359: Overcoming the Fear of Speaking Up with Karin Hurt

Pete Mockaitis
Karin, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Karin Hurt
Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, first thing I want to hear about you is that I understand in your life you were struck by lightning. What is the story behind this?

Karin Hurt
Yeah. People tell me that explains a lot about my personality actually. It was not one of my brighter moments. I was a manager of a pool, and I closed the pool because of lightning, like you’re supposed to, and then proceeded to go sit down at a metal table to wait the storm out. And so the lightning got attracted to the metal table, split a brick in half that was right in front of me, and propelled me about five feet against a wall. But I was fine. Yeah, it was really crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
So, did it strike you directly or did it strike the brick in front of you?

Karin Hurt
It hit the brick and then the momentum of it, it ricocheted into me. So I didn’t get hit directly. Yeah, it was crazy. And I was sitting next to a guy who was like 300 pounds, and he flew too.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wild.

Karin Hurt
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And so you went to the hospital, or how did this end up unfolding at the end?

Karin Hurt
I went to the ER, but they didn’t keep me or anything. It was fine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Wow, that’s wild. I always wonder if people take that personally, like with you and God: “Is there a message here, because this feels very intentional and targeted?”

Karin Hurt
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Did you choose to interpret it in any particular way, or you just said, “Hey, man, stuff happens”?

Karin Hurt
Just took the story and ran with it.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’ve been using it on podcast interviews years later. I’m glad that you’re safe and well. And how about the other gentleman? Did he turn out okay?

Karin Hurt
Yeah, he’s fine too.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. All right, cool.

Karin Hurt
Well, I don’t know. I mean, he was kind of a jerk.

Pete Mockaitis
Was he a jerk before lightning struck him?

Karin Hurt
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so maybe the lightning was directed at him and I was just in the crossfire.

Pete Mockaitis
[laugh] Oh, that’s good. Thank you. So, tell us a little bit – you are the chief executive officer of the organization Let’s Grow Leaders. What is this organization about?

Karin Hurt
We are an international leadership development company, so we do long-term leadership development programs, short programs as well. We work both with corporate clients and also government clients, and we also do keynote speaking and a little bit of strategic consulting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. That’s a nice lineup. And so, you’ve packaged some of the wisdom in your book Winning Well. What’s this book all about?

Karin Hurt
It’s called Winning Well: A Manager’s Guide to Getting Results – Without Losing Your Soul. And so, it’s how do you get breakthrough results and remain a decent human being along the way? And it’s really focused on extremely practical tools to do that. So, how do you win well when you have to have a tough conversation with an employee, or when you need to terminate someone, or when you’re running a meeting? How do you do that in a way that really both builds results and gains better relationships?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh boy. There’s so much we could talk about there, and I want to hit a little bit there and in particular dig into a term you’ve turned into an acronym – the fear of speaking up, or FOSU. Is that how you pronounce it? Okay, I was wondering.

Karin Hurt
Like fear of missing out, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
We talked to Patrick McGinnis, who apparently coined that phrase – fun fact – in a previous episode. He didn’t coin it in the episode, but in a previous episode we talked to him and he coined it. He also said he had “fear of a better option” – FOBO – and that never really caught on.

Karin Hurt
So funny. Well, we’re hoping FOSU will catch on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s catchy and I think it’s a real phenomenon. Now we’re talking about it, so let’s talk about that now. So, what caused you to focus in on this phenomenon? Could you orient us to some of your research or findings or discoveries on this concept?

Karin Hurt
I will tell you that we were noticing a really significant pattern when we would go in and work at multiple levels of an organization. So, we would talk to the C-level. You go and you talk to the CEO or the senior vice presidents and they say, “I just wish our employees at the frontline or our first level supervisors would tell us when they see these issues or when they see that we have negative things that are impacting our customers” or, “I wish they would think more creatively or solve more problems on their own. I don’t know why they just keep their heads down, do their work and don’t speak up.”
And then we’d go in to do work at the frontline and we hear employees say, “Nobody cares about what I think. Every time I bring an issue to my supervisor, they tell me not to worry about it, just keep focused on my job.” And so, there was this massive disconnect within the same organization. And so, we started then looking at other organizations where that wasn’t the case, where people really were speaking up and what was the difference.
And so, we also have developed some very specific tools that we use to help encourage senior leaders to ask, or middle managers to ask, and make sure they are encouraging people to bring forth problems and to bring forth their ideas in a very strategic way. And then we also have tools where we help the frontline position their ideas in a way that can be heard, because there’s this other dynamic, and sometimes people blame the Millennials, but I don’t think it’s just the Millennials, or anything is just one generation’s issue.
But people say, “My problem is my employees are speaking up, but they’re not doing it well.” And so they’re just blurting out their ideas and they’re not positioning them well, so that they’re being rejected. And that’s another dynamic. So, really have been working on how do you get senior leaders and middle managers to ask, and how do you help frontline and lower level management to position their ideas in a way that they are well received? And that’s been a lot of fun and we’ve really been learning a lot about what works the best.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. This feels like a really big, important topic and I’m excited to dig into some of the practical how-to’s, but I’d love to get your take on this issue. How big is it, how important is it to tackle this, as opposed to any other matters of communication, collaboration, culture, stuff in the work environment? Have you made some discoveries in terms of the gravity of this issue?

Karin Hurt
Yeah. So, I think it’s getting more and more important. It’s always been an issue. This is not new, but why is it so important now? And as we go into an age where so much is being automated – the easy stuff is getting automated – if you want to provide effective customer service and it’s about something easy, you drive it to self-serve and people do it online. But by the time they get to a human being, they are needing more sophisticated conversation and they want somebody who can really hear their ideas.
So now you’ve got these folks at the frontline who are really getting to the heart of what your customers’ concerns are, and if they don’t feel empowered to do the things they need to do or to raise the issues upwards and let people know what that customer experience is like, you’re not going to have the innovation you need for your company. So, I would say that is definitely a piece of it.
Another is employee engagement continues to be a challenge. There’s the Gallup research that says 70% of managers are feeling disengaged or severely disengaged at work, and where does that disengagement come from? A big part of that is people who feel like they’re not being heard. And so, when you can give people a voice, that really helps create a deeper connection to the work that they’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. That makes me think about Google’s work, associated… Is the project Aristotle? I always get it mixed up – associated with psychological safety and teams being the thing that differentiates the high-performing teams from the not so high-performing, in which people just feel safe and comfortable expressing just what they think. And you had some research I saw on your Twitter, I believe, or somewhere in my research about you – you discovered that, was it less than 1% of employees felt very confident and comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas? Could you unpack this stat for us a little bit?

Karin Hurt
Yeah. So, this wasn’t from our original research, but this was just some of the work that we were doing to understand what was happening. It was actually some work that VitalSmarts did. It was their survey. But we’re actually in the process right now of doing a big, deep study with University of Northern Colorado, so I’ll have more of our own statistics soon.
But this basically said people are afraid to really say what they feel. And I’ll give you an example, a very real example of how this played out just a couple of weeks ago with a client we were working with. So, it was a big software implementation that had been done companywide, and throughout they had had user groups, user experience calls every single week. And the users would raise any issues that they had, and then they would knock them out. And they thought everything was going fantastic.
And then the vice president said, “Okay, great. I’m just going to go now, do some management by walking around, going to the fields, see how things are going.” And she sat next to a representative who brought up the software. And it took five minutes for the first page to load, and then it took another five minutes, which is not how this experience should be. And the software company had promised that this new system would be seven times faster than what they were working with previously. And here this was radically slower.
And so, she said to the representative, “Is it always like this?” And she said, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But it has a lot of other great features.” And she said, “No, it’s not supposed to be like this. Why didn’t you say something?” And she said, “Because my manager said, ‘The company has invested a lot in this software,
so whatever you do, just tell everybody how wonderful it is and how grateful you are to have it.’”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh boy, sabotage.

Karin Hurt
And as it turned out it was just that the network couldn’t support it. They needed to do a network upgrade. There was nothing wrong with the software. They needed to do a network upgrade, which is not a big deal. And they were able to fix it within 24 hours. But these representatives have been suffering with the lost productivity of this for a month. And so, that’s the kind of thing where, who was scared there? Well, probably that person’s immediate supervisor. And you can’t have an environment like that if you really want to get to the root of problems quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, we talk about fear there. Can you maybe unpack that, in terms of what is the specific fear, and how real is it, versus imaginary?

Karin Hurt
Yeah. And that is a lot of what we’ve really been thinking a lot about. How real is it? So I think people are afraid. You can’t get in trouble for not doing anything or not saying anything, but you can get in trouble if you say something that people think is dumb.

Pete Mockaitis
Fair enough. A safer bet is to keep your mouth shut.

Karin Hurt
Safer bet is to keep your mouth shut, exactly. And so, that is part of it. And also I believe sometimes it’s fear at the middle management level, which then trickles down. And so people say, “Don’t go to my… Don’t bother them with this.” So they keep the ideas down.
And then a big part of this fear, which we find, is that somewhere along the line somebody spoke up a long, long time ago, and it didn’t go well. Either I’m a manager and I used to have a terrible boss and I wasn’t allowed to speak up, and now I have a new boss, but I’m not giving my new boss the benefit of the doubt because I’ve learned these old habits.
I was working in one organization and it was so crazy. They were all telling these stories to me about how nobody ever listens and you could really get in trouble if you try to raise issues. And so I started saying, “How long ago was that?” And, “Well, that was 10 years ago. It was 15 years ago, but it’s still the same now.” They couldn’t come up with a current example, but it was so deeply embedded in this culture. And so, for that organization, we really had to give the management team very specific tools that they could use to encourage people to speak up and really come out and say, “No, the culture is different now.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I dig that. So, when the bad things happen, could you unpack a little bit? Let’s just take a good, hard look at the worst case scenario when it comes to speaking up. So, in terms of someone just yells, like, “Don’t bother me with this! Handle it yourself, Karin, I’m busy!” Or what does it sound like in practice when it goes wrong?

Karin Hurt
Or, “That’s a dumb idea.” Or, “We’ve tried that before.” “That will never work.” “This is out of your swim lane.” You hear that. “Stay in your lane. Don’t worry about that. That’s not your issue to deal with.” Usually when you hear stuff like that, it’s coming from an insecure manager.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. But what’s interesting is – call me an optimist – but none of those reactions were extreme, like, “You’re fired” or, “If you ever mouth off in this sort of a way, suggesting that all of the ways we’ve worked and the processes that we’ve implemented are inadequate for your higher standards and you’re ungrateful, then you could just find the door over there.” So, it sounds like it’s sort of dismissive, it’s kind of disrespectful, it would make you feel like… I’m hearing the Charlie Brown music in my head, like, “Oh, bummer.” But it’s not, brutal. It’s just sort of unpleasant and it just makes you feel not so good.

Karin Hurt
I totally agree with you. And that’s really the point. I think that a lot of this fear people have exaggerated in their heads, or they’ve extrapolated from one bad experience and then forgotten the other 99 good experiences they had when they did speak up.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then, let’s dig into a little bit of the how-to. So, if you’re experiencing some fear of speaking up, maybe how do you tackle the emotional element of that, and then how do you actually do the positioning of the issues?

Karin Hurt
Yeah. So I would say first and foremost it’s, how do you connect your “What” to your “Why”? What is it that you want to say, and why is it so important? Because if you can ground in the greater good that you’re trying to accomplish, you’re going to get some courage from that. Another element in terms of overcoming the fear is, think about some times that you did speak up, and what did you do to make that work, and what was the impact? Rather than thinking about maybe the one-off circumstance where you spoke up and it didn’t go well. One of the best ways to build confidence is to recall on past experiences that were successful.
And then the next is to use some tools to do it well. And one of the most important techniques that we teach is, how do you initiate the conversation? So, you’ve got some hard news or some bad news that you need to give to your boss, or some feedback that you are worried is not going to be received well. Start by making a real genuine connection: “I really, really care about you and your career. I care about this team and I care about the projects that we’re working on, and I really want us all to be successful. I’ve had some observations. Do you have a minute?”
It’s very hard for anybody to become defensive when you start like that. So, start by creating the genuine connection. And then from there, make sure that you’re doing this in private. If you’re talking about something controversial, nobody wants to be confronted in front of a bunch of other people. This is different than if your boss is in a team meeting and says, “Does anybody have any suggestions?” That’s different, because they’ve invited it in. But if you are the one initiating it, it’s always better to take it offline and have that conversation.
And then the next piece is to really consider what is the person you’re trying to persuade – what’s big on their mind? What is their most important things and how can you position what you’re looking to accomplish in a way that relates to that? If their most important focus is the financial bottom line, how can you position what you’re worried about in terms of the impact it’s going to have on the financial bottom line? If they’re are most worried about the customer experience, how do you position what you’re going to say in the way that what you’re worried about is negatively impacting the customer experience?
And then the other is stakeholdering. Often there are other people who you can gather information from, or you can help engage in your argument, that may have more credibility on the subject than you. So, I’ll give you an example on that one. I worked at Verizon for 20 years, and at one point I was leading a 2,200-person sales team. We had had a particular month, where like Murphy’s law, everything that could have possibly gone wrong, did. We had several feet of snow, just a bunch of different things.
And it was very clear to me that there was no salesperson on my entire team that was going to make quota. And if you don’t make quota, if you don’t get to a certain threshold, you really don’t get any compensation additional to your salary. And this is a huge deal for salespeople. And so, what I was worried about was that if people were beginning to look towards the end of the month and they said, “There’s no way I’m going to make any commission this month”, they were going to sandbag and save all their sales for the following month, which would have been terrible for our revenue numbers.
But I really couldn’t go to my boss, who was the regional president and say, “We need to lower quotas”, because that looks self-serving, because if I lower my team’s quotas, my quota goes down. So instead, I went to our finance director and I explained to him and I did the math and I showed him how we would actually get more revenue and more margin, even if we paid out more commissions by lowering the quotas. He got the math, he said, “I think you’re absolutely right.” He went to the regional president and explained it, and they lowered quotas. So, I think sometimes so long as you get what you want, it doesn’t matter if you get the credit for the idea. So yeah, I think that’s also part of it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool, and very sensible and proactive, to identify that and get that going. I’m fixated. Now, the snow – I know I did some work with wireless companies in training. So the snow impacts the quality of the signal, but are you talking about just their ability for people to get to their meetings?

Karin Hurt
To a store. So, I was retail sales, so I had all the Verizon Wireless stores in Maryland, DC and Virginia. So if you have three feet of snow, customers are not coming to your stories, even if you’re open.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Thank you.

Karin Hurt
At least not to buy a new phone. They may be coming for something to repair, but that doesn’t create revenue.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay, so we talked about the individual professional raising an issue upward to management. So now, what if you are the manager and you want to encourage people to speak up effectively? How do you do that?

Karin Hurt
A couple of different ways. One tool we use and I have created is called “Only UGLY”. And so, this is just four very easy questions that you can ask your team. What are we underestimating? That’s “U”. “G” – What’s got to go? “L” – Where are we losing? And “Y” – Where are we missing the “Yes”? So, an example of this – we did an “Only UGLY” conversation; it was a company that had grown from five people to 110 people in five years.
So, as they were growing, people were coming from other companies and they were bringing their favorite project management software, their favorite communication tools, and they just kept adding more and more tools to the mix. And so, we were doing this strategic offsite and we broke the team up into the four conversations. And the “What’s go to go” group listed every communication tool and project management tool that they had, and they listed like 27 of these.
And then they gave everybody in the room a dot and said, “Put a dot next to three of these that you think are the ones we should keep, that you use every day.” And all the dots clustered in the same couple of tools. So then they said, “What would happen if we got rid of everything else?” And everybody in the room was like, “Yes, thank God.” Then they looked back at the chief operating officer, and they thought he was going to be furious because they thought he wanted these tools. And he said, “Oh my gosh, I thought you wanted these tools. You know how much money we’re going to save if we don’t have to pay the licensing on all this?”
And then they simplified, because what they were finding is that people were spending as much time updating software and programs as they were working on the work. So, that was a quick, easy example. If you ask people, “What do we need to stop doing? Where are we missing the ‘Yes’?” Ask your team, “Where are there opportunities that you may not be thinking about here that could really add additional revenue or improve the customer experience?”
Every single time we use this exercise with teams, it is fascinating to me how fast how many ideas get into the room. We were working the other day with a company and we just spent two hours doing this exercise, and they came up with a list of a whole easel sheet of things that they could immediately implement within the next 30 days that would really make life better. And then they came up with three strategic projects that they would work on for the next year. A good investment of two hours.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yes. So let’s review. So, we’ve got four components – the UGLY. Can we hear them again?

Karin Hurt
What are we underestimating? So maybe we’re underestimating competitive pressures; maybe we’re underestimating the shift in the job market; we’re underestimating this new call center that’s opened up down the street that’s going to take all of our best talent because they’re paying $2 more per hour. “G” – What’s got to go? What do we need to stop doing? “L” – Where are we losing? Where are we losing to our competition; maybe where are we losing talent; why are we losing talent? And then “Y” – Where are we missing the “Yes”? This is, where are there real strategic opportunities that we could be focused on that we’re not?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. And it reminds me of a powerful question we picked up from Jason Nazar, who founded Comparably. We interviewed him some episodes ago, and his power question was, “What am I pretending not to know?” That’s potent. And you’ve even made it all the more richer, more robust with subcategories of the ways we pretend not to know things. That’s cool. Thank you.

Karin Hurt
Sure. So the other thing I would say is if you really want people to tell you the truth – it’s not just management by walking around MBWA, but one of the things we often see, we call it, “Oh crap, here they come” – OCHTC. And how are you showing up? When people see you coming, are they excited to tell you what they’re working on? Are they knowing that you’re genuinely interested in hearing what’s working and what your ideas are? Or are you showing up pointing out everything that’s wrong, telling them your point of view, and shutting things down? And in every organization we see some of both. And so, just how do you show up in a way that is really curious? And when people really believe that you are genuinely interested, they’re going to want to show you what they’re doing, and that’s where you’re going to really get some of the best practices.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m curious, you mentioned being curious and best practices. Are there some more practices, some key things folks do that maybe subtly or not so subtly just kill that willingness to speak up from others?

Karin Hurt
The very best way to kill that is to ask people for their ideas and feedback, and then not do anything with them. You’ll see the employee suggestion boxes or the electronic version of that, where these ideas go to die. And so, even if you can’t implement the idea, somehow acknowledging: “Hey, we’ve heard you. Thank you so much for your input.” Really recognize people who are speaking up and bringing ideas forward. And even if you can’t, then you at least explain why: “This is a great idea. This is why we can’t do this at this time, but thank you. And please, keep these ideas coming because I’m sure you’re going to have one that will be exactly what we need.” And just really being encouraging of that.
I read an article the other day and I think it was Harvard Business Review, where they were talking about, this company had a recognition program for, if you stole somebody else’s best practice and implemented it and it was really successful, the person whose idea you stole would get recognized, and you would also get recognized. So people were really encouraged to not just keep doing their own things in their own teams, but to share with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. Well, Karin, tell me – anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Karin Hurt
I think that’s good.

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

Karin Hurt
Eleanor Roosevelt, “Do one thing every day that scares you.” I think that’s very relevant to what we’re talking about here, because half the time when we do things we realize that they weren’t as scary as we really thought.

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

Karin Hurt
I am a real big believer in the diffusion of innovations, which is old; it dates back to the ‘60s. But I find that theory has been one of the most grounding theories for me in large-scale change efforts. And the idea there is, who are your change agents? How do they influence people? Who are your early adopters? How do you get them involved in spreading the word early on? Who were the people who were reluctant? And really mapping out in any change, where do different people who you must influence fit in this change curve? And then what are the strategic ways that you can make sure that you are bringing people along and giving them what they need to feel comfortable about your change?

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Karin Hurt
I love almost anything written by Seth Godin, but my favorite is Tribes. One of the keynotes that I do is Turning Your Volunteers into Brand Ambassadors or Building Your Army of Brand Ambassadors, depending on whether you’re talking about internal or associations. I really believe in his theory of how do you make genuine connections, one person at a time, in order to build tribes that are meaningful, in order to influence the large-scale change that you’re trying to accomplish?

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool?

Karin Hurt
Our blog is my favorite tool, I would tell you that. I believe that content marketing is just so important to be able to serve people and show what it is that you have to offer to add value every single day. So, I would say my WordPress blog is certainly my favorite tool.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit?

Karin Hurt
Exercise. That is the only way I can manage all of the stress of being an entrepreneur and keep the level of energy up, for sure. So, I’m a big fan of kickboxing and running and pretty much anything that keeps me moving.

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

Karin Hurt
Yeah. The big thing is really being willing to show up authentically. In so many of our keynotes, that’s really one of the most important messages, is how do you ground yourself in who you really are, and show up with confident humility in that way? And when you can do that, and balance the confidence, the humility and the focus on results and relationships, which those are the four components of our Winning Well model – people will follow you, and you will be able to accomplish great things, and you will have more influence.

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

Karin Hurt
Our website is LetsGrowLeaders.com, and you could subscribe to our free blog. We write two articles a week, and that’s a lot of powerful tools there. And also our book is available on Amazon and just about everywhere, and that’s called Winning Well.

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

Karin Hurt
I would really love for people to take something they really, really believe in and have the courage to position that argument well, to speak up, and to be the change. And we like to say, be the leader you want your boss to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Karin, this has been a lot of fun. I wish you tons of luck and success with your speaking and your books and all that you’re up to!

Karin Hurt
I really, really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. Thanks so much.