Team Intelligence w/ Jon Levy

Forget everything you know about leadership. In the latest episode with Chad and Joel, behavioral scientist Jon Levy tears down the myth of the lone genius and reveals why your "super chickens" might be sabotaging your entire operation. Levy, author of the new book Team Intelligence, unpacks wild stories from his own life—from shredding for a RevAbs infomercial to using a massive 421-million-match Hinge study to prove that introverts never pair up. You'll hear about the "Super Chicken Problem," learning what homicidal hens in the 1970s can teach you about corporate success and why rewarding individual superstars can destroy your team. You'll also learn about the "Too Much Talent Problem," the surprising reason teams overloaded with stars often underperform, and how a "no-stats All-Star" helped his basketball team win. Finally, get the truth about the "Airport Problem," why remote work can feel so lonely, and what managers—who have accidentally become "camp counselors"—can do to fix it. If you've ever wondered how to build a team that crushes the competition without crushing each other, this episode is a must-listen with a startling truth: Harvard MBAs might not be any different from anyone else when it comes to leadership.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  Man, you know I'm a fan of using new tech that takes the boring repetitive crap out of a Recruiter's Day and allows them to have more time to connect with hiring managers and candidates.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Yep, Winston is doing the heavy lifting while recruiters kick back and do the actual hiring stuff. You know, like talking to people.

• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 0:53Speaker 00

  No doubt. It sounds like Rebecca and the team are using Winston to push Smart Recruiters into the future while the ATS vendors are basically on an AOL dial-up modem with a dashboard.

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• 1:19Speaker 01

  Start using Winston today, or I guess you can stick with...

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Now we return you to our regular scheduled program in progress.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Soash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheeseman Podcast.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. It's the podcast your mom warns you about, AKA the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad So wash is riding shotgun as we welcome John Levy to the show. He's a behavioral scientist and New York Times bestselling author known for his work in trust, human connection, belonging and influence. So why the hell is he on a show like this? Well, his latest book entitled Team Intelligence, How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius. He's going to talk about that. It's a book that debunks myths about leadership and introduces team intelligence as the true

• 2:35Speaker 00

  driver of success. John, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  I am beyond excited to be here. It's so nice to be on a, on a podcast or talk that I don't actually have to watch what I'm saying.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's no ivory tower here. There's no Google. Like this is the real people. This is, this is where you want to be, John, if you want to get your message across to the masses.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I'm just happy that you, you had that intro because I thought this was an intervention, to be quite frank. So behavior scientist. Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Don't worry. I'm judging and evaluating you moment by moment.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  I'm raising the bar really high for you, John. I hope that you can clear it. Well, John, we've read a little bit about your professional career. A lot of our listeners, watchers won't know you from Adam. Give us who John Levy is and then why we should care.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  So I'm a behavioral scientist and I spend a lot of my time asking possibly the weirdest questions you could find. Probably the most famous study I ever did was the largest in history on dating. So we looked at 421 million potential matches between people. Yeah. Dating app page. We got all their data and we ended up like, because I care about connection, trust, like all these kinds of factors that are very human, whether it's personal or professional. And we found that, and this was so funny, we found that across every factor you could imagine, the more similar you are to somebody, the more likely you are to date. You basically want to date a slightly different version of yourself. And so if you have the same initials, you're 11.3% more likely to date.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Oh, stop.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  I'm completely serious. If you went to like the same NCAA conference, even though you're not in school anymore, and now you're back in like some major city or something, you are more likely to. The one exception, and I thought this was just hilarious, was introverts and extroverts. I thought introverts would date introverts and extroverts would date extroverts. Two introverts almost never date because no one starts a conversation. Isn't that awesome?

• 4:29Speaker 05

  60% of the time, it works every time.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  So I then took my like, understanding of human behavior, and companies started coming to me and saying, what do we actually do with this? And then I started applying it to the workplace. And that's kind of what brings us here today.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  Any personal stuff you want to share?

• 4:48Speaker 04

  Oh, sure.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Family?

• 4:49Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Sports fan? What you got? We want to know John Levy, goddammit.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  I'm a girl dad. I have two, expecting a third soon. So I'm gonna have three under three.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Three under three?

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  We believe in productivity in this house.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  I guess.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  What else can I share?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Building a team, I see.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  Cheeseman over here was asking about an absolutely ridiculous thing I did when I was 28 and broke. I wanted to see if somebody will give me free food. And so I was underemployed and overweight. And I managed to sign up to be a before and after fitness model for a late night video infomercial. And so they give you your food for three months and they train you five, six days a week.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  And, oh my god, I got shredded. I lost 20 pounds.

• 5:41Speaker 06

  What are you doing, step bro?

• 5:45Speaker 04

  Oh my god, what was that problem?

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, clearly. So that was possibly the weirdest thing, you know, but it will work out for food.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  You got shredded, though. Did you get paid to get shredded?

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Shredded?

• 5:58Speaker 04

  No, no, no, they don't pay you for integrity reasons.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  They just fed you. Integrity reasons.

• 6:04Speaker 04

  But if you, if you still look on the internet, it was like a follow up program to P90X called Rev Abs. And I was like their token white looking guy.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  And is that when you met your wife, Judy Lawson, JL, get it? I was listening. I was listening.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  I met my wife at an airport, but.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  In the airport. Okay. Were you going to the, were you going to the same place? Was she hitching a ride? What's going on?

• 6:28Speaker 04

  I basically struck up a conversation with her at the gate and we were going on the same flight initially, but then we each had layovers. And as she would later describe me as that guy who wasn't nearly as charming as he thought he was. But on the air bridge, you know, I said, do you want to cut the line? Because, you know, I travel a lot. I had status. She's like, sure. So we end up on the air bridge together and I said, Hey, you know, you can either take your pre-assigned seat and sit next to some, you know, 300 pound man muffin topping over the armrest with terrible BO, or you can switch your seat and sit next to me and have the most interesting flight of your life.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Hello. Hello.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  And she said, Yeah, let's do it. And then we ended up talking for the next, you know, eight hours and I asked her to join me for a drink on the layover.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  That is smooth.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  And I disappeared for a second. I said, I'll be right back. And I brought, this is so cheesy. I brought a gold bottle of champagne from duty free. You know, those.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Those like ultra cheesy ones. And we end up drinking it and just kind of hitting it off at the airport.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Okay, kids. Okay, kids. This is not a dating show. Okay. We're going to get into the actual topic right now.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. He's got a call with Bill Gates after talking to us. So.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  John, we're going to talk about team intelligence today. John, you've garnered tons of attention. You've been on CBS, NBC, and now you've hit the pinnacle of your career, my friend, the Chad and Cheese HR's most dangerous podcast.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  If I tried hard enough.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Be careful.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  You would be on our show. And now today is the day, my friend.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  We still haven't published yet. Okay. Anyway, in, in reading through all your chat GPT notes and everything that you sent to us and all the videos I could actually pull together. I've got to ask, because you talk about team intelligence and in, when we talk about teams, one of the things that really kills a team a lot of times is decision by committee because it sucks, right? And the rise. The rise of rugged individualism has been pounded into our heads. Yes, the whole greed is good. Yay capitalism. How do we short circuit a narrative that's been happening since the union busting Reagan years over 40 years ago? I mean, it's still happening today. It feels like

• 8:40Speaker 01

  it's literally hardwired into society. How do we, how do we focus on team as opposed to rugged individualism?

• 8:47Speaker 04

  So I think we need to understand what we're actually trying to accomplish, right? What we suffer from is what's called a super chicken problem. And now I'm completely serious. The 1970s, a chicken producer called Decal produced a chicken called the Decal XL. It's like the Ferrari of chickens.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  XL. That is awesome.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  It could literally outlay any other chicken out there. The problem is that when you keep breeding for individual productivity, at a certain point, the only way to get more resources to become more productive is to peck the other chickens to death. And so they became very violent and they would literally kill each other. And so they started doing this awful thing, which is clipping their beaks. And so a researcher by the name of William Yor said, there has to be a better way. What we need to do is we need to actually take a crossbred chicken and then instead of only rebreeding the top performers, we're going to put them in groups and we're going to weigh the total output of the group. And the top groups, generation after generation, will be rebred. And the idea was that if we reward through mating,

• 9:49Speaker 04

  basically, both productivity and pro-social behavior, then we'll get really great groups that know how to be around each other.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  You're comparing us to chickens, John. You're comparing us to chickens.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Isn't it great? The other things I could compare us to is way worse.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Well, we just got back from Nashville and the hot Nashville chicken, I can tell you, is a winner in my book.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  So what ends up happening is that Muir runs a test. Can the super chickens beat out the teams? And what ended up happening, happening after a year was that the teams far outproduced the super chickens by a long chunk, mostly because most of the super chickens were dead. And so in corporate America, you hit it a nail on the head. The problem is that if we Keep rewarding people for individualistic top performance. We're going to get highly competitive behavior. Where at a certain point, the only way I can do better than the people next to me is to making sure isn't making sure they do poorly. I'm incentivized to make sure that my colleagues fail. So I could be in the top 10% so I can get bonuses. So the first thing we need to look at is how do we foster pro-social behavior?

• 10:53Speaker 04

  And then the second thing is, we have to understand, how do we reward and give status? Whatever we give status to and give money to, that's what people will reproduce. If I give bonuses for the top performance of an individual, then that individual will, or then people think individually. If I start actually giving rewards for groups, then, and giving status for the people who support each other, then people will, it's much like breeding, will want to repeat whatever gets them that reward. We are status driven.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  I assume you hope that CEOs and business owners read this. But who else do you hope reads this book? And what was sort of the inspiration around it? I know, I know you do a lot of interesting things aside from writing books.

• 11:36Speaker 04

  So the answer is that when you're a Jewish kid with a brother who's a doctor, it's really hard to impress your mother. And so I'd really love it if my mother read the book. Aside from that, I think that the important thing to understand is that if you are in a team at any point or responsible for building teams, this book is for you. The reason is that what we ended up really coming to the conclusion was that the role of a leader is very limited in terms of its impact. Most of the work happens between team members. The single most important thing to realize is that it's not an employee's job to be productive. Individual productivity comes at the cost of the team. I'll give you a simple example. In basketball, there's only one stat that predicts a player's salary.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Score.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Hundred percent. So every player is incentivized to shoot regardless of if it's a good shot. They've maximized individual productivity. There's only one stat that predicts an effective coach. It's the increase in the rate of passing under that coach.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  If I can increase how much a player passes, it means the ball is more likely to get to the person who has the best chance of scoring. My job isn't to be productive. My job is to make my team smart. Sometimes that means shooting, but usually it means passing.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Because we hear all the time and you can stick with the sports analogy real quick. But we hear all the time that, you know, companies are just looking for A players. Give me the A players, find me the purple squirrel, whatever they want to call it, right? But can there be too much talent on a team? Can there be just too many A players, too much talent? That's what it sounds like. Talk a little bit about that.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  So what you're actually talking about is specifically called the too much talent problem. A group of researchers did a funny thing. They wanted to understand how do teams get affected when we add more and more talent? And it turns out that in sports like basketball and football, European football, so soccer. When you cross about the 50 to 60% mark of top talent, the team is massively underperform. The question is why? And I was just talking to the owners of one of the big basketball teams. And they said, you know, when you have people who are used to controlling the ball and shooting, then they're not really mentally in the state of passing the ball or are working with other people. Sometimes called like a heliocentric model where everybody works around them because they're the star.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  Now, the problem actually exists in a very specific way. Because if you look at baseball, there is no maximum level of talent. And that's because baseball is a sport that is basically individualistic that you happen to be playing as a group. There's no way to be selfish in baseball. If you hit a home run, it doesn't mean that I'm at a disadvantage on your team.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  And so what it's actually called in the workplace is task interdependence. Meaning that if our roles are intertwined, yeah, then you're going to have a problem. But if we're completely individualistic and never interact, it really doesn't matter. Now, I do want to add one thing, which is the too much talent problem exists not because of top talent. It exists because we are really bad at measuring what's useful. We're great at measuring what's easy to see. It is easy to see when somebody scores. But in basketball, there's a player called Shane Battier, who was on the Miami Heat. He's retired now. There's this funny thing that it would happen with Shane Battier. Five players in the NBA, if you add them to your team, the team scores about an additional

• 14:57Speaker 04

  eight to 12 points per game. It's called a plus minus. Battier was known for having no meaningful stats whatsoever, and the team would get a plus six, which is insane. He wouldn't shoot, he wouldn't steal, he wouldn't do any of these things. Why? Here's one example of why. Because he would memorize every player's stats, and he would know, okay, that player over there, he's their rebound guy. If I push him back, then it creates space for my people to actually get the ball. Shane Battier is a no stats all-star because the current statistic system doesn't understand how to measure his behavior. It's not that he's not a star, it's just, we're measuring stars wrong. And so, I believe, yeah, get top talent, but complementary talent that actually fulfills a bunch of skillsets that

• 15:41Speaker 04

  we need, rather than what we traditionally call top performers, that all have the same skills that don't necessarily add up well.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  And I don't think that's the mindset. I think the mindset is, let's get the best people work for our company, and ultimately, they're gonna do the best work. What you're arguing is, hire the best talent, but surround it by the, what you call glue, glue players, I believe, or the glue of an organization. I don't think that exists today. I think, if you go to Meta, it's like, we want to hire the best developers. They don't think about, who would be complementary? Who would be the guy, or gal, that sees what other people don't see? How should employers sort of rethink hiring and the worldview that you hold?

• 16:25Speaker 04

  So, I think what we need to ask is, what actually predicts the intelligence of a team? Right? A researcher by the name of Anita Williams-Woolley actually looked at this. She found that it was none of the things that we traditionally believed predicted it. So I'll give you an example. We traditionally think it's like talent, like highest IQ, oh, we've got the best person, right? Not a predictor that the team was able to solve problems. We looked at, or she looked at, average IQ, not a predictor. How much people liked each other, not a predictor. The actual predictor, you're gonna love this, the number of women on the team.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Talk to me.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  It's not because they're women. It's because women index higher on emotional intelligence tests.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  And when you look at what causes a team to be effective, it's different than an individual sport. In an individual sport, it's pure talent. It's like the equivalent of IQ, right? Serena Williams can go on the court and dominate for 25 years on pure talent and hard work.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:21Speaker 04

  Once you put somebody in a team setting, they've gone from taking their shots to having to coordinate and pass and shoot less. And so if what happens is that we end up in a situation that all we have are shooters, nobody's passing, and then the team won't do well. And so when we're recruiting, what we need to look at is resource diversity. I'm not talking like we've gotten stuck on these ideas of gender, race, all that kind of stuff.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  I'm talking resource diversity.

• 17:47Speaker 01

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• 18:08Speaker 01

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• 18:38Speaker 04

  Resource diversity is mental models, skills, experience, languages spoken, contact, you name it, right? It is inevitable that if you have a diversity of resources, that's going to look more diverse, but we need to focus on the resources the team needs, not the simple, easy to see stuff.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  So how do we, how do we get into this emotional intelligence kind of mindset with, once again, for 40 plus, probably longer than that, years, easily, that, you know, it's always been male dominated, tough, hard, rub some dirt on it kind of shit. That's not emotional intelligence at all. How do we start to train toward that to be able to create more productive teams? Be it not just females, obviously females, I mean, it's, it's something that is innate within them.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  There are plenty of men who have high emotional intelligence and plenty of women who don't. I think that it's, once again, we have to focus on what's useful, not what's easy to see. Let's not categorize people by gender so much as skillset that they can bring to the team.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  But you just did, you said females are, are better in teams.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  I know, saying that the teams that have more women do better because of their emotional intelligence. You could find a group of guys that have, I just wouldn't want to reduce something to something that's simple, like saying, oh, we can't have another man on this team we have to hire. Or, right, because that creates a negative interaction between genders rather than saying, hey, who has really high emotional intelligence? If you focus on that question, you'll probably end up with more women anyway. But it begins with something that's of value. I could develop more emotional intelligence. A person can't be any more of a woman, right? It's not like a, a skillset, it's an immutable factor. So I think the, then the question is, what do we do about it? First of all, we have to realize that not everybody needs it.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  Let's say you're a leader who doesn't have high emotional intelligence. Figure out who on your team does and partner with them. Let's say Chad, you're the person and I go, wow, Chad, listen, I don't have high emotional intelligence. Or, and it takes a little bit of self-awareness. Hey, it's really clear that people trust you and that you're like a go-to person or glue player on the team. It's not my skillset. I'm really good at whatever it is, sales, marketing, whatever it is, right? I'm going to ask for your help. If you hear me talking too much in a meeting, or you see that there's somebody who's staying silent, but they should really be speaking, will you let me know or call on them?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Throw out a safe word, yeah.

• 21:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And but that's the. Point here is that suddenly the team becomes smarter and I didn't actually have to develop a skill. I just had to be willing to let you shine or listen to you. And herein lies the truth that the smallest unit of effectiveness is team, not individual. And we keep putting everything on the leader rather than looking at the skills a team needs to be effective.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  John, going back to your, your sports analogy, sometimes Shane Battier is Magic Johnson. Or it's Tom Brady, or it's LeBron James. How should companies think about a super high level talent empowering everyone under him or her? Whether it's a top person or a glue worker, like, aren't there situations? Sometimes it's the CEO. I would say Steve Jobs might be in that transcendent category. Should companies think about that or does it just accidentally happen?

• 21:54Speaker 04

  Should they think about how do they?

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Like, we're going to bring in the best of the best and they're going to make everybody else better.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  So I will argue that, that that's not necessarily something that most companies really think about. They, they're too stuck on the model of the super chickens, hoping that the super chickens will solve the problem. Oh, this person's incredible. Now, what you'll notice is that when you bring in a turnaround CEO, they've been through this before at two, three companies sometimes. And so their entire team will actually just relocate and they'll bring them from project to project because they've already created an intelligent team.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  And then they augment it with the current employees, right? So they phase people out and that's the thing. It's, you'll notice it's not just the leader. It's not that they come in and get everybody on board. They have the people and the habits and the systems that they already work well with for those turnarounds. And they bring them all with them, maybe not all, but often. And that's what makes the magic happen. A CEO without the rest of that team is going to have an uphill battle.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  So is that because they all have Harvard MBAs? Is that, is that what I'm hearing? We all have to go.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  That's the true defining characteristic of any decent human being, which is why I'm an indecent human being.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Is it all just cracked up to having an Harvard MBA? Tell me the truth, John.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  I'm gonna tell you the truth, and it's both delightful and terrible. If you want to succeed, having a Harvard MBA definitely won't hurt. It's often been referred to as the golden passport, meaning people will take you seriously.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Connections.

• 23:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, and connections and all that. The problem with it is that the commitment of Harvard, if you look on their website, is that they say they're going to create the leaders of tomorrow. And when you compare Harvard MBA or MBA graduates in terms of performance versus those people who have the same jobs who do not have MBAs, there's no meaningful difference whatsoever. And it is, in many categories, they're underperforming. And the reason I'll give is, I think, pretty simple. Have you ever played Mario Kart?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  The video game, for the listeners, you're Mario or another character from the Mario Universe.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Go kart.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  And you're driving a kart and you're go-kart fighting and all that. Imagine I said, Joel, I'm gonna teach you how to drive, but instead of actually driving a real car, I'm gonna have you play Mario Kart. That's what an MBA is. You're sending people to learn to be leaders by going into a sterile environment, taking you out of the workforce where you'd actually get experience for two years managing people, and then saying, hey, I've slapped a certification on you. Will you learn a bunch of stuff? Sure. Will any of it make you a better leader? Probably not. What Harvard is really good at, and I give them full credit for this, is saying, hey, you're an impressive individual, you're already going to be successful, and I approve of your success.

• 24:43Speaker 04

  And so it gives people a marker that you get to say, okay, they're impressive. It's not because of the MBA, it's because Harvard already pre-qualified them. But for every person that makes it into Harvard, there's probably 100 others that are just as effective, if not better, that didn't make the cut or didn't even bother applying because they're already great leaders.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, we like the shorthand answers to everything. There are some things in the world, I guess, that are contradictory or challenges, I guess, for employers. The work from home phenomenon. You have disparate employees working together through Zoom calls and Slack messages. Where do you fall in terms of the importance of the talent and teams when you're working virtually? Are the rules different? Is there advice that would help with that? Talk about the remote world and how it plays into your vision.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  So this is a really frustrating issue. The first thing is that when the pandemic happened, culture used to happen at the office. And then what we found was that everybody went home and culture happened at the level of your manager. The problem is that they were never hired or trained to do that. So it was like a pretty awful experience. Companies thought that we can solve it by telling everybody to come back in. Right? It would reduce the anxiety, the depression, the feeling of disconnection, the desire for a sense of belonging to the organization, all that kind of stuff. The problem is, is it actually created something called the airport problem, or I call it the airport problem, which is when you go to the airport, even if you have the same captain and crew, you're going to the same place. We generally do not talk to the people around us.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  If you take a bunch of people who don't know each other and shove them into a building, they're basically at an airport waiting for their turn to go home.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Watching the clock, yes.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  It's commercial time.

• 26:29Speaker 01

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• 27:13Speaker 01

  Qualified applicants, more qualified applicants, less cash. So if you're hiring in the high volume space like logistics, healthcare, retail, hospitality, warehouse, manufacturing, you get the idea. Stop wasting your time on resume spam. Check out smart qualify at talroo.com. That's T A L R O O dot com. Talru, clarity in job advertising. It's showtime.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  And then they complain that they're on Zoom, Teams, meet calls, whatever it is, and nobody's around them. And it's a very fair complaint. The problem is that what's good for us and what's easy to do are often opposing. It's easy for me to stay home, eat Cheetos and play video games. What's good for me is taking a walk and exercising and being uncomfortable at the gym. What's easy is staying at home in my pajamas, but that leads to higher rates of depression, isolation, loneliness, mental health issues. It prevents young talent from being able to absorb and understand managers and being mentored and developing kind of skills or lessons through the environment. It leads to a disconnection in a slew of ways.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  Some companies that are smaller, I've never seen it at a company of greater than 2,000 people, have really been able to create fantastic culture remotely, but they were built for it. I have never seen a company that has 50,000 or more people have an amazing remote work culture.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Because they weren't built.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Can you do it? Yeah, but it requires a fundamental rethinking of work. And I can tell you a lot of the steps to do, but they're not going to do it because it's just not their priority.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Is that a human issue or a technological issue? Like, are humans just wired to not, when it's that big, to function correctly? Like, I've seen, like, in the army, which Chad served, like, a platoon, I think, is only 150 people. Or like, once you get past 150 people...

• 29:09Speaker 04

  You're talking about Dunbar's number.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, Dunbar's number is this theoretical number of how many social ties we can... It's completely theoretical. There's no evidence that it's actually... Like, there's at best mild evidence that we keep pointing to that it's true. It has to do with some specific... Brain scans of a region of the brain and different mammals and how big that area is in each mammal.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  But is there, is there a point where you're too big to function in a remote environment? I guess is the question.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  I think we're functioning, right? The question is, isn't if we're functioning, it's, is this the way that we're, we want to work? Is this good for us? And is it what's going to allow us to succeed moving forward? So I'll give you a few quick examples of why this is important. If everybody's remote and you haven't created solid remote work culture, then people are just going to jump the next time they're offered a little bit more money. Because what's the difference working in my basement for you or for somebody else? Right? I've no allegiance to anything. If I'm not there in person, how am I going to be mentored in any meaningful way? The other issue is that as distance increases, intentionality has to increase. There's something called the Allen curve, which is across every communication type.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  The closer two people's desks are, there's an exponential growth in how often they communicate. By the time you get to like 50 meters away from each other, you might as well be on different planets. You're just not talking to each other. When everybody's far away from each other, there is no sense of familiarity in the same way. And so what ends up happening is that we have to be intentional in the way that we create it. But nobody's providing those tools to managers and you can't expect that for managers. So what you end up with is like these awful happy hours where the extroverts talk over everyone. And you're like, why am I doing this? I don't want to be drinking alone at home with people I don't even want to be drinking with in person.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  So as we start to, I don't know, we talk about pushing people out of the whole workforce, to be quite frank. And as AI becomes more prevalent in our workdays, we start unlocking efficiencies. And inevitably the staff starts to shrink. I mean, could AI be the final ingredient to diffusing teams? Where everybody's talking about humans can have their own team of agents, right? Not even humans, team of agents. This seems like a, a huge change, obviously.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe it's that the agents have teams of humans.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  And because they might be smarter and we might be just working for them. Either way.

• 31:41Speaker 04

  Yes, I think let's start off with the basics, right? Every time that there's a technological breakthrough of any kind, people try to solve every problem with it and it just doesn't work that way, right? So like the internet, oh, it's going to democratize everything and politics is going to be different and voting is going to be different and like the internet changed everything, but not in the ways we thought. We thought that it would be encyclopedias online. We didn't imagine Wikipedia. We thought it would be television over the internet. We didn't imagine YouTube, right? And so we don't know yet, but here's a few hints that I think are very reasonable. Once we get through like the efficiency stuff, right, which is the early phase of everything,

• 32:23Speaker 04

  whether it's when we telephone technology changed and we didn't need women to route, I say women because it was, I think, almost exclusively women routing calls back then. Those people ended up working off in secretarial jobs in other companies. But there was like a downsizing of like half a million people or something like that that were around the world, around the US.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Kind of rerouting calls. Now, once we get past that phase, then we can get to the interesting phases. The phases that are now we can do something that we've never been able to do before and we didn't even think of. So if I want to make a team smarter, right? One of the three pillars is diversity of resources. If I'm on a sales team and I'm on a call like this one, I want an agent there that as we're talking about, oh, I want to sell to Simmons, the German company, right? I wanted to cross-reference every salesperson's LinkedIn, every conversation we've ever had for reference of it and see every potential contact. And then now that that's all been surfaced, as a team, we can say who we feel comfortable actually reaching out to, right?

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Now it's made the team smarter because it has revealed resources that we've completely forgotten about.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  Now we as a team can actually come up with a strategy of who should approach. Because if you want a 10 million, 20 million, 30 million dollar deal as Google Cloud to sell a product, that's going to be human to human. But we are going to use that intelligence to make better decisions or accelerate the process. Now we've made the team smarter. It's not that we have less salespeople. We have more productive sales teams.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  How long do you think that's going to take? Because the hard part is

• 33:56Speaker 04

  Three years.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  That gap. So three years though.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Five years.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Could decimate an economy.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  Listen, I'm not disagreeing with you on anything. There's going to be a fundamental reckoning and we are going to discover very quickly what the limits of this version of technology is. If history tells us anything, and it could, I'm not saying it's going to repeat, but it often rhymes, right? That there's going to be a plateau at a certain point until the next innovation occurs.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  It's the end of the world as we know it, kids. And I feel fine. That's John Levy, kids. That's the reckoning. John, thanks for spending a few good moments with us today. For our listeners and viewers.

• 34:38Speaker 04

  And even more bad moments. That was your number.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  Hey, that's life, baby.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  That's part of our show.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Life happens on this show. For our listeners and viewers that want to know more about you, maybe pick up the book. Where should they go?

• 34:51Speaker 04

  So my website is johnlevy.com. J O N L E V Y. And then I'm John Levy, T like Thomas, L like Lion, B like Boy on all the socials. John Levy T L B. J O N L E V Y T L B. And the book is sold literally everywhere that books are sold. That sounds so much like an ad, but yeah, so Amazon.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  It's like when we tell people, listen to whatever your podcast platform of choice is, right? Kind of the same thing. Again, guys, the book is Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius. Chad, that is another one in the can. We out.

• 35:28Speaker 07

  Thank you for listening to, what's it called? A podcast. The Chad, the cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know, and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one. Cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode.

• 36:13Speaker 07

  And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out.