#07: How Companies Are Learning From Pro Sports to Lead Their Teams with Cody Royle

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Cody, thank you for making the time to come on the podcast and being a part of episode seven. Our audience knows who you are, I’ve linked your Twitter and your other social media profiles in the show notes. So I’m going to get just right into it. You and I have discussed this at length, one, on our walks, when we’re grabbing a pint, and I’ve noticed that companies like Netflix, most recently Shopify, are comparing their businesses to sports teams. And I think this is growing in popularity. Why is this happening now?

Yeah, thanks for having me on, Michel. As you know, this is a topic that is so close to my heart and my work, so we could probably talk about this for hours. Netflix-

And we have.

And we have. I think we could do a Tim Ferris four hour podcast episode just on this topic. Yeah man, the writing has been on the wall with this kind of stuff for a while, particularly with Netflix and the way they’ve described themselves. The reason for it growing in popularity is that organizations have started to realize, one, that their core strength is their people, and that’s actually a new concept, as much as you and I talk about that a lot and we get up on stage in front of people and say, “Pay attention to your people and ask your people what their strengths are and take care of them.” This is still, from a business perspective, it’s a really new concept. Because the way that we made money in the past was we built a faster supply chain or we marketed better or we innovated better or whatever it was, there was always something that was product or service focused that got us a competitive advantage.

We’ve arrived now at a place where a lot of those competitive advantages are democratized. You can come out with the next Facebook today and then tomorrow some kid in his basement in Russia has replicated your product within 24 hours. And now we’ve realized that we have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of amazing human beings that have huge capability. How do we optimize them? And so the reason we look to sport is that’s all sport has ever been, has been how do we organization and utilize the people that we have to solve this complex problem? A basketball team has only ever been five men or women on a court and potentially a coach, trying to solve the problem, and so they’ve had to utilize the skills that they have access to.

And so now we’re starting to see that linkage between business and sport, and really at its core it’s around optimization. Not motivation like most people think about sport.

And during your time with Team Canada, when did you have that aha moment? Maybe it was during that time, maybe it came before that, but where and when did you start drawing the parallels between sport and commerce? Because I know this isn’t new for you, but do you remember when it kind of clicked and you saw the opportunity to run with it? Because you were there before many, many other people. And I actually would attribute my connection to you. So when did this dawn upon you?

Yeah, I had a little bit of a perfect storm in terms of that light bulb moment or that aha moment, and it was through my role at AFL Canada as the head coach there of the mens national team, and working in the corporate environment at the same time. So it was around 2016 that the light bulb went off for me, and it was just this like I said perfect storm of nights and weekends trying to build a high performing team and culture and learn in the sporting space. And then Monday to Friday 9 till 5, walking into a corporate environment, seeing how the biggest companies in Canada were trying to do the same thing. Just living in this world of teams and trying to optimize people and understand their talents and best deploy their talents against what we’re trying to achieve.

That’s really when I started to put two and two together and the outcome of that for me was writing Where Others Won’t, my first book. I kind of got really lucky. If I had have just had just a business side or just the sport side I might not have necessarily put the two together like I did in the end. What came out was this idea around people innovation and grabbing onto your teams in the workplace and saying, “Okay, we don’t need to necessarily run like a sports team, we don’t even need to use sports metaphors necessarily, but we can look at how they build their culture and how they look at performance, how they look at players exiting, how they look at players entering their environment. We can look at all those things and draw out the best lessons and redeploy them against our business and see similar results.”

So you started to answer my third question about what we can specifically learn from championship winning sports teams. I’ll ask you to unpack this. When I think of sports teams, I think of the general manager who is putting together the team for the owner or the ownership group to be able to ultimately win something, a trophy. And in business that winning might be defined differently from organization to organization. It could be more stores, more geographical footprint, more revenue, profit or whatever. How do we maintain a company culture of having a unit within a company where if you’re going to replicate what some sports team does they’re going to replace people without batting an eyelash. Do you think companies are comfortably doing this?

No. They’re not. There’s multiple reasons for it. There’s our framing, so how we’ve framed business, how we’ve framed competition within our business, how we’ve framed just work in general in people’s heads. Things like losing your job or exiting a company or not being what a company needs right now, kind of shoots us through the heart with an arrow a little bit, personally. That then brings through all sorts of shame and all these different things where… and this is the battle that Netflix and Shopify and all these companies are fighting now, is that mental model that human beings in the western world have around work is being reshaped, and they’re trying to reshape it but they’re fighting generations it’s bad if I lose my job rather than what the company’s trying to do is look at it the other way around and say, “Actually it’s great that you’ve been here, you’ve given it your all, we’ve protected you, we’ve loved you while you’re here, but you’re not the right person for this company anymore or this job or we don’t need this job or we don’t need…”

Netflix’s example, and you and I have sat down with Patty, it’s like that transition from being a warehousing and logistics company to a streaming over the internet company, that’s a complete 180 in terms of what the business does. So they’re reshaping that, and that’s what they’re struggling with. And then you add on all the stuff we’ve done in legal and HR and the protectionism around jobs, that becomes a bit of a policy nightmare as well.

If anybody wants to listen to Patty McCord take me to school, you can listen to the podcast where the three of us get together and talk. It was one of those moments, I think I said something and Patty rebutted it with, I’ll never forget it, verbatim I think it was, “Michel, you’re wrong and here’s why.” And I took a step back. My jaw hit the ground, I was like how do I respond to this? I did it because you need to know when to say, I’m going to take you to school right now. So I’ll link up that episode below.

I want to go forward with this because truth be told, as I’m building my next company, I don’t like using the word meritocracy because I think it’s misinterpreted and some people really don’t like it really. But as I’m building the next company, I am going to be a little more strict with who stays within the company for how long. Because I do look at sports teams who will move a player in or out according to the company’s needs, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this.

Netflix has a great saying of, “Adequate performance earns a generous severance.” And I really like that. I think to your point of western companies, that you’re seen as a jerk, a bad employer, heartless if you fire somebody, but as and you I know there’s a right and a wrong way of doing that. But just be thankful that we’re not employers that have our employees for six year contracts and we can’t get rid of them after two years. The Vancouver Canucks, they’re my team and they’re just inundated with bad contracts. So if you’re listening and you run a company, be thankful that you don’t have that [inaudible 00:11:30] suggest that you probably don’t.

Where do companies and leaders start? If they listen to this podcast and are compelled by your message, Cody, and they identify a team, maybe it’s their team that they root for, and say, “You know what, maybe I should study the inner workings of this team and see what I can glean from them.” What do you recommend they start trying to uncover?

Can I just add one thing onto what you just said, because I heard another great phrasing for something similar. It’s from a book from my friend Owen Eastwood, and his book’s called Belonging. It’s a great book about, kind of autobiographical and then it leads into his work through finding out that he has some Maori heritage from New Zealand and the ancient wisdom from the forefathers down there, and how that’s passed along in terms of how teams see belonging and how cultures build. The thing that he wrote in there, which comes from his heritage, is this idea that we’re all part of a long line, and the sun shines on us at various points as it comes along the line, and the sun will go down on us at some point. The idea there is that you’re connected to your ancestors through that line, but also that the sun keeps moving along the line of people.

And so the way that I think about that in the context of what we’re talking about is it’s very similar with companies, isn’t it? Where it’s like, look, you’re part of this long line of people that are going to give their all to this company, and when the sun’s shining on you, we are going to give you a thousand percent of all of our energy to set you up for success, but the sun will set on you and your time here just as it’s going to set on me and my time here as the leader or the manager or you as the owner. I know this is going to be your life’s work, but in 50 years time you might choose to sell and the sun will set on your time with that organization.

It’s just another way, I was thinking about it in terms of what we’re talking about here that I think is really compelling, that you’re going to get all the warmth of the sun while the sun’s shining on you, but it’s not going to shine on you forever and that’s okay.

 

I think by framing employment and work like that.

Yeah, and nor is it the responsibility of the company to make sure that the sun is shining on you all the time, because I believe that employees need to take… team members of any organization whether it’s sport or commerce, need to take ownership over that. Often I see employees looking at their employer saying like, “Well, grow me, grow me. Give me education.” Yeah, we can but you got to take ownership over that and do something with that.

That reminds me of Mike Gillis, he’s the former general manager of the Vancouver Canucks team that went to the Stanley Cup most recently in 2011. I’m paraphrasing but in a podcast I was listening to he said, he invested in all these things, sports science, sleep doctors, and so forth well before other sports teams were doing it, at least in the NHL and the NFL and North American leagues. But what he said was we were going to remove people from our team who weren’t going to take us up on the opportunity of extending their careers. It’s one of those things, I know you’re an avid podcast listener, it was one of those things that I had to go back and listen to multiple times, because taking the opportunity to extend your career and ultimately excel, these are the things that are really coming to me now that I’ve focused on it in studying sports teams and seeing what I can take into my upcoming organization and share with listeners like we are today.

Going back to the question, where do I start? Okay, I’m very motivated by your message, Cody, let’s say, and I’m like okay I found a team that I want to kind of unpack, what am I looking for first?

Yeah. You’ve just answered the question for me, and the answer is we actually need to stop looking at championship teams. We overdo that, and I think the lessons from… we want to clue on to Steve Kerr and the Golden State Warriors and we want to clue onto the All Blacks and we want to clue onto Manchester United and Alex Ferguson and all these things. But actually the most innovative ideas are coming from the 2011 Vancouver Canucks who ultimately didn’t win.

What I’m saying is that there are so many innovative lessons from teams who either don’t quite get there or are trying to get to the next level or are a small budget team that are trying to push themselves into the upper echelon of their league. We see that in European soccer a lot. And so the really, really innovative stuff is coming from those kind of teams, and I think we should be looking at those rather than going back to Phil Jackson and Steve Kerr and kind of the ones that we always hear about.

So that’s actually my recommendation, is there are teams all around the world, Aussie rules, cricket, soccer, rugby, the big five north American sports, that you can go and search for, and the great thing is there are so many articles about all the cool, the money ball of soccer and the 2011 Canucks bringing in sleep doctors. You can find these stories out there, and that’s actually the really innovative stuff because they’re striving to get into that upper echelon. Whereas the teams that are close to a championship, they tend not to actually innovate terribly well because they’re just trying to turn the dial slightly to get over that hump. That’s actually my recommendation.

Okay. I see that. I understand that, because if you go into studying a team that just has a track record of excelling and you come in at the end of their story after they’ve achieved the success, I think there’s more value that you could extract when you see the quote unquote the come-up. Because the Canucks weren’t doing well before all these things.

You end up… and this is really my core idea around Where Others Won’t, the initial idea, was what you end up with when you listen to those stories, those championship winning teams, and they have sustained success and blah blah blah, is those ideas allow you to catch up to the opposition. Which is fine, and in business that might be what you’re trying to do, you don’t need to be a championship winning team.

Whereas if you want to be really innovative, you don’t want to catch up to the opposition, you want to go past the opposition. So the catch-up game is a dangerous game sometimes, because you can always play catch-up, whereas for me, I much prefer to look at okay, well what’s next? How do we go past everything that everyone already has rather than just trying to play this catch-up game? Hence my recommendations, the really innovative stuff is those teams that are in the middle but they’re damn ambitious and they’re like, hey there’s this thing about sleep… in 2010, 2011, there seems to be some sort of thing about performance and we’re going to grab onto that. That’s who you want to clutch onto and go, “These guys were really thinking about competitive advantage.”

If you’re recruiting for a position in business and you see someone’s resume have some sort of athletic accomplishment, do you pay special attention to them?

Yes.

And how come?

There was actually a study done in Ireland, and this was quite serendipitous actually, but I was on the bus to the airport. My wife’s Irish as you know, Michel. I was on the bus to the airport and the radio, just the Today FM regular radio show was on the bus. And they had this professor who’d just done this study. The reason it was serendipitous was because the study was on people who had played team sports growing up and whether they had gone on to earn more money in the workforce. And the link that was found, I ended up digging it up and I wrote a blog about it. The linkage that the study found was that they were better able to navigate the workplace because they understood team dynamics, they understood how to have difficult conversations, they understood how to deliver direct messages, like what do you actually mean? Because when you’re playing soccer, when you’re playing Gaelic football, when you’re playing basketball, you need to say, “What do you mean right now? We need to know now.”

They had harnessed those lessons from sport and been able to pull them with them into the workforce. And so they were actually earning above the average of someone who didn’t participate in team sports. So there’s studies done on this now that kind of validate our line of thinking around that. And it’s not just that you were the captain of the hockey team, it was that you understand and you operate and you have a level of comfortableness in a team environment. And think about how relevant that is to the workplace. Everything we do is in teams, absolutely everything. And you’ve been practicing it since you were, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. You come into the workforce with 10 or 15 years of deliberate practice. That has to be worth something, right?

Yeah, I think so. I’m partial as well. What is somebody didn’t grow up playing sports? Or they can’t make the connection? Are we alienating them?

If you ask the audiences that come and listen to me speak at conferences, yeah some of them, definitely.

Yeah.

That’s probably the question that I get most often. People that haven’t participated in it. And again, what I come back to is I think the framing is wrong. I think when we move it away from what people traditionally associate sport metaphors as is motivation, and we do a great job on Instagram of grabbing some Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan quote about how motivated they were, and everyone watched Last Dance, “How driven was Michael Jordan?” That’s not the lesson from sport. I’ve just kind of told you about a study that what actually impacts the workplace is the deliberate practice of team dynamics.

And so when we’re kind of having to convince someone to look at what we do in sport and how it’s relevant, I think we really need to dial it back to that. Well, you’ve had all these opportunities of working in a team, how does that help you? Doesn’t matter what discipline you’re in, whether you’re in retail, whether you’re in software development. Those lessons have to be front and center for you. Yeah, I work in a team. Okay, and so how do you feel when your best skills are utilized and acknowledged within the team? Yeah, I feel great. Okay, so these are the lessons from sport, this is really what we’re trying to get at.

So the answer is yes, we are alienating them, but I think again, it’s such an easy way to reframe it and say, “We’re not just talking about chest thumping and doing bench press and kind of yelling at each other. We’re talking about the actual lessons from sport, it’s team dynamics, how do teams achieve things?” And there’s so many lessons in there.

Yeah. I had someone recently, past 30 days, tell me that my correlation between business and sport was very quote unquote bro-y. And I didn’t really care to respond to it too much, because I don’t think that they were able to make the connection, or I framed it incorrectly, which is what you’re speaking about now. And that reminds me of a conversation that I had with a friend named Joe Morello, he’s as high as you can go at EA Sports and he’s been there forever. And we had a similar conversation, it’s like how do you make sure that you don’t alienate these team members that didn’t grow up playing sport? And he said something extraordinarily similar to what you had just said. For those listening, that’s your answer. And Cody said it himself, that it’s one of the questions he gets the most. So it’s likely going to happen in your organization as well, so have the foresight to reframe that conversation.

We’ve talked about companies and operating like sports teams. You just mentioned Michael Jordan. I like… Kobe Bryant fan. How can employees learn from athletes or individual high performers? What are some of the things that if somebody is listening, is like I want to be the best salesperson in my department, and I want to glean some lessons from x person, Serena Williams, Kobe Bryant or whoever. What are the things that you think they should study?

Yeah. Great question, man. The biggest one that I would say, that I think is the most relevant, is what you observe from really, really high performers in sport, is that they show up every single day and give something. What we like to do, again because it becomes a really nice poster on the wall or an Instagram story is talk about the days where it goes well. But what the Jordans and the Bryants should be recognized for is that they actually at least show up on the days where they weren’t feeling it. And they won’t tell you that there are any days like that because that’s kind of part of the story and the halo effect of the brands that they’ve developed, but there were days when Kobe didn’t want to go to the court and there were days when Michael didn’t want to go to the court and just wanted to have a nap or whatever it may be, play golf. But they showed up and they gave 100% of whatever it was they had that day.

I think if there’s one lesson to glean out of those kind of people it’s that. 100% of whatever you’ve got that day. Even if that’s 50% and you’re just running at half capacity, 100% of your 50% just puts a tick in that box, I did something that day. I might have sent one cold email, made one cold call, and left a voicemail, whatever it may be, but it’s just… As Gary V says, “One is better than zero.” And it’s just putting that one in the box, and what the best do is they put a one in the box every single day, and it adds up over time.

The other thing would just be is you’ve got to find something that you actually love. The best sales people that I’ve ever worked with for instance, they just love selling, they love the process, they love being on the phone, they love talking to people, they love the back and forward and the negotiating and they actually genuinely love it. Whereas I was terrible at sales because I didn’t love it.

Me too.

I looked at all those things and they made me cringe. I felt like I didn’t believe in what I was selling. And so I couldn’t actually do it, it made me feel physically sick by the end, making a phone call to sell something that I didn’t believe in. Whereas what I do now, I could wake up at 6AM and go to bed at midnight and have the best day of my life, because I really, really love it. So that’s that self awareness piece. Do I actually love this or am I doing this for the pay packet or whatever? The Michael Jordans and Kobe Bryants of the world, they love what they do. They absolutely love just playing basketball, and so they get to do that, and do they do it every day.

Do athletes subscribe to the notion of work smarter not harder?

Some do.

Are they the best?

Some.

Who? I can’t think of an athlete that didn’t put in the work while also did things that optimized their health, which I would consider the smarter part. You hear of LeBron James and other athletes who use the off season to rehabilitate their bodies, rest, and many other things, so maybe that’s the smarter part. The harder part is what you just said, put one in the box even when you don’t want to. I can’t think of… an athlete does not come to my mind, a recognizable athlete who didn’t put in the work.

You see those childhood videos of Serena Williams and her dad playing in Compton and it was appear that they’ve been they’ve there forever, for hours rather. I don’t know. I’ve had this conversation at length with many people. Self admittedly, I used to subscribe to the hustle culture when I was in my early 20s, now not so much, it’s just really working hard, and it got branded at hustle and then everybody used that. But how is that possible if you’re going to be a high performer and just kind of like hack it and find ins and outs?

I think it’s the same process as what you just described. What happens is yes, there’s hard work and then it’s refinement of that hard work over time as you mature and age and what you need etc etc. And then it all get bundled together retrospectively as I worked my ass off. Which is true, but it’s very similar to the pattern that you just described. And so maybe the answer is actually it’s work hard and then work smart.

Right. Load management. Do any team members in business get load management? You don’t have the answer that I don’t think. That’s a bizarre… is that working smart? Is that the coach working smart? Load management?

That is the physiologists working smart.

Right, okay.

Most athletes, and again this is very personal and so you can’t say all NBA players or all major league soccer players or premier league players have certain thresholds, but essentially there’s a line of thinking that a player should be within these physiological thresholds based on a whole range of different markers. And if they get towards the upper end of that threshold they might break. And that means they might get injured.

One of the, probably the biggest kept secrets in professional sport is that the coach doesn’t always make those decisions. A lot of the time the medical staff or the high performance guys go, “Look, we can play this guy tonight and he can probably play 48 minutes of NBA basketball but he might break in that process. So do you want to take that risk?” If so, he wants to take that risk, he’s fine with it of course, the athlete will always want to play, but the fans kind of go crazy about starting lineups and this guys minutes were managed blah blah blah, but it’s all kind of based on these thresholds. An inexact science obviously, but there is some science or heavy thought that’s gone on in the background.

I’ve actually pitched that idea to a bunch of CEOs, I did a presentation to about 200 tech CEOs. Some of those high performance idea I pitched to them. An easy one was jet lag. Put your hand up if you’ve flown across North America, you fly the night before, you give the big presentation in the morning to the investors, and you flew in and flew out. Yep, all 200 put up their hand. I’m like, “Hands up if you did anything for your jet lag? You’ve just changed three hours in your body clock and you think that you’re going to deliver that presentation at your optimum?” Oh yeah, okay. There’s little things like that that actually could be pretty key lessons.

Yeah. Because that’s not sport or commerce, that’s just human function. That’s where I kind of see there’s no differentiation between the two. I’m thinking of Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets, and this year he took a lot of time off and it wasn’t because of injury. So my question is do you believe in unlimited vacation for employees?

I do.

What do you say to the person that likes the idea but is fearful of it?

Try it.

So easy, so easy. Okay, I’m not letting you get away with that. Okay.

This goes back to the conversation that we had with Patty. A lot of my-

I’m trying to forget to be honest. I’m kidding.

I should have said earlier, I was looking at you as she gave that response. And I’m pretty sure if I was on film, I think my face would have gone white as I was looking at you.

I was like, why did I volunteer to be a part of this? It was like a roast. Anyway, just go listen to the podcast, it’ll be linked below. But please continue, I’m interested.

I thought you were going to flip the table and walk out the studio. The key I think isn’t that Netflix did it, the key is the process that they went through around okay, so we start to remove these things. But they actually tested it, they went and did things, they implemented it, they took away the expense policy, and then lo and behold, what they found was that they treated people like adults and those adults didn’t abuse the system. And then they start playing around with more things. Do we need this? Do we need a vacation policy?

If you hire adults, you treat them like adults, I don’t believe that they’re going to suddenly start taking 10 weeks off unnecessarily. I think they’re going to respect that you treat them like adults, they’re going to respond like adults, but you’ll never know until you put it in a live environment. Anyone that works in computers or software will know exactly what I’m talking about here. You can test the hell out of absolutely everything, anything, you can put it through automated manual testing. Until it gets into the live environment and you actually see what happens once it gets out to the public, you never actually know. And it’s the same with company policies, you can’t hypothesize and have the finance people run all the numbers on it. Go and do it and see what happens.

Yeah. And I’m positive someone is going to color outside the lines. I can almost guarantee it.

 

But that shouldn’t paralyze you from doing it, because then you probably shouldn’t go for that walk tomorrow morning because somebody’s going to get hit by a car tomorrow. Might be you, might not be you. You can’t be paralyzed by the… you can’t create a system for the 1% of people that might screw you, because that other 99% you’re completely losing the potential value of what these things might bring.

And I think there’s enough case studies of companies doing these progressive things well, and bringing great results to the company. So start somewhere, maybe even start with just a department within your company if you’re a larger organization. And it’s all risk management. Could this be a critical error that ruins this company? I doubt it. To your point, just try it.

My last question. If you are building a team within your department and you were allowed to bring in one athlete, past or present, to join the team, ignore the skillset, who are you bringing and why?

This is a tough one. You didn’t send me this one, you didn’t send me this one [inaudible 00:40:26] I should have…

I will go first. I will give you a moment.

You can probably tell, I’m doing the NHL player when they ask a question and they’re trying to expand so they can just keep talking so they get more time to think about

I’ll go first.

I’m doing that now.

Mine is Steve Yzerman. He was the youngest captain of the Detroit Red Wings, I believe he was the captain when he was 19 years old, which is like… my immediate thing that comes to mind was what was I doing at 19? It probably wasn’t good and it’s very likely that it was legal. And this guy is the captain of a team. He wasn’t the biggest player, I don’t think he was even the fastest, he just had this level of grit and was just a champion through and through, carried himself extraordinarily well. So that’s who I would want to bring on our team.

Now he’s like a very accomplished Stanley Cup winning general manager. One of probably my top five people I’d want to learn from. So Steve Yzerman is who would come on my team.

Yeah. I had a Steve Yzerman jersey in Australia.

No.

I was probably the only one.

How did you get it?

Probably the only one.

Did people know what it was? I’m kidding. I’m kidding.

For whatever reason, and I don’t even know why this happened, but The Hockey News used to get sent to Australia, and I remember I had the Nintendo game 98 or 99 or something like that. So I saw the magazine at the newsagent and picked it up. I think Canada had just won something and so yeah, was one of those things, and then I was like… you had to go to one of the knock-off markets, so it wasn’t a legit NHL jersey, but I managed to find one. So yeah, there was a young boy in Melbourne Australia rocking around in a Steve Yzerman jersey in about 1999.

That’s awesome.

Which if you’re listening Stevie-

Call me first.

Just know…

No, no, no. Go ahead.

Just know how far your influence went. No, that’s a good one, Michel. I would say, thinking about it, and I’d go for a similar reason as you, but it would be Tim Duncan.

Yeah.

Still underappreciated despite-

Oh my god, yeah.

Everything that he achieved personally, San Antonio achieved, just everything about him I think stacks up to how I would build an organization. When you’re just the consummate team person and you actually stand out for being the consummate team person, that’s right down my alley in terms of the behaviors that I’d like to build my team, my department, my organization around. Having someone like that just displaying those behaviors day in day out, and not haggling for an extra pay rise every year and never in the news and always supportive of teammates and becomes kind of a companion to the coach as he ages. All of those things just stack up to how I think about teams and organizations.

I like how he carries himself. I references how Steve Yzerman carried himself, and Tim Duncan as well. You’ll see in the pregames to NBA broadcasts they will have a camera person walking alongside the players as they go into their dressing room, so they’re in street clothes. And you would always see Tim Duncan, he dressed unassumingly, he would just have his bag, and he was going to work. And I always remembered see that while others athletes have a little bit more swagger to them or whatnot or want more attention perhaps, Tim Duncan was just going to work, and he did it really, really well, quietly. And to your point still isn’t as popularized as the athletes of his era.

Cody, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Everything about you is going to be listed in the show notes from your [inaudible 00:45:21] to your LinkedIn to your two books to your podcast. And I’ll link up to your website also. I’ve already told you, Cody, that as I’m building [inaudible 00:45:30] we’re going to have some sort of relationship. I already foresee you hosting a talk or having some sort of module training for our team. And you I will take that offline, but for those listening if you have a team, whether it’s a company or if you’re the leader of your department and you want Cody to come and give a talk to your team, I’m assuming you’re for hire. I’m pretty much volunteering your services to people that are listening, but reach out to Cody. I learned a lot from him, and I’m certain that you learned a lot from him today. Cody, thank you so much for being on.

Thanks for having me on, Michel. Appreciate it, mate.

 

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Michel travels the world speaking at annual conferences and company events. His speaking topics are focused on customer experience, employee engagement and company culture. To have him speak at your event, contact him directly.