Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:06 Welcome to teaming up conversations, the podcast, I'm your host Simon better. I believe that one of the most satisfying and rewarding moments in life is belonging to a trusted team and achieving something unique together. Thank you for joining our dialogue, how to build lead and be part of an inspired team and community.
Speaker 1 00:00:40 I'm very excited for our teaming up conversation with my dear friend, Larry Levin. He's an expert on executive team dynamics, managing organizational complexity and cultural change with a deep understanding of people and strategy. Larry Ray breaks down the nature of teamwork into what works and what doesn't. We cover success, critical topics around top teams, including improving the dynamics and capabilities of executive teams. How do teams effectively navigate through change complexity and growth? And we address the blueprint for optimization, how to make a strong team even better. Larry has written the book top teaming, a roadmap for leadership teams navigating the now the new and the next. He has worked with many sea level executive teams of some of the largest corporations in the world and has advised those top teams how to thrive in an increasingly complex ambiguous world. A unique skillset that Larry processes is his questioning skills, his masterful asking really powerful, pointed and provocative questions. So the interview is a wonderful lesson, how to ask insightful questions, enjoy the teaming up interview with top teaming expert, Larry Levi. Excellent. Larry, great to be with you. Thank you for being on my podcast,
Speaker 2 00:02:15 Simon. Good to see you and to talk with you.
Speaker 1 00:02:18 I enjoy and loved your book top teams. And one of the concepts I will think about teams and building teams is you have the saying that the team really has to find out what is the team for. It's such a simple, yet complex topic to understand. Can you elaborate that? What do you mean with that and how do you get a team to figure out what is it for?
Speaker 2 00:02:48 Well, I think the first thing is, is to recognize that no two teams are alike and there isn't one quote, right? Kind of team, you know, the, what a top team needs to be is the most optimal team that, that business or that, that is necessary for that business or for that team. So the team has to define the type of team they need to be one of the starts. And it's a hard question to ask is what are you for as a team? Are you for simply being as profitable as possible for the organization? Is this a team that's a growth team? Is this a team that is a, you know, a new team and is coming together and needs to do something that has never been done before in this industry? Is this a team that is formed after, you know, post merger or acquisition? And it's a hybrid team of people that were previously in a business and people that are new to the business and are forming as a team. So defining where, what the team is and what the team needs to be, because that's ultimately what you have to do is what kind of team do we need to be? What are we for? What do we need to be?
Speaker 1 00:04:01 How do you describe a top team? What makes a top team? And can you gimme an example of the work you have done with teams that you define as a exemplary top team?
Speaker 2 00:04:14 Well, the, you know, the concept of high performing teams been around for a long time now and, you know, I taught high performing teams for years and the concept of high performing teams and, and what I realized back in probably 2009, when we had the great recession, this already is a long time ago. It doesn't feel like a long time ago that when business crashed and people didn't really know how long it was going to before, you know, what the future looked like, you know, etcetera, et cetera, there was so much uncertainty that there were almost two kinds of teams that I saw, you know, and these were all pretty high performing teams. They, these were not dysfunctional, both dysfunctional teams. So there were the type of teams that essentially hunkered down the business cut as deeply as they could cut. And the teams hunkered down and they sort of waited for this storm to pass and they didn't know what pass looked like.
Speaker 2 00:05:15 What was on the other side, how long it was gonna take, et cetera. The other type of teams really utilized that, you know, that time, this opportunity to really dialogue with one another about where they were going, what they needed to be, what were the possibilities and the opportunities inherent in this during this time and how did they want to emerge from this recession and in doing so, what was really different from wanting to the other was the amount of, and the quality of dialogue that went on in the team sooner, Rob sh has said for years is that dialogue is the essential unit of work. And it's a very powerful thing, but if you watch how most teams operate, and this has been especially true during COVID times, and when teams have been virtual is that the teams tend to be not dysfunctional, but transactional, operational, they are typically report out teams.
Speaker 2 00:06:18 They have been trying to keep the business afloat. They're dealing with amazing amounts of uncertainty, which if you think about the volatility, complexity, uncertainty, et cetera, the VUCA thing, ambiguity, you know, we've been through that in spades. And you know, this is preaching to the choir here cause you went through it in a couple of countries. And so what the, what most of those teams didn't do is to step back and to really ask themselves the question of how are we doing, how do we optimize as a team? And what does even better look like as a team?
Speaker 1 00:06:54 Do you have an example of a team that you worked with that is really good in addressing those questions and has a high level of quality of diet?
Speaker 2 00:07:06 I, I, I have a couple, one of the teams that we just worked with couple of weeks ago and I've been working with them virtually is a huge, without naming it is a huge device manufacturer, right? And this was a, this was part of this large complex global team that operates really around the world. So you can imagine the calls that they have are very difficult to get everybody who matters on the call, respect time differences, do all those kinds of things that make it the way they are. And the team grew naturally because the people in there were hardworking, committed, very good at what they did very involved, but they'd never been challenged to really grow as a team. And, uh, one of the major big bosses of the organization basically showed up and said, okay, I want you to give me a three to five year growth plan.
Speaker 2 00:08:10 What are the big things you're going to focus on as a team? And, uh, and we want you to think big, and we want you to think in ways you haven't thought of before. Now that frankly scared the crap out of them, cuz they had never done that before they, they knew how to navigate this complex organization and to make money and to do well. So what we did using utilizing our top team assessment, several meetings with the, you know, the upper echelon of the team is to really work on what does this team need to do? How do we need to be with one another? What does our focus look like? How do we want to be known as a team? What does growth look like? What do the challenges look like? And we had a lot of different kinds of people on the team.
Speaker 2 00:08:57 We had people who were essentially really high level complex software engineers and designers. You know, we had people who did both internal sales, cuz they have to sell it to the people in the organization who then sell it to the other businesses and consumers. So there was a, there was a sales component, both internal and external. There were financial people that were there. There were attorneys there that said, you can do this, but you can't do that. And because we're working globally and so on and so forth. And what we had is we had a lot of people who had been working well almost as a portfolio team. There was a lot of different stove, pipes and silos that reported into this wonderful, really brilliant guy who was essentially burdened with driving the team and making this team really good.
Speaker 1 00:09:43 Let's wrap this a bit. Uh, you mentioned the assessment that you have tell a little bit more, what does the assessment do? How and what information you gain from it to increase the quality of dialogue?
Speaker 2 00:09:59 Well, these, you know, the, my belief is that a team has to define the type of team they need to be, but there are a lot of areas that are consistent that teams have to do well. And a lot of areas in which teams do well and areas in which they don't. So for example, you know, this asks people on the team to look at where they are in terms of their strategic and contextual understanding, you know, how much do they think together around the future? How well do they under, do they have the information that they need? Do they have the type of people around the, the table that they need to have? It talks about, you know, how candid and open they are as a team, because this gets into the whole aspect of psychological safety and trust, which ultimately, and we can, we should probably talk about this.
Speaker 2 00:10:46 More gets to the golden ring of where a team should be, which is around collective intelligence and collective intelligence, simply put as the team is smarter than the smartest person in the room. So people together are smarter. That's also in some ways the golden ring for inclusion and diversity, if you think about it that way, and you know, it talks about how well does this team navigate a complex organization? How do they handle the boundaries, the matrix working across the organization, working with one another. And uh, to what extent, how well do they execute, right? To what extent do they focus on the present and the numbers? To what extent do they work on things that are also conceptual and you know, and then there's other areas that we sometimes add to this, which is around cultural understanding and cultural respect, how they handle meetings.
Speaker 2 00:11:37 And it's different for those teams that can meet in person versus those teams who had to work virtually. So, so what happens with the team assessment is it really gives a blueprint for where a particular team is. Do we mostly agree that this is an area that we don't do well or an area that we do well? Is there a real scatter, you know, of with the 15 people and people are all over the board, some people think we are really great at this. Other people think we're terrible at this, that's an issue. And so what it does is it gives you common language and it gives you a blueprint and a roadmap around where do you need to put in the work to optimize this team? So this is really a, it's a blueprint for optimization. It is what it is not, is a sort of dogmatic approach to this is what a good team looks like.
Speaker 2 00:12:32 These are a lot of elements that are really critical to teams that can work well in, you know, collectively and grow as a team and sustain the growth, going forward. The top team assessment and the virtual team assessment, which is it's kind of little brother, a little more contained area really are also operate as a baseline. So they come back in six months and they say, okay, you know, we've been working on the following things, how are we doing? What difference has it made? And given where we are right now, what do we work on next? Because evolving a team is a constant journey. There's no, you don't arrive right. The minute you think you're arriving the goal posts, move mm-hmm <affirmative>. And that's one of the things that's really kind of critical about, about a team. So the aspect of teams and change is there's no, there's really no steady state. The steady state is around evolution, which sounds like a bit of a confusing way of thinking about it. But it's, it's always moving. The nature of change has changed.
Speaker 1 00:13:37 The ultimate goal is tap into the collective intelligence of the team. Yes. Now let's take the opposite. When you work with teams who are not there, they are challenged, they're stretched, they're overwhelmed to a degree dysfunctional. Yeah. Can you give three major common challenges and issues that teams struggle with?
Speaker 2 00:14:05 Yeah. I mean, one of 'em that is pretty basic and sounds pretty soft, but in this case, the soft stuff drives the hard stuff. Is that the whole aspect of psychological safety in a team. So in the, in the olden days, and maybe now in the ER, hopefully in the emerging days, if you and I worked together on a team and I knew where your office was and you know, we occupied the same floor, the same building. I could go knock on your door and say, Simon, you got a minute, let me kick this around with you. Or I think you and I are, are kind of struggling around the edges about this. Let's see if we can get together and kind of work this through we all. Or we go to lunch together. And I think of collective intelligence in that whole journey as a, a as really beginning from a point of view of the obvious emotional intelligence, people have to know who they are and they have to know what drives them.
Speaker 2 00:14:58 They have to know how they impact other people. And then at the far end is the collective intelligence is how do we really work together? You know, to think bigger, think more broadly, think more deeply, you know, and, and really kind of understand what what's possible for this team. That's the, in some ways the highest level of optimization, the connecting tissue is around the relational intelligence. That's the informal nature of a team, that's you and I going to lunch. That's, you know, you and I going to, you know, going to dinner, having an after an adult beverage after work, maybe more than one and you know, and really kind of getting to know one another that's where, what builds trust and that trust is the safety net for the high wire act of collective intelligence. Cause in collective intelligence, you challenge, you can challenge everything, you know, so, you know, you can have, you can have nine tens of the people in the room saying this is a great idea, what a fabulous strategy to pursue, but you want that other one 10th or that other 10% of, of the people to say, hang on, have we thought about this?
Speaker 2 00:16:08 Let me tell you what my concerns are. You know, we, you know, we've done this before. We don't wanna screw this up in the way we've screwed it up in the past. And so they have to have that kind of psychological safety to challenge this. You know, this was one of the things that Google found out and their Aristotle project when they were trying to define what a, you know, what, what a great team looked like in the, and you know, what this, how this worked. They put all the smartest people together. And there was a lot of sharp elbows in that room. They put all the people that knew each other and went bowling together and nobody wanted to offend anybody else. And they realized that psychological safety having a, a huge diversity, a good diversity, uh, of both intellectual and, um, historical experiential power.
Speaker 2 00:16:58 And, and I think the third one was really around ensuring that everybody in the room talked and participated, which meant if you weren't a subject matter expert, what was your role? If you're not a subject matter expert, your role is paying attention to the process, to the dynamics who's talking, who's not, are we going in the direction that we set out for? Or have we hit a default setting for ourselves as a team? So, you know, in thinking about these kinds of teams, one of the things that I really look for is to make sure I really understand the context. What is the strategy of this team? What's their history, what's the business model of this team. What's their, what does growth look like going
Speaker 1 00:17:40 Into that topic? What's as a common struggle teams have in defining where we're going, what's the growth strategy look like?
Speaker 2 00:17:50 Well, one is pretty obvious, which is it's all leader led, right? If it's just the leader's strategy, if that's where it's coming from and that's, that is going to suboptimize the team. Cause while the leader may be the smartest guy in the room is the leader smarter than the collective of the people that are in the room. And so the, you know, it, they can default default to a leader led team or the person who's the reigning expert. Now there are, there's certainly organizations in which it that's the way it works, healthcare, academic medicine, it works that way. Investment banking, you see a lot of it there, but when you get into tech and you get into manufacturing and you get into some of the other areas of industry, if it is really leader only driven, that's one way a team can default another is that they simply don't talk to each other because their meetings are, tend to be report out.
Speaker 2 00:18:41 And they don't ask themselves the key question about what does even better look like what's optimization look like for us. And that's another way to default. It's kind of a soft default because people really learn to deal with these meetings in which people go around and they report out about their area or it's their turn. They put their deck up on the board, right. And you know, they put their Excel spreadsheets up on the board and they sometimes will look at that and, and such a level of depth that it doesn't lead itself to dialogue or discussion. Right. And then they go around to the next person. So is that a dysfunctional team? I would argue it's not a dysfunctional team. Is it an optimal team? No.
Speaker 1 00:19:29 There is how a team conducts meetings is a good indicator for their effectiveness. Yeah. And I always say there are three purposes in a meeting inform <affirmative> inform, come up with different ideas and solutions. And the third is make a decision.
Speaker 2 00:19:48 That's right.
Speaker 1 00:19:49 Mm-hmm <affirmative> in most, in many companies, I see that 90, 95% of the time in meetings is used for information and a little bit of decis, uh, of creative problem solving many teams that have found they're not good in making decisions. How do you make decisions? What's the process? How do we make decisions when there is a lot of uncertainty or conflict involved? Can you elaborate a little bit on effective decision making for teams?
Speaker 2 00:20:24 Well, decision making is situational. You know, so if you know, Simon, if you're a leader of a team and you know, you can make a decision, you can say, Hey, I've got positional power here. You know, this is my call. This is what we're gonna do. And with that, you can get people to comply. Sometimes you get people to comply with a deep understanding, right? So they are, you know, are they committed or are they complying? That's a question that you look at another situation is that you ask people what they think and what their opinions are. So you, you can start off Simon if you're the, if you're the leader and, and what you can say, it's my call. I'm gonna make, I'm gonna make the call here. And that's fine if it's, if there's like an emergency or it's urgent, or it's, you know, you have a, a certain budget or constraint that you've gotta meet, et cetera, and you can get people to comply.
Speaker 2 00:21:17 Cuz most people will ultimately nod their head and say, Hey, it's the boss's call. You can ask another way is to ask people what they're really thinking and why. And to really kind of hear that information, that data, those opinions, that kind of critical stuff and say, okay, this is what I heard. And this is what I'm gonna do. Based on what I heard. You have to let people know that's how you're operating. You know, otherwise they'll stop giving you what they, you know, you know, why should I bother telling her what I think, because she's gonna do what she wants to do anyway, you know? And you wanna avoid that. So you have to label that a third way is to have organic. What I think is organic consensus. You look around the room and people are nodding their head, which is great. And I mean, okay, we agree now that only works.
Speaker 2 00:22:02 If people will disagree, if you trust that somebody in the room will disagree. If that's what they feel, then organic consensus really works. Cuz it's honest. Another way of defining consensus is, okay, we have some, a couple people in the room that you know, that, you know, don't fully, totally support that this decision. I don't think it's the right thing. The question is, will you support this both publicly and privately? How many meetings have you been to or been part of in which people nod and say, okay, that's what we'll do. And there's a meeting after the meeting or there's a, there's three people that are walking down the hall and say, can you believe this? I mean, yeah. Are we really gonna do this? You know, or you're driving home and you go, I can't, you know, I can't believe nobody said this or I can't believe I didn't say anything.
Speaker 2 00:22:53 So, you know, it's, you're setting a real high bar. What you're thinking about real true, honest collective intelligence in a group of people that have high trust for one another. So there's a lot of work involved here. There's this lot of very deliberate work in terms of raising the bar to have a top team. And that's one of the things that definitionally is different than a high performing a team, a high performing team, you know, looks at us at a number of different areas and say, we have to be good here and here to perform well. And our results have to show that when you deal with collective intelligence, you're dealing with defining interdependency, how interdependent are we with in with one another? And the other question is looking at the edges of interdependency, which is what happens when you have a matrix organization or a team that's fairly matrix in which you have to understand what's in.
Speaker 2 00:23:50 And these are three questions by the way that I use all the time. And they sound really easy. But if you think from through, these are questions that are almost the underpinning of building trust. And so I would come to you and I would say, Simon, help me understand. What's really important to you in your role. What's really critical. What's really important. And I listen carefully. The second question is help me understand what your concerns are. And the third question is what can I do to help you in my role? And typically what happens when somebody has that, those three questions with the other person, the questions then get reversed. And now you have a real honest dialogue that is the basis of trust and how can I help you? What happens is you as I get better at anticipating what is coming your way, right? I get better at figuring out how, what I do and what Ralph over there does and what Rosa does over there, how that impacts you. So then we're starting to knit these teams together in a, you know, in a much more effective way.
Speaker 1 00:24:52 Do you have an example of highly interdependent team and maybe one that is less in interdependent?
Speaker 2 00:25:00 Well, teams that are less interdependent are typically called portfolio teams, which might be you're running a business, but it's not just one business. You've got three businesses under you that you're running. Okay. And each one of those businesses has a leader and that leader has a P and L perhaps, or a series of goals and, and teams underneath him or her. And that's typically a portfolio team. If you look at, at an org chart, what does an org chart tell you? It just tells you who reports into who it doesn't tell you how business gets done. And it doesn't tell you how business gets done across an organization. So one of the things you know, that, you know, you learn in the consulting world is to really look at what those, those barriers are. Some people call them swim lanes, but I think of swim lanes as nothing more than wet silos.
Speaker 2 00:25:50 <laugh>. And, and what I do think of is that, you know, those teams or those people have to have clear goals, clear responsibilities, you know, ultimately they're responsible. You know, we think the now the new and the next, this is what they signed up for, right? Their bonus can be based on this and how well they do around this. But the boundaries in between those have to be semipermeable. You have to be able to cross those kinds of boundaries. You've gotta be able to move in and out, which means you have to understand their business, their goals, their challenges, et cetera. So that would be a portfolio team, a more highly interdependent team. And there's a number of them is you think of some of the teams that you see in medicine, in which you really are completely dependent on somebody else's expertise. And they're knowing what has to happen when it's true of sports teams, people have to know their position and they, but they have to know where everybody else is at a given time and, and how that works and how they play together.
Speaker 2 00:26:52 Right? And they have to define that they have to define their offense. If you think about what kind of team do we need to be, you know, are we primarily a passing team or we a running team or, you know, and so there's a, there's a lot of ways of defining the type of team we need to be. And it's not, you don't do this once. This is a dialogue that you have over time, as you keep evolving this process. So if you look at where teams fail, they fail to have these conversations early and they stay operational virtual, just simply numbers driven. They fail. If they do it once in, in an offsite that they have. And by the way, people should not use the term retreat. They should use the term. We're gonna go have it advanced with each other because directionally it's more.
Speaker 2 00:27:39 And, uh, I learned this from an old partner of mine who said, you know, he gave the term advance and I got at the minute, he said, geez, can't believe can't believe I've been using the term retreat for a long time. You know, if teams just do this every once in a while, as opposed to, you know, over the next two months, we're gonna take one meeting every two months or every three months. And we're gonna ask the question, how are we doing? What does even better look like? They, for example, have results from a top teaming assessment. And they've said, these are the three areas that we are going to work on. That we think if we improve, we're gonna float a lot of boats. We're really gonna move us forward. How are we doing? This is what we set out to do. How are we doing?
Speaker 2 00:28:24 What does even better look like now there's after action reviews. Very few people talk about during action reviews, right? You know, which is, this is what we're doing. How are we doing? And so, so the teams that I work with, one of the things that I really want to ensure they do is to work on themselves as a team continuously over time. And this does a couple of things. They, it is either deliberate to move it, to push it down the organization. If you're talking about working toward the top, which where I spend a lot of time there and then being able to kind of work it down the organization, which is really where the rubber hits the road and you get speed and, and things like that. And it also gives people common languaging in terms of what they're talking about and a view of how they evolve as an organization, beyond the team, how do we, as an organization continue to evolve and grow and with that's where development comes in and training comes in and, you know, and ensuring you've got the right people and the right roles come in. But if you're doing this in pieces, it's very hard to net together.
Speaker 1 00:29:32 One of the concepts that I love is this performing in and now plan for the next new and create a new. So the, now the next and the new, do you have an example of a team who's really good at that to really decide on those three timelines and balancing and combining all three, because as leaders, we get a focus on all three. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:29:57 I mean, a couple of examples. The, the most recent was the week before last with the, you know, the, this big team that I referenced earlier, I knew when this team was beginning to really click as a larger team. When people came back from breakout groups, they were working on this, they were working on that and they came back and it wasn't just report out. But as they were reporting out the cross talk, the dialogue in the room was astounding. Never I've, I've never seen that before with this team. And they were having a great time. And I looked at their brilliant leader and he had a wall to wall smile on his face. So they clearly have goals. They have KPIs, they have all these things that they sign up for. That's the, now that's everything that they're responsible for. They've got to design, you know, create this software.
Speaker 2 00:30:50 They've gotta figure out what AI looks like and how do you fully utilize the cloud, et cetera, et cetera, you know, in an organization that is device driven. So they're inventing things internal and which the organization over time is gonna be known for. That's the, now that's what they're getting paid for. The new is the strategic comments and the strategic direction. This is where these businesses are going. This is what our competitors are doing. This is what's possible. And we can't do it all. So what are the critical areas that we're gonna deliberately and consciously focus on? That's the next? So the now is the, now the new is the ongoing strategy in strategic hunt. And the next is, are the critical priorities. So this group, after two days of intensity came up with three areas that they're gonna deliberately and consciously focus on and business plans for those three areas.
Speaker 2 00:31:47 And that definition of success, what it looked like, what the value value is. So it's not just activity, but it's value driven. What's the value that this is going to bring to the organization. They did things like force, field analysis looking at, okay, you know, these are the things that will drive us forward in this. And these are the restraining forces, and that may might be market. It might be the culture of the company. It might be the leadership of the company, or, you know, a couple stodgy people who are, you know, got a lot of power that are gonna be blockers of this. So they have to look at all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 00:32:23 You have a lot of experience working with teams, facilitating teams, coaching teams, I call you a senior in that sense, what would be the advice from your senior perspective to your younger aspiring person? The junior person let's say 20 years ago, someone the, the, the, the Larry 20 years ago who wants to become, uh, an expert team facilitator, what, um, suggestions do you have to the younger junior, your self?
Speaker 2 00:32:59 Well, you know, the first one is I am inherently suspicious of people that have a methodology that says, this is how you do it. This is, you know, this is how you coach, so they are, you know, there are some coaching schools and, and methodology of coaching and say, this is what coaching looks like and how you do this successfully.
Speaker 1 00:33:22 Yeah. Here are the seven steps to become a great coach.
Speaker 2 00:33:25 Yeah, yeah. You know, or the seven steps of anything,
Speaker 1 00:33:28 You know, anything. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:33:29 Yeah. And, and so, yeah, I mean, it's, they can, you can talk about seven things that are critical. You know, they're really important, but you know, if you look at this and just that's the process, so I'm inherently suspicious of that. And I, I think people have to be willing to have a lot of courage as they proceed with their career, because they really have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. They, they have to be willing to journey into what is not yet known to them and really learn it. You know, I was, um, fortunate in a lot of ways because historically I started off as a clinical psychologist. And so, you know, I, you know, in a, in a good clinical program, you learn about depth and you, if you're any good, you have courage to ask the next question and to go deep. Now that's very transferable in, you know, in, in coaching, you know, is to, is to have that kind of depth when you move into consult into the consulting world, which I did, and I didn't do this, I didn't do any of this super deliberately.
Speaker 2 00:34:33 I think I more followed my nose in terms of what interested me and what was next and what I thought I had to learn in the consulting. Stereotypically, you learn, you focus less on the individual and you focus more on context. You know, you focus more on the business and how business gets done and, you know, what are those kind of critical things you think more macro than micro in, in a lot of CA there's a lot of, uh, examples, uh, in that. And there's also a lot of areas in which you'd say in a way a minute, that's not really true, really works this way, that way, but I think it's, you've gotta go deep and you've gotta go broad. And there's the opening scene in the music man, the great musical is all these sales people on a train. And they start off with essentially a rap song, you know, which was like a 1950s rap song about you gotta know the territory.
Speaker 2 00:35:28 And I think that's one of the things from, you know, really good coaches, really good consultants learn the territory. They learn context. They sit in meetings, they have to be willing to play smart dummy, which is to ask questions because they are not subject matter experts. I'm never a subject matter expert, you know? And so I'm happiest when I'm the dumbest guy in the room. And hopefully one of the most curious and ask a lot of questions, cuz that advances the, you know, that advances the, you know, the conversation and the dialogue. So I think that's really happened. So, so you challenge the established formulaic approaches. I think you have courage. I think it's important to know what you don't know and, and not be so, and, and not be certain. And I think you also have to tell the truth. You have to be willing to tell the truth and be willing to be fired occasionally.
Speaker 1 00:36:25 Good advice. Thank you, Larry. A lot of good, uh, insights. If people wanna learn more about your expertise, your tools assessment, where can I find you?
Speaker 2 00:36:40 Well, you know, the, the book top teaming I is still out and I think is, is still relevant. If I wrote version 2.0, I would be including, you know, more of the virtual world. Right. And in, in that. And, but it's still, I think, a very solid book and, um, simply I'm at the 11 group.com, glad to talk to folks about it. You know, we don't heavily market ourselves. I think we work mostly reputationally at this point. And, and what's really fun is to work with other people, you know, so, you know, those of us who are in Alexa Excel together and, you know, have colleagues that we know we trust and, um, they share common values and hopefully, uh, common experience. You know, that's really how we think about, you know, how to have fun at work,
Speaker 1 00:37:28 To finish up our conversations. Is there one suggestion or advice for people to take away that I think listeners need to know from you?
Speaker 2 00:37:40 I always suggest that people ask the next question and, and sometimes that's of yourself, but you know, but it's, it's often of other people where you go, I, you know, this might be a dumb question, but, or you ask a, you ask a question that's deeper or you call or you call something out. You know, you say, you know, I think you folks are being really careful with each other. I think there's more here. I think there's a lot not being said. And sometimes that's really interesting. Sometimes people get a little mad at you cuz I like to move on, you know, and you know, and here you are challenging and established good team to, to, you know, to get even better. But you know, I learned a lot from a team that I worked with a number of years ago that in the, in the top teaming assessment, on a scale of one to 10, they were all like high eights nines and a couple of tens in terms of things.
Speaker 2 00:38:32 And the leader had told me before, we're really a good team. And so the scores came in and I'm looking at 'em and I'm thinking, as we're, as I'm driving there that morning, what are we gonna talk about? We have a day and a half together and this team has really said, we are really good. And apparently they really are. The reason why they were good is how the leader kicked it off. He said, you know, on a scale of one to 10, we're all like eights, nines and tens. It's pretty good. The question is what's a 12 look like the world is gonna change and we're gonna have to be good enough to really anticipate how and be ready for it. So what's a 12 look like what's even better look like. So for me, I'm asking the, the, the question about even better all the time.
Speaker 1 00:39:17 Yeah. How do we stretch the boundaries?
Speaker 2 00:39:20 What does, what does real optimization looks like? And damn that's fun. Yeah. That's a lot of fun.
Speaker 0 00:39:27 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:39:27 Wonderful. Larry, thank you so much for our chat today. Much appreciated.
Speaker 2 00:39:35 Always a pleasure.
Speaker 1 00:39:36 Thank you.
Speaker 2 00:39:38 Take care of my friend.
