Ep-008: Is what you are calling a team actually just a group? With Brad King, PhD
Episode Summary
My personal interest (obsession?) is with personal productivity and effectiveness. But in this increasingly interconnected world where problems are becoming increasingly complex, we need more than highly effective individuals. We need effective teams.
Brad King is an Organizational Change consultant who specializes in agile team evolution, change management and execution strategies. He has been trusted by companies ranging from education to energy to facilitate transformations in how work is done among specialized teams and how goals and strategies translate to concrete action that drive business growth.
I invited Brad to bring the team dimension to productivity and to pick his buzzing brain on trending topics like remote work as well as talk about some approaches to work going forward. Listen through to the end where Brad shares his 20% that has made the biggest difference as well as an inspiring thought on personal productivity.
Highlights (TVF Timestamps)
Why being a deeply skilled individual is not enough anymore (04:00) (1:00:00)
The error of treating team knowledge work with the outdated industrial mindset (08:00)
Does environment shape behaviour in organizations? (13:00)
The Work From Home and Hybrid Work Conundrum (15:00)
An intriguing less talked about aspect of inclusion regarding women in the workforce (23:00)
80/20 Problems of teams. Is your team just a group? (28:00)
One investment that will make a HUGE difference. It’s not what you think. (38:00)
One possible reason why burnout happens (45:00)
Greater than the sum of it’s parts—a metaphor for individuals and teams (49:00)
Executive leadership’s role in facilitating effective team work (54:00) (1:07:00)
As always, Brad’s 20% (1:11:00)
Brad’s Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kingbrad/
Official Website: https://bradleyking.ca/
Transcript
Anthony Sanni: Welcome to 80/20 productivity. The podcast that's dedicated to helping you do more by doing less, by helping you focus on your vital few; the vital few things that make the biggest difference in our lives and work. On the show today, I am so happy to have with me Bradley King or Brad King, as I know him. Brad has been working in the productivity space for many years. He's a business consultant and he has worked in some of the biggest companies out here in Canada in Calgary, and I'm just so happy to have him on the show. Welcome Brad.
Brad King: Thanks buddy. Good to be here.
Anthony Sanni: Yeah. Good to see you again. You and I met a few years ago when you were working on that process improvement project with a big tertiary institution out here.
Brad King: Post-secondary yeah...
Anthony Sanni: Big post-secondary and we got talking over, as productivity nerds tend to do, over a zero inbox. I remember you were showing me your [inbox] and I remember thinking, “Geez, this guy, like who does that zero inbox, is that even possible?” But obviously it is because you had it.
Brad King: Yeah. It's a bit of a bit of an illness. That's for sure.
Anthony Sanni: I know it's one of the reasons why I was really excited to have you come on to the show because you and I, whenever we talk about productivity, we tend to talk about a lot of really interesting topics and subjects and I thought, “Hey, this conversation would be great for people on the show to listen to”, especially because my big thing is personal productivity, which I know you're really into as well. But some of the work you have done has focused on team productivity. So, we've been following your career for a while and it's interesting to see how you have become a go-to person in this space for a team productivity in many areas.
So, tell us a little bit more about how you got into that.
Brad King: I guess about several years ago now it just became clear to me that organizations were becoming much more reliant on teams to get things done and we see several different operating models that have come into existence over the past 10 years or so. But the one that has really stuck, I think, is this persistence or this persistent reliance on teams and teamwork to get things done, right? So, you're seeing a lot of team-based organizational models, sometimes they're called network-based organizational models, where people are able to come together and to form up really quickly to solve a major business problem or challenge. And then depending on how the organization works, they may disband just as quickly or they might stick together. But the landscape of the organization is just much more fluid and dynamic and a big reason for that is because of like the premise of teams nowadays.
Anthony Sanni: Why do you think teams are more important now than they used to be? Are we dealing with a unique situation now where teams are more relevant?
Brad King: I don't necessarily think they're more relevant. There is just an increasing reliance on very specialized expertise and very deep skill sets. And typically, when someone's skillset is very deep, say they're an expert in a particular kind of engineering for example, typically when their skillset is deep it's not broad, right? And so, they need to rely on other people to get other parts of a project done. And so, this reliance and interdependence on other people and other processes, and even on specific kinds of technologies, it stitches together this web, if you will, of an organizational structure where it's defined by these types of dependencies. And so, people need to focus on, or try to get better at, working within these types of structures and leveraging these types of structures to get stuff done. So, I think it's always been the case that people have been, or that organizations have been, reliant on teams. I think it's even more so now just because everything is so connected, everything is so interdependent. I can't do something unless Anthony and his team does something first.
Anthony Sanni: For some people they might say, “Oh that's so obvious”, but I wonder... is it though? Because I look at some organizations, and I'm sure you've worked in some of these organizations, where they talk about teams a lot but then how much have they really enabled those teams? It's one thing to embrace something logically and say, “Yeah, that makes sense, we need teams”, but then how do those teams function? I guess we'll get into that as we get on in the conversation, but that's an interesting perspective because I think more about personal productivity, so that would be the deep individual, the person who's really good at what they do, but then these people depend on other people as well.
What are some of the challenges you’ve seen with that, working in teams with these people who are really good at one thing, for example?
Brad King: I don't want to make it an extreme argument here to say that, “most people in organizations are only good at one thing”, or something like that, but I guess the biggest problem that we see is a legacy or a throwback to just kind of industrial modes of production and divisions of labour where you have organizations that are organized, generally, in terms of kind of functional hierarchies and functional silos, and what we're seeing and what we've seen for at least 20 years, as long as you and I have been in the working world, is that typically when you're trying to deliver a product or a service, you need to go cross function, you need to go cross the silos, not deep within the silos. Most organizations are designed, I think, to promote this kind of, or to enable this kind of, functional excellence. They're not necessarily designed to support this kind of cross-functional collaboration and communication that has to happen in order to get things done.
Getting back to your question earlier, I think what's really important to underscore here is just that most people, and this is just my own view, most people have trouble collaborating in teams with people who are outside of their function, who are outside of their “tribe” if you will. And that's not necessarily because they have some sort of personality issue or something like that. They have trouble collaborating because the structure that they work within is not set up to promote collaboration. It's not set up to enable collaboration. That's why they have trouble. I always tell my clients, the complaint that you hear almost all the time with every single project you're on is, “We need to break down silos, information and functional silos. We need to start breaking these things down.” And this has been like the mantra of most consultants and gurus for forever. But then there's a question that arises from this: why are people behaving or why are people acting or performing, if you will, as if they are in silos. And the answer I think is pretty obvious. They behave this way because you put them in a silo, right? If you want people to behave like they're in a silo, well put them in a silo. If you want a certain type of behavior, you can structure the environment to get that type of behavior and most organizations have not designed themselves to promote quick, cross-functional, team-based collaboration.
Anthony Sanni: I think I'll break down one after the other. So, you started by talking about the industrial mindset, if you will, to paraphrase, and for those listening, you probably know what that means already, but just in case you didn't know or you forgot, think like auto manufacturing: this is where the car gets the gasket put on; this is where this gets done; this is where the car gets spray painted; so, it's more you stick to your job and the assembly line move the parts through, and at the end, it spits out a car essentially. Whereas what it sounds like you're describing here, Brad, is that for a lot of the modern problems and for what companies want to do these days, it’s almost as if they need those bits to cross, they need them to talk to each other more, they need them to interact more and to have input more, and that's really not the industrial way. It's a different way of looking at work and it's been going on for, like you said, over about two decades.
Brad King: I like to think of it in terms of the industrialization of knowledge work. So, if you're building a car, like a model-T back in early 19-hundreds, you have a specific position in the assembly line and you do one specific and specialized thing. Like you said, you put bumpers on, or you load the engine onto the chassis and that's all you do. The characteristics of “knowledge work” are fundamentally different because you're not really making car bumpers, you're not really assembling a car, you're producing a knowledge product and that's much uncertain and under determined problem. And what I mean by that is, there's really only one way to build a car on an assembly line, there are a million different ways to build a piece of software, a million different choices, and that's what I mean when I say under determined, it can go in one way or the other way, or in a million different ways. And so really, it's all about people... it's reliant much more on people's ability to communicate and to collaborate effectively with each other. Whereas you didn't necessarily need that in an industrial factory.
Anthony Sanni: Why do you think knowledge work is becoming more relevant? Why are some of these really established, really mature companies, now, who have maybe thrived through the industrial model of doing things, why do you think they're turning more and more to this brand of work, this knowledge work?
Brad King: I think it depends on the company and it depends on what industry you're in. Certainly, I'm not trying to suggest that the factory model or something like that is obsolete. I think where we get into problems though, is where you try to take this factory model and apply it to a fundamentally different mode of production... and that's where we run into problems. It's a completely different business, if you will, to be in when you're producing knowledge products versus producing something like a car or some sort of physical product.
Anthony Sanni: I remember the other thing you talked about that was interesting is how some organizations who want to do this kind of work, who maybe have determined that this knowledge work model is the right way forward for them, their environment is set up to promote it. And that really struck a chord with me because I remember one of the things you did when you worked at this post-secondary where you and I met, is at a point in the project you actually got the people working within these teams that you had designed to start to sit together. And I remember it was weird for a lot of people, “You mean that had to go sit over there now?”, and was that kind of application of this concept of environmental, if you will, in environmental design?
Brad King: Yeah, yeah. One of the things that we know just empirically since maybe in the past 50 years or so, is that you can shape people's behavior in pretty profound ways just by shaping the space around them. And so yeah, you're right; like one of the things that we did on that particular project is we literally broke down the walls between these people and created a space where they could communicate around a communal table. And it sounds so simple because it is so simple. What we found in that particular case is that, we wanted to promote collaboration, we wanted to promote communication across all of these different programs and program areas, so what logical reason do we have for putting people in cubicle cells and making it, not just physically harder, but harder in almost every single way. So yeah, one of the things we did is we designed the space to promote easier collaboration and easier communication. And that wasn't a necessarily a ground-breaking thing that we did, it was a pretty obvious thing, I think.
Anthony Sanni: I don't think most people realize the impact their environments have on them, and I've talked about this from a personal perspective, but it's interesting to hear you talk about it from a team perspective. For me, I think if you want to read, maybe start by purchasing books, for example; maybe get a library membership; maybe put the books where you can actually see them so that when you walk by it reminds you to say, “Hey, you haven't read your book today” or whatever. But the dimension you're bringing is to say at the team level, how are you facilitating the kind of behavior, the kind of interaction that you want? And that's a very interesting dynamic.
How do you think that has been affected by remote work? Because it's one thing to get people to sit around and it's very profound, like you said. What do you think is happening now that we've moved, especially with knowledge work? Knowledge work is one of the biggest candidates for working from home.
Brad King: I've been thinking a lot about this problem over the past two years as well. So, I guess we could ask ourselves, and I'm curious to know your thoughts on this too, whenever we push social communication into a new medium, something is usually gained, right? Usually there's some sort of efficiency that's associated with it, but at the same time you lose things as well, right? Now the things that we gain from remote work are pretty obvious... increasing flexibility and convenience and things like this.
I think the things that we lose are much less obvious. And I'm trying to think at a deeper level about what is actually lost when we start pushing work into remote spaces because I think this is where things are inevitably going. We're all going to live in the metaverse, or something scary like that, in the next five years anyway. So, what happens though when you get into these virtual spaces? How has social and human communication fundamentally altered? I think a big thing is of course, that we lose a degree of context. We lose a degree of social cues and things like this that allows us to make sense of how we're interacting with people. The most obvious example here is sarcasm, right? Sarcasm doesn't translate very well through a digital medium. That's why they invented emojis, memes, and things like this. I'm still thinking through what's lost when we go to a completely remote work environment. And the thing that I hear the most as I'm interacting with people and all these different organizations, is they just miss that kind of face-to-face, human-to-human interaction... that kind of co-located, embodied communication, right? And I think that is totally understandable. But again, everybody's slightly different. I've met people who are totally fine working remotely, they have a great remote relationship with their colleagues, they don't see a need or a reason to interact with each other in a IRL context, if you will.
Anthony Sanni: IRL is in real life.
Brad King: It's been a very divisive phenomenon that's happened to us over the past few years. Some people have coped really well and some people haven't. So, I think that the big challenge we're all having now is how are we going to design workspaces and workplaces so that we can exploit all of the advantages that come with remote work that we all know and love, and also retain some aspect of the human, face-to-face aspect of working life as well. How can we get the best of both worlds? And I don't think that there's a straightforward answer and I don't know that anybody has really figured that out yet, at least for most larger corporations.
Anthony Sanni: I agree with you 100%.
Brad King: Here’s that I think won’t go well: so, this is what you hear, not just with some of the organizations that I work with, but also just in general, “we need to get back to normal”. You hear this all the time, “You need to get back to work”, and I keep saying this to anybody who listen: “You can't go back”. The toothpaste is already out of the tube, it doesn't go back in anymore. Time only moves in one direction. You can't go back to the future here. The new model, the change already happened. So, this idea that we're just going to go back to “normal”, and that everybody's going to come back into the office and things will be the same, I think is a huge, huge error. And that's going to lead to all kinds of problems, not just in terms of the way people are interacting in this kind of post-COVID society, but also just in terms of an organization's business agility and their ability to compete with other organizations that are much more flexible, that are much more dynamic and have more of a liquid operating model, right?
Anthony Sanni: One of the people that I was coaching recently was saying how she works for a very traditional organization and for the longest time, her job is, as you have mentioned earlier, knowledge work. And she, for the longest time, had been trying to negotiate a work from home, flexibility type setup, and the answer was always, “No, we're not set up for it. We're not set up for it. We're not set up for it.”, and then COVID happened and all of a sudden, within 48 hours, they were set up for it. I can understand why the company maybe didn't want to start something like that, but now that it started, you're saying it's going to be really hard to go back and make the excuse that “We're not set up for it”. No, you are, because we've been working like that for two years. And in her case, productivity actually went up. So, I don't think it's just the flexibility, there are some of these online tools that can actually boost productivity. As far as getting the job done goes, they can help people working asynchronously... so many things are possible with technology. But I also agree, we've evolved for a few thousand years, to interact in a physical, tactile way with each other. The caveman did not Zoom call how to make fire. They were there striking the stones and figuring it out, physically. And so, I don't know if there's something genetically hard wired into us that makes us favour working in proximity, even when there are so many measurable reasons not to in the business sense. So, it is quite a pickle, I think. And it'll be interesting to see if and how we are able to resolve it.
What's your thought on hybrid, where you work onsite for a little bit and then work offsite? What's your view on that as a compromise?
Brad King: I think that's the most sensible way to go. I think that organizations that are trying to roll out this new way of working to their people, one of the things they're going to have to explain to everybody is, if they want them back in the office, they're going to need to come up with a good reason to have people back in the office.
Anthony Sanni: And it has to be better than we’ve already paid for this space.
Brad King: Yeah, or you hear other excuses like “we've seen our productivity decline.”. I'm not sure that's necessarily true, at least not in any of the studies that I've seen post the start of the pandemic. And like you said, people find that the biggest change that has happened to their productivity is that they're more productive, so the productivity excuse for coming back doesn't work. Or the fact that, if we go 100% remote it's going to degrade our culture or something like that.
What is culture anyway? Your culture exists no matter what you do, it's just there. It's not something that you can shape. It's what's left behind after people do the work. So, I think the hybrid model is really the only model that makes sense in a 21st century world. The actual mechanics of putting that into motion I think are a little bit more complicated. So, you have who's coming in at what times and what teams are required to be in, which are not. And who makes those types of decisions? Are they going to be reserved for leadership teams or are they going to be delegated down to delivery teams themselves, or something like that. All of these kinds of details need to be worked out. I think that the hybrid model is really the only model. Unless you want to go 100% remote and in which case, again, you've just decided that the whole face-to-face thing is not as important to your organization and it's not as important to your employees and your clients. Or maybe you meet up for a big face-to-face meeting once a quarter or something like that. So, there's all kinds of ways to structure work. I think what your client is probably distressed about is that we have all this possibility now. And I think what's going to happen for at least more than a handful of organizations is that they're going to go back to the old way. They're going to go right back to trying to do things the old way, and it's going to, like I said, create a bunch of problems.
Anthony Sanni: Look at job postings now. They put “Remote” upfront; they let you know right away this is remote. And I think part of that is a way to attract talent. People who have tasted the flexibility and like it, or whatever benefits they think. Not everybody likes remote work, like you said. Let's face it, some people love it, some people don't like it, some people have detested it from the minute it started. But I think it's safe to say that for most people, especially people who are in the uptick of productivity in their careers who are also balancing family and a lot of other things, those things tend to happen around the same time in most people's lives... they are getting into the groove of their career right around when they start a family and all that.
Brad King: The other thing that we should point out is that a lot of organizations talk a big game about inclusion and diversity. The pandemic, as everybody knows, did not impact everybody in the same way, and remote work, for example, may be much more appealing to women than it is to men; women who often do have to juggle other life work and that can make a huge difference to them. I think that's another thing to be pointed out and just put on the table, right? If we're really talking about designing an inclusive workspace well then, we need to just admit that the way things were going before in some organizations, it wasn't exactly conducive to starting or growing a family.
Anthony Sanni: It wasn’t inclusive.
Brad King: And that burden disproportionately, for better or worse, falls on women in society and it wasn't really a huge secret to me when the pandemic started and we saw lots of women dropping out of the workforce because their organizations were just not designed to support the obligations that they needed to and that they needed to take care of. So that's a whole other kind of conversation that I think we haven't even started to have yet in a serious way.
Anthony Sanni: It's an important point. I agree because when we think of inclusion, a lot of people think, race, religion, sexual orientation, but you could argue that the biggest divide of the human race is gender roles. Those are the two biggest categories, right? Those two major gender roles that people fill. And so, if you're truly inclusive you excluding 50% of your workforce, potentially, if you don't consider that as part of your design. I was guilty of thinking about inclusion along those three big categories, race, religion, sexual orientation, not really in terms of those two. So, thanks for adding that dimension, I think it’s very important.
Brad King: The other thing that we should note is that even before the pandemic is that all of the "culture work”, the collaborative culture team building kind of work, the office birthday parties, the team building exercises, the field trips and these kinds of things, all that disproportionately fell onto women in the workplace anyway. It was all women who were doing this kind of collaborative work. And that was often seen as work that was necessary. If it was necessary, we certainly didn't treat it that way because those are generally considered to be non-promotable activities. And the majority of the time you find women in workplaces doing that work of building culture.
Anthony Sanni: Very interesting. We could really go down the rabbit hole on this one and I'm tempted actually to explore it, but maybe we'll circle back because if we're talking about team productivity and we end up with a situation where the group that tends to be the champions of culture within a team gets excluded, then what happens to the team culture? It's very interesting.
And even on a global scale there has been research that has shown this whole thing of “if women ruled the world, there would be no wars”, I think that's complete nonsense, but that whole idea that there are communities that have been led by women that have seen improvements in rather unique ways just because of that approach to leadership.
The other thing that you mentioned that I wanted to explore a little bit is, because we are talking about the vital few, 80/20, if you were to say 80% of problems in teams come from this 20% of issues, what would that 20% be, in your experience?
Brad King: Yeah, that's a difficult one. You put me on the spot here, but the thing that comes to mind almost immediately is I also wonder what separates a team from a group? What separates a team from just a group of people? The big distinction here just comes down to the ability of all these people not just be going in the same direction and aligned toward a single goal, but there's a dynamic within a team where it's not unlike a soccer game or hockey game or something like that, where you have different team members that are passing back and forth between each other. They're handing off things and some people are doing their bit of it and handing it off to somebody else. And it looks it a little chaotic at times, but what it really comes down to is coordination, right? The ability to understand, “Okay, this is my role in the team, this is what I need to do to support my other team members in their roles and they're doing the same.”. I don't know if you get that on a lot of teams. I think that a lot of what we call teams are really just groups of people doing stuff, and they're just like, “I did my thing”, and then they hand it back to the project manager and they're like, “all right I guess I'm done.”. Imagine how that would work in a soccer game, “I kick the ball down the field, what else do you want from me?” It doesn't work. You're not really part of a team.
So, to come back to this question of what's that 20% of the effort that will give a huge result, I think that the simplest and most straight forward thing that you can do is just make your work visible.
So again, we talked a little bit earlier about an industrial factory. In a manufacturing factory, the workflow is visible. It's pretty clear and you can see where the work piece or the work goes, you can see what happens to the work product as it goes through each of the stages. You can't really do that in knowledge work very well and so we need to communicate more and we need to communicate constantly, in order to coordinate ourselves around the work product. Again, this is another very basic thing, but I find that a lot of people do not make their work visible. They write things down in a notebook in a way that, number one, only they can understand; and number two, nobody else can access it so nobody really knows who's doing what and when. What this creates is more uncertainty within the group and now we need to communicate more, and that generally means more meetings and more execution risks because we have to somehow reduce that uncertainty all the time. And there's really no reason at all why most teams that are engaged in “knowledge work” or service work can't make that work visible to each other. That would at least that would at least give them a way to communicate without having to invest so much in having meetings to compare checklists, basically.
Anthony Sanni: What I love about these conversations is that sometimes it's what I expect to hear, but sometimes it’s not at all what I expect to hear, and this is one of those cases where that was not what I was expecting...
Brad King: What were you expecting?
Anthony Sanni: We’ll get to that. But it’s interesting and I think it’s one of those subtle but powerful concepts. Anyway, there's so much to unpack there. To answer your question really quickly, I could have sworn you'd have said something along the lines of “The biggest problem I see is that people don't have clarity of what they're trying to do”, or something like that... that's what I was expecting. I think it's so easy to affect even the most well-oiled machine and that's what I like about the angle you’ve come from. No matter how well organized your organization is, this is the kind of thing that could still easily derail your efforts at teamwork... if work is not made visible, it is so easy to ignore or to just miss.
Why do you think that is? Do you think it's a question of just personal habit? Or is it a question of them not knowing any better? Cause I've been there too. One of the conversations we had was how I still use a notepad, and you said it's not very searchable; I thought, “He's right. You can't control F on a notebook.”. I still use a notebook till today but I've also started to blend it with digital stuff that I can just search for terms and find them, so there are definitely benefits to both.
Let's go back to what you were saying. What do you think it is that's causing teams to suffer in that way?
Brad King: I think that it could be several different reasons. I think habit is part of it. I sound like I'm against the old pen and paper but I'm not, there's something very satisfying about the texture of dragging the pen across the paper. And I write in cursive, so when people see my handwriting, they're like, “Oh wow. This guy is old school.”. I love it too, don't get me wrong, but when we put things into a system, whether it's like a task board, some sort of queue management system or just as a basic shared list, you're not just doing it for yourself and making it easier for you to track what you're supposed to do, it's an active communication to your team members because now I don't have to poke you all the time and say, “Anthony, what's going on with that thing. I'm waiting on that. What's going on with that? Did that get done? Did that get submitted? Did I hand off? Was that approved?”. These are the types of interactions that I think constantly distract us at work. And what we do when we make our work visible through some sort of a digital system is we make what was once that active communication, we make it passive. I no longer need to reach out to you to figure out what's going on, I just look at look at a board or I look at a list and I can tell. And that's the team communicating.
Anthony Sanni: I like that. You take communication that's usually active and you make it passive. I wonder how many hours in a week that would save people, right? Now I wonder how much efficiency that would create. And it’s not just efficiency, at least in my mind, my approach to productivity is not efficiency for its own sake, it's efficiency “So that, blank” right? Whatever that blank is for you, if it's so that you can do more, fine. If it's all that you can have more fun, fine. I don't care, but it's efficiency so that blank. The question becomes what's the price that we're paying, maybe unknowingly, by not embracing these kinds of systems in our teams? We may feel like we're doing okay, business is good, but is there a price that we're paying with?
Brad King: Yeah, and I think that prices is, of course, time; which is kind of opportunity costs. While I'm busy attending that status meeting, that's time I'm not working on my stuff.
I'm thinking about your question, because I'm not sure if I answered it, why do people resist doing this right? Or why do people why do people struggle with it? So, habit is one. But honestly, I don’t think a lot of people understand that when I make my work visible, yeah, it's not just for me... it's for you. That's something that I'm giving to the team. When I choose not to put my tasks on a shared list or not to open up my calendar that's a decision that in a way... it could be made for very rational and strategic reasons, maybe there are private things that you don't want to share... but it's a very individualistic way to think about your work. “Oh, I know what's going on”, okay, that's great that, but I don't know and that's the problem because you don't know when I need to know. I think that, again, this is partly the ways that organizations are designed and structured. We designed them with an individualistic mindset or an individualistic mode of operation. We don't design them so that they can support teams as much.
Anthony Sanni: I think one of the foundational points you made earlier is that point of how organizations are designed, even the way your organization is structured, is always going to facilitate something.
What would be a very practical setup for a cross-functional team? And I'm coming back to the point you made super early in the conversation where you said some teams are short-lived, they come together, do a task and disband. Other teams, maybe this is their job for the long haul, as long as they work in that department. So maybe we'll look at that nuanced later, but let's assume the latter, or even the former, what are some of the really practical things that can be done to promote the kind of transparency or visibility or all this stuff, that makes for a good team?
Brad King: You said a moment ago you thought I was going to talk about clarity, so this is it, I'm going to talk about clarity. I don't know about you, but I think most people go about their day to day and everybody just assumes that things are clearer than they actually are. And I think people just nod their heads and go, “Yeah, I get it. Of course, I do”, and they only understand this little sliver, their little piece of the work, then they don't understand the big picture. And so, it's very hard when you don't understand that big picture, what you're moving towards and what your ultimate objective is. When you don't understand that, you can't make decisions on the fly about what to do when your team runs into a problem. Or when you have different people within the same function or within the same team that have different perspectives or they aren't clear about what it is that they're actually trying to achieve, that's a recipe for conflict. With the clients that I'm working with it's not a waste of time at all to take the time, invest in creating clarity and that vision is going to help you. It's going to help you see the pathway forward much more clearly. That means you're going to be able to accelerate much, much faster, right?
Anthony Sanni: Invest in creating clarity, I really like that.
Brad King: You can invest in creating clarity or you can just accept the risk and hope it all works out. Sometimes it's not seen as “value” adding work. And it's not seen by value added work, usually by the people who have the whole picture in their head. And if you're just coming on, its “Oh my God, I got to explain to this guy what this project is all about and what this, we don't have time for this man. Just read the documentation”, and that's where we run into problems because you're going to do what everybody does; you're going to do your best to figure it out but we're not actually going to check ourselves and check our understanding to make sure that we are on the same page and we are all moving towards that same objective. The only point of which we had that conversation is usually when a conflict comes up, and then we find out, "Oh, what I thought was clear, was not that clear.”
Anthony Sanni: And you said just now checking on the objectives; do you think it's worthwhile for effective active teams to have those formalized?
Brad King: Absolutely. One of my consulting offerings is OKR Coaching. OKR is just a very super simple framework. You have an objective or goal that you're trying to reach and that's the “O” part. Then the key results, the “KR” part, is that quantifiable measure that indicates to everybody who's looking at this piece of work when it is that you're going to reach that objective, basically it's the success criteria. For example, I might have an objective to grow closer with my customers. That's a goal. How am I going to know that's happened? A key result might be “I might get X amount of inbound consulting requests, inquiries or inbound calls” and that might be a signal to me that yes, I am achieving that goal. When we start to break apart goals like that, what we want to do is make them clear; we want to make them as unambiguous as possible. When I look at a lot of corporate goal setting frameworks and even objectives and goals that you see in most organizations, most of them are just a collection of stuff that people do. I'm not sure that they're really goals... it's we're going to do this project this year. Okay. What's the impact? What is the actual goal? How does that help the business? And that takes time to figure out and people often just don't have the time, or they've convinced themselves that they don't have the time to do that work.
Anthony Sanni: That’s a very important point: they don’t have the time. And it is hard work sometimes, so there's delays to factor in as well. It's bad enough that I don't have the time, I don't want to do all that stuff. I just really want to do this project. Can I just do the project instead? It's like what you said earlier, it's the difference between a team and a group, and now it's a difference between actual strategic goals and just a collection of people doing stuff. Even in my business, it’s me and a few contractors and even in this relatively small group (in terms of numbers), let alone a multi-national, thousands of employees, kind of organization, I can totally see how it’s easier to slip into that trap of not having clarity around why we’re doing what we’re doing and then not having objectives as well. It's so simple, but it's so necessary.
Brad King: I think everybody would much rather prefer to just not think about impact and to not do the work to qualify the impact of what they're doing. They just assume that if I do the project, I'll get the result, I get the benefit. When often, that's not the case. We've all seen projects that are delivered perfectly, they're executed impeccably and they don't change anything to do with the business. So why did you do them, right?
Anthony Sanni: Yeah. Why did you do it and why do you spend all that time, all that money and that effort?
Brad King: Yeah. It's a great project, everybody on it was awesome, they all did the roles, it performed impeccably and we didn't change anything.
Anthony Sanni: Even before we start talking about team productivity, because you mentioned leadership teams and delivery teams, there's the fundamental question of at the leadership team level, what are you putting forward to delivery teams? Because the delivery teams will do essentially whatever the leadership puts as a priority, they'll probably give it a shot, but even if you have the most efficient team delivering something and that thing doesn't matter...
Brad King: You built the wrong product. Everybody's worst nightmare...
Anthony Sanni: You build the wrong product...
Brad King: We've all done it. Most, normal humans, mere mortals have always fallen into this.
Anthony Sanni: But it is an interesting consideration as well... was the goal of the team necessary to begin with. And if I know that affects motivation as well; if you have team members who are knowledge workers that are smart enough to see the pointlessness of what you're making them do, then it's really hard to get them motivated. Have you ever seen that happen?
Brad King: Yeah, I am seeing to happen right now with one of the clients that I'm working with. One of the top issues that we're facing right now is the fact that people just don't understand how their work connects to a larger vision, a larger purpose, larger mission, a larger business goal. They just don't see it. And part of the responsibility of management is to make that clear for them, make it clear how their day-to-day work connects with the business strategy, with where we're all going for the organizational strategy. And again, like you said, this is hard work, it's deep-thinking work. But yeah, that's just the worst, right? It's the worst thing that can happen to you is that you're in a cubicle just like everybody else and you're just toiling away and you feel like you're just not really having any impact at all. That's just awful.
Anthony Sanni: It is. Even emotionally, and we can poo-poo emotion all we want but human beings are emotional beings. We bring that stuff to work. If you feel like it's pointless, why get better at it? Why do it better if ultimately, you don't see the point, you don't see how it connects to the other moving parts?
Brad King: And I've often wondered this, and I'm wondering what you think too, we see burnout is now a major thing, right? I often think, this is just my intuition here, but why are people constantly burning themselves out? Is it because they're working long hours? Yeah, maybe, that could be part of it. But I also see people who are small business owners, people like you and me who work 20 hours a day, and yeah, it's grueling, it’s a grind... or people who work in mission-driven organizations, non-profits, and things like this, they are putting in countless hours usually for a modest salary and you don't see that level of burnout; so, what's different? And not to say that we're not all susceptible to burnout, but I often wonder if a big part of burnout is just the fact that you can't see what impact you're having, you don't see the point.
Anthony Sanni: It's definitely thought-provoking because I agree. You've done work and energized by the work. And you’ve done other work and have just been drained for sure. So, it is interesting. And I think part of that is a function of just sheer difficulty, right? Some tasks are just more difficult, maybe based on our skill level at the time, and so maybe that drains you. And other tasks, although difficult, they're in that sweet spot where they challenge you just enough, but not too much, and so maybe there's that dynamic going on. But I agree with you, there's definitely a motivation side of things, for sure. And if people don't feel like their teams or their contributions to the team or the team's contribution to the greater goal, or if they don't see it and they can't relate to it, I can totally see how that would be extremely deenergizing...
Brad King: Yeah, demotivating and demoralizing, right?
Anthony Sanni: And I remember when I worked at this job and we just kept doing our job, doing our job... one particular summer, the VP of the entire division, not just our department, but the division came and, for the first time in the two years I had been working there, told us how what we were doing was contributing. And that was the first time in that many years, I think I heard it maybe once more while I worked there, but it was amazing how much of an impact just having someone at that level of leadership come in and say, “Hey, you guys, this thing you do is important. Here's why, here's how we use it”, and it was a game changer for me mentally. And so that's a very important, very profound point I think you've made, Brad, that I think a lot of companies and even individuals in teams should think about... is it worth, I wonder, going out of your way for your own sake to find out why your job is important; maybe you find out it's not important, so maybe don't do it, I don't know. But do you think it's worth it? I think it would be worth it to go out of your way to actually find out what your work actually translates to.
Brad King: Yeah, I think so. I'm always reluctant to make these types of generalizations, but it seems like everybody wants to feel valued. Everybody wants to feel like they're having impact. Everybody wants to feel like they are helping to achieve something. And this is again, part of the motivating power of teams too, right? When you atomize people and you put them in cells and call it a workplace, it's so much harder to connect to something beyond yourself. And like you said, when you can't see what that connection is and you can't draw that line between what you're doing and who you're helping and what you guys are achieving, it seems to me like burnout is so much easier to get to that, because you feel like, whatever I do, it's irrelevant anyway. Like it's taken absurd existence.
Anthony Sanni: Let's shift gears for a second. If there was something you could liken an effective team to, what would it be? And what are some of the characteristics of that thing, knowing that all metaphors are imperfect obviously, but what would be your preferred metaphor for a functioning team?
Brad King: So, one of the stories that I love to tell about teams is about Michael Jordan. Everybody knows who Michael Jordan is, greatest basketball player all the time. One of the greatest athletes of all time. He was a hero growing up to everybody to all kids who were interested in sports... the 1990s Bulls, the Dynasty, Scotty Pippin, all these guys, they had something that was unmatched in the history of the sport. Of course, they were skilled, of course they were at the top of their games, but what they also had was a kind of understanding, a kind of synergy between each other that came to them through millions of hours of practice and experience with each other, so that they could get to the point where they all knew what each other's capabilities were, they all knew the rules of the game, they were all moving toward that same objective. And a big part of it, of course, had to do with Michael Jordan's skill.
So, Jordan wins at least three championships, I can't remember if the Bulls won the fourth one or not, and then he retires. Of course, because he’s at the top of his game he retires and everybody says that's it, no more Michael Jordan, basketball is just going to be whatever after this. But of course, he gets bored, as they all do, and he wants to come back and play. He comes back and plays [for the Wizards] for a season but they do so poorly and nobody can understand this. They can't understand how is it that, this team... it’s Michael Jordan, MJ is on the team... what happened, basically. And to me, what that kind of taught me was that, it's not really about individuals, they’re important for sure, but when you're talking about a world-class team, it's something beyond individuals, it's something that exists between individuals, between Rodman and Pippin and MJ, it's something that they had going on between each other, it was that synergy. You take one person away, it's like taking a key part of that puzzle piece away; the picture doesn't look complete anymore and the team doesn’t perform the same way. That was a pretty profound example for me: how you could take one of the greatest athletes of all time and put him in a different context, on a different team, at a different time, in a different place and it's not really the same person, he's not the same player. Wow.
Anthony Sanni: Wow.
Brad King: Yeah. Call it what you want, the secret sauce or whatever, but I think what made them so special was their experience with each other and not just their individual characteristics.
Anthony Sanni: It's a subtle but deeply impactful thought, and very humbling too. Because here, like I've said over and over again, for me it's about how can the individual do their best, produce their best work, build the best career, build their best life, but also remembering that, depending on the industry you pick (it might matter more in some than in others) but more and more in the world today who you work with is just as important, if not more important. I think it was Richard Koch that was the one that said who you work for is sometimes more important than what you do. He was saying it in terms of branding and career and learning and all that jazz, but in these terms, I'm learning, from this conversation, it's also that synergy that happens. If you are extremely talented, extremely hardworking, extremely industrious and you're in a team that for some reason it just doesn't work, you may not reach your full potential.
Brad King: But you can often make things worse. It's going to take five times as long and things are going to be so much worse in terms of quality, scope, budget, like everything is going to be worse.
Anthony Sanni: Very interesting. And so, from your perspective on the team front, what are some of the ingredients you have found to be consistent. Let me not say ingredients, let's say roles because there is the technical role that a person fulfills. Do you find there is some softer skill type roles that teams tend to do better if those people are there, and struggle if those people aren't there? Or is it just a question of picking people strictly based on their technical functions?
Brad King: Sooner or later we're going to have to talk about leadership, because it's such a pervasive topic and popular in management and things like this, one of the things that I've really tried to emphasize with all the teams that I have is that leadership is absolutely necessary for sure, but it's not inherent within an individual or at least it doesn't have to be.
When we're talking about leadership within a team, you may have a formal title of whoever is the leader, right? The project leader or the project manager, scrum manager, product owner, whatever you want to designate that role as, is the formal leader. But the actual practice of leadership is much more fluid. It's passed around from different team members, it's distributed. And I think that good leaders, and that's really all of us, and this is going to sound like a bit of a cliché, but we have to know when to stop leading and let other people lead. We have to know when to let go and then just trust that your other team members can get the job done. And if they make a mistake, they make a mistake. Most of us are not saving lives so we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously. They made a mistake, we're going to learn something from it, let's just move on. I think that decentralizing leadership and distributing it, passing it around, the volleyball system where one person serves until he messes up and then he rotates, the other guy takes it for a while... That's the way I think an essential quality that most great teams have is that the they're able to share that leadership responsibility and they're able to identify when they need to shift leadership to different people, depending on the context and what they're facing.
Anthony Sanni: Yes, that is, again, a surprising answer. But I think a useful answer as well, because one can understand why leadership is a big deal now...
Brad King: … Because there’s so many that are horrible at it.
Anthony Sanni: Exactly. They become leaders, but it's more positional and so they don't understand, or maybe not that they're bad people, but maybe they've just never thought about it in the way that it actually appears to work... let's put it that way. So these centralized leadership, contextual leadership, are some of the things I heard you talk about, and this might even be the best place to actually segue into discussion on leadership teams or teams of leaders. For someone who is sitting around that table, having the conversation with other people of influence in an organization, that's their role... They're not the people necessarily doing the work, they can get in there, but that's not necessarily their role. Again, to use the 80/20 term, what is the 20% that causes 80% of the problems around that table?
Brad King: I think that one of the biggest mistakes is that they don't actually ask the team what the team needs from them. Leaders are directive, they're telling their teams what to do when it really should be the teams that are directing the leaders. And this is something that we get from agile philosophies, this kind of servant-leadership model. But most leaders are just not that connected, they're not as close to the work as the people actually doing the work, obviously, so they can't really help out in that way. So, they should just stay out of it basically. The more they're involving themselves, typically the slower things will go, the more complicated things will go. But people are people, they have their own kind of tendencies. Some people like to be in control and can't just let go that easily. But what they really need to do is to just put that trust in their team and then just to ask their team, “Okay I can't really help you deliver this work, the nuts and bolts of it so to speak, but I can help clear path for you. So, what do you need me to do? What do you need to do? Who do you need me to talk to? What conversations do you need me to have? What conflicts do you need me to address?”. Those really effective leaders are the ones that are clearing that path for their teams and they are the ones that are dealing with the problems that the team just can't solve by themselves either because they don't know how to, or because of their position within the organization, or because of politics or whatever. I’ve always heard this this cliche, if you're going to bring a problem to your manager, at least have a solution, or something like that. I think that's completely wrong. Bring problems – that's what they're paid for... to solve problems. That's it, that's their job. Bring the problems to them and let them help you sort it out. I really think that from a leadership standpoint, the sooner leaders internalize that part of their job, I think the better things will be for their teams. They might not be able to code, they might not be able to write copy or whatever, but they are able to solve political problems within the organization that often can stall the work, and that is their job.
Anthony Sanni: Very cool. Very cool, I like that. Let me just do a quick recap here because we've covered a lot of ground actually. We've talked about the role of making your work visible. We've talked about the role of clarity for the team to know exactly what they're doing. We've talked about how a person can be extremely talented and capable, but then in the wrong team, they suffer. We've talked about a lot of different things... the role of leadership.
One thing I wanted to also talk about today for the people listening is conflict in teams. What are the biggest sources of conflict that you've encountered? And as a follow-up to that, if a person were to be in that situation, what would you recommend that the person do in that situation of conflict?
Brad King: That's a tough one. I can tell you an example that's come up for me recently. Recently I was involved in coaching a team where this team was charged with introducing agile into the organization. Not introducing it, but basically completing an agile project within the organization. Now the organization itself is not set up to promote this way of working. So, the cards are already stacked against them. And one of the big sources of conflict that I see is people who just have different ways of working. And again, I think part of this comes back to kind of personal productivity. One of the downsides of this emphasis on personal productivity is that there's nothing that's shared. And if there's nothing that's shared, then you don't really have much of a foundation to build a team on. So, if I'm really on top of my own productivity, my own personal productivity, and I do it my way and you do it your way, that immediately is going to be a source of conflict because I think that ways of doing are connected to ways of behaving and ways of being. And so, you're going to behave in different ways and I'm going to behave in different ways. And that really is a huge source of conflict. And so, what we need to do is, we need to have a conversation, right? We need to talk about it. We need to come to some sort of consensus about what each of us is actually willing to compromise on and maybe create a new system between us that we can both share, right? Some sort of platform that we can both work from. Because again, this type of a conflict is not fundamental conflict. This is not like a domestic dispute where we're arguing over where the button goes on the page or something like that. This is “I don't think you're doing things the way they should be done.”. That's a different level of conflict. So, unless we can sort that out, we don't really have much of a team. This comes back to how did you and I end up working together to begin with? We’re just a group of people put together and said, there you go. That's a team. We've got a team here... Based on what though? Maybe that was a selection problem that happened before you and I started to have this conflict, or before this conflict started. I think that different ways of working are a huge source of conflict within the organization. And, if you're in that position, you have to find a way to address that, and to come to some sort of consensus about how we're going to work together. What are we going to share in terms of how we're going to do this? Because it's like, if we can't, then we're basically at odds we're talking two different languages.
Anthony Sanni: So, the other one you raised was personality. This is more mechanical; it’s how I work. How do you encounter personality issues that have very little to do with the job, and then, what do you do as the coach in that case? What do you tell these people? How do you handle those?
Brad King: It depends. When I'm working with teams or different clients, I'm trying to change something about the team's performance. I'm trying to change something the business, usually trying to improve it. So, we're trying to change something... I can't really change your personality. I can't. I call myself a change management consultant, a behavior change consultant, I can't really change people's personalities. What I can change are is the physical workspaces. I can change the processes they use. I can change the rules that they use to interact with each other. I cannot change a personality. When it comes to dealing with personality conflicts, my advice would be is just to focus on what you can actually change. You can't change someone's personality. And again, I wonder if a lot of these kind of negative personality traits or these traits that are perceived as negative, how much of it has to do with stuff that is maybe in your control that you don't really realize? Like maybe someone is behaving like a jerk because they feel like they're constantly caught off guard with last minute requests. Why are they caught off guard with last minute requests? Because nobody can see what’s happening in the workflow. So, I guess what I'm saying is that I'm reluctant to go straight to saying,” Oh, that's a personality problem.”.
Anthony Sanni: Ah, gotcha. I gotcha. Yes, it could be a process problem manifesting. It could be many different problems, right? Like you're saying, that's now manifesting.
Brad King: Yeah. But the point is I want to exhaust all the other possibilities before I come to the conclusion that person is an asshole. And if I do get to that conclusion, first of all, you want to vet it with a few different people; make sure it's not just me. And if you do get to that conclusion, then they have to go. There are just some people that are just those people. We all know them. We've all worked for some of them. There are assholes in organizations and they cause a lot of damage, so just remove them. Whatever way you can, just get them out. If that's the ultimate conclusion, then you should just take comfort in the fact that you cannot change the personality. I try to approach a problem, a conflict like that, with that being the last option. I try to exhaust all the other possibilities and explanations first.
Anthony Sanni: And from an individual standpoint, people are the best at change when they're ready for it. Some people after one or two negative experiences, they start to look inward. I know of people who have built really successful careers after having a rough time starting out because they had those personality issues that they weren't ready to deal with. But then after, say the third, or maybe even the fourth bad experience at a job, they start to think is it me? And then they start looking inward and they make changes. So, I agree with you. I don't think anybody can change, definitely not in a business standpoint, but that's not even your job, you're not there to do therapy necessarily.
Before we go, there are two more things I want to talk about before we go. The last one is obviously talking about you and your 20% that makes 80% of the results. But before we do that, I wanted to ask you, is there something I should have asked you that I didn't, that is important for people to know about teams, about being effective, about building and being a part of effective teams?
Brad King: This is just my opinion, but I think that it's not really about team building and trust falls and things like this, we need to help our clients and help each other see teams like we see organizations, which are dynamic systems of interacting people. Our job as leaders, because we're all leaders... it doesn't matter what your title is and the org chart, you are a leader because we already established that leadership is a practice, it's not a role (management is the role, there's a big difference), but if you are a leader, your job is to understand that system, the system of your team, the system of your function, the system of your organization, and the interactions and the patterns that happen within it. It’s building teams and evolving them to a really high level of performance, I think it definitely helps to have that kind of systems perspective... that it's not about individuals, it's not really about personalities. It's about these interactions that you're seeing between them that take the shape of the specific workflows that they use, the specific tool sets that they use, the practices that they invest in, where they direct their focus. Are they investing in clarity? Are they investing in other places? What's working for them? Just this constant examination of how this team of people is interacting. I think that's the one thing that I wish we could talk more about.
Anthony Sanni: I'm glad you said that because it sounds like you've just opened up a task for me to invite you back on this show.
Brad King: It's just hard to be clear sometimes. You know what, we're talking about complicated things and that's hard. Even for me... and I have a PhD in Communication so that doesn't mean that much these days.
Anthony Sanni: It should. The thing about that, that I find is, I think people who come from academia or who have had exposure to academia is you get the guy who comes and says that's black or it's white and people like that binary sort of things. But if you have any kind of nuance to your communication, you lose out because people want that binary “it's this, or it's this”, “just tell me what it is or what it isn't”, but because people were more academic in their approach or in their exposure in the past, you're trained to look at the nuance, to look at the gray areas. And so, when you talk, it almost sounds like you're not explaining; well, it's because you're being awfully careful.
Brad King: I feel so validated that you just said that because that's how I feel. That's how I felt for a long time. It's true. I do try to be very careful, and I do try to be very nuanced. And you're right, people have a hard time with nuance.
Anthony Sanni: Generally, it's true. What you should do is you should just say what it is even if you don't want to
Brad King: Or offer a prescription for high performing teams. Here's a cruiser, here's a general prescription, it'll work in all situations.
Anthony Sanni: Have you considered writing a book though? Because I feel like a lot of your perspectives are not what people expect to hear and they're so valuable. And I think it would make a great topic for a long form where you get a chance to actually explain what you're saying.
Brad King: It’s a good challenge because I think writing is thinking. I don't know if you got this, but when you have to put your ideas down on a page, oh man, that makes it really clear. You have to be clear.
Anthony Sanni: Yes, definitely.
Brad King: Yeah, exactly. The first time it comes out, it's nothing, it's garbage. And you're like, wow, that's a reflection of how I'm thinking. It's just pure garbage and then you take a few more runs at it and it gets clearer and clearer. And so that process of writing, is the process of thinking; they're so connected.
Anthony Sanni: So that brings us now to what is your 20%? I ask every guest this. There's a lot that you have, I know part of your story and how you've arrived where you're at. A lot of it is your personal interest and commitment to being productive and to continuing to develop yourself. So, through that journey, what have you identified to be your 20%? There's no wrong answer. It could be anything, but what's the 20% for you that has made 80%.
Brad King: So, you know this again, I'm the king of simple answers today. I would say if there's one thing that's made the most difference for me, it's just carving out time to continuously learn new things. I've been through all the productivity systems, like you name it, we can talk about all of them if you want. I'm fluent in all of them and nothing has really stuck, but one of the things that I've just constantly come back to is just being curious about the world, being curious about things in the world, things that I'm experiencing, being curious about people, being curious about their stories, where they come from, investing that time to learn these things. It not only gives you that kind of immediate payoff that I can use that, not in a manipulative sense, but maybe to connect with someone better or maybe to get my work done better or whatever. But the other thing is that, for me, learning is like a bodily function. I have to do it. It's a source of renewal. And that in itself keeps me motivated. If I'm constantly studying and learning something new, whether it's about parenting or volleyball, it could be anything, just constantly keep learning and keep investing time in yourself. We talked before a little bit about self-reflection as well. That's another form of learning, right? Block off that time with yourself and just have a conversation with yourself about how you're doing. That has helped me immensely over the years. Get better.
Anthony Sanni: So, after going through all these productivity systems, it comes back to this for you. That's the one that's held constant.
Brad King: Yeah. Because when you cycle through everything, all the different systems, you pick things that work and you discard other things that don't work. The Bruce Lee rule. Isn't that what Bruce Lee said? Take what's useful and leave the rest. And you get something from David Allen and getting things done; I used to do that. I don't do that anymore. That doesn't mean that all the ideas are worthless. I certainly picked out tons of them that I carry forward, or agile results or bullet journaling or whatever. All of these things you can pick bits and pieces from and you mash it together to form your own style. That's made a huge difference for me just in terms of my productivity. I know you asked about productivity and one of the things that I'm challenging myself to do is to think less about productivity and more about impact.
Anthony Sanni: Yeah, you’re definitely come back on the show. There's no way you're not coming back. You can't just drop a bomb like that, two bombs in a row, and be like, “okay, bye Anthony”. You're coming back for sure. I'm going to drag you back off the street if I have to.
Brad King: I'll be a little bit more prepared in terms of these ideas, but we talked to a lot today about so many different things. Like one of the things we talked about was burnout, right? And I think we speculated about what a burnout was associated with... just a perception that what you're doing, doesn't matter, you have no impact, and I know some very productive people who get stuff done and they're burning out, and I think part of it has to do with the fact that they feel like they're not having any impact. I'm trying to learn to take a break from all the productivity porn and whatnot, and to start thinking about, “okay so what are the big areas in my life that I need to have impact in”. We're both fathers, I'm sure that's probably either number one or number two. It's either being a father or being a husband is probably number one or number two. But don't even rank them, just say, these are the most important things in your life. It's your family, it’s your it's your children, it's your friends, the people that you help, the people you're making a difference for, the customers. And learn to savor that impact and stop pouring about how productive you're trying to be. Oh, I didn't achieve my task quota today or something like that. All right. It doesn't matter. Did you impact somebody else's life? Did you make a positive difference? That's worth so much more.
Anthony Sanni: I agree. And that would be the perfect note on which to end this conversation. Thank you so much, Brad for sharing your thoughts for informing, for providing insights, for inspiring us all, for inspiring me and inspiring all those that are listening to the podcast right now. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go?
Brad King: They can go to my website. It’s www.bradleyking.ca. You can find me on LinkedIn too. I don't think I'm hard to get a hold of. Can we put that in the show notes?
Anthony Sanni: Yes. I'll put that in the show notes for sure. Why would you not just put the links in the show notes? You don’t do any other social rights?
Brad King: Not, but I heard that the kids like Tik-Tok.
Anthony Sanni: But if you do want to learn about Brad, I'll put all the links, all the officially licensed links by himself in the show notes and nothing from the dark web in there at all for sure. Thank you so much again for your time and hopefully...
Brad King: … No, thanks for your time, man. It was so much fun, looking forward to our next chat.
Anthony Sanni: Absolutely bye for now.
