With two senior HR Practitioners and a CEO, I had real expertise for this particular roundtable discussion of the Mark Murphy podcast discussing his book ‘Team Players: The Five Critical Roles You Need to Build Winning Team’. We dug deep into the concept of Psychological Safety and how this allows for a diversity of roles, for robust discussion, for curiosity and tough questions and for creative outcomes. This led to a discussion of how to apply the idea of the 5 roles in decisions for hiring - and how to talk with teams and those on interview panels well before new hires about what roles they actually need. This was to avoid the ‘hiring like me’ tendency to clone oneself in hiring decisions. Comparative advantage was seen as a crucial concept for legacy and succession, with founders/CEOs etc needing to hand over key functions and bring people through well before they themselves are due to leave. Another deep conversation was around setting objectives and key results, and the discussion landed on the need to frame these in terms of peoples’ natural role types.

This is a deep dive into the dynamics of winning teams. Mark Murphy's research has identified five key team roles: Director, Achiever, Stabilizer, Harmonizer & Trailblazer. Our discusion ranged widely from psychological safety, to comparative advantage, to reciprocal expertise affirmation. This podcast is essential for anyone who manages or who participates in teams. There is also a deep practicality in Mark's approach to overcoming common social and cognitive biases in teams including herding, groupthink, confirmation bias, personality dynamics and power differentials.

I found this roundtable discussion of the 6 Missing podcast to be both delightful and thought-provoking. First, we discussed the idea of an addictive personality and how we can convert such impulses into 'useful addictions'. We also agreed how 'comforting' TJ Dumser is as a person as reflected by his insights, vocal tone and general demeanour. We explored the idea of ‘state dependent cognition’, which led to a discussion of the shift in psychology to include somatic or body-based therapies. A quite profound discussion followed about accepting our relative insignificance and how this takes a self-imposed weight off our shoulders. We agreed that a new insight was that ambient music doesn’t so much dictate what emotions we are to feel, but allows us to uncover what's there and finally, we explored how TJ’s music is a type of mindfulness practice.