Transcribed by https://otter.ai See Blog
Mitch Simon 0:10
Welcome to another episode of team anywhere where CEOs, leaders and experts at building teams, companies, organizations, and amazing cultures
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 0:22
share how to lead from anywhere in the world. I’m your co host on the East Coast, Jim Bianco Mathis,
Mitch Simon 0:28
and I’m your co host on the West Coast, Mitch Simon. And we invite you to join us team anywhere.
Today on the podcast, we interview Nick Petri author of work without stress, building resilience for long term success. Whereas most teams fail under stress. There are certain teams that actually thrive under stressful conditions. Nick shares with us the secrets of our hybrid and virtual teams confront today’s turbulence, focus on strengthening their relationship, look for new opportunities and restructure to take advantage of the disruptions in today’s new work environment.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 1:17
Welcome to another episode of team anywhere, and I’m your co host, Ginni Bianco, math is on the east coast. And I’m here with my co host, Mitch Simon on the west coast. And we are excited today to have the incredibly accomplished Nick Petri from New Zealand. And Nick comes to us from far far away, first of all, given where we’re at, and he was formerly with the Center for Creative Leadership, where he was a researcher, writer and instructor. And he continues that work now on his own. And his current focus is resiliency, and leadership and the complexities all around that. And he has a book called what we will hopefully talk about work without stress, billion resistance for long success, long term success. And welcome, Nick.
Unknown Speaker 2:17
Thank you very much, Jenny. Thank you very much, sir.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 2:21
And to begin, we’re going to start with a question that we have been asking all of our guests, which is, how has been your journey through that 20 and now into 21. With this COVID pandemic, how has it affected you, and all the different parts of your life as you’re now looking forward?
Unknown Speaker 2:43
Yeah, in some ways, it’s affected me a lot. And in many ways, not at all, with when I sort of came through the work from home and COVID, we were living in Austin, Texas, I’d been there for 12 years. Living in the US with my Australian wife, we have four young boys, or under 10 years old. And so when it happened, you know, like other working parents, all of a sudden, we were homeschooling we were, I was running workshops, we’re doing all of this. So it was pretty full on to start with Tibet period, probably like for most people with sort of had in Vienna sort of got interesting, as I started to wonder, can I keep doing my work, which was a lot of virtual workshops, things like this. Some of my clients started to say to me, Well, neck, don’t take this the wrong way. But these sessions you’re doing pretty much just as good as when we used to fly you in and put you in a hotel and feed you and all of this. And I sort of I sort of started thinking about that. And I thought, well, do I really need to be in Austin, Texas right now? Or could what could we be anywhere? And, you know, we’ve been away from home for a long time away from family. My wife, you know, was away from her parents and the kids were growing up with no cousins or uncles or Auntie’s. So we started to think, could we be doing the same work from New Zealand? And so we said, let’s, you know, there’s always opportunities which come out of these crises if you ask the right questions, and so we decided to come home. So we moved back to Nelson, New Zealand. And it’s a bit of a experiment because we didn’t know where the clients would keep wanting to do this. And it turns out, they have and it’s busier than usual. So, so now I’ve got a sort of different life back in New Zealand, but half my life is still in the US or with my European clients. So um, overall, it’s, it’s been good, but it’s been a bit of a revolution for FMI that people, people are happy with how things are.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 4:51
Wow, that Yeah, that was a very literal journey for you. Besides the mental journey.
Unknown Speaker 4:59
Yeah.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 4:59
Well, you had shared with me the work you’re doing interviewing a lot of leaders. And through all of that, interviewing and interacting, some themes have emerged. And I wonder if you can share that with with us.
Unknown Speaker 5:17
Yeah, a few things. I mean, I both interviewed leaders Plus, I read a lot of the research on how to individuals, teams, groups respond when big adversity or trauma happens. And so I sort of put the interviews plus the research together, to some of the things which emerged was that when the big adversity hits, pretty much everyone has the same response, initially, everyone has a big drop off, and the sort of functioning goes down. But then after that, people start to go in different directions. Some people continue to get worse, frankly. And if it’s, if they get overloaded, they can end up with post traumatic stress. And, you know, that will be happening for some people out there right now. And it also happens, organization, some just got completely overwhelmed and probably won’t recover. Some stops recover, but they never get back to where originally where they were. So they survive, but are impaired, we see that with businesses, and we see it with individuals, most people actually are pretty resilient. And they’ll bounce back. And they’ll come out of the adversity, pretty much looking the same as the way they went into it. However, there was this fourth group, and this is the group was most interested was afterwards, they bounce back, but they don’t bounce back to how they were. Afterwards, they actually look different. They use the experience to transform to change to grow. And at the end of it, they’ve got new capabilities, greater capacity, new skills, this sort of what some authors would call anti fragile, the more volatile situation gets, the more they grow. You know, companies like Amazon are a bit like this almost looks like it doesn’t matter what you throw at them, they get stronger. Right. And so I’ve seen those four paths with leaders on dealing with and teams and dealing with businesses, that’s been one thing. Another one I’ve noticed is sort of this this, you know, whole been has gone on phases for people. And there’s sort of three main phases I’ve noticed. The first one is the crisis phase, when everyone is just trying to cope with this huge, you know, it’s an explosion of work, or it’s, you know, just trying to get through the situation. second phase has been where people start to explore new opportunities, which are emerging from the situation. And the third phase is that growth, in one pattern I’ve noticed is that many, many leaders, organizations are still stuck 11 months later in crisis mode. And they’re not really evolving and coming out of it. So eventually, I mean, you can, a lot of these leaders, I mean, they’re very good at being in crisis mode. They love the adrenaline, they love the energy, they love operating, but they’re used to doing it for two months, three months, no one’s used to doing it for 11 months, 14 months. So they’re, they’re starting to burn out. And so as a lot of suffering, actually, I’m seeing in the workplace. And probably the third pattern. I’ve noticed that a lot of some leaders who are very skilled are not getting to do the type of work which used to really fulfill them. So they’re doing a very different type of work at the moment, and sort of the current context. And it wasn’t really what they signed up for one leader, I know he’s very good at the big picture, strategic, dealing with stakeholders, winning business doing this sort of thing, but he’s not doing that anymore. And he’s just running out of energy for it. So I’m seeing quite a bit of that people what hasn’t just been a short phase, it’s been chronic, really
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 9:08
interesting. Now, how is that affecting them, then, especially now, when we going into these hybrid environments and then needing to lead their teams and taking whatever culture that there was, and now trying to transfer it? How are they feeling about that? What are they doing about that? Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 9:37
yeah. Well, I think it’s really amplified everything about a leaders approach and leaders habits. One CEO said to me, You know, I said, What are you noticing about all of your leaders in terms of working from home, and he says, the same principles of good leadership and team leadership still apply, but everything has a amplified, they said, If you didn’t have good one to one meetings with your people before, that was bad. If you’re not doing it now, it’s disastrous. And he said the same for the leaders with good practices, which they’re doing previously, those are amplified. So it’s almost like seeing a bit of a bifurcation with teams summit is getting much worse. They’re really struggling, and then others with, you know, good managers are actually, it’s been interesting, as I’ve interviewed them, they said they are feeling closer than ever before. This Heis, which has been a good and a bad thing. Interestingly, they have ties with each other in the team have been amazing, you know, they now they know each other’s pits and families and hobbies and all that. So it’s been really good. They’re much tighter, our connection strong. However, what I’ve also heard in the interviews, as people said, they’re very concerned because the weak ties across the organization have dwindled and died. They are not meeting anyone from other departments. They are not meeting people in the cafeteria at lunch. And they are very concerned sort of, for the knowledge of the company, but also for the Korea. And interestingly, I do quite a lot with technology companies. A lot of the people in these companies have never met a person from their company. Which, you know, when when they were telling me this, I was just shocked. I’m like, of course, I’m like, because they you know, they get new people quickly. So um, that’s a big thing. People never met someone from their company. And they’ve been there a year.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 11:39
Yeah.
Mitch Simon 11:43
They’ve never person to person.
Unknown Speaker 11:45
That’s exactly right. They’ve just met, you know, faces on sprains. Yeah. Which has been Alright, but they’ve only met people on their team. And, you know, not really anyone else, which is a very strange thing.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 12:00
So has any leader that you’ve met, attempted to take care of that gap? And have you seen any of them do it successfully?
Unknown Speaker 12:12
Yeah, they acquire some of the good ones at getting the a team to think very strategically about what their relationships need to look like across the business. And they’re either orchestrating collisions for the people with different key players across the organization, or they are having meetings where they merge different people at different times. That’s been quite effective. It’s not as random as it used to be, you know, you went along to a conference of 70 people, you know, from your company, and you ran into people. So once again, it’s been amplified, people need to be much more conscious and deliberate about what their networks look like. And it’s, yeah, there’s some good stuff by Phil Wilburn, who was he’s a network. researcher, he works at workday now used to be at CCL. But he’s written quite extensively around what do good networks look like, especially in an environment like this?
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 13:15
That’s fascinating. So even the term network has had to take on a whole new dimension. It’s networking within your own organization across the world. Hmm. I love also that term you use creating collisions?
Unknown Speaker 13:31
Hmm. Yeah, that’s, that’s wonderful. Yeah. That’s right. One of the things which tends to happen with all of us, as we tend to start getting what they call the network science, a closed network, we know people who know each other, and you end up in an echo chamber. And one of the, you know, the real challenges for people right now is because it’s so comfortable, they’ve actually got to do the opposite. And you’ve got to branch out and connect with people who don’t know each other and open up your network requires reaching over a lot of different boundaries up the organization down across outside takes a bit of effort. And, you know, it takes a bit of nuance and skill, because people are already overloaded with zoom meetings, etc. So how do you create real value for the other people who you want to meet?
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 14:24
Exactly. As you said, it needs to become more thoughtful and strategic? Yes, I need to reach out over here for these reasons over there for this region, even putting a team together or workgroup now. Yeah. needs to be looked at differently.
Unknown Speaker 14:42
Yeah. Sorry. A lot of people getting quite suspicious of me meeting invites turning up for them. Especially a lot of the organization’s have open scheduling, which means you can just go into anyone’s appointment and make a meeting and a lot of them As I’m saying, you know, look at their calendars. And they’ve some of them said they had 16, back to back meetings between eight and 5pm. And they hadn’t sold any of them. So,
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 15:14
yeah, something Yeah. These are the balancing act, as the new system and process gets figured out. Yeah. A lot of folks have shared with us that, especially now with folks getting vaccines, and adopting what might be forever wearing masks in certain situations. actually having people get together four times a year on so that there’s the zoom, and etc, I don’t need to see people every day. And yet, the gatherings making them more structured also, and they can be anywhere.
Unknown Speaker 15:58
Yeah, I’m sure that will be true, it’s going to be very interesting. And I don’t think anyone knows, I think it’s going to be one big experiment, run by many different organizations. And, yeah, it’s, it’s gonna be very curious one thing I just speaking to someone the other day, who runs, events for lots of different organizations, and they all come together, and she was saying that we’ve now been through a full budget cycle without people flying around the world traveling, staying in hotels, you know, eating at nice restaurants. And so, one company, I know, the CEO said, we’ve saved $250 million and not traveling and this sort of thing, we are not going back to the old way. And so that there’s going to be a big one, everyone knows now how much they saved. How big a priority a company’s going to feel it is to bring people together. And I think different companies will have different cultures around us.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 17:01
Exactly, exactly. So let’s take this because this then led and continues to lead in or build off of the book you wrote on stress and resiliency. What key points, can you share with us from there?
Unknown Speaker 17:20
Yeah, so this is a session I feel I must have run at times. Now, this workshop since COVID hit because all of a sudden, resilience was already popular and needed, and then people realize we probably need it even more now. So this, this work was based on 30 years of research done at the University of York about this question, why is it when two people go through the same situation as each other? One person might get stressed and overwhelmed? And another person is fine. They’re resilient. Yeah, why the difference. And usually, you know, the traditional way of looking at us as events equals stress. So however, that whole thing is wired, people responding so differently to the same event, including what’s going on for all of us at the moment. And so from us research, a few big ideas emerged. The first one is there’s a difference between pressure on one hand and stress on the other, we usually put them together, like they’re the same thing. Got a stressful boss, stressful job, COVID. stressful. But if you pull them apart, you start to see this slightly different pressure in this work was defined as external demand in your environment. And I’ll ask leaders, do you think about in your organization, his pressure? And they say, yes, of course, do you think everyone is stressed? They got? Yes. And then a few people got to know some people got sort of the pins, you start to see they’re related but not the same. The second big idea from this research they found that was convert the pressure and distress. People need to do something very specific. And the people who weren’t doing this weren’t getting stressed. And what people need to do is ruminate about the events which are happening either events from the past and attaching the Euro emotion to it. Why did this happen to me? Why did the managers decide this? Or events in the future? What if this happens, what if that happens, and just churning on and on and on about it at 3am? You know, when you’re lying in bed, when you go to lay down, or when you’re sitting in a zoom meeting, you should be concentrating, but you’re really worried about something which is coming up. When you do that your body goes into fight or flight as if you’re under physical threat. And if you stay in that state for long periods of time, as people are at the moment, you start to burn out. It has an impact on your arteries on your heart, on your immune system. And people just start to wear their bodies down in minds down. So that’s sort of the first big idea is helping people notice how much are you ruminating at the moment because I’m making a lot of leaders who have got very high levels of pressure, that very low levels of stress. And then other people who, if we look around, they’ve actually got very low levels of pressure, but enormous amounts of stress, to see that these are two slightly different things is very important. And so a lot of leaders who I’m doing this with now can all of a sudden see that this stresses coming internally, it’s not just somebody out yet. So that’s sort of the the opening ideas, and then we go into various things.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 20:32
And then, let’s play that out further. Now that leader turns around and starts working with their team, some in the office some from afar. And those team participants will start having their own balance and in balance around the stress versus the pressure. Right, right. And that’s one reason I have heard that psychologically. It will benefit organizations, putting new processes around more flexible ways to work as long as the person has a choice, then maybe they can create a better balance, and a workplace that is more conducive to them doing their best.
Unknown Speaker 21:27
Yes, that’s right, this sort of list different solutions, which organizations and leaders might look at with your team, some which you’re pointing out via a sort of systems or processes solutions, like we actually need to change our policies around flexibility around workouts around whether we can email each other in the evenings and the weekends. That’s one that’s sort of one bucket, which is very important. The other one is sort of what can the individual do for themselves and their own psychology with how they’re dealing with it. And they’re both important, you wouldn’t want to only do one and neglect the other. They’re both, you know, they complement each other. And so but yeah, so I think the leaders who I’ve seen doing best have been supporting their people. And both of those domains, both some of the ones who obviously not doing so well, they told me, they basically, they took their whole work from the office culture. And when, when COVID happen, they just picked it up, transplanted it to the work from home culture, and just did exactly the same thing. Yes. And it was incredibly hard on everyone. But they didn’t make adjustments. So you certainly need to do things.
Mitch Simon 22:42
What changes have you seen in some of the companies that didn’t just take from their old culture and implant it in the at home culture, that actually reduced stress for their people now, let’s say stuck at home for the next year.
Unknown Speaker 23:03
Yeah, so some of them, that was the message, they seem right at the start. Some of them gave people time off, immediately paid time off, just to get your family situation sorted, or your personal situation sorted. They gave people some money, not too much, but just some, to show people that are to set up their new office space, which I had, right. None of it was enormous. But it sent the message and built incredible amounts of loyalty at that company, for example. A lot of it came from the executives modeling a new way. I saw quite a few examples where the executives were saying, you know, take breaks, take a holiday don’t work the evenings. And yet everyone was getting these emails from the executives at eight at night. And they knew that they were taking no breaks. So the best ones modeled it and did that very openly that they were going to take some time off, that they don’t work after whatever hour or before. And people, a lot of it actually wasn’t company wide policies have happened team by team, the greatest variation was team by team with some members saying, you know what, a lot of managers, the ones which did best overall were the ones who decrease their focus on task, and increase their focus on relationship and connection. And their team meetings, which was amazing to me, because I used to know these teams that always say, we don’t have enough time. We don’t have enough time to get through everything on the agenda. And when I spoke to them about how they’re doing, they said they’re going great. they’ve stopped trying to get through so many items. The manager has actually freed people up just to make decisions. Go do things, you don’t need to consult as much as you used to with everyone else. And they’ve all given team members permission not to have to consult me so much. And that’s mean, they could just trust each other on Get on with it. And it’s freed them up to actually I think to do that they actually had to do the connection stuff they were doing in the team meetings. But they just freed them up just to get on with things that’s been like really clear identifier of the high performing teams.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 25:28
I love that example. Because we keep hearing, you need to establish trust. And that’s a very dramatic way,
Unknown Speaker 25:37
huh? Yeah.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 25:38
Just, you know, what, go off and make those decisions. Yeah, let’s agree on the outputs. And let’s all see what happens in the working.
Unknown Speaker 25:48
Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot. Ironically, there’s less consulting with than they used to be what a lot of times, people always used to get frustrated, I remember, with our you’ve got to go off and sign this off with 12 people before, you know, you can move any thing in it, any one of them can say no. And it’s over, with now hearing just move, just keep moving fast. It’s an uncertain environment, we’ve got to take lots of experiments, keep making progress, and just keep updating each other. It’s
Mitch Simon 26:17
interesting, Nick, when you talk when you opened up this podcast, and you talked about how you saw in the past, different teams reacting to crisis in different ways. It seems now that everyone is in a crisis right now. And every single person is, let’s say, in some cases alone in a crisis, right? And I’m just wondering, what you suspect will come out of this crisis? And will it will it be dependent upon the culture that the company had before, or it would be more dependent upon the culture that the leader, you know, has now assumed event, its new environment?
Unknown Speaker 27:03
I think it’s going to vary greatly. Because I’ve, I’ve noticed both on the individual and collective level with organizations or teams, the ones who are not going to come out that well, have just doubled down on their old approaches and old ways. And basically, this solution has been work harder, work longer, hit your numbers, keep going. That’s not enough. And so their strategy hasn’t worked very well, for the organizations I’ve seen do that, and then nothing sort of things obvious. But that’s what had made them successful up until this point. That’s right. These organizations and individuals were enormously successful with that formula. And so when the crisis hurt, that was what they double down on. The ones who seem to be coming out this, it’s like that post traumatic growth. They don’t quite look the same as before. They’re not out of it yet. But you can see it, the green shoots are emerging. And they’ve asked themselves the question, what’s the opportunity here? That’s probably one big differentiator. What another opportunity here, and they’ve asked themselves, what’s changing about our customers needs? What new business models might emerge here? What new capabilities might we need? And I’m also saying they’re not so short term focused. There’s sort of different horizons, they’ve got some people looking at sort of the third horizon, which is way off into the future, when things have settled down. What are we going to look like they’ve got some sort of the mid range, then they’ve got some dealing with the crisis. They haven’t got everyone trying to deal with the crisis only.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 28:52
That is fabulous. And I have heard that too. And I, it’s almost like the crisis has made that. So that is our new way of looking at the world. So so we are ready on Earth. All right, now we’re going to go into my favorite part. Could you share with me this, these are leaders that you have found to be moving beyond achievement and going into vertical growth, as opposed to horizontal growth? Yeah. Could you talk some about that, please?
Unknown Speaker 29:33
Yeah, sure. And maybe I should give a little bit of a little bit of background around what is this vertical and horizontal growth. So in in my career, I spent a long time doing leadership development working in business and, and sort of trying to help leaders and adults grow. And the sort of traditional way of doing that was just to say, Well, what what leaders need is they need new information and new need new knowledge, they need new tools and new new skills. And if we give that to them, then they’ll be really good leaders. And so I got good at doing that sort of development. And the problem was, even though the leaders would get all this, they wouldn’t really change. And it wouldn’t really help them solve the problems that we’re dealing with. And as I learned more and more, I swear, it wasn’t really a problem of knowledge. It was more of a problem that the leader needed to grow beyond the way they were thinking and seeing the world at the moment. And sort of metaphorically, sometimes we talk about traditional leadership development would be like a cap, the leaders, the leaders, mind as a cap. And the goal is to fill up the cap as high as possible. Whereas this other type of development, which there is which is more around growing, the leaders capacity, or growing their ability to evolve their mind to see the world in new ways wasn’t so much about filling the cap that was growing the size of the cap itself. So capacity expense. And so most leaders who we see an organization’s this sort of very much in this expert mindset, or achiever mindset, they either want to have all the information have all the answers, they are the expert, they know everything. Or the next sort of stage beyond that is the achiever mindset, which is I just want to hit my numbers I want to perform, I want to win, I want to be known as being someone who delivers. So most leaders are at one of those two stages, and they might see it. But they start to get to a point where you start going to settle bereits. And I’m seeing a lot of this in organizations now, because I’m running workshops on this, this time, you get the point where they’re saying, well, I’ve already achieved a lot. I’ve sort of done a lot of things, I thought were going to make me happy, but I don’t feel fulfilled yet. There’s a solution just to keep trying to achieve and do more and more and more, more in doing that. It doesn’t feel as good as it used to. And I’m starting to burn out. And once leaders are starting to notice that and talk, ask those questions, they start to explore what might be beyond that. Then in the research, what’s beyond that, it’s called the redefining stage or redefining mindset, where you actually start to say, How do I both achieve some things in my life, but feel fulfilled? What does you start with saying, well, I want to do meaningful work, not just hit numbers, I want to see it’s a purpose for what I’m doing, where a sense of contribution? What do I really care about. And so for some people, you know, can look like a bit of a midlife crisis, you know, she was going along great. And then all of a sudden, this happened. But, so some of the work we’re doing in organizations is helping leaders see where they are on that developmental stages. And honestly, they feel relieved when they see it, that you’re not going crazy. You’re not losing your motivation. You’ve just moved beyond that part of your life. And you see it with, you know, consultants very often, because they were already in workplaces. They were doing all that. And then they said, and after that, your organization’s not going to let me move beyond that. And they’ll go off on their own, they’ll become consultants or coaches, or sometimes
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 33:36
their teams, they turn around, and it’s happening to their teams. So I want to keep that thread, remembering if so when the leader start going through this new growth, that’s going to have implications for their teams.
Unknown Speaker 33:51
Yeah,
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 33:51
let’s just go especially now with this new environment.
Unknown Speaker 33:55
That’s true. I was just speaking to a group of leaders this morning, who were saying that case, they get into the sort of the stages, their teams sometimes feel confused. They feel left behind by the leader who wasn’t telling them what to do anymore. They were talking about listening to a story about a CEO. And some of the people on the team were feeling confused, because he wasn’t telling them what he wanted. He wasn’t telling them what to do, and giving them direction. He was sharing his thinking he was sharing ideas. He was sharing what the future could look like. But then that walk out of the meeting and see is say, what does he actually want us to do? And that’s the point he wasn’t going to tell you what he wanted you to do. He wants you to work things out. You know, that’s why you’re on the team. So can we for the teams as well. You know, they’re at different places as well on developmental stages.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 34:52
And I know you have a whole set of tools that leaders can begin to use with their teams. Obviously, a lot of it is around the dialogue and the asking questions. And when you have people in that team who are also at different levels, and you make them aware of that, especially during these troublesome times, you can talk about the opportunity for a team to really grow. Yeah, looking at world differently.
Unknown Speaker 35:27
That’s right. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is a lot of organizations would like the development to now happen at the team level, as opposed to what it used to be you watch once let’s do, you know, bring leaders together from across the company, that’s been quite an interesting shift. So they’re looking for solutions that teams can do with their team leader, because that is the unit who was together, much closer than they used to be. So that’s certainly true. And we’ve built quite a whole lot of resources for teams now that how they can develop together as a group, as opposed to what’s you know, 30, a cohort of 30 people, which used to be the more common way?
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 36:06
Yes, exactly. And a lot of your, your white papers, and so forth, have those tools in them. And we want to make sure we let folks know how they can go find those and use them. I just found them the other day, going through all of the stuff that you have is is take some time to digest. So and they’re very exciting. Yeah, I’ve got lots of asking of questions. And lots of as I’m just doing this for our listeners, if I were operating at the level below me, how would I approach this decision? versus if I’m operating at the level above me? And I’m not I’m we’re not talking hierarchical level, we’re talking at mindset level. And that’s just that, I believe, is just a fabulous way to look at the team. And it’s, it’s like you’re gonna crack them open.
Unknown Speaker 37:13
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Mitch Simon 37:16
Nick, have you seen any particular practices that teams have taken on over the last year that you find pretty exciting?
Unknown Speaker 37:24
Yeah. So I’ve seen that it’s been powerful when it’s come from the top. And the executives, actually, because it can permeate a lot of people all at once, there’s something about sort of the senior senior executives, and particular SEO and the team, they can create a bit of a, like a ceiling for the whole organization, that people can’t really evolve beyond there, because they just keep feeling they keep can push down, or they really do tend to set the elevation of the whole culture. And we’re seeing organizations make quite a big shift quite quickly, as when the CEO, you know, has talked about we need to evolve quickly. The environments, changing our context, our industry, how do we quickly evolve to be fit for the future? And the answer as well, the executive team needs to go first, and then do all of us at scale. And so one CEO, who was working with he said, Okay, I’m going, how do we do this? They had quite an expert achiever culture, very much like I know the answers. I’m bulletproof, no vulnerability. We said, Okay, what we’re gonna ask you to do is go out and identify, what are the areas that you need to improve them? And what are your strengths? And so I said, like a 360? No, no, no, do it live. So he went out, and he interviewed people on the organization throughout the organization on what is his biggest backhand, we call it like the era he’s not so good at. And people were getting emails from the CEO, I’d like to have a chat with you about, you know, areas I need to improve on. And they said, it was a shock to the system, because no executive hadn’t ever done that before. And he went first, but then the other executive team members started doing it as well. And so all of a sudden, for the first time ever, you had these executives seeking feedback. They went through a process and then at an all hands meeting, he actually got up and shared. Alright, here’s what I did. I went out and interviewed all these different people. I was hoping I was going to get to work on this thing, but no one told me that what everyone said is, Mike, you need to get out the details and be a CEO. You need to set the strategic picture and leave us alone to do our work. And you know, in his mind that was coaching. He was coaching when it’s down to details, not for them. And then the CEO went next and then the CFO went next and shared that after I’d been through this process. I see Your turn. What do you want to work on? Most Powerful was that they’d modeled it first before asking anyone else to do it. And then that approach, we sort of cascaded that out through more and more leaders. And so they got, like, hundreds of leaders doing this plus many more things, many more tools. But that was very powerful, because it made things very transparent. It’s okay to change. It’s okay to develop. It’s okay to be vulnerable with each other.
Mitch Simon 40:30
I love that answer. Yeah, it’s great. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 40:32
Right.
Mitch Simon 40:33
Well, I’m Nick, I’ve loved this chat. And I love. I love your approach to leadership. And I love your cadence and your pace, too. I was wondering if, if our listeners wanted to get a hold of you and find out more about your white papers and your trainings and your books? Where would they go to find that?
Unknown Speaker 40:57
Yeah, they could go to the website. It’s www Nicholas Petrie. PTR ie.com. They can feel free to send me a message from the app. But what I’ve tried to do as well, it’s put a lot of free resources on the show. You can go you can explore all the topics we’ve talked about. inhabit a chat to people. I’d like to follow up.
Mitch Simon 41:20
Great. You ever coming back to the United States? Are you guys are good?
Unknown Speaker 41:23
That’s a mystery. I do not know what the future holds. Partly it’ll depend on what client’s expectations are. Like, are they good with doing something virtually? They say no, we need to get face to face. I mean, I loved my time and us. So it my boys are Americans that were born there. So very much like to go back. But it’s also good here for a spell as well. Yeah.
Mitch Simon 41:49
Great. Well, thank you, Nick. This has been fantastic podcast. And thank you, Jenny, for finding Nick and bringing him to the podcast. And thank you to all our listeners for listening to another episode of team anywhere and if you’ve loved this episode, or any other episodes, please pass this along to your friends and colleagues. And we look forward to seeing you on our next episode of team anywhere. Bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
