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Me vs. We: What Creates More Value? · Humanity Working

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Whoever's dumb idea that was, Matt.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: So many people are excited about the gimmick that we have to keep the gag going.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't do the clock.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: All the comments from the listeners.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: They forget to do the clock are just overwhelming.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Precisely.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, uh, today we're digging into the tension between the individual and the team.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: What creates more value, the me or the we?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: It can be a bit counterintuitive, actually, Matt.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um definitely, definitely the we, but we will we'll get into details as to to why and why and how.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And just briefly, when we say me versus we, we're talking about what people bring to an organization in terms of the work they do themselves versus what people bring to the organization as part of a team.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, in terms of making the team itself better.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: So so yeah, so uh maybe in in an example would be like uh maybe in sports or you know, players, teams, things like that.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Is there is there a parallel and and what have you seen in your research?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, actually, in fact, the the whole research came from that.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: As regular listeners to the podcast will know, we actually study sports quite a bit.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the reason we study sports quite a bit is because um it's really interesting in the sense that it's measurable, right?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: You can see when a team is doing well because they win, right?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: You can see when a team is doing well because their results are better during the course of a season and so on.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: So you'd a lot of these intangible things inside the workplace you can't really measure, but in um sports, you can measure them directly in terms of uh in terms of results.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why we do it.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what is interesting is that there aren't just single examples, there are multiple examples of situations where star players have moved from one sports team to another, and the sports team they've gone to hasn't necessarily got much better, and the sports team that they've left hasn't got better, it's uh hasn't got worse, it's actually got better itself.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So a great great example of that was uh A Rod Alex Rodriguez.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: He played for the Seattle Mariners, was considered to be one of the greatest uh baseball players in the world, in history, in fact.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um 2001, leads the Seattle Mariners, signs a massive tenure contract, was the largest uh sports contract uh in the world at that time, I think$250 million, something like that.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and joins the Texas Rangers.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Texas Rangers doesn't get materially better.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: The team he left, the Mariners get massively better after he leaves.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Cristiano Ronaldo, similar situation, comes back to Manchester United.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um everybody thinks that Manchester United's uh um performance is gonna go up massively.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: It does not, if anything, it gets worse.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So these types of things happen, um, and they happen within sports teams.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Often it's considered to be uh unusual that it does happen, but in reality we see that it happens a lot, and we see the pattern doesn't just apply to sports, it applies to the rest of the world and it applies to business settings.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's fascinating with sports because there's so much going on if you've played a sport and you recognize like some team sports, it's just as much about the talent on the team as how they kind of feel about each other.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And you had Alex Rodriguez Rodriguez heading into Texas.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone in the world knew he got this crazy, ridiculous contract.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: So even without him doing anything, he was walking into a resentment fireball, right?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um so and then the pressure on him to perform based on that, who knows what his own mental state was like was like, oh my god, I I better perform, which made him worse, right?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe, you know, uh when there's it's it's all psychology of the players around the players themselves, and the outside perception and pressure that changes in a work setting, it's it's yeah even tougher because A, you can't measure it, right?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And B or it or it's hard to.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: You can, yeah.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: But it's hard.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: The interesting thing there, though, Matt, is that I think if you look back at the data, you'll see that he's that his performance isn't materially worse.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: There is an element of that, right?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: But if imagine that you go into an environment like that, and you imagine the environment you go into is one of resentment or even just one of uncertainty, like how are we gonna play differently now, A-Rod's here, and so on.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, if everybody else's performance gets diminished by, I don't know, five percent, the margins are so small in sports that if everybody's performance goes down by five percent, you've turned a good team into a worse team by join by joining.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think is one of the interesting lessons to be learned here, right?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: You bring in the star performer to your team with the goal that you know just their arrival is gonna make everybody better.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: But if all the intangibles shift 3%, 4%, 5% by virtue of this new person coming in, you've potentially made that team a worse performing team than it would have been otherwise.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Did you uh it's a a little bit of a tangent, but also sports related.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: If you followed Ted Lasso, as I recall, you know, part of the arc of the story there was you know, Jamie Tart was the star, the ego.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and they brought in a guy who was the super guru at some point one of the seasons, and he actually made the team realize they should work better together.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: So the superstar came in, you know, uh and made Jamie Tart a better player because he became a team, like it was like this boiled into story arc also uh make makes a lot of sense.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but in reality, how often does that always play out, right?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it makes it makes it a tough choice on all right, so who do we hire?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Do we hire the star?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like what do we do, you know?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: So in our world, um uh this by the way, this is something that we've uh we've done programs on.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um I do keynotes on as well.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a it's just a fascinating area.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so we call that type of star performer, we call them star soloists, right?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because they're brilliant, they get amazing results, but it's always in a solo setting.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um their focus and drive can be incredible, but it also can create disruption, make it difficult to collaborate and all that kind of stuff.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: So hiring them is probably third on your list, ironically, right?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: What you ideally want, if you could possibly do it, is you want what somebody that we call a star catalyst, right?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the star catalyst is somebody who is awesome in their own right and can make the team better as well.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Really, really hard to do to go back to sports.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the famous example of that is actually documented in The Last Dance for folks who've seen that, right?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Where um Phil Jackson is persuading Jordan, Michael Jordan, to shift from sort of solo to team-oriented play.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the full knowledge that his own stats might go down, but with the goal of making the uh making the team better.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that transformed everything, made the Bulls as as as uh dominant as they could be.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um you want that if you can get it.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: But 99% of the time you're not getting that.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: So before you get to that kind of like star soloist thing, you really, really want to, if you can't do it, you want to go for what we call a team amplifier.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: The team amplifier are the glue.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: They're the people that sort of build on each other's work and help others build on theirs.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Often they're less flashy, but they're way more valuable for a team's success.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: And rather than making everybody else in the team's performance 5% worse, they're making everybody else's performance in the team 5% better.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is that most teams, most organizations are not set up to measure that or to hire for that, um, or to even reward that on a day-to-day basis.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's striking me that that some of these things need to like make their way if they haven't already into uh almost more targeted making their way into hiring process in in the questions you're asking in an interview.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like, hey, would you consider yourself a team amplifier, team catalyst?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how would you describe yourself in that way?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is you're gonna get a lot of that information.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, focus your understanding that, yeah.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Focus your questioning on scenarios that show how they have made others better.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if they're not able to do that, because star soloists generally will not be able to do that, that should be minimum yellow flag.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's how you hire, who you hire, and considering that these are uh, you know, so we were talking earlier about uh maybe before the before the podcast about uh the the idea of the gauntlet of work out there and the gauntlet of HR screening and the algorithm of it.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, man, so it it has to be tuned too, because it's probably just gonna find you the star players.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna find you the Alex Rodriguez pretty easy.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so how do you get, hey, I'm a you know, for a person to realize, like, hey, you know what I'm really good at is making everybody around me better.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: How do I put that in my profile so it finds me?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that kind of thing.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's fascinating.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure is, Matt.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Good episode.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Think we think we nailed it.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Talk to you next one.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: See you in the next one.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Great teamwork.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Our interviewer is Paul Slater.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, like, and recommend us to others.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: It helps us reach more people.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.