Employee Engagement Expert: How You Can Build a High Performing Team For Your Business w/ David Burkus

0:00I wish I had a better name than the team culture triangle. I once jokingly on stage referred to it as the Triforce of team culture, which is a Zelda reference that like three people in the room understood. Building the best team ever. We're going to look at all the things that you and I need to understand so that we can look at the way we do business and look at the way we build teams and do it with a finesse that gets us the highest performing team. Some things you just cannot speed up. And the more time you give yourself and the more forgiving about that, I think the better you soar, right? And it's no surprise that the largest airplanes with the longest range also require the longest runways to get up to speed.

0:36When David says fire all the managers, what do you mean? Well, there's a thing called intelligent failure. Let's get to it, David Berkus. So, David, your definition of success, how do you define it? Yeah, man, I'm so corny when it comes to this one. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. My first job out of school, before I went back to grad school and went down the whole professor route, I was insane. And when you work in sales, inevitably someone is going to hand you a Tom Hopkins book, right? And it's going to, yeah, you know what I mean, right? And it's going to be a bunch of gobbledygook about closes that make other people feel awkward.

1:14And I have pushed most of that out of my brain. But there's one thing I could never forget, which is that Tom's definition of success was the continuous journey toward the achievement of predetermined worthwhile goals. And I've never found a better definition than that. so I just stole it, right? Continuous journey, meaning you're not going to get there because every time you hit a goal, you're going to set a new one. Predetermined, meaning it doesn't happen by accident. Worthwhile, meaning you actually want to do it. And then goals, meaning you're not just shooting in the dark. You've got something you're actually sort of going for.

1:46And I've just, I've never found a better definition of that. And so that's when I hear that success word, that's the first thing that comes into my head. I was lucky enough to share the stage with Tommy in Australia back in, well, gotta be 20 something years ago now in Sydney, Australia. So, you know, when you think of success, where in life did success become your choice? Like, where did you say, I'm going to be a successful person? Yeah. I mean, for me, probably high school era, right? So my story is a really interesting one. When I was in high school, that was when I was sort of like, hey, I want to be a writer, right?

2:24And I went to undergrad to study English and creative writing, fiction, right? Novelist, that sort of thing. And then while I was there, took some electives in psychology and that sort of thing, just became fascinated with that, right? And the people that were using good creative writing skills to talk about this, right? So this is Dan Pink, Free Agent Nation. This is early Gladwell stuff, like the articles, the books hadn't been out yet, et cetera. And so that was when I found the path, But like, even in high school, it was like, you can't not say like, I want my name on books, right? And not think, okay, I need to be a success at this.

3:01I can't just shoot in the dark, right? That's when the goal. Now, I had no idea when I'm 17 years old that it would be psychology, leadership, teamwork, books, etc. Right? But that was probably kind of the start, right? That was the first sort of big goal. You can't say you want to be a writer without then setting a goal of having a published book. So that was the first real goal, right? Yeah. And that's amazing that you get to start in high school really setting goals for your life. I mean, that's, I think a lot of people don't get to really setting goals for most of their life. And when they hit a podcast like this or a book like Tommy's or something, it switches them.

3:37What do you think switched for you when you started setting goals then? Um, this sounds terrible. I think it was when you get old enough to realize where people are without them. Right. So so think about this going going down the path. I've decided I wanted to be a writer. I'm in I'm in public school in Massachusetts. Who is teaching me? Inevitably, people who didn't actually hit their goals. Right. If they did hit their goals of being successful writers, et cetera, they wouldn't be in a public school room teaching. No offense. Like teaching is a noble profession. I was an academic. I was an educator for 10 years at university level.

4:13But my point is like you start to realize, oh, shoot, like even these people didn't necessarily help me. Maybe they had the goal and didn't sort of pursue it, right? But I think as soon as you get old enough, the other thing that happened to me was I was in high school, my senior year, actually my whole high school life, I worked at a supermarket. There's a chain in New England called Market Basket. Any of your listeners know it. You know it was a great place to work. But you end up meeting a lot of people who are three or four years down the road from you. So they're in their early 20s and you're 17.

4:44and they're boasting about their$45 ,000 a year job because that's like mind blowing money to a 21 year old. And then you're kind of like doing the math and you're like, no, it's not. So that, I mean, inevitably like meeting people, being old enough to realize that not everyone gets everything they want in life and interacting with people who didn't is what I think really woke me up. So what's the David Berkus formula for success then? What are the ingredients that make someone successful? Yeah. So I think first, if you go with my stolen Tom Hopkins definition, you have to sort of have a predetermined worthwhile goal.

5:26I'm also hugely influenced now. This is me switching from sales guy to intellectual. I'm also hugely influenced by Roger Martin, whose two big strategy questions are where do we play and how do we win. Right. So predetermined worthwhile goals is also that that where are we playing? Like what what is what are we accomplishing here? What's our goal, et cetera. But then how do we win is the really interesting question. Right. And this is where I differ from a lot of people. I think it's kind of I'm a big proponent of the idea that different is better than best. Right. And so when you're looking at those individual goals, just saying I'm going to be in the best in the world, that's a really tough strategy.

6:03There only gets to be one of those, right? I'm certainly not the best writer in the world. I'm not the best speaker in the world. I'm not the best stand-up comedian in the world, et cetera. Like my unique value proposition to the market that hires me for a speech or a workshop, et cetera, is this kind of talent stack of like, I call it smart guy you'd want to have a beer with, right? It's this talent stack of like, okay, I can cite the data as good as your sort of Adam grants, et cetera, in the world. And yet I can crack some jokes and pay attention to what's in the room and do, to use a standup comedy term, do crowd work in the middle of a talk and that sort of thing.

6:37And that's a differentiator, right? And so that's my thing. There's sort of those two questions. What is that actual goal? And then what's your strategy to get there? And your strategy can't just be out work because there only gets to be one person who grinds so much that they become the best in the world. But there's a lot of people that get to be differentiated categories of one. And so that's kind of what I go through in that formula, right? You need the goal, but then you need the differentiated plan to get there. Love it. Love it for sure. It's amazing. There's so many methodologies to get to success and success is not one thing for any group of people.

7:10I always ask though, what's your theory on the relationship between failure and success? Yeah, well, I think intelligent failures would be the term that I would use, right? And an intelligent failure is something you can really learn from. And intelligent failure is something, it's something, it's kind of like Kevlar, like wearing a bulletproof vest. You're going to take hits. What you want is to make sure you're not taking any hits that take you out, right? And so when you're doing, when you're going for risk, you need risks for sure. And you need to run experiments. You need to try stuff. I've tried all sorts of stuff in building out my brand and putting out different content.

7:48We had a magazine at one point. We had all of this different stuff. But the goal was never to get so tilted towards anything that that failure would take us out of the game, right? I firmly believe in the line of work that I'm in. I just need as many at-bats as possible. I need to step up and take as many trials as possible. I need to make sure that none of them are a death blow. And when I do that, then some of them are going to fall apart and I can go, why? And I can learn from it, et cetera. You're going to need to extract those lessons. Failure, after all, is feedback, but only if you're still alive.

8:22Yeah, I got feedback. I'm dead. Yeah, exactly. So that's my goal is the intelligent risks that make room for failure, but not failure that's final, failure that's just sort of feedback. And then you learn and you grow and you pivot and you adjust from that. What brought you to leadership, management, team? What brought you to that as like a thing that, as you said, you wanted to be a creative writer, but you end up writing about this amazing other subject. Yeah. So, so I fall in love with the idea of writing about social science and writing stuff that's actually helping people using storytelling to not only tell the case study of a company or a leader or a team, but also to tell the story of how we discovered this psychological principle.

9:03Right. And in the beginning, I kind of had intellectual ADHD, right? There was a book on, on creativity and innovation. There was a book on networks and network science. There was a sort of future of work book called Under New Management that was all sorts of different trends. And it took kind of getting all three books out. This is that, who is it? I think the Kierkegaard quote about life only being able to be understood backwards, right? It took having three out in the marketplace that are just scattered out there to realize that like, wait a minute, the through line through these is teams, right?

9:35So the most highlighted passage in the first book on creativity is the phrase creativity is a team sport. And that's the thing everybody wants to talk about is how do you not boost your own individual creativity, but how do you get teams to work together? The Under New Management book is a bunch of different future work policies, but they also represent that shift from doing solo work to doing teamwork. And the networking book is really just about how you partner with and collaborate with other people in the network of your space. So that's where I had this sort of realization that the through line is just sort of teams.

10:06And that's when I went deep on it, right? Now, it just so happened because of where we were in the world that that next book was a book about teams remotely. How do you work with a team when they're not with a team? Because that's every team was working remotely. But that became the through line. And so that's become my sort of niche where I've dedicated all of my spare time and research, learning more about that field, researching more in that field. And then also that becomes, if that's my input, that's the majority of my output is focused in on that team's idea. Yeah, let's dive into them. Actually, let's start with the fire all the managers, which is something that, you know, people throw it around.

10:40It's like fire all the managers. And for years, people go, I don't want to be a micromanager. I want to be a leader. And I'm like, but how does anything get done in your company? You know, so take me more into that theory too, because I think it's important. Yeah. So this is, again, another theory that came out there that I wrote a lot about without the realization that it's really about teams, right? Fire all the managers doesn't mean nothing gets managed, but it does mean that the work of management, so setting budgets, making decisions, tracking accountability, performance feedback, hiring, et cetera, a lot of those functions are actually better suited for the whole team, right?

11:16And you know what I think is interesting is you write this book called Fire, or you write a chapter called Fire All the Managers inside of this book, and everybody, exactly what you said, thinks it's about frontline and middle managers. And I think I probably was at the time, right? Because it's about this, making sure people aren't micromanagers. Ironically, the place you see it the most is actually in senior leadership teams. I've worked with so many senior leadership teams that are now truly collaborative teams instead of just people reporting to the CEO, right? 20 years ago, that senior leadership team, you probably didn't want to use the word team, right?

11:50Because all they were was different representatives of their own little fiefdoms into operations and finance and tax. Never seen it, never seen it at all. Right. And now they're realizing, wait a minute, this CEO thing, it actually works better if we're a senior leadership team of seven or eight people that are collaboratively making these decisions. Now, my hope is that trickles down. But we've started to see that shift there. And that's what it's really about. You could leave someone in there with the title of manager. Most of these companies, a few go to sort of co-CEOs and that sort of thing.

12:21Most of them still have an appointed CEO. But that CEO realizes that his or her job is a whole lot better if there's a much more collaborative, team-centric approach to this, right? I noticed Alan Mulally's quote on your latest book, and Alan was probably one of the best at, I think my favorite quote of his is, my job is to not say anything. You know, it's like, how does that theory, like, because I love the way he approaches that, and it relates a lot back to your stuff. Yeah, no, I've been fortunate enough to learn a ton from Alan. And Alan is my pick as like greatest living CEO. He's not currently CEO, but he's still alive.

12:58And I was fortunate enough to meet him through Marshall Goldsmith, who's been sort of a mentor of mine. And Alan's whole phrase is working together, right? Even when he was at Boeing before the turnaround of Ford, it was very much about if we don't actually work together on this, make decisions collaboratively, none of us are as smart as all of us, right? Then we're not going to do this around. Now, what I think is really interesting is when that working together model came over to Ford, so he was hired in 2006. So, again, this was actually kind of the beginning of that shift to a collaborative senior leadership team.

13:29In 2006, his sort of grand realization was like, we're not going to turn this company around unless we all start working together instead of everyone just defending their division, their department, and casting blame in other places, right? which requires a lot more, again, seeing everything as we're one team, but creating the psychological safety and the identity, shared identity around the one team so that people can talk honestly about their failures, not to have a call back to five minutes ago, right? And actually extract those lessons. You know, my dad always used to have this joke that failure is a great teacher, but tuition's half off if it's someone else's failure.

14:05And when you really adopt that team mentality and you create that sense of psychological safety, what you can do is you can have the team learning from each other's failures. And so the whole team learns a whole lot faster. Right. And so I think that's been a big approach of Allen's as well. And it's just been, it's been fascinating to watch it work twice. Right. And, uh, and I, you know, Allen's not done yet. Allen's now moved on into sort of teaching that working together model. So there's a lot more examples of his influence on senior leadership teams that we're going to see in the future for sure.

14:34I love it. I think it's great. You mentioned psychological safety in there. Let's go through a theory or let's start to look at the employee engagement and psychological safety and how they work together. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, depending on which survey of engagement you use, right, you're going to see psychological safety represented a bit more or not in the actual items and the questions. But I've yet to see, you know, if we use the standard sort of textbook definition of engagement, then what we're talking about is people who are locked in, who believe their work matters, who believe that the challenges they're facing in any given day match up with the set of skill sets.

15:09Too challenged and they're burnt out, not challenged enough and they're, I don't know what we call that, bored out, right? But there's that sort of perfect, perfect match, right? Which also means that if you think about a perfect match of the challenges of the task for your skills, that actually means you're going to fail a decent amount of the time and you're going to succeed a decent amount of the time, right? Because if you always succeeded, then you'd be bored. And so what you again need in that sense of failure is the ability to kind to talk about it. Psychological safety from a textbook definition is the feeling that the team is safe to take interpersonal risks.

15:40And those come in a variety of different forms, but openly talking about failure is one of them. Feeling like you can bring your whole self to work is one of them. Like you can share ideas about your identity, that you can share your ideas and that your ideas are accepted, right? And so it's very, very hard because it's impossible to do this in reality. It's very hard to find a company that reports high levels of employee engagement without also reporting high levels of psychological safety. It's sort of a precursor, right? You have to feel safe to actually bring your whole self to work to those challenges, to know that these challenges are going to grow you before you actually feel engaged in it.

16:16So there's a massive correlation there because I don't think engagement's possible without it. Yeah. And what do you think it is that's the trend of people have finally started to realize that engagement is necessary today? I mean, is it just knowledge of it or you think there's something bigger than that? Yeah, well, I mean, the irony is we've never been in more agreement that employee engagement is important. And yet it's basically stayed the same levels it has as we've come to this awareness, right? So we're still at like three out of 10 in the United States, where we are two out of 10 globally people report that they're highly engaged in their job, which these are dismal numbers.

16:52I think the reason it's come to an awareness is that we see the disproportionate effects of it, right? Performance follows a power law in just about every scenario, right? It's not a normal curve where most people are in the middle, et cetera. No, it's a power law where the top performers dramatically outperform everybody else. And then when you go in and you look at what are the causes of those, yeah, talent, intelligence, et cetera, are one of them. But there's a lot of talented, intelligent people who get put into a culture that drains them. And so they don't perform for a year or two before they go off and find a new job.

17:22Right. And so I think it's just this realization from a lot of organizations that this is the precursor to setting people up on that power law to really, really thrive. Now, the irony, as I said, is that while we're realizing that we still are, are pretty clueless at understanding how to turn it around. And I have some ideas on why that is. But yeah, we still need to grow in that area. So we know it works. We just don't know how to get it working. Yeah. Look, it's really interesting because, you know, here at Action coach, we run a whole employee engagement program. And you mentioned Marshall.

17:54Marshall and I and Mark Thompson and Richard Maloney did a video book on engagement years ago talking about, you know, how to actually make employee engagement happen. And I think it's just starting, people are starting to actually act on it now. Compassionate leadership's becoming a thing. We're starting to see that stuff. When you look at leadership and its trends over the years, I think one of the great things is almost your books sort of start to follow a bit of a trend, I guess. It's like, you know, you can follow a bit of a history of this whole thing as where it gets. And that brings me to your latest book of the best team ever.

18:33A, why best team ever? B, let's dive into the triangle. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, ironically, you know, I joked I have some ideas on why we're still doing poorly on the engagement side. And I think best team ever to some extent is a example of that. So one of the data points that really stands out to me in this whole thing is that employees who are on positive team cultures, not the whole organization, but employees who are on positive team cultures are 2.3 times more likely to be highly engaged. Right. That's not 23 percent. That's 230 percent more likely. Right. So there's something to this team element.

19:07And if you think about every survey you've ever taken or every survey you've ever administered, you know, an action coach, most people, when they're filling that out, they're not answering for what it's like to work for the entire company because they haven't worked at enough places across the company to know. They're answering it, talking about their immediate manager, the team that they're on or the teams that they're on. Right. So engagement surveys are a reflection of that team culture. And I think this is where the disconnect is. I think we still think about organizational culture as predominant over team culture.

19:36And it's not true. Organizational culture is just the average of each individual team culture. And the thing that really got me to realize that was the pandemic and the shift to remote work, which was the book before Best Team Ever was all about working remotely. What does it take to feel like a team and build a team when you're not actually in the room with them? Because it became even more important. Now you're not even at the office every day running into random people that you might know but don't work with. Now your day-to-day experience is basically just interacting with the people who are on your team, right?

20:05So that makes that sense of team culture even more important. And so that's why we decided to really focus in on that. Okay. If employees who are highly engaged. I don't think a lot of people pick up on. The small team is really where team happens. It's not the hundred people, the thousand, the 10 ,000 people. It's that small team that I think. And I think when we get into the triangle, I want people to sort of recognize that fact because that's highly important. Yeah. Yeah. So we're talking about that immediate team, right? And that is often defined as the people who report to the same manager, but not everywhere.

20:40Like, again, when I was in sales 25 years ago, we had what we called a team, but we're all individuals, right? And the team was actually the people that were in the same city with me working, even though we had different products, working in the same company in that same area to the same clients, right? So yeah, it's that small team. And this is the problem, right? Organizationally, we still think of engagement initiatives and culture initiatives as let's have perks and let's have flexible work environment and let's increase our benefits package and increase incentive compensation. And those are company-wide things.

21:11And yet the problem is team by team. I actually know most of the time when I'm working with organization, I know why their engagement numbers are down the first time I'm talking to them because they send me the breakdown by question. And I'm never interested in the breakdown by question. I'm interested in the breakdown by team, by region, however small we can break it down. That's what I want to see because odds are there's two or three managers or two or three teams or maybe a function, a location, a division that's dragging the numbers down because the culture on that small team is a problem we need to turn around.

21:44Well, hey there, and thanks for listening. I've noticed that 78 % of you are brand new, which means you haven't hit the subscribe button yet. By subscribing, you help us bring on even better guests, better quality content, and serve you better with even more podcasts. So please hit that subscribe button. It only takes a second. It makes a huge difference. If you support us, we're going to support your success and help you achieve big success together. All right. The triangle, take us through it and help me understand each one of those points. Cause I think that using it will help massively for people watching today.

22:17Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wish, I wish I had a better name than the triangle, right? The team culture triangle. The, I once jokingly on stage referred to it as the Triforce of team culture, which is a Zelda reference that like three people in the room understood. So I knew how many gamers there were. But when you look at high performing team cultures, teams that are highly engaged, those positive team cultures we're talking about, you find three commonalities in almost all of them. We've already talked about one, which is psychological safety. The other two are common understanding or sometimes called shared understanding and a sense of pro-social purpose.