The Leader Factor

Explore the significance of alignment in teams and organizations, the high cost of misalignment, and the 5 Alignment Questions framework to drive shared understanding and commitment. Learn how dialogue fosters alignment, the importance of continuous intervention, and the risks of assuming alignment without verification.

The podcast discusses the importance of accountability and critical thinking in leadership. It explains that accountability involves taking ownership and being proactive, while critical thinking involves evaluating information objectively. The podcast emphasizes the interrelationship between accountability and critical thinking. It also explains how leaders must model these skills before expecting them from others. The importance of transferring accountability and ownership in leadership roles is highlighted, along with the significance of problem-solving and participation for leaders and their teams.

Learn how to develop emotional intelligence through practice and experience. EQ is a learnable skill that can be improved over time. Willingness, self-awareness, motivation, and behavior change are key factors. Improving EQ requires continuous self-monitoring, gathering feedback, and making incremental improvements. The podcast explores the importance of influential interactions and self-discovery in enhancing emotional intelligence.

The podcast explores the causal relationship between emotional intelligence and psychological safety, emphasizing the importance of assessing emotional intelligence. They define EQ as the ability to interact effectively with others, and discuss how psychological safety rewards vulnerability. The podcast also highlights the impact of EQ on team dynamics and behavior, and explains how individual habits of emotional intelligence shape team culture. The hosts conclude by discussing the upcoming launch of a self-assessment tool.

Tim and Junior discuss the importance of emotional intelligence for maintaining competitive advantage. They explore the essence of business strategy and the role of emotional intelligence in the experience economy. They emphasize the significance of memorable experiences and the need for emotional intelligence in organizations. Emotional intelligence is essential for creating and sustaining competitive advantage.

This podcast explores the practical and actionable aspects of emotional intelligence. It covers core concepts of self-awareness and self-management, as well as social awareness and relationship management. The six competency model of EQindex™ is discussed, along with the efficient EQindex™ assessment tool. Exciting news about the upcoming release of the EQindex™ is shared.

Learn how to implement psychological safety within organizations by creating the right conditions for feedback and support, identifying cultural liabilities, and changing norms. Understand the concept of what you tolerate, you normalize and the importance of holding people accountable. Explore the process of unlearning and the challenges it brings. Discover how to create psychological safety through rewarding vulnerability and building trust.

In this week's episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior dive into what it means to create cultural accountability in an organization. Our definition of culture is the way we interact. At an individual level, cultural accountability is being accountable for the way you behave and interact with others. High performing organizations have high cultural accountability. As always, we move from theory into practice, and Tim and Junior share tons of practical and actionable examples to help increase cultural accountability in yourself and in your organization.Why cultural accountability? (01:38) Accountability is one of the most important concepts and components of an organization, and we often talk about accountability as it relates to performance accountability. But there's another side of the coin. Because there's a direct tie between culture and innovation, having cultural accountability will be a competitive advantage for your organization. Running two organizations at the same time (10:21) In order to have a high performing organization with good longevity, we need to have high cultural accountability. Why? Because two contradicting things are happening at the same time in every organization: execution and innovation. In a way, we're leading two different organizations at the same time, the current organization and the organization of the future. Tim and Junior share how to navigate that dynamic. Creativity and innovation (18:41) Creativity is an input for innovation. Our hosts pose the question: Does your environment nurture doing something differently than what we would expect? You don't press into creativity and force it through a strainer. It needs to breathe.Create cultural accountability by establishing clarity (25:14) What are the expectations as it relates to your culture? If you have non-existent or very confusing expectations, you won't be able to hold people accountable. Create cultural accountability by modeling and rewarding proper behavior (32:22) How are you supposed to hold someone accountable for something you don't do? If you don't see a behavior embodied, personified, modeled, it's an abstraction. Leaders need to be the example, own up to their mistakes, and encourage others to behave similarly. Create cultural accountability through consistency (39:16) Establishing predictability is essential to creating cultural accountability. People who are only held accountable are not held accountable at all. Important Links:The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety Behavioral Guide

Tim and Junior discuss measuring organization's culture and explain the different ways it can be measured. They explore the challenges of measuring culture and the importance of defining it accurately. The podcast also delves into the measurement of team culture, the role of psychological safety, and the significance of quantitative and qualitative data in measuring culture.

In this episode, Tim and Junior discuss how high-performing teams are formed and maintained. The quality of an organization is a reflection of the quality of its teams, and high-performing teams have patterns. Although there are many patterns, Tim and Junior will focus on a core four in this episode, including how high-performing teams (1) connect, how they (2) improve their skills, how they (3) view transparency and autonomy and how they (4) continuously seek innovation.The benefits of improving your teams' performance (01:43) Remember, individuals rarely accomplish extraordinary feats alone. The quality of an organization is a reflection of the quality of its teams. As you improve your teams, you’ll get two things: Leverage and scale. You'll be able to multiply the force, scope, and magnitude of your organizational efforts.How do high-performing teams connect? (13:55) High performing teams know each other. If your team doesn’t know each other, it’s not a high performing team, or at least it won’t be for very long, or when things get hard. Tim and Junior share the story of Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and why a 3-day offsite was one of the most important things he has done as a CEO.How do high-performing teams improve their skills? (26:33) High performing teams are constantly growing. When teams acknowledge that the knowledge they have today is not enough, they open themselves up to development. How do high-performing teams view transparency and autonomy? (38:10) High performing teams are focused on achievement based on transparent, meaningful metrics. Tim and Junior talk about Google's Project Aristotle and how they discovered that psychological safety is the #1 indicator of high-performance. How do high-performing teams chase innovation? (50:44) High performing teams believe in continuous improvement. They're proud but never satisfied. At the end of the day, challenger safety not just as challenging the organization, but challenging ourselves to do better and be better.