Ep 117 Teamwork: Understanding your team's cognitive and emotional culture

In this insightful episode of The Crazy One, Stephen Gates uncovers the deeper layers of company culture beyond team-building events and office perks. He explains how culture is truly shaped by the daily behaviors of every employee—from executives to interns—and how these dynamics have a profound effect on creativity and innovation. Stephen breaks down the three key elements of emotional experience, explores the impact of cognitive and emotional cultures, and shares actionable steps anyone can take to start transforming their workplace culture for the better. Tune in for a fresh perspective on creating a meaningful, impactful culture in any organization.

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Transcript

What's going on, everybody? And welcome into the 117th episode of the Crazy One Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates, and this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership, design, and everything else. That helps to empower creative people. Now remember, you can listen to all the shows, get the show notes and a whole lot more. Just head over to thecrazyone.com. As always, that's the word the crazy and the number one.com. Make sure you also hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform to get the latest episodes whenever those come out. And always, I also love for this always to be a dialogue. So if you have any questions, you want to keep up with my often more homebound adventures thanks to the pandemic. You can always follow me on Twitter or Instagram and you can follow the show on LinkedIn or Facebook. Now it's not a secret that there's been sort of a thread through all these shows that really has been my quest to understand what makes up a great team. What makes it different from everybody else? So that's something I wanted to revisit today is I want to talk about one of those big mysteries, one of those big things that everybody talks about, a word that gets used all the time in every single company. And like so many other words like it, we use it all the time, but often have no idea what it actually means. We want to talk about team culture. And I think most people think about team culture is like birthday parties or team building events or, you know, what fun or different channels can you create on Slack now that we're all working remotely. But I think like most things, this goes a lot deeper than that. And there's a lot more that's going on under the surface than most people realize. I think this was similar when we did episodes on trust or emotional intelligence or things like that. That trust seems to be something that everybody's sort of like, oh, you need to have trust. But when you ask them what that means, what are the different types, how do you define it, how do you build it, the answers are a little bit slower in coming. Now here's the other thing I would say is that before you decide that maybe this doesn't sound like a show that applies to you, trust me it does. Because this is something that I think everybody needs to understand. You need to understand it for your current job. Obviously, if you're a leader, you're one of the people who needs to be working through and leading culture. But also, I think if you're on a team. You need to be aware of what the culture is. You need to be aware of how do you hold your leaders accountable? How do you actually show up in that culture? And it It definitely is something that if you're ever looking for a new job, this is something you really need to focus on. Because I think most people, as we talked about in the episode around negotiating your salary, Just feel like so grateful to have a job that they glaze over a lot of these things and often find out usually when it's too late. That they've joined a company with a toxic culture. They've joined something that doesn't really align with their values. And then it's like, okay, well, I guess I'll stay here. And in that usual eighteen to thirty month window, I'm going to go find a new job. So this is an attempt to try to break that cycle, to try to get teams to function better, to get more people to be aware of this stuff. So what we're going to do in this episode is I want to start by just exploring the basics of what are the three different parts of an emotion. And this is something where it doesn't matter where you live in the world, like, who it is you are, there are always three basic parts that go into having an emotion. Now I want to start with that because if we're going to talk about culture, culture sits on emotion. So, you know, you think about it, not very surprising that again, a team is made up of people. So you need to understand how individual people experience emotion. Before we can talk about how teams experience emotion because there's a straight line between those two. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about the three different parts of an emotion. Then we're going to go into what are the two different sorts of cultures that exist in every company. Every company has a cognitive culture and an emotional culture. So I want to explain what those are, break down the different types that are there. And go through so that everybody can sort of understand what that is. And then finally, what I want to do is to just sort of briefly touch on what are some of the things that you can do to change that culture, to understand it. If you're a leader, how do you show up and be able to make a difference in that? Because I think a lot of people recognize really good culture. A lot of people recognize really bad culture. And in many cases, it's just how are we more deliberate in creating it than just trying to show up in hope. So that's what I want to get into today. But let's start with, again, before we understand team culture, let's take a step back and really look at the basics of looking, how does a person, how do you experience an emotion? Because like I said, I always find this to be fascinating because much like when I started doing work in trust and emotional intelligence, whenever you start digging into it and you start to study it, There's a lot more that's going on there that I think everyone feels. Whenever you step back and you sort of draw out the different parts, everybody goes, oh yeah, that makes sense. But whenever you're often experiencing it, you aren't taking the time to realize that these sort of things are happening. So, what I want to do is to start with explaining that every emotion that you and everybody else in the world experiences is made up of three different parts. A subjective experience, a psychological, sorry, a physiological response. I'm going to try and get that word right. I knew that was going to give me trouble in this show and I kept wanting to say psychological, but it's not. Physiological response and a behavioral expression. So, it all starts, and all emotions start with a subjective experience. The easiest way to think about this is that this is really the trigger, the stimulus, the reason why you have an emotion. Now, this can be really simple. It could be something as simple as seeing a very particular color or smelling something, you know, very particular or being a particular location or again, it can be simple visual stimulus like that. And then it can range up to really big things. So if you think about losing a loved one or getting married or these sort of milestone dates in your life that you will always remember, These are all the stimulus that will trigger emotions. Now, no matter how minor or how intense that experience is, it can provoke one or honestly a number of different emotions and these emotions are going to feel different for everyone. So I think that's why I think it's important to call this a subjective experience, because especially as we get into team culture, you can have multiple people who sit in the same meeting who hear the same thing being said. Some of which are going to think, oh, that's great feedback. That's a great thought. That's a great, and they're going to interpret it one way. Well, then you may have other people who are going to find it demoralizing, demotivating. Like just, you know, they're gonna be so angry and so depressed whenever they come out of the exact same meeting. Well, that's why. Is because it's the subjective part of the subjective experience that makes the foundation of that emotion so different. But here's the thing is that, like I said, no matter what, where you are in the world, what you do, that's where it starts. Well, then once we have that stimulus, that moment, that experience, whatever it is. We all react with what's called a physiological response to that subjective experience. Now the physiological response is the result of what is called the autonomic nervous system. This episode is going to be full of fun words that I can tell it's like those $5 words and this is why I went to art school so I didn't have to pronounce these, but the autonomic nervous system. And what that does is it reacts to the emotion you're experiencing. Now that part of your nervous system really controls often the involuntarily bodily responses and it regulates a fight or flight response. Which often means whenever you feel an emotion, do you want to stay? Do you want to talk about it? Do you want to figure it out and sort of be present? Or do you, like the word says, do you want to run away? Do you just, do you just not want to deal with it and be able to do that? Again, everybody has different fight or flight responses whenever they go through that. But it's really just, this is almost like how we physically experience the emotion. And I think that what happens then is that our bodies will create these voluntary and involuntary Behavioral responses, which is more of the actual expression to the emotion. So again, there's that sort of the subjective experience, your nervous system processes it. And either you're going to get angry. You want to go away. Like there you, depending on sort of what that is, you're going to have some sort of. How does your brain physiologically respond to it? And then the last part is what's the behavioral response? Now, that can be that if you think about getting married, right? As an emotional response, that's going to make you smile or laugh or be really happy. And that's going to be your behavioral response there. Somebody gets mad at you. Somebody at work puts you down. Maybe your behavioral response is more of a grimace, a sigh. This is a lot of these things really then become You know, couched in, I think, one, your personality. So again, how do you react to that subjective response? I think you're gonna have to lean into a little bit more of like societal norms because I do think this is where society and culture layers in because different cultures will express emotions differently. But in many cases, you know, this is what if you, if you read different things, right? So if you study with poker players about the tells that people will have when they have good or bad cards. If you think about Chris Voss and that sort of never split the difference, how do you negotiate? How do you think about things? How do you read somebody's tells? Well, this is what it's really based in are these behavioral expressions, because again, that's how you can start to figure these things out is they're just things that we all do based on that that betray how we feel. And like I said, that could be which direction you look, the expression on your face, that could be your body language, whether you're sitting there with your arms open or your arms crossed, right? These are all behavioral expressions. But I think the reason why this is important is one, I think if you want to be a good leader, if you want to be a good coworker, if you want to be somebody who can show up and be a part of a great team. I think that there are people who either empathetically or deliberately Pay attention to these things, right? I think they are careful and thoughtful and that cultures are careful and thoughtful about what are the subjective experiences that could trigger emotions. And then I think, again, they are aware of those behavioral cues that people put off. This will, in, you know, so much lately everybody wants to talk about EQ versus IQ. IQ meaning intelligence, EQ meaning emotional intelligence. Well, in many cases, the EQ part of that is how well do you read the behavioral expression of an emotion. So I think that, like I said, it's good to be able to think about that and whenever you see somebody who you work with really well, whenever you see somebody who you really struggle with, this is what I think is often really good to do is to be able to figure out How do they respond to those different stimulus? So again, what is their subjective experience? Are there things that consistently trigger them? And then again, what is their behavioral expression of that? Because the good news is people tend to be decently consistent with how they express it. So once you understand that, then you can find out better ways of working with them. The harder part with this is that it does require you to pay attention to people and not just be stuck in what am I doing and how do I think about things. But that's the foundation. Now let's move on from the foundation and let's actually talk about how does this apply to corporate culture, to team culture, to doing those sort of things. Because, you know, team culture is I think then defined by what is the framework of how a group of people work together. And then I think the resulting experiences of how people work together often are what create those subjective experiences, the triggers. And I think that we can talk about this all the time, but the reason why I think culture is so important is because culture is often the feeder of those subjective experience triggers. So are people happy? Are they sad? Are they motivated? Are they depressed? Do they have a reason to believe? Are they totally disconnected? Again, those are often then, how are you consistently feeding those subjective experiences that trigger their emotions? Then if you think about it, the physiological response, it then gets defined by if you and your team, how do you want to respond to those stimulus? Do you want to fight to make a change? Or do you want to take in the flight response and then to be able to see people start to quit and run away? So again, you'll see it that it happens in an individual, but you'll see similar behavior expressed a little bit differently in groups. Because there is a physiological response for how bought in are people into the team? Do they stay? Do they go? The great resignation that we're seeing right now is a massive, massive response to a physiological response of people deciding that based on that Consistent subjective experience. They don't want to be a part of cultures anymore. They don't want to be a part of teams anymore. And then lastly, you can see that behavioral response and how people act on the team. But I think that it really is the behavioral response is really more of the emotional culture of the team. So again, there's a little bit of that loop of while the culture produces the subjective experience that you want to consume, the expression of that culture then sort of links back to that trigger so that the two really feed each other. But here, there's really just two different types of team cultures. They're separate, but they're intertwined. And we want to talk about both of them in detail because I think they're both important. The first is what is your team or your company's cognitive culture, which really defines how does the team or the company think? And again, I think that this is often a really important piece of that because this is often the foundation, the groundwork for the expression and the stimulus. So we want to talk through and understand that. But then there's also an emotional culture. And this defines how the team is feeling, what the company values. It often will define leadership style, how the company or the team will invest in their people. And ultimately all of these will then really look at what is the type of work that the team can produce. Now I think these two cultures are very closely tied to the practical and emotional states of trust that we talked about back in episode eighty-eight Now, if you haven't listened to that episode, I would say go back and do it because I think that on top of just understanding the basics of an emotion, if this is something that interests you, if this is something you want to learn more about, Trust is a huge part in all of this. And so we're not going to touch on that today, but we definitely want to recognize that it's a thread that runs through all of So again, I would highly encourage you go back and check out episode eighty-eight where we will talk about the difference between practical and emotional trust. And again, how that often will define the way a team works together. Now. Let's go through all of these in more detail. And I think hopefully, hopefully that's the end of like the $5 words and all the crazy stuff like that. And we can get back to just some simpler ways to talking about things. But as we talk about cognitive culture, right? Like let's start there. Because I think in many cases when people talk about corporate culture, typically what they're talking about is cognitive culture, but they don't know it. Similarly in pass shows when we've talked about how words like design or innovation or trust or things like that, Are often sort of big, big sort of catch-alls for deeper concepts. That's true here. Because cognitive culture is that shared intellectual value, the shared norms, the shared artifacts, the shared assumptions. That really serve as a guide for the team. And depending on the depth of those, depending on the way those are focused, Those different artifacts and norms of the culture can be incredibly empowering or they can be incredibly repressive. Because this is the thing is that this cognitive culture really sets the tone for how employees think and behave at work, for instance. How customer-focused, innovative, team-oriented, or competitive a team is or should be is often defined by its cognitive culture. And the thing that often is easy to be able to see is that cognitive culture, which is sorts of aligns to more of the practical part of the trust equation, often more closely aligns to verbal cues. So this is you can watch the way that people, what do they say? Or what do they not say? This is often really then the expression of the way that they're thinking. But I think again, it's really important to understand these different types and there's four different types. And again, as you look at the research. There's a bunch of different ones, but in my experience, I think, especially as it comes to creativity, creative teams, innovation, I think there's really four dominant cognitive cultures. Which is a market culture, a hierarchy culture, a create culture, and a collaborative culture. Now let's walk through what each one of these means. And also, just don't feel like you have to, you know, furiously scribble down notes through this whole thing. Um, again, you can just go to thecrazyone.com, go to episodes, find episode 117, and I'll have all of these notes written out in there. So you can use that as a basis to be able to go off of. So again, you can just just listen to it for right now and then go back, grab the notes and then try to digest a little bit more. Now the first one is a market culture. Now what a market culture really wants to focus on is results. And it focuses on results, honestly, pure and simple. There's not much more to it. Because in this type of culture, people are highly goal focused. And you'll often see that you have a group of leaders who are really tough and really demanding in order to achieve those goals, those success metrics that the company's defined. I think obviously if you think about. Finance. There's a lot of other ones where again, very, very goal focused, very, very driven. Um, some consultancies can be this way, different things like that, but. You know, it's often easy to spot because this is usually fairly consistently a pretty high pressure environment. But I think that for the people who really like the pressure, For the people who like to get results, this for them can also be something that is really rewarding when that hard work pays off and it pays off in real and measurable results. I think the people who really exceed in market cultures are that they tend to be a little bit more process driven. They tend to be more results driven, like having them go into an open ended brainstorm is probably the closest thing to hell they could ever get to. Because just that lack of focus, that lack of drive, that lack of a clear goal and just the ability to go like explore is sort of bonkers. So the other thing I want to do is just to sort of take the top line of the pros and cons of each of these cultures because not every culture is going to be for everybody. So the pros of a market culture are really going to be that again, you are surrounded by people who are highly driven, highly motivated to achieve their goals. You know, it tends to be a self policing sort of culture where. Because of the goals, because of the pressure, because of the people who want to excel that way, if you are not wired that way, you tend to sort of be moved out of the organization pretty quickly because it is just about performance. And whenever you look at it, I think, you know, the improved performance of the company really will then help a lot of people stay more motivated because everyone is committed to that success. They are clearly aligned. Behind what those goals are. Everybody knows what we need to do. They knew, they know how much we need to move the needle to do those sort of things. Right? So in that case, you get a lot of clarity. But. The cons of this is that whenever you are just simply encouraging constant competition, that can go over the edge fairly easily. So I think It is often difficult to find it and to keep the balance so that this does not become a toxic workplace where people will just do anything. Sell anybody out. There is no trust. You know, at the end of the day, everybody is just out for themselves to achieve their goal and get theirs. And that is often usually the downside of that sort of market culture. And I think that you'll also see that as an individual, as a person who works there, you're going to experience stress and even burnout at a far higher rate. Because again, there is that constant pressure and I think that's where you will usually see in these cultures a higher than average turnover rate. And we'll, we'll talk as we get to the emotional culture. This, this often pairs with one of the different types of emotional culture. But the problem is, is that when you're performing, the company tends to love you. If you need a break, if you burn out, if you want to slow down, if you want to prioritize yourself, then it sort of turns into much more of a what have you done for me lately sort of culture. Now, the next cognitive culture is going to be a hierarchy culture. Now, very much like the name would imply, this is a culture that focuses on process and on structure. And it really is about that highly structured, highly process oriented way of working because in this sort of culture, most activities and decisions are dictated by existing procedures, existing processes. As opposed to debate, brainstorms, free thinking, it's very much we need to go through these steps to get to this outcome. And it's an interesting role here because I think we're in like a market culture. Leaders are very much about keeping people motivated and getting their goals in a hierarchy culture. Leaders are much more in place to ensure honestly that the teams are efficient. That they're those well-oiled machines. And I think that they really place the bulk of their focus more on stability, results, and reliable delivery. Right, because that's what it is they want. They want to be able to know that we put this in here and we get this output, you know, over here and that the process and things like that have all of that under control. Now, here again, the pros of this can be, look, there's a lot of clarity in communication and expectations because almost everything you do is prescribed. I think you can see why a lot of creatives probably don't do very well in a hierarchy culture. And this is why a lot of times whenever these cultures try to start design teams or they try to bring in creatives, The, the creatives will often see this as a really great challenge. We can come in and get our hands on something and make a really big difference. But the problem is they just, they miss the misalignment between the way they like to work, more open, more free thinking, more brainstorming, and again, a culture that only wants to put everything into process. And so that conflict ultimately is what often causes the friction and all too often the failure in those sort of teams because there's just, there's a fundamental misalignment in the way that we want to approach things. But I think that for a lot of people, the other reason why they tend to like a hierarchy culture is that it does. It gives you a greater sense of security and predictability. Because of all of that process, right? Like, you know what's going to happen. You know how this is going to go. So there's not that, there's really not a need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Because it's all prescribed for you. Now, there's more than a few cons to this culture. I think especially as we look at it through the lens of being creative. One is that prioritizing process over people Um, can be a difficult culture, right? I think it makes it feel inflexible and often it really even just sort of unsupportive because in many cases we sort of just strip the humanity out of it. And whenever we do that, we often introduce just a lot of rigidity, right? And that rigidity really will most of the time, almost all the time, Stifle innovation and growth because people are afraid to think outside of the box. They're afraid to be able to deviate from the process. The process said we have to do this. We have to do that. And then again, that's innovation is born out of getting it wrong. Innovation is born out of exploration. And this is a culture that just doesn't want those things. And I think you also have almost no leaders and almost all managers because what you really are getting are people who just are going to move the work along, right? Like they're just going to shepherd it from point A to point B according to the process. There's not much leadership is going to be asked for. It's going to be more around, again, that compliance process and structure. So I think then as we get into the last two, now we start to get into the cultures that I think are good for creativity. The first one is a create culture. And a create culture really focuses on entrepreneurialism. And this is often, create cultures are most often where you are most likely to see those move fast and break things posters from Facebook. There's still the joke that like a week later that got covered up with another one that said slow down and fix your shit. But this is often that sort of hacker, you know, rebel sort of mentality. And it's because this culture really fosters a really entrepreneurial sort of environment where people are encouraged to take risks and aggressively pursue those off the wall ideas and as a result. There's often a lot of innovation, a lot of learning, a lot of growth for people and teams and the company. And I think that's, those are obviously then the pros here, right? You have a lot of innovation, a lot of growth, a lot of freedom. I think that as a result, there's often usually a lot of psychological safety. Because, you know, people, employees, teams, they feel really secure taking those risks because you're actually encouraged to like you might actually even be called out if you don't, right? Like it's such the opposite of that hierarchy culture. But here again, I think there are cons to create culture as well is that in many cases that constant drive to explore can sometimes make it feel like there's a lack of stability. Because there's so much investment in the new, that constant investment in new initiatives, new thinking, new direction, new, new, new, new, new. And I think also, this is usually a culture that is really hard to come into. Because it is. It's pretty intimidating to be a new member of that team when you don't have the expertise to work quickly and work aggressively to be able to come in that way because that's not the way most schools work. That's not the way a bunch of different companies work. If you're going to come into a create culture, really pay attention to how they onboard people because you want to make sure that you get the time to be able to adapt to that way of working, to be able to ramp up and to be a part of it. So you're not just simply thrown into the deep end of the pool. Because often it's gonna film really overwhelming. And again, I think that it feels overwhelming just because you can feel like you get lost in that that only focus is on new. And that sometimes that new and why the move fast and break things turned into slow down and fix your shit is because sometimes it comes at the cost of things like details, refinement, Depth of thinking, right? The ability to really focus on some level of your craft, those become secondary. And when those become secondary, that obviously becomes a problem. Now the last one to talk about is collaborative culture. And collaborative culture really focuses on teamwork and on togetherness. Because in collaborative culture, Right, you want to work with people who feel like family and you want to do it in a way that feels like it's fun. And I think that usually these cultures are really friendly working environments where things like relationships and morale and participation and consensus take center stage. And that this case where you'll start to see that the managers, the leaders, they often probably act a little bit more like mentors than a figurehead. Because, you know, those figureheads are in some of these other cultures, right? They tend to dish out instructions or reprimands. They tend to be there to sort of keep everybody in line. In a collaborative culture, it is. It is more of just what that sounds like where what you're doing is to really try to collaborate together and that leaders are there to more mentor and to help. And so again, I think, you know, the pros of that is obviously you get happy people who enjoy working together. You get better communication and better energy, better risk taking, better mentorship, better growth because people feel like they're being heard and they're being supported. And that there is that real emphasis on let's come together and let's work together on this. Now the con of that is, and look, I think it's with all of these, it's like so many things we talk about on this show, it's about balance. Because if it's all collaboration and everybody has to be pleased and consulted all the time, Then productivity and creativity usually become compromised. Because in many cases, what you're going to see is that it's a culture that often has an inability to make tough decisions, to give tough coaching, to give strong leadership, because they're so concerned about other people's feelings and that that's such a high priority. Now, for me, in my experience, I'm not saying that those things aren't a priority, but at a certain point, leaders need to lead, right? You need to walk your talk. You need to give people a direction because if it's just all democracy all the time, People are gonna feel heard, which is really good. That is mandatory to make change. But if that's all that it is, and there isn't strong progress, there isn't clear direction, we aren't creating something. Then again, I think what you'll find is that people feel heard. They just don't feel like they're growing. They just, again, it feels too much like we just endlessly discuss things or people endlessly listen. And then again, no actual tangible results come out of this. Now often, sometimes cultures are really cut and dried, right? Like you'll see a clear market culture, hierarchy, creator, collaborative culture. But sometimes you can get blends and sometimes you can see a create and a collaborative culture or, you know, a market and a hierarchy culture. You can see a little bit of blending on these. I would say, look, just take the next week. Look at these different cues, look at the pros and cons, and just watch your team, watch your culture to figure out which one of these you're a part of. And definitely use this as a cheat sheet when you go try to hire someplace new. To be able to look at what are the sort of things there that you can clue in on. And again, be clear on which of these four cultures do you want to be a part of? Because you should know and would have probably had a fairly strong response as I was talking about this. To which one of these do you think you want to be a part of and that you would really succeed in? Okay, so that covers the four types of cognitive culture. Now let's get on to the emotional culture part of this, because look, cognitive culture is undeniably important. It's important to an organization's success, but it's only part of the story. Because emotional culture is more of the shared effective values, norms, artifacts, assumptions that govern the emotions that people have and they express at work. And I think more importantly, sometimes it, it governs and defines which emotions are you better off not expressing. And that sometimes that, especially again for creatives, can become maybe the more important thing. Because if you can't show up as yourself, that becomes really difficult. Now, as we talk about emotional culture, this is something that is rarely talked about. And I think it's something that you'll only see or experience if you are a part of really high maturity, high performing teams. And that in many ways, it's just because dealing with emotion, dealing with people Is much harder. That's why you'll see a lot of companies tend to be more of a market culture or a hierarchy culture, because what that allows you to do is to sort of divorce and give up the human part of this. It goes to, again, it's just hitting a goal. It's following a process. It, it's sort of stripping the humanity out of what those things are. And I think you'll start to see more strongly emotional cultures in a create and collaborative culture, just because those value people more. But, you know, really what it means is that these are cultures where you have to really pay attention to those consistent nonverbal cues. The gestures, the facial expressions, the body language, those things really express emotions rather than I think what most people key on, which are more of those big like emotional outbursts. When somebody gets mad or somebody, right? Like it's, those are often at a breaking point. And so again, these are cultures that tend to pay more attention to some of these smaller things. And look, it's not surprising that countless studies have shown there's a significant impact to how emotion affects teams, companies, and company performance. That you'll see that positive emotional cultures lead to better performance, better quality, better customer service, better bottom line revenue. And this is true across every role, across every industry, across every company, across every country. In the same way, you'll see that in negative emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, those things lead to negative outcomes, poor performance, high turnover, all of those sort of things that you don't want. But this is again sort of in the same way that so many companies struggle with the practical and the emotional parts of trust. Well, again, this sort of again will line up to the practical trust is driven out of market cultures. It's driven out of hierarchy cultures. And that emotional trust is more driven out of create cultures, collaborative cultures, and that again, needing to pay attention to your emotional culture. But that's harder. Not as much fun. Can't be dictated in just process. It's messier. And so again, this is why a lot of companies, a lot of leaders struggle with it. But there's, you know, here again for me, there's, depending on what you look at, six or seven different types of primary emotions. And there really is a culture that would probably line up to all of those. But if we're here again today, trying to keep this to around a 45-minute show, I just want to focus on three. Two of which are the dominant emotions and I think one which is a little bit more of a blend, but I think is really important to look at. So what I want to look at is a culture of happiness. I want to look at a culture of fear and I want to look at a culture of authenticity. Well, authenticity is not necessarily an emotion. It's a blend of emotions. I think that for this particular conversation, it's one that I do really want to hit on. So a culture of happiness, again, sounds just like what it is, right? Like these are cultures that focus on joy. They focus on belonging. And it's just what it sounds like where people love to come to work. And that culture of joy is really hard to find. And it's even rarer to find an authentic form. And we'll talk about that more in a second. But like obvious examples here would be Disney. Like that sort of place where it not only is it the happiest place on earth because of You know, what the experience is like, but that is driven out of a culture of people who are really celebrated, who love to be a part of that, who really love what they do. And so again, that is like a culture of happiness in probably its purest form. And obviously the pros of this is that it's a culture where you start with positive intent all the time and then work backwards. That is different because in a lot of cultures you have to earn trust. You have to earn what is going on. It is just not simply assume that you are smart and capable of your job. And again, I think that is often one of the secret sauces of so many successful teams. Is that they hire smart people and they trust them to do their job. As opposed to they hire smart people and then they have to prove that they are smart. Oftentimes you watch these companies that will hire experts and not listen to them. The hell sense does that make? But look, I think that a culture of happiness will really be aware of and prioritize emotional intelligence. That you realize trust is long to build and short to break. That how you act, how you show up every single day matters. And that these companies, I think, are often so much more aware of their customer experience and their company legacy, right? Again, think about Disney. This is something that is so aware of wanting whenever you are there to be a magical experience. And they are so aware of the company's legacy of what Walt's legacy was. Again, you can see a legacy like that in Apple and going back to Steve Jobs. You can see it in a lot of these. Again, what is the legacy we want to leave? So again, there's just, there's an awareness Do something bigger than the next quarter's numbers and are we making enough money to keep the stockholders happy? Now, I think that the con of this is, and I'd said this in the upfront, right? Whenever I'd said that this is good when you can find it in an authentic form. Now I've seen and have been a part of some of these cultures where it is faked or it is overdone where everybody is expected to be happy all the time and it is nothing more than an act. Where you're sort of called out and you know, if you don't show up and you're not really happy, then you're going to hear about it and somehow you aren't part of the company and why aren't you a part of what's going on? And so again, I think that's the difference between authentic happiness and whenever it's sort of being faked. Because to me, then this culture of happiness can become toxic because the problem is when it's being faked is that everybody knows their problems. They're not discussed. Everybody knows that there are problems and that people are not feeling secure or psychologically safe. Again, not being discussed. That it just feels like everything's being swept under the rug the whole time in favor of everybody just being happy. And so I think it really is that level of authenticity that really drives them the level of work you see out of this emotional culture that it can be average all the way to breakthrough. Because I think if it's just one that sweeps it under the rug and you fake the funk on that one, then it's going to be average. I think if it's really an authentic culture of joy, then these are the places where, you know, you have the honesty, the authenticity, you have that sincere emotion. That really, and again, this gets to one of the deepest parts of that emotional trust that is really driven into this culture, which is why in those cases, those teams and those companies are so successful. Now as we swing to look at the opposite of this, so as we come out of the culture of happiness, we go to the culture of fear. And this, unfortunately, in my experiences, in my three years of consulting, working at Envision and just talking with a lot of other people, I think a culture of fear is Far, far too dominant because I think a culture of fear is one where employees are really robbed of all their power and their independence in favor of compliance. And this is almost always driven by weak, insecure, or uneducated leadership. People who really want to, I think just maintain a dynamic where you honestly, the bottom line is where they just don't want you to get close enough to see they don't know what they're doing. And this is easily, easily the worst culture to work for because it's just, I mean, hopefully it'd be obvious just based on the name. But I, again, I think that the irony here is that this is a type of emotional culture where Where all the emotions are suppressed. Because you know if you express any actual emotion, if you try to question anything, That again, those things will be used against you. Now, this is where you often will most see a culture of fear will most often line up against a market culture or hierarchy culture. The same way a culture of happiness will most likely line up against a create culture and a collaborative culture. Because it's just, that's more of what you're looking for. Because if you are process and goal driven. In many cases, not all of them, but again, what you want people to do is to follow. You value that compliance. And that emotions and questioning and creativity are things that are not welcome because those will disrupt what's going on. Now I'd say for a lot of companies come to mind here, but I'll be honest, for honest reasons, I don't want to give those examples because like I said, if you're part of one, all I'm going to say here is just leave as soon as possible. Because they are toxic. They are demeaning. They'll rob you of your confidence and they will rarely if ever change without a real sea change in leadership, changing of the board, something big. But the reason why I think also like a culture of fear is so difficult is because this is one where leaders really consistently demonstrate for me the lowest level of leadership maturity. Because what they wanna do is that they wanna propagate that culture of fear and they do this so that nobody can see that these leaders don't know what they're doing. And they don't want anyone to get close enough to see or question those decisions. So what do they do? In those moments, they want to be really strict on just follow, just do what we say. Just, you have a job because we allow you to. Because that's the thing is if you do start to get too close to those, in many cases that's what gets threatened is your job security. And they do it to keep you in line. And that, again, for too many of us who don't negotiate our salaries and are just grateful to have a job, we're sort of like, oh, well, they're leaders, so they must know better. One of the things I learned a long time ago, don't care how many letters are in front of your title, don't care how long you've been in an industry, don't care how successful it may look, that does not mean you know what the hell it is you're doing. And again, I think that in many cases, this is what you'll see is that people have built these sort of propped up images, these propped up, and that oftentimes if you question them, what do they say? I've been through this before. I know better. You don't have the experience, right? Like what they do is to immediately put people down. Because that's the thing is instead of listening, instead of being vulnerable, instead of doing what that is, well, that's what you want to do. You want to control them. So instead of being open and vulnerable to saying, Hey, look, I could be better. You immediately want to keep people in line. Because again, there's, and that is driven by a real insecurity of like, do I know what I'm talking about? Now. You know, normally for the structure we've been going here, this is where I'd get to the pros and look, the only pros here, I would say the only possible pro here is that if you're a manager in this culture of fear, it allows you to be mediocre and to be celebrated for as long as you can keep everybody in line. Right? Like, that's really the only upside. So like, look, if you're a mediocre leader or things like that, this is probably where you want to hang out. Because again, I know I have seen a lot of people who have made very, very lucrative careers out of no discernible talent outside of, I guess, candidly following direction and kissing ass, right? Like, that's really all that it's made up of. But the cons of this are many and they are significant. But I think the top ones are, look, like, leadership will use any tactic they can to maintain control. And you are seen as a resource, not as a person. And you are disposable at any time. And so like I said, just there's so many, you know, downsides to this. So as a result, the level of work you see is usually basic at best. Because look, everybody's afraid. Nobody takes any risks. There's almost no teamwork. There's definitely no trust. And so I think, again, this can be seen in the work, which is often usually deeply siloed. And get struggled to get any sort of real adoption, any change to even simple best practices. Because again, what we're valuing here is more compliance and being in line rather than actually really caring about the results. Now the last one, like I said, is an emotional culture for me is the culture of authenticity. And for me, this is what every company needs to strive for. And again, as you look at the best collaborative and create cultures, they are combined with an emotional culture of authenticity. Because these are, this is a culture that really focuses on acceptance and achievement because it values people and wants them to be able to show up as themselves every day at work. And so that's my thing, right? Like in my experience, a culture of authenticity is easily the best culture to work for because again, showing up as your true self Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. And so for me, I really believe that this sort of culture of authenticity is the strongest, is the most powerful, that it eats all the other ones sort of for breakfast because it lets people really be themselves. And it is about balance where you can be authentic because we know when you're authentic, you can be more productive, more creative, more innovative. That again, it is about the balance of being authentic in the placement and in the surrounding of a team. Because here again, whenever this gets into more of just the pure create culture, right? Like a create culture is a little bit of authenticity gone a bit wrong, right? Because everybody's trying to be so authentic and so off the rail and so new, new, new. That then you lose the stability, you lose the, where the authenticity sort of runs over the team a little bit too much. And so, again, I think that that can sometimes be the con of that is that if it gets out of balance, that, you know, you can try to Fake a happy face. You can try to just, again, lose yourself a little bit because somebody else's, else's authenticity may sort of run over yours. But that's my thing is I think that really at the end of the day, it is about, you know, that a culture of authenticity for me, when you can show up as yourself, where you can feel heard, where you can do that. You know, I think much like a culture of happiness, it's a great culture and that it really will yield in many cases really great breakthrough work because it's sincere and balanced. And again, it still leaves space for there to be honesty and process and that it isn't just sort of show up and do whatever you want. But those are, like I said, those are the four different types of cognitive cultures, the three different types of emotional cultures. So, what if you're in one of the bad ones? What if you are sort of seeing the beginnings of one but it needs to get better? What do you do? How do you change it? So what I'm going to do is I want to talk about this for a minute because I think there's a few things to start to pay attention to. And I think the first one is, um, to look, to really start by harnessing and understanding how do people feel now? Because I think that what you're gonna find out is if you can just start by creating a space for people to have honest conversations around what the emotions are that they're experiencing. That's where you have to start. You have to start by people feeling heard, by feeling recognized, by just seeing that leadership understands the state of things. And again, not that they're faking the funk and it's just everybody be happy. Because again, you, happiness and those things, no leadership can come at the cost of authenticity. And then I think the other part of it is, is that the leaders, the people in charge, again, even if you, if you're on the team, what you need to do is you need to model the emotions that you want to cultivate. Right? Long line of research on emotion will show that people in groups catch feelings from one another. Because what they do is a thing called behavioral mimicry, which means that if somebody else is feeling more positive, if somebody else is feeling Like, things are going well. If somebody else is feeling like things are in a really good place, others around them will start to mimic that. Inversely, if things start going badly, if people start feeling negative, if people don't feel heard, then those emotions turn bad. And so the mimicry there is that everybody sort of goes over the edge and will start catastrophizing and sort of everybody's kind of a doom merchant talking about how bad things are. So again, think about it, about how are you modeling the emotion you want, because that can make a big difference. And sometimes, honestly, you may have to fake it till you feel it. Because there are some cases where, and look, I've said this before, hope is just more work. It's easier to be cynical. It's easy to be able to give in and say, gee, I don't know if this is going to go the right way. That again, I think that that ability to say, look, I believe, I hope, I know where this can go, even if you have to fake it a little bit, sometimes I think is really important. And I think it is also important in all of this to make sure that you are balancing the emotional piece of it with the operations, the process, and performance management. Right? Because it can't just be all emotion and do whatever you want and do those sort of things. This is a business. There has to be a balance. But one of the other things I've done with some of the teams that I've worked with and some of the things that I've talked to is also to try to find ways of measuring emotion. The simplest way that I know to do this is that, and some of the companies I worked with actually install these, maybe you've experienced it where you've walked out of a store, a restaurant, a grocery store, and there's sort of like a small plastic little, I mean, a kiosk makes it sound too big, but just sort of like a little I don't know what, just like a little box that's there that'll have three to five different faces on it. A smiley face, a neutral face, and a frowny face. And I'll say, how was your experience today? And you hit one of those as you walk out the door. You can use things like that. There are apps, there are other things like that to actually measure how are people feeling. Now again, if you're gonna do this, be clear about why you're doing it, be clear that it is anonymized, be clear about what you're going to do about it so it doesn't feel big brotherish and like, again, we're trying to find the people who aren't happy because that will just make everything worse. But I think that just like anything else, that ability to try to measure it, whether through sentiment or other things like that is really important. But I think the biggest thing around all of this Is how you implement your culture really probably matters more than anything. Because just like all other aspects of an organizational culture, emotional culture needs to be supported throughout your organization. It's the role of senior leaders and executives to drive that culture. And this is often my problem and my great frustration is I think that leaders are often really Extremely unaware of how much influence they have in creating the emotional culture. I think they often underestimate Things like that day-to-day modeling. They understand how, oh, it was just one comment or I did it once or the people know that that's not what I mean. Right? These are ways of sort of explaining away those things because I think what they often mistakenly do is that they think and they try to prioritize what they feel like are more large symbolic emotional gestures, which can be powerful. But they are only powerful if they are in line with your daily behavior. Because if not, they ring hollow and you get a lot of feedback around again about how you're not being authentic. And this is one of the biggest things as a leader. And this is again, for me, this is where vulnerability and authenticity are the new currency for leadership and what we are doing. And that again, you can't just try to fake or, you know, just live in these big symbolic emotional gestures when you get the whole team together and say something. And then day to day your behavior, it does something completely different. Because again, that will break trust. It breaks the emotional culture. It does a lot of this stuff that ultimately, again, people at the end of the day, people don't necessarily give a shit about the words you say. They care about how you say them. They care about if you walk your talk. They care about those sort of things because you can say the right things all the time, but if your behavior and your day-to-day modeling breaks those on a consistent basis, people don't believe you. They don't trust you. And then again, you will watch then that, that, that sort of emotional modeling ripple from that leader through the leadership team, then down into the team. Hopefully the team is strong enough that maybe it doesn't get that far. But again, these are really problems. And look, senior leaders set the first example. They established the rules, right? The middle managers and the frontline supervisors are then the ones who are making sure it's being consistently practiced. Because again, like these are the things that are some of the biggest influences on employees is their immediate boss. And that suggestion that again it so again it's not just all on senior executives, but again, you have to look at and understand what is going on there, but then it is also on the team to understand how do they show up for each other that they aren't off the hook. For being a part of this. Because here's the thing is an emotional culture is shaped by how all employees from the top executive to the intern show up every day. Right? Yes, it's up to the senior leaders to establish the emotions and to help organize, thrive, and model those emotions and reward people who do the same thing. Because if you don't, if this is something you don't want to pay attention to, if you just want to be processed and goal driven all the time, then you cannot be surprised when your culture turns negative. You cannot be surprised when it turns into something that you don't want or even worse if it is an emotional culture where the emotion is one of suppression. Where people either lose the reason to believe, they just give up on what is going there, right? Like this is the heart of that phrase when people say people don't quit a job, they quit a boss. This is why. This is what explains it. Is because again, the way you show up and the way you create a cognitive and emotional culture for your team will dictate your success. And that just going through the motions and saying the right things is not enough to get it done. So this was a long show. There's a lot of stuff to pack into this. Hopefully it was helpful. Hopefully, like I said, these are things that you can start to look at your team, your culture, your leaders, your coworkers, and yourself. To try to figure out how do you show up and to be able to start some of these conversations. Because again, this is about emotion. There are not right answers here. But what I think that can be the most powerful here is when there's understanding here. Whenever people show up and they're allowed to have the spaces to talk about these things, to work, to contribute, to feel heard, and then to see action that results out of it. That's where again a cognitive and emotional culture and that ability to lean into that and again to see and overlay how trust overlays on top of this. This is the DNA. This is what makes up great teams in business, in sports, in any way a team, a group of people come together to form a team. These are the things that matter. So. Hopefully all that was helpful. Like I said, make sure you go, go to thecrazyone.com, get the notes. Again, I've got all this written down there so you can use that as your cheat sheet. Do me a favor as always. Go to your favorite podcast platform. Leave a review. It helps other people know what you think about the show. It helps the message get out to more people. Uh, as always, everybody down in legal wants me to remind you that the views here are just my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers. These are just my own opinion. And finally, I say it every time because I mean it every time, but thank you for your time. Especially on days like today where the show ran a little bit long. But look, I know that time is truly the only real luxury any of us have. I'm always incredibly humbled if you want to spend any of it with me. So, go out. Get emotional. Get vulnerable. Talk to people. Actually understand that emotions and these things matter, especially when it comes to creativity, which is so dependent and driven by emotion, right? It really is something that at the end of the day, when you get control of your emotions, it will truly let you always Stay crazy.