We Not Me

What happens when you grow a company from the ground up, and are then asked to leave? For entrepreneur Bart Foster, it meant reassessing his identity, and ultimately redefining himself.

After years spent as an intrapreneur within the corporate world, Bart founded his own health and wellness company and became an entrepreneur. Now he leads a company that helps teams think differently, get out of their comfort zones and into nature.

Key takeaways

• Pay attention to the 70% of the bell curve in conversations.
• We can make an intentional choice to pick the place we have for our conversations. It doesn’t always have to be in a meeting room.
• What feels like a failure might just be a sign of us stretching our comfort zones.
• Discomfort can be a good thing to seek.
• The quality of the question drives the quality of the conversation.

Links

• Connect with Bart on LinkedIn
• Business Outside – Bart’s company
• BusinessOutside: Discover Your Path Forward - Bart’s book
• The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, by Michael Easter
• The Regret Minimisation framework: how Jeff Bezos made decisions
• Leave us a voice note

Psychological safety is made up of a number of tiny interactions. Whether they be Slack messages, meetings, or emails, these forms of communication – and their responses – determine how likely someone is to speak up and share their ideas.

Stephan Wiedner is a psychological safety trainer, CEO, and volunteer firefighter. Stephan trains coaches to help create spaces where people feel free to speak up, with the confidence to know they’ll be heard.

Takeaways from Dan ad Pia

• Attunement is about making sure everyone is on the right mental frequency, and not just assuming you’re on the “correct” setting and everyone else needs to adjust.
• Focus on those micro moments of communication. Because without taking care of those micro interactions, problems can occur in the macro.

Links

• Connect with Stephan on LinkedIn
• The Fearless Organization – Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, by AC Edmondson
• Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smart, by Liz Wiseman

For the first time in over a thousand days of Squadify and forty episodes of the podcast, Dan and Pia are in the same room, and are joined by Juliet Owen, to discuss findings from a recent analysis on Squadify data.

Squadify works by asking team members to fill in a survey at the start and end of a particular period. Participants rate the importance of a series of conditions for team success, and then later return to record the presence of those conditions.

Key findings

• Teamwork is a more important condition for hybrid teams than it is for those that work face-to-face.
• Hybrid teams tend to be more task and transaction focused.
• Not being together is allowing us to become more easily distracted.
• Hybrid team communication can sometimes lead to fear of missing out.

What hybrid teams should focus on

• Creating psychological safety
• Using the right technology to enable better communication and avoid distraction
• Keeping communication clear, so that everyone shares the same understanding

Links

• Connect with Juliet on LinkedIn
• Marco Polo video chat app
• Leave us a voice note

Effective dialogue is the one thing getting in the way of senior teams. Listening is a fundamental part of team communication, and it begins with curiosity. Without it, leadership can be a lonely pursuit with less diversity of thought.

Before heading up design and research at LIW, Andy Chevis was an HR director and a salesperson, and has taken his curiosity in how we communicate effectively through his career. In this episode, he shares some of the common – and very human – pitfalls we all fall prey to, and how we can bridge those gaps to hold space for fresh ideas.

Takeaways from Dan and Pia

• Curiosity has a place at all levels in the System Team Self model.
• Curiosity starts with us.
• Ask yourself “what kind of person do you want to be?”

Links

• Connect with Andy on LinkedIn
• Empathic Listening: The Highest Form of Listening
• Leave us a voice note

Community policing runs on trust, no matter the location. That trust flows both ways, and can have its basis in something as simple as a common interest.

New Jersey police officer Adam Verducci and his squad are so well-connected that he knows when a situation is in progress just from the sound of a fellow officer’s voice on the radio. In his conversation with Dan and Pia, Adam walks us through a day in the life of a US police officer serving a relatively small town, where trust and connection come together to keep people safe.

Takeaways from Dan and Pia

• Keeping a cool head can help keep a volatile situation from escalating.
• The uniform denotes the job, but doesn’t give the wearer power.

Links

• The Rest is Politics
• Battleground: Ukraine
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Leadership is equal parts head, heart, and guts. Joining Dan and Pia to look back on an inspirational third season of We Not Me is CEO of LIW, Dan Meek.

Episodes highlighted

• Breaking out of the box – neurodiversity and connection, with Ross Fraser
• The brain science of teams, with Sue Langley
• Teams at the frontline of medicine, with Andy Bocock
• Connecting to heal, with James & Kristy Thomas
• Teams in disaster relief, with Janet and Reid Boswell
• Bringing our baggage to teams, with Mark Steadman
• Generative leadership in teams, with Kathleen Curran
• Coaching challenging teams, with Jackie Weaver
• Leadership for healthy teams, with Stephen Hunt
• Happiness in teams, with Matt Phelan

Links

• Head, Heart and Guts: How the World's Best Companies Develop Complete Leaders, by David L Dotlich et al
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Undiagnosed autism can feel like a constant struggle to understand, and to be understood. For autism campaigner Ross Fraser, this led to him hiding away for decades to avoid continuing to feel like he was doing or saying the wrong thing, without ever being given rules that made sense.

The autism community in the UK includes approximately five million people, and yet in Ross’s experience, most people who live with autism say they’ve felt alone most of their lives.

In his conversation with Dan and Pia, Ross breaks down some of the key differences between neurotypical and neurodivergent minds, and talks openly and emotionally about the impact loneliness and isolation has, which is what fuels his advoacy.

Takeaways from Dan and Pia

• Are we getting worse at connecting together as humans? If so, part of the work of connection means treating each-other as individuals.
• Is anyone really “fully” neurotypical?
• Any difference needs to be embraced with compassion, care, and curiosity.
• If you can be compassionate, you can work with any human.

Links

• “I wouldn’t change it for the world” Scot who met wife after breaking back in freak accident is “grateful for injury every day”
• The Best of Enemies (2019)
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Human beings are designed to connect. Lockdowns showed us how much we valued connection, but also how vital our habits were to helping us stabilise. But while habits include routine behaviours, they can also include thought patterns that lead to judgements of others.

Sue Langley equips people to be the best they can be. She does this by applying positive psychology, emotional intelligence, and neuroscience. In her conversation with Dan and Pia, she explores how principles applied of positive psychology can help teams get stuff done together.

Takeaways from Dan and Pia

• Put your brain health first.
• Build habits
• Pay attention and attune to the things that will keep you on your game.

Links

• Langley Group
• Positive psychology
• fusiform gyrus
• In Conversation with Professor Marco Iacoboni
• Generative leadership in teams – We Not Me episode 30
• Self-determination theory
• Leave us a voice note

When Becky Malby discovered that her local water provider was dumping raw sewage into the nearby river on a regular basis, she was outraged. So she helped setup a citizen science project to test the local water and found that it was full of dangerous pollutants, contradicting the study the water company had conducted which labeled the river water safe enough to drink.

Becky helps GPs within the NHS understand where the gaps are between those needing primary care and those who are making and getting appointments. As well as discussing bathing water status, Becky also outlines some of the systemic issues with primary care in the UK, and how she’s helping practises address them.

Takeaways from Pia and Dan

• If you approach a complex problem with a simple answer, you might end up worsening the situation.
• Humans need to connect differently to work against decisions made for the pursuit of shareholder profits.
• Adaptive challenges require adaptive leadership.

Links

• Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges, by C Otto Scharmer
• Diatoms
• The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, by Ronald Heifetz
• Leave us a voice note

Accident and emergency nursing involves managing and working with ever-shifting teams, with people joining temporarily who bring skill and knowledge, but aren’t familiar with the team’s inner workings. This is one of the challenges facing NHS nurse Andy Boocock.

Andy describes working, not only with his team in A&E, but when teams dovetail in emergency situations.

This conversation involves a discussion on and examples of gallows humour, involving stories of a medical nature.

Takeaways from Dan and Pia

• We can choose to help people or “mop around them”.
• Fear of embarrassment should not stand in the way of us helping someone in need.

Links

• “My only regret is running out of space” - how tattoos transformed one Very Inky Dude into a celebrity fashion star
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