Hey folks and welcome back to giant talk i'm your host roger and i'm here as you know i always like to have interesting conversations with interesting people and i'm here today with luke fisher who is ceo of mo so welcome to giant talk luke thank you for having me no my pleasure my pleasure Pleasure. So tell us a bit about you, what Mo is, a little bit about your story before we kind of delve into the subject today, which is going to be around high performing
teams. So just tell us a bit about you. Yeah, sure. So I started the company about five years ago. And my story from while I started it, I was part of a big fintech company that went through a cultural transformation over about five or six years. They had a couple of failed attempts at it and then one really successful attempt at it and it led to massive growth in enterprise value.
My learnings and reflections were that generally teams are quite poorly equipped to actually drive high performance because it requires them to change their behaviors individually and then in turn the way that the team operate and function. There's a lot of pressures on you generally as a manager in order to do that. My learnings were that change generally is driven from the bottom up. It's the marginal changes that make all of the difference that have the transformational impact.
Often at the top of organizations, we think about transformational change as something that we do rather than we help facilitate and make happen. So I set off trying to tackle the problem of how do you help managers and leaders sustainably invest in organizational culture?
And how do you create more of those moments that really do shape the experiences people have with your organization and showcase your culture and what you're all about and so that led to the inception of Moe we've now been going about five years the product's used in about 40 odd different countries by a bunch of really wonderful brands that we're helping build you know high performing cultures and if anyone is listening to this thinking we want
to build a high performance culture or we want to engage our employees then check us out and let us know what you think or hit me up on linkedin absolutely yeah and and for for those for listeners out there you you just check the show notes there'll be a link to to mo and and luke as well so we will we'll be able to point you in the right direction there yeah just curious you know you mentioned that you there'd been a few failed attempts at culture
change and then there was one that was very very successful. Was that because it was far more bottom up in how it was driven and how it was focused? Yeah. So what tends to happen, especially in private equity, is you get a whole new leadership team in. They then replace their VPs that sit underneath them. Then they create a grand ambition for strategic direction and vision for the company. And then go through the process of communicating that information.
But then very often people don't change their behaviors. They're not invested in the wires people might believe. And then incorporated within is normally initiative follows around employer brand, employee value proposition, and purpose, values, beliefs. This is what we're here for. This is what we're trying to do and achieve. And the problem tends to manifest in brand expectation is created. You know, purpose, values, beliefs. This is what we're here for.
This is what we're trying to do. This is the rallying call.
And then manifest in the experience that people have in what you say what you look like and what you do ultimately yeah organizations are really good at saying all of the right things and looking all of the right ways unless you can get that action step really firing and people actually changing their behaviors a lot of it falls short yeah that the difficulty there is that saying all of the right things and looking all of the right ways are generally quite easily controllable from
the top but acting in the way and behaving in the way and shaping rewiring the organization to create these new behavioral patterns needs leadership from the bottom up it's very hard to do to enforce from the top down like you can with communications or with with you know a redesign of your intranet or an upgrade to your office to look and feel much prettier yeah so So I became obsessed about how do you actually change those behaviours so that it feels
like you're acting like the promises that you're making. Oh, yeah, being authentic. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. How many times do you walk into an organisation or have you walked into an organisation where they've got a lovely set of poster values on the wall, but then immediately kind of your experience, your sense doesn't quite match up. And so saying one thing and then acting in another way is that starts to build.
Sense of mistrust although you might not consciously be thinking of it you might not more consciously think i don't trust this place but it's kind of like that doesn't quite feel right and that's how it starts isn't it that's that and that can lead ultimately to disconnection can't it yeah it's almost like how people just describe car sales people or estate agents where you go through this process of false promises and you end up with buyer's remorse yeah
and then you're unhappy once you the talent attraction issues are the same if the the promise of the culture and the environment is a veneer rather than it is true to what actually happens in the organization yeah i love that a veneer yeah yeah yeah it looks nice on the outside but just get beneath the surface and it's not quite the way you think yeah exactly so to do that i guess that was a long answer to your question is bottom up generally is where
you can be true to what you're are actually claiming to be and it's where if organizations are seeking to compete on culture rather than cash in many cases these days in terms of people joining great organizations and great places to work for their culture rather than the money necessarily that they're gonna they're gonna earn especially the younger generations then you have to you have to practice what you preach you have to be in the position where you you walk the walk and that only happens
bottom up this is this This reminds me, I'm going way back into my dim and distant past, almost feels like a former lifetime. When I was in corporate, there was one particular change program around organizational values, a new set of values, which the organization was bringing in. And they took a different approach to any other sort of communication or training program that they'd ever done before. And they trained line managers to deliver the training to their teams.
And what they allowed, or rather enabled the managers to do, was to take these three values... And help contextualize them in their particular area. And that was really important because tenacity, which was one of them. Looks very different in a sales team as it does in an engineering team.
And through doing that, they enabled each of those areas to kind of build their own understanding of what the behaviors, is how that value manifested itself if they were doing it really well in engineering for instance what did it look like if they did it in in sales what did it look like and that that became although although there was definitely a sort of top-down dictate we need to do this the the energy behind it was absolutely bottom up and that was
a really powerful program so it kind of you know i i think I could see where you're coming from and maybe you've have even experienced that to some degree and a long time ago yeah exactly that I think how you think it's a mindset shift right from one of a mandate which is typically akin to like an older school command and control leadership structure it's a one of autonomy and empowerment in how you equip people to drive change and in In things like employee engagement,
you know, 70% of the variance in the engagement results come down to the line manager. This big study that's recently been done by Gallup that talked to this problem. And therefore, the research is backing up the, you know, the old age old adage of people join companies, but they leave managers. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah and that yeah that is that is a nice a nice little sort of mantra to dig by but i would actually go one step further i would challenge that people leave cultures because i think if a manager is being permitted to act poorly it's something about the culture that's giving that permission what do you think yeah i would i would agree is it's it's for me that still falls into bottom up because the the nature of influence of leadership and who condones and who doesn't certain types
of behaviors yeah the challenge with behavior is different to you know kpis that we typically manage performance outcomes on is behaviors have to be observed and therefore the basis by which you can see get the insight and therefore take action and see the change in that that is a lot lot harder to observe than a you know a kpi that we might measure production or sales or whatever it might be and i think therefore it often
becomes that the invisible the invisible work basically is in is in the behavioral patterns that help to shape the outcomes but it's because it's invisible and you can't use the mantra of measure what matters and and therefore bang the drum on those numbers you end up in a position where it often falls secondary injury.
But the behaviors are what drive the outcome, how managers think about shaping those for, effectiveness and therefore productivity and, you know, connection and interaction and how they go about dealing with their teams to create things like psychological safety, which are proven to aid performance. It puts a lot of ownership on, a lot of onus, sorry, on the manager.
Very often they're just not equipped for, you know, I mean, I think I read a stat the other day, only 8% of managers have ever had any level of formal training. Most people are relying on ways of working from their last company rather than any form of expectations that are in their new. So you look at it and you can see, you know, it's a whopping great problem space to solve for. And it makes my job quite fun being in the thick of trying to do that.
Yeah. So what, 8% of managers only receive formal training? Yeah, I think it's something ridiculous like that. It's certainly in the low digits and I think below the kind of 20% mark.
Yeah you touched upon one of the really important facets of a rather characteristics perhaps of a high-performing team you know i think one of the best studies that's been done in the past 10 years was the study the two-year study at google where they looked at 180 teams and you know they found that psychological safety was the number one number one characteristic that was present in in high-performing teams.
What's your kind of experience of perhaps, you know, helping to develop that and also, you know, experiencing it as well? Yeah, so a lot of my leadership development and one of my favourite books is Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which is built around a similar principle that the absence of trust, is the foundation to a high-performing team. So psychological safety from the Aristotle study probably didn't massively surprise me.
I know that the specialists that might listen to this will give you the nuance and definition between trust and psychological safety, but the sentiment to the average person is trying to get at the same thing. So I think the challenge is actually actually, that the word is banded around quite a lot. I don't think people actually know when they have it and how to make it better. And we had a really interesting webinar that we spent some time on with a consulting business.
And they talked about what are the habits, behaviors, the rituals that can help form psychological safety.
And they analyzed the specific behaviors that led to psychological safety as an outcome being achieved and the single biggest predictor of psychological safety was in the level of turn taking within the team that's the opportunity for expression yeah and therefore your views not being shut down immediately was the the biggest predictor so it's it's the small it's often the need to sweat the small stuff small things big impact is what really does make a difference and i
guess the message in that is that with some small tweaks you could actually have quite an exponential effect on it and i think as well psychological safety i think suffers from a little bit of a of a branding problem because i think people think that it is a soft and fluffy whereas in fact it isn't is it because if if it's present it means that people can respectfully and constructively challenge each other. Which is not exactly fluffy.
It's not about hiding, you know, from away from the hard and difficult conversations. It's about facing up to those. Yeah, I mean, it's why I quite enjoy the framework of Patrick Renzioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, because it puts the very next layer on top of absence of trust is fear of conflict. If you don't have trust, you're unlikely to engage in active conflicts.
And anyone that is having active conflict or debate knows that sometimes it can be tough, especially if you don't believe in the intentions of the individual because of an absence of trust.
Trust so most people don't think of this stuff at a conscious level but they know whether it's there, and when when it's not they know when they feel they can be confidently speaking up and they know when they shy away from sharing their opinion and i think when you when you feel the environment that you're in it is easier to know and understand whether you then have a sense of psychological safety and whether you want to
change that or not then becomes your next decision right both both as the leader in facilitating an effective team and as an individual that often, you know, sadly votes with their feet and will go somewhere else. Yeah, yeah, that's very true. And we see this challenge come up in our work around OKRs because especially when you're at the building stage and you're trying to come up with those ideas which are going to help you either seize the opportunity or overcome the challenge.
You know, sometimes it needs to be, it takes that one idea that's pretty left field, which people haven't thought about before to be, to be put forward. And if people don't feel safe enough to do that, then you could potentially miss out on, you know, something that could deliver real value for the organization. I think the one thing I observe now in managing teams myself is that There can often be, especially in younger generations, a real fear of failure.
Right. And I think the fear of failure needs to be combated with higher levels of psychological safety and acceptance that, you know, there's no stupid ideas and anyone should be able to have their opinion. There's no stupid questions. All of these things are signals to, you know, we're not going to shut you down or think that you're ill-equipped to do your job effectively. We just need to have the conversation in order to progress together. Yeah.
Rather than this kind of tread on each other's backs to get to the top type mindset. Yeah, which is usually very ego-driven and so on and so forth.
Nice reframe that we find to try and help kind of get away from the the negativity of failure is to frame frame these these ideas these as as tests yeah we we use experimentation as our language you know and okay that's drawing from scientific practice but if if science if scientists were fear of we're frightened of failure we'd never get anywhere would we yeah um so yeah exactly yeah yeah so you mentioned a few moments ago
about the kind of interplay between you know kpis hitting the numbers you know yeah measure what matters yeah versus behaviors so when it comes to a. Yeah, behaviour is super important. I think we just kind of nicely explored the psychological safety elements of that. But when it comes to providing clarity for a team, how important do you feel that is in terms of what's required, what needs to be achieved? Clarity of what, I guess, would be my question.
So clarity in where they're going, what they need to achieve, how they need to behave, all of those things vitally important right along with bernie brown has a great framework around the five c's for delegation which is all around context connective tissue helping people understand like what does this thing really actually look like because those people are well-intentioned when they come to work right nobody turns up trying to be a bad employee or
rarely do people turn up trying to be a bad employee so i think often clarity of expectations. In all forms that it comes vitally important because otherwise someone's going to miss the mark or somebody's going to be disappointed right yeah 100 100 and again that's one of the that's one of the real elements of value that we we see our clients gain from using you know from from using okay how's that that clarity a really solid key result provides for them i think um Sorry, just on that point.
I think the leadership conundrum is one of the axes or the swing is between high accountability or high levels of empathy or performance and well-being are often seen as at odds with each other. You know, the same with like traditional mindsets for organizational effectiveness being in competition or cooperation. But in a world in which work is now highly collaborative, you need high degrees of cooperation in order to succeed together.
It means that people need to have strong relationships in order to achieve the outcomes together. And I think there's quite a lot of age thinking that happens that we've been educated over time, you know, with core business principles of this is how this stuff works. The delivery model shifted quite a bit in the way that we have to rely on high degrees of collaboration these days.
And therefore if people don't have strong relationships if people don't have high psychological safety if people don't invest time to get to know each other to ensure that you know contribution is valued and it's known between those individuals the outcomes will suffer and i think often we see that it's a trade-off between one or the other i think more so than ever now one is a means to the other if that makes sense.
Yeah, that makes absolute sense. And you're right, there is often a tension between each of those, on each of those spectrums that you describe. And it doesn't have to be a case of one or the other.
Definitely not. and i guess it's you know the the skilled managers and leaders understand where to be on that scale for that particular situation that they're in at that particular moment in time as well because an arm around the shoulder and a little bit more empathy might actually ultimately lead to better performance than you know holding someone absolutely you know accountable completely in in a potentially you know negative way so to speak for um for performance so yeah
it's it's it's a delicate balance isn't it i think i think it's i think often the problem is that we look at these things as also binary you know like exactly business is a moving beast like it changes all of the time things happen you need to flex your style you need to flex your approach if you've just made a whole bunch of layoffs and you immediately transition into high accountability without empathy probably lose a lot of the emotional connection that people have to the
outcomes that drives their motivation and in turn their behaviors if you're in a position where you are too nice you probably won't get the effectiveness and people are motivated by progress it's one of the biggest drivers of employee motivation is that sense of progress So if they're not feeling a sense that they're moving forward, but they work in a nice environment, again, they'll be in a position in which they switch off.
So I think the art of the modern manager is knowing when and how to flex your style and be in a position in which you are equipped to do that rather than overwhelmed with a whole combination of tools and processes and expectations on you that get in the way of you delivering ultimately. Yeah 100% and I've I know it's quite an old one but I've always liked Blanchard's situational leadership model, for managers you know we'll all we'll all have a particular part of the quadrant that we will.
Naturally sit in but you know for you gotta you gotta manage a new joiner very differently to someone that you've had on your team for two or three years yeah you know just just sort of talking at eye level but um yeah that's uh that's that's something that's given me a lot of value through the years it's come back to this bot sorry that it just comes back to this bottom up versus is top down top down generally means you have to dilute the level of personalization to
the situation in order to serve the masses i think the manager is the path to high personalization but they need to be better equipped to deal with the situation means in turn they'll get the most out of the team but the team will also get the most out of the environment that they're working in because all of the top-down focus stuff has to be more generic in order to serve the masses you know so the more you can think about how do you empower
from the bottom up and provide alignment and focus through things like OKRs so people know what they're what they're there to do and achieve the more you can empower the manager I would generally say that the more successful the outcomes will be.
Yeah which nicely brings me on to one of the other points that was raised from in the google study which was around the meaning of work so purpose as you were just saying you know through alignment you can see how what i'm working on perhaps the okr that i'm leading how that links into you know a given strategic priority and how much it makes the needle move.
Curious with your work with mo and obviously the data that you're collecting from clients around, you know, the engagement and so on and so forth. How important are people...
Stating that meaning of work you know a degree of purpose in the work that they do how important is that to them because if we if you know a lot has been said about the the the new generations joining the workforce that it's increasingly important for them but what's your experience of that i think there is a lot of misconception by what purpose actually means like it shows up in quite a few like daniel pink's drive talks to intrinsic motivational drivers and purpose
it's in there i think the it's funny speaking to a customer of ours this morning that is in they're helping to cure cancer highly purposeful right right and we often also work with charities and so on and the sense of organizational purpose is often and can be when it's aligned to individual purpose perfect it's the best formula formula you could ask for right organizational purpose matches what someone individually feels like their purpose is in life and that is your winning
formula the the challenge i i find is. It's so rare especially as the organization gets larger that you're going to have a hundred percent of people that are joined up you know all of the wood behind the arrow in order to match that so i think we need to reframe sometimes what we think about in terms of purpose which is not everybody's going to want to do the thing that the organization exists for.
And their individual sense of purpose can be different, but still flourish within the organizational context. And I think a lot of what I hear, see, read around purpose is about how do you foster a brand that people can stand behind and care about, rather than how can you unlock the individual sense of purpose in the way that somebody contributes to the organization, which is why I come back to, the manager and the team in helping people live up to their maximum potential.
So that's my view on purpose. Individual purpose, huge motivator. Organizational purpose, varied. And I think there's some brands that have the opportunity to flex on that much, much more than others. And I think if you're an employer listening to this, you often need to give consideration to whether purpose can be one of your primary differentiators in the talent market. Yeah. Whether you're trying to manufacture purpose that then lacks authenticity when you try and bang that purposeful drum.
Oh, there's a there's a real sharp question that requires a lot of honesty, I should imagine, a lot of honesty to to to answer truthfully. OK, so in your work through Mo, you know, where you're obviously providing really important mechanisms for employee recognition. So tying this back into the theme of sort of high performing teams, talk to us about the importance of recognition in building and maintaining high performance too.
Yeah, sure. So generally in feedback, you have, you know, constructive or developmental, you have positive reinforcement. Depends on the school of thought that you're in, whether it's carrot or stick, or whether it's positive psychology, or it's living in fear of doing the wrong thing. How we think about things is key to building a high performance culture is in the habits, rituals and routines of the team.
You need to equip people to change their behaviors. And we do that through a combination of automation, a templates library for people to select from these high performance habits and a leadership assistant that equips managers to drive change within their team with personalized recommendations to have the biggest impact on creating that environment for their people.
How that flows through a manifest though is into what we call moments moments are social communications celebrations that people can be a part of in that you have the opportunity to further reinforce certain types of behaviors that you've observed in the person as they're going about doing these things yeah so on one half there's the equipping the manager element and the other part is how you provide that positive reinforcement
for people doing the right thing right the there was a really good mckinsey study that was recently done which talks to the.
Perspective of the employee on why they stay with an organization and the perspective of the employer on why they stay with the organization the number one thing that came out was that people feel valued for their contribution right they work 40 hours a week or whatever it might be they give their blood sweat and tears and they want to know that it matters that it's meaningful that it makes And therefore, acknowledging to them that what they do,
what they achieve, how they act and what they bring to the team is important is vital to people in often the truest sense of how they think about changing their behaviors. And this is probably a little bit deep. I don't know enough about your listener profile, but there's a really good thing from Huberman. So he's the professor, does Huberman Lab. Lovely, really good podcast for anyone that's into podcasting, listening to this one.
And he talks about habit formation. It's a two-hour episode. It's quite long. But the fundamentals of what he talks about in terms of what drives changes in your behaviors is goals or identity.
Identity and goals he used the example of you know if you were getting married and you wanted to lose weight it gives you a really tangible sense of purpose yeah to behave in a way that is different to what you might have been used to as an example whereas identity is a stronger force that over the long term will shape these consistent sets of behaviors around who you want to be so it It gives the difference between I'm an elite
athlete in the sense of identity versus I need to lose weight for my wedding and how those things cause you to think differently about habit formation and how some of them stick sustainably and how some of them don't. And I think when you think about that through the context of work and you think about that in the sense of we are going to be this type of team, which is a high performing team and therefore we must.
We sign up to these things, these ways of working, these habits, these rituals, these routines. Or more practical, you know, we have this OKR to achieve and therefore it means we need to behave like this. People need reinforcement that as they change what they're doing day to day or how they're doing things day to day is actually on the right path. Because often the goal feels like the top of the mountain.
Mountain, the behaviors are the steps that you take every, every day, every week to get up the mountain and recognition has the, the opportunity to play the role of positive reinforcement to keep the mindset strong, to keep the team.
Mindset strong in order to continue to pursue the goal yeah um so yeah no i think you make a brilliant point there about you know the power of motivation if it's if it's being guided by a goal versus it being guided by identity because goal is kind of a i don't know whether tactics the right word but it's temporary right yeah exactly it's temporary whereas identity really goes to to the the sense of our sense of self this is how we see ourselves and
this is how we want to be this is what we want to be known for and that that that's a really powerful question if you ask a team what is it you want to be known for i've actually used that in the past when i in, in a culture change program when we've had a set of values that we're looking to instill in the organization part of as i mentioned you know the example from my previous employer you know making it very bottom up so you've got the organization goals well this
is this is what these three we need to get our head around as a team so what do they look like and therefore what do we want to be known for as a team when it and so you do start to develop that sense of identity.
And i think that's that that's that's a really you know that taps in to that like you say that really deep that deep intrinsic motivator it also ties into it gives you a great sense of purpose for why you're acting and behaving in a certain way it makes all of your actions meaningful and intentional so a lot of the things that are talked to as a way of you know theoretically operating as a high performance team this loops into okay well what how actually do you do that
what specifically do we need to do in order to become the high performance team and you need to pick is it about that a goal isn't that a sense of identity is it a finite consideration or is it an infinite consideration because identity is long term by nature you know it's it's not going to happen overnight because you you have to walk the walk as well as talk the talk you know but it also plays to this bottom-up consideration because that sense of identity likely
evolves as the organization Organization gets too big to have one single sense of identity. So the role of leadership in my mind with that kind of. What is it? I think it's Dunbar's law or rule. I can't remember the formal term, but it's the sense of community. And when the community starts to subdivide is normally over 150 people. Yeah. Yeah. Up until that, that scale, you likely can create that true sense of identity or that clarity of the goal that you're all going for.
And in turn, what that means you need to do and behave in order to achieve it it does become a bit more complex to do it as a collective for 10 000 people and therefore the bottom-up strategy and how you equip and enable leaders managers to create that environment and those conditions for the subgroups bottom-up and can often create the opportunity for much more likely success i remember reading about how gore you know as in
gore text as an organization when they when when when a part of the organization reaches a certain size they they not exactly spin it off but they set it up as its own organization now i'm sure that that, presents a huge amount of challenges around alignments and i mean horizontal alignment here and and making sure that you that you know you minimize the duplication and so on and so forth but it's you know to have these sort of much smaller entities for exactly that reason you know know,
because they can become too big and people can become very easily disconnected. And yeah, so that, and that sense of identity becomes weaker and weaker, the larger you get. And it is a huge challenge for, for, for leaders and managers in that, you know, in large organizations to create this sense of identity, isn't it? Yeah. Okay. So. I think in terms of, from what I'm understanding about Mo and what that offers, it seems to be like a framework for recognition.
Is that a fair way to characterize it? Yeah. So how we tend to help customers from their problem space. So they're typically either, they've shifted strategy, they need to help drive changes in behaviors, engages employees and improves performance. Or it's a sub-part of that problem. They've had an engagement survey, and they're in a position in which the results are poor. And they want to be able to say, okay, we had this insight. How do we turn that into action? We would help them do that.
Or they're in a position where they've got a turnover problem. They don't measure engagement, but they can see more people than they want are leaving the organization, probably because they're unhappy in some way, shape, or form. And therefore, we would help them tackle those problems through the leadership assistant and some of the behavioral prompts that would help them shape this world-class culture. And then through these moments that really matter to the people in the organization.
That keep them informed with what's going on, connected to each other and feeling valued and celebrated for the great things that they do every day. Right. Okay. All right. So if any of our listeners want to check out Mo, there'll be a link in the show notes.
So, you know, please do that. uh so luke that that was been a really fantastic conversation you know this is an area i've worked in for a while but i've still picked up some new stuff from it so thank you personally for me i really appreciate it and i'm sure our listeners no our pleasure and i'm sure our listeners will have will have gained a lot from it too so that just uh leaves me to say that uh thank you for tuning in to yeah another episode
of giant talk i'm going to wrap it up there and i look forward to having you all join us again on another podcast very soon. Take care now.