In this episode of Career Sessions, JR Lowry speaks with behavioral scientist Jon Levy to explore what actually makes teams effective and why the answer isn’t what most people think.

Drawing on research across psychology, business, and even sports, Jon breaks down the hidden dynamics behind high-performing teams, including the overlooked role of “glue people” – those who quietly elevate everyone around them.

They discuss:

• Why emotional intelligence matters more than IQ on teams
• The surprising reason too much talent can hurt performance
• What “glue players” do differently and how to spot them
• How influence really works (and why it’s not about power)
• The role of trust, belonging, and feedback in team success

Jon also shares insights from his unconventional work building communities and designing experiences that foster deep human connection.

If you’re leading a team or want to become more effective within one, this conversation will challenge how you think about performance, influence, and success.

Follow Career Sessions with JR Lowry so you never miss an episode.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/jon-levy/.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

What Leaders Get Wrong About Performance And Teamwork, With Jon Levy

Several months ago, I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal on people who play glue roles on teams and I thought to myself, I would really like to interview the person who was profiled. Here we are. My guest is Jon Levy, and we’re going to talk about his multifaceted work and life, covering what makes teams particularly effective, including glue people, influence, and the science behind it.

Also, Jon’s very unique Influencers community and his crazy year spent traveling the world and attending some of its most iconic events. Before we dive in, let me remind you that our episode is brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, like thousands of others already have, join the PathWise community at Community.PathWise.io. Okay, it’s going to be a fun conversation, so let’s get going.

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Jon, welcome. Thank you for doing the show with me.

JR, are you kidding? I’m so excited.

As I mentioned in the intro, the genesis of this was a Wall Street Journal article that you wrote back in the fall. We’re recording this in January. Before we dive into the topics that I had planned to cover, it’d be great to get just a quick background on you.

John Levy’s Secret Dining Experience (The Influencers Community)

I’m a Behavioral Scientist. I’ve spent most of my research career looking at trust, connection. I oddly did the largest study, I think, in history on dating, where we found weird things like if you have the same initials you’re 11.3% more likely to date. It’s called implicit egotism. Anything that reminds us of ourselves is more attractive and appealing. What I did with my knowledge, years ago, I created a secret dining experience. Twelve people are invited and they come to cook a terrible meal together, anonymously.

Nobody knows who’s going to be there and they’re not allowed to talk about what they do or give their last names. They cook this awful meal, they sit down, and as they’re eating, they play a game to figure out what people do professionally. That’s when they find out they’re sitting with astronauts and Olympians and Nobel laureates and the editor-in-chief of a major magazine or the guy who won an Emmy for barking on “Who Let the Dogs Out.” it’s incredibly varied. Although I don’t do research on the dinners themselves because it’s not really how it would work, it gave me insights over the years that led to actual work that was made.

Why is it a terrible meal?

Anytime you do something that’s a professional task with a group of people who are not professionals, it’s not going to work out that well. It’s not by design a terrible meal. It’s just there’s Nobel laureates are busy in a lab, they’re not busy in a kitchen. The same is true for CEOs of big companies or Academy Award winners. It’s just a different skillset. You can have a fine meal that’s edible. Nobody’s ever gotten sick. All these people can afford a much nicer meal at a very fancy restaurant if they want to go.

Who chooses the menu?

Me and my team. It’s just the same thing at this point every time because you need something that can be prepared in a certain length of time. It needs to be able to be safe for everybody. If you’re vegan or vegetarian or something like that. You have to occupy a certain number of people. It’s just fallen into a very basic routine.

I had to do something a little bit like that. I was going through an outdoor leadership training program and we had to prepare each of the meals and so none of us really knew each other. We got thrown into the kitchen and had to plan a menu. One of the guys called an audible at the very end and decided he didn’t feel like cooking pasta, so he’d gone out and brought a bunch of stuff to cook this Indian dish.

The guy who was running the program, he told us late, “I was thinking in my head, ‘This is going to be an unmitigated disaster.’ There is no way this group of you who don’t know each other are going to be able to prepare this Indian dish that half the group wasn’t familiar with and have it turn out okay. You proved me wrong. You guys did it. Nobody yelled at each other, nobody had a meltdown, it actually tasted okay, you cleaned up, it was all good.” that’s the closest I’ve come to your secret dinner experience.

The beauty of the dinner is that when it comes to connecting people, we tend to do everything wrong or backwards. In the business world, we think, “Okay, you are somebody I want to sell something to, so I’m going to take you out for an expensive business dinner.” The problem is that stuff doesn’t actually work. It’s like this. If I said, “JR, I know you don’t like my personality, but I have tickets to the Super Bowl. Do you want to hang out?” Now I have just rented your attention, hoping that it’ll convert into business. The reality is that it’s rented time. It’s not something you care about.

What causes us to care about something is called the IKEA effect, which is that we care more about our IKEA furniture because we had to assemble it. As a byproduct, anything we put effort into we care about more, whether that’s our kids, our pets, our plants, or our work. By getting you to invest the effort into making the food with each other, it caused you to feel more connected and care more about each other and the product that you made.

I literally just put together an IKEA nightstand for reasons that we don’t need to go into here, but I don’t love that nightstand any more than I would love a nightstand normally. I sat there as I was building the thing going, “This is a really bad use of my time relative to other things I could be doing. I would rather avoid the flat pack and just buy the finished-made thing.”

Here’s what’s interesting. I’m not saying you’ll even like it. I’m just saying you’ll care more about it. It was a sunk-cost effort that you will never get back and right now, if you were to say, “Which one of these items do you have the strongest emotional connection to?” It’ll probably be your IKEA side table because you’re like, “After all that effort, if we’re not using this thing I’m going to go crazy.”

Let’s dive in on some of the work you’ve been doing. I know you study teams. When you have studied high-performing teams across the various domains that you’ve looked at, what separates them from the rest?

Defining High-Performing Teams & The Role Of Emotional Intelligence

The first question we need to ask is what do we actually mean by high-performing? There’s so much jargon that’s thrown around that’s total BS out there. What we’re probably talking about is more how smart a team is. How quickly can that team solve a problem with the resources they have? If we take a bunch of different teams and give them a series of challenges, what is it about the teams that perform quickly versus those that don’t? This was originally research that came out of the failures of September 11th.

September 11th occurs. After, a report showed that the CIA knew about half of Al-Qaeda’s plan, the FBI knew the other half, but they worked so poorly together that they became collectively stupid. The government funded a bunch of research. A lot of it was led by this woman, Anita Williams Woolley. What she found is that the things that we thought predicted an effective team actually don’t. Having absolutely brilliant people on the team made no real difference. How much the team members liked each other could actually be a liability.

The single greatest predictor was unexpected. It was the number of women on the team. The more women, the better the team did. I think it’s important to understand why, because it doesn’t tell the full story. It’s not that all teams should be all women except for one man or something like that. It’s that women tend to score higher on emotional intelligence. When we look at a group’s dynamics, you could have the smartest people in the world, but if they are just butting heads constantly and can’t make progress, it doesn’t matter how smart they are.

Emotional intelligence allows us to understand when to push on a topic, when not to. Who to go to for the knowledge that you need. When to call on somebody when they’re being quiet but actually have the information. The more of it that we have on a team, the tendency is that the team does better. What Woolley and her colleagues discovered is that there’s an entire collection of characteristics that actually empower a team to succeed. A lot of it is actually underpinned by emotional intelligence.

Effective Teams: Emotional intelligence helps us know when to push a topic and when to hold back, who to turn to for the knowledge we need, and when to draw out someone who’s quiet but has valuable insight. The more emotional intelligence a team has, the better it tends to perform.

Which I guess should not surprise us. We’ve been talking for the last 30, 40 years about emotional intelligence and the way that it trumps IQ in many other things and plays such a valuable role. At the same time, we’re still having debates about bringing women into the boardroom and into the executive suite and it feels counterintuitive to what the research shows but power ultimately isn’t always the most logical.

I think one of the big mistakes we’ve made is measuring what’s easy to see versus what’s useful. I’ll give you an example in sports and then let’s get back to that boardroom that you just talked about. In basketball, there is one stat that predicts a player’s salary. Simply the number of points they score. There’s also only one stat that predicts if a coach is effective. It is not wins. It is the increased rate in passing under that coach. Now what most people don’t realize is that these two stats are actually the exact opposite of each other.

If you’re incentivized to score in order to earn a lot of money, you are going to take a lot of bad shots. That will be very bad for the team but very good for you. Let’s call it empty calories. Increased rate in passing means that you’ve stopped thinking about your own personal goals and started thinking about the team’s goals. As a byproduct, the ball ends up with the person with the highest chance of scoring. What that actually translates to is selflessness. You can see that what’s easy to see is points. It’s not the thing that’s good for us.

We have to look past the obvious. The easy to see thing right now is saying, “We need more women.” No argument there. It actually misses the point. What we need is higher levels of emotional intelligence. If we reduce people to the easy to see stuff like race, gender, orientation or anything like that, we’ve reduced them to the things that they can’t improve or get better at. Whereas if I say, “I really want JR on the team because he has really high emotional intelligence and allows us to function better,” then suddenly, you’re an asset to the team that brings value.

There’s also plenty of men with high emotional intelligence and plenty of women who don’t have any. If we focus on bringing the right variety of skills to the team, inevitably the teams will look more diverse. If I simply reduce you to these immutable characteristics, then you’re going to get backlash, and understandably.

I think the hard part in what you just said is emotional intelligence is a very subjective thing. It’s really difficult to measure it relative to a lot of other things and that probably makes it harder to do what you’re suggesting.

If these things were obvious and easy, people would be doing them. Companies aren’t stupid. The status quo is really easy to maintain and inertia is hard to overcome. If you have a general policy in place or habit that you think is working, there’s a million other fires to put out. Why would you begin there?

Interesting that you brought up NBA statistics a minute ago because the statistic that I was thinking of wasn’t scoring or passing but this idea of plus-minus. How many points does the team score when you’re in the game relative to the opponent and how much do they score when you’re not in the game? You can see whether when you’re in, do we build our lead or do we lose our lead? To me, that’s a great measure of a person who’s in a glue role.

Shane Battier is a guy I’ve always admired as a glue guy in the NBA from his time. He always embodied that idea of bringing a team together and not necessarily showing up in the obvious stats but in making his teams better and would just love to hear a little bit more about what you’ve learned about these people who play these glue roles on teams.

The Characteristics Of Glue Players

We’re so obsessed with the people who score in basketball, so the general belief is let’s just get a lot of these top performers together on the same team. It turns out that there was a research project that looked at this specifically and found that in basketball and in soccer, or European football, when you cross about the 50% mark of top talent, you actually get a reduced performance from the team. The reason is selfishness. When everybody’s only looking out for themselves, it’s not surprising that suddenly, people aren’t passing and the team isn’t coordinated.

Amusingly enough, this doesn’t actually exist in baseball because there’s no way to be selfish in baseball. If you are up at bat and you hit the ball or don’t, it doesn’t really have a direct impact on the next person. You can’t steal runs from another person. The question then becomes, how do you fix the too-much-talent problem? What’s the best composition of teams? A research group from Brigham Young University said, “Okay, we’re going to look at player stats and see are there any players that have a huge impact on the team but maybe don’t score a lot?”

What they found is that there’s an entire collection that they called spillover players, I call them glue players and these people can multiply everybody else’s results by about a factor of 1.6. The question is, so in basketball, if a player cares more about the team than they do about themselves, when it comes time to getting rebounds, they might block you, JR, and push you out really far so you can’t get the rebound, and then somebody else on the team can get it.

They’re sacrificing their own stats in exchange for the performance of the team and you get the stat instead. You could imagine that over the course of a game or a season, that begins to really add up and your stats begin to look significantly better, or whoever gets the rebound. This behavior has an outsized impact. What I mean by that is the people who tend to have these characteristics have three habits. The first is that they’re incredibly team-oriented. They put the team above themselves.

In Shane Battier’s case, he was probably one of the few players ever in NBA history to say, “Take me out, coach, so that I can be better rested when they put their best person out there.” That’s incredibly selfless. Nobody in sports does that. The second is they tend to have really high emotional intelligence, meaning that they are able to understand how to maneuver the big personalities and communicate with people to get them to be more cohesive and gel.

In Battier’s case, he was famous for being called Lego because when he’d get on the court, everybody would click into position. As a byproduct, he actually ended up speaking more than other people do on the court because he’s passing information to everybody to be aware of what’s going on. The third characteristic is that he’s incredibly forward-thinking. He takes the actions that nobody else even thinks to take.

In Battier’s case, he would memorize the opposing team’s stats, knowing that a specific player will shoot 5% worse from areas on the court and if you can just push them there over the course of a game, that has a huge impact on their scoring potential. You can begin to see that with these characteristics in place, people trust him. They know that he’s not going after their status so they’ll accept support from him. The emotional intelligence allows him to maneuver between the team members and understand how to communicate with them and he’s taken these actions that people don’t expect that improve everybody’s success.

In the corporate world, that’s like that employee who welcomes a new person onto the team and makes sure that they’re integrated quickly, so instead of taking 6 months to integrate, they integrate in 2. Suddenly, you have a massive uptick in productivity from that person. It’s the person who rewrites the slides before an important presentation because they realized they were a little messy. It’s the person that plans the group birthdays or acknowledges people for their efforts. It’s the person that calls on the quiet person in a meeting that has something to share. These people are the glue of your team. There’s no award for them, there’s no bonus for that behavior, but it literally multiplies everybody else’s performance.

If you’re a leader, how do you learn to appreciate and spot this person and these behaviors?

The first thing I would do is probably ask the people on the team, “Who’s the person you trust the most?” or “Who’s the person you go to for advice?” or “If you need a connection in another division, who do you go to?” The other thing you can go for if you want to get really technical is that there are emotional intelligence tests that you can perform and see who has a high EQ. Now the next thing you should understand is that having it on the team is really important, but you shouldn’t beat yourself up if you don’t have the highest emotional intelligence.

You can partner with people and say things like, “JR, I know you are really good at these things. I’m not. Will you signal me if I’m overspeaking? Will you let me know if I need to have a conversation with somebody from the team?” the fact is, we put too much pressure on our leaders to be great at everything and that’s just not realistic. Instead, we need to look at it from a team perspective. How do we get everybody to contribute so that the team is as smart as possible?

I think a lot of leaders miss that. Though. Would you agree?

Yeah. It’s not because they don’t care. It’s because we’re stuck in this model that in order for you to be a leader, you need to have this perfectly curated collection of skills that nobody has. The most effective leaders in our society are not well-rounded. Elon Musk is not great at creating psychological safety, neither was Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. They created incredible organizations that each changed the world in some way. We have to understand our leaders are wildly flawed. That means that you can be wildly flawed and still accomplish extraordinary things, but it’s important to understand what to focus on and what not to do.

For people who are or perceive themselves to be the glue, what’s your view? Good role to play, bad role to play? Does it ultimately help or hurt you if you’re being selfish and thinking only about its impact on your career?

I think asking the question of if it’s a good role to play or bad role to play is like saying, “You’re American. Is it good to be American or not?” the point is you were born probably in the US and you’re American, and we’re not going to change that about you at this point. Maybe you could go apply for citizenship somewhere. The point is that at this point in most people’s career, they’re probably baked in with that characteristic or not. You can try to maybe tone it down or tone it up. We’re not going to go from a 2 on emotional intelligence to a 9. It’s just not going to happen.

Now if it’s good or bad, I think is irrelevant. I think that it’s important for teams and hopefully we’re going to be in an era now where we give it more credence and value. I think the potential is that AI models will be able to notice it by you being on a Zoom call or a Teams meeting and then be able to highlight these things and show, “These people are having an outsized impact. You should promote them or you should put them in like the leadership teams because the impact they could have there is incredible.”

The second thing is that regardless of where you land on the spectrum of these skills, it’s important to understand that no one skill works by itself. A multiplier or glue player needs somebody to multiply. A team of Shane Battiers accomplishes almost nothing because they block everybody from getting the rebound and then there’s nobody there to get it. Pairing him off with a LeBron, a Chris Bosh, and a Dwyane Wade like he was with the Heat, they won back-to-back championships. It’s important to understand that we’re over-focused on the individual and under-focused on the team.

Certainly, it’s hard if you’re dependent on one person to carry you for you to do that over a sustained period. I’m curious to get your views. There’s a lot of teams in the sports domain and otherwise that have their heyday, that hit their high, have this fantastic moment, but they can’t keep the magic going. I wondered if any of your research looked into what are the behaviors ultimately that are important to creating long-term effectiveness.

Creating Long-Term Team Effectiveness

In basketball, which we keep coming back to, there’s an interesting article written about a guy named Gregg Popovich. That’s when a statistician looked at just about every team and the talent level that it had and they all win just about the number of games that they should, except for Gregg Popovich, who is the coach of the Spurs. They won over 100 games more than they should based on the level of talent. That’s because Gregg Popovich was the ultimate glue player when he was a coach. He would make people feel a greater sense of belonging to the team than probably anyone else out there.

As a result, they played team basketball. In fact, it was the Spurs that then beat the Miami Heat when they were in their heyday. I believe Popovich has, what is it, five championships or something like that, which is just an astounding career. The flip side of it is when you look at the Golden State Warriors, which had a fantastic streak, and ask what is it that changed the team’s dynamic? A lot of sports commentators would say it was when Draymond Green in a practice, I believe, punched or choked out one of his own teammates.

When you breach the social contract to that degree, it is really hard to come back from it. One of the things I keep emphasizing is, and this took me a long time to realize and learn, do you remember when you had your first kid and everybody gave you all of the unrequested advice on how to raise children? It’s like, “Read them these books and you have to play with them in these things. You’ve got to do music class, my god it helps in their development so much.”

Any parent at one point realizes, “Wait a second, there’s no number of books I can read to a child to make up for somebody verbally abusing them.” The negative impact of breaching the social contract is so much worse than the positives of, “Let’s take you to a Montessori school.” Somebody in a workplace experiencing sexual harassment cannot be made up for by giving them really great feedback in their annual reviews because the negative impact of the bad stuff is so much worse than the positive impact of the good stuff.

They say that as a manager, if you really want your constructive negative feedback to be taken in the right way, you need to have 7 to 10 times as much positive feedback that you’re conveying right alongside it so that people know that you care. You create this element of psychological safety in your feedback construct with that person that implies that, I’m doing a little bit of funny math here, but means that your negative feedback carries seven to ten times as much weight as your positive feedback.

It comes from an article by Dan Kahneman and I think Amos Tversky, who proposed Prospect Theory. The idea is that the pain of a loss is a multiple of the pleasure of the gain. Meaning like if I lose $100, that amount of pain from losing $100, to make up for it, I have to have like the joy of finding $500 or something like that. Now it’s estimated somewhere between I think 2.5 and 5 times is the ratio.

The issue is that, listen, no feedback is terrible. Negative feedback is better but it doesn’t compare to positive feedback. Positive feedback gives such a profound multiple in terms of reward and likelihood that somebody will perform the task again, that it’s just critical. Now there’s a few things you can do around these things.

One is you can just constantly catch your people doing something right and reinforce and reinforce and get like a flywheel going. You could also toughen up your people so that they become antifragile. There are certain things that when you apply pressure to them, they get stronger, and then it becomes a group activity to break everything down and improve.

Let’s shift gears and talk a little bit about influence. I know you also study that and would love to hear your thoughts on what people misunderstand about how influence actually works.

The Three Factors Of Influence

We’re used to thinking of influence these days as either a great book by Robert Cialdini or some twenty-something eating avocado toast on Instagram. I think we’ve lost focus on what actual influence is. It’s simply the ability to affect a person or an outcome. It is not power. It is not force. Me telling you that you have to go do something because I’m your boss is not influence. That’s power. Influence is me saying, “Have you considered getting this car?” and then potentially you buying it.

If we were to oversimplify things, the factors that seem to influence us consciously, let’s call it, are who we know, how much they trust us, and the sense of belonging we share. This should seem pretty obvious. If you don’t know someone, it’s pretty hard to influence us. The second factor is how much they trust us. I might know you, but you might think I’m a complete liar. If I say, “You should check out this investment opportunity,” you’d be like, “I know exactly what I’m not doing this afternoon.”

The third factor is the sense of belonging we share. Let’s say you were traveling through Southeast Asia and you hear somebody speaking English. You suddenly go, “Are you an American?” and they say “Yeah,” and you get chatting and you find out that both of you went to Duke. How do you think you feel about that person?

I’d feel certainly a sense of belonging with that person as an American, as a Duke graduate. It’s amplified and I want to get your view on this by the fact that we’re in Southeast Asia because it is a rarer thing to run into an American Duke grad there than it would be to run into one in Philadelphia or New York.

The answer is yeah, it’s amplified. That is a contextual characteristic. What it points to is also that the more common ground you share with someone, the more likely you are to feel a sense of connection. In this, what you begin to realize is that you have a disproportionate level of connection and trust to that person.

That sense of belonging amplifies it. If we could affect any of those factors, we can affect the level of influence you have. Question isn’t do you have influence? We all do. It’s over what and to what degree. Now the only question is, what do we want to be able to influence and then how do we connect with those people and build trust?

I’ve heard this idea of know, like, and trust being the three pillars. Yours is a little bit different in terms of this sense of belonging. It’d be good to get your view on that.

First of all, it’s really hard to tease out like and trust. It’s possible, but I think it’s very hard. Think of all the people you actively dislike that you trust, and you might not be able to think of anyone. Likability is often a factor of, if you actually know them, two things. People who are most likable are often people who know a lot of people and let them know why they are liked.

Meaning if I go and I say, “JR, I really respect how thoughtful you are when you interview. You do your research and you ask relevant questions. That’s appreciated because a lot of people I’ve interviewed just don’t do the work.” I’ve now given you a feeling that you are safe, you belong, and are appreciated. The tendency is you will like me as a byproduct. It’s not that I’m trying to get you to like me, it’s that I’ve told you why I like you. The people with the highest likability tend to be the ones that express to others why they are liked. I think it’s really just showing a sense of belonging to some degree. I think it’s a fair overlap. It’s just really hard to tease out likability from trust.

There’s so much more we could talk about, Jon, but I want to at least make sure we talk a little bit about some of your adventures. You spent a year having an amazing, exhausting adventure traveling the world and going to a bunch of iconic events like Burning Man and Art Basel. I’m curious what prompted that and what you took away from it.

Every year, I used to take on a crazy challenge that I didn’t know how I was going to complete. One year was go to all seven continents in the year. I did it in eight months. I had another year where I went every month to the biggest event in the world. Burning Man, Art Basel, Running of the Bulls I got crushed by a bull and almost died. I did all these things and it was fantastic. I ended up writing a book about the science of adventure called The 2 AM Principle.

I ended up meeting my wife in the process at an airport as I was collecting stories. Now we have a large family and it’s a completely different type of adventure. I stopped being able to take on those big travel adventures because I am not going to subject a poor child to getting on a plane every month. Hopefully later on when they’re older, they will be well-stamped on their passports.

Certainly, my kids who are now grown, I think would look back and say that the trips we did to other countries when they were younger and it was mostly Europe helped them see the world in a different way and gave them a love of traveling and getting out and doing unique and different things. That’s been something for me. I’d never really traveled as a kid outside the US other than to Canada and then I went traveling with some friends after college and obviously developed a lifelong case of wanderlust at that point.

My kids, now that they’re grown, I can go wherever. It gets me into trouble. I have had my share of illnesses and injuries in far-off places and you learn how to take care of yourself in lots of different circumstances, but I definitely have not come as close to death as you have when you were getting gored by that bull or run over by that bull.

That was really rough and I still have injuries to this day. I got crushed, I think it was left shoulder was where the bull landed from a jump, and I think it caused my right shoulder to tear so my back was a mess for years and years. Yeah, some crazy adventures. Everything from battling Kiefer Sutherland in drunken Jenga and winning an invitation to his family Thanksgiving that he then promptly forgot he invited us to, so when I showed up, he was like, “Who are you?” All the way through to within ten seconds of meeting the woman behind the duty-free counter in Stockholm airport, she quit her job and decided to travel with me and my friends.

That’s very funny. Coming back to your Kiefer Sutherland experience, one thing I will say is that I have a rule that I need two-factor authentication on any invitation extended when somebody is a certain amount drunk. If I don’t get confirmation later on that they really meant it, I’m not going to take it at face value.

I’m just going to show up and make it awkward.

Alright, Jon, this has been a fun conversation. I feel like we should schedule another one at some point and dive into all the other things that you’ve been up to. Certainly, I appreciate your time today. It was really interesting to hear your thoughts on teams and influence and glue people and all of that. The fact that we talked a little bit about travel is just a bit of a bonus on top. Thank you.

It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Absolutely. Take care.

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Thanks to Jon for joining me to discuss his research, his work and his adventures. As a reminder, this episode was brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, join the PathWise community now. You can also sign up on the website for our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Thanks.

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About Jon Levy

Jon Levy is a behavioral scientist and NY Times Best Selling author known for his work in trust, leadership, and team intelligence. When results matter, Jon gets the call.

Levy specializes in applying the latest research to transform the ways people and organizations approach the way they build trust, and work together. His clients range from Fortune 500 brands, like Microsoft, Google, AB-InBev, and Samsung, to startups.

Fifteen years ago, Levy founded The Influencers Dinner, a secret dining experience for industry leaders ranging from Nobel laureates, Olympians, celebrities, and executives, to artists, musicians, and even the Grammy-winning voice of the bark from “Who Let the Dogs Out.” Guests cook dinner together but can’t discuss their careers or give their last names. Once seated to eat, they reveal who they are. Over time, these dinners developed into a community. With thousands of members, Influencers is the largest community of its type worldwide.

Jon’s second book, You’re Invited, was released to critical acclaim, quickly rising as a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and international best seller. In it, Levy demonstrates the value of trust, connection, and community in accomplishing what is most important to us.

His third book, Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius, demystifies the science of leadership and the habits that make teams more than the sum of their parts.

In his free time, Jon works on outrageous projects. Among them, spending a year traveling to all 7 continents, or to the world’s greatest events (Grand Prix, Art Basel, Burning Man, Running of the Bulls, etc.) and barely surviving to tell the tale. These Adventures were chronicled in his first book: The 2 AM Principle: Discover the Science of Adventure.