Cacophony or Symphony?

What are the qualities that you look for when you're building a high performance team?

I look at my role as an opera conductor, right? You have individuals who are experts in, you know, in the violin and the cello and the drums. How do you synthesize this together? And I think the key to a successful organization or a successful team is really to have experts who are smarter than you. But how does the person at the top kind of bring this all together? Because you can have cacophony or you can have a symphony and successful firms that are symphonies are because the person at the top has kind of brought all this together.

You're putting it all into harmony. And how do you build a culture where people feel safe to speak out openly and honestly?

Yeah, I think this is more about learning. I mean, for colleagues to see this by example. Because you can say this is a safe space, but if the boss or the supervisor gets vindictive, then you know that you're not going to speak up again. So I think celebrating failures or talking about "somebody brought this to me and I pivoted as a result of that, and it's a safe place to speak up and talk," is important for any successful team or a successful organization.

Can you give us an instance of that where perhaps someone did not feel so comfortable speaking out? And what impact did that have on your organization?

Frankly, I cannot, because I have always inculcated this and I end every meeting by saying, "listen, even if you don't want to speak up in a public environment, this is an open door policy. Please come in and share your thoughts, because I don't know at all." I want to be challenged. I want to be questioned. We have a vision or a view. But you don't know everything. And so I think we've made some pretty good decisions based on the fact that we've had a diverse set of people who come in either challenging it or supporting it with a slightly different nuance. And I think that's why we've been fairly successful.