From Spark to Surge: How Great Leaders Turn Moments into Momentum

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W four CY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor Elise Cortez.

1:04 Welcome back to the Working and Purpose Program, which has been brought to you with passion and pride since February twenty fifteen. Thanks for tuning in this week. Great to have you. I'm your host, doctor Relise Cortes. If we've not met before and you don't know me, I'm a workforce advisor, organizational psychologist, management consultant, logo therapist, speaker and author. My team and I at gusta Now help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high performance culture, inspirational leadership, and nurturing managers activated by meaning and purpose. Many organizations are not aware of how critical it is to invest in developing their leaders and managers not just for their own effectiveness, but also to avoid burnout and keep them fulfilled so that they can and that they can also measure and monitor the experience of purpose in the organization to keep it working as an operational imperative. So much opportunity there. You can learn more about us and how we can work together at gustodashnow dot com or my personal site, Atliscortes dot com. Getting into today's program we have with us today, the author of the New Science and Momentum how the best coaches and leaders build a fire from a single spark, which is the focus of our conversation. We have Don Yeager.

2:09 He's a twelve time New York Times bestselling author, longtime associate editor for Sports Illustrated, and one of the most in demand public speakers on the corporate circuit. He is the host of the highly rated Corporate Competitor podcast. Also with US Today is retired General Bernie Banks, who now serves as the director of Rice University's Door Institute for New leaders and is a professor in the practice of leadership within the university's jesse A. Jones Graduate School of Business. Bernie retired from the United States Army in twenty sixteen as a Brigadier general after having successfully led West Points Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership. In his final assignment. He has led military units ranging insights from ten to three thousand plus people. Additionally, he has engaged with organizations around the globe regard in their leadership development efforts. In other words, have two amazing powerhouse houses with US Today.

3:02 Don joins US Today from Tallahassee, Florida, and General Banks from Houston, Texas. Gentlemen, he hearty, welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank Thank you so much, Elise, Thank you It's wonderful to be here. Isn't it great to be on the other side of the mic on? You know? It's just fun? Right? Oh? Great? Right, well, let's kick this thing off by celebrating this beautiful book you put into the world. I absolutely loved it, as I told you before we got on air. Huge fan, I want to dive into it. I was really intrigued. By how you talk about in the book, even just the spark for the book, how it came to be. I think that that's a really fun thing to kick off with. So one of you tell us about how this book came into to be present for us. I'll jump in. Yeah, many of many of you, many of your listeners might remember that there was a Super Bowl played a few years ago in which the favored New England Patriots had fallen behind the Atlanta Falcons twenty eight to three. In fact, midway through the third quarter, the odds makers gave New England a point six percent chance of winning the game. At that stage, you know, Atlanta was a ninety nine point four percent the odds of winning. And then suddenly little things started to happen, things that hadn't happened previous in the game, Tom Brady, the least mobile quarterback in the NFL, suddenly ran for a first down and little things started to pile up.

4:27 And what happened was that the Patriots began to change the momentum of the organ of the game. And before it was over, someone will remember the greatest comeback in the history of the Super Bowl. No team had ever come back from more than fourteen points down, and the Patriots came back to win in overtime. And the very next day I came in to my office, opened up the whiteboard where all the creative team were gathered in the conference room, and just wrote the words, how does a moment turn into momentum? How does that happen? How do you? How do you? How did what? How can we explain what happened last night? If people are trying to understand, could that happen to us in our organization? Could we be the Atlanta Falcons and maybe give up a great lead? And over the course of the next eight years, I partnered with General Banks, one of my great friends for many years, and we began interviewing the most amazing leaders in the planet. We began going into the field and polling Americans adults on what they believe about momentum, because we wanted to explain what we could about the about you know, the dynamic that that allows that to happen in organizations. And what we found was some really incredible detail. And I know we'll get into that with you a lease, but but it's it's it's a It was an amazing journey. I think both Bernie and I we were sad we had

5:57 to cut it short. We would have gone five more years interviewing people because we were so into it. But you have to stop at some stage and right, and I'm grateful that you enjoyed it. I do understand that, and I absolutely love that. I wish I would have been there in your back pockets for the whole trip. I would have been. Cheering you on and ask this too. Okay, So one of the things that I think I really gravitated to that I think is pretty core to what you write about for Momentum, which we'll get into next. But I think I want to situate first role of mirror neurons and of course the concept of flow. If you can situate and kind of explain how mirror neurons work, why they're important, and of course white flow is related to momentum.

6:43 Yeah you want me to take it? Yes, okay, good, So I'll tell you. One of the first things we started thinking about was, you know, there was some pretty famous work done about thirty years ago by a researcher in Santa Clara, doctor named me Hi, and his last name was so long I couldn't pronounce it. I've always said it chisholm Ahley, but I'm sure that's not right. It's something close, probably as close to that. He told me to call him doctor c. Yeah, I got it worked, Doug great, which is what Mike Krzyzewski does to coach k but the uh. But me Hi actually agreed kind of in the early stages of our research to sit down with me, and it turned out to be one of the very last interviews he got a chance to do before he passed away a few years back. But in that dinner with he and his wife, I proposed to him that flow as as he defined it, which is the ability to believe I'm in I'm in flow. Right.

7:45 We've heard that phrase used before where suddenly you look up and you don't realize that that it's it's quitting time because you've been so engaged in your work, you love what you're doing so much that you don't see the clock. You're writing and suddenly it's two in the morning and you have no idea. That's flow. But what we wanted to propose was that when a group of people get in flow, that's when you create momentum. Right, it's group flow, which is different than what he studied, And by the time dinner was over, he was fully engaged, he was excited, he was cheering us on, encouraging that.

8:25 This was exactly the extension of his work from thirty years earlier and couldn't have been happier to offer us advice and counsel. So flow is that ability for an individual to be moving towards something special. Momentum is when a group of people are doing exactly that, when a team, an organization, a company are moving together in a lockstep. And so with that, the next thing that really kind of came out was this idea about mirror neurons. One of the ways that doctor c encouraged me to look at this concept was that there's a fair amount of research done right now on mirror neurons, which is the ability for two people to feel something similar even though only one of them actually experienced it. Right, I'll just put it really simply. It's like if you and I work at the same place a lease, and you complete a masterful sale, something really big. Instead of being jealous that you were the one to complete it, I actually I'm as happy for you as if I had completed it myself. And that's and that is when mirror neurons are flowing in very simple ways. Some people talk about it like when you go into a room and somebody yawns and suddenly other people start yawning. That's that's the

9:59 action of mirror neurons actually taking and physiologically playing itself out, even though neurologically it was me who yawned, and then suddenly you feel the need to. And so mirror neurons are when that group of people moving in flow together are actually capable of celebrating each other as opposed to finding jealousy amongst one or the other, because you are going to get credit for this moment as opposed to me. And so those two elements of the project were ultimately very important in our understanding and our description for others of how momentum can become a collective.

10:50 Effort beautifully explain. Yeah, that's okay. It's a really important concept I think for listeners and viewers to get as we go along here, very very powerful. And by the way, I'm proud to tell you that in the ten and a half years that I've hosted the show, not one says my guest yawned on the show. So therefore I didn't yon either. Don't even start, don You're not going to be the first one. Okay. So now we've done all that, let's talk about what is momentum? Why should we care about this? Yeah? I think the build off of what Dodge has shared, I like to think of it as a belief with respect to do we think things are working for us or against us? Quite simply, you know, going back to this notion of flow, is the flow head in the right direction? Is the flow head in the wrong direction?

11:41 Do we feel like we're swimming with the current or against the tide? You know? And so it is a belief, it's a mindset, it's a mindset, and that mindset, it's important for leaders to be intentional about how they shape the mindset and beliefs of their other teams. And so in the research that we conducted and the interviews that we were privileged to take part in, we examined how leaders across four different verticals, business, sports, politics, and the military went about creating momentum throughout their careers. And the stories they shared were fascinating.

12:21 All right, love just some of the descriptors you have in your book, and there's just so many great things. I ran out of the ink when I was highlighting your book. But I like how that momentum has been described as a competitive energy tsunami. That sounds good to me, a great exaggerator, which is what John Maxwell said, and a force multiplier. I mean, doesn't that sound pretty good If you're trying to get a team to a win, and you're trying to do something in turn a company around, or you're performing a military operation, that all sounds pretty good to me. We should all want that, would we? I mean, would that wouldn't wouldn't the opportunities for us to be successful be greater if any one of those things things were true within our team?

13:03 Yeah? And I like what you also said when we talk aboutmentum you say in your book and I quote you say, we start with the premise that momentum exists and can be manipulated by intentional types of preparation and organizational structure, and we give the following definition. Momentum is a synergistic force that influences the progress, resilience, and focus of a team, and its impact on the mindset of a team positively or negatively can be manipulated or extended. Now that ought to be ladies and gentlemen, both exciting and terrifying you if you're a leader, I. Hope it should be exciting. You know, when we were thinking about this book, I was having a conversation with one of my friends who runs the private equity practice for a very large financial service. Is Concerned, and these folks invest billions of dollars in organizations in the hopes that they can unlock dormant potential create value. And when I was talking to about this concept, he said, creating momentum is my job. Hm hmm, plain and simple. My job is not to make money. My job is to find opportunities where, through our company's intervention, we can create positive momentum, unlock an investment thesis, and ultimately return money to those who had the courage to invest in us because they thought that our acumen with respect to generating momentum was worth taking a risk on.

14:33 That is terribly exciting, Bernie, Oh my goodness, very exciting. But at least I want I want to I want to be the negative. I'm going to be the negative Nelly here, but I'm gonna be negative. I love's answer there. But one other thing that stood out to us was in the early stages of the work on this. We went into the field with a nationally recognized polling firm and and and reach out to four thousand Americans adult right and asked them a series of questions about momentum. Number one. The first thing that stood out was that ninety plus percent of them believed in momentum. That number rose to one hundred percent if you only included in the answers those who had played sports, had either led an organization, or served in the military. You do one of those three things, and your one hundred percent convinced momentum exists. But while most of them do believe it can be manipulated, only twenty five percent of them had ever worked in an organization where the con the construct the idea of manipulating momentum had actually ever been raised, where you know, what can we do, how can we create something? How can we take advantage of this moment?

15:46 Only twenty five percent, But the last number which really stood out was that seventy two percent of them said if they were working someplace where they perceived momentum had shifted to a competitor where they were on the losing end of the they were coming up from behind in con in this idea, they would consider looking for other work. Now. So while it's it's in Bernie's example, it's that guy's job right to create momentum, for all the rest of us, it's our job too, because if we're not number one, not only are we we do we risk giving ground to our competitors. We also risk losing our very best employees, who they may not say it, but they know it, right.

16:40 They know when it's a mindset, right, it's a belief system, and they know when they believe that they're behind and losing ground. And nobody wants to ride out on a sinking ship. And this is why, of course, right we both of all three of us know how important leadership and culture is. Why We're going to talk about that next after we take our first break, so let's do that. I'm your host, doctor Leis Cortez. We've been on the air with retired General Bernie Banks, who now serves as the director of Rice University's Door University for New leaders and is a professor in the practice of leadership within the university's jesse Ah Jones Graduate School of Business. We also have Don Yeager, a best selling author, associate editor for Sports Illustrated, and host of the highly rated Corporate Competitor podcast. We've been talking about where their book Momentum came from, what is momentum, why it's important. After the break, we are going to talk a little bit about their model, but then we're also going to talk about how momentum can be can be stewarded by leaders and within culture. We'll be right back.

18:00 Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization. Please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise A Lise at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

18:52 Thanksteresting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. As I'm dedicated to helping create a world where organizations thrive because they're people thrive and they're led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness, and we do business that betters the world. I keep researching and writing my own books, so one of my latest came out. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meaning and purpose can radically enliven your business. And I wrote it to help leaders understand today's diverse and discerning workforce. What do they want and need from you from their work experience, and then I offer twenty two best practices that you can cand equip you for you to be able to put that into your culture and provide that for them. You can find my books on Amazon or my personal site at least quretest dot com if you are just now joining us.

19:35 My guests are Don Jeger and Bernie Banks that are the authors of the new Science of Momentum, How the best coaches and leaders build a fire from a single spark, which of course I loved. So before we get into talking about leadership and culture and how we can really presence and nurture the idea of momentum, let's talk about your model. It's pretty hefty, it's pretty strong and robust. So can one of you take us through your momentum model? Yeah, I'm happy to do that. So, when thinking about how we would distill the insights glean from talking to leaders across the four sectors, nine things came to the fore. One it all starts with leadership. Leadership is the X factor, It's what makes organizations and momentum go. And so the model starts with leadership. How do you foster effective leadership, create clear alignment around what direction are we headed? How do we galvanize people's willingness to work in a coordinated manner and then sustain the effort required to achieve our desired aims. From there, it's a leader's responsibility to foster the right culture. So what are those norms, values, beliefs that you're going to put in place that are going to serve as the daily expectations of those you are in a relationship with. Then it's important to get the right people on your team. Recruitment matters. You don't get to recruit every single member of your team, but you have to recruit key players, what you know, Coach k referred to as glue guys. You know, the right A players,

21:06 Get the right people in place in those critical roles, and from there you start to think about what are we going to have to do in order to prepare ourselves to put ourselves in a position where we can seize a moment or a set of activities. And so this preparation component, people highlighted how they had gone about that over time. Once those things transpire, when the moment happens, we call that the spark, and it doesn't have to be one thing. It can be a set of things that transpire within a certain timeframe. But then it's important for leaders to be able to recognize the spark and then help others to recognize it as well, and so communications became important. Leader communications, how do you communicate effectively to help people put the spark into context and galvanize their willingness to continue the effort going forward. From there, you have to maintain a positive climate on your team.

22:01 Climate is a short term reaction to the environment. Culture is pervasive. So how do you have a team where hey, guess what, Yes, we are continuing to foster just belief that, yes, we can do this. We were built for this, which leads into the importance of never taking mindset and belief for granted, fostering that all which leads to outcomes which then tie into feedback and so it's an iterative process. But those nine things stood out time and time again in our conversations with leaders across all those fields of endeavor. Beautifully explained Bernie, think you might be a professor, and so listeners and viewers, that's the meat there. What Bernie just really explained of how that all ties together. And what they've done is they've got a chapter on each one of those pieces so you can really dive deep into it. But that was beautifully explained. Okay, so now what I want to do is I want to talk about how this shows up and some of the examples having your book in terms of leadership, in terms of culture, so our listeners and viewers can now connect the concept.

23:06 I am not a sports fan or really big into sports. I'm lucky if I know what sport is being played in the season, So don't hold that against me, guys, But I am very, very fascinating with the Golden State Warriors, and so I want to talk about how this this notion here of you've got a chapter on the culture and what coach care if that's why I'm saying, is saying Kerr Kerr is doing to shape their shape theirs, their culture and then set them up for such strong performance and success and even the purchase, could you just kind of situate, you know, you talk about the purchase of the Warriors, let's start with that. That's pretty fascinating. Well, I'll jump in there. You know, the Warriors were a pretty you know, we're kind of trending upwards as seemingly, but they but they though they were trending, they seemed to be underperforming against the talent that the ownership that bought the team believed them to be capable of, and so they chose to make a leadership change. They brought in a new coach and and ironically, the coach that brought in had never been a head coach before in the NBA, so he's a he's brand new to his role, but he had been he'd been around and been a been a participant in many championship teams. So he understood that what what he believed was the most important thing was the reshaping of the culture. He didn't need to change players, he didn't need to change leaders. What he needed was to reshape the culture. And he uh and made a point that there were there were several elements of the culture that really stood out to him, but

24:38 the number one piece. He believed the culture was built on four core values joy, competition, compassion, and mindfulness. I'm going to get to joy last, but but the idea of competition. He believed that the players need needed not to believe that anything was given to them, that they had to continuously be ready to be their very best in order to get playing time. So competition was extraordinarily important as a cultural value that he wanted players to understand, don't expect anything come prepared to compete. Compassion was equally important because the one thing he said is, you know we're in a failure sport, right. Nobody wins every game, Nobody hits every shot. Even Michael Jordan's most famous quote is about the number of shots he missed. And so the idea of compassion was in his cultural ethos was that we had to be forgiving of each other because you're going to fail, and I can't be mad at you for failing because tomorrow I might fail and I need you to be supportive of me. So show compassion to each other. Mindfulness was just simply the idea of constantly being connected. He was looking for connection, and that really led to his concept of joy, which he said is the most important in building any great team culture.

26:06 And joy for him was looking at what makes it we're going to be better at our work if we're if we're happier at our work, right, And so how do I build joy? And one of the things he discovered was that the previous coach didn't agree that music should be played during practice. Very simple thing, but the players love music. The players want to dance as they're practicing, and so he very simply added music to the atmosphere, and it changed the way people felt about being in the workplace. He started looking at it and saying, you know, the other thing we need is to know each other better.

26:48 So he started inviting player families to travel with the team on charters as they were heading to away games, and he would invite those families to join the team for dinners because he wanted everybody to get to know each other better. He wanted a better sense of joy. And that didn't just manifest itself, it did so in explosive ways. Just three years after he became the head coach, Golden State, you know, delivered the greatest season in NBA history. They won more games than any team ever had. Forget Michael Jordan's Bulls. They delivered more wins than anybody in history.

27:32 Based on he would argue this concept of joy. I thought that was so compelling, that whole bit that she wrote about that, and I think the idea of situating and making joy a central part of your culture, and then talk about those those mirror neurons, of course, being able to see how people respond to that music and increase their energy and their and their happiness. And then I did really appreciate the idea that in terms of encouraging the compassion, so that when when the other players knew what was happening in their personal life, so what were they dealing with what was important to them? Who is their family? I just think that is really, really something special to celebrate, and I really wanted to make sure that we showcase that. So gorgeous share. Thank you, Don.

28:19 I also think it's important. Bernie, she said, gorgeous share it to me, not. If I can find it. Bernie, I'll say the same thing for you, but only if you earn it. Ners. I'm happy for Don to have gotten a gorgeous share. So here's gorgeous share. Is my gorgeous share. We're like, we're winning. You see. It's so easy to you know, make someone's stay right. We should just do more of it. But you know, here's where it gets really. Fun for me, as somebody who's been trafficking and meaning and purpose and all these kinds of things for some time. Now we can talk about the numbers of how this stuff, you know, translates. If you you talked about in the book how the Golden State Wars top the Forbes Annual Valuation list for NBA teams for the first time in their history in twenty twenty two, and then top the list again in twenty twenty three with a value of seven point seven billion dollars. I mean, there's so many things we could say about that, but I think it's important that listeners and viewers can connect this to the bottom line as well. It's not just feally good stuff.

29:22 These are real results. Yeah, and I think that's an important piece of this entire discussion. Right, Nothing about this journey for Bernie or myself has been about looking for some really fun thing to do. Now, we want people to be more successful, right, and momentum allows you to become more successful. Just fun all the way around. And you guys are both fun. What a delight. I didn't know what I was going to expect, and look at you, I might not want to give you back. So let's just we'll see. Okay, Well, let's talk about this spark. You have a whole chapter around the spark, and this is kind of of where things kind of where you say where the spark is the place where belief systems begin to shift. Let's talk about it.

30:08 Yeah. Yeah, So. When thinking about how do you recognize momentum. This was something that immediately came to mind for me because of the time I spent in the military. In the military, we spend countless hours preparing to develop capabilities that should something transpire in the world that requires our services, we're able to recognize those moments, tailor our activities to create positive momentum so that we can prevail and secure our nation and do to things we do in the military. And so in the military we call that seizing the initiative, And so how do you recognize when the moments occur that now present an opportunity for you to seize the initiative to go on the offense. In the military, when you're on defense, you're doing defense the entire time with the intent of getting back on the offense. It's always about having offensive efforts that you are orchestrating. And so teaching young leaders throughout the military how to recognize when critical things transpire and then to build upon those in a very thoughtful way was something we actually taught people how to do well. And so I was very curious, how are others doing this? And one of the conversations we had was with a very successful basketball coach Buzz Williams, who at the time was the Texas A and M basketball coach, and he was talking to us about how

31:41 we prepare his players to recognize the importance of certain critical moments within a game, and he was just so creative the way he went about it. Conversely, when we talked to one of the co founders of Nvidia about how are you going to recognize the spart he went back to, Hey, we didn't stumble upon the importance of GPUs. We knew that one day there would become a need to have computational power that could do several things at once, foster parallel processing, conduct matrix operations, and nobody was there yet, and nobody could really anticipate how fast do we have to get there? But they knew at some point in the future that's going to become important. And then boom, some things transpired and they had the best capability and suddenly they just skyrocket. But it wasn't the first time they had done that. They had also done it for gaming.

32:36 They had also done it. So they're in the business of constant reinvention in order to create positive momentum for their organization and to change the game inside the technology space. And so you saw it in the military, you saw it in industry, you saw it in sports, we saw it in politics. In our conversation with James Carbill and how we would prepare candidates, it was fascinating, say, at some point in this campaign, something's going to transpire, and in that moment, we have to be prepared to seize it and to build upon it. And he ran us through some scenarios and they talked about how you would create dialogue around that in the moment, and he rattled off a fictional scenario where he gave an impassioned speech and you were like, oh, you had to have that already, you know, that's something you memories. He's like, no, them made it up in the moment. But it was unbelievable.

33:34 But you know, with all this notion that they were all able to recognize when do a set of discrete activities gain outsized importance, how can you communicate that to others and then build upon it. Yeah, and in video, I mean, I think one of the things that stood out. One of the co founders sat down with us and it was fantastic to learn. I mean, you know, you know, them to be currently the first four trillion dollars come company in history. But that company back in twenty sixteen was kind of in the was in the the It was about one hundred and twenty two billion dollars in value, so it was a decent sized company, but not anywhere near what it is today. But they began then investing in this computational power that others were not investing in, so that when the moment that chat GPT is announced to the world, suddenly becomes a phenomenon, right, it becomes the spark the next very next day, and Vidio was worth thirty two billion dollars more than they were the day before. Why because they were ready for the spark.

34:46 Yeah. Yeah, this is so exciting, gentlemen, And it's just a shame that either one of you are very passionate about this either about this at all. I know. So we're going to take our next break here. But what were I love. What I want to situate for our listeners and viewers is the I the opportunity that you can teach people in your organization to recognize this bark. So let's have them thinking about that when we go on to break, because after the break, I want to situate a little bit about leader communication and the power in the world of storytelling in relation to that. As you kind of started to allude to, Bernie, I'm your host, Doctor Elise Cortez. We've been on the air with Brigadier General retired Brigadier General Bernie Banks, who now serves as the director of Rice University Stewart Institute for New leaders and is also a professor in the practice of leadership within the university's Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business. And we also have Don Yeager. He's the best selling author, associate editor for Sports Illustrated, and the host of the Corporate Competitor podcast.

35:42 We've been talking about some of the aspects relative to their model of the momentum. After the break, we're going to talk about that what I mentioned, the leader communication and how compelling you can situate yourself to really steward momentum in your organization. We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise A Lisee at elisecortes dot com. Now back to Working on Purpose.

37:03 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor, Relyse Cortez. As you know by now, this program is dedicated to empowering and inspiring you along your journey to realize more of your potential. If you want to learn more about how we can work together and learn about the Gusto Now Academy for leaders and individuals on various journeys alike, make your way to gustodesh now dot com and then navigate to the training tap where you can find the academy. Love to have you join us if you are just coming onto the episode with us. My guests today are Don Jeger and Bernie Banks. They're the authors of the New Science and momentum, how the best coaches and leaders build of fire from a single spark. So I have to celebrate this notion. Of course, you have a chapter on leader communications, and of course I am a champion for helping leaders to develop really being effective strong storytellers. So let's situate how that plays into being able to nurture momentum.

38:01 We're both being gracious, Doun's like, absolutely, and so one of the things that highly effective leaders do is that they use stories to establish context and to positively influence the things that are transpiring around them. And so learning how to tell an effective story was absolutely essential as we looked at this and we saw how people sought to put very complex things into terms that people could understand, right, And so learning how to communicate, learning how to tell stories, leveraging facts, not making things up, but highlighting things that were tangible and saying, Okay, here's why this matters, here's how it's going to positively influence this other thing. So earlier you were talking about facts and figures, and you gave some of those stats from the Golden State, whereas well, we were talking to David Petraeus about his activities when he was leading US forces in Iraq during what was later called the Surge, and it was a turnaround effort.

39:11 Prior to his arrival, things weren't going really well, and so he came up with a four pronged strategy for how he was going to dress stuff. But one of the elements of that really hinged on telling the story in a factual way and then putting those facts into contexts don't end up in the spin room, which is what a lot of people try to do. And so using facts and figures, telling compelling stories, making your communications easy to understand, plain language, you don't become too verbose. All of those things play a significant role in helping people to understand here's the moment, here's why it matters, here's what we have to do going forward if we're to take advantage of it.

40:03 Well. And keep in mind, gentlemen, that I'm all about developing inspirational leaders and so being able to share share a critical message in a way that connects your team members to what it is that you're out to do and encourages them in the process, lifts them in the process. It's just so compelling and so much of what I teach as well, So that whole chapter just really excited me. And then under that that I want to get to next is this idea of how you can champion belief in mindset. I think you said something earlier down about this, and let's see, I already said that you gave a gorgeous response. Bernie, so did you. Just to make sure we both get our kudos in here, But I do want to situate more of that because I think there's so much that organizations are missing in terms of opportunity, in terms of how they really steward, nurture and support belief and mindset, especially relative to momentum.

40:57 If one of you can. Take that, I think I think one of the things that stands out, you know, to the point Bernie was making about, you know, how to how do leaders communicate? And and one way to look at the way we built this model is it's almost like if you're if you're a camper, if you go out camping, and the very first thing you have to do if you're going to build a fire, right is you have to you have to assemble the fire together. You get to put the wood together in the right way so that there's air that can feel, that can fuel it, and you want to make sure it's stacked right, there's kindling in there. And then at. Some stage, so that's all the pre work, that's the recruiting, that's the culture, that's the that's putting together the team that's ready for the moment. Then the spark occurs, right, and the fire starts to grow. But now comes our responsibility as leaders to fan the flames, to make that fire as as dominant as possible, to let it, let it take hold. And one of the things that really matters in that in that fanning the flames window is is how we encourage. As you said, right, it's how we how we change and we take the belief in mindset.

42:13 They already believe we're going to be successful. Now the moment has occurred. Now it's our job to remind them all that work we did beforehand, all that preparation we did for this moment, it's ours. It's here, let's go right. And if I can encourage you to bring the best possible mindset to the workplace, if I can get you to believe with me that unbelievable things are head, the fire is going to be magnificent. You're going to if you trust me, if you believe me, and you are now witnessing this fire taking hold, you're going to jump on board, and the people who jump on board are going to help you through leader communications continue to fuel the mindset of their fellow teammates. Right again, mirror neurons.

43:06 As belief systems grow, belief systems. Grow, it's so powerful. And as a leader, your capacity, ladies and gentlemen, to steward that, to nurture that, to guide that is just so powerful. And think about the impact that you can have in your organization when you learn to do that. Well, so exciting. Okay, so we talked about those mirror neurons, and of course I situate then how important it is to be able to steward that positive emotional contagion. I want to be able to share with you have several practices in your book or approaches for leveraging emotional contagent to build momentum in teams. Let's talk about at. Least a few of those to be able to equip our listeners and viewers with some other material as they walk away from our podcast.

43:54 Yeah, so there are several things that we would recommend in that regard. One this notion of setting positive xptations and establishing a positive vision. Effective leaders set high standards. They don't set the bar low. They set the bar high, and they say, guess what, here's how we're going to go about clearing that height. So setting positive expectations, establishing a positive and then turning that into clear goals, smart goals, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time bounded, and then tapping into people's why the purpose piece you've already highlighted the importance of that. Another thing is having a growth mindset, based on the work of Carol Dweck. So how do you promote curiosity, how do you think about empathy? And how do you leverage the two so that you can learn along the way it's been set for the most agile organizations are the ones that learn most effectively, and taking time to engage in introspection and exploration matters. A third is to think about how do you foster a reflective mindset, really get people to be mindful, to engage in mediation, so to find that calm space that can unlock new insights. And there are a variety of others around understanding the neurofeedback you're receiving, right, So there are a number of ways in which you can go about applying these things in service of enhancing the likelihood that you achieve positive momentum.

45:24 It's so exciting to element. It's so exciting when you see this stuff in motion. You know, when I go into organizations, I can tell immediately there's this idea called limbic resonance. Right, It's probably related to what you're doing with the mirror neurons, but I can tell if an organization is gelled or not. I can feel that energy. I know if they feel demoralized, disconnected, or if they feel congealed and together and on fire. And I love how we're talking about equipping leaders and organizations to create more of that momentum. So this is so exciting for me. All Right, we have time really to cover just a little bit about the idea of outcomes and feed that us. You're bringing your last chapters. It's the finale, so let's just talk a little bit about that. We have maybe two minutes to discuss that.

46:08 I'll be quick, but I do know that one of the things when we looked at outcomes and feedback, one of the one of the places we turned for uh for for great learning was the Blue Angels, Right, the Navy's unbelievable team of pilots. If someone in the Navy can be unbelievable, they're they're the ones. This is what happens to an army guy. An army yes, says it. Army guy. Yeah? Can you mute the army guy? So that's my mirror neuron talking to you, Bernie. But yeah, the Navy, the Blue Angels are fantastic. But one of the things that stood out to us is here's this organization that performs at the highest level, but because of turnover. Right, they have turnover every year, they have forced turnover. They bring in new pilots every year. Their goal is to build momentum throughout the season so that they're best show is their last show. Right, They want to get better every show, and so one of the things that they do in the process of that is they do they do unbelievable feedback loops in which when they walk into the room after a practice or show, everyone takes from their arm their rank. Right, their ranks come off because this is no longer about you having a position as general and I'm just a journalist. This is the opportunity for us to speak truth to each other. Great feedback. We have this phrase in the book. Feedback is the breakfast of champions,

47:40 and those who can actually eat breakfast do well. So go to work, build feedback into your organization, which will allow you then to grow, prepare, start the loop again. That's the beauty of this model as we drafted it. It's actually a continuous loop. And while while the momentum will slow at some stage, your goal is to restart the model, keep it moving, keep it growing, and make momentum yours. Oh so good, guys, so so good. Okay, So I want to give you a chance each just to say a little something in closing, say maybe fifteen or twenty seconds. The show is listening to by people around the world.

48:21 They care about elevating their own leadership, stewarding their organizations, or more meaningfully plugging into their own work. What would you each like to leave them with? Don you want to start? Sure? You know I would tell you. I think the beauty of a project like this is that it starts with a crazy moment and an idea, and next thing you know, you get a chance to learn from the very best. I think that you know, we believe success leaves clues, and that's what we went out to do. We chased success, sought its clues, and put it here for others to hopefully grow from. I would just like to build upon that and say you need not have experienced something personally to make it an experience that you can leverage personally, learn from the wisdom of others. It will accelerate your ability to be effective in your role. Minding these stories has been an honor for both of us, and we're just excited to share these stories with others and the hope that it can lead to people positively impacting other people's lives around the globe.

49:30 Bernie and Don, it is an absolute delight and pleasure to know you both, to have learned from you, be inspired by you. I'm so grateful that I found you, that you came on the show. Thank you for being on working on purpose. Thank you Eric. Listeners and viewers, you're going to want to learn more about these two amazing gentlemen and their book. There's a couple of places you can go. You can go to the Harpercollinsfocus dot com website to find their book, but I would also recommend that you go to LinkedIn and find each of them individually and connect with them that way. That would be one of the best and easiest ways to do that. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always catch a bee recorded podcast. We were on air with Isaac Perlatinsky talking about his book How People Matter, Why it affects health, happiness, love, work, and society.

50:15 He's passionate about mattering, well being, and fairness, and we talked about how when these are satisfied in people, families, communities, organizations, and even nations altogether thrive. Next week will be on the air with Ken Banta talking about his new book Seeing Around Corners c Suite wisdom from America's most insightful leaders. See you then, and together, let's lean in and learn together how to make workplaces that work for everyone and find wasted business in a way that betters the world. Let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four C. Why Together, We'll create a world where business operates conscientiously leadership and fires and passion.

51:00 Performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose. They crave see you there. Let's work on purpose.