A wonderful podcast with musician Jake Isaac led to an equally wonderful roundtable with my friends from Nettwerk Music. We began with a discussion of creativity as communal experience. This led to the insight that this is the opposite of being precious or needing to be validated. Rather, music is a driving for connection and, for Jake Isaac, a quintessentially sacred experience. We also discussed suffering as a road to deep learning - which then morphed into a conversation about wellbeing and contentment as the natural consequence of being attuned to reality. Finally, we explored the live environment, jamming, improvising and creative interaction and concluded it is a type of public conversation. When done authentically, it converys a unique expressiveness and brings about a miracle of communication: that I am not alone in my experience. This reflects Isaac’s philosophical ground in ‘Ubuntu’: ‘I am because we are’.

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.