Building Business Resilience Through Commitment to the Team

Keith Ferrazzi: Hi, I'm Keith Ferrazzi, the host of Shifting Ground by TriNet. TriNet is a full-service HR solutions company committed to empowering small and medium-sized businesses by supporting their growth and enabling their people. You can catch our new episodes of Shifting Grounds on the third Tuesday of every month on Apple, Spotify and RISE.TriNet.com.

Well, today we have a very special treat. And I know I say that we always have a special treat, but this time, we absolutely have a special treat. David Champion is the CEO and the founder of Maya Health, a platform that's powering and transforming the mental health ecosystem and landscape. And if we have learned anything over the last two years of the pandemic, we have certainly awakened to the power and the importance of mental health and mental wellbeing in all of our lives, but particularly in the workplace.

Now, by way of background, David, as I was digging some things up, you were brought up in Papua New Guinea, Portugal, Scotland. I don’t mean need to be flip, but is there a kilt story there somewhere?

David Champion: Funny you should ask. I'm getting married this summer. And one of the exciting moments in preparation for that is flying to Scotland to have my kilt suit fitted. And the theme of our wedding is the “Dance of the Emerald Panthers.” So, I'll be in full emerald and dancing like a panther, a Scottish panther at that, in the forests of Austria, which is where my fiancé is from.

Keith: I can only envision it right now. Now, David, by the way, I also knew that you came from very humble beginnings and you've achieved so much in your life to be leading such an extraordinarily, both important company, but also a thriving and growing company. So, congratulations to you on that.

What, from our learning objectives, for those of us who are listening in here today, we have two objectives for this podcast. The first one is to really start introducing this team to your journey around the tools that you use and some of the characteristics that you've created and seen as highly effective team characteristics. So, we're going to be focusing a lot around team competencies and how you build those.

We're also going to be diving into a number of myths that I think a lot of people have about teams that, frankly, need to be rebooted. The first question, David, I would ask of you is, what awoke you to the need to dive into your team differently than you might have otherwise? Was there a pivotal moment? What was it that sought you into a journey to really reboot and re-amp that team?

David: If I'm brief, can I offer to give two parts to that answer?.

Keith: Yeah, absolutely. This is your time to educate us. So, please.

David: The context here is that I was never that drawn to team sports. Growing up in Scotland, life is all about sports as a teenager. And sure, I played rugby and cricket and that kind of thing, but it's not where I excelled or what I enjoyed. I found myself more likely to play tennis or snooker, or even playing piano, oil painting. I was much more drawn to these solo activities, which I think was an important juxtaposition as I started to build companies as an entrepreneur and come to terms with the fact that I couldn't be successful just relying on my own tools. I needed to trust people around me. I needed to empower them. And I would say that I was not that good at that at the beginning of my career. First part of my 20s, that was something that might have even been a bit of a blind spot to me.

And when I was in my late 20s, I started embracing some of the courses that Landmark offers. And some of your audience members might be familiar with Landmark. I know that they have a pretty split set of opinions in the public.

Keith: Well, I think a lot of that goes back to its early derivation from Werner Erhard's "est," etc. But I also just weigh in. I found that my very first Landmark session that weekend was one of the most transformative times of my life, too. So, I'll give you a high five on that. But continue.

David: Happy to hear that. Yeah. Same for me. And you might know the team management leadership program, TMLP, that they offer. I have to say, I didn't even go through the program, but just from hearing about it, something clicked for me. A light bulb went off and essentially, it was, you can't do everything that you want to do in the world on your own. And this concept that you've got to, as you call it, Keith, "team out." You've got to create these teams and that doesn't mean just work teams, but also a team around preparing for the wedding, a team around getting a new house ready to move into. Whatever the team is, whether it's made of friends or consultants or contractors or other. There was something that clicked and I realized, I'm completely limiting my own potential by thinking I need to do it all and being so arrogant as to assume I even can.

So, that was a big shift. And the part two, much briefer answer, is, was meeting you. And I don't mean to just blow smoke, but we met a couple of years ago. I've read your book immediately. It was the first time I started to understand the concepts that you've brought to the world, like co-elevation and what it can truly mean, no matter the hierarchy in an organization, to be there as an equilateral team that is there for mutual support. And seeing the benefits of that philosophy in the last year or so has been probably the most notable transformation in how I run a business.

Keith: Well, David, thank you. And you have been a beautiful inspiration to me, as I hope our listeners will become equally as inspired by you and your beautiful soul as a leader. We're going to go through what I've tried to pick apart, maybe three or four different areas of shifting people's mindsets around team. But I thought the best place to start might be exactly the space that you serve in your business, which is that of mental wellbeing.

I've often found that many individuals have an old mindset, that an individual's mental well-being, their stress, their challenges, their struggles, their vulnerability, that these things are not to be spoken about in public. Right? The team, you don't share that with those you work with. I'm sorry, that's your personal life. That's not professional and that we don't... you do those kind of things discreetly.

Maybe you can talk a little bit about your mindset of the contract of a team around lifting each other up and mental wellbeing, and maybe even tell some stories, if you feel comfortable enough to do so, that are real to your experience.

David: Happy to and of course, want to be sensitive to the individuals in my team. But I think it's fair to say that working in the mental health space naturally creates a drive, a gravitational pull for organizations to employ people who have their own mental health—like, direct stories of either being in their healing process for mental health trauma or at least having close family members and so forth, who they've supported through that.

So, I've noticed an indexing of individuals, both in my team and in others, that are self-proclaimed experiencers of various challenges, be it anxiety, depression, some form of trauma or other. And there's something beautiful about that, because we really are all in it for the collective healing that we've begun to experience.

Keith: Well, David, one thing, first of all, having coached hundreds of teams, what I think I can tell you is that the experience that you have in your organization is not different from many others. Mental health challenges and struggles exist all over all organizations. The fact that you've created such a... you've laid such a beautiful table for people to be more vulnerable and open, that might be true, but it exists rather universally. But go on, please, yeah. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how you encourage that to be shared and in what way do you lay the table in your team?

David: Well, to be frank, I lay the table by developing friendships with everyone or as many people as possible who I work with, and I think that's a controversial topic. I know that common wisdom in business is for CEOs and execs to maintain an arm’s length relationship with their teams and that makes it easier to make rational decisions when they have to be made, and I found that really, really hard. And I don't know if it's a symptom of my character, or just start-up, or the industry we're in, but I think that genuinely caring about each of the individuals at the point when I'm meeting them, getting to know them, understanding if there's a fit for us to work together.

And usually, it's as early as that that I find they open up in a very vulnerable way about whatever their life journey has been and is. And then it's hard to put that bird back in the box, if you will. There's then an open channel of sharing and I would say I'm equally vulnerable. I am a fairly open book when it comes to my own sort of decision-making matrix in life, my philosophy and sense of ethics, and all of the characteristics of that. And I think because I'm more open and transparent than the typical CEO, that also probably creates space for others to be the same way.

Keith: But I want to also make sure I understand, that's a one-to-one basis. Well, what I've seen you done is create a collective comfort with sharing, a collective comfort with vulnerability, a collective comfort with that among the team together. So, I wanted to make sure that the listeners understand this isn't just you developing the friendship, you developing the flow, but I've seen you develop it as actually a contract among your team. Maybe you can speak a bit to that leap from individual to a collective team sharing at that level.

David: Where that starts is with integrity. And the integrity needs to be omnipresent throughout what I'm exuding, whether it's in the workplace or my personal life. That goes in a couple of directions, both with what I say, I do, unless I shift that, re-contract that promise beforehand. But more importantly, when people speak to me, they know that I'm not then going to turn around and gossip or turn it against them or use it in some way for personal gain or extraction.

And I think because I've taken that to extremes, even to extremes that might put the business in a less advantageous position, because I'm not playing some of the dirty games that are common in business, I think the team also trusts that whatever they share is being shared into a safe place. And I think that's the contract you're probably speaking to, is a sense of safety amongst all team members.

And I'm not saying that I'm perfect at that or anyone in our team would say that we have 100% sort of sparkles in our teeth when it comes to the way that we operate as a team. I think that we're all still on our learning journey. But fundamentally, the ethics of integrity are there and everyone can feel it.

Keith: Well, let me shift the grounds. With having laid that degree of psychological safety with your team, what I believe then arises from that is a degree of risk-taking. Risk-taking of willingness to be courageous, to be candid, to speak courageously in the room, even when it's risky to do so, right? And even to give feedback in a room, not just from you as a leader, but the team willing to give each other feedback in a room.

Now, that, again, is very, that's antithetical to the idea that the old myth, which is listen, you praise publicly, you criticize privately, that the idea of challenging peers in the past might have been thought of as throwing people under the bus. But what you do is you allow that challenge to be, again, a part of the contract in the room. Maybe you can speak a bit about that, and some of the times when that has been particularly valuable or you've seen it really be advantageous to your business.

David: I'm happy to hear you're reflecting that. It's not something I would have self-professed to be great at, but I am definitely practicing that ethos in the workplace and personally. And again, your coaching and your team's coaching has been instrumental to that, and we're definitely on the learning journey.

If we were to look at a specific example, I think of the time when a set of, I think it was seven of our managers came together and were invited to not dive straight into the agenda items or the outcomes desired from the meeting, but instead take a moment to each share what was really, really troubling in life. And it was incredible how quickly people became comfortable and saw that they were safe to share something that you would almost never expect to hear in a business meeting.

And this was each individual's sharing, whether it was about their marriage or their kid or whatever other aspect of their life might have felt challenging. And what I noticed after that was that for the rest of the meeting, when somebody didn't agree with what was being discussed or if they felt like they needed to change the perspective of the conversation, rather than what might have happened generally, which is reserving that for a one-on-one conversation afterwards, like you said, they were comfortable coming out with it.

Keith: Well, from a research perspective, it makes sense that when you have empathy and care and connectedness, then you also care enough to be truthful and you care enough to not let another individual fail. You care enough to share transparently what you believe that individual needs to hear to be more successful. And that, in the past, if you don't have the care, it could be considered criticism. It could be considered nitpicking. It could be considered punitive.

But if it comes with that intimacy, that empathy, then it's delivered in a mechanism that it's about lifting each other up. And you mentioned the word co-elevation, which is truly lifting each other up. Now, one of the things, David, that we've noted about high-performing teams is they don't work in silos. Right? Where the team really finishes together.

And even this idea of many executive teams where the team at the top, which would be your team, your executive team, is team one. Like, when somebody says, "How's your team?" It's not "how's the marketing team doing," but this is the team. That sense of collectivism, collaboration, etc. How do you make that pivot from siloed to a sense of collectivism, a sense of collaboration, which I'm sure that all organizations struggle with? How have you seen success in making that pivot?

David: I have to say, the different opinions, different perspectives on how a task can be accomplished, are always going... They continue to come up. We do not have a team that all thinks and feels the same way. But we do have a team that all believes in the power of psychedelic medicine, the importance of best practices for psychedelics to reach the world and the best path to creating best practices being to observe the data.

And those three things are what we are doing. And it's really interesting that regardless of different perspectives on what might need to be done on a day-by-day basis, we can always pull it back to that North Star. And that's probably only possible because it's part of our process, as we bring people into the team and as the team continues to morph, that everyone is bought in to that mission and that alignment.

Keith: When I think about what I'm hearing you say around a group of individuals committing to that shared North Star, right? But I'm also hearing that we're all coming at this from different vantage points and a more inclusive, diverse set or points of view. Now, I'm sure your chief operating officer or your chief financial officer have a very different way of looking at the world than your chief evangelist does, right? And what I'm interested in is, how to hold that space where people recognize each other's differences and value them and want to tap into each other's points of view?

I think a traditional way of working in team is that people do their work and bring it to the team in the form of a report out, etc. And infrequently are people bringing problems to the team in hopes that the team and its eclectic or diverse backgrounds would help them crack a code on something, right?

It's more a fault mechanism of, if I show weakness in that team and the team needs to come to my aid, that's a downfall. As opposed to, on my way to coming up with a better answer, I want to bring it into the team and exercise the valuable input from this extraordinary set of souls here in the room.

And that's a big shift. And that's what I was intrigued, as an executive, how do you extract that kind of diverse thinking and shift from that siloed mindset to a real mindset of co-creation, collaboration, co-elevation, that shift?

David: Well, is it okay if I talk about the CPS?

Keith: Yeah, please. You have to tell them what it means.

David: Yes. Collaborative problem solving. Is that right?

Keith: There you go.

David: There you go. I think the first time you professed that model to the world was in "Leading Without Authority." Is that right?

Keith: Yes.

David: Yeah. So, that model completely shifted the approach that I think I was taking to bringing about some kind of answer through a group session, to put it in general terms, which is often called a brainstorming meeting or a think tank or what have you. And when I learned about that, we put it to the test for a specific topic. God knows what that was. Was at least a year and a half ago now. But we just thought, okay, there was a critical issue in the company. There was something that we needed to address and it was in everyone's interest to address that, not just siloed to a single department.

And I decided to test this model. After doing a bit of a dry run with one of my execs, we brought all of the managers, which was about seven or nine people into the room and posed the topic. And rather than having everyone just popcorn style their immediate gut responses or intuitive input to that problem, there was this very, very powerful step in the process, which was breaking out into groups.

And I think at the time, we did probably three groups of three and each group was tasked with answering two very, very specific sub-questions that might contribute to that bigger challenge. And on a shared Google slide, because everyone was remote and digital at the time, they pulled up the first question. Each of them in those groups of three was giving their answers. And then you can imagine how the rest of that process went, until we get back into the room and we are back as a group of nine. And a representative from each of the three groups reads out the highlights, not everything, but just the highlights of the most important concepts that were brought up in those three breakouts.

And sure enough, there were, I would say, over 50% of the ideas brought up, not only were they things that I hadn't thought of, but everyone agreed those were the kind of 10% ideas that don't get thought of in a simple brainstorming session, probably because they require people to get to the bottom of the barrel, to explore what is down there in the depths of their mind that might be of relevance, but also to do that, again, in a safe place. And a lot of people aren't comfortable talking in groups of nine, but they will speak up if they're in a group of three and that was a phenomenal approach.

Keith: Yeah, so let's just sort of double-click on that for the listeners. The average group of 12 individuals leave a meeting and only four people feel that they've been heard. Of 12 individuals in a meeting, only four people feel that they've been heard. Simply utilizing, whether you're in a hybrid work, using the breakout room function in your video meeting room or even if you're in a physical room, turning and speaking to the next two people next to you, even small reboots of three to five minutes, seven minutes at a time, can redefine the conversation, because the psychological safety in the small room is transformative and ideas flow. Introverts show up.

And so, it's such a powerful idea to utilize and leverage these simple actions of pausing and double-clicking and using time to extract true wisdom from the team. And what we're seeing in our research is very few teams, very few teams are scratching the surface of the innovation that exists in the team itself.

Now, David, early on, you were talking a bit about some of the vulnerability in relationships. I'd like to do a quick exercise that will teach our listeners a simple tool, but it's one you've done a number of times—a personal/professional check-in. But I'll augment it a little bit and just ask you a simple question and I'll answer it myself. But I ask everybody listening to think about it and take this simple question back to your own team.

So many organizations feel that they have degraded the sense of connectedness among their team during hybrid work. But that's because they haven't really been purposefully building connectedness. You know, the olden days, we used to build connectedness in a walk down a hallway. But now we need to be more purposeful.

So, David, I'll go ahead and start. What's building your energy up and what's bringing your energy down? For me, it's pretty easy. What's building it up is a new love of my life. I think those who've been listening might have heard that I fell in love during the pandemic. Thank God for swipe right. And what's bringing my energy down, to be honest, is, while we fell in love during the pandemic, we were not, I was not traveling.

Now, as the world is opening up, my traveling schedule has been very different and it's bringing a strain to the relationship because that's not what this relationship was built on. It was built on being there all the time. But the idea of jetting off to one coaching assignment or another has been really strenuous, and scary for me, that I might be sacrificing some power in the relationship. So, that's what's bringing down my energy, you know? How about you, David?

David: Personally, what's bringing me up is a very easy one. We have an 18-month-old, Savannah, who's an absolute ray of light, and just, every day, no matter what is going on in the world and with my professional life, the moment I see her, I feel like everything is right. And of course, getting married to Lana this summer, and feeling the tingle in my toes, the excitement for that, and feeling like it's really near, after a beautiful five-year-plus journey together, I'm so filled up in my personal family life.

What's bringing me down is that this has been a bit of a cloudy winter for Denver. We're supposed to have 300 days of sunshine and I don't think this winter's statistics have shown that trajectory to be on course, so I'm very excited to have a little bit of sun this weekend as I fly to Baja and celebrate a friend's birthday.

Keith: Oh. Well, good for you. Good for you. And mazel tov, of course, on the wedding. It's going to be such a glorious time and I can see you prancing around in the emerald green kilt. You'll have to take pictures and send them to us. So, just as a way of summary, what we heard from David today is a real focus on how important mental wellbeing is, but really laying a table for mental wellbeing as a shared commitment among your team. True resilience is built through a team's commitment to each other.

And David laying the groundwork as a leader for that, with his own empathy, with his own integrity, is a beautiful starting point. But then leveraging off of that relational strength, and that vulnerability, to build the kind of relationships that you can be candid, you can be courageous, you can give each other feedback, you can speak up in the room, becomes now what his high performance is built on.

So, it's that beautiful underpinning of the relationship and the vulnerability, which has allowed David to be the kind of a leader in this fast growth environment that he's in, in an incredibly important space of mental wellbeing.

David Champion, CEO of Maya Health, I just want to say thank you so much for your time today and thank you for being an inspirational leader to us all.

David: Appreciate it, Keith. Thank you for having me on.

Keith: So, just for our listeners, our podcast, Shifting Grounds by TriNet, it's committed to helping small businesses and their leaders with timely and relevant business content. Shifting Grounds drops the third Tuesday of every month and we hope you'll continue catching our new episodes on Apple, Spotify and RISE.TriNet.com. See you on the next episode.