The 5 Pillars of High-Performance Teams in 2027

0:00Your job as a leader by definition is to create a high performing team. The thing is we talk a lot about that, but we don't always know how to get there. We have a special podcast episode for you today. It is the recording of a masterclass. I've done very recently called the five pillars of high performing teams in 2027. So it's very timely. It has a lot of information in here. And it's going to tell you what you need to do to get your team to its highest level. Here we go. Welcome to Leadership Mindset 2.0. Practical neuroscience and psychology to transform you from a tactical doer into a strategic leader. Here is your host, former social entrepreneur of the year and coach to some of the world's top executives are Michael Anderson. Welcome to the five pillars of a high performing teams in 2027. Now we have a really interesting masterclass here.

1:02And if you were either watching it live or you're catching it on the podcast, either one of those is okay. And the reason this is really important is by definition of being a leader, you need to have a high performing team. And we all know that, but there's so many different things that often aren't talked about or you're not given the road map to. So really that is what we are going to go through today. And we're going to talk about what I call the five pillars so that they're really easy to spot for you. And you can get an analysis of really where you're at right now. You're going to be able to evaluate the one pillar that's holding you back. What I've learned about doing this for over a decade with leaders of all shapes and sizes. It's normally not the one that they're working on presently for a couple of different reasons. We'll allude to that as we go through that. And of course, what are we going to do about it? The important thing. Starting off with a question for you.

2:05If you had your whole team in a room right now, would you think to yourself, ah, here's an amazing team. I feel like their leader. I'm so proud of every one of them. They totally respect me. They love working here and we're crushing all of our goals and targets. Could you honestly say yes to all of that? That is a lot to ask. But that is a big question. But that's a really important question because this is where you need to get to have a high performing team. And you may think that's asking a lot and that might not be. This is where your target needs to be. Because this is what I actually hear. And these are quotes for somebody who joined my last team performance accelerator last year. And so these are actually what leaders have said when they haven't said yes to that last question. Look at some of this. It's easier to do it myself than hold them accountable.

3:07How many times do we say that to ourselves? This is a good question. Am I expecting too much? Or do I have the wrong people? Is it me or is it them? Sometimes I make excuses for my team on why they did not perform. This is what I actually hear from real life leaders from around the world. There is a big difference between high performing teams and not high performing teams. And I just put this up there because maybe you spot some of what's going on for you. A lot of these things are symptoms. Like for example, strong trust and cohesion. You don't tell people to trust people more. That is the result of doing certain things over and over, creating the environment for that, which is what the five pillars drive. So what you see here is a difference between low performing teams and high performing teams, low performing teams, cost and firefighting, blaming and excusing, reactive and defensive. As opposed to high performing teams, proactive problem solvers, strong trust and cohesion, self directed and strategic, et cetera.

4:12So that's what we're going to talk about is getting you there. Because if you don't have these results and of course, mistargets, misgoles, your team isn't getting done with it's supposed to do. The lack of trust with each other, within the team, stress for everybody involved. And this is the really important thing. It creates what I call a shame spiral. Because you as a leader are probably here because you are good at doing. And because you are good at doing, you created an identity of that. You probably have it years of doing that. Whether it is your own company or you're running a team in an organization, you are a really good do or you're great at getting things done. But when your team is struggling, you can't outwork that. If you work harder, you're doing their jobs for them and you secretly know that, but that's not sustainable. Then you start to think, Hey, this is hard and you start to doubt yourself. The more you doubt yourself, the more it affects your leadership, the worse your team does, the more you feel disconnected from your team, the worse the culture gets, the worse the accountability gets.

5:16And then the worse you feel about yourself, that's what I call the shame spiral. We need to break that before it gets worse. I have a lot of things about 2027 because things are changing really rapidly. And I want to point out some things here is overall what's changing in 2027. Then we're going to talk about some other specifics as we go through this. You're being asked to do more without more people to do it. In the last year, only 181,000 net jobs were added in the US, which is a fraction of what what it was the past couple of years in UK payroll employment has been falling for two years. But how put us up and productivity is up. Everybody's always going to say that AI is something to do with this. When they dig into this, it's not about AI. AI is helping us out, but it's causing more inefficiencies in a lot of areas than it is efficiencies because it's in an infancy. But what you as a leader are probably being asked to do is do more with less.

6:20I hear that over and over. I'm short staff. They're cutting my budget, but I'm expected to do this. I'm expected to do that. This is the crunch that a lot of leaders are facing right now. And what's really interesting is manager engagement is dropping. So this is a Gallup poll. It went from 31% in 2022 to 30% to 27% to 22%. That has to do with different things, including AI, which we're going to dig more into as we go through here. So as a leader in 2027, things are getting more difficult and people are trying to do different things. Here's what doesn't work. We talk about what does work. I'm going to talk about what doesn't work. So first of all, asking for more headcount does not fix a team with no culture and no clear expectations.

7:20It just gives you one more person to manage or scales dysfunction. I have so many stories of leaders who hired somebody. They put all their hope into this person and the person didn't work out or the person didn't have the change that they were looking for. Last year, I had a food manufacturer owner hired a general manager to fix his management team. Ten months later, he had to let them go. Sales were down and they were back to square one minus a salary. I had another business owner in Africa. Talk to me and twice he's tried to hire somebody to run his organization. Didn't work. I have a lot of leaders who just praying that they're that one headcount that they're going to hire. There's one magical person that's going to come fix their dysfunction, fix their culture, take everything off their plate. So they can be totally strategic and it never works. If you're waiting for that magical fairy tale quit waiting because it's holding everything back.

8:25Implementing AI is very similar to this. I want to send you an email. I got yesterday the day before this is copying paste that I'm not going to tell you who it was because you're going to see why this is literally what this person said. I took a six week course on cloud, but I did not get me to the guaranteed 15 hours a week back. I still struggle to get my AI cloned to behave like me. I still struggle to find time to work on my team as I'm still in the doers zone to help keep projects on task. I know you got a lot going on. AI is not this magic fairy tale thing either. In fact, if you're like me, it actually creates more work. I'm getting a lot more done with AI, but it's creating more work. And sometimes I get really stressed out because I've all these things I have to do with AI. And I see that with everybody. I see that with teams. So we got to be careful with this. You can't buy your way to a better culture. Risks, perks, compliments being liked.

9:29These are what insecure leaders do to try to buy your way to a better culture. And it works for about two weeks. You can basically bribe people. They'll be really happy for a short period of time, maybe two weeks. But the problem is if you keep buying your way into this, people are going to expect that it keeps coming. So if you keep giving people raises when they're not happy, when they're working a lot or promotion, the next time they're tired, they're burnt out, they're going to expect the razor, the promotion. And other people are going to see that it's happening and then they're going to expect it. You're going to create way more long term problems. I got a ton of quick fixes that don't work off sites. Oh, let's just do an off site and it'll fix everything. You can have an amazing off site. And then you can come back to work of the next week and then everything reverts right back to normal. You can put these AI tools. We're going to put in a new dashboard or what have you is going to magically, we're going to do a culture AI thing and is going to magically fix our culture.

10:29Doesn't work. And you can do consultants the next book or week long trainings. And this is a guy who does week long trainings as a consultant writes the book. But these are not quick fixes. Look, consultants, there are, consultants can be helpful, but it's not going to magically fix everything overnight. You can read my book a thousand times, but it's about implementing and integrating what's in there. And week long trainings when people go away for a week, learn a whole bunch of stuff about leadership. They don't implement it. So these are not fixes, even though you want them to be because hope is not a strategy. If you haven't intentionally built your culture and team, they're probably working against you. And when I say intentionally, like this is the strategy that I want and have been working towards that for a while. And the same thing with your team, if you don't know how to hire right, if you're not hiring the right person, then you are digging yourself into a hole.

11:30And you can't do your way out of it either. Because as a doer, you are probably really good that when things get tough, that you suck it up and you work more hours and you outwork the problem. But the problem is that you disempower your team. They know they can go to you and when something's difficult, you wonder why they're not accountable because you pick up all the pieces. So every instinct that got you here now works against you. Now let's go onto the pillars. Oh, actually, the one thing I want to do is I wanted to tell you my story. Now, most of you know me. So we're not going to go into my long story here. But I just wanted to tell you the relevant part. So I found in my first software company at 35 on a smart guy. I work really hard back then I was a programmer. I really knew the ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics, Nav, NVIDIA, I had been doing it for 12 years. So I knew the technology.

12:30There was a gap in the market place. We had a lot of success right off the bat. And next thing I have this decent size company. Everybody in the company was older than me except the office manager. Here I am a 353637 year old former programmer that's running a multi million dollar business. It grew so quickly within two, three years. I was on the front page of the newspaper. I had no idea what I was doing. I understood the product. I understood the technology. I understood how to manage projects, manage customers. I didn't understand how to manage or lead. I understood a little bit of how to manage. I didn't have any clue how to lead. I didn't have great leaders. I had a couple of K ones, but I didn't have a lot of great leaders to model after. And that really caused a lot of problems for the organization, the organization, went up and down, stopped scaling for a while, went up again, went back down again. I hired a lot of people who I knew and trusted were really good. But then they started leaving. And I thought really close with them. And they're like, Mike, the culture here is not very good.

13:31I knew what a culture was, but I had no idea how to change a culture. Zero. I thought leadership was getting a bunch of two dudes in, handing them out to people. And if they didn't get them done as fast or as well as I thought, I would get angry and frustrated. That's why we had a crap culture. That's why we had problems. And I knew I had the fixes. So I got coaches. I took courses. I surrounded myself by great leaders. I took a master's in psychology. I learned about myself. I learned about what it makes other people tick things started to fall into place. I found it to other companies. A one time I had three software companies, two in California, one in Singapore. I was running two of them and the one company won the number one best place to work. We were on the fastest 100 companies in San Diego. We were on the ink 5000 list of fastest growing companies. Leadership mindset 2.0 has sold over 100,000 copies, one three book of the year awards.

14:32Companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Uber, bring me into work with their top leaders. And just to help them create high performing teams. I've been through all this. And what I teach is the exact steps that I needed to learn to make my team high performing. What I've been doing over the last 12, 15 years is making it really bite-sized so that I get to teach it to other people. Okay. That's enough about me. So let's talk about let's have you score yourself. We're going to go through each pillar for each pillar. We're going to talk about what it really means. Because there's going to be words you heard about before. Then rate yourself. If you listen to the podcast, just create the number in your head. And then we'll talk about strategies on how to change it. At the end, you're going to get a total out of 100. Number one, culture. I like to call this the personality or soil of your team. Because a lot of people talk about culture. A lot of people don't really understand what that is. A lot of people don't really know that you can change it.

15:32A lot of people don't know how to change it. But this is how this is the technical definitions. The invisible setup behaviors, beliefs and norms that shape how your team shows up every day. I like to say, look, if somebody was to hang out with your team for a day and read your team's mind, what would they say? How would they describe it? All right. Let's look at what your culture says. So here are the four questions. I'm going to read each question. And I want you to rate yourself from one to five, five being the highest. But I'm going to talk about what a five is because I want you to get clear about what's possible or what excellence looks like. So number one, team members consistently take ownership rather than blame others or external circumstances. A five for this would be that nobody ever says that's not my job or blame the economy, the government, etc. And they fight to have the most impact. I remember from my company, once we did a lot of work on this and there would be

16:34a problem client, people would fight to handle the problem client, even though they'd have to deal with a frustrated project manager on their end. There'd be late hours, etc. Because they had so much pride. Two, there is a high level of psychological safety. People feel comfortable speaking up. Excellence for this is do people disagree with you as the boss? Do they tell you it's not working? Have you created a environment that people can come to you and tell them exactly what's on their mind? If they're not doing that, you don't have this because people always have good ideas that they need to share with you. Three, we have healthy conflict without drama, personal attacks or avoidance. People often take different size of an issue and they hash it out. In and afterwards, they're good with each other and they're good at the decision. They don't take it personally. They understand that these decisions need to be made. And if that doesn't happen fairly often, you haven't created a culture for this.

17:38So if that doesn't happen, you can't give yourself a five or four. Number four, team members support and challenge each other to grow and improve. Excellence looks, there is zero jealousy and people look to actively empower, celebrate and support others. If people don't truly have each other's back and aren't truly trying to raise up everybody else, you cannot give yourself a four or five in this. Sorry, I'm being tough on you because sometimes I'll get somebody's survey back and we'll go through it and they've way over emphasize themselves. Now in 2027, the culture is more important to the younger generation and with AI proliferation. There's a Randstad's work monitor report. It's a survey of around 26,000 workers over 35 countries and has two straight years of data on this. 74% report a strong relationship with their manager has being a key anchor of stability. And 85% say they perform better when they feel a sense of community at work.

18:44So that's why this is so important. You have to be intentional about your culture by defining it. But in your culture is a combination of what needs to be done, your personality, your existing team makeup. And then you need to clearly communicate your expectations and hold people accountable to it. You have to be impeccable in modeling it. I'll give you my Ryan story. I was doing a strategic session for an organization and they sent over their core values. When we started this strategic session, I said, Hey, before we get started, let's review the values, the vision. But I don't understand this one was one values called tight. What do you mean by tight? And Ryan, the CEO of the president said, Oh, tight means like, Oh, I'm always prepared. I'm early to things. I really run. It's like a tight ship. I'm like, Ryan, who's the founder and president? I'm like, are you tight? He's like, yeah, I'm tight. I'm like, interesting because you totally forgot about one call with us in the last couple of weeks. And you were 20 minutes late to the other one.

19:44So Ryan, are you tight? And he got a little embarrassed because I know what actually I'm not tight. I just want everybody else to be. So that's what I mean by you have to be impeccable in modeling it. You people are going to do what you do, not say it's like having kids. They're going to do what you do, not say this is where people get a lot of things wrong. You're so much more under a microscope than you could ever imagine. So you have to get so clear about what your values are and team values are and show up like that. And that isn't easy. And I'll tell you, it's not easy to create a true to the high performing team. That's why there's not that many of them, but it's worth it once you get there. And the cool thing about culture is once you have it itself maintaining, it has momentum. It takes some elbow grease to get there. Pillar to the purpose and vision. What I call the guiding principles, this could be values as well. This could be a lot of a couple of different things. This is the compass of your team. This is the why your team exists.

20:46The vision is where you're going together and the purpose, the purpose is why your team exists. The vision is where you're going together. They give direction and meaning. So rate yourself. Pillar number two, purpose and vision. Question one, there is a clear vision and purpose that everyone knows and buys into. And number four, number five means I could pull anybody on your team or the organization and they could tell you the purpose and vision and be excited about it. Number two, our teams, values are clear and guide decision making. Do you actively talk about values when making decision and use these as a map? You hire or don't hire based on these values. Number three, we visit, revisit and refine our vision regularly to stay aligned and relevant. So excellence in this looks like you've talked about the vision out loud, not just posted it in the last 30 days and had a conversation about it.

21:51Number four, team members can articulate how their work contributes to the bigger picture. So that means if I went into anybody in your organization, they can explain how their work connects to the bigger goals in their own words. They didn't memorize what you told them it meant. Okay, pillar number two, vision and strategy in 2027, the best talent is making this a key criterion from that massive study from last year, 48% of people wouldn't accept a job off or the company didn't share their social and environmental values. And that's up roughly 26% relative to the year before. 3% 29% have already quit a job because they disagreed with what their leadership stood for. 43% of consider leaving over their employees stance on political issues. And for the first time in the survey's 22 year history, work life balance, ranked above pay as a top motivator. Purpose and vision are important and it's easy to have when it's hard to live them.

22:57Because they translate big goals into a simple, inspiring vision. Everybody can see themselves in and is kept alive by connecting daily tasks to long term purpose. A little pet peeve I have, if your vision or purpose has the phrase shareholder value in it, I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. That's sick. Nobody gets out of bed wanting to increase the value for the shareholders. They want to know why this matters to them, why they should have fun, why companies doing something that they are proud in. I learned three, the team makeup, the puzzle pieces, the composition of your team, skills, personality, strengths and how they fit together. Everybody, you get the right people in. The things are a lot easier, but often we don't have the right puzzle pieces in. So pillar number three, again, Rachel, I have one to five, five is the highest, one is the lowest. Question one, I have complete confidence that I have the right people on this team to succeed.

24:03So the question for you is if you want to rate this excellent, would you hire each person on your team with no hesitation? Boom, I want her back. Boom, I want him back. Boom, I want them back. Number two, our team genuinely likes each other and pulls for one another. So do people cover for each other often without being asked? Number three, we understand each other's personality styles and communicate accordingly. So excellence in this is your team hums along with unspoken rules that make it easy to perform at a very high level. If you've ever been in a high performing team, I know what Jane likes or doesn't like. So I do that when she does the same for me. Number four, everyone is a great cultural personality and values fit. A number five means there are no prima donnas, there are no talented people who you just deal with because they have skill, but they're a bit of a pain in the butt. Okay, team makeup and strategy. So this to get there, you have to hire and promote

25:08for values and fit, not just to CV or qualifications. Use personality assessments and strengths tools. Put the right people in the right seats and exit the wrong fits. The people that don't fit because dear leader, I have a message for you. Your job is to create a team of A players. And when you have people, when you have some A players and some not A players, when you have some Cs or Ds or B minuses, here's what that tells the A players. We don't value you that much. You have to make up for the slackers on the team. Do you know who high performers like to hang out with? There are other high performers, not a team where they're carrying the load. They have to take on the extra responsibility and they see you allowing subpar work. You are not doing your job if you are allowing people there that aren't doing what they are supposed to be doing.

26:09And chances are, if you're watching this, you're an A player or you were an A player at some point and you know exactly what I'm talking about. Miller for team engagement. This is the fuel. How engaged your team is engagement is and look, engagement is similar to culture, not the exact same thing. And it has to do with your team makeup, attitude, your purpose and vision, all this stuff go together, but they all hold it up. Engagement is the level of ownership and energy people bring. Accountability plus empowerment equal motivated proactive teams. Lack of recognition is the number two driver of job stress for both Gen Zs and millennials right behind long hours ahead of pay and fairness concerns. People want to be recognized and that gets them engaged. Here's how you raise yourself on pillar four. Team members follow through on commitments without being reminded.

27:11Excellence looks like you never need to chase people and when you give something to somebody else, you never wonder, are they really going to get that done by Tuesday? Number two is people are empowered to make decisions within their roles without always escalating. So excellence and number five in this looks like somebody made a real call this last week or two without running it by you first. Number three is underperformance is addressed constructively and consistently consistently consistently. Number three means you always deal with things right away before they fester. You don't make excuses. You jump on that and have the conversation that needs to be had. Number four, team members are proactive. They look for ways to improve and contribute. Excellence like this looks like somebody recently fixed a problem. You didn't know existed and then told you about it or you found out and you end after they've already fixed it.

28:11That's engagement. Now in 2027, AI, news, wars, politics are all given people reasons to disengage. Global engagement fell to 20% in 2025 down from a 23% peak in 2022 and the second straight year of decline. Gallup also found that best practices organization still hit 79% manager engagement nearly four times the global average. Now to get this clear expectations and authority and empowerment. Your job is to get the most out of your team and some people mistake this for being kind and being nice. But I'll tell you what, if you've ever played sports, if you ever played sports or you talked to somebody who's played sports and you ask who is their favorite coach, it's never the person that was there trying to be liked by them. It was the person in them who saw their potential and pushed them, knew when to push them and knew when to hug them. I'll tell you one more

29:16quick story about this. I hired one of my favorite hires. His name was Russell. I hired him in his early mid 20s and we had a very mature company. We didn't have a lot of young people. He worked his butt off. He came in as our office manager. Next thing you know, he was like a director in our company. And for real, it's five years or so. I sold the company. He went to another company a couple of years later. We were having lunch and he said, Hey, Mike, I just wanted to thank you for everything that you did for me because he was now a VP at this other software organization. He said, I just wanted to thank you. I'm like, Oh, because I taught you all this technical stuff. And he's like, no, I can learn that stuff anywhere. He goes, you taught me emotional intelligence. You taught me leadership. You taught me how to listen. You taught me how to coach people. And he goes, that's why I want to thank you. And that's why I'm a VP. That really touched my heart. That's why I do what I do. You need accountability framework. It needs to be you holding people accountable. You're not there to be liked. You're there to earn respect. And you do that by being clear. Once you do that,

30:17people are going to respect you. Then they're going to like you. You need to celebrate ownership. You need to let people know what great work looks like. You need to know what drives each team member. Be their catalyst growth. pillar number five leadership. Like one of my clients said, I don't want to be the firefighter. I want to be the conductor like conductor of the orchestra. Leadership is the presence, the mindset and the behavior of the leader. It's the force multiplier for all the other pillars. Leadership is the force multiplier. Okay. Rate yourself from one to five on these four questions. Number one, I spend the majority of my time on strategic thinking, not tactical firefighting. Five is over two-thirds of your time is spent strategically. Question two, I lead through vision, values and coaching, not micro management. A number five means you have no tactical tasks on your list of your calendar. Number three, I have developed leaders within my team to take the whole burden off

31:23of me. You have a successor and other leaders on your team that can cake up the leadership one needed. Number four, I feel I have the skill set to lead this team and I'm giving the team what they require from me. Excellence in this means you have the confidence when things come up, you can handle it. When you had conflict or hard conversation, you handle it naturally and easily address it. That's leadership. So look, you got to get clear on your role. You have to invest in your own mindset and tool set. You have to model these behaviors. Do not control. You need to coach, mentor, guide and lead. Look, everybody's burnt out. Then it's the economy. Then it's the politics. There's AI coming in. Everybody's got excuses. You're the leader. Suck it up, figure it out. This is on you. You need to take account of your accountability and responsibility for your team.

32:24Everybody's got external circumstances that are difficult. This is your job is to embrace these things. I did a keynote a couple of years ago and afterwards the managing director and co-founder of the company came to me because Mike, we had a couple great years. We were growing and growing and then we stopped growing. After I saw your presentation, I realized we had a bottleneck and it's me. I haven't been growing. He was a salesperson. He loved selling. The company was at the point. They didn't need him to sell anymore. They needed him to lead. They needed him to coach. They needed him to empower. He went through an accelerator and we turned him into that. Within six months, two people came to him and told him it was the most they'd ever enjoyed working anywhere. I think that's so heartwarming when you hear that from one of your team and you heard it from two. They say, we talk about AI and leadership and let's talk about that for a second.

33:26Here is based. If you didn't know, I did a massive study on what leaders need to do in the age of AI. Let's talk about what pre-AI leadership is. I just want to explain this. Here's what the role of a leader was previously pre-AI leadership. The third was their functional area. That means if you were a chief financial officer, your functional area is a finance. If you're a chief marketing officer, that's marketing. Even if you're a sea level or VP, you still need to do some of your functional work. About a third of its management, it is hiring people. It is doing a employee reviews. It is managing projects. Then there is leadership. Purpose vision and power and coaching. You know what AI is really good at? The functional area and the management area. So, future leadership in 2027 beyond, especially with AI means you got to be a lot better leadership because AI is really good at your functional area. It's really good at managing stuff. We need you to be great at culture. We need you to be great at these five pillars. Danger zone. If you're under 49, you got some work to do.

34:3350 to 74. You're looking along. I call this keeping up. And then 90 or 100 is high performing team. Look, it's not easy to get high performing team. You need to invest. There's no quick fixes. This is about you, your team investing. 62. This is really give you more insight into where you need to focus. So, where do you go from here? My goal in this was to give you a score card so you can self identify, get an idea of where you need to work on. I gave you for each pillar what it is and some overall steps to improve in that pillar. If you have what you need from that great, I wanted to give you some overall direction. If you're like, hey, Mike, all that's good stuff, but I need more help than just this score card and the overall things to do for each pillar. Then here is what I have for you. I'm opening up a new cohort for what's called my team performance

35:37accelerator. This is the three months live program that starts on 6th of October. This is not pre-recorded. Over these three months, you get six live two hour sessions taught by me every other week. You get mindset anchors between every session and you learn concepts, you learn tools. And then you go for two weeks and you'll implement it and integrate it. I talked about these go away for one week trainings. Don't work. That's because people don't integrate and implement. Mike, accelerators are all about giving you the tools and skills. You go out and implement them and then you come back for coaching from me directly. So that's why I design them like this. In between the sessions, you get mindset anchors, reminders, you get two full weeks to implement things. You get a private community of leaders from around the world. And then this last one, we had people from Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, of course, US and Europe, Costa Rica, I believe, Fuji, I think it was. So you'll need some great leaders from around the world. All

36:42such as a record you have lifetime access to all the tools. And even if you can't make a session or two, you get the recording. So you catch up on the recording. It's always better to do it live, but if you always have access to them. So by December, so if you're like, hey, I need to do this. By December, you will have defined your culture, communicated and started holding people accountable to it. You will have a clear vision and purpose your team can actually see themselves in. You'll have done a full personnel audit. So you know who's an A player who's coachable and who's not a fit. You have an accountability system that does not make you the bad guy. This is about empowering people. And you'll be coached on how to have the hard conversation that really specifically tool and skill without dreading it for a week first. And so you and your team member will actually be empowered at the end of it. And what's new for this 2027 cohort is you're going to learn specifically how to manage the change around AI and how to manage people and

37:43teams in this age of AI and you'll get eye prompts to support your own leadership. The investment for this, this is all in US dollars. It's a 1995 early bird until September 16th, 2495 thereafter. You can split payments over three months now. You can also invest in three private sessions with me. You're going to get a lot of value through this. But sometimes people are like, Hey, I could use a couple one-on-one sessions. So you can get three of those for only $600 if you want that add on. If you want to send three or more leaders, I do have some group race. Just email me. If you're in the GLC alumni or inner circle, these are ongoing groups that I run. And the median cost to recruit one executive hire was over 10 grand. This is a fifth of that. And you are going to get everything you need to create your own high performing team. Now, a lot of people don't pay for this themselves. Maybe about a third of the people pay for this themselves. I have a two page business case built for your manager or your L&D learning and

38:47development. You will get this in a confirmation email, the cost, the ROI, the business case, etc. I think I might have it here. Where's the TPA guide? I think it's right here, but there's the guide in the chat. Early bird ends 16th of September. And Roma closes on the 29th, starts the 6th of October. If your company is approving it and you need some extra time, just let us know we're here to work with you on that. Now, look, I'm about to go to Q&A. What we have is we have a lot of case studies of people that have been through this before. A couple of different CEOs, head surgeon, first time leader, technology, managing director, etc. So we have people that have been through it, talked about their experience. So you can get an idea of what they've done. If you're ready now, go ahead and sign up. If you need approval, download the business case send it today. You're going to get some follow up emails on this. If you're not sure, you can reply to the follow up email and tell me your question. All right. I'm going to head over to the Q&A. Okay. Let me get into question answering mode. What if the culture is quite good and clear

39:52within the team, but less good in the rest of the company, other departments, even though we are on a small company? Yeah, I get that. So if you are responsible for the culture of your team, and that can be difficult when there is a different culture in the larger company, but I'll tell you what, especially in a smaller company, when you can create a high performing team within a larger company, that is going to look really good for you. Because then the people around are going to know that you have what it takes to create this on a larger scale. And then what your job also is to manage up and to let people know you're available to do this, maybe for other teams, or take on more responsibility, or get a raise or get a promotion, because that's who get raises and promotion are people that have high performing team. And then you can take on more responsibility and create more positive impact. And so you want to see how you can multiply your impact in other areas of your organization. Where is the best place to start on changing culture?

40:54As always, my buddy Russell, he's dealing with a lot of this now. He's in a new role. Where you want to start at is you want to to figure out what that culture is. And then you want to start thinking about where you want to move that culture. And then what you want to do is you want to get people on board with moving the culture. This can look a lot of different ways in different organizations. But you have to find the reason the people would want to move to a better culture. It's going to improve their happiness. It's going to be a career move for them. They're going to have an easier life. They're going to have more fun for some people as political. You have to know your different people. And this is something we'll go much deeper into. If you're talking about the best place is to really write down what your culture is now. Write down what is keeping your culture there. And then you get an idea of where you want your culture to go. And then there's a whole lot of steps to do at that time. Thank you, Russell. My current next question. My current

41:56leader wants me to constantly escalate all my issues. What is the best way to ask how we can avoid this? I tend to be an independent worker. And last week I made a mistake and didn't escalate it. So it probably believes this is the best way to lead. My current leader wants me to constantly escalate all of my issues. What is the best way to ask how we can avoid this? So what I'm getting here is that you have a leader and they want you to tell them. That's why I get by what you mean escalate all of their issues. If that's happening, you have to understand the person above you. And I talk a lot about managing up not as much in the team performance accelerator, but in some of my other ones is you have to under you know, you want to figure out why they are asking you to escalate everything. And that might be because they don't trust you that they are micro managing. If they are micro managing, they are in a state of ego and protectionism. So you need to understand that

42:58and then develop a relationship with them to start asking, how can I earn? It may be as explicit as this. You may hint at it at first. How can I get to the point where I am, where I can have the trust? Or maybe it's not even a trust issue. Maybe they think that's what their role is. So you have some investigation work to do to figure out why this person is doing that. And you do that with curiosity. You can ask him, Hey, why do you want me to escalate everything? Are there some places where I can not escalate things or I could be more effective if I do this and that. So you want to have these type of conversations with them when your energy is very calm. So you don't want to ever make sure you're attacking them or anything else. You just want to have these with a really easy conversation. I just had two staff who left and they made quite a negative impact. Good that they left. I created some toxic culture. I want to reset the culture and get the team to come together to think about it. What are the first few things I should consider? We're going to go through that a

43:58lot in the accelerator. And there's so many different variables to changing the culture. How long the team has been together? How long people have been there? What country you're in? How old the people are? Etc. How long you've been in there? What type of functions that they do? But you really want to get clear on where things are at currently and where they want to go. I can't diagnose much more than that because I'd have to ask you 100 questions. But it's good. They left. If you ask me, it's been a real pleasure here. And I'll just leave you with this. Creating a high-performing team. It's not easy. When I say it's not quick, there's nothing you're going to be able to do in the next three days or five days to make a massive dent. This is a long game. But once you create a high-performing team once, you are going to learn tools and skills of how to do it. Once your team is high-performing, then you also have momentum. You have the culture,

45:00you have the engagement. People will start holding each other accountable. And then it's so much easier. And then once you've done it once, you can take that and do it again. Once you do it again and again, then you're going to get it. But this first time, if you've never done it before, or maybe you've done it one or two times before. And this is a different environment. And this is a more difficult environment. Then you need the deeper tools and skills. Once you have a team, especially when you have moved them from not performing to then high-performing, it's so fun. It's so fulfilling because the real fun of leadership to me is having a team that exceeds expectations. It hits their goals, exceeds their goals. And then you see the joy in everybody. You see the pride they have in themselves and in the team. You see the people growing to me. That's why I do what I do. That was my favorite thing about leadership. And that's why I do what I do so that I can help you feel that same

46:02fulfillment. As a leader, if you're looking at your team right now thinking, I need to get more out of them. My team is not performing the way it should be. Then I have exactly what you need. Right now, we're enrolling for the upcoming cohort of the team performance accelerator. This is my live three-month program where you get everything you need to get your team performing to the highest level possible. You will learn about team culture. You will learn to make sure you have the right people on the team and in the right seats. You will get guidance. You will get support. You will get community. You will get accountability. You will get everything you need that over these three months you will build your toolkit and your skill set so that you can lead a high-performing team. And what it is is three months of me teaching live along with mindset anchors, support community, etc. Now if you're interested in this, go to rmicolandersome.com slash team

47:05or check in the show notes. Once again, that's rmicolandersome.com slash team or check in the show notes. It starts in the beginning of October. So if you're interested, get the information now. Go to the page. It has a whole bunch of case studies. It has pricing. It even has a document for you to set to your manager or your HR so that your organization can potentially cover this. Okay, if you want to get your team to perform at its highest level, I will see you in the beginning of October.