Mark Murphy on 5 Ways to Build Teams That Actually Work | EP 708

What if the real reason most teams fail has nothing to do with talent, effort, or motivation? In Episode 708 of Passion Struck, New York Times bestselling author and Leadership IQ founder Mark Murphy joins John R. Miles to reveal why even the most innovative, most driven teams quietly fall apart. Drawing on decades of research and his latest work on high-performance teams, Mark explains why misalignment, unclear roles, and unspoken expectations are the hidden forces that derail results. Together, John and Mark explore the five critical roles every successful team needs, why traditional team building often backfires, and how leaders can diagnose what is missing before dysfunction sets in. From elite sports teams and legendary bands to Navy SEAL units and corporate cultures, this conversation reframes leadership as an act of alignment rather than control. If you are entering a new year thinking about leadership, culture, or the kind of team you want to build or belong to, this episode will fundamentally change how you see collaboration. Listen. Reflect. Build better. Check the full show notes here: https://passionstruck.com/building-winning-teams-mark-murphy/All links gathered here, including books, Substack, YouTube, and Start Mattering apparel: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesTeam Players Companion WorkbookIdentify the Roles. Close the Gaps. Build Alignment. Reflection prompts and practical exercises to help you assess your team, uncover role gaps, and lead with clarity in the year ahead. Download the free Companion Workbook at: https://www.theignitedlife.net/p/team-players-mark-murphyIn this episode, you will learn:Why most teams fail due to misalignment rather than lack of talentThe five essential roles every high performing team must have and what happens when one is missingWhy traditional team building often creates more friction instead of trustHow elite teams, from professional sports to special operations units, adapt leadership based on contextHow to identify your own natural role and help others play to their strengthsWhat leaders can do when they cannot hire new people but still need better performanceSupport the MovementEvery human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it.https://StartMattering.comDisclaimerThe Passion Struck podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Passion Struck or its affiliates. This podcast is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment from a licensed physician, therapist, or other qualified professional. Connect with John Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/Book John to Speak: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking/Keynotes, books, podcast, and resources: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesChildren’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Substack: https://www.theignitedlife.net/Support the Movement: https://startmattering.com/. Every human deserves to feel...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  I happened to come across, and so this is in the 90s. I happened to come across a line that Michael Jordan had said. So, Michael Jordan's one day walking off the court and one of the assistant coaches, Tex Winters, the guy who architected the triangle offense. He hollers over to Michael and he goes, "Hey, Michael, there's no I in team." And Jordan looks back at him and goes, "Yeah, but there is an win," and walks off the court. And I said, "Yes, that is what I'm gonna win. I someday write a book about teams. That is what I'm gonna call it."

• 0:35John R. Miles?

  Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter.

• 1:23John R. Miles?

  Hey, friends. Welcome back to episode 708 of Passion Struck. I hope you had a peaceful, meaningful Christmas, or however you chose to mark this season. Earlier this week, we heard from Nir Bishan, author of the new book, The Solution Mindset, who challenged us to move from creativity to execution. Because ideas don't change your life, solutions do. Today's episode builds on that. Because once you've got clarity, once you've got a mindset for solutions, the next question becomes, how do you lead people well enough to actually deliver on what matters? My guest today is Mark Markey, New York Times bestselling author and founder of Leadership IQ. Mark has spent decades studying why teams succeed or quietly fall apart, even when

• 2:06John R. Miles?

  the people on them are smart, driven, and well-intentioned. And his research is blunt. Most teams don't fail because of talent. They fail because of misalignment between expectations, roles, and reality. In this conversation, we explore the five roles that high-performing teams must have: the director, achiever, stabilizer, harmonizer, and trailblazer.

• 2:29John R. Miles?

  We dig into why traditional team building often fails, what happens when a team is missing one of these roles, and how to identify and fill your team's gaps, even if you can't hire new people. If you're heading into a new year thinking about your leadership, your culture, or the kind of team you want to be a part of, this episode is for you. Before we begin, a quick favor. If this season of becoming has meant something to you, share it with someone who's stepping into their next chapter. And if you haven't yet, leave a five star rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's one of the most powerful ways to help these conversations reach the people who need them. And don't forget to check out the Passion Struck podcast on our YouTube channels at either John or

• 3:08John R. Miles?

  Miles or Passion Struck clips. All right, let's dive in to episode 708 with Mark Murphy. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide in your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

• 3:27John R. Miles?

  I am so thrilled today to welcome New York Times bestselling author Mark Murphy to Passion Struck. How are you doing today, Mark?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  I am awesome and very appreciative that you asked me on here. Thank you.

• 3:41John R. Miles?

  I had the opportunity of living in Atlanta. It was for a short time, but we really loved it there. We lived in East Cobb, and I just felt that in particular, the spring was spectacular, closely followed by the fall. And we're talking right as you head into the beginning of peak season there. But man, I remember our front yard had so many flowering trees. It started with the tulips and then went from there. But there is like a six week period in the spring where it's like Atlanta just comes alive.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  It really is gorgeous. And yeah, I live in East Cobb as well. So I know exactly, it's funny, my wife and I both grew up in Buffalo, New York, which explains why we now live in the South. So when we're getting spring in Atlanta and there's color and stuff, growing up in Buffalo, you didn't always see color for in the springtime. It often took till June.

• 4:40John R. Miles?

  For me, it was a great location because I was right off of Lower Roswell and Johnson Ferry. And I'm a big hockey player, so there was an ice rink right there by the Kroger, which was literally like a two minute drive for me. So it was the most perfect situation I would ever have for my hockey passion. But I digress.

• 5:01John R. Miles?

  Mark, you have spent decades studying why teams succeed or fail through leadership IQ. Was there a first moment you realized that the traditional ideas of teamwork weren't enough?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Yes, and it was mostly brought on by some experiences I had that I didn't love. Personal experiences and I'm not studying leaders and writing about leadership in general, but hadn't really thought about teams too much. This is 20 years ago now. And I was sitting on a team that is a joint venture of some other consulting firms we put together. And I'm sitting there and I am just utterly miserable. And I'm thinking to myself, this would be so much easier if I could just do this myself. Like, we are wasting unbelievable amounts of time. We're either talking over each other or half the room isn't even really participating.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  They're mentally checked out. This is just a nightmare. And I can tell people, smart people that I knew were not offering up all of their insights. And then somebody was like, well, what we need is team building and some real bonding to bring us together. And I'm like, oh, I'm trying hard not to roll my eyes. And I'm thinking like, this is really gonna make this painful now. And when I left a couple of these meetings like that, I happened to come across, and so this is in the 90s, I happened to come across a line that Michael Jordan had said. So, Michael Jordan's one day walking off the court and one of the assistant coaches, Tex Winters.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  The guy who architected the triangle offense, he hollers over to Michael and he goes, hey, Michael, there's no I in team. And Jordan looks back at him and goes, yeah, but there is in win. And then walks off the court. And I said, yes, that is what I'm going to win. I someday write a book about teams. That is what I'm going to call it. And so I let the idea set for a number of years and I got focused on writing other books and doing other things. And then when I came back to this, and I started doing some research on people in teams and looking at, okay, what's the best team you're on? What's the worst team you're on? What are the characteristics of those really nightmarish teams? What are

• 7:22Speaker 01

  the characteristics of the best teams? And the thing that I discovered was that the best teams are ones where every person gets to play to their strengths. They get to play their role, rather than stuffing a bunch of people in a room and saying, we are all going to be best friends, and we are all going to get along, and we are all going to think the same, and we are all going to have the storming and forming until we are one cohesive melded group. We're going to be okay with, you know what? You're quiet, but you have some big ideas. Or you know what? You're a little bossy, but you love timelines. So you're going to be in charge of that. And now you get a little touchy feely sometimes. What? When you see somebody mentally checking out, jump in and do that.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  And you know what? You're pretty good at making the decisions, even if everybody else gets mad at you. We need that. We can't go without making some decisions. And the best teams really had five kind of distinct roles that somebody or somebodies would play. And one of the, again, one of the big elements was, the more I looked at these teams, it was like the light bulb, when I was thinking back to that Michael Jordan quote was, you do not have, you would never construct a basketball team where you say, what we need is five Michael Jordans. Because A, you're not going to find them, but B,

• 8:47Speaker 01

  That would be a nightmare because you need somebody who's gonna be tall and stand down near the basket. You need somebody smaller who's quick, who can get the ball to Michael. You need somebody who can shoot from a distance. You need somebody who can drive into the paint. You need somebody that plays really good defense. You need a mix. No sports team on earth or an orchestra. You've never seen a band where it's like everybody is playing the exact same instrument. No, you have harmonies. You have mixes. You have all these different voices and talents and skills. And whether it's basketball, football, an orchestra, a rock band, it doesn't matter. In every other group, we accept and recognize and appreciate all of these different roles that we play.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  And that, not only that, but business is like the only place where we stuff people into a room and say, "Okay, now we gotta get you cohesive and we gotta smush everybody together." But every place else in the world, they're like, "No, play to your strengths. Do the thing. If you're 350 pounds, let's not make you a wide receiver. If you're 200 pounds, let's not make you an offensive lineman. Let's let you do what you're really good at." And that, when I think back on that 20, 25 years ago, and I go, "Why was I so miserable in that room?" The question comes back and it's borne out by the research is that I wasn't really being able to

• 10:16Speaker 01

  do what I was good at doing. I was being asked to do something that really wasn't my natural fit. But when you have a team where people can do what they're put here to do, that's when we start to really feel in sync with ourselves, our career, our strengths. And that's when teams start to go, "Oh yeah, this actually feels pretty darn good."

• 10:40John R. Miles?

  Well, thank you so much for sharing that, Mark. And it was a great lead in to the book that we're discussing, your brand new book, Team Players, the Five Critical Roles, which you alluded to. You need to build a winning team. And I just want to go back to Michael Jordan there for a second, because when I think about those teams, the person who often gets lost the most, I think, in the discussion of the Bulls is Pippen, and probably to a lesser extent, Rodman. But I felt bad for Pippen in the way that he orchestrated his, he did it to himself, but his whole contract, because he didn't really make the money he should have for so many years, given he was really a

• 11:20John R. Miles?

  critical role in enabling Michael. But I also thought it was really funny when Rodman would go off the deep end, it was Michael going to Las Vegas, or wherever he might be, to go track him down and bring him back and say, hey, you've had enough fun. We need you back to win a championship. Although Michael said that, I do think he understood that he couldn't do it alone, and he needed the supporting characters to build that masterful team.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  It's interesting that it really was, there was a turning point in the mid 90s, where the light bulb did start to come on, where prior to that, he was very much, I am going to do it all. It will be, sometimes leaders when a business will say, I'll be faster if I just do it myself. Well, that was pretty much Michael Jordan, early on in his career. And what's fascinating is that his points per game actually went down when they started winning championships. So he went from low 30s down to like, high 20s points per game, as they started winning

• 12:30Speaker 01

  championships. And it was this light bulb, and you can see it statistically, this light bulb came on, that he said, you know what, these other roles are vital. And if I let them do their thing,

• 12:44Speaker 01

  That frees me up to do my thing. And that ultimately means we're a lot more likely to actually win. If I can, but it does mean that I have to recognize my own role. I have to recognize that I am part of the team. I have a part to play. My part is special. And, and any team, we just did some new research coming back with, with a book coming out, that there are roles on a team that often are a bit under recognized. They don't get the same recognition. There's a role on the team we call the achiever. And this is the quiet doer. They're the worker. They're the one who's, if you're in a team and you're having some discussion about, okay, we gotta make this big board pitch.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  And somebody raises their hand and says, well, I'll be in charge of actually making the slides. That's your achiever. Now, most people say, yeah, this is the role that is A, one of the most vital roles on the team. But B is most of the time gets under recognized. And there are things like with the Pippin example, where yeah, sometimes the, the recognition is not going to be there. And where you see teams get into trouble sometimes is when you have people competing, and we've all lived through this, where you have three people that all want to be in charge and make the final decision.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  And it's, well, a team can only handle so many of those people in the room. You cannot have a team of five people where all five believe that they should be the final decision maker. That's not going to be a good recipe. And so sometimes it's about not only us each individually finding our place, but also being okay with that. And us having, every person having enough self-awareness to say, here's where I fit. This is where I can make a special contribution. And the more. Pippen realized that and when the coach took him aside and said, I want you to become Defensive Player of the Year. That was another, and so he ended up becoming Defensive Player

• 14:54Speaker 01

  of the Year. That was another light bulb moment where Pippen started to see, oh, my role is a little different than Michael's role. Michael should be winning scoring titles. I should be leading in assists and Defensive Player of the Year. And that was when they started to fit into their roles. But to your point about Rodman going off to Vegas, the other thing they recognized is, listen, there is sometimes on a team, you get that kind of crazy person. Now, they may be in a business team, they might be like your crazy, bold innovator. We call that the trailblazer. But sometimes it's a Rodman type and you're like, listen, we gotta let this guy go blow off some steam for a bit. Let him leave the

• 15:38Speaker 01

  team for a week, go to Vegas, get it out of his system, and then we'll fly out, we'll bring him back and get him ready for the run. Again, this idea that we all have to participate in every meeting equally. No, that's not what a team is. A team is a collection of talents, but it doesn't mean it's a collection of all the same talents.

• 15:59John R. Miles?

  So how about we go from sports to music? You open up the book with The Beatles as the perfect metaphor to frame the architecture that you lay out. And I, a couple of months ago, was watching their documentary, I think it was the Let It Be album that they were doing, trying to create this album so that they could then go film in. And at the time, you're starting to see the Beatles crumbling. You have Lennon, who is doing his own thing. You have Ringo, who is sitting there as the foundation, holding it together. Harrison is pissed off at the rest of the band, especially Paul and John at the time, and what

• 16:43John R. Miles?

  Was remarkable to me is I didn't realize how much of a leader McCartney played in the band in and nor did I understand how many instruments he could play until I saw him go to Ringo and get on behind the drums and say, "You should be playing it like this." And Harrison, "You should be playing this guitar solo like this." That was pretty interesting. Here you have John, the visionary and provocateur, Paul McCartney. Like I said, this person who was achiever, perfectionist, Harrison, the spiritual experimenter, and then Ringo, this grounding presence. But you give them different names and I thought through their examples, it was a great way to frame the styles in your book.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's the five roles that, for lack of better terms that we came up with, there's the director who's your, will make the tough decisions when the decisions need to get made. You have the trailblazer, and that's the person, they're your out of the box thinker. They're that provocateur, as you say, and they're coming up with the really bold, crazy ideas. Now, sometimes it's a little much, but oftentimes it's what gets you innovations. Then you have the stabilizer, and this is your, if you think of a body, it's like the spine. This is what kind of keeps you on track and meeting deadlines and hitting deliverables and things like that. Then you have that achiever, and this

• 18:06Speaker 01

  is the person who just is quietly doing the work. They're not necessarily managing all the others, but they are the one who like shows up like a Ringo, like an unsung hero. They're there, they're playing, they're gonna do work. And it's like you never have to worry about them because they're gonna just be consistent and predictable and get stuff done. And then there's the harmonizer. And the harmonizer is the one that is the kind of the peacemaker of the group. They're the one that is, and you can see this, like when you see a team start to fall apart, oftentimes what you're seeing is a lack of a harmonizer, somebody who can actually pull the people, the rest of the group back together

• 18:51Speaker 01

  and say, "Listen, we all still have a common vision here. We all still fundamentally enjoy each other's company enough, but we're all committed to the same thing. Let's work out this conflict, simmer it down a little bit, and then we can get back on to, in this case, making music." And these roles, if you have at least somebody who can, and sometimes you'll have, and if it's a small group, for example, a group of four, you might find that you have somebody who is playing both peacemaker and what we call the harmonizer and the achiever. Like they're doing work, but they're also keeping the peace. Or you might have somebody who is both a director and a trailblazer. Like they're going to make some tough decisions and make sure, listen, we're not going to

• 19:35Speaker 01

  debate this for the next three weeks. We have a deadline, we have to hit. So here's what we're going to color the album cover. It's going to be yellow. And so that's it. Suck it up, move on. But also maybe as the trailblazer at the same time with some bold, big, crazy ideas, you can have a person, one person play multiple roles sometimes. But at a minimum, it's getting these five roles covered. And it's interesting because I love that you pull out the Beatles. There was another example I used too. There's a flip side of that from a, well, later on, what you were talking about is when the Beatles got bad. Well, Pink Floyd also got to a similar place.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  And one of the things that happened to them is that they didn't actually appreciate each other's roles. Now you got one guy going, it's all songwriting. It's the songwriting, the people singing and playing guitars. Anybody could do that. And then the rest of the groups go, no, actually singing and playing guitars is important in a rock band. It's not just writing the music on the page. And when the roles don't actually appreciate each other, you don't have to be best friends with this other person. You don't have to love this other person, but you have to appreciate what that role brings to a team. Listen, I may not want to be the harmonizer.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  I may not want to be the peacemaker, but I can appreciate that such a role is necessary. I may not want to do it myself, but I gotta have somebody that is capable of doing that because I'm not that guy, but it's a necessary thing. And you can see, I love when you bring up the Beatles because I can see real time as it starts to crumble. And obviously it did. End up crumbling, but you can see like in your example with McCartney, how many different roles he was actually trying to play when they were starting their own production studio. He's trying to play stabilizer, keep them on track and make this thing not lose

• 21:41Speaker 01

  money, although it did end up losing a lot of money, trying to play director, make tough decisions. And meanwhile, you still got John like out innovating and doing amazing stuff, but Paul then is like, well, do I have to now step in and play two other instruments as well? You can see them trying to juggle all these roles. And early on, they were in lockstep. It was later on that it started to fade.

• 22:05John R. Miles?

  Before we continue, I want to pause on something important. Listening to a podcast is one thing. Becoming the person you're listening for is another. Every week, people tell me, I love these conversations, but how do I actually apply this to my life and work? That's exactly why we create companion workbooks for each episode. Practical tools designed to help you integrate what you're hearing into how you lead, decide, and show up. For this episode with Mark Murphy, the workbook focuses on clarifying expectations, identifying hidden team roles, reducing friction and misalignment, and strengthening trust through clarity. You can download all our free companion workbooks by joining my Substack community at theignitedlife.net. Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 22:55John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Now, back to my conversation with Mark Murphy. So if we look at the Beatles, I just want to go through each one and see if I peg them correct. So I had Lennon as the trailblazer, Harrison as the harmonizer, Ringo as the stabilizer, and then I had a hard time picking was Paul McCartney the achiever or director or a combination of both?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  So for my money, a combination of the both, of both, he, there were times where he was very much the director. And what I saw in looking at parts of their history, there were times where when the conflict started to get, early on got bad, it was because both he and John, with John serving as almost a proxy for Yoko, where they were both competing for the director spot. They were both competing for who was going to make the big decision about who are

• 24:01Speaker 01

  the Beatles and what are we going to be? And who's going to be allowed even simple, stupid stuff like who is allowed in the studio when we are recording? There were early on fights when Yoko first entered the picture about whether or not Yoko could be in there. And John said, I'm making the decision. She is here. And everybody else was like, no. And then it was, but it was a battle essentially over, and again, it sometimes this stuff comes out over simple, stupid decisions, but it was a decision. And that's where I could see moments where both Paul and John were trying to play director and take charge

• 24:41Speaker 01

  and make that final decision. And that's where some conflict started to come in.

• 24:48John R. Miles?

  I'm going to take us in a little bit different direction. You famously found that nearly half of new hires fail within 18 months and 89% of those failures are due to attitude, not skills. Okay, so I want to park that for a second. Later on in the book, you mentioned I worked at Dell. You cite Michael Dell's famous, I'm going to shut Apple down comment, but I want to go to this environment at Dell. When I walked into the environment, and this was in the late 2000s, I came in as VP and to understand Dell, you have to understand that it's in many ways, a pretty flat organization. There,

• 25:29John R. Miles?

  there was Michael and there were at the time, he would call them presidents, but they were really SVPs and there were like five or six of them. And then there were VPs and then you had different levels of VP who had either regional or global responsibility. And so I had global responsibility, but.

• 25:47John R. Miles?

  An average VP at that time lasted less than six months coming into the environment. And in this scenario, when I look at it, it had less to do with attitude and more to do with the attitude of others. So when I came in, Michael challenged me that the company wasn't going in the right direction. And so we needed new ideas. We needed new technologies. We needed new ways to do things. But what I ran into was a whole bunch of peers, whether they be VP, directors, or SVPs, who had been with Michael for a very long time, some decades, who didn't

• 26:28John R. Miles?

  either see the change he visualized, or didn't want to be a part of it. And so what was ended up happening is we used the Google, the GE model, which Michael loved, that every single year, you take out a certain percentage of the organization. And what was happening, as I could see it, was the old guard would keep those who were close to them and loyal, and they'd put the newer employees on this list of who would come out. And so it was this ever evolving door. It's a long way of going at this. Like, why does this happen? Because to me, you're wasting so much money and talent when you get into this dilemma.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  It's a great question. And it's funny, I wrote about Dell as an example, and here I'm talking to the former CIO of Dell. So it's, I want you to fact check me on these things. One of the things we have found is that when I first did the hiring for attitude study, and 89% of the time when a new hire fails, it's for attitude, it, you raise a really important point, that it's sometimes, it's not so much about the person's, the individual's attitude, as much as it is a bad fit between the attitudes. And what you can see, when attitude is defined

• 27:50Speaker 01

  as whatever I like and I am most comfortable with, what happens is that it enables, for example, an executive to say, if I don't really want the change, so my boss, Michael, wants the change, massive change, but I'm still...

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Allowing the executives beneath me to choose the attitudes that they are most into, or choose the people that they most want on their team. Then what ends up happening is ironically, you end up losing the people that would be those change agents. And back up one second, I get CEOs will sometimes call me and go, we need to increase our innovation, we need to move faster and blah, blah, blah. And so we're gonna do that through hiring. Okay, cool, but what percent of your workforce do you think you're gonna need to hire new in order to really fundamentally impact the culture?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Well, if we make a couple of really good strategic hires, uh huh, you got a company of 10,000 people. You honestly think three, five, even 50 are gonna make a dent? What's gonna happen is the company's immune system is going to kill them off. And they're going to chase out those new innovators, those trailblazers that you've hired in. If you don't do something to fundamentally say, listen, we need more trailblazers. Not only do are we gonna go hire them, but I am going to make them prominent, I am going to give them voice. I am going to meet with them personally. They are going to be personally connected to me

• 29:39Speaker 01

  because I need to know that we're really good at stabilizing, but we're lousy at trailblazing. So I need to protect these trailblazers and I'm not gonna let the company, everybody else, kill off these new voices in the company. And if you don't do that, we've all see this where it's, he's lucky that you decided to fight through it because not everybody does, right? As you say, it's there were plenty of people that would come in and then six months later, they're out. Not everybody is gonna grit through like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. Where it's come hell or high water, we are gonna, I'm gonna get that boulder up there. Every other people are like, this is not worth it.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  I'll go to a place where they're not trying to kill me off. But that's part of the issue is for a lot of folks, if an individual contributor, for example, reads one of my books or columns or something and goes, Mark, what should I do? How should I tell if I'm going to survive? Well, look at what they're saying. What kind of visibility? What actions are they actually taking to say that they really not just verbalize that they want whatever you bring? Let's say a trailblazer mindset, but what are they doing? Like real tangible evidence that says we want more of this? Cause if they're not making that role more prominent and giving it some backing, and what's going to end up happening is that you're going to lose that person.

• 31:11John R. Miles?

  Let's go through some different examples. So I grew up in Pennsylvania, am a huge Philadelphia sports fan, obviously love the Eagles. And you have an example of the Eagles' dream team in 2011, where they stacked their roster with all these stars and they end up going eight and eight. And then you look at the team that they have now, which won the Super Bowl last year. And one of the things I love about Hertz is it's interesting. The TV caught them playing the Chiefs and one of the linemen from the Chiefs shouts over at Jalen, he goes, ah, we held you to only 88 yards today. And he goes, I don't care, we won. And I think there's something so important to look at Jalen.

• 31:56John R. Miles?

  I don't think he cares at all about being the league MVP. I think he cares about what does he do with the cast around him to put the Eagles in the best opportunity to win games? So I thought I would bring up those two different universes for maybe you to compare and contrast. What happened in 2011 and what worked so well this past year?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  It's such a great example and it's one of the things that the last year's Eagles team has is they, people really understood their roles. They understood this is the unique contribution. This is my comparative advantage. This is what I'm really good at and here's how I can bring some value to the team. And there was a recognition that we are all parts of this whole. Now, one part is not more or less vital. They are one of the top offensive lines, for example, in the NFL, especially last year, but still, obviously, they're still darn good. And, okay, well, that's a vital part to play. Now, a quarterback who

• 33:08Speaker 01

  can run, that's a vital part to play. A receiver who is top tier, that's a vital part. There is the running back, of course, Saquon, vital part, but it goes deeper than that. When Saquon Barkley was on the Giants, the offensive line was one of the worst offensive lines probably in the modern NFL. And you cannot have a running back succeed when you have a terrible offensive line. I don't care how transcendental that running back is. If there's nobody blocking the running back, the running back's role is not 100% determined

• 33:48Speaker 01

  by the offensive line, but incredibly influenced by the offensive line. And so you could take Barry Sanders behind the world's best, the world's worst offensive line and Barry Sanders is not going to be able to do much of anything because it's just not. The cool thing about the Eagles is that they all understood the interplay of all of their various pieces. They, Barkley and A.J. Brown, the Hertz, they all understand how interconnected each of their parts is to the other. It's like they get it. They truly understand that we have this diversity of roles. We each have a part to play and that's it. And we are

• 34:30Speaker 01

  happy playing our part because it ultimately got them a Super Bowl. Whereas when you take the dream team Eagles, it was more about, look at the names. Look at these superstars that we brought in here. And what's interesting is it's not just the Eagles. There is a body of work on this, research on this now, that when you take a dream team, this quote unquote dream team, and they've done this with Wall Street analysts, for example, or even research scientists, that superstars, people who believe their own press, are often not, don't recognize that they are part of a larger ecosystem. So when they did this with Wall Street analysts, for example,

• 35:12Speaker 01

  and the Wall Street analyst would say, I'm the star now. I'm writing all the great reports. I'm making a couple million a year. And so I'm going to go join a new firm where they're going to put my name on the door. And this, so the Wall Street analyst would go and join a new firm. And their performance in terms of the stocks they picked instantly went, just cratered. And one of the things that they discovered was that these guys, I said guys, they were mostly guys, didn't realize that part of what had made them successful was all of the researchers working underneath them, all of their colleagues in the other departments. If I'm analyzing consumer goods, for example, and somebody else is analyzing, I don't know,

• 35:56Speaker 01

  government relations, and they can see that tariffs are happening over here, and that's going to have a huge impact on consumer goods. If I don't have that person who's giving me a heads up, I might miss this thing entirely. They just didn't recognize, they thought that they were the star, self-contained. That's it, that's all we need. And like going back to the Michael Jordan thing, like, he didn't, it took him until he realized that if I don't have somebody who can get behind me and defend, I could score 40 points, 60 points in a game, we could still lose. And what the modern day Eagles have, like, this year, last year, when they won the Super Bowl, is a recognition that I am not an island.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  The Dream Team Eagles? Oh, no, it was, "Look at all these stars. We got, if I just put him out on the field, poof, that magically fixes the defense." No, no, it does not. And you could see this. I thought one of the most amazing things was when they asked Saquon if he wanted to take those last carries to get over the rushing record at the end of last year. Let the young guys go in. Doesn't matter. And it's like you just saw this appreciation of his offensive line, the fact that they also have a, in Hertz, a quarterback who can run, which adds like another scary element for defenses because you can't just key off

• 37:19Speaker 01

  on Barkley. You also have to pay attention to Hertz and so on and so forth. But that's one major difference is they all understand that they are playing a role within a larger ecosystem.

• 37:33John R. Miles?

  Well, and I think the other big thing, thanks for those examples, is that Saquon also realized that the linemen needed rest and that Hertz didn't need to be injured and that if they were going to keep rushing him, the front office isn't going to risk putting in your B team to protect one of the best rushers in the league. So you got to keep the A team on the field. And especially the game after that where he could have gone for the all-time rushing lead, that was the determination is we want to rest our team so that they can make this deep run. And if he would have played, they would have had to protect him. It really does show the self-sacrifice, which leads to greatness. Well, I want to take

• 38:16John R. Miles?

  this a little bit different direction. So we, I think we've done a couple of great examples to get people, give people an understanding of the concept. I want to give them some practical abilities to practice this. Mark, what is the first step for a leader to assess which roles on their team? That they have based on the roles in your framework and which are they missing?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  The very first thing is to, one, just talk to your team and tell them, okay, listen, here are five basic roles we need to make sure we're covering. And then ask your team, which of these roles do you think other people would say you play? If we were to go around, if you were to guess, what would other people say is the role that you most commonly play? What would that be? It's a fascinating exercise. Now, it's a weird way to ask it, right? And you could theoretically, and practically it works reasonably well. You could ask people, out of these five roles, which one do you like the most? Are you the decision maker? Are you the quiet doer? Are

• 39:25Speaker 01

  you the peacemaker? Or do you want to be the harmonizer, the trailblazer, the stabilizer, blah, blah? And some people are incredibly self-aware, and they're very good at saying, yeah, this is where I'm good. This is how other people see me, blah, blah, blah. But when we ask it in the form of, what would other people say is the role you most commonly play? It accesses a different part of the brain. It's a technique called meta-perception, where we're basically, humans are weirdly biased when it comes to evaluating ourselves, but weirdly good at evaluating how others see us. If you ask people, how do you think other people see you? Humans are actually

• 40:09Speaker 01

  strangely accurate in saying, this is how other people probably see me. And so what that does is it cuts down on people saying, well, I want to be the director. Sure, it sounds like a cool title, but listen, not everybody is cut out to be the director. Not everybody is comfortable with it. Not everybody has that skill set. And when you have everybody do a real self-assessment, here's the role I'm most comfortable with. That's your baseline. Now you can instantly see, do I have somebody that is playing my harmonizer, somebody that is playing my stabilizer, et cetera? And depending on the task, there are going to be times where

• 40:55Speaker 01

  You might look at having a team, but let's just say it's you and another person working on something. And you're like, what is this really require from us? And it's like, okay, we got two days to get this presentation made. And one of us is going to have to make sure we stay on track. One of us is going to have to make the slides. And one of us is going to hopefully come up with something neat and creative. Well, okay, we're probably, and if we get along reasonably well, we probably for the two of us, we don't need a harmonizer. Like we're, there's not a lot of peacemaking because we're not going to have a lot of conflict. Decision making, well, we're not going to let this, it's not going to be that hard to decide because we've got a very constrained timeframe. We probably need a stabilizer to make sure we get the right number of slides.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  We need an achiever to actually make the slides and we need a trailblazer. Okay. So between the two of us, who's going to do what? I have a person who's my right hand inside my company and she's very much a stabilizer. I am very much not great as long as I know we're going to work on this thing. As long as I know you're here, play in the stabilizer. Cool. I don't have to do it. That's what you're really good at. It's not what I'm really good at. As long as we're a brutally honest with ourselves about who is in the room. Then B, if you start to see that you've got gaps, then you can ask the second hard question, which is, which of these gaps is actually going to be necessary?

• 42:21Speaker 01

  And if I can't go get somebody to play that role, then what I have to do is ask a second question, which is, okay, this group really doesn't have a harmonizer. We don't have somebody to play peacemaker here. Any volunteers, anybody who feels comfortable fulfilling that role? If it was a group that was utterly bereft of anything resembling peacemaker type of talent harmonizers, I would volunteer and I could get my way through it for a period of time. Not my preference, but you'll have somebody in the room go, yeah, I could do that. But I can get it through the next couple of weeks.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Not my favorite. I don't love it, but we can survive this way for a little bit.

• 43:08John R. Miles?

  I like your topic of role switching, which you were just starting to get into as a great alternative. And I'm just going to use a personal example here. When I was at Lowe's before I went to Dell, I was one of five direct reports reporting into the CIO. And I started out in the role of leading all operations, doing the data centers. I had information security under me, et cetera. And then I got put into the role of leading all software development, which was just a phenomenal role to have. But the role I really wanted was this role where I would have been the interface to the business and that person who was helping the business visualize what they wanted and then taking it back to the rest of the IT organization to build. And I remember we went through

• 43:53John R. Miles?

  an org change and I didn't get that role and I was pretty upset about it. And I remember sitting down with my boss and he said, John, you are the one person that I have who can do every single role that we need. And so I'm putting you in this place because I need it the most and the rest of your peers can't do it. And at the time I was pretty pissed, but when I look back upon it, it was really a nice compliment that he was giving me because I was like that journeyman who could take a role and make it mine. And the one he put me into was kind of becoming the chief data officer of the company, which I came to realize

• 44:38John R. Miles?

  how important it was to him because he realized that what really made Lowe's different from Home Depot at the time was that we were competing based on data and that if we had the best data, we had the best opportunity to try to catch up to the market presence that they had. And as I got into it and really realized how strategic that data was and how much the rest of the company relied upon it, I came to understand the importance of the role, just as an example.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  It is a great example. It is something to your point, to your example, you do have to be explicit with the, I'm asking you to switch because, because you will get people that will get pissed. I don't want to do this. This is not the role that I want. But it is when you take your best offensive lineman and, you know, your left tackle and the right tackle gets hurt and you go, listen, I need you to switch to the right. That's like, we are dying over there and you're the only person who can move over there. Cause you're the only person who can do both. It's going to hurt your numbers a bit this year. It's going to make your performance not look as good.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  But it is for the betterment of the team and it's not forever. We're gonna try, I promise, we are trying to replace the right tackle. And in your case, yeah, listen, it's right now, we just, we're going through an ugly reorg. It's, things are a bit chaotic and I need somebody I know that can step in and do this. Cause we have a gaping hole in that role and I don't have anybody who can play it. And I know it's not your fave, but if you give me a bit of time, a bit of leeway, then we'll work to get you back to where you want to get.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  And that's the thing that comes with kind of this honesty and clarity that if we're just transparent about this, you will find the Johns of the world who will give you some time and go, you know what? All right, I'm a little pissed, but I'll give you a bit of time to work this out. I'll be a team player and I'll play this other role, even though it's not my fave because I can, I'm capable of it. But that's, if you're going to get a, a John to go along with this, it takes that kind of transparency and that honesty to say, here's why we're doing this.

• 47:04John R. Miles?

  I want to switch to talking about something you call adaptive hierarchies. So I'm a Naval Academy graduate, spent time in the military and was fortunate enough to do some tours with Navy SEAL units and a number of deployments. So I got to know them extremely well. And one thing that you cite in the book is that SEALs rotate leadership based on context. I think something that they do even better than that is in that small unit, even if someone else can do a certain job, they are all assigned a job and that's the job they do. And they each know what each other's role is going to be on a mission and they stick to it. And I wanted to take that and then take it to a different scenario.

• 47:48John R. Miles?

  So a really good friend of mine, who I've known for ages, is a guy I like to talk about on the podcast. His name is Chris Cassidy. Chris was a Navy SEAL and ended up becoming an astronaut and then became the chief astronaut. And I was having this conversation with Chris about what is it like being the chief astronaut? And he said, you do not realize, because his job is to select which astronauts go to space. He's like, you've got to look at the complexity of what we're dealing with. You've got different countries who are sending people up. You've got different missions, plus you've got people who are sitting in a tin can who've got to exist with each other for months and months on end.

• 48:33John R. Miles?

  And so he said, you really have to look at the different roles you have, the different personality types, and how are they going to gel? Which is why it can take so long for some astronauts to go up into space and some never make it at all because they just didn't fit the position that was needed for the mission at hand. But I think, when I think about this, Stan McChrystal, General Stan McChrystal and the McChrystal Group really focuses on what you're talking about here and what they do for businesses. So they talk about something that they call eyes-off leadership, where they talk about that you've got to assemble the right team. But you have to trust that they're each going to do their job and you don't

• 49:18John R. Miles?

  micromanage them. I threw a lot at you, but I was hoping you might be able to bring this back, this adaptive hierarchies and why all of this is important.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and some great examples there. And the notion of an adaptive hierarchy, just to level set, is that there's hierarchies, which is, okay, somebody's in charge. And then there's a chain of command and all that. An adaptive hierarchy kind of takes it a little further and says, okay, I may technically be the one in charge, but for this particular task, this person is better suited at this thing than I am. They have the expertise I don't, so they get to make the decision. And it's the star on the team passing off the last second shot to somebody else. This is like, well, that person is a better three-point shooter than I am, even though I'm the star of the team, that person is the better three-point shooter. They get to be in charge of that shot.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  And so with an adaptive hierarchy, it is recognition that there are these different talents. There are these different roles. And we may be in a situation where if my team is rife with conflict and I have a good harmonizer on my team and I look and I go, listen, I'm not that good at mediating conflict. I'm not that good at playing the peacemaker role, but I have a really good harmonizer. You know what? I'm going to let them take charge of it. And to your example about the SEALs, one of the things is that, and when I've interviewed those guys, is that when you have somebody who is, they all have those roles, as you say, and you point out,

• 50:57Speaker 01

  but they also trust each other to play that role, which means they don't need to micromanage. So yes, even though there's going to be a leader, in the sense, there is always going to be somebody that outranks somebody else. But when push comes to shove, in the context of the mission or in a particular task or a particular situation, there's somebody who is in charge of that piece. And the hierarchy, in that moment, it doesn't look like the classic org chart where the sniper says, well, I know I've been given this task and, but now let me pause for a moment and go ask and just double and triple check and I got to run it up the chain of command. No, it's already been assigned. Sniper has the order.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  They know what they have to do. And when the target becomes available within the right context, then they can do what they need to do. And that's the idea of the adaptive hierarchy. And what you see sometimes in organizations that don't do this is that you will have they become constricted by the hierarchy. And it's, well, this person has all the talent, has all the information. They need to make the right decision. Businesses will sometimes talk about pushing decision making down to the lowest available level. Push it down as close to the front lines as you possibly can because you can move faster that way. Well, organizations that don't do a good job of that, or they

• 52:24Speaker 01

  talk the words, but they don't actually practice it. You end up getting people that feel like, I can't actually make the decision here. I'm not allowed to decide because I have to worry about who's above me in the hierarchy. And taking that a step further with your friend, the chief astronaut, which is amazing. I love that. Recognizing that you may be astronaut Bob over here. Astronaut Bob may be an amazing astronaut. Cool. But if Bob doesn't fit the role that is necessary on this mission, well, just because Bob has the most tenure,

• 53:05Speaker 01

  just because Bob ranks highest in the hierarchy, does not mean that Bob is the right fit for this mission. I might have somebody on my team who is more senior, more smarter, more experienced, more whatever. But if a project comes up and I need somebody who is a stabilizer, or the master of the Gantt chart can keep a project on track with to do lists and all of that kind of stuff, timelines and milestones and everything else. If that's what I need, then it doesn't matter if my trailblazer is the smartest person in the world.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  They're not the right fit for this particular project. And I think it's a brilliant thing when, you know, when your chief astronaut friend is going, yeah, I listen, it doesn't matter who you are, but it's about finding the mission where you are going to be able to play the role that you are best suited to play. Because if I just stick you up there a long way from being able to be taken out, like this isn't the kind of choice where if you screw up a hiring decision in a business, okay, what's the worst that's going to happen? You gotta wait, what, 30 days? And you could stick them in another office and it's not doing a lot of damage. Man, you do that in outer space, like you're not getting this person help.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  There's the, you can't just undo it. It's in, there's no oopsie daisies in outer space. Really being crystal clear about how this person is going to fit is just so absolutely, it's literally life and death. We use that, we overuse that phrase, but there it is literally life and death. And yeah, I think it's a brilliant example.

• 54:55John R. Miles?

  I'm going to close this arc out because I'll tell you a story about Chris that a lot of people don't know. One, if you want to learn more about Chris, NASA thought so much about him that they allowed Disney to come in and film an eight part series called Among the Stars, which basically follows Chris and his brother taped a lot of the video through his journey into his last trip into space. But it's, it has an interesting end to it because he was the commander of, I think it was Expedition 63. But if you're doing space travel and he's going up with a couple of cosmonauts, they are working together for months, if not a year, preparing for this mission together.

• 55:38John R. Miles?

  And in his case, this was going to be the last time he knew he was going to get to go to space. And six, like six weeks before launch, and there is a backup crew. One of his crewmates, the cosmonaut, was out on a run, hits a tree branch, pokes them in the eye and gets medically disqualified. So the Russian space agency changes up their two astronauts and there was an American astronaut who had been training with them. But the Russians felt so strongly about Chris, his leadership and ability to get along with really any of their cosmonauts that they allowed him to stay on the mission and he got to lead it. But I think it is a good example of these different roles people play.

• 56:21John R. Miles?

  Now, I wanted to end today, Mark, by talking about a scenario that didn't go well, like the Eagles. And I, before I was with Lowe's, worked for a company called Lendlease, which is headquartered in Sydney. And so every time I was there, we would write down the path from the Sydney Opera House. So I got to go to the Opera House on so many occasions. And the Opera House is amazing. It's one of the most iconic buildings in the world. But what people don't know, if they don't know the backstory, is, man, it was plagued by dysfunction, poor collaboration, role gaps, et cetera. So you had this original

• 56:59John R. Miles?

  architect, Jorn Utzen, who was a trailblazer. But what ended up happening around him, and I was hoping maybe you could use this as an example of what went wrong. But if you had the chance to put a dream team on this project, what would you have done differently to maybe bring us home in today's episode?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  So I'm glad you brought that one up. That is a great example. They had Utzen, and brilliant trailblazer, visionary architect. Again, the sail design on the top of that thing is just magnificent. But he was odd, not particularly communicative, brilliant, but not the most organized fellow in the world. And so what they did not have was, they did not really had a stabilizer, somebody to keep the project on track. But he had very little power. They did not really have a harmonizer, somebody who could make peace. And when you're talking about a mega project, and we're talking about like government officials,

• 58:03Speaker 01

  oh, you need somebody that can make peace between the parties and go and play the diplomat and smooth over some ruffled feathers. They also, though, did not have

• 58:16Speaker 01

  The achiever part was taken care of just all the other people on the project, but they didn't really have a director, somebody who could go toe to toe with Utzen. And when he said, "We want to do this sale design and we have to raise this up and we have to pour new concrete," somebody who could go, "Uh-uh, hold on, buddy. Nope, we're not doing that." Or, "We're not moving forward with this design until you give me some specs." "I need to know how many tons of concrete we're talking about here." There was nobody that could say, "Hey, you, no." And so what ended up happening is you have this trailblazer who's kind of left to go off into

• 58:59Speaker 01

  outer space in a metaphorical sense. Listen, I'm just gonna come up with crazy, awesome, brilliant stuff, but without somebody kind of pulling back and saying, "Wait a minute here. This is what we're gonna need. This is how long it's gonna take. This is how much it's gonna cost." That thing was thousands of percents over budget. It was insane. And then it's so bad that they built part of it and then it was wrong and had to blow it up. So they dynamite the cement and a chunk flies into the bay, lands on a ferry, this giant chunk of concrete. I mean, it went about as bad as you could go and still have it turn out okay at the end.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  The crazy sad part of it is he never got to see the building finish because he got fired. Utzen, the architect, never saw it in person. And so if I were building this dream team and I had somebody I knew was a brilliant designer, my first question is gonna be, "All right, who is my stabilizer? Who's gonna keep this project on track? And who's my harmonizer? And who's gonna smooth things over when this guy inevitably ticks off lots of other people? And then who's the director gonna be? Who's actually making the final decision on this project?" So those would be, if I were assembling this, and it's funny.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  You get somebody like a Steve Jobs, one of the little recognized parts of his leadership. There's all the famous parts, but one of the lesser recognized parts is he was always pretty good at putting in place stabilizers and achievers around him. And Tim Cook, for example, was early on, well, pre his passing, Tim Cook really joined as in many ways, the stabilizer function for inventory. And so Steve could not have to worry about that and he would keep the trains running on time. He would keep things moving along in an effective way.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  And when you've got a crazy brilliant visionary, one of the first things you've got to do is make sure you have paired up with them a stabilizer to keep it on track and a harmonizer. Cause if they have a prickly personality, you're going to need somebody to smooth over the ruffled feathers because it will inevitably happen.

• 1:01:25John R. Miles?

  Mark, I have enjoyed having you so much on the show today and your book, as you could tell how much I enjoyed reading it, so many phenomenal examples. We just hit on a few of them. And this is the book that I wished I had 15 years ago in my career. So I highly recommend people go out and buy it. And where's the best place for people to find you?

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  You can find me at leadershipiq.com and through there you can find all the books and the articles and the research and the studies and all of that. But that's usually the best way is just leadershipiq.com.

• 1:02:02John R. Miles?

  Well, Mark, such an honor to have you today. Thank you so much for joining us on Passion Struck.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me, John.

• 1:02:10John R. Miles?

  That's a wrap on today's conversation with Mark Murphy. What stayed with me the most is this, becoming doesn't happen alone. It happens inside systems, teams, cultures, and relationships that either support growth or quietly drain it. Mark reminds us that high performance isn't about pressure or charisma. It's about alignment. It's about knowing what's expected, why it matters, and how we move forward together. Episode shifted how you think about leadership or teamwork. Please share it with someone you work alongside or someone who's building something meaningful in the new year. And if you want help turning insight into action, join me at theignitedlife.net, my Substack, where each episode is paired with tools to help you live what you're learning. Next up, I'm joined by my friend David Nurse, former professional basketball player turned

• 1:02:54John R. Miles?

  high-performance coach, who's worked with elite athletes, executives, and teams on one thing that separates good from great: flow. We'll explore what flow really is and what it's not, why pressure blocks performance and presence unlocks it, and how to access your best state when it matters most. Because becoming isn't always about pushing harder. Sometimes it's about learning how to move in rhythm with who you already are.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  If there's only bad stress, and think of that in your life as like the overwhelm or feeling like you have too much stuff on your plate, it's pointless stress that is going to keep you out of the ability to get in the zone because you have just too much like nonsense, the non-essentials really. But the you stress, the positive stress, is the nerves that you feel before you walk on stage. It's the pressure that you might feel before you go on to a sporting arena. Like those, that type of stress allows you to perform at a higher level if you have a relationship with it that you're accepting of it.

• 1:03:57John R. Miles?

  I'm John Miles. You've been passion struck. And until next time, go live like you matter.