James Scouller on “Enterprise Excellence” Podcast

I appeared as a guest on the Enterprise Excellence podcast, hosted by Brad Jeavons. Brad runs the Enterprise Excellence Academy in Brisbane, Australia. We were discussing my trilogy, How To Build Winning Teams Again And Again.

The EE Academy is a global network of experts who help organisations build cultures of continuous improvement and innovation in pursuit of sustainable growth and a better future.

You can find our podcast interview, which went live on 23 October 2024, on YouTube, Apple, Spotify and Buzzsprout.

Topics we covered included::

• What drove me to write a trilogy on winning teams.
• The focus of each book in the trilogy — what each book covers and how they complement each other.
• What a team is (and isn’t).
• The valid alternative to a team (the performance group) and when to use it to best effect.
• The three big psychological issues all work groups must address if they are to become genuine teams: Commit, Combust and Combine (C-C-C) … what they mean, why they follow one another, and how to recognise them.
• How the arrival of a new team member can trigger a new C-C-C challenge.
• The influence of William Schutz on my thinking.
• Where trust comes in the C-C-C model … and how long it takes to build it.
• The seven-principle (7P) action model for addressing the Commit-Combust-Combine issues.
• The importance of emotion in team goal setting.
• How to change ingrained habits on a wide scale — the importance of focusing on just one or two changes at most.
• The crucial difference between a team’s basic purpose and its motivating purpose.
• How important it is to have the right people on board, Belbin team roles, the research behind Belbin’s model.
• Adapting your application of the seven-principle (7P) model to the team’s specific situation and challenges.
• The TeamFixer tool for figuring out which C-C-C issue is dominant and therefore which parts of the 7P action model you should apply first.

If you want to visit Brad’s website to hear just the audio version of our interview and browse his site from there, just click this link to the Enterprise Excellence website.

Enjoy the podcast.