What Does Your Future of Work look like ? Gabe Barrett Former CIO Abellio Group

What does the future of work actually look like and are we designing it, or just reacting to it?

This is a slightly different Get Amplified episode - Gabe Barrett former CIO of Abellio Group, a leader whose career spans consulting, cybersecurity, and leading technology at one of the UK’s largest transport organisations, joins Sam and Vic for a thought provoking conversation.

And we go deep!

From misaligned purpose inside organisations to the realities of hybrid working, Gabe challenges some of the biggest assumptions we’re all still holding onto about how work should work.

We get into:

• Why most organisations say people matter, but don’t act like it 
• What misaligned purpose really looks like (and the chaos it creates) 
• The shift from being driven by technology to being fuelled by it 
• Why the future of work is less about structure and more about behaviour 
• And what truly defines a team (hint: it’s not just a group of people working together) 

There’s a brilliant thread running through this episode: the future isn’t fixed. It’s being shaped right now, by the choices leaders make about what they value, measure, and reward.

If you’re thinking about hybrid working, culture, or how to actually get teams pulling in the same direction, this one will get you thinking.

You can find an overview of the Team Speed Check we mention here 

We would love you to follow us on LinkedIn! 

https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplified-group/

Transcript

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Sam 0:09

Welcome to Gemplified from the Amplified Group. The podcast to tech industry leaders and aspiring leaders who want to help the companies execute faster. As always, we've a virtual and something like a cemetery and sunny background looking out at the gun, which is overgrown because of the rain. Vicky's over in Deepest Artists, Oxfordshire. Vicky, who have we got on the podcast today as our guest?

Vic 0:31

So today we've got Gabe Barrett. And Gabe and I don't know each other that well. We actually met through Paul Russell, who was a previous podcast guest of members through a design thinking group. And I just remember listening in on the design thinking group and being totally blown away by Gabe. And then we had a follow-up chat where Gabe's got such an interesting background. And where the majority of our guests are in the tech industry actually in vendors or partners, Gabe comes from the customer side of things. But what he was talking about that was so fascinating was about misaligned purpose within organisations. So I'm sure we're going to come onto that, but it's just a real treat to have Gabe as a guest. So thanks very much, Gabe.

Sam 1:24

Fantastic. Welcome, Gabe. So perhaps you had best start after that illustrious introduction, giving us um something of a high-level career history, if you don't mind, just for purposes of introducing you to our guests.

Speaker 1:36

And thank you so much for having me here today. So my career really starts when I went to university, when I thought I was going to be an aerospace engineer and ended up mostly a rugby player and then actually studied geology. But those were those are two quite formative experiences being on a rugby team and studying a science at a university in the States, where the rocks were not the main point. It was the process of critical thinking, research and analysis and communication. After that, I had a stint in management consulting and started to focus more and more on risk management, especially around the science of decision making. And then took a bit of a turn into tech and got into cybersecurity. And then from cybersecurity, in my last role, I was the chief information officer for Abelio, which is one of the UK's largest public transport organizations.

Sam 2:30

That's quite a run.

Speaker 2:32

And now uh I've now founded my own company called uh Otter Intelligence, which is focusing on team building and teams, especially in a hybrid and remote context.

Sam 2:44

Okay, that's really interesting. Why otter?

Speaker 2:47

Because otters are smart, adaptive animals who work well in teams.

Sam 2:53

Ah, excellent. And they can use tools.

Speaker 2:56

And they can use tools and they're really cute. And so they're going to make for some.

Sam 3:01

They are cute. My my daughter has a a group, I think, on WhatsApp where they receive a daily cute otter pick. So she's got hundreds of cute pictures of otters if you ever need one.

Speaker 3:14

I'll come calling for some ultra pictures.

Sam 3:17

Fantastic. So I mean that's a that's a really good range of experience, is there? So you know I can see why you've got a huge amount of value as in a in a consultancy situation. Of all of that massive experience, what's your biggest kind of takeaway? What's your biggest thrust of interest?

Speaker 3:36

It's not the I would say functional area that I've worked in. That's never been the most interesting thing. The most interesting thing for me has always been getting groups of people to work together, and usually groups that are spread out across different offices, across different countries, across different functions. And it's the people that I've come to learn and come to enjoy as being the most fascinating part of it. And that the role of a leader is not to be the best at doing one particular functional job, it's to enable a group of usually more talented, more experienced, uh better trained in that particular functional area, enabling them to do their best work.

Sam 4:18

That absolutely makes sense. I used to say to my guys at SoftCat that, you know, I was just, I was just the pitch man. I was just responsible for getting them in front of the senior management team and in front of the sales guys and in front of as many customers as possible. I was just the guy with the arrogance to stand up in front of people, whereas they were the guys who actually knew what they were doing, which turned out to be true, which is rather rather good. So it sounds like you've come to exactly the same conclusions as Vicky and the Amplified Group. The people element is the cine qua known, the you know, the most important thing.

Speaker 4:51

Absolutely. And I think it's only going to become even more important going forward that we identify and address that fact explicitly rather than implicitly. Because a lot of organizations will say, Oh, our people are our most important resource or they're the most important thing about the company, but then they don't act in that way.

Sam 5:11

Yeah, they pay lip service to it.

Speaker 5:13

They absolutely pay lip service to it. But as jobs are, as some jobs, and we can talk about the nature of which jobs become increasingly automated, what's going to be left are the jobs and the new jobs that require things that only people can do, that require empathy and emotion and creativity.

Sam 5:34

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 5:36

It's all about people, and it's also about groups of people. We're long past the point where an individual, if an individual in fact ever could be responsible for some great piece of work, everything now is going to be created in collaborations. This week, interestingly, is the hundredth anniversary of Einstein's lecture where he revealed his theory on relativity. Wow. Einstein is often seen as this, you know, eccentric loner genius. You know, he was amazing, he changed everything. And that's true, but he didn't do it in isolation and he didn't do it in a vacuum. It built on other work that was happening around him. And he he actually went out of his way to say that, but that was never actually the message that was picked up. That even these incredible, utter transformations in how we see the world are not the product of one person alone in a lab or a factory or a room thinking.

Sam 6:41

It it doesn't work like that, does it? You know, you you test your ideas out on other people, and you know, you balancing stuff backwards and forwards helps you to hone your own ideas. And you know, even if you're the lead thinker in that area, you're absolutely right. You cannot do it alone.

Speaker 6:56

No, absolutely not. So the foundational capability that will be the difference between organizations thriving and organizations failing.

Vic 7:08

I think what you've what you've just said there, Sam, as well. I mean, we've we we've talked about this, but we've really experienced that recently at the Amplified Group of the fact that we are just getting so many great insights that are helping us define how we better support our clients. And you know, Gabe and I were talking about this last week. But something that I'm really keen to explore some more, Gabe, is the fact that we've both had a journey through technology, and something that I heard you say the other day was um on a webinar that you were doing, was about the fact that we have been dominated by tech, but now we're going to be fueled by tech and the importance of the humanization. Uh can you just expand on that a bit more for us?

Speaker 7:57

Sure. What I'm what I meant by that was the exponential rate of technology developments and improvements over the last few decades have massively outpaced humans' linear thinking style. So technology developments have almost run away to a large extent. Social media is probably the best example of this, certainly the one that people can relate to the most, where the technology development, we didn't understand the consequences of it. It took on a life of its own and a life very much driven by a small number of individuals that took on this thing. And so it's it's radically reshaped how we engage with the world, how we engage with each other, how we how we engage with things that were previously thought to be fundamental, like truth and facts, have become malleable in the experience.

Sam 8:57

The whole lived experience thing as opposed to truth, was it I think is really interesting.

Speaker 9:04

I I think lived experience is something else, but we can maybe come on to that later if we talk about diversity and and I think the recognizing somebody's lived experience. I'm talking about the difference between you know, you can you can't have your own facts, you can have your own opinion, but you can't have your own facts, and that's not the prevailing necessarily opinion at the moment. So we've as a society started to question things that previously were not open to questioning, and some of that's good, some of that's bad. But I think where we're getting to now is we're starting to talk about this. We're starting to talk about how do we harness these technologies for good and how do we adapt to this increased rate of transformation. You know, we used to be periods of uh development and then stable and then a new development and then stable, and and that's not the case now. It's it's just constant change. Constant change. And we need to learn to adapt to that, and organizations need to learn to adapt to that so that we are being fueled by technology rather than driven by technology, that we decide where it goes and what use it's put to as a society, which is going to be difficult because we're quite a fractured society at the moment, we're more polarized than we've than we've ever been. There's a very strong individualistic streak and bent to to Western democracy in particular that has replaced the good of the many with the rights of the one. Yeah, agree with that. And that makes it difficult for there to be collective decisions around where we take particular technologies.

Sam 10:56

Really interesting. Really interesting. Look forward to digging into that in a bit more detail, I think. Um, so Vicky mentioned in the introduction your challenge around misaligned purpose within an organization. Would you mind going into a bit of detail on that, please?

Speaker 11:10

It's something I've seen in a lot of organizations, actually. Uh, but my most my most recent experience probably illustrates it the best. So a train company, you would think the purpose of the train company is to get, you know, the most people from A to B, you know, to get them on their train. On on time, safely. On time, safely. It in a reasonable degree of comfort, yeah. And and for a reasonable price, you know. So that would be that would be a consumer's view of what a train company should do. But that's not actually how a train company works. And a train company is not a single entity. Now, this all predates COVID, and we can talk a little bit about what's changed since then. So, in the pre-COVID world, a group like Abellio would win a tender to run a particular line or particular collection of lines for a length of time around seven to ten years. So Abelio had five train companies. Well, those train companies had their genesis in British Rail. And while the ownership of that, any one individual company would change every seven to ten years, maybe longer if the same company won it again, the people to a large extent hadn't changed that much. So these companies were staffed by people who'd come from British Rail, a nationalized rail organization, and they were nearly effectively a public sector body, I suppose. And importantly, it meant they had a public sector mindset, a mentality about what their purpose was, which was different to what the group thought the purpose was. So the group's purpose was to make money, and I don't mean that in a harsh way to say that capitalism is bad and evil, but their purpose was making money, and that meant meeting all the requirements of the contracts. The people who actually worked on the front lines, the drivers, their priorities were quite different. And I spent a day at Houston Station once looking at operations because I wanted to understand what this company does. And I had uh an experience that's always going to stay with me. So the train was leaving Houston, uh, going up north, and the whistle had blown to say, right, that's it, we're closing the doors. The dispatcher was standing on the platform, getting ready to give the signal that would allow that would tell the driver that it's okay to start moving on the train. And a young family comes running down the ramp. If you know Houston coming running down the ramp, and what the dispatcher should have done by procedure is told them, sorry, you've missed the train, you'll have to get the next one, it's over there on the platform, whatever. But instead, he didn't press the button to say to the driver, you can leave. Like you could see him with his hand over it, and he was beckoning the family to run. And so they sprinted and they got on the train. And 28 seconds late, the train left the station. So 28 seconds probably doesn't sound like such a big deal, but you're never going to get that time back, and it's only going to get worse. So that small delay is going to propagate throughout the network. And I looked at this and I thought, when he goes home at the end of the day, and his kids say, Hey Daddy, how was your day at work? He might say, Oh, my dad was great. Because he will have gotten an emotional serotonin bounce from that young family making it onto the train. Who knows where they were going? Going to see a loved one, going in a family outing, but he will have gotten an immediate I did a good thing brain reward, not a, oh, I caused congestion and delayed to 700 people, perhaps in various trains down the line. And that's what made me think about this idea of we don't have aligned purpose in very many companies, all the way from the top down. Starting because we don't have clarity of purpose. Very few companies are able to say what their purpose is. And to be clear, making money is not a purpose, it is what allows you to achieve their purpose. I'm don't have an issue with making money.

Sam 15:34

Isn't to some degree making money a happy accident of having a good purpose that everybody's behind?

Speaker 15:40

I don't think it's a happy accident. Uh if you're if you're a non-profit, it's different. But if you're if you're a company, it's not it's more than a happy accident. Because if you don't make money, you're not going to be able to run your company. So you won't be able to achieve your purpose, you won't be able to entice more people in to scale it to achieve more of your purpose. So it's very important and it needs to be part of it, but it's not the purpose itself. Makes sense.

Vic 16:06

So from your perspective, when when you first told me that story, it felt like the different levels within the organization almost had conflicting purpose. And that caused a challenge for you.

Speaker 16:19

Yes. They had conflicting purpose and conflicting identity around what it is they were there to do and who we were as a company, who they were as employees. And that makes getting anything done very challenging because you can't align it to a North Star. You can write the best business case in the world. But if some parts of the organization simply don't care about that particular thing that you're trying to do, you're not going to achieve it. And you can spin a really good line and you can make most things you know attach, but it's very obvious when it's not fundamentally important to what an organization is doing. So it makes any kind of cross-departmental, cross-functional objective almost impossible to meet.

Vic 17:07

Yeah, yeah, I absolutely see that. And actually, um, I've been super proud this morning because we've just taken a team that we worked with two and a half years ago. They've just done our speed check. And the we when we're talking about speed to market in in the tech industry, we we look at four different elements, which is purpose, trust, clarity, and simplicity. And these guys have scored 89% on purpose in their leadership team, and the alignment there is just amazing. And it's it's been really, really lovely to see because when we worked with them two and a half years ago, they were all over the show.

Speaker 17:52

And I think that all over the show is probably the overwhelming majority of senior leadership teams. Yeah, I think they're one of the trickiest teams, actually. If you go down into a function, into a HR team or an IT team or a sales team, there's a lot of commonality of purpose and experience. But when you're talking about a senior leadership team, they're generally from different verticals and so have different experiences, have different priorities, have different goals, and are often strangers to each other. John Amici, who's a fabulous organizational psychologist, was talking about this recently, saying, How can you be a team when you're strangers when you don't know each other? And so that that team having gone from one to the other shows the other important thing, which I think a lot of people are uncomfortable sometimes talking about leadership, teamwork, because it's thought of as an attribute that you've got. You're either good at leadership or you're you're a good team player, or you're none. And that's not true. These are skills, these are skills that everybody can be better at. Some people accept them, but everybody can learn them.

Vic 19:06

Yeah, I agree. Totally agree. And and that's really drives us to do what we do because it's taking particularly, because some people I think it comes more naturally too, but actually it's subconscious and it's bringing it to the conscious and putting it on the table. A lot of what we do seems so blumming obvious.

Speaker 19:23

Isn't that always the case, though, in hindsight, that it seems so obvious? But just because something's obvious doesn't mean it's easy. And these can be tough skills to learn because they they speak to our sense of ourselves and how we value ourselves. So I could think this is tricky space for people to enter into, especially if they do it unsupported.

Vic 19:48

Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Sam 19:52

Yeah, agree with that. It's easy to say that something is is simple, but find that it's actually bloody hard work to execute.

Speaker 20:02

Yeah, yeah.

Sam 20:03

Simpleity different things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 20:07

If you look at the senior, you know, the demographic of senior leadership, these tend to be people who are fairly well advanced in their careers, and acting in a certain way has gotten them to that point. It served them very well. They're now in these senior leadership positions with a lot of authority, power, money that comes along with that. And they're going to struggle because what got them to where they are isn't going to get them to where the organization needs them to be. And it's a big ass to say to someone, well, thanks for your you know 20-year career, uh, but all the skills you have are no longer relevant. You need to be completely different. That is emotionally a very, very devastating blow to give to someone. And so I think that's why support is so important for senior leadership teams, because you don't want to get rid of all the knowledge and experience, and you certainly don't want to demotivate your teams.

Sam 21:05

Yeah, makes sense. So, as what with everything else that you're doing at the minute, running your own business and so on, you appear to have chosen to do a master's in organizational psychology. Was that necessarily such a good idea?

Speaker 21:20

Well, well, if it's not hard, it's not worth doing.

Sam 21:22

Well, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 21:24

I like to challenge myself. And the reason for doing the master's in organizational psychology is twofold for me. The first is I've had an interest in all these areas for quite a long time behavioral economics, science of decision making, but I wanted to pull them together into a cohesive framework. And so going through a master's in organizational psychology will give me some of the groundwork that I might have skipped over had I done it as an undergraduate. So that there's that aspect of it. The second Though, which is the part that really excites me, is doing research. Going back and doing research for the first time in 20 years is really quite exciting. Being able to access all the current research that's going on out there, but also the fact that we are in a field that is quite new because of COVID. So the field of developing teams, that's not new. The field of developing teams in a hybrid world, now that's new. And so there's the future is up for design, as I like to say. There is no pre-existing benchmark of exactly how you should do this. There's no established, you know, best practice. There's a lot of trial, there's going to be a lot of trial and error. There's going to be a lot of great ideas that are going to then need to be expanded on, modified, improved. And that's very exciting to be at the start of something new.

Vic 23:06

See, it's funny, I don't see it. I I know it's new mainstream, yes, but I don't see it as that new in the way that some people are describing it, because it's it feels like that's how I've always worked. The hybrid world. And I and we could this will be quite a good debate to have, I think, because to me, the hybrid world is sometimes you're in the office together, sometimes you're not. And you are, I mean, I I ran virtual teams across Europe and globally. And the teams we would get together in person maybe once or twice a year, but most of the time we were we were working remotely.

Sam 23:48

It's a physical and logistical impossibility to be all together.

Vic 23:51

Yeah, absolutely. But the team spirit that we had and what we achieved together, I think we were in that hybrid world, but my goodness, we got a lot done. So I think I I get it's not the norm for the majority of people, but I think I'm quite privileged to have had that experience.

Sam 24:12

Yeah, I'd I'd say, you know, my my group at SoftCat were broadly similar because, you know, particularly when I had handed over the services operations stuff and was focusing on the office of the CTO and the consulting aspect, almost by definition, that team was in front of customers 80% of the time. So we we were like ships that pass in the night, but every so often we'd get together, we'd have a nice dinner, and maybe a glass or two of red wine, and that would bring it bring everybody together. And that you know, that team spirit endures. You know, I haven't been officially part of it for three years. I'm I'm still on the WhatsApp group, and we know we still chat. In fact, Dylan, who who kind of took over, is coming around for brunch tomorrow. So, you know, that team spirit endures despite the fact that we were very, very rarely all in one place.

Vic 25:05

Yeah. So maybe, Gabe, you think about it from a from a different perspective.

Speaker 25:10

Yes. So I think there are two aspects there that are worth bringing into the light. And the first is the idea of self-selection. So there are a couple of companies that are completely remote, but they were designed from the start as completely remote. So they only attracted to them and retained the people who worked within that system. So they were self-selecting. And there are certainly in the tech world slightly more teams that work like that than in the non-tech world.

unknown 25:44

Yeah.

Speaker 25:44

So first there's this idea of self-selection, and now we're talking about companies with pre-existing cultures and with pre-existing people moving to a new way. So that that transition is new. Yes. So I think that's one aspect. The second then is we're talking about a systemic change. We're not talking about one team going from being in the office to being virtual, we're talking about entire structures moving to a new way of working. So a lot of processes will have been built up based on the idea of co-location. Those processes may not be written down, and there's a lot of work that's not explicit that's going to need to be made explicit. So, for example, I was talking to a very large law firm uh the past couple of weeks, and their training method for new lawyers is to learn on the job. It's essentially an apprenticeship model. You come in and you learn from the senior lawyers. So, what they're finding is the junior staff, they're the ones who want to come back into the office because they want to learn. They also don't want to be on their own in their bedroom. They would rather be with their mates, and then after a hard day at the office, you go to the pub and complain about how hard work was. You know, it makes it a lot more fun. But they need to learn, and so they need to be there and they need to be with the senior lawyers. The senior lawyers, though, they don't need to be there. They've got their existing networks, they've got their existing knowledge, they could do the work of the client brief perfectly fine remotely.

Sam 27:20

They're probably also very, very comfortable and very pleasant to be at home. Whereas the new the newer guys, even new lawyers, are probably in rented flats and shared accommodation and things.

Speaker 27:30

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Probably three or four to uh, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Flat share or house share. And so there's the absolutely there's the social side to it. But I think the important thing is to make explicit what the work actually is. It's not just completing the client brief, it's bringing on board the new lawyers. Uh, and there's a lot of emotional work that happens in a workplace that's not explicit. So the people who organize the team events or the lunches or the birthdays, that's not explicit. And if it's not explicit, it means it's not valued. And in the future world of work, we will need to be very careful about how we measure and ascribe value to work. So if it becomes merely the production of the service or good, it will become all about efficiency, which will kill creativity, which will kill innovation, and it will kill any sense of team spirit or purpose. So the things we choose to measure, and by definition, therefore the things we are ascribing value to will need to be chosen very carefully.

Sam 28:40

Is there also an angle with the value thing? And I'm thinking out loud here, which means it's probably wrong. Um that in a hybrid world where you're almost effectively being paid for your output rather than your presence, that the value of that output is more important perhaps than it would otherwise been, because nobody's there to witness you being in the office long hours, you know, putting the hard yards in. All they get is whether you've hit your sales number or whether you've produced the requisite documents or or whatever. Is there an angle there? Do you think?

Speaker 29:20

I definitely think it moves us to an outcomes, not ours way of thinking about things. But we need to make sure we're including a broader definition of outcomes or outputs, that it's not just the work package, it's about the creation of the culture and the creation of the team environment as well. If that's the kind of company you work in. If you work in a company where the only thing is the production of the good or service, then you'll have a very different culture arising.

Sam 29:48

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I get, yeah, if you're just Acme Com Corp that produces a particular widget, you want to punt as many widgets out the door as possible, I suppose, don't you? And and maybe maybe that's all there is to it in that scenario. But I think all three of us would probably work for a company with a bit more purpose than that.

Speaker 30:08

Yeah, and that's all well and good until that widget is no longer useful in the world, until it's supplanted to something else. And then the company's desperately trying to grow its, you know, a shrinking market by producing you know more widgets faster.

Sam 30:23

Yeah. And and cut costs, which means it's an even less pleasant place to be, and then people start to leave, and you're in that downward spiral that I've heard referred to as circling the drain. Yes, that's nice.

Vic 30:37

But that's the tech industry in a nutshell, isn't it? Because with the innovation that's coming through, if you're not constantly innovating, whatever you're creating, whatever the tech is, it's going to be out of date. Something is going to be better, quicker, faster, more effective. There's going to be a new solution in the market, and you need to be constantly innovating. And it comes, it comes down to that innovation that you were talking about, probably that that introduced us to each other in the first place, Gabe, through the design thinking and that whole being able to be creative and having the right environment there in the first place. But something I think we have experienced at the Amplified Group that people are starting to see the value more in culture and team experience. And I think that had, you know, there are organizations. I mean, SoftCat, where Sam used to work, is a great example that they they had this consciously and worked at it every day. But I think there are more organizations starting to recognize the importance of it. But I'd be really interested to know how how do you think you can measure that?

Speaker 31:48

So culture is an interesting one. And the way people talk about culture can mean different things. Like whether culture is important. Culture just is. Culture is an emergent property. You get a group of people together for any length of time, you get culture. British people queuing for a bus. Great example of difference in culture to a group of Americans waiting for a bus. So you always get this. And what organizations are starting to, I think, realize is your culture shapes your organization. The shape of your organization shapes your culture. It's not something you can direct. You can't command and control culture. You can have a command and control culture, but you can't say our culture is going to be this and make it so. Culture is the collective experience of people, it's the collective behaviors of people, it's what's rewarded, what's punished. And so when we talk about culture, I don't like good versus bad culture. I think what's important is behaviors. Yeah. So you can have a set of behaviors that lead to a culture that aligns with your purpose. That would be that would be good culture. Now you might have a nefarious purpose. Your purpose might be to, you know, take over the world and roll from a volcano with a laser or in a bold cat. But you could have you could have a culture that is completely aligned with that by having behaviors that enable that. So that's my take on culture, that it's really about behaviors, and behaviors are absolutely measurable.

Vic 33:36

Yeah, yeah. So there's there's two points from for me on that. One was, Sam, I don't know if you remember, but when we had Mark Templeton on and we were talking about culture with him, his definition of culture was it's how you get stuff done, which I think is actually summing up what you what you just said there, Gabe. The uh the other thing is measuring behaviors. Well, that's absolutely what we do with the assessments that that we run, starting with the five behaviors, and the fundamental one for us for any healthy culture. And I I get your point about, you know, you can't say whether it's a good or bad culture, but a healthy culture to me is a culture that's got really strong trust, and it has to start with that. And you can absolutely measure it.

Speaker 34:16

Absolutely. And I I have my own personal views on what I think a healthy culture is. I think the the point is just that it can be different for different companies, but I can totally agree. The other thing that really bothers me is values when people talk about corporate values, honesty. What does that mean? Oh, so if you didn't, if you didn't say that on your wall, you would have actually turned around and lied to me. It's ridiculous to be, but also, how do you measure honesty? Yeah, you can't. Well, if you measure behavior, your value should be we will always tell the truth, even if it's something you don't want here.

Sam 34:51

It's like the sales guy who says, To be honest with you, and you know damn well that there's a lie coming. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Vic 34:59

I actually love Lencioni's definition of values, and he has some if there's what you've just been describing there on um the honesty. Um, we would describe those, or he describes them as baseline values. So these values, I mean, you wouldn't want to hire anybody that you didn't think was honest. So there's baseline values, but then there's also the values of how is it, what makes us different to our competition? What is it? How do we get things done? What are our behaviors that make us different? And those are the those are how, and then there's the aspirational values, which is what people tend to do is this is where we want to go, and we're aspiring to them, but they're not actually, I'm not observing them in the office today.

Speaker 35:50

Absolutely.

Vic 35:51

And I think that's a really straightforward way of thinking about them.

Speaker 35:55

One other way that I like thinking about values is what are you willing to pay? So, what price, what penalty are you willing to pay to behave in a certain way? That will tell you what your values are. So if you're willing to go through the difficulty of a HR process to get rid of somebody who's behaving in an inappropriate way, that shows how you value safety and integrity. On the other hand, if you are, if they're a high performer, you know, if they're that you know, amazing high performance jerk and you're willing to tolerate their behavior, well, that shows you that you don't value those things. And actually, what you value is you know, maybe the stream of sales coming in through this person. So that's co-hard cash. Yeah, that price you're willing to pay it indicates what your values are, I think.

Vic 36:50

Yeah. No, I think I think that's a really good point.

Sam 36:54

We appear to have covered an enormous amount of ground, but for the sake of summing it up for our listeners, Gabe. Perhaps you could give us a handful of takeaways.

Speaker 37:03

Um I would say first is this is all about people. The future of work is all about people. Get really clear on what your purpose is, because without it, how are you going to attract people to you? And I'll stick to three, and I'll go with my third being focus on behaviors, and everything else will come from that.

Sam 37:29

Cracky summary, thank you. Yeah, well, Ricky, you best uh lead us into your favorite segment.

Vic 37:37

And and uh I'm not sure it's my favorite. I think I I enjoy learning from the project.

Sam 37:45

Bruce Forsyth, they're all your favorite segments.

Vic 37:47

They're all my favorite, exactly. Exactly. Gabe, we have talked about this briefly, but for us at the Amplified Group, you know, I think you touched on it earlier. Work, it's it's about experience, it's about feelings, and it's about that emotion. And for us, to get people to go that extra mile and to have that intrinsic motivation, team experience is is what makes that happen. It's how we feel when we're working together. So, what does what does team experience mean to you?

Speaker 38:23

Team experience.

Vic 38:25

Great team experience. I should define that, shouldn't I?

Speaker 38:28

A great team experience is one where you do the work for each other, not for yourself. And I mentioned at the top of the podcast that I played rugby at university, and that is the benchmark of team experience for me. Because it's a game you can't win by yourself. You can't even win at the same time. If you could clone yourself 14 times, you wouldn't be able to win. You need different people doing different things in order to achieve that, and you have to rely on them to go and do what they have to do, to stick their head somewhere uncomfortable to get the ball so you can go do your thing. And it's that willingness to when we played, we played for each other. And that is that is always going to be, I think, the benchmark for me of what it should feel like at a team. I don't think companies are families, but they should be teams where you're willing to do the work for each other.

Vic 39:27

That's a great definition. Love it. Thank you.

Sam 39:30

Nice one. I like that. Very cool. Having been dreadful at rugby, I'm not sure I can totally understand that.

Speaker 39:38

But well, I wasn't very good, but I loved it.

Sam 39:42

I'm pretty sure you weren't as bad as I was. I so I couldn't wear my glasses when I was playing as a kid at school, and I didn't have contact lenses in those days. So I was effectively blind on the rugby pitch, and the only try I ever scored was by mistake.

Speaker 39:58

But at least you got one.

Sam 40:00

Well, at least I got one. At least I got one. I'll stick, I'll stick with cricket. But you know, the the cricket example is the same. You know, Ben Stokes is uh you know, possibly the world's best cricketer. But if you had a team of 11 Ben Stokes, you you know, you wouldn't win because he's not a spinner, you know, he's not a wicket keeper, you know, it is it it just doesn't work. You're right. You you need a different set of people and balance each other's skill, each other's skills out.

Speaker 40:26

I think you need uh for me that interdependence is one of the fundamentals for it to be a team as opposed to a group of people working together.

Sam 40:36

Yes, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, where you you you dovetail each other's skills and experiences to create something that's that's greater than the sum of its parts, I suppose. Yes.

Vic 40:47

I'm sure I've seen you write that, Gabe, about a team. Your definition of a team is where it's a group of people that has interdependence. Yes. Have I seen you? Is that right?

Speaker 40:58

Yeah, yeah. I think I think a team is a group of people working towards a shared goal who are reliant on each other to achieve it.

Sam 41:09

Yeah, perfect. Love that. I think we should leave it there because it doesn't get much better than that, does it?

Vic 41:15

No, brilliant.

Sam 41:16

Brilliant, great stuff. Thanks, Gate. Very, very interesting stuff. I wish you every success with your uh your masters and your business. I think that it'll be really interesting to track both of those and see where we end up. Um, so thank you very much for being part of today's podcast. And thanks to our listeners for joining us on Get Amplified from the Amplified Group today. As always, your comments and subscriptions are gratefully received.