The Collective Edge | Why Most Teams Underperform & How to Build Teams That Are More Than the Sum of Their Parts With a University College London’s School of Management Professor, Colin M. Fisher

Audio Transcription

Transcribed with Cockatoo

(Speaker 5)
I’m going to be honest with you guys. We’re not executing. We’re not getting things done.

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All right?

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So I went to the library. I found this. OK? It’s a seminar on how to execute. I think it’s going to help you guys a lot. All right?

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So take some notes.

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Pay attention. All right?

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Here we go.

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Jeffrey, are you OK?

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You look frustrated. It’s just so hard to get things done, especially in the workplace. Whoa. Some shows don’t need a celebrity to narrate the show. This show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, Why would two men who have built 13 multi -million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use?

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Because they believe in you, and they have a lot of time on their hands.

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They started from the bottom, now they’re here. It’s The Thrive Time Show, starring the former U . S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark. and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body.

(Speaker 2)
Dr. Robert Zillner. Two men, eight kids, co -created by two different women. Thirteen multi -million dollar businesses. We started from the bottom and now we’re at the top Teaching you the systems to get what we got Colton Dixon’s on the hooks, I’ll break down the books See it’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks As the fuck you see my wife and kids Gentlemen I’ll show that I think buddy might want to listen to if you’ve ever had to work with a group of people Maybe you had to work with a group and it didn’t go well. Maybe there was common dysfunctions.

(Speaker 2)
Maybe Carl kept showing up late for the meeting. Maybe Susan kept missing the deadline. Maybe Eddie kept eating everybody’s food. Maybe what was 1 plus 1 equaled 0 because the group became a dysfunctional disaster. Well, today’s guest is an expert on helping you optimize the way in which your group works together. So if you’ve ever been in a group where it’s 1 plus 1 equals 0 or 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1, Equal one.

(Speaker 2)
If you’re in a group that is dysfunctional by default, you’re going to want to take notes and grab a pen and a pad as we enter into the lab and introduce today’s guest. He’s a professor at the University College London School of Management.

(Speaker 1)
He’s sort of a big deal, and he’s lowered his standards to allow himself to be interviewed by me. With that being said, Colin Fisher, welcome onto the Thrived Time Show.

(Speaker 2)
How are you, sir?

(Speaker 1)
I’m doing well. Thanks for having me on, Clay. So Colin, I got to ask you, how did you become this expert in the world and the world of working with groups?

(Speaker 14)
Yeah, I don’t think anybody is out there in the playground when they’re six dreaming of being a professor who studies groups.

(Speaker 1)
But I, I think they’re also, they’re fascinating to, you know, from whatever age you’re coming at it from. So I remember being a kid looking at everybody kind of clustering around in groups and going, huh, that that’s kind of odd. Why? Why are those people together? Why are these people together? But then that that, you know, curiosity really stuck with me, even into the time so I used to be a professional jazz musician, I was a trumpet player before I

(Speaker 1)
got into this whole business school professor thing. And there, you know, you play with groups, different groups of people all the time, that you’re sitting in with one group, you’re playing a wedding one weekend, you’re playing a different kind of concert next weekend. And some of these groups just work, and some of them didn’t.

(Speaker 2)
And I thought that there was a method to the madness.

(Speaker 1)
I thought that there were some ways to predict which groups were going to succeed and which were going to fail. And so I set out to study that and really to better understand, especially how in these kind of like real -time situations, when you’re right there with another group of people, whether it’s jazz or it’s a sports team or it’s a military response team, that these kind of real -time interactions, how that those can come together so people can be more than the sum of their parts.

(Speaker 2)
What instrument did you play, or instruments did you play? I was a trumpet player. I can make some other instruments work, but I think trumpet’s the one you probably want to hear me on the most. OK, so trumpet was your instrument of choice. And so I had to get that resolved in my mind. Now, back to the professor deal.

(Speaker 1)
How did you get into being a professor? How did you go from being the jazz musician guy to the professor guy? Those seem like two dissimilar worlds. Yeah, it’s not your normal career track. You know, I was a studious guy. I don’t think it surprised any of my friends and colleagues that I wanted to go back into academia.

(Speaker 1)
But what happened was I was down in New York and I was, you know, sort of the cliche struggling jazz musician. And I decided to get a master’s degree and that there was this program at NYU where they let you kind of make up your own master’s degree so you can propose whatever you want. And I decided to study improvisation in different art forms. So improvised dance, improvised theater, different kinds of musical improvisation across the world. And I found this work on the psychology of creativity that I thought was really cool. And so it was like people who were like, actually in the lab trying to predict what what was going to be more or less creative in the workplace and everywhere else.

(Speaker 1)
And it turned out that the woman who was doing this research, Teresa Amabile, she taught in a business school. It happened to be Harvard Business School. And so I said, hey, I’m this jazz musician guy who wants to study groups and creativity.

(Speaker 13)
You think it’s a good idea for me to come and work with you?

(Speaker 12)
And for whatever reason, they thought it was a good idea.

(Speaker 2)
And then they make you a business school professor. Wow. Okay. So that, there you go, folks. That’s how you go from a jazz musician to being a college professor. Now, um, most groups by default are going to underperform.

(Speaker 2)
I mean, that’s just a fact and you have this new book you’ve written. I’m going to pull it up on the screen so our listeners can check out the book here. And folks, again, we’re going to pull up the website right now. We’re going to go there. I’m going to go to Amazon right now. I’m going there right now, folks.

(Speaker 2)
I am not playing solitaire. I am not, uh, I’m not responding to emails. Let me pull this up. We’re going, it’s the collective edge. Everyone go there with me. We’re going to Amazon, the collective edge.

(Speaker 2)
We’re looking for the book. Let me pull it up. And we can all verify this is the right book. Let’s make sure we’re looking at the right book.

(Speaker 1)
We’re going.

(Speaker 2)
OK, so the Collective Edge. Is this your book right here, Colin? Are we looking at the right book? That is my book. OK, that’s the book right there. And again, folks, I recommend that if you’re driving, you don’t do what I’m doing right now.

(Speaker 2)
We’re pulling it up. This is the book. It’s got a great cover.

(Speaker 1)
It’s got the light bulb that appears to be exploding, the collective edge unlocking the secret power of groups.

(Speaker 11)
I believe that by default, the secret superpower of groups is dysfunction.

(Speaker 1)
So I want to get your thoughts on this. Why do groups by default become dysfunctional most of the time? Well, groups definitely have a bad name out there that like when we see groups in the news, when we see them in the popular press, it’s usually because they’re they’re doing something. wrong. And I think when I say, hey, you guys have to go do a group project, you’re going to be on the committee, you’re in these meetings, all those things to a lot of people sound, sound like bad things, right.

(Speaker 2)
But at the same time, if you look around the world, and you want to see who’s doing the great stuff, who’s creating the next billion dollar business, who’s making the next scientific discovery, who’s, you know, really out there being more than the sum of their parts, it’s also groups. And so we’ve got this kind of, you know, two faces of groups where we really need them to do to solve a lot of the hard problems in the world. But at the same time, we’re not very good at them for really predictable reasons that have to do with our psychology, our own desire to maximize our own outcomes, our sort of laziness when we think other people are accountable for things, and the kind of conformity pressure that comes along with being part of a group that lead us to kind of suppress sometimes our own opinions, suppress what we know, suppress our individuality. And so that’s what makes groups so tough. So you claim, and I’m not saying this is an attacking passive aggressive question, I’m just saying, but you claim that you can teach people, teach groups, teach businesses to build teams that can actually perform in a way where the total is more than the sum. So you took employee one, employee two, employee three, you add that up together.

(Speaker 2)
You’re saying you can teach a team to perform maybe at a value of a five. If each employee brings a one to the table, you’re saying you can get five employees to maybe produce a seven.

(Speaker 1)
You’re saying that you can produce a team where they can produce results that are greater than the sum total. Tell us about this. Unpack it for us. We’re taking notes. Yeah, if if you’re really serious about getting the most out of your groups, you absolutely can get this kind of synergy where people are more than the sum of their parts. But it really does require research.

(Speaker 1)
a lot of the assumptions you might have about how to run your business. Because most businesses are organized to maximize individual performance, that we hire individuals, we assess individuals, we reward and punish individuals. And yet, then once you get there, you put everybody into a group and say, all right, work together, but we’re still going to assess you all as individuals. And so the first thing to do is think more about the group as the unit that you’re trying to maximize the performance of. And that stop thinking, oh, if I maximize all the individual performance, then I’m going to have good group performance. Because as we just talked about, if we’re competing with one another on a group, it’s harder for us to collaborate, that we’re going to hide information from one another.

(Speaker 1)
We might not help one another when we need to. We might be content to let somebody else bear the load while we slack off a little bit.

(Speaker 2)
And so the first step is just think about groups at all. And so if you’re if you picked up the book and you’re listening to this podcast and you think, all right, I’m going to really like think about group dynamics and I’m going to be on the lookout for them. You’re already ahead of most people that most people aren’t doing that.

(Speaker 1)
And that’s part of why I wrote this book. Where do you get the most pushback on your research about working as a group? Where do most people say to you, they say to you either directly to your face, or they say it when you’re speaking at an event, or you see it in eye rolls, or they, whatever, or this is woo -woo. Where do you get the most pushback? Well, luckily, I’m not really teaching too much of a woo -woo approach to this. I’m very nuts and bolts about the structure of groups, about making sure that you’re composing them right, about setting goals that make sense, about having reward structures that make sense.

(Speaker 1)
If you’re out there doing trust falls and trying to you know, do team building exercises, you probably didn’t read the book, because I’m not a big fan of most of that stuff. That what I want people to do is first think about who’s on your who’s in your group, who’s on your team, how many people are there. And the one of the things I get the most pushback on is not that people are skeptical, but that people don’t want to do the work and make it happen. So the best size for a group is to be around 4 .5 members. So we want to have somewhere between three and seven people on our work teams.

(Speaker 1)
But yet, most teams have way more than that. That when you go in a meeting, you see meetings of 10, 15, 20 people trying to get work done, trying to make a decision. And when you have that many people around the table, there’s no way you’re going to hear from everybody. You’re not going to learn what they have to say. You’re not going to be able to you know, really maximize what they have to give to the group. And you’ve already lost just by having too many people in the room.

(Speaker 1)
So one of the things I get pushed back on is saying, you know, if you’re telling me you’ve got a team of 25 or 30, I’m saying that’s not a team. You’ve got a small organization. Now you need to build teams out of that.

(Speaker 2)
And it’s not that people don’t believe me that I think, you know, this idea that if you went to a dinner party and you were trying to connect with 20 different people, that’s going to be a hard job. But if you’re trying to connect with four or five, six people, that’s something we can do. So it’s not so much that people aren’t believing that this is true. It’s that they don’t know how to make that happen in their organizations. All right, well, I’ll tell you this. In my organizations, we have a lot of competitive people, people that are really, really, in my companies that I run, people that they want to dominate.

(Speaker 2)
They want to be the top. If we have a video editor, there’s somebody who wants to be the top editor. We have a photographer.

(Speaker 1)
They want to be the top photographer. We have a manager, they want to become the best manager. So how do you theorize in your book, how do we harness the individual motivational needs of people without inviting conflict? Or is it even possible? I mean, you’re always going to have this contradiction, right? People always are going to want the status, the claim, rewards to win against other people.

(Speaker 1)
And what you want to do in an organization is to channel that so that they’re not trying to beat the people they’re supposed to be cooperating with, because that’s where we run into problems. So if you work at Coke and you want to beat Pepsi, that’s great. That’s a great thing. You want to get promoted?

(Speaker 2)
That’s just fine. But we will also want to have an organization where just because I’m getting promoted, that’s not going to be by me pushing down the other people in the organization, because that’s not good for the organization either. So you have to create ways that the people who you need to cooperate with one another don’t have incentives to hurt each other at the same time. And that’s where I think, you know, competitive cultures go wrong is when they point the sort of competitive gun at the wrong person. Now, Colin, somebody’s watching today’s show and they’re overwhelmed by my paleness.

(Speaker 10)
They’ve been distracted and they’re going, this guy, he’s so pale and it’s hard to focus on the guest because the host is so pale.

(Speaker 2)
And I forgot the title of the book, so I’m pulling up the book again. It’s called The Collective Edge, folks. It’s The Collective Edge, Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups. Who wrote it? Colin Fisher. Now, in this book, your book is endorsed by Daniel Pink.

(Speaker 2)
Daniel Pink, kind of a big deal. Daniel Pink, one of the best -selling authors of all time. He’s been on our podcast multiple times. Daniel Pink endorsed your book. You know, this is a book, again, for anybody out there, if you’re struggling to manage a group of people, this is a book you might want to look at. Now, I’ve got another question for you.

(Speaker 2)
There is a myth, you believe, and maybe I’m misquoting you, but I believe that you believe that there’s the myth of the lone genius. There’s a company out there where the boss makes all the big obstacles seem small. The boss is the guru. The boss is the genius.

(Speaker 1)
The boss knows all. Everybody goes to the boss, and then there’s other people that are not at that level of the boss, and maybe this is a good thing, maybe it’s a bad thing. Talk to me about the myth of the lone genius. genius and why it’s so pervasive according to your book. So the myth of the lone genius is, again, it’s, it’s just the way our brains work, that we like stories that have heroes and villains. And that because we experienced the world as individuals, we go out there and we also try and explain what we see in the world in terms of individuals.

(Speaker 1)
When we see an organization succeed, the company is doing really well, we look for that hero. We look for the person who should get the credit. And when something goes really poorly, when your team loses, usually you fire the leader, you fire the coach, you blame the best player. And that our brain is looking for these individuals that we can assign credit and blame too. But when you actually dig underneath these stories, you end up finding there was always a team there. And it’s just that some people are better at kind of taking all that credit for themselves than other people are.

(Speaker 1)
But it’s also the case that we, in our own minds, believe we deserve more of that credit than we really do. So there was one experiment where they asked everybody on the team, what percent of the credit do you think you deserve for this team’s success? And if you added everybody’s numbers up, it should add up to 100, right? But the number that it added up to, on average, was 235%. So if you ask everybody in the group how much credit they deserve, everybody thinks they deserve more than they really do, because it’s impossible that everybody’s right about that.

(Speaker 1)
And so when you you kind of unpack whatever invention, whatever business you want, and you really go back and you look at what everybody was contributing, you’re going to find there was a group there. In the book, I talk a lot about Thomas Edison and, you know, everybody kind of says, oh, Thomas Edison, he was this great inventor who invented the light bulb.

(Speaker 2)
But he didn’t invent the light bulb at all. The light bulb already existed. He patented a particular version of that, that again, he had a whole group of people that at the time were well -known to work with him and helped him develop this. And it was just, you know, he was a little bit better at getting his name on the final product than everybody else, but that this misleads us then to try to ask individuals to go out there and save us all the time when what we should be doing is forming a team that can actually do this hard work. Paulant, do you hate Thomas Edison? Is that what’s going on?

(Speaker 2)
Is this an anti -Thomas Edison show? Do you have any clarification you want to make on your Thomas Edison thoughts? Because there’s some people out there, their entire life, man, has been based upon Thomas Edison made 10 ,000 failed experiments of the light bulb, but he kept going, and then he had success. There are people that have that plaque on the wall, man. And you’re coming after Thomas Edison? Eazy -E?

(Speaker 2)
You’re coming after Edison?

(Speaker 1)
Mr. Ed? What’s going on with you? Do you have an issue with Thomas Edison? Tell us what your research has shown about Thomas Edison. You know, nothing against Thomas Edison. He did a great job of patenting a cheaper light bulb than existed beforehand so that more people could have it.

(Speaker 1)
And he did do a lot of trial and error, but he didn’t do it alone. He wasn’t sitting there in the basement by himself. He had all these pictures you can find of him.

(Speaker 2)
They’re always with what he called his muckers, which again, you can tell he didn’t think that highly of everybody else around him. He’s calling them the muckers. But that, you know, when you really go back through the notes of who ran these experiments, who was coming up with these designs, you know, sometimes it was Edison, but just as often it wasn’t. And it’s not so much a criticism of medicine as it’s a criticism of the way we tell these stories in history and the information that we’re losing that’s then leading us to some of the wrong conclusions. All right, let me give the listeners out there a little bit of praise about your book here. Daniel Pink writes, if you’ve ever wondered why some groups spark brilliance and while others remain stuck in mediocrity, this book has your answer.

(Speaker 2)
The collective edge is essential reading for creators, builders, and leaders. So at least one person agrees with you so far. That’s Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive, The Power of Regret to Sell Us Human. Final question I have for you about the book here. In your book, you talk about how to lead without being the leader. without being the leader.

(Speaker 2)
Again, what I’m doing, folks, on today’s show is I’m bringing to you a man who’s obsessively researched this information for years. He’s bringing to you his findings.

(Speaker 1)
Some of you will agree, some of you will not agree. I challenge everybody to really dive in and think about these concepts. So you’re saying in your book, you teach how to lead without being the leader. What does that mean? So it’s easy to think that leading is the thing that the person in these formal leadership positions does. right, the CEO, the manager, the team coach, that that’s what leadership is.

(Speaker 1)
But leadership is also these informal things that other people do that and that we intuitively we know this that we when we use the word leadership, we’re not always talking about what the formal leader is doing. So when we say like your sports team needs leadership, so yeah, I’m a fan of the Seattle Seahawks. We just got a new coach, traded away our quarterback and everybody’s saying, you know, this team needs new leadership. They don’t necessarily mean just what the formal leaders are doing. They’re saying we need people who are going to be accountable for the group.

(Speaker 1)
who are going to try and motivate themselves and other people, who are going to monitor that we’re working towards our goals. And we’re going to do whatever needs doing to help this team achieve its goals. And so thinking about that is what we call a functional approach to leadership. It’s doing what needs to be done to help your group achieve its goals. It’s influencing your teammates to do that same thing.

(Speaker 2)
And that when we think that leadership’s not just the job of these formal leaders, It makes everybody buy in more, that these are more engaged teams that share leadership. They work harder. They tend to perform better. And that’s why I talk about leadership is not just what formal leaders are doing. Colin, there’s somebody who’s going to interview you in the near future. And you’re going to go, man, that guy, he nailed it.

(Speaker 2)
Then there’ll be an interview where you go, you know, that guy, he should have asked me this. And so as a podcast host, what I’m always trying to do is make sure that I ask you the best questions possible.

(Speaker 1)
And because I know you’re going to get off this show and go, yeah, I wish Clay would ask me this, or that one show, I loved it when they asked me this. I’m going to go ahead and let you ask yourself the final question. What is the question that I should have asked you on today’s show? Maybe about your book or about your research, because we really want to hear from you. people take away is a picture of groups that isn’t about trust falls, it’s not about cohesion, it’s not about these kind of like cliches of team building that we have when we think about building better groups.

(Speaker 1)
It’s about the work that we do before we ever get in the room with the group, that the power of structure. And in the book, I talk about this being a metaphor like, You could choose to be a gambler who goes into the casino and you’ve got the best strategy ever for playing blackjack. You’re going to do everything right. You’re going to split eights. You’re going to double down when you get those two eights and split them. You’re going to do everything right.

(Speaker 1)
But we don’t want to think like the best gambler. We want to think like the casino. We want to be the ones who make the rules of the game. And when you’re structuring teams and organizations, you can do that. You can structure the rules of the game by setting the goals for the team, deciding who’s on the team, giving the team the tasks that it’s going to have.

(Speaker 2)
And that when we think like the casino and we do all this work before we ever get in the room with these teams that may be underperforming, we’re going to have a lot better chance of succeeding. We’re going to have better groups and these better groups are going to make your company better. They’re going to make your life better and they’re going to make the world better. So that’s what I, that’s what I want to leave people with about the book. Folks, that’s Colin Fisher.

(Speaker 9)
His book, I’ll put up on the screen one more time, that book is The Collective Edge.

(Speaker 2)
Someone says, what’s that book? It’s The Collective Edge. Someone says, I don’t remember the name of the book. What is the name of the book? Tell me. It’s The Collective Edge.

(Speaker 2)
Someone says, my speaker system is cutting out. Please say it again. The Collective Edge, Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups. Colin Fisher is his name.

(Speaker 1)
Leading Groups is his game.

(Speaker 2)
That’s The Collective Edge, Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups.

(Speaker 8)
Colin Fisher, thank you so much for joining us on today’s edition of The Thrive Time Show.

(Speaker 3)
We really do appreciate you.

(Speaker 6)
Thanks so much for having me, Clay.

(Speaker 7)
Take care.

(Speaker 3)
Bye -bye. But Clay Clark, man, he is one character. It’s a good word for character. Yeah, that is it. Good, driven, smart. And I’ve never met a guy who was so hyper all the time.

(Speaker 3)
He’s doing so much good. And then I met his mother. And she just says, she just lets him be Clay Clark.

(Speaker 6)
I mean, so he’s endorsed by his mother. And he’s doing magnificent work.

(Speaker 4)
So it was great meeting you out there and all the people that he surrounds himself with.

(Speaker 3)
His client Clark starts his days at five o ‘clock in the morning. Oh, it’s incredible. Yeah, he’s he’s like, he’s he’s a machine. He’s a machine. But his you know, I could I have problems with my company starting at nine o ‘clock.

(Speaker 6)
Yes. Hundreds of people showing up at 5am in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

(Speaker 7)
Man, he’s a leader of a leader. He’s a fantastic young man. No, he is. He is.

Transcribed with Cockatoo