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Ida del Mundo

Oct 21
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1004: Seth Godin on How to Maximize Your Impact and Deliver Work That Matters

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Seth Godin shares insightful stories and perspectives to help us think strategically and create meaningful change in a complex world.

You’ll Learn

  1. The mindset that makes you indispensable
  2. Why to embrace that you’re an impostor 
  3. Three questions to ask with every project 

About Seth

Seth Godin is the author of 22 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He’s also the founder of the altMBA and The Akimbo Workshops, online seminars that have transformed the work of thousands of people. 

He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. You might be familiar with his books Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip and Purple Cow. His book, This Is Marketing, was an instant bestseller around the world. The newest book, The Practice, is out at the end of 2020 and is already a bestseller. His newest project is leading a worldwide group of volunteers creating The Carbon Almanac. 

In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. His blog (which you can find by typing “seth” into Google) is one of the most popular in the world. His podcast is in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide. 

In 2018, he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame. More than 20,000 people have taken the powerful Akimbo workshops he founded, including thealtMBA and The Marketing Seminar. 

Resources Mentioned

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Seth Godin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, welcome back.

Seth Godin
Thank you for having me. It’s good to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I am excited to dig into some of your insights and wisdom and stories and fun that you got cooked up in your latest book, This is Strategy: Make Better Plans. Could you kick us off with a particularly fascinating, surprising, counterintuitive nugget that you’ve come across as you’re putting this piece together?

Seth Godin
Potatoes.

Pete Mockaitis
Potatoes. That’s surprising.

Seth Godin
There were no potatoes in Europe until 1500 or so. They evolved and were hybridized in Peru. Well, when potatoes arrived, it’s worth noting that potatoes are twice as efficient at creating calories and food for humans as any other food that you can grow.

But when potatoes took off, Dublin, in the 1800s, was the most densely populated place on earth and has never retained, become that densely populated since. So, potatoes are the key to all of this. Anyway, because the people in Europe were colonialists, they looked down on things that were strange, it wasn’t high status. Potatoes came close to being banned in England, and they were banned in France.

And a guy, an entrepreneur, wanted to get potatoes into the diets of people who were starving and who needed food. He had access to the court, so he got Marie Antoinette to wear potato flowers in her hair, just as a little signal that maybe potatoes would be okay, but that wasn’t enough. So then, he rented some farmland a few miles away from Versailles and planted a whole bunch of potatoes and hired armed guards to stand watch over the plot all day but at night, he sent them home.

So, of course, the peasants, seeing that this high value item wasn’t guarded, stole potatoes, ate them, discovered that they were just great. And that’s how France was saved. The lesson of this is strategy is your philosophy of becoming. What moves will you make? What tasks will you take on to change the system, to see the system, and then change it? And it’s all about status, and affiliation, the freedom from fear. It’s time all woven together so that we can do the work we’re proud of.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful, and there’s a lot there. I want to maybe get a contrasting story. Tell us the tale of your hot take on how organ donation should work.

Seth Godin
Well, a relative needed a kidney and so I got to learn a lot about the system. It turns out, in the United States, kidney donation is opt-in, and it turns out that every year millions of kidneys are buried that could go to somebody who needed them, and this leads to a shortage and a waiting list. The problem with the waiting list, of course, is that people are dying to get on it, and they’re dying when they’re on it.

So, lots of things have been suggested. Most of them are horrible, like paying poor people to donate their kidneys when they’re dead. And I got to thinking about the game theory here, the strategy that you could bring to the system, and Dr. Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein, a well-regarded cardiologist, worked with me. We wrote a paper, published it in Transplantation Journal. We did everything right, and even though my idea is correct, it didn’t get adopted. And in the book, I outlined exactly what we did wrong.

But the short version is this. Right now, opting in to donate a kidney has some fear associated with it because you have to acknowledge you’re going to die, and you have to think about how your family is going to engage with that. If we just added one shift to the rule set, which is your priority on the wait list is based on how long you have signed up to be a donor because now there’s no moral issue, right? If you’re not willing to be a donor, you shouldn’t be willing to be a recipient.

If that is the case, that there’s a priority to people who donated early, everyone’s going to get on the list as soon as they can because you would be afraid of being left out. Tension, and status, and affiliation. As a result, the shortage would go away and we wouldn’t need a list. But – and this is the lesson – the people who are in charge of the list are risk averse. The people who are in charge of the list don’t want to go first. The people who are in charge of the list, the worst thing they can imagine is screwing things up.

So, in order to get them to say, “Yes,” I would have needed to spend four years on the road, going to conferences, writing papers, going to meetings, dealing with committees, doing tests, and I wasn’t willing to do that sacrifice. And that is a key lesson in how we make change happen, which is don’t try to start a log on fire if the kindling you have is too small.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. And what it’s hitting home for me here is that your kidney idea and potatoes are both fabulous. I love them both. I’m a good Lithuanian boy. We love our potatoes. And it’s intriguing, I think, and this might be sort of a no-duh for many, but I think a number of professionals who strive to be awesome at their job, kind of get a rude awakening at times that just being great, having a fantastic idea or product or offer or solution or skill set isn’t adequate to make it happen.

Seth Godin
Correct. Well said. And that’s why the first two ideas that I just shared with you are not about your job. They’re about projects. But most of us have a job and we have a choice. Either our analysis is, “My job is to do my job, to wait for instructions, just like I did in school, and to do the tasks that are put in front of me.” The alternative is to view my job as a series of projects where I go to people and I enroll them in working with me to make the change I seek to make.

The problem with the first path is, while it might give you peace of mind in the short run, particularly in a changing world with AI and everything else, you’re going to be a cog in a system that doesn’t care about you. Whereas, if you can adopt an awesome mindset to say, “I want to be a contribution. I do projects. I make change happen,” the doors are wide open.

And the CEOs I talk to from companies big and small, that’s what they want from their employees. Unfortunately, they act in a way that doesn’t signal that. They act in a way that makes it feel like third grade and you’re just trying to get through the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you zeroed in on a few of these key principles, difference makers, status, affiliation, fear. And, yes, I think there, I think I see them front and center in terms of, “You know, if I stick my neck out and do this kind of weird thing that nobody else seems to be talking about, so maybe it’s not important, then I could very well look like a total idiot here, and so my status could be down, my affiliation could be down, people not asking me, inviting me to cool stuff anymore, and I’m just afraid of that. Ultimately, you know, getting fired, losing income, got to sell the house, got to downsize, all the things that could unfold.” So, help us, how do we kind of navigate through those core issues?

Seth Godin
So, you’ve nailed it. And the one thing you left off the list that people are motivated by is the freedom from fear. Not actual risk, but the freedom from feeling like we are taking a risk. And it turns out that work has amplified our fear. That’s how they get us to comply and it’s a trap because, the people who get the joke and are willing to encounter the feeling of fear, actually have the most stable and resilient jobs.

So, my first job, I didn’t know any better, I was 23 years old, I was lucky enough to be working with Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Michael Crichton, I launched a whole line of science fiction adventure games, and it was a job, I wasn’t the boss. And the packaging was absolutely beautiful but I needed a way to seal the package for the stores because Target and Lechmere and other mass merchants didn’t want this fourfold gate thing open.

So, they said, “You have to shrink wrap it,” and I didn’t want to shrink wrap my beautiful packaging. So, I ordered 10,000 little tiny Velcro dots to hold it shut. The problem is that 10,000 little tiny Velcro dots do not adhere and stick to coated cardstock. And as a result, my peers happily made fun of me for months. And the thing about it is the 10,000 tiny little Velcro dots probably cost the company $400. And because I was willing to dance with that, I launched more than a dozen gold or platinum level pieces of software in the time it took my colleagues to launch one or two middling products.

Because my posture was the best surfers find good waves. Here’s a wave and it’s not fatal. I can lean into possibility. I can do projects that could be generous if they work and aren’t about my ego but are about making a change. And I knew that the downside was, yes, maybe I was going to get fired. I came within a day of getting fired.

But if I was going to get fired, it wasn’t going to be because I was timid and it wasn’t going to be because I was selfish. It was going to be because I was bringing possibility to the table that made people uncomfortable. But I knew that that’s the definition of being awesome at your job. We don’t need you to comply more than everyone else. I can go to Upwork for that. I can go to Fiverr for that. What we need from you is to push and to imagine because that’s what’s worth paying for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really powerful. And so, zooming in on, I guess, the fundamental mindset that you had cooking with regard to the dots is whereas, others in that same position say, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess shrink-wrapping is the thing that we do. So, hey, that’s a shame, but, okay, shrink-wrapping, here we go.” So, they might just go down that pathway.

But because you’re willing to take the occasional oopsie and embarrassment, you are liberated and emboldened to charge ahead and do a lot of great stuff and get way more big wins than a couple of little scuff losses along the way.

Seth Godin
Yeah. So, here’s one way to think about it, and I learned this accidentally at business school. A business school professor has a challenge where they’re teaching a case. They’ve got 60 people in her class, and she has to call on people to move the conversation forward. And I showed up at business school, I was one of the younger people there, and it became clear to me that the spreadsheets and the two-thirds of the case that was about crunching the numbers, it was going to make my eyes bleed. I was never going to be good at it. I didn’t want to be good at it.

So, I decided that I was going to invest all my effort on reading about the personalities and the situations, and not even open the spreadsheet that came with it. And I made it clear through my actions that if a professor wanted that kind of analysis, that’s the day to call on me. That if they wanted to embarrass me and ask me about the numbers, they were welcome to, but that would ruin the… that gets old. They don’t want to do that. They don’t want to set me up to fail. I want to set them up to succeed.

So, if you earn the reputation at work that you’re the person who does interesting things with energy, that you’re the person who contributes and raises the quality of conversation, if you’re the one who asks hard questions, you can hire a boss that wants you to do that, and now you have job security forever. Whereas if you are, you can pick anyone, and I mean anyone, trying to fit in all the way, the minute they can find someone cheaper than you, I promise they will.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a hard reality check, a true one. I’m reminded, we have a conversation publishing shortly, with Duncan Wardle who worked at Disney, and he developed a reputation for making impossible things happen, which was so fun because they just kept giving him these super cool out-there jobs, and he just kept getting to do them and getting cool results and building a career reputation, and now consulting practice and books and all those things.

And so, that’s quite beautiful how you get a bit of a, the word personal brand feels a little shallow for this. It’s a reputation, it’s an oomph, it’s an ethos, it’s a vibe, it’s a thing that you carry within you and is recognized by others and that perpetuates more phenomenal opportunities.

Seth Godin
But let’s be very clear, this is not about talent and what you are born with. You begin this by being the person who orders lunch better than anybody else, because ordering lunch is hardly fatal, and the people who order lunch and always order the same thing, boring thing wrapped in the shrink wrap and everything else, those people, you can count on them for boring lunch.

But if they come to expect that you’ve done your homework and you realize that two of the people are vegans and one person is gluten free and you found this place, and dah, dah, dah, and lunch was great, you haven’t pigeon-holed yourself as an admin. You have pigeon-holed yourself as someone who cares. And from that, you will get better at caring and being seen as caring.

And so, it’s not that, you know, “Seth started doing this at the beginning of his career, so I will never be able to do it.” It’s, I just was lucky enough to be present with people who challenged me to be challenging. And once I got a little better at it, I could do it more. And so, that’s what we seek to do. And I don’t think I tell this story in the book, but one of the key bits of development I had in my career, it’s the first day of work at Spinnaker Software. It’s my summer job. I am the 30th employee. The company would grow to have hundreds of people and then get acquired and stuff like that. But I walk in, there’s no voicemail, there’s no email, the fax had just been installed, and on the receptionist desk, is this plastic carousel with 50 slots in it and a Dymo label maker to put each person’s name on one slot.

So, you would walk in after lunch or you would walk in in the morning, you’d spin and spin and spin this thing until you found your name and then there’d be the pink message slips. You had to do this three, four, five times a day. It wasn’t in alphabetical order. It was in the order people had been hired. That makes sense because otherwise you’d have to rebuild the thing every time you hired someone. And I walk in and I look at this thing, and I go, “I’m going to have to look at this thing five times a day spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, so does everyone else.”

So, I reach over to the receptionist desk, and she has a one of those magnetic things filled with paper clips, and I pull out a paper clip and I put it next to my name. So, now all you got to do is spin to my paper clip and I’ll be able to find my message, and the people who know they’re near me can spin to my paperclip and save time. Well, within 24 hours, it was festooned with different-colored paperclips and pipe cleaners, everyone had a little flag over their thing.

I saved the company many, many, many hours of spinning. It wasn’t fatal. It was awesome, and no one told me to do it. No one said, “You’re the senior vice president of paperclip affixing.” Instead, I saw a problem and I solved it. I didn’t have to take credit for it. I didn’t have to send out a memo. I just took responsibility, and if someone had said that was stupid, I would have taken my paperclip out.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful and very resonant. My mom ended up becoming the CEO of the local credit union because she noticed the former CEO was vacuuming after everyone left, and she’s like, “Well, I know how to vacuum.” And so, to your point, she did not get a reputation for, “Oh, Jan can clean.” It’s like, “Oh, Jan cares. She’s invested in this facility and what we’re about. Well, okay. I’m going to give her some more responsibilities,” and then one thing leads to another.

Seth Godin
Go, Jan, go.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely. So, let’s talk about this fear business. Freedom from fear, it’s interesting because I’m thinking about Dr. Casey Means makes an interesting point about feeling safe. She’s like, “To be incredibly clear, you and everyone you’ve ever loved will die. So, in one way, none of us are really safe.”

Seth Godin
Correct, not to mention the asteroid. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-oh. Now I’m fearful, Seth. So, in a way, none of us are really safe. However, feeling safe is associated with all kinds of wonderful benefits. There’s creativity and health and freedom from chronic disease and all these things. So, likewise, with regard to freedom from fear, none of us are truly free from all risk. Like, we may very well get fired and someone may very well say, “That’s a very stupid idea and you’re not allowed to come to these meetings anymore.” That can happen. But if we have freedom from fear, boy, we unlock a lot of goodness. So, do you have any pro tips on getting to the other side of that?

Seth Godin
Well, we need to talk about resistance, but first I just want to do a small asterisk about fired, which is, I remember a few decades ago when Ford Motor Company saw that sales of the Ford Explorer were slowing down and they fired 10,000 people in one day. Here’s the thing. If their union had been smart, the UAW, a year earlier, would have said, “You’re making junky cars. We’re going on strike until you design a better car.”

Because the fact is those 10,000 people didn’t deserve to get fired. They got fired because other people designed a lousy car. That’s the risk we face, actually, when we show up at work; the risk of complying, not the risk of leading. So, this freedom from fear. If you talk to people who run the marathon, the first thing you’ll discover is that some people quit at mile 20 and other people finish.

And the difference between quitting at 20 and finishing is not how fit you are. It’s, “What are you going to do with the tired?” because they all get tired, but the people at 20 don’t know what to do with the tired so they have to stop, and the people who make it to mile 26, their coach didn’t teach them how not to be tired. Their coach taught them what to do when they feel tired. And the same thing is true with the fear.

Resistance, the thing that holds us back, writer’s block, Steve Pressfield’s great term for it, makes us feel like an imposter. And imposter syndrome is real, that when you get asked to do something, where you are confronting the future, something that hasn’t been done before, you will feel like an imposter. And so, the question which you just asked is, “How do I make imposter syndrome go away?” And the answer is, “You can’t.” And the reason you can’t is you’re an imposter, and so am I.

If you are making assertions about the future, you can’t be sure. You can’t guarantee that you are right. So, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re simply pretending that the future will be the way you say. And so, when we feel that show up, we can’t make it go away, but we can dance with it. We can welcome it. We can invite it to sit down for tea. We can use it as a marker and a symbol that we might be onto something. And if I don’t feel afraid when I’m doing my work, then I know I am not trying hard enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Can you expand on that a little bit because that shows that you care, that you’re trying something new and challenging on your edge, outside your comfort zone, like these kinds of things?

Seth Godin
Yeah. Well, how long does it take to type a 200-page book? And the answer is a day, maybe four days if you’re Robert Caro, but not that much longer. So why does it take so long to write a book? And the answer is, “You don’t know what the next sentence is supposed to be.” That the work you’re getting paid for is to explore what the next sentence is, not to type.

But a whole bunch of people signed up to do a job where they’re in the typing pool. And the problem is the typing pool is no longer filled with employees. That the miracle of AI plus outsourcing is that if I can write down a job, I can get someone to do it faster and cheaper than you.

Pete Mockaitis
If I can write down a job. Yeah, I could chew on that for a while. What is write-downable and what is not?

Seth Godin
Correct. So, I can say to somebody, or to an AI, “Please read this 100-page document and highlight 20 of the quotes.” And if all I need is the quotes, that’s mechanical. I can write that down. If it’s, “Please highlight the 20 most important quotes,” that’s worth paying a human for. Because the decision of what are the most important ones, the choice to leave the other ones out, that’s risky. There’s no guarantee you’re right. Fear arises.

And so, where I get into trouble with AI, where I get into trouble with Upwork, is if I ask someone to do a job where I can’t write down all the steps, because then, inevitably, I get disappointed. But if I can write down all the steps, I would be a fool to hire an expensive human to do it when I got a computer that’ll do it all night for free.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, pick the best quotes, or the most engaging quotes, or the most viral quotes, or the most thought-provoking quotes. So, if someone on Upwork were to say, “Okay. Cool. Sure thing, Seth. How do I determine which ones are more thought-provoking than the others?” then that is supremely not write-downable.

Even if you could write down, it’s like, “Well, you know what? It might have, like, an interesting contrast, like ‘Ask not what your country can do, but what you can do for your country.'” You know, so it might. So, any document or guidance you could produce would be incomplete, and, thus, in your parlance, not write-down-able.

Seth Godin
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Yeah, that’s juicy. Okay. So, we’re all impostors, so we dance with it and it’s not going to disappear. And, in fact, we could hopefully learn to embrace it as an indicator of something good and positive and exciting.

Seth Godin
Yeah, that’s our job. That is actually what it is to be awesome at your job, is to do things that are not write-downable, and this doesn’t mean you have to be a super fancy executive. So, there’s a fancy hotel chain in the US and the chambermaids are the lowest paid people in the organization. They’re the people who make up your room every day. Every one of them gets a $250 per guest budget to spend any way they want to please a guest.

So, they’re the front line. If they discover a couple really upset about something, they can just interrupt while they’re making the bed, and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. Why don’t you just go have lunch? It’s on us.” And they just made a decision that is not write-downable in the moment, and this is somebody who’s getting paid minimum wage.

If you don’t trust your frontline people to do that, you’ve decided to make a commodity and to race to the bottom. The alternative is to race to the top, is to stand for something and to trust your people to understand the strategy and help you get there.

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, I love that so much. My very first W2 job-job was at Kmart, and Pantry Pete, they called me. And when I learned in the training video that I had “the power to please” you know, like, “Oh, sorry, we’re out of the Pepsi 24-pack, but I can give you two 12-packs for the same price as the 24-pack,” I thought that was the coolest thing ever. And I even wrote down in my schedule, “not work, but exercise power to please,” or EPP because I was dorky.

But it really was the funnest thing I did in terms of, I guess it was the autonomy and pleasing people feels good and I think that’s just a thing that I wish every team, organization, had more of, that capacity to do that.

Seth Godin
And Kmart closed its last store last week, and the reason is because they took that piece away and raced to the bottom. They tried to out-Walmart Walmart, out-Amazon Amazon, and that’s really hard to do, because if you race to the bottom, you might win.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I love that language, out-Walmart Walmart, out-Amazon Amazon, and they sure didn’t out-Target Target. Sorry, Kmart. I mean, I’m a loyalist, got the apron, but, yeah, Target really wiped the floor there. So, let’s talk about you have a great quote in your book, “We mistakenly spend more time figuring out how to win the game we’re in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place.” I think there is just loads of wisdom in this. Can you unpack that a bit for us?

Seth Godin
Well, so we’re surrounded by games. Social media is a game. How many followers do you have? Whichever project you’re taking on is a game. Your career is a game. How much money do you get paid? These are scoring mechanisms that imply what the game is for, that there are people, billionaires, who think that what the world is for is for them to make as much money as possible.

And the thing is, if you confront a game that you cannot win, that is making you unhappy, trying harder to win that game is probably the wrong path. And so, the smallest viable audience gives us the freedom to pick who we are working with and for, and to ignore everyone else. And that gives us the responsibility to pick a game we want to be responsible for, as opposed to just saying, “Well, I’m playing the same game everybody else is.” Everything goes back to high school.

When you were in high school, you could have played the game of “How do I become Homecoming King or Queen?” or you could have played the game of “How do I get on the football team?” or you could have played the game of “How do I become first chair clarinetist?” Those are totally different games. And if you’re playing one of those games really, really hard, but the only reason is because you need to win it, you haven’t thought about which game is good for you and your world, you’re probably making a mistake.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, in the professional context, I’m just thinking about folks who just ran down the path, “Go be a doctor. Go be a lawyer. Go be an engineer. Oh, shoot, I hate this. Uh-oh.”

Seth Godin
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us some more examples of folks who have made this mindset paradigm shift and it’s been transformational for them?

Seth Godin
Well, one of the keys to the shift is to ignore sunk costs. Sunk costs are all the things you’ve invested in – a law degree, building something, buying something – and defending them going forward. You’re 35 years old, you’re a dentist, you hate being a dentist. It’s not going to get any better. You’re still going to hate being a dentist, but you keep doing it because you’ve already invested 10 years of your life and all this money in being a dentist, which means you’re sacrificing the next 40 years of your life to defend a choice that might’ve been a good one in retrospect when you made it, but it isn’t a good one anymore.

And the response is, “All sunk costs are gifts from your former self.” The Pete of yesterday, or 10 years ago, did something for me today, and you are allowed to say, “No, thanks.” You don’t have to accept the gift. Now you can make a new decision with new information. I could take this gift of a dental practice and this dental degree, or I’m going to say, “No, thank you,” and I could go become a tree farmer.

And shifting like that turns out to be good-decision science, but it’s also great for our heads, because every day you go back to your job, every day you go to work, you are re-signing up to accept the gift from yesterday. But if the gift isn’t helping you, don’t do it. So, yes, I know people who graduated from Harvard Law School but are now podcasters and life coaches. I know people who had a really good run doing something in Silicon Valley, but now they’re busy building boats because they didn’t give up, and they’re not retired. They’re creating value. They’re just playing a different game.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Some gifts need to go to Goodwill, and that’s totally fine. That’s acceptable.

Seth Godin
Yeah, it’s critical, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
A lot of this rich thinking we’re doing here seems to only exist, from my perspective, outside the realm of the urgent, the here-and-now next action. How do you think about dealing with urgency and getting the headspace to think wisely and strategically?

Seth Godin
So, you either live in the last minute, the next minute, or the best minute. Those are the three choices. So, what does it mean? The last minute is whatever is the highest on my urgency list is what I’m going to do right now, because there’s always going to be something that’s the highest on your urgency list. That lets you off the hook. You don’t have to be responsible for any of your choices because the urgency list determines it. That’s doing everything at the last minute.

The next minute is offered to everybody, every day. We get the next minute. What will we choose to do with it? And the best minute is yesterday you had one minute that was the best minute of your day. Everyone did. How can you make it so that your best minutes stack up? How can you make it so you have more of those? Because very few people who spend their life working at the last minute have many best minutes to report.

The short order cooks don’t usually have a lot of highlights from their day because all they know is someone ordered some eggs, they made some eggs, and then they went back to the next thing. And the power comes from taking a deep breath, leaving the urgent alone, it will take care of itself, and focusing instead on “How do I make this a best minute?” And you can’t work enough hours to defeat everybody because there’s only 24 hours in a day, but you could work less hours and make a bigger difference if you did the right thing with your time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Seth, I love that question, “How do I make this the best minute?” Your book, This is Strategy, is filled with useful questions. Could you share a couple of them that you think might be the most frequently useful and transformative?

Seth Godin
Well, the ones I keep coming back to are “Who’s it for?” “What’s it for?” and “What’s the change I seek to make?” Because “Who’s it for?” makes it very clear who my client is, who my boss is, who my customer is. Ignore everyone else. “What’s it for?” is why do they need this from me? What are they dreaming of when I show up? Where’s the empathy of what I did for them?

And the third question is, “What is the change I seek to make?” because if you’re not making a change, then you’ve just signed up to be a cog. You are here to make a change. Our work is actually projects. Our job is getting paid by somebody to consistently do projects, but your projects are here to make a change happen. Can you point to the change you are making?

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, Seth, tell me anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about a few of your favorite things?

Seth Godin
I would say the single best thing people can do, if any of this has resonated, is to find someone not related to you, and meet with them once a week by Zoom to tell each other the truth, to answer these questions together because what you will discover is, knowing the meeting is coming, you will change your behavior so that you can report in the meeting that you’re onto something. And just having that sounding board can open the door to make a difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Seth Godin
In the classic self-help book, Dune, the Bene Gesserit say, “Fear is the mind-killer,” three words probably worth tattooing somewhere on your body.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Seth Godin
I think that understanding what the marshmallow test really measures is really helpful. The marshmallow test has been seen as saying that if a three-year-old can sit for five minutes with a marshmallow so they’ll get two, that self-restraint leads to 20, 30 years of happiness. So, therefore, people who are “born” with self-restraint are destined for greatness.

And some of that is correct, but it’s worth understanding that a kid who grows up in a household that’s under stress, where there’s trauma, where there isn’t dinner on the table, where parents are doing their best but can’t always keep their promises, those kids understandably eat the marshmallow because who knows if you’re going to come back with two marshmallows. You probably won’t.

So, I think we need to give people a little bit more grace and a lot more support because we don’t all win the birthday lottery. And what we can do as a culture is create the conditions for people to become resilient and to find self-restraint so that we can all maximize the joy we have and that we create for others.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Seth Godin
You know, it’s really fascinating to me that you’re not supposed to talk about your own book, but I listen to my own books all the time, because if I’m headed to a meeting or I’m feeling stuck and I put on The Practice, it gets under my skin again. But if I have to pick another book, I think if you haven’t read The War of Art by my friend Steve Pressfield, you need to do that right now.

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

Seth Godin
You might not have a spokeshave at home, but a well-sharpened spokeshave is your first choice for woodworking. And for my job that involves typing, Claude.ai is so much better than ChatGPT. It’s harder working, it’s kinder, it’s not arrogant, and if you’re not using it every day, you’re being left behind because the future is arriving very fast.

Pete Mockaitis
If I may, I do have a ChatGPT premium subscription, and I’m thinking about switching. Have you looked around to all of them; the Gemini, the Perplexity, the dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and Claude’s your winner? Or you just found Claude and said, “Yep, I’m sticking with you”?

Seth Godin
I use Perplexity every day. If you’re using Google, you’ve made a mistake. Perplexity completely defeats Google. I’ve tried Gemini a little bit. It’s really fun if you want to tweak Google, to ask Google to compare things. Like, type in “Pop-Tarts versus Doberman Pinschers,” and it will give you a little essay about the difference between a Pop-Tart and a Doberman Pinscher, as opposed to say, “That’s a stupid question.” Claude would say, “Why are you asking me that?” and do it in a kind way.

So, I haven’t tried all of them. What’s magic about Claude is they spent a lot of time trying to create something that will challenge you to do even better with the next time you interact with it. Whereas, ChatGPT, to me, feels like it’s always doing me a favor, it does the minimum amount, and it argues, it really argues with you when it’s wrong, and that just pisses me off.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s like, I say, “Hey, give me this answer,” and it tells me what I would do to get the answer. It’s like, “Yes, I know. Go do that now, please.”

Seth Godin
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Seth Godin
I would say that my favorite habit, if people know me, is that I have habits. That I have intentional habits. That I eat the same thing, I get up at the same time, but most of my habits are about wearing an actual uniform and having a practice when it comes to my job. I do not wait to be inspired. Tomorrow, there’ll be a post on my blog, not because it’s the best post I ever wrote, but because it’s Friday. And knowing that these are things I do, frees up my mind to make a different sort of decision. And we all have habits, but if they’re not intentional habits, I think they’re probably getting in the way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to especially resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often, they Kindle book highlight, they retweet to the high heavens?

Seth Godin
My most successful blog post is also my shortest. What a surprise. You don’t need more time. You just need to decide.

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

Seth Godin
Seths.blog, there’s 9,000 blog posts, one a day for a very, very long time. And if you go to Seths.blog/TIS, you’ll find out everything you need to know about this new book.

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

Seth Godin
You’ve already done the key thing, which is listening to Pete’s podcast, which is showing up and announcing you want to be awesome at your job. The challenge is, “Can you actually say what it would mean to be awesome at your job?” Because if you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going there.

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, thank you. This was so much fun. I wish you much luck with your book, This is Strategy, and I hope you have many excellent plans well-executed.

Seth Godin
Thank you, Pete. Keep making this ruckus. It matters.

Oct 17
0

1003: How to Be Both Empathetic and Effective as a Leader with Maria Ross

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Maria Ross reveals how leaders can drive growth and improve performance without sacrificing empathy.

You’ll Learn

  1. How everyone wins with more empathy 
  2. Why leaders struggle with accountability—and how to fix it 
  3. How to practice empathy without devolving into people-pleasing 

About Maria

Maria Ross is a keynote speaker, author, strategist, and empathy advocate who believes cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. She is the founder of Red Slice and advises organizations on how to leverage empathy to better engage and connect. Maria has authored multiple books, including her most recent, The Empathy Edge and hosts The Empathy Edge podcast. Maria’s forthcoming book, The Empathy Dilemma: How Successful Leaders Balance Performance, People, and Personal Boundaries arrives on shelves in September 2024. A dynamic speaker, Maria has delighted audiences at leading conferences and organizations such as TEDx, The 3% Conference, The New York Times Small Business Summit, and Salesforce and her insights have appeared in many media outlets, including MSNBC, NPR, Entrepreneur, Forbes, Newsweek, Huffington Post, and Thrive Global. 

Resources Mentioned

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Maria Ross Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Maria, welcome.

Maria Ross
Thanks for having me, Pete. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited, too, to hear about some of your wisdom about empathy in professional contexts. So, I’d love to start by hearing, if there’s a particularly surprising or shocking discovery you’ve made about empathy in professional context since you’ve been researching this stuff for years and years and years.

Maria Ross
Yeah, so many. I mean, there’s so much data and research out there that shows that being an empathetic leader and colleague boosts engagement, performance, innovation, results in better customer loyalty, better customer lifetime value. I think what was most surprising to me in the early days was discovering that, for some companies, there’s a link between their empathetic culture and their stock price being favorable.

So, we all know, personally, that when we’re dealing with people that are empathetic or dealing with brands that are empathetic, we do feel seen, heard, and valued, and that actually translates to bottom line results. So, it’s been a fun mission to go on, to show people that empathy is a strategic advantage and by no means is it a weakness.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s beautiful to hear you say that because, I don’t know, I’ve just been on this YouTube kick in which I’ve been hearing about the playbook of big tobacco and big pharma and big food and big chemicals, and it seems like, “Okay, someone says there’s a safety problem and you just deny, deny, deny and infiltrate research and all that.”

That kind of seems like the opposite of empathetic leadership, is that, like, we’re not trying to understand, “Oh, shoot, we might be causing harms,” but rather, it’s like, “No, no, no, no, you’re all wrong, and it’s not what’s up.” But I’m thinking even in these contexts, we think an empathetic culture would be a more lucrative one.

Maria Ross
Yeah, actually. And it’s funny because, yes, of course, we can all find examples of companies and leaders who are the opposite, the antithesis of empathy, and yet they are succeeding. But I think my message is all about you can be both empathetic and high-performing. You can be empathetic and achieve amazing results. You can be empathetic and hold people accountable, and that they’re not either/or. I think the examples you’re citing are the examples of companies gone awry, and organizations that are harming people rather than helping people.

But from a sustainability perspective in the long run, employees are looking for cultures. It’s sort of table stakes for them, “Will I be seen, heard, and valued in this culture?” But also, brands are now needing to appeal to generations of people that actually want to know what’s going on under the covers. They want to know what’s going on under the hood. And so, they actually do care about how you’re treating your employees, how you’re treating the planet, how you’re treating your community.

And we saw in the pandemic, through several studies that were done through an organization called DoSomething.org, that especially Generation Z buyers and younger Millennials were actually making purchase decisions based on how well companies were, I guess, responding to the needs of their employees and their communities.

I know when I was 17, I didn’t really care, but these generations do care and they vote with their wallets in terms of who they will support and who they won’t. And so, when we look at long-term viability and long-term sustainability, some of those outdated tactics may work for a while, but eventually those organizations are going to die out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, what’s coming to mind here is I’m thinking about some friends who worked at a medical devices company, and there are some stories in which the leadership of such companies say, “Hey, take a look at someone. They’re going to come on stage for our annual meeting and we’re going to see how we saved their life and meet their spouse and their children.” You’re like, “Wow, look at what we do with our work.”

And then other leaders are just, like, all about EBITDA and cash flow projections and growth and da, da, da. And so, they’re doing the same thing, they’re making medical devices, and yet the presentation in the big meetings has a very different flavor, “Look how this enriches people” versus “Look how this enriches shareholders.” Well, the folks that I know left the company that is all about the shareholder enrichment view. So, I think that is very resonant in terms of engaging that stuff is powerful.

Maria Ross
Absolutely. And there’s a host of research, it’s sort of tangential to the work that I do around how purpose-driven organizations drive more innovation and drive higher retention and higher engagement from their employees for exactly the reason that you cited. It doesn’t get us excited to do our best work for a company that we know is just making a few people at the top much richer.

So, what is our actual purpose? What is our actual mission? Why are we here dealing with the slog of everyday work life if not for something that motivates us and inspires us to be our best selves? And that’s not just something fluffy. That’s about, “Do you want your team operating at maximum cognitive ability? Do you want them coming up with new ideas and being innovative? Or do you want the people that do that to go work for your competitor?”

That’s really the choice that a company is making if they choose to just focus solely on the money-making aspect, because that might be very inspirational for those that are benefiting from that at the top, but it’s not beneficial or enough of a motivation for the people that are within the organization. And as an example, recently a study came out that comes out every year. It’s in its ninth year. It’s called the State of Workplace Empathy Report. It’s done by an organization called Business Solver. And you can go check it out. It’s free.

But one of the things that they consistently find over and over again is that when employees are asked, “How does your company show empathy to you?” They actually cite some benefits as empathetic. And the top benefit that they cite is not higher work compensation. That’s like 13th on the list. The top ones are flexibility and also employee assistance programs. So, getting the support they need and also having workplace flexibility is more important to many of our best workers. Now that’s not to say we underpay everybody, but it is to say that that carrot of money only takes you so far.

Pete Mockaitis
And just to be clear, employee assistance, is that money or is that something else?

Maria Ross
Employee assistance programs are like mental health benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, got you.

Maria Ross
“Do I have somewhere to go within the organization to get help that I need?” Assistance for new parents, assistance for bereavement, “What are those employee-assistance programs that you have in place to support me as a whole person and not just a body at a desk?”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay, so empathy is great. Your book is called The Empathy Dilemma. It doesn’t sound like a dilemma, Maria. That just sounds like a great thing to go do a lot of. Where’s the dilemma?

Maria Ross
It does. So, the first book on the topic was called The Empathy Edge, and that was really the business case of the ROI of empathy for your organization, for your team, for your brand. And what I was hearing from people over the last five years, because that came out in 2019, right before the pandemic lockdown, I was hearing from people, “Great, we’re sold. We are converts, right? But here is where trying to be a people-centered leader gets really hard. Here’s where it gets challenging for me.”

And especially in the environment we’re in right now, we’ve got this group of managers and leaders in the middle who are being squeezed by the expectations of the business and the demands of their people, and they’re trying to be human-centered leaders, but they are burning out. They are experiencing a lot of poor performance. They’re seeing quality slip, and they’re wondering what they’re doing wrong.

And so, The Empathy Dilemma is really about helping people balance the needs of the business with the needs of their people by presenting five foundational pillars that will help them be both empathetic and effective at the same time without burning out, which is the key.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you tell a story to illustrate that picture? What is me having so much empathy that I burn out and become ineffective look like in practice?

Maria Ross
One senior director I remember speaking to was talking about the fact that she had an underperformer on her team, and she had bent over backwards during the pandemic to provide flexibility and support to her team, and all of that resulted in good things that we don’t want to go back on.

We are talking about mental health more at work, we’re understanding that, again, people don’t park their humanity at the door when they come to work, and things going on in our culture, in our society, in the world, impact our ability to populate an accurate spreadsheet at work. We don’t forget those things. And so, all of those conversations were good, but what was happening for this particular senior director is that she had one employee who was constantly taking mental health days, and constantly citing, “This crosses my boundaries. This does this. This does that.”

And her response as a leader was, “What am I doing wrong? I need to support this person better.” And her idea of support was not having difficult conversations with her, not wanting to confront her, wanting to take on the work for her. And what she finally realized was that, in the name of empathy, she was actually not doing empathy. She was people-pleasing, she was caving in, and she wasn’t having confident and tough conversations head-on. And what that was doing was that that was not empathetic to the rest of the team who had to pick up the weight of this person constantly failing in their role.

So, when she finally was able to have a direct conversation with this person, and say, “Look, these are the expectations we’re holding you to, and you’re not meeting them. So, tell us what’s going on for you. Is this something where you need to be in a different role? Do we need to build different skills?” And in that situation, that employee was actually not responsive to her at all, to the point that they ended up parting ways because that person could not succeed at work. And nobody wants to come to work and fail every day.

So, what happened with this leader was she thought she was being empathetic the whole time, and what she was, was something else, and that’s what I talk about in the book, about the differences between empathy is not people-pleasing, it’s not caving into unreasonable demands, and it’s not even agreeing with someone. So, you can still make a difficult business decision, but it’s how you do it.

How do you communicate? How do you show up? How do you build a culture of trust so, when something like this happens, you’re able to have a really difficult conversation with someone, and say, “I’m not going to put it off. I’m not going to put it off because it might hurt their feelings. I’m going to have the conversation I need to have because I need to protect the rest of the team, and I’m here to do a job. I’m here to deliver something to my organization.” Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can do that and still make tough decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, do you have any guiding principles, or maxims, mantras, distinguishing guiding lights to help us as we’re making these distinctions or, I don’t know if it’s a tightrope, or if it’s a two-by-two matrix, or how you conceptualize this so that we’re playing the game just right and not falling into the zone of being a jerk versus a people-pleaser, but we’re being empathetic and effective at the same time?

Maria Ross
I think the biggest thing people need to understand is that empathy is anything but weak. Because for you to be able to take on another person’s perspective or point of view without defensiveness or fear, that actually requires a very strong person. And so, empathy for others actually begins with working on yourself. So, are you self-aware enough? That’s actually pillar one, self-awareness.

Are you self-aware enough to know how you show up in an interaction and in a conversation? Do you know what your strengths are? Do you know where your weaknesses are? Do you know what your emotional triggers are? That’s a hard one for people. I spoke to a CEO this past year who, very successful business, finally did some sort of personal development and some self-assessment, and realized that one of her biggest triggers was actually not being believed.

And so, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where someone accuses you of something, and you immediately start searching through your sent mail of like, “No, no, I know I didn’t say that,” or, “I know I said that,” or, “I know I have proof of this.” That was setting her off with people that really were just communicating that they didn’t understand something or that they had a misperception of something. She would sort of go off the deep end.

She realized this about herself and she realized that in those moments she wasn’t showing up as her best leader self. She was showing up very defensive and very much from a place of fear, to even hear what the other person was saying. So that’s what we mean by understanding our triggers. And so, when we work on ourselves first, we can show up in the conversation with more grace, with more patience.

It’s kind of like, you know, I have a 10-year-old, and I am the worst mother in the world when I’m hungry and tired, when I don’t have my own well full, when I don’t have my own battery charged. And so, in order to be empathetic with someone and stand strong, you need to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself, that you are re-energizing yourself, helping yourself think in different ways. That’s why the second pillar is actually self-care.

So, self-awareness and self-care can help you create the foundation you need to have a more empathetic exchange with someone without blowing your top.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood, yes. And we had, boy, one of the early episodes, we talked to Jim Tamm, and he kept coming back to managing your defensiveness is just transformational in terms of having effective conversations and working through this. And some of those parts boil down to self-awareness and self-care.

I would like to chat about the five pillars, and maybe, since we’ve already introduced self-awareness and self-care, could you give us perhaps a top do and don’t, associated with each pillar based on what you are seeing most frequently and what seems to be the most effective or disruptive?

Maria Ross
I love it because there’s a lot of strategies and then actionable tactics that people can try in the book. And I do want to just offer this, you don’t have to do all of them all at once. And they’re not meant to be linear, but if you do start with self-awareness, you can uncover “What are my weaker pillars of the five?” And you can mix and match and experiment with a few of the tactics within each of those pillars to see how you can shore up your empathy and show up as a more confident leader who can also make room for compassion at the same time.

So, self-awareness, the biggest tip is, take a self-assessment. There are a bazillion of them out there. There’s Enneagram. There’s Myers-Briggs. There’s DISC. Whatever could work for you, put your ego aside. Ego kills empathy. Put your ego aside and say, “I know that there’s got to be things that I could work on,” and help pinpoint what some of those things are. And that also can include seeking feedback from others and being okay enough with accepting some negative or constructive feedback.

With self-care, it’s making sure that you make time and hold it sacred for what charges you up, what lights you up. Self-care doesn’t have to be passive. It doesn’t have to be massages and manis and pedis. It could be, for some people, it’s rock climbing. For some people, it’s being in a play or doing improv. For some people, it’s knitting or running or whatever it is, training for a marathon. So, make sure that you’re making time for the things outside of work that light you up.

The things where you’re in flow, the things where you’re thinking about the present, because the more mindful you are, the more you can actually be present for someone in a conversation and read their cues, read their body language, hear their tone of voice, see what they’re doing in terms of, like, they’re fidgeting or their gestures. You can only do that if you are charged up. So that’s self-care.

The third one is clarity. We cannot hold people accountable to an expectation that we’ve never set. And too often, we, as leaders – I’m guilty of all of this too, by the way – we, as leaders, think we’re being clear about something, or we’re making assumptions that everyone in our organization or our team knows what professionalism means, or has the same definition of it, or understands what we mean by effective communication, or what we mean by hierarchy, or whatever the term may be.

Spelling out those things when you work with a team is really important to make sure that you’re coming back to shared goals. So, do we have like a document that goes beyond like the pretty bullet points of our values on the office wall? Do we have something that says, “This is how we communicate. This is how we run meetings. This is how we honor each other’s time. These are the expectations of our culture”? And make sure that that’s documented and it’s clear. Because if it’s not clear, you can’t hold people accountable to it.

The fourth one is decisiveness. And this is a good one, and you might be able to relate to this, and so will your listeners. But many of us, in the name of empathy, we understand that multiple points of view hold value. We understand that we make better business decisions. There’s a whole host of research around that, around diversity and inclusion, and belonging in terms of what makes a really good business decision. When we have diverse voices at the table, we can uncover opportunities we’ve never seen, we can avoid risks we might have missed.

The challenge is when you try to be an empathetic “leader,” you think that making a decision means making everyone happy, and that’s not what it means. There’s no such decision that will get unanimous consensus. I guess unless it’s, “Hey, you all get a million dollar bonus this quarter.” But what it’s about is being able to swiftly synthesize multiple points of view, make a decision, and then be able to communicate that decision back to your team in a transparent way, “Here’s why we made this decision. Here’s why, Pete, we weren’t able to implement your idea, but please keep those ideas coming because they’re useful.”

And being able to communicate in a way where people can say, “Okay, I disagree, but at least I commit.” Disagree but commit, “Can I at least get on board with the decision because I understand how it was made?” And the fact that you made it, that you didn’t just let it fester because it was uncomfortable or hard, or because you were waiting for the right sign from above to tell you it was the right decision, that leaves people in limbo. That stresses them out. That makes them anxious. They want to know what the plan is going forward. And so, being able to be a decisive leader is actually empathetic.

And then, finally, this one you might really enjoy, the fifth pillar is joy. The fifth pillar is creating levity, creating comfort, creating an environment where people can relax and be themselves is an important part of building an empathetic culture. Because when you do that, you build trust, you build psychological safety, and brain science shows us that when we are under stress or we’re being punished for something, our executive functions shut down. They’re not working because we’re in survival mode. So, no one’s going to learn, no one’s going to grow if they’re in an environment of fear and anxiety and heaviness all the time.

So even if the work is not always fun, we can create an environment where we can have levity, where we can laugh at ourselves, where we can have awards for the best failure of the week, where we can have fun Slack channels that say, like, “This is the curated lunch channel, and show us what you had for lunch for our remote team.”

There are so many ideas and so many leaders that I spoke to for the book that shared some really interesting ideas with me, but the possibilities are endless. And you can solicit those ideas from your team. You don’t have to just, as the leader, come up with all the ideas for how to make work more fun. There is research out there as well, again, tangential to my work, that shows that if you have a friend at work, you’re more engaged, the quality of your output is better. And in environments where it matters, safety goes up.

So, do you have a friend at work? Not all your workmates need to be your best friends, but do you have a friend or a best friend at work? That actually goes a long way to creating an environment where people actually want to show up and do the work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I feel like I’ve got a good sense of some top do’s and don’ts for self-awareness and self-care. Could we hear a couple of your faves on the last three: the clarity, the decisiveness, the joy?

Maria Ross
Clarity, I actually offered up, which is to create a document for your team of, like, a memorandum of understanding, is what one company called it that I interviewed for the book, but sort of a code of, not a code of conduct, but sort of a rules of engagement for your team. Document that, “What will we put up with? What don’t we put up with? What are we asking of people?”

It could be something like, “We do not have to check our emails on the weekends, but if there’s an emergency, the leader is allowed to text someone.” It could be, “On Fridays, we don’t have meetings.” It could be, “In meetings, don’t get upset if we challenge your idea. That’s part of our culture is to be additive and to always try to up-level everyone’s ideas. It doesn’t mean you’re being attacked. It means we’re adding to it.” So, things like that, whatever is true of your culture, there’s really no one example, but being able to document that.

We often talk about like the unsaid rules of our team or our culture. Don’t make them unsaid. Write them down. Make sure everyone understands them. Decisiveness, one tactic I came across that I really liked, was putting a limit on your decisions. Meaning, if you know you have trouble making decisions, put a decision date on your calendar as a task, and say, “I will make this decision by next Friday,” and let everyone on your team know, “Hey, I’m making this decision by next Friday, so weigh in before that because I’m going to be making the call on Friday.”

That actually gives you a forcing mechanism that now people are expecting you to make a decision, and they know they better get their input to you before then or it’s not going to be factored into the decision. And then for joy, I gave you some examples of companies that are using some really creative Slack channels, or doing really great team-building exercises that are not forced team building, forced fun for people. But can they tie their team building back to either a skill they’re trying to build or to their mission?

Can they do a community event that supports their mission? Can they do something that also is inclusive of everyone in the organization? So, when you’re planning, the default is, “Let’s do a Friday happy hour.” That’s not really that kind or empathetic to those in your organization who might be recovering alcoholics. It might not be kind to someone who’s got to go pick up their kid at daycare at 4:00 o’clock. So, are you doing a mix of activities or modalities for injecting joy into the workday so that it accommodates people with different needs?

Pete Mockaitis
Could I hear about a particularly brilliant team-building thing that’s not happy hours or forced fun?

Maria Ross
So, I interviewed a woman named Teri Schmidt. She runs a company called Stronger to Serve, and I interviewed her for my podcast, The Empathy Edge, because she had such a unique take on team building. They have created seven experiences that you can choose from, or you can work with them to customize your own, where they’re tying the activity into a company’s purpose or mission.

And what they’re doing is, the first half of it is actually a skill building, a professional development exercise. So, let’s say, one of her packages, it is helping folks deliver difficult performance reviews or deliver difficult information. So, at the beginning, they worked on delivering how they could up-level their ability to deliver tough information in a nurturing and compassionate way and in a confident way so it didn’t leave people confused.

And then the second half, and it’s escaping me what it was, they did some sort of a service project around that that helped them use the skills they had just learned at the beginning in the project they were doing, and they were doing a service project as a team. And her research shows that when you engage in service, in acts of service together, it actually bonds you as a team.

So, I thought that was a really clever way of trying to, like, feed, I hate to say kill birds with one stone anymore, so I say feed birds with one scone. Not only does it check off professional development, it checks off team-building, and it checks off acts of service related to your mission or your purpose. So, it kind of ticks all the boxes for people and creates a memorable experience that they can bond around, but that actually has meaning to their day-to-day work.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. I dig a lot of these, and what I’m thinking the most about now is with clarity, it’s astounding how one word can mean completely different things to different people. And I remember I was chatting with a buddy of mine, and he said that he was thinking about his culture of his company. He was disappointed that someone quit and they gave two weeks’ notice.

And he said, “I understand that this is a norm in organizations and employment, but in our organization, we’re all about setting each other up for success, and this really didn’t do that because it put some folks in a tight spot. You try to replace and backfill and reshuffle things.” And he felt like that was a bit of a failure in terms of communicating the culture, is that apparently this message didn’t apply because they didn’t even, like, apologize or acknowledge, like, “I know.” It’s just like, “Oh, yeah, hey, I’m moving on, so, okay.”

And so, he sort of took that on himself, like, “Well, we really got to be clear about what do we really mean about setting each other up for success.” And I think that’s, in many ways, what makes cultures fun and interesting and distinctive from organization to organization. It’s like, “Hey, this is a normal practice in many places, and here it’s not acceptable, and this is why, and what’s behind it, and what setting each other up for success means in our vernacular.”

Maria Ross
Right, “And what does it mean here?” That is such a great example, Pete, because that’s a thing about assumptions. And that’s also an assumption based on generational. That’s an assumption based on maybe what group you’re from. So that is such a great example of the fact that when we make these assumptions about these unsaid rules, we set ourselves up for failure.

And there’s a great book I’m going to recommend, not mine, that’s called Unlocking Generational CODES. It’s by a generational expert named Ana Liotta, who you should have on the show, and it’s one of the clearest breakdowns of the differences in the generations, not because one’s right and one’s wrong, that we’re all formed by generational operating systems.

We’re all informed by our generational operating systems that usually stem from, within the generation, something, some seminal event that happened around we’re 10 or 11 years old. It actually shapes the way that we view things. And so, it went all the way from what she called a traditionalist, which were like way older, like my parents’ generation, like ‘30s, ‘20s, ‘30s born, down to what she called Nexters, because she actually wrote the book before the term Gen X or Gen Z came out. And also, she gave, like, tips on how to get around those communication snafus that you have. But what I loved about it was it talked about for each generation, within their operating code, what were the differences around how they view information, for example, how they view communication, how they view professionalism.

So, one example is some of the older generations look at information as something to be hoarded. It’s an aspect of power. It’s “The more information I have, the more important I am.” It’s not right or wrong. It’s just what was part of their DNA, part of their generational DNA.

If you look at Millennials and Gen Z, they see information as a catalyst, “The more people that have information, the more innovative we can be, the more we can problem-solve, the more we can get creative.” So, you can imagine someone with that perspective trying to talk to someone with the other perspective about making decisions or transparency or, “Why didn’t you tell us that was happening?”

All of those things that cause all of these barriers to us being able to connect and, more importantly, perform, it comes down to clarifying what do we mean by these things, and understanding that people will have different definitions of their own based on where they come from, based on their own experiences, based on their ages, based on their sexual orientation, based on so many factors that it behooves us, within a culture of a team, to say, “These are our rules for operating together, and we don’t want to make any assumptions.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love to get your take, Maria, for folks who are all in on empathy, and so much so that maybe they even struggle with non-empathy, people-pleasing behaviors, and that’s just in them, any pro tips on how to shake that off and be empathetic and more effective in those times in which it’s you got to call someone out, to hold folks accountable, to point out mistakes or development opportunities and difficult things?

Maria Ross
As you go through the self-awareness phase and understand your behaviors and your actions and your triggers and your strengths and your challenges, you can then determine, “What are the other pillars that I need to shore up in order to be in a position where I can have these conversations without giving away the farm, without taking on extra work because I feel sorry for someone?”

Once those foundations are shored up for yourself, you have a bigger likelihood of success of having an empathetic interaction with someone that still gets the job done, that still holds them accountable. I spoke to one leader for the book, who is a CMO, a chief marketing officer, and I had worked for her at one time. And her ability to get to know her people was by design.

She would keep, you know, this sounds kind of creepy, she would keep files on people, like family’s names, kids’ birthdays, interests, all that kind of stuff so she could have more meaningful interactions with her team, so she could get to know them outside of work, and understand, “For this person, this is how I need to motivate them. For this other person, this is how I need to motivate them.” And she was a master at actually managing up as well, being empathetic to her managers and her bosses, because empathy flows both ways.

And when I spoke to her about this dilemma that a lot of folks are experiencing, especially around leaders who say, “Oh, my gosh, I have so much work to do, and now you want me to be a therapist?” she was very candid and said, “I am very clear that my role is to generate revenue and drive growth. My role is not to be a therapist.”

“I can still get to know someone personally so that I can motivate them and inspire them and have fun with them, and be clear with them in a way that they can understand because I know them. But I’m very clear that my primary goal is this. And I’m not here, I was not hired to help you figure out your boundaries with your mother-in-law. That’s for someone getting paid $300 an hour who is an actual therapist.”

So, what I loved about that is that we conflate these things that actually make it harder for us to lead with empathy because we don’t have to be someone’s therapist. It’s not the same thing as getting to know someone on a personal level. And so, I think that that’s one of the biggest tips I could give is make sure that you understand the difference between where your role and your goal ends, and some other modality or some other intervention is required.

And for this particular leader, she was very good about understanding that “If the conversation gets to that point, then I need to direct that person to the resources or the employee assistance programs that the company provides. That there’s a line between what I’m able to do as I’ve gotten to know this person and motivate them and have fun at work, to what this person might really need.”

And I think if we’re more aware that there is a line, that we don’t sort of bleed into the people that we are managing, I think that’s a better way for us to more strongly set our boundaries. And I really like sharing that story because it’s about clarity of boundaries, but it’s also about clarity of role and clarity of goals, and why she is there in that company, what she’s there to do, and what she’s not there to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Maria, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Maria Ross
No, I think we covered it all.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Maria Ross
A favorite quote of mine is from Eleanor Roosevelt who said, basically, I don’t remember the lead into this, but it’s how it’s so hard to please everybody because you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. So do what you think is right. That has actually been a really big driving force for me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Maria Ross
Drive by Daniel Pink, and it’s about understanding the secret factors that motivate us. So, I just think that whole field of motivation is fascinating and his books a great read. It’s called Drive.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you?

Maria Ross
I think it might be the closing tag to my podcast, which is something I came up with when I was writing The Empathy Edge. It’s that “Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive.”

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

Maria Ross
They can visit my main hub at Red-Slice.com. They can find all the socials there. I’m on Instagram @redslicemaria. And my podcast is at TheEmpathyEdge.com, or on your favorite podcast player.

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

Maria Ross
Yes. Do not fall into the false narrative that empathy is weak. Bring it into your career, bring it into your work, bring it into your life. And if you practice it at work, it may just spill over into your personal life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Maria, this is fun. I wish you much good empathetic moments.

Maria Ross
Thank you so much for having me. This has been fun.

Oct 14
0

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

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Anne Chow demonstrates how embracing inclusion enhances performance and transforms workplaces.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why busyness destroys opportunities
  2. How inclusion boosts success 
  3. Why consensus is over-rated

About Mitch

As the former CEO of AT&T Business, Anne Chow was the first woman and first woman of color to hold the position of CEO at AT&T in 2019, overseeing more than 35,000 employees who collectively served 3 million business customers worldwide during her time there. She is currently the Lead Director on the board of Franklin Covey, serves on the board of 3M and CSX, and teaches at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Resources Mentioned

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Anne Chow Interview Transcript

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.