In this episode, we share proven strategies for building a powerful culture in any business – and uncover the truth about how your mindset can be one of the biggest game-changers in business with our guest Thomas Steding. 

Tom Steding, Ph.D. has been CEO of more than 12 high-tech companies and active chairman of several others. He is co-founder of the Mayfield Alliance with former Facebook Executive Blaise Bertrand. Tom is also the co-founder of Quadrix Partners, providing leadership interventions. He is a “Seal Team Advisor” to the Stanford-Affiliated Alchemical Accelerator; a Founding member of the Silicon Valley Angel Group; and the Executive in Residence of the Palo Alto-based Venture Capital Private Equity Roundtable. He is also the co-author of the bestselling Built on Trust: Gaining Competitive Advantage in Any Organization and the author of the soon to be released Real Teams Win: What Smart Leaders Need to Know Now About Achieving Peak Performance.

• The difference between a real team and a fake team?

• You can dramatically improve performance by reducing cost

• Performance does not depend upon spending, it depends upon leadership

• The key is to get to the emotional life of the team

• It’s not a strategy, it’s not project management, it's leadership. Everything else is necessary but not sufficient.

• Leadership model - view the organization as a network

  • Links between people or teams (aka nodes)

  • You’re trying to build a high trust, low fear environment

• Culture eats strategy for breakfast, but people don’t know how to talk about culture

• “Mindset eats culture for breakfast” - If you want to talk culture, you have to talk first about mindset.

  • Agility

  • Awareness

  • Courage

  • Relatedness

• The goal is to create an environment that is psychologically safe and creative

  • Complementarity - get out of dogmatic, one-sided thinking. It’s not this or that, it’s this and that. Don’t think dogmatically.

  • Empathy. Emotional intelligence and emotional integrity.

  • Non-attachment. Avoid idealized expectations and fantasies. Idealized fantasies are the cancer of the mind.

• A connected team can always come up with better ideas than you can own your own.

• How to practically apply these ideas to a turnaround

  • Day one - take the team off-site for 2-3 days and train them. It’s simply an intellectual exercise and sharing ideas with them.

  • Statement of operating principles - everyone contributes to the new operating principles

  • “I want you to speak up” - it takes time for people to speak up.

• If there is an issue with the company that you don’t deal with it means one of two things

  • You don’t know about it.

  • You don’t care about it.

• “It’s better to have nobody in a role than a bad person (i.e. toxic or sabotaging the culture), even if they are talented."

• 90 Minute interviews with 5-7 key executives to see who needs to stick around

  • Are they low ego?

  • Are they open-minded?

  • Are they growth mindset?

  • Can they evolve as part of the team, or no?

• “Drama is evidence of sand in the gears"

• Agility

  • Intellectual Agility

  • Emotional Agility

• Awareness

  • Emotional awareness of the team, drama, etc

  • Marketplace and economic awareness

• Narcissism is one of the biggest barriers to implementing these proactive changes in an organization

• If you don’t deal with issues on the front end, it gets worse as you grow and add people

• 2/3 of people are disconnected from their jobs

Thank you so much for listening!

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Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Tom’s LinkedIn

Media

• Research Gate - Thomas L. Steding’s Works

• Crunchbase Profile: Thomas Steding

• Bloomberg Profile: Tom Steding

• Psych Alive - “The Second Wave: The Emotional Impact of the Prolonged Pandemic” By Tamsen Firestone

Books

• Amazon Author Page

• Real Teams Win: What Smart Leaders Need to Know Now About Achieving Peak Performance Dec 1, 2020 by Thomas L. Steding

• Built on Trust: Gaining Competitive Advantage in Any Organization by Arky Ciancutti M.D. and Thomas L. Steding Ph.D.

Episode Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet, bringing the world's top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts, Matt Bodnar and Austin Fabel. 

[00:00:19] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than 5 million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. In this episode we discuss the surprising future of work, the truth about robots, automation and jobs and how you can best position yourself for a successful career within the future of work with our guest, Jeff Wald.

In this episode we share proven strategies for building a powerful culture in any business and uncover the truth about how your mindset can be one of the biggest game changers in business with our guest, Thomas Steading. 

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on there along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time For What Matters Most in Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com, you can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word SMARTER to the number 44222.

In our previous episode we talked about the secrets of creating influence. How to be more confident? And the truth about the shortcuts that you can take to be successful with our previous guest, Phil M. Jones. Now, for our interview with Thomas. 

Tom Steading Ph.D. has been CEO of more than 12 high-tech companies and active chairman of several more. He's the co-founder of the Mayfield Alliance with former Facebook Executive, Blaise Bertrand. And Tom is also the co-founder of Quadrix Partners providing leadership interventions. He is a seal team advisor to the Stanford Affiliated Alchemical Accelerator, a founding member of the Silicon Valley Angel Group and the Executive in Residence of the Palo Alto Venture Capital Private Equity Roundtable. He's also the co-author of the best-selling book Built on Trust: Gaining Competitive Advantage in Any Organization, and the soon to be released Real Teams Win: What Smart Leaders Need to Know Now About Achieving Peak Performance.

[00:02:23] MB: Tom, welcome to The Science of Success.

[00:02:27] TS: Thank you very much, Matt. Nice to be here.

[00:02:29] MB: Well, we're excited to have you on the show today, and you have such a great background. I can't wait to dig into some of the stories and experiences and lessons that you've learned from that. I'd love to start out with you have a bit of a reputation as a turnaround expert in Silicon Valley. And I'd love to get your perspective on why that's the case and what you really view as a turnaround opportunity.

[00:02:55] TS: Sure. I’ve been developing this leadership material over decades. I’m a solo learner. So it's taken me a while to figure out what really works. We make a distinction between real teams and fake or pretend teams. And in terms of stories, I’ve been CEO of 13 startups. I’ve often – Some I started from scratch. Some I went in and after that operation for two years or longer. And in many cases you find people that say, “Yeah, they do teamwork. And they’re a team,” and so forth. And even further examination, what you discover is they really don't like each other. They don't communicate. They don't trust each other. There's toxic gossip of rampant slippage and so forth. I’ve seen that over and over again. 

And by implementing this method, I’ve been able to create that environment based on the new leadership model that allows for real teams to blossom, to create real teams and change the culture dramatically. And in fact one of the interesting features that I discovered is that you can actually dramatically increase performance by actually reducing the costs. In some cases, I reduce costs by more than 50% and yet triple or quadrupled sales. So that says that performance and success doesn't depend upon spending. It depends upon leadership. And that make can make a big difference. That's a bit of the background on my approach. 

The issue here is to – I would describe the approach of the book as a depth perspective, getting to the emotional life of the team. What's really going on between people? And understanding at that deeper layer. That's where the real action occurs. I’ve gone through periods in my career where I thought strategy was everything. I thought project management was everything, operational management, technology and all that. And it turns out those things are sometimes important, but they're not sufficient for success. What you've got to do is get to the deeper layers in the organization and rebuild it from about the bottom-up. So that's what the book is about. 

[00:05:04] MB: There's a lot of different things you've already shared that I really want to dig into and explore a little bit more. Let's start with this notion of getting to the emotional life of the team. And I love what you said about how it's not necessarily strategy. It's not project management. Really at the core, one of the single biggest differentiators of a successful business versus a failed business, is the emotional connection between the leadership team. So tell me more about what that is and how – 

[00:05:36] TS: Sure. The new leadership model is viewing the organization as a network of an agile, flexible, dynamic network of this set of nodes that’s interconnected. And the links between the nodes, the nodes could be people or teams. Those links are not reporting relationships, but rather paths of open collaborative communication in a high-trust, low-fear environment. So that's what you're trying to build. And the book talks about three principles and four practices in a diagnostic model to address that. 

One of the things that it really focuses in on is what I call the mindset layer. People have been talking about culture, and that's become more and more a fattish topic in high-tech. People are beginning to understand the importance of culture, which is accurate. And people that will bromide is that culture eats strategy for lunch. And I think that's true. You can have a great strategy and bad culture, you're not going to be successful. But the problem is people don't really know how to talk about culture. Often you're here, “Well, it’s pizza for Friday, or we don't do politics,” and those kinds of bromides. But that's not actionable. 

The point of the book is if you want to talk about culture, you have to first talk about mindset. Mindset drives culture. And in fact mindset eats culture for breakfast. It's the way we put it. And that's where the hidden factors reside. So there are four dimensions of mindset; agility, awareness, courage and relatedness, four different dimensions. Each dimension has an intellectual and emotional component. If you can look at the company from the perspective of mindset, and the mindset, the patterns of thought between the ears of the leaders, cultures between the people, the patterns of behavior between the people. But this is the internal view of the system from the leadership. And understanding those four dimensions will set up. And if you have a weak dimension, that's where dysfunctionality will come in. So I’ve talked about examples where you had strong courage you had strong agility. You had strong awareness, but weak relatedness and it failed. So you need a balanced approach among all four dimensions.

[00:07:59] MB: Some really good insights. And I want to dig more into this, because in many ways a lot of the crux of this podcast over the last four or five years has been a focus around trying to uncover the cornerstones of mindset and the realization that mindset really is such a fundamental component of being successful in any endeavor, whether it's business, whether it's art, whether it's music, whether it's politics. And to me, the fact that you say that mindset is so important to me really helps make it very actionable, because I feel like when I hear about pizza Fridays or all of these kitschy activities, there's a disconnect when I hear that between that and what culture actually is and really the high-performance culture of successful businesses. So tell me more about how to differentiate the appearance of culture versus the substance of culture and how to cultivate a mindset within an organization that checks all those boxes. And I want to talk about agility and awareness and so forth in a minute. But tell me more about that.

[00:09:03] TS: Okay. Yeah. I think to fill it out, look at them. The idea of the new model is that you're creating an environment that's creative and safe. Psychological safety is a factor here, but it goes beyond that. Psychological safety is something that Google discovered is the number one factor in supporting innovation. And the idea is they form the connected team, and that's where the future competitive advantage comes from is that people can speak up and contribute fearlessly. And that's where the good ideas come from. 

Now what you want them to do is eliminate dogmatic thinking. That's one of the dimensions here. There are three practices to that, three principles to support that. One of them is complementarity, and that is just that people get out of dogmatic once by their thinking, but understand that it's the rule of nature. It's not this or that. It's both, this in that in the old times. It's always another side to an issue. So you teach people to avoid dogmatic thinking and dogmatic declarations. 

The second is empathy, which is the glue. We talk about emotional intelligence, but we build that beyond that to emotional integrity as a refinement on the emotional intelligence concept. The third one is non-attachment, which is avoiding idealized expectations, idealized fantasies. We call that cancer of the mind, because it's so pernicious. It’s so corrosive to progress. 

So an example, I had a VP of marketing, a company I took over, and she had to sit at the end of the table. I didn't care where I sat in the conference room. I sat somewhere in the middle. We're talking about – We're having a creative dialogue about a program and she pounds the table and says, “We have to decide whether we're going to do this in September or not.” That's a dogmatic statement that killed right then – When you have a dogmatic statement that kills creative collaboration. That was the end of the discussion. She reduced it to a simple one bit answer as opposed to staying in the creative mode and looking for the better answer.

The connected team always can create better ideas that you come up with on your own. I relied on that. I think on the weekend I’m worried about such and such thing. I’m going to an executive staff meeting Monday morning. And I'll say, “I’m kind of worried about this. I’m thinking maybe we should do this.” And they knew it's not a very smart idea. And it's like fresh meat to the team and they just devour that and they chew it up. And always, almost inevitably, somebody, somehow out of that process comes a better idea. So it's that kind of an approach. And the practices we set up, which are communication, collaboration, commitment and closure are in support of creating that kind of creative dialogue that you can sustain in a fearless manner. 

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[00:14:41] MB: I understand the conceptual level of this very clearly, the idea that increased emotional intelligence, awareness and a focus and orientation towards the truth and non-attachment to specific outcomes or views, openness, creativity, all these things are vital to the health of a team. How do you really think practically about, day one, you come into a company. It's a turnaround situation. How do you approach that? Because I mean especially if you're dealing with financial realities of the business, losing money, whatever it might be, how are you balancing that, “Hey, guys let's sit down and everybody needs to adjust their mindset to be more open-minded or whatever,” versus, “Hey, we need to cut costs,” and, “Hey, we need to reduce the team and all of these practical realities of the business.”

[00:15:29] TS: So what I typically do is the first day I will take the team offsite for two to three hours and train them and go through all the material. Knowing that at that stage, simply an intellectual exercise, they'll hear the words. They'll say, “Yeah, sure.” And then you set up a process of drafting, the way I’ve done it before. You don't have to do it this way. But we draft a statement of operating principles or practices one page. And everybody gets to contribute to that, and it's based on the material that was in the training. And everybody gets to offer their edits and then everybody signs it. Now you've got a statement about how we're going to move forward. 

I have a weekly all hands meeting. Sometimes we go more frequently than a week. It's voluntary. They call it T with Tom is typically the way it's done. People can come, and it's not scripted. It's not a tell and sell event. It's, “Here's what's going on. What's going on with you guys?” Anybody got ideas?” That becomes a process that takes time to evolve. Depends upon how deep the problems are at the beginning. One company I took over in Lake Tahoe was run by a psychopath. He would – There's a employee handbook, and if he caught somebody like leaving early to go to a dentist, he would revise the employee handbook book and resend it out. You can't leave early to go for dentists and so forth. It was a symbol of tyranny. 

So I called the fire department and got a license or permit. I told everybody to print off this 100-page document. Bring it out to the parking lot, and we had it on fire, and we burned that. So that was a symbol of that. Some people – I kept saying in the all-hands meeting, “I want you to speak up. I want to speak up,” and it took time. People were scared to death to speak up because they got shot before. I had this experience other times in my earlier career where the culture was if you used to speak up, you get shot. Well, you got to teach people it's safe. It's not only safe. That you're almost requested to speak up, even toss out half-brained idea, because you can start working with half-brain's idea and find the really good idea that's residing behind the half-brained surface. 

And so you create that kind of permission. I’ve had two instances where investors – We did everything we said we would do. Six months later one investor abandoned the company. So we had financial trouble for six months. So I went to a daily – Well, it was actually it was a weekly – Instead of a weekly staff meeting, I had a weekly all-hands meeting. I told everybody everything. I explained exactly what was going on. What the problems were. In both cases I ran it six months and we got a successful exit. In both cases we lost one person, and that's because they got a better job. They would have left anyway. So it's that kind of open system that everybody's included is the empowering aspect of the approach.

[00:18:45] MB: How much of this approach is focused around your specific interactions with the executive team versus trickling that down, sharing it with the entire company. And how do you think about permeating the culture, the mindset shift that you're creating in a company from just you to the executive team to the broader organization? 

[00:19:06] TS: If you proceed top down in the sense, so you train everybody, and you really work with the executive team and ensure that they're really on board that they are adopting this ahead of the other members of the team, that leaders go first. And if you have issues with the executive team, you deal with them properly. Because if there's an obvious problem in the company and you're not dealing with it, there are two conclusions. One is you don't know about it, which means you're not paying attention. The one is you don't care, which means you're stupid. So you boldly address issues early as you can, as early as they're identified, and then the executive team models that kind of behavior on through their staff and emphasize that. 

The all-hands discussions contain – A big chunk of it is people saying, “Well, here's a problem. How do I deal with it?” And I go back to the principles and say, “Well, this is what we do. We tell the truth, or we get closure, or we honor a commitment,” or whatever it takes and to help them really understand how to apply it in specific pragmatic instances.

[00:20:16] MB: Tell me more about this idea. I like the notion of servicing issues really promptly and dealing with them. Tell me more about that framework and how you quickly address whether it's problem individuals or problems that come up. 

[00:20:30] TS: Right. I just hate gossip. I think toxic gossip is corrosive, of course, and needs to be rooted out. The alternative is direct mitigation, talking to the person. I actually do something about the problem that. Not gossiping with somebody else that can't do anything about the problem. And I make a big deal out of that. And I had a woman, executive, in a company I ran. And she was addicted to gossip. She could not stop. And I warned her and warned her and I fired her. People who knew that I fired her because she gossiped. That solidified the impression that this was important. She had talents that were available to the company. You got a bad person. It's better to have nobody in a position than a bad person however talented they might be. 

[00:21:20] MB: And how do you think about when you come into a situation assessing who is going to stick to or adapt to the cultural changes that you're making versus who is not going to stick around or who you might need to let go?

[00:21:37] TS: So, often, there will be an early phase of coming in and doing an assessment before actually coming on to run the company. And I’ve done that before as well. And you interview – They get 90-minute interviews with about five to seven key people. You can detect it immediately. It's not a rational questionnaire kind of approach scoring thing. It's an intuitive grasp. Mostly it's about whether the person you're talking to is comfortable in their own skin. Whether they are low eagle or are they putting on something? Are they trying to present a persona, a cover up? You quickly get an idea independent of their technical skills or management or marketing skills or whatever. It's whether they are able to evolve as part of an overall team evolution and be part of something that works in a healthier manner. So you can pick it out very quickly. That sets up the action plans to follow. 

[00:22:43] MB: That makes a lot of sense. 

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[00:24:33] MB: I want to come back to some of the practical pillars of this that you talked about a minute ago. You mentioned agility. And correct me if I said this wrong; agility, awareness, courage and relatedness. Are those the four correct pillars of organizational mindset?

[00:24:47] TS: Right. 

[00:24:48] MB: Could you briefly give me a description of what each of those is and how you approach implementing them?

[00:24:56] TS: Sure. Let's take agility for an example, and this is the idea that the dimension of agility has an intellectual and an emotional component. So intellectual agility is being able – And I’ve done this before. You look at the product roadmap that you're building out and you're looking at the marketplace and what's going on out there. And you realize that that's not the right product roadmap. And so you have to stop and turn around a dime. And I’ve done that before. We've discovered and it saved six months of development time taking out the wrong product. So that's intellectual agility. 

Emotional agility is different. It's the ability to hear another person's point of view and take it in without rejecting it outright dogmatically, but really understand completely and be able to relate on the basis of their perspective using their metaphors. And so forth. That's a different kind of agility. 

Likewise, awareness is the CEO needs to know the marketplace and the competitive situation, barriers to entry, the economics and all that kind of stuff. It's very important. But the emotional side of that is to really understand what's going on with the team. Are they trusting each other? Are they acting on the principles that have been laid out? Where's the drama? Drama is always evidence of sand and the gears to mix my metaphors, but looking for the functioning of the team at the emotional connectivity level. So those are two dimensions of awareness that are important. 

Relatedness is a kind of a late comer to management. It seems like a California, West Coast idea, but it's very important about both externally with customers and account management, that kind of thing, but relatedness internally. The ability to sustain a productive dialogues with people without going dogmatic on them. Avoiding disagree to disagree conclusion in a collaborative conversation, that sort of thing. So I had an instance of – The first startup I ran was pretty good privacy. It was a famous email encryption company. We put privacy on the map. We were considered to be the marking of the gorilla in four months by the press. 

We brought in a guy and we established a values-based approach that we had the process that I just described and we had several documents to explain what our values were and how we're going to behave. And part of that was direct communication and respect, two different ideas. I brought in this guy, and he grabbed VP of product marketing or products. A woman, very bright woman, and berated her loudly in the hallway. And so I called him in and I said, “What are you doing?” And he said, “Well, I’m doing direct communication.” And I said, “Yeah, but you forgot about respectful communication.” I put him on probation eventually. He left the company. Interestingly about a year later he showed up on the cover of Fortune Magazine with a bunch of other people. So this is the critical founder of the internet. So it doesn't mean you have to be a helpful team player to get famous. But I still stand by in the action I took, because it was very destructive. 

[00:28:25] MB: Yeah, that's a great example. And I think, I mean, a lot of this stuff seems like it's common sense in many ways if you believe in the importance of checking your ego at the door and having an open approach to communication, those kinds of things. For me, it always comes back to the application of it is much harder than the theory. And what are some of the sticking points that you've seen or places where it gets really hard to implement some of these mindset changes? 

[00:28:57] TS: It's easy to understand intellectually and it's difficult to do, to behave and carry out at the emotional level. One of the most difficult things is narcissism. Now, the book has about 11 interludes looking at ancient myths. And people would say, “Well, they are old stories and they're not relevant today.” Well, I'll tell you something. Those mythic figures are sitting in the conference room today or on a Zoom call. The message of narcissists was that he couldn't take input. The narcissistic leader will not listen to people on the team and won't listen to people outside the company. Their mind is made up and they're going to proceed on that basis. That's the opposite of the kind of mindset that we need in the team. People are open to hearing other points of view, and we'll work with those points of view as opposed to rejecting them outright. The core to team dysfunctionality is narcissism. And so there's a material in the book about how to detect narcissism in the team and how to deal with it. But if you have a narcissistic leader, you have a great deal of trouble implementing this overall blueprint approach that's described in the book. 

[00:30:14] MB: What are some of the practical strategies for detecting narcissism?

[00:30:18] TS: There's a list. It’s actually derived from the DSM, which is the dictionary of mental illnesses, but it's things like people who talk too much that they're often – They use the I word a lot. They're dogmatic. They can be emotionally reactive. So they won't take criticism. They're touchy. They're defensive. There's the whole list of things. But you can imagine that kind of a character. Difficult to work with, not listening. Spend a lot of time promoting their own value as opposed to working on the problem, those kinds of things.

[00:30:56] MB: I want to come back to some of the practical examples from your experience. I know you've worked with a lot of different businesses. What was the typical size of a company in terms of maybe the team size of an average business that you got involved with and helped turn around?

[00:31:14] TS: The average size is probably around 35 people, 35, 50 people, sometimes runs up higher than that. Sometimes it was a fresh start, three founders working to get it off the ground. Pretty good privacy. I hired six executives in the first four months. So I built that top down. Eventually got to 75, 80 people or more, something like that. 

I’ve done work with accelerators including the Stanford-affiliated alchemist accelerator and given presentations on the material to groups like 25 CEOs in a particular class. And the response is, “Well, we're too early for that.” And my answer is, “No. When you have two people, you now have a team. The time to set the values and the principles for the company is that early point.” In fact, with pretty good privacy, I stopped the whole process and spent a day with the core founding team to develop those value statements and principles and got those in place first before you start bringing people on. It's also a recruiting tool and it's a filter. You can see people's reaction to it if they say, “Oh, this is BS. I’m going to do it my way.” They're not going to come on be part of the team. It's very inspirational. People want to be – One of the four things that people want is to be part of something bigger themselves that reflects their basic values. That's a critical factor in attracting the right kind of people. 

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[00:34:41] MB: Is there an organizational size that you’ve found? And you’ve touched on it a little bit just now, but that these principles work better for them? If you have a company of three people, is it too early to come in and say, “Okay, here's all the stuff we're doing.” Or if you have a company of 200 people, is it too large to say, “We can really actually impact these changes and push them through the entire culture of the organization.” 

[00:35:09] MB: I think that's pretty much independent of it is size agnostic. When you're at three people, a typical founding team has a crazy founding CTO, for example. You've got to deal with – And then pretty good privacy case, it was a really crazy CTO. You had to deal with that right away and establish how we're going to work together, because as you add people, if you haven't dealt with it, it's going to get multiplied and becomes – It's contagious. So that's a point where it's very important to do that. 

You got 200 people. You would build it top-down through the executive team. I’m doing something. I’m on the board of trustees of Pacifica Graduate Institute Santa Barbara, which is probably the center of the world in depth psychology mythology and so forth .And I’ve declared that we are going to overhaul the culture. Their silos and them versus us conflict and a bunch of stuff and they're flat in terms of growth, and that's a big part because the culture is not working well. 

And so I started with the chancellor. He loved it. Then we brought in the executive team called the IMC, whatever that stands for, the senior faculty and so forth, the administrative people. They loved it. It was transformative. And then the pandemic had, but they had already had breakthrough results in the way they operated and were do much better job in dealing with the pandemic as a consequence of that. But that's an organization of 250 people. Maybe it's more than that, 600 students or something like that. So it's a much larger organization, but it was clearly working there, and we'll pick up the ball on that as we get through the pandemic. 

[00:37:01] MB: Yeah, I think that's a great example of the fact that these principles can be applied to a broad swath of companies. Another small theme that you've shared a couple different times is this notion that you have to really address, challenge issues whether they're people problems or organizational structural business problems at the very front end. I really like that notion, that if you don't address the problems on the very front end, then they're going to multiply and become worse as the company scales or grows or as you add people to the organization. 

[00:37:33] TS: That's right. And I talk about this in the book. The full implementation of the three principles and the four practices creates a sealed container in the sense that problems come up in the system. There's a dialogue, respectful dialogue, collaborative dialogue to find a creative solution. There's commitment to solving that and it's an authentic commitment and things get solved. And this is going on at multiple levels at the same time in the organization without the necessity of top-down intervention. It's an organic, self-healing, self-correcting, self-regulating entity. And it's amazing when that happens. Suddenly people are happy and they're feeling productive and they're proud of their work and they're finding a great deal of meaning in their work life, which is where people want to find meaning as opposed to going through the motions. 

Google – I mean the survey firm, Gallup, sent two surveys ten years apart. Came up with the same thing, is that two-thirds of the employees are disconnected from their jobs. They go through the motions. It's not meaningful to them. You can think about the wasted capability. Now you're sitting in the conference room. The person on either side of you, they're not connected, they're not engaged, they're not contributing. They're not getting creative. They're not energized. They're not inspired. What a waste. This is the thing that – This approach is what creates that positive environment. People are engaged. They are energized, and that's why you can dramatically increase performance while cutting costs. 

[00:39:10] MB: Such a great insight. And Tom, for listeners who want to start to implement some of these ideas into their own lives or businesses, what would one action step be or action item that you would give them to start applying these practices today?

[00:39:28] TS: I would start by – There are different places you can start. One is to start to examine the system around you and assess the quality of the interactions to see whether people are truly listening to each other, they're trusting each other, opening their communication. They have a permissive attitude towards ideas and letting people speak up, or it's the opposite? I would tell you the system that you're in to the extent you can influence. You either are the leader or part of the leadership or can influence the leadership, then I would suggest presenting the idea of using these principles and practices and maybe preceding that with an assessment of the company based on this three-layer model, including the mindset and the four dimensions. Can be an interesting conversation on the executive team meeting, “How are we doing on these four dimensions? Where are we successful? Where are we failing?” as the starting point to really understand how to build this out. So those are some things you can do. 

The issue that people will ask about and have asked about in the past is, “Well, I’m in an organization. They really are screwed up. It's a bad culture. What should I do?” My answer is sort of what I just said, which is you try and influence direction. If you can't do it, it's what my first co-author called discovering gravity. You just discovered gravity.  You're in a system that's not going to change and you have to decide if you want to move on or you want to tolerate that system in this sub-optimal way. So it's not like you got insecure for all situations. It's going to require top-down. It's got to come from the leadership, and leadership's got to be open to this, and a lot of cases are not. 

[00:41:17] MB: Yeah, that's a great insight and one that if you really take a look at your situation you might realize that you can't create the change that you think is necessary. And maybe you need to jump ship. 

[00:41:28] TS: I was on a board of a public company, and the CEO was really good. It was a public company financing and nano-capital markets and so forth, but he's a very bad operational leader and was heading for trouble. He had a lot of trouble on his team. And I said – One of the concepts in the book is complementary partnering or what we call twinning. Two people have a mutual, total unconditional commitment to each other and help out listen to each other and so forth. And I offered that to him and he refused. He refused because he felt if he partnered with me he would show weakness that he had to get help. He refused to call for partnering. His stock went down, I mean, literally. It went down 99.98% as a result of his leadership and they ran up – I don't know, $60 million dollars in debt. And he said later to a colleague of mine, he says, “I should have listened to Tom,” but I could have helped him out. That's the cost of this kind of thing. 

[00:42:31] MB: And, Tom, where can listeners who want to read more or find more, et cetera, find you and your work online? 

[00:42:38] TS: the books available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I can be reached at tom@realteamswin.com. Happy to collaborate, respond to that. I’m also on LinkedIn. 

[00:42:50] MB: Well, Tom, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your story and your wisdom. Some great insights into how to build the right mindset in any organization. 

[00:43:01] TS: Terrific! Well, thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation. 

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