The Intersection of SaaS Solutions, Services, and Team Impact with Dr. Alison Eyring

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 necessary to help your team excel and thrive in today's rapidly changing world. Your host is Dane Groeneveld, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience in enhancing team dynamics and innovation. Today we're diving deep into the heart of organizational dynamics with Dr. Alison Eyring. With a PhD in organizational psychology, she's channeled her passion for teamwork into decades of expertise and business growth and transformation. You won't want to miss out on these three critical insights we're about to share. First, have you ever wondered why some organizational changes seem stuck in the mud? We're uncovering the three levels of organizational change and shedding light on a key area HR often overlooks that's crucial for growth and transformation. Conflict. It's that pesky elephant in the room. We're zeroing in on the primary catalyst of workplace strife and more importantly, handing you the answers managers need to dissolve it. And lastly, have you ever felt that the term team has lost its essence in the corporate world? We're unraveling the misconception behind the word and pointing you to the spots in your organization where the real magic happens. So teamwork makes the dream work and we are 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. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of Huddl3 Group, and today I'm joined from Singapore by Alison Eyring. Alison is the founder and CEO of Produgie and we've just been catching up on some great remote oil and gas industry stories in our prep here today, so it's going to be a fun conversation. Welcome to the show, Alison.

Alison Eyring: It's great to be here, Dane.

Dane Groeneveld: So for the benefit of our listeners, could you perhaps tell us a little bit about your story? How did you come to be doing all of this great work around growth and teams?

Alison Eyring: Well, I am now running a software company called Produgie, which is a company that... So Produgie is an enterprise software that enables leader, team and organization effectiveness. And it's a company that I actually incubated and then spun out of another company that I started in 2000. And the other company that I started was a consulting... It still exists, it's a consulting company, specializing in helping companies solve problems around growth and transformation. And I had grown that business to today, it has about 300 coaches and assessors and consultants globally. But I felt frustrated that we really couldn't serve smaller companies and so around 2016 I started thinking, " Ah, surely there's a way for us to use data and technology that can enable companies of all sizes so we could serve them." And at the time I thought we were just going to leverage technology to serve, to lower prices, and I didn't think that we were actually going to build a SaaS, but that's eventually what we did. And yeah, so that led me to this. I think the other thing that led me here is that I'm a scientist, so I have a PhD in organization psychologist. I spent my whole life trying to bring science into the workplace and had worked over decades in my company with other scientists, building tools and assessments and development experiences, not learning content, but approaches to accelerating development of individuals and teams that we built and studied and tested and we then embedded that in our software. And so that all culminated in Produgie.

Dane Groeneveld: That's super neat. I love it when I hear stories of SaaS platforms that were built out of an initial effort to tech enable a service offering. It seems like that's where some of the best software's built because it's built with the real world application and you've got immediate customer feedback. It's a really good story.

Alison Eyring: Well, we clearly knew pain points. We had so much experience working with organizations and knew where the pain points were. But it's interesting because in my own career I did a lot of work in strategy and change, large scale organization design and transformation. And the one thing that I did with Produgie that I didn't expect to do was spinning it out. And the reason for that was twofold. One was because we needed to raise capital because it's hard to raise capital for a consulting firm. And the other was just that we wanted to be able to grow fast. And we needed to do that because we have a very affordable license. It's incredible, the cost of one hour of coaching, you get a year license for Produgie.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow.

Alison Eyring: So it's incredibly disruptive. And so we knew that we were going to have to sell a lot of licenses and a consulting company isn't set up for that. You have a consultative selling model, it's all about trust and relationships. Which is all fabulous, it's just not a way to sell a lot of licenses. So the idea of the need for a new business model, I didn't know that at the very beginning, but I should have because I worked with so many companies that struggle with transformation and they have that problem. They say, " Oh, we want to change, we want to go faster." And yet they can't get out of their culture, they're held back by it. And sometimes that's why spinoffs are more successful than mergers and acquisitions.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I believe it. And it's a great case study on teams, isn't it? It's easier to set that team up, to spin them off and to give them a real sense of values and identity and mission rather than to have a confused organization trying to do three or four different things concurrently.

Alison Eyring: It's been incredibly challenging because actually I didn't bring people from Organisation Solutions into Produgie-

Dane Groeneveld: It was an all new start? Got it.

Alison Eyring: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Alison Eyring: Running software is so different from consulting. When you build things versus serve, it's just so different. The skillset's so different and we didn't have that skillset in Organisation Solutions, but the skillset that Organisation Solutions has now, now they're a channel partner, we love that and we're able to partner with them, we can market with them, we can do all sorts of things with them. And we're learning from them, now we actually have a whole channel where we have a pipeline of about 20 companies that are coming on board to have that relationship.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat.

Alison Eyring: We could have never done that if we had been just in Organisation Solutions.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. One of my favorite mentors that actually went from services into technology, SaaS, she used to say, and you just said it, " In services, you serve. In technology, you help educate the customer on how to use your product." Right?

Alison Eyring: Exactly.

Dane Groeneveld: So when you're on a services engagement and the customer says, " Hey Alison, would you mind including this and doing this and answering this problem?" The general response is, " Sure, we can look at that." And there may be some change orders or whatever, but you start going down a path. Where in SaaS it's like, " Well, we don't do that. That's not in our development queue, but maybe we could educate you on using the product this way or finding an integration partner." It's a little bit more concrete where you play in.

Alison Eyring: Yeah, I completely agree with you, Dane. I think it's a lot about cost of acquisition. So services tend to be very profitable, so you don't really worry. When you're going to sell an intervention that's$ 30, $50, $100, a quarter of a million dollars, you spend a lot of money to acquire that project. Whereas when you sell a license that costs$ 200 or $ 16 a month per user, you really have to have a system in place that allows you to acquire your customers very affordably. And to me, that is a very different mindset.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's true. The second point that you raised there, which I think is extremely relevant, is the fact that coaching and consulting is out of reach for a lot of small teams and small companies. It's so expensive. If you look at some of the rates, you just said$ 200 for an annual license where you're paying$ 200 to$ 500 an hour for a lot of the best coaches and consultants. So it's pretty neat that you're making that impact right there.

Alison Eyring: Well, and it's interesting because I've had conversations with potential partners of ours in this value- added services channel and they say to me, " Well, what's the role of humans?" And I say, " There's a huge role for humans." The problem in service, services are expensive because when humans deliver services, as the service provider, we want to bundle a lot of the service because it costs a bit to earn it. And so as a result, you won't get a consultant that wants to sell an hour of their time. So it's really a delivery problem. And that's part of what we're doing with Produgie is we're building a system that enables us to deliver these services, still with humans if it's needed. But also, people can buy our software, it deploys like Google Cloud platform. They can purchase it and use it DIY. It just turns out that a lot of companies don't want DIY, they actually want services and they need services from humans, but they just need little bits. And that's part of the problem that I think Produgie solves, which is enabling companies to get the services that they need, at the size that they need, but also to not be beholden to all the service providers, which is a big problem. If you're a mid- size, ambitious company and you want to do team development or leadership development or coaching, you buy them from different vendors and everyone has their own toolbox and they have their own approach and it really is not buyer- centric. And that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to make a service that really benefits the buyer and helps them scale their business and allows them to then purchase the human services around it that are qualified, that are wonderful, but that are in little bits.

Dane Groeneveld: I love that. It's funny, we had a wonderful consultant, a lot of our guests on the show, a lot of our listeners are coaches and consultants. And we had a consultant in the room with us the other week in Eric Enright, one of our operating partners, made a wonderfully direct challenge, lightheartedly, and he said, " Well, aren't consultants always looking to find a way to prolong the engagement?" You're always going to tell us that we're great here, but we've got problems there and it's a three- year effort to get there because that means you are part of the journey with us, you've got fees. And while he said that in jest to make a certain point, there's a lot of truth in that and a lot of small businesses that are just grabbing a consultant because it comes recommended and haven't necessarily got the muscle memory for how to engage and work with the right coaches. They can get lost in a fragmented offering and starting something and never finishing it. That's something I've certainly been guilty of in the past.

Alison Eyring: It's so easy because you're busy, the business is hard. Well, we're really trying to help shift a mindset in business that away from what I consider to be very individualistic, episodic, elitist, intervention oriented solutions to this notion of systemic leader, team and organization effectiveness. And that's what our software enables. And that's a really different mindset.

Dane Groeneveld: It's hugely different.

Alison Eyring: It's very different. I think work is very hard and it's especially hard for managers. And they've got pressure from above, they've got pressure from below, they've got pressure from customers and they need help. And no organization in the world can afford to give them the kind of support and the guidance without some sort of technology.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I think you're right. And it's interesting the way you frame out, and I've heard this spoken of before, organization, team, individual. You come from a scientific background, you've got the PhD. Is there a science? Is there data behind those three layers that allow it to be a catalyst or a focus lens for that change?

Alison Eyring: Well, certainly if you look at all the literature and the research and organization development and change, you always talk about three layers. And it's micro, macro and meso levels of change. And so you have the individuals and the individual level, you have all these individual differences and attributes because we're different as humans. Then you have teams and then there's a group level construct. Well, it's interesting, a lot of times people use the word team because they don't want to say the word subordinate. And they talk about teams, but I always say, " Well, are you talking about individuals or are you talking about collectives of people?" But there are different dynamics that are happening at the team level that are influenced by the individuals, but there's something more. So it's a nesting. And there is research, using hierarchical linear modeling and other things that look at the effect of the outer layer on the inner one. So the team affects the individual, but the individual differences impact the team in the same way your culture influences the teams or the groups. And then they over time also shape the culture. So there is an interdependency between those and organizations are very complex systems. And if you're just poking holes at one thing, this is a huge problem I think in human resources, is that human resources are only focused on people. And I believe that human resources have to think much more systemically about the organization and the capacity of the organization to enable growth and transformation. And so you have to be dealing with all three of those layers if you want to successfully grow and change and transform.

Dane Groeneveld: And that's a really important shout out on HR, largely dealing with the people and not the systems. I think there are certain organizations that are a little bit more systems oriented. But we had that conversation today with another guest on learning in an organization, for example. If you're only looking at learning as a box ticking exercise, did we give people access to learning? That's very different to, are we intentionally designing learning to align with our strategic objectives for growth? And there's so much more to it when you take the system's lens. So that's really interesting. And the way that you bring that through in Produgie, is Produgie itself a system for mapping how people play in their organizations or tell me a little bit more about where that magic starts to work?

Alison Eyring: Well, if you think about Produgie like two stacks of IP. And so it has one... We talk about tech stacks in software, but we have two IP stacks and there's one stack that is really enabling great performance in teams, collectives of individuals. It has diagnostics, it has a diagnostic tool that was built over a decade of research on what drives team effectiveness. And what's really cool about Produgie is that any user can go in, they create a team, they can send out the diagnostic, they can actually repeat it once a quarter. So it's cutting out all the admin costs and delays and problems. They can get that data, they see their benchmarks, they see benchmarks against all other teams on each of the different dimensions. They have a team impact board that I'm really excited about because it changes the idea of productivity. So you think of these wonderful tools like Monday and Asana and Jira, and they're really helping us not only produce things but be more efficient with tasks. But with our team impact board, we're really focused on creating collective performance, getting the team to know and trust each other, to be able to know what each other's doing, to be able to do team Sprints together, which we think is really important. And actually the other thing we have in Produgie that's really special is we're not a learning platform, we're an activation platform. We're about activating and sustaining behavior in individuals and groups, and that's a very big difference. Sometimes learning is important as a component of that, but we have a methodology called a sprint, which is like a charter or a pattern of actions, behaviors that drive outcomes. And every user can configure this based on the problems they're trying to solve. Or if you're a program manager, you can configure it. Or if you're a busy manager of managers, you can configure a sprint that you want teams or individuals to do and give it to them as a URL. And that just saves time and energy. We think that's really inaudible because everybody's busy, everybody has so much to do so if we can conserve a little bit of energy on things like that, then it gives us more energy to perform and improve productivity and get things done.

Dane Groeneveld: And it creates a lot more clarity I would expect, because so often we walk out of a meeting and we remember telling someone this and they remember hearing that and then we come back in two weeks to look at the work product and we're like, " Whoa, how do we end up here?"

Alison Eyring: Yeah, that's one thing I've learned to appreciate is the agile practices. It's interesting, when I was in consulting, I knew about it intellectually and we had many clients that were doing work in that space, but now that I work in a company that produces software and we use Sprints and we use these disciplined practices, I realized that a lot of what we do in teams is just horribly undisciplined.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Even just the way we think about putting teams together, often we just get stuck in what we've always done, dust off an old job description. In fact, that's interesting. On that first IP stack on performance in teams. I wonder over time as you look at team effectiveness and you look at the team impact board, whether it begins to shape the evolution of job design in teams. Maybe there's a little bit more real time feedback on what's working, what's not.

Alison Eyring: Well, I think it does because I think that we're really shifting away from the idea of stable jobs. Even Produgie has this adaptive development plan and it really is based on this idea that what we need are people who can solve problems and they need to be growing and they need to be developing continuously. And so that adaptive development plan helps them. But I definitely think there's a movement and a shift in thinking about stable jobs to tasks. John Boudreaux talks about this a lot. We do that in my own organization. We'll even have a list of things to do and if there's some stuff to do and you want to do it, you can do it. That's just a very different way of thinking. We also have a concept, we're building up an ops team right now that has customer success, BD, sales and marketing. And the concept of that team is that they're a team, each of them has a home base, which is a functional stack, but then they're also some interdependencies and overlaps. And I think for small businesses, that is really important because if you're relatively small, and when I say relatively small, it could be 1, 000 people. You could still be very... That's still big. But you may not have a lot of specialists. Specialists are very expensive and you need a balance of generalists and specialists. And so the way you think about how do you form a team, what is membership, what are the capabilities? That really gives you a lot of flexibility. We've got to move away from these traditional ideas of a job description and I'm on this team and I report to you. But it definitely takes a new level of thinking for managers, we have to prepare managers to be successful in that environment as well.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I actually see a lot of that. Again, Eric, who I mentioned earlier in the episode, he runs one of our software businesses as well as being an operating partner. And he's just got this insane talent for bringing people together based on their attributes, passions, and getting them to work in these small collaborative teams and achieve great stuff. Small but mighty is the phrase that we've coined there with some of his teams and what they're doing. And interestingly, it's going away from what we did in the Industrial Revolution of specialized, specialized, specialized, but we're not entirely back in that artisanal sort of craftman, take something the whole way through. So we're caught in the middle, which is exciting, but it takes, to your point, a lot of very intentional leadership to work through that as a team. And not just leadership from the leader, it's leadership from all of the members of the team.

Alison Eyring: Exactly. In my other company, Organisation Solutions, we ran a consortium for about a decade that was called Getting Results Long Distance. And at the time, no one was talking about it. And what we saw was we were finding that many companies were struggling with this problem of, how do I manage across culture, across time zone, across geography? And so we basically would run these programs and through that we actually built a lot of the IP that today sits inside of Produgie. And that was one of the things that I saw most often with distributed or remote teams was the tendency for a manager to fall into what I call a hub and spoke model of leadership. And it's exhausting. And if you're distributed or you have remote teams and you think your managers are burned out, that's one of the reasons. It's because they don't have shared leadership in their teams. And that requires a different way of thinking and operating that it's not just about getting better at performance management with individuals, it's about sharing leadership with a collective. And if you don't have shared leadership, then that person who's in the hub, they can never get out of their job. So it really creates problems with flexibility in the organization.

Dane Groeneveld: I wonder how that plays out with matrixed organizations because when you say collective leadership, I'm hearing something that's more than functional and project, I'm hearing something that's a little bit more continuous, fluid. Is that fair?

Alison Eyring: Well what I think is I call it shared leadership. So if you think about a group, so you've got a group, it could be across functions, whatever, it could be within the group, there's many decisions that are made that govern the work that team does. And so in a hub and spoke model, you've got a manager in charge and they're making all those decisions. With shared leadership, there might even be minor things like how do you decide who takes leave? Who does what work? Who plays what role in a meeting? Just some of those simple decisions around the mechanics of how we work can be shared. So when I say shared leadership, that's what I'm thinking about it. Now, if the team is very mature, then what happens is the team can function pretty independently without the supervisor. And that's great because then what the supervisor's doing is running interference with other teams. Because almost all the conflict in organizations is in between groups. It's not within a person, it's between people. Or it's not within a team, it's between teams. So if your manager is so focused on, I'm managing my team and I'm the boss, then they don't have any energy to be looking up and out. And that creates conflicts with stakeholders and that creates misalignment. And that, by the way, is something that Produgie can really help with. I'm really excited inaudible.

Dane Groeneveld: That's exciting. I need Produgie right now, I think

Alison Eyring: We all need Produgie.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. It's interesting that you say that that the role of a leader in running interference. I think that's true now more than ever because with the advent of technology, and particularly email, let's be really specific here, so many teams just kick the can down the road. Something comes up and they're like, " Ah, I could work on that now, but if I had this piece of information from that team, it would be easier. So I'm just going to push it over there and say I'm waiting on them." And so I just find there's this real lack of accountability because tasks just get pushed around and it's always someone else's fault or I'm waiting on someone else. And actually if we just got a few people around the table and had a conversation, we could get a lot more done.

Alison Eyring: Well, and what you're describing, that's a great example of just a simple practice of a kanban board helps to eliminate that. Because it's simple, you set up your backlog, you've got a backlog of items, they move into progress, you have routines around daily standups. Wherever there's a blocker, you identify it's blocked and you say, how do you unblock it? And I think that that's a practice that many teams don't have is that rather than saying, " Oh, this is blocked, here's the person we have to talk to, or this person has the knowledge." They do what you're describing, which is they're like, " Yeah. So let's kick that can down the road, someone else will solve it." And then that creates problems and it often creates conflict. And then that exacerbates the problem because now that there's conflict, people don't want to talk about it. It's all because they've got to name it and claim it. There's a blocker and you've got to fix it. So I do think there's certain practices and disciplines that can help complex organizations be excellent.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Absolutely. And once that conflict comes out of the way, everything lifts, wellbeing, morale, innovation, customer experience, it's the whole lot.

Alison Eyring: Exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of research. People love to say, "Oh, conflict is good for innovation." But there is no research that supports that. In fact, the research says conflict is bad and so you want to avoid it. It doesn't mean you want to avoid difficult conversations, it means you want to learn how to have difficult conversations, you want to learn how to speak about things that are uncomfortable. But you don't want conflict to happen because then that destroys relationships. When you destroy relationships, you have no trust. And trust is the oil that makes the machine work. If you don't have that, you're not going to function.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I actually think we had a great guest on to talk about innovation in teams, Dr. Ernesto Sirolli, and we were talking about tension was his word. And tension's a good thing because as he described it, when you've got a team that's innovating, if someone's all about the product and there's no one there doing the marketing interference and interface to say, " Well, will the customer use that? Yes, it's awesome, but will they use it?" Then you could go too deep on your product development without really knowing the customer's going to want it, use it, and so on. And so he was like, " You need a healthy tension there between those two individuals, but you don't want conflict either." So it's an interesting balance to strike.

Alison Eyring: Exactly. And that concept of tension is very evident in the research on business growth and innovation. You're talking about exploit and explore type innovation. That's actually the other stack that I mentioned of IP is we have a growth leader framework that came out of research. We spent a decade researching what predicts business growth, and then we built an assessment that actually does predict business outcomes and it's embedded in the software. So earlier you were talking about forming teams, that IP can be used in identifying what would make a good team or what roles do people play in the team and what might be missing. But the concept of tension, it's so important for growth and transformation.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That growth leader framework, is it... I can just think about some of the teams I've been on when we knew we were doing awesome, but we didn't know why. So does that help create some affirmation around, " Hey, this team's performing well because it has the right mix, the right tension of attributes on that group."

Alison Eyring: It would give you insights because at its simplest level, there's three components. You've got to perform, you've got to deliver results. There's perform, energize and transform. Those are the three components. So I call it the trifecta of growth. And there's always a tension between the perform and transform. And then there's always a trend of tension that if you're doing both of those, you're probably burning people out if you don't energize. So there's three. And then each of them has different components. But definitely if you look at the growth leader team profile, it shows the different roles that people play. And we'll see patterns where, for instance, there's a team that's saying, " We want to drive innovation." But you look at their team profile and people aren't playing the role of innovation. They're not behaving in a way that enables an innovation. And the good news is you can learn how to do it. It's not like you're born and you have it or you don't. Others are so innovative, they're not very good at creating structure, goals, monitoring, tracking. Some are great at that, but maybe they're too in their head and they're not spending time talking and engaging and building relationships. That's the energize. So those three dimensions are critical for a team to have.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Whether they're innovating or not, it just grows because sometimes you're just scaling up.

Alison Eyring: Correct.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Alison Eyring: That's right. Because no matter where you are in your journey, you have to be able to deliver outcomes. You've got to deliver today, you've got to be able to be ready for the future because it's going to change. So you've got to be building capabilities. That's the transform. And then you've got to engage people, you've got to have vision, you've got to develop, you've go to engage stakeholders. Those are all the different components of the growth leader framework, but you really see the gaps when you bring a team together if they lack any one of those three.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And it's funny, you see that, you'll see some teams where the leader hires a whole bunch of assassins like them who are just excellent at execute, execute, execute, but they burn out anyone who wants to stop and rethink where the system or process could be built differently or whatever else it might be.

Alison Eyring: Yeah. Oh, there's a huge conversation in the startup community, I hear it all the time, it drives me crazy, where they say, " Oh, founders are innovators and don't worry about all the other stuff, just hire the other people." And I'm like, " Well, okay, that's going to work if you just want your founder to get you to maybe your first million or maybe not even to revenue." Because what makes you successful as a leader now isn't what's going to make you successful in the future. So it's not necessarily a fixed set of characteristics, it's the ability to morph and adapt and to form a team that can actually perform in a great way. That's going to be the hallmark of a great founder or leader in a business.

Dane Groeneveld: I like the fact as well that you talk about the ability to learn some of these skills or dimensions. Because we see with so many psychometric assessments and other tools that they say, " Oh, StrengthsFinder, my MBTI, whatever you are now, you probably have been for 10 years and you will be in the next 10 years." And so while they're exciting in terms of telling you where you're at and how you might perform under stress and in your best self, they don't really give you a lot of latitude, I don't sense, for growing into a role the team might need you to be in today or tomorrow.

Alison Eyring: That's right. Well, in very good psychometric assessments, the tendency is to measure the fixed traits or attributes, and psychologists talk about the Big 5. So if we've been doing that for about 50 years, measuring the Big 5 in a reliable and a valid way, which is great, but if these are relatively fixed attributes, then we can't develop them. And with our growth leader framework, we are measuring those and we're measuring the behaviors and the patterns of practice that drive outcomes. And both matter, but if you really want to develop capability, you're not going to change people's personality. You can at best help them celebrate what gives them strength and overcome what doesn't. But that doesn't sound like a very efficient process to me. I think we should be thinking about what are the practices and the routines and how do we guide the right behaviors.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Absolutely.

Alison Eyring: inaudible for selection.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And I've even seen that at a real micro level. My son's in middle school now and we're working through some anxiety and bullying issues, as I think a lot of parents do when their kids go into middle school, and have a great therapist working with him. And they're giving us just some really good practices, to use your words, and patterns on, " Well, how do you think about this when it's happening? How do you use a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 assessment to just get really present with your physical surroundings and try and break out of that fear cycle?" And so at a micro level, the fact that we see patterns and practices help people get out of crisis means that at a more macro level, teams should be able to far more easily navigate some of these conflicts or bottlenecks if they just adopt the right patterns and practices too.

Alison Eyring: Yeah. Well, you see it in every field. Surgeons, when they use a checklist, they make fewer errors. I used to fly airplanes, I had a checklist. You use checklists because they remind you and use patterns to help make it easier to repeat excellence. Yeah, it's interesting, going back to your middle school story, my husband is also a PhD organizational psychologist. He's so fantastic. And when our girls were growing up, I always loved watching him talk with them because I always would have a tendency to say things like, " Oh, you did so great. You're so good." Or something like that. Or, " Don't worry, you'll do better next time." And he would say, " Well, you need to practice. So what are you doing? Let's practice together. Okay, I'm going to give you this." Or if they had an exam, he'd practice rehearsing with them. And they both did really well and I appreciate it because I think that what he did was he taught them how to learn, he taught them how to take tests. And I remember when our youngest was going to go to school on a bus and she was feeling nervous, very anxious, and he had us all sitting in the living room pretending that we were on the bus, having her practice talking to people. And so I do think that practice, mental rehearsal, techniques like that are fabulous ways for us to learn new ways of behaving.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Absolutely. And with that in mind, are there any particular practices between your two stacks of IP, once a team gets into Produgie, do you have a typical cadence of meeting to look at, say, the team impact board or redoing the team effectiveness, team performance surveys?

Alison Eyring: Well, what I love about Produgie is it is just software. You use it however you want, just like Microsoft Software, Google Workplace. However, as a leader, what I believe and what I find with others is that it's really important to have a cadence. And usually every business has a cadence. You have a beginning of the year, you have quarterly cadence, you have a monthly cadence. And so what we always encourage users to do is to find a cadence that fits with their cadence as a leader. And if they don't have a good cadence, then it can help them have a cadence. In fact, we have some great Sprints around that. Because for some managers it's not easy, particularly first time managers, that's one of their biggest challenges is figuring out what's their managerial cadence with people, for one- on- ones and with team events and team sessions. So generally with our Sprints, they can be a week, four weeks, eight weeks or 12 weeks. And so the user will configure that. And we have a roadmap, for instance, on the adaptive development plan, it has it by quarter. So we're not inaudible in what you have to do, but we're encouraging a cadence that can then be adapted for the size problems that you have and also for the cadence that you run. Big companies will often have very long, big cadences, and you worked in the oil industry, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Alison Eyring: You have long- term, you'll be in a big company. If you talked about a week, that's crazy talk, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Alison Eyring: But if you're in a startup that you might have cadences of a week, in my business, we have BizSprints that last a month and we have 12 of those Sprints every month and we work up to them, we have a backlog, we execute it. So I do think that depending on how big or small your business is and how fast you're growing, then the cadence has to adjust and then everyone in the organization has to adjust. And that's why we have to be thinking more systemically about these issues as opposed to, let's just help that one individual.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And this adaptive development plan, is that for a team or for an individual?

Alison Eyring: It's for an individual.

Dane Groeneveld: It is. Okay.

Alison Eyring: It is For the team, they have their team impact board and they'll do their assessment and then they decide what they're going to do. They'll do Sprints. Although you just gave me an idea for a new feature.

Dane Groeneveld: Sorry.

Alison Eyring: Thank you. This made the whole interview worth it. That's a great idea. Okay. It's happening.

Dane Groeneveld: All right. There you go. I'm always fascinated by how these things work together and I've looked at so many different systems, tools, approaches. It really is interesting to see if you can get into one thing and stay in it and make it start to address a number of things from strategy to values, behaviors to one- to- one feedback cycles, it's more likely that you're all going to stay in it rather than get distracted and jump into another tool.

Alison Eyring: That's right. And that's a huge problem today that you've got mentoring, coaching, feedback, performance, you have all these different things. And usually how you deal with individuals and how you deal with teams are very different. And that's one of the problems that we are also trying to solve. The other one is being where the technology is. So for instance, Microsoft, a lot of people are in Microsoft, most of our users, they're either using Microsoft Teams or Slack. So we want Microsoft Teams and Slack users to be able to experience Produgie seamlessly. That's super important. If I get my messages in Slack, I don't want to have to go out and see my notifications somewhere else, and I certainly don't want more emails. I think that's an important aspect of technology is it has to appear where the user is and with the tool set that they're using.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Definitely. And there have been some technologies out there that it feels like you need a PhD to actually get in there and configure it. So I'm seeing technologies that are easier and easier for even people like me to use. But that's important too because if all of a sudden, going back to the earlier point that you made, if you have to pay a coach or a consultant to come in and show you how to configure and run meetings in the technology, then the$200 a year license fee plus the$ 60,000 consulting thing blows you out of the water.

Alison Eyring: That's right. And that's why we said that we really wanted to model it to be DIY. And not because we don't want the people, but because if it's not DIY, then it means you're always beholden the people to help you. And so I feel like that's really important. I really think that a lot of the innovation that we've had in this space really isn't that innovative, it's actually been like cool UI/ UX, doing what we've been doing in the field for 20 and 30 years. And so I do think there's huge opportunity now with more cross disciplinary technologies and ones that are not just automating what we've been doing, but actually creating new ways of solving problems. I think that's a little bit more innovative. We certainly think Produgie is a different category. We call it adaptive organization systems.

Dane Groeneveld: Interesting.

Alison Eyring: Because people say, " Oh, is it HR Tech? Is it EdTech? Is it work tech?" We're like, " Well, no, it's adaptive organization tech." But we're creating something new that we haven't done this way before. And I think that's important because organizations are changing so quickly that we have to be able to enable people to change fast enough to be successful in that environment.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Absolutely. And you see teams within teams, teams within organizations, is it something that you can just deploy at a singular team level versus corporate organizational wide?

Alison Eyring: You sure can. In fact, you can go to our website and sign up for freemium.

Dane Groeneveld: Cool. I might have to do that.

Alison Eyring: Yeah. So we have the freemium model. And we're learning, I'm not going to pretend that we're perfect, but it's pretty cool. So you can go in, you can sign up for free, you can get started. We have these playbooks that we've defined because what we learned was that organizations say, " Wow, it does so much. Well, how do I get started?" And so we have a team book right now that we're really focused on called Team Productivity Without Burnout. And so people go, they can click on a landing page and then immediately start the Team Alignment Survey and they can start to use it. If they like it, they can upgrade online with a credit card, and if they don't, they can stop.

Dane Groeneveld: That's great.

Alison Eyring: And we think that's great. And we have a Growth Leader 360 that they can use in the freemium. So I think that's the direction of technology in our space. I hope it is. I think it's exciting.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, me too. It's funny, Alicia, who actually helps run this whole podcast with me, she was here in California the other week and we did a strategy session on where's the podcast going? We've just passed our one- year anniversary. We love having all these amazing guests on the talk about these great topics around teams and we're starting to think, do we start to commission some research? Do we do a book? Do we create a community? And we're starting to put all of that on the board and it's all exciting, but it's also very daunting. So maybe we should go and sign up and start using that in our team.

Alison Eyring: Nice. And we can partner in that because all of your listeners can go in and do the Growth Leader or the Team Alignment Survey and then we can share the data with them.

Dane Groeneveld: That would be fun. I'll definitely-

Alison Eyring: That would be cool. I'll do it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I'll definitely alert Alicia to that after this conversation.

Alison Eyring: It's a deal. It's done. Yes.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. So my final question then, Alison, is as you look to the future of teams, next five, 10 years with these emerging technologies and opportunities for small teams to achieve great things, which I think technology allows, what are your hopes and wishes for what the experience of teams, what the agency of teams is going to continue to become?

Alison Eyring: Well, I hope that it'll become more mainstream, that people will stop using the word team to mean an individual that's not a manager. I really think it's important for us to have language and for us to see that almost everything that matters in organizations happens within group and that we really need to get those groups to be great. And it requires new tools and new ways of thinking. I think that's one of my hopes. One of the areas that I'm pretty excited about like everybody else is generative AI. And we have a number of little applications of AI in Produgie, which I think are pretty cool. But one of the super simple implications of it is that it means that people don't actually have to be so expert, they can leapfrog expertise quickly. And an example, we have interns that come in, and we just had an intern that came in this summer who was helping us work on our ESG Sprint Library. We give away our ESG Sprint Library because we really want to activate leadership for social equity and environmental sustainability. So if anyone's interested, contact us. We're excited about that. She's a student, she's studying it and I just said, " Hey, use ChatGPT. It's cool, you can do that." And I gave her a little bit of guidance and she helped us to build some Sprints and we uploaded them and now they're into Produgie. And I think that that's a very cool promise. It doesn't mean that the AI is going to replace us, you really have to manage it, and you have to know its limitations and you have to know when not to use it. But for someone who maybe is new to a team or is early in their career, it can help them leapfrog. To me, that's very exciting. I think it also has a lot of promise for giving teams insights that they wouldn't normally have and suggestions. So I do think that that's going to change very quickly. So the use of generative AI will change how we help teams. And I guess my last hope is that we will have a world where everybody wants to share leadership for high performance and that shared leadership is so important. We can't just rely on one person to solve the problems and that's the power of teams.

Dane Groeneveld: I love that. I think they are three great hopes. I'm excited to be part of the journey with you and with Produgie too, and I appreciate you sharing your ESG Sprint Library. I'm sure a number of listeners would love to jump into that. So if they want to find you, Alison or the Produgie product, what's the best way for listeners to reach you?

Alison Eyring: Well, thank you for asking. Well, I personally am incredibly discoverable. If you type in my name, I think you'll find me. I'm on LinkedIn, I love to connect with people on LinkedIn. Produgie also has a LinkedIn site. We have a growth leaders community as well. If you want to be a growth leader, join our community. We're really excited about that, we want to help people spend their life becoming a growth leader and the more we have those muscles and capabilities, the better off we are. So our website, Produgie. com, P- R- O- D- U- G- I- E. It means future leadership energy.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, I love it.

Alison Eyring: That's what Produgie means.

Dane Groeneveld: Future leadership energy. That seems very well- placed for being on the Future of Teamwork.

Alison Eyring: I agree.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, that's awesome, Alison. Well, I appreciate you taking the time this morning. And yeah, I look forward to collaborating in the future.

Alison Eyring: Sounds great. Thanks so much, Dane.

Dane Groeneveld: Thank you.

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 paved the way for a future where collaboration thrives. If you're hungry for more insights, strategies and research on collaboration, head over to the futureofteamwork. 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.