Cracking The Code of Successful Teams: Max Hunter (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of leadership team coach Max Hunter’s talk titled “Cracking The Code of Successful Teams” at TEDxVUAmsterdam 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Power of Togethership

What the world of work needs now is togethership. Togethership is the combination of the words togetherness and leadership. It’s the leadership skill to create a cohesive, resilient and effective team. And in the coming minutes, I will help you to crack the code of creating togethership.

How to create a team that can overcome anything together. A team that’s fun to work in. A team that can achieve things greater than you ever imagined. A team that you will never forget being a part of.

My name is Max Hunter. And I’ve had the pleasure of working with hundreds of teams over the last 20 years or so. I’ve also been part of a leadership team and a C suite as well. Through this time, I understand what it is that make teams work.

Understanding Team Dynamics

The good, the bad, and the ugly. And I fundamentally believe in the power of unlocking what is there in a group of individuals that make up a team. One of my C suite roles was indeed as a chief joy officer.

What has that got to do with togethership? I hear you think. And what the hell does a chief joy officer do anyway? Well, we painted a vision for the chief joy officer role which was to create a place to work where people would wake up on a Monday morning and look forward to going back to work to make a difference. A big vision, you might say, but one that I think we all believe is definitely worth chasing.

In fact, I was thinking about it recently and how it’s drummed into us from such an early age that Monday mornings are, by definition, a bad thing. You may know about the grumpy, sarcastic, cartoon cat Garfield. I had a duvet on my bed with Garfield’s face on it and it just said, “I hate Monday mornings.” That grumpy cat has got a lot to answer for, I promise you, because I was ten years old at the time.

The Monday Morning Feeling

I was ten and that’s when we have it drummed into us. But first of all, I want to take you back to your Monday mornings as well. I want you to think about a time when Monday mornings felt great, when you’d wake up on a Monday morning, open your eyes and think, “Yeah, come on, let’s do this.” Got it? Good.

And I’ll take you back maybe to another time where Monday mornings felt quite the opposite, where maybe even Sunday evenings, when you closed your eyes to go to sleep, you got that feeling in the pit of your stomach, “Oh, no, I’m not looking forward to this.” Got it?

I probably don’t need to tell you, as you remember those experiences, the impact that that Monday morning feeling has on motivation at work and, therefore, the consequent productivity and effectiveness of your ability at work, right?

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In either one. And there’s lots of research that helps us to prove this as well, what that Monday morning feeling delivers. Some work from our friends at Workhuman shows that great employee experience, that Monday morning feeling, can deliver up to three times the return on assets. That’s a measure of profitability and more than double the return on sales, a measure of efficiency and effectiveness.

Leadership Challenges

In fact, when we speak to leaders about what it is that puts them in a bad Monday morning feeling, they tell us it’s things like people escalating issues to me all the time, some toxic workplace culture behaviors like gossiping, talking about each other, not to each other. About having to firefight the detail all the time so that I, as a leader, don’t have time to focus on the stuff that makes a difference, the strategic stuff, focusing on my people at least as well.

Of course, I’m going to teach you how to unlock the code of togethership, because if you can create that in your teams, then it means that you’re much more likely for the people in your team to wake up with this Monday morning feeling and not this one, and that can only be good for your people and for business. To maybe help paint that for you, I’m going to tell you a story about a team that I once had the pleasure of supporting, and a leader who embraced togethership in its fullness.

A Team in Crisis

The team was in a bad place. There’d been layoffs, people had new roles and descriptions, even new teams, smaller teams and new bosses. They were in a pretty dark place, and yet the leader and the team knew that they had to get moving quickly and delivering, because without that, the future of the team and the individuals was at serious risk. So the team leader invested two days of the team’s time to try and get them moving forwards.

At the start, we did what we call the wall of frustration, where people put post-it notes up on the wall of what is it that frustrates them, what gets in the way of doing their best work, what are their fears? This wall was full and heavy, hard to see how in a few hours we could get moving.

Over the coming hours, we did things like connecting the team as individuals and humans, sharing their stories, and sharing a laugh at the same time. We also invested time in building trust, vulnerability-based trust in the team as well, whether we went one level deeper as well.

At some point, we got them to share their wall of hopes, the future-focused opposite of the frustrations. Where do we want to get to?

What could be possible? What will help?

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Breaking Through

Then at some point on day two, we realized we want to get to next steps, we want to get moving, but there was something holding the team back from moving from here to over here. So in this new space of more trust and connection, we left them some space. And at some point, someone spoke to what was not being said. They looked and said, “All the work it will take to get from here to here, I don’t want to burn out, not again.”

The emotion that swept through the room, of course, connected the people even more, but more importantly, other people started opening up about the fears, about what was holding them back moving from here to here. Once the team processed that and had had a break, when they came back, the new energy in the room was palpable. They wanted to make a change. They looked at the wall of hopes and said, “No, we want to change that.”

There’s different hopes that will make a difference, that will get us there, that we want to achieve without the leader’s help. And then in the next two hours, they created solutions to move forwards that they struggled to get to for months beforehand. They had this amazing energy and desire to move forward together. Let me help you decode what happened of how to get from here to here by taking you back even further, tens of thousands of years closer to the origin of man.

The Roots of Togethership

We went from being arguably one of the weakest physical species on this planet to arguably ruling it for right or wrong, because we came together in tribes. We divided labor. We had each other’s backs. We made sure the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

We came around the campfire every evening as a tribe. We shared stories, there’s lions over there, there’s food over there, and I’m sure we shared a laugh as well. We had an innate sense of vulnerability-based trust. We knew that individually we could get stabbed in the back or eaten by a lion after we slept.

We knew our own and each other’s intrinsic vulnerability, so therefore we did have each other’s backs so we could sleep at night and then go out the next day and start hunting for food, nurturing and training our young, looking for the next cave to be safe the next night.

Why do I talk about cavemen? What’s that got to do with the world of work, I hear you think? Well because the world of work, right, we don’t go around beating each other with clubs anymore or being eaten by lions, although you probably know someone at work who at least metaphorically goes around beating their chest or someone who hopefully metaphorically goes around marking their territory.

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The Code of Togethership

But no, what the cavemen, what we knew is hardwired into us lies the code of togethership and I will now unpick that for you one at a time. So number one, bring people together. Recreate the proverbial campfire and use that time intentionally. Don’t waste a single minute on death by PowerPoint or sharing reports to the boss.

Use that time in other ways and use the other elements of togethership to use that time. The second one to unlock is connecting people. Take time to share stories. Take time to get to know how each other ticks, what triggers us even, what we’re proud of.

Share a laugh together. There’s research that shows there’s a physiological benefit to connecting and bonding when we share a laugh together. Number three, build that vulnerability-based trust. Go one level deeper together because at work we walk in and we put on this mask that says I’m all right, Jack, so we’ve forgotten that we’re vulnerable individually.

You could have this with where am I struggling at the moment? Where do I need help? What have I got on my plate outside of work that’s bothering me? And once you have those three elements, then you can finally get into true co-creation where you can share ideas, where you can have constructive conflict and not hurt each other, where you can make better together.

Implementing Togethership

Now, if you want to be interested in trying out togethership in your team, you need to have a team. I’ll give you one tip that you can take away and do straight away. When the team’s next together, ask the simple question of each other, “What have you got on your plate right now that’s playing on your heart and mind outside of work?” And then listen and see what that on its own unlocks.

Togethership, the combination of the words togetherness and leadership. Togethership, the leadership skill to create a cohesive, resilient, and effective team. The four keys of the code bring people together intentionally, connect on a human level, and build vulnerability-based trust, and then go co-create. Want to be part of a team that can overcome anything together?

A team that’s fun to work in? A team that can achieve things greater than you ever imagined? A team that you’ll never forget being a part of? Try togethership.

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Thank you very much.