Riding Waves, and the Spirit of Teamwork on the Open Ocean, with Simon Phin

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This is a podcast episode titled, Riding Waves, and the Spirit of Teamwork on the Open Ocean, with Simon Phin. The summary for this episode is: <p>Simon Phin, Chief Executive Officer of Beyond The Break Pt. Lt., stops by to talk about surfing, oil rigs, and teamwork with host Dane Groeneveld. On this episode of the Future of Teamwork the two cover how Simon translated lessons from tandem surfing to practices that ultimately helped oil rig employees around the world stay better connected and safer on the job. Dane and Simon also cover the nature of collaboration after COVID, and how to make workplaces more democratized.</p>
Meet Simon Finn
02:09 MIN
Tandem surfing and working together as a team
03:06 MIN
Taking lessons from tandem surfing and applying them to drilling teams
02:22 MIN
How good teams can still emerge with bad leaders
02:52 MIN
Not addressing conflict or doing it only through text, and potential in the metaverse
03:10 MIN
Imagined class structure, and examples of success in wartime
02:47 MIN
Learnings from managing diverse, fragmented drilling teams, building safety cultures
02:09 MIN

Dane Groeneveld: Hi there. My name is Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 Group, and it's great to be welcoming Simon Finn to the Future of Teamwork podcast today. Simon's the President and CEO of Beyond the Break, which is probably one of my favorite names of a business I've ever come across as a surfer, and that's something that we both share in common. So welcome to the podcast, Simon.

Simon Finn: Thank you, Dane. Thank you. Lovely to be having a chat with you.

Dane Groeneveld: Absolutely. I think probably the last time we were together in person, we were likely sitting down in Greenspoint in Houston talking about some of the work that you and the team were doing for drilling operations right around the world, which was pretty cool. And you bring a lot of psychology and some really good behavioral practices to that, putting these teams together and making them function in a safe way. So I've always been intrigued by the way you do your work, but perhaps for our listeners, you could give us a little bit of background on who you are and how you've come into that line of business and what you're doing then?

Simon Finn: Sure. Well, I'm obviously Australian. I was born in a small city called Adelaide. Went through school without much skill in mathematics or science. For whatever reason, I just had a bit of a knack in understanding at a young age why people were either happy or unhappy, or wanting to do things with me or not wanting to do things with me. And at a young age, I started to work things out. So fortunately at school, someone said, " Look, you're not going to be the next king of physics or a mathematician on the Fields Medal, but why don't you give the humanities a go?" So I was very fortunate at a young age going through school, and ended up going to university and doing my undergraduate degree and then post- grad qualifications around human behavior and around that area of organizational psychology, so that's why my formal training is, and then I ended up doing what I'm doing now about 20 years ago. And in between, I was in the corporate world for a little while, which I didn't enjoy as much. So in short, I've always had an interest in people, and it's probably in the latter years you understand what you're good at and what you're not as good at, and I tend to believe in working on your strengths and recognizing those weaknesses, get somebody else to help.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, that's really neat. And I know from our surf discussions, and we're here to talk about teamwork today, but surfing for me has always been an individual sport. But you've turned surfing into a team sport too. Surfing some pretty big ways on tandem boards.

Simon Finn: Look, I'm really, really fortunate. My wife is tiny, and I've got a love of history, so Hawaii has given us pretty much the world of surfing and water sports. So I always found that wonderfully romantic, around tandem surfing. So we've probably done that for the last 15 years, and it's just been a wonderful part of our lives. So yes, I do tandem surf. We don't compete anymore, but we did that for a while and loved it. So it's interesting, but on that aspect of teamwork, in tandem surfing, a lot of people have tried it over the years and they've been wonderful surfers. Professional surfers are highly competent surfers, and they just don't gel well. Tandem surfing works when one person allows the other person to lead and they work together as a team. So Nicole and I have been really lucky in that part. She never surfed in her life. She was a really good water skier. So we were able to work together, and we were able to succeed well in that area. And I think it comes back to a lot of really good teams, whenever you observe them is that not everyone tries to be the boss and people realize what they're good at and whoever is leading that team allows people to fulfill those roles. And I think that's helped us.

Dane Groeneveld: So it's a little bit more like ballroom dancing than extreme sports.

Simon Finn: Look, a lot. A lot. In big waves, it's a little different, it's take off and hang on and make sure you all survive. But looking in general competition when we do that, it's a mix between ballroom and acro when it comes to the ability of two people to do things together. So in the US, you find a lot of cheerleaders, or acro gymnastics-

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Simon Finn: ...are really good at it. In Australia, we don't have that of course, so we're at a different level. So yeah, it's interesting working together in that way.

Dane Groeneveld: And I've seen some pictures, you and Nicole, unafraid of charging some bigger waves. I think I saw a picture of you at Padang Padang in Indonesia, which is a wave I would've been scared to surf.

Simon Finn: Yes. Well, Padang Padang, I've surfed that on my own. We haven't surfed that tandem.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, right.

Simon Finn: We've surfed that just a couple of hundred meters down, a break called Impossibles.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Simon Finn: And we've also surfed Uluwatu, not at death- defying levels, but two to three times overhead's enough for us. We're very much those years behind us now. We look for more for the gentle Nusa kind of waves, or in the US, the Rincon Malibu kind of waves, where we can have a coffee afterwards. That's more our go.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. So going from teamwork in the ocean to teamwork on a drill rig, what was it that first caught your eye, gave you that introduction to working with drilling teams? It's a very unique work environment.

Simon Finn: Look, back 22 years ago, I was working in the corporate world, and I just didn't enjoy it. And my neighbor was involved in an area, working in Australia with a client that had been involved in a pretty significant fatality, which had made headlines in Australia, and then shut down the biggest gas plant, which affected the East Coast of Australia, millions and millions of people. And I was invited to go along and spend some time involved in that area, and I was just intrigued about how people were handling this situation, and it wasn't necessarily conducive to long term team growth. People were looking for accountability, and finding out who was responsible rather than working out how this situation occurred. It just struck me then that you've got hundreds of people affected in this, they're all teams, they're all tribes, they're all clans working together, but no one's feeling part of this because no one's dealing with the huge issue, which was there's a massive loss here. There was a massive loss of life. There was long term legacy issues, but they weren't dealing with them. From that, I was just fortunate to meet some people in the US that gave me an opportunity and off we went, and the last 20 years has been this ongoing journey of seeing how people interact, really when you've got sometimes good leaders and bad leaders that can form good or bad teams. Sometimes in alignment with that good leadership or bad leadership, but sometimes completely against it. They form really good teams because the leadership's so bad. And sometimes when the leadership is really good, it doesn't allow the teams to thrive as much as they should because it's two hands off. So that's how I ended up, and it's just been an interesting ride ever since.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, and that's an interesting concept, of the bad leader, but a good team can still emerge. And the converse of that, but if you think about that bad leader/ good team scenario, what is it that allows that team to come together and forge it for themselves, forge that teamwork, that good safety behavior culture?

Simon Finn: Look, it's a good question. I think too often in organizations, Dane, and you would've seen this many times over your career, managers are appointed and they're called leaders. But it's not actually the people are saying, " This is the person I want to be led by." So you may have a manager appointed to a position. They may be an exceptional engineer. They may be a wonderful accountant, a great lawyer. They may have great hard skills, but their hard skills got them to a position, but not necessarily what we would call soft skills. I don't want to call them soft skills, but I'm broadly speaking here. And that's the ability to understand how people operate, so if a poor leader, a bad leader ends up leading people and they realize that this is not the guy or the gal that should be leading me, they more often than not will form their own teams to protect one another and to protect the culture that they have developed, irrespective of the manager who is there tending to lead them.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's interesting. There's a speaker that I watch, Eric Carielle, talked about teams surviving bad leaders, and that sometimes, that is an impetus to do just that.

Simon Finn: Look, it's really interesting when you say teams surviving bad leaders, is that our work over the last 20 years has been going on and off all rigs around the world, and observing behavior that can contribute to poor safe practice, and more often than not, the issue is the person at the top. More often than not, it's the person who is the greatest influence on that operation. Now, if that person is a micromanager, corporately, they're probably doing the right thing. They're making sure everything is working as it should operationally or accountably in one way. But they're not necessarily giving the crews, the team the confidence, and in turn, that confidence in their competence to do what's required of them safely. So you don't necessarily have great teams that can be sustaining high performance. So it's an interesting scenario, is that regretfully, my experience would suggest a poor leader or a poor manager of people doesn't allow teams to thrive.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That same speaker Eric Carielle talked about team behaviors, team dynamics, referencing old military structure, because a lot of organizational behavior was originally studied in the military, and he talked about the think/ tell/ do structure. And it was really interesting because I'm now currently reading one of Bernard Cornwell's books on the Sharpe series, and it's early 1800s, he's a guy that gets promoted out of the ranks. And to what you've just said and to what Eric talked about, there's this concept that the officers were standing behind these fighting men, who were generally looking towards their corporals and their sergeants, sergeant majors for the real behavioral, get to know each other, know how to spark each other up and make the right calls in the field, and the officers were standing behind just closing the ranks when someone got shot and went down, or communicating messages. But they weren't really part of the team, and it's fascinating thinking about that dynamic 220 years ago in a military environment, and seeing that it still exists in some teams today. And I think through COVID, we're seeing unfortunately some of those... I think some of those dynamics are almost becoming more prevalent again because of remote work and you've got this detachment of certain leaders fro their teams, and probably not in a drill side environment, because you can't have a hybrid completion supervisor or night man there on the site, company man on the site. But definitely in a lot of businesses, it is something that we're having to tackle almost over again.

Simon Finn: Look, what you're saying there, there's a lot of work that's recently coming out globally around that. There's an Australian by the name of Duncan Young, who's the head of wellbeing for Lendlease, which is a significant company in Australia. He's recognized this quite a lot, that there's a lack of collaboration. Because the normal interpersonal cues that we take from teams when we're together are no longer there. And that we've moved more in a binary fashion, where people are feeling that somebody's with me or against me through connection in an artificial communicative world such as this, where we're talking online. And that's been really interesting. You can see globally that companies are wanting their teams to come back and spend time with one another. Other companies are saying, " Look, we'll make it work," for whatever reason. But I think we're going to see a huge amount of study come out in the next few years about how we're going to handle this. I for one really do enjoy seeing people be able to thrash out issues when they're together, and then have that opportunity for resolution resolve, and sometimes seeing a different point of view outside of that formal teamwork when we're together. We might be having some quiet time afterwards or before. We negate the need to allow people to spend time with one another, not necessarily discussing work, but discussing things that bring them together, which allows them to function. So I think it's an interesting time on that matter.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it really is. And I think part of it's going to be coming up with different ways to get together and collaborate, and then another part will be what technology evolves, augmented reality, virtual reality, what evolves to allow us to have better interaction when we are virtual, because right now, we've gone a long way from dial- up telephone calls to video calls, but I still think there's a long way further that technology can go in driving that collaboration, where we have to rely on it.

Simon Finn: Look, it's affected our business unbelievably the last two years. I looked between June 2009 and say, March 2020 when I came back to Sydney, I averaged 70 flights a year and I was away from home around 100 nights a year. And more often than not, that was visiting our teams wherever they were around the globe, working and visiting our clients, working with them. And if there was an issue, quickly jumping on a plane and resolving that face- to- face. And it was done easily and well, and generally, in good faith. When you're in front of someone, you can see if they're upset, whether they're stressed, and you can work through those issues personally, face- to- face. When you're doing that through Zoom, that's near impossible, despite what people say. And the last two years has been really challenging for me in an area where I'm used to human interaction. I'm used to seeing how someone's eyes respond to a conversation, little things around facial movements, or you can see sweat forming if it is one of those conversations. You can't do that online.

Dane Groeneveld: No.

Simon Finn: So it's been immensely challenging for us, and we've had to find ways around that, and as soon as we can get back traveling as freely as we'd like to, that's what we'll be doing. But I personally have noticed it, and I don't know how a generation coming through will see a mediary of communication that has been normal to say, someone who's already been doing this for 10 or 15 years beforehand.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Well, I can definitely see it in our teams and in some of our customers' teams, that conflict is now being managed more through text than through conversation, which is dangerous.

Simon Finn: Yes.

Dane Groeneveld: Or it's not being addressed, the conflict is being avoided. And that's even more dangerous, so I think there is definitely like you say, a lot of studies that come out of it, and you're going to see the companies that I think perform well are the ones that find ways to embrace that conflict, embrace that learning opportunity by getting people together. And maybe, who knows? I'm not a technologist, but I keep looking to all of this talk about the metaverse and people being able to have avatars, and maybe in the future, you will be able to put goggles on and you will be able to see the sweat forming on whatever their avatar is, and you'll be able to see that their arms are crossed really tight, or whatever it is in their body language. But we're a long way from that.

Simon Finn: Yes, we are. It's just interesting times, and I've got to be conscious, I'm on the other side of 50 now, so I've been in the workforce for 35 years, so I see the world quite differently to my children who are in their early 20s, and going off in their different endeavors. So it is very different how we're viewing it, and we're seeing that the Boomers move out of the workplace. So how are we working around this? I don't know. But I'm just going back to something that's been proven for hundreds of years, is that the interaction of people in a small group, that could be a small team of three to four people, up to a large team, and I don't think teams function that well either, eight to 10, which does follow that traditional army model. How they're going to interact if they're not together, being able to thrash out issues, and you mentioned something really important, and that is when conflict's avoided. When conflict's avoided for too long, it's precarious, it's dangerous. It doesn't engender trust, and it doesn't allow teams to resolve failure, and that's hugely important.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I know there was a study, one of my good friends in Swansea, in Wales actually, he's a doctor. He works in intensive care and they do a lot of training out there in the NHS around safety. And one of the case studies they went through was a nurse who due to the hierarchy in the surgery, wouldn't engage in conflict with the surgeon who is perhaps overlooking, being a bit complacent around some use of surgical equipment or washing up or whatever it was, and that was creating more infections from surgery, which were ending up in ICU. And that's a perfect example of where the conflict... People see what's going wrong, but they're not willing to have the conflict, and that hurts the patient. It hurts the hospital. It hurts the morale of the team. The rot really sets in when that becomes typical.

Simon Finn: Yes, it is. Look, it brings in an interesting scenario in society when we have imagined class structure, or imagined status structure and real class, real status structure. Something we've learnt is that, and I'll use the English system and the American systems, in the Great War, World War I, we saw messy failures between the British army structure, which the officer structure were generally people of class, of means, of status that were living in a pre- world of the Crimean War, or a world of Wellington, going back to the Crimean War. It was living a life that was no longer present. In the Great War, they weren't able to communicate with their men. There was just no association. It didn't have some understanding, and that carried through to World War II. What we saw in the US system was quite different. That class structure, that status structure wasn't there. And the US army system was unbelievably successful in World War II, because there wasn't that great divide between those of authority and those who were delegated to deliver those commands. So that was interesting, and I think in Australian history, we've never really had that class structure. We haven't had that status structure, and the way in which Australians resolved conflict during World War I between officers and soldiers was very, very different to the way in which the British did, and we've learnt a lot from team structures there. What's of not though, if that... and I might be speaking against the trend here is that in some ways in the US, it's become as much of a British system because of the private college system and private university system, that people come out and there is a belief that they will be a leader in business.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Simon Finn: And they're not able to communicate, or they're not able to understand how the person who has not been given that privilege or that opportunity thinks and how they interact. And I think we're just seeing that in a lot of business functions. Now, we're seeing that in greater society, whether it's politics as well.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I like the way you talk about it as maybe an actual class structure or status structure, or one that may be just perceived there too. And I think you're right. It is perceived, when it's which school did a leader go to? Or what qualification do they have? But also what company they work for. So if you go back to the work you've done on the drilling rigs, you've got the operator and then you've got the drilling contractor, and then you might have other subcontractors and teams in there, and you've got expatriate talent and regional talent. I mean, you've seen no doubt some very different structures, status structures in that operating environment. As those types of structures become identified, as the world continues to go forwards, what are some of the key learnings that you took away from those more diverse, more fragmented drilling teams that you went in and built safety cultures with?

Simon Finn: Gee, it's an interesting scenario because quite often, the quietest voice in the room has a great deal of knowledge, but isn't heard because of perceived structures. Now, I don't suggest that someone who has come in as what we may refer to as the company man, or someone who is the OAM, or someone of influence and power is a negative individual. But there is perceptions of status that when that person is speaking, it's the truth, it's the way to go. Yet that person that's receiving the message may well have worked on eight to 10 different operations over the last six to 12 months, and they've been involved in one task, and that task is replicated no matter where they've gone, yet that person who is running that operation, that regal and company man, they may be there for 12 months. They've never seen it before. So it's that need to be able to have an environment where that quiet, silent person has the courage to say, " Look, stop. I have seen this before, why don't we try this?" And the leader to be able to say, " In this instance, I don't know the best way forward. I'll all ears."

Dane Groeneveld: That vulnerability.

Simon Finn: And that's really challenging to do when you're seen there as the god who should know the answer for everything, and that's just not possible.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I read a lot about psychological safety right now in a lot of these workplace articles, which I think helps encourage that quiet voice to feel confident to stand up and say something without retribution. I know you use video a lot on the kickoff of some of the drilling campaigns, but were there any tips and tricks, or rituals that you would build in when you would go and work with a new group to help try and create that psychological safety, that awareness of the value of the team?

Simon Finn: Look, it's difficult, because when someone like us, someone like me is going onto an operation, people are nervous. What are you there to do? And when you say, " Look, we're trying to bring the best out of people, we're trying to see teams function in a way which allows safe work or performance to be sustained," it's hard to believe. I like to have a quiet conversation with the people who are running the show, the company man, the drilling supervisors, the OAM and say, " What works well and what doesn't work well?" And then find a way to communicate with crews, and that's not going to happen in one or two days. It will take quite a while until people listen up. So what works well, what doesn't work well? And sometimes, it's perceived status, it's perceived control, it's perceived jealousy, and it's not actually there. So it's finding ways to disarm those preconceived ideas that are not necessarily there. I do like using video in a way that disarms people. You can get a lesson across quite easily. More often than not on a drilling rig, no matter where it is around the world, you will have meetings twice a day, a pre-tale meeting where that may be in the morning shift or the evening shift, and they say what's going on, and then once a week, you have a safety shutdown meeting. If that is regurgitative and it's a PowerPoint presentation or someone is delivering a company line, people will forget that within 20 minutes, and by the time they wake up in the morning, they can't remember at all. If you can find a way to deliver a message on video that includes those people and they run it, and today, you can easily do it with an iPhone, people remember it, and you've got a chance to deliver a very simple message, sometimes in a humorous way. Sometimes, in a serious way. Depends on what needs to be done, but it allows people to have control of that message. So number one, try and seek out what the perceptions are, and then try and address them in a way that doesn't demean others, and also allows you to bring people along on a journey, and I don't always like that word journey, but you've got to bring people along on this pathway with you.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, there's actually a great entrepreneur that I'm doing some work with right now over in the UK, Nicholas Sykes, he's got a business called Process Stories, which is just starting. And what you just said there I think is something that he's identifying as well. So you mentioned understand where those perspectives are, but then find a way to bring the team into it, to be part of the message, and he had a group of individuals who were rather creative. They didn't like reading standard operating procedures and doing the regular toolbox meetings, and just by chance, he was being playful, he started creating some graphic novels to talk about how they would work together on the team, and then he started asking them to contribute to this graphic novel, to say, " Is this really the best process and what are we missing?" And it became a bit of the ritual for the team to over time, let that graphic novel of the standard operating procedure evolve, and so now, he's being a bit playful with that and creating these videos, and having this real time interaction, and almost chat function around the video. And" Hey, that didn't actually work this week, and we've got a problem. What do you guys think we do with this?" And the team ends up creating the best practices for you, rather than some brains trust back at corporate. And to your point, they then feel like they own it, they're a part of it, it's safe to speak up about it. So I'm intrigued by that whole space. I've not done a lot of work with it, I've seen some of your videos, but it's a good way to democratize team behavior, and team evolution.

Simon Finn: The term you've used there is a ripper, the democratization of team behavior. Teams by their very nature will only work if they are democratic, and that is allowing the team to say, " At this moment in time, you're the best person to lead this. At this moment in time, you're the best person to keep us accountable. At this moment in time, this person or these people are best to do a certain thing." In 2014, we took on a significant operation, it was the startup of a rig called the Maersk Viking. At the time, it was the biggest drill ship in the world. And in one small thing, we worked out that when it came to well control, which is critical for the safety and well being of any operation, a lot of people were glazing over when it was being discussed, and I was one. I've been doing this a long while, but I didn't know enough about well control. And fortunately, one of the guys in my team, his wife, gorgeous gal was/ is a news reader in Western Australia, in Perth. And Jasmine came up with this idea saying, " Look, after we do the news, I've got 10 or 15 minutes to keep the crew around, if you can pay for this small 10, 15 minutes of time, I can give you a studio/ production house, and we'll do something around well control." We called it Well Control Wednesday, and it kicked off around little things around well control and we had a rule, you can't go over three minutes. And you've got to ask a question, and you've got to have the crew respond and it's got to be comedy and humor in it. What happened was over a period of just weeks in doing this, we got all these questions around well control that people had no idea about, and they were able to observe something over three minutes that you hadn't previously been able to get done in weeks or months, or even years. And I learned so much out of it that once I started rolling it on with the clients, is that they started to realize there was this assumption of knowledge, that we assumed that people had a knowledge and they never wanted to be tested. We didn't want to test them because we feared what they would know or what they didn't know. So finding a way to let this democratization of teams say, " Why don't we try this?" It ended up being gangbuster, and you can do it in any culture and any language as long as you let the team say, " What is it that would help you this week?" And you will find someone say, when it came to well control, I don't know what role the annulus plays, or when someone says, " We're sweeping the stack. What does that mean?" When someone says, " We've got to watch the shakers," I don't know what role that plays, and all these little things came together, and it was such a revelation, because we learned a ton, the crew interestingly enough, Maersk being a Danish company saw things very differently. So they were very open minded, and I was just very grateful that the client at the time said, " Hey, I'm learning as I go and I'm enjoying it," so we went gangbusters on that, and it as just because we fell into something because we were afraid to ask the question. Because we knew the answer probably wouldn't confirm. The basis that we should've held is that everyone knew what they were doing, because they did.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, which is a huge driver in safety. So it's democratizing the team behavior, but also democratizing knowledge to say it's okay to get your knowledge from another colleague, or a junior colleague, because I think that's another problem you see in business, is people are like, " Well, I can't ask my staff member what this is, because I should know it, I'm their boss." So that's really cool too.

Simon Finn: It's really interesting, and I've got two experiences in life. One is obviously now, I run a company that over the last 20 years, we've operated in 25 different countries around the world, we've done 50 startups, and we've had a heck of a lot of people involved. And generally, I'm the boss. I'm the largest shareholder in the company, so people will want to do as I say, because that's their employment. I try and disarm people as much as possible to say the only way we will succeed is if we're brutally honest. Not everyone will be brutally honest with me, no matter how much we try and create an environment for them to do so. In a sporting world, which you may be familiar growing up in Australia, I'm involved in a voluntary organization called Surf Lifesaving. It's where people give their time to go to the beach and be amateur lifeguards, or volunteer lifeguards. And that could be your rural fire service, it could be anything where people come together, raise their hand and say, " Oh, we'll do something for the benefit of our elders. Well, in that, I was in a leadership position. I was a club captain and you learned very, very quickly whether you had people on side or off side, because people can just tell you exactly what's on their mind. And one thing, over a period of 10 years, I was a club captain. When I first started out, I didn't know what I was doing. And I wasn't listening to others. By the end of it, I realized that I was good at a few things. I was good at understanding people. I was good at understanding what we need to set as the vision, and then thankfully, and it took me a long while to work it out, that I was not the best executor of everything that had to happen. So I needed to surround myself in the team. Who was an engineer in their professional life? Who was the accountant? Who was the teacher? Who was a data driven person? Where were the trades that were used to getting on with the job? And once you learned that, as a team leader, you start to realize that you need to be a bit of a conductor, and you need to say, "Okay, where's the trumpets? Where's the violins? Where's the drums? Where's this?" And you need to bring that together. If a leader or manager doesn't realize that they can't do it all and that they don't realize that they're a conductor of an orchestra, they're really struggling. So that was a revelation to me about 20 years ago, and it's helped me a long way in the last few years.

Dane Groeneveld: Ah, yeah. Definitely. And I've been a part of a Surf Lifesaving club, actually just up the road from you at Long Reef in Sydney, in my early years. It was good fun, but never got to that club captain level, but the friends of mine that have stayed in it, it's a great community. It's an important role, and there's a lot of candor in those environments, generally.

Simon Finn: There is candor, and this comes back to the future of teams. Wherever people are listening to this, I encourage them to do voluntary work, to be a volunteer in society, because you will learn your influence. You will learn whether that influence is real or perceived, because when you are an appointed manager or an appointed leader in a company, that influence is given to you by the vary nature of the firm. When you become a leader in a voluntary organization or a sporting body, whatever that is, where people aren't employed to do as you say, you learn very quickly what kind of influence you have. And I've learned that so well, and also, your position as a leader of a team is not forever. Everyone goes through a point of performance, and for me, I knew on two different occasions that I'd had enough, that I'd run out of steam, and I'd quickly step down. The challenge in organizations is that when they think they've appointed somebody to a certain position and they hang onto them too long rather than saying, " You've run a great race, we need to get you off doing this, and let someone else come in," and that doesn't necessarily need to be someone young. It means to be someone who at that moment in time is the best person to influence others towards a meaningful goal that will bring people with them for the betterment of others.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, and that's an interesting topic. I've read some things in HBR around 4. 6 years is an average term for a publicly traded CEO and that type of thing, but that concept of seasons for leaders, as not just public CEOs, as leaders in all different levels of the organization, that there are seasons. And I think coming out of COVID, that might be one of the other things we're seeing play into the great resignation. I can see it with some of the folks on my team, there's some people that are maybe a little bit tired or maybe aren't ready to take on the new way of leading post- COVID with all this remote work, and companies are very wedded to hierarchies and salary scales, and they don't change quickly. They do hang on. So I think that's probably a big driver that we're going to see in the next year or two here, as teams reorganize.

Simon Finn: We are going through such great change. It's just significant. The one thing that I still can't get over people who are leading organizations don't do is they don't maximize the opportunity for communication. Most people have a very simple phone, whether it's an Apple phone or an Android phone, you can make a video on it. You can find someone within your organization, online, wherever it is to edit that. You can have a small group of trusted people who may agree with you, may disagree with you and say, " Once a week, I want to put out a message to everyone on a Friday, Friday afternoon, I'm going to make it on my phone. Can you please have a look at it, tell me what's right, what's not right? Edit out whatever you need to do, get it out." It costs nothing. It takes a little bit of time, but it allows a team, you might have a team of five, 10, 20 people, a few hundred, a few thousand, whatever that is, 10,000, 20,000 people. But it allows people on a regular occasion to hear from the one person who is leading that organization that can say, " This is what's happened over the last seven days, this is what's happened over the last 14 days," but you shouldn't leave it anything more than 21 days, but organizations don't do it. They put out press releases, they put out edicts. They put out company results. They don't measure themselves, and this comes back to a personal thing of mine, they don't measure themselves on meaningful results like happiness and wellbeing. It is still a GDP, a gross domestic product, or a profit and loss. It's those things that are important, but they're not always sustainable. So getting off the point a little bit here, but-

Dane Groeneveld: No.

Simon Finn: ...I do think that ability for leaders to communicate is hugely important.

Dane Groeneveld: I think so too. And I actually think it goes a step beyond the leaders. I think it's team members too, because teams are often working together, but they don't really know what that other function in the business does, or who that other person is. And I think like you said with the Well Control Wednesday, short videos can create so much more engagement and accessibility than traditional forms of sharing information in businesses. So I don't think it's going off topic at all. I think it's a really good direction.

Simon Finn: Just coming back to this Well Control Wednesday, look, I learnt a huge amount about my client the first time we did that in 2014, 2015, that there was just this belief, and it wasn't a negative thing, a belief that people knew what they were required to do. Certain people, when they're performing a task in an operation like an offshore drilling rig, people know their job, but they don't necessarily know how that job impacts this job over here, this job over here, or this task over here. And the ability to help people understand, " I do this small role which allows this to function, this to function, this to function," and that's why you being able to do this is really important to me. And the clients that I was working with were so receptive to it all, but as it came along, they said, " Man, you got to broaden this out. I want to hear everything and anything," and it just allowed the democratization of this team to be really, really embracing of influence and power, to the point that we were involved in that rig, I thought it was going to be for 120, 180 days. We were there for roughly 18 months, two years.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow.

Simon Finn: But over that period of time, the Maersk Viking was the most successful rig startup in the IADC, the International Association of Drilling Contractors, for a 12- month period. It was the most successful for Maersk, and importantly from an economic point of view, it had the less downtime, it had the less incidence of any rig that was being run by the client, which was ExxonMobil at the time, over that running 12- month period. Now, did we make that happen? No, I wouldn't say we did, but we contributed to an atmosphere that allowed people to resolve issues openly, because they saw someone on a little vignette, a little video that they didn't know that well, and they'd go up to the barge master, or they'd go up to the captain, or they'd go up to a roustabout or a roughneck or someone was doing something, saying, " I don't understand what you're doing, but why do I need to be doing this for you?" And then explaining it. I never knew. And that's how it is in companies. I have asked things of my accounts department before, or a different department, and they say, " Why are you asking for that?" And I say, " Well, I need to know this," and then they can't execute it, because I've never explained it properly.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah. I've seen it a lot, too. Not only at work, but also at home, where it's my wife, and I'm like, " I need this." " Well, why do you need it?" " For this reason." "Oh, well, I could've done it this way for you and you wouldn't need that." "Oh, I wish I told you that a week ago."

Simon Finn: Yeah. I just come back to so many of the learnings I've had have been exposed to me in non- employed environments, where people are brutally honest with you. I had an interesting gap in my life, just for personal reasons. I took time out between 2004 and 2008, and I took a contract with the Australian Defense Force to do pre- deployment training for Australian army officers in the Middle East. I can't go into it, but I just learned a ton from people who had perceptions that what they were doing was right because that is what their chain of command wanted. Their chain of command had never said that, but it was this perceived instruction of command without being there, so I learned a lot, that there is perception of perceived expectations that are not necessarily there. And you've got to help people work through that. You've got to help people understand situational awareness, and the importance of asking questions, and then critical thinking. Sometimes, you need to be responsive, and other times, you need to just back off. My mom, pre- computer age always said, " Write that letter and then send it in the morning." Now, I wish I still did that, but it's such an important thing because people will be pressing send on an email at 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, 12: 00 at night, when really, they should just say, " I'll let it sit, I'll get up in the morning, I'll go for a walk, I'll have a stretch, I'll meditate or do some yoga," or do whatever, and I'll come back to it and go, " That was a bit harsh." I might get on the phone, I'd rather get on the phone. I wish I did that more, and I don't do it enough, and-

Dane Groeneveld: Me too.

Simon Finn: ...just got off the phone to my mom last night, so that's what reminded me of it.

Dane Groeneveld: Those are always wise tips, those tips from our parents and our mentors, who have seen it in a different-

Simon Finn: Yes, correct.

Dane Groeneveld: ...time of technology and probably a different time of complexity as well, to be honest. But those are some great practices.

Simon Finn: Yeah, we bring up this term mentors, which when you and I were young, there wasn't this expectation that you could have a mentor. Now, companies expect it. As we transition workforces over, there's a lot that older people can learn from younger people, younger people can learn from older people. And it's just finding that right balance of having a mentor and a mentee. I've spent a lot of time involved in that space over the last 24 months. I had a few friends that are in significant positions in the corporate world globally, and I've said the same thing, is that you've got to allow companies to say, " We need this to happen," but don't control it. Allow people to find the people that they'll gel with, and that will allow teams to regenerate and refunction and move in directions that will benefit the company, will benefit those people that are in an organization looking for change, looking for growth. If you don't control it, and just provide pathways for it to be accelerated.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's so organic and so necessary right now. It's hard. It's been such a good conversation, Simon. Thanks again for joining me today. It's hard to summarize. There's so many cool little snippets that we've touched on from perceived status, from learning where your influence is with voluntary work, that riff that we did on democratizing teams and knowledge, and helping bring out the engagement of those teams through some video interaction, there's so much good stuff we've covered here today that I think influences the future of teamwork, so thank you for joining, and thanks for letting me start the conversation with a bit of talk about surfing Indonesia too.

Simon Finn: Good on you. Thanks so much, Dane. All the best.

Dane Groeneveld: Thanks, Simon. Peace.

Simon Finn: Peace.

DESCRIPTION

Simon Phin, Chief Executive Officer of Beyond The Break Pt. Lt., stops by to talk about surfing, oil rigs, and teamwork with host Dane Groeneveld. On this episode of the Future of Teamwork the two cover how Simon translated lessons from tandem surfing to practices that ultimately helped oil rig employees around the world stay better connected and safer on the job. Dane and Simon also cover the nature of collaboration after COVID, and how to make workplaces more democratized.

Today's Host

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Dane Groeneveld

|HUDDL3 Group CEO

Today's Guests

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Simon Phin

|Chief Executive Officer of Beyond The Break Pt. Lt