Host Intro (Gene Kim)

[00:00:21.195] Up next is Dr. André Martin, and there are so many things about his work that I admire. I met him when he was the Chief Learning Officer at Nike. He later took the role of Chief Learning Officer at Target, and then, unbelievably, he served as the VP of People Development at Google, where he led the global team committed to helping Google unleash the full potential of Googlers worldwide.

[00:00:44.115] If you love the employee net promoter score that made it into the DORA metrics, that actually came from a text-message exchange with him. He's the author of Right Fit, Wrong Fit and the upcoming book Collective Confidence, due next year. Here's André.

André Martin

[00:01:00.625] Thank you. Good evening, everybody. How are we doing today? Good.

[00:01:08.255] I have the unique opportunity to stand onstage and talk to you about a topic that I've cared about for what I think is actually about 25 years. And as my career progressed from a little town in the Ozark Mountains in the middle of nowhere to many of these amazing places I got to go work and experience culture and people and teams.

[00:01:29.755] Before all that happened, I was an organizational psychologist, and I got into my craft because I'm fascinated by the human condition. I'm fascinated what happens when two people, five people, a team of people, communities, companies come together and try to do really hard things.

[00:01:50.155] And lately, especially after today's presentations, I've been sitting with a question. And that question has to do with this idea of how can we harness AI and all the other beautiful disruptions that are coming our way, and our limitless human ingenuity, when our tanks are empty and our optimism is on really shaky ground? That's the question that I've been holding for quite a long time.

[00:02:19.395] And when it comes down to it, I sort of look at this question and I start with, you've got to back up, take a deep breath, open your eyes really wide, and take a look at what's happening in the world. There are three trends that I've been watching a lot lately, that I've been super curious about.

[00:02:35.475] The first one is all about this idea of uncertainty. In all the executive teams I work with now, from $10 billion down to new startups, they're all riddled with uncertainty. It's dominating our conversations. And when we're uncertain, we get stressed. When we get stressed, our focus narrows. When our focus narrows, we make decisions that are reactive. We make decisions that are about fight or flight, or worse yet, we stick our head in the sand and we just hope that tomorrow is a little sunnier. And we know hope is just not a strategy.

[00:03:11.185] So when you think about uncertainty: three-year low, when CEOs were asked how much confidence they have in their executive teams to overcome uncertainty. Think about that. Your CEO isn't sure that they have the team that's going to get them through this hard time.

[00:03:27.445] A second prevailing trend for me is isolation. This one really worries me. We know how detrimental isolation is from all the time we spent in COVID. We know that isolation creates fear. It drives a lack of empathy because the universe just becomes all about us.

[00:03:47.675] When you're lonely or isolated, it's the health equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes every single day. And one of five of you are currently lonely on a daily basis. And when I look at loneliness, I think about this and just say, God, you know what? We talk about long COVID. This is our societal long COVID. It's the greatest leadership challenge we all have right now, is to reduce loneliness, get people back in a room, get them talking, get them listening to each other, and then driving that ingenuity that we need.

[00:04:21.785] The last prevailing trend for me is pessimism. And this one makes me sad, because what it does is it makes it way too easy to see all that's wrong in the world. It allows us to be disappointed in each other, and it creates a divisiveness that has us starting from a place of massive distrust.

[00:04:44.105] And I look at pessimism and I think that's the ball game. If we can't see possibility in each other, if we can't see potential in each other, if we can't come to a table and say, hey, maybe this person in front of me actually has something that could help me be smarter, that might actually change my opinion, that I might one day be so moved by somebody that I decide that everything I thought before was incorrect, we need that possibility back in our world.

[00:05:17.865] And so I look at all those trends and I think, God, they are impacting the workplace in really massive ways. All of this data you may have seen before: $6.9 trillion of disengagement or productivity loss due to disengagement. You look at 20% of employees think about quitting their job every single day. That's a quarter of this room.

[00:05:46.545] We know that these trends are impacting how we come. And then we're talking about AI, we're talking about massive disruption, we're talking about strategies have to change, and everybody's just bringing the worst of themselves into work. We're getting their fumes. We're not getting their creative energy.

[00:06:02.265] And so for me, I've been sitting here saying, you know what? We are having to do increasingly hard things, and we're doing it with less creative energy, less optimism, and less belief than we've ever had before. And I think I might just have a possible solution to it. Not the blue pill for it all, but I think I might have a concept that we can talk a little bit about and start leaning on to change the game. And that's this idea of collective confidence.

[00:06:33.185] I've been thinking about collective confidence since my days in graduate school. This was the topic of my master's thesis and dissertation 20 years ago. Collective confidence is simply the unwavering belief that together we have the capability for greatness. It started with a researcher named Albert Bandura way back. He took this idea of self-efficacy or self-confidence and said, what if we could apply it to teams and groups? What if we could drive confidence purposely in teams and groups? What would that do to performance?

[00:07:07.345] So it's been 20 years since I've been in the research. I ran a survey just last year with 400 team members from around the world and found some really validating results. The first is that collective confidence is an enormous predictor of team performance; it accounted for 51% of the variance in this group, above even those group-process items that we love.

[00:07:30.625] The second thing that happened is past performance. We often look to past performance as the precursor for future performance. We love the winning streak. And yes, past performance is important, but actually only early on in a team's lifecycle. There are five other inputs that are just as important, if not more so, in boosting a team's confidence.

[00:07:52.855] Third is that if a team is confident, it has a positive impact on other highly valued team attributes. Team cohesion, risk-taking, and others become much stronger if and when that team is confident.

[00:08:09.105] And last but not least is collective confidence is a performance link. It will increase performance if and when you have a really strong group process. So a confident team without a really great group process, ways to make decisions, ways to have debate, if those things aren't in place, you don't have massively hard and achievable goals, then your confidence will erode over time.

[00:08:37.625] So when you think about understanding collective confidence, there are basically six inputs. You have to have self-confident individuals. There's a concept of contributory confidence that becomes really important. Mastery experiences, vicarious experience, shared learning, and shared leadership. Now, I'd love to talk about all those today, but I don't have the time. So I chose three I want to spend some time in.

[00:09:01.485] But I want you to hear this: the one thing that we've seen in collective confidence is that it's not the result of a winning streak. It happens by leaders who choose to curate it in really small moments over time. I'm going to talk about a few leaders today that I got to do case studies with and talk to. I've been talking to admirals of submarines, I've been talking to Hollywood production companies, to people who are running really fast-growth companies. And the similarities among these highly confident teams will kind of blow your mind.

[00:09:35.465] So the first thing I want to talk about today is a concept that not a lot of you know, which is contributory confidence. Self-confidence is my belief in myself. Collective confidence is my belief in the team. Contributory confidence is how much belief I have that my skillset is unique amongst this very certain group of people that I'm working with.

[00:09:57.555] What happens in teams when we first join them? Think about this. You've all had this experience. You come in with this massive experience set and you sit down, look at these strangers, and wonder almost immediately, do I have anything to add? Now, the best leaders in the world, they don't leave that question for you or anybody else.

[00:10:17.135] I want to talk about a leader that comes from a very interesting place. Has anyone ever been to Burning Man? Burning Man is a phenomenal community. Paul is the creator of one of the most longstanding, most successful camps that originated due to an orphan stuffed animal at Toys R Us about 15 years ago. He's created basically a spirit adoption center at Burning Man.

[00:10:42.655] What I love that he's done is he's mobilized 150 people every year. They build this massive camp in a desert in the middle of nowhere. They have a great party for a week, and then they pull it all down and leave no trace that they've ever been. And when I talk to Paul, he's a master of contributory confidence.

[00:11:01.565] Three things that he does that blow my mind. Every Sunday, he has a slow hang with his crew. They're all scattered all over the world. But every Sunday they come together, and they just open the phone lines and videos and just sit there. They talk, they hang out, they show pictures of their family, and they use this slow hang as a way to simply build deep connections that he knows he's going to need. It allows us to understand the superpowers and the essence and the values of each other, so we can put those to work over time.

[00:11:33.975] The second thing he does is he makes everybody the boss of something. When there's a problem, his first question is, who's the boss of this? Who's the boss of this? And he asks it until somebody raises their hand and says, it's me. And they're like, good. You're now the CEO of trash, because you can't leave any trace. Someone says, hey, all this trash on the camp, you're now the CEO of trash. You're the CEO of to-do lists. You're the CEO of good food. And so everybody becomes the boss of something, so everyone feels like they have a unique way to contribute. It's brilliant.

[00:12:04.115] Last but not least is he puts unlikely duos together. He did this intuitively. When I asked him why, he said, because that's where magic happens, man, in a very Burning Man kind of way. What he did know is there's actually a social phenomenon that's about competence borrowing. We are more likely to borrow competence from people who have a different skillset than us than we ever are from people who practice our same craft. And so he actually gets more out of people, and they contribute more, because they not only do the thing, but they start teaching and mentoring somebody else. So that's contributory confidence.

[00:12:41.065] The second one is early success as a team creates a habit of winning. One of the phenomena is mastery experiences, allowing people to have early low-stakes wins in analogous environments, allows you to create the confidence to do hard things. Now, back in the nineties, we talked about this as team building, but in one of the companies I work with, they've really mastered this art in a much more elegant way. This is PeakSpan Capital, a fast-growing tech VC firm out in New York and on the West Coast.

[00:13:09.295] Three things they do to build this performance. The first one is they have a farm system. They only hire out of college, and they don't hire finance specialists, because they want to teach everybody their craft. And they set up basically an internship over the first summer, and they literally curate small wins all the way along the way. So these individuals walk out thinking they're the best thing that's ever happened to the finance world.

[00:13:36.545] The second thing they do is they have a weekly warm-up. They all get on for four hours. They talk about investments, they talk about accomplishments people have had, they talk about small things that are happening, and they create this place where they are reminding people that they're great.

[00:13:52.525] And then the coolest thing they do is if you do something good for this company, everybody piles on. Everybody piles on. Every single person in the company will literally send you an email and say, that is awesome. I love it. And it creates this unbelievable ripple effect around recognition that makes you feel so good that you could never potentially lose.

[00:14:12.585] The last input I want to talk about is inspiration. This is called vicarious experience. The best teams in the world, they go out and seek inspiration because once we're inspired, we have to put that energy somewhere, and it goes to new, better, different, more meaningful ideas. And so when you think about inspiration, they go out and they find similar teams in analog environments that have already done something they're trying to do. And they don't look at them with judgment. They look at them to say, we can do it too.

[00:14:44.765] My favorite story that I had so far, I just did this interview last week, was with the Deadliest Catch production team from 2006, the second season of this show. This team had to take an almost-failing franchise and make it work. We're talking seven, eight ships out in the crazy ocean; two-person film crews, most of which had no film experience at all because they hired from the military and they hired people who were rafting guides, because they had to be able to survive on these ships that are tiny and really dangerous.

[00:15:13.265] Three things they did that were really interesting. The first one is they had film school the first week everyone arrived there. They all learned how to film, and they watched examples of greatness ranging from blockbuster films to the crew that was out on the set last year. They literally just inspired people every single day for a week.

[00:15:33.745] Second thing they did is every time the boat came in, there were no cell phones back in 2006, really. So every time the boat came in, they did debriefs. The production team would sit with that crew, find out what they did, take their best shot, and the next debrief with the next crew, they would start with that inspiration dose, expose them to excellence that was happening somewhere else.

[00:15:56.445] And the last thing they did is they stoked this really brilliant combination of rivalry and camaraderie. Rivalry, in that we're all on these boats trying to get that master shot, and camaraderie in that, God, every single one of these shots is going to make or break this beautiful show we're trying to shoot. And so they just feathered those pedals really beautifully.

[00:16:17.225] And so when you think about this idea of collective confidence, there are a few things you can do right now, and these are the six. You want to grab a photo of it, I encourage you to.

[00:16:27.925] The first one is reinforce individual accomplishments so people continue to keep self-confidence. If you don't have that, you're not going to win. Secondly, make everybody the boss of something. Get rid of the titles and just go, you know what, you're the boss of X. Third is provide the team opportunities to succeed together in low-stakes environments. Team building actually is a really important attribute to long-term performance.

[00:16:49.305] Fourth is make sure to bring inspiration doses in every day. If we're not inspired, we're never going to shoot for excellence. You're never going to get discretionary effort. Take time to learn and build capability together. Learning together builds a collective library of information and allows me to depend on the people in the room in a much different way.

[00:17:10.465] And last but not least is rotate leadership roles. Give everyone the weight of leadership, not just the responsibility, not just the glory, but the weight of it. And they'll start to understand and see how hard that leadership is to do every day.

[00:17:24.985] A final thought for me is my wish and my hope is that we get rid of pessimism, we harness uncertainty, we find our way out of isolation and into each other's lives again. And then we're going to be able to build these confident teams. Confident teams play to win instead of playing to lose. They innovate rather than stick to the safe things. They see challenges as opportunities, not as threats. And most of all, they regroup after failure instead of pointing fingers.

[00:17:58.185] My hope is that this is a little inspiration for you to start building confidence on your teams. And I hope you'll join me on the journey, because this is the end of my presentation, but it's just the beginning of this work. So in the next year, you'll see a book with this title. I'm going to be doing a lot of posting and might be reaching out for research and stories and ideas about how we all can create a little bit more collective confidence. So with that, have a great night. It's good to see you again, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.