Jennifer Ilkiw:

From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City. Welcome Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICE's exchanges around the world. Now, let's go Inside the ICE House.

Hey Jon, it is so good to have you here. Just for the audience, Jon and I met probably just about a year ago now. I'm relatively recent to New York, and I had gotten this email introduction from someone who had said, "Would you like to come to a dinner with successful people? And we'll do it in an apartment in New York. You come, you make dinner together, you sit down and you chat." And when I first read this, I was convinced that it was all a scam, so I ignored it.

Another one came in and then I started researching a little bit about Jon, realized he is much more legit than that, but then I was still worried that given it some random apartment in New York, I didn't know exactly what to expect. So I made Jon get on a call with me. So I actually knew that he was who he was. And then we had the dinner and we've been friends since. It's been wonderful and I've met so many wonderful people through Jon. So I wanted to bring him on because he's written a new book called Team Intelligence. Jon, can you tell me a little bit, maybe we talk a little bit about the dinners and the influencing dinner and a little bit about how that led to the book.

Jon Levy:

Oh, absolutely. So let's say about 15 years ago plus I would not say that I was having the career that I really wanted to. I was frankly broke, overweight, and I thought, wow, I'm pretty smart. I work really hard. Why isn't it that I'm getting the success that I want? And I came across a crazy scientific study and it asked this question, does the obesity epidemic spread from person to person like a cold or is it a percentage of the population? And what we discovered or what the researchers discovered was wild, that if you have a friend who's obese, your chances of obesity increased by 45%.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Wow. It's crazy.

Jon Levy:

Your friends who do not know them have a 20% increased chance, and their friends removed one more layer, have a 5% increase chance, and this effect is true for happiness, marriage and divorce rates, smoking habits, even voting habits. And so I asked question, okay, maybe the problem isn't that I'm sleeping through my alarm to go work out. Maybe the problem is that what I need to do is hang out with people who are really effective at everything. And so I wanted to gather them all. And so I invited them to come to my home, cook me dinner, wash my dishes, and clean my floor. And they thanked me for it and apparently invite me onto podcasts.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

There you go. And then it keeps going. And how many... I remember when we had our dinner, you had had us guess how many dinners you'd done? Can you remind me just and also for the audience so that they understand?

Jon Levy:

Tonight is dinner 417.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

That's amazing.

Jon Levy:

Before all these brilliant economically minded individuals who are listening right now think that I'm some business genius. I pay for everything at the dinner. There's no business model. And to my wife's dismay, I run several a month.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Well, and that was also when I was invited, I couldn't believe that it was free.

Jon Levy:

Yes.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

But you know what? You are cooking your own dinner-

Jon Levy:

It was terrible.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

... and I got to meet great people. It was wonderful. The food was fine. It was not, it wasn't terrible. I've had much worse food. My children can attest to that, that I have cooked much worse than we ever cooked at your place. But it was fantastic. And to be honest, I think the discussions with everyone far outweigh anything that you're eating and stuff like that.

Jon Levy:

Except for the listeners. People come, it's completely anonymous. You can't talk about what you do or give your last name. You cook this meal and it's fine. Listen, it's not like some Jon George or Michelin Star meal by any stretch of the imagination. But when we sit down to eat, we play a guessing game to figure out what people do. And you find out that it's Olympians and astronauts and the occasional Nobel laureate and executives like you, and we've hosted the occasional princess and prime ministers and all that kind of stuff. It's been celebrities and Oscar winners and Grammy winners, and even the guy who won a Grammy for barking on who let the dogs out.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Oh, see, there you go. You never knew that you could get a Grammy for that. I had a question. You've got this new book Team Intelligence coming out. So your first book is You're Invited and then now you've got Team Intelligence. How did all these... I'm assuming all these dinners and talking with everyone really led you to start thinking about this book. Can you talk a little bit about that for me?

Jon Levy:

Yeah, so here's really funny. At least in the US education system, there's this perception that if you want to be an effective leader, there are these core competencies. There's eight or six or 12 depending on the company that's selling you the program. And I started thinking, wow, that's really interesting. Is this accurate? And I've hosted close to 4,000 people. And the problem is that nobody's skills seem to line up with any of these essential characteristics, and it makes no sense if they're essential. And so I said, what actually matters? And I'm happy to answer it because we spent three years researching. It was crazy if you know it.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

It was, I mean, because I read, I didn't get through the whole book, but I probably read about three quarters of it over the last two or three weeks. And I thought it was absolutely fascinating how you talked about different people within the book and different concepts you have from glue players to first conversation, all these different pieces. But yeah, it would be great if you could expand a bit for us and then we'll get into a little bit more of the book and the ideas.

Jon Levy:

Absolutely. So here's what's funny, we keep being told they're these core competencies. And then when you compare them to, let's even say the most famous leaders, Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, neither of them were great at creating psychological safety or creating consensus. So they're nice to have qualities. They're not essential. There's actually only one quality that's essential for a leader, and it's stupid. It's simply that they have followers.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Okay, fair enough. Which makes sense.

Jon Levy:

Now, when you ask why people follow, the most common answers are like vision and charisma. But the funny thing is that most leaders don't have that either. And so what we ended up finding out is that I guess the best analogy is anybody who has a teenager will probably be able to relate to this. Or if you can think back to when all of you were in high school, how do most of us feel on Sunday nights at about 6:00 PM when we're in high school?

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Well, we're dreading the week and all the homework that we still have to do that we haven't done.

Jon Levy:

Exactly. And notice, we're free, but we're experiencing dread Now, Friday at 1:00 PM, how do we feel?

Jennifer Ilkiw:

We know it's the end of the week and we get two days off and we get to relax and we don't have to go to class and get up early and we can sleep until 1:00 in the afternoon. So thrilled.

Jon Levy:

Exactly. Notice, human beings don't relate to the present. They relate to the future we believe we have.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Okay, that's true.

Jon Levy:

And so as a byproduct, the reason we actually follow is that when we interact with a leader, they cause us to emotionally feel that there will be a new and better future. That's it. We don't need to like them. We don't need to want to hang out with them. We'll ignore their transgressions. As long as they make us feel that the future is better.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

That's a beautiful way of looking at it. So I quite like that.

Jon Levy:

Now, here's what's interesting. What actually triggers that response, that feeling is not vision or charisma or any of these essential characteristics. It's actually the opposite. It's that you, Jennifer, have a handful of super skills that might be unique to you that are so disproportionately strong that when people interact with them, they go, wow, with her in charge, I don't need to worry about that. And that's what's interesting. It's not that you're good at everything. None of us are well-rounded. It's that you're amazing at some specific things, and that's what makes us feel that.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

So if we find these leaders and you found all these successful leaders, one of the concepts you brought up in the book, which I really quite liked is there's this idea of being a team. But one of the issues that we see in a lot of organizations and one of our ICE's core competencies is your ability to work as a team. But the problem is a lot of companies start to look at very much individual work for compensation, whether it's how many days you're coming into the office or how much money you're making or how much commission you're bringing in. And so that almost takes away, so we believe it's a team. How do you ensure that the team is working as a team? And I guess part of that is the leader bringing all of that together and standing back and seeing that bigger picture, even though from a bigger organizational standpoint, they're trying to pinpoint certain characteristics that are very individual to try to drive value.

Jon Levy:

So I think what you're pointing to is something we call the super chicken problem.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Yes, that's correct.

Jon Levy:

And I can describe it in two ways. One is that in the, I think it was the early '80s or late '70s, a company called DeKalb bred these chickens that were like the Ferrari of chickens. They just could outlay anything out there. It was absolutely incredible. The problem is that when they bred them for pure productivity, they ended up actually creating so much competition that it bred violence in. So at a certain point, the only way the chickens could get more resources to lay more eggs is by attacking the other chickens. And it was devastating. In sports, we often see this, we call it the too much talent problem, which is if you put a lot of top players together, the team ends up underperforming. It happens at about 50 to 60% top talent. And the reason is, let's say basketball, there's only one stat that predicts a player's salary, and that's the number of points they score.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Yep, I can see that.

Jon Levy:

So what we've done is much like you described salaries and bonuses and all that, we've incentivized people to be selfish because if they take a bad shot and it goes in, on average they're going to earn more money, but they're probably going to miss a lot of those bad shots. Now, there's only one stat that predicts a player's salary, sorry, rather a coach's effectiveness. So player salary is points. Coach's effectiveness is predicted on the increase in the rate of passing under that coach, meaning let's say you're my coach, if I go from passing 50% of the time to passing 70% or 80% of the time, now the ball is more likely to get to the person that has the best chance of scoring. And it means that I've stopped thinking about myself and start focusing on the team. The role of a leader ultimately is to maximize the intelligence of their team, it's to help the team members solve problems as quickly as possible with the resources they have.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

So how would you help, if one of our listeners, for example, they were in middle management in a company and they know that the people below them and they're not going to be able to necessarily, because you could be an organization with 60,000 people, this middle manager is not going to be able to go up to the CEO and say, "You've got to change things like how many days people are in the office." Or, "You've got to change your compensation structure." They're not going to be able to do that. What would you say to them to say, "Listen, you've got a team of 20 or 30 people." So for example, if they have a relatively small team, how do they help to influence just that team and also get themselves noticed above even within those restrictions that they have? Because even as that person, I could see that somebody is saying, well, "Listen, it all sounds great, but I'm still being compensated based on what our CEO is saying, and I'm far too below to make any of these changes, but I love to try to figure out."

Jon Levy:

Yeah, you're not going to change your corporate comp structure. And even if you try, it could end up being a complete disaster because people are so used to something that already exists. So let's look at the things that are in our control. When I talked about what leadership is, the big joke is that being able to make people feel that there's a better future doesn't actually guarantee effectiveness. You could have a bunch of incompetent people following another incompetent person. It just gets the crew together for the heist. The question is, I think you're asking is how do we get the crew to get away with the heist?

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Yes, sounds like it.

Jon Levy:

And so I think the first pillar we need to understand is that teams that have the ability to reason outperform. And when I say reason, it's the ability to think or work from where we are to where we want to go. The biggest thing that's in our control there is ensuring that there's alignment. Everybody is heading in the same direction. Now, you want to make a team stupider, give people conflicting incentives. Now, you can't change the conflicting incentive of maybe bonuses, but what you can do is as the leader, ensure that everybody is very clear on what the company's mission is, what the team's role is within the company, how their individual role plays within the team.

And then the step that almost no manager ever does is to tie your personal goals to your work goals. Because if your personal goal is to buy a house and you don't believe that the work you're doing in the office will help you do that, then you're going to start some side hustle, which will take up a lot of your time and your thinking, or you'll be looking for another job. But if I can say, "Jennifer, I know that you want to buy a house. I want you to realize that if we do our job, the stock value will grow so much that your stock will be able to afford the down payment on that house."

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Yep. No, I like that. That is a great way. Because I think we're all getting into the season. I mean, we just got an email from HR saying, you're getting into the season where you're going to sit down and review and talk with those who work with you and talk to them about the future goals and plans. And it's really trying to sit there and have a very honest conversation that doesn't feel so esoteric or random that people aren't getting anything out of it. I think the hardest thing that certainly I find as a leader is sitting down and having those conversations, planning for them, but sometimes they feel, it's not that it necessarily falls on deaf ears, but I'm probably not as good or effective in it as I would like to be. I like this idea of linking personal goals to work goals. It's also very neat and easy way for people to see and understand it. I think... Yeah, go ahead.

Jon Levy:

I also want to add one thing that I thought of as you were saying this. Not all managers are great with the personal stuff, and that's okay. We seem to put a lot of pressure on everybody to be great at everything. If you had a chief of staff that was good at that kind of stuff, maybe they also sit in on the reviews and help with those conversations.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Okay.

Jon Levy:

Nobody says that you have to do it all. And this idea in corporate America that, oh, because the linear structure of your reporting makes you in charge. No, you just have to make sure it gets done. Somebody else can actually assist you or help you with it.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

No, I like that. Also, it leads me to a question of how do people manage up? Because we all are managing down with our employees and making sure that they're better. And we're trying. We've got managers above us that are saying, this is what we want you to accomplish. So let's pretend they've, and we can come back to it a little bit, but they've created this strategy that everybody understands. So we all know what we want to do. There's a four or five year plan. We have the idea of what we want to do. But then you've got a manager who doesn't necessarily manage, they're much just happier doing their own little thing, and they just happen to be, they've gotten to a very senior role. They know what they're doing, they're very smart, but they're not necessarily great at managing their staff. So we somehow have to manage up with them.

What advice would you give people to try to figure out how to manage up either to someone who does it well or someone who's not doing it at all? Because I love the idea of if it was me, for example, I could say I'm not very good at having these conversations. Let me bring in HR to be able to do it, or somebody, a chief of staff for someone to do it. But I can't necessarily sit down with my boss or somebody cares, very uncomfortable sitting down with their boss saying, you're actually pretty crap at that. You bring someone in. So we've got to figure out how to manage up as well also so that we're seen and they can see the work that we've done. What advice we'd give people on that?

Jon Levy:

So I think that we need to tackle two different questions here, if that's okay. Can I [inaudible 00:19:24]?

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Go, go. Yeah, please do.

Jon Levy:

The managing up thing, really hard. And when we look at the people who are often very good at it, frankly, they can be quite narcissistic. They're people who enjoy talking about themselves and are good at self-promotion. And if we're really honest, not that many people are great at managing down. Not that great number of people.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Managing up, yeah.

Jon Levy:

Managing up and finding somebody who can do both is a very rare, that's just pretty impressive. But there is one move that I can recommend. So this is from my previous book, You're Invited. I shared a story about the craziest art heist in history. It's 1911. It's the Louvre and a man walks in on a Monday, I think it is when it's closed, rips a painting off the wall and walks out. Nobody notices because it's protected by 11, mostly drunk Legionnaires. And about 36 hours later, newspapers cover the theft of this painting and people stand in line just to see the empty spot on the wall. Three years later, through a series of events, it's returned and the world rejoices, newspapers around the world cover it, and it becomes the most famous painting in history. And that painting is?

Jennifer Ilkiw:

The Mona Lisa, excuse me. Yes.

Jon Levy:

Correct. The Mona Lisa is not the greatest painting ever made. It's just the one that we've seen the most. It's called the mirror exposure effect. And the problem that we often have is we think that if I come to my boss when something is fully cooked and ready and I presented, they will be so wowed that they'll say, you deserve a promotion. But that's not how things work. You don't marry somebody the first time you meet them. You have to date an idea before you marry it. Does the wow factor work with a product launch? Yeah, because who doesn't want the new iPhone or whatever? But it doesn't work with ideas.

So if I instead reported to you and I said, "Hey, you had asked me to do a project to research something or a potential solution, I wanted to give you a five-second update in the hallway. We've done this, this, it's looking really promising. I'll report back." Later that week I bump into you again in the hallway or we're at our weekly meeting and I go, "Oh, by the way, the team has made huge progress. Let me just update you." And bit by bit you get their opinions so that they feel invested. It's called the Ikea effect. When people invest effort into something, they care more about it. And as you're updating, they're seeing that there's progress. They're feeling more invested because they're giving feedback. And you seem like an individual who's accomplishing a lot and sharing the actual struggles that you're going through as you're doing it.

So they know all of the ways that you've been making decisions. Oh, we initially tried this and now we've done this, and it's really fantastic. Now, you don't want to do it so much that you're annoying the boss, but giving these periodic updates shows that you're on top of things, causes them to feel invested and gives them insight into the unique ways in which you manage and problem solve. So then when they're thinking, oh, who's doing a really good job? It's not just some wow report, great, and I haven't heard from you in two months. It's, oh, I feel invested. I care about your results and look at the great work.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Yeah, I like that. And I think it always feels people should do that around the point in time when we're determining compensation as well.

Jon Levy:

Yes, that's called the peak-end rule. Human beings don't remember the duration of pleasure, pain. They remember the peaks of experiences and how they end. So make sure that right before comp, you do a thing. I don't know what the thing is, but you do a thing.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

We do a thing, make sure managers know about it, whosever making that decision on comp. And yes, because that was always something that always amazed me, that when I was looking at comp every year, the number of people who would just disappear and not talk to you for about two months. And I'm not sure if they thought that was a better thing to disappear, but I thought that the time you start doing everything, because I remember the last two months, I don't necessarily remember the last year. And as much as a manager, you're going to sit there and say, I want to look at a full year and maybe take notes. We just get too busy to do any of that type of stuff.

Jon Levy:

It's not realistic. In the age of AI, we might be able to say, oh, we have all these recordings of calls. These people are really consistent. I have an email record of all the communication and we might be able to track over time, but we also, we will see, I think the entire work landscape will change. And so it's hard to predict which way we'll go with these things.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Yeah, it's interesting how AI is going to change this and what we look. I recently, we're using Copilot in our organization and just the different things that we can do with it when it's linked to all our different applications, it's amazing. And talking to a few people, they might like it. Somebody told me they use it two, 300 times a day. I don't think I've gotten to that limit.

Jon Levy:

Two, 300?

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Hundred times a day. But I guess if you're linked, you get through your email-

Jon Levy:

If you don't sleep, that's-

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Some people don't in this company.

Jon Levy:

... many times an hour.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

But I guess if you're thinking about one of the one I thought was amazing, it'll just summarize a bunch of emails for us. Like, here you've got a hundred emails that have come in, pick the most important ones for me to read first. These types of things. I'm not sure I 100% trusted a story that's not too much of a tangent is my oldest daughter who you met, she has to read little women over the summer for school, which of course she didn't read. And she kept saying, "Oh, my best friend Evie's read it. If I need anything, I'll call Evie. I'll use ChatGPT." And then she called me up three days ago and she said, "I've got to buy another copy. Because when I was reading ChatGPT about it, I couldn't find the reference in the book. So clearly the book is incorrect. And if I buy a new copy of the book, what's written in ChatGPT?"

Jon Levy:

Okay. Here's a little tip to everybody listening. You want to do something called red team or red shirting something, which is when ChatGPT gives you a response, you say, you take that response, copy it into a new window and say, can you fact check this?

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Oh, I like that. I'm going to have to teach her that one.

Jon Levy:

And then you take that response and you run it in a new window and you fact check it. Apparently these large language models begin to hallucinate the more content there is in a page. But after a few rounds of fact checking, it'll probably catch just about anything you need to be concerned about. And listen, this stuff is in the infancy. We're in that stage when the internet came out where there was still blinking text and banner ads everywhere for sites that nobody should ever be going on.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

I do remember all of that.

Jon Levy:

It's absolutely incredible and well worth using and well worth learning to master it. But we're in beta versions right now. It's not the thing yet. We don't know what the thing is yet.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

I know, it's going to be interesting to see where this goes because you're right. I came out when I was in university, when I first started, I was looking everything up in books and I had my first email address in university, and then everything changed. And so my first undergrad career was half with the internet, half without. And at that point, we still trusted more what was in books than we did on the internet. Mostly crazy. It was a crazy, yeah, I am aging myself now here, but that's how it goes.

I know we don't have that much more time, but I wanted to talk a little bit about something, what I read in your book. You talked about bursty communication, which I loved. I loved the term, but also when I started reading a little bit more about it, I found that there was a lot that I almost, with what I've been doing in my work in the last even two or three months that I've realized that we have to do or things that we have to change. Can you talk a little bit about it? I found that was one of the most valuable tools that I picked up.

Jon Levy:

Sure. So the second pillar of team intelligence is the ability to know what to focus on, when and how. And teams that outperform, that have high intelligence, that solve problems quickly with the resources they have synchronize their behaviors. It's often they have shortcuts in their language, but also when they meet, they are very intentional. They come together. They now might argue it out, but when they're done, they are very clear on next steps and where to find the resources they need. And then they go their separate ways and do not bother each other. If you want to make a team stupider, just keep interrupting it. It won't be able to get any work done. And so as long as everybody knows where the resources are and where to find them, then they're in good shape to actually get that work done.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Yeah, no, because I love that. Because I find with what I do now, I've got a bunch of different topics that I have to constantly look at during the day. So I flip from one topic to another topic, and some days it's just a constant flow of meetings where you feel like you've actually done no work at the end of it. And I always sometimes try to hide my phone so that I don't look at it because you just get distracted by two or three different things coming in at once or just different emails. I'd found for a while it was useful if I had meetings, we would have, the way our old office was set up, we've moved offices, is I would have a dedicated Zoom or meeting screen because as soon as I put it on my main computer, then all of a sudden I'm looking at emails and I'm doing other things and then you lose what you're doing.

And in this new office space, we're not able to do that the same way. And I have to very much concentrate on trying. And I've got four screens, so it's trying to some ways minimize everything. And people laugh at me that I have four screens because you're hiding behind it. But also, I need to see what's happening in the markets. And then I like to have the... And I like to have everything spread out so I can see it, but how to focus and even spend a half an hour working where you're uninterrupted in thinking. It's incredibly hard.

Jon Levy:

It's just such a gift. To be able to actually focus is probably the biggest gift a leader can give their people because we otherwise, they're doing work in the evenings and weekends and then they burn out and their family is unhappy that that's their career. And it just creates a lot of complexity. And frankly, the burnout probably leads to more mistakes and then more time trying to fix it.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

Before we're done, really excited to be seeing this book come out. Can you talk a little bit about when it's coming out and where people can find you for the future?

Jon Levy:

So books coming out October 7th, Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius. It's with Harper Business. It can be found anywhere that books are sold. And if anybody wants to get in touch with me, I'm super easy to get ahold of J-O-N-L-E, V as in Victor, Y in yellow, .com, jonlevy.com, and I answer just about every message. I can also be found on LinkedIn and all the other channels. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Jennifer Ilkiw:

No, this is wonderful. Thank you so much. You take care.

That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X at ICE House podcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week inside the ICE House. Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.