A Journey from Street Hockey to Coaching Thriving Teams with Andrew Sillitoe

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 teams 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. Have you ever instinctively jumped in to solve your team's problems? In today's episode, we're tackling this common management dilemma and more. Dane welcomes Andrew Sillitoe, a renowned leader who after a successful 15- year journey with elite sports teams, pivoted to transforming the business world. As a mentor to over 5, 000 leaders, Andrew is here to share his insights on team dynamics, performance, and leadership. Today's podcast first highlights a crucial aspect of effective management. A manager's primary role is to coach and guide employees towards their own development, instead of intervening to solve problems or complete tasks for them. This discussion offers valuable insights and strategies on how managers can effectively fulfill this role. Then, the podcast features an enlightening segment on Andrew's personal journey, introducing listeners to a wake- up call he experienced. This shifted his perspective on wellness and the necessity of integrating work- life balance, illuminating the transformative impact of personal experiences on one's approach to wellness. Finally, in a compelling part of the podcast, Andrew draws from his experience with elite sports teams to introduce the concept of distributed leadership. He explores this approach's nuances and how it can be effectively implemented in various teams to achieve high performance. 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. This is Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 group, and today I'm joined by Andrew Sillitoe from the UK, but living in the Czech Republic, and having a pretty cool list of titles, I've got here performance coach, business psychologist, founder, and writer of Managing the Mist. So we're going to have a great conversation today and glad to have you on, Andrew.

Andrew Sillitoe: It's a pleasure to be here with you, Dane. Thank you for inviting me.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet. So we were just catching up before the show on some of the different parts of the world and experiences you've had, maybe you could bring the listeners up to speed on how you come to be doing a lot of this work right now around flow and Managing the Mist.

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah, gosh, I'll make it as quick as possible. I started out life playing street hockey in my small town, Tunbridge Wells, which is southeast of England, about 45 minutes outside of London. Just caught a wave in the eighties, roller skating, and that was all the big thing, in my town anyway. And started playing hockey and the sport caught a wave, actually, and then it transformed into in- line hockey and I started playing in-line hockey. I moved to Canada, pursued a career there, and professional career as a roller hockey player as best as I could. And that opened up some opportunities for me, there's a whole story around that. But I ended up spending some time in California, playing roller hockey down there. And I guess my claim to fame is I was the first British player to play in the championship, the pro professional championships.

Dane Groeneveld: Unreal.

Andrew Sillitoe: And I was playing for a team called the California Slipjacks, that was our team.

Dane Groeneveld: Cool name.

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah, exactly. So it was good fun. So I spent a lot of time down there and traveling around and meeting a team in different parts of America, but we spent driving from California to Vegas for the competitions out there, and it was just a wild time in the late... Well, this was probably early 2000s, actually. And then it just ventured into a bit of corporate work. I was in the surf and ski scene, skate scene for a while, and then I randomly joined Yellow Pages as a salesperson, selling advertising, and actually had a really good... I remember the first day I walked in there and there were all these posters, corporate pros, I'd never seen anything like it, that kind of world. That freaked me out a little bit, and I remember thinking, " This is just not for me." And what was interesting actually, we had three weeks of training, so you're in a hotel for three weeks and you just get absorbed into the Yellow Pages way of doing things. And I remember day one actually, looking at the train and thinking, " All right, that's pretty cool, doing that work." And I remember saying to the person next to me, " This training, being a trainer," I'd never seen that kind of work before. It felt like what I was doing with coaching hockey and so on. Anyway, I pursued the career and I actually had quite a bit of success there and worked my way up into a leadership role, managing the regional sales team and learning really, just winging it as a manager. I think any first line manager can relate to that. You have a bit of training, but they throw you in the deep end, and you have this angelic view that you're just going to transform this team and we can just absolutely smash it. And then day one, someone says, " I'm stressed, I'm going off for six months," and then the next person, and you're not spending all this time trying to just catch things, that was my life until I managed to create my own team and develop it that way. But I remember the first six months just being like, this is not what I-

Dane Groeneveld: Chaos.

Andrew Sillitoe: Expected at all. Yeah. Why can't I be like my manager was, and realizing that she'd been doing a job for 20 years. It's like season pro, whereas I was a bit naive, I think, going into it, but it really grounded me in the world of leadership. And then an old school friend, it was Facebook time, it was about 2006/7, an old school friend got in touch with me and said, " What are you up to?" And it was just, I hadn't seen him in 20 years, I think at this point. And it turned out he was a COO at a company called Blue Sky Performance Improvement, and they were going into organizations teaching sales training, leadership development, and so on. They ended up selling to Capita. It was founded by a guy called Mark Janssen who'd grown this boutique consultancy. And they just asked me, " What are you doing at Yellow Pages? How much are they paying you? We've been following your sports career. Could you come in and talk to us about the parallel between sports and business?" And I hadn't given it a single thought, really. In fact, even at Yellow Pages, I remember they said to me in interview, " Well, with your sports background, you're going to be really good at sales." In my mind I was thinking, playing roller hockey and selling advertising seemed to me to be million miles apart, but I think there were some things, some traits maybe, that did help, with the discipline and being organized and structured and so on. So anyway, they gave me a job and I haven't looked back since. So that's how I got into performance coaching, working with them, and then did my training, did my ICF qualifications as a coach, and later on did a master's in organizational psychology. And so fast- forward a few books and probably 10, 000 + people trained and coached over the last 13 years or so.

Dane Groeneveld: Nice.

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah. So that's a whistle- stop tour. I hope I didn't let that drag on too much.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I love it. And you had me at catching waves, as a surfer, when you were catching waves of rollerblading and then the hockey taking off.

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah, I definitely rode a wave. If you lived in California in the mid- nineties, for example, it was in- line hockey and in- line skating, rollerblading.

Dane Groeneveld: Everywhere.

Andrew Sillitoe: It just kicked off. And I caught that wave. There was a team in Anaheim called the Anaheim Bullfrogs, and I had a poster of their top goalscorer on my wall in my small town in Tunbridge Wells.

Dane Groeneveld: How cool.

Andrew Sillitoe: So it was eventually being out there and actually seeing, his name was Victor Gervais, French Canadian, and he played on the Canadian national team, but he was playing for the Anaheim Bullfrogs, and they played in the same arena as the Ducks during the summer. So it's just a wild time, been good fun, very lucky.

Dane Groeneveld: Lucky. And it's pretty cool when you see, and luck's an important part of it, but when you see these emerging waves and you can jump on them, it feels like you are jumping on the front of another wave right now with the work that you're doing because we are seeing in teams globally, it doesn't matter what country, what industry you're in, we're seeing this whole movement towards, well, how are we creating clarity? How well are we freeing the team to do more together, to be healthier, to be better humans? I just see that everywhere. And so-

Andrew Sillitoe: There's a real shift.

Dane Groeneveld: It might be, yeah, there's a shift here and you've already got a track record for getting ahead of the shifts and riding them, so I think that's going to make it-

Andrew Sillitoe: Sometimes too early.

Dane Groeneveld: Maybe. Yeah, maybe.

Andrew Sillitoe: Sometimes the wave dies out before I catch it, building on the analogy. But yeah, I think you can be a little bit too early sometimes, but I think there's definitely a movement. And usually what I'm doing is I'm just sharing how my life's evolving, really. Because as I evolve, then obviously the topics and the things I talk about shifted. So yeah, it's a good observation.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool.

Andrew Sillitoe: I think it's pretty accurate. Thanks.

Dane Groeneveld: You also touched on another interesting phrase in your first leadership role of winging it, and I've always personally benefited from being thrown into opportunities where I had to wing it. And I think we'll talk a little bit about that today too. If you give teams a little bit of license to get in there and have to work it out for themselves, where there isn't a strict playbook, what that means for individuals, for teams, for building teamworks, and I think that's an interesting concept, probably to dig a little bit deeper on today as well.

Andrew Sillitoe: I think organizations that are able to do that, and I look back at my time in Yellow Pages very fondly because I don't think, at the time, we kind of knew because people talked about it, but how far ahead it was actually in its training and its culture. And it had the ability to do that because it was essentially selling colored paper for £ 1000, and it had a 60% margin, and it was just a really profitable business, it was constantly reinvesting in itself. And then obviously the whole thing just stopped when Google really got traction. But the training and the freedom, if you think about Daniel Pink's idea around mastery, autonomy, and purpose, I think they really did that quite well. It was a very hard job. It was very target, very result driven. But I think there's something you touched on there, which I think is important. I always think of it like a teenager or a child, we can really interfere with their development if we're not careful, because we want it to be perfect and we want everything to align up and we want them to get the result we want them to get. And I think sometimes, as leaders, we do that. We interfere with the opportunity for growth because we don't give them the space to try things and fail.

Dane Groeneveld: That is interesting. And you talked about the sport to business parallel. I was just at the weekend, both my older two kids had a soccer tournament, and my son is just a natural- born athlete, he's there to win. It doesn't matter if he doesn't have the skills, he'll just find a way, right?

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah. How old is he?

Dane Groeneveld: He's 12.

Andrew Sillitoe: Nice.

Dane Groeneveld: That brings its own problems around performance anxiety and other issues like that. But then my daughter is so different. She's very artistic and very people- oriented. She doesn't put a lot of pressure on herself. And so she's there, she's playing in goal, which is a rough, rough position.

Andrew Sillitoe: So is my daughter, my daughter's a goalkeeper as well.

Dane Groeneveld: Really?

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah, but in hockey, but yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: It's tough because you see them in goal and they're getting scored on, your heart sinks every time you're like, " Oh, they really messed that one up." And so we're sitting there as parents saying, " Oh my gosh," here's one son who's just going, and he's out in the field, and my daughter's in goal, should she be playing a goal? Maybe that's too much pressure for her. And we're creating unnecessary noise because we're not just letting her, talking about interfering with development, we're not letting her find out for herself whether she likes it or not. And this is her second tournament that my wife and I are fretting on the sidelines. But I think a lot of managers have that same vibe, and the next question is, how do you create that room for them to do their own development safely?

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah. It's a question that comes up a lot. And the only way I can really describe it for the manager is the letting go. Just letting go. What is the worst case scenario? What assumption are you making around this? Particularly when you've got a manager who you're working with who is complaining about time management, hasn't got enough time to do this, hasn't got enough time to do that, and you list out all the tasks, and the meetings that they're... Oh, I go on the sales call as well, I have to be in the sales meeting because that's something that I have to be. Do you? Really? Well, they might not close the deal. Well, yeah, they might not. But if you're playing this short term and you want this person to be in your organization for the next two, three years and really develop as a... Whether it's sales or working on a project or whatever, they're never going to get the opportunity to close that deal, have that learning experience, fail, and you're going to keep complaining about time management. So what are you prepared to let go of? What assumptions are you making about the what ifs? And make peace with that, because the long- term benefits are going to outweigh the short- term pain.

Dane Groeneveld: I really like the way you frame, what assumptions are you making? Because that, as leaders, I don't think we stop and ask ourselves our assumptions very often, and that comes at a detriment to the team because, going back to clarity, if they don't know what assumptions you are making, they're sitting there going, " Gee, why does Andrew keep asking to be on my sales calls?"

Andrew Sillitoe: Exactly. Just give me a break.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, " Andrew keeps blowing my sales calls. I've got a great relationship with his customer, and he comes on and rolls out the high pressure sell."

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah, exactly. So I think there's a lot to be said for that. And don't get me wrong, I think managers should also go out on the field, or whatever it is they're doing, and observe and have an opportunity to coach. But I don't see the post game analysis where the head coach takes the player into a room and does a debrief on the game, and what were the strengths? What worked well? What could you have done better? Is very different to the head coach jumping on the pitch, elbowing the player out the way, and then putting the ball in the net and saying, " See? I still got it." That's what I see sometimes.

Dane Groeneveld: So I shouldn't run out to my daughter's soccer game and save the goal for her?

Andrew Sillitoe: Make the save. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think she'd be a bit embarrassed. Knowing my daughter anyway.

Dane Groeneveld: I think so. Yeah, no, mine would too. I like that. And that's a really important delineation. We've had this conversation in the past on a similar show to this, where it was like, the beauty of coaching is that you're not a player, and you get two things that are very important. One is you get to do practice drills in a non- game environment, which a lot of leaders don't do. And two is you get to do debriefs later, which a lot of leaders don't do, a lot of team members don't do. So yeah, that's powerful.

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah. I think the classic is I don't have time for that. You don't have time for a retention problem. You don't have time for underperformance. These are going to take up more time. I can't afford to hire, again, whatever. Well, if you're losing people. It's the old Eisenhower Matrix stuff. I think it fits in that non- urgent important box, coaching and developing people and mentoring and taking people for a walk around the block and having a chat, coffee, and getting them away. What I call getting them away from the game, and don't talk about KPIs, try not to bring up the metrics. Just have a, " Hey, we've got half an hour, what would you like to focus on?" And it's still a goal- orientated conversation, but they just come away from it going, " Wow, I've got an objective there, and we just had a chat over a beer. It was great." But the skill for the coach or the manager, I think, is the facilitation of that conversation. The art is making it feel like a conversation that's non- threatening, that's energizing. So I think that that's the proactive approach to these things that often get neglected, because they're constantly putting out fires.

Dane Groeneveld: And that energizing piece that you touch on, that's important for relationship building too. And again, I'll circle it back to my daughter, this week I went to her soccer training, and afterwards I said, " Hey, do you want to just play a bit? Do you want to just mess around?" And so we start, I said, " Put a hand behind your back, let's just catch the ball one- handed. Let's just have a game. We're not talking about where you should position on your posts or anything like that." And we played for half an hour and asked those coaching questions like you did, " Hey, what could you do differently the next time to make sure you catch that?" The next thing you know, she asked me the very next day, " Hey, can you come to practice so we can play again after practice?"

Andrew Sillitoe: Nice.

Dane Groeneveld: So I just built on my relationship, but it was a performance- orientated discussion, how to catch a ball with one hand, but we made it play, and now it's something that we like to do together. So it can be both energizing in the moment, but I think it can also build a bit more human connection.

Andrew Sillitoe: Absolutely. And I think, again, that's the skill. I always say to Matt, of course you've got to work on the strategy, you're going to have to make some decisions, there's going to be some tough things. But if you can be really good at what I would call performance coaching, where you are asking these questions in the moment. I always think of business, you're either in the game or you're getting people away from the game. So Sir Alex Ferguson is a good example of this, I think, at Manchester United, 25 years, arguably one of the most successful managers of all time. He was shouting and barking at his players, this aggressive, angry Scotsman on the sideline. But the players refer to him as like a father figure because clear boundaries, clear expectations, but he had a relationship with the players away from the game. He got him away from the game and considered himself as a mentor. And I think if we could differentiate those two things, mentoring away from the game and coaching in the game, giving feedback, constructive feedback, evidence- based in the moment, water cooler type stuff, and then be really good at training. And I don't mean necessarily presenting, but getting your team together to do problem solving, to mastermind, to maybe facilitate a training session on... We're talking about sales and lot today, but any situation, but let's say closing the closing or asking questions or whatever it is. But I always think back to my time, the trainers were great, and I've been on both sides of that, in L& D and as a consultant going in and as a sales manager. But the training I used to get off my manager was so much more powerful because it was real and it was anecdotal and just real nuggets of just like, " Wow, what you just said there has changed everything, my approach, how I'm going to do this today, because it was just from experience." And I think sales managers underestimate that. And I think sometimes it comes from a place of fear that if I go into, there's a bit of imposter syndrome, or going into the room and presenting to a group of people that might be skeptical or so on, so they avoid it. But I think the skill of being able to hold a room and communicate a message and train people, I think, is such a great skill. And I think it's probably the thing that will give a sales, any manager, the biggest ROI on their time, if they're consistent with it as well.

Dane Groeneveld: And so getting time together to problem solve is a different way of looking at training and coaching than what traditional L& D departments do as well, you don't have to have a 15 slide deck to walk through and an exercise.

Andrew Sillitoe: No, I always say to them, it's quite nice, sometimes I teach just six steps of how to design training, make sure you've got an objective, tell them what's in it for them. Because if you've got to get a bunch of salespeople that would rather be out closing deals and earning commission, and you've brought them into a room for an hour to work on something, you better be quick at telling what's in it for them, what they're going to get out of it by the end of this, and get that in the first 20 seconds at least. But also, just get them to think a bit more creatively. Find a video on YouTube that's funny and just share it, that illustrates the point. Tell a war story. Just tell a real story that you're probably incredibly embarrassed about. And at the time, it was not funny at all, but I can guarantee it's going to be the funniest thing you tell your team right now. You know what I mean? Because it's just cringe story that... And everyone's got a war story and just that humility. But then I think what managers then become, sometimes I think they want to be the hero, because it's a bit like the sports star is the hero on the pitch. The manager is the mentor, it's the guide. It's like the Joseph Campbell type idea around the hero's journey. The leader is the guide in that story. So I think if they can share, " This is what happened to me, this is how I overcame it, or here are the three..." And the story is like, oh my God. And the learning the art of storytelling as a manager, I think these skills are really underestimated. It's like it's for somebody else. It's like for the keynote speaker that comes in once a year to motivate our team. No, you can do this. It's just stories are by design. And once you get the idea of what telling a story is and making it personal, or tell a story about someone else. So these skills that are often maybe not for me actually could be probably the best skills to develop and share.

Dane Groeneveld: And they're great skills for any team to be investing in because you can then recycle them at home with the family in the community and whatever organization you're in out with customers, they're hugely transferable.

Andrew Sillitoe: They just weave into the... Again, the art is weaving into the conversation. The skill is knowing that there's a beginning and middle and end. But the point I was actually, sorry, I was going to make, is that so they can have these structured training sessions, it might be 30 minutes, a lot, but I say to them, if you genuinely run out of time, just do a mastermind with your team, because you don't have to prepare for that at all. But it can be equally as enjoyable, useful. And if you can really facilitate that conversation, say, " What's our biggest challenge right now? What's holding us back? Okay, let's discuss it," and try not to interfere in that conversation, but let go and let the team discuss it. And sometimes the feedback I get is, "Well, they're too junior. They don't have the ideas." Well, then work with that, and then balance it between asking and telling and advice. But make your default asking. I think that the best skill leaders can develop is to be really good facilitators, if they can develop the art of facilitation. And that's what I experienced of my coaches, the best managers, they're just really good at asking questions and making you think, and put you under a bit of pressure with some of those questions, but helping you through that to come up with a solution, I think that's a really good skill.

Dane Groeneveld: I'm really glad you say that, Andrew, because, no knock on the coaching consulting community because I think there's a lot of brilliant people doing a lot of good work, but there has been a saying going around for years, which is, " Hey, if you are the leader of the team, you are carrying too much power. You can't be the facilitator. You need me to come and facilitate." But the way you've just framed it is, actually, if you're the leader of the team and you're going to be effective, you need to become a better facilitator.

Andrew Sillitoe: 100%.

Dane Groeneveld: You don't just augment.

Andrew Sillitoe: No, I prioritize that skill. And there'll be a time when you're facilitating and you realize, okay, my team doesn't have the answers here, they just don't have the information. They're just either new to the job, or they... No experience. Okay, so here's what I think, here's what I think we might want to consider. Of course, bringing a consultant in once a month or for a quarterly retreat or something, so you can roll your sleeves up and get amongst it with the team and have that objective steer on the day, I think is a good investment, for sure.

Dane Groeneveld: Correct. So it's getting the balance. It's not abdicating responsibility to facilitate. It's saying, " I'm going to do it, but I'm really going to lift when I bring in coach, consultant, whoever else it is."

Andrew Sillitoe: Absolutely. Yeah. I think if you bring the consultant in to facilitate your workshop, then make sure it's flat, and you don't override it and you don't... If every idea, everyone looks and says, " Well, we better go with the boss's idea because he or she's the boss," then we've probably got a bigger problem we need to deal with.

Dane Groeneveld: A friend of mine said the other day, " You really need to set that out. Hey, we're looking for the best idea, not the boss's idea."

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah. It's a nice way of putting it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's cool. So that's all fun conversation around sport and coaching, but jumping into the book, Managing the Mist, and what you and I were talking about before the show, creating clarity, really driving for flow in teams, what is it that you are seeing that is emerging now to create that? What's different now than say 10, 15 years ago in business that leaders and teams should be seeking to understand?

Andrew Sillitoe: It's a good question, and I ponder on this one. I think there's a couple of things we could look at, which is when I wrote the book, I started writing actually in 2007, 2008. It was published in 2013. I had to use micro stories that built. But I do think the 2008/ 9 recession influenced a lot of my thinking, although I didn't realize it at the time, when I wrote it. But I think there was this chaos, and this lack of clarity and confusion, and there were a lot of businesses starting, and they're either coming out the other end of a complete restructure. So my first four corporate clients were Pfizer, Ericsson, AXA PPP, and Virgin. And they were all, like you do when you start consulting, you phone your friends up, and they go, " Well, I know someone at Pfizer, I know this person, this person." And all of a sudden I was immersed in that, and I realized that there was this just rabbit in the headlights. We've just been through this huge restructure. I think I've come out of it unscathed. I've still got my job. I lost a lot of friends in the business. There's that kind of feeling. And then I was also working with a lot of small businesses that were startups. That had left, had been made redundant, or they started by themselves, particularly recruitment businesses, I niched in that for a while. And I do wonder if we're now going through a similar cycle where people really want answers, they're confused. It's been a bare market and they've just grown, they started the business in 2012, they don't know any different, and they really don't know any different. All they think is it's a good market. And it is literally like work has just fallen off a cliff for them. I try to prepare people for this, but they don't. They just can't imagine it. They can't imagine that the economy would just do that. That it's literally, it was like this yesterday, and it's like this today. It stops, usually. And the problem we have at the moment is that nobody's really saying what it is, so I don't know what it's like in America, but people are talking about recession, talking about recession in the UK, but no one's actually said, " Okay, we are in it," so that's even more confusing. So that's been on my mind, is this desire, this need for clarity and so on, because there's a lot of confusion in the world at the moment that could be a cycle? Having said that, and we will circle back to team flow, but I think there's a very individual challenge, which is when I first started talking about flow, or getting into flow, it probably goes back 20 years actually, because of my own experiences of going to Canada to play hockey, playing in California, struggling with being in that dressing room, being an English guy. How do I play at a level that needs to be so I stay on the team? Because they're already looking at me going, "Why have we got an English guy on the team?" So I've got to be even better to make sure that I keep my spot. So I had a lot of that stuff going on and I suppose I was into it anyway. My brother had given me books on this, he was 10 years older than me, and my godfather was into psychology and giving me books on Dale Carnegie and so on. So I was already on that journey in my late teens, early twenties. So I always thought of flow as this something that you, in a sport, you have this anchor. I'd never done NLP, but NLP, they talk about anchoring, and if you could put your finger and thumb together, you're in the zone, and so on. So it was always this idea that you get in the zone. But then when I wrote the book, it occurred to me when I thought about my own experiences, it's not getting in the zone, it's actually staying in the zone, and not getting triggered. So that was where I went with it and how I talked about it in the book, but I was still focusing on sport and business. And it wasn't until 2017, after two gold medals with the British team as head coach, I played in 11 world championships, I was growing a business, flying around, working with Pfizer, and making pretty good money as a management consultant, living the dream. And then all of a sudden I was suffering with gout. Sometimes I had to embarrassingly cancel things because I was getting gout, which was always put down to diet, but also stress- related the travel, and my wife turned around to me and said, " I did not sign up for this." She was stepmother to my daughter, pretty much raised her together, and then we had two children, and all of a sudden this handbrake on my life, and that's when I wrote The 4 Keys, because it was about balancing life, and also thinking about, well, why is flow limited to business and sports performance? And actually, isn't there something about integrating this into life? Why should it be something I turn on for work and hockey and put more effort into the GB dressing room than I am my own family? That doesn't make any sense. So that was a big wake- up call and that put me on a bit of a transformation. And when I started sharing my story with other people, they were like, " Yeah," people start to get vulnerable and share this. So it put me on a different journey. But I do think, even when I started that, there's definitely been a surge in wellbeing, and we were seeing, I mean YouTube now, I don't know if it's just my algorithm, but it's Andrew Huberman and all these people-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Oh, it's huge.

Andrew Sillitoe: That are talking about wellbeing and mindset and so on, and life integration. So I think, yeah, there's been a surge in that, and so I think there's a real desire for that. And what I found myself is that sometimes reverse engineering it from a commercial question, which is how do we make money as a business? And think, well, I think people want this, so pre- sell that. Versus actually saying, well, what am I experiencing? And then I start talking about things that feel real to me that then resonate with people. So I think the reason why I'm sharing all this, because I think we've got a potential financial crisis, which is causing a bit of uncertainty, and we've got a real movement in wellbeing. And I can go on stage now in a sales organization and say, " Why didn't you spend 5 to 10 minutes in the morning meditating?" And I won't get laughed off the stage.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That's real.

Andrew Sillitoe: Whereas 10 years ago, it's like, " What? What are you talking about? Has this guy been smoking weed?" Do you know what I mean? It's a completely different... And it's probably because a whole different generation of people coming into the workplace that are embracing that.

Dane Groeneveld: It's interesting that you mentioned a new generation, a lot of people put it down to the generation, but you said something earlier which I think is actually more telling, and I had that conversation with my mentor yesterday. We were talking about mental health and wellness, and are we seeing a lift or an increase in mental health challenges and wellness concerns because of pandemic or digital staff or whatever it is? And he's a good 15, 20 years older than me, so he's seen a little bit more. And he said, " The reality is that this was always here, this need for work- life integration, this need for flow, this need for wellness. But we never talked about it. You just didn't talk about it." So I don't think it's a new thing, and I don't think it's a new generation, I think what's new and why the new generation are bringing it forward more into the workplace is that we're all talking about it. We've lifted that guard and said, " Yes, it's real." You used the word vulnerable, which is what sparked that conversation. Yes, it's real, we all are suffering it, and we all need to do something about it. And that's actually uplifting, I think. It gives us opportunity.

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah, I think it is. I think we can go into the sociological aspects of it, the baby boomers, post- war, stiff upper lip, don't talk about our stuff, don't mention the war. And then you have this breaking away. And I hope that we can keep it practical so it doesn't become a political left or right movement. It's just a-

Dane Groeneveld: Human.

Andrew Sillitoe: Practical... Yeah, human. It's been in us for hundreds of thousands of years. Well, certainly 20, 30, whatever. But it's a human instinct. And I was listening to something today, my second- youngest son is seven, and we'd noticed he's responding, acting up a little bit. And you look at it go, and it is just linked to leadership, but as parents you start going, "Well, it must be a mirror image of us. What do we need to change in ourselves? What are we doing? Why is this happening?" And I think leadership is the same. But I read that with young children, that they won't ask for help because, at a psychological level, or biological level, that could be quite threatening to the tribe. And therefore if I get kicked out the tribe, that means death, ultimately. My son isn't saying, " Well, I'm scared that I'm going to get kicked out," it's not, about the family or whatever. It's not. But at a biological level.

Dane Groeneveld: It's subconscious.

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah. So how important it is to create that psychological safety for young children, and I don't think that changes in the organization. But hey, I'm paying you to do the job, you've got some objectives, this is what you need to do. So why would we need to have a fluffy conversation about your wellbeing? But this is like it's happening, and I think that shifted.

Dane Groeneveld: It has.

Andrew Sillitoe: Well, why would I give them feedback? Why would I give them positive feedback when we're paying them to do the job? Well, that's like saying to a professional athlete earning 250 grand a week, " I'm not saying good job, well done for scoring the goal." Well, I'm sure there are some managers that are a bit like that, but to me that sounds crazy. So this humanizing, but keeping it practical. And I think mental health, I do think sometimes still we're confusing mental health with mental illness, and I think that gets blurred. Physical illness, you have to go to hospital, but physical health is just a choice whether you go to the gym or not, or eat healthy. It's on a spectrum, scale. And I think mental health is the same, and I think an organization has a responsibility to create an environment where people feel safe to focus on their mental health, talk about these things. But I think we also have a personal responsibility to get up in the morning, go for a walk, block time out the diary, have some downtime. If you really truly want to integrate flow into your life, it takes effort. Flow isn't, or recovering from a day eating pizza, drinking beer, and watching Netflix isn't conducive to recovery. It actually takes effort to go and... Whether it's a yoga class, or for me hockey once a week, or the kettlebell for me, but it takes effort, sometimes I don't want to do it, but I know it's good for my mental health. I know it's going to focus on, I know it's going to release some endorphins, it's going to other chemical hormones in the body that are going to just make me feel good. So I don't know if we digressed there a little bit, but I think it's linked to flow.

Dane Groeneveld: I think it is. And actually, you've probably read it, the book Ikigai, that talks about flow, and it talks about some of the Blue Zones, so it looks at the Okinawans.

Andrew Sillitoe: Yes.

Dane Groeneveld: You ever come across that?

Andrew Sillitoe: I know it, only because I got deep into nutrition, and particularly the Blue Zones. So again, I'd have to check out of it because I went into it because I was suffering with gout and it's related to nutrition, and I found a way to solve it for me. So any of the listeners out there that have gout, reach out to me, because I have-

Dane Groeneveld: You've got a model.

Andrew Sillitoe: Well, I certainly put it in remission, but it's so polarized, nutrition. You've got to be careful what you say these days because-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, you do. And what I liked about that, it talked about nutrition, it looked at the Okinawans and it was like, look, they made a lot of their own vegetables, and ate a lot of their own vegetables. They liked to get together as a community, there was a lot of dance and other activities that they would do together. And so as a community, they created space both for the communal and the individual self, around really healthy patterns. And actually, if teams can do that, then that's got to unlock a lot of focus, innovation, safety.

Andrew Sillitoe: 100%. I'm a huge believer that nutrition actually plays quite a vital role in flow, because the relationship between the gut and the brain, a lot of good science coming on that, so we've got to look after that because... So I think there's a lot to be said for that. And so an organization putting a fruit bowl out on every Monday morning's probably not going to cut it. But again, it's very personal. You literally can't tell people what to eat. Even in schools you see it. The school will say, " Well, for the kids to be healthy, they need to eat this." Then you see families feeding, putting, in the UK anyway, fish and chips through the wall, because that's what my son eats, and my daughter. So it's such a sensitive issue. But I do think, as a leader, if you really want to have that clarity, at least cut out the processed foods, if you really want to take flow seriously.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's a big one.

Andrew Sillitoe: And I think if you look at the extremes, the carnival diet or the vegan diet, the ones that are really thriving on it, for the most part it's because they've cut out processed foods.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, agreed. Yeah, that's what I've actually worked on in my own diet too. It's interesting. I didn't expect we'd go to diet in this conversation, but I'm glad we have, because I think that ties into my final question I want to ask you, which is around distributed leadership that you talk to in your book. And I'm seeing a lot more of the need for that. Now, whether it's diet, whether it's how we show up for customers, whether it's how we tackle systems problems, that distributed leadership, just the team being aware that, " Hey, we're here to achieve this goal, we're here to do these things, let's talk about all of the stuff that we're tackling and our philosophical alignments on how we tackle it." That's got to be a big unlock for the future of teamwork.

Andrew Sillitoe: I think so. I think if you look at the military, there's this idea that there's a strategy at the top, and then the front line is out there executing the strategy. Where if you speak to anybody that's on the front line and go, " By the time we are here, the strategy is done."

Dane Groeneveld: It's done.

Andrew Sillitoe: I mean the tactics anyway. It's like, " We're on plan D now." But it's still aligned to the mission. And I think that's just a good example of distributed leadership, is how a group of people can say, "Well, look, we know what the objective is. We've got to make some tactical decisions that are going to enable us to achieve that objective, and it's not the same tactics that we set out to do at the beginning of this mission." So that's autonomy, it requires trust, but absolute clarity of the mission. So if you've got people that are confused and don't know what they're doing, you haven't got a motivation issue, you've got a clarity issue, because people just don't know how to make those decisions. Of course, competency will play a part in it, and experience. But I think distributed leadership, this idea, it goes back to the playful side, I think. If you speak to the football players, soccer players, and the ice hockey players, they'll talk about the hockey on the pond, they'll talk about the football on the field, it was away from the structured thing. And how they, between the group, organized the teams, and who played where. And that's the fun and that's where they learn the most. And I think that business can benefit from trying to draw on some of that. How do we make this less... Freedom in the framework. How do we make sure that everyone understands what the purpose of this game is and what we're trying to achieve? But, hey, let's give them some freedom to make some decisions that align to that. And if it goes wrong, there's going to be some risk attached to it, it means to mitigate that risk. But the value is going to be the learning. So if you are connecting with your team once a month, every two months, three months, or you're trying to avoid them because you just don't like them, then guess what? You're not going to get that feedback loop. You're not going to be able to iterate. You're not going to be able to change. You're not going to coach, and keep moving, and keeping in that straight line, you're going to end up going on a different direction. So I always think of high performance culture as a process. I don't think there's fairy dust or... Every now and then a team just pops because the stars align and there's just a few things that happened. But for the most part, majority of teams, they have to go through steps to create a high performing team, and that's where the facilitation skills come because they can facilitate them through the steps. What are we working towards? Where are we now? What's in it for us when we achieve this? Which is a really important question that I don't manage to ask enough, which is when we achieve this objective, what's in it for you? Because in sports, a player can emotionally connect with the objective. They can imagine having the medal around the neck or lifting the trophy. They've got this. But in business, it's hard to imagine. So people will get the mission intellectually, but if you really want to change their behavior, they've got to get it emotionally. So asking them to imagine how the world would be different, " Well, I guess I'd buy the car of my dreams." If it's materialistic, it's fine. " I'll maybe evolve into a manager one day, or career opportunities." But get them to really imagine what it's like when we achieve this objective in the next 12 months, and then you go through the processes.

Dane Groeneveld: That's an important call- out too, Andrew, because, you said it before the show, hey, everyone thinks they have to have this grandiose purpose statement, but it's okay to come back and have a commercial objective for the business.

Andrew Sillitoe: Definitely.

Dane Groeneveld: Or a commercial objective for the individual, it's okay. That's why a lot of us are here. No matter how good the purpose is, you wouldn't be here if the business wasn't profitable.

Andrew Sillitoe: Exactly.

Dane Groeneveld: Or I wasn't able to achieve what I need for my family.

Andrew Sillitoe: No, absolutely. And I'm incredibly grateful to Simon Sinek because it actually generated a lot of work in the early... Can you help us with our why? Well, I realized very quickly that my answer to that question was, no. Really. I can work with your marketing team, and I can help them shape the why, we'll craft something. But to get everyone around a table who one person's saying, " Well, I'm able to get out of bed every day to make enough money to send back to my mother who has nothing," versus someone who was saying, " I love this job because we make an impact on the world, and we do this." Two very different whys. Still purpose led, still of service. But I do think sometimes we think it's too obvious to say, " At the end of this year, we need to increase our revenue by 40%, and that's what we're aiming for." Or, "We are going to achieve 6 million, 20 million, whatever it is, that's the objective for this team. What's in it for you when we do that?" Then it's a different conversation

Dane Groeneveld: That that's a good call- out. Well, I've taken a ton of great notes, Andrew. I think if I summarize it down to a model that I took away. Clarity, obviously, is a big thing that you talked about, but including the what's in it for me in the clarity, it doesn't just have to be the larger P purpose statement. Distributed leadership, inviting everyone to be part of the conversation.

Andrew Sillitoe: Absolutely.

Dane Groeneveld: I liked the conversation around play. The hockey on the pond, or letting teams do masterminds and work through problems in real time. And I think my absolute biggest takeaway that helps with all of those things was just leaders of teams needing to get better at facilitation, I think that's very much within reach. Whether that's the storytelling elements or the question asking, I think that's in reach for everyone.

Andrew Sillitoe: And I think the leader could look at it as an energizing thought of, " Okay, well, if I was to be a master at facilitating." Really, I think all leaders should focus on this, identify their strengths at some point, and be really good at it. If you're really good at analyzing data and presenting it, then great. If you're really good at giving a keynote speech and really be good at that-

Dane Groeneveld: Play to that.

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah. I think be really good at what you're good at. I say it to all the athletes I work with, " Just be really good at what you're good at, because the coach will love you for it."

Dane Groeneveld: And they know where to go.

Andrew Sillitoe: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool. So you talked about athletes that you work with, but I know you also work with a lot of businesses, and a number of our listeners probably fall into that category. If anyone wants to find you, connect with you, look at doing some work with you, how do they best find you, Andrew?

Andrew Sillitoe: Oh, just head over to my website. I've got a blog and you can find me there. It's just andrewsillitoe. com.

Dane Groeneveld: Well, thank you for the time today.

Andrew Sillitoe: Thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. I felt like we needed a part two because I think we're just getting warmed up on this.

Dane Groeneveld: We should. We should totally do part two. Yeah, we are. We'll find some other ways to collaborate too.

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah. Great. No, I appreciate it, Dane. Thank you very much.

Dane Groeneveld: Thanks.

Andrew Sillitoe: Cheers.

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.