B State: A New Roadmap for Bold Leadership, Brave Culture, and Breakthrough Results

The same thinking that has led you to where you are is not going to lead you to where you want to go.

As a typical team-building facilitator back in 1983, I had just completed a program with a leadership team, using all the standard methods. We created an aligned vision statement. We did a styles survey so people could better understand each other. I had the participants do team activities and action plans to apply their “awareness” and “team experience” to their “workplace goals and challenges.”

If the positive evaluations at the end of the program were to be believed, my program was a huge success.

Three months later, I visited the company to do a follow-up meeting with the team leader and ran across several team members. They were all excited to share how much they had benefited from our work together. One person even said, “It changed my life!”

I was on top of the world, my ego and self-esteem growing with every word of praise. Of course, I had to ask: “How’s the leadership team doing?”

“Oh, it’s still as dysfunctional as usual—everyone’s still fighting about everything—but we all agree the team building was great for our individual growth!”

So much for my swelling ego! I felt like a failure as my heart sank to the floor. Sure, I was happy for everyone’s wonderful personal growth, but that wasn’t what I’d been hired to do. I was supposed to build the team.

“For a while,” the woman continued as I barely listened, “the team was working better, and the impact was very positive. But two months later, people were back to their old behaviors.

I don’t even remember whether I met with the leader that day. I know I went home depressed. After all, I had used the methodology learned from my graduate-school mentor, a leading organization-development expert, professor, and practicing consultant. I had carefully followed in his footsteps so I could provide substantial value to my clients by building teams and helping people in a meaningful, long-lasting way.

I prided myself on my high level of integrity, so I decided right then that if I couldn’t figure out how to help teams last on their own in an improved state for at least one year, I’d change careers. I was tired of consultants and trainers who made promises of better effectiveness but didn’t deliver lasting results, and I wasn’t about to join that group and live in hypocrisy just because it paid well.

I went back and analyzed every team and organization I had ever worked with, looking for some commonality, some pattern of breakdown. And I found it—at the same point after every team-building program in every organization. Even though everyone reported feeling improved trust, support, and dedication while we worked together, their day-to-day challenges had undermined those commitments after three months back in the workplace. Follow-through soon broke down, and the trust and support they’d so eagerly built together fell apart.

It didn’t take me long to realize why: none of the teams—or the team members themselves—felt answerable for their commitments or agreements, so they had no reason to live up to them.

It all came down to accountability—which, I discovered over the next two years, is a moving target. No matter what I did to change my team-building methodology, each solution only worked for about three months before another issue popped up. People would take responsibility for their behaviors—they stopped bickering, for example—but six months later a lack of follow-through on priority projects created another breakdown. Nine months later, another issue popped up when new hires weren’t properly “on-boarded” into their team culture.

Enough was enough. Even though I’d been a “good student” all my life and followed my professors’ teachings diligently, I stopped reading popular management books during those two years. I did not refer to what I’d learned from other consultants and advisors. I divorced myself from my core beliefs about change management and building teams. I even gave up my “sacred cows”—those theories I knew for a fact were correct because they made perfect sense.

If I’m going to truly approach this challenge as a scientist, I have to be as impartial as possible. I have to let each situation be my teacher. I have to “pray” for solutions when I have none, using an instinctive self-hypnotic meditative state to let my subconscious show me the answer.

It was a scary, uncomfortable period in my life, probably because I still thought of myself primarily as a jock and a musician. Sure, I liked team building, but I never considered myself creative or innovative. I wasn’t a “thinker” like my college roommate Chip Clitheroe, who once invited me to a retreat to “think about thinking.” The only things I wanted to think about were hiking and boating. As far as I was concerned, I was just tweaking what my mentor had taught me. I set a goal for myself, a new criterion for success: to have a team function effectively on their own for a year without needing my support.

Then we did it again with another team. And another one. I didn’t have to change careers! I had created a repeatable, systemic approach that consistently resulted in lasting team success.

A few months later when another company asked me to submit a proposal for team building, I wrote up the methodology I’d just discovered, which had worked so well for my last client.

“Well,” the manager said during our interview, “I like your proposal and approach, but it’s not team building.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “Team building is the only thing I know!”

“Hey, I’ve got a pile of proposals here for team building, and none of them are anything like what you’ve written.”

I left the interview shocked, my very identity challenged, and immediately sought out my mentor for a reality check. “Isn’t this exactly what you taught me?” I asked, showing him what I thought were just new tweaks on his methodology.

What had I done? I wasn’t innovative—I knew that for a fact. I was just an ordinary team-building consultant.

Except, apparently, I wasn’t. Apparently, I had created something really different. I needed to give it a name and develop it to its fullest potential. I called it “Agreements for Excellence.”¹

I went back to reading books and publications. After being away from them for over two years, however, I discovered that many of their logical methodologies and practices didn’t reflect how the typically illogical human being consistently responds. My criterion for validating any new management book or keynote speaker was no longer how inspiring they were, but how accurately they reflected the human condition, with all its natural and innocent flaws and idiosyncrasies.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had started on the journey to creating the B State transformation for business, culture, and individuals.

1As I improved and expanded the process, I eventually renamed it “Rapid Team Results.”