Unlocking Team Cohesion with Matt Poepsel

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Timestamps:
00:00 – Cold Open & Intro
04:43 – How Systems and Technology Are Messing With Team Cohesion
09:58 – The 2024 Olympic Team: A Powerful Leadership Metaphor
11:01 – Synchronization: Why Teams Need to Row in the Same Direction
13:56 – The Role of Hope in Leadership Success
19:02 – How AI and Technology Are Changing the Leadership Game
22:52 – Building Trust in Leadership: Why Transparency is Key
25:17 – The Future of Leadership: Where It’s Going and Why It Matters
30:23 – The Disconnect Between Old Leadership Methods and New Challenges
33:49 – The AI Impact: Is Technology the Answer or the Problem?
36:00 – Wrapping Up: Matt’s Book and Podcast Insights

Matt Poepsel (00:02.00)
One of the biggest rifts that I see, Skot, is this huge delta between employers and employees today. A lot of times when you talk to executives, they’re saying, “Employees don’t want to work anymore, they’re not bought in, we need to get them to return to office, I got to be able to see them.”

When I found in my conversations, because I went exploring trying to say, why are we experiencing what we’re experiencing? That led to some of those earlier trends, and you used the term earlier, entropy that I love, which is exactly when systems tend to fall and move toward disorder.

Skot Waldron (00:35.00)
When I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the world. I’m helping leaders and I’m helping teams communicate better. I’m helping them build trust faster and actually enjoy working together. I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot. I’ve spoken at national architectural firms. I’ve spoken for pharmaceutical company offsites. I’ve spoken at associations, you name it.

With 99% of attendees of all those events, over 1800 people have reviewed me at this point. 99% of them saying they got some value. That’s pretty awesome. Even the caterers have thanked me. And if they are thanking me and they’ve heard a lot of talks and they’re busy doing their jobs, that’s saying something. If you’re an event planner looking for a speaker who’s really easy to work with, trust me, I want to be the last thing you’re worried about on event day. I’m going to take care of you. And who actually delivers value for your audience that they are going to use on Monday morning when they return to the office, then let’s talk.

Do things feel a little bit chaotic to you right now? Maybe a little bit unstable, maybe a little bit disorganized. The world is a little bit like this right now. There’s things coming at us from all angles all the time right now. And that is hard. It’s kind of always been that way, but it seems like it’s that way even more now than it has been in the past. Matt Poepsel is going to be on the show.

And Matt is going to talk about this word entropy. And I’m going to read to you just for a second, the definition, just because some of you probably are like me and going, what does that word actually mean again? And it means this, it’s a fundamental concept in physics and information theory, representing a system’s disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. He talks about that. And we’re going to talk about that on the show. And how we get past it, because he says, laziness, not leadership, those are not the problems. It’s entropy.

Matt Poepsel is the author of Expand the Circle: Enlightened Leadership for Our New World of Work and host of the Lead the People podcast. He serves as Vice President & Godfather of Talent Optimization at The Predictive Index. So, if you may have heard of Predictive Index or PI, he works there.

He holds a PhD in Psychology, an MBA, and a Harvard Business School Certificate of Management Excellence. Matt is a part-time faculty member at Boston College where he teaches in the areas of leadership, human resources, and business spirituality. So here we come.

Matt, we’re going to rock this thing. It’s going to be so good.

Matt Poepsel (03:32.00)
I love it. Let’s do it.

Skot Waldron (03:34.00)
Okay. So, first of all, I want to know why you’re giving all the leaders a pass, okay, right now. So, you claim that the chaos is the real reason, this entropy, this whatever is the real reason, not necessarily laziness or leadership, you say. So, I’m just kind of like poking it a little bit here, right? But tell me about that.

Matt Poepsel (04:01.00)
I think a lot of times we discount the fact that there’s so much that has changed on us over the last several years, really. It seems to be accelerating too. And a lot of times when we look at people, whether they’re our leaders, whether they’re the individual contributors, we’re quick to try to ascribe like, oh, work ethic isn’t there. It’s this new generation. We try to make all these explanatory reasons. But I like to say that, you know, it’s really this notion that, when so much has changed so quickly and there’s so many forces that are working to actively pull us apart. Whether it’s remote work, whether it’s technological advancement, AI is coming in now. There’s so much happening. It’s not laziness. It’s the system itself that’s actually working against us. And we need to understand that.

Skot Waldron (04:42.00)
Do you think that the system, okay, let’s say there is some laziness out there and there is some bad leadership out there. Let’s just put it out there, right.

Are the systems also and all this stuff happening, making it worse? Is it amplifying those individuals?

Matt Poepsel (05:03.00)
Yeah, it amplifies it in a big way. When the system is designed to sort of pull us apart a little bit, it’s creating a lot of isolation. People feel separation. They feel disconnected. Then all of sudden it makes everything a lot harder. And I think a lot of times people are going to move towards self-preservation. So, a lot of times when they feel a little bit distraught, something’s not quite right, it’s not necessarily that they’re lazy or some people are lazy. You’re right about that. But in some cases, it’s hard if everything feels like you’re running underwater or like you’re swimming upstream a little bit. And I think that that only exacerbates the problem.

One of the biggest rifts that I see, Skot, is this huge delta between employers and employees today. A lot of times when you talk to executives, they’re saying, “Employees don’t want to work anymore, they’re not bought in, we need to get them to return to office, I got to be able to see them.” But employees are saying, well, you’re just trying to use AI. Put me out of a job. You’re just out for yourself. You’re trying to, you know, lay off a thousand people with an email.

And neither of which is universally true. There’s of course examples of both, unfortunately, but I think what’s happening is this separation that we’re experiencing, we’re personalizing it more than we really need to. And that’s going to continue if we don’t start to take a step back and really look at the bigger picture.

Skot Waldron (06:16.00)
Okay, so self-preservation’s kicking in. We’re seeing it on both sides, that they’re personalizing this thing and there’s a threat. Like, they see everything as a threat.

Matt Poepsel (06:28.00)
Yeah. It’s anxiety right now. And I think that happens when there’s the pace of change, when there’s so much working against us. Right now, the job markets are not great. So, of course employees feel threatened. They don’t want to be out there. They see the LinkedIn headlines. They see the nature of companies being a little bit more hesitant to make hires, for example. So, they feel that fear.

But what they don’t do all the time is to understand that if you’re listening and you’re a business owner and you’re saying, I’m watching everything change so fast, entire business models being disrupted. My competition might be investing in AI faster than we are. That’s fear too. And I think that executives are human, right? We understand that we feel our pressure, whether it’s from the board or just because, you know, we want to act as good stewards of our business that we’ve got to make change happen.

So, there’s this sort of amplification happening and what’s happening is that we’re being ripped apart a little bit by some forces, whether it’s technological in nature, whether it’s just an evolution. I mean, almost everything about our lives in the modern world has changed. And I don’t think we always stop to appreciate what that does to us and how we show up for one another.

Skot Waldron (07:32.00)
Tell me about this example. You talk about tight loops. Explain to me what this tight loop thing is first. And then I want to, you know, we’ll come back to all the things that we’ve been talking about this problem here.

Matt Poepsel (07:45.00)
Yeah, I like to talk about performance loops and it’s a very simple example of it. Like if we were all standing in circle, let’s say there’s a team of seven or eight people, you can think about like your executive team if you’re listening in and you’re all standing really close together and you’re trying to pass work left and right and make it spin around the circle there, so to speak. That’s a nice tight loop. It’s going to be pretty efficient, but if everybody takes two steps back and now it’s getting wider and wider, loosening up a little bit. Now pretty soon somebody’s dropping the bean bag on the way. There’s a start to be a little bit more corrective action. We lose a lot of efficiency whenever things get loose.

So, the way to think about it is that when those bonds are tight, when the groups are really working efficiently together, all the prerequisites are there. The workflow is very naturally. We don’t have to do so much realignment, recalibration, deal with competing goals. But loose loops, unfortunately, are what we’re seeing more and more because that’s the natural state of things when we start to move apart.

The way that you know that you got a loose loop at work is when you see more time spent by functional leaders focused on their own local self-interest and not so much working with the collective as an example. And then all of a sudden, if there’s lots of rework, endless debate, decision-making is slowing down, those are all signs that we have got loose loops that need tightening.

Skot Waldron (08:57.00)
And then how do we identify them?

Matt Poepsel (09:00.00)
You could definitely look at the productivity gaps. So, all of a sudden, if a team was high performing, but now after several months of working together, they’re starting to slip a little bit. There’s a little bit more of that self-protection happening. That definitely can be the case. When trust drops a bit, that happens too. That’s an example. And the biggest thing is the rework. I think we have to understand that when we put in payroll as an example, if we think about it as business owners, you’re talking about purchasing an amount of energy. And when that energy gets wasted, gets frittered away like heat in any system, then it’s not doing that productive, you know, that good work that we’re asking teams to do.

So, that shows up as that corrective action when it’s like, I’m confused. I was pursuing this part of the goal, but you’re now saying something else. That’s a huge problem. Or whenever there’s those sidebars, “hey, can I talk to you in my office for a second?” Like those types of things, they’re wasteful. And I don’t think that the inefficiency that we calculated often enough, but that’s exactly what happens. And that’s what destroys value in most companies.

Skot Waldron (09:58.00)
Okay, so tell me. Let’s use an example. You have an example you talk about with the 2024 Olympic team.

Matt Poepsel (10:07.00)
Yeah, exactly right. It’s one of my favorites. So, the US men’s Olympic team, you think that they trained hard all those years to try to win the Olympics every year? Of course they do. I mean, we have a very sophisticated program, hadn’t won since 1960, but in 2024, relatively recently, they did win the gold medal. And what’s funny is when you look at the interviews about how it happened, I love the example of there’s no cox and they’re just all four of these dudes working together, trying to make sure they synchronize. They talked as much about what they did outside of the work and the training that was important, of course, but they talked about they referred to it as an ethereal bond between themselves, the relationship that they had, the trust, and even the love, Skot, they said the word love, the love they had for one another helped them to operate as one. So, they said, it felt like we’re one boat. We’re not four independent rowers. And I thought that’s exactly what I don’t see when I’m doing executive conversations about things that are going wrong in organizations.

And so it really became to me the metaphor of saying, yeah, just like a crew boat in the water, we all have to make sure that we’re synchronized together in the way that we’re doing our work and do it in a way that keeps us cohesive and tight, for example, as opposed to people starting to drift off a little bit. Then that’s where the inefficiency steps in. And that’s the biggest crux in that example of that Olympic team. They just outperformed because they did it as a collective. And it wasn’t just any one person’s heroic effort, but that’s exactly what we see with the environment that we’re in.

Skot Waldron (11:33.00)
And that’s an interesting example because in that sport, it is important that everybody is in sync. You know, there are some sports where it is an individual effort. If I’m on the rings and individual effort, there’s coaches and trainers and medical staff and all kinds of people in the background, but I’m the one performing. I’m the one on the rings. I don’t have to be in sync necessarily with anybody else for that event. But for this particular event, that sync is so important in that they’re all on the same page, that they all have one mind, one effort, one goal. Like one guy starts going, yeah, I’m going to start rowing a little bit faster because I think that’s the way we need to do things.

Matt Poepsel (12:16.00)
100%.

Skot Waldron (12:18.00)
It’s done.

Matt Poepsel (12:19.00)
It destroys all of the performance gains that a collective needs to put out. So, it’s so great that you bring up this point too. And you think about it, that type of synchronization is exactly what we need now in business because it’s more collaborative than ever. We’re going through change faster than ever. We need to be able to adapt and adjust. We need to be agile, right? We need to overcome challenges we never had before. We need to adopt new technologies that we never had before. We need to absorb an entire new generation of workers in Gen Z that we’ve never had to before.

And so, all of these things mean that the stakes have been raised, and every organization now is doing collective work. But if we’re doing it in an inefficient way, then not only is it wasteful in terms of the ROI that we’re getting on all that payroll, for example, it feels bad.

I’ve never seen statistics as low as we see now when it comes to lack of trust in senior leadership in terms of employee engagement, the levels of isolation and burnout that people are feeling, the rage quitting that’s going to happen when the job market opens up because people are like, I’m putting up with it now because I don’t want to be out there. All of these negative things are showing up in our psyche because of what we’re experiencing. And it’s really this disconnect. It’s that lack of synchronization. And that’s why I come back to that crew boat over and over again, at a time when we need to be more synchronized than ever, we’re being pulled apart.

Skot Waldron (13:39.00)
So, okay, so we’ve got everybody, we’re rowing, we’re doing our thing. How do you keep the tight loops or that in sync feeling, the group, the tightness of us from becoming an echo chamber?

Matt Poepsel (13:56.00)
Yeah, that cohesion that you’re talking about. How do we make sure we stay together? We know we have to keep moving just like any boat, right? But we got to stay together when we do it. There’s a couple of key components I use to break it down.

And the first one is hope. When I found in my conversations, because I went exploring trying to say, why are we experiencing what we’re experiencing? That led to some of those earlier trends, and you used the term earlier, entropy that I love, which is exactly when systems tend to fall and move toward disorder.

It happens to my desk, Skot. I don’t know about you. My desk is always messy. I tried to clean it up.

Skot Waldron (14:26.00)
My desk is never messy, Matt, ever.

Matt Poepsel (14:29.00)
What? Never ever, it’s unbelievable. That for most of us, you know, it gets to be a messy desk and you’re like, okay, that’s just kind of what systems do. And I don’t think we always appreciate that that happens to human systems and human teams as well. And so that’s why when I went on this discovery, one of the first thing I found that these really tight, cohesive groups, they had hope. They were working toward a clear vision of the future that was motivating and compelling to every one of them.

And so, one of the first questions we ask ourselves, if we’re not happy with the level of collaboration, the types of things that we’re seeing, are we sure that our people see this motivating positive view of the future? If we come in and we say, we’re going to take all these new AI technologies and drive all this new efficiency. Are they like, is that a good thing for me or a bad thing? Right? When hope breaks down, my willingness to be part of the collective starts to wane a little bit.

But the second one is mutuality. This was all about, do I feel like my contributions and my expected benefit are equal. And it doesn’t mean that they are equal that the CEO and the individual contributor should earn the same. It’s not that at all. But it’s like, are we having mutual interest here? Are we understanding what each side is going to get? Because what’s happening now is that employers sometimes feel, if I let my employees work remotely, they’re not going to work hard. They’re going to get over on me. They’re going to take the money that I’m giving them, and they’re going to waste that investment.

But at the same time, employees are saying, well, I understand why we’re doing all this AI stuff. It’s so that you can get an advantage and we’re going to get screwed in all this. Right. So, whenever that mutuality breaks down, that’s when cohesion breaks down and then all that inefficiency starts to creep in.

But the last two real quick, one is around commitment. Am I committed to doing the work? Yes. But also committed to the team and the collective success. If I just want to get out and look for what’s in it for me, that’s not commitment to the team concept and commitment to the group’s collective welfare.

And the last one is that synchrony we talked about. Is the way that I’m doing work actually pulling us together or is it actually pulling us apart? And so, I think the way we set up our incentive structures, our communication, the way we make decisions, all these things have to be.

So, the four things together that I found show up more than any others were those things. And I think it makes a nice tidy list of things that we can look to our own teams and saying, have I created hope for my team? Are they feeling some sort of mutuality? Like we’re in this together. Are they willing to commit to the teams being together and having collective success and performance. And then finally that synchrony, are we doing our work together in a way that’s making it easy for us to act like a team, not harder. When any of those aren’t there, you’re not going to see a tight loop at all. You’re going to see inefficiency and looseness.

Skot Waldron (17:04.00)
I love that you include hope in there. I’ve been talking about that recently quite a bit in the sense that, you know, I always talk, you know, I wear a shirt that says Hope Dealer on it. It’s a nonprofit that I’m on the board of and, you know, deal hope, right? And my brother started this thing and he was a, you know, drugs, alcohol for years. And he said, Skotty, I used to deal the dope and now I deal with the hope.

You know, and I always say that every leader is a hope dealer and you should be like everybody here should be a hope dealer. And then often people I’ve heard before, people come back and say, hope is not a strategy. And I’m like, you’re right. It should not be your full strategy, but it should be part of it. And that’s why I’m so glad to see that it’s made it into your four, right? Cause I think it’s so critical. Cause when you don’t have it, you have the opposite, which is hopelessness.

Matt Poepsel (18:02.00)
Hopelessness, hopelessness, it’s devastating, Skot. And you’ve rightly called it out. And so, the reason I put it first is because we have to have a clear picture of what we’re trying to accomplish and why and what’s in it for us, you know, and we have to be bought in. And I think a lot of times we skip that step or maybe we just internalize it.

As leaders we might know why we need to do a thing, upgrade some computer system or acquire a competitor or whatever it might be. Like we internalize why that is. But if we don’t explain it and help others see themselves, everyone thinks they’re the hero of their own story. That’s the mindset that they have. So, their definition of hope won’t be the same as ours. We need them to see the positive future and what’s their experience of it.

So, are they going to get to develop new skills? Are we making a move for financial viability and that way we can have stability in uncertain times and it’s good for us to be an ongoing concern and they can feel good about job security? That’s something that’s showing up in the surveys now more than it used to is having some sort of stability and consistency is rating even higher in terms of employee interests than having purpose and meaning. Because right now it’s such a mess right now out there.

So maybe that’s part of the hope. But I think you’re exactly right. Without hope, what are we doing? It’s a very mechanical transactional view of the world if we don’t have hope.

Skot Waldron (19:17.00)
So, people want stability more than they want purpose and meaning.

Matt Poepsel (19:22.00)
And I think that’s a reflection of how much change we’re absorbing and how much it’s what it’s doing to us. Basically, this constant adjustment that we’re making, constantly trying to catch up. You feel like you’re playing catch up. I hear people all the time saying, I just, everything seems harder than it used to be. And when we even look at our lives, when we look outside of work, it’s very much, we have to understand the system is designed to keep us in our homes. Consuming the streaming content, scrolling through the socials. I can do DoorDash. I don’t have to go out to the restaurant, right? I don’t have to go to the store. Amazon will bring me whatever I want. And it’s turning into this very individual isolated experience versus the communal things we used to have.

So, cohesion right now is at such a premium. I like to say that entropy is not just having an effect. We’ve entered the entropy economy. It’s an entire way that what we’re conveying and pursuing and creating for one another is creating these experiences where connectedness and cohesion is actually more scarce than it’s ever been.

Skot Waldron (20:26.00)
Well, the entropy snowball is very large, and it is moving at full force down the mountain. And if you stand in front of it, you’re just going to get swallowed up in it. So, what are we doing? Like, I know you got your four pillars there, help combat it and to make sure that that’s kind of like a checklist for us of some kind. Are we doing those things? But if things feel unstable for our people, and we sense some instability there, what do we do about it?

Matt Poepsel (21:02.00)
Yeah, it’s a really great question. And I think the biggest part of that is to, we don’t have to judge it. We don’t have to pretend like entropy is this bad thing anymore. We have to say that gravity is bad for airplanes. Well, gravity is just a thing, and airplanes had to figure out how to succeed in spite of it. Right. So, I think that it’s one of these things where nobody’s asking us to go backward or to stop introducing new technology or anything like that. There’s only forward. But if we do want to stick together, we want to stay committed, I like to study those high performing organizations. If you think about first responders, you think about military, these high stakes, highly dynamic situations, they invest a remarkable amount in the social fabric of teams. I don’t think we see that as much when we watch, you know, military groups in action, for example, we see the behaviors, but what we don’t see what’s all the work that was done behind the scenes in those areas we’ve talked about when it comes to getting to know one another, spending time together, making sure there’s some level of interest outside of work, knowing that I’m advocating for you, I’ve got your back, you’ve got my back, you know, these types of things that all happens, you know, sort of during peacetime.

You know, in my military experience, that was certainly the case. We spent a lot of cycles on the team concept and doing things working as a team, so that we would be ready when things inevitably went wrong, or we face challenges, it wasn’t as if we were acting like strangers, you know, we had been together and been through a lot already by that point.

So, I used to talk to a lot of high stakes organizations. I think they’re all high stakes organizations now, Skot. When you think about every company that we talk to, they’re all going through various types of change, either from consumer demand, the way they produce, the technology they absorb, what they’re trying to accomplish, macro economy, political landscape, whatever you want. Like there’s a lot of anxiety and threat taking place. So, it’s all high stakes. That’s all I see anymore.

Skot Waldron (22:52.00)
I heard, I think it was Simon Sinek talking about a principle at some point where, you know, he was talking about the seals, and he does his whole chart thing with that. But it’s the idea of like, can I trust you with my life? But also, can I trust you with my wife? And it was that character side. And that was something that he said that seals ranked higher than actual, the competency side was the trust side.

And is there that cohesion and that is proactive leadership. And as you did, and as you train, we do the team stuff before the chaos and before the emergency. So, when the emergency happens, because the emergency will happen, we’re not going, wait a second, we’re a team, right? Like you believe the same thing I do, right? Like we’re doing the same thing, right? You know, and that’s not the time to be doing that. The work should be done prior to that.

Matt Poepsel (23:50.00)
And it’s all about a lot of it’s about transparency. It’s about sincerity. It’s about authenticity, all these types of things. So, when you show up as a leader, a lot of times, especially middle level leaders are given a part of the command from the top. The executive team says, “we need to do this thing. We need to cut costs in the business by 10% next year.” Okay, great. And they’re handed this as their directive. Then they turn to the team and the team’s like, wait a second. How are we going to cut 10% of costs? Like you’re going to take away certain software packages or now we can’t use certain outside vendors, or we may have to lose some team members and still do the same amount of work.

All said and trust is being tested, right? And that’s where if we don’t have hope, if we don’t have mutuality, all those things as prerequisites, that team is going to start to drift apart. And now everything gets harder. Everything gets a little bit more onerous in terms of self-interest and I’m not going to do anything but the minimum because they don’t care about me. This is where the downward spiral kicks in.

So, I think trust is absolutely a prerequisite. And if you don’t have it, you got to earn it. If you do have it, you got to preserve it. That’s just the way it works. And I think you’re right that the military gives us great examples, sports teams, same thing. Like we see all these great examples, but when we look in business, sometimes we get so busy doing the work that we forget to take our people with us. And we forget to create that cohesion through trust and safety and communication and intention.

It is absolutely something that as leaders, we need to recognize that the future of leadership is a very human practice because if AI can do it, it’s already commoditized. That means your competitors can do it too. No big deal. Whoever gets the most out of their people, whoever creates the environment that can retain their people, whoever grows their people, those are going to be the winners in the future. And that’s what this is all about.

Skot Waldron (25:37.00)
Okay, so finish this sentence for me. This is part of my semi lightning run. I always tell my guests like I try to do lightning round stuff, but I always get really intrigued. So, it never really turned into like a full-on lightning round.

Matt Poepsel (25:50.00)
It starts out lightning, yeah?

Skot Waldron (25:51.00)
It starts out a little lightning, but not.

So, finish this sentence. The future of work, cause we’re talking about the future here, will belong to leaders who blank.

Matt Poepsel (25:09.00)
Understand what they’re up against. Yeah. I think that the reality is, I talked to too many leaders that are acting as if some parts of management haven’t changed in a world that they acknowledge everything has changed. So, I think that we have to understand the way the work is being done now. And really the human reality of absorbing all this change, it’s not going to slow down, Skot, as you know, we have to do business the way it’s being done.

Skot Waldron (26:26.00)
Hold on, I want go back to something you just said. That leaders are not understanding that things with management had changed despite claiming everything around them has changed.

Matt Poepsel (26:38.00)
100% yeah.

Skot Waldron (26:39.00)
Give me an example.

Matt Poepsel (26:40.00)
Well, if you think about like over the last five years, just pick it because I think we’re talking to senior leaders, HR people, we’ve been in business world. If you’ve been in the business world more than five years, you’re thinking back and you’re like, wow, there’s so much has changed. I mean remote work, AI, all this great stuff. And I say, great, how has how has leadership changed? Oh, you still have an org chart? Yeah. Is that how work gets done in your organization? No, not even close. Okay, interesting. What about your incentive systems? Right? Have those evolved? Are you now doing collective incentives or still individual incentives? Well, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

So, it’s like all of our techniques which are already outdated, you could argue even five years ago, they’re woefully outdated now. And so, when we start looking at how do we actually reward those leaders who are able to create cohesion and to really hold our people together, in addition to putting up the results like that’s what it’s going to take.

So that’s why I say like, we can look back and point to things like, if you travel now, like I was talking to my mom the other day, she doesn’t travel that much. She’s like, what’s it like traveling on airplanes now? I’m like, it’s incredible. Are you kidding me? There’s no paper. You check in, you go right to the front of the line, whatever. You sit down in your seat. It knows who you are. So, you can pick up the movie that you were watching on your last flight. She’s like, what are you talking about? Everything’s changed. Like it’s not that bad. But then you go back and you say, how are we managing people? Same way we always have. And it’s woefully out of step.

Skot Waldron (27:59.00)
That is so interesting and I hope every leader heard that. And I think it’s because that takes intentionality. Everything changing around them is reactionary. I mean, they’re not necessarily in control of that. It’s just happening around them. But the changing their leadership style, that’s the intentional part that they do have control over. And so, it’s probably why it doesn’t happen. I don’t know. Thoughts on that?

Matt Poepsel (28:31.00)
I think we don’t necessarily understand the, what we’re trying to accomplish. We don’t understand our role as leaders. When you think about leaders, a lot of times individual contributors get promoted and say, well, my job is to put up results. That’s true, but that’s not complete, right? It is also to grow and develop your people to create that type of togetherness, that connection, make sure they feel connected to you as the manager. Sure. But also, to the company’s mission and to their own work and to their teammates. And it’s like, you’re in the business of, you know, I like to say that leaders are healers of separation.

What’s happening now is we’re experiencing the separation. It’s taking this tremendous toll on us. This is why people are going through some things right now. Leadership has the ability to connect people and to draw them in in a world that’s trying to pull us apart. So now at this point, if I see and I accept my mantle of leadership as yes, collective output, but also through collective cohesion, it’s a two-part act, right? Then all of a sudden, I can look at my own contributions and my priorities a lot differently. If I’m just getting results, but I’m not keeping the team connected, then what’s going to happen is people are going to begin to be less efficient. Eventually they can turn over, they can remove some of their discretionary effort. So, we have to get both sides of the ledger right. And I think many leaders don’t even necessarily acknowledge that that’s something that they’re being asked to do.

Skot Waldron (29:49.00)
What’s one thing leaders underestimate about cohesion?

Matt Poepsel (29:54.00)
Yeah, I think it’s deep connection to performance. I think a lot of times leaders feel like it’s nice to have, it feels ooey-gooey kind of stuff. Not true. This is physics. This comes down to it. Like when you don’t have that level of cohesion, everything gets harder because you’re losing so much productive effort that could otherwise be going into the work is going into corrective effort. Because now I have to miss, I have to realign you because you were misaligned. Something you were doing wasn’t in sync with what we were trying to do. The miscommunication.

All of these sorts of conflict resolution that happens between teams. These are all signs that we’ve loosened up. We need to tighten these things up, right? We need to get closer. And that’s, I think that’s a huge part of it. So, it’s not ooey-gooey anymore, if it ever was. And I think that it’s fundamentally aligned with high performance is high cohesion.

Skot Waldron (30:43.00)
Um, that’s good. That’s good. All right. What’s a habit that every leader should drop this year?

Matt Poepsel (30:50.00)
Um, I would say to some level, overthinking. I think right now there’s a lot of challenge that’s coming into us and we’re trying to constantly figure out what’s the strategy, what’s the pivot, what are we going to do differently? Sometimes I think we need to do that for sure. But then I think once we’ve done, we’ve set a new direction. We need to execute. We need to check in with our teams. We need to spend more time with them and doing that kind of work versus trying to plan for an uncertain future.

What happens in, you know, and this happens in the military too, we exercise much shorter planning cycles when it’s very uncertain. So, we’ll do it more frequently, but we’ll do it lighter, right? As opposed to let’s come up with some big monolithic plan. And then by the time you’re done with that plan, battlefield conditions have changed anyway. So, it’s like, okay, a lot of times in the Marines, they’d say, let’s focus on the 70% solution. Like, let’s get 70% of the thinking done. Because if we sit around until we have 100% of the thinking, it’s too late. Like we can’t be doing that.

So, I would say over overthinking, ruminating, those are things I’d like to see leaders do less of.

Skot Waldron (31:49.00)
Yeah, I’ve heard, you know, just to get a little technical about it, right? That 70% mark, right, is as often used as a sweet spot number of like the right amount of information you need to be with act with confidence, but not so much that you lose the momentum. They say, you know, below 50% is usually like you’re kind of guessing, you know, kind of that realms.

I mean, it’s hard to measure how much information we have, right? We pretty get nerdy about it, but it’s like, you know, I think there’s a gut with you. It’s like, hey, do I know most, like, can I make a decision based on this information? Is there always risk? Sure, there’s always risk. But I think that there’s definitely something to be taken there.

So, let me ask you this. What’s giving you hope right now?

Matt Poepsel (32:43.00)
Yeah, I think a new year always tends to bring some new hopes. So, as we’re recording this, thinking about like we have a lot of year to work with. I think that also there’s a growing awareness of that something has changed. I think that there’s this growing awareness that things are different now than they were. I don’t hear so many people that I used to saying, “can’t things just go back to normal.”

In the aftermath of the pandemic? A couple of years after, I think we’re still holding on to some notion that we could go back to whatever was happening before. I don’t hear that anymore. I think people have now accepted the fact that there is no normal to go back to. And I think that’s actually a very positive thing. I think it’s a hopeful thing. I think that there are leadership models and methods that we can learn and apply. And so, I think that we know how we have to want to do it and we have to execute. But I think that it’s not some grand mystery and it doesn’t cost a ton of dough and it doesn’t take a ton of time. So, the fact that it’s as practical as it is to get your people, hold them close and do the work. I think it’s very pragmatic.

So, I’m hopeful about that too. So yeah, lots giving me hope. And, and I think that in the reality is that we don’t know exactly what AI is going to do, but I think there’s a very strong possibility that a lot of the administrative type work, the things that were kind of taking away our ability to live happy, productive lives and show up for our people and doing the things that only leaders can do. I think we have a better shot at doing that than we did before those technologies. So, I’ll even take hope from that too, Skot. What do you think?

Skot Waldron (34:13.00)
Amen. I think there’s something there. Although I will ask people sometimes, I’ll be on stage, I’ll say, “hey, how many of you are busier, despite the age of AI that we’re in, are busier now than you’ve ever been?” And almost every hand goes up.

Matt Poepsel (34:31.00)
Yeah. And that’s the lack of discernment though. That’s you know, we’re not necessarily using our judgment. We’re trying to apply old tools to outdated ways of doing work. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re more productive than we were just because we’re busier or certainly that we’re creating more value or that we’re doing the right things. So, I think what happens anytime you get a new tool, you’re kind of clumsy with it. You don’t go, it’s going to be like, somebody hands you a new set of golf clubs, you know, even if they were better, higher quality clubs, you’re like, I kind of got to learn my way around these things.

I think that’s the phase we’re in, which is why people are working harder. But I do think if we fast forward out a little bit, we will master these tools like we always do. And I do think we’ll end up in an elevated place compared to where we were.

Skot Waldron (35:10.00)
And I do believe, like you said, it is our systems, it’s not the tools, right? It is the systems that are the problem and maybe the processes, the way we think about them, what we prioritize and how we, whether we’re intentional about our lives or accidental about our lives and leadership and how we do things. And all of that, I think, gets in the way and we’ll always get in the way if we let it.

Matt Poepsel (35:35.00)
And real quickly, it’s not sustainable. You can’t work the way people have been working for the long term. It’s just not possible. And the second is it’s not valuable. When you start looking at the things that are the most valued, like innovation and agility, these things take space and bandwidth. You can’t just kind of tick off checkboxes all the way and get to those, the things that we need most. So, I do think there will be a reconciliation, but I am optimistic about where we’re going to land.

Skot Waldron (36:00.00)
Tell us about your, I want to hear about your book, your podcast. What’d you do.

Matt Poepsel (36:05.00)
I’ve been hosting a podcast for a couple of years called Lead the People. It’s very much about understanding that while it’s important that we manage the business, we have to lead the people. And the reality is it’s a human-centric form of leadership, the one that you preach as well. I think it’s so valuable. And I just love being able to talk to guests in a pretty high brevity format and get some good stuff going. So, I love podcasts.

The book I wrote was, it’s called Expand the Circle, very much about trying to take an outside in perspective but lead from the inside out. So, providing actionable techniques about how you can lead yourself before leading others, before leading your team and so on. And it’s a very principled book. I call it enlightened leadership because it does require us to recognize that things have changed. And so, I really enjoyed the book writing process and giving talks based on this sort of what comes next for leadership. So those are all fun things to do.

Skot Waldron (36:55.00)
That’s cool. So, if people want to hire you to come speak or train or whatever about any of this stuff, where do they go?

Matt Poepsel (37:04.00)
LinkedIn is the best place. Huge on LinkedIn, love to spend time on LinkedIn, meet so many amazing people from around the world over there. I would love to just hear from you and connect with me, follow me, whatever works for you.

Skot Waldron (37:14.00)
Awesome. Matt, your brain’s awesome. I appreciate you bringing it and sharing your thoughts with us. Good job.

Matt Poepsel (37:22.00)
Thank you, Skot. I really appreciate you for what you do. Let’s put some good stuff out there and help some people.

Skot Waldron (37:30.00)
All the things you’re feeling right now with the disorganization, the chaos, all the stuff, it’s okay. It’s part of what we have right now, what we’re dealt. And we can, you know, we have to react to some of that stuff, okay? But if we do the work beforehand, if we do the prep, if we do the team building, if we do the cohesiveness, if we tighten the loop, okay? Create that…

Loose loops are problems. Okay, we drop things, things get messed up, tight loops. So, we instill hope. We create some mutuality, okay, with a combination of what the contribution, the benefit, the things that we’re getting plus that we’re giving those things, commitment and synchrony.

Those four elements, I love the thought through those. And if we can instill those in our organization and think, what are we missing right now? Why are things feeling so chaotic? Where are the balls dropping right now? If we can think through those things and use as maybe as an audit of some kind, this is going to help us a lot with our business and with our teams.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay Unlocked.