Team Intelligence w/ Jon Levy

In this episode, behavioral scientist and NYT bestselling author Jon Levy joins Chad & Cheese to torch outdated leadership myths and unveil the real engine of high-performing organizations: team intelligence — the science of building groups that actually pass the damn ball instead of trying to be LeBron on every play.

Levy brings the receipts: Why rewarding individual “A-players” creates corporate Thunderdomes. Why groups outperform superstars (spoiler: most of the superstars end up metaphorically dead) Why teams with more emotional intelligence, and yes, often more women, consistently outperform. How companies completely mis-measure talent, overvalue the wrong stats, and overlook the “Shane Battiers” who quietly win championships. Why remote culture fails, what actually fixes it, and why your Slack happy hour sucks. AND how AI agents will reshape team dynamics faster than your CEO can say “reorg”.

If you lead people, build teams, manage humans, or just enjoy watching corporate BS get torn to shreds, this is your episode.

Jon’s book Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius is out now — and unlike your MBA, this one actually makes you better at working with people.

Chad. Cheese. Levy. A super-team that won’t peck each other to death.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Joel Cheesman (00:30.336)

Yeah, it's the podcast your mom warned you about aka the Chad and cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman joined as always. Chad. So wash is writing shotgun as we welcome John Levy to the show. He's a behavioral scientist in New York times, bestselling author known for his work and trust human connection, belonging and influence. So why the hell is he on a show like this? Well, his latest book entitled team intelligence, how brilliant leaders unlock.

Chad Sowash (00:38.33)

Hello.

Mmm.

Chad Sowash (00:45.648)

There he is. There he is.

Joel Cheesman (00:59.232)

collective genius. He's going to talk about that. a book that debunks myths about leadership and introduces team intelligence as the true driver of success. John, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.

Chad Sowash (01:13.264)

Thank God you said that.

Jon Levy (01:13.418)

I am beyond excited to be here. It's so nice to be on a podcast or talk that I don't actually have to watch what I'm saying.

Joel Cheesman (01:22.772)

Yeah, there's no ivory tower here. There's no Google. Like this is the real people. This is, this is where you want to be, John, if you want to get your message across to the masses.

Chad Sowash (01:23.355)

Yes.

Chad Sowash (01:29.904)

I'm just happy that you had that intro because I thought this was an intervention to be quite frank. So behavior scientist. Yeah. I thought the same.

Jon Levy (01:38.574)

Don't worry, I'm judging and evaluating you moment by moment.

Joel Cheesman (01:41.704)

I'm raising the bar really high for you, John. hope that you can clear it. Well, John, we've read a little bit about your professional career. A lot of our listeners, watchers won't know you from Adam. Give us who John Levy is and why we should care.

Chad Sowash (01:43.054)

You sound like my wife, John.

Chad Sowash (01:54.724)

Or they might.

Jon Levy (01:58.51)

So I'm a behavioral scientist and I spend a lot of my time asking possibly the weirdest questions you could find. Probably the most famous study I ever did was the largest in history on dating. So we looked at 421 million potential matches between people. dating app Hinge, we got all their data. we ended up, because I care about connection, trust, like all these kinds of factors that are very human, whether it's personal and professional.

Chad Sowash (02:11.929)

Chad Sowash (02:17.23)

What?

Joel Cheesman (02:25.877)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (02:28.684)

And we found that, and this was so funny, we found that across every factor you could imagine, the more similar you are to somebody, the more likely you are to date. You basically want to date a slightly different version of yourself. And so if you have the same initials, you're 11.3 % more likely to date. I'm completely serious. If you went to like the same NCAA conference, even though you're not in school anymore and now you're back in like some major city or something, you are more likely to date.

Chad Sowash (02:39.6)

Mm.

Chad Sowash (02:45.136)

No stop.

Jon Levy (02:57.73)

The one exception, and I thought this was just hilarious, was introverts and extroverts. I thought introverts would date introverts and extroverts would date extroverts. Two introverts almost never date because no one starts a conversation. Isn't that awesome?

Yeah

So I then took my understanding of human behavior and company started coming to me and saying, what do we actually do with this? And then I started applying it to the workplace. And that's kind of what brings us here today.

Joel Cheesman (03:33.672)

Any personal stuff you want to share? Family? sports family? What you got? We want to know John Levy, god damn it.

Jon Levy (03:35.598)

Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. I've. I I'm a girl, dad. have to expecting a third soon, so I'm going to have three under three and then. Yeah, we believe in productivity in this house.

Chad Sowash (03:44.24)

Ciao!

Chad Sowash (03:49.668)

Three under three?

Joel Cheesman (03:50.775)

my god.

Chad Sowash (03:54.638)

Ooh, I guess. Oof.

Jon Levy (03:57.263)

What else can I share? She's been over here was asking about an absolutely ridiculous thing I did when I was 28 and broke. I wanted to see if somebody will give me free food. And so I was underemployed and overweight and I managed to sign up to be a before and after fitness model for a late night video infomercial. And so...

Chad Sowash (04:02.96)

Building a team, I see.

Joel Cheesman (04:15.658)

I'm listening.

Jon Levy (04:26.659)

They give you your food for three months and they train you five, six days a week. And my God, I got shredded. I lost 20 pounds.

Jon Levy (04:39.321)

my god, what was that from?

Joel Cheesman (04:40.416)

Welcome to the chat and cheese podcast, John. All right.

Jon Levy (04:43.924)

Yeah, clearly. So that was possibly the weirdest thing. You know, but is it will work out for food? Yeah, my god. No, no, no, they don't pay you for integrity reasons. Yeah. But if you if you still look on the internet, it was like a follow up program to P90X called revabs. And I was like their token white looking guy.

Chad Sowash (04:44.432)

Jesus.

Chad Sowash (04:49.712)

It got shredded though. Did you get paid to get shredded?

Joel Cheesman (04:51.264)

shredded.

Joel Cheesman (05:07.402)

Is that when you met your wife, Judy Lawson? JL, get it? I was listening. I was listening. Yeah, sorry.

Jon Levy (05:11.694)

Yeah, yeah, no, no, I that I met my wife at an airport but Yeah

Chad Sowash (05:13.505)

okay, none of it. Okay, okay. So kids, in the airport, okay, were you going to the same place? Was she hitching a ride? What's going on? Okay.

Jon Levy (05:23.66)

No, I basically struck up a conversation with her at the gate and we were going on the same flight initially, but then we each had layovers. And she would later describe me as that guy who wasn't nearly as charming as he thought he was. It was really, really funny. But on the air bridge, know, so I asked, do you want to cut the line? Because, you know, I travel a lot. had status. She's like, sure. So we...

Chad Sowash (05:28.72)

Mm-hmm.

Chad Sowash (05:45.008)

Which is, I think.

Chad Sowash (05:51.792)

Uh-huh.

Jon Levy (05:53.549)

end up on the air bridge together and I said, hey, you you can either take your pre-assigned seat and sit next to some 300 pound man muffin topping over the armrest with terrible BO, or you can switch your seat and sit next to me and have the most interesting flight of your life. And she's.

Joel Cheesman (06:06.09)

Hello. Hello.

Jon Levy (06:09.966)

And she said, yeah, let's do it. And then we ended up talking for the next eight hours. And I asked her to join me for a drink on the layover. And I disappeared for a second. I said, I'll be right back. I brought, this is so cheesy, I brought a gold bottle of champagne from Duty Free, those ultra cheesy ones. And we ended up drinking it and just kind of hitting it off at the airport. And we met up again.

Joel Cheesman (06:15.284)

is smooth, That is smooth.

Chad Sowash (06:26.82)

yes.

Chad Sowash (06:33.188)

Okay, kids. Okay, kids. This is not a dating show. Okay. We're going to get into the actual topic right now. cause I know, I know we got to get to you. You are an important guy, John. We're going to talk about team in team intelligence today. John, you've garnered tons of attention. You've been on CBS, NBC, and now you've hit the pinnacle of your career. My friend, the Chad and cheese HR's most dangerous podcast one day.

Jon Levy (06:39.508)

You wanted to know about my life, yeah.

Joel Cheesman (06:45.93)

Yeah, he's got a call with Bill Gates after talking to us.

Jon Levy (06:46.155)

I am.

Joel Cheesman (06:58.218)

rock bottom.

Jon Levy (06:59.852)

I knew one day if I tried hard enough.

Chad Sowash (07:04.24)

Be careful. We still haven't published yet. We still haven't published yet. Anyway, in reading through all your chat GPT notes and everything that you sent to us and all the videos I can actually pull together, I've got to ask because talk about team intelligence and when we talk about teams, one of the things that really kills a team a lot of times is decision by committee because it sucks.

Joel Cheesman (07:04.938)

You would be on our show and now today is the day, my friend.

Chad Sowash (07:33.976)

Right. And the rise, the rise of rugged individualism has been pounded into our heads. Yes. The whole greed is good. Yay. Capitalism. how do we short circuit a narrative that's been happening since the union busting Reagan years over 40 years ago? I mean, it's still happening today. It feels like it's literally hardwired into society. How do we, how do we focus on team as opposed to rugged individualism?

Jon Levy (07:34.608)

it's awful.

Jon Levy (08:03.0)

So I think we need to understand what we're actually trying to accomplish, right? What we suffer from is what's called a super chicken problem. no, I'm going to be serious. In the 1970s, a chicken producer called DeKalb produced a chicken called the DeKalb XL. It's like the Ferrari of chickens. This thing could literally, yeah, it could literally outlay any other chicken out there. The problem is that when you keep breeding for individual productivity at a certain,

Chad Sowash (08:06.96)

Mm.

Chad Sowash (08:21.584)

Xl that is awesome

Jon Levy (08:32.77)

point, the only way to get more resources to become more productive is to peck the other chickens to death. And so they became very violent and they would literally kill each other. And so they started doing this awful thing, which is clipping their beaks. and so a researcher by the name of William Yor said there has to be a better way. What we need to do is we need to actually take a crossbread chicken and then instead of

Chad Sowash (08:45.104)

Oof.

Chad Sowash (08:51.002)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (08:59.284)

only re-breeding the top performers, we're gonna put them in groups and we're gonna weigh the total output of the group. And the top groups, generation after generation, will be re-bred. And the idea was that if we reward through mating, both productivity and pro-social behavior, then we'll get really great groups that know how to be around each other. Isn't it great?

Chad Sowash (09:19.322)

Mm-hmm.

Chad Sowash (09:23.716)

You're comparing us to chickens, John. You're comparing us to chickens.

Jon Levy (09:28.98)

other things I could compare us to is way worse.

Joel Cheesman (09:32.352)

Well, we just got back from Nashville and the hot Nashville chicken, can tell you is a winner in my book.

Chad Sowash (09:36.976)

That does an entirely different thing to your body, but go ahead, John, sorry.

Jon Levy (09:37.975)

A winner. Yes. So what ends up happening is that Muir runs a test. Can the super chickens beat out the teams? And what ended up happening after a year was that the teams far out produced the super chickens by a long shot, mostly because most of the super chickens were dead. And so in corporate America, you hit it on the nail, Chad, the nail on the head.

The problem is that if we keep rewarding people for individualistic top performance, we're going to get highly competitive behavior, where at a certain point, the only way I can do better than the people next to me is in making sure they do poorly. I'm incentivized to make sure that my colleagues fail so I could be in the top 10 % so I can get bonuses. So the first thing we need to look at is how do we foster pro-social behavior? And then the second thing is

Chad Sowash (10:24.282)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (10:36.546)

we have to understand how do we reward and give status. Whatever we give status to and give money to, that's what people will reproduce. If I give bonuses for the top performance of an individual, then that individual will, or then people think individually. If I start actually giving rewards for groups, then, and giving status for the people who support each other, then people will.

It's much like breeding will want to repeat whatever gets them that reward. We are status driven.

Joel Cheesman (11:13.608)

I assume you hope that CEOs and business owners read this, but who else do you hope reads this book and what was sort of the inspiration around it? know you do a lot of interesting things aside from writing.

Jon Levy (11:24.11)

So the answer is that when you're a Jewish kid with a brother who's a doctor, it's really hard to impress your mother. And so I'd really love it if my mother read the book. Now, aside from that, I think that the important thing to understand is that if you are in a team at any point or responsible for building teams, this book is for you. The reason is that what we ended up really

Chad Sowash (11:47.952)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (11:53.251)

coming to the conclusion was that the role of a leader is very limited in terms of its impact. Most of the work happens between team members. The single most important thing to realize is that it's not an employee's job to be productive. Individual productivity comes at the cost of the team. I'll give you a simple example. In basketball, there's only one stat that predicts a player's It's the, exactly, 100%.

So every player is incentivized to shoot regardless of if it's a good shot. They've maximized individual productivity. There's only one stat that predicts an effective coach. It's the increase in the rate of passing under that coach. If I can increase how much a player passes, it means the ball is more likely to get to the person who has the best chance of scoring. My job isn't to be productive. My job is to make my team smart. Sometimes that means shooting, but usually it means passing.

Chad Sowash (12:53.712)

What about because we hear all the time and you stick with the sports analogy real quick, but we hear all the time that, you know, companies are just looking for a players. Give me the players, find me the purple squirrel, whatever they want to call it. But yeah, that's what they call it. It's it's stupid shit. but can there be too much talent on a team? Can there be just too many a players, too much talent? That's what it sounds like to talk a little bit about that.

Joel Cheesman (13:04.576)

Thank

Jon Levy (13:06.626)

The purple squirrel, that's so funny.

Jon Levy (13:22.19)

So what you're actually talking about is specifically called the too much talent problem. A group of researchers did a funny thing. They wanted to understand how do teams get affected when we add more and more talent? And it turns out that in sports like basketball and football, European football, so soccer, when you cross about the 50 to 60 % mark of top talent, the team is massively underperforming.

Chad Sowash (13:34.032)

Mm-hmm.

Chad Sowash (13:47.216)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (13:50.671)

Now, the question is why? And I was just talking to the owners of one of the big basketball teams and they said, you know, when you have people who are used to controlling the ball and shooting, then they're not really mentally in the state of passing the ball or working with other people, right? Sometimes called like a heliocentric model where everybody works around them because they're the star.

Chad Sowash (14:12.41)

Mm-hmm.

Joel Cheesman (14:18.634)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (14:20.312)

No.

The problem actually exists in a very specific way. Because if you look at baseball, there is no maximum level of talent. And that's because baseball is a sport that is basically individualistic that you happen to be playing as a group. There's no way to be selfish in baseball. If you hit a home run, it doesn't mean that I'm at a disadvantage on your team. Right? And so...

Joel Cheesman (14:37.546)

Mm-hmm.

Chad Sowash (14:37.808)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (14:49.858)

What it's actually called in the workplace is task interdependence, meaning that if our roles are intertwined, yeah, then you're going to have a problem. But if we're completely individualistic and never interact, it really doesn't matter. Now I do want to add one thing, which is there too much talent problem exists, not because of top talent. It exists because we are really bad at

Chad Sowash (15:06.437)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (15:19.456)

measuring what's useful. We're great at measuring what's easy to see. It is easy to see when somebody scores. But in basketball, there's a player called Shane Battier, who was on the Miami Heat, he's retired now.

Chad Sowash (15:21.04)

Mm-hmm.

Joel Cheesman (15:33.002)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (15:36.483)

There's this funny thing that it would happen with Shane Battier. The top five players in the NBA, if you add them to your team, the team scores about an additional eight to 12 points per game. It's called a plus minus. Battier was known for having no meaningful stats whatsoever, and the team would get a plus six, which is insane. He wouldn't shoot, he wouldn't steal, he wouldn't do any of these things. Why? Here's one example of why.

Joel Cheesman (15:58.112)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (16:04.94)

because he would memorize every player's stats and he would know, okay, that player over there, he's their rebound guy. If I push him back, then it creates space for my people to actually get the ball. Shane Batier is a no stats all-star because the current statistic system doesn't understand how to measure his behavior. It's not that he's not a star. It's just we're measuring stars wrong.

Chad Sowash (16:14.576)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (16:35.392)

And so I believe, yeah, get top talent, but complimentary talent that actually fulfills a bunch of skill sets that we need rather than what we traditionally call top performers that all have the same skills that don't necessarily add up well.

Joel Cheesman (16:48.608)

And I don't think that's the mindset. I think the mindset is let's get the best people work for our company. And ultimately they're going to do the best work. What you're arguing is higher, higher, the best talent, but surrounded by the, you call glue glue players, I believe are the glue of a, a, of an organization. I don't think that exists today. I think if you go to med, it's like, we want to hire the best developers. They don't think about who would be compliment or who would be the guy.

Chad Sowash (17:16.558)

for $100 million.

Joel Cheesman (17:17.554)

or gal that sees what other people don't see, how should employers sort of rethink hiring and the worldview that you hold?

Jon Levy (17:31.289)

So I think what we need to ask is what actually predicts the intelligence of a team, right? And when a researcher by the name of Anita Williams Woolley actually looked at this, she found that it was none of the things that we traditionally believed predicted it. So I'll give you an example. We traditionally think it's like talent, like highest IQ. we've got the best person, right? Not a predictor that the team was able to solve problems. We looked at, or she looked at average IQ.

Not a predictor. How much people liked each other. Not a predictor. The actual predictor, you're gonna love this. The number of women on the team.

Chad Sowash (18:08.506)

Talk to me. Yeah, why?

Jon Levy (18:10.146)

Why? Because women, it's not because they're women, it's because women index higher on emotional intelligence tests. And when you look at what causes a team to be effective, it's different than an individual sport. In an individual sport, it's pure talent. It's like the equivalent of IQ, right? Serena Williams can go on the court and dominate for 25 years on pure talent and hardware.

Once you put somebody in a team setting, they've gone from taking their shots to having to coordinate and pass and shoot less. And so if what happens is that we end up in a situation that all we have are shooters, nobody's passing and then the team won't do well. And so when we're recruiting, what we need to look at is resource diversity. I'm not talking like.

We've gotten stuck on these ideas of gender, race, all that kind of stuff. I'm talking resource diversity. Resource diversity is mental models, skills, experience, languages, spoken context, you name it, right? It is inevitable that if you have a diversity of resources, that it's gonna look more diverse, but we need to focus on the resources the team needs, not the simple, easy to see stuff.

Chad Sowash (19:31.62)

So how do we, how do we get into this emotional intelligence kind of mindset with, with once again, for 40 plus, which probably longer than that years easily that, you know, it's always been male dominated, tough, hard, rub some dirt on it kind of shit. That's not emotional intelligence at all. How do we start to train toward that?

to be able to create more productive teams, not just females. Obviously females, I mean, it's something that is innate within them.

Jon Levy (20:02.338)

Yeah.

There are plenty of men who have high emotional intelligence and plenty of women who don't. I think that it's once again, we have to focus on what's useful, not what's easy to see. Let's not categorize people by gender so much as skill set that they can bring to the team, right?

Chad Sowash (20:18.03)

But you just did. said females are better in teams. So they must bring.

Jon Levy (20:22.294)

I know saying that the teams that that have more women do better because of their emotional intelligence. You could find a group of guys that have I just wouldn't want to reduce something to something that simple like saying, we can't have another man on this team. We have to hire or right because that creates a negative interaction between genders rather than saying, hey, who has really high emotional intelligence? If you focus on that question.

Chad Sowash (20:35.492)

Gotcha.

Joel Cheesman (20:39.466)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (20:51.342)

You'll probably end up with more women anyway, but it begins with something that's of value. I could develop more emotional intelligence. A person can't be any more of a woman, right? It's not like a skill set. It's a immutable factor. So I think then the question is, what do we do about it? First of all, we have to realize that not everybody needs it. Let's say you're a leader who doesn't have high emotional intelligence. Figure out who on your team does and partner with them. Let's say Chad.

You're the person and I go, wow, Chad, listen, I don't have high emotional intelligence, but, or, and it takes a little bit of self-awareness. Hey, it's really clear that people trust you and that you're like a go-to person or a glue player on the team. It's not my skillset. I'm really good at whatever it is, sales, marketing, whatever it is, right? I'm going to ask for your help. If you hear me talking too much in a meeting or you see that there's somebody who's staying silent, but they should really be speaking.

Will you let me know or call him?

Chad Sowash (21:51.984)

throw out a safe word. Yeah.

Jon Levy (21:53.527)

Yeah, exactly. the point here is that suddenly the team becomes smarter and I didn't actually have to develop a skill. I just had to be willing to let you shine or listen to you. And herein lies the truth that the smallest unit of effectiveness is team, not individual. And we keep putting everything on the leader rather than looking at the skills a team needs to be effective.

Joel Cheesman (22:18.624)

Yeah. John, going back to your, your sports analogy, sometimes Shane Baddie, is magic Johnson or it's Tom Brady or it's LeBron James. How should companies think about a super high level talent empowering everyone under him or her, whether it's a top person or a glue worker, like aren't there.

situations, sometimes it's the CEO, would say Steve Jobs might be in that transcendent category. Should companies think about that or does it just accidentally happen?

Jon Levy (22:54.158)

Should they think about how do they?

Joel Cheesman (22:56.51)

Like we're gonna bring in the best of the best and they're gonna make everybody else better.

Jon Levy (23:01.784)

So I will argue that that's not necessarily something that most companies really think about. They're too stuck on the model of the super chickens, hoping that the super chickens will solve the problem. this person's incredible. Now what you'll notice is that when you bring in a turnaround CEO, they've been through this before at two, three companies sometimes.

Chad Sowash (23:17.978)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (23:29.238)

And so their entire team will actually just relocate and they'll bring them from project to project because they've already created an intelligent team. And then they augment it with the current employees. Right? So they face people out and that's the thing. You'll notice it's not just the leader. It's not that they come in and get everybody on board. They have the people and the habits and the systems that they already work well with for those turnarounds and they bring them all with them. Maybe not all, but often.

And that's what makes the magic happen. A CEO without the rest of that team is going to have an uphill battle.

Chad Sowash (24:04.612)

So is that because they all have Harvard MBAs? Is that what I'm hearing? We all have to go to

Jon Levy (24:09.644)

I mean, that's the true defining characteristic of any decent human being, which is why I'm an indecent human being.

Chad Sowash (24:14.704)

Is it really just cracked up? Is it all just cracked up to having an Harvard MBA? Tell me the truth, John.

Jon Levy (24:22.988)

I'm going to tell you the truth, and it's both delightful and terrible. If you want to succeed, having a Harvard MBA definitely won't hurt. It's often been referred to as the golden passport, meaning people will take you seriously if you have one. Yeah, and connections and all that. The problem with it is that the commitment of Harvard, if you look on their website, is that they say they're going to create the leaders of tomorrow. And when you compare Harvard MBA or MBA graduates

Chad Sowash (24:36.336)

connections.

Jon Levy (24:52.31)

in terms of performance versus those people who have the same jobs who do not have MBAs. There is no meaningful difference whatsoever. And it is in many categories they underperforming. And the reason I'll give is I think pretty simple. Have you ever played Mario Kart? All right. The video game for the listeners, your Mario or another character from the Mario universe, and you're driving a car and you're go kart fighting and all that.

Chad Sowash (25:11.185)

yeah.

Chad Sowash (25:17.156)

And a go kart. Yeah.

Jon Levy (25:21.334)

Imagine I said, Joel, I'm going to teach you how to drive, but instead of actually driving a real car, I'm going have you play Mario Kart. That's what an MBA is. You're sending people to learn to be leaders by going into a sterile environment, taking you out of the workforce where you'd actually get experience for two years managing people, and then saying, hey, I've slapped a certification on you. Will you learn a bunch of stuff? Sure. Will any of it make you a better leader?

Joel Cheesman (25:30.24)

Mm-hmm.

Chad Sowash (25:41.572)

Yes.

Chad Sowash (25:46.288)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (25:51.151)

Probably not. What Harvard is really good at, and I give them full credit for this, is saying, hey, you're an impressive individual. You're already going to be successful. And I approve of your success. And so it gives people a marker that you get to say, OK, they're impressive. It's not because of the NBA. It's because Harvard had already pre-qualified them. But for every person that makes it into Harvard, there's probably 100 others that

Joel Cheesman (26:03.615)

Yeah.

Jon Levy (26:20.886)

are just as effective, if not better, that didn't make the cut or didn't even bother applying because they're already great leaders.

Joel Cheesman (26:29.312)

Yeah, we like the shorthand answers to everything. There are some things in the world, I guess, that are contradictory or challenges, I guess, for employers. The work from home phenomenon. have disparate employees working together through Zoom calls and Slack messages. Where do you fall in terms of the importance of this, the talent and teams?

Jon Levy (26:32.824)

Yeah.

Joel Cheesman (26:56.83)

When you're working virtually, the, are the rules different? Is there advice that would help with that? Talk about the remote world and how it plays into your vision.

Jon Levy (27:07.31)

So this is a really frustrating issue. The first thing is that when...

The pandemic came, which really is what accelerated this whole thing. Culture is something that happened at the office. When we went remote, it's something that happened at the manager level. But no manager was hired because they're a good camp counselor and know how to bring culture to life. It's an unfair expectation. So companies said, hey, we're going to tell people to come back in because that's going to solve this.

Chad Sowash (27:19.098)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (27:43.276)

Have you ever been to an airport?

Joel Cheesman (27:46.314)

Yeah.

Chad Sowash (27:47.48)

Yeah, few times.

Jon Levy (27:47.553)

Okay, do you talk to the people sitting next to you all the time? You do? You two are weirdos. Chad, you're a weirdo that freaks people out then. Nobody wants to talk to the person next to them at the airport. Listen, it's how I met my wife, I know. No, like, but in general, you'll notice that nobody talks to each other, right? I think it's great that you actually do. talk to strangers constantly. Now, here's the problem.

Chad Sowash (27:51.319)

yeah, not all the time at the bar. It depends on

Joel Cheesman (27:52.256)

Not all the time. Chad likes people more than I do. Yeah.

Chad Sowash (28:01.55)

they do at the bar of course

Jon Levy (28:16.866)

You have the same leader, right? The captain and the crew are leaders. You're going to the same place, same goal and same destination. And and the issue is that you don't want to communicate or talk to anybody. And that's the same problem. I am so sorry. My daughter just walked in. So do you want me to start that over? And or do you want my daughter on? OK, so.

Joel Cheesman (28:35.434)

That's okay. This is what we do.

Chad Sowash (28:35.683)

you're good. You're good.

Chad Sowash (28:42.084)

Yeah, just keep keep rolling.

Joel Cheesman (28:42.324)

Hi.

She's a cutie.

Jon Levy (28:46.838)

I actually don't want my kids on the internet. if it's okay, I'm gonna... Can we start that over? Yeah. you're gonna pixelate my child? No, it's okay.

Chad Sowash (28:49.84)

Okay.

Joel Cheesman (28:52.151)

Pixelation. Or we'll edit it, yeah.

Chad Sowash (28:52.388)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, let me start over. yeah, yeah, no, pixelate my child. Them's fighting words.

Joel Cheesman (29:01.092)

pixelate the face.

Chad Sowash (29:03.678)

fighting.

She's beautiful.

Joel Cheesman (29:06.368)

Is Trish editing this? Whoever's editing this, this will be their point of editing.

Jon Levy (29:11.926)

Okay, so should I just start all the way at the beginning or should I just go into it and we'll cut stuff together?

Chad Sowash (29:19.226)

Yeah, we'll cut wherever. mean, just go ahead and start from the beginning. You're fine.

Jon Levy (29:21.036)

Yeah, okay. Okay, when the pandemic happened, culture used to happen at the office. And then what we found was that everybody went home and culture happened at the level of your manager. The problem is that they were never hired or trained to do that. So was like a pretty awful experience. Companies thought that we can solve it by telling everybody to come back in. Right, would reduce the anxiety, the depression, the feeling of disconnection, the desire for a

Chad Sowash (29:34.064)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (29:49.071)

sense of belonging to the organization, all that kind of stuff. The problem is, is it actually created something called the airport problem, or I call it the airport problem, which is when you go to the airport, even if you have the same captain and crew, you're going to the same place, we generally do not talk to the people around us.

If you take a bunch of people who don't know each other and shove them into a building, they're basically at an airport waiting for their turn to go home.

And yeah, and then they complain that they're on Zoom teams, meet calls, whatever it is, and nobody's around them. And it's a very fair complaint. The problem is that what's good for us and what's easy to do are often opposing. It's easy for me to stay home, eat Cheetos and play video games. What's good for me is taking a walk.

Chad Sowash (30:16.282)

Watching the clock, yes.

Chad Sowash (30:23.056)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Jon Levy (30:45.494)

and exercising and being uncomfortable at the gym. What's easy is staying at home in my pajamas, but that leads to higher rates of depression, isolation, loneliness, mental health issues. It prevents young talent from being able to absorb and understand managers and being mentored and developing kind of skills or lessons through the environment. It leads to a disconnection in a slew of ways. Some companies that are

Chad Sowash (30:48.368)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (31:14.944)

smaller, I've never seen it at a company of greater than 2,000 people, have really been able to create fantastic culture remotely, but they were built for it.

I have never seen a company that has 50,000 or more people have an amazing remote work culture. Can you do it? Yeah. Can you do it? Yeah. But it requires a fundamental rethinking of work. And I can tell you a lot of the steps to do, but they're not going to do it because it's just not their priority. It's easier to just tell people.

Chad Sowash (31:32.922)

they weren't built. Yeah.

Joel Cheesman (31:45.344)

Is that a human issue or a technological issue? Are humans just wired to not, when it's that big, to function correctly? I've seen in the army, which Chad served, a platoon, I think, is only 150 people. Once you get past 150 people, it's hard to know. Sure.

Jon Levy (32:04.79)

You're talking about Dunbar's number. So yeah, Dunbar's number is this theoretical number of how many social ties we can, it's completely theoretical. There's no evidence that it's actually like there's at best mild evidence that we keep pointing to that it's true. It has to do with some specific brain scans of a region of the brain and different mammals and how big that area is in each mammal.

Joel Cheesman (32:13.405)

Okay.

Joel Cheesman (32:24.618)

But is there a point where you're too big to function in a remote environment? I guess is the question.

Jon Levy (32:30.028)

So I think we're functioning, right? The question is, isn't, if we're functioning, is this the way that we want to work? Is this good for us? And is it what's going to allow us to succeed moving forward? So I'll give you a few quick examples of why this is important. If everybody's remote and you haven't created solid remote work culture, then people are just going to jump the next time they're offered a little bit more money because

What's difference working in my basement for you or for somebody else, right? I have no allegiance to anything. If I'm not there in person, how am going to be mentored in any meaningful way? The other issue is that as distance increases, intentionality has to increase. There's something called the Allen curve, which is across every communication type, the closer two people's desks are, there's an exponential growth in how often they communicate.

Chad Sowash (33:05.264)

Mm.

Jon Levy (33:31.064)

By the time you get to like 50 meters away from each other, you might as well be on different planets. You're just not talking to each other. When everybody's far away from each other, there is no sense of familiarity in the same way. And so what ends up happening is that we have to be intentional in the way that we create it. But nobody's providing those tools to managers, and you can't expect that from managers. So what you end up with is like these

Chad Sowash (33:38.416)

Mm.

Jon Levy (34:00.819)

awful happy hours where the extroverts talk over everyone and You're like, why am I doing this? I don't want to be drinking alone at home with people I don't even want to be drinking with in person

Chad Sowash (34:05.391)

huh.

Chad Sowash (34:12.826)

You

Jon Levy (34:16.418)

like

Chad Sowash (34:16.442)

So as we start to, don't know, we talk about pushing people out of the whole workforce, to be quite frank. And as AI becomes more prevalent in our work days, we start unlocking efficiencies and inevitably the staff starts to shrink. mean, could AI be the final ingredient to defusing teams where everybody's talking about humans can have their own team of agents?

Jon Levy (34:27.959)

huh.

Chad Sowash (34:45.55)

Right? Not even humans, team of agents. this is, mean, this seems like a, a huge change, obviously, from, yeah, they could, well, it could be, and because they might be smarter and we, we might be just working for them either way.

Joel Cheesman (34:46.026)

Yeah.

Jon Levy (34:55.266)

Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe it's that the agents have teams of humans.

So here's, yes, I think that, I think let's start off with the basics, right? Every time that there's a technological breakthrough of any kind, people try to solve every problem with it. And it just doesn't work that way, right? So like the internet, it's gonna democratize everything and politics is gonna be different and voting is gonna be different. And like the internet changed everything, but not in the ways we thought.

Chad Sowash (35:11.194)

Mm-hmm.

Chad Sowash (35:31.93)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (35:32.825)

thought that it would be encyclopedias online, we didn't imagine Wikipedia. We thought it would be television over the internet. We didn't imagine YouTube. Right? And so we don't know yet, but here's a few hints that I think are very reasonable. Once we get through like the efficiency stuff, right? Which is the early phase of everything, whether it's when we had, when

Telephone technology changed and we didn't need women to route, I say women because it was, I think, almost exclusively women, routing calls back then. Those people ended up working often secretarial jobs in other companies, but there was like a downsizing of like half a million people or something like that that were around the US, kind of rerouting calls. Now.

Chad Sowash (36:08.528)

Yes.

Joel Cheesman (36:19.914)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Levy (36:26.878)

Once we get past that phase, then we can get to the interesting phases. The phases that are now we can do something that we've never been able to do before and we didn't even think of. So if I want to make a team smarter, right? One of the three pillars is diversity of resources. If I'm on a sales team and I'm on a call like this one, I want an agent there that as we're talking about, I want to sell to Simmons, the German company, right?

I want it to cross reference every salesperson's LinkedIn, every conversation we've ever had for reference of it and see every potential contact. And then now that that's all been surfaced as a team, we can say who we feel comfortable actually reaching out to.

Jon Levy (37:14.7)

Right now it's made the team smarter because it is revealed resources that we've completely forgotten.

Joel Cheesman (37:21.141)

Yeah.

Jon Levy (37:22.732)

Now we as a team can actually come up with a strategy of who should approach because if you want a 10 million, 20 million, $30 million deal as Google Cloud to sell a product, that's going to be human to human. But we are going to use that intelligence to make better decisions or accelerate the process. Now we've made the team smarter. It's not that we have less salespeople, we have more productive sales teams.

Chad Sowash (37:48.494)

How long do you think that's going to take? Because the hard part is that gap, that gap. So three years though, could decimate an economy. If we start, if we...

Jon Levy (37:52.29)

three years.

Five years? Yeah, three.

Listen, I'm not disagreeing with you on anything. There's going to be a fundamental reckoning and we are going to discover very quickly what the limits of this version of technology is. If history tells us anything, I'm not saying it's going to repeat, but it often rhymes, right? That there's going to be a plateau at a certain point until the next innovation occurs. Sorry, go ahead, Joe.

Chad Sowash (38:06.704)

Mm-hmm.

Chad Sowash (38:12.901)

Mm-hmm.

Joel Cheesman (38:27.493)

It's the end of the world as we know it kids and I feel fine. That's John Levy kids. That's the reckoning. John, thanks for spending a few good moments with us today. For our listeners and viewers.

Chad Sowash (38:29.856)

It's a fundamental reckoning. A fundamental reckoning.

Jon Levy (38:37.486)

All right.

And even more bad moments, was your number.

Chad Sowash (38:45.68)

That's part of our show.

Joel Cheesman (38:46.066)

Hey, that's life, baby life. Life happens on this show for our listeners and viewers that want to know more about you, maybe pick up the book. Where should they go?

Jon Levy (38:54.188)

Mm-hmm. So my website is johnlevy.com, J-O-N-L-E-V-Y. And then I'm johnlevyt, like Thomas L. Ikebine, be like boy on all the socials. Johnlevy-T-L-B, J-O-N-L-E-V-Y-T-L-B. And the book is sold literally everywhere that books are sold. That sounds so much like an ad, but yeah. So Amazon Barnes and Noble.

Joel Cheesman (39:17.824)

What's like when we say, we tell people, listen to whatever your plat, your podcast platform of choice is, right? It's kind of the same thing. And again, guys, the book is team intelligence, how brilliant leaders unlock collective genius Chad. is another one in the can we out.

Jon Levy (39:23.522)

Yeah.

Chad Sowash (39:33.296)

We out!