Shifting from Me to We: The Power of Being a Good Teammate with Lance Loya

Viral is emotional contagion. That's your control of your body language and your emotions. When you walk into a room, your positivity radiates. It inspires others to get excited about your cause and it's sharing your passion with the rest of your team. And then empathetic. Empathy is such a buzzword in leadership circles right now, but there's a lot of truth to it. It's that we still confuse sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is when you feel bad for somebody else. Sympathy is when you feel what it's like to be somebody else. Empathy really is making a point to understand others' perspectives. And those five keys, if you're alive, you can be a good teammate. Welcome to Super Entrepreneur's Podcast. Today we have with us Lance Loya. Best-selling author and authority on the mindset of a good teammate. Lance has authored nine books on team dynamics, including the We Gear, How Good Teammates Shift from Me to We. Welcome Lance. Yes. Shahid, nice for having me here. Wonderful. My pleasure, my friend. Great to have you. So that's a, a big shift from me to we. Yeah. An important shift though, right? You look at almost every problem we have in our society. And if you're an entrepreneur or a leader of some capacity, I bet almost everything that causes you to lose sleep at night revolves around somebody on your team or in your organization being selfish. They are all about me. And if you can get them to shift from me to we, you get yourself more sleep back. Yeah. It's quite common when you will see this in corporations and businesses. For example, when it comes to benefits, when it comes to other things, when you hear people, they talk about me and my being taken care of, right? And that, that paradigm about we, it's a great opening for improvements because when you start thinking we, then you start together making a bigger change. Yeah. That's synergy. That's the real moving force behind any successful endeavor. Yeah. The more, the merrier. And that's how you create power in organization. So many people are just there. We have become a society that is motivated so much by what benefits me, what's in it for me, and that becomes the basis. And ultimately it's a very shallow basis. If you want to do big things, what's the old adage? If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And that's really the basis of being a good teammate. Very good. I call it the hashtag, let's grow together. That's the concept of this show. Yeah. I just go and add value as much as I can and wherever relationships build, wherever we can help each other, we grow. And it's a beautiful thing because now you don't really have to worry about growth and try to see, okay, how am I going to beat the next, how am I going to beat that business and competition? All that. You just, whoever's coming around, you just going with them and helping them grow and in turn you grow. Yeah. Success becomes a by-product of your effort, your willingness to, to invest in your own, your standards of excellence. Yeah. So what inspired you to write so many books, bestselling books? I would think that I am an atypical guest for you because I had no real desire to set out to be an entrepreneur or an author or a professional speaker or any of those things. I grew up in an area where like a lot of people, if you wanted to make it out of that impoverished or that environment, you, you had three choices. You were either an athlete, you an entertainer or criminal. And that was the only real path to any kind of a change in your life. Obviously being a criminal, not an option. If you want to be a good person, that's not good. Yeah. I don't know that I had any real entertainment abilities. I can't sing. I'm not a musician. So I attempted to try to take the path of sports and I tried very hard. I love sports. I was involved with it. I just didn't possess the physical attributes to be a professional athlete. But I was a sponge for learning my craft and I became a coach. So I was a college basketball coach for a long time. And then I had an experience. It was an epiphany. It really changed the direction of my life. I had a bad flight. That's all it was. I was on a plane, had a bad flight. Bad turbulence. It scared me. And I was worried about my family and I'll like a lot of working professionals with young children. You worry about the time you spend at work and the time you're away from your children. And I thought, what if something happened to me and I died? What advice would I leave with my children? And I started thinking how I got to be on that plane to begin with. And in this case, I was watching, I was flying home and watching a player. I had coached, received this award and it was an award not for what he did on the court, but what he was doing in the community was using his position as a student athlete to be a positive influence on his community. And he received an award for that. I thought, well, that's, that ties into what the advice I need to leave my daughters, because this young man, he wasn't the best player in our team. He wasn't that tall. It wasn't that fast. Wasn't our leading scorer or any of those things. But he loved being a part of the team was such an ingrained part of his identity. People on the team loved being around him. And ultimately I decided there's the advice I want to give my daughters. Just be a good teammate. You're a good teammate. You're always going to have a support network in life. You're always have financial security because companies will always want to hire people with your mindset. And if you're a good teammate, you're always going to have purpose in your life. A reason to wake up every morning, something to look forward to because you serve the needs of your team. Service leads to purpose. Purpose leads to happiness. That was my advice to my daughters. And how do you convey that to your kindergartner? I drew pictures and I wrote out these very rudimentary sentences of what I thought it meant to be a good teammate. And that became my first book, a children's book called be a good teammate. What happened was I didn't intend for it to be a book. My wife showed it to her friends who showed it to their friends and it got published everywhere I would go. And then I'd start getting asked to speak at schools and come to literary festivals and things like that were completely out of my realm as a sports coach, but everywhere I'd go, there'd be somebody who'd come up to me and say, you need to write an adult version of that because we got people that work for my company that don't know what it means to be a good teammate. Eventually I took that plunge and that took off and led to more speaking. And eventually I was doing more speaking than coaching. So I took the entrepreneurial plunge and dove into that realm. That's wonderful. Are you going to continue to write? Yes. Cause I can see the impact it's making and I hear it. And sometimes I'm on my own personal crusade because I can really see the impact of this simple message, be a good teammate, I see how it changes lives. And I see all the problems in our society come down to that premise. And we get companies to invest in our communities. They stop seeing themselves as an outside entity and see themselves as a teammate to their community's problems. That's how the world changes for the better. Yeah, it's so true. And you will see it in, in entrepreneurship as well, right? For example, if a group of entrepreneurs decide to do an event together and they all commit to sharing that event and helping each other get the message out. But from the entire group, say for example, 10 people, only one of them is actually taking part. The rest just did not participate at all. And it comes back to commitment as well, right? When you make a commitment or when someone is a good teammate and they make a commitment, they remember. It's very true. I like to think of them as moving from interested to invested. They take that extra step. When you're interested, you care, you're curious. You want to know how things are going. You'll ask questions. If something good happens, you're genuinely happy for their success. But when you're invested, you take it one step farther. That entity's problems as your problems, and you become committed to helping those solve their problems as you are to solving your own problems. And that crucial extra step is often what makes the difference. So that's the tipping point from a fledgling entity, a company, to a successful one. Yeah. And as a podcaster, if I didn't impress this upon my subconscious mind, if I didn't make this part of me, it would be very difficult to do what we do on a regular basis, if you don't have that desire of we, it'd be so much harder. It's a higher purpose, right? Higher, something bigger than just you. Bigger, yes. In your experience, the people you've had on your podcast and your own professional experience, who do you think most people fail at? Like they start their business and there's that old business analogy that most businesses fail within the first five years. Why do you think that is, like in your experience? In my experience, they just didn't have faith. So they weren't persistent. Yeah. I can, I relate to that. What more companies I work with, more nonprofits I work with who fail, I get, I see a recurring theme with them. And then I look at the most successful ones, the ones that have real longevity. And I see why they succeed. And it goes back to why they started in that business. And many times is because they were slighted and they have this chip on their shoulder. They're going to prove somebody wrong. Somebody told them they couldn't do it. And that is how they launched their business. And it's a great start. It's a great premise. It's a very, it's a motivation in the beginning, that chip on your shoulder. But it's very fleeting. And I look at the most successful entities, someone like a Disney world or an app or something. And I've noticed that those people, whether it's Walt Disney or Steve Jobs or whoever it is, they are motivated. What I like to call chipless motivation. It's not their desire to prove somebody wrong. It's a desire to bring their ideas to reality. And that allows them to take challenges. It keeps them from being deterred by failures and risks and things like that. And that's really why they succeed. And where it ties into the art of being a good teammate, because they see themselves as being a teammate to a higher purpose for their services or whatever it is they're providing. And they want to be a good teammate to their customers, their clients. So I think that is a key. You get entrepreneurs, you can't be motivated by a chip on your shoulder. Maybe in the beginning that gets you going, but you've got to be motivated by something more than that. Yeah. It's that individual ego that gets us in trouble. Yeah, I agree. And what's being a good teammate. It's the suppression of ego. Isn't it? It's so true. I love these words. And if you're a good leader, you have to be a good teammate because of the best leaders are part of the team. You have a different role in a team. Sure. But you still have this obligation to be a good teammate. And there's a great sports analogy. I like to say you don't abandon ego. It's just some of the most successful people I know. And Bill Russell was famous for saying that he's the most egotistical SOBs he's ever met, but it didn't have an individual ego. He had a team ego. Yeah. And really we're always trying to find ourselves as entrepreneurs and individuals. But the key to success isn't in finding yourself. It's in losing yourself in the team. And I think there's a lot of truth in that. So what do you feel the most important qualities are for an effective team? An effective teammate? I think there's five. And it goes back to that story I told earlier about the young man who won that award who played for me. And, and I like to tell audiences when I'm speaking to them or I'm working a workshop, I'll say, you don't have to be fast to be a good teammate. You don't have to be tall or strong or good looking or you don't have to be intelligent. You just need to be alive. Now there's duality in that because yes, anyone with a pulse can choose to be a good teammate. Really is nothing more than a choice. But alive is also an acronym. And I like to explain to them that the live stands for active, loyal, invested, viral, and empathetic. And I feel those are the five key behaviors of a good teammate. As I studied this genre, this section of people, I've determined that I've labeled as good teammates. I've seen these same five behaviors, these characteristics occurring over and over. And he is active, active. I'll walk you through it very briefly. Active is you see a problem, you take action. You don't blame, shame, or complain. You are good on it. Loyal is that your allegiance to something greater than self. We think of loyalty as being a reciprocal relationship. I'll be loyal to you if you're loyal to me, or I'll get your back if you get my back. A good teammate will get your back whether you've got theirs or not. Regardless, that's what's best for their team. Invest that we talked on earlier. It's the depth of your commitment. Viral is emotional contagion. That's your control of your body language and your emotions. When you walk into a room, your positivity radiates. It inspires others to get excited about your cause and it's sharing your passion with the rest of your team. And then empathetic, empathy is such a buzzword in leadership circles right now, but there's a lot of truth to it. It's that we still confuse sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is when you feel bad for somebody else. Empathy is when you feel what it's like to be somebody else. Empathy really is making a point to understand others' perspectives. And those five keys, you're alive. You can be a good teammate. Cool. That's awesome. I love that. You came up with that. Yes, that's mine. But you know, those aren't my ideas. Those are, those have been around for centuries. Those are just all I've done. Alive. I like the alive acronym. All I've done, and this is what any great entrepreneurial spirit does. They see a need and they package it in a way that solves a problem. And I think if you're a leader and you list out every attribute, every expectation of your company, and you create this, you craft this wonderful mission statement, how many people in your company can recite that mission statement, can recall it quickly? It's hard, but it's simple acronym. Alive. We can all remember that. Be a good teammate. We can all remember that. That stickiness factor. Easy. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Like a screensaver. Yes. You'll, as soon as you see it, you'll know it. I've never heard that before, but I like that. I like that. So how do you motivate and encourage team collaboration and communication? Yeah, that's always the challenge, isn't it? I think really one of the biggest mistakes I see entrepreneurs and leaders make revolves around that very issue. And some, I like to explain it sometimes to what I call the teammate curve. So if you look at your random run of the mill underachieving team, it has the shape of a bell curve. And at one end of the curve, those are your top 10 percenters. Those are your good teammates. They are the ones who show up early. They stay late. They do whatever is asked of them and they eagerly do whatever it asks them. They're the volunteers. Now at the other end of that spectrum, those are the voluntolds. They don't do anything without being told. And then when you do tell them they're grumpy about it and resentful and they resist what they've been asked to do. Those are the bad teammates. And then in this middle is this chalotinous 80% lump. Now, as a leader, what you're trying to do, if you're going to build a team first culture and a motivated culture of good teammates, you don't want to do anything that's going to empower those voluntolds, the bottom 10%, and you don't want to do anything that's going to alienate the top 10%. In fact, you want to make sure you're motivating and recognizing them and expressing gratitude towards them for what they're doing. You want to encourage a continuation of the game. Then what you're trying to do to that 80% in the middle is sway them to turn that curve into a slope. So you got more good than bad. Now, the problem that leaders make, the mistake they make is they try to incentivize that middle 80%. They try to motivate them through awards and things of that nature without ever defining what it means to be a good teammate on their team. And by doing that, you turn that eight and that middle 80% into mercenaries. Now, mercenaries can be effective. They'll do what they're told as long as there's benefit to them. They are the people in the me gear. And ultimately when it stops being of benefit to them, that's when they abandon ship and that's when you get into turnover problems and a lack of investment. So what you have to do, you have to make sure you define what it clearly means, be very explicit, what it means to be a good teammate, what you expect. And then you, you emphasize that in your culture. Very good. That was excellent, Lance. It was a real pleasure talking to you today and learning about what you do. You have a very specific type of strategies when you're working with businesses and people and creating that team environment, because the more we have we out there, I find that the world will be a better place, not just in the business world, but just how we are with each other. And I just want to appreciate you for coming on this show and thank you for your time. Yeah, no, I feel like Chick-fil-A here, but the pleasure was mine. I was, I really am glad to be a part of this. I think what you do is extremely important and whether you realize it or not, you being a good teammate, providing this platform and disseminating these tips that, that help entrepreneurs become successful, the reality is the more good teammates we have in the world, the better the world is. So true. Lance, thank you so much for that. And audience, thank you once again for joining us. Lance, his information is in the show notes. Take a look, check out his books. He's a phenomenal writer. So you want to check out the work that he's done, especially around teammates, teamwork, and becoming a we in environment and mindset. It's great to see what he's doing for everyone and it's definitely worth your time to see what he has put out there and what can help you be the best version of you and thanks again and thank you for helping us grow, appreciate you all. And Lance, thank you so much. Pleasure's mine.