Welcome everyone. Okay, let's see who's tuning in. Hi, Nicole. How are you today? Hi, Jeff.
We've got so many fun people here. Hi, Tamara. Oh, Pam, Jaylynn. Hello, Blaine, Bonnie, Jamie,
Sarah Lynn, Deb. Welcome, everyone. If you wouldn't mind while we're waiting for everyone
to hop on and connect to audio, popping your name in the chat, where you're tuning in from,
what team you're a part of. That would be fantastic. So we can see. And if you are
international, like our team from Dubai, go ahead and let us know what time you're tuning in.
Because I know it takes a special kind of commitment to be here at 3 a.m.
So good to have you all here for today's session. I am Diya Bekio. If we haven't met yet,
I'm at Team Brilliant. I'm the Director of Marketing here, as well as one of the EDGE
coaches. We'll be joined by Dion Van Zyl today. He's going to lead our teaching.
And we're going to talk about taking your business to prime, one of my favorite teachings.
So while we are here, we've got so many different people and teams represented on the call. We have
technology firms, we have construction companies, we have marketing firms, legal counsel, excuse me,
legal counsel, education, all over the board across so many different industries. So to kick
off today's session, I'm actually going to go ahead and introduce a couple of teams just to
share who they are. We'll highlight a couple today, maybe at the beginning of each session.
And then we'll see who they are. Okay, so I see Bruce with Anovo. Bruce, would you mind telling
us a little bit about Anovo, the name of your company, what you guys do, and where you're based,
and about how many team members we have joining with you today? Absolutely. Yeah, this is exciting
to be here on the first week of the EDGE. And so, yeah, we're Team Anovo. And nobody really knows
who Anovo is, but we have a group called Kingdom Messengers. And we have a product called Tribe
Social. And so our team is kind of split between those two products. And there are five of us.
And we're all over the place, mostly on the East Coast. But we got Lucian in Canada. We've got
Tamara, and we've got someone at Dallas. And then we're in Atlanta. So that's our team. Yeah.
Awesome. Thank you. Welcome. I don't know if Stephen and Chelsea are on today. Can
Jenny do you see if they're on here today? If not, I'll go ahead and have Teresa introduce
Team Brilliant and where we're tuning in from today.
Let's see. There we go. Okay, go ahead. Do you want to go or do you want to wait for minutes?
Go ahead and go. It looks like they're not quite on yet. So I'll start with you.
Yeah. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. I am Teresa Cook. I'm Graham Cook's
wife. I am co-owner of Brilliant Perspectives. And this is our lovely team. We have Mariah,
if you want to give a thumbs up. And Jenny Taylor, if you give a wave. And you guys just met Dia.
You may already know her. And then we have Danielle. Give a wave, Danielle. And then
somewhere in here, I think we have Bridget. I don't know if we have Bridget. We also have
Jaylin. Jaylin, if you want to give a wave. And we're just excited to join you in this training.
It's changed our business. It's changed the way we do business. And we're really excited
for it to do the same for you guys. Absolutely. Yeah, pretty unrecognizable from where we started
out, which is exciting. All right. So before we're getting started, I wanted to go over a
little bit of the session today. So what we're going to do is we're going to start with a teaching
about 20-25 minutes of the teaching. Then we're going to go into breakout rooms with your team
members. So you'll have the option to join a breakout room. And you'll see your company's name.
So go ahead and hop into that name and that company. And then you'll have about 15 minutes.
We need to be back here at 145 to do a Q&A. So in your team, your team leader has some discussion
questions to ask and a dialogue about the content during the breakout time. And if you are one of
our solo team members, you have the option to hop into the solo team breakout room and discuss with
other solo entrepreneurs or startups the questions. Or you also have the option to just hop off the
call and complete your questionnaire by yourself if that would be easier to do. I love community.
It helps us accelerate our learning. So I highly recommend hopping in together with your group and
your team. And then I think that's it that we have for today. If you have questions throughout the
call, please pop them in the chat. I'll be watching that. Make sure we cover everything.
Also, at the end of the teaching, we'll have a Q&A session if you need clarification or want to go
further in one of the principles. And then at the end of the session, we'll have a Q&A, maybe
application, or maybe we've talked with it as a team and go, this isn't really making sense to me.
So please feel free to raise your hand during those parts of the session. And we will get to
as many questions as we can answer. We will end promptly right on the hour. OK.
Dionne, I'm going to
give it to you.
Thanks, dear, really appreciate it.
We're really excited.
Welcome to week one of The Edge.
This is season one, week one,
you're right at the beginning of the whole program.
And we're excited because we have put together
a systematic program that actually goes over three seasons.
Each season's about 13 weeks.
This is obviously season one where we're gonna lay
a lot of foundations around
how can we become a high-performance team?
And whenever you say that, a lot of people are like,
oh no, it sounds like I'm gonna work 14 hours a day
and Saturdays and get a weekend off once every three months.
And in the normal sense, that is typically what happens.
In fact, we've almost developed a sort of corporate culture
in that unless you're stressed out
and kind of working very long hours,
you're not bringing your A game.
But what we're gonna do over the next few weeks
is change that perception.
What if you can bring your A game
in a far more effortless way that feels more relaxed?
And so we're gonna talk a lot about making work effortless.
We can talk about how to bring delight back into your job.
And to do all this,
we're gonna start with a core concept
we call taking the company to prime.
So I don't genuinely like a lot of slides,
but I'm gonna just put a couple of slides up.
Just sometimes visuals help.
So I wanna walk you through just a few thoughts and slides.
So feel free to interact if anything grabs your attention.
It helps a lot of people
if you are throwing things in the chat
or you like something
or you want some clarification questions and so on.
So this portion of it is really,
and we'll do this every Wednesday,
I will give an idea, usually some power tool.
So where do we get all these tools from?
This comes from over 30 years of training and teaching
and including my own PhD
in which I studied all the best management practices
from around the world.
I was fascinated by some of the stuff
coming out of Brazil, for instance.
There is a company that just absolutely
captured my imagination,
stuff out of Malaysia, various parts of Europe,
a lot of the US of course.
And I'm here in the office in Santa Barbara, California
where Brilliant is based.
And so I'm also based in Atlanta, Georgia.
So I live on both coasts, so to speak,
or not quite on the Atlanta coast, but in Georgia.
So what are we gonna do is we're gonna highlight
a different thought leader in business.
So if you were to jump on Google
and say leadership training,
I think there's over 2 billion links
to leadership on Google.
And if you jumped on Amazon
and try to buy a leadership book,
I thought, I don't even remember how many,
over 2 million books on Amazon
and they just grow every day.
Excuse me, one moment.
We've been talking so much, I'm losing my voice,
but we'll be fine for the session.
So when you look at all that,
you think, how do I process all this stuff?
How do I gather all, how do I know what works?
How do I know what's gonna work for me?
How's it gonna work in a small business?
And that's our gift to you.
Our gift to you in these 13 weeks
is to pick the very best ideas
that really shift culture in a company.
What we do not want is to have 13 cool talks
and nothing changes.
I'm sure you've all done that thing.
You go on the offsite, couple of days on the offsite,
have some fun, talk about a whole bunch of stuff
and nothing changes.
Go back to the same stress, same work,
same everything, right?
And so why is that?
Why is it so hard to change working culture?
And so a good analogy is, if you think about Tesla
and you think about, Elon Musk once said,
it's pretty easy to create a prototype electric vehicle.
Many companies are doing that,
but it's a hundred times more difficult
or two orders of magnitude,
more difficult to create the machine
that builds the machine.
The factory that creates the car
is a hundred times more complicated
than creating the car itself.
And that's very similar to what it's like
if you're going to take your corporate culture
and in the next 13 weeks, try to shift it to a new place,
that takes tremendous patience.
It means bringing everybody along
and it means creating new language
and it means implementing all these things that we do.
So that's why we're going to have a breakout session
because what?
we want you to do, we want you to own these ideas, we want them to become your ideas, we want the
concepts to become your thoughts, your way of looking at the world, and then we're going to
highlight different leaders. So today I'm going to be drawing quite heavily on Ben Zander, who is
the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. He wrote a book called The Art of Possibility,
a really, really interesting individual who created for us a new paradigm of leadership.
I'm also going to be blending in a book by a very famous Israeli thinker called Isa Kedisis,
who wrote this concept called Corporate Lifestyle Cycles. That's for those of you who want all the
detail. For those of you who don't care and say, give me the bottom line, let me give you
the bottom line. So I'm going to just do a quick screen share here,
and then we'll go to just a few key thoughts and a couple of slides. So here we go.
Is my screen say move to prime? Yes, sir. Okay, that will work. And so what do we mean by moving
to prime? What is prime? When does a business get to prime? And to help us with that, here is a
quick little diagram. If you think about the life cycle of a business, it started as an idea
in somebody's head, and then they overcame the resistance, that's what the wiggly lines are,
the resistance to actually start. You know how many people have a business idea and never start
a business? Most people, right? And for the incredible courage that it takes to launch a
business and to start a business, and then to drive it to success takes a lot of work.
But to go from success to prime is another little resistance area, because of some core elements
that happen. It takes incredible effort to make a startup business successful, right? So maybe
you're in a startup, or maybe you're past that stage already as a business, and what you found
in getting it, it's like all hands on deck, crazy hours, and you do a lot of unsustainable things
to get it going. There's not really a division of labor, sort of as, you know, board meetings
happen in elevators or in the car on the way to the client. It is really a high-pressured
situation to get revenue in, get new clients, get the business, you know, supporting itself.
But getting it to prime is a completely different culture. It means everybody playing in their lane.
The simple analogy we use for understanding the difference between the two,
think of five-year-olds playing soccer, right? So if you've ever watched five-year-olds play soccer,
they all just attack the ball at the same time, and it's like a ball of dust, everybody kicking
the ball or trying to, and it kind of moves, the ball of dust moves around the field with everybody
having a go. When you start to move to a professional soccer team, is that everybody plays
a position, and they trust each other, they're competent in what they do, they're competent in that
position, and if one person passes the ball to the other, they have confidence and trust that their
team member knows what to do with the ball, knows the strategy, knows the game, knows the play that
we're going to play now. So that is prime. Prime is putting people in their right lane, allowing
them to lean into their natural strengths, instead of having a group of generalists doing whatever it
takes to make it successful, now we transition into people playing in their lane. So we're going to
talk a little bit about that. Now, if you get too strict with the prime thing, and people get too
compartmentalized, it starts to develop a bureaucracy, and ultimately that's how companies die.
So we're not going to focus obviously on the back end of this graph, but just to give you a visual
of what it looks like. So you may want to take a minute and think, where are we in our
company along this chart? I assume for many of you, you've got through the start stage, you're hitting
an element of success. What we do here at the edge is to take you from success to prime. What is prime?
Prime is that point at which the business can still thrive without the founder. So there's the
asset test, right? If we took the founder out of our business, would the business move forward? In fact,
would it not just survive, but would it actually thrive without the founder? So going to the next
concept is, with growth always comes complexity, and complexity is the enemy of speed. I mean,
you've seen this before. Before when things were simple, there were just two or three of us.
and we were making money and it was great and we were moving forward. It seemed to be chaotic,
but fun. And we remember the good old days when we still just kind of jump in and we all did
everything. We all did the accounting, we all did the marketing, we all did everything. We did the
shipping, we did everything. But now it's got complex and now we have different offices and
we have different states and we've got all these people and we're not clear about what we're doing.
And so everything slows down. But there's good news. If we can deal with the complexity,
if we can bring clarity, which is what we want to do over the next few weeks, is we're going to
focus on bringing clarity to your business, clarity to your role, and then putting the right people in
the right place, the right seat on the bus, so to speak. So in a success culture that when we
talked about a bunch of generalists, we end up with a lot of unsustainable effort. Yes, that effort
got us to success, but we cannot keep doing that. We burn people out.
It's not something that is sustainable in the long run. Secondly, the
complexity will continue to grow if we do not take control of it and drive simplicity as a core
idea. Thirdly, role confusion. As people start to figure out who's playing what position on the field,
it can become confusing as to who really has this piece, who has that piece, because
a lot of times in a small business, you wear multiple hats, right? So very few companies
have got to the stage where you really just do one thing. If you do just do one thing, then that's
where we're trying to get people to, so that the one thing should also be the
thing that gives you shiny eyes, that makes you feel alive. So this whole concept of
role confusion, people not knowing where they fit in, leads to discouragement, and then there's this
longing for, oh, remember the good old days, which by the way, is fairly delusional, because the good
old days were chaotic and you weren't making any money, or not enough. So as we go through this idea
of a success culture, we can't go back to what was. So you can't think old and expect new,
right? You can't say, oh, we're going to keep doing the old way of doing it, we just expect new results.
So we're going to talk a lot about how to think new and expect new. So to do that, let's talk about
prime culture. Prime culture is going to be built, is built on four key pillars, and that is we're
going to teach everybody about leadership. We're going to develop a work culture, so we know how to
work together with people playing their different roles and their different positions on the field.
Everybody's going to be involved in innovation, not just for products or for services, but
innovation at every level of the company, you know, counts receivable or HR or whatever it is,
and then economics. We want everybody to understand how we make money. We want not just how we make
money in general, but how what you do specifically contributes to how we make money. When we understand
the underlying economics, it's easy to think like an owner, even if you don't own shares in the
business, but we all want the prime culture is having everybody in your team think and act
like owners. In other words, there's a level of ownership and a level of feeling like this is
really important, this is mine, this is my contribution, this is where I have expression, I'm
developing my career, I'm developing my skill set, and to do all of this, you know, we want to go
through these four pillars over the next 13 weeks. So over the different seasons, we do this in
different layers, but here in season one, we're going to start with leadership. And you might say,
well, I don't understand why I need leadership training, I don't have anyone reporting to me.
Well, you do lead, you lead your contribution to the company, you lead customers, you lead vendors,
you lead. And so what we want to do is we want to move to a concept where we are becoming
a team of leaders, not just a team with a leader. And this is a big deal. This is one of
those things where when you're thinking about changing the culture of a team, it's really
tough, especially for the founder. Because the founder, in this case, by the way, what I didn't
show you in that bell curve, is in some cases, the founder can almost find it intolerable
to make this transition, because they're so used to being at the hub of everything,
and everybody being a spoke from the
and they just give instructions, but that doesn't scale.
That cannot become a long lasting company with a legacy.
And if you're gonna leave a legacy,
if you're gonna build a company that matters,
then we all wanna be part of a business
that has meaning in it, right?
We wanna be part of something that
when you wake up in the morning,
you're not just collecting a paycheck,
you want something that you feel like
I'm really growing as a person, I'm growing as a leader,
I'm growing in my skill, I'm growing in my career,
and my career path is starting to make sense.
We don't just wanna go through a process
where we collect a check and do work
and exchange hours for a paycheck.
What a waste of human life.
It's interesting though, that in every five or 10 years,
there are surveys done in Europe and the US
about how many people hate their jobs.
And I'm not talking about people who sort of dislike it
or the aspects of their business,
I'm talking about genuinely hate their jobs.
In Europe, that number is over 85% of people
hate their jobs.
What a waste of human life that is, in my view.
In the US, it's a bit better,
61% of Americans hate their jobs.
And I'm thinking, we have got to change
how we lead companies.
What if a company can become life-giving
in the way that it is led?
What if a company can change the paradigm
so that people feel their lives mean something
and their contribution really matters?
And that's what we're talking about.
And the key to doing that is to change to this concept
of becoming a team of leaders,
where everybody leads something.
They lead their contribution, they lead their team,
maybe they lead their department,
maybe they lead a sales team,
they lead some aspect of the business.
So let's talk through in a minute
what that could look like.
So here's an example that we found
really helped us as a team.
We call it the firefighter model.
And in the firefighter model,
think of different components of the business, right?
Sales, marketing, maybe finance, technology,
you will have your own list here around the team.
So the idea of the firefighter model
is for the client, the customer,
who's standing in the burning building,
needing rescue and is gonna jump onto this net,
into the firefighter's net,
then that net has to have a certain tension, right?
I mean, it's rather obvious to see that if it's no tension,
if it's all slack and that red dot in the middle
is actually touching the ground,
this is not a safe place for the customer,
for the client, right?
So on the other hand, if, for instance,
we have a very boisterous salesperson on the team
who grabs the net and through sheer force of personality,
rips the net out of everybody's hand in the meeting,
the customer still has no safe place to land.
So that means for a balanced team to really work,
for a team of leaders to function together,
there has to be healthy tension.
Tension doesn't mean something's wrong in your business.
Tension means something's right.
Healthy tension, where we all got our hands on the net
and we're pulling at just the right amount,
that healthy tension creates a safe place for our customer,
because now they're getting the best
of each element of the business.
So here's one of the big things we've seen,
even in big companies, you know, talking to,
a very large company of over 300,000 employees.
And I was talking to one of their sub-small teams
of 2000 people, and we were talking,
and this is exactly the problem they had.
They had such strong leaders
that someone kept pulling the net out of everybody's hand.
And so we said, well, and then the opposite problem, right?
We've got the person who just wants to get along
and doesn't like confrontation
and doesn't wanna pull on the net.
And so they come and move towards the middle
and the net goes slack.
So what this means is we all have to grow.
Those who pull too much have to learn
to bring their strength in team, in balance,
and those who are not used to pulling
and don't necessarily like confrontation
can find a style of bringing tension
in a way that feels right to them.
And, you know, this isn't about personalities.
This is about making the business function
and for you to find your space around the net that works.
And so you have to pull for your corner.
You have to pull for your side of the business.
That make sense?
How are we doing?
Let me take a quick check in.
We're doing all right?
Good.
OK, so the firefighter model idea
is to think about, do I have my hands on the net?
Which net is it?
And as the company gets bigger, obviously,
there are different nets.
There are different teams, different departments.
So maybe you don't have your net on the senior management level
team.
Maybe you're not in the C-suite, so to speak.
You're not the team leader.
But you are part of some team.
And you have your hand on some net.
And the question is, are you bringing enough strength
to bear, but not too much?
Are you bringing your strength in team,
in submission to your team?
So we need a new paradigm.
And this is where Ben Zander was really
helpful in the book called The Art of Possibility.
And I have a link, which we'll drop here in a bit.
And he gave us a new concept of the leader as a conductor,
the conductor of an orchestra.
Not talking about the trained conductor.
I'm talking about the conductor of an orchestra.
So think about an orchestra with all the different components
of all the different instruments playing.
And it's a big team, right?
And Ben makes this comment that he
said when he was 45 years old, he had a revelation, an epiphany.
And the epiphany was this, that he
realized he's the only musician who doesn't make a sound.
Now, I don't know if you know much about conductors.
But they tend to be some of the most talented musicians of all.
They often play masters of several instruments.
But he realized that he became powerful
when he made his team powerful.
He became powerful by making the different members
of the orchestra powerful.
Now, this has a lot of implications.
Because normally, our concept of leader
is more like braveheart.
Charge, and then they're out there in the front,
and all the horses are thundering down.
Some of you will die, but it's a risk
I'm willing to take, to quote Shrek.
So I mean, as you go through that whole process,
we usually think of a leader in that sense, right?
Go and charge and take the hill.
But what if there's a better mode of leadership?
The leader as the conductor, the person
who makes the people in his or her team powerful.
And this happens at every level of the organization.
This isn't just the CEO's responsibility.
When I talk about the leader's conductor, many of us
are maybe playing in somebody else's orchestra,
but we're also conducting our own,
if you want to think of teams and sub-teams.
So let me give a couple of thoughts
around the conductor-leader analogy.
So the first thing is, obviously,
we have to recruit the right musicians, right?
We can't have a bunch of drummers only.
We can't just have everybody on the violin or electric guitar
or whatever it is we have in each.
We have to have the right musicians.
And by the right, I mean somebody
who fits our way of thinking and who fits our style.
It doesn't help if we are a classical music
and we're trying to do a symphony together
and the person wants to do hard rock or jazz.
If you've got the wrong musician type, it doesn't help.
Well, I'm a programmer.
I can do accounting.
I can do whatever.
But it doesn't fit the style.
And secondly, are they competent at the level
that this team is playing at?
So there are team members.
We believe deeply in helping people
grow to as much as far as they will go.
But there has to be a base competency, a starting point,
enough to work with.
Now, this can be a very difficult thing
to explain to a team because there
are some harsh realities that happen.
So one way of thinking of this is if you think of a graph.
So I'll just use my idea for a second.
So if you think of a graph going up, right?
And as it's growing, think of the steepness
of the graph, the gradient, to be the growth of the company,
the rate at which the company is growing.
If you're growing slower than the company,
then there's a gap and the gap's getting
bigger and bigger and bigger.
Guess how that ends?
Right.
Or if you're growing faster than the company,
your growth is steeper than the company's growth.
Guess how that ends?
That ends like you get bored, you
don't feel challenged anymore, and you
want a bigger, more interesting job.
A good leader will always make space
for the fast-growing people in their team.
A good leader will.
identify we're not growing fast enough for this person, she's just too smart, she's too quick,
she's too quick on the uptake, we have to make space for her, I have to give her more space or
I will lose her. The other way of looking at it is if somebody's dragging behind we need to get
the gradient to come up and that's why we coined the phrase a team of leaders because you have to
lead and own your own growth rate. Well do some people just grow naturally faster than others?
Perhaps, but if you're in an environment where you always feel behind, you always feel stressed
and you don't feel like you're ever catching up, it may be time you know to tell the conductor
you're going to go and play in another you know with another team and if you're the leader of
that and you're seeing people instead of dragging them ongoingly some of you you know haven't done
the kind thing as a leader. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do as a leader is release that person
back into the marketplace to find a team that fits their growth rate better. Sometimes that is
the kindest thing and sometimes we want to be we have compassionate hearts and we want to help them
and so we keep trying to reorganize the business around this will not work, this does not serve them,
they just always feel behind, they always feel stressed. So I want to deal with the reality of we
have to have the right musicians in the team playing at the right level. Now that doesn't mean
we all have to be exact, not at all, but it does mean we have honest conversations. So what we do
twice a year at Brilliant is we sit down and say hey here's the growth of the company, here's your
growth, the gap is getting bigger. So here's what we're going to do, we're going to put you on a
we're going to start tracking you on a monthly basis and if in two months we haven't seen this
change we have to call it a day. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do to someone who's really
dragging who's drowning in the growth rate of your business is to release them and but we want
to give them every opportunity to be successful. We believe in people, we love people, that's the
whole point of this team of leaders thing. So maybe you have as a leader or you know you're seeing that
maybe you feel that you know like hey I need to have a conversation with the CEO,
I need to have a conversation with the person I report to because I'm just slowly drowning,
I'm unhappy and you know to use the analogy of a bus you know you might be sitting on the bus
but you just don't like where the bus is going, you don't like you know you're just not comfortable.
The kindest thing and the most honorable thing you can do is ring the bell, stop the bus, part well
and move on because you know the world is a big place and there is a place for you. It may not be
where you are right now but if it is and I'm going to assume for the moment it is then we need to get
every musician in the right seat so we can't have the drummer sitting right next to the violinist
and we can't have you can just imagine the chaos when we put people in the wrong space.
In this thing of it's amazing to me how many leadership programs and self-development programs
focus on you fixing your weaknesses. I personally think that's the most, that's the largest waste of
time I can possibly imagine because they're your weaknesses for a reason so rather than doing that
concentrate on your strengths and lean into your strengths and let your strengths lead you to
where you need to go. Some of you are in the wrong seat and you're not sitting in the right seat
in your company. It doesn't mean you have to leave the company but maybe you should be in sales
and not in marketing. Maybe you should be in a different role and so that might be a very
healthy conversation to have with your leader. I'm unhappy or I really feel I need
to be in a different place and the other aspect of why you cannot look at
yourself in the sense of saying I might be in the wrong company,
I might be in the wrong seat or you're trying so hard to fix your weaknesses that you're not
maximizing your strengths so the company is not getting the benefit of what you truly bring.
The next thing we want to have them all singing from the same sheet of music. We're going to spend
more time on that in the weeks to come. How to get clarity on what it is we're doing. Next week we're
going to really dig into that in a much bigger way and they know when it's their turn to play.
When you get the ball, to go back to the soccer analogy since we're switching between the two,
when you get the ball, you know what to do with the ball. You're competent and you know what to
do. When the conductor points to you, you know what to do.
do with it. So that takes some practice and some getting used to, especially for the leader to
trust the team member they just handed the ball to, right? When they call on, I always go back
to the conductor analogy, when they point to that person, they're going to come in on time,
in the right way, and they're competent, and they know their game, and they know their piece,
and it's well rehearsed, and they know what to do. There's clarity. Because here's the bottom
line leader. You become powerful by making them powerful. So the question is, how do we measure
that? At Brilliant, we measured the idea of shiny eyes. How alive is the team that you lead? And we
can tell how alive they are by, do they have shiny eyes? You know what I mean. You look in someone's
eyes, they're alive, they're there, they're engaged. That's what I'm talking about. How alive
are you, and how alive are you in your team? So, you know, here's what we want to do. We've set
ourselves a goal, is that if one of our team members leave, we want them to be the smartest
person in the room. Because what we're doing, and the reason why your leaders signed you up for the
Edge, the reason why you're part of this program, is to give you this great gift. To give you the
best leadership and management practices from around the world, crystallized, simplified, and
put in your hands. That's the gift to you. That's the gift your company is giving you, and why you're
on this training program. Is to give you that gift, that even if you moved somewhere else,
you will have been equipped. You've grown in your leadership, you've grown in your career,
and you've moved forward as a person. So, we want to create a work culture that people love
to be part of. We do not want to be the one where people look at the culture and says, that
is a toxic environment. We will get into, in weeks to come, the neuroscience of what happens
when the culture is toxic. The neuroscience, when people do not feel safe, the physical brain
chemistry shuts down their creative capabilities. When people feel safe and trusted, and there's this
feeling of, I love my job, I love where I work. For them to be creative and innovative is incredible,
but it's amazing to me how many leaders create a toxic environment and then tell their team,
bring your A-game, what's wrong with you people? You know, do you want me to fire you? You know, that
type of constant threats, constant people don't know where they stand, that kind of leadership is
not the prime culture we're looking to create. And here's the last idea. Small changes gain massive
momentum. So, we want to, week by week, tweak the culture, tweak your culture. In 13 weeks later,
we want the culture to be in a completely different place. So, think of it like James
Clear in the book, Atomic Habits, uses the analogy of, you know, if you have a block of ice and it's
at 16 degrees, and each week you turn it up one degree, when you get to 24 degrees, you go, oh, this
isn't working. But if you just keep going, at some point, by itself, the ice will melt. And if you keep
going still further, it will turn to steam. The conditions, the entire structure of your culture,
will flip into a new mode, if you keep tweaking it. And that's why, one of the best practices I
can suggest to any leader, is do weekly training with your team. Spend time working on the people,
and giving them more capability. And at the same time, work on the business, not always in it.
If 100% of your time, each week, is just working in the business, you will not get this benefit.
And the fact that you have all elected to be part of this today, congratulations. I think you're
making one of the smartest decisions, not just for your personal career, but for your culture, as a
team. So, let me drop out there for a second. And again, small incremental changes over time. Here's
where leaders get frustrated. They come up with stuff like, oh my goodness, you know, I have, you
know, I've been, we talked about it five times, how come nothing's changed? Well, you're going to have
to talk about a lot more than five times. It's going to be continual and insistent. Over to you, Dia.
Thank you. All right. So, we're running a little long on time. So, I wanted to give Brilliant,
Team Brilliant, we've been through this program multiple times. So, if one member of Team Brilliant
wouldn't mind raising their hand, I'd love to hear how transitioning to a team of leaders has affected
either you personally, or our corporate culture, or our productivity. Would someone from Team
Brilliant be willing to weigh in today? Or I will choose you.
So if you don't volunteer.
Jalen is Jalen on.
Yeah, she did raise her hand.
Look at that.
You know me well, do ya?
Yeah, I was just going to weigh in and say I think a lot of us
can probably relate to the feeling of the soccer field analogy
and we're probably used to being the star who can run with the
ball and we're kind of nervous to pass it to people because
we know we can take care of things.
And so I think in this training, it's really cool to be a part
of a team where you know, if I kick that ball, they're going
to be able to carry it.
They're going to be able to move it forward.
So it kind of frees me up to focus on other things outside
of trying to keep everything together.
So I think it just allows me personally to focus and to grow
in my lane and then also let other people do that as well.
Thank you Jalen for sharing.
So we're going to transition into breakout rooms.
Unfortunately, we don't have room for Q&A right here, but
we will have room at the end for Q&A.
So Team Brilliant, if you could go ahead and enable the breakout
room. So what you'll do, you'll see if you're on the desktop
at the bottom, you'll see a new icon that says breakout rooms.
Go ahead and click that and select your team.
If you're a solo team member, enter into the solo or if you
want to, you can also disconnect and work on the worksheet
that you were provided yesterday and on the welcome page to
the Edge and we'll be back in about 10 minutes.
It'll be a shorter time.
So you'll get booted from the room automatically and come
right back here and we'll enter into a Q&A and a wrap-up.
Okay.
Thank you everyone.
If you don't know where to go, I'll be here answering questions.
Waiting for everyone to join the audio.
I see we've got about eight people still in the breakout rooms,
but they'll shuffle on over here.
I know it was very, very quick today.
We'll give you a little more time in the future to actually
get into the breakout and the material.
It's very difficult to do quickly.
So as we're joining back in, I apologize for the short breakout
room today.
We'll definitely give you guys more time.
Wave at me if that was at least helpful or started the gears
turning for you.
Okay.
Okay, good.
And like I said, it'll be second nature and then a couple weeks
here. We'll all know how to get to our breakout rooms and not
get stuck and lost.
So, okay, we're going to go and move into Q&A and a little bit
of a sharing time now.
So if you have a question, go ahead and raise your hand in the
Zoom app using the reactions panel and then we'll go ahead and
take them one by one.
As you're answering the question, we have a very short amount
of time.
So please try to start your question with my question is and
give a concise question and also try to keep in mind to keep
it a little more general for the group that's here.
Maybe not a very, very super specific person or question behind
a person.
So go ahead and raise your hands now if you want to have a
question.
And if not, we'll move on.
Any questions from anyone?
No, okay.
Good.
If they come up later, go ahead and feel free to email us at
edge at brilliant perspectives.com and very, very happy to go
over those with you.
Oh, let me just check the chat real quick.
Yes, we will definitely give more time next week.
All right.
Dionne, Michelle asked what book would you recommend we read
throughout these next few weeks?
And I'm wondering if you could speak to that quickly as far as
what we're focusing on and what materials we want to be really
consuming.
Yeah, if you want to read more, I dropped a link there.
There's Ben Zander's book on the Art of Possibility.
It's a great book.
Definitely can read that.
And we can, you know, I think that will really drive the whole
idea as leaders conductor.
So we try to give all our references so that you know, the
sources of what you're getting and where you're getting it
from.
Some of its hours, some of its tweet, but most of it is
simplification of great leaders.
And so hopefully that was helpful.
Thank you, Dionne.
As far as Team Brilliant goes, I'm wondering again, if someone
else on the team, Teresa, I know you had your hand raised
earlier, if you wouldn't mind commenting, looking back on
before we started this training and in this particular area
where the business is at now, how has that impacted us?
I know that your co-owner of Brilliant.
So would you mind giving us a little feedback?
Well, I could speak to a lot of things, but because we're short
on time, I'll just share what I shared with our team, is that
I really love the concept, a lot of the concepts, but the
Firefire model, because I think what it does is it very quickly
indicates who's a team player and who's a solo player.
And so we've all worked with people who are always pulling
something out of our hands.
And we've also worked with people that you can't get to be
a part of the team.
And so I think when everyone starts figuring out.
how to pull together at it as a team player.
It showcases the other two very quickly.
And to be kind to everybody, everybody just redefines,
either you are a team player or you aren't,
go off and do what you need to do.
But the other thing I was sharing that I love,
and you guys are gonna see this more and more
even with Dion's training,
is that when you have, when everyone's holding,
when you're on a trampoline
and all of the springs are in right tension together,
you actually can springboard higher.
And that's what I love about this,
is that when everyone is pulling at the right tension,
you can springboard higher,
which means that you get a perspective
that's further out than when it's at your feet.
And so it creates this acceleration
because the whole team is seen further out.
And so you're not looking at the next step,
you're looking at the goal that's beyond you.
And there's just this acceleration that happens.
And I love that Dion mentioned in the very beginning,
just the whole practice of delight.
Because when you can move that fast
with that much permission and that much freedom
with a team that are all within the same mindset,
in the same culture,
then even the things that are not delightful,
you can totally practice delight
because you can move through it faster
without someone trying to pull or push something from you.
There's just an absolute trust within the team.
Absolutely, Teresa.
Thank you for sharing that.
That dovetails really perfectly with Madeline's question.
Dion, she asked,
how do we communicate with other team members
that are in the firefighter scenario?
I know there's a lot of wisdom on that
and there's also some ways to not do that well.
So Dion, would you give us some insight?
What a great question, Madeline.
That's fantastic.
I think that is the issue,
is that that is our job as leaders.
It needs a conductor, right?
So now we're mixing lots of metaphors,
but if you think of it,
if you had a supervisor standing around saying,
hey, pull more, pull less, pull whatever,
that's the job of the leader is to get that tension right.
Because who's the beneficiary?
The client.
How you serve your customers will be the beneficiaries
and how much joy you would feel in your team
and feel seen, feel like you have a place.
That is the job of the leader.
So the leader's job is to get the right people at the net
and pulling and then orchestrate the communication.
And sometimes I found,
if I just give you one practical point,
self-awareness solves 80 to 90% of leadership issues.
Sometimes people are just not aware.
And when you say, hey,
are you aware that when you're meeting,
you just suck up all in the room,
you just talk everything to death.
It's like, we ask you a question
and then you act like we clicked on the link.
Then you give us the whole thing.
We don't wanna click on the link
every time we ask you a question.
So sometimes just make people self-aware
is a very good way of starting the conversation.
Well, are you aware that when so-and-so gets strong
and clear, then you tend to withdraw and pull back?
What can we do to help you?
So many, many elements of leadership management
are fixed by simply making people self-aware
and starting a conversation.
It doesn't have to be aggressive.
It doesn't have to be combative or overly assertive.
Just start the conversation, make people aware.
That's all usually solves the problem.
I agree.
Robin added, making people self-aware
needs to be done with love and kindness,
just to underscore that point.
I think that's so good.
And I wanna encourage anyone who's here learning
and growing and ready to grow.
There can be tension that we experience personally
and in our teams,
as we're starting to really dive into these concepts,
as we're dialoguing about them,
sometimes there's some unlearning and unwinding
that has to happen before things can be rewired properly.
So that tension, again, is healthy and normal.
So if you're a leader and your team is working through,
well, I don't really know what's going on
or what does this mean for us?
How are we gonna change things?
Or if you're a team member and you're feeling that,
that's totally normal and it's part of the process.
So just keep coming back and keep sharing.
Really, really important to keep sharing.
As we're gonna leave the call today,
we'll have a survey pop up.
And if you could fill out that survey,
we wanna make sure that we are teaching on things
and communicating principles and explaining them in a way
that's really easy for you to apply them
into your everyday work situation.
We're not just learning and coming up with concepts.
We actually wanna see the culture change and shift
and make your job amazing and have less stress
and get more done.
It's real, I've experienced that.
That's not just an idea, it's a reality.
So as we're leaving the call today,
please go ahead and complete that survey.
And if you have any questions, like I said,
put them into the chat or send us an email
at edgeofbrilliantperspectives.com
and we will see you next week.
All right, thank you everyone.
You