Harnessing identity to win
Today’s episode was specifically created to act as an extension of the conversation with Professor Alex Haslam. Alex talked a lot about identity and how it is foundational to our self esteem, how we interact with others – and by extension how we work in groups at work.
Today’s guest is Jeremy Holt, Jeremy is a performance psychologist who has worked with a huge range of sports teams, rugby, the Olympics, motorsports but also in corporate business and the military. His approach is to build team success by leaning into identity.
He says the secret of success for many teams isn’t talent, it’s identity. Identity isn’t a byproduct of success, it’s what creates success.
The reason why I wanted to talk to him is that he’s just published a book For the Love of the game which gives a clear step-by-step guide to building group identity. He uses it to talk about sports teams, in fact youth sports teams but the applications are really clear for work. The book lays out the substance of his work but then gives you conversations to start on the bus, conversations to start before training, conversations to start on a team trip away. He talks about how you might use team departures, how to build team rituals, how to create a sense of group identity. It felt to me like a resource that any leader could draw upon if they wanted to build their team identity – and team culture.
Jeremy Holt is a psychologist and leadership coach who has spent more than 20 years helping teams get better. He’s just written a book which takes concepts of identity and shows leaders how to make them work inside organisations.
Jeremy posting about identity Read his research about better team results.
Watch the Lebron documentary More Than a Game
Jeremy’s book For the Love of the Game
This episode is the third part of a series about the power of identity in teams. Listen to the other Eat Sleep Work Repeat episodes about identity.
Transcript
Bruce Daisley: thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could introduce who you are and what you do.
Jeremy Holt name’s Jeremy Holt and my background, I’m an occupational psychologist, chartered occupational psychologist here in the uk, and I guess probably around
Jeremy Holt: years ago I started. really interested in high performing teams and what made high performing teams different to ordinary teams. So my work started off in the corporate sector, did a lot of work in investment banks, then shifted more into pharmaceuticals companies. But I’ve really worked across a very broad range of organizations. I also started working with the military and ran high performance teams training for. British officers for about the last decade I’ve been working in sport as well. So bit of variety, but the same principles sitting behind working with all of those groups. I wanna come at this slightly,
Bruce Daisley: I wanna come at this a slightly probably reverse order angle ’cause some of the stuff you’ve hinted at there. I wanna come back to you comment in the book that you’ve written for the love of the game. You comment that someone : to you, how come you use all of your identity stuff in your work, but you never use it in your sport? And I’m just intrigued with that. If you could give us to some extent story of Hove Spartans and you working with them.
Jeremy Holt My job is working with senior leaders or officers or elite level sports people. But my hobby has been coaching rugby I’ve been doing that for more than 20 years. I was one of those weekend warriors who started off. Coaching my son’s team. And then when he grew up and moved on, I decided to carry on coaching I was coaching at Hove Rugby Club, and I got involved with a team who were under fourteens at the time called Hove Spartans. And when I first started working with them I guess I was doing what I think many sports coaches do, which is really focus on the X’s and the O’s as they call it. Tactics and skills and techniques. I wasn’t really applying the identity work that I did in elite level. And I got challenged by one of my friends who said, what on earth are you playing at?
Jeremy Holt That’s surely that’s what you should be doing here. When I thought about it, I realized that there’s a difference, obviously, between being a consultant who comes in and talks to leaders about taking a particular approach with their team or helps them to take that approach with their team and doing it with your own team and being the leader who’s doing it. So I tapped into my own reticence about doing things differently because, when you start to lead in a different way, a different understanding of leadership, then of course it creates a degree of uncomfortableness or anxiety. So I think that’s what I was experiencing and I just reached a point where I thought I better push on through this and and see what happens there.
Bruce Daisley: There’s something where you mentioned that one of the former players had got in touch with you and or had posted it in their bio or they’d referred back to this and it immediately brought to mind, I dunno if you ever
Bruce Daisley: It, but for a long time the Twitter bio of LeBron James used to say LeBron James St.Vincent, St. Mary’s School class of 2003. It’s just an illustration there. Sometimes when we get this identity right, when people feel part of something magicalReally special to them, that identity can be really enduring it, it can really have this impact on us and that’s what it immediately put me in mind of.
Bruce Daisley: So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you set about, in that example there, of building identity in that team.
Jeremy Holt a really good observation, first of all. So one of the questions I ask leaders at and many military officers that I’ve worked with over the years is think. Back to your best experience in a team, your personal best experience, and you’d be surprised at the number of people who maybe have been out in combat zones or just achieved extraordinary things. But they’ll refer back to some sort of childhood experience, which was maybe the first time that they really felt. Connected with other people and it was often to do with sport. And so that’s the power of sport is that it allows people to get that deep sense of connection and belonging. And the way that I approached it with the team that I was coaching and the way that I work, approach it with the other teams that I work with at whatever level is to use this approach, which we call tribe. And it has its origins in social identity theory. And so it’s really looking at group dynamics that happen, the group processes that happen somebody categorizes themselves as belonging to a group. When you categorize yourself as being one of us and it changes your perception, it leads to all sorts of cognitive biases that can be really productive and that we can tap into because.
Bruce Daisley: Because, what I loved about your approach, We’ve just had a couple of episodes talking to Alex Haslam some people might superficially when they hear. idea of identity mentioned, either might wince from it or wonder if it’s some sort of
Bruce Daisley: something that’s an invention of recent politics, that it’s not necessarily what they want to associate with. Whereas your work, and the way you would it here a direct through line connects.In Eastwood’s work that we’ve talked about. His book superficially is called Belonging, but really it’s all about iden identity. It’s about group identity and group identity extending back into tradition and extend extending forward into legacy. All of those things are about identity. I’d just love you to reflect on Whether you actually communicate that theory to people when, whether you bring people into that or whether you just talk about the practicalities of emotion and how people feel.
Jeremy Holt about the theory because I think it’s important for people to understand what happens in groups and we have an opportunity to give people a better understanding.
Jeremy Holt So obviously when I work with a team I’m doing this work in a particular context, which will often be, their work team or their work organization. And what they’re interested in is creating a culture where the sorts of behaviors that, that you see contribute to sustainable performance within that. Team or that organization. But what sits behind that is, is this concept of identity. And the problem with identity is that it’s quite an abstract concept. It’s a, it’s one of those words that gets thrown around a lot and we don’t really what it know what it means. But if you step back from it and you think about it from an individual perspective to start with, then your identity, you, your individual identity is what makes you different from me.
Jeremy Holt Okay? And everybody understands that, What the research has shown, and there’s been a lot of research about this over, at least the last a hundred years, but particularly over the last 50 years, really looking at what are the components that create your identity or so-called identity construction motives, And basically there are six elements to your sense of self. Six things that you are trying to achieve by by being yourself. One of them is a sense of connection over time, so past, present, to future. So we like to believe that who we are connects us with our past, our present, and our future. The second is some sense of meaning or purpose or relevance. So we like to believe that we’re on this earth to do something that. That people will remember. That makes a difference, that has value. The third is, that we like to be different. We want to be different from each other. and so we need to know what makes us distinctive. The fourth is that we need to know where we belong where it’s safe and who’s our gang, if you like. Who’s our tribe? the fifth is we want to feel competent. And so we define ourselves in ways that help us to feel competent. And the last is about self-esteem. So we like to feel good about ourselves, so what we’re doing as we construct this sense of who we are.
Jeremy Holt And if you think back to your childhood, at times that’s quite a painful process, isn’t it? As you’re trying to figure out who on earth am I as I become separate from my parents, where do I fit into this world? What’s my value? It has these component parts. So if you think about that from an individual perspective, you can also think about that from a social perspective. So all of those factors have some relevance at a group level as well. So when I define myself as belonging to a group. And Alex Haslam, I’m sure has told your listeners about some of the things that happen when people are defined as, or define themselves as belonging to a group, categorize themselves as belonging to a group. When we do that, we want to know what is the identity of that group, and that group has these identity elements. Now, actually, we did some research with Sussex University of years ago. It was a. Three year research project. And what we found was that five out of those six operated at a group level.
Jeremy Holt So self-esteem was less important, but the other five were very important. And so if I can understand how belonging to a group my sense of my identity and my social identity, then I’m more motivated to to put that group first, to see myself as one of us. And it goes beyond that, doesn’t it?
Bruce Daisley: And it goes beyond that, doesn’t it? Because I’d love you to go into that research ’cause that research that there’s something material to these, that teams that have a clear sense of shared identity are more successful. And I’d love you to give us that. That explosive finding really.
Jeremy Holt what our research showed was, and we did research with 45 teams they were sports teams ’cause we were interested in performance and sports teams. Obviously, you know what the measure of good performance is, so we could make comparisons between those teams. but the fundamental psychology that we are looking at is the same whether you’re in a sports team, a military team, a business team, it.
Jeremy Holt It doesn’t matter because it’s about a fundamental level of being a human in a collaborative environment. But what we found was that the teams that had the strongest identities, so if you compared the 20% of teams with the strongest identities, the teams, with the weakest identities, the bottom 20%, those teams at the top, they outperformed by 53%. So not a marginal gain, but an absolutely massive difference. If I can just explain that a little bit by using a metaphor, it might help. Who we are together our collective identity, our team identity, or our organizational identity is founded on a collection of beliefs. Okay? So this is the programming, if you like. That we run on. So one way of thinking about it is thinking about a team as being like a mobile phone. Okay. So on your mobile phone you have a lot of apps and each individual within the team is good at using a particular app. They’re using a particular cap, they’re bringing a particular capability or competency or skill to the way that this thing operates. But what sits behind all of those apps is the phone’s operating system and the phone’s operating system. The phone’s identity. So you know, in a phone it’s programs in your human brain. It’s also programs, but those programs are collections of beliefs. So where organizations go wrong is if half the organization is operating on Android and the other half is our have got iPhones, we’ve got operating systems that don’t communicate with each other. So at the app level. We might be quite good because we’ve got the skills that we need, but the underlying operating system that joins us together and enables us to collaborate, communicate, and feel, and emotions are really important at work and feel that sense of us, that sense of togetherness, that sense of belonging. That’s very difficult if you’re running on different operating systems. One of the things that really struck me
Bruce Daisley: One of the things that really struck me is that my football team of sort of mediocre football team, but the manager talks a lot about identity and I wonder if he’s seen your research or he is seen a trend of this had this recurrent feeling with the idea of purpose. I’m skeptical of purpose really. cause it’s been appropriated by companies and leaders, certainly in the way it’s applied. I wondered whether identity might become the same. That identity is incredibly powerful if you feel like you’ve discovered it or you feel like you’ve co-created it. But might be ineffective if you feel like someone handed it to you on a piece of paper.
Now your book seems to go into the exercise of saying to people, here’s how you bring this into conversation. You make it co-creation, but I love your thought on that overall hypothesis. First.
Jeremy Holt of all, word, the word identity is thrown around a lot and I don’t think it’s often very well defined and people don’t really know what it means.
Jeremy Holt So it’s just a word that gets thrown around. We’ve lost our identity and if you look at football clubs there’s probably a good example. So you know, you’ve got. Manchester United, where you have the fans who are saying, we’ve lost our identity. You’ve got Rangers at the moment where the fans are saying they’ve lost their identity and really what it is it’s a mismatch between the fans whose belief is this is what we’re all about, this is who we are.
Jeremy Holt And the key word here is the we. And then the management or the owners who have ignored that and so they’re building something different. So in, in terms of our model, the tribe model, that means that there’s discontinuity from past to present to future. So we’ve lost a sense of tradition or connection over time. And so obviously that’s going to be jarring in terms of sense of collective identity. I think that, if we start to define what identity is more clearly, then it becomes more meaningful. And then the second point that you made, which was around, can you hand it to someone or do you have to co-create it? the evidence is absolutely clear on this. It’s so much more powerful to co-create something to co-create an identity than it is to be told what it is. And you just have to, step back for a moment and think about that. I’m going to tell you, I’m gonna come in. I’m gonna say, here’s what we believe here’s what we care about and here’s what we’re all about and here’s what makes us different.
Jeremy Holt And this is what belonging means. And you are gonna say Thank you. Thank you so much for telling me or not, the chances are not actually you’re more likely to say where did that come from? I don’t understand that, that’s not who I am. That’s not my understanding. But if I give you the opportunity to co-create this sense of us, and because you know what?
Jeremy Holt In the work that we do with the Tribe Protocol, we break this sense of us down into five component parts. It becomes manageable and then and then people are creating a new shared reality or a new shared operating system. And the reason
Bruce Daisley: And the reason why I was really taken with your book is that I had some relationship cards that I’d seen someone use for a corporate use. And these cards were like 120 cards that you would flip one over and it would invite you to reflect on like an emotional, personal experience you had.
Bruce Daisley: And the intention was to build intimacy and your book felt like the same, but is for group identity. So I love the fact that some of them were. To provoke a discussion on the bus or to have a quick conversation before the team sat they were throwing questions about when are we at our best, or, what were, what really sets us apart. There, there were questions that wouldn’t feel, I think, manipulative to the people participating in them, but might uncover some authentic truths. Was that your objective?
Jeremy Holt book is in four parts. So the first part is a general introduction and explains a bit about social identity theory, the research, how I came to write the book, so the genesis of my thinking. The second part. Just a series of con conversation starters.
Jeremy Holt So questions, and then there’s some guidance on how to set it up and follow on probing questions and what you might hope to get from having those conversations. it’s based around the tribe model. And so there’s five foundations in Tribe. Tribe is an acronym for traditions, relevance, identity, belonging, and Effectiveness. So for each of those foundations, there are six questions. So you end up with 30 questions overall, and then the sec, sorry, the third part. Exactly the same format, but now translated into challenges. And the difference between a conversation and a challenge is at the end of the challenge, we’re trying to arrive at an outcome. So we have something which is in agreement. So if we think about creating shared beliefs, and that’s what we’re really trying to do here, the first step is that we need to put into. minds that these beliefs are important, that they matter, and that if we can reach some sort of agreement about them, then that would be helpful for us. you can do that very conversationally and quite, openly and the fact that I’ve said something it can never be taken out. So just the fact. That as a manager or a coach, I’m asking these questions. I’ve already triggered new thinking in the people who are within the team. So I’ve started the process. And then, so part three, then the challenges lead to agreements. And the agreements lead to clear agreed actions and those actions can then be treated as experiments. And we go out and we see weather. What we’ve agreed makes us more like what we want to become or not. So you progress in this almost like a scientist exploring your own reality and testing it out. And then part four of the book is, that throws out all sorts of questions for the person who’s doing this. So a coach or a manager, What if this happens? what should I do about in, in sporting context? What should I do about captains and player leadership? What’s their role? How do I get other coaches involved in this process?
Jeremy Holt If you’re involved in youth coaching, then you know, cognitively in terms of people’s brain development, where are they at? What are they able to do at different ages? So part four is answers to those sorts of questions or ideas around those sorts of questions. Just to help people use parts two and Parts three. Is there a minimum viable team
Bruce Daisley: There a minimum viable team. You’ve mentioned that sometimes you’ve got people just turning up and playing for an hour a week or two hours a week and maybe training once, twice a week. I guess in the workplace we’ve got multiple teams and we, most of us are members of multiple teams. And it might be firstly the team that we’re managed by, but then we are.
Bruce Daisley: Members of a project team or we’re members of something additional and should we try to have the same level of cohesion in all of those teams? You’ve worked with organizations, suspect, suspecting organizations like the Marines. There’s a degree of cynicism to anything at times like most workplaces.
Bruce Daisley: there a minimum viable team that we should be trying to impose these things on? How do you think about that?
Jeremy Holt of answers to that. So in terms of size, you can make the argument that a team of two people is a team. If they start to think of themselves as a team, in other words, if they start to think of themselves as us and we, and acting in a coordinated way, then you start to get group characteristics. If what’s happening is that those two people are having an interpersonal relationship. So it’s me and you. Really, you’re not, psychologically you’re not a team. So that’s one element. The second is what is the job that you do? So do you need to collaborate? So when I work with business teams, often the start point is, do you need to be a team?
Jeremy Holt Because it’s sometimes like a monkey on people’s shoulders. We’ve got to collaborate, we’ve got to get together. We work remotely, but we got to get together. And the underlying question when you decide whether you need to be a team or not, is. Do you need to collaborate in order to achieve a higher quality outcome or a high quality product from your work?
Jeremy Holt So if what we do is better, because you and I have talked about it, or a group of us have talked about it, if it’s qualitatively different and better at the end, then that’s when we should be a team. And whenever you have a circumstance where you should be a team because you’ve got to do collaborative work, then it makes sense to try and build an identity for that team around that piece of work. the wonderful thing about human beings is that we we have multiple group identities. So I go back to social identity theory. This is the idea that who you are has two main components. One is your individual identity or your personal identity, and that’s reasonably static over time. And this is the sense of yourself derived from perhaps some genetic characteristics your neurological development, your family experiences, and so on.
Jeremy Holt So that’s you as an individual. And then the other component is your social identity. And so this is you as a member of a group. but your social identity consists of many groups. So we all know that we could be at work, behave in a particular way, feel a particular type of attachment. Go home, meet with friends, behave differently, feel a different sort of set of emotions and detachment. Go and watch football on a Saturday afternoon, perhaps behave very differently because we’re now in a football crowd making chance and all sorts of behaviors that we wouldn’t ordinarily do. But that’s because we understand that’s what’s expected of us in this context. So to be one of us, I need to join in that context and I want to be one of us.
Jeremy Holt So I do join in and then on Sunday, we go to. We go to church and maybe Sunday lunch with the family. And again, it’s completely different. Our understanding is there. So we are wonderfully complex, dynamic creatures, which is why a lot of the approaches which think about, for instance, leadership as an. Attribute struggle because it actually, leadership is an attribution, not an attribute. Whether I’m a leader or not is something which is designated by somebody else. I can have an official title, but do people want to follow me? the real question of leadership. So that’s an attribution, it’s not an attribute. And we have many different contexts, so we can switch. Sorry, it’s a long answer, but to come back to your the question which I think you asked was, we belong to multiple teams, what can you do? And what I’d say is you build an identity in each of those teams if it needs to be a real team, if it needs to do some real work together. What I really
Bruce Daisley: I, what I really loved is sometimes when. Examples are given of stories that didn’t go well. You can see in that what didn’t go well and the contrast between to use a specific example of football the football golden generation with the Beckhams and the Gary Nevilles and an old manner of talent that, that England had a decade or so ago, two decades ago.
Bruce Daisley: Not working, leading into maybe Gareth Southgate’s success with maybe slightly lesser players. And I’d love you to talk about how there was a failure of identity in that generation era of football.
Jeremy Holt back, 15, 20 years, we didn’t really, particularly in sport, there wasn’t very much attention paid to idea of collective motivation.
Jeremy Holt So management was often through individuals who were good or not so good at the technical, tactical part of the job. Organized people and often worked with people one-to-one, so as individual characters and built good relationships with those individual characters. And that was certainly the case during the Golden Generation as it became called. And a friend of mine Chris Neville, was in that England camp as a sports scientist and Masser at different points during his time there. Rio Ferdinand has talked about it very openly as well. So there was no effort made. There was no importance put on creating a sense of us or doing activities together. So what happened is that the teams would turn up, they’d turn up, they’d sit at. Breakfast, dinner and lunch and dinner in their club cliques, they’d continue in their club cliques. There was no attempt to create a, a sort of England identity. And what that meant was there was a lot of confusion and there was also a lot of conflict between those different cliques because they didn’t really want to cooperate with each other. They, because they spent most of their lives competing against each other. So unless you actively do something about that. It doesn’t change identity, shared identity is there. It’s always there. So in organizations it’s there and it, and you can see it because it plays out in politics and cliques and infighting. And so the question for leaders is, do you grab hold of this and start to direct it in a way that will help you achieve the outcomes you want? Which presumably around high performance and sustainability. In other words, it’s gotta be a good experience for people, for them, want to continue to be part of it. So do you pay attention to that or not? Gareth Southgate, he grabbed hold of that, didn’t he? There’s his famous Dear England letter where he talked about what the identity of England was, and that’s been turned into a really fabulous play, which I think is with the national theater at the moment, itself is called Dear England.
Jeremy Holt And it talks about how he crafted. That sense of identity within the England team, when you do your work,
Bruce Daisley: When you do your work, o obviously you’ve written about sport, you’ve studied sport you’ve released papers on sport and you’ve had a lot of involvement with sporting teams. But when you do your work with. Other organizations?
Bruce Daisley: Are there any adaptations you make or is it broadly the same stuff, but apply the tribe model and everything that you’ve created and articulated?
Bruce Daisley: Is it the same stuff but just done in a different context? What, how would you, how do you adapt it?
Jeremy Holt generally the same stuff, but done in a different context. And the, probably the biggest difference is that in an organization I can usually get a couple of days with a team and take them through the tribe protocol. And we reckon that at the end of two days, we can have transform transformed people’s beliefs about who we are together, which creates a springboard for them to go away and. Perform well, and as long as that’s followed through, in other words the manager and team members hold themselves to account around the agreements that they reached during the Tribe Protocol, then it has a very positive impact for them. So the biggest difference is that, ironically it’s much easier to get someone to dedicate time to developing. and building an identity in a corporate world than is in the sports world because you’ve got competitions going on all the time. And if you can get in preseason and do something, then I, that’s probably your best opportunity. So what we have to do in a sporting context is break it down into smaller chunks and disperse. Through other elements of training. But it’s basically, it’s the same process and there’s a logic to it. So the tribe protocol starts with traditions. So we look back, we look at what’s been good in the past, how has this team functioned when it’s been at its best?
Jeremy Holt What are the individual team members’ experiences of teams functioning well in their best? And what would we like to take from that? Take forward into the future, what sort of quality we look at, what’s the purpose of the team? So purpose of relevance, we call it relevance is important. So what’s the value that this team exists to create? Who’s going to judge it? Who are the stakeholders? And therefore, what are we here to achieve? I suppose in a sporting context, that’s always. Other than winning, because winning is not really a purpose. Winning is something that you do on your way to achieving your purpose, whatever your purpose is. the third element then is identity. So we say what? What is distinctive about this team that gives it an edge that will help you to have a competitive advantage. And so there’s facilitated structured discussions around trying to find out what would, what do we think will give us an edge. So these are the first three areas that really define who we are together. And then the last two are about well, and so what, what do we do? So belonging is about reaching some agreements about how we’re going to treat each other in a way that sets. Expectations for inclusion and knowing what’s expected of me, to be one of us, I have to do this. Okay.
Jeremy Holt We’re all clear on that. and then effectiveness, the E in tribe is about what do we need to do? How do we need to organize, how do we need to behave in order to really fulfill our potential to be as effective as possible? So these are five areas of agreement, and we put those five areas of agreement on a single. of paper. So one page in the corporate world, we call it the tribe canvas. In sport I tend to call it the tribe shield. But it’s exactly the same document. And the reason for a one pager is that all of those long discussions. I summarized on one piece of paper. For instance, when I was working with the Great Britain Wheelchair rugby team before the Tokyo Cycle, Tokyo Paralympics, where they went to Mono Gold medal, every time there was a team meeting their tribe canvas was projected onto the wall. They had stickers on their water bottles which had the tribe canvas printed on it. That me reminders all over the place. When a player got a new.
Bruce Daisley: Okay.
Jeremy Holt Got their first cap, got their first great Britain vest. The tribe canvas was there in front of them to tell them what we were all about. The players created an induction document so that when new players arrived, there was a standardized kind of process or series of rituals help the players to understand what they were joining and what they were buying into. So they were using all these, you would call those traditional. Cultural levers in an organization, and they were using those to reinforce and bring to life the agreements about who we are together. It’s one of the reasons why I love
Bruce Daisley: It was one of the reasons why I loved the little things that probably helped form that, which is, a, a team discussion. A discussion over like the team meeting, which is, oh, if we were going to describe our culture.
Bruce Daisley: a new joiner. What would be one of the things in the past that we would mention and you’ve basically got this group creation of people saying, would you remember that time, that dot.
Bruce Daisley: And they, it adds to that legacy.
Bruce Daisley: You mentioned rituals there and I’d love you just to lean on that a little bit. Rituals play such an important part in sustaining cultures.
Bruce Daisley: When you’ve seen rituals worked effectively, are they things that teams are already doing that you say, let’s double down on this, or do you create new rituals?
Bruce Daisley: And if you’re creating a new ritual, where would you even start?
Jeremy Holt you do have a ritual that you can repurpose or just use in the format that it is, but really the point of
Jeremy Holt Rituals exist in all societies, don’t they? And have done throughout time because what they do is they communicate to people without having to go into long explanations. So it’s a moment that, that everybody has a shared understanding of what’s happening here. And so in organizations, there are, if you think of the life cycle of someone through an organization there are opportunities for us to put in place rituals.
Jeremy Holt So what do we do when someone joins our team? What do we celebrate as we go forward with our team? What do we recognize? What do we celebrate? Maybe what do we be reward, but certainly what do we ritualistically celebrate and how does that become part of who we are together? And then what do we do when people leave the team?
Jeremy Holt So how do we acknowledge their contribution and how do we create some sense of continuity for the team moving forwards without this person? So rituals and symbols are really great ways to. To do that. And most of the teams that I’ve worked with will at a very simple level, put in place those kinds of things.
Jeremy Holt When we have a team meeting, we should always start by looking at our tribe canvas and just reminding ourselves what’s on the tribe canvas? This is what we agreed. Are we gonna do it at the end of the meeting? We know that reflexivity, or taking time to reflect on how effective your team is a really positive thing.
Jeremy Holt It’s an important part of teaming. So does the team take five minutes at the end just to reflect on, did we live by the agreements that we reached in our tribe canvas? And some teams will just take a quick poll. You can set up a poll on teams, and then you can track it. So at the end of each team meeting, how did we do, score out a five.
Jeremy Holt Okay. Oh, look, we’re going down. What’s happening here? You can track it over time and it gives you some data to work with. In addition to the subjective experience, the thing that. We are trying to create is a love affair in effect between the individual and the team. So the teams that we belong to that really matter to us, that’s family or to do with our community or religion or sport, or sometimes work but often not work. That’s like a love affair. We put in a huge amount of effort into those groups because we want them to do well, and when the group does well, we feel great.
Jeremy Holt It’s a really visceral thing if you’re a foot football fan and your team wins a game, it wasn’t expecting to win. People feel deep, visceral, joy at that experience, and they also feel heartache when their team loses. So the status of the team. Is really important to us. And when that happens at work, what you get is the opportunity is two things really.
Jeremy Holt You get an opportunity for people to experience joy at work because they’re part of something which feels successful. And the second is you put, people put a huge amount of effort into making sure that they do experience joy at work. Kicked off,
Bruce Daisley: We kicked off. I asked you about your experience with Hove Spartans, to, to conclude, maybe you just could tell us how the first couple of seasons went with Hove Spartans. I asked you how you’d applied these things and then didn’t give you the chance to actually tell us the outcome of that.
How did the first couple of seasons go?
Jeremy Holt was difficult because I didn’t have very much contact time with the players, and so we’re just. Ticking away, asking questions, doing sessions when the weather is poor, when you can’t get outside to train rugby. And we’d, we’d put some flip charts on the wall and we’d get the treaded post-it notes out with a bunch of 14 year olds. But they got it and they gradually got better at it and wanted to be part of it. we created this sense of commitment and we created a distinctive playing style, which we called Lightning rug. Be. So we thought that we could be competitive and win by playing faster than anybody else, but obviously we didn’t have the capabilities to do that when we started. So we had to train in order to try and achieve that. And it took time, but we kept working at it going faster and faster. And we, in, in the first season I coached the boys. We came bottom in the Sussex League and we lost all our league games. We won a few friendlies, but we lost all our league games. And I guess that maybe you would’ve expected a little bit of descent, but actually that wasn’t what happened because they were starting to get tighter and closer together and they could see the possibilities as well.
Jeremy Holt And we were doing better towards the end of the season compared to the beginning, beginning of the second season there were more players came along. So even though we were the bottom team. More players wanted to be part of it because the word had got out that something good was happening here. We were able to stay, we to avoid relegation because one of the teams in the top league dropped out. So we played in the top lead and we went undefeated in the second season and won the league.
Bruce Daisley: Wow.
Jeremy Holt And that’s because we started to develop the capabilities to be the kind of team that we agreed that we wanted to be.
Jeremy Holt And we stuck at it. And it was a really, emotionally intense and close experience for everybody involved. And as you said, the comments from players even now, some years later, is that it was a really happy and beneficial experience in their life. And we have get togethers and a lot of the team turn up.
Jeremy Holt A very positive experience. And the last thing I’d say is Managers often look at this kind of initiative as something that they do to their team, but not being part of their team. But actually what happens is it changes you as well. So I went from being someone who put a bit of effort into coaching this team, to someone who put in a huge amount of effort.
Jeremy Holt To coaching this team because it had become part of my shared identity as well. And so there’s a transformation which is beneficial for everybody involved in terms of performance, in terms of motivation, and just in terms of that sort of satisfaction when you see things working well. I love it, Jeremy.
Bruce Daisley: I love it, Jeremy. The reason why I love the book is that to the almost everyone who listens to the podcast gets in touch with me and they’ve got this sort of desire to make their own workplace better. They might not be the big boss, they might just be but they’re a stakeholder in it, but they’re often looking for directions, pointers, exercises, just something they can do.
Bruce Daisley: book is just filled with not only the substance of theory that explains how this works, but then the majority of the book is just practical exercises, how change makers can set about inspiring improvement in their own organizations. And so for that, it’s just this incredible compendium of. Assets for you to try and make your own team better? I couldn’t recommend it more and I’m always reluctant to give such full-hearted endorsements like that. ’cause I read so many books, but this, I was really swept away by it.
Jeremy Holt thank you very much. That’s very kind of you and quite humbling because I know that, not only have you read many books, but written very successful books yourself, so that means a lot.
Jeremy Holt Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us.
Bruce Daisley: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us.
