nonfiction business books. Welcome to the show, Mark.

We can't have any more fun with your bio. Come on in. Say hello. All right. Thank you so much, Chris. And by the way, congratulations on 13 years. That's amazing. Yep, yep.

I'm out. Talk about sustainable. Yeah. I'm done done well last show your last show that's it 13 years i've had enough of this i'm like carson i'm just leaving it going on a fucking boat anyway welcome to the show congratulations on the new book those are always fun give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Yeah, the easiest way to find me is reimaginedteams.com. So pretty easy. Reimaginedteams. There you go. I was just watching Leno talk about taking over Carson and then the Carson joke came up. So what motivated you to want to write this book? You've written seven books in all, too. All great business books. Honestly, I just get so tired of the team building books and approaches that focus everything on relationship building as if that was what makes a great team. When, you know, my experience in sports and music and

the area that needs to actually perform, they don't talk relationship at all. Not at all. It's like the one thing that we've emphasized in business when you look at the top performing teams, don't do. Yeah. I started a few relationships in business with my team, but then the HR called me in for sexual harassment. I'm kidding.

That didn't happen. That's a joke, people. That's a joke. Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't ever. What's that thing? Eat where you shop. Anyway don't do that don't ever what's that thing eat where you shop anyway whatever work or whatever you know that's it anyway give us an

overview of this book what's inside yeah give us an overview that people can tease out the most there's two really main important things and it's so easy really when you think about it what most teams do is they identify all the problems that exist today and then they go one by one trying to solve it and then get into arguments about solving it and conflict about solving it and all of that kind of stuff. So you actually don't want to do that. The better thing to do, the more efficient way to go is go to a place in the future and imagine what it would look like if it was optimally functioning where those conflicts weren't existing and start to set up how do we need to function with each other for the outcomes we need to produce. And then guess what happens when you create that environment, the old problems don't have to be solved. They literally disappear. They don't exist in the environment. And as people ask me,

how long does it take to change a culture? I generally say one to two days. Really? Why? Because if I go out to the future and we optimize how we're going to function, and then we apply that to the challenges and goals that we have today, all of a sudden teams start functioning different. They let go of whatever the old baggage was that they've been carrying on. And everybody's just so focused on getting it. Hey, folks, this is a quick break in from the show. Hey, be sure to check out my new courses at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com.

That's chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com forward slash courses. Or you can just click the courses tab. You can see we've got new courses up for how to start a podcast and video training that can get you up to date on everything we're doing, of course, my speaking, my coaching, and everything else. But be sure to check out the new course that we have up for starting your own podcast after 13 years. I'm kind of sharing some of the secrets of what I know. So be sure to check that out at chrisfossleadership.com forward slash courses.

Done. That brings me to the second part, which is instead of focusing on relationships, focus on execution. I played baseball. It was about getting on the field, turning a double play and throwing people out. And how do we communicate and how do we work together? And what happens if someone bobbles the ball? What do we do?

We worked all that stuff out on the field where so often what team building does is take people let's cook dinner together yeah as if that relates to what we're going to do in the business can you imagine a sports a professional sports team cooking dinner hoping that's going to help them to make a double play everybody knows that you just have pizza party right exactly and i'm all for that, by the way. Yeah, but it's become the joke meme on LinkedIn that like, hey, you fix everything with pizza party. Sure. Whatever.

Oh, you want more wages? No. Just serious pizza party though. Pizza. Yeah. It's become a meme, if you will. So that's pretty quick turnaround to change culture, do you have to remove the person who's like, for me, a lot of culture comes from whoever's leading at the top or leading, whoever's leading the team in the

culture they set. I've seen like a lot of high school popularity cultures. That's always a big thing where people are focused on kissing the boss's ass and that sort of relationship, as opposed to what you mentioned earlier, achieving results. And it just becomes this thing of how far can we brown nose the dude or the woman? I see a lot with female managers. How does that work? Do you have to remove that person or do we have to retrain them? Here's what gets really interesting. When you start to set up what we call team habits, like these are things that we all

agree upon on how we're going to share information or make decisions or surface and solve problems. And now we're doing it based on outcome, not based on style, not based on preference, not based on politics, but literally based on outcome. Those that can't be accountable to that start to surface. And quite honestly, they typically leave on their own. They weed themselves out. That's nice. I've literally worked with executive leaders who worked in a position for 20 years, but really weren't performing. Everybody knew it, but no one wanted to say anything. Now that we have agreements, all of a sudden it's, hey, we're not here to badger you, but we need you to come through.

What support can we give you? Oh, no, no, I don't need support. Great, we'll come through because we're going to check up on you the next week until it happens. And then they go, oh, I don't like this new culture. There's too much pressure. Yeah, because you weren't performing to begin with. I actually have to do something. The one thing I hate more than anything is high school culture, the popularity culture, like you mentioned.

Oh, yeah. It's the person who they try and make everything revolve around them and everybody has to suck up to them. And you're just like, hey, man, I just want to do my job and go home. I don't want to deal with you. And to me, it's just called a high school culture. That's the technical term. But it's that popularity.

How cozy can I be with the boss? And the one thing, it was really important. And it was good important and it was good that i learned that the one thing i learned with my companies was whoever came in and kissed my butt the most like i'd just be sitting in my office and knocking their hey chris how's it going and oh yeah you're the man chris you're so awesome they'd be talking me up and whatever as soon as they'd leave my office i'd tell my executive secretaries, I'm like, go get his numbers because I know what's going on. He's not doing his job.

That's brilliant. Yeah. As soon as I started seeing, you know, I'll do a joke here for crudeness, but as soon as I started seeing that brown-nosing tickle bum thing going on, I'm like, hey, what? We better check some numbers here every freaking time. And I think it's important for managers to do that because if you're an ego-based manager, then you're like, oh, I really am the man, the greatest, and whatever. And I already knew I was the greatest and had a narcissistic ego anyway. I didn't need anything more, and I recognize that. What are some other things that we can tease out about your book, tips,

and maybe some stories or lessons? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that we put so much focus on relationships, and yet we aren't outcome-driven in most organizations. We're activity-driven. And it's all about, oh, look how hard I can work, and look how much I need to do, and we don't prioritize because we don't want to say no to anything. It's like, it's gutless, quite honestly. It's like you have to have the courage to say no to some things and you have to prioritize,

but you also have to be outcome driven and stop the game of, oh, go do this. You don't know why you're doing it. You don't know what the purpose is and you certainly don't know what success looks like to be told, oh no, that's not what I wanted. Or to be wanted. Or when you ask the questions, I'll know it when I see it. This is like, how many times do we see that? You would, again, never see that on any sports team or music group. Do we have a real leader who's not willing to set clear outcomes, clear expectations, and clear boundaries. Is the failure of those leaders that they don't, they assume people do their job or they don't

want to be the bad guy, maybe the whipcracker, or they feel they're being the whipcracker if they're, like you say, I like your team, your team equation that you use there, because if you're a coach and you're just like, let's just run around the field and the touchdowns and take care of themselves, I'm sure, I think that's how my Raiders play. They just get as many penalties as they can if you're a coach and you're just like, let's just run around the field and the touchdowns and take care of themselves. I'm sure. I think that's how my Raiders play. They just get as many penalties as they can. And they go,

Hey, we got enough penalties. That's three field goals. They told us there were three touchdowns. They told us. So technically we win the game by penalty. They don't understand. They don't understand what's going on.

So that's my Raiders. It's painful. Anyway, enough of that. I'd have a, I'd have a moment of sadness there and loss. We'll do this again this season. So how do, so why do they fail? Do the managers not want to be mean?

Do they, are they just focused on relationship maybe too much and not enough on get the damn touchdown already, boys? Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I think, first of all, the one thing that we run into in organizations is that many times leaders don't know what an outcome is. They think an outcome is a metric. Yeah, metrics are in many ways so arbitrary to begin with, and it doesn't give you a sense of what good looks like. See, an outcome is what does good look like. It includes the execution and the result and the metric. You can't separate any of it. You don't go to a baseball team and say, okay, now here's your ideal batting average. Go make it happen. It's just like that. Just ridiculous.

So the same thing in business. It's not about a sales goal or an efficiency goal. Those are all nice and you need to have them and they're great indicators. However, if you don't know what good looks like to create it, it's now arbitrary. Yeah. Oh, we're going to give you the goal, but we're not going to give you the resources to accomplish it. And by the way, we don't even know what resources are needed to accomplish it. Okay. Everyone then doesn't take any of their direction very seriously. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's the other equation that can happen, huh? You're like, Hey, everyone needs to get that can happen, huh? You're like, hey, everyone needs to get 10 sales this month. And you're like, can we get some phones in here

or something? Yeah. And of course, if we get the 10 sales, can operations actually produce it? Exactly. Yeah. I ran a mortgage company for close to 20 years. And one of the challenges you had was you had to, there's so many different, you relied on so many different people, the title company, the credit reporting company, the appraisal company, inspection companies. You relied on so many different people. And one of the challenges of the business was, if anything, when you're dealing with vendors is you got so many links in the chain that all it takes is one chain to break and everything unravels. Yeah. And you just mentioned something super important. I really want to highlight this because you just said something that every sports team, every music group practices that in business,

we don't even think about. And that is proactive recovery planning. In other words, if something goes wrong, how do we work together? Not a plan B b which is already figuring everything out ahead of time because you may not have the information to do it but just simply how do we get the right people in the room to make the right decisions in a fast way to overcome whatever challenge is going to show up because ultimately if you think about it all sports teams all music they practice that they rehearse it over and over until their recovery plans are as automatic as their plays. Yeah, that's really important. And you've got to be able to execute through the whole thing.

You've got to be able to have the processing that can put things. You can sell as much as you want, but if you can't ship and deliver, screw you. And when we don't have a recovery plan, the plan in most organizations is find somebody to blame. Finger point. Which is, to me, the biggest disease in organizations today. It's silo behavior, hero behavior, and blame behavior. Yeah. I love blame environments.

I remember when we started our first company, it was for a courier company for a blood clinic maybe i should announce them i don't know it was like that in the 90s and they had a blame culture and so they would literally spend more time every day documenting and emailing to cover their ass as like that thing that happened wasn't wasn't my fault and they would spend more time documenting that it wasn't their fault than they would in productivity. It's almost the same thing I ever saw. They would just spend all day trying to make sure that if someone went,

somebody in management went, what the hell happened here? Why did this machine catch on fire? It was like, hey, we wrote five things that says it wasn't me. Yeah. What the hell? And and just blame placing blame became such an environment that they they finally put swipe cards on the bathrooms oh so they can know how much time you're spending in the bathrooms when that when it reaches that point in the culture you got a problem that would not be good for me because sometimes you can ask my wife, but it's a long time.

It's my, she's called it my man's cave. Yeah, that's the only time a man can get away from everybody and have his private fucking space. If I was married with kids, I would just go into the bathroom, not to even sit in there. I would just stand there and look at my phone or just, I don't know. Hey, don't give away my secrets. Some karma mantra yoga exercises, turn on the shower, sit on the, sit on the seated toilet and just kind of, I don't know, do you go a piece or something? I don't know. I remember when, when I was engaged with somebody who had kids, I never went to the office on Saturday and Sunday. And suddenly I was

like, yeah, I'm going to the office on Saturday and Sunday. I'm out of here. So there's that. I understand what guys go through. But having an environment where people, what's, you mentioned something earlier and it reminded me of that old axiom, unless you know what your goals are, if you don't write down your goals, if you don't know what they are, you'll never achieve them because you're not focused on them. Something that sort of axiom that's out there. I'm sure there's a meme somewhere, but basically if you don't know, if you don't define your goals, you don't have any really. You're just wandering.

And if you don't know what it looks like to be in the space of accomplishing those goals. Like one thing, if you look at gymnasts, if you look at, again, top athlete musicians, will even imagine what they're doing and feeling like when they're performing before they perform. Yeah, there's a lot of mental clarity that they do. There's mental clarity. And here's what I often say that most organizations operate as amateurs, not professionals. They get out there and they play and, oh, I go to a class. Okay, I've been to that class. Therefore, I'm that good of a leader.

Give me a break. If you're a professional, you're always driving for what's my next level of excellence. What does excellence look like? And it's a moving target that constantly evolves as you get better. Not, oh, I've attained my lowest level of performance or class, and now I'm called a leader. Let me ask you this. A lot of people, I'm brain farting here. I had

a really good question. A lot of people now, they're working from home. How do you find teams work from home now? How's that effect? Did you get a chance to write about that in some of your book? We actually took about four to five months when COVID hit, given that I was either going to go out of business or stay in business, I thought, let's get outcome driven and literally changed our whole team methodology to be done virtually. Oh, wow. And it was amazing and awesome experience to do that. And we actually got quite a few teams that went through our system virtually and we measure results. So we're able to track what was the

effectiveness it was quite amazing there's one advantage to virtual that people never thought of i've never thought about it and that is when you're in a room together personalities can take over when you're on screen it's very hard to have that same level of dominance and same level of cutting other people off. That's true. That's true. I remember the big question I had for you. One thing that I noticed, as we mentioned before and led into here with the COVID thing, is I saw so many people during the COVID thing where they were getting Zoom fatigue. And my friends, they work for big companies, and they're like, I've been through 12 to 18 Zooms today. And I remember always thinking, this is from a business CEO point of view, I'm like,

what work is getting done if they're just sitting on Zoom meetings all day? When are they getting time to do their work and be productive? We're just paying people to Zoom? No kidding. But see, it's not, we could talk about it as zoom but in reality when people are back in the workplace the biggest one of the biggest constraints to getting anything done is i'm always in meetings i've never really seen people's calendars where they're in meetings double booked and triple booked meetings throughout their entire day so the only time they can get work

done is to stay after work and do it. It's honestly ridiculous. And I just worked with a group last week, an executive team. And I asked how much of what you get in one meeting is literally repeat of other meetings that you're going to. And they say, oh, 30% minimally and up to 75%. It's just killing us. Yeah, it's crazy. I would see just so many Zoom meetings and I'd be like, how do you get any work done? Do you just, I don't know. You have to be like that guy who's the comedian who's on TikTok or wherever and he has the green screen, he's at a football game and stuff. But yeah, it's just like, when do people do work if they're doing 12 to 18 meetings a day? And maybe that's something that people don't really factor for. Do we have a non-Zoom?

I think my company would probably have like non-Zoom hours. Like you can't have any Zoom meetings between 12 and 4 or something. I don't know. Do your damn work. I know enough about productivity about some people where most of their work gets done usually on Monday or Tuesday and they just watch YouTube videos all week or sometimes they're just playing catch up on Thursday. They're just like, oh crap, I didn't do anything all week. I've been on OnlyFans, so I should probably do some work here

and catch it up. I think that's one problem we have in our society i think we really do need a two to three day to four day work week because i know how much work people don't get done during the week come on man i know and i think it's i don't know i my opinion is worse since doing this whole code thing people staying at home i have a lot of friends that are married that have kids and families i hear what they're doing like half of them are gaming with me in the middle of the day so i'm like don't you have work to do and they're like yeah all right there's a zoom call coming up like man i wish i worked for the whoever but whatever what are some other ways in the book you talked about reimagining teams and stuff yeah the biggest thing too is that are your meetings about sharing information or are they actually about solving problems?

Honestly, you don't need to meet if it's to share information, get a status update, look at our metrics. I know that's really popular to do all that stuff, but to me the only thing that actually does anything to move the organization forward is removing obstacles. That's the whole job, especially of leaders. Your whole role is clarity of direction and priority. And let's remove obstacles so that other people aren't hassled to get their work done and be successful.

Yeah. And I don't care what the obstacle is. It could be a relationship obstacle, a process obstacle. I don't really care. Just remove the dang things. And if you're not removing obstacles, you're worthless. That's true. That's true.

Because no one else is going to do it. I used to look at the processes in my business and go, okay, how many hurdles do we have? And let's get rid of some hurdles so that stuff can move from one end to the end faster. Exactly. You look for results. The more thorough puts you can have, the faster the thorough put, the better off things can process. The more hoops you're putting in and you're like, no, we need to have more meetings. What else do we need to touch on in your book before we go out?

One other thing that just, to me, is all about what's going to happen in the future. And that is there is so much change, the pandemic, regulatory, politics, whatever else, supply chain, there is so much going on. We cannot think of having answers and going back to the way things used to be before the pandemic is idiotic. We have to now understand that we're pioneers. We're going to have to iterate more, have recovery plans, try things, experiment, and find out what works rather than having all the answers. And that's where collective intelligence is going to be important so that we're coordinating all this as we're moving forward so that we can adapt in a coordinated manner afterwards. That to me is the real key of leadership. It's a whole different mindset for leaders. It really is afterwards that to me is the real key of leadership it's a whole different

mindset for leaders it really is and to me leadership has really changed and you almost have to be able to inspire more because you've got to reach through people's screens through the zoom and stuff you can't have in the office and be doing the whole cheering thing and stuff you've got a you've got to be able to rah-rah from afar, if you will. I think it's going to change a lot of leaders to where you almost have to be more of like a YouTuber sort of person or something where you can make video or you can come across in video with more rah-rah. I think that's the word I'm stuck on today. With more motivation, more inspiration, but you've got to be able to do it through a camera.

I don't know, maybe the future CEOs or YouTube stars today or TikTok stars today, because we need people that maybe the business channel should have a TikTok where the CEO is making TikTok videos of him singing or something. I don't know. I'm just doing jokes. But yeah, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. It's going to be a blended environment for sure. So you got to be good in person. You got to be good on screen. And the good news is that we now can see people that are in different countries that are parts of our team that we couldn't even see before. So a lot of things have improved from that standpoint, but we've got to be smart about how we use the technology and how the technology supports our people,

rather than again, coming in with fixed mindsets about the old days. Yeah, very true. Very true. This has been pretty insightful. Give us your dot com so people can find out more about you and the book on the interwebs. Yeah, you can get a lot of information. We have both case studies, blogs all over the place, a lot of videos that you can catch

on reimaginedteams.com. That's the easiest place to go. That will link you to other websites that we have that can broaden that information and knowledge if you want, but reimagine teams.com is the place to go. There you go. Thank you very much, Mark, for being on the show. We really appreciate it, man. Yeah. Thank you, Chris. This is great. I just love the style. Real practical. Yeah, we try to make it fun like a radio show. The old days, I grew up with those radios. But we try to make it fun, throw some fun in so it's not very dry.

I have a lot of authors that will pull us aside because, you know, we get all from the big publishers. I've been doing podcasts all day today, and yours is the fun one. Thank you so much. I was ready to kill myself. We try and have a lot of fun and do a lot of jokes and make it fun. And I think people learn better with entertainment than they do with, plus we don't want to make this another Zoom call for the day. Oh God, it's Chris again in his Zoom podcast call. So thank you very much, Mark, for coming on. Thanks for tuning in. Go ahead and refer the show to all your family, friends, and relatives. Remember, tell them that the Chris Foss Show is a family that loves you, but doesn't judge you. The best kind of family there is,

right, Mark? The only family. The only family there is. Anyway, guys, be sure to subscribe to the show, all that good stuff. Find us all over the interwebs. We have a million groups. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out, Mark. Thanks.