The Remarkable Leadership Podcast

00:00:08:09 - 00:00:30:04
Kevin Eikenberry
You are on teams. You likely lead teams. And you know that not all teams are created or succeed equally. If you would like to understand how to unlock greater success for your teams and for groups. First of all, I'm guessing you'd like to do that. And if you would, you're in exactly the right place. You're going to love this episode.

00:00:30:07 - 00:00:54:20
Kevin Eikenberry
Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast, where we are helping leaders grow personally and professionally to lead more effectively and make a bigger, positive difference for their teams organizations in the world. If you are listening to this podcast in the future, you can join us live to be a part of this sooner. To have more of an impact on it, and again, mostly to get the information sooner.

00:00:55:02 - 00:01:20:03
Kevin Eikenberry
To find out how and when and where we do that, you can join us on our LinkedIn or Facebook pages. Two of the places where we stream these episodes live. You can learn more by going to a remarkable podcast.com/facebook or remarkable podcast.com/linkedin. Do that to get the inside scoop and to join us in the future. Today's episode was brought to you by my latest book, Flexible Leadership.

00:01:20:04 - 00:01:40:00
Kevin Eikenberry
Navigate uncertainty and lead with confidence. It's time to realize that styles can get in our way and that following our strengths might not always be the best approach. In a world where that is more complex and uncertain than ever, leaders need a new perspective, a new set of tools in order to create the great results that organizations and teams want and need.

00:01:40:00 - 00:02:04:20
Kevin Eikenberry
And that's where flexible leadership comes in. It can provide those things to you. Learn more. Order your copy now at remarkable podcast.com/flexible. And with that, it's time for me to bring in my guest. If you're with me live or are watching the video here he is. Let me introduce him to you and then we'll get started. Colin. Fisher, is.

00:02:04:21 - 00:02:36:20
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, it's Doctor Colin M Fisher to be a pro, to be appropriately at that and honest. He, has been a professional jazz trumpet player. And because of that, he's always been fascinated by group dynamics. As an associate professor of organizations and innovation at University College London School of Management. His research has uncovered the hidden processes of helping groups and teams in situations requiring creativity, improvization and complex decision making.

00:02:36:22 - 00:03:03:12
Kevin Eikenberry
He's written about group dynamics in both popular science and management audiences. His work has been profiled in prominent media outlets such as the BBC, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, NPR, and The Times. And now in his great new book, The Collective Edge Unlocking the Secret Power of Teams. Here it is. My copy is not the official one, because I have one that came out before the book came out, which as of this conversation was a week ago.

00:03:03:13 - 00:03:07:22
Kevin Eikenberry
Colin, thanks for joining us and thanks for writing a great book.

00:03:08:00 - 00:03:11:18
Colin Fisher
Thanks so much for having me and for that fantastic intro. Kevin.

00:03:11:20 - 00:03:21:09
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, even though I bobbled it earlier and that's only because before we came online, I said, you know, about twice a year I will babble the intro. And so that's I put that in my head, I.

00:03:21:09 - 00:03:23:00
Colin Fisher
Suppose jinxed you. Yeah.

00:03:23:07 - 00:03:43:18
Kevin Eikenberry
So let's start here. You've been playing the trumpet and and been interested in jazz for a long time. You talk a little bit about that in the book, but I'm guessing that even though you early on really wanted to understand a lot about group processes and group, stuff, you probably didn't necessarily when you were, I don't know, ten, 12 years old, expect you to be doing what you're doing today.

00:03:43:20 - 00:03:54:06
Kevin Eikenberry
So just tell us beyond beyond the jazz piece. Like what sort of leads you? What's the journey that gets you to us having this conversation?

00:03:54:08 - 00:04:04:03
Colin Fisher
Yeah. It's, you know, it's the typical story, right? You go to music conservatory and then you become a business school professor after after that. Right. So.

00:04:04:04 - 00:04:09:10
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, okay, if it's going to be that obviously you're going to be we're going to follow the cliche that maybe we should just go.

00:04:09:12 - 00:04:34:03
Colin Fisher
Right. So, yeah, it's a it's a funny journey because obviously not that many people have heard of organizational behavior when they're ten, 12 years old, unless you're, you know, close with a parent or loved one who is into that. So I, you know, as as you were saying, I was a jazz musician. I had just finished music conservatory, in Boston.

00:04:34:03 - 00:04:57:22
Colin Fisher
So I went to New England Conservatory in Boston. And then, like all good aspiring jazz musicians, I moved down to New York City, tried to kind of make it in the Big Apple there. And as I was doing that, I found this program at NYU that was called Individualized Study. So you basically get to make up whatever masters degree you want to make up.

00:04:58:00 - 00:05:23:10
Colin Fisher
And I decide to study improvization across different art forms and kind of compare them, because I really was fascinated with this idea of how it is that people can spontaneously come up with something that they've never thought of before. And that as I was doing my master's thesis research, I came across the work of, a woman named Theresa mobley, who was studying the social psychology of creativity.

00:05:23:12 - 00:05:50:20
Colin Fisher
And I thought, this is pretty interesting. And, you know, I, I was a studious guy that I was thinking about PhDs and, and so I looked, I looked her up, and it turned out she was in this field called organizational behavior and teaching at Harvard, the Harvard Business School. And so I said, hey, I want to understand the conditions that, allow teams to improvise creatively.

00:05:50:22 - 00:06:06:17
Colin Fisher
And, you know, to my everlasting surprise, she thought that was a good idea, too. And that that and that, that was something that was worth studying. And I was a good person to study it with. So we started working together on that. And, from there, the rest is history.

00:06:06:19 - 00:06:14:10
Kevin Eikenberry
Leading us all the way to the book, The Collective Edge. What's what would you say? Calling is the big idea of the book.

00:06:14:12 - 00:06:39:14
Colin Fisher
The big idea is we need groups. They're all around us. We group dynamics are influencing every part of our lives. Even when there's no group, they're there in our heads affecting what we say and what we do. But we ignore them and that we're just kind of pushed around by group dynamics, kind of like it's this invisible wind.

00:06:39:16 - 00:06:59:01
Colin Fisher
And we focus a lot on how to change ourselves. We sometimes, you know, if you're in the business world, you may see a lot of books on strategy for your whole organization, but we kind of skip over this group level. We don't think nearly as much about how do we get the most out of our groups and teams.

00:06:59:03 - 00:07:05:21
Colin Fisher
What's so special about them and why they're different than managing individuals or managing whole organizations?

00:07:05:23 - 00:07:23:16
Kevin Eikenberry
So I have a question that I don't know. Maybe no one's asked you this or I don't know. Yeah. I'm curious because most books, written about this kind of thing. If if there's a word in the subtitle of the word in the subtitle is going to be team or teams, and you use the word groups.

00:07:23:21 - 00:07:30:10
Kevin Eikenberry
So how are they the same or different, and why did you choose groups rather than teams.

00:07:30:12 - 00:08:03:08
Colin Fisher
So I think teams, you know, are the groups group, right. The kind of like platonic ideal of the most group thing you can be where you have these, you know, small sets of interdependent people working together towards a collective goal. That and so teams, you know, I do think have a very specific meaning. And they are, like I said, the sort of best kind of group to be in if what you want is to get work done.

00:08:03:09 - 00:08:32:16
Colin Fisher
But what I wanted to tell the story of wasn't just the story of real teams, which I think people usually associate with work teams or with, you know, sports teams or things like that. But I also wanted to tell the story of how group dynamics is affecting your life at home. How it's helping us to understand politics and what's going on at the highest levels of government, how it's affecting basically almost everything.

00:08:32:18 - 00:08:52:07
Colin Fisher
And so I am, you know, primarily I, I am a researcher who studies teams for the most part. But I wanted to kind of bring the science of teams and take it just out of the kind of boardrooms and, and, you know, project management world and to kind of bring it in, bring it to everyone else as well.

00:08:52:09 - 00:08:58:12
Colin Fisher
So I, I did choose that on purpose. And I think that's a that's a great first question. And I have not been asked that.

00:08:58:19 - 00:09:27:10
Kevin Eikenberry
So I will say, that you and I talked about before we, before we hit record, before we went live, that there's a specific chapter about polarization that I think we could have the whole conversation about here. And it's one of the things I try to find or usually it finds me in every book I read or every one of these conversations I have the thing that will stick with me, and it's that chapter that will probably stick with me the most.

00:09:27:10 - 00:09:54:12
Kevin Eikenberry
And the reason I'm saying that now is, is obviously to complement you. But beyond that, to say, I don't know, for all of you who are listening that will even get there in this conversation, because we do need to get at the Timi ness stuff, that high end of the group ness stuff, as you mentioned. And and so we may not get there, but there are great things in this book that do go beyond, maybe the the tactical or even strategic that we need to be thinking about, as relates to the show.

00:09:54:13 - 00:10:17:05
Kevin Eikenberry
So that's where we're going to go. But I do think there's one of the thing we need to do before we go start to dive in. And that is and you talk about this at some length, especially in Western culture, you know, we have this belief that, there are these lone geniuses that they are they magically make things happen out of air.

00:10:17:05 - 00:10:36:20
Kevin Eikenberry
And that certainly is true, is far less true than we believe it to be. So, like, let's talk about what you call I think you call it the lone genius myth. Talk about that just a little bit. Because if we're going to if we're going to be effective as leaders of teams and groups, we need to be clear about this ourselves and help our teams with it as well.

00:10:36:22 - 00:10:59:04
Colin Fisher
Yeah. So the myth of the lone genius is this idea that we when we look back at history and we try and explain it, we tend to focus on these great individuals, you know, that we're we're trying to tell the story of Steve Jobs or of Einstein or of, you know, whatever. Pick the sort of lone genius that that you look up to the most.

00:10:59:06 - 00:11:40:01
Colin Fisher
And there's good reasons, if we understand our own psychology, that we want to do that first, it's easier for us to relate to it, right? That we we live our lives as individuals. And so it's easy for us to kind of relate to a story that's about someone else who's experiencing the world as an individual, but it's also because of what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error, which and that's called fundamental because this is at the basis of so many of the cognitive mistakes that we make, and that what we do is when we're trying to explain why someone else does something, we tend to use their traits, their personality, things about them as an

00:11:40:01 - 00:12:05:10
Colin Fisher
individual to understand. And, you know, why were you late? You know, why did you say that thing I found, you know, vaguely insulting? Well, you know, it must be because, you know, you're lazy or you're you're rude and that those are the kinds of explanations that especially when we're not thinking very hard that we use and we systematically underweight the situation and the context that that these things are happening in.

00:12:05:12 - 00:12:35:19
Colin Fisher
And that part of that, for whatever reason, we look at groups as a big part of that context. And so, you know, in the book, I kind of peel back some of these lone genius myths. I look at the discovery of of the double helix structure of DNA. I talk about Thomas Edison and we sort of, you know, peel back the layers and whatever story you pick when you peel back those layers, you're going to find a great group right behind that, you know, seemingly lone genius.

00:12:35:20 - 00:13:17:01
Colin Fisher
And so I think if we're trying to manage for, you know, people to do great things, then we need to understand that it's those great groups we're trying to create. We're not just trying to find the next genius. That's not really how these things happen, and that there's a lot of great data that shows that, on average, that these sort of lone geniuses, that individual discoveries, individual businesses, individual patents, those are happening less and less, and they're less and less impactful that in today's world, groups and teams are the ones who are disproportionately making all the big discoveries, starting all the great businesses, making the changes in the world that we want to see.

00:13:17:03 - 00:13:19:17
Colin Fisher
So I think it's really important to unpack that.

00:13:19:19 - 00:13:49:01
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, there's some really cool examples in the book about all that. I think along with some of the stuff that, that I said that I will take from this book around polarization and understanding it better. The other I think big thing for me was the stuff around synergy. So I'd like to talk about the science of synergy a little bit, because as you note in the book, you know, a lot of times people like you and I will use that word.

00:13:49:01 - 00:14:00:18
Kevin Eikenberry
And others, I think, sometimes kind of roll their eyes about that. And so let's talk about the science underneath that sort of very cool, trendy and maybe cliche word synergy.

00:14:00:18 - 00:14:19:07
Colin Fisher
It's I really thought long and hard about like, do I want to use this word because I do think it's got, you know, it's almost of the like most cliche business buzzword you could use on some level, right? Like in, in a movie, if they're trying to make fun of business people, they're probably going to have them talking about synergy or something.

00:14:19:09 - 00:14:42:17
Colin Fisher
But, you know, when you study groups, synergy is real. And it's it's sort of the, the, you know, magic sauce that we're looking for all the time if we just, you know, split everybody up and we have the team and instead of having them work together, everyone was working alone as an individual group and we add up what they did.

00:14:42:19 - 00:15:20:14
Colin Fisher
Is that going to, you know, be more or less than if we had them work as a, as a real team. And that's a that's always the question because that's a real question if you're a manager. Right. Should I really split people up or should I have them work together and that for years it proved to be really hard to find that we, you know, when researchers were studying this, they kept finding that groups underperformed that bar that when you bring people together, they're less than the sum of their parts, literally that if you just have them split up and do things individually and added that all together, whether they were, you know, pulling a

00:15:20:14 - 00:15:48:14
Colin Fisher
rope or cheering or, you know, stuffing envelopes or even brainstorming, coming up with ideas, we keep finding what researchers called process losses that they were literally less than the sum of their parts. But that doesn't need to be the case in the science of synergy has told us that they're we can predict the times that it's most likely where groups are going to be more than the sum of their parts.

00:15:48:16 - 00:16:12:22
Colin Fisher
And so that's really where I think this, the science has done, is made more sophisticated comparisons between individual performance, group performance and the sort of, you know, hypothetical. What would the best individuals do? What you know, with the fastest individuals do, what would the most efficient individuals do? And how does a group compared to those things? And I think that's where we've seen a lot breakthroughs.

00:16:13:00 - 00:16:31:22
Kevin Eikenberry
So anyone who's listening now says, okay, what are some of those times? So give us a couple things to help us as leaders. Understand, recognize, be aware of those moments when the process gains outpace the process losses.

00:16:32:00 - 00:17:09:00
Colin Fisher
So that the times when synergy is most likely are when things are complex. So that's the the number one predictor is when you give teams a complex task, they have a lot better chance of outperforming individuals, than than they do. They have a lot better chance of outperforming the best individual. The fastest individual, all these things. And by complex, I simply mean there's, you know, too much for individuals to keep track of that when there is, you know, 18 different choices and 18 different contingencies and a whole bunch of rules.

00:17:09:02 - 00:17:36:21
Colin Fisher
But then groups are going to tend to perform better than individuals, but that it's beyond that and that a lot of these important tasks, you know, whether it's starting a business, whether it's, you know, engineering some new product, they require more expertise and more diverse expertise than any one person has, and that there's a lot of these tasks, like playing in a jazz ensemble where you literally couldn't do it alone.

00:17:36:23 - 00:17:38:23
Colin Fisher
Right? There's no there's no way, like, I.

00:17:38:23 - 00:17:41:12
Kevin Eikenberry
Can't play the saxophone and the trumpet at the same.

00:17:41:12 - 00:18:05:05
Colin Fisher
Time. Right? That's right. You can't play the trumpet and the saxophone. So we need this whole band. And that's again an opportunity for synergy. But moreover, if we kind of take that metaphor further, we tend not to like bands that are all the same instrument. The chances that your favorite band is a saxophone ensemble of six saxophone players is quite low.

00:18:05:07 - 00:18:26:14
Colin Fisher
I mean, there's some great ones. Don't get me wrong, my friends, if any of my saxophone ensemble friends are watching, no offense, but they're, you know, we we like that diversity of skills in our groups in the same true work that when we set teams up where not everybody knows the same stuff, not everybody's bringing the same skills to the table.

00:18:26:16 - 00:18:48:06
Colin Fisher
That's when we have a chance of synergy. And so we're giving them complicated work stuff that, you know, hopefully no one knows the answer to already, and that this kind of is the flip side of that, right? The, the the time where you have the worst chance of synergy is where we already know how to do the task really, really well, that we could do it as individuals.

00:18:48:06 - 00:19:08:06
Colin Fisher
You know, we don't need to to have a group here. I could go home and I could do it on my own and that it's got this kind of repetitive quality where the process is really prescribed for us. So somebody else has told us, you've got to do step one, step two, step three, step four, step five. You can't deviate from that.

00:19:08:08 - 00:19:11:23
Colin Fisher
And those tend to be things that groups don't have a great chance of synergy at.

00:19:12:01 - 00:19:30:06
Kevin Eikenberry
And yet everyone who's listening will say, well, we've done that. And sometimes we do that in the name of inclusion, or in the name of we think it's going to create engagement. It's one of the reasons why we end up with meetings that have way more people in them than we need to have in them, and we could you and I know you and I could go way down that path.

00:19:30:23 - 00:19:57:13
Kevin Eikenberry
I want to I want to ask you, everyone who's listening is. And I said it in the open is on teams leads teams has lots of team experience, some good, some not so good. What is it, would you say, from the breadth of your research, what is the thing that people most often get wrong about teams?

00:19:57:15 - 00:20:00:23
Colin Fisher
Oh, boy, there's so many things. So. Well, give us a couple.

00:20:01:01 - 00:20:20:19
Kevin Eikenberry
I know, I know, I hate it when people ask me what I call the desert island question. Yeah, I can go to the desert island. I don't get only take one album with me. I know which one you take because I read the book. But fundamentally, I know getting it to one is hard. But but what are a couple of the big ones that have a huge impact on our success?

00:20:21:00 - 00:20:53:07
Colin Fisher
Yeah, I mean, I think you were alluding to one of the biggest ones right there, which is this kind of groups as a vehicle for, you know, including everybody in, you know, a decision or feeling like we don't want to leave people out of these meetings because you know, that they would feel bad, but instead that we just group meetings shouldn't have more than about seven people in them.

00:20:53:09 - 00:20:55:02
Colin Fisher
And they just.

00:20:55:04 - 00:21:00:12
Kevin Eikenberry
Say that, again, everyone needs to know this. I mean, and you may know it, but you don't do it. Say that.

00:21:00:14 - 00:21:29:12
Colin Fisher
Right. So group meetings shouldn't have more than seven people in them, that if you've got more than seven people, your chances of everybody feeling heard, everybody feeling like they're contributing, even if you invited them because you wanted to include them, the chances that they're going to feel that way are really, really low. That we know if we enter a room and there's 20 people sitting around a table and we've got an hour long meeting, you know, you know, you're not going to be heard.

00:21:29:12 - 00:21:57:23
Colin Fisher
You know, you're not going to really have a real discussion where we, you know, come to new ideas that that's just it's not possible that some people are just going to sit there and be silent and not say anything, or it's going to be trivial and that, you know, the research really bears this one out. And I would say this is where I get into the most combative, not combative, but I think every yeah, everybody like when I tell, you know, managers this, it's not that people don't believe it.

00:21:58:01 - 00:22:18:04
Colin Fisher
It's just they don't know what to do with that because it seems so impossible to then go, wait a minute, I'm supposed to only have meetings with, you know, 3 to 7 people in them all the time and that, you know, these kind of all hands meetings where I've got 20 or 30 people, I'm supposed to just like, not do those and tell people not to come.

00:22:18:06 - 00:22:22:03
Colin Fisher
And the answer is, yeah, that that's exactly what you're supposed to do.

00:22:22:23 - 00:22:46:02
Kevin Eikenberry
Think about how much. Listen, everybody think about how much time, bad word I spent, man. Hours. You get back in your organization. If you simply did that one thing. You're welcome. Everybody. Because that is massive. And even when we had our leader head on, it was. I don't know how to do that. We've all been in those meetings with our leader hat not on.

00:22:46:07 - 00:22:50:19
Kevin Eikenberry
And we know it. Colin is exactly right. Right.

00:22:50:21 - 00:22:52:23
Colin Fisher
Yeah. It's it's so tough. Yeah.

00:22:53:01 - 00:23:24:10
Kevin Eikenberry
I absolutely I know it's tough. So so let's talk about launching teams because everyone who's watching or listening it is or will have the opportunity to launch a new team, a project team or whatever, or building a brand new team, whatever. What are a couple of things that we should be doing and maybe things we don't know we should be doing when we're launching or forming teams so they can be more effective more quickly.

00:23:24:12 - 00:23:53:05
Colin Fisher
The most important thing is something I hope you know you should do, even if you you forget, which is to be clear about what the goal of this team is. Why did we get these people together? What are we supposed to achieve? Where are we? Good. Yeah, where are we trying to get to? And that too often where I think people make a mistake is they assume that everybody knows why they were invited.

00:23:53:07 - 00:24:17:13
Colin Fisher
They assume that it's like, oh, you know, it's like you, you must have, you know, read all the materials or you heard from somebody else or somebody else told you. And so we can just get right to work. So right at the beginning and even before the beginning, right when you're sending out the materials for the meeting, when you're whatever communication there is, you're saying, here's, you know, here's what we're trying to achieve, here's where we're trying to get to.

00:24:17:14 - 00:24:41:17
Colin Fisher
Here's why it's important. You know, the this is important to us as an organization. It's important to the world to do. It's important to, you know, me personally. And then the third thing, and this is where I think people skip it, is why is this going to be challenging? And this gets back to what we were just talking about with when, when should you even have a group that has a chance of synergy in this?

00:24:41:17 - 00:25:03:01
Colin Fisher
When we're doing something complicated, something challenging that's going to require us to really use the full complement of our knowledge, skills and effort. And if we don't feel like it's going to be challenging, that's when you get people who are going to be disengaged. And and, you know, we kind of check out. So, you know, these are the kind of three buckets your, your three, three.

00:25:03:09 - 00:25:26:03
Colin Fisher
Checkmarks you're trying to hit when you're articulating the goal that it's clear what it is, it's clear why it's important. And you're articulating what's going to be challenging about it and why we're going to need a team to do it. So I think that's the the one that I think hopefully you kind of know that. And, but that it gets forgotten too often.

00:25:26:05 - 00:25:59:08
Kevin Eikenberry
And you said the right word. We assume the leader thinks, well, surely everyone knows this. Just because you said it in your head 60 times, does that mean you've even said it out loud once, let alone enough times for people to get it? Without questions? There's there's so much Colin that we could talk about. I really I want to talk a little bit about competition because and this might be an area that, the reason I want to talk about is because I found myself nodding in agreement with you, throughout that section.

00:25:59:14 - 00:26:19:18
Kevin Eikenberry
But let's talk about competition, because we seem to have a bit of a love hate tension about it, like, well, yeah, we sort of know competition can be good, but like, we've all seen where competition causes problems on a team. So how do we keep or make competition healthy for our teams and groups? Yeah.

00:26:19:20 - 00:26:46:23
Colin Fisher
That's a it's a great question because competition is one of the most powerful motivators that we know about. If you want people to be, you know, work really, really hard putting them in a competition where they think they have a chance to win, that's going to work. Now, the the problem, it's going to if what we want is for people to work hard, but that working hard isn't always the same thing is healthy.

00:26:47:01 - 00:27:23:19
Colin Fisher
And so I, I like the way that you phrase that here is making competition healthy. And that there there's a couple of things that we might get confused about. One is competition within the team is very difficult to to make healthy, that when you have members that are competing against one another for rewards, for promotions, for just the, you know, goodwill of the boss, the that may motivate individuals, but it's going to make it less likely that when they need to help each other, they need to support each other.

00:27:23:19 - 00:27:29:11
Colin Fisher
They need to be teaching one another things that it's making it less likely that they're going to do it, and the.

00:27:29:11 - 00:27:31:18
Kevin Eikenberry
Process losses are going to grow here to to.

00:27:31:18 - 00:27:51:03
Colin Fisher
Go back. That's what your canvas. That's right. And that, you know, that you that although, you know, we we all kind of idolize these, you know, high profile situations like, you know NFL training camp just ended for a lot of people. Right. And there's there's competition between team members to make the team to start and all those things.

00:27:51:03 - 00:28:02:03
Colin Fisher
And we've all probably been a part of groups that had that character to them. But that that, you know, sports are only a good metaphor for other kinds of organizations some of the time.

00:28:02:06 - 00:28:04:19
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, they're only really a good metaphor until they're not.

00:28:04:21 - 00:28:26:01
Colin Fisher
Yeah. That's right. And that yeah, sports have a lot of things going for them that we don't have an organization. Right. They have these really well defined tasks. They've got, you know, work that almost is inherently already motivating and that when we're in the world of business, usually we're doing stuff that's much more ambiguous and confusing. The tasks aren't that well defined.

00:28:26:01 - 00:28:48:11
Colin Fisher
The scorecard isn't isn't there for us. We can't tell if we're doing well or not as we're doing the work, especially when we're doing something new. And so in those situations, competition is not very helpful that the less well we know what it is we're doing, the less competition's likely to help, because when we get stressed, we tend to do things that are familiar.

00:28:48:11 - 00:29:15:14
Colin Fisher
Our brain actually travels familiar pathways when we have, whether it's good stress or bad stress. And that competition is is kind of a potentially good stressor. But but when we need to make new connections, to learn something new, to be creative or innovative, then these kinds of stressors work against us. They're working against our brain, and they work against our social connections within the group.

00:29:15:16 - 00:29:50:02
Colin Fisher
So the best way to have healthy competition is to benchmark the team against itself, to say, let's compete against ourselves yesterday. Let's do better than we did last week, last month, last year, and that if we're constantly competing against, you know, these past versions of ourselves, that's where we tend to see the healthiest competition. Now, if you if you do have a rival out there in the business world, you know, if you're work at Coke and you're you're against Pepsi and you sort of say, hey, let's be let's be Pepsi, you know, that's not such a terrible thing.

00:29:50:04 - 00:29:51:02
Colin Fisher
But sometimes.

00:29:51:02 - 00:30:12:20
Kevin Eikenberry
What happens is a lot of times is we end up saying, well, we want to beat the second shift or we want to beat, I mean, all of the conversation we can all have about silos in organizations ultimately end up being putting this, putting the competition in the wrong place by competing against the other departments and and trying to win that way where we're sub optimizing the system.

00:30:12:22 - 00:30:41:15
Colin Fisher
Right now. Absolutely. And that yeah, you're absolutely right. I've seen especially a lot of big organizations where there's a ton of different metrics and that people are competing for resources, and those resources are more of their everyday experience, that we end up competing absolutely against the wrong, the wrong people. So healthy. If you're if you're managing with competition and trying to motivate people that way, the more you can get us focused on being a better version of ourselves, the better the better off you're going to be.

00:30:41:20 - 00:31:10:08
Kevin Eikenberry
And ourselves being us, not me personally. So I don't know that as the person who co-wrote books called The Long Distance Leader and the long distance team and the long distance teammate for that matter, We have to talk a little bit about remote hybrid virtual. Call it whatever you want to call it. Because the highest level of grouping is to use your word from earlier is when we're we are face to face.

00:31:10:13 - 00:31:33:17
Kevin Eikenberry
We are are we are together in a synchronous manner, at least some of the time. And and that's not necessarily our situations now. And so my, my question for you is if, if you're talking to a leader whose team is remote or hybrid in some way, shape or form, and I know there's all manner of what that could look like.

00:31:34:08 - 00:31:46:05
Kevin Eikenberry
Based on what you know and what the research tells us, what are a couple of things we ought to be keeping in mind to help us help our teams be more successful.

00:31:46:07 - 00:32:05:11
Colin Fisher
So, yeah, this is up there with with the question I get asked a lot and I'm glad we're we're talking about it. And I think there's a couple of, you know, things we need to be really clear about in our own heads. So when we say remote and we say hybrid, that we could mean a couple of different things.

00:32:05:13 - 00:32:36:14
Colin Fisher
So if what we mean is sometimes we're not having people come into the office and we're all meeting virtually and sometimes we're in the office. Get that I think is fine. It creates new challenges, certainly, but that, you know, when we have the ability to involve people from different geographical locations, we should theoretically be able to get people in with more precisely the right kind of expertise, the right information, different perspectives.

00:32:36:16 - 00:33:10:11
Colin Fisher
That should be good, right now. So there's a lot of advantages that we have from being able to communicate in these different ways. But as you say, we're we evolved to read a lot of each other's nonverbal cues to get a lot out of being in person. And that's information that we don't get nearly as efficiently when we're meeting over these kind of, different sorts of zoom or technological, mediated platforms or whatever they might be.

00:33:10:13 - 00:33:25:01
Colin Fisher
And so we do that creates what, psychologists call psychological distance, which is basically just what it sounds like, that I see you as more distant from myself than I otherwise would if we were face to face.

00:33:25:03 - 00:33:30:23
Kevin Eikenberry
And that in itself is super important because it's more than just physical distance, right? Yeah. It's a really important point.

00:33:31:02 - 00:33:54:16
Colin Fisher
Yeah. No. And it's, you know, that that psychological distance is absolutely heightened when we're over zoom, that even if, you know, I'm zooming with the person in the office next door, there's still more more psychological distance meeting this way. And so if you're a leader who's leading a lot of these kind of virtual team meetings, you need to be conscious of that and try and overcome it.

00:33:54:18 - 00:34:25:06
Colin Fisher
That we didn't get to make small talk on the way, on the walk over to the meeting, or right before or right after that. We can sort of read some of these nonverbal cues that might help us understand, you know, what other people are thinking and feeling. And that means one we may need to ask. And that's a kind of easy fix if you are less confident that you know what everybody else is thinking and feeling, a great way to find out is to ask and make that part of the what of the meeting.

00:34:25:08 - 00:34:45:16
Colin Fisher
And then sometimes I've seen a lot of teams do really creative things to make sure that they can see each other as more human without it taking up half of the meeting. And I think this is the challenge, right? If we all go along and we do establish, check and say everything that's going on in our lives, everything takes a little longer in these virtual meetings.

00:34:45:16 - 00:35:03:13
Colin Fisher
So that's really tough. But, you know, I've seen some teams where they rotate who does that. And there's kind of a little show and tell or it's Kevin's during this time to say, you know, here's what's going on in my life, or there's some kind of like open mic for three minutes at the beginning. So there's creative ways you can do that.

00:35:03:13 - 00:35:31:06
Colin Fisher
And I don't think, I don't want to be in the business of saying, like, there's one way that works better than all the other ways, because I think all this is a moving target. As we get more comfortable with these technologies, as these technologies themselves change and the fidelity of them change. So I think just, you know, being conscious about trying to do temperature checks and to be, you know, make sure that everybody is remembering there's other humans on the on the other end of this.

00:35:31:08 - 00:36:00:08
Colin Fisher
But when we say hybrid, I do want to, you know, put a note of caution there, though, because sometimes we confuse hybrid work, that sometimes we're in the office, sometimes we're not with hybrid meetings where some people are physically present and some people are online hybrid work generally, research has shown that's good hybrid meetings where some people are online, some people in person research is much more pessimistic about those.

00:36:00:10 - 00:36:05:23
Kevin Eikenberry
And very focused on the skill of the facilitator to help, to help make it better or not.

00:36:05:23 - 00:36:29:14
Colin Fisher
It's yeah, it's very it's you're making your job harder that essentially that when you have a hybrid meeting you're probably disadvantaging some subgroup. It's probably the online group relative to the people who are in person. And that the chances that like, people don't feel included or heard, even though they're present at the meeting, go way, way up.

00:36:29:16 - 00:36:49:13
Colin Fisher
Information sharing is worse and that it's harder for groups to develop norms when especially when who's online and who's in person keeps changing, which in a lot of groups it does. When you have this norm, it's okay to meet that way. And so groups just don't get going at the same rate as even a group that always met virtually.

00:36:49:15 - 00:37:08:04
Colin Fisher
And so if you feel like you're having these hybrid meetings and you're struggling, I would much rather you say, okay, everybody, just grab a computer, let's all be online, and we're going to figure it out that way rather than having these two different communication media going on at the same time. And that's where groups have been seemed to struggle the most.

00:37:08:04 - 00:37:29:17
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, I completely agree. Both. From our our team's personal experience as well as our work with clients as well. I agree with that 100%. A couple things before we go. Collin, I said before when we were talking with Collin Fisher, the author of The Collective Edge Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups. And we'll let him tell us a little bit about where he can we can get that and all those things in a second.

00:37:29:17 - 00:37:38:21
Kevin Eikenberry
But a couple of other questions, Collin, before we go, and the first one of which is what do you do for fun besides play jazz.

00:37:38:23 - 00:37:47:00
Colin Fisher
Besides play jazz, boy? Yeah. I don't have that many, hobbies outside. I didn't know you're going to take jazz. Jazz away.

00:37:47:02 - 00:38:05:09
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, I didn't either jump right in that instant because I thought we've already covered that. And you, if you're watching everybody, you can see the piano in the background. First time I've had a guest. 500 guests, with with a piano first being a background. But anyway, anything other than than jazz playing, listening to jazz that you would say is in that fun list.

00:38:05:11 - 00:38:26:23
Colin Fisher
You know, I've, I've taken up one of the national pastimes here in the UK. So I'm based in London now, despite the accent, and that, you know, the one of the, one of my favorite things to do is walk around London, so I, I go askew busses, I don't, I try not to take them very often and the London's actually not as huge as you might think.

00:38:27:01 - 00:38:48:03
Colin Fisher
So I, I walk and I hike and I try and see new places around here. Find new find new restaurants. So that's definitely the if I'm not playing music, you know, maybe I'm, I'm hiking to a jam session or hiking to somewhere that I can play music, but I definitely I, like to walk around now.

00:38:48:05 - 00:38:52:10
Kevin Eikenberry
The next question is, what are you reading these days? Colin?

00:38:52:12 - 00:39:19:10
Colin Fisher
Yeah, so, so many, so many things at this point. There's so, so many great books going on. I would the the two, I will say one, I probably should have read, a long time ago, which is Toni Morrison's beloved. So I finally have picked that up. You know, I'm probably I'm probably not quite far enough into it to really give, a huge, synopsis of what?

00:39:19:10 - 00:39:44:01
Colin Fisher
Of what's actually happening because it is a book where it's kind of hard to figure out what's happening a lot of the time, magical realism, is tricky. And then, my son is getting ready to do is, college applications right now, and he's writing about, this book by, Carlo Rovelli called Helgoland, which is sort of, about this relational theory of quantum physics, but it's really clearly explained.

00:39:44:01 - 00:39:54:06
Colin Fisher
So I'm trying to stay with him and, and understand what he's talking about when he's trying to write this personal statement by also reading this book. Not sure I'm achieving it, though.

00:39:54:08 - 00:40:01:04
Kevin Eikenberry
Holy smokes. Reading that kind of a book for your college application, I don't know. It's different here.

00:40:01:04 - 00:40:02:01
Colin Fisher
Maybe I would be able to.

00:40:02:03 - 00:40:14:18
Kevin Eikenberry
Stay with it even as well as you're staying with it. Colin. How can we learn more? What do you want to point people? How can they connect with you? What do you want to say about that? Oh, for those watching, I'll hold the book up while Colin does it.

00:40:14:20 - 00:40:28:11
Colin Fisher
So, one stop shop. Colin. Fisher.com. Now they'll have where you can get the book. No matter where you are in the world. It will have my newsletter and my socials and all the great stuff that I undoubtedly will be up to.

00:40:28:13 - 00:40:54:03
Kevin Eikenberry
Colin M fisher.com. And so now, a question for all of you who have been listening and it's the question I ask you every single episode and it's simply this. Now what what action will you take as a result of this? Listen, I know you're on teams and listen, I know you likely lead at least one, if not many teams, so there's plenty that you could take from this conversation.

00:40:54:05 - 00:41:11:21
Kevin Eikenberry
And I'm not going to presume what it should be, but I am going to urge you, though, is to take action on whatever that is so that you got an insight. You need to translate the insight into action. And when you do that, good things will come for you and the teams that you're a part of. I hope that you will do that.

00:41:12:08 - 00:41:23:14
Kevin Eikenberry
Colin, thanks so much for being here. I was really looking forward to this conversation. And, and I appreciate not only our time today and your, your insights, but also this great book that you wrote.

00:41:23:16 - 00:41:29:23
Colin Fisher
Oh, thanks so much, Kevin. Thanks for having me. Thanks for all of you for, checking in here.

00:41:30:01 - 00:41:50:21
Kevin Eikenberry
And so, everybody, that's the conclusion of another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast, which means three things. So number one, make sure you come back and make sure you come back. It means that you need to make sure you're subscribed wherever you watched or listen so you don't miss any future episodes. And one more thing invite someone else to join you next week, or invite them to watch the show, or listen to the show that you just listened to.

00:41:50:21 - 00:42:02:20
Kevin Eikenberry
Because when you do that, it helps all of us get better. It helps all of us get smarter, and it helps put a smile on Kevin's face. Come back next week, if you would, for another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.