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KF #23. Organizational Savvy Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Aug 03
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593: Why Hard Work Isn’t Enough: Insights on Developing Your Career with Patty Azzarello

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Patty Azzarello shares three simple steps to finding more success and satisfaction in your career.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The top reason most people get stuck in their careers
  2. Why results don’t speak for themselves
  3. How a simple email can forge powerful relationships

About Patty

Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She has more than 25+ years of experience working in high tech and business. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales. She has been successful in running and transforming large and small businesses, and has significant international management experience.

She is the founder of Azzarello Group, which works with CEOs and leadership teams to help their businesses (and people) get better at what they do. She is the author of the best selling books: RISE: 3 Practical Steps to Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader (and Liking Your Life), and MOVE: How Decisive Leaders Execute Strategy Despite Obstacles, Setbacks, and Stalls.

Resources mentioned in the show:

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Patty Azzarello Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Patty, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Patty Azzarello
Hi, Pete. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re going to be talking about how to… I love the forced awkward segue. We’re going to be talking about how to rock out in your career and to rise, but you actually have some history in an actual rock and roll band. Tell us this story first.

Patty Azzarello
That is stating it a little bit generously. I started my own company 12 years ago and I created an advisory board for my company. And as I was putting the board together, one of the people noticed that, “You know, we could form a band.” There was a drummer, there was a keyboard player, there was a lead guitar player, and I describe myself as a willing singer. I’m not a great singer but I’m a willing singer. So, we got a rhythm guitar player and a bass guitar player to fill it out, and we were together for a couple years. We played a handful of gigs. It was super fun. It was just super, super fun.

Pete Mockaitis
One of the funnest parts about bands are their names. What name did you go with?

Patty Azzarello
You know, we never named our band.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow.

Patty Azzarello
We never named it.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s even cooler.

Patty Azzarello
My business is called Azzarello Group. We just would call it The Azzarello Group band. It was sad.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it looks like you rose to power even in that context. Like, your name was the one that got to be on the band, so we’ve got some things to learn from you. So, you’ve done a whole lot of work and research in zeroing in on why some people rise or do not rise in their careers. And this is a fascinating topic. We had Carter Cast, he was a professor at Northwestern who talked about five career derailers. And you’ve got some insights yourself. So, lay it on us. Maybe could you start us off by what’s perhaps the most fascinating and surprising discovery you’ve made about what makes the difference between those who rise and those who don’t?

Patty Azzarello
Well, I think the thing that gets most people tripped up is that working hard is not the answer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Sweet.

Patty Azzarello
Like, just being great at delivering on your job description does not make you stand out. It helps you not get fired. But I find that people, they put their head down and they work super, super hard, and they do an excellent job, and they just have the sense that if the world is fair, they’re going to get tapped on the shoulder, and they’re going to get noticed, and they’re going to rise. But it doesn’t work that way. And it’s simply because everyone else is too busy to go find you and learn about what you’re doing, and you have to figure out how to advocate for yourself in a positive and productive way if you want to stand out and if you want to get the recognition necessary to get ahead.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, hardworking alone doesn’t cut it. Delivering well on the things on your job description doesn’t cut it. So, it sounds like you’re saying that’s necessary, like you need to do the thing that you were hired to do. And your book has three key sections: do better, look better, and connect better. So, do better, is that about the actual performance of your job?

Patty Azzarello
Yeah. So, if we just take the model very, very quickly, there are three parts to it, and the thing that a lot of people miss, and I missed in my own career before I learned this. I wish I had my book in the beginning of my career. It would have made things a lot easier than having to stumble and figure it out along the way. But I think the issue is that those three parts are all critical, and a lot of people just focus on the work. They only focus on the work.

So, do better is not just about delivering on your job description, but it’s about making sure that you are delivering value, and you’re not judging your value by being busy. You’re judging your value by, “Am I really delivering things of high value?” Look better is about your reputation and making sure you’re not invisible, because if you’re invisible, you don’t get noticed, you don’t get promoted. And it’s not about being political at all. It’s about communicating in the right way about your work, so you are sharing the value that you deliver. And then, connect better is simply about meeting support. The most successful people are the ones who get the most help. They’re not the ones that are so brilliant all on their own that they can just soar with their own efforts. And being able to get help and ask for help, and build the network and support you need is a critical skill.

It’s funny, every once in a while, when I’m on a stage and there’s questions from the audience, I get the question “Patty, do you have any natural tendencies or habits or traits that think helped you in your own career success?” And the first thing that always comes to mind is a willingness to ask for help. One of my superpowers is just asking for help, learning from smart people, accepting help, putting that help into practice, and I couldn’t have done any of the things that I did without people helping me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, excellent. So, that’s a nice little overview there in terms of the three components: do better, look better, connect better. I want to touch upon each of them in some level of depth. I’m curious, would you say that if your goal is to rise in terms of to be promoted, to earn more money, to get a cooler, more high-visibility, high-impact, sexier, if you will, projects, if that’s what you’re up to, then would you say that the do better, look better, connect better are of equal importance? Or if you had to do 100% allocation, how would you split it up?

Patty Azzarello
The most important thing is to make sure that none of those are zero.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Patty Azzarello
It’s not that you have to have a particular balance or have the same balance at any point in time. But if you think it’s just all about the work, and the other two things aren’t important, you’re going to get stuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I like that view, it’s like make sure that nothing is zero because I see a spreadsheet in my mind’s eye in terms of, “Okay, I can multiply three things, like zero to 100. So, then the product of these three figures could be anywhere from zero to one million, one hundred times a hundred times a hundred.” And, sure enough, anything multiplied by zero is zero. So, even if there’s a master of someone who looks really awesome and connects just fantastically, if their actual ability to produce the work is at zero, then they’re going to kind of hit a brick wall pretty soon, in terms of like, “Hey, we gave you this because we love you and you know all the people, but you didn’t even do it. I can’t trust you anymore.” So, the rise concludes. So, that’s handy. Make sure none of them are zero.

And I’m sort of imagining, if I multiply them out, what’s that look like? And maybe I’m not at zero but I’m like at two of a hundred in terms of like connecting. So, that’s really a bottleneck. Well, that’s my mathematical brain. You said avoid zero, that’s where I went. So, let’s dig in then. So, with do better, you mentioned that it’s not about being busy. It’s about value. And value is…well, hey, I’m a former strategy consultant, so that’s a word that can fall into jargon territory pretty quickly. What do you mean by value and how do we identify whether we’re doing something that’s high value or low value?

Patty Azzarello
Well, if you think about how you end up spending your work days, there’s a lot of crap that filters in. And the first step is to identify the low-value activities, to identify the chaotic, repetitive, low-value activities, and just develop this habit of saying, “This is not worth this much time.” If you can just develop that habit, and not let yourself get swept away in a bunch of low-value activity, by definition, what you do work on is going to have more value.

But beyond that, I think it’s really important to look at what you’re working on and give yourself some time to think about it, and assess it, and judge it, and look at it, and say, “Where is the value coming from? Is this helping customers? Is this creating efficiency? Is this helping us all communicate better? What are the good things of value that are happening when I complete this work?” And I find when you start thinking about that, you start having the ability to add more value.

Now, if you want to go right to the heart of value, understand the P&L of your business, understand the business model, understand where the company makes money, understand where the revenue comes from, where the profit comes from, where the costs are. And the more you understand that, you might have a job as an individual contributor in a customer service or support department, but when you start thinking about the P&L of the business and the P&L of service and support, you start to realize, “If I could serve customers faster and better, that’s value.” Like, just turning the crank and doing, answering the same question over and over again is doing your job. But thinking about it, and saying, “I’ve answered this question 47 times in the past two days. Maybe I’ll suggest getting to the root cause of it so we can avoid that question entirely and the organization spends zero time asking that question.”

So, no matter where you are, what level you’re at, what role you’re in, you can always be looking at how the work is done, and thinking of ways to improve it, and to make it better. And that’s what I mean by value.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s really great in terms of, you know, I think there was a Dilbert book called Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons. And so, not to be pejorative of…every human being has intrinsic value. But some activities certainly, and some meetings certainly, just don’t do much, or maybe even do negative value adding. And so, one, I think just sort of having your radar up, and saying, “Huh, how is this good and useful?”

And then, sometimes, it’s like, “You know what? No one’s asked that question in five years, and we should’ve stopped doing this a long time ago now that you mentioned it.” That can sometimes be the outcome of just having that habit of regularly questioning. And I’m thinking, even if you’re not in a business organization, the value could be governmentally, sort of serving constituents or nonprofit, like fulfilling the mission and the impact metrics that you’re after there. So, roger, you’re thinking about that, what’s viable, what’s not so viable, what is the good this results in.

And I think, often, it’s great to, I’d love your take on this, to diplomatically ask those sorts of questions. I mean, you probably don’t want to say, “Does anyone care about this crap anyway?” But you do kind of want to educate yourself and get perspective on how something is viable or not viable. So, do you have any pro tips or scripts for how we ask that question without insulting people?

Patty Azzarello
Yeah. So, in two directions here. So, this happens so frequently, an executive will ask somebody to do something, and the person runs off and starts doing it because they believe they have to do it best and immediately because an executive asked, therefore, it’s super important, just because the executive asked for it. That is so not true. Executives ask for things all the time, and they have no idea what they’re asking for. They just have no idea of the costs of asking a question.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, intriguing. So, you’re saying they know what they want but they have no idea what the cost is.

Patty Azzarello
Right. So, an example is, when I was an executive, I asked my financial manager, “What is the headcount of our organization?” in the hallway, and I expected him to say, “Eleven hundred and thirty-seven.” And he said, “Well, it depends.” I’m like, “What do you mean?”

And he said, “Well, if you want an answer that is 90%-95% accurate, I can probably get that to you by the end of the day. But if you want it more like 97% accurate, I’ll have to wait till tomorrow morning because I’ll have to pull the organizations in Europe and Asia, and that might take even two days. But if you need it really accurately, it’ll probably take about two weeks because we’ll have to pull all of the open job wrecks, and all of the reports of people who are leaving, and rationalize that.” And my head was just exploding, thinking, “Oh, my God, don’t do any of that. Like, I literally thought you could answer my question in the moment.” And I said, “Do the shortest one. Do the shortest one.”

And so, a great way to match the value of a work to the time you invest in it, and make sure there’s a good match there, is to simply ask yourself the question, ask the executive the question, before you start working, “How much time and effort is this outcome worth? Is it worth an hour? Is it worth a week? Is it worth a half a day?” And if you can really understand that upfront, you’re going to do a much better job and you’re not going to be running around in circles wasting time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I tell you, that’s such a powerful question. I love the way you articulated that because it can vary massively, and you have no idea. And just assuming it’s at one level is bad news. Like, sometimes the answer is, “It is worth more than your entire annual compensation package to nail this perfectly.”

Patty Azzarello
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, okay, then. And then other times it’s like, “Oh, I mean, please spend no more than 10 minutes doing what you can do on this.”

Patty Azzarello
Yeah. But just because an executive asked doesn’t mean it’s like your life is dependent on doing it great and immediately.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Perfect. And so, under do better, you make a point that we should become less busy. That sounds appealing, and we kind of mentioned we should become less busy just by eliminating low-value activities. Do you have additional reasons for why we should become less busy?

Patty Azzarello
Well, so first and foremost, if you burn up all of your time on delivering just what’s in your job description and you’re overwhelmed by it, look better and connect better are going to be zero.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Patty Azzarello
So, first and foremost, it’s important to be less busy for that. But it’s also important to be less busy because you’re a human being that has a life outside of work that also matters, and just grinding yourself up in your work is not my definition of success. My definition of success is that your job has to fit into your life in a way that your life works. And a big part of that is being less busy. And if you’re so busy, you’re not adding as much value as you could because you’re just not thinking about it.

So, the advice I give in terms of how to become less busy, there’s a ton of advice in my book Rise which we don’t have time to go through all of it here, but the one thing that I think is a must to start thinking about is what I refer to as ruthless priorities. And what I mean by ruthless priorities is to be very ruthless on choosing them, and then be very ruthless about protecting them and actually getting them done. And so, if you’ve got 25 things, 25 super-duper important priorities on your task list, you’re not going to get them all done. You’re just not. No one ever does. But if you try to start saying, “I’m going to put these in rank order, or I’m going to draw a cut line,” your head starts to explode because everything seems so important you just feel like you got to do it all.

What I like to do in that case is go through each one and ask the question, not, “Is this important?” but “How bad would it be if I failed at this?” And I find if you ask that of your 25 things, there’s going to be a couple that suddenly rise to the top. And that’s one way to choose your ruthless priorities. But choosing a ruthless priority does not mean you don’t do anything else. It just means that you have one or two things, you’re not going to have 25 or even five ruthless priorities, you’re going to have one or two, and you’re going to protect them, and you’re going to commit to yourself, “No matter what, I’m going to get that one done. No matter what else is happening in the world, I am going to get this one thing done, and I’m going to protect it.”

And, typically, if you choose one thing, it doesn’t take up 100% of your time, so you have the rest of your time to deal with all the flak and other stuff that you still have to do, but you wake up every morning, and you say, “I am going to de-risk that ruthless priority,” and then you finish it. Hallelujah! Like, people love to finish things. And then you pick the next one. And I find that by doing and focusing in a ruthless way on one important thing at a time, you can sort of cut through the chaos, and even if you stay very busy, you’re getting the high-value thing done, and the busyness is not getting you stuck anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
And, actually, I want to zero in on the Hallelujah portion of that because I think that what’s great about that ruthless-prioritizing question there is by taking the time to surface your own kind of emotional anxiety, angst, associations with the to-do list, and then nailing the things that, in a way, have the most hidden terror embedded within them, you really will experience a sense of release and freedom and urgency, stress, anxiety leaving you.

And this happened to me many times. Like, I’ve just been surprised, like, “Oh, I feel so much lighter now that that is done, and I don’t think I even knew that I would feel that way.” But, now, with your question, I will probably more frequently be able to identify that in advance and bring into the prioritization. Very cool.

Okay. Well, let’s talk about looking better. Yeah, how do we do that?

Patty Azzarello
I love a comment. I got an email from a woman in the UK who said, “Patty, I read your book Rise, and I got two pay raises and a promotion.”

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Patty Azzarello
I was like, “Wow! Like, what did you do? What did you learn? Tell me more.” So, I sent her an email, and she came back and she said, “It was the look better part.” She had been kind of at a zero on look better. She was in a marketing company, and she was in charge of events, getting people to events. And she was growing the event business for two years. She tirelessly worked to grow their event business, and she was in a meeting with the CEO.

And the CEO looked at the spreadsheet, and said, “Huh, I thought, in general, the event business, the event market was declining. I guess it’s not, because our numbers look good.” And her valiant efforts were invisible. He just assumed he had made a wrong assumption about the market, and their event business was growing because the market was growing.

Pete Mockaitis
Au contraire.

Patty Azzarello
And it was such a wakeup call for her to hear from my work that you have to be an advocate for the value that your work creates. And so, she immediately started communicating about all the things she learned about how to grow their event business ahead of a declining market and make it a growing business for them. And she didn’t just run around bragging, “Look what I did,” but she shared meaningful nuggets of work that other people could learn from, and suddenly she got that positive visibility, and her career just took off with more pay and promotions because she connected the dots.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Boy, that is very illustrative in terms of just the assumptions people make about why even if you’re doing amazing work that’s creating amazing results, you think, “Hey, the results speak for themselves.” They don’t. We’re just making it. Even when the executive had that context of, “Oh, I thought that market was declining. Well, I guess it’s not.” Yeah, that’s excellent. So, point taken. You got to share that with people. And I guess do you have some pro tips on how that happens?

Patty Azzarello
Yeah. So, there’s a chapter in the book that’s titled “Be visible but not annoying.” And this is where I really want to emphasize again that I’m not talking about being political, and I’m not talking about just having a good talking game without results to back it up. The results absolutely do matter. But the thing that people struggle with is, “Oh, I don’t want to be self-promoting. I don’t want to come off like I’m bragging. I don’t want to be annoying.”

The reality is if you have those concerns and fears, you’re never going to be annoying. You don’t have it in your DNA, so I try to get people to stop worrying about it. But we all know people who are advocating for themselves and their careers absent of results, and that is super annoying. The magic formula here is simply to ask yourself, “Is what I communicate of value to the people I share it with?” And if the answer is yes, you’re not being annoying. So, you don’t just around saying, “Look what I did.” You run around saying, “Look at what the company can do now. As a result of this project being completed, we are now in a different space and we can accomplish X, Y, Z which we couldn’t do before.”

And it’s important to tell people that because, Pete, you finished your work, and if you never share, “Now what? Now this value is here, what can we do with it? What can we learn from it? How can we build on it?” you’re missing an opportunity to create even more value. So, if you think about the way you communicate as creating value, because you’re sharing how to collect the winnings of the results you delivered, that’s never annoying. People are like, “Wow! That’s fantastic. I can use that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s a great point in terms of things change all the time and you develop new capabilities, and as a result, that’s going to come up from time to time in terms of, let’s say, oh, even if it’s sort of like deep in the internals of the organization, like, “Oh, but, yeah, we probably don’t have the data on that.” It’s like, “Well, we used to not have that but once we upgraded with the ABC, we can now pull this by this, this, and that.” It’s like, “Oh, well, okay then. Great move.”

Patty Azzarello
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
“Please go get the data on that since we now can,” and then they’ve been made aware. I like that in terms of the point is not, “Look at me, I’m awesome.” The point is, “It’s valuable and we can do something now,” or maybe the context has shifted, or there’s a new opportunity in terms of, “We’ve been getting great results with so and so who’s been quite pleased so they might be the perfect partner to want to explore doing a new thing.”

Patty Azzarello
Right. So, if you don’t mind, before we leave look better, I just want to make one more point on that, which is the importance of understanding how you are perceived.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Patty Azzarello
That’s another thing that sometimes just goes to zero for people. They don’t worry about it, they don’t think about it, but it’s your reputation. And if you want to get recognized, if you want to get promoted, you have to understand what your reputation is, and you have to recognize how you’re perceived. And the way I like to advise people on this is to think about what it would look like if you were to put in your best self forward, and then try to do that on purpose. Try to do that with intention. Because a lot of times we’ll do something, we’ll do a presentation, we’ll do a negotiation, we’ll deliver something, and have the internal reaction of, “Man, I was brilliant,” but you feel surprised by it.

And isn’t it a shame to be so surprised? And it’s kind of a copout to be surprised. Why not try to be brilliant on purpose more of the time? Why not be more intentional about showing up as your best self more of the time? And, again, that’s nothing about being political. It’s just about committing to show up stronger and to be present and to give more in the work environment to give more value because you are showing up. That’s another key part of look better.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s interesting how that can then translate into particular actions that you take. In some ways, you might say, “Well, hey, it’s kind of out of my control. I have good days and I have bad days. Sometimes I’m in the groove, sometimes I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.” But, in practice, right off the bat, things like, “Hey, well, I could sleep. I could exercise. I could eat a healthy meal. I could think in advance of the meeting what specific outcome am I looking for, what are likely to be their main concerns, and how could I bring something that will address those concerns.”

So, it’s interesting that, in a way, hey, our general mood does shift day to day and we’re not in complete control of that. In another way, there’s some key sort of levers that we can all pull. Are there any kind of recurring leverage practices you recommend in terms of being able to show up at our best more frequently?

Patty Azzarello
Yeah, there’s a chapter in Rise, and I’ve got also a lot of other resources on my website on this topic, of the idea of understanding your personal brand, and that’s your reputation. Your personal brand is whatever everybody else says it is based on their interaction with you. And so, yes, we all have our good days and bad days, and low energy and so forth, but if you can think ahead of time about what it is you would like to be known for, that can help you be purposeful about it even if you’re having a bad day.

So, if you would like to be known for the person that sorts through the chaos and the clutter in a complicated situation and always has a creative, clear answer, keep that switch turned on. And even if you’re having a bad day, “Oops, this is a complicated conversation, this is time for me to use my superpower.” And if you think about that ahead of time, you stand a much greater chance of doing it consistently.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Great. And then how do we do that connecting better?

Patty Azzarello
You know, connect better, as I said earlier, one of my superpowers has been asking for help. This is another area where a lot of people go to zero which is just networking, just keeping their professional network going. And what I say, there are two elements to networking. One is meeting new people, and the other one is keeping in touch with people you already know. And the second one is actually where all the value is, because once you meet a new person, they become somebody you already know, and if you don’t put any effort into that relationship, there was no value in making the connection in the first place.

And so, what I tell people – and I tell introverts, and I’m also an introvert so this was not natural for me, I had to learn it myself – is that even if you dislike the idea of meeting people so much that you never want to meet a new person ever again for the rest of your life, you should still be networking with the people you already know because that’s where the value is. And that’s actually a lot less scary to people who have a fear of networking.

And what I like to say is, “Let’s just cross out the word networking and instead use the word be generous.” That’s what networking is, it’s reaching out to people, it’s being kind, it’s saying hello, it’s asking if you can help them, it’s sending them interesting things, it’s actually being helpful. The more of that you do, the more you are going to have an army of people who want to help you when you suddenly need help.

And so, you don’t have to try to match it up one-on-one, but it’s more of a karmic thing that always be giving, and always be giving more than you’re taking. And if you’re doing that, you’re going to have so much capital in the bank that people are just going to be so happy to help and support you when you need something. And it’s really that easy. Just be generous and invest some non-zero time in reaching out to people you already know and being generous.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you mentioned a few ways in which we can be generous. I suppose there’s push and pull. Like, you can be generous when someone asks a question, you can either give them the shortest possible reply that finishes that email and gets it out of the inbox. Or you can really thoughtfully think, “Oh, you know, what is it they’re trying to achieve here? It seems like this. I imagine this should probably be difficult given A, B, C constraints, restrictions. I know someone who might be able to help with that.” And so then, there’s one way that you’re generous when a request is made of you. How do you recommend we be generous when no one is asking for anything?

Patty Azzarello
Yeah, it’s so simple. “Hello.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Patty Azzarello
I know when I get an email from somebody I haven’t heard from in years, and they just say, “I was thinking about you and wanted to say hello.” That brightens my day. Absolutely. And if those people…I have people in my life that do that regularly maybe once a year or so. If they ever need anything from me, I’m so happy to do it because I feel like we’re connected, I feel like the connection is current. It’s really that easy.

And I often challenge people in workshops, I say, “How many meaningful network…?” Like, they say, “I’m too busy for networking,” which just means, “I don’t like networking and I don’t want to prioritize it.” And I say, “I don’t believe anybody is too busy to not be able to spend 30 minutes a month doing something intentional. How many networking outreaches could you do in 30 minutes?” Now, if you’re using LinkedIn or Facebook, a gazillion. Like, like, like, like, like, a couple of comments, you’ve got a lot of hits.

But if you wrote thoughtful emails, you could probably write five thoughtful emails in 30 minutes. And if you did that once a month, you would have done a thoughtful outreach to 60 people in a year, which is infinitely bigger than zero and it’s a value. And so, I really challenge people to do that, and they’re like, “Well, what do I do?” And I say, “Just say, ‘Hi, I was thinking about that project we worked on together and that funny thing happened, and I just wanted to say hello. And here’s what I’m doing. My kids just started college. No need to reply. Just thinking about you. But if you do get a minute, I’d love to hear what’s up with you.” Something like that.

It’s easy for them to read, it doesn’t take a lot of time, you’re giving them something. And this woman said to me, she came back to another workshop of mine three or six months later, and she said, “Patty, when you told me to do that, I thought that was the stupidest thing I ever heard. I just thought that was the stupidest thing I ever heard. I thought it was just a waste of my time, a waste of the other person’s time to have an email with no useful relevant content in it, but I took your dare, and I did it.” And she said, “I have to thank you because it has been wonderful. I have gotten back so much from these simple outreaches that have just made me smile and a few useful things even happened.” And it’s there you go. It’s another Hallelujah moment.

We tend to, I think, sometimes think about networking as this big scary thing where you’re supposed to go schmooze with highly-important influential people and get them to do something for you in the first meeting. It’s like, “No. Say hello to your friends.” That’s networking.

Pete Mockaitis
And I love how there’d been many friends that I’ve wanted, intended to reach out to, and it’s almost like a vicious cycle in terms of, “Oh, it’s kind of been a while. I feel like it’s been a while. Then I really got to bring it in terms of…” But it could just be, I love what you said, it’s like, “Hey, I was thinking about you and how we did this thing. Hope you’re doing well,” and just maybe like a comment, like, “That was really funny,” or, “I really appreciate how you did this.” It’s like, “This has come up again and again,” or, “I still haven’t thrown away your Christmas card because you’re, oh, so adorable, and it’s on my desk. Hope you’re doing well.”

Patty Azzarello
Exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. Well, tell me, any final thoughts you want to share before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Patty Azzarello
So, just two more ideas in connect better that I’ll just mention very quickly. One of them is what I refer to as the experience paradox. And what I mean by that is a lot of people say, “Patty, I want this job but I don’t have the experience, so nobody will give me this job.” And what I mean by the experience paradox is you can’t get the job without the experience, but you can get the experience without the job.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Patty Azzarello
And so, if you’re thinking of career development, that’s what career development is, is to set your sights on the job that you want, and go learn about it, talk to people, just immerse yourself in that job that you want, and look for crumbs to pick up, projects you can volunteer on to get some experience in that job. That sort of connection is really a shortcut to advancing.

And then the other thing I want to mention before I leave connect better is if I look at my own career, the outside of my own efforts, there was nothing more impactful for me than having mentors. And if you don’t have mentors, go get one. Talk to smart people and be learning from smart people. And, for me, it doesn’t need to turn into some like awkward marriage proposal of, “Will you be my mentor?” because you can just learn from smart people and they never know that they’re your mentor.

But if a relationship sparks and you find that you’re talking to the smart person a few times, all you need to do is say something like, “You know, these conversations have been so incredibly valuable for me, and I’ve been putting the things that you say into practice, and they’re working, and I’m so grateful for that. I’m starting to think of you as a mentor. Would it be alright, maybe, if I got on your calendar on a more regular basis, once a month for half an hour?” And if they say yes, you’ve got a mentor. It’s as easy as that. And do it.

Advancing your career without mentors is like climbing Mt. Everest without a Sherpa and a guide. Like, yeah, you could give that a try, but why on Earth would you? Get the help.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Yeah. And it’s interesting how even in the mentorship example, it’s the experience first and then the role, if you will, of mentor protégé. It’s like, “Hey, we’re already been doing this for a while and we’re seeing that.” Very cool.

Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Patty Azzarello
So, the first one is from Picasso, and it is that, “Inspiration does exist but it has to find you already working.” And I just love that because if you’re doing any kind of creative work, if you just sit there and wait for inspiration, it just doesn’t work that way. But if you’re willing to just kind of sit yourself down and start doing it badly, just start, then that’s when the inspiration comes. And I found that over and over again in my life.

My other favorite quote is from Mary Anne Radmacher, which is about courage, and it’s “Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’” And I think, particularly now, where there’s so much extra stress and pressure and uncertainty, we can’t underestimate the value of just coping, of just trying again tomorrow, “If I didn’t set the world on fire today, that’s fine. I’m going to show up again tomorrow.” I think that’s just so important.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Patty Azzarello
The one thing I have been a student of is success and watching successful people and learning from successful people. And the area that I’m most fascinated by is what it takes, is what the investment is behind that success. Because I think a lot of times we have a tendency to look at success and think it was easy for the person, and I love understanding, “What was not easy about that?” I’m fascinated by that. And I have another quote by Michelangelo, which just cracks me up, which is, “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And how about a favorite book?

Patty Azzarello
In terms of like business books and books that enrich your knowledge, one of my favorite, favorite books is Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, about how to communicate effectively. That was just like a lightning bolt, and that kind of changed everything for me. I love that book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And how about a favorite tool?

Patty Azzarello
My cheque book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Patty Azzarello
If you look in my tool drawer in my house, I have a hammer, and I have duct tape, I have a couple of screwdrivers, and if it can’t be fixed with that, I use my cheque book. And I’m not a gadget-y person. I have probably the fewest apps on my devices of anyone that I know, but one of my roads to success was just realizing there are certain jobs I shouldn’t do, and just being willing to outsource and get someone else to do some of the things that are not in my wheelhouse is my favorite tool – delegating.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Patty Azzarello
I started about five years ago committing to exercise every single day. And for the first two years, I had a 100% record. And what was fascinating to me about that was it required much less discipline to make it not optional, because before it’s like, “Will I? Won’t I? Will I do a harder workout tomorrow?” I spent so much mental anguish in deciding on a given day whether or not I was going to exercise. And as soon as I made it not optional, boom, I got so much mental time back, and it required so much less discipline. So, I’ve been doing that for about five years now. I don’t have a perfect record anymore but I miss a handful of days a year, which, for me, is close enough.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with people; they quote it back to you frequently?

Patty Azzarello
You know, it kind of gets back to our theme that’s been running through this conversation about not staying too busy. And it’s one of the most highlighted things in my book Rise which is, “You have to find a way to deal with all of the work, not do all of the work.” You can’t just let stuff drop on the floor, but, man, don’t just do it all as it comes across the table. Deal with it all and do the stuff that matters.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Patty Azzarello
I would point them to my website, which is AzzarelloGroup.com. And I also have an online professional development program that’s called my Executive Mentoring Group. And you can find that at ExecutiveMentoringGroup.com, or if you don’t want to type so much, ExecMentorGroup.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Patty Azzarello
Schedule some time to think. If you’re not doing that already, schedule some time to think, and use it to conquer your busyness, and make sure that the look better and connect better portions of your efforts are not zero. But it all starts with scheduling time to think. Give yourself that gift.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Patty, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck and all the more rising.

Patty Azzarello
Thank you. It’s been super fun.

Aug 30
0

484: The Overlooked Basic Skills Essential for Career Success with Dean Karrel

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Dean Karrel says: "The most important thing is to be yourself, enhance your own skills and make yourself better. That's how you advance your career and find new opportunities."

Dean Karrel makes the case for mastering the basic skills that will put you above the rest.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How “B students” can achieve more in their careers
  2. How to survive and thrive in office politics
  3. The secret to building unshakable confidence

About Dean

Dean Karrel is a Career and Executive Coach. He is the instructor of twelve courses with over 600,000 views available on LinkedIn Learning and has also been in senior leadership positions for more than three decades with major global publishing companies, including 22 years at Wiley. Karrel has hired and trained thousands of people at various stages of their careers, motivating them to maximize their abilities.

Resources mentioned in the show:

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Dean Karrel Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Dean, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Dean Karrel
Pete, thanks so much. It’s a pleasure to join. And you’re getting close to 500 of these podcasts. That’s really impressive.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks. Yeah, it is, it is coming up and I’ve got something special I’m thinking about for number 500. I hope it comes together.

Dean Karrel
I was wondering if you were going to do some special event. That’ll be very exciting. So, you’ve got certainly a lot of us listening when number 500 comes up.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you. Well, there’s so much good stuff to talk about and I want to first hear your tale. I understand you have entertained dreams of being a standup comedian and your name is pronounced Carol not Karrel.

Dean Karrel
Carol, that’s correct.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’ve got to hear, do you have one or two great jokes you think could be stage-ready?

Dean Karrel
Well, I’ve got a number of jokes that could be stage-ready, unfortunately, I don’t know if they’d be good for the podcast. It’s funny, over the course of my career, people have said to me, “Dean, you tell great stories, you tell great jokes, you should be a standup comedian.” Well, the funny thing is, it’s like if you’re in front of an audience of colleagues and friends, and you’re making fun of yourself or you’re making fun of senior leadership of the company, of course everybody is going to laugh and they’re going to enjoy it.

The trick is how do you do that in front of an audience that doesn’t know you? And so, early on, when I first graduated from college, I actually went to a couple open-mic nights. I’m living in upstate New York, Rochester, New York and I go to the Holiday Inn Chuckles Club or something on a Friday night open-mic night. And I think the crickets are still chirping. It is really tough.

I talk about it in my career about confidence and how important it is to have confidence. Well, that shattered my confidence, trying to tell jokes and be a standup comedian. It is something that these people I give a lot of credit, because talk about being vulnerable and being out there, and you’re standing on a stage. So, I quickly learned that standup comedy was not going to be my profession.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, that’s amazing. They make it look so easy, the great comedians, but behind the scenes, there are many, many jokes that have died after testing and you’re only seeing the greatest hits by the time the Netflix special comes out.

Dean Karrel
Well, it’s interesting, I talk about in business the importance of planning and preparation. And what’s interesting, if you go back to standup comedy, we see Seinfeld, or you see your favorite comedian, or you see the comedian who appears at the comedy club in Chicago or New York or LA. They just don’t get up there and start telling jokes. They’ve gone through weeks and months of planning and prepping and honing their skills so there’s a correlation to that to business, how important it is to be ready. And it’s also knowing your audience.

You asked me for a couple of jokes right now. Well, it’s not appropriate. It’s tough right now for this audience. And there’s a whole correlation to all of these things from comedy to actually to the business world of planning and preparation, and also knowing your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I want to dig into a lot of the expertise and tidbits along these lines in terms of knowing your audience and doing the preparation. And so, you’ve done many courses and many years of coaching. I’d love to start with maybe what’s perhaps the most surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made when it comes to professionals at work, like over and over again you see this?

Dean Karrel
I think over and over again we try to impress or we get intimated by people with lofty titles or advance degrees, and we try to be people that we’re really not. I use an example of when I first got into business, I was really impressed with some of the colleagues that I worked with. I thought they were smarter, I thought they could do things better than me, and I’m kind of really intimidated by that, and I found myself trying to do things that really weren’t myself.

And you see in business where people say, “Well, I need to have an MBA in this,” or they get impressed by somebody who’s a senior vice president of marketing or sales or the CFO or CEO. And you need to step back and realize you have to be yourself and how do you enhance your own skills. And sometimes we get intimated and sometimes it comes back to confidence. But the most important thing is be yourself and enhance your own skills and make yourself better. And that’s how you advance your career and find new opportunities.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you say to yourself, could you share an example of the opposite of that? Like, it’s a mistake to try to do this when that’s not you.

Dean Karrel
Well, I remember going to meetings when I first got into business, and I’d be intimidated by seeing somebody that maybe had a lofty title and somebody with an advance degree. So, I would speak up in meetings because I thought that would be an impressive thing to show other people that I could hold my legs and hold my stance in front of a large group of people. And I would talk about things and I would go down a road that really didn’t need to be done. Or I would extol achievements that I had made in the sales field in trying to impress others. And I quickly came to realize, you know, that’s just not being myself.

I was trying to please others and at the same time what I was doing was not really being authentic. I wasn’t being genuine or real. I was just trying to prove myself to other people. And that never works. There’s a lightbulb that goes off in everybody’s career when they realize, “You know what, I just need to be myself.” Not everybody is meant to be the CEO. Not everybody is going to be the Chief Marketing Officer or the best sales professional.

So, how do you separate yourself? And how do you enhance your own abilities? And that’s the lightbulb that comes off in some people’s career early on, in some people it never goes on. But you have to realize that, “Where do you fit in business? And how do you maximize your abilities to be successful?”

Pete Mockaitis
And when you’re doing those things, trying to prove that you’re smart, which is unattractive for everyone around, it’s like, “Okay, Dean, you’re wasting our time. Okay, we already know that you’re fine, which is why you have this job and, yes, we already know those accomplishments. Thank you for reminding us. Can we get onto the topic at hand please?”

Dean Karrel
Well, we all know those people. We go into a meeting and somebody will say, “Well, I’m the senior vice president of XY & Z.” Or, there’s always that one person in every company who is the first person to talk in every meeting, they’re the know-it-all. And behind the scenes, we’re all saying, “Oh, I wish that person would just be quiet.” And they develop a reputation of being the know-it-all, and that’s never the right approach. It’s also the person, again, every company has them, and they’ll say, “Well, you know what, during my years at XYZ business school, I learned the following techniques.” Well, we don’t care.

Pete Mockaitis
“At Harvard.”

Dean Karrel
Right? But every company has these people. And sometimes we can get caught in the trap of thinking, “Well, maybe that’s the route we should take.” And I came to realize, and it’s the wakeup call, saying, “That’s not the approach you need to do. You need to be yourself and enhance the abilities that you have and not worry about anybody else.”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, one of your tenets there, I’d say within that realm, is that it’s really key to master the basics. And that sounds wise. Sure, we should master the basics. But can you tell us, what do you mean by that and sort of like what’s the alternative route that is a poor choice?

Dean Karrel
So, we all get caught up, let’s say, with learning advanced techniques in marketing or social media analyses and organizational development, mergers and acquisitions, and that we forget about, and I think it’s learning and going back to mastering social skills, people skills, soft skills. How do you handle yourself in a meeting? How do you handle public speaking? How do you work with a micromanager? The basics of business are lessons that they don’t teach at a business school.

Oftentimes, we learn these from, hopefully, our first sales manager, our first manager in whatever business that we happen to be in that will help coach us and train us. But a lot of times it happens through osmosis. We’d go to a meeting and we realize, “You know what, I shouldn’t be using my cellphone, I shouldn’t be texting.” Or, we’ll read about stories about that but no one has actually ever trained us in not to do these things.

So, over the course of my career, I’d always have, like, the people I work with have called them Deanisms, and I put together a list of about 200 different topics. And I wrote about a page, a page and a half on each just covering everything from meeting conduct to how to work with your managers, how to work with colleagues. We all talk about being authentic or being vulnerable and words like that, but what does that really mean? So, I went through all of these and I wrote just simple subjects of basic skills and how that can help you be successful in business.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s so wise. And I think I remember in sort of my earliest career moments, just like these simple things, like, “Okay, you have a spreadsheet. There’s a column for a category. Try to make those categories a sort of a simple set of, I don’t know, 5 to 20, or whatever as opposed to your own invention for each category. Otherwise, it won’t make any sense later on when you try to filter or pivot a table or whatnot that’s not useful. Or when you attach a file to an email, double-click that file to ensure that it is the correct version of the file and not a prior version of the file.”

And then I had a great mentor who was managing me in a meeting, and he saw that a partner was doing this as he was sending something out to the client, and he said, “See, Pete, even partners do that.” And it’s so true, it’s like those are the things that can embarrass you or can really distinguish you, I’d say, particularly in the early phases of a career in terms of like, “Okay, this person just gets it. I don’t have to explain all of that.” And that just sort of builds trust and credibility and all kinds of good things.

Dean Karrel
Some people do just get it and they understand it, they’re quick and they figure it all out. And you touched on something with Excel which, ironically, is one of the topics in the book that I wrote, is that I’ll have people come up to me and they say, “You know, I’m awful with math and I can’t do Excel.” Well, you have to learn the basics of Excel or any spreadsheet package, whether it’s Google Sheets or Excel, whatever spreadsheet package. You have to be able to put together a basic P&L, you have to be able to work your way through a basic P&L because that also holds true for our personal lives too.

How are you managing your own budgets at home? You have to learn basic math skills. But, again, that’s taught as a major course – analyses, spreadsheet analysis, and what-ifs and so forth. But for the average person, let’s say like me, the B student, did I ever have the course in saying how you use Excel for basic work in business and the importance of it? And I think it’s essential. I’m not saying you need to be the CFO or an accountant but you need to be able to navigate your way through Excel, a basic P&L, and a spreadsheet and a balance sheet.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s one basic. And you had mentioned, okay, you outlined about 200 of these. I’d love it if you could zero in on perhaps the most leveraged two to five-ish of these basics. And my criteria, I’m getting really choosy with you, are that they’re, one, often overlooked, like you might be surprised at how often people just sort of don’t do this; two, it makes all the difference in the world in terms of you do it or you don’t do it, and the impact of folks on it; and three, it’s a lot of bang for your buck in terms of, “Hey, it only takes a couple of minutes and it makes a world of difference.”

Dean Karrel
How about if we start off with a story? I’m a firm believer in knowing your audience and I think that’s so important no matter what job you have and what business you’re in, and I learned this from my very first manager. And he would talk to me and say about the importance of knowing the customer, learning a little bit more about them before you meet them.

So, my first sales manager was a religious person. He never pushed this on any of us who reported to him but we all knew he was a religious person, and he would always write personal notes. This is the early days of email, before email. He’d send a personal note saying how we were doing and how we could continue to improve. He was always big on that.

And that first Christmas, when I was working for him, I was sending out cards to all of my friends and I included one for him, and I had one that was a cartoon of Ziggy and a bear on a pair of skis, and when you open the card up, I wrote, “Happy Holidays – Deano!” And I mailed it off to my manager named Gary. And, literally, two days later, I get the Christmas card from him and he wrote a personal note. He talked about the blessings of the holiday season. And as soon as I got it, you know what, “I forgot, he always writes personal notes and maybe I should’ve sent him a religious card or whatever.”

When I saw him two weeks later, he said to me, “Hey, by the way, way to know your audience,” and he laughed and I apologized saying, “Gary, I’m sorry I didn’t send you a religious card.” And he smiled, he said, “I wasn’t looking for a religious card. I know I never talk about religion with anybody. But the fact is you just did a…” what this day and age would be like an e-card, an e-Christmas card, and it was a toss aside, “Happy Holidays – Deano!”

So, fast forward a year later at a holiday season, I get a Christmas card from him that’s religious in nature again, and then he had kept the same card I had sent to him, and he said, “Thinking of you – Gary.” And it’s his subtle coaching way of saying to remember, “Always know your audience.” And what’s funny now is we’ve exchanged that card for over 30 years, back and forth, with the same line, and, “Happy Holidays – Deano,” and he writes down, “Thinking of you – Gary.”

And so, the message there was great coaching. He didn’t go write it at my face, saying, “Dean, what are you doing here?” And it’s something that’s just a nice lesson through the years we’ve gone through. So, knowing your audience also then ties in with, Pete, you know, today, I’ve spent some time and, obviously, I’ve heard your podcast before, but I went to listen to the ones you’ve just done recently so I get a feeling of  your style, you’ve got a great sense of humor, you always ask great detailed questions that dig in deeper. So, it’s like knowing the audience and knowing who you are, getting a feel for you before you and I are chatting today.

So, to me, that’s a critical lesson. Is that a course at a business school? Is that a course in a community college? No, this is something that I think are basic skills and lessons.

Pete Mockaitis
And there it’s just a matter of kind of asking yourself a couple key questions in terms of, “Okay, what are they? What are they into? What might they appreciate? What’s something that’s unique to them?” And that’s good. Well, you talked about humor and happy holidays, I’m thinking about, I believe this is the episode of 30 Rock where so he made a card and said, the front said, “Happy Holidays,” and then you open it up and it said, “Here’s what terrorists say – Merry Christmas.”

Dean Karrel
That’s good. Yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s outrageous. So, that’s what I’m thinking about when you go on standup comedy and about knowing your audience and cards.

Dean Karrel
Well, it ties in maybe a little bit also about you and I meeting for the first time today through this podcast. You asked me how do I pronounce my name. And I would bet you, over your course of your lifetime, Pete, your name has been pronounced more than a few times. And I call that basic skill of I make sure that on LinkedIn you phonetically spell it. It’s like it’s very simple but it’s, to me, that’s a sign of respect of saying, “You asked me how to pronounce my name. I take the time to learn your name.” Basic skill.

When your name is mispronounced, and you talk, let’s say, in a business setting, if I’m seeing a new customer, or a new client, or whatever, and I mispronounced their name, immediately you get off on the wrong foot, right?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. That’s true. I was in a training once and someone said, “Oh, Pete Macchiatis. I just love that name. It reminds me of a macchiato.” I was like, “That’s completely wrong but I’m not going to take that from you if you’re getting such delight.”

Dean Karrel
Yeah, well, then you take it to the next step. How often has it been misspelled?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, right, yeah. Plenty.

Dean Karrel
You know, my name has always got – people usually misspell it with two Ls and other people get away with it for once, twice, maybe three times. Then after the third time, it’s like, “Hey, wait a minute now.” So, again, a basic skill of respect. It also ties in remembering people’s names. We always see people say that, “Oh, I’m awful with names.” Well, we all struggle with names sometimes. We can’t remember everybody we meet.

But how many times have you met somebody, Pete, you’ve met them three times, and then they’ll say to you, “Hey, it’s nice to meet you.” It’s like, “Where have you been? I’ve met you three times already, and you still don’t know my name, or you still don’t even remember that you’ve met me.” And, again, basic skill but it carries so much weight, and I think is it make or break for business success? No, but compiled and put together with all the basic skills, I think it can separate you from other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, absolutely. Okay. So, we’ve talked about knowing your audience and knowing names and pronunciations. So, what are a couple other big ones?

Dean Karrel
How about first impressions? You know, we all say we shouldn’t make judgments off a first impressions? But it is critically important in this day and age whether it’s through an email, whether it’s through a phone call, whether it’s through a first-time meeting with somebody. And my story that I have in the book that I love telling is this is one where there was a day that I wasn’t going to be seeing clients, I wasn’t going to be meeting with customers, and I dressed casually to work, which, for me, is khaki pants and a more toned-down dress shirt.

And I’m going to the coffee shop across the street, and there’s a gentleman, two people in front of me, and this is a coffee shop I go to every day. They’ve got a great staff. Lovely people work there. And, all of a sudden, they got a little bit behind, they got a little slow. And this guy, two people in front of me, started to get in the face of the woman who was making the coffee. And there was a point where I just said, “Hey, buddy, take a break. She’s doing the best she can.” And I said it really politely.

Well, this guy turned around and looked at me like I was, you know, who am I. And he had a few choice words for me. And at 7:30 in the morning, I wasn’t about to start getting in an argument, but I finally just said, “Hey, take it easy, will you?” So, fast forward two or three hours later, a sales manager I’m working with comes to my office and he says, “Dean, I’m interviewing candidates for an opening position, for a new opening position. I know you’re not planning to see somebody today, but do you mind spending a few moments with this person?”

Well, you know where this is headed. About two seconds later, the guy from the coffee shop walks in, and he looks at me, and I just said to him, “Hey, how was your coffee?” Well, he went white. And, again, it’s a first impression, he was a good salesperson, but you learn a lot about somebody and how they act when no one’s looking. And, to me, that’s something. If he treats people like that in a coffee shop, this poor person who’s working so hard, how is he going to treat a customer? How is he going to treat clients if that is his style when he thinks nobody around from that company is going to see him?

And we ended up hiring somebody else, and that wasn’t the overall deciding factor, with that person’s attitude, but because we found somebody who was really superior in all of their skills. But what that did was a memory for me of just how this person acted. And so, that’s a nice story, a reminder that all first impressions do make a difference.

Pete Mockaitis
And that kind of gets me thinking about gossip in the office. And I don’t know how Stephen Covey said it in terms of like honoring those who are not present or something like that. it’s like, “Boy, if you’re saying these things to me about that person, you’re probably saying some things about me to others. And that just kind of doesn’t feel so great.”

Dean Karrel
I’ve talked about gossip. I think that’s one of the great destroyers of corporate culture and it gets people all wound up, and it’s part of human nature. We like talking about things and you can’t eliminate it completely. But 90% of the time, what gossip does is it ends up getting people more stressed out. And it’s not senior management that gets stressed out, it’s the rank and file, it’s the support team, it’s the assistants, it’s the entry-level people who they hear gossip, they’ll hear that somebody’s been laid off or fired, and then the gossip and the rumors starts. And before you know it, you’ve got a whole organization that’s tied up in a knot.

And a gossip to me is a destroyer. And I say, unless you hear from the CEO or corporate communications, what you’re hearing is speculation and gossip, and turn it off and don’t listen to it. I think, again, that’s one of the lessons in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I very recently heard, I realized a turn of phrase, I don’t know where it came from, and it was just to, “Talk to people not about people.” I thought that is a nice encapsulation of it. And the thing is talking to people, it takes more courage and humility than just shooting your mouth off for stress relief or whatever.

Dean Karrel
Right. Tied in with gossip is also using the BCC on your email. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. And whether it’s blind carboned or confidential. Confidential is another one. I think confidentiality is, again, once one person knows, two people are going to know, and it’s not confidential anymore. And I’ve had a few experiences in my career when I learned my lesson about that. And you’ll find out about confidentiality lasts about 10 minutes and then it spreads like wildfire.

So, if you don’t want somebody to know about it, and if you said something bad about somebody, then don’t say it, or see them face to face and talk about it and discuss the issue. Don’t put it in writing, don’t spread it around, and all of that does is cause ill will and it’s not good for you or that other person.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Well, while we’re on this kind of a topic, a number of your basics fall into the category of office politics. How should we think about that? And for those who say, “Oh, I hate politics,” like, how do we survive and thrive in that environment?

Dean Karrel
Well, we all hate politics, all of that. It’s part of an organization and it’s part of all of the company’s culture. And a lot of that starts at the very top. And if you’ve got a good CEO, you’ve got good leadership, good companies, politics are usually nipped in the bud. Jeff Bezos doesn’t put up with that at Amazon. And Jeff Weiner at LinkedIn has a great culture in that organization. Every company has politics but it’s nipped in the bud.

Where you see things are going sideways, or where management is not involved, or if they’re in lofty towers and they’re not visible, they’re not being seen, and I’ve come full circle on this in my career. When I first started, I thought, “Oh, my gosh, the CEOs were the best, they’re at the top.” Well, there are lousy CEOs and there are really good CEOs, just like there are good managers and there are lousy managers.

Again, early on, I thought, “Well, you know what, I can adapt and I can change.” And people who put up with office politics, managers who are micromanagers, they’re not going to change, so that’s where you, again, have to look after your own interest and find that next opportunity. A lot of people are put in high positions, lofty positions, and they’ve never been trained on what to do in those positions. People are managers, but that’s a big step in becoming a leader. And leaders don’t put up with politics, they don’t put up with gossip. It’s focused on the customer, focused on success, profitability, and so on. And I think some people have got it and others don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say don’t put up with politics, what are some things in particular that encompasses this set of behaviors to avoid?

Dean Karrel
It’s communication. And if you have a problem with somebody, or something is going on, don’t send emails, and don’t wait for next month’s townhall meeting, do it today. Get the group of people together today. Or if you’re hearing about something that’s going on in the organization, if you’re a leader in the company, or if you’re department head, don’t sit on it, address it.

Too often now, we wait for, “Well, you know, we have a department meeting on Friday and we’ll discuss it,” or, the buzzword now, “Let’s have a townhall meeting next month on the 15th.” If things need to be addressed, whether it’s politics, rumors, gossip, where we’re going as a company, don’t wait. Do it today. And I think the best leaders address those things and nip them in the bud and that’s how you become successful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, any other critical basics that make a world of difference?

Dean Karrel
Well, again, going back to knowing your audience, the people I’ve worked with, they’ve heard this mantra, and when they hear this podcast, they’re going to hear it again. It’s planning and preparation. And that’s one of my primary messages throughout my career. Again, I was a B student, and I got to be a B student because of extra credit.

And I used to take the time to plan and be ready, and whether it was a test to take, a course to do, and in business, seeing a new customer or seeing a new client, I always make sure I was ready to go. I use the analogy of you don’t start cooking and getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner the night before, right? You’re going to have a problem. And you’ll hear people say, “You know, I’m seeing a customer, I’m seeing a client,” and it’s 24 hours before they’re going to go. You can’t do that. You have to be planned.

The Thanksgiving dinner, you’ve got to defrost the turkey five days early. You got to know what other people are going to want to eat. You have to get all of the side courses ready. So, Pete, do you think I sat down for this podcast at 4:00 o’clock or 3:00 o’clock or whenever and said, “Oh, here we go”? No, I went and learned a little bit more about you. Again, as I said, learn and listen to some of your other podcasts.

That is not rocket science. But planning and preparation is something that people just take for granted sometimes. And I think it’s one of the basics that has helped me become more successful than maybe I could’ve been in my career. I mean, it’s helped me move to the next level of taking that time to know customers, know the people, do the research.

If I’m going to visit a publicly-traded company, spend time on their website to learn about their financials. Spend time to look for presentations they’ve made, press releases. All of these can help you and give you a competitive advantage and just make you more prepared. Also, that ties in with helping you be more confident. And if you’re prepared, you’re ready, you’ve taken the time to know everything you can, so it just builds your confidence, which I think is one of the other critical aspects of the basics is confidence.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, do you have a checklist there that you sort of know, “Okay, preparation complete”? I guess my own process is I imagine kind of.
“What might they ask me? And am I ready to answer that? And what would I most not want them to ask me because it’s trickier, difficult, or embarrassing, or I don’t think I’ve got a great answer for it? And how will I handle that?”

And so then, once I feel good in the sense of, “Okay, I think that no matter what kind of thing they throw at me, I’ve got a decent response.” That’s when I feel prepared. But do you have a particular set of issues or research activities you like to make sure you do with your time?

Dean Karrel
I think you nailed it just there. If you think they’re going to ask you, “Hope they don’t ask the embarrassing question,” they’re going to ask the embarrassing question. And if there’s something going on with your company, or something with your product or service offering, they’re going to ask that questions. You have to be prepared for handling objections.

Ironically, that’s one of my courses at LinkedIn Learning is handling objections. And if you’re ready, you know you’re going to get questions about whether it’s your price, or your product, or your service. If you’re surprised about questions that are being asked by your customer or your client, then you haven’t done your proper planning and preparation.

So, the checklist is knowing what questions you’re going to be hit with, which are the objections. And having your checklist ready with the key features and elements, whether it’s yourself, whether it’s your business, and having those, the top three things that you want to be able to get at, not the top 10. What are the key critical things that I want to make sure Pete knows about me through this podcast? And, again, that’s not that difficult to do but not everybody does it. And, again, that goes to being prepared and being ready.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you mentioned confidence is key, and one of the means by which you acquire that is by doing the proper preparation.

Dean Karrel
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
What are some other components to have that confidence?

Dean Karrel
So, to build your confidence is it does take time. And if anybody says they’re always confident all of the time, then they’re lying. We all go through things over the course of our career and it’s like a rollercoaster. And I think people need to hear that. I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve been in business a long time. And when I say to people, “You know, I still have my confidence or I get nervous sometimes.” Hey, Pete, I was a little nervous getting ready for you today.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m intimidated.

Dean Karrel
That’s showing, Pete, the vulnerable side, the authentic side of me but it also shows that I’m ready so I can be confident as we begin to speak. And I think that’s so important in knowing and realizing in the course of our careers, we’re going to have moments where our confidence is rocked. And the trick is, how do you overcome that? And then it goes back to building on your strengths and working in areas where you know you can have some successes.

But if you think, over the course of my three plus decades of being in business, I’ve always been, “Hey, I’m Dean Karrel. Let’s rock and roll.” Oh, that’s a lot of baloney. I’ve had moments where I’m like, “What’s next?” I mentioned I do these courses with LinkedIn Learning and, Pete, like you, I’ve spoken my whole life. I speak in front of audiences all the time, and sales meetings through the years, 500 people, 300 people, whatever.

I’m out at LinkedIn’s studios out in California, and I’m ready to tape a course and, all of a sudden, my knees start shaking. And I’m thinking, “Wait a minute, I know how to do this.” But my confidence was a little unsure because it was a new step for me, something new to me. And the trick though is then being able to overcome that and realizing, “You know what, I have done this before. I have been successful in this before.” And I said, I took a deep breath, did a little spin around the block, so to speak, in the studio, and then we’re ready to roll.

But I think people need to hear, if you’re new to business or even if you’ve been in business for 10 years, 15 years, you’re going to have moments where your confidence is rocked. And the trick is how to overcome it, and you go back to your strengths, which again, for me, are the basics – planning and preparation, working with people, understanding people, and so forth. And, again, that ties back to some degree just my philosophy of business, and it starts off with being good to people.

People say, “Is that a business skill?” I can’t tell you, Pete, how many people come up to me and it’s a good feeling, “Hey, Dean, you’re so nice. You’re nice to people.” Well, how hard is that? But it differentiates me from a lot of people. I say hello. “Why, is that a business skill?” How many times have you walked down the hallway, Pete, and somebody looks at you and they just grunt or they don’t look at you at all? Does that happen?

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yeah.

Dean Karrel
So, people say, “Well, Dean, you always say hello.” “Wow, there’s an MBA course. Dean says hello.” You know what I mean? But that’s part of my philosophy. If you’re a B student, you got to work hard, and that’s one of my messages often, it’s work ethic. So, I sound like everybody’s grandfather here, but you have to have a good work ethic. And, to me, that’s a basic skill. It’s integrity, character, reputation, credibility. I mean, these are, to me, are cornerstones of being successful in business that they don’t teach at any school.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Dean, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Dean Karrel
Well, the last message is it’s like you always have to know your priorities. And what really matters, you know, at the end of the day our families have to come first. So, we all talk about we want to be the most successful business person, “I want the corner office,” or, “I want to make more money,” but at the end of the day, it’s knowing your priorities. And what really matters in life and I think family comes first.

I worked my tail off throughout my career but at the end of the day I’m proud that I didn’t miss some of my son’s events, I didn’t miss my daughter’s basketball games, and I think that’s a message that we all talk about, but I think we all need to follow and follow even better.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dean Karrel
Well, it ties in with business, and the quote side of it is that, “The true test of a person’s character is what he does when no one is watching.” And I think that ties in with my basics, being good to people, and being who you want to be. Can you look at yourself in the mirror and be happy with what you’re seeing? So, John Wooden actually has that quote, which I don’t like using sports people for quotes, but it’s his is such a good one. “The true test of an individual’s character is what they do when no one is watching.”

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Dean Karrel
I’m a big believer in I wish I had taken more psychology classes in college and afterwards. And I’ve done that later on. And I’m a believer in emotional intelligence. So, Daniel Goleman’s studies on emotional intelligence. There’s other great studies, Travis Bradberry’s EQ 2.0. I think how we follow human nature, human behavior, I think those are all valuable skills for all of us to learn in business. And I think those are studies that I really enjoy.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Dean Karrel
Two of them. One is, and this might surprise you, coming back from the sales industry, but it goes back to when I was a kid. I read Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. And just the trauma that this individual went through, the struggles that he went through, and I actually wrote to Arthur Miller, and it goes back to being good to people. Arthur Miller wrote me back, and I was a high school kid. So, that book had an impact on me and my life.

And there’s a business book that I recommend to everybody and I think it’s essential reading, it’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. And it’s 200 pages, inexpensive book. It’s worth everybody’s time to read. I think it’s a really valuable book of how you work in an organization, work with teams, and how you need to get things done.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Dean Karrel
I love my iPad, I love my iPhone. I don’t use them 24 hours a day but it keeps me organized, it keeps me on top of things, and I use them for all of my chores. Going back to your Excel question, I live on Excel too, I keep everything organized. I’m an organize freak. I drive people nuts with that that I used to work with because I’m really organized. Because if I don’t stay organized, I find myself going crazy. So, this keeps me focused is when I have all of my tasks, my to-do list.

You’ve had a number of people on your podcast talk about being organized and having things and journals and notes. Well, I agree with that, so those tools and everything that I can use that can help me stay focused, I think, is valuable for me.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote is back to you often?

Dean Karrel
Everybody always says to me, “Dean, you always talk about planning and preparation.” I also talk about you have to believe in yourself. Because, again, I have had moments where I’m like, “What’s this all about? And what am I doing?” And we all go through that at various stages of our life, in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond. So, my nugget is you’ve got to believe in yourself. And not every day is going to be perfect.

And on my work now as a coach with people, I see rollercoasters that people are on, and it’s like, “Oh, man.” There’s a fine line, as you know, Pete, between coaching and being a psychologist, and I have to put the barrier up sometimes. And you see people that are really going through some struggles in their business careers, and I always go back, you have to believe in yourself and go back to the things that work for you, which ties into mastering the basics. And then the other nugget that everybody I’ve ever trained and worked with is family comes first, that I’ve already mentioned that. It’s so true.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Dean Karrel
Well, I have a website, you know, TheSkyridgeGroup.com but, frankly, what I’m on every day, and I post a couple of times a week, is on LinkedIn. I urge people to follow me. I post videos that are a minute, two minutes long. And I had one yesterday about the importance that we have to have of following up with people who are looking for jobs, or people who write to you and say, “I need help looking for jobs.” And sometimes we duck those calls and sometimes we don’t respond to those emails. So, on LinkedIn, I have posts and videos that are up all the times. I would actually direct folks, follow me there. I think you’ll like what I have to talk about.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Dean Karrel
Well, it sounds like a catchphrase but you always have to be learning. I went back to college at a later stage of my career, four years ago, and it was the best thing I ever did. I went back to New York University, NYU, I took courses in human resources management, two exceptional professors, and I was with people there half my age.

So, always be learning, always look for new opportunities. You don’t have to take the MBA course. Take any course. Read. You got to read books. You got to take a seminar. Listen to these podcasts. If you pick up two tidbits, three pieces of information, what a great investment of your time. And my challenge is, to everybody, never stop, whether you’re 20, 40, 60 or 80. It’s always going to pay you dividends.

Pete Mockaitis
Dean, thanks for this and I wish you all the luck with your mastering of basics and your many other adventures.

Dean Karrel
Pete, I really enjoyed speaking to you and I’m excited for every podcast obviously, but you’re getting close to number 500, so you can count on me there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you.

Dean Karrel
Thank you again.

May 06
0

435: Building Trust and a Powerhouse Team with Kristine Lilly and Dr. John Gillis

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Kristine Lilly and John Gillis say: "Wearing the same jersey does not make a team."

Legendary soccer player Kristine Lilly and researcher Dr. John Gillis share the 13 tactics of a powerhouse team, whether in sports or business.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The 13 tactics that make a powerhouse team
  2. The most common mistakes teams make
  3. How to build trust in a team

About Kristine and John

Kristine Lilly is an expert on effective teamwork. She consults with organizations, providing lessons gleaned from her remarkable career as a professional athlete. Lilly played midfielder for the United States Women’s National Soccer Team for over twenty-three years. This included five FIFA World Cups and three Olympic Games. She was inducted into the US Olympic Hall of Fame in 2012 and the US Soccer Hall of Fame in 2014. Before that, she won four national championships at The University of North Carolina.

Kristine lives outside Boston with her husband, David Heavey, a Brookline firefighter. They “team together” to raise two amazing daughters, Sidney and Jordan.

Dr. John Gillis, Jr. facilitates executive leadership development using a dynamic business simulation for LeadershipX. As a management consultant, he has worked for IBM, Accenture, Center for Creative Leadership, and The Conference Board. He did his doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and Wharton Business School. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Lynette and their four children: Jack, Rylan, Caroline, and Mary Claire.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Kristine Lilly and John Gillis Interview Transcript

Kristine Lilly
For women for the span of – if you look at 1991 was our first World Cup till 2004, which some of the – Mia, and Julie and Brandi retired. Those eight to ten years, we won two World Cups, two gold medals, came in third twice and won one silver.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Kristine Lilly
Not to say we won every tournament, but if you look at – and if you go further on, the worst place we’ve done in any competition with the US Women’s National team is getting out in the quarter finals of I believe it was the – what Olympics? ’96, 2012, ’16. They lost in the quarter finals. Every other big event with the US Women’s National team participating either got first, second or third.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Kristine Lilly
So we won. We won a lot. We worked hard to be successful and really amazing group of women that I played with during my time and obviously now. The team continues to win, which hopefully, is due to a good foundation that was set early on with the National team.

Pete Mockaitis
That is awesome. That is quite the track record, so I want to hear how you did it. I understand much of this is packaged in the book, Powerhouse. Maybe you could orient us to what’s the big idea in the book?

Kristine Lilly
Well, basically, when John and I talked about it, I would share the stories about the team and he couldn’t – I think, John, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think he had an idea of the US team, but I don’t think he really knew the history of what we accomplished. Then I finally shared a movie with him called Dare to Dream that was on HBO. I said, “Just watch this.”

Then he got a history of the team and he was really impressed with the team. Then we talked a lot about business and how a business needs to come together and work as a team like these sports teams to be successful. He’s like, “You’ve got such a great story here. Why don’t we share it?” That’s where we are with how we got this book going and sharing all these great stories of the US Women’s National team while paralleling it to business tactics as well.

John Gillis
Pete, if I could just add on. As a spectator and a fan of the team I got to watch when they were winning the gold medals in the World Cup Championships. But then when Kristine and our families became friends and she’d tell some of the stories behind the scenes and all the effort, the practice before the performance and what they did to prepare themselves so that the team would be successful.

Those are the stories that I think are so relevant that Powerhouse shares some insight into those stories, not that you’re just seeing the team win, but what it takes to actually build that effective team so that they put themselves in position to win. Those stories that Kristine was sharing set through the years that I’ve known her, that’s what we really wanted to share and then say how does that apply to business.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. You’ve got 13 tactics in the book. Could you give us a quick overview of what are the 13 tactics?

Kristine Lilly
Right. I think if you’re first wondering why 13, that was the jersey number I wore for the US team. We’re trying to keep that kind of personally cute and connected to my career. We have 13 tactics. We’re not reinventing the wheel on teamwork or anything. We’re just trying to emphasize if you put these tactics together that they can help you be successful.

What’s really cool about this book too is we’ve broken them down into groups of three. Obviously there’s one underlying theme throughout this whole book, which is our last chapter called Doing the Right Thing. Each group of three is under a different category or pillar. We have transform, empower, achieve and motivate. We’re using the word team to create those words.

Each pillar has different tactics. The first one we have selecting your team members, align the team’s directions, score a goal, would be transforming a team.

Obviously you get into empower, so we’re setting the team foundation, leading the team, and then serving on international teams because, obviously, the game is global for soccer and obviously, business and corporations are global as well.

Then our next one is achieve and you have learn teamwork, communicate with the team, and handle team conflicts. Then the last pillar motivate, you have chemistry, cultivating your team ethos and a winning mentality.

When I look at all these things, it’s really powerful when all those components come together and what the team can accomplish. I think when we talked earlier about the success of the US Women’s National team, all these components were on fire, all these components were working. There wasn’t something lacking in any of them when we were successful. I think that’s the difference in a good team dynamic and one that’s not as successful.

Pete Mockaitis
And in business environments, what would you say is something that is most frequently not working within that lineup?

John Gillis
I’ll jump in here and just highlight that Kristine mentioned that we’re not recreating the wheel, but at the same time, Pete, every business that I go to and I’ve been doing management consulting my whole career for decades. I go all over the globe looking and talking to companies and time and time again you see where there’s dysfunctions within the company.

Even though we recognize that teamwork and being effective in our teamwork will help provide a competitive advantage, each organization if you go to an individual at a company and say, “Hey, tell me about teamwork at this company,” most people will tell you a story in the negative. They’ll tell you what’s going wrong, why there isn’t effective teamwork.

Even though the question is “Tell me about teamwork at the company,” most people just have a negative experience with it. We’ve always known for years that teamwork can help a company succeed both as far as the teams working effectively, but how that contributes to the bottom line and making profitability, but yet, companies continue to struggle in that.

Through the 13 and really looking at assessing your company with some key questions at the end of every chapter, it’s saying let’s self-identify and self-assess where our team is strong, but where we have opportunities to improve so that we’re not one of those companies that’s saying when someone asks you, “Tell me about teamwork,” that we answer in the negative.

We want people to be able to go through the 13 teamwork tactics and be able to answer in the positive and say, “This is why our team is strong.”

Pete Mockaitis
Within those negative answers, what do you find most often? You mentioned you’ve got an assessment with the questions at the end of each chapter, so you can get to the particulars for your given organization. But what are the ones that you’re seeing most commonly folks are falling down on?

John Gillis
I’ll go first and then I’ll let Kristine jump in here in her experience. But I find that each company is unique and different, but yet if you have to highlight some of those, it really comes down to a breakdown in trust, a breakdown in role clarity and a breakdown in accountability.

We see team loafers that are there pulling down the other team members because their roles aren’t clear, they don’t have accountability for executing their work deliverable and so the overall trust among team members breaks down because of that role clarity and the accountability. Kristine?

Kristine Lilly
Yeah, it’s not ironic, but I think it’s similar on the sports side of it as well. Trust is a huge thing and knowing what your role is and accepting it and diving into it. Because a lot of times you may have a position on the field or in the office that you don’t agree with, but if you want to have your job and you want to help your group or your organization be successful, you’ve got to hunker down and do your job that it is and accept and go with it.

I think John was spot on with the business side of it, similar with the team side. Trust is a huge component for team members on our team. We had that throughout.

I think the other one I would add in there would be communication. Usually when I look at a game that we played and we haven’t been successful or we’re not being cohesive, we’re not finding the rhythm together, the field is really quiet. When we start talking and we’re communicating a little bit better, it changes the flow of the game. I think communication is a big part of it as well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting correlation that you noticed in terms of actual experience that when things aren’t going well, it’s quiet.

Kristine Lilly
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And when things are going better, it’s not quiet with regard to speaking up. I can certainly see times where that happens.

John, I was intrigued by the interrelationship that you point out there in terms of when there’s a lack of role clarity and/or accountability, you’ve got some loafers, folks who aren’t doing much, and then trust is eroded in terms of I guess the other folks are taking a look at the loafers like, “What the heck? This isn’t fair.” It’s a real knot of unpleasantness. Tell me what are some of your top tips to facilitate some additional role clarity and accountability and trust?

John Gillis
Pete, you nailed it on the head. I think most people that are listening to this podcast would be nodding their head and saying, “Oh yes, I remember at this company or the company I’m at now or the company I was at a decade ago, I remember that team loafer and how it really did erode the trust.”

One of the things that we try to highlight in Powerhouse, it’s not just here’s the areas where teams might have issues, but how do we go about building trust. When you get to that section of the book, it’s looking at those steps as far as the benevolence, the openness, the honesty that’s going to help create trust.

As we talked about ahead of time, most of this book, if not all of it, it’s all evidence based. We researched trust. We researched accountability. We researched roles. We wanted to give people not only here’s issues that might come up, but here’s some research-backed approaches that you can use if your team is having a trust issue.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to hear what are some of the most impactful practices or activities, things to do when you find yourself in those shoes?

Kristine Lilly
With our sports team, one of the biggest changes in our team was when we hired a skills coach. We had Dr. Colleen Hacker join our team and she changed our group in a sense where we found everything we needed within each other, but it was really finding that path to connect with everybody and accept everyone for who they are and know that everyone had a role. I think that really was a change for us.

We would practice different things, whether it was team-building exercises, where we had to do to the typical fall back and your teammates got to catch you. Every time you do that, you’re still wondering are they going to catch you. But you build that trust and you see that. That was a big change in our team and bringing out the trust of the group and really helping us connect.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting. Kristine, you’re saying that you did on numerous occasion these trust fall exercises and that was genuinely helpful?

Kristine Lilly
It was. It totally was because you still wonder if someone’s going to catch you. You’ve got to trust in that. They were there always. Sometimes a little laughter or maybe they caught you a little late, but they still caught you.

There were different exercises that helped build that or different ways that someone could step up and lead in different activities we did that maybe they were quieter on the field, but then you came to this tactical game and they started to step it up so that gave them the confidence to be like, “Oh, I do have a voice and people will listen.”

John Gillis
Pete, I think it’s really critical here that Kristine gave a great example. Finding the right team building activities for your audience, not – a trust fall might be perfect for your audience or it might not be the right activity.

In the book we talk about business simulations and we talked about coaching. We walk through several activities that you can do for team building because you have to find the right one for your audience.

One other story that Kristine shared in the book that I think was critical is that different activities are going to allow different players or different team members an opportunity to shine. You’re giving different platforms for people to step up and take leadership roles.

Kristine had talked about specific activities where a team member that might have been quiet in one activity was able to shine in another. It really allows that trust building to come through different environments and scenarios.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. We talked a little bit about some of the problems and interventions. I’d also like to get your take when it comes to the thing that makes the biggest difference in terms of boy, with this you see a whole lot of power in terms of teamwork and performance getting enhanced. I’d be curious to get each of your takes on is there one of the tactics that is perhaps the most impactful.

Kristine Lilly
I think when you look at building a team and becoming a powerhouse, I think if you don’t have all these, you’re not going to be as strong. But I do think if I look at one area that really helped us, I would say this is from ’91 to ’99 when we won two World Cups and then the first gold medal in the Olympics and then came in third in one game, our leadership was unbelievable.

When I look at a component of a team is you have to have good leadership from your top coaches down to the bottom. That’s really important to have that going for you. Carla Overbeck was one of our captains and the leadership that she provided along with Julie Foudy was incredible.

The one thing in the book that she has a quote in the book, she says, “Our whole team was based on servant leadership.” What I love about that is Carla was the first one – she was our captain and everyone respected her – she would be the first one to pick up the balls or pick up the cones or do the hard work when, in highlight, when you look at anything that some of those players would just walk by it.

We genuinely cared about each other and genuinely wanted to make each other better, so we served each other to help that happen. I think leadership role from top all the way down was just so important in that timeframe.

Pete Mockaitis
So you mentioned the servant leadership piece and going ahead and doing some of the grunt work, the not so glamorous stuff, picking up the cones and balls and such, could you share what are a couple of other things that come to mind that make that leadership incredible?

Kristine Lilly
Well, I think when I stepped on the field with these women, we all were similar mentality, had the same goal set. We wanted to be the best in the world. But obviously there were times when you weren’t at your top and you’re struggling or technically you’re not on and your head goes down.

The greatest example I can share with you about Carla and how well she led us and how balanced she was with how she spoke to us, was if your head was down, she wasn’t like yelling at you, “Let’s go.” She’s be like, “Kristine Lilly, we need you.” Immediately you’re like, “All right. They need me. Even if I’m crappy right now, they need me.”

Then on the other side is when you’re doing well and you’re tearing it up, Carla would be the first one like, “Lil, that’s the way to go.” You have a leader that knew how to help each individual player out there and get the best out of them at the highest moment and at the lowest moment. I think that’s why Carla was so amazing in that sense.

Julie Foudy was our other captain and she balanced that out with humor and passion. You have two people leading us in different ways, but getting the best out of us at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us some examples of the humor and passion that really made an impact for you in the leadership realm?

Kristine Lilly
Yeah. Well, Jules was our vocal leader. She always wanted the ball, so she was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and half the time she had two players – three players on her, like, “Jules, I’m not giving you the ball.” That would make you laugh a lot.

But there was one play in the World Cup, in the ’99 World Cup when we won, where I headed the ball off to …, which we talk about in the book. After the play happens, I’m running out of our penalty box, we just cleared it, I’m running next to Jules and we look at each other and she’s like laughing and we’re both thinking in our heads “Did that really just happen?” We were just laughing at that moment.

I’m like, holy cow, we’re in the World Cup final. Overtime. We almost lost the game and we find a moment where we can laugh. That’s what was so great with Jules is the humor was always there to remind us this isn’t life or death. This is a soccer game. You’ve got to enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
I really like that notion of if you’re feeling lame and underperforming, to hear your name and we need you as opposed to any number of other things you can yell out, like, “Come on. Get it together. What’s wrong with you?”

Kristine Lilly
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Dozens to choose from, but I cannot think of something that would be more kind of uplifting in terms of getting a quick refocus then hearing your name and we need you.

Kristine Lilly
Yeah, it was pretty powerful to be honest with you.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig that.

John Gillis
Pete, I know that you come from the business world like I do and how many times has someone come up beside you in the business world and said, “Hey, Pete, we need you.” It just doesn’t happen as much. Even though I can point to the times in my career where it has because they’re few and far between, but they mean so much to me when someone comes on and picks me up in the corporate setting.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly and you feel valued in that midst. I think it’s …, rather than saying that, we’re just kind of ticked off that someone’s not doing what they’re supposed to do. Instead of thinking, “Oh, we need you,” it’s “Well, hey, who else can I shift this too who’s not going to let me down and make me angry?”

John Gillis
Exactly. That memory of teamwork where you have the social … that really impacted you.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love it, so as you teach this stuff and you’re sharing the good word and helping the teams to perform all the better, what are some particular mistakes, some things that people struggle with when they’re trying to put it into practice?

Kristine Lilly
Well, I think if you look at sports teams, business is they talk about it and talk about it and they tend not to put it into action. If there’s a way that you’re supposed to handle conflict and your leadership kind of just brushes it under the rug and talks about “Oh, everything’s transparent,” and then brush it under the rug, you lose respect and you lose trust immediately.

I think being consistent with what your ideas are, your values are, what your per se rules are, and staying true to them. I think that’s any kind of team, a business, any organization, your family as well, letting know what all the rules of the house are or guidelines that we all go through.

But I think really putting everything into practice is really where I think people falter. On the sports field definitely I feel that. We just don’t execute each thing we have set out to do, but I think in the business world that can be one of the parts that people can struggle with. They do a lot of talk, but they don’t put in to action.

John Gillis
I think, Pete, one of the reasons that it’s not going into action is that most people if you talk to them, they’ll say, “Hey, I’m a good team member. It’s that other person that’s not a good team member.” We don’t realize our own blind spot. We’re not self-aware or we’re not team aware.

I think it really requires that trust and that openness and communication to say, “Hey, I need to acknowledge where I’m a strong team member and I need to acknowledge where I’m not so that I can work on that,” because no one on the team thinks that they are not an effective team member.

They might think that they are, but it’s being team aware of how you fit in to the team and how you can better impact the team in a positive way and then acknowledge and work on the areas where you might be pulling the team down.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

John Gillis
One last thing that I would just highlight here is that Kristine mentioned that her number was 13 and there’s 13 chapters. She talked about the four pillars, transform empower, achieve and motivate. When we were structuring the book, it’s not that there’s one that’s more important than the other. All 13 really are critical.

You have the four pillars, and of course, the foundation that she talked about earlier, doing what is right. That’s a foundation for the other 12 chapters. Each one is critical and you can’t really ignore one and highlight the other because then you’re going to have a gap on your team.

Kristine Lilly
I think what I add to the process of writing this book with John when we were figuring out what all the chapters and who to talk to and obviously I was thinking of my teammates and once we figured out where we wanted to go with the people, once I started to reach out to them, they all were like, “Sure, when do you need me?”

It just reiterated why this book is so important because immediately I asked all these women that are super busy in their lives and they immediately were making time to do the interview to share their insight on the success of the US Women’s National team and just made it more prevalent how great that team was and how great the team continues to be because they do for others. I thought that was pretty cool.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Thank you. Well, now could you share with me a favorite quote? If one of you has one and the other one doesn’t, that’s totally fine for each of these fast faves. But yeah, what is something you find inspiring?

Kristine Lilly
A favorite quote of mine just in general?

Pete Mockaitis
Yup.

Kristine Lilly
I think one of the quotes that I always resort back to is an Emerson quote, “What lies before us and what lies after us are small compared to what lies within us.” I think when I look at my career and being part of the team, there’s always so much more you can give from yourself. If you look at the sports world, you spend your time like, “Oh, I can’t run anymore. I can’t do it,” but you can.

There’s always something more we can give to others and to our self to be better. That quote always resonates with me in life when I choose to do something and I’m feeling real rundown or a bit tired, I’m like, “No, I can do more.” That’s always for the bigger picture. It’s for others. It’s for your team. It’s for you to be better.

John Gillis
I love Kristine’s deep quote. I was just going to highlight that at the beginning of each chapter we pick a quote from one of those players that Kristine just mentioned and put it at the beginning of the chapter. But the introduction, the quote that we lead off with is “Wearing the same jersey does not make a team.”

I think so many times in the business world we say “Hey, this group of people, they’re a team because they all work for Company X,” or “They’re all in Department X,” or whatever reason we say, “You’re a team,” but yet, quite frankly, they have the same name across their jersey, the department or the company, but yet they don’t operate as a team.

Even though we put the team moniker on lots of groups of individuals, it’s really a team in name only. They’re not collaborating. They’re not building trust. They’re not having open communication. They don’t have clear goals and responsibilities.

We really need to – the word ‘team,’ that moniker, is thrown around quote a bit, when actually groups of individuals aren’t working together effectively as a team. I love that quote, “Wearing the same jersey does not make a team.”

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

John Gillis
Kristine, are you letting me take this one?

Kristine Lilly
No, I’m letting you take this one, John. You just busted on my sweet quote, my deep thoughts with Kristine Lilly here.

John Gillis
I love the deep thoughts of Kristine Lilly.

Kristine Lilly
I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.

John Gillis
Pete, one of the great things here is the team that wrote this book, so you have Kristine at the beginning of her chapter sharing these wonderful soccer stories and you have Dr. Lynette Gillis that did a lot of academic research that plays into the book so that it’s evidence based. Then I provided the management consulting experience with numerous companies across all sorts of different industries.

The research is really throughout, but the one that I’m going to highlight for you on that question because we did every chapter there’s research, but yet the one I think that people might not think about as much is the network centrality and really saying that when you look at your team, you need to figure out where the center point is.

For a lot of teams that might be the leader. Kristine talked earlier about Julie Foudy and Carla, but on some teams it’s not necessarily the person at the top. That central part of a team could be the person where people go to for information, for guidance, for direction, for know-how, for knowledge, for historical comparisons, that they are the central part that the team members go to in order to get work done effectively.

Understanding who has influence on a team, especially if it’s not the formal leader, but yet that informal leader, I think that’s a critical aha moment that the research provided in this book to say when you look at your team, don’t just look at the leaders, but look at the informal leaders, those that are central that have influence among your team members.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Thank you. How about a favorite book?

John Gillis
Well, I can tell you, when we were writing this, there’s several authors that came to mind that we really admire and wanted to model after. Those, Sheryl Sandberg, with her book Lean in and Option B and of course her co-author there, Adam Grant that also wrote Give and Take. You look at Malcolm Gladwell and his evidence-based approach to look in at psychology and workplace culture.

A lot of those writers and authors are the ones that we really looked at it and tried to model some of this writing after. Obviously, that’s a high standard but we wanted to give that evidence … based approach similar to Jim Collins in Good to Great and give people a book that they could go to their business teams and their organizational teams and say, “Wow, this is not only entertaining, but I learned a lot and can apply to my business.

All those authors I just mentioned I feel like when I read their books, that’s what I felt. That hey, it was entertaining and I know that I can go and apply this immediately. I can pick up the book at the airport, read it on the airplane and when I get to the worksite, I can immediately apply it because it was not only entertaining, it was immediately practical and applicable. Kristine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Kristine Lilly
Favorite tool, awesome at my job. I don’t know. I think for me – obviously my career playing my tools were my feet. They keep me going on the field. I think now we have a company with Mia Hamm and Tish Venturini called TeamFirst Soccer Academy. We travel around the country teaching kids about the game, but also about the passion and love that we shared for it and how to be a good teammate and obviously, how to work together as a team.

I think for me, my tool is just communication for me within my co-founders, also friends and then the staff we bring along with us to be able to communicate with them to get the best of them for the day on the field with the kids or whatever it may be and to make sure there’s fun involved because the reason why we played sports or play sports is because it is fun.

When you get into the world where now you’re trying to make money and run a business, I think there still needs an element of enjoying what you do. I think if I look back at my coaches that I had in the National team from Anson Dorrance, one of the first coaches of the US team and then Tony DiCicco took after him. He passed away almost a few years ago now.

He used to come to the field – Tony would come out to the field and he used to stand in the middle of the field, put his hands up in the air and he would just say, “I love my job.” We’d be like, “Yeah, yeah, Tony. We know. We know you love your job.” But it kind of – it stayed with me and a lot of the players that one thing we remember about Tony was him saying that.

But the fact was he really did love his job and we could tell he loved his job because how he taught us, how he communicated with us, how he was passionate about everything from the field stuff to caring about us. I think that’s a pretty powerful thing when you love something and if you can be passionate and spread that love and be contagious, that’s a great tool to have in your pocket.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit?

Kristine Lilly
John, do you got any favorite habits? I had a whole routine for my game.

John Gillis
Kristine’s habits are fantastic.

I think the habit is knowing where your strengths are and where someone else’s strengths are so that you can leverage your strengths for effective teamwork. In this case, I was more the cheerleader for the girls and the email guy to organize the parents, knowing that Kristine and her coaching would give them all the soccer tactics that any five-, six-, seven-year-old girl would need to know at that level.

The habit for me for effective teamwork is knowing your strengths and capitalizing those, but also recognizing where your team member has more strengths than you so that effectively the team as a whole is stronger.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget that you share in the book that really seems to connect and resonate with audiences and you hear it quoted back to you frequently?

Kristine Lilly
Well, I don’t know if there’s just one nugget. I think for myself when I worked on this with John and read it over again, I think obviously the one thing that comes over and over in our minds is the word ‘team.’ I know that’s what it’s about, but even with our four pillars – transform, empower, achieve, and motivate – are all from the word team.

What I’ve learned throughout my career and pretty much in life and everything, you can’t do anything alone. You need people. People need people, but people also want people. People want to be a part of a team. They want to be a part of a group and feel like they’re valued.

I think the team concept is so powerful that individually, you just can’t necessarily do all that you want sometimes. I think the team is great. I would say the word ‘team’ is pretty much used a lot in this book and one that resonates with everybody and really resonates with me because I was part of such a wonderful team.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome.
Oh great. Thank you. If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Kristine Lilly
For me, you can go to KristineLilly13.com to reach out to me. Also, go to Amazon to preorder the book, which will come out May 7th, but is available to preorder now. John can share his contact info.

John Gillis
JohnGillisJr.com. Kristine’s speaking, we have training workshops and just thrilled for everyone to join this Powerhouse training with us.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Kristine Lilly
Well, I think first off, recognizing what your part of your organization and what you’re trying to accomplish as a team is the first step. I think once you have that and you can embrace your teammates and find the strength within each other and the familiarities and the common mindset, then you can do great things.

I think back to why the teams were successful when we did win championships. It was a group of women coming together that were likeminded, strong, competitive, feisty, wanted to tear people apart on their way to success, but, in the same sense, doing it together, working your role and figuring out what you need to do to help the whole unit be successful.

When that happens, you’re in the zone. It goes back to the sport’s thing going, people in the zone, they don’t hear anything, they’re confident, and they’re going to make whatever shot they’re going to do right now happen.

John Gillis
I would say from my charge, we can all reflect back on our careers and know the successful teams that we were on and then the groups of individuals that were teams in name only.

Yet, when we were naming this book, we didn’t have Powerhouse when we started writing the book, but then someone said, “You need to name this book Powerhouse because the definition is a team having great energy, strength and potential for success.”

When you look back and say in your career where was the powerhouse that I was on, the team with energy, strength, and potential for success, and what can I do in today’s team to help us be a powerhouse.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Kristine, John, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much for sharing the good word. I wish you much luck with your coaching and teaching and book and all the fun you’re up to.

Kristine Lilly
Thank you, Pete, for having us. We appreciate it.

John Gillis
We really do. Thanks for it. It’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, well that is the recording. Good deal, thanks a lot.

Kristine Lilly
Thank you so much. That was great. We appreciate it.

Mar 18
0

414: How Culture Change Really Happens with Gretchen Anderson

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Gretchen Anderson says: "Everybody wants a culture that's aligned with what the business is trying to do."

Gretchen Anderson provides research insights on cultural shift from her work at the Katzenbach Center.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The four elements critical to a work culture
  2. The role of the critical few in an organization
  3. How to leverage the behavior you already have for the bette

About Gretchen

Gretchen Anderson is a director at the Katzenbach Center who has been working  with client teams across the globe for over 15 years. Gretchen has a doctorate in literature from Stanford University and currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with her two children, Jane and Calvin. Her new book is The Critical Few: Energize Your Company’s Culture by Choosing What Really Matters.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Gretchen Anderson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Gretchen, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Gretchen Anderson
Hey, how are you, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m doing well. I’m doing well. I think we’re going to have a good time here.

Gretchen Anderson
Great. I’m really looking forward to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your take, first of all, it seems like we’ve got something in common
You and I both listen to podcasts while falling to sleep. I want to hear all about this habit of yours in terms of what are you listening to and how do you do it. What is actually stuck in your ears?

Gretchen Anderson
Yes. For a while I was really into these headphones called SleepPhones. They had a great pajamas for the ears.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh that is nice.

Gretchen Anderson
Which, I loved that name. But then I actually just discovered I could put my iPhone under my pillow and I just let it play.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay. That’s great.

Gretchen Anderson
What about you? What do you do?

Pete Mockaitis
I think I’ve got something called CozyPhones, which sounds similar.

Gretchen Anderson
CozyPhones. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’ve got SleepPhones.

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah. I used to listen to strange recordings in the days before podcasts. Then I would get sick of them. But there’s some sort of perfect middle of the Venn diagram of it has to be interesting enough that it distracts me from my own thoughts, but boring enough that it doesn’t keep me awake. Obviously, Pete, Awesome at My Job is never going to be in that category.

Pete Mockaitis
You know just want to say.

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah. But also I like that the voice is familiar. Sometimes I’ll listen to things on linguistics. Topics that are sort of adjacent to mine and that I find interesting, but are not directly relevant or else my mind will still want to pay attention.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’m intrigued by the SleepPhones. I’ve been using CozyPhones, which are nice, but they have a cord. I see the SleepPhones are wireless.

Pete Mockaitis
Thanks for the tip. I can get wireless there. I like to also listen to podcasts or Blinkist, which has all you book summaries. They’re a sponsor, thanks Blinkist, of the show. Or sometimes a TED talk, just the audio, because that …. You go, “Oh, okay.” Then once one goes, it’s like okay, that’s about the right amount of time. I’ll be asleep now.

Gretchen Anderson
for me if it has a dot of music, it wakes up like a bolt of lightning. Yeah. Honestly, the production values can’t be too high because I can’t have music.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you for digging into that element. You’ve already educated me with something that could be transformational.

Gretchen Anderson
I’m glad. I’m glad. I’m glad. Everyone will be awesome-r at their job if they get a good night’s sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m right with you on there. Can you orient us a little bit? You’re a director at the Katzenbach Center. You do a lot of work associated with company culture and simplifying that. Can you orient us to what do you do and why does that get you jazzed?

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah, so I run a knowledge center within a large consulting firm. I work within PWC. I run a center with a team that is the firm’s kind of incubation engine on topics around culture and leadership and motivation and performance.

Pete Mockaitis
I like all those things.

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah, it’s really fun. I get to have – we do research, we write, we have articles, we publish this book that we’ll be talking about today, and we get to take this very cross industry, cross-the-globe view. PWC is a very, very large global firm. We get to be part of conversations about how ideas and theories, about how culture works in a business context are happening literally everywhere. It’s really fun.

We get to see what’s kind of universal. What’s the common X-factor that’s going to help both a local green construction firm in Baltimore and a giant global technology firm? What’s going to ring true for leaders at both of those organizations? That’s the really fun part about my job.

Pete Mockaitis
That is interesting, yes. You share some of your learnings in your book, The Critical Few. What’s the main message of the book?

Gretchen Anderson
The main message of the book is that culture, just like your strategy and your operating model, can and should be considered as absolutely a problem and an issue and an opportunity that gets leaders out of bed every day and that that motivational piece of the business if tapped and cultivated can be a source of positive energy for whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish.

Pete Mockaitis
Positive energy, I like that. Well, could you maybe give us a picture of that in terms of maybe it’s a case study or a story or example of an organization that went from not so energized to wow, this is great.

Gretchen Anderson
we ground the book within a fictional case study about a CEO, who we call Alex. We did this in part because culture is such an intimate topic for so many organizations.

The book is the story of very much a composite of all the companies we have ever worked with. It’s the story of a fictional company, who has a CEO who’s come in that’s kind of a company in retail.

They’ve got a lot of things going for them, but a lot of things are tough. By working with this leader, we’re able to help him understand that working within and through the culture and the motivations that people have, he’s able to get the best out of that business.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you maybe orient us to what’s it look like when it’s not at its best in terms of the energy and the vibe amongst the people in terms of the daily grind versus the happy place toward the end?

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah. I would say the real switch is that people within an organization before they begin kind of an evolution on culture that’s kind of purposeful and kind of critical few-ish in the way that we describe in the book, at the beginning they’re thinking about culture as something that’s standing in the way of getting work done in the way that they want to get work done.

It’s the thing that people throw their hands in the air and say, “It’s the culture. What are we going to do?” or “I would love to get this done,” or “This keeps happening and it seems like it’s the culture.”

It goes from being something that they feel is out of their control and kind of obtrusive and causing kind of drag to at the end of the book, they feel like there are specific things that they recognize what their culture is, they see it’s sort of core traits of who they are, they see how they came to be that way over time and how they’re not going to change them quickly.

They also understand that by being really precise about the behaviors that more people could do more of every day, by being really precise and really descriptive, by motivating and rewarding when people do those few behaviors, they’re able to start seeing them self-reinforce. They’re able to start see them virally spreading.

The book ends with a scene in a retail store, where the CEO and one of his board members literally watch a guy not knowing he’s being observed helping a customer in a way that he wouldn’t before and sort of attaching that to understanding that he’s part of this new shift in the culture and the direction.

Pete Mockaitis
When we say, “Hey, it’s the culture. It’s out of control. It’s a drag,” can you give us some examples of particular issues or complaints that folks would affix to that? “It’s the culture. It’s out of control. It’s a drag. It is what it is.”

Gretchen Anderson
we hear companies talk about this all the time. These are going to be really familiar to you and your listeners. They’re going to be, “We spend too much time in meetings and nothing ever gets done.” They’re going to be things like, “We’re drowning in a situation where decisions can’t be made without consensus.” It could be, “The way that things are drawn on paper, nobody follows those processes. Everybody bends the rules.” It could be all sorts of things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’d love to hear then sort of what are the four critical elements that you zero in on?

Gretchen Anderson
if I had to sketch the whole thing out for you, it sort of is the overall message of the book and of our approach is you have to be very comprehensive in how you think about what a culture is, but you also have to be willing to just start by looking at a piece of it and focusing in there.

Culture is a kind of ecosystem that includes how people behave, and how they feel, their emotional energy, their mindsets. It also includes specifically how they behave and show up to work together.
You, however, you can’t influence people’s mental states because they’re private, because I can’t tell when they’re changing. But what you can do is you can be very specific about behavior. We talk about behaviors as a point of entry.

We also say the culture of an organization as it exists today is where you need to start from. If you were to say to me, “I want to build a culture that looks like the culture of this wonderful restaurant down the street,” or “I want to build the culture of that technology company that everybody always talks about,”

I would say, “You know what, Pete? The culture of your organization grew up to be that culture for a reason and it supported the way that business has gotten done to date. Let’s figure out where you start from and then we’ll figure out where you’re trying to get to next.”

To bring it back to those four elements – that’s how we talk about that first element of the theory is this idea that every organization has a critical few traits. if we’ve all got the name of the same business on our business card and we all show up and work here and we’re part of this ecosystem, we’re going to share some family resemblance things in common.

Those might be things like a relationship orientation or they might be things like a focus on metrics or faith in our leader or – they’re a set of characteristics that if you met somebody you’d never met before but they both worked in the same company, you’re going to presume that they share.

And importantly, each one of those traits is going to have ways that they’re supporting you getting work done and ways that they’re hurting the work that you need to get done. There’s this notion that there are critical traits and all of those traits have ways that they’re helping and hurting. You can’t change them quickly, so what you might as well do is figure out how to work within them to get more of what you need.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you talk about these traits, do you have sort of a master menu, if you will? I guess when you think of culture sometimes we can think about particular continua or dichotomies, like, “Oh, it’s very relationship oriented versus process oriented.”

Gretchen Anderson
Yup.
It’s always a tension because have you ever talked to any organization that is purely one or the other, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Gretchen Anderson
It’s interesting. We started thinking this way about traits seven or eight years ago. At that time we kind of purpose built them every time. We did a lot of interviews and kind of by hypothesis sort of built up what do we think these traits are after every – we’d have a lot of conversations. Then we started to realize some of these traits seem original to a company, but there’s a lot of ones that we kept seeing over time.

We’ve built a survey-based tool to kind of pull those out. That survey-based tool is definitely on kind of a poll of like “Are decisions made in this organization by consensus or are decisions made by single point of accountability?” “Do I feel I’m rewarded only for the financial metrics I deliver or do I feel that there are a broader set of points on which I’m evaluated?”

Very few organizations are going to fall far to the left or fall to the right. There’s definitely like a kind of spectrum quality to where organizations show up.

Pete Mockaitis
I love when you get really specific that way in terms of, hey, decisions can go one way or the other and sort of somewhere along the lines and then they how you get rewarded also. Can you unpack a few more of those dimensions?

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah, sure. We also think about is it very hierarchical or is it very flat. We think about do things follow the org chart or is everything very loose and informal? It’s those kinds of like, where are the pulls?

Another thing that’s really cool that doing this survey over time, I mentioned we do research the Katzenbach Center. We do longitudinally. Every couple of years we run a survey across organizations that mainly have been our clients basically because we have their emails. But 2,000 people in 50 countries responded to our last survey, so we get a pretty global and kind of cross-industry perspective on how people view these kinds of things as well.

We asked some of those questions and then mapped them to the industries that they answered. We’re even being able to start to say these are the kinds of traits that show up in particular industries.

We are saying yes, every organization kind of has its individual thumbprint, by taking such a close look at each organization, not against some external framework, but sort of in a very intrinsic take it in its own terms way, but by mapping that over time and looking across a lot of organizations, we’re able to see some trends that don’t mean, “Oh, we’re measuring you against our scorecard.” They’re very much built on the organizations own responses.

Does that make sense? You’re kind of wonky like me, I can tell. You’re asking me very detailed questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Because I think the world culture can be a little fuzzy for some.

Gretchen Anderson
For sure.

Pete Mockaitis
In terms of “It’s the way we do things around here. It’s like the vibe. It’s the feel, Gretchen.” I think the more that we make it all the more precise is like, “What I mean by culture is when you make decisions is it more like or more like that? When people are rewarded is it more for this or more for that?” If you have any more kind of extremes or ends of continua, I’d love to hear them.

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah. Well, so some of the things that we’ve had a chance to see – one thing – and it’s actually come up in a couple of difference sources recently. Let’s talk about that spectrum of how we’re rewarded.

Am I, Gretchen Anderson, rewarded as an individual within my company? Do I feel like it’s just going to be metrics? I’m sorry. Do I feel like it’s just going to be financial metrics or do I feel like there are also going to be sort of how I made the people on my team feel and a sort of broader set of metrics?

We did a regression analysis against the 2,000 respondents. A guy in our network said, “It would be really interesting to take that data, do a regression analysis against how proud I feel to work where I work.” The highest correlation in any of those scores and questions we asked, the highest correlation was “Are my metrics broad?”

I thought that was really nice because I sort of know that intuitively. It feels better to me as an individual to feel as if my whole self – how I mentor people – it feels good to me as an individual to feel as if a broad set of metrics are applied to my performance than just one specific one.

But I really liked that our data – because we didn’t ask, “Do you your metrics make you feel good?” or whatever. We actually just did that correlation. That was really nice.

Then similarly, PWC has done a survey outside of the Katzenbach Center, a survey called Digital IQ. They did an external analysis based on market data of companies that are most innovative in a digital space, like highest digital innovation that they looked at externally rather than by asking them, “Are you digitally innovative?” It was a set of external market criteria. And then found broader performance metrics tended to correlate as well to higher digital innovation.

I thought that was cool. I try to take a point of view on culture. We try, within the Katzenbach Center, to say we’re not saying any kind of culture is all good or all bad and we’re not saying, “Look, here’s our scorecard of good culture. Take the survey. Uh-oh, you only got an eight.” That is not what we’re doing at all. We’re really trying to take every organization on its own terms and encourage them.

This is very much what the book is about. We’re encouraging every organization to look within, figure out what you’re best at, and try to do more of it rather than apply some external measure. But then the nice part is that over time and being very deliberative in this space, we’re able to start to actually say there are some things that we do see and believe really drive the kind of motivation that feels like  everybody wants more of.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear some of those. What are some of the things everyone wants more of?

Gretchen Anderson
What everybody wants is a culture that’s aligned with what the business is trying to do.

We argue the goals should be for if you are trying to do the hard caloric work of evolving your culture, that is about trying to find ways to make sure that individuals working within your company feel there is an alignment between the kind of messages I’m getting and kind of what I’m rewarded for and all of those things feel coherent for me with what I need to do to help this company perform.

In our mind when we’re saying, “You want to work on your culture,” we’re saying that should be your goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Very nice. Then that’s rather thoughtful then in terms of making sure you have that alignment as opposed to for instance, I think let’s say innovation. “Hey, we want to be more innovative. We want to have more ideas. We want to make them happen. But there are sort of behaviors and rewards and bonuses that are tied to never being wrong, for example.”

It’s like, “Oh, well, there you go. I feel kind of disjointed being here and it’s not so fun. Am I supposed to come up with wild ideas, which may or may not work or am I supposed to just sort of do the thing that we all know works, which would not be innovative?”

That’s nifty. Then I’d love to hear then, how do you zero in on particular behaviors and can you give us some examples of behaviors you might zero in on to support something and how you would get those reinforced?

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah, the idea is that those behaviors need to be not chosen at random, but what they need to be is they need to be a bridge between what we understand the culture to be today and where we’re trying to get to.

Let me explain it in the context of I’ve currently been having conversations – a wonderful guy reached out to me, who’s running a green construction firm in Baltimore.

He’s very much talking about “In this world that I’m in, how do I get everybody in my office from the back office staff to the frontline people, to be all more customer-focused, even if they’re not dealing with customers every day?”

We did this really fun workshop with them around given these kind of core traits of who we are, the sort of pride in our business, this sort of attachment to our leader and his vision and these traits of who we are, team oriented, safe and careful—what would customer service behaviors look like that would be grounded in the way we are today, that we all agree would help us kind of outperform our peers in the market on the dimension of customer service, but what might behaviors be?

They talked about like, might a behavior be a dress code, might we have a consistency of style and dress that would mark us as part of this company, that would be appealing? We actually had a wonderful conversation about one of the core traits that had come out in this company was a real organization-wide, autonomy was valued.

We had this amazing conversation about what might a behavior be of we understand how to dress for work that would respect that autonomy trait. We can’t roll something out organization-wide and make it really sound like a heavy new policy without it being tissue rejected by an organization in which people feel like they should be able to make autonomous decisions every day.

Again, none of this is magic, but what I’m trying to sketch and show was that by having these conversations and the ways that we’re grounded and the concepts that we talk about in the book, it kind of framed the right conversations such that they were able to talk about behaviors in a way that felt very realistic and practical and approachable and real.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. So what are they going to do?

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah. What they also decided to do and this is another really core part of the theory is they are going to work with the people in the organization to figure out the right answer. They’re going to work with the people in the organization, we call them the critical few people.

These are the authentic and formal leaders, who have a finger on the pulse of how everybody thinks and behaves there, who sort of intuitively know what the kind of emotional triggers are going to be for people. The leader there has decided to name a couple of those authentic, informal leaders, sort of put the case to them.

Again, I get to go all the way back to this overarching theory that the best that you have in your organization is already inside of it. A lot of times you need to guide an organization to understand that the answer isn’t going to come from something external, but from paying attention to the voices of the people inside.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. As you’re going about doing all of this, are there any particular tips, tricks, do’s, don’ts, key things you find yourself saying frequently as you’re making it happen?

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah, absolutely. A big one is it’s much easier to act your way into new ways of thinking than it is to think your way into new ways of acting. That’s from an author named Jerry Sternin, who wrote a book called The Power of Positive Deviance. We love that quote. This is about a sort of behaviors-first approach to making things happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Now could you give us a couple of examples of behaviors that have just been transformational in terms of you’ve identified this is the thing we’re really going to do and reinforce that just had powerful ripples for organizations?

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah, I could, but I want to pick on that question a little bit because I think innate to this idea is that the things I describe, there isn’t a behavior that is so magical that every organization could pick it up and apply it. It’s an adjustment from “Here’s what we’re doing today and here’s how it could happen better.”

It might be walk the front line and talk to folks every day and listen to what they say or it might be send every meeting invitation being very specific about what the outcomes of the meeting will be. It’s that there’s been energy behind that particular behavior and we’ve kind of agreed that if we commit to it collectively, it’s going to help us get somewhere rather than that there’s a – I wish there was.

If I could change every organization by saying, “There is a behavior and that behavior is hugging.” I would love to say that there is some universal solution or some behavior, but it’s amazing it’s usually the behaviors that organizations come to, it’s very important that they come to that consensus and that they describe those behaviors in language that makes sense to them, but it’s actually kind of hard to pull them out and show why they matter because it’s such an intimate answer.

Pete Mockaitis
I can understand that how for different organizations that, for example, the email meeting requests that are very specific on the outcome.

When you adopt that behavior, some groups would say, “Yes, what a breath of fresh air. That’s what we need so badly because we just meander all over the same place and we waste all this time.” Others would say, “Well duh, that’s how we’ve always done every meeting everywhere, every time, so there’s not a really a change or a gain to be made.”

Others would say, “Why do we need that at all? It’s self-evident. We all know what we’re trying to do here. Just two or three folks get together and we chat about how to bang out the widget better. It’s not that complicated. We don’t really need to do that.” I hear you that different behaviors will be the potent leverage prescription for different organizations.

In terms of how you zero in on what’s the thing for a given organization, it sounds like you identify the traits that you really want and then you talk to the people who are influential and have their finger on the pulse and are emotionally intuitive and with it with folks to see what they’re hearing and what they think would resonate. Are there any other sort of key practices to surface what might the kind of highly leveraged behavior be?

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah, absolutely, but let me make a small correction on what you’re saying. What you do is you leverage not necessarily the traits you really want, but the traits you really have. I know that sounds like such a small distinction, but it really is about you have your aspiration of where you’re trying to get to, but the important part is, you’re trying to ground it in a just where we are today that’s realistic.

Then you understand what we have, you understand what you’re trying to get to, whether that’s customer centricity in my example or in a highly-siloed healthcare organization we were working with recently, we understood that to be collaboration. That was the strategic aspiration that we needed.

But then the really critical thing to do as well is this notion of you choose what you’re going to measure and why. You resist the temptation and the impulse to try to find a comprehensive set of metrics that will measure everything and instead you say,

“When things start to change and feel different around here, where will we actually see that difference and how do we make sure we really pay attention to that and kind of drop a thermometer there such that we’re able to really get beyond people’s natural cynicism that culture can’t change, demonstrate, look, we said upfront there would be this proof point and we have it!” and use that measurement and the reporting of that measurement to be the energy that helps people move forward and move on.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us some examples of measures, so for example, collaboration, what kind of numbers might you put on that?

Gretchen Anderson
There actually was a really cool example from our own firm. We did in the Canadian firm within PWC, they did an organizational network analysis.

Everyone sort of took it as a – this sounds correct that we’re constantly asking partners in a professional services firm to collaborate with other partners outside of their business area. That sounds like a good idea.

But they did an organizational network analysis to figure out who sort of had the densest networks and whose networks stretched across – if I’m a partner in financial services, how well connected I am to partners in other parts of the business. They were actually able to correlate revenue per account to partners that had the strongest network relationships outside of their immediate area.

What a beautiful way to kind of specifically encourage a behavior to say “Let’s look at this behavior. Let’s measure how the networks map to this and let’s actually track it to revenue.” When actual business results can be tracked to something that we’re trying to encourage, that’s always really beautiful.

It’s rare and wonderful when you can come up with one kind of very clear metric like that. Usually we say, “Find every point at which – how many people show up for the program? Do we see an increase in engagement scores around particular issues we’re looking for? What are the things that you measure already and where can we see some kind of lift there?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so it’s nice certainly when you see hey, we want collaboration and we’ve got a nice proof point. Hey, look at this correlation partners who are well-connected with all sorts of different areas are having higher revenue per account, which makes sense because they’re able to recommend cool stuff to their relationships at the accounts. Then what is the behavior that you want folks to do more of when it comes to bringing more collaboration?

Gretchen Anderson
Within that example with the partners, I would probably say, if we want to figure that out I would want to kind of trail the partners who are doing it well.

I would want to trail them and say, “Are you flying to different client’s cities and setting up dinners with partners who you don’t often see even if you’re not on a pursuit together? Are you sitting down every morning and writing ten emails to people in the network?” I think it would look different. We would try to figure out what were people doing that seemed to be most influential and how can we get more people to do more of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. Thank you. Anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things?

Gretchen Anderson
Sure, yeah. I talked a little bit earlier about interesting trends that we saw in our kind of global survey in those results. We had a really from this very, very diverse 2,000 respondents, we had a very interesting thing pop up. Again, it was the sort of thing that we’d known intuitively through many years of working with organizations of different sizes and different maturity levels and industries.

We walk into an organization and we ask the leaders how the culture is and they very often have lots of positive things to say about it. Then when we go further down into the weeds, into middle management, into the frontline, it is definitely a different story and a lot of times kind of that’s where the truth lies. That sounds kind of obvious, but our survey data popped that out so baldly.

When we asked the question, “Do senior leaders have culture as an important topic on their agenda?” if you responded to that in our survey and you identified yourself as a senior leader, you were 71% likely to agree versus only 48% of people who did not identify themselves as being part of the leadership team.

We were like, “Wow, that’s remarkable.” That tendency to use culture more cynically further down in the organization is almost a universal based on our data. We thought that was really cool.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Gretchen Anderson
You’ll like this as a podcast host, from the podcast StoryCorps, I really like the quote, “Listening is an act of love.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Gretchen Anderson
I wish I could remember the author right now – but read an article recently in HBR that was about how we like to believe that open office spaces make people behave in ways that are more collaborative. A huge amount of real estate dollars have been spent on that concept kind of in the past 30 years.

But a guy did a study, a HBR professor did a study using people’s Fitbits to track – there was a major change in an office layout and they tracked by Fitbits before and after how much people got up and walked around and talked to their colleagues. The open office space, paradoxically, made people stay at their desks more.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, is that because you can just talk to someone without moving?

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah, or you’re slightly getting so sick of people that you’ve got your headphones I loved that point just in the sense of what we think in a top-down way is going to cause a certain behavior, is not necessarily what’s going to happen. If those leaders had interviewed everybody about what really would drive collaboration, they might not have started with real estate.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Thank you. How about a favorite book?

Gretchen Anderson
I love a book called Everybody Lies. It is about Google search data. It came out this year. It’s basically about how indirect – the ways that people query in Google forms a sort of more accurate record of predictor of how they’ll behave than kind of direct surveys. I’m getting at really, really interested and feel like the next frontier of culture work has to do around how do you measure behavior not by asking people, “Are you going to behave this way?” but really by indirect forms.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, yeah. Can you give us an example of one way we lie?

Gretchen Anderson
The great example from the book was around – it’s a really obvious one – but if you asked people, “Are you going to vote in an election?” versus if you found out how many people queried the location of their polling site. That second query almost entirely correlated to how many people voted in a certain district versus the question the day before, “Are you going to vote?” obviously a lot more aspirational.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Gretchen Anderson
It’s a good one, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Thank you.

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah. I see that a lot just in talking to leaders about in order to get at culture, you always have to go at it slant. You have to kind of think about what motivates people and what they’re truly going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Gretchen Anderson
That’s such a good question. I’m going to say something surprisingly old fashioned. I can’t survive without a notebook next to me at all times.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Gretchen Anderson
I travel with a yoga mat.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh good.

Gretchen Anderson
I won’t get on an airplane without my folding yoga mat in my bag. I think it’s a good sort of self-reinforcing one.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks? You hear them sort of repeating it back to you frequently?

Gretchen Anderson
I think it would probably be about how most leaders wildly overestimate how rational people are.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s resonating with me.

Gretchen Anderson
….

Pete Mockaitis
Rational in the sense of doing what it is in their best interest or doing what is logical or what do you mean by rational?

Gretchen Anderson
Yeah. I’ve taken this very much many years of working with John Katzenbach, the emotional drivers of how an organization behaves are – I’m not going to say more powerful than the rational ones, but so easy to ignore.

And that really understanding the people’s pride in their work, people’s sense of disenchantment when things feel incoherent, people’s motivation to work with someone who makes them feel good about the work that they do. Those are really powerful reservoirs of energy, but that it is much, much easier and tempting for most leaders to really focus on the rational reasons than be utterly baffled why things don’t line up like that.

Pete Mockaitis
If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Gretchen Anderson
I would point them to the website for the book. It’s TheCriticalFewBook.com. That will also point them to the Katzenbach Center at PWC. There’s a link through to that. You can also follow me on Twitter. I’m at GBrooksAnderson. You can find our book on Amazon.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Gretchen Anderson
I feel like in the many years I’ve been doing this kind of work, I both realized through my own personal experience as well as watching organizations work, I think you need to really pay attention to what gives you the most energy. You need to think about what are the situations in which I feel motivated. Just to find yourself in them more often.

I feel like so many people spend their careers and lives kind of beating themselves up for not feeling that motivation. It’s the quieting down and saying, “What do I feel energy around?” that usually leads you to the question that you and you alone were meant to solve.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely, thank you. Well, Gretchen, this has been fun. Thanks and good luck with all you’re doing there.

Gretchen Anderson
Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. I really appreciate the time.

Dec 21
0

383: Driving Adaptability in your Organization with Michael J. Arena

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Michael J. Arena says: "You can't really have a breakthrough without something to break through."

GM’s Chief Talent Officer Michael J. Arena explores the idea of ambidextrous leadership to help lead your organization in its current state and in its future – at the same time.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Ways to positively disrupt the way you work
  2. Concrete ways to mine the ideas of your organization
  3. Why conflict is essential to the evolution of ideas

About Michael

Michael is the Chief Talent Officer for General Motors (GM), where he launched GM2020, a grass roots initiative designed to enable employees to positively disrupt the way they work, which was highlighted in Fast Company and Fortune. Michael is the author of the book Adaptive Space, which is based on a decade long research initiative that won the 2017 Walker Prize from People + Strategy.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Michael J. Arena Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Michael J Arena
Thanks Pete. I’m looking forward to this.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh me too, me too. Well you’ve got what sounds to be to me like a pretty fun job as the chief talent officer at General Motors. Can you orient us a little bit to what does that mean in practice?

Michael J Arena
In essence it’s really about how do you optimize human capital across the overall corporation, so how do we bring in the best people possible. In short, I’d like to say, how do we bring in the best people possible and then bring the best out in those people. That’s all about human capital and how do we get those people positioned to be able to leverage what they know. Yeah, it’s quite fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Now in practice over the last few years you’ve been doing a lot of bringing out the best in people it sounds like. If you look at sort of the financial picture at General Motors in 2009, they’re filing for bankruptcy and now you’ve got some great profits. The business press would point to cultural shifts as being an essential part of making that transformation.

Could you give us a little bit of the behind-the-scenes or in-the-middle-of-things narrative for how this came to be and the human capital pieces play into it?

Michael J Arena
Yeah, absolutely. Just to clarify, I joined the company in 2012, so I can tell you – I can describe that journey from that point forward and more precisely around this role here in HR. I do think it’s about culture. It’s certainly – it’s been quite the journey.

I can remember when Mary Barra took over as CEO. One of her very first quotes and comments was this industry is going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 50. What that means is you need to rethink everything you’re doing.

Culture is a core element of that. It’s not the only one. It is either an enabler or a stifler of what you want to do with things like business strategy and how you’re going to drive operational management, how you’re going to think about new consumers and new business models and all that sort of stuff. It’s been quite the comprehensive journey from that point to this with much of it still in front of us.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so could you give us a little bit of the particulars with regard to before the culture was more like this and now it’s more like that and here are some of the key things we did to bring about that shift?

Michael J Arena
Yeah, and again, I think it starts kind of with the industry. This was an organization and an industry that was all about driving execution, all about continuing to drive scale across the world. The game’s changed quite a bit. It’s now – we’ve got a – it’s now the future mobility.

We now need to think about what are customers demanding, what are customers – the best illustration I can give about that, then I’ll go back to the specifics of your question is people are moving to cities, just to put it in a real live external marketplace example. People are moving into cities and everyone’s becoming connected. The way you think about mobility inside of a city versus mobility in a suburban environment is very different.

We need to then get the business to start thinking about things differently. That certainly requires us to instill new sets of behaviors and to challenge everybody to think bigger than perhaps they had in the past. Again, to move faster as well because the world outside is moving super fast compared to what we’ve been used to.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, so it seems like we’re changing sort of the total focus in terms of what General Motors wants to be excellent at in order to succeed in a different environment with more people in cities and sort of car sharing and ride services, sort of a different landscape than it was in 2009. I’m curious to hear what does that look like in terms of day in/day out humans at GM interacting with other humans and how they’re doing it differently now?

Michael J Arena
Yeah, one of the big things we did to start to drive this transformation is we plugged in a program that we call Transformational Leadership. This was a partnership with Stanford. It’s a year-long cohort program with Stanford where we take the top of the organization, 35 people on an annual basis, go through this program.

The reason I call out that program is because it answers your question rather directly in that we’re not just shifting to the future, we’re thinking both about the current state of the business and the future state of the business in the same moment. We call that ambidextrous leadership if you will. That came out of that program.

Everything we talk about here is growth and core. We’ve got to be excellent at the core of the business. We’ve got to continue to be – operations, we have an operational excellence program. Operations have to be maniacally precise and everything we produce has to be durable and everything else, but at the same time, which is what makes it ambidextrous, we need to be thinking about the future. We need to be thinking about where is the customer tomorrow going to be and how can we get there sooner than anybody else.

There’s a lot of people talking about agility in the world today. The way I like to talk about it is most large organizations shouldn’t talk about themselves as being completely agile. They need to be agile in places. They need to be agile on the edge. They need to be agile in the growth side of the business because the growth side of the business is where the future is. They need to be disciplined and operationally excellent in the core.

In fact, one of the studies that I read recently that talks about this, and then I can share exactly how we’re doing that, was a Mackenzie study where they said organizations need to be both fast at times and stable at other times. About only 12% of the companies they reviewed were able to do those two things at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense with regard to boy, if you think about sort of any organization, sort of what it can handle well and what it can’t, I even think about customer service interactions in terms of it’s like if you want to check your credit card balance or sort of get some basic information and sort of – or get a replacement card or report a stolen card or do some fraud stuff or change the credit limit, it’s like that’s kind of very basic.

But if you sort of go out beyond the edges, suddenly it gets really I guess confusing for the people in terms of what they’re trying to do. It’s like we’re really built up and tooled up to do these dozen things very quickly and efficiently and systematically.

But now I’m trying to get my private mortgage insurance canceled with my new insurer – my new mortgage holder because they transferred them over as they do. It’s been rather challenging. It’s like, “No, no, no, I understand your policy, but in fact if you looked at the original text, the original mortgage, this is kind of how it’s supposed to work, so can we do that?” They’re just so flummoxed, like, “We’re going to have to look into this, sir.”

I think that’s intriguing to think about it. In some ways you want to just be high-scale, high-efficiency with doing that thing repeatedly with, frankly no innovation because it’s working great and other areas where you really got to adapt and see what’s new and what are people starting to really ask for.

Michael J Arena
Yeah, 100%. 100%. It’s funny that you mentioned banking as your example because I grew up in banking.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Michael J Arena
I remember that exact question coming to me at one point in time when I was asked by the president, the company I was working for, “Michael, how can we become more innovative?”

I told the same story you just did a moment ago. “Are you really sure you want to be innovative where you’re driving precision and you’ve built expectations for consumers and you want to be reliable and you want to create a consistent set of interactions or are you asking if you want to be innovative on the edges?”

At that point in time, this was before mobile banking, so it’s a great illustration. When it comes to something like mobile banking before it had existed, you have to be innovative there because no one’s ever done that at that point in time. No one had ever done that. You have to be agile. You have to think differently. You have to move, shift, flux, understand the consumer, shift with the market. You have to do that super fast.

That’s where we are now as a company on things like car sharing and what we’re doing with Maven, what we’re doing with electification, what we’re doing with self-driving vehicles. You have to be completely agile and you have to manage that side of the business with a whole different set of muscles while continuing to keep an eye on the core of the business and making sure that you’re doing that flawlessly.

My analogy for this is every organization is both a super tanker, which is critical to getting stuff done precisely and at scale and a set of speed boats that are being sort of tossed out into the white water so that they can move fast and agilely shift with the environment and then ultimately grow themselves into what the next core of the business is and should be.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you talk a little bit about sort of the people practices that bring that about? I’d be curious to hear if in the course of having meetings or interactions one-on-one, you’d say whereas before at GM people more so spoke or interacted or accepted or challenged these kinds of things, now it looks different in terms of their interactions.

Michael J Arena
Yeah, so the first thing to know is that in that model the era of one-size-fits-all solutions is inappropriate. You’ve got to use different solutions for the different parts of the model. Some of the practices are – we use a lot of design thinking on the growth side of the business. We’re out talking to consumers. We’re out engaging consumers in Manhattan and San Francisco and places that we might not interact with on a day-to-day basis traditionally.

Then we’re thinking about how do we bring those ideas back into the business and connect up with other parts of the business, build bridges, if you will, to do agile design and to move fast. Amazon calls them small two-pizza teams, very small teams that can first of all build something, like a minimum viable product or solution and then ultimately the reason the bridges matter later is scaling. That’s the growth side of the business.

Now on the core side of the business, you just incrementally have to ask yourself the question, how do we make this better every single day. How do we continue to get more nimble and more agile even in the core so that whenever the new growth part of the business comes to fruition, that the core is already ready to sort of cast it up onboard and take it on?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then in forming these teams, can you give us an example of something that you’re able to quickly react to and how it was done?

Michael J Arena
Yeah, so a couple different examples. The one that I can think of most notably off the top of my head is what we’ve been doing with Maven, which I’ve mentioned already. Maven is our car sharing platform. Maven by its very definition is access to a vehicle as opposed to ownership of it. We sell cars and in the core of the business we continue to and will continue to for quite some time.

But on the other hand just like there is Uber and Lyft, which are ride sharing applications, there’s a need to get from one point to the next inside the city. We found this sort of whitespace that no one was serving, which is how do get outside – how do you not own a vehicle, but maybe take that vehicle for longer durations than just from one of the end to the other end of the city.

Maybe you’ve got it for a couple hours. You’re driving it as opposed to someone picking you up and you’re actually deploying an asset – someone else’s asset – that may be sitting in the garage at some point in time.

This whole shared economy model, we went out – to be very precise – we went out and started interviewing people in the streets. It was in design thinking. What we found out was owning a vehicle inside of a city may be more of a burden than a benefit for some, but we can build a solution around that so that they still have access to a vehicle in such a way that they get the conveniences of it without the burdens of it. That’s where Maven really evolved from.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Now you were big in pushing a concept called GM 2020 throughout the organization. What does this mean?

Michael J Arena
Yeah, it’s, again, we’re now back in the core of the business. One of the things we want to do is we want to think about the core of the business in regards to how do we build the culture where people just can’t wait to show up to work the next day. People just really want to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Back in 2014, we launched this, I’ll call it a movement. We launched this movement where we invited – and this was back when we were really trying to attract young people into the organization. We were really just starting to as corporations as a whole create different environments that were, at that point in time, I would say were more Millennial friendly. I don’t believe that any more. I think that’s true for anyone and all of us.

But we launched this initiate where we thought about okay, if we were to recreate the culture or rethink culture or rethink the workplace, why not invite the people in the room that will actually be living with those outputs in the year 2020.

Literally using some design thinking methodologies and inviting 30 people into a two-day event, we went out, we took them out on buses, and we went and looked at all these creative workplaces first across Detroit. That movement, those 30 people, ended up growing into a movement that we call GM 2020, how do we positively disrupt the way we work.

They continue to grow into a much larger body of people. It’s thousands now of people that show up into these events, constantly thinking about how we can get better and all volunteers, but constantly thinking about how we can organically get better on a day-to-day basis.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. Then what have been some of the key adopted practices that have shown up in terms of doing work better and in a more enjoyable way?

Michael J Arena
The great part about this is that all kinds of ideas emerge out of this. One of the – perhaps my favorite story, there are plenty that I can share, but perhaps my favorite story was we were about ready to open up a new building.

It was a ten-floor building where generally what happens is you go in, you bring a facilities crew in. You bring in some architects. They look around the space and they decide what the footprint should look like. They plug in standard furniture and everything else. Well, rather than approaching it that way, what we decided was why not invite the people who are going to be working in that space into designing it.

We did what we called a two-day co-lab, kind of like a hack-a-thon, if you will, across two days. We invited in 35 people. We put them into teams of 5. We asked them to – we walked them through the space. We gave them the same parameters that any facilities team would have in regards to cost constraints and architectural barriers and all that sort of stuff.

We literally had these teams and teams of five build prototypes. After giving all those constraints and talking to individual users, which were their fellow employees, we actually had them build prototypes of what that space should look like. They competed against each other.

At the end of the – I said two days, it was actually 24 hours from beginning to end, from 12 o’clock to 1 o’clock the next day – at 12 o’clock the next day, they presented their working physical prototypes to a design team and the winning team actually created the design of the way that that building ultimately was created.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. Then how did they like it?

Michael J Arena
Again, it was very different then perhaps what would have been designed for them. One of my favorite stories was the winning team actually cut a hole in the – they said if you want to collaborate, you need to be able to look up and down across multiple floors, so they actually cut a hole in the center of the building in their prototype three floors deep. They said “This is will be the collaboration zone. The two floors above that will be the concentration/deep work zone.”

Whenever they did that, well, of course they’re not architects, so they weren’t thinking about how sound this was, so there was all this push back on, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but architecturally that doesn’t stand up.” I’m thrilled to say that that team ended up becoming part of the overall design team.

They didn’t cut a hole in two floors, but they ended up – or in three floors, but they ended up cutting it in the two in order to make their solution work. They were thrilled, the short answer. They were thrilled at the end of the day with the new design.

That’s not a huge example, but there are all kinds of those everyday examples that I’m giving you now, like where people designed an onboarding app or people designed a learn and share so that they could do a career fair and all these little things that manifested throughout this community so that they’re able to move really fast and organically create these new solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting. With the hole in the floor, you could – one person could stand on one floor, the other person stands on the floor above and they look down at each other?

Michael J Arena
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
You could accidently – if you weren’t paying attention, walk into a hole and fall down.

Michael J Arena
No, no, it’s not quite that way. They had the railings and all that stuff up. But it was really much more to illustrate that we’re not separating ourselves from different groups. If we’re going to collaborate, we at least need to have this sort of proximity to one another as opposed to hitting our floor button and showing up.

It’s, again, a small thing, but as you engage people in making those decisions themselves, they become very, very proud about those outcomes and they figure out how to iterate on it and make it better over time.

Pete Mockaitis
So people don’t speak to each other through the floors? It’s more of a symbolic-

Michael J Arena
Yeah, absolutely. They see each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Michael J Arena
So they can certainly correspond back and forth. I guess I’m just sort of the dispelling the safety myth.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, got you. The railings certainly, that makes sense. We’ve got the safety covered. They would in fact speak through the hole from one floor to another.

Michael J Arena
Completely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. That’s fun. Now, you’ve also got a book, Adaptive Space, that captures some of these principles that you put into practice. Can you sort of share with us kind of what’s the book all about?

Michael J Arena
I’ve talked around a lot of it already, but it’s this core concept of why are some organizations adaptive and are able to respond to the changing marketplace and the other organizations perhaps aren’t quite as adaptive.

As a researcher, this was even prior to my time I come into General Motors, as a researcher, four of us actually launched a research initiative, went out and studied 60 different companies, all Fortune, really, 100 companies, and asked that question, why are some adaptive and why are others not.

What we found, and this is the part that I talked around a bit already is that those were – every single organization had two things. They had these sort of core systems, we call them operational systems, which is the formality of how you get work done and they all had entrepreneurial pockets, even organizations that aren’t adaptive have innovative entrepreneurial activities happen within them.

What the adaptive ones had that the non-adaptive organizations didn’t have was what we ultimately called adaptive space, but basically it’s the bridge to get those ideas through the organization and pulled into the formal systems.

Think of it quite literally as how do you more intentionally mine the idea, everyday ideas throughout your organization, both big and small in such a way that it becomes part of the adaptive fabric of an organization that can respond differently to the outside market. That was a lot, but-

Pete Mockaitis
What are some of the – what was that?

Michael J Arena
No, I was just saying, so that was more than a mouthful for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh no, that’s cool. Then what are some of the practices associated with getting those bridges up and going in terms of these things make all the difference if you’ve got them versus don’t?

Michael J Arena
Yeah, yeah. The interesting part about this is it’s a social phenomenon. The interesting thing is the connections that you create inside an organization are more important than I think we ever believed they were before.

Think about it this way, we all want to think about who are the – how do we build a bigger network and how do we build our network inside of an organization. What we discovered was your network matters immensely, but your network needs to be different for different intentions.

I talk a lot about social capital. I’m in the talent space and spend a lot of my time talking about human capital, but I also talk about social capital. Human capital is what you know, social capital is how well positioned you are to leverage what you know. Remember, I said that every organization had entrepreneurial pockets, but not everybody was able to leverage that and that was because they weren’t connected appropriately.

A couple of the practices to get very precise with you is there are times where you need to create discovery networks. A discovery network is a network that’s actually going outside of the insular walls of an organization and finding out what the customers of tomorrow really need and want, like the Maven story I shared with you a few moments ago.

There are also times that ideas were too. Organizations, all organizations have lots of ideas. You’ve got to bring those ideas into the world. It’s important to have discovery connections because that’s how you stay relevant, that’s how you can move – you can keep pace with the outside market, but you’ve got to bring those ideas in and you’ve got to actually put them in the very small, tight, what Amazon calls two-pizza teams. We call that agile design in many organizations or scrum teams.

That requires a different set of connections. You want very trusted small groups of teams of maybe six that are taking ideas that were discovered and then bringing them into the world and iterating them, move them fast.

Then once they built a minimum viable product, this is where a lot of companies sort of fail, once you build a minimum viable product inside of a small pocket, you then have to start to think about how do I get that scaled on across the broader business. That requires yet a different set of connections that we call diffusion connections.

That’s – when you think about those different practices, it’s a different set of connections and a different set of practices for each of those steps, if you will, on any given product lifecycle or any given solution lifecycle into the business.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m really intrigued by the notion that you said that the ideas are a dime a dozen. There’s tons of them in a scaled organization. Boy, I imagine a critical lever that is really make or break here is effectively choosing, selecting, deciding which of these ideas are worthy of getting a two-pizza team to advance it and go after it a bit. What are some of the key ways that these decisions can be made optimally?

Michael J Arena
Yeah, you’ve got to be disciplined in that process. I’d say ideas are cheap. I say that somewhat tongue in cheek. They’re cheap if nothing’s done with them. If somebody just shares an idea and they don’t do anything with that idea to bring it to life, then who knows if that was a good idea or not.

An idea is nothing but an abstract, but if you actually take that idea and you build something around it and you go test that idea, which gets into your question, the best way to find out if an idea is worthy is to actually build some aspect of it, low-resolution prototype and get out and test it. Test it first with some friends inside the business, find out if some colleagues get excited about it. Then ultimately test it with consumers or would be consumers.

Then that’s not enough because it’s still this low resolution sort of fragment of an idea. It’s better than the idea itself I should say, but it’s still a fragment of a concept. You then have to decide, okay, what are the thresholds to know whether or not we can win with this idea or this is a real idea that would have real market impact or this an idea that’s worth our investment.

That’s a whole different series of practices and the only way to know that is to set up milestones around that concept or an idea and hold people accountable for getting to those milestones. If they don’t, you kind of decommission it and you say we can only take so many of these at a time.

Every organization has a finite set of resources, so you just simply decide how many people am I going to invest in this idea, how many people – what do they need to prove between now and the next milestone, whatever that is, and if they don’t prove it, do we have the courage to shut that idea down so that we can take those resources and reinvest them into something else.

In short, what you just heard me describe is there are parts of the organization where you need to act and think much like a startup.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. I think that’s excellent in terms of having that discipline and those clear thresholds that you’re identifying. I guess I’m thinking about backing it up a little bit earlier in the process. I imagine GM has thousands of ideas emerging. Then you may only pilot test out dozens at a time. Why don’t we say 1 out of 80, little ratio, shows up and gets the minimum viable product treatment.

How do you decide what hits that initial threshold, like, “You know what? We are going to spend some time, money, resources six people on this one.”

Michael J Arena
This is where I think it truly is a social phenomenon. I think our inclination – when you or I have a new idea, our inclination is to go take it to a leader and to go get it formalized. That may be the worst idea possible. That may be the worst step forward possible because you don’t even know if that idea’s good at this stage.

What I’m – and we’ve done this very much in the GM 2020 community, where we basically say, “If you think you’ve got a great idea, go find a friend.” That first friend is really social proofing your idea. That first friend – somebody who you trust, somebody who you respect, somebody who you think would get this – is your first litmus test.

Once you share that idea with that friend, if they look at you like, “Michael, this is really stupid. I have no idea what you’re talking about,” well, you might just be wrong and you might just decide that it’s time to shut it down. But if they’re excited about it, then our next step, what we talk about a lot is, go follow the energy.

If I share this idea with you and you’re excited about the idea, then okay, so who else might be excited about this idea. At this point it becomes more than it’s Pete’s idea, Michael’s idea together and we go find a few more friends.

This, what I’m describing to you, is much more organic than mechanistic, which is how we want to tend to think about innovation inside of a company. It’s much more social than process driven.

At some point, you need formal support. At some point once you know you’ve created network buzz and people are excited about this idea and they believe in the beauty of this as it’s co-created and it’s no longer just my idea, it’s all of our ideas and we can all find ourselves in it, well then the likelihood of securing support and resources is amplified ten-fold.

That’s the way that you get these, as I stated it earlier, these entrepreneurial pockets fired up and linked up across the broader organization for grander success.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Awesome. Well, any other kind of key practices you think the typical professional needs to know or do you want to move ahead to hear about some of your favorite things?

Michael J Arena
Yeah, well I guess one thing – because I haven’t talked about one – there’s one thing that everybody who’s listening to this conversation is wondering. Okay, that’s all fine. That sounds great. But what about the resistance? What about when somebody doesn’t like my idea? Then what do I do?

One of the things that I like to talk about is conflict sometimes – charge into the conflict. The conflict later – once you believe your idea is good, once we’ve got a band of a half dozen or so of us, then the conflict is really critical to the evolution of that idea. The conflict is essential to getting it scaled.

One is take that conflict as a compliment because you’re probably not doing anything innovative if you haven’t created some disturbance. Charge into it and start to think about it. Oftentimes what I like to say is you can’t really have a breakthrough without something to break through. If you’re not expecting some degree of resistance or some degree of conflict, then you’re probably not being so bold.

A lot of people ask me, “Well, what do you do with conflict? What happens whenever the antibodies kick in?” What I say is, “That’s awesome.” It’s about how do you pivot in response that that, how do you bring them in to the process so that you can pressure test those ideas, you can morph them and you can challenge them in such a way that you make them bigger and more scalable both within the business, but far more importantly outside into the marketplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Thank you.

Michael J Arena
I just would not want to underplay sort of the value of tension even more than conflict, I wouldn’t want to undervalue that, but what I will say is tension too early in the process actually prematurely kills ideas. Tension later in the process becomes almost like this pressure testing sort of amplifier, if you will, to get lift off sooner.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Thank you. Well now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Michael J Arena
You probably have noticed even though I live inside of a human capital job that social capital is an area that I spend a lot of my time.

One of my favorite quotes and this will get a little bit into the conflict thing is it’s a quote by Colonial Picq. This quote goes like this, “Five brave men, who do not know each other well, would not dare attack a lion.” I know that’s masculine, so I’ll pivot it in the next part of the quote. “But five lesser brave men or women would do so resolutely.” I think this is a team activity. What I’m talking about, you have to have friends. You have to find friends. You have to have people who are in it with you.

One of the things that I know is that if you try to do this alone and you try to take all the credit for yourself and you try to hold onto an idea, you try to hoard it – this idea can be anything, any kind of solution – you will not succeed. But if you find and enlist friends and you work together as a team, you’re chances of succeeding are amplified significantly.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite study, experiment or bit of research?

Michael J Arena
Again, this whole networking space, I studied a lot of network theory. I guess the one that just jumps out at me right off the bat is a professor over at University of Michigan, Wayne Baker, a good friend of mine, went out and studied – we didn’t even talk about this – but went out and studied energizers and people who bring energy into an organization, which is one of the core network roles that I talk a lot about.

What he found out was that high performing, agile adaptive organizations have three times as many energizers as average performing organizations. That’s a study, where in the HR space we talk a lot about engagement. My belief is we’re going to be talking much, much more about energy moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. How about a favorite book?

Michael J Arena
I guess in the last couple years books that I’ve read, the one that jumps out the most is Adam Grant’s Give and Take, like givers and takers. His whole philosophy, if you haven’t read it, is that long-term, givers, people who are constantly helping, supporting and lifting each other up are the winners in the long-term game. It’s a phenomenal book.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit?

Michael J Arena
I think it’s easy to live inside of an organization and become somewhat inculturated. One of the disciplines – I don’t know if this is a habit – one of the disciplines that I have instilled for myself is to – I have, on my calendar I have, literally this is what it says, ‘critical distance day.’

Literally once every six weeks I have a day on my calendar where I have prescheduled, I’m getting out of the day-to-day business and I’m going to go do something very, very different. I’m going to talk to consumers. I’m going to go to a conference. I’m going to a university campus. But I’m going to do something to refresh myself to think differently than I would if I were just managing the daily business.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate and get quoted back to you frequently?

Michael J Arena
Yeah. I guess the one that I think of is we live in the era of disruption. We’re all talking about digital disruption these days. We want to talk about things like agile, but I personally believe that in the era of disruption, social is king. We’re going to be talking much more, much, much more about both energy and social capital as we move forward over the next decade.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Michael J Arena
The book, there’s a website for the book, AdaptiveSpace.net. They can certainly go on there. I’ve talked a little bit around some different network roles. There’s another website out there called NetworkRoles.com that they can actually go sort of take a self-assessment to better understand their own individual network role.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael J Arena
Stop talking about it and start doing it. Go find a friend. That first friend matters more than you can ever imagine. Find a first friend to partner with on whatever it is that you’re thinking about it is the first step forward. We oftentimes think of things and oftentimes don’t act on those.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Michael this has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much for sharing the good word. I wish you and GM lots of luck in all you’re up to.

Michael J Arena
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I’ve enjoyed the conversation.