Maybe you could go into a little bit about that.

Yeah, sure.

I mean, I think there's two points that I'm making there.

We're trying to get ROI from our AI investments.

The first thing I was saying was stop allowing your organization, your IT professionals, stop allowing them to measure AI performance based on the tool use.

That's irrelevant.

That's like saying we're going to measure our success by how much tokens we can spend.

How does that fit into the AI world?

Hey, oh, let's go.

We're feeling more isolated than we ever have before in society.

And now in social distancing, we're gonna start to feel more isolated than ever before.

So a leader needs to increase the interconnectedness, increase the co-elevation and the commitment of the team.

[upbeat music] Things that used to happen serendipitously at the water cooler or in the hallway now need to be engineered into our work engagement.

In the old days when we were waiting for a physical meeting to start, we would be standing around doing some level of small talk in the room.

That actually quiets the, the fight-flight mechanism of the reptilian brain, and it increases people's courage and affinity to have open dialogue.

Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

[laughs]

Hypothetical, hypothetical situation.

Okay, here's the situation.

Um, we are in the middle of what a lot of people call the Great Resignation, and I roll my eyes on that term.

Um, first of all, it's so hackneyed and, and everyone's talking about it.

It could be boring.

But here's what I want you to think about, um, Adi.

... and will evolve?

Why was this finding from this study not a surprise to you?

After my formative book that you, you're mentioning, Never Eat Alone, I started to study small groups of individuals and how these small groups of individuals were potentially transformative in each other's lives.

And I looked at things like Weight Watchers.

Why was it that Weight Watchers had a higher statistical, um, weight loss than programs that didn't have a community element? It was that group weigh-in where a group of people that cared about each other showed up to hold each other accountable for their weight loss, et cetera.

I studied AA programs, where individuals who are in the gutter, literally, right, could turn their lives around with a group of other of their peers without even a leader involved.

The format of the AA program doesn't even have a leader involved, and these people are committed to what I call co-elevating, uh, committed to a shared mission for each other but committed to helping each other further, right? So I started studying these group, and I wrote a book called Who's Got Your Back.

And at the end of that book, as a part of the publicity, you know, I, I, I went on Good Morning America, and we did a co-elevation challenge where a group of individuals came together, and they each had their own goals that some of them were frustrated in not achieving.

Again, that's Bon, B-O-N, Charge, C-H-A-R-G-E .com/drew, D-H-R-U to give your skin the recovery support it's been missing.

[laughs]

Our shares, our product line shares.

So what if there's 12 people in that room, some of the marketing people in that room, salespeople, you and me, whatever.

What if we ask them in advance in a spreadsheet, "Hey, go in there," and, and the first question is, "What's the real problem we're solving for here, and what is a bold solution to that problem?" And everybody were to take a little bit of time and write up the answer to that question.

We read it, and then we go into the room having organized around what we just read.

So I'm working with a, one of the largest software firms in the world right now.

They're launching a brand-new platform strategy, and the execs were so frustrated that they don't feel that they have urgency and ownership over the new platform strategy.

Obviously, this book's about team, about relationships and other people, like, in, in the professional organization, and what are the tenets from that first book that really carry to the current one?

Yeah.

And that has to do with productivity.

These days you want to get something done in an organization, you've got to figure out how do you navigate building relationships inside of your company to get the stuff done you want to get done.

I literally was up this morning coaching a very prominent top 100 of a major corporation, and I was teaching every one of them to identify who are the three most important people that your relationships are weak with today inside of the company, that if they were stronger, you'd be more successful.

And then I was teaching them how to navigate moving those either strained or absent relationships into something that I call a co-elevating relationship, and that's the stuff we teach at Connected Success.

But that's productivity.

Learning.

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

And, and then there'll be the meeting after the meeting, and the conversation after the conversation.

If on the other hand you, you sh- there's a chapter six, talks about 21st century collaboration.

If we shift from the meeting based collaboration to asynchronous before the meeting, and I ask 12 people to answer the question, "What's the real problem we're trying to solve? What's a bold solution to fix it?" And everybody writes that down in a shared document that they can look at with each other.

Then the organizer of the meeting reads all of that information.

Presumably we need to ask everybody to read that information.

Then we start the conversation in the room, but now we've already seen half the solutions.

Thanks

I want to ask why that is, because a lot of people might think, well, you know, we've learned to be resilient.

What we identified in the research was that resilience was thought of as an individual sport.

It was, I am resilient.

What we saw though, were that the organizations that thrived and had better engagement scores, less reported mental stress, stronger mental resilience, these organizations recognized that resilience was actually a team sport.

where the team adopted a commitment to raise each other's energy, to identify each other's energy.

I'll give you another very simple nugget or a practice that came out of the chapter around resilience, which is a leader doing a monthly energy check.

I just did it this morning, actually, with a client where you just go to the chat room and you say to your team, how is your energy these days from a scale of zero you know i'm lying in the in the mud puddle all the way to a five which is you know i'm skipping on rainbows with unicorns put your energy level in the chat room now in in this case there were three individuals that had scores between zero and two it was actually it was a zero one and a two but it allowed us to pause and say Jane, is everything okay? I see you put a two.

this applies on a team level, right? Like you often have people in a team who are aware of other developments or what competitors are doing, but it comes down to practices to kind of bring that out and have them be intentionally discussed and worked up at the team level.

So like, how do you get these teams to work like this?

Well, the first thing is you need an enlightened leader who's read my book that recognizes that their job is to lead without authority, is to lead in service of a mission, and then to enlist people in a team that is a volunteer army to go take a hill together.

So, you know, right now, the idea that AI can be reinventing, whether it's our customer interface, right, and our customer exchange, that's going to have a technology component, of course.

That's going to have a marketing component.

It will probably, depending upon the industry, have a sales component.

And it will also probably have to do with HR and others.

And Once somebody recognizes that the team that I'm creating is an interdependent team, then the next step is how do you reach out to those individuals and onboard them, right? And the most important thing is to onboard them with excitement and to onboard them with hope and possibility that we could go take a hill together, crush a new idea, break through some pre-locked up um sense of ourselves as a company etc so there's a motivational piece of invitation but then there's a humility piece to get off the damn podium and stop trying to be a leader with authority but being a leader that co-creates and that's a big part of the book which is how do you get a group of individuals to co-create with a lot of candor, with a lot of transparency.

I'm ready.

Talk about what it is and why it's important.

Well, let me do it in a way that's a little prescriptive for our listeners here.

Any of you should be asking the question, first and foremost, who's my team? Who's my team? And every chapter of the book, it talks about 10 shifts from leadership to teamship, 10 shifts from having the burden on your shoulders alone to leaning on a group of individuals that will make sure that you are stress tested and won't fail.

And there's a relationship among that group of individuals that I call co-elevating.

A group of folks that while they're collaborating, trying to achieve some mission, they're also pushing each other higher.

So the first question I ask you is, who's your team? You know, the other day I was on a podcast and there was a gentleman who had just started a coaching practice.

And, you know, by the end of the call, I had put him in touch with the CEO at Ferrazzi Greenlight, thinking that the two of them could be peer coaches of each other because my CEO is relatively new.

Exactly.

and i mean what kind of research do you need to do to ask that question

the research is that at the beginning of the biden administration exactly this time at the transfer of power from the prior administration to the biden administration i wrote an article in fast company which is my advice to the Biden administration for how he should run his cabinet and how his cabinet should treat the Hill.

Now, they took none of it and I didn't get any calls, but I'll tell you, look, very interesting.

I did study this as a result of writing this piece.

You can go back and find it in Fast Company four years ago.

And what would I recognize was the cabinet is a bunch of very high powered, brilliant people.

And whether you like their politics, et cetera, they are what they are.

the deal