Crafting Adaptable and Empowered Teams with RallyBright CEO John Estafanous

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork Podcast, where we explore cutting edge strategies to keep teams human- centered, drive innovation, and empower you with the tools and insights needed to help your team excel and thrive in today's rapidly changing world. Your host is Dane Groeneveld, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience in enhancing team dynamics and innovation. This week on the podcast, we're delighted to feature John Estafanous, an expert in enhancing team resilience and culture. As the founder and CEO, John leads RallyBright, a SaaS performance management platform, blending behavioral science with data analytics. RallyBright provides tailored professional development tools reflecting John's focus on innovative team building and enhancing organizational dynamics. Tune in to learn three essential takeaways that offer practical research fact insights into building stronger teams. First, uncover the often overlooked concept of a team's collective purpose. While the focus frequently lands on company or individual purpose, understanding and nurturing a team's shared purpose is crucial as it forms the backbone of organizational success. Second, they'll explore the science behind team dynamics with insights into research driven factors contributing to team failures, and John will reveal the primary indicators that predicted team success. Third, they'll explore the importance of assessing how different teams collaborate and perform together. Understanding the dynamics of how teams operate together or where they fall short is critical to fostering a productive and harmonious work environment. So teamwork makes the dream work, and we're here to inspire your next collaborative breakthrough. Gather your team or put on your headphones and let's dive in together.

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork Podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of the HUDDL3 Group, and today I'm joined by John Estafanous. John is the founder and CEO of RallyBright, and he and I have been introduced through a mutual acquaintance and it's been a great start to our relationship. So I'm looking forward to sharing more of John's story with all of you. Welcome to the show, John.

John Estafanous: Thanks, Dane. It's great to be here. I'm a huge fan and excited to be here today.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it's cool. I've had a lot of fun learning more about RallyBright and what's equally as exciting as the platform, which we'll talk to today is kind of your story and how you came to decide to start building the platform. So maybe you can share a little bit more of your sort of origin story.

John Estafanous: Yeah, absolutely. I would say it's more of an evolutionary story, that origin story, so to speak. So RallyBright just for context is a team intelligence and performance platform that helps you measure, diagnose and improve your team performance and your team dynamics and other areas around high performing teams. And the way I got into it or evolved into creating this organization is just through my own personal history. Started out when I was a young child, always sneaking down to the basement to program computer games with my brother. And then in undergraduate and law school, I was actually building hospital management systems where I really learned about the power of data and how when you actually track pre- treatment or pre- intervention, intervention and then post- intervention outcomes, you get a longitudinal view of how in this case a patient is performing. But across the spectrum of the business world, how organizations, individuals, and teams are performing. So I mentioned, I went to law school. I like to joke, I made the mistake of going to law school because I had never really wanted to practice once I got there. And during my last semester, I actually wrote a business plan for a business planning or a business course at law school and I was like, " Wait, this is a great idea. I'm going to go do this." So I started my first company right out of law school with enough self- awareness to understand that I preferred computers to lawyers. And it was a dot- com idea in early 2000. Obviously that didn't work out because we all know what happened later, but it turned into a software company in a marketing agency, and this was me right out of school and built an amazing team of incredibly motivated colleagues, and we did what the world never expected us to do. We built and sold to big brands and ultimately sold the company. And then that was the next stage of the evolution, which was, " Hey John, now you're the CTO of a 45 person technology department at a marketing agency with a 37% attrition rate. Go fix it." So it was somewhat shocking, but of course it was a huge challenge. And the first thing I did was I googled like, what does the CTO for a marketing agency do? Or there's no playbook, there's nothing out there. So I hopped on a plane, I met everybody, we fixed it, and then I went to a bigger organization where all of a sudden I had, we scaled from a 100 to 400 people with teams around the world that were all reporting to different P& Ls. And this was how do we drive digital transformation for a global agency? Once again, the same issue. There's no clear cut playbook for all of this. Without going into too much detail, what it really came down to the foundation of RallyBright was when I decided I wanted to do more of what filled my soul versus what I had been doing, it really came down to three things. It was technology, teams and people. And ultimately how do you create a framework to empower every leader or every manager to build a high performing team and what are the principles that drive that? And at my first company, I was very fortunate, our founding partner was actually one of my first customers, and she was an embedded executive psychologist at Microsoft for over 18 years. And we built some team tools, and my thought was, let's build a SaaS platform around this and let's give every manager, every leader, every HR department, every L& D professional, every talent management professional, a framework and a technology platform that can help scale building high performing teams.

Dane Groeneveld: That's so neat. So many great points to dive into. I love the way you framed it as an evolution that you can sort of see that sort of growth. And before the show, you talked a lot about, you actually mentioned the term fall up. We were talking about people being in teams and whether they fall out of teams, and you said they fall up, so you had some great examples there of falling up through your different moves too.

John Estafanous: Yeah, it's been an interesting journey, and a lot of it comes down to throughout that journey, how do the managers really, or the leaders really build teams and people so they can go on to bigger and better things?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, no, that lens of the leader is important. It's come up a couple of times in conversations this week because a lot of people will often talk about company's purpose and they'll talk about engaging employees, but they didn't talk about the role of the leader and the team, which both seem to be more central to the organization's ecosystem. So I think you're closer to where the real magic's happening there.

John Estafanous: Yeah. And if you think about it, who do you work with the most on a daily basis? We've all heard the phrases of you spend more time at work than with your family. And at the end of the day, it's not just about the company you work at, it's with the people that you work with every single day to achieve that common business purpose, which is Google definition of a team, a group of professionals that rely on each other to achieve a common business purpose. So there's a huge influence there, and the person that's going to influence that relationship the most is going to be the manager. And management, as we know, is different than leadership, but when managers become better leaders, they build better teams. That's just logical and true, and the data shows that.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, absolutely. And I couldn't help but miss when you said you got on better with computers than lawyers. I've heard some bad lawyer jokes, but that's a great statement.

John Estafanous: Listen, I have a lot of friends that are lawyers I respect the profession. I think we've got a great team of lawyers working with us, but at the end of the day, you have to understand where your superpowers and where's your kryptonite. And looking at law books wasn't where I was at.

Dane Groeneveld: Me neither. I actually tried to do law myself and the library scared me away.

John Estafanous: It's a scary place.

Dane Groeneveld: It Is. Yeah.

John Estafanous: And I was a literature major in undergrad, but the law library was a bit different.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Heavy, heavy. What's interesting, as you shared that story, John, of the 45 person team after you sold your business and how you got on a plane and went and met people and fixed that, I want to dive into that a little bit more today, but actually the next job really caught my ear. When you explained you went from a 100 people to 400 people in a global organization, you're running technology as a function, and those individuals report up to different P& Ls. So just the whole concept and construct of team there must have been really stretched through that journey.

John Estafanous: Yeah. There are so many different ways of looking at teams, and that was truly, I would say, drinking from a fire hose. You're talking global organization, you're talking about functional practice areas within broader geographic P& Ls, you're talking about multiple missions and purposes and objectives for each one of those teams, like how do we elevate everybody but still deliver what we need to for our specific functional goals? So to me, it was really, really interesting. And candidly, the first approach to that was like, what's our purpose? What are we trying to accomplish together that each manager and each team can contribute to? So yeah, it was remote, it was hybrid, it was matrixed, it was geographically dispersed, all of those things. And you have to start with the right foundational elements to get everybody aligned and then actually working together with strong dynamics to achieve that performance.

Dane Groeneveld: And when you touch on that, starting with a purpose for that group, was it a company purpose at that stage or was it the purpose for the technology function that you were leading, or where did you position that?

John Estafanous: Yeah, I mean it all starts with the organizational purpose, right? Because ultimately whatever your organization is employing you to do or asking you to lead has to align with the overall organizational mission. And then I think it's really around how do you define your functional or your team purpose around what's going to complement and enable and accelerate the overall mission. So not technology or in this case digital transformation just for the sake of digital transformation, but to elevate the organizational goals. And then it becomes how do we do that? Do we need to create the systems, the process, bring in the right people, how do we work with other parts of the organization? How do we understand how the organization sells to customers so we can accelerate that or lift the tide for everybody versus just creating a silo?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's neat. And I've heard, and I talk about it a lot on this show, Dan Pink introduced it to me, whether it was originally his work or not, the big P little P construct, which is there's the company purpose and then there's the individual purpose, but you're essentially introducing team purpose in between that. So maybe there's three Ps.

John Estafanous: Yeah, I would say there should be a team purpose, right? Because ultimately you want to align individual purposes to the organizational purpose. And that's kind of like the middleware, and I'm not going to get technical about it, but essentially-

Dane Groeneveld: I like that.

John Estafanous: ...the translation mechanism, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

John Estafanous: How do we support you as an individual to achieve your goals and grow within the organization? How do we support our team goals to ultimately drive those company goals? I think it's really important to be thinking about that. And we found, so it's one of the dimensions that we measure on the platform is direction, and that's all about what is the team's shared purpose and vision and how does that align with the organizational shared purpose and vision? And we have a little exercise, which is build a team, lead a business. So your team might be the senior leadership team for an operating unit within an organization. It might be a team that's building product, but ultimately you need to know what you're doing that for and how it aligns with the customers, the company, and how it fulfills the individuals.

Dane Groeneveld: And that build a team, lead a business concept, so is that trying to almost empower each team in a business to act like an owner? We hear a lot of people say employee and ownership mindset, so are they thinking about leading the business of their function versus the business of the wider organization?

John Estafanous: Yeah, it starts at the function, right? Because we want to make sure that we have agency and accountability within our team to actually achieve the goals that we're setting out. So we talk a lot about how do you measure performance on a team? Oftentimes we're looking at spreadsheets, right? We're looking at P& Ls, or we're looking at timecards, or we're looking at OKR platforms or whatever. But at the end of the day, when we look at performance on a team, what we're really looking at is are we clear on our objectives? Does everybody have ownership and accountability and commitment to one another as a team? And are we measuring ourselves in a way that we all agree on as a team and meeting our commitments with a bias for action?

Dane Groeneveld: I like that.

John Estafanous: It's a different lens, but they all filter into the same objectives, if that makes sense.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, because you do see a lot of teams deploy OKRs, but being clear on objectives, people can run out and set their own OKRs that excite them and impress the boss, but it doesn't necessarily get the team aligned on an objective. And then as far as the ownership and accountability, it's not necessarily something that is shared at a team level. It might be, I've seen a lot of OKRs deployed where an individual's chasing their piece or a function's doing it without thinking about customers. So you can get into a lot of trouble if you don't have that alignment.

John Estafanous: I think it's really important because most of what we all do is a team sport, whether we like it or not, you know what I mean?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

John Estafanous: It's business is a team sport. Any function that you look at is a team sport. It's very rare that you find an individual that operates alone in an ivory tower, and that's how they're held accountable and that's how they help others.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. There may be a few examples in the deep R& D scientific world where there's someone who's just off the charts, but there's often a team that they're coming back into as autonomous as they may be.

John Estafanous: Yeah. And then they should still be held accountable to others and others have teams. And that's kind of ultimately what it comes down to is it's very rare that we never see it, but obviously we're somewhat biased in terms of the folks that we talk to because we're a platform.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, you're in your own world. A friend of mine the other day said, I'm living on a very different algorithm to you, and I'd never thought that I was living on an algorithm, but there it is again.

John Estafanous: We won't go there, but I agree with you, but we all have our own algorithms that we follow, for sure.

Dane Groeneveld: So the other point that you made in your introduction, John, was your, I think you said first customer, and was it co- founder also who'd been psychologist at Microsoft?

John Estafanous: Yeah. Yeah, she was... So at that very first company I started right out of law school, we were building team assessments and individual 360 assessment tools for our partner who was using them at Microsoft, which was kind of cool that we had Microsoft as a customer, as a startup right out of school. And what I really learned from that is the importance of having a framework. Obviously you learn that when you're building medical systems because that's just how things are done. What we learned is by tracking diagnosis, treatment and the various codes that are all associated with that, we could extract data around productivity, around billing, around clinical outcomes, all sorts of really, really interesting things. And really all they wanted was how do we collect data? How do we get patients through the system faster? But at the end of the day, it's okay, we're doing this many more of these types of procedures. We're seeing this many more types of patients. This is how the outcomes are being driven by the types of interventions that we're doing. So learning about the fact that there were frameworks around the people side and specifically frameworks around the team side, I think it's absolutely critical because most organizations aren't measuring teams at the same way that they're attempting to measure overall engagement with their engagement surveys or individual performance with performance reviews. And I think that's a huge gap because as we've been talking about and once again understanding our own bias here, teams are the core business drivers for most organizations, but most organizations don't have a framework to say without bias and without kind of the filtered views of the leaders, how are teams doing collectively, and what are themes that we're seeing in our organization and how do we measure this in a way that's giving us longitudinal data so we can optimize how we bring people together, how we enforce their working relationships, how we track their non spreadsheet performance, because that's a huge driver I think for all of the things that companies are doing now around engagement, around individual performance, around business outcomes, what have you.

Dane Groeneveld: And even in today's age, particularly if you are a heavy customer facing organization, there's that whole community engagement and relations which is becoming bigger and bigger. We're seeing that with a lot of big brands getting canceled or getting a big following because they have a better environmental sustainability footprint. A lot of these things are off spreadsheets too.

John Estafanous: Yeah, no, of course. And I think what you're alluding to is this concept of is a team adaptable? What is their outside in focus? Do they understand their customers? Are they hearing what's happening in the market? We've seen candidly, a steady erosion and adaptability across teams over the last couple of years. They're really, I think two primary drivers of that. One is at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, teams became a lot more siloed. The connection rates on teams actually went up pretty significantly because people were more empathetic with the people that they work with every day. And a lot of those relationships got stronger. As we're coming out of COVID, we're finding that those silos have actually, they've created it a little bit a harder environment for teams to work with other teams.

Dane Groeneveld: Other teams. Yeah.

John Estafanous: Yeah. And that connective tissue between teams has deteriorated somewhat as we've dealt with fully remote, hybrid, now return to office, the culture of being able to walk down the hall or have a lunchroom conversation with somebody who's not on your team at another department. So we always joke, there's always been friction between things like sales and marketing or product and engineering or finance and everybody. But at the end of the day, a lot of times those relationships, there were these unspoken ways of working together to get through those disconnects, whether it's picking up the phone, walking down the hall, or seeing somebody at lunch. Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

John Estafanous: That adaptability, so that was the first driver of the adaptability erosion. The second is just the rate of disruption. It's been nonstop, as we all know over the last three years with all the things that we mentioned. And there's a lot of fatigue, and I think there's a lot of narrowing of the aperture to what do I need to do to accomplish my goals today versus who do I need to be speaking to and getting feedback from and building relationships with to accomplish our goals for the future.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. There are two themes I think that any business owner can or any leader of an HR or people function can associate with very easily right now. And visually, that siloing effect that you talk about that kind of erodes some of the connective tissue between teams. I can totally see that in businesses that we operate in, businesses that we support, you've seen that strengthening of the individual team at the cost of the teams and the ecosystem. And that can have some really, that gets compounded by your second point on the rate of disruption because most disruption isn't singular in its function. Most disruption comes across the customer and all of those functions, engineering, sales, marketing. And so when that change is happening, if each of those groups is really firm and rigid on, hey, this is how we operate, this is what we do, we love each other but we don't have quite as much time for you, that just causes probably a lot more of this burnout that we're seeing where people just constantly feel like they're being asked to do new stuff, but it's not what they want to do. And they're in all sorts of meetings. It all just kind of builds.

John Estafanous: Yeah. And burnout is another one of those things that's very real. I mean, you see it now with the increased focus on individual wellbeing or employee wellbeing. We've actually, while connection spiked at the beginning of the pandemic, we're actually now seeing what we call a barbell effect on connection on teams. And this is something I think every leader needs to be cognizant of is, sure, you may have made it through this together, but now we tend to have groups of people that are very close and groups of new people that are coming in trying to navigate how do I build connections on teams in a remote hybrid world? But then the burnout is also causing some of those folks that have kind of been through the past several years of disruption to start to disengage and start to fall off. So we end up seeing very clear clusters of strength of connections on teams. You can have a team of 10 people, six of them may feel very connected and aligned, four of them may be struggling. And once again, it's the power of data that helps you get beyond that without having to ask, how are you feeling today? But asking more about how is the connection on our team? Do we have psychological safety? Do we have trust on the team? Are we handling conflict appropriately? By being able to get to the behaviors that drive connection, and that's part of what we do on RallyBright is we are behavioral science- based, understanding what's happening with your team members without calling them out. But once again, looking at the team as a collective is really, really important.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And I saw one of your team members had made a post which you'd liked on conflict, and I love the way you broke down the three types of conflict. I think it was relationship, process and task. And it sounds like what your data is allowing teams and both macro and micro within the organization and at large in our society, it's a leading indicator. It's saying, hey, this is coming. The conflict's there. If you don't start addressing it or creating that psychological safety in these teams that are kind of a little bit stuck, that the real damage is yet to be seen.

John Estafanous: Yeah. And I would say not just stuck, but one of the things we're seeing on a lot of the executive teams or senior leadership teams is folks are a lot crispier. And I use that term crispy as, it's something we use in the platform, but the thought is we're all trying to do more with less, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Got it.

John Estafanous: And we're all under the gun and we're all dealing with macroeconomic and geopolitical and all sorts of other things. So people are getting a little bit crispier. And I think oftentimes what organizations or this is something I learned very, and it was a key learning for me is conflict is not a bad thing in business. In fact, conflict if it's handled well and productively is a driver of innovation, creativity, and new ways of problem solving. And first we have to segment what type of conflict are we encountering? But then as we move towards that resolution, are we not damaging relationships and are we not making things personal? Because when we can do that, look, it's funny, I was just listening to a podcast with Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake, and he was basically saying, when you hire a great team, you want them pulling you, you want to be holding onto the reigns, not pulling the cart. And when you have that happening, there's going to be conflict. There's going to be kind of clashing, and that's expected, whether it's between departments or between individuals. But that's where the real magic happens when you're able to say like, okay, this is about the issue, it's not about the person. And if we solve this collectively, we're all going to be better off for it. Because usually what's happening when there's conflict is difference of opinion, difference of approach, difference of process. But the people that are usually bringing their points of view to bear, they're there for a reason. So it's the delivery you have to get beyond it. We actually have a tool in the platform as well that focuses around how do you understand your own conflict style and how do you look at the team conflict style? Because just like there are different psychology personas or psychometric personas, there are different conflict styles, like I am an enforcer problem solver. The first thing I'm going to want to do is figure out what the solution is and go for it, but then I'm going to want to dive a bit deeper. We have another conflict type called the problem solver peacekeeper. If everybody on the team is a problem solver peacekeeper, you're going to spend a lot of time digging into the root cause and then trying to get everybody on board. inaudible being aware of that.

Dane Groeneveld: And I guess there's different, that's really interesting on conflict styles, there's different learning opportunities that come from the combination we talked a bit about leaders earlier and the importance of a leader on a team. But if a leader's style is to be more that peacekeeping problem solver, then the rest of the team maybe gets stuck on all of the root cause analysis and isn't learning about how to jump in and fix things quickly. So it's fascinating.

John Estafanous: Yeah, the number nine lowest behavioral indicator that we have in terms of a team's, so the number nine vulnerability for most teams is that they often get stuck overanalyzing issues and failing to move forward. Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I've often said that to friends, sometimes it's better to make the wrong decision than a slow decision.

John Estafanous: Exactly. And candidly, number five is we don't surface and resolve conflict in a productive way. So when you see how these things begin to overlay, you can start to say, okay, how do I start to address these things? There's the Bezos disagree and commit, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

John Estafanous: At some point, the quicker you can get to that disagree and commit, depending on the level of decision, the better you are at being able to adapt to what's happening to the world outside you. And I think that's correct.

Dane Groeneveld: Now that you've given me two of the nine, I'm intrigued. I want to hear what the other seven are. So what's the top one? Have you got them there?

John Estafanous: Well, the lowest ranking is team members don't understand how other teams are executing on their agendas, how our team enables other teams to execute on their agendas. So once again, it's that how does our purpose ladder into the purpose of other teams within the organization?

Dane Groeneveld: It's the middle P, I'm going to call it. I like that.

John Estafanous: Yeah. I like that. I'm not going to go through the whole list, but decision follow through, productive meetings, internal focus. Candidly, they tend to focus more around some of those connection personality issues. And that's one of the reasons we incorporated psychometrics into the platform because teams are made up of people and the better we understand ourselves first and others, the better we can perform collectively. So at the end of the day, there are some around connection, but most of the areas where teams are struggling is around this adaptability area. And that's something that we're just seeing pretty clearly through the data and through just qualitative experiences with folks and having conversations like this with leaders.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's neat. And adaptability keeps coming up, so I want to dive into that. There's a lot of great guests we have on the show that come in and talk about the way that we do work is broken and that we've made work really burdensome and not fun and very rigid. And I've personally got some stories and experiences like that. Earlier in my career I was lucky to keep falling up into roles where I'd get into a team and we had a whole lot to do, and it was just like, Dane, go and do it. So I got to work out visa and immigration processes, work out background and drug checks for people that were in Africa when I'm trying to deploy them to Australia, build partnerships in different regions so that I could support my teams when they were deployed to countries where I wasn't. So I got to do all of this cool stuff, and that was because the business was growing. And then in larger organizations, well, there's a department that does that, and there's a role that does that. So your job is just make a lot of calls and get more customers on the phone. So you kind of start to get siloed. And I think that hyper- specialization of roles that we've seen in a lot of growing organizations and technology's played its part there too, has actually impacted, I've always thought at an individual level, adaptability, but absolutely from what you are sharing here, it's impacting adaptability at a team level too, because there's all of this systems, tools, process, which is designed to be repeatable and not broken and not messed with.

John Estafanous: And the question is, it's a balance, right? You're always going to have the balance. And another vulnerability that we've seen is that the team's not experimenting enough. And in order to actually successfully experiment, you have to have the right environment. You have to have the right process. You have to be able to say, okay, instead of falling up, let's fail forward. Let's run experiments. Let's time box them, let's set clear objectives, and then let's make sure that we're learning and growing from the experience. So that fits directly into what we talk about between high performing teams and resilient teams, so to speak, because our product is called resilient teams, and that means a team is able to engage with adversity, rebound from setbacks quickly, sustained performance through disruption, and learn and grow from the experience. So there are components of having a growth mindset, not just at the individual level, but at the team level. And in order to have that mindset, you have to have that foundation of safety and belonging and the fact that we are going to create an environment where it's okay to try new things within constraints, but to learn and grow from them. Because ultimately it's like conflict. If you do this right, it's going to elevate your game.

Dane Groeneveld: That's a big unlock. I'm going to get you to repeat those four, John. So you said engage with diversity, rebound from...

John Estafanous: Rebound from setbacks.

Dane Groeneveld: Setbacks.

John Estafanous: Sustained performance through disruption, and learn and grow from the experience.

Dane Groeneveld: That's awesome. Yeah, I like that model. We had a guest on the show, Luke Williams, who's a professor up at NYU Stern. He wrote the book Disrupt, and I've been referencing him a lot lately from the conversation I had with him because it created his approach to ideas and teams being encouraged to play with ideas and experiment, to use your word, was a way of saying, hey, in this world of disruption, we just talked about that earlier, the only way you can stay ahead of it or create your own disruption is that if you're constantly experimenting and look for ways that others outsiders may break what's great about your product or your service or your customer experience. So he's doing that through his idea skills platform, but there's a lot of symmetry there, and it's driving the right, the invitation I think is a really important part. It's an invitation for teams to become resilient. It's not, hey, if you want to be resilient, go into the gym and do a 100 press- ups every Tuesday and then go swim. It's like, let's actually play as a team. So I like that the way that you've framed that.

John Estafanous: Yeah. And once again, it's having that agency and commitment and accountability of the team as a group to be able to do that. And I think also just having the right foundations and obviously measuring what matters, but in order for a team to truly hit its objectives, they have to be working as a team. That's kind of like step one. And that's why you have to look at the people side as well as the process side. I love the analogy that our friends over at Contemporary Leadership Advisors has shared with us, and we use this in our trainings, is do you want your team to be graphite or do you want your team to be a diamond because they're both made of the same molecules, carbon, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

John Estafanous: And it's really about how they're connected to one another.

Dane Groeneveld: And graphite's crispy.

John Estafanous: Graphite's a little bit crispy. Yeah, exactly. And it's layered and it's stacked and whereas you want the matrix, right?

Dane Groeneveld: No, but I totally agree with you. It's funny when you mentioned crispy earlier and you talk about resilience now, my dad's always been a big proponent of what he calls staying in the elastic zone. He's like the elastic zone's where you and the team need to be. And once you go outside of that, well, it's plastic and you push too far, and there's breakage, there's damage for you personally, for your team, for your customers. And I think it's a good way to be visually thinking about teams, particularly getting away from spreadsheets like you said earlier.

John Estafanous: Yeah. And understanding what are the characteristics of that elasticity that you're looking for. I think that's really important. Do we want a wide rubber band, a narrow rubber band? Do we want something that can flex and grow? And what are the parameters for that? I think it's really important, but it's all about enabling the team to operate as a high performing individual, but as a collective, as a team. And that's all the things you want in leaders you want out of the team as a group.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, no, that's neat. So with your platform, as I've come to become more familiar with it, which has been awesome, you've got these team vulnerabilities that you've mentioned and you will operate in Sprint. So as I look at it, you are creating this framework for the team to be doing what's important to them in their day job, but also to be growing as a team and working on some of those interactions and accountabilities and goal setting opportunities. Where do you see, as that starts to happen in the organizations where you're having success, where do you see that sort of taking teams in the future? Is that going to redefine sort of role design and team composition? Is it going to take teams into expanding the capabilities of their functions? Are there particular sort of outcomes that they're starting to lead into?

John Estafanous: Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, it's around how do we create the healthiest, highest performing and inclusive teams possible? So how do we get all of our managers upskilled to the point where they understand what it means to be a good leader and have a framework by which they can measure how they're doing and how their teams are doing. There is that elasticity component to it as well as how do we define teams and how do we actually look at team relationships, interdependently within an organization, but also between individuals. So I think there are some opportunities there as well. In terms of the overall function and roles of the teams, those are generally set by the external org charts and whatnot. But what we have found is there are ways to identify where are teams operating much stronger? What are the strengths of our organization as a whole that we want to reinforce? What are the vulnerabilities that are creeping up that are maybe cultural canaries in the coal mine or performance canaries in the coal mine across an organization? And where have we addressed these strengths, where have we doubled down on these strengths effectively, and where have we addressed the vulnerabilities effectively? So I think that's kind of the baseline. For individual managers or individual teams and leaders, what we found is that elasticity is critical, because guess what? Every quarter or every four to six months, we're going to get a pulse on where we are. And we want to, just like anything, we want our numbers to go up into the right, but we also want our connections to be stronger, our alignment to be stronger. And we also have to understand that our vulnerabilities can and should change.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

John Estafanous: So what we're working on now is going to be different than what we need to work on next. So I think about one customer, and this is probably the most basic example, but every year as we've worked with them in the bottom 10 of all their teams was we have unproductive meetings. And for the first year ever, it was like, hey, our meetings are not in the bottom 10. All of our scores have come up, which means that vulnerability is now a strength. We're having productive, more effective meetings. It seems basic, but you think about what that means to the several 100 people that are in meetings every day, and the amount of time that's being spent and the outcomes of those meetings, that translates directly to the bottom line in those performance metrics that we all want to measure on our spreadsheets.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, absolutely.

John Estafanous: Yeah, I think there's the creating a framework to look at not just performance, but the behavioral components and the people components and the cultural components of what makes a team great, but then also learning, adapting and stretching against that as well.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And so we've talked a couple of times on leading indicators which your data will start to show, and I'm hearing that again there, but something that just popped up new was you mentioned maybe mapping the wider organization for some hotspots, whether that's a gap or it's a strength. And that's really interesting because in a fast changing world, we don't always know what we want or why we want it. Sometimes you kind of got to just stumble across something, a jam and then try and expand it. So are you seeing, as you look at multiple teams within an organization on platform, that there is this kind of next practice best practice identification that starts to emerge?

John Estafanous: Absolutely. And it's one of the things we love partnering with our HR partners on within organizations, because obviously you can't give somebody like me a whole bunch of data and say, don't aggregate it, don't slice and dice it, don't look at it different ways. So one of the first things we did when we started working with multiple teams, and we've had organizations where we've had over 60 VP level and above teams all using the platform, and that's a goldmine of context and data to take action on. So being able to roll that data up to understand where the hotspots, which teams are struggling, more importantly, how do we empower every leader to achieve their highest potential with their team and create the best environment for their team? Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

John Estafanous: So being able to see not just what's happening across the organization, but how does that map to what's happening with an individual team, and how do we approach the leader and the team in the right way to help them achieve change and growth? That's where the real power comes from when you start looking at things holistically across an organization. And then there's the longitudinal view as well, like are we achieving the right outcomes? And that's where we'll tie back to all of the spreadsheet metrics and show the ROI and all that other good stuff is when teams are high performing, they deliver better results. McKinsey's done studies on it, HBR has done studies on it. We all know that data's out there. And for executive teams, it's critical. We know that when the executive team is working well together, they're going to achieve 190% better financial results for the organization.

Dane Groeneveld: 190 is a big number.

John Estafanous: It's a big number. When the top team is aligned and high performing, I think that's from a Deloitte study, their organization is going to achieve better results. We know high performing teams just in general, deliver 50% better business outcomes overall than just non- performing teams or not high performing teams. So it's all there. We all know it intuitively. We just haven't measured it, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

John Estafanous: And the problem I was trying to solve by creating RallyBright was, and I use this example, is as a global executive, I had insights and relationships with each of my team leaders, and I could get a pulse by having my one- on- ones, but I'm always going to have bias whether I like it or not. I'm human and I have a relationship with an individual, and I'm always going to get a filtered view. So while things may look great and the numbers may show things are looking great, what's really happening on the ground in the team, there's never been an empirical way to measure that. So all of a sudden with a newborn, I was spending two months in Singapore fixing a problem that was caused by something external. But had we had that canary in the coal mine, we could see there's conflict with these other departments. This is what's happening with customers. This is what's happening with the relationships on the team, et cetera, et cetera. And that's really what it is. It's how do we make better decisions? And our friends at CLA in their book, what is it, The End of Leadership as We Know It, they say, don't use data as a trap. Right? Data without judgment is one thing that can be a trap for most executives.

Dane Groeneveld: Absolutely. Yeah. Because you can easily dive in and use it for whatever you want too, or get stuck doing all that root cause analysis that you mentioned earlier.

John Estafanous: Exactly. If you're a problem solver peacekeeper, that's going to happen.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I feel like we could have kept talking for at least another couple of hours here, John. I love the energy, and I love not only the insight and the ideas that you bring, but just the practical wisdom that you guys have built into the platform and that you've seen deploy in your own team. So that's been a joy to be engaging with for me, and I'm sure for our listeners. A couple of key takeaways, what I really love is the way that you've defined that middle purpose. There's the organizational purpose, the individual purpose, but the purpose of teams. I really love the way that you talk about resiliency in teams and driving adaptability in particular, because to your points on teams becoming disconnected and the increasing rate of disruption, that adaptability is critical for any business. And then that third piece, which is really all about the leading indicator, like we've got enough data, if we ask the right questions, if we get the teams to hold each other accountable, we can start to have a better view of what challenges and opportunities lie ahead and stop being so reactive. So there were a few themes that I really heard today, and going back to what you shared with me at the beginning of the show, that there is no playbook or guidebook for teamwork, and you and the team seem to be a long way down the path in solving for that problem.

John Estafanous: Yeah. Well, our mission is to make teamwork better for everybody, and whatever we can do to help their work, we're going to do it.

Dane Groeneveld: It's awesome. It's a great mission. So thanks for taking the time, John. And if our listeners want to reach out and get a demo on RallyBright or find out more about Contemporary Leadership Associates or any of your other partners, how do they best find you?

John Estafanous: Yeah, just reach out at John @ RallyBright or go to our website, RallyBright.com. And I'm always on LinkedIn too, so I would love to connect on LinkedIn.

Dane Groeneveld: Awesome. Well, I recommend it, so I'll look forward to staying in touch.

John Estafanous: All right, thank you, Dane. Really appreciate being here.

Dane Groeneveld: Thanks, John.

Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us. Remember that by embracing vulnerability, trusting our intuition, and approaching challenges with compassion, we not only strengthen our teams, but also pave the way for a future where collaboration thrives. If you're hungry for more insights, strategies, and research on collaboration, head over to thefutureofteamwork. com. There you can join our mailing list to stay updated with the latest episodes and get access to exclusive content tailored to make your team thrive. Together we can build the future of teamwork. Until next time.