How managers boost team performance with focus and EQ

Faris: Far too often, you know, I go into companies, I've worked with companies that are just doing too many things. A hundred initiatives, you know, 200 initiatives rather than just focusing on five to 10 and doing them really well. So, put that all together, you get an equation that says, to be strategically successful equals IQ * EQ * FQ.
Jimmy: Welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader, the podcast for leaders working in complex, challenging environments to gain insights and ideas which help you increase your impact without burning out and to help you build a high performance culture in your team. I'm your host, Jimmy Burroughes. And if you're new to The High Performance Leader, make sure you subscribe or follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes before you put down your device.
Hello, and welcome back to this week's show. I am absolutely thrilled this week to be welcoming a good friend, a colleague, a mentor, a visionary, Faris Aranki from Shiageto Consulting. Now, Faris is quite amazing insofar as he has taken the model for team effectiveness and patented it into an incredible easy-to-digest equation, which we'll dig into later. Faris is the face of AXA Insurance, and also works with a number of large organisations globally to essentially help them build team effectiveness across their organisation. More recently, he's also been working with a number of startups to share some lessons with them from the big guys into the small guys, and taking those lessons from the small guys into the big guys. Faris, welcome to the show. How are you?
Faris: Well, thank you, Jimmy. What an amazing intro. I'm great. After all that intro, I'm in a generic hotel here in Germany. It's not all glamorous on my side, listeners, viewers. But hopefully, I will do justice to how you introed me, Jimmy. And really looking forward to this conversation.
Jimmy: Amazing. And no offense meant to the German population there that--
Faris: No.
Jimmy: --about being generic. It's just the hotel, absolutely. We won't mention brands because we don't want to get offend anybody. So, Faris, obviously, you know, an incredible run of uh You're probably the most well-traveled consultant I've ever met, but an incredible run of work around the idea of team effectiveness. And we'll come on to the equation later, but I'm interested to understand how did you end up in this type of role based on your experience and your previous employment?
Faris: Yeah. Okay. Well, I'll bring it bring it to life a bit. And I should preface this uh, you know, some of your listeners, maybe a bit like me, a lot of my career, which I only realised later on, is because I love variety, and I get bored easily, Jimmy. And maybe some of your listeners are in a similar boat. But what do I mean by that is, I've been running my own firm for the last four years, and it's been absolutely amazing. I'm sure we'll explore what I do in more detail. But how did I get to running my own firm, which is all about strategic effectiveness? Well, just prior to this, I was a strategy consultant for 12 years at the the likes of the world of McKinsey, Booz, Bain, many of your listeners may have heard of, which was absolutely amazing, right? You get to solve lots of complex problems, but eventually, you get bored of it, would you believe it or not? Uh so after doing that 12 years, I had the inspiration to start my own firm. Being in the world of strategy consulting really helped me scratch that itch of variety, challenge, because before that, I used to work in the energy industry uh where I love solving big complex, global problems around oil and gas. And I was in strategy in that world. But a long, long time ago, I started as a high school teacher. I used to teach uh economics and maths to kids of various ages. Really loved that, and actually that gave me a lot of the skills that I use today. And even those jobs, uh you know, I've had a few more along the way. But it is a lot of driven by challenge, boredom, and just keep wanting to learn more stuff, really. So, that that's a bit about me.
Jimmy: I love it. And you know, the overlap when we talk about burnout, the one of the things that we see people who are good at avoiding burnout is that they take on new challenges and explore new things, not to the point of exhaustion, but are constantly stimulating their brains with new problems to solve and new things versus being the hamster on the wheel all the time. So, I like the fact that you've you've probably staved off your own burnout by switching gears and changing lanes occasionally. And now, so you work in this world of team effectiveness. That's a big topic, but you seem to have boiled it down to three key concepts. Walk us through what are those three elements of team effectiveness, and so we can understand them a little bit better.
Faris: Yeah, and I think invariably this is linked with why I set up a company. So, if I just go back one step into my old world as a strategy consultant, where effectively, you're a big brain for hire. And many of your regular listeners or who have dipped into consulting and know this world that, effectively, you are there to solve complex problems, and the key output is you deliver a giant report. Now, whether the client or the company you're working for actually does anything with that report is actually, if we're honest, a toss-up, right? Sometimes they do. Usually, they don't. And actually, over the 12 years, I became fascinated by this. Like why what was the difference between taking a good idea and doing something and being successful with it and not? And what I came to observe is it was down to three elements. Okay. One was the quality of the idea, okay? And that's where a lot of these big strategy firms focus on. Let's have the best idea. Let's solve the problem as best we can. So, that's what I call the IQ side of strategy. Great. You need good ideas. You need to test them, you need it. But you know what? If that's all you have, then it's not going to fly because the second key component is this element of emotional intelligence, this EQ where if you cannot transfer around your business the excitement around your idea, your strategy, then it's not going to go anywhere, right? Um people Because you need people to deliver it. You need people, customers, staff, all to engage with it. So, that ability to transfer and get buy-in, which is the EQ side of things, is very, very important. And then the third component that we identified, and that I saw specifically, was around focus. It's not enough to have a great idea, people bought into it, but you need to have the ability to focus on that to deliver it effectively. And far too often, you know, I go into companies, I've worked with companies that are just doing too many things. A hundred initiatives, you know, 200 initiatives, rather than just focusing on five to 10 and doing them really well. So, put that all together, you get an equation that says, to be strategically successful equals IQ * EQ * FQ. And that's our methodology that we trademarked and patented.
Jimmy: I love it. It's so simple when you explain it out. But obviously, you've made a successful consulting career out of supporting organisations with this type of work. Can you share with us from your experience, where is the area that you encounter most frequently that teams are overlooking? Is it the IQ, the EQ or the FQ, and and why do you think that is?
Faris: Yeah. I think, you know, on the balance of things, and I often get asked, and I keep a little tally. I'm that kind of nerd, you know, "Oh, it's another IQ project, it's another EQ project." We actually help with across all three dimensions, but I'd say by far and away the area that we get asked the most is around the EQ. You know, I don't know about you, Jimmy, but I've come across a lot of very smart people who just, for one reason or another, are not able to get others on board. It could be because they're just too immersed in the detail, they just don't know how to talk to other people, or they just miss opportunities. So, we get a lot of requests to sort of work on this area. It's not just about marketing. It's about It can be at the very core of team dynamics, you know? I'm sure, Jimmy, with your world of burnout and working with teams, you see a lot of teams that don't necessarily click or work 100% together. Either the team members uh it don't get on with the boss or there's there's someone in the team is causing a bit of friction that might lead to that burnout. And that's an all an element of the EQ side of things because if you can't be your best at work, then it doesn't matter how good the idea is, you're not going to deliver it as well as you could do. So, certainly I'd say on the balance of things, EQ is the area that we get asked the most to help with.
Jimmy: It's really interesting your No, out of the three that you chose that that was the one that came up. And you know, certainly from our research, we're seeing that often the lack of EQ is because those leaders and senior leaders are genuinely struggling themselves. And so, they just don't have the latitude to be able to be caring, to think about change management, to maybe have empathy with those people around them because they're on the delivery cycle, operating from a place of fear themselves, worrying about budget cuts, the restructure, the the annual target, whatever it might be. And so, those things do get deprioritised and they do just focus on the delivery and and using their smarts to get through. Can you share with us an example of where you have encountered this lack of EQ in an organisation, and the kind of costs and impacts that's having on their team effectiveness?
Faris: Yeah. I thought of a couple, and I I'm going to share a couple, but I'll do it very briefly because I want to to sort of highlight how it can happen by accident, but also it can happen by sort of intention. Uh so what I mean by that, let's talk about the accident one. So, I working with a small startup where the founder is an amazing guy, but he's an engineer, and his dream day is just in a lab building stuff, which is great to get the product off the ground. But he now has a team of about 60. They need a leader who communicates with them because they've got a series of difficult choices: Should they follow A or B, you know? There's a lot of green white space in front of them. But that's just not his natural style. So, he wasn't aware that by just with his head down, the team were getting more frustrated, you know, because they weren't getting enough communication. They couldn't get this clear decisions from him. And this was creating a backlog both in terms of what should they do, but also how they felt about it. So, just simply working with him and the team, but without sort of attacking him, just saying, "Let's create an environment where you can ask the questions of him that you want, he can see what you need from him." And sort of two or three sessions helped unlock that. And it did lead to longer-term coaching for this individual who was completely unaware of the impact he was having on his team. So, that one is, you know, nice and simple. That can easily happen when it's not your natural strength, it's not an area.
But then equally, you know, intentionally, or sort of more sort of conscious, I'm working with a a larger organisation, a trading team in a larger organisation, where the personalities are very alpha and very dominant. In fact, the boss couldn't give a damn. He actually said to me, Faris, "I don't give a shit about people, okay? I'm paying you to sort out that side of things." Okay? Because he's very honest with me, which in some ways I'm grateful for, but I'm sad as a human being that he doesn't care enough about his team. He'd rather outsource the actual the caring element. But what was even more worrying is that that attitude flowed throughout his team. They really didn't care about each other because the boss didn't care. So, in that scenario, we had to use other techniques to get the team to start teaming, to unlock the value that we knew they could bring because it was hindering the quality of the decisions they made as traders and it could be seen in their day-to-day performance. But fortunately, we had some techniques, and we helped them overcome that. But yeah, you can get two ends of the spectrum, and it's always fascinates which one will you enter a company.
Jimmy: Wow, fascinating stories, and I'm sure resonate with people out there who may or may not realise that they are struggling in one of those three areas. If I'm sitting as a CEO or a member of a senior leadership team, and I'm thinking, "Well, where should we be focusing our efforts? What should we be focusing on?" Could you give us a couple of insights around what would I be looking for in each of those three elements that might give me an indication or some sort of yardstick measure of we've potentially got a problem here or a strength area here?
Faris: Yeah. So, I think good barometers, and the thing is there's a bit of overlap actually. So, this is where the beauty comes in. So, let's start with the IQ, which is a lot of people go, "Well, we're we're very good." I always think the acid test of the IQ is how many inputs did you get? How many ideas did you get before you chose the idea that you're going with? So, you know, it's great you've got a strategy, but was it the only option that you had? Therefore, it became your strategy, or did you have 10, 20, or maybe even a hundred options and you intentionally picked this? Because if you only had one and you picked one, the chances are it's not a great strategy, right? It's one made out of duress or under pressure or lack of creativity. So, that for me is always a good barometer of, okay, let's see. And the good news is we can always stimulate more options, okay? I can pretty much guarantee every company, but how we do that is usually by being more inclusive. That's why I say it overlaps with the EQ. So, that's a good test on the IQ side of things. So, if you're out there, and you've got a new idea, just go back to the sort of the thought process and see how many ideas took to get you there.
And then if we come to the EQ, how many people have you talked to about that idea? How many people have been involved in it? Now, I'm not saying that everyone needed to be there on the start of the journey, but certainly it is far easier to disseminate an idea if people have been involved in some way or another than if you've just done it on your own and you try and force them to buy into it. So, how much of you actively engage with your team, your employees, your company on your strategy or your idea is a good barometer. Now, and if the answer is it's just been me in a room, again, you're probably not in a great place on the EQ side of things.
And then in terms of the FQ is how many competing priorities do you have? Just honestly, look around your company, look around your own life, if you're doing this on a personal basis. How many things am I trying to achieve at the same time? Again, if it's more than sort of 10, the there should be a a sort of a warning light going off because it's very hard for anybody to do 10 things or more than 10 things really, really well.
Jimmy: Amazing insights, and just very simple things there to look out for. But actually, quite a powerful yardstick for what we could be looking for if we want to semi-diagnose what's going on in the team.
Hey, there, Jimmy here. I just wanted to drop in on this episode and say an enormous thank you for all of the amazing reviews and testimonials and feedback we're getting about the Ways of Working podcast. Top 10% globally, and absolutely thrilled to be there bringing as much value as we can from the Ways of Working community to you, our listeners. I wanted to drop a quick note of one of the beautiful reviews that was left by Jenny M 49. Thank you so much, Jenny, for that kind review. Jenny says, "For those people who want to gain a practical performance edge, full of practical tips in every episode, tune in here." Jenny, we really appreciate your feedback. Thank you so much. And hope that you, our listeners, will follow and subscribe using your favourite podcast platform of choice and bring every episode to share value, knowledge, and expertise from our incredible guests. Take care. Speak soon.
I want to go back to that one that you mentioned is the most frequent, which is our lack of EQ in an environment. And I use the three C's model for why these things might go wrong. Maybe I believe that my team are not conscious of the challenges that I'm facing, so how could they possibly give good insight? Or maybe they're not capable of understanding what we're going through, because they're not up to it. They're not smart enough. They're not capable enough. They're not as clever as me. They haven't got the experience I've got, so how would they know? Or finally, the the third option could be they don't have capacity right now. They're overloaded already, so I can't involve them in any decision-making processes. These are three kind of common resistance points that we get when people don't involve others. How would you work through those? How would you start to work with a leader to overcome that?
Faris: Uh so, I mean, some of that is mindset and narrative that they're telling themselves. Great coaches like you, Jimmy, and and others help people with that mindset. But a lot of what I do is either show the benefit of going to the team or highlight, you know, I I talk a lot about bruising egos. I show where there's a deficit, right? And I'm not afraid to call senior leaders out and kind of bruise their ego a little bit, so that they actually go, "Do you know what? I do need to change my way or I do need to influence." Now, let's bring this to life a bit. I do a lot of something called wargaming, Jimmy, which I know from your military background, you may have been involved in some wargaming from a military point of view, but in the business sense, we don't actually go to have any combat. But what we do do is stress test and bring to life strategies. Okay, it's a super fun activity. But here's the thing, Jimmy. Every time I do it, the same thing happens the first time we play it, which is we get really boring, bland answers because we just normally involve the senior team who've been thinking about the problem already, you know, for years, and they always come up with the same answers that they've always come up with, okay? So, imagine we were doing a war game for a retailer say, "Well, how can you win this new market? How can you outsell other retailers?" They'll just come up with the ideas they've always come up with.
Now, what I then tend to do is introduce a different group who, on the face of it, don't have the capability, aren't conscious of everything that the senior leaders know, might not even have the capacity. So, I go and say, "Give me a junior team. Give me give me some graduates. Give me some people off the shop floor." I then put them in this war game to compete against these senior people. And do you know what happens in round two? They usually beat them. And they usually because they come at it from a completely fresh point of view, without any sort of prejudices or assumptions that the others. And it's that bruising the ego, you know, a bunch of senior professionals who get beaten by a junior team, suddenly go, "What the hell? Right." I, you know, "I'm pissed off now. I'm going to listen to you, Faris. I'm going to do something differently." So, I'm not afraid to go a bit left field, irritate them, or, you know, as I said, or show them the benefit and challenge those narratives. But one way or another, I'm going to demonstrate to you that some of those things you thought about your team are just not true.
Jimmy: I Resonates so well with me. I've just finished reading Daniel Coyle's The Culture Code, and one of the first things he talks about in teaming and trust is the pasta tower activity and how high can you build a tower out of pieces of pasta and Sellotape. And generally, the teams that score the best are kindergartners, followed by virtual assistants or executive assistants, followed by students, and you work your way down to the least successful group, which tends to be executives and senior leaders, because they're all thinking about positioning and angles and politics and team influence versus just chucking ideas in the pot and seeing what happens. Absolutely fascinating. It's an example of the same thing. In terms of the wheels coming off. So, often teams can go through these activities. They can really focus in on one of those three elements and improve their performance, and improve their effectiveness, and then the wheels can come off a little bit down the track. Have you seen that happening? And where does that tend to happen? What's your experience?
Faris: Yeah, I mean, that happens all the time, right? You know, teams forget that any sort of little change in their dynamics means they almost go back to the start. And they get disheartened, and they they go through the change curve, you know? I'm thinking about teams where they've been buzzing for years. And you know, I I recently worked with a medium-sized firm where, actually, the founders were all best friends. They all started well, and the firm grew successfully. Then they hit a period of sort of stalled growth. They all individually became frustrated by this. And what they realised, you know, they asked me to come in and facilitate sort of conversations around the direction of the firm. What they realised is they'd stopped communicating to each other. You know, over time, they'd taken for granted that they all knew what the other person was thinking. So, they started to cancel or, you know, the weekly team meeting would come up and say, "Actually, we don't need it this week." And a new member had joined and they'd not taken the time to induct them into the senior leadership team. So, it was kind of creeping up as that sort of boiling the water around them. They weren't aware. So, actually acknowledging it, you know, having a reset, having a formal like, you know, I'd get them to do some of the, "Hey, let's get to know each other," exercises. They're like, "We already know each other." I said, "Well, you might be surprised if you take a slightly different angle." So, not being afraid to invest in doing some of the things that you might have forgotten to do is always invaluable, even if it's just setting up regular coffees amongst people. You know, so sometimes we take it right back to basics, but it can happen a lot because it's easy to take things for granted and not continue to work on it.
Jimmy: And I think, you know, from my experience, the doing a program with a facilitated piece of work and then thinking that's going to solve the problem, when actually that is almost just the start of the journey. And you need to continue those things you spoke about in the meeting, put them into practice, pressure test them to know that sometimes these things might stop working, or you might have to re-look at them versus, "Oh, we did the people thing on that day, and now we're all good." Actually, it's a journey of work, right? And you can't just stop doing it.
Faris: Yeah, it's a bit like saying, "Well, you know, I got a gym membership at the start of the year. Why am I not fit? Well, you've never been to the gym, buddy," right? It doesn't It's not enough to have one course or one Yeah. Yeah, I I can tell you loads of stories about that. But I'm sure you've had much the same. In fact, one one springs to mind about, you know, a client. It wasn't even a client. It was a proposal, Jimmy. It was a proposal. I wrote a a proposal for a team of how I'd help them improve their culture and work together. And what the client did, God bless them, is they took my proposal, and decided to try it themselves, and then they disappeared off the face of the earth. And then, uh obviously, I was annoyed. I'm sure people out there have had similar situations. But then I was pleasantly surprised/amazed when two years later, the same client rang me, kind of sheepishly saying, "Look, we did take your idea and just try to run it. We weren't successful, so can you come in and actually do what we talked about two years ago?" On one side, I was kind of like, you know, uh "That shows you." But actually, I was really impressed at how he was willing to swallow his pride and come back and ask for that help. And you know, it's been a real pleasure working with them uh when we did reconnect two years later.
Jimmy: Really good insight that um sometimes having that external perspective as well can be useful to shine a light on the things maybe you're unwilling or unable to take a look at for yourself in those conversations, and to sometimes just to create that safe space for a conversation that you, for whatever reason, aren't able to reach directly with your team, which could come down to some of that EQ stuff, right?
Faris: Yeah. Why do the greatest athletes in the world still have coaches, right? They're the best at their game, but you can't read your own label. You need someone external with a few grey hairs, I know you can't see it on this video, Jimmy, who will point out the things that you might have missed.
Jimmy: Yeah, absolutely. No, that's awesome, Faris. Thank you. And so let's talk quickly about the trademark, and the equation. So, we've obviously we now know the three elements of team effectiveness, and you've walked us through some of the variables and measures that we might want to pay attention to. But just walk us through from an offering perspective, who are the types of people that you really like to work with? And why have you trademarked this equation to be able to use it in these organisations?
Faris: So, uh you know, I used to be a maths teacher, so I love equations. Uh I know, I'm that sad. But I thought, you know, when I I'd identified these things, I thought it would be very useful to have an an equation, a methodology, that could really easily communicate with clients and what areas we were helping them with and where the barriers were. So, we developed an assessment around this. And then it just naturally occurred to me to I was surprised that there wasn't a trademark around focus quotient. So, I I went out and trademarked that. And then I thought, "Hey, do you know what? Just for completeness, we'll trademark actual equation." Uh and do you know what happened, Jimmy? I got involved in a trademark battle. A big company sort of came along and went, "No, no, no, that's far too close to something we've trademarked. So, stop now. Cease and desist." And I naively thought I could just handle it on my own, so I end up ringing the head of a law firm to try and thrash it out, but was politely told, "This is not how we do things. You have to hire your own set of lawyers." So, long story short, Jimmy, it was 18 months of lots of legal fees, and lots of back and forth, but we did win, and uh we got our trademark. And do you know But what was much more fascinating was during this battle, the amount of support we got from clients who were like, "Don't give up. Don't don't fold in the face of this big corporation. This is the essence of your company." And it was such a ringing endorsement of it had really resonated with them, and that it was, you know, so powerful. So, you know, if I wasn't bought into it before, I was definitely at the end of the 18 months thought, "This is a great thing. This is a great sort of language and and a simplification of something that a lot of people see in front of themselves, but don't actually grasp on a day-to-day basis." So, yeah, it's been a real pleasure to finally have it, even if it's uh cost me a lot of sleepless nights.
Jimmy: I'm sure. And and, hey, well done on that. And it is, you know, I I really agree. If you make it simple to understand, we do the same thing with our PACED framework, which is the the the framework for high performance culture. And exactly that, it's just easy to remember, easy to think through, and people tend to really go, "Oh, yeah, that's the bit I need right now," because they can see the it puts it in a box to think in, which is super helpful.
Faris, this has been such an interesting conversation. And, you know, I always find in our conversations that I learn something new. But if you wanted our audience to take away one thing about everything we've spoken about, what would that be?
Faris: Yeah. I think, you know, looking across the three pillars, it's involve more people, right? It could be in the ideas, it could be in the transfer of the knowledge, or it could be in prioritising. But the more you share what's inside your head, and the more you share your strategies, your ideas, the better you will be in terms of the IQ, the quality of those ideas, getting people bought in, and the ability to focus on them. So, don't be afraid to go out there and tell more people about what you're doing.
Jimmy: Fantastic. And if people want to get in touch with you, how can they reach out and connect most effectively?
Faris: Oh, well, I'd love to hear from all of them. So, they can either come to Germany and find me out here, no, but I'll be back in London. Uh they can look us up on the company website, and drop us an email through there. You know, the uh company is called Shiageto Consulting, which Shiageto is the Japanese word for a sharpening stone. So, that's why we help sharpen other companies. Or come find me uh personally on LinkedIn. I spend far too much of my life there, but I do like it. So, look for the one and only Faris Aranki. There's only one of us on LinkedIn, and we can carry on the conversation.
Jimmy: Fantastic. And we will put Faris's links in the show notes below this episode, so you will see his website, his email address, and his LinkedIn profile where you can keep up with all of his musings as he jet-sets around the globe. Faris, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Really appreciate your time and enthusiasm, and uh look forward to speaking soon.
Faris: Likewise, Jimmy. Thank you.
Jimmy: That's it for this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. If you enjoyed this episode, please drop a review on whichever platform you listened on. We really appreciate it, and it helps us to connect with new listeners. Also, if you haven't already, head to jimmyburroughes.com and download a copy of my latest best seller, Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance. It's the leader's playbook for building a high-performance culture, and is packed with practical action tips to get you started. Stay tuned for next week's episode of game-changing insights and ideas on The High Performance Leader.