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.

1031: Mastering Virtual Communication with Andrew Brodsky

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Andrew Brodsky shows how to sharpen your virtual communication skills.

You’ll Learn

  1. What your emails and texts say about you 
  2. The PING framework for efficient virtual communication 
  3. Why in-person meetings aren’t always better 

About Andrew 

Andrew Brodsky is an award-winning professor, management consultant and virtual communications expert at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. Poets&Quants selected Andrew as one of the “World’s 40 Best Business School Professors Under 40.” He is an expert in workplace technology, communication and productivity and serves as the CEO of Ping Group. Andrew earned a PhD in organizational behavior from Harvard Business School and BS from The Wharton School. He currently lives with his wife and two rescue dogs in Austin.

Resources Mentioned

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Andrew Brodsky Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Andrew, welcome!

Andrew Brodsky
Thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m so excited to dig into some of the wisdom of your book, Ping, and I’d love it if you could kick us off with a particularly surprising discovery you’ve made as you’ve been teaching this stuff, researching this stuff, and putting the book together.

Andrew Brodsky
The most surprising discovery that I’ve seen in my research is that there’s a whole lot more nonverbal information we send in our text-based communication and low-richness communication, like email, instant messaging, than we realize we do. So, when most people talk about it, they’re like, “Well, you don’t send any nonverbal behavior via email,” but we do.

So, typos can relay emotion, time of day a message sent can relay power. There are things like how we interpret emojis is not as straightforward as one would expect. So, there’s a whole lot of other information we don’t even realize we’re sending that other people use to interpret what we’re saying.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Andrew, this calls to mind, have you seen this Key & Peele sketch, where they have an escalating misunderstanding?

Andrew Brodsky
I actually use that clip in my class to teach when I teach virtual negotiations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, excellent choice.

Andrew Brodsky
It’s one of my favorite ones.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess that’s part of what makes you one of the world’s best business school professors under 40, Andrew. Kudos.

Andrew Brodsky
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
So, absolutely, so that’s intriguing there in that there is more that we are sending. I guess we don’t even know that we’re sending it. And then I guess there is still the risk of misinterpretation of those signals, like, “Oh, he sent it at midnight, therefore, this means that,” whereas, that assumption or interpretation could still be off, but some kind of thing got embedded by the time itself of when it was sent.

Andrew Brodsky
One of my favorite studies that researchers have on this, they use an example or metaphor to describe this process. So, what they do is, basically, tap a song out on your desk with your fist, and then imagine what, if you were to tap it out to someone else, what are the odds they’re going to guess it? And most people guess really high percentage. But in reality, very few percentages of people get it right.

The reason being is that when we tap out the song on our desk, we hear the music in our head as we’re tapping it, so it seems really obvious to us. The problem is, when someone’s listening to it, they’re not hearing that same music. They’re coming from their own set of assumptions, interests, and they’re like, “I don’t know what song it is.”

And the same thing happens with our email. When we’re typing out emails, we hear the emotion in our head as we’re typing it, so it seems really obvious to us. But the thing is, when someone else gets it, they’re not hearing the same emotion. For instance, if a boss sends a sarcastic email, they need to be humorous to their subordinate.

If they have an anxious subordinate, they’re going to be like, “Uh-oh, my boss is mad at me, or being condescending,” because they’re coming from somebody that’s very different. So, we all read information, whether it’s emails, or instant messages, with our different tone, so we gotta remember that they’re not hearing the same music we are when we’re writing this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a beautiful comparison point in terms of what’s in our head and what we’re actually transmitting that can go there. And it’s funny, my kids, we just got a keyboard, and they’re experiencing this right now, and they sort of spontaneously played the tapping game, and they were flabbergasted of their own discovery and how their sibling was unable to pick up on the cue, because, indeed, all you have is rhythm when you’re tapping as opposed to pitch, completely missing that I was doing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” because there might be multiple things that would have somewhat similar rhythms.

So, that’s fantastic. Well, so we’re going to dig into a little bit of the pro tips, the do’s and don’ts, and the best practices. But I would love to hear, maybe, just what is at stake here in terms of whether we master this stuff or we limp along and do okay with it, like the average professional?

Andrew Brodsky
So, I’m guessing everyone who’s listening has seen some email from some executive gone viral that’s extremely embarrassing, or those videos during COVID of executives, like, doing a horrible job of laying off people. Like, we’ve all seen these things go crazy viral. But those are the mistakes we generally think about when it comes to virtual communication. Those like big ones that went viral, but there’s a whole lot of other interactions that are meaningful.

They don’t have to go viral for it to impact yourself, your relationship, your career. So just every day, how are you presenting yourself to your boss, to your clients, to your teammates, is meaningful, and these things add up. And, especially when we’re interacting virtually, and we’re not standing in front of the other person, communication serves an important role. So, there’s our work, and in most cases, there’s not objective measures for work, whether you’re in accounting, human resources, whatever else. Most of our jobs don’t have 100% clear objective metrics.

And then on the other side, it’s on evaluating that. And also, it could just be a simple conversation between two people, and they’re trying to evaluate how engaged you are. And the thing is, they’re making subjective evaluations of this, because there’s just no objective way to evaluate most of these things. And the filter between your actual work, your effort, your engagement in conversation, and their evaluations is your communication.

So, that is what drives how people perceive these things. So, making sure you can communicate effectively across any mode has been shown to change outcomes everywhere from building trust, to how productive, or how high a performer you seem, how good of a leader you are, how good your outcomes are in negotiations. These things are impactful because that’s what drives perceptions, often so more times in reality than the actual work or effort you’re putting into the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that really rings true. And we, humans, are not perfectly rational. There’s an understatement for you, Andrew, it’s so fascinating, and maybe you can share the actual science behind this to make it all the more real. But I find that our moods, emotions are not giving us reliably accurate information, you know?

And I’m not talking about, like, major sort of mood disorder diagnoses or anything. Just like terms if we are feeling cranky on one day and see the same stimulus, as we’re feeling well-rested and chipper on another, what we interpret about the stimulus is totally different, even though the objective reality or forecast is unchanged by our internal mood states.

And so, then, if there’s little things we’re doing that are annoying people with regard to our use or lack thereof of emojis, our grammar approaches, single spacing, double spacing after a period, the quality of our lighting or camera or microphone, any of these things that don’t really matter do impact the recipient’s mood, and then their evaluation or judgment of you, like, how competent and sharp you are as a professional.

And so, I’ve seen this on both sides of the table. And I’d love it if you could share, is there any super compelling research that shows just how powerful these effects can be?

Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, and there’s a ton of things I talk about in my book that, in theory, we shouldn’t have to do, but we all make these judgments of people, even though they’re not really rational. So, one of the good examples is when it comes to video calls, and, you know, we talk about email and instant message, let’s move to video.

There’s been a bunch of studies about video interviewing, and they show that eye contact during video interviews is significantly related to how the interviewer evaluates the interviewee. But here’s the problem, when you’re face-to-face, it’s very easy to maintain eye contact because you’re staring at the other person’s eyes.

For most of us, when we’re doing that on a computer, we’re staring at their face on the screen, so we’re actually making eye contact. But if you’ve got a laptop, if you’ve got a monitor set up where your webcam is above your monitors, for most of us, it looks like we’re looking downward, or we’re looking to the left, or to the right, because we’re looking at the person’s face on our screen as opposed to the webcam, which is kind of dumb because we actually are making eye contact, but to the other person, it looks like you’re just kind of looking off.

So, they might make assessments that, “Hey, this person’s not really engaged, or maybe they’re reading from a script, or they don’t care, or maybe they’re just looking up recipes for dinner tonight.” Whereas. in person, we don’t even have to make those guesses because we can see they’re paying attention. So, there’s like this dual problem virtually where they have to guess more because they can’t see what you’re doing because you’re not in person.

And then you’re trying to maintain eye contact, but it doesn’t necessarily align with your webcam. For this, there’s a bunch of easier and some harder fixes. So, just dragging your video call screen up to right under your webcam can be really useful for aligning. There’s more complex things. You can get a standing mount webcam that stands in the center of your monitor, or maybe just hanging webcams that you can actually stick onto your monitor. But just being attentive to these little cues virtually can be really, really important, even though, honestly, it shouldn’t have to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. No, that’s so well said. And if I could just throw out one more tip. I use, this is a fancy setup, podcast or life, but this, it’s a teleprompter, which is also a display, the Elgato prompter. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Andrew, but I’m looking right at you always because it is a display showing up in the teleprompter mirror immediately in front of the camera lens so that’s, I think, the ultimate.

And I’ve heard people as they talk about reviews of this product, they are amazed at their communities, “It’s like you’re looking right at me. How are you doing that?” And so, I’ve been sharing this with a sales consultant. Because I imagine, if it matters in video interviews, it probably matters in sales conversations too.

Andrew Brodsky
Oh, yeah. I’ve got a more low-tech option myself. I just have a webcam stand that is bendable, so I put it right in the center of my screen. I’m a little less intense with it, but it’s the same thing, because this way, I can look at you and I’m looking at my webcam simultaneously.

But, yeah, these things matter everywhere because, I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of like, we feel like we’re on a video call and we feel like someone’s not paying attention to us, and in many cases, they’re not. But this gets back to my point that I was saying, is the way people make these judgments is often more about how you’re communicating acting as opposed to what the reality is in some cases.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is powerful and eye opening. And if you could please share with us the eye contact video interview study, we’ll absolutely link in the show notes. That’s good stuff. And tell us then, are you aware of any cool stories of a professional who really took some of these principles and tips with gusto, and saw a cool transformation when they implemented them?

Andrew Brodsky
One of my favorite ones was an organization I consulted with recently, so this is a large Fortune 100 tech org, and they were having a big problem with communication overload. They had hours and hours of meetings, they were doing emails, like all night long, and it was creating a lot of stress for them. So, one of the things I approach with them is trying to have more structured conversations within teams about “How can we communicate better?”

And there’s some interesting research, for instance, that fits into this about the email urgency bias. And what that research shows is that, when we receive an email, we expect that the sender thinks we’re going to respond, or they want us to respond quicker than they actually care about. So, for instance, if you sent me an email, you probably think, “Ah, if he gets back to me a day, that’s okay.” I get the email. I’m like, “Oh, here’s an important podcast host. I need to respond within 30 minutes,” right? And I think that’s what you’re expecting from me.

And the problem with that is it creates a stress. It creates this feeling of needing to check your email all the time so that we’re interrupting our work, we’re interrupting our time with our family, and it creates all these different issues. So, what I did with a number of teams there is I had conversations with them and said, “Okay, amongst your team, let’s figure out, what medium has what response time? So, as a team, what response time do we want for email? What response time do we want for instant message? If there’s an emergency, how do we do it? Do we do it via text message? Do we do it via an urgent tag on one of these things?”

And in those conversations, as a result of that, they were able to get more focus time because they weren’t constantly having to check their communication and interrupt what they were doing. And multitasking is one of the worst things you can do for your productivity. And just like one related study to this is there’s some research that shows it can take up to a minute after each email to get back in the zone of work.

And it doesn’t sound like a lot to say, “Oh, it takes a minute to get back in focus.” But if you’re like me and sending like 30 or 60 emails a day, that’s like half an hour to an hour each day of just getting back in focus for the tasks. So, by enabling them to better chunk their communication without having to actually constantly be checking email and instant message, they ended up having a lot more time for work, they were more productive.

One of the team leaders came back to me afterwards, and was like, “My family hated me because I was on my smartphone all night long. And now I finally get to enjoy my family time because I know, if there’s an emergency, I’m going to hear the text chime, and I do not have to look at my email or instant message anymore whatsoever during the night, because we’ve actually made the implicit more explicit.”

Pete Mockaitis
That is powerful. And I have ran seminars where I have seen similar results with teams, so I will just put a big check mark on that one, is this assumption about the expectation that is far from reality causes all these angst and interruption and unnecessary multitask and unpleasantness. And it is such a wave of relief for folks when you can have that conversation, like, “Oh, wow, I don’t have to do that? This is amazing.”

So, that’s a great feeling and liberates all kinds of good stuff. Well, that sounds like a master key right there, Andrew, with this stuff, is, “Hey, how about we get aligned on what our expectations and preferences are with regard to how we’re using all these tools?”

Andrew Brodsky
And it’s great, because on the back-end, too, someone’s not taking two weeks to respond to your email because you said, “As a team, hey, we’re going to respond to every email in a day or two.” So, it kind of not only gives us more time to focus. We don’t have that dangling email for over a week because we said, “You need to respond at least a day or 24 hours, even if it’s, ‘I’m going to get back to this by X date,’ so we’re not left wondering.”

And when it comes to virtual interactions, silence is a whole lot more awkward than it is in person because we don’t know what’s going on in person, if they’re clearly thinking. Virtually, we don’t know if they just deleted our email. We don’t know if they don’t care at all. So, having those norms, and then at least within those norms, having a set of practices where we send something within the given time to say, “I’ll get to this by X,” really helps erase all that ambiguity that can harm relationships very seriously in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Cool. Well, how about you take us through your favorite tools and tips for how we do all this stuff masterfully?

Andrew Brodsky
Sure. So, my favorite tool is the framework that I made for this book. So, whenever I read a self-help book, a business book, personally, I really like when there’s a framework because there’s often so many suggestions that I never remember all of them. So, in writing my own book, I did what I like to do, and I need one. So, for my book Ping I’ve got the “Ping” framework.

P for perspective taking, I for initiative, N for nonverbal, G for goals, and all the recommendations and research in the book fits into these four things. So, for instance P for perspective taking, this is the idea that when we are engaging in virtual communication, we tend to end up more self-focused because we’re maybe just looking at text on a screen, or even if we’re having a video call, they’re a small square on our screen as opposed to this big person standing in front of us, so we’re less focused on how the other person’s going to react, how they might think.

You would say things online often that you wouldn’t say to the person when you’re right in front of them because you’re more focused on how they’re going to react when they’re standing physically right in front of you. So, it’s really important to take a moment and try and think about how might someone see this from their perspective.

And going back to that emotion research, one of the good recommendations that came out of that is, if you take your message and read it in the exact opposite tone out loud than you intended. So, if it’s a sarcastic message, read it as serious. If it’s a serious message, read it as sarcastic out loud. Suddenly, people tend to be much less likely to be overconfident about how clear their message is. When they do that, they realize, “Oh, wow, my message is not as clear as I intended it,” and they fix it.

And then I for initiative. The idea here is you need to think about, “What can I add back in here into this mode that might be missing?” So, an example I give in the book of this is small talk. Many of us hate small talk, and for good reason, it’s not productive. And research shows that small talk decreases productivity. But it does have a benefit.

Small talk improves trust. And the reason being is we trust what we know. If I know nothing about you, if I don’t know about your family, what you do for fun, what your hobby is, I don’t feel like I have an understanding of you, so I don’t feel like I can trust you. Small talk is one of these ways that helps us feel like we get to know somebody else and we trust what’s familiar.

So, finding ways to add in a little bit of small talk into your virtual communication, whether just a couple lines of email, asking them, you know, “Hey, I know you mentioned you’re going on a trip. How did it go? Here’s what I did,” can be really, really useful for building that trust, if that’s your goal. I’m not saying write 10 paragraphs of small talk because everyone’s going to hate you for it and it’ll backfire, but the idea here is a little bit of this stuff, taking the initiative to add those things back in, can be incredibly useful.

And the nonverbal behavior, just being attentive to all the different cues you’re sending, and we’ve talked about a bunch already. So, eye contact during video calls, typos, emojis, which I can talk more about if we want, all these different cues and understanding, “What information am I sending without potentially realizing?”

And then, lastly, G for goals. I wish there was, I could just say this is the best mode of communication. There’s one mode to rule them all. It would be a very short book if I did. But the best mode really depends on what your goal is. So, let’s say video calls, for instance. There’s this big debate – cameras on, cameras off.

And my answer to that, when executives or teams or anyone else asks me about that, is it depends on your goal. So, research shows that having your video on can be useful for building relationships, for showing engagement, because it shows, “Hey, I’m listening. I’m paying attention to you.” But on the other side of that, there’s Zoom fatigue or video conferencing fatigue, where research shows that being on video can be really exhausting.

You’re staring at yourself. You’re observing all your nonverbal behaviors. It can be really energy depleting and that gives you less energy in the meeting, less energy afterwards, could lead to burnout. So, there’s these pros and cons. But if you think about it this way, if your goal is to show engagement, build a relationship, camera on. If your goal is to save energy to be able to focus better, then camera off is better.

So, maybe cameras on is better when you’re interacting with someone you don’t know really well. But when your team already has strong impressions of each other, we already know everyone’s engaged, we already have good feelings of each other, and having our camera on or off really isn’t going to change those things for a one-off meeting. It might be better for us all to have our cameras off so we can focus more on the task at hand.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And you mentioned multitasking being bad news, and my understanding of the research is that if the multitasking is really close to mindless, like, “I am also walking on a treadmill,” or, “I am also folding laundry,” or, “I am also tidying up some of these items on my desk, like the pen goes in the pen drawer, the cups can be gathered and placed to the side.” Like, my understanding of these matters is that you’re actually not having a cognitive deterioration when that is the case. Is that accurate?

Andrew Brodsky
I would say it’s better for some people than others. So, there’s a personality trait like multitasking ability, technically, where it works better for some than others. In some cases, communication can be mindless, but in many cases, the communication is involving something that you’re not immediately working on, so your mind has to switch to a different task in the meantime.

So, it’s not like you could be doing your emails while you’re simultaneously brainstorming something unrelated altogether. If you’re really, really good, maybe you can, but for most of us, it kind of interrupts that process pretty badly.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. And when I said mindless, I was referring to the secondary activity, the walking your feet on a treadmill is the mindless piece.

Andrew Brodsky
Oh, of course. Oh, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Such that it’s quite possible to pay attention well if the secondary activity is not communication-related and doesn’t take much conscious attention whatsoever. Is that a fair way to think about multitasking?

Andrew Brodsky
Oh, yeah. And one of the, I think, funnier, more absurd examples I get is, you’d be surprised how many executives have told me that they email from the toilet, where they’ve basically got their smart phone there and they’re taking out their communication. A little bit less exercise fun than being on the treadmill, but, yeah, I mean, I guess you get the job done there, right? So, yeah, so using those times otherwise, like if you can get some physical activity in, that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and that’s kind of how I think about the cameras off-on exactly as you’ve well-articulated in terms of, it is more tiring, it requires more of me, but perhaps if we are building the relationships, then that’s a great use of energy from the team is to do just that, versus, it really would be nice if we gave people a little bit of a break and we’re able to handle a little bit of the things simultaneously so long as they’re not messing up their ability to concentrate.

Andrew Brodsky
That, and if the only way you can keep your team’s attention is to forcing them to keep their webcam on, you’ve got bigger problems than that. You should be having deeper conversations about “Why is our team engagement low? How can we increase it?” If the only way you could do it is forcing people to keep their cameras on, you’re basically fixing the symptom rather than the cause, and you’ve got an underlying team problem there, and you are kind of treating the team more like children in many of those cases, where there isn’t that added value.

And, again, that’s not to say there aren’t situations where having camera on is really useful. I use it for teaching, especially when meeting new people, it’s really important, but there are many situations where it just isn’t adding value and it can really take away from the interaction.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that’s powerful. Thank you. You’ve got a perspective on strategic silence in meetings. What do you mean by this and how do we do it?

Andrew Brodsky
So, strategic silence can be useful in a whole lot of situations. So, negotiating is often a fun one in these scenarios where silence is this great thing where it causes other people to fill the air. We feel a bit awkward during it, especially during virtual meetings, too. So, if you’re in this situation where you’re hoping someone’s going to disclose something, letting them do some of the talking and just being silent can be really useful. You don’t want to go to an extreme about this.

The other thing, too, is it becomes, in some ways, easier to speak over each other in certain modes of communication. So, some people will say, “Oh, video is pretty much the same as face to face.” And what I’ll say is, “Well, there’s pros and cons to each. There isn’t one better than the other.” But one of the things that happens with video is there’s often this slight lag, you know, we’re talking like milliseconds here.

But the problem with that slight lag is that research has shown that it messes up conversation turn-taking, where you kind of have these more awkward silences, you kind of interrupt each other more, so sometimes having a little bit more of a pause can be useful in video calls just to make sure you’re not constantly interrupting the other person, especially if you’re somewhat of a fast talker like myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. And are there any common things that we’re all doing wrong and we should just fix it?

Andrew Brodsky
I think there’s a lot of things I’d say we’re all doing wrong, myself included, but the biggest one that I would say is that we often don’t take the time to stop and think, “Am I approaching this communication the right way?” We’re so busy and overloaded with meetings, with emails, that we don’t pause and say, “Should this really be an email or should this really be a meeting?”

And this lack of mindfulness is one of the main factors that drive people to have hours of wasted meetings each week that should have been email. And on the other side of that, too, that people often forget is there’s a lot of emails that probably should have been meetings. So, like this interaction we’re having now, you’re asking me a bunch of questions, I’m fairly talkative, so each answer is like five plus paragraphs.

If you’d emailed me these, I would probably take days writing up the answers, editing them, crafting them, but we can have this conversation live in under an hour. So, emails can also be really unproductive too in certain situations. But people just do whatever has been done, “So, we always have a meeting for this, so we’re going to do a meeting,” or, “We always have email for this, so we’re doing email,” or, “It’s already an email conversation, so I’m not going to ask to switch to phone saying, ‘Hey, can we get on the phone for a second just to resolve this?’”

So, taking that moment to think, “Is this the right mode and am I using it in the best way possible?” Even though you’re taking some time and losing some productivity to engage in that thought process, it actually saves you a ton of time in the long run and can really help improve your relationships in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig that. I also want to get your hot take on these AI meeting tools, the transcribing, the summarizing, what are some pros and cons here?

Andrew Brodsky
When it comes to these AI tools for, let’s say, summarizing for now is what we’re focusing on, I think, again, it kind of cuts both ways. It’s awesome being able to have a summary of the meeting afterwards because it frees your mind up from having to worry about every single thing that’s being said in the meeting. You can focus on the conversation and you can go back afterwards.

The problem is that there’s research on something called cognitive offloading, which is this idea that when we offload tasks to technology, so we just have the technology do it for us, we tend to remember them less and we tend to learn from them less. So, if I have one of these tools summarizing every single meeting, so I’m not making a point of remembering what was said, for the most part. I’m not writing down the notes myself that helps me increase my memory, and I’m probably not even checking those notes afterwards because I know they’re available somewhere.

Then some client comes to me and asks me about something we talked about three weeks ago, but I’ve had tons of meetings since then, and because I wasn’t as focused on remembering what happened during that meeting, I don’t have a good answer. So, we can end up becoming a bit lazy mentally as a result of this.

So, the trick is finding that right balance where you can use them as a resource, but you’re not cognitive offloading so much that you’re not using your brain’s memory or storage itself. You’re only using your computers in that situation. So, you want to get that nice middle ground of using both your brain’s memory and your computer’s memory for storing what was in the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that is a great principle to bear in mind, in general. When we do cognitive offloading to the machine, we learn and remember less, and I think that applies to so much stuff – your GPS, the calculator. I was watching a chess YouTuber, international master, Jonathan Bartholomew, and he said, “I always recommend you analyze your chess games yourself first before you make the computer do it in order to learn more.”

And so, I think, boy, you could apply this in many, many contexts, so that’s a nice little master key right there. And I’ve also observed, sometimes these meeting recorders continue recording when some people have left and, oopsies, the parties did not intend the other people to hear that part of the meeting. Oh, my.

Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, there’s definitely been a number of those communication whoopsies. There’s always the funny one, I’m seeing a CEO get up and, suddenly, they don’t have pants on during the call, accidentally. Like, that’s the good meme, right? That started with the naked shorts hashtag, I believe, that actual example there.

So, these virtual communication blunders, in many ways, can be more problematic because virtual communication is just so permanent. Whereas, if all this stuff happened in person, there isn’t going to, generally, be a record of it. So, virtual communication is great because that record’s there when we need it, but, unfortunately, often it’s there when we don’t want it to be there as well, which is part of why it’s so important to get this stuff right.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Andrew Brodsky
The big thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is artificial intelligence and actually writing your communication for you. So, as opposed to just summarizing meetings, do you just have it write your emails for you? Do you have it write your messages for you? And in my view, artificial communication can be really useful for the brainstorming, helping to edit, but I, generally, recommend to others that you do want to make sure the communication is your words because most of the time no one’s going to figure out you’re using AI, but they might one time.

Maybe it uses the word you don’t, like, elevate. Maybe you would talk about something in person. Maybe they mentioned they had a car accident the past weekend, and then you just copy and paste an AI email that starts with, “I hope you had a great weekend!”

Pete Mockaitis
“Do you remember what I told you about my trauma?”

Andrew Brodsky
Exactly. Exactly. And the problem is, if there’s one slip-up and they realize that you’ve been using AI for communication, their assumption is going to be, “Well, they’ve been using it every time I communicate with them.” And then their next question is going to be, “Well, why am I even communicating with this person?”

So, there’s such a risk of removing yourself and your own words from the communication that even one slip-up could really, really massively backfire. But I do think this human component of communication will continue to be incredibly valuable, at least for the jobs that require humans in them. If you’re required to be in that job, then people are going to want to communicate with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. This has been my AI thing over and over again. It’s, like, AI can be a handy tool in the drafting phase, like, “Ooh, there’s a great word or phrase or sentence here and there.” But, oh, man, you are asking for trouble if you just outsource the whole of anything to AI without some careful checking, editing, curation.

Andrew Brodsky
Exactly. And AI is never going to know everything that you know, at least until we get to that distant future’s phase, maybe where we get brain chips and all that, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, brain scanning.

Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, I think we’re a good aways away from that and from people actually being comfortable with that, even if for some reason that tech companies can get it to work. But the idea here is it’s just not going to know everything you know, so it won’t know everything you know about the other person, it won’t know everything about your goals that you want to achieve, so it just won’t be able to do this as well as you can. And the relational risk of over-relying on these things can be really, really severe.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote?

Andrew Brodsky
I’m kind of a cliche one. I like the Golden Rule. So, “Treat others as you would like others to treat you.”

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

Andrew Brodsky
It’s one from the ‘60s. It’s about the pratfall effect. This study involved people listening to quiz show contestants, and they had someone get all the questions right, and they had someone get a bunch of questions wrong. The person who got every question right, people rated them as really competent, but not very likable.

It’s like that kid in middle school who was raising their hand all the time and got everything right. You thought they were smart, but kind of everyone hated them. It’s also why I didn’t have too many friends in middle school. But there was a third condition in this study where they had the person get every question right, but they spilled coffee on themselves, and that person was rated as just as competent as the one who got everything right, but just as likable as the person who got some questions wrong.

And the idea here of this is that making mistakes in not your domain of expertise or work expertise can make you seem more human and more approachable. So often at work, we feel this need to put our best foot forward or best face forward, but the key findings from the study is that makes you feel unapproachable, especially if you’re a leader or a manager.

And, actually, showing that, “Hey, I’m a human, I make mistakes,” especially in areas where they don’t matter, so it doesn’t make you look incompetent, can be a really good way for making you seem warmer and more likable in the process. So, don’t try and hide your true self in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m thinking, as a callback, when you’re doing a video interview as a candidate, make sure to spill a beverage.

Andrew Brodsky
I might not do it in that short of an interaction, especially when you’re low power, because I think in the video interviews, they’re searching mostly on confidence, at least in the early rounds of them. But if you’re in a later round, you are kind of with a group socializing, one of those situations, that might be a better situation to try and pull one of those things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m sure we’ll make enough mistakes without having to engineer beverage spills along the way. And a favorite book?

Andrew Brodsky
So, my wife was an indie fantasy author, and so I’m biased. I like her stuff better. So, my favorite book of hers was one called Hex Kitchen. H-E-X K-I-T-C-H-E-N. So, it basically took Hunger Games and “Magic” and “Hell’s Kitchen,” and it was a magical cooking tournament. And for me, getting to read fantasy is just such a nice escape, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I leaned on her expertise in helping to write my book so that the stories are a bit more fun. Because me as an academic with bland lame writing, having her on my side was just incredibly useful in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And a favorite tool?

Andrew Brodsky
My favorite tool probably is one that I don’t necessarily want to admit fully, but it’s probably the undo send function in email, and also the delay delivery function in email. At least for the latter one, I’m not as embarrassed about that one. But I like using the delay delivery one often because I sometimes will just try and knock out all my emails, like at one or two points of a day. And by delaying it and communicating a little bit more frequently, or seeming I’m communicating other times, or it can make me seem more present.

So, as opposed to all my emails going to my boss always only at 10:00 a.m. and never going at any different hours for instance, it might make me look like I’m not doing anything the rest of the day. So, sometimes I’ll strategically have my emails go at different times of the day to be like, “Hey, I’m here all the time.” And if I was giving recommendations to managers, I would talk about how to avoid those biased evaluations.

And this stuff is called productivity theater, and I talk about in the book, but the idea here is, unfortunately, human beings like theater, so knowing how to perform in it can be incredibly valuable to making sure that you’re achieving your goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Andrew Brodsky
Going on hikes. There’s a good research that shows just going outdoors, especially when you’re sitting at a computer, and having physical activity can be one of the best ways to disconnect.

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

Andrew Brodsky
When it comes to virtual communication, don’t underestimate the value of removing visual cues. This is what I would call the in-person default bias, where we assume in-person is best, and we compare everything to in-person, but there’s a whole lot of advantages to not meeting in-person, to not having video on, that you can leverage by using email and text-based communication better, the least of which is getting rid of tons and tons of unnecessary meetings in the process.

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

Andrew Brodsky
So, you can check out my LinkedIn, Andrew Brodsky, you’d find me over there pretty easily. And then if you Google me, you’ll find my website as well where you can reach out to me directly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have any final challenges or calls to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, I would say try and think about your communication overload, and not get caught up in it, and take a step away for a moment and try and engage in some meta thinking, a level above, and think about “How can I do this all better?” As opposed to just accepting this stuff as a fact of life and a fact of work, think about “How can I improve my communication habits in ways that will make me more effective and make me happier in the process? Is there ways to do this that I won’t feel as stressed out and I can actually enjoy it more?”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Andrew, thank you.

Andrew Brodsky
Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

1030: Building a Career that Lights You Up with Mary Olson-Menzel

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Mary Olson-Menzel reveals her strategies for aligning your strengths with career opportunities that excite you.

You’ll Learn

  1. How
 to discover what truly lights you up
  2. Effective LinkedIn outreach approaches
  3. The key thing that grows careers

About Mary 

Mary Olson-Menzel, bestselling author of What Lights You Up?, is a career expert and executive coach with 30+ years of leadership experience. As CEO of MVP Executive Development, she helps individuals and organizations unlock their potential through her compassionate, results-driven approach to “Humane Leadership.” A member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches Community, Mary is dedicated to guiding leaders toward greater success and fulfillment.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Mary Olson-Menzel Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mary, welcome!

Mary Olson-Menzel
Thank you, Pete. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear about what lights us up and how to think about that for career and more. So, I have to open up, Mary, with what lights you up?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Writing the book lit me up, for sure. But really, really helping people find what they love to do, find what lights them up, helping them elevate their leadership in the world, is what lights me up, along with my family.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you’ve worked with a lot of folks, executive coaching and looking at career matters, any big surprises or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans when it comes to this sort of thing? What do you know that we don’t and should?

Mary Olson-Menzel
One of the big things, Pete, is that people think that your pedigree is the only thing that matters, right? My degree, my work experience, everything else. The truth is who you are as a human being and what you bring to the table, the energy that you bring to the table, matters even more than your resume and your pedigree and all the degrees in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I think that really resonates and makes a lot of sense And I just love that the book title, the question, “What Lights You Up?” So, pedigree doesn’t matter so much, and what we bring to the table matters a whole lot. Could you share with us, why the title “What Lights You Up?” What makes that a super central and important question to address, as opposed to a nice to have somewhere in the mix?

Mary Olson-Menzel
What lights you up is so meaningful because it’s really truly about what drives you every day. What gets your head off the pillow? What are you passionate about? Where are you finding purpose in your life? And, to me, that all encapsulates your inner light and really what it is that makes you happy on a day-to-day basis in your work.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, it’s almost like, in some ways, your play, your fun, can speak to your destiny, for good or for ill, and I thought, “Oh, that’s maybe a little heavy-handed.” But I’m going to lay it on you, Mary, who wrote the book What Lights You Up? what do you think of that?

Mary Olson-Menzel
I love it. I mean, because what lights people up is different, right? And so, what we really need to think about is, “Where is our sweet spot? What is it?”

There’s a term, Pete, that I love called Ikigai, and it is the Japanese word for the intersection of this, it’s basically a Venn diagram of “What’s your passion? What’s your purpose? What are you good at? And what does the world need?”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, we had the CEO of Korn Ferry, Gary Burnison, on, and he was speaking to a similar thing with regard to, if you really know what your strengths are, what your purpose is, what makes you happy, then if you’re happy, you’re probably motivated. And if you’re motivated, you’re going to outperform.

And I was like, “Okay, well, here’s a guy who’s got a vantage point on careers and talent and progression,” and that seems to resonate and synchronize with these very same concepts. It’s like when you’re into the thing, you pour yourself into that, and then you get good at it, and then you’re distinctive, and you can really kind of build a career, a brand, a reputation, a legacy from that.

Mary Olson-Menzel
Absolutely, and it’s so true. When you’re into what that thing is, you start to feel like you’re in the flow. You know, those moments when you feel like you lose track of time, you lose track of everything because you’re so into what you’re doing, and you’re so excited about it. So, that is what we want more of for everyone. Because what we want is for people to be able to amplify and elevate their own natural gifts in order to make the workplace a more enjoyable place to be.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And could you share with us a story of someone who, maybe they were in a career that was not lighting them up, they did some introspective research to discover some things, and then rejiggered their activities and the job role they were in to see cool results?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Absolutely, there are so many. Part of why I wrote What Lights You Up? is because I developed a 10-step pivot program to help people do exactly that. And so, the myriads of stories are so much fun, but I really like this one. There was a media executive in New York City who was at a crossroads in her career. And she kept looking at all the usual places, right, other media outlets, everywhere else.

And I said to her, “I challenge people to tap into ‘What is it that they’re passionate about? What are their side hustles? What are their hobbies? What are they doing outside of work that’s getting them excited and lit up?’” Well, she was really into horses. And so, we went down this whole path where she said, “Gosh, you know, I mean, if I really didn’t need money, I would just work with horses.”

And I said, “Hold on. Listen to yourself. Maybe there’s a way that you can work with horses and make money and use your existing skillset to do it.” And so, she ended up pivoting into a role up in Saratoga Race Course, where she was the head of marketing and media relations for Saratoga Race Course. She did all kinds of really cool programs with the horses.

Pete Mockaitis
That is really cool. And I love that notion that, in terms of the flow, you’re getting yourself lost in it.

Okay. Well, can you walk us through the process, the steps by which we determine this?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yes. Well, first, you have to take a good look in the mirror, really, really get very, very clear on who you are and what stage of life you’re in, and what you need from that stage of life. We’re all in different spots. We could be just starting our careers and we need to make money, and we just want to make enough money to travel and go out and have a couple drinks on a weekend, but then your stage changes.

There are other stages where you get married, you start a family, and your needs in your career change. So, it’s about getting very, very clear into where you are at this moment in time, what it is that’s making you happy currently, and then starting to think about, “Wait, am I where I want to be in life?”

And if you can answer “Yes,” well, that’s great. Then let’s just look for ways to keep growing and keep going down a path that you already have started that is really great for you. But what if your answer is no? If your answer is no, then it’s really about thinking, “Okay, what’s working in my life? What’s not? And how do I change that? How do I create a roadmap for what could be next?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. And so then, any other key questions that you find super helpful at this stage of the game to elicit insights?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Absolutely. There’s so much that you can start to think about at this stage of the game. You really tap into, “Where are the moments in my day when I’m at my best?” From there, you really think about, “Okay, where are the moments in my day that are draining my energy?” We all have them. Even those of us that love what we do, there’s moments or there’s tasks in our day that drain our energy.

And so, really starting to think about, “Okay, where can I go from here? How can I get more of what it is that I like, what it is that I enjoy, and also what I’m good at? Where can I make the biggest difference, not only in my career and how I feel about it, but in the world?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then what’s our next step?

Mary Olson-Menzel
The next step is to dust off that resume and start getting really very serious about updating the resume, updating your LinkedIn profile, thinking about who you’re going to reach out to in your network, because you cannot do it alone. You have to tap into your network and the people around you. And in the book, I say, “If your inner light is your superpower, your network is the super-highway that’s going to get you your next job.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, in the course of resume and LinkedIn tweaks, any top tips or tricks, do’s or don’ts, things that you see again and again and again that we should all just be doing or not doing?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yes. Stop stressing about the resume, number one. The resume is kind of now what I would say your calling card. It’s that little thing that’s going to get you in the door so it has to tell a story, yes, the story of your career. It has to be clear, concise, but it doesn’t have to be that complicated. And so many people get so stressed about their resume that they lose sight of the fact that this is only one piece of a job search.

So, take the pressure off yourself on the resume. Make sure that it’s clear, concise, easy to read. The average recruiter spends six to ten seconds looking at your resume, so it just has to be eye-catching, clear, so that it catches their eye, because then the next thing they’re going to do is go to your LinkedIn profile. And your LinkedIn profile, these days, as of 2025, is exactly where it’s at.

This is where people are networking, this is where people are finding jobs, and this is where hiring managers and recruiters take a deeper dive into who you are as a human being and what your professional profile looks like.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us more. LinkedIn profile, content, conveying who I am as a human being, how does that work?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Okay. Well, you have all of the information from your resume on LinkedIn, so you’re transferring all that data to your LinkedIn profile. But what LinkedIn does is it takes it up a big step further. You’ve got your profile picture, you’ve got your connections, you’ve got what people are saying about you, you’ve got all kinds of different things that you can put on your LinkedIn profile to make it very robust, to kind of give a fuller picture of who you are as a professional, who you are as a human being. And then, even more importantly, once you’ve gotten that all set, the next thing is to engage on LinkedIn. And so, that is really a very, very important part, starting to put your thoughts out there, professionally, not politically, hopefully, not in other ways, but, really, professional thoughts, like, “Oh, I saw that Google is doing this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Then engaging with other people. So, Pete, if you put something really interesting out on LinkedIn, I’m going to like it, I might share it, and I might even repost it with my thoughts. So, this is where you’re starting to create some momentum, positive momentum, with the algorithms of LinkedIn so that more and more people are noticing you on there.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you said don’t do the politics. When you said who I am or who you are, and LinkedIn is sharing this, I guess I’d love some more of your perspective on that with regard to what belongs there and what doesn’t. Because I think who I am, I think is much broader than the career business-y facet of Pete Mockaitis. But, in your view, is LinkedIn then for more than just the job career business-y part of a professional?

Mary Olson-Menzel
It has become a little bit more than, which is actually kind of nice, in my opinion, because when you’re looking for a job, when you’re living out there in the world, you are not just what you do. You are a whole human being, and so I think that’s the really important part. I mean, I have shared things about my kids on LinkedIn.

My mom passed away last year. I shared a whole post about her and how she inspired me in my life.

So, it has become a little bit more personal, which is, I think, really great, because I think it just shows the kind of person that you are with the things that you’re sharing. You do run the risk, though, of unconscious bias from a hiring manager if you start sharing things that are too personal.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example of what’s too personal?

Mary Olson-Menzel
I tell most people to stay away from politics and religion on LinkedIn. That is much more for your own private conversations or other kinds of conversations. I think that when you’re sharing things on LinkedIn, it’s really about amplifying and elevating who you are as an executive, who you are as a professional, but also who you are as a person.

So, if you can keep it with a more productive and positive spin, what you’re sharing, or from a learning, “I went through this really hard thing, and this is what I learned from it. I want to share this with the rest of you so that you all can learn from this, so that you don’t have to go through this hard thing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. All right. So, we got our introspection, we got our resume in LinkedIn, looking fabulous. What’s next?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Next is reaching out to that network to start having conversations. And the one mistake, there’s many mistakes, but one of the top mistakes that a lot of job seekers make is that they just look for the openings. So, I’m going to use Google as an example again. Pete, you want to go get a job at Google? You’re going to look for, what does Google have open? What are they hiring for?

And in my book, I basically say flip your job search inside out. Don’t just look for the openings. Don’t just scroll on Indeed or scroll on LinkedIn. Start to create a target list of companies that you’re inspired by, a target list of companies that feel like companies that you might want to work for. And I put those companies into three categories that I call the three Ps.

One is your usual prospects. Like, our friend from New York City in media, she was looking at usual prospects just in other media and entertainment companies. The next category is your pivots. She could have taken those media tools and skills that she has into environment where she could have done something really interesting but then she really was focused on her passions, and that’s the most fun area to focus on. That whole area is like, “Hey, if I can make money doing something I’m passionate about then I’m winning.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, cool. All right. And so, any pro tips when we’re doing this reach out? What do we say? What do we not say?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yes. So, you’ve got the target list of companies, that’s the place that you start. And so then, you go on to LinkedIn and into your network, and you say, “All right, who do I know that works at Google? Who do I know that…?” For Google, I’m just using them as an example today, but, “Who do I know that works at Korn Ferry? Who do I know that works at 3M?”

Whatever is on your target list, starting to look into your network, and say, “Okay, who can I talk to that’s working there or that knows somebody who’s working there?” And then that’s when the very warm connections start.

Keep it short because people’s attention spans are not very long these days. Stay really, really focused on, “Hi, Pete, I’m very interested in talking to you. I’m in transition and I’d love to hear what the opportunities are at XX company.” Simple. And if you have mutual connections, “Hey, Pete, I’m connected to you by Joe. Joe says great things about you and thinks we should talk.”

Keep it so simple. Because, immediately, they’re going to look at your LinkedIn profile and check out who you are anyway, so you don’t have to give a lot of words into who you are and what you’re looking for. Just, “I’m looking for my next career adventure, and I’d love to talk.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And what’s our next step?

Mary Olson-Menzel
The next step is having the conversation. You can do it, obviously, in the good old-fashioned way of a phone call. You could do it on Zoom. You can do it on Teams. You could meet for coffee. But just remember that people are busier than ever these days, so ask for 15 to 20 minutes of their time. And if it goes longer, that’s just a bonus. It means you guys are clicking.

But 15-20 minutes just to connect, and then talk to them about what they’re doing. Just be curious, I mean, curious about human beings, curious about what they’re doing, curious about what it’s like to work at that company. And then when you’re wrapping up the conversation, number one thing to never forget is to ask, “How can I help you in return?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. And then, while we’re asking them questions, are there any key pieces of insight or questions that are super powerful that you recommend to try to include within that conversation?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Definitely delve into what the culture is like. You want to make sure that that culture, of whatever organization that you’re targeting, is a good fit for you and for what you want out of the workplace. But also try to ask them to introduce you to people, “Are there three people that you could introduce me to or three names of people that I should be reaching out to, to get some help?” And then, of course, always ask, “What are the next steps?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, after you’ve had these conversations, what’s next?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Well, then you hope that Joe, our friend Joe, who connected us, will say, “Well, great. You know what, Mary? I’d love for you to come in and talk to the hiring manager. I know that we’ve got open positions in this, this, and this.” And then if you’re lucky, sometimes it’s a much longer game than this quick and this what’s next.

But if you’re lucky, you get in, do an interview, and then you tell your story, and that’s where the magic happens. The resume just tells me who you are, but the way that you would tell your story is what’s going to draw me in and want to hire you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how do we do that well?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Well, we start at the beginning. People, just remember this. Literally, don’t start from where you are currently. Start at the beginning because the brain is wired to listen to a story that’s in chronological order, “I started at undergrad here. I did this.” Talk about the transitions to, for example, I worked at Tribune Company in Chicago for almost 10 years.

The transition of why I left Tribune Company was because we had a job opportunity in New York. So, make sure that you’re not only talking about your accomplishments, but also the ways and the reasons that you left one particular job to go to another one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then, let’s say that conversation went smashingly well, and we have an offer. What now?

Mary Olson-Menzel
What now? This is fast forward career coaching. I love it. So, what now? You’ve got an offer on the table and you really have to think about, “Okay, is this offer…?” Yes, it’s amazing, you’ve gotten this far, “But is it an offer that’s going to work for me and my stage of life right now?”

So, you really want to weigh out all of your options with the offer. Is it compensation-wise what I want? Is the quality of life that I want going to be there? Is the culture that I want going to be there? going to be there? Where are the growth opportunities? Where are those? How can I make sure that I have forward momentum once I get into this job?”

And then, benefits package. All of it falls into a whole package for the whole person. And, once again, you are a whole person who’s negotiating a whole package for your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And so, when it comes to the negotiation, do you recommend we go ahead and do that?

Mary Olson-Menzel
That’s a tricky one. There are ways to negotiate, but you don’t want to push so hard that you turn them off and potentially rescind the offer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yeah, I know. This is it. The stakes are really high. You’re at this point, and so you have to know exactly where you can negotiate. There are a lot of hiring managers who will tell you, “I mean, you’re at the top of my salary band, and this is as high as I can go.” All right, well, then you’re not going to negotiate on the salary, but you can potentially negotiate on the softer things, like maybe more paid time off, maybe a little extra vacation time, maybe a sign-on bonus, maybe they’ll pay for you to go get your graduate degree or pay for some professional training. Those are all negotiables that will help you get to a better place where you feel really good about the offer package.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then, in terms of the actual dance or conversation, are there any things you recommend, magical words or phrases that we do say or we don’t say?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Well, I think the number one thing to think about is gratitude. Gratitude is everything when it comes to a negotiation, but also, when it comes to life. I mean, truly. I think that if you come to it from a place of appreciation, “Thank you so much for this offer. I am really excited to start at this company. I just have a few questions. Is there any room to move on the salary? Is there any room to negotiate something else?” So, coming from that place of appreciation and gratitude and really helping them understand that this is a place you want to work and you want to make it work for both of you.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. So, you’re just asking about the flexibility. And that’s sort of an interesting question in that, I suppose, it’s in the employer’s interest if they really want you to be honest. Because, I mean, if you just wanted some savings, you’d be like, “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. No flexibility whatsoever,” you know? Rigid as a bar of iron.

Mary Olson-Menzel
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
However, hopefully, you’ve got them really, really fired up for you, in particular. And I guess it also varies a great deal in terms of, it might not even be very emotional at all in terms of, “Well, actually, no. This compensation package is standardized across all of North America, and so that’s kind of what it is.” So, “Okay, glad I asked. Now we know,” and you can sort of make the thumbs up, thumbs down decision on those terms.

As opposed to, I’ve heard other people say that they just have carte blanche authority to give a 10% salary increase to anybody who bothers to ask without approval from anyone higher up. It’s like, “Oh, wow. Well, that sure sounds like if that’s a semi-common policy…” you tell us if it is, Mary, “…then I should probably make sure to ask.”

Mary Olson-Menzel
You know, Pete, you brought up the most important thing – honesty from day one. Truly. So, when you start going through the interview process, a recruiter or a hiring manager is going to ask you, “What are your compensation expectations? What do you want to make? What do you need in this job?” And, hopefully, both sides are being very, very honest and upfront so that there are no surprises by the time you get to that point.

And, by the way, I can’t remember who said this recently, but they were saying, basically, it was an actor who said, “I’ve got this magic word is, ‘Thank you so much. By any chance, can you do this? By any chance, can you do this?’” So, you’re not saying, “I demand,” “I want.” You’re saying, “Hmm, is there a little wiggle room here? Is there a chance that this can go up 10%?”

And if they can, hopefully, they’ll be honest with you, and say, “Yes, absolutely,” and then they just made your day and you made 10% more that year. But if they can’t, they’re going to be honest with you, too, about that. And then you’ll start to be able to see where the negotiation space is.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, let’s say, “Hooray! A deal is made. A job offer made. A job offer accepted,“ any pro tips for the first weeks and months?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yes, lots. So, the first 30, 60, 90 days of your tenure at this company are so important. You really, really want to become a sponge, you want to become a student of that organization, and you want to work side-by-side with your boss, with HR, to make sure that you’re meeting all the key clients, key stakeholders, and making sure that you’re having one-on-one meetings with these people so that you’re getting to know all of the people that are going to be surrounding you on a day-to-day basis.

And in What Lights You Up? I have a whole sheet of talking points to have those meetings, like, “Tell me about a typical day. What’s a day in the life for you? What keeps you up at night, Pete? How can I help with that by coming into this role?” All of those things, “How can we best work across departments?” You shouldn’t just be meeting with people in your department. You should be meeting with other departments, too, so that you can see where there’s room for cross-departmental collaboration.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And, tell me, we sort of walked through a process timeline. Are there some things you recommend that we just do always outside of when we’re specifically thinking about maybe a new opportunity or a transition, but just a regular wise thing to do to keep our careers and trajectories sharpened in a great spot?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Well, always remember that your career growth is in your hands, so don’t always rely upon your boss or the people in the organization to be constantly looking for opportunities for you. You’ve got to be open to those opportunities and be looking for them, and have it be a conversation with your boss too. So, one, never stop growing once you’re in that role, but also even if you’re so happy in this role, make sure that you’re keeping your network strong. Make sure that you’re having a friend at another company every once in a while.

Make sure that you’re watching what’s going on with other companies so that you’re not only growing within your own organization, but you’re creating a presence around you that can support you if, all of a sudden, the worst thing happens and you get laid off the next day. You want to have that network strong all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Mary, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yeah, I would just reiterate that. Be open to the opportunities that are around you. Be open to conversations around you. Become a student of not only the industry that you’re in, but a student of life. Be curious about what’s going on around you, and just remember that you can focus on what lights you up. You can focus on what makes you happy. And I’ve seen thousands of my clients do it, so just don’t lose hope.

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

Mary Olson-Menzel
One of my favorite quotes is “The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what one’s destiny is, and then to do it,” and that is by Henry Ford.

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

Mary Olson-Menzel
I mean, I’m really kind of loving Mel Robbins right now. She’s just written this book called Let Them. It’s “The Let Them Theory.” And it’s all about how other people are going to do things that maybe you don’t like but you don’t have control over that. All you can control is what you react and how you react and what your mindset is. So, in life right now, somebody’s doing something you don’t like? Let them. But you can control how you react to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Mary Olson-Menzel
One of my very favorite books is a book called Leading with Gratitude by two of my fellow Marshall Goldsmith “100 Coaches” colleagues, Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick. Just a great, great book, all about bringing gratitude into your day-to-day life and how it just changes everything.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Mary Olson-Menzel
My favorite tool that anyone can have access to is one called StrengthsFinder. And you can get it on Amazon, you can take the test, you can get your top five strengths. But what I love about it most, Pete, is that it throws away the notion that we were talking about earlier that, actually, that your CEO of Korn Ferry was talking about.

When you’re leaning into your natural gifts, you can amplify everything you’re doing. When, in America, companies many, many years ago would be like, “Well, Pete is a really great interviewer, but how good is he at finance? Maybe we should send Pete to some finance classes.” No, Tom Rath just blows this out of the water, and says, “No, let’s just continue to amplify our own strengths so that we can continue to get better and better at what we do and what we’re good at, and looking at our own natural gifts and bringing those to the workplace.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Mary Olson-Menzel
My favorite habit, which has become a must-do most days, is, as soon as I get the kids off to school, I do a quick meditation, and then I get into a Peloton workout. And that, before I’ve started my day, work can go off in different directions, and you can be fighting fires or doing whatever you have to do all day, but I already know that I’ve gotten my kids off to school safely, I’ve grounded myself with a meditation, and I’ve taken care of my body so that I have more energy for the rest of the day with my clients.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with clients and readers and audience members?

Mary Olson-Menzel
I really think that my favorite quote from the book, is it’s imperative to work, to keep the lights on in your house, but it’s even more important to keep the lights on in your heart and do what you love. Because when you’re doing what you love, you’ll get hired faster, you’ll get promoted faster, you’ll make more money, whatever money is to you, whether that’s time or cash or whatever, and the byproduct of being happier.

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

Mary Olson-Menzel
They can connect with me on LinkedIn, as I said. It’s the best place to connect. Mary Olson-Menzel at my LinkedIn profile. You can also go to MaryOlsonMenzel, all one word, dot com, for anything you need to know about the book. And then for any work that we do is MVPExec.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?

Mary Olson-Menzel
There’s no better time than today to start doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mary, thank you. I appreciate this and wish you the best.

Mary Olson-Menzel
Thank you, Pete. It’s been fun.

1029: How to Tell Stories that Inspire and Influence with Anjali Sharma

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Anjali Sharma reveals why some stories fail to influence or inspire—and shares her top tips for creating stories that do.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why “amazing” storytelling isn’t the end goal 
  2. The critical question that generates more effective stories 
  3. Why to think like a journalist–not a novelist 

About Anjali 

Anjali Sharma is the Managing Director of Narrative: The Business of Stories. Anjali works with private and government organisations to determine what their individual and unique business challenges are, and by incorporating Story Skills, she crafts individualised solutions to help solve those challenges. 

Anjali has helped companies to increase Staff Engagement and Performance, increase Client Satisfaction and Sales, define Company Values and effectively Position Brands by embedding Story Skills into their organisations. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Anjali Sharma Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Anjali, welcome!

Anjali Sharma
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat storytelling. And I’d love it if you could kick us off by telling us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about us humans and story over the course of the last 20 years.

Anjali Sharma
I think the most wonderful thing about storytelling is that, no matter where you go, there is room for storytelling everywhere, whether you go into someone’s life, whether you go into someone’s work, whether you go into relationships with your family, but the most effective storytelling is the one that actually really deep dives into a particular domain.

What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that what I used to think, roughly about 12 years ago about storytelling is, storytelling is everything, it’s everywhere, and that was the beauty of it, but it was also the disadvantage of it, because you could start telling stories to people who work in corporations, which is where I largely kind of played the work that I do, and they would be like, “Yeah, it’s a great story, but how does it matter to me?”

So, I think the hyper-target-ness of the story is what makes it resonate, where people listen to it, and go, “Oh, my God, that’s exactly what happens to me.” That thing that people say can only come when you really target the story to the audience that you’re telling the story to. Stories are great, but the best storytellers know how to flex their narrative according to who they’re telling the story to. So, I think my biggest discovery was that.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, could you give us a really quick example of what’s a generic story that’s not really going to “wow” someone versus what is that same story sound like in a micro-targeted way?

Anjali Sharma
Okay. So, I think I’d like to sort of make a little correction to that because, even though the story can go “wow,” we don’t tell just for them to be like, “Wow.” We want people to get up and take an action, and it is not necessary that whatever I will say “wow” to, I will actually act upon. I’ll demonstrate this to you.

So, say I want people to challenge the status quo for better innovation, and I say, “You know, we must challenge the status quo,” and I tell them the story of the founder of Body Shop, Anita Roddick, and Anita Roddick tells this story. She’s no more, but when she was around, she told this story to a magazine interview in which she says that, “When I was all of 12 years old, I remember the day when my father passed away, and my mother, in the house, was cleaning the floor, and there was this bucket of dirty water next to her.”

“And she looked quite sort of anxious and stressed, but a large part of her anxiety and stress was coming from the fact that my parents didn’t get along with the local priest, and she wasn’t sure that my father was going to get a Catholic funeral or not. And a few minutes later, the doorbell rang and my mother opened the door, and the priest was standing there. And the priest looked at my mom and said, ‘You’re very lucky. We’ve decided to give your husband a Catholic funeral.’”

“And my mother picked up the dirty water and splashed it onto the priest. Now when you’re brought up with a mother like that, you would challenge status quo.” Because for her, as a Catholic, it was right to get her father to get that funeral. It wasn’t a favor that the priest was doing.

Now, a lot of people get moved by that story, and they go, “Wow,” and “Amazing.” But as soon as you walk out of that place where I have told you the story, you’re walking out with a colleague of yours, you would say, “It’s a lovely story, but if I did that to my boss, I just, you know, I don’t think I’ll have my job. I’ll lose my job,” right?

So, a lot of the stories get, like, “Amazing,” but they don’t get an action in the right direction. Therefore, you have to choose the story very, very correctly because a job of a corporate professional is to remember that, more important than the re-marketability of the story, that this is an amazing story, is the resonance of the story. Resonance of the story will drive an action. Remarkability will give you claps.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. That’s a really handy distinction, and I think it’s possible to go a whole lifetime without making that distinction because the claps feel good, you say, “I’m a master storyteller. People, they cry, they applaud, they tell me I’m amazing.” If you’re a speaker, they keep telling their friends, “And I keep getting booked.” But in terms of, if you’re being after a specific activity or action from your audience, that’s not adequate.

Anjali Sharma
Certainly. So, my success in a corporate world is not determined by the amount of claps and tears I get in a boardroom. It’s determined by how I moved people to take the action in the right direction and how much innovation we get, how we enhance the productivity, how we motivate people to come up with the best possible campaign next. So, I think that’s a very important distinction. You’re absolutely right.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I guess, specifically that context, in terms of if you’re just looking to make phenomenal content that gets a lot of podcast downloads or even if it’s like a full-blown movie or something, then a wow can be fine. But if we’re after a particular action on the part of the people we’re telling it to, then, yes, that’s one key thing to look out for, is, “Can they receive that? Is it relatable?”

So, lay it on us, how do we go through a process by which we can craft stories that are effective at bringing about the action-taking we’d like from the people we’re telling the stories to?

Anjali Sharma
So, we’ve kind of, over the last 12 years or so, tried to make this approach extremely practical, simply because of the reason that, if I walked into a corporate boardroom and I asked people, or into any workspace and asked people, it’s like, “What is it that is your biggest challenge?” almost everyone will say time, right? 

The really traditional format of story and the creative format of story that actually relies on high character, high emotions, kind of built over time, you write, you go away, you let your creative juices flow. In corporations and workplaces, we don’t have time. So, the way I look at it is like this. Before even you tell a story, I say to people, the audience that you’re talking to, first determine, “Are you influencing them or you are inspiring them?” Those are two very different things. I mean, if I’m going to be speaking to the board or I’m going to be speaking to the senior leadership team. I need to influence them. But if I’m speaking in a town hall and getting 450 staff members to join an AI-upskilling program, then I need to inspire them.

So, the key way to differentiate whether I’m inspiring or influencing is, “Am I asking these people to take an action that affects many people? Or am I asking them to take an action that just affects them?” If it is affecting many people, like, “Let’s adopt that, buy that new technology,” it’s going to affect many people. That’s an influence decision.

But if I’m asking people to go and join this one-week upskilling AI hackathon that we’ve got, then that’s an individual’s decision that I’m going to go and join it, right? It’s a little bit like getting people to be fit, getting people to read more. These are individual decisions. I’m not disrupting an ecosystem. It’s my individual decision. Those are primarily inspirational messages.

So, very simply, “How do I target the story right?” You first think, “Am I influencing? Am I inspiring?” If I’m influencing, I’m asking people to take an action, make a decision around things that sort of influences, has an effect on many people. But if it’s an inspirational message, it’s likely to be an individual who’s going to have to take that action.

Okay, once I’ve determined that, very simply, I go, “If it is inspiration, then I have to give them a nudge to a new identity.” Because what we often do is we give people goals, but I learned this from James Clear in his book, the Atomic Habits, and then I’ve brought that learning into storytelling.

When we talk about goals, for example. Writing a book is a goal. But why do people write a book? Because they want to be called authors. That’s a new identity they want for themselves. Running a marathon is a goal, but being called a marathoner is an identity. People want to be known like that.

So, when you are developing an inspirational message, you have to give nudge to a new identity. If I bring it down to the corporate world, I’ll give you another example. When I bring it down to the corporate world, we worked on a program back in 2016 where we were asked to build a story around a factory that was going to become a smart factory with automation, robotics, etc.

And the whole proposition of that story was productivity, and I was like, “This is not going to work for people on the ground. This is not inspirational for them,” right? So, we built a new identity for them – supervisors of robots. Because somebody’s got to program them, somebody’s got to charge them, somebody’s got to roster them, and “Do you want to be the supervisors of robots?” And that was inspirational for them.

So, that’s how you kind of look at an inspirational message. And then when you come towards the influence style of messaging, I think your hyper-target-ness comes from, really, looking at three areas. Most messages that are influential have a story that anchors on time, which is efficiency. So, can you make a proposition for being more efficient? Or, they come to an image or a reputation, which is, “Can this story help build better image or a reputation?”

And then, lastly, if you’re working for a profit-making company, which most people are, “Am I able to, through this story, save money or make money?” So, I often joke around and say, “What is the TIM you’re angling?” T-I-M, you know, time, image, money. So, if you want influential stories, story that influences, then time, image, money are my anchors. But if I’m building an inspirational story, then a nudge to a new identity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is a fantastic distinction between inspiring or influencing. And I’m reminded of, I think in my early days, I was doing consulting for a strategy consulting firm, Bain, and we would make these slides that were so dense with numbers, numbers, data, charts, all this stuff, and effectively we were influencing corporate executives and boards in terms of, “Take this course of action and you will see tremendous profit.”

Like, that was always, we talked a lot about our story, “What’s our story?” And, basically, that was always the story, like, “Hey, do this thing we say and you’re going to make a lot of money, if you boil it down.” And so, those slides had a whole lot of data, a whole lot of charts to paint a compelling picture that was, “Hey, here’s the proof, here’s the evidence, here’s the argumentation like a debate, that this is, in fact, the optimal pathway relative to your alternatives.”

But then, at the same time, on my downtime, I’d be watching TED Talks, and I think, “Man, their slides look so much cooler and more beautiful and inspiring than what we do.” I felt like we were sort of we spent all the time with these slides, and I thought they don’t feel as awesome as the TED Talker slides, “What’s up?”

And I think this is a really handy way to think about it. It’s like, we are attempting to accomplish completely different objectives. If you trot out 20 fancy data charts to your TED audience, they’re like, “Yeah, okay. That wasn’t very much fun for us. Thanks.” And vice versa, if I just showed a picture of a seed in a hand to a board, it’s like, “All right, I hope you’ve got some data coming because this isn’t going to cut it for long.”

Anjali Sharma
Exactly. Oh, my God, you sort of distilled it beautifully. And I love the fact that I have taken you back to some time in your career because that is exactly what resonance is. I’m reminding you of an experience you have already had. And when that happens, you know that what I’m saying is resonating with you. So, you’re absolutely right, the objectives are very, very different, and that’s where the hyper-target-ness works really well.

I’ll add one little piece of information. There’s always this sort of war between the technicality of what we do and the emotions that are embedded in the way we communicate. And what I have learned is that time, image, and money, although seems like a sort of a very transactional way of influencing. In fact, rooted in it is an emotional thing.

Look at that boardroom and see all those people who are seated there. Their next career move depends on whether they are making that company efficient, whether they’re making that company profitable, which is money, and whether they are protecting the reputation of the organization or not, or they’re building the reputation of the organization or not.

So, I used to think, “Why is it so transactional and so dry and distilled in influence area?” But then when I started looking at the people sitting there, I was like, “No, this is also emotional because their next career step is dependent on those three things. So, their connection comes from that.

Leaning upon the definition of connection from Dr. Brene Brown, the exchange of energy that happens when people feel seen, heard, and valued.

When those people sit in that boardroom and you tell them a story that anchors itself on time, image, and money, they feel seen, heard, and valued, because that is what their job is all day in and out, to make more profit for the company, to enhance the reputation image of the company, and to make sure they’re efficient all the time. An inspiration, a nudge to the identity, new identity, is what’s the connection for the person who’s listening to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really resonant. And it’s funny, like if you apply the same sort of debater, data-driven argumentation approach to be very compelling about a thing they don’t care about, and I’m not making value judgments either way, but if a board doesn’t care a hoot about climate change or whatever, and you have just fantastic statistics about the carbon emissions of a thing and how this pathway will be so much better, you may have proven that point excellently in terms of that’s a rock-solid, logical approach, but you haven’t hit upon a thing that they’re emotionally invested in, you’re not going to be successful in your attempt to influence.

Anjali Sharma
Hundred, hundred, hundred percent. You know, Pete, you’ve taken me back to 2018, when I went to Hiroshima, Japan for 18 months to make another semiconductor factory have increased level of diversity. So, Japan, obviously had a huge amount of skill shortage, I mean, still does, but that was becoming a huge issue at that time. And this factory was originally owned by Japanese owners, but an American company took over.

And they soon realized that, “If we don’t get more foreigners working here, if we don’t get more women working here, and if we don’t get younger people working in here, so it’s diversity of three different lenses, we’re not going to have any people, and the factory will have to shut down.” So, there was this whole proposition, imagine, that homogeneous culture of Japan, this proposition of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and everyone used to just kind of roll their eyes and they were like, “Yeah, whatever.”

And I had this vivid memory of one conversation between two senior leaders that I just happened to hear, who said, “Great, now we can make a compelling case of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but we still don’t get what is its connection to the performance?” And I realized, “Oh, my God, like, what they really care about is the performance of the factory,” and then we have to find a way to connect the DEI proposition to the performance of the company.

And when we started to kind of figure how diversity, equity, and inclusion will help the performance of the company, every boardroom eye was curious, eager, willing, because it connected with them, and there was a direct correlation. We just needed to surface that and anchor the story in that.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think I’ve learned that lesson a few times in terms of, “No, this is what you should care about. This is what is right and good and proper.” Like, that really falls flat, it’s like, “Okay, well, now I feel judged and I guess I don’t, so I am bad,” and I’m thinking about another manufacturing situation.

I was once doing a Myers-Briggs training for some executives. I was very excited because, like, we had these executives. There was their big meeting where they had flown in from multiple continents, and I was a part of it, like, “Oh, wow, I feel like I’m big-time now,” kind of early on when I was independent in my career.

And they had this situation, they manufactured like sausage casings. And, apparently, one of their major production facilities was having a real big problem at the moment, where there were sausages exploding left and right, which I thought was sort of a funny thing to imagine, “Oh, another exploding hotdog!” you know.

And so, they were all kind of consumed with this mentally, and I was like, “You know, isn’t that kind of a manufacturing issue. You should just kind of let them handle it. This is, like, your big executive meeting. This seems weird. And I feel inconvenienced because I’ve trucked it out here and I’m ready. I’m fired up and ready to go.”

And I thought it was so brilliant the way their VP of Human Resources reframed it for me, she says, “You know, this stuff here that we’re doing is important, and I really want to make sure that the whole team has all of their attention and focus on this, as opposed to this manufacturing issue. So, it’d be great if you could come back in two hours and then we’ll have it as sorted as it can be, and we’ll be able to give you all of our attention.”

I thought, “This woman is a master, because I’m annoyed, I’m frustrated, I don’t like rescheduling the thing. I’m fired up, energized, perfectly caffeinated, raring to go.” But then she turned it around to the thing that I cared about was having a productive, engaged, transformational session, and, “How, in fact, if you just do this thing that we want, then you’ll get that.”

And I heard a quote, which I love, which it said, “Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have it your way.” And I was like, “Okay, yeah, she just did that to me.” And we had a great session and the sausage factory, I guess, got sorted out, all is well. And so, you nailed it. Like, if you are making a super airtight logical case about a thing they don’t care about, you’re not going to get very far.

Anjali Sharma
And the tricky part is to really figure out “What do they care about?” Because, in your head you can think, “Oh, of course, everybody should care about DEI and climate change, and it affects our planet.” Yeah, sure, everybody should, but tomorrow morning when they get a call from their boss, nobody’s going to ask them about the diversity level. They’re going to ask about, “Where are we sitting in terms of performance?”

Like, even with the whole ESG bit, I have to be very honest. Every time I work on a narrative, and we come to the S part, which is the social impact part, the reason why the teams are really motivated is when they recognize that they’re not going to get investors if they don’t work on this. So, in some ways, it is an institutionalized forced change. So, how good it is that we have to think about diversity under social impact of ESG, the S part, because now, if we don’t have a good ESG report, we’re not going to get investors?

So, it’s like, there’s this term I heard many years ago, intrusion of inclusion, like you really make sure that it happens by systematically creating things that are institutionalized. You cannot escape those. So, I think more and more that I do this work, the more and more I realize that, yes, we all want to be good, but what we’re worried about is just getting through today. And if we want to get through today, in the way the ecosystem is built, then we have to really find the right framing and the right positioning and the right target of the story, or else it would fall on deaf ears.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so understood. And so, we have a huge distinction about “Are we trying to inspire or influence?” And we got to really get after a thing that they care about. So, can you walk us through sort of step-by-step or what are the key actions or processes we go through in order to do just that?

Anjali Sharma
Yeah, so I’ll pick it up from before. So, you sort of think influence, inspire, you think, “Okay, I need a story that I can anchor on time, image, money, or I need a story that can actually invite them to being, have a nudge to the new identity.” Now, here’s one thing I want people to remember is that, for a very long time, what we have understood for storytelling to be is either a marketer’s take, or a very big sort of stage sort of style of storytelling.

But when you are standing in the boardroom, the kind of storytelling that works in corporation has to have a little bit of a journalistic take into it. So, my invitation to all people who work within, who are actually trying to use stories in day-to-day work is to have a slightly journalistic take of storytelling. Now let me elaborate this for you, and then I will demonstrate for you.

So, what do journalists do? They go into the ground, they find the stories, and then they bring them out, and then they tell you, and then they make a point, or whatever is happening, they bring that out into the open, they bring it out to the surface. Now, a lot of people will try to find stories on the internet, from TED Talks, and try to tell all these really big types of stories which will never work.

Journalistic storytelling requires for you to actually get your hands dirty, go in, into the grounds, the coalface, and actually find stories that can actually help you make a point that you want to make, or sometimes they even change the point you want to make. You think that’s the point you want to make, and when you start having those conversations with people on the ground, you realize, “Oh, my God, what I thought was all along wrong.”

So, here’s an example of a journalistic story. So, once I’ve said that my audience are inspirational, so I will say, “You are the workers in this factory that are going to become a smart factory. I invite you to become the supervisors of robots.” Now at this stage, they’ll be like, “Hmm,” so it’s relevant for them, but it’s not yet resonant for them. It’s, “Okay, here’s something for me. You’ve opened with that positioning. I like it, but tell me more.” It’s not going to stop at that. A nudge to the new identity is the beginning of it.

Then, when you tell the story, here’s the story I found from the ground, and I built it for a CEO president, and he told: “Now, what do I mean by being supervisors of robots? Now, many of you in the audience today actually work within the factory, helping with taking things from one end of the factory to the other end of the factory.”

“Let’s take Maria, for example. Maria has been with our company for about eight years now, and Maria is in the audience. And when she joined us eight years ago, her job was to take a trolley, put in the semiconductor chips, and move them from one area to the other area.”

“Now, this may sound simple, but we all know this is a highly sensitive product, and it has to be done very, very carefully. So, it takes time and she moves the products carefully to the other side and downloads them for whatever other activity that needs to be done with them before they’re ready.”

“Now when she joined us eight years ago, she would on an average do eight rounds in an eight-hour shift. She’d go from here to there, here to there about eight rounds or so. Now, today, it’s the same Maria, it’s the same factory, but she’s having to do many more ups and downs, close to 24 ups and downs in a day. That’s three times more. Why is that? Because the demand for semiconductor chips has increased.”

“Semiconductor chips are everywhere. In our passports, there’s a semiconductor chip. When there is a finger scan somewhere, there’s a semiconductor chip everywhere. They’re everywhere. So, the demand increases, our workload increases.”

“Our workload increases, we are not allowed to have a bigger factory, we are not allowed to hire more people. Within the same factory size, within the same number of people, Maria is now being asked to do a lot more. And this trend of more and more and more and more will not stop. So, what are we going to do? What we are going to do is we are going to tell Maria to stop doing this work of picking up products from one end and moving them to the other end.”

“Instead, we’re going to get an AGV vehicle, which is like a robot, to do that, and Maria’s job is going to be the supervisor of that vehicle and make sure that it is rostered, it’s charged, it does the work that it does.” Now, this is a journalistic style of storytelling, because I’ve gone and found it on the ground, and when people are listening to the story, they’re going, “Yeah, exactly. That happens to me all the time. I have to move things so many more number of times. Like, I’m a human. How much more can I do?”

It reminds them of their own experience, so the resonance starts to happen here. The positioning and the anchoring of supervisor of robots brings relevance. It does not bring resonance. It’s when the combination of relevance and resonance happens, influence takes place. So, what is journalistic about it? Journalistic is that I didn’t get that story by just sitting in the boardroom and having a conversation. I got the story because I went on the ground, I chatted to people, “Talk to me about your day-to-day work.”

I can’t even tell these people, “Tell me a story,” because if you ask people, “Tell me a story,” then people think that I’m asking them to be Clint Eastwood. So, you have to have a very specific style of getting moments out of them and then be able to sense-make and put them into a structured way and give people who work in these organizations, who need to inspire or influence people, a language which will move people into the right direction.

Now, this is not a story which will make people go, “Wow, what a story!” What this would definitely do, it’ll remind many of those people who are sitting in the audience going, “That’s exactly what happens to me. That is so true.” That is so true doesn’t mean it’s factual. What it means is, “It resonates with me.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I like that journalistic frame, because that helps a lot with regard to, we’re not trying to blow minds, necessarily, by making like a James Cameron epic film situation, so it’s not the Hollywood style, nor is it are we trying to be sort of the great American novel style but we’re being journalistic. And just the same way that we have a fascinating, riveting, impactful sort of news article or documentary, that’s kind of what we’re going for here with regard to our actions, our discovery, our presentation.

And we can feel great about the success if they are nudged toward that identity, as opposed to they are telling everybody they have to check out your YouTube channel.

So that’s a great lens, the journalistic lens. Tell us, do you have any top do’s or don’ts in terms of executing this in practice?

Anjali Sharma
I think the first thing is that, whenever you stand in front of your audience and you start speaking, you have to have earned the right to be there. This is not, “I’ll get GPT to come up with something for me.” I mean, of course, you can take GPT’s help to refine it, but the moment I start speaking about Maria’s story, straight away, the audience know that I have done the due diligence of going to them, at the coalface, chatting to people, and finding out what’s going on.

So, I always say to people that, “Don’t sit in the boardroom and just don’t chat there. Don’t think you know what it is. Get down, and talk to people and figure out.” I think that’s the first thing.

The second thing I would say to you is that please relieve yourself from the pressure of trying to come across as an amazing storyteller, because people are not interested. In fact, if you get told that you’re an amazing storyteller, then that’s the wrong outcome of your communication. What you have to be able to hear from people is, “You made a very relevant point. I’m going to do what you said. I think that makes a lot of sense.”

Moving people in the right direction to take an action is a better judge of how effective you were versus the claps that you get and versus how you get. If you get complimented on your being an amazing storyteller, that means the focus was you and your flamboyancy, not the point you made. So, if someone says to you, “What an amazing storyteller you were,” like, “Thank you. What did you get out of that? Like, do you think you’re going to take the action I was asking for?” Figure that out. So don’t feel that pressure.

And I think the third thing I would say to you is. When looking for a story, yes, you have to be journalistic, but also remember the kind of story that works in a corporate space is a story that happens all the time. In other words, a high-frequency story, not a low-frequency story. So, a pilot lands a plane in the Hudson River has happened. But if I told that story in a corporate boardroom, then people would be like, “That’s great. Never going to happen to me.”

But if I told a story about us not using a tool that we have to update our learning and development plan, and then not getting the promotion that we wanted because, on the dashboard, it didn’t seem like you were updating that so people didn’t know you’ve done all these things, all these courses and workshops etc., then a lot of people will go, “Oh, my God, that happens to me all the time.” So, high-frequency.

The founder of Google said this, “If you can find a problem that people face multiple times a day, you have a billion-dollar business.” Now when you take that saying and put it into the world of storytelling, if you can find a story, the problem that you talk about in that story, people experience many times, you  have a story that will resonate a lot.

So, resonance is more important than remarkability of a story. So, don’t pressurize yourself at trying to find a story that is amazing because, most likely, that will get you claps but will not get you the action. So, look for a story that happens all the time. So, I think those three are probably practical ones to follow.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really doing the trick. And you’ve finally put to words why I get a little bit skeptical and I don’t tend to dig presentations or stories that lean a lot on legends of business, like, “Here’s what they do at Amazon and at Disney and Netflix. And Steve Jobs said and did this.” It’s like, “Yeah, okay. Sure, these people are genius, high performers, and they did a cool thing, and maybe there are some things we can learn from that. But it doesn’t resonate with me much,” and I think it’s for these exact reasons.

One, they haven’t journalistically done the work to see, “What are we actually struggling with here?” And secondly, they’re low frequency matters, like, “Yes, introducing the iPhone was really cool. That was a historic technological moment, and that happened, and now it doesn’t happen that often.”

Anjali Sharma
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, I think it’s just, you know, resonance only happens with things that happen all the time, because those are our daily experiences, things that kind of resonate with us. Yeah, I mean, like, we love Steve Jobs, and we love his ability to orate, but, you know, it’s available, but it’s not accessible. His style is available for us to view, but it’s not accessible for us, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally, “Just be like Steve Jobs, guys. That’s all it takes. Come on!”

Anjali Sharma
“What’s wrong with you?” Yeah, so that’s the hyper-target-ness. So, everything we’ve spoken about is about that really, that hyper-target-ness of a story, really looking at it from that lens of critically thinking it through and really trying to understand that it’s so easy to become a victim to this big style storytelling, “When I was born or when I started my career, oh, my gosh, you know, it’s like…” nobody really cares about that. Only your mom is really interested in listening to what happened to you, but we don’t really care about that.

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

Anjali Sharma
I can never say the full thing because it’s really long, but I’ll tell you which one it is, and you’ll be able to find it very easily. I think there’s this quote, where it sort of says, “When you lose the grip, you slip into a masterpiece,” which I really, really like. But the reason why I love that quote so much is because, after working in this space for more than a decade, my style in the beginning of working was very systematic, it was very structured, and it was very effort-filled. And then came a point somewhere, three, four years ago, where that system, that structure was like that intentional approach was so embedded in me that if I sort of knew the direction.

I could kind of maneuver within that, but that’s the only part. To become effortless, you have to put in the effort first. And telling someone who’s just, like, a couple of years into a certain domain, a specific domain, to just lose that grip is not the right thing.

But I think there comes a point where you start experiencing the magic of all that is in your subconscious, all that is embedded. So, I think that’s one of my favorite quotes, to put in so much effort into what you do, that it becomes so effortless. 

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

Anjali Sharma
So, if you are interested in storytelling, learning how to be better at it in a corporate space, the thing that helped me gain mastery in that, more than reading, writing was actually the fact that a system, a system for success that actually forced me to do the necessary work in this space.

If you want to gain mastery, then make a decision on what are you going to not just do, which is within you, but how are you going to put yourself out in the world in that domain. When you do that, you actually start becoming really, really good at it, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a blog every week, whether it’s a little thing you’ll come up with. If mastery in this domain is your aspiration, then a promise to the world that I will show up in this manner every week is what you need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Anjali, this is wonderful. I wish you many beautiful stories.

Anjali Sharma
Thank you for having me and having this wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed how quickly you grasped everything I talked about, distilled it, and repeated it back to me, which was really nice.

1028: How to Bridge Disagreements and Create More Win-Win Agreements with Robert Fersh

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Robert Fersh shares tried and tested strategies for de-escalating conflict and bridging disagreements.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to find shared goals to move past differences 
  2. The best way to deal with defensiveness 
  3. What to do when you fundamentally disagree 

About Robert 

Rob Fersh is a seasoned consensus-builder and has spent over 45 years bridging policy differences and moving public policy forward in Washington DC, working for Congress, in the Executive Branch, and in leading non-profits. He studied at Cornell University and Boston University School of Law. Rob founded Convergence Center for Policy Resolution in 2009 after directing a national anti-hunger organization. Rob’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. 

Resources Mentioned

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Robert Fersh Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rob, welcome!

Robert Fersh
Thanks, Pete. Nice to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into some of your goodness here. And I’d love it if you could start us with a juicy, dramatic story of a super difficult conflict that you mediated and how you ended up resolving things.

Robert Fersh
Well, thanks, Pete. There’s a lot of stories to tell, but maybe the most dramatic is the one that opens the book that Mariah Levison and I have written called From Conflict to Convergence. And it was really my maiden voyage in trying to be a bridge-builder on big national policy issues. So, I had an idea back in the early 2000s that if we could only bring together all of the people’s disagreements that stood in the way of extending coverage to millions of Americans that didn’t have it, that there’d be an opportunity to potentially create a breakthrough, because at that time, 40 to 50 million Americans were estimated to be without healthcare coverage at any point in time.

And also, this was just a few years after, in the Clinton administration, an attempt to reform healthcare led by Hillary Clinton, failed miserably and divided the entire healthcare field, and people opposing and supporting their ideas. So, we actually pulled together, all the leading stakeholders on healthcare. And they agreed, left to right, that people ought to have healthcare coverage. The disagreement was how to do it.

So, we brought together the hospitals, the insurers, the pharmaceutical companies, consumer groups, unions, you name it, people who are all influential stakeholders in healthcare policy in this country, and we attempted to break this decades-old gridlock on how to cover the uninsured.

Well, this group met 12 times over two years in an attempt to try to break the gridlock on how to cover the uninsured. And, eventually, they came up with a series of ideas that formed the basis for expanding coverage to people in the United States based upon shared values. We had the Heritage Foundation, a very conservative foundation was at the table, US Chamber of Commerce, various unions and liberal advocacy groups and so on, but they all came together to design what became the architecture of efforts to improve healthcare coverage in the country.

And I think my favorite story out of that is, as I said in the book, there was a representative of the American Medical Association at the table by the name of Carla Willis, who was their chief economist, and she’d been very outspoken in early meetings trying to forward the ideas the American Medical Association had developed.

But I noticed, over this two-year period, Carla had gotten quieter and quieter. And, finally, at the 11th meeting of this group, where they actually looked like, that day, they would seal the deal on the design of how to cover the uninsured in a way that bridged the divides across the left and right, Carla came up to me at a lunch break and said to me, “Rob, you have ruined my life.” But she said it with a smile, and I responded in kind, and said something like, “I hear that all the time. How, in particular, have I ruined yours? I do have four kids after all.”

And she said, “I’ve been sitting here for the last two years. The AMA and I had come up with very thoughtful proposals. I thought I understood all the issues and all the different approaches and our ideas were best. Now I’ve been sitting here for two years seeing all these intelligent, well-meaning thoughtful people say things I never thought of, and I can’t see the world the same way.”

And in a sense, she was saying, even though the final proposals included some AMA ideas, she epitomized what we’re trying to do in this work, which is to have people who have disagreements on how to solve problems expand their worldviews, not relinquish their principles, but begin to see ways to have their underlying interests met in a way that might be different than what they’ve, you know, were positioning themselves to support, but in a way that did not sacrifice the principles and the values they had.

So, that was a pretty dramatic opening act for me as a bridge-builder to help pave the way for multiple pieces of legislation that expanded healthcare coverage in this country.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! Well, that sounds amazing to hear anyone say that. That’s about as much as you can hope for, I suppose, when you’re doing this kind of work. So, that’s powerful. And can you share, what do you think were some of the core principles that made that possible?

Robert Fersh
Thanks for that. The essence of the work, and it’s interesting. Well, one of the participants at that table came from the Heritage Foundation. His name is Stuart Butler, very much someone who wanted private solutions, not so much government solutions. But having been born in Great Britain, he also believed in universal healthcare, so he was an interesting person to have in the room.

And here’s what Stuart would say, he said, “Look, I’ve been battling people for years on healthcare. And what was different about this process is that although we thought we knew each other, we really didn’t know each other. So, this process, which allowed us to understand the values, concerns, and interests of people underneath all the different positions they take, to allow people to go deep and to understand how they came to believe what they believed, and to feel a sense of shared mission, which they did have to solve problems was really important.”

So, some of the key elements of this process are to, A) at least have a shared vision, and there was that, and this group said, “We’re going to cover as many as possible.” That was agreed upon. No one said it has to be single-payer like Canada or Great Britain. No one said it had to be every last person but as many people as quickly as possible. The second piece was to build relationships across people so they understood each other deeply. And with that comes trust. Trust that the intentions of other people are things you can work with.

In most cases, people want the same things, disagree on how to get there. And that process actually demonstrated that building relationships with trusts could break through decades-old disputes some people in the room had with others. And many areas of common ground that were significant, even though disagreements remained, and, in fact, some of the ideas that eventually became law were not necessarily fully included in our consensus.

But what we did was to move the ball forward to get people much closer to the point where they were very near agreement on how to cover the uninsured in this country. And in fact, what we did design was what people call the architecture of what became the Affordable Care Act, even though the Affordable Care Act went a little further than what our group recommended.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that does sound novel, as opposed to how do we normally go at it when we have different viewpoints on a matter.

Robert Fersh
Yeah. So, what’s normally done, and I was part of this in the Washington culture, is that people who disagree get invited to all sorts of webinars and seminars, and people set them up for debate, and then everybody unloads about what they believe, and they may be polite or they may be impolite, and people then summarize what the disagreement was. But it’s pretty rare that people take the time to go underneath that to understand what drives people, what life experiences led them to believe the things they did, and to understand what their underlying interests were.

And this is an idea that Bill Ury and Roger Fisher and others, Bruce Patton, in Getting to Yes, distinguished a long time ago, which is the difference between positions and interests. Positions tend to be hard and fast ways that people want to solve a particular problem, but underneath that are your interests, your needs. And what we’ve done is, I think, allowed people to have a conversation which almost never starts about debating positions about how to solve a problem and getting underneath it all.

“What are your values? What are your interests? What are your concerns?” And when you begin to identify them, and there’s usually any number of pathways that can satisfy interests, and our goal, different than many other political battles or other discussions that go on, was to try to meet the widest range of interests, create the so-called win-win solutions for people.

Again, not necessarily requiring everyone to agree on everything, but to find wide swaths of agreement that have people leaving whole, feeling their needs are being met, and to understand that just for their needs to be met, other people do not necessarily have to lose, that you can set up situations where multiple people and multiple groups’ needs can be met. So, that is what distinguishes our approach from a lot of the normal give-and-take, and Washington, and the State houses and other places around the country.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s see, the United States health insurance coverage is among the most complicated things on the earth today. So, perhaps, could you give us a nice illustrative example of this positions versus interests, and going deep to unearth them, in perhaps a simple example that we can all understand, like, “Oh, okay, that’s a position, that’s an interest, and I can see how you’ve crafted a thing that’s meeting people that have almost the opposite, it seems, positions, are getting a win-win in terms of their interests being fulfilled”?

Robert Fersh
We have an issue in the United States, which is called long-term care, which is the non-healthcare-related services that you provide to elderly and disabled people who cannot take care of themselves. And we do have a crisis in that many people only rely on family members to take care of them, can’t necessarily afford coverage.

So, we were approached by a group of leaders in that field to convene a group. And the position of some people was that, “It’s got to be a private sector response. It’s got to be insurance. And that’s how we’re going to get home. Let’s keep the government out of it.” And then there were people who said, “You know what, long-term care is a terrible issue. It’s bankrupting families. The needs aren’t being met. Let’s move to some massive new government program, a la Social Security, tax everybody, create a huge program on how to cover people who face this crisis. It’s not everybody, it’s not even a majority of the public.”

And so, you had two very opposing points of view. One was market-based solutions only, and one was government-based solutions only. So, their positions were, “Yeah, for some people, let’s set up a new Social Security type of insurance for the entire country.” And the other people said, “No, let’s just tweak the private insurance system.” And so, we were at loggerheads for a while, and then we took a break, and other groups working on this, and helped design a study that Milliman, an actuarial group, and the Urban Institute did together.

And the study showed that private insurance is never going to make it happen all the way, and that there were some issues with going public all the way. And eventually these groups found a way to combine a mixture of public and private approaches to allow people to get long-term care coverage as they needed. These ideas are still panning in Congress, they haven’t yet moved forward, but there’s a lot of attention to it.

But underneath it all, people found, based upon studies and information they had, that each of their own solutions weren’t sufficient. And it set the stage to find compromises to take the best from private insurance to try to make that stronger, and to also have the government help take care of the catastrophic costs that make the private insurers more viable and also to provide coverage to people through the public as necessary.

So, I hope that was close enough to home to make the case for the distinction between positions and interests.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, there it seems like you had some progress because you had some independent research, which said, “Hey, see how neither one of you are really going to get where you want to go by doing just your position.” So that’s handy. Although, I imagine it takes a little bit of prep work in order to get folks’ hearts and minds to even be receptive to facts or research or data of any kind that is unfavorable to themselves. So, how’d you get there?

Robert Fersh
Well, this was a number of years ago before I think the loss of confidence in institutions and the debate about what’s facts and what’s alternative facts was as ripe as it is now. I think we honestly got there because people realized, in this particular debate, they were missing information. How effective, and with modeling, and again, by lining up two groups, one that leaned left and one that leaned right, to do the research that was trusted by people of all sides?

There was a sense that they wouldn’t be able to go further until they had more information. That’s not true in all the work we do. Some cases, people feel they have enough information and have enough agreement on facts that they can go forward even if they don’t agree on all the facts. So, in this case, I think people just felt frustrated that they needed more information. They got curious and they helped themselves design the study so that their various needs could be met and the questions they wanted answered could be met.

So that’s an unusual intervention but it’s also an important one, given what we have today, which is a lot of disagreement on facts, a lot of people feeling that the other side isn’t as honest or as forthcoming as they should be. So, to the extent groups that are coming together to solve problems can agree upon trusted sources or help put together facts that they can all rely upon, that’s an important step toward progress and agreement in any particular process.

Pete Mockaitis
And if your counterparts are not feeling curious and rather sort of dug in and solidified, or you yourself are not feeling curious, you’re solidified, dug in, what are some of your perspectives on how to stir up that helpful curiosity?

Robert Fersh
Well, I would say a lot of people enter our rooms where they’re sort of, maybe shoulders are hunched, their arms are crossed, they’re defensive. Many enter our room not in a collaborative frame of mind. To be honest, some come for defensive purposes. We did a huge project on K-12 Education, where we had the current president of the National Education Association, she was vice president then, and a woman on the West Coast who ran a conservative foundation, who was known as a critic of teachers’ unions and a supporter of more computers in the schools, which some people thought would take some teaching jobs away. And especially she was an advocate for school choice.

And the woman on the West Coast, who was a conservative, basically said she came to the table not thinking much would happen. She’s a woman of action, didn’t believe in gabfests, as she kind of called them, and too much talk and not enough action. But when she got in the room and began to hear people as human beings and create relationships that weren’t just about debating the issues, breaking bread with people, hearing their life stories, I think it opens your hearts to understanding other people.

So, part of the way I think to foment curiosity, if you will, is to have people feel a connection to each other and to take an interest in each other. Beyond that, I think the process itself works that way. If you bring together people who can interact in goodwill, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t get tense, it doesn’t mean there aren’t fierce debates at times, but who begin to see that they share values and they share goals, which is how we start out, and oftentimes they develop some principles by which to guide it, then people have a greater propensity to get curious because they’ve come to the table because they agree there is a problem that needs to be solved.

And once they begin to also open their hearts, the way Carla did in healthcare, to see that they didn’t have all the answers, that no one perspective or no one individual has all the wisdom, and they get that, and that happens almost automatically, when people are in the room and there’s skillful facilitation of conversation across differences, usually, it tickles something inside of them to want to learn more, not just to oppose blindly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Rob, could you perhaps walk us through maybe a step-by-step, in terms of, okay, we got two folks, they have wildly different positions on a matter, and we want to have some of those delightful breakthroughs, transformations, feel goods that you’re describing on the other side? It seems like we’ve got a couple principles to work with, with regard to shared vision, shared values, as well as coming to some personal connection pieces and understanding the human and the what’s underlying stuff. But could you share with us, maybe, as much as it’s possible, a generalized framework or step-by-step, “When you got conflicting positions and want to find some convergence, here’s step one, step two, step three”?

Robert Fersh
I mean, the first step is to clarify, “Is there a shared goal to begin with?” It’s very hard to have people work together if they don’t have a shared goal. But the fact that they share a goal, even if they disagree on how to get there, is a very important starting point for people to come to the table.

So, at least, and even that, Pete, begins to build a little bit of trust that you’re not at odds with someone about how the world should look. You just disagree on how to get there. So, having a shared vision, a shared goal is a very important first step for people who seem to be in disagreement.

After that, as we’ve talked about, having them get to know each other a bit, having them understand each other’s values, their own life stories, what led them to believe what they believe is really important, and beginning to assemble some basic guidelines or principles by which they could potentially agree on, even though they continue to disagree.

So, we had a project on economic opportunity and mobility where we had the Chamber of Commerce and we had unions at the table. But they developed a principle that said, basically, if you work full time, you should have a life of dignity, and basically not live in poverty.

Robert Fersh
And yet, underneath that, there was disagreement because people on the left, in particular, wanted more higher minimum wages, in fact, a big national minimum wage, and the Chamber and other business leaders said, “No, that doesn’t work for us. Too many regional variations. Too much difference.” But they also signed on to the principle that if you work, you shouldn’t be living in poverty or should at least be living in dignity.

And that meant that they also, if they weren’t going to do that solely through putting the costs on the employer, that they would be open to governmental changes, including things like the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Child Care Tax Credit, other things, because to adhere to that principle, they needed to do something besides just saying no to the minimum wage, and so there was some movement there.

So, to review now, have a shared goal, begin to build relationships of trust, begin to understand each other’s underlying values, and then engage in a conversation where you begin to go deep on the issues themselves, and ask people to keep a mindset of curiosity, ask them to keep a mindset of giving others the benefit of the doubt, develop a mindset where, in some ways, you internalize that.

Even as smart as you may be, or as well-informed as you may be, just develop a little humility that you may not know everything, and you begin to engage people in respectful conversation about different ideas that help meet the goals and the principles you’ve already established. And our experience is that, when this is well done, people can then push each other’s thinking to a higher level. As William Ury said to you in his podcast, he said, “We don’t have enough conflict.”

And I don’t know if I agree with that fully, but my point is that conflict can push thinking to a higher level, and bringing out better solutions than any one party had to begin with, and that’s our experience. So, that’s the basic process to try to promote relationship, promote trust, promote curiosity, engage in respectful dialogue where you don’t ever attack the person or their motives.

You have ground rules by which you observe confidentiality. You allow people to make mistakes knowing it’s not going to go out of the room. And you try to listen in a way that really leads to constructive results and the full expression of different points of view as people push each other’s thinking to a higher level and become attuned to understanding how they might meet each other’s needs.

There’s an acronym in our book called OPTIONS, I never quite get it right. But it’s really “only proposals that meet others’ needs succeed” is the thrust of it. And when the whole group, whether it’s two people or other people, become committed to not only meeting their own needs, but seeing that their needs can be met and others’ needs can be met, you have an opportunity not only to solve problems better, but to create relationships that radiate over time constructively.

People leave our processes often working together better for years to come because they now see each other and understand each other at another level.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fantastic. And when it comes to the understanding of individuals at a deeper level, with regard to, “Why did you believe…?” or, “How did you come to believe that thing?” and understand who they are as people, are there any super powerful questions or exercises or activities that you engage in that helps unlock some of this interpersonal magic?

Robert Fersh
There are sort of two key questions you can ask when someone else is talking is, basically, “Did I get that right?” and, “What am I missing?” So, you can internalize that. Using curiosity is a hugely important tool. And as I often kid, curiosity is not well expressed when you say to somebody, “I’m curious, how the heck could you ever come up with that point of view to solve the problem?”

But if you can ask authentically curious questions of another person to learn, not to debate, to hear them out. You can always debate. You can always walk away later. You can always disagree vehemently. But if you can develop enough personal relationship, where it’s sort of natural, you get curious. Often people develop bonds of affection in the room, even though they used to be sworn enemies. Some of them go to ball games together or call each other up when they want to make sure they’re not just hearing from their own side in a way that blindly misses the other points.

So, this is the practice of curiosity in a skillful way, where people begin to see that they can, despite they’re maybe being upset about what they’re hearing, go to another gear, go to what Bill Ury calls the balcony to kind of look at this more dispassionately, and not to get triggered by what the other person says, but committed to wanting to learn something. So, that’s a very important skillset for people.

Pete Mockaitis
So, a poor question is, and that’s not real curiosity, is, “How the heck did you come up with such a stupid point of view?” Could you give us some illustrations of what a few good, quality, authentic, useful, genuine, curious questions look, sound and feel like in their verbiage?

Robert Fersh
It would be something like, you know, someone says, “I think the only way to provide healthcare coverage is to go Canada as its single payer, and everybody’s covered, and the costs are down, and so on.” And you could respond from the hip saying, “You know, that’s not an American way. It’s going to stifle innovation. It’s going to give the government bureaucracies too much,” you know, you could go after them that way.

But you could simply say, “Okay. What has been your experience with that particular approach? And why is it that you favor that? And is it something related to your own personal experience? Or is it more a philosophical point of view? Please, I’m very curious about how you came to that set of beliefs and why you believe that.”

And if you just ask that authentically, you’ll learn something. You may still disagree with it totally, but you won’t simply just go into a pitch battle of government, not government, private sector, not public sector, whatever. You begin to get into what we call complexifying an issue, and that’s really important to begin to disrupt a little bit the sort of tightly held views people have.

Again, not asking them to compromise their values or their principles in any way, but to see the issues a little more complex once they fully understand how reasonable people could take that view. And that’s kind of how, because I’ve done this work the last 25 years or so, I go through life now. Whenever I read an article that I either immediately disagree with or agree with, my first thought is, “Let me read something that’s the opposing side there. I’m sure there are reasonable people who disagree. I’m sure this isn’t the full answer.”

And if you can internalize that, at any given moment no one has the full answer and there’s always something to be learned, then that’s an important move forward in your mindset to be a collaborative problem solver.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that notion a lot, the complexifying, because I think the human brain tends to like and prefer simple. We tend to like clear-cut, black and white, “But, of course, this is how it is.” And yet, if, in fact, reasonable people do have a differing point of view, then there is naturally going to be some complexity there.

And if it feels simple in your brain, then perhaps it is indeed the case that you are missing something and there is some complexification that is necessary for you to enter into in order to get to that place of understanding, “Oh, okay, so that’s why you think that.”

Robert Fersh
So, Pete, that’s exactly right, but let me also, for your listeners, because I think these ideas apply to businesses and nonprofits and philanthropies, and certainly on the academic campuses, widely. But I also want to make clear there, and this approach we move forward, doesn’t mean you necessarily talk to everyone about everything all the time. Sometimes there is not time for leaders to make decisions by consensus. You can have so-called death by consensus, drive itself nuts.

And there also are people in groups who are so ideological, so wed to certain ideas, or may have some views that are so extreme, whether that be on race or other things, that they cannot necessarily come to the table, cannot open their heart. And you got to that a little bit to begin with. So, that’s where you have to have a shared goal. If you don’t have a shared goal, like I used to say, not that I would ever have been called upon.

I wouldn’t have suggested that Martin Luther King sit down with the then, you know, I think he was the sheriff or that law enforcement officer, Bull Connor, in the South. If what King wanted was integration and economic opportunity, and he was facing a segregationist and there was just no room, then you can’t necessarily pull people together when people are so extreme or so convinced they have the full truth.

On the other hand, I would also say to you, that really tough issues, when you know there can’t be agreement, you can still use these processes to form relationships of trust and do some things that are just adjacent to the disagreement. So, I have good friends who worked on the issue of abortion. And one friend had convened a bunch of people who are anti-abortion and pro-choice, and it was understood to begin with that, on the fundamental issue of when a woman would have a right to choose, there would be no agreement.

It was a position of deep religious belief on one side, in particular, but also a deep principle-belief on the other. But these people were convened at a time when bombings were going on in abortion clinics and people were dying and tensions were running high. And the idea was to understand each other. And in the case of my colleague, Mary Jacksteit, as I understand it, she brought together these people on the auspices of Search for Common Ground.

They began to understand each other. They began to understand that principled people could stand on either side, and that, at least at a minimum, they stopped demonizing each other as inhuman or not in touch with the fundamental needs of others. And then, in some cases, they actually found they could work together on things they shared, like teenage pregnancy prevention, and better foster care and adoption systems should be brought to terms.

So, even though they didn’t reach agreement on the fundamental issue of abortion per se, they were able to develop respect for each other, and live more civilly with each other, and not live as if they’re at war with each other, and then define areas they could work on together, which they thought were socially positive. So, I think that contributes to a more civil and effective society, where we can bridge those divides, even if it’s not solving the entire underlying problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s a cool example in terms of, perhaps, indeed, the foundational viewpoints may be irreconcilable, like, “This is a human being in the womb,” or, “It is not.” It’s like, “Okay, well, I don’t know what we can do with that when we have the opposite views. But maybe there are some other shared goals that we can rally around,” and away you go.

Robert Fersh
So, we talked earlier about values and shared goals and listening and trust, but beyond that, when we do our work, we urge people to do their homework. And that’s true if you’re in a business or otherwise. Make sure you understand who the key players are, who you need to include, and get the best possible answers. And we’re all for inclusiveness of all the voices that are important, not just influentials and experts, but people with lived experience.

So, mapping, what we call mapping the terrain, understanding who believes what to begin with is really important, and doing your homework to understand who you need to convene. Then comes what I’ve already said, nurturing trust in the room, and we do that through a series of exercises. Never start by debating people’s positions, but to understand each other.

And then it’s really important that everybody be heard and really deeply and listen to respectfully. And that’s what we reinforce that by what some of us call ground rules where you don’t go after people’s motives, and you give people equal time or as much time as they need to be heard and so on. And then with skillful help often, but this can be done within organizations, you ask people to begin to generate what we call options for mutual gain. And that’s really an important part of the process. Yes, continue to forward things that are in your interest.

I’ll tell you one quick story, which may surprise people, when I did my maiden voyage on healthcare in 2000, really, 2003 to 2006. We had an executive from a major pharmaceutical company, and there were people in the room very skeptical of pharmaceutical companies, writ large. But this gentleman, who was one of the top officials of this pharmaceutical company, earned the trust of everybody in the room by making, I believe at the opening, making a statement that says, “My company has a huge interest on how we cover the uninsured. I know there’s 40 or 50 million people in the country without insurance.”

“But let me just say on behalf of my company, let’s have a conversation about the best way to cover people. And let me worry about later, what that does to the financial underpinnings of my company. But I really want to have a conversation in which we’re part of a community trying to solve the problem in a way that does the most good for the most people. And if we need to fight it a little bit or demur or we need to tweak it, let’s come to that later.”

But he set a tone there, and this, I think, is a sign of great leadership that said, “I’m open. I’m not going to be defensive. I want to listen. I want to learn. And, hopefully, we’ll come out with solutions that work for everybody.”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that principle a lot in terms of the deferring, it’s like, “Yeah, you all know I work for a pharmaceutical company, and we’re going to have to go ahead and maximize profits for them shareholders. That’s sort of what we do, but we’ll figure that out later. For now, let’s see what the theoretical ideal is that we can all sort of move toward.”

And, yeah, you know, you may, afterwards, need to do some negotiations, some give and take, some horse trading, whatever, to make that workable for all of the parties. But to start with an initial goodwill commitment to get somewhere, and then finetune later, I think, can be very helpful in many contexts.

Robert Fersh
Yeah, and again it’s, in this case, I think, in light leadership by this individual, who seemed to be a very wise man. Let me tell you just another story. The first project, pretty much, I ever did at Convergence, was on nutrition and obesity. And it was interesting because we had difficulty assembling a table. We got a table of public health and consumer groups and some major food companies.

And about a week before the first meeting, which was pretty highly charged because a lot of these people had already been in prior discussions. As one food company executive said to me, “I’ve never been in discussion with the consumer groups where they didn’t walk out in protest against big food.” And he represents a big food company.

So, we assembled this group, and about a week before the first meeting, a leading voice on the consumer side wrote a blog or an op-ed basically saying, “You know, those of us who want to diminish and fight obesity and diabetes in this country, need to stay pure to our principles. Of course, we need to talk to food companies because they’re part of it, but let’s make no mistake. Their interests are,” exactly what you said, Pete, “is to maximize shareholder profits, and so they can never be full partners.”

So, fast forward, so immediately, my inbox filled up with notes from outraged food business people who were coming to the table, saying, “Is this guy really coming to the table? Does he understand how insulting that is that we can’t be part of a solution like we don’t share goals to diminish obesity and diabetes?”

So, we convened people who were very highly charged in the room, and for a while pretty tense. But eventually, as we went around the room, I’m not here to blindly defend all food companies. Some are better than others in terms of their public spiritedness.

But one after another, food company representatives said, “You know what, we do have obligations to shareholders. On the other hand, we’ve got employees. We have family members. We have people who have lost limbs to diabetes and people who have terrible health problems. And we have healthcare costs for our companies that go up because people’s diets aren’t so great. We can’t unilaterally disarm selling our products and just take away all our profits.”

“But if we can make it so that serving healthier foods could be more profitable and marketable, then we would love to join as partners with other people, and we’d also love it if consumer groups would stop attacking us every time that we try to do the right thing. Because whenever we do it, you’re just skeptical and you come after us.”

So, what happened was, over the next 36 hours, there was a remarkable level of frank dialogue about what were the needs and interests of companies, and what were the needs and interests of consumer groups. And, eventually, within a year or two, we did come up with a series of recommendations. But by the end of that meeting, the leading voice for the food industry, representing an umbrella group, said that she had learned a lot, and that she really hoped to be able to work together with the group.

And the fellow who had written that op-ed that had stirred people up said, “You know what, I’m not conceding anything at this point, but this conversation is going to make me think afresh about how to partner with the food industry. And I look forward to doing that.”

So, this is about what it does when you understand and you complexify, and know that, just because someone works in a corporation doesn’t mean they’re evil and selfish. And if someone works in a consumer group, doesn’t mean they don’t care about the thriving of corporations that help make services and goods available to people in this country.

And to the extent we can complexify their views of each other and make them a little less ideological in an honest process, not by lecturing them, but just by learning and experiencing, you open doors for levels of collaboration that normally are not thought possible by a lot of people who think that we are divided everywhere into us and them. And that’s not necessarily true.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Rob, in our last couple of minutes, could you share any top dos or don’ts for folks who are looking to be awesome at their jobs and thinking about some conflict things?

Robert Fersh
Well, I think the top do for me is, no matter where you sit in your job, you can be a collaborative leader, whether you’re the boss or not. You can always be a voice for saying, “You know what, this is a tricky problem. Let’s get everybody who’s got a stake in the outcome in the room, let’s try to listen, let’s try to push for ideas that work for as many people as possible.”

I had the great honor of working with Stephen Covey quite closely for a number of years. He was the author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” and probably the greatest promoter of the term win-win, which some people dismiss, I think, too easily.

So, I think, developing a mindset of, “For me to win, others don’t necessarily have to lose, that no one person or group holds all the answers, that there’s always something to be learned. And if I can learn to be curious, then I think there may be ways to get through things that are really important.”

I think the don’ts, are to check your ego at the door. Make sure that you’re as centered as possible, that’s another do. When you’re interacting with other people, take care of yourself, and make sure that you are not as reactive as you might be when you’re meeting people who disagree with you.

So, don’t take the bait. Don’t get reactive. Do be passionate about your views, absolutely. But don’t make the assumption that just because someone disagrees with you, that they’re not a good person, don’t have good values, don’t have important things to say.

Pete Mockaitis
Rob, thank you. This has been enriching, and I wish you much pleasant convergence.

Robert Fersh
Thank you very much, Pete. A great pleasure to be on. If people want to know more about our work, please look at the book, From Conflict to Convergence. And also at Convergence, we’d love to have people involve with us. We are doing problem-solving ourselves, and then we have a whole new learning lab where we are.

And the book is part of that where we’re trying to inspire and equip people to be collaborative problem-solvers. And we have an online training program coming on in the next few months, where I think people who really want to pursue this can, in addition to reading the book, find ways to collaborate more effectively no matter what they’re station in life. So, thank you for this opportunity.

1027: The Mindsets that Inspire Teams with Paula Davis

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Paula Davis shares best practices for keeping your team engaged and motivated.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why to shift focus from performance to people 
  2. How to keep your team connected and motivated 
  3. The tiny noticeable things that improve team dynamics

About Paula 

Paula Davis JD, MAPP, is the Founder and CEO of the Stress & Resilience Institute, a training and consulting firm that helps organizations reduce burnout and build resilience at the team, leader, and organizational level.

Paula left her law practice after seven years and earned a master’s degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the author of Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being & Resilience and Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team. 

Her expertise has been featured in numerous media outlets including The New York Times, and Psychology Today.

Resources Mentioned

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Paula Davis Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Paula, welcome back.

Paula Davis
Hello, it’s so good to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear you talking about Leading Well, and mindsets for engaging, retaining, and inspiring folks. Could you kick us off with any of the most surprising discoveries you’ve made when it comes to what it really takes to engage, retain, and inspire colleagues these days?

Paula Davis
One of the things that really surprised me was actually seeing the data around when companies take, not only at a performance focus, so looking at numbers and metrics and quarterly earnings and all of that, but also layer on sort of a people focus side, so combining that performance and people focus, the great business outcomes that come from it. So, really amplifying the business case was one of the things that I wanted to do in this book because I think it’s a piece of the puzzle that’s oftentimes left out when we’re talking about some of this human-focused psychology stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what kind of performance boosts are we talking here?

Paula Davis
So, we are talking about much lower attrition rates, sometimes cut in half. We’re talking about higher earnings. We are talking about, 4.3 times more likely than the average company to maintain top-tier financial performance for an extended period of time. And one of the pieces of the puzzle that I think is really important is that, because I hear from a lot of professional services firms, in particular, and other companies who say, “We’re meeting our numbers. We’re doing really, really well. We got lots of money rolling into the company. Like, why should we switch? Why is taking a performance focus so wrong?”

And the answer is it’s not wrong. But what the research talks about is that, in good times, you know, companies that perform financially well, those financial performance-focused companies do great, but when it comes to down times, when it comes to, say, the period of time during the pandemic, what have you, companies that have that balanced approach, that really add that people side to the equation, tend to go through the rough patches in a more smooth way. They take less bumps.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you perhaps paint a picture for what that looks, sounds, feels like in practice in terms of, “All right, this is what being in a company that has the hardcore financial performance focus feels like in terms of the vibe, and the messaging, and the experience, and infrastructure, all the stuff,” versus what a more balanced place feels like? And maybe share a story for how that plays out in practice.

Paula Davis
Sure, yeah. And so, what was interesting is the research that I just talked about found that only 9% of the companies that, this was a McKinsey report, researched actually fell in that balanced approach. So, we’re not talking about a lot of companies here. And one of the companies that I think comes to mind for me is one of the companies that I talked about in Chapter 3 of the book.

It’s a really large healthcare organization that has taken kind of its mindset around recognition and appreciation and has really codified it in some unique ways, not only within the organization but they’ve actually elevated it, that notion that, “This is what we’re going to do. This is one of the values that we’re going to really, really hit hard and kind of walk the talk about.” They’ve elevated it all the way up to the C-suite and board level strategy.

So, very rarely do I hear a company that either read about or that I’ve worked with actually say, you know, like, “Some of this well-being motivational engagement stuff is actually baked into the highest of the highest-level strategies that we’re thinking about.” And so, clearly, looking at this concept from a dollars and cents standpoint, right, because it’s part of the entire financial strategy that we’re looking at for the company, but that it trickles down throughout the organization in a number of different ways.

So, they have a Making Moments Matter platform where they are able to send these recognitions and appreciations to each other via a platform of technology that they have in the organization. They have a yearly event where they actually nominate people at every single level from around the entire system. And they have different categories of folks who are finalists, or what have you, and they pick somebody who, out of the entire organization of 50,000 plus people, most truly espouses these values, and then they honor them at a dinner.

And so, there’s just all these different ways that they have decided to take this one particular piece, this human piece of the puzzle, and actually build it in a number of different ways. And they actually have told me that they see this as their most, from an economic standpoint, valuable retention tool and talent attraction tool. And they can tell that when the people in the organization are truly kind of walking these values, they see better outcomes with their patients in a whole host of ways. So, that’s the best example I can think of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can we zoom in into like a Making Moments Matter type thing? Like, if I were there in that organization, like what would be happening as we do this stuff?

Paula Davis
Say, you had a wonderful interaction or encounter with a colleague, or you noticed somebody who was really walking the values of the organization, you could put a little message into this platform, and that would register and it would go not only to the person, but it would go to the person’s manager, and I think it might even go one level above that as well.

They’ve collected multiple millions of these individual sorts of appreciations and recognitions, and just talking about how that has really just helped to build a really strong cultural fabric.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, I like that so much. It sounds really good. I read the book The Fund by Rob Copeland, which was talking about Bridgewater and their unique computer stuff and culture. And, at least the way he writes it, it sounds like a nightmare, like just a miserable place to be from Rob Copeland’s perspective in the book, because it was sort of doing almost the opposite of that in terms of like everybody was continuously tracking and ranking and rating and scoring everybody on all of these competency dimensions, they called it their baseball cards.

And so, there’s always sort of like this looming threat of, “Oh, someone could ding me for behaving in such a way,” and then others would pile on and you’d see your real-time, I guess, status, score, baseball card figures plummeting relative to the other people in the organization. It sounded horrendous, as Rob Copeland told it. And this is like the opposite. It’s like, “Here are some cool stuff that went down. Hooray! Let’s celebrate you publicly.”

Paula Davis
That does sound horrendous, and I didn’t dig into this, but I think you bring up a really good point, or he brings up a really good point, certainly, is that I think when you’re talking about making moments matter, or taking time to appreciate someone, or highlight something that they’ve done well, or recognize them, whatever word you want to use, I think that really has to be done authentically. And that’s I think one of the things you got to watch out for, I think, with any type of platform like this. It’s not about, like, “Ooh, I’ve got to get to 20 by the end of the week.” It’s about making them the most authentic that you can.

But I think that most of us zoom through work with our heads down, just, you know, we’ve got so much work to do, we’re just trying to get through the day, and so we’re at zero. So, kind of finding that balance between nothing and a race to get to a certain number.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s funny how these things naturally come up in our brains in terms of, “Oh, wow, that was a really cool chat I had with Paula. That was great.” And then they do, they fly right out of our brains as we rush to finish the next thing that needs to be done, oh, so urgently. So, if you have an institutionalized system process methodology by which these things are captured, and you just know, “Oh! I know just the place to park this fun pleasant thought I had. Here we go!”

Paula Davis
And because I think a lot of organizations have, the recognition policies. So, like, “At five years we’re going to send you a something or at 10 years we’re going to send you something.” They have sort of codified ways to express appreciation and thanks but they don’t necessarily support or talk about or think about or highlight, like, everyday day-to-day practices.

And so, I talk about how important it is to start to kind of go in that direction because it kicks the door open to something much more deep, a fundamental human need for us to know that we matter. So, that’s whether we are at, you know, talking about our families, whether we’re talking about work, whether we’re talking about our communities, we want to know that we’re making an impact on some level, right?

And so, mattering is about both those moments of appreciation, but it’s also about those moments of achievement where I also know that I’m contributing something. I’m contributing something and other people are noticing or affirming or telling me that I am having that level of impact.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. So, the research is backing this up and, boy, 9%.

Paula Davis
A lot of room for improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess if we find ourselves in an organization that’s doing some nice stuff this way, I guess we should feel grateful because it’s apparently rare.

Paula Davis
Based on, certainly, that one research report from McKinsey, yes. In fact, I think they found it was 55%, which was the bigger category of the quadrants, so four quadrants. I think it was about 55% who actually didn’t show a high level on either category, not outperforming on the performance side and not outperforming on the people side either. So more than half are just kind of, you know, “Here we go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s some cool research. And would you say that’s the big idea behind Lead Well? Or how would you articulate the core thesis?

Paula Davis
Well, I think that’s definitely a piece of it. I think the big idea behind it is, I think wanting to let the world of work, and particularly leaders know, that they’re really driving the conversation when it comes to the fact that we’re looking at “Work has changed. And how has work changed? And why has work changed? Because that’s happened, what do we have to, how do they, how do leaders have to be thinking differently about that?”

If we want to continue to have or see good outcomes, if we want to sort of reverse this trend of burnout, if we want to reverse the trend of, we’re at an all-time low level at least for the last 11 years of disengagement, things that we keep seeing come up consistently over and over are taking root. And if we’re going to go in a different direction with that, how do we do it?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when we talk about change, what would you say is the most pronounced change difference that the worker, let’s say the knowledge worker, is experiencing now as compared to, say, 15 years ago?

Paula Davis
So, certainly, I mean, we can’t avoid the conversation about AI, right? I think that the explosion of just new technology and new ways of thinking about doing work and really, honestly, potentially, being at a point where we might see some of those lower-level tasks, eventually at some point, potentially, be consumed by technology and other things, I think is much more realistic than it was 15 years ago.

I think, certainly, the outcomes associated with the pandemic, and I know we’re largely beyond that or however we want to word that, but I think, psychologically, what a lot of people and a lot of leaders don’t understand is that we’ve carried the effects of going through something so traumatic for a lot of people and cataclysmic for a lot of people with us.

And we’ve really, I think, very intentionally, started to look very differently at “How do I want my life to unfold? How do I want my world of work to look? How do I get both of those two things to integrate? And if I am not seeing a workplace that’s going to be supportive of my well-being and supportive of some of the human-centered aspects of work that I feel are much more important now, I may seriously consider going somewhere else.”

So, I don’t think we really– I mean, 15 years ago was when I stopped my law practice and I started down the path toward this work. We weren’t having these conversations at all about wellbeing in work. And so, I think the fact that that’s amplified has been a huge change as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, that’s intriguing, the COVID pandemic impact. It’s so funny, I think back to 2020, it was like another lifetime.

Paula Davis
I know.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d heard that people don’t want to make any movies or TV shows set in that time, it’s like, “We all just want to forget that happened. That’s not entertaining in the least to return to such memories.” And so then, is there any cool research or data saying, “Whoa, here’s something that feels very different in 2025 as compared to even 2019”?

Paula Davis
Well, I think one of the pieces that helps explain why people feel so differently now because of that is something called post-traumatic growth. So, I think a lot of folks are familiar with the term post-traumatic stress disorder. Less people, I find, are familiar with the term post-traumatic growth. So really understanding that when we go through life’s big adversities, when we go through life’s big challenges and traumatic experiences, most of us will take a look and go, “I do not want that to happen again. I wish this thing hadn’t happened because it kind of changed things completely for me.”

But what we oftentimes find is that humans do come out the other side at some point and they share some characteristics. They talk about a renewed sense of connection. They really, really amplify the importance of their relationships. They really want a sense of meaning and some deeper sort of connection involved in their lives, and it’s not something that they can just erase or have go away. It’s sort of like a permanent shift in how their world has changed.

And so, I think that that helps to explain why a lot of people have come out of this now really talking about how “I would like meaning at work, and I would like to have a little bit more indicator of my impact,” or, “I do want a workplace that’s going to support my mental health and well-being. And if I don’t get those things, yeah, I might stay for a while.”

But, I mean, I don’t think our workplaces, our leaders really want to have their teams be thinking about how they’re going to be plotting their next choice of where they’re going to work. We want our workers to feel engaged and motivated and staying. So that has been a big piece for me to think about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us then, what are some of the top mindsets and practices and cool stories that show them in action, come to life, to give us a picture here?

Paula Davis
Yeah, so the first one, and I sort of alluded to this already in the story that we were just talking about, but it’s called “Prioritizing Sticky Recognition and Mattering.” And so, this chapter honestly really changed how I have looked at my friendships and my relationships with my family, and certainly my relationship with my eight-and-a-half-year-old, “Am I telling her enough?” Because I think a lot of times, we just assume that people know, like, “Hey you’re in my universe and so all is good to go.”

But, like, really amplifying that sense of showing people their impact, and then blooming that fundamental human need to matter, I think is really a cool starting place, and really low-hanging fruit for a lot of organizations. But then I talk about also the need to amplify what I call ABC needs. So that’s a lovely combination of autonomy, belonging, and challenge.

So, we need a sense of, in our lives, in our world of work, we need a combination of “Do I get to choose my own adventure?” That’s how I think about autonomy. “Do I belong? Do I show up to a place where people care about me and my leader has my back, and I know I’m part of a group that is doing something well? And do I feel challenged? Am I able to grow and sort of build my skills within my current world of work?”

And then workload sustainability. So, this was one of the hardest chapters for me to tackle, but I felt like this book would be incomplete unless I did, because unmanageable workloads are one of the, if we’re looking at the root causes or sources of disengagement and stress and burnout, by far and away has been the number one unmanageable workload that I have seen with all of the groups that I have worked with. And so, trying to unpeel all of that, getting into what makes for a more sustainable workload, was a big piece of the puzzle.

The fourth one is building systemic stress resilience. So, to deal with all of the uncertainty, and the challenge, and the change, and the setbacks, and the obstacles, and the stressors, we have to not just be thinking about resilience at the individual level, but how do our teams become more resilient and how can we fortify organizations to become more resilient?

And then lastly, I wanted to talk about values alignment and practices associated with leading in a meaningful way. Certainly, with the generational conversation, I think that notion of values alignment and meaning has been pushed to the forefront. And values misalignment is also another one of the core drivers of chronic stress and burnout and disengagement. And so, it’s that whole kind of piece, puzzle pieces together in terms of the mindsets that I want leaders to be thinking about.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say workload sustainability, I’m curious, what do we know in terms of what makes a workload sustainable or unsustainable?

Paula Davis
Yeah, so basically it comes down to really two big buckets, and I decided to write about one of the buckets, and it’s really about better processes, procedures, and teaming practices. So, if I’m going to get my arms around building more workload sustainability, I got to figure out, like, “Why do we have so many open projects? Why are we doing so many things that are draining money?” and trying to get my arms around just even sort of where all of that is coming from?

And then the other piece of the puzzle, is recovery. Like, “Are we making enough time to really stop and pause? And what does that actually mean and look like in our day-to-day, in our week-to-week, month-to-month?” It’s not just the taking a vacation once every three years, that doesn’t do it.

So that notion, though, of really starting with leaders trying to dig in and just see, like, “What do we have? Why do we have so much? Why are we not focusing on certain things? Do we have Band-Aid initiatives going on where we’ve got so many open projects, but we don’t have the funding or the people or what have you to actually finish things and push them through, but they remain open?” So, there’s a lot of first steps, or kind of digging that leaders really need to engage in.

And then it becomes, “How are your meeting practices? Do you have information that’s located in places where everybody has access to it? Are people really clear about their roles and responsibilities? Do teams understand how we’re supposed to communicate with each other?” So, it gets back to a lot of very basic sort of teaming practices, very basic procedural things that I think when they’re done with more intentionality, can then start to help us understand how we can bring workload back into more of a sustainable realm.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a quantity, a number of hours or projects or something by which we can start to see, “Ah, this is where a workload begins dipping into the unsustainable level”?

Paula Davis
That’s the hard part because it’s so subjective, and I talk about this a lot associated with my burnout work, too, is that when we’re talking about an unsustainable workload, what’s unsustainable for me may be very different for you. What was unsustainable for me when I was 25 looks very different than what it is right now when I have an eight-and-a-half-year-old and a whole host of other just life obligations that I have to attend to at this age.

And so, I think it’s a fluid, subjective thing to be thinking about, and that’s why it can be so hard, I think, for leaders to really wrestle with “What does this mean?” because for one team in one department, it may look one way, and for a different team, it may look completely different. And so, you have to take it on kind of a team-by-team, case-by-case basis. So, there isn’t like a hard and fast metric. Like, I can’t say, “It’s seven projects for you, and three projects for you.” It’s totally like team and industry dependent.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about things in a similar light in terms of if what you’re doing is fascinating, riveting, engaging stuff that lights you up at your core and resembles play, it’s almost like there’s no limit in terms of like, “As long as you can, like, eat and exercise and sleep and see your loved ones, you might be able to bang out a massive number of hours.” And yet, if it feels like drudgery, then maybe even 20 hours a week is too much.

It has been sort of my subjective experience, and as I look at stories of like, I don’t know, I think about like hackers, it’s like, “These folks are just cranking away at their computer for hours upon hours upon hours,” and yet, it’s fun, fascinating, interesting, and juicy for them, because it’s so cool, “I’m learning, I’m exploring, I’m discovering. Oh, my gosh, this thing worked! Wow, I did not expect that to work! Oh, I made a discovery! I should probably share this with the world so that the world becomes safer! And I’m contributing to that and making a little bit of a name for myself.”

And yet, at the end of the day, they’re still seated, tapping on keys, looking at a screen, whereas another person can be doing the same distributed across dozens of inconsistently interrupted projects that they don’t really care that much about how they work out to be, and feel tremendously stressed, burnt out, flustered by the matter.

Paula Davis
Yes. And so, that’s an interesting example, but I think it goes back to the power of knowing and understanding the impact that you’re having and the impact that you’re making. And do you feel that C in the ABCs, right? Do you feel a sense of challenge and growth? Do you feel like you’re able to learn new things? Do you have people who are around you who can show you the ropes and help you get from point A to point B or wherever it is that you want to take in terms of the next step in your career?

And it’s interesting what you were just talking about, and I don’t know that you’ve talked or thought about it through game theory, but one of the small kind of strategies that I talk about in that particular part of the book is sort of adding gamification thinking to some of your work, for leaders to kind of introduce gaming concepts and practices.

So, when you think about playing a game, or like, for me I just inherently go to video games, part of the reason why they’re so consuming and they’re so enticing and you want to stay with them and it’s hard to break away from them is because the objective is really clear, “I have to get to level 20,” or, “I have to rescue this particular person.” So, there’s a clear end point, and there’s clear goals along the way, and while you’re going and trying to achieve that particular goal, or whatever getting to the next level looks like, there’s all sorts of phenomenal feedback cues.

There’s bells and whistles, and the point total gets higher, and you’re getting such immediate feedback that you’re on the right track or that you’re doing the right thing or that you’re not doing the right thing, so you can course correct. So, it’s the same types of concepts that can help leaders think about, like, “How do I build some of that into helping people still stay engaged and have fun with the work that they’re doing?” because a lot of us aren’t.

Pete Mockaitis

And so then, what are some of the coolest ways you’ve seen folks implement some of these principles, these gamifications into normal professional work life that have been fun and effective?

Paula Davis
One of the companies that I talk about, it’s actually a really big law firm that I talk about in the book. I don’t think we oftentimes think of like law firms as being, I certainly don’t, as having been in that world for a long time, as being ultra-forward thinking when it comes to these types of concepts.

But a big law firm that I talk about in the book really has created sort of this, almost like this separate sort of leadership education for their lawyers, and they actually give them titles. So, normally you’re just an associate, and then you’re a partner. But they actually give them new titles as they ascend through different pieces of this leadership academy.

And so, in addition to the titles, they get one-on-one coaching so they’re getting, I think, some of that more strategic feedback about how they’re doing and how they can continue to get better at each level. And there’s also, I believe, like a notification or something that goes out to the clients as well. This is an indicator to their clients that, “Hey, the lawyer who you’re working with is now ascended almost right into the different, the next level of the game of sorts, and here is the wealth of talent that they continue to bring.”

So, again, I don’t know that they or I were looking at that through the gamification lens, but you can see how, when you start to build sort of larger scale intentional programs like that, you can have those types of game theory sort of built in or used as a way to explain some of the beneficial outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I would love to get your viewpoints in terms of, let’s say we’re in an organization where, unfortunately, not a lot of these cool best practices are at work, but we have our little sphere of influence in terms of a team, or even just a couple direct reports, or even ourselves. Any pro tips on how we can take advantage of some of these principles to make some good things happen?

Paula Davis
I think that the best place to start, and certainly where I advocated in my first book too, is with your team, with a team. And even if your team is just you and two other people, that’s a team. I think sometimes we think that teams have to be these really large entities, and that’s certainly not the case.

And so, I think starting with some of the best practices to implement some of that sticky recognition and mattering, just because the outcomes are so strong with that. So, that’s just simply, you know, one of the researchers I interviewed for that chapter said, “Sticky recognition and mattering lives at the day-to-day moments in your interactions.”

So those 10-minute moments when you’re walking down the hallway with someone or you’ve just patched into the Zoom and it’s a few of you just kind of hanging out, what do you say? Like, do you interact with somebody? How’s your day? How’s your family? What’s going on? What has your attention right now? Just sort of, I think, getting back to relearning how to see people when we’re so consumed by our work in technology, I think, is a really important starting point.

And then, one of the things that kept coming up as a thread in a lot of the successful companies and people that I interviewed was this notion of just, like, I call them Seinfeld meetings because Seinfeld was a show about nothing. And so, it’s these one-on-one moments to talk to people really about nothing, purposely without a business outcome associated with it.

So, again, just spending 15 minutes every other week just checking in on someone and asking them, “What has your attention right now?” can be hugely beneficial. Just talking to each other about just best teaming practices, “Are we all aligned together on how we’re communicating with each other, about how we see our team, about what the end result is? Are we all clear? Do we all have clear guardrails about where we’re supposed to start and where we’re supposed to end up?” So, again, I think some of these human practices in combination with some basic teaming practices, I think, is always a winning combination.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And could you share with us a cool story of a team or organization that really just put these principles into practice in a beautiful, illustrative, transformational way?

Paula Davis
One example that I mention is, it’s really a framework, so it’s less, I think, about a company, although there’s a few companies that are implementing this. In the Work Sustainability chapter talking about it’s called the US Bank Guidelines, where US banks’ in-house teams of sorts, have really intentionally thought about, “How do we want to create relationships with our outside vendors, our outside counsel, the outside people who we work with, and our internal folks that’s going to be supportive of intentional delegation; that’s going to try and minimize the fire drills and the urgency; that’s going to honor and respect communication practices and work-life integration boundaries and things of that nature?”

And so, talking about the different sort of principles that they have, that have become these guidelines that do just what I said, talking to them about how they’ve started to implement those, both internally and externally with the people who they work, have certainly been eye-opening. So, I think a lot of where we’re at right now with some of this is we’ve got to just try it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Paula Davis
So, I think, for me, one of the big takeaways from the book is that this comes down to this being leading well. It comes down to what I call tiny noticeable things, or TNTs, that are a combination of a little bit more human stuff and a little bit more team stuff that together, I think, become a really powerful source of motivational fuel for folks.

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

Paula Davis
One of my favorite quotes is “Between what is said but not meant, and what is meant but not said, a lot of love is lost.”

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

Paula Davis
One of the research papers that I found really fascinating talked about how, and this is just kind of an interesting way that they were able to measure a team’s heart rate synchrony. And when teams’ heart rates were in sync, they, I think it was like more than 75% of the time, made good decisions together.

And so, it was really indicative of psychological safety and trust. So, I thought it was just really interesting look at some of these things from a physiological perspective and see how when heart rates were more in sync, there was more trust and better decision-making among teams.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Paula Davis
I love Brigid Schulte’s latest book is called Overwork, so I’m obviously digging into all of the things work-related about how we can do work better and make work better. I keep coming back to, over and over again, Kelly McGonigal’s book The Upside of Stress.

Because I have spent so much time in the burnout space, I think, really, taking an interesting look at “What is stress meant to help us do?” It’s meant to help us connect. It’s meant to help us find meaning, and that a meaningful life is a stressful life on some level, and so that reminder is helpful.

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

Paula Davis
Yes, there’s a skill that I talk about with that sticky recognition and mattering piece called a thank you plus, where so if you don’t say thank you very frequently, this could be at work or outside of work, start there. But the plus piece is to add the behavior or the strength that you saw that led to the good outcome.

So, it can be as simple as saying, “Thank you so much for summarizing the reports. The way that you did that helped me find the key takeaways quickly, and it made my life a lot easier and the conversation with my clients simpler.” Just that extra little smidge of peace really resonates with people. And so, I oftentimes will have people trying to practice a thank you plus to me or emailing me and calling out the fact that they were trying to do a thank you plus or mentioning that to me in some way.

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

Paula Davis
They can go to my website, which is StressAndResilience.com, or they can find me at Paula Davis on LinkedIn.

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

Paula Davis
I would say just don’t forget about the fundamental human need that we all have, to just make sure that we’re making an impact in our world, and just being really keen to share that with people when you notice it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paula, thank you.

Paula Davis
Thanks so much, Pete.