Shifting from Busy to Aligned

As always, welcome to Beyond Limitss. I am Kevin Spindt, I'm the Chief Growth Officer here at The Pacific Institute, and this is a little bit of a special Beyond Limitss because this is our one year anniversary. We started doing these officially last year on August 2nd. We are one day short, but if you've been coming to these sessions, this will be our 13th one that we've done since this time last year. And I do see a lot of friendly faces.

Many of you have been here before. Thank you so much for coming back. I also see a couple of new faces. If this is your first session, thank you so much for joining us and if this is not your first, thanks for coming back. If you've not been to Beyond Limitss or if you need a little refresher, here's what Beyond Limitss is all about.

This is an opportunity for us to get leaders together in a room like this on the first Friday of every month. Last, uh, last month. We did it on the second Friday because of 4th of July. But with the exception of that, we are here on the first Friday of every month getting leaders together so that we can share insights from our core curriculum, from something we call mental technology. And we want to be able to relate that to the current events that are going on in your world.

Whether that's what's going on with AI or whether that's the crazy market conditions or tariffs. We want to be able to relate what's going on in the world to our curriculum because we know that there is cognitive psychology going on in the background at all times. And when we can network together with individuals like yourselves, we can ask good questions, we can learn from you, we can learn from each other. And oftentimes we can learn how to tackle some of the challenges that we face around the world. This is a great opportunity for you to network and meet some others.

Learn a little bit more about how what we do and if you're considering doing some business with us in the future, you can consider this just a little bit of a preview if you're one of our existing clients. Thank you so much for coming back to practice if you're new to The Pacific Institute. Real briefly, I just want to explain who we are. Unlike most organizational change companies, we do not come in with a model. We don't show up and say, here's a model for you to follow.

This is exactly what to do, when to do, how to do it. Ready go. Instead. We believe that most organizations have that type of a model. What we really need to focus on is the individuals, the core of how we view and how we react to our surroundings.

Because we know that human beings do not interact with the world around us as it actually is. We interact with the world around us as we believe it to be. And when we know those beliefs can shape our environment and how we react to the world around us, we know if we can shape those beliefs and change them. At the core, we have the ability to change the core of a business, which is really it's teams, you and the people that you lead. When we can change their teams, then we can change the entire organizational culture, the conversation that they're having in the back of their heads behind the business.

So we believe that change is not something that happens, uh, by screaming into a megaphone. It's one person connecting to another, connecting to another. So we love this one to one, to one to everyone, or one to one to one to infinity is our goal. So each and every one of you that is here, thank you so much for being the first part of that chain. We sincerely hope that you are able to bring this type of information to those others as well.

Today's topic is one that should be pretty salient for most of you right now we're talking about shifting from busy to aligned. If you're here and you have a camera on, raise your hand wave at the screen. If you've said to yourself, oh my gosh, I'm so busy. Anytime in let's say your life, we've all had this before. Now how many more people here feel that extra pressure as we are right on the doorstep of Q4, the dreaded Q4 when we're about to find out how we did this year.

So what we've discovered is that the vast majority of leaders, they're not failing because they're not trying. They're not failing because they're not putting in the hours on the treadmill. They're stalling because of misaligned thinking that somewhere in between the right ear and the left ear is some information that is not aligned with the organizational goals. So in high profession, excuse me, in high pressure environments, effort is very rarely the problem. And you've probably experienced this in your organizations or others that you've worked in the past.

Effort isn't the issue. It's alignment, it's effort towards what.

It's not that there's no energy being spent, it's what are we spending our energy on. So our session today, if we can be successful, we hope to check all or at least some of these boxes. We want to help you leaders reset some of your thinking heading into Q4. We want to give you more productive thoughts to run between that right ear and that left ear so we can take out the head trash and help you go into Q4. With a lot of momentum, we want to shift out of the end of year chaos into more intentional alignment so that we're not doing so much spinning our wheels in the mud like we're stuck in the mud in Alabama, but rather making progress and traction and moving forward.

Thank you lolly for laughing at that recentering your team's energy around strategy, not just stress. Actually having the energy around what we're doing that's productive, not just doing something. So we're making sure that it's productive energy. And then more important than anything, finishing strong without burning apps. So the goal is to be able to finish strong because as much as we all make that charge towards the end of Q4, unless you're retiring, there's going to be a Q1 coming right after that.

So we don't want to burn out, we don't want to use up all the energy. And if we can be strong in our position as leaders, we have the opportunity to do all four of these things. Now, when we think about busy versus aligned, let's first talk about what we mean by alignment. I'd love to see some answers go into the chat on this one. We're going to have lots of opportunities for the chat today.

So if you don't have your keyboard in front of you, that'd be almost impossible because they're on all computers. But let's see if we can type some answers in because here's what alignment sounds like. I'm going to give four examples. This is what matters the most to us right now would be an aligned statement. We are clear on the priorities and we know what to do.

Next is alignment. Let's focus and finish what we've started and here's what success looks like. Now, if you see and hear those things around your organizations outstanding, please keep saying and doing those things, especially if you're acting in accordance with those beliefs. But here's what misalignment sounds like and you might find that you've heard this stated in your organization or past organizations that you've worked for. We're working hard, but we're not exactly sure on what I thought it was somebody else's lane.

I thought Richard was dealing with that. I wasn't sure if that was my responsibility. Everything we do is urgent no matter what. Everything we do is urgent. There's no such thing as a backseat priority.

We're spinning but we're not moving. Kind of like a merry-go-round. We're going and going and going, but we're not making progress. So as you think about your organization, this is our first opportunity to put some answers in the chat. I'm going to give everybody about two minutes or so to think through this one.

Richard's got a perfectly good opportunity to interrupt me here, but the question is this, if your team operated with more alignment in Q4, what would that make possible? And I don't want you to think about a hundred percent alignment, even if it was just 10 to 20% more, what do you think might happen or what might stop happening? So take two or three minutes, put some answers in the chat, think it through and I'd love to see your answers to that question. Take a minute or two. Here I am watching these chatting come In.

Great answers. You know, like the way that we think about this here is if you're on a team of leaders, that is, if people on your team, yourself included, have direct reports and you're 10% misaligned with each other, what does that do to those poor humans that work for you? So sales points, fingers at marketing, there's never enough leads, right? Or the customer success folks are saying the product team's just not innovating quickly enough. 10, 20% misalignment causes havoc. And the way, one way to estimate the low end of the cost on that, the low end is you take every salary

of all the humans on your team and everyone below you. And if you imagine that yourself and your team, you're very aligned, but you're 20 per, you could do 20% more multiply everyone's fully loaded salary by 0.2 and add all that up. It's millions and millions of dollars in human drama. That's what it is. And we're all spending it all the time.

You made that sound very expensive. You're saying that this is an expensive problem, Richard, I've, I've seen that to be true. All the screens that I can see with cameras on, everybody's nodding their head along with you And so are the folks that we can't see. Um, there is this statement, um, did you know this is unrelated to that, but related to, to putting cameras on, how much of the meaning that's being conveyed from one human to another is conveyed by the words. Put that in the chat.

What percent? If your name is Brian McDevitt, you're not allowed to answer. Brian got it wrong. Yeah, no, I did not. Anyway, I'll be, I'm trying to give other people a chance here.

I'll let him answer the rest. Good to see you. Thanks for coming by today. Only 7% of the overall message that we communicate is the words. There's two other things.

There's the tone of our voices. 38%, 38% of the meaning of message is delivered by the tone of our voice. Lemme try that differently. 38% of our communication is delivered by the tone of our voice, right? And the remaining 55 is our body language. Um, and that's why we are strong advocates to see your beautiful smiling faces unless you're in a situation where you can't show them. That's actually research that was done by a, um, a psychologist, I think named Albert, Ian.

Ian. And it doesn't count when you're just conveying facts like engineering diagrams or anything like that. Anything where there's emotion or human meaning, which is kind of like everything. The vast majority of human communication. Mm-hmm.

So we saw a lot of good answers coming in here. There seems to be a pretty consistent theme that there would be improvement. If there was more alignment, great. That's exactly what were expecting. Let's talk a little bit about what the trap of Q4 looks like.

Now, the reason I've numbered these bullets is I'm going to ask each person here that if you feel that this is maybe present in your organization, put the number in the chat as these pop up. So for example, when urgency becomes the default strategy disappears under the Q4 trap. So Q4 pressure often drives reactive behavior. If you think that that is something that's happened in your organization due to the pressure placed on Q4 or really at the end of any month or quarter, it often drives reactive behavior. Go ahead and put a one in the chat.

The second one here is teams default to effort over intention. So there are individuals that are putting in work simply so that work happens, but there's no actual intention on what they're doing. There's an awful lot of spinning. There's an awful lot of, I'm going to prove to Jeff just how much work I'm doing by continuing to do work. I don't know exactly what I'm accomplishing.

If that's true, put a two in the chat. You can also have a one and a two. It's okay if more than one of these are true. Number three, if short-term winds come at long-term cost. If you are spending all of your time blowing out the smoke but not putting out the fire are short-term winds coming at long-term cost.

Put a three in the chat. Number four, without mindset alignment, strategy ends up taking a bad a backseat. So folks are not aligned between their right ear and their left, certainly not aligned with the others in their organization what they're thinking. And as a result, that strategy, that really good strategic plan that we spent two days in an offsite building ends up taking a backseat. If that's true, put a four in the chat.

You recognize there's an end of year pattern and it's the same one that happens every year and it accidentally ends up showing that urgency is more important than intention. Doing it fast, doing it now, doing it quickly

becomes the most important instead of doing it intentionally. And then finally, number six, it is not just seasonal. It ends up becoming habitual. It becomes part of what we think we need to do to survive. This isn't just one time, one year when things were tough and Jeff gives the darkest of all answers by putting all three sixes.

So as we can see, many, many people have answered yes to a lot of these. These are not uncommon things that are taking place. And I don't put this up here so that everybody can go, Hey, look how bad we all are. This is just so that you can see that you're not alone. This is so that you can recognize that in a room full of leaders.

Look how many others are facing the exact same things that you are. So another opportunity for a chat question. How does urgency, whether it's at the end of the quarter or end of the year or end of the month, depending on how your business does your goals, how does it show up on your team and what sort of an impact does it really have? How does that urgency show up? Is it in sales results or client success?

Where does it show up and how does it impact your team? I'll play a little music. Give you a chance to think that one through a little. I love the first couple answers coming in here. Default to quote, how it's always done.

Mm-hmm Failure to involve the team in decisions. Yeah. That natural desire to when things get busy, just grab the reins and say, I'll do it myself. Oh, I know that one. That's terrible.

Hey, I have a story I'll tell as people are putting things in. Last company that I was running healthcare company, um, maybe started as 20 people. We grew it to maybe 500 or so. And I had one leader who was very strong underneath me. I was the CEO.

I had one leader underneath me who was a very strong personality and she also got a lot done. And I trusted that she would keep getting things done. And so I gave her more and more responsibility, larger and larger and larger team. And um, what I started to notice is that over the weekends, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, sometimes late at night, emails were being sent, emails were being answered. Yeah.

By this human. What that did was it caused a culture of urgency across her entire team. In spite of the fact that I didn't want it, in spite of the fact that that wasn't the way that I was behaving. And I was the CEO of this company and I started to question my own mindset. Wait a minute, this company is a big fast growing healthcare company.

Maybe I should be sending emails over the weekend. And that's that urgency mindset. It spread. Guess what happens to anyone want to venture a guess? We burnt out.

We burnt out so badly that people were exhausted. Some people got sick. I was one of those people. That's how it showed up for me. That made me think of a James Baldwin quote that I just put in the chat.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but have never failed to imitate them. Employees do exactly the same. Mm-hmm When there's a modeling of I respond to emails all day and all night, that becomes the unintentional expectation of the culture. And those that maybe didn't want to work at two o'clock in the morning on a Sunday, find themselves doing exactly that. And that's the type of thing that leads to the burnout.

We were talking just a couple slides before. So we definitely want to make sure that we take steps not to accidentally infect the culture with the wrong mindset like that. So where do we go? Where do we go from there? The second piece of this is there's that culture of busyness.

We saw lots of people raise more than one hand when I asked if you'd ever said the question, am I busy or am I too busy? Or I'm so busy that I can't, some of us might have even gone

so far as to say things like, I'm too busy to go to the gym and exercise because that's the badge of courage that says I'm working so, so, so very hard. So a couple things you want to think about. When Disney becomes the performance signal, it oftentimes is hiding misalignment because it's just work. It's just effort. So there becomes this pressure to appear Disney.

My background is a lot of work in startup companies and when you are at a startup company, everyone is freaking busy early on. There's tons of work to do. You're all wearing so many hats. Mm-hmm. There does reach a point where the world slows down a little bit.

And if you've always been thriving in a busy mode, you start to understand, I don't know what my priorities are. I've just been used to working 13, 14 hours a day. I'll just stay busy on this wrong project or this uneffective initiative. It becomes a little bit of a badge of honor. Raise your hand, put a thumbs up on the screen, indicate in the chat if you've ever been in an organization where working the long day was accidentally treated like it was this thing to be proud of working in a startup company, working in law firms, working in places where you're saying, oh yeah, it's 60 hours a week.

No big deal. I remember working for a startup company and I was averaging about 13, 14 hours a day and I wore that like it was a badge of courage. It accompanied nicely with my anti-anxiety medications and the ulcer I developed and all sorts of other things. That badge of honor was simply just me saying that I needed to stay busy because I thought my value was in a long day, not in the production of the work. So saying things like, I'm slammed.

I gotta be here a long time. I would find myself being done with work at 11 hours, but loitering around the office for just a little bit longer because I didn't know what to do and what am I if I'm not slammed? And it becomes an accidental value signal. It points towards the activity more than the impact. And that's not what we want.

We want to focus on the impact. And if you can get it done in less time, congratulations. Good for you. So we want to see what we can do to try to avoid this culture of busyness because being busy is good when it's productive, being busy for the sake of busy, uh, that's just running on a treadmill, which most people don't like to do. So we have to understand that there's a deeper belief in play and that we accidentally value busyness.

We accidentally say that being busy is the same as being valuable and productive. Instead of just saying, getting the work done is what's valuable and productive. And the problem is one that we've emphasized a little bit earlier is if everybody is sprinting and nobody's steering, where are you going? You're using up a lot of fuel and a lot of energy and you don't want to spend a whole bunch of time spending all of your money refueling because you make U-turns all the time. You want to make, you want to refuel because you're going in the right direction and you need to refuel not to come back around the other side of the merry-go-round.

So another reflective question for the group is where do you see the pressure to stay busy or the pressure to appear busy showing up in your work culture? Take a minute or two to put a few in there, but where do you see that pressure to stay busy or appear busy showing up in your work? If you work in higher volume sales, I've oftentimes seen salespeople putting in countless hours of time prospecting old dead leads because they want to appear busy. Ah, there's some really good ones in here. Some very big brother like answers saying that team leaders are watching or surveying.

I've done work in, uh, call centers before where some of the leaders full job is just watching to see how long somebody's been not available for the next inbound call. Yeah, yeah. Um, how long it takes to reply to a Slack message. My wife had a job 15 years ago, sort of a call center support job and they literally just measured her on uptime.

Not anything else that she did, but was the green light on indicating that she was at her computer or not. She quit. There gets to be a little bit of robbing of human autonomy that takes place like that that tends to drive folks away. Yep. I like that last answer there.

Trying to create the appearance of being busy and think about the amount of time and energy and company money spent on employees trying to make sure that they can appear to be busy spending time and their hard-earned salary trying to appear to be busy so that the boss won't give them a hard time instead of being productive. Now those are the types of beliefs that we're able to, to uncover when we do our cultural assessments. Because when we can understand what people believe is expected of them in their roles, we can start to understand a lot more about their behavior. That's why we do those cultural assessments. That's why we figure that stuff out because we know one of the core tenants, and if you've been to these sessions before, you've heard this like a broken record.

Beliefs drive behavior as a core tenant to The Pacific Institute before you do it. You think it. So every result that you have started as a thought first. So if the leader has beliefs that's going to shape the team beliefs just like that James Baldwin quote where the children have never been very good at uh, listening to their parents but have never failed to imitate them. If you are acting overly urgent or creating busyness at the end of the year, that is what's going to translate to the team.

A lot of folks are going to take a look in the mirror on this one because they've said a lot of things like this When you shift into survival mode. We've worked with organizations before that have said openly to their employees, look, we're just trying to keep the lights on right now. We're in survival mode. Anything we can do to keep the lights on in this building, we're just trying to make payroll. When those types of things are shared, imagine the behavior that's going to follow that.

So what is needed is there's a mindset evolution because last year's mindset probably isn't going to work again for this year. Most organizations are needing to shift and change and evolve, especially if last year's mindset was we shifted into busy and we made a last ditch scramble to try to make our Q4 numbers. And then ultimately a team is going to absorb the mindset of the leader. So if the leader is moving towards not busyness, but actually impactful work and moving away from the illusion of being busy and into trust and collaboration and working together, that's where they're going to start making some progress. Because misaligned beliefs, they shape everything.

It starts with beliefs, it moves to the culture, and then it shows up in conversations. It shows up in decision making. It shows up in behavioral norms about what is expected, acceptable, or allowable within the organization. 'cause remember, culture is not what you tell people they're allowed to do. It's what you let them get away with.

Mm-hmm. So when those beliefs make that type of a shift, they show up. And when beliefs drift, the culture shifts too. And once you've lost the culture, then you've lost the driver. So here's a loaded question for you to put in the chat.

What's one belief on your team, particularly involving Q4 that might need to shift in the next couple of weeks? What's a belief that might need to change because we know that that would drive behavior? What would be the belief that would need to shift before Q4? Take a minute or so to put a few answers in the chat there. Hmm.

Ooh, I like that answer. Focusing only on the task and not where it fits into the bigger picture.

If you lead a team, imagine asking this question of your team in your next team meeting, boy Richard, if you didn't already work here, I'd offer you a job. After that answer, Richard says, shifted belief. We are all that we need to be successful. Good answers coming in here. I like Jeff's answer.

Find and share the picture so that we all know the direction of the organization. That is a core tenet to The Pacific Institute, knowing what that replacement picture looks like. If you saw my session last year, you would've heard us talk about a recovery point in race car drivers. So let's tell a little bit of a story what this looks like in practice. We want to show this from both sides of things.

Who here has heard of a little company called Microsoft? You can save you the effort of raising your hand. We've all heard of Microsoft in 1999. Microsoft was the world's largest organization. They were the most valuable company in the world because in 1999 the.com boom was booming and Windows 98 was the most popular thing that had ever been created by mankind.

Period. And in 2003, they'd started to slip a little bit, they'd lost some market share, they'd gone down a little bit. The.com era had changed some. And a gentleman named Steve Balmer was at the helm. If you're a Clippers fan, you know exactly who I'm talking about.

So what Steve Balmer did back in 2003, he took that most valuable organization and he implemented a little something called stack ranking. Raise your hand if you've ever heard of stack ranking of employees before. Here's how stack ranking worked. You were forced to on a month by month basis as a leader, evaluate every single member of your team and you had to rank them. So if you had 10 members of your team to keep the numbers simple, somebody came in number one and two and three, and yes, somebody came in dead last, which meant that these employees were ranked and that was their performance review moving forward.

Now, can you imagine what would've happened when every person in the organization was being forced to rank like that? Imagine you're sitting down at the dinner table on a family of five and your parents says you're the number one child, you're the number two and you're the number three. In order to keep that ranking, what folks started to do is what folks would naturally do. It was an awful lot of self-preservation that kicked in. Instead of folks trying to be the best and hope they got the best score, they started to view this as I just have to do better than the people around me.

It created internal con uh, conflict. It created internal competition. It created, I win. You lose within the organization, not I win. They lose outside the organization.

So there was a lot of political behavior. Talent started protecting itself. People didn't share ideas or collaborate. 'cause if I share this idea with Richard and we work together on it and he presents it better, he's going to get ranked higher than me. And if I get ranked too low, I'm going to lose my job.

So innovation stalled. A company that had been innovating like crazy, windows 95, windows 98, all these new products were coming out. Suddenly innovation went downhill and suddenly there was things like Vista, the Windows phone, sorry, if you ever owned that, products like Zune, things simply didn't evolve. Jeff, thank you for laughing at that one. But from 2003 to 2013 and what's known as Microsoft's lost decade, their value decreased by over 50%.

Over 50% of their market cap was dropped. Meanwhile, little companies that used to be tiny, tiny, tiny blips on the radar next to them, like Apple soared to be twice their size over that 10 year period of time. These were some quotes that came from individuals that worked in the organization during that last decade. Direct quotes from Microsoft employees. If you were on a team of 10, you knew two people would get a great review, seven would be mediocre and one would be terrible.

Terrible. That quote goes on a little bit further to say and eventually fired.

You'd walk in the door knowing that somebody had to fail. Imagine being a leader and saying, I've got 10 great team members, they're all wonderful, but I'm going to have to rank them and say that one of them is bad and one of them is the best. So as you can imagine, this did not go well. They called it the lost decade for a reason because things went poorly in 2013. They made a big change at the leadership and a gentleman named Satya Nadella took over.

And if you've not heard about who this gentleman is, no big deal, we're going to tell you about him right now. But the core beliefs that were brought in we're not focused on being busy or doing work or being better than the person next to you. It was all trust, collaboration and a growth mindset. If you've ever read the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, the whole principle of having a growth mindset from Carol Dweck, that book was handed out to Microsoft employees. They were told to read it, internalize it, and bring it back to the workplace.

Mm-hmm. So instead of stack ranking, they changed it to collaborative performance reviews. In fact, they didn't even call them performance reviews, they just called them check-ins. Instead of this quarterly or annual performance review where you were told how you stack up against others and then eventually fired if it was poor, it moved into regular check-ins. Very Socratic asking individuals, how are things going?

What's going on in your world? What else is taking place? Using actual coaching conversations to spark discussions. Instead of looking at results and activity and assuming that that meant that there was going to be production, they embedded a growth mindset into the organization. Like I said, the entire organization read the book.

They were asked on a regular basis, how can we expand our mindset? How can we think about this differently? This encouraged learning innovation and it lowered resistance at all different levels, which allowed them to innovate and do a lot of forward thinking. Things like, for example, they made an investment in a little company you might've heard of called Open ai. And if you think that I made any of these slides with chat GBT, you're correct.

And it's powered by open ai, the investment that they made at that time. So they got a unified messaging. Everybody was aligned around empowering every person to achieve more, to accomplish more, that we are stronger than I, and that if we work together we'll get better results than if Richard and I are competing against one another. And that resulted in streamlined priorities around cloud and productivity. It focused a lot more efforts on cloud-based products like Office 365, which many of us are using teams, which is how this meeting might have been held if weren't hosting it on Zoom.

It allowed them to stay focused on the stuff that was working, not just the activity. And as a result of that, there was a boatload of collaboration. They broke down the silos, they started connecting their software and their hardware divisions together and they came up with some really good stuff, bottom line, because they emphasized empathy, curiosity, and accountability from the top down. They were moving away from fear-based leadership to belief driven leadership sneak preview. It worked.

The question is how much did it work over the next 10 years? So these statistics stopped in 2023. And I will tell you that Microsoft has gone up since that time. But to keep it fair, this is a 10 year to 10 year window. So from 2013 to 23, voluntary turnover reduced by 30%.

Anybody who works in hiring that knows just how expensive it is to hire people and knows how big of a number that is, especially when we're talking about engineers who are not exactly the cheapest employees. Employee engagement, 27% increase. This include the approval ratings for the executive team and senior leadership, which had been previously very, very low. So huge improvements there. Stock growth, if this matters to you, if you have stock, if you're a publicly traded company or you have investors, this one probably matters a little bit. 800%.

I don't know Richard, I didn't go to MIT, but I think that's a nice big number. So that's what we're shooting for. That's the type of goal that we want to see. That's that stock price that we want to see. And then market growth.

Remember I told you they were the largest company in the world in 1999. They dropped to the second or third by 2023, they didn't even crack the top 100 in 2013. And guess who's the second largest company in the world right now? At $2.5 trillion. They've done expansive growth.

And if you follow the tail of the tape, it all leads back to the decisions that were made in 2013 when they stopped pitting employees against one another. And they recognized that culture is a business driver. It's what drives the culture. It's not a backdrop. And what they realized is that they had accidentally created the wrong type of culture.

They had accidentally created a culture that was rewarding hustle over impact

that was resulting busyness over collaboration. They were focusing on all the wrong areas. So here's another opportunity for a reflective question. Thinking about these two examples of the same story from 2003 to 2013, it was all stack wracking me against you. And from 2013 until present, it moved into trust and collaboration.

What's a belief system that you could shift right away that might set up your team to finish strong in Q4? I give everybody a minute or two to put a few answers in. And Richard, a chance to comment if you'd like. What's a belief or system that you really think that you could shift that would set your team up to finish strong starting in Q4 Or maybe something, I know that folks are putting this in the chat. Something about being, you know, really human centered like, like Satya was and is, think of it, second largest company only, um, beat by Nvidia, which is driven because of really large language models like OpenAI, which he invested in in 2012.

He's like twice as valuable as Apple. Apple used to just knock these guys down, right? And what he did, I mean obviously there was corporate strategy, there was a bunch of um, you know, execution. But execution happens with the um, the focus on people. There's a new uh, sort of threat to psychological safety in the workforce.

And that's ai. And we've got, I just had a client ask me this morning, what do I do as you're helping us to build this transformative culture, um, with the fact that I have to use AI to create efficiencies that are going to continually allow us to reduce our force. And that's what my investors are expecting. That's what I must do. How do I handle that?

So Satya here is one of the thought leaders and you know, they just laid off I think 9,000 people. He doesn't have a great answer. His answer is, I don't. This is terrible, this is sad. This is progress.

And progress has happened many times in the past. And you know, if you look back when 90% of us were farmers and now very few of us are, that must have been a transformational change. That was really difficult too. Um, and yet here we are. He's, he in spite of the fact that he's got, I dunno, 200 some odd thousand people that work at Microsoft. 9,000 of them just let go.

And yeah, you bet it dropped to the bottom line and it made their stock price go up. You bet it did. He's talking about it. He's out there talking about the human impact of these sorts of things. So he is a leader who focuses on the humans.

What one, what's one belief or system you could shift right now to set your team up to finish Q4 strong. Look deeply at your humans, see them as full functioning independent autonomous entities with families, with fears, with hopes, with challenges, with dentist appointments. Uh, and align all of those things up to help your team finish up you four strong. It's definitely not work harder. If it is work harder.

It's definitely going to start by getting aligned first so you know what to work hard on. So we don't want to create the illusion that there's anything wrong with hard work. It's great, it's just hard work. When it's productive work, we want to make sure that we're making progress. And with things like ai, it's, it's very true.

And if we focus on the humans and their ability to adapt and handle change, my personal belief is that, you know, the calculators didn't put accountants out of business. It just made them have to operate differently. AI is probably not going to put a lot of us out of business, but it is going to make us operate a little bit differently. So what we want to think about here is how do we get the executive alignment going? How do we, how do we make progress?

Because alignment isn't about agreement, it's about clarity and trust and sharing momentum in the right direction. So how do we build that? How do we create it? Because when there's misalignment, especially at the end, it starts to set the stage for a lot of effort and limited progress. And that's not how we want to end Q4 because that's going to basically mean that's how we're going to start Q1 next year.

We're going to start on a bad place and we don't want to do that. So leaders don't need to necessarily think the same thing, but they absolutely have to be clear on what matters most. We talk about this all the time, like it's directions in a GPS, Richard and I can both put directions into the GPS and if they're not clear and they just say something like, let's go to the store, we're going to end up at drastically different places. We might even say, let's go to the grocery store and go to different places. If we really want to end up making sure that we're not wasting effort and turning around needlessly, we should have a lot of clarity about we're going to the grocery store on the corner of market.

And third, these are the directions

we're going to take to get there. When directions are clear like that across the organization, there's not wasted effort because everybody knows exactly where you're going and when you get there. And that's the level of clarity that we shoot for. Because when there's clarity and trust and accountability and those things are missing, all that's left is an individual interpretation. And it's not Richard's fault that he went to the wrong store if I didn't make it clear.

And it's not my fault if I didn't go to the right store, if he didn't make it clear. But if we make that very, very clear, then we know exactly what we're going to do. So alignment is a performance multiplier. It's not just a communication exercise. It's not just, oh look, we're all on the same page and we held hands and send Kumbaya.

It actually helps us align and not waste so much money on those expensive U-turns. So our equation is this, clarity plus trust plus accountability equals accelerated results. If you're clear and you trust the people that you work with and you can hold each other accountable to following those directions and going to the right place, we will get there faster. Period. So out of these three, which one, clarity, trust, or accountability really needs to be the biggest focus for your team.

Going into Q4, which one do you think is the biggest factor? Is it clarity of vision? Is it trust of one another? Or is it accountability? Is it me and Jeff saying to one another, I'm going to hold you accountable to your work, you're going to hold me accountable to mine?

Got a couple clarities, a couple of trust answers sneaking in. Nobody has said all of the above, but that is an acceptable answer. These all hold hands. So when there is a lack of clarity, people will take a lot of actions and it gets really frustrating when you take a lot of actions towards something and find out that it wasn't the right thing because the message was unclear. And that erodes trust.

So each one of these kind of holds hands to the one next to it. Thank you Thomas, for putting all of the above. That was the most honest answer there is. So as we move a little bit further, we want to talk about what are we really going to do to reset the internal dialogue. 'cause as we've said many, many, many times before we do it, we think it and that comes in the form of self-talk.

So there's that conversation that's running on in our head all the time. It's running on like, like it's a radio announcer, just commenting on absolutely everything that's going on. And if we can control that dialogue, then we know that those belief systems are going to be able to be built by what leaders say, do and model and reinforce. So as we said before, teams do and repeat what you say and do and repeat. So if you are trying to have your team change their thoughts and beliefs act in accordance with your own, they will emulate what you do.

Internal dialogue, like saying things like we need to survive this quarter. It might not necessarily be the best thing that you'd want to say. It might be creating a little bit of doom and gloom because you might say that as the leader because you think that motivates others. And what really might be happening is you're motivating their LinkedIn profile because they're worried that the business is going somewhere or they're thinking, ah, this we're, there's only so big we're going to get. This is not the right place.

The last thing you want to do is create the wrong message. So be clear and try when you can to avoid those. We're just trying to keep the lights on statements. Leaders have the ability to shape the culture by how they handle stress, pressure and priorities. If you are clear as a leader about what the priorities are going into Q4, your team will be too.

If you talk about how stressed you are and how concerned you are, you're emulating that a lot. It'd be pretty rough if you got in the car with your three little kids

and said, well, it's raining outside, so there's a pretty good chance we get in a car accident. This is going to be a rough drive. You wouldn't want to do that as a parent driving a car any more than a leader would want to do that with their team or their organization. So shifting that internal dialogue starts with simple tools, right? Self-talk, visualization, affirmation.

If you've ever been through our workshops before, that's what we talk about. We have the types of tools that help replace stress-based language with belief based focus. That's what we're gearing towards is taking the conversation that's in your head that might sound like this is going to be a rough one, we're going to really have to get it done in Q4 or we're screwed. And replace it with productive conversation that leads to the right visualization and a really productive replacement picture and action. So one more question for you.

What message, whether it's spoken or otherwise, do you want your team to internalize going into Q4? What do you want them to be saying in their heads in Q4? And I hope the answer isn't, I'm going to work a long day to make sure we get it done. Take a minute or so, let's see what messages we have that you want your team thinking. What's the mantra of your organization going to be for?

For Q4, we work with a consultant named Donka who talks about the Vikings going west. And their mantra was, the gods are calling us west. What is your organization's mantra or should it be? Is there a better way to do this? I like, I also like the very optimistic, we got this, they are trusted and empowered to do their best work.

And I have their back. That is a good refrigerator magnet. Thanks Thomas C. Great stuff. Because I own my space and trust my teammates, we find the way to thrive.

I'm going to put that on accessory as well. I want to go back to Thomas C. You said, based on the start of our talk today, clearly I need to work more on body language and voice tone than the words I send. So with your team, the way to do that is unfortunately show up in places like this and meet them, show them your whole body. And also the other thing you can do is you can send them videos rather than emails That my friends is what we call a genius attack.

And it was a good one. Thank you. I love the answers going in the chat here. We're transitioning to a better culture with clear pictures and trust in our teams to perform better. I love the motion that I feel in that statement.

Mm And yes, we are going to celebrate our successes. Excellent stuff. So here's just a few, I dunno, tips for Q4 'cause it's really not about doing more. It's about aligning the energy and working on what really matters the most. It might feel like a lot more work 'cause everything's all coming to a head.

But realistically, it's all about just aligning that energy. Because resilience isn't about endurance, it's about the ability to reset, refocus, and respond. And that's what you're asking these folks to do. And when the message is clear and consistent, it's really easy to be resilient and hi, the highest performing teams are not the ones that exert the most energy. They're the ones that align first.

They get on the same page sooner. If you follow sports, this is why it's always so weird when you get these all-star teams together, but they can't beat a non all-star team. It's because putting all that best talent together doesn't always result in success. Getting people who know how to work together, play together, build on each other's strengths. AKA align is what leads to more success.

So when you can get people that are aligned and on the same page and they have high intellectual friction and low social friction, those are the teams that get the most work done. If you want to hear more about that, I'll give everybody a homework assignment. Read about Google's project Aristotle, and what happens when you try to put the most talented individuals together in a room and create on paper the most talented team that mankind has ever seen,

and then read about how the results weren't maybe as good as they thought. So when it comes to recovery rhythms, clarity, clarity based planning, they reduce burnout. When you know what you're working on, it's not that big of a deal. Hard work is not a problem when you realize that it gets you somewhere. Hard work is awful.

When you spend hours on a project only to find out the project parameters were not clear and you spent a whole bunch of time building X when you were supposed to be building Y, that results in a lot of burnout because it's just wasted effort. And then finally, it gives the opportunity for reflection. So those leaders that are clear and have the ability to create teams who can stay grounded in these high change environments and accept the fact that, yeah, Q4 might be a little bit different, but if we stick with our same core values and we stick with trust and clarity and accountability, we're going to be able to be very productive. This is a repeat of that last question, but with a few things that are up there. What's a shift that you think, even a small one that would help your team finish stronger?

What do you think you might be able to give your team that they don't have now that might lead to finishing Q4 A little stronger. Brian, you'd asked the question. I was saying high intellectual friction and low social friction. It's what leads to the most productive teams. Richard and I should have the ability to violently disagree with each other about what should happen next.

While not having high social friction, we can agree that we have different ideas and then align. If we have high social friction, we don't have the ability to have high intellectual friction and intellectual friction equals fire. We like that. So what do we do next? Here is your opportunity to take action.

Last month we talked about an upcoming session and a few folks put their votes in and thank you very much for putting those in because next month in September, now that we're here in October, this is our that we're in August. It's officially next month on September, starting on the ninth, we are hosting a live virtual delivery of our Invent Your Future Professional 2.0. This is going to be four two hour sessions. We'll be holding this on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So it'll be on the ninth, 11th, 16th, and 18th of September.

If you scan that QR code, you're able to see the information about the event. I will be sending an email to everybody here who has that information as well. But this is an open session, so this is for you and or members of your team, friends, family members, et cetera. We're expecting a group of about 25 to 30. I'll be facilitating that along with one of our other facilitators here.

So this is your chance to engage with us a little bit further and take these types of concepts and explore them a little further over four virtual sessions. In addition, next month we have a guest speaker who's coming in. So you're going to get a little break from myself and from Richard. We're going to be doing a session next month with one of our senior executive consultants. One Lori Fisher, who's been using this curriculum and information for the past 15, 20 years is going to be giving us a presentation on trust as a strategy and a culture asset.

I'm going to use the word recommend, but I don't think that it's strong enough. So I highly recommend that you come and attend this session. It'd be very interactive. We look forward to seeing you all there.