Okay, well, we're gonna go ahead and get started.
So today, we're gonna be discussing the neuroscience
behind the culture, a culture of trust,
how that releases innovation, growth, and productivity.
It's one of my all-time absolute favorite sessions.
So we're in for a treat today, guys.
We're gonna hear from Dion,
and we'll also hear a clip from Simon Sinek,
which is an absolutely fantastic clip
if you haven't watched it before.
And if you have watched it before,
you always get something new every time.
So we'll add a link to the full session
at the end of today's training,
just to make sure if you wanna go ahead
and hear more of the stories
and the background in the session,
I highly recommend doing a full watch.
We'll also post that in the comments
and on Brilliant Later under the replay
so that you can go ahead and take a look at that.
And today, my pro tip for today,
as you're in the breakout rooms,
I wanna encourage you,
it's really easy to let others set the bar
for how you choose to respond in a circle of trust
and how you're responding in a situation.
So just remember that you have the ability
to shift the culture.
One email, one phone call, one Slack message at a time,
you have the ability to actually shift that culture
and build a culture of safety
with all of the little interactions.
That's what makes a huge difference over time.
Okay, so if everyone is ready to dive in,
go ahead, welcome Dion in the chat,
and let's get started, Dion.
Yeah, I'm super excited about the session today.
Welcome everybody.
Today, we're talking about creating a culture of trust,
and I'm so fascinated.
I've been studying this for quite a while
and quite a few decades actually,
and I'm amazed that if you get this one switch
in your culture changed,
what it releases in the people, in the team is extraordinary.
But just to give it some context,
here's the question I have for you.
If you could work in a place that you really love,
and what if the leaders in that organization
invest in you as a leader
beyond the skills you actually need for your job?
In other words, they're investing you for you,
not just for the productivity you could represent.
What would that change for you?
We all wanna work in a place like that.
What's really sad though,
is that reading a Gallup 2017 Gallup poll,
it was a global study,
and they found that only 15, 1.5% of people
love their jobs globally.
Out of 1.2 billion people, 15% love their jobs.
That means the other 85% was okay,
some even hated their job.
Now the numbers actually double that in the USA.
So here in the United States,
we have a 30% of people love their jobs,
which is double the global average,
but still it's only 30%.
So the thing that shocked me most about that survey
was that for most people answering the survey,
they said it's more about the people than the job itself.
Even if they love being in an environment,
even when you had to care for people you didn't like.
So here's a question for you.
What if it's more about,
not as important as what you do,
but who you do it with?
And so my dream as a leader,
part of why we created The Edge
was to change business culture
so that people feel fully alive,
love what they're doing to such a degree
that they themselves change.
So think of the impact, not just for the company,
not just for the individual
who's now in an environment that they love,
that they feel they're growing in,
but think of what that does in their home life
for their kids.
And the downstream impact of that is phenomenal.
So my goal personally,
I'd love to see the 30% people loving their jobs
go to 80%.
That's a very bold and ambitious goal.
And you're joining me today
in getting that goal started
and getting that moving forward.
Fortunately, there's a lot of people pushing for that.
So why is this so important?
Why is culture such a critical issue?
And the reason is,
is that culture will eat strategy for breakfast every time.
You know, you can strategize all you like,
but at the end of the day,
it's culture that can pivot really quickly.
When you suddenly face an obstacle as a business,
when you face a brand new challenge,
it's a culture that can pivot really quickly
rather than,
oh, well, now we don't have a strategy
to get back in the boardroom,
come up with a new strategy.
I think we overrate strategy in business schools.
So I wanna play a clip for you from Simon Sinek,
which captures this whole concept of circle of safety.
And then I'll jump back in afterwards.
It's trust and cooperation.
So trust and cooperation are really important here.
The problem with concepts of trust and cooperation
is that they are feelings, they're not instructions.
I can't simply say to you,
trust me, and you will.
I can't simply instruct two people to cooperate, and they will.
It's not how it works.
It's a feeling.
So where does that feeling come from?
If you go back 50,000 years, to the Paleolithic era,
to the early days of Homo sapien,
what we find is that the world was filled with danger.
All of these forces working very, very hard to kill us.
Nothing personal.
Whether it was the weather,
lack of resources,
maybe a saber-toothed tiger,
all of these things working to reduce our lifespan.
And so we evolved into social animals,
where we lived together and worked together
in what I call a circle of safety.
Inside the tribe, where we felt like we belonged.
And when we felt safe amongst our own,
the natural reaction was trust and cooperation.
There are inherent benefits to this.
It means I can fall asleep at night
and trust that someone from within my tribe will watch for danger.
If we don't trust each other, if I don't trust you,
that means you won't watch for danger.
Bad system of survival.
The modern day is exactly the same thing.
The world is filled with danger,
things that are trying to frustrate our lives
or reduce our success, reduce our opportunity for success.
It could be the ups and downs of an economy,
the uncertainty of the stock market.
It could be a new technology
that renders your business model obsolete overnight.
Or it could be your competition that is sometimes trying to kill you,
it's sometimes trying to put you out of business,
but at the very minimum,
is working hard to frustrate your growth
and steal your business from you.
We have no control over these forces.
These are a constant, and they're not going away.
The only variable are the conditions inside the organization,
and that's where leadership matters,
because it's the leader that sets the tone.
When a leader makes the choice
to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first,
to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results
so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong,
remarkable things happen.
I was flying on a trip,
and I was witness to an incident
where a passenger attempted to board before their number was called.
And I watched the gate agent
treat this man like he had broken the law, like a criminal.
He was yelled at for attempting to board one group too soon.
So I said something.
I said, why do you have to treat us like cattle?
Why can't you treat us like human beings?
And this is exactly what she said to me.
She said, Sir, if I don't follow the rules,
I could get in trouble or lose my job.
All she was telling me is that she doesn't feel safe.
All she was telling me is that she doesn't trust her leaders.
The reason we like flying Southwest Airlines
is not because they necessarily hire better people.
It's because they don't fear their leaders.
You see, if the conditions are wrong,
we're forced to expend our own time and energy
to protect ourselves from each other.
And that inherently weakens the organization.
When we feel safe inside the organization,
we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths
and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside
and seize the opportunities.
The closest analogy I can give to what a great leader is
is like being a parent.
If you think about what being a great parent is, what do you want?
What makes a great parent?
They want to provide their children with education,
discipline them when necessary,
all so that they can grow up and achieve more than we could for ourselves.
Great leaders want exactly the same thing.
They want to provide their people opportunity, education,
discipline when necessary, build their self-confidence,
give them the opportunity to try and fail,
all so that they could achieve more than we could ever imagine for ourselves.
Charlie Kim, who's the CEO of a company called NextJump
in New York City, a tech company,
he makes the point that if you had hard times in your family,
would you ever consider laying off one of your children?
We would never do it.
Then why do we consider laying off people inside our organization?
Charlie implemented a policy of lifetime employment.
If you get a job at NextJump,
you cannot get fired for performance issues.
In fact, if you have issues,
they will coach you and they will give you support,
just like we would with one of our children
who happens to come home with a C from school.
It's the complete opposite.
This is the reason so many people have such a visceral hatred,
sort of anger at some of these banking CEOs
with their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures.
It's not the numbers.
It's that they have violated the very definition of leadership.
They have violated this deep seeding.
in social contract.
We know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed
so they could protect their own interests.
Or worse, they sacrificed their people to protect their own interests.
This is what so offends us, not the numbers.
Would anybody be offended if we gave a 150-million-dollar bonus to Gandhi?
How about a 250-million-dollar bonus to Mother Teresa?
Do we have an issue with that?
None at all.
Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers.
They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people.
Yeah, we're going to give you a link to that
so that you can go ahead and watch the full clip.
If you haven't watched the clip, or you have,
I encourage you to watch that.
This whole concept of a circle of trust
is absolutely critical for us to unleash the potential of our team.
You know, that was a TED Talk that he did.
And when people hear that, they go, that's great, I want to do that.
If you think about it very carefully, culture changes very slowly.
I spoke to a leader the other day, and he was saying, man, I've met with my team.
I've told them three times, we've got to do this new thing.
And it just doesn't seem to take hold in the culture.
And so I said, well, of course not.
It's more like melting an ice cube, turning up the temperature one degree every week.
That's why you come to these trainings, one degree every week.
And after six months or so, the temperature will have risen,
and the ice cube will have become water, and the water becomes steam.
We keep using this analogy because what we want you to capture is this is
a slower process, but it is so worth it.
So let's talk about some of the neuroscience,
the effects behind a culture of trust.
When you have a culture of trust,
one of the three big chemistries are released in your brain.
So this is just pure chemistry.
Dopamine, which is also the habit former,
that little ping that you get when you get a text or a post or something on social
media, that little dopamine rush you get, why you have to check immediately,
why you kind of get addicted to your phone.
It's an incredible tool when it's used appropriately.
In other words, if people get that sense, that feedback,
this only comes when they feel safe and they don't have to defend themselves.
So in a circle of safety, if you feel that you have to defend yourself
from your own inventions, people taking credit for your work or
people going off to your job, or you feel there's a certain toxicity
to your culture, then your dopamine is not the thing that you're experiencing.
Oxytocin, or the hugging drug, that feeling that you get,
or what's released in your brain when somebody hugs you, that's that social,
relational feeling, that feeling of trust, that feeling of,
man, I'm accepted here, this is a great place,
and I feel I belong, that's oxytocin.
And then the third drug, serotonin, is what we call the leadership hormone.
And that's heavily related to that sense of pride in what you do,
that sense of loyalty and status.
You can see how quickly these three would very rapidly build
a completely different culture and a different outcome.
A different performance level will happen almost automatically.
It's only in this context you can build a team of leaders,
because that leadership hormone needs to be effectively engaged.
So how do we set up this brain chemistry?
How do we put this together in a way
that really creates that safe space where people can function?
Well, part of helping us understand this is let's start with what happens if we don't.
If we don't put this together,
if we're not able to create a safe environment where people can function,
then what we release is cortisol, that hormone is released.
Same thing you get when you're stressed,
when you're feeling that pressure, stress, that actually there's toxicity in your body.
You literally feel that toxicity go into every cell in your body.
What a lot of corporations do is create these kind of toxic or unsafe environments
where physically poisoning people's bodies, your brain locks up.
And then we're saying, bring your A game.
You should be creative.
We want to hear your best ideas.
And everyone's going, I don't even know my name right now.
I watched somebody in a meeting
where we were discussing things and the meeting went negative and the leader
jumped on them and went after them in a very specific way and asked a question.
Now, I knew that that person knew the answer to that question.
But in that moment, they could not think.
I'm sure you've had that feeling, right?
somebody like went after you and in that moment something is like your brain froze. It's like
what happened to my brain? The brain chemistry physically changed quickly to defend yourself.
You felt attacked and so what happened is you know you were struggling to remember your name,
let alone the answer that they were asking for. This is a very you know this simple chemistry
that's happening. So what if we don't have that in the company? What happens if we create that
circle of safety? Well we release creativity. Leadership starts to naturally develop.
That sense of belonging. Hey these are my people and even it's not necessarily everybody we like,
it feels safe that it's that we're doing this together. I belong here. There's place for me
here to grow. There's a place for me here to become the person I want to become.
So it builds loyalty, that sense of status and as Simon Sinek was pointing out,
cooperation starts to happen. Loyalty, trust, cooperation are not things you can command.
They're things you have to nurture. They're things that have to evolve.
So as we're thinking about this, I thought it'd be helpful to just referring to another
neuroscience study and it's the positive effects on your neuroplasticity. Now that just means
simply that how positive thoughts shape your brain. Your brain literally is constantly changing.
Think of it as you know highways in your mind. When you keep doing the same thing or having the
same thoughts, when something happens and you respond negatively or positively, it's like you
keep walking that pathway. So for instance in South Africa, when you're in the bush and you're
out, we had a game farm as a family and you'd see the animals would, through the bush,
they'd have these little trails and then of course the animals would keep walking on that trail until
that little trail became a little wider and soon it became a little pathway and over time people
started using it, then it became a well-worn pathway and every now and again we just pull out
the bulldozer and drive it down the road and make a road out of it. So that's a lot like how
your brain works. When you keep going down the same pathways, that shapes your brain. It literally
shapes how your mind thinks and so every time you have that stimulus, your brain immediately
goes down that pathway. The good news is you can rewire that in under seven days. That is not as
permanent as it feels. So positive thoughts, for instance, automatically increase mental productivity
and improve cognition, your ability to think quickly on your feet. It intensifies the ability
to pay attention. It improves the ability to analyze incoming data and it really just
overall enhances the ability to solve problems and be creative. So what happens is if you've
developed negative responses to things, the good news is you can rewire your brain in less than a
week. It's amazing how that's why they call it neuroplasticity. It's almost like playing
with what those kids use on the, what's the stuff I'm thinking about,
the dough, like the playdough. Playdough. Thank you. I came up with the word. Thank you, dear.
So the playdough is exactly, think of that as your brain, right? So you can see I spend a lot of time
with playdough. I have two grandkids. I should know what playdough is. So as you're
thinking about this, don't think of it, oh, well, that's just the way I am. This is not actually true.
You can change anything. It feels like the way you are because it's just a well-worn pathway, but if
you ignore that pathway and develop a new one. So, you know, one of the things that we can talk
about and how you can help rewire your brain is a rule we call the five-second rule. And so the
five-second rule, there's a book about this, which really talks about the fact that you can completely
change the way you think. Because if you allow, if you find yourself with negative thoughts,
what you're doing is you're decreasing the speed at which your brain can process information.
What negativity does to your mind is it literally makes it difficult for you to find solutions. It
makes creative thinking difficult. It literally is changing the structure and the pathways in your
mind. And even positive feelings you do have become impaired. You know, it's this idea that
it's this idea that if, you know, if there were 10 bad things happen to me this, you know, this week,
you know, all I'm going to think about is those 10 bad things. If I flipped it around and said,
I find great things happen to me today,
but one negative thing happened.
Guess which one I'm thinking about at the end of the day?
The one negative thing.
What is that about us that does that, right?
So the issue is, you know, some people suggested,
well, you need seven positives for one negative.
That is actually not true.
The neuroscience shows that it doesn't matter
how many positives you have,
the negative thing will immediately go
to the top of the stack.
So here's the thing.
At some point, we have to realize that we have to
declare war, if you like, on all negative thinking.
It doesn't mean you don't face facts that are negative,
but you don't let them define how you think.
And so at an individual level,
we have to address this negative thinking issue.
So let's talk a little bit about,
so that was at a personal level.
Let's upgrade the conversation.
Let's talk about how we are together.
How can we create a culture as a team?
And so there are a couple of habits that I believe
will really help us build culture.
The first one is what we call the in-the-room rule.
The in-the-room rule is you talk about someone
as though they were there, in the room, right there.
And I know that, you know,
if I had a situation happen where somebody told me
something negative about someone else in the team,
so I called, I said, hang on one second.
And I got the other person on the line and I said,
say what you just said.
And of course, guess what they did?
They toned it down.
They made it nicer.
The tone changed.
They've changed the words a little bit.
The idea was basically there.
I said, no, no, no, what you said was,
and I repeated it with the same tone,
with the same words they just used.
And they were horrified that I did that.
And I said, look, what I wanted you to learn from that
is that if you weren't willing to say it
in exactly the same way as you just said it to me,
you just broke a very powerful trust-building component.
If we're not sure how we've been spoken about
in the rest of the team,
then this is not something that builds trust.
So doing that simple little exercise,
which is a bit rough,
although I've only ever done that once, it's not my habit,
but it occurred to me that if we talked about people
as though they were in the room,
I was involved in the military at one stage.
And one of my jobs in the military,
my two years National Service,
is I was involved in a thing called electronic warfare.
And in electronic warfare in South Africa,
we were fighting a war in Angola
against Russian technology and so on.
My job was to listen in on all the radio communications.
So we had teams all over the country
and they would tune in and listen to people's conversations
on military conversations.
And as the enemy was moving around,
we were listening on their conversation.
We were tracking where they were.
We were using this as a very powerful way
of knowing what they were doing.
And we would crack all their codes
and all that kind of stuff.
Then it occurred to me,
if somebody was listening in on my conversation all the time,
sometimes I think my apps do that.
You talk about something and suddenly all the ads arrive.
I got to go, that's suspicious.
And so, but if that person was listening in,
if your team was listening in all the time,
would you say that in the same way?
So in the room rule.
The next one is just show appreciation.
It's amazing that just the simple act of saying thank you
or showing appreciation, but do it accurately.
By that I mean, show appreciation with precision.
By that I'm referring to,
I really appreciate that in the meeting,
how you drew the two people and weren't saying anything.
You have a great way of including others.
Don't just say, oh, that was great, good work.
I appreciate you.
Okay, but that's not precision.
Get precise, be precise about what you appreciate
because what you're doing
is you're making others larger in the team.
You're giving them a higher status.
You're feeding the chemistries in a healthy way
that we were talking about,
the positive chemistries in the brain.
So when we're talking about others
as though they're in the room,
then what happens also is we have to defend those
who are not in the room.
In other words, sometimes things get said,
the person's not there,
and sometimes it's up to us to protect those
who are not there to protect themselves.
And I think one of the ways to help the culture
mature to a new place is to say,
we do not trade in negative inferences.
You know how people can say a thing,
but they don't quite say it,
and they just leave the inference hanging in the air.
They create that little doubt, that little...
sphere thing, just calling that out sometimes is helpful. Because
when we trade in negative inferences, it's a very, we
think maybe, you know, what do they really mean? They leave it
open to interpretation. So if you have something negative to
say, and you're addressing a negative issue, then the best
thing is do it with a kind tone. If you're a leader, and you're
giving feedback to someone, you can tell them, you know, here's
here's, let me give you some feedback. When you do that, and
you give negative feedback with a kind tone, be very specific
examples, don't generalize their negativities, don't generalize
their mistakes. You know, you have a tendency to annoy people
is not helpful. You know, you know, I remember a guy came up
to me one day after I did some public speaking, he came back
and he said, you know, I always thought you were a very annoying
person, I realized, maybe you're not so bad. I don't know
that was meant to be a compliment or what was one of
those. Okay, thank you, I think. So the point is that if you're
going to give people feedback, saying things sitting down and
saying, look, in a meeting, you tend to dominate the meeting, I
want to make you aware on Tuesday, this happened, want to
make you aware, self awareness solves probably 80% of all
management and leadership issues, making people self
aware is a great gift. And it takes somebody who cares to do
that it costs you when you go to someone else, and you say,
here's here's some feedback that costs you, you're taking a risk,
you're taking relational risk. And the fact that you're willing
to do that creates a culture of trust, because somebody thinks
about and said, wow, that really cost them. So here's the
feedback. If you're the recipient of negative feedback,
my suggestion is you say, thank you, I appreciate that, period.
Do not expand, do not get defensive, doesn't matter how
much you disagree, don't like it, hold it, and give it some
time, give it a couple of days to think it through before you
give the feedback. And the reason is, we're all naturally
defensive. What happened there is in that moment, you felt
unsafe and you went into defense mode. But if you but if you can
hit the thank you, I appreciate that stop, if you can pull that
off, you will grow. You know, Elon Musk says that the growth,
the greatest growth he's had is has been negative feedback from
friends, the positive feedback. It's encouraging, but you don't
genuinely grow by that. Right? It encourages who you are today,
but it doesn't help you see what you can't see. And so when
somebody gives you negative feedback, it's usually because
you have a certain blindness in a certain spot. And that just
opens your eyes. And in many ways, it's a great gift, if it's
done kindly, it's a great gift. So, you know, as a culture, one
of the things we've set up in our own culture is if you have
an issue with someone, go to that person. And if you've talked
to them, and it fails, then complain up, don't complain
sideways. Complain up, don't complain sideways. What do I
mean by that? Don't go and stand at the water cooler, or, you
know, the online equivalent of don't go and talk to everybody
on why I talked to that person, they didn't hear me go up, go up
to the next person up the, up the chain and say, hey, I talked
to so and so they didn't work. Can you help me? Can you give me
advice? So, you know, if we start to get the idea that we
are in an environment where people are only correcting us
because they have our growth in mind, that is a very healthy
trust building culture. So, as a leader, pro tip, and we're
coming in for a quick landing here, pro tip. If we proactively
admit our mistakes, and report it first, and very fast, that is
a huge confidence builder, if you as the leader or as an
individual, so we the way we say it brilliant, is good news
travels fast and bad news travels faster. Be the first up
be the first one to go. So, you know, we had a rule in our in
our family growing up with our kids, and we built this in into
our parenting. And as Simon Sinek said, parenting is a great
analogy for leadership. And so in our parenting, for instance,
if one of the kids did something wrong, and they before
we even asked or even discovered it, they came and told us the
whole story upfront and own the whole thing, there was no
punishment. If we found out about it, ask them the question,
and they told us the truth, you know, it was probably less
of an issue. But if we found out about it, asked them and they lied or gave us a little
workaround truth, then it would then it would go dark for them. It would be tough, right.
So here's the thing, the same thing when you own your stuff first up. So we were running
a international trading platform trading forex traders. And I had a new employee was 25 years
old. This was his first full job. And he was managing some of the accounts and he pressed
the wrong button on an account and the client lost, I think it was about $30,000, just like
that, just from clicking the wrong button on a live trading platform. And because we
had this ruling place, he called me immediately. And he said, I have just lost 30,000 was my
mistake. I didn't follow the protocol completely owned it. And I said, thank you so much for
doing that. My opinion of him went up, my trust of him went up, I got on the phone called
the client, client was unhappy. But yes, what the client said, wow, I appreciate the integrity
and the care that you let me know, because the client asked me, when did this happen?
I said, you know, 15 minutes ago, 12 minutes ago. So I want to say this to you and end
up with this key thought is as you go through this, here is a great tip. Never add a personal
pronoun to a negative, not for yourself, or for others. It's not my stress. It's not my
this, my that. Don't add a personal pronoun to a negative. That's your first line of defense
against dealing with a negative world.