The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Hive Mind at Work: Harnessing the Power of Group Intelligence to Create Meaningful and Lasting Change by Siobhan McHale

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

The Hive Mind at Work: Harnessing the Power of Group Intelligence to Create Meaningful and Lasting Change by Siobhan McHale https://amzn.to/3Bc1Ysg Learn a new model for understanding how organizations really operate and implement changes that get real results. With so many forces of change buffeting the business world today, a scary state of flux has replaced any sense of certainty, stability, and familiarity, delivering a wake-up call to make crucial changes happen, make them happen quickly, and make them stick. Traditional approaches to change management fall into one of two categories: Organizations function like machines, where managers pull change levers to “fix” problems with an engineer’s mindset (IQ). Or People form social networks wherein individual “influencers” make change happen by developing effective interpersonal relationships (EQ). Neither of these models offer a full picture to what really happens in an organization. In this groundbreaking new book, change expert Siobhan McHale offers a third option: organizations are complex ecosystems that require a Hive Mind or Group Intelligence (GQ) to bring about meaningful and lasting change. We can learn a lot of lessons from how bees operate: Hard work: An individual bee spends its entire 40-day life span gathering food for the hive. Teamwork: Inside each teeming beehive an entire community works collectively to achieve shared goals. Role clarity: Every bee has a specific job, with the queen, drones, and worker bees faithfully playing their part. Resilience: Bees can overcome daunting challenges, including all the parasites, pathogens, pesticides, and climate fluctuations from Maine to Miami and beyond. See how a hive mindset solves many of the common problems all businesses struggle with today!

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. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. 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 rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, that makes it official. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys stopping by.

As always, for 16 years and over 2,000 episodes, we bring you the most smartest people, the most brilliant authors and minds on the planet. None of them, of course, are mine because I'm just the idiot with the mic, but we have the most smartest people. Refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, linked, linkedin.com forward slash chrisvoss, chrisvoss1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. She is the author of the latest book that just came out yesterday, September 3rd, 2024.

It is called The Hive Mind at Work, Harnessing the Power of Group Intelligence to Create Meaningful and Lasting Change. Siobhan McHale joins us on the show today. We'll be talking about her book, her insights, and all of her research that she took and did so that you can be smarter in how to do your workplace better, and you can probably use some of the data for your life. Siobhan has worked across four continents, helping thousands of leaders to create more agile and productive workplaces.

She's also been on the inside as the executive in charge of culture change in a series of large multinational organizations. One of these inside jobs is a radical seven-year change initiative at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, a bank that transformed itself from the lowest performing bank in the country into the highest performing and most admired banks in the world. Professor John Cotter used to work in the ANZ as Harvard Business School case study designed to teach MBA students about managing change. Welcome to the show, Siobhan.

How are you? I'm great. It's great to be here today, Chris. It's wonderful to have you as well. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? SiobhanMcHale.com and also follow me on LinkedIn. Siobhan, give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside your new book. Early about when you face change challenges at work. So let's say you've got an engagement problem or a productivity problem or

safety issues, challenges. How do you walk up to these complex adaptive problems? And really what I'm saying is IQ and EQ are no longer enough, Chris. You need group intelligence in order to solve these complex adaptive challenges. The group, who would have thunk it? And we need more people. We need more help.

I realized a long time ago, I'm not the purveyor of all the great ideas as the CEO of my companies that I need other people's help, especially those that know more than I do. So Siobhan, give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? SiobhanMcHale.com is a good place to go. But also, Chris, I publish weekly on LinkedIn. So, if people are interested in this topic of change and culture, then please do find me. Okay.

So, Siobhan, tell us more about your book. I noticed when I was looking inside of it, you have the nine, let me see if I can pull this up again, the nine fundamentals of group work, I believe it was called. Yeah. Yeah. So, I start the book, the first chapter is about the nine laws of group dynamics. Mm-hmm. Chris, and these are the fundamental theories. You need to know how groups work, essentially, if you're going to manage groups of people, if you intervene successfully in groups in order to help them to deliver, help them to grow, or help them to adapt.

These are nine fundamental laws in terms of how groups operate. Now, do you take kind of your hue from bees? Is that the cornerstone of your thesis in the book? Yeah, I think we can learn a lot from the bees. And one of the things I do in the book is follow the bees as they swarm on a wombat farm. So the hive becomes overcrowded and the bees swarm and they go in search of a new home. Now that's a big challenge for the bees and what can we learn from them on the journey. So as well as case studies in the workplace and I have many of those, I also draw some of the bees. The nine laws of group dynamics, patterns, connectedness, role, multiple perspectives,

context, embeddedness, pattern blindness, unintended consequences, and tipping point. And one of the things you espouse as leaders with group intelligence, understand the nine laws of the group dynamics. Do you care to expand on that a little bit? So I'll give you an example of the ANZ, just a quick example. When I walked into ANZ, the executives were at a loss in terms of what to do to fix the very poor customer satisfaction there. And they had restructured the organization, organization Chris but that had only taken it back backwards so one of we did was take a step back and we actually found what I call in the book an order taker pattern at the bank so head office had stepped into the role of order giver

and the 700 bank branches had stepped into the role of order taker and this pattern of we take orders from head office was essentially running the bank so we needed to see that pattern in order to successfully bring about change so that is about the law of patterns a lot of passions so give us a little bit about your history in your words how did you grow up what influenced you what got you into the businesses that you were in and developing this theory so as a child i grew up in ireland and i was fascinated by the bees as they swarmed in the orchard on my family's farm and that fascination with natural ecosystems led me to a career studying human ecosystems into organizational psychology to begin with.

And then two parts to my career. The first half was really as a management consultant, flying in and out of organizations across four continents. And then the second part has been rolling up my sleeves as an insider that you mentioned to make change happen in organizations as the executive in charge of change. This book is really written from that role and from that lens as an insider. That's pretty interesting. So you ran this experiment, I guess, with the company you're working with, the bank, to test out this theory of yours. Is that correct?

Yeah, a lot of these theories in the book I've put in workplaces rather than just ivory tower theories that haven't been tested. These are tried and tested methods. And that's really what led me to this theory that we can no longer depend on IQ and EQ. EQ is emotional intelligence which is about the interpersonal realm so it's about do you understand your own emotions and the emotions of those around you. IQ is rational logical intelligence which helps you with legal problems but these two intelligences are not enough to help you to understand groups and often when we we bring about change we have to change how groups of people are thinking behaving so that's why group intelligence is really important group intelligence

because technically in a corporation or a group you have to you have to operate as a group. So some of the things you talk about is hard work, teamwork, role clarity, and resilience. Can you give us a little bit of rundown on some of those aspects and what they mean? Yeah. So role, for example, is really important. And if you can imagine, let's say, let's take Anna, who gets up in the morning in role of wife and greets her husband. She goes down the corridor and gets her twins ready for school in role of mother. She holds a train in role of commuter and heads to her workplace in New York City, where she's a head of a department at a hospital. The first meeting of the day, she steps into a role of teacher with a group of students. Her second meeting, her role of negotiator with a boss in order to secure extra funding for equipment in her department. And that afternoon, she

steps into a role of advisor with a group who wants a second opinion on a diagnosis. That evening, she catches up with some old schoolmates and she steps into role of friend. Now, is Anna the same authentic person in each of those interactions? Yes, she is. But her behaviour changes according to role. So, Chris, many of us have been taught that personality dictates our behaviour, but actually the role we're taking up influence behavior in just as powerful a way. Wow. Behavior is impactful and important and all that good

stuff that goes into it. So what are some examples of you've seen success using some of the theories you have in the book. Yeah, so one of very many examples, but let's take one simple example where an infrastructure I was working with was experiencing problems with safety and the safety stats were declining. They were seeing more and more accidents. And when I spoke to the safety team,

they said, we just need more policies. People obviously aren't clear about what they need to do and how they need to behave. But when I looked at it, they had over 5,000 safety policies that nobody was reading them and they didn't need any more. And so when I went out on site, what I discovered is that there was a pattern. A pattern is an agreement between different parts of the group. But the pattern in this organization was the working pattern. So essentially, there was a hidden agreement that we break the rules in order to get the job done on time. And that hidden agreement, the rule-breaking pattern, was influencing the role of the employees on these jobs.

And also the supervisors who were stepping into the role of condoner in order to overlook safety breaches. So seeing the rule-breaking agreement, a pattern in that organization, was the key to unlocking improvements in safety. Once we saw that, we reframed the roles. Yeah. And we saw improvement.

That's pretty wild. I mean, basically people finding a way to go around them. I've heard of different corporations that aren't operating well and et cetera, et cetera. And, yeah, it was in the fact that people needed more rules and regulations that they needed less. So do you coach for this? Do you consult and speak and different things like that that people can find at your website? Yeah, I'm actually the head of HR or the chief people officer at Dulux Group, which is a paint and paint place in Melbourne.

So I'm not actually doing any consulting, but I'm very passionate about not just my role as the chief HR officer, but also my role as an educator so this is why I've written two books on the topic and occasionally I speak at conferences but I do have a full-time job but I'm very passionate about the fact that insiders like myself should be writing about our experiences most of the books Chris in this area are written by outsiders, and that's a really important lens, consultants or academics. But we also need to hear from the insiders

who are making change happen every day in workplaces. It's super important. And give us a plug for your other book. What was the title of it? That was called The Insider's Guide to Culture Change. So how do you create a workplace culture lever that can grow and adapt? Pretty insightful then. People should check out your book, read it, figure out how they can harness the power of group intelligence, etc., etc.

Final thoughts and pitch out to people as we go out on where they can pick up the book? So you can pick it up on Amazon.com or any of your online or real bookshops. They should have a copy of it. And Siobhan, what is a good.com where people can look you up on the interwebs again? Yeah, it's

SiobhanMcCowell.com but probably Chris, the best place to find me is LinkedIn. And that's where I publish regularly. So if people want to follow my thinking and what I've got to say about culture change or leadership, that's a good place to find me. All right. Well, thank you very much, Siobhan, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me, Chris. And thanks to our artists for tuning in go to goodreese.com fortunes chris voss linkedin.com fortunes chris voss chris voss won the tiktokity and all those crazy places on the internet be good to each other stay safe we'll see you next time