Why Your “Best Employees” Are Killing Innovation - with Mark Murphy

Marion Anderson: We say we want innovation. We say we want people who challenge the status quo. We say we want bold thinking, fresh ideas, and people who don’t just nod along. And then - quietly - we promote the safest people in the room.

The ones who don’t rock the boat. The ones who stay in their lane. The ones who make their manager’s life easier. Today’s elephant is this: your “best employees” might be the very people killing innovation.

Not because they’re bad at their jobs. But because they’ve learned exactly how to survive the system. And to help us unpack that, we’re joined by Mark Murphy - New York Times bestselling author, Forbes senior contributor, and founder of Leadership IQ. Mark’s advised leaders everywhere from Harvard Business School to the United Nations.

His research has been featured in places like the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Bloomberg, and the Washington Post. And his work focuses on one uncomfortable truth: the behaviours leaders reward are often the ones that quietly block progress. Once you see that pattern, you can’t unsee it. Let’s talk about why.

This is the Elephant in the Org. - > Danny Gluch: Welcome back to the Elephant in the Org, everyone. I'm Danny Gluch, and I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, Cacha Dora 2 - > Cacha Dora: Hello? 3 - > Danny Gluch: And Marion Anderson.

4 - > Marion: Good morning! 5 - > Danny Gluch: And today, we have… A fantastic guest. Mark Murphy, why don't you say hi and introduce yourself real quick? 6 - > Mark Murphy: Hey there, Mark Murphy here, and first, thank you all for having me.

I'm excited for this conversation, and yeah, I am the founder of Leadership IQ, and we are a leadership and training 7 - > Mark Murphy: research company. 8 - > Danny Gluch: That's fantastic. I love leadership, I love training, I love all of the things. And you're the author of Team Players, which is… oh god, you stole, like, one of the best titles of the book I can think of.

9 - > Danny Gluch: And the elephant in the org is… 10 - > Danny Gluch: All about this… this research, this work that you've been doing, and the idea that 11 - > Danny Gluch: there is toxic harmony. We, you know, I love the term toxicness, toxic that. I'm like, is it toxic? And then it turns out, yes, very toxic.

And the idea that organizations say they love and encourage things, but in practice. 12 - > Danny Gluch: actually struggle and discourage the exact same things that they want to encourage. And we're gonna really dive into a lot of your work, a lot of your experience, a lot of what you've written on and researched. 13 - > Danny Gluch: And… 14 - > Danny Gluch: Mark, I want to talk with, first off, the kind of stock question.

What made you interested in this? What's your background? How did you get into starting something called Leadership IQ, which is fantastic? 15 - > Mark Murphy: So my… my early career was actually spent in the world of, turnarounds.

And so, like, a company's gonna lose 100, 200 million dollars, you know, and they gotta do a major restructuring, scrub the balance, blah blah blah. And a lot of it, you know, involves layoffs, things like that, and… 16 - > Mark Murphy: As you might expect, not every company that comes out… that goes into a turnaround ever comes out of a turnaround. Sometimes they're sold off for parts. 17 - > Mark Murphy: And, you know, inevitably, they do damage.

So I was doing a, working with a lot of healthcare organizations at the time, and I did a study where we took a look at the mortality morbidity rates of hospitals that went through across-the-board layoffs. 18 - > Mark Murphy: It's pretty intuitive nowadays, but it was not at the time that if you do an across-the-board layoff in a hospital. 19 - > Mark Murphy: your standard reduction in force, your risk of about a, you know, getting a significant, statistically significant jump in mortality and morbidity rates went up by about 300%.

20 - > Mark Murphy: And so, you know, basically, it was like, okay, you know the old joke, like, never fly on a bankrupt airline? Well, same thing, like, don't go to a hospital where they're doing a layoff. 21 - > Mark Murphy: And so, after about a decade, I was running that firm, and we ended up selling off the company to a big $20 billion conglomerate. 22 - > Mark Murphy: And I said, okay, well, I can't work for a big $20 billion conglomerate, so I said, I'll… they made it clear that, you know, my innovative personality that we're gonna talk about 23 - > Mark Murphy: I was not so on board with what they wanted, and I said, well, I'm not gonna… 24 - > Mark Murphy: be not me.

So, I said, I'll give you a year. And when I left and started Leadership IQ, because of all the research we had done, and found that the mitigating thing, the thing that stopped 25 - > Mark Murphy: like, you know, damage being done to patients and the organization, when you go through a turnaround, was the leadership side. I said, you know what, instead of dealing with this on the back end, where we're just laying people off, what if we could, like, fix this on the front end, and, like, develop better leaders, so maybe we didn't… 26 - > Mark Murphy: Get into this horrible place.

27 - > Mark Murphy: At all. And, you know, like, wouldn't that be a shock? And I said, that sounds like a way more enjoyable way to spend my life and career. 28 - > Mark Murphy: So, that's what I did.

I said, I'm not dealing with the turnaround side of the world anymore, it's only gonna be the, the leadership side, the, you know, the precursors. And the thing that… 29 - > Mark Murphy: I kind of founded Leadership IQ1 was the idea that we gotta have some data. Like, I'm not gonna go into the guru business, where it's just… 30 - > Mark Murphy: listen to me, because, you know, I'm so charming. And I said, that doesn't seem like, you know, my natural.

But, if we always have data, then no matter what we say, if we can back it up, even if it's an uncomfortable truth. 31 - > Mark Murphy: if I can prove it, or at least provide evidence for it, then… 32 - > Danny Gluch: Hmm. 33 - > Mark Murphy: this gives me the freedom to do all sorts of interesting things. So that's kind of the, you know, the long history of how we got here.

34 - > Marion: I'm, like, I'm, like, itching to take us down a different tangent, because you're talking about hospitals and mortality rates and stuff, and it takes me right back to Amy Emondson's early work, you know, psychological safety, hospitals, all of that stuff, and I suppose before, like. 35 - > Marion: we go right into the topic. I'm just curious, how much of that was based on lack of psychological safety, even if it's a ballpark guess? 36 - > Marion: Yes.

When you… in your early research. 37 - > Mark Murphy: You know, hindsight being 20-20, I'd say that probably a good third of it was. 38 - > Danny Gluch: Because it's the… 39 - > Mark Murphy: Long before there was a notion of psychological safety, there were lots of emphasis on 40 - > Mark Murphy: Speaking up, just in general. The JCHO, the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, this is… oh gosh, I'm really dating myself.

This is back in the 90s. They started a campaign called Speak Up, and the Speak Up campaign was designed to empower 41 - > Mark Murphy: nurses a lot, to… and even patients, to be advocates for their own care, to, start tackling preventable medical errors. And preventable medical errors could be anything from… 42 - > Mark Murphy: Not washing your hands. A clinician not washing their hands, which is, the number one cause of nosocomial infections in a hospital.

Wrong-site surgeries, for example, like literally amputating the wrong leg, things like that. 43 - > Mark Murphy: And it was designed just to get people more and more comfortable with the idea of, it's okay, if you see a doctor come into the room, and he or she doesn't 44 - > Mark Murphy: At least hit the hand sanitizer. 45 - > Mark Murphy: Say something. Say something.

Yeah. 46 - > Danny Gluch: So, it, you know… Damn. 47 - > Mark Murphy: it all kind of ties together, right? Like, that was one piece of it.

Now, another part of it, of course, is there's… it depends on how broad you want to go with psychological safety, because there is an assertiveness component to it, there is an organizational hierarchy. 48 - > Mark Murphy: component to it, there's a power distance component to it, so it… you know, I mean, you can… if you broaden the concept of psychological safety enough. 49 - > Mark Murphy: It starts to become fairly all-encompassing, but if we're dealing with simply the sentiment of, do I feel comfortable speaking up.

50 - > Mark Murphy: Even tackling it, you probably have to hit 3 or 4 other factors that play into that. 51 - > Danny Gluch: Yeah, that's… 52 - > Marion: Yeah, it's definitely… that's definitely… that's definitely when we have you back to record another episode, because I'm like, I really want to go down that road. Danny, pull us back! 53 - > Danny Gluch: I actually, I mean, this is one of the things that I think Mark… 54 - > Danny Gluch: It has such a unique perspective, and your experience 55 - > Danny Gluch: But so many of the leadership books deal with hospitals, right?

And they deal with this idea of, you know, like… I don't know if the numbers sound better, because it's literally talking about life and death and morbidity rates, sounds, like, very impressive. 56 - > Danny Gluch: But I wanted to sort of tie in what you were just talking about with the Speak Up campaigns, and also the 9-11, you brought that up, you know, what an interesting time to start an organization. And the sort of see something, say something campaigns. And… 57 - > Danny Gluch: I'm curious if you see, sort of, like, differences or commonalities in 58 - > Danny Gluch: the cultures behind speaking up, because I've always thought that the see something, say something had a very, like, neurotic, 59 - > Danny Gluch: feel to it, a very, like, oh, there's something wrong, as opposed to, like, the say something when you're talking about it in a hospital of, like, this is a normal thing.

60 - > Danny Gluch: And how do you feel, like, is there a tangible difference? Is there a substantive difference between, you know, the feel of these different campaigns of, like, oh, there's something wrong, you need to be on watch, you need to be on guard, versus, like, hey, you're a part of this, say something, you're a part of this team. Do you think that there's a difference between how those things feel and the ability of people speaking up? 61 - > Mark Murphy: Hugely.

And one of the big differences And so… 62 - > Mark Murphy: I am blanking on her name. 63 - > Mark Murphy: There's a comedian, and I heard her doing this routine, and she was talking about she's, she went on some, you know, like, blind date, and she meets a guy at a bar, and she's, 64 - > Mark Murphy: he's ordering a drink, and he's like, you know, I want a vodka and soda, and the bartender's like, do you want a lemon or a lime? And she's like… and the guy's like, 65 - > Mark Murphy: Yeah, the, the green one.

And the comedian's like. 66 - > Mark Murphy: the green one, it's called a lime. Like, how do you not know what a lime is? And she's like, and then she goes into the, hey, listen, and I see all those signs with the see something, say something, like, I just saw something, this guy doesn't know what a lime is, who am I supposed to call for this?

And, I mean, it was hysterical, but that goes to the essential… 67 - > Mark Murphy: I think major problem with See Something, Say Something is, see what exactly. 68 - > Mark Murphy: If it's a hot… Yeah. 69 - > Mark Murphy: campaign to speak up. 70 - > Mark Murphy: Well, they're clear about what it is you should be looking for.

I mean, we, again. 71 - > Mark Murphy: Hand washing. Did you mark the surgery site? Like, if you're gonna be operating on my left shoulder, did you pull out a Sharpie and mark the left shoulder versus the right shoulder?

Did you pull out the chart and confirm and look for 72 - > Mark Murphy: Did you check the lungs? Were the lungs clear? Did you read the chart and check for medication? 73 - > Mark Murphy: It's… speak up, I know exactly.

And I'm not a nurse, but, you know, if you tell me what to look for, yeah, I can do casual observer stuff sitting in a hospital, because the list is… 74 - > Mark Murphy: pretty darn clear what you're supposed to look for, right? And with see something, say something. 75 - > Mark Murphy: what am I supposed to look for? And because it's so fuzzy and vague.

76 - > Mark Murphy: All it does is allow each individual who's out looking 77 - > Mark Murphy: to assess what they consider dangerous. And… and that is a… you might as well… 78 - > Mark Murphy: tattoo be prejudiced on everybody's foreheads, because now. 79 - > Mark Murphy: It's, you know, if I happen to be scared of people of color, for example, and now I see a person of color doing something, well, you told me, I saw something, and it's, like, just a recipe, versus… 80 - > Mark Murphy: a list, even on an airline.

You go into an airline, you know, and it's the… if they had a Speak Up campaign, it'd be like. 81 - > Mark Murphy: Did you hear the pilots go… you know when you're sitting on a plane, and the cockpit door is open before they take off, and the pilots are going through there? Pull up, pull up, and they're, like, pressing every alarm button to test and make sure it all works? Again, I'm not a pilot, but I can… 82 - > Mark Murphy: I can tell you that the pilots have or have not gone through the safety checklist simply because I have ears.

83 - > Mark Murphy: And I know what a safety checklist sounds like on an airline. We all do. 84 - > Mark Murphy: And same thing, I can see if a nurse or doctor washing their hands. But to see something say something is so problematic.

Well, it's problematic because it's so vague. 85 - > Mark Murphy: that you're. 86 - > Cacha Dora: And it's so, like, weirdly contextual, in a way, right? 87 - > Danny Gluch: Yeah.

88 - > Cacha Dora: Where it's like, if you're in manufacturing, or if you're in something, all these really high process, high-procedure things, you might be able to… be able to line into it, but, like, I've seen them see something, say something campaigns on, like, a poster on a bus. 89 - > Danny Gluch: Do you see them in national parks? 90 - > Cacha Dora: You see them in. 91 - > Danny Gluch: I'm like, I don't know, I see a lot of things.

92 - > Cacha Dora: Yeah, it's like. 93 - > Danny Gluch: That box looks suspicious. 94 - > Mark Murphy: Yeah, and it's like, you know, it's… I, 95 - > Mark Murphy: one of my oldest friends, used to be an executive at DuPont, and they are an insanely safety-focused organization, and, 96 - > Mark Murphy: And, you know, so I… I got the lessons from him early on that I've tried to pass on to my children, especially my son, who works on cars, and it's like, okay, well, I can… I can do a quick safety audit.

Do you have eye protection? 97 - > Mark Murphy: Do you have ear protection? Is the saw blade, does it have the cover down when it's not in use? It's like, okay, again.

98 - > Mark Murphy: I'm a simpleton, but you can train me in a specific context to walk into a workshop or a garage 99 - > Mark Murphy: and do a quick see-something, say something kind of thing, like, hey, why isn't that, you know, that grass cutter, that saw blade covered? Okay, I can do that, but… 100 - > Mark Murphy: you know, again, you gotta contextualize it, and Kasha, as you said, it's like, it's so context-dependent that, yeah, put me in a hospital, a garage, auto shop, a factory, cool, you can train me up for that.

101 - > Mark Murphy: But… 102 - > Danny Gluch: But yeah, walking around the street, it does seem to bring up a lot of those sort of, like. 103 - > Danny Gluch: Prejudices, and that's… that's… that's problematic. 104 - > Marion: But bringing it back to toxic harmony… 105 - > Danny Gluch: Sorry, I had to go there, it was, it was, it was too, too interesting to me, I'm sorry. 106 - > Marion: problem, we find something interesting, and we go off and attaching.

107 - > Marion: But I want to get into this, because this… when I was reading the book, and it really resonated with me, and… and… 108 - > Marion: being… 109 - > Marion: being a Brit, and having lived all over the place, I was thinking about examples of my own, kind of, like. 110 - > Marion: living this experience of being in organisations where this exists, and layering into that different cultures, you know, having lived in the Middle East, growing up, obviously, in the UK, 111 - > Marion: even in the UK, Scotland to England are very different.

Scottish people are a lot more direct, English people tend to be a little bit more… 112 - > Marion: Oh, polite? I don't know, maybe that's a bit of a stereotype, certainly not always the case. But, like, when I started to think about it through those lenses, I was like, oh, this thing's really interesting, because it still exists and manifests in lots of different contexts and ways. 113 - > Marion: But it plays out differently.

And again, sorry, I'm taking this off on another tangent, but it was really interesting to me, thinking about it through a multicultural lens. 114 - > Marion: Tell us more about how this kind of came around, and why this was such a pinnacle area of the book. 115 - > Mark Murphy: So, one of the… Before I even actually started on 116 - > Mark Murphy: the book proper, one of the studies that we did was we just… and this kind of went to somebody, you know, personally, who has bumped up against this, from time to time, where 117 - > Mark Murphy: You know, when I… I told you when I sold my… that earlier company to this big conglomerate, and I'm meeting with their chief marketing officer, this, you know, $20 billion company, and we're… 118 - > Mark Murphy: Sitting in the room, and I said, Don, I got all these great ideas, and then here's how we can roll it out.

You know, you've got X thousands of hospitals, blah, blah, blah. And he stopped the meeting, and he looks at me, and 119 - > Mark Murphy: It's a very Southern way, and he goes, Mark, I have to tell you. 120 - > Mark Murphy: That people that get that aggressive don't last very long here. 121 - > Mark Murphy: And… I walked out of that meeting, and this is… 122 - > Cacha Dora: Massive.

123 - > Mark Murphy: This is before even cell phones were popular, so I walked into a side office, and I called my wife, and I said. 124 - > Mark Murphy: Well, I'm in hell. 125 - > Mark Murphy: I don't know how long I'm gonna last here. Like, I am literally leaving this office and going to a bar.

And, I'll be home tomorrow. 126 - > Mark Murphy: And so, I had always kind of had, you know, I've had experiences like that, so… 127 - > Mark Murphy: I did this study, and what we did was we asked managers, a couple thousand managers, and we asked them, 128 - > Mark Murphy: We're gonna give you a list of characteristics. 129 - > Mark Murphy: We basically want you to rate 130 - > Mark Murphy: what your… you know, just to imagine, like, a 7-point scale, I want you to rate your employees on this.

Think of your favorite employee, and think of your least favorite employee. And now, go through and score 131 - > Mark Murphy: your favorite employee and your least favorite employee on these characteristics. So, managers' favorite employees were things like 132 - > Mark Murphy: They're dependable, they're understanding, they're tolerant, they follow the rules, they stay in their lane. It was all, you know, kind of compliant, conform, don't be a pain in my rear kind of stuff.

133 - > Mark Murphy: Their least favorite employees. 134 - > Mark Murphy: Where things like, challenges convention, challenges conventional wisdom, likes to be on the cutting edge, swims upstream, is a nonconformist, doesn't know their own limits, it was stuff like that. 135 - > Mark Murphy: And… 136 - > Mark Murphy: So then, we did a second part, which was, okay, what are the characteristics of the most innovative people you know in your organization? 137 - > Mark Murphy: And it's things like swims upstream, is a nonconformist, takes risks, blah blah blah blah.

And… 138 - > Mark Murphy: Basically, the upshot of it was… 139 - > Mark Murphy: Managers' favorite employees were the least innovative types. Managers' least favorite employees had the characteristics of the most innovative people. 140 - > Danny Gluch: And it's like… 141 - > Cacha Dora: They made their jobs easier versus harder, but had a completely different net profit. 142 - > Mark Murphy: Exactly.

143 - > Danny Gluch: Yeah. 144 - > Mark Murphy: And here's the thing. 145 - > Mark Murphy: I did not make up this study design. 146 - > Mark Murphy: I took this study design from a study I had come across, doing some other research of a study of schoolchildren in, like, the 1970s.

And so these educators did the same thing that I did for managers, they did it for teachers. 147 - > Mark Murphy: And they asked the teachers to rate their favorite student and their least favorite student. 148 - > Mark Murphy: And… I thought it was when I first read that, I was like, ugh. 149 - > Mark Murphy: Well, and this is why, you know, me and my children from time to time would get in trouble in school, because it's like, well, you know, you say you want, like, creative thinking, but you don't want… you don't like the creative thinkers.

150 - > Mark Murphy: And because they're disruptive, and they're a pain in your butt, and they're harder to work with, even though, theoretically, they ultimately are… 151 - > Mark Murphy: You know, ostensibly gonna deliver more value, but that's not what you like. 152 - > Mark Murphy: And it turns… so I had always had that in the back of my mind, and said, at some point, I'm just gonna replicate that study. 153 - > Mark Murphy: But just do it in business, rather than, you know, I'm… I don't work in education, so that doesn't matter to me.

I mean, it does, but not, like, what I… I don't have access to, you know, a million teachers to go survey them, but I do managers. And so I said, I'm gonna do this for managers, and… 154 - > Mark Murphy: What that really hit was that… 155 - > Mark Murphy: you know, we say we want innovation, we want people to challenge the status quo, you know, the old Steve Jobs line, you know, we're here to make a little dent in the universe. 156 - > Mark Murphy: Yeah… heh. 157 - > Mark Murphy: But, while that sounds good, and no company would say we don't want innovation, Yet… 158 - > Mark Murphy: If you don't do innovation coloring within their very specific lines, how they want it done, if it challenges them a little too much.

159 - > Mark Murphy: Very few companies actively seek out or are willing to put up with the kind of, even in a meeting, the kind of discussion and interactions that need to take place. 160 - > Mark Murphy: If we're just doing something… let's say we have a change process we're putting in place, and you look at the timeline for it, and you're like, well, that's… there's no way that's gonna work. 161 - > Mark Murphy: And the manager's like, well, this is the timeline, this is what we're gonna stick to.

Well… 162 - > Mark Murphy: You know, it's how it's always been done. This is the conventional wisdom. And there's somebody who's a bit more innovative, looks at it, and says. 163 - > Danny Gluch: Hmm.

164 - > Mark Murphy: we could do this differently. You know, what's the natural reaction from a manager? Well, that's… no, this is the way we're doing it, and that's just the way it is. 165 - > Mark Murphy: Okay, and… 166 - > Cacha Dora: It's that, like, opposition to challenge, right?

Like, it's that same thing, like, people don't like change, but also, when you start playing with power dynamics and hierarchies, suddenly, this openness to try something new goes away because it was their idea, or they're the one that's holding it up in the system. 167 - > Cacha Dora: And that resistance to challenge, CHCH, challenge and change, I feel like are very, it's like a human behavior problem at the end of the day, where, like, you've got some part of… 168 - > Cacha Dora: whether you have a mammalian brain or a reptile brain, whatever you ascribe to in the world, right?

Like, either way, it's… it's… 169 - > Cacha Dora: Very hard to turn that off for people, even if they might see the value. 170 - > Cacha Dora: it needs to be framed up better, because it's just now… well, you're not making things move faster, you're slowing me down, you're slowing the process down, but at the end of the day, like, that's also the antithetical to what psych safety is to begin with. 171 - > Marion: Yeah… 172 - > Mark Murphy: Very much so. 173 - > Marion: Yeah, and I think, like, when you take that concept and sort of, like.

174 - > Marion: laid it into our current experience, our current lived experience and external environment, right? Where, you know, if you think about tech. 175 - > Marion: I think is a great example, like, tech… 176 - > Marion: industry is just in absolute flummox right now, because on one hand, you've got one of the greatest periods of innovation in industrial history with AI, but then on the other hand, you've got Amazon about to lay off 14,000, and God knows who else is going to come after that, right?

Like, we're already hearing, as we go into, sort of, wrap up Q3, go into Q4, we're already hearing those 177 - > Marion: Warning kind of conversations about, you know, NDP year profits, etc. 178 - > Marion: So, like, layoffs are happening, they're coming. I mean, they've been happening all year, they've been happening for the last few years, but I think next year's going to be really different. And so… 179 - > Marion: going back to… almost going back to what you were talking about earlier on with the see something piece, like, it's the same thing, right?

Like, if I, 180 - > Marion: you know, in my job, and I don't feel secure, and I don't feel psychologically safe, because if I see something, or if I see a problem, and I speak up, then that could be a target on my back. And so, when those layoffs come around, then I'm out the door, so I'm gonna be… I'm just gonna hunker down, and just, like, hopefully, you know, not cause too many waves, and… and try and ride it out. 181 - > Marion: But guess what, then? I'm not going to innovate, because I'm not going to take risks.

And so we're stifling our innovation. 182 - > Marion: And, like, I'm just… I'm fascinated by this dynamic, because organizations are like, we want innovation, we want creativity, we want you to just, you know, here's all the AI tools, go and… 183 - > Marion: like… rebuild the world, right? But at the same time, but we're gonna lay you off! 184 - > Cacha Dora: There's penalization for the thing I'm asking for.

185 - > Marion: Absolutely! It's wild! It's wild! I mean, what's your take on all of that, Mark?

186 - > Mark Murphy: So, one of the issues that we see a lot is that 187 - > Mark Murphy: when we, you know, we all say, yeah, we pay the company, we want innovation, but it's really only the very senior-most executives that actually get rewarded for innovation. 188 - > Mark Murphy: Middle managers… and so, an interesting thing we have seen. 189 - > Mark Murphy: Senior executives, the very top, are the most 190 - > Mark Murphy: risk-taking oriented. The most pro-risk-taking.

191 - > Mark Murphy: Frontline employees are actually second to… there's a pretty big gap, but they're second compared to the 192 - > Mark Murphy: senior executives. The worst is the least… the most risk-averse, the least risk-taking group is actually the middle managers, the managers in between the execs and the employees. 193 - > Mark Murphy: Because there is a chance that… 194 - > Mark Murphy: An employee is incented to create something. 195 - > Mark Murphy: that might involve innovation.

So, imagine you have just an individual coder, and you have a coder who's come up with a better algorithm, a better… it can shorten the code, and it loads faster. So they're, like, even, you know, it's a micro-innovation, but they've just come up with something wicked cool that speeds up the way the code loads. 196 - > Mark Murphy: Okay, odds are, they're gonna get… 197 - > Mark Murphy: rewarded for, or at least recognized for that in some way, shape, or form, like, that's cool.

Nothing wrong there. CEO, if enough employees do that, well, the stock price is gonna get up, and Wall Street's gonna go, okay, they're doing some cool stuff. 198 - > Mark Murphy: So, the CEO is getting rewarded. But the manager in the middle… 199 - > Mark Murphy: whose job is often more of herding cats than it is encouraging innovation and, like, cascade it up and add value.

It's more like just… 200 - > Mark Murphy: Just keep things on track, try not to get us sued, you know, make sure people show up on time, make sure they're working in the office, not from home, you know, and stuff like that. And their job is weirdly antithetical. 201 - > Mark Murphy: to innovation, and I'm not saying it should be like that, it obviously should not be like that, but that's de facto how a lot of managerial jobs kind of end up, is they are… 202 - > Mark Murphy: risk-averse.

They are, you know, prevent mistakes rather than 203 - > Mark Murphy: achieve something great. And, you know, it's a… It's more of a, 204 - > Mark Murphy: A fear-based than it is a achievement-driven Kind of mindset, and… 205 - > Mark Murphy: And so that is one of the problems, is that, we're… 206 - > Mark Murphy: doing… you know, we're rewarding them in all the wrong ways, or incenting them, I should say, in all. 207 - > Danny Gluch: Yeah. 208 - > Mark Murphy: Because it's like, listen, we want you to, you know, hit the budget number, you know, don't step out of line too much, and this is one of my earlier books.

209 - > Mark Murphy: was called Hard Goals, and it was basically… that was built off of a study that we did called, Are Smart Goals Dumb? 210 - > Mark Murphy: And, one of my biases is against, in a SMART goal, you know, specific, measurable, Achievable, realistic, time limited. 211 - > Mark Murphy: My beef is not with the S, the M, or the T, it's with the A and the R. It's the achievable and realistic parts.

Because no CEO on Earth sets a SMART goal. 212 - > Mark Murphy: You know, said hard goals are BHAGs, big, hairy, audacious goals. 213 - > Danny Gluch: Yeah. 214 - > Mark Murphy: CEOs do not set SMART goals.

And yet, we turn around and we say to the managers. 215 - > Mark Murphy: create your SMART goal. It is very much. 216 - > Danny Gluch: Do as I say, not as I do.

And… 217 - > Mark Murphy: That is a… again, it's a hypocrisy, and it's a disconnect. 218 - > Danny Gluch: Damn. 219 - > Mark Murphy: And it is very much the same thing that plays out with innovation, because, you know, achievable, realistic, it goes back to, you know, your favorite versus your least favorite employees. 220 - > Mark Murphy: My least favorite employee is the one… they don't do anything realistic.

They, you know, they're always trying to scale Mount Everest, whereas my favorite employee, like, stays in their lane and colors within the lines. Well, it's the same thing with hard goals and smart goals. 221 - > Marion: Yeah. 222 - > Mark Murphy: And again, it's like, I just look at, sometimes, very simple things and go.

223 - > Mark Murphy: Okay, what does the CEO do? What does the CEO goal look like? Like, show me your goal. 224 - > Marion: And, you know, and you look at what they tell Wall Street, it's not… 225 - > Mark Murphy: we're gonna have a half a percentage point improvement.

No, when they go to the Goldman Sachs Investor Conference, it's like, we're gonna be number one, or number two, or in every market space we're in, or we're gonna get out of that market space, and this is… 226 - > Cacha Dora: 10X, and… Yeah. 227 - > Mark Murphy: You know, you can't even get funded if your projection chart doesn't have a hockey stick shape to it. 228 - > Mark Murphy: You know, and that's the thing, is that mindset is so different. 229 - > Mark Murphy: from managers, and what we expect of them, that it's no wonder they end up being the least risk-averse, because at least if a CEO goes out, hires an innovative programmer, there's a chance that that person has enough autonomy because they control 230 - > Mark Murphy: the world in front of them.

They control their computer screen, their lines of code, their whatevers. 231 - > Marion: Hmm. 232 - > Mark Murphy: Okay, you got a chance that that individual's gonna innovate, but odds are they're mad. 233 - > Marion: something you just said just actually put shivers down my spine, because if we think about… again, I'm focused on tech here, because this is where it's most relevant.

There's a real trend right now about flattening structures, flattening hierarchies, right? Now, when you're, like. 234 - > Marion: 9 deep, 10 deep, 11 deep, absolutely, like, clean that shit up. However, when you're starting to get very, very, very, lean and, non-hierarchical.

235 - > Marion: That… 236 - > Marion: That sort of, like, gap of where those middle managers are kind of either being squeezed out, or let's face it, a lot of people don't even want to be a manager anymore, because it's shit. 237 - > Marion: So… so when you think about that delta and those behaviors and those expectations of your, you know, risk takers, your… your… your… I mean, let's… let's call it out what it is, right? Those higher amounts of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, all of that stuff, right, at the top end, and then you don't have… 238 - > Marion: You don't have that counterbalance at the bottom end.

239 - > Marion: Who are these poor buggers in the middle that is your developer? 240 - > Danny Gluch: Recording. 241 - > Marion: You're a person trying to do the job, like… 242 - > Marion: Oh my god! This is terrifying.

243 - > Mark Murphy: Well, and that is one of the reasons why You know, so many… 244 - > Mark Murphy: you know, everybody wants the flattening, but this stuff goes in cycles, right? I mean, like, it was… 245 - > Danny Gluch: Hmm. 246 - > Mark Murphy: what, like 10 years ago, 15 years ago, we had the whole holacracy thing, and that had its moment where we're gonna go into circles, and we're gonna get… pay the middle managers to either leave or take a staff job, and one by one by one, every company that tried that 247 - > Mark Murphy: has abandoned it.

Or they got, like in Zappo's case, they got bought by Amazon, and Amazon said, no. You know, Medium, tried it, they have even published an article explaining why they've abandoned it, because it… it builds its own 248 - > Mark Murphy: Hierarchy, and its own bureaucracy that just kind of… 249 - > Mark Murphy: You know, oozes out of it, it just… 250 - > Mark Murphy: You know, comes out organically. 251 - > Mark Murphy: And it is a… number one, I think that. 252 - > Marion: Humans are wired for hierarchy, and there's enough.

253 - > Mark Murphy: you know, neurological evidence that, you know, in the book, I give some of the studies, like, you know, if you see a dominant face, you would tend to it more than if you see a face with less dominant features. You put 254 - > Mark Murphy: two puppets in front of a group of preschoolers. Give one puppet two pencils, another puppet six pencils, and the toddlers instantly go, oh, the… 255 - > Mark Murphy: puppet with six pencils as the boss. Like, we just spot hierarchies all over the place.

And it doesn't have to be… 256 - > Mark Murphy: You know, like the animal kingdom, where it's a dominance hierarchy necessarily, but we… we do… we are wired for certain kinds of hierarchy. 257 - > Mark Murphy: But hierarchy done right, when hierarchy is put in the hands of the people best able to make particular kinds of decisions, people with the right kind of expertise and talents to be in charge of that particular aspect, rather than, you know, we're just installing fiefdoms.

258 - > Marion: Yeah. Hierarchy… 259 - > Mark Murphy: can work really well, but it also, back to your point, Marion, it becomes… 260 - > Mark Murphy: something of an insulation to not… to not allow the CEOs, for example, to run unchecked. 261 - > Marion: Because there is some reason to have. 262 - > Mark Murphy: You know, as much as we are, 263 - > Mark Murphy: Antithetical, in many respects, to innovation.

264 - > Mark Murphy: There is an argument that we don't want the old. 265 - > Mark Murphy: you know, Mark Zuckerberg move fast and break things. 266 - > Mark Murphy: You know, I mean, there needs to be limits on that as well. Like, move fast and break things?

You want to pull that off if you're designing new drugs, for example? You think people we're gonna kill if we adopt the move fast and break things approach? Yeah, you know what, if you screw up my web browser for a day. 267 - > Mark Murphy: probably not everybody's gonna die, but man, you do that in a drug trial?

So, you know, again, there are contexts to it, but also, there is a reason to have… 268 - > Mark Murphy: at least some hurdles, and it's not a black or white issue, where it's like either innovation has to be allowed to run unchecked, or we're just suppressing all creative thought 269 - > Mark Murphy: It's like, you know, even the best creative writers in the world had editors, because it's good to have, you know, another set of eyes, and so even if you're going to do something extraordinary, even Picasso had an agent, you know, he had to still sell his 270 - > Mark Murphy: galleries, it's like, there was at least another person to provide an additional bit of perspective and go, okay, Picasso, Pablo, I love this, man, but, you know.

271 - > Mark Murphy: Could you… 272 - > Mark Murphy: maybe put an ounce of color in there? Like, something? Like, maybe not everybody is headless? You know, like, just something to, you know, a little interplay back and forth, which is, again, that's a gray area, and it is not 273 - > Mark Murphy: well, he must hate innovation.

No! It's just, you know, kind of seeking, you know, to ease it in a little bit, but that's one of the roles that a manager can play when they're doing it really well. 274 - > Mark Murphy: Is to make sure that we don't go completely off the rails. 275 - > Mark Murphy: And that there is some guide rails to this, and so that we could innovate, and move fast, incredibly fast, but just do it smartly, and, you know, we can mitigate the downsides without suppressing all innovation.

That is eminently doable. 276 - > Marion: Yeah, I'm… 277 - > Marion: fright… I'm frightened for the next 5 to 10 years, so I'm not gonna lie, I think it's gonna be a. 278 - > Danny Gluch: Goodbye. 279 - > Marion: Bye.

280 - > Danny Gluch: I laugh, but it's true and very sad. When you were describing the sort of, like, the innovation and, like, the most innovative are at the top and the bottom, and sort of, like, the… but what managers like is the not innovative. I sort of see, like. 281 - > Danny Gluch: The two triangles, you know, where the points meet in the middle and they expand.

282 - > Danny Gluch: And it just… it looks like there's a stress point. Like, that stress point is that middle manager. And… 283 - > Danny Gluch: I think it exists, like you said, very naturally. It's like a human, you know, instinct.

In any sort of society, you see these influx points of they're responsible both for making the innovation happen that is being asked from upwards, which is a lot of pressure. 284 - > Danny Gluch: But they're also, and I think this is where a lot of the stress comes from, is they're responsible for mitigating risk. 285 - > Danny Gluch: Right? Those, you know, those new people, the individual contributors, the coder, right, who's trying to do innovation, they're responsible for, like, but I want your job to still be around in 10 years.

I need this to be stable enough to where we don't just, I don't know, lay off 14,000 people. 286 - > Danny Gluch: For… for no good reason. And… 287 - > Danny Gluch: And I think there's a lot of stress there, and… 288 - > Danny Gluch: I think that's one of the reasons why they prefer, just like a teacher prefers the docile student because it makes it easier to manage classroom, I think the manager likes docile employees because it's easier to get those predictable, safe results.

And if people aren't speaking up, they're not shaking the boat, those are the ones who are like, well. 289 - > Danny Gluch: I know that my role and your roles are still gonna be here in 10 years, because we're not gonna move to a place that's unexpected and invites that risk. 290 - > Danny Gluch: But my question is, and this is a long way to get to a question, is… 291 - > Danny Gluch: that's obviously not great long-term, because it's too stable, it's stagnant, it's milquetoast.

So, what is it that managers should be looking for to include on their teams, to encourage, to incentivize on their teams, that isn't just, like. 292 - > Danny Gluch: super… like, you can't have a bunch of innovators underneath a middle manager. It's gonna be chaos. Or is it?

I don't know. You're the expert. You've done the research. 293 - > Mark Murphy: So, the… Thing that comes out of this, and to your point.

294 - > Mark Murphy: is that there really is a… you need a balance, right? And so, the thing we discovered when I started the research for the… for the Team Players book was that if you think about the most effective teams, and you start looking at, like, what is a really effective team. 295 - > Mark Murphy: have to do to be effective, to be successful? Well, it's things like they have to be able to make decisions, they have to be able to achieve stuff, like they, you know, do work, deliver results.

They have to be able to stay on track with, like, you know, timelines and deadlines and milestones and whatnot. 296 - > Mark Murphy: Ideally, they're able to resolve conflict, but also encourage people to speak up. It should have a high enough level of engagement that people are participating and feel psychologically safe and emotionally connected. And then, it obviously needs to have some innovation.

297 - > Mark Murphy: And what we found… so I… we ended up… the more we looked at it, we found that most of the time. 298 - > Mark Murphy: Those functions fell amongst… were divvied up amongst different people. 299 - > Mark Murphy: On a team. 300 - > Danny Gluch: Hmm.

301 - > Mark Murphy: It was often the case that the most… the innovator on the team was also not the. 302 - > Danny Gluch: Deadline Taskmaster one. Like, those two roles did not work in harmony. Like, that usually was not the same person.

303 - > Mark Murphy: And so what we found was that there… a team typically, to be successful, would have 304 - > Mark Murphy: really 5 distinct roles. And so, we called the director the person who can make that hard decision, the achiever, who was the person who's like, I don't need to be in charge, just give… tell me what to do, and I'll go do the stuff. I'll write the code, I'll make the Excel file, whatever. 305 - > Mark Murphy: The stabilizer is the person that keeps us on track and is in the, you know, make sure we're hitting the deadlines and the to-dos and all that stuff.

The harmonizer is that one usually responsible more for the 306 - > Mark Murphy: Not fully, but partly for the psychological safety and the emotional connectingness. They're the… 307 - > Mark Murphy: The person usually with the highest emotional intelligence who can kind of read the room. And then we call the trailblazer the person who's really kind of the innovator. They're the person who will come up with that out-of-the-box kind of crazy thinking.

And… 308 - > Mark Murphy: If you just had a 5-person team, well, then it, you know, works out pretty well, where it's… 309 - > Mark Murphy: one person per role, and, you know, voila, those… when we looked at five-person teams, those were usually how it got distributed. Now. 310 - > Mark Murphy: In the real world. 311 - > Mark Murphy: Rare is the case where you will truly have a 5-person team.

You are much more likely to have an 8- or a 9- or a 10-person team than you are a 5-person team. And when we started to look at those, what we found was a team could have a bunch of achievers, a bunch of doers, workers. Totally fine. 312 - > Danny Gluch: Hmm.

313 - > Mark Murphy: You could even have one or two stabilizers, fine. Another person keeping you on track? Not gonna kill you, that's good. You could have a couple of harmonizers.

Yeah, a little more peace and safety and emotional connectedness. Good stuff. Where teams really get into trouble is where they have 314 - > Mark Murphy: Multiple directors, and we've all been in those meetings where you get multiple people who think they're in charge, and so it's… 315 - > Mark Murphy: just a 90-minute pissing contest to see, you know, who gets to make the final decision. So those are nightmares, so you really can't have multiple of those.

316 - > Mark Murphy: And the truth is, we saw very few cases where teams would have an overabundance of trailblazers. Because of everything we've talked about, and because it starts so early, where we kind of beat it out of people. 317 - > Danny Gluch: You know, my… my recommendation, like, on the best teams. 318 - > Mark Murphy: they always have at least one.

And it's… my recommendation is, listen, don't get hung up on having too many Trailblazers, because 319 - > Mark Murphy: Odds are, in a normal organization, if you get one, you're… you're doing great. And so, probably on a team of 8 people, you're not gonna have 7 Trailblazers, because it's… it's just not practic… it's not the practical reality. 320 - > Mark Murphy: You know, in most organizations, and with all the assessments we do. 321 - > Mark Murphy: it's the least common of the roles that people play.

People are… it's the one that they are least likely to self-identify as. So, the… but the issue is that even in… 322 - > Mark Murphy: cases, if you did have, you know, a team of 7 trailblazers, yeah, it would be absolute chaos, not just because you'd have 7 crazy innovators in the room, but also because 323 - > Mark Murphy: Who's gonna monitor the health of the group dynamics? Who's gonna actually make a decision? Who's gonna keep it on track?

324 - > Mark Murphy: By the same token, however, If you have a team of all harmonizers. 325 - > Mark Murphy: While that sounds nice, and it would be a lovely meeting to sit through, it would be delightful and warm and collegial. 326 - > Mark Murphy: You're not gonna get anything done, and nobody's gonna make a hard decision that might tick off somebody else in the room, and so it's going to be passive and indecisive, even though it will feel delightful. You could have a team filled with stabilizers, and yeah, they will get things 327 - > Mark Murphy: Done on time?

328 - > Mark Murphy: But is it gonna be good, creative, interesting work? No, it's just gonna be checking boxes and, you know, hitting timelines, but… 329 - > Mark Murphy: who cares? Because the stuff we're hitting the timelines with isn't that good. And so, when we looked at and we asked people.

330 - > Mark Murphy: You know, one of the earliest studies we did on this was we just asked people. 331 - > Mark Murphy: Tell us about your best team that you're on, tell us about the worst team that you're on. And let's just start simple. You identify for us what's the best team, what's the worst team.

332 - > Mark Murphy: You know what's impacting your career, you know what's delivering the best results, and so we took the best teams, we're like, oh, well, tell us about the people on those. What do they do? What's their role that they're playing? Tell us about the worst teams.

What's their role? What do they do? Tell us about them. 333 - > Mark Murphy: And the initial finding was that, yeah, the best teams were pretty evenly distributed.

They had all five roles covered. 334 - > Mark Murphy: Even if it was, you know, two of this, one of this, they had all 5 roles covered, whereas in the worst teams. 335 - > Mark Murphy: only 20% of the time did they have all 5 roles covered. The vast majority of the time, they were missing 336 - > Mark Murphy: At least one, usually two or more, of these other roles, so they were just… 337 - > Mark Murphy: out of balance, and part of that was… 338 - > Mark Murphy: You know, when you look at… What the… 339 - > Mark Murphy: who people hire.

You know, they often will pick people that they like, that are easy for them, that they get along with. 340 - > Mark Murphy: They're much less likely to hire somebody that is possibly going to be a pain in their rear, even if it's exactly 341 - > Mark Murphy: what they need. I mean, you know, ask a trailblazer who's the most annoying person you have to sit next to, and it's probably going to be a stabilizer, because it's going to be the person that's like, okay, well, you're going to get it done this month?

Like, what, give me a deadline. Well, I don't know, you can't rush the creative process. No, you can, because we're all going to get fired if we don't. 342 - > Mark Murphy: And so, but, you know, who does a… or a harmonizer, right?

Who does a trailblazer need? Well, a trailblazer needs a stabilizer and a harmonizer. It's like, that's what they need, but that might not be the most fun for them. 343 - > Mark Murphy: And that's part of this, too, is that so much of hiring is… Capricious and non-scientific that… 344 - > Danny Gluch: Mmm.

345 - > Mark Murphy: very least not regimented, that even when people… even when they're just selecting people from amongst their team, or from across the organization to build the team, let's say cross-functional work group or something, you know, they're picking the people that they can connect with, not always the roles that they need to fill to make this an effective group. 346 - > Danny Gluch: That's… man, that is such… 347 - > Danny Gluch: truth. And I think, you know, when we talk with so many organizational leaders and managers.

348 - > Danny Gluch: the conversation almost always goes towards the creating a team is a kind of alchemy, right? It's… it's not a, 349 - > Danny Gluch: a black and white sort of thing to do. It's a science, you know, it's a mixology, and finding that mix, right? Because no one fits those roles perfectly either, right?

So finding that mix, that's going to make an effective team is really hard. And… 350 - > Danny Gluch: How do you 351 - > Danny Gluch: managers go about hiring for, like… is there self-assessments? Like, is there a way to identify and diagnose what you're missing, what you have too much of, and what you need to add to the group? Like, oh, I need, you know, that dash of Tabasco because this is too creamy.

352 - > Danny Gluch: Sorry, I don't know why I was thinking about, clam chowder, but… 353 - > Cacha Dora: I was gonna say, that sounds like clam chowder. 354 - > Danny Gluch: It is. 355 - > Mark Murphy: I was actually sitting here thinking, what is Tabasco and creamy? I'm like… 356 - > Cacha Dora: It's missing the bread bowl, that's why.

357 - > Danny Gluch: I lived in San Francisco for a long time. We do a lot of clam chowder and bread bowls. It needs Tabasco, or it's just, you can't eat it. 358 - > Marion: I don't know, my brain went immediately to a Bloody Mary, but that's just me.

359 - > Danny Gluch: I'm so sorry. 360 - > Mark Murphy: So, yeah, now I gotta… I grew up in Buffalo, New York, so I am a, you know, lifelong… 361 - > Mark Murphy: Buffalo Wings fan, and… Oh, there you go. You know, it's, I hear, I'm like, Tabasco. I'm like, well, couldn't you just use some Frank's Red Hot?

That'd be even better than the Tabasco, and it's like… 362 - > Danny Gluch: Yeah, honestly. 363 - > Cacha Dora: 10 out of 10 on Frank's, love it. 364 - > Mark Murphy: So… What were we talking about? 365 - > Marion: He's better than that.

366 - > Mark Murphy: Yes, okay, I remember that. I mean, thinking about Buffalo, and it's football season, and, you know, all that. 367 - > Marion: 1980s, I'm sorry, I'm stuck. 368 - > Mark Murphy: So, one of the things I always tell teams, one of the easiest things you can do is literally start with just a quick around the room, and ask people the question.

369 - > Mark Murphy: What role would other people say you most commonly fulfill in our team? 370 - > Mark Murphy: After you, you know, teach them the 5 roles, and then ask them, what role would… 371 - > Mark Murphy: other people say that you most commonly fill. And the reason I like to word the question like that 372 - > Mark Murphy: is… Meta perception? 373 - > Mark Murphy: people are weirdly better at gauging what others think of them than they are doing a self-diagnosis.

So I can ask people, you know, what's the role you most commonly fill? 374 - > Mark Murphy: But if I ask it, what's the role that other people would say you most commonly fill? They get weirdly more accurate. And so, it's just a nice little quirk.

That will give you a very quick read on 375 - > Mark Murphy: who do you have in the room? And if you see that you're missing, knowing the five roles, if you see that you're missing one, okay, well, that's a pretty big red flag right there. Second thing is then ask everybody on the team 376 - > Mark Murphy: Is there another role 377 - > Mark Murphy: That you're not currently playing, that you would like to try, or you'd like to develop. 378 - > Mark Murphy: And this, I love this for two reasons.

One is that it kind of gives you an idea of bench strength and, you know, what other capacities might you have on the team that maybe you're not aware of. But also, it kind of gives you some future growth opportunities. If you know you've got somebody on the team. 379 - > Mark Murphy: that would really love to try, you know, being more of that stabilizer role, or being more of the harmonizer, because they might be thinking about their career, and they're like, you know, I'd like to get into management someday, and I know, I've been told I am a little rough around the edges.

380 - > Mark Murphy: And I know I'm gonna… if I want to succeed as a leader, I'm gonna have to smooth this out a little bit. 381 - > Danny Gluch: Hmm. 382 - > Mark Murphy: Could… could we work on me trying to be that harmonizer a little bit? Because it… it might round me out for… 383 - > Mark Murphy: you know, a management role someday.

Like, okay, cool. And maybe they're not gonna be the world's best harmonizer, but if you know you've got somebody who's willing to work at it, and wants to develop those skills. 384 - > Mark Murphy: Now you've got them at least a bit more invested in… 385 - > Mark Murphy: trying to contribute to the group and do something meaningful. In all of this, of course.

386 - > Mark Murphy: We'll get so much easier if the leader of the team and the person doing the building of the team, whether you're hiring externally or just assembling people internally. 387 - > Mark Murphy: If they have a dose of self-awareness. 388 - > Danny Gluch: Nope. 389 - > Mark Murphy: It… this gets infinitely easier, because it's… 390 - > Mark Murphy: I see so many leaders who will come, whether they're a manager or a CEO, they'll say, well, I have to play all five roles.

I have to be the decision maker, and I have to, you know, get the people engaged, and I have to hold them to the accountable to-dos, and… and it's like, no, A, you don't. There's no rule that says you have to do them all. 391 - > Mark Murphy: B, 392 - > Mark Murphy: It makes your life a nightmare, because trying to play all 5 of these roles is exhausting. Number 3 is every time you do one of these things that isn't your core.

393 - > Mark Murphy: You're taking work away from other people and denying them an opportunity to actually grow and develop their skill set, and so you're not preparing them 394 - > Mark Murphy: To take that next leap in their career. 395 - > Danny Gluch: Hmm. 396 - > Mark Murphy: The other side of it is that odds are, you're not gonna be the best at doing that thing. So, if, you know, if I look at myself, for example.

397 - > Mark Murphy: I am much more of a trailblazer than I am… that's the role I enjoy playing the most. 398 - > Mark Murphy: And I would tell you, and anybody who knows me would tell you, that my weakest point is the stabilizer. 399 - > Mark Murphy: And so, it takes an ounce of self-awareness to go. 400 - > Mark Murphy: Yeah, I mean, okay, if everybody was out sick today, could I step in?

Like, I'm not an idiot, I can, you know, hold it together enough for a few days, great. But if you ask me to do this for a year, A, it's gonna be miserable for me, and B, I am by far not the best person to do it. 401 - > Mark Murphy: Whereas, I have a person on my team, and she is A amazing at it, and B, she loves it. She loves doing 402 - > Mark Murphy: that I absolutely hate doing.

She loves… for her, there are tasks. I remember one time we were doing a 403 - > Mark Murphy: database alignment with a couple of our research studies, and creating a data warehouse to tie the studies together. And I sat there and I looked at it, because I had started the studies. 404 - > Mark Murphy: And I'm like, this… this is horrible.

I hate this so much. And I found myself… there was one day, I, like, you know, had to… I was sitting here with a glass of wine, just to, like, try and get through this, because I'm like, I hate this task so much. And so, I called Jill, and I go, listen, I got this horrible thing that I'm working on, and I hate it so much. 405 - > Mark Murphy: would you take it off my plate, please?

And I made it sound absolutely horrible, and so she's like, yeah, of course. So she takes it. The next day, we talk, and she's like. 406 - > Mark Murphy: Oh my gosh, this is so much fun.

407 - > Mark Murphy: What? 408 - > Mark Murphy: I'm like, this is the worst thing I have done this month. And she's like, oh my gosh, this feels so calming. It's like, I love seeing the order out of the chaos.

This is, like, actually pleasurable and enjoyable for me. I'm like… 409 - > Mark Murphy: okay, well, A, you're nuts, and B, this is great, because that's… Yeah. But that's the, you know, that's the diversity in these roles that we're trying to get, is there is stuff that… 410 - > Mark Murphy: you don't like, nobody likes every single thing that is on their plate. There should be… if you're not doing something you don't like, you're not stretching enough.

But then, if you find somebody else that can do it better, faster, and hey, might actually enjoy the thing. 411 - > Mark Murphy: Well then, awesome! Now you've got a. 412 - > Danny Gluch: fully.

413 - > Mark Murphy: fledged team, and we each get to do more of what we're good at doing and like doing, and the team is stronger as a result. It's like win-win-win. 414 - > Danny Gluch: Hmm. 415 - > Marion: I… I love that… oh.

416 - > Cacha Dora: Go ahead, Mary. 417 - > Marion: Tasha. 418 - > Cacha Dora: I was gonna say, I loved your call-out on… 419 - > Cacha Dora: It… the importance of being more self-aware than needing to do every role. 420 - > Danny Gluch: And, like, being able to… if I could identify where these roles show up in my team.

421 - > Cacha Dora: That is more powerful, that will help everyone way more than me trying to be like, I need to be all five. 422 - > Cacha Dora: And… and on top of it, it also is better for the person at the end of the day. Like, I know that, you know, work can't always be a feel-good moment. Sometimes you have to do the hard thing, or you have to be stressed, or you have to… whatever, right?

Challenge is challenge. 423 - > Cacha Dora: But… 424 - > Cacha Dora: Imagine if we had more leaders who did have the ability to see the things instead of trying to do all the things. 425 - > Danny Gluch: Hmm. 426 - > Mark Murphy: And that right there is the difference between… you know, it's that necessary skill to actually be a leader, is that it's not just about, I'm a worker bee.

You know, we… 427 - > Mark Murphy: We used to do these studies where we'd take, we'd do it with, like, nurses and engineers and pharmacists, and so we take, like, a nurse manager. 428 - > Mark Murphy: And go, are you a nurse first, or are you a manager first? 429 - > Mark Murphy: And 99% of the time, they'd say, I'm a nurse first. Do it with an engineer, an engineering manager.

Are you an engineer first, or are you a manager first? 430 - > Mark Murphy: I'm an engineer first. And one of the things that has happened over time, and this is one of the reasons why we flatten organizations and why it's so easy to fire managers, is we've devalued the concept of management as a profession. 431 - > Mark Murphy: And… 432 - > Mark Murphy: It is like, well, you know, you're not doing real work if you're not a, you know, a nurse, or a engineer, or a pharmacist, or programmer, or, you know, whatever.

433 - > Mark Murphy: And, like, the management is like, that's… that's not the real work. And it's like, well, yeah, go live in an organization that has crappy managers versus one that has really good managers, and then come back and tell me. 434 - > Mark Murphy: if management is or is not real work, because the ones that do it well are, you know, Kasha, to your point, are… they're developing people, they're assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their team, they're putting people into positions to succeed.

435 - > Mark Murphy: It's… it's just night and day difference, but… 436 - > Mark Murphy: so many managers feel like, A, the management part is kind of a throwaway, and B, if they're gonna add any value at all, they have to do absolutely everything. And it's like, you are fundamentally misunderstanding 437 - > Mark Murphy: What it is to lead a team of people. Leading a team of people is not… 438 - > Mark Murphy: Being the entire team. 439 - > Mark Murphy: And the other side of it is, on a practical level.

440 - > Mark Murphy: If you started a company. 441 - > Mark Murphy: And you went to Silicon Valley to go down the VC route and try and get funding, and you walked into a VC and said, yeah, I do everything. 442 - > Mark Murphy: They will not give you money, because to them, that is a giant red flag, that you don't know how to build a team, and that you. 443 - > Danny Gluch: Hmm.

444 - > Mark Murphy: the weak point in this organization. And so, just on a practical level, like, if you wanted to, you know, go off on your own and scale your own enterprise, man, that is death. 445 - > Mark Murphy: To try and get financial backers to believe in you, because they will never believe in somebody who says, I do it all. That's idiocy.

They'll look at you and go, you can't build a team. And the one thing we want you for, maybe you invented the new algorithm, true, but also, if you can't build a team. 446 - > Mark Murphy: Trust, we will move you aside, we'll stick you in a closet and let you. 447 - > Danny Gluch: Yeah.

448 - > Mark Murphy: the algorithm, and we'll install it a leader, a CEO, who can build a routine, because that's what we're after. 449 - > Marion: Hmm. 450 - > Danny Gluch: Oh, man. That's so many just amazing and practical nuggets.

But as we try to wrap up, because we're all stressed for time, but other than buying and reading your book, 451 - > Mark Murphy: What is it that you would like to. 452 - > Danny Gluch: to help these managers, organizational leaders, or people with aspirations and, you know, just workers trying to work their way up and find their place. What would you suggest that they do, sort of, in the moment? 453 - > Mark Murphy: Going back to one of the very first things we talked about with innovation and psychological safety and hearing from, you know, not suppressing the innovators, is do this.

After you've done that quick little around-the-table exercise. 454 - > Mark Murphy: And you have a sense as to, you know, who's who on your team. 455 - > Mark Murphy: Is do this. 456 - > Mark Murphy: Find the one or two or three people that you don't hear from very often.

457 - > Mark Murphy: And the next time you have a meeting, start your conversation by hearing from them first. Stop opening it up to the floor. Stop opening it up to the group at large. And use some psychological science to stack the deck in your favor to… 458 - > Mark Murphy: Bolster the voices that 459 - > Mark Murphy: you don't often hear from.

You know, the herding effect is real. Whoever speaks first has a huge impact on the outcome that the group eventually comes up with. 460 - > Mark Murphy: well, okay, that's bad, but it's also good, because if you know that going into it, take the voices on your team you don't hear from enough. So if it is your trailblazer, if it is the innovative person on your team, and you haven't heard from them very much.

461 - > Mark Murphy: Then just make them talk first. Prioritize them, because as the leader of the team, you can impose some structure, and this is one thing I will say about psychological safety. 462 - > Mark Murphy: Psychological safety, for it to be more than a slogan. 463 - > Mark Murphy: You actually have to put some structure around it.

464 - > Mark Murphy: And part of that is ordering 465 - > Mark Murphy: who talks first? And so, surface some of your quieter voices, or some of the voices you need to hear from. Maybe it's the more diverse voices, maybe it's the divergent voices. It's the voices that are challenging the status quo.

466 - > Mark Murphy: Whoever you need to hear from, and it's usually the people you hear the least from, ironically. 467 - > Mark Murphy: surface that, control it, because otherwise, you can say, this is a safe space for everybody to speak up and share their concerns. I promise you, that's not true. 468 - > Danny Gluch: And if you do one thing that we do in our research that anybody can do now with AI.

469 - > Mark Murphy: Take a transcript of your most recent meeting. Take that transcript, delete the secure, you know, price change or piece of code, whatever. Okay, delete that. But then, throw that transcript into ChatGPT.

470 - > Mark Murphy: and say, Tell me. 471 - > Mark Murphy: Who spoke the most in this meeting? Did anybody raise an objection? Once they raised an objection, what happened to the conversation after?

Did that person ever speak again? 472 - > Mark Murphy: for the rest of the meeting. What was the reactions of the group? We used to have to code all of this stuff.

473 - > Danny Gluch: Like, go through the transcripts and code this line by line, and… I mean, and I'm talking, like, not just 20 years ago, I'm talking, like, even 4 years ago, when we would do linguistic studies. 474 - > Mark Murphy: oh my gosh. Nowadays, it's like… 475 - > Mark Murphy: this is… it's one of my absolute favorite AI things, is it's like, we've made… everybody can do the kind of studies that we do on this. 476 - > Mark Murphy: Literally every person who has access to Zoom 477 - > Mark Murphy: can do it nowadays, because you throw the transcript into Claude, or ChatGPT, or Gemini, whatever, and just go, analyze the transcript.

Who spoke the most? Who spoke the least? If I wanted to reorder the conversation, who should I have speak first next time? 478 - > Mark Murphy: You can put structure to this, and actually surface innovation, surface, create psychological safety through structure, and that would be my… 479 - > Mark Murphy: One simple thing, super practical, that people can start doing literally today.

480 - > Marion: That is gold, man! That is just gold! 481 - > Danny Gluch: I mean, and even without. 482 - > Cacha Dora: new.

483 - > Danny Gluch: Even without AI, just taking the time to reflect and be like, how did that meeting go? Who didn't speak? When someone brought up an objection, what happened after that? What can we do next time differently?

Just taking the 20 minutes to do that exercise, I think every… 484 - > Danny Gluch: team, every organization needs to do that. And it would just… find the time. 485 - > Danny Gluch: You know, if you're too busy, find the time, that's super important. 486 - > Danny Gluch: It's also really interesting that you were… you were talking about, you know, that as the solution.

And going back to the studies, how you stole from the study about school teachers, that's also one of the solutions in the classroom. 487 - > Danny Gluch: is structure who talks. Don't just let the person who's super eager talk. 488 - > Danny Gluch: find the person who's quiet and introspective and reflective and slower to speak, give them space, find a way to make them speak, and add to the classroom is one of the, like, classic sort of pedagogy moves, and it works, and it makes the classroom better, and it'll make your team better.

So I really appreciate you calling that out. 489 - > Mark Murphy: It is amazing how, like, leaders are, in many respects, teachers, and if we thought of it more like that. 490 - > Mark Murphy: We would have so much better leadership. 491 - > Danny Gluch: Yeah, absolutely.

492 - > Marion: Well… 493 - > Danny Gluch: Thank you so much. Oh, Mary, were you gonna say something? 494 - > Marion: No, I mean, I was just gonna say, Mark, like, where can people get their hands on your amazing book? They can pre-order, like, all of this stuff.

495 - > Mark Murphy: So, the book is, Team Players is available anywhere. You buy books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, whatever. But you can also go to LeadershipIQ.com, and if you go to… 496 - > Mark Murphy: either go to the Research tab, you'll find a number of our research and studies there.

In fact, you'll find the Innovator study that we've been talking about. That's there. There's a study on team effectiveness that is there as well. And so, if you want to 497 - > Mark Murphy: nerd out and put yourself to sleep from time to time, you know, that's a good place to go.

There's lots of charts and data there. And then if you go… 498 - > Danny Gluch: charts. 499 - > Mark Murphy: If you go to the quizzes tab, there is a bunch of quizzes, free quizzes and stuff, but there's a team players quiz, which if you want to go, okay, well, what's my natural team role? 500 - > Mark Murphy: then you can do that, and it will… it'll guide you through.

And they're, you know, a couple of minutes to take, they're fairly short, so… 501 - > Danny Gluch: Well, that's my next story. 502 - > Cacha Dora: And I was like, I… I was like. 503 - > Danny Gluch: That's like a good quiz. 504 - > Cacha Dora: any day.

Give me a good quiz. 505 - > Marion: I'm gonna… 506 - > Danny Gluch: ace that test, I'm gonna send you the results. 507 - > Danny Gluch: Those, those links will be in the show notes, everybody. Thank you all for listening.

Mark, thank you so much for coming on, and for sharing your stories and your insights. It was really fantastic. Everyone, be sure to subscribe, like, leave a 5-star review, and 508 - > Danny Gluch: Message us on LinkedIn if you have ideas for other elephants that you guys want to talk about, guests you want us to have on, and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you so much.