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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.

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

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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.