Audiovisual Cultures episode 95 – Cohesion Culture with Dr Troy Hall automated transcript

this is audiovisual cultures the podcast that explores different areas of the arts and cultural production with me paula blair visit patreon.com forward slash av cultures to find out more and to join the pod right hello and welcome to audio visual cultures today i have the great pleasure of speaking with dr troy hall who is an award-winning culture strategist radio show host speaker author and talent retention strategist dr hall is the author of cohesion culture proven principles to retain your top talent and a new book called fanny rules so we’ll hopefully try and get to talk about both of those at some point um and uh so i’d really just love to start by saying a very warm welcome dr troy hall hello well hello a very warm welcome to you too and wow what a what a beautiful face you cast on the screen and what a shame that your listeners can’t see it

um thank you that’s very kind i wasn’t expecting that i’m trying to take compliments i’m trying to just take them and not back them off these days well no it’s really a good thing to do because you know when someone gives you a compliment and you don’t know what to say the correct answer is thank you yes you know and then you get to move on as opposed you know it’s like when someone says oh isn’t that a wonderful outfit you have on and you go oh this old thing you know and it’s it’s kind of you know it really doesn’t uh support or it doesn’t extend you know the the great greeting that the individual gave you so i didn’t mean to make you blush so yes listeners she had a beautiful shade of rose happening on those cheeks when i made that uh sort of comment to her but uh but nonetheless it was a great comment to make i mean you know people are missing it so but anyway i i appreciate you having me on the show today it’s a great privilege and honor on my part oh thank you uh so where abouts do we find you are you based in south carolina is that where you are at the moment well yes i actually live in the states here in south carolina i live in a city called charleston which many folks will know because it’s one of the top 10 tourist destinations in the world and it’s the number one tourist destination in the us and uh it’s a great place to live but my work extends beyond the four walls or beyond the beaches of south carolina and i actually uh do work with companies from around the world mm-hmm freddie brilliant yeah so we’ll we’ll talk quite a bit about your work then um so for listeners it might be a bit of a change of tack for us because this is an arts and culture podcast and um if people have been with me for a while you know you’re a regular listener you should know that i take quite a borderless approach i like to think of it to what we consider to be arts and culture and i was so delighted to hear from um from troy because uh i’m really keen to hear more and learn more about this idea of cohesion culture in the workplace it’s come up before if you remember we had a guest called rachel brick on not so long ago and um you know she was talking about um workplace abuse and this is somebody who worked for quite a well-known arts and culture organization here in the uk and um so that’s something that maybe we can get into in a little bit but i was wondering troy if you wouldn’t mind maybe outlining that idea of cohesion culture and your your book about that topic well thank you so much for for asking so the the the we’ll start with the premise of coalition culture and what it is so a cohesion culture is a safe work environment where people have a sense of belonging are valued and share in mutual commitments and this strategic framework can fit for all organizations the good thing about about these elements and this understanding of culture is that it’s not restricted to just the us it actually works in collective cultures it works in uh individualistic cultures it works with you know individual people around the world i mean if you think about it who doesn’t want to belong to something you know as human beings we are actually created with a desire to want to be a part of something and so often times we will join clubs and organizations and do special events and volunteer and we do all of that because you know we want to belong we have families to extend those personal relationships and our value comes when we find purpose and meaning in what we do you know yes not everybody is afforded the opportunity just to work for the sake of working right many of us work for the sake of making a penny making a pound to help us get to where you know we want to be in life and so if you’re not working in a place that you truly love or a place where you feel inspired in a place where you know what you’re doing makes a difference then it does make it very tedious and uh you know very tiring and then the last is the shared mutual commitments and although teams and groups will work together to achieve a common goal it’s really important that organizations take the stand to first commit and and really do something for the development of their staff first in the mutual commitment and then expect the employee to respond afterwards so as you talked a little bit about a toxic work environment the cohesion culture is just the opposite of that and gives you it gives really individuals an opportunity to say we can take what we already have and we can make it better and we do that by looking at that strategic framework of belonging value and mutual commitment and say how can i make that work in my organization and make it unique for me it feels like a bit of a utopian dream in a way but you i think you’ve you’ve shown that it’s possible this can be achieved so um is there anything you could tell us about that you know where have these techniques been applied and what kinds of what kinds of things happen to achieve a cohesion culture in a workplace so the one really good thing about the the collision culture and again i’ve been speaking about this for years is that those three elements also help you create diversity equity and inclusion which of course is a very hot topic today uh to be able to think about it so when when you first consider belonging the opportunity here is to ensure that individuals aren’t just faking it until they make it so when you’re when you find that an individual is has a sense of belonging to the organization that individual then is enthusiastic they’re going the extra mile they’re loyal they’re helping other people they’re contributing therefore they’re really an active part they’re vested and invested into the organization some of this you can actually tell from some observations that you may have of individuals to determine that but for the large part what i do with organizations is i start with a cultural assessment tool and my phd is in global leadership and entrepreneurship and my dissertation was around group dynamics with an emphasis on cohesion and so this model is an opportunity to have a company benchmark and they can look at it and say wow this is where we are and then they can take a look at where they see some deficiencies and actually then you know create some programs uh probably the biggest things uh to keep in mind is this that today’s uh work uh force characteristics there’s four primary ones that i think your listeners might be interested in uh one of them is the entrepreneurial spirit so when it comes down to it individuals who are working in an organization today have developed or evolved a mindset in addition to those who are coming in to say i want some autonomy in what i’m doing i want to know that i have a certain level of authority to do the job and what is that level of authority you want oftentimes in an organization people want their employees to show great initiative but yet they haven’t given them permission to show that initiative so i like to think of initiative in this way so part of this belonging and part of getting people including in going and what they’re doing is look at and i compare it to a couch so i think you’ll kind of uh or a sofa so i might if i’m since i’m speaking to um my my british colleagues i’ll use sofa a little more sophisticated than the us word couch so in the sofa so you have an individual laying on the sofa that’s your first level of initiative and they’re just not doing anything they’re just laying on the sofa the next level of initiative is they sit up on the sofa because you’ve called their name so therefore they’re now listening to figure out what’s next then the next opportunity is they stand up in front of the sofa because they have an idea but they need to check and make sure that they can do it the highest level of initiative and that’s really where you’ll start to see individuals really blossom in this entrepreneurial spirit is when they when they get up from the from the sofa and jump over it and they actually go do something and then they tell you what they’re doing so that is what we’re looking at in this entrepreneurial spirit and then we have a level of collaboration and this is where people want their voice to be heard i can imagine like you you have great collaboration you want your voice to be heard you’ve chosen a podcast to share your voice and to be collaborative you allow guests to come on to interact with you just like your listeners will have an opportunity to think of how they will contribute and even if it’s just in their in the general arts and culture community even going through museums or or seeing art pieces or or going through lovely gardens um you know you still have a collaboration where you’ll want to talk about the art and what it means to you and how well it’s the same thing in a work environment people just talk about projects then instead of art but it’s the same thing they want to contribute and have their voice be heard then they want social interaction people want to be socially connected so podcast gives you an opportunity to be socially connected to you they listen to you on a regular basis they love the sound of your voice they want to hear what you have to say they hopefully will be interested in guests like myself who come on and hear something maybe a little different and they’ll think wow this is you know really a great thing i’m i’m connected i’m connected to another part of the world that i wasn’t connected to before and then lastly is purpose and meaning and it goes back to the value statement that i gave you before people will seek higher purpose in their life sometimes they will seek it from a higher being they’ll seek it from the universe they’ll seek it from their own self gratification but they do seek to make sure that what they do makes sense in the world and all of those particular items those those characteristics of the workforce are really important when you think about them uh because they transcend all generations and they transcend all cultures reading around uh quite a lot it seems to have a lot of emphasis on um on leadership and what employers can do to facilitate this environment um and um you i find that really interesting because in my experience it has been employers and management level colleagues who maybe are maybe are at the root of the toxicity and um it’s how do we get certain people to recognize that um that maybe they might be at the root of the issue you know if there’s a place where there’s a high turnover of workers because people become unhappy and they leave and you know and the common denominator is maybe the line manager for example or a team leader or something like that and it’s id when those people do not think or realize or understand that they might be the problem you is there something in in your work that helps people recognize that and evaluate that and change those behaviors one of the ways of course is the cultural assessment tool because it will give them information the reality is though when you think about it if the individual leader does not want to listen then the individual leader doesn’t listen and so there’s probably not many techniques i mean otherwise you’d be forcing yourself so there’s something called organ organizational or institutional power and then there’s the influential power so when you when you exercise this organizational or institutional power you’re kind of forcing people to do something whether they want to do it or not and guess what happens when you force people to do something whether they want to do it or not and you go away they go back to doing what they were doing before so it’s really hard so it’s influential power to get people to be more aware and and hopefully you can encourage the mind of the leader to be teachable when the individual is teachable they then build these seven other attributes together so i have seven attributes of an effective leader so when working with someone is trying to help them really expose some of these deep rooted uh cultural values or core values that the individuals have so so the technique is to ask questions to understand why an individual thinks the way they do so it’s and you want to have really safe conversations when you’re trying to change the mindset of someone if you are attempting to to change their mind by telling them all the things they’re doing wrong they’re not going to listen so the opportunity is to create um this experience of self-discovery that’s one way to do it um so the individual you try to hope that they’ll be teachable so you will ask open ended non-leading questions to them and ask them tell me a little bit about how you see the work environment how do you see individuals interacting with each other ask about those open questions and get them to talk another way to do it is um and again when i’m working with the ceo and i’m not really sure or i’m working with an executive team i’m not 100 sure where they are i give them an assignment to do for two to three weeks depending upon how long that they have the the fortitude or the rigor to do it but i ask them to do three things one i want them to check out the greetings in their organization how are people interacting with each other do they actually greet each other in the hallway so they greet each other in the morning on the phone on the zoom call wherever they happen to be what’s that communication like when they first do they just come in and go right to their workstation do they actually have some interactions with people what is the greeting and then again because i’m very careful remember depending upon which culture i’m in i’m saying will you apply that to what you believe is the standard for your culture you know what’s the standard of the way the greeting would be not to go off off uh too much but just to say in some in in some asian cultures the greeting will be different than it will be in uh the american culture so the greeting and the conversations and stuff will be different so you have to apply in africa there’s a different way in which those greetings may interact there’s some similarities but you so what i’m saying is you apply what is called cultural relativity to all of this and that means you understand the context of the culture then you apply it so then you look for these greetings right then the next thing you listen you listen for laughter do you hear the sound of people having fun and if so what are they having fun about and if they’re not having fun what are they dealing with what is going on what is happening and then the last element is you look for and prior to all of this um you know issue with the pandemic i used to call it a handshake so it was greeting laughter and handshake now the handshake is kind of molded a little bit because what i’m looking for is agreement so what you’re now trying to determine is what is the way people create agreements sometimes they do handshakes and that even comes in a greeting right a person sees each other sometimes they will hand shake they will hug they will have some sort of interaction uh that sort of creates agreement what does that look like maybe someone compliments another person out on the back there’s again another agreement of what the individual is doing so i send them off to go look for that for two to three weeks if the individual come back comes back and they haven’t discovered anything the likelihood is their desire to change change isn’t there and if their desire to change is not there then it’s an uphill battle and that really then creates a problem for the people in the organization because then they have one of two choices well they have three choices to make one do nothing two try to create conversation to make a change or three find another place to go and i don’t recommend that since i’m a talent retention strategist i try to create strategies to help you keep the people not to run them away yeah i think i’m thinking about some of my own past experiences and those of people who’ve been on the podcast as well and it’s trying to negotiate between so much of that stuff i don’t know if there’s any clear-cut answer but as you say it’s it’s about wanting to change and wanting to address any issues so it’s trying to maybe get people to that point in the first place and it helps with uh open questions because here’s what happens our our core values of who we are as people like like i believe honesty or being truthful i want to be fair i don’t want to do things that cause harm to people those are some of my basic values well my belief system is built for my values and just the same as yours and all your listeners your you have these values that you that you learn through life it’s called uh the implication theory um and or the attribution theory and so these values are created through your life experiences and then once you have those values your belief system starts to then be engaged based on those values well then your attitude of how you react uh to all of those things that are happening in your world are all occurring as a result of your core values and your beliefs so you’ve got core values beliefs and attitudes and all three of them equate to your behaviors and so then the behaviors that you take are a result of it so when you see individuals who are really not behaving in a way that you think would be the uh something that would be appropriate or healthy or good so like in the toxic because however you’ve defined toxic that you believe that there are some behaviors that aren’t appropriate then the best way to get to it is to understand their values and what is the core value of the individual because you can’t change the attitude you can’t change the belief if you haven’t addressed the value so that is the place to go so your questions and things should be then necessary should be then you know uh focused on their their value system and how that value system has come to be and that may create some enlightenment and again it’s all a part of allowing the individual who is steadfast in their way to have a self-discovery and aha moment that gives them permission to make a change allows them to be safe and vulnerable in a way in which they understand oh okay now here’s the thing i can also tell you is that it’s you can also appeal to the economic factor of leaders and sometimes you can excite them look let’s just take a look at the hard numbers so even if you don’t feel that your organization should change maybe you think that all the things you’re doing are great even though people think they’re toxic let’s just take a look at what you said before the turnover what are you spending in the way of turnover what do you see in the dollars and what um you can speak about is even opportunity cost opportunity cost to an individual is when they lose a person in an organization if you’ve had at least three years in an organization and you leave you cost the company 25 of your salary because you take organizational intelligence with you now it’s not stuff that you’re stacking in a briefcase or sending in a file to you somewhere else it’s what you know about the company that allows you to operate you know the personalities of the people you understand the rules and regulations um when people call and ask you information you know who to go to immediately you don’t spend a lot of time that there’s money to that so it’s 25 of the salary then another 15 of the salary on top of that is then what it cost you to woo that particular person to the organization and then the money that you’re spending on training them to actually complete the job or do the job now although people will come with skill sets they don’t know the the intricacies of your jobs they don’t know your company’s rules and regulations policies and procedures somebody has to teach them and even if they have to learn it themselves there’s still a cost involved in that so you’re talking about up to 40 percent of the individual salary is spent just replacing a person and when the person has been there for longer than than three years they’ve been there five years or seven or ten years and leave the organization it cost you even more because they are taking even more intellectual intelligence with them when they leave the organization well it’s really never had it laid out that way before that’s really fascinating um i hope hearing some of this can help any listeners out there who might be in the midst of something in their workplace um i think that’s really really helpful and there’s a lot there to think about

it might be nice now to to ask you then about your most recent publication if that’s okay because i think that’s something very close to your heart i understand but it’s also why you’re even interested in these areas as well so i’d love to hear about funny rules if that’s okay well absolutely it would be okay it’s my pleasure to introduce you so uh just for the video i’m holding it up fanning rules it’s a mother’s leadership lessons that never grow old and these are um the life uh teachable moments that my mother passed along to me as a young boy and as a young man and it’s a way for me to honor my mother so at 12 years old my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and we did not think she would make it i’m from a very very poor town in west virginia and we were very poor we sometimes i say we didn’t have two nickels to rub together to actually make things work but mom was very clear about some things and one of the things that she taught me was that my character is going to be defined by the choices i make not the circumstances i find myself in she said there’ll be circumstances all the time but how you choose to act about them will make a difference she told me that successes and failures don’t shape my life it’s how i handle them and so if i really take those i took those those life lessons to heart and as a 12 year old boy i helped nurture her on her bedside we thought she again she would die because 50 some years ago when people were diagnosed with cancer ultimately more of them died than people survived and uh so this was an opportunity where my mom chose life she said i’m not going to be defined by my cancer cancer is a circumstance i’m going to live life and i’m going to try to teach my son as much as i possibly can so in those years and of course there were some times before me mom was always mentoring me so i kind of thought of my i think of my mom now is really my greatest mentor and she spent so much time with me because mom was the uh the nurturer and the caregiver dad was the protector and provider and by the way we all got along very well but the book is about mom although i’ve included a little bit of dad because my brother said to me he said if you’re going to write a book about mom he said don’t forget dad and i said it’s okay dad will play a role just like he did in our family mom was a star so mom’s the star of the book fawn was the star of the family so that would be the case well the great news is and i don’t mind sharing this because it’s all part of it but 43 she lived 43 years from that time before she passed away but what she passed away from was not natural causes she died as a result of dementia and alzheimer’s so my mom could outrun cancer but she could not outrun alzheimer’s and dementia so the my proceeds of the book are going to benefit the alzheimer’s association uh so that we can do something good alzheimer’s stole my mom’s memories and this book is a chance for me to give them back so it’s 31 teachable moments wrapped around nine rules and uh it becomes a great guide for leaders to to really take and absorb this so purpose-driven leaders would like this book emerging leaders would like this book because these lessons really will make sense to you when you start to see them and they’re built in bite-sized pieces easy to read easy to absorb and understand and you get an opportunity to understand a little bit about fannie and i think it’s also important for our listeners to say this like it’s not lost on me that fanny means something else in other cultures so my mom’s nickname was fanny and how she got that nickname was her girlfriends and so i tell the story in the book but there’s so much other stuff in the book that i don’t mind sharing this just to tease the listeners a little bit in case they’d like to get it and by the way it is available on amazon yukon so you uh they’re in the united kingdom so you’ll be able to get it and um so uh so she got this she got her nickname because she was 98 pounds soaking wet and her girlfriends were all about her being more flirtatious they said and her name was francis and they said francis you need to be more flirtatious mom was shy and reserved i mean when she spoke she said great things but she was shy and reserved and she was saving herself for this beanpole of a man named slim who was my dad so they were fannie and slim 65 years married they were fanny and slim most people didn’t even know their real names so the girlfriend said to her they said you know honey the only way you are ever going to have one is if we give you that name so the name fanny was born and mom wore that moniker proudly for this 65 70 years that she had that had that name and um so you know we really refer to her as my mom so my mom fanny and that’s um you know little that’ll give you an idea about the book and what’s behind it sounds wonderful so it sounds like a really good personal way of actually passing on some really important knowledge and some knowledge it’s really prescient in the world today because there’s so much talk about thought leadership and you know um all of us here in any way entrepreneurial we have to be our own marketers and everything because i mean i can say i’m a podcaster but i’m also a marketer you know i have to i do all the marketing for the podcast myself and everything and i’m having to learn all of that and how to influence and to be um you know um yeah just there’s so much language you have to learn and so much to do with algorithms and everything and how to hit the sweet spots of stuff which i’m still very much nervous about yeah so all of that it just feels very transferable to a range of of different approaches to what we think of as leadership yes it is really it’s the leader so i have uh so a couple of messages that when i i work at in not only my consulting world but also as an executive coach and so i have a few messages that i sort of begin with so one of them that i would share with you is this is that you cannot serve the many until you serve the one and what that means is that you the leader have to be right before you can figure out how to help someone else and if you yourself are not in the right spot just like we talked before about those toxic leaders when those toxic leaders are not right how are they helping the other people who are part of the organization all they’re doing is making the other individuals frustrated over the fact that they can’t actually you know move forward with their lives and they they feel like that leader needs to get right so in the book cohesion culture proven principles to retain your top talent the first two chapters of the book is on leadership it’s actually helping you make sure that you really know and the family rules as a companion to that because it expands on more of the leadership aspects of you because you really need to get the leadership right leadership is what drives the culture you have hr strategies and practices that begin holding it up and begin supporting it but it’s the leadership that actually makes a difference in the culture not the hr and hr people aren’t running around and actually making sure the culture is okay in every department and with every business unit and every individual it’s the leaders who actually have that responsibility to do it and that’s the heart of the people that i work with is to make sure that that gets handled and that people are able to respond in that way so so from that not only is it getting the leader right but also that message you cannot serve the many until you serve the one reminds us that we aren’t always leading a group of them we are often leading a group of him and her and so therefore we have to be responsive to those individuals to their styles to their types to how they respond to the world and the transformative leader is the ultimate leader for a cohesion culture because that particular individual says i will think of someone else first and then self not that they don’t think about self this isn’t mortarism this is not where the individual completely forgets about but they think about someone else first and then self and they do that so that gives us an opportunity to look at it the other way is to say you cannot serve the many until you serve the one which says that i must see the humanness of the one if i’m going to change change the plight of many so if you want to be involved in social so in your arts and culture listeners who maybe uh are with non-profits who actually are thinking about um you know solving things like issues with agriculture or housing transportation hunger you know self development whatever whatever it is that they’re doing um they must first see the humanness of the one then they can be involved in understanding the many and it really enhances and changes it and that became very clear to me when i was in kenya so i had a couple of opportunities to be in kenya on some field work uh during one of them i was in the village and i met with three men uh these three men had been involved in this village but he had a bad mentor who actually paid for them to be educated and they could have left the village and gone somewhere else but they chose to come back now this village was in poor economic conditions as you can expect in most of the areas in in rural africa um that it had a lot of crime there was very poor again economic conditions poor housing for water all of this there was uh drugs um and they they really looked at it and said that that the real issue in this area that something that they could say was the root cause was prostitution and so they then looked at it and said we must figure out the difference between the person who says i choose to do this because i have no choice and the person who chooses to do it who says that’s the way i want it to be so they went with the individual who felt like they didn’t have a choice and they said they taught them a skill or a trade and i was very interested in that and i said well well tell me you know what are you going to do and they said well we’re going to teach them to sew this way they’ll be able to create something take it to the marketplace and be able to sell something other than themselves so they’ll be able to have worth for themselves because now they will make money from something that they have put together and that would be a great thing and all of a sudden my u.s mind is going crazy and i’m thinking like wow how many sewing machines how big is the space where you’re going to be have you passed out pamphlets you have people coming into to do it you know that’s all going inside my crazy head thankfully i knew that i should not speak that and i simply asked the question and said so how many sewing machines do you have and he said one he said because i must teach the one who will then help me teach the many and that all of a sudden became so crystal clear to me because the one taught two the two to each is four the four is eight and 16 32 and moving on and we know how that can actually create the ground swell that we need to create change and what we do know is this just like in this village when those women when their safety security and protection were challenged they could never self-actualize to being a more fulfilled human being because their safety and security and protection that’s what happens we retreat in so in an organization that has a toxic environment that’s what happens that’s why you don’t have great performance in a toxic environment because people are so concerned for their safety and protection they can’t self-actualize and do jobs and think of themselves as bigger and better and greater and thinking of helping someone else because you’re so focused you force the individual to focus on themselves to become myopic and to move inside but when you give people life when you give people hope you break the cycle of helplessness and that’s what those men did they broke the cycle of helplessness by providing hope it’s a great story yeah you must have loads of examples of that from your travels your research all over the place because i i know you travel widely to deliver talks and to consult and all sorts of things and um you deliver courses and everything so i mean do you have any other of those kinds of stories have you seen anything else that you’ve witnessed that has informed a lot of your books and i’m a metaphorical uh teacher or metaphorical speaker you know so i like to give you know real life examples of things and so so this one uh a a little lighter on the lighter side so i was uh in the philippines and i actually uh visited with uh raquel choa who is known as the queen of chocolate so although you have the queen of england philippines has the queen of chocolate and so raquel goes um her history goes back to many many generations uh taught them how to use the the cacao tree and that’s where the great chocolate comes from the very rich chocolate comes from the cacao tree so we were there and um we were learning about this cacao tree and this chocolate and all this one of the things that i thought was really surprising to me was they allow the beginning stock of the cacao tree to grow maybe nine months 11 months and it has these beautiful green leaves that just start at the top of them nice big full leaves and they cut and they cut the stem off right before there i’m thinking to myself wow wonder why they they did that why did they cut the tree there to do that well what they didn’t do is they slipped the top and then they take a piece of a mature cacao tree and they graft it inside of that and then wrap it all up in plastic to make sure that the cacao tree doesn’t get any diseases or anything with it and then they allow it to continue to to bond and when it does it changes how the cacao tree go grows so if i were to ask you do you know how long it takes a cacao tree to actually produce fruit when it just grows from the ground fresh up i don’t i would guess five years i don’t know five years that’s a great guess exactly five years great and we didn’t plan this so this is awesome and then now when you graft a piece of it how long do you think it takes the cacao tree to actually produce fruit ah um oh i don’t know maybe at half’s the time i don’t know that’s it brilliant you are 100 brilliant you see your listeners know how brilliant you are i now have heard it’s right it reduces it in half so that’s the value of mentoring so what i’ve learned about mentoring is that’s when you’re taking the young cacao tree and you’re grafting it with them with someone who is seasoned um and actually you know allow them to to really move further and faster along in their career we know this that 63 of all employees in an organization are looking for growth development and advancement so be the mentor be the cacao tree that is actually grafted to the young cacao tree and make a difference in producing that chocolate in half the time that it would have taken them to to do it regularly and uh so those are a couple of the stories that i would give you that kind of give you some examples of uh of different life lessons i think the most important thing i would also say in this is that if you listen to what i’m telling you and you think of it as wisdom then it’s because you feel that the knowledge has been applied so when people have said that knowledge is power they have forgotten the rest of the sentence knowledge is not power by itself knowledge is just an accumulation of information you can hoard information you can hoard books you can collect things you can know all kinds of information but if you never put that information to use it’s never wisdom so therefore you never have the power the power is using the knowledge and information you have so when your listeners are listening to the stories that i’m telling today and they’re actually thinking about them when they execute those stories they then will be able to see and fulfill the wisdom of what we’re actually talking to you about today and the same thing will hold true to all of your guests who will come after me and to those guests who came before that when they go back and re-listen to the recordings and you hear information put that information to use don’t let it just sit there and wait on itself to develop but actually do something with it that’s yeah really fantastic advice and a really great analogy as well um i mean what it what it strikes me it what strikes me from that is that i think certainly in the arts um you know and i’m thinking about film that my background is film cinema um and with freelancers of of all kinds i think we’re it feels like we’re pitted against each other we have to compete for everything and that idea of mentorship i think is so important to it to just remove that element of feeling or perceiving a threat from someone and moving towards helping each other out i think is a really big cultural shift and probably a wide range of different types of workplace different types of you know just anything anything any kind of system yeah i think it’s like open source when you think about open source um uh technology yeah open source technology is that everybody shares in it so you don’t really own it you contribute to it you extend it so if you think if all of a sudden we could take that mindset and go wow i wonder what that would apply like instead of being so threatened by the fact that somebody might get some you know a leg up on you or do something a little better than you did you kind of i think for me it would mean well i still have to stay sharp so i don’t mind sharing my information because i know i’m going to remain sharp or i’m going to work to remain sharp in what i do so a couple of things that i wanted to also tell you about cohesion culture okay good one of them is is that cohesion is what’s called a causal phenomenon it’s not correlational so in correlate so when i say that meaning that a correlation typically is taking two items and finding a statistical relationship between them either they statistically relate or they don’t often times we look at correlational data and we like to predict that oh these two things happen this is good for us this means we can do business and build business on that it’s not necessarily true what you want to look for is what we call causal phenomena and causal phenomenons means cause and effect so here’s what we know in research every time cohesion is present you get performance the level of performance you get is a level of engagement of where individuals are contributors individuals are enthusiastic they’re loyal they help other people they think beyond themselves that’s the level of engagement you get and so with cohesion you get performance you get engagement with correlational data you just get relationships so i’m going to give you an example to share that with you so you have a rainy day in the united kingdom we have yes yes we do today so so do you open your um bumper shoot do you open your umbrella uh stay inside mostly stay inside right so right and so the opportunity is is that you can have a rainy day and not open an umbrella you can have an open umbrella and not have a rainy day sometime if you do get a chance to go to your coast and go to your beach line you might sit under an umbrella to shade you from the sun and if you do the umbrella is open and there is no rainy day that’s correlational so i can correlate the fact that rainy days and umbrellas have a correlation to each other but one does not cause the other you don’t open an umbrella and you get rain you don’t have rain and automatically open an umbrella but when you have cohesion you do you anytime you have cohesion you have performance if you have performance you are more likely it’s attributed to cohesion if you can’t really have the level of performance that we want in an organization without first really developing time and energy on cohesion the other thing that also happens when i work with folks is they hear me talk about it i’m very passionate about collision culture and they think well you know especially your folks from the united kingdom they’re saying oh well he just wants to americanize us he just wants to make us an american culture and i’m like no no no that’s not it i take the strategic framework of belonging value and shared mutual commitments and lay it over top of your organization for you to then say i now can organize the chaos within my company because i now know the structure right so i’m not making it the same it’s how your culture is but in those areas so the one of the analogies or metaphors i use is about chocolate cake so do you like chocolate cake yes good have you had at least one piece of chocolate cake in your life yes have you had more than one piece of chocolate cake most definitely yes okay and i promise you and your listeners i will not ask if you’ve had two pieces at the same time so the fact that you’ve had two pieces of chocolate cake the likelihood is you’ve had it at different times and from different bakers would that be true yes good now did they taste exactly the same no no but you but they tasted enough that you could recognize that they were chocolate cake yes good there are three primary ingredients to a chocolate cake in addition to the cocoa the milk the eggs and the wheat the flour so in looking at those items you can have a variety of milk sources a variety of egg sources and wheat sources that actually create the flour so you’ve got all this going in so it depends on how those are put together that actually create the chocolate cake you’re going to eat and when you taste it or when you see it you recognize that it’s chocolate cake you don’t have any problem recognizing this chocolate cake but you don’t look at it and go wow that chocolate cake looks exactly like the other person’s chocolate cake so i’m not going to have it so a cohesion culture is exactly that it’s your chocolate cake so i like to say that when you do when you make your croatian culture you make your chocolate cake means you get to have your cake and your cohesion too very nice very nice analogies really good i can see you’ve really really thought these sites and the metaphors really do help bring bring the ideas to life so i really hope that helps a lot of our listeners um i am i’m wary of keeping you too long so um is there anything else that you wanted you really wanted to say today that we haven’t got to yet nothing that we haven’t gotten to what i would just really you know like to thank you again for uh giving me a chance to talk about my mom and to really promote the fanny rules book uh it’s just so it’s so important to those of us who have been caregivers with people who’ve suffered with alzheimer’s and dementia to understand that it’s not an easy you know road to to to be on and uh when we have to find ways we all have to find our own ways to give those memories back we know that our loved ones are not going to remember them no matter how much we want them to they’ll have moments when they’ll remember them but they won’t be the same and those memories when they’re stolen from you find a way to give them back and this was just my way of giving those memories back uh to my my children my grandchildren uh you know my my brother and his family uh a way for them to kind of remember uh you know grandma in a way in which they wouldn’t have remembered her normally yes and also then the rest of us can benefit from her wisdom and we can apply it yes and so now when you see and hear fannie rules you’ll know that i’m talking about my mom yeah and i also um it makes me want to fist punch as well funny rules yeah like that it feels nice exactly well women women power if you think about it i mean there’s such a great strong you know conversation about that is that the uh the fact that here we have an individual with a 12th grade edu 12th grade us education um which means no college no formal education beyond that uh who was wise beyond her years i mean things that she would tell me like one of those uh conversations that that she would tell me is about being mediocre she says don’t be mediocre don’t be lukewarm she says you want to be hot you want to be cold she said because mediocre is just blah and it just settles you know for for whatever and so i took that message and i then crafted it into this one and it’s that mediocre settles to the bottom and complains about the view and i never wanted to be a person who complained about the view i wanted to celebrate the view and so she would also tell me that i could be anything i wanted to be so if you want to understand how i could actually move from this poor town in west virginia and actually receive you know two postgraduate degrees end up with a phd you know all of this is because the fact that this woman said i can be whatever i want it to be but whatever i wanted to be be the best of it that i can and she didn’t put any parameters on it she said if you want to be a janitor and you want to sweep floors she said then be the best floor sweeper there is and fanny told me that i needed to clean in the corners because she said a good floor sweeper will clean in the corners because anybody can sweep in the middle that’s brilliant that’s a that’s just such a lovely again a lovely picture to leave us with and that’s a really important message i think um so dr troy hall i cannot thank you enough for your time today it’s been really informative really enjoyable um so do you want to just tell us very quickly where listeners can find more information about you and all of your amazing work well great thank you so on linkedin you can connect with me at dr troy hall that’s dr troy hall t-r-o-y-h-a-l-l so it’s a real simple names ten letters right and then if you want to check with me on the website it’s those same 10 letters drtroyhall.com and if you want to know more about the books that i put out then it’s drtroyhall.com books awesome that’s really great and i’ll put those links in our show notes everywhere that this episode is going to be going out as well so it’s easy for people well thank you so much it’s been really enjoyable i hope you’ve enjoyed your time as well i have and as i i think as i might say customarily cheers cheers it’s been splendid

this is a cozy people production with me paula blair the music is common ground by airton used under a 3.0 non-commercial creative commons license and is available at ccmixter.org if you’ve enjoyed this episode please give us a good reading subscribe and recommend audiovisual cultures to your friend all of our contact details socials information ways to listen and our mailing list sign up can be found on our website linked in the show notes thank you so much for listening and supporting take care and i’ll catch you next time