In this high-octane episode, Paul Teasdale, Founder of Paul Teasdale, shares how he helps teams get the right amount of data to drive stunning success again and again and again.
In this episode you will discover
– How to clearly identify all the results that you really want
– What Infobesity is and how to avoid it
– Why you may not want to copy someone else’s great process
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach and I am here with yet another high demand coach. And that is Paul Teasdale. He helps people perform using insights from his seven years of working with a Formula One team McLaren, whilst also incorporating lessons from other high performance organizations that he has worked with, from sausage banking, to banking to Formula One, and lots of other stuff in between working both in the UK and in New Zealand. Paul has plenty of stories to tell and lessons to share. He helps his clients bring an f1 performance mindset to their organization. And I have to admit, Paul, I totally nerded out when I saw that he had worked with with the McLaren organization. I think we may have even chatted about this a little bit before. But it’s it’s tough time to be anyone but Red Bull at the time it is recording here. So a big Formula One fan, I’d love to see the sport become a little bit more competitive. But I’m so excited to see what that has to do with business and for you to tie those two together for us. But before we get to all of that, I’d love to take just a big step back and hear about your time there maybe what what were you doing before getting into coaching? And how did that lead you to make the leap?
Paul Teasdale
Well, as you say, I’ve had a amazingly varied and interesting career as I’ve taken the opportunities that come to me. I started off repairing and overhauling aeroplane engine parts. As my first job out of university, I’m an engineer by trade and by training, manufacturing engineering, in particular, those methodologies of performance improvement is what I’ve taken throughout my career. But I’ve taken opportunities that have come my way, I had a great time working with Kerry foods making sausages, I was a production manager, a sausage factory, getting to work with people across different shifts, different day, cultures and environments working with those big teams to to actually make stuff happen on a day to day basis. And I love those. There’s lessons that I’ve learned from from that space. And then I took sort of various different opportunities that came my way, essentially, as a consultant either as an internal role, or I spent about five years working as a performance improvement consultant, primarily in the food manufacturing business. But with a little bit of variation in between that, and and did that for about five years living on the road, decided to take a bit of a career shift or an a light shift, really, the wife and I were just married about a year at that point decided we’re going to move out of London, or the hustle and bustle that was happening there. And we looked at the obvious places around the UK in Birmingham and Manchester and Oxford. And we settled on New Zealand. It was one of those opportunities that come your way you start to investigate it and a sudden this before you know it, the balls rolling and you go in along with it. So I took a great role in a very large business over there largest business in New Zealand at the time, the big dairy giant Fonterra working with their leadership teams to help facilitate improvements in their internal teams, particularly around how they optimize their milk. So if you think about your make, you’re making a decision as to what to make with all this milk that’s in front of you, you know, if you just make milk powder, you miss out on opportunities and cheese and weigh powders and all sorts. So there’s lots of different balancing equations to to work out the best fit. And very working with some amazing people in that role. Got made redundant unexpectedly when the wife was, I think, eight months pregnant. So as you do you, you drown your sorrows for a day and then go back into it and said, right, what am I going to do with this, what I’m going to how I’m going to move forward with what I’m doing. And it was at this point that I started to really get my coaching experience from, from being a coachee. And seeing and feeling the value of coaching and that front because I had an amazing coach who I’m still in contact with today, who helped me to realize that this is an opportunity to go beyond what you’ve done before and open the mind up and made the non obvious move into banking. So I had an opportunity to work in a business banking team out in New Zealand and did that for a number of years. Before we decided to move back to the UK family reasons with at this point, we had a little Kiwi boy in tow with us. And and thought right we’re going to move back to the UK but only for an exciting opportunity. It’s something that’s really going to move the career forward. I happen to know quite a few people, one of whom was working and still does work for McLaren in the world of simulation, setting up and running their simulators over there. And as I reached out to the wider network, as I always encourage people to do so Oh, I think we might have a role that might suit you. Let me introduce you to someone else. Yep, and jumped on a plane naturally had decided it was too risky to do this job. Just from phone interviews at 1112 o’clock at night, I was like, if I’m going to be serious about this, I’m going to jump on a plane and go over the other side of the world. And it paid off and had the opportunity to work with McLaren. And I spent about six or seven years working with them, taking their ways of working, and some of their technologies out to wider organizations. So helping people with their challenges and their opportunities that they had, and coaching their teams, to how do you get a high performance mindset? Active in your organization. And that’s what I do today, I’ve got now gone fully independent, and take that approach, and all those lessons from everything from sausage making to f1. And help people apply those lessons for themselves.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fascinating, fascinating. Well, one of the kinda I don’t know, this is a not great secret. But some of the worst run businesses if I could say that, it’s a little mean, but some of the worst run businesses are businesses that focus on leadership, right, and it’s just this total conundrum. But you see this kind of weird dichotomy happen. It always left me kind of wondering, Where do Where does Formula One as your McLaren as a team? How did they function as a business? Would you say compared to your other spheres that they that they were a very well run business? Or does that performance mindset on a track distract from performance as a business unit.
Paul Teasdale
And it’s a double edged sword, it can go both ways. And and it’s, that’s the art of dealing with particularly that any high performance team, any high performance environment, you’ve got to be aware of when that becomes negative. I think if you looked historically at Formula One in general, and maybe McLaren, specifically, up until the time where Zac Brown came along as the CEO, it was very personality driven. And, you know, Ron Dennis did some amazing things, bringing that company together. But he was a huge personality leader. And that had huge advantages for the organization. But some disadvantages as well. And what I see happening in the space is that raw, the likes of Zac Brown and the like, have come in and recognized that it’s, there is value in all sorts of different things outside of the business. A big part of what I was working, I worked in a particle McLaren applied technologies. And that was interesting because it had come about as a, when we don’t win on track, we’ve got no money coming in. Essentially, it’s a marketing business with a Formula One team attached, this actually ran. And so you know, when that Formula One team isn’t doing well, how do we bring in money? How do we diversify? And that was about taking those technologies and approaches and say, right, people can buy this as a service. And so that mindset of going, what else can we do? How do we balance this? So if there are many aspects of it being a fantastic business, there’s some great lessons that you can learn. And I think, like with a lot of high performance businesses, and lots of businesses that are doing really well, you might even look at the likes of Apple and, and the likes ego, right? They’re doing excessively well, how can we learn from them? Well, it’s not always going to apply to you. And there are certain aspects of what they do. That would be considered negative in a lot of contexts, maybe even within the organization, when you’ve got to keep on working on that. For the team and for the, for the organization as a whole.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, this idea of Applied Technologies. The first time I remember hearing about it was actually from Williams f1 racing, and they were going into ers. And they were actually new fattier, high speed cameras, and counting the number of movements for an ER team in these triage setting. And it was like, a stunning to me, right. totally fascinating. So most of our folks here though, they’re not running ers. So how do we start to take some of this this high performance culture these lessons removing these processes from the world of f1 and actually implement them in our business?
Paul Teasdale
Well, that’s, that’s my job. And my passion, I guess, is to help people be make high performance accessible to them. And to make them realize that actually, there are frameworks to to follow and things that you can look at. One of the main challenges that I help people with is a donor if you’ve come across this term before an info obesity. So it’s that element of over consuming data to such an extent that it has a negative impact on performance. And people are struggling with this. They’re drowning in more and more reports and things coming at them that, in theory should help them make better decisions. And actually, lessons from the world of f1 say that, yes, you can get more and more data, but it comes at a cost. In the f1 world that cost is a sensor that goes on a car it fought to get that data together. That adds weight to the car has a negative performance on the the actual thing that you’re trying to do with that car and And so it can be counterproductive. So that your all of your data has to have a return on investment. And I developed a framework off the back of my learnings there called Rapid performance that helps put data last for data informed decisions, and want to make better data informed decisions by focusing firstly on results, understanding the actions, the people the insights. And then finally, what’s the smallest possible data set I need? Yeah, and that I think, is if you start to bring things up to a level of this is the approach, this is the mindset, this is the ways of working, then those can always be applied, understood, and mended if needs be. So you, you adapt, before you adopt to that another thing I often encourage people to do is make sure that you understand what’s applicable to you and why and then adapt it for your needs before you adopt it and make it work for you.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s so the so wise. It’s an interesting thing. And at scale architects, we kind of break the world into different stages, right, and you have the kind of young entrepreneurial growing organizations, and then you have kind of the larger, more established industry giants, if you will, and kind of the whole spectrum in between. But a very interesting thing that happens across that spectrum is some are under data driven, right? They’re going by the founders golden gut, you know, it’s just whatever their intuition says, you know, we live and die by I just know. And so I think what a lot of folks don’t recognize on this idea of info obesity is that it doesn’t just come out of nowhere, it has its roots in a really, really important function. And I don’t hear you saying we don’t need any data. I heard you saying, what’s the smallest data set we need? But the tension on that is so sharp, because there’s, there’s too little data, right? Well, we’re not getting the minimum that we need. And then there’s too much. And one of the things about the sports world that we don’t always have in the business world is a tangible cost, right? That sensor weighs something, it costs something, and and we’ve kind of we can almost measure the cost of that a little bit more tangibly. So how do you help people navigate measuring the cost of that data acquisition and consumption for their business?
Paul Teasdale
I mean, it is a, it is a tough one, because one of the key things that I help people with is cognitive load, you know, it’s a difficult thing to put a metric on, because it’s so different from person to person. But the more data and the more information you put on people, you’re adding cognitive load. Now, if that then leads to better decisions, and helps people make decisions, then it’s brilliant. But it’s when it gets to that tipping point that it becomes a problem. And that’s a really tough thing to manage. But it is, there’s a lot about understanding, if you can understand the results you’re trying to drive really in the first place. And not just, you know, I want a profit, I want growth of sales and or whatever, those are important. And they’re important to have, what’s the wider context? What are the ends, so the strategic objectives, or the regulatory framework you’re working with? So if you know, f1, is simple world where you know, I want to win the race? Well, I want to win the race, and have good fan engagement, and focus on sustainability, because that’s really important to our organization. And it has to be within the regulations. So once you start to bring those things in play, you can start to say, right, how do I make this happen, and that and that. And then if you truly understand those results, it becomes a an easier game to play in. If I want this for if I can see the line of sight between getting this data. And ultimately data doesn’t cost a lot in organizations, typically, where it does tend to cost a lot is if you’re implementing new systems, or bringing new things in play. And I’ve worked with businesses that have been investing 10s of millions of euros in this case, to get more data, only to get to the end of it and go Well, I don’t really know what to do with it now. Well, and so if you’d have taken a different approach, and understood the results, and how it all fits in and what insights your people need. And I think that Insights is a really critical word there, then you can establish actually only need 20% of that data that this big, big system can give me maybe I can get away with investing, at least initially in a smaller version of it. Or I can build something that is more agile and can scale up at a later stage. Yeah.
Scott Ritzheimer
Paul, I really, really liked this because it captures again, he captures that tension so well. And you generally have kind of two groups of people, you have the ones that like, you know, the data never lies that day to day to data and you can never have enough data and then you have this other group that’s like that can’t even spell data. It’s like why don’t they let alone wait for it. So you I love the way that you’ve captured this. And that starting with results is so helpful, not just because it leads us to what the straightest line is to those to the data that we need, but also because it helps people who aren’t as data oriented, to get in to buy into the process. Yeah, right, and not just be frustrated by those, you know, those couple of people who want data on everything. So how have you found different teams responding to this? Do you find some people in a team want more data than others? And how do you help them reconcile that?
Paul Teasdale
A lot of it is I mean, the general coaching approach is what helps people to understand how much value is this for them in the circumstance they’re in right now. And you may well get people who think they want more and more data. And your job as a coach is to challenge that. It’s not to say no, you don’t need it, you know, you need less or have been locked up. Who am I to say that I’m not in that role, I’m not you managing your your job right now. What I can do as a coach is to challenge that thinking, and make you step back and go, Do I really need this? Why am I why am I thinking that I need this? Is it just a comfort blanket? Does it have a direct line of sight to the performance I’m trying to drive? Is it for me that I want this? Or is it for the team? Is it for the organization? Because if it’s just for me, then it is? Is that really the right thing to do? And so that’s the, the dichotomy is that people will some people, as you say, will try to shy away from the data. And you’ve got to challenge them a bit more on, you know, are you really, you’ve got some amazing insights coming at you, but you’re making decisions that are against that. Now, that’s a you know, you see that in a lot in f1. If you had people purely going on data, I think there was a time when Mercedes tried this with their pitstop strategy, they said would essentially automate the the decision as to when to pit. Now that is great. Because it takes away a lot of thinking from a lot of people and a lot of stress. What it does remove is the situational awareness, and the the smarts that people have, that you will never be able to build into a system where you’ve got people who are on the on track side. And you can say, right, oh, the rains gonna stop really soon. I’m looking at the all the data says the rains about to stop, and I’m standing trackside, and I’m going to go, it’s bucketing down here I’m soaked through, it might have stopped two miles away where you’re where the sensors are. But it hasn’t stopped here. So that gives that situational awareness to say, yes, the data says that. But I’m going to add on my smarts to this. You that’s where I like the way in which if you do this properly, and you do it well, you change the question from what’s the decision that I need to make, almost to Why shouldn’t I make this decision that the data is pointing towards? Well, and that enables people to go back and have more power by challenging it and saying, Yeah, I know, it says we should put all our effort into sales in the North West region. But actually, you’re not aware of a you know, a holiday that’s happening there. And some some politics that’s going on, that’s actually going to have an impact. And we really go se you know, that’s where the the magic is. And so yeah, it changes the question, and it changes the approach to, to informed decisions.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, as so, so good. There’s a saying that I use everyone’s eyes that the numbers don’t lie, but they also don’t tell the truth. And so I love how you’ve tied these together. So just for folks listening, rapid is his framework, and its results, action people insights and data. And you got insights and data right next to each other. And, again, there’s, there’s just so much wisdom in and I love seeing it from the outside, because it does it pulls those together. It’s not that we’re we don’t get to sub out the decision making just said well, the data did it so I don’t have to think about it. And in the same token, we don’t just get to do whatever we want and disregard the data altogether. So I love the way that you’ve brought that together, bringing it into one cohesive framework is so so helpful for folks. Now, there’s a question that I have I like to ask all my guests this and it’s this. What’s the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What What’s that one thing that you wish everybody listening or watching today knew?
Paul Teasdale
That high performance is truly accessible to anyone. You know, it doesn’t matter what field you’re working in, doesn’t matter how experienced you are, how long in the tooth you are, or new to the game you are. High performance is just people who have followed a process. If someone else has done it, it’s accessible to you. And if someone else has do it, you can do even better than that. If you can learn how to do it it, people often focus a lot too much on what they want to achieve. But it’s the how do you do it? Like, I’d love some lessons from f1. And yeah, I’ve watched f1. I love all the lessons that are there. How are you going to actually apply those to your situation? That’s the gap that I’m trying to plug in. I think that’s, yeah, it’s accessible to everyone.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good, so good. So we’ve talked a lot about how you help your clients and your driving performance. But I want to turn things around just a little bit and have you take off your coach hat promo and put on your, your CEO hat and talk to us a little bit about your organization, next stage of growth and what challenges you think you’ll have to overcome to get there?
Paul Teasdale
Yeah, the growth of of my businesses is really about making sure that the offering that I have and is hitting home, you know, when I’ve had some great engagements with people, I think I can build the offering to some wider businesses, maybe some doesn’t have to be big businesses, but I’m getting some great traction with big businesses where the approach is so scalable from an individual level all the way through to an organization level as well. And that’s, that’s my next stage is getting packages together, that people can consume. that’s right for them. I think there’s amazing opportunity for people to build common language in their organizations by having shared experiences, and shared growth. And so yeah, it’s about taking what I can do and offering it on a wider scale. I’ve also got contacts in some great technology companies as well, who support that coaching, with more offline capabilities, you know, to sort of coach in your pocket and the apps that are there that can make people more accountable for their actions outside of the workshops, and the programs and the and the talks and the sessions. So trying to build that into a wider offering that people can make sustainable in their organizations.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. Well, Paul, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for sharing. Again, I love the framework. I love what you do, and just excited to see folks connect with that. So on that note, folks who are listening, and maybe they’re feeling the info obesity creep in, or maybe they’re saying, Hey, we don’t have the right data in the first place. We need help. And so how can they find out more about you and the work that you do?
Paul Teasdale
And easiest thing to do is go to my website, which is paulteasdale.co.uk. And that’s Teasdale with a T A S? Sure, it’ll be in the show notes there. But one of the first things you’ll see there is the opportunity to just set up a free 30 minute chat with me. I love connecting with people, I love seeing what value I can add, not trying to sell you anything. I’m just trying to understand what value I can bring in. If people have got any questions, please just get in touch. Reach out on LinkedIn as well. Um, but always interested to connect with people and see how I can help.
Scott Ritzheimer
I suppose as well Paul, thank you so much for being on. I had a chance to check out Paul’s website. He’s got some great videos on that explain his process and how he helps. You will not regret it. So Paul, again, Paul, thank you so much. And for those of you listening, you’re watching you know your time and attention means the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Paul Teasdale
Paul helps people perform using insights from his 7 years working with Formula 1 team McLaren, whilst also incorporating lessons from other high performance organization that he has worked with. From sausage making to banking to Formula 1, and lots of other stuff in between, working in both the UK and in New Zealand, Paul has plenty of stories to tell and lessons to share. He helps his clients bring an F1 performance mindset to their organization.
Want to learn more about Paul’s work at Paul Teasdale? Check out his website at https://paulteasdale.co.uk/
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