Did we do Big Ange dirty?

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1:40This is Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture. You might recall a couple of years ago, I did a podcast on Ange Postacoglou and how he was enacting a cultural revolution at Spurs. You might remember it because a lot of people frequently remind me about it on LinkedIn and just send me messages. Oh, have you seen you ruin this guy's career? And as a result of that, I've made a joke about it a couple of times. I think, you know, to qualify it, when Ange joined Spurs, it felt really life-affirming to a lot of Spurs fans. I'm not a Spurs fan. I'm not a huge football fan. But it felt really life-affirming because they seem to have got their mojo back and it seemed to be working.

2:27Players were playing with a smile on their face. They were achieving great results. It felt finally like they'd found someone who was going to bring the style of football that they wanted with the right amount of va-va-voom to it. As you know, it didn't end especially well after they won a European Cup this summer. Ange Postacoglu was fired and I posted something on LinkedIn saying I felt deeply apologetic and maybe I should delete that episode. And someone got in touch with me, said Dan Jackson today, got in touch with me. Dan Jackson, he's a former Aussie rules football player who now has a coaching role at a different club.

3:11He formerly played at Richmond Football Club and now he's a culture coach and psychologist at Adelaide Football Club. And he got in touch with me saying, well, maybe there's something about the Premier League that isn't conducive to producing psychological safety. And I've spent a couple of days really reflecting on that because I think he's exactly right. The sense of fearfulness over the amount of money involved about the the demands and the spotlight that the press and fans put on managers and teams mean that psychological safety is probably being squeezed out. And it just raised a really interesting question for me about whether there was a trade-off between having this high performance environment and the amount of money involved.

4:02So today I'm going to have a conversation with Dan. Dan Jackson, like I say, works at Adelaide Football Club, Aussie Rawls team. And it's like a phone conversation, really. It's like a provocation where we talk about the challenges that maybe Ange faced. We talk about him as a practitioner in a football club, how they seek to build a psychologically safe environment, how they build trusting environment between players. And what I loved about it is that it's very rare that you get someone who's a practitioner inside a sports team who's willing to open the curtain and show you what they actually do.

4:40So it's a really enjoyable conversation. This is Dan Jackson. The full links to Dan in the show notes. This is Dan and me discussing whether we did Ange Pasta Coglu dirty.

4:56Dan to kick off I wonder if you could introduce who you are and what you do yeah Bruce Dan Jackson I work I look after leadership and culture and a professional Australian rules football team Aussie rules some people will be aware of it others not and my background I played in this competition in a different team for 11 years then went over and did a masters of performance psychology at the University of Edinburgh worked in and around different industries in the UK and then have landed back in the game that I know best here in Adelaide. But yeah, my role's predominantly around doing what we're going to talk about today and that's how to optimize culture in a professional sporting environment.

5:30And you got in touch with me after, not after the Andrew Postacoglu episode, but after I sort of kind of pulled back on it, I said, you know, maybe I shouldn't have done that episode or people had criticized me. And you got in touch with me, you said, I'd be interested in looking at how the world's premier football competition has so little respect for building genuine high performance culture rather than challenging him. And I thought, oh, that's a good critique. Explain a bit more of that pushback, really. So what do you think was going on and why was I getting it wrong potentially by turning my guns on Pasta Coglu?

6:07I sound like a very passionate sports fan. That wasn't necessarily come to the defense of Ange per se, although we can explore sort of what happened with his relationship with Tottenham. I was probably jumping more to your defence in the sense that my line of work is all around how do you build high-performance cultures that help you win. And my personal view and experience is that you need a certain period of time, and it's generally not a short period of time, if you want to actually create and sustain effective culture change. And it just seems, I mean, even statistically, the high turnover rate across the industry is for the English Premier League.

6:43It's nearly unparalleled. Now, football, we'll say football, we'd call it soccer here. Very similar across a lot of the other professional leagues, but comparative to, say, Australian domestic sporting competitions, even the North American ones, there's greater stability and time given to managers or head coaches to be able to build a culture that they believe is going to help them align their strategy and achieve long-term success. I was probably jumping more on in. We know that Ange Postacoglu is a culture coach, and that's what I'd really enjoyed from the episode that you'd done at the start of his tenure and the insights from the journalists you'd chatted through about.

7:14So then when I guess you retracted it, I kind of saw it as, well, that's obviously culture is not that important, which of course you believe that it is. And mine was maybe a little bit of a broad stroke to say that no one in the Premier League cares about it. But it was a statement to say, maybe there's an opportunity lost there for Tottenham because they've done the coach turnover thing multiple times, hasn't got them anywhere necessarily. Maybe this was one they needed to stick out a little bit longer to see if he would have had the opportunity to actually genuinely evolve that culture to something that gives long-term success, not just looking for the shortcut.

7:43Yeah, and I suspect at the heart of that is the underlying thing, which is for a lot of people, creating culture appears to be more of an art than a science. And so I guess that you might, to the defense of the Spurs organization, you might say, well, there's no agreed scientific methodology to creating culture. So as a result of that, we don't know if another 12 months was going to help him achieve something or continuity was going to help him achieve something because it's so nebulous. You were kind enough to send your dissertation over. And there's one quotation in there from someone, someone who's got a business background.

8:23And they talk about, well, maybe change isn't the thing that we should be seeking to do every time things aren't going well in culture. We should be seeking some continuity. And you seem to be sort of saying that that continuity is probably quite important when it comes to building something that's got psychological safety at the heart of it. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, and this is the reflection from a key leader at an AFL club who had been through this. And I'll talk about potentially how our industry is different and it's all made for equality so that there are parameters in place that stop teams being able to dominate year in, year out, which is very different to the landscape that, say, Tottenham operate within.

9:04But that idea, and this is something that happens a lot in sport, that we go, something's broken. And it's pretty obvious because they're losing. Teams lose. And I'm sure clubs all have their own way. But even AFL teams are being guilty of it. They go, okay, well, something's broken. It's probably culture. Because like you say, it's more of an art. So it's hard to really say. We've got the tangible data and the win-loss record, the rankings on the table. That's proof that we're not performing well. And often it's sack coach, a manager, whatever it might be, different positions of leadership across these clubs.

9:32and then the next group come in and off they go and we just assume that it's fixed. But I've always looked at it like it's kind of like putting a brand spanking new rug over a cracked foundation and assuming that you've fixed the problem with your ground. Unless you've done the audit to go, okay, well, what within our environment's not working? And that's what I went and researched at this club that had been very successful. In fact, my old club and I'd been there 11 years of lived experience in a culture that it wasn't high performing, it wasn't good, suboptimal, I could tell you stories that would resonate with people from, this was 10 years ago, 10 to 15, about what old school toxic culture looked like in professional sport.

10:03Like you're late, you go in the boxing ring. Other people are late, you're down jumping in the ocean at 4.30 in the morning because that'll teach you to be more committed to time schedules and stuff like that. Now, the game has evolved a long way and people from the corporate world often can't relate to that because you're probably not sending your HR team or your graduates to do anything like that. But this person had made a comment that just because you change the leadership, you're not necessarily going to fix up the problem. So a proper methodology would be, okay, well, let's do a cultural assessment.

10:32And that's what it sounded like. The conversation you had with the author, or sorry, the journalist from Tottenham, was that they basically got that on face value, that there was low enjoyment in the way that the players were engaging. There was not much trust there. There was just a whole lot of issues which would have said culture wasn't where it needed to be. And that Ange had come in and, yes, some of his stuff's quite unique. He's an out there kind of guy, but high connection, bring the joy, bring the energy. And it was working early. But then after two years, we say, no, definitely not working.

10:57gone. Now, maybe the pundits will say that his football strategy wasn't, that's fine. I'm not trying to claim that that was the wrong decision because it might have ultimately been the right one. But if it's about trying to embed a long-term sustainable high-performance culture, which gives you the best chance for your strategy, your X's and O's to play, it's very hard to do that in 18 months, I reckon. And so just recycling the leader, you're probably going to find those same things are at low connection within the group, low enjoyment, all that kind of stuff are still going to be there. Give me a bit of the perspective of how you might bring that rigor to it.

11:27So you've got the benefit here of being a former sportsman yourself and now studying this stuff. So if you were going to come along and do the sort of audit that you're describing here, what does that audit look like? You've mentioned a couple of things, but are there certain things that you look out for or are there certain things that you try and get your head around? Yeah, I mean, I've not led one, but I'm the beneficiary of one that was happening at the club that I'm working at now, which probably fits in regards to the narrative of what I'm sort of saying around in Australian sport or at least in the AFL, there is time given to coaches to be able to do it.

12:01Now, we don't have a relegation system in most of our sports leagues. So there's different pressures. So it's not to say that the Premier League need to go and adopt this. So we, my team, were struggling prior to me getting here. They did a cultural review. So they get external parties to come in, sit down with key stakeholders being players, coaches, administrators, take a lot of the sort of standard data that you'd get through engagement surveys and whatnot and just put together a report that says, well, what's happening in regards to the people dynamics of this organization? And it was a similar process that had happened at the team that I'd done the research on.

12:34And then the themes come out. And if the themes are people related, then you need to make people kind of investment. So one of the recommendations from the report that had assessed the Adelaide Crows was that they needed someone full-time to look after leadership and culture because traditionally in our game, it had been done by consultants that would be in a day or two a week and very hard to have your finger on the pulse of culture if you're flying in and flying out. And I'm not sure, I mean, you chat to a lot of different people and have worked in different industries, whether it is so unique, but I mean, generally we look at the custodians of culture or the architects of culture being a CEO, a head coach or a head manager, and maybe some key influential people in the org chart, they need to shape it up and then they just send it, peripherated down.

13:16In our world, there are jobs like mine where it's the job, I'm not there to move X's and O's and magnets around or to coach how to kick a ball, how to mark my roles. How do you help those key leaders build the environment that's going to help optimize all the people, both on and off the field, and then build the leadership capacity to bring it up. So the audit process is very subjective. Most of the time, it's just interviews with a bit of data because like you said at the start, it's an art form, not a science, and putting together a case that says, okay, well, this environment is people are just coming, getting the job done, and they're leaving.

13:49They're not enjoying what they're doing. There's high fear of making mistakes. There's low trust. So therefore, people aren't seeking help. All the stuff that comes out in the psych safety research. Okay, what are we going to do about it? And I would wonder if you're in charge of an organization, or maybe if you got given a role like this in a big organization where you didn't have to worry about strategy because you're not actually given any leadership title, your whole role was to help optimize the environment for the day-to-day worker. What What would be the things that you might look at implementing to help support the strategy?

14:17Yeah, I was really struck. I mean, I feel like overwhelmed even thinking about, daunted about how I would do that in a high-pressure environment like sport. I read one of the outside people, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say who the person was. One person came and said on this audit of the club that the club currently was high detail and high control. And I guess that must be a reflection of stress and anxiety that they put a lot of rules in place. And this person said they should have more lateral thinking and be more relationship focused. I love that as like an outline. But you can imagine that maybe a chief exec of a club might not necessarily see the upside of that.

15:04And so can you sort of talk me through the realities of a diagnosis like that, you know, how it's received. but then how you would bring about applying that to a club. Because I guess to sort of look at Tottenham, you might go when the fans start getting on the club's back and then the press start getting on the club's back. And what we saw exhibited with Ange was that this guy who had been this sort of warm hug of a personality, he'd been like making jokes, he'd been, you know, like everyone's mate. Suddenly, he'd become this angry, irascible, impatient interviewee. He was frustrated with everything.

15:44And look, it just seemed like he was being pulled down into a vortex where he was never going to be the old version of himself, right? So long, complicated question, but I'd love you to sort of explain when a diagnosis like that comes along, the high detail, the high control, what that means and how it's interpreted. and how you could try and move towards more relationship focus. Yeah, and I remember that. The person you're quoting, actually, we can chat about it, is Pippa Grange. And the reason it's relevant is because she's worked within English football before and been a guest on your podcast.

16:16That's right, that's right. Definitely worth bringing her back to chat further because she's, I would say, she's probably one of the foremost gurus in this balance of all culture, performance psychology, and what it is to work in professional sport because it is a unique beast. And England in particular, living in London, I know what that media and the fan base are like, but it's exactly the same as Australians. After my few years in the UK, I realized that we are just the children of you guys. And so our culture is very similar. And so when teams are winning here, everybody is put on a pedestal.

16:49And so the Adelaide Crows is from a two-team town. It's not a huge city, but they are passionate about football. So we live that experience week to week. And when you're on top cloud nine, there are their own traps within that. but it's definitely a lot better than being at the bottom which you've just referenced around what it's like when you're losing a lot and that is probably the biggest learning I took from my research at my previous club. It takes real steady leadership to be able to ignore that external noise because the average football pundit is not there to try and help you make sustainable change to your culture.

17:20They're there to create noise around their own title which is to be a pundit. But that noise then reverberates around through fans who then sit in the ground and so when you lose, There's the heckling and then your board who are in charge of making these decisions. They're only human. So there's this constant pressure on key decision makers to make change because we think that's what's going to fix the problem. And because we can always relate to stories in sport, oh, well, so-and-so changed their coach and look at them go. But if we, I don't know, finding someone from the Oklahoma City Thunder, it might be really interesting like the Sam Presti type to talk about his experience in charge of an organization in a small town that are passionate about sport.

17:58and it's a six or seven year journey where they stated we're going to focus on, there's a great quote out there around them talking about drafting people, not players, and that they really wanted to build an environment where they get the best out of the person on and off the court because that was what they, now there's lots of teams that would have said that that's been their strategy, but they've stuck to it for six or seven years and ultimately won a championship. How do you do it though? It goes back to that art versus science thing. So in our experience here, we had issues in the start of our tenure.

18:25We got a new senior coach, a new general manager of football when I started at the start of 2020. And some of the issues were that because of the pressure around the external environment, it had made the job a lot less enjoyable. People were sort of coming in and then leaving. There was a lower trust, which often happens with leadership change. When people in our environment, they're high performers, but when they're in an environment that's not performing, often the selflessness falls away and it goes to how do I make sure I get the next contract, which is no knock on an individual. It's a survival mechanism.

18:55So for us, the process was about, well, how do we build in a stronger sense of connection and belonging? Like they are buzzwords these days, but inherently, and this is really interesting listening to your podcast, and I forget the author's name, but the mattering guy, Zach. Zach McEuliffe. Yes. Fantastic. Really aligned with what we do. Like how do we make these young athletes who have often been the best players in their teams come into an environment like this and make them feel like they matter, but more importantly, help them understand that if they can make, we have a squad of 44, only 22 play.

19:23if they can help everyone else feel like they're important as well, then come game day, you're going to have a pretty strong united, i.e. connected group. So that was one push of ours early. Now, we weren't using the language around mattering. We had everyone read a children's book about have you filled a bucket today, but effectively, it's just mattering in children's book form. And it's like a rite of passage that every person that comes into our club gets a copy of this book. And we talk about filling buckets. And if you wanted to look at the psychology behind it. It's really foundational stuff.

19:50But if you talk to 18 to 26-year-old or 32-year-old professional footballers around the neuroscience of connection and empathy, you're probably going to get a glazed look. You ask them to read a children's book and then buy into the concept of filling buckets and not tipping it, you can start to build a pretty strong culture around, we want to use today's language, around mattering or belonging. Now, that's just one small example. You've still got the how do you manage stress under pressure on fear? Well, that's another avenue where you've got to bring in the right experts, create an environment where people might have to have the humility or vulnerability to think about learning mindfulness as a school, as a tool to help them perform better under pressure, which again, in male-dominated sporting environments, nowadays, it's a lot more, people are a lot more likely to do things like that.

20:32When I was playing, no one was talking about doing mindfulness. That would have been seen as a bit of woo-woo kind of stuff. So, what I'm trying to say is, yes, when it comes to the people part, there's no one way to do it, but there's no point just listening to what other clubs do, other teams do, other organizations do and saying, we'll do that. What's the the heart of your cultural problem. And that's the biggest issue with culture. We have to take the time to do that audit and say, well, our strategy, we think it's pretty good. So let's back that in, get real clarity. Everyone knows their role and what they need to do.

20:58And that's in any industry. Ours, it's just, are you standing in the right place and kicking in the right direction? But then all the stuff that fits in and around that is where we can make it a bit of guesswork. And I guess it's removing that guesswork and making it more applied and being able to test it and see if it works. Because maybe you might build a really highly connected group and you're still not winning. Okay, well, maybe we've got it wrong and maybe it is actually the strategy or the game plan. But I'm just not sure people take, like you said earlier, the rigor to understand what kind of culture they've currently got and where are they trying to take it to.

21:26I guess what you've said along the way there is sometimes it's about silencing the noise of the people outside a group. And that might be agents, it might be fans, it might be the press, it might be sort of, and then being inwardly focused and trying to get a more meaningful connection and a more meaningful synchrony of perspective that children's book helps achieve that sort of synchrony if culture is organizational programming how can we all get to agree with each other what our philosophy is here you talked a little bit in your dissertation and it was it was so powerful that i'd love to go through it about how you try and get people to feel a connection how you are connection first, relationship first.

22:06And one person said in passing that after going through one of these exercises, they realized how superficial their connection with each other had been in the past. And they realized that they now had a sort of greater extent of understanding. And that seemed, if you could take us through sort of some of the thinking behind that, it seemed relevant for people who might do a more mundane office job, but maybe don't have the same connection with colleagues that they used to have. Maybe they don't go to the pub anymore with them or they don't sort of know them socially anymore. So I wonder if you could just talk about how being relationship first or relationship focused has an impact and what methods people have done to reach it.

22:49Yeah, and this is a really fascinating one. And when you take it from a broader conversation than just about sport, because sport is so dependent on interaction. Like you're in the same room. We can't have work from home days in this environment because you can't kick the ball from screen to screen. I guess you could do review meetings. And generally, everyone that works here or competes here is passionate about what they're doing. You're not coming and just checking the box for the day. There's not many spreadsheets to fill out. There's certainly a lot of hard things about working in professional sport, but one of the pleasures is the human relationships of all.

23:19So we don't even need to wrestle with why connection is important per se. If you really want to understand, though, where the value comes back from. And I think this is where it does relate to all the conversations you have with people at the moment around sort of work from home and where that fits in is genuine connections. It's not just about, oh, well, I like you and that's great. For me, it's about, first of all, shared understanding. Like if you're going to work with someone, now, if you're just working with spreadsheets all the time and your interaction with other people doesn't involve much more than sending them email, probably not that important.

23:48But if you have to have a robust conversation around where your strategy is going, if you have to give someone feedback around how they presented, if there's not a, we believe there's not a strong level of understanding of what makes that person tick, what are some of their fears, what's their best approach to receiving and giving feedback. Very hard to optimize that small relationship. And if a whole organization is suboptimal on its little diodes of network relationships, then there's going to be suboptimal performance outcomes somewhere along the way. How do you do that though when in today, if you're outside of sport and people want to work from home and they don't want to go for beers and there's generations, they're not necessarily seeming like they need that same level of connection.

24:31It's certainly not through their work. That's one that I'm still wrestling with. I'm lucky that I'm in an industry right now that doesn't require me to solve for that problem because people have to be here and they do understand the power of it. But it's been one that as I've listened to a lot of the guest experts that you've had on your podcast, it's made me think, okay, if I was doing this in industry that wasn't so dependent on people being in the same office, would I be able to preach connection and belonging and now mattering as a subset of that being as fundamental? Well, I think so because I believe it's an absolute core principle to high performance because if you're going to get the best out of someone, you need to genuinely understand them.

25:02But I haven't actually got an answer for how you would go and do that. There was one part in what you talked about where as part of a group introduction, players or I guess all team members, whether playing team or the support team, had to stand up and do something which was hero, hardship, and highlight of their lives. that just, I guess that just do a certain amount of self-revealing to each other. And that's where someone said, I realized that the conversations I've had till now have been so superficial. And I was just really struck. I did something with the Moth storytelling group. And they said, this was about sort of teaching people how to tell stories.

25:43And they said, I was interested, are we teaching people how to tell stories because there'll be better presenters or there'll be better in meetings and they went oh no no not at all it's just when people feel like they've listened to you know the wonderful moment that changed someone's life when they were 13 when they've listened to that from a colleague the colleague suddenly becomes this sort of three-dimensional real individual in their heads and your the thing you talk about here the hero hardship highlight just seemed to be a very simple tool that made maybe this new person who just transferred into the team, it made them seem connectable, relatable, real.

26:26And just a very simple device. But for that to elicit the response from someone, from a leader there to say, I feel that all the connections I've had till now have been trivial, superficial, meaningless, actually demonstrates that a degree of mutual exchange, a degree of mutual self-revealing, I mean, it seems so straightforward, but it can be transformational in terms of building that connection if you are going to be relationship first. And yeah, I'm probably repeating the same thing. If you're in a performance industry, you're really dependent on having people execute their role at the highest level, which is what at least sport is about.

27:03But I think even in small startups, everyone is so invested early and we're intimately connected that it's just not such an issue to have to go through these processes because we spend so much time together and we're driven to move forward. But as things start to grow, if you're just assuming that those connections are staying at that nice, deep, shared understanding level, that's when often that's the reflection that you've quoted from there. The assumption often ends up leading you astray because you find out eventually, like, oh, Farhat, do I really know this person? So that hero hardship highlight piece has been well-documented over here because the team that used it, the Richmond Tigers, went on to win three premierships, championships in four years.

27:39And so everyone wants to, of course, look at what are they doing really well. And there's a great story that comes out of it. We've had something similar here in the early part of our journey. We do footy family friends and bring a photo of the mosaic of who you are, how has footy influenced the person you've become? Because that's obviously the core part of our people's lives, whether you're a coach or administrator or a player. Family, like how's your family shaped your values and your traits and characteristics and friends who supported you along the way. So as an example, if you ask me about family, I would show a photo of my grandma who's known with us and say that, well, she had a huge influence on who I am because as a child, I just remember so fondly her taking me to the museum and the botanical gardens and reading me stories and just imparting this love of learning.

28:20And that's the thing that I love to do, just endlessly curious. So if you're sitting out there, if I'm direct report or someone below on equal level, and that's all you take from it, like, oh, Dan Jackson talked about his grandma and his love of learning. Well, then if you need to come to me and you want to work together to come up with a new strategy for a project or execute on something, you're probably going to lean in on that opportunity for us to develop a new understanding or to leverage my curiosity as opposed to someone else who doesn't really care about that. They're all about results driven because the person that had the biggest influence on them was their father and he's just all that.

28:53You've got to work really, really hard. You're going to have a different conversation when you need to really lean on them. And that's where that high performance part comes in. And we're all about dealing with that external pressure, internal pressure, which not everyone deals with that in their job. So maybe hearing about someone's, you know, tightest family member or hero or highlight or some of that may not have the impact. But in our game, it certainly does because at that root level of understanding how to get the best out of someone. And I think it underpins the mattering piece as well, which is just, it's more language around psych safety and in connection, it ties in.

29:21Owen Eastwood stuff, Pippa Grange, Brene Brown, they're all saying the same thing. how do you make someone feel that the job that they're doing, which may actually not be that important, is really important because they're playing a role in a big picture. And as a leader, you need them to execute that role if you're going to be performing at your best. The caveat with that, although the risk is from people listening and go, oh, I could do hero highlight hardship. And you start to get your people to go out there and be vulnerable. There's good research anecdotally and academic as well. Putting people in a vulnerable position when the environment's actually not very supportive, there's low psych safety can be really detrimental.

29:55So that's what I was saying earlier, don't just do the connection piece like that because you think, oh, that sounds great. I need to build more connection in my team. My team will like doing that because unless you're in a place that the team's ready to support, or you've got a pretty reasonable level of site safety, it might work backwards for you. Or your team might go, we don't even work together. Connection's not important here. There might be something else. It might be about clarity, commitment, might be managing anxiety. But you need to know what are the cracks underneath your rug that you're working on if you want to build a genuinely sustainable high performance culture.

30:22I think you're exactly right. Quite often we hear from people that people feel that certain initiatives or certain things that they're asked to do are manipulative, actually. They can see through if the intention isn't honest and good. They just think, you know, they might have a friend that they go and whisper, what's this all about? And they can see through it and they maybe performatively go along with it, but don't believe it. And, you know, I guess that undermines everything that we're doing. The one thing I wanted to, I guess, reflect on is that that is a mechanism to try and build a tighter cohesiveness amongst the people.

31:02But that isn't the culture in itself, is it? You know, you need to have a set of grounding philosophies or principles. And one of the things that came out of the report, the dissertation you wrote, is that maybe the old version of thinking about culture is that if you wanted to enact cultural change, you had to unfreeze the culture and sort of change what was going on. Then you had to realign the culture and then refreeze it. And the one thing I got from what you'd written was that that notion of refreezing culture probably isn't dynamic enough for the way that we live now. So, you know, an example might be that if you're a sports team, you can't just freeze the culture because new people might come along and you need to make them feel like they were a participant in creating this ethos that we've got around us right now.

31:57It can't just be like you slot in and nothing changes. The culture needs to evolve over time. and that cultural evolution, that substance of what the culture is and what it looks like, seems to be a really important part of trying to make sure a culture feels inclusive, dynamic. I'd love you to talk about that, your experience of that with sports teams. Yeah, I think this one plays across all industries. That model you're referring to is one from Edgar Shen, who I know Frances Frey based a lot of her work on and again, someone I have a lot of respect for both in the literature, I've read her books and listen to on podcasts like yours, but he's not the only expert in the space, but his model is really profound in this space because it's quite simple.

32:37If you want to change culture, it's first of all, we've just chatted about this, you need to unfreeze what's there, what's broken. And that part is all about helping people in your organization or team understand that it's broken because we don't always necessarily see that. In the sports world, you do because we're losing, but just because you're losing it, the culture might actually be quite strong. We might just lack talent. I know Owen Eastwood has shared anecdotally that when he's talked to all the different leaders and he's talked to a lot across not just sport but a lot of different sporting teams and organizations i think he said something about like you know when leaders that he works with to say that 40 of success comes down to talent you just can't you just can't have success in our environment without having talent but then he said that next chunk in this cool anecdotal 25 percent environment i'm pretty sure he quoted some research out of the english institute of sport was a meta study was something about like they claim that 70 of behavior is influenced by environment.

33:28So, you need to work out, okay, well, what in our environment's working and not working and help other people understand that too because you come in as the leader and say, we're going to change. Everyone thinks it's okay. It doesn't help with the next part, which is cognitively restructure. And I think it's a very clever term because if culture is just a representation of how all the people in a, so let's just say, organization or team are thinking, and I would say even at its simplest, it's how they're behaving, but that's underpinned by how they're thinking. You have to cognitively rewire everybody's brain to be able to get culture change.

33:56Because if you can go and put values on a wall and you do some connection activities and you put the ping pong table and have free coffees on Fridays or something, you might say we value connection and fun and joy. But unless people actually, like you're saying, they're not rolling their eyes and saying, here's another stupid initiative, you've not actually completed the first step with unfreezing. But where I challenge it is, yeah, the third part of Edgar Shen's model was about refreeze. So once you change the shared brain and everyone has these underlying assumptions and the behavior is really consistent, no one's rolling their eyes when we do these things.

34:24We've got clarity about what we stand for. It's not about refreezing because then effectively, as he's articulated, as people come and go, the people's brain, the collective brain is different because people are different. And if you just try and suck people in to be like what it was six months ago, six years ago, you're just not capturing the genuine, first of all, culture of who's in the group, but also the opportunity to evolve. So that's where I think we've all realized that culture is about constantly evolving. So that brings you back to the first step too, because if you're always assessing like self-auditing within your team and organization, what not from our strategy, what from our environment's working for us and what's not, it can actually help you bring you back to that unfreeze phase and go, well, we're really nailing this part.

35:04We've got great connection and belonging. Probably what we need to do now is challenge each other more because we've got this really strong unity. We've actually got to leverage that to have harder conversations because that's going to help our performance in the boardroom on the sporting field. How do we do that? Well, we build it into our system of cognitive rewiring and then we assess it over time. So you get this cycle of just constantly reviewing your culture as opposed to saying, here are our values, here's the behaviors that everyone adheres to. They've been here for five years. That's why we've got such a strong culture.

35:29Because in my experience these days, it just doesn't work anymore. You get left in the past. So we started off sort of reflecting on Anj Postacoglu. Did we do him dirty? Yeah, as a proud Australian, the easy answer is yes. But as a rational human being, I understand there are so many variables around it. But probably I think where the opportunity lies, maybe it's worth finding some people at other clubs, English Premier League clubs, that can't compete on the talent war part. So, I mean, I'm a Fulham fan, having lived in South West London when I was there. Yeah, what do Fulham do to try and optimize the talent that they have if they can't spend as much?

36:09Because every now and again, you'll get a Leicester City that come out and win and is it a Clodio around the area? Every time they get a clean sheet, they go make pizza. Was that the secret to it? Maybe that was a little insight to what it was. They just had this joy and fun, and that's what they did. But Tottenham, they spend lots of money. Man, you were spending lots of money, and they're not having much success at the moment. So probably what would I do? I would have given Ange another off-season period to try and change the culture with the easiest way, which is get rid of the players he knows aren't working for the group and bring in some that he knows, because that's the easiest way.

36:39It's just a cheap way to do it. And give him another six months or less than that, the off-season over there, to start to really embed. and then test. And if 10 rounds in, they're still going to change it. Okay, no worries. But that's what I would have done because again, in Australia, a coach will get four or five years before you put that kind of pressure on. They won't get cut after 18 months or two, but it's a different game. And so maybe I'm probably being a little bit idealistic and loyal to a fellow Australian, but we'll never know because he got the sack and he'll go somewhere else and maybe win another trophy in his second year.

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39:07And with so many coverage options, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs so you can continue to focus on what's most important to you. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Yeah, yeah, that's it. It's just a demonstration quite often, isn't it, that there's so much money involved that someone who just wants to optimize for money believes that making a quick decision is the right thing to do. And it's just interesting that in the business world, which quite often there's more money involved, we don't reach for the same conclusions. We don't change leadership teams as quickly in the business world as we do in sport.

39:51So it is an interesting contrast, possibly because results are so much more immediate in sport. and public and it's very easy to get that noise unless you have a BHP in Australia that keeps returning bad poor profits quarterly then you're going to get shareholder noise and it's going to but it's not front page and back page every day so that pressure isn't there they get time to go and review and audit and like I think going back to that question before how do you work it out engagement survey data I don't think that's that's part of the the picture we have real clarity I mean part of the things we assess going into our game review meeting every week the core part is the tactics, the X's and O's, but a core part of it is what are the behavioral expectations?

40:32What are the behavioral norms that the players have agreed that are more intangible on the field that we know make a difference to performance? And that exists off the field as well. There's real clarity that in an AFL game, in the moments where the ball's not in play, there's a responsibility that you're living up to the cultural elements of expectation. It might be picking a teammate up off the ground. It might be celebrating a little thing. It might just be connecting through eyes and hands. We track and measure. We have real clarity, first of all, around what those things are. And so, let's say you're a project manager on a construction site and you've got really strict policies around safety.

41:07You've got project management tools, which makes sure everyone knows exactly what they've got to do and how they've got to do it. But are you having a conversation with 30 different people, maybe more, maybe less, around those in-between moments, which I think you'd agree is the culture part. Like, how do we, what's above the line on how we talk to one another. It could be as minute as like swearing on site because we're next to a school. This project's next to a school and we just don't, we want to be a well-respected part of our big vision as our construction company. We're all about being respectful members of our community.

41:36And so that project manager does a bit of an audit about where this group's at, sets real clarity for the length of this project. These are some of the things we're going to agree to, but they may be different to the next project, which is out the country and you can go to the pub afterwards. But being able to assess what do we need out of this group right now for this period of time to achieve this goal? And then getting real clarity. That's where I think the easy wins are, sitting down with your team as a manager and going, look, hopefully you've got role clarity on what I need you to do, but do you have clarity on who I need you to be?

42:02And that's not trying to shape you into someone you're not. It's asking you what you need in regards to this collective environment to be your best at work every day. So if someone says, well, I really love actually connecting at least once a week in a non-work way and I love having a beer, well, you might go back to beers on a Friday. But if others say, I hate that. It makes me really feel awkward, but I actually really would like to get to know people at a more intimate level. Then maybe one of these storytelling components would work, but culture change doesn't have to be a big review piece.

42:29It might actually just be carving out the time and everyone's really busy just to seek clarity around what do we need from our environment and are we there right now? And wherever that gap is, just building in behavioral expectations that we can all buy into and then goes that unfreeze, put it in whatever process is in place, and then just go back and assess and it takes us round and round. I think it's more wins can end up going a long way. To wrap up, Dan, you've mentioned your obsession with lifelong learning and sort of curiosity. I wonder if you could just point us in the direction of something that you enjoy reading, listening to, that gives you some direction on culture.

43:05Is there anything from the world of sport or something that you find actually helps you understand these things? Well, Bruce, it's awkward because a lot of the stuff that I go to, now it's not sports related, as your podcast. I think you've got a great understanding on the consistency. And this is the whole idea of, oh, yeah, people, sport and business, they are very different in so many ways. But if businesses are people-focused, then they're going to be very close to sport. And that's where I think you've got a great strong leaning towards. I mean, Owen Eastwood's book, Belonging, was really great to help me get better able to articulate probably what I've had the lived experience around, like having an environment where, say, to take Brené Brown's idea of not trying to fit in.

43:45It's very easy in a sporting environment to have people come in and go, well, what's the archetypical English Premier League footballer look like? He's a bit of a lad and he's going to act that way, as opposed to be your authentic self, understanding that there's parts of this environment you're going to have to put a bit of a mask on and fit in, but ultimately, do you belong? So, that one, I think, is foundational if you're looking at that connection piece. This book about mattering, I'm only halfway through, but I agree with you. I again, it underpins this really important part from a sporting sense.

44:14To be honest, I try and do a lot of my thinking outside of sport because sport just tends to focus on sport a lot. So I'd probably fill your bucket certainly with the fill bucket book. Keep exploring this stuff because it ties across the professional sport. And I would encourage if there's someone, if I can think of someone that I know over in the landscape of Premier League football, it'd be really fascinating to find out what are the constraints that stop people? We know that talent is going to be the number one way to win because you've got the infinite budget. It's not infinite, but they've got a lot of money to spend.

44:43How are other teams trying to create competitive advantage if they can't spend? I'm sure there's some really interesting people that you could tap into. Love it. Thank you so much, Dan. You got in touch sort of saying that there was more to the conversation and I think you've definitely provided some sort of provocation and stimulation there. So I'm so grateful you got in touch. Thank you. I appreciate the chance to chat, Bruce. Thank you to Dan. Like I say, you can see his LinkedIn and connection to him in the show notes. I'm not sure his dissertation is publicly available. We did mention that a couple of times, but he gave me access to what he'd studied and what he'd worked on.

45:20And I loved reflecting on the realities of trying to make this real. Brilliant. Thank you so much to Dan for getting in touch. If anyone does work in another sports environment or another sports team, or just another environment where they're willing to draw back the curtain and show the realities of how they bring this stuff to life. I will very happily platform them. So thank you to Dan. As ever, the best way to stay in touch with the podcast is by subscribing to the newsletter and you get a link to that in the show notes. I've been Bruce Daisley. See you next time.

45:58Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle, host of the Nutrition Diva podcast. Summer is here and with it, the hot and sticky weather. A morning working in the garden or maybe on the golf course can leave you more depleted than you realize. And plain water isn't always the most efficient way to restore the balance. That's where Liquid IV comes in. Its science-backed formula is clinically proven to hydrate faster than water alone. Whether you're exercising, playing outside, or simply surviving a summer heat wave, it's an easy way to stay hydrated. Shop now at liquidiv.com. Liquid IV, hydration that goes wherever life takes you.

46:33Checking off the boxes on your to-do list is a great feeling. That's why a State Farm agent is there to help you choose a coverage option that's right for you. Whether you're getting a new house, car, boat, or RV, helping protect it is important. And State Farm is there to help you choose the coverage you need. Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app. And with so many coverage options, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs so you can continue to focus on what's most important to you. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

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