Ashley Goodall - SVP - Leadership & Team Intelligence at Cisco

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Ashley Goodall, the SVP of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco. And we discussed topics from his new book, Nine Lies About Work. We also discussed the link between technology and human interaction and the role a leader plays in the amplification of team productivity. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:00:37) Hi, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) How are you, my friend?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:00:40) I'm very good. Thanks. How about you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) Amazing. Today is a beautiful day. And what part of the world are you in? We are in Florida.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:00:50) Oh, there you go. Okay. So what's the weather like down there right now?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) It's pretty horrible. I'm just having a good day.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:00:56) You're just having a good day. Alright. So don't look out the window is the answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) Correct. Yes.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:01) Or don't go out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:02) We get that island effect where in the summer it's stormy and hot and muggy, but you just do your best to keep a positive attitude.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:14) That's funny. I used to be on a, in a past life, I used to be on a project in Miami. I was in Miami every Monday for a long, long time, and you could set your watch by the thunderstorm at 3:00 every afternoon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:26) That's right. That's right about where we are right now. It's just getting ready for it. Yeah.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:30) It's getting ready for it. We should probably get it in 24 minutes' time, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) Yeah. Where are you at?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:35) I'm in Montclair, New Jersey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:38) Very cool. Is that where Cisco's headquarters is?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:41) No. The headquarters is San Jose, California. So I have a home office here, and I have an office office in San Jose, and then United Airlines likes me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:53) You have lots of points?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:54) Yeah. Lots of points. Always going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So I do good work on planes. Otherwise, I think they would have fired me a long time ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:04) Well, so just so you know, this is the interview. It's just you and I hanging out talking. There's no big intro or anything like that. I was just scrolling through LinkedIn one day, and I saw a post. I'm not sure if it was about the book you had recently done, but I came across your profile. I started digging into you, and I was like, this person quite possibly loves leadership as much as I do.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:02:24) There we go. There we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:26) So I said we have to talk to him.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:02:28) Well, it's a great pleasure to chat. And, you know, you just fire away with questions, and I'll keep talking. And you tell me when you've had enough. How about that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:35) That sounds great. I want to take it back. We know that there's an amazing book, and people can find that. We'll ask some questions about the book, but I want to know more about your origin story. Right? I saw a little bit about music, and I'm curious, was music your first love? Was technology your first love?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:02:54) Oh, really clearly music was my first love. I actually grew up thinking I was gonna be a musician. That was the first career I actually landed on and thought, oh, grown-ups seem to do that. I could do that. I played from the age of, I think, five or six, the piano, which I still play. I then added to that, and so this will give you a sense of the music geekery in my early years. I added violin and viola, then pipe organ, then I would sing, then I started writing music, and then I played in orchestras, and then I finished up conducting orchestras and learned an awful lot about leadership. Although I didn't necessarily know I was learning about leadership at the time, I was just learning about how people play together and what the different roles are. But I learned about leadership for the first time really, in hindsight, by being the leader of a symphony orchestra, which I got to do for a year when I was in undergrad. Then I think a fairly circuitous journey through designing concert hall acoustics. So I did actually go in, you're in Florida, I worked on the Performing Arts Center in Miami and worked with Cesar Pelli actually on the acoustics for that. Then a career change, then an MBA, then human capital consulting, then more and more leadership stuff, learning stuff, performance management became very interesting in about 2015, all of which led to the role I now have at Cisco and, of course, writing the book that you mentioned.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:23) So what do you exactly do at Cisco?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:04:26) So my title is, which I mentioned because it's, I think, at least to me, interesting, Senior Vice President of Leadership and Team Intelligence. And what we did at Cisco now four years ago is we put together a new organization, one of a kind as far as I know in HR organizations around the world, the mission of which was to figure out how we could do everything possible to build more teams like our best teams, more leaders like our best leaders, and do all of that while providing people with reliable real-time intelligence about the world they lived in. So there's this really interesting fusion of the leader and the team and the information about the world that they live in that for us is a really, really important area of investment and curiosity and innovation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:24) I am just massively intrigued because you've got this wealth of knowledge. I wanted to be like, what did you learn? But I'm curious. You wrote this book, Nine Lies About Work, to sort of set the record straight about common misbeliefs?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:05:41) I think to help us in a way get out of our own way in the world of work. And there are many things, and of course we've written about a lot of them, although I think we could probably come up with some more. But we wrote about a lot of them in the book. And they have this sort of characteristic that the leaders of an organization with all the best intentions in the world try and tidy up, if you like, the mess of work. They try and tidy up. You know, we're worried that people aren't all working on the same thing, so we're gonna have a cascaded goal system. We're worried that people don't understand what the company is for, so we're gonna talk about culture at a high level a lot. We're worried that our people need to grow and develop, so we'll tell them what a uniform ideal of performance is, and then we'll tell them where their gaps are. And there are many other examples of these sorts of things. And of course, if you're on the receiving end of those, none of them is particularly helpful because down in the trenches in the teams doing the work every day, firstly, you know exactly what work you've got in front of you because your team is connected to the world, your team is connected to your customers, your team is connected to other teams inside the organization. It's not hard for smart people to figure out which things should demand their attention on any given day. And so when the goals come cascading down on you like toxic rain, you're sort of like, okay, what's this for, and where am I in this? Where am I in this? When you are measured against a set of competencies and you get your scores, you have two reactions. The first reaction is, where do those scores come from? Because that's not how I understand myself from the inside. And secondly, why are you all hopping on about the bits of me that are least useful to the world? Why aren't you focusing on the bits that are the most useful to the world? So I think the impetus behind writing the book was to say, look, we've designed the world of work as though certain things are true. If you push on them and you look at the evidence and you look at the research, you find that they are not true. They are lies, and we are gonna be hamstrung in our efforts to build workplaces that nourish and support the people in them until we can get out of our own way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:12) I love it. I've come to this. So we did this podcast. I don't know if you know about this part of it. I'm gonna share a little bit to give you some context, and I'm gonna ask some more questions. So we did this podcast, and then leaders were giving some pretty great advice about how they grow and mentor and do different things with their teams. And then we ended up creating these leadership challenges where people go do things with their teams, and then it did pretty well. It started to take off, and then we started realizing that we have to sell to HR as we grew a sales team and all of this. And then HR was like, okay, well, we need to do this three-sixty survey, and then we need to find out where their different areas and their skills gaps are. And what I realized when building this measurement system is that the way I'm going to measure as an individual is highly dependent on my current mood, and that's a really hard way to show improvement or results.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:09:08) Well, it's funny. I mean, what's interesting is you can measure somebody's experience of work if you know how to do it, and that experience can and does change and is changeable. But, unfortunately, the way you do it is not a three-sixty, and the way you do it is not a manager rating, and the way you do it is not an assessment with 53 questions. And the way you do it fundamentally is not to ask other people what they think of Joel today because you get a whole bunch of noise and not very much signal. In fact, specifically, not much signal. The way to do it is to say, Joel, what's your experience at work today? And the questions I ask you to define that should be questions that I know from prior research lead to or predict your performance, predict your innovation, predict your creativity, and on the other side, predict whether you're gonna stay or leave a company. So there are ways to do this, but in a way, we've massively overcomplicated the design of work and how we do these sorts of things. And there are some very simple truths in how you actually measure a human's experience at work. And when you get the simplicity right, then you can do all sorts of other interesting things. But as you've discovered, you're trying to do some good in the world and help leaders. And if what you have to do first is cut through this sort of thicket of three-sixty and then this and then this other thing and then this other thing, you never emerge from the thicket.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:51) Yeah. I just, I don't think that people can reliably rate other people in that way.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:10:58) They can't. Yeah. They can't. I mean, it's absolutely provable. And by the way, it's not a new, this isn't like breaking news. People can't rate other people. This is like 20-year-old news.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:09) But you would think it, for me, it was like when I saw that on the list, I was like, look, everyone look, it's on the list. Because we found it to be true, but then you go out in the world and everyone acts like it's not true.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:11:19) Well, I tell you what. I mean, everyone acts like they have a thought about other people, which is true. We all have thoughts about other people. But our thoughts about other people aren't the truth of the other people. They're only the truth of our thoughts about other people. And yet when we design our, it's almost like, if you think about tennis, it's almost like our measurement systems are always us jumping over the net into the other person's court and trying to play the game for them. Whereas what we really need to do is stay on our side of the net and go, look, my experience of you is this. Now that's good data because I know what my experience is. I'm a reliable witness, if you like, of my experience. But I don't know anything about you. I know nothing about you, and I can't come to know anything about you. All I can do is understand my own experience. Now that means we can measure, but we've got to stop measuring by jumping over the net and opining on what other people are like and whether they have strategic thinking and execution and business acumen and all of the other weird and abstract things we try and measure in people. We gotta stay on our side of the net and describe our experience. What that looks like is, you know, would I always go to Joel for excellent work? That doesn't tell me anything about Joel. It tells me about me. But if you add that up, you now know about the people around Joel and their experience of Joel. That's not nothing. It's much more humble, but it's actionable as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:46) That is really interesting. So the framing is very important. I like how you, that's a small subtle difference, but it's very important.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:12:54) Well, and it connects, you know, in the book we write about feedback as well. And of course, feedback is another case where we just keep jumping over the net. Let me come over the net and tell you what you need to do, tell you how you should do this differently, tell you how you should do this better. But of course, those things aren't actually, they can't know how you should do something better. They can only know how I would do something better. But, yeah, we jump over the net. We trample around in your head for a little bit, and then we give you, and then we tell you off because you haven't done anything differently. And you're like, didn't you get the feedback? And you're sitting there going, the way that you think about this stuff is completely different than the way I think about this stuff, and you have no idea how I think about this stuff. And you can't live a day in my head. So the most useful thing for you to do is stay on your side of the net and give me your reactions to what I did. Then I can gauge my impact in the world. Then I can figure out from my sense of who I am and what I'm trying to do how to change those reactions. But you gotta stay on your side of the net.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:58) Now I'm always trying to grow and improve as a leader. Should I be going deep into my strengths, or should I try to average out and be well-rounded?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:14:09) You can sort of take your pick. If you want to thrive as a leader, you're never gonna get there by becoming marginally better at the things that you suck at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:23) I love it.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:14:24) And the evidence for this is look at leaders in the real world. Now, again, in companies, we like to tidy up leadership, and we like to say every leader should have the following list of characteristics and, you know, we arm wrestle about whether authenticity is more important than vulnerability. And while we're sort of grinding on all of that off inside some darkened room somewhere, meanwhile, there are actual leaders out in the real world, and they're leading. We know they're leading because people follow them, which is the only thing that characterizes a leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:53) Yeah. That's my John Maxwell right there. I love that.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:14:56) There you go. No followers equals no leader, period. End of conversation. And so you look at people with followers and, funnily, they're not at all well-rounded. They have colossal deficits, but they've all figured out something that they're really good at doing, uniquely good at doing in many cases. And they've understood over the course of a lifetime how to refine that, how to make it more powerful, how to make it more visible for people across the world, and how to use that to give people something to hook on to. We talk in the book about spikes. And, really, when you look at the best leaders, you find they are beautifully spiky. They have understood themselves. They have understood what they have going on with such great clarity that they know how to magnify that.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:15:50) And the corollary of this, by the way, which I think many listeners will recognize, is that leaders are actually slightly annoying people because we still see the faults, and yet we follow. And we know in ourselves that we're following you despite your faults. We're forgiving your faults, if you like. Following is an act of forgiveness. It's not going around going, I'm not going to follow until I find a perfect person.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:16:18) It is, however, looking at the world and looking at people around you and going, my God, that person over there has this amazing talent. I want to be part of that. And at the same time, they're not very good at this, and they occasionally miss on this. And those things are going to frustrate me.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:16:33) But for me, the trade is worth it. I'm going to hook my wagon to yours because of what I see that is so magnificent about you, and I'll forgive you, if you like, your trespasses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:46) What are your strengths?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:16:52) I'm a distiller.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:54) Yeah. That's why I like you, man.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:16:57) That sounds like I spend my time in an inebriated state. But, actually, I'm not so much talking about that. But I've learned that what I can do is I can look out into the world and I can see patterns and I can make them simple and clear for people. And that if I keep doing that and keep doing that and keep doing that, that clarity is useful to other people. And so a lot of my spikiness as a leader, if you like, comes from being able to say this, not this, this not this, this not this, and do so over time with a heightened sense of contrast and a greater sense of clarity.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:17:42) So what I do is I distill things and in the distillation, I serve others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:50) I love it. I have this thing I call the three R's: reduce, refine, repeat. Because, like, I noticed that constantly—I used to build applications, like software, large software applications. And so I'd go into an industry I knew nothing about. I would consume everything in the world about insurance or financial products, build out this entire system, solve all these problems, make everything really, really, really simple, and then go do that in a whole other industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:14) And I found out that, like, my superpower is just consuming large amounts of data, simplifying it down as basic as possible, and everyone's always like, "Oh."

(Ashley Goodall at 00:18:24) And that sort of clarity is very hard won. I mean, it's not—you know, I think many of us at work crave greater simplicity. And very few people run around going, "You know, it would be great if things were a little more complicated," because things are more than complicated enough. But the simplicity is hard won. It's not a trivial matter to be able to go, "You know what, folks? It's not feedback. It's attention." That one thought: don't give people feedback, give them attention. Don't give people feedback, give them reactions.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:19:03) Those are, you know, the beautiful thing about anything that's simple, that's well done is when you encounter it, you go, "Oh my goodness. That makes perfect sense." But you couldn't have thought of it for yourself. And the "you couldn't have thought of it for yourself" bit means that somebody has really been grinding on what are the differences in detail, what is the essence of something, and then how can we clarify that essence for people?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:33) Do you pace or, like, walk around when you're thinking?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:19:37) For me, it's not location specific or sitting or standing specific, but I do do this thing where I'll have a conversation with somebody about something, and I'll know that I've gotten half the thought out, and then the conversation will finish, and then I'll just keep ruminating on it. So I am, I think, a little bit of a post-conversational ruminator as a new category of person for the world. One person in it, thankfully. And, you know, half an hour after the conversation, I'll go, "Oh, that's the thing I was trying to capture. That was the thing I was trying to frame."

(Ashley Goodall at 00:20:13) And a lot of my most useful insights come in the rumination after a day or after a conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:25) So right now, you're at Cisco. You're studying and leading and figuring out all of this about the best teams. What are—well, let me not answer that for you. Let me say this. What are some of the patterns that you're noticing between your best teams and your best leaders?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:20:48) The best teams seem to be able to solve for two things. They seem to be able to solve—at least this is according to all the research I've ever looked at, including research I've done at Cisco—they have figured out, their leaders have figured out, and the team together has figured out, how to see and value the uniqueness of each person. Teams are actually great individualizers. There's a beautiful paradox there, by the way. In order to be seen as an individual for who you are, the best way to do that is to group with a bunch of other people who see you for what you are. So first thing is teams are individualizers. And then secondly, teams create a common understanding of how we support one another and what matters most to us, which is a universal thing. So teams manage to live in the—they manage to make powerful the tension between an individual and a group. They manage to make that not friction, but amplification.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:21:52) They manage to make that something where individuals can thrive because the team thrives and the team thrives because individuals thrive. And the best leaders know they have a role to play in that, that it's a significant role, and that it's not an exhaustive role. In other words, the team has to solve certain things for itself and the leader can help, but the leader can't get people all the way there by themselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:18) Starting to remind me of the conductor. Right? You can't play all the instruments. Right?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:22:23) Yeah. And, you know, the thing that I learned conducting a symphony orchestra—I mean, the thing that's sort of glaringly obvious if you think about it for a second is the product of the orchestra is sound, and the conductor is the one person who doesn't make any by definition. So the product of a leader and a team isn't made by the leader. The space to make it is made by the leader. The possibility to make it is made by the leader.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:22:54) The environment to make it is made by the leader, but the making is done by the team. And there's a moment in conducting at the beginning of a piece where you stand either in rehearsal or in performance. You stand in front of the orchestra and you give the downbeat. And, of course, at the bottom of the downbeat, you don't actually know for sure that anything is going to happen. And, you know, they might all not play.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:23:24) Now you've practiced it, and there's a sort of general agreement that you're going to do this and they're going to play. But it reminds you in that nanosecond that the doing of the work isn't the leader. The doing of the work is the team. The making of the space for the work is the leader. And I think you can translate that all the way through to what we know about teams at work.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:23:48) The leader can certainly give attention to each team member to what it is that's unique about them. That leader can certainly bring the team together and say, let's make sure we understand what we're confronting together. Let's make sure we talk about what matters to us. Let's make sure we have a conversation about excellence. Let's make sure that we support one another.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:24:05) But the team leader can't actually do any of that. They can frame it and emphasize it and point to it, but then it's for the others to do it or not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:15) No, I'm so—I love this interview. My favorite ones ever. Dude, you kill it. Do you do a lot of talks around the world? Do you speak a lot about this, what you've learned?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:24:27) Well, I have to say that, you know, the book was out beginning of April, and I think it's touched a nerve. I think lots of people have read it and gone, "Thank goodness somebody is beginning to say, not this this, not this this, not this this." So, yeah, I've been asked to—Marcus, of course, my coauthor has been asked—to give a number of speeches, presentations, podcasts, media interviews. The world is very interested in what we're trying to say, and that's really heartening for me because I think these things have needed to be said for a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:08) Well, it's things that, like, we find true inside. We just need someone to articulate it in a way with a reputation and a level of credibility that allows us to not just try to sell it internally or we can actually point to some third party reference that, hey, this is actually—

(Ashley Goodall at 00:25:27) Well, and yeah. And the evidence as well. I mean, we went out of our way. You know, I lead a bunch of research at Cisco. Marcus is a researcher by profession.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:25:39) And so we went out of our way to make sure that we were following as closely as we were able to all of the evidence that we could amass on a particular topic. So, for folks who haven't read the book, we range across research into engagement through the neuroscience, through the soccer, through the Elon Musk and Tesla.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:01) Yeah.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:26:03) We tried to give people not just a polemic, which is relatively easy to do, but actually a fresh look at the real world of work informed and guided by everything that we know to be true about the real world of work. Because if it's founded on evidence, then we can rely on it and we can act on it. If it's one person's point of view, then that's just there with every other person's point of view. So the evidence is a really important part of what we've done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:39) What did you learn about Elon Musk?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:26:42) Well, I probably shouldn't give away the reveal for everybody who hasn't read the book. But when you look at somebody like Elon Musk, what strikes you? There have been all sorts of articles saying, "Goodness me, Elon Musk should calm down, and he should stop smoking pot on podcasts, and he should stop doing this, and he should stop doing this, and he should stop doing this." The world seems very eager to tell Elon Musk what's wrong with him and what he shouldn't do. But then you say, well, what has he done?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:27:15) He's founded multiple companies that now have valuations in the millions and billions of dollars. He's reinvented the automotive industry. He's reinvented the space industry. He's on his way to reinventing solar power. He's thinking about hyperloops.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:27:35) And instead we get—and, you know, it's a great case in point for how we actually react to one another at work day to day. We're so easily drawn to, "Oh my goodness me, stop doing that. If only you would do this, you would be better." But we lose sight of where's the human there? What can that person do brilliantly well?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:27:55) How do we magnify that? And, you know, it's a truism that people don't change very much. We talk a lot in organizations about change, but if you look at a human over the course of their lifetime, the big bits don't change very much. The question always when we're dealing with people at work and certainly when we're leaders dealing with people at work is not so much how do you put in what isn't there, but how do you draw out what is there and make that useful and powerful and focused? And how do you help people build their own impact in the world based on their own uniqueness in the world?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:37) Give me a little bit of, like, a more like an action thing. Like, let's say I'm a leader. A leader is listening. They want to help their team a little bit. Like, what's something they can actually do?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:28:48) Here's one. And this one's great fun, and what you need is a pad of sticky notes and a few pens. So it's a cheap exercise. You give people two sticky notes each. You set the team around.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:29:02) You can do it virtually or you can do it collocated. And you say to each team member, on the first sticky, write the words "come to me when." On the second sticky, write the words "don't come to me when," and then fill in the blank. So everyone goes around and goes, "Alright. I would like people to come to me when you need something put in a database that needs organizing and you're struggling with Excel and Excel hasn't got enough rows and columns and anyway you can't do the relational stuff.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:29:31) And so come to me when you want somebody to sort through your data." And somebody else goes, "Come to me when you've got a tricky problem with a teammate and you can't see your way through the fog." And then you keep going and you keep going and you keep going. And sooner or later, the following marvelous thing happens. Somebody else goes, "Don't come to me when you've got an Excel thing that you need turning into a database."

(Ashley Goodall at 00:30:01) Or somebody else goes, "Don't come to me when you've got a thorny problem with a team member because that drains the living daylights out of me." And you figure out how to trade, and just giving a team visibility into with completely free choice what each team member would like to volunteer to the team and what each team member would not in the best of worlds want to volunteer to the team is a marvelous exercise in individuality again and also makes transparent to everybody that, look, if you move a task from this person who's drained by it, "don't come to me when," to this person who's energized by it, "come to me when," the work still gets done, but now you've got from zero energized people to two energized people just by moving a piece of work. And no one needs to give anybody permission to do this. All you need is the information. All you need, if you like, is the intelligence.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:30:55) So that's a fun place to start.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:58) That is amazing. Completely unique. I've never heard that one before. Thank you. Have you, like—so then the follow-up question to that is how do you deploy that exercise across teams at Cisco?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:31:13) Well, we use a combination of technology and human interaction, if you like. And by the way, one of the things that I think is most important in the world of technology at work is that we don't lean too far into purely digital things and we don't lean too far into purely human things, but we try and figure out where's the productive intersection between those. So we do a couple of things where everybody at Cisco has taken an assessment called StandOut, which is a strengths assessment. And you go into our technology, and you can actually digitally complete the sentences, "come to me when" and "don't come to me when." You can share them with your team.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:31:52) It's actually more useful to do it in a live setting as I've described because there's something present tense about it. There's something about the trading and the bartering and the insight that occurs in a group in real time that's very powerful. But the other thing that we do with our technology is every week, every team member at Cisco does what we call a check-in. They go into the technology and they answer a few simple questions. What do you need from your team leader?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:32:22) What did you love and loathe about the prior week? And if you're getting love and loathe, it's the same sort of thing as "come to me when" or "don't come to me when." It's my emotional reaction to my work. And then what are your priorities for the following few days? So the team member gets to go, "Alright.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:32:39) Here's the world as I see it. Here's the world on my side of the net. This is what I'm focused on. This is what I need. This was my emotional experience at work last week," which we know, by the way, is important.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:32:52) And then they hit submit. The team leader gets them all. And you can see online what each person needs from you if you're the team leader. You can comment. But then, of course, what you do is you have a live conversation.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:33:07) So now we go from the digital to the human, and the check-in online serves as a template, if you like, for a conversation. And critically, it's the conversation that starts on your side of the net. It's not a one-on-one where I go, "Tell you what, Joel, it's our time again this week. I've got a list of 18 things I need you to do. Please sit there, write them all down, nod your head,"

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:31) And get on with it.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:33:32) I hope they're all done by the same time next week, which is a conversation that you actually aren't a part of. You're just sitting there listening and doing as you're told. This is the inversion of that. This is to say the team leader doesn't make any noise. The team leader isn't making the music.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:33:49) The team member is making music. So we've got to start by understanding what the parties, what their score is, if you like, what they're going to play next week, and seeing whether we can help them shape that in some way. And you have to do it weekly because the world changes daily. If you have a conversation with anyone on your team once a month, we actually have data on this, they get less engaged because attention has a half-life. And if you get wonderful attention from somebody once a month and you spend three weeks going, "Where the hell have you gone? That was kind of good when you paid attention to me and asked me about my work and my priorities and my loves and my loathes. Where did you vanish to?" Now I know what I'm missing, and now I know you could do it, Mr. Team Leader, if you tried and you've chosen not to. And so I think less of you as a result. The best technology for team leaders is frequent attention to the world that each of the team members is living in. And when you get frequent attention, you unlock all sorts of magnificent things on the team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:58) How do you take these learnings? You know, there's the book, but like, have you taken the software or the concepts and made them, like, divested them in a sense to where the open public can consume the product, or is it just—

(Ashley Goodall at 00:35:11) I mean, the software is made by ADP where Marcus and I work. Anyone can get hold of the software in the market. It's called StandOut.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:21) StandOut.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:35:22) Yep. And, you know, what's lovely is that it doesn't really require permission from HR. Obviously, if you want to do it at the scale of the enterprise as we've done at Cisco, we adopted it. We've helped shape the design of it, and we've rolled it out to 74,000 people globally, 15,000 teams. But if there's a team leader listening who says, "Look, I don't want to wait for this or I'm not sure this is coming," you can go and get a license and you can buy licenses for your team and you can have them interact and do check-ins and learn about one another's strengths right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:02) Do you find that this ability to meet with people weekly and then your research of the half-life of the information, getting this out to leaders, do you think that helps empower them to actually make it a priority? Because it could be like an amplifying effect.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:36:20) I think what leaders hook onto is, again, the clarity and the simplicity. What we haven't really done to a very great extent is teach people how to have a good conversation. Now there are plenty of HR organizations that will sit you down and say, "Here's a course in active listening," or "Here's a course in empathy," or "Here's a course in—" We haven't said any of that. We've said, get the frequency right and the rest will follow. If you do this 52 times a year, there's a pretty reasonable chance unless you're a complete idiot that the 52nd time will be better than the first time.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:37:00) And, of course, you're doing this not 52 times with one team member. You're doing it with the whole team. I do 400 check-in conversations a year, and you learn how to do them with each team member. Each team member wants a slightly different conversation. Some want short, some want action item focus, some want to talk about broader issues like development, some want to run through their list, some want to start with your list.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:37:23) You learn by doing it. And the most important takeaway—and by the way, we have evidence on the power of frequency. The more frequent up to about once a week, the more frequent the conversation, the higher the engagement. But we've learned that the frequency is the magic thing, and many, many team leaders at Cisco have been able to grab hold of this and been able to say, "Okay, I'm trying to be a great team leader. I need tools to help me to do that. I need insights to help me to do that. And this is simple, and I can do it, and people love it. So I'm going to keep doing it."

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:04) That's good research for the people who, like, leaders who are like, "I'm busy. That sounds like it would be nice to do, but I've got to do these other things." To hear that from you and that's your experience in such a large dataset that if they just take the chance, right, and they just try implementing this and do the frequency and see the—you know, maybe commit to doing it for three months straight to see the results, right, every week. That would give them some—I'm trying to help transition the people who are optimistic but slightly doubtful into actually doing this so they can see the benefits for themselves. Help me sell that.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:38:39) Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, the first thing that you run into, as you said, is, "I don't have the time. I'm a busy leader. I got stuff to do. I don't have time to pay attention to the people on my team, certainly not on that frequency. They're all grown-ups. They can look after themselves." It's roughly the caricature of what you hear, to which the response is, precisely what do you think the job of a leader is then if it's not to activate and understand and shape your team?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:39:08) It's like the symphony conductor saying, "I'm too busy to conduct today. I've got other things to do." You're like, "No. That's your job." The job of a leader is to build a great team.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:39:21) Okay. After you're done with that, by the way, which is a thing that is never done, after you're done with that, then by all means, turn your attention to other things. We have to help team leaders understand that the team is the number one priority, not the number eight priority. It's not what you get to after the other stuff. It's what you get to before the other stuff that makes the other stuff easier.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:39:44) And you're going to spend the time anyway. Spend it in a way that has leverage, if you like. The best leverage for a team leader is always building a great team. So for folks who are sitting on the sidelines going, "You know what? I'm not sure I can do this." Try it, firstly. You don't need technology to try this, by the way. You can have everybody send you an email on a Monday morning saying, answer the questions. "Here's what I need from you, boss. Here are my top five to six to eight priorities for the week. Here's what I loved and loathed about last week." Anyone can do that, and then commit to have a conversation about it. Try it for three months, and you'll find you can't live without it, which is very, very interesting. There is something addictive about the rhythm of attention in a high-performing team that becomes the connective tissue. And it's very, very hard in the world to find connective tissue.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:40:44) We try and impose it on people, and it hasn't gotten us very far. The connective tissue of a team is attention to what matters to each team member, and then from that to be able to have a sense as a team together of what matters to everybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:00) Oh, this is so good. I'm so happy we got to have you go on the show and do this because it's such good information. And it's, you know, moments like these, episodes like these that, like, I just—it reignites all the reasons why I'm spending time doing this and helping get these words out.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:41:21) I suppose the overall message here that I'd ask any listener to take away is that sometimes in life we're very lucky because doing the right thing and doing the generous thing is also to do the smart thing. And in the world of individuals at work, recognizing that we all have certain strengths is not only the right thing to do because people are different. It's also the smart thing to do because that's where we're at our most productive, where we make our greatest contribution. In the world of teams, paying attention to people and what they need is not only the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do because in that, you activate the energy of a team of people together. So I'm an optimist, of course, and I have great faith in humanity and great faith in the individuality that each of us brings to the world.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:42:23) But even where I'm not, it is still the most pragmatic, down-to-earth, hard-nosed business decision that any team leader can make to pay attention to people on their team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:37) I love it. Yes. You made it cool. That's what it is. You made it not lame to be a good person. That's just what you did there.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:42:45) My God. It can't be lame, can it? What's wrong with us if we think it's lame to be good enough?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:50) Right? I love the way you can articulate it. It's beautiful. I have to ask, and we can cut this last part from the interview if you would like. But I'm so curious to know, how do you manage or coach or how do you work with the leaders who aren't using the system?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:43:10) Well, you have them—you know, the best thing to do is have them try it and hear from their team members. I haven't yet met a team member who has said, "I want less attention. I don't really want attention to me." Humans don't actually work that way. So you can have folks try it. You can, of course, show them the evidence. You can, of course, explain to them the neurochemistry of attention and how we grow. Human brains grow under attention and under positive attention. You can have their own leaders do it for them, which is extraordinarily effective because when you experience this as a recipient of frequent attention to your work, you very often get what that is and it's very easy to give it to others.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:43:59) And, ultimately, you set it as an expectation. We've set an expectation for all the leaders at Cisco that they are doing check-ins and they are responding to check-ins. And right now, I will tell you that north of 92% of the check-in online submissions at Cisco get a response either in a comment or a conversation from a team leader at Cisco. So we have an attention right now organizationally that is enormously high. And what that means is if you come to Cisco and you submit a check-in, you're going to get attention. So now we give our people—we give our team members the mechanism to get the helpful attention they need to the work they know they need to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:45) I know. I love it. How do you as an individual, as the leader of these teams of performing teams at Cisco, like, how do you look at the people who aren't doing it or dropping off? How do you deal with that?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:44:58) We study them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:01) You just study them? Yeah.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:45:02) We get curious. We do research into why don't you—you know, we go and interview people. Why isn't this working for you? Why isn't this something that you're interested in doing? The truth is always out there in the world. You can't jump to conclusions. And so we spend a lot of time trying to understand why people who aren't leaning into the ecosystem aren't leaning into the ecosystem. The stuff that comes to the top of the list is, "When I do it, my team leader doesn't respond," which is not very good. Or interestingly enough, "My team leader and I talk the whole time, so I don't need the digital bit because I've already got the human bit," which I need to understand better because there is of course a structure to a conversation that's informed by our technology that says you really should talk about needs, love, loathe, priorities, and that's a useful structure and you can hit that in 15 minutes if you're good.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:46:06) But those are some of the reasons, but the short answer is we go and ask people. We—by the way, because we're researchers—we collect a representative stratified sample of people who aren't engaged and then we go measure and interview within that and we use that to inform how we communicate, how we design the platform in the future, so that our future path is set both by those who are using it, which is what we pay most attention to, but then also by those people who have yet to fully jump in. You know, the thing not to miss is why are the people who are using it using it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:46) Right.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:46:46) Look for the positive deviance. Positive deviance is a really interesting thing and it's usually more valuable in designing something than negative deviance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:57) Right.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:46:58) So I'm pretty clear that my responsibility is to help the team leaders at Cisco who find this useful. My responsibility is to help make it even better and more powerful for them and then secondarily to figure out how to bring more people into the fold. Because if I do it the other way around, I'm optimizing on the wrong thing. I need to optimize for the people who are really into being a team leader, who've understood what that means, who relish that responsibility, who are geeked out by the fact that everybody's different.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:47:33) If I can keep innovating and providing a useful and powerful and easy-to-consume experience for them, then that will necessarily make it easier for some of the people who are on the sidelines to jump in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:47) I love it. No. That was very, very useful. I extremely respect your input and advice. Thank you so much for sharing and coming on and hanging out on the podcast. It's been a lot of fun.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:48:00) Well, it's been great fun chatting. I hope this was informative for your listeners, and I'd encourage people to check out the book if they're interested in finding out more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:10) And so they can get it on Amazon maybe? Or—

(Ashley Goodall at 00:48:13) Amazon, wherever books are sold, and there's an audiobook as well. So if you like listening to me, then you can listen to more of me. And if you don't like listening to me, then the print version will remove you from that particular experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:27) Well, if they don't like listening to you, I don't think they would have made it this far in the episode.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:48:30) That's true. That's true. We lost those people a long time ago, didn't we?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:34) Well, this has been absolutely fantastic information. Thank you so much, Ashley. You have a fantastic day.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:48:39) All right. Thanks, Joel. You take care now. Bye for now.