Confidence Is a Team Sport

0:00Good morning, I'm Michael Covnet, and this is the next big idea, daily. Your quick dose of the best new nonfiction from some of the smartest authors around. Now what separates a great team from an ordinary one? Talent helps, of course, resources help. A brilliant strategy doesn't hurt, but even with all those ingredients, teams can fall apart. Ray Martin is an organizational psychologist and talent executive who's helped shape workplace culture at Google, Nike, Target, and Mars. His new book is Collective Confidence, the winning formula of the world's best teams, and will join us with some of his big ideas in just a moment. And then in the second half of the show, Andre will be back to share ideas from his 2023 book, Wrong Fit, Right Fit, why how we work matters more than ever. How teams build confidence right after these ads.

1:01Today's episode is sponsored by Notion, Shopify, and Quince. Learn more about how Notion can support your business at Notion.com slash daily. If you're ready to hear the of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.com slash daily to start your free trial today. Find your next fall favorites at Quince, download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to quince.com slash NBID. I live and die by my digital calendar. I love the flexibility of dragging and dropping my appointments and commitments around on a screen, but that approach sometimes clashes with how the rest of my family operates. My wife, for instance, swears by the classic oversized wall calendar in the kitchen. To her, it's a central hub. To me, it's a chaotic mosaic of scribbled notes and scratched out appointments that's impossible to keep current. We try our best to stay in sync, but the mental load of coordinating two different systems meant important details were always falling through the cracks. That's why I'm such a fan of the Skylight calendar.

2:03It's the perfect bridge, a stunning digital display that mounts right on the wall like a traditional calendar, but sinks instantly with all our Google and digital schedules. Now we have one clean color-coded view of everything from college breaks to date nights. We can even manage chores and shared grocery lists in real time. It's finally replaced the household confusion with actual clarity, giving us back the one thing we need most quality time together. Families are better when they're working together. Right now Skylight is offering our listeners $30 off their 15-inch calendars by going to MySkylight.com-Daily. Go to MySkylight.com-slashDaily for $30 off your 15-inch calendar. It's nyskyli.com-slashDaily. I'm Dr. Andre Martin.

3:04I'm an organizational psychologist, and I've spent my career building and coaching teams first inside Mars, Target, Google, and Nike, and now with founders, executive teams, and athletes. My new book is Collective Confidence, the winning formula of the world's best teams. I'm going to share five key insights from it right now. Insight number one. The team is the only unit of performance that matters now. In August of 2017, Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston. Official rescue systems were overwhelmed within hours, so ordinary people hitched up their fishing boats and went to work. They became known as the Cajun Navy, no hierarchy, no script, nobody in charge. They split the city into sectors, tracked water levels, and trapped families through Facebook groups and walkie-talkie apps, and in days, they pulled an estimated 8,000 people out of flooded homes.

4:05No one trained them for that. They shared a belief that together, they could figure it out. That story stays with me, because leading right now is hard. The Surgeon General has called loneliness a public epidemic, with one in five employees feeling lonely on a daily basis. Change is coming at us at a magnitude pace and relentlessness never before see. And in early 2025, a survey of executives found 84% of companies feel under-prepared for the disruptions headed their way. Being alone has become almost impossible, and that is pushing us back towards each other. The team is the only unit of performance that matters now. I saw this firsthand at Google when the pandemic hit. The team I led took our entire onboarding program, virtual, almost overnight. No executive had that playbook. The group built one in the middle of the chaos.

5:06Executive confidence is shown to be one of the strongest predictors of future performance. So when the next disruption arrives out of nowhere, and it will, your job is not to have the answers. Your job is to have already built a team that believes it has the capability to find them together. Insight 2. You cannot motivate your way to confidence. Leadway through a rigorous inspection of the USS Honolulu, a weapon system issue came up, then equipment damage compounded it. The inspectors had every reason to fail the crew before the exam was finished. The crew rallied. They worked the problem and demonstrated capabilities the inspectors had written off. At the end, the lead inspector told them, we've done a number of these exams over lots of years, and this was the best we've ever seen. Admiral John Richardson, who commanded that submarine, told me that story.

6:08In his mind, that moment didn't just happen. It was curated over the entirety of the year leading up to it, one sailor at a time. Whenever a new sailor came aboard, Master Chief Bill Kramer sat him down and gave him the truth in two halves. First half, this is going to be hard. You'll stand watches and do scut work while you're unqualified. Second half, you will have help. You will have mentors. And after a year of grinding, you'll earn your dolphins and everything changes. Richardson and Kramer also went hunting for small wins. The ship spent holidays on a four hour cleanup Thanksgiving and Christmas included. They ended it and spread the work across regular duty days. Kramer's line, those were big wins because they were little wins. One of those young sailors found Kramer after the inspection. He was not wiped out.

7:08He was lit up. If that's about as hard as it gets, he said, I want to reenlist. By inspection day, that crew was full of people who had already proven to themselves they could handle hard things. That team's belief was assembled out of individuals who both believed in themselves and as a result in each other because confidence spreads like a virus and compounds like interest. So do two things. Give newcomers both halves. What is going to be hard and what the path through it looks like? Then find the ritual that drains your team for no good reason and end it. Site number three, everyone needs to know why they matter. Every August, 70,000 people build a temporary city in the Nevada desert for Burning Man. Inside that city, thousands of grown adults line up to adopt stuffed animals.

8:09That's Camp Corny. It started in 2014 when Paul, Disco Troyano carried a single stuffed unicorn on a stick around the playa. And I would hand it to someone. They'd start dancing with it and it just made them so happy. He told me 50 animals the next year, then 100. Now it's 3000 a year. The real magic isn't the stuffed animals. It's what happens to the people who show up to help without pay, equity or any clear monetary benefit. They do it because the collective matters. Investment bankers become bar bosses. A craftman who never thought of himself as creative and a software developer who had never touched fire effects team up to build a 25 foot fire shooting unicorn arch. Troyano's rule, if you see something that needs doing, congratulations, you're now in

9:09charge of it. In my research, this was one of the most powerful predictors of collective confidence and one of the least studying. I call it contributory confidence. Individual confidence is about your own ability. Contributory confidence is knowing that your skills, your effort and your ideas matter to this specific group. Almost everyone can recite their job description. Far fewer can tell you why they are vital on this specific team. So tell them and be specific. Here's what only you bring. And here's what we would lose without it. Five minutes and people carry it for years. Insight number four. Barrowed brilliance raises the bar. In 2006, Jeff Conroy had a problem. As showrunner for Deadliest Catch, season two meant six crab boats in the bearing sea.

10:11A two person camera crew on each one, 30 foot waves and no second takes. His shooters were ex-military guys, nature, documentarians, and extreme sports junkies. Almost none had been to film school. So he built one. Before the season, he brought everybody to Dutch Harbor, Alaska for a week. They watched the previous season's footage together, the beautiful shots and the botched ones. No ego, no finger pointing. One operator's clever angle inside a crab pot became everyone's. One operator's miss moment became everyone's lesson. Then out at sea, a cameraman named Doug Stanley was thrown against the deck by a rogue wave, cracked his ribs and kept filming. Every crew on every boat heard about it. The sentence in their heads changed from this is impossible to, if he can do that, we

11:11can at least try this. Your team does not have to earn every ounce of confidence the hard way. They can borrow it. Run your own film school. Get people together to look at real work, the wins and the misses before the pressure is on. Look outside your industry too. Mark Rimpola built Zico coconut water with a team of eight by studying vitamin water, red bull and Starbucks. We became students of success. He told me excellence leaves clues. Insight number five. Make everyone the boss of something. In 2009, two Berkeley seniors heard a professor mention that gourmet mushrooms grow unused coffee grounds. At the class of hundreds, Nikhil, Berrura and Alejandro Vales were the only two who emailed to learn more. They grew their first crop of mushrooms in buckets in Alejandro's fraternity house,

12:15then turned down their offers in consulting and banking. Neither was the boss. Decisions got made together. When a crop failed or an investor passed, one stepped up while the other caught his breath. I've been alongside Nikhil and Alejjo as a coach and a friend since those early days. And I watched them step forward for each other and step back for each other so many times that it became unconscious. A language with no words, just movement. I asked Nikhil once how they handled disagreement. He said when a lay host says something differently, my first thought isn't how do I convince him. It's what am I missing? In March of 2026, almost 20 years in selling in Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Amazon, back to the roots had a record month. Not because they finally cracked the code on something because they never stopped doing

13:15the things that built the company. Have every person on your team one thing that is theirs where they can make the call and you back it. Then borrow Nikhil's question. The next time someone disagrees with you, ask what am I missing before you decide how to answer? So five insights. This moment we are in calls for better, more confident teams. You cannot motivate your way to confidence. One needs to know why they matter. Brilliance must be borrowed so we can see success as possible and leadership works best when everyone holds a piece of it. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy the book. Thank you Andre. Alright, we are going to take a quick break and then Andre will be back to share ideas from Wrong Fit Right Fit. Why how we work matters more than ever.

14:16Personal story time. For most of my career I have worked for other people. I have had good, seemingly solid jobs at big, apparently stable media companies. But as you may know nothing is set in stone these days and after a while it became clear I was better off striking out on my own. Now as a co-founder of the next big idea club, I find myself effectively running a small business and I have come to realize that starting your own thing doesn't have to be a big daunting endeavor, not anymore anyway because you really don't have to do it alone. Shopify makes it easy to start selling a product or service from day one. Shopify checkout helps people start and finish their purchases so seamlessly that potential customers become actual customers before you know it. That backend support leaves you more time to grow your business which is, you know, the fun part. If you're ready to hear the of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.com slash

15:17daily to start your free trial today. That's right, start your free trial at Shopify.com slash daily. That's Shopify.com slash daily. Guys I don't know what it's like where you live but where I am we're just beginning to get the first taste of fall. Just a little bite in the evening air that lets me know the long, sweaty summer will soon be on its way out. And that's good news because I'm all set for sweater season thanks to the new pieces I've gotten from Quince. Quince makes 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at no joke just $60. They've got premium pants fitted tees. Everything you need to refresh your wardrobe for a new season whether you're looking for something cozy for a chilly evening or a versatile layer for the office. They've got the perfect essentials to keep you comfortable all autumn long. I've been practically living in my Quince commuter pants which are great for traveling and for my everyday running around. And despite what you might think given the surprisingly affordable prices, Quince sources

16:19everything from ethical factories. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash NBID. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. And all available in Canada and the UK too. That's qiuince.com slash NBID. So now that we're in the middle of the AI revolution, a lot of people are worrying about whether they'll be able to keep up or even whether they'll have jobs at all. And I get it. But a lot changes when you stop thinking about AI as a replacement for human effort and consider its power as a tool for collaborating with other humans. Next big idea club, we run pretty much our entire back end on notion, managing everything from our author, roster and podcast schedule to our internal meeting notes. And now that notions AI tools are woven directly into that shared workspace, it's been a game changer.

17:20Our team and our agents collaborate seamlessly. We aren't just organizing data, we're extracting meaningful insights and planning our next moves. We're finally getting a handle on the mountain of information that comes with running a business. Information is the AI workspace where your team's knowledge, projects and agents all come together in one place. Teams using notion move faster, cut friction and costs by consolidating tools and stay aligned. It's now got over 100 million users, including people at huge companies and small startups alike. Learn more about how notion can support your business at notion.com slash daily. That's all lowercase letters notion.com slash daily to try notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Hello, this is Dr. Andre Martin. I'm an organizational psychologist, a culture strategist at joyful and the author of wrong

18:21fit right fit. Why, how we work matters more than ever. I've spent the last quarter of a century obsessed with how to make work well, less work. During my time as chief talent and learning officer at revered brands like Nike, Mars, Target and Google, I met many talented people who were doing the best work of their lives. They were healthy, fully engaged, confident and optimistic about the future. They walked around the howled halls of these great brands with a bounce in their step and a purpose to their day. They were in the end a part of something that just made sense to them. They had found their right fit. But in each of these companies, there was another very particular group that caught my eye at the beginning of my career and is held my attention ever since. The talented people who were struggling, struggling to do their best work, struggling to keep their confidence high and struggling to make sense of the place where they had landed.

19:23They had had past success in other companies, had been accustomed to high performance and had rarely wondered if they were good enough. Yet there they were, exhausted, frustrated, lacking confidence and in a state of discontent. These were my people, my cause, the highly talented individuals who landed in wrong fit. As I began my early research for the book, I found myself dissatisfied with the conclusions many top authors reached on culture and engagement. Most of them looked at the similarities about what makes a great culture. And there are some, for sure. However, in my experience, it wasn't that simple. It was the differences between them and how they did work on a day-to-day basis where the most interesting insights lie. You see, Nike did work differently than Target, who did it differently from Google, who worked very differently from Mars and so on and so on.

20:24So I started with a different question. What if the issue wasn't good or bad culture or toxic versus engaging workplaces? What if the answer to engagement didn't lie in five universal truths or ten principles of building a great culture? What if the issue was fit? The fit between how a company worked and how a talent prefers to do so. I pulled from my experience, combed through all the current research on the state of work, and then conducted 100-plus interviews with talented individuals from around the world to learn about their right fit and wrong fit experiences. The insights were breathtaking. So what do I mean by right or wrong fit? Well, for the purposes of the book, fit is a deep and authentic connection to how a company works day-to-day. Not just what it values or stands for, but how the company collaborates, solves problems, changes conflict, socializes ideas, gives feedback, determines high performance, thinks

21:27about time, develops its people, and the many other things. It's all the activities that make up work on any given day. Every company has a way where work gets done, and it is different everywhere you go. So how do you find right fit? Here are a few key insights from the book to help you whether you are a talent looking to find right fit or a leader looking to build for it. Insight 1. Work is hard right now for a lot of people, harder than it should be. COVID was not the cause, but it was a great accelerator. The Gallup Organization estimates that right now there is $8.8 trillion of loss productivity in the workplace due to disengagement. We are seen unprecedented levels of burnout and stress with reports from the likes of CNBC and Ernst & Young estimating 53% of our managers are burnout and 40% of employees feel isolated

22:28at work. Further, global engagement numbers have barely moved in a decade, though many companies have invested like mad in their respective employee experiences. The result has been a crisis of commitment and a debt of energy, the likes of which we have not seen in the modern workplace. Companies have lost their secret sauce or unique way of working and talent looking for right fit are left confused and disappointed about why it is seemingly so elusive. Thus, more often than not, talent is finding themselves in wrong fit experiences. One of the interviewees in our book described the feeling of wrong fit as, everyone has a secret decoder ring for success except for me. Others describe wrong fit as if they were slogging through mud or being punched in the face every day in different ways. Something has got to change, so what do we do? In site 2, the first step defining right fit is knowing yourself and what you are solving

23:32for in your career and in life. Some in time again in the interviews for the book individuals told us that they wish they would have done deeper self-reflection before kicking off a job search, that they wish they would have thought harder about what they were actually solving for. Thus, the book provides aid excursions or reflection exercises that are built to help you understand who you are, how you prefer to work, and what you are solving for in a decision to stay or to go. The excursions are illuminating as they take on areas such as what you value in big decisions. The life you are trying to build in the next 5-10 years, the qualities of your ideal leaders, and whether your career is about company, craft, or cause. By completing the excursions, you ensure you walk into the interview process with a clear view of what will matter most. 8-3 Interviews are like first dates, and first dates tell us very little about whether we

24:36are actually compatible. The movement towards culture decks, employee brands, and beautiful career websites built in the service of attracting the best talent has had some unintended consequences, the biggest of which is that recruiting has become more marketing and manipulation than it is a fair assessment of fit. Case in point in a recent survey by Resume Builder, 40% of managers admitted to lying during an interview process, 40%. So as a candidate, you need to realize that everyone is showing up on their best behavior, including you. Thus, we aren't getting deep enough to see and feel what life will be like on a random Tuesday morning in January. The book provides you with questions and strategies to get more clarity so you can make a better decision. And your decision matters as we will spend 13.5 years of our adult life at work every second, every minute, every day.

25:37In site four, on board with a mindset of assessing for right fit versus assimilating to fit in. No matter how good of an investigative journalist you are, what you are sold and recruiting will be different than what it feels like to work at a company day to day. So it is important for you to understand how the company really works, how the company collaborates, solve problems, manages conflict, socializes ideas, gives feedback, determines high performance, develops its people, and so on. This is probably a good place to mention that there is not such a thing as a perfect fit. However, the fewer dimensions where you have to fit in or change the way you prefer to work, the easier the work will be. Fitting in is like trying to write every day with your non-dominant hand. You can do it, but it is more stressful, more frustrating. The quality of your work goes down, and it takes more effort leaving you depleted.

26:40In site five, fit is a two-way street. Companies can help to create fit by rediscovering how they work at their best and sharing that with both employees who are here today and those that will come tomorrow. No two companies work the same way, but here's the rub. As companies grow, they bring in talent from the outside. That talent arrives with both their highly valuable technical skills and all of their favorite ways of working. If companies are not careful over time, the secret sauce gets diluted or disappears, and the company becomes an amalgamation of all these individual leaders' favorite ways of working. This is the real reason why we're led to think being bigger means work has to be harder. It doesn't. Not if we keep our ways of working solid. It all starts with how companies can rediscover their secret sauce and then re-recruit their talent back to it. The last few chapters of the book are dedicated

27:42to strategies to do just that. In conclusion, I would simply add that joining a company is a commitment not unlike marriage. But in these days of infinite browsing, FOMO, and job hopping being worn like a badge of honor, we are missing something that matters to us as humans at a foundational level. And that is deep connection and belonging. There's an unseed and cost to job hopping. We set our relationship capital back to zero, our reputation back to zero, and we have to learn a whole new system and language to get work done. That can be exciting once in a while. But remember, you have a finite amount of creative energy. And when you move jobs, that energy flows for a long time to the transition, not to your craft. The more you move, the more your top skill becomes moving. Spend just a little bit more time looking for right fit, and you will spend more of your 13.5 years at work,

28:43energized, engaged, fulfilled, and happy. I hope you enjoy the book. Thank you, Andre. OK, everyone, you can get copies of both of Andre's books that we talked about using the links in the episode notes. While you're there, you can sign up for our free newsletter so you can get these big ideas right in your inbox. I'm Michael Covnet. See you tomorrow.