Winning Teams

In the military, it was all about the details for today's guest, Charlie Gilkey. And when it comes to teams in a business, the same is true. Charlie's military background sets him up very well to talk about team habits and what habits benefit teams in any environment.

What are the habits that impact the quality of work? In today's episode, Charlie shares the 8 categories of team habits and how finding the one that is broken, could solve a world of problems.

It's time to start talking about the things that are broken instead of accepting that they'll stay that way. You don't have to wait and it doesn't matter the size of the team. As the author of a process book called Team Habits, Charlie helps readers grab onto these ideas to make sure that their team's habits serve them well.

• Charlie's background in the military
• The best of the individual, the best of the team, and how to lead
• "The broken printer"
• Teammates are not victims, but active participants
• The collective habits that we can change
• Different types of power
• Don't wait till the whole organization is ready to change
• It's all about the details
• High-belonging and high-performing teams set goals together
• No agenda? No meeting.
• Never let a crisis go to waste
• New generation entering the workforce
• Find the "broken printer" and fix it
• The 8 categories of team habits
• Charlie's book recommendations and daily rituals

Charlie Gilkey is the founder of Productive Flourishing, a website that helps changemakers (creatives, leaders, and entrepreneurs) start finishing the stuff that matters. Productive Flourishing is routinely placed in the Top 50 websites for planning, productivity, creativity, and team development for creative folks.

Charlie's work is widely cited across media outlets and is routinely featured, showcased, or highlighted in places like Inc., BNET, Time, Forbes, the Guardian, Lifehacker, and more.

Charlie is the author of several books including Team Habits and Start Finishing.

• Productive Flourishing

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Your thoughts shape your reality, but if those thoughts are negative or undermining, they suck your energy and shift your focus from strength and self-confidence to worry and fear. As a leader, this is something we need to change so we can lead a successful team.

Renie Cavallari is today's podcast guest and she is a source of unbelievable energy. She has a strong background in the corporate world but has been running her own consulting business where she focuses on team performance. Renie is also a best selling author of several books, but today we're honing in on her most recent publication: HeadTrash: The Leading Killer of Human Potential.

So what is HeadTrash? HeadTrash are those thoughts and that negative voice in our heads that hold us back and destroy our mindset. With Renie's guidance, we can understand the voice in our head, ask the right questions, and reframe our mindset to get unstuck from this cycle of negativity and disconnect.

• What happens when we talk to others the way we talk to ourselves
• The steps to take to "take out the trash"
• Owning our head trash
• The importance of this tool for leaders
• Is your mindset serving you?
• How head trash robs us of our potential
• The habits that decrease your emotional stress
• Changing the habits that do not serve you
• The impact of the questions we ask
• Becoming clear about the motivation behind a desire
• Shifting by changing the question
• Teams create their own lies
• The difference between a mediocre and successful performer
• The gap in onboarding
• Questions to ask yourself every morning to get yourself in the right mindset
• Renie's book recommendations and daily rituals

Renie Cavallari is the founder, CEO, and Chief Instigator of Aspire and an award-winning international marketing and leadership expert. Her inimitable grasp of business and its challenges, along with her proven, innovative solutions set Renie apart as a captivating speaker, author, leader, coach, and strategist who has driven measurable results for businesses around the world for over 30 years.

Since founding Powered By Aspire in 1995, Cavallari has worked with hundreds of clients around the globe to challenge the status quo and effectively ignite change. Known for creative collaboration with customers to optimize revenues through strategic marketing & consulting, cultural alignment, and training, Aspire is recognized as an innovative change organization with revolutionary programming and research-based, field-tested, and protected processes that improve financial performance. Cavallari raises the bar.

• LinkedIn
• Powered by Renie
• Aspire Website
• RCI Institute Website
• HeadTrash: The Leading Killer of Human Potential by Renie Cavallari

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What exactly is performance management? It's a term we hear thrown around but what does it entail for an organization? Well, there's the traditional outlook and then there are the ideas of today's guest who is reimagining performance management as we know it.

Projjal Ghatak is the CEO and founder of OnLoop, the mobile-first feedback and goal sharing platform purposely built for the modern team. This tool is habit-forming and provides feedback as a stream of consciousness. This innovative strategy is helping managers and employees work together on their own development and in a time when organizations are struggling with attracting and maintaining talent, this is a massively important topic.

Listen to this episode about this amazing tool and be sure to reach out to Projjal and his team because what he is doing is something you can do, too. And you will see results.

• What performance management actually means
• The institutions that shaped Projjal's outlook
• Habit-forming technology
• Generative AI and its many uses
• Shifting the mindset and the behavior of the manager
• The impact of feedback
• Biases and why they exist
• Making decisions with scalable data
• Making sure the process isn't complicated
• Feedback as a stream of consciousness
• The five things that need to be done to drive rhythm
• Projjal's book recommendations and daily routines

Projjal Ghatak is the CEO and co-founder of OnLoop, a pre-launch VC-backed seed stage SaaS start-up in a new category called Collaborative Team Development (CTD) to reinvent how individuals and teams of knowledge workers develop in a new hybrid future. Prior to founding OnLoop in 2020, Projjal spent three and a half years at Uber in a variety of roles including leading Strategy for Business Development globally, leading Strategy for the APAC rides business, and GM of the Philippines rides business. A lot of his personal pain as a leader in high-growth, high-functioning orgs led to the founding of OnLoop. Projjal has also spent time in finance raising debt and equity from New York hedge funds for an industrial conglomerate, in strategy consulting in Southeast Asia, and in early-stage companies in Latin America. He has an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems, and a Bachelor of Business Management from the Singapore Management University.

• OnLoop Home Page

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For this episode, I am thrilled to have the author of one of my favorite books, Chris DeSantis. Chris is the author of the phenomenal Why I Find You Irritating: Navigating Generational Friction at Work. In addition to being a great author, Chris is an expert in his field with so much experience with global brands in understanding the changes we're currently seeing in the workplace.

Now, more than ever, there are more generations working at the same time. It is such an interesting topic and very timely. In our conversation today, Chris shares the differences between people of different generations, what they expect from the workplace and the changes we will continue to see over time.

• Chris's background and expertise
• The timeliness of his book's topic
• Bringing clarity to a complex issue
• The differences between the upbringing of each generation
• The impact of Gen Z on the workplace
• The mistakes we make regarding the judgment of generations
• The pitfalls of a hierarchy business model for younger employees
• What we need to offer to attract a new workforce
• Chris's advice for a leader in this situation right now
• Chris's book recommendations and daily rituals

Chris De Santis is a speaker, author, consultant, and most recently podcaster specializing in Management and Organizational Development issues and interventions. He specializes in assisting individuals or groups in identifying and overcoming obstacles to effectiveness. He brings with him thirty-eight years of experience in training and development. He has an undergraduate degree in business from the University of Notre Dame, a graduate degree in Organizational Development from Loyola University in Chicago, an MBA from the University of Denver, and previous work experience in manufacturing, professional services, and not-for-profit environments. Why I Find You Irritating: Navigating Generational Friction at Work is the culmination of speaking on or about this topic over the past fifteen years. You can also listen to his advice podcast, "Cubicle Confidential" along with his co-host, Mary Abbajay.

• Why I Find You Irritating: Navigating Generational Friction at Work by Chris DeSantis
• Chris DeSantis Home Page
• Chris DeSantis on LinkedIn

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Every organization it seems is facing enormous change right now and today's guest is an expert. An international expert in leading and accelerating change, Jeff Skipper guides leaders to plan and implement successful initiatives. His recent book Dancing with Disruption: Leading Dramatic Change During Global Transformation outlines his 12 steps to successful change and can literally be used as a checklist.

In our conversation today, Jeff dives into the role of the leader in these times of change. We know that the leader needs to organize and implement, but Jeff proves that the leader is much more impactful when they show up as a coach, motivator, and an inspiration. He has an interesting take on not just starting well, but finishing well, too.

• How Jeff became the international expert he is
• The number one thing to get right
• The complex role of the leader
• Inspiring a large team to be engaged in change
• Tailoring the message one on one
• Building connectivity in a team through a common "enemy"
• Investing time in engaging stakeholders
• The lessons learned through the pandemic
• Hybrid is here to stay
• Starting strong and finishing well
• Jeff's book recommendation and daily rituals

An expert in accelerating change, Jeff guides corporate leaders to plan and implement successful change initiatives. Based in Canada, Jeff is an international change leadership consultant, speaker, and author of Dancing with Disruption: Leading Dramatic Change during Global Transformation. He works with organizations in energy, finance, technology, and other industries to develop the strategy that precedes effective change. Clients, such as Bayer, BP, and The Salvation Army, have engaged him to achieve dramatic results during strategic transformation. Backed by deep expertise in leading change, Jeff guides leaders to develop effective change plans based on the twelve proven strategies he presents in his book. This empowers leaders to reach their goals faster with greater buy-in throughout the entire organization.

For more than twenty-five years, beginning with a twelve-year career at IBM, Jeff has guided change projects by focusing on the people's side of change. He holds a master's degree in organizational psychology and is a Certified Change Management Professional. As CEO of a transformation services company, he grew it to seven figures in just five years.

• Jeff Skipper Consulting
• Dancing with Disruption: Leading Dramatic Change During Global Transformation by Jeff Skipper

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The thing that separates the organizations that are good at delivering plans and successful projects and those that are not may come as a surprise to you.

Today's guest is Greg Spira and in this episode, we talk about just that. Greg is the author of Trust the Plan: Demand Management for Business Leaders and he is in the business of helping organizations plan and roll out projects. He has worked with some of the biggest and most successful organizations worldwide and through his experience, he has learned exactly what sets these successful organizations apart.

In the interview, Greg discusses how to build an atmosphere of trust, the behavior patterns to create to ensure that trust is maintained and built upon, and how to manage cross functional teams with alignment.

• The act of planning and getting the team together to prepare
• The difference between simple and easy
• Autonomy and self sufficiency
• Trust as the key quality that separates successful organizations
• Wasted energy in low-trust atmospheres
• Creating patterns of behavior
• The characteristics that build trust
• Create interdependence
• Cross functional collaborations
• Start with defining the language to use
• Where am I today and where do I want to get to?
• Creating solid plans
• Greg's book recommendation and daily rituals

Greg Spira, a business advisor with Oliver Wight, is an expert in Demand Management and Integrated Business Planning. He has written and co-authored many whitepapers on the subject of Demand Management and is an instructor of the Oliver Wight Americas Demand Management course. Greg has particularly deep experience in the consumer goods industry, having helped many well-known large food companies improve their planning processes. He has also supported companies in a wide range of other industries, including packaging, chemicals, healthcare, medical devices, and fashion. Greg received his MBA and CPA, CMA from McMaster University where he has since been a sessional lecturer.

• Greg Spira Home Page
• Trust the Plan: Demand Management for Business Leaders by Greg Spira

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For this episode, you will certainly want to take notes, because today's guest has so many pearls of wisdom from his years of experience on how leaders should look at their business. Zain Raj joins us today to talk about his approach to building a business and solving the many problems leaders face in maintaining the growth and success of the organization. Zain's take on the topic is wonderful and fascinating.

Zain is the founder and CEO of an ideas incubator called ZedNext which he talks about in our conversation today. Through ZedNext, Zain takes an objective and disruptive look at issues and trends to help marketers and business leaders realize their full potential in a data-driven, digitally led, and insights-driven world. He takes something very complex and makes it, not easy, but simple.

• Zain's drive to solve problems
• The evolution of business in a more complex world
• Respect as the foundation of knowledge
• The problems of large companies in sales
• Zain's most recent published book
• The right things to focus on when solving a problem
• The questions to ask when you are experiencing a problem
• Why is trust important but misunderstood?
• Doing the smaller things right every time
• Philosophy's connection to business
• The work Zain does with clients to improve problem solving
• Understanding your customer and building around them
• How to future proof your business
• Zain's book recommendation and daily rituals

A visionary leader, entrepreneur, business accelerator, investor, philanthropist and industry futurist, Zain Raj is considered a global leader in finding new and different ways to grow brands. His unique ability to unearth surprising insights and incite inspired ideas has created billions of dollars of value for his clients and investors.

Currently, Zain is the Chairman and CEO of Shapiro+Raj, a top-ten independent insights and inspiration company in North America. He is also the founder and CEO of ZedNext, an ideas incubator that takes an objective and disruptive look at trends to help marketers and business leaders realize their full potential in this data-driven, digitally-led and insights-driven world. His theories and methodologies provide clear and actionable ways to help companies deliver sustainable growth through these times of significant economic and cultural change. He has also authored two Amazon marketing and sales bestsellers, Brand Rituals: How Successful Brands Bond with Customers for Life and Marketing For Tomorrow, Not Yesterday: Surviving and Thriving in the Insight Economy™.

• LinkedIn

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Sports and business have a surprising amount of things in common and today's guest is no stranger to either field. David Lindsay has a varied and exciting background in multiple sports and has made the connection between the sports industry and successfully running a business. Now, David spends his time working with companies on improving performance as a coach and motivational speaker.

In our conversation today, David shares the process he has developed that is a surefire way to improve your vitality as a leader and team member. He gives actionable day-to-day things you can do right now that will help you become a more effective team member and will build the foundation of binding a team together for a common purpose. The major takeaways from this discussion will have your team motivated, engaged, and performing at a high level.

• David's varied and exciting background in sports
• The connection David has made between sports and business
• The importance of every skill set and position
• Managing goal clarity
• What does winning mean?
• Keeping up the motivation
• The 5 Steps to Improved Vitality System
• Open lines of communication and feedback
• Things you can do to recharge and rebuild
• The importance of sleep patterns
• How to bring a team together
• David's book recommendation and daily rituals

David Lindsay is a personal trainer and professional speaker from Sydney, Australia. David played Rugby League for many years up to NSW Cup, trained as a Professional Arm Wrestler, and then pursued Martial Arts. In the last ten years David has studied many successful teams and individual athletes, from The All Blacks (Rugby Union), to Rafael Nadal (Tennis), Ronda Rousey (MMA, UFC) and many other successful teams and individuals. They all, in their own way, follow a similar structure to the "5 Step System Towards Improved Vitality in the Workplace" that David has come up with to improve workplace relations, morale and profitability of your business.

• David Lindsay Home Page
• Dynamic Company Culture Spotlight Podcast

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Today's guest is known as being the king of scaling businesses which is certainly a skillset not everybody has. Kurt Uhlir joins the podcast today with a very interesting background in serial entrepreneurship, technology, marketing, and of course scaling businesses. His experience covers all different types of markets and industries and he has worked with organizations across the globe.

Kurt can talk about many things, but today we're leaning into his biggest passion - servant leadership. In this episode, you'll learn what servant leadership is, how to embrace it, and the incredible impact it has on not only you as an individual, but your business or organization as a whole.

• Kurt's background in entrepreneurship, technology, and marketing
• The skills needed to successfully scale businesses
• What high achievement servant leadership is
• Being wrong and being right
• The facade of control
• The Eastern and Western approaches to innovation
• The difference between servant leadership and authoritative leadership
• Discovering your purpose through helping others accomplish theirs
• Intentional rest as part of the success equation
• Kurt's book recommendation and daily rituals

Kurt Uhlir is a globally-recognized marketer, operator, and speaker. He's built and run businesses from start-up to over $500M annual revenue, assembled teams across six continents, been part of the small team leading an IPO ($880M), and participated in dozens of acquisitions.

As a dynamic and charismatic speaker on marketing and innovation, Kurt's speaking experience includes speeches across the United States and Europe in addition to presenting at prominent industry events. Kurt is a popular and entertaining commentator and has appeared on national television shows and periodicals including the Wired, TechCrunch, Thrive Global, USA Today, Business 2 Community, WGN Radio, NBC, and ABC. Reach out to him for a guest on marketing, real estate, or growing American based businesses.

• Kurt Uhlir Home Page
• Kurt Uhlir on LinkedIn
• Kurt Uhlir on Twitter

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What is pay justice and pay equity? And why do they matter? Sally Loftis has dedicated her career to helping organizations through the minefield of this topic and helps them overcome the growing distrust of institutions through systemic work. She is the founder and Managing Director of Loftis Partners in North Carolina and comes to us with a background in HR and consulting. Now she specializes in the area of pay justice and is a real expert in her space.

In our conversation today, Sally discusses what exactly pay justice and pay equity are and gives insight on how to manage this issue, especially in the United States. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach and it is a challenge. But the work Sally does not only helps organizations understand pay justice and pay equity but also helps them systemically change their approach to it altogether.

• What led Sally to the area of pay justice and pay equity
• Pay justice is the systemic work required to pay people in a meaningful way
• Getting ahead of any sort of mistrust
• The difference between wage and cost of living across different locations
• What is pay transparency and why is it such a big deal?
• The importance of pay equity
• Where organizations fail in this area
• The impact on legal action in the United States
• Intention and more conversations
• Team agreements
• The history of trust in organizations and institutions
• What Sally's goals are for Loftis Partners
• Sally's book recommendation and daily rituals

Sally Loftis is the Managing Director of Loftis Partners. Loftis Partners approaches every project as a co-creation process with participants and stakeholders. Their pedagogy is grounded in the work of organization development, human resources, and social justice. The firm is also rooted in a racial equity framework by education, lived experience, and training. Sally is the primary consultant for all projects at Loftis Partners and they add more consultants as needed. Sally completed her Bachelor of Business Administration with a concentration in Human Resources at Freed-Hardeman University and received a Nonprofit Management Certificate from Duke University. She also completed a Master of Science in Organization Development at Pepperdine University where she finished her thesis on pay equity in nonprofits of all sizes.

• Loftis Partners Home Page
• How to Conduct a Pay Equity Assessment
• Fully Human Resources LinkedIn Newsletter
• Subscribe to Loftis Partners Email Newsletter
• Sally Loftis on LinkedIn
• Loftis Partners Blog

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