How to Create a Common Purpose with Landon Gorbenko | Episode 3

In this Cultivate your Culture article, Zoran is joined by Landon Gorbenko. Landon is the Director of Performance PowerUp Academy and GScience. He is also the host of the No Tilt Mind Podcast. He has a Masters in Performance Psychology and works as a Mental Performance Consultant with a wide range of amateur to professional esport athletes to improve their mental skills and overall performance.

This article is the transcript of a podcast done regularly by Zoran Stojković. Listen to Cultivate Your Culture. Please excuse any transcript errors in this article.

Zoran Stojkovic: Hello, I’m your host, Zoran Stojkovic and welcome to cultivate your culture. This podcast we’ll be discussing how leaders can build connected high performing teams and business in sport using actionable tools, evidence based systems and simple processes. Today we’re joined by Landon gore Benko, a really great friend of mine and Landon Landon has a quite an awesome background. He has his bachelor’s in psychology, and then a master’s in performance psychology. He’s the director of performance of powerup Academy and G science and works with a wide range of amateur to pro eSports athletes to improve their mental skills and overall performance, which includes team culture and communication. Landon, thank you for being on the show. And welcome.

Landon Gorbenko: You bet. I’m excited to be on here. I know we’re gonna have some good conversation.

Zoran Stojkovic: We are we are. So maybe I’ll start off by asking, What does cultivating your culture mean to you in the esports world?

Landon Gorbenko: Yeah, so cultivating your culture in an esport world? Because for everybody out there that’s listening, I primarily only work with eSports. So that’s why he’s asked about eSports specific? It’s a really good question. Because right now, when you look at almost any game, each game kind of comes with a kind of like its own culture, right. So if you’re working with a call of duty team, if you’re working with the League of Legends team, or fortnight, squad, or whatever it might be, the game itself almost comes with a culture. And unfortunately, a lot of times those, those bits of culture are very toxic. like Call of Duty, for example, it’s got a reasonably toxic and rage like culture. So you got to, you got to kind of find ways to remedy that. And so when I’m working with the team, it’s really about identifying, like, what is actually a beneficial thing like what what are we? What is the current culture that your team has? That’s toxic and holding you back? Is it like, communication issues? Is it value differences? Are you all pushing towards a different goal, you really got to identify what kind of culture they already have, that’s kind of harming them, and then establish what would be a, a positive or a helpful team culture. And in eSports, it is a little bit it’s peculiar in the sense that each game like I was mentioning has its own kind of inbuilt culture just based on how the game developed. And so when you come into each game, you kind of have to understand what that the default culture is there so that you can work on fixing that. And it’s, it’s sometimes chaos, working with esport cultures, for sure.

Zoran Stojkovic: Yeah, neat. So you’re saying each game kind of has its own culture, much like companies would have their own culture internally. And you’re saying that cultivating your culture to you means understanding? What are the things that aren’t going great. So for example, if members in the team are kind of going in different directions, or have different goals, different values, and that are not aligning to each other’s values and team culture, and to the to the values of the organization? I guess that’s where that’s a place you’d start and you start some of those conversations. So how then how do you define team culture? I mean, this is a term that gets thrown around so often. And there’s a lot of professionals that go into teams do workshops, and all sorts of things. But I mean, how can we actually define it? I mean, yeah, how do we make it tangible?

Landon Gorbenko: Yeah, I think that’s a really good budget, how do you define team culture, right? And either, for me, at least just going off the top of my head, right with this conversation, there’s two, two really big things that we can be looking at when we’re looking at team culture is one, what is the team’s purpose? And then number two is how does the team interact? Right? Like, I think those are two really big fundamental parts of team culture. Because if you don’t know what your team’s purpose is, like, is this a rec league? Is it fun? Are we going for a world championship? Are we going for a regional champion? What is the purpose of that team? If you don’t know that part, you don’t really know how to work together, because everybody’s going off in their own direction, doing their own thing, and you’re not really functioning as a unit. And then also the other component of how do we function together? So how do we, how do we relay information? How do we resolve conflict? What are our strengths, weaknesses, like really understanding how you guys work as a unit? So I think team culture, to me, at least in my world, is kind of based off of those two things is the purpose of the team and how does the team interact?

Zoran Stojkovic: That’s huge, right? Having that shared purpose and having alignment on that and getting buy in into it even and then understanding the communication styles, how people communicate how information is disseminated. So why is that important? Why is it important to cultivate the culture of a team and why not just have these individuals that are superstars?

Landon Gorbenko: So again in eSports, one of the weird things that doesn’t happen in traditional sports is that eSports I’m a competitor. I’m an athlete that’s wanting to go pro bulk of my my development spent in isolation, where what we do is called soloqueue. Right? Like, if I was doing League of Legends, I’d queue up for games by myself, I’d get paired with four random teammates and against five random teammates, because five on five. And I really developed this sense of like, not like an isolation, identity kind of thing where I’m working by myself, to get myself to a certain point. And then you, when you finally make it to the proceed, you are now in a very collective mindset, or you’re supposed to be raised to be working alongside for other people to create this really cohesive five man squad, but you’re bringing into it, this very isolated kind of identity where you’ve been, up until this point, you’ve been pushing your own goals, your own strategies, your own plans. And so when you get five people at all kind of come with come in with that kind of mindset. And say, All right, now all five of you got to work together, you got to solve this, they’ve never learned those skills yet. So when things go wrong, it’s everybody else’s fault, they tend to blame everybody else, there’s not a whole lot of top tier conflict resolution, because up again, up again, up until that point, it’s been very, like, I gotta do this, I gotta do this, this is me, I have to wait, I have to do this, you, it’s all on yourself. And this is why it’s really important to esports, because they, they’ve never had that opportunity to work in the team. And so you see a lot of culture issues that way, because they’ve just never learned how to resolve conflict, how to work together towards one goal. So everybody’s kind of pushing towards their own goal. And then you get this big tension, because everybody’s going off on slightly different directions. You got to we got to rein it in so that everybody’s going towards one unified vision.

Zoran Stojkovic: Yeah, definitely all the noses have to be pointed in the same direction. And so what what I’m understanding from what you’re saying is esport athletes practice on their own through soloqueue, which is like a mission, they get thrown in on their own with random opponents and random teammates, who they don’t know. And they got a really quickly improvise, and figure out and adapt and be flexible to win the game. And that reminds me of pickup basketball. I mean, somebody was on a basketball team can go and there’s this great culture of pickup basketball in Europe and in parts of the states, and where people just go in and they play a pickup game of basketball people they don’t really know, or people they might have bumped into before. And then what they’re doing there is they’re automatically they got to find their role, figure out how to figure out how to communicate, and just get things going to play the game and and then they take those skillsets back to their team. And that is really important. And what another thought that came to mind, as you were talking is when you have people that work in sales, and they have a sales quota to meet. That’s a very individual thing. And the reason that’s important is because if you’re part of an organization, the organization does better when everybody does well. And so what might happen is not everybody’s aligned, or people don’t want to share what’s going on, like there was this example of a fishing company. And these two units that did fishing like deep sea fishing, wouldn’t tell each other where the best parts of the ocean to catch fish were because they were like individual teams and not. And so these two like leaders of the teams weren’t really working together, even though the organization was suffering as a whole. They were wanting to kind of keep those secrets and give misleading information. So it is very important. I mean, for business in sport, and definitely agreed with you. What about shaping team cultures? I mean, do you in your role and mental skills and performance often optimization? And in eSports? Have you How have you shaped team cultures of the teams? Like is it I’m curious, what what what kind of work? Have you done to do that?

Landon Gorbenko: Another great question. I think you and I talked about this a long time ago, I think where we were talking about how do we how do we build values and culture within a team? And I was thinking about what you said, and I was I kind of kind of falling in the middle between what I said back then and what you said, Then, when you said at that point, because you said that, or I said that what I was doing at that time was I would try and kind of identify what bonded or what kind of held the team together, and then use those principles to build the culture around that. So it was more of like me intervening. And then you were I think you correct me if I’m wrong, but you were stating more along the lines of you have like a workshop and you get everybody to suggest values or different kinds of points of culture that the players thought were good. And then you use that and then they build their culture around those things. And so I think that kind of falls somewhere in the middle there. Now, where it’s we do those workshops, we put those values on the board. But we also try and take what we already see within all the players like maybe maybe this group of boys or this this group of players love to meme, we will try and shape their culture a little bit around that like goofier side because they’re more of like a goofy team, essentially, if they’re members. But then while I’m also shaping that I’m trying to get their input on what they think is valuable, like loyalty For example is one that’s very huge in eSports. Because, up until this point, one of the things that happened very frequently was, a team would form a team would do well, and the team might not do so well. And the moment they don’t do so well, they blow apart. And so loyalty has become like a very key part of culture building within eSports. Because we need to make sure that teams stay together, even when things get tough, because that’s not something that traditionally happened like in fortnight, League of Legends, Call of Duty, Apex, Overwatch, CSGO, whatever, whatever game you’re looking at, teams will blow up, as soon as they start going bad, they just fall apart. And so loyalty is is definitely one that I think a lot of teams are trying to shape their identity around. And that’s one that I use frequently. So it’s like, when we know when something goes bad, it’s an expectation that we work through it, we don’t fall apart. It’s Is it an expectation that we, we work through it, and it’s tough getting esport athletes to buy into culture development, because again, their development came from a very isolated by themselves growth, like it wasn’t with teams, they didn’t, they usually didn’t get to the point that they’re at now, because they were working with teams, it’s because they played alone. And that playing alone is what got them here. So in their minds, even if it’s like consciously or unconsciously, in their mind’s eye, the way that I continue to grow is by playing alone. So you really do have to try and build that loyalty. And it’s tough game to buy into those cultural things. And I think you have to in bed an expectation within the entire organization, that being part of this team means you live and abide by these kind of expectations. And that that expectation becomes the culture of the team. So yeah, that’s how we build team culture and eSports is still like it’s an art form is not clean. It’s very difficult to do with an esport athletes.

Zoran Stojkovic: That sounds like something where you have individual sport athletes in traditional sports, or in the world of business, you have people who are used to working alone, like contractors, or again, sales or something like that, where they’re really working on their own. And they’re not part of a team now being part of a team or an organization, or being part of a college program where now they gotta do gymnastics, but they’re part of a team. They’re not individual anymore with only their coach and and there’s this environment, and there’s all sorts of things going on. It definitely is an art form to to cultivate that.

Landon Gorbenko: Yeah, I guess the one of the things we’ll add there, too, is one of the things that has been applied that a lot of performance coaches or sports sites have been doing in eSports is, and I don’t think this is very effective, at least I don’t from the results, I don’t think it’s been very effective is systems of self accountability, where performance coaches have put in place things like, like fines, if you’re late to practice, or whatever it might be, like they put in systems of self accountability. And it’s been by and large, failing. Like, I know that players still show up late because they’ll just pay the fine, they don’t care. They Yeah, they won’t wear their jersey to practices, because again, they just don’t care. It’s just the punishment only goes themselves. And I think going forward, we’re gonna see more teen culture is built around team accountability, where if I’m late for practice, it’s my teammates that are hurt, not me. And I think that’s something we’re gonna be seeing very shortly now. So it’s like, say, You and I are a duo. And you’re in the practice room ready to go, and I’m 10 minutes late, you’re probably going to be the one that has the fine because I was late. Right? I think that’s what it feels like just from talking to some other performance coaches. That’s the way culture development is going now is that the the, the self accountability and the self identity is not working in eSports. And we have to build that collective in that group. And I think group accountability is like the next wave of performance coaching within eSports.

Zoran Stojkovic: Yeah, and I’ve definitely seen that in traditional sports as well. And I mean, people, people or people everywhere in groups, or groups, and it’s, I think what we’re talking about can really be generalized to any context. I’ve definitely seen that live in person, were late to practice. Everybody else who’s on time has got to do fitness until you get there. So then, yeah, there it is, that your teammates to you out, but I don’t I kind of question that, because well, now we’re talking about motivation. Yeah, I think that that’s a form of extrinsic motivation, where you were somebody else’s getting punished for it. I think, if there’s a deep commitment, and there’s a deep accountability within the culture, and one of the the desired behaviors is responsibility or preparation or punctuality, then calling people out and having the team call the person, team members call the person out, as opposed to the leader of the team or the coach. I think that’s really important. Unfortunately, those kind of conversations don’t get had too often because there isn’t great psychological safety but by default, and what I’ve learned In a lot of teams, and by psychological safety, I mean ability and that freedom to be vulnerable and to take risks and to actually say things to each other that that matter and to have that, you know, like to call somebody out. And I think the best teams in the world have that, where, if you’re late, I’ll call you out like, Man, you’re late. I’ve been waiting, and you receive it as feedback. And you’re like, Oh, crap, I am. Yeah, seriously, my apologies. Like, I’m not gonna let it happen again. Yeah, I mean, it’s a it’s a lot more powerful. And mean, when we’re thinking about cultivating culture. I mean, for you, what is the starting place? And I mean, I know this is a is a tough question. Because cultures can be can have different, different needs and strengths and weaknesses. And so what is the starting place? Who has to be in on those conversations? Is it the leaders in the culture? Is it the team members? Who would you start with? And how is it cultivated?

Landon Gorbenko: Yes. I think here’s a two part. So one thing I’m gonna say first is, I think team culture and dynamics and buy in all those kinds of things. I think there is a little bit of a root of pride. Like, I think one of the starting points of developing cultures, team pride, right? Like when you look at a lot of traditional sports, like not to use a overused example, but All Blacks, like there’s such a deep rooted pride for that organization. So when you get called out for doing something wrong, it hurts because you are proud to be part of this organization. And to be called out on something you’re proud of, to be part of that hurts because it’s, it’s like an attack on the personal self. And that’s not we don’t quite see that in eSports. Yet, it’s definitely developing as much more so than before even better teams like even in Yeah, the the better teams are developing now. So like, if I was to be part of TSM, or cloud nine, the players that are being put on those teams, now they’re starting to feel that like, Let’s go, I’m part of C9. Like, this is huge. Let’s go. But outside of that, not so much. Yes. It’s still early days. There’s almost like entitlement where a good players like, yeah, I deserve to be on this team. Not a sense of pride to be on the team. But like, yeah, I deserve this. And I think that’s a little bit of the wrong way thing. But I think no matter how good you are, you should feel pride in the organization that you’re playing for. Because that gives you buy in, and when you’re bought into it, then you are pushing towards the team’s goals, not just yourself.

Zoran Stojkovic: Oh, absolutely.

Landon Gorbenko: If you have, yeah, if you have that sense of entitlement, you expect your team to follow suit with you, right? Like you say, this is my goals, I deserve to be here. So my teammates should be following me. And if they’re not, then they’re the ones that hurt. They’re the ones that are messing up.

Zoran Stojkovic: As star performers. Sometimes can. They’re…

Landon Gorbenko: Michael Jordan

Zoran Stojkovic: Michael Jordan, right? Last Dance, right. Like coming in and being a star performer and a team before and, or maybe knowing that you’re the best and the team that you’re at. And that’s really tricky. Because companies and teams that are built around star performers typically don’t do very well, long term, a piece of that is you really want that person that’s a star performer that has a lot of influence over the culture and certain people have more influence over the culture and certain people have less you want those people to buy into those behaviors that you’re you’re wanting to you as the organization wanting to live because it kind of goes down to all levels, doesn’t it like to the staff and the backend of the office to the people working on the front end to to the C suite level and to the to the other stakeholders? Like it’s, it’s so important that everybody buys into it, but that culture shift is, is really challenging. I think it starts with a conversation, having a conversation and just saying, Look, what do we want? Like, what do we want this this year? If If 2021 is successful for us? How does that look? What are the outcomes we’d have? Okay, what about looking at at our relationships? If 2021 is a success? How does that look? You know, how are we going to be communicating? What are we going to be doing or not doing? What about when we’re working? Or training? How’s that going to look? What are we at just starting with some of those conversations and clarifying that for people and just letting I think it’s important to for the C suite to have like for that for the leaders of the organization to have those conversations beforehand to set out some sort of framework, and to set out a couple of key behaviors. But what I found to be really effective is to then let the members of the team who are actually going to be doing the day to day and doing a lot of the heavy lifting, to have them come up with what does that mean? Like? What does it mean to be punctual to you? And what happens if somebody is not punctual? So going, somebody going against the grain? Or they’re pointing in a different direction? Who calls him out? How do they call them out? Just so everybody knows to expect it? And then obviously, when new players and new, new new people and performers are on boarded onto the team, it’s vital to let those people know and to obviously to ask them questions around what is it that we can do to support you and just make people feel welcome, but like, I don’t Anything that’s a starting place like, hey, let’s let’s scope this out, Landon. The issue is, those conversations do happen. teams go on retreats and do like here’s a strat plan for the year, here’s our goal goals for the year, and then what happens, it gets filed away or it gets saved on a computer and then or maybe it even gets put on the wall. But then nothing happens with that. I really think it’s a daily grind of like repeating it until people actually get sick of it of like, Yeah, what what are we about? gait? We’re about this? How did that go? Today? If competing is one of one of our key behaviors or values? Who’s somebody today who exhibit it? And why is there a situation where you yourself didn’t really live up to that value? And how can you do that better next time, and just really tying it in having that common language and really having everybody buy into it, because if the coaches live a certain set of values, and the the athletes have a different set of values, its nose is pointed in different directions, and that does not word for cultivating culture.

Landon Gorbenko: Yeah, and I think you’re right with the, you kind of preach it till I get sick of it is, is actually something that I think is fairly useful. And the reason why I think that is, let’s just look at the way that kids are raised, right? Like your parents, just hound you with different kinds of morals and values and stuff, right, and you get sick of it, and you rebel. And there is like that, that tension between you and what your parents are saying. And then you turn 25, and you just your default setting is everything that they beat into you like in terms of like, morals and values. And I know that’s not like a perfect analogy, and I kind of worded it poorly. But it’s kind of similar in eSports, worse, or not eSports. But any performance domain, you teach something, you teach something, and you teach something, you teach something, and then when you’re done all that you teach it again, you teach it again, right, you just keep on going, they’re gonna get sick of it, like it’s not something you want to hear on repeat, but eventually becomes part of the expectations and the the baseline culture within an organization. And I think that’s what we’re aiming for. And eventually, when, when the bad word hits the fan, they’re gonna they’re gonna default to those things that you were teaching them because it was pounded into them, right? Yes, it’s cool. And I, there’s actually an idea and this, you might have a good, good input on this. So there’s, when you’re looking at an organization, so let’s say like you have the management team within a sporting organization, and then you have the team, the players of an organization, do the values and the culture of the organization, should they be adopted by the players? Should the organization adopt to the ones that the players put in place? Should there be different values and culture between the organization? And the players? Like? That’s a tough question to have as well, like, Where is the entire thing need its own dynamics and its own values and morals? And whatever? Or are they split a little bit? And that’s, that’s an interesting question to have, too, especially in eSports, where you have usually some kind of corporate entity that owns a team. So players values and their dynamics are going to be wildly different than what the management’s cultures and values are. So how do we bridge? That is a very interesting question that they definitely don’t have the answer to

Zoran Stojkovic: Oh, God, let’s explore this a little bit. I like that. Ultimately, I don’t think those should be very different. I think that I really think for an organization to be successful, there has to be alignment from the top to the bottom. Now, where does that come from? And how did the values get decided? That’s a challenging one, I’ve seen all sorts of things, I’ve seen the values get brought in top down, I’ve seen bottom up and then middle out, I don’t really know what, what I feel is, is the way to do it is to have everybody have input into it, and to somehow even if there are organizational values, to find a way to personalize it to the team, here’s what the values are. Here’s a mission. Okay, cool. What does that mean to us? What does that mean to this group, this team of 689 people, whatever it is, because sometimes in an organization, you have, like 50 teams, or 100, teams of like, five to eight people working. And it’s like, each of those teams can’t live off of a recipe book and can’t live the exact same values the same way because the team is different. Yeah, the team is like, functionally, there’s, there’s eight human beings on that team. There’s eight minds, there’s eight people with different wants, desires, pain points, wishes. So I think it’s really important to personalize it to the team and to even like, add in some of their own because that’s that is going to happen, that is going to happen spontaneously, but teams and cultures and organizations have, like they have values, whether they admit it or not. It’s like it’s and it’s basically the behaviors that when you add up all the behaviors of all the members on the team, how you’re communicating, what are the roles and is there clarity around roles? Do people have believe their work has meaning? Do people believe their work has impact how do people communicate? How do people represent the company? Why do people work there like it’s a Big mixture. And there’s a lot of things, but how that how do you think team culture can be measured? I mean, this is it can’t be an airy fairy concept, right? Like, we got to be able to put something to it.

Landon Gorbenko: Here’s so this is kind of me putting my own thoughts onto my question, because this is something that I’ve been exploring recently is where, how do you divide it? Where is that like exactly what I asked you. And the the thing that I’m kind of sitting on right now that I’m liking the most is that the organization establishes the values, builds it into the structure of the organization. So this applies to the management staff all the way down to the players, right, so the values are implanted. And then the culture in dynamics is each group within that organization, interpreting and using those values. So the management staff sees, let’s just pick three random values. So let’s say let’s say the organization as a whole picks loyalty. camaraderie, and I know what’s a good third ones aren’t. So let’s say loyalty, camaraderie, and team members, team, please First, I would almost say those are the same as loyalty. But anyway, let’s say let’s say, let’s say loyalty, camaraderie, and feedback, let’s say those are the three values of i know, they’re probably not really great values, per se. But let’s say the organization implements those three values into the entirety of the organization. What those three values then are, how they’re utilized by the management staff might be different than how the players are utilizing it. But at its very base, and core, everybody is abiding by these three values. This is what built the organization, this is how it’s done. And when when, at the end of the day, when whether it was a good or a bad day, whether we win or win or lose, we have that camaraderie to fall back on. And so the players that might be that might be their meme culture, where they’re, they’re joking around, so they might have just had just an absolutely awful day, but they are falling back on their their love of jokes, and goofing off. And all that kinds of that’s where camaraderie falls in for them. And the management staff might have a different version of camaraderie where they might go out for dinner together and have a discussion, whatever it might be like, they’re both abiding by that value, but they’re applying it in different ways. And so then we have feedback, the players might be doing code reviews or debriefing feedback, the management staff might look a little bit different. But again, they’re all abiding by those values. And that’s kind of what I’m toying with right now is implanting the values into the organization itself, and then applying those values differently based on the needs of the group within the organization.

Zoran Stojkovic: Yeah, I think I think we agree on that point. Like that’s, I think that’s the, that might be the best way to do it. And and then how do you measure it? How do you measure, measure team culture and assess it? Like, how do you measure whether it’s improved? How do you measure whether it’s gotten better? Like, is it very subjective? Or is there objective measures that you think and metrics that you think companies can use?

Landon Gorbenko: Hmm. I think, yeah, there’s always going to be some degree of of some degree of objective measurement that you can do. But I think it’s going to be a hybrid always like, I’m just trying to think, like, if you’re doing something like loyalty, for example, let’s say that’s the value of an organization, looking at the turnover rate within an organization might indicate Are you being effective with your loyalty, because if you have a huge turnover rate, that might mean that you’re treating it just like you’re looking at the boss, and the boss has a huge turnover rate of players management that maybe that’s because you’re treating them poorly, so they don’t feel that sense of loyalty. So if you are an organization that has huge turnover rate, and then you start slowly seeing that your your management staff is staying on longer, your players are a little bit have longer longevity under you. That might be an indication like that might be a good way to measure loyalty or even in terms of like camaraderie, or some kind of cohesiveness. You can kind of measure just by based on how much time players spend together. That’s not really a subjective thing. But if they’re spending time together, and they’re spending time together frequently that might indicate that they’re, they’re bonding right

Zoran Stojkovic: You mean outside of training, outside of work.

Landon Gorbenko: Yeah, yeah. Because they’re, they’re obligated to be there during work or training, that’s part of the job. But when they’re like bonding outside of it, that might be an objective measurement, that they’re increasing their camaraderie and their cohesiveness. And I don’t know, that might not be a great objective way. But there is always creative ways that you can objectively measure something based on that. But I think the objective nature of measuring those things is unique to each team and each team settings, you have to figure out ways to objectively measure it in that unique setting.

Zoran Stojkovic: And there’s, I mean, companies do surveys all the time internally and, you know, teams use questionnaires and there’s a lot of sports psychology and leadership questionnaires for measuring that sort of stuff. I think, like it’s a really hard question. How do you measure a team culture? How do you assess it? What are the metrics? I really think you can feel it, which is a terrible answer.

Landon Gorbenko: I don’t think, I think that’s a great answer.

Zoran Stojkovic: When you go into a team, if there’s banter, if there’s chatter, if there’s activity, if there’s energy, that’s a sign of Hey, something’s people are people enjoy being here.

Landon Gorbenko: Exactly.

Zoran Stojkovic: If you have those one on one conversations and check ins as the leader of the team, and, and people seem to be happy, and people don’t seem to be having issues with each other, which like that, that might be another Well, I don’t know if that’s perfect, though, like you, even high performing teams have issues and challenges. So I’ve got I don’t think that’s I don’t think that’s, that’s great. But companies are doing all sorts of things, man, like there’s, for communication, people wear these things around their neck, and it tracks how close they are to, to a colleague, and how much time they spend in close proximity. And what was kind of cool about that. And then not the content of the conversation, but like, just basically those two things, what this one company found through using those lanyard, electronic things is, hey, if you if your desk is within eight meters of somebody else, you’re like, very likely to spend a lot of time with them. But the further it gets away from that eight meter mark, you virtually do not see them in person. And that was kind of interesting, right? So it’s like the seating and accompany matters for for Team culture. How you’re seated.

Landon Gorbenko: Yeah. Right.

Zoran Stojkovic: There’s we got, I think it’s a Dunbar’s number of 151. Malcolm Gladwell talks about it, and in the tipping point, and it’s like Dunbar found that when companies get to more than 151, people, they like, things start to break down. And he noticed this with like social connections, because the research on it where it’s like, you have 150 people in your life, we can have 150, up to 150, like meaningful relationships in our life at any given time. And there’s 150 people who, if we saw them at a bar, we’d go for a drink. Like if we saw them randomly on like a Friday night at a bar, we go for them for a drink. So there’s things like that as well. And I, I know, obviously, like company culture is going to become more and more important. As we as companies are shifting to online, remote cultures, companies that used to be in person or maybe now doing remote work. So that definitely changes the culture, doesn’t it because now you’re not seeing each other in person and you’re you’re doing things online, you don’t have that random water cooler chat that you would otherwise

Landon Gorbenko: I think for what it’s worth, like, I don’t think we can discount the use of subjective measures like the I feel it, we can’t because it’s like, I’m sure every performance coach listening to this or in the entire world knows other performance coaches, who knows literature inside and out, like they know the science to a tee. But then when they get put on with a team they can’t deliver, right. And it’s because they don’t have that, that feeling like they don’t have that subjective part objective. scientific knowledge doesn’t always translate to practical use. And I think that’s a key point, like, part of being a coach or anything in this realm is knowing the subjective side of things, right, like knowing how to enter like, you can get like what the average is or what the standard is. But when you’re looking at an individual, it’s very difficult, it’s very different. And you have to be able to manipulate and use the knowledge in a practical way. And subjectivity is is a key part of being a coach, you have to be able to utilize it. And I think that’s one of the defining parts that separates like the great coaches and the good coaches and the bad coaches is not necessarily how much knowledge they have, you have to have office, you have to have a certain baseline level of knowledge to be successful, but then how they apply the subject of subjective parts of it because that’s, that’s key, if you’ve got a coach that’s just lecturing, giving up all the information, but isn’t able to feel that the team isn’t cohesive. Like they they might be doing all, all the right things according to literature, and like they’re delivering the right content. They’re saying the right things, but they’re not feeling what the team is going through or how the team is interacting with that information. They’re gonna miss a lot of the delivery.

Zoran Stojkovic: Yeah, absolutely. Marrying the subjective and objective is really important to knowing how to ask questions and talk to people individually on the team to check in and to understand how they’re doing and and really, really important, man, definitely agreed. Maybe my last question to you is, what’s one practical tool, our listeners can apply tomorrow to cultivate the culture of their team, regardless of their role within the organization?

Landon Gorbenko: Hmm. So I don’t know this directly answers your question, but I think it is an important thing for developing culture in general, and it’s just based on the whole concept of trust. Is you as a coach, are you asking sorry, are you asking for coaches to use or for players to use or anybody

Zoran Stojkovic: Regardless.

Landon Gorbenko: Okay, You have to make it evident and well known that you are in a safe space to talk to right? Like, if you and I are a teammate, and I come up to you say, dude, you pissed me off yesterday, or you hurt me yesterday or even on a positive side like, Man, you were crushing it yesterday, I need to know that you can take that feedback. And so I think that’s one of the biggest things a lot of people can be doing. And their own thing is making sure that they make it known that they will take feedback positively, and they won’t take it personally. And they’ll actually utilize that in a way that’s helpful. I don’t know if that’s really a practical thought.

Zoran Stojkovic: That’s a very practical thing, because you’re talking about psychological safety again, and that vulnerability, but your, your, I feel like, are you more so talking about listening, when somebody is taught and kind of like asking questions proactively and sharing when things aren’t going great for you with another coworker or teammate? sharing those kind of things?

Landon Gorbenko: Yeah, I’ll get I’ll get let me give two examples. One from a coach perspective, and one from a player’s perspective. Let’s say I’m coaching a team. And then a player comes up to me later and says, dude, what you were saying today? made no sense. I don’t get it. What were you even trying to tell me, I could either take that in a bad way and be like, Alright, this, this person is obviously not listening, not trying hard, I’m taking a pause away and sit them down and try and explain it further. So it’s, it’s making sure they feel safe coming up to talk to me, tell me telling me that they’re either upset at me or they don’t understand what I’m saying, or whatever it is, like, they feel safe, confronting me on those things. And then likewise, as a player, if you’re a player, so if your coach comes to you and says, This is what your teammates are feeling about you, understanding that that’s not an attack, but that’s trying to be helpful and constructive. So it’s really just like, being able to create a safe environment where you’ve taken information and use it properly.

Zoran Stojkovic: Nice. That’s huge. So knowing as a coach, knowing that if somebody comes up to you and wants to talk, just giving them the space and not judging it, just kind of like welcoming the fact that they’re even sharing something with you. And then as a player being open to getting feedback from teammates and coaches. And so essentially your one practical tool is communication.

Landon Gorbenko: Yeah. Or it’s even like openness to feedback might be a better way of saying is that might be the best way is because if you shut down things, when there’s feedback, whether it’s positive or negative, you’re really rejecting the possibility of growth. So it’s really just being open for feedback.

Zoran Stojkovic: Nice, growth. That is a nice word. So Landon, tell us what you’re up to right now and where people can find you.

Landon Gorbenko: Yeah, so one of the things and this is just like a little bit of a reach out to people. But one of the things is I’m very, very passionate about trying to build the esports ecosystem and getting people involved with it. So if you do ever have any questions of this to anybody, not just us or him, but like to everybody out there that’s listening. If you have any questions about eSports you’re wanting to learn more about it, feel free to reach out to me I’m more than happy to jump on a call with you or help you out in any way possible. And the best way to get in contact with me is either on Twitter, which is at vertex psych, LinkedIn, which is just landed Banco my name, or actually those are probably the two best if you use Discord. You can you can join me message on discord, which is for Vertex#8689. That’s my username. And those are probably the three best ways to just get in contact with me or reach out to me. I’m pretty responsive on all platforms.

Zoran Stojkovic: Nice London I’ll put those in the shownotes thanks so much for coming on. That was a that was a really cool conversation and I’m sure we’ll have you on again and and keep talking about this sort of stuff as we explore.

Landon Gorbenko: Absolutely, always happy to come on.

Zoran Stojkovic: Hey, thanks for tuning in to cultivate your culture, rate and review our podcast on iTunes. Any websites and resources mentioned in the podcast as well as the guests information can be found on the show www.kizo.ca/podcast. Here’s a sneak peek of what’s coming up in our episode next week.

Bruno Guevremont: How do we determine what’s the culture and is this going to serve the mission statement or our goals? And and that’s how I established this because I find today nobody discusses their definition of.

Zoran Stojkovic: tight we’re recording.

Landon Gorbenko: Yay. Go

Zoran Stojkovic: I’m not gonna cut that out.

Landon Gorbenko: You better not I’m famous for my finger guns ammo is finger gun.