This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

Each week, I grill thought-leaders and results-getters to discover specific, actionable insights that boost work performance.

Nov 05

1194: How to Finish What Matters with David Kadavy

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David Kadavy discusses expert strategies for following through on your creative ideas and projects.

You’ll Learn

  1. The missing “fifth quadrant” of the Eisenhower important/urgent matrix
  2. The trick to make big projects less intimidating
  3. The Raphael versus Leonardo modes of creativity

About David

David Kadavy has been a full-time independent creator for nearly two decades. His books have sold well over 100,000 copies and been translated into a dozen languages. He was design advisor to Timeful, a productivity app whose features were integrated into Google Calendar. He lives in a cabin in the mountains outside of Medellín, Colombia.

Resources Mentioned

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David Kadavy
Pete, it is so good to be here. I’m so comfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, I’m delighted that we are chatting again. You’ve been working away on a book for six years, so congrats on, you finished it. I guess it mattered.

David Kadavy
Yes. Well, the book is called Finish What Matters. I think the last time we talked, we ended the conversation saying, “Oh, well, maybe we’ll talk in five years.” Well, it’s been six but, sometimes, finishing stuff just takes a long time if it matters to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Completely agreed. So, tell us, during this six-year journey, or Odyssey, did you have any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries about finishing what matters while you’re writing this thing?

David Kadavy
When I was going into it, this is the third book in a trilogy for me about creativity and creative productivity, and I went into it thinking, “Oh, this is going to be easy. I know how to finish things. I’ve written, this is my fifth book. I’ve had a podcast for hundreds of episodes,” things like that. And it’s like, “I already know everything about finishing.”

And that didn’t turn out to be the case at all. I actually learned a lot about this because that word matters really stuck with me, and it really made me think about, “Am I just finishing projects? Do I get too stubborn about finishing the things that I start?” that it’s important to finish the things that do matter to you and also that kind of fit your risk profile. They’re like, “What kind of bets do I want to make?”

And so that is where I ended up learning a lot, because I had a lot of self-searching to do, and I came to realize that I can sometimes be too stubborn about finishing the things that I start, I will definitely be more discerning in how far I take ideas from now on and which ideas I decide to follow.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that sounds like an important lesson for all of us, our finite time on this earth. Can you share with us what’s, perhaps, the big idea or some key criteria or principles you use to make these calls?

David Kadavy
If I connect it to being awesome at your job, like when you’re being awesome at your job, you’re probably delivering results. And you’re probably, to do that, doing things that you expect to lead to results. And these are going to, generally, be things that are expected of you.

But there’s this kind of other category of things where you have ideas about how you might, say, improve a process, or start a task force, or do something that if you don’t do it, nobody’s going to complain to you about it, nobody’s going to notice.

And maybe you get a little bit of energy to explore one of these things, tinker with one of these things on a Friday afternoon for an hour or two. But then come Monday morning, the priorities take over and you end up forgetting about the thing.

And so I think that we are all aware of the second quadrant on the Eisenhower Matrix, the things that are not urgent but important. I’m kind of advocating for a fifth quadrant, if you will.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it still a quadrant? Or is it a quintet?

David Kadavy
I guess it’s not.

Pete Mockaitis
Quintrent?

David Kadavy
The fifth quintent. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well. But the things that are not urgent, but unknown, unknown outcome. So how do you find the time and energy to build that task force for incorporating AI tools in the company when you need to prepare that deck for Thursday’s meeting, or to tinker with that process when you need to fill out that self-assessment for your performance review, or submit that proposal to talk at that conference when you need to study for that certification exam, these things that something might come of it?

But we’re having this conversation because you and I, 10 years ago, decided to go to a conference. And what’s going to come from the conference?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Podcast Movement in Chicago. What? What?

David Kadavy
Yeah, and you think at a conference, okay, you’re going to meet some folks, maybe you’ve got some objectives, but one of them is not, “Oh, so I can have a conversation about my book on somebody’s podcast 10 years from now.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

David Kadavy
Right? But these are the things that kind of steer your career in a satisfying and gratifying and innovative direction, are these things that you have an idea, and maybe you have some kind of vision for how you’d like for the thing to turn out, but you don’t really know what the next step is.

And also if you were to follow the thing, it probably wouldn’t lead you to that destination that you have in mind. It might lead you to some other place completely surprising.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s really fun, because when you say unknown, I’m enjoying that. I get excited by that. The thrill of exploration and discovery is a real good time. And I’m thinking about, like, video game designers, they know it, you know? It’s like, “Ooh, I found a thing. Yay!” It’s really intriguing.

And I imagine there are probably some dangerous temptations on either side of this. One is that you don’t do anything at all unknown because there’s a ton of things, and four quadrants is enough quadrants with all the bullet points on all the quadrants.

David Kadavy
We don’t need a fifth quadrant.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like there’s no capacity for anything else or it’s so much fun to explore and play around with all the nifty new little AI tools and the things and the models and what can they do, that it’s all not really what you “should” be doing with your time in order to make results happen.

David Kadavy
Yeah. Well, you definitely don’t want to be spending all of your time exploring, unless somehow that is your job. But I think that it’s helpful to set aside, like, a certain amount of time and energy for one. And then, two, like, be deliberate about scoping these things, not necessarily viewing them as big giant projects.

Like, I think of it as this thing I call the fortress fallacy. And that is that, I don’t know what it’s like for you, but whenever I have an idea, it’s always the fortress. It’s always this big giant thing that I don’t actually have the skills or resources to carry out. Resources including time and energy, right, because there’s other priorities.

And when I think about taking that first step, it’s really intimidating. What I like to do is what I call the cottage test, is that when I think of that fortress, when I have a big idea, I actually keep a spreadsheet of ideas where one column is called Fortress and another is called Cottage.

And I’ll write down that fortress idea, it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to write this 700-page book.” And then I will come up with the cottage version of that, which is it’s not breaking the thing down because that kind of requires more foresight than is often possible when doing creative things or when innovating. I think of it more as like, “What’s the smallest version of something resembling this idea that I can do?”

So, like, for example, let’s say that you did want to start a task force in your company for working with AI tools, and you’re thinking about like, “Oh, well, what’s the impression going to be amongst my colleagues about me automating them out of their jobs?” or, “Who’s going to be on the force? And how are these supervisors going to react to it?”

And it becomes overwhelming and you realize, “Oh, I’ve got more important things to do.” But if, instead, you’re thinking of it as like, “Well, let’s look out for a colleague that I could ask to have lunch with, and we can do some brainstorming and share notes and that’s the end of that.”

Well, and then maybe that becomes more of a regular thing. And then maybe slowly, over time, things start to happen. You see what I mean? It’s like starting off with a well-defined little experiment that you can carry out, and that you might have some kind of expectations for, but they’re far different from the initial, like, pie-in-the-sky or castle-in-the-sky, if you will, vision that you have. And you can budget your time and energy that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool to think about and well said with regard to the fortress feeling intimidating and so much so that, perhaps, we’ll just look elsewhere.

David Kadavy
I mean, I can actually feel it in my body when I’m looking at those two columns and I write that fortress idea. I can feel myself start to tense up, like, “Ah, I just don’t have time for that. I don’t have the resources.”

And then as soon as I write down that cottage idea, it’s like, “Okay, instead of writing that book, maybe I’ll just record that 30-second reel or something like that.” I can start to feel myself relax and start to get excited about, “Oh, well, what’s going to happen? That unknown, what’s going to happen?”

And that’s something that can make work a lot more fun and enjoyable is not really knowing what’s going to happen with some portion of what you’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if I could piggyback off of that, I’d love to get your hot take on, if we’re doing something kind of repeatedly, like, I’m doing my, I don’t know, 1,198-ish episode of How to be Awesome at Your Job, I mean, I think it’s fun because, you know, new person, new ideas, new stuff, we get into it.

But then there are certain portions of it in terms of like, “Okay, now I got to package it up and publish it, you know?” That feels less fun because it can seem a bit more repetitive.

Do you have any thoughts on how can we bring some of that enthusiasm, excitement, exploration, unknown into our repetitive corners of work life?

David Kadavy
I think when you’re doing something repetitive, one, there’s something exciting about it because it is an opportunity to continuously improve on something. And that’s something that I’ve always gotten excited about.

When I’m doing something repetitive is that I can create a process and formalize it and see, “Well, what if I tweak this part or that part?” And then the next time around I get to do it differently.

Or, as I develop that process, then I can start to offload or automate things. And then I can start to ask myself, “Okay, what is my value-add here?” So in the case of a podcast, because you have automated so many things and offloaded them, delegated, you can now bring more of your own creativity to the process, and you can start to experiment with things there.

So I think it’s important to, if you’re doing something repetitive and you’re not able to decide to not do that thing anymore, it helps to find something that you’re learning from the process.

You and I are both podcasters. I know when I started my podcast, it was because, by forcing myself to do an episode a week, I figured, “I’m going to grow in these ways. I’m going to get to talk to mentors of mine. I’m going to get to practice talking about my own ideas. I’m going to force myself to read more books than I might have otherwise.”

And so there becomes, like, these kind of aspirations that you’re able to push yourself along with better by setting up obligations for yourself. But during that, you’re also asking yourself, “What do I want to get out of this?”

Because, eventually, you reach this point where maybe you’re not learning at the same pace that you were. And then it becomes a choice of like, “Can I offload parts of this to somebody else?” or, “All good things must come to an end, and so I’m not doing this particular thing anymore.”

And for myself, I did over 300 episodes of a podcast. And I reached a point where I said, like, “This is great.” I mean, I do miss it, but I just was reaching the point of diminishing returns on growing the way that I wanted to.

And that was, you know, one of the things that I faced as I wrote this book and learned was like that, “Oh, it actually…” especially with these things that can go on forever, you’ve got to define a finish line at some point.

And that can also be part of the reason why we maybe put off trying some of these ideas that we have is because it’s a little bit of a fear of success thing. It’s like, “If I set up this task force, and now I’m in charge of that, and like now that’s my responsibility, is that something that I’m going to enjoy?”

And so it can help to, early on, define some kind of finish lines for yourself. So, like, again, talking about a podcaster. A friend of mine, Drew Ackerman, when he started his podcast, he had a history of not finishing things.

And so he looked at the statistics and saw that, “Oh, you know, after the first two episodes, 50% of podcasts or 80% of podcasts don’t do anymore after.” So he said, “Okay, I’ll do two episodes.” And then after that it was five, and then after that it was twenty.

And he’s on over 1300 episodes of his podcast, which is called Sleep With Me. It’s like bedtime stories for adults, helping people get to sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve listened to it.

David Kadavy
Yeah. And so when you are facing this project that, if it turns out well, you’re going to have this ongoing obligation, you can end up learning a lot from just sort of defining how much of it that you are going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Tell us a little bit about your Leonardo and Raphael analogy.

David Kadavy
Yeah, one of the things that I came across while writing this book that really captured my imagination was about Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. So Leonardo da Vinci, I feel like, is more famous now than Raphael. Raphael was, like, the quintessential Renaissance painter.

I mean, he was awesome and he had a ton of output. He’s got the Raphael rooms in the Vatican, those are giants. I mean, if it wasn’t for the ceiling down the hallway, Michelangelo’s ceiling, then that would be the greatest accomplishment in Renaissance painting. There’s entire walls of palaces that are lined with his finished paintings.

By contrast, Leonardo da Vinci, we have, like, a dozen finished paintings to his name, attributed to him. And there’s a lot of unfinished paintings as well. And you think, “Well, Leonardo must have really lacked discipline or just not been able to follow through on things.”

Except, when we realize that, for Raphael to paint the way that he did, he learned from Leonardo da Vinci. There’s actually a period of time they call the Florence period when Raphael’s career, where he spent a lot of time in Florence, and he spent a lot of time with Leonardo da Vinci, they might as well call it the Leonardo period.

And you can see that his paintings changed dramatically. And he was more influenced by Leonardo than any other painter. But Leonardo has this reputation as being a little ADHD, as being distracted, as we’ve got these thousands of pages of his notes on everything from metallurgy to geology to paleontology, which didn’t even exist at the time.

And there’s this reputation that, “Oh, he was just… he painted on the side, but he was distracted by science.” No, painting was the most important thing to Leonardo da Vinci, more important than anything. And his pursuit of science, his interest in all these different topics, were all to just feed his skills in painting.

For example, Leonardo made some pretty prescient observations about the moon. And this is an experiment that everybody listening can conduct, and he described it in his notebooks.

It was that if you look at a crescent moon up in the sky and you put your hand or some other more distant object as he describes it, over the illuminated part of the moon and look at the dark part of the moon, the shaded part, you’ll notice it’s not totally dark. There’s kind of a lighter area within it.

Now there were all these theories at the time about why that might be. Like, people thought maybe the moon was made of some sort of translucent substance. But Leonardo da Vinci correctly theorized that, “Oh, that is, at night the sun, the sun at night, reflecting off of the oceans of the earth into the shaded part of the moon and illuminating that.”

And so he had that understanding of light as, like, bouncing off of things. And you can see that under the chin of the Mona Lisa. And then there’s another painting by Raphael from that Florence period where he was learning from Leonardo that looks it’s the exact same composition as the Mona Lisa.

I mean, he copied the Mona Lisa. It’s a different subject. It’s a young woman with a unicorn in her lap, which is pretty cool. And he’s got that illuminated thing under the chin. You can look at his earlier work, it’s not there.

And so, oftentimes, we see this where somebody has to tinker and experiment before their innovations can really be implemented. Sometimes, it’s the same person, but a lot of times, it is somebody taking an innovation that was arrived at through experimentation and then executing on it, and that is what Raphael did.

And so I know for myself, some people think more like Leonardo and some people think more like Raphael. Where Leonardo had what I would call an inductive process in that he’s tinkering with stuff and making observations.

And it all kind of, like, piles into his knowledge about the world, and through that he paints something like the Mona Lisa, which took 15 years and he never really finished it and the client never got the painting. It was kind of never finished.

Some people have like a deductive approach, which is more like Raphael’s approach, where they take an idea or a concept and they just execute on that. And I think that we need to be careful with how we compare ourselves to colleagues or heroes that we are trying to emulate because we can very quickly make ourselves feel like we’re not accomplishing much when, really, it’s just that we have a different approach or we’re attracted to different problems.

I know that I’ve found that for myself that I had an a friend who was a writer who was writing on one subject all the time and I was just like, “It’s tough to keep up with this guy.”

And so when he pointed out, well, he’s deductive, you’re inductive. I’ve written about a whole bunch of different subjects. He’s written about one thing for 20 or 30 years and that suits him. He can do that.

And once I started to embrace that, “No, I’m just interested in a lot of things, but I need to be a little bit more deliberate about sizing my experiments and maybe trying to formulate for some some plan of what direction I’m going in,” that’s when things have gotten a lot more comfortable for me.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. Well, I’d also love your take on when we’re in the midst of things and pursuing a project and it’s not as fun, interesting, rewarding as it was when it was fresh and shiny and new at the start. Do you have any pro tips on, indeed, finishing what matters here?

David Kadavy
Yeah, because they’re actually, especially when it comes to something that is creative and fun in the beginning, you can sort of naturally be coming up with ideas while you you’re taking a shower or having lunch with a colleague and you get these new ideas, you can integrate them into it.

But actually finishing something, you have to step away from that sort of inductive process. And that can be difficult if you’re somebody who is attracted to thinking in that way, somebody who, I guess the personality traits would be somebody who is low on need for closure or high on openness to experience, like, they want to be constantly taking in new things. And finishing is the exact opposite of that.

So I think of it like finishing displacement theory, that your life and your work is filled to the brim, and you can work on your project and it will fit into your life and your work. But then we reach this point where we say, “Well, we got to finish this thing. How are we going to finish this thing?” and it becomes very difficult.

The thing is it just takes extra energy and time to be able to make that mental shift from just taking in information to actively saying, like, “Nope, we can save that for V2,” things like that.

And so you kind of need to make some space, see what sort of obligations you can put off to the side for some period of time until you finish this thing. For me, like working on this book, there was all this talk about all these AI tools, and I was interested in that but I had a not-to-do list.

“Can you make for yourself a not-to-do list? Here is an idea that has come to me. I’m very excited about this, but this is on my not-to-do list until this project is complete.” And that way you can start to give yourself some of that extra mental energy to do that sort of gritting of your teeth that needs to happen to actually get a project done.

Pete Mockaitis
So extra energy in the sense that, because you really want to do these things and your not-to-do list is growing and is interesting, it becomes a source of energy like, “Ooh, let’s get this thing done because, then, I’ve got this whole pile of interesting stuff just waiting for me.”

David Kadavy
Well, that’s part of it. That’s part of what can motivate you. That can also help because, oftentimes, when you get into a long-term project that is kind of all consuming, part of why that can be scary to finish is what you have waiting for yourself when you’re done, which is you don’t necessarily know.

Or you’re comfortable working on this project, you’re excited working on this pro project, you’ve reached a point where it feels very natural and fluid. I think of it, like, the stand-up comedians that they work on an hour and then they release it on Netflix and now they never tell those jokes again. And you hear them talk about that and they all feel very lost.

So there’s this void that you’re kind of scared to find yourself in when you’re finished with this project. And so, yeah, that not-to-do list can make you excited, can give you something to look forward to when you do finally finish this project.

But, at the same time, I think it is balancing that Leonardo and that Raphael in that I know, I personally find it much easier to stay in a certain mode, whether that is the exploration mode where I am taking in new ideas, where I am tinkering with things, or that execution mode where I call it, while I was finishing this book, I call it devastating focus.

I’m like, “I’m not going to watch movies, putting all my screens on black and white, doing everything I can to reduce the amount of distraction or extra stimulation that I’m attracted to that is not related to this project.”

And I find that when I’m finishing a big project, you’ll find that you’re finishing a lot of other stuff at the same time because you’re in that mode. So you have this sort of season where you’re going to get this thing done. And then after that, you can have that season where you get to the stuff on the not-to-do list and then you’re taking in information again, taking in new ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Devastating focus. That sounds cool.

David Kadavy
Well, you think about it, like, when you are about to finish a project, what’s difficult about that, when it’s like a career-defining project, is that you have to kind of accept a new version of reality before it exists. You kind of need to puncture into this new version of reality.

And if you imagine, like, a piece of fabric between you and that new version of reality, and if you were to, like, press it with your finger, like, it would move. But if you were to concentrate that same pressure into a needle, it would puncture through that cloth, into that new version of reality.

And so I think of devastating focus as, like, it’s kind of the same amount of effort. It’s just that you’re focusing that effort on a very small point that you are using to step into this new reality.

Pete Mockaitis
The word devastating is so intense, it feels like it has implications all over the place. Do you mean you’re devastating the project ahead of you, or you’re going to feel devastated by how much you’re sacrificing in order to knock her out or both?

David Kadavy
A little bit of both. Like, when you get into a really big project, like you’re going to need support from the people around you. You got to talk to your spouse and say, like, “Look, can we work out this, that, and the other thing? Like, can we just not watch movies for the next couple months while I finish this? Or, can you help me with this part of the chores or something?”

I interviewed one reader who, she was writing a book, and her in-laws helped her out by renting a house that she could write in for a couple months. You need to rally your resources.

And there’s also an element to it that is meant to be self-motivational and self-inspirational, too. If that’s the posture that you like, I think that it works for me. It sounds a little what the kids call thirsty, you know?

It’s like maybe a little too ambitious, but it’s only so often in your life that you’re, like, really driving forward on a huge project that takes you years, and it takes that level of motivation sometimes where you got to psych yourself up a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, any other top tips before we hear about some of your favorite things?

David Kadavy
Well, I would like to tell a story about this academic named Niklas Luhmann, who showed up on the first day of his professorship and said, “I have a project in mind. I’m going to write a theory of society, a theory of everything. It will take me 30 years.”

And he went on to write this two-volume, 1200-page theory of society, how everything in society works from romantic relationships to business, to politics, to finance. And it took him 30 years.

Now it sounds really amazing that somebody could show up on their first day of work and put forth a 30-year plan, and then actually carry it out. But the way that he did it actually looked kind of fun and was incredibly interesting.

And I think it’s something that we can learn from when we have that castle-in-the sky or that fortress in our minds, is that along the way, Luhmann published not just this 1200-page theory of society, he published 500 times. He published over 400 articles and over 70 books.

And the way that he went about that was by just taking little notes as he read. He created this database of notes of 90,000 notes. It’s the subject of a research project at the University in Germany that he was doing his research at.

And from the special way that he has organized these notes, we can see the way that he went about these projects, was that he started with these notes. And he used this thing that I call BESS, which stands for, we know the acronyms, right? BESS – breaking, expanding, stacking, and surrounding.

And so breaking is, when you are working on something larger, finding some insight that you can break off and create your own little project with. So you might be putting together the quarterly report, and there’s one slide in there that, “This is pretty interesting. I’m going to take this to the team meeting.”

And so for Luhmann, that would have been there was a presentation that he put together. And they can see from the way that he arranged his notes, that as he was writing that presentation, he added notes to his database, that he had new insights as he was working on this presentation, and they went into the database.

Next is expanding. And that is when you’re working on, you create something smaller and then you expand it into a larger thing. So, maybe you have that slide from the quarterly report and you bring it up in the meeting, and then that actually becomes a lunch and learn, and you end up giving a presentation, you expand it into a lunch and learn.

For Luhmann, his use of expanding was taking that presentation, which he later turned into a book on the exact same subject. So he expanded it into a book.

So next up is stacking. Stacking is just taking smaller projects and then stacking them together to create something larger. So let’s say you do that lunch and learn, and then you do another lunch and learn, and then you do another lunch and learn. And now you have this new onboarding process or course that you can put together for training people in the company.

For Luhmann, that was, his notes was one thing, and then also as he did these presentations, he would stack the notes together. He’d take them out and arrange them on a table, and that would be an article. And that’s how he published hundreds of times was by stacking things together.

And then surrounding is basically conquering larger, more ambitious projects by taking on smaller projects that don’t seem related at all to that larger, more ambitious project. It’s sort of dissolves the defenses, so to speak, to use some more tough language along with devastating.

So it really devastates the defenses, is by doing a little project here and a little project here that builds some skills that will help you conquer this larger project. So let’s say you are in charge of organizing the company offsite and, because of that, you have to negotiate with vendors.

Well, that’s an opportunity to work on your negotiation skills. And now when it comes time to negotiate your salary, you’ve gotten some practice with that. This can often come from outside of your work life. Like, if you take improv classes, you do a little bit of stand-up. Well, now you’ve gotten some practice thinking on your feet, and you can use that in talking with clients.

For Luhmann, that first day when he said, “I have this 30-year project idea in mind,” he was able to set forth such an ambitious plan because he had already spent a couple decades doing that thing where he’s taking notes as he reads and organizing them.

And maybe publishing an article here and there, such that when he began doing that, he wasn’t even thinking about sociology. He was thinking about something completely different. He was working on organizational structure, just for an example.

And so that is something that, I think, is useful, a story that could be inspiring for our listeners as they think about the ambitious things that they would like to take on, is, “How can you use BESS – breaking, expanding, stacking, and surrounding – to find little opportunities to break off projects, to expand those little experiments into larger things, to stack them together to create larger things, or to take on projects that aren’t necessarily related to that target project to surround them?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

David Kadavy
Yeah, I love this one by Ford. I think is really underrated, which is that, “Many inventors fail because they do not distinguish between planning and experimenting.”

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

David Kadavy
Yes, there’s this economist, David Galenson. And like a good economist, he wanted to study the prices of paintings. And he thought he would find this neat pattern that say the younger painters have more valuable paintings, or the older painters have more valuable paintings.

But instead, he’s found two separate patterns. There were the young geniuses who peaked early, and later on, their paintings were not as influential, not as valuable. And then there were the old masters, those who, as they went on, they got better and better.

The two archetypical examples would be Picasso and Cezanne. Picasso peaked at 26. Cezanne peaked at 67. And, like we were talking about earlier, Cezanne was Picasso’s hero.

So if people remember from art history class, Cubism, and it’s basically representing a four-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas where you see the nose twice from different angles and there’s all these rectilinear forms and stuff. Picasso really picked that up from Cezanne. And Cezanne spent decades experimenting with kind of breaking down the natural world into different planes of color.

And Galenson has found this pattern over and over again, where there are these people who are more executors like Picasso, who become successful very quickly, and there are those who are more experimental where it takes a lot longer to build that foundation.

And that is a really fascinating study to me. And that’s also where you see Leonardo as an experimenter and Raphael as an executor.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

David Kadavy
I really enjoy Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I think that we could all benefit from conducting more tiny experiments in our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

David Kadavy
I like iOS shortcuts, specifically using iOS shortcuts for idea capture. Just making a little widget, to just, whenever you have an idea, tap on that widget, write it down, and it will put it in that sheet, and then you can later go through and and evaluate that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

David Kadavy
I really enjoy this thing called TRE. This is going to get a little weird. TRE stands for tension and trauma releasing exercise. And you can look it up on YouTube, and it’s this sort of thing where you lay on the floor, and you do a certain series of exercises, and it sort of causes you to tremble a little bit, and it releases all this tension like in your back and your hips and stuff.

Check it out on YouTube. I will warn you, be careful with it. It is way more powerful than it looks. You might want to talk to a TRE practitioner if you’re going to try it out or do it at your own risk. But it is very cool, and I’m very glad that I discovered it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, my mind is blown a bit because I have zero frame of reference for this. And so that’s exciting and it’s unknown, and I like exploring unknown.

David Kadavy
Dr. David Berceli, it’s his idea and it’s really cool, and there’s starting to be a budding population of people online interested in it, and it’s really cool.

Pete Mockaitis
So maybe just one more minute here. If I were to do cardiovascular exercise, I know what kind of adaptation I might get. My heart and lungs are able to deliver oxygen and blood circulation more effectively. Cool.

If I do strength training, I’m pumping some iron, it’s like, “Oh, now I am stronger. I’m able to lift more weights or more reps or longer sessions. Cool.” What kind of adaptation or benefit do I get from doing TRE?

David Kadavy
Releasing of tension. And I don’t want to sound New Age-y here. There’s also, like as you do it, these memories pop up and they can be traumatic memories if you’re somebody with a history of trauma. But they can be just, like, that time that somebody cut me off, or that time that somebody interrupted me in a meeting, and I wanted to say something but I didn’t.

And so the best explanation I could give is that it’s almost like, in those moments where you’re resisting some kind of a reaction, an emotional reaction, that you tense your muscles, and then that muscle ends up kind of being tense all the time.

And so TRE releases that tension, and it’s something you have to do kind of like repeatedly over and over to get the benefits of it. And then you sort of reintegrate into your new tension patterns, and then you sort of find maybe things that might have upset you before don’t, or tension that you had in your body, like back pain, neck pain, things like that. You might see those dissipate.

Pete Mockaitis
Nifty. Okay.

David Kadavy
I decided to go with something really different.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

David Kadavy
I find that that fortress fallacy people find very resonant when they’re trying to take on a big project and they realize that they’re dreaming of the fortress and they should consider the cottage.

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

David Kadavy
I would point them to Kadavy.net. Or, if you’re on a mobile and you want to type it quick, you’d just be kdv.co. Go there, sign up for my newsletter, “Love Mondays.” That is a weekly newsletter, and I’m not going to tell you which day it comes out on.

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

David Kadavy
Yeah, I think when you have an idea, capture it, and then later, triage it. And, in fact, I have put together a special tool that I personally use to triage my ideas. And you can find that at Kadavy.net/awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. David, thank you.

David Kadavy
Thank you so much. It’s been so great to reconnect.

Oct 29

1193: How to Build a Team That Can Thrive Without You with Bill Flynn

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Bill Flynn shares his strategies for building a team that can lead, decide, and thrive without you.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you shouldn’t play the hero
  2. How to build a self-sufficient team
  3. How to delegate authority, not just tasks

About Bill

Bill Flynn has collaborated with Alan Mulally and Amy Edmondson, pitched Steve Jobs, accomplished much, failed often, and learned many useful lessons from thirty years of studying the science of success. He is best described as a pragmatic Simon Sinek; an optimist and an operator.

Bill embodies his core purpose – simplified servanthood – by spending each working moment to help create a compassionately productive society by enabling enlightened leaders to focus on the few things that truly matter to their teams and key stakeholders. For having a great business is one way of making a better world.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Bill, welcome!

Bill Flynn
Thanks, Pete. Glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat about your latest, The Hero Trap. Could you kick us off with a particularly surprising or extra fascinating discovery you made while putting this all together?

Bill Flynn
Well, what I found out is that when you get promoted to run a team or run an organization or division, department, whatever it may be, everything that had got you there, all of the successes, rewards, recognitions for being the decision-maker, the hero, the person who won the deal, came in at the last minute and saved something, whatever it might have been, work against you when you are now leading a team.

Being the hero is not your job when you run the team. It is to make the team the hero. And it is a sort of insidious situation because you’ve got decades probably, at least 10, if not 20 or 30 years, of reinforcement from when you’re young, in school, wherever.

And then if you actually get to a point where you say, “Hey, you know, this isn’t working for me. My life has been taken over. The hours and time that I have to spend doing this because I have to be the one who has the answer.”

You know, you can’t eat dinner, you can’t go home, and you decide that that’s not working for you, and you begin to pull back and let the team do more stuff, their first reaction will very likely be discomfort. They don’t want you to pull back because they have been acculturated, if you will, into this particular way of thinking where when something bad happens, you’re the one who comes in and fixes it.

So they sort of help you solve that as opposed to having the responsibility to do it themselves. That’s what I’ve learned.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s well said. And I think that just the hero verbiage, really, I think grounds this whole thing in sort of the emotional stakes of what it feels like as opposed to very theoretical discussion, like, “Oh, as you enter a leadership role, you’ll need to begin delegating what you used to do.”

It’s like, “Okay, yeah, I’ve heard that before.” But when you crystallize it in this hero language, that really brings it home. Could you share some key stories that illustrate this?

Bill Flynn
Yeah, so I sort of experienced this myself, not that I was necessarily the hero in this story, but I came in and replaced the hero. I was brought in a number of years ago to help a founder sell his company, and he brought me in as his sort of head of sales and sort of the guy with the gray hairs, if you will.

And through that process, I helped him do that about a year or so after I started, he sold the company. But during that process, his co-founder, who was the person who wrote most of the code of the software that we were using, this was an email hosting company, was running marketing.

And he ran marketing like an engineer. And he did a Scrum in the morning and he gathered his four or five people, and sort of told them, “Okay, let’s do this today.” And then at the end of the day, they sort of debriefed. And he did that day after day after day.

And when I took over, I said, “I’m not going to do that,” for two reasons. One is that just wasn’t the way I did things. I’m more closer to a builder and an architect in my vernacular than I am the hero or the controller.

And, two, I didn’t have the skills to do that. I didn’t know how to write copy. I didn’t know how to do page search or a SEO at the level that needed to be done, so I couldn’t tell them what to do. But I could say, “Hey, look, you know, what do you think marketing’s job is in this company?”

And we had a discussion about that, and we came away with, “Marketing’s job is to help make sales easier.” So I said, “So all the things that we do, that’s our job is to make the process of actually turning someone into a customer a lot easier.”

“And you all have roles to do to contribute to that, and let’s discuss what that looks like, how we would measure, how well we do there, what are the areas of marketing that we want to make sure we’re excellent at in terms of cost and throughput and volume, etc.”

And I said, “Then go do your jobs, and then figure it out, and let me know when you need me to help sort of come in.” And I didn’t just sort of let him go. I certainly was involved in the process, but I was more sort of eyes-on hands-off type of thing. And when I first said this, you should have seen the faces in the room.

They hated me. I think the word is correct. And I was told later by them because, eventually, they came to appreciate what I did. I was told honestly, “You know, we just hated you because, you know, what are you doing? You sort of basically upended our entire existence at that time, and asked us to do something that we weren’t asked to do.”

But as time went on, and I supported them, they were very good at what they did, they knew what they were doing, there were certain things that I could do to help, but so they sort of ran marketing without me.

And what’s really nice about this story is one of them became my client years later in what I do now. And we’re still, we have a 20- some odd year friendship from that. And two of the other women that were in the organization used me as their reference for the next job. So for the next 10 years, I was the person they asked to be their reference for the next job.

So If you can get through that knothole of difficulty and despair, if you will, it usually turns out pretty well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, boy, that speaks to a lot of things all at once, and I’m really digging it. Because, well, one, the fact that they hated you suggests that what they were doing before was working for them reasonably well, I would speculate, right?

It’s funny, if what they had before was terrible, and you came in with those fundamental, you know, big-picture first principle questions, “What’s marketing’s job here?” they might say, “Oh, finally, we can throw off the yoke of all of the silly junk we’ve been dealing with.”

I’m thinking about the book The Goal, about manufacturing. It’s like, “What are we trying to do here?” “Well, we’re trying to make some money, and the manufacturing supports that by, you know, efficiently, cost effectively, reliably, turning stuff through the manufacturing lines. So that’s kind of what we’re doing here.”

And so they had all these, you know, silly metrics that were just bogging things down and nonsense. So they were doing something that was working for them well enough, such that when you disrupted it, it was not welcome.

Bill Flynn
Yes. exactly. And what’s interesting is, and they began to see it as we added, we started to add velocity to marketing. because when you have to wait until it goes up through the top, that slows everything down, and he or she may not have all the answers. or if even the fact that you have to do that, slows everything down.

I gave them guidelines and guardrails, and I gave them direction at the high level, and I gave them safety. You know, I said, “Look, you’re not going to get everything right. You may make a mistake every now and again, but that’s okay because what we’re doing here together is new, and we want to grow this part of the organization, which means you’re going to make mistakes.”

“So what we’ll do is we’ll just work together and we’ll correct them, and next time we won’t make those mistakes.” And, again, they didn’t believe me. They thought I was setting them up for failure. I think that’s what made the difference for them. They saw that they could do things faster. And the metrics actually got better.

We increased the average order size because we did marketing to help sales, but we also had a website and we did online sales. So marketing was basically also a sales engine. That average order size went up. The cost per acquisition went down. So all the things that you really look for at a high level worked really well.

So they were competent and reasonable people, and they saw that. And once they saw those metrics going, it actually gave them energy and motivation to want to do even more. So I think that’s what you see when you go from good enough to approaching great.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I also dig, when we think about just the title there, The Hero Trap, you can feel like a trap for you in terms of, “Oh, my gosh, the sheer hours required of me to do all of these things is, it feels like a trap, like a prison.”

And also, it’s a bit of a trap in terms of, as you think about what universe of career possibilities might exist for you, you might say, “Well, I don’t know much about marketing, so I have no business leading a marketing team.”

But it seems like, “Au contraire, if we utilize some of these principles, you could be an effective leader of all kinds of teams in which your subject matter knowledge is somewhat limited.”

Bill Flynn
Exactly. And interesting enough, so I used to be a Vistage speaker, and for those of you who don’t know, Vistage is a sort of peer-to-peer advisory organization, have been around for 60, 70, 80 years. And it’s mostly CEOs and leadership teams. It has a whole bunch of capabilities. And I would speak to CEOs, so I’ve spoken to hundreds, if not thousands of CEOs.

And I would do this exercise with them where I would have them fill out a three-by-five card for that particular role. And we’d put CEO or founder or whatever on the front. And on the back, at the top, it says, “Why do I get paid?” And it’s, “What are the key things, what are the key outcomes that this role, regardless whether I’m in it or someone else, gets paid?”

And I had people who ran, you know, pet stores and ball bearing companies, and software organizations, high-end technology, in the same room. And after I had them fill out the card, I would have each of them turn to each other, and they would read their card to each other, and they would help each other, you know, sort of helping them with the process.

And then after all this was done, I said, “So what was the thing that you noticed when you did this?” And, invariably, more than half the time, I would hear from people that say, “Well, you know, I run a pet store, and he’s the ball-bearing CEO, and our cards are remarkably similar because the key outcomes for that level of the company are basically the same.”

So I think, in some cases, you absolutely have to have some knowledge, some skill, minimum amount. There’s a credibility issue, of course, and competency issue, a minimum competency. But you don’t necessarily have to know everything to the nth degree. But you do know how to attract and build and develop teams. And that is a universal skill.

And as far as I know, Pete, and I’d love to hear from your take. I mean, I went to school. I have a business degree. I have a degree in marketing. I was never taught how to run a team. I wasn’t taught anything about teams, right? I was taught things very specific, very discrete things about skills and knowledge, but not about something that really matters to me.

It may be the most important thing on the people side of the business because teams get most of the work done. It’s rare that one individual is responsible for a large portion of the success of a company. So I think your comment is well made.

And if we can help people understand that being a great teammate is how you can be awesome at your job, not just being just great at the thing that you have been asked to do, but also be part of a great team, then you will be able to go very far, whether you want to go up an organization or wide or somewhere else. I think that’s a really important skill to have.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m loving you already dropped a few of these very foundational questions, which I think are really illuminating. Can you give us some more of these favorite questions in your toolkit that really help organize and clarify what we’re up to?

Bill Flynn
Yeah, so one of the things, I work with individuals that lead teams. So I typically work with CEOs and then the leadership team, but I also work with people below that. And I’m a go-to person sometimes for these folks.

And when they come to me and they say, you know, “Here’s the situation. I’m trying to figure it out,” my first question almost always is, “Let’s assume that whatever you’ve done here is completed. How would you describe that as an ideal outcome? What would that particular thing look like?”

“And so give me details. Don’t just give me a word or two, but let’s walk through what that is. Because it’s a lot easier to go backwards from there than it is to go forwards from where you are.” So that would be something that I definitely work with, be it an individual contributor or a team leader or a CEO. It doesn’t matter. To me, that’s a vital question.

And that is also a question that goes across all sorts of parts of the company. For instance, if your job is to run a particular meeting, that should be the first thing you ask yourself, “What is the ideal outcome of this particular meeting? How would I describe a very successful version of this meeting?”

And then you say, “Okay, if that’s what I’m really trying to do, who are the people in the organization, regardless of title or whatever, that I must have in this meeting to give me the best possible chance of achieving that outcome?” Then you put together the agenda.

We hardly do those first two things. We just invite anybody. We don’t really know the end. If you do those two things, your meetings will go much faster, they’ll have much better throughput. The people in the meeting will be a lot happier because they actually have context and they understand what they’re trying to accomplish, why they’re there.

So those would be a couple of things, or one thing that I think can stretch across a couple of different areas.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Okay, so the ideal outcome and then going backwards, and then the subsequent questions. What are some others?

Bill Flynn
As a contributor to an organization, one thing that I learned, and I remember from your notes, I’m a big fan of Pareto, the 80/20 model. And this quote that I can’t find, so I guess it’s mine, but I’m sure I stole it from somebody, is “Few things truly matter, either in business or in life, but those that do, matter tremendously.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Bill Flynn
And your job as a parent or as a team leader or a team participant, whatever it may be, if you could figure out what those few things are, and it’s typically no more than five, and most likely somewhere between two and three, and you spend the bulk of your time and energy making those things optimal, that is the best time you could ever spend as an employee, as a leader, whatever it may be.

It’s easily said, more easily said than done, but once you figure that out, the world becomes a lot easier to navigate and to view, in my opinion.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I think that’s so true. And I have found, like I love the book, The 80/20 Rule, or Essentialism, or The ONE Thing. And it’s funny, so these are books about, you know, productivity, effectiveness, getting more stuff done.

And I find that if I’m stressed, I actually pause to read or reflect on some of these ideas. It’s very liberating. It increases peace and it reduces stress because it’s, like, “I don’t actually have to deal with everything. I’ve got to deal with these, you know, two, three, four things. And they make all the difference there.”

I’ve taught on the 80/20 principle and, like, these things are not just a little bit more important or impactful. They’re 16 times as impactful. Let’s walk through the math, and it’s huge. So could you maybe give us a few examples of a domain, and the two or three things that matter a whole lot in that domain?

Bill Flynn
So, I used to run sales. And when I first started running sales, I wasn’t very good at running sales and I, again, sort of said, “Okay, what does selling mean? And how do I know when there’s a great salesperson?” And I looked at all the great salespeople I had worked with, and they were all different. Yet, one would say that they were successful.

So I said to my team, “I only have two rules as your leader of sales.” I said, “Of course, you need to know your product, you need to know what we do, all that kind of stuff, all the basic stuff.” I said, “But I don’t care how you reach your number. We can argue whether your number is fair or not, and I’m happy to do that. But once we sort of set your number for the month or the quarter or the year, whatever it is, my two rules are be honest and be responsible.”

“And, you know, honest was, I don’t want you to knowingly say something that is disingenuous or incorrect in order to win a deal. And then responsible is responsible to there are three constituencies that you need to be responsible to. You need to be responsible to the organization, you need to be responsible to the client, and you need to be responsible to yourself.”

“So if you are able to do those two things, again, if you want to make a thousand calls to get your number, or you want to make ten calls because you do deep research, whatever, or somewhere in between, if you want to focus more on your personality and relationships versus technique, I don’t care, as long as you’re honest and responsible. And we, as a team, we’re going to work together to make that happen.”

Pete Mockaitis
And how do you define responsible in this context?

Bill Flynn
Responsible, again, for those three things is you need to be responsible to the organization so that you know you’re not just closing a deal to get a check. You’re representing an organization. In many cases, you are the organization to those people, so you have to remember that. So the things that you do and say are reflective of everyone else behind you.

The second is you need to be responsible to the client. They’re going to be clients that want to buy from you. But if you do a good job of qualifying them and doing needs analysis, we may not be the right fit. And I would rather have you walk away from a deal that isn’t the right fit because, eventually, that client is going to be unhappy.

And if you do that a few times, you’re going to be dealing with those unhappy customers, which will take time away from you getting new customers who are happy. So you need to be responsible to them. And then, of course, to yourself, right? You want to make sure that the future version of you is very proud of the current version of you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so responsible in the sense of you are owning their concerns and acting in their best interest. It’s, like, that’s yours. And you feel it, as opposed to that’s someone else’s issue. They’re going to have to deal with satisfying them somehow.

Bill Flynn
Right, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very good. Well, so now, zooming out a bit, you’ve got a framework – a controller, builder, architect. Can you walk us through that a little bit?

Bill Flynn
Sure. So what I found is that, either myself or other people that I’ve worked with and/or researched, because of this hero trap, the success paradox, we have usually a default identity. Most people, especially if they’re founder-led, you know, they’re a founder of a company, default to the hero, the controller model, because they were the ones who had the answer, they had to do the research, they had to do all the work, because that’s what got them there.

Eventually, the company grew and got successful, hopefully, and that became more and more of an issue for them. But also, what does happen, and I’ve seen happen, is when pressure hits, that’s their default regardless of the size of the company.

So if financial pressure hits or some other type of pressure hits, they’re going to default to getting in there and solving the problem, as opposed to stepping back and saying, “Okay, how do I help my organization do this?” So that’s the issue that I found in general.

And I was saying, “Well, is that the best way to do things?” And I came up with this framework which says you actually have the option of three different identities. The controller, which by the way, Pete, is okay. It’s not a bad identity. Sometimes you need to jump in and do the work and make the decision, etc.

But if you just stop there, that’s where we get back to you don’t get to go home at night. You know, the nights get longer and you get a call at 3:00 o’clock in the morning because something was broken in Japan, and you have to fix it or whatever. But you can’t just stop there. You have to be moving towards architect.

And the next step is builder, and the last is architect. So if I were to synthesize this, controller is, “I do.” The builder is, “I teach how I do.” And then the architect is, “I build systems so I’m not necessary to do either of those two things.”

So if you are the hero and, let’s say, I’m sure in your situation, you’ve probably come in and you’ve had to, like, fix something. Maybe there was an angry client or some system broke, and you had to come in and just make it happen because there was urgency to it or whatever.

Your next step is to say, “Okay, let me teach my team how I did that. Let them understand how I think through these kinds of problems.” You probably have an innate heuristic or whatever it is, you know, some sort of rubric that you use to walk you through a process.

And if you teach that to them, the next time that particular thing comes up, then they will know how to say, “Hey, this is what Pete would do.” And if you’ve read Turn the Ship Around, this is sort of what David Marquet was talking about in his example when he took over the submarine that he didn’t know how to run.

So he basically told people, “I need you to tell me what you intend to do, and I will just sort of say go ahead, because I don’t know how the ship works, but I will teach you how I think. I’ll teach you how. I need to keep us safe. Here are the things that I need to do.” So when they’re doing that intent model, they’re using his thinking to do that.

Now that works for a long distance, but when you really are in a situation where you want to fire yourself from the day-to-day as much as possible, you need to build systems so those people can take that knowledge of yours and use their own brains, be it individual or team, to look at things that you haven’t prepared them for.

So, for instance, you might have taught them a particular way of thinking, but the next thing that comes up is there’s a slight deviation from it, and it doesn’t look and smell exactly like what you just told them. So what will happen if you don’t teach them the systems, then they have to come back to and you have to sort of solve that one a little bit differently.

But if you put the systems in place and you create this architect model where you’re building people who think for themselves and can leverage the system, they won’t even come to you at all, or they’ll come to you and say, “Hey, this came up. It looked a lot like the thing you taught us a year ago, but this was the change. We’re going to do this because this is how we looked it through. Are you okay with that?” And you’re like, “Go ahead, give it a go.”

That’s very different than, “Hey, the problem came up and we don’t know how to solve it. Can you help us fix it, or fix it for us?” So those are the three models: controller, builder, architect.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you give us a real-world example of a domain in which we’re approaching it as though we are a controller versus builder versus architect?

Bill Flynn
Sure. And I can use an example from one of my clients. I had a client for many years that grew tremendously quickly, over many years, grew 40%, 50%, 60% a year and continued that pace. And then things started to slow down. And the leader couldn’t figure it out.

And what he would do is he would insert himself into the process. So he may have said, “I want to hire these people, and I want to be the one who makes the final decision, or this is what I want us to do to fix that particular thing.” He would literally put himself into that person’s role who reported to him, head of sales, head of marketing, whatever it may be, and just did their job for them, because, again, that pressure hit.

I have had other leaders who have taken what I’ve said and done the opposite, where one of my favorite sayings, which I already said, is, “Your job as a leader of team or teams of teams is to fire yourself from the day-to-day as much as possible, because your job eventually is to look out to the future of the business, or the team, not down into running it.”

And one of the folks that I worked with took that to heart and just sort of stepped away from his team, and they felt abandoned because he hadn’t set up the structure for them to be independent. He didn’t give them the guidelines and the guardrails that I mentioned earlier. He didn’t give them the direction. And they were very much struggling and were unhappy with his process.

So we had to work together and have him sort of step in and say, “Okay, you know, where are they disappointed? What are they looking for?” And he started to step back in and started to put the scaffolding in place so he could step back a little bit more than he did before. So those are a couple of examples that I’ve seen directly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you have made a point that, when you’re delegating, it’s not just about delegating tasks, but delegating authority. Can you share the distinction and some examples?

Bill Flynn
Yeah, so this happens a lot, and I bet your listeners have either, unfortunately, did it inadvertently or had it done to them is, you know, you’re delegated a particular thing, and then you go ahead and act on it, do your best, and then the leader comes in and either undermines you completely, and just says, “You know, we’re doing it this way. We’re not doing that way. I didn’t really like that.”

Or, you know, challenges you in front of the group in such a way that your authority to that particular delegation was minimized, if not eliminated. Another example that I like to give is, let’s say you’re given the ability to run a meeting, right?

So the leader says, “Hey, I want you to run today’s meeting.” And you finished the meeting, and it went okay. And the leader, as they’re leaving the room, says, let’s say I was the one leading the meeting and you were my boss, Pete.

As you’re leaving, you say, “Hey, Bill, can you follow me back to my office as I have some feedback I want to give you on this meeting?” And then I’m following you back to the office, and as I’m walking behind you, I’m catastrophizing. And I’m thinking, one, you know, “What happened? Am I in trouble? What is everyone else who was left behind in the room thinking about me? Where is my status within the organization because you just sort of threw this out there?”

So by the time we get to your office, and you sit behind your desk, which is a status symbol, and a protection of you, right, because you’re physically behind something, and I’m sitting in a chair, completely exposed, so my lizard brain is on fire, and my heart is beating.

I’m probably sweating a little bit. Maybe my vision has narrowed. And no matter what comes out of your mouth next, I’m probably not going to remember it because my brain is already saying, “Run like hell. Get out of the room. This is an existential event.”

Because our brain isn’t very good at distinguishing between a social threat and a physical threat, so all the parts of our brain light up are the same. So what you could’ve done differently to, hopefully, get the same outcome was you could’ve waited till everyone left, sat down next to me, and said, “Hey, Bill, how do you think that meeting went?”

And if I’m not delusional, I’m going to say, “You know, I think part of it went pretty well, and some of it, some of the parts I was a little comfortable with.” And you say, “You know what? I agree. Let’s do this. Put some time on my calendar this week, and I want you and I to get together.”

“And I want you to bring two or three things that you thought went really well in the meeting that we can maybe brainstorm and even improve and make them better. And I want you to bring one or two things that you didn’t think went very well, and I’ll do the same thing, and we’re going to work together every week until you and I agree that this is the best possible version of this meeting.”

Both were trying to get the same outcome, but the way it was done was a difference of authority, if you will.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Yeah. It was like we’re collaborative team partners achieving an outcome together as opposed to, “I’m the boss and you got to shape up.”

Bill Flynn
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, any other tweaks or pro tips you recommend, like shifts that make a world of difference?

Bill Flynn
So from what I can understand, most of the listeners that you have are, they may or may not be running teams. They’re probably an individual contributor. There’s probably not CEOs at all.

Pete Mockaitis
There might be, like, 40 of them out there. Howdy CEOs, we appreciate you.

Bill Flynn
What you want to do is the best way to make yourself promotable in most organizations is thinking about how you can be the best possible teammate to the group, right?

What value do you bring to the organization and to the team? And then how does that fit with all the other folks on the team? And how do you make sure you work together and make sure that you understand that they’re all bringing their own perspective, they’re bringing their own experience, and that will make your contribution even better?

Unless, of course, the person that hired everyone hired exactly the same person, just five of them, then that’s difficult. But most don’t. We’re at least going to bring our different experience to it. When you become a better teammate, you’re seen differently by people on your team and by others.

And if that’s what you want, if you’d like to run a team, etc., you can. This is exactly how I acted. I eventually became the general manager of a division of a company. I’ve not been a CEO myself. And I was one of those unusual people. I was usually the number one and number two sales rep in most of the organizations I was at.

And, usually, the mistake is to promote that person and they run the team. In my case, I guess I was a little bit different because I came at it differently. And I always thought about myself not as the best salesperson, but one of the other salespeople here. And I still can learn from everyone else, right?

There are so many steps in a sales process from awareness and interest generation, qualification, needs analysis, closing, negotiation. There are all sorts of skills that, you know, I could get better at. And I acted that way. So when I was promoted, it was not a surprise.

And it was not something that most people had an issue with as well, because they saw me that way as I developed myself through that particular organization and my career. That would be something that I would definitely tell the 33-year-old on average individual contributors.

That if you’re looking to do that, whether you’re looking to lead a team or not, but just be recognized as someone who’s valuable. To me, that would be something I would highly recommend that you think about is, “Am I being the best possible teammate today? Am I working hard not only to be a great individual contributor, but making my other teammates look great as well?”

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s so essential to proactively prompt yourself, interrupt yourself, get that in the groove, because, otherwise, it’s so easy to just get sucked into the endless to-do list and hustling to achieve the thing.

I found that it really does take a moment of stopping, pausing, considering. It’s like, “Oh, you know what? Hmm, this person over there, that just happened for them. And so they’re probably feeling this or needing that. And so, well, hey, I can offer something there.”

I just recently had an experience. It’s like, “Oh, man, someone got some bad news. Oh, I should probably give them a call. They might like that.” And then I heard from a third party, it’s like that meant the world to them. It totally picked them up.

And it’d be very easy to say, “Oh, shucks, I’m behind. I got to hustle up and get out the door.” But, yeah, I think that’s a great tip is to proactively ask yourself that question because, otherwise, it won’t bubble up and you’ll overlook many little opportunities that can make a big impact.

Bill Flynn
Exactly. And I think what you’re saying is the word little is important. You know, if you did this, it probably took 30 seconds to a minute to just say, “Hey, you know, I was thinking about you. I heard about this, and I can’t imagine how you’re feeling. I’m here if you want to chat, whatever it might be.”

And most of the time they’re not going to take you up on it, but they’re going to remember that you did that. And if you just do that, you will be putting credits in the bank, and then there will be a time where you’ll need something.

And if you do that well enough, my suspicion is you won’t even need to ask someone. They’ll just do it, because they’re going to say, “You know what?” Just like in the military, they say, “Why would you do that? Why would you put your life on the line for this other person?”

And the answer is always, “Because he or she would do it for me.” And if you can have that sort of esprit de corps in an organization, the velocity and the production and the satisfaction and fulfillment of that group of people will be off the charts.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Bill, tell me, any final top tips you want to make sure to put out there before we hear about your favorite things?

Bill Flynn
When you hear that little voice in your head, especially, again, if you’re highly competent, you’re probably the top person in the group for certain things, if you find yourself saying to yourself, “It’s faster if I just do it myself,” that is a bit of a yellow, if not a red flag, that will probably work against you eventually. In the short term, it will not.

And this is the insidious nature of it, right? You will be celebrated. You will get an endorphin rush, a dopamine rush. It’ll feel great. And what also is interesting is if you start to do it the other way, because what you’re doing feels, it’s not only self-rewarding and egocentric, but it also feels like caring, so it’s hard to sort of walk away from that.

But if you hear those words, right, “Faster if I just do it.” That should be something that ticks in your brain and says, “You know, maybe I’m trying to be the hero a little bit too much here,” and stop yourself, and say, “Okay, am I the person who absolutely has to do this?”

First is, “Am I actually the right person to do this? Do I have the expertise, skills, knowledge, abilities, etc.?” And if you’re not and you’re just trying to sort of look better than someone else, then that’s a whole other problem.

But if you are, you know, it’s also you want to say many hands make a lighter load, or something like that, right? It has other benefits as well. So that would be my sort of last tip that I would say, if that little voice in your head says that. Listen to it and think of an alternative.

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

Bill Flynn
This is probably for the future version of the people who are listening to your podcast. I have come to believe very strongly that great leaders create organizations that don’t need great leaders.

Your job is to create a situation when you’re no longer in that position, that when you leave, either to be moved up in the organization or out of the organization, or wherever else, that the person that takes over from you, there is little or no disruption from when you leave to when they take over.

So if you can create that environment, then I think that’s what we should applaud as a great leader, as opposed to, again, the hero that came in and saved the thing. And I think a really good example which would have surprised me, is Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, right?

When Tim Cook took over, the world said, “Oh, my God, Apple is going to fall apart.” It did not. It grew at a record pace outside of it. And, again, Tim Cook, completely different kind of leader than Steve Jobs, but to his credit, Steve Jobs set up that environment.

I think, in an interview once, he said, he was asked what his greatest accomplishment was. And he didn’t say a product. And this is a product guy, right? He loved products. He loved making things. He said, “Apple University.”

He said, “I created an environment that will build great Apple folks. And whether they’re here or somewhere else, we’re teaching them all the things that we know.” He said, “That will be my greatest legacy.” And even though it’s sort of behind the scenes, I think he’s right. And Tim Cook is a good example, and we’ll see how this next leader does as well.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Bill Flynn
So the research that I cite often is the stuff that Marcus Buckingham did, and I think he talked to, I think, it was a thousand different people in 19 different countries. And he asked them, “How many of you are on a team?” And it was 80 something percent.

And then he said, “How many of you are on more than one team?” And 60 some odd percent of those people said they were on more than one team. And then, “How many are you are on more than that?” And there was another 50% or so.

So the research shows that teams are the most important human component of any organization, of almost any organization. And being a great teammate and running a great team is probably the most important thing.

And he’s not the only one. Amy Edmondson has done similar research. There have been some other folks who’ve done similar research as well, that teams are really the thing that drive most success of companies, etc.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Bill Flynn
“Your job is not to run the company. It is to create the future of the company.”

And, again, back to neuroscience, we cannot focus on two things at the same time. We context-switch. And I said, “If you’re indispensable, if you have a long line out your door, you’re not going to be able to look out and have time to do that.”

“So your job as you move up in the company and, especially to running teams, always be thinking, ‘How can I be doing less? How can I fire myself from the day-to-day so I can spend more time creating the future either of the organization or the department or the division or the team?’”

So you’re making sure that you’re spending the best part of your time is making the whole better than just the individual.

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

Bill Flynn
My website is probably the best place to go. My books are on there. You can download my latest book for free, and The Hero Trap will also be on there if you want to pre-order it. There’s all sorts of other resources and things I have on there. And that’s called www.CatalystGrowthAdvisors.com.

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

Bill Flynn
Yeah. Fight the feeling to become indispensable. So keep that in the back of your mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Bill, thank you.

Bill Flynn
Thank you, Pete. Appreciate it.

Oct 26

1192: How to Tackle Difficult Conversations to Build Stronger Relationships with Kerry Siggins

By Podcasts No Comments

Kerry Siggins shares her practical framework for navigating conflict, managing emotions, and finding common ground.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why avoiding conversations often does more harm than good
  2. The SHARES model for effective feedback
  3. The hidden assumption harming your conversation

About Kerry

Kerry Siggins is a sought-after international speaker and the author of The Ownership Mindset: A Handbook for Transforming Your Life and Leadership. Her work focuses on leadership, communication, accountability, employee ownership, and building high trust cultures.

Siggins also brings her work directly into organizations through The Talk With Trust Leadership Experience, an immersive and interactive leadership experience designed to help teams practice courageous conversations and build stronger communication habits in real time.

Whether speaking to executive teams, companies, conferences, or leadership groups, Siggins combines operational credibility, emotional intelligence, and practical leadership insight to help organizations create cultures where people feel empowered to communicate openly, take ownership, and grow together.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Kerry, welcome!

Kerry Siggins
Thank you, Pete. I’m so glad to be here. I can’t wait for this interview.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy, me, too. Well, tell us, Kerry, what is something fascinating and counterintuitive you’ve discovered about us humans and tricky conversations?

Kerry Siggins
Tricky conversations, yes. Well, I wrote a whole book on this because I hate having hard conversations. I’m a recovering people-pleaser, and I found myself avoiding difficult conversations because I was always worried about the consequence of having that conversation, “I’m going to make this person mad at me,” “They’re not going to like me,” “I’m going to damage the relationship.”

And what I’ve learned is that when you don’t have that conversation, you’re actually avoiding consequences that are far worse. And if you want to build trust with people, you need to have those conversations. You need to trust enough in yourself and in that relationship to be able to lean into it.

And if you don’t, truth withheld, usually makes things worse in the end. So that is what I’ve learned is really digging into, “What consequences am I avoiding? And what consequences are there going to be when I don’t have this conversation?” And that helps give me the courage to go say what needs to be said.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Far worse consequences, could you give us an example story here?

Kerry Siggins
Yes. so I just had something recently happen of an employee who was a great cultural fit, came into a role, she was struggling for a bit, I really wanted it to work out. I was trying to help her and I would see these little improvements. And so I was like, “Oh, I think we’re getting there. I think we’re getting there.”

And what I didn’t have was a bigger conversation around, “If these things don’t get fixed, if I don’t see market improvement, then there’s going to be bare consequences. Like, maybe this isn’t the right fit for you.” But I kept just hoping that she would get it, hoping things would turn around.

And then, ultimately, when they didn’t, I had to have a different conversation. And that was, “I don’t think this is the right fit, this role is the right fit for you.” And she was so upset with me because she was like, “Why didn’t you just tell me that from the beginning? I didn’t realize that my job was on the line.”

And I realized that I was avoiding having that conversation because I believed in her, I wanted her to succeed, I didn’t want to demoralize her. And if it didn’t work out, then I was going to have to take something on. I was probably going to have to take her direct reports.

And so I was avoiding these consequences, couching it under, “I’m just giving her more time. I’m just giving her a shot.” And she felt really blindsided when I actually told her, “Hey, this isn’t working,” because I didn’t have that direct of a conversation. And trust broke down.

And so that is an example of something that we all do as leaders in trying to help people who are struggling, but not just coming right out and saying, you know, “There are serious consequences if this doesn’t…if we don’t see a turnaround.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, I think that’s a really good nuanced distinction piece there in that you shared a portion of the key messages that needed to be shared with regard to, “This is what’s not working and needs to be adjusted,” but not the entirety of the messaging, which was, “And, in fact, this is so important if you don’t fix it, you’ll have to leave.” So that is the harder part to say.

Kerry Siggins
It is, and I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to say that. And then, ultimately, that’s what happened. And then that person was blindsided and it completely breaks down trust because, like, “We’ve been having these conversations for six months now. Why didn’t I know it was so serious?” And I had to say, “You’re right. And I’m sorry.”

And it made me feel like a really crappy leader because I know better than that. But it was one of those things that just snowballs. And the next thing you know, you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I haven’t been having the conversation that really needs to be had. And now I’m going to blindside this person. Why didn’t I just have that conversation the first time?”

It would be so much easier if the expectations were clear and the consequences were clear, then somebody has a choice, right? At this point, though, I took away that choice of, “Can I really step up into the role?” because I wasn’t having the full conversation.

So, truth, when you come right out and you say it and you just put it on the line, it gives people options, it gives people choices. It doesn’t mean that it’s always going to work out, but truth delayed, it usually is hurtful.

It usually damages relationships because that person feels like, “Why didn’t I know this? I could have done something about it. I could have done something differently if I would have known.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so great perspective there in terms of you are avoiding something in the short term, but it could be far worse in the long term. Alrighty. Well, tell us then, what are the best practices for finding the courage, for finding the words to go ahead and go in there in conversation?

Kerry Siggins
So I think the key is preparation. And it doesn’t have to be this long preparation, but, oftentimes, we go into conversations that are difficult and we haven’t really thought through, “What am I trying to get out of this? How do I make sure that I have accurate information? How do I get the other person’s perspective? How do I make sure that there’s a path forward so that it’s clear what expectations are going forward? And how do I stay grounded in this conversation?”

We just go in and we wing it. Or, maybe we spend a few minutes, like, writing down what we’re going to say. But if you have a process to prepare for these conversations, it makes all the difference in the world.

And that’s why I wrote my book, Talk with Trust, is that I have this model that I was just using intuitively. And then I had someone tell me, “You’re actually really good at having these difficult conversations and, like, making people feel good when they walk out of your office. How do you do it?”

And so I started to think about it and I was like, “Oh, I have a process that I do,” and that’s what is in my book Talk with Trust, which is the SHARES model. So the secret is going in with preparation and always seeking to understand, always going, “What is your perspective on this? What is going on?”

Help people stay in dialogue, and it’s so much more productive than you just coming in hot, giving the feedback, and then letting the person go. They don’t feel seen, they don’t feel heard, they don’t feel safe. And that’s our job as leaders is to be able to have the difficult conversations, but do it in a way that builds relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so the SHARES model, let’s hear it.

Kerry Siggins
So the first S is specify your ideal outcome. So that is, “What do you want from this conversation? What behavior change? What outcome do you want? What do you want the relationship to look like?” Know that going in because it helps keep you grounded, especially if things do get emotional.

The H is have your facts and feelings ready. You need to be able to have observable facts. People want that, “Give me an example.” You need to be able to state that, and you don’t want it to be your opinion, right?

You can say, “You were late for a meeting,” that is an observable fact. “You were late to this meeting because you don’t care about the team,” that is your opinion. And then the feelings piece of it is really important because they need to understand the impact.

So, “You’re late for this meeting, and the impact of the team is that we’re waiting for you, and it’s really frustrating for people. And then we have to go back and repeat what we had just talked about. That’s not working for the team.” So you have the observable fact and the impact. So people really understand what’s going on when you’re trying to give that feedback.

The A is my favorite, it’s articulate your experience. So we’re taught to use I statements, “I feel,” “I think,” as a way of owning your perspective. But, usually, the statement that comes after “I feel” still is a judgment, “So, Pete, I feel that you were disrespectful.”

And it’s like, “Whoa! Wait,” you know? So that sets people back. It creates defensiveness in people. But when you articulate your experience, and you say, “Hey, Pete, in this situation, when you said X, Y, Z, I experienced that as disrespect. And a story I told myself is that you don’t respect me. But I want to own that that’s my interpretation. Can we talk about this?”

Now you’re owning that it is the story that you told yourself, and you open it up for the next one, which is reflect with questions and dialogue, “Okay, is the story that I’m telling myself true? Is that what you intended? What was going on?”

When you have questions, it allows the other person to be in dialogue, where you could say, “Oh, Kerry, no, that wasn’t what I meant at all. I’m really sorry. I have X, Y, Z going on in my life and I was distracted.” Or, you say, “Yeah, Kerry, actually, I do respect you, but I am struggling with you right now because X, Y, Z happened. “

And now, all of a sudden, you’re in dialogue and you’re really understanding what’s happening. And that is such an important piece of creating psychological safety that the other person gets to be able to share their own experience, too.

The E is endorse a path forward, which is make sure that you have an out, like what success looks like, “What do you want from this?” So you have your outcome, “I need this behavior changed. Now, how do we get there?”

When you come and give someone feedback, especially an employee, and you don’t have a path forward and you just expect them to go do it, a lot of times you’re going to be disappointed.

And a lot of times when you’re giving somebody feedback, you’re giving that feedback because they’re struggling and they probably need help designing a path forward, getting to that successful outcome. So our job as leaders isn’t just to give them the feedback, but it’s also to be able to have them, help them see a path forward, a way forward.

And then the final S is stay emotionally grounded. And this is the thread that goes through all of these things because, oftentimes, when we’re giving feedback, we can feel emotional, we can feel upset about something, and then we might show up emotionally charged, which makes a person defensive.

Or, we may be grounded, but the other person gets emotional. And, oftentimes, we want to either fix it or we get defensive ourselves, we meet them where they’re at. And our job as leaders is to stay grounded. And so that’s the final S in the SHARES model.

So this is a whole process that you can walk yourself through to be able to have a difficult conversation in a way that builds trust rather than just winging it and hoping for the best.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Lovely. And how do you stay emotionally grounded if you are frustrated, annoyed, enraged during the course of the conversation? How do you stay grounded?

Kerry Siggins
So the biggest thing that I do is take a deep breath. When you take a deep breath, you calm yourself and it calms the other person, too. And as leaders, we have to hold ourselves accountable to managing our emotions. But it’s not always easy to do.

So if I am in a meeting with somebody and it gets heated, I put my feet on the ground and I just lean forward like this and I just take a deep breath. So I’m just going to pause for a minute, right? There’s power in the pause.

And I remind myself, “What is the outcome that I want? The outcome is that I want this relationship to be better. And so what do I need to do right now in this moment?” And taking that breath or two deep breaths is enough to help you reground yourself in that moment.

If you can’t, if you feel yourself getting angry and you’re going to say something that you are going to regret, I, 100%, think it’s okay to say, “You know what? I need time to process this conversation. I really don’t want to. I want to be thoughtful in what I want to say. And so can we circle back in an hour or back tomorrow?”

I did this when I got some of the toughest feedback I’ve ever received in my life. Several years ago, my VP of operations, who was my right hand man, told me that I was erratic and hard to work for. And my initial reaction was, “Get out of my office. If you don’t want to be here, you don’t have to be here. You can go.”

But I didn’t want to react that way. I wanted to understand what he was saying, but I was emotionally charged in that moment. And so I said to him, “Well, that was a lot. and that really stung. And I want to be able to have a conversation about this, but I can’t do that right now. I need to go process what you just said. Let’s circle back tomorrow.”

And if I would have had my initial reaction, it would have been really bad. By giving myself, you know, 18 hours to calm down, to process, to be thoughtful in the conversation that I wanted to have with him, the next day, it changed the path forward.

So there’s really important power in the pause and just saying, “Hey, I need a minute.” That’s okay. It’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So you’re pausing and you’re breathing. Understood. With regard to the endorse a path forward, It’s funny, I really like the use of the word endorse, and not just because it makes your acronym work, but because it’s not the same as dictating, like, “And this is what you need to do, pal.”

Kerry Siggins
Exactly. Yeah, it encourages a shared path forward, and I think that that’s really important.

Pete Mockaitis
And so could you, perhaps, give us some examples of how a full conversation cycle might unfold here?

Kerry Siggins
Sure. So I’ll give you an example why this is so important and why I put this into the model. I’ll give you a story of me in my 20s. So I had been in a sales role in my early 20s, really successful, left that company, went to another one, similar role, and, all of a sudden, I was struggling.

I wasn’t getting in front of decision-makers. I wasn’t closing deals. Everything that I had done in the previous company wasn’t working. And my boss called me into his office and he said, “You know, Kerry, we’re not seeing the sales numbers. And looking through your call logs in Salesforce, you’re not getting in front of the right people. You’re not getting in front of the decision-makers.”

And in my head, I was like, “Yeah, I know. Duh!” But I was like, “Yes, I get that.” He’s like, “So I need you to put together a plan and come back to me by the end of the week of how you’re going to change your approach,” and excused me from his office.

And I was so demoralized because I knew I wasn’t successful. I knew what was working in the past wasn’t working now, but I needed help. But there was no conversation about, “Hey, let’s brainstorm. Why don’t you role-play with me? I’ll be the client, you be you, and let’s walk through how you’re approaching this. Let me go on some calls with you to see.”

There was no collaboration or curiosity around how we do this better. And I left eventually. I left the company. And if he would have said, “Hey, I know you’re struggling. I want to help you. You are responsible for you,” because that’s what he was doing, he was creating accountability.

“But let’s do this. Let’s talk about how you can be more successful. Let’s get you some coaching. I’m going to go on a ride with you. You know, I would like to see a list of decision-makers. Let’s brainstorm this together,” I would have walked out going like, “Okay, I have a plan now that I can go execute to,” and it would have changed the entire experience.

So I think it’s really important to say, “This is what success looks like. Now let’s come up with a plan to help you get there,” and not just put it all onto the employee. They’re struggling for a reason.

So brainstorm with them, “What is it that you need? What are you trying that isn’t working? What roadblocks do you have? Do you not have clear expectations?” Those types of questions can help you put together a plan that when that employee leaves your office, they know what they need to go do. And then it’s up to them to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s a real nice illustration of, perhaps, extremes. One could be, quite simply, “Do X, Y, and Z, and that’s it. You know, here’s the answer. I dictate, I direct. And I pontificate, and that’s that.”

And then there’s the other extreme, which we saw you demonstrate from that manager, it’s like, “Give me a plan.” It’s like, “Okay, it’s all on you to generate the thing.” And, in a way, that’s nice. You’re not being micromanaged, but it’s not so nice, it’s like, “Do you care? Are you in this with me? Are we a team?”

So, yeah, I like that a lot in terms of being collaborative and helpful but also saying, like, “Yes, that thing you said, this is the one that I endorse,” because it’s quite possible that you could come back with a plan that was no good.

Well, so you said at the very end of the story, you left the organization. But maybe before that, tell us what happened when you came back with your plan?

Kerry Siggins
I came back with my plan, and he told me, “I think that this is okay. You need to do these three other things.” And so he dictated it, but I was actually grateful for it. And, at that point, though, I was already planning to leave the company.

And so I only gave it, like, I didn’t put very much effort into it because, at that point, I was like, “This isn’t going to work.” And so I think I quit, like, two weeks, two or three weeks later, like, “Okay, this isn’t working.”

So, by that point, I was pretty frustrated and I could see the writing on the wall. I was either going to quit or they were going to fire me, and I was like, “Okay, I’m just going to quit.”

So he gave me some feedback on it and then gave me, like, three additional things to add to the plan. But neither one of us were very invested in it at that point. So it didn’t really matter.

And it’s really interesting that that part of the story doesn’t stick in my head, like, how frustrated I was when I walked out of his office with no support. Yeah, good question. I got to think about that, like, “What did I do?”

Pete Mockaitis
I think we’re considering these things and we avoid the discomfort, the unpleasantness, there’s fear, all kinds of uncomfortable, you know, going maybe the back of the neck and your belly or wherever you feel it.

I’m curious, how much of our fear or perception of risk about whatever terrible consequences we imagine by going into these conversations, how much of that is real versus just entirely just a goblin of our imagination?

Kerry Siggins
I mean, it depends is the answer. You know, the better that you know the person, I think the better read you can have on the situation. But I found that almost every conversation that I had going in with a perception of how it was going to turn out, something was inaccurate about it, because you just don’t know, right?

We’re so sure that we know how things are going to go, that what people are going to say, how someone is going to react, and I always find myself surprised at what I learn in those conversations.

So, sometimes, I’m like, “This conversation is going to go really poorly.” And sometimes that is true. It does go really poorly because I know that person and they don’t like feedback and they’re going to get defensive and I have to give them their response.

But it’s almost not always as bad as I thought it was going to be. Sometimes, it was worse than what I thought it was going to be. But because I try to stay in dialogue and create that curiosity around, you know, “What are your experience? What do you feel? What happened?” I always gain some type of insight.

So I’ll give you an example. I had to have a conversation with an employee. She didn’t report to me, but something happened and it involved me. And so I debated on giving her feedback, “Should I give it to her or should her boss give it to her?’ And I was like, “You know what? I’m going to give it to her because I’m the one who is part of this story.”

And I, honestly, thought like, “I’m going to fire her. She’s probably going to get emotional. And like what happened was a breach of confidentiality. And so I’m probably going to let her go, but I’m going to ask, I’m going to seek to understand. I’m going to use my SHARES model.”

And so I did. I had the conversation and she immediately owned it. And I was expecting her to deny, to try to figure out how to deflect, and she just came in and she owned it, which changed how I felt about it.

People make mistakes all the time, and when you own it, for me at least, I’m so much more willing to be forgiving and to help that person through it. And so she owned it. And so I was like, “Okay, I don’t think I’m going to fire her. But this is all in my head. And I could see that she was just really scared.”

And I was like, “Why don’t you just tell me what was going on with you at that time? I’m trying to understand why you made the decision that you made.” And she told me this, like, really personal story about something that was going on in her life.

And I realized that she made a huge mistake, she didn’t handle it well, and she needed help. So the conversation went like I thought it was going to, in fact, that she did get emotional.

It didn’t go the way that I thought I was going to fire her because she did own it. I didn’t expect her to own it. And I learned something really important about her that helped me help her get some help. And at the end of the conversation, she gave me a big hug and she was like, “Thank you so much for not firing me, and thank you so much for listening to me.”

And six months later, she’s thriving. We were able to support her with this personal thing that was going on. And so that surprises me, right? And so part of my expectations were accurate and part of them weren’t. And because of the way I handled it, I now have a personal, a better relationship with her that I wasn’t expecting to have.

Those kinds of things happen all the time in these conversations, but we have to seek to understand. We’ve got to make sure that we just don’t come in hot, say what we need to say, and do not give that other person a chance to be able to talk through it with you because there’s always going to be something that you learn.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s great advice when you’re on the receiving end of these conversations as well, that owning it is the right answer.

Kerry Siggins
Yes. Always.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, you were expecting, “Okay, well, she’s going to get defensive, then I’m going to fire her. That’s how this is going to go.” So, one, you were surprised that that did not happen. And I suppose, I was also recently talking to someone who was in a position of, you know, thinking, “Oh, I might need to fire someone shortly.”

And I said, “Well, you know what, I’m going to raise the concerns with her and we’ll you know see what happens.” And I was so struck by how, and maybe I’m just, like, spoiled because I’ve had over a thousand of these conversations with experts on workplace matters, such that he had some thoughts about what he noticed and what he would like to see differently.

And she just, basically, you know, argued that he was wrong, that he was mistaken in his perception. And I was just like, “Oh, that’s just the wrong answer.” It’s like, “Even if you believe it,” I was like, “It’s so the wrong answer. I think ChatGPT or Claude could have told you what to say. And it, off the shelf, no knowledge of deep context could tell you the right words or words that would be far better than those words.”

So there’s that. You’ll be surprised. And, yeah, owning it just always goes better.

Kerry Siggins
Always. Always. Always. Always. The cover-up is always worse than the crime. Nobody wants to work with a victim. Nobody wants to work with somebody who is defecting or blaming. And we do it because we’re protecting ourselves, right?

When we deny, blame, say that, you know, argue with somebody about why they’re wrong, it’s because they’re brushing up against what we believe about ourselves and we feel the need to defend who we are.

But my philosophy is that there’s always something to own in every piece of feedback that you ever receive, even if it’s just perception management. So, like, this woman didn’t, you know, didn’t agree, but it’s the other person’s perspective.

So it’s their perception. So maybe I should be curious about why they have this perception so that I can go, “Huh, okay. Is this just an image management issue, a perception management issue? Or is there actually something that I should dig deeper?”

And human nature is that we want to be right. And that’s why we argue, “I want to be right. I would much rather be accurate.” And so when I feel the need to protect my point of view, I pause and say, “Do I want to be right or do I want to be accurate? I want to be accurate.”

So I should stop and listen and ask more questions and make sure that the way that I’m seeing this is actually correct, because if it’s not, I might make a decision or I might continue to do something. And based on this idea of, like, “I’m right” versus “I’m accurate.” So it’s a great tool to just pause when you feel yourself getting defensive because it’s usually we want to be right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Kerry, tell us, in your experience, what are some top do’s and don’ts that you’ve seen over and over again that make all the difference?

Kerry Siggins
So the number one do is prepare. Always prepare, even if it’s five minutes, you can just use the SHARES model, just quickly jot down, “What outcome? Here’s the facts. Here’s my feelings. Here’s the five questions I’m going to ask. Here’s the path forward that I would like to see.” Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. Like, you preparing is so important.

The next do is make sure that you are grounded. If you are upset, it’s not the time to have the conversation. Don’t go into a conversation when you’re already angry. It is probably not going to go well because you are not in control of your emotions.

So pause. Take a day, take a night, take a shower, go for a walk. Whatever you need to do to calm your nervous system down to prepare to have that conversation, you’ve got to make sure you’re grounded.

My first don’t is don’t argue with the person. That almost never is going to get you anywhere. It doesn’t get you anywhere with your spouse. It doesn’t get you anywhere with your employees. It doesn’t get you anywhere with your boss.

And so if you feel the need to argue, it’s really good to just say, “I’ve got to pause. I feel like I need to defend myself here and I’m falling out of curiosity. And so I just need to ground myself.”

But whenever we start to go into our respective corners, that is when conversations fall apart and that is when trust falls apart. So when you feel yourself going into that corner because you want to argue a point, that’s a really good time to pause and just stop.

And then the other don’t that I would have is don’t assume that you are accurate. We humans think we have it all down, and we don’t. So seek to understand. Be curious. Don’t assume that your perception of what’s going on is accurate.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that’s a tremendous lesson for all humans at all times. Yeah, don’t assume that your perceptions are accurate, I think, is a tremendous mantra, lesson, to hold firm. And I heard of that term recently, the cognitive bias is called naive realism, the belief that you see the world objectively, and anyone who disagree with you must be uninformed, irrational, or biased, coined by psychologist Lee Ross.

And I think that’s so perfect. It’s, like, I think that’s almost just like the air we breathe, the water we drink. It’s, like, “Well, yeah,” like you don’t even stop to question that you might be totally off base with your perception. So I love that.

Kerry Siggins
Yeah, we do. Just because you think it, doesn’t make it true. Well, I mean, let’s face it, like we are getting hit  with something like 11 million bits of information per second, and the brain can process something like 50. Your brain is filtering out the vast majority of input that it’s receiving in a given moment.

And so, of course, your perception of reality is not the same as the person next to you. They are processing different information. Those 50 bits can be completely different than your 50 bits.

And so it just comes down to science. Like, your version of reality is simply your version, and it doesn’t mean that it’s accurate, and it doesn’t mean that it’s the next person’s. In fact, it’s not.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s dead on. And so when you talk about don’t argue, the notion of spouse, partner, sort of peers, or, you know, you’re the junior to manager, I totally get how not arguing there is great.

Now let’s say, though, you are the boss and, you know, you say, “Hey, I observed dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah,” and then, yeah, I don’t know, the person, more or less, says, “Uh-uh.”

And so it’s funny, like, when emotionally, it’s like you’re hooked. It’s like, “Excuse me? Like, this is night and day. I observed this thing. How can you say, you know, the sky is not blue?”

You know, it feels very alerting when someone just, like, straight-up contradicts you, and maybe it just seems like a total unambiguous, unassailable, like fact, you know, rooted in truth and data, how do you not argue when someone just denies what you sure think is true?

Kerry Siggins
Yeah, that’s a really tough one. So here’s the difference. There’s a difference between arguing and debating. And arguing has this sense of emotion in it. And when you argue, people go to their corners and then they get more entrenched in, “No, I’m right,” “No, I’m right.”

And that does not mean, though, that you don’t have a healthy debate. So what I do when somebody says something to me that I believe is simply just not accurate, not true, does not in align with what I perceive it to be, I ask questions, “Okay, you know, that is absolutely not how I see it, but I want to understand from you. Like, where did you come up with that? Help me understand.”

That is such a powerful way to reframe it, “Help me understand,” because then, the person then is going to have to defend their point of view. And then it’s so much easier to say, “Okay, what you just said there, like that’s where I see it differently. Let’s talk about that.” So you can still have a conversation and you can still debate, but when you argue, that is when emotions rise and that’s when people go into their corners.

So when somebody comes back at me as the boss and says, “You know, I disagree with you,” I’m not going to argue with it. I approach it with curiosity, “Okay, tell me why. Give me an example. Show me how. Give me your thought process there.”

And, oftentimes, I can get them to my side because we just talk through it. And sometimes, I’m like, “Oh, you know what? I can see that point of view. I still might not agree with it, but I can accept that point of view.” Curiosity is the antidote to defensiveness, to arguing, to going into your corners.

So that’s how I approach it, is be curious. Because we as leaders, we don’t want to shut people down, we don’t want to make people feel stupid, even when somebody says something stupid, which happens all the time.

Like, you don’t want to make that person feel that way, right? They’re learning, they’re developing, they’re growing, they have their different worldviews. So ask questions and have a dialogue about it. It’s okay to debate. It’s okay to say, “I disagree with you,” but going back and forth and arguing, it’s going to diminish trust and it doesn’t feel good for anybody.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good deal. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Kerry Siggins
I love Brene Brown and, “Clarity is kindness,” is my favorite quote because I have to remind myself, like the example that I gave you of the very first time when I was dancing along the fringes of feedback, the tactical part of feedback, instead of the whole consequence.

I always need to remind myself that clarity is confidence, or clarity is kindness. If I am not being clear in my expectations, in the way that I feel, the way that I think, then how can I expect somebody else to be able to live up to those expectations, meet those expectations, somehow understand me better?

So my favorite quote is, “Clarity is kindness” from Brene Brown.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Kerry Siggins
I think my favorite book, I use it all the time, is, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. It helps you define strategy so well. And I use it in all the boards I sit on with the CEOs, and I use it in my own company.

And so, as a CEO, you know, or as a leader, you need to define good strategy and have everybody aligned to it. And I think Good Strategy, Bad Strategy is the best.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Kerry Siggins
I mean, ChatGPT, hands down. My life has been changed by AI. Oh, my gosh, I am so much smarter because of the power of that kind of information and automation at my fingertips. It’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Kerry Siggins
Exercising. I love to exercise.

Pete Mockaitis
And a key nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Kerry Siggins
“Seek to understand,” that phrase is used here throughout my organization. And I said it probably 18 years ago when I started. I was like, “Well, I’m just going to seek to understand here.” And I think it is so powerful.

Before we go and spout our opinion, or get angry about something, if we just said, “No, I’m going to seek to understand,” it would change the dynamic of everything. So seek to understand.

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

Kerry Siggins
You can go to my website, KerrySiggins.com. Everything is there, my book, Talk with Trust; my first book, The Ownership Mindset, which is back here; my podcast, the Kerry Siggins podcast; and everything about speaking, advising, the company that I run, Stone Age, everything is there.

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

Kerry Siggins
Yeah, so I have this amazing Talk with Trust Leadership experience that I do. I can do it virtually and it is game-changing. The companies that I have worked with on it have changed the way that they have difficult conversations and how they lean into them and how they prepare for them.

And so if it’s something that you’re interested in learning more about, reach out to me because I think that there’s nothing more important than learning how to have difficult conversations. So much of the world’s problems come down to crappy communication, and not having difficult conversations well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Kerry, thank you.

Kerry Siggins
Thank you. It’s been so much fun, Pete.

Oct 22

1191: How to Regulate Your Emotions Masterfully with Dr. Marc Brackett

By Podcasts No Comments

Dr. Marc Brackett shares research-backed strategies to build your skill of self-regulation.

You’ll Learn

  1. The critical first step to masterful emotional regulation
  2. The biggest misconception we have about our emotions
  3. How an alter ego can help with self-regulation

About Marc

Marc Brackett, PhD, is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University. He is the author of the bestselling book Permission to Feel and more than two hundred scholarly articles, with his research featured in The New York Times, Good Morning America, Today, and the Huberman Lab podcast. A sought-after keynote speaker, he has headlined over seven hundred conferences and advises Fortune 500 companies on integrating emotional intelligence into workplace culture. 

Together with Pinterest cofounder Ben Silbermann, Marc launched the award-winning How We Feel app, a powerful tool helping millions of people improve their well-being. He hosts Dealing with Feeling, a YouTube web series and podcast that brings groundbreaking insights on emotion regulation to a global audience. He lives in Connecticut and New York City.

Resources Mentioned

Pete Mockaitis
Marc, welcome!

Marc Brackett
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’ve been excited to talk to you for a while. I discovered you because I was talking to AI, it’s like, “I want an app that just is very beautiful and easy to log in emotion, but in just a few seconds, but has a delightful interface and isn’t clunky.” And then it’s like, “Oh, you want How We Feel.”

Marc Brackett
Awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “Okay.” And so I tried it out, and I was like, “This is amazing.” And so then I asked AI, “Who was the mastermind behind this? He must be on my podcast.”

Marc Brackett
Well, I’m not the only mastermind, just so you know, but I appreciate that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so tell us the story about this app, why it’s useful. You teamed up with the Pinterest folks, because everyone needs to know about it. It’s free and it’s amazing.

Marc Brackett
I appreciate that. Well, I mean, the backstory is that I wrote a book before my most recent book that’s called Permission to Feel. And it’s about why emotions matter and how do we get more skillful about understanding our emotions and labeling them.

And I was very fortunate that the co-founder, and then CEO of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann, read the book and he and I got to be friends. And then we just started this collaboration where we co-created this app that, who knew it would have three million downloads and hundreds of thousands of users every day.

And we’re really proud of this collaboration because it was bringing the science of emotional intelligence to technology that’s focused on creativity and beauty. How better can it be for someone, either one of us, right, to have that kind of collaboration?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, and it’s so delightful in a world where, you know, folks are taking vengeance on Adobe by reverse-engineering their software to have just a delightful, beautiful, functional, helpful world, doing-good app available.

I do it with my kids as well. It’s like, you’ve got the four bubbles of, like, high energy pleasant, low energy pleasant, high energy unpleasant, low energy unpleasant. And they’re the right colors.

Marc Brackett
You’ve learned the theory.

Pete Mockaitis
And the colors make sense. Like, high energy pleasant is, what color would we guess? Yellow. And then, you know, low energy, unpleasant, it’s blue. I just love everything about it. So this app is fun, it’s beautiful, but tell us, science man, is it useful and why?

Marc Brackett
I haven’t been called science man in a long time, but I’ll take it. Well, it’s not just an idea. It is the collaboration on deep research on emotion. So what do we know about how we understand our feelings? Well, there are two basic dimensions to understanding our emotion system.

There is a pleasantness aspect of it, so, “Am I feeling very pleasant in this conversation with you? Or am I feeling unpleasant? Do I feel like approaching the conversation? Do I feel like avoiding the conversation? Do I feel safe and comfortable? Or do I feel uncomfortable?”

Let me ask you that. Where are you right now on that pleasantness dimension?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s very pleasant so far.

Marc Brackett
Same here. So we’re we’re in that kind of pleasantness space. And then, you know, for me, it’s, I’m on the East Coast right now. It’s around 3:15 p.m., recording time. I’ll be frank, I’ve had a long couple of weeks. I’m about to go to India tomorrow.

My energy is a little like I’m low energy, but I’m also like wired tired, if that makes any sense. But I would say I’m more on the depleted energy side. So I’m expecting you to keep me going. How about you? Where’s your energy?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, mine is high just because I’ve been anticipating and looking forward to this for a while, and so my dreams are coming true, as we speak.

Marc Brackett
Look at that.

Pete Mockaitis
No pressure, Marc.

Marc Brackett
There you go. I’m feeling, I’m like “science man,” and you’re like, “dreams coming true.” This is a good deal for me. So it looks like you’re more in the yellow and I’m more in the green, which is fine.

It’s just what I find is that when you ask someone the question, you know, I’m going to ask you, like, “How are you feeling?” most people they’re like, “Fine,” “Good,” “Okay,” “Meh.” Not helpful. Not helpful if you’re a parent, if you’re a partner.

But if I said I’m feeling content or tranquil, “Oh, you know, Marc is in a good place.” Or, if you say you’re feeling ecstatic or elated, I’m like, “Wow, like, this guy has got, you know, some really strong, pleasant emotions about this episode.”

But on the opposite end, if you were to say, “I’m feeling down,” or disappointed, or hopeless, my goodness, like that’s, I got to do something about that. Or, if you’re anxious or overwhelmed.

So the app is designed to take what’s called the circumplex model of emotion, which is, you know, a technical term for a theory, and translate it into emotion space so that people can understand their feelings better.

So we’ve got those four quadrants, as you mentioned. Then we got the words in those quadrants. And in the app, we have 144 emotions and their definitions. Secret, there’s a little search button. You can do about 500 more if you like.

Pete Mockaitis
Didn’t know it.

Marc Brackett
Yeah. It’s not that conspicuous. So we’ve got to make that more obvious. But, yeah, you can. If you don’t find the word that you like, you can search for a word and it’s probably going to be there.

But I think, most importantly, one of the things that I’ve always felt strongly about is that if technology doesn’t do anything different than what you could do with a poster, then don’t bother.

But what’s cool about the app is that you can tag your feelings for things like who you’re with, what are you doing, where you’re at. And that’s interesting because then you start realizing, “Oh, I’m in the yellow when I’m with these people. I’m in the blue when I’m with those people. I am in the green when I’m working here. I’m in the blue when I’m doing that.”

And, importantly, to get at a deeper understanding of why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling, the app has an AI function where it’ll ask you questions, “So you said you’re in the yellow, you’re feeling energized. Like, what are you doing right now?”

And it keeps track of that, personally, for you to help you, you know, and can probe you to ask you questions so that you can have a deeper understanding, especially, for example, if you’re feeling, let’s say, hopeless.

You know, just get some insights. And then just, for now, I’ll just say that leads to a bunch of emotion regulation strategies. So, “Do you think you need a breathing exercise right now? Do you think you need to take a break? Do you think you need to reframe or rethink your situation?”

And then you can track it over time to look for patterns. So it’s pretty cool.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it is cool. I’m a bonafide fan. And in terms of, like, the value of precisely labeling emotions, so, one, it’s better for us to connect and understand each other and where we’re coming from. But you’ve also got some research in the books, saying that labeling your emotions precisely also aids us in our ability to cope, to regulate, to modify.

Marc Brackett
Yeah, that’s true. You know, think about it. You said you have children?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Marc Brackett
All right, so let’s do a little role play. Sound good?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Marc Brackett
So you’re my daddy and ask me how I’m feeling.

Pete Mockaitis
“How are you feeling, little Marky?”

Marc Brackett
“I’m upset, Daddy. I hate everything.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, what are you upset about?”

Marc Brackett
“I just don’t know. I’m upset.” So let’s freeze. Do you want to keep going?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s a number of pathways I could go down.

Marc Brackett
Let’s go.

Pete Mockaitis
But I guess I was thinking, it’s, like, “Where do you feel the upset and how?”

Marc Brackett
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Pete Mockaitis
“I mean, is it in your eyes, like they want to cry? Is it in your stomach? Is it, like, ‘I’m sick’?”

Marc Brackett
“It’s in everything. Everything.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Okay. And how long have you been feeling this way?”

Marc Brackett
“I don’t know. Why are you asking so many questions?”

Pete Mockaitis
“I just want to understand you and where you’re coming from and what’s going on.”

Marc Brackett
“Okay. I don’t know.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Well, would you like to do something that might feel some other kind of way? Maybe have a fun adventure or food or what do you think?”

Marc Brackett
“I want ice cream.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we can pause it there. It’s, like, ice cream may or may not be the appropriate move, you know, based on any number of factors, but I hear you. Like, we got a child who’s not saying much.

Marc Brackett
It’s tough. And I think, you know, for the parents who are listening to this, my guess is that you’re like saying, “Oh, my gosh, this is my life. This is why it’s like this endless cycle of craziness.”

And so, like, firstly, the word upset just has no meaning. Is the upset disappointment? Is it frustration? Is it anxiety? Is it sadness? Because we want to get granular. That’s the point of the work.

And what we really want to do is understand the why behind the feeling, which I was not giving you, because you weren’t really going there yet either. So imagine I say I’m upset, and then I’d say, you know, “I know that upset is kind of yucky, I get it. But what happened on the way home from school today that made you feel that way?”

And then you start realizing, “Oh, maybe it was on the bus. Oh, okay. So the bus ride stunk, huh? Did something happen on the bus? Was there, like, a weird conversation or, you know, did somebody say something?”

“Yeah, somebody made fun of me.”

“Oh, okay. I’m sorry to hear that, son.” My point is that we’re trying to get to the, from the big picture down to the narrow, because, then, you realize, “Oh, my son feels bad about himself. He’s not sad. He’s not angry. He’s maybe feeling shame.” And there’s the opening to the conversation to be helpful and supportive.

What happens with most kids, and we don’t have to do this whole thing on kids and parenting, by the way, is that we don’t really know how to say what we’re feeling. We get taught through social media and television.

For boys, we just yell, scream, say, “I hate everything. I’m upset. Get out of my face.” And then parents get triggered by that. And then you kind of don’t know where to go because you’re like, “My kid is not doing so well, and maybe it’s my fault and I don’t even know how to begin the conversation because I’m triggered.” And it doesn’t go anywhere.

And so the goal of all this work on emotional intelligence is to help people not get so activated, especially as the adult raising a kid; how to be present; and how to ask good open-ended questions to find out what the real feeling is because you got to name it to tame it.

And so disappointment is about unmet expectations; anger is about injustice; shame is about diminished self-worth. And if you know that, you have that knowledge as the dad, your way of talking to your kid and your strategy would probably be different.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, very good. Well, staying with the children angle for a moment, you mentioned Uncle Marvin a number of times.

Marc Brackett
I did.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you share who was Uncle Marvin? Why was he important to you? And how do you think about the Uncle Marvins in people’s lives, generally?

Marc Brackett
Great question. So, you know, I had a pretty tough childhood, meaning I grew up, I would say, lower middle class. You know, we had some things, but we didn’t have a lot of resources.

I have two brothers who are still my closest friends, but they had their own developmental challenges, some severe. And my parents were not coping well with that. And my mother needed to do a lot to help my brothers. And, at the same time, my father was working his ass off trying to make ends meet.

And, unfortunately, I was abused by my parents’ good friend during that time. And I didn’t share it, for the millions of reasons we know that people don’t share abuse, until I was 11 when my mother’s brother, Uncle Marvin, came into town.

And I was very fortunate that he happened to be writing a curriculum to teach kids about feelings, which is kind of like, “How does that happen to an 11-year-old who’s suffering from bullying and abuse to have this magical uncle pop into his house who’s running a curriculum to help kids talk about feelings?”

And that is my story. It’s a true story. And he was the first person who asked me how I was feeling, and listened. And so I told him that I hated life and I was really miserable. And he didn’t freak out. He just said, “We’ll get through it together.”

And just fast forward, you know, I’m now in my 20s. I’m going to college. I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life. And I just have this moment where I’m thinking about my life, and I’m realizing I want to be a psychologist and I want to write curriculum to help kids deal with their feelings.

So I pulled my uncle out of retirement, and we start writing a book that no one should ever read, this is 30 years ago already. And that led me to get a PhD in psychology to become a professor, to run the center, you know, to found the center at Yale, called The Center for Emotional Intelligence now.

And I’m proud to say that, you know, what Uncle Marvin did in one classroom, and with me personally, as of this year, has reached 10 million kids.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, that is delightful, and hooray for Uncle Marvin and all the Uncle Marvins for people. You shared in your studies and surveys that about only 35% of people have ever had a person where they felt they could just share all of their emotions, and that person would kind of be cool with it and help us work with them, and that is very sad to hear.

And my first head scratcher there was, “Well, wait a second. Well, what about, like, therapist counselors?” Like, allegedly, I saw 42-ish percent of folks in the US have ever, at least one time, interacted with a mental health person. Are we counting them in the number? Even the pros aren’t getting it done?

Marc Brackett
Well, the pros are not the same. You know, I want to differentiate clinical treatment from feeling seen and heard in your childhood and in your relationship. Most people don’t marry their therapists, which is a good thing.

But I think the point of my research is to really demonstrate that many kids, 65% of our kids, are growing up not believing they have anyone they can really talk to about their emotions.

And so what does that do? It makes you eat your feelings, hide your feelings, bang your head against the wall, do unhealthy things. And we don’t want people to do that. That’s not the habits we want people to develop.

And what I know from my research is that when you have that figure in your life, you’re healthier, happier, you sleep better, you have greater emotional intelligence, greater life satisfaction, deeper purpose and meaning in life. So why the hell wouldn’t we want to make sure everybody has an Uncle Marvin or an Aunt Maria?

But yet, people are afraid to be that person for other people. A lot of people say, “I don’t have the time,” or, “I’m scared,” or, “I’m not skillful.” I’ll just say really quickly, with the research, there are three big characteristics that show up. And it’s non-judgmental, good listeners, who show empathy and compassion.

So when people say, “I don’t have the time,” I kind of like get annoyed because we can all listen a little bit more. We can all show more empathy and we can all be a little less judgmental.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, well said. And so maybe, well, maybe I misunderstood your numbers.

Marc Brackett
That’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
So the 35% is specifically referring to children as opposed to adults?

Marc Brackett
So in my adult research, I’ve also done research there, it ranges between 40% and 60%, so, really, it’s contextualized. But, you know, let’s say it’s around 50% of people in the workforce say they have someone, as an adult, that can show up for them in this way. It’s not enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yeah, certainly. And then I’m thinking about that also in context of some of Jamie Pennebaker’s work on expressive writing and discussion, in which they shared with folks, “Hey, this is a really special opportunity. You could talk to someone with complete confidentiality about whatever you’re feeling.”

And I was like, “Oh, that’s really a sad comment if that’s really a unique, rare, special opportunity.” And yet it was. The folks in those studies were eager to take them up on that opportunity.

And, boy, it’s sad and it’s eye-opening. And I guess I did not know how blessed I have been, Marc, that this is the lay of the land, and the impact is huge. So, tell us, be non-judgmental, good listeners, empathy and compassion, if we’re thinking, “Oh, shucks, I want to be able to provide some of this for people,” any pro tips, top do’s and don’ts?

Marc Brackett
Sure. Well, I think what’s important is what’s not there. And so just as important as what shows up as the characteristics of these people is what doesn’t show up. And what doesn’t show up is fixer, advice-giver, problem-solver.

People are not really looking for that. It’s quite interesting to me because many of us fall into the trap, right, as a parent, as a partner, we’re like, you know, “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

Or, we get so swept up in their feelings that we can’t process our own feelings because we’re so lost in the other person’s feelings. Or, we hijack them. I love the hijackers. I have a few friends that are like that.

It’s, like, they call it a check in and then we spend an hour talking about them. Or, the advice-giver, like, “I’m telling you what to do here.” The fixer just wants it over. The advice-giver wants to be the knower.

And so that’s not what we’re looking for. So what does it look like to show up with non-judgment? Good question. What do you think?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I guess there’s internal and there’s external. To show up with non-judgment, I guess internally, is we’re literally not judging in the sense it’s like, “Oh, that’s stupid. Like, “Oh, that was a pretty selfish thing.” So, internally, we are not judging from, like, a moral, casting a moral assertion about someone.

Marc Brackett
Moral certainty, right? Like, “This is the way it should be.”

Pete Mockaitis
So that’s internal. And then, externally, I guess it’s just like our tone and facial expression and word choice don’t suggest that we’re doing that. Like, “Why did you do that? Really? Ugh!” So, I mean, like just sort of not doing that.

Marc Brackett
You’re exactly right. And it’s hard to change the internal one because, you know, we’re brought up in a society that we’re biased without even realizing it. But you can become more aware of it.

And I think I was just doing a training for leaders before this recording, and we were talking about the difference between good judgment and giving people constructive feedback and being judge-y. And it’s different.

And so judgment is like, as a professor, like, “That’s the worst paper I’ve ever seen. Like, really? You have a PhD in psychology? You could have fooled me.” And there’s sometimes when I think that, I can’t lie, but I have the choice as to whether it comes out.

So there’s a lot of self regulation in being non-judgmental. It’s, like, you’re going to have the automatic response to the situation, but the question is, “Can you build the space to regulate?” That’s tough.

And so I think that’s the big one for non-judgment, and be more curious. The curiosity is key. Don’t be the knower. I think the judge knows everything. The learner is asking questions to get more curious.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, thank you, that’s excellent. Well, I want to, maybe, zoom way out. We’re talking a lot about feelings, emotions, and how we’re relating to them, how we’re dealing with feeling. It’s funny, me and emotions, I was shaped tremendously by Tony Robbins.

Marc Brackett
Look at you.

Pete Mockaitis
As a teenager, I wanted to be him. I wanted a Tony Robbins poster in my room because I loved his books. And other kids are into, you know, sports, music, movie posters. I was, like, “Can I get a Tony Robbins poster in my room?” They didn’t make them so I didn’t get one.

Marc Brackett
You’re supposed to have the Farrah Fawcett poster, but it’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
But it was really tricky, and I think it was incomplete, if I may, as I’m learning decades later, that it seems like, with Tony Robbins, it seems like when it comes to emotions, I’ve got two approaches.

One is, you know, reject and suppress anything that is not “empowering” and enter into a peak state with power moves and visualizations and chest-pounding, jumping up, “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

And, by golly, sure enough, that was pretty effective in terms of, “Oh, I don’t want to do this homework. Well, let’s get into a peak state and let’s do it.” And then the other part was, “Oh, emotions, they have a message for you. And so you need to decode them and then move on.”

Like, “Oh, you feel guilty? Well, you violated a value. Well, okay, note that. Okay, don’t do it again. And get out of that guilt right away.” And so I’ve come to learn that that’s sort of a shallow, incomplete relationship with emotions, although, there is truth to each.

We have some ability to change how we feel, and which might be wise at times, and our emotions can give us valuable information, but we could overdo it. So, tell me, what is your broad worldview on a helpful way we should think about emotions and our relationship to them?

Marc Brackett
So I think, you know, the Tony Robbins model, and many other people who are these motivational speakers, it’s almost like, “Don’t let your emotions get in the way of your goals.” And that’s a suppression or a denial or a plow through.

I think that works to a point, and you can do it, and I’ve done it. But your emotions creep up on you. And you can live for so long suppressing. I always say emotions pile up like a debt. And, eventually, that debt comes due.

I used to be a fitness instructor, and so I used to see people at the gym for six hours on the treadmill, thinking, “I’m getting my workout in.” What they were really doing is not going home to their partners that they were having a difficult time with.

And so if you don’t really work with your emotions, then you’re probably not going to have the best or the most elaborate well-being. And I think that it’s a both-and. I think we want to achieve our life goals and work, and sometimes we have to not allow our feelings to get the best of us and just put the blinders on and full force ahead.

But, at some point, we do have to recognize how we’re feeling. And then I’ll give you example, because I did some work with the Department of Defense, and I met some pilots.

And they said to me, “You know, we’re just taught to compartmentalize. You know, we’re up in the air, we’re bombing things. And then we get off the plane, the two co-pilots look at each other, they give each other a little nod, then they go home and never talk about it again.”

And I said, “Well, how did that work for your home life as a parent, as a partner?” Like, “It didn’t work very well.” They were just holding in so much sadness or anger or fear or whatever it was. And it had no place to go other than self-hatred, rumination, PTSD, alcohol.

So my version of this is that everyone should learn how to use their emotions wisely to achieve their goals. And wise use of emotion, you know, in the short term, if I’m seeing a scary movie, I’m like, “I don’t want to see it.” Who cares? No impact for my life. I just don’t watch those stupid movies.

Or have fun, you know, it’s a game that you play. But if I’m doing that with my significant other, if I’m doing that with my colleague, it’s going to suck when I go to work every day, or when I come home from work.

So we want to figure out helpful strategies. That’s, obviously, to use my little term, “Dealing with Feeling,” which is my book, which is, “How do you deal with your feelings? And what are the strategies?”

And I think the first is you have to shift your mindset. You got to recognize there’s no such thing as a bad emotion. That’s a big one for a lot of people. Even I in my 50s still secretly saw anxiety as a weakness. And I don’t see it that way any longer. I really don’t. I view anxiety as something that I feel when I feel uncertain about things that I care about.

And that shifts the way I think about it. It doesn’t make it a bad thing. It’s saying, “Oh, you’re anxious that you’re still fundraising. You’re anxious because you want to raise the money. Or, you’re anxious because you want to do a good job. Okay, so let’s figure out how to do a good job or how to raise the money and you won’t be so anxious. Or, let go of the things you have no control over.”

The second is you got to know how to deactivate. You got to know how to, like, when your kid comes up and says, “Daddy, I hate you,” and you want to say, “I’ll give you hate.” You can’t retaliate.

You got to step back and be like, “I got to take the high road. I’m going to breathe. I’m not going to allow my kid to have this power over me. I’m not going to be triggered. I’m going to lower my arousal.”

Then you got to have the language. We talked about that a bit. You got to know how to reframe because we do have a negativity bias. So I’m a worst-case scenario kind of guy. I’m a little bit of a neurotic, you know, pessimist who, it’s like, you know, I grew up with a lot of negativity.

My grandfather was, like, “You laugh now, you cry later.” “Great, grandpa. Can’t wait to see you again.” And so I tend to be that way. Like, even when I’m giving speeches and I get an applause, I’m like, you know, “Somebody must have not liked it.” It’s like, “Why are you going there, Marc? Like, 800 people are clapping. You really have to go there? Like, what’s up with that?”

And then I have to stop and say, “Marc, just enjoy the freaking moment. It’s okay. You know, it’s okay to be happy once in a while.” So that’s that self-talk cognitive work. We got to have that relationship with the non-judgmental, compassionate, good listener. We got to take care of our bodies because our brains need fuel to regulate.

And then the last thing I’ve been working on is something that I call, you know, being the best version of yourself. And, essentially, what I mean by that is my new vision is to help people have a part of their identity be, “I’m someone who can really deal with their feelings.”

And when it becomes that way, it’s no longer something you strive for. It’s just something who you are. It’s a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, there is a lot of goodness, absolutely, within that. So let’s touch on a few of these. So shift mindset, no bad emotion. So I like it’s a very succinct understanding and articulation of, “Oh, I’m feeling anxious. That means I’m uncertain about something that’s important to me.” Now, these quick shortcut cheat code interpretations sound really handy.

Marc Brackett
They are.

Pete Mockaitis
Could I have a bunch of them for each emotion?

Marc Brackett
You can. And every emotion might use, or each emotion might have a slightly different strategy. So, for example, when I do a lot of travel and there’s a lot of problems with travel right now, there’s always a delay, there’s always a flight canceled, and I’m stuck in the airport. I’m like, “I cannot believe this. I’m so stupid. Why am I doing this?” I can go into that whole rabbit hole.

And then I just say, “Marc, you’re stuck, you know? So what are you going to do with your time?” “Oh, I can work on my next book. I can go, ‘I now have six extra hours to write. Yay!’” So I quickly shift to something productive that’s useful as opposed to just sitting there and yelling at the flight attendants or whoever is behind the gate.

Like, where is that going to get me? Nowhere. So I think really thinking about, in that moment, “What’s going to help me? What’s going to help me not ache in this feeling that’s unnecessary? I have no control over the outcome. I’m not going to make the plane get off the ground.”

I have a phrase I usually say, “Marc, you know this isn’t permanent,” and it kind of helps. Now, when I’m shopping with my family, I’m very cheap. I think everything’s a ripoff and expensive.

And so I have to then have a different form of like, I’m just like, “You know what, Marc? Like, is this stupid thing that we’re buying worth your relationship? It’s not. Let it go. Just let it go. Just walk down a different aisle. Just don’t even look at it.”

And I have to just separate myself and have a little bit of, like, you know, “You’re too controlling. Let it go. Like, it really doesn’t matter.” And that helps me with those feelings. So you learn over time.

You know, when I’m with someone who’s very difficult, for example, and they’re yelling or screaming or upset, I make them into a movie. And I just observe them and I just watch them.

And I’m like, “Wow, this person never learned. This person hasn’t read my book. This person hasn’t learned healthy strategies to regulate emotions. Like, I wonder what their childhood was like.”

And I get, like, curious, but I don’t allow them to have that, like, power over me. Do you see where I’m going with this? It’s, like, different techniques work for different experiences. But you got to learn them, and they really work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, could you learn us a key technique that is super transformational, yet easy and comes up all the time?

Marc Brackett
Yes. How about we use you again?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Marc Brackett
All right. So do you ever get triggered at work or at home?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Marc Brackett
Okay. Can you think of an example with a family member or a colleague where you’re just, like, in your head, like, “I hate them,” or whatever it is, something negative?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, I get triggered by, I think, software at work a lot, which is like, “Oh, this is so dumb. I can’t believe it. I’ve got this fancy camera, this fancy microphone, but if I want to use it, oh, no, I’ve got to pay a hefty rent to some software company to enable me to do that.”

Marc Brackett
Okay. So that’s more like a self-trigger with an inanimate object.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Marc Brackett
Okay. Like, how would that negatively impact your day or your time?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, depending on how long I’m in a huff about it, and that’s what’s so funny for me, is, like, sometimes, I could speak wisely just the way you were demonstrating for us, within a couple of minutes, like, “Yeah, well, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s kind of dumb and annoying, but we’ll get through this. That’s fine.”

As opposed to, you know, like, “This is a grave injustice. And I’m livid about it.” And I’m going to be huffy-puffy about it for a good 40+ minutes, which is not 40 good minutes of, you know, creative, productive, beautiful work.

Marc Brackett
Right, yes. So you’re already seeing how this works. But I’m going to give you the little kind of trick, which is that so, for me, I’ll give you my example now. At my job, I’m a professor at Yale. I grew up with very humble roots, and a lot of my students are not, they don’t come from those roots. They have different, they have roots that have, like, they’re like gold plated, or not even gold plated. They’re like gold.

And some kids, not many, but some are very entitled. And it’s a trigger for me because I don’t relate to that kind of, like, entitlement. So a student might say things like, “Professor Brackett, I’ve got a question, but I don’t think you’re going to know the answer.”

And I’m, like, “Okay, this is going to be fun.” And my, like, automatic self is, like, “You got to be freaking kidding me, you entitled, blank, blank, blank.” And then I’m like, “Wait a minute, Marc. Wait a minute, Marc. You’re the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence.”

And so I do have an alter ego, which is this guru of emotional intelligence, this feelings master, as I call it in my book, like, this person who is the wizard of emotional intelligence. And if I put myself in that person’s perspective or that superhero, as people have done with kids in research.

If I put my superhero self in to play, all of a sudden, the entitlement becomes an opportunity to be creative with this student. And I’d say, “Gosh, that was an interesting way to approach me. Can I ask you why you thought that would be helpful?”

And then, all of a sudden, I’m not like the nasty retaliatory professor. I’m more like the professor who is going to be wise and provide some feedback in a healthy way for the student.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s fun. This adopting an alter ego reminds me, we had Srini Pillay, talked about psychological Halloweenism on the program, the podcast here. And, yeah, you could just sort of choose to, “I’m going to go there,” and that’s beautiful.

Marc Brackett
But it’s a muscle. It’s a muscle.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, Marc, could you now share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Marc Brackett
The quote that I live by, which is attributed to Viktor Frankl, but we’re not sure he actually said it, but doesn’t matter to me, is the one about my work, which is, “Between stimulus and response, there is space. In that space lies our power and freedom to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” I just love it.

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

Marc Brackett
I’m endlessly in admiration of my mentors who really, and not so much invented but put together the theory of emotional intelligence. I just think it was genius for Peter and Jack to say emotions are not idiosyncratic impulses that make you make bad choices. Actually, when used wisely, they help you achieve your goals.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Marc Brackett
I’m going to go back to Man’s Search for Meaning, which is, where Viktor Frankl wrote his work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear quoted back to you often?

Marc Brackett
I do, actually. And most recently, this technique that is about distancing, like, yourself away psychologically from the stimulus that’s really triggering you. And I say we have to become skillful at observing and not absorbing.

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

Marc Brackett
I think just going to my website, which is MarcBrackett, M-A-R-C, Brackett, B-R-A-C-K-E-T-T, dot com. And I’m on Instagram, Substack, LinkedIn and all that.

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

Marc Brackett
I guess my call to action is for people to consider being the best possible role model for what it looks like to be an emotionally intelligent colleague or parent. Or just visualize yourself as being the most emotionally intelligent person at work and see how that makes a difference.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Marc, thank you.

Marc Brackett
Thank you so much.

Oct 19

1190: How to Get Off to a Great Start with Your New Manager with Dina Denham Smith

By Podcasts No Comments

Dina Denham Smith shows you how to use a leadership transition to strengthen relationships, expand your network, and find new ways to grow.

You’ll Learn

  1. The first step in dealing with a change in leadership
  2. Why it’s worth investing in a relationship with an interim manager
  3. Why it pays to know the “operating preferences” of your new manager

About Dina

Dina Denham Smith is an accomplished executive coach who draws on her background in organizational psychology and first-hand executive experience to help senior leaders and teams at world-class companies such as Adobe, Netflix, Goldman Sachs, PwC, and Sephora thrive. 

Dina has written more than 70 articles on leadership and career success for outlets such as Harvard Business Review and Fast Company. Her work is also frequently featured in other global media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and the BBC. She is the lead author of the bestselling book, Emotionally Charged: How to Lead in the New World of Work.

Resources Mentioned

Pete Mockaitis
Dina, welcome!

Dina Denham Smith
Thank you. Good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you. And you wrote a lovely piece in the Harvard Business Review about “The Keys to Succeeding Under a New Manager.” Could you share with us what prompted you to think the world needs this article?

Dina Denham Smith
Yeah, a couple things, really. There’s a lot written about and written for leaders when they have a new leadership position, like the first 90 days, right? It’s a classic. It’s been around for forever. There’s all this guidance that exists for leaders how to hit the ground running.

But what I noticed is there was very little guidance for people who have a new leader and how they can make the most of the transition. And, you know, concurrently, I also noticed in my client base, and then the research backed it up, it just felt like people were getting new managers all the more frequently.

And as I dug into this, sure enough, they are. And it’s for a couple of different reasons that have kind of become like they’re sort of on velocity now. Like, one, there’s more restructurings. So there’s just like a lot more change happening in organizations.

And then the second thing that’s happening, and it’s, really, I think, it’s such a shame, honestly, is the leadership failure rate is really high. And that is because they’re really not given that much guidance or support when they take on a new role with new scope.

And so the turnover amongst leaders, really, at all levels, is pretty high. So you take these two things together, and what it means for a lot of folks is they’re getting new managers more frequently than ever before.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, good eye observing things with clients and the research. And what I think is so interesting and useful about that is it’s happening frequently and yet it can really be a tremendous opportunity as opposed to, I don’t know, a big ball of uncertainty and anxiety, “And now what do I do?”

Dina Denham Smith
Yeah, I would say it’s both-and, you know, because it’s almost like the devil you know, right? And for some folks, they’ve developed really strong, like long-standing relationships with their managers, and it’s a really sad event when they discover that, like, “Oh, no, she’s leaving,” or, “He’s leaving. And what does that mean for me?”

Other folks, right, if they haven’t really worked for someone great, could be relieved. And many folks are just kind of, like, beaten down. But, oftentimes, what I see happening, too, is that people kind of go into this holding pattern where, as opposed to being like, “This is a huge inflection point, and there’s a lot of things that I can do to make the most of it.”

They kind of go in more into passive, like, “Let’s wait and see how this works out” mode. And that, I think, is the biggest opportunity lost because there is a lot of uncertainty. And when there is uncertainty in change, it’s hard and there’s opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really cool. So the “Let’s wait and see,” it’s interesting because, in a world of much tumult, reorganization, chaos, that seems like a totally sensible, rational, natural response, like, “Okay, well, before I get too, you know, invested, committed, because who knows, maybe this person’s going to be gone in a couple months as well.”

Dina Denham Smith
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
So it’s a totally natural response. And yet, it does sort of squander that opportunity that you have in front of you. So can you lay it out for us, what are some of the top things you recommend we do when we find ourselves under a new manager?

Dina Denham Smith
I think the first thing is to almost, like, just clear your internal emotional space. So, for example, if you have worked for someone for a long time and you’re really sad and feeling extremely exposed, this happened to one of my clients, kind of recognizing all those emotions that you’re feeling.

And the reason to do that is so that you don’t actually bring them into the next situation. Like, there could be like a little mini grieving process, and you need to, like, recognize it so that how you’re feeling doesn’t unintentionally color how you show up with the next person.

The other thing that I think is really important to think about, and this actually just happened. I was interviewing the team members for a new leader that I was working with.

And one of them shared with me, he was like, “You know what? I was totally dreading her arrival because I’d heard all of these, like, horrible things about what a driver she was and a micromanager and all this stuff.” He’s like, “And you know what? It turns out she’s the most supportive leader I’ve actually had to date at this company.”

And so, you know, reputations oftentimes precede us, especially if the person is coming from someplace else within your company. But recognize that you really need to make up your own mind about this person, in part, because that reputation might be outdated. And secondly, it reflects what other people think, right? And they’ve contributed to that situation, too.

So I think the first thing is to just kind of really, like, clear your heart and your mind and be open to what could be a great new relationship. Like, oftentimes, we think about what we’re losing or the ways things could go sideways, right?

Our survival brain, like, kicks in high gear when things get uncertain and we don’t know what’s going to happen and, “Who’s this person going to be? And how’s this going to work?” Like, we think about all the ways that could go wrong. It’s just what we do. It’s how we’ve sort of stayed alive historically.

And you really need to intentionally kind of like toggle your brain into the other mode. And I’m not talking about, like, forced like Pollyanna. I’m talking about, like, also seeing the opportunity in this situation.

So maybe asking yourself like, you know, “What could be the silver lining here?” or, “What might be the opportunity here? How could this maybe go better than I even think it could? What could be in this for me?”

I mean, there’s a million questions that you could use to help yourself see what your brain might not naturally be seeing. So I’d start there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot, yeah. And those are great prompts to get the wheels turning and the brain pointed in some new directions. To back up a bit, when you mentioned a grieving process, what could that look like? And how do you know when you’ve grieved enough?

Dina Denham Smith
Well, grieving can look like a bunch of different things, right? The sort of the five stages of grief is really well known, but they don’t necessarily show up in that order for all individuals.

So you might feel really sad or you might feel angry or you might just feel like bowled over and resigned. You might feel like a lot of different things that suggest, you know, you’re just, you feel like there’s been a loss. And there legitimately might be, right?

It’s sad when somebody you’ve had a wonderful relationship with moves on to another opportunity or finally takes the chance to retire or is asked to leave. I think there can be some legitimate loss there.

And, at the same time, we concurrently have to accept, like, the reality of the situation. And so legitimizing and validating the way you feel and accepting what now is are equally important processes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, a great perspective for you sort of resetting things, getting your mind and emotional slate clear and good and not taking too much outside influence from the chatter and about the reputation or whatever, forming your own views. Where do we go from there?

Dina Denham Smith
What I’ve seen is that, sometimes, a new manager arrives on the scene quickly. There is a very smooth transition, “You know, Jane will be departing and Joe is coming in,” or whatever the case may be. Other times, especially at the more senior levels, there is a notable gap.

So one of my current clients, she’s now been without a manager for four months. Another one I’ve worked with is finally getting her leader after eight. So these interim situations can last anywhere between days, weeks, months, because hiring is a very, very expensive decision, and at more senior levels, they want to get it right.

And so there can be this sort of limbo period where there’s an interim structure. You have this interim leader. And it can be this time where you think to yourself, “Well, why invest? Like, they’re not going to be my leader anyhow.” But, again, that would be another missed opportunity because there’s a couple things.

One, it’s a new person in your internal network that you can invest in. And you never know where these strong relationships will, ultimately, take you. They might have a new perspective on some of the situations you’re trying to resolve. They might have strengths your former manager didn’t that you can learn from.

They will, undoubtedly, have a different network of relationships at the company that they might be able to tap for you. And so, by all means, invest in that relationship and make the most of it because it certainly can’t hurt.

And sometimes – guess what – that interim is appointed head. So, yet one more of my clients right now, I literally just started working with her, last week we had our kickoff session, and she was the interim head of a product department for six months while they looked for the chief product officer.

And you know what happened? They discovered she completely stepped into that role and she was doing great. And every external candidate they looked at, they stacked the external candidate up against her, and they, ultimately, decided, “You know what? We don’t actually want to bring in somebody. She can do it. Let’s get her a coach so she can really step into this really powerfully and support that transition.”

So folks on her team who were just like idling and waiting for that new person to arrive, it’s a shock to the system, right? So, by all means, invest in that relationship. It will only serve you.

And I think the other thing to do while you’re in this limbo period is you no longer have this set structure, which gives you a lot more latitude to be reaching out across the organization.

So we all know you don’t want to go over your head’s boss, right? Like, they’ve got certain sort of like sacred relationships that they wanted to, like, run point on. Well, they’re gone. You can step into those voids and really strengthen your internal network. So, again, you know, I’m like be on your front foot here. Don’t wait this out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a great reminder, interim often becomes permanent. And even if they don’t, I mean, it’s a pretty cool opportunity to get to know someone who’s apparently flexible and trusted to drop into places across the organization.

So, yeah, that’d be pretty nifty if you’re one of the few who really seem to care and, you know, pour forth attention and effort into that relationship. That’s pretty memorable.

Dina Denham Smith
Absolutely. I don’t know, you never know where these things are going to go. And so I think you sort of like making the most out of every day. Make the most out of this relationship, too. It could be so positive not just in a self-serving way, but you might have like a great new colleague at the end of this.

Pete Mockaitis
And within this particular context, investing in the relationship, what does that practically mean?

Dina Denham Smith
Yeah, practically, it means helping them come up to speed really quickly. They’ve just been dropped in. They’re now working two jobs, this interim person. They’ve got their previous team, and now they’ve got sort of these additional new reports.

And they maybe they’ve assumed the entire team, maybe they’ve assumed just a few folks, but whatever the case may be, like, their load has just been increased because of this other, you know, leader departure.

So do what you can to make it really easy for them to sort of assume a managerial role for you. Bring them up to speed on, you know, your scope. What are your key projects? What are you working on? What are some of the problems that you’re sort of working through and how you’re solving them?

Help them understand the snapshot version, like, what you do, what you’re about, and the things that you’re working on that are going well. Where you’ve got challenges that you aren’t able to entirely meet and you need help, bring them in as a resource.

They’ll have a different perspective. They’ll have different ideas, different resources at their disposal that might help you solve something in a new or more effective way. So that would be one thing.

And the second thing that’s important, especially if you’re coming up on a performance cycle, is your manager has just departed for whatever reason and so has most of your performance history. And this new leader is now in charge of doing your performance review.

Well, the very best thing that you can do is tee them up. And I’m not talking about being duplicitous and only giving them the highlights, but giving them sort of history and everything that they need to do that review in a balanced way. Again, it’s just about making it easy.

I had one client, this is the one actually who’s been in this interim situation until recently for eight months. And she had six managers over six years, like it really was a revolving door.

And so we developed a strategy, probably, I don’t know, four months ago, around this performance review cycle that was coming up. And she helped the general counsel understand all that she was doing, her scope, her strength, all of it.

And it turns out she got her largest raise and her largest stock bonus ever in percentage terms. So these things can work out incredibly well as long as you put yourself in the driver’s seat.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, it’s so funny, well, you mentioned an opportunity. I mean, it’s quite tangibly an opportunity right there, you know, fabulous review and money stuff flowing, I guess. But I’m thinking just about in terms is the very human place that person in the new role finds themselves.

And it’s just like, “You know what? You’re the only person who made my review easy. And I really appreciate that. So, not to be too flippant about it, but I just get the impression you’re really on top of things and, generally, great, and you’ve given me a lot of facts. So, yeah, how about we’re just going to go ahead and give you an awesome review?”

Dina Denham Smith
Yeah, when people make our lives easy, we like them more. And when we like people more, we act like we like them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, it’s true. It sounds simple, but I think it’s overlooked and it’s very true and powerful. You had a nice little take on – I love your phrase – in terms of figuring out how they work and operate quickly. And we’ve had Mary Abbajay on the show, talking about some managing-up principles which could be quite transformational.

And you’ve got a great phrase here, “I’ve always found it useful, when working with someone new, to discuss operating preferences early.” That sounds like a great way to take any awkwardness or discomfort, like, “Wait, what are we talking about and why?”

It’s like, “Oh, this is what we’re talking about and why. And you what? You’re right. That does make sense.” So what are some of those operating preferences you want to check through?

Dina Denham Smith
And I would say, you can have this conversation with an interim head. And then, further, once the permanent person comes along, this is paramount because what, oftentimes, happens is there’s this like drag. Like, transitions have this drag.

Everybody’s feeling each other out, trying to figure out like, “What matters, you know? How is this going to go?” And, meanwhile, you can really just hit it on the head. And it’s about, “How can we work most effectively together? Like, help me get to know you.”

So let’s just play this through. You have a new leader, a new manager. Very early on, rather than trying to read the tea leaves, use some of your one-on-one time to say, “Hey, I’d really like to get to know you better, how you like to work. Would you mind if I ask you just a few questions?” People love being asked questions. They’ll say, “Sure.”

And then I would ask questions like this, “Like, you know a little bit about my scope and what I’m doing. Like, are there certain areas of my business or my work you really want more visibility into? Let’s talk about, like, where you want me to just tell you what’s going on? And where do you want to be part of the decision?”

So you’re really like just hitting the head on like, “Where do you want visibility? Let’s talk about decision-making. When there’s a problem happening, one of the things I’m, like, working with, do you want to know about that problem, like, early on, or do you just want me to come to you once I’ve figured it out and tell you how I solved it? How do you like to communicate?”

“It can get really like mechanical. If I really need you, like should I email with, like, a special subject line? Do you prefer a text, a Slack? Like, let’s talk about how you most prefer to communicate and what your best channels are. What are your pet peeves? Like, if I do it, what’s going to drive you crazy?” So just asking.

And this speeds everything up for both you and your manager in terms of forming a really positive and constructive working relationship. It’s not about becoming best friends. It’s about really working together, like efficiently, productively, positively. And you can just get under the hood and ask a few questions and get there a whole lot more quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and to  your point before, that we like it when people make things easy. This is one  of the best ways to do just that. Like, “What you mean by easy might be different than what I mean by easy.” So just get right to it.

Dina Denham Smith
Exactly. And, again, most leaders, really, and I primarily work with leaders, so I know this to be true. They love when people are like, “How do you like to work? Like, let’s get into this so that  we can together hit the ground running.”

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Dina Denham Smith
Very few people ask their leader that. And it’s like, I don’t know, it’s just, I think once you hear it and internalize it, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, of course,” right? But, oftentimes, we just don’t think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, you say very few, and I believe it. I’ve asked audiences about this. I talked with Mary Abbajay about it. Her estimate is like less than one or two percent based on what she sees in her audiences and research work. So, yeah, it’s a huge opportunity in terms of differentiating quickly, and it’s just delightful for everybody. So, yeah, go for it.

Dina Denham Smith
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Dina, tell me, any other key things you want to mention in this situation that folks should know before we hear about your favorite things?

Dina Denham Smith
Well, I think one of the things that can also go overlooked in this situation is some of the team level dynamics that oftentimes occur when there’s a leadership transition. So whenever there’s a transition, as we’ve talked about, uncertainty increases.

Well, you’re not the only one who’s gone into sort of survival mode, like, “What’s going to happen to me? How is this going to work out?” And, oftentimes, things can get a little bit political for a bit.

There can be, like, territoriality. The leadership levels, I always call like a “Game of Thrones.” Like, people can get into sort of like land grabbing and it can get, like, just a little goofy with peers.

My best advice is to not play that game. Be aware that these politics are happening, but don’t play it. Instead, take an approach of meeting with your peers and trying to collaborate with them. And the reason for this is twofold.

When your new leader arrives, if they see a team where there’s, like, a lot of politics, first off, it’s really obvious. And the more fragmentation or competitiveness they see, or confusion they see in their team, the more scrutiny it invites, right, because you have just raised that new leader’s stress level.

Like, “All is not well here. Like, there’s infighting, there’s some unfortunate sort of like relationship strains, like roles and responsibilities aren’t clear.” That raises their stress about the health of the team, which naturally then invites them to take a much closer look at, like, “What’s going on here?”

You can really differentiate yourself by, as much as possible, trying to establish strong collaborative relationships around you with your peers. So talking with them one on one, like about any sort of overlaps or lack of clarity or alignments or just how you can more work together more effectively, that can really set you apart when, oftentimes, people’s response to this situation is a little bit more selfish.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well said. Okay. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dina Denham Smith
It’s from Maya Angelou. And she said, “People will not remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel.”

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Dina Denham Smith
I absolutely love, and I go back often to a really groundbreaking study and finding from Matthew Lieberman, who’s a neuroscientist out of UCLA, and what he discovered, and this is years ago now.

But that social pain, when we’re left out or we’re criticized or something happens interpersonally that is hurtful for us, it lights up the same networks in our brain as physical pain. Meaning, if you get, like, punched in the face and you get criticized, your brain doesn’t really differentiate between these things.

And what’s so important about this in terms of how we think about how we relate to others and the workplace is understanding sort of like the impact of our actions and our words on other people, such that if we leave out a teammate, or if we’re hypercritical, or we gossip and people discover it, it hurts them as much as as physical pain.

And this triggers all of these unnecessary and unfortunate dynamics in the office that can really be prevented. And so I think it’s a really meaningful thing. And I hadn’t thought about this before, but it very much connects to that quote I initially shared, right, about people won’t remember what you say, but they will remember how you feel. And if you hurt someone, it’s a slow road to repair.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. And a favorite book?

Dina Denham Smith
I think, probably my all-time favorite is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which I’m sure most people are familiar with, but I think it’s just profound the idea of, like, we’ve got this millisecond in between stimulus and response. And that millisecond, we can change our lives with it every day.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Dina Denham Smith
My dishwasher?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a good one, yeah. And a favorite habit?

Dina Denham Smith
My habit is also my hobby. I’m a passionate equestrian and I ride a few times a week, and it’s like my silver bullet for all that ails me in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate, they quote it back to you often?

Dina Denham Smith
I think, one, and this is me, well, it’s, oftentimes, said in a leadership context, but I actually think it generalizes to most of us, and it’s that leadership is an inner game.

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

Dina Denham Smith
Two places. LinkedIn, I am Dina Denham Smith. Denham is spelled not like the jeans, but D-E-N-H-A-M. And then my website is DinaDSmith.com. And those are the best places.

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

Dina Denham Smith
Treat every day like a new day. So, start your day thinking about, “How can I make this one just one percent better than the day before? What could I try or do differently or repeat because it worked so well?” But just being intentional.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. All right. Well, Dina, thank you.

Dina Denham Smith
Thank you.