In this episode of Stronger Sales Teams, host Ben Wright engages in a discussion with Kendall Wallace, a distinguished expert in team dynamics and corporate offsites. Broadcasting from the picturesque North Shore of Oahu, Kendall imparts her extensive expertise on designing transformative team-building experiences that cultivate trust and meaningful connections. Kendall explores her personal career journey, transitioning from a notable position at  Facebook / Meta to leading a company that specialises in designing bucket-list corporate offsites. She underscores the crucial importance of trust within high-performing teams and provides actionable advice for resolving both overt and covert conflicts within teams.

About the Guest:

Kendall Wallace is a specialist in crafting impactful team-building experiences and currently heads Executive Offsites. With a decade of experience dedicated to personal and team development, Kendall possesses a distinctive background that merges expertise in user experience research from her tenure at Meta (formerly Facebook) with extensive training in Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). Now residing on the North Shore of Oahu, she is committed to assisting teams in enhancing communication, reducing conflict resolution times, and achieving balanced work dynamics.

Key Takeaways:

• Understanding the brain’s role in bonding and conflict resolution, focusing on minimising cortisol levels to foster a healthier team dynamic.
• Effective strategies for dealing with visible and invisible conflicts within teams, including surveys and role-playing exercises.
• The importance of empathy exercises to enhance understanding and cohesion between different departmental roles.
• Utilising key questions from “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” to diagnose and address team challenges.
• Implementing fun yet impactful role-playing scenarios to help team members see multiple perspectives and humanise each other.

Time Stamps:

0:00 Intro

1:00 Guest Introduction

3:16 Executive Offsite

4:54 Switching From a Tech Company

8:21 Neuroscience of Team Building

12:4 Managing and Resolving Conflicts Constructively

16:00 Dealing with Hidden Conflicts

19:05 Go-To Exercise in Resolving Conflicts

21:42 Guest Socials

22:4 Outro

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Episode Transcript

Transcript

Intro:

Hi, everyone. I’m Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You’re listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.

Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you’re an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.

Ben Wright:

Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. We have another first this week, our first guest from Hawaii. And what a cool place to be talking to someone in the depths of winter across most of Australia when Hawaii is in that beautiful summer with those crystal clear waters. And we’re talking about something that’s a little bit different to normal and team building. And I couldn’t think of anywhere more relaxed where I’d rather go actually with a team to do something like a team building activity. But Kendall’s going to tell us all about it today.

But before we do that, a little bit of a background on Kendall. So she’s all about mastering, creating meaningful experiences that make us as people and as teams feel more alive, more connected, more at one with ourselves and nature and everything that comes from having really good relationships. She herself will say, and she’ll self proclaim that she will create those movie-like magical moments, not on screen, but in real life through the offsites that she runs. She’s been doing this for about a decade. And when I say this, I mean really focusing on personal growth and how we can do it as people and as teams. Before that, she actually had a career with Meta, which I think she’s going to tell us about why and how it came to a very abrupt end. And then from Meta, a very technical, I.T. based role or I.T, if you like, very loosely into designing bucket list type of corporate offsites and experience is something so different. Right? So I’m really, really looking forward to hearing about that journey. She’s helped well over a thousand people across 75 odd groups in improving their communication, getting rid of blind spots, minimising recovery time between breakdowns and think conflict, and then really to finding out that work life balance that we need to get right as individuals and as teams.

So she’s also an EFT practitioner, which Kennedy can tell us all about that. She uses that in her coaching, which helps people more psychologically, I guess reprogram their subconscious. Now, though, Kendall, and I’d say jealous, but I’m living in very similar aspirational type of places. The north shore of Oahu. She absolutely there living her surf dreams or her Blue Crush dreams. I think you were telling me before earlier. So, Kendall, welcome very much to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast. Lovely to have you here today.

Kendall Wallace:

Oh, thanks so much, Ben. Really appreciate being here.

Ben Wright:

Excellent. Well, today we’re going to talk about why we need to really consider investing in meaningful work relationships and how that can impact us as a business, both from a day to day operating point of view and our bottom line as well. But before we do that, I’d love it if you could tell us a little bit about Executive Offsites, what you do and why they’re successful.

Kendall Wallace:

Sure thing. Yeah. So Executive Offsites is a company basically designed to create meaningful offsite experiences, meaningful moments for the teams to actually connect, build trust, because we know that high performing teams have trust as one of their core traits and really have an experience that’s fundamentally just enjoyable for the team and the teammates so that they kind of look around and almost like, forget that they’re with their teammates, they’re at a work outing, so to speak. It’s just flat out enjoyable. And then they solve any team dynamic challenges or any support that’s needed.

So we really specialise in creating moments that are just really transformative for the team, for individuals themselves, but with each other and just with their company and environment.

Ben Wright:

Okay, great. And that trustworthy you talk about, it’s so easy to say. And it’s also so easy to say we focus on building trust. It’s kind of like when businesses say the customer is at the centre of everything we do. I hear that with every single business I work with, and aspirationally, it’s fantastic, and it’s very important that we focus on it. But actually living it and bringing it to life, particularly in a way that it can handle the hard times, is so difficult. So I’m looking forward to talking about that.
But before we do, you had a really strong tech background, worked for a great company, and it’s in an industry that I would argue has a huge amount going for it. Why the big, and I think abrupt was the word in your profile, switch.

Kendall Wallace:

Yeah, it’s a great question. So I was on a team that was a cross functional composite of people, different walks of life, different roles, different positions. And it was within a product team at Facebook. And my time there, I was there for four years. I worked on different teams. You know, it was great. I learned a lot. And at the same time, one of the things, though, that we did ineffectively was really resolve any team challenges. And so what you saw a lot is that as great as a company as that was, whenever there was conflict, people switched teams, or in my case, got fired, actually.
So what started out as a simple difference of alignment. So I was working with our, and I’m sure on sales teams, similar where there’s sales leads, right. On this particular team, it was basically our quarterback of the team, if you will, our product manager. I was a UX researcher and was supposed to provide research to support the direction that the product manager wants to take it. Now, on the one hand, you have, the product manager wanted to go in a certain direction and needing that research to back that up. But on the other hand, the research kept not testing well. And you know how sometimes don’t shoot the messenger…well, the messenger got shot. Because what’s interesting in that is it started out as a difference of opinion in a product direction. Like, I think, you know, her thinking we should go a certain way. I think it should go in a different way based on user research. And what started out as a simple difference of opinion got really exacerbated into a personal conflict that, you know, eventually made me not be a team player in her eyes.
So I bring that up because, you know, eventually that led to, yeah, me getting fired, which is a hard pill to swallow to be labelled not being a good teammate, you know? And so since then, I really have been such a student of team dynamics and taken programs about understanding how it is that how you function in your own family, actually, in the years prior, are so formative in how you operate in the workplace and all these different layers of understanding, you know, team dynamics, as well as team trust and how that gets formed has really been part of my education in now guiding teams and helping them resolve even those little bits of tension because it’s so vital, because people’s livelihoods are at stake, quite frankly.

Ben Wright:

Yeah, it’s amazing when you have someone that’s…and for me, the people that I love to work with are those that have experienced what they’re teaching and what they’re talking about. So it sounds like you actually experienced it right at the coalface there, because you’re right, it’s never nice to be told you are not good at anything, let alone being a team player. But no doubt that has prepared you really well for this transition. And I think we’ll talk about conflict and unresolved conflict, or probably more importantly, invisible conflict. We’ll talk about that as we go through today. But let’s talk about team building and the really impactful team building, not the we’re going to tick the box. We’ve done what we need to do because certain departments in our business have said we need to; the stuff that can really make a difference.

So before we do that, a little bit of formative work, neuroscience team building. You talk about that extensively in your literature and everything about you. What is the neuroscience of team building and why do you think it’s important?

Kendall Wallace:

Yeah. So it actually piggybacks off of the topic you just brought up around conflict. So we’re humans. We’re inevitably in relationships going to enter into conflict. Now, interestingly, it’s important to evaluate what’s going on in our brain in different work scenarios. So when we’re bonding, we have brain chemical oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine boost. Dopamine as well as serotonin boost. All these are good chemicals, right? Create bonding, create goal driven behaviour.

Now, the other one, that occurs specifically when there’s a team conflict or when you’re in a meeting and let’s say the team moves on and you’re not quite sure, like, maybe you disagree, maybe you don’t speak up at that particular moment, or maybe you get called on and aren’t sure what the response is. So what happens in your brain then is cortisol. Cortisol rises, and it’s that fight or flight type of experience that makes us have a shortness of breath, you know, kind of sweaty palms, really kind of want to get out of the room, honestly. And what I found in interviewing many neuroscientists is that what’s actually more important when we’re creating meaningful work relationships is to minimise the cortisol. It’s not actually about hitting the dopamine in the serotonin. It’s about in those moments when you’re. Oh, crap. You know, during those moments, it’s actually being able to minimise the cortisol, bring it back down in a healthy way.

Having an experience like that where you’re…I’ll use the example I just used of being called on in a meeting where that happens, but then you have the experience of, it’s okay, and the cortisol drops back down. Like, that’s the experience that we need to give people in order to basically restore homeostasis in their brain. Like, that’s the more important thing. So going off of that, like conflict, having a discussion around that, you know, usually people are, that cortisol builds up, people want to get out of there. So what’s really important is in navigating and facilitating these discussions. Wherever we do talk about an elephant in the room and that cortisol builds up, people have the experience leaving that room of then it dropping back down in a healthy, facilitated way. Does that make sense? Like, that’s the more important thing than the oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, those are all very powerful, but it’s really mitigating the negative from overpowering.

Ben Wright:

Our team talks a lot about the emotional bank, and that is consider you going into a bank. Your bank account’s zero and you’re making deposits into that bank, and you’ll make a number of deposits over a period of time. But if you need to make a withdrawal from that emotional bank really quickly after your first deposit. So in terms of a real bank here, if you’re going to put money in and then you need to quickly make a withdrawal, it’s going to stop at however much money you have in the bank. And then in that instance, it might be a big withdrawal sends you into the negative, your bank account closes, your in arrears, and essentially negative things happen, whereas the more positive deposits you’ve made into that bank over a period of time, even if it was a large withdrawal, it keeps you in the positive. And I think you’re talking about something very similar there that says we need to keep working on the positive side of relationships. They don’t have to be big dopamine hits that come in and they’re huge moments of celebration. But we also need to be really mindful about not having huge withdrawals that come from that.

So the negative sides of relationships and that when something arises that might challenge us and raises cortisol, we need to be prepared. We need to have ensured that we have a relationship that allows that to be raised without it sending someone into that flight or fight mode. I really like that focus on that safe space to work together.
So how does that then flow into managing or resolving conflicts constructively?

Kendall Wallace:

Well, it almost aligns with off site and team building based activities. Think about it. You go to an escape room or something like that, it’s these little serotonin or dopamine boosts that. Yeah, I mean, it’s better than nothing, right? It’s definitely better than nothing. However, what’s more valuable? Maybe that or, like, addressing the elephant in the room, you know, like, that’s the actual Stephen Covey talks about the speed of trust and talks about the withdrawal and deposit as it pertains to trust. And, you know, you can have all these little builds up, but, like somebody, you know, feels backstabbed, etcetera, that withdrawal is expensive, you know, that needs to be addressed or you might lose a key salesperson.

So how does it relate to conflict? It’s important, really, to address these elephants in the room, to address these moments, to be able to talk straight. And you do it with all parties because at the end of the day, a team is a system. Two people might have conflict, but because all these other people feel the tension energetically, they’re part of that system. And it’s really important to have, I mean, whether it’s your sales lead or a skilled facilitator who’s navigating that conflict, you just address it head on, but do it in such a way where the parties that need to understand that the conflict is resolved are present for that discussion. And I think one thing that might be helpful, too, for, you know, I think, well, and maybe I’ll ask you, like, within sales, most of the conflict that you hear about happening, is it between departments, usually, like the setters versus the closers, or the marketing versus sales? Like, these leads are crap versus, you know, and so one of the really key aspects, too, is to… you don’t have the even have a role play in some of these conflict management sessions that I’ll facilitate where we involve the ghost in the room. You know, the ghost role that’s not there, but clearly has a role in creating the conflict. Right. So I think, yeah, those are some of the key things.

Ben Wright:

Okay, so we’re talking about making sure the parties are present. They’re in a headspace where they can actually work through it proactively. We’re dealing with the elephant in the room, which might be a third party trigger that’s causing that conflict to be exacerbated, but focusing more in the team building activities around how we’re resolving the negative than how we’re really prioritising and maximising the positive. And that all makes sense.

But what about with conflict? That’s often hidden. I certainly, in my experience as a leader of a business and a great business it was, and across the corporate world and entrepreneurial businesses is, I’ve found that the most damaging conflict is often the hidden types. The stuff that doesn’t come out expressly in meetings or in how you operate, but you can feel that underlying tone in terms of how teams across functions work together or individuals within teams work together.

What’s your advice around dealing with hidden conflict?

Kendall Wallace:

So what I do with all the teams I work with initially is I send out a survey, and because I was a UX researcher and have quantitative survey skills, it’s kind of easy for me. But one of my favourite questions to ask is, what do you go home and complain to your spouse or friends about? From that answer you can get a lot of information. Also, Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Every one of your sales managers should be reading this book. It is incredible. Our sales leaders.

One of the things I do is actually utilise his questions. I build that into the survey as well. And from there you can really identify what major dysfunction is present within the team and then structure how you’re going to go about dealing with it, whether you’re going to wait for an off site type of experience or whether you can deal with it in a weekly team meeting, etcetera. That’s one of the ways I do from the survey any interests or any interesting responses that I see, then I dive deeper and have in depth interviews with those individuals. And lastly, there’s no substitute for being in a group and feeling tension and just naming it. You know, people feel it. And, you know, when you are in the position of authority to be able to then address it. If it is, you know, a leader or manager, that’s your responsibility to then name it. And I think when it’s inner departments, one of the key exercises I will facilitate is just empathy exercises, opportunities for people to get to know one another. Because at the end of the day, one of the biggest challenges is people not feeling seen, heard and valued. So it’s really important to facilitate these opportunities for people to feel just that, because they really need to be understood not only by their teammates, but by the counterparts they’re working with. And, you know, when setters understand the closers challenges by actually having human to human interaction, not like, you didn’t do this right, you didn’t do that right. But a little bit of empathy building on what their day to day looks like, what’s on their plate, you know, and just having that human connection can be very important to then further the cause of then them setting one another up more effectively in the future.

Ben Wright:

Okay, so I think what I’m hearing here is that invisible conflict that we talk about it’s actually all about doing the work to get it out on the table. And whether that’s a survey, I love that question. What do you go home and complain about? I was trying to think about what I go home and complain to my wife about. Love that. Then digging in deeper, if you find something that’s a little bit of an abnormality or having the courage as a leader to be able to bring that out, either yourself in a team meeting, or if you don’t think you’re at that point in your career or your skillset to then have somebody else come and help you do that, I really like that.

So while we talk about that, what’s your go to? What’s your favourite team building exercise? When we talk about, let’s say, resolving conflict that people who are listening can do themselves with their teams, I really.

Kendall Wallace:

I really do love having people role play because it’s fun. And if you can do it, by the way, take people outside, utilise the sunlight and the natural serotonin boosts that they’re going to get with fresh air to do any type of exercise. But one of the key ones I love to do is a role playing exercise where I just facilitated it two weeks ago at a conference, actually brought two people up on stage and had two people really play out the villain version of the person that they had conflict with. You know, like really, really go into it, like utilise accents, play it full out, because it’s important to get that emotion kind of out from this stuck place of just, you know, kind of griping about it, but have fun with it. And then the second part of that exercise is then to play it full out as they are humanising the other person. So really having a humanised experience of, you know, understanding more about where the person’s coming from. And so I will basically type up the roles and then attach it with a staple and then basically give, pair people off and have people play the different roles. And so it’s whoever the traditional roles are. Like, in this one, it was UX researcher and product manager, but it can be setters, closers, marketing, sales, you know, whatever the us versus them is. And then just to have them play it full out and switch. So each person really gets to play it, you know, four times. First the first roll, and then the second roll with empathy. The first roll, the second time is with the first roll, but with empathy. And then the third time is the second role as a villain. And then the fourth time is the second role with empathy.

Ben Wright:

Yeah, right. Okay, so what we’re doing is actually forcing ourselves to look at completely different perspectives for the same problem. And I work a lot around the staff model and trying to understand that my obvious is not necessarily everyone else’s obvious, but also that we do have different drivers in life. And I love that having a way to force ourselves to actually look at other people’s perspectives, which are very unlikely to be the same as ours, and how we can find a way to work together that’s really constructive. So, Kendall, we’ve dived a lot down into dealing with conflict, both visible and invisible, and I’m very grateful for that today.

Executive Offsites and Kendall Wallace where else can people find you if they want to look you up?

Kendall Wallace:

Yeah. Follow me on Instagram @kendallwallace123 and I have a whole list of all the exercises that have been very instrumental for trust building for all the offsites I run. The survey – people can utilise that survey and just copy it and use it for themselves, as well as the interview questions that I use when I ask people to try and get it better, understanding the conflict on the team or the challenges the team is experiencing. And a list of all the exercises. So if you want to DM me, find me on Instagram and DM me Ben + Playbook, I’ll happily send it over to you. And for anybody who’s listening, great.

Ben Wright:

KendallWallace123. DM her Ben + Playbook and you’ll get a whole lot of stuff. Awesome. Thank you, Kendall.

It’s been great for everyone else listening. Please keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

Invisible Conflict: Recognition, Resolution, and Team Growth, with Kendall Wallace