#007 - The Seven Deadly Leadership Sins: Sloth

Tiffany Lenz 0:06

Do you watch anything good?

I'm watching the crown, the fourth season of the crown fascinating. I am not like up on the latest with them. But I've just I was watching the crown and then paused, waiting for whatever season to come out and then hadn't picked it back up again. Like as soon as it was launched and so I've been watching season four.

Robert Greiner 0:26

Oh, you were saying that the royal family was mad at Netflix or whoever made the show?

Tiffany Lenz 0:31

Yeah. I saw an article somewhere about that, where they were asking for better disclaimers around the fact that it was fiction. And like, a lot of it is just not fiction. But Netflix refused to put more disclaimers on it.

Robert Greiner 0:48

Why would you?

Tiffany Lenz 0:51

They felt that people knew that it was historically based drama. And there's a little bit of creative license there. But like, a lot of that stuff happened because people are still alive today who remember it. Like I keep running things by my mom. I'm like, hey, do you remember when this happened? She's like Oh, yeah, I totally remember that.

Robert Greiner 1:09

Diana and I watched. I think the first two seasons. We love Matt Smith from Doctor Who? Such a great actor. He was the first doctor that my wife was like watching every episode. We're watching them together. Steve Moffat was the full time writer of Doctor Who when Matt Smith took over and sounds like a David Tennant, Russell Davies kind of thing. And it Russell Davis was okay, I love David Tennant. He's my favorite probably my favorite actor like and just in general. But Steven Moffat, who also made Sherlock, the BBC show

Tiffany Lenz 1:44

I loves Sherlock.

Robert Greiner 1:45

Benedict Cumberbatch was also one of my favorite actors. Anyway, Steve Moffat wrote all of the Doctor Who episodes that we loved the most. You can't just start Doctor Who anywhere. You'll you'll be confused or it'll be too corny for you. And so I have a gateway path to get you hooked on Doctor Who it takes maybe six episodes. And they're all like Steven Moffat episodes.

Tiffany Lenz 2:10

Nice. I might have to borrow that from you. I've never gotten into Doctor Who and always felt like I was maybe missing something.

Robert Greiner 2:15

And then now the newest doctor is a woman. And I haven't watched any of those. And I'm really excited about introducing Amelia to her first doctor, who's the woman. And so I've been like saving that one. Partially for that and partially like just time related. But that'll be cool. So when I introduced the show to her, she'll have experienced her first doctor, which you apparently like really remember like, which one you start with? was true for me. And which is David Tennant. For me. You should start with one called blink. It has

Tiffany Lenz 2:45

I hope everyone's writing this down.

Robert Greiner 2:47

Yes. So it's one of the older ones. And then maybe girl in the fireplace after that one, which is a sci fi love story. If there's a love story with the sci fi element, like I'm interested, but yeah, Blink and Girl in the Fireplace would be to like really good ones to start.

Tiffany Lenz 3:06

I got it. That's awesome.

Robert Greiner 3:07

I don't want to right before you go to sleep. That gets it spooky.

Tiffany Lenz 3:12

Okay, okay, got that noted for my holiday watching.

Robert Greiner 3:16

Yeah, it'll be great.

Tiffany Lenz 3:17

But that's how I feel about some black mirror episodes to like, one I can't binge it and two, if I watched them before I get asleep. I'm like, this is disturbing. My my rest. It's too much.

Robert Greiner 3:29

Yeah. And some of those things that I'll get can't remember was it Isaac Asimov, who was basically said, Hey, great. science fiction is not predicting the automobile. It's predicting the the, like rush hour or the car crash. Like the traffic jam. Like that's where the true sci fi innovation type stuff comes in. And black mirror is just filled with that. It's like a little too close to home for me.

Tiffany Lenz 3:51

Yeah, seriously, especially working in technology like we do. Yes, I know. Actually, those things are possible. And it scares me.

Robert Greiner 3:58

Or is already happening on a smaller scale, or it's

Tiffany Lenz 4:00

already happening. You don't have to I wish it was hard. Yeah.

Robert Greiner 4:03

Yes. Oh my gosh. So anyway, Matt Smith, to go back to the crown. He's the reason why we started it. And it was great. It's a great show. I liked Winston Churchill in those first couple episodes and our first couple seasons and stuff. Definitely really interesting.

Tiffany Lenz 4:18

Yeah, yeah. And then he's not in Season Three, three, and four. Because they do it what feels like, to me a pretty big age jump. It's actually not that many years, but they change actors completely. And it feels like they jumped ahead like 10 or 15 years, even though according to them, they didn't. But the actors change and there, they look a lot older, and they're both very good, but I thought that was a little odd. Just my opinion.

Robert Greiner 4:43

Yes, it would be hard for me, even though we just talked about a show where that happens on the regular. So your birthday is coming up. Happy birthday.

Tiffany Lenz 4:51

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Robert Greiner 4:54

Yes, right around the time you're going to take some time off your It's nice having a December birthday.

Tiffany Lenz 4:59

I don't mind. Some people hate it. I don't mind it my birthday three days before Christmas, so shout out to all those Christmas babies out there.

Robert Greiner 5:06

Did you ever get like this is your birthday and Christmas present? In one?

Tiffany Lenz 5:10

all the time, except probably from my mom who's super sensitive about that stuff. So she would have gone the extra mile. So not even use Christmas wrapping paper. Birthday wrapping paper. Yeah, distinct celebration. So it was very thoughtful like that. Very cool.

Robert Greiner 5:27

All right, so we are in the middle. Where are we halfway done? We're right around the halfway mark.

Tiffany Lenz 5:32

We are we're hitting this. Have you thought of it as a clock face? We are just crossing from, say 11-1, because they're not quite even. But yeah, we're setting over? Yeah.

Robert Greiner 5:43

Yes. Seven Deadly leadership. sins. Yes. And I'm just gonna check my notes real quick, although you probably have it in front of you which ones will be covered.

Tiffany Lenz 5:51

We've covered lust, gluttony, and greed. so far. So we're hitting number four, I was just thinking about kind of the theme of things that we've talked about. We've talked about a number of things that are all related to setting, setting expectations or victim thinking, We started last week talking about the customer, we're going to talk more in the coming weeks about an external presence. So it's not exclusively like internal and external focus, because this week is also very internal focused. But there are lots of different ways to package these I chose this order, I think you I think if you were to take the same depth, seven deadly sins, and look at it from a different angle of these are digital sins, or how large projects can be successful or can be a failure, these first three would be early on, like before, before chaos, something that you could affect, that would inhibit failure. And then the last ones are after you've jumped the shark, and you've already hit a point of failure, but the way we're looking at them, so far, we've talked about just being inflexible, feeling like a victim, and losing focus on your customer.

Robert Greiner 7:05

Excellent. And I can't remember how deep we've gotten into this. But I do love analogies, I basically operate by them. It seems like my wife's always making fun of me, appears things like that, just how I think, Oh, this, this is like Uber for this other thing. And I'll make sports analogies a lot, too, I think partially because there is an analogue around world class performers, and really tight feedback loops. And I'm jealous about how much feedback professional athletes get on every little component is measured, I think that'd be really helpful. Our leading and lagging indicators in the business world are months or quarters, or years, or sometimes immeasurable, or we don't have the right tools in place or things like that. And so I definitely like the analogy idea here and then thinking about, okay, what does gluttony look like in an organization? And how are people gluttonous, the different ways? And then how can that be a group of people because at the end of the day, even though, this is an analogy, you said, it's tongue in cheek, which I like, but it's all human nature, as well. And so it's funny to see interesting and not really funny if you've if you're experiencing it, but interesting to see how this stuff plays out.

Tiffany Lenz 8:13

Interesting that you would bring up feedback loops and lagging or leading indicators as they relate to people's feedback. Because today, our topic is all about looking at your team. It's all about reviewing and paying attention to the behavior patterns that you see and what you do with those. Because we're talking about sloth today.

Robert Greiner 8:34

That's my daughter's nickname, because she gets dressed so slowly. So little sloth.

Tiffany Lenz 8:40

I have a soft spot for slots, I visited a slot sanctuary in Costa Rica once just because so I have a soft spot for slots.

Robert Greiner 8:49

They're pretty cool. There's one in the Dallas world aquarium. So it's more there's not as much like water and fish life in the Dallas aquarium as you might think there's like an ant eater. And there's like a little sloth area by the snack bar and it's not really roped off so you could actually go right under it with it there. And I always thought they were pretty cool. Moving around and stuff. So anyway, my daughter gets dressed slowly. So there you go. Alright, so what is slot look like in an organization? I think we can all think about what it's it's a little bit obvious about what it looks like for an individual what is an a slot like organization look like?

Tiffany Lenz 9:29

So the way of characterized slough is the way that a leader or a manager focuses on their employees the way they who they reward and who they ignore. And I don't think for me, the implication is not that managers in general, or leaders are lazy. That's not it, slothful but there is an easy path and a hard path of employee engagement, employee development and working Looking at the the overall chemistry and DNA productivity of your team and how you keep fine tuning each piece so that you've got a really well oiled machine. And when I think about sloth in this case, it is frankly, rewarding superstars because that's easy and ignoring people on your team who are toxic, because that's much harder to spot.

Robert Greiner: 10:23

I do love rewarding superstars, telling me all right, the home run hitter, the Hail Mary touchdown pass, four seconds left in the game, after half the crowd has left, the three point shot at the buzzer. Someone working over the weekend, and solving a really hard problem and being able to meet a client commitment or a delivery deadline. We do love heroes, and we love rewarding heroes as a society as an organization as individuals. I'm thinking right now I love nothing more than having someone on my team just take the initiative and do something. And it's great. And it's I could never have done it that anyway. And this is so good. Like, do you want an iPad? What can I do for you? And yeah, I definitely, like this resonates with me, like all I want to do is have a team full of high performers and reward them for doing a great job. But I don't really like doing the other stuff, which is what dealing with the opposite of high performance.

Tiffany Lenz: 11:22

Yes.

Robert Greiner: 11:23

Which are in what you defined as toxic toxic employees. Yeah. Okay, so what does that look like

Tiffany Lenz: 11:28

Read this interesting article recently, and it's become a little bit of a, it's becoming a policy for me. And right now, it's a bit of a thought experiment, because I'm working with new teams and still going to be building a team in 2021. But it's the two x rule of toxic employees. So this article was an Inc article from just October of this year, it was titled if you follow the two x rule of toxic employees, Harvard research shows that you're a better leader than you think That is a little bit, it feels counterintuitive, even what does that mean to ex rule of toxic employees. But that's why I got my attention, obviously, because I'm like you I love rewarding people. I love celebrating other people's successes people on my team people not on my team and words of affirmation is one of my top two love languages as I like giving and receiving that sort of affirmation and praise. So the idea that you would need to pay more attention to someone who's toxic is a little bit counterintuitive for me. But as I started reading this article, it started to make sense. And I kept finding these moments where I was like, Oh, yeah, I've experienced that I've had felt that exact same way, I've felt repelled, in a very strong way, by a toxic person, then I felt drawn by a superstar. So a couple of comments from this article. One was, which is worth more. So if I just asked you, what do you think on your team? Because you want a team of superstars as do I? What is worth more to you a superstar or a toxic person?

Robert Greiner: 12:59

Do you mean having a superstar and getting rid of a toxic person or just having one of each

Tiffany Lenz: 13:04

Just having.

Robert Greiner: 13:06

Oh, certainly superstar? Yep,

Tiffany Lenz: 13:08

that is what we think. But we if you look at it from this lens of compare and contrast, a this in 2015, there was a study by Harvard Business School where they looked at a slew of data as they always do, across 60,000 employees. And what they found is that hiring a superstar defined as the top 1% employee made the company on average 5000 extra dollars, but exiting a toxic employee saved the company more than twice that about $12,500. And so that seems odd. And yes, it's just one piece of data. But if we look at why that is, the point of this article was that actually repelling is stronger than attraction. So a toxic employee causes two times more people to leave than a superstar causes people to stay. So if you just look from that one lens and say, if I have a superstar, and I have a, if I have a superstar around toxic employees, I'm actually losing the investment I made in that superstar because they are two times more likely to leave than any praise that I give them will cause them to stay. So that was one data point.

Robert Greiner: 14:29

They tell their superstar friends that this is a terrible place to work. So I think that's interesting point, because I think it was Martin Fowler, who talked about the original or Paul Graham, maybe that talked about the original, like 10 x developers. So we come from the world of software development, hyper productive software engineers, software developer programmer, is 10 x more productive than their middle of the bell curve counterparts. And so to your point, you could spend a lot of time and energy recruiting, hiring the best talent. And then if you entertain, or allow toxic behaviors within the organization, those smart people are just going to say, Oh, forget this, I can go somewhere else. And I don't have to deal with this hassle anymore. And so you keep the toxic people around, to just constantly repel away like a perpetual repelling force, all of your best people. And then you're making these investments in really great people that amount to nothing, because they're not there long enough for you to get any kind of return on those investments.

Tiffany Lenz: 15:31

I'm familiar with that work. And I've certainly experienced as a project manager and a manager and leader of developers, I've experienced that exact conversation of having very strong, capable, Uber intelligent developers who just say, I actually can't take this if you can't figure out how to fix this team structure, such that I don't constantly feel like I'm being pulled down or brought down wet morale, or otherwise continually about. And so what good really does me giving them a 5,10,15% raise do not much what good really does the verbal praise the public recognition do not much. Their everyday experience is stronger, and it dovetails nicely with the second point in this article, which is, you have to think about the impact experience of each person. So as a manager, as your team grows, you have to accept the fact that you can really only impact 20 to 30% of the people on your team. Those are the people you can really surround yourself with and spend enough time with that it's a direct impact, which means that 70 to 80% of the people on your team are impacted by someone else. And if you're not, if you're not overweighting, the number of superstars to toxic employees than the superstars are being impacted 2x by every toxic employee, it starts to almost feed off of itself and like this downward spiral.

Robert Greiner: 17:07

So when you know that 2020 especially you start thinking about well being and I think, on average in aggregate, humans are more depressed this year than than in the past and things like that. And we've had situations like this, I think everyone has in their life where you could have 100 things going really well. Careers firing on all cylinders, you made more money last year than you've ever made, you have really good relationships at work outside of work, your social calendar is full, you've doubled your friends or your follower followers on Twitter, whatever those metrics are, and then you don't get along with your sibling, or your spouse, or your kids. Or maybe the work that was going really well doesn't go really well. And this one thing gets out of whack. And then that basically erases the good feelings, the positivity, the joy out of those other areas in your life that are going well. And so I could very much see how great culture bringing in food every day, wear whenever you want to work, free bus rides to and from work, like whatever perks you could throw at humans good salary, like dry cleaning, whatever, you stick one bad manager in front of an individual contributor. You put someone toxic on a team at the pier level that undoes everything else you could possibly do.

Tiffany Lenz: 18:27

It's interesting that you can define toxic as not, we're not even talking about people who are a legal risk. We're just talking about people who, in one way or another, undermine their colleagues, their company, their project, it's much more from this particular set of research. The questions asked were much more about interaction, or someone who just complains all the time, that toxic behavior just wears on people.

Robert Greiner: 18:57

So interesting point, too, because they did saying like misery loves company. I remember a client interaction I had, and this is all of our discussions. I like bringing up these memories that I think Yeah, I don't know if this is a good thing or not. But so I'm at a client, we're doing a software integration, custom dev thing, pretty standard, you would look at this and say it's a fairly solved problem. It just needed to happen. There was the team that was ultimately responsible for the application after we left, had a pretty junior developer on the team. And then a jaded senior guy who never really got promoted above the individual contributor role had been at the company probably too long, and just over the years, seemed to get more and more bitter. And I remember they did this like behavioral assessment, they brought someone in a work. There's this new body of work coming, we want to make sure everyone's gelling together. We're gonna invest some time, let's get your Myers Briggs or whatever. And let's talk about how we're wired so we can build some trust. Build the team up together. And the older guy thought it would be funny to just pick random selections on the behavioral tests so that when the readout happened, he could say how wrong now. So he seeded it with bad data. And this junior developer, I remember, he thought it was hilarious. He thought it was so funny and looked up to the older guy. And now you have just magnified the toxicity of the organization. And they have two people running people off. Yeah, this is terrible. Now, I'm afraid. So what can we do about it?

Tiffany Lenz: 20:37

That is horrible. I don't, I've never confronted anything quite like that. But I can certainly look back at reasons that I have wanted to join a company or even join a team inside a company, as being I'm always drawn to people in mission. And then I am always pushed away by a violation of that either people or mission, and it can be constantly negative, insincere, toxic people. I've never confronted anything exactly like what you said. But I have even as a consultant, like leading accounts, I've had to talk to employees about toxic behavior and had to talk to client executives, about a an employee on their side and their behavior and the impacts that it was having on the entire team. And that's really tricky stuff. It's stuff that you hope you don't get to until you've already built some trust there. But it does happen. And somebody's got to do it.

Robert Greiner: 21:38

Yeah. And I think we mentioned I mentioned this to you earlier, but if you went through my LinkedIn right now, and started with my very first job, all the way up to where I'm at now. And if you said, Give me three reasons why you left here. One, one, I do feel like was mostly opportunity, but I could definitely name three to five people. In some cases, one where I was like, good riddance, I'm glad that I don't have to deal with you anymore. It's worth the risk, it's worth the hassle of finding a new job just to get away from this person.

Tiffany Lenz: 22:08

So imagine if you were the manager or the leader, or the executive on the receiving end of that sort of feedback, our conversation, Robert, and if they had the ability to play that whole scenario back and think of but what if, six months before you quit a 12 months before you quit? They saw toxic behavior, and they ignored it. Now we're talking about sloth. Worse yet, what if they didn't even notice it? But it is, to your point earlier, when we were speaking, it's just so much easier to look at the Rockstar, the superstar the person like knocking out of the park and focus only on their happiness and their needs, without realizing the residual impact of the people around them who need to their like their performance has to be addressed positively and negatively.

Robert Greiner: 23:06

You're so right, it's so easy to praise. Someone who did such a great job. And so difficult definitely path of least resistance, right? If you're going to spend energy, addressing your team with feedback, it's going to be much easier, you're always going to default to instinctively to go to the Rockstar to the person that hit the homerun, it feels so good. It lets you feel good. Maybe you can take a little bit of leadership credit for how good this person did because they're on your team. And you can say, hey, look what did under my guidance, but you don't want to go and have to talk to your boss about maybe firing someone on your team that can make you look really bad.

Tiffany Lenz: 23:42

And that's that thing right there. I'm gonna pull on that thread for a minute. I because I do think this is both and I think you focus on reward superstars and you address toxic employees as a leader, other than setting strategy. What other job really do you have, other than building a well oiled machine finding the right people cultivating the right people, helping them work as one toward one mission? It shouldn't that be your primary job where that's not typically what we spend time doing as leaders. In fact, it's the last thing we spend time doing. At our firm, we're lucky enough to have a pretty extensive structure built in that naturally highlights good and bad performance and helps move people along and develop their career. But I've never seen anything like it anywhere else, which speaks to a pretty at this point in my career. I've seen a lot of other companies and a lot of consulting firms. It's a pretty big deficit. But you mentioned something else that is even more subtle here, which is, why is it shameful, almost shameful for a manager to go to their boss and say that they need to let people go on their team because they're toxic. Why is that a negative reflection on You as a manager, why isn't that heralded and brought to the forefront and and celebrated?

Robert Greiner: 25:06

Yeah, that's a good question. I think this could be like a recursive sloth thing where if your direct comes to you and says, Hey, I have, I know I've been talking to you about Sara, she's great. We just gave her a bonus, she was the whole reason we were successful Employee of the Month kind of thing. But James, that guy, we really, we need to let him go and give me your feedback about interrupting and yelling at people. And he's constantly late. And I have all this data around it. As this person's Boss, I may say, Hey, don't come to me with that problem. Tell me more of the good stuff, it still it all comes back to this path of least resistance thing where you tend to punish the messenger, which is a one of the 20 bad habits and what got you here won't get you there, which we talked about. But yeah, I think maybe that could that also be related to path of least resistance from the bosses side, where it's just it's, you don't want to maybe praise someone for cutting or cutting out some dead weight or some negativity? Because it's a hard thing to do.

Tiffany Lenz: 26:07

It's just very interesting that I think it's deep. It's pretty people don't like conflict as a rule, which means they don't like rooting out hard things like having the hard conversation, dealing with that hard problem. Firing someone or exiting a toxic employee, that's so much harder. And we don't like any element of that as humans. So it's a it's almost societal, it that behavior is rejected. If you find a manager doing it, is their manager likely to constantly support that kind of behavior? for all the right reasons? Probably not. Even if you were lucky enough to find two people in a chain, who thought that way? Are they the only people in their organization, probably not to fully depress you on this topic, but it really is a little bit, it really is a little bit of a domino effect, or you start to see, wait a second, this isn't one leader, we're speaking to one individual at a time here who can make a difference. But if you're a leader listening to this, and finding yourself in that kind of culture, maybe the toxic employee around you is your manager. And there's nothing you can do about that. Except maybe find someplace where this sort of honest, open conversation is not not stymied and shut down. It's not shameful.

Robert Greiner: 27:26

And I think one feeling that would indicate you're in that situation, as a leader, if you feel really lonely in your role, there is a an aspect of like, your values are not aligned or something is up and you feel alone, I think is probably a good indication that you're in a situation that you were talking about.

Tiffany Lenz: 27:45

So before we go down too much of a path of doom and gloom, especially who's so close to so many holidays, well, actually, lots of people are already celebrating holidays. But there is a remedy. And when I started thinking about the remedy, it was almost overly simplified, thou shalt go forward and build an empowered team period. And that didn't seem like quite enough, because it doesn't give like how, if for finding yourself even intuitively, in a situation where this makes sense to you, and you want to practice it, or maybe you've been practicing it and not getting great support in your organization, building an empowered team is going to be difficult. The way I have thought about it myself is and I'll share a personal example is build an empowered team with a force multiplier, which implies that you have to figure out what your team's or your organization's force multiplier is. For me, and this is actually the topic that brought us together in the first place in a meeting a few months ago. What for me, I went right to Patrick Lencioni. And that research, and this is you and I started talking when I heard you sharing some of lencioni pyramid and Five Dysfunctions of a team. A number of years ago, I was building an executive team of my own for the first time and I started building around targets like scalability and sustainability to say that everyone has and can't just have a win win, it's got to be a win, win win, I've got to have to just meet everyone's needs at the same time, internally, externally and also clients. And because I was building internationally in the healthcare space, I just found that skill wasn't enough, I had to have a global team. I really wanted the executive team to be 50% women, let's just you know, lay everything out there at the same time. And as I did my own sort of just levels of different kinds of analysis on what would what would really be my force multipliers. What would elevate this team if it wasn't just skill, I couldn't I didn't have a common timezone or a common language or even a common culture across most people in the team. And when I went back to Lencioni his material and I found trust sitting at the bottom of this pyramid. I thought, My gosh, if I could figure out the behavior sets that would build trust across this group of men and women in so many different cultures who didn't even share the same first language. That is it. That's my unlocking and my force multiplier. So going back to sloths, right, this is building a an infrastructure inside a team that routes out toxicity itself. So the toxicity wasn't all mine to identify, and all mine, maybe not all of it to deal with most of it to deal with, but not all, but even the identification itself. That was the power of my particular force multiplier, when I picked trust. So I ended up instead of just building business metrics, I built what I called rules of engagement. And there were three of them. And they were all behavioral. So imagine setting a group of 40 plus year old executives down and saying, really what I need you to hold each other accountable to are these three things, judging positive intent, talking to one another, not about one another and making each other look good? And a myriad of questions? And what does this look like and feel like and how do we do it? And but like explaining to them that if we if these things will, in fact, build trust in us as a team, the their sheer capabilities, the business results would come. I just knew it, it ended up being a proof positive experiment took us three and a half years, but it was a proof positive experiment to see quite a lot of business results. But I would say to any manager or leader or CEO out there, the way to build that effective powerful team isn't just rooting out a toxic employee, one by one, you have to find a force multiplying process that will exponentially address the behaviors that are negative and have to go because if you have to do it one person at a time, it is going to take so long that most people will lose energy with it,

Robert Greiner: 32:02

you've hit on a really interesting, let's call it leadership tactic or hack around rules of engagement, up front rules, ground rules, when you're in a meeting, when you're giving a presentation. When you're facilitating a workshop, it's really say, Okay, what are our ground rules, and then you can even have people shout them out, right, like respect, everybody, no cell phones, there are a lot of really common ones. And ultimately, what you're doing is you're creating the value system of a group, whether it's a one time one hour workshop, or it's a multi year, multi person, team or team of teams. And then you can say, hey, my expectation is, we hold each other accountable to these things, we've all agreed that these are the rules of engagement, if you violate them, or you don't call someone out for violating them, we're calling it upfront, that's not acceptable. And that really drives some clarity into what the team can expect from each other. To your point about mission and people earlier, you know what the value system of the team is around you what you can expect from them. And it starts, it makes it really easy. We're talking about path of least resistance here. It makes it less hard, less friction centered, to approach someone about toxicity and misbehavior, because you've been given permission ahead of time. So I think that's a good when you said, an empowered team, you're giving permission to opt in. And then as a leader, you're not enough to solve this yourself. Because you have a dozen people around if you have four people around. What are you going to do? as an individual? That's way too hard?

Tiffany Lenz: 33:31

Yeah, yeah, it is. I, I found this was incredibly challenging. But I did find that the team themselves, at least their feedback to me was, it was very difficult, but over time, very empowering. And interestingly, as I've heard from a number of those people throughout the years now who's our team disbanded in 2017, for a number of reasons, I found that I still hear from some of those folks, and they will reach out and talk about those rules of engagement, more than anything else, something that they took with them, like I learned to always give people the benefit of the doubt, or I learned to always talk to somebody before I talked about them with full change in the way you choose to interact with one another. We can and I think we will do a whole whole discussion on those three and break them down. But that's a a micro example of how you can't you just have to accept that as a leader, you have to build the output is you have to build the team. You have to build a high functioning, high performing team. You can't deal with everything yourself. So how are you going to build a process that does the work for you,

Robert Greiner: 34:46

You know, we talked about earlier, an indication that if you're doing the right thing might be loneliness, could be a proxy. I think in this case, when you set those rules, a good indication potentially Maybe not in all cases, but maybe a proxy is discomfort. Now, do you play golf at all? Have you ever played golf? Okay, so I got really into it for a while. And just like any one of my hobbies, I just go off the deep end, I could tell you about different clubs and lies and deep, dynamic plane and all of this stuff I got. I'm in like PGA Tour Store, trying to help people even like that kind of that level of annoying. Yeah, yeah, I can't help it. And I took some golf lessons. And the first thing they do is you get up in front of the instructor and you hit a couple golf balls, and Okay, like reorient your posture a little bit, and then swing like this. And it is the most uncomfortable thing, it feels unnatural. It's weird, I don't understand it. But you like hit the ball more consistently. And then you once you build that muscle memory, once you're used to it, then you can't think about not doing it that way. And the idea is over time you just kind of mold and shape your swing and how you play and then you're doing all the right things. And so this seems like the same level of analogy, it's like very uncomfortable at first, that's probably an indication that it's in the right direction. Because the past, the path of least resistance is not helpful, it's toxic. So you're climbing up the hill towards the objective the right way. And then over time, that becomes easier and part of the culture. And then once you've paid the price of entering into that, then you get to reap all the rewards of the increased trust the decreased toxicity of the team and then over time, you'll be in a much better spot. So does that what you mean by like force multiplier

Tiffany Lenz: 36:32

100%. That's exactly what I mean. Yeah. And it is really uncomfortable at first have to share some examples with you. And the next time when we dig into this, because I've got examples for each one that are so weird, and things you would never expect it changing human behavior is always difficult. And these are not, you mentioned lagging and leading indicators early on. Like These are not things that you can measure, you can't measure how often one gives the benefit of the doubt to another person. It's hard enough to measure trust. But what you can measure is the function and the productivity that comes from a team that invests in this. And that's what we're both firm believers on. And I have to two times now I have been able to try this and have evidence that shows that it does work, from a business standpoint, it is certainly a difficult sell in some cultures, not in others. But in in most corporate cultures, it's a hard sell, because it's a very different way of building a team. But I'm not even saying that this particular way, like building around trust is the exact I think you and I both agree it's the right thing to do. But is it the exact force multiplier for everyone, not necessarily going back, it was for me, continues to be for me, for sloths, I think you're still looking to just build a high functioning team and find your own force multiplier.

Robert Greiner: 37:59

Yeah. And just a word of encouragement too if you're in the leadership position, and you're faced with this tough decision, which we all are or will be at some point. It's not a matter of if but when, when the coach benches, the superstar player who maybe has the best stats on the team, but has the worst attitude. You look at that. And you're like, Man, that's leadership, thank goodness, someone stood up to that guy, when someone is let go at work for budgetary reasons, or is getting laid off or something like that. It feels terrible. It just feels horrible. When someone gets let go for the right reasons. And it's conspicuous. There's a bit of a sigh of relief. And I think people around you appreciate reducing toxicity more than they let on. And you are materially improving the lives professional lives, which bleeds into the personal lives of those around you. Because you're removing negatives from the equation, which to your point from earlier, have a much better repelling effect than the positives. And we see that in our personal lives as well. Yeah, I love it. I think this is good. I would if I was going to fall into any one of the seven deadly sins in which there would be multiple of organizationally, professionally, sloths would be one of them. I think I really tend to index on path of least resistance, rewarding the superstars and letting other things slide as thinking not my problem. They'll figure it out. Those kind of things. So this was really helpful for me. Thank you for your time today.

Tiffany Lenz: 39:27

Cool. Cool.

It's my pleasure. This is probably one of the most fun ones for me. Thank you.

Robert Greiner: 39:33

Yeah. Was it hit me a little PTSD? Always? Yes, yes. So thanks again, and I'll be Have a Happy birthday.

Tiffany Lenz: 39:43

Thank you. Take care.

Robert Greiner: 39:44

We'll

see you in a week. Bye.