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Jan 03
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827: How to Make the Most of Conflict with Liane Davey

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Liane Davey discusses how to ease the friction of conflict to make way for more productive conversations.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why facts won’t solve a conflict—and what will
  2. How to productively respond to harsh criticism
  3. What most people get wrong about feedback

About Liane

Liane Davey is a New York Times Bestselling author. Her most recent book is The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Your Organization Back on Track. She is a contributor to the Harvard Business Review and is called on by the media for her leadership, team effectiveness, and productivity expertise. As the co-founder of 3COze Inc., she has companies such as Amazon, RBC, Walmart, UNICEF, 3M, and SONY. Liane has a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology. 

Resources Mentioned

Liane Davey Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Liane, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Liane Davey
Thanks, Pete. I’m pretty excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your wisdom when it comes to conflict, and your work The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organization Back on Track. This is a weird segue, but one time I had a consulting project where we had to get one of the world’s largest bakeries, a huge factory for cookies and crackers back on track. And I learned that you have a special love for factories. What’s the story here?

Liane Davey
Since I was a little kid, I used to watch this television show that they did factory tours of things like how do they make crayons, and that one has really stuck with me for 48 years, I think. And so, I just developed this lifelong fascination of how factories work. And not only do I watch the shows on TV, but now every chance I get, I will tour a factory.

And I have also been to a large industrial bakery and watched them make chocolate lava cakes. I have been to the factory where they make Ed shaving cream and Glade candles. And the best one, of course, the Mars chocolate bar factory. So, it’s just I love how the machines work. Industrial engineering just gets me really excited. I didn’t have any of the skills to study it or do it professionally, so I just hop on as a spectator whenever I can.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fun. And what’s the name of the show?

Liane Davey
So, “How It’s Made,” oh, when I was a little kid, it was called “Polka Dot Door.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Liane Davey
And I’m in Toronto, it was a local show here in Toronto. It was wonderful. They used to go through the polka dot in the door and open up to a video of a factory, but then “How It’s Made” as all of the mega machine type shows and extreme construction. There’s lots of them now, very popular.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is fun. I heard, I believe it was the I Love Marketing podcast, one of their hosts suggested that it’s a good exercise for marketing and business folks because it just gets…I don’t know, I find, I’ve only done it, like, four times, but I found when I did, there’s a bit of kind of like awe and inspiration that gets my mind noodling on, “Well, huh, what’s my podcast? How does that get baked? Where are the stuff? What are my bottlenecks? What can we improve?”

Liane Davey
When I learned that I wasn’t going to be good at engineering or building it, I started to think about the modern economy and what’s the equivalent of a factory or a machine in the modern economy. And, of course, the answer is it’s a team. In knowledge work, the team is the machine, and so I was like, “Oh, I can do psychology, that comes naturally.” So, that’s where I kind of still think of it as machinery, in a sense, but it’s just human machinery.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, Liane, you did the work of the trick of the segue for me because let’s talk about these machines, and sometimes things are not quite functioning properly in the realm of conflict. Could you share with us, what do most people get wrong about conflict? Or, what have you found supremely surprising and fascinating and counterintuitive in terms of your discoveries within this topic?

Liane Davey
Yup, teams don’t have enough conflict.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, not enough. I’ve heard that before. I think it was Pat Lencioni who mentioned it on the show. Please unpack that for us.

Liane Davey
Yes. So, conflict, which let me just define it because I think when there’s wars raging in the world and COVID mask-wearing fights on Facebook and everything else, I think conflict has got a bad rap, but conflict is just the struggle between incompatible or opposing needs, wishes, and demands. And by 10:00 o’clock every morning, if you work in an organization, you’ve faced many struggles between incompatible and opposing needs, wishes, and demands.

So, if we’re going to take a limited number of resources, a limited number of hours in the day, people who are overtaxed and overworked, and decide what’s the most valuable thing we can do be doing with their time, that’s going to require conflict because there are many things competing for their time and attention.

If we’re going to look at a plan and not just rubber stamp it but look at what are some of the assumptions, what are some of the risks, that takes conflict. If we’re going to give somebody feedback, that the way their work landed with us, or the way their behavior landed with us, is causing problems, that’s going to require conflict.

So, all day, every day, conflict is important, critical, to healthy organizations. And so, that’s what people are most surprised about. So, what we get wrong is that, as humans, we tend to run from conflict, particularly with our own groups. We believe that having conflict with those people is going to get us voted off the island, in some sense, and so we have far too little productive conflict.

And then we can also talk about, on the other hand, we tend to have far too much unhealthy, unproductive, harmful conflicts. So, we’re getting it wrong, we have too little of what I call tension, which is the kind of conflict that stretches us, and helps us grow and learn and optimize solutions, and we have too much friction, which is the kind of conflict that is about not listening, not budging, not learning that wears us down.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very beautiful, Liane, the tension versus friction. Maybe it’s I don’t get enough kinesthetic metaphors in my life.

Liane Davey
So, the metaphor, if you want to take it further, so what I say is I use the word conflict, even though a lot of people ask me not to, I use it because I don’t ever want folks to have the expectation that it’s not going to be uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable. Even the healthiest most productive conflict is uncomfortable. But I always say tension is uncomfortable like yoga.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I was thinking weightlifting.

Liane Davey
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that one as well, right? But in both cases, weightlifting and yoga, the stretch of that tension is constructive. It builds muscle. It enhances flexibility. It makes us better. But, on the other hand, friction, if you want to play with the metaphor there, is like getting a blister. And there is nothing good to be said for a blister. It is that chaffing, agonizing, red raw kind of feeling. So, we want more tension, more that yoga-weightlifting stretch, and we want less friction.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Liane, I’d love it if you could zoom in and make this extra clear and real for us in terms of sharing a case study or success story of a team or a professional who had a whole lot of friction and how they converted that into useful tension.

Liane Davey
Yeah, absolutely. I’m working with a team right now where issues have built up, and what I refer to as conflict debt. So, just as we can get into debt by sort of charging things we can’t afford to our credit card, we get into conflict debt by just deciding we don’t have the energy or the time to address issues, and we just put them aside. And, unfortunately, the interest compounds, and we get ourselves into bigger and bigger trouble as that conflict debt piles up in a team.

So, I’m working with a team that’s in a considerable amount of conflict debt, and there’s a lot of friction. And the friction is being experienced as, “They’re arrogant. They don’t empathize,” and it’s all coming out as things that are very subjective. The behavior has now got to a point where “I’m not even responding to their emails. I don’t even want to talk to them.” And so, we’ve reached this stalemate where that’s where I got involved.

And so, the work is to say, “There is tension in here. There is something uncomfortable that we need to talk about, get into the open, so that we can do a better job of understanding the realities and the constraints for everybody involved.” But the problem right now is there’s no chance to resolve the tensions or kind of come up with a solution that optimizes because everyone is experiencing it as friction.

And so, one of the things that you can do is really take the way that you’re feeling. And so, if you’re feeling that is someone is arrogant, that’s a judgment. And arrogance is probably more about how you’re experiencing the other person’s behavior than about what the other person is intending. So, the first thing to do is to just notice that you’re making a judgment, and it’s not real or objective. It’s true that it’s your judgment, and so we don’t want to invalidate it, but we want to start by kind of saying, “What is making me feel that they’re arrogant? What is it that I’m seeing or hearing, or not seeing or hearing, that is leading me to that conclusion?”

And as a very first step, just interrogate your own judgments because those judgments are going to be a big, big source of friction. Once you can kind of interrogate the judgment, you want to, again, not invalidate it, not tell yourself that “I’m not allowed to feel that way” but, instead, to try and translate it into, “Okay, if I wanted to communicate that to the other person in hopes of changing the interaction, how can I say it in a way that is either useful feedback so I could determine what’s their behavior and how am I reacting to it?”

So, I could say something like, “When, in the last three decisions we’ve made, we’ve gone with your recommendation over my recommendation, I feel like my ideas aren’t valuable. I feel like they’re not getting a fair shake.” So, we can sort of take what was judgment about arrogance and translate it into behaviors, “You selecting your ideas over mine, or somebody else’s over mine.”

Or, we can make a request. We can say, “What I would really love is if when you go with a decision other than the one I recommended, could you help all of us understand how you took my input, how you used it, how you mitigated the risks that I mentioned, even if we’re going with the other decision?” So, that’s really a big thing.

When you have friction, when you get into a hole, when you get into that conflict debt, you’ll tend to have a lot of judgment about other people. So, listen to it, interrogate it, and then translate it into something that is constructive, something that is positive tension and move forward from there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, as I put myself into that situation, I’m imagining the person on the other side saying something you really don’t want to hear, which may be the unpleasant truth, which is, “Well, the input that you have provided historically has been inaccurate and risky,” and I guess, here, we’re doing some more labeling or judging.

Liane Davey
That is what’s most likely to happen, right, so keep going, keep roleplaying that and I’ll answer it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. “Well, Liane, I appreciate you being able to articulate this to me. I guess the challenge we’re facing is that in those three examples that we’ve explored there, your input was inaccurate, and risky, and showed a basic lack of understanding about the core issues that we’re dealing with here.”

Liane Davey
“Wow, that’s pretty unpleasant to hear, a lack of understanding, and risky. That’s certainly not my intention. What do you see as the things I wasn’t paying enough attention to? Or, what else do you think I need to understand to be in a position to offer more valuable advice or suggestions in the future?” So, what you want to do is not allow people to throw judgment back at you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Liane Davey
So, I do think it’s the way you roleplayed it is very true. People will often say “Well, you were risky, or ill-informed, or…” that’s what they’ll give you, so be prepared for that. But the key thing in that situation, so what I was trying to show is it’s okay to say that that just felt like a sucker punch. It’s okay to be human.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I’m sorry, Liane. Even though it was a roleplay, it felt hard saying it.

Liane Davey
Right. And so, it’s okay to say, “That’s really hard to hear. Like, I’ve never had that feedback before.” So, it’s okay to react for a moment, to just buy yourself a little time, or even, with some folks, I just recommend don’t even worry about getting a lot of words out. Just say something like, “Ow,” and then give yourself a moment to then say, “Okay.”

And you can either, in the moment, say, “What does risky look like? Could you share with me what I was missing, what made my recommendations risky? Or, what else do you think I need to understand, or learn, or appreciate to…” and so you can go right after then. Or, you can say, “Ow,” and say, “I’m going to need to reflect on that for a bit. Can I follow up with you on this later? Or, could I ask that we have another time where you help me understand what risky looks like and what it means, and where we go from here?”

So, first of all, don’t let someone judge you. I think that’s a key piece of advice. Make them do the hard work of giving you something objective because you did the hard work to be objective with them. And then don’t be afraid to let people know that you are human and it can be hurtful when somebody judges you.

And then, finally, lead on whether you would like to have that conversation now, or whether you need a little bit of time, but do come back to a place where you can find out both what happened that didn’t work the first time, and what could look differently so that it goes better the next time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really excellent. And as I’m imagining the conversation playing out, I guess you’ll realize that, again, doing more labeling and judging, it’s like, there’s a chance, I imagine it’s slim, Liane, maybe you’ve got the data, that you are dealing with just a full-on sociopath or a total jerkface who just has no…

Liane Davey
Five percent.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, 5% – who has little regard for your feelings or whatever. But I guess, more likely, you’ll hear something which is useful or on its way to being useful in terms of, “Well, Liane, you failed to consider just how sensitive issues X, Y, and Z are for stakeholders A, B, and C. And those are really hot-button issues, and it’s pretty cavalier to just mention them in this flippant context which could really set them off and make our team look bad.” And it’s like, “Oh, I had no idea that those were hot-button issues for those stakeholders, and now I know.”

Or, it’s like, “Your proposals seem to overlook the fundamental fact that a key part of our valuation is the Wall Street perception of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” It’s like, “Oh, you’re right. I thought all that mattered was cashflow or profitability.” Like, “Okay, hmm.” So, that could, indeed, unlock some insight, or often that’s a problem with feedback is that it remains into this fuzzy land in terms of…

Liane Davey
Right, it’s not feedback.

Pete Mockaitis
“You just need to be more of a team player, Liane.”

Liane Davey
Right. So, let’s stop on feedback for a moment because I feel really passionately about this one. What the vast majority of people called giving feedback is actually making evaluations. It’s not feedback at all. So, feedback, true feedback is to give the other person new insight about how their behavior is impacting you. So, I could say, “Hey, Pete, when you sent me information to prepare for this conversation,” so that’s totally objective. It’s immediate.

Pete Mockaitis
That happened. For the record.

Liane Davey
I say, “I felt like you really take this podcast seriously, like I was excited to be on a podcast that is so professional.” That’s feedback. So, the feedback is not novel information about you or your behavior. It’s novel information about me or the impact of your behavior. And what we do most of the time is we just walk around flinging in judgment at people. And in this case, it’s positive and so people think it’s okay, “Hey, Pete, you’re so professional.”

Pete Mockaitis
Hey, you’re right, I don’t mind that at all.

Liane Davey
Right. But I encourage people, I call that praise. It is unconstructive positive messages. And I encourage people to practice on the positive because if you practice on the positive and get it wrong, you’re not going to get in much trouble. When you move to the more constructive or negative feedback, it becomes more dangerous and higher stakes, so you want to practice on the positive.

But what you’re doing is when you’re giving somebody feedback, if you tell them what they think, if you tell them how they feel, if you tell them who they are, that denies somebody’s personal sovereignty and it’s likely to lead to a really unhealthy conflict. It’s not going anywhere good. If you describe their behavior as objectively as possible in a way that you go, “You’re right, I did send a four-page document about how to be prepared for this podcast.”

You’re going to be nodding and saying yes, and then so I might’ve given you it as constructive feedback, “I was pretty overwhelmed, I was nervous that I’m not ready to be on this podcast, or I’m not good enough.” I could’ve given it as constructive. But, again, the key thing is that your behavior is not something you’re going to debate or disagree with in my feedback. What you’re going to be surprised by and learn from is, “Oh, I didn’t intend to intimidate a guest. I was trying to help you feel prepared.”

So, getting feedback right and actually delivering feedback, giving people the gift of candor, what I would say is candor, for me, is me being willing to be uncomfortable for your benefit. So, it’s uncomfortable if I had…it’s, of course, not true because I felt very positively about the preparation for the podcast, but if I had felt intimidated, being vulnerable and saying, “That was intimidating,” opens me up to saying, “I’m not as professional as your other guests.”

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re not committed. You’re not willing to do the work, Liane.”

Liane Davey
Right. So, candor is me being willing to be personally uncomfortable for your benefit. But I’d like you to know, just in case there are other guests in the future, or in case your intent was not to intimidate the guests, or those sorts of things. So, if we could just get that one thing fixed up, if we could start giving proper feedback, and stop evaluating and judging, like feedback most of the time is just evaluation and judgment in sheep’s clothing. So, if we could stop that, we would deal with a lot of the friction that’s going on at the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Huh, Liane, this is a lot of good insightful stuff. And I’m thinking about that notion of, in my consulting brain sees a two-by-two matrix, in terms of constructive-unconstructive, like, “You’re very professional.” It’s like that feels good but it doesn’t help me. And now I’m thinking about Russ Laraway who talks about continue coaching is like praise or comparable.

And so, I guess, the constructive point might be just something like, “Hey, I really recommend you make sure you keep doing that. Like, if you switch calendar software providers, make sure people still get that thing because it’s so good.”

Liane Davey
Right. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Okay, I’ll keep that in mind.”

Liane Davey
Yeah, exactly. Or, I could ask a question, like, “What’s one new insight you’ve had in the last month and not incorporated into the document yet?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure, yeah.

Liane Davey
I could ask you something like that to help you more deeply process something you’re doing well. So, yeah, the two-by-two is, “Is it constructive or unconstructive?” And, “Is it behavior I want you to do more of or do less of?” So, that would be what people tend to call positive or negative feedback but I don’t like that term but it’s, “Do I want more of the behavior?” so coaching forward. Or, “Do I want less of the behavior?” and so that’s the two-by-two.

So, praise is everywhere. So, praise like, “Good job.” And if you want a fun research tidbit, Dr. Nick Morgan, so, yeah, Nick is a great friend, and Nick cited some research, so I’m going to get the stats wrong. But it’s something like 60% of folks who receive a text or an email or a comment that’s just “Good job,” about 60% of them interpret that as sarcasm. So, you think you’re praising someone, you think you’re being nice, and they’re like, “Oh, oh, well, fine,” they experience it as sarcasm.

So, that’s all the more reason to not praise people, which is that unconstructive, “I want more of this,” and instead to go to the effort that we’re talking about of giving positive feedback, “So, when you sent out that document, I felt so prepared, I felt confident signing on today, I’m really interested. Are there any new things you’ve realized that you haven’t added to the document yet?”

Handing that baton back to you to process it a little bit more deeply, one of the things that’s good about that is lots of people don’t like getting that positive feedback. They’re a little squeamish or awkward or uncomfortable about it, so they just kind of let it kind of float away. So, by asking you a question, like, “What’s one insight you haven’t incorporated yet?” it forces you to process that positive feedback to work with it, to internalize it a little more so it makes it stickier.

On the behavior we’re trying to get less of, asking the question is really…so, in the case of, where we’re talking about being less arrogant, saying something like, “How do you want to be perceived by your colleagues in operations?” would be a way of forcing the person to process, “Oh, okay, if you’re telling me that the way this lands as I’m smarter than everybody else, processing the question of ‘How do I want to be perceived’ forces me to work with that information,’” again, making it stickier.

So, yeah, so the great pieces of good feedback are sort of orient the person to the situation, describe their behavior, then give them an insight about you, and then pivot the conversation to processing it more deeply, and, “What am I going to do with that information?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so much good stuff, Liane. Well, I’ve got all these questions I want to ask, like, how do we work to the emotion of conflict? And it sounds like we hit it right there. But were there more?

Liane Davey
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy. Okay.

Liane Davey
Oh, yes. Okay, emotion is a big, big, big, big, big important topic for me. We’re not good at it and a lot of our conflict debt is because we don’t want to broach the topic because we fear triggering an emotional reaction, and sometimes that’s a very positive thing, it’s like, “I don’t want to hurt these people. I care about them,” and sometimes it’s a bit of a selfish thing, “I don’t want them to not like me anymore,” or, “I don’t want them to yell at me because that would scare me.”

So, one of the things we need to understand is that, I say this all the time, facts don’t solve fights. Period. And if wearing masks debated on Facebook is not the perfect evidence that facts don’t solve fights, I don’t know what is. But you coming up with some examples of where two people were wearing masks and they both got COVID, and, therefore, isn’t it clear that masks don’t work. And me posting back some article from science magazine showing respiratory droplets, you know, nobody is changing their mind based on that fight with facts.

Instead, we need to understand that fights are about values and beliefs and things that matter. And so, emotions are simply clues that we…I always talk about this. If the dragon starts to breathe fire, you know it’s protecting treasure. So, facts are just the wall of the castle, they’re very unimportant. But if the dragon is breathing fire, yelling, crying, getting angry, pounding the table, then that’s your clue, emotions are very, very helpful clue, that there is something going wrong that there is a value that they hold dear that feels at risk, feels threatened, and that’s why you’re getting the fight that you’re getting.

So, emotions are one of the most important datasets we get in organizations, and emotions don’t always come out as yelling or tears. One way emotions often come out is people start to dial up their language. So, all of a sudden, their sentences are including, “You always…” and, “We never…” and, “Every single…” we start to use absolutes, we start to see sarcasm pop in to people’s comments.

So, all of these things, whether it be tears or sarcasm or any of these other examples, are just signs that there’s emotion present, which means there are values at play in this conversation. And so, trying to put more facts or try to take facts out of the brick wall is not going to help. What you need to do is try and get the brave knight to lower the drawbridge so you can come in and you can find out what’s actually going on.

So, I think emotions are…and a different metaphor, if you don’t like the fire-breathing dragon metaphor, a different metaphor is emotions in the workplace are a lot like pain, not something you want very often but very useful if there’s an injury because they tell you to slow down and stop and pay attention, and it gives you the opportunity to figure out what’s actually going wrong.

So, I find we treat emotions as something to push through as quickly as we can, to suppress, to invalidate, to just say, “Well, this is business, not personal,” or, “Suck it up, buttercup,” when emotions are one of the most valuable datasets that we have in an organization, and it’s so important that we use those data to figure out what is this fight actually about.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when we talk about values, well, I’ve seen long list of values, and I guess I’m also thinking about fundamental human needs in my head is Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication talking about, “I felt like my need for respect wasn’t being met and so I felt angry.” And so, when you say values, are you thinking about a short list on a menu, or are you thinking about it could be hundreds of things?

Liane Davey
Yeah, I think it can be hundreds of things. So, I was working with an organization, a high-tech computer organization, and we were debating about whether they needed to do a layoff or not. And the CEO was advocating pretty strongly against it, while the general manager of the unit that was in the red was advocating pretty strongly for it, and they really…there was a lot of friction. It wasn’t a constructive conversation.

And so, one of the ways to get values on the table in business is to ask the question, “Okay, what are the criteria for making a good decision here? Because it’s kind of cold, and people think that’s an okay thing to say in the world, where, “What do you value?” just doesn’t feel like…” So, when I said that, the general manager said, “Well, I really value performance. I am here on behalf of the shareholders to make sure this business is profitable, and I wear that responsibility very heavily.”

And then the CEO, interestingly, said, “Well, you know what, for me, I feel like tech companies have mojo, and if you lose that mojo, that’s worth more than a couple of quarters in the red. You don’t get it back, and so I’m thinking about that.” And so, those…

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Liane, if I could time out for just a moment.

Liane Davey
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Mojo could be defined a few ways. Could you unpack that a smidge?

Liane Davey
Yeah, absolutely. So, Silicon Valley companies, and actually this is a great time to be saying that, their valuations, both in the stock market but also in the eyes of potential employees or users, they are often quite disconnected from reality. They are not about how much revenue or profit the company makes. There’s just something more about brand, more about hype, more about excitement. Some companies have momentum behind them and some don’t.

And this was a company that had a lot of momentum. It was seen as a cool company, a company people wanted to invest in, a company people wanted to work for, and so the CEO’s concern was that, “If we do our first layoffs, then the big risk is that we lose that and we never get it back. We never go back to being a company that’s never let a single person go.”

So, this was a few years ago now, and it was just so helpful to have that on the table and to be able to talk that through because he’d never articulated it. The general manager couldn’t figure out why the heck the CEO was willing to have his business be unprofitable. And so, once we could talk about that as, “These are all legitimate things. Now, how do we balance them? How do we make tradeoffs among them? How do we decide which way to go?”

And, actually, what was really cool about it is then we got away from the friction and into a really powerful conversation with really good tensions that led to a completely different option, which was, “We have other business units that are quite profitable at the moment. Could we move some of the folks, the really key talent, over to the other unit for a while, make some real progress there, never have to let go people who would be very hard to replace but also give the other business a little bit of a chance to recover, cut its costs.”

So, once we got to everybody feeling heard, everybody feeling that the things that mattered to them were part of the equation for the solution, then they just got so much more creative, then they got out of this adversarial scenario and into, “Let’s really think about this together. If we’re trying to solve for profitability of the business, if we’re trying to solve for keeping the mojo of the company,” others then sort of started to add.

The chief technology officer was the one who raised the issues that, “These are people with specialty skills that we’ve been training for 10 years. If we lose those, we don’t get them back.” So, his addition in things he values to the criteria conversation is what unlocked this possibility of, “Could we secund them into a different part of the organization?”

So, when we feel heard, when we feel understood, when we feel like our treasure matters to other people as well, then we settle into, “All right, now we’re smart people trying to figure out how do we balance these things.” So, it’s a very, very useful and constructive productive conflict technique.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Liane, before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things, I’d love to hear if there’s any super quick and powerful tips and tricks that make a world of difference?

Liane Davey
Yeah, there really is. And the one sort of magic trick of all of this is that most of the time we walk around the world working so hard to have people understand our experience. As Stephen Covey used to call it, we sort of strive to be understood instead of seeking to understand. So, there’s a technique I call validation, which is just when someone says something you disagree with or you think is a dumb idea, pause for a moment, and, instead of shooting down their idea or telling them why it will never work, validate them by saying, “Okay, so you think we should host a customer event in Q1.”

So, all you’ve done is reflect. And then be curious. Ask, try and understand, that’s coming from somewhere, something they value, and just ask a big open-ended question, “What do you see is the big advantages of that? Tell me your thought process. What got you there?” something of a big question. And then listen and ask and reflect until you feel confident that you can kind of get their truth out of your mouth.

Then you might say, “Okay, so for you, you’re worried that our marketing launch didn’t bring the benefits of this new approach to life for our customers. And until they feel it in a different way, until they can maybe put their hands on the new product, you don’t think sales are going to go up, so that’s why doing an event in person feels like the right solution for you.”

What you’ll find is when you speak their truth, their truth, even more importantly, when their truth comes out of your mouth before your truth does, it will be an entirely different conversation. It will shift to truly a conversation, a dialogue, and it won’t be a fight. Then what’s cool about humans is we work on reciprocity.

So, when you’ve taken the time to understand their truth and listen and validate them, they will be highly likely, unless we’re with the 5% of sociopaths, but if we’re with 95% of the population, and then you say, “The way I was thinking about it was that before we talk to our customers, we need to do another round of training with our sales staff. I’m not sure they’re ready to tell the message in a compelling way. So, I was thinking that that was the issue. How do we get the right balance between our sales team and going directly to our clients?” or you can ask whatever other question.

But when you’ve spoken their truth first, when you’ve added your truth, not as something more right or more worthy, but you’ve added it as a second truth, and then you’ve kind of pivoted to, “Hmm, okay, what are our options here? How do we deal with this?” you will find, you avoid, you neutralize 80% of conflicts in your team.

And the one thing, I know you have a young one at home, I have a 20-year-old and a 16-year-old daughter, and this method, it got me through the entire teenage years. If you validate a teenager, if you make them feel heard, if you’re curious about why that’s true for them, and you get their truth out of your mouth first, they actually will hear you out. They will let you coach them. They will stay with you.

So, this technique, my guess is every single person listening will be able to use this technique today at some point because we tend to do the opposite. We invalidate people, we push for our truth, or why our idea is smarter or all of these things first. And if we flip the order, and said, “Okay, let me make sure I know your truth. And as soon as we both know that I know your truth, then I’ll add mine.” It changes everything.


Pete Mockaitis
Thank you, Liane. Well, I’m curious, any particularly memorable exchanges with a teenager that you could share with us as an illustration, like, “Oh, that’s how it’s done”?

Liane Davey
Well, the first, I’m going to first tell you how not to do it because it’s memorable because I did it wrong. When the elder one was in Grade 10, she was taking music because she loved music, and she came home one day and proclaimed that she hated her music teacher, and I blew it. I kind of looked at her, I don’t like the word hate, and I definitely don’t like it aimed at a teacher.

So, my response was, “You don’t hate your music teacher,” which, if you remember, we were talking about this sort of cardinal rules of respecting someone’s sovereignty, and telling somebody else how they feel is not cool, not allowed. And so, I blew that. So, it took me about three weeks to earn back the right to talk to her about this.

Pete Mockaitis
And what did she say, “I do, too. You don’t understand, mom. Shut up”?

Liane Davey
Well, she started and then she just stormed off, the heavy thumps up the stairs and the dramatic slamming of the door, and she was right to do that. I had really overstepped. I had blown it. And so, when I tried again, do-over, you have to do do-overs with teenagers, when I did the do-over, I just said, “Hey, I want to go back to this, and it must really suck to hate your music teacher because you got an hour and 20 minutes of that every single day, and I know you love music.”

And even just me saying that, me just validating that that must be rough, changed her entire body language. And so, then I said, “What’s going on?” And I, being a horrible person, had assumed that this was the teacher who’d finally figured out that she never practices, but that wasn’t it at all. I’m so bad. It turned out that this teacher, there was a kid in the class, probably a neurodiverse kid would be my guess, sitting still, not fidgeting was a challenge for him.

And this old-school teacher just would have no part of it, and she was leaving him, bullying him, my daughter said, and leaving him in the hall for the majority of almost all classes, and that’s why she was so upset. It wasn’t on her own behalf. It was because somebody else was being wronged, and my kid is a social justice crusader.

And so, I said, I could then speak her truth, “So, you’re really worried that Ms. T is quite unfair to Gibby, you’re worried how this is affecting him. Okay.” And, first of all, I was proud of her for feeling all those things. And then I could say, “Okay, now what I’m thinking about is how do we make sure you don’t lose your love of music? How do we make sure this doesn’t affect your grade? Can we find you other outlets for your love of music outside of the classroom?”

And she was totally willing to entertain those things once I had been clear that this was about the injustice and the teacher’s behavior in the classroom. So, invalidating her cost me three weeks, and that was extremely costly, and it was modeling terrible behavior, and I had really blown it. But when I came back to it, and I said, “Look, I’m sorry about that. I blew that and I really want to understand and I want to hear you.”

And when I was open and listened and reflected her experience of the situation, then she was so keen to talk with me about, “What can I do? And what are my other options?” And those were really, really powerful. And she’s a junior in college now, and we have great conversations about hard things now because I finally figured out that this validation technique, which just takes a little practice, completely changes the tone of all of our conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you, Liane. Well, now, if we could hear a bit about your favorite things. Could you start us with a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Liane Davey
“When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.”

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

Liane Davey
So, we’ve been talking so much about cameras on and cameras off, and Zoom and all those sorts of things. New piece of research that when we’re having these hard conversations, when we’re trying to understand values and emotions and those sorts of things, it turns out the telephone is much, much better at promoting what they call empathic accuracy than these web calls.

Pete Mockaitis
Really?

Liane Davey
So, if you really need to connect with someone, if you’re in conflict, if you need to understand where they’re at, and if you want to be more accurate in empathizing, go for a walk, put in your earbuds and talk on the phone.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Liane, that’s so fascinating and counterintuitive. It seems like aren’t we missing out on all these facial expression indicators with the phone? Do we have hypotheses as to what the mechanism is by which that is so?

Liane Davey
Yeah, so it’s new research. So, first of all, we get a lot more information from voice than we think. So, like, here’s my mini experiment for you. If you close your eyes, I’m going to talk, and, at some point in talking, I’m going to start smiling. Could you hear it? Did you hear the difference between? So, right now I’m not smiling, and now I’m smiling.

So, what happens is when you pull up the muscles in your face to smile, it lifts up your soft palate, changes the shape of the resonant chamber of your mouth, and it’s absolutely something that we can pick up on. So, there’s more data in the voice than we think or know. And new studies are saying that we take up a lot of bandwidth, cognitive bandwidth, in trying to process people’s facial expressions and body language, and we’re not always very accurate about it.

So, what you’re doing in going to the phone is you’re getting rid of all of the energy it takes to process and misprocess that facial information, and you’re really keying in on what is actually quite high-fidelity data coming from pitch and tone and words and all those sorts of things. So, yeah, really fun, exciting, new research coming out.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. Thank you. And a favorite book?

Liane Davey
Well, I guess if you want relative to this topic, I would say Chris Voss’ Never Split the Difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Liane Davey
A former FBI hostage negotiator, and it’s just full of many fascinating stories and insights. And I know that, thankfully for most of us, the stakes are not as high as hostage negotiations in most of our collaborations. But there are many things to be learned from Chris’ stories and examples.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Liane Davey
So, I am a big fan, so my PhD is organizational psychology, so I am coming to every conversation with the understanding that while we want to have one-size-fits-all, and we want to have the perfect advice, that individual differences play far bigger of a role than we yet appreciate on teams. So, I use a tool called The Birkman. It’s a very deep and insightful psychological assessment tool, and I don’t leave home without it. I don’t work with any teams without having that understanding, deep understanding, of the individual. So, Birkman would be my favorite tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Liane Davey
This is not a productive habit, but I am so in love with, you know the Wordle craze?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Liane Davey
I did Wordle. I’m not a big fan of Wordle because some days I get stuck and it makes me feel dumb. But it’s expanded and it’s had babies. It’s gone to Quardle, so it’s four words at a time, and now Octordle, which is eight words at a time. And so, every morning, I do the Octordle, which sounds ridiculous, and I then text my results to my 89-year-old mom who lives far away, and she texts me back hers. And that habit, which is just a little tiny moment of connection to start my day, feels really great.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Liane Davey
That facts don’t solve fights one does come back to me a lot. Maybe another one, since I’ve already said that one, is communication comes from the Latin root commune, which is to make common. And so, in this email-Slack kind of world, I always say, “You can’t make common as one person. So, you can’t communicate to someone. You can’t communicate at someone. You can only communicate with someone.”

So, communication cannot be accomplished on your own. You cannot send an email and check off, “I have communicated.” You only communicate when it’s actually been a two-way process, and you have made something common. And in conflict, I think we communicate with each other far too seldom, so that might be another thought that is helpful to folks. Who have you communicated at that you need to communicate with?

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

Liane Davey
So, if you want come and interact with me, I always talk about LinkedIn as my couch. Come and sit on my LinkedIn couch and let’s talk about interesting things about making teams happier, healthier, and more productive. And if you want to dive into the treasure trove that is about 500 articles and free resources, that’d be my website LianeDavey.com.

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

Liane Davey
Yeah. So, this is a big one because I think the vast majority of us are conflict-averse, we don’t like it, we get into conflict debt, we avoid it. So, my call to action is that some things are worth fighting for.

Pete Mockaitis
Liane, this has been such a treat. I wish you much fun and productive conflict in your interactions.

Liane Davey
Thanks so much, Pete. I have had a blast.


Nov 03
0

814: How to Take Control of Your Mood and Feel More Powerful at Work with Steven Gaffney

By | Podcasts | 2 Comments

 

Steven Gaffney shares the simple shifts that help you feel more powerful at work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to easily redirect negativity into productivity
  2. Three reframes that make problems more manageable
  3. Two quick hacks to snap you out of a funk

About Steven

Steven Gaffney is a leading expert on creating Consistently High Achieving Organizations (CHAO)™ including high achieving teams, honest communication, and change leadership. Steven has worked in more than 25 different industry and market segments for over 25 years. He uses cross-discipline solutions and best practices from other industry sectors to bring fresh, innovative and consistently successful approaches to his clients. He works directly with top leaders from Fortune 500 companies, associations, as well as the U.S. government and military; and is also an author, speaker, and trusted advisor.

  • Book: Unconditional Power: A System for Thriving in Any Situation, No Matter How Frustrating, Complex, or Unpredictable
  • Website: JustBeHonest.com

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Steven Gaffney Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Steven, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Steven Gaffney
Thank you for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book Unconditional Power. But first, I want to dig a little bit into… one of your areas of expertise is honesty. I’m curious if, in all your work and research, if there’s an area in your life where oh, you had to do a bit of an honesty upgrade.

Steven Gaffney
You mean honesty upgrade as in like being honest to myself or that something? Is that what you mean?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. An area where it’s like, “Oh… Given this, I’m seeing a little in myself, perhaps there’s an area I need to be more honest about.”

Steven Gaffney
What actually happened, how I got involved in the work is I started to do some seminars for creative people like photographers and film and radio commercial directors because I used to have a business in that area. So I’m teaching them how to do communication, real basic stuff, and on the side, I would just always give people advice about honesty because I’ve always been a really honest, upfront person. 

And one day, a friend of mine said, “You should be teaching this stuff.” So, I guess the honesty moment was around being honest and actually teaching honesty out there. But what I mean by honesty, just so we get this out, it’s not the truth or lies that’s the big hang-up. The biggest problem is not what people say. It’s actually what they don’t say. It’s what they leave out.

So, that was what I realized and starting to teach. And then I developed a nine-step formula on how to share difficult things and have it go well, and we can get into that as well, but that’s how I started and that’s really about the honesty moment, you could say.

Pete Mockaitis
What we don’t say in terms of we just choose to omit this because it’ll be uncomfortable, we think we might not like it.

Steven Gaffney
Yeah, think about it this way. How often have you thought, “My gosh, if they just told me that, I could’ve figured out the answer.” A lot of people in their jobs experience this because, “My gosh, if my boss had just told me this, or a coworker just told me this,” or if you’re leading an organization, and you lose a great employee, and you find out the real reason why they walked out the door, and thought, “My gosh, if I had known that was what was bothering them, what prompted them to look, we could’ve done something about it.”

Really, when you look at life, and I challenge people, the number one problem isn’t what people tell us. It’s actually what they don’t tell us. It’s what they leave out. So, the trick of the whole thing is to try to get the unsaid said. And I don’t mean that people try to hold back from an evil standpoint. People are often afraid to share really what’s going on with them and with others.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. So, speaking of some of this emotional stuff, your latest book Unconditional Power is about some of that, how we can do some thriving in situations that are frustrating or complex or unpredictable. Tell us, what’s the big idea here?

Steven Gaffney
Well, the big idea is that most people suffer from conditional-ism. Now, that’s not going to make a lot of sense till I explain it, so let me explain it really easily. The three different types of moods or mindsets we all get into. One mindset is powerless. That’s where we say, “What difference can I make? I’m only one person here.”

Conditional mood is kind of this next-thing mindset, and that’s where we say, “We recognize we have some power over this situation but it’s conditional on other things.” And so, we say, “I can do that as long as they give me more money, or as long as there’s more resources, or as long as I have the right time.” There’s always a condition to the power.

But the most powerful state is when we are powerful, and that’s where we recognize there’s conditions but we’re in charge and we ask ourselves, “What am I going to do about this situation?” So, the big aha was doing work with so many organizations, what I discovered was many people think they’re powerful but they’re really conditionally powerful. And they’ll say, “I can do that as long as…” But the objective is how to be unconditionally powerful.

Hence, the whole idea of the book and how to get that done. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, so is that even possible? Aren’t all of our powers subject to conditions?

Steven Gaffney
Well, here’s the thing. I’ve worked with a lot of successful people, and I’m sure yourself as well. Whenever you’ve overcome a challenge, you haven’t been conditionally powerful. You said, probably in a powerful state, “I recognize the situation,” but you focus 100% of your energies on what you’re going to do about the situation.

For example, a client of mine lost a big contract. Now, they could’ve rationalized to the whole organization, “It’s our biggest contract. We’re really doomed and we’ll do as best as we can, given that we lost a big contract.” But what the CEO said, and what all the top leaders said is, “No, we’re not going to use that as an excuse. It is what it is. We clearly lost this. But what are we going to learn from it and what are we going to do about it?” And they’re having one of their best years ever as a result because they didn’t waste time being conditionally powerful, which is really kind of the state of excuses. They, instead, have been powerful.

Let me give you example in my own life. So, in 2009, I got diagnosed with cancer, and I’m completely fine now, so fast-forward to that. But, also, 2009, was in the middle of the great recession. And so, one of the first things to go, obviously, were things what I do for a living: consulting, speaking, that type of thing. But what I said to myself was, “I can’t control that I have cancer, and I can’t control that there’s a recession, but I can control what I’m going to do about it.”

So, I didn’t allow myself to have excuses and I spent 100% of my time focusing on what I was going to do about it. And from that point on, we’ve had our best years ever. And some of the strategies in the book is really what I learned from others about how to be unconditionally powerful. So, yes, it is often the state we’re on in the conditional side, but we’re really being conditionally powerful and it is around being powerfully unconditionally powerful, and that’s the state of when we make things happen.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when you say state as in sort of like our emotional, internal way of being?

Steven Gaffney
Yeah, absolutely, because I make the argument in the beginning of the book. Have you ever noticed that when you’re in a good mood you’re smarter? Think about that. Like, when we’re in a good mood, and somebody throws us a problem, we’re like, “All right, this is a problem, but I’m going to figure out a way.” But when we’re in a bad mood, maybe a lack of sleep, or whatever the case may be, somebody throws us a problem, and you’re like, “Ah, here we go again. Not another problem,” right?

Or, we might say things like, “No good deed goes unpunished. We’re always having some challenges,” or, “What am I going to do about this situation?” And so, it’s easy to affect our mood, and our mood impacts our actions. So, I make the argument in the book that, as leaders, and as friends, the most important thing is to have a great state of mind, but, really, what we’re looking at is mood.

So, mood matters. Mood really does matter. And the objective is to have mood discipline because we can be in good moods and bad moods but what if we can be in a great mood on demand rather than by accident, and that’s a big part of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds very appealing. I’d like that very much. Tell us, Steven, how does one get into a good mood on demand?

Steven Gaffney
Well, there’s ten strategies in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I’ll need them all.

Steven Gaffney
So, we can go through as many as we can. Well, and the thing about it is it’s not like hold tight till we get to number five. No, let me give you some real ones that they can move on immediately. So, one of them is intentional disruption. So, have you ever been in this situation where you can see things going downhill, or somebody gets in an argument and something is going downhill? And what we end up being is a victim to a meeting, a victim to a dinner party, a victim to something, and we’re like, “What am I going to do about this?”

Intentional disruption is the idea that human beings are creatures of patterns and associations, which is there’s nothing wrong with it as long as it’s working, but when it’s not, we have to intentionally disrupt it. So, let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. First on the personal side on how I use this. I had a dinner party a while back. And do you ever have one of those couples over and they’re great but they could start to get into an argument and they can bring everybody else down? Well, that’s what started to happen.

And so, I just used intentional disruption, and I said in the middle of them having an argument, I said, “Can I ask you a question?” And one of my friends, she goes, “Yes.” And I said, “Well, what do you love about him?” And she kind of jolted her head back, and she said, “Well, he does always have my back.” And then he started to say some favorable remarks, and it shifted. I disrupted the pattern.

In a meeting. So, let’s say you’re in the leadership, you’re in a meeting, and you’re dealing with an issue, and you can feel everybody kind of being in a down mood. Intentionally disrupt it. So, one way to do that is begin a really tense meeting that you have to talk about a problem, do a go-around and say, “What’s the biggest win that’s happened to us over the past month as a company? What’s the best thing that’s happened to you?”

And by the mind going there, it actually puts it in a good mood, good spirit when they’re answering that question. And then when you go back into the problem, they’re looking at it from a good mood, a good perspective. Those are examples of intentional disruption. And the good news is we don’t have to be the leader to use these types of strategies.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. When it comes to questions, boy, I see it in my brain and I think it’s the human condition. When posed a question, we just want to go after an answer, and it’s like we’re just running after that thing. And so, it is an effective redirection pretty quickly is asking a great question. So, can you share with us a couple other favorite questions that do a good work in terms of getting us into a positive mood with that disruption?

Steven Gaffney
Yeah, and I’m not talking about just being big motivational talk, because people say, “Oh, motivational talk, how long does it last?” It really is about being sensitive to the mood of us and others. So, another example is you could say to somebody who’s really challenged with a problem, is I love using the magic wand question, which is, “Well, if I gave you unlimited time, money, how would you approach this?”

Or, when somebody doesn’t know what to do in their career, I’ll say to them, “Okay, if you had unlimited talent, but you had to choose a job so you’re not going to work for free, what would, ideally, you would love to do?” And, see, people often look at their life from the past into the future, but when you ask the magic wand question, it creates an energy and excitement about the future, and you’re releasing all those other conditions to look at things.

And it doesn’t mean that we can make that happen overnight, but what it does is it jolts the mind out of why we can’t do something, or, “I don’t know what to do.” Because you just say, “If I gave you a magic wand, what would you ideally like to happen in this relationship, in this conversation?” And what you’ll find when you ask people that question, it will jolt them, and they’ll often say, “Well, I don’t know.” And then a really good comeback to that is say, “Well, if you did know, what would your hunch be?”

It’s interesting, when you just say that, people say, “Well, is it that simple?” Yeah. If somebody says, “I’m confused,” you say, “Well, if you weren’t confused, what do you think would happen?” Because what you’re trying to do is have them engage in the future and where you want to go. So, the magic wand question is the case.

Another good on the innovation front is, “What if the opposite was true?” So, somebody says, “We need more resources.” “What if the answer to the problem was we needed less resources?” “But we need more resources.” “But what if?” So, you use the what-if principle, and that gets them thinking differently. But my point in bringing this up is we need to be in control of the questions rather than suffering from answers we don’t like. We just can redirect it.

So, for example, somebody is really critical of us. You say, “Well, thank you for the feedback. Can I ask you one question?” They’ll say yes, and most likely. Say, “Well, what do you like that I have done? I understand that’s a feedback that I haven’t done these things correct. But tell me something that I’ve done right,” and see it jolts their mind in a different direction. You’re not discounting the feedback but that’s how you can get balanced feedback as well.

The point being is don’t suffer in silence. Don’t suffer from the things that aren’t going well. Intentionally disrupt it. That’s just one of the strategies in the book, and I can go through more as well.

Pete Mockaitis

Please do. So, that’s intentional disruption, a great question redirects things to help you get into a good mood on demand. What’s another strategy?

Steven Gaffney
Reframe to refocus. So, the idea of this is back to the powerless conditional and powerful state. When we’re in a state of mind or mood or whatever that is not serving us, and we all can get in these moods, “What difference can I make? I’m only one person,” we feel powerless or somewhat powerful but it’s conditional. So, that’s how we’re looking at a problem. But if we reframe the problem, put a different context to it, it can make us more powerful.

 

So, let me give you an example. There’s three types of reframes, and I’ll go through the first one as an example. We can go through the others. But it’s reducing the frame. Reducing the frame. So, have you ever had a situation which is really seemingly the odds are against you, or it’s a business problem, or something going on in your life where it sounds like there are so many problems, and you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, where do I start?”

Well, reducing the frame would say, “While all that could be the case, what are the most important things I need to do now?” So, let’s say you’re on overwhelm. You’ve got business stuff and other things, you say, “Okay, what is the most important thing in my life?” whether it’s family, whether it’s work, or let’s just say work, “What’s the most important thing to do that I need to do now?” But that is reframing. Leaders can use this really well where people are stuck in a problem that seems very complex. The idea is to make it simple.

So, an example would be where you might say, “What are some key performance indicators?” So, we got a lot of things to consider, but what’s the most important thing? Let me give you an example. I worked with a company that was really suffering in revenue, and their backlog to business is really poor, and, Pete, they had all these key performance indicators, and, of course, people are like making this problem really complex.

And I said to them, “Well, how often do you see the customer?” And they said, “Well, that’s a good question. We spend a lot of time internally.” And I said, “Why don’t you have a key performance indicator and just monitor people going to see the customer, customer interactions?” And people could say, “But what about the quality of the interactions? What about your marketing?” I said, “Look, look, just focus on going to see the customer,” because that’s what they weren’t doing, and that was a big needle-mover. So, they focused on just going to see the customer and their whole pipeline turned around.

So, somebody, I think it was Albert Einstein who said, “It takes genius to make a complex problem simple but it doesn’t take genius to make it more complex.” I’m not sure he exactly said that. But when you think about it, have you ever met somebody who can make a complex problem even more complex, and you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, what are we going to do?” But what you’re doing is you’re reducing the scope of it. You’re reducing the frame. And then when somebody says, “Well, I can do that. I can get that done.” And so, that’s the idea behind reducing the frame. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Thank you. And how about a third strategy?

Steven Gaffney
Well, so let me cover a couple things on the reframe because there’s a lot to dig deep there that I think between intentional disruption and reframing people could change things. Another type of reframe is enlarging the frame. Enlarging the frame is have you ever had something bad happen to you and you’re feeling down, or maybe other people are feeling down?

Enlarging the frame is putting it in a bigger picture. And what you’re saying is, “While that is bad, we lost a customer,” or, “While this is bad, this conversation didn’t go well or this meeting didn’t go well, let’s put a perspective. We’re doing well here, we’re doing well here, we’re doing here. And this is happening, and this is happening.” And, suddenly, people see it in a bigger picture.

What you’ll notice is, really great leaders like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and all the historical ones, but any great leader you feel kind of you want to follow are really good at enlarging the frame. What they’re doing is they’re creating a bigger vision, and they’re saying, “While these are issues, we need to see the big picture, the future.” And enlarging the frame makes people feel more powerful. That would be an example of that.

And the third type of reframe is you change the frame. That’s where you say, you just change it to a direction you want. I’ll give you an example there. I hired a company to work on an IT project and they were really behind, and I was getting annoyed. And so, I said, “When are you going to get this finished?” And, in essence, I can go the long version of it, but, in essence, what was happening was they said, “Well, it’s going to take us about four months,” which would’ve been in November. This was a couple of years ago.

And I said, “Given that I would like it, ideally, done in a month, what would need to happen?” which is basically just one month instead of four months. “And I’ll credit the company.” The company said and shot me an email filled with action items that if I could agree to it, they could get it done in a month, and it was done in six weeks.

Now, what’s interesting to unpack there? Well, most people would work in the existing frame, “It won’t be done till November.” “Well, how do we get it done shorter? And how do we get it done in October?” whatever. But I just said, and I wasn’t demanding in a jerk-type of way, I just said, “Given that I, ideally, would like it done in a month, playing at this, what would need to happen?”

So, you can use change the frame. You just say the prepositional phrase. So, for example, you’re having a difficult time with somebody. You might say, “Given that, look, we have a lot of arguments, but given I, ideally, want us to get along great, what would need to happen?” You see, that’s creating a different frame rather than “Let’s try to solve the problem.” Solving the problem would be the existing frame, but reframing it, or changing the frame would be, “Given that I want us to get along great, given I want us to work on this and not have any strife, what would need to happen?”

And so, those are examples of changing the frame. How is this landing with you, Pete? I know I’m doing all the talking.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s good. Yes, I like it. Let’s hear a third strategy.

Steven Gaffney
Another great one is, oh, act and you will become. So, when you look at a lot of times, when we’re sometimes down, and so a way to trigger ourselves is to be the person we want to be. So, imagine you’re playing a movie of your powerful self, how would you act? So, in other words, you might feel down but that’s where you might smile, you might change your body, like you’re an actor in a movie.

And what you find by researching great actors is they don’t play the part; they become the part. And becoming the part means really stepping into it. So, if you’re feeling conditional or powerless, it would be acting and you will become. So, you’re tricking your mind to get into that powerful state, and then that helps move it forward.

Now, I will say, I don’t like the terminology fake it till you make it because there’s something insincere. But what I’m saying is access to just becoming that, so you’re not doing the lip service, not just, “I now want to smile.” That’s kind of fake. But it’s like, “No, I’m going to smile, I’m going to carry my body differently, I’m going to change the tone. I’m going to really be that part and see how that feels.” And it’ll often trick your mind into changing things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Steven Gaffney
I’ll give you a very simple, another one that’s so simple we often forget it, and it’s make the unaware aware. Make the unaware aware. So, let’s go back to that distinction. You got powerless, you got conditional, and you got powerful. So, what I’ve experienced is that a lot of people, now I mentioned this earlier but I’ll apply it to the strategy, where they think they’re powerful but they’re really conditionally powerful, “I can get that done as long as, as long as…”

But if you explain this distinction to people, and just from the podcast that we’re doing, what you’ll do is you’ll find out that people will shift to the powerful. In fact, just listening to the podcast and being aware of it. Nobody wants to say, “I love being conditional.” No, people want to be unconditionally powerful but they just don’t think about it. So, making the unaware aware is you explain the distinction. And by explaining it and thinking about it, it’ll automatically, because of awareness, make you become powerful.

An example would be a client of mine, there was an operational problem. And I had taught his folks on the strategies, and so they came into his office, and they said, “We got a problem.” You ever have somebody just dump a problem on you? And he said, “Look, I understand we have a problem here. So, how are we all being about it?” People said, “Well, we’re being conditional.” And he said, “How would we act if we were being powerful about it?” And people said, “Well, I think we should be doing this, and we should do this, and this.”

And they, suddenly, came up with a whole bunch of ideas, and they shifted from the complaint mode, which is kind of the excuse conditionally powerful, and they solved the problem, he said, within about five to ten minutes. It was just a matter of being aware of catching that. That’s another strategy as we’re talking about things.

And in the book and stuff like this, I know we’re going super, super fast, but there’s a lot of examples to trick even more doing this, but we can continue, too. But, anyway, make the unaware aware is another really successful strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Yeah, let’s hear a fifth.

Steven Gaffney
So, another one is input drives output. The input drives output. We are a product of who we’re around, if you think about it. Jim Rooney is a motivational speaker, he subsequently has passed away, but he said, “We are a product of the five people we spend the most time with.” And so, what I have found is, if you think about it, if we have a down mood or our mindset is feeling powerless or conditional, who are we surrounded by? Who are our friends? Where are we watching on television? What are we doing?

Pete, did you find out, you probably experienced this, did you ever meet during the COVID period where they had CNN running 24/7? Nothing wrong with CNN but it was like repeat, repeat, repeat. Well, if you got all that negative input, of course, it’s going to bring you down. So, I’m a big fan of knowing what and being aware of what’s going on, but what’s the input into our minds? So, if we’re feeling down, or we’re feeling like things aren’t going our way, or we’re being powerless or conditional, we really want to ask ourselves who are we surrounded by. Who are we being?

So, this is like, as parents, people are sensitive to who their children are around, but it’s really an example would be you’ve got somebody at work who’s just self-righteous, who’s just really difficult to deal with, and you’re saying, “I can deal with them maybe but what’s the impact to other people?” And so, input drives output is honoring the idea of who are we surrounded by.

So, one of the exercises I love to do with people is I’ll say, “Write down the names of the five people you spend the most time with. The five people.” And then I’ll have them place them on a grid, which we can talk about, but, in essence, it’s around what kind of person are they. And, inevitably, we are a product of who we hang around with. So, if we don’t like who we’ve become, we got to change the environment. We got to look at things differently.

People say, “I can’t pick and choose everybody I work with.” No. That’s true. But you can pick and choose how much time you spend with a person. You can pick and choose whether you stay on the phone or get off the phone, whether you’re on the Zoom call, or then after the Zoom call, you just jump off and you’re doing other things. You can all the person afterwards or not. And, in a physical sense, when we’re around people at work, you might be in a meeting where somebody that’s way, you can use intentional disruption and the strategies we talked about. And then after the meeting, you can just distance yourself. You know what I’m saying?

I often say to people, “Reward people with the time that they deserve.” And so, who charges us up, we should spend more time with them. And whoever doesn’t, we should distance ourselves from them. Have you ever had somebody who’s like really just brought you down, and you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I got to get rid of them.” Legally.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I’ve decided to make some choices associated with folks I like to spend more or less time with, and certainly.

Steven Gaffney
When we’re talking about this stuff, it may sound kind of obvious at certain points and maybe not at every point, or maybe all. I don’t know. It’s up to people, of course. But I really want to challenge them because simple things make a big difference. Somebody wrote a book years ago called Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and It’s All Small Stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Steven Gaffney
I actually think it’s the opposite. We should sweat the small stuff because it’s the small stuff that matters. It really is. When people say, for example, “Culture at work. What’s the company culture?” My experience is culture is very local, so you can have the broad company culture but if you work for somebody who’s really difficult to deal with, or if you had people who are really challenging, that’s your sense of culture of the organization.

And so, you got to look at certain things, and ask yourself, “Well, it’s the small things that make a big difference, who we hang out with, how we frame up things, intentional disruption, making the unaware aware.” Things of that nature.

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

Steven Gaffney
Norman Cousins said, “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss in life is what dies within us while we live.” And although that may sound like a downer, but it’s really about don’t let things that are important to you stay inside you. Share it. Do something. Take action. Go after your dreams. And go for what you want and what you deserve.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Steven Gaffney
One of my favorite books of all time in change is a book called Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. It’s fantastic. And what’s neat about that book is it’s all about everyday people making major changes in organizations. And there are many, many books I can go through but that’s just one that just comes off the top of my head that I just love.

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

Steven Gaffney
If they go to JustBeHonest.com, so our website is JustBeHonest.com, and if they go there and they say that they’ve listened to your show, and here’s the thing, and they write and email us on something they did, and I want to hear an action they took, if they do that and they just share what they did, we’ll send them the book I wrote years ago about how to share the most difficult things to people and have it go well, it was all about how to have honest conversations and have it go well, we’ll send that to them for free. And all I ask them to do is share that they listened to your podcast and share how they’ve used what we’ve talked about.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Steven, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and unconditional power.

Steven Gaffney
Thank you. And thank you very much for having me.