teamwork

223: Douglas Gerber: How do you create high-performance teams?

Intro:    Welcome to the Fast Leader podcast, where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader, and now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner Jim Rembach.

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Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who’s really going to give us some practical application to building better and stronger and higher performing teams. Douglas Gerber was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He’s got an older brother and a younger sister and an 80 year old mother still driving her Subaru around the hills of Portland. He has an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management and as a certified professional facilitator and professional coach. Douglas has always been fascinated by cultures and languages and during his teenage years tasted life in France and Europe and later in Latin America and Asia, that gave him the language bug and he ended up studying and speaking eight languages. 

These experiences have also made him keenly aware of how cultures and groups of people think and interact. He has extended this awareness to business teams and discovered a talent and passion for supporting teams to perform at their best. In 2003 after a successful 20 year corporate career culminating as a vice president for PepsiCo, Douglas left to start his own consulting firm, Focus One. He wanted to share the benefit of what had worked so effectively for him by teaching other organization how to build high-performance teams. His transition into this field actually began ten years earlier when he had attended a corporate leadership program conducted by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, one of the fathers of executive coaching.

After reviewing his personality assessment and several discussions, Marshall challenged him with, Douglas what are you doing in corporate? Everything I see from your assessment shows that you’d be a great executive coach. At that time he laughed off Marshals’ prodding but his encouragement must have remained in the back of his mind because year’s later Douglas found his niche as a leadership team coach, encouraging leadership teams to commit to achieving high performance. Douglas’ mission is to help team teams experience the fulfillment, thrill and exhilaration of working in a high-performance team, just as a winning sports team shares a compelling identity so can a business team. Douglas currently lives in Hong Kong he married with two lovely daughters and one baby in the oven. And he is the author, Team Quotient: High-Performance Leadership Teams That Win Every Time. Douglas Gerber, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Douglas Gerber:     I am ready Jim. 

Jim Rembach:    I’m glad you’re here. I’m really excited at the discussion that we’re getting ready to get into but I’ve given my Legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

Douglas Gerber:      Well, I really have two passions, Jim. One is as you—in the introduction you talked about all the countries I’ve lived in. My philosophy is, if you live in a country you need to understand the people and if you want to understand the people you have to speak the language. I’ve learned all these languages, so that’s my first passion, is languages. My second passion is working with teams and helping them move from a sense of me to we. That magic transition where the team moves from self-centered to concept of collective. So that’s my current passion. 

Jim Rembach:    Well and my gosh, I’ve really enjoyed—and so for me just to kind of give everybody an insight into how this works for me is I do a deep scan of books that I have the opportunity to interview authors and in your particular book I just found myself wanting to sit there and read page by page and so I am going to do that, I don’t do that for every single book I will be doing that for yours. I think I just learned so much about how to practically put together a high-performing team and there’s so much insight in here. But I think it’s really important for us to start with the definition of team quotient and team Q because there’s really two different types of TQ that you’re talking about. In the book you about a collective team TQ, which is that team’s ability to operate as a high-performance team. And then you talk about personal TQ, so is that individual component. You also have a table in here that talks about where people typically focus their time, effort, and activity and very little of it is actually going to need a team environment. Tell us about that?

Douglas Gerber:      Yeah. Let me just get started by—we all know about IQ and we all know about EQ they’ve been around for a long time. But I realized there was something missing in the leader’s arsenal and that’s something called TQ or team quotient. After investigating this I realized that nobody had actually investigated team potion. So I ended up trademarking, so it’s trademarked in four continents around the world. The idea is that team quotient is the intelligence of the team. How well does it work together? And unlike the individuals, IQ or EQ just personal, TQ is both personal as well as collective. So that’s what we have the personal TQ and the collective TQ. Personal TQ, says, what’s my propensity to work in a team? And collective TQ says, how is the team working together? And so there’s a score just like IQ score there’s a teacher score. The team receives a score and then it’s aspirational saying, how do you move forward in the future? So that’s the concept of TQ. And what I found is that you actually need to measure a team for the team to be able to get us hands around it’s team journey.

Jim Rembach:    So talking about that  that the team journey I think you also refer to something that we’re going to talk about in a little bit talking about the state of where that is. Talking about the imperative and the breakdown of where people actually invest their and energy is in personal development, for that time and efforts typically 40 to 70 percent if people development, it’s typically 20 to 40 percent and in team development prior to actually starting on their TQ and high-performance development journey it’s about 5 to 15 percent. However, in order to really do what you were talking about from a team perspective that team development after embarking on the journey the leader’s time and energy goes to 30 to 40 percent. You talked about many of the reasons for that and then the benefits that are apparent what do you see really coming out of that that’s most impactful?

Douglas Gerber:      I think the leaders, unfortunately have been misguided here. Because leaders spent a lot of time talking about—my own personal leadership or how I lead people or their vision or strategy and very little on how do I lead a team. This whole area of team development that leaders may spend 10 to 20 percent on it but actually they should be spending 40 to 50 percent on it because it’s the team that will make the leader successful. A leader can only do so much and if the leader doesn’t have a great team then he or she will be limited. So that’s why the imperative, the imperative is that the leaders need to spend time on their teams. Why don’t they do that? There’s a couple of reasons. One is ignorance. They don’t know the power of a high-performance team. Secondly, it’s not easy to build the team as any leader knows. I often ask people in my seminars, how many of you are married? Or how many of you have long-term partners? People raise our hands and say, is marriage easy? People say, no, marriage is definitely not easy. Well, if you’re in a team of 10 people just multiply that by 10 and now we know what the difficulty is. It’s not easy building high-performance team but it is imperative. And so that’s what we do we demystify this whole area of how you build it and how you do it. 

Jim Rembach:    And in addition as you’re talking and I started thinking about all that complexity and thinking about the magnification of it because I have multiple individuals that I’m now having to be married to essentially. Of course, now we know about the whole divorce issue and how that comes into play but for me I can see how the whole energy issue is really impacted. If I’m not putting energy into all of those relationships and helping them to work it’s going to end in divorce. 

Douglas Gerber:      That’s right, that’s right. Absolutely. And that’s why as a team leader if you just let your team go on its own you don’t put the energy into it, you’re going to have people leaving or you’re going to have people who are disconnected. One big buzz words of course is, engagement. If you want to get a team that’s engaged you have to spend time on it you have to but you have to pay attention to the team that’s engaged you have to spend time on it you have to pay attention to the team. 

Jim Rembach:    Another thing that I found really interesting here is you talk about lessons from team sports and applying them in business. There’s eight things that you have identified as far as successful sports teams and what they do and what allows them to be successful. You talked about mutual reliance, challenge to do your best, awareness, identity and pride, trust and confidence, success and performance, motivation fun, and then coaches encourage team commitment. Now, one of the things when I was looking at this and I was like, hmm, does this have some gender tendency to it because it seems like very male type qualities as a whole?

Douglas Gerber:      I never thought of it that way it’s an interesting thing. I don’t think that there’s a gender  issue around building teams. Let me give you one reason why, we take up the whole area of fun and some people say, well why do you’re talking about fun and teams? I’m going to back up and just say that I was working with European team and this Swiss guy got up and I said, we should have a break this is getting kind of heavy. And he says, why would we need to break this is for business we we’re not supposed to have fun. And I said, well that’s interesting and everybody else wanted to have some fun. So the idea is that to build a team you have to challenge the team you have to get people engaged and you need to have some fun and if you’re not doing that you’re not going to build a high performance team. So I would say fun is not a masculine thing or a feminine thing  but fun is something that’s actually really critical that people miss in that whole environment. Now let’s relate it back to sports, people who are playing sports or in great sports teams they’ll tell you that—we have so much fun playing these sports. It’s so challenging there’s so much energy and juice. And that’s the feeling you want on a business team or a corporate team as well. 

Jim Rembach:    You’re talking about business and corporate team I’m thinking about this teams at all levels at the frontline. One of the issues that you have about the frontline for a lot of organizations is the higher turnover rates, well heck you have that in executive level now too, but then the other thing is I’m thinking about this as a generational issue you didn’t have to talk about the whole dysfunctional and self-absorption piece as much as we have done with the advent of the whole  device devices that we now can sync ourselves into and loses ourselves into to me it seems like it’s becoming significantly harder to build stronger teams because of everybody’s connection. 

Douglas Gerber:      That’s absolutely true. I think there’s some wonderful things that have come out of the Internet age. One of them that has not come out of it is that a sense of face-to-face connectivity and this actually gets in to this incredible area which will be very important in the 2020s as team has become more virtual and so we’re seeing more and more virtual teams. And so what I say to people is that, look if you’re going to have a virtual team try to get together at least once a year that face-to-face connection is essential.   Maybe you can do it more than once a year maybe two times a year or four times a year,   but at least once a year get together that will make a huge difference in terms of the whole connectivity of the team.

Jim Rembach:    It’s interesting that you said that because I just had this conversation with one of my coaches yesterday talking about the power of proximity. In that if you’re working and leading a remote team where everybody is disperse in different areas you still have to pay attention to the power of proximity and you just have to do certain things to replace your face-to-face connections.

Douglas Gerber:       Absolutely. And also part of this is we’re on video here, videos a lot better than audio obviously, so where possible use a video and where possibly use life-sized video even better. But if you only have audio there are certain things you could do, one of them is that, you got to get to know each other. Share photos of your kids, of your holidays, spend a little bit of time at the beginning of the meeting talking about some personal things to make sure those connections are there. Because what happens is that people naturally will go into the tasks and then business when they’re talking on the phone they go right into the tasks. What you really want to do is the opposite, you want to spend a little bit of time on the personal side because that’s going to keep the team together. 

Jim Rembach:    It’s funny that you say that that’s one of the things that I coach all the time. People want to get on the phone and like, okay, we have a lot to do so let’s get to it. 

Douglas Gerber:      Exactly, it’s the wrong thing to do it’s the opposite. 

Jim Rembach:    Yeah, yeah it actually makes things more difficult to get done. Okay, needless to say you talked about assessing the team and all of that and you do have that in the book. You talk about the collective quotient health check for the team and then you also have it for the individual and then you can total up your score. Then you mentioned something about the aspirational components of trying to increase your health check score and that ultimately leads to something that you call the TQ mango.

Douglas Gerber:      Okay, I just like to say that when you do the assessment—one of things I found, and there are a lot of assessments out there and some of them are very complicated, you can do this TQ health check online, confidential everybody on the team takes it and it takes less than 10 minutes. It’s easy and it’s easy to get a hundred percent of the team members involved in that. And then you get your score and you get a diagnosis of what’s working what’s not working and your areas to improve. The starting this gives you the starting point, are you a dysfunctional team? Are you a mediocre team? Or are you a high performance team? So that’s the TQ mango. And at the bottom is this dysfunctional team. And I get a lot of dysfunctional teams, these are people who don’t talk to one another. This is what I call a team in a state of warfare. And believe it or not there are a lot of teams like that where you have different cliques there’s backbiting people are not getting along. I actually love working with those teams because to see them transform is very satisfying. 

Next level up on the mango and this is where most teams are, this is sort of mediocre teams. A mediocre teams are sort of (16:18 inaudible) the problem with mediocre teams is that you get stuck in a rut and you just keep going on as a mediocre team. One of the key characteristics of mediocre teams is what we call silo mentality. We all know what silos are, silos are those big cylinders, so silo mentality is when people come to the meeting saying, I represent my area I represent my department and I’m here to win I’m here to win my concepts, my arguments, I get my budgets approved etcetera, that’s silo mentality. So moving from silo mentality to team first, that’s the shift that we’re trying to make. Most teams that are in the mediocre area are in that silo mentality. You have a group of individuals coming together but they’re not a real team that’s a mediocre team. The high performance team, which is by the way only 5% of high performance teams it takes a lot of work. High performance teams are ones that—they do think about the team first. You have that sense of energy, you have that sense of passion they’re not in competition they’re actually supporting one another. 

Some leaders will actually say, oh, I like my team members to compete with each other a little bit. But actually what you want is you want people supporting each other not fighting each other. That feeling you get in being a high-performance team is unlike any other feeling out there. It is something that once you have that once you experience high-performance team you never want to go back. Like a sports team, championship sports team, if you ask anybody on a championship sports team what’s that like? They said, that’s nothing like it, same thing in a business or corporate team.

Jim Rembach:    It’s funny to say that I talking about sports, you’ll hear team members say, I love these people,

Douglas Gerber:      Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it’s the same thing when you’re on a high-performance team you—here’s this concept of team identity. In other words, when you go to work every day, you’re driving to work and you’re thinking, oh, I’m going to go see all my team members. Are you excited about that? Are you proud about that? Or are you saying, oh, no, I have to go see my team members.  So it’s that sense of identity that you’re excited to be with your team members because it is challenging and it is motivational it is something that keeps you going and that’s what you want in a high-performance team.

Jim Rembach:    Gosh, when I’m thinking about all of this particular effort and activity and all of that I start thinking about that need for inspiration that you talk about. One of the things that we focus in on the show are quotes to do that. In the book you have tons of excellent quotes because it’s loaded with a lot of case studies. And so for me when I started thinking about this particular book I’m like, okay, Good to GreatI that has sold millions of copies but you one of the things about this book that is even better is that it gives you the case studies in how to do it. 

Douglas Gerber:      Yeah, and in fact, I actually call this book the, Leaders Operating Manual for Building High Performance teams. So it’s not only what are you achieving but it’s the how to. One of the things I say the leaders don’t make this too complicated, you’ve got tons of ideas in this book and you have a roadmap but if you only take two or three of those ideas and you implement them well with your team you’re going to make a lot of progress. So don’t feel you have to go all the way, keep it simple. 

Jim Rembach:    Another thing too is I started thinking about all of this work and we’re going to get to your favorite quote in a second again there’s so many things in this book I want to talk about. I see that having this problem with dysfunction and being average and not being high-performing also ultimately affects two important things these days and that is the employee experience and then even more importantly the customer experience so if you don’t have a high-performing team the customer is victim. 

Douglas Gerber:      Absolutely. I actually want to tell you a story about that. I was working with the team in Singapore and they were on the lowest quartile of customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. There was a lot of stars on the team but they weren’t working together well, we did a program and a year later they came back and it actually shifted that whole thing around could be that on the top quartile of customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. So high-performance teams have a huge impact on employee engagement satisfaction and the whole customer piece because you’re not high performance if you can’t have great customers and you don’t know how to work with your customers. 

Jim Rembach:    Without a doubt. Okay, so, down okay so favorite quote, I know you have several probably but if you can share one or two with us I think that would be fantastic. 

Douglas Gerber:      My favorite quote is, leaders are only as good as the team’s they build. You can think you’re a great leader but if you can’t build a great team you ain’t a great leader and that’s what I really believe. When I talk to leaders and I say, you’re really bright you’re a good strategy guy you’re really good at motivating people but if you can’t build your team then you’re really not a great leader. That’s my favorite quote and that kind of sums up how I think about this whole area of team transformation. By the way, I don’t talk about team building so much I don’t try to build teams it’s about team transformation. It’s not like a one-off event that you do it’s about a year two three years to create a transformation in this team. Just like a sports team you don’t build a sports team in  a couple weeks it takes years to build a championship sports team, same thing with business and corporate teams.

Jim Rembach:    That’s why you call it a TQ journey they’re going on their journey. Even when you started talking about the mango and you explained in the book you talk about of them being in a state of the part of lingo.

Douglas Gerber:      One other things that happens almost everybody’s been through the experience, you go on a team-building day, you do a rope score so you do something fun and everybody’s having a good time you get back to the office what happens? Nothing. Nothing happens everybody goes back to their old habits. This is why we don’t call it team-building we call it team transformation because what we’re trying to do is to transform teams throughout their whole working life and when they go back to the office that they actually are transforming through that experience.

Jim Rembach:    Well, talking about transforming talking about learning all those languages living all those different places all the different case studies you’ve been through—family all of that, I know you’ve had humps to get over and they’ve helped you get to where you are today. Can you share one of those stories with us so that we can learn from you?

Douglas Gerber:      I’ll go back to when I was a vice president in PepsiCo. We had a high performance individual named John. And John was managing a region, he came to me and he said, Douglas I’ve got some bad news for you. Now, if you’re in Pepsi and somebody says I’ve got bad news for you what do you think? You got to think one thing, the guy’s going to Coke. Sure enough, he says, Douglas, I’m getting a promotion, general manager of Coke. I said, John I know you can’t leave you can’t leave, he’s a great, great guy. So I went back to HR person, Linda and Linda saying, Oh, no. Six months later we’ve got a similar job for him. So I go back to John again I said, John, six months you’re going to be a GM for PepsiCo. He said, I don’t know Douglas I still want to go. I said, why else? What it is? Oh, salary 30% salary increase. So I go back to Linda, 30% salary increase. She says, no problem we can do that. Back to John and Johns says, one last thing Douglas, I don’t have a PA. And I said, well that’s not a problem I can get your PA, I don’t need to talk to Linda about that. But Douglas I don’t want any PA I want your PA. Do you think I was going to give John my PA? No way. So the question is did John leave? Yes, he left. Was it because of my a PA? No. The reason John left, and I found out through talking to Jerry one of the people of John, John felt that he was not really part of a team. He felt that he was a high potential guy and he knew that but he didn’t feel that sense of identity, camaraderie and energy challenge of a team. Those are my early days in PepsiCo and I vowed never again to let that happen. Those were actually days it was about there was about 20 years ago I started putting a lot of tension on how you create high-performance teams. The five years that I was actually a vice president PepsiCo I never lost one team member. We got some promotions but never lost one team member. That was something that was very instructional for me. One of the things people had said to me, because a PepsiCo you have a lot of turnover, they said, how’d you do that? And I said, well I really focused on the team. I never really focused on making sure that people were happy and motivated and stimulated in this team environment. 

Jim Rembach:    Gosh, so many things started running through my mind when you started talking about that and how it really affected that whole turnover component. We often talk about how important community is. We all say that we need to have the feeling and sensation of being part of something that’s much bigger than ourselves and that applies everywhere.

Douglas Gerber:      The sense of belonging is a need that we all have. Unfortunately, sometimes we go to work and we don’t have that sense of belonging that sense that we’re part of a community and that community is our team.  We might get that with our family, we might get that from a spiritual perspective but a lot of people they just don’t feel that. It really corresponds to a basic need that we all have.

Jim Rembach:    In addition, when you talk about the work of today and going forward it’s just going to continue to grow—it’s about teamwork, it is about teamwork. Very little of it is really about individual contributor anymore it’s all about—even individual contributors working as a collective. 

Douglas Gerber:      Yeah, that’s right. Just think of a company. A company is a series of teams. There might be ten teams, there might be a thousand teams. But company is actually a series of teams. It’s the team unit where you can really make things happen. And so as a leader of that team it’s your imperative to create the best team environment you can. You’re absolutely right. And I think this is why people spend too much time on the individual contributor aspect and not enough time on the collective aspect. 

Jim Rembach:    When I start thinking about the work that you are doing with TQ you said you’ve actually trademarked and all of that in a couple of different countries, I see a lot of benefit that could be derived by organizations to use this work. But when you start thinking about goals and all of that, what is one of your goals that you have?

Douglas Gerber:     One of my goals Jim is actually to get people to start thinking about teams and team development just like they would any other development, the idea of team quotient. Let’s take this whole team thing and measure it lets benchmark it and take it as one of the most important things that we need to do, so that’s the first. The second thing is that I truly believe that if you have high performance teams people are going to be happier they’re going to be more fulfilled at work. It really is and it really is a formula for happiness because you think about the experience of working in a team like that you’re going to be very motivated. So I think for me that’s one of my missions—to help people transform them fulfill through the team environment and experience.

Jim Rembach:    And the Fast Leader legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.

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Okay, Fast Leader legion, it’s time for the Hump day Hoedown. Okay Douglas, the Hump day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Douglas Gerber, are you ready to hoedown?

Douglas Gerber:      I’m ready to hoedown. 

Jim Rembach:    What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today? 

Douglas Gerber:      What’s holding me back from being an even better leader today is creating that sense of true leadership throughout the world on a global sense. 

Jim Rembach:    What is the best leadership advice you have ever received? 

Douglas Gerber:      Best leadership advice I’ve ever received is that pay attention to your people your people make you successful.

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Douglas Gerber:      One of my secrets is having great emotional intelligence and really understanding where people are coming from and being sensitive to the dynamics of team environments.

Jim Rembach:    What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Douglas Gerber:      One of my best tools is to—when we are having meetings getting people to talk about their personal lives before they start talking about business.

Jim Rembach:    What would be one book that you recommend to our legion, it could be from any genre and of course we’re going to put a link to Team Quotient on your show notes page as well.

Douglas Gerber:      Good to Great, you mentioned that before. Good to Great was very inspiring. Before I started, this is interesting, before I came with the name team quotient I was actually thinking the name should be good to great teams but I wanted something a little bit more unique.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader Legion you could find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/DouglasGerber. Okay, Douglas this is my last hump day hoedown question:  Imagine you were given the opportunity go back to the age of 25. You can take all the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you. Actually you can’t take it all back you can only take one, so what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Douglas Gerber:        I would definitely take back skill and knowledge of building a high performance team. The performance team. The reason why is that I now realize that that’s the key to success. 

Jim Rembach:    Douglas, it was an honor to spend time with you today, can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you?

Douglas Gerber:      You can contact me at douglasgerber.com, my website. And I’d love to be in touch with you send me an email I try to answer all my emails and be in touch.

Jim Rembach:    Douglas Gerber, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over to fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

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