Greg Voisen
Hey, well welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. We have a returning guest on the show. Charlie was on the show many months ago. He owns a company called Productive Flourishing up in Oregon. And Charlie, good day. How are you?

Charlie Gilkey
I'm great. And Greg, I'm really excited to be back on the show. So thanks for having me for our second conversation.

Greg Voisen
Well, we're gonna be talking about Team Habits. This is the book. And It's the Small Actions that Lead to Extraordinary Results for teams. This is a hash a book, which is wonderful. And I'm going to let them know a little bit about you. Also, if you want to know more about Charlie, you can go to www.productiveflourishing.com. Twitter, it's at charliegilkey.com. And that's g-i-l-k-e-y. Charlie has advised hundreds of teams, fortune 100 companies to tiny nonprofits through productive flourishing. He's coached and trained companies that he's founded. Charlie is the author of the critically acclaimed start finishing, how to go from idea to done. He's also a former Army logistics officer and a near PhD in philosophy. How near

Charlie Gilkey
all but dissertation.

Greg Voisen
Alright, that's good to know. Because I have a master's in spiritual psychology. So I love it. Charlie lives in Portland, Oregon, thriving community was just up that way. Here you go. Team habits by Charlie Gilkey. Charlie, we, before we came on the air here to kind of talk about this, we literally were talking about productive flourishing. And I want people to know that Charlie mentioned something really important that for all those CEOs that are listening right now, kind of have to have your own personal plan before you go to the team plan, right. And he has prior books that address that. He also has an application now called momentum, that you can get an iOS or Android, and we're gonna give you a link to that. And I just want to mention that because it's the strategy that you kind of have to put together before you bring it to the teams to roll it out to the A and the B players, and whoever else is on your team. So that's a that's a good thing to know. Right? So hold on one second, we're gonna block this out. And so what I would say is that, you know, you had two other books prior to Team habits and your organization productive flourishing, we said, it was focused on helping people finish the most important work that they start. And I think that's true with everybody. It doesn't matter if it's me with the smaller organization and a podcast, or people who are running 1000 person company. It's like, did we finish what we started? How is your work now evolved into writing T hap teen habits? And why our team habits so important to make a shift in the productivity of the organization?

Charlie Gilkey
Yeah, well, I really appreciate that question. Because team habits is both something that I knew I would be writing a book like it before I finished start finishing. But also, as I was doing a lot of the conversations for start finishing the things that I knew I would be writing kept pulling out. So I deal with paradoxes. I love my work being focused around paradox. So start finishing, really addressed the paradox of why we don't do the things that matter most to us, like solving against procrastination is a different sort of scenario, because you know, we procrastinate on things we don't want to do. That's pretty obvious of why we're not doing it. We don't want to. But it's really a mystery of why we don't do the things we actually want to do most. And so start finishing handled that conversation. And as I said, I knew what's now team habits would be the second book, because it was like, Well, the first one was about how you get your best work done. And I knew the second one would be how we do that together. Right? So the code name for Team habits before it was team habits will start finishing together. Why habits are so important, is because so often when we look at changing our business or organization, the very first thing we do is try to change people changing people's really hard, super, super hard to change people. Most of the time, people don't want to be changed, especially by someone else. When really what we need to be thinking of is, what are the ways we're working with each other what I call work ways and those team habits, which is a subset of work ways that are really getting in the way of us wanting to do or getting to doing what we want to do. So that's the paradox on the team side. When you think about it, most of us love getting stuff done with other people. We're wired to have good relationships with other people. And we actually liked the idea of what we're going to accomplish. Those are three different things. So you would think that with that set of assumptions about who we are as people, teamwork would be easier than it is the teamwork. For many people, it's challenging. So, my approach and team habits is to take those Givens because that's fundamentally who we are as people and say, what's in the way of us doing what we most want to do?

Greg Voisen
Can I ask you a question, though, Charlie, because I think in today's world, and it, it just seems to be the more I have these conversations with people who have productivity apps to go for a day and second brain and all this kind of stuff, that it's the massive volumes of information that we've allowed to come off of our transit that's distracting us and getting the procrastination. Because we think we need to attend to all these other things as well, at the core of this, can you I mean, cuz, you know, I've studied the neuroplasticity, the way in which the brain works. And the reality is, it's firing, it's coming in, we're, we're seeing all this stuff come in, and we get more and more confused, and we get less and less done. Can you address that? Really? I know, it wasn't one of my questions, but it came up during this. Yeah, well,

Charlie Gilkey
part of it, and I'm gonna talk about it at the team level. But I think it's true at the individual level, right at the team and organizational level. The problem is we keep adding, and we're not subtracting, right? We just keep adding and keep adding and keep adding. And so when you look at Team habits around goal setting and prioritization, one of the first things I'm going to tell you is before you start adding a bunch of other stuff, your first factor should likely be subtracting. But subtracting takes far more courage and discipline than just adding another thing on. And so you know, I was writing about this this morning, because I was writing about team habits for your B hags, right. And I'm always skeptical when people start talking about B hags and 10x goals. I'm not pessimistic, I'm skeptical. And there's a big difference. I'm skeptical because most leaders are not willing to do the work that it takes to really invest in and prioritize a bee hag long enough for it to happen.

Greg Voisen
Well, we refer to bee hag big, hairy, hairy, audacious goal. I just had Shannon sesco on here, who owns a metronome, which is company has a piece of software, and they have consultants out there. And when she was talking about three hack, most companies will set a 10 year goal very few set a three year goal. Right? Where are you kind of sit in this behind because a lot of people will say, Well, this is my b hag. It's my biggest vision, it's, you know, it's 20 years from now, it's I mean, if you don't have proximal goals, right, you're never going to get to the B hag anyway, so you can set all the B hags you want.

Charlie Gilkey
Look, I am fundamentally a strategy execution guy more so than I'm a strategy generation guy. And I see far too many examples of organizations and visionaries, having gold declaration sessions, where they set goals, but are not willing to actually think through the strategy to execute those and think about what needs to change in their organizations. So I'm intensely skeptical of a lot of those exercises, in the sense where when I'm facilitating, and I'm part of those conversations, I'm like, Okay, we are going to spend some time during this section talking about real world changes and scenarios that are going to happen because of that change. And to get you to allocate budget, and priorities so that we can make that shift. Because really what you think about this, think about it from a team level, your team or organization is going one direction, it's got organizational inertia, everything's going that way. When you change the goal, it's not a straight line does not a motorcycle, or a car here, it's a cargo ship. So by the time you change directions, and get it to curve and you have that drift arc that happens, it takes longer than most people are around. So I was actually writing about this and saying that one of the challenges would be hacks, is people's tenure in the company is not long enough to actually see them through. And so what happens is new leader new B hag in the organization that just on one edge of that arc, has to start it again. It still doesn't get to where it was trying to go. And so you have to have I love that she's talking about three hacks. I'm really more of an OKR guy in the sense of like, okay, let's have a B hag. That's fantastic. You can do the three hag that's here, but I want to know what massive effort we're going to do. Do this year to break the inertia that we have going along this route. And I want to chunk that down to quarterly and get that down as close to the work as possible. Because otherwise, it's going to be yet another change initiative. That fails. I mean, let's get real, Greg. Two thirds to 75% of top down change initiatives fail? Oh, yeah. Right. So

Greg Voisen
very reason. So Charlie, what do you mean? There's a lot of people out there that see this book, and they'll go team habits haven't really heard that. I've talked about my own habits, changing tiny habits, but not team habits. What do you mean by it? And how small actions are actually leading to these significant outcomes in teams?

Charlie Gilkey
Okay. So I'm glad that you started that. Because we know what habits are at the personal level. And we know a lot about the habit science, like we don't have to go down that stuff. Right, read James clear as atomic habits. You're right. But we don't think Wait a second, my team has habits, there are things we do as a team together, that lead to certain outcomes. And so people a lot of times, let's just jump right into it. Because I know our listeners are thinking about it, meetings and meeting culture. People will come to me, Greg, and they'll be like, well, I need to change my meeting culture, because it sucks. And the first thing I say is I know what you mean. But if you want to change your meeting culture, you have to change specific meeting habits that are leading to outcomes that you don't want, right? That's how we change culture. So team habits are those typically implicit agreements that we have with our team, about how we do things. So it's easier to point out bad habits, sometimes some good habits. So I'll start with bad habits. Let's talk about the bad the bad meeting habit of showing up to a meeting. And it's 20 minutes in before people figure out why they're at the meeting. Right? You've wasted 20 minutes of people's life, and then they have to catch up and figure out Wait a second. That's why we're here. I didn't need to be here. Right. That's one very example. That's a small habit that we can change. If I were, you know, we, if I were king for the king of work for the day, I would say okay, here's one of the rules, no agenda, no meeting, period. If you can't take the time as the person proposing the meeting, to think through what we need to talk about, and give me a tentative schedule for time. You don't deserve my time. That's including team leaders and executives.

Greg Voisen
Know, I was I was bringing this up because I was listening to Tim Ferriss podcast with a guy I can't remember the name. But you know, they have no meetings. And he uses loom. Right? And, and I get that looms big thing. I started using it as a result of listening to the podcast, because I can see its effectiveness in communicating. What are your thoughts around the use of this kind of technology with teams, because we got all kinds of things, we got slack. We got this, we got that we got Asana, you and you mentioned it a minute ago, I use Asana in my company, with my assistant, it works quite well. What do you see, to be these team habits and the digital element that would be integrated into that? Because those we're still going to have those team meetings, it's just going to happen? The question is, can they be less? Can they be spread out? Can they be more effective? Can there be an agenda, all those kinds of things that you should address,

Charlie Gilkey
I'm probably going to be slightly contrarian here, because I have seen more of this no meeting trend. And when you look at who's saying that, and their role in the company, I think it's resting upon a lot of privilege and assumptions that don't actually work for a lot of the workforce. The fact of the matter is, people need mentoring. People need coaching, people need a space to really have a one on one conversation about what's going on with their work, and their talent development. You know, all of those types of things. And when you start looking at actually having a methodology and having ways to help people not only get today's work done, but tomorrow's work as well, and their skill development. You can have that in a series of 28 loons going back and forth. I think that's the least effective and least human way to have those types of conversations. So if they're saying, let's stop the update meeting, I'm on board. I'm 100% on board with that. But if they're really saying no meetings, and like no conversations, it really depends on how granular they get with that. Then I'm like, Well, what that's going to create and this is part of thinking about team habits that's going to create a downstream consequence. One of the downstream consequences if it's really strictly no meetings, which sometimes means no conversations, but sometimes doesn't. So it's a great headline, but if you do the work that you do the work that I do, actually out in the world, you'll see that that headline doesn't actually address Reality of work to your point.

Greg Voisen
And I, I'm certainly not opposed to meetings or no meetings, I'm saying that I'm hearing people today, because of the amount of times it's been in meetings in the billions of dollars that are potentially, people are saying wasted, I'm not gonna say they're wasted. I'm going to say that it's time well spent on many of them. And many of them, it's not time well spent. So it's really now the decision to have a meeting, and I want to talk about that, because you talked about three levels of decision making in a pyramid. And I think it really comes down to I've had many conversations lately with authors on books around how do you make decisions? Right? And so if you would, because that falls into a team, address that for us, because you put a actual graphic in the book?

Charlie Gilkey
Yeah, yeah. So there are three levels of decision making that I think, will cut down on a lot of the noise and crud and wasteful meetings, those are the ones that I want to get rid of, right? Where we hijack eight other people's time, just that Greg and I can talk about something. Let's stop, right, right. So three levels of decisions. A level one decision is a decision someone can make or an action they can take. And they don't need to tell anyone, just go and get it done. A Level Two decision is a decision they can make or an action they can take. But they need to tell someone, right, they need to tell either their manager, the team. And a level three decision is one, they can't make an action they can't take. But in the best teams, they provide a recommendation, or a tentative plan about how to proceed for someone who can make that decision to me. So the reason it's a pyramid is that in an ideal world, about 80%, of work, falls within level one decisions. People can just do their jobs, and don't need to tell anybody and we can get rid of this like Twitter stream of what we're doing all day. It's just noise and it's not helpful. Right? So you either trust your teammates to get the work done, or you don't and if you don't, that's talk about that along a different vector. Got it? Yeah, the second one is 15% will be level two decisions, where you make them because your team does need to know your manager does need to know. And then 5% Are those level three decisions. And so I want imagine the leaders here, let's imagine your day to day, if you just had to work on level three decisions with your team, you didn't get the updates, they didn't they weren't on your in your desk and or on your desk or in your office asking you a bunch of questions. And it was just those three those level three decisions where that was where your time need to be spent. And you spent your time educating your team about how those decisions are made, so that you can make fewer of them in future. This is 10x sort of know that purrito work that if you do that, meetings cut down project

Greg Voisen
right here 7550 And five rule applies and if it's only 5%, it's a smaller percentage of the decisions that need to go to somebody else to actually finally be made. You know, and from your perspective, what are the most common challenges that teams face when trying to build effective habits? And how does your methodology address these challenges? And how do we make better decisions as teams, so let's talk about those 75% of the decisions that we have to make or the 15% that we have to make as a team to make better decisions.

Charlie Gilkey
So part of maybe I'm maybe I'm a little contrarian here, but right now we have dueling managerial paradigms, right? In the sense where we still have the paradigm of if I see you working, if I see a head across the room, or if I see a butt in the seat, you're working and being productive, right? We have that paradigm still at play, which is part of in in 2023 and 2024, we're gonna see that paradigm pulling people back into office, because like, I don't know what you all are doing. But I know if I'm watching you, you're working. Okay. We also are in a place where we have a much more hybrid results for results focused work environment, to where it actually doesn't matter where my buddy is, or, or anything like that. It's if at the end of the week, I get my key things done. When you switch to this latter way, actually, you have to be more communicative about what needs to happen in advance. And so many of the leaders that are pulling people back in and just wanting to see heads aren't doing the work of saying here are the actual outcomes I need you to get in this timeline that's realistic. And if you get those, it's on your own. Right. Because they're not doing that. It's like well, I need you around so I can see you working and then because I'm doing a lot management I have to tell you week by week or day by day what you're doing,

Greg Voisen
you've created in the old command and control environment Which you're talking about, which is the one where I want to see you across the, you know, through the glass and make sure you're programming or whatever you're doing. We do see some of that coming back, we do. But you also said, before we started this show that you like to address what you see as the future of work. Now, I've read so many different books, and people have come on, about what the future of work is going to look like. And this affects teams, let's talk about it and team habits. Because if we're going to be responsible 100% for ourselves and our outcomes, okay, which is rule number one, from your degree in philosophy, right? And nobody else does it for you, meaning just you you've got to be responsible. How do you see this world of work where CEOs, midline, managers are trusting without a command and control environment, to actually allow people to work autonomously, and make those decisions to move the needle forward in the company.

Charlie Gilkey
So part of it goes to the to the organization's goal setting and prioritization habits, right. And so this is, you know, when we go back to sort of be hack things, if you set goals that are wildly unpredictable, or not wildly, wildly unachievable based upon, you're willing to your willingness to invest in them and prioritize them, you're going to continue to be in the place to where your teams are not getting those things done. So you don't trust that they're doing the work. So you continue in the cycle of that you're stuck. And you're stuck, you're stuck in the loop. But the loop, I want to be clear here, probably gonna piss a lot of leaders off today. But that's okay. It's part of my job. The loop is actually of your own design. Like your team, your organization typically does not get to set the goals and tell you based upon our current capabilities, and what budget we have, and everything, we can stretch get there. This is this is where I think we can go. And that's what we're going to build upon. That's not what actually happens. What actually happens in most organizations is it's like you need to get there and figure out how, regardless of the constraints that you have with the organization. So part of this is I really want to I really want team habits to change the dialogue about how some of these things get set, right. And so if I, let's pretend Greg and I are on a teammate,

Greg Voisen
are you assuming there's no exclusivity in this, I mean, because to be having an inclusive environment, you're listening to the team members, and you're listening to what they say as to how it might be achievable. Now, in every team, you've got a B, and maybe C players, different levels of acuity and different levels of skills, and people's perception of whether or not it's achievable for maybe somebody who is an A player and goes, yeah, yeah, we can do it. Or a B, or C player, that's going nah, isn't any way that I'm going to be able to get that done. You following me?

Charlie Gilkey
I am following you. Right? In any organization, you're always going to have that to have A, B and C players. Yeah, you don't necessarily want your BNC players to be the standard setters because you're likely going to get B and C results. But it's also true that if you focus only on what the A players to do, the A players will assume everyone else is exactly like them. And set goals that obviously you are not going to work because not everyone else is exactly like them. Right. And so you actually use some of the wisdom of the crowds here, which is a thing we know from the Internet, we know like this is what works is you take you know sort of a mean line and add a little bit more. When we look at goal setting science, we know that if it's merely an easily achievable goal, you're actually more likely not to achieve that goal, because you're unlikely to invest the level of effort it takes to get there. But we also know that unless there's extreme organizational backing, having one of those epic goals where you're going to like 10x, your business in a year is also not going to work. Because people are like, I don't understand how I'm going to attend to the business of today and do this new thing without you removing something. So what we look at is stretch goals. And so as I said earlier, I use more of the LKR way of thinking about this. So that's objective and key results. And really, we look at goals that we want that are in the 55 to 60% achievable rate, like the confidence level,

Greg Voisen
leisure push and pull goals that you mentioned in the book, slightly different.

Charlie Gilkey
I'll get to that in a second. Right. But when you look at that actual target, that level of confidence that works well for a lot of teams is in that 55 to 65% range, you know, it's likely that you're going to achieve MIT, but you can't phone it in. Right? You can't just pretend like it's going to happen. So you have to worry about sandbagging and things like that. But that's where I would go on this sort of like one of the things we have to get to is where teams are actually brought into a stretch goal conversation, and builds the pathways such that the team then can commit to that goal and say, Yeah, I believe we can do that. It's going to be challenging, but we can do that versus getting some goal where they have no idea where it came from.

Greg Voisen
But you said that he's 5%. And I go back to that old chart of a stretch goal, where you saw people with their skills abilities, versus their ability to achieve the goal. Okay. And that's been around for a long time, as long as I've been on this planet, and you know that as well. So if I've got somebody's in a beach chair, and I put that stretch goal in and I don't feel confident, and I'm in this team, what do you do? I mean, what are, you know, you referred to in the books is, in the book, this goal setting prioritization, and this push goal versus this pool goal? How, what is that? What does that mean to teams? Why is that?

Charlie Gilkey
So? Most goals from an organization are push goal, meaning someone sets the goal and pushes people to get that. So you can even hear it in the language around how people think about, well, how do I get my team to achieve the goal? It turns out that typically, if you're in that conversation, you are compelling your team to do something that either they don't understand and haven't committed to, and you're trying to motivate them to do something that is not in alignment with what they see is going on. Right? That is one of the hardest ways to lead and manage people is just to continually make them do stuff, pull goals use both the individuals of the teams, but also the team's collective affinities to decide to sort of frame that in that. And the thing about it is Greg, it might actually be the same destination, you might be trying to get your team to go to the same place. But there's one way in which you say you're going to this place, make it happen, I'm going to compel and push you to do it, versus enrolling the team to go through that place. And then because they want to go there, they've seen it, they believe, and they want to drive there your management posture shifts from like pushing and whipping people to get a goal to supporting and removing things that are in their way. Right? Very important. It's a very important distinction. And I know because I have my own company, and I've led plenty of other scenarios. I know there's a time in, which is like, Look, you get paid to do a job, just do the job I tell you to do. I know how I know that I've been there. I will tell you in every experience where someone has said that, or I've said that I got the very opposite thing of what I wanted, right? In every circumstance was like, look, okay, let's pause for a second. Let's talk about where we're going.

Greg Voisen
You've allowed Charlie your emotion to get into the way of the logic madness behind what it is because, you know, we're human beings, we're all of us playing on the team are human beings, we have emotions, we have feelings, we get hurt. There's a lot of things that go on, it's a quite a dynamic, to be honest with you. And I think one of the things that you're really good at, is how you craft clear communications, and being proactive. And I want to address this and then one time to run out so that we get this, what is effective communications look like within a high performance team or organization, in your estimation, because you just showed an example in your own smaller company, where you allowed your emotions to do something and you didn't get there. And you know that everybody on that team has got their own set of emotions in their own whatever. But when it comes down to it, many of them are not saying it. They're keeping it to themselves. And they don't want to express it. What do you do to help create clear communications and give people a safe place to talk?

Charlie Gilkey
Well, there are really two different things that we're talking about there. So one, if people have no room to actually say what's on their mind, and how they feel about it, and all that kind of whatnot, what you're going to get is a culture of toxic positivity, to where you have two options, you can be habitually enthusiastic about everything and be a yes person. Or you can be quiet. Those are your two options. And most people, I'm one of those people that wake up naturally enthusiastic, I'm a possible Attarian, I can see that right. Most people are a lot of people are not like me, right? And so if their only option is to pretend to be like too early or be quiet, they're going to be quiet, which means we're not going to tap into the intelligence of the team and of the organization. And we're not going to know what's real. We're just going to have a bunch of wide eyes like me, saying what we can do and everybody else be like, well, we'll do the best Right. So one is to make it okay for people to address their concerns them addressing a concern about a project or a goal is not them being pessimistic. Right? They are trying to what if we inverted that and say they are trying to figure out how they can be a useful part of the project and not set the team up for failure. Because when you do after action reviews, and a lot of teams, and I'm brought in to do these, there typically is about a third of the team, where if they were being honest, knew before they committed to the project, that it wasn't going to work. Right, because of other things. And they just didn't have a space to say it. So they just saw themselves in their team running into a ditch. And because of the culture, they couldn't say anything about it. Right? And so then they gotta sit in a meeting later and chart two things I know. So one is to say, Hey, I am actually before we make this decision and pulling teams into the call setting and prioritization conversation in the planning conversations, like let's get it out, y'all. Let's do a pre mortem, why is this not going to work? What do we need to address? What's in your way, Greg? What's in your way, Charlie? And then as leaders do our job to say, Okay, I got it, I heard it, there are some of those things that I can address.

Greg Voisen
I think currently, that's the best bit of advice you've given anybody on the show right? Now? And I'll tell you why. Because you're doing a pre mortem is what you're saying. And you're saying, let's talk about the obstacles that you see getting in the way of us achieving it, before we actually even go out and do it. So that we can help you remove those obstacles to make it easier to achieve it. And that's a very big thing. In all of this, and that's what you said, when I asked you this question about clear communications. That's it because if psychologically, what's going on with me, and my own personal growth and development, is that I have a not enough enoughness? Complex? I'm not gonna speak up if I don't feel enough, right? If I feel out of place within the team, but if Charlie gives you permission to speak up, and you don't, that's your own fault, because he said, what's going to get in your way of achieving this goal? Do you know, you, I'd like to actually talk about in the time remaining some real world case study stories of teams, organizations that have successfully applied team habits. It's obviously not a new term. But it's also something that people need to think about. So for the most positive outcome and performance and getting the most of their tasks completed, what would you say is that give us an example of a case study that you've done, and how it worked and what you applied it to? How you applied team habits to it.

Charlie Gilkey
Yeah, so I'm actually going to give you a fairly extreme version of this, because I was working with a client. And we had been working on what's now team habits, I had different language for it at the time, but we were working on it. And she was at a point to where she was considering doing two things at once, acquiring another team and moving their team into a completely new physical space. Right. Now, by the way, if you've ever tried to do any of those, you know, one is hard enough to do both at the same time is really tricky. But she decided to do both, because as I was explaining this acquisition and mergers, like what you're gonna have is two organizations with completely different team habits come together, and try to figure out what their new normal is in a new space at the same time. So because they are a landscape designer and sort of architect firm, that's what they do. She actually decided to completely redesign her physical space to use team habits and sort of as the foundation so a few things that we did, I'll tell you what we did, and didn't tell you the outcomes, right? I say we, but it's mostly her. So I'll say what she did. Instead of doing the stupid thing to where we make people commute to an office, and then put headphones on, so they can drown everybody else and look at a screen. She redesigned the space so that it was optimized for collaboration. So there's a bunch of makerspaces and collaboration spaces, they come together and build things. They do all of that sort of stuff, because that's why people want to come together. It's incredibly hard to have a whiteboard on Zoom, right? And so if you're doing that type of thing, it's better to be in person, and the people get to choose that. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself. So the other rule is if you're just doing admin office work, do it from wherever you want to from home coffee shop doesn't matter, right? You decide. There's the only mandate that they have is that there's about three hours I believe they may they play with it to see what it is to where you're required to be in a collaborative posture with your team, three hours of the day. What that looks like, is determined by the team leader, not by her and not by the individual because a team leader probably has the best view of what the team actually needs. And can say, actually, Hey, Greg, Charlie, we're going to be doing this exercise today. They don't need three hours, they don't need three hours. Typically they do because of the type that they do. But I think at this point, they have the communication protocols such that that's a real conversation, and the team can decide, hey, we know that's your standard three hours, we don't have it today, we're going to focus on this other work that we're gonna get done. And then they do that I

Greg Voisen
liked the design, design sounds great. So what was the outcome of all of this great change in environment and providing these guidelines, I'm not going to call them rules, because they were guidelines, they didn't say, Hey, you have to, they basically said, hey, it's up to the team leader to decide how we're going to meet three hours a day, in a collaborative environment. So maybe we're all going down to Starbucks and sit at a table, maybe we're gonna meet in the office, whatever, what happened for her in a standpoint of engagement, productivity, positivity, the change in the environment.

Charlie Gilkey
So I can talk about the engagement and positivity and morale more so than I could talk about the specific results. Um, although I can give you some of those. So the first thing that happened is the, like, come back to the office and cajoling people to come back to office went away. Because it turned out that people actually wanted to come and work with their colleagues, when it made sense to do so. And so that hole, do we are we in office? Are we hybrid? What are we doing, it actually evaporated, because it ended up being a labeling issue. And teammates got to decide what worked for them, and individuals got to decide what worked for them. So because of that morale went up, right, because they're like, Oh, we don't have to do this. And because of that project flow increased, you know, some of those things that you care about in her type of forum get better. So time on task or project, ability to get things done on time on, you know, on, on time, so I don't have the percentages yet, because we're still working through some of this to normalize it. But we saw it immediately an immediate Upshot in that. Now, I have to tell you about some of the downsides of this, though, because that's just how I am you, right? Part of what shifted in this. And this is the challenge. And Peter Drucker actually came up with this like 60 years ago, like this has been around for a long time, we knew that the shift to knowledge working was going to be a massive paradigm shift for so many people. Because deciding what you're doing today, based upon your own priorities, and things like that is not a skill set, you learn anywhere. We don't teach that in school. We don't teach that in the trade schools, we don't teach it. And so much of our team had to learn how to make good decisions and prioritization on their own. And so in the short term that led to some decision fatigue, and a little bit over of, you know, overwhelmed when it came to that now, they worked through that when they realized, wait a second. For a lot of days, there's no one right answer here. Like I can work on this from there, or I can the next day do something different. So they learn to be more adaptable, and less rigid about it. But learning how not to do learning how to be adaptable, and less rigid, is a task for many people.

Greg Voisen
fluidity, right? I think we work in a world today where people have to be flexible, there has to be fluidity. I've had Steven Kotler on here so many times to speak in about, you know, our brain chemistry and how it works and how we work as human beings and that it really comes down to that it's like, okay, I can be curious, hopefully have a team that is curious. Secondly, you hope that they all have a purpose, and the purpose is aligned with the company, they get that as well. You hope that there's a vision that somebody at the top is set that we're all working toward, and a common alignment and ground, which goes back in history, a zillion years, then you're going to set some goals, and you're going to set some proximal goals, and you're going to work toward those goals. But the pre work upfront, to actually get to doing the other things is so much more important than the work itself. Right. And that's brings me to this while the book is emphasizing the power of these small actions, which is I'm now getting down to the proximal goals. How do these micro habits align with kind of a broader organizational goal and vision especially when we're working in a team? Because, you know, if I said to you, hey, I have a sauna and I have 18 things to do today. Well, I don't know if all I can personally say this. I can't tell you that all 18 things that might have been on my list. Were part of the bigger overall picture for the goal of the company. I can tell you there are things that came up in between that as an A player I needed to get done. But that doesn't mean they're being done towards this larger vision or goal today.

Charlie Gilkey
Yeah, I'm, again, I want a two way dialogue here, right? Because if I'm an A player, and I'm getting the things that are really driving my work forward or seem to be driving my work forward, done, and that's not driving organizational priorities, what happened there? I was my job, so out of alignment with the organizational priorities, that merely me winning at my role is not enough. It'd be like it's football season. So I'm gonna use analogy. It'd be like having a star quarterback that does, he throws, and people catch it. And they do all the things. But there are no points on the board at the end of the day, like, how did we get? How does that activity not line up with points on the board? And so that's why I want that two way dialogue. Because if I'm Charlie, a high achiever, doing my thing, getting sales, whatever my job is, and then someone comes to me, they're like, well, that's really out of alignment with the organization. But like, but how, where did that? Why am I firing off of this old plan? Well, I call it ghost plans. And this happens a lot in organizations, their goals, plans, because people who are in the room making the plan, either don't distribute the plan, or they don't tell people when there's been an update to the plan.

Greg Voisen
Yeah. Charlie Gilkey Charlie Gilkey. I know, I can say this with 100% confident is very curious. And Charlie Gilkey also puts a lot on his plate. It doesn't mean because I've seen what you produce here just in the last few years. It doesn't always mean it's 100% in alignment with that bigger vision. Precisely. And that is part of the issue, isn't it? I mean, we like we're human beings, we like variety. We like different things. We like things that sometimes take up off of task, because it's fun. It's exciting. Maybe the one that was on task isn't as much exciting is what I hate to be like the Doomsayer here but no, no, I

Charlie Gilkey
like I love you being a doomsayer, Greg, because I want us to have the real conversation. And you're absolutely right. I can look back and we're making some changes my business because I'm looking back over the last year and change. And I'm like, I've been doing some things that have not been going have not been getting the result that we want it now it took me enough time. And enough data to look at and be like, oh, I thought it was going to do x, it did not do X, right? I need to make a change, because that's not working. Right. And so

Greg Voisen
you'll figure it out that it didn't do X is the key. But sometimes, you know, there's an enticement into those other things. And you'll hang out with them for a long time and they suck a ton of energy. And then they dissipate, and it doesn't turn out the way that you wanted. And then you're like, oh, okay, spend all that time on that thing, right?

Charlie Gilkey
Well, let's talk about it. Because we're talking ostensibly around team habits, like I started the journey for Team habits two years ago, right? Every seed that I planted, every sort of every plant that I fertilized all of that sort of work, I would I didn't know if it was going to work until the book came out. And so that's the thing about strategic projects that I wish we talked more about right? is most of the things that are behind, we sort of talked a little bit about it, most of those are going to take a significant amount of time to play out. But because of the artificial corporate cycle, or artificial time cycle that we put things on, it's like you got to show results in a quarter. For real, I can do exactly the right thing, and not show you the full results of what happened in a quarter. And so if you constrain me to always making quarter side like hitting things that I can hit in a quarter, I'm not going to do my best work, your players are not going to do their best work. Because think about this, let's talk about sales, let's get rid, let's get it most of your best, most profitable sales are going to take a while to play off to play out. Someone, one salesperson may need to cultivate that sell for six months or a year. Right? If you are always just looking at what activity they did today, and what short term thing it created, what you are going to do is incentivize your best performers to do the same thing to do the same thing. And then what you're going to do, though, here's what you're going to do, and I'm going to be the counter Deus err, you were then going to have a performance meeting with them about them not hitting bigger level goals. Think about that.

Greg Voisen
And here's the duality of that. The duality is that the CEO sitting in the position has all these salaries to pay and all these people to keep benefits for and all this stress associated with whatever he or she is having to run. And so they're saying those small, incremental little achievements in sales were to choose the sales, even though maybe it wasn't that $10 million sale that I was hoping would occur that took, you know, three years to cultivate that activity and because you're too I've got about an area now that I'm very familiar with, which is sales and marketing, right. And it's a challenge to continue to juggle these long term relationships, while at the same time making those smaller sales that are feeding the kitty to keep it going right. And you bring up a really important area there. But I ask you this, we're in this rapidly changing world of work that face you and I have been talking about this for the last 40 minutes. It is changing, especially remote teams, digital nomadism, all the stuff that we can bring out. How do you envision the evolution of Team habits in really the coming years? In other words, I'm sitting here at 2023. Let's say I went to 2033. Okay, what do you see the world of work looking like? What do you see team habits then becoming? And you're maybe not the progress procrastinator or procrastination. But you can actually say if they had a crystal ball, if you did if Charlie Gilkey had a ball, based on this prior years of experience. And moving forward five years, let's say, what do you what do you see, because I'll everybody who's listening today, it's going team habits. Great, I love it. I love this Charlie guy, I see what he's talking about. We got to do there. But we know that the evolution of the workplace is going to occur whether or not we're, we're doing it or not, it's got to happen.

Charlie Gilkey
So I'm going to posit and hedge at the same time. One of the reasons I wrote team habits was so that the teams and the organizations of teams learn to adapt, as they go along, I talked about eight categories of Team habits, those are not going to change, right? I want to install a methodology such that the team can look at what they're doing and be like, hey, team, this is not working on my team. I mean, something I didn't address this earlier, the four to eight people you spend 80% of your time working with that you have an incredible amount of rapport with it's mean, Greg, if Greg and I are having a meeting, and it sucks, we can say, Hey, Greg, I love you as a person, you know, I got your back. But this ain't it, we got to do something different. And we can do that with the four to eight people that are part of our core team. And so the eight core habits of you know, decision making, goal setting and prioritization, planning, communication and collaboration, the core team habits that I'll talk about that are sort of what we do that are personal effectiveness habits, I can go through all of them, those categories are going to remain important, because they have been for the last millennia. Right? Not going to

Greg Voisen
try I look at Hold on. I look at this. Somebody actually is in your backyard, which is April, Renee, you probably know her. Yeah. Eight I mean, she's in Portland, she's got to know you, if you don't know her

Charlie Gilkey
know, we know each other person.

Greg Voisen
But I'm saying this, these superpowers for thriving and constant change. That and I the reason I brought back up her podcast is because I remember specifically, she had eight superpowers. And in your team book, you have really kind of gone down this path, right? To prepare people for what is to come? Yep. Okay. And I think that's a very important element, Charlie, is that, you know, people who are sitting in those big seats, they want to know what's around the corner. They're looking to see what's going to affect their workforce and their productivity. They're looking to see where are they going to get great A players from? They're looking to see how am I going to build more teams. And I'm saying you've addressed mentioned that in this book, you've addressed most of what needs to happen to make this happen. Now, if you were to give these listeners today, like useful takeaways, from each chapter, which you've got, won't be the three key takeaways or insights you'd like the listeners to walk away from after reading. And for my listeners, this is the book Charlie Gilkey team habits, how small actions lead to extraordinary results. What would you what would you inform them of?

Charlie Gilkey
So three from the entire book, I would focus levels of decision making is just such a game maker game changer that when we talked about that earlier, because it removes so much of the team chatter and waste, too. What I would say is make habits out of building belonging for your team, because it turns out that high belonging is a necessary component of high performance. You can get performance without belonging, but you can't get high performance without belonging. I agree. And the third thing that I want us to normalize more, I'm in I'll take this direction, you probably didn't think about it is for us to use our team's actual capacity to help them prioritize what they should be working on. And I know that sounds obvious when I say it, but it's not done so much in the workforce, right? And so if you did those three things, and open it up so people can have the conversations, the the hope that I put out the dream that I put out to answer your question, because that leader, as you mentioned, is looking what's going to be around the corner? Well, how am I going to adapt? How am I going to evolve? I'm going to say, what if it wasn't on you? What if it was on the teams that you've created that see before you do and adapt before you do and tell you how they've adapted in a way that's in alignment with the priorities that you've set? What if you didn't have to figure it out? Right, that is the world that I want to set up. I don't want our teams and companies to be future proof. I want them to be future ready. Installing the team habits that we've talked about that work for your team, but also the meta habit of the team being able to change and adapt as it needs to without higher ups telling them anything. And without those A players having to drag everything is the single best way to make a resilient organization that can adapt for the future that requires far less management and leadership than what we've been doing. So I don't know how virtual work is going to be five or 10 years from now, I do know that hybrid is normal. Hybrid is going it's currently normal. And there's not going to be this Are we in office or remote? It's going to be everybody's hybrid, in one way or the other because we're already there. Let's get over that conversation. But the real question becomes how do we let teams how do we provide the tools so that teams can themselves determine when they need to meet in person? And when it doesn't make sense? How do we open it up? So we say, Look, your team collaboration and bonding budget for this year is $30,000, you all decide how you want to use that I'm not planning your strategic retreat anymore, right? I'm not planning that there's the budget, figure it out, you actually don't need to tell me. All right, to have that level of trust, to have that level of guidance that we sit down and that culture, that's what high performing companies are going to do. And we start that they're tiny habits of breaking down the barriers that make that not the norm.

Greg Voisen
Well, I've kind of always said that accountability creates autonomy. And, you know, there's an equal equation there, if you can be accountable for what it is that is trying to be achieved. You can also have this autonomy, nobody's gonna be looking over your shoulder, if you're getting stuff done, that needs to be done. That is part of the strategy and the plan, and so on. So with that, you know, it's like any good soccer team football team basketball team, you have to have a high level of intuition of who you're going to pass the ball to, with their ability to actually take the ball down the court, or take it down the field, and actually then pass it to somebody else with a high degree of intuition that you believe could kick the goal, make the basket, or throw the ball to the infield for for, you know, goal. And that is teamwork. And I think there is a tremendous amount of, you know, you're getting a doctorate in philosophy, there's, there's a lot to be said. And my book was called hacking the gap, a journey from intuition to innovation and beyond. And I believe that intuition is a big factor that people need to foster with inside themselves, to figure out who the right players are that they want to pass the ball to, that can do it. And also, you can't get anything done unless you've got those right players on the team. Yeah, so yeah, Team habits, is it? Yeah, there you go. Everybody go out and get this book. Get it? Today. I have a link up to Amazon parting words, you're about ready to say something, Charlie?

Charlie Gilkey
What I was gonna say is, yes, I am a philosopher by training, but similar to the inside of Team habits, actually comes from my work with clients and the army and things like that it comes from the real world. Right? And just from that perspective, I have seen individuals and teams who are given the capability to rise to the challenge, do so much faster than people think they can. Right? And so we're in this moment that I hope people hearing this podcast will say, okay, what would happen if I encouraged my teammates to work on their team habits, and I stopped trying to change people, and what would happen if I pointed them in, in directions that made sense to them? And, and step back and let it happen. Let's step back and let that team win. We've tried the white knuckle, get it done. And we've had to do that in a way over the last few years. But we are merging. So I hope that you'll hear this and say, Look, we need to start rebuilding work trust with each other.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, that the executives need to let go and trust. Yeah, and for them to try what you're talking about right now requires that I think that it's a matter of, you know, you talk about a players will hopefully those executives or a players, hopefully those executives are open to new ideas. Hopefully, they're flexible. If they're not, they may not be the right person to help bring that company into the modern world as we see it today. So you know, your book is great, it's an opportunity for my listeners and readers to go learn more about teen habits. Also, as I mentioned way earlier in this podcast, if your personal, just gonna say it shit isn't together, go to productive flourishing. And look at the application called momentum to actually get your stuff organized and put together before you start working with your teams if you're a team leader, or an executive, because as Charlie said, that is a big factor. And we're going to have Charlie back on to really talk about that. And more of a I want to call focused way. So for all of you who want to know more, go to productive flourishing.com can find more about Charlie can learn more about the book will have a link to Amazon for the book. You can also see Charlie out on other podcasts as well, but also YouTube channel. So check that out as well. And, Charlie, it's been an honor having you on honestly, every time we've done this, and we've only done it twice now. I get so much from our interviews. So thanks for that. And thanks for your approach to what you're calling team habits, not tiny habits, but team habits.

Charlie Gilkey
I appreciate that. Likewise, always a great time, Greg. I look forward to our next one. And yeah, let's do that.

Greg Voisen
All right, you take care.

Charlie Gilkey
You too.