Simon Curran, the Chief Development and Culture Officer at Rokt, is a passionate and experienced leader dedicated to unlocking human potential. With over 25 years of global experience in marketing, innovation, and leadership development, Simon has a diverse background that includes co-founding a creative consultancy, Bastion Shine, and working as an executive coach for high-performance groups like the All Blacks Performance Labs.
In this conversation, Simon shares research, models, and deep insights to explain how to create high-performing teams in any environment, from elite sports to hyper-growth businesses.
Answered on this Episode
- How can leaders make a culture of belonging effective by balancing acceptance and standards?
- What is the critical, non-negotiable order for the Three C's (Connection, Clarity, and Courage) to achieve sustainable high performance?
- Why is focusing on velocity (pace times direction) more effective for hyper-growth companies than focusing on simple speed?
- What is the difference between an executive who is "in charge" and a leader?
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Advice From Simon
1. Lead from the Heart by Connecting First High-performing teams are comfortable in their own skin.The simplest way to do this is to connect before you correct.
- Actionable Tip: At Rokt, the first five minutes of any meeting are spent on connection to take people out of their heads.
2. Scaffold Performance with the Three C's: Connection, Clarity, Courage. Sustainable high performance is built on a specific model in this order.
- Start with Connection: This is the why. You must first provide people with the dignity of knowing where the company is going and the purpose or role they play.
- The Clarity Trap: If you give a team Clarity (the 'what') first, they treat it as an instruction, do it, and immediately come back asking, "What happens next?"
- The Courage Trap: Asking people to be Courageous before giving them Clarity creates a problem of "motivated idiots running around doing brave things" without direction.
3. Use the Formula: Performance = Potential - Distractions. To help employees increase their capacity, leaders must focus on reducing "drag." The formula for human performance is:
- Actionable Tip (One-on-Ones): In every check-in, use four questions to uncover hidden burdens: "How are you now? How are you really? How are we? What's one thing I can do to help you in your role?". This often uncovers the "drag" the person is carrying. Increase frequency of one on ones.
Connect with Simon Curran
Transcript
Aaron (00:00:00 - 00:01:52):
How do we create a new world of work? One where companies succeed because of their leadership, not despite it. I'm Aaron Levy, the founder of Raise The Bar and over the last decade, I've been immersing myself in this question in this podcast, raising the bar on leadership. We talk to people, leaders, founders and culture experts about how they've created a people first culture in the workplace: the challenges, the hurdles, the wins and the failures.
Join me in this movement towards creating a new world of work. We want to see. Today we're joined by Simon Curran, the Chief Development and Culture Officer at Rokt. Rokt is an e-commerce technology that helps brands monetize the post-purchase moment with relevant AI powered offers and experiences. While that sounds very high tech, which it is in our conversation, Simon, I dove into his journey to this moment. It involved trauma, sports teams, coaching, identity, and a passion for change.
And so while we talk about this all in the context of the business and the workplace, we also talk about this at a human level. And there are some really key insights and research and models that Simon shares to think about not only yourself as a contributor, reaching your potential, but how to lead high performance teams, whether it's a sports team or a business team. There are a lot of good things here to listen to, and I think you're really going to enjoy it. Take a listen.
So, Simon, I am pumped to have one of our conversations actually recorded. We've had a few in the past and, you know, just hard journeys have crossed and your ideas on habit formation and human development and team performance is something that's always fascinated me. So you've had quite the career and quite the journey, and now you're kind of like leading up the team at Rokt. How did you get here?
Simon (00:01:52 - 00:04:09):
Aaron the short version of it is trauma, actually. And I don't mean it was a traumatic journey, but it was trauma that led me. Yeah, I started my career working in a brewery. I then started working in advertising in the UK. I came back to New Zealand, got into opening businesses, and had a range of different interests.
And three daughters and ten years ago, my then four year old daughter fell off the back of a boat and had a cardiac arrest in the water. And in that moment, everything changed. A series of unexplainable miracles transpired, and there was an emergency train nurse on the beach who swam 45m into 45 minutes of CPR. And our daughter, someone on the beach, had a defibrillator.
My daughter was in and out of life support for a period of six days, six weeks in hospital, discharged with a defibrillator under her ribs and at the time we were told you are very lucky. And we said, no, thank you. And the nurse said, no, no, your daughter had less than a 5% chance of making it. She's made it for a reason. Now you have to work out what that reason is and what that did for me and my wife and I. I realized the first X number of years in my professional career at speed, chasing my ego, not following my purpose.
And so that took me into someone who said, you need to get yourself a coach because you're in a bad place. I got myself a coach, I loved coaching, I fell in love with team coaching. Team coaching started with large organizations, but large organizations took me to surgical teams. I played with orchestras that took me to elite sports teams. I set up a business in New Zealand called All Blacks Performance Labs with our national rugby team, the All Blacks coaching.
High performance became fixated on what separates the best from the rest. And what's the difference between a team of champions versus a championship team? After ten years and studying, I stopped coaching a particular executive who introduced me to a guy called Bruce Buchanan, who's the founder of raft, which then relocated my family and I from New Zealand to be now here in New York on his executive team. As we track from moving from freed up to some other form of ownership structure. So that's a journey. That's the vision.
Aaron (00:04:10 - 00:04:20):
Take me back to that. Living your life on purpose, discovering what you're here for. What was that process like and and and and what came of it.
Simon (00:04:20 - 00:06:17):
Yeah. I subsequently became a big believer in identity. And I think what's interesting about the legacy of identity and playing with purpose is the noble words that usually we write down on pads when we do an off site, and usually what happens on an off site as we write notes, we never write again, but we go some stage that's that's going to be important.
And what trauma does is it forces all of those things into perspective very quickly. And so my wife and I have sort of dedicated our lives now to help people going through change without requiring trauma to do so, because most people say, one day I will, but there's no need to until there's an essential need to. And so that's our thing. Now, we do that in a coaching capacity or an in-house capacity.
And, we get, we're blessed because we get to work with all sorts of different high performers and we study extreme environments. So from seals to Seal team six, soup to seal, elite athletes, Olympians, greatest of all time athletes and coaches, and founders and funders. And we're not so much interested in what makes them unique, but we're interested in what makes them, what do they have in common.
And so through our journey, our kind of our life motto now is the figure eight. And the idea is study, work, coach, play with the world's top performers, but then try to decode that. And to Sesame Street's simple playbooks to help those that need it the most. But ironically, those who get at the lowest decile communities, those that can't afford to do offsides and don't get exposed to these sorts of things. So that's our purpose. Now is the figure, right. And being in New York and being in an organized, fast getting technology business is in many ways the ultimate petri dish for exactly that journey. So that's part AG.
Aaron (00:06:17 - 00:07:00):
Yeah. I'm so interested in how you drive so many directions. I want to take that. I'm really interested in how you translate helping people go through change . We know 70% of all change efforts fail at an organization level. And, you know, probably even greater at individual level. Most change efforts focus on process and structure.
And I like the traditional way companies approach it such as putting playbooks and toolkits and resources in play and even education and training and communication campaigns. But with all that, still change tends to fail more often than going out. So I'm curious what you found in your journey really works to make change stick.
Simon (00:07:00 - 00:08:11):
Well, like I love your use of language. And because not only do most changes start and fail because it's processes and systems based, but actually most interactions fall short because I concentrate on processes and systems. You know, we forget that we're there at work or we're at home or away with friends or with family or clients and colleagues, with people.
And because we're people, we beat in the same way. We often hear comments in high performing environments that people play out of their skin when they're comfortable with the skin that they and this idea of belonging was genuine. It's kind of in some circles, fallen out of popularity, but what hasn't changed is the highest performing teams we can find in any environment, from elite sports, soldiers, founders. Yet yet it is this, this understanding that to belong means to be accepted for who you are and expected to bring your best. But we have to have both of those things. If you have one without the other, it doesn't work. If you, if you are accepted for who you are with no standards, well, that's like a country club.
Simon (00:08:11 - 00:09:26):
That's a collegiately underperforming group of people. But it's really nice. But if you're expected to be your best without being seen for who you are, we're going to burn each other out. So the power is in the sand. It's a little bit like all the conversation at the moment, not I. This is human intelligence. It's not either. It's both. And when you create a culture or an environment or a, you're a leader that has the ability to traverse from head to heart, backward and forward, that's when the greatest thing happens. I mean, we can name that in our own experiences.
But I would often say most people walk into a meeting room and they hear it, and they do the entire meeting in their head, and then they go to the next meeting room and they repeat, repeat room. And yet 30cm away is our heart. So one of the gifts we learned from an elite sports team is this idea that we should first connect before we correct. So at Rokt. The first five minutes of any meeting is spent. Connecting just takes people out of their heads into their hearts. Because from there incredible things will happen. Now we're fast and we've got high standards and all of those things, but just to understand where someone's at can change the trajectory of that discussion.
Aaron (00:09:26 - 00:10:00): How do you translate that idea of accepting people for who they are and where they're at, and expect them to do their best? How do you translate that to rolling out a new go to market strategy with the sales team or. Right, like restructuring the organization because of AI and getting the team to understand what that is and actually start to implement it and take action. It's like, how do you translate that from conceptual to team actions, behaviors, skills changing in real life and in real time, you know?
Simon (00:10:00 - 00:12:47):
So I'll share with you a mental model. Then I'll talk about it. But but but this is not to say that we get it right all the time because we really don't. We're trying very hard to. And the little mental model we coach our leaders here often is we draw a triangle and cut it into three layers.
And these three layers are what we think scaffolds high performance not in certain circumstances but sustainable. And the 3 to 3 levels are firstly connection, then clarity and then courage. Three C's connection, clarity and courage. What's interesting, Aaron, about those three things is we think you need those three ingredients, but you need them in that specific order: connection, clarity and courage.
Because what can happen and we've all seen it, people, a new leader or someone in charge is told there's a problem. But this team or this room, they walk and they said, well, what's the matter? And they said, oh, they're just they're after more clarity. And the person who's in charge is, oh, you want clarity. I'll give them clarity. Here's what we've got to do.
But the problem is, if you give people clarity before connection, people take that as an instruction, which means they'll toddle off and do it. And I'll come back and say, we've done it. What happens next? And the person in charge is, that is, you are more clear. Again, knowing what they're craving is a connection that it's everyone's dignity to know dignity. Not not not nice. David's everyone's dignity knows where we're going as a company. And the role that I play to help us get there. That's why we'll always do connection first.
Similarly, many organizations, many rooms think that the key ingredient is to be courageous. But if you're asking people to be courageous before we give them clarity, you've got motivated idiots running around doing brave things because they think that's the currency of the building. No, what's the currency? As once they connect that, then give them clarity. Once you've got clarity, then help them. Then on how to be courageous.
So while the drive is to do things quickly, one of the things that we've done here is we're trying to change our language from speed to velocity, and it's a nuance. But for us it's an important nuance. And we found this as we were transitioning and accelerating our journey into AI first, that at first it was all about speed. But as you know, you could go fast one way and I could go fast the other way. And we're not going anywhere. Velocity is pace times direction. And that's predicated on knowing where we're going and then taking up our cadence to be able to get there.
So we're spending a lot of time at the moment not only circling through what do we want people to do, but why do we want them to do it? That's the connection layer.
Aaron (00:12:47 - 00:13:10):
How do you get that to sink in? Do you have, you know, ways or stories in which you've done that, whether it's with AI first or something else, like how do you get these concepts to sink in? You know, not just with the layer below you, but the layer below them so they can be enacting it. Like, what are some examples that you've seen work or maybe others that you've seen not work to like, hey, we thought this would work, and it totally didn't because I think we can learn from either one.
Simon (00:13:11 - 00:17:30):
I'll give you a recent example. I did an event a little while ago with Sean Marks from Brooklyn Nets, and he played for San Antonio Spurs. He played under Popovich, the great coach. I sit and give me a story about pop. AC the thing about Popovich is you could see him on the sideline. The one not many people knew is just how he understood his players. He'd know the players names, the kids names, the kid's dancing recitals and the big shows so that before game day, rather than leading out the strategy, he might say, hey, what's going on? The family. And it's speaking to that.
So trends like that, I'll go to the market team for the last two, two and a half years. They meet every Tuesday morning. I think it's 845 to 945 with a cup of tea and the old coffee. The only topic they're discussing is connection. They'll do an icebreaker, they'll do something, and gradually the conversation may evolve into something to do with work. But the idea being, if we can't carve out a portion of time each week to connect a group first as a team before we go out and serve as a team, well, then there's a problem, and we learn from another one.
We learned from a very high performing Olympic gold, many winning sides. This is a team that does one on one on a daily, if not a weekly basis. One on one. Now we hear one on one in the context of an organization. They're like, oh no, you know the prepare. We're doing them that frequently and asking questions. How are you now? How are you really? How are we? And what's one thing I can do to help you in your role?
Now? The gift of that one on one is sometimes you don't get past question two. But here's the thing you didn't need to get past question two, because someone in that team that day was carrying more load than we might never have realized.
A final example. One of the most common questions that we'll ask when we do a session here with our leaders or our teams is we'll say, I'm going to go three, two, one, go and show by way of fingers, how close to your full potential are you playing today? And I don't mean Monday. I mean now ish. The most common answer anywhere around the world is somewhere between a 6 or 7.
Now, how we story tell that back is that Mark actually isn't out of ten, although that was the question. But ten is just how good Aaron thinks he could be, and most of us have yet to find that out until the crisis is so big or the opportunity so large. So for most people, that's 6 or 7 is out of 12. For some it's out of 15, for many it's out of 20.
But when you frame a room with that, a wow. Despite how many years of experience, despite how good our run rate is, could it be true we're only accessing half of what we're capable of now? If we keep doing it the way we've done it to try and get more potential? That's a recipe for madness. So we have to change something. What if we change connection first, and then we scaffold it up to clarity and then get to the final ingredients of confidence?
And we're in a cycle doing this with teams now in this X number of weeks to calendar year and X number of weeks to financial year end, well, what would need to be different for it to be different? What separates the best from the rest when performing under pressure? What's the difference between a team of champions versus a championship tape?
Here's the simple way we ask a question. We go three, two, one go as an individual. Where are we? Answer about six okay, second question. As a team, how close to our full potential we are playing now when the on aggregate mark for the team is higher than the on aggregate mark for the individuals, that suggests we're a championship team because I walk into this room as a six.
But yo, when we sit together we play like a seven. But most teams up at most teams and most organizations that I've the privilege to encounter with are more teams of champions. Because I walk in as a six, but when we sit together, we're only like a five. It's like we leak a point and then we try and diagnose where and we'll go back to exactly the same model. Was it connection, clarity or courage?
Aaron (00:17:30 - 00:18:13):
Yeah. Because we often see that an executive team specifically there's just they're human beings like anybody else, but they're human beings with additional ego. Maybe I'd say it in a polite way, because what got me here makes me good. And so my five is a great five, like I'm a champ. And so I don't come with that mindset.
So how do you break through that ego? And I know my mentality when trying to go from, especially when you're growing a fast organization. Right. Breaking down the silos at a certain stage. Silos. Great. But at another stage, when you get big enough, you have to break down the silos and get teams to work together. And have that high performance executive team.
Simon (00:18:13 - 00:21:17):
My guest, Aaron, is the only thing that's bigger than the ego is the armor, because in fact, most of those executives don't think they're amazing. Most of those executives are stuck with louder imposter syndrome than the ruins underneath them, but the armor around them. That's the thing that fortifies, because the last thing we can do is pretend we don't know what we're doing.
So the role of what we call an unreasonable friend and the unreasonable friend to the executive is do it with care, but be unreasonable. Call them on their staff and unfortunate and now organization. That's the role I get to play with our leaders is to be an unreasonable friend. But actually that's not a title. That's a mindset that can be given to anyone on a particular chain.
Most of these executives, it's the loneliest team to be in, in the company, because the presumption is that you have all the answers up there. But meanwhile, of course, that's not the case. It's even less the case in the world that we're in. And so we use this metaphor, this, this, this, this way to codify three different types of teams.
And you see all of these teams, but when you name it, it gives people the opportunity to go, gosh, I hadn't thought of it. Three teams: soloists, symphony orchestras and jazz bands. So consider this. And in any organization you're thinking that soloists are a group of individual artists, really good at what they individually do, or they're vertical and that's all they really care about. There she sits there playing the drums and he's got the guitar, and occasionally they look like stars. Are they really good at that anyway? And they keep doing their vertical.
Symphony orchestra has evolved from that. And what we know is that the symphony Orchestra takes these amazing artists and creates a majestic sound, but only when someone stands in front of them, warns and conducts, and they can only conduct when in front of them. They scored music. But here's the problem. Most of our score music is now out of date, and that version of leadership or being in charge is holding on to an identity of my role is to have all the answers, when actually it's probably to ask more questions.
If the highest evolution that we can find of taming is like a jazz band, because in a jazz band there are two courageous acts. The person that plays the first couple of notes and gets going, and the second person that hears and thinks, oh, that's good, I'm going to come in on that. And at first it's a little clumsy, but then the jamming and we've all been in rooms when it's jamming, but equally we've been in rooms with a meeting. Doesn't start till she or he walks in with the metaphor of the one and starts conducting, and we just wait for it.
Well, that's a symphony orchestra. And what usually happens with symphony orchestras is they actually splinter into soloists so that no amount of artificial intelligence fuels that. That's a human connection before. It's an artificially stimulated accelerant. So in many ways we're sort of going back to the ancients and that stuff.
Aaron (00:21:17 - 00:22:54):
Yeah. And I think I resonate a lot with that. Most of the things we deal with on a daily basis while there's technology here that's advanced, a lot of things at the core of it, it's human beings trying to figure out how to live their lives and how to figure out how to live with each other and a collection of people. Right. Like. And that goes back quite a bit right there. There's a lot that we can unpack there.
And I guess you talked about this idea of identity and in sports, I've, in my past life, I was a I did a lot of sports specific training for professional athletes and just saw how you go through your life and you built up and like I said, you're you're playing that sport is your identity because you've been doing it since you were five, six, seven. Right now you're in your 30s or 40s or 20s and you're stopping that. And what does that mean translated to the workplace, right?
You have these people, these executives or these senior leaders or these individual managers who are their identity, it is built up into who they are and what they produce. And you talk about breaking through it with getting them from soloists to, to a jazz ensemble playing together. I get always caught up in that requires them to do something different.
Not just not just have and not just be like, that's a great idea, but that requires them to do something different tomorrow, and then the next day and then the next day. And the truth is, if they're not going to, they're not going to go from being two out of ten as an entire ensemble team to a ten out of 10 or 10 out of 20. Right. In two weeks, it's going to take time. So what have you found that has worked to get people to start to move and take those different actions on a daily basis?
Simon (00:22:54 - 00:26:33):
Yeah. Great question. And that's why that's unfortunately or ironically the gift of trauma or setback. Because when things are going well enough, there's not usually enough to want to change it. We just tolerate and many people are going to finish their career having tolerated a whole lot of stuff. But any moment there's an inflection moment caused by ourselves, our family, the market that provides an opportunity for reappraisal.
And so the greatest athletes or executives, one of the things that they do really, really well, relative to the rest is they don't define their identity on what they do. It's who they are. And that's something that lives with you. Because if my identity is the CFO of a car with a CEO, they'll come a time when I'm not there. And then you see identity wobbles.
But here's the thing that we're sort of keeping a careful eye on, you know, we hear a lot of organizations or a lot of commentary around AI is not a technological change as much as it is a cultural change. So we've been really fixated on what was the last big cultural change at mass to impact Covid, like? Covid changed a whole lot of things.
But one of the things that we've found most fascinating, and we're keeping the most careful eye on the prevailing story during Covid was, Will we get through this? The prevailing story now is capable now. It's a very different design, therefore, because what we all had in common and Covid was a common enemy. But now in many organizations, whether it's explicit or not, I'm pitted against you. Because if numbers are going to change, how do I know what your number is? Not my number.
So this is a really rare moment. And the organizations and the teams and the leaders that create an environment safe enough for people to feel like they can quite honestly say, I'm only a five out of ten, 12, 15 at the moment, but I want to do better. I'm going to declare that, and I need you to hold me to account as much as I need you to help me with ideas and resources.
And so that's when, you know, in moments like this, I think that you're in a winning team when it's being thought of but not discussed. I wear and I hear not in a heart. Well, then it's an arms race and we'll see who wins that one.
And so the way that we've referred to this particular moment in time, one particularly on AI, is we've decided it's not going to be treated like a management mandate. It's going to be more of a movement by the people for people, breakout classes, training and yada yada to help people feel safe through this work.
And so we talk a lot about a formula and the very simple formula for this is a human formula, an AI formula which equals your potential less what distracts you. And at the moment we're really concentrating on that distraction bucket. Too often performance reviews and the likes concentrate on the first two words. Your performance is close to your potential.
We don't spend enough time talking about what is actually the drag on our cognitive load, or our thoughts cycles, or our velocity. What are these distractions? I came out of a meeting today. Well, we call it the four D's. What are you going to dump, defer, delegate and do that? Let's just clear some runway now to be able to think again.
Aaron (00:26:33 - 00:27:24):
Yeah. We talk about our things we have leaders do, which is, like a weekly check in. And one of the big elements of it is like delegate delay or say, no, like, what are you going to do? Because you can't do it all. And, you know, some of it you don't need to be doing now, some of it you never need to be doing.
I love that. And yeah, yeah, I'm glad we didn't bucket that into the performance review, because we could probably spend a whole another hour talking about how, how that is. It's always fun talking to organizations. And teams say goals are meant to help you reach towards something bigger, not meant to assess. Are you doing a good enough job or not? And if we expect people to hit all their goals, then we're setting potential at a way too low level, right? Like goals are like potential drivers, not performance metrics exclusively.
Simon (00:27:24 - 00:28:26):
Well, and and for another time. But we've moved our performance review process from about six months to now about six weeks in the organization. Get a status or a status update. Don't have the tracking every six weeks. And doing that. We've moved from eight layers to now, four across from a graduate to the chief executive. That's per span of control out from five to some of them, 25, which means we no longer do one on ones.
By design, they're one to fuse or you bookend specific time. So as we've done that compression, what we've had to do is really coach in the importance of human connection because it can't come at the cost of some of the velocity that we're chasing. Hence the fascination of this, this moment of time that we're at right. Right. We're giving everyone the ability to have an AI coach in your pocket, but not at the cost of a discussion, just as an accelerant or a primer for that human connection discussion that happens at the same time.
Aaron (00:28:26 - 00:28:38):
So I guess, how do you get that? How do you create the space for that discussion? If I'm now responsible for 20 other people, for that connection, for that safety.
Simon (00:28:38 - 00:30:38):
And so here's one of the things we think is really interesting. We had a chap who is a former commander of Seal team six and he came in and we bought him with the high performance coach from Cirque Du Soliel. We designed this amazing leadership session with him. Boss. He made an observation with a group of about 40 leaders and he said, can you put your hand up if you're a leader and everyone puts their hand up, this is great, hands down.
Can you put your hands up? If you're in charge? And you watched the room go, well, I think we just did this. He said, no, we really didn't. In charge is hierarchy. That's a title. But leadership's not based on how many people follow you. And if you call yourself a leader and you turn around and no one's following you, I got a surprise for you. You know, and we all know people that had titles with no followers, and we know people that had no title, but you'd follow them wherever you get them to go.
So what the one on one used to be predicated on is that it was a delineate, a hierarchical reporting structure. So I go to my boss and she gives me feedback and we go back. And what we're increasingly talking about is more the idea of player coaches. So that there is a team, all of which are capable, capable of giving me feedback on how I'm performing on a more regular basis. Sometimes my functional expert is not my direct hierarchical reporting line.
And so we're encouraged to build within our AI suites the ability for people very quickly to give what we call even better feedback, so that even if I give an Aaron a compliment, like I can do a peer review, I have to build in there. And Ebi Aaron, you know that last session. But you know what? It'd be even better if Nick started to do it, rather than that being a formal thing that used to flow. We're trying to make it far more organic, like a coach does with an athlete on an hourly basis, or an athlete does with another athlete on a minute by minute basis.
Many people have these pictures on walls of athletes and high performing teams, and then they go to work and they completely forget it, and they fall into a hierarchical process that's now well dated and that's how we're trying to break those silos or those cogs in the wheels and how the information should flow.
Aaron (00:30:56 - 00:31:04):
What are some of the unanticipated consequences or pleasant surprises of that, of that model, that shift?
Simon (00:31:04 - 00:32:47):
It's, and this is we're learning this real, real time, I think what it does is, the notion of culture by design, you've got to be very clear on what is who is who's the tailor and who's the recipient of the outfit. If it's by design, bespoke, and when you know what culture you want, you have to be very, very transparent in communicating it.
Because the culture here is not for everyone. It's not by a long way, and it takes a certain amount of confidence or courage to come out and say this. So if you're after predictability, reliability, you're not into it. Ambiguity A reasonable level of balance Rokt’s the wrong place, just categorically if you want to stretch time in the deep, in the yada yada, then it's a great place to come and play.
But simply knowing that and so in sport, which is the benefit of the environment I get to come out of, you can be dropped from sports for being really good, but not brilliant because the other person is. So people move in and out of sports teams very fluidly. In organizations. It can feel like it's a role for life, or until you have an Oxi.
So I think we're in this really interesting phase now of working out what actually is the culture that organizations and teams want, and to what extent are we prepared to communicate the consequences of that? So we're trying to work that out as we go, but we know it's not right for everyone.
Aaron (00:32:47 - 00:33:16):
Yeah. And I think there's a beauty of defining who you are. Right. That's not right or wrong. This is who we are. And if this and when people have that clarity, they can say, I don't want to be a part of this. And also you can identify this isn't a fit. And I think some of the most courageous things that we can do is acknowledge either ourselves or for somebody else that it's not fit. And we often try to say, oh, well, we just got to see if we can like, you know, the more we try to make something a fit that's not a fit, it's a pain for everybody.
Simon (00:33:16 - 00:33:59):
Exactly right that we've seen some of our greatest success stories have been in people that have been without saying very, but 2 or 3 layers. They've been 2 or 3 layers underneath someone. And when you take those layers away, they're like a beanstalk. There's a process we would have had no idea of because the prevailing logic is, oh no, well, they do it early in their career and it gives them a chance of doing this. And once they've done that, like a rite of passage, when you strip rites of passage away and say, this is an environment for people of any degree of background to come and give it the best shot, let's see what's possible. Blown our lights out. Genuinely.
Aaron (00:33:59 - 00:34:45):
It's a fascinating human experiment that we're in. And it's so fun that you've kind of brought it into kind of full circle from your own personal journey to, to the sports, which is like, I feel like just like a hyper focused way of seeing how human beings connect to each other. Right. And it, it, it already has the built in like kind of goals and objectives.
And so it makes that part easier. And then now translating it into, into a hyper growth workplace, which is, which is fascinating. So, this has just been a really wonderful, fascinating conversation. I think that the quote that is sitting in my mind, and will from you today is it's really like most people live life, life by chance. And it sounds like you're here to help people live life by choice itself. Thank you so much. This is a blast.
Simon (00:34:45 - 00:34:49):
Thank you Aaron, great to see you again my friend.
Aaron (00:34:49 - 00:35:08):
Raising the bar on leadership is produced by Raise The Bar for. We help organizations level up by empowering their managers with the tools, skills and training to be better leaders of people. You can get in touch with us at Raisebar.co. Thank you for listening and go put your learning into practice.
