Unknown: 0:02

The cosmos is within us. We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. Carl Sagan. Welcome to the lessons from nature podcast, modeling the secrets of the bees, hosted by Mark Rubin.

Mark Rubin: 0:21

If you hear my voice, you're alive. And if you're alive, you're alive because you're part of a team of people who trade money for work in different ways. All human beings do work to earn money to trade for different forms of energy. Even if you grow your own food and produce your own electricity, it's likely you didn't mind the metal for the shovels that you used to plant your garden, or the minerals you needed to build solar panels. And that's because we use money to trade work with each other. And that means we're all part of the same team. Today on the lessons from nature podcast, we'll be discussing secret nine from honey as money. It takes a team. It's about the organization of work that enables collaborative species to work together to maximize the rate of energy transfer, by doing the least amount of work in the shortest period of time, the most efficiency. I'd like to introduce my co host, Ram Nair. RAM is a Chartered Professional coach, Master learning facilitator and holds a diploma in high performance coaching. He's been the head coach for the Canadian National badminton team, the Canadian National para badminton team, the Mumbai rockets of the premier badminton League, and the Vancouver lawn and tennis badminton club. He's the author of two books, the sport of life, and from confusion to clarity, Ram will co host four episodes with me, where we will discuss the psychological secrets of the bees, through the lens of the human business of making money, and the bee business of making honey. Welcome, Ram. It's great to have you here.

Ram Nayyar: 2:04

Thank you. Nice to be here.

Mark Rubin: 2:07

So today RAM, we're talking about an area that I know is very meaningful to you, which is about teamwork. And we're going to talk about teamwork in the context of the big business of making money and the human business of making money. But in particular, since you are a professional coach, what we're really going to talk about is the idea of winning. And winning in this context means organizing a group of people in a way that creates a game that enables them within the boundaries of the rules to win. So first talking about the bee roles in the hive. And there are different job functions inside a beehive. And there's different kinds of bees. And there's different ages of bees, different skill levels of bees, different strengths of bees, and all these things come together in some kind of magical optimization of teamwork. To enable the bees to gather energy efficiently, store energy efficiently, reproduce efficiently, gather information from their habitat efficiently, and survive till next spring. That's the game they've been around for 100 million years playing this game, the long running sport, the sport of survival. And the job functions go like this, the queen bees job is simply to manage the rate of reproduction in the hive. By laying eggs at a certain rate, what she's doing is she's sensing the amount of pollen and energy in her habitat. And she's trying to lay eggs 21 days in advance of the flowers being there because that's how long it takes to recruit and train a worker bee. The worker bees are females. And they don't typically reproduce. They don't lay eggs unless something goes wrong with the queen. What they do is they have a lifecycle which I'll come back to in a minute. The male bees the drone bees a primary job as a is is they just wait for a virgin queen to hatch, and they try to mate with her. And then they die in the process. And that's that's their entire role. And that's why there's a minimum number of those bees in the hive because they're just consuming resources just waiting to spread some the chance to one chance and a zillion to spread their genetic information. So there's the different roles now within on the worker bees. The female worker bees they start out as eggs and then they become larva and then they become baby bees. The next phase of a baby B is caught on nurse B and nurse B is just an older like a toddler and the nurse B will bring the baby honey from inside the hive moving around because they can't fly it and nurse b She's a little older they can't leave the hive yet. And when the nurse bees get a little bit older, they become wax bees. They developed glands that enable them to make wax and they just repair the inside of a hive. And then after that they become a forger and they leave the hive and they go out and they get the energy sugar the money and They they've made these try to survive outside of the high dangerous place, birds, other insects trying to get them. And they, if they make it back, they bring back the honey in the hive. And throughout this process, there's training, and communication, and organization. And so those things have direct parallels into what you do with it both the different sort of strengths and capabilities of roles, the communication, and the training, which which comes through dances, B dances. So that's sort of the background of B teamwork, what I just explained was what's called division of labor, and how the work of keeping the hive alive and gathering energy is distributed across the different different kinds of bees and different ages of bees and stuff. The impact on productivity of this is that when bees are specialized in these functions, they become quite skilled at those functions. And this improves the efficiency of the hive, the division of labor improves efficiency, because they're just focused on one thing until the until they go to the next thing. And so in terms of a team, in terms of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of individuals, both as individual players and teams, what stories could you tell about the division of skill on labor on a team, and your experiences in maximizing sort of the performance of the overall team.

Ram Nayyar: 6:26

So I'm gonna give you a macro example. Of course, as I've highlighted in my my book, The the sport of life, sport, mirrors, life, mirrors, business, they're all sort of the same thing. But I need to be very practical one, about athletes and performance, right, so an athlete needs to perform. Back in the day, it might have been the athlete and a coach. And then later on, we realized that, you know, there was more things happening, because some athletes had great coaches, or maybe they had the same coach, but maybe it's the same coach with very similar athletes. But the results are different. Well, what's happening? Well, then we had, oh, wait a minute, we came up with an idea that it was a group of three, and the three was the athlete, the athletes, family, parents, and the coach. Now we've blown that up, way up. And now we call it the I S T, the integrated support team. So whether you're dealing with an output performance of one athlete, or have a team, they need an integrated support team. So depending on what you want as an output, so imagine that this way that your queen bees managing the output, right? In this case, the queen bees, maybe not the athlete, but maybe it's the High Performance director, which is also a role that I've held. My job as a high performance director, is to then figure out what the best thing for my team or individual athletes about. And what will happen is, I'm going to create that integrated support team. So all of the different parts that are needed, do we need a chiropractor or physio? Do we need both? Do we need a massage therapist? Do we need cold tanks? A great story about that, as we found ourselves at the Youth Olympics in 2010, in Singapore, and it was very, very hot, and we got the largest garbage cans, we could find brand new, dumped in a bunch of ice and water, we managed to get something in support of our athletes, because that was the job. The job was we need to support this athlete, we need to support this athlete fast. And if it's a cold tub that the doctor requires, then my job is to go out run and go find that I can't emphasize enough how whatever we might think every single component of that team is important. Without that tub, we don't have a cold bath. Without the cold bath, we don't have a cooldown without a cooldown. We don't have recovery. Without recovery. We don't have performance. And it was all because of the tub. Yeah, every single part of that there is no member of a team that does not play an important role. If you've assembled that team correctly,

Mark Rubin: 9:09

I appreciate your story. And I like sort of thinking it through both in terms of beads, but also in business. You know, people are specialized. And there's handoffs between different processes. And what you're optimizing in a sporting arena is the performance of a person. And in a business, you're optimizing the performance of the money, you're trying to make it more efficient that the work is being done. Let's talk next about building a high and how the bees work together to create a hive. These all work together to construct hives. By producing wax and shaping into these honeycomb structures. By working together in this collective way. Bees can construct larger and more intricate and more structurally sound hives and this gives them more space for storing the energy in the honey and the protein in the pollen and for making babies. You just discuss rived a process by which you're sort of synthesizing what's needed for optimum performance, you being the coach, what kind of questions? Are you asking yourself and others to try to figure out how to assemble your hive in a way that gives you the best results?

Ram Nayyar: 10:18

So that's so interesting a question because having traveled all over the world and being in different environments, I look at a hive when you say hive, I look at I say environment, what we learn in sport psychology, is a very simple thing that the more closer to the home environment, that person setting is, the more comfortable they are, which then allows them now to focus on the job at hand, which is to win the competition. So let's, let's think about it this way. If you wind up in some place, wherever that is, and it's super hot, and there's no air conditioning, how will you perform, because you're going to be so busy trying to keep yourself cool that your energy is being spent in the wrong place, right, as the person that needs to perform? Sure. So we have an entire so when you ask the question, how do I figure that out? You figure that out by asking the people that need to perform. So tell me what what kind of environment works for you, I will tell you that on any national team, we have an advanced group, an advance of people that show up at the place, they're going to show up before the Pan Am Games, will it so you're gonna have to build that environment. So food things, our our athletes, lounges, whatever, as Canadians, what are we going to have, we're going to have two things, always gonna have granola bars, or we're going to have Tim Hortons coffee. Okay, that's gonna be there. So building the environment is both physical, and psychological. I've translated that for companies I've worked with in the executive coaching space, and said, Okay, you want production? Take a look at your physical environment. Like, how is it setup? If it's too comfortable? You might lose production. If it's not comfortable enough, you might lose production. So how do you set it up? So that it will work for your team? What are the access points? Do they need light? Do they not need light? Do they need a coffee room do they not need a coffee room and so on, it's

Mark Rubin: 12:25

good to demonstrate that kind of empathy and really understand what people need and appreciate the idea that when people are doing high performance work, working hard, and whatever it is, whatever it is, creating the environment, the hive, the habitat for them to feel comfortable. Air conditioning has to work windshield wipers after work. Anyway, so I appreciate that. Alright, let's move on to the next topic here, which is about defense. So honey bees collectively defend their hive against predators. That could be other bees could be mice could be bears could be people. And when a threat is detected, the bees release a pheromone that alerts the other bees and stimulates a defensive response. And by working together to protect the colony, they ensure the safety of the Queen their babies and their food resources. And that improves their chances of survival. And in this case, we're winning the game of life, what is the focus you have working together to defend against competitive threats?

Ram Nayyar: 13:21

First, you rally around a symbol, a logo, a icon, something, something that you in the company world, I always try to ask people to say, Okay, what why are we here? What are we here for? We're here for x Corp, the symbol of X Corp, you have that pride in that symbol of X Corp. In a sporting world. It's a symbol or a flag, you know that, at every major games that Canada goes to we take a moose with us, it becomes our symbol, something to rally around. And when you're out of games, and there's you know, 400 Canadians among 10,000 other competitors. As soon as you see that red and white and you see that big see, you know that you're in a safe place, you know that you can go there at the Olympics and 2016 in Rio, the golfers all came out to support the badminton players. Why? Because they were on the same team, because they had something to rally around the idea of defense is support. So another word for defensive support is support a common goal and protect against a common threat.

Mark Rubin: 14:37

That's a great answer, not the answer I expected but a great answer. It's important, I think, for people to identify and belong to a team. And I think that by having symbols like you described and enables them to identify first, who's on their team, and then that feeling of belonging comes after the identification of that. That's really what it comes down to is that people feel that they're part of the thing that they belong to A and creating a symbol helps them identify that they are part.

Ram Nayyar: 15:04

Every evening when the medal count comes out, the athletes gather and they look at the medal count. And in certain games, there's a celebration, hey, we're gonna go down to the art village, our little area, and we're going to celebrate the victories. It's not my victory in my team's victory, and therefore I celebrate in the corporate world, we can have leaderboards, sure, we're going to celebrate the overall victory of the company. And you know, that's one of the things I'd say to any business owner is like you want to be successful, you said something that made a lot of sense, which is, make it their company, it's not your company, make it their company. And once it's their company, they're going to work a lot harder and a lot happier. And it's not a mind game. It's truth. It's the truth. You belong here. And we want you to be successful. And if and it's not always and it is not always about incentivizing. But that becomes very one dimensional

Mark Rubin: 16:01

point operated, and employee only treats a customer as happy as they are. So basically, so if your objective is to create happy customers, you have to have happy employees. So in the same sense that you're talking about on a sports team is creating both the environment, the opportunity, learning, development, growth, etc. So that they'll stay happy for as long as possible, and make the thing run as best we can. Let's talk next about communication. And how that comes into play. And I'm very curious about about your answer to this one is, so bees communicate in different ways. They communicate through vibrations, and dances and movements, but also pheromones. So the dance is like a one on one scenario that has to propagate through, but have sent in an enclosed area. Everybody smells at the same time. So basically, it's a way to signal everybody at once. And so the impact on productivity is it coordinates activities in the hive, either activities of bee stay calm, or activities have become aggressive.

Ram Nayyar: 16:59

We had a course that I that I really enjoyed it was called coach observation. The educator said, listen, we're gonna go down, and we're not going to watch a game board is gonna watch the coach. Right? He's gonna watch a coach, and you're gonna see what he or she does, and you're gonna see how that's reflected with the team. Since that information, we did a long, long, long study on it. Like it wasn't just one time we did it multiple times. And we, we began to notice that coach's behaviors translated into the team, they were coaching. Yeah, I say, What do you mean, like, the coach appeared really calm. They did. And then the one on the sideline, they paced. And then they gave advice, and they looked really assertive. But then when they went down, they put their head down in a book, and they started looking, what's going on. Now, those are called mixed messages. Right? And the athletes notice this chair, and they respond in kind. Many times when I have been coaching I'm looking across because we sit across a court and I'm looking at that coach, and I'm going, oh, you know what? I person who's nervous, I don't know what's up. But something is, I know that I can take advantage of that. And if you think about the athlete, the athlete is always communicating non verbally. And so I you know, like if you if you're hunched over and you're, you know, huffing and puffing, what are you communicating, you're communicating, you're tired? Well, I'm going to use that. Yeah, right. But if I do the opposite, and that's why I try to train my athletes to say, Listen, just look energetic and look up. And if you're feeling bad, look happy. Right? It's a double edged sword, because what you're trying to do is, you're not trying to have them fake it, but you're having them to control it, control that, that communication, and you become the person you become the person that's dictating how that communication goes out. Because if it's involuntary, give something away.

Mark Rubin: 19:00

Let's talk about new people on your team. And we're gonna talk about this, through the context of an egg hatches becomes a larva. And that turns into a baby bee. And like I said, the nurse bees, which are just female worker bees, they that are young, they take care of the larva, and they work, you know, to feed them and also keep parasites off of them and keep them alive. And so this this group behavior of working together as as sort of nurse bees is the same thing in a business as having trainees. I'm not just talking skills, I mean, overall level of comfort or level of skill, their level of interest in learning, and then how you could onboard them onto your teams in a way that integrated them into the team that was best for everybody.

Ram Nayyar: 19:44

When ever you have a new person sharing becomes the most important thing. And this is more of a practical example of in one of the one of the companies that had hired me and they were, you know, they were having new people and I said so what You know what this person you've hired them? What do you know about them? Do you know that they have a set of skills that maybe would be advantageous like you've hired them based on a set of skills that you required? Right? Got it. But they've also come with additional skills that we may or may not know. And if you allow them to share that information, that this is how we do this, then what winds up happening is you may actually further your goals faster with that new person, it will give that person a sense of belonging and importance. And it will help to accelerate their absorption rate into your organization. Because if you don't, if you don't let them have points where they are acting as a leader, or they're acting as, as a consultant, or as a sharer of information, then what you're doing is you're limiting them to their little cog, right, and that cog, then you better explain that cog absolutely perfectly, or it will go sideways, because they haven't yet seen what the bigger picture is. So unlike bees that may be born with a DNA that says, This is already the bigger picture. In real life, you're gonna have to explain that.

Mark Rubin: 21:18

Yeah. And in a way, it's like, creating an environment where people share their strengths and passions, and then integrating those strengths and passions into the overall structure of the system in a way that's harmonious for everybody. It's also

Ram Nayyar: 21:32

the idea that this person begins to own their responsibility, rather than have responsibility thrust upon them. Right. Right, a really wonderful story I've shared with other people, but it's about a friend of mine, who when they were little, so when they were when they were being born, so when they were born, how the parents dealt with the kids. So my friend is born. And until then has an older sibling that's in a crib. They want to move the kid from the crib, to a bed, the older child. But they don't know quite how to do that. Because that's the child's crib. It's the right it's, and because children have this thing of that's mine. They don't want to swap the dads out there want you know what, you're you're getting pretty big, it's time to get a bed for you. And the kid was, okay, sure. So now there's a bed. That Okay, and what I had to take that crib down, because you don't need that the father unassembled the crib and was preparing to take it out of the room. And so what do you think we should do with this crib? And the older sibling says, well, well, you can just use that crib. Because the kid now had responsibility, and it was their crib to give away right? About that, if that's how, if that's how we dealt with, with people that work for us.

Mark Rubin: 23:01

Great story, I appreciate you sharing that one got me thinking about a lot of things. Let's talk about cleaning the hive. And the worker bees work together to keep the hive clean, and free of either dead bees or debris or invaders. They come in there. And they remove those debris and they bring them outside. So the inside of a beehive is super clean. And the impact on productivity is that is that this collective effort to keep things clean reduces the spread of disease and parasites within that. And it promotes the overall health and productivity of the colony because they're not wasting time and energy fighting off defenders. So the question I have for you in terms of a hygiene of a sporting team, I believe it comes down to understanding these statistics would be like the parallel with this and keeping track of numbers and performance in ways. How do you view the importance of measuring accurate performance of people through either KPIs or whatever, whatever? What do you measure in sports? And how does that relate to business? And how important is that? Overall?

Ram Nayyar: 24:03

I think there's a great quote that, that what you cannot measure you cannot change. Yeah, right. And whether we do it consciously or unconsciously, we're always measuring. We're always measuring and we measure with our eyes, we measure whether we measure with tools we measure with our hands, we're always measuring, I think that the more that you're able to put numbers because numbers don't lie, right, the more you're able to put put correct numbers into places and systems, the more productive you're going to be. Example of of cleanliness, if you have a clear desk or if you have a clear workspace or if it's but the easiest example for that is in terms of processes are and we've heard about this before we've heard of, of people that were the same thing every day. Yeah, multiple of them, but they were the same thing. I learned that very, very Yeah. On through one of my one of my dad's colleagues, and he's very smart guy that went to Cambridge, I could tell you exactly what he was going to wear here, as he's gonna wear a blue jacket, with this Cambridge tie it a light blue shirt, gray slacks and black shoes.

Mark Rubin: 25:16

I never, I never got right.

Ram Nayyar: 25:19

And latterly we learned that that what that helped was his productivity because he didn't have to think about it. When we think about kids in school uniforms. It's not to be posh or uppity, it's to reduce the idea that you have to think about the latest fashion, this is your, this is what you're wearing, the more things that you remove, that you have to think about that are in fact mundane, the more productive you're going to be. That's one way of measuring that's that's the cleanliness factor, that's the form factor, the statistics factor, then I can tell you a very interesting story about how funding is done. Okay, funding funding in a system used to be well, if you hit this mark 20 is in the world, let's say you're gonna get some money. So it doesn't matter what you do, until you get 20 from the world, like, as long as you get that you're gonna we're gonna give you funding Well, smart minds said, Well, wait a minute. Now, all we've ensured is that this person is going to be 20th in the world. That's it, that's what we've ensured. Okay? Well, let's say well, to show improvement, if you're 20 is in the world for two years. But after that, you got to be getting better or otherwise, you're just having status quo shares. Now, if you want to get funding, you better now be 18th or 15th, or so we have to see this upward trajectory. And as long as we see this upward trajectory, we'll keep giving you money. But when that trajectory stops, it means you're no longer performing. At a higher level, you've hit your limit, you've done it, we're going to give you a couple of years. And that's the end. If you want to translate that into a department within your organization, or your own business, your own small business. Think about it this way. Well, as long as my profits keep going up, right, as long as my production keeps going up, if my production goes up, my profits go down, there's, I've got to figure something out, you're gonna have to figure out what you're going to measure your business on most businesses, then are measured on profits retained earnings, right? Okay, well, everything else is going to feed into that retained earnings, you're going to have to go backwards to understand statistically, what contributes to that, or what takes away from it. Right? And if it doesn't, and you just kind of go well, that's okay. You know, I'll just whatever, I'll just, you know, we had a bad year. Why did we have a bad year. So I think the importance of statistics is giant. So this is the vicious loop also requires money, right? So so you have to figure that out, you have to figure out where the time is spent to get the money, you need to create more time to create more money.

Mark Rubin: 27:52

That's right, just in hearing you talk about that says I use the word cleanliness, like they're cleaning that but really, the word that encompasses both of the two sides that you said, is hygiene. So you need hygiene of information, or you the hygiene of sort of processes that enable you to use that information in a way I used to clean but really, it's hygiene, I get that word of tidy, I guess or like you know, the bees are doing it, and people are doing it. And thank you for that example. Is there anything else you want to add to the podcast?

Ram Nayyar: 28:26

I think that I think the the first thing where we started off is to understand that everybody on a team serves a different purpose. No one is higher or lower. And that applies for society. And it applies for sports, and it applies for business. Nobody, nobody can be diminished among your team, because they all serve a purpose. And I'm glad that you're doing this because I think people will figure that out that that these bees every bee in that thing serves a purpose bee that sitting around and you might say well, you know those drones are kind of useless, but they're not because no point there's no queen bee. That's right.

Mark Rubin: 29:06

I don't think they're useless. I think they use a lot of honey and they use that honey to propel the genetic information into the future. And that's a useful thing for them to do as important as any other role in the hive because without any individual roles, then the hive doesn't survive. All collaborative species work together to gather more energy in the shortest period of time with the least amount of work. The fact that you're alive means you're part of a team that provides you with food, shelter, water, money, and emotional support. If you're watching this video, we're on the same team of curious people on planet Earth. If you enjoyed this discussion about teamwork, please subscribe to this podcast lessons from nature modeling the secrets of the bees. The next three episodes on the psychology series cover plans specialization and communication. Right Hammond I will see you there visit projects at Lake dot life for more information about living in harmony with the rest of nature