Part 2: The Playbook to Enhancing Team Dynamics

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show. We've been talking about teamwork in the workplace in the last couple of shows. I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher.
In the past couple of episodes, we went through negative and positive personas and team dynamics at work. You might have recognized a couple of areas in yourself to work on, I know we did.
Hopefully, you recognize a lot of the positive ones. As we said, leaders, you should really try and model all of those positive personas in one way or another. If there's a couple of areas you don't, you're weaker in, work on those. In this show, we want to dive into a playbook for peak team performance. No awkward team building exercises here, just the elements to make sure your teams are healthy and functional and not one of the dysfunctional family holiday get-togethers that happen every time you've got a few select individuals that wind up on your team. I know I gave a few of you PTSD right there, so my apologies.
Let's get into the playbook here for peak team performance to start. I want to touch briefly on three key elements to team formation. That's team size, diversity, and communication. Just some quick points to consider on those. Let's start with diversity. Teams with diverse backgrounds, I think we've talked about this in the past. The diversity of opinion will make better teams. Studies back that up. There's all kinds of studies on diversity.
We're not just talking about what we are talking about. We're not just talking about ethnic and cultural diversity, but we are talking about that. We're not just talking about age. We're not talking about gender, even neurodiversity. We're talking about all these things. The more, the better. Guys, what other kinds of diversity should be considered when you're putting together a team?

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:13)
I think there's also this idea of diversity and thought, and beliefs, those are really important. There's the value of collective intelligence. As long as it's not a herd mentality, collective intelligence, where everybody just kind of like, you know, there's no real value in that. Some will say, hey, we all think alike. We move things faster, but that's not where innovation lives. So it's also diversity in thought, you know, being able to openly and safely have contrasting dialogue about things. You know, I often say, you know, you can argue to get to the truth as long as you're arguing towards getting to the truth.
But I think those are important elements, too, that are often overlooked.

**Ash Maher** (2:58)
Absolutely. I think for me, my thing is diversity and professional backgrounds.
I think for the longest time that you had to companies with select individuals that went through a traditional path, whether it's, oh, you have to have a college degree, you are going to select people who have master's degrees.
Now that's completely tossed out the window. I think people really care about results a lot of times. And your background, you may have been able to acquire amazing results in different spaces and not have the traditional background in getting to those results. So having an open mind and open to diversity in different backgrounds, even if sometimes you're giving an offer or a job to someone who's an outsider from your industry, but their background might be relevant to the goals you're trying to achieve, especially with the new world that we're really living in, in AI and so on and so forth. So I think that's a huge one is don't get so caught up in the tradition. Maybe look deeper and see, okay, maybe this background could be valuable to us, even though it's coming from the outside.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:53)
Yeah, I think that's especially true. I could think of a thousand cases where, yeah, just popping in my mind with what you're saying there. One of them to me was we were working on recruiting for a police force and this is a very progressive police force. They were not just interested in like, you've got your typical military people that come in to play there, but they were all, no, we want customer service people. We want people of these different diverse backgrounds because it'll make our force, our team, a lot better and we'll have all these different perspectives in there, which in the past has just been a big problem.
So, yeah, that's one of the most valid places to start is making sure you've got that diverse opinion there, diverse team, diverse backgrounds. If you don't, again, you're asking for some resentment, you're asking for all kinds of baggage.