Unlocking Organizational Success: Simplicity, Alignment, and Authentic Leadership

Cristina Amigoni: Be careful how numbers are used, and are they actually getting you to where you want to go, and do they actually matter. Sometimes, you don't need numbers. Sometimes, you just need to not hear the squeaky wheel.

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives. 

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that's with our families, co-workers or even ourselves. 

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni. 

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore. 

Both: Let’s dive in. 

“Authenticity means freedom.”                                                                       

“Authenticity means going with your gut.”

“Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.”

“Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.”

“It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.”

“Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.”

“It's transparency, relatability, no frills, no makeup, just being.”

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human. Today, we have another book recommendation. I think this one is going to go on the Siamo-required reading list. This one was a short read but a fun one. Also, hello, Cristina. We’re here. I'm going to back my way into a greeting. 

Cristina Amigoni: You could do the book recommendation on your own. I don't necessarily need to be here. 

Alex Cullimore: Let me just talk through my thoughts on this. That would be much more interesting than us just having a dialogue. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. We're back. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. We're back. This should be after some summer break, so we wanted to kind of hit this with some – we got some more of our usual podcasting coming up, some guests, some book recommendations, some general leadership ideas that we've been coming up with and working with. That will be a lot of what's coming up in this season, so welcome back. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Welcome back. We're talking about The Advantage by Pat Lencioni. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes, yes. I'm sure many people have read at least some of his books. He's famous for things like Getting Naked, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Ideal Team Player. He works at The Table Group. Also, the group that came up with the Working Genius, which is one we've talked about, I believe, on this podcast even before. A very interesting group, lots of great thoughts about human-centered leadership and what it means to really dive in and have a more human-based workplace and what it means to kind of use all those things that people like to call soft skills. The Advantage, I think, is a great description of that. He likes to use the term, and I think it's a good one. Organizational health, what does it take to have organizational health?

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. How it's the key ingredient to organizational success. 

Alex Cullimore: One of the things that really struck out on there, he eventually gets into defining organizational health. But he talks about how people often get hooked into needing to have a strategy or be the most clever strategy. Or they think they need more know-how to bring more industry knowledge to the table. 

He reiterated that in all of his time consulting and in all the companies that he's worked with, he's never met a company that didn't have the intellectual capability to be successful. They all know enough about their industry. They know enough about the levers of business. The one thing that is often overlooked is the organizational health piece that allows that all to glue together and actually come together successfully. So you can use all that know-how and actually create the success we all say we're looking for and see those metrics we all like to chase. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. The ironic thing is that the organizational health piece is founded on the simplistic things, on the things that we think are simple. But they're the first things that we forget to do, and we don't focus on. So all the expertise, all the intellectuality, all the complex stuff is usually present in organizations. It's the simple things that bring down organizational health and create environments where we don't get the outcomes. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That was a huge – I think it was well-stated in the book. It's something we've talked about a little bit, even on this podcast. We've certainly talked about it a lot just in our work and how we approach work. But one of the things he comes up with in the beginning is talking about the biases that organizations tend to come up with that stop them from approaching organizational health because it is a lot of the simplistic things. 

Organizational health is the ability of an organization to function. It is literally like body health. It's the ability to execute on the things that it needs to execute on. It ends up being all those things like effective cascading communication and having actual alignment within leadership teams and taking the time to get aligned instead of losing time. Finding out later you were not aligned and having to undo work and redo things and find buy-in again. It's all of these things that feel straightforward and having effective meetings with the a planned agenda and not having just what he calls meeting stew, which is a great visual of trying to mash all of the ideas that you need to cover with people into one meeting and then having nothing effective come out of it. Taking that three minutes on the end of a meeting, so everybody really just reaffirms what they heard from the meeting instead of, like I said, going two weeks later and finding out you weren't aligned. 

The biases that get in the way of doing these things are things like the bias towards sophistication. I think he called it the sophistication bias that any solution has to be complex and difficult and overwrought and just a little bit of just it has to be more clever than the next competition when realistically a lot of the solutions are pretty straightforward. It just takes admitting that and committing to doing it. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, and also the over-sophistication of goals. He talks about how even in goal settings you end up with a million goals, and they all are priority. Or the priority depends on the leader. Or the priority depends on the week, the mood, mercury and retrograde, which really means that you have no goals. So pick one and make sure that everybody's, again, aligned, again, towards the one. Everybody understands what their role is into that, and they work as a team, as one. The team piece, it's a big part of the organizational health that he talks about in The Advantage is how do you create an effective team. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Which is why we're putting it on our required reading list. It's right up our alley here of what we do and how we do it. Since I do like that piece about the aligning people and making sure you are all on the same team because it's easy to have silos. It's easy to have conflict. It's easy to feel like, “Well, we did our part.” But he points out like a sports metaphor of a football team where the team loses the game. But one of the players on the offense team says, “Well, we did our part. We scored as many goals as we could,” which doesn't really matter when the defense lets in more points than the offense scored. 

The whole team did lose. Yes, you might have done your part or what you thought was your part. But how much are you actually supporting the team, and how much are you really embracing that mindset that you all win together, or there's no actual winning? The organization wins or it's not a win, 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. He's got all sorts of great concepts like that, especially going back to the basics of like, “Then how do we become a team?” He's like – well, the first thing that he looks at is, again, the simplistic stuff or the stuff that can be looked as simplistic, which is, well, we have to know each other. We have to communicate. We have to know how to address conflict. We have to understand that we are interdependent. We have to be accountable with each other, which all come down to the essential human skills. 

Again, it's like it's taking away that need or that desire for complexity. It's not complex. It's hard to do, but it's not complex. We avoid conversations that may turn into conflict. The concept of approaching those conversations and leaning into them is not complex. It's hard to do, but it's not complex. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. This is a series of very simple but not easy ideas. That’s a great example, the productive conflict one. He talks about how any effective team really truly needs passionate conflict. You have to go back and forth. You have to have different ideas. You have to share those different ideas. You have to assert and advocate for those ideas. As a team, decide when you've landed on one, you're going to go forward with you're all committing to it because, again, you're all still committing to the win. It’s not about who came up with the idea. It’s about trying to advocate for what you think will be the best idea to land the vision or to further the vision that you're all working on. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. When I was thinking through what Pat talks about and even when you look at what makes leaders successful, what makes a team successful, an organization successful is it is those simple things that comparing to sports, if we go to the sports analogy, again, if you become an expert or if you become a very good player of any sport, let's say tennis, you become a good player of tennis to the point that you're scoring points. You have great shots. You're able to really narrow down the more complex techniques, whether it's slicing the ball or hitting the ball with the racket between your legs backwards with your – in a headstand. 

All of those things are things that we see in expert players. Yet as a tennis player who has never gone anywhere close to professional or Wimbledon but has gotten to the level of playing tennis well, the thing things that I miss and that my coach always had to remind me of and are in my head because now my coach is in my head when I play tennis are the simple things, are the basics that I learned when I was learning to play tennis at 10 years old, which is bend your knees. Point the shoulders where you want the ball to go. Keep your wrists steady. They're not the complex things that I miss when a shot doesn't go as I would like it to go. It's the simple stuff that I have to go back to reminding myself constantly bend my knees. Point the shoulder. Listen. 

In a leadership perspective, listen to the people in the room, to everybody. Listen to all the voices. Lean in to the hard conversation. Start with creating the story when you have a car conversation. Include the impact of it. Don't assume that people know what you're talking about. Establish an agenda. Are we all on the same page? This is where we are, and this is where we want to go. Ask open-ended questions. Like some of the things that we talk about in leadership, they are simplistic and they're the things that we don't do. We recognize immediately like, “Oh, no. I actually didn't listen to everybody's voice because I just wanted to go in with my agenda and share what I wanted to do.”

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That’s what makes this difficult because those are all natural tendencies and easy, easy to fall into. It's easy to avoid these conversations. It's easy to not do the things that we know should be done. If we get into the habit of those, doing those things can become easy. Then you get the effective results. 

To go back to the simplicity, like doing these simple things, the other prime example is Katie Ledecky. She talks about and her coach talks about every time she has something that she's just not quite getting, she just works on that, that one thing. It’s how you lift your arm out of the water, how you get into the water, how you like – she'll just do that over and over and over again. 

Then we all got to see the results of the last Olympics and, hopefully, at these Paris Olympics coming up for us as well that she's just laps ahead of people by the end of these races because she's worked out all of the kinks on all of the small things that matter. Every little piece of form that can be perfected, she's perfected those things and just works on the little things that have clearly made a huge difference. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. They definitely do because it's a sum of those things. In a leadership context, how often do we go in and listen to actually understand with curiosity? How often do we actually go in to listen and understand what's happening beyond the words? Understand that people are taking the space to share, and sometimes they don't usually share. That's what you're listening for is like, “Oh, wow. Let me actually learn here. There's a lot I can learn from this person that doesn't usually share as much.” It’s now sharing a lot with the group because they feel that the space is more safe. 

Now, you've learned that you've created a safer space, and you can go back to figuring out how that worked out, what made it safer, how can you repeat that. You're learning what this person that may not share all the time is actually passionate about. How can that help move the team forward, the organization forward? There's always a lot more than just listening and then, after the fourth person speaks, getting bored. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. I think that actually plays into exactly one of the biases is like, “Well, we don't have time to do that,” and we hear that sometimes. We talk a lot about how to listen and deeply listening in our leadership classes and some of those pieces that become really important and when to let people continue to talk. It's understandable that people bring up the same concern a lot of the time about like, “Well, we don't have time to do that.” I mean, I have decisions that I have to make. We have deadlines we have to meet. 

Yes, all of those things are true, and it's a short-sighted view if you miss out on the fact that you lose two weeks of trying to realign because you didn't take five minutes to listen. You lose a relationship that takes a lot longer to build, or you just slow down the building of that relationship if you don't give the time and the listening and the figuring out who that person is and what they can do. Take that time. You're just going to lose it in different ways, and you won't be able to identify those. 

But when you do have them, things will move faster. It might feel slower at first, but the whole system operates much more efficiently, and you will get all those speed back and more. It won't feel so much friction all the time if you do that work and just spend a little bit of that time ahead of time instead of thinking I don't have the time, which is understandable with all the pressures that we have. It makes sense we feel that way. If we take a little bit longer view, I think we'll see the time that we're losing by not taking that time. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, which also brings up a great exercise that Pat talks about in the book, the Personal Histories Exercise, which goes back to taking the time to getting to know people as humans, as opposed to title, department, responsibility, tasks, projects, degree, whatever none thing that we usually focus on. It's like rather than talking about a project or a task or the next decision that needs to be made, what if you created a team by getting people to understand who they are as humans. 

The Personal Histories Exercise which he talks about doing when he goes in to consult with executive teams and leadership teams where he does right away. It's one of the first activities they do because after that, you can work as a team on whatever is important. But first understand who the people are in the room and give, again, that space to listen to every single one of them. Yes, it's going to take time. Yes, it's going to take patience to listen and learn. But that's the point. 

Alex Cullimore: Also, we've been part of many conversations where that unearthed something that was about to be a giant roadblock. If it hadn't been unearthed then, that was about to explode in everybody's face. It feels, again, like, “Yes, I don't have the time to do that.” Yes. But you also don't have the time not to do that. You definitely don't have the time to hit roadblocks you didn't see coming that you could have found if you had taken the time to listen to, to figure out what needed to be done. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, definitely. Yes. I think there's a huge underestimation of the time and the cost and the energy that's after the fact, after things don't work out. You're constantly redoing, and you're constantly going back to the drawing board, and you're creating those ties that are now much difficult to create because there's histories, there's biases, and there's assumptions based on what didn't work out, as opposed to starting from a blank page and starting from creating the social connections, creating the human connections so that it is easier or a little bit easier to disagree two weeks down the line, two months down the line. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. It's a lot harder to be mad at somebody when you understand them. It's a lot harder to have unproductive conflict when you understand them. It's a lot easier to have passionate conversation the way you need to and have passionate conflict the way you need to when you just know the person. You trust that that person has the best intentions of the vision in mind, and they're not trying to outwardly attack you or your idea. It's just about advocating for the idea they think they have that that could be better, and maybe it is, and staying open to that and staying open to both forms of those. 

It's a lot easier to have that actual connection and do the things that we all know need to be done in a workplace if we just put this base layer organizational health at the forefront of our focus and allow those to happen. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. In that vein, one of the things that I like Pat, the way he puts it in the book, is, too, it's like we have this measurement obsession. In the measurements, the companies and the organizations that make the headlines are not the ones that have high organizational health. Sometimes, they are. Patagonia has very high organizational health, and they have results as well in terms of a successful financial company. 

But when you see a headline of a company saying ABC company is great because everybody talks to each other, that's not a headline that makes the papers. So if we keep chasing those headlines that are more financially driven or sensationally driven, then we miss out on all the possibilities of actual organizational health and success that may not make headlines. In that success, as an organization, we have to look at what are we measuring and what's worth the measuring. Do we – organizational health and effective teams and cohesive teams, sometimes it is when you don't hear the squeaky wheel. 

If you think about it from a driving car perspective or any machinery, it's like you don't even know that the car has all the thousands and millions of parts that it has and what they are supposed to do until one of them doesn't work. Otherwise, you're just driving. Most of the times, you're so distracted in the driving that you don't even know you're in a car until you get off and you have to park. But you don't pay attention to the squeaky wheel until the wheel squeaks. 

Maybe that's a measure is that there is no squeak, that everything is working smoothly, as opposed to trying to find some numbers to attribute to like, “Oh, I've driven five days with no squeaky wheels, so my car is working fine.” I'm like, “No. I've driven –” The wheel was squeaking once last month, and that's annoying. I'm going to remember that more than the days that it wasn't squeaking. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That measurement goes right into the poor incentives. If you have like, “I want maximum number of days without a squeaky wheel,” that goes to people can spend all of their time then working on a way to muffle that. Not fix what was squeaking on the wheel but spend a lot of time making sure that it can't be heard, even when there's a problem. That's the problem with falling into so much measurement-based. You better be really careful what you're measuring and have people understand the actual intent of what's being measured. 

It's not that I don't – I just hate squeaks. I do. I think they're very irritating as a person. But that's not the measure of success. That's not why having a squeaky wheel is bad. It's indicative that something is off, that some of the alignment is off. You'll lose efficiencies other places, just in general operations. But you'll also be risking the occasional blowout of like, “Uh, yes. Nope, got no breaks. That's real bad. What do we do now?” 

Cristina Amigoni: That would be real bad. 

Alex Cullimore: Adding away and just pushing away and trying to meet those metrics. You can chase the headline about the biggest revenue goal. But what did you do to get there, and is that sustainable, and does it matter that you got that headline a month afterwards? Or is your company now just so in shambles just to prop up that one number? There's so much rework to do, and we fall so easily into, “Hey, I want to see goals, and we're making progress towards goals.” That makes sense that we want to see the progress. 

When we start to try and put unhelpful measurements on it, we start to just play to those measurements. Well, we're showing this measurement. We're showing that that conversation is up. Is it the right conversation, or did you say we measured by IM chats that people weren't communicating as much? Then suddenly you've incentivized people sending back and forth hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi 40 times, just to make it look like there's messages. 

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. Or it's like there's too many meetings. I'm like, “Maybe the –” It’s not about the number of meetings you have. Maybe it's about the quality of the meetings you're having. What's happening in the meetings? What's not happening in the meetings? Are you talking in circles? Do you have 10 different people thinking that the meeting is about 10 different things? Is there lack of alignment? Is there alignment? Can you actually know if this is a tactical meeting versus a strategy meeting versus a standup meeting? Which one is it?

Rather than looking at measurements, “Oh, let's reduce the number of meetings,” and then two months later, a month later realizing like, “Oh. Well, we've got a bunch of critical incidents, or we've got a bunch of issues because nobody talks to each other.” I'm like, “Well, no. We reduce the number of meetings.” We met the measurements. We met the matrix, but we've created all sorts of other problems. So get to the core of what is it that you actually want. Do you want more effective meetings? Then get to more effective meetings, which, again, do you really want to measure it? Measure it in terms of numbers. Is that a successful measure?

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That bias towards numbers and something that feels quantitative and something that feels like we can then point to and then point a trend on and then point to what has happened or not happened, it feels like that's more concrete. But because the actual things we're trying to get to, a successful company, is so much more intangible, we're just at best, if we're really lucky, we have a measurement that approximates some of that. At worst, we're just creating incentives that work against the actual success and functioning of the machine. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Not only but data is biased. There's an illusion that somehow because it's numbers that it's objective. It's not objective because it's still human processing the numbers and telling the story they want to tell to validate their point using data. We're not against numbers. We're just saying be careful how numbers are used. Are they actually getting you to where you want to go, and do they actually matter? Sometimes, you don't need numbers. Sometimes, you just need to not hear the squeaky wheel. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. It could be if your edict is we need to have better meetings, then a measure of success might be that the number of meetings reduces over time. It might happen that way. Asking everybody to reduce their number of meetings is going to go very differently than telling people why you need what needs to come out of each meeting and taking the time to do that. 

I think in the book he jokes about a lot of executives, and it's natural to kind of bulk at that. They're like, “Well, we don't have time to figure out what every single meeting has to be about. We're too busy in the chaos of all the meetings that we haven't figured out.” It’s so self-fulfilling. If you don't take the time to do it, you end up in firefighting mode when you could have just not started the fire. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Also, just like anything else, just like muscles, when you're trying a new workout or playing a new sport or doing something new, it takes longer at the beginning. Then once it becomes a muscle memory, then it takes much less. Then it takes you 60 seconds to figure out what the meeting is about and communicate it out to people. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That's a great metaphor about the picking up a sport. If you think about learning a language, you do pick it up piece by piece in the beginning. Word by word, you're trying to memorize things. You're trying to figure out how verbs work, how the general grammar structure and whatever language you're working on works. But as you get more comfortable, you start to know some of those things. You just start to use it as communication. You're not word being like, “Ah.” 

This is where the first person present conjunction of to go is or conjugation of to go goes. It’s not where you're – you don't have to piece meal that together. It's just in your memory, and you're using that effectively, and you're now just using that to communicate. It will feel slow at first some of these things, and that's to be expected. That's not a bad thing either because you might as well take the time to do the deliberate practice and get very good at those because if those become natural, those numbers start to follow. The successes you were looking for in the beginning start to follow. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. You create change agility. You can move faster. You're not constantly redoing work. You're not constantly having more meetings to break down the silos that were created by not having enough meetings. All those things eventually get better to the point of you don't notice. We've talked about this in the past. It's like the perfect type of music in a restaurant or in an ambient. It's that type of music where it's not loud or obnoxious or doesn't match the energy of the place that you notice it. But you do notice it when there's silence, and so what’s that music?

There's actually an article that I read earlier this week by the Gapingvoid that compares Brian Eno to Beethoven and talks about how a company culture. It's better suited to be Brian Eno, and Brian Eno is a famous music producer who actually created airport music, a kind of elevator music but for other places which, again, it's ambient music, which is, again, it's that balance of you notice it if it's not there, and you notice if it's too loud and it's the wrong music. But when it's the right music, you actually don't know it's there. It just becomes part of the movement. It becomes part of the mood. It becomes part of the ambient. 

In culture, in organizations it’s the same thing. It's not about the loud Beethoven type of symphonies where it is so captivating that everybody stops what they're doing. You go to a concert to listen to Beethoven. You don't put it in an elevator, and rise everybody's blood pressure or lower the blood pressure if you listen to the requiem. There's a time and a place and a culture that's loud. It's a culture that focuses on the flashy stuff. But what's happening on a day-to-day basis? What's happening in every single action? Every single action can be loud. Every reaction can be loud. It has to be kind of a steady, it's there, and we know it's working exactly the way it's supposed to work. It helps everything else happen. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That's why health is such a perfect word for it, organizational health. It’s like just being healthy in your body. While it is a good gratitude practice to remind yourself when you are healthy like, “Ah, I'm grateful that I feel healthy currently,” it's usually something we don't really think about. It's just if we feel good, we're just doing things, and that's a – if a company is healthy, it'll do the things. The organization can do what it needs to do because it's healthy. 

When it's not healthy, that's distracting. It’s a continual – whatever bringing it back to it. Some things are minor health incidents. Some things are major health incidents. But health is very much that just underlying. When it's going well and when it's what it's supposed to be, you're not going to pay attention to it much, and that's great. That should be the measurement is that you don't notice a bunch of fires everywhere. You don't notice a bunch of issues. You don't notice a bunch of silos. It's hard to look around and be like, “Wow, not a lot of silos here.” It's pretty easy to look around and be like, “Wow, there are some silos here.” 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. That allows you space for innovation. If you're not fighting fires, then you can actually strategize. You can think of the next idea. You can solicit the next change. You can do all those things that we like to do in organizations and we like to do at work because most of us don't like to do the same thing over and over and over, which is – and now I can pay attention to what's happening in the market and with all the competitors and how we can be ahead of the game instead of behind the game. But if I'm constantly fighting fires internally, I don't have time to figure out what's happening externally. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. It’s so much easier to meet what you're trying to meet when you're already healthy doing it, and it does take all the practice of continuing and maintaining health. We haven't gone into all of the aspects of it and all the details of it. But one that I do want to touch on and just highlight some of the exercise that you talked about to kind of get to it is values. It talks about the importance of values and how you use values. One of those is that we've all seen company values that have no meaning. It's just something that was thrown up on the wall. It’s four words that sound good, usually involving something like integrity, excellence, professionality, whatever it is. There's things that like –

Cristina Amigoni: Play to win. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes, yes. Play to win, compete, work hard, play hard, whatever it is. Unless – the way he describes it is it has to be something that the way that this company acts would be noticeably different than any other player in their space, than any other company doing that. Professionalism is something that all consultancies probably have to have at some level. If you want to go be in a services business, you have to have some amount of professionality. 

That's now table stakes. That's not a differentiator, and values should be something that are really kind of unique to the culture, unique to what this company brings and how they do it. Is it humor? That's great. That might be it, is it? Whatever the thing that that company does well and it is how they bring it and how they live their world, that's what an actual value is. Not just things that we kind of aspire to or think that are nice to put on a wall and people should really think about but have no difference between us and any other company. Those don't help, those don't create any vision, those don't have any intent, and those don't guide any actions. Value should help you guide what you're going to choose to do. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. The measurement is do you actually act according to the value every time? When you don't, what is the reason for that? He has a couple of really good examples of those. I think the one that I remember is there's a famous airline that humor is actually one of their values. If you fly the airline, you'll know because you get on, and the flight attendants, as they talk about safety checks and the usual spiels, they bring humor to the interaction. They bring humor to those monologues. 

At some point, there was a customer that complained about the fact that safety is not funny, and so they were – they did not agree with the fact that the safety instructions were done with humor. The CEO actually stood up and said, “Humor is one of our values. Therefore, we wish you best luck flying different an airline.” That's what it looks like to actually live the values. It's like you're not going to just put humor as a value on your company wall, on your website. But then at the first instance, you're going to go an opposite way. No. If humor is a value, then you stick to that. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That's also a great description of why it would be a problem to look only at measurements because if you think about just I'm going to retain every possible customer, first of all, no thought to what the cost of supporting that customer might look like. But secondly, if that's the only goal, then you can easily trample on your own values and be like, “Well, I mean, this time no because really we're focused on this revenue goal right now. So who cares that we should be humorous or that we should be supporting each other or that we should talk through that?” Or whatever you've put on that are actual values. 

The way he talks about helping people understand those, I really enjoyed, too, because he talks about the idea of putting together dilemmas that you have to face. I have this value. So, okay, X situation comes up. How would you, given this value, want your company to move and respond and helping – it's a great way to help people understand in action what that looks like because we all do end up facing various dilemmas. It's a great way of identifying this is why this is important, and this is how this is in action. 

Also a great way to litmus test your values and say like, “Could you make a decision based on this?” If not, then it's time to work on a good action-oriented value that you can use for decisions. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. It's true. The testing of the values is a huge one because there's another example of a company where transparency was a value. So they decided to be transparent about everybody's salary, VP and above. Then they increased the group, and they said like, “Okay. I think we want to be transparent, and everybody can – it's going to be out in the open what anybody director and above makes.” 

At some point, it was brought up that for the value of transparency, everybody's salaries should be open to knowledge, to the entire company. That's when the senior leadership and the leadership team decided that in this case, transparency was going to be detrimental for the goals of the company. So rather than be transparent about everybody's salary at all levels, they were transparent about the decision to not disclose what everybody's salary was for manager and below. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That's a great example. You're still honoring the value. Either way, you're just letting know what it is, just transparency. If you don't have some of those dilemmas, you could make either decision. Does it help to make that decision? How does it serve the overall vision? 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. It’s a great book, highly recommended. Tons to learn from it. 

Alex Cullimore: Great book and one of the reasons it's definitely a required reading. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. We’re now getting to the point where people have to read for a month before it actually start working when they join us. 

Alex Cullimore: This one, luckily, is actually quite a quick read, I will say. It feels very detailed, but it is about a five-hour audio book. If you listen to them slightly more than 1X, then it's much less than that, I suppose. But even five hours is not a huge commitment. I finished that one in like two days over the course of a couple of runs. But it was very compelling. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. It is a very quick one. Yes. The next one that I'm reading, so it'll probably be a podcast in the future, is Supercommunicator. Excellent. That is an excellent book, so we'll talk about that in a month or so when I'm done with it. That one is a little longer. I think it's like eight or nine hours, so that's going to take me a few more walks. 

Alex Cullimore: I'm going to have to start that one. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. It's a really good one. All right. Well, thanks for listening. 

Alex Cullimore: Thanks for listening. 

[OUTRO]

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you for listening to Uncover the Human, a Siamo podcast. 

Alex Cullimore: Special thanks to our podcast operations wizard, Jake Lara; and our score creator, Rachel Sherwood. 

Cristina Amigoni: If you have enjoyed this episode, please share, review, and subscribe. You can find our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Alex Cullimore: We would love to hear from you with feedback, topic ideas, or questions. You can reach us at podcast@wearesiamo.com or at our website, wearesiamo.com, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook. We Are Siamo is spelled W-E A-R-E S-I-A-M-O.

Cristina Amigoni: Until next time, listen to yourself, listen to others, and always uncover the human.

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