1002: How to Inspire Great Performance and Increase Team Satisfaction with Anne Chow

Pete Mockaitis
Anne, welcome.

Anne Chow
Thank you so much, Pete. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you. You are as senior a leader as they come. So, no pressure, we’re going to expect senior-sized insights from you, Anne?

Anne Chow
I don’t know. I used to be, perhaps, Pete, so I think it’s all relative. I’m currently employed by myself, which I think is something that lots of us can relate to, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, so we’re talking about your book and more, Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion. Could you kick us off with a really phenomenal, dramatic story that illustrates, indeed, just how transformative this inclusion power stuff is?

Anne Chow
So, this is actually how I opened the book. So, many of us can sort of reflect on what was the very first job we had where we realized that leadership was a thing. Many of us entered the workforce, whatever that may be, in a small business, medium-sized business, or a big company, and we’re going to work and we have a job. But leadership is sort of this abstract thing. It’s the people above us, people making the decisions, that are not like us doing the work in any way, shape, or form.

For me, I realized that leadership was actually a thing when I first had this job in customer service. And it was the first time that I had a large team that was sort of a seminal experience if you were in telecom, if you were an up-and-coming leader, that they wanted you to lead an actual big group of people that was geographically dispersed, demographically very different than yourself. Many of them were union workers as well. And so, that was the first time that, for me, I realized that leadership was a thing.

I kind of came in with a lot of, I would say, dare I say, Pete, cockiness, that I was coming in as a new, fresh leader, and I knew where I was going to take the group, and credibility wasn’t instant, let’s put it that way. Most of these people had so much more tenure than me, they were over twice my age, and much more seasoned and much more wise. And what I realized that there was a difference between leading and managing.

I had previously managed lots of things. I was responsible for projects and tasks. But in this case, I wasn’t just responsible for the job of the customer service function of my multi hundred-person organization. I was responsible for the people who were doing the work. And, ultimately, that’s what leading bigger is all about. It is really taking a very human-centric approach to your work, to your tasks, to everything that you do, not just about your workforce, but also as it relates to all of your stakeholders, whether it be your customers, your investors, your partners, your suppliers, or even internal partners and other organizations that you might work with.

And so, for me, that was a huge realization because I realized that I could not get the job done all by myself but I had to figure out how to lead bigger through widening my perspectives, by including more people in my purview. And that was all towards the objective of, one, being awesome at my job, but, importantly, having greater performance and a much greater impact on the business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you have the aha moment, leadership is for real. It’s a thing that you’re living and experiencing, and you can’t do the job by yourself. You needed to work through the folks and make it happen and take a human-focused approach. So, understood. So, then, did you see some transformative power with inclusion? Or what went down when you found yourself in this situation for the first time?

Anne Chow
So, first, I was hit and met with I wouldn’t call it quite a brick wall, but it almost felt that way in the sense that I didn’t have instant credibility with my team. I thought, naively so when I was, this is when I was in my 20s, that, “Hey, my title, my role would instantly gain me some respect and credibility,” and it didn’t. My people gave me kind of a wake-up call, they said, “Hey, what makes you think that you know what’s happening here? We’ve had leaders like you before. You’re just a young whippersnapper. You’re going to come in here and just kind of do your check mark and then move on.”

So, what I found myself having to do was truly listen, truly empathize, truly try to put myself in their shoes to understand, one, “Why were they so non-trusting in management?” Two, “What were the issues that they were facing in terms of not being able to do their job well?” There were many barriers. Most of them were outside of their control, which is where I would come in, whether it was relationships with other work groups like sales. And I think in many organizations, there’s friction between sales and service.

Sales are the people who get the commission for making the sale. They don’t have to make the service actually work or put it in. The service people are left holding the bag, trying to deliver what the salespeople committed on. Service people are there when something breaks. You don’t call a salesperson to fix something. You call a service person. And so, I had to get underneath those issues, actually represent them in front of other stakeholders, sort of transform how we were working with other teams, both internally and externally, because we had external suppliers and partners as well. And that completely changed the amount of agency we had.

It completely changed how they viewed me, quite frankly. They put a lot more trust into me. They realized that I was there to help them, to support them, not to micromanage them, but to empower them and remove barriers and enable them to be more successful, both as individuals but also collectively as a team. So those are just some of the examples of when you lead with inclusion, when you lead bigger from the front and with people in mind, it absolutely works.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you had a change of heart in terms of, “They’ll respect me because of my title,” to, “No, they’ll respect me when they see that I’m for them, I’m serving them, I’m making their lives easier and understanding them.” I’m curious, was there a particular turning point or issue, and we can zoom way in, in which you really keyed in on a pain point or a frustration or a something, and then delivered something for them, and they said, “All right, here we go”?

Anne Chow
Yeah, there was. I’ll just riff on the example that I just gave between sales and service. So, sales was a constant pain point for us, and we would have chronic sales teams that would constantly bring in something that was overcommitted, we were not involved in any of the upfront planning process, and it was that kind of that old adage, Pete, that you’ve probably heard as many of your listeners have heard in terms of “Poor planning on your part does not a crisis on my part make.”

This was our life in customer service. We actually had, over time, we developed this wall of fame and wall of shame. The difference between the sales teams that were on the wall of fame, they had learned to work with us in a strategic way, in a proactive way. We actually felt like we had a partnership. The sales teams that were on part of the wall of shame were last minute, everything was always a crisis, we never had enough information, and we were always put in a bad position as it related to serving the customer and delivering what we need to do.

And so, in that front, what I did very specifically was target those sales leaders, my peers and my colleagues over there, to attempt to compel them to change their behaviors, to attempt to compel them to work inclusively together to realize that we are on the same team, this customer is our joint customer, and we will both be better off, and our teams will be better off if we actually work together.

So, I worked tirelessly to try to get as many of these sales teams, because this is where we would get our orders from, was from sales, from a delivery standpoint, and that was really a big part of the effort, very specifically, that I worked on as their leader, as their supporter to help my team get their role done.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say wall of fame and wall of shame, I’m literally imagining a wall with portraits of individuals. Was this physically present in the facility?

Anne Chow
Yeah, it was. It was the day before digital signage, so it was very much paper-driven and marker-driven, and could be easily removed, let’s say, if your leaders or customers might walk through the site. You wouldn’t want to see something like that. You’d want to see leaderboards and much more sort of cheerleading type of stuff. But no, it was in fact visible.

And what I think one of the most powerful things it did for my people, as it relates to how they perceived me, was that I was actually authentic and recognize what they were going through as opposed to giving them some corporate party line of, “Oh, well, yeah, we got to deal with it somehow. You know, it’s not their fault,” but to really be there for them as part of the team and really being part of a solution to help us all deliver better and lead bigger.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I’m thinking it’s fairly common to hear dismissive corporate talk, and it has so many flavors, but it all serves the same end, to be like, to convey, “I don’t really care what you’re whining about. Go ahead and make it all better.” And so, Anne, could you give me some choice phrases, like what a blow-off sounds like from that leadership?

Anne Chow
Well, Pete, I’ve strived my whole career to not lead this way, so I’m going to dig deep here. I’m going to dig deep here, although I will confess to you and our listeners and viewers that I have been accused from time to time of using corporate jargon. So, some corporate jargon that, these are some of the phrases that I, quite frankly, can’t stand, although I am guilty of saying them in a time or two. How about, “It is what it is”?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah.

Anne Chow
That’s just not helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. It’s basically saying “I will do…” Like, in response to they’re raising an issue, a complaint, a concern to you, and you’re saying, “It is what it is,” it’s basically like, “Nothing can be done. Next.”

Anne Chow
Right. And how actually ridiculous is that, right, which is nothing can be done. Something can always be done. And I think that when I think about that phrase or even catch myself wanting to say that phrase, I have to reframe myself and say, “You know what? There is stuff that we can control. We need to focus there. There are things that we can influence.”

“That is my job as the leader is to help drive influence where we may not have control. I know there’s also a ton of stuff we care about, but we can neither control nor influence it. Worry is a very unproductive emotion, and we all kind of go through this as humans. So, worrying about the stuff that we can neither control nor influence just hurts us all.”

So, part of I always felt, instead of saying “It is what it is,” is to get your team focused on “What can you control? What can we influence? And how can we influence it? And, yes, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff we care about, but it falls outside of our responsibility and our influence, and so we do no good expending calories and energy in lamenting about it.” So, I always found those situations as an opportunity to refocus my team, and also refocus myself, quite honestly.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. And I also like that there’s three categories and not just two. There’s control, there’s influence, and there’s out of control, as opposed to just control and no control.

Anne Chow
And, Pete, the engineer in me would say maybe there’s probably four categories. There’s control, there’s influence, there’s stuff you care about, and there’s stuff you just totally don’t care about, all of the other stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Anne Chow
But our care-abouts are usually much, much greater than that which we can control, and sometimes we confuse the two. And in a workday or in any day in your life when you think about this, your time and energy are finite resources. So how are you going to spend that time and your energy? And do you align that time and energy against that which gives you the most powerful outcomes and impact? Or are you just busy?

I never really like this word “busy,” because activity is different than productivity. And so, that’s sort of another area is that, “Oh, you know, gosh, we’re so busy,” or, “I’m too busy for that,” that’s another one, or, “Oh, we’re too busy right now. We can’t look at that.” Busy doesn’t mean that this other thing that’s coming in might not need to take a greater priority.

Busy just implies, “All right, you’re just doing stuff. Is this stuff productive? Are you even open-minded enough to listen to other perspectives, to understand what this other opportunity or crisis or challenge might be, that it should, in fact, rise to the top of what you need to focus on, what you and your team need to focus on?”

So, I think that’s sort of another one, is to not fall in that trap of just “Oh, we’re too busy right now. We’re too busy to consider that new dataset. We’re too busy to go and read that additional research report. We’re too busy to go and take that field visit and join you in that customer meeting that might actually tell us something about whether or not our products and services are working in the minds of customers.”

So, I think that’s also another sort of corporate trap that we fall into, is that the craze of the day, the busyness takes us away from really thinking about having impact. And whether or not that busyness, what is it that we’re working on, the time and energy and effort that we’re placing, is it really aligned with the greatest performance and the greatest impact that you, as an individual, can have, but also you, as an organization, a team, or even a company, depending on what your role is?

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. So, busy doesn’t tell us much at all other than you have a lot of activity occurring currently.

Anne Chow
Right. And maybe you’re actually not that good at prioritizing. I am guilty of this. I think we are all guilty of this when we have days, weeks where we just feel like we’re, you know, what’s the analogy, the hamster or the gerbil in that wheel, that that’s like we’re going, we’re going, we’re going, but we’re actually going nowhere. And I think we’ve got to catch ourselves when we find that to be the case.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we’re talking about inclusion, can you share with us, what do we mean by the word inclusion in terms of how you define it, and how it’s often defined just generally in corporate speak? How are we thinking about this word?

Anne Chow
So, first, let me say that this book that I just recently wrote, Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion is a leadership book. It is not a DEI book. One of the intents of me writing this book was to approach inclusion with a much more strategic perspective, aperture, than it is currently perceived by some. A quote actually from the book is, “Inclusion itself has been made too small, stuck at the end of the DEI acronym.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Anne Chow
So, here’s what inclusion is to me. Inclusion, and I use leading bigger pretty synonymously with inclusive leadership. All that is, is widening your perspectives to have greater performance and greater impact. And the ergo, the therefore from that is, one of the easiest, most straightforward ways to widen your perspectives is to widen your perspectives by including as many different kinds of people as you can in the work that you’re doing, whether it’s your employees, your team members, your partners, your customers, or otherwise.

Every business is a people business. And so, to take this very people-human-centric approach to your leadership and to your business. And who doesn’t? I mean, think about it. Who doesn’t want to widen your perspective so that your performance is better and that your impact is greater, however you might measure it in the scope of your job, or your career, or your life?

Why do I say inclusion has been made too small? There are different groups of people who view that DEI, which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, means certain things. And I think that it is often misconstrued by certain groups of people to mean issues of gender and race representation at the cost of everything else.

One, in actuality, this is Anne’s view. This is Anne’s view of DEI. One is the acronym does us a disservice because it oversimplifies three different important strategic leadership imperatives. While they may be interrelated, they’re not one thing. Diversity is just simply the reality of the modern world. Every generation that comes forward becomes more and more diverse. Our elements of diversity go far beyond our gender and race, our gender identity, and our racial and our ethnic identity.

Who would have ever thought that an element of diversity in the workforce would be, whether or not you wear a mask, or whether or not you have a vaccine, but these were new and emergent, during the pandemic, aspects of diversity in terms of how you had to think about your team, dynamics, how you would run your workforce, how you handle your workplaces. And this is just ever-changing, and my book explores many of the different dimensions that shape us as individuals.

But of course, Pete, no two of us are the same, and that’s the beauty of diversity. Diversity just is. You can choose to embrace it and lean into it because the diversity, the evolution of the diversity of the world will impact your workforce. It will impact your customer base and your evolving customer base. It will impact your investor base. It will impact everything about the work that you’re doing today, will be impacted by it.

The question is, “Do you lift your head up out of the sand and sort of run toward that to try to understand it so you can get ahead and grow? Or do you just kind of let it happen to you, and consciously or unconsciously ignore or exclude certain parts of the world because of your frame of thinking?

Equity is just simply fairness. So, for each of us as leaders, we have to decide what fairness we want. Do we want making it up? Do we want equitable access to health care for all of the members of our team? So, equity to me is just an outcome, and it means a fairness of some kind of outcome, and each leader has to decide what that is.

Inclusion, which is where the magic is, requires action. When you think about it, if you want to lead, act, behave in an inclusive way, it requires that you open your mind, that you open your perspective, that you open, in some cases, your heart, and that you do something differently, and it is about widening your perspective. Ultimately, what we want is more diverse, more innovative perspectives to help us come out with better outcomes, making better decisions. I mean, that’s what we want.

That’s how you become awesome at your job is that you make better and better decisions. You do that by surrounding yourself with the best people possible. You do that by delving into as many data sources, valid data sources as possible, and you collaborate. You collaborate. And if you’re responsible for an organization or a team, you build cultures that are agile, that are resilience, because the only thing that is constant is change.

So that is my view of inclusion, is quite simply widening your perspective, and inclusive leadership is about, and leading bigger is about widening those perspectives so you can have greater performance and greater impact. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, there’s a lot of really good stuff to think about there. So, can you bring that all the more real and practical in terms of our mindset and our way of thinking and interacting with the world? What are some habits or approaches that are working against us, maybe don’t even realize we’re doing, that fail to widen, but rather constrict our perspective to our detriment?

Anne Chow
Yes, very much so. So, I actually had an opportunity a couple years ago to co-author a book called The Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias, and the way that we opened that book is with this sentence, and that is, “To be human is to have bias. If you were saying that you don’t have bias, you would be saying that your brain is not working.” So, bias basically sits in the functioning of our brains and neuroscience because we experience so much.

We’re taking in so much data in every moment but our brain can only process a very, very small fraction of it. And so, how we handle that is we form biases. Biases are predispositions for preferences. It may be even prejudices against certain things, groups, people. It could be associated with food. I mean, think about if you had a bad experience eating a certain kind of food, you will have a bias and not eat it ever again.

Why is it that if you happen to be exploring, let’s say, a different kind of cuisine than you’re used to, and you’re going with somebody who is very, very experienced in it, you want to ask them, “Well, what is that?” They’re not going to tell you, because if they tell you that it is, this is a true story that I experienced, if they tell you that it’s goat brain, you’re not going to eat it, because you have a bias as to what it is.

But if you try it, you may find that you actually like it. I mean, this is kind of how it works, right? On the flip side of that, in terms of the positive, think about the feelings that all of us have. If we meet a total stranger who’s from the same hometown we are, or how we might react when we bump into somebody or meet somebody who’s from the same alma mater, we have a natural affinity to those people because we always like to seek common ground.

Where we can fall into traps with this is imagine if you’re recruiting for a position that people have equal skillsets, maybe one of them even has better skillsets, but they didn’t go to the same school that you did in the same program. Might you inadvertently say to yourself, “I know exactly what program that was because I went through it, and it was super hard, and I’m going to pick that person over the other person who maybe has some of these other skills but I weigh those, the fact they went to my alma mater and went to the same program I did, higher because I have inside knowledge, and it’s something that relates to me,” right?

That would be almost a very natural reaction for many of us, but you may not actually be picking the best talent for the role if you let that bias rule. So, we have many situations like that, that we go through our regular workday, where we have to catch ourselves on, “Are we thinking with a narrow perspective? Are we leaning towards what’s comfortable? Or are we seeking wider perspectives? Are we making ourselves and the team sufficiently uncomfortable that we know we’re challenging each other enough, that we’re doing the due diligence around the debate of any particular issue so that we come out with the best decision and the best outcome?”

It doesn’t mean that we’re ever going to get consensus. In fact, one of the things I touch on in the book is the difference between collaboration and consensus. We always want collaboration. If, in fact, you have a truly diverse team and you’re really getting in the weeds of a difficult issue, you may never get consensus.

Some of you may be out there thinking, “Well, then what do you do?” You can get alignment. You can develop alignment if you’ve built an environment and you’ve cultivated an environment of constructive discourse, healthy debate, smart risk-taking. But consensus should actually never be the objective if you’re dealing with something really, really, really difficult and complex.

You’re going to have many different perspectives about it, but you want to vet all the different scenarios that you possibly can, the various risks, the intended consequences, think through the unintended consequences. And so, these are just a couple of examples of how we might, in our everyday lives, at work, or even out in our community, find ourselves falling into the trap of comfort.

Pete, this is a very interesting stat that may not surprise people, but over 70% of leaders pick protégés that are of the same race and gender. That’s pretty significant, that number. And when you consider it, think about yourself, who are you most comfortable with a lot of the times? Who might you not be comfortable with and why, even if you don’t know the people at all?

This is the power of really thinking more inclusively, acting more inclusively, behaving more inclusively, because if you don’t, you are, I absolutely believe that you’re going to ultimately lose to a leader who is leading that way. You will be out-competed, absolutely, in my view.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s funny, as you say this, I’m thinking about the podcast and like what I’m comfortable with, and it’s like, “I am not comfortable with TikTok,” for example. It’s, like, I don’t like being there. Like, it’s weird to me. It goes fast. I feel like my brain is getting dumber, and so I don’t want to deal with it. And, at the moment, there are no How to be Awesome at Your Job shorts on TikTok.

And yet I can see in my own data that my listeners, generally, are not big into social media. They kind of are, you know, they’re like me. And, as I do the surveys, it’s like, “Oh, the average age of my audience is growing faster than time is passing.” And TikTok does skew to younger folks and, I guess I’m 41 now and time is flying.

And so then, I see what you’re saying with regard to our comfort. It’s just like, “Eh, I don’t like TikTok.” And so, it’s like, “Oh, so that’s it? So, I guess I’m not going to mess with TikTok, we’re not going to get into TikTok, and we’re not going to draw in young folks who like using TikTok who have no idea that this show exists, and it is to our detriment just because of my preferences and comfort levels.”

Anne Chow
That’s right. And when you think about it, Pete, not to scare you, but I’m sure you’ve looked at all the demographic information because you’re now mulling it over. You as a Millennial, because you’re a Millennial, this is the first year in the workforce that Gen Z is either equal to or outnumbers Boomers. So, Gen Z-ers who are all over the TikTok, and if you talk about Alpha, who is coming behind them, coming after them, it’s all about the TikTok, do they not want to be awesome at their job? Of course they do.

But what are the vehicles and platforms that serve them to get what I think are timeless conversations that you have lifted up through your podcast, entirely relevant to them? But they will not ever know, nor will they ever move backwards in terms of using their mother or fathers, the elders. I have two Gen Z children, so one is already in the workforce, one is, knock on wood, going to enter after she graduates in December, and they actually call us the geriatrics. And I’m a Gen X-er.

So, I mean, I’m an old Gen X-er, mind you, but I’m a Gen X-er but my children actually call us the geriatrics. And I fancy myself to be pretty technology savvy but I’ll confess to you, since you confessed to me and everybody else, I don’t do the TikTok either. No, I don’t. And I’m specifically calling it “The TikTok” because it makes me sound even more geriatric but I’m kind of playing it to…

Pete Mockaitis
“All these youngsters and their TikToks!” So, that notion about being uncomfortable and widening the perspective, I think is very helpful because it’s possible for it to just blow right past us in terms, like, “Yeah, I don’t really like TikTok, so I’m just moving on.” It’s like, “Oh, well, we’ll timeout, like ideally, you’re having a wider perspective and including people who will challenge you a little bit along those lines, and say, “Okay. Well, TikTok may or may not be an optimal channel for you to invest in, but it’s worth a fair shake given just the vast quantity of hours that people are spending on TikTok, even though you’re not one of them.”

Anne Chow
Right. And, in your line of work, How to be Awesome at Your Job, more and more workers that are entering the workforce are on there, so you’re actually missing a big part of your target audience because of just this shift. And I think that really underscores a point I made earlier, which is you could do that, I could do that, but, ultimately, we will lose to somebody who is the next-gen Pete or next-gen Anne, and who is already on there, who’s going to disrupt us. Our audience will dissipate and we will become irrelevant, even if our content is better because, simply, we’re not there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Miss Excel is crushing it on TikTok, for example. So, they’re out there.

Anne Chow
Yeah, they are. They are. They are, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we talked a lot about TikTok, but I’d love to hear about other examples in which we can kind of, oopsies, forget to widen the perspective, and not get the inclusive goodness that leads to our peril.

Anne Chow
So, this is actually the last chapter in the book, and it’s about flexibility. So, some of us in today’s world will think, “Okay. Well, flexibility is important. Yeah, we want to work in a place that’s flexible and in a work environment that’s flexible.” Some people may say, “Well, you know what that means? That means that you get to work at home, I get to work in my car on the road. It means a flexible, hybrid work environment.”

I actually think that flexibility in a work environment. Flexibility and leading bigger means the following, and you’re going to be able to tell I’m an engineer because I’m going to give you three other concentric circles. The first circle is your job, the second circle around that is your career, the third circle around that is your life.

To me, flexibility means leading in a way that acknowledges and respects the fact that every member of your team has a job in the context of their career, in the context of their life. I’m going to sound like a geriatric now. Back in the day, when I first entered the workforce, you had your professional life and your personal life, and they were very much bifurcated. Workforce was a place that you went to. It wasn’t something that you did. We didn’t have this incredible technology that enabled you to be connected at all times, to be able to get stuff done, and check in, and do whatever it is you need to do. That world is gone. It’s over.

We now live in a world, and the pandemic really accelerated this, as we all know, where we all know that we have one life. It has some personal dimensions and professional dimensions. We can do work wherever it is that we live. We have to recognize, if you’re choosing to be a leader that your interactions with other people are specifically about their job and your job, but they have bigger aspirations. Their job sits in the context of their career, which sits in the context of their life.

And I think that the data says that we work, we spend about a third of our lives working, another third sleeping, so work plays a very significant role. So, unless you, as a leader, respect and seek to understand and have this broader perspective of, it’s not just about “Get the job done. Get the job done. Get the job done.” There has to be empathy involved, there has to be authenticity involved, there has to be grace involved.

These are words that, ten years ago, were never, ever thought of entering the workforce or in the context of leadership. These are now much more important skills in leaders today, and our next-gen workforce actually expects these traits in their leaders. So, to think much more broadly, to widen your perspective of what flexibility actually means, and that, ultimately, no two people are the same, you might not have a working agreement with somebody who is not a high-performer, is not going to be the same as you are with a high-performer who’s more experienced, who’s demonstrated, that they can have a much more fluid approach to work.

And so, I think this is a level of, if you will, sophistication in our thinking about what flexibility actually means. An example of that is safety. When we think about safety first, in my generation, that meant physical safety. That workplaces had to be safe, that if there was a spill, it had to be cleaned up, that there were rails on the stairs, handrails on the stairs, and you had to hold the handrail on the stairs, these kinds of things.

But today, equally as important is psychological safety, and psychological safety in the workforce. So, we all play a role, if you’re choosing to be a leader, to create environments where people feel safe to express themselves, to take smart risk, to have constructive debate. Because, how are you going to widen your perspectives if you don’t create an environment where people actually feel comfortable and safe to do so?

So, you cannot have an environment that is toxic or one that punishes “failures.” You have to have freedom within some kind of framework and some type of expectation, and this is just a very different way of leading. It’s a very different way of thinking about how you do your job and how your job relates to other people’s. I actually tend to think it’s really, really exciting and even more meaningful. But those are also some of the things I think for people to think about.

Pete Mockaitis
Anne, I’d love it if you could share any specific actions or tactics or do’s and don’ts associated with some of this goodness.

Anne Chow
So, here’s what I would say, I’ll address this from two different perspectives. If you happen to be a manager of a person today, so you have a responsibility for a team, people, whatnot, when you do your performance reviews with them and you give them performance feedback, you’re giving them feedback very specifically on their job. But part of your responsibility is to ensure that you have some line of sight to what their career aspiration is.

So, part of your role as their manager, as their coach, as their supervisor, if you will, to use some old-school language, is not just to focus on their performance development and performance management. You also have a responsibility to focus on their career management and their career development. I’m still shocked by the number of times that I worked with people, and they say, “Oh, I just got blindsided. That employee just up and left because he, she, or they thought that it was going to be better. They got a job that they thought they could have more upside. They just never brought it to me that they actually aspired to get promoted or they wanted to move from this function to that function.”

So, you as the manager, you as the supervisor, you as the leader have a responsibility to not just focus on the job but to help prompt and understand career aspirations, because I can tell you that individual, I mean think about yourself, you’re not just doing your job to do your job. You’re doing it because it’s going to lead to something.

And even if it’s you’re doing your job today to put food on the table, to get healthcare, for your family and yourself, you are doing that so that you can serve some other passion, whether it’s in the same line of work, whether it’s some, what is maybe today a side hustle compared to your day job, but you’re doing it for a purpose, and that purpose, your career is whatever that life’s purpose is, whatever your calling is, and that may or may not be directly related to your job.

And I think that we, as leaders, have to respect that, but we actually have to embrace it if we want to cultivate talent and have the best workforce out there. So, Pete, that’s one example of what you can do very differently. It doesn’t change the fact that you’ve got to continue to give performance feedback and performance-develop your people, but it also says you also have to think about their career development and their career management as a separate but parallel thing, because they are, whether you like it or not, and they’re going to.

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

Anne Chow
So, one of my favorite quotes is, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” It’s a quote from Gandhi, and I think it’s a quote that, for me, embodies the fact that we are all adults, and we take ownership of the choices that we make. And if we see something that we believe needs to be changed, you’ve got to become part of that positive change. You’ve got to be part of the catalyst to make it happen. And so, that is one of my favorite quotes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Anne Chow
One of the ones that I have used constantly since it came out, and they just celebrated the 10-year anniversary, the 10th one just came out, actually, I think just very, very recently, and that is the McKinsey Lean In, Women in the Workplace study that started a decade ago.

One of the reasons why I find this set of research so groundbreaking is that it very specifically goes into multiple facets of women in the workplace, slices and dices the different demographics, talks about the different stage of the evolution of women in the workforce at various different levels, and peels the issues and the opportunities back, not just by identifying the problems, but it also offers solutions for companies and organizations to consider, to continue to cultivate women in the workplace. So, I think it’s been one of the most groundbreaking, consistent set of research done over multiple, multiple years.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Anne Chow
A favorite book of mine is How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen. I think this book is so revolutionary in the way of, you know, there’s been a lot of study shown that we, as people, are not truly happy unless we’re helping others. You know, this whole idea of happiness at work and joy at work, I mean, it tends to be sort of so simple. When you think about jobs and careers, it’s so quantitatively-focused, so ambition-focused, but ultimately what brings you joy in your life?

It really is extremely, extremely provocative in terms of helping you, maybe even catalyzing you to think through this question of “How will you measure your life?” We each have one life to live. We do not have a professional life. We do not have a personal life. We have one life. It has professional and personal dimensions, and we’ve been given a gift of this life. So, what is it that you want to accomplish in this very, very short time that we have in this world? And my hope, of course, is that you choose to lead bigger, not just at work but in your life.

Pete Mockaitis
And a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks?

Anne Chow
I’m going to reinforce something that I just said because I think it’s such an important one. We each have one life to live. We don’t have a professional life. We don’t have a personal life. We have one life that has personal and professional aspects. And so, the challenge, the opportunity, the gift we have each is to figure out what we want to do with that one life, and there is no time like the present.

Time is that most precious resource that we all tend to waste and squander. Once time has passed, we can never get it back. And so, if there’s something that you aspire to do, be, help with, become, the time is now. There’s no time like now.

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

Anne Chow
I would point them to my LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, or my website, which is TheAnneChow.com, The-A-N-N-E-C-H-O-W.com.

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

Anne Chow
Yeah, I would challenge every single person here to think about how you can lead bigger. What is the one area in your job that you would like to learn more about, where you know that widening your perspectives will help you, you just haven’t taken the time or made the effort or even thought about how to go about doing it? Is it with your team? Is it with a platform, a tool, a part of the market that you want to pursue, a set of investors that you know are out there, but you haven’t figured out how to connect with them yet? So, find one area first with respect to how you might widen your perspective and start there. So that’s the one challenge, a homework assignment that I give everybody out there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anne, this is fun. I wish you much great big leading.

Anne Chow
Thank you so much. You too, Pete. Cheers to leading bigger.