Dr. Barbara Kellerman explores the roots of bad leadership and offers strategic tips for challenging it.
You’ll Learn
- Where leadership training falls short
- The two core components of “bad” leadership
- Four tips for standing up to bad leaders
About Barbara
Barbara Kellerman was Founding Executive Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School; the Kennedy’s School’s James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Leadership; and a member of the Harvard faculty for over twenty years. She is currently a Fellow at the Center.
Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books. She’s appeared on numerous media outlets and has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.
She received the Wilbur M. McFeeley Award from the National Management Association for her pioneering work on leadership and followership, as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association. From 2015 to 2024 she has been ranked by Global Gurus as among the “World’s Top 30 Management Professionals.”
- Book: Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Leadership for the Common Good)
- Book: Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers
- Book: Professionalizing Leadership
- Website: BarbaraKellerman.com
Resources Mentioned
- Documents: The Federalist Papers
Barbara Kellerman Interview Transcript
Pete Mockaitis
Barbara, welcome.
Barbara Kellerman
Well, thank you, Pete. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for asking me.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom, and I thought it’d be great if you could maybe kick us off with hearing a tale of maybe the most wild case of bad leadership you have witnessed or heard about through your work and research in the workplace.
Barbara Kellerman
Well, Pete, if you know my work, it goes back on bad leadership, in particular, to a book I wrote or an essay. At first there was an essay I wrote called “Hitler’s Ghost: A Manifesto,” which was me arguing that, what I call the leadership industry, which is my field, all kinds of experts on leadership, whether in corporate leadership or political leadership, mainly corporate leadership, that my colleagues in the leadership industry were not paying any attention to what I call the dark side of leadership, the painful side of leadership, the egregious side of leadership.
But in the book that grew out of that, which came out about 20 years ago, which is called Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, I developed seven different types of bad leadership. Those types of bad leadership are important because they range from the ineffectual, all the way, in awfulness, to evil.
So, it really depends on which type of bad leadership are we talking about. Obviously, if we’re talking about evil leadership, which I define as someone who inflicts pain, literally physical or psychological pain, on his or her followers, that’s obviously a different case in point as somebody who is, dare I say, simply ineffectual.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so I guess I’m interested in terms of, let’s go with evil, in terms of in the workplace, you say, “Whoa, so you think your boss is bad, check it. This is what full-blown bad looks like.”
Barbara Kellerman
So, I would say that the word evil as I define it, and again I developed and identified the types in the book, it very rarely applies to the workplace because it implies a kind of malevolent intent, which I don’t think we find that often in the workplace. In the workplace, I talk more about something called callous leadership, leaders who are thoughtless, mean, or unkind, not thinking carefully about the other, or leaders who are explosive, who lose their tempers too quickly.
Alas, it’s one of the mysteries of the human condition to me because it would seem to me that it would be in the interest of most leaders and managers to keep those who report to them relatively happy as opposed to unhappy.
Pete Mockaitis
I’ve often wondered, that’s one of my top mysteries of humanity, it’s like even if you are purely self-interested, and truly care not a wit, about your fellow human being, you’re still better off not being a jerk. You adjust, you get farther, you achieve more of your ends if people can tolerate you and, generally, are fine interacting with you.
Barbara Kellerman
I completely agree with you, Pete, but I would say it especially applies to, let’s say, the United States of America in the third decade of the 21st century, when the issue of talent retention, holding on to people that you think are really important to your enterprise, to your mission, to your purpose, that becomes really top of your list of priorities.
So, it is often in one’s self-interest, apart from the graciousness of being decent as opposed to indecent to other people, it is in one’s, as you imply, in one’s self-interest, in the corporate interest, and almost always in the interest of the task that needs to be accomplished to keep people, if not wildly happy, at least from being miserably unhappy.
Pete Mockaitis
That checks out. So, with all that said, can you lay it on us, a tale that was particularly shocking in terms of bad leadership at work?
Barbara Kellerman
I think I’m going to take a slightly different example, a man, because he’s so extremely well-known since, even since, though he’s now dead, a man by the name of Jack Welch.
Pete Mockaitis
All right.
Barbara Kellerman
Who, of course, was one of the legendary corporate leaders of all time, the company, which many of your listeners will know, is General Electric, and it’s an example, I would not exactly call him a bad leader, particularly a prototype of somebody who’s awful, but he was known, very well known, and much admired for being lean and mean. And that, of course, meant letting a lot of people go.
Pete Mockaitis
I remember the nickname Neutron Jack. He would evaporate, make the people disappear, but keep the buildings and equipment.
Barbara Kellerman
Exactly. But I will tell you why I, in particular, think that history has proven him not to be a particularly good leader, even setting aside the point that we’re just making. So, Jack Welch was on the cutting edge of what I referred to earlier as the leadership industry. And you probably know this, Pete, that GE, again, was on the cutting edge of corporate training. They had a campus in Crotonville, New York, and it was well known, again, at the forefront of the leadership industry.
The irony of that, though, and it addresses what I am known for, I dare say, for better and worse, which is a kind of skepticism, if not even cynicism, about the leadership industry, which professes to teach people how to lead wisely and well, and I’m not sure we have an enormous amount of evidence for that. But setting that aside for the moment, the Crotonville campus was an example of something that didn’t work.
Because, as I hardly have to tell you that in recent decades, now it’s somewhat recovered under CEO Larry Culp, but for decades General Electric went from being the icon of American industry to being one of the fall guys of American industry, and Jack Welch’s successor failed absolutely to not only help the company thrive, but he succeeded in plunging it straight downhill.
Pete Mockaitis
And there, what do you believe are some of the particular behaviors that were so destructive and may have led to GE’s demise?
Barbara Kellerman
I don’t know that I would use that language, Pete, that it was particular behaviors, I think it was just a kind of hubris that assumed that, “You know, the way I teach leadership, it’s guaranteed to succeed.” As I suggested a moment ago, we have not a great deal of evidence that the way leadership is taught, whether within organizations, whether within business schools, schools of public administration, our criteria for measurement are rather meager.
We’re dealing here with human beings, not widgets, so it’s hard to measure the success of a leadership program, a leadership course, a leadership institute. And I would say that hubris was the main problem with Jack Welch and his legendary leadership training efforts.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, then could you maybe give us some examples of how hubris translates into some of the things they did and said that were problematic?
Barbara Kellerman
Well, again, I want to be careful to distinguish between being bad, or to use the word you just used, “problematic” and not being good enough. In other words, I’m not saying that what was done at Crotonville was bad. I’m saying that the successes that were touted were in scant evidence and are in scant evidence.
And I’ve taught many leadership courses, although I don’t tell people I teach how to lead, I tell them I teach about leadership, which is actually two different things, that when somebody takes a leadership course, whether mine or anybody else’s, and then they’re questioned at the end, or there was a kind of review, “What did you learn? How was it?” typically, the answer is, “This was a great course. I learned so much. It’s amazing. I’m a different person.”
But, in fact, in the real world, we don’t really have brilliantly successful ways of assessing the long-term impact of what most leadership courses, programs, centers, institutes, etc. actually accomplish. So, it’s a quick and easy sell, “Buy my book and you too can learn how to lead,” “Take my course and you too can learn how to lead better than you’re leading now,” “Follow my seven easy steps and you too can succeed,” I would argue that’s not as brilliant to sell and brilliant to buy as people generally like to believe.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then I’m curious, from your perspective, having looked at a lot of things and having a lot of skepticism for a lot of promises, have you seen any bright spots and what makes them bright?
Barbara Kellerman
In a book I wrote called Professionalizing Leadership I argued that leadership learning should, much, much more strongly than it currently does, resemble learning how to be a physician, learning how to be a lawyer, learning how to be a teacher, learning how to be an engineer.
In other words, I argue that we need to take it more seriously, that we need to think more like some of the sages from the past, whether it’s Plato or Confucius or Machiavelli, which is it takes a long time, if not a lifetime, to learn how to lead.
And if you’re going to, again, emulate what the professions do, becoming a doctor, becoming a lawyer, you will realize that what I break down into a three-step process. First, it should be, in my view, leadership education, which is developing an intellectual understanding of what leadership and followership entail. Just like in medical school, one of the first courses that you take is anatomy. They’re not going to let you slice into a human body until you have learned, been educated about the anatomy of the human body.
So, it is with leadership. I believe first step should be leadership education. Second step should be what I call leadership training, which is where you develop the skills required to lead in your particular context. By the way, I’m going to deviate again because I want to stop at context. So, I can be a great leader in one situation but a lousy leader in another. So, I always talk about the importance of context, which is something we can return to if you like, but I’ll go back for a minute just to the three-step process of what I call professionalizing leadership.
Step one, leadership education. Step two, leadership training, learning the skills and talents that are required for your particular job or task in your particular organization, or situation, or circumstance. And step three is what I call leadership development, which is like adult development, which means, again, lifelong learning. You cannot get an MD in 2024 and presume that that medical degree, no matter how great the medical school, will stand you in good stead five, 10, not to speak of 15 and 20 years hence.
If you’re a physician or you’re a lawyer, you must take continuing education courses. You must take courses that keep bringing you up to date on what good medicine and good science entails. And so, it should be with leadership. There is no reason to assume that if I take a leadership course or a leadership training or a leadership program in 2024, there will be nothing new to learn in 2029, not to speak of 2034.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then digging into your book, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers tell me, any particularly striking or surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you made here?
Barbara Kellerman
I would say they’re all surprising and counterintuitive, which is to say that our tendency, and this is the human condition, again, we’re not talking here widgets, we’re talking about human beings, which complicates the situation infinitely. The surprising thing is how passive we are when we have a bad leader or manager.
Now, again, let me go back, because on one level it is not surprising. Sometimes it is costly and sometimes it is risky to take on a superior, let’s say we’re talking in the workplace, to take on a manager or a leader, or whatever language we want to use, and it’s much easier for us to simply, even though we may dislike it or even become stressed out about it, which is not uncommon in the workplace, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, sometimes we just decide to put up with it, that it’s easier to put up with it than to try to figure out how to take it on.
The problem with that, as the title “Leadership from Bad to Worse” implies, unless we take on bad leadership, again, however defined, many different ways, relatively early in the process, it’s almost certain to get worse. In other words, bad leaders, probably like bad people more generally, don’t wake up one fine morning and say, “Golly gee, I’ve been bad. I’ve been not nice to my subordinates. I really ought to be a nicer boss. I ought to pay more attention to their well-being. I ought to care more about how they feel on the job. Silly me, I’ve not been behaving very well.”
What that means is that the only way then to get these people to change is in some way to intrude on, interrupt the process. Sometimes that’s an exogenous force, something that happens from the outside. But more often than not, it is unfortunately the subordinates that need to take on the issue and need to think through, “If there’s going to be any change for the positive, how can this be done, tactically and strategically, in a way where I don’t end up cutting my own head off, that is cutting off my nose to spite my face?”
So, I would say the issue of the reluctance to look at bad leadership and try to figure out how to stop it from getting worse, that to me is on one level surprising. Although, again, I hasten to add, on another level, really quite understandable.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Barbara, this is fascinating. So many things are sparking up for me here in my brain. One is the movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” in which he sings the song, “Someone should do something.” You know, it’s that passive sense. It’s like, “I don’t like this. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s risky. I hope something changes.” But often, to your point, it just doesn’t.
I’m thinking, you might get a kick out of this example. We had a senior executive at a, I don’t want to name names here, at a major organization that teaches leadership, Barbara. And there was another…
Barbara Kellerman
We’re going to move on, yes.
Pete Mockaitis
…senior executive who, I guess, went through a startling number of assistants, maybe six, very quickly. And they were getting the recruiters, the headhunters fired up to hire a seventh. And then before they did so, it was a peer, a fellow executive said, “Hey, you know, I’ve noticed, and I want…” And so, he sort of demonstrated how to give this feedback well.
It’s like, “Hey, I want you to understand my intention is only to serve you and to help you out here. I’ve noticed that six people have left, and there’s been a lot of sort of comments or themes associated how your behavior has been perceived as pretty disrespectful and demeaning.” And so, boom, there it is. And sure enough, like, that’s hard to say, and nobody did.
Barbara Kellerman
And you’re talking about peer-to-peer.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, exactly.
Barbara Kellerman
You’re not even talking about subordinates to superior.
Pete Mockaitis
It was peer-to-peer, but that’s what it took. It took someone to sort of shake them up, to provoke the status quo, and sure enough it worked. At first, he was very upset, but then he took the feedback to heart and said, “Okay, I guess I can kind of see your perspective, and I guess I will behave differently.” And they had a good outcome, so that’s really cool.
So, yes, it does take something, and I think often, if there’s not a brave someone somewhere, it will just continue. What’s that famous quote? “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for the good people to do nothing,” Edmund Burke.
Barbara Kellerman
Yeah, that is a famous quote and it’s very much what I believe to be true, although I’m always very careful, Pete, as I suggested a minute ago, to not blame the, you know, I don’t want to blame the victim, I don’t want to blame the subordinate, because often people need and want to hold on to their jobs. Often people are really quite scared of doing that. It is, of course, as your example suggested, easier if it’s a peer as opposed to a subordinate.
But in the book, Leadership from Bad to Worse, I have examples of exactly that, including in the corporate sector, how, unless it is stopped, it almost does get worse. And one other comment on that is it’s much easier to stop it early in the process. When you start noticing somebody is not behaving well, however we want to define that, it is easier to say something, to do something earlier on.
The longer bad is able to take root, rather like a plant, the deeper those roots go and the harder it becomes to uproot them. So, without taking the plant analogy too far, I think you get the point that the longer this goes on, and the more entrenched everybody becomes, the more difficult and, indeed, sometimes often painful it is to upend what’s going wrong, to change it.
Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And it just makes the conversation itself harder, like, “How long has this been going on? Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” That’s tricky.
Barbara Kellerman
Exactly. By the way, if I can add one other thing here, Pete. I mentioned in passing earlier that my interest in leadership is matched every bit by my interest in followership. So, what do I mean when I use the word follower? As you may know, if you’re in the leadership field, and your listeners will know who are familiar with the leadership literature, that’s a kind of loaded word, follower, because it presumes among other things that followers always follow, which is not actually how I define the word.
Followers, most of us, by the way, generally follow. We are socialized to follow. We’re rewarded by our parents, by our teachers, by our bosses, if we’re good followers, meaning relatively obedient most of the time, again at home, in school, in the workplace. If we disobey too much of the time, that’s not good. But in order to understand the leadership dynamic, the dynamics of power, and the dynamics of authority, and the dynamics of influence, it is impossible to understand them if you focus only on one half of the dyad.
You cannot have a leader without at least one follower, and I have argued now strenuously for several decades that, therefore, the understanding of what happens, let’s say, in the workplace, it is impossible to get it by looking only at the person or persons at or near the top of the hierarchy. It is important, equally important, to understand why everybody else in the workplace is behaving the way they do.
Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, that makes sense. You mentioned tactically, strategically responding. I definitely want to spend some time on that. But first maybe you could clue us into what are some of the telltale signs we should look out for? Like, what’s truly bad versus something I just kind of don’t like and doesn’t jive with my personal preferences?
Barbara Kellerman
So, the word bad, Pete, is inordinately interesting. So, it’s childlike, right? “You’re being bad,” says a parent to a four-year-old. Conversely, “Oh, what a good little boy,” or, “What a good little girl.” So, when I wrote the book “Bad Leadership,” I wrestled with that, “How do I define bad? What does that mean to be bad? Is there a better word in the English language than bad?”
You earlier used the word, for example, toxic. Well, not all bad leadership is toxic. There’s a lot of bad leadership. Toxic, of course, means poisonous. There’s a lot of bad leadership that is not poisonous. It’s just bad. But it’s not so bad that it is toxic. And I was interested, and I remain interested, in what I call the universe of bad leadership, all kinds of bad. A little bit bad, a lot bad, evil bad, as I said earlier, but not so bad too.
So, I not only developed the seven different types of bad leadership, to which I referred earlier, but I also defined bad, or bad to good, if you will, along two axes. And these axes have stood, dare I say, the test of time. There are two of them. You can think of them as intersecting if you want. So, one axis is from effective leadership, which is, needless to say, good leadership, to ineffective leadership, which is, needless to say, bad leadership. It’s better to be effective than it is to be ineffective.
The other axis, again, very simple, but simple is good when we’re talking about such complicated subjects. The other axis, the second axis, is not effective to ineffective, it is ethical to unethical. So, a leader is presumably better if he or she is ethical than if he or she is unethical. Now, to go to your question, since I’ve defined these as two different axes, one is ethical to unethical, the other one is effective to ineffective, you can even understand intuitively that one can be along a continuum.
So, sometimes, really very ethical, but sometimes, and this is again the human condition, not uncommon. For example, lying. We, generally, think that lying isn’t so great, but lying, we have a higher tolerance for lying now than we did, and most leaders lie a little bit. Some leaders lie a lot, and people don’t seem to mind necessarily. But that’s what I mean about two core components of being bad, being good. One, again, ethical to unethical, the other, again, effective to ineffective.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. Well, so then, in a way, that can surface things pretty clearly, like, “Oh, this guy who’s really a jerk and screams and pounds his fists a lot, he’s kind of getting some results in terms of folks hop to and do what he says, and do what he says quickly, and work long hours, and make stuff happen.” So, in a way, that’s effective, at least short term, but it doesn’t feel ethical in terms of dignity and respect and kindness and the golden rule sorts of things.
And so, that’s kind of handy. It’s like, “are we generating results, effective and ineffective? And does this seem to violate the world’s wisdom traditions about the dignity of the human person and treating others the way you want to be treated?” that’s more on the ethical, unethical side of things.
Barbara Kellerman
I cannot support your point enough, Pete. Muddling those two criteria for being bad or good is a big mistake for just the reason that you say. It is really possible. I mean, lots of people didn’t like working for Steve Jobs. He wasn’t adorable. He wasn’t always nice to people who worked for him, but he was, as you say, incredibly effective, brilliantly effective, a genius at being effective as a leader.
By the way, this lesson was taught to me very early in my career as a so-called expert in leadership. When I was giving a talk, I was still a young scholar, and I said something about Hitler being a bad leader, which I thought was self-evident. But I remember to this day, somebody standing up in the audience and objecting to what I said for exactly the reason that you just said.
That person pointed out, and I’ve learned my lesson since then, that, again, I’m not assuming your audience are not experts on German history, but the truth about Adolf Hitler is that between 1933, when he first came to power, and 1939, when the Nazis marched into Poland, he was a brilliantly effective leader.
He was an extremely good leader between ’33 and ’39, if you define good, again to the point that you just made, Pete. If you define good as being effective, he was a good leader between 1933 and 1939. Not ethical, but very, very effective.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s a handy framework we got there in terms of “What kind of bad am I looking at?” And so, let’s say, we see on either side, “Yup, we got an ineffective leader here,” or, “Yup, we have an unethical leader here,” what are some of the strategic or tactical steps we should take if we find ourselves in that position?
Barbara Kellerman
So, one of the reasons I’m interested in followership is because of what in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a phrase particularly associated with the women’s movement, was called consciousness-raising. Raising our consciousness about the possibilities, in this case, of action. So those of us who are employees, or subordinates, or ordinary people working in a group or large organization, whatever it may be, tend not to be aware of the possibilities that we might actually be able to act in an effective way, be agents of action.
So, if you talk about strategy, it’s one of the reasons I’m so big on followership. It’s one of the reasons I would wish in a perfect world that good followership, how to be a good follower, would be taught every bit as much as how to be a good leader, because ordinary people need to understand their own agency. If we don’t get the fact that we may not have power and we may not have authority, and, by the way, I distinguish, as some of your audience may have picked up, I distinguish among power is one resource, authority is another resource, influence is the third. So, I distinguish among power, authority, and influence.
So ordinary people, that is, workers in a large organization or even in a smaller group, subordinates, whatever you want to call them, may not overtly have much power or overtly have much authority, but that doesn’t mean that they need to think, or that we need to think of ourselves as being without agency. So, consciousness raising about the power, you can call it follower power if you want, that, to me, is step one.
Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, once we have that awareness, what are some of the best possible moves?
Barbara Kellerman
Well, I’m always leery of putting people in bad situations. Whistleblowing, for example, has rather a romantic note to it, “Oh, my God, so-and-so’s a whistleblower. How great is that? They opened a can of worms at work and it deserved to be opened. Thank goodness somebody had the courage to do that.” In fact, in real life, it’s quite dangerous to be a whistleblower.
There are books on, if you’re going to be a whistleblower, you want to be a whistleblower, you better know the law. You better be sure of the financial resources you have because your agent, your organization, your company might sue you. So be careful. So, step one is to be careful. Step two is, in general, do not act alone if you can possibly help it. Step three is to start at the lowest level of action.
So, to use an example that you used a few moments ago, you said one peer came up to another peer, one boss to another boss, one manager to another manager, and said, “You know, you’ve lost six assistants in the last whatever,” let’s say it’s 12 months. “You might want to take a look at how your assistants are feeling, about being your assistants, about your attitudes and behaviors toward them.”
So again, “How do I do this at the lowest level?” which would be presumably a simple conversation, possibly between the subordinate and the superior, friendly, cordial, trying to raise issues that have perhaps nobody’s raised before, or to do it in a way that the superior can actually hear. Step four, five, and six is, at certain points you have a choice. Are you willing to risk your position, possibly even your job, assess your costs and your benefits. Don’t be dumb, even if you want to upend bad, however defined. Be careful, be aware of your own self-interest. Do you really need the job? Or is your talent sought elsewhere? And are you willing to lose your job over your intervention or over your action?
If you are not, you better assess your risks. You better be careful. But again, if at all possible, do not act alone. Get allies and consider tactically what your various venues are for possibly saying something and doing something. And that could include everything from several of you going to the person who is not acting the way you wish, to going around the person, possibly to a peer, possibly to a superior. So, there are all kinds of ways of doing it, but I never, ever want to make it sound simple, and I never, ever want to put people at risk professionally if, in fact, they can’t afford, literally or figuratively, to be at risk.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Barbara, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?
Barbara Kellerman
Well, I guess the last thing I’ll say, Pete, is that although our conversation has focused on the workplace, the work I do, I think of it as trans-sectoral. It applies as much to the public sector as to the private sector. It applies as much to Western Europe as it does to the United States. And, in fact, what’s interesting about our field, if I can assume you’re in my camp of being interested in these issues of leadership, is that for all the differences between, let’s say, Americans and Argentinians, or Americans even and Canadians, there are profound similarities in the human condition.
In the end, we’re all human beings. We all relate to power and authority and influence in similar ways, and that’s worth bearing in mind as we focus on the differences among us. It is, in this field, perhaps the similarities that are the most striking.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?
Barbara Kellerman
One of the courses I taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and it’s arguably my favorite, is a course called Leadership Literacy. So, there is a great literature on leadership where people have thought about these issues since time immemorial. I earlier mentioned the names of Confucius and Plato, but if you simply go to some of our own, and by that, I mean American founding documents, such as the Federalist Papers.
Men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison. These men thought long and hard about the issues that you and I are surfacing. So, one could do worse than to go back to some of the classics of what I call the great leadership literature, of which I’ve just given you a small sample.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear yourself quoted back to you often?
Barbara Kellerman
I hear that people are happy to have me surface subjects such as bad and follower. Those are the ways, as I said earlier, that I distinguish myself most from my colleagues, and people are relieved to hear a discussion, an honest discussion, of how to tackle bad, again, however bad is defined. People are relieved, eager to hear about their own possibilities for exercising influence even in large organizations.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?
Barbara Kellerman
I’m available on email. I have a website and I am, by the way, a regular blogger. I’m also on LinkedIn, so happy to connect to members of your audience. And I can be found easily, if somebody looks hard enough, and I have many, many books on leadership and followership. They’re mostly available, of course, on Amazon. So, if people are more interested, I’m sure they can find both me and my work.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?
Barbara Kellerman
Become aware of your own potential influence on the people and on the situation within which you find yourself. And becoming contextually conscious, conscious of your own role, it is amazing. It is amazing how that empowers people to act.
Pete Mockaitis
Barbara, thank you. I wish you many pleasant encounters with good leaders.
Barbara Kellerman
Or effective ones with bad leaders, right? Either one or the other. Thanks very much, Pete. Good to talk to you.
Elaine Lin Hering discusses why to stop censoring yourself at work—and how to strategically do that.
You’ll Learn
- The massive costs of keeping quiet
- The fundamental question that helps you speak up wisely
- The subtle ways we silence others—and how to stop
About Elaine
Elaine Lin Hering works with organizations and individuals to build skills in communication, collaboration, and conflict management. She has worked on six continents and facilitated executive education at Harvard, Dartmouth, Tufts, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. She is the former Advanced Training Director for the Harvard Mediation Program and lecturer at Harvard Law School. She is the author of the USA Today Bestselling book Unlearning Silence: How to Speak Your Mind, Unleash Talent, and Live More Fully.
- Book: Unlearning Silence: How to Speak Your Mind, Unleash Talent, and Live More Fully
- Website: ElaineLinHering.com
Resources Mentioned
Elaine Lin Hering Interview Transcript
Pete Mockaitis
Elaine, welcome.
Elaine Lin Hering
Thanks so much for having me.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad that you’re breaking the silence here on How to be Awesome at Your Job. I’m excited to dig into this wisdom.
Elaine Lin Hering
We have all the secrets ready to go.
Pete Mockaitis
All of them.
Elaine Lin Hering
Oh, no, let me rewind. Some of them, let’s reset expectations accordingly.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Some of the secrets. Well, how about you kick us off with one of the secrets, a particularly surprising or counterintuitive or extra fascinating discovery you’ve made while putting together Unlearning Silence.
Elaine Lin Hering
Well, I think that Unlearning Silence actually is the discovery because so often, at work, the advice given us, and that maybe we’ve given to other people, is just speak up.
Pete Mockaitis
Just.
Elaine Lin Hering
Speak up. Just speak up. Speak up more clearly. You need more courage. You need more confidence. You need to be more direct. You need to be less direct. You need to smile more. You need to smile less. The list goes on. And I gave out that advice as someone in leadership development for more than a decade, where I received it.
And I found it wholly unsatisfying, because “Just speak up fails” to consider all the reasons that we don’t speak up, that continue on, things that we’ve learned, which I term the silence we’ve learned, and the ways that other people continue to silence us. So, to me, the insight is, instead of telling people just speak up, we actually need to solve for silence on our teams and in our orgs.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that sounds important. Elaine, could you unpack exactly how important and why? Like, what’s really at stake here if we masterfully unlearn silence?
Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah, if you haven’t come across it already, Google a Time Magazine article on how self-silencing is killing us, it’s focused on women, but basically health is at stake, lives are at stake, which sounds really radical and like too far out there. But if we are not getting our needs met in basic respect, in being able to communicate the things that we think are important, or the insights we have, there’s the value proposition from a work perspective, like less employee engagement, like quiet quitting.
But it also, the messages we internalize about the parts of ourselves that we need to censor, or that we need to leave at home when we go to work, really leads to loneliness and social isolation, as well as internalized messages of self-doubt. So, this whole conversation about imposter syndrome, the “Go fix yourself” is some version of imposter syndrome. And, to me, we’re asking the wrong question.
So, silence is when we’ve learned where and when it is welcome for us to share what we really think, which parts of us are allowed or acceptable, appreciated at work or not, and therefore what parts of ourselves we need to leave out of the equation. And what’s tricky is so many managers at the same time are saying, “Tell me what you really think. We need new innovative ideas.” And you can’t have innovation, and you can’t actually have real collaboration, if people feel silenced, and also many of us learned silence along the way of “bite my tongue,” “you want to be easy to work with.” Be a good team player, so often translates into don’t rock the boat. And so, to me, health is at stake, collaboration is at stake, business impact is at stake, engagement, wellbeing at work and in work life is at stake.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay, a whole lot.
Elaine Lin Hering
That’s a lot of doom and gloom right there.
Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. And so, for the health, just to review the mechanism, it’s sort of like if we are doing a lot of the silencing, then we are not having as close of relationships, and we’re feeling lonely, and then we’re missing out on the healthy stress-buffering goodness associated with the relationships, and then that leads to potentially our early demise. Is that kind of like the biochemical pathway we’re looking at?
Elaine Lin Hering
Biochemical pathway in addition to if you feel like you need to edit out parts of yourself, then your nervous system is on chronic high alert. Our nervous system is useful in being on high alert. But high alert is not supposed to be normed. It’s not supposed to be every day. So, cortisol levels, stress, all becomes internalized, and that ends up leaking out in physical manifestation in hives, in hair loss, in loss of sleep, weight gain, etc. in addition to this epidemic of loneliness, of thinking, “It’s just me.” That’s the biochemical addition there.
Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, it’s intriguing how it sounds like a utopia to just, “Hey, bring your whole self to work, Elaine. Just share.”
Elaine Lin Hering
Oh, it’s such BS.
Pete Mockaitis
“You do you. Just let it roll, and say what’s on your mind anytime.” That feels comfy, that feels free, and yet, in like most utopias, the reality is not so rosy, like meetings would go on forever, you’d say, “Wow, there are a lot of really weird things unfolding, and that was inappropriate, and that was offensive, and my feelings are hurt.”
And so, it’s really a tricky one in terms of my sense is, and you tell me, Elaine, is that we’d be better off if we were less silent and more courageous in putting forward more than we are now, generally speaking. Is that fair to say?
Elaine Lin Hering
So, I’m trained as a lawyer, so let me be as explicit as I can. Unlearning silence does not mean saying everything, everywhere, all the time to everyone. The world is far too noisy and complex for it. So, your point about utopia, we still live in reality. So, chapter three of my book is when silence makes sense. There are some instances where it does not make sense for me to share what I think because I’ve seen what happens to people who really say what they think. Or, I don’t have it in me. I don’t have the bandwidth today.
You don’t know what’s really going on. You don’t know who I’m caretaking at home, the sandwich generation, I’ve got kids, I’ve got parents, and you want to debate me on that strategic direction that’s really going to change in three months anyways. I might just sit there quietly because you know what, it’s all going to change anyways.
So, to me, though, the difference between silence that is additive or strategic, or is damaging and the health impacts that we’re talking about is agency, “Am I choosing, when I stay silent, how much I disclose? Or, do I feel like staying silent is the only option?” And there are a bunch of traps that our brains fall into, like not being able to distinguish between our current manager and current work situation, and our last manager and last work situation.
We all have baggage that we walk into a relationship with of, “If my first manager shot me a look or told me that my work product was crap, I am likely to be more tentative going forward in pushing back.” I have that datapoint that says, “Oh, that didn’t go so well. So, how do I avoid negative consequences now?” And so, our brains also trick us into forgetting what is present versus past, over-indexing on short-term costs.
Like, if I give feedback to my manager right now, I have to go have the conversation, I have to feel the sweat in my palms and my heart palpitations, I don’t have time for that. Versus if I don’t say something now, what happens three months, six months from now? So, we over-index on the short-term costs versus the long-term impact.
And, frankly, when it comes to group dynamics, why should I have to take the hit? Because if I say something, I may or may not benefit, but I do have to deal with the cost and the potential cost of the blowback in the moment, versus the policy change benefits everyone who comes after me, maybe, if it comes to fruition. So, that voice silence trade-off is one that our brains calculate all the time, often poorly, and most certainly subconsciously. And my argument is let’s just bring that calculation into the conscious so that we show up more intentionally rather than living on autopilot.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it feels like there is a lot of complexity and consideration, ins, outs, what-have-yous, to deal with here when we’re navigating this. So, Elaine, help us, are there some key guiding lights, principles to simplify this?
Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah. When it comes to silencing ourselves, there is this notion that researchers call the “illusory truth effect.” And what that means is, if I have beef, I’m frustrated with one of my colleagues, I’d probably go to talk with another colleague about it, probably go home and talk with whoever I live with about it, might even tell my manager about it. And in repeating that narrative, our brains start to think, “Oh, I’ve actually talked with the actual person about it,” when we haven’t.
So, when we think about silence, there’s just a check of, “Have I actually had the conversation with the person who is concerned by or with whom this issue is of concern?” rather than our brains tricking us into thinking, “Yeah, I’ve had the conversation,” when, really, I’ve had the conversation with everyone else in my life except for that person.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good tip. We may very well fall for that.
Elaine Lin Hering
We may fall for that. Another concept, mitigated speech. You can look at pilot training for this, but, essentially, we as human beings don’t tend to be as clear as we think we are. So, for example, particularly across lines of power and power dynamics, your boss says, “This is what we’re going to do,” and you’re thinking, “That is never going to work. I know that we don’t have the resources for it. We don’t have the budget for it. We don’t have the right skills that’s in place.”
And you might say something like, “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” to which, if you take that question on face value, they could say, “Yeah, of course,” and then end of conversation, and you’re like, “Oh, my boss totally doesn’t get it.” Notice the gap between what you actually said externally versus what you’re thinking, “It’s a horrible idea. It’s not going to work,” to “Do you really think it’s a good idea?”
And so, there’s a whole range of directness that we could leverage to say, “I have concerns about that direction. Here are some of the concerns,” or, “Here’s what I’ve observed of other teams who have gone down that path.” All of those things are more clear in actually communicating, “This is a horrible idea,” than, “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” or, “Have we thought this one through?” And so often we mitigate our speech without actually noticing that we’re doing it. So that’s another way that we silence ourselves or dull the impact and the clarity of our message.
The third idea that I probably should have started with is, fundamentally, do you believe you have a voice? Because so often in the workplace it’s, “I don’t have a voice. I’m a cog in a wheel. I play this project management role. That’s what I get paid to do. And so, my job is to literally channel the thoughts of whoever my leader is, whoever is giving me direction, or that the company has decided the voice of the brand.”
And, over time, it makes us a really good worker, but it dulls our sense of whether I have agency to think for myself. So, that very quick check of, “Do I believe I have a voice? And if not, why?” Notice that. And the reason I’m saying I should have started with that is double loop learning. So, this idea that if you want a result to change, you don’t just look at the behavior. You actually have to go back one more loop to look at the mindset that drives the behavior that then drives the result.
So, if your mindset is, “I don’t have a voice. I don’t have agency,” it changes how you show up at work, versus, “I have unique value-add thoughts of my own,” leads to different behaviors, which leads to different results.
Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, Elaine, help us unravel this. Let’s say we’re saying, “Okay, there are times when I don’t feel like I have a voice, what do I do about it?”
Elaine Lin Hering
I’m taking a deep breath there because there are so much of it really depends on the context. I don’t know who your manager is, I don’t know what the stakes are, I don’t know if you’re on a work visa here, and so the stakes are all different. The thing I would do is to start with the distinction of, “Do you know what your voice is?” versus how you use it. So, let’s break it down there.
If you are wondering whether you have a voice or what your voice sounds like, because you’ve just been so focused on doing whatever you think your manager would want, or your mother would want, or whoever role model of how you think you should show up would want, I would start by asking two questions. In a meeting, listening to this podcast, engaging with any sort of content, be asking, “What do I think?” not “What does my manager think?” not “What does my brother think?” not “What does my mother think?” but, “What do I think?” And what that does over time is remind you that you actually have unique thoughts of your own.
Second question is, “What do I need?” Because so often silencing is also suppression of our needs, our desires, our wants. And so, “What do I think? What do I need?” reminds you that you actually are an autonomous individual with needs, goals, hopes, concerns of your own. In negotiation theory, we would call those interests. So, that would be my advice on rediscovering or finding your voice. And then begs the question of, “How might you use it? And when might you use it?” which is the more situationally dependent one.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love it. It’s so simple, and yet so easy to just fly right past it.
Elaine Lin Hering
Because we’re on autopilot. Yeah, and we’re moving to the next thing and the next thing, and this is how we’re used to operating, and also the advice given us is, “Well, just speak up. You need to have more courage.” So, we’re down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to be more courageous versus, to me, speaking up and using your voice is actually a matter of calculation, “Does it make sense? Is it worth it for me to speak up, which the way that other people interact or react to me profoundly matters and impacts whether I want to share what I think and what I feel?”
Pete Mockaitis
It does. And what I find interesting is that question, “What do I think?” can sometimes take a little bit of time to really develop. Because sometimes, “What do I think?” it’s like, “I don’t actually know what I think yet. I don’t have thoughts yet. I just have feelings. I feel a general sense of unease and trepidation about those things you just said, and I don’t even know why yet.”
Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah. And, by the way, based on your identities, feelings may not be appropriate for you to have at work. So then comes the suppression of, “Let me not even engage with that sense. Let me just do what the group or the dominant norm seems to want to do here because it’s far easier and not necessarily a better outcome in the short or the long term.”
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And then I guess, as you sit with it longer, in terms of, “What do I think?” if we only have a feeling, you got to dig into that a little bit. And sometimes it can just be like, “Oh, this kind of reminds me of another situation I had that went poorly. So let me examine to what extent is this really similar versus was there some surface level similarity that’s really not applicable to this that I could just be like, ‘Oh, okay. Well, this is a totally different manager, different situation, different project, different client. So, okay, that’s probably not a thing I need to worry about.’” As opposed to, “Well, no, these similarities really do surface that there is some extra risk here, or there are some difficult things I’m not so sure we’ve all thought through that probably need thinking through before we barrel down this path.”
Elaine Lin Hering
Yes. And, by the way, there’s no time, or it feels like there’s no time at work, because we’re already behind schedule, we’re already behind the eight ball. I love what you said about sometimes it takes some time to even realize what you think because that is a difference in processing style and wiring that most modern corporate workplaces do not account for.
So, what I mean by that is, in organizations, particularly corporate America, it seems like there is one particular style of communication that is held up as effective leadership. It often sounds like three succinct bullet points with no ums, just the right amount of emotion to show that you care, but not too much emotion that you lose credibility, particularly if you present as female.
And so, those of us who are post-processors, and I’ll define that in a minute, are at a distinct disadvantage because we’re not as “quick on our feet.” So, two major styles of processing: real-time processing, where the more we talk it out in the moment, the more clear the idea gets; and post-processors, who are the type of, you know, if you’ve ever been in a meeting, you can’t quite figure out what to say, about 20 minutes after the meeting, you’re like, “That’s what I wanted to say.” Welcome to being a post-processor.
And that, to me, is just a difference in wiring, whereas, many workplaces consider that a weakness, “You need to be quicker on your feet. You need to be able to do the rebuttal. You need to be able to input your insight and expertise now or you’ve missed your shot.” And I want to believe that communication is not a Hamilton musical where you’ve got to shoot your shot, and if you don’t, then life has moved on.
Pete Mockaitis
In rap format, which makes it…
Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah, and wearing really cool clothes.
Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.
Elaine Lin Hering
So much as we could actually design to account for those differences in wiring and that time to figure out what we think. So, in a meeting, for example, you still have your meeting, so the real-time processors can have their conversation. And at the end of the meeting you say, “All right, it seems like this is where we’re headed, but everybody sleep on it. As you post-process, share whatever comes up in your post-processing in a Reply-All on this email thread, or put it in Slack.”
You’re doing a couple things there. One, you’re normalizing that we’re all wired differently, and if we really want to hear the best ideas, not just the loudest or the fastest ideas, then we need to design the way that we communicate to leverage those different styles rather than penalize.
Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. It also makes me think about how it is even more so a fine idea to share slides or notes or documents or whatever in advance of the meeting so folks already had a chance to ponder, “What do I think about this? What do I need with regard to this?”
All right. So, within the complexity of “Do I speak up or do I stay silent?” could we summarize what are some…because in a way there’s this whole emotional element too, in terms of there may be a rational, optimal thing to do. But I might not even be seeing that clearly because I’m scared of what’s going on.
So maybe, first at the rational level, can you give us the pro speaking up indicators and then the con? “No, maybe stay silent” indicators in terms of what seemed to have the most impact, the biggest punch, and come up the most often as a consideration we should be working through?
Elaine Lin Hering
In terms of the pros, is it worth it to you? Is it worth it to you? Meaning, you care enough about the issue, the stakes seem high enough, “Can you live with yourself?” is probably the anchor I go back to. Can you live with yourself if you don’t say something? And if the answer is I can’t, then that would be pro-say something.
The don’t say something is you’re not yet sure what you think, you don’t have bandwidth, and you are unwilling or unable to stomach the costs of speaking up. Oftentimes, the greatest fear is like, “If I say something, if I give feedback, I’m going to get fired.” And there are some people who say, “Well, that’s a really extreme example. Who gets fired for giving feedback?” And for many of us, we know that it does actually happen. Sometimes it’s not overnight, although I spoke to someone yesterday who was let go for giving her boss feedback.
It doesn’t happen overnight, but do you stop getting the invites to the meetings? Do you stop getting the juicy projects at work? There are real costs, which is what makes it complex, but that takes me back to, “Can you live with yourself if you don’t say something? How much does it really matter to you?” The other way I’d answer the question, and you can decide what you want to keep, Pete, is in Chapter 3 of the book.
The questions that we tend to ask are, “What are the costs of speaking up?” and our brains tend to over-index on the costs, real and perceived, meaning, “If I say something, I’m going to get fired. Maybe that’s what happened at my last job, but that’s actually not the cultural environment that I’m in right now at this current job. So, what are the costs of speaking up?”
And our brains focus on the benefits of staying silent, like, “I don’t have to deal with it right now,” and we tend to assume that, “If I don’t have to deal with it, I haven’t heard about it, maybe it’ll fix itself. Maybe it’s going away.” Spoilers. Doesn’t usually. And so, that begs the third question of, “In light of the costs and benefits, what makes sense for me?” And this is why I really struggle with doing a hard line of, you must speak up in these contexts and don’t speak up in these contexts because I’m not you.
I don’t know what you’re carrying. I don’t know what you’re healing from. I don’t know what you are holding for your family or households. I don’t know what the stakes are for you. And that point, to me, takes us back to agency, of you getting to decide is the difference between silence that is strategic or that, frankly, is oppressive or is damaging.
The place that you’ll notice we didn’t explore, there are, “What are the costs of staying silent? And what are the benefits of using your voice?” And so, I would be looking in those four arenas, rather than focusing just on the costs of speaking up and the benefits of staying silent, also adding to your analysis, “Well, what’s it cost me if I don’t speak up? And what are the potential benefits, even if they’re not guaranteed, of speaking up?”
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And what’s intriguing with the fear and the notion of over-indexing on the short-term, like, “Oh, this is going to be really uncomfortable,” it can be fascinating how sometimes, if you’re the only one speaking up and providing the contrary opinion, it does happen that folks are annoyed that you spoke, “Hey, you want to get out of this meeting earlier? We were almost all wrapped up. We had close to consensus, and then you just had to throw this thing in here. So that’s kind of annoying.”
And so, it does feel like you lose a little bit of street cred or social capital or whatever in so doing that. And yet, at the same time, it is so case by case, there are some leaders who will just be absolutely delighted, like, “Here, at last, is someone who’s giving me a perspective I’m not hearing elsewhere, things I need to be worried about, making sure I’m not blindsided, giving me a heads up. This one has high potential and a bright future.”
And so, it’s interesting that those, I don’t know if we know what proportion of managers fall into what camp, that’s sort of hard to know, but if you know it, Elaine, drop some stats on us. But I think that might be an example of something we might undervalue or under-index for as we’re assessing this stuff, is you might discover that you have the potential to be differentiated as a super valuable person that your manager loves, loves, loves, and trusts you, and wants to run more and more things by you because they’re not getting that perspective elsewhere.
Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah, because you’re not just plus one-ing everything else. You actually have a value-add because you’re offering a different perspective. I actually want to do one better because I don’t want to get us to the point where we’re at the end of the meeting and then you have to be contrarian. That cost is too high emotionally, socially, the social threat of speaking up.
So, what I tend to coach leaders to do is instead of leaders…leaders in a very, very well-intentioned way, saying things like, “What do you think?” or don’t even ask the question. It’s, just leaders assume, because they would do it.
Pete Mockaitis
“Sounds like we all love this idea.”
Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah, if you have something to say, you’re going to say it, versus using standard questions, “What about this works? What about this doesn’t work? What are the pros? What are the cons? What about this resonates? What concerns do you have?” If those are the questions that we, as a team, use to evaluate an idea, I don’t need someone to muster up the courage to offer a contrarian view or play devil’s advocate because it’s baked into how we’re doing the work, how we’re having the conversation, and it’s just the next agenda item, “Okay, we’ve talked about the pros. What are the cons?”
And that takes the pressure off of everyone, rather than, “Okay, Pete, muster up the courage now, take the risk.” We’re lowering the barriers to engaging in conversation and engaging by adding your perspective.
Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that sounds like a wise best practice, to just go ahead and do that, when discussing decisions and options and considerations. Any other top do’s and don’ts you’d put forward?
Elaine Lin Hering
Oh, so many. So many. Let me start with the leader. So, we as human beings tend to assume that people, other people are wired like us. It’s just human nature. So, unless we stop and intentionally realize, “Oh, there are some people who are post-processors. Well, I’m a real-time processor? Okay, then what do I do about it?”
The first reason I articulate in the book that leaders end up silencing the people they lead, the people that they genuinely want to thrive and want to unleash their talent, is that they fundamentally underestimate how hard it can be for someone to speak up. If your voice has always been welcome, if your ideas have always been well received, you forget that other people could have different life experiences, and this is just a cognitive awareness of, “Oh, it could be hard for someone not because they’re weak or deficient, but because they’re different than I am.”
And so, the “don’t” is don’t assume everyone is like you. The “do” is figure out what makes it easiest for people to share their thoughts and feelings. Some people are typers. Some people are talkers. Some people communicate best real-time. Some people it is asynchronous. Some people are morning people, evening people. Can you understand what makes it easier for someone to communicate so you, as a a colleague, lower the barriers to people telling you what you really think?
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. What else?
Elaine Lin Hering
I’m like, I could just go down the table of contents.
Pete Mockaitis
I’m down.
Elaine Lin Hering
You’re game.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, let’s hear it.
Elaine Lin Hering
Okay. So let me do one more on leaders as a pet peeve, and then I’ll go from the how to speak up perspective. One of the most subtle things that we end up doing that silences other people is, when they finally take the risk to share what we think, what they think, we change the topic, and it’s really subtle, but we change the topic from their concern to my reaction to the situation.
So, example. They come and say, “Hey, Pete, I don’t think we’re going to hit the deadline.” And your reaction is, “What the hell? Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?” It seems like we’re talking about the same thing, the deadline and our inability to hit it, but you’ve actually changed the topic to your own reaction or the process of why they didn’t tell you earlier versus focusing on, “Why do you think we’re not going to hit the deadline?”
In that moment, it’s a subtle shift of topic, but it actually signals to the other person, “Oof, they didn’t really want to hear me. We’re not going to address the thing that I finally mustered up the courage or taken the risk to share.” So, watching out for whether you are staying on the person’s original topic rather than changing the topic in the moment is one way of maintaining the open lines of communication.
Pete Mockaitis
That’s really good. This reminds me of land-lording.
Elaine Lin Hering
Oh, no, that’s a whole ball of wax.
Pete Mockaitis
A tenant will tell you that something’s wrong and like your first reaction is like you’re mad, like, “What? How long has this been going on? What’s the problem? Why are you doing this?” And I’ve learned though, I had another friend who had a rental property, and she had this horrific rat situation brewing for months.
And so, she actually did ask politely, “Okay, so how long is this going on? Okay. So, why didn’t you mention that earlier?” They said, “Oh, we didn’t want to burden you or inconvenience you or whatever.” And so, I just sort of installed in my internal habit that, just no matter what you’re feeling, you say, “Thanks for letting me know.” Because I do, I want them to let me know early when there’s one or two rats, before there are dozens of rats or whatever the issue is, whether it’s a physical property or like an intellectual, algorithmic thing we’re doing in a white-collar environment. I want to know, so thank you for letting me know.
Elaine Lin Hering
Yes, and have you been explicit with your team or your renters about your hope and expectation? Or, is that an unspoken norm because that’s how you would prefer the world to work, that’s what you would do? Have we made the rules explicit? Meaning, tell me early, tell me often, come to me right away when there’s one or two rats or even when you see some rat poop. Let’s be really explicit versus the “I didn’t want to burden you. We thought we could fix it by just putting out some traps. You’re so busy.”
There are a thousand reasons why people don’t say things, and from a really well-intentioned perspective, but have we also communicated to them how we would prefer, what we’re inviting in from them, what the operating norms are, and making those explicit rather than implicit, and then getting frustrated when they get violated.
Okay, from a speaking-up perspective. You can find your voice by asking those questions, “What do I think? What do I need?” But then there’s this question of using your voice. And using requires action, and action can feel vulnerable. So, in order to see whether it really is my voice or whether it is worth it to me to say something, I’m going to have to take actions over time to experiment.
And so, I’m a big fan of small experiments. If you’re someone who tends to overthink, spiral and overanalyze, you can get out of that over-analysis by trying something, and I would recommend a low-risk environment. Meaning, if you are just starting to practice the muscle of giving feedback, you wouldn’t necessarily go to your boss right away and tell them everything that you think is wrong with them. Maybe it’s when you are at a coffee shop and the barista gets your order wrong. Do you say something in the moment?
And maybe you don’t really care if it was iced coffee or hot coffee, and maybe you really do, but say that you don’t. That’s actually a great time to practice because, if they don’t respond well, if they’re too busy to change the order, whatever it is, you don’t really care. So, practicing on strangers is a great way to build that muscle of sharing your thoughts.
Another context would be with a group of friends, and this whole debate of, “Okay, what are we going to have for dinner?” Do you practice having an opinion, expressing an opinion at a time that you don’t really care? So, “Hey, what about Thai? What about Thai food?” And they’re like, “No, I really feel like burritos.”
You’re like, “Okay.” But you at least get that datapoint that says, “I expressed a point of view, an opinion, and the world didn’t fall apart,” which, for many of us who hesitate to speak up, to use our voice, we don’t have that dataset that says, “I expressed an opinion, and it was okay. I have that dataset that is glaring in my head of, ‘I said something, and I got cut out of that team.’”
Or, that relationship never recovered. Or, “Maybe I’ve never tried, because in my family of origin, it was whatever dad says goes and no one ever challenged that. I never tested that out.” So, trying things out with strangers where you don’t really care about the relationship or it’s not a long-term relationship, trying it out where the stakes are low of things you don’t really care about, to get different data points that tell you, “It’s okay to express an opinion. It might actually be helpful.”
Pete Mockaitis
And what’s so interesting is as you do that, I think you go really just determine, discern some patterns associated with what kinds of things do I find difficult to say. Just yesterday, I noticed I needed someone to spot me in the gym for a bench-press situation, and I was so nervous to ask someone, which I thought, “This is a fairly normal request. Most of the time I don’t hear it, but it’s not a freakish thing.”
And then it’s really true, but my mom mentioned in a conversation like, “Well, Pete, you really do hate putting people out.” I was like, “I really, really do. You’re right, mom.” And it’s like I’ve seen this real time. And, at the same time, and so I did, I did, I asked for a spot. I was pleased with the bench performance, if anyone’s wondering, and it’s really cool to be able to practice in that environment.
And even if I got a disgusted response, “I have a lot of work I need to do here, and I have to be out of the gym in six minutes. Absolutely not.” Like, that’s the worst it could possibly go. And that’s fine, and I have grown those muscles as a result of having gone there.
Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah. I also want to be really explicit that the framing of “This is what I’m trying on” is important. Because if you’re just trying it on, it’s like trying on clothes before you’re going to buy them, “Does this fit? Does this not fit?” And it may fit in that instance of, “Oh, yeah, that was fine. It was part of the normal course of being at the gym, and I’m still alive.” And you may say, “You know what? I did that.” And it doesn’t feel like me. It doesn’t feel right to me. Great. Try something else.” But the point of an experiment is not to get to a specific outcome. The point of an experiment is to learn something. So, this stance of, “What might I learn in testing a hypothesis I have, in expressing an opinion, in trying something on?”
Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, Elaine, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?
Elaine Lin Hering
I’ll say one last thing, which is, oftentimes, when we are thinking about expressing our points of view, we’re waiting for other people to give us permission, and that is a trap that I find many people falling into, which is why I’m naming it here. You think about school systems and you have to ask to go to the bathroom. At work, you have to submit for time off to take the PTO that is rightfully yours, and so there’s a lot of baked in “I’ve got to ask for permission.”
And in what ways might we be waiting for others to give us permission when we could give ourselves permission to experiment, to share an opinion, to try something on? That is, I’m always looking for, “What can I do, unilaterally, because if I’m waiting for the other people in my life to start showing up in a different way, I’m probably waiting for a really long time? But if I can do something differently myself, then I might be able to get to a different outcome faster.”
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about a favorite study or experiment a bit of research?
Elaine Lin Hering
Oh, babble hypothesis of leadership. So, number one in a six-person meeting, two people end up doing 60% of the talking. And more interesting, that leads to the babble hypothesis of leadership, is that people code frequency or quantity of verbal contribution as a sign of leadership or high leadership potential. It has nothing to do with the quality of the contribution, so much as, “How much are you talking?”
And so, the babble hypothesis of leadership, to me, is something for us to guard against, that just because someone’s talking a lot, actually listen for the substance, and that if we want to have healthy workplaces, we need to create space for different models of leadership. This one dominant norm that’s very chatty but maybe, at times, lacking in substance has gotten us to where we are, and the question is “Where are we going from here?”
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite book?
Elaine Lin Hering
I’ll do recency bias. The one in front of me right now is Micro Activism by Omkari Williams, “How to Make a Difference in the World Without A Bullhorn.”
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?
Elaine Lin Hering
Turning off email, 5:00 p.m., no longer load work email onto my phone, because there’s got to be some semblance of sanity.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?
Elaine Lin Hering
Leaving my phone. Apparently, I have a complicated relationship with my phone. Leaving my phone in a different room when I sleep.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that’s really resonating with folks that they quote yourself back to you often?
Elaine Lin Hering
“In what ways are you silencing yourself to preserve the comfort of other people?”
Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?
Elaine Lin Hering
ElaineLinHering.com.
Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?
Elaine Lin Hering
Try something. Try something. The ruminating, the overthinking, the spiraling, you can get out of that by trying something. Because by trying something, you will learn something. So instead of waiting for the next perfect step, start by taking a step.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Elaine, this has been enriching. I wish you many optimized silences and un-silences.
Elaine Lin Hering
Thanks, Pete. To a life lived fully to you.
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