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Meet Paul
Paul is an expert at showing corporate teams how to be more unified and more collaborative. His proven team building program is guaranteed to bust through the silos as he shows your team how to be as unified as the players in a great orchestra.
A-list corporations have been using Paul’s team building program for almost two decades, his audiences include Microsoft, RBC, Goodyear, ING, Heineken, FedEx, PwC and P&G.
How to make your people more cohesive.
I’ve been lucky. I've been part of a cohesive team. I have played in the same musical group for 27 years. The group is the Evergreen Club Gamelan.
Evergreen is not famous like U2, Coldplay or the Rolling Stones. I'm pretty sure you haven't heard of us. But we do have a bit of a following and a reputation for being great at what we do, including several CD’s, many concert tours and a couple of Hollywood film sound tracks.
While we’ve had many great things happen to us over the years, it hasn’t been the quickest path to financial freedom. Yet, many of the members have been in the band since it started more than 30 years ago.
Why is that? Why would people be part of something for so long when the financial incentives are low?
Because being part of a cohesive group is a powerful experience. It satisfies so much of what we look for in our work and, dare I say, even in our lives.
How a new perspective will make you more successful
I was blown away. He gave me one of the best audience comments I’d ever heard, and as he said it, I knew something had changed for him.
I had just finished delivering my talk, “Building Trust”, to a group of 100 people.
They brought me in because their organization was going through restructuring.
There were many changes in leadership.
People had had to learn new skills and others had even needed to change office locations. They needed to rely on each to make this work. They needed to trust each other.
If you follow my work, then you know the tools I use are musical instruments. I do this so people can experience the concepts that I speak about. The audience sits in a circle so they can see each other as they do this.
About 2/3’s of the way through my program, I had the group improvising a piece of music, as I often do.
At one point, when the piece was cookin’, (musical term for going really well), I brought a couple of people into the center of the circle. One of them was the boss.
At first they weren’t sure why I brought them up there. I told them, “Just stand here and listen.”
When the program was over and I was chatting with a few audience members, the boss approached me.
He said, “Hey Paul, I have a suggestion for you. Remember when you brought me up to the center to listen? I said, “Yes.” He said, “You should find a way to have everyone get to do that.”
I said, “Interesting. Why do you think that?”
He said, “When I was in the middle of the circle, I could hear how it was all fitting together. I was astounded at how great we sounded as a group.
When I was sitting in my section, I didn’t hear that. I only heard the few people around me and myself. It didn’t sound as good. I was wondering if what I was doing mattered.
When I was standing up there, I realized that this is something everyone can learn from. It would help them appreciate their contribution.”
It struck me that many of us suffer from that problem. We’re working away doing the best we can but we don’t know the impact we’re having. We don’t know if what we are doing is making a difference.
And it’s because we don’t have the right perspective.
10 things you can do to be an amazing collaborator
Warning! I am going to start this post by talking about my kids and their friends.
I know that there is nothing more boring that having someone prattle on about their kids. So I'll be brief.
It’s because kids can teach us about collaboration, the collaboration we all once knew (even you, without the kids).
It struck me that kids (yours, mine and that other guy's) seem to be pretty good at making it happen.
I've been listening to them talk… it’s one idea after another. They can’t wait to get together.
I’ve watched them build something out of spare bits that they find lying around. Or they create some new video with their technology, which is never too far away.
They all seem to know what to do and when. Sometimes, it doesn’t even look like they're collaborating, it’s so seamless.
Sometimes it looks like an argument. There’s one voice trying to get on top of another to share the best idea.
Sometimes one leads, then another. There is a lot of trust - a lot of inclusion.
But no ever walks away upset. Somehow, it all works out. As a matter of fact, this can go on for hours, even days. It depends what it is, I guess. I wasn’t invited to the meeting.
It got me thinking about what it takes (in our grown-up world) to be a great collaborator. And here's what I’ve come up with.
How to use silence to make your work and your life better
I’m fortunate to be able to spend a little time at a cottage during the summer. One of my favourite things to do is to get up just before sunrise and take the canoe out for a slow paddle.
As the sun creeps upward, it’s a time of awe-inspiring silence.
The water is like glass. Only the bow of the canoe and my paddle cut through its smooth shiny surface.
It’s not really silent though. You can hear some birds singing and the odd fish jumping out of water, but it’s as close to silence as I can get without finding a anechoic chamber somewhere.
I know that, very soon, the silence will be overcome by fishing boat motors or the splashes of an early morning swimmer, or worse, by jet skis and skill saws.
I’ll often head over to an old beaver dam and just sit there in the canoe. I’ll let my ears search the forest and water for a chirp, rustle or splash. I hope for a chance encounter with a beaver perhaps. But my paddling has probably tipped them off long before I arrive so that’s never happened.
This is a place where I remind myself how to listen.
And that’s important. Because without an appreciation for silence, we can’t really listen to what others have to say.